Reasons to be Impossible

Whisky galore

2012-01-25T11:42:00.000Z

Biofuels get a bad rap for distorting agriculture and pricing food out of reach of poor people. So, here's a good Biofuel story:

A new company has been formed to commercialise a process for producing biofuel made from whisky by-products.Edinburgh Napier University's Celtic Renewables Ltd will initially focus on Scotland's £4bn malt whisky industry to develop biobutanol and other chemicals.

Admittedly, Whisky itself is non-essential (although, arguably, it is a useful storage mechanism for calories). Reusing byproducts, though, strikes me as a useful process. Again, as with the tide power below, diversity and inspiration will produce more and newer different ways of achieving the ends. So long as the biofuel industry remains a natural dependent variable on the whisky production, then it shouldn't produce distortions in the food market.

Bob-bob-bobbing along

2012-01-23T16:55:00.000Z

Another innovative energy production method:

The Searaser machine works by using wave energy to pump water up to container tanks and the water is then released to a hydro-electric turbine.[...]He said that a full size machine would be about 1m wide and 12m deep and cost up to £250,000.

That's quite an affordable option to throw into the mix, and it has the capacity to smooth out demand, maybe with other forms of power (and of course, the principle applies, why not use wind driven pumps in land to stock up reservoirs?) Now, 230,000 homes isn't a huge number (this doc suggests there are 21 million households in the UK, and that's set to grow by 250,000 per year) but it is a start; and new technology begets new technology. Maybe more sites can be found?

Requiescat in Pascoe

2012-01-19T09:24:00.001Z

I've been busy (what an excuse -- I've been idle) but I do have to stop by an blog the death of Reginald Hill. When I heard on Sunday, I went and count how many of his books I have on my shelf (twenty two, came the answer). I had a wee phase of trying to collect all the Dalziel and Pascoe novels. I had stopped because they were taking up too much space (especially as I was buying the hardback of each new one as they came out -- Hill was one of the handful of authors whose books I do buy the first available imprint of).

Reading his books was a physical pleasure. Could feel the enjoyment flowing through me: the mixture of mirth, dread and anticipation. He plotted to perfection (especially Midnight Fugue). He managed to combine high literature and low genre effortlessly. He was able to move from police procedural, to locked room and English country manor mysteries without breaking his fictional world. He also managed to keep the series alive, fresh and changing without ever 'jumping the shark' and being ridiculous or making silly changes. Unlike Christie, he seemed to actually like his bread and butter characters.

Throughout, he managed to inject a liberal and progressive sensibility into what is often a bastion of reaction. "It's a war on the streets" and all that. Dalziel was a reactionary pig, and Hill knew it, but humanised such a man.

I'll also throw in a mention of the perfectly villainous but also utterly ambiguous Franny Roote who was "persecuted" by Pascoe. I guess we'll never find out the truth about him now.

Taxing issues

2011-12-15T15:07:00.001Z

From the BBC:

Over a five year period up to 2010 (the latest data available) the number of UK taxpayers with an annual taxable income over £10m more than doubled from 131 to 274.

In 2010 they owed £2.1 billion between them. This is a good and hard data. Whilst it doesn't cover all the super rich (after all, some manage to arrange their affairs so they don't have to pay tax on their super incomes); but we know that these 274 people had more than £10 million in earnings in 2010. My rough maths makes that a total of over £5 billion in annual income (or roughly £18 million each) that the tax was paid on. Note the curious fact that the figures increased dramatically after a fall due to the 2008 crisis. Now, inflation will be playing a big part in all this, but it does suggest some are benefiting nicely from the crisis, thank you. Now, some might be footballers, not all will be capitalists qua capitalists (a few barristers and lawyers might sneak in there) but it shows that out of 60 million, much fewer than 1% are doing very well indeed.

A cute one

2011-12-13T16:08:00.001Z

I love steam engines me. Even little ones. Well, micro-scale Stirling Engines. Of course, as they say, it's not a perfectly reliable power source; but imagine if they break through and we can have powered nano/microscale devices?I know I should flag up the Higgs Boson, but I'm waiting for final confirmation. In the meanwhile, this is a breakthrough to celebrate in a small way.

About those tins of beans...

2011-12-10T12:24:00.001Z

...I think I'd add a tin helmet to the shopping list. My favourite source, Der Spiegel strikes again:This October was the third straight month Chinese exports decreased. Along with it, the hopes of German manufacturers that Asia's growth market might help lift them out of the global crisis as it did in 2008 are also evaporating. This time China faces enormous challenges of its own -- a real estate market bubble and local government debt -- that could even pose a risk to the global economy.
The Germans can't borrow, and Chinese growth is about to hit the skids. *Gulp*

It's worth reading that article in full. In world terms, this is the crisis spreading from the financial sector into the real economy of manufacturing: coupled with a massive balance of trade gap. Remember, China holds much of the dollar debt in the world, and it has been China that has helped prop up the debt bubble in America in order to keep its markets going.

I also note the mention of the ghost cities -- so reminiscent of Ireland's boom/slump situation (and, I believe consistent with David Harvey's model of capitalist crisis).

Part of what this shows is that even state capitalism and pump priming isn't enough to end the crisis: we've seen austerity here and spending for growth there, eventually, someone has to admit that a market economy just doesn't work for the majority of humanity. In the meantime, get tying kitchen knives to broomsticks and start a pike practice squad in your street:you may be needing it soon.

Cometh the Singularity

2011-12-06T11:43:00.001Z

From the BBC: Scientists at MIT replicate brain activity with chip:Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have designed a computer chip that mimics how the brain's neurons adapt in response to new information.
As Searle noted in his Chinese room essay, the only route to Artificial intelligence is to build a physical brain. Well, it looks like what MIT have done. here's the ominous bit:Such systems could be much faster than computers which take hours or even days to simulate a brain circuit. The chip could ultimately prove to be even faster than the biological process.
That is, super human intelligence may be around the corner, and with it, the singularity. Rapture those nerds. Come what may, this could very well lead to massive break throughs in computing and our knowledge of human intelligence and neuroscience.

The ongoing agricultural revolution

2011-12-05T15:54:00.001Z

At last I am moved by a story to write: German Urban Farms the company's website is here.

The Frisch vom Dach, or Fresh from the Roof project, plans to create a 7,000-square-meter roof garden, complete with a fish farm, to provide Berliners with sustainable, locally-grown food....
The fish will be sold as food and, crucially, their excretions, especially the ammonia excreted through the gills, will be converted into nitrates. That will serve as fertilizer for the plants growing in green houses above the fish tanks. In turn, the plants will purify the water for the fish. The system for sustainable food production is known as "aquaponics."

The first instance of vertical farming, or industrial farming. Bringing the countryside into the city. As the Spiegel article points out, this model is low energy, unlike the more science fictional dreams of vertical farms. It also fits in with the permaculture crowd. That said, it does offer the prospect of advancing the cause of re-wilding (and of driving urbanisation faster).

I'd be interested in how much their prototype container farm manages to produce, since the idea of mass producing and distributing a container/greenhouse strikes me as being an efficient way to spread food production massively.

Buy beans!

2011-11-24T08:39:00.001Z

The time may have come to start hoarding tins of baked beans, wearing furs and running around in a post apocalyptic landscape:

Germany has been considered a safe haven of financial stability amid the ongoing euro crisis -- but that may be changing. Growing mistrust from investors seems apparent after what has been described as a "disastrous" government bond auction on Wednesday. Just two-thirds of the German bonds sold, leaving analysts concerned but not panicked[Spiegel].

I suggest now is precisely the time to panic, while the analysts are being cautiously worried. If we leave panicking till everyone is doing it, we'll have to fight for those tins of beans with our teeth.

The fucking Germans cannot borrow money! the country that escaped recession, the one that is still growing, the one that has been bailing everyone else out. Now, the Spiegel article suggests this may be a lack of confidence in the Eurozone as a whole, and of some of the fundamentals in the German economy; but it also has an expert suggest:

"Because of the low rate of return in Germany, some investors are now cautiously going to countries that they had recently avoided," he added. "In France, or even in Ireland, chances for returns are certainly promising."

that's right, it's more profitable to lend to risky countries because you get more interest. There is the cause of this mess in the first place: it's more profitable to lend to people who a less able to pay back (until the day they actually default that is, at which point you own their soul).

More to the point, though, this seems to me to reflect that there may not be as much money floating around generally: surely, normally, someone, someone, would want to pick up safe, unprofitable low hanging fruit.

Start breaking out the old family blunderbus: the apocalypse is here.

Occupying my time...

2011-11-03T13:12:00.000Z

OK, so, clarification time. I didn't want to give the impression that I was against the #Occupy movement, or even thought it was just the usual suspects: my point is that our obligation, and even my own inclination, is to raise the issue of challenging for political power; and that unless the movement spreads into something that reaches into every street, then it will be smothered -- one way or another.

Let's put it this way, the image of Tahrir Square, and the Arab spring on which it is modelled were very dramatic. But the substance of the Arab spring happened the other week, with the election of the new government, the final grasping of the levers of political power by the new Ennahda Government in Tunisia (and the same old military in Egypt).

The old Trotskyist image of the steam and piston comes to mind: the popular protests were the steam on which the piston of the Islamist/Military parties came to power. Doubtless that image is still motivating Trotskyists here.

What I hope for, though is that we all become not steam, but small cogs, wielding a share in a precision mechanism in which we all can fine tune and control (and which we can brake by our refusal). Note how quietly the elections have gone, but how oh so determining they were in the future direction. The devil is in the detail.

Of course, in Oakland the protest has spread and taken the form of a "General Strike" -- lets hope our can do the same come N30; but I'm going to keep banging the tedious drum for the necessity for political action.

Settled

2011-10-21T09:28:00.000+01:00

According to the BBC:

The Earth's surface really is getting warmer, a new analysis by a US scientific group set up in the wake of the "Climategate" affair has concluded.
[...] Funding came from a number of sources, including charitable foundations maintained by the Koch brothers, the billionaire US industrialists, who have also donated large sums to organisations lobbying against acceptance of man-made global warming.
[...]Since the 1950s, the average temperature over land has increased by 1C, the group found.

Although there are caveats -- the work hasn't been peer reviewed, for example -- because its claims are not extraordinary, and corroborate previous studies, this suggests to me that this is copper bottomed science. Now, the scepticism about AGW -- whether this change is driven by humans or by sun spots -- will remain, but it has fewer boltholes to run into.
Whatever one's politics, one will have to take climate change into account, and responding to it will become the governing imperative of the century. Hopefully now no-one (especially a front rank politician) will be able to dispute climate change science with any credibility.

Occupy the World

2011-10-20T14:03:00.003+01:00

OK, so - time to get grumpy. The occupy thing is cute. It's reaching out, and getting people to take notice; but it's not enough.
I was at Occupy LSX last weekend, and it struck me that the easy way to occupy the stock exchange is:

Win the elections.
Send the riot police to occupy the stock exchange.

That is -- political action will get results. Now, I'm not saying the grumpy leftist thing of: "we need a programme". Not at all. What I'm saying is simply that a political party (or parties - hell, why doesn't someone register 'Occupy the Council' as a party name?) is an effective outcome.
Look, it costs nothing to contest a council seat (OK< if you want to print leaflets it'll cost a hundred quid) -- but if the occupiers can turn themselves into nominators then that is something.
An absence of policies is a good thing, a determined movement of 'Vote the scoundrels out' will send shock waves through the political elite like no bugger's business. Once we've occupied the seats of power, then lets debate what to do -- in a way compatible with the democratic impetus of the #Occupy movement. But, but but. Political action is needful, elst it turn into simply pleading with the powerful.

Chase me...

2011-10-07T14:39:00.000+01:00

Clue 1
Clue 2
Clue 3

The answer? Pink washing - all are promotional pieces taken from the JP Morgan Chase - the financial collossus: not that you're know it from looking at their website. You'd think they were a charitable foundation. The most significant bit of charity, though, is:

From the end of 2010 through the first quarter of 2011, JP Morgan Chase donated an unprecedented $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation, in the form of 1,000 new patrol car laptops, security monitoring software in the NYPD's main data center, other technology resources, and funding. The gift was the largest in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police Department to strengthen security in the Big Apple.

Very charitably, they have strengthened the hand of the state. of course, this is what happens when the capitalists are against paying taxes - they have to pay directly for their protection. The good citizens of New York will have the clear pleasure of knowing that the police on the streets are the paramilitary wing of JP Morgan Chase.

So, when they volunteer to help us out, and fix the problems of the market, we need to remember they do so on the basis of protecting the market. Charity is private property trying to treat the ills of private property.

The revolution is still on...

2011-09-22T15:23:00.000+01:00

So, according to Oxfam, there is a land rush on in Africa:

It says up to 227m hectares (560m acres) have been sold or leased worldwide since 2001.
Half of all deals that have been verified are in Africa, amounting to an area the size of Germany - 35m hectares, Oxfam says.

The example given for 227 million hectares is the area of the entire of Western Europe. That is, there is an ongoing agrarian revolution, driven by the market. Now, some of that is uprooting some pretty unfair land distributions in any case: but, as some writers, from Charlie onwards have noted, Capitalism is the agrarian revolution. Dissolving peasant economies and turning land over to market use is what capitalism does. Of course, Oxfam wants peasants to stay peasants, whereas what will happen to them is that they will become proletarians - with all that that entails. Given the parlous state of the world economy, some of that entailment is starvation. of course, given the parlous state of the world economy, investment in land seems a very good idea.

The report's abstract says:

Oxfam’s research has revealed that residents regularly lose out to local elites and domestic or foreign investors because they lack the power to claim their rights effectively and to defend and advance their interests.

The report states in its executive summary:

The recent rise in land acquisitions can be explained by the 2007–08 food prices crisis, which led investors and governments to turn their attention towards agriculture after decades of neglect.

Of course, biofuels get a mention, but then, and this will be a fillip to vegetarians:

Across the globe, diets are changing towards more land-intensive products, such as animal proteins (meat, dairy, eggs, and fish) and convenience foods.

Who needs fusion?

2011-09-20T15:28:00.002+01:00

Whoop! Whoop!

US researchers say they have demonstrated how cells fuelled by bacteria can be "self-powered" and produce a limitless supply of hydrogen.
[...]
In their paper, Prof Logan and colleague Younggy Kim explained how an envisioned RED system would use alternating stacks of membranes that harvest this energy; the movement of charged atoms move from the saltwater to freshwater creates a small voltage that can be put to work.

As they say, it isn't economic - but then, no technology is when it's first invented. All economics tells us is how easy something is to achieve with the current technology/infrastructure. Changing that means that costs fall, and new processes become economic. Hopefully, this could develop faster than Fusion: after all, we're already at the proof of concept stage here, and the input costs will be lower than building a fusion plant. Energy from sea water. Wow. From their abstract:

There is a tremendous source of entropic energy available from the salinity difference between river water and seawater, but this energy has yet to be efficiently captured and stored. Here we demonstrate that H2 can be produced in a single process by capturing the salinity driven energy along with organic matter degradation using exoelectrogenic bacteria.

Follow up...

2011-09-16T11:31:00.002+01:00

Credit where due

2011-09-15T15:21:00.000+01:00

OK, this is worth a second post today. Infant mortality is falling:

The number of children under five who die each year has plummeted from 12 million in 1990, to 7.6 million last year, the UN says.

The report is Levels & trends in child mortality : report 2011: "Nearly 21,000 children under five died every day in 2010—about 12,000 fewer a day than in 1990." That's 12,000 additional survivors per day, and it's taken 20 years. Further:

Globally, the four major killers of children under age 5 are pneumonia (18 percent), diarrhoeal diseases (15 percent), preterm birth complications (12 percent) and birth asphyxia (9 percent).Undernutrition is an underlying cause in more than a third of under-five deaths. Malaria is still a major killer in Sub-Saharan Africa, causing about 16 percent of under-five deaths.

these are of course, mostly preventable. Just to concretise that, of the 21,000 dying everyday, 7,000 are due to starvation and starvation related diseases. As I've observed on this blog before, for a handful of dollars anti-Malarial netting could be distributed. Saving far more lives than any bomber squadron ever could.

So, theme of the day, within capitalism, through a concerted effort (not via the mysterious workings of the invisible hand) the hideous slaughter of poverty is being reduced. We could, and should, be able to go further and faster.

Just as an end note, let's not forget that the so-called global crisis (and it's impact on food prices) could well reverse this trend. Further, though, I don't know what could be more deserving of being called a crisis than 7.6 million annual deaths through poverty. It should be top of the news everyday: today, 21,000 infants will die. This report shows the corrosive effects of udnerdevelopment:

According to the World Health Organization some three-quarters of medical devices given by rich countries to developing nations remain unused.
[...]
Prof Chris Lavy, an orthopaedic surgeon who has spent time in Africa, said: "One of the newest hospitals in sub-Saharan Africa was built with infrared sensors to turn the taps on in the operating theatres.
"Wonderful idea, but is it really appropriate in a country where there are no other infrared controlled taps and no engineer to fix them? Within a year most of them had failed, some of them in the off position, and some of them in the on position."

You know you're evil when...

2011-09-15T12:53:00.001+01:00

The Telegraph can take the moral high ground against you

However, figures from the building industry suggest that developers are holding large numbers of plots where they have been granted planning permission but have not started construction.
The National Trust estimates the total land bank with planning permission to be around 330,000 plots.

Of course, this is an effect of the Telegraph representing the landowners keen to keep the value of their land by preventing development spoiling their views or undermining the value of greenfields. Private eye has made much the same point this week.

The real villain, of course, is the property market. Landowners have an asset in land-with-permission irrespective of if they build on it: and, of course, if they do build, they fix its value; whereas if they leave it fallow it rises continually with rising land prices. Land itself grows in value - roughly - in line with economic growth (modified by precise pressures on farming, industry and housing need in specific locales).

In short, the incentive is not to meet housing need, but to hold onto large chunks of land. Now, this could be easily remedied - a tax on land-with-permission would stop them getting permission, but could be an incentive to move where permission exists. A land value tax would hit everyone with land, especially the greenfield nimbys. It could, though, be done within capitalism.

The problem is the politics. Generations of politicians have committed us to private home ownership, which people treat as an investment. So long as house prices continue to rise faster than inflation+interest, that's a goer. It does, though, commit politicians to ensuring house prices rise, which means supply must always fall behind demand, else it wrecks everyone's asset value.

So, a large company/housing co-op that relied on rental income for its profits could probably see everyone adequately housed, but only if the interest of land owners were adequately eliminated; but that would be almost impossible to do since it would have to hold land as well. To work, we'd all have to end up renting, and at the mercy of market rental rates.

Risky business

2011-09-14T11:08:00.000+01:00

Life on Earth is a function of geology. The rocks shaped life, and continue to shape us. Importantly, they shape modern technology. Everything, from the pain on the walls to the keyboard I type with started with someone extracting specific coalitions of atoms from out of the Earth.

So the British Geological Society's "Risk List" makes for fascinating reading. It ranks the worlds elemental resources according to scarcity and risk of supply (including political governance).

Shock news - China accounts for 97% of all rare Earth metals - you know, those pesky ones we need for high technology (and probably the odd medicine). China is the chief source for 27 minerals - well over half.

As demand for metals and minerals increases, driven by relentless growth in the emerging economies in Asia and South America, competition for resources is growing. Human factors such as geopolitics , resource nationalism, along with events such as strikes and accidents are the most likely to disrupt supply. Policy-makers, industry and consumers should be concerned about supply risk and the need to diversify supply from Earth resources, from recycling more and doing more with less, and also about the environmental implications of burgeoning consumption.

It's hateful to think that war could result over access to these minerals -- and in the case of China, unthinkably horrible. What this illustrates is how we are dependent upon the same Earth, and can only succeed by full global, human co-operation, instead of trying to screw each other based on a capacity to deny access to patches of territory. The report, as it makes clear on the BBC is partly intended to promote policy makers to open up new deposits and diversify supply. Especially as demand for these minerals continues to rise:

Mobile phones embrace the use of these technology metals, with lithium batteries, indium in the screen, and REEs [Rare Earth Elements] in the circuitry.

With over 50 million new phones being made every year, the "volume of technology metals required is astonishing and the pace of demand is not letting up", said Alan McLelland of the National Metals Technology Centre.

Just a final note, The Democratic Republic of Congo is the chief source of Cobalt - that was a contributing factor of the War that saw 11 million die there.

Policeman in the head

2011-09-13T10:40:00.003+01:00

This is a fascinating unfolding story - the traveller slaves. Quite what the alleged slaves were enslaved in, and how they were held and used still isn't clear, although it seems to have been an international ring. What I am interested in, though, is a quote in the Irish Independent.

Graham Clark, who is homeless, told Channel 4 news last night that he was kidnapped and held for ten months.

“You were separated from them. You weren’t allowed to enter their trailer...I wasn’t allowed to use their toilet services, strictly for them. I had to go into a bush and wipe myself with leaves. Degrading.

“I was treated like a slave, but at least I had a roof over my head. I was scared. I tried escaping once but they found me, not too far away.”

Note the phrase in bold: "at least I had a roof over my head." - he was imprisoned, made to shite in the bushes and work as a slave.

The psychology is fascinating, a mix of It could be worse" (really!?!), and holding on to the little that he has - a roof and a little food. This despite his previous attempt at escape.

What I'm driving at is that this illustrates the human capacity to withstand the conditions of slavery and gross impoverishment, and the mental architecture that allows such structures to survive. Imprisoned and maltreated animals will try and bite back, and human mentally adepts.

I have no way of knowing why he was found "nearby" but I surmise it was because he had no-where else to go, no company or structures to replace the slave conditions, so didn't go far and went back when found.

It seems the peculiar institution rests on our very human capacities.

Radioactive owls

2011-09-09T09:27:00.003+01:00

Well, just to bang the tech. drum once more: Nuclear fusion 50 years away. (for the uninitiated, that's a nuclear fusion joke).

Actually, it's within the next twenty years, if the timeline from HIPER is to be believed, their timeline is:

The project was accepted onto the “European Roadmap” in October 2006, with the UK agreeing to take a leadership role in January 2007.
HiPER is a consortium of 25 institutions from 11 nations. This includes representation at a national level from 6 countries (Czech Republic, France, Greece, Italy, Spain, UK), 2 regional governments (Aquitaine and Madrid), multiple international institutions and industry. There are also strong international links to programs in USA, Japan, Republic of Korea, Russia, China and Canada.
This consortium submitted a proposal for a 3-year “preparatory phase project” to the EC on 2nd May 2007.
Following positive reviews from the EC in July 2007, the preparatory phase project will run from April 2008 to 2011.This phase will establish the scientific and business case for full-scale development of the HiPER facility.
This phase is timed to coincide with the anticipated achievement of laser fusion ignition and energy gain (on the NIF laser in the USA). As such, future phases can proceed on the basis of demonstrable evidence.
Construction of the HiPER facility is envisaged to start mid-decade, with operation in the early 2020s.
The UK is a leading contender to host the HiPER laser facility.

So, if NIF gets it's act together on-time with a substantial proof of concept by next year, then Hyper goes live 2020, so 2030 functioning nuclear fusion, and electricity too cheap to meter?

Lets think about why the nerds spurt themselves dry over nuclear fusion - it would means almost limitless energy, without geographic restriction and without any substantial pollution or adverse environmental effects.

In political terms, it would re-write the map, with the geopolitics of the past century almost entirely out of the window - I'd suspect the main driver would be minerals for batteries to power electric motors. Fusion wouldn't mean socialism, but it would create the sort of material abundance that would undermine the rational of capitalism.

Church comes out fighting

2011-09-05T09:08:00.005+01:00

Things are getting interesting in Ireland: with a tussle between the Catholic Church and the Fine Gael Government.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny was today refusing to back down from his claims that church authorities frustrated investigations into child sex abuse as Education Minister Ruairi Quinn urged parents nationwide to take national schools back from the priests.

this is a big change in the way the Church has been treated (also note, this Conservative government wants parents to use democratic school boards to change things, rather than the anti-democratic stance of the Tories here with their 'Free Schools').

Given the status of the Church in Ireland, this is turning into an ugly bare-knuckle battle - that it is even happening at all is fascinating. Obviously, it could just be unscrupulous pols using a heated debate to distract attention. More than that, though, it could be a genuine shift in the political culture of Ireland towards greater secularism - reading Highlights of Kenny's Speech basic nationalism might be something of a spur, or simple repugnance of what has happened on the Church's watch. The article above is clearly the Church coming back fighting.

Speculative hunger

2011-09-02T11:33:00.008+01:00

Much like I said in my recent postings about Total Factor Productivity, the absence of profitability in certain sectors of the economy leads to investors chasing the last refuges of security and profitability. Everyone has been talking about gold (although, its rise in price in an effect of inflationary printing of money).

Now, the Spiegel has a report on speculation in food that is well worth the read.

The result of the team's efforts bears the innocuous title: "Price Formation in Financialized Commodity Markets: The Role of Information." But the contents are explosive. The UNCTAD experts conclude that the commodities market isn't functioning properly, or at least not the way a market is supposed to function in economic models, where prices are shaped by supply and demand. But the activities of financial participants, according to the study, "drive commodity prices away from levels justified by market fundamentals.
[...]
Most investors involved in the commodities business today have little understanding of the actual products. "Market participants also make trading decisions based on factors that are totally unrelated to the respective commodity, such as portfolio considerations, or they may be following a trend," the UNCTAD report concludes, describing the dangerous herd mentality of investors. According to the report, such behavior has nothing to do with objective pricing."

In other words, purveyors of effective demand are seizing upon the carrier signal and in the process distorting it, a bit like someone confusing the words for the poem - if I have more words, my poem is better."(From the UNCTAD report).

Essentially, the Efficient Markets Hypothesis is exploded - the idea that "all publicly available information is immediately reflected in prices. In its strong form, the EMH contends that even private information – available only to individual market participants – is reflected in the price through the effects of the transactions of the persons in possession of the information."

Market actors move as a heard, and react to one another (and the price signals) despite any other objective knowledge. The report calls for more transparency and regulation - but really, total transparency requires opening the books, which in turn requires common ownership, rather than the game of market smoke and mirrors for private advantage.

"The financialization of commodity trading has made the functioning of commodity exchanges controversial. Their traditional functions have been to facilitate price discovery and allow the transfer of price risk from producers and consumers to other agents that are prepared to assume the price risk. These functions are impaired to the extent that trading by financial investors increases price volatility and drives prices away from levels that would be determined by physical commodity supply and demand relationships. As a result, commodity price developments no longer merely reflect changes in fundamentals; they also become subject to influences from financial markets. Consequently, market participants with a commercial interest in physical commodities (i.e. producers, merchants and consumers) face greater uncertainty about the reliability of signals emanating from commodity exchanges. Thus, managing the risk of market positions and making storage, investment and trading decisions become more complex. This may discourage long-term hedging by commercial users. Moreover, with greater price volatility, hedging becomes more expensive, and perhaps unaffordable for developing-country users, as well as riskier."

Windy Miller

2011-09-01T11:37:00.004+01:00

This isn't science fiction, but unless I'm mis-reading this: Europe's onshore and offshore wind energy potential (Technical report ; No 6/2009) / European Environment Agency. It is both technically feasible, and market economic, to provide all of Europe's project energy needs via wind-power.

Leaving aside some of the environmental, social and economic considerations, Europe's raw wind energy potential is huge. Turbine technology projections suggest that it may be equivalent to almost 20 times energy demand in 2020.
[...]
Despite being a small proportion of the total technical potential, the economically competitive wind energy potential still amounts to more than three times projected demand in 2020.

The main limiting factors appear to be changes needed to integrate the Europe Wide energy grid to overcome lulls in the wind - so when it is is calm in Ireland the wind in Germany can still keep the juice flowing (this overcomes a central objection to wind power) but it would be a major infrastructure project.

high penetration levels of wind power will require major changes to the grid system i.e. at higher penetration levels
additional extensions or upgrades both for the transmission and the distribution grid
might be required to avoid congestion of the existing grid

They suggest a total economic potential of 12,200 Terra Watt hours in 2020. Given wind run on less than full capacity almost all the time, we need to roughly quarter that figure (I think).

So, all that is required is the political will, and the international integration and co-operation in order to provide energy for all of Europe's needs - and we can even use solar and bio-mass to complement wind, or (as in Scotland) hydro-electric power to off-set the variability.

Of course, in the UK, lots of landowners are objecting to "eye sores" and complaining about windmills, because they spoil the countryside (and thus the value of their property).

iPads for schools?

2011-08-29T15:36:00.008+01:00

This story is the shape of things to come:

Each first-year pupil at St Kevin's College in Crumlin will pay €150 for the iPad, which will contain all their text books. They will keep the computer for the year and do all their schoolwork on it.

Now, from a professional point of view, I wonder what sort of deal they cut with the publishers - textbook costs are the bread and butter of many publishers, who are loathe to see their unit sales go over to e-formats (which destroy, ultimately, the possibility of making many sales). Academic publishers tend not to mind, since they don't need to sell 60,000 copies to make their costs back.

But this is where it is for our digital natives now, a single slate of technology will contain all of their education - and the question becomes, why not load up all their reading resources all the way through their academic career - they will expect instant access to ebooks at university.

Propriatorial rights are currently holding back the widespread adoption of ebooks. Certainly, there remains a need to pay for quality, but the time will come when e-books sweep away a lot of the existing informational infrastructure. When you have the entire world's knowledge accessible from a slim bag sized machine, anything is possible.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were similar schemes in the offing in the UK. The publishing industry is changing fast, and with a 3G Kindle only costing £150.00 (my mate bought an ebook in the pub as a demonstration) everyone will begin to expect. Likewise, it has reached the point where if you're with anyone with a smartphone and the conversation turns round to 'What Bands was Steve Vai in' - someone can Wikipedia the bugger before you can blink.

More from Fred

2011-08-16T13:02:00.002+01:00

For the principle of taxation is, after all, a purely communist one, since the right to levy taxes is derived in all countries from so-called national property. For either private property is sacrosanct, in which case there is no such thing as national property and the state has no right to levy taxes, or the state has this right, in which case private property is not sacrosanct, national property stands above private property, and the state is the true owner.

Got that? Taxes are communist. Wouldn't it be nice if this wee quote could go viral, see how long it takes before frothing Tories are telling us paying any taxes is a communist plot?

Same source as before.

Right said Fred

2011-08-10T11:19:00.006+01:00

Present-day society, which breeds hostility between the individual man and everyone else, thus produces a social war of all against all which inevitably in individual cases, notably among uneducated people, assumes a brutal, barbarously violent form — that of crime. In order to protect itself against crime, against direct acts of violence, society requires an extensive, complicated system of administrative and judicial bodies which requires an immense labour force. In communist society this would likewise be vastly simplified, and precisely because — strange though it may sound — precisely because the administrative body in this society would have to manage not merely individual aspects of social life, but the whole of social life, in all its various activities, in all its aspects. We eliminate the contradiction between the individual man and all others, we counterpose social peace to social war, we put the axe to the root of crime — and thereby render the greatest, by far the greatest, part of the present activity of the administrative and judicial bodies superfluous. Even now crimes of passion are becoming fewer and fewer in comparison with calculated crimes, crimes of interest — crimes against persons are declining, crimes against property are on the increase. Advancing civilisation moderates violent outbreaks of passion even in our present-day society, which is on a war footing; how much more will this be the case in communist, peaceful society! Crimes against property cease of their own accord where everyone receives what he needs to satisfy his natural and his spiritual urges, where social gradations and distinctions cease to exist. justice concerned with criminal cases ceases of itself, that dealing with civil cases, which are almost all rooted in the property relations or at least in such relations as arise from the situation of social war, likewise disappears; conflicts can then be only rare exceptions, whereas they are now the natural result of general hostility, and will be easily settled by arbitrators. The activities of the administrative bodies at present have likewise their source in the continual social war — the police and the entire administration do nothing else but see to it that the war remains concealed and indirect and does not erupt into open violence, into crimes. But if it is infinitely easier to maintain peace than to keep war within certain limits, so it is vastly more easy to administer a communist community rather than a competitive one. And if civilisation has already taught men to seek their interest in the maintenance of public order, public security, and the public interest, and therefore to make the police, administration and justice as superfluous as possible, how much more will this be the case in a society in which community of interests has become the basic principle, bind in which the public interest is no longer distinct from that of each individual! What already exists now, in spite of the social organisation, how much more will it exist when it is no longer hindered, but supported by the social institutions! We may thus also in this regard count on a considerable increase in the labour force through that part of the labour force of which society is deprived by the present social condition.

1845, Frederick Engels: Speeches in Elberfeld

To understand isn't to condone, or encourage, but the beginning of amendment. Socialists are not in a war with the police, but seek to render them unnecessary by other means.

Interestingly, listening to some of the rioters (well, the looters), a meme of them "getting something back" seems to be running through, claiming their 'reclaiming their taxes' - that might be worth future study. A mix of a feeling of entitlement and of being put upon.

Meatbots to be replaced by Robots

2011-08-05T10:28:00.006+01:00

So, Foxconn are out to replace their workers with a million robots."The Taiwanese company has vowed to expand automation in its plants, with Chinese state media reporting plans to use a million robots in the next three years."

Shiny? Not really, this is the culmination of the Chinese economic trajectory - having massively expanded capital by extensive exploitation (throwing capital and labour at production) it now needs to expand by intensive exploitation (using less of each). Taking a production line with simply piece work and machinising it majkes perfect sense. Given that people have been killing themselves to get away from this work, as Noel Sharkey observes, getting rid of it by mechanisation can only be a boon to humanity at large.

The people on these production lines were meatbots, humans made, forced, to behave like machines.

Yet, humanity at large doesn't exist. Workers depend on the sale of their labour - that's why people didn't just walk away from the horror of this line-work. The human consequences of advances in technology is the key political question of the 21st century.

Refactoring

2011-06-21T09:18:00.004+01:00

Just to add to the previous post - if MFP/ROP is 0.2% and GVA is 1.7% (both 2000-9) (from the Annex, this is), then the gross added profit is still 11% of the total GVA - that is, a massive capital investment makes a small return but still a big chunk of the overall additional wealth created. As a comparator, the 'good times' of the 90's the average was a GVA of 2.2% and an MFP of 0.9% - 41% of value added accruing to capital. Or should I say, accruing as profit to capital, since this is over an above amortisation and capital turn over.

Factoring productivity

2011-06-20T16:14:00.005+01:00

OK, I've been lazy of late.

So, I've started doing a little research, I came across this little beauty an ONS report on 'Multi–factor productivity: estimates for 1970 to 2009' (if that title doesn't engorge your erogenous parts, no economic text book will).

Basically, Multi-factor productivity (or Total factor productivity) is the nearest empirical measure we have top the Marxist idea of 'the rate of profit' - it is a measure of the value added over labour and capital inputs (normal productivity is just measured against labour inputs).

So, if I told you that between 1995 and 2009 the MFP/ROP for the UK was 0.3% you'd have a clear idea that this is *not a good thing (for capitalists)*, it means, out of the trend overall growth rate of about 2% only a tiny fraction was true capital profit. Check out the relatively easy to read annex at the end, that compares Gross Value Added (GVA) and MFP.

It also explains why in the recent trends, we can see financial services performing so highly - people were chucking money into the financial casino because there just wasn't a proper industrial outlet (it also means that the current drops in output are actually genuine corrections for the inflated activity not justified by the real growth rate of the MFP/ROI.

The big Marxist question is what comes first, the crisis, or the fall in the ROP - clearly, as the report says, they seem to be related, and the collapse of ROP in essence is the crisis.

Joining the dots

2011-01-11T08:41:00.005Z

This post from Charles Stross.

This report from the BBC.

This post from Energy Bulletin.

Put them together, and we get:

According to IEEE Spectrum, a 70 millisecond power drop in a single factory is going to cause a 7.5% reduction in shipments of FLASH memory over the next two months. Worldwide. The news this week that about one-third of Australia's coal production has been halted by massive flooding in the state of Queensland is an opportunity to look at the coal supply situation in Asia and the impact it could have on global energy prices in the next few months.The flooding has been so widespread that while some communities are still bracing themselves for the worst, in others the clean-up is well under way. The forecast is for more rain to come, and there are reports of flooding in neighbouring New South Wales. Prime Minister Julia Gillard has warned that the recovery will take a long time.

Ruddy Hell!

2010-12-23T15:48:00.003Z

Sheridan Guilty!!! I was beginning to think he'd done enough to get acquittal, see full details on the Sheridan Trial Blog.

This one will run and run.

Go on, I'll bite

2010-12-23T15:26:00.004Z

Britain's top sports make grassroots TV cash promise

The UK's leading governing bodies for sport have agreed to reinvest at least 30% of their domestic television revenues in grassroots projects...The nine organisations to sign up are: the All England Lawn Tennis Club/Lawn Tennis Association (joint signatories), the ECB, the PGA European Tour, the FA, the Premier League, the Royal & Ancient, the Rugby Football League and UK Athletics. In fact, the only member of the SRA's "major spectator sports division" not to sign up is the Rugby Football Union.

Fnar.

Playing with Babelfish

2010-12-14T14:59:00.002Z

中国不是社会主义
政府归属不是共同所有权
共产党是暴君
中国的工作者有力量推翻暴君
废除薪水系统

Collective bargaining by riot

2010-11-11T09:36:00.004Z

So, the students kicked off. Cue condemnation and jubiliation (Actually, Bone's blog has some detailed accounts from inside the riot).

Now, I've been to a few riots, and know that the police always win, even if they didn't control this one as effectively as they usually manage. There's no way that the rioters can force change, except, the cost of policing must be taken into account - as we know, the police are facing cuts as well, but making the state find non-discretionary spend to protect itself could throw a spanner in it's spending plans.

To do that would require sustained and repeated demonstrations, not one offs (the mistake anarchists and the like with their annual May Day riot made). More riots/demos by a wider movement would force some sort of discussion, but, as we've seen in Greece, if the political offices hold firm, it isn't guaranteed to work.

It remains, though, plebeian, rather than proletarian as a style of politics - plea bargaining with power, rather than seeking to recreate the conditions and world according to our own liking.

More important than rucking with cops is organising for political action - the students are threatening to unseat Lib-Dems (a good enough move in itself), but an electoral movement to use political power to control our own labour is needed.

Update:

Luke Akehurst makes some good points, though, from what I've read elsewhere, his 'few bad apples' thesis may not hold, as there may have been some genuine student involvement (but I'm sure the old lags and usual suspects may have had a hand). Obviously, where I disagree is with the use he would put political power to, but then, that's why I don't support his party...

Irish by-elections

2010-11-04T11:29:00.003Z

Small flaw in Irish constitution discovered, there is no timetable in law for calling a by-election meaning the Cowen government, the majority of which (with Greens and ragtag independents) is less than the number of current vacancies, is living on borrowed time. It seems it plans to live on long enough to pass another (yes, another) austerity budget. If you thought Ireland had got really austere before, it's going to be more so soon.

So, a General election in Ireland after Christmas, followed by a Green wipeout and a stumble for Fianna Fail?

FBU Picket run down by manager

2010-11-02T10:44:00.004Z

hat tip Ian Bone

Mick Shaw, president of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU), described the accident. He said: "A fire engine returned from an incident and drove into the fire station, its crew refusing to wind down their windows and talk to the pickets.

"It was followed by a car driven by the officers, and as the pickets tried to talk to the driver of the car, it accelerated suddenly and one of the striking firefighters was thrown up and into the windscreen.

(Croydon Guardian

The driver of the car has been arrested.

Update: More at Scrocialist untie

Calling the Toons

2010-10-29T08:43:00.005+01:00

Hat tip to Darren for spotting this piece of hilarity that, I think, sums up everything I've wanted to say about recent politics, but just haven't been bothered enough to write:

From Tribune, and the incomparable Martin Rowson ("The violins inherited in the cistern" titter).

I started off by saying that the reason I hadn’t done any cartoons of [George Osborne] was that, until this evening, I had no idea what he looked like and, until a few weeks previously, I’d never heard of him. This, I continued, was because of the abject hopelessness of the Conservative opposition, who through arrogance and self-indulgence had left the real job of opposition to the cartoonists such as myself and Steve Bell, who was also enjoying his ennobled namesake’s largesse.

However, I went on, should the dark day ever arrive when he, George, managed to climb to the top of the greasy pole (he gave an enthusiastic bark at this point), then it was only fair to warn him that every day of his life, my colleagues and I would be emphasising his weak chin, that weird cleft in his nose, his bad skin and everything else about his appearance, while also depicting him eating babies while wading thigh-high through a vast lake of human blood and shit. And I finished off by telling him that if he didn’t fancy a future of crying himself to sleep every night, he still had time to retire from public life and get into interior decoration or run a pet shop or something.

It was at this point, with his lower lip trembling slightly, that the future Chancellor of the Exchequer suddenly burst out: “I wasn’t expecting this kind of thing!”

How I voted in the Labour Leadership Election

2010-09-11T12:22:00.003+01:00

I'm going to have words with my Unison's branch's membership secretary - I could have sworn I filled in a form to opt out of the political fund. Yet, yesterday, I received my Unison Labour Leadership ballot paper.

I agonised over what to do with it.

To have it even count you have to tick a box affirming "I support the policies and principles of the Labour Party, and am not a supporter of any organisation opposed to it and pay a political subscription to the body that issued this website."

So, technically, I should have just binned it. But, the urge was upon me. Reader, I lied, I ticked the box.

So, how did I vote?

I wrote: "No Leaders WORLD SOCIALISM" across it, and ticked the box so they would have to count it as a valid spoilt ballot. At the least I've cost the Labour Party a bit of money. At best, thousands of people doing the same could send a message. If your union includes you, go for it mes braves.

Discussion with Spufford

2010-09-01T08:52:00.004+01:00

This is an interesting audio file discussion with Francis Spufford. I've only heard as far as his disputing that Marx ever intended communism to mean abundance, I wonder if anyone out there can suggest any counter evidence?

Very interesting

2010-07-13T15:39:00.002+01:00

Via Grinding.be

PediaPress – Book “The Socialist Party of Great Britain”

2010-06-29T14:39:00.003+01:00

PediaPress – Book “The Socialist Party of Great Britain”

More adventures in Print on Demand - I've arranged this, and printed one copy to place in the Socialist Party Library, chiefly for archival purposes. Simply a compilation of Wikipedia articles about the SPGB.

Mr. 3%

2010-06-22T13:47:00.003+01:00

What price power?

Well, it seems for the Lib-Dems it's 3%:

Before the election, the Tories promised that 80% of the work of cutting the deficit would come from cutting spending and 20% from raising taxes.

In fact, the chancellor has announced that the figures are 77% to 23%.

That 3% is the impact of the coalition.

According to Nick Robinson It's possibly debatable, but the Yellow Tories will surely argue that for all they are worth. Indeed (I won't look for it) but Luke Akehurst pointed out that Lib-Dem pre-election plans involved 0% tax rises to deal with the deficit.

Here come the robots!!!!

2010-06-18T09:34:00.002+01:00

Robot hospital 'Nuff said?

They will also have to keep at least one human on standby, should any of the robots break down.

No, not replacing staff, then. At least this is robots to save lives.

Labouring in vain

2010-06-16T11:13:00.003+01:00

According to New Statesman Labour leadership contenders had a hustings at the Fabian society, and were asked whether they were socialists.

I'll leave you to read the article directly, but will simply draw your attention to this paragraph

That hint of disdain for the usefulness of ideological speculation may be a rather more authentic Labourist tradition than any theory of Socialism has ever been (The trade unions would never have founded the party if it had really wanted to be a Socialist one).

The Fabian intellectual GDH Cole had written, somewhat approvingly, of Labour having a "socialism so undefined in its doctrinal basis as to make recruits readily among people of different types".

Labour is not, and never has been a socialist party, it does not stand for socialism, but is trade unionism carried on into politics, it is the use of political power to defend and advance the interests of working people within capitalism. Just like a trade union, it has to tack, turn and sometimes cut a bad deal for its members.

Socialism is not sticking up for the bottom dog, it is using the organised power (and, yes, wealth) of the workers to completely overturn the economic system to one which is permanently run in our interests. It is political action that can do that.

The proof!

2010-06-11T08:49:00.005+01:00

Just to prove what I wrote yesterday, David Cameron goes all the way to Afghanistan to praise the hell out of the troops.

He also said he wanted to "rewrite and republish the military covenant" - the pact of support between Britain and its armed forces - and put troops "front and centre of our national life again".

"I want you to help me create a new atmosphere in our country, an atmosphere in which we back and revere and support our military," he added.

He also quoted someone who said that without soldiers there is no democracy, no free speech, no freedom. Funny, I could have sworn the soldiers arrested John Lilburn, arrested Colonel Brass and (in the form of the Police) fought against the Chartists at Hyde Park. Those are the people who brought us freedom.

Also, true to Tory form, he has increased troop pay - doubling operational allowance to £5K. Now, noticeably, the natural Tories in the military brass (and the general Labour ambivalence or antipathy to the military) meant that the army was used as a political football to help bring Labour down, and the Tories want to use the hired killers as a sort of bread and circuses thing - pumping pride in the army as they cut the social wage for the rest of us (and also ensure the loyalty of the means of death should things kick off at home).

Jenkins channels Kautsky

2010-06-09T10:36:00.003+01:00

viaJon's Union Blog Simon Jenkins has been fulfilling his requirement to "say something controversial":

I say cut defence. I don't mean nibble at it or slice it. I mean cut it, all £45bn of it. George Osborne yesterday asked the nation "for once in a generation" to think the unthinkable, to offer not just percentage cuts but "whether government needs to provide certain public services at all".

Certainly, that's not the sort of suggestion the Tories want from their consultation (by consultation they mean announcing a set of fixed choices and then getting the answer they wanted in the first place anyway).

Of course, as a practical matter, I would much prefer that killing people was cut before helping people (although a few hundred thousand suddenly unemployed squaddies roaming the streets doesn't appeal). As you can see from the comments section, a lot of people remain wedded to the idea that we need to spend such fortunes on defence, because a threat might be round the corner.

Now, this is what Kautsky had to suggest would happen 'the day after the revolution':

In the first place it is self-evident that it would recover what the bourgeoisie has lost. It would sweep all remnants of feudalism away and realize that democratic programme for which the bourgeoisie once stood. As the lowest of all classes it is also the most democratic of all classes. It would extend universal suffrage to every individual and establish complete freedom of press and assemblage. It would make the State completely independent of the church and abolish all rights of inheritance. It would establish complete autonomy in all individual communities and abolish militarism. This last could be brought about in two ways; through the introduction of universal armament and the dissolution of the army. Universal armament is a political measure and dissolution of the army a financial one. The former can under certain conditions cost as much as a standing army. But it is essential to the security of democracy, in order to take away from the government its most powerful means of opposing the people. Dissolution again aims mainly at a diminution of the military budget.

Opposition to militarism is both political and practical in terms of wastage and social power. Simply ending the army isn't enough, it needs to political revolutionary change to a radical democratic society, in which all have a stake to remove the threat of disgruntled ex-military types forming new deaths quads.

iSuicide

2010-05-28T08:37:00.003+01:00

I first read this in private eye, but google led me to The Independent:

Yesterday, Li Hai, a 19-year-old employee of the [Foxconn factory in the southern Chinese boom town of Shenzhen], jumped from the top of the building in Shenzhen to his death. It brought the number of suspected suicides at the factory this year to 10. There have been another two attempted suicides.

This factory has (and the number seems to change) hundreds of thousands of employees on its vast estate.

This vast enterprise makes our consumer electronics - apparently the iPad is made there, among many other gadgets. This is the pinnacle of alienation, the workers complain of feeling like machines, their entire lives are subsumed into the factory.

Yet, another way of looking at it is that out of the 6 billion of us on Earth, a tiny fraction are producing immense quantities of shiny goods, the productive power of the technology of this plant, if it was conquered, de-alienated, could be used to liberate us and stop us feeling like machines.

An old breed of life

2010-05-25T09:07:00.008+01:00

Now, Boulton and Watt nearly crippled advances in steam technology by applying for a patent on the separate condenser. The problem was their design saved 75% of the fuel costs, but they tried to charge the full value of the saving for the price of their patent (virtually nullifying the value of the development to industrialists). They also blocked research and development through their patent (indeed, Watt apparently engaged in patent blocking).

Relevance? Well, according to one scientist the same could happen with genetic research:

A top UK scientist who helped sequence the human genome has said efforts to patent the first synthetic life form would give its creator a monopoly on a range of genetic engineering.
[...]
"I've read through some of these patents and the claims are very, very broad indeed," Professor Sulston told BBC News.

"I hope very much these patents won't be accepted because they would bring genetic engineering under the control of the J Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). They would have a monopoly on a whole range of techniques."

The trick being the range and broadness of the patent (by the way, it's absurd to deny that patent breeds monopoly, that's what a patent is, it is a legal monopoly of an idea based on origination).

As with steam engines, technological development might be held back by the attempt to establish such monopolies. The market is a poor driver of research. If we are to benefit from being able to create whatever biological pattern we care to choose to create, it needs to be a creative commons. The simple chase to be first to introduce a new technique should be sufficient incentive.

The drive to monopolise knowledge is part of a possible route to capitalist decadence.

In my judgement

2010-05-19T09:20:00.004+01:00

A lot of confusion appears to have grown up around the BA/Unite injunction. A few things need to be made clear.

First, as to spoilt papers, section 231 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations Act 1992 says

"As soon as is reasonably practicable after the holding of the ballot, the trade union shall take such steps as are reasonably necessary to ensure that all persons entitled to vote in the ballot are informed of the number of (a) votes cast in the ballot; (b) individuals answering yes to the question, or as the case may be, to each question; (c) individuals answering no to the question or as the case may be, to each question; and (d) spoiled voting papers."

So, the law is the Union *must* provide a result including the numbers of spoilt ballots. Unite, though, maintain they did take the reasonable necessary steps to give the statutory results. What was argued in court, as can be seen from the Judgement, was whether the steps taken were in fact those "reasonably necessary" or whether they were insufficient.

Indeed, what we are up against, then, is not necessarily a failure to comply with the act, but the British common law system, wherein the courts get to interpret the meaning of such bits of law as 'reasonably' - many laws operate on a basis of trying your level best to comply, and hoping not to reach a court case which will confirm one way or another the legal practice (a lot of copyright work is like that).

Anyway, this is the most important point. The judge wasn't even making a ruling on whether the union's actions were legal, merely whether there was likely to be a case to answer

In the end I consider the arguments as to whether the statute has been complied with give rise to properly arguable issues for trial. The matter is not so clear as Mr Hendy would in my view have it. I certainly cannot hold that the union's likelihood of success is overwhelming. I have regard to my assessment of the likelihood of success at trial, and at present I am inclined to think that the union may well have failed to put in place an adequately analysed system calculated to ensure that all reasonable steps were taken to communicate with relevant members as soon as reasonably practicable the relevant items of statutory information. The point to my mind is an arguable one.

That's it, it's not a ruling, it's just an injunction based on the likelihood that BA *might* win the court case and so be subject to severe unjust detriment were the injunction not to be granted.

So, the law puts the test of reasonableness into the hands of the judges. But look at it this way - imagine if a journalist had to notify anyone likely to be identifiable in their copy at least a week in advance of publication, and had to show them that article in final draft and in full. Imagine if they could get an injunction based on the likelihood that there was any inaccuracy (including placing of commas or semi-colons) or if they felt that that they had not been properly informed of the process. We'd say clearly that was an inhibition on freedom of speech, and so this is on the freedom to strike.

No Leaders

2010-03-19T11:21:00.002Z

I should say that I a a member of Unison - currently undergoing a General Secretary election. Now, first, some points. Unison's rulebook explicitly states that it is a member lead organisation, there is no reference in the rulebook to a leader, or a leadership, so in essence, the General Secretary is a secretary, not a general.

In reality, the public image is that he is the leader. Currently, the post is held by a member of a bizarre entryist cult called the Labour Party, that puts their organisation first and foremost while pretending to put members first. They are being challenged by Militant. Dave Prentice is being challenged by Paul Holmes, and Roger Bannister. Now, the only issue at hand should be experience of the union, and capacity to carry out conference instructions, but they are all vying to be a leader.

I think, on due reflection, I'm going to wipe my arse on my ballot paper when it arrive. We have no leader, we are all leaders.

Share a bonobo?

2010-03-08T15:34:00.004Z

This isn't election related, so I'll blog it here - Bonobo's share! - our nearest cousins (5 million years ago, ISTR, we shared a common ancestor) have a capacity for sharing: "[researchers]gave a hungry bonobo access to a room with some food in it. This room was adjacent to another two rooms, which the creature could easily see into. One of these rooms was empty while the other contained another bonobo. The hungry primate could then choose to eat the food alone or unlock the door by removing a wooden peg and share his fare with the other bonobo."

A dog would not do that, simple and flat. Hardwired to share? Inherently social animals? Playing a long game to gift giving? But a fascinating glimpse into what we are.

Vaux Populi back up

2010-02-08T11:19:00.005Z

Another election, another manifesto - we're off again, Vauxing Popularly....

More NEP

2010-02-03T17:23:00.005Z

On closer reading I came out with this gem:

Looking at the top of the income distribution, using data from tax records, the share of the top 1 per cent in after tax income fell from 12.6 per cent of the total in 1937 to 4.7 per cent by 1979, but rose again to 8 per cent in 1990 and 10 per cent in 2000. The share of the top 0.05 per cent (the top one in every two thousand) fell from 2.4 per cent of the total in 1937 to under 0.5 per cent in 1969. By 2000, their share had risen back to 2.5 per cent.

That's about 30,000 people in the UK, are taking home a 2.5% of all after tax income. 2.5% of the UK population is 1.5 million.

What these figures show is the clear ultra minority who benefit from the current system of society.

Separate and unequal...

2010-01-27T08:45:00.007Z

Hatty Harman has managed to get a commission into inequality to report (summary here). Here's some of what they say:

Britain is an unequal country, more so than many other industrialised countries and more so than it was a generation ago. This is manifest in many ways – most obviously in the gaps between those who are well off and those who are less well off...

For some readers, the sheer scale of the inequalities in outcomes which we present will be shocking. Whether or not people’s positions reflect some form of ‘merit’ or ‘desert’, the sheer scale of differences in wealth, for instance, may imply that it is impossible to create a cohesive society. Wide inequalities erode the bonds of common citizenship and recognition of human dignity across economic divides. A number of analysts have pointed to the ways in which large inequalities in the kinds of economic outcome we look at are associated with societies having lower levels of happiness or well-being in other respects, and to the social problems and economic costs resulting from these...

Most people and all the main political parties in Britain subscribe to the ideal of ‘equality of opportunity’. The systematic nature of many of the differentials we present, and the ways in which advantages and disadvantages are reinforced across the life cycle (as we describe in Chapter 11 of the main report), make it hard, however, to sustain an argument that what we show is the result of personal choices against a background of equality of opportunity, however defined. Inequality in turn then acts as a barrier to social mobility...

Median income in 2007-08 was £393 per week (at 2008 prices) – in other words, half the population was in households where income adjusted for household size put them in a position that was less favourable than a couple without children with a net weekly income of £393 (£20,500 per year), and half was in a more favourable position. A tenth had incomes below £191 and a tenth had incomes of more than £806 per week (including more than 5 per cent above £1,000 per week). Thus the 10th percentile was just under half the median, and the 90th percentile was just over twice the median, and so the 90:10 ratio was more than four...The top 1 per cent has incomes more than five times the median...

Occupational social class is the only breakdown where within-group variation is generally substantially less than that within the population as a whole, although it remains large (Table S5). Growing inequality between broad occupational classes was one of the important contributors to the growth in earnings inequality over the 1980s....

The evidence we examine confirms that social background really matters. There are significant differences in ‘school readiness’ before and when children reach school by parental income and mother’s education (Figure S12). Children entering primary school in 2005-2006 whose mothers had degrees were assessed 6 months ahead of those who had no qualifications above Grade D at GCSE. In addition, every extra £100 per month in income when children were small was associated with a difference equivalent to a month’s development. Rather than being fixed at birth, these differences widen through childhood...

What could be clearer, inequality of outcome creates inequality of opportunity. Class is the big divider.

Kautsky on revolution

2010-01-21T08:35:00.006Z

Kautsky is best known negatively, the great betrayer, the renegade - people only read of him rather than read him.

Frankly, I rate Kautsky as a writer - and that rating is that he is worth reading, even where you disagree with him. He's not like David Icke who you can not bother with because the refutation isn't productive, refuting Kautsky bears fruit. I was scrolling through his book The Social Revolution and on the day After the Social Revolution.

It is an intriguing glimpse of Marxistant social democracy - and something the present day left so lost in the wilderness would do well to catch. here's his prescription for a victorious proletariat:

In the first place it is self-evident that it would recover what the bourgeoisie has lost. It would sweep all remnants of feudalism away and realize that democratic programme for which the bourgeoisie once stood. As the lowest of all classes it is also the most democratic of all classes. It would extend universal suffrage to every individual and establish complete freedom of press and assemblage. It would make the State completely independent of the church and abolish all rights of inheritance. It would establish complete autonomy in all individual communities and abolish militarism. This last could be brought about in two ways; through the introduction of universal armament and the dissolution of the army. Universal armament is a political measure and dissolution of the army a financial one. The former can under certain conditions cost as much as a standing army. But it is essential to the security of democracy, in order to take away from the government its most powerful means of opposing the people. Dissolution again aims mainly at a diminution of the military budget.
[...]
Undoubtedly the victorious proletariat would also make fundamental reforms in taxation. It would endeavor to abolish all the taxes that today rest upon the laboring population – first of all the indirect ones that increase the cost of living, and would draw the sums necessary to the covering of governmental expenses from the great properties by means of a progressive income tax supplemented by a property tax. I shall return to this point later. This must suffice for the present suggestion.

A particularly important field for us is that of education. Popular schools have always occupied the attention of proletarian parties and they even played a great role in the old communistic sects of the Middle Ages. It must always be one of the aims of the thinking proletariat to deprive the possessing classes of the monopoly of culture.
[...]
There is one problem above all others with which the proletarian regime must primarily occupy itself. It will in all cases be compelled to solve the question of the relief of the unemployed. Enforced idleness is the greatest curse of the laborer. For him it signifies misery, humiliation, crime.

I'll leave the question of taxation to another post, since it is encompassed in my point of significant disagreement.

What is interesting is although he consciously commits to radical bourgeois measures, he tags on the significant radical measures of anti-militarism (a biggy in Germany) and also a clear class conscious necessity of dealing with unemployment, in effect (and this is made clear later in the passage) destroying the labour market, by removing the compulsion of poverty.

If the laborer can once be secure of existence even when he is not working, nothing would be easier than for him to overthrow capital. He no longer needs capitalists, while the latter cannot continue his business without him. Once things have gone thus far the employer would be beaten in every conflict with his employees and be quickly compelled to give in to them. The capitalists could then perhaps continue to be the directors of the factories, but they would cease to be their masters and exploiters. Once the capitalists recognized, however, that they had the right to bear only the risk and burdens of capitalist business, these men would be the very first ones to renounce the further extension of capitalist production and to demand that their undertakings be purchased because they could no longer carry them on with any advantage.

This would enable many differing forms of joint ownership by the workers - nationalisation, municipalisation and co-operativism.

The point being, contrary to the Labour movement, he didn't see state power and nationalisation as the means to socialism, but rather a clear class analysis led him to see resolving and abolishing the wages system as the means of dissolving the market system.

More another day.

One world

2010-01-19T08:20:00.004Z

This is a fascinating little story - the Micronesian federation - lots of tiny pacific islands which will fall beneath the sea as global tides rise - have raised the issue of the Czech Republic boosting a coal power plant. I'll let someone else tell the story:

Micronesia noted CEZ's coal-fired plant at Prunerov in the north of the republic was the 18th biggest source of greenhouse gases in the European Union, emitting about 40 times more carbon dioxide than the entire Pacific island federation.

OK, to politics - the first is that the idea of countries a hemisphere apart being environmental neighbours is important - the air is global, the climate is global. We are all locked into one spaceship Earth, and we need the common means to control it.

Whilst the Tragedy of the Commons is seriously disputed nowadays, the atmosphere is an excellent example of a commons, and externality that can be ruined by untrammeled free action.

Sadly, in a world of nation states, the narrow interest of the Czech Republic in the short term will trump any longer term concern they may have about climate change - those Bohemian mountains aren't going to fall under the sea any time soon. Commonise costs, privatise profits. Common ownership, and democratic control of the worlds air is needed, and I think this story illustrates way.

The fruits of war

2010-01-05T11:10:00.004Z

I heard this on the world service this morning (insomnia bites), regarding Afghanistan:

...officially, unemployment is about 40%, though it is probably far higher than that; of those who do have a job in Parwan, 45% earn less than one dollar a day; chronic malnutrition for children under five across Afghanistan is 54%.

Now, I tried to find out what the time series on malnutrition is in Afghanistan, but find there are no recent stats. Over half of children are severely malnourished. 1 in 5 will die before reaching five years.

Stats for the whole world can be found here (just found this Excel file which indicates Afghan child mortality is barely unchanged since 1990). The world stats are a tale of misery, with many of the neighbouring countries reaching rates of over 50% under nourishment.

The BBC though, presents us with this factoid:

And perhaps most surprising of all, on a UN scale of human development indicators, Afghanistan has slipped from 117th in the world, to 181st - second from the bottom - since the Taliban were ousted.

Wither the left?

2009-12-22T09:38:00.005Z

I ask, once more.

I was home over the weekend, in Redcar - you may have heard of it, it's the place where the steel jobs were (btw, it's pronounced Rehcuh, you have to make an attempt at swallowing your own tongue while saying it to get it right).

We never used to have trots on the high street, but last time I was up the Millies were there, doing a stall, and this time, the SWP were out and about. It was too cold to stop and argue with them, but I bought a paper.

Joy of joys - while fumbling around for change, student trot opened up a wallet stuffed with twenties - yes, my vile and unsubstantiated prejudices against trots confirmed once more - result.

They were peddling the line "fight for every job" - now, I don't think that's sound tactics at even the most basic level, the fight should be concentrated on raising the general cost of redundancy, so occupying the steel plant and holding the owners to ransom sounds like a better option for me - those scrap plants must be worth something.

Even then, they are doing a disservice in not relaying the basic fact that we cannot beat gallivanting unemployment, and a firm determined to close down a plant to save costs. The only possible response is political action. Even at a sort of Latin American Left reformist level, you need to take the fight to politics.

Then, the question becomes, do we use state power to bribe capital to keep an uneconomic plant open, or do we use it to change the relationship between labour and capital forever? We need to get that question on the agenda, and focus like a laser upon it. The trot answer of trying to stir up discontent as an inchoate force will not get us anywhere, especially because most workers have the wit to know when they're on a hiding to nothing.

The political unity of the workers is the only thing that will win through, not tilting at windmills.

At your Service

2009-12-03T08:18:00.003Z

By request: my review is written, but only about 700 words, I don't think the subject warrants more.

On the question of errors, it is error strewn. Petty, stupid things, yes, he gets Trotsky's partner's date of death wrong (by two years), he claims that Oslo and St. Petersburg are on the same longitude 59N (think about it), square brackets close round, in one paragraph A sacks B and then Trotsky regrets the sacking of A - they're names were mysteriously transposed, names even change spelling mid-paragraph.

Service names and thanks his proof reader and editor - but maybe he shouldn't have.

Anyway, I need to tidy my review, I had to check it wasn't just my copy that was error strewn, and I'll submit to the Socialist Standard.

I'll say here I think the errors are being used as a distraction tactic, they're big complaint is despite all the praise he heaps on Trotsky as a writer, orator and individually brave man, he clearly just didn't like him.

A new dawn

2009-11-24T08:53:00.004Z

I was sat in t'pub t'other night, minding my own business, reading Robert Service's biography of Trotsky - to review it for the standard.

This emo-ish lad came over to me, and asked what I was reading. I showed him the cover, and awaited his opinion on Trotsky:

"Who's that?" asked he. I was taken aback, the lad had never heard of the leader of the Russian revolution.

The kid went on to tell me (he was slaughtered) that he was part of some sort of Youth Council for London, and knew how to solve all of Britain's problems (credit, you see, take all the money away, divide it up, and then issue credit - pull out of world trade for a while to do this, and stop immigration - by the latter point I stopped humouring him and started laying in on how daft he was, and he beat a slight retreat. I am every bit as much of an arguing machine as Trotsky was).

Anyway, his ignorance aside, I think it's a good thing this kid knew not of Trotsky. Perhaps there is hope.

Back to politics

2009-11-18T16:15:00.005Z

OK, so, a round up-cum-linkage of three web stories.

Firstly, Dave Osler, passim making the case that there's nowt to the left of Labour. All well and good, and true. In fact, as Luke Akehurst has been banging on about for weeks, and now Jonathon Feedland has joined in with - the race isn't run, yet. There are still months to the election, and the incumbants have all the power and publicity position brings them.

Which brings us to the Queen's speech (Gawd bless 'er - incidentally, a Labour candidate is being disciplined for being rude about the Queen: telling the truthYes, it is a 'values' programme, more about the tone than detail; but what tone.

A national care service for the elderly, restrictions on bankers bonuses - Labour forced into little errosions of the market.

Yes, millions still support Labour, and the electoral advantage, thanks to the distribution of votes, gives them a strong hand. That means millions support capitalism; but the give aways Labour will try to use to stay in power offer some prospect of a space for socialists to criticise and say "not enough".

Socialism doesn't grow out of despair, but of hope. The midst of a recession doesn't build for revolution, but the start of growth, when there is a prospect for renewal and "never again" maybe, we'll have a chance.

With the SWP going into meltdown, maybe a clear run for socialism will be had - although I suspect it's the Millies who'll end up last man standing, creating an SSP redux.

oh, well.

Mute inglorious...

2009-11-06T10:15:00.006Z

Or, Why I Love Heavy Metal.

I went to see a mate's gig last night, I was feeling a bit ropey, but went anyway.

I was the usual fare, most of the audience were either band members, or mates/partners of band members - so fewer people than I normally speak to at Hyde Park, tiny audience.

But all the bands played their hearts out, a sort of rocky mi, the night went from 90's Nu Metal through a Placebo inspired band, to a genuine Metal five piece with a drummer with no shirt and poodle hair (and they did rock), to ending the night with a Metallica style thrash outfit.

My ears stopped hurting after a while, and I loved every stroke of the bass, every wail, every thump of the drum and trill of the lead guitar. Classic stuff, and every bit as good as some big name top of the line bands, all for a fiver.

And this is going on in pubs across London, playing slogging their guts out for no money, because they want to play - sure, they want to be famous, and have a chance at the riches, but most know that will never happen, and this is as far as they'll get.

he music industry is a lottery, and success is overrated. Look for quality where you will, and maybe, just maybe, avoid the mass marketing machines.

Feral
Roxville
Rubella

Warrrrrr!

2009-11-04T16:29:00.006Z

Just finished reading Rolling Hot by David Drake, from his Hammers Slammers universe.

I was actually expecting a rather turgid future war story, but what I got was a relatively humane story of combat, gore, bravery and sacrifice. It was the point at which the peacenik joins the hawk in their contempt for the hypocrisies of the liberal who wants a clean, nice war - Drake, a veteran, presented war in all it's random insanity, the dissociation, the noise, the despair, the cock-ups and the bravery. He is noted as saying that behind the glittering tech he is interested in the basic balls of the men and women who make a war machine go.

My point is that the same story can be read in two ways, it isn't a screed in favour of war, but a toned down description of events - he even masterfully manages to put the metabackground of the war to one side, his mercenaries fight because they fight, and the framework of causation is irrelevant to them - much like the films Saving Private Ryan or Zulu, the point of which is the glory of the pointless battle, the fight which soldiers put up without a deep personal motive, because then can and they must.

It is not, as such science fiction, it is the reality of war masked by some shiny technology and transposed out of our immediate cultural context - more fantasy than SF I'd say, but then, I'm developing a hardline on such things.

Literature, anthropology and socialism

2009-10-28T15:52:00.009Z

Thanks to Many books and my e-reader, I've just finished reading Grant Allen's The british barbarians.

Stuart may enjoy this one - the conceit (and I am going to spoil the plot) is that a time traveller goes back to the time of writing (the 1890's) on an ethnographic tour of British taboos from the perspective of the 25th century - it anthropologises Victorian Britain, and compares the mores of that society with primitive taboos, and finds that society unenlightened and primitive (having things like private property in land, and marriage).

Now, the central motor of the plot is a free love romance (a married woman flees her husband, no less), but which in classic liberal romantic style pictures this as the woman's emancipation (the protagonist proclaims her to be his, and she naturally subordinates herself to him).

The interesting part is that the author is so sure of the truth of his wares, and yet, so far as I can see from my own scant reading, his examples from 'primitive' tribes are fallacious, and his own points about the natural purity of women are now exploded.

Finally, of interest is the brave exposure of prostitution as a constituent part of marriage relations. Also of intriguing note is the defence of the idea that we are alone in the universe, and that there is no extra-terrestrial life.

Well worth the read.

Eco Logic

2009-10-16T10:54:00.004+01:00

The Swedes are keeping warm with Bunny Boilers!

I kid not, they are burning rabbits for fuel - apparently, rabbits are an alien plague, and they kill so many, turning them into fuel is a good way of getting rid of the bodies - obviously, they must be killing little ones without much eating on them.

That is the future of the green movement - biofuels kill bunnies!

Dangerous

2009-10-15T08:53:00.003+01:00

Well, I was flicking through Tom Barry's Guerilla War In Ireland on the bog this morning, because parts of the news reminded me of some details from that tale - viz the attacks on police stations by insurgents in Pakistan.

This is bad, if they are strong enough and feel they have enough support to be able to attack their opponents civil forces of social control, they are well on their way to full scale insurgency (and maybe further than that). It's especially worrying as.

They recently attacked the army (with no come back from their own support base - and the army is a central pillar of what is Pakistan).

There appears to be no civil force to counteract them, no labour movement, or anything on the streets.

This is bad on a stick. Meanwhile the efforts to get to a plausible victory condition in Afghanistan are redoubling, while the chances of just plunging the whole region into chaos continue to grow. British ministers try and say that the war was fought to stop planning, preparation and training of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan/Pakistan - but in reality they have turned the whole area into one vast training camp for guerillas - it was a hot war like this that trained Bin Laden, lets not forget. The veterans of this war will haunt the battle fields of Earth for thirty years to come.

Fantasy reformism

2009-10-14T17:08:00.004+01:00

OK, back to fantasy reformism, again. I have two.

1) Recall - much in the news at the moment. Now, I've said before that I prefer frequent periodic election to recall, because the question of the trigger is a pesky one (set too low, political gridlock, too high and the measure becomes all but worthless). I was reading, though, the Wikipedia article on Constructive votes of no confidence. The idea being, you don't vote the incumbant out until there is a replacement candidate (i.e. you vote the new one in rather than the old one out). This sets the bar quite well, because a candidate wouldn't run unless they thought they were in with a chance of winning.

2) War!!!! - following Isaac Asimov's idea that war represents a failure of politics, herein a suggested new rule - the way a government declares war is by the Prime Minister making a statement admitting their failure, and resigning from office. A nice simple test, if they really think war is necessary, they should signal it by making a sacrifice themself.

Any suggestions out there for fantasy reformism?

A dark mind

2009-09-30T16:18:00.005+01:00

I have an evil, corrosive mind. A friend of mine gave me a book she cherished from childhood - a German kids book by Michael Ende (author Neverending story) called Momo.

Now, this book is excellently written, and wonderful and imaginative. I centres on a sinister group of Time bankers stealing everyone's time and making their lives miserable - the perfect anti-capitalist story, you'd think.

I enjoyed it; but my problem came afterwards. See, the happy ending basically centred on the genocide of the grey men - wiped out to the last one, sent screaming in terror to try and avoid their fate. This was more than a little disturbing. See, the novel is a classic paranoid fantasy - a mysterious group who move among us unseen, who manipulate us, who weave elaborate conspiracies around us (they attack the central character, Momo, through her friends, "turning" them against her). The sly Others are watching us, and they are stealing something precious from us, our jouissance, our time.

Mercifully, the Grey Men are bowler hat wearing cigar smoking bankers, without anything remotely to suggest Jewishness or to connect to the very similar anti-semitic theories (the connexion is in the structure of the paranoid fantasy which is affixed to the Jews in some instances). The exterminationist response is, also, similar - the grey men are rootless and have no real substance, and so may be freely destroyed to save us all.

This is the anti-capitalism of fools - or the anti-capitalism of children - the belief that rather than transforming the world, if it was just freed from the presence of the despoilers, all will be well. Similarly, George Monbiot falls into this trap in his current call for class war a tirade against the rich as polluters.

The point is, that the world as is, freed from the current rich, from the present Grey Men will be alright is flawed. Revolution is more complex that a childish wish for the bad things to just go away, for the hated enemy to stop robbing you, it's about self transformation, and changing the way you are to stop being in the position of victim.

We will have no need for a terror, to exterminate our enemies, that is what is so liberating about socialism. And I'm glad that reading against the grain opened that up for me.

This is what a crisis looks like

2009-09-16T17:24:00.006+01:00

From the Daily Mail (I know, I know), the reality of crisis:Martin Stopford, managing director of Clarksons, London's biggest ship broker, says container shipping has been hit particularly hard: 'In 2006 and 2007 trade was growing at 11 per cent. In 2008 it slowed down by 4.7 per cent. This year we think it might go down by as much as eight per cent. If it costs £7,000 a day to put the ship to sea and if you only get £6,000 a day, than you have got a decision to make.

'Yet at the same time, the supply of container ships is growing. This year, supply could be up by around 12 per cent and demand is down by eight per cent. Twenty per cent spare is a lot of spare of anything - and it's come out of nowhere.' That is, a vast fleet of unused ships are moored off Singapore, hundreds and hundreds of empty crewless tankers.

Whats more, the ship yards are running out of orders, and will be at a standstill by 2011 - the long tail of the recession shows itself here, recovery will only soak up the available stocks, there will be a lag before new capacity is needed.

Via Grinding.be

The poverty of politics

2009-09-09T16:23:00.004+01:00

Real politics:

This blog shows the truth of local politics - councillors posing outside shocking potholes THAT THEY HAVE FOUND AND ASKED OFFICIALS TO FIX!

What will socialists do about the potholes, our putative electors would ask. We pointed to the bloody shovels, and let them work it out for themselves....

Obscene

2009-09-01T09:29:00.004+01:00

In Zambia, a journalist is being prosecuted. Plus ca change, you may say, but this journalist is being prosecuted for obscenity. So what?, you may say. true, but this journalist is, well, let the BBC tell you:

She sent photos to government members showing a woman giving birth without medical help during a strike in Zambian hospitals in June. The baby died.

Read that again. A woman giving birth in traumatic and fatal circumstances, is obscene.

I'd go to suggest that President Rupiah Banda is the one who is obscene.

Spread the word, it might get back to him.

Back

2009-08-19T09:55:00.002+01:00

IX.

The heart asks pleasure first,
And then, excuse from pain;
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering;

And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor,
The liberty to die.

-Emily Dickinson

The keening of anarchists

2009-07-17T08:22:00.004+01:00

So, I was telling you about the squat against the MP couple. It seems the courts moved, and repossession was granted. On the last night, my informant tells me, someone who was keen for the squatters to go hired some local kids to come to the house and cause mayhem. Keen eyed readers can find a version of this story on Indymedia.

Now, whether they were provacateurs, sent to discredit the squatters, or really just lary local lads, doesn't matter. It shows the risks of direct action (and the prospect that the other side will break the rules to get back at you, too). While direct action can be satisfying, I don't think it offers an alternative to clear political organisation (worse, in this case, the anarchists come out sounding like the taxpayers alliance). Yes, their keyings on t'interweb may have helped rabble rouse a touch, but their hardly likely to dent the average consciousness, much less those leftists who support Keynes' policies.

That's why I'm not keen on this type of politics.

Agalmics in action

2009-07-16T10:48:00.007+01:00

So, in the pub the other night, these Doctor Steel types turned up mob handed, so the poor bar feller was swamped. Eventually, he got to me, but, I pointed out that some other lad had been waiting longer - the bar feller indicated that he was at this end of the bar now, so he'd do me anyway (he was looking a bit frazzled).

I apologised to the lad. His response was interesting, he offered to the barman to pay for my drink, so that he could get his now - he'd clearly been waiting a while.

We clinked glasses, and honour was satisfied.

Now, this strikes me as agalmics in action, lets look through.

1: I offer to let the lad go first. I couldn't loose, I'd be guaranteed to get served after him anyway (bar folk remember things like that), and I was protecting a general interest in queuing (it's a bummer when people get served straight after coming to the bar when you've been waiting an age).
2: He had an interest:
a) In re-enforcing the queuing system (he's just lost out due to its breakdown).
b) In getting his drink as soon as possible.

So, we both had a self interest which we served by not doing the immediately self-interested thing, but acting in an other centred way. This is a good example of the evolution of co-operation, of agalmic behaviour. Bastardised Smithian behaviour wouldn't allow for this sort of thing, it would say by grabbing my drink at the first chance, and him pushing to get his drink soonest, we'd all be better off, but it seems that freely exchanging gifts, we made the system work better.

Oh, the Irony...

2009-07-15T08:41:00.003+01:00

Last night, in my boozer, I spotted a crowd dressed disturbingly in what looked like fash uniforms. They were, clearly, nice kids (story to prove that forthcoming), but it was still a touch disturbing.

Anyway, I asked one what was going on, and he told me they were part of Doctor Steel's Toy Army - apparently, some yanklander artist who specialises in some sort of cod world domination conspiracy and and ironic pseudo fascist movement, to bring a worldwide Utopian Playground about.

of course, it's larks and capers, but I couldn't help feeling, to a certain extent, ideology is lived, as some geezer once wrote. Dressing the same, enacting uniform movements, etc., however fun filled and knowing, is actually living the part of a regimented movement (and for all they know, one or two loons in their midst might be serious, or, rather, might seriously start taking their identity from the cod fash cause).

I'm not saying these people are dangerous, but, like some among the chaps whose ironic throw backed imperial racism (joke, joke) is possibly real. In a good Freudian sense, saying things you think are a joke is a good way to say the things you really want to but feel you can't.

Sorry to be all po faced and contrary to post-modern laughter, but ultimately, I think it's a dead end. The revolution will be boring.

Fair dinkum...

2009-07-14T08:02:00.003+01:00

Erm, yes, more robots.

Australia is launching a competition for war robots.

I've already covered this thing here a lot, so I'm just putting down a marker to note how things are moving, we've gone from the realm of the speculative to practical aspirational political policy - and if Australia is doing it, then every tech savvy industrial power will be thinking about it.
The government wants to develop an "intelligent and fully autonomous system" capable of carrying out dangerous surveillance missions.

Senior officials in Canberra have said they hope that unarmed robotic vehicles will do some of the army's "dirty work" in such hazardous theatres.

The ultimate plan is for groups of these sophisticated machines to be sent into battle to help neutralise the enemy.
Heh, unarmed eh? Unarmed neutralising, what, by guiding unmanned drones to targets? Hmmm, nice.

Anyway, below, a small picture of the future...

Here come the robots

2009-07-13T08:48:00.003+01:00

The aim of this talk is to explore the effects of a particular form of technology on the state of society. It will examine the concepts of robotics and artificial intelligence; the concept of the technological singularity; what such an event would mean for the labour market; and, because of the central role of the labour market to capitalism, what this would mean for capitalist society as a whole. It will also take in the contradictions in capitalisms need for labour; and how, ultimately, socialism is essentially the emancipation of labour.

Near future science fiction frequently explores the possibilities of imminent technologies. Gadgets that haven’t been designed yet, but could be given recent real advances in technology and design. Whilst its track record on such predictions as us getting to Mars by 1977 and everyone having rocket cars by 2002 are a bit wide of the mark, others have been much closer – and in fact actively conservative compared to the real historical record.

Authors such as Charles Stross in his Halting State or Ken Macleod in his Night Sessions explore a future where mobile phone technology linked up to glasses which display information to the wearer can link up with technology like google Earth and GPS systems to tell them, just by looking, who lives in a house and what criminal records they have and other known details. They explore the expanding pace of technology, as the machine intelligence of computers begins to exceed that of the living human beings. Iain M. Banks in his Culture novels explores the after effects of that process, where humans served by loyal robots live in a post scarcity anarcho communist space faring society.

We need to pause here to discuss some terms. Much of this will be familiar. The difference, for one, between a machine and a tool. A tool enables a human to do a job, while a machine effectively replaces human labour. A robot is a sort of machine. The word itself is Czech, coming from a play about automatons, and it means worker, but with connotations of slavery. The international standards organisation defines a robot as: “an automatically controlled, reprogrammable, multipurpose, manipulator programmable in three or more axes, which may be either fixed in place or mobile for use in industrial automation applications." Which more or less means the same thing.

Robots do not have to be physical, and many expert systems can be described as a robot of sorts. When your wordprocessor corrects your spelling, that is a type of robot.

A singularity represents an "event horizon" in the predictability of human technological development past which present models of the future cease to give reliable or accurate answers, following the creation of strong artificial intelligence or the amplification of human intelligence. Futurists predict that after the Singularity, humans as they exist presently will cease to be the dominating force in scientific and technological progress, replaced with posthumans, strong AI, or both, and therefore all models of change based on past trends in human behavior will be obsolete.

The technological singularity refers to a situation in which technological advancement begins to accelerate to the point where new designs are produced, basically, before old ones are implemented: where super intelligence exists. More prosaicly, when the robots begin to be able to do our thinking for us. Proponents of such an eventuality point to growth of computer processing power and the growth of communications and transport technology. The mark how the time taken for products to reach ubiquity and obsolesence is falling – it took 70 years for telephones to become ubiquitous, the iPod has managed it in about 8. For example.

We’ve even reported such trends ourselves, in the Socialist Standard. We told how 3D printers have been developed that can make models and parts out of sillicon and plastic – and how that will lead to faster development of prototypes. Those 3D printers can also produce 60% of their own parts. If they get to 100% we’d have multipurpose machines that could reproduce themselves, and maybe even adapt for diffferent tasks.

Machines making machines. This would have drastic effects on the labour market. Robin Hanson writes in the IEEE Spectrum:

The relative advantages of humans and machines vary from one task to the next. Imagine a chart resembling a topographic cross section, with the tasks that are ”most human” forming a human advantage curve on the higher ground. Here you find chores best done by humans, like gourmet cooking or elite hairdressing. Then there is a ”shore” consisting of tasks that humans and machines are equally able to perform and, beyond them an ”ocean” of tasks best done by machines. When machines get cheaper or smarter or both, the water level rises, as it were, and the shore moves inland.

Depending on how these contours actually lie, this could mean mass displacement for millions of workers: redundancy on a grand scale. From shop staff to clerks, essentially human posts could be done away with by “simple” intelligences or machine expertese.

Of course, this trend has been continuing since capitalism began. As Hanson notes:

The […] proliferation of machine-assembled cars raised the value of related human tasks, such as designing those cars, because the financial stakes were now much higher. Sure enough, automobiles raised the wages of machinists and designers

Throughout history, the labour market has had winners and losers, swings as well as roundabouts. New workers have always been recruited to replace those throw on the scrapheap; but in this scenario, new workers can be designed, trained up and introduced faster through machinery that it would take to breed and train a new generation of humans.

The suggestion throughout discussion of a technological singularity is that productivity would soar. In essence, it would herald an abundance economy. For some radical “trans humanists” this would mean the end of capitalism.

The capitalist mode of production carries with it a strong impulse for this sort of increasing productivity:

The battle of competition is fought by cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities demands, caeteris paribus, on the productiveness of labour, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore, the larger capitals beat the smaller. It will further be remembered that, with the development of the capitalist mode of production, there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions. The smaller capitals, therefore, crowd into spheres of production which Modern Industry has only sporadically or incompletely got hold of. Here competition rages in direct proportion to the number, and in inverse proportion to the magnitudes, of the antagonistic capitals. It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hands of their conquerors, partly vanish.

The result of which is the fact that:

…the growing extent of the means of production, as compared with the labour-power incorporated with them, is an expression of the growing productiveness of labour. The increase of the latter appears, therefore, in the diminution of the mass of labour in proportion to the mass of means of production moved by it, or in the diminution of the subjective factor of the labour-process as compared with the objective factor.

The additional capitals formed in the normal course of accumulation serve particularly as vehicles for the exploitation of new inventions and discoveries, and industrial improvements in general. But in time the old capital also reaches the moment of renewal from top to toe, when it sheds its skin and is reborn like the others in a perfected technical form, in which a smaller quantity of labour will suffice to set in motion a larger quantity of machinery and raw materials.

(Marx, Capitalv. 1, Chapter 25)

While 90% of what socialists discuss, from inequality to exploitation and unemployment, can be defended without needing recourse to the labour theory of value, (and some writers have suggested Marx should be dealt with in this way) not doing so robs our theories of their explicitly political dimension. As can be seen from the preceeding, the capitalist mode of production is as much about drawing in the command of labouring humans as it is about making profits – it is a source of social control.

Capitalism is in a bind – it wants to use as much labour as it can as little as possible. That is, while it on the one hand sets its production goals as limitless, an infinity of riches and products, it wants to spare the precious labour that gives it an edge in the competetive battle. This is what the shackles of capital mean to labour, that goals and activities that are within the practical bounds of human endeavour are left unsurmounted because it is not capitalistically efficient to do so. Capitalism prefers the increasing refinement of the productive process to the actual attainment of any specific outcomes or goods.

This brings us to an important factor. As EP Thompson noted in his The making of the English working class – the working class made themselves. Workers, and their demands for waged labour as compared with the previous forms of bonded labour, were, if you’ll forgive, in the vanguard of promoting market relations. Professor Robert Allen of Nuffield College, Oxford, an economic historian, goes so far as to suggest that a significant contributing factor to the Industrial Revolution occuring in Britain was the relatively high (at that time and in the world) Real wages of the workers here. Particularly, they were high relative to fuel costs and capital costs. The importance of this is that it incentivised innovation and mechanisation. Similar features have been attributed to American industrialisation. The high costs of labour, and capitalism’s drive to spare labour if at all possible is a key motor of capital accumulation.

This, then, presents us with a bind. Capitalism spares labour, cuts labour and labour costs, while it grows. Further, as we’ve seen above, whilst it accumulates, it cheapens the products of industry. This presents us with a situation in which fewer people are employed, and in which the cost of employing people actually falls. The mass of use values they can command may well increase, but the value of their pay declines. We can see this in the recent history of the United States “Since 1975, practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top 20% of households” – that’s from the CIA world factbook.

This raises the prospect, as the tides of technology rise and surplus population increases and real wages fall, of a natural limit to technological growth – the point at which the labour market ceases incentivise intensive exploitation of capital, and it becomes cheaper to simply exploit labour extensively. The Socialist Party has never emphasised a theory of “decadence” like some Marxist groups, but these conditions would be as close to a decadence situation as you could find. Hanson sees a situation in which we would all have to become capitalists, because labour would not longer pay, but if what I have suggested above comes to pass, then we simply wouldn’t have that option, and a form of labour feudalism could emerge.

In response to a questionaire, when Marx was asked what were his goals, he simply replied “The emancipation of labour.” This brings us to the crux of the matter - technology emancipates us from labour, but so long as a vast swathe of humanity depends on the sale of its ability to work labour will be in the chains of capital. Socialism, the emancipation of labour, would see a situation in which rather than try at all costs to spare labour, we will freely chuck it at problems because we would be working towards definite ends, rather than an ever increasing size of profit.

It would be nice to think that technological progress would simply evolve capitalism away. If we believed that, we could shut up shop and simply become chears leaders for advancing bleeding edge technology. The dangers of the alternative, a kind of stagnant capitalism based on cheap super abundant labour unable to fight back, is quite terrifying. We've seen how capitalism does have a drive to advance technology, but one that may be undercut by its dependence on wages labour. Waged labour has not been the passive tool of capital, but an active and essential participant in driving capitalism onwards. I'd suggest that we as workers cannot sit by and hope that a magic bullet will solve our social problems, and our active organisation remains essential to attaining socialism.

Thus, I'd like to finally touch on an old debate we once had at conference - the question was whether socialism was possible in 1904. The arguments tonight may make it sound like it was not so, that we're still waiting for the robotic productive forces that will make it possible; I would argue, though, that productive forces encompases more than technological capacity, and includes the organisational and mental capacities required for a given form of society. The friction between capital and labour was a source of technological innovation, that friction was a productive force. As I said just before, socialism will free up labour, irrespective of technological capacity, to use whatever technological powers are available. Socialism is not a byproduct of technology but of social consciousness.

Thank you.

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/robotics-software/economics-of-the-singularity

http://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/members/robert.allen/Presentations/leyden-2.pdf

http://www.doktorsleepless.com/index.php/Singularity

Squatters

2009-07-03T08:52:00.005+01:00

It seems the Keens have developed squatters - I know this because the barman in my regular haunt is a black bloc anarchist involved in the squat.

The Keens are a pair of Labour MPs who have a house they list as their main that has been empty for seven months or more - they say it is being renovated (slowly, it seems).

The interesting thing this bloke told me was that the anarchists involved are trying to get local independents to stand against the couple at the general election - back to non-partyism.

I explained I think that parties are useful and important for accountability, but we agreed to disagree.

It's positive that it is turning into a political movement, but the craze for independents (usually Tories in Disguise) illustrates it's a negative movement. But, we shall see.

Learn the buggers...

2009-06-25T15:29:00.007+01:00

On a coach going through Manchester I saw a blue plaque, once. It told the world that it marked the site of St. peter's field, the scene of the infamous (to anyon immersed in labopur movement culture) Peterloo. My heart skipped a beat, there, in what is now basically downtown Manchester was the place where 15 people were killed and hundreds injured. I'd read about it so often, thanks to the poetry of the radicals laureate Percy Bysshe Shelley.

One. Small. Massacre - nearly two hundred years ago, now. Still remembered, still an animating force. It spurred on the chartists, it burned in the hearts of the labourites and the socialists. Castlreagh and King George didn't fall that day, nor shortly afterwards, but it created a cultural bond for the workers' movement that has since gone on t hound the likes of Castlereagh et al.

In Iran the dead will not be forgotten - the Ayatollahs will not fall this week, nor, I suspect, even this year, but the memory of this month will remain, and may even be remembered in Persian verse. It might read something like this:

XC
'And these words shall then become
Like Oppression's thundered doom
Ringing through each heart and brain,
Heard again - again - again -'

XCI
'Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.'

Because they're worth it

2009-06-19T08:54:00.004+01:00

The British Chiropractic Association v. Simon Singh (a relatively well reported news event) takes a new turn, the BCA have now released a list of citation showing evidence for chiropractic treatment.

This list is torn to shreds here, here, and particularly here.

To add my small contribution, as a librarian I looked to see what I could find of the journals cited - Journal of Manipulative Physiological therapy (the most frequently cited) is not held by any major research university in the UK (so far as I can see). Spine (another cited) appears to be published by chiropractors, and the reputable sources, as other bloggers have noted, appear to be irrelevant.

Chaff is the only way to describe that list. The BCA have exposed themselves, pass the word, let the world know, and if your friend is contemplating chiropractic treatment, just remember - the BCA had the chance to put up solid evidence, and demonstrably failed to do so.

Sarky again...

2009-06-16T08:20:00.004+01:00

M'Lord Rogers is an interesting man, with interesting things to say:
"I think that anyone who uses his power due to birth [like Prince Charles', whose views on the Chelsea Barracks redevelopment saw it stopped] breaks a constitutional understanding - it's not a law, it's a constitutional understanding - and a trust we have within our society about the role of people who have received power in that manner."
Again, we find replicated the debates of yesteryear, a true bourgeois finding arbitrary authority of a Royal getting in his way.

To say I'm no fan of M'Lord Rogers is an understatement. His best achievement is his remuneration package, which, according to Private Eye is calculated on a post tax basis (i.e. his gross pay increases when direct taxation goes up to protect his net/take home pay). he's an inspiration to us workers on how to avoid the burden of taxation falling upon us.

Nonetheless, he is but one bourgeois, but we still see the old class struggle, and its root causes played out in this merry little drama. Prince Charles did stop a development, when so many other individuals who object to schemes are overridden or ignored by the planning process. Doubtless, he had a quiet word with the Qatari royal family, but it's enough to show aristocratic power still remains.

Should we celebrate M'Lord Rogers' stance? No, we just laugh that the constitutional lash up once again shows creaking signs, and hope that the end to both rulers and robbers is at hand.

Recent activity

2009-05-07T08:32:00.005+01:00

Sorry for radio silence, been blogging over at Vaux Populi. Herein my list of recent posts:

Change you can't believe in
Greenwash
Surveying the field
Candidate admits error
Putting the case
Caring
Presenting our candidates

So, see, I have been blogging, and like a fiend!

And they're off!

2009-04-09T13:54:00.004+01:00

Our European election address has been approved, and we're going to contest the London region list in the Euros. Vaux Populi is back up and running, expect exciting commentary on delivering leaflets in the rain, again.

On a personal note, this will be my first ever opportunity to vote for a socialist party candidate, I'm so happy.

Seize the bank and seize the tower

2009-04-01T08:25:00.003+01:00

...As some bright feller once writ.

The steady media drum beat announcing impending violence and mayhem is part of a strategy of detterance, deterring people from protesting (cos they don't want to be in the violence) and allowing a sucker punch if none occurs ("the police took effective action that stopped the violent minority, your honour").

Over the weekend, Donal Macyntire, on radio 5, had an interview with a journalist, who had infiltrated the Gleneagles movement. Such unbiased questions of the "was there a secret hierarchy" sort, and the journalists on facetious and contemptuous comments guaranteed that it would be ten minutes of supporting the caricature of anarchists. Did the bloke in black really have a bodyguard, or just a heavy mate? Hmmmm.

Of course, that today's protests will in all likelihood be swatted away easily by such cheap media tactics demonstrates just how futile and worthless they are: anarchy is a game at which the police will beat you.

It might be fun to protest, I was there at the great May day riot a few years ago, it was great fun, honest. What is needful, though, is the slower, grass roots, boring job of organising politically: education, meetings, networks, votes. That would scare the bejaasus out of the powers that be. Really, we should try it.

With a bit of luck soon I'll have news on a Euro election bid by the Socialist Party, maybe the Euro elections would be the place to start?

Too cheap to meter?

2009-03-31T08:54:00.003+01:00

Nuclear fusion has been fifty years away for the last twenty or so years, to my recollection. Well, now the scientists are talking of the culmination of 50 years work with the potential arrival of a proof of concept laser ignition fusion reaction. If this works, as we'll apparently know if the next couple of years, after that, it's all detail, and we're on our way to limitless clean energy.

Then all the futurologists and tech heads can go around laughing at the greens. The implications are vast - energy free of geography, and without limit - plus a helium by product: "Airships!" Fusion + robots = socialism. Now, as Doktor Sleepless asks, where's my jet-pack?

On a similar theme, young Master Stross has declared his near future book Halting State to be already obsolete - things are moving, kids.

Back to the Rugby: Skolars v. Rams.

2009-03-16T15:54:00.004Z

I didn't blog about the first match of the season I managed to attend, mainly because the composition in my head was a snarky demolition of the Skolars for their apparent inability to hold onto the ball and not give away soft penalties.

Their match with Dewsbury Rams, yesterday, was a transformation. Sure, they lost. That's what I expect. But I expect them to lose excellently, with passion, skill and energy, vibrantly fighting against men twice their size and speed with the skills and tactics of experienced players recently demoted from a higher division. That's what I saw against the West Yorkshire side.

OK, so the visitors scored a try on their first set. That's alright. That that team cut through the Skolars like a whatsits through summat, no problem. That the Londoners could make metres when they had the ball, and the whole game was practically fought in their own half, fine, fine.

15 minutes at the start of the second half, despite wave after wave of Dewsbury using their 900 stone No. 33 like a battering ram, they did not pass. that was worth the admission. To see Skolars breifly snatching the ball, and playing through the Rams' lines, that was worth the price of admission.

The score in the end was both truthful and a deceit, the Rams scored fairly and freely, but the Skolars' fight nearly, just nearly, might have been a better match, with some cannier play, maybe.

London Skolars 14 - 42 Dewsbury Rams

PFI - the truth is out there.

2009-03-04T08:32:00.004Z

Well, the Government are going to bail out the PFI companies. The crisis has made the inevitable happen sooner. After all, the point of running critical services is that they must be run, and can't be allowed to fail, transferring control to another firm or organisation costs money and causes disruption - the risk of PFI has always been mitigated.

The only reason, aside from bunkum about risk and private sector innovation and management, is that it creates legally different employers within the public sector, i.e. it is about breaking the unions, and using laws against solidarity striking to undermine union solidarity and national pay bargaining.

All the tosh talked by Unison and the labour left about public sector borrowing, etc. was exploded by the RMT, who managed to co-ordinate strikes against the fragmented companies, thus undermining the manoeuvre by effective solidarity. If we want to combat PFI and workforce fragmentation, we need co-ordinated targetted strike action,not pleadings to Government or campaigns to "keep it public" - it is purely a union matter.

Crisis explained

2009-02-05T08:15:00.004Z

Economic crisis explained.

It is a plot of which Jorge Luis Borges would have been proud: some of the best military and juridical minds in Italy are wrestling with the problem of how to dispose of the unwelcome legacy of tens - perhaps hundreds - of thousands of soldiers who never existed.

Though commanded by a real Lieutenant General, headquartered in Padua, Italy's so-called Terzo corpo designato d'Armata was a fiction - a giant cold-war bluff. It was dreamed up in the early 50s to convince Moscow that Nato's frontline was altogether more solid than was the case.

[...]

The army was disbanded in 1972 but archives and barracks the length of Italy have remained clogged with what La Stampa said was "tonnes" of paper. And none of it can be destroyed. Under Italian law, officially secret documents can only be pulped once they have been declassified. And they can only be declassified by the office or unit that created them. And, of course, this no longer exists ...

That is, an army existed almost entirely on paper, in the form of notional essence that allows physical armies, and still exists. The paper records cannot be cleared away, because of the lack of a real force to remove this notional existence.

The Italian state borrowed a notional army in order to be a player in a real military conflict, a conflict that never really happened, and so the debt never made a profit. The military archive market continues to suffer, but this notional essence locks up those archives.

A clearer example of what happens in an economic crisis couldn't be found.

A century

2009-02-03T11:19:00.007Z

"[It] is a vast military centre and militarily defended city in every sense of the laws of war, written or unwritten, as applicable to aerial warfare. We have no wish to destroy indiscriminately or to injure or kill women and children, or other non-combatants"

Israel Spokesperson? Hamas spokesperson?

No, German Zeppelin commander in World War I, called Mathy, talking about London. This is a man who commanded a raid that killed 109 civilians exclusively by dropping small incendiary bombs on Russell Square, through Clerkenwell and on into Hoxton - densely populated civilian areas all. On Portpool Lane a high explosive bomb killed four children and injured six adults.

A night earlier, another Zeppelin had bombed its way along the Kingsland Road from 10,000'. No military targets were in view.

Mathy claimed the British had posted an anti-aircraft gun under Saint Paul's, trying to use a historic monument as a shield. The British deny this. Sounding familiar?

In fact, if you travel on the C2 bus, you pass Regent's Park barracks, and then, onwards a little, less than two hundred yards i.e. missing distance) is a Church and an Infants school. Is the British government cowardly hiding it's military installations in civilian areas? or doesn't that matter, they'll be bombed anyway.

How we got here, a quick guide

2009-01-21T15:52:00.006Z

In capitalism, entrepreneurs identify needs (effective demand) and try and fulfil them. This, though, is impossible, so they use market forces, the pricing system, as a proxy for knowing the real state of demand. Another name for market forces, is trial and error. The entrepreneurs allocate capital according to profitability, again on the basis of trial and error. Now, the return on this capital will always be a simple fraction of the investment, i.e. it will always in a given period be less than the value of the investment itself.

Thus, for a, say, E1,000,000 annual return, E10,000,000 is invested. If the entrepreneur gets it wrong, all of that capital is lost. That is the punishment of trial and error. Simple really, the value of the risk is less than the value of the reward. When, as it inevitably must, it goes wrong, capital gets lost.

A crisis is capitalism functioning perfectly correctly. Perfectly smoothly, the situation today is capitalism being normal.

This is what capitalism looks like. Entrepreneurs must get it wrong, and the value of capital must be adjusted, and the lives of all those dependent upon it must change. The point is, that value is a ghost in the shell, that lives on beyond the actual goods deployed in production, its exorcism is a painful process.

Another one bites the dust...

2009-01-15T08:55:00.005Z

I weep for McGoohan, he is dead. Coincidentally, I've been watching quiter a few episodes of Danger Man recently - half hour episodes of quality spy stories, in which, interestingly, the hero wins through wit and guile, rather than shooting out the bad guys (apparently McGoohan had moral issues with a lot of spy fiction, note the absence of girlie kissing and philandering). His role is Scanners was superb, and as well as Longshanks in Braveheart.

p.s. unrelated, but a text of mine has been posted over on the party's blog - on the Gaza question/issue/thing.

Old film reviewed

2009-01-14T16:03:00.006Z

So, I recently bought the Aliens DVD, and watched it for the first time in a long while.

Some random thoughts, which I maintain are (sort of) relevant to contemporary issues.

Obviously, the cries of fandom went up - the Alien from the original movie had fought unarmed civilians - surely, if someone sent in THE MARINES! things would be different. Lo, they went.

I think, I have already commented here on how popular genre movies structurally provide a narrative for militarism, the enjoyment of the pure right to exterminate your foes, with unlimited self defence justification are the preparatory ideological trappings for the military mindset. We fear the monster, and enjoy the justified extermination of it.

The Marines in aliens, though, to make it interesting, are hamstrung - they go into a reactor room, in which firing high explosive 10 mm rounds would be dangerous - they are disarmed by industrial processes (a process the evil corporate Burke points out has a big Dollar value). That is, capital, and the need to preserve it (and, importantly, its literal power to reproduce itself) sets the limits of the unlimited use of destructive fire power. Of course, in the end, the plant is destroyed, and thus the jouissance laden violence allows the nest of Alien eggs to be fried.

What of the Aliens themselves? They are biological, Ripley's threat to their eggs threatens their reproduction, and they cannot attack her when she rescues Newt. Their chest bursting is explicitly compared with birth giving in the dialogue, they come from us. They do not "fuck each other over for a dollar." And, of course, they co-operate, like a hive mind. Obviously, generically, the movie is actually a zombie movie, the colonists have become aliens, overtaken by biological pure need. That is, use values - consumerists in the mall.

Hence the centrality of Newt - Ripley risks all to go back for Newt, because she is an individual, and a value worth fighting for. In the end, she calls Ripley "Mommy", and traditional family values are restored (minus the father - although the hints at Romance with Hicks may be there to leave an impression of a future attachment/family). Ripley, the voice of pure extermination prevails and wipes the enemy out, establishing this new order.

Symbollicly, she battles the Alien queen in a powered lifted suite - open, but high tech, a visible meld of human and machine. Ultimately, the film is a Carlylian repudiation of finance capitalism and collectivism in favour of individual values.

In other news...

2009-01-07T08:18:00.006Z

32 "Taleban" killed in Afghanistan.

The war in Sri Lanka continues, with 14 year-old girls compelled to fight. Unknown thousands have died and been displaced in the many years of warfare.

The war in DR Congo that has claimed over three million lives continues, including mass rape and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people.

Ethiopian troops pull out of Somalia. Four civilians were killed on the day of the pull-out. Ethiopian forces have been drained by this occupation, which has not restored stability to Somalia, which remains a nest of warlords and pirates.
For once, a power in war exagerates its kill count, as Colombia claims to kill 8 guerillas a day - though the BBC suggests maybe civilians are being counted towards that total.

Fighting continues in Darfur, Sudan where also, apparently, slavery flourishes.

I give in, here's a list of current conflicts.

A rational person would think that maybe a sustained worldwide effort for peace would be needed - maybe some sort of co-ordinated action. Certainly, that must be the only rational view for anyone who wants to be called a socialist. Bop-a-mole responses to local flashpoints with media saturation that allows horrors that would be considered minor incidents in other conflicts are clearly insufficient.

AFK

2009-01-06T08:38:00.004Z

I went home up north for a while, and so have been afk.

I missed the big demo on Saturday, I was busy meeting up with a mate I'd not seen for a while. Anyway, whilst I would agree it is futile for a socialist in London who is a member of a tiny party without parliamentary or council representation of any stripe to actually make comments on the war in Israel/Palestine (there is a comment on the Party's blog here), I do think there is something needful to be done. That is, to counter the support from equally impotent, but still vocal supporters of the war in this country and many similar. By whom, chiefly, I mean the "No justice, no peace" crowd - glibly chanting away and pushing others to their death from the comfort of their armchairs.

But first, back to class. The is a, if you will, hard edged class-centric way of posing the matter. The strength of the working class comes not simply through raw numbers, and certainly not through military might. Our strength is creative, we make, maintain and remake the world around us - and will use that ability to build socialism. The more of us there are to do the building, the lighter the work and the greater our strength to get our way.

War runs contrary to all of that. It destroys our work and our ability to work. It destroys the fruits of our labour. It destroys us. By disrupting daily life, causing unemployment, by cutting back democracy, by taking our time, energy, inclinations and thought processes and turning them towards destruction rather than creation, war, warfare and militarism undermine our consciousness as a class and our existence as a class.

It promotes plebian rather than proletarian politics - so much of Gaza is now unemployed that there is no working class strength left, only numbers, only the bitter will to fight and be killed. Hamas and Israel both as provocateurs and agents have brought this about to suit their own ends. Israelis are being pulled from their work to serve as reservists, while the national economy is put through more strain and its coffers are drained by dropping $BigNumber bombs.

The war undermines the working class in Gaza and in Israel. The immediate object must be peace: for its own sake, whatever political settlement is required. Those who take sides, or call for the victory of one side or another, and who give succor, encouragement and the prospect of international intervention on one side or another, are directly attacking the workers of Israel and Palestine.

Within our means, within our limited capacity, we can influence at least that much - take the argument on, and maybe stop the ludicrous corpse counting, hand wringing and its concommitant macho bullshitter rrrrevolutionary violence posturing. Getting the international strength of the workers behind a peace first is incredibly difficult, but expressed in terms of solidarity with the workers of both those states it would do more good than the endless tit-for-tat game of siding with the ruling class of either state.

Spot the the theme

2008-12-16T09:56:00.004Z

From Marx and Coca Cola, he reports that Senate Republicans killed the Car maker bailout because: "This is the democrats first opportunity to payoff organized labor after the election. This is a precursor to card check and other items. Republicans should stand firm and take their first shot against organized labor, instead of taking their first blow from it."

Who said the class war was dead? The same theme emerges over at electoral vote:"A striking pattern has emerged in the fight over bailing out the big three automobile companies. Senators from the north are for it and senators from the south are against it. Why? It turns out there are assembly plants in both the North and the South. The ones in the North are owned by American companies and are highly unionized; the ones in the South are owned by foreign (mostly Japanese) companies and are not unionized. Hourly pay in northern and southern ones is comparable but benefits are much better in the North. Southern senators who oppose the bailout don't really object to the government interfering with private industry and don't really even mind a government-appointed car czar running the companies. The sticking point is that they want to break the unions and force union members to take cuts in pay and benefits to bring them down to the level that the workers in the South get."

Over at Dave's Part young master Osler notes the drive is now on over here for paycuts, and hopes that Unions will resist. Of course, we know that unions are powerless in the face of unemployment, and with a stagnant pool of around two million to start with, when it grows to (fingers crossed against) 5 million, there'll be fuck all we can do. I'm afraid it's political action or nothing.

To be clear, I noted Charlies reproduction schemas and disportionality as being the means of analysing crisis - I noted that only destroying capital really gets us out of the mess, but hammering wages might enable some firms to survive. It would be counter productive because, like pump priming it leaves the root cause intact, but it would help some capitalists maybe to the disadvantage of others. Certainly, they'll try it, because the only alternative is suicide - that's the point of crisis, that in trying to save themselves, capitalists make it worse for themselves (and for us).

To the ballot boxes, mes braves, to take up cudgels against the crisis that is capitalism.

A financial classic

2008-12-15T13:32:00.004Z

A classic feature of economic crises is that suddenly corruption is unveiled - economic growth is the great rock that, when it is lifted, is found to be covering for the lice festering beneath.

Simply put, during the good times, a plausible story can allow an otherwise worthless company to keep on borrowing, so long as investors keep making profits, no-one looks too closely, but when the chips are down, and someone gets bilked, suddenly we all realise that everyone gets bilked. In this case, not, that the firm was judged to be reasonably sound and a secure investment, not a fringe risky business, level headed investment folk, not mad speculators, have been burnt here.

Of course, Davy Cameron reckons there must be a day of reckoning. of course, it has to be the consciously bourgeois party that says that, coming from Labour it would be called a return to class war. I always laugh at the cretins who see the PRC (China)'s long prison sentences for fraud as being some proof of socialism.

A very Bourgeois revolution

2008-12-12T07:55:00.006Z

The notoriously litigious Barclay Clones have given us a textbook in bourgeois revolution - they have used their financial might to bring democracy to the Island of Sark through the courts - and now democracy has arrived, and voted against what they wanted (their own privately owned Bond villain base, it seems) they have decided to punish the puny mortals for their temerity to use their democracy, by disinvesting in the tiny island and causes relative mass unemployment. Their spokedroid has said: "The island cannot at the same time treat the Barclay family in the way that it has and expect them to continue investing large sums of money into its economy." Hulk Smash. Mongrol Smush. Big Jobs!

Once again, they prove that democracy is impossible in a society of unequal wealth - the microcosm of Sark has given the totalitarian pair their opportunity to prove that. It also shows the value of Harry's place style democratisation.

And what of the publicity shy scheming meglomaniacs themselves? Well, through their purely viscious actions they have exposed themselves to more headlines and public oprobrium than most folk could manage in a life time - I hope their lawyers hands drop off writing out all the vexatious writs that will now follow to keep the filth wallowing pigs able to live in their castles in the air.

Quoth J.M.

2008-12-10T16:24:00.002Z

From the Marx and Coca Cola Blog:

Ms. Darling, who was pregnant when her insurance ran out, worked at Archway for eight years, and her father, Franklin J. Phillips, worked there for 24 years. ...So Ms. Darling asked her midwife to induce labor two days before her health insurance expired.

I checked his source (New York Times) and came across this line he didn't quote: "“I was scared. I remember that the bill for my son’s delivery in 2005 was about $9,000, and I knew I would never be able to pay that by myself.”"

Inspiring dread

2008-11-27T09:11:00.002Z

I've held off making some of these comments, lest I give people ideas. I've often wondered why Al Qaeda terrorists have gone to such convoluted means to make their terror attack - gas cylinders, exploding shoes, whatever, when a couple of blokes in a crossfire with handguns could do more damage and instill more terror by running round for hours afterwards.

Just like they have just done in Mumbai to such horrific and spectacular success. After all, Virginia Tech, Colombine High, kids have shown the way to spread mayhem and terror with a couple of semi-automatics, a planned team job hitting the right targets can, we now know, do much more. Including killing the chief of Mumbai anti-terror police.

The biggest danger is that mickey mouse outfits clock on to what a good trick this is, it is perfect asymmetric warfare, cheap tiger/flea tactics.

I think today is a very bad day indeed for the world.