Dialectics and the history of maths and technology

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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!

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


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


Thanks Michael Rosen for reading and responding to the comments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October, the German revolution, and us

On FaceBook, Addy wrote:

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

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


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

Time to take it all back

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

One of us summed it up by writing:

"…the country is sick."

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

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

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

Our work produces ALL value. 

The following deductions are then made:

1) Profit (at least 10%)

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

3) Direct taxes (federal, state, local)

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

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

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

That's just the positive stealing.

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

1) Military expenditure;

2) Preventable and curable diseases;

3) Deliberate creation of ignorance and lack of skills;

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

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

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

7) Destruction of productive facilities in war;

8) Destruction of human beings in war.

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

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

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

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

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

If not, we shrivel.

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

America - the good life getting better...

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

My comment:

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

Förbättra skolan - improving schools

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

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

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

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

A short discussion about history and truth:

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

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

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

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

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

Discussion with an Indian Maoist on the New Wave Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cuba - some comments on a blog

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

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

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

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

I made the following comments:

First:

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

Second:

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

Third:

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

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

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

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

Therapy in Britain - healthier attitudes towards mental health

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


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

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