Eppur si muove

Unprofessional advice on professional editing

2012-02-15T13:48:00.000+01:00

A practising professional editor just wrote a terrible blog post on common "grammatical errors":
http://litreactor.com/columns/20-common-grammar-mistakes-that-almost-everyone-gets-wrong

I commented as follows:

I agreewith jcasey and the others who think this is a bad article. It's also dangerousand destructive.

Dangerous,because it misrepresents so many aspects of language use, even written fairlyformal usage, ie it's misleading. And it's misleading to a high degree and somuch the worse because it's written by a practising editor, ie someone sittingin judgment.

Whichis why it's destructive - it puts all the focus of writing on the wrong things.A lot of commentators have pointed out that most of the quibbles are about worduse, not grammatical structures. Since a lot of the points are (to say theleast) "moot", a lot of inexperienced or unsure reader/writers willbecome even more anxious about their use of language and dry up rather thanstate their views.

Markmakes a lot of useful distinctions, including prescriptive and descriptive. Butprescription, ie language dictatorship, is rooted in description regardless.The distinction of "educated" is more useful, but then the questionis educated to what degree? And with what result?

A realeducation won't lead to mechanical pedantry, and mechanical pedantry is exactlywhat this article gives us. It's education to the level of Word's grammar andusage check. God help us all. Semi-educated, half-baked. A mid-level languagebureaucrat's plateau. Style and usage by decree.

Thisworked partially and for a time in the heyday of Classical French, but it'snever ever worked in English, and in fact it has only served to provoke thescorn and amusement of good English writers. Mocking linguistichyper-correctness and up-tight (f)rigidity is a red-blooded tradition in our language,as is its whoring around with its own dialects and each and every otherlanguage it comes into contact with.

Educatedusers of language who wants to get their ideas across with vigour (yes I'mBritish) and grace will follow the adage: "Laws are for the guidance ofwise men and the obedience of fools". There are NO FORMAL RULES inEnglish. There are deep-seated grammatical (syntactical, lexical andphonological rules), and breaking these will break communication to a greateror lesser extent, but ain't no way nohow breaking formal rules will blunt anargument or detract from its power. (Check out Labov's 1972 article"Academic Ignorance and Black Intelligence" for an incontrovertibledemonstration of this.)

Or, asthe King of Hearts said to Alice:

"Takecare of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves."

THE CLASS CHARACTER OF CHINA

2012-01-30T12:19:00.001+01:00

A discussion on FaceBook. Mine is the final comment.

DB: Alan the Spart family are about the only groupsthat still hold to China being a DWS. Surely you recognise the long process ofrestoration of the LOV starting in the villages in 78, extending to the SOEsand SEZs in the 80s and becoming prevalent in the 90s and 2000 as China joinedthe WTO and rapidly expanded into the global market. Restoration was onlypossible because it did defeat workers opposition. The SOE workers fightingmass sackings in the 80s were defeated. The students and intellectuals fightingthe corrupt party officials taking backhanders from capitalism were defeated atTienanmen in 89. The CCP at the 14th Congress in 92 was then able to announcethe adoption of the LOV and hence its defence of capitalist social relations.At that point the class character of the state changed. Your position is hardlydifferent from the Maoists today who see China as still socialist because ofthe CP rules behind a veil of 'market socialist' ideology. They are dangerouslydeluded and so are you.
A G: So you have accepted that reformism in reversehas occurred in China with a state power seamlessly changing its classnature...
D B: The defeats of workers in the late 80s and in the 1989crisis were not 'reforms' but a series of counter-revolutions that destroyedthe remaining potential of workers and peasants to stop the restorationists whoby 1992 were able to change ithe class character of the state marking thedecisive victory of the counter-revolution. From that point on workers andpeasants would have to fight for a socialist revolution against a capitaliststate.

CM: Sorry Dave, but the Sparts aren't the only ones to seeChina as a DWS or hold that neither a bourgeois counter-revolution or arestoration of capitalism has taken place. The only real historical parallel(ie guide) we have to the process ofrestoration is the USSR. There we have seen extreme political degeneration takeplace in the late 20s and the 30s, with much bloodshed, and we have a Marxistanalysis of the process provided by Trotsky in the Revolution Betrayed.Economic and full-scale bourgeois restoration took place formally, with thelegal abolition of the workers state, in 1991.

Now, if we are to use this real historical development inour analysis of world events the first thing we must do is take note that evenafter a full-scale quasi-fascist political counter-revolution in the SovietUnion (Trotsky's characterization, not mine), the socio-economic foundations ofthe workers state were strong enough to hold back full-scale restoration (ieeconomic and social counter-revolution for six whole decades counting from1930.

The character of this socio-economic counter-revolution is aNEW phenomenon. It's HISTORICALLY UNPRECEDENTED. And we have not yet had aserious full-scale Marxist analysis of it.

What we can say prima facie (just on the face of things) isthat the working class has been hit in every aspect of its life by the restoredbourgeois-capitalist state. Health, welfare, education, culture, security,legal rights (!!), working conditions, employment, exploitation of labour.Things weren't good under Stalinism (in fact they were fucking awful), but wehave seen that there has been plenty of scope for further and more brutaldeterioration.

The shocking thing for most of us (as Marxists) was that thecounter-revolutionary coup was radically different from bourgeoiscounter-revolutionary coups we have witnessed - the Kissinger-Pinochet coup inChile is paradigmatic.

Since the Stalinist bureaucratic counter-revolution waspartial (ie political) and "peaceful", we should perhaps have beenprepared to expect a similar chain of events during the bourgeoiscounter-revolution. The bloodshed and suffering came after the coup, not duringit.

And the bourgeois counter-revolution was accompanied by anuprising of the people against the bureaucracy. The people helped throw thebaby of the workers state out with the filthy bath-water of the counter-revolutionaryregime. This is hugely paradoxical, but it's a logical consequence of thehatred aroused among workers and oppressed people in general by a repressiveregime.

The bureaucracy paved the way for the socio-economiccounter-revolution, but it only came to fruition after decades of deliberateneglect and mismanagement.

OK, so what has this got to do with China?

Everything. The Chinese revolution wiped out capitalism onthe mainland, but the workers state it created was run from the outset by acounter-revolutionary bureaucracy - hence the term Deformed Workers State.

The rule of the bureaucracy as a bureaucracy managing (inits deformed and counter-revolutionary way) the new socio-economic system as anational whole has NOT CHANGED FUNDAMENTALLY. The bureaucracy as a massivewhole is still VERY MUCH IN CHARGE. And it is supported by the army and militiawhich of course form an integral part of the bureaucracy.

What we need to understand is that THE BASIC INTERESTS OFTHIS MASSIVE BUREAUCRACY in the currentworld situation of capitalist crisis and political degeneration ARE NOT SERVEDONE JOT BY A FULL-SCALE BOURGEOIS-CAPITALIST SOCIO-ECONOMIC RESTORATION. Theyare doing extremely well thank you very much as things are now. THE MASS OF THECHINESE BUREAUCRACY - and they are much more secure in their positions than anySoviet bureaucrats were - HAS EVERYTHING TO LOSE AND NOTHING TO GAIN FROM AFULL-SCALE RESTORATION OF CAPITALISM IN CHINA.

In my view this is the clearest description of the currentsituation in China. There is a political regime fundamentally deformed from thestart, and extreme economic deformation. This economic deformation cannot bedescribed as fundamental in any Marxist sense however. Yet. To becomefundamental a real socio-economic counter-revolution is needed, and that hasn'thappened yet.

It is impossible to imagine the horrors of a full-scalerestoration in China with its massive but submerged class tensions (acircumstance note by Trotsky in relation to the Soviet Union in the RevolutionBetrayed) and the extreme and murderous poverty lurking under the surface likedragons in the Yangtze River.

One more crucial factor is the HISTORICAL TIME SCALEinvolved. The USSR survived as a workers state for six decades despite the pressuresbrought to bear on it by an overwhelmingly hostile and aggressive imperialistworld and the catastrophic mistakes of the Stalinist regime - the victory ofNazism in Germany and the Second World War, to only take the most obvious andappalling examples of this.

CHINA, after (say) two decades of similar but nowhere nearas extreme pressure, has not been politically or economically threatened as astate by imperialism since the seventies. Imperialism has been in full crisissince then, completely unstable and completely dependent on destruction andglobal oppression for its survival. The only reason it was able to push theSoviet Union over the brink was the total destruction of the organizational andpolitical independence and sense of identity of the working class achieved bythe bureaucracy over seven extremely harsh decades.

The arena of the world class struggle today is determined bythe growing decrepitude and desperation of imperialism, and the growing powerand prosperity of China. (India is in the middle and Brazil is looking on, soto speak.)

While the nature of the world class struggle - as Trotskystated in the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International - is chieflycharacterized by the lack of revolutionary leadership in the working class.

As I see it, we have to see this, acknowledge the EXTREMEPOLITICAL AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC CONTRADICTIONS in play, and realize that THEQUESTION OF CHINA IS ABSOLUTELY CENTRAL IN THE FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF THE CLASSSTRUGGLE AND OUR PART IN IT. WE MUST APPLY REVOLUTIONARY DIALECTICS TOUNDERSTAND AN UNPRECEDENTED WORLD SITUATION. Only then will we take thestruggle forward and move beyond 1950.

Barcelona - Real Madrid, Copa del Rey, 25 Jan 2012

2012-01-26T14:29:00.000+01:00

What a match!
RM like a hurricane sending non-stop bolts of lightning screaming down on Barcelona. Barça like a flock of seabirds weaving their way through the raging elements to peck out the eye of the storm god.
I've never seen Madrid press so high and hard, or Barcelona pass with such speed and precision under such close and aggressive marking.
No time for showboating, and precious little time to think at all. Ronaldo without the preening! Özil like a mercurial mix of Messi and Beckham (!). Puyol's one-man drive down the whole pitch! Kaká on form! Xavi and Xabi playing blinders. Pepé getting his come-uppance from Messi. Ramos everywhere, Pinto running the gamut, Piqué strong and supple, Casillas requiring every goal against him to be a miracle...
And Danny Alves rounding it all off with that miracle goal.
Now just imagine being part of all this in the flesh!
What a match...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2012/jan/25/barcelona-real-madrid-copa-del-rey

What to do when they smack us down

2012-01-12T15:33:00.000+01:00

The following was posted on Facebook:

S M

aren't these companies supposed to obtain permits before they can proceed to fracking? shouldn't those permits detail the hazards the local population will be exposed to? when are we going to consider the precautionary principle?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-09/fracking-moratorium-urged-by-u-s-doctors-until-health-studies-conducted.html

Fracking Moratorium Urged as Doctors Call for Health Study

www.bloomberg.com

The U.S. should declare a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing for natural gas in populated areas until the health effects are better understood, doctors said at a conference on the drilling process.

I commented:

S - just asking questions like this isn't enough. The answer is "of course", followed by "so???". They've got to have their power to disregard humanity (and the world) removed, by force if necessary. They *never* hesitate to use force to further their ends. One example should be enough to demonstrate this: the US-engineered Pinochet coup in Chile in 1973 - copper. They use force (preferably the threat of force, but that's just icing on the cake) to keep us and our interests out of power. When did you ever see an election where power over the economic structure of society was an issue? Or if there was, where it was allowed to take place, or if it still did, where the result was allowed to stand? Or, if the result stood, where the issue wasn't finally decided by force? Again Latin America provides a myriad examples."If voting could change the system, it would be illegal."When they butcher and torture our families and friends and destroy our communities, it doesn't help to stand by and weep. Libya. Syria.

S M responded:

i hear you. is there a peaceful way, though?

I replied:

Nope. Never has been. No system has changed without the violent ejection of those profiting from it. Today we have a big problem. Previous system revolutions have started piecemeal - you could see a tide rising around the rocks - like the welling capitalist enclaves under slavery (in Rome say) and in the bourgeois city-states of Italy after the fall of the Roman Empire. Today the bourgeois capitalist system is entrenched worldwide and has to be overcome on a world scale - this is a much greater challenge. This doesn't mean every country all at once - the October Revolution and the post-ww2 revolutions showed us that. But capitalism will keep savaging humanity until the non-capitalist socialist system dominates the world economy. If previous oppressive systems were rocks swallowed up by a tide, capitalism is a pressure cooker (goatskin bottle) that will explode from the pressure building up inside it. The better the precision we use in cutting our way out, the less destructive the explosion will be. Which means that the more we know about this process, the better our chances - both of getting out and in fact of surviving at all as a civilized species.

Om svenska skolan - on Swedish education

2012-01-04T23:42:00.000+01:00

En mycket vass artikel av lärarförbundets ordförande om den svenska skolan efter 20 år av kommunalisering och privatisering:

http://www.expressen.se/debatt/1.2660199/metta-fjelkner-bjorklunds-svek-ar-farligt-for-sverige

En slö och trög och infam (han har mage att åberopa Vygotsky!!) reaktion på verkligheten som ligger till grund för Metta F:s artikel -- dvs på SVT:s dokumentärserie 'Världens bästa skitskola' -- finns här:

http://johankant.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/varldens-basta-skitskola-del-1-kommentar-2

Min korthuggna kommentar till denna reaktion:

Mycket korthugget, tyvärr:
1. Om man ska ha betyg ska de vara relativa. "Absoluta" betyg funkar INTE. I England har de funnits (bokstäver o allt) mycket länge, och betygsstegen befolkas av passande socialgrupp, inget annat. Absoluta betyg kräver att lärarna har mycket god insikt i ämnet och lärarna har inte det. Dessutom är fokus omöjlg i relation till absoluta betyg. Relativa betyg utgår däremot från att de flesta barn är normala (38% treor) och att bättre och sämre prestationer är avvikande - mycket bra och mycket dåliga prestationer är mycket avvikande (7% var femmor och ettor). Lärare klarar att se prestationsskillnader mellan elever bättre än de klarar att bedöma elevernas insiktsgrader. Särskilt när de har standardprov till hjälp.
2. Skolan är utslagsmaskin lika mycket som utvecklingsmaskin. Alla betygssystem bidrar till utslagning. Relativa betyg är öppnare och tydligare när det gäller denna funktion. Barnen sorteras i förhållande till varandra som grupp, som socialt kollektiv. Absoluta betyg ger sken av att barn bedöms i relation till en absolut kunskapsmängd. Förljuget hyckleri både i relation till skolans utslagnings- och sorteringsfunktion och till kunskap och inlärning som kultur- och samhällsgärning.
3. En del av mina fd kollegor (jag var gru-lärare i Norra Botkyrka under många år) trodde (i sin utopiska enfald) att kommunalisering plus absoluta betyg skulle tvinga skolpolitikerna att förse skolan med de medel som behövdes för att möta elevernas utbildningsbehov. Nu vet de att verkligheten inte fungerar så.
4. Min egen karriär som lärare sammanfaller med yrkets fullständiga nedgång och skolans kollaps - från en institution med hög allmän kunskapsnivå som gav de flesta förutsättningar att fortsätta ett steg till i en utbildning, till en rad institutioner med låg ojämlik kunskapsnivå där många inte får med sig förutsättningarna för att gå vidare i en utbildning. Jag har alltså bevittnat det statistiska förfallet med egna ögon, och känt slagen på min egen rygg.
5. Dagens skola betjänas av tidsstudieterrade lönesättningslismande lärarhjon. Den leds av - tja - folk som tycker att kronor och ören är de enda argument som behövs. Och planeras och styrs av ideologiskt förblindade vinstgynnare.
6. Kontentan? Skolan formas av samhället, samhället formas inte av skolan. Ska vi ändra skolan (och därmed våra barns möjlighet till allsidig kunskaps- kultur- och samarbetsutveckling) så ska vi ändra på samhället.

Judging China using western economic criteria

2012-01-04T20:20:00.002+01:00

China is different - as I argue below in a FaceBook discussion

China's epic hangover begins - Telegraph

www.telegraph.co.uk

China's credit bubble has finally popped. The property market is swinging wildly from boom to bust, the cautionary exhibit of a BRIC's dream that is at last coming down to earth with a thud.

December 15, 2011 at 10:53am

Choppa Morph Chinacan't be judged using western economic criteria. In the first place westerneconomic theory is bollocks - they can't understand their own economy(nation-based imperialism and world capitalism) for starters - just look at themess in the US and Europe that they are helpless before and can't give anycoherent explanation for. In the second place - and I assert this withtremendous confidence - China is not fundamentally capitalist. It's still adeformed workers state. The Stalinist USSR degenerated monstrously in thepolitical field, less in the economic. China is monstrously deformedeconomically, less in the political field (Trotsky made direct comparisons withfascism, and was right - this can't be done with China, however much we detestits repression.
So it's a proto-socialist state that is mismanaging this appallingly - cos itdoesn't understand or want to understand Marx's economic theory. But as such itisn't subject to capitalist laws of investment or credit. Above all it doesn'tneed to subject itself to western-style demands for short and medium termreturns on infrastructural/large-scale productive investment. The USSRoutperformed all the imperialists in terms of pave of development throughoutthe 30s. (Good stuff on this in The Revolution Betrayed by Trotsky, of course.)
Mistakes will be made and losses and lurches - how not?! - but they will havenothing the effect such things have in the imperialistworld.
If China fucks up it will be because of political action by the top bureaucracychanging horses and selling out to imperialism - as in the USSR. I don't thinkthe conditions for this are present now, for lots of reasons. The most obviousone at the moment is that imperialism is an visibly stinking and bubblingeconomic cesspool and who would voluntarily jump into that? The top bureaucratscan do very well thank you expanding their present positions as is.

December 15, 2011 at10:53am · · 1

Kriya Zur Idon't think real estate and "property market" constitutes fixedcapital investments... That is allowed greater flexibility in China than fixedCapital investments . Additionally, since land below the structure is allnationalized in China the real estate market appears very different than whatit does in India which also means that the property market"swindling" in China would have much lesser effect

December 15, 2011 at11:58am ·

R H S ‎> since land below thestructure is all nationalized in China...
Just in Australia....

December 15, 2011 at 12:06pm ·

Kriya Zur Eminentdomain ?

December 15, 2011 at12:07pm ·

Kriya Zur ‎@Robert: What acc. to you would be non-capitalist ownership of land then ?

December 15, 2011 at12:24pm ·

R H S Not sure if stateownership is necessarily non-capitalist. In Australia you only can rent land,not buy. This gives income to the state and a certain 'grip' on real estate,but the overall effect does not seem to be very different from owning land andpay taxes over it perceived value.

December 15, 2011 at12:45pm ·

Kriya Zur Thatstill doesn't answer my question. Presuming that government ownership of landis merely another form of capitalism where private property technically doesn'texist, what then IS non-capitalist property ? Also there's a contradiction andvagueness in your comment you say that the government has a "grip"over real estate but then say that "the overall effects don't seem to bevery different from owning land and pay taxes over it perceived value" .The contradiction is that there is no ownership of land by private persons andall land is owned by the government so how is the tenant able to SELL the landwhich he does not own ?

December 15, 2011 at12:57pm ·

R H S The very word property isa capitalist concept, so I'm at a loss what you're looking for.
When the stae owns all land, the possesor of a certain piece of land does notsell, it, but just passes the lease contract to somebody else. He can chargewhatever he s, providing he finds acandidate. I assume however that 'the state' (/municipality/whatever) has aveto. Not very different from the western concept where the state may veto orregulate the *use* of any land, whoever the owner.

December 15, 2011 at1:04pm ·

O C China is not so strongthan we believe. Not all people live well. There is a big difference betweentowns and country. The last people live Mao´s times.

December 15, 2011 at3:11pm ·

Adhiraj Bose ‎@Robert :There cannot not be a Socialist property that is an impossibility. Every socialform be it Capitalist or Socialist is based on how property is used andorganized. In fact the very difference between systems in how property isorganized between one and the other. Capitalism differs from Feudalism in thatit can be freely transferred and owned by private persons excersizing theirfree will based on their wealth rather than their birth as it was with feudalnobility. Under Socialism the private aspect of ownership logically would standabolished in favor of Social ownership. In transition this necessarily meansthe state having complete ownership of property. More important than that ofcourse ... is who controls the state i.e. which class controls the state.

December 15, 2011 at5:09pm ·

R H S Evidently we live a worldapart, both geographically and historically. When we had a feudal system, inwhat we call the Middle Ages, a big and wealthy middle class existed and theytransferred property between them all the time.
"Social ownership" as in 'Everything belongs to all of us and nobodyis responsable'? I wish you a great future.
The question 'Which class controls the state' reveals where you're coming from;in a functional democracy there are no classes and the state is controilled bywhover won the last elections.
BTW My son H S livedin Pune the last half year!

December 15, 2011 at7:39pm ·

Kriya Zur ‎@Robert: Read up some English history then :-) and see how Common law came intoexistence. On the point of 'responsibility' have you heard of such things asCOOPERATIVES ! :-) *( P.S : Amul cooperative is a $3bn enterprise :) )

December 16, 2011 at 9:35am ·

Cuba - imperialism, bureaucracy, socialism

2012-01-04T14:13:00.001+01:00

An article in Havana Times dealt with some pressing issues, and got a dismissive "workers control of the workplace" response, so I responded to both the article and the comment.

Cuba: Counter-revolution vs. Socialist Utopia

http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=58814

Pedro Campos
HAVANA TIMES, Jan 1 — The genuine counter-revolution doesn’t conceal itself, it protests openly against socialist utopia with arguments like this:

“No. It’s not possible. It can’t be done under the current conditions. We cannot develop large-scale cooperativism, self-management and the consequent democratization of society. The objective and subjective conditions don’t exist.

“We have to first develop capitalism, letting domestic and foreign capital develop the country. They will return to modernize the sugar industry and all other industries, ports and communications for us, though we need a strong and organized working class. Furthermore, imperialism is right here; it could easily appropriate self-managed cooperatives and enterprises and take advantage of democratization to get rid of the historic leaders and put the old oligarchy back in power.”
Those who express such notions — and reveal their leanings toward the new Chinese imperialism — cannot even fool elementary school children. In any case, imperialism, which is one sole entity, can paint itself blue, yellow or red and it would be very easy to appropriate the assets of the government.

These assets belong to “all” in words, but which in truth, the only ones who feel like they are owners are the members of the bureaucratic class, who are increasingly isolated from the people.

If properties belong to the people — to individuals or collectives, to work groups or community groups, to freely associated workers or the self-employed — then all of this would indeed be very difficult for imperialism.

It would not be the same to confront and expropriate a bureaucratic state, ready and willing to share economic power with foreign capital, as it would be to take on people who own the means of production and control their destiny.

The supporters of statism spout a line that sounds orthodoxly Marxist (“the great development of the productive forces of capitalism and the wealth it generates is what will bring on socialism”).

Yet they have destroyed the country’s economy, squandered its resources and compelled its youth, professionals and technicians trained by the Cultural Revolution to choose between leaving the country or selling churros [strips of fried dough] and ice cream cones.

They have in fact become the main brake on the development of new forms of socialist production.

The enemies of de-statization are opposed to the turning over the management and control of the profits of state-run enterprises to workers’ councils. The statists are the ones who are blocking the establishment of an extensive cooperative law for industry and services, while at the same time they prioritize wage exploitation by private wealth.

They are preventing the elimination of the multitude of absurd state monopoly regulations on the market, rejecting the urgently needed unification of the currency and impeding other changes.

In short, they are the ones who are retarding the development and strengthening of the Cuban revolutionary process. They are obstructing the socialization and democratization of economic and political power.

Whether they achieve their objectives or not, only time will tell. What is clear is that many young people, workers, professionals, technicians, homemakers and retirees who have spent their lives for this lamentable system of “state socialism” are unwilling to continue putting up with the deceit.

They’re demanding radical changes to the state-centric economic and social policies of the party/government.

These same people from below — on their own and without waiting for the readiness or approval of the established bureau-bourgeoisie — are carrying out various life-important economic, social, cultural and political initiatives outside of state institutions.

It is within those institutions where many are grabbing on, attempting to control everything possible in society while accusing their opponents complicity with the imperialist enemy.

Any initiatives from outside bureaucratic control are met with the slogan, “Either you are with us, or you are with the imperialist enemy.” For them, then, there are no more options.

One has to ask themself: Who have been the true accomplices of the imperialist enemy?

Have they been those who have shown through their policies that “socialism” — which has never existed — has been a social, economic and political disaster. Are they those who have succeeded in making most people not even want to hear the word “socialism”? Those who have made Latin Americans reject socialism as an approach to people bettering their lives and living more freely?

Are the true accomplices of the imperialist enemy those of us who want socializing and democratizing changes now, with less state and bureaucratic control over the economy and politics?

Alternatively, are they the supporters of counter-revolutionary immobilism, who are counting on foreign investment and private capitalism to save their state-centered bureaucratic wage-labor model of the neo-Stalinist cut, to later “try” to reintroduce the cycle of bourgeoisie expropriation by the “working class”?

Are the accomplices of the enemy the ones who have never set out to change production relations of capitalism?

Are they the ones who wish to deepen the revolution and change everything that resists it or are they those who in the name of change don’t want to change anything, so that everything remains the same, especially the same bureaucracy that has held political power for a half a century and has led the country to the current disaster?

Are they the ones who turn to various forms of violence and repression to combat those who peacefully advocate different ideas?

Likewise, the following will also have to be answered: Can the majority of those old, reactionary, conservative, stiff and accustomed brains, with their old, authoritarian, bureaucratic-centralism-educated ways of command and control change their mindsets, as is demanded by those at the heights of power when self-recognizing the incapacity of the centralized system?

Wouldn’t it be better to set aside those stuck in neo-Stalinism thought and instead empower the people, the younger generations, to democratically develop new forms of social, economic and political organization and new leaders demanded by the changing situation, instead of seeking a “cadre policy” aimed at ensuring the perpetuation of “everything that must be changed”?

I hope the party conference this January will help in finding answers to these questions, whether by action or omission.

2 RESPONSES TO “CUBA: COUNTER-REVOLUTION VS. SOCIALIST UTOPIA”

Grady Ross Daugherty says:
January 3, 2012 at 2:32 am
Like all Marxists, comrade Pedro apparently believes that only state property is socialist, and that socialist property can only be that owned by the state. The fact that he calls for democratic running of state-owned enterprise by the workers does not alter the fact that he is, in a programmatic sense, a state monopoly socialist.
The old Utopians made the programmatic error of abolishing private productive property rights immediately. Those entering their exemplary communes put everything into the communal pot, and this was going to show the world how communism could be exampled and built right now, without a multi-generation bridge to is elimination.
The Marxists speak of socialism as a bridge to a society without private property, then force the abolition of private property onto society at the beginning of the bridge journey. It has never worked.
Marxism makes the same programmatic error as the Utopians, by making everything productive common, state property, as did Cuba by 1968. Pedro Campos still cannot understand that workers can only achieve democratic self-management of the workplace by owning it directly. He clings to the fantasy that someday, somehow the workers could and would achieve workplace democracy under state monopoly ownership socialism.
Reply
- THIS IS MY RESPONSE:
  
  January 4, 2012 at 4:57 am
  Grady thinks that direct workers ownership of the workplace will bring socialism. If that ownership is capitalist – which it will be if the state hasn’t expropriated the capitalist bourgeoisie – then the workers will start off exploiting themselves and before long transform themselves into capitalists using the labour of workers imported from outside the workplace. This is anarchist, autonomist utopianism.
  
  But for a state to expropriate capitalism, it can’t be a bourgeois state – the bourgeoisie won’t expropriate itself. Individual bourgeois rivals – of course! But not the whole class. And to create a non-bourgeois non-capitalist state you need an anti-capitalist revolution that tears the means of production (land, factories, finance) out of the hands of the bourgeoisie, and takes them into its own hands defending them against the raging bourgeoisie/imperialism by force of arms.
  
  The problem of a non-capitalist state run by a reactionary privileged bureaucracy is one facing every workers (plus peasants) revolution. Revolutions can degenerate, and the harsher the pressure from imperialism, and the less well-developed the material preconditions for modern production, the easier this degeneration is. This was seen in the USSR in the 1920s in the losing battle fought by the revolutionary Left Opposition against the degenerating Stalin-led wing of the Communist Party. The defeat of the revolutionaries led to the political degeneration of the USSR and ultimately to its capitulation to imperialism in 1991. And made the successful anti-capitalist revolutions in Yugoslavia, Vietnam and China deformed from the start, since they took the degenerated Soviet Union as their model. No workers democracy – in fact, anything but workers democracy!
  
  Before the threat of imperialist restoration in China (the biggest threat) or Cuba (most important for Latin America and the Americas including the US) can be properly tackled, all this historical experience needs to be examined, understood and assimilated. Which means spreading and discussing in depth the issues and arguments in the 1920s when the revolutionary fire was still bright in the Soviet Union. Which means discussing the Left Opposition and most significantly the arguments and positions of its leader, Leon Trotsky, whose role in the October Revolution together with Lenin can be compared to the teamwork of Fidel and Che in Cuba, with the difference that Lenin and Trotsky were incomparably better versed in Marxism and more deeply rooted in working class revolutionary activity.
  
  Pedro passes over this completely. And this makes his well-meaning words a bit like foam on the waves. History and the workers revolutionary movement are the ocean and the Gulf Stream, speeches detached from these are liable to be flung in the air by a rock and swept away by the wind.

Learning poems by heart - and censorship of "foreign"

2011-11-03T18:06:00.000+01:00

A nice piece in the Guardian about the benefits of learning poems by heart at school.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/mortarboard/2011/nov/03/fielding-poetry-rime-of-raving-dotard
My comment was inexplicably deleted. Here it is anyway - followed by my follow-up comment...

One of the best things you can give the kids at school - all categories.
And the better your choice, the greater the treasure they carry with them through life.
If it's memorable, they'll memorize it - even if it's memorable only for your own enthusiasm or the blood and thunder Fagin/Frankenstein presentation.
That's a teacher's view. As a kid, I remembered a lot - as pointers, not as whole poems. The mountain sheep are sweeter/But the valley sheep are fatter./We therefore deemed it meeter/To carry off the latter... Ours not to reason why/Ours but to do or die/Into the valley of death/Rode the six hundred... St Agnes Eve - Ah, bitter chill it was/The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass./Numb were the beadsman's fingers as he told/His beads. His beads he told, this patient holy man.... O Wild West Wind, thou breath of autumn's being... If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind.
Non-pointing wholes were the exception - Ozymandias (how not!), a couple of Wordsworth's things, Tyger, Jabberwock, and a fair few Donne Falling Stars.
But later, learning languages and having runs to pace, I got into Chaucer - original Prologue some way in, and Latin, Catullus, Horace and my special favourite the invocation to Venus and Spring and Epicurus of De rerum natura.
Banging it in.
Benefits so great I even got my 8th grade immigrant kids in the Stockholm ghetto school to work through Vivamus mea Lesbia atque amemus in enough detail to get it by heart if they wanted to. (The Latinos helped with the first vocab runthrough).
Rhythm, word music, real life - all resonating inside as Wystan says. Ignore crabbed age and celebrate golden youth.
In der Jugend goldnen Schimmer... Unter den linden,/ an der heide/da unser zweie bette was,/da muket ir finden/schone beide/gebrochen bluomen unde gras./Vor dem walde in einem tal - /tandaradei! - /schone sanc diu nahtergal...
And if you want to learn Swedish, try Fröding...
Havet välte, stormen ven,
vågorna rullade asklikt grå.
"En man är vräkt över bord, kapten!"
"Jaså."
So much for God.
"Den dröm som ej aldrig besannats,
som dröm var den vacker att få.
För den som ur Eden förbannats,
är Eden en Eden ändå."
So much for the cynics.
Or Ferlin:
"Du har tappat ditt ord och din papperslapp,
du barfota barn i livet.
Nu sitter du åter på handlarns trapp,
och gråter så övergivit.
Vad var det för ord, var det långt eller kort?
Var det väl eller illa skrivit?
Tänk efter nu förrn de föser dig bort,
du barfota barn i livet..."
So much for the Tories and Gradgrinds of this world.
Or Diktonius:
"Röd Eemili ramlade perklande raklång i snön..."
Or Almqvist:
"Men utur rike prästens ko
var den söta mjölken.
Barnen fingo stå
vid modrens bål."
So much for White Terror and witch-hunters...
Or the shortest sweetest poem I know (Yugoslav folk):
Дај
Боже
да драги
може!
Time to leave?
I will arise and go now,
and go to Inisfree,
and wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled...
And savage indignation there will no longer lacerate my breast.

[Follow-up:]
Since my comment above was deleted presumable cos some of the quotes were in foreign, I'd just like to say that most of my school learnings-by-heart were pointers not full poems. Full poems and long stretches came later when I needed to pace long runs and fill queuing with some meaning if I couldn't read or think. And a lot of the time they were in foreign.
Wystan's "resonance" is spot on. And so is the teaching power of making poems (or any resonant language artefact) your own.
That's it. As for the quotes etc you don't know what you missed.

Dealing with dumping..

2011-09-23T12:32:00.000+02:00

A nice question and answers in an agony aunt column in the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/sep/22/private-lives-relationship-ended-upset
dealt with the end of a relationship. A modern one with no professions of love for instance, but still leaving the woman devastated when she felt dumped.

My comment was:
You were spinning a cocoon, he perceived that you were erecting a cage.
As for saying you love someone or not, words don't count. He probably thought he was being honest and that you wouldn't accuse him of betraying Love. You probably thought he expressed Love by his actions and the way he looked at you and held you.
My guess is that any neediness came from a deep desire for affirmation, and that this is a wish rooted in something missing in your emotionally formative years as a child. Think about this, because if it's even partially the case you want something from a partner (ANY partner) that you can't get in an adult relationship. Affirmation between two adults is different from that in the relationship between a parent (or equivalent) and a child.
And if you weren't affirmed (ie loved for what you were) as a child, you'll be screwed as an adult till you mourn your loss (no solid emotional ground to stand on). We need firm ground to stand on, not straws to clutch at.
On a cheerful note - the abyss we keep slipping back into is never bottomless - if we touch bottom (which we can do by "letting go" ie surrendering to our misery ie mourning the loss) then we can push off up again.
Cocoons and cages (or, in the case of a lot of men, harness, reins and whip) won't do the trick. The only constraints we thrive on, that we feel good and human within, are voluntary and reciprocal.
That'll do for now, I hope.
(Maybe some other time I'll have an opportunity of developing the positive aspects of all this - they are many and strong. One to think/feel about is that deep down inside we're all the same, and have an emotional strength and resilience (capacity to spring back again) that keeps us going - and this would be impossible without great love and warmth. Our *own* inner warmth and love, deep within the heart of humanity.)

Faster than the speed of light...

2011-09-23T11:49:00.000+02:00

An article in the Guardian this morning refers to experimental evidence that neutrinos may travel faster than light.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/sep/22/faster-than-light-particles-neutrinos
This would be a revolutionary discovery if it's corroborated.
I made the following comment from a materialist dialectical perspective :

Time is just an accident of interacting material forces. So the direction of time just reflects the direction of interaction. Cause and effect is an even more fundamental axiom in our understanding of the world than the constancy of the speed of light. Meaning cause comes first and effect follows it. Without cause and effect not only would we be buggered, there wouldn't be any us to be buggered.
So indeterminacy and the rest of it is an arse-first way of saying we don't clearly understand it all yet.
So, whatever the relative speeds of photons and neutrinos, ie however rapidly they change their positions, they don't make time into a substantial phenomenon we can travel in. Things happen, including us. Because of the constancy of this, and because of our understanding as a reflection of it (ie back to front) we invented time as a measure of change. Just as we invented logic to tame the regularity in change.
Being (things and forces) is there. Thought (our inventions) helps us deal with it.
No Thought without Being. Plenty of Being without Thought.
I'll save Nothing and Becoming for another comment.

The British riots - symptoms aren't causes

2011-08-11T14:33:00.000+02:00

An article in the Guardian by Zoe Williams, who has her headed screwed on, discussed vigilanteism and its relation to a functional society.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/10/uk-riots-vigilantism-big-society
I made the following comment:

Zoe writes: "Big society might look like people on the streets with brooms or doner knives; but that's not what functional society looks like."
For a long time society has been very functional - for the bourgeoisie running a capitalist society for their own benefit and enjoying a monopoly of violence (army and police) and public judgement (ie condemnation, punishment and criminalization of their antagonists).
Now not even the bourgeoisie and its public representatives (damn near everyone in politics and the media) can run a functional society. "Those above can't rule, and those below can't be ruled".
Which leads to unofficial attack groups (ultra-right thugs, ultimately death squads) attacking the enemies of capitalism and the bourgeois state, and others who are singled out as scapegoats.
And since the rest of us need to mind our backs, we organize self-defence groups. An "invisible", organized and "orderly" class war breaks surface and becomes visible, 2-way organized (ie polarized) and "disorderly" from the rulers' perspective. And since organization, education about society and politics, creative and benevolent treatment has been cut out of the non-ruling body of those living and working (or jobless) in Britain, no one should be surprised when the social eruptions are disorganized, ignorant, anti-social, apolitical, destructive and malevolent. It happens in the slums of the US (LA) and France (Paris) and now (once more) Britain.
Given all this we should note that given the degree of damage to property there has been very very little damage to person, and given the number of the rioters the state response has been disproportionate, vindictive and divisive, to say the least. A typical image from the riots has been of a half-a-dozen heavily armoured, anonymous (super-hoodied), armed police, with leash-tugging dogs and armoured cars in the background standing over a single unarmed lad who's about to be carted off and done over (if not physically, then civically).
The howls of rage at the symptoms (sometimes ugly symptoms) are hypocritical and cynical given the wilful neglect of the causes underlying these symptoms.
And the causes are inseparable from this bourgeois capitalist society, and will only become more deeply rooted and virulent as this society becomes less and less functional even on its own terms.
Temporary alleviation was achieved with the New Deal and the Welfare State in the 30s and 40s. However, this only occurred in powerful countries after their bourgeoisies were threatened with extinction by colonial independence and revolution - oh, and after a world war that ended with ultra-imperialist Churchill being unceremoniously dumped by the workers who had fought his imperialist war for him.
So now New Deal or Welfare State for a while yet, just more of the same gouging out of living flesh. And more and more panicky squealing and scapegoating from defenders of the state as quo (with no quid).

The riots in Britain - London, Bristol, Birmingham and Liverpool so far

2011-08-09T13:56:00.000+02:00

I made the following comment on the live coverage of the riots in the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2011/aug/09/london-riots-violence-looting-live)

Very briefly - it's not the government, it's the class they represent. The bourgeoisie has a monopoly of everything public in Britain Europe and most of the world today, and they're using this public authority to smash all public enterprise, goods, services and amenities they can. To put the profits from this into their own pockets (that's what profit is - private money after productive capital investment and unproductive military and ideological expenditure are taken care of). They're looting the general public (us) using the monopoly of public violence (military, police) their system gives them, not us.
Now the most reviled and criminalized and impoverished section of the general public - immigrant, slumdwelling working class lads are reacting in the way they have seen the ruling class acting towards reviled, impoverished and criminalized foreign countries - burning and looting. But they show none of the indiscriminate ruthlessness of the bourgeoisie on the rampage in the colonial wars of Britain and France, or the imperialist wars of the US.
They are a barometer showing the way the rest of us are feeling. They can react spontaneously this way because they aren't tied down by property debt, car and other loans, or a job to lose. And have the energy of youth. The rest of us don't challenge state (class) violence so lightly.
But when we do, it will need more than thousands of police to curb us. There are so many of us that we'll be kettling them, and occupying their lives the way they have been occupying ours.
And we'll be organized, and have a clear idea about what we need to do to get them off our backs for good, and tear public wealth out of their greedy, gory hands.

Cochlea implants and discrimination against the deaf

2011-08-06T11:55:00.000+02:00

An article in the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/05/deaf-people-cochlear-implants
took up the arrogant and authoritarian attitudes of hearing experts in relation to deaf people and cochlea implants. A lot of the commentators piled in on the side of those vilifying the deaf. So I added this comment:

TimSkellet's early comment is excellent - the historical perspective is absolutely necessary here. Since sign language is a native language like any spoken language (lexicon, syntax, semantics, brain location) this whole business is the same as the ignorant and vicious attacks common in relation to bilingualism or language diversity.
The audiologists campaigning against sign language users are no different from race biologists or ethnic cleansers - or the academic thugs attacking minority languages or languages on the brink of extinction.
These implants are very expensive. The people working with implants have a vested interest in promoting the intervention. They are like Microsoft Windows propagandists in IT.
Look - as hero of the intolerant and bigoted Maggie Thatcher used to say and probably still does - minorities can chew gum and walk at the same time. If I know two languages well, say Finnish or Welsh and English, then I use them both as I choose, as I see fit, according to my whim. It's my right, just as it's my right to go into a shop and spend my money any way I like. It's none of your damn business to tell me what to buy or how to use what I buy. Western civilization. Right of ownership. What's mine is mine to use and abuse. And my language is more important to me than any consumer crap. These audiologists (and the other geocentrics I've mentioned) would scream blue murder and call in the cops and the court of human rights if they were forced, or even just pressured into using their school French instead of their native language (presumably English). Well, sign language is the English of deaf people, and oralism or cochlea speak is their school French.
And we all know that women are imperfect men and blacks are imperfect whites, so let's operate them too to assimilate them and lift them out of their miserable victimized status.
What a shitty society where imbeciles in a position of authority and status insist on either/or instead of both/and.

The Oslo bombing and massacre - right-wing terror

2011-07-23T15:33:00.000+02:00

On a discussion list a Swedish contributor was quite right about the blindness of the established bourgeois/imperialist rulers to the right-wing threat. I added a few reflections:

First a couple of general remarks beside the main point:

1) Swedish TV has been broadcasting Norwegian TV more or less non-stop since yesterday afternoon, in Norwegian, with no subtitles or translation, just as is. It's astounding how easy it is to follow. Easier than local comments from football managers or players around Sweden. Few linguistic or cultural barriers to greater political unity in the Nordic countries (the slightly greater initial linguistic problems with Denmark etc would only require a little extra good will).

2) The characteristic informal and democratic tone and approach between people in the Nordic countries has been very evident in the main. Also the lack of hysteria and the thoughtfulness in the responses even of those injured or witnessing the destruction and murder.

3) More than 80 youngsters slaughtered in a country with a small population like Norway will have a huge personal and social impact. That's a lot of families and friends and communities with a gaping emotional hole suddenly ripped open. And a whole youth movement traumatized. 500 young Social Democrats were at the camp, and almost a fifth of them were wiped out.

And now some political thoughts:

1) The immediate reactions, although guarded, were full of the established "security" (ie insecurity) perspective. Parallels to the Twin Towers, the naming of Al-Quaida, the naming of a fundamentalist cleric with asylum in Norway, discussions of police and secret police and political security readiness - the lot.

2) They all chimed in "on message". Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt. Australia. The EU. Obama, a complete reptile, obviously didn't give a fuck about the victims, but preached the need for increased cooperation between (imperialist) secret services and greater political unity (ie "toe the line").

3) The damage was huge - the street and district looked as if they'd been hit by an Israeli or US bomb or two. But more like Oklahoma City than Gaza or Fallujah.

4) The before and after contrasts were very telling. While the assumption was a fundamentalist Islam cell, the talk was all strategic, international, "security" and politics. When it was discovered it was a right-wing reactionary all this vanished and the personal aspects took over. Less "atrocity" and more "tragedy". No more stiff upper lip spirit of the blitz, but let the tears roll. In other words it was sentimentalized, personalized and trivialized. The insecurity experts were allowed to slouch off home to lick their wounds, so to say.

5) The arrested suspect (clearly responsible) is a reactionary Freemason fundamentalist Christian militia guy with a number of powerful guns (legal) who ran a small farm so he could buy 3 tons of bomb-grade fertilizer and assemble his car bomb. Blond, tall, business education. Wore police gear and looked like a cop so he had no trouble calling the youngsters at the party camp to a meeting to talk about the bombings in Oslo and then shoot them like sheep in a pen. So of course everyone started baying for Freemason blood, for total control and clamp down on the militia-like gun groups (legal), a ban on right wing Christian groups and propaganda, business education, and reactionaries. Right...

6) The full crocodile cohort was rolled out - archbishops, royalty, the more unctuous anchor guys.

7) The political implications of the party attacked (the (very unworker, very pro-bourgeois) Labour Party) were toned down immediately. Socialism and the welfare state as obvious targets for reaction were never mentioned.

8) It's easy to hate a swarthy raghead Ay-rab, but not so easy to hate a reactionary blond beast in evening dress swathed in posh orders.

9) The massive scale of the destruction and carnage (in peacetime Nordic circumstances, not Gaza, Fallujah or Kandahar) has made it difficult to find a single victim to tether the personal sentimental response to.

10) Total absence of discussion of the need for a mass, class-based mobilization aiming for secure housing, health, employment, and living conditions as the only real, deep, long-term solution to this kind of problem.

11) On the bright side, no polarizing hero-worship and demon-hatred as at the Twin Towers - no beatified fire-fighters or vilified Saudi allies (oops, I meant middle-eastern Muslims). No glazed-eyed Bush panic. Dignity and restraint. Unlikely to be any ring of steel around Gardemoen airport the way Blair surrounded Heath Row with tanks.

12) Yet again the futility of individual terror as a political weapon has been revealed. The victims had no power over policy, their deaths will harden opinion against the perpetrator(s) and encourage yet more repression and spying on citizens in their everyday lives. In this case however, the bomber and assassin may actually have furthered his cause - any repressive measures taken will almost certainly impact his enemies more than his political friends. Islam will be accused of creating an atmosphere of terror that encourages this "madman" (he will certainly be written off as a lunatic in a further trivialization of the affair) to act the way he did. So perhaps it's not the futility of individual terrorism that has been revealed, but the way it can be exploited if used cunningly and indirectly. The strategy of a successful "agent provocateur" (as used in India in Bombay for instance, regardless of whether the provocateurs are Pakistani or Indian government agents).

These are my immediate reactions.

Dialectics and the history of maths and technology

2011-04-01T18:40:00.001+02:00

Stephen Wolfram (Mathematica maths software and Alpha engineering search software) has just blogged about his acquisition of a Swedish modelling software company.

http://blog.wolfram.com/2011/03/30/launching-a-new-era-in-large-scale-systems-modeling/

Very interesting stuff.

One of the comments caught my eye. Mark wrote:

"If only someone could have effectively modeled the consequences of building six nuclear reactors next to each other in an earthquake zone right beside the ocean and a hundred and fifty miles from the thirteenth largest city on the planet. Yeah. A good model would have made all the difference. [coughs] Really. Is the answer improving our technology or is the answer improving the idiots using our technology?"

I responded:@Mark. Any model (whether made by an idiot or not) depends on the axioms involved, the first principles the algorithms have to obey. Aristotle (and Hegel, too, bless him) distinguished between dialectical reasoning and formal logic. The reasoning discovers and refines the axioms underlying a system – and since they can’t be formally proven (Gödel) they are what Hegel calls apodeictic – you can just point at them and explain that the logic of investigation, discussion, and demonstration has got you here. Euclid is about as clear as you can get on this.
None of this is Kantian, however – he expels dialectical reasoning to the black box of the Thing in Itself, and tells us basically to go hang when it comes to discovering axiomatic principles. And so much of the work of today’s science and study is based on Kant (at least lip service is paid) and the worship of formal logic, that the axioms are arrived at by trial and error.
In the case of economics and politics, the investigation process is constrained by ideology and prejudice. Our system cannot deviate from equilibrium (eg linear development) over time on average. Great. And then the crises come and are dismissed as soon as they’re over as anomalies. Inadequate axiom, catastrophic result, regardless of whether the algorithms are created by a rocket scientist or an astrologer. Sun around the earth? Same thing. Nukes on earthquake faults – our models assure us bad things can’t happen, so they won’t and they haven’t.
Bottom line, the quality of our axioms depends on our freedom from ideology and prejudice in our search for fundamental principles.
Most politicians and economists today have clout without quality, they’re always getting it wrong. Quality without clout exists too. But clout is a political thing. The Inquisition had clout without quality, Galileo had quality without clout.
In other words, Quality is Us, and US is a political war with THEM.

The necessity of Big Nuke - Monbiot again

2011-03-31T13:29:00.000+02:00

George Monbiot in the Guardian sounding off again about the necessity of nuclear power.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/mar/31/double-standards-nuclear

My response this time:

So, you're making bets with human lives for the next ten thousand years, at least. Less than one hundred years of 100 centuries have passed, and we've already seen the Bomb in action, jerry-built first generation plants, nuclear waste in the US and the USSR gone AWOL, "accidents" like Sellafield, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Ten thousand years. The final solution to waste management hasn't been solved. The history of (literate) human civilization only covers five thousand years. One or two epochs of chaos and barbarianism and we'll see Nuclear Fission generating a Final Solution for humanity - that's all of us, now and ever after.
Big Oil, and Big Coal don't threaten civilization as such. And over a perspective of ten thousand years!!
You, George, are gearing up for a really plush job as a shill for Big Nuke.
Your cred has been washed away with the toxic spill water in Fukushima they can't find storage for. And the toxicity shredding your cred will accumulate (it accumulates, remember?) over the next, oh, ten years or so, at the very least, according to Big Nuke fans. That's what they're saying about the situation as it is NOW. But this "accident" looks to non-Nuke fans very much like the beginning of a catastrophe, not the end.
Two developments will solve our energy problems in the next couple of decades.
One is certain - renewable fuels and improved efficiency.
The other still sounds hypothetical and speculative to most people, but I can assure you it isn't. It's a successful mobilization of the massed working classes and peasants of dozens of countries around the world to put an end to capitalism and its dictatorship (when did the bourgeoisie ever permit the diversity of a competitive alternative non-capitalist workers state to show its paces?)
After that Big Nuke (and yourself as Little Nuke) will be as relevant as the people who used to think the sun circled the earth.

Emergency regimes in the imperialist heartlands

2011-03-29T10:49:00.000+02:00

George Monbiot writes indignantly in the Guardian about illiberal and repressive legislation in Britain, and the tightening of the screws since Thatcher.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/28/free-protest-clegg-oh-dear?
A commentator indicated that what's good for the goose should be good for the gander. I quoted him and added my own comment:

TheGreatRonRafferty
28 March 2011 9:05PM
On the BBC earlier tonight - the announcement that hooligans wearing face coverings would be banned from demonstrations. On screen at exactly the same time - a line of police officers ....... with face coverings.
You couldn't make this stuff up!

Well, anything and everything they do to protect their economic, social and state interests is fine, even if they have to set aside constitutional rights and freedoms in the process. We've seen this in the emergency dictatorial regimes used to protect a bourgeois capitalist state in Italy (Mussolini), Germany (Hitler), Spain (Franco), Chile (Pinochet), etc, etc (just riffle through the diplomatic history of the US, Britain and France for a more complete list. If the threat from the working class and its mass of poor allies isn't quite as immediate, but still acute, you get permanent regimes of emergency mostly military goons (as in North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia etc) protecting the capitalist system. A bit less acute and a bit more constrained by the deadlock between the classes underlying classical bourgeois democracy and you get what we see in eg the US Britain and France. Sometimes desperate concessions (as in the postwar Welfare States and their equivalents) and sometimes (when the bourgeoisie feels it's got us on the ground) a good kicking and a lot of harrassment (the Thatcher/Reagan/neo-lib-con era).
If we did the same to them, their choir of media angels would stop singing hosanna in the highest and start belting out a doom-laden dies irae. We'd hear no end of the evil being done to Freedom, Democracy, Justice, National Glory, the Economy, and Joe down the Pub.
If we managed to exorcise capitalist economic insanity and set up a workers state or two, they would protect their interests (ill-gotten gains) by all measures necessary, in the name of National Glory, the Economy and Joe down the Pub, and in flagrant disregard of Freedom, Democracy and Justice. (Using Joe down the Pub to do their dirty work, of course.)
In all these instances they are evidently operating a dictatorship in the interests of the bourgeois class, all the while screaming that a corresponding dictatorship in the interests of the working class is totally indefensible, has no right to exist and must be exterminated.
Over the past couple of decades it has become obvious that Classes are still with us, and that they are still engaged in Class War. Obvious but unacknowledged, and unmentionable in respectable public discourse (eg the Beeb and the Guardian). George M and others describe the symptoms, but refuse to diagnose the cause, even less the cure. But until the cause is diagnosed and publicly acknowledged, and until there is a massive public debate on the best cure, then the symptoms will just get worse and worse.
The New Deal and the Welfare State were just desperate palliative measures (morphine to keep a dying system from feeling the agony). As soon as the worst fever abated, the mercy measures were withdrawn, and the system was back on the street as its old rapacious self, hungrier and more ruthless than ever.
And if anyone can imagine a new dispensation of Welfare State palliatives being prescribed today, in the first place they're out of their minds, and in the second place, if the inconceivable should happen, it would all be rolled back again in a few decades, for ever and ever.
So, would you rather be a naive non-combatant torn limb from limb by Freedom and Democracy Peace-Builders, or would you prefer to bite the bullet and defend yourself and yours and your own interests - the interests that are shared by everyone in the world except the rich and powerful few and their mercenary thugs and parasites?

Energy Effluent

2011-03-22T10:07:00.000+01:00

Same energy bollocks as the last blog took up. This time it's George Monbiot in the Guardian who's condemning us to millennia of fear, uncertainty and doubt:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima?

I commented:
So much for Monbiot's progressive credentials (I won't bother with "left" or "socialist").
I'm sure he's gone through the litany a thousand times... Sellafield, Chernobyl, Murmansk...
And all the US and Soviet weapons and plutonium that's been misplaced and is unaccounted for, and the fact that 100,000 years is a geological time scale, and that Sod's Law rules...
If Monby thinks that the Japanese run "crappy old plants" then god knows how he'd describe what they have in other less "timid" countries. How about some jerry-built breeder on an earthquake fault in some jerry-built nation? (err, China? the Balkans?) Volcanoes? Asteroids? Nuclear bombing (err, Israel finally loses it and bombs Iran).
There's any amount of depleted uranium just lying around in Iraq...
Final deposition? Not even "crappy old" Sweden has found the answer, let alone errr Sellafield.
In fact Monby's lost it... put all the money, scientific research, propaganda and international cooperation into renewables that's been wasted on nukes and you'd have an alternative up and running in a decade. Solar in North Africa, China, India and Australia coupled with High Voltage Direct Current transmission lines coupled with advanced storage capabilities we haven't got an inkling of yet (think video over the internet on mobiles just ten or fifteen years ago). And that's just solar.
M is either headline-hungry, money-hungry or power-hungry - we'll see which in the next few years. A Christopher Hitchins of Big Nuke.

On energy policy

2011-03-16T16:35:00.000+01:00

An exchange on a discussion list degenerated into a jeremiad about having no choice except Coal, Oil or Nuclear, whether we like it or not.

I objected, as follows:

Fossil fuels are deadly in many different ways. So are nukes.

We don't have to accept either. The alternatives are feasible, and in aggregate more than sufficient. They can (and now *will*) be developed as rapidly as nukes were during ww2 and the Cold War - money is no object when you really really want something.

Oil is shite, coal is shite, nuclear fission is shite.

Water is good (rivers, waves, tides), air is good (wind, a/c heat exchangers), earth is good (geothermal heat exchange and extraction), and fire is good (geothermal steam and direct heating in volcanic areas). Insulation and passive heating is good. Sun is good (passive heating of water and buildings, solar film, solar concentration plants).

Storage and battery technologies will soon be up to the task of evening out supply and demand, and large scale provision of power by utilities will be smoothly linked with small-scale local production, and transmission technologies will even out geographical disadvantages (High Voltage Direct Current).

There will be immense economies of energy by way of local production of power, food, etc - rooftop solar collectors, wind-turbines and gardens. Every stream will be able to produce electric power for local use.

Nuclear fusion and extraction of electricity from the environment (Tesla lives!) are good, but a few decades from use on a mass scale.

There's no point whatever in us lobotomizing ourselves to put ourselves in the position of today's rulers and fuel/power profiteers. We don't have to pretend it's a choice between Death by coal, death by oil, or death by radiation.

Their "realism" is reptilian self-interest trumpeted as the General Good by corrupt media, prostituted expertise, and worshippers of the Established Fact tm.

Our realism is removing these bastards from power and setting in motion an international drive to realize the potential I've sketched above on a scale a thousand times greater than the Manhattan Project, the Marshall Plan or the Race to the Moon.

Their approach reduces human beings to passive victims, ours magnifies them into active makers and doers.

Some elementary points about getting to socialism

2011-03-05T23:16:00.001+01:00

In a discussion on Facebook, AM wrote:

"For real socialism, look at Germany, plus the Scandinavian nations. Free elections, trade unions are respected, health care for life for all citizens, & free enterprise to make the money that makes all the above possible. China is headed in this direction, I think. Do you really want to go back to the USSR, with no money & a five-year wait for an apartment or a Trabant (car)?"and"... there are better, successful models of socialism than the old Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist one. I wish the workers of Bangladesh success in preserving trade unions!"

I responded:

AM, you can forget Scandinavia as a model of Socialism. The idiots running the crippled remains of ex-Warsaw Pact countries like Czecho/Slovakia after the so-called Velvet Revolutions had all kinds of crazy ideas about Third Way socialism based on eg Sweden. Fat lot of good it did them. Not much left of the Welfare State these days. Both Conservative and Social Democrat governments have been rolling and racheting back all the postwar gains of the workers. Education, health, pensions, workers rights, public services of all kinds all going down the drain while the "country" ie the rich just gets richer and richer.
And there's nothing odd or remarkable about it - workers get better conditions when they threaten to boot out capitalists for ever. As soon as the capitalists feel less threatened they force worse conditions on us as soon as they can.
And as Mike said, Mao and Stalin and their bureaucratic regimes have as little to do with Marx and Lenin as Hitler and Mussolini - with the exception that Mao and Stalin used Marx and Lenin as masks to fool the workers. They had to do that cos their privileges were sucked from the blood of a non-capitalist state, a workers state. Bureaucratic regimes always try to turn themselves into real hereditary bourgeois, though, rather than let the workers take power democratically. In the USSR they went the whole hog and handed over the state to capitalism. The Chinese haven't got there yet (what's the point? They're doing fine as it is,and what on earth has imperialism got to offer them that they can't fix better themselves?)
If the imperialists don't destroy the world, real socialism will come, don't worry about that. What we don't know is where or when. What we do know is that the start will be a bloody mess following the battle to oust the capitalists - they'll go far less quietly than Gaddafi - and that when things settle down they won't look ANYTHING AT ALL like the Stalinist USSR or Red China.

Almost immediately AM responded with this friendly post:

" ‎@ Choppa: best explanation I've heard yet! Thanks. Is there any country today that comes close to your ideal? Just curious."

and I replied:
Nope. But more on that another time.
Think modern bourgeois democracy before the English Revolution of 1640-60. There were no countries then anyone could point to that came close to that ideal. Yet after two centuries all the advanced countries were bourgeois democracies.
The thing is that socialism will be a worldwide system improving on the highest levels of production and quality reached by capitalism, and it will be run on the basis of workers democracy and universal cooperation and planning. We'll get there, but there's a lot of spade work to be done before we do.

2011-02-01T14:39:00.000+01:00

Mary Beard's blog reflections on a successful reunion with some old college friends and public cuts
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2011/01/old-girls-reunion.html
provoked a reactionary outburst from "Anne":

"So why this unanimity?"Because you're all knee-jerk left-wingers who are typically intolerant of anyone who disagrees with you. I went to Cambridge and I know your type: seemingly likeable and intelligent, but underneath you are actually very narrow-minded (cf "crap arguments" and the spiteful attack on Toby Young) and genuinely think you are cleverer than everyone else. Wake up and take a look at our horrendous schools, appalling healthcare and bankrupt economy and then at least have the respect not to silence and dismiss your opponents.

I commented:

Happy continuation! (of the New Year) as they say here in Sweden.When you're with friends you talk from the heart, and that's refreshing and revitalizing.When you're with acquaintances or colleagues you spice up the platitudes with the odd shared in-joke, but not much more.So the intimate reunion is what I go for. The "official" one might release lots of very unpleasant feelings (especially if the context is somewhere as schizophrenic as Cambridge).I say "intimate" cos "private" smacks too much of Anne's ideological single-mindedness right now. Perhaps Mary could give us a riff on the real meaning of the word "public" as in "public-minded/spirited" or "open to the public".One of the things that galls me about Anne's self-righteous and strident preaching is her obvious contempt for the vast majority of her fellow-citizens and fellow human beings. She and her ilk strike out their own humanity and promote the inhumanity of the war of each against all. If everything human except this selfish part of herself and a select few other individuals is alien to her, then her life doesn't deserve to be called human. But at least she isn't spewing the "Western civilization", "humanitarian principles" hypocrisy of the smoother brand of Conservative."Homo sum: humani nil me alienum puto""No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main".

Another comment on the Middle East

2011-01-27T11:57:00.000+01:00

An article in the Guardian by Seamus Milne about the Palestine situation after the recent leaks ended on a miserable capitulatory note.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/26/authentic-leaders-middle-east-peace
I wrote the following comment:

Milne details one humiliation and betrayal after another, and the violence from Israel's and the PS's side accompanying these acts of brutal oppression. He makes it clear without saying as much that the whole setup involves the National Question to a very high degree. Good reasons for war and regime change - "at the very least".
But the usual litany of "democratic overhaul", representation and respectable unity is then churned out as a solution for "anyone who cares for the Palestinian cause", with the usual pre-emptive weeping and wailing. The only sane reason for such an argument I can think of is to avoid being smashed to pieces and final-solutioned by the Israelis. In which case the choice offered seems to be between the peace of a real graveyard and the peace of a virtual graveyard.
Real sanity will not accept such a choice.
JFK once said (mirabile dictu) that "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable." His words ring truer than ever today in the Middle East and the Maghreb, and make Milne's whining Jeremiad into an utterly useless piece of writing "for those who care about the Palestinian cause".

This was deleted by a moderator, so I posted this instead:

Hm... deleted for being too inflammatory no doubt.
So let's just say that there isn't the slightest possibility of any "peaceful" solution in Palestine (or indeed the Middle East in general) and that any claim that there is a pure illusion.
Palestine (especially Gaza) is both a real and a virtual graveyard. Rousseau said that "peace" under the wrong conditions just meant the peace of the graveyard. This kind of "peace" might be imposed temporarily, but (as events in Tunisia etc and many other places at many other times show) it won't last.
JFK once stated the obvious:
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable."
This is what we're witnessing on an escalating scale in the world today. Palestine is no exception.

A comment on the Middle East

2011-01-26T11:48:00.000+01:00

Someone in Israel complained about the Hizbollah take-over of Lebanon in a discussion group. I made the following comment:

"No country is an island..." and certainly not in the Middle East (and North Africa).

The only key to understanding the tortuous shifts and tempestuous hostilities there is imperialist interference to grab and safeguard strategic fuel supplies (and profits). First the British and French, now overwhelmingly the US (plus Nato and the EU as bit players).

It's not just a question of Israel or Syria or Iran (or the bogey-de-jour) in themselves. It's the whole antagonistic system. The reactionary Zionist state of Israel is a bloodthirsty US surrogate, enclave, bridgehead, thug and assassin. A Frankenstein's monster composed of body parts sewn together and galvanized into movement - only Mary Shelley's monster was gentle and cultured. Its corrupt oppressive neighbours are either imperialist creations themselves (like Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and now Iraq) or non-imperialist states based on anti-US(-French-British) popular hatred and surviving because of this (Iran, Syria, Libya, Algeria).

Democracy etc is as irrelevant to the Middle Eastern setup as God, Jehova and Allah are to humanity. And as irrelevant as human rights violations against the Jews, Gypsies, Socialists, Communists, and homosexuals in Nazi Europe.

The only hope for a resolution of this toxic world-historical tangle is political organization and work to remove foreign and local oppression. Until then chopping individual heads off the hydra will only make things worse. Passive residents of the Middle East are at the mercy of the violence sloshing about, whether they take part in it or not. The more they support the various killers (whether "official" as in the Israeli armed forces, or unofficial, as in Mossad) the less involuntary and arbitrary is their fate. Supporting the killers but pretending the violence is only perpetrated by the Other is acting like an ostrich with its head in the sand waiting for its heads and legs to be scythed off.

If Israelis want to blame anybody for their insecurity and anxiety and guilty consciences they should blame the US and Britain. But they won't so the insecurity and anxiety and guilt will continue until the Zionist utopia is blown away (by the hurricanes of history).

(NB Zionists (and of course Zionists are not all ruthless bloodthirsty reactionaries, although you'd hardly think so these days) may be Jews, but Jews aren't necessarily Zionists.)

So if you live in Israel, or the Middle East in general, you're living in a very turbulent and violent part of the world. Inventing scapegoats and pointing fingers won't help. The class war going on worldwide is open and deadly, and needs to be resolved deep down.

Pro-terror control laws in Britain

2011-01-02T15:17:00.000+01:00

Some superficial pie-in-the-sky whining in the Guardian about undemocratic control orders in Britain. No call for action, no call for a system that won't spawn this kind of repression, no attempt to look at the brutal reality of the interests the politicians are defending.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jan/02/control-orders-human-rights-coalition-review

My comment:

Everyone seems to think that there is some scientifically based justification for the orders. But just look at the war on terror itself. The only logical justification for it has nothing to do with children's debates about principles of human rights or defending democracy or international law.
It's pure self-interest on the part of the ruling bourgeoisie mediated through its lackeys in the official political bodies of the state.
Now how can such apparently bone-headed irrationality serve the interests of a state? Well, if it's an imperialist state it has to keep its power to coerce its enemies, most visibly hostile rival states but fundamentally including the national and international working class. And how does it keep its power? First of all by arming its military and police to the teeth and using them to kill, break, cripple and intimidate to the greatest possible extent. And second by using a strategy of divide and rule.
The arming is proceeding (let's focus on the US and Britain) full tilt flying in the face of democratic values and natural justice. Police are used as militias and trained to be as brutal as possible to increase the intimidation. If the police fail, the army is called in. If the army fails, a fascist regime is brought in for some no holds barred defence of the state. Bugger the regime (democracy etc), it's the state that matters.
Overt murder, breaking and material destruction is a US speciality. It deters rivals and enemies from confrontation. It wins no hearts and minds, but it's not intended to. Deeds are what matter, not words.
Divide and rule is a British speciality. Weaker than the States in material terms it's way ahead in diplomacy and strategy. It knows it's fighting a rearguard war on a road to nowhere, so it aims to survive as long as possible. Hence it balkanizes everywhere it loses direct control. Nation against nation, "race" against "race", cultures and religions against each other. It's good at making the victims of its policies do it's dirty work and making them look like ruthless aggressors out to slaughter innocent bystanders.
India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka; Nigeria; Cyprus; Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi; Malaysia, Singapore; Yeman, Aden; the whole Middle East with Israel as the jewel in the crown (Balfour was British); white colonists vs Indians vs various black ethnicities; Christians vs Muslims vs Hindus; etc etc.
And that's just the old colonies.
Ireland is the gold standard of British strategy. 90 years of divide and rule since nominal independence, and still going strong. Who cares about mayhem and national prostration - Ireland is crippled and fettered still.
Foreign policy is the same - throw spanners into the works every chance you get - France vs Germany is the big one there, updated into sabotaging the EU (as if that was needed!).
And the war on terror? Scare the shit out of people with a scape-goat bogeyman - the Mau-Mau de jour - and fill the media with one-sided tales of demons and dragons. Kettle public opinion. Be as over-the-top as you like - surround Heathrow with half the army!
So, there's no way these creatures of the capitalist class dictatorship will ever be converted or even enlightened. They must be removed and their state replaced with one backing and protecting the working majority of the people. Till then we'll live in chains and so will our kids and their kids to the 10th generation.
A good start is getting up off our knees and saying a resounding NO.

Buy your own books and literacy, proletarian scum!

2010-12-25T21:07:00.000+01:00

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

2010-11-26T17:53:00.000+01:00

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

2010-11-03T16:37:00.000+01:00

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...

2010-10-20T10:37:00.000+02:00

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

2010-10-12T17:24:00.000+02:00

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)

2010-10-05T22:54:00.000+02:00

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

2010-09-13T20:03:00.000+02:00

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

2010-09-07T11:16:00.001+02:00

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

2010-08-08T14:46:00.000+02:00

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

2010-08-01T12:18:00.000+02:00

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

2010-07-31T14:27:00.000+02:00

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...

2010-07-29T14:45:00.000+02:00

Here's a short article from Scientific American on sharing scientific ideas and work:
**********************

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

**********************

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

2010-07-26T12:07:00.000+02:00

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

2010-07-24T16:03:00.000+02:00

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")

2010-07-24T11:25:00.000+02:00

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)

2010-07-03T13:27:00.000+02:00

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

2010-07-02T14:51:00.000+02:00

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.

Education in today's society (2)

2010-06-30T09:28:00.001+02:00

PL commented on my contribution to yesterday's blog discussion:
I respect Brecht and deeply admire Shelley; but for wisdom in these matters give me good old Dr Johnson:
"How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part that laws or kings can cause or cure."

To which I responded:

@PL: Johnson was a pompous windbag.
He knew next to nothing about the human heart.
Just ask any slave (white, black, plantation, galley, salt mine); any starving, HIV-infected kid, any addict or convict from the ghettos of the richest country on earth; any crippled victim of landmines, bombs (working, unexploded, napalm, cluster, vacuum, sophisticated or improvized), snipers, flame-throwers, or gas attacks (military or civil); any indentured child labourer; any mega-city slum-dweller drinking sewage; any farmers thrown off their land by debt, violence, or ecological terrorism (dam projects, monoculture, man-made environmental disasters); any victim of flogging, keel-hauling, blinding, legal amputation; or any girl or woman violated, brutalized and broken by the sex industry.
Shall I go go on? There's more. And these are only the "lucky" ones still alive.
And take no account of lives stunted and emptied by the anxiety, frustration, stress, and illness of "privileged" societies. Or lack of educational opportunities like those Mary is fighting to preserve and generalize.
Johnson was a pompous windbag.

Education in today's society

2010-06-29T11:46:00.000+02:00

Mary B's blog
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/06/escaping-exams.html
drew the following comment from me:

In a decent society, learning and education will be taken seriously. Social wealth (which will be greater than we can imagine today) will be distributed sensibly. As a result, the sharing and caring Mary and a few other lucky people dedicate themselves to will be the norm.
Till then Sweetness and Light will be beacons in the night, in stormy seas, near a jagged rocky coast. Most of us (humanity, that is) will be wrecked without seeing any beacons, a lot of us will be killed by wreckers using false beacons, some of us will reach the shore and find that the beacons are real but inaccessible, and a few will actually make it to the flame, enjoy its light and heat, and keep it alive.
And share snippets of hope with each other:
Die Nacht hat zwölf Stunden, dann kommt schon der Tag...
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

*

The place of Latin

2010-06-15T15:11:00.002+02:00

A short piece in today's Guardian:
Latin: why we're better off with the ancient language
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/jun/14/latin-language-in-schools)

My comment:
As anyone can tell you who has seen any of my comments on any blog relating to this subject I'm a huge fan of Latin.
Partly for cultural reasons and partly out of an unusual passion for languages - one that has overcome a lack of autistic proficiency to give me useful access to a number of different but related Indo-European languages (some alive and kicking, and some half-dead and flapping), and to a fundamentally different non-Indo-European language. The iconic Finnish mentioned here a couple of times.
Some languages I got at school as compulsory subjects, some I studied voluntarily at college level, and some I just picked up on a teach yourself, learning by doing, voluntary basis.
Compulsory French at school worked, compulsory German just about despite hopeless conditions. All the rest has been voluntary - whether formal or normal.
Formal helps, but opportunity and incentive helps more.
That's why Grabyrdy's comment bangs the button:
"I would add that it's not only Latin that helps brains develop. Teach every child in the country to play a musical instrument and participate in orchestras and choirs, and the IQ level of the whole country will rise within a generation."
Education has to provide opportunity and incentive, and needs to be polytechnical - intellectual, physical (sports, drama, music), practical (craft trades), interactive (politics, psychology).
So that's Britain oot the windae as far as Latin or any other language is concerned.
I regret none of my languages, except maybe Swedish for the way it's invaded and occupied my life far too obtrusively and disproportionately. I'd rather have had my life invaded and occupied by Russian, Chinese (yes please!) or Bengali (or Sanskrit. - I'm half-dead and flapping myself...)
So... anyone who gets a foot in the door, or even better makes it all the way into the rip-roaring party that's another language and its culture, feels more fully human for it and helps others feel better too. And the special thing about Latin here is that it offers a widely recognized currency standard for language, culture and civil fundamentals. (Special Drawing Rights if not Gold...)
My own favourite (with me everywhere, and more worn by the day) is Lucretius On the Nature of Things. Oh, and Tacitus. Mohammed Alis of culture -- deeply human, aware of their own value, no one's tool and no one's fool, unrepentantly nonconformist, dazzling masters of technique and harder hitting than anyone else alive.
And nothing prissy, bigoted, arse-licking, or demeaning about them.

I made a further comment:
MSGlendinning writes:
"I currently teach EFL. There is absolutely no coincidence that the students and people that I know that are non-native speakers that have the highest level of fluency and understanding of the nuances and other pecularities of English are the ones that have spent time immersed in an English-speaking country."
So if they're so good why do they need you to teach them?
How do you "immerse" yourself in a country? Burrow head down into the soil (or concrete)? If you immerse yourself in intercourse with people in that country (heh) how many people do you need to intercourse with? And how much and how? And what language and culture do the people you intercourse with use?
Maybe it's communication between people that's the important thing... So god help us given the dreadful communication skills of the average teacher, if teaching has got anything to do with it.
To communicate you need something to communicate about, and communicate with. And if you live somewhere you are forced to communicate with people there. But if you are well prepared to communicate about things that are common to humanity, and are skilled/trained at learning, you'll pick up a language like lightning - as I've seen in my teaching. If you aren't, and you're surrounded by your own culture and language (let's say you're Armenian or Russian in LA), then you're screwed. As I've seen with Kurds and Somalis in my teaching.
OK, so the thing about Latin is that a lot of it is one way communication - but a lot of it is communication about things common to humanity (sex, money, politics, war), done in ways common to humanity (writing, striking language, striking settings). And it communicates these things using a common cultural legacy, adding familiarity.
So why shouldn't acquiring Latin be more useful and attractive than acquiring pidgin Double Dutch? Should we force people to learn New Guinea Creole because living people use it and it has a thriving local culture?
If you read novels or follow the news, then you're into abstract, non-immediate, non-immersive communication. That is, you're in a good position to derive pleasure and stimulation from Latin.
The conditions for learning it aren't too good - but neither are the conditions for learning other languages in Britain. And Latin has one huge advantage - almost everyone involved with teaching it or using it is full of enthusiasm for the language, for the culture and for sharing this with others. But first let's have a decent society and a decent educational system, so non-local culture and communication mean something more than an old school tie.

About class leadership

2010-06-15T10:53:00.000+02:00

Some thoughts on the tube this morning

Given that imperialism is capitalism pregnant with socialism...

The history of the 20C shows that the objective preconditions for socm are far better than we realized, and conversely the leadership situation is far worse.

An important factor almost never taken into account is the enormous readiness of the working class to follow leadership even to death - provided it perceives the leadership as its own.

Examples are the Social Democrats in Germany and the KPD during the early 30s when their warring destroyed the class's organizational and political viability and let in the Nazis. Also the fatal leadership of the CPSU and the CCP in China and Spain, Indonesia etc.

On the positive side we have the objective victories of the class(es) in ww2, in China vs Japan and the KMT and the bourgeoisie, in Yugoslavia and Vietnam and Cuba, and in the creation of the DWSs in Eastern Europe and Korea.

This is empirical evidence of the power, courage, discipline, loyalty of the mobilized working class and its allies.

If there are leadership struggles in the class, these can mobilize the same loyalty and courage in a civil war leading to self-destruction (examples above), plus generally speaking a condition of short-circuited paralysis if the war is "invisible" to the masses - as in the DWSs (including the degenerated SU) or in welfare states or imperialist states with traditionally large-scale concessions to strategic sections of the class (the US, Australia).

So, what are the conditions for winning leadership in the class, for getting the class to perceive us as its leaders?

EMPIRICAL - We must be vigorous and influential and viable and be seen to be so.

STRATEGIC - We must have objectives that are crystal clear, attainable, and attractive.

PSYCHOLOGICAL - We must be "charismatic", ie fulfil the empirical conditions with confidence, bravura and heroism.

None of these need be met to an absolute or ultimate degree (as is obvious given the support gained by bureaucratic and fundamentally treacherous leaderships). But they must be met well enough, and in particular to a degree strikingly superior to other contenders for leadership (eg the Maoist leadership of the CCP vs the Moscow-backed leadership, or the Castro leadership vs the Cuban CP, or Chavez vs other left forces in Venezuela).

If you think these points are correct, learn them by heart! Impress them on your comrades and work your arse off to make practical use of them!!

US-backed piracy and murder - Israel rapes the Gaza peace convoy

2010-06-01T09:54:00.002+02:00

In response to a long and toothless thread on a discussion group I wrote:

Israel's arguments remind me of nothing so much as the justifications given by the Argentine junta and the South African apartheid racists for their brutal and inhuman actions. And however "sincere" individual South African whites might have been in their support for these arguments that doesn't make the slightest difference to their responsibility for these actions. I don't consider Argentine supporters of the junta to have been sincere in the least. And I think that any sincere Israeli supporters of the Israeli military and those giving them their orders in this murderous act of piracy on the high seas are either wilfully ignorant and indifferent ("they're only Arabs, and anyway they bring it on themselves" - I've heard it first hand) or completely numbed to any sense of proportionality in political interaction including acts of war.

Israel exceeds the vileness of both the apartheid regime, the Argentine junta and (for what it's worth, the old East German regime) for several reasons. The first is the total support in words and actions and arms supplies by the most powerful nation on earth, the US. US support for the junta was less open, and the SA racists were only supported openly by a second-rate imperialist power - Britain. Every brazen Big Lie by Israel is swallowed whole (camels against gnats) by the States, and not a cent is withheld, not a carbine or bulldozer or bomb or helicopter or "adviser". Legions of university-trained, highly experienced, smooth-talking lawyers fill the newspapers and airwaves with sophistical gunk - brains targeting humanity like those of the American war industry, instead of working on solving problems of disease and poverty that kill thousands of people daily. The wall being erected (much of it already in place) between privileged Israeli areas and discriminated Palestinian areas is larger and more jealously guarded than the infamous Berlin Wall, and even than the much bigger wall the British occupying forces erected for similar reasons in Belfast. Oh, and Israel has the Bomb, which neither Argentina, nor racist South Africa (not quite), nor the GDR had.

All this makes me sympathize with those who refer to the rulers of Israel and their supporters as Zionazis. This is not the case, politically or historically - Israel is a very different kettle of rotten fish from Nazi Germany, as Aristotle would be able to tell us if he were around today. But the symptoms of callous degeneracy are there for all to see and ignore at their peril. Israel is the child of imperialism and is allowed to act out its bad boy tantrums by its indulgent parents (and by god I've seen Tantrums on the boardwalk at Coney Island). And all because it's an invaluable fortress for imperialism - locking the Eastern Mediterranean, keeping a lid on popular sentiment in its neighbouring Arab countries (Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan), and constituting a gigantic military base for the US that allows it to threaten the whole of the Middle East by proxy - most recently by howling for a pre-emptive nuclear strike against a US bogeyman de jour, Iran, which the US can distance itself from (plausible deniability) on the basis that it's "just a tantrum". Not to mention the cataracts of pus pumped out by its propaganda machinery. Or the (unmentionable even by Israeli standards, and that's saying something!) deeds of the Israeli secret service Moshad - KGB, Stasi and Securitate eat your hearts out...

And the rot won't stop with a Two-State solution. We need a single, united Palestine, independent, secular, and democratic. But it won't happen given the current balance of power in the world. Divide and rule coupled with military intimidation and a lack of alternatives - too bad Iraq and Saudi don't do the job as well as Israel - will see to that.

And in the meantime, as Pete wrote:

Voltaire had a word for it:

Cet animal est très méchant,
Quand on l'attaque il se défend.

(This animal is very evil -

Attacked, it fights back like the devil.)

Chops

Education in Britain - a Brave New World

2010-05-27T09:07:00.000+02:00

Some idiot gassing on about the need for slightly less elite schools for the increasingly sidelined petty-bourgeoisie and labour aristocracy. (He doesn't put it that way himself :-)
It's from the Guardian of course:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/26/selective-education-grammar-schools?

My comment:
If a school system isn't designed to raise the average standard of education/knowledge/joy of learning/solidarity, then it's going to reproduce all the old crap. Socialize our youngsters into well-off or destitute psychopaths, on class lines.

The British system is "designed" (ha-bloody-ha) - no, let's say structured - to ease the rich and powerful into rich and powerful positions, to let the would-be social climbers tear each other to pieces as they fight their way up the foothills through jungle and swamp, and to consign the wage-slaves and the poor to the factories and streets. At any price. Particularly at the cost of education/knowledge/joy of learning/solidarity and culture.
O Brave New World!
I was able to go to university because of a local government grant, not because of the school I went to. While there I decided I would only go into teaching as a last resort if half my brain went home. Since then things have got much much worse.
Britain is a democracy by the skin of its teeth, and the enamel is wearing away fast. The class divide is very visible once more, and class hatred is returning. Healthy signs for our future!
But the necessary change and renewal will owe next to nothing to our - sorry their - schools and universities. And the little owed will be in spite of and not because of the educational policies of servile governments that divide their time between licking the spittle and licking the boots of capital - when their heads aren't stuck up its arse.

The European Crisis - an outline

2010-05-17T11:13:00.004+02:00

This is an article I drafted with additions suggested by comrades at a meeting last Wednesday in Liverpool.

Any comments or questions welcome!

THE EUROPEAN CRISIS

World crisis
This crisis isn’t a US crisis or a European crisis or an Asian crisis or a Latin American crisis. It’s a world crisis.
The Asian crisis of the late 90s brought Indonesia to its knees and then infected Argentina, and brought down Enron in the US. The Milken junk bond scandal of the mid-80s shook the US finance world. But neither crisis saw the bankruptcy of corporations at the very core of US capitalism like Ford and General Motors, or the fall of financial giants like Lehmann. Or the gutting of European nations like Iceland or the Ukraine. Or such a standstill in world trade or manufacturing. This crisis is not localized, or on-and-off, or sectoral. It’s a general world crisis affecting the imperialist metropolises and every country in their thrall. It’s an economic earthquake and tsunami in one, bringing down economic structures and drowning whole countries.

Overproduction crisis
The crisis is a classical overproduction crisis – of both commodities and capital
All credit is based on collateral. The bottom line here is the sale of real commodities. Regardless of the labyrinths, distorting mirrors, and smoke-and-mirrors illusions created by capitalist accounting wizards, and no matter how high the castles-in-the-air appear to tower above our heads, if the cars, TVs, clothes, machines and raw materials don’t get sold all these illusions will dissolve. And if there are more commodities in the shops than money to buy them, the market will choke. There will be a glut, and an overproduction crisis.
The reason too many goods can be produced is that there is too much capital throwing goods into the market. If one company can saturate a market, two companies will flood it. The only way out of this dead end is for one of the companies to disappear, for its capital to be destroyed. This is done by manufacturing being choked back, and weaker companies going to the wall. And if this isn’t enough, war has to step in to do the job.
These crises are recurrent, ruthless and deadly. And invisible to bourgeois economics, except in the after-the-event, “please don’t expropriate us and throw us away” shape of Keynesianism. That is to say, the large-scale concessions to the working class represented by the New Deal or the Welfare State.

Old powers falling
The US and Europe hollowed out
This crisis has seen US and European imperialism on the losing end of the competitive war. This is unprecedented. The bayonets usually skewer dependent countries or weaker imperialist nations. This time household names have been gone bankrupt – Ford, General Motors, Lehmann, the Royal Bank of Scotland. And huge conglomerates have been cannibalizing groups that aren’t quite huge enough – Cadbury’s has been swallowed by Kraft Foods, for instance.

New powers rising
More viable production meets remaining demand
If two companies compete to the death, the surviving company will emerge stronger. As Ford and General Motors fail, Chinese carmakers take their place. Geely steps in to take over Volvo from Ford, and BAIC makes the best offer for Saab as General Motors is forced to sell. However, GM refused to accept the Chinese as buyers for its new line of Saabs, and ended up selling to a Dutch sports car maker in the pocket of a Russian billionaire. British companies like the steel giant Corus, and the prestigious brands of Jaguar, Land Rover went down to the Indian juggernaut Tata Group.
Britain’s manufacturing sector now comprises only 13% of GDP. It’s little wonder that it is more vulnerable to credit collapse than countries with a strong manufacturing or natural resources sector that are able to hold out in markets where less competitive countries are swept away.
Rising countries are moving into the spaces left by declining imperialist powers. China, India and Russia are making themselves felt, and Brazil is picking up momentum in Latin America - even intervening in the Middle East with a recent visit to Iran by the Brazilian president.

The crisis is general and interlinked
Financial, commercial and manufacturing developments in one place immediately affect and are affected by developments in other places
When Ford and General Motors went bust, Volvo and Saab, with their R&D and manufacturing operations in Sweden, had to be auctioned off, and were on the brink of bankruptcy. If they had been liquidated this would have gutted the economy of the whole of western Sweden. Whole towns would have lost their livelihoods as their only major employers were Volvo or Saab, or companies producing parts or components for them. In the event both were saved, by Chinese and Russian capital. But this solved nothing as far as capitalism is concerned, because world capitalism needs capital to be destroyed, not saved.
The same futile scenario is being repeated around the world.

The EU is tearing apart
The interests of imperialist countries in the EU are savaging the interests of the weaker countries
While Sweden has been scrabbling to save its own skin, Swedish banks have been digging their claws into weaker countries. Sweden is, after all, an imperialist country in its own right. So although more and more of its economy has been bought up by foreign capital, its own capital has been sucking the blood of Latvia and the Ukraine. One of the major leeches being the cooperative and trade union owned Swedbank.
French banks are holding a knife to the throats of Portugal and Spain – and most dramatically of Greece. German capital is setting up shop everywhere in Europe. This process is very visible on the streets of Serbia, which has only recently been prised open to foreign capital. The same goes for new EU members from former Warsaw Pact countries like Romania and Bulgaria.
In this process Germany, France and Britain are all out for themselves. All the fine talk about European unity and solidarity evaporates when national interests are at stake.
The interests of the banks are savaging the lives of individuals
Insolvencies are at record levels and negative equity is sky-rocketing. Perhaps the most striking example of this is Latvia, where a whole stratum of starry-eyed conspicuous consumers suddenly couldn’t pay the loans they’d taken out to buy their flats or a Mercedes. The new material wealth they thought was theirs was repossessed, leaving them facing a lifetime of debt with nothing to show for it. Personal catastrophes of this kind will soon hammer Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland and other countries on the sharpest end of the crisis.

Debtors and creditors
Payback time
The biggest imperialist countries are in debt on a huge scale to the Market. To cover this debt they need to enforce payment by their own debtors. But if they drive their debtors into bankruptcy they will lose all the unpaid debts. They desperately need to get their money back, but they also desperately need to have debtors able to keep paying, preferably for ever. To reduce debtor countries to complete servitude would be to turn them into colonies. This is a very inefficient form of exploitation. “Free” wage labour is a more efficient from of exploitation than slavery, and “free” nations offer greater profits than colonies – with far fewer overheads.

The Great Depression
The current crisis so far is the 1930s in slow motion
The Big Crash happened very fast. There were no bail-outs. The capitalist world economy stopped dead. Recovery was slow and painful. Our present recovery, if and when it happens, will be even slower and even more painful, but the crash is still happening. Bail-outs, international attempts to coordinate responses, all kinds of artificial resuscitation methods are being deployed to put off disaster for another few months. They might as well try to hold back the tide or use a wooden fence to stop a lava flow.
The big difference is that the working class is not defeated
The great difference between the current crisis and the 1930s is that the working class is not defeated. Capital has been unable to deal a decisive blow to the class, despite sluggers like Thatcher and Reagan. The class is still putting up resistance and making demands, despite pro-capitalist leadership in trade unions and labour parties.
And today the general standard of living is higher than it was in the 30s, and there is still a welfare state, however run-down. Purchasing power in Greece has fallen by a third, but people still survive. And although this cushions the first blows, it also means that the class is stronger and in a better condition to fight when it finally starts fighting.

War
This resistance means that the ultimate capitalist solution to the crisis of overproduction of capital -- war on a world scale -- is so far more of a threat than an immediate danger. This was not the case in the 1930s.

The capitalist response
Privatization of profits and socialization of losses
Normally sluggish governments become nimble and quick as soon as capital needs to be rescued. Red tape is ignored, there are no humiliating interrogations or insulting pittances involved.
The neo-liberal ideology of total market freedom has been unceremoniously dumped. It was fine to justify huge private profiteering when the circumstances allowed huge profits to be made. But as soon as losses appear the market is shoved aside and the capitalists run squealing to their governments. Corporate welfare is lavished on capitalists who have fallen on hard times. The losses are socialized. And this means that the billions handed over to failed capitalists by their governments will be paid for by the working class by way of higher taxes and slashed public services
Huge loans and crippling austerity
To extract payment, governments are imposing austerity programmes of unprecedented severity. The trillion dollar loan the Greek government needs to rescue capital has been granted by Germany, France and the IMF on condition that it drives through the cuts.

The working class response
The class response has so far been passive or unfocused
In the current crisis no working class organizations have demanded permanent public ownership of banks or companies that have gone bankrupt and been rescued with public money. With this kind of leadership it’s no wonder that the class response has been passive or unfocused. Treacherous political and union leaders are fighting desperately to keep the lid on discontent. They are fighting the workers they represent instead of the capitalists causing the crisis.
Governments are not as savage as their masters would like
Despite the treacherous manoeuvring of unions and parties, class anger has made itself felt. In Greece there have been massive and prolonged demonstrations, and violent confrontations. The austerity measures have been met by general strikes. This kind of response terrifies governments and means that although they are savagely attacking the working class, they are nowhere near as savage as their masters in the Market would like.
Great social problems like mass unemployment (for example the 20% unemployment in Spain, and the much higher figures for youth unemployment throughout Europe) are too dangerous for politicians to discuss. In parliamentary debates and during elections the real world is a million miles away. This silence is also caused by fear of the working class.
A powerful working class will undoubtedly fight back
Although there has been no great increase in working class mobilization in recent years, the working class remains undefeated and its potential power is greater than ever. Today’s developments will push the class forward to struggle. When it starts moving it will rise in many countries at once. The speed with which mobilizations spread from country to country in 1968 will be surpassed. There are fewer differences between countries today, there are more links, and communications are faster and easier.
From defence to attack
To do more than just defend itself the working class must consciously target its real enemy. To replace the political dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and set up a workers government the class must learn who its enemy is, and how to defeat it. In each country and in the world as a whole. But taking power nationally and creating a socialist world demands a completely different class leadership than we see around us today.
Building a new and conscious leadership is the only way to give the working class confidence in its own strength and in its ability to change the world. And it’s the only way to ensure that we never have to endure another catastrophic capitalist crisis.

Posturing...

2010-04-29T15:58:00.001+02:00

This is a short item about slouching and confidence from Scientific American:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=stop-slouching

Stop Slouching!

Good posture boosts self-esteem

By Harvey Black

"When you were growing up, your mother probably told you to sit up straight, because good posture helps you look confident and make a good impression. And now it turns out that sitting up straight can also improve how you feel about yourself, according to a study in the October 2009 issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology. Researchers asked college students to rate themselves on how good they would be as job candidates and employees. Those told to sit up straight with their chests out gave themselves higher ratings than those instructed to slouch while filling out the rating form. Once again, Mom was right".

So I commented:

There's a difference between a good healthy posture and an uptight ramrod.
The ramrod stiff, chest puffed out position is crippling. It creates enormous stress on the body, especially the spine, and blocks its relaxed natural functioning. Any athlete can tell you that. Wilhelm Reich - a much-maligned psychologist - worked all his life to loosen up what he called the "body armour" encasing most of his patients. This armour is a sure sign of an authoritarian social setting and rigid(ified) attitudes.
Good healthy posture is what our bodies are designed for. The body stands upright of its own accord if we let it. If we use the muscles of our lower back and chest to "consciously" hold ourselves up then this natural capability atrophies. Resulting in straightening followed either by sit-all-day slouching or the rigidity of a tin soldier.
The rich and royal, by the way, make sure their whelps get years of training in standing up straight and walking so they can a) project impressive confidence (as the article says) and b) subject their bodies to as little wear and tear as possible during all the walkabouts and hanging around at cocktail parties they have to do.
In Sweden, where I live, it's taken them 7 long years to train the common-as-muck personal trainer boyfriend of the heiress to the throne so he can walk properly as her consort.

The emptiness of imperialist political manifestos (2)

2010-04-19T14:01:00.002+02:00

I was asked a direct question about my comment to Mary's blog on political manifestos
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/04/and-the-prize-for-the-worst-manifesto-goes-to-.html#

Tim W said.: ...give us a crib to that last line, would you?
I replied: Hi Tim. Now you ask, I see that I expected four words to do more work than they should ;-)
It's a mini-quote from Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, Book I, stanza 1:
"Мой дядя самых честных правил,
Когда не в шутку занемог,
Он уважать себя заставил
И лучше выдумать не мог.
Его пример другим наука;
Но, *боже мой, какая скука*
С больным сидеть и день и ночь,
Не отходя ни шагу прочь!
Какое низкое коварство
Полу-живого забавлять,
Ему подушки поправлять,
Печально подносить лекарство,
Вздыхать и думать про себя:
Когда же чорт возьмет тебя!"
"Christ, what a terrible drag" .. literally "My God, what a bore"
Eugene's going to inherit an uncle so he's got to go to the country and look after him until he dies... take him food and be nice, etc...
A recent English translation (G R Ledger for the internet http://www.pushkins-poems.com/) is:
"My uncle, a most worthy gentleman,
When he fell seriously ill,
By snuffing it made us all respect him,
Couldn't have done better if he tried.
His behaviour was a lesson to us all.
But, God above, what crushing boredom
To sit with the malingerer night and day
Not moving even one footstep away.
What demeaning hypocrisy
To amuse the half-dead codger,
To fluff up his pillows, and then,
Mournfully to bring him his medicine;
To think to oneself, and to sigh:
When the devil will the old rascal die?"
The relevance is that we have to look after this decrepit old society, with its wealthy, murderous politicians and their lying manifestos till it dies and we can inherit what's good in it. There's an ironic twist to the quote - Eugene is a callous arsehole, cos his uncle is an exemplary gentleman. Our uncle is a vicious vampire condemning us to Life-in-Death - and yet we mollycoddle him by taking part in his cynical rituals and letting him claim we're behind him.
If we fail to put a stake through his heart, we end up broken zombies:
"Two ginscented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was
all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished.
He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."

The emptiness of imperialist political manifestos

2010-04-16T13:43:00.001+02:00

Mary B has been very busy blogging recently. Her latest is about the uniformity and superficiality of the party manifestos for the coming general election in the UK.
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/04/and-the-prize-for-the-worst-manifesto-goes-to-.html#more

My comment:
Politics on this blog? Oh deary me...
Anyway, has anyone else noticed that once the Soviet Union's bureaucrats/nomenklatura sold themselves to capitalism the imperialist states have had nothing to worry about in terms of rights and freedoms? They no longer have to pretend to they are the champions of decency, democracy, freedom of thought and expression, freedom of religion, and freedom of movement (eg no arbitrary restrictions on travel), that they are promoters of a society free of informers, denunciations, ideological straightjackets, corrupt leaders living lives of luxury unthinkable for the toiling masses, destructive militaristic priorities, and that they lovingly foster a heritage beauty,culture and truth. So the
imperialist leaders have been gleefully doing everything they once criticized (except the good things like the right to employment, universal access to education and health care, free cultural centres, dirt cheap books and music).
And now the aesthetics of repression and lies are stifling us here too. "Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend."
Little poxes on a commons bench, little poxes made of ticky-tacky, little poxes, little poxes, little poxes all the same... And there's blue ones and pink ones and cute little yellow ones, and they're all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same.
Bozhe moy, kakaya skuka!

An Indian site against caste

2010-04-15T10:31:00.007+02:00

I got a mail from A in India linking to this site:
http://www.anti-caste.org/

on caste, women's oppression, communalism, and class struggle in South Asia from a Marxist perspective

With specific reference to the following article:

http://www.anti-caste.org/2010/03/operation-green-hunt-maoists-india-praful-bidwai.html?

I subscribed to their emails immediately, and sent the following mail to A:
Straightforward stuff that gives us the conditions for struggle on a more than superficial level. We can contribute to sharpening the perspectives here. Particularly the common lack of trust in the strength of the oppressed classes to fight state repression. Always this emphasis on the "overwhelming" technical (including troops) superiority of the class enemy. If they succeed in their repression, it's because we aren't organizing and mobilizing the way we should.

The principle here is neither pessimism nor optimism, but a clear understanding of the classes in struggle and the relations of power between them - on the surface and below the surface. Here we can help enormously by bringing in international and historical perspectives - how a determined and conscious struggle has resisted and defeated "overwhelming odds".

Down with empiricism! Empiricists have never understood history or been able to draw any lessons from it - regardless of what they call themselves. The Manifesto is our touchstone:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

That should be clear enough. It's the classes that are at war, not the groups of individuals engaged in the battles. These groups do the fighting, but as representatives of the warring classes. The relative strengths of the groups change, often very rapidly. But the underlying social and historical strength of the warring classes is constant over whole epochs.

China

(yet again) is a good example. The liberation armies under Maoist leadership tapped into the strength of the oppressed classes. They survived the apparently overwhelming military superiority of the bourgeois war machine (the bourgeoisie is always mobilized for war and engaging in armed aggression against the working class and its allies - as the current Indian example in the east-central tribal areas demonstrates very clearly), regrouped, mobilized the classes, released their potential power, and swept away the bourgeoisie.

If they could do it despite the inadequate perspectives of the leadership, we can do it and surpass it, too.

« De l'audace, encore de l'audace, toujours de l'audace », as the great French revolutionary leader Danton said. "Bold and daring, even more bold and daring, always bold and daring!"

Cheers

Meta-bloggery

2010-04-14T14:39:00.001+02:00

Mary's blog about bureaucrats turning red tape into straitjackets has seen the comments taking an unexpected turn or two (my previous comment [7 April, Even sheep ...] provoked one commenter to accuse me of "synthetic rage"). I continued the discussion.

http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/04/why-good-practice-can-ruin-good-practice.html#

My earlier comments provoked some response, to which I responded with a "meta-comment":

James Smith writes: "And Xjy, why are so many of your comments about class conflict? I respect your political/sociological views, but is this really the place to expound your theories?"
This is really the place (a good place), James, and I'm not trying to expound anything.
Mary's being considered for the Orwell prize - for political writing! She's even labelled as "subversive" in the blog blurb. Those are establishment invitations to politically "subversive" comments. Num?
However, there is a real political and sociological perspective to Mary's reflections. How do state decisions (via the government and its bureaucracy) affect the acquisition, sharing and passing on of knowledge essential to a good society? This present blog is an example. Comments on the root of these decisions are relevant. If the comments are "outside the box", that's more a reflection on the box than the comments. Do I have to remind everyone that even Reader's Digest has been banging on for decades about the importance of dissident thought to creativity and progress? And if a reactionary US Republican rag does it, why shouldn't an educated and cultured bloghood welcome it? Diversity, stimulation? At my breadmill our last kick-off gave us a whole day of "creativity
I haven't been accused of corrupting youth - yet - though Mary has raised this spectre in blogs about state vetting of anyone with contact with kids. Censorship and paranoia are recurring themes in the blog. Gadflies sting. Hemlock, anyone?
"Here I stand; I can do no other. God help me."
"Dixi et salvavi animam meam."
Of course, if my "rage" is only "synthetic" instead of synthesizing, as Anthony A maintains, then it's Thersites bitching or Diogenes showboating naked in his barrel rather than Socrates or Luther. But hell, rather that and my own place in Hell than wafting about on the banks of the Styx.
A bit of meta-bloggery shouldn't be too out of place now and then, either, innit?

Let there be light!

2010-04-12T12:03:00.000+02:00

A wonderful little story by Germaine Greer in today's Guardian. A perfect provocation of manacled minds, yielding a rich harvest of ignorant and bigoted comments.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/apr/11/germaine-greer-federico-fellini

My own comment:

The puppies yelp, the caravan passes...

One of the most liberating things about liberation is fighting for it. Those were liberating days. Fellini, old-style not-so-intellectual but no-holds-barred iconic culture critic and mythologue, meets new-style intellectual and no-holds-barred culture critic and iconoclast Germaine G... Female Eunuch meet Casanova and Citta delle Donne. If this had been filmed (heh) it would be as iconic as the Mailer brawl in New York. Mailer Iliad and Fellini Odyssey.

Out in the sun in the open air. US imperialism getting turfed out of Vietnam, Portuguese imperialism getting turfed out of Africa, Spanish fascism getting turfed out of Spain... Equal Pay Act... Sex Discrimination Act.

We had a few good years left (got rid of the Shah...) till Thatcher and Reagan and Disco started stomping all over us.

Fellini was good at twisting the Zeitgeist by his balls till he showed himself for what he was in relation to real people. So are you, Germaine.

And that generator! What to say...

Fiat lux!

Movin' an' a-groovin'

2010-04-08T14:24:00.000+02:00

Here's a comment I posted last year on Scientific American, on a piece about why we like dancing so much.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=experts-dance

choppam at 08:47 AM on 04/21/09

The parallel with sex is good  here - limber, coordinated, improvisational sex produces its own excitement and release, and good, tight, individual bonding. And D Marchant's comment: "Mirror Neurons are just structural evidence that we are wired for social harmonic unity, and unified rhythmic movement reinforces these social bonds" ties in with his observation about "group synchrony.  So-called "primitive" tribal dance rituals organize individuals into collective group entities that hunt better, resist predation better and act as one larger organism than individuals alone." 

Getting the cacophony of individual conflicting interests, emotions etc (due to status, gender, age etc) into synch is imperative for effective group functioning - think orchestras or sports teams. Music and dance achieve this - the greater the crescendo and the freer the orgasmic release, the better for us and our groups.

Which just shows how inhuman and sclerotic our present puritanical anti-sensual society is and how great the need is to change it to a more liberating and energizing society where schools give our kids a deep confidence and mastery of rhythm and harmony and interaction and creativity in their earliest and most formative years. With this foundation they'll be able to work together better and learn together better later when it comes to more abstract things like science, logic, maths, etc - theoretical analysis and synthesis.

So Wilhelm Reich and his followers were bang on target with the central place they gave orgasmic release in their theory - and the necessity for loosening up, sloughing off body "armour", moving and a-grooving, reeling with the feeling, rocking and a-rolling, etc. 

Excellent!

And of course, a lot of studies that you all know better than I do have shown that music and song target different parts of the brain from less rhythmic more discursive language. 

Which also (since it's all hardwired) shows that attempting to suppress rhythm, dance, music, poetry etc (as certain puritanical sects or regimes do) or to corral them into commercially profitable industrially bullwhipped sectors (Big Entertainment - Hollywood, Recording, etc) or to turn it all into some kind of hyper-exclusive minority activity (Big Art, Dance, Performance, etc) is as hopeless an enterprise as trying to stop the tide coming in, or trying to ban electricity.

Even sheep can help you defeat a monster...

2010-04-07T09:18:00.000+02:00

Mary's latest blog is about the neutralization of thought in higher education.

http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/04/why-good-practice-can-ruin-good-practice.html

I made the following comment:

Julian wrote: "When people like you meekly go along with such nonsense, it makes everyone's life harder because "they" continue to impose their petty rules and regulations. For goodness sake, get some backbone and stand up to them."
When you sign off your soul to Mephistopheles, he wins. He's got the enforcers on his side. He puts the food on your table. Nothing 'meek' about this - Faust wasn't meek. He just signed the wrong contract. And back in the 50s and 60s university life (in Britain) had academic freedom, tenure, optimism and excitement. Helen of Troy with a brain (girls - find your own equivalent :-)
Standing up to the Man requires more than spine. It's not an individual thing - unless you're feeling suicidal. It requires organization, hatred of the system, and a clear enough view of a good alternative.
Academics aren't exactly god's gift to the future of humanity, but we need 'em, and at the moment they're being ground into dust and irradiated. In 2000 years they'll be like the bags of shit in Pompeii - only toxic. Their freedom is our freedom. We grow a spine - they grow a spine.
Simple, but not easy...

Brian O wrote: "Perhaps a little deadwood is fine if it lets the rest of us do more work and less documentation of work."
This might sound like a defence of incompetence, time-serving and place-hunting, and we can all give examples - I'll just name Robbo the Fish and G O as my favourites.
When I was a "radical conservative" god help us all I used to think so too. I soon realized that what the British had ever done for us was starvation, slavery, pillage, rape and murder, however, and this put things in a different light. Efficiency and "total quality assurance" in an unjust and anarchistic society where everyone is at war with everyone else is not just a delusion but a ticket to the abbatoir. I give you the efficiency of the extermination camps. Or the pernickity mean-spirited egalitarianism of the social insurance system.
Every flame of freedom is a beacon of hope. The heroic autodidacts of 1850 to 1950 were following these beacons. Some of us Faustian idiots of the 50s and 60s were doing it too, in much better conditions.
Dead wood is better than wood that is cold, black, wet and slimy.

In a just and decent society where work and creativity are rewarded and where everyone has security of income, food and shelter, and culture, it will be possible to promote on merit (in the widest sense) alone, and to pursue efficiency without destroying people. Till then, resist, keep your head down, and drive that hypocritical beam in the eye of the oppressor into his brain.

Use your wits and even a flock of sheep will help you defeat a brutal one-eyed monster.

Go, Trolley Dollies!

2010-04-01T10:13:00.000+02:00

Mary B's most recent blog is about BA's cabin staff and their strike, and it's quite reasonable on the whole.

My comment:

How about issuing the BA cabin staff with the carbines toted by the goons patrolling the Heathrow terminals?
All for reasons of capitalist security of course, but these cabin carbines would come in handy when defending workers' security every few years.
Good working conditions grow out of the barrel of a gun.
Go, Trolley Dollies!

(Now there's a wickedly subversive comment to chew on... ;-)

Couple of random impressions about music

2010-03-31T20:29:00.000+02:00

I was thinking the other day about how I react to music.
Just can't help moving to Tchaikovsky - like jumping up and starting to dance..
Or singing to Verdi, although he has amazing movement too. I always think about the entr'acte in La Traviata - a slow sinuous waltz in 4/4 time...
And Wagner - like Jabba the Hutt in white tie and tails...
And Puccini - Wagner lite. Sentimental pornography for the petty bourgeoisie.

Bone-headed bourgeois bigotry

2010-03-29T15:02:00.000+02:00

Some philistine wrote a piece in The Guardian today about Sigmund Freud's analysis of Leonardo da Vinci, and, as usual, wasted no time or effort in putting the boot in.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2010/mar/26/art-sigmund-freud-leonardo-da-vinci

I commented:

The usual anti-scientific crap you get from flat-earthers ready to deny at any cost the significance of unconscious drives and motives in human activity.
The reason Freud's contribution is spat on while Einstein's isn't is that psychology is a much more social science than physics. The established flat-earthers have much more clout in relation to psychology. When they deny the relevance of "psychology" they are really denouncing the relevance of hidden mechanisms in society and life.
This denunciation still affects Darwin and evolutionary theory, although God is hardly a visible factor.
The other great scientist who revealed hidden and unconscious mechanisms working implacably to shape our society and world - Karl Marx - is perhaps even more vilified and misrepresented than Freud by bone-headed bourgeois bigotry.

As Marx wrote in Capital I: "Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es." [They don't know what they're doing, but they do it.]

What kind of state is China today??

2010-03-19T17:24:00.000+01:00

The other day I received this mail on the topic of China, and what kind of state it is - non-capitalist workers state or bourgeois capitalist state.

"A comrade of mine was doing political work in Poland and came in contact with comrades of Worker Solidarity who had split off from Solidarity. She described to us the struggle of the solidarity movement since 1979 which began with the occupation of the Gdansk shipyards. How General Jaruzelski had siezed power in 1981 to try to crush this workers movement. Although they were unable to accomplish this due to the strength of the movement they were able to divert it to an extent. An unholy alliance of the Stalinists and the Catholic church set out a program of brutal suppression of the workers leadership in Solidarity while wooing the right wing elements including the opportunist Lech Walesa. They had enough success that the round table conference of 1989 was able to sell out the country to imperialism while deflecting the workers demands. Another reminder that the crisis of the leadership of the working class is the all important question today.

What is the relevance of this to China? Well I was doing some digging around in our archives on the 10th. anniversary of the Tiananman square massacre and found out several things. First of all the Chinese beaurocracy had taken a keen interest in the events in Poland and Jaruzelsky's policies. A book of his essays was translated into Chinese and published, Also he was the guest of honour at a special celebration laid on by the Chinese leadership some months before Tiananman.

Any study of the Tiananman massacre shows clearly that it was aimed at the working class wing of the emerging opposition movement. Robin Black, a member of USEC, who wrote a book about these events, described how the student leaders were negotiating with the army for a way out of the square while at the ither side tanks were crushing the tents of the workers.

This defeat of course played a big part in enabling the superexploitation on which the regime rests today."

I replied:

There is absolutely no disagreement on the counter-revolutionary (counter socialist bolshevik-leninist workers revolutionary) character of the Chinese regime. Just as we have no disagreement on the counter-revolutionary character of the Stalinist bureaucratic regime in the USSR. However, as Trotsky made clear in The Revolution Betrayed, the counter-revolutionary quasi-fascist character of this regime didn't mean the USSR was no longer a workers state - ie non-capitalist.

There is general agreement among us that China and some other countries made successful anti-bourgeois revolutions after world war 2 and got rid of capitalism as the dominant mode of production. And we characterized them as deformed workers states. That is, they were already in the condition right from the start that the Soviet Union degenerated into under the Stalinist regime. So Trotsky's principled argument goes for them too, regarding the relevance of the character of the regime (however vicious) to the character of the state (ie workers/non-capitalist or bourgeois).

But you don't take up question of the economic character of the Chinese state at all. Attacking workers leaders and beheading revolutionary organizations was and is part and parcel of Stalinist rule. Not just crushing a popular mobilizations in a capital city, but destroying whole socialist revolutions (China, Spain, Greece). China too has destroyed a whole revolution and with it a mass workers leadership (Indonesia).

To determine if China is still a deformed workers state or not we need to look at its mode of production and the economic relations defended by its armed forces and police, and if these are now *qualitatively* different from the early years. If they are qualitatively different we have to show exactly how and when the qualitative change occurred.

Water changes quantitatively if you heat it from 0 to 100 degrees Celsius. It gets much much hotter, but it's still remains water. It changes qualitatively - from water to steam - at 100 degrees. The change is sharp and general. It can be pinpointed easily in relation to any number of criteria.

The qualitative change from the non-capitalist Soviet Union to Russia (and from the non-capitalist Eastern Bloc to Balkanized capitalist ministates) was a bit messy, of course, but still sharp and general. Like the qualitative changes brought about by the English Revolution and the French Revolution, not to mention October 1917.

So, in relation to China, when did the qualitative change from deformed workers state to bourgeois state take place? An event like this is world-shaking, as in 1640, 1789, 1917 and 1990.

This is the question we have to ask ourselves, and I'm not ready to give a definite answer yet. However, from what I've observed there has been no sharp or general qualitative change. Not even the opening of the Shanghai stock exchange, or the absorption of Hong Kong with its capitalist structures almost entirely intact. The enclaves handed over to imperialist exploitation don't represent this kind of change. (In passing, I don't think "super-exploitation" is much use as a category - it reflects our impressions of exploitation, not its essential economic character) These enclaves developed quantitatively rather than qualitatively, as more and more potentially threatening joint ventures, as far as I can see at the moment.

These are indisputably acts of class collaboration and extreme cases of class betrayal. Yet we should recall the situation in the Soviet Union of the 30s, say. The dialectic tensions involved there almost defy belief, but Trotsky was able to bring them into a single polar relationship (opposed poles of the same phenomenon) by the analysis leading to the characterization of Degenerated Workers State. In some ways China strains the dialectic even more intolerably than the Soviet Union did (as in the examples I've mentioned). In other ways not (China hasn't paved the way for Nazism or an imperialist world war by its policies - yet).

But strains of this kind are quantitative, not qualitative. Qualitative is when the hawser mooring a big ship snaps. We don't have to argue the toss about the risks caused by the huge quantitative tensions that have been building up in it. We don't have to ask ourselves if it's broken yet - even if there can be doubts while some of the individual steel threads making it up are ripping apart.

Big questions I want to resolve in my mind concern the land, the stance (and social weight) of the lower and middle strata of the bureaucracy, and particularly the composition and attitudes of the mass of the armed forces, the troops, NCOs and lower officers.

And in all this we shouldn't forget the significance of India as a parallel and contrast.

The capitalist crisis in Greece

2010-03-19T14:57:00.001+01:00

The Guardian today had an article on the Greek crisis dealing with the general European, Euro and German crisis too.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/18/greek-pm-gives-eu-leaders-rescue-deadline

It was followed by dozens of comments. I added mine:

Our media are liars. Our economists are more idiotic than the astronomers and priests who thought the earth was the centre of the universe. And they cheer on our rulers as if the sun shone out of their arses.
If any of this (or only a tiny fraction of it) had happened in the Soviet Bloc in the days of the Cold War, it would have been headlined as a catastrophic collapse and irrefutable evidence of an insane and absurd economy.
But it didn't happen. And the headlines screamed at us regardless.
Now we have a catastrophic collapse in the heartlands of capitalism, providing irrefutable evidence of an insane and absurd economy. And the media tell us it's all a readjustment. And the economists mumble into their beards. And our rulers work half of us to our deaths, and leave the other half to rot.
But in this capitalist world is There Is No Alternative. Just as there was no alternative to the Pope ("burn em alive!") or the maggoty sorry mighty Catholic Church or the Kings and Emperors by the grease of god.
That's enough irony and sarcasm. There is an alternative - workers states running a non-capitalist economy. This will replace the outworn, worm-eaten capitalist system and sweep the capitalists and their lickspittle politicians, astrologers and ideologues into the cesspool of history along with the Popes and the Emperors.
The capitalist class has no time - it faces its historical exit - and so its policies are more and more destructive and desperate. The people who produce the things the capitalists own and sell can't be got rid of until our world is destroyed. But our struggle is urgent - if socialism doesn't replace capitalism in the near future, then capitalism will destroy our world.

It'll only be the "bad guys" of course

2010-03-11T11:31:00.001+01:00

An article brought up the question of IT companies and human rights.
http://www.eweek.com/showblog/58575/GoogleChina-Dispute-May-End-Up-at-WTO/rp/

My comment:
You can bet they won't get stuck into allies like Britain or Australia or Sweden. Or the US for that matter. Not to mention Israel.
Remember all the human rights violators who aren't touched cos they're "our sons of bitches" - like Uzbekistan, where the British ambassador Craig Murray was fired for his public criticism of a dictator who boils his enemies alive. Or Colombia (just one example of many) where it's routine for the US to waive human rights conditions in relation to arms deals.