Alternative Business

Outlaws, Crime and Culture

Martin Parker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136617454
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

From Robin Hood to Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean, outlaws have been a central part of 800 years of culture. These are characters who criticise the power of those in the castle or the skyscraper, and earn their keep by breaking the law. Outlaws break categories too. They are fact and fiction, opposition and product, culture and economy, natural justice and organized crime.

Beginning with Robin Hood stealing from the rich, and covering along the way pirates, smugglers, highwaymen, the Wild West, the Mafia and many others, Martin Parker offers a fresh and exciting insight into the counter culture of the outlaw – one that rebels against the more dominant and traditional forms of economy and organization and celebrates a life free from wage slavery.

Alternative Business is a highly readable, entertaining book that will prove a helpful study tool for all students and lecturers working on organizations, cultural studies and criminology.

1

Knowing the Outlaw

In February 1632, an English writer of ballads called Martin Parker entered his ‘A True Tale of Robin Hood’ into the London ‘Stationers’ Register’, an official list of publications established as a means of enforcing copyright. Parker had already written ballads about the misty tales of King Arthur and St George, and here produced a poem about another legendary English figure. He subtitles this work:

A brief touch of the life and death of that Renowned Outlaw, Robert Earle of Huntingdon vulgarly called Robbin Hood, who lived and dyed in A.D. 1198, being the 9 yere of the reigne of King Richard the first, commonly called Richard Cuer de Lyon. Carefully collected out of the truest Writers of our English Chronicles. And published for the satisfaction of those who desire too see Truth purged from falsehood.

(Knight and Ohlgren 1997)

There was a popular proverb at the time that ‘tales of Robin Hood are good for fools’, but Parker’s Robin Hood claims both historical accuracy and nobility. In the poem, Robin was outlawed as the result of the plotting of a rich abbot, and takes to the woods with a hundred men. He robbed from the rich, castrated any clerics he didn’t like, and was kind to the poor:

But Robbin Hood so gentle was,

And bore so brave a minde,

If any in distresse did passe,

To them he was so kinde

That he would give and lend to them,

To helpe them at their neede:

This made all poore men pray for him,

And wish he well might speede.

(op. cit., lines 73–80)

This other Martin Parker’s wasn’t the first account of Robin Hood, but it certainly contains most of the key elements of the narrative that we would recognize nowadays (Holt 1960). An outsider, a criminal, a hero who cared about the poor and showed us what freedom might mean.

The story has, in the globalizing culture of the global North, been something of a touchstone for ideas about the noble robber. A cowed local population, a company of bold men hiding somewhere, and a cruel authority figure. Perhaps most importantly, some idea of stealing from the rich to give to the poor. It is a heroic story of resistance to oppression, and of the justifiable use of violence. An inspiring tale, and one that has been retold in many ways over the centuries through ballads, songs, poems, novels, films, TV series and children’s plastic play sets made in the third world. The names for the goodies and the baddies will alter, but what is consistent is the distribution of power and justice. The people in charge might have the castle, the army and the money, but the sparking-eyed rogues in the shadows have right on their side.

This book begins with Robin Hood because I think that it isn’t merely a children’s fantasy, or an interesting bit of social history or literature, but an enduring story about power, organization and economics. Built into the narrative is the idea that what one person assumes to be the necessary order of things, another might think of as injustice. Or that crime is what the powerful call any economic activity that damages their interests. Or that a gang can be as organized as an army. The seventeenth-century Martin Parker does his best not to question the authority of King Charles the First’s power in his poem, preferring to suggest that this is a history, and such events couldn’t happen in these days of ‘plenty, truth and peace’ (line 462). Not a very good prediction, given that Charles was beheaded by revolutionaries 17 years later. This twenty-first-century Martin Parker has the opposite problem. I want to untame the outlaw, and show that even a blockbuster Hollywood film like the 2010 Robin Hood starring Russell Crowe can be understood as a radical text. I think that these are deeply subversive stories, and that we can find the politics of Robin Hood in many different guises – as pirate, smuggler, highwayman, train robber, bandit, outlaw, Mafiosi, bank robber, jewel thief, revolutionary icon and so on. We can also find the Sheriff of Nottingham, of course – as king, captain, detective, policeman, businessman, mayor, banker, general, president, manager and so on. I am interested in these ideas, in these stories, because it seems to me that their ubiquity and endurance tell us something rather important about popular culture, and about political economy. To put it simply, I think that a great deal of popular culture is and has long been hostile to the forms of organization and economy that are contemporary with it. Stories about outlaws, whether in medieval ballad or blockbusting film, appear to fit into this interpretation pretty neatly. Blackbeard, Jesse James, Dick Turpin, Ned Kelly and many, many others reflect a deep suspicion of those in power, and also sometimes present ways of living, and forms of character, which present radical alternatives to the present.

More widely, I want to argue that a whole variety of questions about the political economic order are expressed through popular culture. Whether (for example) Hollywood musical, horror film, The Godfather or episode of The Office, there is a reading of all these materials which presents them as engaged in a critical commentary on contemporary culture. Hidden in plain sight, the legitimacy of markets and power are actively contested, either by offering a ‘utopian’ alternative in ‘entertainment’ (Dyer 1993), by metaphorizing the bloody contradictions of capitalist relations (Newitz 2006), or laughing at the pomposities of power (as we will see in the rest of this book). Of course, against my general positive reading of the ‘popular’, there are also those who would dismiss ‘mass’ culture as merely one part of an assembly line of product which makes money for some Hollywood mega-corporation, or distracts consumers into stupefaction (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002). In this book I will argue that there’s an odd sort of denial going on here, as if we have to explain away all these representations by insisting that they don’t mean anything very much. Perhaps one of the most powerful things that ideology does is to allow us to see something, and then encourage us to ignore it and assume that it isn’t what it is, but is actually something else instead.

The outlaws that this book tracks down are part of a broader ‘counter culture’ which continually problematizes power and authority, and hence to some extent de-naturalizes the dominant forms of economy and organization. In that sense, Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean plays a similar function to David Brent from the TV show The Office. They both show the stupidities of the powerful, and celebrate the limits of control. But this isn’t the end of the story, because a detailed consideration of representations of the outlaw shows us quite a lot else, too. To be more specific, I think that this is a figure which both makes and blurs a series of structural oppositions which we often keep separated. The outlaw certainly problematizes the relation between natural justice and the laws of the state, but so too does their endless re-presentation for money raise questions about the boundary between accommodation and resistance. Captain Jack is both a product manufactured by Disney and a fantasy of freedom, and the two seem inseparable. So a Pirates of the Caribbean school lunchbox is both a clear example of global capitalist economics, as well as an enduring cultural image of dissent which goes back at least four centuries. Finally, the noble robber questions the divide between fact and fiction, history and myth. As we shall see in most of this book, stories about outlaws shaped what outlaws did, and discovering the ‘truth’ of the outlaw is always difficult, and sometimes impossible.

I think that it is very difficult to understand Robin Hood, Captain Jack and the rest unless we see them as straddling these supposed contradictions. The point is that each side of the opposition makes the other, so they are really both/and, rather than either/or. It is easy enough to think that the structures of the world give us certain sorts of categories – facts, the market, the law, power – and that we can then compare and contrast them to their opposites – fictions, culture, crime, resistance. The outlaw both makes and confuses these distinctions, being an impossible object that marks a boundary and restlessly erases it. The story of Robin is both fact and fiction; he is loyal to the King and at the same time a rebel against authority; his stories are part of 700 years of European culture and are also products being sold by ballad writers and global entertainment corporations for money. Finally, Robin asks us to question the boundary between crime and law, between the bandit and the King. The outlaw both organizes and disorganizes our common sense (Cooper 1990). Understanding the economic outlaw means not deciding to choose which box to put Robin into, but noting that his endurance comes from an ability to trouble simple classifications. Out there, in the woods, he asks us questions about who we are, and why we are so sure about what we are doing.

Social Bandits

The traditional ‘noble robber’ represents an extremely primitive form of social protest, perhaps the most primitive there is. He is an individual who refuses to bend his back, that is all.

(Hobsbawm 1972a: 56)

I am certainly not the first or the only person to have thought about the political implications of the economic outlaw. Eric Hobsbawm, in Primitive Rebels (1965) and Bandits (1972), writes about the idea of the ‘social bandit’, suggesting that ‘in one sense banditry is a rather primitive form of organized social protest’ (1965: 13). Hobsbawm, a radical historian, is searching for the ways in which ‘official’ histories hide resistance as deviance or criminality. In his first book, originally published in 1959 as Social Bandits and Primitive Rebels, Hobsbawm collects a series of essays on what he calls ‘primitive’ or ‘archaic’ forms of social agitation. His distinction here is largely between peasant protest and working-class organization, and he often implies that the former is politically confused, ineffectual and so on, when compared to self-conscious revolutionary movements. There is something interesting here about the assumption that social bandits are somehow ‘pre-political’, situated within a realm of imagination and desire, but incapable of the formulation of coherent political demands and co-ordinated action. The division of politics into categories of reality and fantasy is an important one, and I will come back to that repeatedly in this book.

Hobsbawm begins with Robin Hood, and notes that many of the secret societies, mobs, gangs, sects and bandits that he is concerned with exist in societies in which there is some sort of tension between tradition and modernization, or forced social change. For those who resist, change ‘comes to them from outside, insidiously by the operation of economic forces they do not understand and over which they have no control’ (op. cit., 3). So though Hobsbawm sees the social bandit as a historically interesting figure, he is continually concerned to stress its limitations.

Social banditry, a universal and virtually unchanging phenomenon, is little more than endemic peasant protest against oppression and poverty: a cry for vengeance on the rich and the oppressors, a vague dream of some curb upon them, a righting of individual wrongs. … Social banditry has next to no organization or ideology, and is totally inadaptable to modern social movements. Its most highly developed forms, which skirt national guerrilla warfare, are rare and, by themselves, ineffective.

(op. cit., emphasis in original)

He goes on to catalogue some characteristics of the social bandit, that they are young, male, have the support of the people and so on. I’ll go into these ‘structural’ descriptions in more detail in the next chapter, but when I first read the book I found it remarkable just how many figures Hobsbawm manages to unearth – Oleksa Dovbush and Juro Janosik in eighteenth-century Carpathia, Angelo Duca or ‘Angiolillio’ from Naples in the same period, Schinderhannes in 1790s Rhineland, Diego Corrientes from eighteenth-century Andalusia, Nikola Shuhaj, a Czech robber from the early twentieth century. Of course these names might be well known in particular localities, but they certainly suggest that the better-known figures covered in this book – Dick Turpin, Black Bart, Billy the Kid and others – are really just the English-speaking tip of a very big iceberg.

Importantly, Hobsbawm also includes mafias as a developed and systematic example of social banditry. Here he is focussing primarily on nineteenth-century examples and not the twentieth-century US versions we will meet in chapter seven and which were popularized in so many films from the 1970s onwards.¹ He is at pains to stress the political ambiguity of mafia arrangements, because they often repress the peasantry themselves, but suggests that secret societies like this are common, though often undocumented, and that they represent a partially organized form of social protest. Interestingly, he doesn’t suggest that they are examples of ‘organized crime’, which would be the more common label nowadays. He notes their valued character traits, the secrecy, initiation rituals and language that unify this ‘network of local gangs’ (op. cit., 33) and suggests that they share the same sort of glamour that attaches to the social bandit. However, he claims, the two are not the same. ‘One of the commonest misconceptions about Mafia … is the confusion between it and banditry. Mafia maintained public order by private means. Bandits were, broadly speaking, what it protected the public from’ (Hobsbawm 1965: 40).

Much of the rest of Hobsbawm’s book concerns the connections between religious millenarianism and peasant uprisings, with the city mob, religious organizations of working men in Britain and secret societies of various kinds. The direction of his argument is to show how rational forms of working-class organization can grow from irrational roots – from religion, gangs, crowds and fraternities – but he leaves us in no doubt as to the superiority of properly organized political parties in terms of securing social change. A few years later, in Bandits, he expands on the nature of social banditry as ‘peasant outlaws’ who ‘are considered by their people as heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation’ (1972a: 17). He locates the ‘noble robber’ as a rural phenomenon, and explicitly excludes robbers who regard the peasants as their prey. This latter group would not have popular support, and hence be regarded as simple criminals. As in the previous book, he is clear that social bandits are not revolutionaries, and not to be regarded as part of a social movement. They are instead ‘the exception that proves the rule’, an example of individual rebellion which does not turn into collective protest (op. cit., 36).

Bandits contained a lot of new examples, from China, India and the USA, a more systematic discussion of the vengeance and expropriation that social bandits engage in, and a description of the necessary economic relations between the robber and their community. Hobsbawm also discusses examples of social bandits becoming politically motivated guerrillas, but again dismisses their politics. ‘As bandits they could at best, like Moses, discern the promised land. They could not reach it’ (op. cit., 108). Like the anarchists that he also dismisses, it is as if the social bandit were a symptom of a form of mass false consciousness. Charming, in their way, but needing to have the principals of party organization and mass mobilization explained to them by someone who really understands politics. But then, in his final chapter, ‘The Bandit as Symbol’, Hobsbawm shows us why he does think that the bandit matters:

What survives from the medieval greenwood to appear on the television screen is the fellowship of free and equal men, the invulnerability to authority, and the championship of the weak, oppressed and cheated. … In a society in which men live by subservience, as ancillaries to machines of metal or moving parts of human machinery, the bandit lives and dies with a straight back.

(1972a: 132)

These ideas stimulated much debate, most of which was concerned with the extent to which Hobsbawm’s presentation of bandits was itself romanticized, and perhaps even bad history. As Anton Blok argued, ‘Rather than actual champions of the poor and the weak, bandits quite often terrorized those from whose very ranks they managed to rise, and thus helped to suppress them’ (1972: 496). In his reply, Hobsbawm agrees that not all bandits should be understood as examples of rebellion, but asserts that some can (1972b). Central to their disagreement, and to later reviews of the ‘social bandits debate’ in the 40 years since (Slatta 2007), is the question of evidence. Is the social bandit a creature who can be measured against some sort of historical or ethnographic evidence, as Hobsbawm seems to imply, or are they largely mythical creatures, as Blok wishes to have it? Secondly, if they are (at least partly) mythical, what does this myth tell us? For Hobsbawm, and those social historians who have since developed the idea of ‘social crime’ (Hobsbawm et al. 1972, Hay et al. 1977, Lea 1999), it seems to be a myth that can express protest at injustice. For Blok on the other hand, it seems to be a form of ideology that usually conceals interests and naturalizes oppression. Again we will return to these issues all the way through this book, particularly when repeatedly discussing the relation between ‘real history’ and ‘cultural representation’. For now though I simply want to note that it seems that bandits sell. Hobsbawm’s book has been reprinted many times, and went on to have a second revised edition in 2000. Just like poems about Robin Hood, perhaps the images that Hobsbawm collected somehow had meaning to readers which exceeded his rather definitive political judgements, and Blok’s solid dismissals.

The Outlaw and the Business School

I’ll say a lot more about all this later, but also want to note here something rather specific about my approach in this book. Unusually perhaps, for someone writing about popular culture, I am academically located within a business school. Over the last 30 years or so, these parts of universities have grown very quickly and become places in which questions of organization and economy are generally regarded as translatable into charts, spreadsheets and strategies. The business school is presented as a place which is only interested in things if they make money, or stop people from making money. Other questions might be academically intriguing, but they will quickly be dismissed as irrelevant or ivory tower because the measure of the business school is business itself. This is the bottom line and, it is often said, nothing can be built if you don’t get the bottom line right. On the other hand, other departments within the university claim to be largely uninterested in such brutal evaluations, and so people studying history, literature, cultural studies, film and so on have traditionally not had to worry about whether their research has ‘practical’ implications.² (And by ‘practical’ here I mean, of course, making money, or helping the public sector to lose less money.) The arts and humanities largely rest on the assumption that things are worth studying because they are int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Knowing the Outlaw
• 2. The Many Myths of Robin Hood
• 3. Pirate Utopianism
• 4. Robbers and Romantics
• 5. Outlaws and the Frontier
• 6. The Mafia
• 7. Modern Bandits
• 8. The Counter Culture and Organization
• 9. Popular Political Economy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index