Education in today's society (2)

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


To which I responded:


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

Education in today's society

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


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

*

The place of Latin

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


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


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

About class leadership

Some thoughts on the tube this morning

Given that imperialism is capitalism pregnant with socialism...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C

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

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


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

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

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

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

And in the meantime, as Pete wrote: 

Voltaire had a word for it:

Cet animal est très méchant,

Quand on l'attaque il se défend.

(This animal is very evil -

Attacked, it fights back like the devil.)

Chops

Education in Britain - a Brave New World

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

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

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

The European Crisis - an outline

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

Any comments or questions welcome!


THE EUROPEAN CRISIS


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

Posturing...

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

Stop Slouching!

Good posture boosts self-esteem

By Harvey Black  

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


So I commented:


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

The emptiness of imperialist political manifestos (2)

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

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

The emptiness of imperialist political manifestos

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


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

An Indian site against caste

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

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

With specific reference to the following article:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheers

C

Meta-bloggery

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

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

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

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

Let there be light!

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


My own comment:

The puppies yelp, the caravan passes...

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

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

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

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

And that generator! What to say...

Fiat lux!

Movin' an' a-groovin'

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

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

choppam at 08:47 AM on 04/21/09

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

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

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

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

Excellent!

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

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

Even sheep can help you defeat a monster...

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

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

I made the following comment:

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

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

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

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

Go, Trolley Dollies!

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

My comment:


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

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

Couple of random impressions about music

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

Bone-headed bourgeois bigotry

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

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

I commented:


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

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

What kind of state is China today??

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

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

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

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

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

I replied:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The capitalist crisis in Greece

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

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

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

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