Books that changed my life

There are many lists produced by people of the ten best films, hundred best songs, twenty best books etc. and these lists can be very engaging and interesting. However, even the compilers of these lists would generally admit that on a different day they would compile a different list.

My list is a little different. It is a short list of books I have read that have changed my world view and helped to shape the person I am and my hopes for the world and its future. None of these books is my current ‘flavour of the month’; indeed I first read all of them at least ten years ago.

The first life-changing book I ever read was the authorised version of The Bible (not cover to cover but in an ordered fashion at Bible classes). What I took from The Bible was not the distorted message that is the watchword of many so called fundamentalists, but the humanity and sheer goodness that comes from the Sermon on the Mount, the concept of the glory of sacrifice, and the central tenet of The New Testament, to love thy neighbour, when all men are my neighbours. As a teenager the profound effect of The New Testament caused me to ‘get religion’ and I became a Methodist Lay Preacher for a short while. However, as time went on my scepticism grew as I observed so many pious and religious people who clearly defined their neighbours in a much more circumscribed manner. This led me to increasing secularism, but the concept of worldwide brotherly love never left me.

The second of these life-changing books I read was Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Robert Tressell was actually Robert Noonan, an Irish housepainter, who arrived in Hastings via South Africa, and wrote a thinly veiled story of the lives of himself, his workmates and their families in the fictional town of Mugsborough. The book revolves around the central character of Frank Owen, a housepainter who believes the capitalist system is the cause of all the poverty and degradation of himself and his workmates. The book is a brilliant analysis of the hypocrisy of religion and the contradictions of capitalism, written in a style that is easy to understand and exceptionally moving. It advocates a socialist society in which work is performed to satisfy the needs of all rather than to generate profit for a few. Although he completed the manuscript in 1910, the book wasn’t published until 1914, by which time Noonan had died. It is a truly remarkable book, written by a non-professional writer that remains in print to this day. It has been said by senior Labour politicians of the 1970s as diverse as Denis Healy and Tony Benn, that The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, available to servicemen in abridged form, was the book that won the 1945 General Election, and thus brought into being the greatest government that the United Kingdom has ever known.

It is difficult to put a measure on the influence and power of this book. In the end it shows not only hope but anticipation of the better days to come:

The gloomy shadows enshrouding the streets, concealing for the time their grey and mournful air of poverty and hidden suffering, and the black masses of cloud gathering so menacingly in the tempestuous sky, seemed typical of the Nemesis which was overtaking the Capitalist System. That atrocious system which, having attained to the fullest measure of detestable injustice and cruelty, was now fast crumbling into ruin, inevitably doomed to be overwhelmed because it was all so wicked and abominable, inevitably doomed to sink under the blight and curse of senseless and unprofitable selfishness out of existence for ever, its memory universally execrated and abhorred.

But from these ruins was surely growing the glorious fabric of the Co-operative Commonwealth. Mankind, awaking from the long night of bondage and mourning and arising from the dust wherein they had lain prone so long, were at last looking upward to the light that was riving asunder and dissolving the dark clouds which had so long concealed from them the face of heaven. The light that will shine upon the world wide Fatherland and illumine the gilded domes and glittering pinnacles of the beautiful cities of the future, where men shall dwell together in true brotherhood and goodwill and joy. The Golden Light that will be diffused throughout all the happy world from the rays of the risen sun of Socialism. (Tressell, R. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists)

Anyone who cannot be moved by such hope and a burning desire to awaken from our “long night of bondage”, must be a very odd person indeed.

At this point in my life, my early twenties I was active in Labour Politics and had a clear view that the Co-operative Commonwealth was the world I wanted to live in. I knew I was a socialist and that capitalism was an abominable evil, but I lacked any robust skills of analysing and fully understanding capitalism. In my mid thirties I was lucky enough to get a place at university and at this point two more books came into my life. These were Karl Marx’s The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, and The German Ideology, also by Marx. These early Marxian works; one a collection of assorted notes, the other a philosophical treatise, made several things clear to me. Firstly, and most importantly, everything in our capitalist world is essentially upside down. Most importantly they make clear that God didn’t create Man; Man created God, and that capital is stored up labour and that any profit made by the capitalist beyond what is paid in wages is the theft of that stored up labour from the worker. Suddenly, things are beginning to become clear to me, and I am beginning to understand why there are different classes, and why I am destined to be forever poor: I am routinely being robbed and simultaneously being lied to.

University also opened my eyes to the fact that not only was I oppressed and exploited, but as a white European man I was also an exploiter. Yet more books changed my view of the world. The first of these was Robert Miles’ Racism, which laid bare the oppressive nature of Eurocentricism and the routine positing of the Black or the Jew as the other. This was particularly challenging to me as someone proud of his home town to realise that it was the first place of the first recorded instance of racial cleansing. I am from York and on the night of 16th March 1190, the feast of Shabbat ha-Gadol, the small Jewish community of 150 in York took refuge in Clifford’s Tower, to take refuge from the rampaging mob outside. Rather than face the mob, many took their own lives, others died in the flames they themselves had lit for warmth and light, and the rest eventually surrendered to the mob. All of those who surrendered were massacred. Miles takes issue with those who take sophistry too far in trying to determine how one should analyse racism, stating that it is tantamount to “fiddling whilst the gas ovens burn”.

This recognition that as a White European I was an oppressor was quickly followed by another book that showed me that as a man I was also an oppressor. Close to Home by Christine Delphy is an analysis of the patriarchal relations within the household, demonstrating that the household is an arena for the organisation of labour, in which the means of production are owned by the man and the labour of the woman is expropriated.

At this point I am in my mid-thirties and have begun to get a clear grasp of the trajectories of inequality in this world, but still have problems wondering why others can’t see it. At this point I encounter a number of books that one would best describe as social psychology. Many speak volumes in explaining why people are as they are. Erving Goffman (Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Asylums etc.) even explains why people appear different to different audiences. However the social psychological writings that impact on me most are the Collected Works of Sigmund Freud. I still believe that much of Freud’s theorising is based on paper-thin evidence and amounts to little, but he does make a very powerful argument for the internalisation of cultural norms. He shows us that our psyche is an internalisation of our world; thus middle-class families beget middle –class children both in terms of status and in terms of outlook. So I now know why so many apparently intelligent people cannot see what is so plain and obvious.

At this point I have more knowledge but I still have no idea how the Co-operative Commonwealth can be brought into being. Although Marx tells me it will, he does not say how. Everything then falls into disarray. I read Michel Foucault. In The History of Sexuality Volume 1 and in Discipline and Punish, Foucault not only shows the relationship between power and knowledge, but also theorises power in what seems for me a completely novel way. For Foucault, power is not a ‘given’, unchanging entity to be won or lost, but a constant ebb and flow of knowledge and social interactions. He also shows how power can be exercised in absentia through his brilliant analysis of panopticism. Reading Foucault is one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life. I suddenly really see the world as it is. This, however, would not have been the case without the books that had gone before. I now am more convinced than ever that the Co-operative Commonwealth will come to pass, that the world will become a greener and more loving place, but it won’t come through a great revolution as in the meta-narratives of Marxism, but through constant vigilance and innumerable small victories, as we, slowly but surely, change the world. At last I know. We can make a difference.

So there you have it; a short, and rather poorly written, essay on the books that have changed my life.