Chomsky on democracy and fascism

This is a brief discussion on the validity of using "fascism" to describe modern society. From FaceBook where S posted the following image of Chomsky and its quotation:








I objected briefly to using fascism in this way, and S responded like this:

S: Firstly, and to be fair, Chomsky makes a distinction between economic and political fascism. He may be appropriating the term to (unhistorically?) characterise a set of socio-economic conditions that do not wholly correspond to those in pre-war Italy, Germany and elsewhere. e.g. the persistence of (almost totally ineffective, corrupt) democratic institutions. Even so, he's not far off the mark. One of the defining characteristics of fascism is corporatism, and there can be no doubt that the US is a corporate-colonial economy. Add the rapidly expanding encroachment on individual freedoms, civil and human rights, an authoritarian regime, compliant courts, controlled media, burgeoning police powers, brutality and impunity, a militarised state that spends more on 'defence' than next 13 countries combined, perpetual war to protect 'national' interests, and you have most of the elements that go to make up what looks very much like an ongoing transition from advanced capitalism to fascism, albeit in a more modern guise.

To which I replied:

Yes, Stuart - lots of facial fuzz, but not yet a full-fledged beard. 

"Ongoing transition" is exactly what this is all about, and in that case the fundamental historical tradition is from capitalism to socialism - from one historical economic mode of production to another. The slave-owning mode of production morphed into the feudal mode of production over hundreds of years with the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of smaller, more flexible states based on feudal relations of vassal fiefs and serfdom. The workers weren't just cattle any more. They were human, but chained to the land and were forced to labour on the lord's land for free besides scraping a living off the plot of land they were tied to.

Then feudalism morphed into capitalism over hundreds of years, starting with the ex-Roman municipalities in Italy and Germany, then magnificently and irrepressibly in the English Revolution of 1640 and onwards (high point 1649 with the beheading of Charles 1 and the setting up of a republic) and the French Revolution of 1789.

These revolutions (as Marx frequently says) borrowed lots of props from the past, especially Rome, but they weren't a revival of the Roman Empire or Republic. 

In the same way, today the world is morphing into socialism. Individual, free enterprise capitalism was dying in Marx's day and he saw it and wrote about it in Capital. All production and distribution is thoroughly socialized and collectivized and we're all inextricably linked to each other through great national and international institutions of circulation like banks and credit card companies and social media. The only capitalist thing remaining is the relation of ownership - but that's enough to make the world the horrifying place it is under imperialist domination.

The capitalist ownership relation was broken definitively by the Bolshevik Revolution and its successful expropriation of the land-owners and capitalists in Russia in October 1917. That model has since been successfully followed in huge parts of the world - Vietnam and China, Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe, and Cuba. Due to the persistence of capitalist ownership and huge material (military) power in the biggest imperialist countries (the US, Britain and France in particular) political pressure on the ruling groups in these countries has been enormous, and some of the non-capitalist countries have been dragged back into capitalist social relations, primarily Russia and the old Eastern Bloc. But they are all dismal failures when it comes to advertising the historical superiority of capitalism that was so deafeningly trumpeted in the 1990s after the capitulation of the Soviet bureaucracy to imperialism. When they have remained independent of US or EU imperialism - like Russia - they have created a post-capitalist capitalism you might call it, a state capitalism where huge oligarchical control of production is mediated through equally centralized political control in a very authoritarian form.

But this is a process foreshadowed in the fate of the post-colonialist countries, too - throwing out the colonialists but not the capitalists has led to all kinds of bizarre authoritarian political set-ups, from ostensibly democratic India, via the stinking corruption of Mandela's non-apartheid South Africa to the familiar dictatorships of Zaire, Zimbabwe, Libya, Saddam's Iraq, Assad's Syria, etc. 

In fact, authoritarian political control coupled with capitalism generates many fascist features, but the process is much more general than what surfaced in Italy and Germany between the world wars.

The truth of it is that modern capitalism - ie decadent, rotten imperialism - is a dead-end, literally dead, necrotic, for human society, and all these "fascist" phenomena worldwide are symptoms of its necrotic decay. If they are allowed to develop unchecked, they will produce barbarism - unchained brutality and destruction of people and the environment in the service of profit.

The only alternative is socialism, that is, a non-capitalist economy and society run on democratic, collective, universally and coherently planned principles by the actual workers producing the wealth in voluntary association with full political empowerment.

This historical alternative, just under the surface, remains invisible to everyone not grasping Marx's scientific explanation of the underlying economic forces shaping human history. And today that means just about everybody. It's not just unfortunate, but a great tragedy that Marx never got round to writing the political part of his work on bourgeois society. He was able to complete the economic part, in Capital and its companion books, but the political part is missing and needs to be worked out by us on our own using his separate historical and political writings - such as the 18th Brumaire, his work on Palmerston, his comments on various countries and their historical development, like Ireland and India and the US, his Critique of the Gotha Programme, and so on. Only Lenin and Trotsky (and to a lesser extent Rosa Luxemburg) have successfully continued this political work and pulled the threads together for us. Most notably Lenin in The State and Revolution, and Trotsky in Results and Prospects, The Permanent Revolution, and The Revolution Betrayed.

It's clear as the noses on our faces that both Lenin and Trotsky (following Marx) weren't just theorists, either, but totally committed to the practical task of organizing a revolutionary socialist party and overthrowing the power of capital, consummated in the successful anti-capitalist revolution in Russia in October 1917.

What I have just written shows the perspectives in which we need to judge what's happening around us, and they have little to do with labels like "fascism" or "corporativism", which scratch the surface of imperialist society with penetrating very deeply. The same goes for "colonialism". They provide a handy way of describing some of the symptoms of our world, but they don't explain anything much, and they certainly don't help us change it.

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. 

Science, reason and bad philosophy

Aimee Whitcroft blogs about rational discussion, aka science, at  http://sciblogs.co.nz/misc-ience/2012/10/09/no-actually-everyone-is-not-entitled-to-their-opinion/  (includes a link to the original blog location) and argues that some opinions are better than others. She doesn't go too deeply into how better opinions are validated, however, so I added the following comment, which gave me the opportunity to quote an astonishingly refreshing passage from an article on quantum physics in last month's Scientific American on why quantum obscurantism is an ideological artefact of bad (bourgeois) philosophy:

The problem is that all formally incontrovertible proofs are based on axioms that can’t be formally proven. So you can argue till you’re blue in the face and never satisfy the ideological sceptic who demands absolute proof.

What it comes down to is a combination of material empirical demonstrations and serious debate of a principled kind. And more often than not debate will equal struggle or even war.

So all truth is fundamentally institutional, rooted in people organized in society.

Which means it has to be fought for and defended in institutional ways, ie using social pressures such as armed force (the queasy might prefer the euphemistic terms 'laws' or 'government').

The litmus test here is the understanding of 'serious'. A frivolous or deliberately obscurantist opponent can’t be talked out of a mistaken position. Rationality won’t bite. Jews, gypsies and socialists will be incinerated if the fascists aren’t removed from power by force.

So I hope Patrick Stokes adds a few words about institutional clout to his riff on "you’re entitled to what you can argue for".

Hegel was well aware of all this as he watched the French Revolution changing the institutional foundations of truth, and he grasped the nettle and accounted for this in his philosophy. The World Spirit and the Spirit of the Age went on to don new socialist personas soon afterwards, however, so 'serious' bourgeois philosophy stopped dead with Kant, ie turned into its opposite and became frivolous and obscurantist.

Which left serious (no quotes) science in bourgeois society groping around in Plato’s cave so to speak.

An article in Scientific American special issue September 2012 by David Deutsch and Artur Ekert (“Beyond the quantum horizon”) lays the blame for the fumbling confusion entangling the quantum field squarely on "bad philosophy".

I’ll leave you with the relevant chunk of the section "Beyond Bad Philosophy":

"Erwin Schrödinger, who discovered quantum theory’s defining equation, once warned a lecture audience that what he was about to say might be considered insane. He went on to explain that when his famous equation describes different histories of a particle, those are "not alternatives but all really happen simultaneously." Eminent scientists going off the rails is not unknown, but this 1933 Nobelist was merely making what should have been a modest claim: that the equation for which he had been awarded the prize was a true description of the facts. Schrödinger felt the need to be defensive not because he had interpreted his equation irrationally but precisely because he had not.

"How could such an apparently innocuous claim ever have been considered outlandish? It was because the majority of physicists had succumbed to bad philosophy: philosophical doctrines that actively hindered the acquisition of other knowledge. Philosophy and fundamental physics are so closely connected—despite numerous claims to the contrary from both fields—that when the philosophical mainstream took a steep nosedive during the first decades of the 20th century, it dragged parts of physics down with it.

"The culprits were doctrines such as logical positivism ('If it’s not verifiable by experiment, it’s meaningless'), instrumentalism ('If the predictions work, why worry about what brings them about?') and philosophical relativism ('Statements can’t be objectively true or false, only legitimized or delegitimized by a particular culture'). The damage was done by what they had in common: denial of realism, the commonsense philosophical position that the physical world exists and that the methods of science can glean knowledge about it.

"It was in that philosophical atmosphere that physicist Niels Bohr developed an influential interpretation of quantum theory that denied the possibility of speaking of phenomena as existing objectively. One was not permitted to ask what values physical variables had while not being observed (such as halfway through a quantum computation). Physicists who, by the nature of their calling, could not help wanting to ask, tried not to. Most of them went on to train their students not to. The most advanced theory in the most fundamental of the sciences was deemed to be stridently contradicting the very existence of truth, explanation and physical reality."

Cochlea implants and discrimination against the deaf

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


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

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.

The place of Latin

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


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


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

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.

Copyright, copywrong, humanity and piracy

Techdirt: It's Not China's Poor Copyright Laws That Fuel Piracy There

www.techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20070409/105456

Contributed by Carlo

Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 @ 3:02AM Permalink to this story.

It's Not China's Poor Copyright Laws That Fuel Piracy There

from the untapped-demand dept

In one of its roles as proxy for Hollywood movie studios and record labels, the US government continually complains to China that it's not doing enough to stop piracy, and threatens it with the big stick of sanctions or other actions through the World Trade Organization. While these threats are usually just hot air, the US has now formally complained to the WTO, saying that Chinese laws don't live up to WTO commitments in the area of copyright protection and enforcement. But there's a second element to the complaint, which takes issue with China's heavy restrictions on the distribution of foreign content, including DVDs, CDs, books and other products. Where things get a little bit more interesting is that the original article in the Wall Street Journal, and indeed, movie studios and record labels themselves, gloss over the second part of the complaint -- when it illustrates beautifully how backwards big content thinks.

A graph in the article says that China and France are the two nations where the movie industry suffers its biggest losses due to piracy. While the dollar amounts cited are pretty certainly bogus, is it any coincidence that the movie industry sees those two countries as the biggest for piracy when they both feature some of the tightest restrictions on the distribution of foreign content? France is pretty famous for its efforts to keep American content out of its media market, while the Chinese government allows just 20 foreign films to be shown in the country's cinemas each year. It would be reasonable to deduce that it's a lack of legitimately available, attractive products that's driving the demand for pirated goods in these countries, rather than weak enforcement of copyrights. This mimics what goes on in other markets: the content industry fails to provide consumers with attractive products to purchase -- though it's generally because of poor strategy rather than government interference -- so they turn to pirated goods instead. The market for legitimate movie downloads probably provides the best illustration of this scenario. The products offered by legitimate, studio-backed sites are so heavily restricted and overpriced that nobody wants to buy them. The idea that content providers like movie studios don't understand this is reflected in the fact that they aren't pushing the government to attack China's 20-film limit, they just want to make its copyright laws more strict. It's just another indication of how the industry won't compete with free, while it protests that it simply can't. The failure in the market isn't a failure of the government to sufficiently protect copyright holders; it's a failure of those copyright holders to provide products and services that are attractive to consumers.

Reader Comments

1. A contradiction. by Terri on Apr 10th, 2007 @ 4:33am

   This makes no sense. If the copyright holders provide no content that users want, then why do the pirates sell so many bootleg copies of that self-same content?

2. Re: A contradiction. by MadJo on Apr 10th, 2007 @ 4:39am

   my first thought would be price. These bootlegged/"pirated" material is much friendlier priced than the original stuff.
   In a way consumers are already voting with their wallets. ;)

3. THis is dumb by Cleveland on Apr 10th, 2007 @ 4:43am

   This has got to be the worst written article ever!!
   I do agree that the gov't may be keep the film industry down on these countries. Therefore making their citizens turn to bootlegs, but that still is not an vaild reason to steal.

4. Re: A contradiction. by Anonymous Coward on Apr 10th, 2007 @ 4:51am

   The copyright holder want to provide the content. As it said in the story China and France drastically restrict the amount of content allowed. The demand is there and the supply isnt. Thats what is driving the piracy.

5. by [caiocesar] on Apr 10th, 2007 @ 4:53am

   I think this is not all true. Se the case of Brazil. It's a wide-open country, specially for foreign content. Even though it has a huge amount of pirated material being bought and sold on the streets of nearly every city.
   The real cause might be the high prices that the so called legal content arrives to stores' shelves...

6. It's True by ImaniOU on Apr 10th, 2007 @ 4:53am

   As an American who has been living in Taiwan for almost six years now, I can choose to either miss out on really good movies and television programs because although there are some foreign films and TV shows here, the only ones picked up are the ones that are extremely popular or do not rely on understanding the language. If it involves fart jokes, then it makes it. If it involves a lot of dialogue, then the companies here don't want to be bothered translating it so they just don't carry it. The law enforces everything has to be subtitled in Chinese, even Chinese-language media because of the different dialects all over the island. If it weren't for pirated movies and TV shows, I would be missing over half a decade of American pop culture. The quality of programming here sucks and anyone who wants more from entertainment than caricatures and bathroom humor is forced to seek out alternative means for getting it.

7. Yeah by Wolfger on Apr 10th, 2007 @ 4:57am

   That about sums it up. Most people are honest, and would rather pay to get something legitimate. Piracy stems from two sources: unavailability and unaffordability.

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

Choppam responds:

Good article. The US govt is very self-serving in its trade policies, hates international agreements that thwart its greed and selfishness, and censors officials and scholars and scientists who disagree with it whenever it can. And it shills for the corporations like Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Money and Big ShowBiz. So it tries to put a lid on the reproduction and spread of useful ideas and creative art for the benefit of useless fat cats and uncreative boneheads.

Most people don't realize that the ability to easily and rapidly reproduce ideas and art (eg books, articles, music, shows, movies, prints, photos) is heralding an explosion in interaction and creative development among ALL human beings - that's the whole of humanity, every one of us. Regardless of borders, bureaucrats or bombs.

The reason why the corporations can't compete is that almost everybody hates them, and most people can't afford what they demand. So as soon as the useful and creative things they've stolen from humanity slip through the prison bars they try and put around them, then they find their way home - to humanity.

The oligarchy (rule by the few) and plutocracy (power of the rich) that is fomenting war and destruction today wants to corner every market it can smell out in order to charge exorbitant prices for necessary products. This system wants everybody to act like ignorant selfish money-worshipping brutes like themselves. Fortunately for us (humanity) most people puke at this idea and do what they can to stay human and share their joys and thoughts with each other. You can't make lives and ideas into private property.

Artists and scientists etc need to live. Most people that make up society realize this better than the fat cats and their governments. So let society organize a fair way to do this without the insanity of present-day copyright and patent litigation.

If big stealing (say the looting of Iraq's oil, or the slave contracts big recording companies force on most musicians, or the destruction of our air and water) is sanctioned by law and government, while small stealing is stigmatized and smeared, then the system needs to be turned on its head.

Meanwhile people will do what they have to do to feel themselves as a real part of humanity, with access to the latest and greatest productions of their fellow human beings.

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.)

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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.