On the destruction of Glenn Greenwald's partner's computers and data by the British government

An article in TechDirt gives a good general account of some of the democratic issues involved in the case of the British government's harassment of the Guardian journalist involved in the Snowden whistle-blowing affair, Glenn Greenwald and his partner, David Miranda.
TechDirt Data destruction orders direct from Cameron

Since the article ignored both historical and class perspectives I made the following comment rooted in the perspective of the Permanent Revolution, ie that the bourgeoisie as a class is totally incapable of taking society forward even to realize bourgeois democratic ideals that are incomplete or even quite absent, and that such ideals can only be achieved in passing by the working class when it achieves the broader goal of emancipating all humanity in a non-capitalist world run by associated producers on socialist lines:

Clear enough for an article lacking historical and class perspective. Should be enough to stimulate any remaining serious bourgeois democrats to take action. Ha-fucking-ha.
We should be clear that there will not be any massive bourgeois democratic response against this violation of fundamental bourgeois democratic rights. The only defenders of such democratic rights on a mass scale are organized socialist movements - workers and poor peasants fighting against the capitalists and imperialists who are daily ruining their lives with overwork in harsh conditions or enforced idleness, and the poverty accompanying both.
The only way to put an end to this kind of inhumanity - both the violation of rights and the brutal exploitation - is to replace capitalist society with a non-capitalist one. The great bourgeois democratic reforms (parliamentary rule, universal franchise, equal legal rights for all, universal education, national liberation) have been achieved in most places, and the bourgeoisie is quite satisfied now, thank you very much. Historical change is class-led, by the class with most to gain and nothing to lose. That used to be the bourgeoisie, from around 1500 to 1789, say. Now it isn't any more. It's the working class and the poor peasants who are one bad harvest away from dispossession and the megacity slums.
So any serious non-socialist radical democrats had better start reading up on history and class and put their effort behind creating an alternative society removing power from the worn-out, incompetent, brutal and incorrigible capitalist bourgeoisie.

Deposing Mursi in Egypt and Democracy

After the news that president Mursi had been deposed by the military in Egypt, a FaceBook friend wrote:

I'm not going to celebrate a military coup against a democratically elected leader, no matter who he is. Hard to see any good coming out of this.

To which I responded:

 Democracy is more than elections, it's practical rule by the people and for the people through duly elected representatives, and it's the practice and persistence of the democratic popular rule that is more important. As in language learning the thing is "communication over correctness", in politics it's not the formalities of selection that are the gold standard, but the realities of priorities in long-term action. The selection of a team can be carried out with impeccable formality, and the team can still play like shit. If there's scope for running change and improvement, well and good, and little harm done. If not, there's a crisis and emergency tensions explode in violence.
In a lot of countries, Egypt included, there are such shifts in the relationship of the active masses to power and social norms taking place that there is little scope for running change and improvement within the social structures in operation. Which means that all the social weight of different social groups/strata/classes hurls itself into the arena higgledy-piggledy and piecemeal, now in part, now all at once, now in a flash, now like treacle, and in situations like this "democratic elections" is a paper label that will be torn to shreds if it isn't securely fastened on a solid substrate and protected by the transparent armour of social practice.
Contradiction and dialectics rule on the surface of today's events in North Africa and the Middle East, and not just in the depths like everywhere else. It's quite conceivable that a military intervention can be more democratic than an elected official's actions. For instance, a case can be made that the military interventions of Chavez were more democratic and proved so in the long term than the formally democratic actions of the US administrations of recent decades... not to mention the formally undemocratic actions of these same US administrations
Judging events in Egypt by the standard of democratic elections (a most elastic and slippery standard!) at the moment is political and historical myopia.

Discussing the same question on a mailing list, I commented:

The problem - as we can see in the US - is democracy in daily action, not so much the formalities of election. The better the daily dose of democracy, the better elections will work. Formal democracy is an indispensable social decision-making tool where the realities of power and consensus permit it. 

In most countries today the realities of class (or other mass social grouping's) power are contentious or becoming so, and consensus is flying (or has flown, or has always been) out of the window, which means that democratic formalities provide no solution for smooth social functioning. When this happens only coercion will work, and this means violence, and "bodies of armed men" to exercise it - as Engels defined the state.

In North Africa and the Middle East (NAME) today we are seeing (as in so many other places before) a living example of the brokering of social power between mass groupings of social interests (classes, strata, etc) and armed bodies. During such a transitional revolutionary period (think of the French Revolution) formalities take second place and the working out of the various contradictions and antagonisms can take years.

In NAME we have the further powerful influence of events and solutions (or unresolved crises) in neighbouring and distant but involved countries.

The Weimar republic is a good example of this process - one that went wrong as far as democracy in the sense of rule in the interests of the mass of the people is concerned. October 1917 is another good example, where the outcome was right - until the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy was able to seize power while the situation was still in post-revolutionary flux. 

The NAME revolutions are still unfolding, so it's pointless to hope for any formal solution soon. What should emerge eventually, unless we get the formal stasis ("peace of the graveyard") of totalitarian dictatorship or its imperialist comprador equivalent, will be a situation where the most powerful group/class is in undisputed control of power, economic decision-making and social levers of cohesion (media/propaganda). Then sufficient consensus will have been achieved and formal mechanisms for election and the exercise of social power will function smoothly. 

Market failure, creativity, and online gouging

Cory Doctorow has written an article in the Guardian entitled "Just because everything has value doesn't mean it has a price". Cory Doctorow: Charging for everything kills creativity About the implications of charging for every little bit of imagined use that can be extracted from an online offering. It's part of a series called "Digital rights, digital wrongs". It's interesting because of its focus on something that capitalism just can't handle, namely "externalities". Better otherwise known as "market failure". His line is that charging for everything will kill creativity.

I commented:

We're back with the problems Marx faced trying to work out the relationship between social production and private appropriation, value, price and profit, and the inadequacies of Adam Smith and Ricardo's attempts to resolve them.
Nothing of value is produced without our labour. So it's natural to expect an equivalent return for it. The problem is a) what is a true equivalent, and b) who will determine this and implement it in society.
Marx resolved the problem of "true equivalence", so problem a) is taken care of. But problem b) is in complete contradiction to the findings of a), since the people determining and implementing equivalence exploit most of us (wage-earners) by creaming off what we produce above and beyond survival (keeping body and soul together at the normal standard of living for our society) and making it their private wealth instead of our shared social wealth.
Cory D ignores this, and ends up arguing for Utopia, since he implies there's a way of accommodating a) with b). This is nonsense, cos ownership is all in our society, and ownership of capital (control of other people's work) is a class monopoly.
This is a pity, cos the main thrust of his argument goes some way along the constructive realistic road discussed seminally by Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionhttp://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
The thing is that the whole of capitalist production today is a market failure. In other words the traditional (or post-traditional, imperialist) market is a useless mechanism for coordinating and eliciting socially useful effort. Market techniques can be very useful in some kinds of distribution, in that they provide spontaneous feedback and self-organization, but they're no good when it comes to deciding social priorities at the limits of resource availability, and they're disastrous in relation to the inevitable necessity of disaster management.
Production and distribution today is a huge social problem worldwide, and some of its most glaring effects are in the realm of ideas and culture. But the solution isn't going to come from economic measures but from political measures that affect the economic foundations of our society.
Till we introduce socialism (non-capitalist ownership and control of production) there will be no solution and Cory will have to keep repeating himself and running on the spot (not to mention the idiots who claim that locking everything down and charging us for the air we breathe is the right way to go).

China and capitalist restoration

In a discussion on FaceBook (11 March 2012) Gerry Downing answers MT and takes the opportunity to  justify the idea that capitalism has been restored in China.
Gerald Downing FaceBook

I don't know why you think I think that China is a deformed workers state but you are wrong. In my view the date of transition was 1992, although that is arguable (Workers Power put it at about the same time). Here is what I think:Let us list the features of the Chinese economy and state to see which it is;1. The “iron rice bowl” is basically gone. Mao’s welfare state has been abolished apart from in a few places. The Gini Coefficient shows a sharply rising graph of income and wealth inequality in China since the early 1980s as in India, not yet as high as Brazil, Mexico and South Africa but getting there. 2. There is a thriving capitalist sector with its own class differentiated bourgeoisie and working class. China now has more millionaires than the UK, Germany or Japan, although at 450,000 it is still a long way behind the U.S. even though that fell by 2.5 million to 6.7 million in 2008. All deformed and degenerated workers’ states expropriated their capitalists and prevented that class arising anew. 3. There is a Stock Exchange and capitalist banks, although, a la Bismarck, Stolypin and Keynes, they are state controlled (unlike in Britain under Blair and Brown) to ensure the better development of capitalism. All deformed and degenerated workers’ states had/have no stock exchanges. This is not neo-liberal capitalism but it is capitalism nevertheless.4. The monopoly of foreign trade is gone but the state still retains strategic control over trade as good capitalist planners. All deformed and degenerated workers’ states had/have a state monopoly of foreign trade.5. They are developing as an imperialist power; their investments in Africa, South America and Sri Lanka, for example, are for purely commercial and strategic/military purposes. This is totally unlike the practice of the USSR where support and investment was to strengthen their hand and give them more pawns in the chess game of achieving peaceful cooperation and compromise with the world Imperialism. The USSR was prepared to sponsor, ideologically and materially, armed opposition to imperialism to this end, China arms its clients but has no ideological opposition to imperialism, however distorted, to offer. However China still retains strong elements of a semi-colonial state in its far-flung backward regions, which are prey to US/CIA interventions to begin the breakup of a developing rival. It is still a long way from a fully fledged imperialist power and history never proceeds in a straight line without wars and revolutions so its uninterrupted development is far from certain.Comrades, when we see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, we call that bird a duck. James Robertson had pragmatically seen the significance of the long swim of the capitalists from Cuba to Miami by 1966 but the International Committee of Gerry Healy and Pierre Lambert refused to look at what had happened there after 1959. In his play Galileo Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo invites the leading scholars of Florence to peer into his telescope for the ultimate proof that Aristotle was wrong; but the men refused to look, instead making evasive, dogmatic speeches about why the telescope could not possibly show any such thing. A little more pragmatism and common sense would now assist comrades, before we progress to the more complex world of the Marxist dialectic. China is capitalist, look; it waddles and paddles and quacks, it’s a duck!.

I responded: 

Sorry, Gerry, I think your duck might turn out to be a swan - even though it's exceedingly ugly as a duckling ;-)

Your version of the history of the capitalist mode of production in the era of transition to socialism is impressionist because it ignores all the important historical questions. 

Most importantly it ignores the question of how modes of production develop and transform - from slave-ownership to feudal to capitalist etc. Despite occasional hiccups they don't head back. It's not straightforward, but it's irreversible. If the new mode of production breaks down, you get chaos and catastrophe - in our day formulated as socialism or barbarism.

So if imperialism is the ultimate stage of capitalism (ie can develop no further scientifically speaking, but just decay or metamorphose into something new and non-capitalist) and is essentially capitalism pregnant with socialism, we must ask what the direction of history is and why capitalism can so easily return to a country where its foundations were destroyed. Against the tide. This tide - clearly seen by Marx in the 1860s, where he states (in Capital III) that capitalism is socialized through and through in every respect except ownership and the direct consequences of ownership), and fully accepted by Lenin - is important for understanding the history of the 20th century. Especially the Soviet Union and its character.

First of all, it's the only possible explanation for the survival of revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union for seven decades. Trotsky recognizes this in the Revolution Betrayed where he attacks impressionist notions that the Soviet Union was no longer a workers state in 1936. The political distortions in the Stalinist USSR were at least as great as the economic distortions in China today, if not greater - Trotsky didn't hesitate to draw direct parallels between the Stalinist regime and the Nazi regime in Germany. He characterized it as counter-revolutionary. But the foundations of the USSR were different. The capitalist "integument" had "burst asunder", and social economic productive forces were no longer constrained by private appropriation. The results of the newly unleashed productive forces were skimmed off by the bureaucrats, of course, but this isn't the same.

Right, so despite a counter-revolutionary regime that banned all political opposition and critical Marxist thinking, crushed oppositional organizations and individuals, didn't understand Marxist economics, and spread lies and confusion about socialism, the new workers state, crippled, weak and impoverished, survived for seven decades and put the imperialist world to shame on many fronts.

When the bureaucratic regime finally sold out to imperialism we got to see real economic counter-revolution in the mode of production sense. First and only time. No lessons have been drawn from this in relation to China. Impressionism talks as if real economic counter-revolution has taken place there too. This is making a nonsense of the category of counter-revolution. Both poltical and economic. Counter-revolution on this scale is spectacular. 1991 in Russia, however well prepared it was politically, and however eagerly and non-militarily embraced it was by imperialism, was not a reformist transition, an undramatic gliding over to capitalist ownership and management.

The urban and rural workers - trampled and despised under Stalinism - were stripped of what little they had left. But this little was HUGE - it was the fundamentally different relationship between a worker and the forces of production in a non-capitalist state. Every speck of inequality and meanness and brutalization in the USSR had arisen AGAINST the nature of a workers state, even a backward and isolated one in a world dominated by imperialism. Superficial analyses (eg the State Capitalist view) missed this aspect of the USSR completely. 

In China, however well prepared the political and some of the economic conditions might be, we have seen nothing approaching the devastation and barbarity of post-restoration Russia. The political chaos. The human destruction. Reversing a mode of production from non-capitalist to capitalist is non-trivial. It means (historically speaking) ramming a big bouncing baby back into a womb that was already too small before it was born. In Russia the only way the restoration has survived is by reshaping the womb, so to speak. The social scale of the forces of production could only be handled by the state taking over the role of capitalist - leading to a real state capitalism run by loyal oligarchs and powerful politicians. Foreign imperialism is nowhere. 

No one has bothered to envisage what might actually happen in China following a real restoration. We have lazily watched capitalist techniques being introduced and just nodded sagely saying: "look - restoration - goodness me..." This has also led to idiotic reinterpretations of "pre-restoration" such as "Mao's welfare state".

In the Revolution Betrayed Trotsky castigated those who treated the bureaucracy as one featureless mass. He pointed out that the class struggle doesn't vanish because its surface expression is suppressed. But the same error is being made in relation to China. And this is the second big problem of the China is Capitalist view. The Chinese bureaucracy is larger and more powerful and far more stable than the Soviet bureaucracy ever was, but it is just as riven by economic, social and political differences - the material interests of the lower, middle and upper bureaucracies are not the same, and often they are in complete contradiction. Lower bureaucrats would stand to lose everything in a restoration. Middle bureaucrats (as always) feel more secure with the status quo. Upper bureaucrats (the equivalent of the Soviet nomenclatura) would probably prefer restoration. Now - and this is BIG - for Marxists a state is an apparatus mobilizing violent force to maintain and defend a particular mode of production. The army, militias, and the elements making them up. Not just leaders but rank and file. Not just general staff but higher and lower officer castes, and the foot soldiers. This organized violence is inextricably bound up with the political and economic management of the state. 

So where does the army stand in relation to restoration? Well, bugger me, how should I know, is the answer, to judge by the total lack of inquiry into the question. 

In short, it's reasonable to assume that there are very powerful forces in China working in both directions - for restoration and against it. Much stronger and more contradictory than they were even in the Soviet Union, as China is a larger and more powerful nation.

Further, just as the USSR prospered (in spite of everything) during the 30s while imperialism was on its knees, China has been prospering during the loooong drawn out death rattling of the great capitalist crisis following the post-war reconstruction (etc) boom. Since say 1980 (when Thatcher and Reagan initiated a desperate reactionary assault on the core imperialist working class) China has been doing very well thank you.

Now, if I were a Chinese bureaucrat of any rank (particularly perhaps a top bureaucrat) I would be asking myself this question: "if imperialism is making such an intolerable mess of things, getting bogged down in expensive unwinnable wars, rotting away socially, lurching from one deep crisis to the next even deeper crisis... and I'm doing just fine with things the way they are here, getting kickbacks from my industrial and financial cronies... and my cronies are doing just fine being looked after by me... Why the fuck would I ever be stupid enough to give everything up and join a losing side? Why should I go aboard their sinking ship?? They are now coming to me with a begging bowl. Asking for bail-outs and handouts, begging for mercy. Nope, I'll carry on as I am for a bit, I think. So, as far as full frontal restoration goes, thanks, but no thanks."

These questions I raise are all fundamental. They can't be answered with trade figures or organizational charts. Economy is Political economy, not company economics, and the big political questions just aren't being asked.

If we hold with Trotsky, then we should move beyond the Revolution Betrayed (1936) to the Transitional Programme (1938), a much more general document assimilating the lessons worked out in the Revolution Betrayed and all of Trotsky's and the class's previous Bolshevik-Leninist experience.

The most important single sentence in the TP is the very first: "The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat."

We need to work out what this means ACTIVELY in relation to problems of capitalist restoration and the fate of Russia and China. It's not enough to passively sit around and bemoan "restoration" and counter-revolution without even considering this aspect of the matter. Because what is happening in Russia and China, obviously, is an expression of the class struggle today in a period of extreme imperialist putrefaction. If "restoration" can be brought about at the stroke of a pen, at the whim of some highly placed bureaucrats in Beijing, and does not depend on a social cataclysm involving a direct confrontation between the working class and the bourgeoisie, then we might as well go into "politics" and fight for a place by the trough in Brussels or Washington. There was no bourgeoisie in the Soviet Union when restoration occurred (which is one reason why it took so long to materialize), so the confrontation was far from straightforward and extremely mediated. There is no real bourgeoisie in China (no state power, no control of commanding heights or army etc etc) so there will be no straightforward confrontation there. 

What we have to do is to work out what social (ie class forces) will be involved in the decisive confrontation, how the bourgeois element will be mediated in China, and in what way we can bring an end to historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat.

We can't do this by handing our enemies a walkover and letting them win by default. "Oh shit, capitalism just restored itself in China. Well, ain't that a shame. Still, it'll be our turn soon..."

I think if a political Galileo were to ask today's "scholars of Florence" to look into his telescope, the thing they would shrink from observing would be "capitalism pregnant with socialism", and a Chinese workers state whose social and economic fate is by no means decided yet.

This very ugly duckling might make quacking noises, but if we use Galileo's microscope (well, today's equivalent :-) we will see that the DNA is that of a swan.

Education in Britain - a Brave New World

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.

Access to higher education and privilege

Mary Beard's blog:

March 16, 2007

Is university entrance squeezing the middle class?

Reinventing the wheel often causes a flurry of headlines. This time (once again) it is about university entrance and the decision to have information about parents included on the University (UCAS) application form. The idea is that it will help to “widen access” if admissions’ tutors know what the potential student’s Mum and Dad do, and whether have been to university themselves.

Squeals of horror from the usual (middle class) suspects.

There is in fact nothing new at all here.

For a long time parental occupation was a question on the special Cambridge application form. Some years ago (I can’t remember exactly when) that question was abolished. The idea was, I think, that this information was encouraging us to discriminate AGAINST the under-privileged – as if we were sorting through the forms and picking out the ambassador’s daughter and chucking the postman’s daughter into the “reject” pile. Socially elite dons looking for students in their own image -- or so the paranoid fantasy went.

I always thought that it was actually working the other way round. Knowing more about where the kids were “coming from” really did help to judge their potential and make a more level playing field.

To put it another way, when I am interviewing a student who wants to come and read Classics, one thing I want to know is whether they have made the most of their opportunities to find out about the ancient world. And it all depends what those opportunities are. If, for example, a girl who has had several long Greek holidays has never once taken the trouble to visit an archaeological site or museum, I will have some qualms. If someone who has never left the country, but lives within a mile of Hadrian’s Wall and has never visited it – well, similar qualms are raised (but I wouldn't hold against them the fact that they had never seen the Parthenon).

The point is that we are looking for those, from whatever background, who have potential – and the capacity to benefit from the course. More information helps (particularly now that the school’s reference is open to the candidate and can be almost useless).

The middle classes really don’t need to worry. I am not looking to favour the stupid daughter of the postman over the clever daughter of the ambassador. I am looking for intellectual potential wherever it is found. Exactly as I have always done.

Posted by Mary Beard on March 16, 2007 at 08:16 AM | Permalink

(There are some good comments, too.)

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

Choppa's response:

Marx's reflections on The Jewish Question in 1844 might help us clear this contradiction up a bit.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/

In a crucial passage he writes:

"The perfect political state is, by its nature, man’s species-life, as opposed to his material life. All the preconditions of this egoistic life continue to exist in civil society outside the sphere of the state, but as qualities of civil society. Where the political state has attained its true development, man – not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, in life – leads a twofold life, a heavenly and an earthly life: life in the political community, in which he considers himself a communal being, and life in civil society, in which he acts as a private individual, regards other men as a means, degrades himself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers."

Thus he distinguishes between the human being as citizen (member of the state), with equal rights etc, and as "bourgeois" (member of civil society) with unequal possessions, wealth, clout, etc.

If we substitute "class" for "religion" in the first sentence of the next paragraph, we read: "Man, as the adherent of a particular *class*, finds himself in conflict with his citizenship and with other men as members of the community."

So basically what academics and universities are doing in their selection process is resolving this conflict between abstract equality and concrete privilege - a conflict that will last as long as the capitalist state itself - as best they can given the built-in contradictions of the task and the varying wiggle-room for different (often mutually exclusive) criteria given by the rules at any particular time.

In my day (the postwar retreat by the capitalist class known as the welfare state) working class students were sucked into higher education with grants that actually enabled them to live and study, and the glorious false flag of "academic freedom" flew over spires and lecture rooms.

Nowadays, with the resurgence of the capitalist class and the rolling back of the welfare state, this is no longer the case.

The solution is not to change the rules of admission or even the grants system (though this might help temper the glaring inequalities a bit) but to change society so the interests of the penurious human majority can no longer be steamrollered by the interests of the inhuman moneybags minority.