Birnham Wood (1)

I recently read the novel called Birnham Wood, which is set in New Zealand, by Eleanor Catton. I really enjoyed the story, although the ending was a bit too dark for me. I liked the way that she interspersed the novel with the philosophical and political reflections of her characters.

Here are a couple of examples from one called Tony.

You're still inside the paradigm. You're still treating people as consumers, you're just saying that they should consume more responsibly and consume less. But as long as you keep talking in the language of the market, you're never going to address the root cause of the problem, which is the market itself— and how we've all become so individualistic and consumeristic that we can't even conceive of anything anymore except in market terms. If we want to mount y kind of serious challenge to neoliberalism at all, we have to go way deeper than just changing our spending habits. We have to change the way we actually think.

Think about the fact that nobody's willing to use the language of morality anymore. We can talk about power—all we talk about is power, who's got it and who wants it—and we can talk about privilege, which is basically the same thing, entrenched power, but to use words like good and evil, or not even evil, just good and bad, when it comes to people's behaviour, or their lifestyle choices, or their forms of self-expression—their freedom—that's, like, totally taboo. Especially on the left. Where do you think we got that from? It's the market. The idea that human choices can ever be without morality, without a moral dimension—that's pure capitalism, seeing the market as a value-neutral space, where morality doesn't exist and people are free to compete on equal terms and there are, like, natural laws of supply and demand or whatever—and, of course, it's all bullshit, markets are created, they're always created, they're always policed and regulated and interfered with by the state. But we totally repeat that same logic. Don't you see? We treat power both as an absolute, as a natural law, and as something that's completely relativised in terms of moral value—so basically, exactly the same as how we think about so-called market forces. There's no difference. And the sad thing is that we can't even see we're doing it. We think we're above this shit. We're inside it. p.100

The term “free market" is totally a propaganda term, and yet we all use it, even on the left. It's insane. We should be asking ourselves, why are we using their words and their logic? Why are we doing their job for them? p. 101.