Eddie Playfair

Zola : a political reading.

Posted on August 13, 2023 by Eddie Playfair

Political writing and political reading.

Politics is concerned with ideas about how we live, power, class, inequality, social and economic relations and how they change over time. Writing also deals with how we live, and we can think of all writing as political, whether explicitly or not, and we can think of all reading as political as well. Each writer and each reader brings their own political sensibility to a text.

Novels can be political interventions, representing political ideas and social, economic and political debates and controversies. Within a novel, these can be embedded in narrative, character, plot, description and observation. A novel can help to make social and political change possible, broaden the scope of possibility, change people’s consciousness and their ways of thinking.

Some writing has very explicit political purposes and clear political impacts. The most obvious example is the genre of engaged, polemical, campaigning writing or journalism such as Emile Zola’s ‘J’Accuse…’, but I’ve chosen here to concentrate on Zola’s fiction. There is a lot to read and a lot to say about the politics of Zola’s work, so this is a very partial, provisional and personal political reading.

Zola (1840-1902) in his time.

The history of France in the 19^th century is one of revolutions, counter-revolutions and coups d’état. Influential ideologies include nationalism, legitimism, Orleanism, Bonapartism, bourgeois and proletarian republicanism, socialism, utopian socialism, Marxism and anarchism. In common with other European countries, 19^th century France experiences the development of industrial capitalism, urbanisation, factory work, new forms of poverty, inequality, class identity, working class self-organisation, trade unionism, exploitation, colonialism, imperialism, racism and antisemitism.

Zola aims to present all of this with authenticity, naturalism, realism, respect for the truth and empathy. Amongst other things, he wants to represent working-class lives and struggles and show the relationship between individual experience and great social, economic and political events at the system level.

What is clear about Zola’s political standpoint is that he is a committed republican. Republicanism covers a variety of political currents, but broadly includes all those who identify with the 1789 revolution and the values of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. It is an anti-monarchist and anti-clerical position, opposed to the church’s influence on society, and education in particular.

Zola combines this commitment to republicanism with an understanding of its contradictions. His republicanism points towards socialism, and he admired the courage of the republicans who stood up against the crimes of the Second Empire. It was the ‘red republicans’ who aroused his admiration most and he was contemptuous of those who adopted or abandoned republican principles to suit their own interest.

The influence of Balzac.

The realist novel in France begins with Honoré de Balzac’s ‘Comedie Humaine’, a series of interconnected novels aiming to depict the different classes, professions and regions of post-revolutionary France. In the new bourgeois order, money starts to substitute for many of the institutions that define the social order and Balzac presents the social relations of this new order in granular detail. He wants us to know everything about how his characters live, what they wear, how much they earn as well as what they say and do.

The young Zola greatly admired Balzac because of the devastating way he portrayed the bourgeoisie.

“He showed a hundred times over the narrow, limited spirit of this class… All the bourgeois of Balzac, with a very few exceptions, are selfish, ambitious beasts who patiently watch and eagerly hunt their quarry.”

But Balzac was a monarchist and a devout Catholic. His criticism of bourgeois society is based on pre-capitalist values such as community and humanity. As Zola points out, if there was a radical message in Balzac’s novels, it was there despite Balzac:

“Here is a man who… bowed down every day before royalty and Catholicism… And today all we perceive in his work is a powerful revolutionary inspiration… On his flag, where he wrote: Royalty, Catholicism, our children will read the word: Republic

Who else is writing politically around this time?

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) does portray working class characters but they generally lack depth or credibility, and are often figures of ridicule. His only depiction of trade unions and strikes, in ‘Hard Times’ (1854), shows little understanding of workers’ organisation and solidarity. The nearest to a working-class hero is the hopeless Stephen Blackpool who is praised as a strike breaker.

Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) in ‘North and South’, serialised soon after ‘Hard Times’ in Dickens’ ‘Household Words’, offers a far more balanced and empathetic view of the motivation of striking workers, from the perspective of a middle-class outsider.

Jules Vallès (1832-1885) wrote a trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels: ‘L’Enfant’ (1879), ‘Le Bachelier’ (1881) and L’Insurgé (1886). He was the editor of ‘Le Cri du Peuple’ campaigning newspaper and was encouraged in his writing by Zola. He fought as a Communard in 1871 and subsequently went into exile for a period after being sentenced to death.

Margaret Harkness (1854-1923), also a campaigning journalist and social reformer, wrote ‘A City Girl’ and ‘Out of Work’ which are serious attempts to see poverty and exploitation through the eyes of working-class characters and communities.

Another key figure of the period produced no fiction but was a prolific pamphleteer and astute political commentator. Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a polemical journalist with a vivid style, a memorable turn of phrase and a passionate enthusiasm for the writing of Cervantes, Dante, Pushkin, Schiller, Aeschylus and Sterne. He wrote about French politics in real time from 1848 to 1871, responding far more rapidly than Zola to the same events.

As well as being an active propagandist, Marx also wanted to explain the deeper systemic historic tendencies and social relations of the contemporary world. His key writings on France include: ‘The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850’ about the origins of the upheavals, ‘The 18^th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon’ about the subsequent coup d’état of 1851, and ‘the Civil war in France’ about the Commune of 1871.

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce… the nephew for the uncle…”
Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon’ (1852)

The Rougon-Macquart cycle

The Rougon-Macquart cycle is Zola’s attempt to create a panorama of a whole society over a 20 year period and through 20 separate novels, dissecting every level of human experience and type of social relation. It’s a phenomenal political intervention and analysis of an emerging capitalist system.

The series is framed by Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état and the regime’s defeat by the Prussians and the Paris Commune but we need to go back to the revolutions of 1848, or even 1789, to better understand the context. Zola understood that 1848 was the last point at which the bourgeoisie had been genuinely revolutionary. He wrote:

“The bourgeoisie betrays its revolutionary past to try to safeguard its capitalist privilege and remain the ruling class. Having taken power, it does not want to pass it on to the people. It ceases to move. It allies with reaction, with clericalism, with militarism. I must bring out the vital, decisive idea that the bourgeoisie has ended its role, that it has gone over to reaction to preserve its wealth and power, and that all hope for the energy of tomorrow is in the people.”

I’ve selected nine Rougon Macquart novels, under half of the series, to give a flavour of what a political reading can reveal. These are not synopses of the novels but an introduction to some of the key political themes of this monumental work.

La Fortune des Rougon (1871)

This is the origin story for the whole series and it reveals the class distinctions and antagonisms of French society from the outset, the fictional provincial town of Plassans, based on Aix en Provence, where Zola grew up. Plassans is geographically segregated into “three distinct independent parts”: Saint-Marc, the district of the nobility a “sort of miniature Versailles” with large square houses and extensive gardens; the new town, “a sort of parallelogram to the north-east; where the well-to-do, those who have slowly amassed a fortune, and those engaged in the liberal professions, occupy houses set out in straight lines and coloured a light yellow;” and finally the old quarter with its “narrow, tortuous lanes bordered with tottering hovels”

The novel also includes the sweet love story of Silvere Mouret and Miette Chantegreil, a tale of idealistic outsiders carried along by republican fervour in opposing Louis-Napoleon’s coup d’état. They are the first in a line of rebels and would-be revolutionaries throughout the series whose sincere actions will not live up to their utopian hopes.

La Curée (1872)

‘La Curée’ depicts the wild speculation and profiteering which powered the ‘Haussmanisation’ of Paris which concentrated wealth into the hands of a powerful new class. The construction of the new boulevards which transformed the city also feed a chain of expropriation and corruption, from government and city officials to investors, developers and contractors. The urge to improve and modernize is not portrayed as evil, but here it has been corrupted to serve the wrong people.

The fluid, destructive force of capital is graphically described:

“This fortune which roared and overflowed like a winter torrent… a frenzy of money… The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, shamelessly, amid the sound of crumbling neighbourhoods and fortunes made in six months… The city had become an orgy of gold and women. Vice, coming from on high, flowed through the gutters and spread out.”

‘La Curée’ is also a story of the powerlessness and exploitation of women in the Second Empire. Towards the end of the story, the central character Renée sees herself in a mirror as she is, naked to the world. Despite having asserted her desires, exercised some freedom to make choices and dominate her lover, she has ultimately been violated and expropriated by men who get away with it. These men are guilty, their social and financial networks are guilty and the whole of Paris is guilty.

Le Ventre de Paris (1873)

In ‘Le Ventre de Paris’, Florent Quenu, a deported revolutionary from the 1848 uprising, returns illegally to his brother’s home in Paris eight years later, gets involved in republican plotting and is eventually betrayed to the police by his sister-in-law, Lisa Quenu, whose politics is summed up by her statement: “I support the government which is good for trade. If it’s doing wicked deeds, I don’t want to know.” In his own words, Zola shows “what an amazing underside of cowardice and cruelty there is beneath the calm flesh of a bourgeois woman.”

Florent’s hapless plotting is depicted as motivated as much by the need for personal revenge on the system which has damaged him as by a genuine desire for political change.

L’Assommoir (1877)

A tale of the fall of respectable working-class characters into poverty and destitution through circumstances outside their control. Zola sets out the lesson of ‘L’Assommoir’ by advocating a programme of education, slum clearance and struggle against alcoholism; a reformist programme, but one that put him to the left of most of his contemporaries.

Zola was concerned, not with moralising about social phenomena, but with understanding their causes. The criticism of Zola was similar to that later directed at Orwell’s ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’, when he challenged left wing stereotypes of working-class virtue. In response to his critics, he said: “Are Gervaise and Coupeau idlers and drunkards? By no means. They become idlers and drunkards, which is quite a different thing.”

Here, Zola is not portraying the working class as a transformative agent of history, but as victims, brutalised and trapped by the system.

Jules Vallès, a leading figure in the Commune, now exiled in London, praised L’Assommoir: “M. Zola is a red in literature, a Communard of the pen.” Jules Guesde, later leader of the left within the French Socialist Party, commended Zola’s portrayal of workers under the Empire, “crushed by the heavy burden of the past, brutalised by excessive toil, dragged into alcoholism by overwork.”

Nana (1880)

‘Nana’ is a thoroughgoing exploration of the social nature of sex as commodity with the theme of class also running through it. Nana is a child of the slums, and her role is likened to that of a fly:

“… a fly the colour of sunshine which had flown up out of the dung, a fly which had sucked death from the carrion left by the roadside and now, buzzing, dancing and glittering like a precious stone, was entering palaces through the windows and poisoning the men inside, simply by settling on them.”

Nana brings death but is herself a victim of exploitation and patriarchy.

Pot-Bouille (1882)

In ‘Pot-Bouille’, Zola traces the fortunes of people living in a single apartment block and confronts the private life of the bourgeoisie, the futility and violence of their interpersonal and sexual relations.

In his notes for the novel, Zola made his intentions clear:

“To speak of the bourgeoisie is to make the most violent indictment that one can cast against French society … To show the bourgeoisie naked, after having portrayed the people, and to show it as more abominable, this class which sees itself as representing order and respectability … the bourgeoisie taking its pleasure and opposing all change. They vote out of self-interest to preserve their position. Hatred of new ideas, fear of the people, determination to stop the revolution at the point where they come to power. When they feel under threat, they all band together.”

Zola shows how the bourgeois family crushes women’s freedom and humanity, and treating them as commodities. For example, Madame Josserand is determined to find a husband for her not very ‘marriageable’ daughter, Berthe. When Berthe recounts how a well-placed prospect grabbed her violently, and she had responded by pushing him away. Instead of taking her side, her mother shouts that she has ruined her chances of marriage, and should have let the man do what he wanted so as to then trap him into marriage.

The other side of the coin is the story of the servant Adèle, forced to give birth in complete solitude, in fear and terrible suffering. Zola saw this as a clear indictment of the society that drove women into such situations.

Germinal (1885)

‘Germinal’ is probably the major working-class novel of the 19^th century. It draws on Zola’s extensive research into the exploitation of miners in northern France and is influenced by conversations Zola had with Turgenev about Anarchist challenges to Marx’s ideas. We follow Étienne Lantier on a journey through the working community that brings him face to face with violence and despair, without ever destroying his belief in a better world.

Étienne embodies the tension between leaders and masses in a working-class movement. He is a worker-intellectual, who reads socialist newspapers and pamphlets, and debates with the Russian anarchist, Souvarine. When the mine owners cut pay rates, a strike begins, and Etienne emerges as a leader. At a mass meeting of workers Etienne captures the mood of the crowd and makes the speech of his life. He is ‘tasting the heady wine of popularity’ and dreams of being the first working man to enter parliament.

Zola shows that working class leadership is not a fixed hierarchical relationship, but an ever-shifting relation. Zola draws out the importance of spontaneity, showing the gradual dawning of consciousness in struggle. He goes into some detail on tactics, such as the potential use of sabotage or flying pickets.

He also shows how ideas develop in the minds of the less articulate characters, bringing out the effect of a strike on those who have taken their situation for granted for years. Faced with the fact of struggle for the first time, they have to painfully think through the questions this raises.

Zola emphasizes the role of women miners and miners’ wives in the strike and rejects the conventional wisdom about the ‘weaker sex’ – his women are extraordinarily tough, notably the indomitable Maheude.

Zola portrays a microcosm of the late 19th-century labour movement, with articulate representatives of the main political currents in the First International prior to the Commune:

Rasseneur, the reformist or evolutionary socialist, believing in negotiation rather than confrontation,
Pluchart, the international socialist,
Abbé Ranvier, the Christian socialist,
Souvarine, the anarchist,
Étienne, somewhere between the two, groping towards militant class struggle and a version of Marxism.

Souvarine, the refugee from Tsarist Russia, where he had tried unsuccessfully to blow up the Tsar’s train, views all trade union activity as futile and seeks “anarchy, the end of everything, the whole world bathed in blood and purified by fire … Then we shall see.” For Zola, this advocacy of terrorism is a desperate sign of weakness and lack of confidence in collective action.

The powerful imagery in ‘Germinal’ conveys Zola’s sense of the dehumanising force of capitalist society. Men and women are denied freedom and human wholeness, subordinated to a logic which puts profit ahead of human need.

Zola said of ‘Germinal’:

“What I wanted to do was to cry out to the fortunate of this world, to those who are the masters: ‘Beware, look below ground, see those wretches who are working and suffering. Perhaps there is still time to avoid the final catastrophes. But hasten to be just, for otherwise here is the danger: the earth will open up and the nations will be swallowed in one of the most terrible upheavals of history.”

These were the words of a reformist, not a revolutionary; but he did include the possibility of social transformation in his perspective.

When Étienne leaves the village, it is not because he has abandoned hope in the working class, but because he had been offered a job in Paris by Pluchart, working for the First International. Since the novel was set around 1867, it was clear he was heading for the Paris Commune – it is therefore surprising that he doesn’t reappear as a mature and determined Communard in ‘La Débacle’.

Zola was influenced by one of the great socialist writers of his time, Jules Vallès, a leading activist in the Commune, exiled till 1880 in London. Zola helped him get journalistic work and encouraged him to write his powerful autobiographical novel trilogy.

Vallès had written articles about the miners’ strikes of 1869 and 1870 when the army was used against workers. On 12 March 1884 he participated in a public meeting in support of the Anzin miners. Later that year, Zola spent long hours discussing this with Vallès as ‘Germinal’ was being written.

During the 1984–1985 British miners’ strike, one British miner saw direct parallels between their experience and ‘Germinal’:

“There are many similarities between the events in the book and what is happening in the current miners’ strike. In both cases management provoked the strike deliberately, confident that the miners would lose, in order that they could reinforce their power. Both sets of miners put too much faith in one man. The French miners paid the price, defeat. Although the miners were beaten by lack of organisation, hunger and bullets, they were changed by the struggle. No longer content to accept their lot in life, the seeds of revolt were sown.”
(Quoted in Birchall)

L’Argent (1891)

‘L’Argent’ is the great novel of capitalist speculation. It depicts a period of transition from inherited assets such as land and property as the basis for wealth, to the more liquid and transferable intermediary of money itself. This ‘new money’ is less tangible, as it passes via scraps of paper through the hands of a new class of bankers, dealers and speculators, each skimming what they regard as their share where the game is played; the Bourse (Stock Exchange) and its side-markets. We also see the associated dispossession and humiliation of some of the decaying landed gentry who symbolise ‘old money’.

We get a sense of France’s expansionist and imperial ambitions with the Banque Universelle’s project to industrialise the near-East with apparently unlimited opportunities for exploitation, power and profit – all wrapped in terms of bringing ‘civilising’ Christian values to backward peoples.

‘L’Argent’ also takes us deep into the Paris slums, providing an insight into the living conditions of the poorest. We get a glimpse of the sordid Cité de Naples district with its open sewers and overcrowded hovels, a place of destitution and degradation and the flip side of the luxury and wealth of a minority. It is here that we discover the result of Saccard’s past sexual assault of Rosaline Chavaille.

‘L’Argent’ also doesn’t shy away from representing this antisemitism which ran deep across French society and Saccard’s prejudice against the Jewish banker Gundermann is visceral.

Another contrast is the ideological one between Saccard and Sigismund Busch, the visionary Socialist and former journalist colleague of Marx who now lives as an invalid with his money-lender brother. Sigismund is not a plotter, but an isolated intellectual working on schemes for a world without money or private ownership, reminding us of other Zola ‘idealists’.

Sigismund makes a cogent case:

“…the transformation of private capital… into social capital created by the work of all… Imagine a society in which the instruments of production are the property of all, in which everyone works according to their intelligence and strength and the products of this social co-operation are distributed to each and all…No more competition, no more private capital, no markets, no stock exchange…”

Saccard is appalled by the prospect, but doesn’t entirely dismiss it:

“What if this dreamer was right after all? What if he had correctly divined the future? He explained things in a way that seemed very clear and sensible.”

Sigismund goes on to outline how the concentration of capital could makes its future socialization easier. Addressing Saccard directly, he says:

“You’re working for us without realizing it… There you are, a few usurpers, dispossessing the masses, and once you are gorged, we, in turn, will only have to dispossess you… Every kind of monopolizing, every centralization, leads to collectivism… moving towards the new social order… We are waiting for it all to break down, waiting for the current mode of production to end in the intolerable disorder of its final consequences.”

The end of capitalism might not necessarily come through insurrection or violent revolution but as a result of systemic breakdown followed by a smooth transfer of power.

La Débacle (1892)

Written twenty years after the Sedan defeat and the Paris Commune, ‘La Débacle’ depicts the final collapse of the Second Empire. The greater part of the novel deals with the disastrous Franco-Prussian conflict, evoking the horrors of warfare. The final section dealing with the 1871 Commune, fails to do justice to the epic subject matter. Zola was sympathetic to the working class but had never been convinced of the need for revolutionary change.

Here was a revolution was taking place on his doorstep offering real emancipation from the regime which so disgusted him. Many artists and intellectuals joined the movement, and for 10 weeks Paris experienced what historian Georges Lefebre called ‘a festival of the oppressed’. It was the first time in history that workers had taken power and tried to build popular democracy, an attempt by working people to change their lives, live differently and actually achieve some of the demands which had until then been political rhetoric. The working class of Paris was reclaiming the Haussman boulevards from which it had been excluded.

But Zola was ambivalent, deriding the painter Gustave Courbet who was active in the Commune. He was a republican, not yet a socialist, and certainly not a revolutionary. He still had to supplement his income by working as a journalist. During the early weeks of the Commune he shuttled between Paris and Versailles, then stayed in Paris, finally leaving less than a fortnight before the massacre. He reported for two different newspapers – the republican ‘La Cloche’ based in Paris, and the right wing ‘Le Sémaphore’ of Marseille. As now, editors bought opinions, and Zola tempered his views in quite striking fashion to suit their tastes.

For the reactionary readers of ‘Le Sémaphore’ he writes: “Individual freedom and the respect due to property have been violated, the clergy is disgracefully persecuted, searches and requisitions are used as a means of government; that is the truth in all its shame and wretchedness. But it is not true that blood is running in the streets.”

But in ‘La Cloche’ he says: “… between Versailles, discussing wretchedly, and Paris which is reconciled at the ballot-box, I confess that instinctively I am for that great and noble city.”

The Commune ended with troops massacring thousands of workers in the ‘semaine sanglante’ of May 1871, thousands more were imprisoned or deported.

20-years later, with plenty of time for reflection and hindsight, Zola chooses to represent the experience of the Commune through only two characters, Maurice, sincere but naive, caught up with idealistic enthusiasm, and Chouteau, the violent and amoral turncoat, the most malicious of all Zola’s portrayals of leftist agitators and an unworthy representative of the values and ideas that animated the Commune. Neither does justice to the various tendencies in the movement, such as Blanquism, Proudhonism, neo-Jacobinism, Marxism.

We are left wondering why Zola never wrote a great novel of the Commune, the most significant political movement of his adult lifetime, happening right under his nose. Jules Vallès died several years before the publication of ‘La Débacle’. Had he lived to read it he would probably have been very disappointed.

Les quatre evangiles: Travail (1900)

Going beyond the Rougon-Macquart series, it is worth mentioning one of the ‘Quatre Evangiles’ novels Zola wrote later.

‘Travail’was Zola’s attempt to depict a socialist utopia. Luc Froment takes over a steel mill in a small town, and under the influence of Fourier’s ideas turns it into a workers’ co-operative. There followed the gradual development of a co-operative community and way of life, as people are drawn in by the sheer power of example. But Luc’s paternalism is the very antithesis of the self-emancipation of the working class. This benevolent Owenite ‘socialism in one town’ is imposed from above, and mysteriously seems to flourish within a hostile system and the rest of France makes no effort to obstruct it. Interestingly, Lenin is reputed to have liked this novel.

Several themes recur throughout the Rougon-Macquart novels and are exemplified by episodes and characters across the series:

Class identity, the collective and the individual from ‘La Fortune des Rougon’, throughout the whole series.
Speculation and profiteering, particularly in ‘L’Argent’ and ‘La Curée’
Sexual exploitation, particularly in ‘Nana’ and ‘La Curée’
Colonial exploitation in ‘L’Argent’
Poverty and social mobility, upwards and downwards, particularly in ‘La Fortune des Rougon’ and ‘La Curée’
Racism and antisemitism in ‘L’Argent’
Idealism, utopianism, rebellion and gradualism: the influence of Marx, Proudhon, Fourier amongst others.
Solidarity, strikes, rebellions, conspiracies and popular uprisings, revolutionary change, coups d’état, gradual change, growth, decline and degeneration, through a chain of characters from Sylvère and Miette via Florent, Sigismund, Étienne, Pluchet and Maurice and from the defence of the republic in ‘La Fortune des Rougon’ via the corruptions of capitalism in ‘L’Argent’ to Chouteau in ‘La Débacle’.

There are many connections between these themes and today’s struggles for social justice. Sadly, Zola’s radicals and rebels do not seem to grow in maturity as experienced activists or develop a more coherent political programme throughout the series.

The significance of Zola today

Zola was clearly a genius who redefined how working-class life, hopes, victories and defeats are depicted in literature. He gives the oppressed a greater voice and reveals social relations, agency and movements in their historical and sociological context better than anyone before him, showing how events are shaped by people’s circumstances. He understands that organised workers can contribute to history, even if he has reservations about some of the methods.

Zola was not a Marxist, but he was anti-capitalist; almost everything he writes is a denunciation of the greed, brutality, corruption and hypocrisy that characterised French capitalism in his day. He wants to present the whole of reality in the same way that we need to see society as a whole in order to understand the system we wish to change.

Nevertheless, even while describing successful independent working-class movements so brilliantly, Zola seems reluctant to show how this could transform the world and he tends to revert to individualistic psychological explanations of the motives and actions of working-class characters. In particular, it is notable that he chooses not to write a novel about the most significant political movement of his lifetime which he witnessed at close quarters. He is radicalized by what he sees and writes about, but is above all still a novelist, putting dramatic effect, individual character, personality and motivation at the centre of his work.

Based on a presentation to the Zola Society, London, 29 June 2023.

See also:

Zola’s ‘Money’ (January 2022)

Zola’s ‘La Curée’ and the corruption of desire (April 2021)

Sources:

Ian Birchall, ‘Zola for the 21^st Century’ (2002) https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/birchall/2002/xx/zola.htm

William Gallois, ‘Zola: The History of Capitalism’, Peter Lang (2000)

Karl Marx, ‘Class Struggles in France 1848-1850’, ‘The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon’, ‘The Civil War in France’.

Posted in Culture, Fiction, History, Politics | Tagged anarchism, Bonaparte, capitalism, Charles Dickens, class, Class Struggles in France, Communism, Coup-d’état, Elizabeth Gaskell, Emile Zola, France, Frederick Engels, Germinal, Hard Times, Honoré de Balzac, Ian Birchall, Jules Vallès, Karl Marx, L'Argent, L'Assommoir, La Curée, La Fortune des Rougon, Le Ventre de Paris, Margaret Harkness, Nana, Napoleon III, North and South, Pot-Bouille, revolution, Rougon-Macquart, Second Empire, socialism, strikes, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, The Paris Commune, Travail, utopianism, William Gallois, working class | 3 Comments

Hotter than July?

Posted on August 5, 2023 by Eddie Playfair

Joining the dots on system failure and climate justice in the era of global boiling.

July 2023 has been the hottest month on planet Earth in recorded history. It included the hottest day ever (6 July) and before it even ended, it had already registered the hottest 3 weeks ever.

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres commenting on the global climate situation towards the end of the month, said:

“The era of global warming has ended and the era of global boiling has arrived… Climate change is here, it is terrifying…. It is still possible to limit global temperature rises to 1.5^oC to avoid the very worst but only with dramatic, immediate climate action… All this is entirely consistent with predictions and repeated warnings. The only surprise is the speed of the change… The air is unbreathable, the heat is unbearable and the level of fossil fuel profits and climate inaction is unacceptable.”

A few of the facts:

Global temperatures have risen by about 1.2^oC since the industrial revolution. World leaders promised in 2015 to limit warming to 1.5^oC by the end of the century, but current policies put us on track for a devastating 2.7^oC increase.
Average global ocean temperatures have broken records in May, June and July 2023, regularly approaching the highest sea surface temperature ever recorded.
The Gulf Stream system could collapse as soon as 2025, with catastrophic climate impacts, severely disrupting the rains that billions of people depend on for food in India, South America and West Africa, and further endangering the Amazon rainforest and the Antarctic ice sheets.
North Atlantic Ocean temperatures have been 4-5^oC above average, meaning that marine organisms need 50% more food just to function as normal and qualifying as a category 5 heatwave which is ‘beyond extreme’.
The area covered by sea-ice in the Antarctic is 10% lower than anything previously seen in July, with an area 10 times the size of the UK missing.
Climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year by 2030, with direct health costs of $2–4 billion per year. Extreme heat in Europe last summer killed 61,000 people, with this year’s figure likely to be higher, but people in the Global South will be the least able to cope.
Northern India has experienced its heaviest monsoon season ever with extreme flooding leading to at least 100 deaths and washing away bridges, buildings and roads. China is experiencing its second successive extreme heatwave with temperatures above 41^oC in many regions. Forest fires have raged across southern Europe and Canada and extraordinary floods have hit Brazil, Spain and South Korea.
The top five oil companies’ profits ($195bn in 2022), exceeding current spending on renewables and climate mitigation

There are many more shocking individual facts like these, each one a dispatch from the front line of global catastrophe. Taken together they tell a single story. We need to join the dots, make the connections and see the systemic big picture in order to address the whole rather than simply tackling each of its parts. We need to understand how our system is failing us if we want to have any chance of planning for a better one. The UN Secretary General’s words remind us that our politics has not yet risen to this challenge.

A few recent examples from the UK context:

The government has recently announced the granting of over 100 new drilling licences to extract as much oil and gas from the North Sea as possible well beyond 2030, widely seen as a move which obliterates the UK’s climate commitments.
Shell and BP each posted several billion pounds in profits in the last 3 months and continue to receive windfall tax breaks from the government. Shell’s investment in oil and gas projects for 2023 is predicted to rise by 10% and BP shareholders received £9 in buybacks for every £1 the company spends on ‘low carbon investments’.
Only a handful of the proposals in Chris Skidmore’s ‘Mission Zero’ Independent Review designed to help meet Britain’s net-zero goals have been taken up by the government. A recent internal government audit found that many of the measures have been allowed to run off course, concluding that that their successful delivery now ‘appears unachievable’.
Plans to electrify Britain’s railways are running so far short of what is needed that it could take 240 years to reach the net zero goal. At this rate, Britain is scheduled to electrify about 100 miles of track by 2025, just 12% of what is needed to be in line with net zero targets.
The government seems to have abandoned any plans for a social energy tariff which would protect the poorest households faced with unaffordable energy bills or prepayment metering.
A single by-election result is being read as a sign of a popular backlash against environmental protection. The government is reviewing ‘anti-car’ measures including low traffic neighbourhoods and low emission zones and political discourse is full of talk of slowing down or even rowing back on existing commitments.

It’s almost as if the status quo is sustainable. As if addressing poverty and redistributing wealth are not political choices. As if we don’t know that phasing out polluting energy systems and promoting public transport and active movement can lower the carbon emissions and air pollution which cause 7 million premature deaths globally per year.

At the same time, the demand to ‘just stop oil’ is derided and labelled as ‘extremist’ with both major parties falling over themselves to condemn climate campaigners and preferrring to focus on protest tactics rather than political substance. But the case for no more oil, together with that for a Green New Deal and a Just Climate Transition should be the political common sense of our age, because they will keep us within the survival zone set by the Earth’s planetary capacity. Some consensus about this could still allow plenty of room for debate about how best to achieve sustainability.

A just transition

It’s clear that we need to decarbonise as rapidly as possible and transition to a sustainable economy where we don’t consume planetary resources faster than they can be regenerated. And that can’t be achieved by simply replacing all fossil fuelled activity like for like or trusting in continuous overall growth in production and consumption. Given that inequality is growing and that the richest 10% of the population are responsible for half of all CO₂ emissions, we need to reduce the overconsumption of that top tenth in order to address the current poverty, injustice and extreme inequality resulting from our economic system. This will also make decarbonisation easier to achieve in time to achieve our targets.

Climate justice means linking rapid decarbonisation with measures to ensure that the poorest do not carry the burden of change. It means ending all fossil fuel extraction and investing in the transition while also addressing the environmental consequences of growing inequalities and the overconsumption of the richest. Those who do the most damage can contribute the most towards both contraction and convergence without great discomfort. Global windfall taxes and wealth taxes could be used to fund investment in public transport, renewable infrastructure, energy efficiency and measures to reduce net consumption and end absolute poverty.

Faced with an existential global emergency whose causes we understand, the really pragmatic approach is surely not to continue the ‘business as usual’ which caused the problem, but to agree a rapid, coherent and co-ordinated global response at the necessary scale; applying known systems and technologies rather than hoping that untested, novel ones will kick in just in time. Instead, it feels like the ‘debate’ about climate action is being turned into another opportunity to score small shortsighted points, while ignoring the big systemic challenge.

Another ‘hottest month ever’ is over, but many more will follow – with lethal consequences. Antonio Guterres concluded his recent speech by urging leaders to lead: “No more hesitancy, no more excuses, no more waiting for others to move first.” But it seems we still have a lot more to learn about leadership in the era of global boiling.

Illustration: warming stripes graphic published by climatologist Ed Hawkins. The progression from blue (cooler) to red (warmer) stripes portrays the long-term increase of average global temperature from 1850 on the left to 2018 on the right.

Dilemmas of growth (June 2023)

Code red for human survival (November 2022)

Education, social justice and survival in a time of crisis (July 2022)

Owning our crises (March 2022)

‘The Ministry of the Future’ by Kim Stanley Robinson (December 2020)

Posted in climate emergency, Economics, Politics | Tagged Antonio Guterres, climate action, climate emergency, climate justice, climate transition, crisis, decarbonising, Ed Hawkins, fossil fuels, heatwave, Just Stop Oil, just transition, net zero, poverty, social justice, Sustainability, United Nations | Leave a comment

Rethinking work

Posted on July 30, 2023 by Eddie Playfair

What is work?

Work is organised and purposeful human activity, some of which is waged and commodified. How work is defined, who does it, how it is valued and organised, by whom and for whom and how it impacts on the world are important questions globally as well as contributing to our personal and social identities. Our understanding of work needs to include production, reproduction, distribution, subsistence and service work, caring for people and planet as well as unremunerated work.

Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry Mural, 1933

Work is a means for the collective transformation of the world as well as a source of meaning and a long-term commitment. The nature of work and the distribution of its burdens and benefits are shaped by the institutions and patterns of wealth and power which humans have created. Work processes reflect our wider systems of economic and social relations and are often contested and the subject of political struggle.

The multiple challenges we face; the climate and planetary emergency, the crisis of growing inequality, global conflicts and injustices, can all be seen as symptoms of a single crisis of capitalism. Any project aiming to go beyond the logic of capital accumulation towards an economy organised around human needs and social justice within planetary boundaries is necessarily also aiming to go beyond capitalism.

In capitalism, the terms of work are set by capital, and in making the transition to a post-capitalist economy we would need to re-evaluate, reconceive and reorganise work on terms of sustainability, justice and freedom. We would need to consider the quantity, distribution and quality of work and to place the skills needed for democratic planning at the heart of the transition process.

Work under capitalism

In capitalism, people’s labour is seen as a means to expand profitable production and consumption linked to the imperatives of growth and capital accumulation. Meeting human needs, creating good secure jobs, ensuring greater equity or sustainability are not key objectives. Instead, the aim is to maximize the return on investment and keep costs down.

Workers are regarded as ‘human capital’ and encouraged to see themselves as tradeable commodities in the labour market. Being successful requires them to invest in themselves by acquiring the best possible skills and qualifications to compete against other workers in an ever-accelerating race to be more attractive to potential employers and justify their share of labour costs. The ‘gig economy’, as the ultimate neoliberal labour process, promotes a toxic culture where workers have little security and few rights, and their survival depends on their ability to ‘hustle’ on their own account and provide exactly what their clients want, when they want it.

The way work is organised is not primarily aimed at creating coherent, fulfilling or satisfying jobs for workers. Within job roles, tasks and associated skills are often fragmented and packaged in reductive ways. Job specifications, work hierarchies, ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled’ categories, pay differentials, notions of routine, managerial or ‘creative’ roles are all the result of socio-historical processes which reflect the power of employers to determine work processes and relations. Many systems of evaluation and reward encourage individual workers to see themselves in competition with colleagues as work becomes another arena for competition, recognition and advancement.

The result is that much contemporary work fails to meet workers’ basic material needs or accepted norms of justice, freedom, and democracy. Britain’s labour market, like many others, is characterised by insecurity, precarity, punitive surveillance and wages that often can’t support the basic needs of life. The experience of work is often one of dominance, exploitation and alienation as the introduction of new technologies and processes, restructuring and downsizing of workforces reinforce climates of fear and precarity and consolidate existing inequalities.

In the labour market ‘capital commands and labour obeys’, and the needs and aspirations of workers and consumers are unlikely to be fully met. Like any other market, it will tend to reinforce inequalities because it is driven by the need for accumulation and concentration of capital. At an individual level we experience work through relations of production and consumption. There is also the unremunerated work of reproduction and care (and arguably that of the non-human living world) – the ‘work which makes all other work possible’ and falls outside the market while being crucial to its functioning.

Many people are trapped in low-quality jobs with insecure wages. Youth unemployment across Europe is over 14%, reaching beyond 40% in some regions. This shameful waste of human potential undermines the creativity of the workforce and endangers prosperity and wellbeing. In the case of Britain, the 2019 report of the UN rapporteur Philip Alston makes the position clear: “Low wages, insecure jobs and zero-hour contracts mean that even at record employment there are still 14 million people in poverty… Britain is not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster all rolled into one.” (Alston, 2019).

While legislation and the regulation of wage labour can mitigate the worst excesses of exploitation, the basic conditions of work are often gendered, racialised and highly unequal. But the workplace can also be a site of education and politicization, where people meet and share ideas, imagine better futures and can mobilise to improve things. Workplace organisation gives workers a voice and the power to negotiate better conditions or an increased share of the surplus or other workplace changes. The work of trade unions is often defensive; preserving pay differentials or protecting relative privileges, but unions can also provide opportunities to develop new conceptions of work and economy.

If we are to look beyond capitalism to an economy aligned with human needs and planetary sustainability, we need to question the dominance of market relations and the notion of workers merely as human capital.

Work beyond capitalism

Questions about the nature, value and distribution of work are central to the debate about any post-growth society which aims to promote social justice and sustainability. A transformation of the basis of economic decisions will also require a transformation of the way work is organised. We will need to break down many of the distinctions and hierarchies of work: ‘unskilled’, ‘blue collar’, ‘middle class’, ‘graduate’, ‘precarious’, which are the result of choices about how to define and configure work.

Kate Raworth’s ‘doughnut’ model (Raworth, 2017) proposes a ‘safe’ range for global resource use and environmental impact and this corresponds to a sustainable and equitable level of economic activity. To ensure human survival, we need to aim for this across all the key indicators. The ‘sweet spot’ for work would represent the total amount of work needed to sustain a good life for all humans on Earth while staying within the ‘doughnut’ and not exceeding key planetary boundaries. That work should be shared as equitably as possible with remuneration pitched somewhere between a universal living wage and a maximum wage. Such an aspiration would avoid the need to set organisational pay ratios, as everyone would be somewhere within the safe range.

Such a reconceiving of work will require concerted planning and democratic participation. Such an economy will need to be democratically shaped and this will require planning at all levels. Collective knowledge, skills and capabilities will be the tools for creating sustainable and socially just economic and social relations. These will include amongst others, skills of analysis and reflection, democratic deliberating and decision-making, organising and mobilising, identifying and resolving conflict. These are not ‘elite’ activities to be reserved for a few, they are skills which will need to be developed, shared and exercised widely.

A democratic post-capitalist economy could draw on experiments in participatory economics and popular planning such as those of the Doughnut Economics Action Labs (DEAL, 2023) and Community Wealth Building programmes (Brown and Jones, 2021). Experiences of worker-initiated planning in England include the Lucas Workers plan in the 1970’s which started as a defensive trade union response to plant closures and job losses and became a fully developed alternative production plan based on socially useful production (Wainwright and Elliott, 1982). Worker owned co-operative groups like Mondragon in the Basque Country, founded in 1956 and still operating successfully, also offer glimpses of the liberating possibilities of work in a democratically planned post-capitalist economy.

The quantity and distribution of work

It seems that a future economy could operate with less human labour overall. The technologies of the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ and the potential of big data and machine learning bring new productivity gains and put jobs at risk in many sectors. We can plan for this in an equitable way and achieve a reduction in overall working time via a redistribution of the surplus value resulting from increased productivity.

This productivity increase impacts in some sectors more than others. Ben Gallant distinguishes between ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ sectors of the economy, corresponding roughly to productive and service work, and describes the employment productivity problem (Gallant, 2023). This flows from the fact that in a low- or no-growth economy, increased productivity in the ‘fast’ sectors where automation and efficiency gains have the greatest impact, can lead to more unemployment as fewer workers are needed to produce the same output. The classic response is to produce more and ‘go for growth’, thereby maintaining employment levels. But a more sustainable solution is to share the benefits of fast sector efficiencies by shifting employment towards ‘slow’ service jobs and reducing working hours across the economy.

Service-based activities tend to be labour-intensive because their purpose is based on the time people spend engaging with others in care or in craft. They are also generally less resource hungry. The economic value of health, care and therapeutic work, teaching, social work and hospitality is generated mainly through human contact rather than increased material production or consumption.

The shift towards more labour-intensive services could allow for both higher levels of employment and reduced working time. We would have to accept lower labour productivity growth overall, but we would benefit from the double dividend of higher employment and lower environmental impact.

Productivity is not merely an economic concern but also a political one, touching on the quality of work, the need for human agency and the limits of automation. The politics of time is also a politics of freedom. Working less means gaining free time to be used as we choose, and becoming time-richer needs to be combined with the availability of more ‘quality time’ activity for people to be able to engage in self-development and community development.

If we can de-link employment from subsistence income, we could achieve a shorter working week and working day for all, with economic security underpinned by a universal basic income. Writing over 30 years ago, André Gorz made the case that it was no longer possible to continue to link people’s incomes to the quantity of work needed by society. For Gorz, this was liberating; establishing everyone’s right “to earn their living by working less and less and better and better, while receiving their full share of the socially produced wealth and the right to work discontinuously and intermittently without loss of income, in order to open up new spaces for activities that have no economic ends and grant these a dignity and a value for individuals and society…” (Gorz, 1991)

The work which has to be allocated and shared at different levels will vary from place to place and the processes need to be transparent and contestable. There will be many political questions to address around the sharing of work and the current disproportionately gendered and racialized distribution of work, including unremunerated work.

The quality of work

As well as questions of quantity and distribution, there are also questions of quality. Working means more than just doing what is required of us in our contract of employment. At work, we experience sociality, solidarity, collectivism, the exercise of power and subjection to power and the closing off or opening up of new possibilities. Work continually changes us and educates us.

Work is never purely instrumental; getting the job done is also an emotional and social process loaded with meaning. We cannot assume that workers, or consumers, think or act as purely rational economic agents. People do jobs, commit to jobs or leave jobs for a multitude of complex and interacting social reasons which are not easily quantified.

What is good work? How do we measure the value of work, the worth of different jobs? Workers want to feel they are doing something necessary and useful, helping to meet human needs and aspirations, making meaning and finding purpose, contributing to human wellbeing. If, in a more egalitarian society, there is still some need for physically demanding, high-risk or repetitive work, we might choose to mitigate this by enhancing the variety of tasks or planning for less working time or more pay in consultation with workers themselves.

We need to make the case for changes to the quality of work as part of any economic transition. As suggested by Amy Isham, this would include valuing the quality of our experience as opposed to our material consumption (Isham, 2023). A more collective experientialism would value the benefits of collaborating with others and participating in building community and democratic decision making.

The fundamental expectation that work should help to meet human needs means prioritising work that builds community, solidarity, resilience, democracy and sustainability. This suggests more investment in work which supports care, justice, reparation, regeneration, restoration and reuse as part of a more circular economy. These priorities do not require us to go backwards or deny technological change. While keeping historic craft skills alive is a worthwhile aim, we don’t need a wholesale return to pre-industrial ‘slow’ modes of production.

Robin Hahnel reminds us that good work should be attainable for all: “We should never forget to point out that what every citizen deserves is a socially useful job with fair compensation. We should never tire of pointing out that while capitalism is incapable of delivering on this, it is just as possible as it is sensible.” (Hahnel, 2002).

David Graeber suggests that capitalism cannot foster true innovation because it tends to apply new technologies in ways which embed existing forms of labour and suppress the idea of any radically different technological future which might “let our imagination once again become a material force in human history.” (Graeber, 2015)

Rethinking work: democracy, social justice, sustainability and planning

The transition to a more sustainable and socially just economy will require people to take control of work as part of taking control of resource use and distribution, operating within set boundaries at every level, from the global to the individual. This will only be achieved consensually if combined with a high degree of democratic decision-making at every level, with as much autonomy and devolution of power and respect for local specificities as is consistent with planetary limits. Highly developed democratic and planning practices will need to be in dynamic equilibrium. Power to make decisions and take action will flow both ‘upwards’ and ‘downwards’ and there will be different approaches to development, innovation and work in different contexts and to meet new demands generated by different groups of people.

Examples of current proposals to redesign work include:

The transformation of work outlined by the authors of ‘The Future is Degrowth’ (Schmelzer et al, 2022):

Phasing out of unnecessary and wasteful work.
The automation of alienating work.
Access to good, non-alienated and meaningful work for all.
A radical reduction in working hours without lower paid workers losing income.
A more equal distribution of work.
A valorization of reproductive and care work.
Collective self-determination in the workplace.
Stronger workers’ rights and autonomy.

The section on ‘Reforming Work’ in the text ‘The Sustainable Economy We Need’ adopted by the European Economic and Social Committee of the European Union in January 2020:

“Work is more than just the means to a livelihood. Good work offers respect, motivation, fulfilment, involvement in community and in the best cases a sense of meaning and purpose in life.

“Specific policies for in-depth consideration and further work could include:

enhanced worker representation on company boards,
the adoption of a right to work or “job guarantee”,
universal basic income,
universal basic services and
a maximum income.”

The three principles proposed by the Centre for Democratising Work initiative of Common Wealth (Lawrence, 2023) as a route forward; democratisation, decommodification, and decarbonisation:

Democracy, because labour is a profound commitment; of our time, our bodies, our minds, the conditions of which should be subject to democratic determination and meaningful agency.
Decommodification, because human beings are not commodities and work should not be treated as such.
Decarbonisation, because the fundamental collective task before us is securing a just transition to a post-carbon future of genuine equity and sustainability.

These agendas offer a direction of travel which requires some reimagining of the conditions for waged labour and a reshaping of power at work. As a minimum they require us to start moving from Labour Market to some kind of Labour Plan and to extend our ideas of living well within limits to working well within those limits. This could be the beginning of a decommodification of work, de-linking it from the means of subsistence and to ensure material security for all regardless of employment status.

We will need to develop more democratic, collective economic decision-making about what needs to be done and how much resource we can allocate to meeting each human need, and a level of planning which requires more socialized investment with decisions taken in the public / political sphere, so that our collective intelligence can be translated into actions to develop the infrastructure and jobs we need. We will also need to value and develop those skills associated with human flourishing and good work. These will have a collective dimension rather than being purely about developing individual ‘human capital’.

The task of advocating and realising a post-capitalist economy needs to be initiated by workers themselves and advanced through broad campaigning which connects economic, social and environmental demands and aspires to be majoritarian and win elections across the globe. As this movement grows, it must keep alive the idea that our current economic relations are not inevitable and that another world really is possible.

Sources:

Alston, P. (2019) Visit to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland : report of the Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, United Nations https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/3806308?ln=en

Brown M. and Jones R. (2021) ‘Paint Your Town Red’, Repeater Books.

Doughnut Economics Action Lab – DEAL (2023) https://doughnuteconomics.org/

The European Economic and Social Committee (2020) ‘Reforming work’ in ‘The Sustainable Economy We Need’. https://www.statista.com/statistics/266228/youth-unemployment-rate-in-eu-countries/. https://www.cusp.ac.uk/themes/s2/wp12/ ; NAT/765 – EESC-2019-02316-00-01-AC-TRA (EN) 10/14

Gallant, B. (2023) ‘The Future of Work?’ MSc. Ecological Economics module lecture notes, University of Surrey. https://surreylearn.surrey.ac.uk/d2l/le/lessons/240558/topics/2711983

Gorz A. (1991) ‘Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology’, Verso.

Graeber D. (2015) ‘The Utopia of Rules’, Melville House.

Hahnel R. (2002) ‘The ABCs of Political Economy’ Pluto Press.

Isham A. (2023) ‘More fun with less stuff’ MSc. Ecological Economics module lecture notes, University of Surrey. https://surreylearn.surrey.ac.uk/d2l/le/lessons/240558/topics/2712470

Lawrence, M. (2023) Centre for Democratizing Work https://www.common-wealth.co.uk/centre-for-democratising-work/introducing-the-centre-for-democratising-work

Raworth, K. (2017) ‘Doughnut Economics’, Random House.

Schmelzer, M., Vetter A., Vansintjan A. (2022) ‘The Future is Degrowth’, Verso.

Wainwright H. and Elliott D. (1982) ‘The Lucas Plan’, Allison and Busby.

See also:

A broader view of skills (June 2023)

Dilemmas of growth (June 2023)

Debating growth (November 2022)

Learning, earning and the death of human capital (February 2021)

Primo Levi on work and education (May 2016)

‘Useful work v. useless toil’ by William Morris (December 2014)

Posted in Economics, Education, Politics | Tagged Andre Gorz, capital, capitalism, commodification, David Graeber, Democracy, doughnut economics, ecological economics, economy, employment, Equality, Hilary Wainwright, human capital, human capital theory, Kate Raworth, labour, labour market, Lucas workers plan, Mondragon co-operatives, post-capitalism, production, productivity, Robin Hahnel, social justice, value, work | 1 Comment

Educating for political literacy in an age of crisis.

Posted on July 21, 2023 by Eddie Playfair

“Who’s Afraid of Political Education?”

The Challenge to Teach Civic Competence and Democratic Participation.

Edited by Henry Tam.

Policy Press, 2023

One of the key purposes of education is to help people acquire the knowledge and skills to participate and contribute to society as citizens, by developing their political literacy. Becoming politically literate means learning about power and how it’s shared and used. It requires an understanding of how change happens and an ability to see our social and economic system from different perspectives and to evaluate any policies being proposed. As with all literacies, this is a social process, best developed and evaluated in community with others, including within educational settings where we can develop a critical understanding of the world.

‘Who’s Afraid of Political Education?’ (Policy Press, 2023) is an excellent new book, edited by Henry Tam, which brings together a range of expert contributors to address the challenges of political education in our current context, to propose some alternative approaches and to outline what a pedagogy of democracy might look like.

The question in the title is a sign of our times. Why would we fear political education? Is it too risky to discuss politics in the classroom for fear of opening a Pandora’s box of disagreement and conflict which can’t then be closed? Are teachers equipped to tackle those dreaded ‘controversial issues’ and risk crossing the line between objectivity and taking sides? Will they be pilloried for ‘indoctrinating’ their students if they try to examine the full range of political ideas?

The theme of this collection is that a functioning democracy needs political education and that both are under threat. Henry Tam opens his introduction with the challenge: “Citizens, we have a problem” and his contention is that “democracy cannot function if citizens aren’t aware of how it works”. The familiar evidence of dysfunction includes low voter turnout, an unfair distribution of power, voter disenfranchisement and the increased acceptance of unevidenced claims and fake news.

Is this a new problem? Was there ever a golden age of democratic engagement when citizens were fully prepared for active participation in a liberal democracy? Certainly, there was a moment in England around the turn of the century when it seemed that Bernard Crick and New Labour might help us create an education fit for a functioning democracy.

Many of the authors in this collection refer to Bernard Crick’s contribution to putting political education on the agenda for schools and colleges via his influential reports:

“We aim at no less than a change in the political culture of this country …for people to think of themselves as active citizens, willing, able and equipped to have an influence in public life and with the critical capacities to weigh evidence before speaking and acting; to build on and to extend radically to young people the best in existing traditions of community involvement and public service, and to make them individually confident in finding new forms of involvement and action among themselves.”(Bernard Crick, ‘Citizenship for 16-19- year-olds in Education and Training’, 2000).

As a college principal at the time, I was very involved in developing and implementing Crick’s 16-19 recommendations. I was inspired by the vision and shared the optimism – and for a while, it did seem that the curriculum might be finding a new social purpose.

But that moment has passed, and the old consensus can’t be conjured up in today’s very different context. In England, and elsewhere, the very idea of education for democracy, political engagement and criticality is now highly contested, with calls to clampdown on teaching about anti-racism, anti-capitalism and environmental campaigning for example.

The crisis in political education is part of a crisis of democracy and a sign that our system is not delivering. Crisis has given us a politics of less rather than more, of mitigation rather than hope. It feels like at best, we can expect to stop a few bad things from happening rather than make any good things happen. The idea that politics could offer us better ways of organising society seems utopian, and the focus is on how to make emergent catastrophe less unbearable. This is the world we are educating for.

And yet, we still hold to the radical promise of democracy. If taken seriously this requires us all to help shape the way power is exercised in society, including in the economy of production, consumption and distribution on our finite planet. But a commitment to such democratic transformation threatens the current order and its beneficiaries. In the neoliberal ‘republic of capital’, there is no need for democratic choices which might challenge corporate power, gross inequality and market rule. When money speaks loudest and billionaires call the shots, politics is both a form of entertainment and the means to legitimise and shore up the system as it is.

This is not to say that there is no political education, but as Diane Reay points out in her brilliant chapter ‘Political education in an unequal society’, citizenship education, where it exists, is often depoliticised, promoting individual responsibility and moral character-building.

Education is now generally framed in terms of building human capital. This makes politics into a personal matter, with individuals expected to take responsibility for coping with system crises, choosing their own opinions and expressing them by picking a side at election time. Focusing on our duty to participate in elections and the mechanics of voting domesticates political disagreement and narrows the scope for social action and social change. Politics is sanitized and controversy constrained within the boundaries of the status quo, with bland appeals to harmony such as: ‘we all really want the same thing’ or ‘there’s more that unites us than divides us’.

While there is much value in consensus-building, politics is about conflict and change, the clash of interests, inequality, injustice and power. We have a shared history of fighting for change through social movements, unions, parties, protests and struggles of every kind and this legacy needs a place in our political education curriculum.

In ‘Different approaches to teaching civic and national identity’, Edda Sant acknowledges the political legitimacy of identity and emotion while reminding us that knowledge is socially constructed. Political disagreement is healthy and emotions are an important part of political engagement. Sant characterises three ways of teaching identity: partisan, deliberative and agonistic, drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s notion of agonism as distinct from antagonism. Political conflict is essential and can never definitively be resolved, so political opponents need to be accepted as legitimate rather than as enemies to be destroyed. Sant adds that, although agonism is better than the alternatives, it cannot deal with all political dilemmas.

Diane Reay reminds us of John Dewey’s advocacy of ‘democracy as a way of life’ which educators need to cultivate, and Paulo Freire’s distinction between ‘the practice of compliance’ and ‘the practice of freedom’. Freire’s conception of autonomy is not individualistic but flows from collective decision-making. Education providers should themselves be communities where political literacy can be acquired through discussion and collective practice.

Barrett Smith and Sarah Stitzlein examine the notion of free speech and the teaching of ‘contentious’ issues in ‘Classroom conflict, ‘divisive concepts’ and educating for democracy’. They draw on climate change, the Israel-Palestine conflict and Black Lives Matter to reflect on how to present new and emerging ideas that are not yet ‘received wisdom’ and the politics of knowledge production. Citizens are best defined in terms of what they do rather than what they know, and both are co-constructed, often by engaging with dissent.

Many of the contributors identify the authoritarian variants of populism as part of the threat to political literacy. But in their chapter ‘Populism, classrooms and shared authority’, Kathleen M. Sellers and Kathleen Knight Abowitz make a good case for a populism which raises genuine social concerns and questions the legitimacy of elites. We can learn from those populist movements which are driven by a democratic egalitarianism expressed through a critically active ‘we’. Sellers and Knight Abowitz propose a role for education which is ‘co-active’ rather than coercive, where democratic authority is expressed through a critical problem-posing pedagogy which promotes active enquiry into authentic problems.

Kalbir Shukra contributes a chapter, ‘Active learning of marginalised young people’, informed by democratic youth work which aims to create positive experiences of voice and agency for young people based on their concerns and their locality, with the caveat that these may not automatically lead on to adult political engagement. For me, this chapter recalled the brilliant work of ‘Leaders Unlocked’ with college students acting as peer researchers in student commissions which investigate issues that affect them, such as knife crime, racial harassment or sexual violence, and develop proposals for action and campaigning.

In their piece ‘Citizenship education: building the future‘, Lee Jerome and Liz Moorse show how citizenship education can make a real difference, using five compelling case studies which involve community organising, counter extremism, equalities, social justice and sustainability work.

There are many other excellent chapters in this collection, making it a vital contribution to an important debate. The authors offer us the tools we need to build a new commitment to educating for political literacy.

Inevitably, there is more to be said and done about many of the issues raised, for example bringing in perspectives from Europe and the global South and from all phases of education, together with fuller accounts of the roles of ideology and technology. A more global perspective would expose more of the inequalities and injustices of power and consumption, war and environmental collapse which urgently require a new politics and therefore new a new political literacy. And a focus on the potential of new technologies to support new forms of participation would be fruitful.

There is also more to be said about political literacy work in further, adult and community education and the specific contribution of colleges to this. A sector which is universal, inclusive, and rooted in communities is well-placed to develop popular critical literacy and citizenship.

In his conclusion ‘Lessons for democratic health’, Henry Tam describes education providers as ‘epistemic institutions’, championing understanding and criticality and in this capacity they are under threat and need protecting. Henry Tam concludes by saying that rather than “keeping politics out of education”, we need to “keep educating about politics”.

In short, we need to embrace political education rather than fear it. To give in to fear would be to give up on democracy, the development of popular alternatives, the possibility of system change and criticality itself.

A political education. (May 2022)

Freire for today (March 2021)

The mighty pencil (November 2019)

Learning through conflict (November 2017)

Giving young people a stake in their future (July 2017)

The habits of democracy (May 2017)

Crick reloaded: citizenship education and British values. (Sep 2016)

Voting and the habit of democracy (May 2014)

Post-16 citizenship in tough times (May 2014)

Contributors to ‘Who’s Afraid of Political Education?’:

Titus Alexander, Sheffield University.

Tony Breslin, former Chief Executive of the Citizenship Foundation.

Bryony Hoskins, University of Roehampton.

Lee Jerome, Middlesex University.

Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, Tufts University.

David Kerr, University of Reading.

Dina Kiwan, University of Birmingham.

Kathleen Knight Abowitz, Miami University of Ohio.

Liz Moorse, Chief Executive, Association for Citizenship Teaching.

Murray Print, University of Sydney

Diane Reay, University of Cambridge.

Edda Sant, Manchester Metropolitan University.

Kathleen M. Sellers, Miami University of Ohio.

Kalbir Shukra, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Barrett Smith, University of Cincinnati.

Sarah M. Stitzlein, University of Cincinnati.

Henry Tam, Director of Question the Powerful.

Posted in Education, Education policy, Politics, Reviews, Teaching and learning | Tagged agonism, Bernard Crick, capitalism, Chantal Mouffe, citizenship education, climate emergency, co-active, co-construction, Colleges, crisis, criticality, curriculum, Democracy, Diane Reay, Education, Equality, further education, global citizenship, human capital theory, John Dewey, Neoliberalism, Paulo Freire, political education, political literacy, politics, populism, schools, social justice, systemic crisis | Leave a comment

Savoirs et valeurs : pratiquer et conjuguer

Posted on July 21, 2023 by Eddie Playfair

Comment préparer nos étudiants pour un monde de crise et de fracture ? Est-il souhaitable ou même possible de chercher l’ordre dans les savoirs scolaires ?

Comment définir les valeurs communes et les savoirs communs qui ont de la valeur et qui méritent d’être transmis ? Comment les transmettre ?
Comment traduire la liberté, égalité et fraternité dans nos programmes et préparer à la citoyenneté démocratique ?
Comment expliquer les inégalités profondes dans une société qui se voudrait égalitaire et plurielle ? Où se trouve ce débat dans nos programmes ?

En Angleterre nous faisons face à ces mêmes défis et nous nous posons ces mêmes questions dans un contexte voisin. On attend de nos établissements une amélioration continue des résultats et nous sommes souvent appelés à donner à l’école de nouvelles responsabilités pour résoudre les problèmes sociaux. Mais nous avons eu peu de débat sur les valeurs et les fins des programmes scolaires.

Nos enseignants sont chargés de la promotion des « valeurs britanniques » : démocratie, liberté personnelle, état de droit, respect et tolérance. Difficile de ne pas être en accord, mais on pourrait se demander où est l’égalité, si fondamentale, qui donne au « respect » son caractère solidaire. On pourrait aussi se demander en quoi ces valeurs sont uniquement Britanniques.

C’est un débat qui n’a pas eu lieu. Ces valeurs sont données, figées, sans contexte historique, sans interrogation, sans dialogue et sans aucune conscience de leur évolution. Un tel débat pourrait être hasardeux car le rejet des valeurs britanniques est la définition officielle de l’extrémisme.

Mais l’interrogation de ces valeurs nous rend capables d’examiner de plus près d’autres idées-clés : l’« égalité des chances », la « réussite pour tous », et notre conscience du racisme vécu et de toutes les autres discriminations systémiques et quotidiennes. L’analyse et la critique doivent trouver leur place dans nos programmes, et ne pas être perçues comme actes subversifs.

Pour résister aux « fake news », par exemple, il faut avoir l’habitude de ne pas accepter tout ce qu’on nous dit, de remettre en question tout ce qui est donné et de chercher à comprendre la réalité à plusieurs niveaux.

Il nous faut peut-être de nouvelles analyses et de nouveaux outils pour bien réaliser le rôle de l’éducation dans un monde complexe. Plutôt que connaissances et compétences, peut-on plutôt parler de « littératies » ? Cela sous-entend l’intégration dynamique entre savoirs et action. Littéracies politiques, culturelles, technologiques, émotionnelles… toutes sont en développement continu, au niveau social et individuel et toutes jouent un rôle important. Elles nous donnent les raisons et les contextes pour « conjuguer » nos valeurs.

Liberté, je conjugue ton nom

Les valeurs ne s’enseignent pas, elles se vivent, se discutent, se redécouvrent, se réinventent. Nos étudiants ne peuvent que les explorer et les saisir pour s’en servir dans leur apprentissage démocratique. Pour témoigner de leur succès, on pourrait leur demander de mettre en œuvre leurs valeurs en créant leurs « chefs d’œuvres citoyens », leurs projets politiques, sociaux, culturels.

La France bénéficie de points cardinaux universels bien ancrés. La devise républicaine française représente la boussole d’une trajectoire de voyage en cours ; pleine d’espoir, et sans destination fixe. Liberté, Égalité et Fraternité se conjuguent et s’expriment chacune dans les autres et se pratiquent dans un contexte social complexe, fluide, en évolution.

Et si nos idéaux républicains ne sont pas toujours présents dans nos rapports, nous devons les re-imaginer autour de nous. L’école doit être un lieu de débat et d’expérimentation ou se pratiquent et se développent ces valeurs, pour qu’elles puissent s’élargir et s’approfondir dans le monde.

La liberté qui est un droit qui ne peut être donné par l’enseignant. Elle s’exprime dans l’action. Elle est créée et vécue dans le quotidien et elle se multiplie dans sa pratique. Elle évolue avec la société, sa portée s’étend au fil du développement social. La liberté de pensée, d’expression, de parole et d’action, s’exprime dans l’égalité et la fraternité ; entre égaux, en collectivité, dans un contexte social ou chaque liberté éprouvée en implique et enchaîne d’autres.

L’éducateur brésilien, Paulo Freire, nous rappelle qu’on ne peut pas imposer l’émancipation de l’extérieur – c’est un processus de réflexion, de dialogue qui aide à découvrir et à comprendre les pratiques oppressives et à se libérer soi-même.

Quand Paul Eluard écrit « Liberté j’écris ton nom » en 1942, c’est un acte dangereux de résistance. En 2020 avec une plus large liberté d’expression peut-on dire « Liberté, j’apprends ta grammaire » et être sûrs que nos étudiants apprennent à pratiquer et conjuguer la liberté, l’égalité et la fraternité – pour aujourd’hui et pour demain ?

Eddie Playfair, 2020

Billet rédigé pour le Collectif d’interpellation du curriculum (CICUR) du Comité universitaire d’information pédagogique (CUIP) autour des questions curriculaires en éducation.

Quelles finalités pour les enseignements ?

La réponse à cette question semble aller de soi : instruire, éduquer, transmettre, préparer… Oui, mais encore ? Quels savoirs transmettre, quelles cultures, quelles priorités éducatives ? Partant de la relation consubstantielle de l’École française avec la République, il nous a paru intéressant de nous demander si la trilogie des valeurs républicaines pouvait constituer la finalité de l’École et de ce que les élèves y apprennent.
Pour répondre à cette question, Michèle Haby, membre du CUIP (Comité universitaire d’information pédagogique) et Jean-Pierre Véran, membre professionnel du laboratoire BONHEURS de CY Cergy Paris Université ont sollicité trois intervenants complémentaires à leurs yeux : une universitaire engagée dans la formation des enseignants, Line Numa-Bocage (CY Cergy Paris Université), la présidente d’ATD Quart Monde, porte parole des parents et élèves les plus démunis, Marie-Aleth Grard, et l’ancien proviseur de lycée et conseiller politique de l’association des lycées anglais (AoC), Eddie Playfair. Chacun d’eux leur a confié une contribution écrite et un entretien vidéo. Extraits de la video : #8 La question des finalités / Extraits – YouTube

Lire aussi, en Français :

L’innovation pédagogique (October 2017)

Les refugies francophones de Londres (October 2016)

Egalit é et solidarité dans une société diverse (April 2016)

Grammaire de Gramsci et dialectique de Dewey (December 2015)

Leçons sans paroles : comment la musique nous apprend a a vivre (July 2015)

L’autonomie : pourquoi ? (April 2015)

Laïcité, égalité, diversité (March 2015)

Citoyens multilingues, societe multiculturelle (March 2015)

L’inspection en Angleterre (December 2014)

Socrate et le numerique (July 2014)

Posted in Education, en Francais | Tagged Angleterre, Education, egalite, France, fraternite, liberte, Paul Eluard, pedagogie, savoirs, valeurs, valeurs republicaines | 1 Comment

‘Transformative Teaching and Learning in Further Education – Pedagogies of Hope and Social Justice’

Posted on July 18, 2023 by Eddie Playfair

Professor Vicky Duckworth and Professor Rob Smith

From a conversation the authors had with Eddie Playfair as part of the Association of Colleges Quality, Teaching and Learning conference in December 2022.

Eddie Playfair: I’m delighted to welcome Vicky and Rob today.

Vicky Duckworth is professor of Further Education at Edge Hill University and has an international reputation for research in adult education and literacy and has always been very committed to challenging inequality through critical and emancipatory approaches to education, widening participation, inclusion, community action and social justice.

Rob Smith is Professor of Education at Birmingham City University. His work explores the impact of marketized systems on education and he’s researched and written extensively about FE and adult education skills policy and its impact on practice, often in collaboration with practitioners. As well as academic articles and reports he’s also published fiction – very intriguing!

We’ve planned this session as a conversation rather than a presentation and I want to start by saying that your book is absolutely brilliant. One of the reasons I loved it was because, as with the ‘Transforming Lives’ project that that you led, you start from the learner experience and learners’ stories told in their own words. In the book you also share your own narratives of FE. So perhaps I could ask each of you to tell us a little bit about your journey and your FE story.

Vicky Duckworth: Well, FE has been a real place of empowerment for me. I left school at 16 with minimal qualifications and worked in the local factory and really, I didn’t think that somebody like me could ever gain qualifications. You know, I was first generation, and the idea of going to college or university never entered my head.

But after working a while at the local factory, I realized that I wanted more. I didn’t know what that ‘more’ was, but I couldn’t envisage my lifetime of work within for the next 40 to 50 years, working within the factory. It’s important to say that I was no better or worse than the people I worked with. I had huge admiration for them, but for a 16-year-old working in a factory just wasn’t the life that I wanted. So I went to the local college; Moston College in North Manchester.

I’d always thought about being a nurse. My mum always wanted to be a nurse, but having 3 younger brothers, she never had the opportunity to pursue a career. So the idea of being a nurse and utilizing my caring capital because I was very much hands-on at home helping my mum out.

So, I started at Moston and I did a pre nursing course, and it absolutely transformed my life. The teachers didn’t speak at me, they spoke to me. It was really dialogic and they were role models, and it was just so exciting, and they instilled hope within me.

And after leaving FE College with this renewed hope and a real zest for the future I trained to be a nurse and midwife, and I was the first in my family to go to college or university or gain qualifications and it’s had an impact on my family; my parents, my brothers and my own children. It’s had an impact on the community, and really it was that experience that drove me to become an FE teacher and teach literacy to adults, and actually want to make a difference.

This also gave me the realisation that we’re not actually in a meritocratic society. Lots of young people are labelled and pathologized, and they leave school with this idea that they’re not clever and lots of the people in our study, said “Oh, I’m stupid” but are far from stupid. Structural inequality, class, gender and ethnicity, coming from socio-economically deprived areas hadn’t equipped them with the dominant resources they needed, and actually FE and gave them that chance to actually reclaim their identities like it did for me. So it was wonderful to work with Rob and to be part of this project and be part of the book, because it’s something that’s very dear to my heart.

Rob: My educational journey was very different and more traditional. I went to a comprehensive school in Birmingham called Queensbridge on the outskirts of Moseley and King’s Heath. I did A levels and then went on to university. I trained to teach secondary English and my learning in further education was after my move from secondary school to further education in 1992. Those of you with the historical knowledge will know that was when incorporation happened. I saw the impact of marketization, and this has driven a lot of my work.

It seems to me that the way teaching and learning happens is so prescribed by the way funding works, and what in the book we call the ‘Funding Accountability and Performance regime’.

So, I was educated into further education and, as with Vicky, some of my most rewarding experiences were in ESOL, adult literacy, English GCSE or Key Skills classrooms and, of course, Access to HE.

I was very privileged to go around colleges all over the country with Vicky and talk to teachers and students about their experiences, and what made further education transformative. And it was astonishing, the number of times we heard people talking about belief, an individual relationship with an individual teacher “she believed in me”. We didn’t prompt them. These are the words they used in our research. It’s about sincerity and connection; and you can’t BS Further Education students, they see through you if you try!

Eddie: The great thing about the Transforming Lives project is how you managed to get people to talk about their experience of transformation. We talk about education transforming lives and sometimes it’s framed in very economic terms: getting a good job, earning more money moving up the ladder, etc. But actually to hear learners really thinking about, and trying to describe, what transformation means is very insightful. The project interviews are still online, and people can listen to these. What did you get from that from when you put all those conversations together as a piece of research? What did you learn about what transformation is?

Rob: For me, there’s an unacknowledged role that further education plays, and it’s connected to the way our education system has evolved over 25 years, since the early nineties.

But schooling has been so fixated on assessment and a third of young people come out without that magical 4 or 5 GCSE grade 4’s so a lot of the work happens at the beginning of the college year when teachers start to build confidence in their students because they feel like they’ve failed.

The fact is, our education system has become very rigid and there’s an assumption that not everyone has the potential to achieve ‘academic’ qualifications. What people should have learned is prescribed each level and yet as teachers we know, as a pedagogical principle, that people learn a different rates and some people might take longer.

It’s ridden rough shod over in schools. It’s very institutionalized and students come into further education and suddenly there’s a kind of a freedom. they perhaps feel like they’re not good at learning but that’s wrong – they are good at learning. But it takes quite a lot to get that belief going Once that belief has started, you hear people saying: “I’m addicted to learning, I’m obsessed with learning, I can’t stop, I want to learn more.”

So it’s about trying to flick that switch, and do things that aren’t measurable within the existing cultures of what we’ve called the Funding Accountability and Performance Regime. You can’t have a metric for how you feel, who you are, what you believe in. It’s not measurable. These are human qualities.

I was very struck by the last speaker who was talking about compassionate education. It’s an extension of the same thing. It’s relational, isn’t it? It’s about sincerity; connecting with your students and the assumption that you can communicate with them as human beings. So, I think that’s the starting point for transformation.

Eddie: There’s also the phrase ‘social justice’ in the title of the book, and this permeates everything. Is there a connection between personal transformation, the kind of journeys of personal transformation that you’ve researched, and wider social transformation; the connection between individuals being able to change their lives and being able to bring about wider social change.

Vicky: Absolutely. I think it’s really important to say that when we think about education being framed in economic terms; getting a good job or earning more money, we found that education was much more than that.

It was intergenerational: we had a number of mothers and fathers who struggled with literacy, arrived at the college and gained the confidence and the skills to read and write. That, of course, had a ripple impact on their children and the children became more confident. They were able to help the children with reading and writing homework and that really broke that cycle of deprivation. The parents spoke how they became role models for the children and indeed role models for their community.

If we take one participant, Marie, who lived on a big housing estate, and because her story was journaled in the local newspaper, the other mothers would knock on her door and ask her: “How can I enrol at college? What steps do I need to take?” So, they become role models on the estates they lived on, as well as for their community, and their family.

Another participant, David, had never voted and returned to further education. Gaining skills, he was able to vote for the first time, to become part of the community and take action. That was so important for him and the way he viewed himself. So, a lot of these elements are not measured and yet they were vital in empowering them and shaping their trajectory and hope for the future.

When we consider Marie learning to read and write, that became the catalyst for her to enrol on an access course and become a nurse. And now she’s a senior staff nurse who’s really making a difference in her community and in the local hospital.

And it’s this ripple impact that makes a huge difference and drives social justice. Often this impact remains invisible and that’s what we wanted to make really clear.

For learners it was often the first time that they’d shared their stories with anybody, and it validated their journeys, and it was so important for them. And they didn’t just share the stories with me and Rob, they shared them within the classroom with each other, and that became a trigger for empowering them. And then, of course, there were the videos and the website, and the other arenas where they could share their work. That was very empowering for them. We can underestimate the power of storytelling. It’s a powerful tool for social justice and emancipation.

Lots of the teachers who were involved in transformative teaching and learning. shared their own narratives with their learners, and they were role models within the classroom. They were brave teachers and offered learners the confidence to share their own stories, including the barriers that they faced. What they do is look at ways where they could address those barriers and that was so important. That first step was getting confidence and hope by sharing stories, by dialogic engagement in the classroom and the teacher knowing their learners. And that catalysed the learners’ trajectory into very many different avenues which empowered them and the families.

Eddie: And those things are very hard to quantify and turn into metrics, it feels like an alternative way of describing the benefits of education. You are critical of the idea of teaching as a mechanical process which can be systematized, packaged up and transferred. How do we support teachers to develop their practice?

Vicky: We encourage teachers to look beyond focusing on a curriculum that centres on assessment. The pressure is on to look just at that. Ideally, teaching should be broader. But if that pressure is difficult to resist, then we should encourage teachers to make the most of the informal space and time around lessons: make sure you engage with your students as human beings, then they are much more likely to engage with the teaching and learning. Underpinning all that is the mantra: Get to know your students.

Eddie: You’re also critical of the ‘neurological turn’ with its emphasis on the need for teachers to understand ‘how the brain learns’. What are the problems with this approach?

Rob: The problems are huge. There appears to be an assumption that learning is like a chemical or electrical process. The language used often sounds to me like the language of computing. For example, memory is talked about as though it has a size like the RAM in your laptop and that division between long term storage and Random access also seems to have come from computer technology. Well, the brain is not a computer: it’s much more complex and more powerful than that. In addition, it’s connected to a human body a man, woman or person who has a religious, class and cultural background and a skin that may be light or dark in colour. All those things impact on the way the human being interacts with others in a social environment: and the classroom is a social environment. The latest fad of cognitive load theory wants to pretend that none of this matters and that if only we know how the brain ‘works’, we will have the answer to how to teach.

It’s a myth. It’s as useful as not overwhelming your students with lots of new ideas and content all in one go. Better to get them to focus on a few things and gradually build. We don’t need a pseudo-scientific set of metaphors to understand that.

More dangerous is how the ‘neurological turn’ attempts to overlook the social conditions like poverty, and the social structures like race, gender and class, that powerfully influence educational outcomes. This isn’t some kind of excuse teachers deploy because they don’t want to be ‘held accountable’ (whatever that means) for their students’ educational achievements. It’s an acknowledgement that for some teachers (and those teaching in further education are right near the top of the list) the work is harder, the challenges are greater and their labour is made more difficult when government underfunds and under-resources the provision they work in. Our education system currently produces social injustice. Focusing on ‘the brain’, as though such a focus will provide the answers to all the issues we face when we engage in teaching and learning within our diverse classrooms, appears to simply be a way of ignoring that. If a young person has had no breakfast, positioning cognitive load theory as the most important pedagogical knowledge for teachers to mobilise doesn’t and can’t help.

Eddie: I always turn to the final ‘What is to be done?’ chapter where we get the authors policy recommendations. Can you briefly summarize your manifesto for FE – for instance the idea of FE as the ‘non-linear’ model of education?

Rob: We think that further education needs to be de-centralised. Strangely, this has started to happen as, last month, colleges were moved back into the public sector.

I think there is a bigger lesson in this. It is an implicit acknowledgement that incorporation, as an idea and a way of organising further education has not been successful. I think it was originally conceived of as being a ‘skills delivery system’ that could be steered by central govt through funding incentives. In fact, colleges, it was thought, could become little entrepreneurial organisations that would soon be weaned off depending on govt money. It hasn’t happened. Colleges are still funded around 90% with public money.

Along with that, that non-linear idea is so important. New Labour championed the idea of lifelong learning – opening the door to people returning to education and to keep being open to new educational experiences and qualifications. But for me, that is part of a broader picture of how the educational landscape might change. We assess our children and young people more than most countries in Europe. It appears to be about performance and ‘standards’ but actually this mania for assessment turns many of our young people off. It fixes their idea about their abilities too early and in many cases this can be damaging.

What’s extraordinary is that the job that college teachers do to start with is often about trying to undo that damage. That means engaging with students, believing in students so that they regain their confidence as learners and can begin to harness their experiences of education to a plan and to hopes for the future. Imagine if further education pedagogy didn’t have to start by addressing the fact that many students have been totally turned off education?

So what happens in schooling, and how assessment is organised and how we think about the movement from full-time education to work and the ongoing relationship between work and education needs a massive re-think.

The government appear to see further education as a skills factory. It’s so much more. That narrow view does us all a great disservice. And most of all it does a disservice to the people who work and study in further education. They are not cogs in the huge impersonal machine of ‘the Economy’ that the government is always referring to. They are human beings with aspirations, individuals with unique gifts.

Further and adult education should be a service for community cohesion that is accessible to all. It should be a service that adults can return to, to learn new things to develop themselves personally, to have fun, to enjoy learning, as well as to gain new skills in order to make a career change. It should and can be a rich resource.

For that to happen, we need a totally new approach from government in terms of the way further education is funded and in terms of the ludicrous amounts of accountability paperwork that colleges have to produce annually.

Eddie: I want to finish with one of the other words in the title which is ‘hope’. Could you share with us where you see the signs of hope for the future? Times are very hard for staff, for students, for the sector and for society as a whole. So I wonder where you think educators can find the hope they need, not just to keep going, but also to move forward?

Rob: I think that the hope comes from the fact that if anything provides social mobility in our education system, it is Further Education. But it is unrecognized by government and for the last 12 years it’s been funded appallingly – we know that.

But it’s also conditioned by the skills discourse that Further Education is often viewed through; around skills, national productivity, skill gaps, gross national product – the kind of language used for the whole economy.

We’re not denigrating the importance of income or the dignity of employment as an aim. These are important goals, but colleges are not just a factory for producing skills on a production line. And most teachers don’t view it as that.

And the model which objectifies people and talks about them as if they are some kind of component, does not work. Actually, it’s been broken since 2009 and it’s limped on. But we can see now that it’s not working. It’s still broken, and it’s a global thing as well. It’s about the whole way international finance works.

I just wanted to say that before that view of further education as a skills factory there was something else in place. I believe that those holistic ideas of education being about personal development and relational contact still burn in the heart of human beings, and in 10, 20 or 50 years’ time there will still be people teaching on that basis when this cycle of neoliberal discourse around skills is dead.

So for me that is the hope. I’ve been in it for 30 years and we need to cling on to it and we’ve got to pass it to our students to carry the torch. I can see that those values resonate with people, they know what you’re talking about and that’s where the hope is.

I trust and believe that we’re coming through the cycle and Further Education has an important role in lifelong learning and providing a new way of thinking about education.

Eddie: We started this conference talking about social justice, and we’ve come back full circle. But we’ve also covered innovation, compassion, hope, love, optimism and, of course, learning. What a great place to finish; on a hopeful note. thank you so much Vicky and Rob for giving us a flavour of the book and I strongly recommend it to everyone.

Education, social justice and survival (July 2022)

Posted in Education, Education policy, Reviews, Teaching and learning | Tagged Adult education, AoC, Association of Colleges, class, Colleges, critical education, criticality, dialogic education, Education, Funding Accountability and Performance regime, further education, hope, inclusion, inequality, knowledge, literacies, neuroscience, pedagogy, Rob Smith, skills, social justice, Social mobility, transformative teaching and learning, Transforming Lives, UCU, Vicky Duckworth, widening participation, working class | 1 Comment

Dilemmas of Growth

Posted on June 14, 2023 by Eddie Playfair

Our relationship with economic growth can sometimes feel contradictory: ‘can’t live with it, can’t live without it’ .

This ‘dilemma’ of growth, as described in Tim Jackson’s ‘Prosperity without Growth’¹, seems to be predicated on two assumptions which are in tension:

That growth is unsustainable because it inevitably leads to increasing planetary impacts from increasing material extraction, production, consumption, waste and energy use. Essentially, we can’t grow without breaching planetary sustainability boundaries.
That degrowth is unstable and necessarily leads to economic disaster, with rising unemployment and falling living standards. Less production means less consumption which means less economic activity and less demand for work.

In ‘Doughnut Economics’², Kate Raworth expresses a similar conundrum: ‘No country has ever ended human deprivation without a growing economy. And no country has ever ended ecological degradation with one’. So it seems that both growth and lack of growth can have catastrophic consequences. But neither human deprivation nor ecological degradation have been resolved and the catastrophic consequences are all too evident.

There is a great deal of compelling evidence to support Assumption 1. Growing economic activity will continue to require more material inputs and the supply of those inputs is finite. Even if we can reduce the pro rata impact of each additional increment of economic activity through productivity and efficiency gains across the cycles of production and consumption, and even if we can rapidly achieve zero Carbon emissions, the level of decoupling of growth from increased planetary damage that would be compatible with sustainability has never yet been achieved.

We also know that beyond a certain level, economic growth does not increase human wellbeing or fulfilment, in fact it can do the very opposite. Above that point, growth is simply driving profits, inequality and wealth accumulation for a few rather than making us all happier, healthier or more fulfilled.

Moving on to Assumption 2, it’s clear that in capitalism, growth is predicated on constantly increasing production and consumption as part of profit-seeking and capital accumulation. Without growth, capitalism tends to go into crisis, with rising unemployment and falling living standards.

This threat of crisis has been used as an argument against every kind of attempt to assert social objectives for economic activity, but does a ‘think of the jobs’ defence justify every extractive, destructive, exploitative, antisocial activity which employs people?

Towards a different system

Instead, we need to imagine an economic system based on a different logic, where investment in innovation, infrastructure and social and community goods is prioritised and targeted where the need is greatest. A system where there is more paid care, health, education, cultural and regenerative work being done and where the work available is shared more equitably. A system where social progress is decoupled from economic growth.

As Jason Hickel points out in ‘Less is More’³ ‘a recession is what happens when a growth dependent economy stops growing.’ He goes on to call for ‘something completely different… a different kind of economy altogether – an economy that doesn’t require growth in the first place.’

A capitalist system predicated on investment for profit seeking and wealth accumulation is not capable of meeting human needs in a just and sustainable way. Any alternative programme aiming for economic and social justice will probably have to include a target of net aggregate degrowth overall, with substantial redistribution and reprioritisation.

This would mean setting ceilings on individual consumption and investing in public provision of health and social care, education and culture, housing and transport, sustainable agriculture, renewables, resilience and community building, while at the same time disinvesting from damaging and wasteful forms of individualised consumption such as fossil fuels, military technology and luxury goods. This would amount to growth for the poorest, degrowth for the richest and security for everyone.

This sort of transition cannot be achieved at the level of individual behaviours and patterns of private consumption. We will need to assert the political in ‘political economy’ and socialise the problem in order to find systemic solutions.

Democracy and planning

We need to start from people’s right to a baseline standard of living and to have a say in determining economic priorities over and above that baseline. This means bringing decision-making about investment, production, consumption and employment into the public realm at different levels and it requires a pairing of planning with democracy.

We need to develop our skills of democratic planning for human flourishing and economic and social justice within agreed planetary boundaries and baseline human requirements. This will have to be combined with a plan for transition and sharing the work that needs to be done fairly and equitably.

Planning doesn’t have to be monolithic or centralised, it can integrate high-level targets, bottom-up responses, innovation and local specificities. The risk that the planners become too powerful needs to be tempered by democratic processes, with inclusive ways of involving people in making the economic choices which affect them.

Living well within limits

At the top level, we would need to define what the global limits and the minima and maxima of resource throughput we each need to flourish, including plenty of scope for local decision-making and choices around discretionary and socialised consumption. We could then chart a global rate of progress for this overall contraction of activity and convergence towards a sustainable level of activity.

The ‘Living Well Within Limits’ project⁴ of Julia Steinberger and colleagues quantified the biophysical resources and provisioning systems necessary for human well-being. The project proposed a simple bottom-up model to estimate target minimal thresholds for the level of consumption needed to provide decent material living standards for everyone on Earth. The model showed that it would be possible to achieve a rapid reduction in resource & energy use, keeping us within planetary boundaries while enhancing and preserving well-being. Global energy use by 2050 could be reduced to 1960’s levels despite supporting a population three times larger. This would require the deployment of advanced technologies to enhance efficiency as well as radical demand-side changes to reduce consumption.

Beyond the dilemma

The ‘dilemma’ of growth is only a dilemma if we accept the argument that capitalism generates stability rather than instability, that it can solve the very inequalities and injustices that it has created, that a ‘rising tide’ of growth will narrow rather than widen the gaps between richer and poorest and that it’s impossible to manage a planned transition to an economy designed to meet human needs in a just way.

If we understand the capitalist mode of production and consumption as the problem we can reject its logic, which seeks only profit and accumulation and creates inevitable crises and ‘dilemmas’. Instead, we need to learn how to set boundaries on resource use, how to plan and how to take social and economic decisions collectively at different levels and to understand both how to degrow some activities as well as grow others, sustainably and responsibly. Our survival depends on this learning.

Sources:

Jackson, T. (2017) ‘Prosperity without Growth’, Routledge.
Raworth, K. (2017) ‘Doughnut Economics’, Random House.
Hickel, J. (2020) ’Less is More’, Penguin
Millward-Hopkins, J. Steinberger, J, Rao, N. Oswald, Y. (2020) ‘Providing Decent Living with Minimum Energy’, Global Environmental Change 65 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.10216
Image: Iakov Chernikhov

See also:

Debating growth (Nov 2022)

Code red for human survival (Nov 2022)

Nancy Fraser’s eco-socialist common sense (Aug 2022)

Climate justice, heat justice and the politics of resilience (Aug 2022)

Education, social justice and survival in a time of crisis (Jul 2022)

Owning our crises (Mar 2022)

Posted in climate emergency, Economics, Politics | Tagged capitalism, degrowth, Democracy, doughnut economics, ecological economics, economy, Equality, growth, Jason Hickel, Julia Steinberger, Kate Raworth, Less is More, Living well within limits, planning, Prosperity without Growth, Sustainability, sustainable development, Tim Jackson | Leave a comment

A broader view of skills?

Posted on June 7, 2023 by Eddie Playfair

Thinking about ‘essential employment skills’

The recent Skills Imperative 2035 report from the National Foundation for Education Research (NFER) is the latest in a long line of documents making the case that the shift towards more professional jobs^(a) is increasing the need for generic, transferable skills variously called core skills, essential skills, employability skills, ‘soft’ skills or transversal skills. The NFER report calls them ‘essential employment skills’ and their top six are: communication, collaboration, problem solving, organising, planning & prioritising, creative thinking and information literacy^(b).

The abilities being described are important and worth nurturing. It’s clearly useful to be able to think things through systematically, work well with others, communicate well, handle information and manage projects, and education should help students develop such capacities. But the agenda is about more than good education. Once identified, an insufficient level of ‘essential employment skills’ joins the list of ‘skill shortages’ and widening ‘skills gaps’ seen as holding back our economy, and it is education which is expected to come to the rescue. But we need to be cautious about claiming that skills policy can solve our economic or labour market problems.

Metaphors of skill: toolkits, clingfilm and thunderclouds

We often think of skills as tools, and talk about skills toolkits, which offer us a range of well-designed instruments to choose from to help us get a job done. Each tool is designed for a particular type of task and can be used in different contexts for that specific task.

Metaphors can be useful to help make what seems abstract more concrete, but they can disguise as well as illuminate. In the case of ‘skills as tools’, used well, they make a job easier, but only if the human user understands the overall job. We have to know which tool to select for which task and also how to use it^(c). Each tool has embedded in its design the learning of many people before us, but the tool itself doesn’t learn^(d) and can’t help to define the objective of the bigger task, only the human user can do that.

Pat Ainley and Jenny Corbett¹ describe the narrative of generic and life-skills as “clingfilm language, that can stretch over almost anything” making the concept of skill into a ”nebulous moral issue, outside everyday experience.” And Charles Tilly² argues that “As a historical concept, skill is a thundercloud: solid and bounded when seen from a distance, vaporous and full of shocks close up”.

Skills as social relations: context, complexity, transferability

The things we call skills are created and shaped by society and the ways we relate to each other – our social relations. They have a history, a sociology and a political economy. The categories described as ‘essential skills’ are complex social activities which are context dependent and cover a multitude of very different experiences in very different settings applying very different knowledge sets and behaviours developed over time.

Real processes have been selected, named, packaged up, lifted out of real contexts and reified as discrete generic ‘things’ to be transferred between different settings. We need to be cautious about giving these constructs more weight than they can carry. They can be described generically but are always acquired and applied in specific contexts. They are highly social and are developed and experienced collectively, so decontextualising them in order to distil their ‘essentialness’ means losing their sociality and reducing their value. They have been extracted from the situations that generated them and have lost much of their meaning. These skills are best applied and evaluated in social settings and this isn’t always compatible with our individualised modes of learning and assessment.

Take ‘teamwork’ as an example. The teamwork required in a successful sports team is very different to that needed in the team running an agricultural co-operative. Each will be shaped by contextual knowledge and experience and also by the interactions of different people who bring their various hopes and histories, assumptions and attributes with them.

What about ‘creative thinking’? In her essay ‘Critical Thinking’³, bell hooks writes:

“Thinking is an action… thoughts are the laboratory where one goes to pose questions and find answers, and the place where visions of theory and praxis come together.”

Thinking is about as broad a skill descriptor as it is possible to have, covering the multitude of mental activities we engage in throughout our lives and underpinning every other skill. There are many different ways to think and we can train ourselves to think things through more critically and systematically and maybe even more creatively, but treating it as a singular skill is stretching the ‘clingfilm’ too far.

Whose skills?

We also need to ask who gets to define and prioritize skills. If essential skills are framed purely in terms of employment this seriously narrows the range of their usefulness. A more inclusive definition would include people’s aspirations as workers and citizens, even if some employers might not welcome the kind of creative and critical thinking which includes questioning their business practices, or the kind of teamwork which involves building an effective union branch or the demonstration of planning and organising skills which lead to industrial action!

The term ‘functional skill’ for literacy and numeracy gives a sense of how we can limit aspiration by reducing the scope of a skill to its narrowest purpose; doing merely what is necessary to function in a job role. What would a broader conception of skills look like if it was based on different priorities, for example human survival and planetary care, or liberation and emancipation? It would require us to centre those skills associated with solidarity, democracy, planning, collective action, organising, nurturing and supporting others etc. Such a framework would not ignore work as an important context, but it would also seek to meet the wider needs of individuals, communities and society.

If we want a more democratic society and economy where everyone has some determining role in shaping production, distribution and consumption priorities, we will need to reconsider what skills we value and how best to pass them on.

We might want to think more widely in terms of ‘literacies’, a term which implies a dynamic web of subject specific knowledge and skill within domains which have some shared economic, social and cultural history. We could start by defining such literacies in fairly broad terms such as: scientific, political, economic, social, cultural, aesthetic, emotional etc. and then focus in on smaller categories.

We do students a disservice if we encourage the idea that skills exist independently from knowledge and that complex social practices are actually simple competencies. Skills cannot easily be lifted up and moved around to be put to work in different settings like the tools in a toolbox. Tools are good for specific tasks but even our best tools are not necessarily transferable to different jobs.

What can educators do?

None of this is to advocate turning our back on essential skills, quite the opposite. It is important for teachers and students to discuss and practice these skills, to make them visible and analyse them in and out of context, in their wholes and their parts, to break them down into elements and to aggregate them up and see how they connect to each other. In doing so, we need to question the labelling and parcelling-up as well as their degree of transferability between different contexts and domains of knowledge.

Watching others, trying things out and talking about what we’re doing are important stages of learning. We can set tasks and create contexts where these skills can be developed and give them time to enter into the students’ habits, behaviours and routines, whether in an educational or a work setting.

It might help us to have a common language, an agreed national taxonomy, for these skills and this could build on existing frameworks like SkillsBuilder or past ones like the Wider Key Skills.

Challenging the ‘skills fetish’

In their article ‘Challenging the skills fetish’⁴, Leesa Wheelahan, Gavin Moodie and James Doughney, make the connection between the skills discourse and human capital theory, which started as a descriptive theory in the 1970s (‘education can prepare people for employment’) but has now become a prescriptive dogma (‘education must supply skilled workers to the labour market’). The skills policies which flow from human capital theory seek to shape and fund educational provision purely in terms of its relevance to the labour market.

What Wheelahan and her co-authors call the ‘skills fetish’ is premised on a narrow, reductive conception of human beings, human motivation and human capacities. It regards skills as discrete, disembodied entities that can be quantified, traded and accumulated in various ways. In this confusion of outcomes and processes, skills are developed, transferred and applied regardless of context, occupation or field of practice and learning becomes an investment by individuals in specific skills to enhance their employability, and by employers to improve their productivity.

Conclusion

Doing things well, including at work, requires both knowledge and skill. Trying to separate out skill as a different kind of knowledge and the acquisition of skill as a different kind of learning is like trying to detach a current from the water which it travels through. While it may be useful to understand the components of a skill, atomised competences are not much use in isolation. They can be described and analysed separately but in practice they are inseparable from each other. Becoming skilled at something can’t be achieved by accumulating essential skills. Becoming a skilled engineer, a skilled historian or a caring, engaged citizen is an emergent process which takes time and can’t be measured on a simple linear scale.

So, we should welcome the focus on the rich diversity of ways of ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’, their interplay, their specificity and the contribution of ‘knowing for doing’ and ‘doing as learning’ to building our understanding of work and life.

Notes

(a) This shift is not inexorable. The growing need for personal care and the potential for machine learning to ‘deprofessionalize’ many current jobs could lead us towards a more ‘hourglass’ labour market with fewer professional or associate professional jobs.

(b) The only surprise in this list of skills valued by employers is the absence of numeracy from the top six. This is despite the narrative that a general lack of maths skills is harming our productivity and competitiveness. Perhaps the assumption is that ‘maths’ is getting plenty of attention as a curriculum subject in its own right.

(c) Although digital tools which incorporate machine learning and AI can interact with their user and ‘learn’ from them, creating a synergy between the tool and the human user.

(d) There is also an element of the tool ‘suggesting’ the task. Good tools, particularly those designed around the human body and human movement (a screwdriver, a paintbrush, a bicycle etc.) ‘show’ us how they might be used and in some cases can even ‘inspire’ us to want to use them.

Sources

Ainley, P., and Corbett, J. (1994) ‘From Vocationalism to Enterprise: Social and Life Skills Become Personal and Transferable.’ British Journal of Sociology of Education 15 (3): 365–374.
Tilly, C. (1988) ‘Solidary Logics: Conclusions.’ Theory and Society 17 (3): 451–458.
hooks, b. (2010) ‘Critical Thinking’, Routledge.
Wheelahan, L., Moodie, G. and James Doughney, J. (2022) ‘Challenging the Skills Fetish’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 43, No. 3: 475–494

Resisting classification (Dec 2021)

Learning, earning and the death of human capital (Feb 2021)

Posted in Education | 1 Comment

In praise of ‘low value’ subjects.

Posted on February 27, 2023 by Eddie Playfair

The English education system is built on value judgements. Measures of provider quality, qualification currency and student achievement create a web of rankings which shape our view of the system, and the resulting hierarchies impact how everyone feels about where they find themselves in that system. Schools and colleges are graded and categorized from ‘outstanding’ to ‘inadequate’. Universities are described in terms of how selective they are, with ‘high tariff’ providers regarded as ‘better’ as a result of a self-imposed elitism. Students are sorted, ranked and labelled based on their achievements at every stage. Once they start to opt for, or be limited to, different subjects or qualification routes, these are also loaded with differential value.

As we navigate our way through education, there is no escape from the metrics of success and failure. Judgements are made at every turn, and every educational decision, whether voluntary or imposed, carries with it a heavy burden of relative value which has real-world consequences. More choices mean higher stakes, more selection means more rejection, more anxiety and more dissatisfaction as well as greater inequality.

These judgements serve to create and reinforce hierarchies and widen the gulf between winners and losers; a gulf which often reflects existing class and wealth gradients. The winners are mostly those who start with ‘high value’ support, study ‘high value’ qualifications at ‘high value’ institutions and then inevitably reap the ‘highest value’ benefits the labour market has to offer. This focus on value-ranking flows from a view of education where individuals are required to invest in their personal ‘human capital’ to ensure it is as valuable as possible in a competitive labour market. But those who start with the least ‘capital’ of other sorts find that the market is rigged against them.

Is it possible to ascribe a value to a subject? Describing the value of a subject is very different from asserting that it has more value than another. Can we really say that maths has more value than history? Or that physics has more value than sociology? Or that STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) are more valuable than SHAPE subjects (Social sciences, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Economy)? Surely the task of education is to introduce students to the many ways of understanding of the world, and the strength of a curriculum lies in its breadth and interconnections. All these subjects have a value simply because of how they help structure and organize what we know.

But in the neoliberal context, markets and competition require ever more differentiation, and the pressure to value, rank and commodify everything is too great. The recent history of the creation of new subject hierarchies is as baleful as that of the creation of new provider hierarchies. The English Bacc by requiring some subjects and not others is one example. Another was the invention of ‘facilitating’ A Level subjects by the Russell Group which was then taken up by the government for their performance tables for a period. More recently, the government’s Review of Qualifications at Level 3 justifies the withdrawal of funding for certain Applied General qualifications on the grounds of ‘low value’. Another iteration of this approach is the publication by the Social Mobility Commission of ‘Labour Market Value’ measures for Higher and Further Education qualifications based on the correlation between ‘positive value-add in earnings’ and different subjects and courses.

We could dismiss these attempts at an empirical ranking of subjects as bean-counting gone too far. But describing some subjects and courses as ‘high value’ requires that others are ‘low value’. This changes the way people think about the curriculum and can have serious consequences for policy and investment. For instance, public funding for 16-18 education now includes a ‘high value courses premium’ described as “additional funding to encourage delivery of selected level 3 courses in subjects that lead to higher wage returns and … enable a more productive economy” – in effect STEM subjects.

When a funding system incentivizes ‘high value’ courses, hard-pressed providers will sooner or later respond by shifting their priorities. As the ‘low value’ subjects become less attractive to both students and providers, they can become unviable and face closure. By the time the alarm bells start ringing about how vital these endangered subjects are, the infrastructure to save them might no longer exist.

Publicly funded education clearly has to demonstrate the usefulness of what it does and the benefits of the programmes it offers. But the idea that all we need is for more students to know which provision has the highest market returns is simplistic and self-defeating. The economy is dynamic, complex and multi-dimensional, and a one-track approach based purely on wage returns is simply inadequate. If we want a responsive educational offer capable of developing the full set of future human capabilities, we will need to value all kinds of human knowledge and skill as well as valuing all kinds of human work.

So, let’s celebrate all our ‘low value’ subjects, champion what they offer us and defend their contribution to the rich curriculum we need!

Education: market or system? (June 2017)

What is social capital? (Jul 2016)

Life in the qualification market. (May 2016)

Market madness: condition critical. (Jun 2015)

Do qualifications create wealth? (Jan 2015)

Qualifications as currency. (Dec 2014)

‘Hindering’ subjects and ‘bad’ universities. (Oct 2014)

Image: Alexander Rodchenko, Objectless Composition no.65 (Still life)

Posted in Education, Education policy | Tagged capitalism, class, commodification, competition, Education, Education policy, education system, elitism, hierarchy, high value subjects, human capital, inequality, labour market, low value subjects, marketisation, markets, Neoliberalism, privilege, qualifications, STEM, subjects | 2 Comments

Frigga Haug and the mystery of learning

Posted on December 6, 2022 by Eddie Playfair

How does learning happen? What exactly is going on when we acquire knowledge or skill?

When we consider our own education, it’s evident that over time we learn quite a lot – some of it may even overlap with what we’re taught. First we don’t know x or can’t do y and then at some later point we can. Learning has taken place, but it’s not always clear how.

We must be finding similarities and making connections between what we already know or can do and the yet-to-be-known or as-yet-inexpressible. Memory, retrieval, recall and practice all clearly play a part. The process is surely also shaped by our identity and our social, physical and emotional relation to others; who we are, who we are with, how we feel, and what we and others want.

The mystery of learning is explored in a wonderful short essay Memories of Learning by the German sociologist and philosopher Frigga Haug, based on her original text Die Unruhe des Lernens (2020).

For Haug, the word ‘learning’…

“…brings on a deep sense of discomfiture. It attaches itself to memories of command and attempted obedience, of failure and displeasure, of guilt.”

Many of us will relate to Haug’s account of the pain and struggle of learning to read:

“Reading presented itself as an unattainable goal… I stared at the characters… and strove to find some meaning in their juxtaposition…It didn’t work. The letters kept stubbornly to themselves; two characters together yielded nothing, let alone three or more. I sat in despair for what seemed like hours over the curves and strokes; it didn’t help that they were big and brightly coloured.”

And then there must have been some kind of change of state:

“…the letters must have been turned into words and this process must have been meaningfully transformed into an activity that one might want to practice.”

But having eventually learnt to read, what Haug remembers is not the meaningful transformation but the struggle and sense of frustration and failure.

I learnt to read, at school aged 5, using a French primer which I think was called ‘Poucet et son ami l’écureuil’ (Poucet and his friend Squirrel). I liked the illustrations of Poucet’s adventures which mainly involved him exploring the farm where he lived. Most of all, I liked the page which showed Poucet going with his mother on a journey to Paris by bus and train. For me, the pictures were the story and it seemed quite impossible that I could ever recount it by simply reading the text. I don’t think Poucet was ever shown doing any reading himself, but I felt that the page with the train represented the promise of future reading and that getting to that point would be the start of further journeys. I remember the book and its illustrations vividly and I also remember feeling that reading was just too big a challenge, but I can’t remember the first time I actually read on my own. The skill must have emerged so gradually that there was no single transition point.

Frigga Haug goes on to recount some of her other negative learning experiences, from ball games and university seminar rooms to using a word processor. In each case, the outcome is generally:

“At some point, I must have learnt how to do it… But what I still remember is those anxious hours in which my head felt so curiously empty.”

We like to emphasize the ‘joy’ of learning, the ‘Aha!’ moments when a student gets it at last, the overcoming of barriers and the life-changing possibilities of learning. That’s a teacher perspective. But the flash of joy or the moment of intense pleasure is often the tip of a big scary iceberg which the learner is only too aware of. Yes, learning can be transformational, but that transformation often comes with an emotional cost.

“…without a doubt, the lasting memory of failure in learning influences the development of one’s personality and the form and attainment of learning objectives in the future.”

Haug wonders why it is that she can’t remember the learning process for all those skills she eventually mastered, including those she took to ‘with ease’, like arithmetic, swimming, climbing and running. She became a teacher herself, guiding others through learning, and she can see how it would be useful to better understand how we acquire whatever it is we have that we want to pass on to our students.

What Frigga Haug offers us here is a powerful personal attempt to evoke the learning process as she experienced it – something with essential and life-enhancing outcomes but which could also be painful and difficult. Perhaps this simply reflects the fact that our learning is the result of our constant interaction with the world; our restless confrontation with the unknown and the not-yet understood. If learning is living, then it naturally includes all the challenges that life presents.

“Learning promises competence and ability, but at the same time it means a loss of security, of illusions…”

Haug draws on her experience in the women’s movement and the way she successfully created discussion and action planning gatherings within the wider Action Council she worked with in Berlin. She concludes that…

“…the teaching-learning problem cannot be expressed in terms of teaching as a thing imposed from above (with) learning as the fate of those below. Rather, one needs to grasp the political dimension… (and to understand teaching as both) the attempt to discover other possible paths through the world but also to find companions for the fight to change it.”

Gert Biesta devotes a whole chapter to the problem of learning in his brilliant book ‘The Beautiful Risk of Education’ (2014). He challenges the idea of learning as natural, inevitable and desirable and shows that descriptions of learning are not neutral and tend to domesticate rather than emancipate the learner. Learning means nothing unless the learner is specific about content and purpose. To say that we have learnt something is to make a political judgement, so as learners we need to seize our learning and make it work for us rather than the other way around.

In order to try to explain what’s happening when we learn, one could reference John Dewey’s social constructivism, Lev Vygotsky’s socio-cultural approach and the Zone of Proximal Development, Paulo Freire’s democratic dialectic and generative themes, bell hooks’s transgressive engagement or Carol Dweck’s growth mindset, amongst other models. Here, Frigga Haug has instead chosen to explore how learning feels: personal, social, political and often also very mysterious.

Memories of Leaning, Frigga Haug (New Left Review 137, Sep/Oct 2022)

Learning from Utopia (December 2021)

Reading bell hooks (April 2021)

Freire for today (March 2021)

Learning through conflict (November 2017)

The skilled learner DOES (June 2015)

Gransci’s grammar and Dewey’s dialectic (December 2014)

Posted in Education, Teaching and learning | Tagged Carol Dweck, Die Unruhe des Lernens, Education, Frigga Haug, Gert Biesta, John Dewey, learning, Lev Vygotsky, Memories of Learning, New Left Review, Paulo Freire, reading, teaching, The Beautiful Risk of Education | 1 Comment

Debating Growth.

Posted on November 29, 2022 by Eddie Playfair

Conway Hall recently hosted a public debate about the proposition “The pursuit of growth is a disaster for our country and our planet” sponsored by the ‘How To Academy‘. Supporting it were Ida Kubiszewski, Associate Professor at UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity and Danny Dorling, Professor in the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford.

It was opposed by Robert Colvile, Director of the Centre for Policy Studies, and Sam Alvis, Head of Economy for the Green Alliance.

All our major political parties seem to agree that growth is a desirable objective, essential to achieving prosperity and the good life for all. The pursuit of growth is presented as an unarguable good; after all, the absence of growth is stagnation or contraction, and that sounds like bad news. Generally, the debate is about how to achieve more growth, or possibly about how green that growth should be.

And yet, growth has its detractors and the ‘anti-growth coalition’ is erm… growing. The Conway Hall audience on 21 November may not be representative of public opinion, but it was clearly persuaded that ‘the pursuit of growth is a disaster’ and voted overwhelmingly for the proposition.

So what were the key arguments in this debate?

Ida Kubiszewski went straight to the heart of the matter by questioning the usefulness of growth as an umbrella term. We need to ask: “growth of what, for what, for whom?”. She also explained why GDP is a very poor measure of progress because it includes all productive and consumer activity, even some highly destructive and anti-social ones such as war and crime. Danny Dorling showed that greater inequality and more luxury consumption can fuel growth and higher GDP without bringing any tangible improvements to people’s security, health, happiness or quality of life.

For Robert Colvile there was a demonstrable correlation over time between growth and virtually every indicator of a good life, and he felt that GDP was “the worst measure of progress apart from all the others”. He asked why we in the rich global North would deny people in the global South the benefits of high GDP – is this not a form of white privilege? Sam Alvis made the case for green growth, using market signals and market mechanisms to incentivise and scale up the new technologies and practices which are needed to decarbonise our economy. Addressing the climate emergency is a massive and urgent undertaking and he argued that this can only be addressed using the economic system we have. System change would be a distraction; simply too big and difficult a project and we can’t afford the time it would require.

But as Ida Kubiszewski made clear, ‘the economy’, whether growing or not, is not separate from ‘nature’, it is a subsystem of it and finite resources cannot be depleted without consequences. The ‘anti-growth’ proposition was not about denying anyone a good life but defining it more democratically for everyone and redirecting economic activity towards actually achieving it for everyone and aiming for a genuinely sustainable future for humans on planet Earth. This might mean more production and consumption of some things for some people, but in aggregate it will have to be sustainable at the planetary level.

All four speakers seemed to agree about the features of the kind of society they support: one which is able to meet everyone’s basic needs, provide good public services for all and help people to flourish. But ultimately, Robert Colvile’s uncritical account of the benefits of growth and Sam Alvis’s willingness to believe that the system which created our social and planetary crisis could also solve it, just didn’t stand up to scrutiny.

This was more than a debate about means. The system which has brought us to the brink of global catastrophe wasn’t actually named once all evening but what came across very clearly was the urgent need for system change. Capitalism requires continuous growth and exploitation, drives accumulation and growing inequalities and precipitates crises if it cannot grow. It is the cause of many of the problems we face, not the solution to them, and far from being a distraction, developing a new system based on new priorities is surely an essential prerequisite for human survival.

See also:

Code red for human survival (November 2022)

Nancy Fraser’s eco-socialist common sense (August 2022)

Climate Justice, Heath Justice and the politics of resilience (August 2022)

Education, social justice and survival in a time of crisis. (July 2022)

Owning our crises (March 2022)

Another fascinating debate ‘Degrowth v. Green Growth’ between Professor Jason Hickel and Professor Sam Fankhauser can be viewed here.

Posted in climate emergency, Politics | Tagged capitalism, Conway Hall, Danny Dorling, degrowth, eco-socialism, GDP, growth, Ida Kubiszewski, inequality, Robert Colvile, Sam Alvis, Sustainability, sustainable development | 3 Comments

Code red for human survival

Posted on November 8, 2022 by Eddie Playfair

The United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide us with a global agenda for human survival. From poverty to peace and justice they list the urgent challenges we face and set a broad direction of travel towards a fairer and more equitable world for human flourishing.

But, according to the 2022 Sustainable Development Goals Report, the aspirations of this agenda are in jeopardy, with progress on each goal either stalled or going into reverse. To recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and deliver equitable global sustainability, we need to rescue the SDGs. We are simply not delivering on our commitment to supporting the world’s most vulnerable people, communities and nations, reducing carbon emissions, conserving natural resources, investing in public services and better jobs or tackling growing inequalities and poverty.

This year’s 27^th Conference of the Parties (COP) is the opportunity to focus attention on one of the SDGs: 13. Climate Action. The climate emergency is humanity’s ‘code red’ warning, impacting across all the other SDGs and acting as a crisis multiplier with impacts across the globe. Increased heatwaves, droughts and floods are affecting billions of people worldwide, contributing further to poverty, hunger and instability. The COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine have further delayed the urgently needed transition to greener economies.

Rising global greenhouse gas emissions are leading to record-breaking temperatures and more extreme weather. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sixth Assessment Report calls for urgent climate action now and provides a stark warning, outlining what we can expect if global temperatures rise by 1.5 °C or higher. As the planet warms, scientists anticipate increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events and potentially irreversible changes in global ecosystems.

Projections show that sea levels could rise 30 to 60 centimetres by 2100 even if greenhouse gas emissions are sharply reduced and global warming is limited to well below 2 °C. Rising sea levels lead to more frequent and severe coastal flooding and erosion. Ocean warming would continue, with increasingly intense and frequent marine heatwaves, ocean acidification and reduced oxygen. Declining ecosystems and biodiversity loss threatens human health and our very survival, and increase opportunities for the emergence of new zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19, and possible future pandemics.

The droughts, floods and heatwaves brought on by climate change add to the pressure on food production in many regions of the world. Parts of Africa and Central and South America are already experiencing increased, sometimes acute, food insecurity and malnutrition due to floods and droughts. Other projected impacts include devitalized soils, increased pest infestations and disease as well as weakened ecosystem services such as pollination.

In 2020, the social and economic disruption of COVID-19 reduced energy demand around the world and global carbon dioxide emissions declined by around 5%. But by 2021, fossil fuel emissions had rebounded to a record high, cancelling out all of this pandemic-related decline.

But it gets worse. Based on current national commitments, global greenhouse gas emissions are set to increase by almost 14% this decade. According to the IPCC report, any further delay in concerted global action will lead to climate catastrophe and we will have missed the brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future.

Climate change is affecting everyone, but the most vulnerable are hardest hit. The IPCC report estimates that over 3 billion people live in contexts that are highly vulnerable to climate change. Poverty, limited access to basic services, conflict and weak governance limit people’sadaptability to climate change, resulting in humanitarian crises that could displace millions from their homes. By 2030, an estimated 700 million people will be at risk of displacement by drought alone.

Current national commitments are simply not sufficient to meet the 1.5 °C target. Under these, greenhouse gas emissions are projected to increase by almost 14 per cent over the next decade. Immediate and deep reductions in emissions are needed across all sectors to move from a tipping point headed to climate calamity to a turning point for a sustainable future.

But the resources allocated to climate action are a fraction of what is needed to avert the worst scenarios. Developed countries have jointly committed to mobilizing $100 billion dollars per year up to 2025, for climate action in developing countries. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), developed countries have fallen short of that promise. Even this $100 billion annual target is far below the IPCC estimate of the $1.6 trillion to $3.8 trillion needed annually until 2050 for the world to transition to a low-carbon future and avoid warming beyond 1.5°C.

We cannot afford to ignore this urgent ‘code red’ for humanity and we must judge our political and economic system by its ability to make progress across all the SDGs, starting with radical and determined action on Carbon emissions and climate justice at this week’s COP.

Education, social justice and survival in a time of crisis (July 2022)

Nancy Fraser’s eco-socialist common sense (August 2022)

Owning our crises (March 2022)

Posted in climate emergency, Politics | Tagged carbon emissions, climate change, climate emergency, climate justice, COP27, crisis, inequality, Survival, sustainable development, UN Sustainable Development Goals | Leave a comment

The politics of silence.

Posted on September 4, 2022 by Eddie Playfair

Simplex and Sapiens are discussing the opposition’s strategy.

Simplex: This government has lost all credibility and support and has no plan for dealing with the crisis.

Sapiens: Agreed. The times we’re living in require a complete change of policy and different priorities.

Simplex: And the absolute priority has to be getting rid of this government.

Sapiens: We have to recognise that ‘business as usual’ is failing us and that we need system change. We need a real alternative.

Simplex: But we need to listen to the voters and go with the flow of public opinion which is basically moderate. Elections are won from the centre, we can’t advocate too much change or challenge the system too much because it scares the people whose support we need.

Sapiens: But public opinion is well ahead of the opposition on many issues, and in any case parties exist to shape the narrative, not just to follow ‘public opinion’, which can be all over the place. Look at the consistent support for nationalization, for redistribution, for union action and for the ‘Enough is enough’ demands. Surely, now is exactly the time for a clear, costed, radical programme which breaks with the current failing system.

Simplex: We won’t get into power as a party of protest, we can’t be associated with strikes and mass action.That’s not how you win elections. We need a ‘grown up’ politics of government; radicalism is just a childish and immature lashing out.

Sapiens: But people are angry, and that anger has to find political expression. It needs to be channeled into political demands, or millions of people will feel unrepresented. Radicalism is a serious and rational response to the crisis we find ourselves in. There needs to be a real discussion now about the kind of emergency programme that’s needed.

Simplex: But this isn’t the right time to be too specific. We need to keep our powder dry. If we set out all our policies too soon, other parties might have time to steal them, adapt them or rubbish them.

Sapiens: But policies aren’t secret weapons! Ideas belong to everyone, they need to be out there, being discussed, in order to have a chance to establish themselves and grow support – that’s real politics. The longer your bold good ideas are out there, the more momentum you can build for them.

Simplex: Tactically, it’s much better to criticize the government without exposing yourselves to criticism. There’s a lot to be said for standing by while they reveal all their weaknesses and lose support: “don’t interrupt your opponents while they’re digging” as the saying goes.

Sapiens: You can’t assume that you will be the beneficiary of all anti-government sentiment. New protest movements might emerge and organize politically. Meanwhile, you’re not building support for an alternative programme. Isn’t this the politics of silence and passivity – a kind of anti-politics?

Simplex: Not at all, we’re busy creating a sense of competence and trustworthiness and building a government-in-waiting which is ready to take over.

Sapiens: Take over and do what, exactly?

Simplex: Listen, if we don’t get in, we won’t be able to do anything at all. Voting for us is the only way to get change, even if it’s not all you’d hope for. Our electoral system forces voters to be tactical and vote for the ‘least bad’ option – and that’s us.

Sapiens: But shouldn’t we also have the option to vote for the kind of programme that will actually make a difference?

Simplex: Do you want the current governing party to win? Anything other than voting for us basically lets the other lot in. Rocking the boat, or abandoning the boat, is just self-indulgent and plays into the hands of our enemies. When it comes to the crunch on polling day, there really is no alternative.

Sapiens: Even your party was once a minor force with little chance of winning – until it grew in support and was able to gain power. There has to be an alternative and real change must be possible.

See also:

Owning our crises (March 2022)

A political education (May 2022)

Sapiens and Simplex have also discussed:

Genetics: Stupid Gene (December 2021)

Selective schools: Your dogma, my principles (September 2016)

The future of the Labour Party: Labour Pains (July 2015)

Does exam success boost the economy? (December 2014)

‘One nation’ education (September 2014)

Posted in Politics | Tagged elections, Labour party, manifesto, opposition, policy, political parties, political programme, politics, pragmatism, principle | 1 Comment

Posts on Corsican themes.

Posted on August 10, 2022 by Eddie Playfair

Seneca in Corsica The Roman senator and philosopher spent several miserable years in exile on the island in the first century A.D.

Paoli in London ‘The 18^th century Che Guevara’ produced one of the first constitutions of the enlightenment era and fought for his country’s independence – achieved between 1755 and 1769.

Boswell in Corsica The Scottish lawyer and writer supported Pasquale Paoli’s campaign for Corsican independence and visited the island in 1765.

Edward Lear in Corsica Lear toured Corsica in 1868 and was an accomplished and well-travelled zoological, botanical and landscape artist as well as a comic poet.

Matisse in Corsica How a visit to Corsica in 1898 inspired Matisse to experiment with colour and invent Fauvism’.

When Corsica welcomed thousands of Serb refugees Five thousand Serb refugees were evacuated to the island in 1916 to escape conflict and persecution and supported by British volunteers, including the extraordinary suffragist and peace activist, Kathleen Courtney.

Conrad in Corsica Conrad visited Corsica in 1921 and modelled one of his characters on a Corsican seaman comrade.

Escher in Corsica The Dutch artist visited Corsica in 1928 and produced some beautiful prints of Calvi, Corte and Bonifacio.

John Minton in Corsica The brilliant English artist travelled to Corsica in 1947 to sketch for a travel book.

Sebald in Corsica W.G.Sebald’s ‘Campo Santo’ is a collection of short fragmentary pieces with Corsican settings intended for a never-completed book about the island.

Village wisdom: Corsican proverbs and sayings A compendium of laconic sayings summing up our relationship with money, beauty, love and the passage of time using the imagery of food and wine, saucepans, barrels, foxes and dogs amongst other things.

The Last Corsican Jacques Mondoloni’s apocalyptic story imagines the elimination of Corsica.

My Islands Line Mariani Playfair recollects her journey from Corsica to Britain and her relationship with her both islands.

Poem: Corsica takes the shape of the island with each line one word shorter or longer than the previous one.

Posted in Culture, History | Tagged Corsica | 2 Comments

When Corsica welcomed thousands of Serb refugees (1916)

Posted on August 9, 2022 by Eddie Playfair

Kathleen Courtney in Corsica.

**Serb refugees en route to Corsica (1916)**

In 1916, around 5,000 Serb refugees were evacuated to Corsica via Salonika, Corfu and the Adriatic coast to escape the conflict in the Balkans. On arrival they were settled in the major towns of Bastia and Ajaccio and further inland in villages such as Piana, Coti Chiavari, Ucciani and Bocognano. Medical, welfare and educational support was provided as well as work opportunities where possible. This major refugee support effort was organised by the Serbian Relief Fund and staffed by the Quaker-run Friends’ War Victims Relief Committee. One of the key co-ordinators of this work was the British suffragist and peace activist Kathleen Courtney who was widely recognised as an exceptional administrator.

The experience of the Serb refugees in Corsica is also the subject of the fascinating book ‘De La Corse aux Balkans’ (2019) by Jacques Casamarta, Guy Lannoy, Pascale Larenaudie, Tanja Milosavljevic, Hadrien Orsini and Zoran Radovanovic.

Kathleen Courtney (1878-1974)

“Women can make their own contribution to the work and ideals of constructive peace”

Kathleen Courtney was born in Gillingham into a wealthy Anglo-Irish military family. She attended the Anglo-French College in Kensington, the Manse boarding school in Malvern and Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford University where she studied French and German. She worked at the Lambeth Constitutional Girls’ Club and became active in the women’s suffrage movement, first as Secretary of the North of England Society for Women’s Suffrage in Manchester (1908), and then as Secretary of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) in London (1911).

In 1912, Herbert Asquith and his Liberal Party government were still refusing to support votes for women. The Labour Party passed a resolution committing itself to supporting women’s suffrage and Kathleen Courtney negotiated with the Labour Party on behalf of NUWSS, leading to their support for Labour candidates in parliamentary by-elections. The NUWSS established an Election Fighting Fund (EFF) to support these Labour candidates and Kathleen Courtney was on the committee which administered this fund.

In July 1914 the NUWSS argued that Asquith’s government should do everything possible to avoid a European war. Two days after the British government declared war on Germany on 4th August 1914, Millicent Fawcett declared that it was suspending all political activity until the conflict was over. Although the NUWSS supported the war effort, it did not follow the WSPU strategy of becoming involved in persuading young men to join the armed forces.

Despite pressure from members of the NUWSS, Millicent Fawcett refused to argue against the First World War. At a Council in February 1915, she argued that until the German armies had been driven out of France and Belgium: “I believe it is akin to treason to talk of peace.”

After a stormy executive meeting in Buxton all but one of the officers of the NUWSS and ten National Executive members, including Kathleen Courtney, resigned over the decision not to support the Women’s Peace Congress at the Hague.

Kathleen Courtney wrote about the rift with the NUWSS:

I feel strongly that the most important thing at the present moment is to work, if possible on international lines, for the right sort of peace settlement after the war. If I could have done this through the National Union, I need hardly say how infinitely I would have preferred it and for the sake of doing so I would gladly have sacrificed a good deal. But the Council made it quite clear that they did not wish the union to work in that way.

In an article in ‘Towards Permanent Peace’ (September 1915) Kathleen wrote:

The Women’s International Congress does not claim to have invented a new means for preventing war; it does not claim to have put forward a startling or original theory. It does claim to have been a gathering of women of many countries, which proved that, even in time of war, the solidarity of women will hold fast; it does claim to have shown that women of different countries can hold out the hand of friendship to each other in spite of the hatred and bloodshed under which most international ties seem submerged. It claims too, to have shown that, while women have a special point of view on the subject of war, and while its wastefulness of human life must appeal to them with particular emphasis, they can, at the same time make their own contribution to the work and ideals of constructive peace.

The Hague Congress, also attended by Jane Addams from Chicago, established the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace and Kathleen Courtney was elected chair of the British Section called the Women’s International League (WIL).

During the First World War, Kathleen Courtney worked with the Friends’ War Victims Relief Committee. Janet E. Grenier, her biographer, described this work: “She worked for the Serbian Relief Fund in Salonika, took charge of a temporary Serbian refugee colony in Bastia, Corsica, and was decorated by the Serbian government. Those who knew her during this period described her as full of life and fun and an exceptional administrator. She went on to work for the Friends’ committee in France, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Greece. She was in Vienna for three years where she was horrified by the post-war scenes of starvation, particularly among refugees.”

Courtney also continued her involvement in the campaign for women’s suffrage. She helped establish the Adult Suffrage Society in 1916 and as joint-secretary she lobbied members of the House of Commons for extension of the franchise until the Qualification of Women Act was passed in 1918. The following year she became vice-president of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship. As well as advocating the same voting rights as men, the organisation also campaigned for equal pay, fairer divorce laws and an end to the discrimination against women in the professions.

In the 1920s Kathleen became the President of the British Section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), a position that she held until 1933. In addition to her work for WILPF Kathleen was involved in many other peace, arbitration and disarmament campaigns. She was an organiser of the Women’s Pilgrimage for Peace in 1926, and in the international effort that culminated in the presentation of a petition signed by several millions to the 1932 Disarmament Conference. In 1930 Kathleen took part in the Women’s Round Table at the Fifth National Conference on the Cause and Cure of War in Washington.

When Abyssinia was invaded by Italy in October 1935, she mobilized British and European women’s organizations in the campaign to prevent civilian bombing. During the Second World War she worked for the Ministry of Information. In 1945 she attended the San Francisco conference that established the United Nations. Soon afterwards she became deputy chairman of the United Nations Association.

Kathleen was always a strong supporter of the League of Nations and its successor the United Nations, and her speeches in 1945 were influential in persuading Americans of the value of the United Nations. Kathleen became Vice-Chair of the League of Nations in 1939, and in 1949 Chair and Joint President of the United Nations Association. Work in connection with these organisations involved her in extensive travelling abroad and many speaking engagements.

Although Kathleen Courtney decided to retire from her formal position in the United Nations Association in 1951, she continued to be active with the organisation, and to work for peace throughout her remaining years.

Based on the blog by John Simkin on the brilliant Spartacus Educational site john@spartacus-educational.com and the chapter on Kathleen Courtney by Helen Kay and Pat Pleasance in the WILPF publication ‘These Dangerous Women’.

Sending volunteers to support Serb refugees in Corsica

This extract from the “Third Report of The War Victims’ Relief Committee of The Society of Friends, October, 1915 to September, 1916” provides background to the Serb relief operation in Corsica (full document available here).

“The possibility of such work (helping with the assistance of distressed Serbian refugees) was investigated by several representatives of the committee, who visited Salonica, Monastir and Ghevgeli, then threatened by the attacking armies. These inquiries made it clear that we could best work in close co-operation with the influential Serbian Relief Fund, with its headquarters at 5, Cromwell Road, London, S.W., rather than attempting to do so independently; and all that has since been done has followed these lines, with the happiest results.

We have contributed many of the workers who have assisted to distribute the relief and to administer the operations of Serbian aid; and the value of this to the larger body has been repeatedly and warmly acknowledged.

The stream of refugees from Serbia took two directions, that flowing south being mainly composed of civilians, who escaped the worst horrors of the retreat. Some of our workers thereupon helped to organise the refugee camp already started outside Salonica. This was a notable achievement in improvisation, and, with an average population of seven hundred, acted for two months as an important stage in the long emigration from Serbia to Corsica, the latter island having been thrown open by the French Government for the reception of the refugees. On each transport that left for Ajaccio two or three relief workers or nurses travelled to accompany the refugees, to give them confidence and to attend to their comfort on the journey. The camp was finally evacuated and all our workers left Salonica, with the exception of one who remained for some months to care for numbers of Greek refugees who had taken refuge in the city.

The other stream of refugees, composed of the remnants of the Serbian armies, and a number of civilians, mostly men and boys, who were anxious to throw themselves upon the goodwill of the Allies, wandered over primitive roads and inaccessible mountain passes to Scutari and the Adriatic coast. Two of our workers spent the months of December and January in this desolate and distracted country, and in spite of the utmost disorganisation, and in face of difficulties second to none that have faced our workers in any of our fields of work, succeeded in finding food and organising relief for some ten thousand civilian refugees. Their perseverance and ingenuity must have saved many hundreds of lives. The story of the conditions they had to face and of the work they performed is as striking as any to be found in the annals of relief work during the progress of the great war.

The refugees who survived the horrors of those black weeks were at length safely transported to Corfu, and subsequently to Marseille. En route for Corsica, refugee camps were organised in Corfu, where employment was provided for the men, and they were reclothed, housed, and fed.

From thence… other parties of refugees were taken to Algiers and to Corsica. In the latter case, in several instances, serious hardship from lack of food and adequate arrangements had to be faced by the refugees on shipboard; and had it not been for the presence with them of representatives of our work, intolerable suffering and literal starvation would have been their lot.”

Much also was done in Corsica amongst the successive shiploads which reached Ajaccio. The French Government undertook to pay a small quota per head for maintenance, but looked to the Serbian Relief Fund to distribute clothing, to organise medical assistance, and to suggest means of employment. Our workers gave special attention to those of better standing than the great mass of the refugees, and many of them were comfortably settled out in little colonies at such mountain health resorts as Bocognano, or in big villas round Ajaccio, where a genial family life is maintained.

No time was lost in starting work to occupy the time of the refugees and to add to their efficiency. A women’s workroom was commenced at Ajaccio for the making of clothes for the refugees. A loom also was set up for making Pirot carpets, which are now being regularly exported to England. At Ucciani, another of the settlements, a number of men and boys have been occupied in growing vegetables, which help to supply the needs of the various institutions. In these and other ways we have been able to lessen the hardships and privations of a painful migration, and at the same time to aim to help the refugees to fit themselves for the task of restoring their national life.”

The archive

The Imperial War Museum in London has records of Kathleen Courtney’s work for the Friends’ War Victims Relief Committee in the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe between 1915 and 1916 and from 1919 to 1927, her work for Serbian refugees in the Salonika transit camp (January 1916), the journey from Salonika to Corsica and her work at the Serbian refugee camp at Bastia in 1916, together with a small collection of contemporary photographs from the refugee camps in Greece and Corsica.

See also:

Posts on Corsican themes (August 2022)

London’s Francophone refugees (September 2016)

Instinct, heart and reason – Daniel Pennac on the refugee crisis (August 2016)

Four cousins went to war (December 2016)

Posted in History | Tagged Bastia, Corsica, De La Corse aux Balkans, Friends War Victims Relief Committee, Jane Addams, Kathleen Courtney, Millicent Fawcett, refugee, Serbia, Women's International League, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Womens suffrage | Leave a comment

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Eddie Playfair

Zola : a political reading.

Savoirs et valeurs : pratiquer et conjuguer

Dilemmas of Growth

A broader view of skills?

In praise of ‘low value’ subjects.

Frigga Haug and the mystery of learning

Debating Growth.

Code red for human survival

The politics of silence.

Posts on Corsican themes.

When Corsica welcomed thousands of Serb refugees (1916)

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