Kids' Books : Bedrock of Capitalism?

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For severai centuries the capitalist system has dominated economic life in Britain.

As a result of this the ideology produced by that economy has dominated cultural life so that the ideas and ways of thinking which came "naturally" to people of all classes have been bourgeois.

Thus the newspapers, novels, films encyclopaedias and even the dictionaries produced have expressed the needs and concerns of bourgeois society.

Reformists find the more noted symptoms of this ideology offensive and see it as their duty to seek out alternative cultural material which is less obviously bourgeois.

ANTI-SOCIAL

In recept years many radicals have turned their attention to the "bias" of children's literature.

One of these, Bob Dixon, has written a two volume book "Catching Them Young" in which he examines and catalogues a mass of children's fiction to discover that:

Much of the material in children's books is anti-social if not anti-human and is more likely to stunt and warp young people than to help them grow"

Like a chemist looking for acid he dips moral litmus into these books to decide what ideals or "messages" about race, sex, class and politics are hidden between their covers.

His researches reveal that the authors overwhelmingly assume that blacks, women and workers are inferior to whites, men and capitalists and should be kept in their place.

Sometimes these assumptions are obvious as when a black hero must use magic to make his face white and they are even too s an intrepi them out whether "Pilgrim's Parade"

get the girl; sometimes more subtle-sometimes ubtle for Dixon-but like d bloodhound he noses Progress" Or "Pony PROPAGANDA Dixons fundamental critical assumption is that all children's literature (and presumably therefore all literature) is simply propaganda which writers use to impart their more or less objectionable views on unsuspecting children and thereby "catch them young"

His judgement therefore as to a book being "good" or "bad" reading depends entirely on whether the authors' political and social ideas are, like his own, liberal.

He is thus not a critic but a very crude political censor and it is on this basis that he hopes to show others "what to look for"

But like all liberals Dixon is unable to grasp that capitalism and all its products are contradictory. This leaves him unable to understand literature.

He cannot face the fact that a work of art can be both artistically powerful and politically reactionary.

"ACCEPTABLE"

If he finds that a book contains "large and important elements which are ethically unacceptable" he concludes that it must be a bad book (though the badness may be concealed by a "skillful style".)

But if Dixon felt compelled to accept a work as good literature he convinces himself that its politics must be "acceptable"

SWAPO guerrillas.

Marxists, on the other hand recognise as Lenin did when writing about Tolstoy that a book may derive its artistic force precisely political preacons or sal and positions History has often placed reactionary bourgeois writers in a better position than "radicals" from which to sense and express the powerful tensions and conflicts of that society.

Critics like Dixon only observe how writers resolve conflicts (which side wins) not how they express them.

Dixon knows nothing about why bourgeois ideas dominate children's literature. In fact he seems to believe that these books cause those idcas to dominate society!

He reduces the whole to one of black collaborators.

The title of the film may be misleading. Not a gun is to be seen. It is far removed from the cliched romanticised picture of guerilla warfare.

It is about the arming of the Namibian masses, against the propaganda and control of the South African Government which aims to isolate the guerillas from the people.

LINK

The film attempts to link up the day-to-day problems faced by Namibians and their political mobilisation by SWAPO In line with SWAPO's policy of uniting all anti-imperialist progressive forces, we hear from workers, farmers, teachers, women, students and political activists.

The awareness of the necessity to fight is not limited to a few young activists, but is here articulated by young and old, by women and men, students workers, which make this powerful statement against colonial exploitation.

But real unity between the most simple brainwashing of children.

Dixon's "cure" is to push for fiction in which those people who suffer oppression in the real world are free (or become free) from it in novels.

He sees not the material world creating books but books creating the world.

Thus, in his section on "sexism" he gives a glowing write-up to a book in which the characters overcome the problem of the sexual division of labour through what he calls "a major role reversal"

In "Hello Aurora" a child's mother practices as a lawyer while her father prepares his doctorate at home and looks after Socrates(!) the baby. Dixon is thrilled because in the book:

"there's a lot about the assumptions other people make and the opposition they set up against what their stride and their good sense encompasses everyone eventually" (p. 37 Vol 1)

That victory is gained by the writer removing any material oppression (by giving them convenient professional jobs) and leaving only "sexist assumptions" to be overcome by a "good sense" which "encompasses everyone"

A delightful prospect. Working class girls reading this work must therefore conclude that, to avoid a future of domestic slavery they need only have the good sense to become lawyers and marry academics.

They face a situation where they must either be isolated in the meaningless round of housework or, if they can get jobs, face being ground down by a double workload.

To suggest that the solution is for them to change jobs with their husbands is to propose that another human being accepts the same isolation and oppression.

The "role reversal" is always seen as progressive by teminists and by those "socialists" like Dixon who try to please them.

It is a reformist solution, an attempt to rearrange relationships within capitalism so that some individuals can escape oppression while: leaving capitalism unharmed and the mass of men and women oppressed.

But Dixon longs for the heroes of children's literature to be not middle-class white boys who do what they're told but working-class black girls who don't.

Bourgeois novels (including those written for children are a product of capitalism and its ideology.

They trace the level of individual characters struggling to solve their problems as individuals.

Dixon wants to rearrange matters so that these fictional individuals are workers. When a worker gets by in a novel, when he holds his head up in front of the boss Dixon will hail a socialist novel and deem it admirable for children.

In doing so he will merely offer them the dregs of bourgeois culture as he offers his readers the dregs of bourgeois theory: both his political and his literary theory are retormist. At £3.60 for Dixon's two volumes these dregs work out quite expensive.