Lawnmower
Legitimation Crisis
Let Us Face the Future
Letter to his Father, The
Loach, Ken
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Lawnmower
The Big Soviet Encyclopaedia
is succinct and illuminating in equal measure (3rd ed., English version,
v.6 p.720):
"A machine designed
to mow lawns. There are manual mowers and mechanised mowers either
of the reel type or with a rotating blade. The USSR produces mechanised
mowers with a rotating blade because they are more productive and
can cut down coarse grasses. A one-cylinder gasoline engine with a
0.9 kV (1.25 hp) runs the mower. As the rotor turns, the hinged blades
cut, fragment, and throw the grass through openings in the frame to
the areas already mowed. A mower can mow 0.12 hectares per hour. One
worker is needed to run a lawnmower."
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Legitimation
Crisis
Of all the books of Jürgen
Habermas, Legitimation Crisis stands closest to the tradition
of classical Marxism. Habermas aims to show how the conflicts produced
by the fundamental contradictions of the capitalist mode of production
are not so much done away with under the social democratic or corporatist
state as mediated by the state and displaced, first into the politico-administrative,
and then into the socio-cultural spheres. In this last arena, the contradictions
of the economic system emerge transmogrified into the withdrawal of
citizen motivation, or as a legitimacy crisis for the regime -- this
last being the central focus of interest in the book.
Under advanced forms of capitalism
the state "carries out numerous imperatives of the economic system".
Because the political system yokes itself to the reproduction of the
economic system, a political legitimation of the relations of production
is called for, and "formal democracy" provides that legitimation
through the election mechanism. Versions of corporatism immunize the
state from class conflict, which helps to fragment class consciousness,
but this is at the cost of growing wage inequalities, inflation, fiscal
crisis and deteriorating public services. The result is that the crisis
produced by the contradiction of capitalism is felt in the form of welfare
cuts, environmental disaster, social anomie, political instability,
and so on, even as the economic mechanism seems to be in perfect working
order. The state props up capitalism, but capitalism is still prone
to endemic crises according to the old Marxist logic, and the crises
are displaced into the political system, creating difficulties for parties,
governments, coalitions and bureaucracies. Sometimes these political
and administrative "steering problems" will be resolved, but
sometimes they will not, and this prepares the ground for the displacement
of crisis from the political to the socio-cultural sphere, making room
for the legitimation crisis. And since the tendencies of bourgeois societies
are to undermine the traditional bases of a unified and legitimate the
social order, the legitimation crisis or its neighbour, the motivation
crisis, will also tend to deepen over time.
Read with twenty five years
of hindsight, Legitimation Crisis does read like a child of its
time: a sophisticated theoretical attempt to understand the crisis of
1968 and afterwards, with the resurgence of ideological militancy and
industrial action in prosperous, Keynesian, postwar Western Europe.
Whether it helps us think through subsequent developments in European
politics is moot. And whether the "legitimation crisis" itself
is a concept that remains empirically applicable or theoretically important
is not obvious, either.
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Let
Us Face the Future
"Let Us Face the Future:
A Declaration of Labour Policy for the Consideration of the Nation"
is the full title of the manifesto which the Labour party produced for
the 1945 General Election, and which is available in full here.
The manifesto, drafted by
Michael Young (now Lord Young of Dartington) began by asserting that
"victory in war must be followed by a prosperous peace", with
a reminder of the "hard-faced men who had done well out out of
the war" thirty years before, who "kept control of the Government"
and ensured that "the people lost that peace". The rhetoric
was robust: "The Labour Party is a Socialist Party, and proud of
it. Its ultimate purpose at home is the establishment of the Socialist
Commonwealth of Great Britain - free, democratic, efficient, progressive,
public-spirited, its material resources organised in the service of
the British people" And it was tempered by pragmatism: "But
Socialism cannot come overnight, as the product of a week-end revolution.
The members of the Labour Party, like the British people, are practical-minded
men and women..."
Some of the language is quite
New Labour: the manifesto called for "a great programme of modernisation"
for a "New Britain", and insisted that "The Labour Party
will put the community first". This Labour Government, however,
would "plan from the ground up", and the manifesto called
for the nationalisation of the Bank of England, the fuel and power industries,
"inland transport", and iron and steel. The Party further
promised to rehouse the people, raise the school-leaving age to 16,
and found "the new National Health Service" in which "the
people may get the best that modern science can offer, more and better
hospitals, and proper conditions for our doctors and nurses". On
the international front, finally, the manifesto pledged the Government
to "the advancement of India to responsible self-government, and
the planned progress of our Colonial Dependencies", and called
for a new United Nations.
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Letter
to his Father, The
This is the name usually
given to a letter written by the nineteen-year-old Karl Marx to his
father Heinrich Marx in November 1837. In the letter, Marx describes
his studies during his first year at Berlin University quite vividly,
and explains the growing fascination that Hegelian philosophy is exerting
on him. For despite an initial aversion to Hegel, "the grotesque
craggy melody of which did not appeal to me", his studies in German
idealism led him to attempt to write a philosophical dialogue, Cleanthes,
and he found that "my last proposition was the beginning of the
Hegelian system".
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Loach,
Ken
Although it's a standard
rite of passage for British film-makers to move to Los Angeles, eyebrows
were raised when Ken Loach (b.1936) announced that he was making a film
in Hollywood. Had one of the greatest practitioners of unvarnished realism
finally sold out to the capitalist entertainment machine?
Of course he hadn't -- Bread
and Roses (2000) was in fact about the callous exploitation of illegal
Latino immigrants by the wealthy. Far from being a Hollywood production,
it was a direct attack on the lifestyles of Hollywood's elite, and the
fact that it had difficulty getting a US release speaks volumes. Even
in Britain it ran into trouble, as its distributor initially baulked
at the number of subtitles required for an ostensibly English-language
film.
Almost any one of Loach's
films could provide a similar illustration of both the man and his work
-- but what is remarkable is that someone so utterly uncompromising
has also been so prolific. His recent renaissance has been particularly
striking -- after making his reputation in the 1960s with such still-potent
masterworks as Cathy Come Home (1966) and Kes (1969),
the two subsequent decades were beset by funding problems and censorship
(even the normally right-on Channel Four refused to show his documentary
on the 1984 miners' strike), and the row over Hidden Agenda (1990),
a fictionalised account of the British Conservative government's alleged
shoot-to-kill policy in Northern Ireland, hardly suggested that it would
kick-start an output that has seen nearly a dozen films produced in
as many years, major film festival awards, and what by general consent
are some of the best British films of the last few years, most notably
Riff-Raff (1992), Raining Stones (1993) and My Name
Is Joe (1998).
While he is respected but
marginalised in Britain and virtually unknown in the US, his work flourishes
in mainland Europe. His Spanish Civil War drama Land and Freedom
(1995) was a major commercial hit in Spain, and The Navigators (2001)
was surprisingly successful in France, where its indictment of Britain's
disastrous rail privatisation policy was almost certainly interpreted
as a warning not to attempt something similar. There are two plausible
reasons for this -- mainland Europe has a more robust socialist tradition,
and English-speaking audiences have understandable difficulties with
Loach's fondness for unvarnished regional accents, most recently demonstrated
by the decision to screen Sweet Sixteen (2002) at the Cannes
Film Festival with both French and English subtitles.
Immune to both the vagaries
of fashion and the blandishments of the establishment -- he has apparently
already turned down a knighthood -- Loach has quietly assembled one
of the most impressively consistent bodies of work of any British film-maker.
Seemingly artless at first glance, his films take casual, caught-on-the-wing
snapshots of their characters' lives and build them up into something
immensely powerful and affecting, all the more so for clearly relating
their plight to a political system that deliberately shuts them out.
He's the British cinema's social conscience, and long may he remain
so.
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