Barcelona 2 - 2 Chelsea

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2012/apr/24/barcelona-chelsea-champions-league

Just when you think you've soon it all, your jaw is made to drop again.
Barcelona were a tsunami - but Chelsea were defences that held despite cracks and leaks.
The myth was consummated by Torres's goal coming like the rainbow after the flood...
It was like watching Muhammad Ali getting beaten over fifteen rounds by an opponent with one eye left and a broken finger.


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IMF curing the disease but killing the patient

Mike Roberts's blog  "A generation of austerity" on 18 Apr 2012 reports on the soul-searching of the IMF in relation to the possibly counter-productive effects of the massive austerity programmes it has been recommending for Europe and the US. My response was as follows:

Not to worry. As soon as enough capital has been destroyed one way or another, and as long as no political economic alternative (ie a non-capitalist workers state) is created by the leadership of the world's working classes, then the whole shebang will start moving again, accumulation will gather steam and the current nightmare will be forgotten. And so on, ad infinitum, until that alternative is created or we all get engulfed in a tidal wave of toxic flame.

None of the official explanations blaming it all on money supply, state profligacy, labour greed, protectionism, the Yellow Peril work now, have ever worked or will ever work.

I think our duty as Marxists is not to accompany the puffed-up pompous bourgeois lemmings over the cliff as their embedded Boswells. If we are to be annalists of the death agony of capitalism we should at least try to emulate Tacitus.

I'd rather we did a Preobrazhensky and applied our theory (which works) to understanding where the present economic situation finds us as a class, and how best we can use it to put our working class society in place instead of the bourgeois society which is now falling to pieces before our eyes, and has been doing so more and more visibly ever  since Marx wrote that capitalism was a thoroughly socialized hybrid economic formation trapped within the confines of bourgeois relations of production in the mid-1860s. (Capital, Book III, Ch 27)

Communism - good on paper but doesn't work

Here's a short Facebook exchange about "communism" not working. Naz had been discussing things at home with her dad.


Naz: 
Hello chops I was having a talk with my dad about communism and he was telling me that it looks good on paper, but it doesn't work. If you nationalize land there's less production, he said south africa was more successful under apartheid because they had more production. He also included that Poland had a lot more progress in 3 years of Capitalism than in 40 years of communism! Explain!! 

Thanks 

Me: 

Hi! Depends how you measure being "successful", doesn't it.

Ask him that first. Success is what? And for who? Would he be among those enjoying the "success"? Why?

Poland. "Progress" is like success - depends what you mean, how you measure it and for who.

And Russia is more appropriate to look at when it comes to what happened under the Stalinist version of "communism". Poland and the other eastern European countries did make progress under the Soviet regime, but they were also badly hit by being treated as occupied semi-colonies and forced to be run for foreign interests by agents of the foreigners.

Despite this Polish women have suffered very badly since 1990, and education and culture have been under the thumb of a very primitive Catholicism since then, too. And the jury's still out on the effects on the peasantry (the mass of small independent farmers) of the return of capitalism. So far the governments haven't dared to attack them in the interests of agribusiness the way they do in most other EU countries.

As for Russia, I don't think anyone living there thought life between 1990 and 2000 marked an improvement over Soviet days, except in relation to certain limited areas of civic rights (there was greater formal freedom of speech, but you could get shot if you exercised it) and the availability of some foreign goods. In the USSR people had money but little to buy. In post-Soviet Russia people had no money (their Soviet savings were DELIBERATELY wiped out by Yeltsin and his pro-western friends) but lots of things they could (NOT) buy with it.

Also the majority of Russians resented being governed by a drunken clown and his robber baron oligarch cronies - and the MOB, which was a genuine product of reborn capitalism. People died younger, were sicker, committed suicide more, drank more, were worse housed, got worse education and health care, had to put up with the horrors of racism, terrorism and war, and watched US-style crime grow unchecked.

Progress and success for some...

Now that was between 1990 and 2000. After Putin became president in 2000 most ordinary Russians felt an improvement came. A lot of the most important resources were brought back in to national ownership (oil, gas). A lot of the least "patriotic" oligarchs were driven abroad, jailed or bankrupted. The mob was tamed. Russia started winning international sports competitions again (like ice-hockey). Russians were very proud of Soviet achievements, and felt humiliated by Yeltsin turning them into a mockery and selling their arses to anyone with a fistful of dollars.

I'm inclined to think that Yeltsin himself was sick of being the laughing stock of the world. From super-power to mange backstreet mutt in ten years flat....k

Yeltsin chose Putin to be his successor. I'm pretty sure one of the reasons was to get his revenge on all the people who had been laughing at him to his face.

You should ask your dad what he thinks about Putin's Russia. By all the criteria of success he seems to use Russia is doing pretty well. But it's doing so by laughing in the face of the US and going back to greater state control. It's looking after its own interests, thank you very much. And of course it's tightened a lot of the civic freedoms that were relaxed after 1990.

Does that make the new Russia "communist" again?

It certainly looks like "our" (ie the West's) enemy again.

But of course the real question behind all this is what is "communism"?

Ask your dad what he thinks capitalism is, and when it started.

Ask him if he thinks capitalism in the US after independence was such a great success.

If he does, ask him if he really thinks the slavery of its first 90 years were such a great thing...

The thing is, new social systems grow, and even though they can be fundamentally stronger than previous ones (capitalism was fundamentally stronger than feudalism) their early years can be very ugly indeed.

Especially if they are surrounded by very hostile and powerful representatives of the old system doing their damndest to exterminate them, which was the case in the USSR.

And one last thing, if capitalism is so good and free and successful and progressive, how come it didn't just cheerlead the whole world to celebrate a capitalist white christmas after world war 2?

The poor people of China threw it out and laughed. Same thing in Cuba and Vietnam.

And all those millions of East Europeans just let themselves be corralled into slavery???

Stalin wanted to hand Yugoslavia to the West on a plate (like John the Baptist's head), but the Yugoslav's didn't want to be a head on someone else's plate and made their own revolution.

He did manage to hand Greece to the West, but not until the Greek people had fought and lost a revolution of their own.

Ask him to look at the world today. And ask him how attractive the rest of the world finds the US. Ask him how often he sees poor people in some war-torn part of the world running on the streets waving We Love America placards. Ask him why US soldiers don't dare walk around in jeans smoking Marlboros chatting and smiling to the locals.

Ask him what kind of success and progress a bunch of armoured SWAT goons smashing through a poor family's wall represents to the ordinary people of the world. US life on TV soaps is one thing. Murderous thugs in your back yard, pissing on your relatives' dead bodies and burning your sacred books, is another.

US forces don't even walk around smiling in places like Iceland any more.

Maybe Bob Hope and Bing Crosby looked like success and progress once. And John Wayne. But they're dead and no one wants them back. Their success has turned out to be a huge historic failure. US history is on fast rewind. Right now we're back in the Great Depression.

Have a great day, Naz! I

I'm taking the dog out for a walk now...

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Why are Finnish schools so successful?

A blog article in the Guardian described the success of the Finnish school system:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/teacher-network/teacher-blog/2012/apr/09/finish-school-system

I commented:

The "free everything" element is not true of higher education. Tuition is free, and that's your lot. Living costs are high, accommodation is hard to find, and materials are not cheap.
The utopian tone of the article is a pity, cos it weakens a very strong case. Finland is riven by class differences and the usual social, economic and political tensions of well-off capitalist countries. Life is hard for wage-earners, and tough for the poor and for immigrants. And the egalitarianism (within class boundaries NB) is soured by Lutheran killjoy look-after-number-one-ism and who-the-fuck-do-you-think-you-are-ism. (Personally I'd rather live in Finland than Britain but that's cos I like saunas and the smell of wood...)
What the schools show is that decent education to a high general standard is possible and can feel natural without a socialist revolution - ie it's a bourgeois democratic aspiration that isn't utopian. All it needs is the political will. 
The proof of this is in the historical record. In Britain during the first flush of the postwar Welfare State local authorities sent hordes of wage-earners' kids to university for free - not just tuition, but the works, maintenance and all. And Britain (if we believe the capitalist mantra of "getting better all the time") in those days was a far poorer and shabbier place than it is today - far less able to "afford" this kind of thing. Which shows that "affording" is not the issue. 
Same thing in Sweden during the "golden years" of their Home of the People (folkhem) welfare state - say '65 to '90. The Swedish comprehensive system, like Finland's but far less formalistic, worked wonders for the kids and national skills, culture, etc. High PISA results for instance. Dazzling performance in research, sports, culture (ABBA :-). In 1991 (I think it was) the Economist even had a panegyric about it. Great high general level of education produces the skills and attitudes needed by business and industry. Trouble is, the article was published just after the then minister of education, Social Democrat Göran Persson, soon to be prime minister, had begun the ruthless dismantling of the system the Economist loved so much. 
Swedes, compromising hypocritical bastards that they are in government, are nothing if not ruthless and single-minded when they want to be (ask any Europeans on the receiving end of the armies of Gustavus Adolfus or Charles XII :-D. They began by emulating Britain, and have now ruined the educational system so thoroughly that Britain is beginning to emulate them (how about "free schools" allowed to operate for profit??).
Again, it's not a question of "affording" anything. Sweden today is pig-richer than ever. It's the political will. If you think (as a bourgeois government) that you can get away with screwing the working class out of past concessions, you'll go ahead. Money is the whole object. And fear the decisive factor. 
So, Sweden and Britain used to be up there with Finland as admirable examples of educational achievement. Now they're slithering in the sewers with the rest and no better than they should be.
For various reasons (including a powerful teachers lobby with real political influence) Finland is still admirable, while Sweden and Britain are despicable.
The main thing I suppose is that there are no miracles or utopias involved. Finland is nothing like Utopia. Nor were Britain or Sweden a few decades ago.

It can be done, it has been done, and it can also be undone. ABOVE ALL, IT IS NOT A QUESTION OF BEING ABLE TO AFFORD IT.


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On the economic crisis which isn't really an economic crisis...

In response to Mike Roberts's blog about a Greek pensioner killing himself in despair outside the Greek parliament, and a couple of comments there, 

http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/04/06/tsolakoglou/

I wrote the following:

Well, from this and your previous blogs it's obvious that humanity's crisis at the moment is less and less narrowly economic and more and more overtly political. The Political in Political Economy is coming to the fore. As I showed a couple of blogs ago with lots of quotes from ch 27 of Book III of Capital (on the role of credit in capitalism), by 1867 Marx already considered that capitalism had outgrown itself and was taking on more and more socialized forms of production and circulation, although remaining trapped and crippled within bourgeois relations of production. So the problems to be solved aren't economic as such - the preconditions for a non-capitalist society run by democratically associated producers (socialism) are there and have been there for one and a half centuries.

The problem, the deepest crisis of humanity, is political. As Trotsky formulated it in the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International in 1938: "

The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat."

You can't put it much clearer than that.

The leaderships of the working class on a mass scale are class traitors, from the Labour Party in Britain to the Socialist Parties in France, Spain and elsewhere, to various "revolutionary" left government parties in Latin America, to the Social Democrats of Sweden. Not to mention the counter-revolutionary regime running the non-capitalist Chinese state. The unions are as bad in their way, backing these governments, worldwide, and in the US even backing an openly bourgeois pro-plutocrat party.

In an economic perspective the most glaring symptom of this betrayal is the total capitulation to the bourgeoisie on the economic theory front. Nowhere among the working class leaderships is Marxist economics taken seriously - and hardly even among the more truly revolutionary (and small) parties.

So the working class is not just politically blind, in that it is force-fed bourgeois policies and whipped into the polling booths to vote for its own flaying, but it is economically blind as to the part it plays in creating society's wealth (flaunted by super-rich individuals and corporations) and running the whole system of production and distribution (against its own interests).

So basically if we are to resolve the deepest crisis of humanity we need to fuse the two aspects of social life, and bring more economics into politics and more politics into economics.

Someone once characterized Soviet citizens as "ferociously egalitarian", and what we need is to be "ferociously revolutionary" if we are to remove the capitalist system and create an egalitarian and democratically run society.

Feeling hopeless

On Facebook a progressive professional colleague of mine posted a cartoon with the caption: "My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane."
This was echoed by almost everyone in the thread. I reacted sharply:

Marx was once asked in one of those parlour games "What is your idea of happiness?" His answer was simple: "Fighting". (zu kämpfen). Any rugby player knows what he means. This depression is pure black magic - the propaganda machine makes us think it's all hopeless (QED so to say) so we feel passive and powerless. But if you look at the explosions of discontent that erupt all around, with people fighting heroically against what seem to be insuperable odds, then humanity isn't passive, and often enough not powerless either, cos the dictators and repressive scum get thrown out on their ear regardless.
The dissenterati (aka "fake left") also do their bit to oil the machine (eg "CounterPunch" and pundits like Tariq Ali. They dispute the strategy of the rulers, but speak as if it's only them as individuals who can see what's up. That is, the masses are inanimate clay, sullenly and stupidly refusing to be quickened by the genius of the dissenterati. (Arundhati R is one of these but with much closer ties to struggle, and a correspondingly less fatalistic and depressing message.)
Shutting your ears to the deafening din of the cheerleaders and the skulkers sticking pins in them is salutary. But we don't have to shut ourselves up into our own little individualist boxes.
What sanity I have comes from a) knowing that humanity is where it's at, and humanity is not the ruling bourgeoisie or its lickspittle goons or the court jesters dissenting to general merriment and being flung chewed-on pieces of gristle from the table. It's billions of us with very elementary human needs that are deliberately being spat on. And b) knowing that all real (ie organized, mass-oriented) struggle taps into the strength of humanity, and its most powerful creative force, the working class -- presently covered over by the congealed sewage of our "labour leaders" and "progressive politicians", but smouldering and rumbling beneath the surface ready to erupt and flow free.
I'm not the pathetic old fraud I see in the mirror each morning, but a vital representative of human liberation. Whereas the rulers see vital representatives of civilization and justice in the mirror each morning, while they are in reality nothing but puffed up leprous reptiles.
We underestimate the huge amounts of money and energy they need to expend to keep us covered in shit - the truth is hard to hide! But we underestimate our own power and the simplicity of the measures required to do away with these vampires for good.
Let's put it this way - fighting is simple - but not easy.
So brighten up and pull your heads out of your arses - it's dark and shitty in there (like Plato's cave ;-). Breathe clean air and enjoy the sun!