March 31, 2010
Priceless!
A chap called Nick has left the most fantastic comment under my last post about Phillip Blond. I’m elevating it to above-the-line status to ensure maximum readership.
Responding to Blond’s claim that the welfare state set up by “a middle-class elite partly to relieve poverty but also to deprive the poor of their habits of autonomous organisation” and that it destroyed the “vivid communal life of the urbanised working class”, Nick adopts the guise of a nonegenarian, steeped in the values and experiences of the golden age before Beveridge ruined the vibrant working-class culture of the 1930s:
7am. Got out of bed which I shared with my three sisters. At least we’ve got a warm bed to share.
7.30am. Washed with a bucket of cold water.
8am. Had breakfast… not entirely sure what it was. But better than having to queue in the bread line.
8.30am. Nancy’s coughing up her lungs again. Can’t afford to take her to the doctor. I suppose she’ll be going the same way as our Sally soon. God works in mysterious ways.
9am. No school, it’s important to contribute. Time to go to work as a maid for that horrible man who keeps trying to touch me.
6pm. Back from work. Time for dinner… thin soup and a bit of bread.
7pm. Put baby to bed. Mum drunk again.
10pm. Hide in room. Listen to dad return drunk from his vibrant community experience down the pub. Try to shut out the sound of mum’s screaming and crying.
11pm. Pray for my own house, tv, electric, free healthcare, pension, fuel allowance, childcare, education etc. Bed.
Nail. Head. Hit.
Incidentally, like the dog that returneth to its vomit I’m off to hear Blond launch The Miserabilist Manifesto at Foyle’s bookshop tonight. If I get half the chance, I’m going to read out Nick’s comment.
UPDATE: I didn’t got to hear Blond, I got drunk in a pub and watched football instead. Perhaps that means I am emblematic of the lack of virtue in modern British youth. Or perhaps it shows – as Aristotle insisted – that friendship is inimical to living the virtuous life. Who knows? Not Phillip Blond, that’s for sure.
freethinkingeconomist said,
March 31, 2010 at 12:33 pm
Comment of the week, definitely. Thanks for posting it, I will use it too.
Fake nostalgia for the past. Has he read the Road to Wigan Pier?
Paul Sagar said,
March 31, 2010 at 12:36 pm
Probably not.
Indeed, he probably thinks it’s a pleasant anecdote about an autonomous self-organised working class trip to the sea-side.
Tim Worstall said,
March 31, 2010 at 12:50 pm
Of course, there were also good things in the 30s. If the maid did get fiddled with it would be her thrown onto the streets for having the shameful lust to get pregnant. Arse bandits were properly prosecuted, not feted on the BBC’s new fangled TV. Contraception was restricted to married women, those trying to limit the number of children, not for those outside holy matrimony who wanted the fun without the consequences.
The great and the good of the left (The Fabians!) were fully in favour of eugenics.
Yes, there were indeed wonderful things in the 30s.
But what really pisses me off about those shouting about “families” is that yes, things have changed but they’ve changed for one underlying reason. The economic emancipation of women. Now I do tend to think this is as a result of the way in which brawn and muscle power simply aren’t part of the world of work any more….at least not in any significant portion of the workforce….rather than doughty fighters for such economic emancipation having had much effect.
But the change in the family can only be undone by removing that emancipation. Quite simply lots of women have decided that they don’t need a man around so why have one? Or why stick with the same one? And it’s that very ability not to need one which leads to the exercise of that choice.
To stop it you’d have to remove the possibility of the choice….and no, I really don’t think that those lauding Blond for his concentration upon “family” have really thought through this point.
freethinkingeconomist said,
March 31, 2010 at 3:37 pm
Brilliant point. People forget what a misery women’s lives were.
Even in a genteel novel like Phineas Finn, where all the women are heiresses and aristos, their effective slavery to women rings through the book. What PB may think of as “the good old days”
freethinkingeconomist said,
March 31, 2010 at 3:44 pm
I meant slavery to “men” . Doh. To quote another male
Richard said,
March 31, 2010 at 3:49 pm
“Quite simply lots of women have decided that they don’t need a man around so why have one?”
What if the children want the man around?
Personally I’m not that concerned about couples splitting up but if they have children then it’s a much more sensitive situation. Yes you can argue it’s better for the children if the parents split than stay together and create an atmosphere of misery but one has to ask whether people take the divorce option much to readily these days.
On the estate where I was brought up my friends parents are all still married bar one. As a result it’s hard for me to understand why so many people get divorced when I know so many long-term contented married couples and barely any divorcees. Is it because younger generations have unrealistic expectations? Does divorce disproportionately affect the working class (the estate I grew up on was typical suburban Surrey middle-middle to lower-middle class)?
Tim Worstall said,
March 31, 2010 at 3:58 pm
“What if the children want the man around?”
Please note that I’m not arguing that higher divorce is desirable. Nor that it’s undesirable. I’m just trying to point out that (in my opinion at least) it’s an inevitable side effect of that economic emancipation of women.
And as such, it’ll only be reversed if that emancipation is reversed.
Alex said,
March 31, 2010 at 10:02 pm
Which a libertarian such as yourself want to do.
Alex said,
March 31, 2010 at 10:02 pm
^wants
freethinkingeconomist said,
March 31, 2010 at 10:05 pm
Alex, um, wtf? Since when did libertarians insist on particular social structures? If they were to have emancipation reversed, how would they do that? hope for self-organising gangs of chauvinists?
There may be much wrong with the libertarian position – its sweet naivity about how things really work – but this charge surely doesn’t stick
Paul Sagar said,
March 31, 2010 at 10:19 pm
Tim,
I broadly agree.
But your point about muscle and brawn can’t be correct. think of women working in munitions factories in the 1940s: they could do the work, but when men returned from war they were kicked out – not because they couldn’t do the work (they could), but because of dominant hierarchies tracking misogynistic assumptions about “women’s work”.
And think of how much “men’s work” has nothing to do with physical strength; most factory work (for example) involves operating machines and thereby doesn’t require physical strength because the machine does the lifting. Or think driving buses or trains – even before power steering, it simply wasn’t the case that women didn’t drive buses because they “lacked the physical attributes to do so”.
The feminist movement of the 1970s especially achieved a lot, and it wasn’t all economic factors what did it: part of the feminism movement’s success was changing the terms of legitimacy regarding women’s employment and employment rights -so for example, and emphasis on equal PAY not just equal job opportunities. OK, we still don’t have equal pay – but as you yourself point out this is in part due to economic structure interacting with the biological brute fact that women bear and give birth to children.
The point is, the feminist movement has changed an awful lot in terms of workplace relations – including factors over and above pay and employment opportunities. Few employers could now get away with pinching their employees bottoms; no political leader could dismiss women as “nice bits of crumpet and window-dressing” anymore. Such behaviour has been rendered illegitimate in our society (and rightly so), leading to it being ruled out. This all works its way into legislative prescriptions and attitudinal reactions, thus changing gender relations in society.
Now certainly you are right that a return to “the traditional family” means reversing the emancipation of women. But you are wrong to tie that to strict economic determinism.
More goes on in politics than economic determinism. Though, ironically, something that both marxists and classical liberals/libertarians share in common is an over-emphasis on economically deterministic factors at the expense at the more subtle, psychological factors observable in political interactions and change, and which in fact have tremendous importance.
Paul Sagar said,
March 31, 2010 at 10:25 pm
“Alex, um, wtf? Since when did libertarians insist on particular social structures? ”
Right. One of libertarianism’s/classical liberalism’s main failings IMO is a complete under-emphasis on, and lack of attention paid to, the importance of social strucutres (inc complex power relations) due to the utopian belief that state minimalism and market freedom will lead to everybody simply getting along fine and none of these nasty worries about oppressive inter-personal social relations arising.
Paul Sagar said,
March 31, 2010 at 10:27 pm
“Please note that I’m not arguing that higher divorce is desirable. Nor that it’s undesirable. I’m just trying to point out that (in my opinion at least) it’s an inevitable side effect of that economic emancipation of women.”
This is correct, I think – except that I’d go further and say that sometimes divorce is positively desriable, e.g. when it allows a woman to escape a domineering and violent husband, or when children are able to escape a deeply unhappy household because the parents find it’s not working and can go separate ways.
Obsessive moralising about the family forgets that often marriage is a bad thing, and no amount of rosey-eyed nostalgia about (Christian?) fairy tales changes that.
Tim Worstall said,
April 1, 2010 at 7:42 am
“And think of how much “men’s work” has nothing to do with physical strength; most factory work (for example) involves operating machines and thereby doesn’t require physical strength because the machine does the lifting. ”
This is true now. It wasn’t true “then” for some value of “then.”
Munitions factories is a bad example for you BTW…the point about the work in such places is that it is “delicate”. And it was WWI when the women were all thrown out afterwards….after WWII the factories themselves were closed down.
Now, sure, I’m guilty of a bit of economic determinism here but that’s possibly me just stating the point too firmly. On the other hand women have flooded into the workforce everywhere and therre’s not been the same feminist movement everywhere.
Anyway, as with almost everything I’m sure there have been a number of causes contributing to what the situation is now. I just like to keep pointing to the muscle part of labour as something which very few people do point to.
It’s absolutely true that in, say, 1700, the gender division of labour was based upon that muscle heft and that today, with very rare exceptions, it ain’t (as a detail to back this up there are very few jobs where men actually get paid more than women for the same job. Manual heavy labour is one of them for this same obvious reason.)
Alex said,
April 2, 2010 at 3:23 am
Giles, Tim didn’t say the “social emancipation of women”, he said “economic emancipation of women”.
Think employment laws.
Tim Worstall said,
April 2, 2010 at 1:48 pm
Alex, do look at what I actually said, please.
No, I don’t think the economic emancipation of women has come about because of employment laws. I think it’s come about as a result of technology. Simply because muscle power is now not the major determinant of who is capable of doing the vast majority of jobs.
Alex said,
April 3, 2010 at 2:56 am
What you actually said was this:
“Anyway, as with almost everything I’m sure there have been a number of causes contributing to what the situation is now. I just like to keep pointing to the muscle part of labour as something which very few people do point to.”
Anyway, you now say:
“No, I don’t think the economic emancipation of women has come about because of employment laws. I think it’s come about as a result of technology. Simply because muscle power is now not the major determinant of who is capable of doing the vast majority of jobs.”
I agree this will have helped, but you’re living in denial if you think employment laws haven’t helped too.