Category: intemperants

Our festival of lights

by  on  in intemperants

I’m talking about Bonfire Night and adjacent celebrations and, when saying ‘our’, am speaking as a Brit.

Guy Fawkes Night was one of the highlights of my childhood, as much for the associated food as for the meagre number of fireworks our dad could (or would) buy.* In this country at least, November the 5th marks the beginning of winter and goes back a lot further than the torture and execution of that failed Catholic assassin. Some of our Celtic neighbours kept the memory of Samhain and I’m sure the Saxons and other Germanic tribes had something similar. The nights are starting earlier and lasting longer and the weather’s getting colder, which is as good a reason as any for a big fire, some warming grub and making as much light as possible. Nor are we alone and the Hindu festival of Diwali happens around this time of year also. What they have in common is ‘the victory of light over darkness’.

It coincides with other festivals for remembering the dead. Hallowe’en, which has almost replaced Guy Fawkes Night as a boom time for retailers to cash in with loads of junk ‘for the kiddies’ to enjoy, is actually the Eve of All Saints’ Day in the Roman Catholic calendar, while November 2nd is All Souls Day when believers visited the graves of their ancestors and deceased family and is often a colourful event, as in Mexico. Not forgetting ‘Remembrance Day’ to commemorate the end of World War 1.

So, with plenty of dry leaves and dry wood from pruning that the gardeners want to get rid of, a big fire is a logical response, which provides a good excuse for an outdoor party before it’s too cold. Candles and lamps would be needed too and I guess gunpowder came into the mix when the government made the failure of Fawkes & Co to blow up Parliament with the stuff an official holiday. Its use in fireworks has persisted, despite repeated attempts to limit or ban it. And we’d want something to warm us inside and what we used to get was baked potatoes (cooked in the bonfire an option), toffee apples and black treacle toffee. My brother remembers soft vanilla fudge as well.

These days family or neighbourhood parties in the back garden or a nearby open space have been increasingly replaced by big shows put on by some charity or community group with much more fancy and expensive fireworks and other features to be burned – one I saw was a large model in wood and paper of the original target, the Palace of Westminster.

As I’ve written elsewhere, these events used to mark the changes in the seasons and served to map out the year. Whether those that are popular now gain the same level of tradition remains to be seen.

[* What I didn’t at first include in this discourse is the tradition of ‘A penny for the guy’. This meant the kids, or a parent, making a ‘guy’ (from Guido Fawkes) to sacrifice on the bonfire. A dummy would be made with your mum’s worn-out tights or stockings, stuffed with screwed-up balls of paper, for its arms, legs and torso and something similar for its head. It would be dressed in worn-out jacket and trousers, possibly shoes, and the head provided with a papier-mâché mask most commonly in the supposed likeness of Fawkes (now well known from its reincarnation by the campaigners of Anonymous), or some other hate-figure (eg Maggie Thatcher). According to my younger brother, we once put a mask on the youngest and used him instead, but I don’t recall it. Kids would take their creation to a favourable street location and beg passers-by for a contribution to their firework fund. They might even chant old rhymes, like “Remember, remember the fifth of November with gunpowder, treason and plot”, even if they didn’t really know the history of it. On the night, the guy would sit on top of the bonfire to be immolated. Whether these were originally folk memories of a similar fate for witches and heretics, I’ll leave to the historians and anthropologists.] 
“Wossall the noise about?”
A similar money-making pastime to ‘A penny for the guy’ was carolling. Kids would stand outside a likely residence and sing xmas carols, then knock on the door and wait to receive some cash or a mince pie the occupants hoped would make us go away. I and at least one of my brothers did this for a few years until it was killed off by television. Then they couldn’t hear us until we knocked or rang the doorbell, which would leave us all the unenviable task of listening to our attempts to sound angelic and harmonious, or even remember the words. This had its origin in the tradition of ‘wassailing’, when the poor would do the same outside the homes of the more well-to-do in expectation of a drink and something to eat, if not cash as well.
Thankfully it died out and is now replaced with kids threatening ‘Trick or treat’ on Hallowe’en. In these more ‘egalitarian’ and paranoid times, one could wonder if there’ll ever be other traditions like them … that is apart from buskers or homeless beggars asking for ‘spare change’ while wearing any seasonal decoration they can find.

RA 29.10.21

Money or “Who says I’m better off?”

by  on  in intemperants

(a beginner’s guide to why you’re not rich)

I woke up this morning thinking about money and what it is. I don’t know why but I seemed to be coming out of a dream phase. Anyway I was thinking about inflation – how a pound is now worth about 10p compared to fifty years ago. On the other hand, my income is probably ten times larger than it was then, so that cancels out and economists will tell me that, ‘in real terms’, I’m in fact better off. In some ways that might seem true but it’s worth looking at more closely.

The musings that follow aren’t new, even for me, but have been spiced up somewhat by listening to a radio programme called ‘Promises, Promises, A History of Debt’ written and presented by David Graeber, a well known anthropologist.

What is money?
The standard answer is ‘a medium of exchange’, that is something, whose value can be agreed on, given in return for goods or services. That value, however, is clearly somewhat variable, as inflation shows. But what about the thing itself? Let’s start with the paper kind.

The title of Dr Graeber’s programme seems to refer to a lovely little phrase that the Bank of England’s notes still carry, ‘I promise to pay the bearer the sum of … pounds’. Did you ever wonder what that meant? If you had, you’d have been told that bank notes were originally promissory notes which could be exchanged for the real thing – metal money, ie coins. We were told that this ended when the UK ‘came off the gold standard’, but gold was never the main metal used for money, that was silver. In fact what that promise on our bank notes meant was the Bank of England owed you so many pounds in weight of sterling silver. Sterling is a fixed standard of purity for silver – 92.5%. Whether a Bank of England £1 note ever got you that, I don’t know, but that was the theory. Currently 1lb sterling silver is worth a little over £250 – that’s inflation. Best of luck getting them to cough up at that rate.

But how did metal become a means of exchange? There have been other things used, like beads and shells, but the main feature seems to be their scarcity value rather than their usefulness. Gold and silver were chosen because they were shiny and gold, at least, didn’t tarnish. Other metals are used as well and we still talk about ‘coppers’ and, in some parts of the country, ‘brass’ and ‘tin’. These are very useful materials, so it isn’t difficult to imagine a time when not everyone knew how to mine and refine them from rocks in the ground, even if you had access to those ores. It would have seemed a magical thing, or at least it did to me when I was a kid. Thus a little lump of copper or tin, that could be worked into beautiful jewellery or a tool or a weapon, would be worth having in exchange for whatever you had to offer at an agreed rate.

Whether or not that scenario ever happened, it would have come under the heading of ‘barter’ and the only advantage metal had over other items was that it took up less room than, say corn, and so was easier to carry. This was for many years the standard history of the beginnings of metal money. However Graeber points out that the actual history is different and, for centuries, people traded almost exclusively on credit. Coinage only came into use as a means to pay soldiers and, in particular, mercenaries. So money and war have a common origin. How surprising is that?

Money hasn’t stopped being magical. If paper notes could stand in for real coins, then the next move was that we could write our own notes – cheques. This worked when a bank was holding our money and would transfer some of it to another person when they received that piece of paper. Magic. Then some smart-arse invented the credit card, which did away with the dreary task of writing out a cheque. But that didn’t mean someone would carry a bag of coins, or even paper, from your bank to the other person’s – it was just the numbers that changed in the ledgers and the banks agreed between themselves who had what. Then came computers and the whole process speeded up exponentially and money became even more abstract and mythical, but it was still just numbers flying around on wires and fibres in the form of electrical pulses. So where was the real money?

Banks and exchanges
We’re told that banks were invented in Italy in the 14th century but the business was around a lot longer than that. All you needed was a large or regular supply of cash* and a customer. The people with the money supply were generally big merchants while, as Graeber told us, the customers were usually rulers who had a war on their hands or in their plans. [* the word cash originally meant ‘box’, like the ones money was kept in, then it transferred to the money itself]

Apart from money-lenders, the other kind of dealers were the money-changers – you may have heard of Jesus chasing them out of the temple in Jerusalem. These exchanged gentile Greek and Roman coins for ones that were acceptable to the priests. Presumably they made a profit on the trade. Elsewhere it seems that no-one bothered much where the coins came from so long as you knew what they were worth compared to your local currency. At least that was the case until nation states became more protectionist about whose money was circulating in their territory. That’s when the exchange, the cambio bank, made its appearance.

Karl Marx defined capitalism as the trade in ‘money as a commodity’. Capitalism isn’t private industry, it’s the trade in money itself. As far as I’m concerned, that’s one of the few things Marx got right. Multinational corporations may be richer than all but the strongest countries on the planet, but the real power lies in banking and currency markets. That’s why there was so much resistance to the UK changing from pounds to euros – one less currency for the gamblers to play with.

Credit & Debt
As far as I can see the difference between them depends on class. If you’re working class, what you owe is a debt. If you’re middle class, what you owe is your credit. If you’re ruling class, you don’t care either way – someone else will pay.

Generally it doesn’t matter how much you owe as long as you’re able to keep up the repayments. It was the banks, mortgage companies and currency traders pushing that logic to its extreme that caused the crash of 2008. And who paid for that? The poor of course. All those huge numbers flitting around the memories of computers across the world may have seemed like fairy dust to those pushing the buttons, but the reality came down to who and what it all was based on – real people making and needing real things, like food, jobs, housing. Wealth means having, or controlling, a lot of those real things by whatever means.

So the real source of wealth is people and all that money – cash, credit, debt – means is ‘how much are you worth?’ The answer to that depends on the person asking the question. In other words, ‘how useful are you to me?’ The answer to that is ‘do you have something I need?’ Well, do you? What do you do, find, produce, transport, package or deliver, that I need? If you tell me that there is something and I believe you, then you’re in credit. If I get it, I owe you and I’m in debt to you. I’m promising to give you something in return. Money was invented as just one way to sort out that agreement but it went on before that for as long as humans have been around.

Is there another possible system? A friend of mine used to talk about the ‘cosmic supply company’. What he meant was, if you give somebody something – a cigarette, a cup of tea, a meal, a lift, some of your time – then there was a good chance that somebody else would give you what you needed another time. Sounds fantastical, but how often has that happened to you? Could we run a world on that system? Who knows? We haven’t tried it for a while.

RA 24-29.8.16

“I believe in being tolerant …”

by  on  in intemperants, Old school lies

The 16 November was the UN’s International Day for Tolerance. Sounds highly desirable but then I think it also sounds arrogant. It’s like that old tag-line for the 1960s – ‘the Permissive Society’. Who has the right to tolerate or permit another’s existence or behaviour? According to my dictionary, tolerate comes from the Latin word ‘tollere’, meaning to lift up. That’s fine if someone asks to be lifted up but more often they’re demanding not to be held down.

Whether it’s race, religion, caste, class, income, gender or sexuality, our world is riven by divisions with those on top consciously or unconsciously bearing down on those lower in the hierarchy than themselves. Asking them to ‘tolerate’ their poorer or weaker neighbour is not what’s needed. Nor should those lower in the pile tolerate their supposed superiors. They have a right to their intolerance but not by categorising all those who seem to oppress them as enemies. Sometimes education and understanding (or ‘overstanding’ for the Rastas) are enough. Sometimes, however, a fight is necessary.

RA 4.11.17

Taxation and off-shore money +

by  on  in intemperants, Uncategorized

Taxation and off-shore money

The so-called ‘Paradise Papers’ have made this front page news but it’s nothing new. Up to 30 years ago my main mode of long-distance travel was by hitch-hiking and it’s common knowledge that this situation tends to make people a lot more open in what they say than they would otherwise be. So, over that time, I had some interesting conversations. One of them was with the boss of a fairly large and well-known company who talked about the amount of taxes that the government lost from corporations which had large off-shore holdings – he mentioned BP and ICI as two of the biggest. He reckoned that, if the government would offer a deal, some of that taxable income could be brought back home. They never did, preferring to demonise poor people on welfare instead. The scale then of lost taxes versus estimated benefit fraud was 10 to 1. It’s got to be a lot bigger now since George Osborne made it even easier for companies to legally base themselves here, in what a former tax inspector on Radio 4’s ‘Money Box’ called ‘brass plate’ status (ie in name only), while their income was safely stashed away elsewhere. When the government conspires to keep their friends rich at the expense of the rest of the population the best description of the UK is a ‘banana republic’, monarchy or not.

Baccy and guns

Another couple of those highway revelations are worth mentioning here. One was over 40 years ago when I was picked up by the Chief Marketing Manager for British-American tobacco. I asked him if he was at all worried by the anti-tobacco lobby, which was beginning to make itself noticed. He wasn’t bothered at all, pointing out that, even if it was totally banned here, they now had their first factory in China and the market there would dwarf anything in the rest of the world.

The other was the cop who took me one night from Warminster to Bristol. Whether the beret and combat jacket I was wearing fooled him into thinking I was a squaddie, I don’t know but he was quite forthcoming. We got onto the subject of when police carried firearms and he said blithely that it happened a lot more often than the public was aware of. As he was obviously CID, I figured he knew what he was talking about.

Goes to show just how much is hidden from the general view, not in secret, but in plain sight.

RA 11.11.17

For God, King and Country

by  on  in intemperants, Old school lies

This obscenity is found on war memorials, often in Latin: ‘Pro Deo, Rege et Patria’. I call it an obscenity because the majority of those servicemen and women did not die for those fictions but either because they had no choice in the matter or to save their comrades. Lying on the battlefied with his legs blown off, a soldier was more likely to be calling for a medic or his mother than any so-called deity, even if he believed in one. Still less for his monarch – it was centuries since any king had been anywhere near a battle, let alone the front line. On the other hand a fair few of those ‘fallen’ may have fought to defend their country, however they envisioned that, from invasion and destruction by the enemy. So we’re talking about patriotism. This term is touted as the ‘decent’ form of nationalism, in that it should not imply any superiority over other nations. But a cursory glance at the history of war, imperialism and sport shows the lie in that. It has to be endlessly invoked because it’s a relatively new phenomenon – the idea of nation states is barely five hundred years old and much less in most parts of the world. Most people’s loyalty is to groups much nearer to them – their family, their tribe, their work mates, their football team, their community, if there is one, their co-religionists. Their traditional enemies are likewise mainly closer to them. So, at times of war and other international conflicts, patriotism/nationalism has to be revived and reinforced and the enemy dehumanised – ‘The only good Indian/German/ Jap/etc is a dead one’. The problem for the rulers is that these false emotions are hard to control when they’re trying to be on good terms with the Indians/ Germans/Japs/etc. Then ‘patriotism’ becomes extreme nationalism, which the right wing make a show of deploring, while using it to their advantage wherever possible. As someone said long ago, “What’s moderate racism?” So what’s moderate nationalism? Another set of blinkers to stop us seeing clearly.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and other lies

by  on  in intemperants, Old school lies

On the 16th November 1917, Lenin is reported as stating at the Congress of Peasant Assemblies (Soviets) that anyone who attacked the soviets was a counter-revolutionary. He wasn’t lying, he was a counter-revolutionary and it only took 2 years until, under Trotsky’s direction, the Bolsheviks took over all the soviets, put the army and navy under the command of officers, often previously Tsarist ones, and the trade unions under military control in the guise of necessary measures to win the civil war. The soviets never regained their autonomy, the armed forces and unions stayed under Party control. It took only another 9 years until the peasants lost ownership of their lands under forced collectivisation. Whether Lenin would have agreed with this is debatable … for what that’s worth.

As for socialist, it’s another word, like Christian, that’s been tortured out of any resemblance to its founders’ teachings. “Are you, or have you ever been, a Communist?” – every Christian should answer “Yes!” if they understood the meaning of either word. If we invent new words, they’ll get twisted too. Give up attacking labels and go for those people who misuse them to hurt other people.

The dictatorship of the proletariat

Another lie – it means the dictatorship of the Party. The Bolsheviks broke the first rule of revolutionaries – not to substitute yourself for the class. Marx called for ‘self activity’. This happened in Russia in March 1917, was crushed by the Party and all memory erased by Stalin. No wonder they’re in the shit now.

What’s in a name?

More lies:-
Democratic = Stalinist or a quasi-monarchy as in North Korea
People’s = ‘Communist’ Party, aka Stalinist
Freedom = Fascist
Christian* = Fascist or at least extreme conservative [* substitute a religion of your choice]

RA 20-21.10.17

The women as usual …

by  on  in intemperants, Uncategorized

This title is part of a quote from an account in a local newspaper of the Exeter Bread Riot of 1854, it goes on, ’The women as usual were the beginning of the disturbance.’ (Western Times, 14th January 1854) I love that because it reveals a truth that, as managers of the domestic economy, generally, women are the ones who know when the situation is no longer supportable. Whether it’s about hunger, as in the bread riots, demanding safer working conditions, as the fishermen’s wives and widows from Hull in the 1960s, or against murder and disappearances, as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo a decade later, women are often the first into battle. They then force the men into action, sometimes by leading them. The storming of the Bastille may have signalled the beginning of the French Revolution, but it was the march of women to Versailles that sealed Louis XVI’s fate. Likewise, it’s not well known that it was the women who started the Russian Revolution in March 1917, appropriately enough on International Women’s Day*, when female workers in a clothes factory in St Petersburg went on strike and called out the men in other works to join them. The Bolsheviks weren’t consulted, Lenin was still in Switzerland, the Winter Palace was unstormed. Shame that Eisenstein didn’t make a film about that.

Of course I’m talking about poor women, not the ones who become professional politicians, business leaders or academic writers. So, while Theresa May desperately tries to get the Tories to back-pedal and take on some of Labour’s policies, we can only wait and hope for the crunch to come.

[* started by a Jewish garment worker and socialist who was an immigrant from Russia to the USA. Come on chickens … time to roost!]

RA 4-6.10.17

Inferior Practice or ‘Why pick on Trotsky?’

by  on  in intemperants, Uncategorized

You probably won’t have spotted the bad pun in the title but it’s relevant – there’s theory and there’s practice (or praxis, if you’re a pedant). Leon Trotsky was outstanding at the first and, many would claim, just as great at the second but I’d object that there was a grave mismatch. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to involve a lot of marxist theory or terminology. I will explain one though, which might come up, and that’s ‘dialectics’. Initially it meant a logical discussion between people with opposing points of view. A German philosopher called Georg Hegel proposed a three-stage process – argument, counter-argument, resolution (thesis, antithesis, synthesis in his terminology). Marx and Engels borrowed this and twisted it to their own uses in order to explain changes in human history. I’d describe it as an attempt to base their theories in science – in this case Newton’s Third Law of Motion: action and reaction are equal and opposite. It’s a useful approach but shouldn’t be used obsessively ’cos we’re talking about human beings not billiard balls. That’s where bolsheviks like Trotsky went horribly wrong.

According to Marx and Engels, the dialectics of history meant that the oppressed and exploited working class (proletariat) would inevitably rise up and replace the ruling class (bourgeoisie) through ‘self-activity’. Class distinctions would then disappear and communism would bring prosperity and peace to the world. It’s a nice theory and still might happen but has nothing to do with what is perceived to be communism by its enemies, nor with what’s been done in its name. Trotsky played a major part in that degeneration.

I don’t disrespect him, Leon (Lev) Bronstein, who changed his name to Trotsky, was a real revolutionary, at least to begin with, and did time twice (1899 and 1906) for his activities even before the Revolution. He was also a great speaker and writer. I’ve read the first part of his ‘History of the Russian Revolution’ in translation and it’s an excellent, if obviously very partisan, account. Like many, his positions changed several times, starting with the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1898 (note the name, friends in Labour and those supposed Social Democrats now with the Lib-Dems; it didn’t become the Communist Party until 1918). When the RSDLP split at the London Congress in 1903, he sided with the moderate minority (Menshevik) faction but tried to get the two parts to work together. He didn’t join the Bolsheviks until after the Revolution kicked off in March 1917 (note also that this was the real revolution; what happened in November – October in the old calendar – wasn’t a revolution but a coup d’état). He rose rapidly to the top. This is when theory and practice began to diverge.

Of course Marx and Engels hadn’t been too shy to contradict their own theories. Not content to let the inevitable march of history take its own course, they set up the International Workingmen’s Association (the 1st International) with the aim of steering it in the right direction. Soon enough they managed to throw out the anarchists by the simple expedient of moving the 1876 congress to New York, knowing the anarchists couldn’t afford the fare. So much for self-activity.

The bolsheviks weren’t slow to follow, beginning with the suppression of all the other revolutionary groups in Russia, not forgetting the anarchists, which Trotsky did not oppose. Trotsky began his revisions soon enough, firstly by putting trade unions under military control, so that strikes couldn’t happen, then by putting all the soviets (assemblies), that had formed amongst soldiers, sailors, workers and peasants in the early days of the revolution, under direct Bolshevik control. This was followed by the suppression of the soviets in the armed forces and the reinstatement of tsarist officers. The rationale (ie pitiful excuse) for this was the failure of German communists to effect a revolution after the fall of the Kaiser, thus contradicting Marx’s prediction that the working classes of the advanced economies in the West would rise first. Russia was the wrong place to start the revolution, so they’d have to busk it. This was how Marxist-Leninism was born. Consequently the civil war continued for 4-5 years more against the tsarist White Army and its allies, England and France, sending reluctant soldiers who’d just defeated the Germans to overthrow the revolution … and, of course, the anarchists in the Ukraine.

Then there was Kronstadt. If any Trot gives you the old line “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”, resist the urge to break theirs and say “You can’t make an omelette unless the hens lay eggs.” That’s another thing the bolsheviks got wrong. It’s 1921 and the régime of ‘war communism’ drags on – the Red Army is winning and has just crushed the anarchist Black Army that helped them beat the tsarists, but workers’ rations and wages are still low and peasants are tired of having their produce ‘requisitioned’ without payment (ie stolen) to feed the Party and the army. Strikes break out in Petrograd (St Petersburg’s better name), birthplace of the revolution. The sailors and soldiers at the naval base of Kronstadt at the mouth of the Neva River come out in support. They produce a list of demands which includes, amongst other things, an end to one-party rule by the bolsheviks. As Commissar for War, Trotsky negotiates by sending in the army. In twelve days the revolutionaries are crushed, those who don’t die or escape to Finland are sent to the gulag. The leaders are executed or gaoled (much the same thing in those prisons). Lenin then recognised the justification of the rebels cause by ending war communism and allowing some liberalisation of the economy (the New Economic Policy). Trots will still defend this with old bolshevik conspiracy theories (lies) and omelette obscenities but those are the bare historical facts.

What’s my conclusion to all this? That Lev Trotsky began as a brave and genuine revolutionary but, when the bolsheviks took over the Russian people’s revolution in November 1917, he joined what he saw as the winning side and he then crushed the revolution … yes, he gets most of the credit. To my mind it was effectively over by 1919 when the unions and soviets were taken over completely by the bolsheviks and Trotsky was the person who headed that process. Kronstadt was the last gasp of independence. He remains a hero to many on the Left now because he tried to resist Stalin but he’d laid the table for Josip and the rest was inevitable. Did he deserve that icepick in the head in 1940? It was just cause and effect … or dialectics, if you like.

RA 2-4.8.17

Education makes you stupid ..

by  on  in intemperants, Uncategorized

.. that’s its job. I’m not the first to make this observation but it probably confuses most people. ‘Surely,’ they think, ‘education makes you smart or makes smart people smarter ..’ That’s the sales pitch it comes with but the truth is more complicated. The simple answer is: it depends on who is providing it and who it’s designed for. One example comes is that, in Victorian Britain when primary school education was extended to all children, girls and boys were usually taught separately. The boys learned geography because they were expected in many cases to travel abroad in the service of the Empire. Girls often weren’t because it might worry their tender minds if they knew that a bigger world existed beyond the borders of their villages or towns.

The word ‘education’ comes from Latin and originally meant ‘leading out’ – presumably from the darkness of ignorance into the light of knowledge. Indeed the road sign for a school used to be a flaming torch, signifying just that. However even a slight dip into the history of schooling shows that it was never that simple. Back in Classical-period Greece the great philosopher, Socrates, bemoaned the teaching of reading as undermining the ability of Athenian youths to use their memories. He might have been right but literacy extends what can be known so much that in the modern world it’s hard to survive without it. But, while wider learning was essential for the rulers and their advisors, for the majority of the population all they needed to learn were the skills of their trade. These latter were learned from your parents or your master, if you became an apprentice. Nowadays it’s called vocational training.

With the rise of Christianity and Islam, education became almost exclusively the domain of the clerics and they guarded their knowledge jealously. Thus in moslem countries the Koran is taught to most children by rote and only in Arabic; in christian lands under Catholic control, scriptures were all in Latin for centuries and anyone who tried to translate them into a modern language stood a good chance of getting burned alive. The Orthodox Church controls its scripture in other, but no less thorough, ways. As societies became more complex, it became more necessary to spread literacy and numeracy more widely in the population, but schools beyond the primary level remained by and large still in the hands of the clergy. This remained the case in England and Wales up to the 1870s and in fact there are still plenty of schools designated Church of England or Roman Catholic. In Ireland this lasted well into the 20th century. The purpose of these schools was to create firm believers and well-behaved, compliant citizens. In their alphabetically arranged ranks, children were taught literally to ‘know your place’, whether that was to be a leader or a follower. These ‘faith schools’ are seen by aspirational parents as the better choice for their children than the anarchy of state comprehensives, especially those in the inner cities and other deprived areas. This is put down to their ‘ethos’ – discipline, uniforms, etc – but is more likely a result of better funding, for whatever reason, providing more qualified staff and more equipment.

It should be obvious by now that I’m talking about ‘official’ education, not all learning. There has always been forbidden, occult learning that had to be suppressed – the province of heretics, wizards and witches and celebrated in stories like ‘Faust’. In the colonies of European empires, learning among the ‘natives’ was similarly viewed and, in the case of slaves, often illegal and punished severely. Later on, during the Cold War, teachers in countries newly independent or still fighting their colonisers, teachers were usually the main targets of right-wing death squads. Now those executions are carried out in the name of fundamentalist islam, not democracy, especially if they’re teaching girls. Meanwhile in the USA, it’s the fundamentalist ‘christians’ who are fighting liberal, science-based learning. Education has thus long been a battleground. For the bosses it’s a balancing act between providing a workforce capable of creating and running the ever more clever technology and having a population that’s thinking for itself. Under the Tudors there was an expansion of schools which led, on the one hand, to Shakespeare and on the other to an educated class who fought a civil war and cut the king’s head off. In the 1960s the UK saw the rise, not only of comprehensive education, but also ‘child-centred learning’. While this approach was well supported by research evidence, it was not implemented with any consistency and failures were seized on by Conservative politicians and the right-wing press as proof of its evil. The student-led protests against colonial wars, exploitation of workers and capitalism in general showed what needed to be done – firstly take control of the curriculum, particularly the teaching of history. The under-classes have long struggled to hold on to their own histories and, instead, been force-fed that of kings and ‘patriotic’ wars to keep them compliant with the current world order. Even the Labour government’s 1948 Education Act failed to touch that. In 1988 the Tories brought in the National Curriculum to put the genie back in its bottle. Now they’re dismantling it for their own ‘academies’ and ‘free schools’ to give them more flexibility, but not too much, while blaming their own straightjacket on Labour. Same old, same old ..

But history isn’t the only area of dogmatism and not all the issues are Political. There have been and continue to be struggles in the teaching of languages, especially ‘correctness’ and grammar, literacy, geography – whose viewpoint to take, mathematics – numeracy or understanding and even science – so much has to be accepted as ‘proven’ before you’re allowed to question anything and, if your results or your equations don’t match the ‘right’ answers, you got it wrong. So, as this essay claims, the purpose of education is to make you stupid .. and compliant, uncomplaining, unquestioning and increasingly in debt. In this way the rulers hope to create the ideal population of zombies to keep themselves in power and wealth. When everyone has the chance to learn to think for themselves, the human race may have a hope to survive.

RA 11.5.17

And all that jazz

by  on  in intemperants, Uncategorized

Jazz was the dominant music of the 20th century and looks like keeping that status in the current one. Jazz was the classical music of the 20th century. Jazz is a generic word for ‘music of black origin’, as the designers of the MOBO award came to describe it. Jazz is talking dirty, jiving, rapping. Jazz is music for the body, mind and soul. Jazz is whatever it wants to be.

Etymologists may argue over the origin of the word itself but the music it came to describe, it’s generally agreed, arose in and around New Orleans in the early years of the 20th century. However that was not its only birthplace – its African creators were the victims of kidnap, rape and slavery and that wasn’t confined to North America. Calypso, soca, ska, reggae, son, rhumba, mambo, salsa, samba and all the other styles that arose in the Caribbean and Latin America are equally jazz. Purists will object and point to essential elements like improvisation, riffing, but these aren’t absent from jazz’s cousins and even improvisation can be scripted, rehearsed and orchestrated. The point is that those southern sounds have the same roots – consensual miscegenation of African and European music. Nor did it stop there, musicians travel and, when recording became possible, so did music. Consequently jazz recrossed the Atlantic to Africa and was adopted by musicians there. So did its twin, the blues, their bastard offspring, rock ’n roll and more recently another brat generally called hip-hop. From Algeria to Azania the infection spread and gave us rai, mbalax, high life, Afro-beat, soukous, mbaqanga and many more right across the continent have all been touched by Afro-American musical styles and just as often made their own connections with European music. There’s an album of music mainly from Natal, I believe, called ‘Rhythms of Resistance’ that was made at the height of the anti-apartheid movement. On it is a track, whose title and players I sadly don’t know because I only have a bootlegged cassette tape, when a fiddle joins in. In my mind’s eye I could clearly see that one night an Irish seaman wandered into an unlicensed drinking establishment in Durban or Port Elizabeth, bought a drink and listened to the local guys jamming there. Having his fiddle with him and being Irish, he joined in. One of the local musos thought, ‘That works. I’ll have some of that.’ At some other point the visitor said “This is a great shebeen!” “What’s a shebeen?” someone asked him. “A place like this.” ‘OK,’ they thought, ‘we’ll borrow that too.’ So shabini is the word used from South Africa to Zimbabwe for a dive, a blues, a speakeasy, a juke joint.

Of course it didn’t stop with Africa, jazz got to Western Europe very early on and the feedback came from there as well. Since when it has gone global – there’s not a part of the planet that this music, whatever name it goes by, hasn’t reached and where it’s enjoyed neat or blended with the native sounds. Jazz is the quintessential musique sans frontières, like all music in fact. It’s our heartbeat.

RA 26.6.17