Barbelith: Books: Harry Potter and Capitalism:

One of the things that reveals Harry Potter as pure escapist fantasy, rather than – as

with the best (children’s or not) fantasy – an attempt to imagine a different

organization of the world and our relationship to it, is the use of magical artefacts

purely as commodities. The wizard world is our world, but with better stuff. The

sweets are better. Football is better, because it’s on broomsticks. The postal

service is better, because there are cute owls who don’t go on strike. This is not

creating an alternative way of looking at the world; it’s inventing gimmicks. Just as

some apparently anti-capitalist actions fall back into a capitalist model through a

reliance on “ethical shopping”, Harry Potter is “magical shopping”.

This is a little overblown; I would worry about the author if I thought it was likely she is actually reading children’s books with any real children. It reminds me of the scene in Jack the Bear (which I just watched with my son) in which the impeccably-credentialed grandfather (a blacklisted victim of McCarthyism) tortured his grandson, the main character, by refusing to let him win at chess ‘for his own good’, while the boy yearns for his absent father after multiple traumas and losses.

The time my son and I have spent sharing the Potter books is not going to make him a good little capitalist consumer any more than it will make him a Satanist. Sounds pretty obvious to observe that the values don’t come so much from the specific books as the overall cultural and ethical context of the upbringing. For some more hopelessly earnest thoughts about the effects of children’s literature, see Herbert Kohl’s Should We Burn Babar? This, however, goes the extra distance with impassioned prescriptions for how to use storytelling constructively.