It’s easy to get the wrong idea about commodity fetishism. It conjures up the sense of something vaguely sexual nowadays, because of the modern meaning of fetish. Psychologists use it to describe the way some people transfer sexual messages into parts of the body or objects which are not primarily conceived as sexual objects, like feet, or shoes.
But in Karl Marx’s day the fetish was primarily a religious notion. It centred on the idea of how primitive peoples transferred the idea of mystical powers from the preternatural ether to an object, like a statue or a charm. Marx had a fairly dull idea of what a commodity was; in Das Kapital he used linen, corn and coats as his examples. Today we have more exciting commodities, as the death of Steve Jobs has reminded us, with his unending procession of iMac, iPod, iPhone, iTunes, iPad and who knows what he has left in the iPipeline.
Think different, is the Apple slogan. Ironically there was a pretty undifferentiated consensus about the tributes being paid to him. Eulogies likened him to Edison and Einstein. He was, apparently, “the Leonardo da Vinci of our time”. More tellingly his death was compared with that of Elvis Presley or John Lennon as marking the end of a cultural era.
All this tells us more about ourselves than about the untimely-ripped Mr Jobs. A commodity is anything which is bought and sold. Commodities are bearers of value, Marx tells us, because of the labour that goes into them. But fetishism attributes to them something else which does not properly belong to inanimate objects.
When industrial nations came into contact with tribal societies something called cargo cults developed. In them primitive people assumed that the material wealth of rich nations came through their magical practices. If only these could be copied, they reasoned, all the associated cargo would follow. So in the Pacific after the Second World War local tribes began building crude copies of the landing strips, aircraft and radio equipment which both American and Japanese armies used to bring in supplies. They assumed that consumer goodies would supernaturally follow.
In the end what Steve Jobs produced was just more stuff. But it was sleek and sexy stuff. It swiftly became part of the cultural fabric because it was possessed of the fetishising power of seeming more than it was. The ‘i’ seemed to stand for inherent – such were the powers projected onto it by the contemporary consumer cargo cult which made what these machines do somehow secondary to the possession of them. To be an Apple-owner is to be clothed in a mystique which marks us out from lesser mortals. Apple users are select and hip, funky and futuristic, minimalist and cool. A commodity, as Marx said, is anything that satisfies a human desire or need.
FollowThere is to be no Plan B, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne has repeatedly told us. Then this week he launched what looked like Plan A-and-a-half with a “credit easing” plan to lend to business using a new arm’s-length agency. It may, or may not, be the right thing. But even Mr Osborne would have to admit it was an offering of managerial dullness rather than a convincing new narrative to embolden the nation through difficult times.
There were those who said the same thing about Ed Miliband’s speech last week. It was, according to your political prejudices, a move to the left, a move to the right or a move to the centre. But all the Press agreed it was flat and uninspiring.
But then in the corridors of a conference on the Church and the Big Society at Manchester University last weekend I heard Professor John Milbank – he of Radical orthodoxy – ask whether anyone had read the actual speech. “It’s been completely misread,” he said. “– it’s totally Blue Labour”.
Blue Labour is philosophy founded by several academics led by Maurice Glasman, who was recently made a Labour peer by Mr Miliband. It aims to reconnect the party with ordinary working people whose concerns have been ignored by the Labour elite.
It is Blue because it favours “flag, faith and family”, its leftist critics say. And certainly it wants to abandon over-reliance on the state in favour of a new politics of community, reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity. But it is old-style Labour in its fiery critique of the mess created in the Blair and Brown era when the market economy was allowed to over-rule all other political values – with a remote, bossy and managerial state created in spurious compensation.
One summary of Blue Labour – that “our lives go well only when they are lived in sustainable relationship with others” – reveals how rooted in a religious worldview its vision is. Maurice Glasman is Jewish but takes much inspiration from the social teaching developed in 17 papal social encyclicals over the last century.
The things our children teach us. A smartly-dressed woman approached us in the street as we left the cinema the other day with a parroted rigmarole about how she needed some money for her bus fare home. I didn’t give her any. Why not, asked my 11-year-old. Because I didn’t believe her, I replied. She just wanted money for booze.
So why did you believe the man sitting outside the Co-op on the way into the cinema, he asked. Because he looked like he needed it; he was dirty and unshaven and looked like he lived on the streets, so I put a pound in his paper cup. So you just go on appearances, said my son witheringly.
Jesus took a different attitude. Give to everyone who asks, Luke records him as saying in the list of imperatives that includes love your enemies, turn the other cheek, and do to others as you would have them do to you. Counsels of perfection, the medieval church called them, knowing that so many of us would fall short.
Not everyone does. One friend of mine gives to everyone who asks, however confected their tale of woe; I’d rather I was conned than that I disbelieved someone who was telling the truth, he says. Everyone has their own responses. Another refuses to give cash but offers to buy self-styled indigents a sandwich (and then lectures them on which fillings take less of a toll on the environment). Another informs beggars that he has a standing order for several homeless charities and directs them to the nearest soup kitchen. As to me, I am utterly inconsistent.
A North American called Kelly Johnson wrote a book called The Fear of Beggars a few years ago. Perhaps fear is what determines our reactions.
Begging, particularly ‘aggressive begging’ is against the law in many countries and such laws are on the rise. We fear being intruded upon (the man with the cup did not me ask for anything, in contrast to the ‘bus-fare’ woman). We fear being conned, which is why populist newspapers love ‘exposés’ of organised begging-rings in which people make a living from professional begging and then go back to three-bedroomed semis in the suburbs.
The present is a gift to unwrap every day
I have watched three people die this week. In the long hours of visiting a relative in hospital you notice what is going on in the adjoining beds. You try not to intrude. But some things you cannot help but see. There was great drama on a couple of occasions with a long continuous beep summoning a sprinting crash team of a dozen doctors and nurses. But it was not the Casualty-style melodrama which took them away.
Dot over in the corner was the first to go. She was already very ill when I first saw her, an old woman in her eighties, never rising from a prone position, but constantly reaching out to press the button to summon the nurses. Yet when the final moment came Dot left the buzzer untouched. She emitted a ghastly gurgle and expired.
In the bed opposite was a woman in her nineties called Vera. Her bed was surrounded by visitors who moved through concern to alarm to distress as the days passed. On the last day they were distraught, weeping and sobbing, but Vera lay in her fluffy pink dressing gown on the bed, seemingly oblivious to their tears, as if she did not want to die so surrounded by sadness. Or perhaps it was something else.
Peggy gave the clue to that. For the fortnight before she had seemed mainly only to sleep. But when the occasional visitor came she sat up and answered their questions politely but without much engagement. When you get home, they said. But she did not want to go home. She was 94 and lived alone. There was no-one to go home to. She liked the gruelly hospital food she said, but she ate less and less of it. Finally she began to refuse the medicine.
For the final days Peggy lay curled with her head on a pillow resting on the side bars of the bed. She moaned constantly, a low mournful haunting sound, one hand slowly moving along her other arm, stroking herself, as if sound and action brought some small rocking comfort in her isolation. No-one came to visit, and she did not respond to the ministrations of strangers.
You are never more alone than the moment you die. And that is true whether you are unattended or in the company of those who love you. You slip across that final bourn, a solitary lonely traveller. None can accompany you to the undiscovered country.
The idea of a tax on every financial transaction made by a bank or City dealer is not new. Indeed it is often called a Tobin tax, after the Nobel economist James Tobin who came up with the idea in 1978 to penalise short-term speculators but not long-term investors. It is an idea whose time has come.
France and Germany are pushing for such a financial transaction tax (FTT) to be introduced Europe-wide . It would raise a tiny levy – of perhaps just 5 pence on every £100 traded in any shares, bonds, currency or derivatives deal which did not directly involve a member of the public. Bill Gates yesterday joined 1,000 top economists across the globe backing the plan.
Britain is opposing the idea for fear it will damage the City of London. Critics of the scheme say it is naïve, impossible to implement and failed in Sweden when it was tried there. Those are just excuses. Britain has had one of the biggest routine transaction taxes in the world the stamp duty which has been levied on every share transaction since 1694. A Tobin tax would be no harder to collect than VAT. And the particular flaws of the Swedish system would be easy to avoid.
Critics say it would make Britain uncompetitive. But unilateral schemes work in Brazil, South Africa and Korea and could be made to work either across the Eurozone or whole EU. Britain would not have to agree – since Europe could levy the tax on any investor based in continental Europe even for deals executed in London. But it would obviously be better if Britain were to back the scheme and ensure that it was implemented fairly.
There ought to be a law against it
I will be writing shortly to the Archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster, and to the Chief Rabbi, to ask them to join my high-level celebrity campaign against the teaching of phlogiston in British schools.
Phlogiston, as you will know, is a scientific concept rose in the 17th century when one Johann Becher postulated the idea that a flammable substances burned because they contained this colourless, odourless, weightless substance. Burn wood and you get ash, therefore wood must be composed of ash plus phlogiston. Simple, eh? But wrong as Lavoiser’s later work on oxygen showed.
Now you might suppose that few, if any, teachers in British schools subscribe to this outdated idea. Maybe so. But it would be dangerous if any did so we should get a law put in place to ban it anyway. We could also have one for Ptolemaic astronomy, the miasma theory of disease and the plum-pudding model of the atom. Just to be on the safe side.
Such seems to be the logic of Dawkins & Co on creationism. Sir David Attenborough has just joined a list of the usual suspects – the British Humanist Association, the British Science Association and the Christian thinktank Ekklesia – in a noisy campaign to ban the teaching of creationism in science lessons in British schools.
This is another example of the New Atheists’ favourite technique, setting up a straw man to kick. For there is no evidence that any British schools have creationism on their science curriculum, as the Department for Education will tell you. All schools are required not to teach creationism as scientific fact.
Ah, but what about the ‘creationist’ academy schools set up by the businessman Sir Peter Vardy where children are taught in science lessons that the world was created in six days within the last 10,000 years? You often read about that in articles based on a briefing from the British Humanist Association. What few of these tell you is that Vardy, fed up with reading them, finally decided to sue for libel in the High Court this year and won – forcing a newspaper to accept that such claims were “unwarranted and wholly untrue “ and that Ofsted inspectors had found that to be the case. Damages were paid.
Time for William Hague to be brave over Palestine
Fevered brinkmanship is the order of the day at the United Nations in New York as the deadline approaches when the Palestinians will apply to be recognised as an independent state. The UN General Assembly will almost certainly say Yes. Faced with that Israel, and its allies in the White House, are engaged in frantic behind-the-scenes deal-making to try to scupper a vote by the more powerful UN Security Council to recognise its statehood too. Were that to happen, the United States would be forced to veto the move, exposing the fact that it is international might rather than right on which Israel now depends.
Israel has legitimate concerns about its ability to live peacefully alongside Palestinians who refusal to accept Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people. But the idea that the peace process will be damaged by Palestinian moves to win international recognition is risible. No serious peace negotiations are going on, nor have they for two decades thanks to Israeli delaying tactics and insistence on building illegal settlements on Palestinian land. Under Israel’s current prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, an approach which was previously obstructive has at time been downright provocative. His aim has not been to force the Palestinians to the negotiating table – but force them to their knees as a client state or compliant work force confined to what in apartheid South Africa were called bantustans.
In the face of that the Palestinians have made significant progress. The IMF, World Bank and UN have declared their assiduously-built infrastructure is at last fit for an independent state. Now Israel is “reserving the right to respond” – threatening to annexe the West Bank or withhold the tax and tariff funds that Israel collects on behalf of the Palestinians. Since that represents two-thirds of the Palestinian budget without it the Palestinian Authority would effectively be paralysed. There have been rumblings that the US Congress might axe its annual $500 million in aid to the Palestinians, which is already only a mere sixth of the $3bn it gives to Israel.
These are dangerous times. But if the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas backs down from his moves at the UN on Friday demonstrations to support the statehood initiative could become a new intifada of violent confrontation with Israel. That mood could spread across a region newly alive, through the Arab Spring, to calls for self-determination. It will provoke uproar among Muslims worldwide, threaten regional stability and increase the risk of another war. Indications of anti-American defiance have come already from Washington’s traditional ally, Saudi Arabia, which this week said it will give the Palestinian Authority $200m to ease its liquidity problems.
Just what South Africa doesn’t need
If you have not heard of Julius Malema you should have. The international business magazine Forbes last week named the 30-year-old as one of Africa’s 10 most powerful young men. Next week he could tear apart South Africa’s ruling party, possibly bringing about the downfall of the country’s president Jacob Zuma, now aged 69, in a battle for the soul of the nation which could ripple through the continent and well beyond.
Malema is the president of the youth wing of the African National Congress. In the days before they fell out President Zuma described him as a future president of South Africa. But now the populist young firebrand – who has won wide support among the poor with his calls to nationalise the mines and seize white-owned land without compensation – is being brought before the ANC’s disciplinary committee charged with bringing the party into disrepute.
President Zuma’s authority is on the line. If he fails, the nation which has so successfully made a peaceful transition from white to black rule could be plunged into political and economic chaos.
Julius Malema is a throwback to the worst stereotypes about African leaders. He is charismatic, populist and reckless. He has fits of temper, will not tolerate dissent and manipulates elections. He is shamelessly racist. He defends the human rights record of Robert Mugabe in neighbouring Zimbabwe. He has attacked Chinese investors as people who “bring nothing to the country”. He is being investigated by three separate authorities on allegations of corruption.
His plans for the overhaul of the economy to benefit the poor, by expropriating white businesses – and his leadership last year of a delegation to Venezuela to study the country’s nationalisation programme – have sent shivers through the international community. So much so that South Africa’s share of foreign direct investment has fallen 70 per cent in the past two years.
Another rogue trader has caused massive losses in the world financial system. A $2bn loss has been registered in the London office of the Swiss bank UBS after unauthorised trading by a single individual.
It is 16 years now since Nick Leeson’s unauthorised deals single-handedly collapsed Britain’s oldest merchant bank, Barings, with losses of £800m. Since then rafts of legislation, regulation, compliance reporting, and complex computer systems appear to have had no effect. Just three years ago another rogue trader ran up losses of €4.9bn at Société Générale.
This is not rogue trading so much as rogue management – the UBS loss was not run up in a single day – which failed to apply proper tests of diligence, let alone ethics. The last UBS annual report boasted that “increased risk taking” had been authorised since 2010.
The trouble is that these increased risks are taken with someone else’s money. Traders in securities are effectively sent into the casino and told they can keep a cut of anything they win but face no real personal penalty for any losses. Bets get bigger and wilder. That is why the Facebook page of the man alleged to be responsible for the UBS disaster read, on his last update, “need a miracle”.
But it is not a miracle that is needed but greater regulation, a ban on high order derivatives and less risk-taking by banks which, like UBS, were bailed out by the taxpayer in late 2008. It is not the odd rogue trader who needs attention but a rogue system.
They’ve made it worse, said my 11-year-old, of the new translation of the Mass when we left church on Sunday. The Vatican will doubtless be unimpressed by the verdict of a child. But it is instructive, for the Eucharist is there for the theologically unformed as much, if not more, than for the obscurantist powerbrokers of the Curia.
The new translation set out to deepen understanding of the liturgy and elevate its tone. The demotic trendiness of the Sixties had rendered the language of the Mass banal, uninspiring and lacking dignity, the argument went.
Undoubtedly some bits of the new version are better. Flow has been restored to the language of Collects previously filled with snappy short sentences. “From east to west” lacks the poetry of the new “from the rising of the sun to its setting”. Behold is better than “this is”. The language of the living room is not always apt for exalted subjects. The Book of Common Prayer shows that.
But other parts are clumsy, wooden, sexist and archaic – in a rather arch cod-Hollywood way. The “cup” elevated by the carpenter from Nazareth has been gilded into a “chalice”. The simple eloquence of “I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the Word and I shall be healed” has been replaced with a clunky reference to the centurion’s phrase “under my roof” which used to make us think of hosts cleaving to the top of our mouths as schoolboys.
“One with the Father” has been replaced with “consubstantial” which enthusiasts justify by insisting it offers clarity to any would-be Arians (not many of those in my parish). If they wanted to be really clear on that – or aimed to up the hocus-pocus factor – they should have gone back to the original Greek homoousios. But “one with” did perfectly well for my 11-year-old.
Don’t mess with the fundamental right to a solicitor
It is understandable that a government intent on saving public money at every turn should conclude that there is no reason why it should pay the legal bills of the rich. But the move which Tory and Liberal Democrat MPs voted through this week – to allow means-testing of individuals arrested by the police before they are allowed access to a solicitor – is a very bad one.
Someone arrested and detained for questioning by the police is in a peculiarly vulnerable position. They face, at the least, major disruption to their lives, damage to their reputation and ultimately a permanent loss of liberty. Those who have never before undergone such an ordeal will often be unable to think clearly and respond in an appropriate manner.
At such a time access to a lawyer is a fundamental right. But Clause 12 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill currently going through parliament gives the government power to introduce regulations to means-test such access. A man or woman who finds themselves in such a situation wants a lawyer to discuss their arrest and the gravity of the charges laid against them. They do not want the first thing a solicitor does is ask them about how they are going to pay as if they were an accident victim in an US hospital.
Means-testing for legal bills might be a reasonable proposal later in the proceedings. But those first two hours at the police station should come from the public purse.
Ministers have insisted that they are not actually proposing means-testing, only introducing “flexibility to make regulations to apply means-testing if it were considered appropriate to do so in the future”.
Sex is not the answer, said the American stand-up comedian Swami X. Sex is the question; Yes is the answer. Something similar might be said of the West Lothian Question on which the Government is to reincarnate that legendary political beast, a “commission of independent experts”.
The WLQ refers to the asymmetry that Scottish MPs can vote on, say, schools in England in which their constituents have no interest. But English MPs have no say on what happens in Scottish schools. This is not just a theoretical unfairness. The last government could not have pushed through controversial moves like tuition fees or foundation hospitals without Scotch, Welsh and Ulster votes since most English MPs opposed them.
The problem comes when you look at the alternatives. Fertile brains have come up with all manner of schemes to bar Scots from voting on matters that do not affect Scotland, to ban them from the parliamentary committee stage, to create an English Grand Committee, to require double majorities (don’t ask), to create English regional assemblies, a devolved English parliament, or dissolve the United Kingdom. In almost all of these the cure seems worse, or certainly more complicated, than the ailment.
The 19th century famously had a Schleswig-Holstein Question, which Lord Palmerston said was so complicated than only three men in Europe ever understood it: one was dead, one was mad, and the other had forgotten all about it. The best way to deal with the West Lothian Question, the former Lord Chancellor Lord Irvine quipped, was not to ask it. He was right. Let sleeping Scots lie.
