Groucho Marxism

Questions and answers on socialism, Marxism, and related topics

  • The evolution of consciousness

    Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of a state or object, either internal to oneself or in one’s external environment. In the philosophy of mind, the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ involves explaining why and how humans and other organisms are conscious. It is contrasted with the ‘easy problems’ of explaining why and how physical systems organisms the ability to integrate information and perform behavioural functions. The term ‘hard problem of consciousness’ was coined by the philosopher David Chalmers in 1994, but it has been known about and debated by philosophers for centuries. The existence of the hard problem poses a challenge to the materialist worldview. In this blog post, I will attempt to sketch out a materialist solution.

    One approach to solving the hard problem is to deny that it exists. This was the approach taken by the materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett in his 1991 book Consciousness Explained. According to Dennett, qualia – that is, instances of subjective, conscious experience – do not (and cannot) exist as they are described. Dennett’s argues that the various properties attributed to qualia by philosophers – that they are incorrigible, ineffable, private, directly accessible and so on – are incompatible, so the notion of qualia is incoherent. Dennett is a very eminent philosopher and as a materialist it is tempting to take his argument at face value; but I think that would be cop-out. There clearly is something that needs to be explained here, and in my view Dennett is dodging the question.

    Another approach to the hard problem is to take consciousness as primary. This is the approach taken by Chalmers, who argues that the hard problem is not reducible to the easy problems, and that solving the easy problems will not lead to a solution to the hard problem. Chalmers’s idea clearly contradicts the view that everything that exists is a physical or material thing. In fact, in his book Why Materialism Is Baloney, the philosopher and computer scientist Bernardo Kastrup argues that the existence of consciousness means we must reject materialism altogether, as materialism can never account for it. Instead, Kastrup advocates for something he calls ‘analytic idealism’, where reality is fundamentally mental.

    This seems rather hasty to me though. Just because we haven’t found a materialist explanation for consciousness yet doesn’t necessarily mean that such an explanation does not exist. In order to find such an explanation, I think we need to view the problem from an evolutionary perspective, and ask why consciousness might have evolved. The only reason it could have evolved was that it provides an evolutionary advantage. But what could that advantage be? The answer, I believe, is that consciousness creates empathy. As conscious organisms, the reason we have empathy for other organisms is that we understand that those other organisms are also conscious. This empathy then leads to greater cooperation, which in turn provides an evolutionary advantage.

    This explanation addresses the ‘why’ part of the hard problem, but it doesn’t address the ‘how’. That is to say, it is an explanation of why consciousness might have evolved, and therefore why consciousness exists, but it doesn’t explain how consciousness arises from physical processes. However, I think the ‘how’ part of the hard problem actually belongs with the easy problems. It should be noted here that these problems are actually far from easy, and Chalmers was being tongue-in-cheek when he referred to them as such. In reality, solving the easy problems will take many years of painstaking research by lots of very clever people. But they are easy in the sense that they are solvable in principle, even if solving them in practice is very difficult.

    The idea that consciousness exists because it provides an evolutionary advantage seems so obvious, I can’t believe nobody has thought of it before. Strangely, though, I can’t find any evidence of anyone putting this forward as an explanation, which makes we wonder whether there might be some motivated reasoning going on. Could it be that people actually want the hard problem of consciousness to be insoluble? I can see why this might be so. The idea that consciousness is somehow independent of physical processes may be comforting for some as it implies that perhaps our consciousness lives on after we die (and presumably also that it existed before we were born, although for whatever reason we can’t remember this).

    This suggests to me that those who advocate for the hard problem of consciousness being fundamentally insoluble might be guilty of the confusing what they would like to be true with what is actually true. I don’t mean to sound condescending here; we are all guilty of this at times. But we obviously shouldn’t reject rational explanations for phenomena just because they make us feel uncomfortable. I would love to believe that consciousness exists independently of physical processes, as it opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities, but my rational brain tells me that this is wishful thinking. The truth is, there is a straightforward materialist solution for the hard problem of consciousness, and we should consider that before we start looking for more esoteric explanations.

  • True socialism does not exist (yet)

    There is no doubt that globally, socialism is in decline. At one time around one-third of the world’s population lived under socialist governments, most notably in the republics of the Soviet Union and its satellites. Today, socialism is the official form of government in only five countries: China, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea. In fact, most experts argue that China’s contemporary economic system represents a form of capitalism rather than socialism, which brings the number of socialist countries down to four. Moreover, it can hardly be said that any of these four countries is doing particularly well. Of the 186 countries included in the CIA’s World Factbook, Vietnam ranks 86 in terms of GDP (PPP) per capita, Cuba ranks 99, Laos ranks 121, and North Korea ranks last.

    These two facts – the global decline of socialism, and the fact that the remaining socialist countries are relatively poor – are often trotted out as a way to demonstrate that, whilst socialism might be a great idea in theory, in practice it just doesn’t work. And on the face of it, it is difficult to argue. So how should we socialists respond? We cannot deny the facts on the ground, but we can start by putting them into context. First, we can point out that although the remaining socialist countries may be relatively poor, so are their closest neighbours. Vietnam and Laos’ closest neighbour, Cambodia, ranks 144 on the list of countries based on GDP (PPP) per capita, and Cuba’s closest neighbours, Jamaica and Haiti, rank 111 and 158 respectively.

    Nobody ever blames capitalism for the relative poverty of Cambodia, Haiti, and Jamaica, despite the fact that these are capitalist states. So blaming the poverty of neighbouring socialist countries on socialism is an obvious case of cherry-picking data to fit preexisting beliefs. However, although this may be true, the argument is not all that convincing as all four socialist states also have capitalist neighbours that are richer than them. For example, Thailand ranks 73 on the list of countries by GDP (PPP) per capita, ahead of both Vietnam and Laos; the Dominican Republic ranks 71, ahead of Cuba; and South Korea ranks 28, way ahead of North Korea (in fact every country in the world ranks above North Korea).

    A better riposte is to point out that GDP is just one metric, and a flawed one at that. Perhaps we should look instead at the UN’s Human Development Index. Unfortunately socialist states don’t fare any better here either: in the list of 193 countries for which the index is calculated, Vietnam ranks 93, Cuba ranks 97, Laos ranks 147, and poor old North Korea didn’t even make the list. It seems pretty clear therefore that these countries are not exactly socialist utopias. But before we jump to the conclusion that socialism doesn’t work, we need to consider another possibility: outside sabotage. It is notable that in the last century, the US has gone to war with three of these four countries (Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea) and has imposed a brutal embargo on the third (Cuba).

    Is it possible that the reason these countries are poor is that they are being actively sabotaged by the US? I think it unlikely in the case of Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea, as the US-led wars in these countries, destructive as they were, all ended many decades ago. However, as the US embargo on Cuba is ongoing, you could make a case that it is having a significant impact on the country’s economy. In fact a 2015 report in Al Jazeera estimated that the embargo had cost the Cuban economy $1.1 trillion in the 55 years since its inception, once inflation is taken into account. This equates to around $20bn per year, or around 15% of Cuba’s GDP (PPP). But a 15% increase in GDP (PPP) per capita would hardly turn Cuba into a rich country; it would still be poorer than its neighbour the Dominican Republic, for example.

    Thus, although the US embargo clearly has some impact on the Cuban economy – it must do, otherwise why would they do it? – I don’t think we can blame it for the state the country is in. How, then, do we as socialists reconcile ourselves to the fact that socialist countries are so poor? I think our only option is to accept that these countries are not really socialist. This answer will not be popular with those who are opposed to socialism. It will also not be popular with many who are in favour of socialism, as Vietnam and Cuba in particular are often held up as examples of successful socialist states. I am also conscious that this answer might sound like a cop-out, and that by saying that these countries are not really socialist I am simply dodging the question. So let me try to expand on this a bit.

    Recall the basic definition of socialism: an economic system based on social (i.e. common) ownership of the means of production. This contrasts with capitalism, an economic system based private ownership of the means of production. Which is a better description of the economic systems that exist in Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea? I would argue it is the latter rather than the former. Although these countries are nominally socialist, in each of them an authoritarian state has effectively taken on the role of the ruling class. In other words, they are state capitalist rather than socialist. In my view, this is the real reason these countries are so poor, and will remain so until there is a truly democratic socialist revolution – one that takes place on a global scale.

  • Where do profits come from?

    The most ubiquitous economic metric is Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, which is a measure of the total value of goods and services produced by a country. There are two ways of calculating GDP: the ‘income approach’ and the ‘expenditure approach’ (there is also a third way – the ‘production approach’ – but that need not concern us here). Using the income approach, nominal GDP, Y, is equal to total labour costs, L, plus total profits, H: in symbols, Y = L+H. Here, total labour costs represents the total remuneration to employees for work done, including both wages (in the usual sense of the term) and salaries. Conversely, ‘total profits’ represents any income derived otherwise, including profits (again, in the usual sense), rent, and interest. Both total labour costs and total profits are gross quantities, so include taxes.

    Wages and profits are nominal values measured in terms of money; but GDP is a real value measured in terms of goods and services. Real values are converted to nominal values using a price index or price level. Denoting real net output by y and the overall price level by p we can write: py = L+H. Rearranging this formula gives an expression for the price level: p = (L/y)(1+H/L). To break this down further we need to understand where wages and profits come from. For labour costs this is easy: people earn wages by working, so total labour costs are equal to the overall level of employment – that is, the total time spent working – denoted here by u, multiplied by the price of labour – that is, the average wage – denoted here by w: L=wu.

    To understand where profits come from, we need to use the so-called Kalecki profit equation, named after the Marxist economist Michał Kalecki. The Kalecki profit equation is derived using the expenditure approach to calculating GDP. Using this approach, nominal GDP equal to the total of consumption, C, investment, I, government spending, G, and net exports, N: in symbols, Y = C+I+G+N. Calculating GDP in this way gives the same result as calculating GDP using the income approach, as we did above. This is due to the circular flow of the economy: one person’s spending equals another person’s income, and vice-versa. We can therefore substitute in the equation for GDP using the income approach (see above) to give the following formula: L+H = C+I+G+N.

    Moving total wages to the right-hand side yields the following expression for total profits, where, for reasons that will shortly become clear, I have split total consumption C into consumption out of wages, CL, and consumption out of profits, CH: H = CL+CH+I+G+N–L. Now, workers can use their wages for one of three things: consumption, saving, and paying taxes. It follows from this and the equation above (after doing a little bit of algebra – note that consumption from wages cancels out) that the following holds, where SL is saving out of wages and TL is total taxes on wages: H = CH+I+G+N–TL–SL. We have just derived the Kalecki profit equation. The truth of this equation is not in question as it is based on macroeconomic accounting identities.

    What is in question is the direction of causality: do profits determine the quantities on the right-hand side, or do the quantities on the right-hand side determine profits? According to Kalecki, the causality runs right-to-left: aggregate profits are always determined by the quantities on the right-hand side of the Kalecki profit equation. This seems paradoxical. If investment and consumption out of profits increase then you would think that this would cause profits to decrease, and vice-versa. However, although this is obviously true for an individual firm, it is not true for the firm sector as a whole, as the investment and consumption of one firm become the profits of another. This highlights a key difference between capitalists and workers.

    Whereas workers have to earn money by selling their labour-power for a wage, capitalists as a class essentially determine their own income. As Kalecki put it: workers spend what they get, and capitalists get what they spend. In fact, the capitalist class also determines the price level indirectly through its investment and consumption decisions. Recall from above our simple expression for the price level p: p = (L/y)(1+H/L). Let us denote the time spent per unit of production – that is, the inverse of labour productivity – by v, so that: u = vy. In Marxian economics, the quantity v is referred to as the value of labour. Then, as L = wu, we have: L = vwy. Substituting this into our equation for the price level gives: p = vw(1+H/wu).

    What does this mean in English?! In brief, it means the price level depends positively on total profits, the average wage, and the value of labour, and negatively on the level of employment. Again, the truth of this equation is not in doubt as it is based on macroeconomic accounting identities. At this point it is helpful to think about how firms set prices. There is a large body of evidence suggesting that firms set prices by adding a fixed percentage, known as a mark-up, on top of the cost of a unit of product. We can therefore write: p = vw(1+m), where r denotes the average mark-up for the whole economy. Equating the two expressions for the price level gives: m = H/wu. Thus, if prices are set using a mark-up over wages then the average mark-up must be equal to the ratio of total profits to total wages.

    We have already seen that total profits are determined by the quantities on the right-hand side of the Kalecki profit equation. Thus, the capitalist class as a whole determines the average mark-up, and therefore the price level, through its investment and consumption decisions. So the next time prices go up, you know who to blame!

  • Materialist physics

    In a previous blog post I suggested that some ideas in physics that seem strange when formulated in a continuous framework based on infinite sets make more sense in a discrete framework based on finite sets. In this blog post I will attempt to flesh this out in more detail. Consider a particle moving in discrete time and let x(t) denote the position of the particle at (discrete) time t. Let dt denote the increment between successive time steps. There are two ways to define velocity at time t: a ‘forward’ velocity u(t) = [x(t+dt)-x(t)]/dt, and a ‘backward’ velocity u(t) = [x(t)-x(t-dt)]/dt. We can already see therefore that it doesn’t make any sense to talk of ‘the’ velocity at time t. In a discrete context there is no notion of instantaneous velocity.

    Measure the position of the particle at time t, and you get x(t). Then measure the forward velocity of the particle, and you get [x(t+dt)-x(t)]/dt. Now measure position again, and you get x(t+dt) because the time has shifted to the next increment in order to allow the velocity measurement. In order to measure velocity, the position is necessarily shifted to its value at the next time step. In this sense, position and velocity measurements cannot commute in a discrete framework. Which is to say that the order you take these measurements in affects what measurements you get. This is the key idea that motivates our constructions. In a discrete time framework, position and velocity are not defined concurrently, as position is defined at a single point in time, whereas velocity is defined using two points in time.

    Suppose that we want to multiply together the position and forward velocity of the particle. If we measure position first we will get x(t)u(t), whereas if we measure velocity first we will get u(t)x(t+dt). Let us define the difference or commutator between the two as [x,u](t) = x(t)u(t)-u(t)x(t+dt). Then we have [x,u](t) = [x(t+dt)-x(t)]x(t)/dt-x(t+dt)[x(t+dt)-x(t)]/dt = [-x(t+dt)2+2x(t)x(t+dt)-x(t)2]/dt, and therefore [x,u](t) = -[x(t+dt)-x(t)]2/dt = -u2dt. Now suppose that our particle is undergoing a random walk, so that at each time step it moves a short distance dx to the left or right, each with probability p ≤ 1/2. Then u2 = dx2/dt2 with probability 2p, and u2 = 0 with probability 1-2p. Then using revised definition of the commutator [x,u](t) = E[x(t)u(t) – u(t)x(t+dt)] where E is the expectation operator, gives [x,u] = -2pdx2/dt.

    Let f(x,t) denote the probability that the particle will be in position x at time t. Then, using the fact that the particle stays in the same place with probability 1-2p, we can see immediately that the function f() satisifies the relation f(x,t+dt)=pf(x+dx,t)+(1-2p)f(x,t)+pf(x-dx,t). Analogously to the continuous case, we can define discrete partial derivatives as fx(x,t) = [f(x+dx,t)-f(x,t)]/dx and ft(x,t) = [f(x,t+dt)-f(x,t)]/dt. Then from our expression for f() above, we have ft(x,t) = p[f(x+dx,t)-2f(x,t)+f(x-dx,t)]/dt. Let us also define the second partial derivative of f() with respect to x as fxx(x,t) = [fx(x,t)-fx(x-dx,t)]/dx. Expanding this expression gives fxx(x,t) = [f(x+dx,t)-2f(x,t)+f(x-dx,t)]/dx2, and therefore ft = pfxxdx2/dt. In other words, the function f() satisfies a discrete version of the diffusion equation, with diffusion constant pdx2/dt.

    Now for the interesting bit. Let m denote the mass of the particle and set dx = ħ/mc, set dt = iħ/mc2, and set p = 1/2, where ħ is the reduced Planck constant, c is the speed of light, and i is the imaginary constant, so that i2 = -1. Then pdx2/dt = (ħ2/2m2c2)/(iħ/mc2) = ħ/2im = -iħ/2m, so [x,u] = iħ/m, or equivalently, [x,mu](t) = iħ, which is a discrete version of the canonical commutation relation between position and momentum. Furthermore, the function f() satisfies a discrete version of the Schrödinger equation: ft = -iħfxx/2m. We have just derived discrete versions of two of the most important relations in quantum mechanics using nothing but high-school algebra. Moreover, in deriving these results we may have uncovered some insights into why they hold, as we will now see.

    If m is the mass of the particle then ħ/mc is referred to as the particle’s Compton wavelength, defined as the wavelength of a photon whose energy is the same as the rest energy of that particle. Similarly, ħ/mc2 is referred to as the particle’s Compton time, which is simply the time of a step length of the Compton wavelength taken at the velocity of light. These are considered to be fundamental quantum mechanical properties of a particle. Now suppose that m is the Planck mass, the largest possible mass of a particle, so that m = √(ħc/G), where G is is Newton’s gravitational constant. Then ħ/mc is the Planck length, the smallest unit of length, and ħ/mc2 is the Planck time, the smallest unit of time. These amounts of mass, length, and time are constructed from the values of fundamental physical constants.

    Thus, our choice of units in the derivation above was far from arbitrary. What about the fact that we multiplied the Compton time by the imaginary constant i? This was not arbitrary either. The concept of ‘imaginary time’ is well established in physics, and was popularized by Stephen Hawking in his book The Universe in a Nutshell. It should be noted that the imaginary constant i is no more ‘imaginary’ than any other number; this unfortunate misnomer is only retained as it his become so well established in the mathematics world. I would argue that the imaginary constant i is more real than most ‘real’ numbers, as it can be constructed from the axioms of mathematics in a finite number of steps, whereas most ‘real’ numbers cannot.

    We have seen therefore that in a discrete framework, we can derive fundamental relations of quantum mechanics in a natural way without having to resort to the usual heavy-duty Hilbert space machinery. Furthermore, these derivations used parameters based on fundamental physical constants with a clear physical interpretation. Admittedly, we have only derived these relations in a special case, and more work would need to be done to see if these results could be generalized. There is no reason to think they couldn’t be though. In my view, a discrete framework is much more natural for quantum mechanics than a continuous framework. After all, quantum mechanics is fundamentally concerned with quanta – the smallest possible, and therefore indivisible, units of nature.

  • How old is human civilization?

    The standard account of human history runs as follows. First, modern humans evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago. Then, for a long time nothing much happened, until about 11,000 years ago when somebody invented agriculture. After that, human civilization took off – and the rest, as they say, is history. There is a glaring problem with this story though: if modern humans evolved 300,000  years ago, why did it take us 290,000 years to invent agriculture? It’s not as though agriculture would be all that difficult to invent! In fact it’s now accepted that after agriculture was invented in the Middle East 11,000 years ago, it was invented again independently on at least four separate occasions. This makes the claim that we went 290,000 years without inventing it before that seem even more fishy.

    An alternative possibility is that we did invent agriculture before 11,000 years ago, perhaps many times, but then each time we subsequently forgot how to do it. This is rather implausible though, as if agriculture is relatively easy to invent, it is even easier keep doing it once it has been invented. Another possibility is that we invented agriculture before, but each time we invented it, for some reason civilization failed to develop. However, this also seems rather implausible, as almost every time agriculture has been invented in recent history, a civilization has subsequently followed. Agriculture was invented independently in the Middle East, China, Central America, and South America in the last 11,000 years, and in all these regions great civilizations then rose up.

    There is another possibility: we invented agriculture many times, and civilizations did follow, but then these civilizations subsequently fell into decline, leaving no trace. On the face of it this seems equally implausible. Surely any reasonably advanced civilization would have leave some sort of evidence for its existence that would have been discovered by now? Well, not necessarily. If our current civilization ended tomorrow, vegetation, storms, fires, frost, rust, earthquakes and burrowing animal activity would erase most of our visible traces within a thousand years. It is therefore quite possible that civilizations could have risen and fallen several times within the past 300,000 years and left no evidence behind – in fact, given the timescale involved, it seems more likely than not.

    Another reason that we may not have found any trace of previous civilizations is that the evidence may all be hidden underwater. Over the past 300,000 years, global sea levels have fluctuated significantly, with a rise of over 120 meters during inter-glacial cycles due to the growth and decay of ice sheets. If previous civilizations developed when sea levels were significantly lower then we wouldn’t have found any evidence for them, as it is very difficult to find archaeological evidence at the bottom of the ocean, and even more difficult to extract it! Perhaps flood-related myths like the city of Atlantis and Noah’s Ark aren’t myths at all, but are instead folk memories passed down through generations of events that actually occurred at some time in the distant past.

    The idea that human civilization might be much older than generally thought was recently brought to my attention by a YouTuber named Michael Button. I highly recommend that you check out his channel! Button’s thesis is very similar in spirit to the thesis put forward in a 2021 book by the anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow called The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. The book critiques traditional narratives of history’s linear development of civilization. Instead, The Dawn of Everything posits that humans lived in large, complex, but decentralized polities for millennia. According to Graeber and Wengrow, social emancipation can be found through this more accurate understanding of human history.

    In particular, Graeber and Wengrow argue that narratives of social development in which western civilization is self-appointed to be the highest point of achievement to date in a linear progression are largely myths. They suggest that our central question is how modern societies have lost the qualities of flexibility and political creativity that were once more common. Their argument is backed up by scientific evidence that has come to light only in the last few decades. Graeber and Wengrow’s thesis is a helpful antidote to ‘Capitalist Realism’, the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.

    Those who argue that capitalism is the only viable system are guilty of what might be called the ‘argument from personal incredulity’. This argument takes the form: ‘I can’t personally imagine how X could happen, therefore X couldn’t happen!’. The truth is that there are many possible alternatives to capitalism. Just because it is difficult to imagine what these alternatives might be doesn’t demonstrate that they don’t exist; all that demonstrates is a lack of imagination. The work of Button on one hand, and Graeber and Wengrow on the other, opens our eyes to the possibility that human civilizations existed in the past that were structured in entirely different ways to our modern society. This, in turn, should give us hope that capitalism can be defeated and replaced with something better.

  • Stand up to Zionism!

    The UK’s new left-wing party, provisionally called ‘Your Party’, still hasn’t officially launched yet, but already cracks are beginning to show. The bone of contention appears to be the question of the new party’s stance on Zionism. The dispute seems to have been sparked by Zara Sultana’s recent Twitter proclamation that she is anti-Zionist. This has led people to ask Jeremy Corbyn whether he is anti-Zionist too, to which he has so far failed to give a straight answer (in true politicians’ style). Many have concluded that his lack of a straight answer betrays that he is sympathetic to Zionism, or at least that the people advising him are. Some have even gone so far to argue that Corbyn is a Zionist himself. The issue has divided those supporting the party into two camps.

    In one camp (the Corbyn camp) are those who believe that whether the new party calls itself anti-Zionist or not is irrelevant. These people argue that the important thing is that the new party stands up for the Palestinian people, regardless of the party’s explicit stance on Zionism. For these people, arguing about whether Corbyn is a Zionist or not is at best pointless and at worst risks derailing the project before it has even started. In the other camp (the Sultana camp) are those who believe it is crucial that the new party declares itself to be anti-Zionist from the outset. These people argue that it is not possible to stand up for Palestinians without taking an explicitly anti-Zionist stance. For these people, failure to take such a stance means that the party is doomed to repeat mistakes of the past, and will therefore fail.

    So who is right? In order to answer this question, we first need to define what we mean by ‘Zionism’. Contrary to what some might say, this term is actually quite easy to define. Zionism is the nationalist movement that emerged in late 19th-century Europe to establish and support a Jewish homeland through the colonization of Palestine. The stated aim of Zionism is to create a Jewish state in the Levant with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible. Straight away we can see the problem with the idea that it is possible to stand up for the Palestinian people without taking an explicitly anti-Zionist stance: Zionism as a concept is fundamentally antithetical to the rights of Palestinians.

    Those in the Corbyn camp would probably argue that Corbyn is anti-Zionist but doesn’t want to state that explicitly, as making such statements has got him into trouble in the past. In particular, he may be wary of once again being smeared as an antisemite; and on a personal level, I can totally understand that. The psychological abuse this man has had to endure since he became leader of the Labour party nine years ago has been off the charts. Imagine devoting your entire life to fighting racism, only to then become the target of a vicious and coordinated smear campaign as a result of which most of the country now thinks you are racist! When put in that way, it’s amazing he’s still participating in British politics at all, and the fact that he is testament to his resilience and devotion to the cause.

    However, if that is the case, it suggests Corbyn and his supporters have failed to learn the lessons of the past nine years. The problem wasn’t that Corbyn was perceived as anti-Zionist; on the contrary, the problem was that under his leadership, Labour conceded too much ground to the Zionist lobby. This was exactly the point that Chris Williamson made in his speech at the Labour Party Conference, for which he was accused of antisemitism and thrown out of the party. There was nothing remotely antisemitic in what Williamson said – in fact the thrust of it was that he was proud to be a member of a party that had done more than any other to combat racism. His removal from the party was done solely to placate the Zionist lobby. Needless to say, it didn’t work, and the smear campaign simply continued as before.

    What about the claim that Corbyn is himself a Zionist? This claim seems absurd at first given Corbyn’s support for the Palestinian cause, but there is some evidence behind it. First, as Labour leader, he opposed any boycott of Israeli goods. Second, in 2018, he declared support for a two-state solution, which is incompatible with giving Palestinians the right to return to their homes. Third, in an article in The Guardian in August 2018, he wrote that it was it was wrong to say that Zionism is racism, despite the fact that it is, by definition, a racist ideology. Fourth, he drove acceptance of the Zionist IHRA definition of antisemitism, which conflates antisemitism with anti-Zionism, through the Labour Party. Taking all of this into account, the claim that Corbyn is a Zionist starts to seem a lot more plausible.

    It will probably be clear from the above that I sit squarely in the Sultana camp on this issue. Zionism is a poisonous, supremacist ideology which must be opposed. Appeasement of the Zionist lobby should not be countenanced – firstly on principle, and secondly because it has been proven not to work. In my view, taking a firmly anti-Zionist stance is imperative to making the new left party a success. We must learn the lessons of the past and stand up to Zionism. At the end of the day, those who belong to the Zionist lobby are bullies – and aren’t we always told we should stand up to bullies?

  • Why are energy prices going up, again?

    The energy regulator for Great Britain, Ofgem, has just announced that it will raise the energy price cap by 2% from October. But what exactly is the energy price cap? Actually there are four energy price caps: one in pence per kWh and one in pence per day, for both gas and electricity. These represent the maximum amounts that suppliers can charge you for each unit of energy you use, or for each day that you use energy. They are all going up by 2%, which means that suppliers will be able to charge you 2% more for your energy from October. This may not sound a big increase but it comes off the back of huge increases in energy prices over recent years: according to data published by the Department for Energy and Net Zero, domestic energy bills in the UK have increased by over 50% on average since 2020.

    So why has Ofgem done this? According to them, it is because of increased wholesale gas and electricity costs. And in fairness to Ofgem, these costs do seem to have gone up slightly in recent months. But this does raise the question of what the point of having a price cap is if it isn’t fixed but is instead tied to wholesale energy costs. Ostensibly the point is of course to prevent suppliers from charging too much for energy bills; but in making the price cap dependent on wholesale costs, Ofgem is effectively ensuring that whenever these costs go up, it is the public that has to foot the bill rather than the suppliers. Thus, although the cap is supposedly there to protect consumers, the way it is set means that it ends up protecting suppliers’ profit margins instead.

    In fact the very existence of the price cap is a tacit admission that a privatized energy system doesn’t make any sense. The unspoken implication is that if the price cap wasn’t there, energy suppliers would charge even more for the energy they supply by applying even bigger mark-ups to wholesale costs. But the whole justification for having a market-based system is that it will be better for consumers, as competition between suppliers will lead to increased efficiencies which will drive prices down! By this logic, there should be no need for the price cap, which is effectively a kind of price control; instead, we should simply be able to let supply and demand work its magic and reduce prices for the consumer. But as Ofgem and everyone else knows, in practice that just won’t happen.

    This leads to the question of why we have a privatized energy system at all. Even if you accept that energy bills need to be tied to wholesale energy prices, why should they also have an additional profit margin slapped on top of them? This wouldn’t be necessary if energy was provided by the state. As already noted, the usual justification that a market-based solution will drive down prices doesn’t hold here. In fact it doesn’t hold for any service that relies on fixed infrastructure, as fixed infrastructure creates what economists call a ‘natural monopoly’. This is why, for example, privatized air travel results in cheaper airline tickets, but privatized rail travel does not result in cheaper rail tickets (quite the opposite in fact).

    In reality, the reason we have a privatized energy system has nothing whatsoever to do with increasing efficiency, reducing costs, or any other of the phoney reasons usually put forward by neoliberal zealots. The reason, of course, is that it allows the ruling class to cream off additional profits at the expense of ordinary people, thereby providing another mechanism through which capitalists can exploit workers. In fact privatizing the energy system is particularly lucrative because, as any physicist will tell you, you can’t do anything without energy. As the economist Steve Keen puts it: labour without energy is a corpse. If energy prices go up then people basically have no choice but to pay the additional amount; it’s either that or freeze to death.

    The government would probably argue that even if it were to nationalize energy, prices would still need to be based on wholesale costs, which are set globally and are therefore not within the UK’s control. But this is only so because the UK is heavily reliant on imported gas to meet its energy needs, which in turn is a result of policy decisions made by this and previous governments. In fact in the UK we are in the bonkers situation where gas plants set the price for all electricity on the grid – even if that electricity is generated from renewable sources! This is due to our ’marginal cost pricing system’ where the price of electricity is set by the most expensive source needed to meet demand at any given time, which is typically gas-fired power plants.

    So under the existing framework, switching on mass to renewable energy sources would not result in price savings for the consumer, even if those renewable sources were entirely within the UK. This is particularly infuriating when you consider that it is now generally a lot cheaper to generate energy from renewable sources than it is to generate electricity from fossil fuels. Both wind and solar can now generate electricity at a cost of £40-£50 per MWh, whereas the  cost of gas-fired generation has increased to around £124 per MWh. Why don’t we simply get rid of the marginal cost pricing system then? Because it’s yet another profit-generating device. Until we remove the profit motive from our energy system, our energy prices will only continue to rise.

  • Why right-wingers are really protesting

    I recently returned from a long weekend visiting my family home in Devon. Driving back through the village where I grew up, I was surprised to see St. George’s Crosses painted on one of the village’s two zebra crossings. On the journey home through Somerset, Wiltshire, and Hampshire, seeing St. George’s Crosses and Union Flags flying everywhere, I started to wonder where this outpouring of patriotism was coming from. Was there a big sporting event on that I had failed to register? But the grim truth soon dawned on me. This was no outpouring of sporting patriotism: it was an outpouring of far-right nationalism. Suddenly the drive home started to seem much less enjoyable. This land I was driving through, which used to feel like home to me, now felt overtly hostile.

    It turns out that the proliferation of flags I was witnessing is the result of an orchestrated campaign run by a group called Operation Raise the Colours. The aims of this group are not entirely clear as they don’t seem to seem to have a website, or any other online presence for that matter. No doubt they would claim that they were simply being patriotic by encouraging people to fly their country’s flag; and under other circumstances, that would make perfect sense. In fact if the England men’s football team ever makes it to a World Cup final, I will be tempted to get the red paint out and start painting zebra crossings myself. But the circumstances we find ourselves in now are a lot darker. It seems clear, in fact, that this campaign is directly linked to a recent protest outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in Epping.

    Now protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers are nothing new. There have been many such protests at hotels all over the country, including at a hotel just down the road from where I live. But what makes the recent protest outside the Epping hotel particularly significant is that it succeeded in driving out the asylum seekers living there. Last week, a High Court judge granted a temporary injunction and said migrants at the site in Essex would need to be moved out by 12 September, and one of the reasons cited for this decision was disruption caused by the protests and concerns for the safety of the asylum seekers themselves. The message is clear: protesting outside hotels housing asylum seekers works. It’s no wonder the far-right felt emboldened to run its nationalistic flag campaign.

    What should the left do in response to all this? It is tempting to say we should do all we can raise the alarm about how this is the next step on our seemingly inexorable slide into fascism. And it certainly feels like we are heading that way. In my 40+ years living in the UK I have never known the far right to be so brazenly self-confident as they are at this moment. But I think making a big issue out of these events would play into the hands of those orchestrating them, who are obviously doing it at least in part to try and provoke exactly such a response. Instead, I think we need to take a more nuanced approach which begins with understanding the root causes. As ever, these root causes lie in the material conditions people find themselves in.

    I have often wondered why people bother giving up their spare time to protest about asylum seekers. You’d think they’d have better things to do! These protesters can’t all just be knuckle-dragging racists (although I’m sure some of them are). So I recently signed up to my local right-wing Facebook group to try and find out a bit more about what motivates them. What I found was quite revealing: far from being motivated by hatred of asylum seekers as people, these protesters mainly seem aggrieved by their perception that asylum seekers are getting a better deal than them and their fellow countrymen. Of course, that probably isn’t the case in reality, and I doubt many locals would willingly swap places with an asylum seeker given the chance; but still, this perception persists.

    What these people are really protesting about, I think, is the fact that their lives are hard and only ever seem to be getting harder. But they cannot articulate their grievance in this way as they have internalized the bogus right-wing narrative that we are all ultimately responsible for our own fate. Instead, having internalized this narrative, they take matters into their own hands in the only way they know how: by attacking those they perceive to be getting an unfairly easy ride. To be clear, I am not in any way condoning the actions of these protesters – far from it. There can be no excuse for the kind of behaviour we have seen recently in Epping and elsewhere. But only by understanding the root causes of social issues will we ever be able to adequately address them.

    So I think we on the left need to find a way to explain to those protesting about asylum seekers the real reason why their lives are so difficult. And that reason, of course, has nothing to do with asylum seekers: it is because they are living under neoliberal capitalism. In fact these are the people most adversely effected by living under this draconian, exploitative system. If there is a positive to take from these recent events it’s that the working class in this country is genuinely angry and is willing to take their anger out onto the streets. If we can somehow redirect this anger away from asylum seekers and towards the real enemy – the ruling class – then who knows what we might achieve.

  • Reform or revolution

    Rosa Luxemburg led an interesting life. Born Rozalia Luksenburg in 1871 to a Jewish family in Russian-occupied Poland, Luxemburg became a German citizen in 1898. Her opposition to WWI led her to co-found the Spartacus League, an anti-war Marxist revolutionary movement, as a result of which she was imprisoned for most of the war. After her release, during the German Revolution, Luxemburg co-founded the Communist Party of Germany and was a central figure in the January 1919 Spartacist uprising in Berlin (mentioned in a previous blog post). When the revolt was crushed by the Freikorps, a government-sponsored paramilitary group, Luxemburg and the other leaders were captured and summarily executed, leading to her becoming revered as a martyr on the left.

    In 1899 Luxemburg published a short but highly influential book entitled Social Reform or Revolution? (German: Sozialreform oder Revolution?), in which she argues that trade unions, reformist political parties, and the expansion of social democracy, whilst important to the proletariat’s development of class consciousness, cannot by themselves create a socialist society. Instead, she argues that capitalism is intrinsically unsustainable and will eventually collapse, and that a revolution is necessary to transform capitalism into socialism. The book is written as a detailed critique of the thinking of Eduard Bernstein, another prominent socialist theorist of the time, who advocated for a gradual, parliamentary path to socialism.

    Reading Social Reform or Revolution? today, what’s particularly striking is how prescient it seems. For example, Luxemburg identifies the expansion of credit and the stock market as things that will exacerbate capitalism’s periodic crises – not, as Bernstein argued, measures that gradually remove the tendency towards crisis. Luxemburg was proved spectacularly right by the great depression of 1929 and again by the financial crisis of 2008; both of these events were caused by over-indebtedness of the private sector and were exacerbated by speculation in the stock markets. In highlighting these factors Luxemburg foreshadowed later 20th century economists such as Hyman Minsky, who argued that accumulation of debt (or credit) by the non-government sector pushes an economy towards crisis.

    In fact the 125-year period since the publication of Social Reform or Revolution? can be seen as one long vindication of the book’s central thesis. We had a period of social reform in the Western world in the 30 years following WWII, largely as a response to the threat of socialist revolution created by the existence of the Soviet Union and its socialist allies. But this did not lead to socialism as Bernstein predicted; instead, these reforms were rolled back as soon as the Soviet Union’s power started to wane and the possibility of revolution began to diminish. Conversely, where socialism has been implemented successfully in the last 125 years – e.g. in Russia, China, Vietnam, and Cuba – it has been as the result of a revolution.

    Another example of Luxemburg’s prescience is her insightful take on trade unions. The importance of trade unions, she argued, is not that they could end bourgeois ownership of capital; rather, they are the body through which workers come together and understand that they are part of a class. Trade unions will never bring down capitalism on their own – and in fact there are countless of examples of trade union bureaucracies acting as a brake on revolutionary movements. The best that can be hoped for is that by bargaining for higher wages, trade unions provide workers with a few more crumbs from the capitalists’ table. But bringing workers together is a necessary step in developing class consciousness, which in turn is a necessary step in bringing about a successful revolution.

    Capitalism is fundamentally unreformable, Luxemburg argues, because of features that are baked into it. For example, we will never be able to reform away unemployment as in order to function effectively, capitalism relies on permanently maintaining a class of unemployed people (referred to by Marx as the ‘reserve army of labour’). In other words, unemployment is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. Any reforms won by labour will therefore be relatively small and insignificant, and trying to reform capitalism from within will be like trying to sweeten the ocean with lemonade. In fact Luxemburg likens union struggles to the labour of Sisyphus, the mythical figure who was condemned to push a stone up a hill over and over again for all eternity.

    But rather than diminish the importance of the struggles by workers, Luxemburg argues that these struggles are central. Social Reform or Revolution? should therefore be read as a call to action. It would be great if capitalism could be gradually reformed from within, as then we could all just sit around reading poetry and let the social democrats get on with it, but it’s just not going to happen. Not only is capitalism unreformable; it will inevitably fall. The expansion of credit means that capitalism is structured as a giant Ponzi scheme, and like any Ponzi scheme, it will eventually collapse. The question is, what comes next? As Rosa Luxemburg herself said, there are two possibilities: socialism or barbarism. We have act now to make sure it’s the former and not the latter.

  • Why did Labour lose so badly in 2019?

    In 2019, the Labour party suffered a humiliating defeat in the UK general election, losing 59 seats, the second-highest loss by any opposition for a century. Many explanations have been put forward for this collapse, but the three most commonly touted are: 1) unpopularity of Jeremy Corbyn and, by extension, the party leadership; 2) the party’s overly ambitious manifesto; and 3) confusion over the party’s Brexit strategy. In this blog post, I will go through each of these reasons in turn and see which, if any, hold water. But before getting into the details, it’s worth pointing out that one of the reasons the defeat seemed so catastrophic is that it was compared to the 2017 election, where Labour performed above expectations. Therefore the question we need to ask is: what changed between 2017 and 2019?

    Let’s start with the unpopularity of Jeremy Corbyn. There is no doubt that on the face of it at least, Corbyn was hugely unpopular with the British electorate. According to Ipsos Mori, Corbyn went into the campaign with the lowest net satisfaction ratings of any opposition leader since the late 1970s. There are reasons to be circumspect about statistics such as these though – the main one being that they don’t tell us anything about why Corbyn was so unpopular, and therefore only provide a partial explanation at best. It seems that for many people, antisemitism and the perceived absence of an apology was the key issue. If so, this largely exonerates Corbyn, as the Labour ‘antisemitism crisis’ has now been completely debunked.

    This suggests that it is not actually Jeremy Corbyn himself who was unpopular but the fabricated version of him that people came to know through the mainstream media. This fabricated person was either an antisemite himself, or on a slightly more sympathetic reading, was not necessarily an antisemite but was more than happy to lead a party full of antisemites into a general election. Of course, anyone who knows anything about Jeremy Corbyn knows that neither of these things is even remotely true, but that didn’t matter: what mattered was that enough people believed them. Clearly, though, it doesn’t make any sense to blame the election defeat on the personal characteristics of Jeremy Corbyn if the vast majority of the electorate didn’t know the first thing about these characteristics.

    So let’s move on to explanation number two: the party’s overly ambitious manifesto. We can dispense with this one pretty quickly. It’s true that there was a lot on offer in Labour’s 2019 manifesto: from free care for the elderly, free university tuition fees, reducing the voting age to 16 and payouts for Waspi women, the party attempted to speak to every sector of society. Apparently, this put people off voting for them. There are two things to say in response to this. First, nobody reads party manifestos. And second, it doesn’t make any sense to say that a party manifesto that appealed to all sectors of society would put people off voting for that party. In fact, the idea is plainly absurd. I honestly can’t understand how anyone can hold this up as a reason for Labour’s defeat and keep a straight face.

    Which brings us to explanation number three: confusion over the party’s Brexit strategy. It’s true that Corbyn and the party leadership equivocated over Brexit for a long time. However this explanation as it stands doesn’t make a lot of sense as by the time of the 2019 election, Labour’s Brexit strategy was clear: the party backed a second referendum. But perhaps it wasn’t confusion over the party’s Brexit strategy that was the issue; perhaps it was the Brexit strategy itself? This explanation is not popular with the liberal commentariat, most of whom voted remain, supported a second referendum, and agitated for the Labour party to do the same. Unfortunately for the liberal commentariat, however, this explanation is the one backed up by the most evidence.

    Labour announced it would back a second referendum in February 2019, as a last resort to stop a Tory no-deal Brexit. At that point, Labour were and the Tories were neck-and-neck on around 40% in the polls, as they had been since the 2017 election. From that point onwards, Labour’s vote share declined precipitously, reaching a low of around 20% in July 2019; and although it rallied slightly after that, it never fully recovered to it’s pre-February 2019 level. If that wasn’t incriminating enough, there is the fact that of the 54 seats Labour lost to the Tories, 52 were in leave-voting constituencies. Finally, there is the fact that between the 2017 and 2019 general elections, Labour lost around 3 million votes, whereas the number of people voting Tory remained roughly the same.

    Returning to the question posed earlier, we may therefore ask again: what changed between 2017 and 2019? The Labour party leadership and policy platform remained broadly the same during this period; the one thing that changed significantly was the party’s stance on Brexit. All the evidence points to this being the key reason for Labour’s catastrophic defeat. In fact, I don’t think the 2019 election would have happened at all had the Labour party not backed a second referendum. It doesn’t take a genius to work out why the Tories decided to hold an election when Labour was languishing at around 20% in the polls. The Tories understood what the liberal commentariat apparently didn’t, or at least pretended not to: in backing a second referendum, Labour had effectively committed electoral suicide.