More Books

Holly posted some thoughts about this article from the Guardian concerning the influence of novels in men’s lives, more particularly, “what do men read to get them through life?” Part of what was important in the article was the notion that men would not use reading this way, that men were “suspicious of the question,” that we “did not seem to associate reading fiction with life choices.”

This kind of struck me as strange because in a recent job interview, a very similar question was put to me: what are the five books that have most influenced my way of thinking? I am proud to say that I answered without hesitation:

1. Raymond Williams’ Marxism and Literature

2. Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1

3. Jeff Harrod’s Power, Production and the Unprotected Worker

4. Marx’s Capital, vol. 1

5. Isabel Allende’s Of Love and Shadows

Raymond Williams’ book literally changed my life. I was an undergrad when I read it and I fancied myself a radical even though I was extremely undisciplined in my work habits and very self-indulgent. Williams showed me not only that Marxism need not be an orthodoxy, an ossified system to be mastered, but a very supple, and changing, theoretical system. Its value could be and needs to be confirmed in the analyses it can produce and not merely inherited from the masters to be repeated by acolytes. If I were ever to teach Marx or Marxism, I would use Marxism and Literature as a core text.

At the heart of Marx’s arguments is the observation that the process through which the market becomes the dominant force in people’s lives, in the sense that people must satisfy their wants and needs through the market and must provide something of value in the market in order to do so, is extremely violent. It turns people into commodities and it displaces the old forms of authority and power, concentrating these increasingly in the hands of those who wield economic power – the capitalist class. For Marx, and for Marxists, this has consequences not only for the organization of the economy and the polity, but also for social life, spirituality and philosophy, and ultimately for the “whole ways of life” (to use Raymond Williams’ description of culture) of the whole of humanity.

Of course, the world has changed in the 150 years since Marx wrote and the analyses of contemporary situations modify the theory as well as our understanding of the world. So Lefebvre and Harrod were obvious choices because these books are at the core of the work I am doing now. But they are important to me because they are such amazing books. Lefebvre claimed that his biggest contribution to Marxist theory was the concept of everyday life. He was a sociologist and also a philosopher, so he set out to understand both how the capacities for reflection and critique of the philosopher came to be separated out of the mundane and repetitive practices of daily life, and how these might be reconciled. Everyday life is not merely the description of what we do on a daily basis; the concept is intended to account for the peculiarities of the divisions of daily life into fragmented spheres, and how the programming of living and of desires becomes more possible thanks to this form of alienation.

Of course, Marx’s work is not beyond critique. Some of the conclusions Marx drew about the tendencies of capitalism have not come to pass. Very notably, his notion that capitalism would tend to concentrate people into two distinct classes (workers and capitalists) that would have an ultimate confrontation does not look like a very good description of what has happened over the last century and a half. Harrod argues that Marxism has taken this theoretical postulate and reified it. Harrod looks at power in the social relations of production and finds that instead of two classes in confrontation, these social relations are very multifaceted and that the various patterns of power relations can connect to each other in different ways. One conclusion that could be drawn from this – similarly to some observations of Lefebvre’s – is that the progress of commodification and capitalist development might displace the older forms of power and domination but not necessarily: capitalism and commodification are often constructed upon and reinforce the old forms. The persistence of patriarchy would be an obvious example.

In the interest of honesty, I did indeed choose Marx’s Capital in the interview but if I had a chance at further reflection, I would pick instead Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Capital is an amazing book – not an easy read by any description, but both sophisticated in its arguments and passionate in its prose. But really, Gramsci taught me how to do political analysis. There is a lot that is very wrong in the Prison Notebooks but, well, they were written in a fascist prison and were the work Gramsci did to clarify his own thinking.

The article in the Guardian was interested in the novels men read and observed that for many of the men who responded to their survey, non-fiction played a more important role in their lives. I’ve lived more or less up to type in my list. But I did include a novel in my list, in part because I would like to be able to write elegantly and in part because I love to read novels, even though lately I have not been able to give them the time I would like. I chose Of Love and Shadows in part because in my view, it was Allende’s best novel. I should give a defence of this claim; indeed, to be true to the spirit of the original, I should make a new list of the five novels that have “got me through life” – but I’ve gone on long enough.