Elias

A Commie I’m not. A crusty old Marxist, maybe.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

So, we had a big party at the homestead recently and I was lovingly described as a communist by my son-in-law. I appreciate the sentiment behind this remark.  For him, it’s a term of endearment.  There were many ‘left-leaners’ in the crowd who would have appreciated the comment because in some senses we share many moral precepts.  Oh, I’ve been described as a commie before.  It wasn’t the first time, nor will it be the last in all likelihood.  I really don’t mind all that much.  Whether or not people actually believe that I’m a communist is another matter and I hope to set the record straight here for anyone who cares.  If people read this blog posting,  and few will, they will know my position on the matter.  For my own sense of self, for myself, I want to set the record straight once and for all.

When I state that I’m not a commie, that doesn’t mean for one second that I’m a proponent of ‘capitalism.’  Many people see communism and ‘capitalism’ as opposites, as alternate ways of organizing ‘the economy’ and ‘society.’   I don’t, nor did Karl Marx when he got old enough to think straight.  As an aside, Harold Adams Innis, the brilliant Canadian political economist and historian said, in a moment of particular lucidity, that one cannot make a contribution to the social sciences before one reaches the age of 50 and he’s probably correct.  He was 58 when he died and his best work happened in the last 5 or 6 years of his life.  Marx was born in 1818 and died in 1883.  It wasn’t until the late 1860s that he really got his shit together, hunkered down in the British Museum and started writing Capital.  Yes, yes, he wrote the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts earlier, but he really got serious later.

The reason I say I’m not a communist is that I’m not a proponent of communism.  For me, or anyone else, to be labeled a communist or anything else for that matter implies a certain level of advocacy, of ‘proponency.’  It’s not necessary to be proponent of something that will eventually happen no matter what we think or wish.  It’s like being described as an old-agist.  I know that old age will happen to all of us, but that doesn’t mean I’m a proponent of old age.  I’M getting old, but that doesn’t mean that I advocate old age. That would be ridiculous.  A communist mode of production will inevitably replace the capitalist one because the internal contradictions within the capitalist mode of production dictate it in the same way the feudal relations of production replaced slave based ones and the capitalist mode of production replaced feudal ones.  The change will happen gradually, just as old age creeps up on us.  Before it’s clear what’s happening, the old bones get brittle, the arteries plug up and the organs just can’t cut it anymore.  The resiliency of youth is past, old solutions no longer get the same results they used to.  Life inevitably brings on death, they are different sides of the same coin.  What that means for me as an individual is clear, what it means for ‘society’ or for the ‘capitalist mode of production’ is also clear.  Nothing is forever, nothing.  Not the capitalist mode of production, not our beloved countries, not our cities, not our towns, not our fabulous wealth.  The question is not whether or not the capitalist mode of production will live on forever, but when it will die.  It’s not even a question of how.  That’s also been clear for a long time.  Still, classical economics is still in classical denial over the whole thing, a fact which is made clear on virtually every page of The Economist which is a proponent of capitalism.

For what I’ve written above I could be branded with the sin of determinism, one of scholarship’s seven deadliest.   If saying that one day I will die makes me a determinist, well that’s ok by me.  Call me whatever name you want.  Furthermore,  what I write above does not mean that life is completely meaningless to me.  We live life on many levels, a day at a time.  My life is full of activity and that means that every day I make many moral decisions most having nothing or little to do with my eventual death.  I don’t  live life as though my life is about to end (I didn’t do that even when I had cancer and the possibility of my quick exit from this life was very real).  I DO things, there is nothing else to do.  I read the papers, listen to the radio and watch TV.  I play with my grandkids.  I can’t help but get outraged by the blatant bullshit and crap that comes out of the government in Ottawa on a daily basis.  Yet I understand  the role that national governments play in the capitalist mode of production and their essential collaboration in making it possible for capital to flow with greater and greater ease globally  and for controlling labour by keeping tight reins on migrations and regulation.  I haven’t lost my moral compass.  I even get angry on one level…say, at incivility, at stupid driving, at poor highway engineering…while understanding that at other levels, the picture is much different and anger makes no sense.  As I write above, we live life on many levels, many planes.  They are all connected although not always in obvious ways.  Even otherwise highly educated people don’t see the connections.  The connections, interconnections and interweavings become visible only after a sustained gaze upon them.  To see them requires special training.  Somewhere, Norbert Elias got that training, as did many other thinkers who have had a sustained influence on me over the decades.

Apparently, staring is rude, even for an 8 month old baby.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

I’m reading Norbert Elias’ The Civilizing Process, the edition I have being published in 1994, but which is really a compilation of  two earlier separate works entitled the History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization both from 1939.  It’s a long, involved and complicated book, a detailed historical sociology rivalling Max Weber’s work.  At the moment I’m reading his fascinating account of the evolution of the use of table implements like the knife, spoon and fork and their moral implications.  He writes that it took centuries from the first appearance of the two pronged fork on the European scene in the early Middle Ages as an implement usually made of gold or silver and strictly used by the upper nobility to its more general use only three centuries later.

Normally I wouldn’t write about a book while still in the process of reading it, but in this case I’m not reviewing his book and it turns out Elias’ analysis provides a great backdrop for something that happened to me today in an elevator.  Carolyn and I were rushing around looking for a cash machine in a mall at 555 West 12th Street in Vancouver, BC., not that the location has any particular significance.  The same event probably could have happened in a number of similar locations.  So what happened was this: We chase around the mall for a bit looking for a cash machine and eventually find one, get some cash and head back to the elevator to get back to the parkade, one floor below.  A woman also waited at the elevator.  She pushed a stroller into the elevator as the door opened and we all got in, but just before she did that she turned to me and said: “He hasn’t learned yet that it’s impolite to stare at people.”  Well, alright.  So I asked her, “How old is he?”  She replied: “eight months.” At which point, the sociologist in me kicked in and I told her that it was a little too early in his life to be learning manners as complicated as not staring or averting the eyes.  She probably thought I was just a nutty old man and left it at that, but she definitely had the old moral wall on her mind.  No way was she going to let her son break an inviolable rule of etiquette such as not staring and she just wished she could enforce it on him even at his tender age.  At least she didn’t hit him for it.

Granted, the use of forks has very little in common with not staring at someone when it comes to etiquette.  Still, they are both things that ‘are not done.’  That is if you want to be accepted as part of a civilized society.  Savages and pagans stare and eat with their fingers, but not civilized people.  The study of manners is the study of morality, who is part of my world and who isn’t.  We struggle constantly with whether or not we ‘fit in.’  In saying that I’m not breaking any social scientific sound barriers.  Sociologists, psychologists and anthropologists have long been interested in manners.  They open an impressive window into what we will accept as ‘civilized’ behaviour.  Their evolution is key to understanding a multitude of other social relations.

That said, I’m a little concerned for the little tike I met in the stroller on the elevator in the mall at 555 West 12th Avenue in Vancouver.  His mother seems to be hyper sensitive to etiquette rule violations.  If it’s true that children hear ‘no’ or ‘don’t’ 40,000 times before they enter kindergarten, this little guy might be in for maybe 60 or 70 thousand ‘nos and ‘don’ts.’  By  the time he gets to kindergarten, he may be so hemmed in by his mother’s imaginary moral wall that he will have difficulty turning around without scraping an elbow.