Marxism 2013 - explaining a party in turmoil

It's almost summer, which means Marxism is almost upon us... well it might be upon you, it's not upon me. Given the shambles running the triumphant vanguard of the working class it may well be the last Marxism ever, in which case it will also be the last time we can do Meeting Title Tombola. Let's kick things off, enjoy it while it lasts:

Freedom now – the last time

Freedom now – after horsemeat

After horsemeat is 1989 all powerful?

Do genes determine the salariat?

Is this the end of the future?

Is this the end of deflected permanent Sartre?

Is the end of Dr Who hardwired in China?

Is assault hardwired into Dublin?

Can Chavez explain what socialists say?

Debate: what do socialists say about panthers in the 21^stcentury?

The British – what are the alternatives?

Can the British become modern humans?

Is gender exposing Gove to fracking?

Does 1979 determine the French Revolution?

Does Dr Who face the Eurozone?

Are there too many people in the Minority Movement?

11 days in August – the liberation of opium.

Can Marxism explain Charlie Kimber?

Corruption: the motor of Alex Callinicos.

Why didn’t Paul Le Blanc decline Marxism?

Does Mark Thomas face collapse?

Who is Dave Sewell? 

What causes Simon Guy?

How does Amy Leather become revolutionary?

How do we turn the tide in 1979?

Does 1972 face collapse?

Are we too late to stop Georg Lukacs?

Are people too selfish for Orwell?

Sartre between Panthers.

Panthers: the motor between Greece.

Why didn't Luxemburg develop in Spain?

How do we stop socialists exposing cover ups?

For no raisin

A list of known planets and their attributes...

Amazonia: is a planet covered in rain forests and lakes. It is inhabited by giant man-hating women, ruled by a femputer who is really a fembot. 

Amphibos 9: is a hot and steamy swamp planet. It is inhabited by Amphibosians.

Byoria 6: home of the Quantum Lichen people.

Chapek 9: is a small, featureless planet colonized 600 years ago by robots who hate humans. The surface of Chapek 9 is extremely barren with a few species of plants being the only native and organic lifeforms. The atmosphere of Chapek 9 is extremely thin, enough to see stars during the day.

Decapod 10: is an Earth-like planet covered in sandy islands and oceans. It is the home of the Decapodians, a lobster-like species of alien.

 Earth: is the homeworld of the humans and is a major planet in DOOP. It is extremely technologically advanced and has millions of native animals. Earth is mostly covered in some form of water, with continents and islands making up the rest of the surface.

Fedex 8: homeworld of the Upsilons.

Jupiter: a gas giant located in the solar system.

Klingon: has an embassy on Earth.

Mars: Mostly made up of farmland owned by the Wong family also home to the famous Mars University.

Neptune: location of Santa’s ice fortress.

Omega 3: is a desert planet where last tapes of Star Trek were kept, along with the crew. It is the homeworld of Melllvar, his parents and possibly more of his species.

Pandora: is a stereoscopic 3-D planet.

Spa 5: where visitors do forced labour, recommended by Dr Zoidberg.

Thuban 9: is the ninth planet of the Thuban star. It's inhabited by the Thubanians and the Chicken-Salmon. Long ago, life there was ideal for cats.

Venus: Home to the Venusians. Its surface has apparently been developed to support wildlife, and may contain gardens.
  

Monbiot, science and stuff...

I am very much enjoying George Monbiot self-puffing in the Guardian for his new book Feral… Who knows, if I have the means I may even buy the book. The latest piece has two points of interest.

The first is megafauna. It’s astonishing to think that the Americas once had mammoths and giant bison with seven foot horns, sabre tooth salmon and a bird with a 26 foot wingspan. This is exciting stuff. The world was once very different and presumably will be in the future. It’s a step away from Another World is Possible.

There are slight dangers in measuring the quality of nature by the quality and variety of megafauna. Humanity is the planet’s dominant species if you consider that it now quite possibly harnesses more energy than all natural processes put together. That said, by most other measures, biomass, variety of species, variety of habitats colonised etc, bacteria are winning the race for life, they dominant domain of life on Earth. 

Monbiot’s point about “rewilding” wildlife reserves and other expanses of nature is apt. Wildlife reserves are often not teaming with life. They are places that are kept as they have been discovered (or perhaps we should say acknowledged), which is frequently in a depleted state. If rewilding is to be practical and progressive it should be taken into the city. The challenge is to reintegrate civilisation and everyday life into the rhythms of nature, have it accord rather than clash with the flows of energy (the water cycle, the carbon cycle etc), and do all this without attacking people’s standards of living.

Some weekend listening

All the world is a stage

One of the (relatively) recent innovations in the horror/thriller genres has been found footage[1]. The appeal of the horror genre is, if it’s effective, it takes you inside a terrifying scenario but leaves you completely safe. The result is not terror but exhilaration. Found footage removes another barrier to the suspension of disbelief. The genre’s weakness is, of course, when it goes beyond the stage any believable character simply drop the camera and run.

But what is that stage?

The vital element in reports of the Woolwich murder has been citizen-gathered footage. Harvested mobile camera footage has brought the audience closer to the event than any professional news crew ever could take them.

The first commercially produced digital cameras came out in the late 1980s, there's been time enough to develop a set of cultural norms based around said cameras. The ability to record and share all aspects of our lives has created the expectation[2].

When confronted with a brutal murder people filmed it. The killers interacted with the camera. They posed, creating a compellingly grotesque tableau – the lifeless, prone body, the meat cleaver, the butcher’s knife, the out of season clothes, the bloodied hands etc. It’s almost as if the killers had been directed. They also spoke to the camera in a similarly precise manner.

The witnesses may have considered themselves as gathering evidence, but evidence was abundant and the perpetrators made it clear they did not want to hide anything. Besides, could that have possibly been going through the witnesses minds at the time (as opposed to an awful torrent of thoughts)? Why didn’t the onlookers flee the scene? Is it the case that the first instinct in these kinds of situations is to press record?

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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_footage_(genre): “Found footage is a genre of film making, especially horror, in which all or a substantial part of a film is presented as discovered film or video recordings, often left behind by missing or dead protagonists”.

[2] Note: if ever there were any illusions as to how much of the internet is a commons, most if not all significant social media platforms now claim rights over photographs and videos posted on them. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/social-media/9752288/Facebooks-Instagram-claims-perpetual-rights-to-users-photos.html

My impression of the Woolwich attacks

The killing in Woolwich is horrific because it is an everyday horror, brought to you live by mobile phone cameras. Television brings you close, it constantly puts you inside the action, and it's clear from this that any numpty with a meat cleaver can slaughter somebody in the street and in the process drag the political agenda down to the depths.

There will be a racist backlash. Probably some awful new law will be passed to 'deal' with the problem (there is no dealing, as such, with simple murder). The EDL have already rioted in South East London. The coming lumpen-Kristallnacht has already been prepared by years of Islamophobia. The only thing stopping it from happening is the anti-fascist movement.

Something a little special

I found this on Bowiesongs Extras, the final page of the original manuscript of James Joyce's The Dead. The blogger quite aptly says "I cannot imagine what it's like to sit at your desk, look down and see that you've just written those lines".

Big cats and stuff

There is an extract in today’s Guardian taken from an upcoming book by George Monbiot, called Feral. Judging by the Amazon review, it seems to cover a similar area to Mike Davis’s essay Maneaters of the Sierra Madre, from his Ecology of Fear (civilisation-nature, environment-consciousness etc). The extract is about big cat sightings in Britain.

There is no big cat population in Britain. Though there may be feral big cats loose in the countryside at any point in time they will be individuals. Big cats are elusive. The most commonly described cat resembles the black leopard – a very shy creature. They also are creatures of habit. There are no signs, nothing out there, carcasses, dung, urine, footprints and so on, that suggest big cats exist in any number. But there are still 2,000 sightings a year. Many communities have a legendary cat. The majority of sightings though are almost certainly of slightly larger than normal domestic cats. 

Humanity of course arose in East Africa. Monbiot suggests there would be an evolutionary advantage to quickly recognising the feline form. Perhaps there is a Cat Exaggeration Gene, but then Monbiot also suggests big cats represent a reaction against domesticity and an urge towards wildness. While he may be on to something I should think that urge is stronger in George Monbiot than Average Joe. I would think it’s more specifically to do with a process that has its basis in an alienated civilisation.

The ancients lived with a natural world that was far beyond their ken. Human cultures tend to personify phenomena beyond its human control, thunder is the wrath of god, comets and eclipses are ominous portents, the forest or the outback becomes a dreamland; these are just examples.

This has been complimented by human civilisation, which now musters forces not only far beyond individual reckoning but perhaps even eclipsing the combined forces of nature. Man-made phenomena are often naturalised. Examples: recessions are regarded almost as bad weather to be endured, there is a “natural” rate of unemployment, deracinated youth are “predators”.

In Ecology of Fear, when confronted by natural phenomena that are not supposed to happen, middle and upper class Southern Californians, having bestialised the working class, recapitulate ancient thought, transforming mountain lions into serial killers, coyotes into gang members, and living in dread of “Africanised” bees.

Where nature does undergo sudden transformation there is usually human agency behind it. Whether this is recognised depends on the degree and type of alienation (fellow Londoners – we live among parakeets). The modern city is uncanny in many ways. Not only does the city seem to have no basis in nature, the post-industrial city seems to have no basis in economics either. The energy that goes into daily sustaining human civilisation must surely tear the social relations it’s based upon apart – yet capitalism goes on.

No wonder strange creatures stalk our borders, nature lurking and repressed but ready to return.

The soaring confidence of the bourgeoisie

Roger Carr (no relation to Jimmy I presume?) the Head of the CBI has attacked David Cameron for moralising about tax. A little indication as to just how much things are going the ruling class's way. David Cameron has done more for the British bourgeoisie than any recent Prime Minister, drastically redistributing wealth upward and reducing all practical opposition to austerity to nought… but that’s not enough for Roger Carr.

He wants the debate about corporations and taxation to be framed thus.

1)      No morality, it must be all about the rules, or in other words what can’t be got away with. Corporations are allowed to draw on the benefits of universal education and healthcare, refuse collection, roads, subsidised utilities and so on, but you cannot insist they pay for said benefits.

2)      Rules on tax should be fixed internationally. This is impossible but, if it were to come to pass it would put tax regimes beyond any democratic scrutiny. It’s also a derivative of the red herring raised so often about tax and investment. Investment is made more often on the basis of the existence educated and healthy workforce, access to growing markets, easily available utilities, communications and freight, but almost never on rates of taxation.

3)      All changes in tax should be submitted to consultation with corporations. Doesn’t this always happen? Isn’t Carr’s intervention precisely part of a consultation process, where the haute bourgeoisie spells out the terms of co-operation with a democratically elected government (OK, we’l let exactly how this government was formed slide for a second). More importantly though, do you get to negotiate how much tax you’re willing to pay? Of course not.

For no raisin

While we try to block the triumph of meat-headed provincial fascism in Britain you never know we might not win and may have to flee for our lives. Here are some names you could use for your fake passport, you never know, they might work:

Dr Jordan Edilstein
Professor Baxter
Krispy Kreme McDonalds
Kevin Bacon
Horse Renoir
Predator
Chilly
Cousin Phil
Parker Peters
Laura Vanderbooben
Luke Fondleberg
Scotch Bingington
Sholanda Dykes
Mr Mustachos
Warren Beanstalk
Ricky Spanish

Silly kippers

OK, OK, OK, there has been the frankly wonderful mobbing of Nigel Falange in Edinburgh. Comrades, I think we’ve found the model for dealing with UKIP public appearances. 

But better than that, it now turns out a major UKIP donor, a Greek shipping tycoon called Demetri Marchessini, once made a coffee table book called Women in Trousers. The main contention of the book was that Women in Trouserswere behaving in a ‘hostile’ manner by deliberately making themselves unattractive to men.

So far so crass (proof, if you needed more, that there's no such thing as single-issue bigotry - UKIP is a crank magnet): but the punch line is this. In the book Marchessini (who also once called Jennifer Lopez a “Mexican tart” – Lopez is Puerto Rican) wrote: “I adore women and want to see them looking beautiful. Everyone has the obligation to look as attractive as possible”. 

This is Demitri Marchessini. Silly Kippers don't know when to stop, do they?

Also, why is UKIP accepting donations from foreigners? I'm just asking.

Social democracy unravelling

For many years we took it for granted that the public was to the left of the government, not any more. Since the beginning of the depression the British Social Attitudes survey has shown a clear right-ward shift in public opinion. According to this piece it has been driven by Labour supporters. 

According to the survey there has been a particular breakdown in social solidarity. In 2011 47% of Labour supporters agree with the statement “if benefits were not as generous people would learn to stand on their own feet”, up from 11% in 1987. Thirty-one percent of Labour supporters now think welfare recipients are “undeserving”. Twenty-seven percent of supporters think poverty is primarily about social injustice, down 14% from 1986, while 22% think it’s a matter of individual weakness, up 9%.

There is no one else to blame except the last Labour government. This is the end result of twenty plus years of triangulation, of the Labour party pointedly neglecting its base, but also trying to square the circle of achieving social democratic results through neo-liberal means.

The most concerning statistic is the one about the source of poverty. It means not only have people shifted to the right but they have lost the ability to rationally calculate their material interests. A majority of people support action to relieve child poverty yet a majority of children in poverty live in households that have work and poverty is supposed to be a personal failing. How does that make sense? 

Unemployment  figures have been well over two million for several years now. This is not a problem of strivers versus skivers (the recession was not caused by 2.5 million people suddenly deciding they couldn't be bothered). Long term unemployment (and underemployment) is a problem for everybody, the entire working class. It creates insecurity, helps suppress wages and overall effective demand.

The way out is not more sado-monetarism but ample jobs at a living wage. The recession is precisely notthe responsibility of the unemployed but the capitalist class.

This breakdown in class consciousness is why it’s not kicking off everywhere. Social struggles in Britainnow start from an even weaker basis than existed pre-2007. It will take years to turn political questions such as the above around, after all it took the Labour Party leadership nearly thirty years to convince the Labour voters they were more right wing than they realised.

On a much smaller level, I think this is why Left Unity is right to try to stop the 57 Varieties of Socialism from overwhelming the party before it’s even properly constituted. British politics has an excess of revolutionary socialist groups. They have sheltered for years under a giant social democracy. That social democracy is no more. If sectarianism could be indulged before it can be no longer.

Interesting...

Some old news, but with bearing on the modern political scene. This is a photo that shows Nigel Farage in 1997 with Mark Deavin, a BNP 'researcher', and Tony Lecomber, a far-right thug with two convictions, one of possessing explosives, the other of stabbing a Jewish school teacher. Farage says he met Deavin once but denies meeting Lecomber and says the photo could be doctored.

If you know someone who supports UKIP

Phil space

A fascinating discovery: the residual water on the Moon came from the Earth. This means when the Earth suffered the likely collision that produced the Moon it already had oceans and a hard crust, and that the water which made it to the Moon survived the collision (quite a feat). Water is a volatile substance. It had to be imported from the outer solar system, where it could exist in a stable form. The water that eventually reached Earth is essentially the same as the water currently buried in carbonaceous asteroids in the asteroid belt, the water came from the asteroid belt, not comets. This means we probably have to thank Jupiter for life on Earth.

In other news, as I tap this out, there's an annular eclipse approaching over Australia; watch it here.

Doom, glorious doom

Capitalism will leave a legacy to socialism. It’s likely then that if workers power comes to pass it will be an emergency regime. Here’s is another thing to consider, a report by the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, discussing likely future health emergencies resulting from climate change. If Britain becomes warmer and wetter it will become more prone to previously tropical diseases.

They are already heading our way. Dengue was detected in France in 2010. Malaria was reported in Greece in 2011. The West Nile Virus first emerged in New York in 1999 and is now found across the United States.

If and when these diseases do infiltrate our society it will be a question of what cost we, or more precisely the people in power, are willing to pay, greater overheads maintaining public health, or the running cost of continual human suffering. Given the debased state of our ruling class I suspect they’d prefer a debilitated and desperate working class to a mild redistribution of wealth for a conscientious and functioning society. 

Reply in the affirmative to the efficacious use of technical language

Some thoughts thoughts for the brain on this. 

A metaphor is a means by which a perhaps complicated idea or set of ideas is compacted down into a single phrase or even word. Take the phrase “all the world is a stage”[1] from Jacques soliloquy in As You Like It. The world is not a stage, but people do act out their lives, as it were, in roles thrust upon them. Karl Marx, a Shakespeare aficionado, put it differently: men make history but not in circumstances of their own choosing. If metaphor is a way of transporting meaning all language is in a sense a metaphor.

Jargon[2] is a form of specific metaphor that applies to defined groups. Jargon is a way for members of such groups to communicate with speed and ease. The danger is quite obvious. Jargon can be esoteric. Esoteric language is exclusive[3].

There are two problems with trying to simplify or clarify language. First of all it makes communication more difficult. If you wanted to discuss, say, watermelons, conversation would grind to a halt if instead of saying watermelon you had to describe it[4]. The second problem is it skirts some very reactionary ideas.

One of which is language superiority. No one has ever said “my language is backward, inexpressive and difficult to learn”. English is the closest thing there is to a global lingua franca, not because it’s an innately superior language, but because it has been spread by the British and American empires. The other reactionary danger is it can serve to drive out refined thought from public life. Socialism is about helping raise the great mass of people up intellectually.

An example: in the early 40s George Orwell was a supporter of Basic English[5]. Most people don’t notice the shift between his celebrated essay, Politics and the English Language, a plea for simple English, and 1984, with its concept of Newspeak. Truncating language, removing all ambiguity, nuance and idiom, was shown as a means of control. Nothing as dramatic has occurred in history so far[6]. Nonetheless attempts to police language have always been reactionary, attempt to transcend it have so far foundered.

There is no clear solution for us, except to say language is a site of struggle. We must be critical at all times. Rather than ask is this jargon we should be asking does this word work? If we are discussing the implications of democratic centralism then we really ought to use the term, instead of inventing a one or a pleasant metaphor, which actually serves to confuse matters. Tom’s argument is actually an esoteric one. Unless you were present at the first national meeting of the IS or received a substantially accurate account of said meeting you are not part of the initiated. You don’t really have a means by which to judge the argument.

We should also be quite rigorous. We have all heard people make clumsy statements. We’ve all probably made clumsy statements. I once heard someone say “we need to be in touch with concrete people on the ground”, which made me think of SWP members swooping about the sky. Has anyone really said anything as lumpen as “comrades will launch a disciplined intervention into the campaign with our propaganda in order to recruit”?

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[1] Happily plundered from the top of the Wikipedia article describing metaphors, follow it, if you like, with “and all men and women merely players”.

[2] Which I didn’t know until now derives from the Old French for birdsong.

[3] That said, there is no universal language, all metaphors are to some degree exclusive. You either understand them or you don’t

[4] Could you please pass me the pass me the large, round fruit with green, waxy skin, pink flesh and black seeds? How much is this large, round fruit with green, waxy skin, pink flesh and black seeds? Does the large, round fruit with green, waxy skin, pink flesh and black seeds taste alright to you?

[5] An English-based language devised by the linguist CK Ogden, consisting of 850 ‘essential’ words, to be used as a lingua franca and an aid to teaching English as a second language.

[6] Although it occurs something drastic might have happened to Korean after six decades of isolation in the North.

Actually existing songs

Actually existing songs available as sheet music in the British Library:

Ball Tossing
Both Old Men or Young
Fair Cloris in a Pigsty Lay
Fixed in His Everlasting Seat
Galloping Dick
A Handy Little Thing to Have About You
I'll Place it in the Hands of My Solicitor
I'm a Very Potent Queen
I Smote Him on the Boko with My Whangee
A Lap Full of Nuts
A Large Cold Bottle and a Small Hot Bird
Miniwanka
Open Thy Lattice Darling
Say Mama, If He Pops Shall I Send Him to You?
They've All Got Sticky Backs
You Do Keep Popping In and Out

This week's All the Hegemony You Can Eat

Here’s an interesting little story. The state of Louisiana currently legislates for the equal teaching of evolution and intelligent design. The state’s governor endorsed the act, asking the rhetorical question, “what are we scared of”?

Disinvestment in science and technology is one thing. Students who hold that the laws of nature can be suspended at any point are going to struggle with the sciences. If the state education system will not foster a scientific culture it will not turn out new scientists and will drive existing ones away.

It’s an interesting illustration of the practical limits of neoliberal economic theory. Businesses love state investment. Capital needs an appropriately educated workforce. Equally it needs a healthy workforce with good morale. It needs a strong transport infrastructure, reliable utilities and waste disposal, post, telecommunications. It needs a guaranteed currency. It needs enforced property rights and well defined borders. It needs all these things and more. Capital requires an actor, something at least the size of a national state, to pool the necessary resources. Of course individual businessmen and women don’t want to pay for these things out of their own pockets, but it’s these factors, more than income or capital gains taxes, that affect investment choices.

Why has there been a continual drive in the United States to restore creationism as a legitimate scientific credo? Why would a ruling class hurt itself so? There are ideologues out there, and the bourgeoisie relies on the state to preserve its coherent unity as a class. Creationism is contested as well as advocated by bourgeois representatives. But this is also clearly part of a management problem, of hegemony. It is about how to deal with mass participation in public life.

We have gone on a lot about Truthiness on this blog. There are ideologies, and there are ideological assumptions, but part of what makes truthiness recent and real (and not just a humorous quip) is there are areas of public life where rational debate has been fully subverted in favour of things like “family values” or “legitimate concerns”. If you attack every iteration of the scientific method, particularly if you stop it from ever forming in the first place by, say, insisting descent through natural selection is at least as plausible as intelligent design, you render people incapable. The gain that the masses make through achieving universal education is, in this instance, nullified.

If you have no concept of what is scientific and what isn’t then you will not be able to discern something as basic as your own material interests. Each attack on science is a pre-emptive strike against a counter-hegemony trying to form. Socialism is as much about the preservation of four centuries bourgeois achievement as it is anything else.

Phil space

The latest from Cassini mission. Its spring in Saturn's northern hemisphere.

The United Klingon Independence Party

Kingdom, surely...? Anyway, it seems the heat is on UKIP, and it's about time. Why? Here's why.

Physical exercise stops you from being gay. Unborn disabled children should be aborted. Nigel Farage admits UKIP candidates could be former BNP members, never mind, at least he's honest, also lap dancing clubs are alright. It seems the limit for UKIP is anti-semitism, which I suppose we should all be grateful for. At least holocaust denial will get you kicked off the ballot paper.

This is the United Kingdom Independence Party. This is, of course, the ugly, provincial underbelly of British life, pub bores, frustrated small businessmen, Graham from the Golf Course, characters we all know and loathe. UKIP is not fascist. Fascism is a right-wing movement that uses extra-parliamentary, often extra legal means. There is a fairly fluid interaction between the ideas of the far right and the mainstream right. The difference is that extra step the far right take, onto the streets, trying to assert such ideas.

No fascist movement ever starts out as an ideologically coherent force but converges, either on a cause or more often on a charismatic figure. The UKIP swamp is broad and dank. In it lurks the wounded monster of British fascism.

This swamp must be drained. What does that practically mean? A UAF-style campaign, perhaps, to suppress the UKIP vote and expose its activists wherever the need arises. Certainly something needs to be done otherwise, even if most people disagree, if this kind of politics is accepted as legitimate then it will give the genuine fascist right room to make a comeback.

David Bowie enjoys a good list too

This is, apparently, the flowchart of David Bowie’s most recent album, The Next Day. Enjoy:

Effigies
Indulgences
Anarchist
Violence
Chthonic
Intimidation
Vampyric
Pantheon
Succubus
Hostage
Transference
Identity
Mauer
Interface
Flitting
Isolation
Revenge
Osmosis
Crusade
Tyrant
Domination
Indifference
Miasma
Pressgang
Displaced
Flight
Resettlement
Funereal
Glide
Trace
Balkan
Burial
Reverse
Manipulate
Origin
Text
Traitor
Urban
Comeuppance
Tragic
Nerve
Mystification

In other news, the fantastic blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame has just reached the end of another epic chapter, Bowie song-by-song 1992-1995, which included the great lost and found avant-album Leon, from which this indescribable song comes.

Memes galore

The advice animal periodic table... in case you were wondering.

Rabbit hole...

The Boston bombings are proving a strange fascination. They are being investigated by federal prosecutors. Their abiding metaphor, at least in public, seems to be “rabbit hole”. The only man who could have unravelled their mystery, who could have said why the bombings happened, is dead.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older brother, seems to have been the instigator of these acts. He is described as being “self-radicalised”. The evidence of his internet browsing and mosque attendance shows a man who became attracted to a hard line, literalist interpretation of islam around three or four years ago. But that is not evidence of terrorism. There is nothing in islam that advocates bombing massed crowds. Terrorist acts are secular acts. Terrorism is the most oblique form of war. When people resort to terrorism it’s because of their military/political weakness.

In terms of politics he did take an interest in Chechenya. But that begs the question, why attack crowds in Boston? Tsarnaev was also known to have propagated conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks. The centre of various conspiracy theories was himself a conspiracy theorist. When the elder Tsarnaev was interviewed in 2011 by the FBI at the Russian state’s request he was found to have no actual terrorist connections.

The younger brother appears to be an even vaguer character. It is a strange thing when a 19-year-old effectively sacrifices his life without any compelling reason why. Could it be Dzhokhar was kept somewhat in the dark by his brother? Perhaps he was just a fool. We may yet find out. Mystery abounds.

One thing is for sure, it is practically impossible for any society to physically defend itself against so-called lone wolf attacks, including supposedly apolitical, non-terrorist acts, like the Sandy Hook or Columbine massacres. Even if they ‘worked’ before no crackdown is going to guard against this kind of thing happening again. The only substantial defence lies is asking why. Why do these things keep happening?

Attention scum!

Childcare minister Elizabeth Truss reckons too many nurseries are chaotic, with "children running around with no sense of purpose". Honestly, what sense of purpose does a two-year-old need? You heard the minister, attention freeloading toddler scum, grab a broom, get up that chimney and find a sense of purpose!

It occurs though, it is standard neo-liberal statecraft, for both Tory and Labour ministers, to decry public service. That's what executive power seems to mean. Make someone a minster the first thing they do is slag off the people they are responsible for administering and trash the service they provide. Why do they do this?

Part of the reason surely is that public service is provided often by skilled labour, which difficult to quantify and almost impossible to mechanise (the reason why public sector unions, badly organised and soporific, still hold some sway - skilled labour has sectional strength). We are still a long way from a digital doctor or a mechanical teacher.

Outbursts like these are partly technocratic frustration and partly a conscious way of holding down the public sector workforce. No one ever comes into office and says, "hey, you're all doing a great job by and large, keep up the good work" or "you don't get the resources you need and yet you still soldier on, I will fight for you". No. Ministers want these workers run down. In the case of nursery workers it means raising the minimum ratio of staff to children to one in six - a recipe for chaos if ever there was one. They want them run down and demoralised.

Satellite eye...

Here's this month's Satellite Eye (it seemed to be a little while coming). This is my favourite, one of the oldest surviving impact craters on Earth, now a lake in Quebec.

Age of conspiracies

This picture has been buzzing round the internet immediately after the Boston bombings. Who is this man?

The Boston bombings are compelling firstly because they are awful to contemplate but secondly because they are, as of yet, motiveless (if it was Al-Qaeda we would have been told straight away). The President initially did not even call the bombings and act of terrorism, then he did, but he still upset some people.

For the time being there is room for myth-making and pareidolia. What was that man doing on the roof? What would anyone do on a roof?

There are immediate psychological reasons for embracing conspiracy theories, the solidarity of the initiated, perverse reassurance about human agency and so on.  There are political reasons why one may promote a conspiracy theory, or conspiracism in general. Fear and projection are key stimulating factors for right wing populist movements, the tributaries of fascism.

The unacceptable attributes of the self, in this case a political body, for example a nation or a race, are projected on the enemy, who is always more powerful, cunning and prolific. Triumph over the enemy requires urgent action, great passion is mobilised, and it becomes a transforming force. It helps also when you find attributes of the enemy within the political body, these people become ‘traitors’ and can be dealt with peremptorily (btw – is anyone else spotting a similarity between this and the SWP CC’s epistemology of internal debate? – a leap I appreciate, but word has it Alex Callinicos turned up at a CC meeting with a copy of the infamous Facebook conversation and started ranting about conspiracies).

There is a short Marxist rider to this, we live in the age of public life, where all the formal decisions about society are taken in the open, yet society seems to career down strange, unwarranted paths beyond any apparent human control. Noam Chomsky contrasts conspiracy theories to institutional analysis. Conspiracies fill the gap left by the absence of the theory of class rule, the nature of the state. Perhaps this means they are part of the operation of bourgeois hegemony? In which case more consideration is necessary.

A damming indictment of the inefficiency of the IRA

More supernature

There’s a book review in the Guardian that gives a spotlight to a fascinating idea – shadow ecology, a stealth biosphere based on an alternative organic chemistry, undetected, right here on Earth, not even imagined until now.

This idea is perfectly congruent with natural selection. At the point when life was formed on Earth there was a lot of biochemistry, energy and time. Most of the history of life on Earth is dominated by single-cell life. By many measures bacteria are still the dominant mode of existence. Multi-cellular life is the comparative exception. There would be no currently available niches for multi-cellular shadow life.

Our conception of life has expanded. Life has been discovered at the bottom of the ocean living in endothermic ecosystems, in extremely acidic or saline conditions, under ice sheets and in deserts. But this life uses the same basic chemistry as our own. If a shadow biosphere exists why have we failed to find it after a more century of biological science? It might be because scientists have been suffering from a lethal theoretical conceit but it might be because it’s not there.

The link between theory and reality is investigation, and there are some tests being proposed to test for possible shadow-life. An example, life as we know it uses the left half of DNA strands as code. “Right-handed” organisms in a culture should respond to right-handed amino acids. Finding creatures using entirely different replicating molecule would be even more exciting.

If found it means something very interesting. We compare how photosynthesis, which evolved once, to the eye, which evolved 50 to 100 times. It is assumed that life arose once on Earth, but maybe it evolved twice, three times, many times. This improves the chances of life arising elsewhere in the galaxy.

Lists etc

Tallest mountains (base to peak) in the solar system according to planet/moon/asteroid:

Mercury - Caloris Montes
Venus - Maxwell Montes
Earth - Mauna Kea
Moon - Mons Huygens
Mars - Olympus Mons
Vesta - Rheasilvia
Io - Boosaule Montes
Mimas - Herschel Central Peak
Titan - Mithrim Montes
Iapetus - Equatorial Ridge
Oberon - Limb Mountain

Bozo bites

Boris Johnson wants a potential new Londonairport to be named after Margaret Thatcher. Double whammy! More proof, I think, that Boris Johnson functions as a prophylactic for Tory craziness (remember when he positively associated himself with Rupert Murdoch during the Olympics, when no other politician wanted to be near him). This is ULTRA provocative, yet a twinkle and a smile from Boris Johnson makes such things seem less than harmless. He is hardening people to Tory ideas and hardening people with Tory ideas.

IS Network - new website

And it looks pretty good. the founding meeting was yesterday. Somewhere between 50-100 people were there. Things went very well in my opinion. This an the Left Unity initiative (which the ISN has decided to support) are two reasons to be cheerful.

Trashing dead politicians

From the Daily Mail two days after Michael Foot died.Richard Littlejohn (who has fought in precisely no wars either) might have done well to note that Michael Foot was a volunteer in the Auxiliary Units that were intended to be the basis of a Resistance if Britain was invaded by the nazis. Life expectancy for unit members was estimated to be two weeks.

Inanimate carbon rod

But let's be clear, future; not just for the next 5 years but the next 4,000 years, together, with the rod, in positive, serious fightback, together, clear where we're going.

Ding dong etc...

An interesting if grim set of results from the latest Guardian/ICM survey. Asked to assess Margaret Thatcher's term in office and it's legacy a narrow majority of people look favourably on her destroying the basis of social democracy, in this case trade unionism and council housing, but oppose the (some would say logical) result of that destruction, structural unemployment and widening class divisions.

Now, we're Gramsicans; we take it as read that median subaltern consciousness in average times is contradictory, that's why we organise. And of course this is just one survey, and surveys are not neutral examinations. But, if it is true, this political agnosticism, people wanting the ends but not the means of social democracy, suggests why a coherent anti-austerity movement has proved difficult to put together.

Breaking news...

Some news

Here’s dome news to chew on. Psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, may be useful in treating severely depressed patients, but it is a Class A drug (I did not know that) and red-tape and costs make it prohibitive to develop.

This is of course a living critique of moralistic laws, legislating what adults of sound mind can put into their body and the unintended knock on effects such laws have. It also shows up the absurd contortions law based on private property can get into. Psilocybin is made in nature, proscribing it does not stop it from being made. You may as well outlaw the tide.

There is no free market in nature. While directly capitalist relations appear to be egalitarian and free (of course in reality they’re not), capitalism applied to nature is naked appropriation. Rent was created out of the violent appropriation of land. When pharmaceutical companies appropriate naturally produced chemicals it is no less of a violent act.

LolOfficer

A Sussex police officer chased himself after his suspicious activity was registered on CCTV. He followed himself for twenty minutes before he was told of the mistake. It's lucky they found out before he caught himself, pinned his own body to the ground and pumped eleven bullets into his head.

Turning the tide

Another win for Owen Jones. We desperately need a genuine anti-austerity front, ideally a left party that multiplies these arguments and starts to turn the tide. The mainstream political logjam is stifling. Owen is right, enough is enough, though it's been that way for nearly five years now.

For no raisin

French words or phrases in English that either mean nothing or something different in French... you heard me...

Agent provocateur
Apres ski
Bete noire
Cause celebre
Cri de coeur
Demimonde
Double entendre
Encore
Fin de siecle
Homage
In Lieu
Marquee
Negligee
Outre
Portmanteau
Reprise
Seance
Vignette

Thoughts for the brain...

I am, I hope, about to have something of mine (a rewrite of the recent Another Green World post) put up on the IS Network blog. The point of the piece will be there is something to be said for socialists incorporating environmentalist politics in a non-utopian way.

Part of the difficulty of green politics is who is expected to put on the agenda, let alone into action. The piece ends with a set of suggestions, possible demands that can link improving quality of life to curbing greenhouse gas emissions to tangible action in the here and now.

The other problem with green politics is the scale of climate change. There is no plausible environmentalism-in-one-country. We’ve commented before on the potential risks and rewards geo-engineering, particularly the scheme for carbon dioxide removal via iron fertilisation of the oceans.

Another solution proposed is solar radiation management, the most realistic idea being spraying the atmosphere with particulates that reflect sunlight. It’s a very costly outlay but it’s familiar from nature. Very large volcanic eruptions have cooled the global climate many times. But the knock on effects can be drastic. Two African droughts in the twentieth century have been linked to eruptions in the northern hemisphere. 

Geo-engineering is no substitute for reducing greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere, but, given the late hour we will need some measures to ameliorate climate change. An environmental movement linked to the workers movement can bridge the gap between the huge ends and currently inadequate means. 

1,000 words...

For anyone not aware, THIS is the problem with Sunderland FC employing Paulo Di Canio as manager. There is even more context than most people realise. He used to perform these salutes when he played for Lazio, a club that, on the basis of its followers, is known informally as Nazio, as the the lowest of the low. Di Canio was expressing solidarity, inciting his fascist brethren.

Four day weekend - part 2

The Coral - Grey Harpoon



Franz Ferdinand - Darts of Pleasure


Arctic Monkeys - Brianstorm



Queens of the Stone Age - No One Knows

Four-day weekend - part 1

Lo Fidelity Allstars - Disco Machine Gun



Primal Scream - Burning Wheel



Death in Vegas - Dirt



Black Grape - Kelly's Heroes

More thoughts for the brain

Asteroids and comets are almost the functional equivalent of nuclear war today. They are a function of alienation in Marxism and the uncanny is Psychoanalysis. Despite the persistence (within the human context) of capitalist civilisation we know in our marrow that it is unsustainable. 

Despite various adventures, we always seem to be back where we began, like we’re in an ongoing sitcom. Ecocide and revolution are difficult to imagine. Only the prospect of existential cosmic calamity it seems can erase that. We rightly fear such an event, yet we do not sublimate or banish it from our minds, as often happens with climate change. The only difference between this and nuclear war is you can check the news every now and then - phew another asteroid will miss us.

A staffed mission to an asteroid is a good idea. We need to start working out how to defend civilisation from the threat of cosmic debris.

The dark side...

Alex Callinicos complaining on Facebook that he had his invitation to participate in the Historical Materialism conference in Delhi withdrawn at short notice by email, rounded off by saying: 

"This is to say nothing of the personal inconvenience and expense you are exposing me to by withdrawing your invitation a week after you had circulated a programme that included me as chairing one session and speaking at another, and barely a week before I was due to fly to India. This is quite unacceptable in what is meant to be an academic conference, and it is also not how socialists should behave towards one another." 

However one of the Facebook Four quite rightly pointed out: 

"YOU EXPELLED ME BY EMAIL". 

For someone who is a professor - Alex Callinicos is really quite dumb, and it shows where his priorities lie. What really gets his goat is the prospect looming of no more academic conferences.

Another green world - some ideas

There will of course be lots more refined ideas out there, but these are some suggestions that can act as both demands and an means to get people active:

Housing:
There should be an urgent house building programme, linked firstly to available brownfield sites and secondly to a plan for redistributing work around the country. All building materials to be locally sourced where possible. Priority should be given to key workers, then to workers in nearby industries, thus reducing the need and length of communing, reducing emissions and costs. New houses to be owned by an elected local government commissioner and administered by Tennants and Residents associations. Rent control to be administered

All houses, new and old, are to be properly insulated and supplied with solar panels where appropriate. Where possible houses to be redesigned to make them energy efficient more generally.

Controlled flooding should be carried out in vulnerable areas. The new land should be used either for recreation or as a wildlife reserve.

Transport:

The centre of all towns and cities with populations over 100,000 (or whatever appropriate figure) are to be pedestrianised, with vehicle access given only to residents and business access. This will reduce both emissions and lower accident numbers. This measure (combined with the reduction in commuting) will lower particulate levels, leading to a decrease in asthma, bronchitis and other lung diseases.

Food:

Brownfield sites not converted into new housing or parkland should be turned into city farms, all city farms should be twinned with local primary and secondary schools. All local shops and supermarkets should be sourced primarily by local  farms, with incentives given to farmers to use organic rather than artificial inputs. The cumulative effect would be to reduce both emissions and costs.

Results are in...

And counted. A grand total of 51 people voted. We would have liked to have got more votes than TUSC, but taking on such a mighty electoral machine in such a short space of time... we think we did well. So, anyway, puzzle no longer, the definitively tip-top best meme of the SWP crisis is, well, you can see it: That's quite a successful revolutionary organisation you've got there... Aaaaaaaand it's gone. It was quite a close run thing. The results are as follows:

Aaaaand it's gone - 31%
Creeping feminism - 25%
Don't X Y - it's petty bourgeois - 20%
We must observe socialist discipline - 12%
China Mieville is SCANDALOUS - 8%
Do you support this - 4%

Both the Whiff of autonomism and I've been on the internet... got no votes.

The seasons - with Brian Eno

Winter 

Spring 

Summer 

Autumn 

Another green world...

Using the non-pejorative sense, a utopian idea is an end without a means. One of the benefits of utopian, or perhaps thinking beyond immediate goals, is it can inform and refresh political activity. One of the sites I occasionally browse is the Long Now Foundation. As you can see it is quite corporate, and it’s very obvious the location within current social structure makes it utopian. Yet it's projects, from wildlife recording to language preservation to the general emphasis on planning and legacy are exactly the kind of things a communal society would be doing in earnest.

Here is a blog post about flood control, not the sexiest subject perhaps but given the fact of global climate change and how much of human settlement is based in low-lying areas it’s an important topic. The great investment the Dutch government made in flood control paid itself in a few decades. In order to allow residents to continue living in parts of the country the proposal is to convert farmland into flood land, another long-term project. The lives and livelihoods of affected farmers must be taken into consideration (I don’t know if they have been) but, apparently the cost-benefit ratio is worth it in terms of housing stock but I would guess also biodiversity.

I don’t like the term eco-socialism. It seems to me to be apologetic. The Green movement, judged on its own terms is not such a fantastic success, no more than any other movement. Socialists should incorporate environmental concerns without incorporating utopianism. The biggest difficulty for Green politics is agency. There are a number of ways in which environmental reform can be realised. Green politics can pull in several directions. Lest we forget, there is such a thing as eco-fascism though it’s usually an attack-term – Karl Max Schwarz anyone?).

Linking environmental concerns to working class agency of course starts with issues around the quality and cost of living, the first will be driven down and the second up as the legacy of climate change accumulates. Flood defence is one issue. Electricity generation is another. Why, in a country like Britain, with long hours of sunlight, consistent wind (Britainhas 40% of Europe’s wind energy but only generates 10% of wind-powered electricity) and three tidal rivers, do we not have cheap, clean and plentiful energy? Environmental concerns permeate issues such as transport, housing and food. It is still difficult to found a meaningful environmentalist practice though. Global climate change is an even bigger challenge than capitalist austerity. But solutions will need to come.

The interventionist leadership finally grinds into action...

And it's a calamity. Julie Sherry's article in the Guardian is appalling. It dodges every substantial criticism made of the SWP during this crisis. The only defence offered (that the matter was investigated and voted on) is actually what people find MOST offensive about the leadership's handling of the Delta case - that the leadership thought itself capable of investigating then ruling on an allegation of sexual assault. Even if it was a good article it has come out THREE months after the crisis broke; so much for interventionist leadership. 

Here is a link to an IS Blog piece responding to the Guardian article.

Actually existing news

The Labour Party is abstaining from a bill being rushed through Parliament that will create a retroactive law overturninghundreds of thousands of benefit rebates due to unemployed people wrongly sanctioned. What is more incredible, the fact The Party of Labour refuses to oppose workers exploitation, or the government’s explanation for the bill, that it will “protect the economy”?

Firstly the estimated total pay-out is £130 million, which is of course next to nothing in the grander scheme. It is nothing compared to Trident, nothing compared to Afghanistan, nothing compared to uncollected tax... You could go on. But there’s also a disturbing tendency in public life, which is fast becoming a blood sport, where the weakest in our society are hounded, sometimes to their literal death. These people have been wronged by a government department but because they're unemployed the rules have to be rigged so they always lose out. For shame!

There’s more though. The national economy is being dragged down by suppressed demand, job losses, part-time work, VAT rises, service cuts and closures all add up. Using the unemployed to fill entry level, often minimum wage positions saves a little in the short term, but only for favoured companies. The government is effectively subsidising companies like Poundland. But is depressing wages and knocking the bottom out of the economy. Without effective demand there is no recovery, just a downward spiral. 

Vote Now!

What is the best meme of the SWP crisis
	Don't X Y it's petty bourgeois
	Creeping Feminism
	The whiff of Autonomism
	China Mieville is SCANDALOUS
	I've been on the internet for 20 years and I must admit I'm lost
	That's quite an successful revolutionary organisation you've got there... Aaaaaaand it's gone
	Do you support this?
	We must observe socialist discipline!
pollcode.com free polls

You have one week!

Phil Space

The Sun is out over London right now. If the weather stays clement there might be a chance to see Comet PANSTARRS this evening.

A notice

Just in case anyone cared, all the people associated, in the past and presently, with this blog are supporters of the International Socialist Network. There will be developments soon, with ideally more to say about the necessity of left-realignment. Keep your eye on the IS blog.

All the hegemony you can eat

The way things have been if I don’t see another buttressing quote from either Lenin, Luxemburg or Tony Cliff for a long while I will be happy. So, in that spirit, let’s talk about Lenin!

One thing I have been adamant about for some time is that the revolutionary party was not Lenin’s key innovation. Firstly, even if he intended to found “The Bolsheviks” he did not intend his party to be a new party. He was trying to found a Russian SPD. Many Communist Parties were not made brand news but founded out of Socialist Party majorities. Despite instants of political hardship (not least of which was Hitler’s invasion of Europe) from the mid-twenties onward the CP was a realistic means for a political career. Lenin intended for the Third International to be revolutionary parties, but being in this case is only the same as doing.

Lenin’s real innovation was his discussion of nationalities. The 20^th century was in many ways the story of revolutionary nationalism. Lenin was so perceptive he was couple of decades ahead of everybody else, including the actual movements. This is important though, what we are talking about here is Lenin the ‘autonomist’, the man who pointed to an expanded revolutionary subject. His particular concern was linking the workers movement in the Russian heartland with the national movements in the outlying countries of the Tsar’s empire. But there are broader applications.

Firstly we are discussing the matter of hegemony. How do movements against aspects of capitalism become movements against capitalism itself? We’re talking not just movements against occupation or imperialism but for civil rights, women’s liberation, LGBT liberation and so on.

But, more importantly, we’re talking about how we build a working class movement in the first place. Wage labour and subsequent exploitation is based on the separation of workers from the means of production. This is an excellent founding fact but too abstract as a basis for day to day politics. People’s living and working conditions are defined by much more than this, by gender, nationality, sexuality, race and so on. We look both for weaknesses in the current capitalist set up but also potential strengths on the part of the working class. An example, in Lenin’s time whole villages would send their sons off to work in particular factories. There was often a pre-existing sense of solidarity, imported from the countryside. This added to the concentrating effect of Russia’s huge factories, made the turn of the century Russian working class a force to be reckoned with.

It’s this kind of confluence that we should be looking for today.

Thoughts for the Brain

What is Marxism? It is historical materialism as a means to progressively change the world. Why does Marxism as a political movement centre on the working class? Because of its position firstly as in independent class with its own aims, second because of its essential role in creating wealth, third because it owns no property in the means of production when it assumes power it has no other group to oppress or exploit, therefore workers power can be used as a means to escape to a classless society.

When we define working class we must insist on wage labour being the key determinant and not things like education or dress or personal consumption. Useful though this may be it is paper abstraction . There is no one who is simply a wage worker. People who insist we are working class and working class only get nowhere. Such an idea can pander to various prejudices, i.e. by suggesting women workers, ethnic or religious minority workers, LGBT workers etc must get over their petty oppression and deal with 'real' working class issues.

What defines wage labour? I remember thinking through why socialists advocate class analysis rather than patriarchy theory. The answer being the former relates to economics while the latter relates to ideology and of course men as a whole do not exploit women as a whole (exploit being the key word, rather than oppress). The former is more immediately economic than the latter but we would be abandoning historical materialism to insist there is an ideology without a basis. Wage labour is in part determined by women's oppression, as it is by racism, homophobia or any other systematic prejudice you can name.

So long as we're clear exploitation is the foundation of capitalism there is nothing wrong with trying to incorporate aspects patriarchy theory into Marxism.