Mad Monx (2023)

From the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard 

In 1327 a Benedictine monastery in northern Italy suffered a calamitous fire which destroyed a magnificent collection of irreplaceable books and manuscripts. It was determined that the cause was arson. The perpetrator was an aged fanatical monk who sought to keep certain knowledge hidden away. Oh, that was fiction, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.

Marx was one of those whose books were destroyed by the Nazis, also keen to keep knowledge hidden. Burnt too were the works of Heinrich Heine. Heine’s 1821 play, Almansor, contains the line: ‘Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too’.

Science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury was also queasy at the repression being practised by the Soviet Union. Russians resorted to manual copying of literature (samizdat) and passing it from hand to hand.

In 1953, Bradbury’s dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451, appeared. Fahrenheit 451 refers to the temperature at which books burn. Set in a future America, it was the job of firemen not to extinguish conflagrations but to initiate them for the purpose of book burning.

‘Sticks and stones might break my bones but words cannot hurt me’ goes the old anti-bullying children’s rhyme, but publishing words can certainly lead to the violence it rails against.

Recent burnings of the Koran in Denmark and Sweden, which have freedom of speech enshrined in their constitutions, have led both countries to contemplate introducing laws to stop such actions. This is not the first time that such events have occurred and the consequences have, in some cases, resulted in extremely violent protests. Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson warned that a spate of Koran burnings in the country has triggered ‘the most serious security situation since the Second World War’. One cannot believe he is referencing the Religion of Peace (sic).

Violent protests followed the publication in 1988 of Salman Rushdie’s novel Satanic Verses. Ayatollah Khomeini, then leader of Iran, called for the death of Rushdie. In August 2022 a stabbing attempt was made resulting in Rushdie losing the sight of one eye and the use of a hand.

A Pew Research Center analysis found that 79 countries and territories out of the 198 studied around the world (40 percent) had laws or policies in 2019 banning blasphemy, defined as speech or actions considered to be contemptuous of a god or of people or objects considered sacred. Twenty-two countries (11 percent) had laws against apostasy (abandoning one’s religion).

In March 2023 the Spectator wrote:

‘No religion ought to be given the power to constrain political discourse or behaviour in order to protect its adherents from being scandalised, and no government should help it by silencing its critics. If a Wakefield resident was to burn the Quran publicly in protest at the pretensions of the fundamentalists (something, incidentally, that can now cause you to be arrested on serious public order charges by police increasingly desperate not to appear anti-Islamic, as happened some years ago), we should fight to protect his right to free speech in the same way as we would if he had been a secularist or left-winger who had burnt a Bible or an American flag’ (tinyurl.com/bdebukkd).

Theory at odds with reality?

Earlier in 2023 an American Tennessee pastor live-streamed a book-burning event urging his flock to throw their Harry Potter and Twilight copies into a bonfire. Because why? Because, he said, ‘IT’S WITCHCRAFT 100 PERCENT! All your Twilight books and movies. That mess is full of spells, demonism, shape-shifting and occultism. Stop allowing demonic influences into your home’. Does he know it’s 2023 not 1933? Or perhaps he thinks it’s 1633.

Whatever the literary merits, or otherwise, of J K Rowling’s works – Harry Potter has sold over 500 million copies since 1997– in an example that modern heresy will still get you burned at the stake, metaphorically, Rowling’s defence of biological women has seen her banned from events celebrating her own books and films. The three main actors whose careers were kickstarted in the Potter film series have been vocal in condemning her.

Not much support for Voltaire’s ‘I don’t agree with what you say but I will defend with my life your right to say it’ there. Nothing is free under capitalism but free speech increasingly comes at a price.

‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past’. In George Orwell’s 1984 the protagonist Winston Smith is employed in the Ministry of Truth’s Records Department. Here he altered historical newspapers and photographs to concur with whatever the Party line was at the time. The removal of ‘unpersons’ was often carried out in this manner in the Soviet Union.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union statues of Lenin were systematically removed from the state the Soviets had previously controlled. Understandable if you’ve been subject to repression for many years but the removal of literary figures seems churlish.

As part of its de-Russification, Ukraine has been removing monuments to Alexander Pushkin the Russian poet, playwright, and novelist, thought to be the greatest Russian poet and founder of modern Russian literature.

A few years back Iran was, allegedly, (the report comes from the American-supported Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) considering removing Persian astronomer, mathematician and poet Omar Khayyam from its education curriculum. Changes were because ‘Officials believe that in order to attract the younger generation they must increase the intensity of their religious and ideological propaganda in schools. They think that a large proportion of young people are turning away from religion and government ideology because of the weakness of propaganda in the education system and the mass media’. Shades of Goebbels?

When William Caxton introduced the printing press into England in 1476 he would have been unaware of the law of unintended consequences. Pity that so many are now experiencing them.

Dave Coggan

The Not So Different World of Harry Potter (2011)

From the August 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

The last Harry Potter film based on the books by JK Rowling was premiered last month.

In many ways the world described in the Harry Potter books is vastly different from ours. A world of magic, wizards and witches, flying household objects, time travel. Yet despite all this we also find many similarities, especially in regards to their economic system. They, like us, have a money/wages based society.

 

It is not clear why wizards/witches would need a monetary economy given the fact that there is no scarcity, as they possess the powers to create almost anything with the wave of a wand. One could reply to this point with a question of one’s own of course: given the fact that we Muggles have the technology to produce what we need and more ourselves, why do we continue to rely on a system of (mostly artificial) scarcity?

 

One of the main differences is that while all witches and wizards own their own wands (and therefore in a sense their own means of production), in Muggle society the means of production are owned by a minority of the population, leaving the majority forced to sell their labour-power, in exchange for a wage or a salary, to this minority. It follows then that in order to utilise the non-magical technology available to us we first have to reclaim it from the minority who possess it. 

 

Given the fact that wizards and witches have the ability to sustain themselves already available to them, why do they, like so many characters in the books continue to work for a wage or a salary? If it’s simply out of a love for the job or because of a recognition that the work they do is needed for their own and the common good, then why not get rid of the financial incentive all together and allow them to work on a voluntary basis? Yet we don’t see this, all we see is numerous examples of witches and wizards forced to go without the things they need. 

 

An example would be the Weasley family. On numerous occasions in the books we find this family unable to afford the most basic of items. There is, for example, the moment on the Hogwarts express when Ron Weasley is unable to buy food (beginning of the first book I believe) and is forced into the degrading rigmarole of Harry insisting upon buying it for him. 

 

What about the time he is unable to buy a replacement wand and therefore loses a duel to the financially superior Lucian Malfoy? Indeed an impartial observer using only the Weasleys as a case study could assume that poverty and lack of basic necessities was a problem affecting all in the wizarding world. However, further examination shows this not to be the case. As mentioned previously, we have the Malfoys; a very rich family who have more than they could ever want or need.

 

Incidentally why do the Weasleys seem constantly ashamed of their poverty? Their father (Arthur Weasley) is a highly industrious man and their mother (Mollie) has singlehandedly raised seven children, surely if there is to be any shame in their situation it is to be shouldered by wizarding society as a whole?

 

It is not made clear in exactly how the Malfoys are so incredibly wealthy. The vast majority of people in Muggle society who can boast such wealth have only achieved it through extracting the surplus value from the labour of those they employ, did the Malfoys exploit their wealth through similar means, or are they simply a relic of feudalism like today’s aristocracy? 

 

It is true that in one of the books Hermione started a campaign to free house elves from chattel slavery, but there doesn’t seem to have been a movement to abolish wage-slavery.

 

There is also the issue of religion. It cannot go unnoticed that in the magical world of Harry Potter they celebrate Christmas. Yet given the fact that so many witches and wizards were tortured and killed in the name of Christianity (those that couldn’t employ the fire-resisting charm at least) why would they want to celebrate the birth of its founder? One can only assume that our fellow Muggles who go about expounding the supposed word of Christ have made a serious mistake; in actual fact Jesus Christ was not the Son of God but a highly advanced wizard, capable of charms that allowed him to walk on water, cure lepers, and revitalise the dead! “No spell can bring back the dead Harry, I trust you know that,” says Dumbledore in The Goblet of Fire; “Unless you’re Jesus!” should have been Harry’s reply.

Johnny Mercer

Harry Potter and the Unchanging Church (2009)

From the September 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Amongst the crazier news items to captivate the hacks of what used to be Fleet Street surely the one about the Pope and Harry Potter must takes a bit of beating. In a world of widespread poverty and hunger, global pollution and the threat of a nuclear conflict, The Times saw the necessity of devoting a spread to this non-event.

"Once condemned by the Pope for undermining the soul of Christianity, Harry Potter has been forgiven. In 2003, two years before he was elected Pope Benedict XV1, Joseph Ratzinger, then a Cardinal and head of Vatican doctrine, said J.K. Rowling's stories of the boy wizard threatened to corrupt an understanding of Christian faith among the impressionable young. ... Now however the Pope seems to have fallen under the Potter spell. The latest in the film series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, is on general release in Britain today, and has won surprising praise from the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano" (London Times, 15 July).

The basis of the Times's surprise seems to be the changing of the unchanging church, but the history of the Roman Catholic religion is one of change to accord with the changes in the non-spititual world. Indeed the church's backflips have been many and the Times article even listed a few of them.

Until the Second Vatican Council, in 1962-65, Catholic Mass was celebrated only in Latin. In 2003 the Church withdrew a threat to excommunicate the parents of a Nicaraguan girl aged 9 who had an abortion after being raped. 26,000 signed a petition against the move. In 2007 they abolished Limbo, a sort of halfway point between Heaven and Hell. All these recent changes are in addition to Pope John Paul II in 1992 finally admitting that the Church was in error 359 years before when they condemned Galileo for claiming that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

In order to survive the Roman Catholic Church has had to change in line with how secular society changes. There are some unchanging tenets of their practice however – their unfaltering support of private property and their collecting dishes at church services. The Lord may provide for the gullible faithful but the clergy rely on something more tangible for their income.

Richard Donnelly