One more (for now) on whether Alex Callinicos is finished

The IS Blog has something to say on that matter, a collective effort, and it's pretty good if you ask me. See here.

Is Alex Callinicos Finished: Pt 5

Hegemony and truthiness

George Monbiot has a whimsical piece in the Guardian about the system of ruling class education, the effect it has both on the people processed through the system and the wider implications for society. It is also a useful piece of anecdotal evidence about the material basis of truthiness.

The telling part is what Monbiot describes as the typical output of public school education, colonial service, the civil service or the armed forces. You might want to add that the solidarity generated by said system (the process detaches young men from their families and attaches them to institutions) also renews the old school tie network in high finance as well, but that is a side effect, rather than an aim. 

While the transition from public school to ruling elite may not be so automatic any more what is true is the system generally turns out “young men fanatically devoted to their caste [read class] and culture”. To put it another way, young members are not taught to exercise hegemony but act as partisans for bourgeois corporate needs.

Truthiness, the willingness of lesser or greater numbers of people to believe something based on whether it feels right, is able to overcome public life when objective means of orientation, such as class, race, gender, nationality etc, are removed. The truth, or otherwise, of a statement, an idea or a collection of ideas (an ideology) is tested in practice.

We are living with a disconnected ruling class that no longer leads but simply represses and denies when it needs to. The subaltern classes however are not moving. The programme of Austerity is proving difficult to overcome in ideological struggle because it is not being challenged in practical struggle. Our society is at rest, like a stagnant pond, and the scum is floating to the top. 

Is Alex Callinicos Finished? Pt 4

Is Alex Callinicos Finished? Pt 3

Is Alex Callinicos finished? Pt 2

Possibly an ongoing theme: Is Alex Callinicos finished?

For no raisin

Except we haven't had a good list in a while. Here is a sample of German words borrowed/adapted into English. Like most lists they fall apart somewhere around Q or at the latest X.

Abseil
Alphorn
Ansatz
Biergarten
Bratwurst
Blitzkrieg
Crumhorn
Diktat
Dachshund
Delicatessen
Doppelganger
Eisbrecher
Eidelweiss
Frankfurter
Flak
Flugelhorn
Gesundheit
Gestalt
Glockenspiel
Hamburger
Handstand
Inselberg
Jugendstil
Kaffeeklatch
Kaput
Kitsch
Kindergarten
Katzenjammer
Lager
Lebensraum
Leitmotif
Muesli
Mitteleuropa
Noodle
Nein
Neanderthal
Nazi
Oktoberfest
Putsch
Pretzel
Poltergeist
Quartz
Rinderpest
Rucksack
Rottweiler
Sprechensang
Schadenfreude
Strudel
Stein
Spritzer
Takt
Urtext
Unheimlich
Uber
Volkswagen
Wiener
Wanderlust
Wunderkind
Zugzwang
Zweiback

Ecology etc...

A fascinating article in today’s Grauniad, where a variant strategy of Iron Fertilisation as a coping/mitigating tactic in the fight against climate change is under discussion. This particular idea is also simple, by adding silicate dust to the ocean you encourage photosynthetic plankton to bloom, drawing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere/ocean system and locking it under the ocean floor, as the plants eventually die.

The silicate dust idea has advantages over iron fertilisation. Firstly there’s a lot more silica around than iron. If you’re outdoors you’re standing on some of it already, basic rock and earth. Silicate fertilisation of the ocean already goes on. It’s what rivers do when they reach the sea. There is also the added bonus that silicates are alkaline. Water acidification is one of the by-products of climate change.

There are a number of hurdles that this idea must surmount, legal and financial. There’s also the issue of how the silicate dust is made and transported, currently this would be largely by fossil fuel energy. It is also not a substitute for turning to renewable energy. Finally there is the issue over the knock on effects of altering the biology of the ocean such.

It reminds me of the revolutionary-frontier potential of Environmental Science. It’s a relatively young area of study that attempts to combine discrete sciences, biology, geochemistry, atmospheric science and so on. It was developed in the 60s and 70s and had reached the A Level syllabus by the time I was going through FE. The leading edge in other sciences, physics, genetics and so on, is small, even vanishingly small. Environmental science is different in that it deals with the tangible.

A complete understanding of the totality of natural relations, the aim of environmental science, would be as revolutionary as a as a complete understanding of social relations (in my opinion best described in Marx’s Capital). By revolutionary understanding I mean applied knowledge, knowledge in action, humanity transcending the limits imposed on it and achieving a higher level of existence.

A new blog...

And a mighty fine one it is too: the International Socialism blog.

Actually existing news

Here's something you can save for people who insist the Royal Family are a harmless institution.

Both the Queen and the Prince of Wales are entitled to veto bills in parliament that might affect the property of the Crown or the Duchies of Lancaster or Cornwall. In recent years the monarch and monarch-to-be have been offered 39 bills for personal approval, one was vetoed (a 1999 bill proposing the transfer of war powers from the executive to parliament was blocked by the Queen). Other bills offered for approval, include the 2004 Civil Partnership Act, the 2004 European Union bill, the 2005 Work and Families bill and the 1997 Merchant Shipping and Maritime Security Act, to name but a few - the last one was because Prince Charles owns the harbours on the Isles of Scilly.

Madness, isn't it? It's an incredible affront to what little democracy we do have. Two very wealthy landowners are given extraordinary executive powers because nearly 1,000 years ago some French bandits won a battle in a Sussex field.

Limerick Soviet

Get on t'internet...

“Comrades need to stop complaining on the internet and bring their concerns to branch meetings”. I paraphrase, but variations on this canard are repeated quite often, sometimes with an addendum along the lines of, “we need to engage with the real world”.

We do need to engage with the real world but moral injunctions about branch meetings are just the opposite of such engagement. Revolutionary socialists advocate direct discussion and open voting against closed meetings and secret ballots, but this fine, hard won principle is not being applied intelligently.

Any medium is by definition is exclusive. You’re either online or not. You can either attend a meeting or you can’t. There are plenty of reasons why someone might not be able to make regular meetings on a Wednesday or Thursday night, too many to list. It certainly doesn’t make you lazy or devious or your opinions invalid. It can equally be said that electronic communication provides an invaluable resource for people not able to meet face to face. In fact it allows a far greater pooling of experience and information than a geographical branch.

But there’s more to it than this. There is an unacknowledged bias that has been hardened by the misapplication of the idea of direct democracy. Why does a branch meeting count as the real world (when quite often it’s a group of ardent left-wingers agreeing with each other then arranging a paper sale) when online discussion does not?

It is, in part, a residual prejudice of 20^thCentury thought. Using McLuhanite terms, under print media the written word is dissociated and cool, whereas the spoken word is involved and hot. The written word had elevated status because it was recorded, for all time.

Thanks to electronic media the written word can unfold as fast as spoken conversation. There is no going back to the old ways of thinking. The internet not only has an idiom of its own (idiom being a sure sign of intense involvement not cool dissociation) but is affecting language and communication in general.

The party must come to understand electronic media and incorporate them as part of a democratic mix, including print media and public meetings, or it will become irrelevant, and all for the sake of principles transformed into shibboleths. To put it another way, if you don’t like what people are saying online don’t hide away in your branch meetings, get out into the real world, get online.

Some guff about David Bowie

David Bowie is back. His new album was made in secret, his first new music in a decade. Bowie had more or less disappeared from public life in 2006. Given there were some grisly rumours that he was dying, it’s no surprise he lead-off song, Where Are We Now, has inspired such a reaction. It’s good to have an old friend back.

The song is not bad too. It is mildly overproduced, always a risk with a record produced over time. Overproduction is a common pitfall in popular music. Bowie albums past have avoided that trap by being recorded quickly and spontaneously. Of course no one would have cared if this song was written and released in 2005, if Bowie had not had a massive heart attack and instead ploughed on with his silver age renaissance. It is a good song, wonderfully sung, plaintive and beautiful.

It is said Bowie lost his way in the 80s after gaining a mass audience but finding he had no connection with them. It is an essential contradiction in a form of popular culture expressed in individual consumption.

Bowie’s muse could almost be said to be popular culture itself. At his musical peak he watched his contemporaries very closely, listened to his predecessors very intently. His lyrical subject matter was a tapestry of modern fascinations, from drugs to UFOs to alternative religion and so on.

Bowie’s public persona (or personas) was an even more removed form of iconography. Whereas Brian Epstein took aspects of The Beatles personalities and made them into vivid caricature, David Bowie created full blown characters to perform. His aliases strike a chord because they reveal aspects of the audience’s personalities that they may not have even knew existed.

He is truly an icon, in the McLuhanite sense, in that he denies information (his most recent return being a case in point – while most famous musicians will start plugging an upcoming album before it is even finished – modern PR practice suggests stars should allow their public maximum access, with social media feeds, FB profiles and so on – David Bowie just released a new song). The audience is left to fill in the details, emotionally and intellectually invest in Bowie the icon.

This is a crisis...

A large crisis. In fact, if you've got a moment, it's a twelve storey crisis with a magnificent entrance hall, carpeting throughout, 24-hour portage, and an enormous sign on the roof, saying 'This Is a Large Crisis'. A large crisis requires a large plan. Get me two pencils and a pair of underpants.

Once more on bourgeois culture...

The role of any socialist approaching modern culture is as a critic. There is no such thing as socialist culture and trying to create such a thing is at best misguided.

Just because something is said in the bourgeois press does not make it untrue let alone something that can simply be written off. Modern mainstream culture is bourgeois. The prevailing ideas in any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class; this includes ideas about law, justice and so on. Most people we want to reach are, to this extent, 'bourgeois'. If mainstream press attacks a part of the socialist you deal with it head on, you don’t dismiss the attack and you don’t hide, because you can’t.

In case you didn't know (but do care)...

Both Keith and I are in full agreement with this and this.

An ounce of theory is worth a ton of action

The old 'orthodoxy' such as it was, was the three pillars of the IS, state capitalism, permanent arms economy and deflected permanent revolution. The last two are now void and the first isn't such a tremendous intellectual head start any more. The SWP has no programme. What makes the party different and how? Why is it a distinct organisation?

Often it’s described as democratic centralism, but such a term is polyvalent, it means different things to different people. Democratic centralism is often attributed to Lenin as a key innovation, sometimes its blurred with vanguardism, another ‘Leninist’ term. Independent initiative is sometimes described as federalism, the opposite of democratic centralism and something to be wary of. Even in Lenin’s controversial What is to be Done the reorganisation of the party as a collective of professional revolutionaries dedicated to distributing newspapers, posters, leaflets and on, was meant to encourage independent initiative: the ultimate aim being a simultaneous (or practically simultaneous) uprising among the diverse and dispersed people suffering under the Russian Empire.

But step into our time again, a party whose point of differentiation is it’s own internal organisation is a step away from a party that exists to perpetuate itself.

Right-wing sectarianism

Sectarianism is bemoaned on the left. Too many socialist parties not enough socialists. Everyone's sectarian, except me. You get the picture?

It's interesting, actually, but there is a proliferation of groups on the right as well, much less commented on. The breakdown of the Tories popular base is well documented. The decline of Toryism is covered, for now, by the convergence of the mainstream parties. The Lib Dems support the current government and the Labour party doesn't really oppose it. The general logjam in our society stems from the fact all significant civil society groups are, in some way, tied up with the mainstream parties.

The breakdown is also occurring on the right. There is the UKIP which currently has around 10% support in opinion polls. It will take many hard Tory votes but unless something very odd happens it won't win any seats at the next general election however. There is the NF, the BNP and the British Freedom party on the fascist right, the BFP is a splinter from the BNP, which in was a split from the NF. In street fighting of course the Infidels have are a split from the EDL. From the sublime to the ridiculous, former Sun editor Kelvin McKenzie has suggested forming a Southern Party to represent, well, people like him living in and around London.

The continual breakdown of political formations possibly lends credence to the idea of petty caesarism as the dominant force in modern politics. 

All the hegemony you can eat

Lenin’s key political innovation was never the vanguard party. Look at the Communist Manifesto, it’s there already. Gramsci is correct in attributing hegemony over and over in the notebooks to ‘Illich’. Hegemony is the capacity to lead. It bridges the gap between a party that fights its cause and by extension the cause of the class it represents and the party that leads the whole of society.

One should take care applying the concept too squarely onto our society. In Gramsci’s time hegemony at the level of statecraft meant a particular class leading a multitude of other classes, each with distinct political aims. There are not coinciding revolutions any more, like there were in 1917.

It reminds me, though I’m not sure this is a perfect analogy, of the observation that socialists should be the best fighters for reforms. They should, but I have also seen the times when this has been acknowledged in the sense of “thanks for being the best fighters, don’t let the door hit you on the way out”. Leading in struggle in itself is not enough.

Similarly, there is the idea that theory serves practice, in particular that a good book or pamphlet provides an overview for activists. It is very difficult for most people to be politically active, at least as as they need to be. Tailoring theory to current activists carries the danger of reducing party culture to a narrow section of society. Theory is liable to be degraded and the party becomes in danger of talking only to itself. This is perhaps how we got to the stage where words such as ‘feminism’ and ‘autonomism’ no longer refer to political credos but make do as refined abuse.

Wider society is also left unprepared should, for example, an unexpected section of the population take up struggle. This is less that the section lose because of lack of clarity – people are often very clear about what it is they’re fighting for and how they expect to get it – but more to do with other groups who might have a secondary interest not rallying to the cause. What was the meaning of Occupy? What is the meaning of modern feminism? Why do disability rights matter? Gramsci described revolutionary activity as the critical renovation of consciousness. Questions like these must be explained.

Supernature

Cryptids are a fascinating branch of the monster family. Cryptids are unrecognised, often mythical plants or animals, though some cryptids go on to become recognised species (the Okapi was once a rumour, later to be proven true). Here is a Wikipedia list of cryptids, everything from extinct creatures to out and out hoaxes.

The fascinating ones are of course the myths, the true monsters. There are a few themes; human/animal hybrids, water dwellers and beasts in the forest. These are respectively ancient sublimations of the outlaw, the foreigner and awe in the face of nature. Water and the forest serve in morality tales: drowning in water = sorrow, losing one’s way in the forest = madness.

Cryptids are part of rural cultures around the globe. Nature has been largely expunged from daily life core capitalist countries, especially the daily life of the upper classes. When nature reappears it often seems like a violent invasion, a natural disaster or a premonition. There’s an interesting chapter in Mike Davis’s Ecology of Fear. Strange things have begun to happen in suburban California as houses have been built increasingly not on farmland but in wild chaparral and desert. The result is brown bears in hot tubs, coyotes in dustbins, mountain lions stalking people on mountain bikes.

Phil space...

There are half a dozen ongoing missions to the solar system. 2012 was a good year for space exploration. A number of interesting things have been discovered.

The solar system is chock full of organic material. Curiosity is homing in on definitive evidence of native Martian organics. MESSENGER has found remote evidence of organic material like tar in the shady polar nooks of Mercury (see picture). We are coming to know more about the methane cycle on Titan.

The other search is for water. People are a lot surer about the existence of water in the solar system. There is a mountain-sized chunk of ice heading into the inner solar system right now, Comet Ison. It may or may not turn out to be brighter than the Full Moon. It will get within 2 million miles of the Sun and leave a blazing tail behind it. Dawn is now on its way to Ceres, a dwarf planet in the Asteroid Belt, composed of ice and rock. Most interesting of all is a two billion year old Martian meteorite discovered carrying water. It is not proof in itself that Mars has surface water 2 billion years ago but it suggests there was 1) water and 2) organics on Mars at the same time as life was present on Earth.

Where did it all go? Is it perhaps still there, locked under the polar caps? Is there a subterranean biosphere prevailing? It’s worth finding out.

Thoughts for the Brain - the measure of time

We live in time, whether we realise it or not. Time is ultimately the product of entropy. The universe is a closed system travelling from perfect order to perfect disorder. The unevenness of the universe at its earliest known moments is what produced history, we have galaxies, stars, planets and people. The Earth itself is an open system so, within this small context, we experience counter-tendencies, such as the origin of species or the rise of human civilisation.

The experience of time is relative, either to entropy or counter-entropy. In the case of humanity it seems scientists are homing in on a theory of time based on the repetition of actions against the activity of oscillator cells in the brain. A well-developed mind is actually very good at estimating time, at least in certain contexts say catching a ball, playing a piece of music, driving a car and so on. 

The idea that time is relative is less interesting than the suggestion that the estimation of time is based upon practical activity: the role of labour in the development of time. Although it must be said there is a conflict between the relative nature of time and the capitalist prerogative to homogenise and quantify time. The meaning of time changes through different epochs, changes with the application of new technology. Perhaps mostly importantly the perception of time is different for different classes; different classes are different sets of relationships within the world of work.

Generally speaking instant communication has decentralised work. Some (not exhaustive) observations:

1)    The difficulty of commuting between home and work has led to the rise of flexitime. This combined with mobile communication has eroded the traditional sense of time.

2)    The laptop allows much white-collar work to be done on the move.

3)    Manufacturing, especially high-end manufacturing, often takes place in (spatially) long chains. Firms save money by improving freight and communication at the expense of stockpiling, in other words by using just in time delivery.

4)    This does not overcome the labour/capital antagonism, it just reorganises it. While under late capitalism whole swathes of our society are no longer dominated by large factories (the traditionally recognised concentrations of workers), this means, from our point of view, different and sometimes new sections of the working class have sectional strength. In this case communication, freight, IT and so on. Small sections of workers in the chain of production can also have an impact, as can workers in primary input industries.

Happy New Year, you scum...

Love, your Government and Overlords.