Posted 11:13 am by Ken

Tsunami

Information about the disaster and how to help can be found at The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami blog. (Via a thread on Making Light, where you can also find more links to aid sites and emergency helplines.) One way to help, by the way, is to copy these links.

Posted 2:15 am by Ken

Catching Up

I've recently finished my latest SF novel, provisionally titled Learning the World and even apart from the looming Christmas I've not been short of things to do. Having recklessly agreed to write short stories for no less than four anthologies, three of them deadlined for next year, I feel as if I'm climbing the lower slopes of Mount Stross. I also have my next novel to think about. And I still haven't decided what it's going to be. I have three ideas knocking about in my head at the moment. The first, on which I've actually done some research and note-taking, is The Bright Command (formerly pencilled in as The Dark Queen's Day), an addition to the still small sub-genre of Dark Lord revisionism. (That's where the multiracial horde with lowly accents and ugly faces who build noisome factories all over fantasyland are the good guys. I like Lord of the Rings, don't get me wrong, but aren't there moments when it feels a bit like Gone With the Wind without the frocks?) It won't be fantasy. It'll have some fantasy look-and-feel, at least at first, but it's straight SF. The setting is a planet elsewhere in the infinite universe that is another Earth with a different history and geography, but with enough similarity in languages that I don't have to make up funny names. The second, to which I've given some incoherent thought, is a kick-start to the hitherto non-existent genre of New Cosy Catastrophe: a good pint of Wyndham with a side of Ballardian bitter and twisted. The strapline for The Execution Channel is 'The War on Terror is over. Terror won.' And finally, a mere evil gleam in my eye, is Storm the Sky!, an epic of the socialist industrialisation of the Solar system. Of course if I really was on the Stross curve I would write all three.

Speaking of Stross, I've been reading his forthcoming Accelerando, and it's really, really good. It has the sort of conceptual density you'd expect from someone taking cyberpunk as default, as read, as a done deal, the way cyberpunk took New Wave, New Wave took Golden Age, and Golden Age took Gernsback.

One thing I haven't been doing is blogging. So here are some links to better stuff than I could write anyway. Via the always interesting and often wrong SIAW, a good piece about Neil Ascherson's much-linked-to review of Deutscher on Trotsky. Then, if you like, you could always read a much more surprising lament for Deutscher by Peter Sedgewick, of whose writing it could (almost) be said, as he did of Orwell:

Every page is compulsively readable, and usually says something very funny, even if it happens to be wrong.

There are virtually no other political journalists from this period [...] whose collected output could be printed today except as a dreadful warning.

Sedgewick wrote a likewise surprising and informative (and regretably incomplete) study of Orwell, and (just to show that he had a finger on the pulse of his own time, the 1960s) a quite remarkably spot-on review of the then high-point of English Marxist thought, the famous anthology Towards Socialism, pinned forever to the dissecting-board as Theory at the Hour of Wilson.


Paying for People Power

Conservative columnist and historian Mark Almond recalls his days as a Cold War bagman who 'carried tens of thousands of dollars to Soviet-bloc dissidents':

Throughout the 1980s, in the build-up to 1989's velvet revolutions, a small army of volunteers - and, let's be frank, spies - co-operated to promote what became People Power. A network of interlocking foundations and charities mushroomed to organise the logistics of transferring millions of dollars to dissidents. The money came overwhelmingly from Nato states and covert allies such as "neutral" Sweden.

[...]

The hangover from People Power is shock therapy. Each successive crowd is sold a multimedia vision of Euro-Atlantic prosperity by western-funded "independent" media to get them on the streets. No one dwells on the mass unemployment, rampant insider dealing, growth of organised crime, prostitution and soaring death rates in successful People Power states.

In 1989, our security services honed an ideal model as a mechanism for changing regimes, often using genuine volunteers. Dislike of the way communist states constrained ordinary people's lives led me into undercover work, but witnessing mass pauperisation and cynical opportunism in the 1990s bred my disillusionment.

Of course, I should have recognised the symptoms of corruption earlier. Back in the 1980s, our media portrayed Prague dissidents as selfless academics who were reduced to poverty for their principles, when they were in fact receiving $600-monthly stipends. Now they sit in the front row of the new Euro-Atlantic ruling class. The dowdy do-gooder who seemed so devoted to making sure that every penny of her "charity" money got to a needy recipient is now a facilitator for investors in our old stamping grounds. The end of history was the birth of consultancy.

Grown cynical, the dissident types who embezzled the cash to fund, say, a hotel in the Buda hills did less harm than those that launched politico-media careers. In Poland, the ex-dissident Adam Michnik's Agora media empire - worth $400m today - grew out of the underground publishing world of Solidarity, funded by the CIA in the 1980s. His newspapers now back the war in Iraq, despite its huge unpopularity among Poles.

Meanwhile, from the shipyard workers who founded Solidarity in 1980 to the Kolubara miners of Serbia, who proclaimed their town "the Gdansk of Serbia" in October 2000, millions now have plenty of time on their hands to read about their role in history.

As a somewhat less successful former bag-carrier myself, I know how he feels.

Posted 5:19 pm by Ken

The Strange Death of Socialist Scotland

Socialism, in its modern sense, was born in Scotland. Before Owen there were millennarians and utopians, prophets and putschists. After him there was A New View of Society. New Lanark is where it all began.

(I'll come back to that.)

Not that Scotland has had a natural inclination toward socialism. This is the country that literally rationalised capitalism, by explaining to the English the new world they had stumbled into, and repeating in practice with great consciousness and purpose what the English had done first in their wonted empirical way. The effect was lasting. In the 1950s half the popular vote went to the Tories. The Clyde shipyards and the Fife coalfield produced the bedrock Labour vote and a thin but hard stratum of Communism, and most of the few British Communists whose names became household words: John Maclean, Willie Gallagher M.P., Jimmy Reid, Mick McGahey. Labour, the Liberals and the Nationalists slowly colonised the raised beaches left by the Tories' long decline, and proved tough as machair grass. For all that, Scotland in the 60s and 70s wasn't a particularly left-wing country. At the level of credible political vision, 1979 clobbered Old Labour and 1989 despatched Communism, here as everywhere else. Other socialist traditions less wedded to the state, though deeply rooted, were as obscure and obscured here as everywhere else. So why did Scotland become ever more left-wing in the 80s and 90s?

What gave Scottish socialism a second life was Margaret Thatcher. For nearly two decades Scots voted Labour and got the Tories. Scottish heavy industry - mines, shipbuilding, steel - withered in the blast. To add insult to injury, the Poll Tax was introduced in Scotland a year ahead of England, rather as dangerous weapons are tested off the coast of Mull. Thatcherism never caught on north of the Border. It wasn't just a question of policies. The woman was detested. Something about her rubbed most Scots the wrong way. It wasn't just the working and middle classes she failed to charm. I know a man who in the course of his work met many pillars of the Scottish establishment - captains of industry, distinguished scholars, princes of the church, retired Army officers, lairds so conservative they were spiritually Jacobites - who loathed her with a passion. Some apparent exceptions - Michael Forsyth, Malcolm Rifkind, Lord Mackay spring to mind - all came from outside the establishment. (Mackay of Clashfern's title is not inherited. His father was a railway worker. He was probably the first presbyterian Lord Chancellor since the Revolution.)

Although it was old Labour that had, in 1978, dashed the hopes of devolution, the Scottish left and intelligentsia responded to the Thatcher years with a devolution of the mind: 'Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation', and all that. The results were brilliant. The art was magic. A left-wing nationalism became the common sense of the age. Its left fringe became the Scottish Socialist Party. Tommy Sheridan, now Scotland's best-known Socialist MSP, first became famous for leading popular resistance to the Poll Tax, and for winning a council seat from the prison his resistance had put him in. Later, he spoke for many who were left out by New Labour: those with no hope, and those with much.

The SSP is much more important in Scottish politics than its 6% of the vote would suggest. The political editor of a Sunday newspaper a few months ago explained it like this: By its permanent potential to take disillusioned left-wing votes from Labour, the SNP and the Liberal Democrats, it acts as a sheet-anchor keeping the whole system to starboard. It's the main reason why the Scottish Parliament seems to have five left-of-centre parties and one right-of-centre party. The right-of-centre party, the Tories, are almost embarrassed to exist. Now this is all about to change.

In Scotland socialism died this month. It was killed by two Executives: the Executive of the Scottish Parliament, when they decided to ban smoking in all enclosed public (and many private) spaces; and the Executive of the Scottish Socialist Party, when they voted to ditch Tommy Sheridan as Convener. Laugh if you like, but if some day there's a book with the above title, November 2004 will have a chapter to itself. Here's why.

First, the smoking ban. Of course I'm against it, but that isn't why I think it's a nail in the coffin of Scottish socialism. Plenty of decisions made by Scottish Labour have been a lot worse. This one, however, is the first time since the Poll Tax when they've decided to go after their own constituents. It's a huge attack on traditional Labour-voting working-class culture, and a huge attack on traditional Labour-voting bohemian culture. Of course its proponents don't see it that way. They see it as protecting the workers, and (as one of them put it) 'saving the dying Scotsman from himself'. They really think it will be popular. The most prominent left-wing journalists agree. They have some sad awakenings coming.

Another Executive setting itself up for a fall is that of the Scottish Socialist Party. Rumours about Tommy Sheridan's personal life had reached the press. The executive were dissatisfied with how Sheridan handled them. They demanded that he either say nothing to the press, or speak to a sympathetic newspaper, or face an open press conference. He insisted he would sue the newspaper retailing the allegations. The executive refused to back him or back down, and thus (it would seem) forced him to resign. When he spun his resignation as the result of a need to genuinely spend more time with his wife, other stories promptly emerged in print.

The SSP executive had no standing to put Sheridan's personal life on its agenda. Nothing had been alleged that affected the public interest, or the working-class interest. If he was reckless to insist on his day in court, that was his business.

I have no inside information. Perhaps having it would make a difference. That's beside the point. For everyone outside a party, its public actions are its actions. I can only go by what I see, and what I see is a train-wreck.

The SSP executive's political ineptitude in this matter is staggering. None of the other five SSP MSPs have a sixth of Tommy Sheridan's nous and charisma. I don't know him personally, but I've seen him speak in quiet rooms and noisy streets. I've by chance seen him convey to an individual a most personal sympathy. The man is an authentic working-class hero, the SSP's only household name, and its greatest asset.

That this should matter to the SSP is a sign of its weakness. It has many strengths. It has flaunted its republicanism. It has stood firm for the legalisation of cannabis, and the decriminalization of heroin addiction. It has opposed the imperialist war. It has stood up for persecuted asylum-seekers. It has stood by beleaguered trade unionists. It has sunk roots that extend far beyond the far left. But one thing it has not done is produce a credible and coherent socialist programme. By quite deliberately setting out to straddle nationalism and internationalism, reform and revolution, state-socialism and left-libertarianism, the party as such has had nothing very convincing to say. There is no conversation of socialism in Scotland. The SSP - as a party, not necessarily in all its parts and certainly not in all its members - is culturally philistine and economically incoherent. It's a tax-and-spend party with a nationalist tinge and more than a touch of political correctitude.

I've always respected the SSP's strengths, but I've never agreed with its statism and its nationalism. Its successes have been very inconvenient to the powerful and privileged. It has been the backbone of the anti-war movement in many parts of Scotland. That movement has now extended to some military families. It can be only a matter of time before it reaches the military itself. The SSP, and Sheridan personally, have been central to this very recent development, which has caused deep concern at the highest levels of the British state. For those in power the SSP's crisis couldn't have come at a more convenient moment.

Back to New Lanark, where it all began.

Robert Owen's enlightened capitalism succeeded. His communist experiments, inspired by that success, failed. His syndicalist and mutualist union failed. He then threw his great energy and ability into the co-operative movement. This voluntary and everyday socialism was a global success. There are now 800 million members of co-operatives. Engels counted Owen with the utopians, but the workers' co-operative has outlived the workers' parties and the workers' states. Which is not to say that Engels was altogether wrong. We still need the commonwealth as well as the co-operative. If it were to re-examine its libertarian and radical roots, a socialism that began again in Scotland might yet have the last laugh.

Posted 9:13 pm by Ken

Like a Death; or, Altogether Elsewhere, Vast

The Conservative and the Communist sometimes find they have more in common than either might have expected; at least that they understand each other, and agree on what is important; likewise the Freethinker and the Fundamentalist. In politics as in religion, both poles are perplexed by the Liberal; from opposite sides of the case they scratch their heads, like Victorian biologists looking at a platypus and wondering if they aren't being made a monkey of.

That's how I feel sometimes. I love you guys, but I don't understand you. Add to this that I have a tin ear for US politics, and my qualifications for commenting on last week's election, and giving my liberal friends tips on how to warm their eggs and suckle their young are complete.

However, these and like hobblings haven't noticeably shut up anyone else, so here's my take.

It's been like a death in the family. Not of someone close, but of someone you didn't expect to miss so much until after they were gone. You wish you'd made more of an effort. You find yourself thinking of other things, and then feeling an unaccountable sadness seep into your day, and then remembering why. Or you keep coming back to it, looking again at the old photos, at the once insignificant postcards. I mean all that; that's been, to my surprise, exactly how I felt. The death is of an idea of America and the mementos are the blogs of my friends.

From outside, I don't think they've quite taken the measure of what's happened.

Before the election, one could at least blame Bush, or some small group around him. In 2000, leaving aside the shenanigans around the count, people had voted for 'a uniter, not a divider', for a 'humbler' foreign policy, for a 'compassionate conservatism'. The atrocity of 9/11 had knocked America sideways. The fury was not only understandable, but so widely shared that the flag of Red China flew at half mast. It was only as the War on Terror mutated into the Iraq War that the mood changed. But this and other features of the first Bush term could still be seen as an abberation.

Well, now the American people have legitimised the bastard. Of course many, perhaps most, of those who voted for the President didn't consciously and deliberately vote for all he stands for. This is because not all, but a substantial portion, were too fucking stupid to find out. These knuckle-dragging cousin-fuckers who are LIVING PROOF that Darwin was right and who were piped to the polls by shills for crony capitalists who are LIVING PROOF that Marx was right still think America was attacked by Iraq, and payback is a bitch. I have news for them. It is. My only problem with that, frankly, is that I love too many folks who don't deserve to be collateral damage.

So what can the reality-based community do? Blunt the other side's wedge issues and start hammering in some wedges of your own.

God: Give the Dispensationalist heresy a sound thrashing. That Armageddon and Rapture stuff isn't unmediated holy writ. It's recent and tendentious and gets most of its fuel these days from a science fiction novel, for crying out loud. Much the same goes for the Scientific Creationist heresy. The theory of evolution is compatible with conservative and evangelical Christianity, and has been held to be so ever since Augustine. The SciCre theory that the universe we live in has wildly different physical and biological laws from the one God created and found 'very good' is not. It's literally the oldest heresy in the book, the one Paul was talking about when he denounced 'oppositions of science falsely so called'. Hammer on this, and leave atheism to us atheists.

Guns: I won't change anyone's mind on this, but those on the left who support the Second Amendment should proclaim it from the housetops. The rest should just buy guns and keep quiet about it.

Gays: Depressing as the votes against gay marriage are, they should be seen in perspective. The people who voted for them are not necessarily raving homophobic bigots. They might just be objecting to being asked to sanctify sin. I don't agree with them, but I can understand where they're coming from. I don't have any solutions for this.

Wedges the other way:

Class. Give poorer people in the red states some good reasons to vote your way. Forget socialism. From the Babylonian captivity of the Walmart workplace and the Enron boardroom, normal law-abiding capitalism will start to look like the New Jerusalem.

Conservatism. Conservatism is not an ideology of world revolution. Neoconservatism is. Real conservatives know this. Make sure they know you know. Red-bait every ex-Trot neocon, and smear the rest.

Global warming. Forget Kyoto. Build more nukes. Reactors in blue states, nuclear waste dumps in the red. (Comparative advantage; it's all in Ricardo.)

Science. Flood Geology won't find oil. Giving human rights to stuff you can only see with a microscope means handing the future to the French. Come to think of it, this is a win, so scratch that one. (Comparative advantage again.)

Americanism. The Bush coalition is not going to fall apart at the first lost war or the first recession, so you're going to need to think like the Modern Prince. Just don't talk like Gramsci. He was an Italian and he was writing in prison. Every strand of opinion on the left, from the most moderate to the most radical, has had an American champion who spoke and wrote with passion and eloquence. Read Gramsci, but talk like Debs.

War on Islamist Terror. It would be a good idea. With Europe, Cuba, Vietnam, China, Russia and every KGB- or CIA-trained mukhabarat in the Middle East and Central Asia already on side, we could really win this one if America joined in, instead of coddling the folks who gave us Beslan and handing Iraq to Osama on a fucking plate.

I should just stop. This may all be decided by factors we can barely glimpse and can't predict, Rumsfeld's 'unknown unknowns'.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

Auden, The Fall of Rome

Posted 10:35 pm by Ken

'In the Beginning All the World was America ...'

It wasn't just another election. Something broke this week.

More than half the US electors have voted for smirking evil. They've voted for a President who openly believes he is above the law. They've voted for torture, tyranny and aggressive wars of conquest. They've voted for religious obscurantism. They've cast a vote of confidence in the past four years, and asked for four more years like them. They've done all this because they believe that this is what it will take to make them safe. They've voted against liberty for a little temporary safety, and they deserve and can expect but little of either.

American socialist Martin Schreader, editor of The Appeal to Reason, gets it:

Until today, it remained something of a question whether or not the people of the United States would use the ballot as a means of demonstrating their desire to maintain nominally democratic norms. As it stands right now, the question has been answered ... in the negative. The combined power of the corporate media, the corporate parties (and their corporatised labour unions) and a contrived ‘culture of fear’ have turned the average American voter into a Pavlovian nightmare. The end result has been that the Bush regime, which came to power through a bloodless coup d'etat in 2000, has now been effectively legitimised through a large 'vote of confidence' by over 50 million Americans.

A plurality of Americans has, through their votes, chosen to approve the burial of the second republic in favour of imperialist empire. Their legitimising of the Bush regime and their support for the 'culture war' has irreversibly broken the continuity of American democracy. The process of Weimarisation is complete.

Certain wooden-headed elements of the left will, of course, continue to assert that little, if anything, new has happened as a result of this election. They will continue to see the old institutional facades in place and will impressionistically conclude that all talk of a new period in American history as delusional. They will note that the uniquely American brand of anti-democratic, anti-worker corporatism that has taken hold in Washington does not correspond to what they read in history books and vulgarly conclude that nothing has really changed. In this author's view, these are little more than the echoes of the past and should be treated as such.

It is time for class-conscious working people, revolutionary socialists and communists to face forward and begin to come to grips with the new situation confronting us. Working class unity will have to take as its starting point the development of a common assessment of this situation and the revolutionary democratic tasks that inevitably flow from it. Left unity - if such a thing is still possible - will have to be its by-product.

Today, I mourn the failure of the 215-year-old 'noble experiment'. The republic is dead: long live the republic!

It is time to begin the world again. We can start here, in the first territory of the Revolution, land of Locke and Cromwell and Paine, by bringing down that man of blood Tony Blair.

Posted 9:03 pm by Ken

Predicted Top 3 Creationist Explanations of Homo floresiensis

1. Apes, hunted by the humans whose spear-heads were found near their bones.

2. Human, children of Adam, not much more different from most humans
than pygmies are. What are you, some kind of racist?

3. Spawn of the Nephilim.

Posted 10:19 am by Ken

The Halflings

The discovery of another human species that may have lived as recently as 12 000 years ago is thrilling and delightful. It touches us in that part of of our minds where we fill the aching gap between us and the rest of nature with dwarfs and giants, elves and hobbits. Real little people! Three feet tall! Wow! It doesn't turn anthropology or the story of human evolution on its head, a piece of science-correspondent gabble I think I heard during my goggle-eyed, gobsmacked, yelping look at yesterday evening's TV news. The best guess at the moment is that the little people had larger ancestors. That an island population of Homo erectus should evolve to a small size is [or should have been] no great surprise. On islands, including Flores, dwarf forms of large animals and giant forms of small ones are common. But I know of not even a science-fictional speculation that it could somewhere have happened to humans. That a brain a quarter the size of ours could sustain human consciousness - tool-making, fire, probably language - certainly is food for thought, and should perhaps make us reconsider the capacities of our remoter relatives.

What's really wonderful is that another human species, so different from our own, should exist so recently. 12 000 years ago is like yesterday. We only just missed each other. At some ancient stratum of our minds, we miss them still. To hope that their living descendants may yet be found is probably forlorn, but only human.

Posted 4:00 pm by Ken

First Lobsters, now Rats

The Stross Singularity looms:

Somewhere in Florida, 25,000 disembodied rat neurons are thinking about flying an F-22.

These neurons are growing on top of a multi-electrode array and form a living "brain" that's hooked up to a flight simulator on a desktop computer. When information on the simulated aircraft's horizontal and vertical movements are fed into the brain by stimulating the electrodes, the neurons fire away in patterns that are then used to control its "body" -- the simulated aircraft.

Posted 8:37 am by Ken

Battlestar Dialectica

Free advertising, or a friendly note to SF/fantasy readers in the northerly parts of the UK:

Tuesday 19th October at 6.30pm China Mieville, author of King Rat, Perdido Street Station and The Scar will be reading from his new novel IRON COUNCIL and taking questions from the audience at Waterstones, 153-157 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow G2 3EW. Tickets free from store

Ditto for Wednesday 20th October at 7pm at Borders, 94-96 Briggate, Leeds LS1. Free event

Likewise Thursday 21st October at 6.30pm at Waterstones 24-26 High Street, Birmingham B4. Tickets £3 redeemable against purchase of the book

STOP PRESS The Glasgow event is going ahead as planned, but the Leeds and Birmingham ones have been cancelled.

Posted 1:14 am by Ken

Calton Hill

My quoting a chunk of 'Caledonia' in this post last night was probably sentimental as well as illegal, but on the day the Queen opens the Scottish Parliament I'm happy to endorse the SSP's stand for the Republic.

Posted 1:31 pm by Ken

Catching Up

I've been away for a bit, and I don't expect to do much blogging in the next couple of months. I'm working on a new SF novel, provisionally titled Learning the World, and the deadline looms. After I finish it I intend to plunge straight into the next, because I already have the notes for it that I usually spend a few months scraping together.

On holiday I read Richard Dawkins' Climbing Mount Improbable and Steve Jones's Almost Like a Whale, both well worth reading. The latter made me want to re-read the book on which it's modelled, The Origin of Species. I read the 6th edition when I was at university, and it's about time I read the first. It'll have to wait its turn on the stack, though.

What incited me to read the Dawkins book was having, a couple of weeks ago, read his essay collection A Devil's Chaplain, where he says:

It is time for people of intellect, as opposed to people of faith, to stand up and say 'Enough!' Let our tribute to the September dead be a new resolve: to respect people for what they individually think, rather than respect groups for what they were collectively brought up to believe.

Posted 5:21 pm by Ken

'Beslan must be the last straw'

I object!

On the slaughter in Beslan

Maryam Namazie

Beslan must be the last straw for anyone and everyone who abhors terrorism and its consequences, including those who still might have felt even after 9/11, Madrid, the beheadings and hostage-takings that these acts were somehow justified or at least the consequences of injustice meted out against the terrorists and their 'cause' or the 'people' they 'represent'.

Beslan must be the last straw because I guess when it comes to children, it is easier to see the truth and go beyond constructed divisions of nationality, religion, occupation, gender or race and to stand up for human beings pure and simple.

I think that is why Beslan will be the watershed in the fight against Islamic terrorism. For one thing, it has made crystal clear that there can be no justification for it. Not even Russian state terrorism. Not even the occupation of Palestine; not even the war on Iraq or every war fought in this century and the last. None of it can justify the thirst, the fear, the pain, the terror, the trauma and the death of even one child in Beslan.

Secondly, it has shown that these justifications have nothing to do with defending just causes and people. Just like the war on Iraq cannot be justified by claiming it is 'bringing democracy and freedom' to the people there; so too Islamists cannot justify their barbarism by claiming it is for the 'liberation of Chechnya or Iraq' or some other seemingly worthy cause. Beslan has shown that both sides lie and deceive in order to justify their terrorisms. Both have shown they have absolutely no regard for human life. And that in fact they are antithetical to life itself.

People in the west have seen through USA-led state terrorism a lot quicker though. Look at the opposition against the war on Iraq. But Islamic terrorism has often been let off the hook because of post-colonial guilt, western citizens' false perceptions that they are accountable for the actions of 'their governments', and the whole notion of cultural relativism which allows bogus abuse-excuse justifications and doesn't hold the masked suicide bomber and hejab-wearing terrorist carrying a Koran up to same universal standards and norms of the 21st century.

Well I object!

And you out there - you decent human beings who are outraged by Beslan and will never ever be the same after seeing those pictures of mangled and terrorised children. You must object as well.

Each and every one of us must object every time they strike. Not only the people of Madrid, Beslan or New York. But all of us.

Next time, upon hearing of another terrorist atrocity, we must leave our workplaces, our homes, our shopping queues, our schools and universities and head for the main city square in every city. I will go to Trafalgar square next time. If you live in New York, go to Times Square; if you live in Berlin, go to Alexanderplatz; if you live in Venice, go to St. Marco Square. Go with banners or pieces of paper saying 'I object to terrorism!' If you don't have pieces of paper or placards, write these words on your hands and on your faces.

The USA, UK, Russian states that are themselves one pole of international terrorism in the world today cannot represent the people of the west or fight terrorism for them just as Islamic terrorism cannot represent or fight for the people of the Middle East and Chechnya.

It is only us.

It is up to us.

Out on the streets.

On our own behalf.

On the behalf of civilised humanity.

We object!

From: WPI Briefing 154, September 9, 2004

Weekly of the Worker-communist Party of Iran

Posted 10:30 am by Ken

From those wonderful people who gave you Afghanistan

John Laughland is a conservative and controversial journalist, so I looked on this story with some scepticism:

[I]n the US, the leading group which pleads the Chechen cause is the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). The list of the self-styled "distinguished Americans" who are its members is a rollcall of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusastically support the "war on terror".

They include Richard Perle, the notorious Pentagon adviser; Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame; Kenneth Adelman, the former US ambassador to the UN who egged on the invasion of Iraq by predicting it would be "a cakewalk"; Midge Decter, biographer of Donald Rumsfeld and a director of the rightwing Heritage Foundation; Frank Gaffney of the militarist Centre for Security Policy; Bruce Jackson, former US military intelligence officer and one-time vice-president of Lockheed Martin, now president of the US Committee on Nato; Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, a former admirer of Italian fascism and now a leading proponent of regime change in Iran; and R James Woolsey, the former CIA director who is one of the leading cheerleaders behind George Bush's plans to re-model the Muslim world along pro-US lines.

The ACPC heavily promotes the idea that the Chechen rebellion shows the undemocratic nature of Putin's Russia, and cultivates support for the Chechen cause by emphasising the seriousness of human rights violations in the tiny Caucasian republic. It compares the Chechen crisis to those other fashionable "Muslim" causes, Bosnia and Kosovo - implying that only international intervention in the Caucasus can stabilise the situation there. In August, the ACPC welcomed the award of political asylum in the US, and a US-government funded grant, to Ilyas Akhmadov, foreign minister in the opposition Chechen government, and a man Moscow describes as a terrorist. Coming from both political parties, the ACPC members represent the backbone of the US foreign policy establishment, and their views are indeed those of the US administration.

If anything, Laughland understates the case. The ACPC's membership list is indeed a roll-call, and not just of neocons. And to chair an organization devoted to the peaceful resolution of a conflict between Russia and Chechnya, who better to pick than Zbigniew Brzezinski and Alexander Haig?

Brzezinski, in particular, must really inspire trust in the Kremlin.

Brendan O'Neill reminds us of, inter alia, Afghan-Chechen links which, in a quite remarkable article on the ACPC site, we are assured do not exist, except in minor and inconsequential ways such as military training and $200 000 dollars.

Posted 10:34 pm by Ken

Before the Barbarism

'Finally, it is 1st September, and the first day of studies ... For the past week ... [p]arents and children ... have been crowding the shops for exercise books and satchels. [...] This is a day you cannot fail to notice. The street is crowded with children in school uniform. [...] Each child is preceded and partially obscured by the bunch of flowers that will be given to the teachers.'

This is not the opening of an article on the Beslan massacre, though it could be, in every detail. It's from a 1985 BBC book based on a BBC television series on everyday life in the Soviet Union. That celebration of the first day of the school year was a surviving ceremony of the civilization that thirteen years ago was swept away. That custom tells us, in a sense, all we need to know about the Soviet Union. (And yes, I know the rest.) This was a civilization that with all its callouses, scar tissue and war wounds, with all its congenital deformities, with all its inherited savageries, had Enlightenment inscribed in its genes.

A very interesting discussion has erupted in the comments to this post, which deserves to be disinterred from Lenin's Tomb. I've strung together the following from the successive comments of a passionate Chechen nationalist:

As a Chechen nationalist and supporter of [Chechen President] Aslan Maskhadov, with all the passionate support I have given to legitimate (obviously the three atrocities in Russia last week are not legitimate) armed resistance against Federal and pro-Moscow Chechen military and police (the "police" in Russia have their own tank and artillery divisions btw), I'm beginning to think that continuation of the armed struggle, coupled with the global war on terror and the total lack of international support (bar the "Brothers of Jihad") for Chechen independence (and the Jihadis aren't, strictly speaking, fighting for a sovereign, Chechen State), will just lead to, in effect, national suicide for the Chechens as an ethnic group.

If things keep going same old for even 5 more years, we'll have had 15 years of almost continual warfare in Chechnya. 15 years!

That's a whole generation growing up knowing nothing but war. Little kids and teenagers in Chechnya today can tell you all about different types of attack helicopters, armoured personal carriers, tanks, grenades, how to strip an AK...but just don't ask them to write it down on a piece of paper, they'll probably have trouble writing. In 1989, our national literacy rate was 95-98% ... I don't even want to know what it is today.

So, to recap, if the war goes same old for the next five years, add in all of the above also factor in future civilian casualties (based on current figures), a seriously decimated medical sector (tuberculosis now affects something like one in ten Chechens...in 1989 there was zero occurrence of TB), unbelievable environmental degradation (a combined legacy of Soviet era pollution and the war damage done to the oil refineries, pipelines and industrial plants...the incidences of cancer and birth defects are also shocking) and a fragmented resistance (Basaev can't even control all the people who profess allegiance to him)...voila Chechens = Arawaks (aboriginals of the Caribbean...Europeans decimated every last man, woman and child through that old combination of flu, overwork, starvation, shooting and chopping).

Just to add. You know one thing a hell of a lot of Chechens (whether pro-Russian or nationalist like me ... even the odd Wahabbite would you believe!) agree on, is that the Soviet Union from Khrushchev until 1989 was actually the time when Chechens (to quote Macmillan?)..."never had it so good."

Of course, no Chechen would look back to Stalin's rule with any nostalgia...the 1944 Deportations ensure that...but the bit after Stalin was a bit of a "socialist paradise" for us.

"Fuck 2004 give me 1984!" - graffiti written on the side of one of Grozny's few standing walls (I got this from a photograph taken by a Chechen journalist in February of this year).

[...]

I'd also argue that like in Yugoslavia, the USSR also produced a genuine sense of Soviet pan-national pride (it wasn't all based on fear). Look, the open racism towards people of Caucasian and Central Asian nationality within present-day Russia was fairly negligible (at least not so open, violent and wide-spread) during Soviet days. Many of the Chechen Rebel leadership had gained their first fighting experience during the Red Army's campaign in Afghanistan...where they served the Soviet State out of genuine loyalty...not coercion.

Now, picture 1984, you're in the Red Army Base at Bagram. What do you see? Chechens, Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Ossetians, Ingush, Tajik, Turkmen etc serving side-by-side in Afghanistan (admittedly in an unjust war...though I'm not arguing about the rights and wrongs of that bullshit war), breaking bread together, sharing a glass of vodka, passing round a nice, fat joint of sweet Afghan Gold after taking on the Dushmani (Red Army slang for the Afghan Mujis). That scenario, seen through today's former Soviet Union, is almost unimaginable.

Okay, I'm not trying to make the post-Stalin Soviet Union look like some "Arcadia" but it bloody well was in terms of inter-ethnic relations as compared to the present.

As one grieving relative in Beslan said this weekend, 'Things like this simply did not happen in the Soviet Union.' Nobody could have imagined in 1989 or 1991 that children in what was then the Soviet Union would one day be reduced to eating the flowers they had brought, one bright September morning, to give their teachers.

Posted 10:09 am by Ken

A Bear Market

The Beslan massacre is Russia's 9/11. It is Islamism's Abu Ghraib. It is the moment when the cause becomes filth. Images of abused naked children will now always be associated with it. It has already been denounced across the Middle East in unprecedented terms.

The atrocity doesn't subtract one iota from the justice of the demand for an end to the long catalogue of horrors Russia has inflicted on the Chechens. It does make any progress towards that end far harder. The Chechens might seem to have already suffered everything that Russia might inflict. They haven't.

The BBC's live coverage seemed intent on finding evidence of anger against the Russian authorities in Beslan. This anger exists, but I don't think it's that particular anger that will find its expression in the weeks and months to come, and I don't think the emphasis on it is particularly helpful.

What happened at Beslan was not just Russia's 9/11. For Ossetia, it was a massacre of the kind that is permanently burned into a nation's memory, like Lidice and Deir Yassin. And Ossetia is the last place in the world where you want that to happen. The Caucasus is where the next world war could begin.

Yesterday's Mail on Sunday (not online) carries an article by Mark Almond, Lecturer in Modern History at Oriel College, Oxford, who wrote presciently about the Caucasian tinderbox last month. Almond notes that 'old Trotskyists' and 'old Cold War warriors' and neocons are among Chechen separatism's Western supporters, and claims that Western tolerance of Chechen separatist websites and exiles doesn't go down well with the Russians. Nor does the habit of former Soviet states such as Latvia to name streets after Chechen rebels, as well as after their own local SS men. The Russians don't see themselves as the imperialists. They see themselves as the targets of imperialism.

Vladimir Putin's speech included a heavy hint that he shares this view:

We showed weakness, and the weak are trampled upon. Some want to cut off a juicy morsel from us while others are helping them.

They are helping because they believe that, as one of the world's major nuclear powers, Russia is still posing a threat to someone, and therefore this threat must be removed.

Others are quite explicit about who this 'they' and 'someone' are:

The situation in North Ossetia needs to be viewed in the context of the growing battle for control of the Transcaucasus between Russia and the Anglo-Saxon powers... The Anglo-Saxons need to squeeze Russia out of the Transcaucasus, and to do that they need to destabilise the situation in the North Caucasus and in Russia in general.

Mikhail Alexandrov in Defence Ministry daily Krasnaya Zvezda

Putin's speech should be taken as a serious warning.

Posted 9:42 pm by Ken

After Burns

Here's a poem I wrote on the date indicated, when I went into Edinburgh and around 2 p.m. our time felt the eerie silence of the sky and the streets, like hearing the birds stop singing during a solar eclipse:

After Burns: 11 September 2002

An empty threat can empty skies:
no contrail-crayon crosses
that pale blue dome. But come on, guys!
We can do better. Losses

are not made less but multiplied
and fear's increased by flinches.
We but dishonour those who died
in dying ourselves by inches.

When in the daylight laws are made
in halls that all may enter,
there's light at night, a world of trade,
a world where Man's the centre.

There is no God, and we must get
our comfort where we find it:
in the rising yell of a laden jet
and a bright contrail behind it.

[I've deleted a verse that doesn't belong here - KMM 6/9/04]

Posted 1:22 pm by Ken

Beslan

There are no words for this.

Posted 9:57 am by Ken

The Hamburg Cell

Antonia Bird's The Hamburg Cell was screened on the UK's Channel 4 last night. It received much pre-emptive flak for showing the 9/11 hijackers as human beings, and for trying to get inside their minds and understand their motives. Two lines of attack were that Ronan Bennett, co-writer with Alice Perman, is an Irish Republican and 'therefore' a terrorist sympathiser, and that screening the film so close to the anniversary of the atrocities is offensive to the relatives and friends of the victims. Both of these are just right-wing political correctness and can be dismissed out of hand.

In fact the film is good, though slow. The physical resemblances of the actors to their originals, particularly the actor playing Mohammed Atta, is uncanny. It shows them as weak, alienated individuals being recruited by the classic methods of any campus cult. (The full details of how they joined Al-Qaeda only became public after it was too late to include them.) Young men without a strong sense of self are a Microsoft for mind viruses, and these were no exception.

Whatever the film's intentions, its effect is that of a recruitment video for militant atheism. We see what was in these guys' minds all right, and what was in their minds was a mass of religious rubbish.

Posted 10:22 am by Ken

Axis of Agony

There can be few who don't feel anguish at the sight of the Russian school seige and mass terrorist hostage-taking of 400 people, half of them children. The agony of the parents whose children are at the mercy of the murderous Chechen terrorists and the ruthless and bungling Russian security forces is painful to imagine. The prospect of a bloodbath like this anywhere is horrible enough, but its location is one that may yet concern the rest of us.

Northern Ossetia borders not only Chechnya but Southern Ossetia, which is the only place in the world where Russian and US troops are physically present on opposite sides of a shooting war, albeit (for now) a low-key one. (US-backed Georgia is trying to hold on to South Ossetia, whose population has either fled north or is eager to separate from Georgia and re-unify with Russia.) Ossetians are the people everybody called Alan is named after, which may be a subtle clue that messing with Ossetians is not a good idea. The Caucasus could become for this century what the Balkans were for the last.

The usual sensitive background analysis is provided by the War Nerd.

Posted 8:44 pm by Ken

New Ways to Hell

Out of Ireland we have come;
much hatred, little room

W. B. Yeats, Apology for Intemperate Speech

As a political thinker George Bernard Shaw is mostly remembered for some deplorable flippancies about Stalinism's crimes. As an individual he was probably insufferable: it should be enough to mention that he was a vegetarian, a teetotaller, and an anti-vivisectionist. He was also one of the best-known advocates of Fabian socialism, and the one who wrote the book on it: The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism. I've just read it, in its Penguin edition, whose title was needlessly stretched out to: The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism. And an entertaining and instructive read it is.

Fancy yourself in a car which you do not know how to steer and cannot stop, with an inexhaustible supply of petrol in the tank, rushing along at fifty miles an hour on an island strewn with rocks and bounded by cliff precipices! That is what living under Capitalism feels like when you come to understand it.

One closes it with a taste of metal and a smell of paper, and a sense of that difference: between the machinery of production and the share certificates of ownership. Shaw was a sound money man, and clear on the political economy of rent: after reading his case for state or municipal ownership of utilities and of quasi-monopoly services, one is left with the suspicion that their privatisation might just be a terrible scam, that would leave us paying more for worse service ... oh, wait ...

The Fabian Society was from the start consciously and deliberately anti-Marxist, and anti-liberal. Marx, while 'one of our English prophets', was seen as a foister of economic fallacies, and an accomplice in the firebrand illusions of liberalism about such unscientific nonsense as the Rights of Man. Fabian hostility to Marxism was repaid in kind: "the Fabian Society is not a working class organisation and stands for state capitalism", said the Marxist Socialist Standard in its sixth issue, in February 1905. Shaw deplored the devastation following the Russian Revolution, ignorant as it showed the Bolsheviks to be of the inevitability of gradualness, but - like his fellow Fabians, the Webbs - saw in its Stalinist nemesis a sinister fulfillment.

All the more ironic, therefore, is Shaw's dark warning:

John Bunyan, with his deep but queer insight, pointed out long ago that there is a way to hell even from the gates of heaven; that the way to heaven is therefore also the way to hell; and that the name of the gentleman who goes by that road is Ignorance. The way to Socialism, ignorantly pursued, may land us in State Capitalism. Both must travel the same road; and this is what Lenin, less inspired than Bunyan, failed to see when he denounced the Fabian methods as State Capitalism.

Lenin is alleged to have called Shaw 'a good man fallen among Fabians', and, to someone who called Shaw a clown, to have snapped: 'He wouldn't be a clown in a revolution!' Shaw deplored revolution, and not because he was soft. It is genuinely hard to tell whether the following extracts aren't a profound moral insight, or another heartless flippancy:

[I]t may drive us mad if we begin to think of public evils as millionfold evils. They are nothing of the kind. What you yourself can suffer is the the utmost that can be suffered on earth. [...] Therefore do not be oppressed by 'the frightful sum of human suffering': there is no sum [...] Poverty and pain are not cumulative: you must not let your spirit be crushed by the fancy that it is. [...] Do not let your mind be disabled by excessive sympathy. What the true Socialist revolts against is not the suffering that is not cumulative, but the waste that is.

But all in all, and sharp as Shaw was, with him we are in a different world from that of the few revolutionaries to have come out of the Britain of his day, of Tom Mann and Eleanor Marx, of William Morris, of John Maclean and James Connolly, and even of Belfort Bax. Their every page breathes a spirit of rebellion from below, not reform from above, and when the chance came they entered the rapids of revolution with, if not always a clear head, a warm and not a cold heart: in the cases of Connolly and Maclean, until privation or the firing squad stopped their hearts. Shaw contributed next to nothing to the one revolution to which he could have given much.

For the terrible revolution whose spectre stalks Shaw's pages is not the Russian, of which he understood little, but the Irish, which he knew to the bone. Between his lines one sees, as in crime-scene photographs, burned-out mansions and RIC men dead. What made a stone of his heart may not have been too long a sacrifice, but too comfortable a room.

Posted 9:50 pm by Ken

People talking politics in a bar

Last night in the Angel Cafe, the basement bar of the Roxy Arts Centre, Charlie Stross and I did our bit for the excellent series of free events - a sort of fringe to the Fringe, as well as to the Book Festival - organised by Edinburgh's radical bookshop Word Power. We each read a passage from our work and then we launched into a discussion about SF and politics. Word Power used the joke of the Scottish Socialist Science Fiction Vanguard Party in its publicity leaflet, but a joke it definitely is: Charlie, as he said firmly last night, is not a socialist, and I've been out of the vanguard-party construction business for the past thirteen years.

We, and a small but interested audience, talked about a lot of things, from the information economy and globalisation to the question of why (or whether) more men than women read science fiction. The audience even came back after the event was interrupted half-way through by a fire alarm, and the Word Power people seemed happy with how it all went, and keen to put on events with us again. Thanks to them, and to all who attended.

If the discussion had ambled differently, I might have talked about some related matters that have been on my mind recently. So I'll just do it here instead.

Looking back on that past thirteen years, part of what I've been doing in terms of writing both fiction and non-fiction can be seen as a political project. Here's a sample of what that project has been about:

A British Marxist, Mike MacNair, has written a short series of long articles on the nature of present-day imperialism, closely reading the arguments of theorists deservedly famous and deservedly obscure. Not light reading, but of particular interest for an original and striking suggestion, which at once locates imperialism within the long view of history and coincides with certain classical liberal and libertarian critiques of imperialism: namely, that the definitive symptom of a system in decline is an increasing dependence on, and hypertrophy of, the state.

This is an example of the sort of thing I would at one time have made much of.

It seemed to me, once, that some radical libertarians were saying, in one language, something that radical leftists had been saying in another language. It seemed to me, once, that the obscure Marxist sects had kept alive a continuity with the radical, democratic and anti-state elements of classical Marxism, elements long familiar to serious scholars and obvious to unprejudiced readers, but obscured by Stalinist monolithism and Cold War fog. Likewise, it seemed to me, the libertarians had pertinent points to make about issues that, while perennial, had become urgent after the Soviet collapse: the critique of central planning, and the defence of civil and personal liberties.

To the extent (in fact slight) that any of the characters in my books 'talk about politics in pubs', this, or something close to it, is usually what they're talking about. I didn't drag these conversations in by the hair - they usually tell us something relevant about the characters and advance the plot. But they were also the kind of dialogues I hoped the books would advance in real life. And, indeed, I engaged in such dialogues myself, arguing with Trots about planning and porn and guns, and with libertarians about workers' co-ops and market socialism and What Marx(ists) Really Said and what did or didn't happen in Russia.

What a schmuck!

So, on to other matters.

It's recently struck me that the moderate, liberal, democratic and humane response to the build-up to the Iraq war should have been to argue for the West to arm Iraq. It's not merely the case that invading Iraq was a distraction from fighting Al-Qaeda: it was objectively fighting on the same side as Al-Qaeda. If you're serious about fighting Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, the last thing you'd want to do, on the face of it, is overthrow - or even weaken - one of the few regimes in the region that was capable of and interested in crushing them within its borders. But that's what the US and UK did. The conclusion must be that they have other priorities that come higher than fighting Al-Qaeda.

The Brits have just charged eight men with conspiring to commit heinous terrorist acts. It seems that the arrests had to be made before enough evidence could be gathered to really nail them, but time will tell. Juan Cole has the story. It's a case study of the other priorities. Feel free to argue about it in a bar.

Posted 2:58 pm by Ken

New Light from the East

Avedon wonders if Mark Ames is 'that lefty I've been hearing so much about', and praises with just a hint of bemusement his savage insight into 'The Spite Vote'.

Mark Ames, steeled by his years over there in the glorious post-Soviet future-and-it-works, is an original and offensive left gonzo journalist. Here's his unforgettable takedown of the response to 9/11 of the pseudo-anarchist liberal Chomsky :

The lack of dynamism or discovery is why, in spite of appearing so "radical" to more dull-witted crackers, Chomsky comes off as flat, fake, ineffectual, especially now, when something new and interesting is required.

Contrast this with real radicals from the past, people of words and action, who were confident enough in their radicalism to adapt and change when paradigm-shaking events overtook them, rather than merely acting out their narrow role. There's the example of the Jewish-Italian anarcho-syndicalist Camillo Berneri, who in 1917 eagerly rushed to the front on behalf of a bourgeois regime he was trying to overthrow, writing: "There are occasions when to get oneself killed is the most logical solution, and to get oneself killed becomes a moral necessity. Cases of conscience are more terrible than Austrian bullets or asphyxiating gases." Or Paul Nizan, the most bilious of all of France's France-hating Marxist intellectuals, who volunteered for and died at the front in 1940.

It's the Nizan ref that's the clincher, for anyone who's read The Watchdogs, a book that did for philosophy what a dead cat through a closed window does for a church.

Or take this incisive analysis of the condition of the working class in the imperialist heartlands:

I'd moved to Louisville with not even a fork or a spoon. Wal-Mart sells all that -- hamper, dishes, utensils, dish rack, sheets, telephones, you name it -- for prices so incredibly low that I was genuinely grateful. I thought about Wal-Mart's union busting, its abused work staff of geriatrics and economically desperate wage slaves, its stocks of Third World products which in turn further destroyed America's manufacturing, it's aesthetic Sovietization of America... and then I thought about my own shitty fiscal situation. Conclusion: "Fuck 'em."

Wal-Mart is one of the few bones with a little meat on it that America throws to its tens of millions of lower-middle and semi-middle classes. Goods that once may have been unattainable are now attainable, almost free, thanks to union busting, employee abuse, Third World slave labor, the destruction of over-priced ma and pa stores, the homogenization of Middle America and every other horrible sin. When I said "Fuck 'em," I didn't mean it in the sense that I'd turned coat and gone right-populist like some David Horowitz. I just meant that I needed those cheap dishes.

Ames goes on to give a cogent analysis of the vicious circles of globalization, stuffed to the gills with quotable quotes ('The rightwing oligarchy and its mandarins explain away globalization's savage effects on the lower classes as all part of prophet Adam Smith's wonderful plan for humanity'), glances at the role of the Russian intelligentsia (the only class to have destroyed the same state twice, and itself twice with it) and concludes with the intriguing hypothesis that the American hard left fails to connect not because it's elitist, but because it's not elitist enough. (Dress like somebody whose lifestyle people might aspire to, not like somebody they would cross the road to avoid.) And there's plenty more where that came from. Not all of it is by Ames, and not all of it can be recommended to those of a sensitive disposition. Nevertheless, the eXile holds out a glorious vision of a future liberated America:

The task facing UN forces now is "De-Bushification" of the occupied US. UN Courts will soon convene to try several thousand Yankee suspects held for Crimes against Humanity that claimed as many as 60 million victims from Kuala Lumpur to Oslo. Some of the most influential "chickenhawks," including Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Cheney, have agreed to testify in exchange for immunity. A British military lawyer preparing the UN's case says, "This lot have turned on each other like rats in a trap, squealing at full pitch."

While the top Bushites face stiff sentences, the ordinary Yankee will be treated with mercy. UN officials who have researched pre-war Yankee psychology stress that the ordinary Yankee "kubik" (derived from "cubicle-slave," a derisive term for Yankee workers) was a victim of the Bushites. "The kubiks were virtual serfs, working 70 hours a week with no medical care or childcare. There was daily propaganda designed to keep them in a state of terror. Anyone who spoke up was punished. They had no choice but to obey."

Nice to see that even in these troubled times the eXile doesn't get all bitter and twisted. Read it regularly, if it survives its latest outrage. If it doesn't, and even if it does, you can always browse its archive.

(Update: slightly edited to remove excess irony.)

Posted 8:52 pm by Ken

A Kinder Counter-Insurgency

Nobody except the estimable libertarian Arthur Silber is making much of this, so here's the story from last Sunday: the Brits in Iraq are turning over child prisoners to the Yank kiddie-fiddlers at Abu Ghraib.

This is what is known as the 'special relationship'.

Posted 10:25 am by Ken

"...the Sistine Chapel of European socialist art"

Fred Whitehead describes a panorama of the German Peasant War titled Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany (1983-1987, oil on canvas, 14 x 123 metres):

This magnificent work is nothing less than the Sistine Chapel of European socialist art. During a period when the socialist and progressive heritage of Germany has been under assault for 15 years, it is encouraging that this monument remains unscathed. I asked at the information desk how many people had visited it since 1989, and was told: 2 million.

Take a look.

Posted 10:31 am by Ken

Paul Foot

Paul Foot's funeral is today. His death was a shock to me, as to many. His investigative journalism was as tenacious as his commitment to socialism, which he always argued for as an explosive expansion of democracy and liberty. Among his many writings were a succession of short books putting this argument with clarity, passion, and wit, of which the following opening paragraph is typical:

'Ever since the beginning of time,' says a disembodied voice over a picture of a spinning globe at the start of Cecil B. de Mille's film Samson and Delilah, 'man has striven to achieve a democratic state on earth.' That is probably putting it a little high (especially as the voice goes on to assert: 'such a man was Samson') but there is some truth in it.

Paul Foot, The Case for Socialism, 1990.

And such a man was Paul Foot.

Posted 8:47 pm by Ken

"... my simple belief that atheism and feminism are hallmarks of the left"

Jaizi of Workers' Liberty writes:

Once upon a time I was a Tao-y arty little hippy whose family happens to be flaming scarlet. It happens that I know a good deal about the diversity of the Islamic tradition, or at any rate more than [George] Galloway, [Lindsey] German and [Ken] Livingstone, who appal me and my simple belief that atheism and feminism are the hallmarks of the Left. What follows is certain reflections on religion and the proposed legislation against inciting religious hatred which may be of interest to comrades.

New Labour seems to view religion in terms of the devotees of Yahweh-Allah-Jehovah, a chap not a girl’s best friend. The National Secular Society chronicles Blair’s enthusiasm for ‘faith communities’. I do not think Zen, wicca and feminist theology are embraced at these meetings. MAB’s hypnotizing of some on the Left is known. Women Against Fundamentalisms remains a little-known organization. Southall Black Sisters operate on a shoe-string. Something has gone wrong and it seems to me that it is bad news for all women.

Read all of this spirituality-friendly rationalist rant.

Posted 8:36 pm by Ken

Sexing-up the dossier

A few years ago, when I was a computer programmer at Edinburgh University, I went to a meeting where two members of the SPGB were putting the case for socialism to a student society called, I think, Third World First, and dedicated, as far as I could see, to the promoting the kind of delusions (trade bad, aid good) that have done so much to keep the Third World third.

After Brian and Matt, the two Socialists, had put their case for the immediate global abolition of the market, some Frequently Asked Questions came up. One of them was: 'Who will do the dirty work?'

Some well-meaning sap in the audience - it may have been me - gave an earnest exposition of the Frequently Delivered Answer: that lots of the dirty work could be automated, that the objectionable thing about dirty work wasn't the dirt but the social stigma, etc. (You can find the rest of it in Bebel.)

'Ah,' said Brian, sounding disappointed. 'I've always thought it would be Matt.'

In the same spirit, I can now exclusively answer the question of who was responsible for distorting the intelligence from Iraq. It was me.

At least, I started it. I set the ball rolling.

Many years ago, when I was a postgrad at Brunel University, I and a Kurdish exile and an Irishman drafted an article for the student paper, Le Nurb. Control of Le Nurb rested on who had seized the means of its production - a golf-ball typewriter, some sheets of Letraset, an X-acto knife and a jar of paste - that week, so its editorial line fluctuated wildly from Tory to Trot to Anarchist to Young Liberal.

That week, it was Trot. The article I was drafting was based on a telephoned report from Iraqi Kurdistan to our Kurdish exile friend. (The Kurds, then as now, needed all the friends they could get.) An official demonstration in Sulimaniyah, under the slogan 'The Kurds are Ba'athist!' had turned into an angry anti-regime demonstration, under the slogan 'The Kurds are hungry!' (It was a pun in Kurdish.)

I transcribed all this.

'"... which could only be put down by the use of troops,"' added my Irish friend.

'You can't say that,' said the Kurdish guy. 'I have no information about the use of troops.'

'Oh come on,' said the Irish guy. 'You think there could be a demonstration like that, in Sulimaniyah, and it wouldn't be put down by troops?'

'Well ...' said the Kurdish guy, 'perhaps ...'

'There you go,' said the Irishman.

Reader, I wrote it, and Le Nurb published it. A couple of weeks later that article was lifted, with permission, by the much more widely read Militant, and shortly thereafter Militant's article was excerpted - imaginary troops and all - in the even more widely read Intercontinental Press. I don't know how many people who are now Labour MPs read either of these journals in their youth, but I'd hazard more than a few. How many minds were changed, how many opinions hardened, by that fictitious fusillade?

None, in all probability. But the lie still makes me blush.

Posted 10:25 am by Ken

The 911 days of Sodom

Seymour Hersh, on what you ain't seen yet from Abu Ghraib:

"The boys were sodomised with the cameras rolling, and the worst part is the soundtrack, of the boys shrieking. And this is your government at war."

Posted 8:15 pm by Ken

Why Robots?

Robots, an interactive exhibition sponsored by, among others, Heriot Watt University, is running at Callendar House in Falkirk until September 5. When I was asked to give a talk about robots in SF as part of the associated evening lecture series I said, 'I don't know much about robots in SF.' That's all right, I was told, you must know more about it than most people.

So, some weeks and a hasty shufti into The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction later, I was given a lift to Callendar House by Heriot-Watt's efficient publicity person, Frances Williams. The exhibition includes an Electrolux Trilobite vacuum-cleaner (sadly showing an empty battery symbol at the time), an astonishing animated sculpture from Glasgow, an interactive remote control for a robot arm in the University's laboratories, and a lot of toys and posters. The venue is an attractive place in its own right, and the exhibition is well worth a visit.

Why are we interested in robots?

Our ancestors were predators and prey. This makes us pattern-recognising animals, and jumpy animals. The patterns we are best equipped to recognise are those distinctive of other animals, and especially other humans. We see faces in fires, in clouds, in leaves. Sigmund Freud said that the uncanny is the experience of being uncertain whether something is alive or not. And from our own - often early - experiences of wondering whether the scratching at the window is of twigs or fingers, or the shape in the corner or behind the door is a figure or a dressing-gown, we see how he was right.

We are also tool-making animals, with an opposable thumb and a flexible hand unique in the animal kingdom.

So the idea of a tool, a machine, that replicates our most distinctive features - a machine with a face, a voice, a mind, a hand - is disturbing and uncanny. In the exhibition you can see many toy robots, and you can see how much design effort goes into making them less frightening, indeed cute, for young children, and more frightening for older children.

The robot in SF has a dual ancestry. One forebear is the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Another is the real practice of building automata, described in Tom Stanage's The Mechanical Turk. The Frankenstein motif of a creation that destroys its creators appeared in Karel Capek's R.U.R. and rampaged through early SF, along with more nuanced presentations. An unambiguously sympathetic portrayal arrived with Eano Binder's I, Robot and was carried forward in Asimov's stories collected under the same title. Asimov, you might say, wrote the book on robots, though other stories - Anthony Boucher's brilliant Thomist fable 'The Quest For St Aquin' and Brian Aldiss's hilarious and elegaic 'But Who Can Replace a Man?' - stand out, as do Philip K. Dick's android dreams and nightmares. From the 1950s to the 1970s, robots carried a heavy weight of themes - humanity, identity, labour, slavery - on uncomplaining metal shoulders.

And then they went away. They became, as I recall Paul MacAuley saying on a panel at Trincon 2, dead tech, like food pills and psi powers and tractor beams. They died and went to heaven - into satire and skiffy, in Red Dwarf and Star Wars, and into cyberspace, where their dematerialised descendants haunt our imaginations as the AI.

But the AI is another story, and another talk.

Posted 11:42 am by Ken

Health warnings

The recent claim that government health campaigns against sunbathing could result in an upsurge of vitamin D deficiency has prompted the Carcinoma Retardation Charity to defend its slogan 'Sunlight Kills!'

'We know it isn't strictly true, but we have to be a little bit strident to put the message across,' a spokeswoman said, coyly adjusting her burkha. 'Ordinary people can't be relied on to know the difference between agonising sunburn and a mild golden tan.'

Meanwhile, the environmental campaign Greenpiss has admitted that illustrating a warning about declining male fertility with a picture of the minute genitals of a cherub from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel 'may have been a little over the top'. Its earlier claim that 'Humanity is a plague species that will with any luck be wiped from the face of the Earth in the cleansing fire of nuclear holocaust' is still under review.

Earlier today, the government suffered acute embarrassment when a drafting error resulted in the House of Lords approving a bill that bans smacking in pubs.

Posted 11:30 am by Ken

George not King, Judges rule

Revolution still in danger but far from dead. This is all beginning to look like the pacier pages of Lord Macaulay. (Via.)

Posted 11:30 am by Ken

Arguments and Fights

The trouble with liberals (though not these, bless their shivs and toecaps) is that they often mistake a fight for an argument, and the right never does. Though this article on the respected and influential Nazi (yes, really) political philosopher Carl Schmitt comes down on the woolly side of the fence, it includes plenty of quotes from which to draw a different conclusion for the days that we have been given: always fight. (Via.)

No wonder that Schmitt admired thinkers such as Machiavelli and Hobbes, who treated politics without illusions. Leaders inspired by them, in no way in thrall to the individualism of liberal thought, are willing to recognize that sometimes politics involves the sacrifice of life. They are better at fighting wars than liberals because they dispense with such notions as the common good or the interests of all humanity. ("Humanity," Schmitt wrote in a typically terse formulation that is brilliant if you admire it and chilling if you do not, "cannot wage war because it has no enemy.")

It has now.

Posted 10:54 am by Ken

Crumbs

Today's Independent carries a full-page obituary of Anthony Buckeridge (1912 - 2004), who died yesterday. The author of the Jennings books (comedies about boys at an English boarding school) turns out to have had a full as well as a long life.

There's often something sad about comedy, or so I find it. When I was around the same age as their protagonists, I read the Jennings books, the William books, and the Molesworth books, and their effect was very different. Nigel Molesworth is clearly a boy well in touch with his inner adult, who is doing something unpleasant in Personnel. William Brown, whose adventures I read voraciously, is a creature - a wonderful creature - of the imagination, not, or not so much, of observation. What William and Nigel have in common is a sense that growing up and becoming an adult is something you are doomed to, and that's what gives them their poignancy behind the laughs.

Buckeridge has no truck with that. The adults in Jennings world are, as it were, on the same level as the boys. The whole trick is that you see the teachers' point of view at the same time as seeing that of Jennings and his pals. The collisions of their world-views are the engine of the comedy, and the product is pure laughing gas, an unalloyed joy to read. The Jennings books made me laugh more than anything in print before I met Jeeves.

Posted 11:02 pm by Ken

Surveying Information Age Warfare

Socialism in an Age of Waiting is back, and very much welcome, not least for linking to a deeply depressing paper on the future of warfare (text download) by the late Paul Hirst. The good news in Hirst's paper is that there is unlikely to be a war between the major powers. The bad news is that in every other respect the 21st century is likely to be worse than (e.g.) the one I imagined in the Fall Revolution books. It's likely to be worse than John Brunner imagined. Hirst concludes:

This is not a pleasant prospect. It could be that this analysis is too pessimistic and the forces outlined here will be less powerful, that climatic change will not be so dramatic, that the R[evolution in]M[ilitary]A[ffairs] will prove more limited in scope, and that the developed countries will shift resources dramatically to tackle poverty on a world scale. For that to happen the attitudes of ordinary citizens in the developed countries would have to change radically: accepting the massive reduction of emissions (and the changes in lifestyle that would have to accompany such moves) to check climate change, paying for more for aid, welcoming migrants, and seeking to eliminate the sources of conflict rather than repress those who take up arms. It would be a remarkable reversal and it will have to happen soon.

It is not, of course, likely to happen at all. The comrades at SIAW would no doubt see the considerations adduced by Hirst as an argument for the democratic socialist world revolution for which they are waiting. But if the economic calculation argument is valid, we must accept that (Marxian, non-market) socialism, however democratic (etc, etc), would result in industry grinding to a halt and people dying like flies, as indeed it has done whenever it has been seriously attempted. (Fortunately it has not been seriously attempted in most socialist countries, hence the otherwise inexplicable prevalence of state capitalism, and the inevitable reversion from state to private capitalism.) If so, it's time for responsible Marxists to follow Hirst's excellent example and stop blathering on about socialism, in the sense of some post-market order about whose actual economic mechanism that is supposed to replace the market they (like the rest of us) have (when you part the thickets of wearisomely familiar verbiage) no fucking clue, and which won't arrive no matter how long we wait.

There is, however, hope, and it does lie in the proles. For if socialism has been the crushing disappointment of the twentieth century, proletarian revolution has been its smashing success. Marx was absolutely on the money about the revolutionary potential of the urban working class. He was just wrong about its liability to establish a socialist order. Proletarian revolutions have been frequent and are increasingly prevalent, but socialism in Marx's sense is still news from nowhere.

(A perhaps avoidable digression: There was one proletarian socialist revolution, and it went to the devil as swiftly as any medieval millennarian commune, due in large measure to the unexpected and (in 1918) quite novel and inexplicable phenomenon of industry grinding to a halt and people dying like flies. ('If you don't mind me saying so, that's a very Soviety bridge,' remarked an old women to Lenin and Krupskaya as they picked their way across some rickety deathtrap over a freezing torrent. Lenin, to his undying credit, promptly added 'Soviety' to his already extensive thesaurus of pejoratives. But to his dying day he never did understand why a Soviety bridge was a rickety bridge - he thought it had something to do with bureaucracy, and put Stalin in charge of sorting the matter out, a decision he lived just long enough to regret but not, alas, long enough to rescind.) 1917 aside, the proletarian revolutions have not been socialist, and the socialist revolutions have not been proletarian.

For lack of even the most essential data, also excluded from this study is the People's Socialist Republic of Nambuangongo, established around February 1961 in the Dembos forests in north-western Nambuangongo (between the rivers Loge and Dang) in the immediate wake of the 1961 rising in Luanda. The republic will probably remain the most distant and curious echo of the Bolshevik revolution. Therefore, in spite of the fact that it has not proved possible to unearth any data on this example, it does seem important that its existence should be put on record.

Bogdan Szajkowski, The Establishment of Marxist Regimes, Butterworths, 1982.

(The book painstakingly and almost tediously documents the non-proletarian social basis of every single establishment of a self-styled Marxist regime, other than the one established by the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet in October 1917 (Old Style).) Some of the most impressive proletarian revolutions have been anti-socialist: Hungary 1956, Poland 1981, Rumania 1989, China 1989. Not all were victorious but, as Perry Anderson said of the 19th-century English workers, even when they won no victories, their defeats were astonishing. What The Economist said of 1981 can stand for them all: Marx's irresistible force met Lenin's immovable object. Sometimes the irresistible force was stopped, and sometimes the immovable object ... moved.)

Not long ago the commonest form of unconstitutional governmental or regime change was through military coup, with guerilla war running a distant but respectable second. These days it's through proletarian revolution: mass, urban, working-class insurrections have toppled governments across the globe. The wage and salary earners are now the largest class on the planet, and by far the most decisive one. They've been throwing their social weight around to good effect. The unappeasable crowd in Republic Square, the converging columns of the rural poor, the snowstorm of secret police files from the broken windows of the gutted Ministry of the Interior, the armed workers and students reading the news in the national television studio - such formerly once-in-a-generation epochal events have become so common in the years since 1989 that they sometimes fail to make the front pages of even serious bourgeois newspapers. The governments they put in have so far not been outstanding at advancing the interests of the working class, but no doubt we'll get the hang of it eventually.

Posted 8:58 pm by Ken

A New Martian?

Cheryl Morgan has forwarded this curious email:

Dear Ken,

Apologies for hijacking one of your friends' email accounts, but as you can probably guess it is not wise for me to reveal my location to the authorities right now.

Anyway, to the point: outsourcing. Please tell Jon not to worry about the Indian thing. I am on the point of securing a lucrative deal with a call centre based on Mars. Their rates are very competitive and initial tests have shown that they have adequate bandwidth. There is a small problem with time delay, but their staff cleverly cover that by claiming to be thinking hard about calls.

As you have probably guessed, their employees are not human. I am still in the process of determining whether or not they are organic. One clue is that they claim to have no transgendered employees, which they say gives them a big advantage over the Indians when going after lucrative US contracts. Personally I don't give a fuck, and I doubt that the average Evangelical Christian has a clue what hijra means anyway, but I suspect that Jon may be concerned that the Indians are exploiting a cultural minority that has difficulty obtaining work in traditional companies.

One small problem. The company gives its name as Freedom Hound Ltd. I smell a rat. Or rather a dog. If you or Jon still have moles inside GCHQ a few quiet enquiries concerning bizarre explanations for lost exploratory hardware would be appreciated.

Yours profitably,

Dave Reid

I should make clear that references to 'moles' are entirely a product of my friend's vivid imagination.

Posted 10:36 am by Ken

Free-Market Think-Tanks Out-sourced

Callers to the Intellect Foundation, the Caesar Institute and other libertarian think-tanks will from today be surprised to hear a pause, a click, and an answer in a flawless but distinctly Indian-accented English. The free-market foundations' entire staffs have been sacked and replaced by eager graduates in the Bombay-based Kali Call-Centre, dedicated to the Hindu goddess of creative destruction.

'If you really want passionate denunciation of an over-regulated economy, and paens to the glory of the free market, there's no better place to come than India,' explains its owner, self-styled 'intellectual entrepreneur' Saresh Ramakrishnan (19), as he proudly oversees a small back room full of two hundred fast-talking, keyboard-tapping, headset-wearing men, women, hijras and children. 'Here we know what strangling red tape and mass poverty are really like. As for religious interference in politics and private morals, we're up against the world's worst serial offenders outside of Iran. We can undercut American ideologues any day. We're English-literate, hip, and nobody can accuse us of being a bunch of fat white men.'

Jonathan Wilde, eminence grise of the Deforestation Alliance, England's 'premier free-market and anti-environmentalist think-tank', gloomily agrees but is holding out against the tide. 'Here in Britain we have libertarians who will work for nothing,' he says. 'I know, to our American friends it seems incredible, if not immoral, but that's the way it is. And it gives us a chance to hang in there until the Indians are in turn undercut by the Fr - the Fr ... the frigging Chinese.'

Posted 12:22 pm by Ken

Market exchanges

Michael Fahey commented on my remarks on socialism and economic calculation, and with his permission I'm posting our exchanges as a dialogue. In cases where I made a point for point response, I've given the whole of Michael Fahey's message first:

Economic calculation is not a barrier to socialism. Supply and demand operate, whatever the economic system, to determine the price (expressed in money) of commodities and services, based on availability and desirability/utility. The powers-that-be make political decisions to subsidize particular people, goods or activities. Subsidies may be exploitative or re-distributive, and subsidies may be offensive to some economists, but they are neither impossible nor unusual.

Thanks Mike. The only socialism that the economic calculation argument addresses is socialism that dispenses with money and prices. This was a common view of the socialist goal before WW1 and the Russian Revolution and it is this that Mises and others claimed was impossible. Other socialisms that retain the market and price system are, as you correctly say, unaffected.

Perhaps Steele and the writers he cites were demoralized by the daunting task of society-wide computation in the pre-digital era. Nowadays, two honest brainiacs with one Pentium could do a better job calculating and articulating the wants and needs of humanity than the ''free" market ever will.

Sorry, no, this is exactly what the economic calculation argument claims can't be done. How on earth could a computer be programmed to register the 'wants and needs' of humanity? Not even a Culture Mind could do it.

Not so fast, MacLeod.

As to needs: six billion times the optimum personal amount of clean water, grams of protein, square feet of safe housing, linear feet of sewage pipe with supporting infrastructure, etc.

As to wants, I'm assuming the brainiacs will have access to polling data through which we can express our preferences as to ice cream flavors, garment styles, etc. (A socialist society presumably would not produce ice cream until malnutrition is conquered, botox until ...) And I'm not looking to hand myself over to Big Brother. Verify that I've done my share of the work, and then leave me alone. I believe that freedom is illusory without substantial leisure time and discretionary income. Not too much to ask given 21st Century labor-saving technology.

>Not so fast, MacLeod.
>As to needs: six billion times the optimum personal amount of clean water,
>grams of protein, square feet of safe housing, linear feet of sewage pipe
>with supporting infrastructure, etc.

At that point, the economic calculation problem only begins. Perhaps calling it 'economic calculation' is misleading. All it means is that you have to have an accurate measure of the value of the resources you're using, to make sure they aren't being wasted - that for any given project, your inputs aren't worth more than your outputs. Or to put it another way, that you aren't using up stuff for one use that would be better put to another use. For that you need a market price, or some measure that does the same job as a price. It is the contention of the economic calculation argument that no such measure has been found, or is likely to be found; and so far none has.

As Trotsky put it: 'Economic accounting is unthinkable without market relations.'

>As to wants, I'm assuming the brainiacs will have access to polling data
>through which we can express our preferences as to ice cream flavors,
>garment styles, etc. (A socialist society presumably would not produce ice
>cream until malnutrition is conquered, botox until ...)

There are some problems with this, starting with that polling data can't tell you (accurately) how much people want a particular good (i.e. what they would trade it off against) and that there is no link between the expressed preferences and the willingness of the brainiacs to supply them.

As to priorities not expressed through the market - as you said yourself, these can be dealt with by taxes and subsidies.

>And I'm not looking to hand myself over to Big Brother. Verify that I've
>done my share of the work, and then leave me alone. I believe that freedom
>is illusory without substantial leisure time and discretionary income. Not
>too much to ask given 21st Century labor-saving technology.

Indeed not, but unattainable (or at least, unlikely to be attained, and greatly at risk) if you don't have a way of counting costs.

Points taken, MacLeod.

1. Re: Market price as necessary for efficiency:

1a. We can set prices without a capitalist market. In our roles as consumers, shop-floor producers, or enterprise managers, we constantly establish the value of things for the purpose of exchange. E.g. six hours of baby-sitting in exchange for help with the school paper; one Barry Bonds trading card for two Mark McGuires. Consider the "black market" in Cuba, or the barter among factories in late Soviet Russia.

1b. There is no "correct" price in the abstract. Price is the product of subjective interactions, continually settled in our billions of transactions. Price need only be acceptable to the parties involved to be functional.

1c. Socialist societies have typically had a retail sector to facilitate distribution of consumer goods. Productive goods, such as hydroelectric dams or dialysis machines, for which there is no ready consumer market, must be assigned resources by the powers-that-be. Reason, trial-and-error, and good faith will do the job. (Capitalist relations of production retard our immense productive capacity. Mal-distribution is one of capitalism's most glaring defects. Distributing things [e.g. toilets!!] by selling them requires that they be scarce relative to demand.)

1d. Efficiency is a means, not an end. Waste is certainly to be avoided, but would it be so bad if we built too much housing, or distributed too much AIDS medication? (Capitalists have never scrupled about redundant production in their weaponry and propaganda.)

2. Re: Preference and fulfillment:

2a. Polls routinely ask us to make choices and rank preferences.

2b. There is no automatic link between asking for people's preferences and fulfilling them. We're assuming an honest socialist government, which will require the constant vigilance and participation of its citizens.

3. Take heart, MacLeod! There are considerable obstacles to socialism, but they are not theoretical.

>Points taken, MacLeod.
>1. Re: Market price as necessary for efficiency:
>1a. We can set prices without a capitalist market. In our roles as
>consumers, shop-floor producers, or enterprise managers, we constantly
>establish the value of things for the purpose of exchange. E.g. six hours of
>baby-sitting in exchange for help with the school paper; one Barry Bonds
>trading card for two Mark McGuires.

Absolutely correct. And if prices are set by bargaining between enterprise managers, presumably they are exchanging means of production - machines, tons of cement, etc, and you do have a market not just in consumer goods but in means of production. Whether that is being done in a capitalist market or market socialism is irrelevant to the point that it's not non-market socialism: it's not the 'communistic abolition buying and selling', 'production for use', the society in which 'the producers do not exchange their products', but instead 'manage things very simply, without the intervention of the famous "value"', in other words the socialism of Marx and Engels, of the SPGB, and of Bukharin and Preobrazhensky's _ABC of Communism_, and of Bolshevik practice (or heroic attempt) between 1918 and 1921, when it was abandoned after resulting in complete breakdown of industry. That's the socialism that the economic calculation argument primarily cuts against.

> Consider the "black market" in Cuba, or
>the barter among factories in late Soviet Russia.

These were/are regarded by the authorities as a bug, not a feature. In fact the enormous black and grey markets, the activity of fixers, etc, contributed quite a lot to the survival of the Soviet economy, which might otherwise have simply ground to a halt for lack of the right stuff in the right place at the right time. So functionally, the illegal market was a feature, but the authorities kept trying to remove it as a bug, until they gave up and the bug ate the program.

>
>1b. There is no "correct" price in the abstract. Price is the product of
>subjective interactions, continually settled in our billions of
>transactions. Price need only be acceptable to the parties involved to be
>functional.

Again correct. So 'prices' set by central planners are unlikely to replicate the prices set by billions of transactions, and won't fulfil the function of balancing supply and demand. That will result in dislocations of all kinds. It's beginning to sound like we are in vehement agreement.

>1c. Socialist societies have typically had a retail sector to facilitate
>distribution of consumer goods. Productive goods, such as hydroelectric dams
>or dialysis machines, for which there is no ready consumer market, must be
>assigned resources by the powers-that-be. Reason, trial-and-error, and good
>faith will do the job. (Capitalist relations of production retard our
>immense productive capacity. Mal-distribution is one of capitalism's most
>glaring defects. Distributing things [e.g. toilets!!] by selling them
>requires that they be scarce relative to demand.)

The socialist retail sector wasn't exactly its bright, inviting shop window.

The consumers of hydroelectric dams and dialysis machines are the suppliers of electricity and health care. Whether great public works, health care, sanitation or for that matter flush toilets should be produced (or subsidised) by the powers that be is outside the scope of this argument. Most people would say that they should. But with the best will in the world, and with all technical competence assured, gigantic malinvestments by the powers that be are quite possible. The first glimmer I had of this was seeing a fucking enormous oil-rig production site [or some such facility] on the west coast of Scotland, with a huge hole in the ground and workers' housing all ready, built by the powers that be in (quite reasonable) anticipation of a boom in oil-rig construction ... which was never used.

>1d. Efficiency is a means, not an end. Waste is certainly to be avoided, but
>would it be so bad if we built too much housing, or distributed too much
>AIDS medication? (Capitalists have never scrupled about redundant production
>in their weaponry and propaganda.)
>

Building too much housing would mean building too little of something else; distributing too much AIDS medication would mean distributing too little of other medication (or other desired products of whatever was used to over-produce AIDS medication).

>2. Re: Preference and fulfillment:
>2a. Polls routinely ask us to make choices and rank preferences.

The preference ranking we give in polls can notoriously differ from what our real preference ranking as expressed by purchases is.

>
>2b. There is no automatic link between asking for people's preferences and
>fulfilling them. We're assuming an honest socialist government, which will
>require the constant vigilance and participation of its citizens.
>

Indeed we are, and indeed it would. As Oscar Wilde said, too many meetings. Not to be flippant, but to ask billions of people to engage in time-consuming participation just to accomplish what they do today by shopping is to ask a lot.

>3. Take heart, MacLeod! There are considerable obstacles to socialism, but
>they are not theoretical.
>Fraternal regards - Mike Fahey
>
>

It all depends on what you mean by socialism. 'Feasible socialism' as proposed by Alec Nove and various kinds of market socialism are theoretically possible, but aren't all that different from a 'mixed economy' and wouldn't do all (or in fact much) that Marxian non-market socialism hoped to do, notably ending the anarchy of production and establishing conscious control over the economy.

With your permission, I'd like to post our exchanges so far to my blog, along with your last word for the moment, should you care to give it.

You have my permission to post our exchange. I've added some comments below, but feel free to take the last word. And at the risk of
appearing tendentious, I'm happy to continue our dialogue. Fraternal regards
- Mike Fahey
>>>>>
Has experience taught us to choose capitalism over communism on the basis of market relations vs. command economy? No.

* The main problem with markets is what they won't do. The "free" market is accessed by cash. Half the world has no money or virtually none.

*Efficiency? Consider planned obsolescence, chronically idle industrial capacity, and most-of-all the wasted energy and creativity of the billions who are un- or under-employed, or slogging along without the benefit of labor-saving technology.

*Capitalism's bookkeepers (Enron, Parmalat, Shell, ad infinitum) have demonstrated their unreliability for an accurate inventory and accounting of resources.

*Bureaucracy exists in capitalism. Ask anyone who has worked in or dealt with capitalist corporations or the governments they control.

*Consider degree-of-difficulty. Socialism takes on a much more challenging task, that of promoting the general welfare vs. abetting conquest by the "fittest". (The Soviet Union subsidized its satellites; the capitalists exploit theirs. Compare the standard of living in the former USSR with that of Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, etc. Now compare the USA with El Salvador,
Haiti, the Philippines or Zaire.)

*Has there been a fair test? No society has been able to experience socialism undistorted by war-mobilization. From the attempt to strangle the soviet infant in its cradle, through the Cold War, to Oliver North's terrorist campaign against Sandinista Nicaragua, and four decades of
strangulation of Cuba.

Will socialism mean "too many meetings" and "time-consuming participation"? Yes, if I must sit on the board of my local library, housing estate, food co-op, football club, child-care center, etc. Let the government provide these services.

By all means, let's have maximum freedom of action and exchange, but keep the "commanding heights" of the economy under socialist control. This requires "production for use'' and "communistic abolition of buying and selling" in key sectors. To leave the major means of production in private hands is to choose barbarism.

Rather than go through Mike's closing points, I'll just remark that I agree with some, disagree with others, and I'm sure it's easy enough to tell which is which. To be continued another time, perhaps, and in the meantime thanks to Mike Fahey for his comments.