Pink Fire Pointer May 2013

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 21stcentury?
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.

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?



[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.

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”?



[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.