On the Issue of Political Extradition & the United States: Saints & Sinners

Posted on 30/07/2013 by Jerome Nikolai Warren

Stamp of Alexander's bust on a coin (taken from Enc. Britannica.)

Alexander’s empire stretched from Macedonia, into modern day Afghanistan. Few consider his conquests criminal, while the actions of  pirates are considered universally repulsive, a fact exemplary of the fine distinction given “saints” and “sinners”.

If justice is transitive, it applies to all alike, and we should critically engage the grave double standard the United States applies to extradition requests it issues, while requests submitted to it for criminals, terrorists and stooges of corrupt regimes are ignored or drowned in court and bureaucratic proceedings. In fact, its own reticence in a number of key cases should be of most import when considering the Snowden affair. Especially considering the severity of accusations lodged against Mr Snowden, it behooves us to apply the same logic we find in U.S. policy to the developing affair, if only as an illuminating thought experiment. Continue reading →

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Tendency of the rate of profit to exasperate

Posted on 29/07/2013 by Gavin Mendel-Gleason

Return on AssetsA few years back Deloitte issued a report1 that had a long term analysis of the rate of return on various measure, investment capital, equity and assets. In all three cases there was a fairly clear downward trend. Deloitte come up with some tentative descriptions for the cause of this which I will not deal with here other than to say they are, in my opinion, extremely dubious. Their theory boils down to the idea that individual capitalist have just not exhibited good management skills.

Now, Marxists have been talking about the tendency for the rate of profit to fall (TRPF, TFRP, LTRPF and probably six other permutations in the literature) for donkey’s years. The manifestations of this argument have taken many forms over many years, and have ranged from a tendential occurrence to an absolute law – from a cyclic event, to something which exists over all time. Those who are interested in crisis theory general push the former: they see it as a factor which helps to cause cyclic crises. Further, there are quite a few that are in the middle.
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Provisional thoughts on Egypt

Posted on 28/07/2013 by Maximilien Robespierre

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Between January and October 1850, Karl Marx wrote a series of four articles on the revolutionary situation in France for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which were collected and published with the dreadfully uninspiring title Class Struggles in France: 1848-1850. Decades later, in 1895, the book was re-issued and Engels, months before his own death, wrote a new introduction for the book. The introduction is now perhaps more famous than the book itself, and probably for good reason. The Class Struggles in France, being written at the same time the events they described were occurring, was a piece of truly contemporaneous materialist history; Engels, in his introduction, noted this and said the following about the difficulty of writing such pieces:

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Review – Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-System Biography – Georgi M. Derluguian

Posted on 20/07/2013 by yeksmesh

"Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-System Biography" book coverThe title of this book by itself could already warrant a read, yet there is much more to find in this book, its interesting title aside. The work mainly deals with the question of the Soviet Union and particularly its collapse and the subsequent descent of certain regions within the former Soviet Union into ethnic violence, particularly focusing on the Caucasus. To do this, the author, himself an ethnic Armenian from the Caucasus, sets out on the ambitious goal of not only explaining these phenomena but also on integrating a meso, macro and micro level analysis in his work. To accomplish this the author mainly takes from world-systems analysis, comparative sociology a la Tilly and Skocpol and, in relation to the micro level, Bourdieusian analysis. The incorporation of this micro level of analysis mainly happens through charting the life of Yuri Shanibov (Musa Shanib when he became a Chechen nationalist leader), an academic from the Caucasus whose aspiring career was cut short during the Brezhnev era for intellectual non-conformism, but who later re-emerged during the post-collapse upheavals as a nationalist leader. This is also where the name of the book is derived from as when Shanibov was recuperating from wounds sustained during the Abkhazia conflict of the nineties, he managed to get his hands on the newly translated works of Pierre Bourdieu and became a great admirer of the man and his work. Throughout the book the author charts the life of this extraordinary persona in the context of the evolution and collapse of the USSR, thus giving us the ambitious subtitle “a world-systems biography”.
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European Left Summer University

Posted on 16/07/2013 by Gavin Mendel-Gleason
Séan-Lugh hasn't been told he's running for Europarl for Ireland yet.

Séan-Lugh hasn’t been told he’s running for Europarl for Ireland yet.

The European Left Summer University was held between July 3rd and 6th. Organised by Bloco de Esquerda of Portugal, the University was a three-day series of lectures and seminars on the key issues facing the European Left, the party of parties that includes SYRIZA (Greece), Front de Gauche (France), Izquierda Unida (Spain) and Die Linke (Germany). These parties are themselves coalitions, with Communist Parties often occupying a leadership role within them.

(We also took notes on the sessions at ELSU)

Predictably, the crisis occupied centre-stage in this discussion, and lectures from Mariana Mortagua on European monetary policy and Jean-Luc Melenchon on the strategic choices for the Left were a particular highlight. But topics such as ‘Political Communication techniques’, ‘Agricultural and Industrial Reform’ and ‘Universal Free Transport’ showed the high level of practical work and political development in the individual parties and the network as a whole. About half of the time in sessions was turned over to debate, allowing for contributions from the floor. Both speakers and contributors were live-translated into Portuguese, French and English, so we monoglots were able to chip in occasionally.
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The ties that bind: historical memory and present struggle

Posted on 16/07/2013 by James O'Brien

After having received 12 years of schooling in Ireland, I think it’s not too outlandish to say that history is a means to the formation of national identity, one which inculcates in the population a more or less patriotic conception of reality that binds them to present social system.

It is very much comparable to what is attempted by the Catholics in the sphere of religion, via the daily dose of indoctrination that is pumped into the heads of 90% of pupils in the country, and which, until recently at least, ensured that the vast majority identified as Catholic regardless of their views on transubstantiation or the Arian heresy.

Photo: resurgence.com

Photo: theresurgence.com

Nor is this necessarily a bad thing, repugnant though it sounds to the modern libertarian temperament. Societies, in order to function as societies, as opposed to a merely Thatcherite aggregate of individuals, depend on value systems and the ideologies that justify them.

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Against the Grand Narrative: on postmodernism

Posted on 06/07/2013 by modulus

The Magdalen Reading, Rogier Vander WeydenWithout recapitulating the entire history of postmodern thought, which beginning we can, for our purposes, anchor at the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment, it is safe to summarise its development as stemming from a justified distrust of the liberal project, broadly understood as the effective redemption of man, through rational means, from the pre-modern fetters of mythical and religious thinking–which one could tendentiously regard as mediaeval vestiges–, and further extending it, with ever more questionable grounds, to all notions of progress, including Marxism, whence it grew. Whether this is to be blamed on or credited to Marxism is often disputed, though the stance that both movements are autonomous is not advanced often enough.

Whatever one thinks of it, postmodernism is an influential position in the academy, and its historical links to Marxism may lead comrades to believe that they must either familiarise themselves with it, or settle accounts, so to speak, by invalidating it. Far from the first effort in this line,2 and, I’m sure, farther even from being a definitive work, this article tries to bring forth the problematic in the postmodern critique of Marxism, and, inasmuch as it succeeds, to help refocus the Marxist analysis of superstructure–which has been taken hostage by the successors in interest of the Frankfurt school–on the firm materialist ground it should never have abandoned.

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Posted in Cultural analysis, Culture, Philosophy | 1 Comment

The roads to power: capitalist democracy and socialist strategy

Posted on 01/07/2013 by Daniel Finn
Portrait of Ernst Mandel

Ernst Mandel

This article comes from an abortive book project that I was working on about five years ago. The questions that it raises about political strategy for the radical left now appear far more pressing than they did when I wrote it, in the light of events in southern Europe and especially Greece. It sets out two alternative strategies for left-wing parties in capitalist democracies—one passing through the established parliamentary institutions, the other going beyond them—by summarizing the views of two important Marxist thinkers, Ralph Miliband and Ernest Mandel.

On the eve of the global economic crisis, the French socialist writer Daniel Bensaid announced the ‘return of strategy’ as a topic for discussion among progressive and radical forces. According to Bensaid, a long defensive period was drawing to a close: ‘We are coming to the end of the phase of the big refusal and of stoical resistance . . . [characterized by] slogans like ‘The world is not a commodity’ or ‘Our world is not for sale’. We need to be specific about what the ‘possible’ world is and, above all, we need to explore how to get there.’3 Bensaid argued for renewed discussion, not of ‘models’ for radical change, but of ‘strategic hypotheses’: ‘Models are something to be copied; they are instructions for use. A hypothesis is a guide to action that starts from past experience but is open and can be modified in the light of new experience or unexpected circumstances.’4

Labour and socialist movements in the industrialized North have been dealing with the challenges posed by bourgeois or capitalist democracy for many years. These questions are now of equally pressing interest beyond Europe and North America, as various forms of capitalist democracy take root from Brazil to South Africa. A ‘strategic hypothesis’ of the sort called for by Daniel Bensaid must address the opportunities and difficulties which such political systems present for the Left.
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Posted in History, Proletarian politics | 1 Comment

We’ve tried to keep a reasonable compromise between security and convenience, between automatically rejecting too many comments or approving too much spam. At this it seems we have failed (well, I should say I have, given I made the choices on spam protection). Henceforth we’re deploying a new solution in that regard. If, in the past, your comments were not posted successfully, I apologise, and hope that it won’t happen again in future.

Spam is a pretty difficult problem, and we haven’t found a perfect way to solve it while maintaining the independence of our website and not relying on third parties to hold your personal information and our data. I’m hoping this change will take us to a slightly better local maximum, if not to the promise land.

Posted on 20/06/2013 by modulus | Comments Off on Spam policy changes

Historical Materialism and Repudiation of Subjectivism

Posted on 12/06/2013 by Paul Cockshott

I am an engineer, so I was naturally pleased when the leading materialist philosopher of today, Daniel Dennet came out in defence of the significance of the engineering viewpoint to philosophy in his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.

Comrade Dennett continues the hirsute defence of materialism

In what follows I will present some observations on the materialism of Marx, from an engineer’s viewpoint – the materialism of a Watt, Shannon and Turing.

The leitmotif of these observations is an antagonism to subjectivism and the idealist concept of the subject and of the will, both of which have, I believe, no place in the materialist world-view.

Those familiar with the current state of penetration of idealism into ‘Marxism’, will doubtless be able to identify the schools against whom I am arguing.

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Interview With Rob Dietz of CASSE, co-author of “Enough is Enough”

Posted on 10/06/2013 by Jerome Nikolai Warren

Rob Dietz recently published the book Enough is Enough with co-author Dan O’Neill. The gist of the book is that the growth-oriented consumer culture in places like the United States and Europe, where, even in the recent crisis, people are “more concerned with keeping their iPhone than with solidarity”, as one commentator put it, is not sustainable. Indeed, one might mention that, at least at present, the possibility of continuation of relations of the status quo is limited, with consequences of present day policies showing themselves in superstorms, droughts, massive shifts in climatological patterns, among others. The search for alternatives brought me to discover Dietz & O’Neill’s book, and the CASSE movement in general. Their ideas are robust, and the alternative they paint –particularly the emphasis on wealth redistribution and willingness to describe the effects of inquality are timely. The interview covers the book and other projects of CASSE.


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Quantum parallelism and scientific realism

Posted on 28/05/2013 by Paul Cockshott
Portrait of George Berkeley

George Berkeley

The philosopher Althusser said that philosophy represents ideology – in particular religious ideology to science, and science to ideology. As science extended its field of explanation, a series of ’reprise’ operations were carried out by philosophers to either make the findings of science acceptable to religion or to cast doubt on the relative trust-worthiness of science compared to the teachings of the church.

This started with Berkley’s subjective idealism and extended through to the instrumentalist interpretation of scientific research popularised by Mach in the late 19th century. In more recent years a particular interpretation of quantum mechanics, the Copenhagen one, has provided a rich seam for such reprises. A classic example is given here: Continue reading →

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“I Had Weird Educational Experiences”: Interview With Noam Chomsky

Posted on 21/05/2013 by Jerome Nikolai Warren

Spirit: Alot of theorists, I think of EJ Hobsbawm in particular, in the book  On History, separate the concept of “biography” from that of “history”. You’ve been more concerned, it is apparent, in your career, with the latter rather than the former, and, is this for a particular reason? Have you  ever, or would you ever consider writing more extensively about your own experiences?

Chomsky: You’re right.  I’ve often been asked to write about my own  experiences.  I do bring them up now and then, when relevant to some  other topic.  But not more than that.  Some day, maybe.  Right now my  judgment is that other things are more important – right or wrong.

Spirit: Like the Russell tribunal?

Chomsky: To mention one.

Spirit: Twenty or thirty years ago, you held a since much circulated debate with Michel Foucault, in which the existence of any overarching human nature arose. You suggested there was such a thing, and yet Mr Foucault was of the belief that “human nature” is always shaped by existing power structures, socio-historical contexts, etc. When pressed to name an aspect or trait of underlying human nature, you were unable to do so, leaving some critics to suggest Foucault “won” the argument (as though that were possible to begin with). In the years since, have you given this question more consideration? Would you answer differently were it posed today?

Chomsky: If human beings are part of the organic world, then they have a genetically-determined nature, and we all know that that is true: they have mammalian rather than insect visual systems, a language capacity that we know a lot about and that is entirely missing in other organisms, and far more. The informal and mostly confused discussions about “human nature” have to do with such matters as tendencies towards violence vs cooperation, etc. About such matters little is understood, just as complex issues about other organisms are little understood. Or for that matter about the inorganic world. But that the answers are heavily conditioned by genetic endowment is not seriously in doubt. Continue reading →

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The Philosophy of Science

Posted on 18/04/2013 by Gavin Mendel-Gleason
Scientific Socialism

Mural of Scientific Inquiry DDR

As we saw in Part I, scientific progress is used by the capitalist class as a tool for the expulsion of labour from the workforce by way of technological improvements, which enables them to increase profits. This fact was immortalised in the conflict between labour and capital in the Luddite rebellions, when textile artisans destroyed machinery in protest of their expulsion from the labour force at the beginning of the 19th century.

It is no wonder then that much of the left, from the 19th and 20th century on, has had some antipathy towards technical progress. Marx, in contrast, made a point of demonstrating clearly the contradiction wherein technical improvements which could reduce human labour end up working counter to the interests of the labourer. The core difference of the Marxist viewpoint was in seeing the technical development as progressive and locating the difficulty instead in the social form: rather than attacking the production of labour saving machinery, it looked towards the root, the organisation of production and not toward the epiphenomena of the exile of labour from remuneration.
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