Spirit of Contradiction

Interest rates and fraud

Posted on 19/07/2012 by modulus

Fraud by Michele Hubacek, in the style of "Obey" by Shepard Fairey

A Fraud

The exploding LIBOR scandalis already bad enough, but there are more general problems with the inter-bank offered rates.

When something like LIBOR comes up, the responses from the establishment are so predictable as to contain no information: “exceptional cases”, “bad apples”, “reestablish public confidence”, “regulator failure”, “better governance”… What if such offered rates are just badly designed, and their incentive structure is inherently flawed? What if this is not a matter of exploiting bugs but rather a matter of improper architecture?

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Posted in Economics | Comments Off

Rethinking Nuclear Power

Posted on 17/07/2012 by Gavin Mendel-Gleason

A coal fired plant with hyperboloid towers

Not a nuclear power plant

As we face the twin perils of an energy crisis arising from the ever increasing cost of oil extraction and the serious threat of climate change, nuclear power has again come back onto the agenda.

When the Nuclear Age first came into being in the 1950s, it seemed as though it was going to provide a clean power source that would soon be completely ubiquitous. As the sound-bite went, it would make electricity so cheap there would be no point in metering it. People dreamed up plans of nuclear powered neighbourhoods and even nuclear powered cars. The potential seemed limitless. Continue reading →

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The rise of money

Posted on 17/07/2012 by James O'Brien

Joe Chamberlain

Joseph Chamberlain is nowadays a half-remembered – by aficionados of British imperial history and resentful Irish nationalists – politician from the 19th century. Mostly he is remembered for siring two sons who followed him into politics and even then he owes that vicarious longevity to one of those sons being Neville Chamberlain, who conveniently – if unfairly – serves as a bumbling foil to the heroic Churchill in the conventional narrative surrounding World War II.

In his day, however, the elder Chamberlain was a heavyweight in his own right, involved in major issues in an array of different fields: he was a pioneering liberal radical in 1870s who sunk Irish Home Rule in 1886; a proponent of alliance with labour who ended up merging with the Tories, a radical who initiated progressive domestic legislation while aggressively pursuing an expansionary colonial policy and, not least, an imperial visionary who saw that Britain needed to centralise its far-flung oceanic empire into an imperial state if it was to compete with the looming continental-sized powers of the 20th century. Continue reading →

Posted in Bourgeois politics, Geopolitics, History, Politics, Proletarian politics | Comments Off

The limits of capitalist accumulation

Posted on 16/07/2012 by yeksmesh

Graphical representation of an episilon/delta limit

Take it to the limit

One of the theories posited by Marx that is of chief importance for the radical left particularly today but also in general, is the theory that the material base of capitalism is geared towards socialism.

Simply stated the theory posits that the development of capitalism creates a centralization of the means of production, taking them out of the hands of small property owners and into larger and larger units which leads to the creation of a large class of wage labourers and a smaller class of owners.

The general concentration of society in these two classes then creates the material base for socialist ideologies, as the much more complex class structure of previous modes of production failed to produce class based liberatory ideologies with a broad following, in contrast capitalist society has a much more simplistic class structure and thus allows for ideologies that explicitly base themselves on class contradictions to have more societal relevance and thus a wider following. Besides that, the centralization of the means of production makes it so that labour becomes more and more a collective project, making it easier for the workers to establish links of solidarity with one another and view themselves as one class compared to when they are self-employed and compete with one another. This process also allows for a continuing replacing of competition between smaller, individualized enterprises with internal cooperation within larger enterprises, thus creating a situation where the production process undergoes a process of limited socialization under capitalism, creating a material base for socialism within capitalism. Continue reading →

Posted in Politics, Proletarian politics | 3 Comments

The proletarian class party, part 3

Posted on 15/07/2012 by Maximilien Robespierre

Leon Trotsky reading the organ of the American Socialist Workers’ Party

For those of you who don’t like to read titles, this post is part three of my series on the topic of the proletarian class party, with parts one and two being found here and here respectively. One thing I didn’t stress in part two was that the objective conditions which determine the functions of the party in relation to the class also condition the rise and fall of the party itself. This post has been followed by another, on the topic of the relation of the party to the state.

As we saw in the second part, the task of the party is to win over the class to the program of revolution and communist construction. Here we will concretely examine ways to do this, in light of the previous distinction between objectively favorable and unfavorable periods for the maturation of the proletariat into a class-for-itself. At all times our tactics must be oriented to the goal of winning over the class, keeping in mind the maxim that where the workers are, we must follow.

Keep in mind that these are my opinions, and someone may have the same conception of the party and disagree with my suggested tactics. Feel free to flame me in the comments (I’m expecting quite a few critics).

Posted in Politics, Proletarian politics | 3 Comments

Disciplining Iran

Posted on 14/07/2012 by James O'Brien

John Bolton rides again

This piece looks at the situation in Iran from the point of view of an American security analyst using a terse style to simplify the presentation down to the core choices. It is hoped that what it loses in nuance is compensated by clarity.

Lest there be any confusion, it goes without saying that that I disapprove of the basis of the analysis, i.e. that the USA has the right to intervene at all. Nevertheless, it is interesting to put their thinking cap on so as to be able to develop a thoughtful socialist position in advance, rather than reacting in a knee-jerk fashion when the media pressure starts to come on.

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The revolution: a cherished failure.

Posted on 12/07/2012 by yeksmesh

Lenin at the all-Russian subbotnik, the Kremlin, 1st May 1920

One of the basic positions held by the radical left is the need to radically transform the society we live in, more precisely from a capitalist society into a socialist society. The generally accepted proposition is that this transition should be enacted through a seizure of political power through which a change in the material base of society is accomplished, in other words a revolution.

This idea has been part of the radical left since its origins in the 19th century, with each new generation of self styled revolutionaries inspiring themselves by the previous examples of revolutions their particular sect points to as being a genuine example of a transition towards socialism.

But is this long held notion that transition needs to happen through a revolution a valid way of changing society? Or simply a tradition that has been passed down throughout the radical left without much basing in reality? In this article I will try to argue that our long cherished view of the glorious socialist revolution is in reality a very problematic position to hold, and that we should move towards a more historically founded way of achieving change.

Posted in History, Politics, Proletarian politics | 6 Comments

Thoughts on culture in an age of superabundance

Posted on 12/07/2012 by modulus

Ruben’s Abundance

One of the biggest triumphs of capitalism lies in having created the impression that it’s a natural system. A non-specialist, when considering other times and societies, will almost certainly interpret them through the prism of capitalist assumptions: transferable property, free trade, labour, wages, and so on. This state of affairs, however, took considerable violenceto achieve. Just as feudal regimes which were installed as the Roman empire fell, the rising of the bourgeoisie as Europe’s and the world’s new ruling class required major dislocations not only to an economic system, but to the worldview which comes embedded with it. So when looking at feudal property arrangements, we’re likely to try to substitute modern categories like property and rent for the more historically accurate feudal forms thereof, which entailed a complex bundle of rights and duties we can scarcely imagine today.

This process of expropriation and disolution of feudal relations and the resulting imposition of bourgeois property took place, in the UK, through many legislative acts, but more specifically through the “enclosures” and “clearances”. The former were decrees by which the landlords grant themselves the people’s land as private property, decrees of expropriation of the people. As Marx points out, enclosures led to the usurpation of ancient communal land holdings, which had been preserved under the guise of feudal relations, by the great landlords who sought to inherit the position of those feudal lords, without any of the constraints they had been subject to. Clearances went further: instead of usurping the communal holdings, clearances swept tenants off their cottages, often by means which can’t be described in other terms than terrorism. Thus the estates were freed from common ownership and feudal encumberances, and those who dwelt on them from their means of subsistence, giving rise to the free trade in agricultural lands, the pauperisation of independent farmers, and the formation of the urban proletariat, deprived of anything but their labour power, ready to serve the voracious needs of incipient industries.

A similar case obtains for intellectual property. The fact that certain goods had not hitherto been subject to the discipline of the market won’t be seen by the bourgeois as anything but an opportunity.

Posted in Cultural analysis, Culture, History | 1 Comment

The limits of populism: are we the 99%?

Posted on 08/07/2012 by modulus

First off, I’d like to point out much of the reaction from the left–or perhaps I should say the sects–to the Occupy phenomenon seems to be misguided and full of sour grapes. Whether one has misgivings about the theoretical grounds of Occupy, or their praxis, or both, and I will note I have my own, it would be considerably helpful for the left were it to succeed, for almost any conceivable values thereof. The way it has helped moved the discourse away from austerity and focus it on inequality is already something we must credit the movement for, like it or not.

That said, and while granting Occupy has done a lot of good in mobilising the most seemingly quiescent people in the advanced countries, I do have objections both to their formulation of the 99% and their decentralised praxis. I’ll dedicate this post to the former and hopefully write something further on the latter on another occasion.

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The proletarian class party, part 2

Posted on 03/07/2012 by Maximilien Robespierre

Organ of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

This is the second part of a series of posts on the nature of the proletarian class party, of which the first part can be found here. There was something of a big time gap between this post and the first one, but the debate on the subject (which I took part in, if you care enough to check) kind of clogged up the blog with similar posts so I decided to wait a while until the next post. This post has been followed with a third post (and more!), with the same level of quality which you gracious readers have come to not expect from me.

Now, we have gone over the abstract development of the party from the class struggle. To refresh: in the class struggle, only a minority of the proletariat is able to connect and reflect upon the various instances in the class struggle and come to recognize that this struggle exists and the bourgeoisie must be overthrown; various elements exist within this minority, which we know as the proletarian vanguard, which each have their own program distilled from the class struggle and exist as “parties” in name but exist in actuality as sects; that as objective conditions more and more intensify the class struggle, these various sects tend to come more and more to the program and theory which best expresses the interests of the proletariat in the struggle against the bourgeoisie at the particular stage in the struggle (we must remember that this is dynamic, and that the vanguard and the program itself have a role in furthering this struggle) and therefore come together organizationally; that this culminates in the communist program and the proletarian class party.

From this question, the question of the nature of the class party, we must go into its functions.

Posted in Politics, Proletarian politics | 2 Comments

Retracing our steps: from the strait passage to genuine party democracy

Posted on 03/07/2012 by modulus

The Great Helmsman

From the Third Internationale onwards, a cardinal dichotomy in socialist circles has been that of opportunism and ultraleftism. The “line”, so Leninists–against whom, let this be clear, I have no animus–say, is like a complex navigation problem. Many are the reafs and hidden shallows where the party may wreck, if it’s not led by a Great Helmsman.

I would argue that this approach was an innovation. It’s clear Marx rarely if ever expressed full agreement with any of his allies, and he had little patience for what he perceived as faulty analyses or misunderstandings. It is no coincidence that one of the works key to understanding his mature positions is the Critique of the gotha Programme, but, notably, he didn’t break relations with its proponents, or tried to establish a competing fraction, even if he attempted to nudge the direction of the compromise programme. As he said: Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes. Why did we change? When did we forget that the point is to change it?

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The crisis in Spain: a public-private partnership

Posted on 01/07/2012 by modulus

There’s a conventional wisdom on the right that the basic problem of the European economies now in trouble lies with excessive public spending. Sometimes this gets a bit more nuanced–but only a bit–and there comes the talk about competitiveness, labour market flexibility, friction costs to businesses, etc. There’s a conventional wisdom on the left, particularly in social democracy, that the problem with European economies in crisis lies with unaccountable private power, and in particular insufficiently regulated financial capitalism. I will argue the Spanish case in particular needs to be looked at from both ends.

I’m afraid in order to present some of this context, I’m going to have to delve into Spanish history, at least from the 50s onward, so please bear with me.

Posted in Economics, History | Comments Off

Which way the Economic Revolution?

Posted on 28/06/2012 by Gavin Mendel-Gleason

The Cybersyn Control Room

All socialists hold that capitalism is not the best of all possible worlds in terms of organising production and consumption when viewed from the position of the vast majority of society. However, socialists have often been pretty vague about what exactly would be substituted in its place. This is especially true of those who don’t want to cozy up to the USSR, Yugoslavia, Hungary or Cuba as models of a functioning socialist society.

If these do not constitute viable and desirable economic systems, then what does? An attempt to settle this question through a perusal of the political programmes of virtually any socialist party would lead one to be just as confused as when one started. Specific models are very rarely put forward. Instead the programmes usually contain some references to nationalisation and a great many of them don’t go much beyond Keynesianism and tax based redistributive policies. (Pension Fund Socialism has a fairly good review of the problems and limitations of redistributive and Keynesian policies).

Posted in Economics, Politics, Proletarian politics | Comments Off

Reds in space: socialist science fiction

Posted on 27/06/2012 by modulus

USSR pilot-cosmonauts at a TV studio

There’s a general view that science fiction is a literature of reaction. Michael Moorcock, tracing the pulp origins of its so-called “golden age” mocks the notion that it’s a literature of ideas in his Starship Stormtroopers–titled after Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, a novel which does, sadly, make a strong case for his position.

Not all science fiction has a reactionary message though. As this list of science fiction for socialists shows, there’s a great deal to read about the future without falling victim to the typical tropes of the expansion of the frontier and manifest destiny–now in space.

Posted in Cultural reviews, Culture | 6 Comments