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Wednesday, 1
August, 2001 1Lit - The Literary Ezine Issue
Ten ============================================================
1Lit
is available by subscription only. If you no longer wish to receive
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issue.
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.
Winston Churchill
Introduction
"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone." John Maynard Keynes
"Some of the Genoa demonstrators were wearing Nike trainers . . . and many we spoke to were jobless and said they had no desire to work." Le Monde newspaper
The 1Lit.com ezine is supposed to be about literature and ideas and this month's issue certainly has a slant towards the latter, particularly ideas socio-political, although of course one can hardly have one without the other.
After the revolutions a decade ago in the Soviet Union and its satellite states, Communism became decidedly unfashionable in most of Europe. While some political parties in countries such as Italy and France claimed to carry the mantle of Communism, many of their policies would have had a better reception from Adam Smith than Karl Marx.
And then Seattle happened. By that, of course, we are referring to the anti-globalisation riots which took place in the north American city in 1999 and inspired a new generation of young men and women to fly the anti-Capitalist flag. While many of them would hate to be referred to as Communist, which is still a dirty word, the ideas they espouse have much in common with the far Left.
The movement has been fired by Naomi Klein's bestseller 'No Logo', which one commentator described as the Communist Manifesto of the anti-globalisation movement. A devastating critique of the manipulative and oft-underhand marketing methods of multi-national corporations, it cannot have failed to shake everyone except perhaps the most ardent Coca-Colist's faith in the conglomerates that now rule Planet Earth. Half a decade after another authoress in her twenties made it chic to take Prozac, Klein has made it fashionable to have a go at McDonalds, Nike, Starbucks et al.
In wake of the riots in Genoa last month, this issue is dedicated to discussing globalisation, presenting writing in favour of and against it. There is an opinion piece by Asad Yawar entitled 'No Argument' which slates the premise of Klein's study and argues she has failed to accept the economic modus operandi of the modern world. As well as an exclusive excerpt from 'No Logo', we have a review of 'Goodbye America!' scripted by a writer from the opposing end of the political spectrum. Jennifer Lane sees much in the polemic which argues that deregulated free trade only increases the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
Even the first two news items happen to be related to this theme, as they are about the practices of European multi-national companies.
As mentioned in the last issue, this will be the last 1Lit to be sent out with Microsoft's Listbot service which is closing down in a week. We have been frantically trying to find a reliable alternative and the Brazil and France are Max-eMail and Subscribe Me Professional. We'll be sending out the next issue of 1Lit with one of these programs. If you have had experience with either of them then please let us know what you thought of them.
We have to hurry to Burger King for a bite to eat and then rush down to Oxford Street to join an anti-globalisation demo, so â la prochaine!
Anne-Marie Hupert and Marcia Wilson, 1Lit.com Europe
CONTENTS:
1. News: German Price Fixing, WHSmith Prize, Irving Loses Case
2. Excerpt: No Human Rights - From Klein's 'No Logo'
3. Opinion: No Argument - A Critique of Klein
4. Book Review: Goodbye America!
5. Poetry: Jesse Ferguson
6. Recommended Websites: Best Philosophy Sites
7. Competitions: UKHotMovies.com Winners, Poetry Competition
8. Archives: Gates Close in a Few Days
============ NEWS ============
German Publishers Face EU Inquiry into Illegal Price Fixing
The European Commission has opened legal proceedings against Germany's biggest media group and its largest book wholesaler for having broken an understanding with Brussels over book pricing.
German publishers are still engaging in "illegal collusion" by fixing prices for book sales in other European Union countries according to the Commission, despite an earlier agreement between Germany's publishing houses and European antitrust authorities to limit book-price fixing to sales within Germany's borders.
The Commission has sent a format "statement of objectives" to the publishing arm of the Bertelsmann group and the bookseller Koch, Neff & Oetinger after complaints that internet booksellers were effectively shut out of the German market. The firms have three months to respond and a hearing is expected in autumn.
However, even if it is proven that German companies operated in a cartel-like fashion, their power and influence is likely to ensure that they will not be punished in a way that would hurt them.
The Commission accepts national systems of book pricing, as long as they have no effect on trade between EU member states. After a long tussle between Brussels and the German book trade, the country's book pricing system that altered last year so that no longer affected imports.
However, online booksellers based in Austria and Germany have said that German book wholesalers and publishers have refused to deal with them.
WHSmith Raises Controversy by Awarding Prize to it's Own Publishing Wing
The winner of the WHSmith Thumping Good Read Award was announced to not a little controversy last month. This is because the winner, Jeffery Deaver, is published in Britain by Hodder & Stoughton, a subsidiary of WHSmith itself.
The Guardian announced the winning book, 'The Empty Chair', with not a little cynicism, stating it was "fortuitous" and "lucky" that the book was published by a company within the WHSmith Group. "Had the voting process not been so transparent, one might have suspected something in the way of a stitch-up," noted the paper in it's famed Loafer section on 14 July.
The WHSmith Thumping Good Read Award is a UK annual award of £5,000 presented to the best popular fiction author of the year. Founded in 1992 by the WHSmith group, the award is judged by a panel of WHSmith customers.
The discredited historian of the Third Reich, David Irving, may face bankruptcy after the court of appeal rejected his application to appeal against a libel trial ruling branding him a racist Holocaust denier who deliberately distorted historical facts. He faces a final legal bill of more than £2m. On 20 July the court agreed that he could be asked immediately for an interim payment of £150,000.
Richard Rampton QC, counsel for Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, whose book, 'Denying the Holocaust', led to the case, said: "There lurks the real possibility of the need to take bankruptcy proceedings against Mr Irving."
He was not in court when the judgment - a ringing endorsement of the conclusions reached by Mr Justice Gray at the libel trial last year - was handed down by Lord Justice Pill. Mr Irving was "somewhere in a van on the south coast" trying to sell his latest book, 'Churchill's War', to bookshops, said his lawyers.
After Mr Justice Gray's devastating judgment that he was an apologist for Hitler, Mr Irving has been unable to find a mainstream distributor for the book, which he has published under his own imprint, Focal Point Press, with finance from American investors.
Mark Bateman, solicitor for Penguin, said: "[Today's ruling] is a very predictable outcome. It is a shame we have been dragged through the court of appeal when there was really no issue in Mr Justice Gray's judgment - his judgment was sound."
Lord Justice Pill said that the trial judge was right to conclude Irving "may be described as a Holocaust denier". He went on: "We acknowledge he has over the years modified, and in some respects, significantly modified, his views upon some of the relevant events.
"However, the respondents were justified in describing him as 'one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial' having regard to the views he has expressed and in some respects persisted in, and the manner and force with which he has expressed them. The use of the word 'dangerous' was justified by reason of his historiographical methods considered by the judge and in this judgment."
As reported in 1Lit last month, Irving's counsel, Adrian Davies, had argued before the court that Mr Justice Gray's conclusions were wrong and unjust and that Irving had come to reasonable conclusions in his books based on the available evidence.
March here to read 1Lit's extract from Naomi Klein's 'No Logo'.
=======
OPINION =======
No Argument: Why the Politics of No Logo will Fail to Provide a Challenge to Capitalism
by Asad Yawar
Naomi Klein's 'No Logo' has been widely accredited for being the bible of what has perhaps rather dubiously become known as the global 'anti-capitalist' movement. As a volume which chronicles the history of branding and the methodology of contemporary multinational corporations - a modus operandi often as bloodstained as the more conventional colonialism it has undoubtedly supplanted - its value is not in question.
However, in the remainder of this short essay, what should become clear is the substantive matter behind two converse principles: why the politics espoused in 'No Logo' has no hope of providing a substantial challenge to capitalism as we know it, and coterminously, why no one has mustered a critique of 'No Logo' on these very same grounds.
Klein's tome lies in a certain tradition: that of Karl Marx. While she would probably prefer a 'neo-Marxist' or 'neo-modernist' tag for her work, it remains unambiguously a book of the Left. Indeed, this forms the roots of her (and I use this term broadly) 'anti-capitalist' polemic. The Left have traditionally been associated with economic planning. While there have always been shades of grey in determining the precise extent of economic planning within a given national economy, the planned economy as an ideal gained true sustenance during much of the twentieth century when it was practised in the Communist world. From Berlin to Bukhara, governments scorned the workings of the free market in the name of world socialism, rational planning, and Marxism-Leninism.
Except it failed. Utterly, for a mixture of reasons. According to one Hungarian professor, speaking on the tenth anniversary of his country's 1988 revolution, capitalism only succeeded because people wanted Coca-Cola in the shops more quickly. The sentiment behind this amusing proposal certainly resonates, capturing in a moment the desires of efficiency, dynamism and, above all, prosperity.
This, however - and this is the decisive point - has left the Left in something of a quandary. Their vision of the world has been shattered; at least insofar as their paradigm has been permanently defiled. More state planning means less efficiency (and, in the absence of the profit motive, less wealth generation). This is what the modern history of economics tells us. While the state has not yet been totally denuded, it is no exaggeration that in the United States and the United Kingdom, the very notion of a public sector as it has been understood since 1945 is being continually subverted.
Of course the history of economics contains another important lesson: the unbridled market can too play havoc with the lives of the majority, and must be restrained. Some basic form of social welfare - however rudimentary - has to remain in place, if only to stop the market from overwhelming itself.
So the situation we have now reads something like this. Alternatives to the market as the main method of resource allocation do not exist. To ensure its optimum performance, some of the resources from the market need to be channeled into educating and maintaining the population who work within it. This functional and inescapable paradox is what could be termed the 'market loop': in searching for an alternative to the market, we are directed back to 'Go' every time.
Therefore, it is Klein's failure to fully comprehend the following maxim that will undermine 'No Logo' and its imitators until they are inevitably forgotten: The market is king, and it needs the state as its servant.
Goodbye America!: Globalisation and the Debts of the Developing Nations
By Michael Rowbotham
Jon Carpenter Publishing, 2000, £11.00
In 'Goodbye America!' Michael Rowbotham argues that Third World debt is inherently unrepayable and lacking in economic and moral validity. The 'debtor' nations, he says, should be released from this unjust burden immediately.
Rowbotham traces the cause of the Third World's present debt crisis to the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference. The American delegation at Bretton Woods refused to accept the Keynesian mechanism designed to redress trade imbalances that would have supported the Third World in its efforts to escape from debt. The Conference gave rise to the two institutions that have steered Third World development over the past 50 years: the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Both institutions were given the task of promoting a free-trade ideology thereby leaving the balance of global trade to be regulated by free-market forces. This, Rowbotham argues, sealed the destiny of the US's dollar supremacy and Third World's unrepayable debt burden.
The book exposes the World Bank and IMF's allegiance to "a collection of economic theories that are supposed to work and the massive documentary evidence that shows they do not". The theoretical model accompanying borrowing from the IMF/World Bank reads accordingly: the developing nation borrows, invests (in agriculture or industry), exports (goods born from investment), repays (with surplus export revenues) the capital loan. In reality, however, achieving the required export revenues from wealthy nations is impossible, leading to the conclusion that the debt "inherently lacks validity". The aggressive trading of 'creditor' nations reflects their unwillingness to sustain trade deficits sufficient for the debts to be repaid. Moreover, the terms and conventions set up at Bretton Woods ensure that developing nations receive a pittance for their exports, further compounding the impossibility of repayment.
Rowbotham focuses on the policy of deregulated free trade, a core ideology of the IMF/World Bank since their inception. An idea which sounds fair and in theory is supposed to lead to the erosion of disparities between trading nations in practice leads to inequality and economic imbalance between developing and industrial nations. While opening up developing nations to foreign investment allows multinational corporations to purchase -- at rock bottom prices -- the most valuable natural assets of Third World nations, or use them as simply cheap manufacturing outposts.
The obligation to repay debts gives rise to an export-led growth in 'debtor' nations that expands at the expense of the development of agricultural and industrial infrastructure for domestic consumption. So while the 'creditor' nations benefit from cheap imports, the people of the 'debtor' nations experience no corresponding improvement in their standard of living.
The 'debtor' nations of the Third World have transferred vast quantities of material wealth to industrialised nations in the form of undervalued commodities, minerals and raw materials. Such 'debtor' nations therefore, 'owe nothing in material terms to any nation or institution beyond their borders,' argues Rowbotham. Lifting the debt burden is urgently needed if developing nations are to regain control of their economic policy and concentrate on domestic needs. Rowbotham examines two ways in which this could be done. The debt bonds could simply be cancelled "with little or no cost to anyone" with a creative accountancy. Alternatively, the international debts of Third World nations could be converted into national debts that would remove the export imperative without breaching the contractual obligation of debt and interest repayment.
Rowbotham further explores the drive behind globalisation, the spurious and condescending arguments that have blamed the Third World for the debt crisis as well as its legal and moral status. He writes with a conventional but extremely clear academic style with excellent use of sub-headings and detailed footnotes. If the events in Genoa a couple of weeks ago have inspired you to read more about globalisation then you could do worse than pick up this original and alternative explanation of the world's financial ills.
Links: AlphabetStreet - buy Rowbotham's book Globalise Resistance - for "groups and individuals opposed to the global growth of corporate power"
======= POETRY =======
Jesse Ferguson was one of London's most talented up-and-coming
poets who sadly passed away in 1997 while on holiday in Majorca. Although only 23, he left behind several volumes of verse and 1Lit is proud to exclusively publish two of his poems. His mother, Celia Potterton, to whom we are grateful for permission to publish his work, often reads his work at London's Poetry Café. You may contact us for more details.
The Sky is Bright
The sky is bright
The elders
Why do they wear white?
Will I gain
Anythin' by staying up
Till midnight
For a new day
An array of a display
We riding out
Make no delay.
How hot the sun
9 planets orniting
Absorbing sunlight
8 planets and the sun
Telling me the future
In the Sunday paper
How straight a shot
Is the fun
To this sure footed stranger
As 5 senses
Cry out "danger"!
Kratos Kills
Kratos kills
Mordas murders
Lucius loves
And Demis dreams
Demis dreamt once
And it came true
Cos he was a powerful dreamer
That killing Kratos
Was murdered by malicious Mordas
And Lucius who loved
Kratos more than Mordas
Took equal revenge
So that undemanding Demis
Cunning chap
Was left as King
On Sound Premises
(For the law could not touch him here)
And he never found it a bore
As the New King
Ain't that the way
Of the Easy Dreamer
Who worries, fights and cares least
And finds that dreams
Rise over screams
When times are bad
And after are repaid no more
The sad and ironic reality of the modern age is that while people in Europe have more scope to research, explore and question the workings of our minds and the world than at any stage in our history, fewer of them take the initiative to benefit from the freedom and resources they have. Thankfully 1Lit readers are less cerebrally-challenged than the average Jo, but if you hop onto a bus and see rows of youngsters swaying their heads to Shaggy tunes emanating from their personal stereos you'll know what we mean about the failure of people to use the cognitive facilities God has gifted them.
On top of that, the all-pervasive influence of the media has become such that the masses can be readily 'taught' what to think (the Jews are evil, diet-Coca Cola tastes nice, Formula One is exciting). The difference between man and animal is that the former has been given the capabilities to think, explore and investigate. So why not turn off 'Big Brother' and exercise your mind before the forces of Shaggyism manage to irrecoverably work their way into your cerebrum?
The word philosophy comes from the Greek philosophia which means “love of wisdom”, so what better to give your mind a work-out than some philosophy sites?
Intelligent but Accesible Philosophy
Articles from the quarterly British magazine are reproduced, alongside a compelling Philosophical Health Check and a few other intriguing games. Features tend to be short and are not as erudite as on many other sites in this field, so this is suitable for everyone except perhaps Sun/Bild readers.
The Stanford Encyclopedia is a 'dynamic' encyclopedia of philosophy that is responsive to new research. It is an impressive, but as yet uncompleted, resource that grows slowly as members of the editorial board approve its content. As you might expect, the bibliographical entires and cross-referencing are unimpeachable. It will be something special when it is complete.
There is plenty here to occupy anyone with an interest; particularly useful are the lists of newsgroups and philosophers' addresses. This site from the University of Liverpoool is more colourful than the average philosophical resource yet contains a reasonable amount of content to stretch your mind.
Philosophy at Large - Liverpool University offering; impressive links section
The International Library of Poetry will award 1175 prizes totaling € 68,000 / $58,000 to amateur poets in the coming months. All their competitions are free to enter and the best thing is it will take no more than ten minutes to submit your work. All you have to do is type your name, address, and poem here and then click submit.
1Lit.com/UKHotMovies.com Competition Results
Our Douglas Adams competition asked for the name of the central Earthling in The
Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The answer was, of course, Arthur Dent.
The winner of the DVD is Suleman Ali from south London, who gets a DVD of his choice
from our partner store and any two Douglas Adams books. The DVD he has selected is 'Sliding Doors' and the books are 'The Beast Within' and 'Mostly Harmless'.
Second prize, a T-shirt, goes to Catherine Harkness of Dumfriesshire.
The five runners up prizes of a Douglas Adams paperback each go to: Jill Smith from London, Gwyneth Jones from Swansea, Jane Anderson of Stockport, Wolfgang Heiss from Berlin, and Anne-Marie Le Febvre from Lyon. Their books will be sent out soon.
Monthly 1Lit Subscriber Prize Draw
The winner for
is Leif Bergman
from a rather exotic location, Sundsvall in the north of Sweden. He'll receive the ten bestselling books at WHSmith
(top five fiction and five non-fiction).
=======
ARCHIVES =======
The Gates are Closing
Because Microsoft are closing down their Listbot service in a few days time, the 1Lit archives which are hosted on their site will be lost forever. This, therefore, is your very last chance to read the back issues of your favourite literary ezine. Did you read the news item in our 1 April issue about the professor who claimed that Nike were 'inspired by Marx'?
ABOUT THE NEXT ISSUE OF 1LIT,
EUROPEAN EDITION OUT ON 1 OCTOBER
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an 8th century Baghdad Caliph's love of learning
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and lots more in the ezine that is to Jeffrey Archer novels what North Korea is to economic dynamism
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1Lit is a free, non-profit making literary ezine. You may read the latest European issue below...
