Profits and the labour theory of value - as explained by the Tories

See here:

With less then a week to go before the biggest walkout in decades, the ministers in charge of pensions negotiations, Francis Maude and Danny Alexander, said the strikes would impose a "significant hit to the economy at a very challenging time" as they urged public sector staff to go to defy their unions and turn up to work next Wednesday.

If 2.5m workers striking for a day costs the economy £500m, that's £200 per worker; compare that to how much they actually get paid per day. That's the source of profit, right there.

Never forget, folks, organised workers should not be allowed to hold the country to ransom, bring the economy and our society to its knees... Only the Tories and their banker chums are allowed to do that. Public sector workers are on strike in the first instant because a 3% across the board increase in worker pension contributions, which amounts to all but a day's wages each month. Hello? Anyone heard of effective demand? Who has got a day's wages going spare to donate to bankers in need? No one I know.

Call careers information. Have you got yourself an occupation?

A million unemployed kids and all Cameron and co, mofos who never had to work a day in their lives, have is gas about 'aspiration' and 'opportunity'.



They should just change Britain to Poundland and have done with it. Abandon hope or take up struggle. All out on November 30th.

A week away from finking...

For very, very personal reasons (happy ones)... but here's something to put down; not a match for something like this, but what is...?

Rosa Luxemburg's argument with Eduard Bernstein, known as Reform or Revolution, is rightly celebrated. There are two obstacles to even roughly applying her arguments today, one is contemporary to her time, one to ours.

The first one is well rehearsed. Luxemburg's argument was with the figurehead of the revisionist movement within the SPD at the end of the 19th century. It was an intra-party argument. Rosa Luxemburg won, in argument. The trouble is arguments are won in practice, to the extent that honest champions of one set of ideas can end up bringing another set to life. The ideology of the SPD was revolutionary, the day to day practice of the SPD was strictly legal.

Her revolutionary career is negative proof of the old argument, you need a revolutionary organisation (however you might see it) to test and win revolutionary ideas.

But the second difficulty, our difficulty is this, who are the reformists? If there was one lesson the last decade has taught us all it is the modern system of government is impervious to the people's will. The next time a Labour left tries to assert how realistic and serious they are, compared to your (simultaneously) utopian and dangerous designs, it's worth parrying them with this. Who honestly still thinks you can change the world for the better through parliament (let alone bring about something like socialism)? Social democrats are the true believers. In this age revolutionaries are the realists, social democrats are utopian.

But, back to the first point, reformism does not arise out of a collective mind, but a social body. Reformism is not a bourgeois minority sport but the formalised version of the general mixture of impressions working class people gain in ordinary life. It is part of life. Who is trying to practice it these days?

Autonomists are often suggested to be the new reformists. One striking connection is the famous aphorism of Bernstein's, “the movement is everything, the final goal nothing”. A modern (and rather sectarian, if I may say so) version is “we are the demands”.

Another connection I believe is the rejection of violent confrontation. This can just be a tactical question. If you are outnumbered and outmatched by an opponent it would be wise to duck battle. This was of course the origin of the SPD's tactics, building a party in a semi-absolutist state. But if this is worked up into a strategic point trouble begins. The problem is obvious; you may reject violence but will violence reject you?

Lets not go too far, neither autonomists nor socialists think the system can be used to bring about communal democracy. Both favour encouraging ordinary people into direct activity, rather than passively engaging them through voting and lobbying etc. Many autonomists would regard themselves as revolutionaries, and who's going to stop them from doing so?

It's worth adding though, there's a difference between revolutionary activity and revolution. Autonomists often see socialists as waiting for a revolution for their cue to spring into action. Any who cares to notice knows this is hardly the case. There is also a link between modern autonomism and the sixties counter-culture, through the slogan “turn on, tune in, drop out”; drop out being the key element, you have to abandon bourgeois society in order to fight it. The sectarian streak in autonomism tends to see autonomist activity as revolution and everything else as missing the mark; “we are the demands”.

So autonomism is not reformism, but is related. There is call for a fraternal, reasoned critique of autonomist ideas, as distinct from traditional points made in the dialogue with reformists. A start may be that autonomism has a strong ethical dimension but no political economy (what it has is borrowed from neo-liberal theory).

Stasi

World of Stupid 2... Godwin's Revenge!

Rhetoric 101: everyone is opposed to fascism, find a link between your opponents and fascism, even if it's just a cheapjack neologism like "feminazi" or, in this case gaystapo, and you will prevail in your argument. See here:

An Anglican newspaper has defended the publication of an article that compares gay rights campaigners to Nazis, saying the author has "pertinent views".

Pertinent is a synonym for relevant. What are these views relevant to?

In his column [Alan] Craig referred to a number of high-profile legal cases where Christians claim to have been penalised for their views on homosexuality.

He wrote: "Having forcibly – and understandably – rectified the Versailles-type injustices and humiliations foisted on the homosexual community, the UK's victorious Gaystapo are now on a roll. Their gay-rights stormtroopers take no prisoners as they annex our wider culture, and hotel owners, registrars, magistrates, doctors, counsellors, and foster parents … find themselves crushed under the pink jackboot.

"Thanks especially to the green light from a permissive New Labour government, the gay Wehrmacht is on its long march through the institutions and has already occupied the Sudetenland social uplands of the Home Office, the educational establishment, the politically-correct police. Following a plethora of equalities legislation, homosexuals are now protected and privileged by sexual orientation regulations and have achieved legal equality by way of civil partnerships. But it's only 1938 and Nazi expansionist ambitions are far from sated."

Yes, before you know it they'll be sending heterosexuals to the gas chambers. Pertinent, in this case means relevant to Alan Craig's vivid imagination (as a side note - I hope, for the sake of sanity that Alan Craig is mixing his metaphors and doesn't actually think the Gestapo led the French Revolution).

It may not have always been the case, privileged, white, heterosexual men have insisting that they are the most downtrodden in society. It is a nice illustration though of the superiority/fear dialectic of bigotry. Bigots simultaneously feel superior yet consistently undermined by the object of their hate. They have the upper hand, yet everywhere they see inevitable doom, in this case hallucinations of pink swastikas. They may be dominant, but their enemy is vital and alive.

There's almost certainly a degree of projection here too. It's rather like Martin Amis's characterisation of Muslims as fascists, followed by thought experiments in a final solution.

We may want to give Alan Craig the benefit of the doubt on this account. I certainly have never heard of him before, and let's not forget for every one of him there may be many Giles Frasers are there?. But why bother? He sounds like an absolute scumbag.

A world of stupid...

Apparently:

Britain is losing its moral compass to such a degree that the armed forces can no longer rely on young recruits to behave in a way once expected by senior officers, General Lord Dannatt, a former head of the army will say on Tuesday.

He may be suggesting this because there was systematic torture of prisoners in Iraq. But that was a (well organised) one off, surely... OK, so there was internment and torture in Ireland in the 1970s... internment and torture in Kenya in the 1950s... back in the 1850s there was this weird phase of executing Hindu rebels by strapping them to cannons, but in no way does this constitute an abbreviated inventory of British army torture... Only a fool or a communist would suggest as much.

Also:

Dannatt, a committed Christian...

Is clearly not so committed that he's heard about the ten commandments, particularly the sixth, "thou shalt not kill"; fairly unambiguous, wouldn't you say? Not to mention difficult to reconcile with soldiery but ho hum...

Arise, ye starvlings... and save the music industry

From all the fucking hippies clogging up London with wax jackets and vintage bikes. Here's why:

Yet there is something profoundly odd about the hyperbolic championing of Florence Welch. At a time when a climate of burgeoning radicalism should be reorienting our culture so that hitherto suppressed voices from the margins might be heard, why is the Great British Hope of 2011 a fashion-obsessed, privately educated young woman from a family of privileged metropolitan movers and shakers? In fact, shouldn't the red carpet treatment afforded to Welch make us question the extent to which we are all complicit in a top-heavy system that no longer has any qualms about poshness and ostentatious consumer decadence?

The huge popularity of FATM's hermetic, Bloomsbury-meets-Björk aesthetic is symptomatic of a society that has become almost irretrievably divided without knowing it. Though it often makes the right noises and appears sympathetic to reform, liberal, middle-class Britain has abandoned counterculture and true radicalism for an unfortunate lingering obsession with escapist lifestyle fantasy. While inequalities have mushroomed in the UK in recent years, the British bourgeoisie has increasingly indulged in a way of life that seeks to cover over its affluence with vague gestures at radical chic, pastoral myth, and down-at-heel "folksiness".

Please elaborate:

The most aloof, entitled middle-class since the Edwardian period has become inured to its position at the top of an emphatically inegalitarian social hierarchy. Meanwhile, deprived of its vocabulary and identity, the real "folk" or working class has increasingly receded from view over the past couple of decades, as several commentators this year have noted. And the pervasive notion that There Is No Alternative has been compounded by the fact that the alternative, proletarian, bottom-up traditions of the past (independent music, folk culture, communitarian politics) have been casually appropriated by a liberal-conservative elite that blithely attaches itself to faux-populist causes such as "big society", nu-folk music, Blue Labour, and Green Toryism. FATM's catwalk pastiche of Kate Bush's wayward, subversive English eccentricity is merely the latest in this series of top-down co-options of "grassroots" marginality.

The answer:

So what is the alternative? Perhaps the point is that we politicians, journalists, academics, and indie musicians are part of the problem rather than the solution, and are likely to carry on being so until substantial reform of the political system allows the genuinely marginalised, alternative sectors of the world a chance to shine.

The author probably isn't suggesting workers power, but something like the above solution should be applied much more broadly, to all of our society.

What is Stalinism and why does it matter?

1. Stalinism is a form of statecraft practiced in Russia somewhere between 1924 and 1953. It is a series of policies, some of which ended with Stalin's death, some of which endured. If Stalinism is this and nothing more then it is an historical curiosity.

2. Stalinism is a system of government best described as bureaucratic state capitalism, where the state is fused with the economy but the imperative is capital accumulation. Its value and necessity depends on your perspective. From the point of view of the group effectively governing Russia during the late 1920s Stalinism, as it came to be, was essential and justified. Stalinism was, from the point of view of Russian history, progressive. It made Russia into a modern society. But that's not our perspective. Capitalism is a global system, and was a global system back when the USSR was founded, even back when the Russian Revolution began. Capitalism did not need developing, it was ripe to fall. This has bearing on the 3rd point.

3. Stalinism is a political strategy whereby Communist Parties around the world were effectively agents of Russian foreign policy. This meant different things in different countries. The consistent theme was Russia need to survive and compete within the capitalist world. Though the Communist Party contained many serious revolutionaries it's political strategy was never revolutionary. Without having an Actually Existing Socialism to serve surviving Communist Parties in the core capitalist countries adapted their strategy only slightly, by positioning themselves as left social democrats, to the point where in several countries they are almost the only true surviving social democratic parties, the official social democrats having become social liberal.

4. So, ok, Stalinism is not a strategy for transcending capitalism, why does it matter? Firstly it matters for the simple, ideological point regarding all revolutions leading to tyranny/co-option. Secondly, it matters because the violent intervention from the top of Russian society around 1927/8, which created Stalinism, did lead to significant change. Can change from below compete, full democracy, self-government compete? The fact that the Russian Revolution ended up founding a bureaucratic command economy when it started as an experiment in communal democracy would suggest to some that such democracy is utopian. We can only make extrapolations from the present into the future, but there're three things worth noting:

(i) For centuries now significant mass movements that have challenged the status quo have developed communal forms of democracy, even if only in embryo. Why would a utopia keep cropping up throughout history?
(ii) The development of capitalism prepares us in part for communal democracy. An example; the republican ideal of citizenship, of popular sovereignty (even if deferred to an elected representative) means that each is able, or should be able, to take their place as head of state. This also applies (in an obviously more round-a-about way) to constitutional monarchies.
(iii) It's a sore day for humanity if it's still not capable of liberating itself. Without change from below, at this point in time, human civilisation is almost certainly doomed.

More on the Greek referendum