Jonathan Jo Morton

This is a paper that I've been faffing around with for about 40 years. A Materialist Analysis of Ugliness in the Modern World    Taking the Tower Block as an Exemplar   The full paper can be found here . Here is the abstract The proposition being investigated here is that those things in the world that cause us distress, have that Affect in relation to some idea - an ideal - about how we would things should be.  All buildings generate information about the processes and practices through which they were produced and of certain characteristics of the society for which they were produced.  If some or other built form disturbs us, it is because it betrays aspects of the context of its production that jar with our ideals.  This runs counter to the common sense interpretation in which ugliness is found in the physical  characteristics of the object itself, and is produced through the ignorance and perversity of its perpetrators In past eras attempts...

Surfing the net I was reminded of Michael Kidron’s, The Permanent Arms Economy (1968) We all deplore the UK (and others) exporting arms to Saudi Arabia (and elsewhere) when we know damn well that they are going to use them to terrorize the civilian population, and we hope that public indignation might make the government more careful about what it sells to whom. But such sales are not just an error of judgement by government, they are systematically imposed by the way in which capitalism works.  It all starts from the observation that the working population can never realize the full value of the outputs that they themselves generate in the workplace (Rosa Luxemburg amongst others).  This is because the value of the outputs is made up of the wages paid to the workers plus the surplus appropriated by the enterprise; so the wages of the workers can only realize the value of a part of the outputs.  There are a number of ways in which the shortfall can be made good; by sellin...

My grand-daughter is hopelessly doing tele-interviews with robots in the vanishingly small chance that she might get a job Which set me thinking.  With all this unemployment, furloughs, shut downs and restrictions, there is very little that we actually need that we can’t get. The people who are in the supply chains through which we get what we need are employed; everyone else is unemployed, ergo, mostly we can perfectly well do without what they would be employed to carry out. What they do - their outputs - are not necessary to our survival, it is that their wages are necessary - necessary to generate the purchasing power to buy for all the things that we don’t actually need, that in turn provides employment and wages to those producing even more stuff we don’t actually need. And of course generating the profit that float the enterprise for who they work, and provide the government with the taxes they need to run the country. In short we have the most part of the population spendin...