Dialectics and Intellectual Freedom

Fredric Jameson’s 1972 book Marxism and Form was an attempt to introduce to Anglo-American literary studies what he had discovered in his studies in France and Germany: the dialectical understanding of culture and cultural artifacts that was, he recognized, completely alien to English-speaking cultural critics. In the Preface, Jameson remarks that the Anglophone perspective, a “mixture of political liberalism, empiricism, and logical positivism which we know as Anglo-American philosophy”, is “hostile at all points” to the dialectical approach.

One way in which this tripartite Anglo-American perspective determines our understanding of Intellectual Freedom is through a strict distinction between subject and object. The individual - isolated, self-determining, clearly defined - comes to information, language, culture, etc, as something outside themselves. This subject-object distinction is also evident in the self-determining individual’s “freedom from” their own culture and society: the fact of parental wealth, for example, or the imperialistic language-games, or the racial and gender relationships into which they are born are supposed to have no influence on the individual as such. The individual sees the objective world around them - including information, culture, etc - as something distinct from themselves.

This strict delineation of the self-determining individual is necessary for the functioning of capitalist society. Only the well-defined, autonomic individual can own property or enter into a contract. The anti-woke criticisms of “cancel culture” are predicated not only on the idea that the individual should not be judged by any kind of corporate affiliation (e.g. belonging to the Proud Boys, or writing in the same journals as anti-semites), but on the idea that the individual is even distinct from the language and choices they make. This separation is clearly seen whenever a (male) celebrity is called upon to make a public apology, as Justin Timberlake did yesterday. JT’s past self is not the individual he is today; JT’s actions are not part of his self-identity; JT should not be judged on these “accidents” which bear no relation to his true, authentic, individual self. One is reminded of the unmasking of the criminal at the end of an episode of Scooby-Doo - “I would have gotten away with it too…”

Intellectual Freedom in librarianship is predicated on this non-dialectical conception of individuality. Whenever the idea of interrelationships is raised - perhaps through an Indigenous insistence on relationality or the interlocking systems of oppression developed by Black feminists - Anglo-American (i..e white) Intellectual Freedom is at a loss. It is “at all points hostile” to a dialectical, relational, intersectional perspective on IF.

The empiricism and logical positivism that Jameson identifies connects librarianship with an affinity for positivist social science that has been LIS’ legacy since the 1930s. Jameson contrasts properly dialectical thinking with the kind of overarching explanation aimed at by science. The dialectical method, he writes, “is more complicated than any objective apprehension of a merely external kind of totality, such as takes place in the various scientific disciplines”. The sciences - even after Einstein - enshrine the subject-object distinction in the same way that LIS does with Intellectual Freedom. In science, Jameson writes,

the thinking mind itself remains cool and untouched, skilled but unselfconscious, and is able to forget about itself and its own thought processes while it sinks itself wholly in the content and problems offered it.

This is how LIS understands people who “have” Intellectual Freedom: the “information-seeking behavour” of fully-formed, autonomous individuals. On the other hand, Jameson insists that

dialectical thinking is a thought to the second power, a thought about thinking itself, in which the mind must deal with its own thought process just as much as with the material it works on, in which both the particular content involved and the style of thinking suited to it must be held together in the mind at the same time… dialectical though it therefore profoundly comparative in its very structure.

What this kind of thinking requires, in order to “think about thinking itself” is an understanding of where thinking comes from, the external, objective, non-individual determinants of individual thought itself. Once this happens, of course, then Pandora’s box is opened: questions of power, structure, determination, inheritance, all have to take their place within the individual’s understanding of themselves as socially produced. Intellectual Freedom then becomes not something that an individual “has”, but a dialectical navigation of agency and structure, liberty and external constraint, contingency and necessity.

It seems to me that a dialectical Intellectual Freedom would see IF not as something which “belongs” to an individual, like property, or rights, or the legal ability to sign a contract, but as a capability to be developed, a technique to be fostered. Intellectual Freedom would then be perhaps, synonymous with “thought to the second power”. This would have consequences not only for IF, but for information literacy itself. But it does place a burden on librarianship: to train, foster, and support dialectical thinking among both library workers and the users themselves. This in turn would require a radical refoundation of the profession and its social, intellectual, and cultural commitments.

Later on in Marxism and Form, Jameson discusses Sartre’s concept of the “practico-inert”, “matter which has been invested with human energy and henceforth takes the place of and functions like human activity”. Jameson notes that

The machine is of course the most basic symbol of this type of structure, but it is really only a physical symbol of it, and in concrete daily life the practico-inert most frequently takes the form of social institutions.

Libraries are one of these institutions. And no matter how often we insist that “libraries are the people who compose them”, such an institution is “in the long run contradictory insofar as it implies that such objects have some genuine supra-individual being, insofar as it tends to mistake the reification of human relationships for actual inert objects of a quasiphysical variety”.

Here we have, yet again, the horns of a dilemma: individuals are never simply individuals, but are related to each other in pre- and supra-individual ways. These relationships, however, get reified into institutions like libraries and then take on a mystified power of their own. At the same time as we must recognize that individuals are always socially constructed, we must also recognize that institutions like libraries are at the same time composed of people. Individualism obscures the truth of social relations; the reified practico-inert does too, but from the other direction.

So a properly dialectical Intellectual Freedom would require a properly dialectical librarianship, one which situates itself among the tensions between individual and society, society and reification, not seeking to resolve them, but seeking rather to contribute to the refoundation of society itself along collective and properly human lines. In this sense, librarianship has to commit itself to class (and race, gender, sexuality, disability) struggle in a real material sense. But a discussion of that proposal will have to wait for a later blog post.

Marxism and Difference: A Response

In my undergrad, I took an introductory course in political ideologies. An oversimplified rubric was provided to us, which took the French revolutionary slogan as its model. All modern ideologies, we were told, respect and uphold “liberty, equality, and fraternity”, but liberalism emphasizes the first, socialism the second, and conservatism the third. Now, this is an enormous oversimplification, and comes close to a mystification - is conservatism’s emphasis on the “natural” order and insistence on a respect for “natural” social differences really fraternity? - but it also reflects a mischaracterization of the socialist emphasis on equality. It has long been pointed out that the fear of the faceless, undifferentiated mass of automatons the capitalist world ascribed to socialism - most clearly expressed in 1984 - simply projected the homogenization of commodity culture onto the “enemy of Western civilization”. Anyone who reads any of the accounts of the Soviet union, both fiction and non-fiction, understands that individuality and difference remained prominent within the USSR. It is an odd paradox that the country which was ostensibly based on the erasure of individuality also gave rise not only to the “cult of personality” around Stalin, but particularly well-known individuals like Shostakovich, Solzhenitsyn, or Andrei Sakharov.

Anyway, I think there is a way in which that oversimplified schema contains a kernel of truth. In a class society, social equality can and must be a tactical objective. The overcoming of inequality - especially in terms of wealth and access to services, etc - is an important plank in the socialist platform. However, this does not mean that socialists erase the notion of difference.

On Friday, I gave the keynote at the annual Forum for Information Professionals conference put on by the University of Alberta’s School of Library and Information Studies. In that talk, I emphasized the respect for individual difference that I see as inscribed within Marxism at least since the 1960s. I used this quote from Audre Lorde to argue that it is in fact liberalism which flattens out and erases difference, precisely out of a “pluralist” respect for difference.

advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must not merely be tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.

Audre Lorde “The Master’s Tools will never Dismantle the Master’s House”. In Sister Outsider, 110-113 (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984): 111.

I concluded by saying that an exultation of difference is necessary if we are to achieve a more just society:

The idea of structural determinations, of the necessary relations into which we are born, is the kind of interdependency that strikes fear into the hearts of those committed to an individualistic society where solidarity and collective action – society itself, really – is impossible. Intellectual Freedom would become, like all other kinds of freedom – and here I’m thinking specifically of anti-vaccination and anti-mask “freedom” – not an individual phenomenon at all, but a social one. It would require that we get over our liberal aversion to positive liberty and embrace the wellbeing and flourishing of human beings in all their radical difference. Neutrality and negative liberty cannot give us that; only positive liberty with a full acceptance of historical necessity can put us on the road to a social and collective freedom in which, as the old book has it, the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all.

In the question period following my talk, one of the attendees posed the following question, which I don’t actually think I answered properly: “Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program proposed ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’, do you believe that the principal ‘all individuals are created equal and should be allowed an equal opportunity under the law to pursue happiness and prosper based on individual merit’ is very similar to Marx’s theory and will really become true?”

The quoted line beginning “all individuals are created equal…” is from Donald Trump’s executive order banning Critical Race Theory in September 2020, one of the documents I was criticizing in my talk.

When I answered the question, I said that we need to historicize questions of equality, happiness, and inviduality, and we need to fully understand what we mean by individuals being “created”. In the founding documents of the United States, “creation” means creation by God; for more structurally-minded Marxists, creation means individuals formed by history and the social contexts into which they are born.

But I think I actually didn’t get to the heart of the question. For me, the motto from the Critique of the Gotha Programme inscribes difference at the heart of the communist project. Far from the homogenized faceless equality and erasure of all individual difference projected onto the Communist bogeyman, Marx’s motto recognizes that individuals have both unequal abilities and unequal needs, and that a communist society would not just tolerate but exult in these differences. The inequality of needs and abilities forming the basis of a future society, to my mind, fits perfectly with Lorde’s incredibly suggestive and inspiring formulation: “Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.”

One of the great things about the way Lorde puts it is that difference and equality are not portrayed as opposites, or mutually exclusive, but as engaged in a common human project: “different strengths, acknowledged and equal”. Our differences may make us, in some sense, unequal; but we are equal in the sense that we are all different.

So, to answer the question, no - I don’t think Marx’s motto lines up with the perspective put forward by the American Constitution or Trump’s executive order. There, individualism is pure and unalloyed - the individual is the bearer of rights, the owner of property (including people), and the legal entity engaged in contract. That is a bourgeois concept of individualism which owes nothing to difference; indeed, it owes nothing to human social relations at all. It rejects society, preferring the “cash nexus” of contract and exchange; preferring ownership to relationality; preferring a fictitious insistence on individuality even as it reduces everyone to the numbers in a bank account.

Libraries Between the State and the Multitude

Controversy over “Little Free Libraries” has arisen once again, this time in the UK. I don’t want to go into the specifics of the problem with Little Free Libraries (officially branded or not). Jane Schmidt and Jordan Hale have written a foundational article about it, which everyone should read.

What I want to get at in this blog post is what I see as a fundamental contradiction (in the Marxist sense) that keeps cropping up in the discussion. What defines a contradiction for Marxism is that the opposition it describes and the problems that flow from it cannot be resolved or fixed within the existing structure. The two poles of the contradiction are irreconcilable within the current social, political, economic, and cultural context. In the discourse around community book boxes there is an opposition between community solidarity, self-reliance, local support, etc, and public or common goods which need to be supported and maintained at a higher level, regional or national.

Defenders of the book boxes argue that they are a form of community self-regulation. Harmless at worst, helpful at best, they provide a sense of community support which is perhaps more about the affective or symbolic significance of freely sharing objects whose use-value is traditionally considered positive (books) outside the dominant structures of exchange. Looked at this way, book boxes are a form of local resistance to commodity exchange more generally, an attempt to recapture the ability of community members to relate to each other outside what Marx and Engels called the “cash nexus” of exchange. Taken to its limit, these book boxes could be seen as one element in a comprehensive network of mutual aid.

However, in a context of massive defunding and closure of state-run libraries, book boxes, like volunteer staffing of library branches, can give the state the ammunition it needs to continue to withdraw financial and political support for public good provided at scale. If book boxes can be considered libraries, then why should the government continue to support libraries? If libraries can be run by volunteers, then why should the government continue to hire trained library workers? One aspect of the geographical issue around LFL’s which Schmidt and Hale point out is that they tend to be most prominent in areas where public libraries are least under threat, and so the problem posed by LFLs to public library support is muted, obscured, or made invisible.

So the debate on Twitter often came down to the question of localism vs. state support: the benefits of communities acting together for themselves vs. the economies of scale and resource redistribution provided by a tax-funded national network of libraries. Many of the arguments tried to point out the benefits of one side or the other, without making much headway. I think the reason this argument is actually irresolvable in the current context is that it actually expresses a fundamental contradiction within capitalism itself.

Essentially, it comes down to the well-established contradiction within the capitalist economy over the question of the common/commons. Capitalism is predicated on private property, but it requires common resources in order to keep going. Control over resources is maximized by being privatized (i.e. the private owner of a thing has full control over it), but some things only work properly when they are held in common (ideological reproduction through schools and libraries, for example). One of the ways capitalism has tried to work within the terms set by this contradiction is to draw a firm distinction between the individual and the state: the individual is the private owner, the commons is managed by the state.

In Marx’s critique of civil rights, he argues that the individualization of rights serves the purpose of making the private individual the only agent in capitalist society. In the capitalist model, there is the individual and there is the oppressive power of Others (society). It makes sense that individuals should seek to achieve a feeling of community belonging through small acts of mutual aid.

If the individual is the only agent in capitalist society, then, it also makes sense for us to look to the one remaining corporate body capable of controlling individuals for the provision and support of public goods: the state. The pandemic has shown how, when we can’t trust our fellow citizens (separated from any community sense by capitalist alienation), then we automatically look to the state to step in to resolve problems: we have looked for mask mandates, government-legislated lockdown, harsh penalties for rulebreakers, etc. This is all of a piece with the expansion of the role of government into civil society since the 1970s. When people like Dominic Cummings break the law with impunity, it undermines the moral authority of the state to counteract individualism (or localism) in order to support and maintain the public good.

Localism and nationwide public services are both “good things”. They are coming into conflict because of the structure of capitalist society; they are in contradiction because of the structure of capitalist society. Capitalism forces us to think of the local and the public (identified with the state) as an either/or proposition. Either we can have local, community-driven solutions or we can have public goods supported by the reach and power of the state and tertium non datur.

In their book on the commons, Commonwealth (2009), Hardt and Negri challenge this dualism. In effect, the problem with localism is that, because it relies on individual choices and actions, and the individual in capitalism is by definition private (see the expression “a private citizen” meaning someone who is not a public figure), localism has to be understood as a form of privatization. There is an aspect of ideology here: arguments for the local, for the commons, for the community are meant to obscure the fact that individual choices and actions are a form of privatization. Hardt and Negri write that today “it is difficult to see the common, even though it is all around us”

Neoliberal government policies throughout the world have sought in recent decades to privatize the common, making cultural products - for example, information, ideas, and even species of animals and plants - into private property. We argue, in chorus with many others, that such privatization should be resisted.

But the capitalist form of society forces to see only one alternative to privatization: the state.

The standard view, however, assumes that the only alternative to the private is the public, that is, what is managed and regulated by states and other governmental authorities, as if the common were irrelevant or extinct.

But the state cannot protect the public or the common. The state, for Marxists, is a “committee for managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie”. As we have seen under the last forty years of neoliberal austerity and privatization, the state is not in fact opposed to privatization, but serves it.

What Hardt and Negri argue for is a vision of the common that is distinct from the polar-opposites which are the only options for us under capitalism. Their argument - throughout the Empire trilogy, of which Commonwealth forms the last part - is in favour of the constituent power of the multitude, a social form that overthrows capitalist social and political relations in order to “win back and expand the common and its powers”. Under capitalism, the contradiction between local and public goods, between privatization and state control, cannot be resolved, and we can argue about the relative merits of one side or the other until we are blue in the face. What will be needed to overcome the contradiction is a fundamental change in our social relations as individuals and as members of the “many as many”, the common multitude or the multitude of the common.

The Social Theory of Neutrality

It’s an interesting time to be researching Intellectual Freedom in libraries. In the 1930s, when IF was formulated in early versions of the Library Bill of Rights, communism was an attractive alternative both to capitalist depression in North America and to the rise of Fascism in Europe. Its attractiveness meant it was a challenge to a mode of production based on private property, free exchange, and the exploitation of labour. Librarianship was faced with an alternative: commit to antifascism in the name of defence of the democratic republic - the line pushed by Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish - and adopt a strict neutrality in the name of the values and principles of that republic. Early versions of the Library Bill of Rights explicitly connect Intellectual Freedom, Neutrality, and the values and support of the American republic.

Censorship of books, urged or practiced by volunteer arbiters of morals or political opinion or by organizations that would establish a coercive concept of Americanism, must be challenged by libraries in maintenance of their responsibility to provide public information end enlightenment through the printed word.

Libraries should enlist the cooperation of allied groups in the fields of science, of education, and of book publishing in resisting all abridgement of the free access to ideas and full freedom of expression that are the tradition and heritage of Americans. (1948 version of the Bill of Rights).

Skip forward nearly a hundred years to the political and economic crises that underline the end of American hegemony and we can see the same debates over the same principles arise.

Yesterday, at the 2021 ALA Midwinter Conference, a Resolution to Condemn White Supremacy and Fascism as Antithetical to Library Work (pdf) was proposed which directly challenged the idea of libraries as neutral and explicitly recognized that “libraries have upheld and encouraged white supremacy both actively through discriminatory practices and passively through a misplaced emphasis on neutrality”. The proposal was moved by Lindsay Cronk and seconded by Whitney Buccicone and Raymond Pun, and sets out a list of concrete recommendations for the ALA to abandon the rhetoric of neutrality and determine how it can become committed to antiracism, antifascism, and take real steps towards equity, diversity, and inclusion.

I like the proposal, though I am not hopeful that the ALA can take any meaningful steps in the proposed direction. It is too large, too old, and too embedded in the “control structures” of North American librarianship. But we’ll see. I understand from commentary on the resolution that the final language needs to be voted on, but that at the meeting there were those who objected to the word fascism and wanted it removed. It would appear that denying and excluding fascism would itself “establish a coercive concept of Americanism” which, in the rhetoric of neutrality, must be avoided at all costs. There could be no clearer example of Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance.

In many ways, what we are seeing are the logical consequences of the adoption of neutrality and Intellectual Freedom after the Second World War, in contrast to MacLeish’s explicitly antifascist commitments. In many ways this can be explained by the socio-economic prosperity of the postwar period, in which people’s social and political views were irrelevant as long as GDP, wages, and house-prices continued to rise. The Cold War too forced North American culture into embracing the myth of “non-coercive” Western culture against the Soviet Union and China. The first real threat to neutrality and IF came in the late 1960s, as an explosion of rebellion against the norms of Western society exploded. The Civil Rights movement, gay and women’s liberation movements, anticolonialism, counterculture, and protests against the Vietnam War, all signalled that the silence (= neutrality) around the faults of Western society would no longer be tolerated. Out of this process, the tendency in librarianship called Social Responsibility arose, formalizing its distinction from strict Intellectual Freedom over the following decade.

In many ways, then, both neutrality and Intellectual Freedom can be understood as privileges of prosperity. At a conference a few years ago, I challenged John Buschman over his valorization of a period of “good capitalism” (the post-war boom that lasted until the early 1970s). He argued that the boom “floated all boats”, that everyone benefited from capitalist prosperity after 1945, and the neoliberal turn was an aberration. What is needed, in Buschman’s view, is a return to the liberal values and prosperity of the “thirty glorious years” following the War.

But not everyone benefited from post-war prosperity. To argue that ignores and erases the real inequalities that lay behind the Selma marches, Stonewall, the fight for Vietnamese independence, the Black Panthers, various Indigenous sovereignty movements, and many other conflicts of post-war American society. The term “cultural genocide” was first used in Canada in Harold Cardinal’s scathing attack on the government’s proposed policy of Indigenous assimilation entitledThe Unjust Society (1969).

Many who want to exclude “fascism” from the ALA resolution are, in fact, culturally and emotionally embedded in the post-war myth of American prosperity and individual freedom. Many of us were born after the neoliberal turn began to dismantle the (unequally applied) protections of the welfare state, but our culture and school systems and libraries continue to holdup “Western society 1945-” as a shining example of negative liberty, individual freedom, and functioning democracy. In many ways, the alternative problems - racism, sex and gender inequality, poverty, white supremacy, and fascism - have been repressed by the example of this glorious past. Trump, the Proud Boys, and the January 6 “riot with deadly intent” must be understood as a “return of the repressed”, an eruption to the surface of long-suppressed problems with North American society, rather than some kind of unimaginable, surprising mistake, shocking in its novelty.

It will be interesting to follow the fortunes of this proposal within the ALA over the next few days and months. The pandemic isn’t over, its economic impact is only beginning to be felt, and in periods of severe crisis, the faultlines between material life (health and the economy) and society (politics and culture) become exposed. Neutrality has always been the fig leaf covering racism, white supremacy, and the underlying fascism of capital; it has always been a politically motivated sham; the sooner we can abandon it completely, the better.

What I am mostly interested in is the social theory of neutrality - a position which often implies an absence or rejection of theory altogether. Neutrality - which can be considered an expression of Isaiah Berlin’s negative freedom - is based on the same social contract individualism as liberalism is, and therefore of all “liberal-democratic” political systems (both parliamentary, as in the UK and in Canada, and presidential/congressional, as in the US). This individualistic social theory, in a nutshell, sees human beings as fully formed and autonomous units, deciding their fates for themselves on their own, prior to coming into social contact with anyone else. This idea, while nonsense, has been hugely influential and is deeply embedded in North American political thought, values, and opinions; despite, or because because, this kind of individual rejects any notion of shared thoughts, values, and opinions outright, except as the result of a free choice by free individuals. Structural oppression, economic determination, sexual exploitation, none of these can exist in the context of the radical individualism of liberal social and political thought. A rejection of neutrality has to be, if only implicitly, a rejection of this kind of unquestioned, absolute individualism.

And we are not short of alternatives - political theories that developed out of the Marxist tradition reject individualism, many feminisms, theories of race, gender, and sexuality, reject individualism. Philosophies as far apart as Wittgenstein’s later work and Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism (as well as contemporary approaches to critical realism such as that of Margaret Archer) all reject it. When we as librarians reject neutrality (something which is long past due) we have to take a long hard look at the individualistic myth of our societies, confront it, recognize the dead-ends it has led us to and its own implication in coercive concepts of (North) Americanism founded on racism and fascism. The interest surrounding Dean Spade’s recent book on mutual aid indicates a hunger for an alternative to individualism. Repurposing MacLeish’s injunction to commit to the protection of liberal democracy against fascism, we can say that libraries and library workers should be at the forefront of a commitment of mutual aid and support against the corrosive individualism that underpins so much of the lore of our profession.

Update and Year in Review

2020 in review. Where to start? Like everyone else I ended up working from home around the middle of March, which is still winter in Edmonton. It was a difficult adjustment as I and my partner (and our cat) live in a very small apartment and had to figure out ways we could both continue to do our jobs without getting in each others’ way, etc. I have no idea how people who have kids or parents living with them managed. It was a hard year. Luckily, Edmonton’s low population density meant that we were able to get out for daily walks in the river valley and the ravine without risk of not being able to socially distance. And in fact, this ended up being one of the things that made WFH bearable. Going on walks every day meant we got to see the cycle of bloom and pollination, the way the different kinds of bees tackled different kinds of flowers on different weeks. Turns out the wild roses that grow everywhere here manage six or seven blooms before the weather gets too cold. The river valley and the ravine have their own cycles and we were able to witness them all. I deepened my photography practice as a way to distance myself from my computer and my job, all of which was necessary in a world where the job is almost exclusively Zoom and email-based.

PhD Update. I can’t remember when it was exactly - either late 2019 or early 2020 - I switched my PhD topic from artificial intelligence and the political economy of jobs to the political theory of intellectual freedom in libraries. I’m now firmly in the writing stage.

Writing Update. I managed to continue working on scholarly articles this year. I enjoy writing, so even when it was a slog, it was a good distraction from my apartment, from my job, and from the world at large. I have two pieces in the pipeline, both of which have grown out of my thinking on intellectual freedom and politics. One article was just published, called (in the end) “The Antinomies of Academic Freedom”. This one was a hard one to write, and I’m still not sure I’m wholly satisfied with it. I tend to redraft rather than edit-in-place, and this piece must have gone through nine or ten drafts by the time I was finished. An early draft was quite different and focused too much on things like philosophy of science. Luckily the suggestions of the peer reviewers and the CJAL editor Lisa Sloniowski helped me make the piece much clearer and stronger.

The other big public-facing change is that I have retired the old Red Librarian website and blog. That site remains up, and all the blog posts are checked in to GitHub., but I’ve created a new website using Squarespace. I liked the idea that all posts (and all changes/revisions) were publicly available, which they won’t be on this platform. I’ll have to see what I can do for preservation here.

In previous years, I’ve listed the books I’ve finished. I read a lot of scholarly stuff, but rarely cover-to-cover, and with this list I like to put down what I actually read all the way through, which means its almost exclusively fiction.

Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist
Graham Greene, A Burnt-Out Case (rr)
Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana (rr)
Anthony Powell, A Question of Upbringing (rr)
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip
Jacques Poulin, Tournée d’automne
Robert A. Heinlein, The Number of the Beast (rr)
Leonard Cohen, Death of a Ladies Man
Leonard Cohen, The Favourite Game (rr)
Neil Gaiman, Sandman Overture
Neil Gaiman, Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes (rr)
Neil Gaiman, Sandman: The Doll’s House
J.G. Ballard, High Rise
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (rr)
Susan Sontag, On Photography
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
John Wyndham, The Chrysalids
Jane Austen, Persuasion
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (rr)
Ursula K. Le Guin, Gifts
Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices
Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers
John Le Carre, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
John Le Carre, The Honorable Schoolboy
John Le Carre, Smiley’s People
James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity

29 finished books, which is fewer than in 2019 (36), but more than in 2017 (27) and 2018 (24).

Jobs vs Work

At the beginning of the Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s quotes a passage from St Augustine where he describes the process of learning a language as learning the names of objects. Wittgenstein objects to this description, saying that while Augustine “does describe a system of communication… not everything that we call language is this system”. Wittgenstein goes on to use the example of board games to illustrate the distinction he’s thinking of:

“It is as if someone were to say: ‘A game consists in moving objects about on a surface according to certain rules…’ - and we replied: You seem to be thinking of board games, but there are others.”

Augustine’s may be an “appropriate description” of language, Wittgenstein writes, “but only for this narrowly circumscribed region, not for the whole of what you were claiming to describe”.

Now, the whole point of Wittgenstein’s later work - culminating in the posthumously-published Philosophical Investigations - is that our language, like everything else in our “form of life” arises out of the particularities of our social relationships. It is our relationships to each other, to the natural world, etc, that determine how we understand and use ideas, concepts, words, opinions, theories, values, etc. All it takes to make this proposition a Marxist one is to place the mode of production - the ways in which human beings engage with the natural world (including humans) in order to produce their means to live - as the overarching relationships among the set of all social relationships. It is unsurprising that Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, despite being staunchly non-ideological (as Terry Eagleton has pointed out), should be so closely related to Marxist thinking. Wittgenstein remarks in a prefatory note to the Investigations how much his thinking was indebted to the Marxist economist (and friend of Gramsci’s) Piero Sraffa.

What this means is that for both Marxists and Wittgenstein it is important to understand not only how the word “work” functions in a particular form-of-life but how work itself functions, as a practice and an activity, within a particular mode of production. Our mode of production is capitalism, which is structurally organized around the principle that work (like everything else) is a commodity, to be bought and sold. The products of labour do not belong to the labourers, but are alienated from them, and as a result the practice of labour becomes alienated from labourers as well. This alienation appears natural because our form-of-life (mode of production) has produced this state of affairs. This leads to all kinds of political positions which call for an end of work. The latest is a piece in Jezebel called “What’s the Point of non-Essential Work?”

The writer, Marie Solis, seems at some points to distinguish between work-under-capitalism and work, jobs and work. “I’ve certainly bought into many of society’s prescriptions about work, viewing it as both an economic necessity as well as a way to satisfy an existential need to feel useful and whole.” But at other times, the distinction collapses: “I was just one of roughly 21 million Americans who lost their jobs. I felt worn out and disillusioned, not just with my particular line of work, but with the idea of work itself.” But by collapsing the distinction, Solis falls into the same trap Augustine did with respect to language: the description of alienated, capitalist work is appropriate in the narrow, circumscribed region of capitalist jobs, but it does not describe all work.

“I was frustrated that I had tied so much of my self-worth to my job, especially when I could lose it at any moment. Why didn’t I have something else that gave me the same feelings of satisfaction and purpose? Why did work seem to be the centerpiece of my life, rather than just one other thing in it? Why did I have to work?”

I take the point about refusing the “max productivity” hustle of post-neoliberal capitalism we’re currently living in. I also accept that refusal of capitalist working conditions and the social requirements that go along with them (success, prestige, leisure time, property-ownership) is necessary for any state of future liberation. But I think it’s important to retain the distinction between alienated labour under capitalism and the human practice of non-alienated work.

One of the ways the language of capitalism produces our ways of understanding is by assigning terms other than work to non-alienated work (playing, crafting, hacking, hobbying, etc). It does this to ensure that work only ever has the narrowly circumscribed meaning of working for salary, dehumanized working conditions, alienation. But when we cook, when we repair our bikes, when we knit or sew or paint, when we draw or take photographs, this is all work. We tend to say we do this work for ourselves and mean we don’t do it for pay. But doing it for ourselves has another meaning: we do it to participate in the non-alienated human practice of labour, the transformation of the world through technique and craft.

We continue to live in capitalism. It is important that workers continue to get paid to survive. But if we want to hold sight of a possible future in which all work is non-alienated, all work is meaningful, and human(e), and fulfilling, and feels like play, feels like crafting, feels like a hobby, then we need to resist the capitalist push to define work solely as the dehumanizing, alienating relationship of selling labour power. We need to resist the bracketing off of non-alienated work as something silly or trivial; we need to retain in our language the distinction between capitalist work - which, to be sure, has only been the dominant form of labour for a few hundred years - and work itself.

Capitalism tries to say that all work is only the games where you move pieces across a board; it is important to bear in mind the many different and varied kinds of games that really exist in the world.