New York, storm, etc...

New York, the Capital of Capitalism, is currently a federal disaster area. Aside from the spectacular footage and the various personal tragedies there is something to be learned from (ex) Hurricane Sandy. 

This is a natural disaster, but climate change means there will be an unnatural number of them in the coming years. Even so, there is no environment on Earth that is simply benevolent. Stay in one place long enough and you will face some kind of natural disaster. A rational and democratically planned society will be able to cope with natural disasters much better than an irrational and sporadically organised one.

This may be just another event, a memorable and individually significant one, but still an event. It could also be an existential moment for US capitalism and, by extension, global society. Every day New York is a disaster area is another day it is not working. In a global slump one of the major centres of capital accumulation has been shut down.

There is a current bourgeois political drive, known to us as Austerity, which is trying to turn societies like ours into a free market idyll, only found in text-books. The only realistic means for an organised response to a crisis like this is the state. The alternative is to let people fend for themselves. If ordinary citizens are expected to put aside for occasions like these it would be perfectly congruent with an austerity drive. But what would that mean for a city like New York? Millions of people have had to evacuate. If teachers, nurses, doctors, fire fighters, office workers, bus drivers, shop staff etc are forced to leave will they be able to return?

The abyss stares back

The link here is to a short, simple piece on the fundamental deception of American political debate. There is such fundamental agreement between the two mainstream parties, public debate narrows down to secondary, often peripheral issues. Because ‘issues’ like teaching evolution in schools, the veracity of climate change or the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate can be argued relentlessly to no practical conclusion, they serve to mobilise various political bases (although the Republicans are always more interested in motivating their core support than the Democrats) and sustain the illusion of urgent debate.

You know it. I know it. It’s seems hardly worth pointing out, except the same grim parade rolls out every four years and no one does anything about it. America is politically null, excepting the Occupy movement, which, rather like council communism without councils, is a moot point if it’s not able to occupy anything. It would take an event so colossal one almost dares not imagine it to open space for a radical alternative. If America means anything it serves as a warning, this is what happens when the labour movement is permanently sidelined.

Meanwhile Polly Toynbee ponders the Tory options in the run up to their conference. David Cameron needs a national vote of approximately 42% to take an overall majority in parliament, 6% more than he got at the last election, and support is ebbing away. There are plenty of Tories with a mind to blow up Labour ‘client state’, i.e. its basis in the wider working class. This combined with a set of irresistible populist measures may yet work. And these measures need not cost anything. Imagine if Cameron led the country out of the EU just as it collapsed.

Feeble though our efforts may be even something like the October 20th democan start to head off that kind of future.

Special relativity? Liberal rubbish!

Just ask this scientician. He'll tell you that there's no evidence (apart from all that meticulously gathered evidence) that energy equals matter times the speed of light squared. Modern science is a just liberal conspiracy to promote thinking.

Newt Gingrich – satori in New Hampshire

He’s probably now not going to be the next President of the United States. Even so, Newt seems to have gained a valuable insight:

"Is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of other people and walk off with the money?"

Well yes and no, Newt, the only quibble being these days it’s possible to manipulate the lives of millions of people; but that’s just me being picky. Then again he also said that:

There is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence, to use harassment...

Elsewhere:

I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time [my grandchildren are] my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.

Which, as the author in the link suggests, begs the question of what on Earth gay-secular-fascist-islamists look like? What do they do, stone themselves to death?

Now, it’s all very well kicking a man when he’s down. For your enjoyment, Michael Moore, kicking Gingrich when he was up:

The end of democracy

There are technocratic governments in Greece and Italy, formed to enforce austerity. They may cry tears at what they have to do, the sacrifices you have to make, but you still have to make them.

The democratic impulse is an obstacle to austerity. People don't vote to be fleeced, not generally (hence, also, the general trend of declining election participation in supposedly advanced democracies). There is active vote rigging, suppression and violence going on in Russia right now. Russia has been ruled by a former KGB agent for rather too long. According to the NAACP the American political establishment is preparing something similar:

In its report, Defending Democracy: Confronting Modern Barriers to Voting Rights in America, the NAACP explores the voter suppression measures taking place particularly in southern and western states.

Fourteen states have passed a total of 25 measures that will unfairly restrict the right to vote, among black and Hispanic voters in particular.

The new measures are focused – not coincidentally, the association insists – in states with the fastest growing black populations (Florida, Georgia, Texas and North Carolina) and Latino populations (South Carolina, Alabama and Tennessee). The NAACP sees this as a cynical backlash to a surge in ethnic minority voting evident in 2008.

Barack Obama is part of that establishment. His election in 2008 chipped a small crack in the American political monolith, also known as the Southern Strategy, in short the means by which whatever way the people vote they get a solidly conservative government. However flaky his programme might have been, Obama inspired the Black and Hispanic working class to become politically active, and that is dangerous.

Jim Crows again...

The state of Alabama has passed a law making immigration all but a crime in itself. The same law also allows private prisons to use prisoners far more extensively for work. A Guardian writer wonders where this is going?

The difference between Alabama and adjoining states is that it is willing to go further down this track. Recently, John McMillan, agriculture commissioner, proposed that the farm work left behind by immigrant workers be supplied with inmate labor. Decatur, a private detention center about 50 miles to the north-west of Alabama, which had been unable to find jobs for inmates, has now witnessed record numbers of requests for labor (for an estimated 150 detainees a day).

So, here is how it goes. First, the state passes a harsh immigration law. Then, it detains large numbers of immigrants. Third, private prisons (LCS, CCA, GEO) receive fresh inmates. And finally, the artificially created labor shortage is supplied by the new inmates. Does this sound like modern-day slavery to anyone?

It has been well observed that the American prison industry is huge. The justice system is a racist system, the cutting edge of a racist society, disproportionately punishing ethnic minorities. Work is effectively forced. Slavery has effectively been restored.

But the relation of work to compulsion and control. We are all wage slaves. We don't need a whip, merely an alarm clock to make us fall into line. We don't have to work for anyone in particular, but we have to work for someone. What the capitalist class wants is, in effect, labour like water. It can turn the tap off and on as and when it needs to.

The capitalist class's plan, it's only plan, for dealing with the current depression is to hold down costs, especially wages, and export. Individually this makes sense, as a collective this is madness, but competitive accumulation drives this system, the first point of view must dominate. Racist laws such as the one passed in Alabama are not just an attack on a people but a class, an experiment in setting a new, lower baseline in working class life. A portion of the working class will go from working for next to nothing to all but nothing, a further downward pressure on all working people, at least in Alabama. It is another illustration why the working class, if it is to be a class for itself, for its own interests, must be staunchly anti-racist.

Phil space

China has a permanent base in orbit. Should we be happy, sad, pleased, enraged, worried, anxious, indifferent, sleepy, flatulent, garrulous...? It all depends on how you look at it.

If you come at it from the point of view of American technological and military superiority, as does Neil Armstrong, you will be dismayed:

"For a country that did so much for so long to achieve a leadership position in space exploration and exploitation, this is viewed by many as lamentably embarrassing and unacceptable," he told a congressional hearing on the future of space flight. "Nasa leaders enthusiastically assured the American people that the agency was embarking on a new age of discovery. But the termination of the shuttle, the cancellation of existing rocket and spacecraft programmes, the lay-off of thousands of aerospace workers [and] the outlook for American space activity through the next decade is difficult to reconcile with agency assertions."

Though, to be fair, there's probably an undertow of my-life's-work-pissed-away ire to Mr Armstrong' statement. Another indicator of the decline of American power, relative to other nations. In a year's time the Chinese space program will be able to put its own astronauts into space. If Americans want to reach the final frontier, for the time being, they'll have to hitch a lift with the Russians. Let's forget this is, ultimately, capitalist competition. In this race, once you lose an advantage it's very difficult to get it back.

From an abstract point of view this is a good development. Humankind's future belongs in space, just as 500 years ago European civilisation's future belonged across the ocean. The main aim of getting people into space for long periods is to reach Mars. Why? Because Mars is our prime target in the solar system. It once had an atmosphere, water and volcanism. Did it also have life? Might it still have life now in the form of a stealth biosphere? These questions have numerous implications, including right here on Earth. I have been reading about the adventures of the twin Mars Exploration Rovers. Achievements though they are, they have covered in years what would have taken a scientist days to achieve. Mars can only really be explored by human beings.

But this is not an abstract question. As we have mentioned this mini-space race is part of capitalist competition. This leads to tremendous cost and waste. Why does humanity need two competing space stations? Because of the capitalist nature of the race, states use huge, secretive, bureaucratic agencies. Amongst other drawbacks, the true cost of various programmes is only now coming to light.

The only long-term viable way to explore space is through open, accountable co-operation.