Hungry for Socialism?

Hunger. By Raymond Tallis. Acumen, 2008.

Raymond Tallis, a physician turned philosopher, has delivered a thoughtful if slightly anarchic book in The Art Of Living series. In 164 pages he discusses several different concepts and manifestations of hunger. Starting with the nature and evolution of biological hunger in animals and humans, he goes on to trace how the pleasure of meeting nutritional needs has spawned for humans a multitude of other pleasures.

The author looks at how the hunger for food develops into what he calls hunger for others. There comes, for at least some people, the hunger for meaning and significance. Tallis’s final chapter “asks how we might manage our individual and collective hungers better so that we shall be less possessed by them and more concerned with the suffering of those to whom even subsistence is denied”.

The author makes several references to Marx, mainly on the fetishism of commodities and humans producing their own means of subsistence, but he nowhere expresses a hunger for revolutionary change. He does, however, take issue with another philosopher, John Gray, for whom planet earth has been doomed by the arrogance of human beings (“Homo rapiens”). Tallis points out that when humans regard their species as no more than animals they are inclined to treat one another even worse than hitherto.

As the author notes, the world we live in demands that we consume many things beyond our bodily needs. It is “a world where many have little or nothing to eat while many more are eating far too much and are in hot pursuit of a multitude of secondary and elective hungers”. Tallis doesn’t talk about a socialist future but he does say a few words about utopia: “The central presupposition of utopian [is] that our hungers will somehow serve our fellow men and not set one against another, that there are fundamental desires that will drive us to work for the common good.”

We drink to that!

SRP

Manchester Tour of Marx’ and Engels’ Manchester Saturday 11 October Meet by the ticket office at Victoria Station at 2pm London Film nights at 52 Clapham High Street, 4pm Sunday 12 October Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on trial Sunday 26 October The Corporation (Nearest tube: Clapham North) Autumn Delegate Meeting Saturday 18 October 10.30 to 5.30 Sunday 19 October 11.00 to 5.00 Socialist Party Head Office, 52 Clapham High St, London SW4 (nearest tube: Clapham North). Manchester Monday 27 October, 8.30pm Discussion on The Priorities of Socialist Society Unicorn, Church Street, City centre For details of meeting to launch the new Socialist Party pamphlet on the environment on Saturday 25 October see page 5.