Perhaps the oddest thing about the Baathist propaganda piece by Patrick Higgins in Jacobin is that it appeared at all. Titled “The War on Syria”, it is the sort of item that appeared with great frequency in 2012 and that came to a climax in late 2013 when what appeared to be thousands of articles flooded across the leftwing of the Internet warning about Obama’s readiness to invade Syria over “red lines” being crossed in East Ghouta. Careful examination of the military and political record, however, would reveal that no such thing was in the offing as I pointed out in a CounterPunch article titled “Why Obama Did Not Make War on Syria”. Indeed, just when so much of the left was running around like Chicken Little, it was exactly when Obama was on the phone with Iran exploring rapprochement—the country that supposedly he was bent on destroying.
Higgins’s article is focused on a book edited by Danny Postel and Nader Hashemi that supposedly contains articles calling for “some projection of American power”. If you are worried about such a projection, why not make Kobane a litmus test rather than anything the FSA has done? This is where American air power proved decisive in dislodging ISIS from a Kurdish town. While much of the left was beside itself with joy over this turn of events, it somehow pirouetted around the alliance between American air power and Kurdish fighters who provided coordinates so that ISIS could be blasted to smithereens. In keeping with its hostility to the FSA, Jacobin ran an article about Kobane that drew a distinction between the Kurdish fighters and the FSA that was alleged to be a tool of Western imperialism. Somehow, the authors failed to read newspaper accounts about who was relying on imperialism:
Talal Raman, a 36-year-old Kurdish fighter, worked on a Samsung tablet, annotating a Google Earth map marked with the positions of the deserted apartment buildings and crumbling villas from where his colleagues were battling Islamic State fighters south of this northern Syrian town. He pinpointed in yellow the positions where his men were hunkered behind a wall, and highlighted in red the coordinates of a building next to a mosque where Islamic State fighters had taken cover.
“Our comrades can see the enemy moving at the GPS address I just sent you,” he wrote in Arabic to a handler hundreds of miles away in a United States military operations room. Then he waited for the American warplanes to scream in.
The tight coordination of American air power with the militia, known as the Y.P.G., from the Kurdish initials for People’s Protection Units, has dealt the Islamic State its most significant setbacks across an enormous strip of northern Syria near the Turkish border in recent months.
NY Times, August 10, 2015
Higgins is far more patient with the Kurdish militia than he is with the FSA:
Amid the brutal sectarian strife across Syria and the Middle East, the PYD’s project in Rojava has over the past year understandably appeared as a spark of hope to many leftists in the West. Their admiration is not misplaced.
But it must still be said that the future of Rojava very much rests on how much room the PYD decides to give to the United States as it considers exploiting the party to deepen divides in Syria.
I don’t know how much more room there is to give in light of them supplying GPS coordinates. That’s cheek by jowl, isn’t it?
You can bet that if the FSA was supplying GPS coordinates to American jets that were dropping bombs on Baathist troops, you’d see Higgins screaming bloody murder. He is up in arms when the question of “right to protect” comes up in the Postel-Hashemi book but is remarkably patient when it comes to the biggest projection of American air power anywhere in the world today. In fact, I would bet a small fortune that Higgins is okay with American jets now targeting the al-Nusra front since everybody knows that al-Qaeda must be stopped. That is, everybody who has read their Christopher Hitchens.
Higgins presents an addled history of the war in Syria that is meant to demonize the FSA. He claims that they were champing at the bit to make war, even within the first month of the Syrian protests in 2011 when they slaughtered 120 Baathist cops in Jisr al-Shughour out of the blue between June 3rd and June 6th, according to a BBC article to which Higgins linked. What would have been useful to point out, however, is that the BBC was merely quoting Syrian television that had a vested interest in making the opposition look as bloodthirsty as possible. If Higgins would have us take the word of the BBC on what happened in Jisr al-Shughour, he might have taken the trouble to mention a follow-up report from the BBC on the roots of the conflict there:
On 3 June, after Friday prayers, protesters gathered in Jisr al-Shughour to demonstrate against the Syrian government. At least one man was killed. Activists say Baseel al-Masri was shot by government security forces.
Masri was buried the following day. Mohammed Fazo, an activist using a pseudonym, told the BBC around 15,000 people attended the funeral procession. He said he personally witnessed what happened next.
“During the funeral, snipers on the roof of the post office building fired at the protesters,” he said.
This is apparently corroborated by another eyewitness, by the name of Abu Abdulla. “There was indiscriminate shooting at the protesters,” he told the BBC by phone.
But none of this would have been useful to someone serving as a lawyer for the Baathist dictatorship, and a cheap one at that. To back up his claims about what took place at Jisr al-Shughour, Higgins cites Joshua Landis, a scholar who once wrote in the NY Times: “For Mr. Assad to help the United States, he must have sufficient backing from Washington to put greater restrictions and pressure on the Sunni majority.” Well, no matter. After recounting local protesters’ outrage over having been fired upon by snipers and their determination to use arms to defend themselves if necessary, Landis can only conclude that they had “a compelling argument”. This is not an argument that Higgins would find so compelling given his obvious cherry-picking approach to Landis’s piece. That is how propaganda works, after all. You only take what you need to suit your political agenda—the truth be damned.
Higgins cites a Washington Post article dated June 12th that alleges that “the CIA has trained and equipped nearly 10,000 fighters sent into Syria over the past several years”, something that prompts him to state: “In other words, the United States launched a full-scale war against Syria, and few Americans actually noticed.” Well, I don’t know about a few Americans but as someone who reads Global Research, WSWS.org, Salon.com, the Nation Magazine, CounterPunch, DissidentVoice, and Jacobin on a fairly regular basis, the notion of America being in a full-scale war with Syria is old news—even if it is bullshit. The Wall Street Journal reported in January on this CIA aid, something that falls far short of Higgins’s hysterical account:
Some weapons shipments were so small that commanders had to ration ammunition. One of the U.S.’s favorite trusted commanders got the equivalent of 16 bullets a month per fighter. Rebel leaders were told they had to hand over old antitank missile launchers to get new ones—and couldn’t get shells for captured tanks. When they appealed last summer for ammo to battle fighters linked to al Qaeda, the U.S. said no.
That’s some full-scale war.
To show that he has a sense of humor, Higgins writes that there is a central contradiction in Syrian politics that belies the notion that a revolution of any kind has been taking place there. When I noticed that the words “central contradiction” had a hyperlink, I became curious to see where it went. Well, it connected to an article by Mao Zedong titled “On Contradiction”. I laughed my head off, especially seeing this in Jacobin. MRZine I could understand but Jacobin with all its ISO buddies? Well, maybe Maoism explains Higgins’s stupidity. I saw the best minds of my generation—well, maybe the nearly best—destroyed by the Little Red Book 40 years ago. Too bad it is still rotting out brains in 2015.
A large portion of Higgins’s article is taken up with the task of disproving allegations that the Baathist state relies on Alawite sectarianism. His arguments are so absurd on the face of it, there is very little need to bother with them. However, the idea that because Iran funds the PFLP, the Syria-Iran bloc cannot be sectarian is so preposterous that something must be said. Once again showing evidence that he doesn’t even read the articles he links to, Higgins neglects to mention that the article he cites—Iran Increases Aid to PFLP—is clear about the strictly pecuniary basis of these ties:
“Following the resumption of Iranian support, there will soon be a dramatic increase in the strength of the PFLP’s military wing, the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, after the internal reorganization of the group is completed,” the sources said.
The PFLP has come out in support of the Syrian regime and Hezbollah’s position on the Syrian crisis. PFLP officials have made pro-regime statements and held Gaza rallies in which participants raised pictures of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah.
In other words, Iran is paying for the PFLP’s support for Bashar al-Assad. Only someone so cynical about the Middle East as Higgins would interpret this as a break with sectarianism. It can better be described as succumbing to bribery. In fact the article reports that when Hamas threw its moral support behind the Syrian revolt, Iranian money dried up. When it ultimately decided to get with the program and line up behind Assad, the money started flowing again. It is quite remarkable that an American leftist can get behind such political horse-trading, the Middle East version of Donald Trump giving money to buy politicians. One supposes that when it comes to writing propaganda for the Baathist goons, all bets are off.
Attempting to show that he is not a complete Baathist tool, Higgins recommends something called the National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change that would like to see democracy and fair play in Syria—bully for them. Perhaps the most useful way of putting the NCCDC into context is to refer to an Al-Akhbar article written in 2011 that described the group as having an outlook that “is out of touch with the prevailing sentiment of the uprising, which seems intent on toppling the regime.” This is a newspaper that Max Blumenthal described as loaded with Assad apologists so one might think that another apologist like Higgins might have been smart enough to avoid trying to con his readers with a cheer for such an impotent formation.
Unable to ignore the obvious realities, Higgins is forced to admit that it was rural poverty that fueled the protests in 2011. But have no fear, our boy is sure not to give the revolt more legitimacy than it deserves because it “lacked a vision and, therefore, any revolutionary agent.” Maybe these poor benighted hungry peasants should have been reading The Little Red Book instead of the Quran. That would have assuaged him, one gathers.
When discussing political Islam’s role in the Syrian uprising, Higgins is sure to remind his readers that the “conservative” Muslim Brotherhood is lurking behind the scenes, a curse to all progressive-minded and secular governments in the Middle East. General al-Sisi knew how to deal with these troublemakers, gaining Bashar al-Assad’s blessing who also understood that state-sanctioned murder gets results.
On his blog, Higgins had a comment about the Brotherhood that pretty much sums up his outlook on Middle East politics:
As for the SNC [Syrian National Council], it was run by a group with leanings to which the American public would not be sympathetic, the Muslim Brotherhood, but it was fronted by liberals.
Don’t you just love the bit about “leanings to which the American public would not be sympathetic”? This is the kind of dreary Islamophobic cant that runs like a shit stain across the entire “anti-imperialist” left. It is sad that Jacobin would spread these feces around so liberally in any number of articles but I suppose you can say that at least they are not much worse than the rest of the left when it comes to Syria. It is a kind of political and spiritual malaise that future historians will be at a loss to explain when they look back at the early 21st century. God give them the strength to penetrate through the filth and, unlike Higgins, tell the truth.
The Rod Holt character in the 2013 narrative film “Jobs”. Note the SWP poster on the wall.
Last night I attended a press screening for Alex Gibney’s documentary “Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine” that opens in theaters and VOD on Friday, September 4th. The film is a brilliant analysis of both the man and the company he built. Since Gibney’s last documentary was on Scientology, it was natural to wonder whether he decided to take on another cult. When Jobs died, Gibney was struck by the mass grief that poured out for the CEO after the fashion of Princess Di. What explained such devotion? Since Gibney owned and treasured his IPhone, this was a question that provoked him into making this film. As someone who likes but does not exactly love his Macbook, and who spent 44 years working as a systems analyst and a programmer, the question of Apple’s place in the American economy and society is also of great interest to me.
There’s another connection. Back in 1967 I met Rod Holt in the New York branch of the Socialist Workers Party, a wiry fellow with close-cropped hair who I found more interesting than most party veterans since he was an engineer and had raced motorcycles—not the typical resume for a Trotskyist. Years later I learned that Holt would become one of the five founding members of Apple. As such I was spurred to watch the 2013 narrative film “Jobs” on Amazon streaming that includes Holt as a minor character. This review will take up both films as a prelude to the new film about Steve Jobs by Danny Boyle that will premiere in the Lincoln Center Film Festival next month. It is understandable why three films will have taken up the Steve Jobs story. Apple now enjoys the highest capitalization of any American corporation at 724 billion dollars, twice that of ExxonMobil. If a film like “There Will be Blood” or “Citizen Kane” documented the ugly character of previous generations of the bourgeoisie, the three films about Steve Jobs bring us up to date on how the computer revolution turns entrepreneurs into monsters—the latest report on Amazon’s treatment of white collar workers bears this out. In many ways, Jobs was the prototypical Silicon Valley terror anticipating Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin. Unlike these more recent avatars of the computer ruling class, the 1960s counter-culture shaped Steve Jobs as both Gibney and Joshua Michael Stern, the director of “Jobs”, make clear. Devotee of Eastern religion and Bob Dylan, wearing long hair, and with a background in phone phreaking escapades, Jobs seemed the least likely candidate for building a corporation twice as big as ExxonMobil—itself the product of a merger of two behemoths. Figuring out how that took place was exactly what drove Alex Gibney into making the most important documentary of 2015.
Born in 1955, Steve Jobs was in his late teens during the biggest shake-up in American society since the 1930s. Unlike me, ten years his senior and ten years Rod Holt’s junior, Jobs was far more interested in Enlightenment than socialism. You have to remember that the thirst for spiritual transcendence was very deep at the time, powerful enough to turn antiwar leaders Rennie Davis and Jerry Rubin into searchers after Transcendence either in the form of a Hindu guru’s cult and EST respectively. EST was a training program that was founded by Werner Erhard designed to help yuppies solve problems after the fashion of Scientology. Erhard cobbled together some techniques that he had picked up from Zen Buddhism. and psychotherapy The CEO of the consulting company I worked for in the 1980s was an EST follower although he never foisted his beliefs on me. The idea that Zen Buddhism could be a guide to business success for both Steve Jobs and my boss might seem strange at first but one must never forget that Zen Buddhists were gung-ho for Japanese imperialism in WWII as I mentioned to Gibney in the Q&A.
Like so many others from his generation, Jobs went to India on a pilgrimage to seek Wisdom with his friend Daniel Kottke who would become one of Apple’s founders. As both films point out, Jobs decided to allocate zero shares to Kottke when Apple was incorporated. He was very good at throwing people under the bus. When Jobs was at Atari in his first real job, the boss offered him a $5000 bonus if he could come up with a really great game. Needing hardware assistance, he recruited Steve Wozniak who was told that he could get half the bonus if they succeeded. But Jobs lied and told Woz that the bonus was only for $750.
That’s not the half of it. When Jobs’s girlfriend became pregnant, he retained a lawyer to help him avoid paying child support, claiming that she had screwed around so much that nobody could tell who the father was. Eventually a DNA test proved that he was the father. Even if he wasn’t, his millions could have easily helped to support the child of someone with whom he had been intimate.
Gibney gives the devil his due. In capturing Jobs’s single-minded devotion to crafting user-friendly and beautiful machines, you are reminded of why Apple became dominant. Unlike Detroit, Silicon Valley was always much more sensitive to marketing trends since so much of personal computing was driven by taste. And once Apple embarked on making products like the IPod, the IPhone, and the IPad, it was possible for consumers to really feel like the computer was an extension of their self. Gibney wonders, however, whether this is at the expense of the social bonding that was so important in the 1960s. If you go into a restaurant nowadays, you will often find a family of four fixated on their IPhone as each course is delivered, with conversation going by the wayside. The phone becomes worry beads that you can’t keep your hands off of.
The final fifteen minutes or so of Gibney’s film is a rather scathing summary of Jobs’s misdeeds from avoiding taxes to screwing Chinese workers out of a living wage as he polluted their rivers with industrial waste. Of particular interest is how Steve Jobs used a special task force of Silicon Valley police to go after a reporter for Gizmodo who had reported on an early release of an IPhone that a drunken Apple employee had left behind in a bar and that had come into his hands. Even after the phone had been returned, the cops raided the reporter’s home and carted off computers and other valuables. When asked by a TV interviewer why he had resorted to such repressive measures, Jobs replied that he was trying to uphold Apple “values”. In the Q&A, someone asked Gibney what question he would have asked Jobs if he had had the opportunity to interview him. He replied that he would have asked him to define what are his “values”.
I can’t recommend “Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine” highly enough. For my money, Alex Gibney is the best documentary filmmaker working today, an equal to Werner Herzog. With 35 credits to his name, including “Taxi to the Dark Side” about the American torture regime, Gibney combines acute social analysis with fluid documentary techniques. As is always the case with documentaries, there is a need to tell a story just as much as there is with narrative films. Since Gibney described Jobs as someone who excelled in telling a story, this is a film that was a perfect match of filmmaker and subject matter.
Despite the fact that only 27 percent of critics found it “fresh” on rottentomatoes.com, I consider “Jobs” to be a compelling film with a remarkable fidelity to the facts, at least based on its close parallels with Gibney’s documentary. Of course, since 98 percent of critics found the wretched “Mad Max: Fury Road” to be “fresh”, there’s no accounting for aesthetic judgments among my peers.
Although I am by no means an Aston Kutcher fan, he captured the essence of Jobs as a brilliant martinet who had about as much warmth as a lamprey eel. Since the film does not try to deal with Apple Corporation’s disgusting behavior overseas, most of the negative side of the Jobs ledger is devoted to his treatment of his girlfriend and workmates including Daniel Kottke.
Much of the drama is centered on fights in the boardroom with former CEO John Scully who is depicted as a hidebound bureaucrat who cares more about the quarterly earnings than Apple’s mission as a corporation that “thinks different”. The most interesting scenes, however, involve Jobs’s interaction with his fellow designers and engineers who are on his wavelength. No matter how much of a prick he was, he appeared to be a very good judge of talent and an inspirer of those who chose to walk the same road with him.
One aspect of the narrative film that is passed over in the documentary is how Jobs and Wozniak presented their first computer to the Homebrew Computer Club in the Bay Area, which was nothing but a circuit board and barely worthy of notice by those in attendance.
In my very first article on the Internet, which was a review of a book about the personal computer industry called “Hackers”, I referred to Homebrew:
So enamored of the idea of personal computing were Felsenstein and Halbrecht that they then launched something called the Homebrew Computer Club. The club drew together the initial corps of engineers and programmers who would launch the personal computer revolution. Among the participants were a couple of adolescents named Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak who went on to form the Apple Corporation.
The hacker ethic that prevailed at the Homebrew Computer Club was decidedly anticapitalist, but not consciously pro-socialist. Software was freely exchanged at the club and the idea of proprietary software was anathema to the club members. There were 2 hackers who didn’t share these altruistic beliefs, namely Paul Allen and Bill Gates. When Allen and Gates discovered that their version of Basic that was written for the Altair was being distributed freely at the club, they raised hell. The 19-year-old Gates stated in a letter to the club: “Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?”
For those who have followed the personal computer and Internet revolution for the past 25 years or so, you are aware of the tension between private and public that remains unresolved. For every scumbag like Zuckerberg anxious to enjoy the kind of monopoly that IBM once had in the mainframe business, there are others willing to work for free on Wikipedia, Open Source journals, free software, and the like. If capitalism creates the technology that allows the instant communication links that make runaway shops feasible, it also creates the networks that allow activists to build solidarity across national boundaries that will oppose capitalist exploitation. This is the contradiction that marks late capitalism more than any other in some ways.
Nobody better represents the intersection between public and private than Rod Holt who was the lead engineer on the Apple II and who worked on the Macintosh as well. In the Q&A I told Gibney that Holt paid tribute to Jobs not long after he died even if his values clashed with his former Apple pioneer. Here is what he told Marxmail subscribers:
Just a remark here:
Dear Comrades:
Concerning Steve Jobs:
I worked with Steve from the Summer of 1976 to his ouster. I was responsible for the Apple II hardware design and its manufacture. I was in charge of the Macintosh group until its launch in 1984. I was twice anointed with the title “Apple Fellow”. I’m sick and tired of people making judgements without the slightest idea of what they are talking about. They buy the official myths fabricated by various individuals around Apple (including the 2 Steves themselves). I have in my possession enough original documents to back up what I am saying.
There were 5 (five) founders of Apple Computer:
Mike Markkula, Chairman of the board of directors
Mike Scott, CEO and President
Steve Jobs, V.P. of Marketing
Steve Wozniak, V.P. Software
Rod Holt, V.P. Engineering
We were incorporated in the state of California effective Jan. 1, 1977 with the above 5 officers. Apple Computer had never been incorporated earlier.
I will just say here that the history of Apple in Wikipedia is seriously incorrect. Most other histories are also wildly wrong. Some of this was deliberately done by Steve Jobs, but most can be attributed to sloppy journalism. Some is due to bad memories.
Steve Jobs wanted products that he would buy and use. For the rest of Apple, the creators produced what they wanted to buy. The success stemmed from this simple set of motives.
Marxists should understand that the Apple products grew from the social environment of these times in silicon valley. There was a confluence here of what we, the designers, wanted and what the world wanted. I could go into more detail if there were room and time, but really, that’s the story.
Jobs was very, very bright, a genius perhaps. So was Woz. And Scotty too. We never lacked for brains. One of Steve’s remarkable abilities was that he listened. I would get into a fierce argument with him, go into the executive staff meeting and be floored when he would take my position exactly, understanding every bit of my arguments, re-phrase them and then convince everyone. I’ve never to this day met anyone that could dispute and at the same time listen so well.
But, for heavens sake, let’s remember that leaders of corporations have to make profits or else they are on the street looking for a job. Steve Jobs wanted a billion happy customers, a goal he could reach only as a super-capitalist. So that’s what he became. It wasn’t where he started, but that’s what happened. The fact that so much ink is expended by the press is embarrassing, but that’s just the byproduct. I’m sure he would be as embarrassed as I am now.
==================
If anyone wants particulars from me, he can ask.
Thanks,
–rod
Recent photo of Steve Wozniak and Rod Holt
* * * *
From Walter Isaacson’s biography:
Update
Posted by Rod Holt to Marxmail on August 29th:
Remarks on Steve Jobs as a Phenomenon
[The producers of the first Jobs movie, “Jobs” kindly loaned a preprint to the Roxie Theater in San Francisco so that my old friends and Apple co-workers could have a party—which we did, wall to wall.
After the showing that Thursday afternoon, here and there, I offered my opinion on the movie and its social meaning. That raised a few eyebrows and more questions. I have since been asked to explain myself, a reasonable request. Since my outlook differs a lot from that of many of us, I thought it proper to clarify what I meant when I talked about Steve as being intrinsically anti-capitalist. By that I meant that Steve was opposed to the “alienation of labor”, while the alienation of labor is intrinsic to capitalist production.
The term “alienation of labor” is a technical term, and like many in philosophy and economics, doesn’t quite mean what one would think. The shortest explanation of the concept is found in Wikipedia. Of course, the concept is not the property of Marx but has been part of the thinking of many thinkers since the rise of capitalism.
In the Wikipedia article, there is a quotation where Marx imagines production with non-alienated labor:
“… In your enjoyment, or use, of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man’s essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man’s essential nature. . . . Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature.”
Steve Jobs wanted his products enjoyed as expressing his essential nature, and therefore in the general sense, he was an artist with the development team and its laboratories as his studio.
In the capitalist system, products are produced by workers paid in money and with tools owned by the capitalist. The sole purpose of the product is to be sold to realize a profit. This process eliminates the artist altogether. Wikipedia sums this up:
In a capitalist society, the worker’s alienation from his and her humanity occurs because the worker can only express labour — a fundamental social aspect of personal individuality — through a privately-owned system of industrial production in which each worker is an instrument, a thing, not a person.
So the product of labor under capitalism, the commodity, is not what Steve Jobs intended to sell. He was selling something better, something more. As far as he was concerned, profit was just fine, but not at the expense of that “something more.”
I wrote the few paragraphs below without a discussion of the alienation of labor, which is an unusual social-philosophical concept. As a result of this omission, there were some misunderstandings. For example, the alienation of labor does not mean the alienation of workers.
The fact that Steve was driven by his vision of beautiful products, “insanely great” as he would say, didn’t prevent us from glorying in our own contribution of non-alienated labor.
I do not believe Steve grasped the notion of alienated labor in and of itself. It is impossible to imagine the tens of thousands of Chinese laborers getting any whiff of the intoxicating perfume in the air we enjoyed in the early years at Apple.
=====================
Let me take on the task of explaining my view of Steve and the “First Five Years of Apple Computer.” Over the years, I’ve listened to lots of people with theories of how Apple succeeded, what was the magic ingredient, and whether the life of Steve Jobs verified the Great Man theory of history or not. I believe that the overwhelming majority of commentators miss the point completely. This is not surprising not only because they weren’t there, but also because what actually went on at Apple completely contradicts some central myths of Modern Capitalism.
I will state my thesis here as briefly as I can. I will not be writing a book proving every jot and tittle on the way to a grand conclusion. However, I feel competent to defend the thesis against any opponent. The first few years of Apple Computer were remarkable because labor was not alienated labor in the Marxist sense. We were not producing commodities for the sake of profit. In many respects, even as the company grew beyond all expectations, inertia carried this extraordinary characteristic forward until the Scully era.
The first three years at Apple were marked by a strong bond between all the participants, and between all of us and the product. We were building a product for ourselves and everybody throughout the world who were like us. (People tend to think everybody except the Other are like themselves in fundamental ways.) This was a product we wanted. And that was why we stayed up nights solving problems as they cropped up. Nobody in the early days was doing their job with the pay envelope in mind. Nobody. Even the production people putting Apples into boxes believed (correctly) they were sending their product to someone like themselves who would appreciate it, and more, marvel over it.
We made no shortcuts whatsoever. Not one. For example, Steve had the boxes carefully marked with our name and logo in red on the cleanest of clean white cardboard. Later, we got a shipment where the ink had smeared and the boxes “looked like shit,” as Jobs put it. So without regard for the fact that nearly 200 Apples were sitting in production ready to go, Steve shipped the boxes back. Both Markkula [Chairman of the Board] and Scotty [Mike Scott, President and CEO] screamed, but they were too late; the bad boxes were gone. And the whole factory silently applauded.
Again: We were in agony when the paint showed signs of peeling off the first cases, which (it turned out) were contaminated by the release compound from the molds. While orders piled up, we didn’t ship until we had stripped the paint, found a method for cleaning the cases and then repainted them. Everything that went wrong met a concentrated corrective effort. When it was clear that the cases made by the RIM (Reaction Injection Molding) method were not ever going to meet our standard, Steve and I took an airplane to Portland, Oregon to start an intensive program to make a new set of molds for an altogether new process that promised perfection (high pressure injection-molded foamed Noryl). Fortunately, our case design was suited to both the material and the process, and without dawdling we jumped right in and Steve wrote some big checks for the tooling. When quality of the product was considered, manufacturing cost was always second.
I worked with Steve (cheek to jowl at times) for the first 7 years and I think I came to know him at least as well as anybody. We never had a conflict over product quality as such. I did have arguments on “features.” Take for example one dispute over the Macintosh; Steve wanted stereo sound, and for Burrell Smith who was doing the logic board design, it would take some major design changes to accommodate stereo (adding an extra shift register, another D-A converter, and making changes in the ROMs and software). So I said No. Enough was enough. The engineering department had to stop changing things; we had to wrap up the design and go to production. I convinced Burrell Smith. I convinced Andy Hertzfeld, and demobilized Steve Jobs. Then I went home late, leaving the usual half dozen perfectionists (including Burrell) working away. But Steve wouldn’t leave well enough alone. He came back to the lab late that night and convinced Burrell that stereo was essential. So, the next morning, Burrell went home exhausted with the prototype boasting stereo, and me shaking my head in disgust. But so it came to be that the Macintosh had stereo even though there was no application program of any sort that could use it and only one speaker — at that time.
This sort of thing I understood, but it conflicted with my desire to get the product to the user promptly. Sometimes I could move things forward, and sometimes I couldn’t. However reluctantly I say this, more often than not, Steve’s last minute changes were the best thing for the customer.
I believe that Steve was dedicated to his audience, an imaginary audience who he would simply will into existence. He wanted commodities to be more than commodities. This desire was the base for the conflicts with Apple’s Board, etc. that forced the Board to fire Steve. But somehow, the vast millions of customers understood and applauded and Steve basked in the glow.
I talked with Ashton Kutcher [who played the part of Steve in the movie] at some length about Steve as the self-appointed representative of the customer, representing the people who could appreciate the quality, the thoughtfulness, and the product; that is, the product as the crystallization of what they wanted. Jobs’s perfectionism was not just a quirk, it was central; he wanted to be the leader of a new wave of products—products that were more than commodities. Products, I imagine, as we might have under socialism. To my surprise, Kutcher had come to roughly the same conclusion. He had read all available speeches by Steve, read memos and listened to those who had direct experience. He was the only one in the organization, which produced “Jobs”, who had thought through the story to the point of understanding it. This is key to his remarkable portrayal of Steve.
The movie clearly shows this conflict between a product made solely to be sold for a profit and a product made to “change the world”. At one point, the movie shows Art Rock, the dark side venture capitalist, explaining to Steve that the company had to make a profit, even at the expense of everything else. When Steve refuses to adapt to this edict, Scully, Rock and Markkula dethrone him and the Early Apple years end. In startling contrast, when Steve returns to Apple, the movie shows him with great intensity telling the new young designer (Ivy) “Design something beautiful that you love. I don’t care what it is.” (I believe one of Ivy’s designs became the iPod.) So Steve wins; we are left to imagine the evil capitalists slinking away.
Jobs’s failure to come to terms with capitalism (at least up through the first Macintosh) was due, I believe, to his willful ignorance of politics. His all-consuming idea of himself as a visionary made it impossible for him to see the contradictions. The failure of his own enterprise NEXT must have been a humbling experience. That, followed by the success of Pixar, which made him rich again, certainly must have changed him.
I have no direct experience of his last 25 years, but I suspect at least his obsession with his audience (the customers) stayed with him.
The Saltsjöbaden Agreement of 1938, a deal that ensured class peace. Trade union leader August Lindberg is at the left while corporate chief Sigfrid Edström is at the right
(This is the sixth in a series of articles on “the Swedish model”. Part one is here. It is an introduction that relates Swedish socialism to Bismarck’s reforms. Part two is here. It is about the persecution of the Samis. Part three is here. It deals with Sweden and the “scramble for Africa”. Part four took up the Myrdal enthusiasm for eugenics. Part five deals with Sweden’s economic partnership with Hitler.)
Feeling duty-bound to understand the origins and development of Swedish social democracy, I slogged through 342 pages of Herbert Tingsten’s “The Swedish Social Democrats: the Ideological Development” that was written in 1941. The emphasis is on ideological since the book pays scant attention to what is happening on the ground. It reads more or less as a chronicle of debates in a party from its founding in 1899. I got what I needed from it by the time Tingsten worked his way up to 1932 or so when party leaders were trying to figure out what relevance their ideology had to the Great Depression. As a reflection of the book’s somewhat limited value, it fails to mention the General Strike of 1931 that was sparked by the shooting of papermill strikers and their supporters in Adalen.
Born in 1896, Tingsten was a political science professor and newspaperman who edited Dagens Nyheter from 1946 to 1959, a paper roughly equivalent to the NY Times. Wikipedia described his ideological history this way:
Tingsten changed his political views several times during his life. In his early youth he was a conservative and later a radical left-wing liberal. During the 1920s he joined the Swedish Social Democratic Party and was on the left-wing faction of the party. In 1941 he wrote Den svenska socialdemokratiens idéutveckling (“The Ideological Development of the Swedish Social Democrats”), where he criticized the party for not fulfilling the marxist goals of nationalizations of the private industry. However, after reading Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom in 1944, Tingsten became a convinced believer in a free market economy and in 1945 he left the Social Democratic Party. He was one of the original participators of the Mont Pelerin Society, founded in 1947.
I certainly got the impression that the 1941 book was critical of the Swedish social democrats from the left even though Tingsten was careful to strike a neutral tone. But page after page is devoted to pointing out how willing the party was to dump the Marxist ideas that were present at its founding even if they were tainted by Lassalle’s state socialism as I pointed out in a previous post.
In the late 1800s the Swedish party (SAP, or Social Democratic Workers Party) was a virtual hotbed of “revisionism”, almost always adopting views that were antithetical to Marxism, such as the rejection of the labor theory of value. As I worked my way through Tingsten’s text, which read more often than not as a stenographer’s notes from various SAP meetings, I was struck by how committed the SAP was to remaining within a liberal capitalist framework even as it paid lip service to socialism.
In examining some of the earliest programmatic statements by Hjalmar Branting, Tingsten points out that he had a rather “inclusive” understanding of the term proletariat. There was an industrial proletariat but there was also a proletariat based on receiving a salary. This would exclude poor farmers and small craftsmen but it would include bankers, cabinet ministers and professors.
Before long, Branting and other party leaders began to think in terms of “the people” rather than the proletariat, seeing social democracy as a force that could unite everybody in opposition to the big bourgeoisie. While Tingsten says very little about this, there is little doubt that the populism of the early days of Swedish social democracy lent itself to the peculiar notion of folkhemmet, or “the people’s home”, that party leader and Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson developed in the 1920s. If you’ll recall, Hansson was in power during WWII when Swedish industrialists were helping to keep the Nazi war machine going.
Folkhemmet was also key to the eugenics program that the Myrdals espoused, which blurred the lines between the family unit, the state and the seemingly progressive character of the welfare state that the social democrats promoted.
Under folkhemmet, the goal was basically not to overturn property relations but to reduce the differences in income between those at the top of society and those at the bottom. In essence, this is what attracts people like Bernie Sanders to Swedish “socialism” even though it has little to do with Karl Marx’s call for revolutionary change.
Wikipedia states that a Swedish political scientist named Rudolf Kjellén developed the idea of folkhemmet in a 1900 book titled “Swedish Geography”. Apparently, he was inspired by Otto Von Bismarck’s state socialism so it is no surprise that the Swedish social democrats who appropriated Lassalle would embrace Kjellén’s ideas of a politics based on:
Reich: a territorial concept consisting of Raum (Lebensraum), and strategic military shape
Volk: a racial conception of the state
Doesn’t this ring a bell? It should. Hitler implemented this approach even though he never specifically referred to Kjellén.
Ironically, Folkhemmet became a symbol of the “decent” Sweden that was being transformed in the post-1970s into a state indistinguishable from other neoliberal projects in Western Europe. While it is understandable why leftwing social democrats would feel nostalgia for the good old days—mirroring in some ways that of some older people in the former Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc—it also found expression in the writings of Henning Mankel, the Marxist author of detective novels in the Wallander series that I wrote about for CounterPunch. In a fascinating article titled “Folkhemmet” by Göran Rosenberg that appeared in OpenDemocracy in 2013, we learn that the detective would like to turn back the clock:
There is no doubt in my mind that Henning Mankell, a self-confessed supporter of the radical left, is having his protagonist, Kurt Wallander, represent his own disillusionment with the retreat from the ideals of folkhemmet [the people’s home] and his own yearning for its political restoration.
The rhetoric of nostalgia remains in fact a potent factor in Swedish politics. This is most explicit in the party that still claims political ownership of the Swedish model, the Social Democrats. Although the party, while in government, has been instrumental in many of the changes signifying a retreat from the model, and while in opposition, has largely acquiesced to liberal-conservative proposals to the same effect, it has skilfully managed to retain most of its traditional rhetoric, depicting itself as the true custodian of folkhemmet.
The final paragraph of Tingsten’s chapter pretty much sums up what would guide Swedish social democracy for a century at least and one that demonstrates his leftist distaste for the party’s subsequent evolution:
In a speech delivered in 1900 Branting emphasized that new viewpoints had become decisive with the party’s growth: “As long as the party is composed of only a few persons who lack the opportunity to exercise any real political influence, it is in the nature of things that their principles will be abstract in form and that the main emphasis will be on future goals. On the other hand, should the working class begin to take a hand in the machinery of society, certain immediate goals to improve its position will appear so attractive and occupy so much time and interest that the more distant ones will, relatively speaking, be shunted aside.” In an article published in 1897, Danielsson recalled that Social Democrats had abandoned a series of dogmas that they had previously defended with fanatic zeal. This was proof of the movement’s viability. In terms reminiscent of the anti-intellectual vitalism of today, Danielsson extolled the capacity of Social Democratic theory to change and adjust. The theory “is distinguished by great elasticity and demonstrates its truth and practical fecundity in that it does not exhaust its forces in vain attempts to do violence to reality but allies itself naturally and voluntarily with all fluid popular movements in various countries for the purpose of leading the working classes on to a higher cultural level and a freer social position along navigable roads that have been opened by history.”
What is also of interest given the stated goal of Bernie Sanders to turn the USA into something like Sweden (at least like it used to be) is whether rich people like the Koch brothers will go along with it. Maybe we could import a new bourgeoisie while we are in the process of importing a new ideology.
But what could have made Sweden’s one percent so amenable to a tax structure that had a leveling effect? Was it something in the water? To start with, it is important to understand that the Swedish social democracy never appeared as a threat to moneyed interests as should be obvious by both their ideology and their willingness to collaborate with bourgeois parties. Given the relatively crisis-free nature of Swedish capitalism (it fared better than most European countries during the Great Depression) and the nation’s neutralism that protected it from the ravages of war, there were fewer irritants at work on the working class at least as compared to France and Germany for instance.
All this led to the trade union movement and the bosses hammering out a partnership based on class peace in 1938 at Saltsjöbaden, a town with salt bath spas as the name indicates. While sacrificing the big profits that a more greedy capitalist class sought, there was at least a guarantee that strikes like the ones that roiled Sweden in 1931 would be kept to a minimum. You can be sure that people like Walter Reuther studied this agreement carefully. Indeed, the Saltsjöbaden agreement and the New Deal represented welfare state capitalism at its pinnacle. When Obama was elected in 2008, people at the Nation Magazine held out hope that he would be a new FDR. There was about as much chance of that happening as the USA adopting a “Swedish model” even in the most unlikely event that Sanders got elected. The reason for this is easy to understand. The American bourgeoisie long ago gave up on New Deal type partnerships between labor and capital. It was much easier to close plants and relocate capital to China, Bangladesh and elsewhere. In fact even the Swedish bourgeoisie has little interest in turning back the clock to 1938, something that will be the topic of a future post.
On August 18 I wrote an article in response to Joe Firestone, the author of an EBook titled “Austerity, Greece’s Debt Crisis and the Theft of Democracy” that had a chapter on the IT problems of a Grexit, which addressed earlier articles I had written.
Yesterday someone brought my attention to a follow-up on his blog (http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2015/08/on-the-it-problem-of-grexit-a-reply.html) that once again tries to strike a balance between Australian economist Billy Mitchell’s blithe assurance that the IT problems are minimal and my own insistence that it will be at least a three year effort to modify the systems. This will be a brief response to Firestone’s latest.
Firestone maintains that he is only for studying and evaluating some approaches. He also favors a phased implementation, something that is put forward concisely in a comment he made under his article:
The mainframe application is undoubtedly very complex so there is a good possibility that Louis is right and the mainframe conversion to Drachma processing cannot be accomplished in the short time necessary for Grexit
So, if we want to support a Grexit that may be necessary in the short term, then we must find a way to get around the need to convert the mainframe application in the short-term
The two possibilities I suggest in my book deserve discussion as possible ways to avoid immediate conversion of the mainframe application and to have to deal with the complexities of the interaction between humans and the mainframe inherent in the operation of the application in the real world
This assumes that you can hold off converting “the mainframe application” for the future but that’s not the way that banking systems are put together as if they were Lego toys made up of discrete modules that can be assembled in phases.
Think of it this way. When you open a checking account, you sit at the desk of some bank officer who begins entering your information into a computer, starting with name, address, social security number, etc. He or she then issues you a temporary ATM card that can be used immediately for deposits and withdrawals.
In the ensuing months, customers might take out a credit card from the bank and afterwards a mortgage and/or an auto loan. And each month they expect a statement that will have an accurate record of their transactions, both debits and credits. I am sure everybody is accustomed to this unless they are used to keeping cash under a mattress.
The implicit assumption (bordering on explicit) in both Mitchell and Firestone’s presentation of the problem is that such a “phase” is essential to moving to a drachma. I can certainly understand why someone might think in those terms because that is generally how we relate to a bank—as a customer. I should add that the applications that handle such relationships are generally referred to as belonging to the “front office”.
Unfortunately, most “back office” operations must be converted on the very day that you implement a new front office based on a drachma since they are designed to support the managers and clerks who are invisible to the customer but critical to bank operations.
For example, the accounting department of a bank is fed data aggregated on a daily basis from various sources in order to populate a General Ledger, which is the source of profit and loss statements and other essential reports for treasurers, auditors and the like. Your deposits and withdrawals are lumped together with those of other customers and end up in buckets identified by a unique General Ledger Account Number, one of which might reflect Mortgages. Needless to say, knowing how much is owed to the bank in this category is essential to a bank based on the 2008 financial crisis.
So if the accounting software is still denominated in euros, what are you supposed to do? Use these for a couple of years until the next phase kicks in?
This does not begin to address the problem of being able to rely on accounting systems once they are converted to handle the drachma. Banks have historical data that is used to generate reports that reflect financial trends. Since 2003, data has been captured as euro-denominated. If you want to study how the mortgage business has been faring over a ten-year period, you need to write conversion software to update computer files going back to the day Greece switched from the drachma to the euro. You also need to make sure that all back-office applications are checked for hard-coded tests for a euro amount, as I have pointed out a number of times.
I know that most of my readers and those who have seen my posts on Naked Capitalism care little about the financial analysis conducted by bank officers in order to make business decisions but as long as Greece remains capitalist, that is the name of the game. This is not a problem limited to banks. It applies as well to insurance companies, brokerage houses, manufacturers, and any other large-scale capitalist enterprise.
Now it is entirely possible that at some point Greece might elect the candidates of the new Popular Unity party that is a leftwing split from Syriza and that is committed to a Grexit, at least if you take them at their word. They may consider the conversion to a drachma to be cost-justified even if it entails the wrenching IT modifications needed to make it work. While I am obviously sympathetic to resisting austerity, I cannot help but wonder if the answer lies solely in the type of currency used. I plan to write a series of articles about Greece that deals with the economic problems in general and hope that by that time the IT questions will no longer need to be discussed since in the final analysis they are secondary to the political ones.
Mike Whitney: The dollar is toast. The IMF is toast. The US debt market (US Treasuries) is toast. The institutions that support US power are crumbling before our very eyes. The BRICS have had enough; enough war, enough Wall Street, enough meddling and hypocrisy and austerity and lecturing. This is farewell.
UJUH: South Africa is pushing two high profile candidates into the top leadership layer of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB).
These two are Tito Mboweni who has been appointed as the Non-Executive Director to the Board of the BRICS New Development Bank and Lesley Maasdorp who has been nominated to become one of four Vice Presidents of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB).
When the World Economic Forum named Maasdorp as a Young Global Leader in 2007, he was already a matured leader. This is after serving the ANC’s economic desk in the pre 1994 era and then graduating into public service. He served as a special advisor to the minister of labour, Tito Mboweni. He then moved to become deputy director in the department of public enterprises where he oversaw major state assets restructuring and privatisation of the time. Maasdorp broke into the top business league in the mid 2000s with positions at different intervals that included; President of Bank of America Merrill Lynch for Southern Africa, Vice Chairman of Barclays Capital and Absa Capital and International Adviser to Goldman Sachs.
Andre Vltchek: “Among the BRICS, there is no place for countries that are siding with the colonialist powers, as there is no place for those nations that are tormenting and sacrificing their own people. For now it is still just an acronym of the countries, its members. But soon, who knows, it may be interpreted as the Broad Revolutionary Internationalist Causeway towards Socialism.”
RT.com: While investors drop Greece like a hot potato Russian and Chinese companies plan to take part in the privatization of Greek state assets, considering them a good investment.
Russia’s leading gas producer Gazprom is considering taking part in the privatization of the Greek gas company DEPA and grid operator DESFA. The Greek Government is currently inviting bids for DEPA, but it plans to keep 34% of DESFA, Reuter reports.
Experts estimate a controlling stake in DEPA would cost about $1.5 billion.
In June 2014, I wrote a commentary on the question of Russian imperialism, making the case that even if it didn’t meet the yardstick established by Lenin in 1914, it was still imperialist in the same sense that Japan was in the 1930s or for that matter Czarist Russia, which colonized nations on its borders. On the other side of the debate, Roger Annis maintained that there are no significant Russian or Chinese banks so how can they be imperialist?
That may be the case but the New Development Bank is projected to be a competitor to the World Bank and a major financier of 3rd world development projects that would supposedly put the interests of the people over profits. Somehow this does not seem to square with Marx’s theory of capitalism but that would not seem to deter people like Mike Whitney and especially Andre Vltchek who views China as following its own rules and not that of a Westerner like Karl Marx: “Only the Western thinkers can define such things as ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’, not Asians, and ‘Chinese socialism’ means nothing to them; it is just a pose, a charade.”
For many BRICS has a totemic quality, as if there could be such a thing as “good capitalism” as opposed to the demonic, mustache-twirling variety found on Wall Street or London’s financial district. I was reminded of that just today when Ron Jacobs forwarded an interview with Thomas Mountain to Marxmail. Mountain turns out to be a former member of Robert Avakian’s cult who retains a soft spot in his heart for China as if the old-time spirit of Maoism lingered on:
Chinese aid has built more schools, hospitals, water and electric infrastructure than all the western governments and the UN combined, and is set to do much more if the present programs that have been announced are implemented. China recognizes that Africa needs educated and skilled personnel to help develop African resources and it is in China’s interest to help make this happen. Again, doing this is a long term investment that will pay off for China, both in good will and in their companies’ bottom lines.
So maybe colonialism is not such a bad thing as long as it has Chinese characteristics? Well, maybe Mountain had the early writings of Karl Marx in mind who thought that the British colonization of India had some benefits: “The political unity of India, more consolidated, and extending farther than it ever did under the Great Moguls, was the first condition of its regeneration. That unity, imposed by the British sword, will now be strengthened and perpetuated by the electric telegraph.” (Of course, years later Marx explicitly renounced these views and equated British rule to grand larceny.)
Is this far-fetched? Comparing China to Victorian England? Not if you read what Nick Turse has to say about the Chinese presence in newly independent South Sudan:
Hungry for energy reserves, minerals, and other raw materials to fuel its domestic growth, China’s Export-Import Bank and other state-controlled entities regularly offer financing for railroads, highways, and other major infrastructure projects, often tied to the use of Chinese companies and workers. In exchange, China expects long-term supplies of needed natural resources. Such relationships have exploded in the new century with its African trade jumping from $10 billion to an estimated $200 billion, which far exceeds that of the United States or any European country. It has now been Africa’s largest trading partner for the last five years and boasts of having struck $400 billion worth of deals in African construction projects which have already yielded almost 1,400 miles of railroad track and nearly 2,200 miles of highways.
A civil war in South Sudan has recently imperiled China’s interests. It was forced to withdraw 300 oil workers when forces hostile to the government threatened them. As an indication of the UN’s willingness to come to the aid of stability whenever the natives get too restless, just as was the case in the Congo in Lumumba’s time, the Blue Helmets are there to “keep the peace”. It is of some significance that China has sent detachments of the PLA to help them out.
For those who like their politics kept simple if not stupid, the whole idea of the BRICS is to counter the power of Wall Street. That being the case, can I make a pitch for being able to handle complexity? Like understanding that Lloyd Blankfein is just fine with BRICS (obviously the two honchos from South Africa with ties to Goldman joining the new BRICS bank serving as all the evidence you should need). Turns out the scumbag-in-chief of Goldman-Sachs went over to China to give his blessing to the New Development Bank at Tsinghua University. You can watch him chatting it up with the dean of the business school here, a chap named Qian Yingyi:
Qian doesn’t seem to understand that the BRICS countries are on a collision course with Western financial interests, at least based on the evidence of the men he has appointed to the business school’s advisory board: Apple Inc.’s Tim Cook, Citigroup Inc.’s Michael Corbat, Blackstone Group’s Steve Schwarzman, Goldman Sachs Chairman Lloyd Blankfein and Carlyle Group’s co-founder David Rubenstein.
So the obvious question is whether this business about rival hegemonic blocs, with the West being Evil and the BRICS being Good, makes any sense with Goldman-Sachs’s bromance with someone like Qian Yingyi. Of course, we should never forget that it was a Goldman-Sachs big-shot who first got gung-ho on this development, even coining the term BRIC (before South Africa was added.) Jim O’Neill wrote “Building Better Global Economic BRICs” in 2001. It is mostly a call for figuring out how to make money in emerging markets and contains none of the hysterical warnings about how Wall Street is threatened by a new white-horse riding hegemon.
One of the interesting theoretical questions that arises out of all this is whether the old understanding of imperialist rivalry based on 1914 and 1940 make much sense in understanding today’s world. I would offer this as a potential research topic. WWI and WWII were ignited by rival nationalist agendas in line with defending capitalist industry. Protectionism via tariffs was the name of the game.
But over the past 30 years or so, capital is much less interested in building walls around local industry, as the hollowed out shells of Detroit, Cleveland and Pittsburgh would indicate.
In a brief chat with Patrick Bond at the Rosa Luxemburg conference in NYC this weekend, I raised the question of whether Lenin’s much-heralded book on imperialism is that useful in understanding today’s world. He suggested that Rosa Luxemburg’s writings are more relevant in many ways. Hmmm. Given her affinity with David Harvey’s analysis, which places an emphasis on capital’s ability to take flight and move wherever a profit can be made, that’s something that makes a lot of fucking sense.
Douma, a suburb in the rebel-held area of Ghouta, east of Damascus in Syria, has been heavily bombarded by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces for several days, following a rebel attack on central Damascus.
On Wednesday 4 February, a rebel group called Islam Army fired more than 120 rockets and mortar rounds into the capital, killing 10 people. The government’s response has been intense and prolonged.
At least 82 people were killed on Thursday and Friday as the Syrian Air Force conducted 60 air strikes on Douma.
A cloud of smoke rises following an air strike by Syrian government forces in the rebel-held area of Douma on 5 February, 2015(Abd Doumany/AFP)A view of the destruction after what activists said were at least 20 government air strikes in the Douma neighbourhood of Damascus(Mohammed Badra/Reuters)Residents of Douma carry an injured man, after what activists said were seven air strikes by forces loyal to Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad(Bassam Khabieh/Reuters)An injured man is covered with dust after reported government air strikes(Bassam Khabieh/Reuters)A man gives medical assistance to an injured man as two wounded children wait nearby at a field hospital after what activists said was an air strike by government forces in the Douma neighbourhood of Damascus(Mohammed Badra/Reuters)An injured man carries a serum bag for another injured civilian in a field hospital after what activists said was shelling by government forces in the Douma neighbourhood of Damascus, on 6 February, 2015(Mohammed Badra/Reuters)Men walk past damaged buildings after reported air strikes in Douma(Amer Almohibany/Reuters)
Assad’s forces carried out further air strikes on Monday 9 February, flattening buildings and killing at least 15 people.
The rebel-held area has been under an army siege for nearly two years – leaving tens of thousands of civilians short of food and medical supplies.
A man walks amid debris inside a heavily damaged building following reported air strikes by regime forces in Douma on 9 February, 2015(Abd Doumany/AFP)A boy stands on rubble as people try to put out a fire after what activists said were airstrikes followed by shelling(Mohammed Badra/Reuters)Syrian emergency personnel extinguish a fire following reported government air strikes(Abd Doumany/AFP)A man tries to listen for survivors trapped under the rubble of a building(Bassam Khabieh/Reuters)An injured Syrian man reacts after receiving treatment at a clinic in the rebel-held area of Douma(Abd Doumany/AFP)A Syrian boy holds his bleeding hand over a waste paper basket as he awaits treatment at a makeshift hospital(Abd Doumany/AFP)An injured civilian sits inside a shelter as he waits to receive medical assistance(Mohammed Badra/Reuters)A man removes rubble inside a house that was damaged by reported Syrian government air strikes in Douma on 8 February, 2015(Mohammed Badra/Reuters)
Around 200,000 people have been killed since 2011 in Syria’s civil war, which pits President Assad against a range of rebel groups including Islamist brigades and hardline jihadists such as Islamic State (Isis) and al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front.
Opening in New York and Los Angeles on August 28th and nationally a few days later (screening information is at oscilloscope.net), the Brazilian film “A Second Mother” is not the first I have seen that features a domestic servant as a lead character but it is one that joins a short list of those that are true works of art as opposed to something like “The Butler” that work only as melodrama and fitfully at best.
Set in Sao Paulo, it stars veteran actress Regina Casé as Val, a sixtyish woman who has worked for a wealthy family for more than a decade and who is like a “second mother” to teenaged son Fabinho (Michel Joelsas), an amiable pot-smoking slacker. Val is one of those maids who are often referred to as “one of the family” but who knows her place. She is capable of scolding Carlos (Lourenco Mutarelli), the bald and bearded owner of a sprawling modern-looking house with a swimming pool, for raiding the refrigerator but would not dream of sitting at the kitchen table with him and his family. Class lines are sharply delineated in the household even if the rules are not posted on a bulletin board. Along with the chauffeur and another maid, Val is grateful for steady work and kindness of her boss but knows her place. When she buys a coffee serving set for Barbara (Karine Teles), the woman of the house who lives a life reminiscent of Bravo TV’s tacky housewives series, she is reprimanded for serving guests with it at Barbara’s birthday party. Don’t use that one, she is told, use the Swedish set instead. In that brief exchange, director Anna Muylaert conveys an unequal relationship that a sociologist might have taken ten thousand words to describe.
Filed under: Donald Trump — louisproyect @ 7:53 pm
Yesterday Washington Post editorial writer David Ignatius compared Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin:
He promises to restore his country’s greatness, without offering a specific plan. He uses crude, vulgar expressions that make him sound like an ordinary guy, even though he’s a billionaire. He’s a narcissist who craves media attention. And for all his obvious shortcomings, he’s very popular.
Whom am I referring to? Russian President Vladimir Putin, of course. But the parallels with a certain American politician known as the “The Donald” are obvious.
Donald Trump is in some respects an American version of Putin. Like the Russian leader, he seeks to reverse his country’s losses and return its former glory. He promises a restoration of power and prestige without trifling about the details.
“We have no victories,” Trump complained to NBC’s Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “As a country, we don’t have victories anymore. And it’s very sad.”
Trump’s official slogan is “Make America Great Again!” It’s a line borrowed from Ronald Reagan’s acceptance speech at the 1980 Republican convention, when the Gipper promised a “crusade to make America great again.” But really, this kind of talk is the mainstay of politicians around the world who campaign on a platform of national restoration. Their message is as much psychological as political.
This does raise some interesting questions even though Ignatius is obviously overly enamored of these facile analogies, having already written an editorial in April 2014 stating that Putin is borrowing from Reagan’s playbook by intervening in Ukraine. This is not to speak of the message put forward in his novel “Body of Lies” that the CIA has been overly constrained by legality and oversight, telling Ken Silverstein in a Harper’s interview: “CIA officials put up with a degree of public abuse that would be unimaginable in the case of military officers.” Given what we know about torture and renditions, this makes him just as scary as Putin if not more so.
But there is something to all this. Putin emerged as a popular leader by playing the nationalist card. As opposed to Yeltsin who put down the red carpet for foreign investors buying up Russian assets at bargain basement prices, he made it clear that he had no use for Thomas Friedman type “globalization” panaceas. He has also more recently become the nemesis of the European Union, blaming it for scheming against Russian interests and throwing his support behind ultraright parties like the French National Party that are also opposed to the EU on a nationalist basis.
Despite the Republican Party’s long standing agreement with the Democrats that trade agreements like NAFTA are good for their class interests, Trump has attacked Obama’s latest free trade gambit on the basis that it does not defend American interests aggressively enough as CNN reported:
Donald Trump has lashed out against President Obama’s plans to create a free trade area across the Pacific.
The outspoken businessman, who is known to start brawls on Twitter, sent out a series of tweets explaining his opposition.
“The Trans-Pacific Partnership is an attack on America’s business. It does not stop Japan’s currency manipulation. This is a bad deal,” he said.
The U.S. government has been negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) since 2009 with 11 other nations, including Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Chile, Canada and Mexico.
It hopes to wipe out trade tariffs to bring down the cost of importing and exporting, which would help make U.S. businesses more competitive overseas. It would also make it easier for businesses to invest in other countries.
The U.S. government estimates a TPP agreement would add $223 billion per year to the global economy by 2025.
But Trump believes the deal would hurt U.S. businesses, particularly manufacturers, and put people out of work.
That’s in contrast to Hilary Clinton who backed her husband’s NAFTA to the hilt and who has spoken out of both sides of her mouth on TPP. Meanwhile Jeb Bush, who is likely the Republican candidate for 2016, has attacked Clinton for waffling. Unlike Trump, he is gung-ho on TPP.
Meanwhile Trump’s rabid nativism does resonate with Putin’s pals in Western Europe, ranging from Marine Le Pen to Nigel Farage.
Undoubtedly David Ignatius was unnerved by what Donald Trump told Bill O’Reilly on June 16th: “Putin has no respect for our president whatsoever. He’s got a tremendous popularity in Russia, they love what he’s doing, they love what he represents. I was over in Moscow two years ago and I will tell you — you can get along with those people and get along with them well. You can make deals with those people. Obama can’t. I would be willing to bet I would have a great relationship with Putin. It’s about leadership.”
I doubt that Ignatius is fully capable of understanding the romance that some Americans are developing with Donald Trump, which is some ways is like that from a generation ago when there was great affection—at least from white people—for Ronald Reagan, another man on horseback, or for that matter the feeling that Russians had for Vladimir Putin until the economy started going sour. There’s something about these macho guys that makes insecure men and women all weak in the knees, after all.
Someone tapped into the Reagan, Putin and Trump mystique—all at once—is probably the best qualified to speak about it, namely Paul Craig Roberts who was in Reagan’s Treasury Department and who nowadays carries Putin’s water just as tirelessly as Stephen F. Cohen. In an article titled “Trump for President?” on his blog, Roberts fuses the iconography of the Kremlin and Atlantic City most eloquently:
There is no known politician in America who measures up to Vladimir Putin’s ankle, or to the knee of China’s leaders, or to the waist of Ecuador’s, Bolivia’s, Venezuela’s, Argentina’s, Brazil’s, or to the chests of India’s and South Africa’s.
In Europe, the UK, Australia, and Canada, the natural leaders are also frozen out of the corrupt system.
In the US, “leadership” positions depend on financial support from the ruling economic interests. American presidents and politicians represent about six powerful private interest groups and no one else.
After Celente went to press, Donald Trump announced to much mirth. A “con man” they say, but what else is the President of the United States? Do you think you weren’t conned by Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama? What universe do you live in?
In actual fact, Trump might be our best candidate to date. By all accounts, he is very rich. Thus, he doesn’t need the office in order to become rich by selling out America to interest groups.
By all accounts, Trump has a healthy ego. Thus, he could be capable of standing up to the powerful interest groups that generally determine the governance of the American serfs.
In my very first post on Swedish Social Democracy, I stated that it was closely related in spirit to the Lassalle wing of the German Social Democracy that Marx and Engels viewed as adapting to Bismarck’s welfare state reforms, which turned out to be a velvet glove concealing an iron fist. It turns out I was on the right track.
From Herbert Tingsten’s “The Swedish Social Democrats”
A document that [August] Palm published in his newspaper The Peoples Will (Folkviljan) in November 1882 is often characterized as the first Swedish social democratic program. It was said to have been adopted by a small organization known as “The Swedish Social Democratic Workers’ Federation,” which Palm had founded in Maimo. In reality, the program was an almost uniform translation of the Danish Gimle Program adopted in 1876, which was, in turn, derived from the German Gotha Program of 1875. Palm’s translation was poor, in some instances inaccurate; the various details in its formulation cannot be interpreted as expressions of specific ideas. This summary will not consider words or phrases that are obviously products of ignorance or misunderstanding.
The following sentence introduced the program: “Labor is the true source of all wealth and culture, and all the returns thereof should accrue to him who performs the labor.” The tools of labor are the monopoly of capitalists; the surplus produced by labor should revert to the workers. Salaried labor should be abolished. Production unions should be established through state subsidies to lay the groundwork for the solution of The Social Question. These unions should be so organized “that the socialist organization can develop through collective work.” The program set up a series of demands that were to be implemented even “under the present capitalist rule”: progressive inheritance taxes, abolition of indirect taxation, which weighed heavily upon the masses, abrogation of the ordinance regarding the treatment of vagrants and the defenseless, the establishment of a standard working day, prohibition of the use of child labor in factories, which jeopardized the children’s health, regulation of sanitary standards in workers’ housing, factories, and other places of work, the workers’ right to administer “without government intervention” funds for sickness and relief benefits, state care for the ailing, the aged, and for those disabled through accidents at place of work. In the autumn of 1885 the Social Democratic Union in Stockholm worked.
Recently I learned that an EBook on Amazon.com titled “Austerity, Greece’s Debt Crisis and the Theft of Democracy” included a chapter titled “The Information Technology Problem” that discussed my articles on Naked Capitalism and those of Australian economist Billy Mitchell who has an unrealistic take on the amount of work required to modify Greek computer systems to handle a return to the drachma.
Joseph Firestone, the author of the EBook, has a PhD in Political Science from Michigan State, over 150 articles to his name, and an extensive background in IT but mostly at the management level. Right now he is the Chief Knowledge Officer of a company called Executive Information Systems, a title that most likely has something to do with Knowledge Management, his area of expertise. This is apparently a field that has emerged since 1991 but one that somehow managed to elude Columbia University where I worked from that year until my retirement in 2012. There will be something about it later in this article by another expert in the field.
Firestone tries to reconcile Mitchell’s views and my own, probably something that irritated the economist emeritus much more than it does me given his irascible reaction to my first article on Naked Capitalism. His tone reminded me of the one I take on issues such as when the Russian Revolution went off the rails but let’s leave that aside and move on to the substantive IT issues.
From Firestone I learned that Mitchell had a short follow-up article that somehow escaped my attention. Using the authority of a friend who appears to be as high-powered as Firestone, a man who “owns a significant private firm in Europe which is at the forefront of delivering innovative card payment services to banks and corporations throughout the Eurozone”, Mitchell sought once again to buttress his “its not rocket science” understanding of the IT issues.
The friend confided to him that since “the Euro was integrated ‘on-top’ of the existing legacy IT payment systems”, ‘switching’ the Drachma back on would not be such a major task.” He added:
the Grexit should be accomplished by stealth. He would leave everything in place as it is for now. Then establish, in secret, a public bank (like the German KfW), procure the banking software out-of-the-box, sign a contract with a major card-scheme to use its network for transactions and hook the bank up with the official Bank of Greece, the nation’s central bank.
I wonder if this plagiarized or at least conveyed the madcap spirit of Varoufakis’s “Plan B”. If they ever made a movie about such a scheme, I’d cast Steve Carell in the leading role (only because Peter Sellers is dead.)
In terms of the Euro being integrated on top of the legacy systems, I have no way of assessing this. As someone who has taken part in at least a dozen feasibility studies over the years, I have learned that it is best to be cautious. Apparently the higher up you are in the IT food chain, the easier it is to throw caution to the wind.
In the late 90s I advised IT management at Columbia to avoid purchasing a Facilities Management System from American Management Systems (AMS). This was an outfit that Robert McNamara’s aides in the Pentagon founded in 1970. That should have been a warning from the outset to steer clear. Within six months after the system was implemented at the cost of millions of dollars, the users decided it did not meet their needs and dumped it. Just a few years later AMS went under, no doubt partly a result of Mississippi terminating an $11.2 million contract to modernize the state’s tax system. It would go on to sue the company for $985 million. Wikipedia states: “a jury awarded the state $474.5 million in actual and punitive damages in August 2000, causing a drop in stock price from 44 3/8 to 14. The company subsequently settled the suit for $185 million.” You can bet that if Greece ever needed consulting help to get them back into the drachma, there would be latter-day versions of AMS knocking at its doors.
Furthermore, with all due respect to Mitchell and his friend who “delivers innovative card payment services to banks and corporations throughout the Eurozone”, there is more to IT in Greece than banking and credit card processing. Greece has hospitals, universities, wholesale and retail companies selling furniture, yogurt, olive oil, tourist accommodations, and Zeus knows what else. Many of these companies do not have in-house staffs. Getting them up and running on a drachma will not be a piece of cake—trust me on that.
For Firestone to bridge the gap between Mitchell and myself, he invokes his own particular areas of expertise that supposedly get us closer to “it’s not rocket science”. Naturally this require some critical commentary.
In a section titled “Web-oriented Architecture Approach to a Drachma-based Transaction System”, he advises “web-enabling a legacy system”, something that might take a “few days, if that long”. Well, gosh, why hadn’t he brought that to Varoufakis’s attention? That would have saved him from the trouble of lining up his pal at Columbia University to program a stealth-based “Plan B”. Firestone even offers up the names of some products that could be off-the-shelf solutions such as the one marketed by the slyly named Kapow Software. While this software no doubt works as advertised in terms of integrating different systems under a web-based front end, it has little to do with the complexities of batch processing—the meat and potatoes of all banking applications for which there is no user interface. Kapow might be of some use to a bank officer evaluating a loan application from a nervous customer sitting opposite him or her, but it is totally irrelevant to a stream of programs run at 3am in the morning that pump out customer statements. A customer statement like the kind that you receive from your friendly banker at the end of the month with a listing of your debits and credits followed by an account total. It is exactly programs such as these that will require onerous and time-consuming attention—nothing that Kapow can address.
Finally, returning to Firestone’s Knowledge Management, he starts off by wisely acknowledging that “people avoided mainframe applications wherever they could, because the chances of failure were so high”. He includes himself in that group. That being said, he regards the Kapow approach as an interim solution and concludes that a “better solution” would be to develop a new system written for the mainframe from scratch “using modern programming tools and techniques”—no doubt drawn from the Knowledge Management toolbox.
All I can say is that ever since the mid 1970s, I have heard about one new technique or another that would finally make developing large-scale systems more averse to failure. They were put forward either as management, systems analysis, database or programming technologies in trade journals such as Datamation or Computerworld:
—programmerless programming: Languages such as MarkIV would allow an end user to build a system by using to specify parameters that satisfied business requirements. In fact I automated Salomon Brothers in London (SBIL) when I reported to Michael Bloomberg in 1977. Trust me, Michael couldn’t have done anything in MarkIV if his life depended on it.
—goto less programming: The less said the better. I stopped using the “go to” in 1978 or so but deadlines were still missed because the user kept changing his or her mind—the real explanation for most software delays.
—structured design methodologies: I worked for a consulting company that employed SDM for a phone company project that would evaluate whether a customer would be charged for a phone call that they claimed that they didn’t make. When the consulting company demanded new funding because the project was delayed, negotiations broke down and we were escorted out of the building by security guards. SDM did not address user indecision, the cause of cost overruns.
—relational databases: This was a huge breakthrough supposedly because it organized data into rows and columns just like a spreadsheet that could be accessed through SQL and best when it was based on normalized data structures, which meant avoiding redundancies through a data analysis of the firm. I can only say that I have worked with VSAM flat files, IBM’s IMS hierarchical database, Cullinet’s IDMS network database before finally becoming a Sybase support person on my project team at Columbia University. All of them work just fine even though Sybase (and Oracle) are best suited for client-server or web-based applications. But in the final analysis, it is the problem of nailing down user requirements that will always bite you in the ass. Given the economic chaos in Greece, this will be a thousand times worse than the normal chaotic situation.
–Object orientation: I spent about five years developing Java programs in the STRUTS framework for Columbia University’s financial system. Anybody who sells OO as some kind of silver bullet should get one in the head.
Since I have never gone near Knowledge Management, I won’t say a word about it although I would be remiss if I did not refer you to this:
Wall Street Journal, Jun 24, 2015
Whatever Happened to Knowledge Management?
By Thomas H. Davenport
I would never claim to have invented knowledge management, but I confess to an intimate involvement with it. I co-authored (with my friend Larry Prusak) one of the best selling books on the topic (in case you are into the classics, it was Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know) and am supposedly the second-most cited researcher in the field (after the Japanese scholar Ikujiro Nonaka).
So I should know whereof I speak when I say that knowledge management isn’t dead, but it’s gasping for breath. First, the ongoing evidence of a pulse: academics still write about it, and some organizations (most notably APQC—a nonprofit research organization of which I am a board member and respect a lot) sells out its knowledge management conference every year. Professional services firms are still quite active and successful with the idea.
But there is plenty of evidence that it’s gasping as well. Google Trends suggests that “knowledge management” is a term rarely searched for anymore. Bain’s Management Tools and Trends survey doesn’t list it in the top 25 tools for the 2015 or 2013 surveys; it was included before that. More subjectively, although I am supposedly an expert on the topic, hardly anybody ever asks me to speak or consult about it.
What happened to this idea for improving organizations? I’m pretty sure that knowledge itself hasn’t become less important to companies and societies, so why did many organizations give up on managing it? Is there any chance it will return? And what does its near-demise tell us about the attributes of successful business ideas?
Although it’s impossible to know for sure why something rises or declines in popularity, here are some of my ideas for why knowledge management (KM) has faded:
It was too hard to change behavior. Some employees weren’t that interested in acquiring knowledge, others weren’t interested in sharing what they knew. Knowledge is tied up in politics and ego and culture. There were methods to improve its flow within organizations, but most didn’t bother to adopt them. Perhaps for this reason, the Bain survey (for example, the one from 2005) suggests that corporate satisfaction with KM was relatively low compared to some other management concepts.
Everything devolved to technology. KM is a complex idea, but most organizations just wanted to put in a system to manage knowledge, and that wasn’t enough to make knowledge flow and be applied.
The technology that organizations wanted to employ was Microsoft’s SharePoint. There were several generations of KM technology—remember Lotus Notes, for example?—but over time the dominant system became SharePoint. It’s not a bad technology by any means, but Microsoft didn’t market it very effectively and didn’t market KM at all.
It was too time-consuming to search for and digest stored knowledge. Even in organizations where a lot of knowledge was contributed to KM systems—consulting firms like Deloitte and Accenture come to mind—there was often too much knowledge to sort through. Many people didn’t have the patience or time to find everything they needed. Ironically, the greater the amount of knowledge, the more difficult it was to find and use.
Google also helped kill KM. When people saw how easy it was to search external knowledge, they were no longer interested in the more difficult process for searching out internal knowledge.
KM never incorporated knowledge derived from data and analytics. I tried to get my knowledge management friends to incorporate analytical insights into their worlds, but most had an antipathy to that topic. It seems that in this world you either like text or you like numbers, and few people like both. I shifted into focusing on analytics and Big Data, but few of the KM crowd joined me.
Any chance that this idea will come back? I don’t think so. The focus of knowledge-oriented projects has shifted to incorporating it into automated decision systems. The hot technology for managing knowledge is now IBM Corp.IBM -0.28%’s Watson—very different from the traditional KM model. Big Data and analytics are also much more a focus than KM within organizations. These concepts may be declining a bit in popularity too, but companies are still very focused on making them work.
If you believe in knowledge management—and you should—perhaps in your organization you can avoid the pitfalls I have listed and allow the idea to thrive. And if you favor a different idea and want it to survive over the long term, don’t hitch a complicated set of behaviors to technology alone. Don’t embrace a vendor for your concept that doesn’t care much about your idea. And if another notion that’s related to yours comes along and gains popularity, don’t shun it, embrace it.
Thomas H. Davenport is a Distinguished Professor at Babson College, a Research Fellow at the Center for Digital Business, Director of Research at the International Institute for Analytics, and a Senior Advisor to Deloitte Analytics.
Recent photo of Steve Wozniak and Rod Holt
