I became excited when I saw that the second issue of Principia Dialectica included a piece on public libraries. The LRB Bookshop kindly and promptly posted me a copy. I'm afraid to say I was disappointed.
The piece, Blockbuster Libraries, is a review of Ruth Rikowski's Globalisation, Information and Libraries: The Implications of the World Trade Organisation's GATS and TRIPS Agreements with some reflections by the author, David Black, on Wood Green public library, part of the London Borough of Haringey, where I worked as a Senior Librarian from 1986-1990.
Black is correct to draw attention to the decline of the public library, and especially of its book stock, though he seems to come close to the Coatesian error of thinking that libraries should only contain one medium, the book, and should ignore other media. He describes the privatisation of Haringey's libraries, handed over to a company called Instant Library from 2001 till 2004 as a Public Private Partnership. Instant Library were, as an illustration of capitalism's tendency to monopoly, taken over by a company called Tribal Technology, whose website says proudly that among other things, they have been "upskilling [sic] McDonald's frontline employees". (Interest declared: I registered with them at the start of this bout of unemployment and I think I'm correct in saying that they have not sent me a single job in seven months).
Black incorrectly considers the introduction of charges for services other than book loans to be a new phenomenon. I am sorry to say that this commodification, as they describe it, of the public library has existed when I worked in them in the 1970s and 1980s. I could never see the justification for the reservation charge, for example. No one library will hold all the materials a user will need, so why charge for obtaining material from elsewhere, unless to penalise the more serious and purposive reader?
Black, or Rikowski, or both seem to draw an entirely unreal distinction between manual and intellectual labour, and claim that there has been a shift from the exploitation of one to the exploitation of the other. This is nonsense. There is no job, no matter how menial, which does not require intellectual effort, neither is there such a thing as entirely intellectual labour. And the long history of patents, developed side-by-side with capitalism itself, suggests that intellectual products were commodified a long time ago.
The rest of the journal is Trotskyite-cum-Situationist in tone, an approach that may have appealed to the modish some years ago but which has rather run its course.
Black, David
Blockbuster libraries
Principia Dialectica No 2, Autumn/Winter 2006 (they have no ISSN as far as I can see, naughty, but maybe Situationists despise such things)
Rikowski, Ruth
Globalisation, Information and Libraries: the implications of the World Trade Organisation’s GATS and TRIPS Agreements
Chandos, 2005 1843340844
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