Groucho Marxism

Questions and answers on socialism, Marxism, and related topics

  • Ending the war in Ukraine

    There have been several rounds of peace talks to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine since it began in February 2022, but obviously none have been successful. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin outlined five terms for a ceasefire and negotiations in June 2024: 1) recognition of all occupied land as Russian, 2) Russia to be given all of the regions it claims but does not fully occupy, 3) a guarantee that Ukraine will never join NATO, 4) curtailment of Ukraine’s military, and 5) lifting of sanctions against Russia. Needless to say, these terms were rejected out of hand by Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his Western allies. But how unreasonable are they? In this blog post I will go through them one by one to see which, if any, of these terms could or even should be agreed to hasten the end of the war.

    Russia currently controls parts of Ukraine’s south-eastern regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaparizhia, along with the whole of Crimea. Putin has said that he wants full control of these regions and for them to become part of Russia. What do people living in these regions want? Let’s start with Crimea. Parliamentary elections took place in Crimea in September 2019 where Putin’s United Russia party won 58% of the seats. Furthermore, over 80% of Crimeans identify as Russian, although it should be pointed out that this is only the case due to the mass expulsion of the native Crimean Tartars in 1944. But even before then around 30% of the population of Crimea identified as Russian, with only 11%  identifying as Ukrainian. In fact Crimea was transferred from Russia to Ukraine only relatively recently, in 1954.

    It therefore seems reasonable to me that Crimea should be allowed to become part of Russia. What about the other regions claimed by Putin? Parliamentary elections took in these regions in September 2022 where the United Russia party won with more than 70% percent of the ballot in each region; but these elections were widely condemned as fraudulent by the international community. The demographic data in these regions are not on Putin’s side either: in Donetsk and Luhansk, the split between Ukrainians and Russians is around 60:40; in Zaparizha, around 70:30; and Kherson, around 80:20. It does not seem right therefore that these regions should be allowed to be swallowed by Russia as part of any peace deal.

    That brings us to Putin’s third condition: a guarantee that Ukraine will never join NATO. Russian authorities claim that an agreement on non-expansion of NATO to Eastern Europe took place orally after the revolutions of 1989 and the alliance violated it with its subsequent expansion; although the leaders of the alliance claim that no such promise was made and that such a decision could only be made in writing. Beyond the debate over diplomatic promises, numerous policymakers have opposed NATO’s eastern enlargement on strategic grounds. And beyond the debate over eastern expansion, many scholars and peace activists have condemned NATO in general as fundamentally incompatible with peaceful internationalism.

    I do not feel qualified to comment on these matters. But it seems silly to continue a war that has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives over something that might not even be a very good idea in the first place. Therefore, I think we should grant Putin’s wish and provide a guarantee that Ukraine will never join NATO. On the other hand, I don’t think we should agree to a curtailment of Ukraine’s military (Putin’s fourth condition). Ukraine is a sovereign nation and should be free to decide itself on this – particularly if it is not being allowed to join NATO. Putin’s final condition, lifting of sanctions against Russia, is a no-brainer, as these would presumably be lifted as part of any peace agreement anyway. In fact they may as well be lifted now as they don’t appear to be harming Russia’s economy at all.

    Thus, I think we should agree to two of Putin’s conditions (a guarantee that Ukraine will never join NATO and lifting of sanctions), partially agree to one (recognition of occupied land as Russian), and not agree to the other two (Russia to be given all of the regions it claims but does not fully occupy, and curtailment of Ukraine’s military). I am no expert in international relations, but this seems to me to be a fair compromise that would likely satisfy Putin and bring about the end of the war. So why don’t we do this? One answer is that we shouldn’t give concessions to Russia on principle, as we would effectively be rewarding them for their aggression. But it’s easy to pontificate about principles when you aren’t the one who is directly affected by this aggression.

    In my view, we in the West should do whatever we can to stop the war and end the suffering of the Ukrainian people – and if that means giving concessions to Russia, then so be it. In any case, I don’t think the unwillingness to give concessions to Russia has anything to do with principles. It seems clear that Western nations see this as a proxy war which they are deliberately prolonging for as long as possible in attempt to wear Russia down. Ukraine is being used as a pawn in a game of great power politics; and as usual, it is ordinary people who are paying the price.

  • What’s going on with Your Party?

    The launch of Your Party, the UK’s new left-wing party, is not going very well. On Thursday this week an email went out to potential members inviting them to join the party with a sign-up link, only for another email to be sent out out a few hours later telling everyone to ignore the first email. Many assumed that the initial email was a scam, but it appears that it was sent out by Zarah Sultana and her team, with the second email being sent out by Jeremy Corbyn and his team. Various statements were subsequently made by both Sultana and Corbyn, most of which were not very helpful in clearing up what had actually happened. The whole thing seems a complete mess. If Sultana and Corbyn are sending contradictory emails before the party has even been launched, what hope do they have co-leading the new party?

    At times like these we must remind ourselves that the new party is not about Sultana and Corbyn or the reformist advisers they have surrounded themselves with. The new party is (or should be) fundamentally about working class political representation. Still, I think it is important that we try to figure out what is actually going on here. The most sympathetic reading is that there is a difference of opinion between Sultana and Corbyn in how to proceed, with Sultana keen to press ahead and Corbyn keen to bide his time. Thursday’s email fiasco would then reflect a cock-up caused by a lack of communication between the two parties. This explanation has the advantage of adhering to Hanlon’s razor: ‘never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence’.

    But if Thursday’s events were the result of a cock-up, it would be a cock-up of epic proportions. Surely Sultana and Corbyn aren’t that incompetent?! I know starting a new political party isn’t easy, but it shouldn’t be this difficult: Nigel Farage managed it, and so did George Galloway (twice). Even Robert Kilroy-Silk, hardly the sharpest tool in the box, managed to get a new party up and running, albeit only briefly. This suggests to me that there is something more sinister going on behind the scenes. I am beginning to wonder whether Corbyn and the people around him may actually be trying to sabotage the new party. The claim seems ridiculous on the face of it: why would Corbyn and his team go through all the effort of getting the ball rolling on this new party only to then try and sabotage it?

    One possibility is that Corbyn’s heart just isn’t in this new project. He is probably still feeling bruised from his time as leader of the Labour party, and he must know that whoever leads the new party will be subjected to relentless attacks from the establishment. Perhaps he doesn’t have the stomach to go through all that again – and quite frankly, who could blame him. There is also the fact that Corbyn is a Labour man through-and-through, and has represented the party for all of his political career until only very recently. Corbyn seems to have a loyalty to the Labour Party that is bordering on pathological. I am pretty sure he’d still be in the party now if he hadn’t been thrown out of it, despite the appalling way he was treated by the party establishment and the party’s obvious neoliberal turn.

    Personally, though, I think there is more to this than Corbyn not being fully invested. In a statement released yesterday, Sultana said she took the step of unilaterally launching a membership portal after being sidelined by Corbyn and his allies and being frozen out of official accounts. She went on to claim that she had been the victim of a ‘sexist boys club’, and that she had been ‘treated appallingly’ and ‘excluded completely’. According to Sultana, this sexist boys club has refused to allow any other women with voting rights on the Working Group. Sultana went on to point out that Karie Murphy and her associates have ‘sole financial control over members’ money’ and ‘sole constitutional control over our conference’. (If you aren’t aware, Karie Murphy is a trade unionist who served as the Executive Director of the Leader of the Opposition’s Office under Corbyn from 2016 to 2020.)

    What are we to make of this? I think it is a clear sign that a small faction has formed around Corbyn that is attempting to take control of, and possibly even sabotage, the new party. This may seem an outlandish and conspiratorial claim, so let me try to back it up a bit. Consider James Schneider, a co-founder of Momentum who was Corbyn’s Director of Strategic Communications during Corbyn’s tenure as leader of the Labour party, and is still one of his closes advisers. Schneider comes across a perfectly likeable, articulate person with genuine left-wing views – until you find out that his wife, Sophie Nazemi, is Keir Starmer’s press secretary! For this reason alone Schneider should be nowhere near the Your Party leadership, as this clearly creates a massive conflict of interest.

    It gets worse though: in a 2020 article for the Spectator, Schneider was apparently exposed as a spook by his friend (and fellow spook) David Patrikarakos. Both Patrikarakos and the other subject his article, Schneider’s former flatmate Ben Judah, had been named in leaked documents from the Integrity Initiative, an organ of the UK deep state. To be clear, there is no evidence that Schneider himself is a spy. Nevertheless, Schneider’s friends Patrikarakos and Judah certainly do appear to be close to the intelligence community. Judah is now a senior fellow at the CIA-linked Atlantic Council (effectively NATO’s think tank). Do we really want people like this connected to and influencing the leadership of our new party?

    I am aware that what have said above might make me seem a tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist. But if the years 2016-2019 taught us anything at all, it’s to be alive to the danger of progressive movements being sabotaged from within. To look at it another way: if you wanted to prevent a progressive movement from succeeding, what better way to do it than to start one yourself, get thousands enthused about and invested in it, then take control of it at the highest level and deliberately sabotage it? In my view, we must act now and take democratic control of our new party, before it’s too late.

  • The language parasite

    Language is arguably mankind’s greatest invention. It has enabled us surpass other large-bodied predators like lions and wolves in our ability to command the environment. This is all the more remarkable when you consider that our senses are pathetically weak compared with other species. Could these two facts related? That is, could it be that the development of language resulted in us losing our ability to see, smell, and hear as effectively as other species? Perhaps the development of language had an adverse effect on the perceptual capacity of the human brain. It could be argued that the use of language diminishes the need for direct observation; but this doesn’t explain why we as a species would have lost our senses quite so rapidly.

    An alternative explanation is that language acts as a kind of parasite which invades the human brain and diminishes its perceptual capacity. This view was first put forward by the linguist Frederik Kortlandt in the mid-1980s. According to Kortlandt’s theory, linguistics may be considered a branch of biology. However, his ‘language parasite’ differs from biological parasites as it is transmitted through sound waves rather than through bodily contact. Furthermore, reproduction of this parasite differs from the reproduction of biological parasites in that the reproduced forms do not resemble their parents to the same degree. This kind of reproduction may be referred to as ‘symbolic reproduction’, to contrast with the organic reproduction of biological parasites.

    It is generally understood that human language does not follow the usual laws of logic. The reason for this, as emphasized by Wittgenstein, is that the meanings of words and phrases are derived from their use, rather than (as is usually assumed) the other way round. This is why the meanings of words often change significantly over time. It is also why dictionaries should always be seen as descriptive rather than prescriptive, and why linguistic purism makes no sense. Another way of saying this is that meanings are non-constructible sets. It is impossible to know a-priori whether particular thing belongs to a particular meaning, or equivalently, whether a particular meaning encompasses a particular thing. This can only be deduced a-posteriori, based on how words and phrases are used in practice.

    To make this a bit more rigorous, we need to make some definitions. Let us say that a thing exists if it can be distinguished from other things, and let us define a meaning to be a set of things that exist. Let us further define symbolization to be the set of all things that exist, and abstraction to be the set of all meanings. We may then define mathematics to be the study of symbolization, and philosophy to be the study of abstraction. Thus, a mathematician is typically concerned with the problem of existence, and a philosopher with the problem of meaning. Further, we may define physics to be the phenomenology of existence, and linguistics to be the phenomenology of meaning (‘phenomenology’ just means the study of something as experienced from the first-person point of view).

    Symbolization, the set of all things that exist, is obvious extremely large; but it is finite, as there is a limit to how many things can be distinguished. This means that meanings, although non-constructible, are also finite, as is abstraction, the set of all meanings. Infinite sets therefore do not exist in this framework, which is in accordance with the materialist view of mathematics I put forward in a previous blog post. However, the existence of finite sets that are non-constructable seems to be a contradiction, as we usually think of finite sets as being constructable. But what exactly do we mean by ‘constructable’? For our purposes, we may define a constructable set as a sets of the form {x: p(x)}, where p(x) is a proposition about x – that is, a statement about x that is either true or false.

    Meanings are therefore simply finite sets that cannot be described in this way. Why does it follow from this that language does not follow the usual laws of logic? Consider the proposition ‘y is in the set X’. If X is a constructable set (as defined here), then we can write X = {x: p(x)} for some propositional function p(). We can then determine the truth or falsity of the proposition ‘y is in the set X’ simply by determining the truth or falsity of the proposition p(y). But if X is a non-constructible set (again as defined here), we cannot do this. What then can we say about the proposition ‘y is in the set X’? We can either say that it is undetermined, or that it is both true and false. Either way, this goes against the rules of classical logic, where all propositions must be either true or false.

    In the same way that biological reproduction operates on genes, the symbolic reproduction of the language parasite operates on meanings – that is, non-constructable sets. These meanings reside in the human brain and are reproduced via sound waves. As Kortlandt points out, this view of language as a parasite which invades our brains controls our behaviour has important consequences for the study of human affairs. Language has enabled humanity time and again to discover new techniques, allowing easy exploitation and rapid depletion of hitherto inaccessible resources, thereby renewing or intensifying damage to other forms of life. The survival of the human species requires a large-scale effort to tame the language parasite by diminishing abstraction and encouraging direct observation.

  • The UK needs to federalize

    It is often said that the United Kingdom has one of the most regionally unequal economies in the western world. This statement certainly sounds plausible, and it is backed up by the data. According to figures published by the Office for National Statistics, in 2022 the Gross Value Added (GVA) per capita in the richest region of the UK (Greater London) was around $80k, around 3x the GVA of the poorest region (the North East). In France, by comparison, the GVA per capita in the richest region (Île-de-France) was around $90k, around 2x the GVA of the poorest region (Corsica). And in Germany, the GVA of the richest region (Hamburg) was also around $90k, around 2.5x the GVA of the poorest region (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern).

    Thus although regional inequality in France and Germany is significant, it is not as significant in these countries as it is in the UK. There is also clearly an issue with disenfranchisement in regions of England outside London. It is surely no coincidence that the only three regions of the UK to vote in favour of remaining in the EU were Greater London, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, all of which have devolved governments (the outlier is Wales, which has a devolved government but also voted to leave the EU). You get the feeling that regions without devolved governments voted for Brexit largely out of a sense of frustration. Logically, it makes no sense for some regions of the UK to have devolved governments but for others not to.

    Before we go into potential solutions, we need to first make sure we understand why regional inequality and regional disenfranchisement are problems in the first place. Regional disenfranchisement is obviously a problem, as is any kind of disenfranchisement; but it could be argued that regional inequality is only a problem if we view wealth and income through a relative lens. If we view them through an absolute lens then surely it doesn’t matter that some regions are significantly richer than others, as long as the poorer regions are not too poor – right? The problem is that regional inequality leads to political disaffection in ‘left-behind’ (i.e. relatively poor) areas, which leads people living in these areas turning to the far right – as the recent far-right march in London demonstrates.

    A potential solution to these problems is federalization. Federalization goes beyond devolution, establishing regional governments that are on equal footing with central government. Although not a guaranteed solution, it would help by empowering regions with greater autonomy and decision-making power, potentially leading to fairer and more inclusive economies through tailored local policies. Regions would have powers that they hold in their own right, rather than power that is granted – and just as easily removed – by Westminster. There is a clear need in England particularly for democratic empowerment and increased local decision-making, and this can only be achieved with the level of autonomy that federalization provides.

    For what it’s worth, here is my proposal for federalization of the UK. First, give Northern Ireland back to the Irish, and rename the UK as Great Britain, or better simply Britain. Next, rename regions of Britain after historical regions to which they roughly correspond to give them a sense of identity (e.g.: Scotland > Alba; North East > Northumbria; North West > Lancashire; Yorkshire and the Humber > Yorkshire; East Midlands > East Mercia; West Midlands > West Mercia; Wales > Cymru; East of England > East Anglia; Greater London > Middlesex; South East > Sussex; South West > Wessex). Then, give these regions autonomous governments and devolved powers that are constitutionally protected. Finally, move the national capital from London to Manchester, the closest major city to Britain’s geographical centre.

    This last step – moving the capital from London to Manchester – would not be popular with some, and particularly not with the political elite. But there is no reason why a country’s administrative and financial centres need to be in the same city. Indeed, in many countries they aren’t. For example, in Germany, Berlin is the administrative centre and Frankfurt the financial centre; and in the US, these roles are taken by Washington and New York respectively. Moving the capital would have huge symbolic importance, as it would signal that London is not the centre of the UK. This fact often seems to be forgotten by the political establishment, but it would be a lot harder for them to forget if they didn’t live there! Perhaps then our political class might finally realise that there is a country outside of the M25.

  • How to get rid of bureaucracy

    Almost everyone agrees that (a) bureaucracy is a bad thing, and (b) there is too much of it. But what exactly do we mean by ‘bureaucracy’? A good working definition is a system comprised of people who are more interested in maintaining their position than they are in the effectiveness of their work. How do such systems arise? One theory is that bureaucracies occur and expand organically to fill a void between the state and ordinary people. On the other hand, bureaucracies can be installed deliberately in order to create and maintain such a void. For example, in East Africa around the turn of the last century, the British ruling class installed a bureaucratic administrative class, made up primarily of people from the Indian subcontinent, in order to create a ‘buffer class’ between them and the African natives.

    Bureaucracies aren’t all bad, at least according to some. The 19th Century sociologist Max Weber argued that bureaucracies serve an essential purpose in removing favouritism and bias from the workplace. Weber identified six ‘principles of bureaucracy’: rationality, hierarchy, expertise, rules-based decision making, formalization, and specialization. It could be argued that these principles form the basis of the better elements of capitalist workplace culture today. Weber asserts that in order to function effectively, capitalist organisations must follow these principles, which leads to ‘management by rules’ as opposed to management at the whims of bosses or owners. Without this there would be no basis at all for objecting to management action, and trade unions could not function effectively.

    Weber’s argument is fine as far as it goes, but it has its limits. He saw bureaucracy as the highest form of rational organisation and the most efficient way for capitalist enterprises to function, which meant his model was tied to the existence of capitalism. Effectively, Weber saw bureaucracy as a way of disciplining both workers and capitalists within a capitalist system. For Weber, bureaucracy was about stability and predictability, not liberation. So whilst workers can use bureaucratic rules to challenge arbitrary decisions, these rules entrench class hierarchies through a professionalized, hierarchical layer of administrators. This is precisely the problem Lenin took up in his 1917 work The State and Revolution, to which we now turn.

    In The State and Revolution, Lenin argued that the old bureaucratic state machine could not simply be taken over and used for the benefit of the working class; it had to be replaced. He argued further that given the correct working conditions – namely, workers’ control of workplaces and soviets (workers’ councils) and the raising of workers’ material conditions – the old bureaucracy would wither away. Drawing on Marx’s lessons from the Paris Commune of 1871, Lenin concluded that bureaucracy had had its time. Whereas under capitalism, bureaucracy can play a progressive role by disciplining bosses and creating a predictable framework for workers’ struggle (as pointed out by Weber), under socialism bureaucracy becomes a barrier to this struggle.

    In a socialist society, said Lenin, the working class cannot allow separate caste of administrative officials to stand over them. Instead, Lenin advocated for the abolition of a standing bureaucracy through principles such as officials being elected and recallable at any time, wages for officials being fixed at the level of workers’ wages, and the replacement of professional administrators with a workers rotation. In Lenin’s vision, bureaucracy is stripped down to its technical functions, whilst real political power rests in the hands of the working class. Unfortunately, in spite of the goals set out by Lenin, bureaucracy in the Soviet Union increased substantially under Stalin. Although it is tempting to place the blame for this entirely on Stalin and his inner circle, the real explanation is more nuanced.

    As the Soviet Union became more and more isolated, scarcity of resources started to become an issue, and Stalin was compelled to appoint a layer of bureaucrats to allocate these scarce resources to the population. This inevitably created a void between the state and the people. It seems that scarcity is a precondition for bureaucracy to thrive. However, scarcity is no longer a problem in many parts of the world, particularly in the West; in fact many in the West often talk of living in a ‘post-scarcity society’. Why, then, does bureaucracy seem to be becoming more prevalent over time? We can only conclude that this is by design, and that the ruling class is deliberately creating and expanding a ‘buffer class’ between itself and ordinary people – much as the British ruling class did in colonial East Africa.

    This deliberate creation and expansion of a buffer class of bureaucrats provides an explanation for the otherwise inexplicable fact that, despite technology automating away a lot of work that used to be done by humans, we all seem to working as hard as ever. Technological automation has resulted in an entire army of workers becoming available to turn into administrators. This explains the push for higher university participation rates; a university education is essentially training for becoming a bureaucrat. The advantage to the capitalist class of dividing workers into two sub-classes – the traditional proletariat and a ‘professional managerial class’ – is obvious: these classes can then be pitted against each other, as we saw for example with the Brexit referendum. It is a classic divide and conquer strategy.

    So how do we get rid of bureaucracy? Lenin’s three key ideas on avoiding bureaucracy mentioned above remain perfectly relevant today. But they stand little chance of being implemented under our current capitalist system, where there will always be an incentive for the ruling class to maintain a bureaucratic sub-class of workers. In truth, the only way we will ever get rid of bureaucracy is by getting rid of capitalism and replacing it with socialism. This is obviously a big task, and a necessary step is to unite members of the traditional proletariat and the professional managerial class by convincing them that they are on the same side. Only a united working class has any chance of overthrowing capitalism.

  • The Chilean tragedy

    Today marks the 52nd anniversary of the overthrow of Chile’s left-wing Popular Unity government led by Salvador Allende, who had been elected President of Chile just three years earlier. Popular Unity had defeated the conservative Christian Democrat government which had been discredited in the eyes of workers by its failure to implement social reforms. These workers elected Popular Unity in the hope that socialism could be introduced in Chile through peaceful constitutional means. Things began well for the new government: free school meals were introduced within weeks of the election, wages were increased, living standards were raised, and the economy reached close to full employment.

    However, Chilean capitalists and American imperialists were enraged by Popular Unity’s election victory. They were particularly aggrieved that the huge US-owned copper industry and other key industries were nationalized with little compensation paid to the capitalist owners. At first, the Chilean ruling class did not move to crush the movement, fearing a backlash from workers who overwhelmingly supported Popular Unity. Instead, the ruling class bided its time and used the media and judiciary to stir up unrest. In addition, the CIA financed reactionary forces to destabilize the economy, with Richard Nixon’s specific orders being to ‘make the economy scream’. This economic sabotage eventually led to 200% inflation, which began to push people away from Popular Unity.

    Egged on by the press, and financed by Chilean capitalists and the CIA, reactionary forces organised strikes in October 1972, two years into the new government’s reign. These strikes crippled the economy further and led to huge shortages. In response, workers set up committees to ensure food distribution in areas most affected by these shortages. These committees represented embryonic soviets or workers’ councils. However, instead of supporting these organisations, the Popular Unity leadership distanced themselves from them, arguing that workers were moving ‘too fast’, in a vain attempt to placate the capitalist class. This emboldened the reactionary forces, who began to assassinate workers’ leaders and trade unionists.

    At this point, Allende should have moved decisively to mobilize an armed movement of workers. Instead, he brought three members of the military into his cabinet, including one General Pinochet. Many of the rank and file in the army and navy warned against this move, fearing it would lead to a coup, but Allende and his government refused to listen. On 11th September 1973, the army rank and file was proved right when the reactionary forces in the military, led by Pinochet, launched a coup. This culminated with the Presidential Palace, with Allende inside it, being bombed using British-supplied jets. Allende chose to die in the palace rather than seek refuge in a friendly embassy. Popular Unity’s short reign was over.

    The downfall of Popular Unity can be attributed to a number of factors, but by far the most significant was the leadership’s quixotic attempt at a gradual, ‘reformist’ road to socialism. The idea that the existing state machine can be used to gradually end capitalism not only flies in the face of Marxist theory; it has been proved time and again not to work in practice. The defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871, for example, proved that workers cannot simply lay hold of the capitalist state machinery and wield it for its own class interests. On the contrary: the capitalist state must be destroyed and replaced with a democratic workers’ state. This cannot be done gradually; it can only be done through a socialist revolution led by the working class.

    A key lesson of the Chilean experience is that once in power, a socialist government must act quickly to remove any reactionary tendencies, particularly in the military. Reactionary forces ultimately prevailed because Allende failed to deliver a decisive blow to them at a point when he had the majority of Chilean society behind him. Had he done this, Popular Unity could have finished the job they started by taking power completely out of the hands of the ruling class and introducing democratic workers’ control, management, and ownership of the economy. Chile would then have stood as a beacon of hope to the masses of Latin America and also to workers elsewhere in the world – even the US, where workers were become radicalized in response to the Vietnam war.

    Instead, Chilean workers were left disarmed, both literally and metaphorically. On the eve of the coup, when they could have come out and defended the government, most stayed at home on the advice of their leaders who believed the military would stay loyal, and in the end Pinochet was able to seize power without any great struggle. Under Pinochet, Chile became a laboratory for neoliberal policies that were used to uproot the social reforms implemented by Popular Unity. These policies would later be adopted by Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, with disastrous consequences. The Chilean coup of 1973 should serve as both a lesson and a warning to workers around the world: once in power, we must act quickly to destroy the capitalist state machinery, before it destroys us.

  • Who really won WWII?

    The EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, recently created a diplomatic incident by questioning Russia and China’s contribution to winning WWII. This did not go down well with the Russians and Chinese, as you might imagine. But her claim is in accordance with the standard account of WWII we are taught in UK, which is basically that Britain won the war with a little help from the US. You only have to glance at the casualty statistics from WWII, however, to see how ludicrously ahistorical this account is. The Soviet Union suffered around 24 million deaths and China around 20 million deaths; in contrast, the UK and the US barely suffered a million deaths between them. Furthermore, whereas around 50% of Soviet deaths and 80% of Chinese deaths were civilians, less than 100,000 UK and US civilians were killed in total.

    What if we look instead at deaths as a percentage of the pre-war population? Even by this metric, the Soviet Union and China are suffered far more than the UK and the US. The Soviet Union lost around 13% of it’s pre-war population and China lost around 4%, whereas the UK lost around 1% of its pre-war population and the US less than half a percent. By this metric there are countries that suffered even more than the Soviet Union: Lithuania lost around 14% of it’s pre-war population, and Poland around 18%. In fact Poland and other countries suffered more than the UK on both metrics. For example, Indonesia suffered around 4 million deaths, 6% of its pre-war population; and Yugoslavia suffered around 1 million deaths, also around 6% of its pre-war population.

    At this point a critic (or Kaja Kallas) might argue that number of deaths is not the right metric to measure a country’s effectiveness in fighting a war. They might even argue that a high number of deaths signals that a country was particularly ineffective. So what if look instead at the number of casualties inflicted on the enemy? In the European theatre the Soviet Union once again comes out on top. The Germans lost around 4 million soldiers on the eastern front to the Soviet Union, and around 1 million on all other fronts combined. In the Pacific theatre things are not so clear-cut, but China’s contribution here should not be underestimated. The Japanese lost around half a million soldiers in China, around a quarter of its total military losses in the war.

    However you choose to measure it, it is clear that the Soviet Union was the key force that defeated Nazi Germany. WWII is therefore best understood as a war between Germany and the Soviet Union for control of Eastern Europe. This is a dispute with roots going back many centuries. Eastern Europe was a patchwork of Germanic- and Slavic-speaking peoples for over a thousand years, with no one group being able to claim hegemony. With the rise of empires in the 1800s it was inevitable that there would be conflict over which group had a right to this land. This conflict came to a head in WWI but was not fully resolved until the end of WWII; and it when it was finally resolved, it was resolved decisively in the Soviet Union’s favour.

    What about the war in the Pacific? Our critic might argue that this was a separate regional conflict and should not be considered as part of WWII. But if that’s the case then we cannot give the US any credit for ending WWII by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In fact we should not give the US any credit for these appalling crimes regardless of whether we consider them part of WWII. Many have argued that Japan was already defeated and seeking a way to surrender, and that the atomic bombs were not needed to achieve this outcome. It was certainly not necessary to bomb two densely populated cities. If the US really wanted to drop an atomic bomb they could have done so into the sea near Japan as a warning, then given Japan the opportunity to surrender (which surely it would have done).

    It is clear that in the West, the UK and US are generally given far too much credit for winning WWII, and the Soviet Union and China far too little credit. The obvious explanation is the natural tendency we all have to big up our own achievements and downplay the achievements of others; but I think there is more to it than that. Recall that during WWII, both the Soviet Union and China were communist states. Giving them credit for winning the war would involve giving credit to communism for defeating fascism – and we can’t have that can we! Instead, liberal Western states felt compelled to take the credit themselves. The idea that liberalism defeated fascism in WWII is now ingrained in Western culture, as Kaja Kallas’ recent comments demonstrate. Unfortunately for the West, however, this idea is simply not supported by the facts.

  • 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 have capitalist neighbours that are richer than them. 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 (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 imposed a brutal embargo on the fourth (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 the US embargo on Cuba is ongoing and has a significant impact on the country’s economy. 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 a huge impact on the Cuban economy – it must do, otherwise why would they do it? – I don’t think we can blame it entirely 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.