Thursday, April 14, 2005
(5:00 PM) | The Young Hegelian:
The Pathos of Indignation
Marx, in his ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,’ writes of that aspect of his critique of capitalism which is not just the calm and measured unpicking of the presuppositions of an ideology and the interests it represents (though this will be his preferred method) but a criticism “whose pathos is indignation”. By this phrase he means the barely concealed anger that inspires and drives the critique, and which sometimes, despite the best attempts at wissenschaftlich even-handedness, forces its way into the open. It is the anger which anyone who has understood exploitation and injustice cannot but feel. In Marx it is embodied in the famous line about the birth-pangs of capitalism being “written into the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire”.It would be something to remember as we in Britain watch the closing stages of a carefully stage-managed election campaign, one in turn being coolly observed and translated for us by the political scientists and psephologists who seem to know nothing of such pathos.
Were one to take Marx at his word and undertake a critique of our present political reality in such a way as to do justice to indignation, one might well present the record of this government in a different light to that which currently falls on those preparing to vote.
One might draw attention to a government which took the country to war on a false and mendacious prospectus. One might mention a xenophobic immigration policy which has all but reneged upon the 1951 European Convention on the Status of Refugees. One might mention the repeated manipulation of the media to stigmatise asylum seekers and immigrants, dividing ‘good’ from ‘bad’. One might invoke the suspension of habeas corpus and trial by jury under the cloak of a ‘war on terror’, ironically reminiscent of the Law of Suspects which characterized the original Terror. One might mention New Labour’s complicity in the ‘extraordinary rendition’ (the ‘torture’, if I can be allowed a larger dose of that pathos) of prisoners.
One might mention the corruption of New Labour Ministers (from Peter Mandelson and his friends the Hinduja brothers, to Tony Blair’s entwinement with Bernie Ecclestone, not to mention David Blunkett’s nanny and her high-speed visa). One might mention the New Labour minions in local government who we now know engaged in large-scale fraud of the postal vote.
One might mention Blair’s alliance with one of the most right-wing and ill-informed presidents America has ever known, an alliance which added a veneer of legitimacy to a ‘Coalition of the Willing’ which would otherwise have been a pariah. One might mention the stealthy increase in indirect forms of taxation from VAT to Council Tax to National Insurance. One might mention the Private Finance Initiative under which new schools and hospitals are now no longer owned by local authorities, and the numerous cases of nepotism and over-charging which have occurred in the awarding of contracts.
One might mention the creeping privatization of higher education that has occurred under this government, the casualising and proletarianising of its teaching and the effect of what Hegel called “that dead thing, money” on what was to be the “opening of the mind”. The price of a degree today can be measured as precisely as most other commodities: £13,500, to be paid by the student, plus upwards of £3000 per annum by her parents.
One might mention (briefly, if one is not to let the pathos go too far, to become, in the old sense of the word, pathetic) the erosion of Legal Aid, the regular revision upwards of corporate CO2 emission limits, the promise of Identification Cards, fingerprinting and retinal imaging.
But Blair wants to be judged on more important things, like the economy and the Health Service. So then, we must play him on his home ground.
If I can quote Susan Watkins,
“Wage differentials and the gender pay gap have widened during Labour’s second term, and the UK GINI coefficient has continued on the upward trajectory it has followed since 1979. Other social indicators are equally bleak. Literacy levels have now fallen below those of the United States—let alone the EU. Pupil–teacher ratios still lag substantially behind Eurozone levels. Since 1997, teachers’ pay has slipped by 9 per cent (for men) and 11 per cent (for women) down their respective relative-pay ladders. New Labour’s response to the ensuing shortages has been the employment of still lower-paid, lower-skilled ‘classroom assistants’. Health spending, too, remains so far behind European levels that even if projected increases—currently under threat—go through, British expenditure, at 8.7 per cent of GDP, will still be well below the expected West European average of 10.7 per cent. Waiting times in Accident and Emergency departments are now longer than when New Labour came to power. The number of doctors per 1,000 of population is currently 1 in the UK, compared to 2.7 in the United States, 3 in France and 3.4 in Germany. New Labour’s per capita recruitment targets for doctors and nurses, even if projected through to 2024, still fall below the average that the EU achieved in 1997.”
Such statistics might be the rational way to criticize the present government, but political reason only gets us so far. “Si c’est la raison qui fait l’homme, c’est le sentiment qui le conduit.” Marx’s pathos of indignation might have been schooled in this thought. Without this pathos political ‘science’ becomes a little less human, forgetful of the indignation that guides those of us with more than a professional interest in politics. If one does not carry at the back of one’s mind the image of just a few of the Iraqi civilians killed by Coalition forces then the debate about politicians’ pre-war mendacity will be merely academic.
Politics as science, despite all the psephological intricacies, is still something of a blunt instrument. If the market signal of prices is imprecise, then even more so are the focus groups and the questionnaires which form The Big Conversation. Government MPs may only be certain that you disapprove of their policies when, with reasons and sentiments, sober and indignant critique combined, you cast your vote to put them out of a job.
If I was a political scientist I would end this piece with a dispassionately even-handed and uncontroversial conclusion, edited so finely to anticipate comment-box objections that it would say nothing of substance at all. I would then sit back with a book on game theory or the wisdom of crowds, and rest content in the knowledge that out of man’s crooked timber nothing straight was ever made. Forgive me the pathos of indignation which leads me to write in a different tone, because I believe the annals of this present government may yet be “written in blood and fire”.
