Numbers can get a little overwhelming. But when you are talking about human beings, it is essential to make some effort to imagine what ten thousand or one million or ten million people look like. I suspect decisions are sometimes made, rashly discounting their effects on large numbers of people, simply because the decision-maker was faced only with numbers on a bare page.
The innovative book One million human beings: One million bombs depicts one million people iconographically, ten thousand to a page. Random individuals are singled out to represent a broader story.
The book is focused on the tragedy of warfare and its proceeds are donated to the anti-landmine cause. In the bloody 75-year period from 1914 to 1989 it just boggles the mind how many human beings were killed violently at the hands of others. The number could be as high as 200 million. Nearly all of them were the result of ideological divisions. (Which is why my blood pressure starts rising whenever I hear people hanker for the “good old days” when people were more certain of their convictions.)
It is extremely sobering. It does not contain a lot of text. But the message, learned from this book, can be applied anywhere. Numbers are all too easy to spout. Here are some about today’s world:
2.1 billion people live on less than two dollars a day.
1 billion people live in slums.
884 million live without access to clean drinking water.
42 million pregnancies end in abortion annually.
I won’t say this book makes it easier to cope with the enormity of these challenges but it at least attempts to put a human face on the numbers.
Communitarianism differs from liberalism in that it affirms that the community as a whole has rights, not just the individuals in it.
This view has suffered a great deal of bad press over the last 20 years, pretty much ever since Ross Perot and various other ‘third way’ US politicians espoused it. Attack dogs -mostly from the conservative side of politics- strove hard to discredit it as a dressed-up form of leftism.
Unfortunately the same word is applied to two concepts. The first, as meant by Perot, is communitarianism as a political ideology. It is very similar to radical centrism, an approach that affirms the essential truth of both sides of a political disagreement and thus treats the dilemma as moot. For example, unfair dismissal laws. A political communitarian would affirm that yes, unfair dismissal laws impose a cost on business but yes, they are also an important protection for vulnerable workers. It’s a “both/and” approach.
To me it seems hard to avoid seeing situations where both perspectives are ‘right’. Throughout this blog I argue for the need to improve working conditions in developing countries both as a social concern and as a business imperative.
However for today I want to talk about the second meaning of communitarianism: a philosophical tradition.
I suspect the reason we hear so little about it is because pundits fail to make the distinction from political communitarianism which does not have a large following and is thus regarded as a fringe concern.
Philosophical communitarianism is important for anyone concerned about the rough edges of modern society. Its defenders are strongly critical of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971), an eloquent defense of liberalism of the kind espoused by former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with her famous one-liner that “there is no such thing as society”.
Communitarianism on the other hand regards social cohesion as important. Unbridled liberalism leads to large disparities between wealthy and poor. Communitarians argue that this should be avoided as it leads to division and disharmony in society, particularly when the problems become self-reinforcing, for example America’s problem with poorly-performing schools in its least-wealthy neighbourhoods. Communitarians’ approach is to say that people do have certain basic rights that go beyond the minimums of free speech, free association, etc. For the good of society, people should also be entitled to a reasonable education, to be paid a living wage, to have access to health care, etc.
Critics of communitarianism assert that, if they ever got their hands on the levers of power, communitarians would likely turn out to be paternalistic, telling people what they want without asking. It’s hard to comment on this since we’ve never seen it happen but I just thought I should mention it to be fair.
Anyone concerned with social issues would benefit from learning about communitarianism, it is a strong and cohesive approach to many of the problems that arise in a liberal capitalist society.
Read More:
Liberalism and the Limits of Justice by American Michael Sandel is a sustained critique of Rawls’ Theory of Justice mainly on the grounds that human beings cannot be separated from the culture that shaped them and thus never act as ’pure’ individuals. In other words, even Rawls is importing his beliefs about the benefits of individualism from elsewhere.
After Virtue by Scotsman Alasdair MacIntyre articulates the need for personal virtue in public life – acting out of concern for the community instead of just oneself – and that this should not be seen merely a hobby for interested do-gooders but as something expected of everybody.
Sources of the Self by Canadian Charles Taylor is an appeal to the modern producer-consumer that ‘you can be so much more’. He points out that our (limited) understanding of our self is a result of the prevailing culture and, even if we want to pretend otherwise, it contains assumptions about what is good in life. It wouldn’t hurt us to question these once in a while.
If you are more interested in the political form of communitarianism / radical centrism, a good introduction is Radical Middle: The Politics We Need Now by Mark Satin (also on Kindle).
Yue Yuen shoewear factory, where one of the interviewees worked
What a happy coincidence that Factory Girls should be my book review for Women’s Month!
It is an extraordinary book, as engaging as any novel or famous person’s biography.
How much do we really know about China’s Pearl River Delta, source of so many goods in our households? (including, for example, 75% of the world’s toys)
Author Leslie Chang from the Wall Street Journal had heard the stories of woe, which have been known for some time, about the less-than-desirable working conditions in the factories of the PRD. She explains in the endnotes:
[The Western press] had already published stories about the terrible conditions in the factories. They tended to portray migration as a desperate act without much of a payoff for people. I had a suspicion that there must be more to this, that perhaps things were not so black and white. For a teenager from a farming village, the whole experience of going out to the city might appear very different than it does to us as Americans. What’s it like to leave your village at the age of sixteen, to go to a city where you don’t know anyone, to work on an assembly line, to earn money for the first time, to date whoever you want? How does your relationship with your family change? How do your friendships change? How does your world view change?
She answers these and many more questions.
The book, and Chang as an author, have many strengths. One is persisting with the interviewees over a very long time (about three years), long enough to see them change and mature in a critical moment of their lives. Another is her ability to avoid moralising about how terrible the working conditions are. She mentions it in passing once or twice but, as the quote above suggests, she feels enough has already been said on that subject. While she is sometimes taken aback at the way her subjects act, she never opines that they should have acted differently. This empathy carries the book through. The result is a ground-level portrait of life in today’s Guangzhou, the aspirations and daily routines of its untold millions of migrant workers.
These people are, of course, not drones. They are actually quite plucky. It turns out that they buy self improvement books in large quantities – apparently bookstores in the region stock little else. They attend night classes to learn extra skills. They readily sign up for direct marketing schemes. They look for love – mostly online, where potential suitors can be reviewed at a rate of several dozen an hour. They couldn’t give two hoots about Communism or the central government in Beijing. And often, having tasted city life, they have no desire to move back to their rural origins.
Chang goes to lengths to explore all facets of life in the factories. She paints an impressive portrait of the chaotic ‘unplannedness’ of it all. With the PRD’s population nearing 80 million and a neck-breaking pace of change, people can purport to be whoever they want. You can readily find someone who will issue a fake identification card or a fake diploma. ‘Everyone’ lies about their past work experience, because no one ever checks. Moreover, technical training is somewhat pointless given the rate of technological change. As with individuals, so it is with companies that are little more than an office and a box of business cards, striving to make their break by landing a first contract.
One question on my mind was answered: Why don’t the workers of the PRD form unions? The answer: Generally they don’t intend to stay at their current place of employment much longer. They are constantly hopping from one to the next (or at least they were five years ago when this book was being researched), constantly looking for a slightly better job.
Well done to Ms Chang for turning a story of overwhelming numbers into something personal. As I neared the end of the book I found myself wishing a photo of the main interviewees had been included, but then I thought no, theirs could be anyone’s story. Not just anyone in the PRD, but anyone who has ever left home.
Yes OK this book has been out for a little while but, just in case you missed it, Alain de Botton‘s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is well worth the while. The book is a startling, almost poetic tribute to the commercial world, taking the time to appreciate work which is rarely celebrated.
In one chapter, he follows a trail of electrical transmission towers across the countryside, starting at a nuclear power-plant on England’s east coast and ending in central London. These towers provide electrical power relied on by millions of people who don’t give it a second thought. Yet every one of them were built by someone; someone who was just ‘doing their job’.
He follows a catch of tuna from where it is caught, in the ocean off the Maldives, all the way to the supermarket aisle and then to someone’s dinner table, noting all of the people involved along the way: fisherman, packers, truck drivers and shop assistants.
The book is part photo essay, part actual essays, with each story extensively illustrated. Happily all the photos are available for viewing or purchase online so, if you don’t have time to read the book, you can at least enjoy following the tuna from the shallow seas off the Maldives to a dinner plate in England. Go on, you won’t regret it:
I can’t recall the last time I read so serious a book that was so entertaining.
The first thing that must be said about Mark Thomas is that he is a comedian. His book “Belching out the Devil: Global Adventures with Coca-Cola” is a spin-off from a program he hosted for Britain’s Channel 4. As a result, it was never going to be a dry, pseudo-academic work and that is its strength. Official documents sanitise these issues, which have serious effects of people’s quality of living and in some cases amount to life or death.
Mark Thomas is a kind of Michael Palin on a mission. At least half of the book is a compelling travelogue of the eight nations he visits to interview people affected by the company’s operations, and it is as good a travel book as any. My personal favourite was his comparison of traffic in Delhi to
playing Grand Theft Auto with four million people connected to the same console.
Fortunately Mark doesn’t fall into the trap of poking fun merely at the people he encounters, to whom he is actually unfailingly respectful; there is plenty of riducule directed at rich world folk including himself and none so much as Coca Cola’s PR people.
However the book is not a random, meandering string of jokes, Mark remains quite determined to find the people he needs to, and find them he does, countering euphemistic business jargon with gritty real-life stories.
The book focuses on five issues:
1. Union-busting by Coca-Cola bottlers, a denial of the right to freedom of association;
2. Child labour in plantations that supply sugar mills;
3. Impact on local communities’ drinking water;
4. Strong-handed tactics used to maintain its 70% market share in Mexico; and
5. The company’s evasiveness about these as, impliedly, an issue in itself
The most relevant to Fair For All is the first. Mark visits people in Colombia and Turkey who’ve been affected firsthand by the local bottlers’ aggressive anti-unionism. In the case of Colombia, this means turning a blind eye to violence and intimidation by the local paramilitaries. Over the past two decades, a number of workers in Colombia who attempted to form a union in the bottling plant in Colombia have been murdered. Coca Cola’s response is to distance themselves, emphasising that national bottlers are a separate entity to the Atlanta-based company we all know (even though it owns a controlling stake in them) and to make vague reference to half-hearted investigations.
Mark Thomas’s concern is, firstly, that these things are happening, but even more that Coca-Cola’s PR releases and CSR reports, to the casual reader, imply that the company is making concerted efforts to redress these “concerns” when, on the ground in places such as Colombia and Costa Rica, they are doing nothing of the sort.
The most dramatic illustration of the gap between some of the officialspeak and the reality comes on the steps of the company’s Delaware AGM. Mark collars the global head of workplace relations and politely asks him about some of the ‘issues’ he has seen firsthand in his travels. The gap between the harsh reality we have experienced with Mark, and the carefully worded official company response is enormous.
Even more instructive is the additional gap between the Coke executive’s off-record comments and the company’s glossy CSR report which is being handed out just metres away, inside the AGM.
Mark puts it to Coke executive Ed Potter in person:
Colombia. Isidro Gil. I spoke to people who saw him killed – someone was shot and killed on Coca-Cola’s property.
Ed Potter explains away the company’s response (or lack of), saying:
Well we’ve never represented that the ILO was going to do an investigation.
Nonetheless Coca-Cola’s CSR statement “The Facts: Coca-Cola and Columbia”, asserts the company has a:
commitment to an independent impartial third-party investigation and evaluation
Mark Thomas has gone to a lot of trouble to prove his suspicion that he is being told that black is white. Good on him.
The book is available on Amazon, and also on Kindle and Audible.
I can’t recall the last time I read so serious a book that was so entertaining.
