Buy your own books and literacy, proletarian scum!

A good article in the Guardian by Michael Rosen on children and books:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/dec/24/government-against-reading?


The problem (as almost always) is that treating this sort of issue (usually a democratic one) as a single issue outside the framework of bourgeois society will resolve nothing - so I made this point in my comment:


Thanks Michael Rosen for reading and responding to the comments.

Now, let's go back to 1945. British voters dumped Churchill unceremoniously cos he was a cold-blooded reactionary butcher. They wanted health and education and a decent future, and they got it. The Welfare State was created and my great-aunt Lil could toddle down to the opticians and get some proper glasses and finally get to see what the world looked like (at least the Bermondsey part of it ;-)

Everyone thought it would go on for ever. I went to university and it cost me nothing - the local authority funded me and thousands of others. I had a free eye operation as a kid, free dental care, free schooling, free school milk, free libraries, etc. Free because we all wanted a better society that shared and cared and was willing to pay for it through taxes.

But it didn't go on for ever, cos it was a Liberal plan to start with, and Labour only put it through cos they were afraid the people would toss them out as well for being cold-blooded reactionary butchers.

The bourgeois governments including Labour started rolling things back as soon as they could, and the intention was clear from Thatcher on - not just roll back, but ratchet back.

All this while Britain was getting richer and richer (if capital doesn't expand and get richer it dies). So it's not a matter of affording anything, it's a matter of wanting it or not, and it's a matter of compulsion, ie force or the threat of it - the cops and the army, or us.

So why reduce the question to BookTrust? They're great people (I've met one)  doing a great job, but given the way the government and capital are taking the country ends up pissing into the wind.

We won't get these governments or British capital to change direction, and even if we did, they would roll things back again as soon as they could.

So this time round we need to ratchet them out of the way, so they can't take back what's ours. So we get health and welfare (teeth, glasses, medicine, emergency help, child care, pensions), and our kids get to learn things for themselves and their friends and everyone in society. And learn to read and enjoy it, and choose for themselves what they want to read (and write) once they've devoured Arthur Ransome, Roald Dahl and J.K.Rowling (or Enid Blyton, W.E.Johns or whatever).

Nothing is a single-issue issue any more. And people, like Michael R, who want to resolve single issues in the framework of this society are becoming more and more obvious pie-in-the-skiers and utopians. Their work on the issues is great, but they won't *resolve* them without a revolutionary change in society.

October, the German revolution, and us

On FaceBook, Addy wrote:

Not many people care to realize that for lenin and trotsky. The most important priority was the German revolution!

So much so that they couldn't believe the Russian revolution would survive without a successful German (W European) revolution. We should bear this in mind and share their amazement and trepidation - what did it mean for one of the most contradictory countries on earth, weighed down by unbelievable backwardness, to carry out the most advanced social turnover in history and survive, alone, facing a world full of high-tech slave-drivers and assassins.
No one expected this to happen, not Marx, not Engels, and definitely not Lenin or Trotsky.
Nothing was where it should have been. Every day brought unheard of novelty, undreamt of glories and unprecedented horrors.
The survival of October, and the fact that it took imperialism seven whole decades to bring the bureaucracy to capitulation, means more for our revolutionary work than we know. As do the even less "textbook" socialist revolutions after ww2.
a) socialist revolution is on the agenda in our epoch, whether we like it or not;
b) it happens even under counter-revolutionary (ie non-Marxist, non-proletarian, non-Bolshevik, non-internationalist) leaderships (eg Ho, Tito, Mao, Castro);
c) once it happens, you have to stop the world turning on its axis to undo it, and use up as much energy to keep the world standing still as you did stopping it in the first place;
d) the working masses mobilize and fight for what they see as right...
sooo...
what are we waiting for?
The answer is - ourselves!
The problem isn't imperialism, economic development, brainwashing mass media, treacherous leaderships... we don't have to wait to find out that they are NOT an unsurmountable obstacle to our revolution
The problem is our own leadership and our own perspectives and actions.
In other words, if we don't do now what we know needs to be done, nothing will ever happen.


I'm tempted to say that the week after the next revolution, everybody will be wondering why it took so long...

Time to take it all back

A thread on a discussion list I'm in has been dealing with issues of ignorance and education in relation to a film on education called "Waiting for Superman" and the state of public awareness in the US revealed in the elections.

One of us summed it up by writing:

"…the country is sick."

I then made the following contribution on the general context of problems like this:

There's an enormous amount of surplus wealth around, and we produce it. It's just that we don't get any of it. Our work creates the surplus that is bloating the already bloated. And the less we get to keep, either as individuals, families or communities (the public), the more they get to squander.

Just think about how we get skinned all day every day. 

Our work produces ALL value. 

The following deductions are then made:

1) Profit (at least 10%)

2) Landlord "tax" (rent) (at least 10%)

3) Direct taxes (federal, state, local)

4) Indirect taxes (consumer, VAT, purchase, whatever)

5) Redistribution charges (money for bourgeois drones like advertising agencies, accountants and lawyers)

What's left is ours but it's often just stolen back from us in exchange for useless and harmful commodities (junk food, entertainment, drugs inc alcohol and tobacco, etc etc).

That's just the positive stealing.

Now add in the *negative* factors constricting our wealth:

1) Military expenditure;

2) Preventable and curable diseases;

3) Deliberate creation of ignorance and lack of skills;

4) Chaotic lunging between gluts and dearths of food and other goods;

5) Deliberate crippling of knowledge and culture, of ideas and creativity, due to secrecy, patents, copyright, restricted access;

6) Deliberate crippling of human interaction due to national borders, travel restrictions and cost;

7) Destruction of productive facilities in war;

8) Destruction of human beings in war.

NONE of the deductions listed affect the part of surplus used for new and re-investment. Any other beneficial use of surplus can be carried out by democratic decision at various levels within the process of wealth production, not outside it after the event. (Democratic here means made by elected representatives at the appropriate level, all on average income and subject to instant recall by their constituencies.)

ALL of the factors strangling human productive potential can be removed either overnight - like business secrecy, copyright and patent walls, and war - or be remedied in the decade or two required to adapt material facilities and productive processes to new requirements - military organizations and manufacturing, institutions of health, education, culture, and research.

This is all very clear. It's very simple, too.

But it's not easy, because the forces arrayed against understanding, reason and human prosperity are huge, brutal and ruthless.

However, their strength is parasitical, sucked from us and our work. If we stop them from sucking our blood, they shrivel.

If not, we shrivel.

They have been depriving us of what is ours for far too long. It's time for us to take it back.

America - the good life getting better...

An article on general conditions for working people in the States:
http://20somethingfinance.com/american-hours-worked-productivity-vacation/

My comment:

The key paragraph in this article is:
"Using data by the U.S. BLS, the average productivity per American worker has increased 400% since 1950. One way to look at that is that it should only take one-quarter the work hours, or 11 hours per week, to afford the same standard of living as a worker in 1950 (or our standard of living should be 4 times higher). Is that the case? Obviously not. Someone is profiting, it’s just not the average American worker."
Very few comments here take up this historical perspective.
Now, I read Reader's Digest back in the 50s (god help my soul) and every number was full of gush about labour-saving devices and the good life these promised. Lighter more enjoyable work, cleaner, healthier environment, more and better leisure. Getting better all the time. And for everybody, of course.
You'd think we'd feel the goodness if all this was the case. But we don't, cos it ain't.
"Labour-saving" devices have eaten jobs and increased pressure on their operators.
Work may be "lighter" in some ways, but that depends who you are and what you're comparing. Some of our deadlier jobs (body and bone breaking, toxic, etc) have been exported, along with some of our worst old working conditions and labour relations. And these conditions of slave labour are used in the most cynical fashion to
threaten us back home.
More enjoyable work? For Google employees, maybe.
Cleaner, healthier environment - for who? In inner cities? Near nuclear waste dumps? Noise pollution, light pollution? Go for a pleasant walk around your neighbourhood, any time you feel like it? Well, the Cuyahoga River doesn't catch fire as often now, but would you swim in it?
More and better leisure - HA. Someone mentioned better TV... Kids have a real choice out in the suburbs - drugs or the church. "I go out walking, after midnight, in the starlight..." - yup.
Getting better all the time - only today none of us feel we will have a better life than our parents did. And our parents damn sure don't envy us!
For everybody...
Americans right now are too traumatized and terrorized by the fear-mongering propaganda fed them day in day out to think straight. They imagine that however crappy their own conditions are, everywhere else is worse, hence more frightening. The imagined threats from foreigners - aliens - are just their own fears projected on to others.
It's a social, economic and political challenge, and needs dealing with outside "official", established areas of debate and policy-making.
So, good luck America.
And good night.

Förbättra skolan - improving schools

My comment in Swedish on an article about a school in West Sweden that magically improved its results over just three years.
http://www.sydsvenskan.se/sverige/article1262061/Nar-skolan-ar-som-allra-bast.html

Dagens ungdomar är morgondagens arbetskraft. Ju skickligare arbetskraft, desto större produktivitet. Ju större produktivitet, desto större profit.
Skicklig arbetskraft kräver vetenskapligt baserad tillverkning, alltså optimerade tillverkningslokaler (skolor, klassrum, bibliotek etc), optimerat handhavande av råmaterialet för att minska spill (inte halva råvaran kasserad eller klassat som andra sortering, som händer med ungdomsmaterialet idag), och optimerade processer fram till slutprodukten (alltså inte någon bäng höjdares drömpudding).
Borgarnas skolpolitik, som också är sossarnas för den delen, går stick i stäv med detta framgångsrecept. Investeringar i skolan minskar obönhörligt från år till år. Produkten blir dyrare och sämre.

Skolpolitiken klarar alltså inte ens av att frambringa produktiv arbetskraft! Kortsiktig vinstjakt minskar långsiktig vinstökning.
Det om det. När kommer de mänskliga aspekterna nånsin att diskuteras? Mera harmoniska, självständigt tänkande o handlande människor som är aktiva, skapande, ohämmade, medmänskliga o glada, som stimulerar sig själva o varandra att upptäcka o uppfinna nyttigheter o nöjen - detta ska vara målet med bildning o fostran för människor.
Vi glömmer hela tiden bort att vi lever i ett förhistoriskt samhälle när det gäller att förverkliga alla människor på likvärdiga villkor. Såväl i Sverige som i Indien.
Comenius visste mer om pedagogik på 1600-talet än våra skolpolitiker idag. Vi rör oss baklänges i tiden.

History is fables agreed upon. - Voltaire (1694-1778)

A short discussion about history and truth:

MB   History is fables agreed upon. - Voltaire (1694-1778)

CM   So is all truth, come to that...
Truth, like history, comes from the barrel of a gun. Vae victis.
Mind you, the more logical, economical and explanatory your hypothesis, the better your gun :-)

SSh   Are you saying there's no way of getting at objective truth? If so I shall have to ask you to step outside.

MB   there's no such thing as truth. but the history - fables/myth/fairy tales is. they're all the same story, and history is just as repetitive. I seriously do not understand why humankind hasn't found a less primitive, less destructive way of dealing with conflict over all those aeons.

CM   SSh, objective reality and objective truth aren't the same thing. By using reason we're gaining a better and better understanding of things around us and things within us. But our understanding of reality is an asymptotic trajectory -- it approaches closer and closer but never actually touches. Frustrating, really... Our understanding put into words is truer and truer the closer the statements cover the reality they're referring to. In other words, reality exists (yay!) whereas truth is pretty much a social thing. It didn't help Gallileo or humanity much while the Church forced a majority of people to vote for geocentrism. Just as it doesn't help the born-again maggots that most of us vote for a solar system that's more than 5000 years old.
Science is a social institution, and doesn't exist outside social constraints. Powerful social forces are at war to control this institution, its methods and output. So truths are different at different times in different places, even if reality is the same.

Discussion with an Indian Maoist on the New Wave Blog

This is part of an ongoing discussion on the New Wave Blog about perpectives on the General Strike of 7 September in India, and by extension on the present state of political struggle in India. A Maoist joined the discussion, and this is a rejoinder I posted to some of his comments.

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150261932180007

Sihaya: "If the larger section of the Rev Left in India does not agree with Lenin's program of mass urban insurrection, it does not invalidate Leninism, but simply states that the specif interventions by Lenin were made in Russia in 1917 which is not really comparable with India of 2010. "

Lenin's programme was not "mass urban insurrection" - it was a revolutionary seizure of state power by the masses spearheaded by the working class under the leadership of the Marxist party of the advanced workers, the Bolshevik Party.

The urban insurrections were the final hammer blow that smashed the resurgent rightwing and the pro-bourgeois Mensheviks, and led to the take-over of state power by the working class led by the Bolsheviks. The rural revolutionary mobilization of the small peasants and rural poor prevented the class compromisers from regrouping in the countryside, and saved the new non-capitalist state from the international counter-revolution. The rural masses, that is, gave unconditional and self-sacrificing support to the new workers state during 3 years of wars against imperialist invasions and White Terror civil war.

(During October, by the way, Stalin was holed up in the offices of Pravda, saying nothing - he was against removing the Provisional Government and wanted to work with it. Stalinists and Maoists never ever mention Stalin's ignominious role during October. Instead they demean October into an "insurrection" - which is a cough and a spit from the usual reactionary label of "coup d'état".)

A further minimizing of the Bolshevik Revolution and the line taken by the Bolshevik leadership (Lenin and Trotsky) is Sihaya's statement that "the specif interventions by Lenin were made in Russia in 1917 which is not really comparable with India of 2010. " Now for Sihaya October is "specific interventions"!!! in 1917 Russia. Well, thanks for these lessons of Leninism. 1917 is then and there, we are here and now. Tough titty, Lenin. You'd have been lost in today's India. Or China's 1927 or 1949. Or Yugoslavia's or Vietnam's 1945. Or Cuba's 1959. Or Chile's 1972, or Iran's or Nicaragua's 1979. Since you just intervened then and there, we've got to reinvent a theory of class struggle for here and now. You left us to reinvent the revolutionary wheel! Shame on you...

A new theory for each revolutionary situation. Not new tactics for new circumstances, but a new strategy. Unless of course we take Mao to be our theoretical saviour (eat crow, Vladimir Ilych!) with the theory of Protracted People's War. Vo Nguyen Giap and Che Guevara were better military theorists for revolutionary guerrilla warfare than Mao - they didn't have millions upon millions of peasants and rural poor to throw away, or Mao's elastic ideas of "protracted". If India follows Mao's line in PPW, then Indian peasants and the rural poor will pay dearly for it - and may not even win a non-capitalist state for their sacrifices!! Mao wanted a class-collaborationist government (Four Classes), but couldn't get one, so he nationalized everything - to survive. You can imagine that the Indian bourgeoisie would do anything to suck up to their new masters, anything to keep control of their property and keep capitalism alive for decades. The rural poor and peasantry will have vanquished the class enemy - and got them back the next day (as happened in India in 1947, and in South Africa two decades ago).

Sihaya writes, regarding programme for state power: "it is true that first we have to eradicate fedualism unless you have a magic wand which will enable India to sweep forward into the future - directly." If eradicating feudalism is our great strategic goal, then we're looking at modern India from Cloud-Cuckoo Land! (not even Mao saw the eradication of feudalism as China's great strategic goal.) Sometimes history deals with this kind of elementary class task for us. In this case it was the British who castrated feudalism and shot off its knees. Nehru and the Gandhis have been feudal rulers?! Jesus... Lenin's work on the peasant question in Russia in the late 19th century, before the overthrow of Tsarism, before even the great body blow that brought it to the ground in 1905, regarded feudalism as an irrelevance even in a country as backward and massively rural as Russia. Lenin's programme for the peasantry - Adhiraj can post it - is light years from that of Sihaya's party. Light years ahead, that is. The role of the urban working class is central to Lenin's class-based Marxist historical analysis of conditions in Russia. Lenin's revolutionary understanding was not hermetically separated from his insurrectionary skills. All his work with the revolutionary Marxist left in Russia built up to the seizure of state power in 1917 - with all the consequences this had for the whole Russian people, both urban and rural. And if it could be done then, it can be done now, since we have seen far more revolutionary class mobilizations in empirical terms and international terms than Lenin or Trotsky ever did (Stalin couldn't see such things even in his wildest dreams). And Lenin made perfectly clear in Imperialism that the class enemy of the worldwide working class and rural poor is the bourgeoisie and its system of imperialists capitalism. Perhaps Sihaya thinks that Imperialism only analyses the situation in 1916 in Russia and Germany?? Then and there?? And since then feudalism has come galumphing back to seize power in India? Or in the whole Indian countryside?? There are big landowners, Lords, in the British Tory Party, now in power. So feudalism has reestablished itself in Britain??  We should wait till feudalism has been eradicated before we set ourselves the task of eradicating the big bourgeoisie to set up a Four Class People's Democracy? And only then start thinking about working for a non-capitalist society?

Sihaya writes the following, in the midst of a windy rant: "Do nothing absolutely nothing, run down every one else unless there is a PERFECT condition for a global revolution. Well buster unlike 'perfecitonists' like your troupe of trotskites we unfortunately work within imperfect conditions and continue to learn as we work. we make mistakes we do somethings correct, but praxis is our norm. I am not going to wait for a perfect India before I stand up for the right of Kashmir's to fulfill their democratic aspirations. We stand up for their rights now.

We accept our accountability to this system we have inherited and we accept our responsibility to it too and at the same time we push to change it."

If he thinks that Trotskyists and Trotskyism are sitting on their hands waiting for perfect conditions for a global revolution, he is guilty of grotesquely underestimating his political opponents. But that's his loss, not ours. To defeat opponents you have to know them, and to know them you need to read and study... (ha bloody ha! - read and study Trotsky?? It would melt my mind, says our Maoist :-) 

He also glosses over the deadly persecution of Trotskyists carried out by the Stalinists and Maoists in Russia, China and many other countries. The way they chose to defeat Trotsky's Bolshevik-Leninist ideas was not to use open debate within democratic centralist workers organizations and soviets, but to wipe Trotskyists out physically. Stalin managed to wipe out the whole of the Old Bolshevik cadre that had led the Great October Revolution. And he finally got Trotsky in 1940 - while the Stalinist bureaucracy was in bed with Nazi Germany.

But it's good to know that the Maoists "unfortunately" (one of The Economist's favourite weasel words, by the way) "work within imperfect conditions and continue to learn as we work. we make mistakes we do somethings correct". Well, what a Brave New political World, that hath such people in it! Working. learning, making mistakes sometimes but doing other things correctly! My goodness gracious me! Learning and working, some things right and some things wrong... No one else on the right or the left could ever claim this practical wisdom now, could they?

He continues: "praxis is our norm. I am not going to wait for a perfect India before I stand up for the right of Kashmir's to fulfill their democratic aspirations. We stand up for their rights now.

We accept our accountability to this system we have inherited and we accept our responsibility to it too and at the same time we push to change it."

India will not even be perfect if the Kashmiris fulfil their democratic aspirations. Bourgeois democracy is not what revolutionary Marxists are aiming to set up. Self-determination for Kashmir is part of a wider struggle for national rights within India that will make the participation of all nationalities in a socialist revolution voluntary and strengthen the United Socialist States of South Asia so much the more.

And now we're not just unique in working and making mistakes, but we're unique in standing up for Kashmiri rights now. You'd think that if the Maoists were unique in this they'd not only be leading the Kashmiri struggle but would have taken power years ago...

The reason they haven't done this is partly because they're implicitly lying about their own uniqueness (ignorant dismissal of political opponents) and partly because they have no theoretical tools to help them understand the growing over of a democratic or a nationalist struggle into a socialist one. Instead they laboriously try to heave themselves from one stage of the historical ladder according to Stalin and Mao to the next. First get rid of feudalism and set up bourgeois rule. Then make bourgeois rule democratic. Then (in conditions of perfect bourgeois democracy - oh the ironies that bite Stalinists in the arse! - one perfect historical stage after the next, and no jumping the queue :-D

start working for a socialist society (preferably, as we have seen in Stalinist praxis in advanced bourgeois democratic countries like Britain and France and Sweden, by parliamentary means. Socialist revolution via the ballot box. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky are beaming down from their Historical Heaven - they are savouring the fidelity of latter-day Marxist-Leninists to the word, the spirit and the praxis of their revolutionary work! No more urban insurrections, people! Let's get the vote out!

The final sentence of this extract formulates this treacherous reformism better than we can:

"We accept our accountability to this system we have inherited and we accept our responsibility to it too and at the same time we push to change it."

Sihaya, as revolutionary Marxists we in no way accept any accountability to this system. None. We say NO NO NO. This system is not OUR system but the system of our class enemy. Suck on that. What you are saying is that you accept accountability for the system of the class enemy! What nonsense is this?!

"We have inherited"! The only thing the India masses have "inherited" is a slab of pavement to sleep on. The bourgeoisie has inherited this system and uses it to drain our blood, smash our bodies and fuddle our heads. It uses the system to enrich itself and to keep us in poverty.

And not just "accountability" but "responsibility" too. Are you going to ask the system to give you a vote of confidence for your "accountability" and "responsibility"? Just wondering...

We respect your concrete struggle against exploitation and repression in the countryside, just as we support the struggle of the Taliban against imperialist exploitation and repression in Afghanistan.

What we don't accept is your programme, your theory (such as it is) and your understanding of revolutionary working class history and traditions.

We are "perfectly" ready to work beside you in your struggle as far as our resources permit. We are not, however, going to allow you to force your programme, theory or reformist praxis on us. Stalin entered a United Front with Hitler. NOT a Popular Front subordinating the Soviet Communist Party to the Nazis (although Stalin urged the Chinese Communist Party to merge with and subordinate itself to the Kuomintang, and as Mao urged the Indonesian CP to do with the Indonesian military). The least you can do is follow Stalin's example by forming a United Front with forces you may not fully agree with.  

Cuba - some comments on a blog

Mary Beard has three blog posts on a trip to Cuba. A lot of the comments are the usual right-wing maggot (gusano) venom.

http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/08/classics-in-cuba.html

http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/08/from-cuba-with-love.html

http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/08/hemingways-retreat-good-books-in-cuba.html

I made the following comments:

First:

Mary's right to get in quick - before the Deluge  [ie to visit Cuba now]. It's not just the retail smear, but the return to Cuba as fun centre of the US. And perhaps we can imagine what the Miami exiles will bring with them in addition to bloodbath revenge. The liberation of Cuba may well be carried out with the same respect for national treasures as the liberation of Iraq.
Pity she didn't visit the other countries of Central America to see what kind of classical tradition they have. 
Oh, I forgot to mention trafficking, drugs and HIV, didn't I? And the dispossession and ejection of most of the people from their homes and jobs. 
Mary! Book a trip for 10 years from now, then we'll get a clear-eyed check on what's going on.

Second:

Paulo writes: "A comment on some of the commentators. You destroy their economy, and permanently threaten invasion with your superior weapons etc. Then you sneer at them for their failures and their poverty."
Not only this - which is spot-on - but according to imperialist ("Western", capitalist, officially sanctioned) economists Cuba should have sunk into the Caribbean about ten seconds after the expropriation of the Batista bourgeoisie. The received wisdom of this crowd is that such economies cannot and will not function or survive. And five decades later Cuba is still afloat. 
Not as the sanction-mongers and sabre-rattlers (and de facto incompetent invaders) would like (ie a hell-hole), but as an attractive (and SAFE) destination for foreign visitors. 
If need was an automatic trigger for revolution the Cuban regime would NOT still be in charge (nor would the US regime in many parts of that country).
In Sao Paulo I stayed for a week with a physiotherapist and her family. She had been to Cuba. She told me that everyone she'd ever touched in Sao Paulo had muscles rigid with stress. But no one in Cuba.

Third:

1) "positive and negative freedom". We won't have to worry about that distinction much longer as our negative freedom shrinks and our positive freedoms get more and more constricting. In fact it's ages since I saw anyone using that notion seriously.
2) for an example of how to analyse and relate to a country as riddled with contradictions as Cuba (and in fact any of those countries that have expropriated capital) I'd recommend Trotsky's 1936 "The Revolution Betrayed". There he takes up the good and the bad, the strong and the weak points of the Soviet Union under the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
He distinguishes between the non-capitalist (let's call it proto-socialist) mode of production, with astounding advances to show, and the bureaucratic regime which came to power in the mid-20s and had state power firmly in its grip by the early 30s.
He characterizes the Stalinist regime as quasi-fascist and counter-revolutionary. Leaden chains holding down the potential of the new society.
You don't have to be a fellow-traveller to appreciate what's good in places like China or Cuba. Or a rabid reactionary to scourge what's bad about them.
Society is contradictory. Contradictions can't be handled with unilateral either-or ideas. Some dialectical understanding is applied to ancient history and feudalism (and even to some elements of early bourgeois history), but none to our own historical epoch.
The philosophers have stopped interpreting the world - let alone changing it.

The coming cuts in Britain and women - splitting the working class

A good article in the Guardian about the way the planned cuts by the ConDem government in Britain will devastate women throughout the country:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/aug/08/women-public-sector-cuts-pay-freeze
However, it doesn't go far enough, of course. As I try to make clear in my comment:

Look (as Thatcher said):
Unemployment, insecurity and poverty are endemic (part and parcel) of capitalist society, even under Welfare State concessions made to blunt the threat of socialist rebellion.
In 1963 it was impossible for me to get work in Middlesbrough - and they were the golden years! Want to dig ditches as a navvy - get on the short list first!
Splitting different parts of the working class against each other is endemic in capitalist society. You name it, they've done it. Ethnic origin, national origin, age, gender, religion, housing, region, neighbourhood, education, skills, unionization, industry, pay scale - individually and in every possible combination.
This is combined with scapegoating of the most vicious kind - first they create the victim through poverty and discrimination, then they blame the victim for problems they've caused themselves, and enforce this ferociously by means of the police, the courts and the jails - oh, and the sewer media
As if this wasn't enough, working people in different countries are split on the same lines - and they can be shredded to pieces and have their homes smashed by the military, and be forced to endure starvation and disease thanks to "sanctions" or just plain greed and brutal indifference.
All this is well-known, but just not talked about in public.
What isn't known at all, thanks to the demonization of free thought in economics, and in particular of Marxist theory, is that the public sector does produce value. It's work produces the most valuable commodity of all - namely, labour power - the only commodity that can generate more value than it takes to produce.
Which makes you think when you compare this kind of productive work with the work put into useless and destructive production like weapons, surveillance equipment and luxury crap of all kinds.
It isn't just this vicious government that needs to be turfed out like Churchill after world war 2. It's just one in a string of vicious governments. The whole system needs to be turned on its head, all the parasitical blood-suckers shaken out, and run by us for our own benefit and the benefit of those like us worldwide.
And the change needs to be permanent, not just temporary and vulnerable to claw-back by governments who first make concessions like the Welfare State (or New Deal) to save their own (s)kin, and then ratchet them back as the threat recedes.

Therapy in Britain - healthier attitudes towards mental health

An article in the Observer reports on changed attitudes to mental ill-health and seeking therapy.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/aug/01/counselling-psychotherapy-survey


I commented:
Britain is a catastrophic place for kids to grow up in. Everything around you conspires to crush your spirit and warp your emotions. Fighting is the only healthy way to live in these conditions, and that's often wearing and leads to shell shock and PTSD. (That re pit villages in the 30s and world war 2.)

Education during the concessions to the working class known as the Welfare State has created a kind of free space for a lot of us to question what's going on. You've just got to read RD Laing to see how it developed - and to see how vicious the role of a "normal" family is in the authoritarian clampdown on young minds, bodies and emotions.
Freud laid out the outlines of successful therapy. You have to nurture trust and love in the patient, where none has been before. The patient must experience this and express it - which means the therapist has to accept it, and return it in a way that empowers the patient to relate to the outside world using these emotions as firm ground to stand on. There are terms for this, but they are a technicality compared to the essence of the process.
So, how many therapists are able to pull this off? Not many, obviously, cos most therapists are in the same boat as we are. BUT, what they often can do is remove some of the most painful and crippling nightmares by clearing out the pus from around the roots - we can't have firm teeth to bite back at the world until their roots have had the poison drained, and then been filled. Given the state of society, this isn't too bad. It's a start. 
If you've sunk into an emotional cesspool, you stink when you're dragged out of it. If you're cleaned up, and feel you're clean, and realize that the cesspool isn't inside you as you imagined, but only something filthy engulfing you - then you're ready to step out on your own, with new clean friends, and enjoy the fight.
Emotionally healthy people in an emotionally healthy society must be the goal. And anything that gets us closer to that is valuable

A real feminist flays hypocritical US blather

Germaine Greer has written a militant and hard-hitting feminist blog in the Guardian about some feather-weight fools who won the Pulitzer Prize and made the New York Times best-seller list.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jul/31/half-the-sky-germaine-greer


I wrote my comment in the form of a letter:


Dear Germaine, 
I love the punch of your articles - you get your point across. You own your own heart and mind. 
That said, feminism will never solve anything globally or permanently unless it's part of a class-based revolutionary movement fighting to turf out capitalism country by country. Urban and rural working class, urban and rural poor, fighting national battles in a coordinated worldwide war. 
Till then feminist agitation and mobilization will be as mutilated and powerless as the UN you flay. 
You wield your bull whip well. With the strength of the world's women in your arm. 
We wield ours beside you. With the strength of the world's working women AND men in ours. 
Makes a good team. 
Your dedicated but critical fan, 
Xjy

Sharing ideas - and strangling them...

Here's a short article from Scientific American on sharing scientific ideas and work:
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http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=when-should-a-scientists-data-be-li-2010-07-22&sc=DD_20100723&posted=1#comments

Jul 22, 2010 02:01 PM in Basic Science | 15 comments

When should a scientist's data be liberated for all to see?

By Katherine Harmon

 

When researchers make an exciting discovery, the data behind it are often closely guarded until they can be examined, developed and then revealed—at least in part—in a peer-reviewed journal with all of the proverbial fanfare. 

But that custom often leaves the public and most of the research world in the dark—sometimes for years, as some lamented in the case of the formal description of the hominid Ardipithecus ramidus, which came some 15 years after the original discovery. Publication usually involves sharing some data because the scientific method encourages others to review one's work so they can attempt to replicate it. But in a Web-driven era of rapidly moving and easily stored data, however, many researchers now argue forcefully for an open exchange of data and the wider use of so-called scientific commons. 

Climate change, molecular chemistry and microbiology are just a few of the fields currently entertaining the idea of a better-connected repository to which data can (or must) be uploaded soon after discovery. And in the medical world, many researchers are looking hopefully toward a digital future in which masses of patient data can be examined for patterns of disease soon after they are gathered. 

"It would be preferable, from a pure scientific advancement standpoint, to have every piece of data released immediately to the public," Jorge Contreras, deputy director of the Intellectual Property Program at Washington University's School of Law in St. Louis, Mo. and author of a new policy essay on the topic published online July 22 in Science, said in a prepared statement. 

That idealistic approach, however, "doesn't give data-generating scientists the opportunity to publish and advance their careers through publication," he noted. Thus new findings and data sets are still usually held close to the vest in the harsh publish-or-perish world. 

And the data dearth doesn't necessarily stop with publication. "Because of busy schedules, competitive pressures and other interpersonal vagaries, the sharing of scientific data can be inconsistent even after publication," Contreras observes in his essay. 

Not every field has been so tight-fisted with its data. As an encouraging example, he points to the Human Genome Project's stipulation that all new data be made public within 24 hours of being generated. But, he concedes, not every discipline is primed to fall in line with such immediate free access. The genome "represented the common heritage of the human species and should not be encumbered by patents," he writes. But patents are precisely the point of many scientific endeavors, and showing your cards to the competition early on is a patently dim decision. 

Thus Contreras proposes a balance of data access and data rights. "I think you must have a compromise," he said in a prepared statement. "Commons weighted too heavily in favor of data users are not likely to attract sufficient contributions from data generators, whereas commons weighted too heavily in favor of data generators" would be less helpful to other scientists and the public.  

But that doesn't mean data should be held back. Instead, he argues, widely accepted lead times—after data are publicly released but before others can publish results on them—would allow "data generators a 'head start' on preparing publications based on their data, yet data are still broadly available for the general advancement of science." 

Image courtesy of iStockphoto/AlexRaths

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I commented:

Humanity needs to own its own thoughts - we think, create,  work and develop together. Everything around us is created collectively - but it's not owned collectively. Once products have been created they're legally in the hands of the profit-motivated people owning the system of production. They act as proxies for humanity.
And as we are seeing (Bhopal, BP, active non-prevention of starvation and disease -Big Pharma and HIV in Africa - and war) they're doing a really lousy job for the rest of us. 
So all that crap about how capitalism (private ownership of ideas, culture and production) stands for progress and prosperity is just that - crap.
Ideas, sharing them and using them is for all of us, now. When this happens we'll be blown away by the force and rapidity of the development of human society. The prosperity created (and the safety and reason of the creative process) will soon make it possible to reward the most active creators well enough, while making life for the rest of us comfortable enough, to both encourage this approach and dispel envy and hatred towards those growing fat off the present system while others die because of it.
This is simple - but *not* easy!

Vae victis - woe to the vanquished

Or, Rule No 1 in War: Don't lose!
Mary B discusses the conduct of war, lies and leaks in relation to Afghanistan today, and puts it all in a historical - Roman and Greek - context.
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/07/civilian-casualties-leaks-and-the-ancient-view.html

I added this comment:

I give you Clausewitz... I give you Macchiavelli. It's still a question of fighting as though you want to win at any cost, including deceit and "excessive" force (the adjective is superfluous ;-). The Mytilene example is a beautiful example of the transition from war mode to peace mode on the part of the combatants and especially the victors. You leave the vanquished some dignity and room for recuperation. Vae victis - but not too much.
Trotsky tells us about the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk between the new Bolshevik government and the Germans. The German generals, lolling around drinking schnapps with their boots on the table, were thunderstruck by the earnestness of the Bolsheviks, their unlaidback style and their refusal to envisage secret diplomacy. This wasn't the way it was done. And no one was supposed to know of the cynicism and intimacy of the victors and the vanquished during the horse-trading.
Must have been a bit like the Royalists negotiating with Cromwell and his New Model generals...
This, by the way, is a big reason why nuclear war is shunned... there's no one left to trade horses with, nothing to plunder now and for ever.
It's also a reason why the capitalists don't just exterminate the workers once and for all.
Hmm... it's also a reason why Mary's blog is both wicked and subversive... for some.

Literacy and junk literature

In response to a reasonable article on the subject in today's Guardian:


http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/23/enid-blyton-zoe-williams-comment?


I wrote:
Books like these are fantastic for getting kids to devour books. So is Harry Potter, and the quality of the ideas and the plot is light-years from Enid B, for which we should be much more grateful than we are. However...
1) Enid B has no intrinsic literary merit whatever, except for yarn-spinning more-ishness. So if weird old expressions become sleeping policemen on the highway of literacy - dump 'em. JKR and Mark Twain can take us over the bumps - they take us on a magic carpet ride - or at the very least have great suspension, Enid can't cos she doesn't, and hasn't.
2) Maybe readers aren't aware of just how fast and loose publishers play with an author's text. They wield the machete just as savagely as any drama producer, only like Mac the Knife their work is invisible. And they don't just do it after the event, they do it before publication too, and half the time they tell the hack what to write in the first place. If translators are traitors, then publishers are parricides or paedophiles (take your pick). So the whole industry is doing all this all the time, and they're about as good at self-regulation as the cops. So Enid is lucky she's still being read, and that the publishers go to the trouble of keeping her turkey twizzles devourable.
3) Junk food is a phenomenon of mass culture in a sick society. So is junk writing. Cure society and you get healthier mass culture.

"We've seen it all before" - Tory lies ("promises")

Mary B on political promises - "we've seen it all before..."

http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/07/big-society-cassandra-speaks.html

My comment (first a language appetizer, then the meat):

@Oliver N: There was certainly a distinctive Home Counties rendering of French (Ed Heath speaking to De Gaulle).
Anyway, as far as Latin pronunciation is concerned Michael B points to the man who says it all, "Vox Latina, Sidney Allen" (Cantab).
As for rational politics, reason only occurs in public affairs if it forms part of the ruling ideology. During the long Social Democratic interregnum (ie Welfare State "Golden Years") in Sweden, there were umpteen inquiries commissioned in which well-balanced groups of serious people looked at evidence and made sensible decisions about education, pensions, etc. Since this worked well, and was a "Good Thing", it was trumpeted by good people I've translated for into a fixed star of the Swedish political system.
Then things got back to normal (ie bourgeois "democratic" hell) and the inquiry system was brought back to normal too. Single-sod inquiries paying lip service to principles plucked out of the PM's arse, and churning out unreasonable conclusions serving the rulers and their ideology.
Oh, and about money... 
First, *of course* you can solve problems by throwing money at them, the only issue is which problems you choose to solve this way - ie nuclear development programmes, fat cat remuneration and banking crises, or health, education, welfare and classical studies. 
Second, we can always afford what we need to afford. The Britain that introduced the Welfare State was a beggar in rags compared to today's bespoke-tailored and gleaming-fanged vampire, and yet...

Education in today's society (3)

Same discussion continued:

Paulo said... 

xjy

I suggest that before you say any more about Samuel Johnson, you investigate his involvement in anti-slavery, and in some of the other matters you mention. In particular, the British use of slaves to fight the war in America. 

Much more, if you're interested. His remark about Patriotism - the firat refuge of the hypocrite - is a start. By "patriotism" he meant the English interests in the American Empire. Windy, Latinate, but strong.

I responded: 
@Paulo: The more Samuel Johnson contradicts himself, the better!
Meantime, here's a revelation for most of you - Edward Rushton, 1756-1814. A book telling his story was published in 2002. "Forgotten Hero. The Life and Times of Edward Rushton. Liverpool's Blind Poet, Revolutionary Republican, & Anti-Slavery Fighter" by Bill Hunter, Living History Library, Liverpool, 2002. (info: editor@livinghistory.org.uk) ISBN 0-9542077-0-X (all this detail cos - as you can imagine - it's not available at WH Smith's)
He went blind helping slaves (alone) on a slaver at the age of 18, during an epidemic of Malignant Opthalmia. And that was just the start. The book gives extracts from his poems, documented accounts of Liverpool as a city built on Slavery, of conditions in the Navy, the Press Gangs, the politics of abolition, the role of ex-slaves in the debates on Abolition, and Rushton's adventure's as an innkeeper. As well as his take on the American Revolution (a letter to Washington taking him to task for his pro-slavery), the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution (Spartacus!)
Our Scouser readers might be aware of Rushton. Few others will. Read 100 pages of Sam J and then the 100 pages of this little book. Think about the role of laws and kings in society, and the role of society in people's lives (including culture and education). 
Decide for yourselves whether or not Samuel Johnson is a pompous windbag. 

West Germany fails in East Germany

From a discussion list.

July 1 marks the 20th anniversary of the introduction of the deutsche mark in East Germany in the runup to full reunification. But the economic benefits that West German politicians promised failed to materialize. What went wrong?

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,703802,00.html 

 

Fascinating.

But "What went wrong?" is not the right approach.

"Why has the whole project been such a miserable failure from beginning to end?" is better. With the follow-up questions: "Why do East Germans still miss the old East Germany after two decades, in spite of everything (and there are a LOT of in-spite-ofs)?", and "Why was the whole fiasco foreseeable from the start?"

It failed because it was trying to turn back the wheel of history. It's just as impossible to force socialism back into its capitalist womb as it was to force capitalism back into its feudal womb. Of feudalism back into slave-states. This is very paradoxical - the new states are "weaker" than the old states, but a thousand times more viable. The GDR, the Soviet Union, etc were getting on quite well enough thank you, in spite of the in-spite-ofs. It was the Nomenklatura bureaucrats who were most dissatisfied, not the workers. They sold the workers down the river to keep their power and privileges in the shape of capitalists.

One little example I saw in the paper today can illustrate this. The usual propaganda about Cuba, and the usual crap about the country being on the brink of collapse (all non-capitalist countries are always on the brink of collapse according to official capitalist doctrine)... BUT one tiny tell-tale detail... Things are getting so bad now that SOME workplaces are no longer going to provide free lunches to the workers. FREE LUNCHES FOR THE WORKERS! In a country on the brink of collapse, that has no right to exist according to capitalist propaganda. Way-hay! Give me that kind of poverty any day.

East Germany couldn't be integrated into West Germany without being torn down completely and built up from scratch. And the people didn't want this. And you can't say you're making a people more prosperous if you raze their lives to the ground (unless, of course, if you're the US in Iraq or Afghanistan, you can and do). It could be brought into the Western sphere of power as a reservoir of cheap labour and cheap land, and that's about it. Referring to Russia in 1990, Kissinger wrote that the West had one year to push its reforms through - while the "euphoria lasted". Before people woke up to the fact that they'd been lied to and were being ripped off.

Question two: Why the nostalgia? 5 years after 1917 (at the most) Russians had forgotten all about the Tsar and Tsarism. It was just a bad dream. Poof, gone. It took less than 5 years for the new state to seem natural, and the old state to be deep in the cesspool of history never to be retrieved. In East Germany 20 years have now passed since the return of the capitalism everyone was said to be dying to get back. And the new state is still not natural, and the old state has not been forgotten. Twenty years!! And the richest capitalist state in Europe has fucked up completely in bringing hope and prosperity to a country with the same language culture and (more or less) history. It has poured money into a bottomless historical pit. It just can't afford the requirements. It has neither the money, nor the moral, cultural or social authority for the task.

And if West Germany can't manage to restore capitalism successfully in East Germany, where the hell CAN capitalism be successfully restored?? And by who?

Cuba (In Spite Of) is a model in Latin America. East Germany is not a model in Europe. Europe has no models since Sweden lost its halo.

Question 3: "Foreseeable?" I'll dig up some old discussion contributions I made back in the day. You'll notice that the Kissinger remark fits in with an obvious scepticism towards the whole restoration project. And it should be obvious that no single part of a country can buy up that country's whole economy. Reformist socialists had this illusion in the late forties. And failed. That's not the way economies work or history works. Post-capitalist society - proto-socialism if you like - takes over what it finds and makes something viable of it. Restored capitalist society destroys what it finds and makes a squalid mess of it. 

To force a vigorous baby back into the womb you have to chop it up first. 

Capitalism and the Western way of life bring security, prosperity and happiness to all - except they don't.

And humanity won't have security, prosperity or happiness until Capitalism and the Western way of life have been tossed into the cesspool of history along with Tsarism. And we'll dump the In-Spite-Ofs too, while we're at it.