Groucho Marxism

Questions and answers on socialism, Marxism, and related topics

  • The decline of social housing

    There is no doubt that anecdotally at least, it feels as though public services are in a dire state across the UK and have been for some time. But what do the data say? It’s not immediately obvious how to go about measuring the state of public services. Perhaps we should start by defining exactly what we mean by ‘public services’. Here I will focus on one specific public service that is meant to be provided by local councils: social housing. I will also focus on one particular council, namely Rushmoor Borough Council in Hampshire, as it’s close to where I live. This council does not maintain a traditional housing register, but rather a ‘housing allocation pool’ based on priority need for social housing. There are currently 1,198 households in this pool.

    In this context, a ‘household’ is defined as one person living alone or a group of people (not necessarily related) living at the same address who share cooking facilities and a shared living room, sitting room, or dining area. According to the 2021 Census, there are approximately 41,300 households in the borough of Rushmoor, which means that roughly 1 in 40 households in the borough are currently in the housing pool. It is difficult to obtain information on how this proportion has changed over time, so it isn’t possible to say categorically that this problem is getting worse. But what we can say is that there is clearly a lack of affordable housing in Rushmoor. That is not surprising when you look at house prices in the borough.

    According to data from the Office for National Statistics, the average house price in Rushmoor in 2024 was £345,000, around 9x the average salary. This ratio is typical of (although slightly higher than) England as a whole. The unaffordability of housing in the borough clearly is something that has got worse over time, as back in 2002 the average house price was ‘only’ 6x the average salary. Moreover, this increase in prices has occurred across all property types and is not just the result of an increase in the price of high-end properties. The average rental price in Rushmoor is currently £1,000 per month, which means that if you are renting and earn the average salary of £39,000, you can expect to pay well over a third of your take-home pay on rent.

    This last point is particularly relevant to those in the housing pool. When people cannot secure social housing due to high demand, long waiting lists, or strict eligibility criteria, they often face significant housing insecurity and must explore alternative, often more costly options. Many are forced into the private rented sector, which is typically more expensive and offers no long-term security. Most of these people won’t earn anywhere near the £39,000 average salary for the borough, so for these people rents are likely to take out a much larger proportion of their income, with some paying more than half their wages on housing-related costs. The high cost of private rent combined with low income can lead to severe financial strain.

    If deemed homeless but not immediately rehoused, individuals may spend long periods in temporary accommodation, such as hostels and B&Bs, or may have to resort to sofa surfing with family and friends. The result of all this is that many people remain in unsuitable, overcrowded, or poor-quality housing, which can lead to negative impacts on physical and mental health. Ultimately, failure to secure housing can lead to literal homelessness, including rough sleeping. This sorry state of affairs seems even worse when you consider that many of the affected households contain school-age children. What makes this seem worse still is the knowledge that we used to have extensive social housing in this country, but then got rid of it!

    Social housing in the UK has experienced a severe long-term decline, falling from 5.5 million homes in 1979 to 4.1 million by 2022. This is despite the fact that the UK population has experienced significant growth since 1979, rising from approximately 56 million then to over 68 million now. The decline in social housing is due to a combination of policies that promoted homeownership and restricted local authorities from building new homes. The Right to Buy policy introduced by Margaret Thatcher  allowed council tenants to buy their homes at significant discounts (up to 70%). Since 1980, over 2 million social homes have been sold through this scheme. However only 2% of homes sold under Right to Buy have been replaced, leading to a net loss of social housing almost every year since 1981.

    Why was this done? The answer, in a word, is: capitalism. The capitalist system puts the pursuit of profit before everything else. It is not possible to make profit from social housing, so social housing had to go. It is important that we stand up to capitalism and demand the right to a safe secure home for all; the mass building of genuinely affordable, high-quality, carbon-neutral council housing; and rent controls that cap the level of rent at a fair and equitable level (I suggest £0 would be a good place to start). Liverpool’s socialist council of 1983-1987 shows that this can be achieved even in the face of enormous pressure from the capitalist establishment. But this won’t happen by itself; we need to fight to make it happen.

  • Some examples of gutturalwechsel

    In the context of Indo-European linguistics, the term ‘gutturalwechsel’ – literally ‘velar interchange’ – refers to alternations between palatovelars and plain velars across different satem languages, with the same word or root appearing with a palatovelar in some languages and a plain velar in others, or even a palatovelar and a plain velar within the same language. It can also take on an extended meaning which encompasses alternations between plain velars and labiovelars in the centum languages, with the same word or root appearing with a plain velar in some languages and a labiovelar in others. Such alternations occur frequently and suggest that Proto-Indo-European (PIE) only contained two types of velar consonant.

    The reason is that these alternations suggest that the split between palatovelars and plain velars occurred separately in the satem languages, after the breakup of PIE, with palatalization occurring in one language but not in another, or in one phonological context but not in another. It is difficult to explain such alternations using a three-velar reconstruction. In a previous blog posts I have given several examples of these alternations: before *e ~ *H₂ in *gheH₂ns ~ *ghH₂ens- ‘goose’; before *e ~ *H₂ ~ *u  in *keH₂u ~ *kH₂u- ~ *kuH₂-  ‘owl’; before *e ~ *l in *kelH₂- ~ *klH₂- ‘straw’; and before  *e ~ *o in *gher- ~ *ghor- ‘enclose’, *kei- ~ *koi- ‘settle’, and *bherghe- ~ *bhergho- ‘protect’. In this blog post I will provide a few more.

    One position where such alternations are common is in so-called ‘thorn clusters’: a sequence of a dental stop followed by a velar stop. (These were once thought to contain a phoneme represented by a letter referred to as ‘thorn’, although this idea has now been abandoned.) For example, *dhghom ‘earth’ yields Sanskrit kṣam alongside Avestan zā̊, Albanian dhe, and Greek khthṓn. The explanation is that the cluster *TK underwent metathesis in the satem languages and became *KT, which yielded *kṣ in Indic, and the velar was then blocked from palatalizing by the following *ṣ. Voiceless *tk yields *š rather than the expected **s in Iranian. For example, *ktitis ‘home’ yields Avestan šiti alongside Sanskrit kṣití and Greek ktísis.

    Two examples derive from the root *tetk- ‘create’: *tetketi ‘create’ yields Sanskrit tákṣati, Avestan tašaiti, and Latin texō; and *tetkon ‘carpenter’ yields Sanskrit tákṣan, Avestan tašan, and Greek téktōn. The sequence *tk apparently yields ǰ rather than the expected **s in Armenian; for example, *H₂rtkos ‘bear’ yields Armenian arǰ alongside Sanskrit ṛ́kṣa, Avs. arša, Grk. árktos, and Latin ursus. Otherwise, the reflexes of *tk are identical to the reflexes of the sequence *ks; for example, *kokseH₂ ‘joint’ yields Sanskrit kakṣā́, Avestan kaša, and Latin coxa. This sequence yields *š in Baltic and *s in Slavic; for example, *deksinos ‘right (side)’ yields Sanskrit dákṣina, Avestan dašina, Old Church Slavonic desnŭ, and Lithuanian dẽšinas.

    Another position where such alterations are common is before *r. For example, *krH₂uos ‘horn’ yields Old Prussian sirwis alongside Old Prussian curwis, Old Polish karw, Albanian ka, and Welsh carw. The explanation is that palatalization was blocked before *r in the satem languages but later spread analogically from the variant *kerH₂uos, whence Greek keraós and Latin cervus. Similarly, *suekruH₂ ‘mother-in-law’ yields Sanskrit śvaśrū́ alongsode Old Church Slavonic svekry, Latin socrus, Old High German swigar, and Welsh chwegr. The explanation is that palatalization was blocked before *r in the satem languages but later spread analogically from the variant *suekur, whence Sanskrit śváśura, Lthuanian šẽšuras, and Greek hekurós.

    In a 2014 paper, the Australian linguist Robert Woodhouse showed that palatalization was not blocked after *s in Iranian when followed by a front vowel, unlike in other satem languages. This explains the gutturalwechsel in words such as *skidros ‘split’, which yields Avestan sidara alongside Sanskrit chidrá, Latvian šk’idrs, and Greek skidarós. In a 1978 paper, the Dutch linguist Frederik Kortlandt argued that palatalization was blocked before *m and *n in Balto-Slavic. This explains the gutturalwechsel in words such as *H₂ekmon ‘stone’, which yields Sanskrit aśman, Avestan asman, and Lithuanian ãšmens, alongside Old Church Slavonic kamy, Lthuanian akmuõ, and Greek ákmōn. To explain this alternation we can posit that palatalization was blocked before *m but later spread from variants of the root *H₂ek- ‘sharp’.

    In his 1978 paper, Kortlandt also argued that palatalization was blocked before *uo in Balto-Slavic. This explains the gutturalwechsel in *kuoitos ‘bright’, which yields Old Church Slavonic cvětŭ alongside Sanskrit śvētá, Avestan spaeta, and Old Church Slavonic světŭ, To explain this alternation we can posit that palatalization was blocked before *uo but later spread analogically from the variant *kueitos, whence Gothic hweits; or from the variant *kuitros, whence Sanskrit śvitrás and Lithuanian švitras. Another example is given by *pekus ~ *pekuos ‘livestock’, which yields Lithuanian pẽkus alongside Sanskrit páśu ~ paśváḥ, Avestan pasu, Latin pecū, and Gothic faihu. Here we must posit that the plain velar spread analogically from the genitive *pekuos in Baltic.

  • Liverpool’s 1983-1987 socialist council

    The Labour council in Liverpool was elected in 1983 against a backdrop of decline that had been going on for 20 years. Beginning in the 1960s, containerisation destroyed thousands of jobs on the docks, up until then Liverpool’s biggest employer. The city’s population then collapsed, from over 700,000 in 1960 to under 500,000 in 1980. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government introduced massive cuts across the public sector. Surprisingly given this backdrop, the Liberals took control of Liverpool council in 1990 with the support of a few Tories. The reason for this victory lay in the fact that Liverpool’s working class had experienced previous Labour administrations being elected on radical manifestos that subsequently failed to deliver, which led to apathy and disillusionment.

    When Labour re-took control of the council in 1983 it was still a workers’ party, but with a pro-capitalist leadership. At that time, there were few expectations that this Labour administration would be any different from the others; but this pessimism was short-lived. Instead of more redundancies, every department saw increased funding based on its needs. Planned maintenance allowed whole estates in areas that had been neglected for years to be modernised in one fell swoop, providing improvements such as new roofs, windows, bathroom extensions, and central heating. The council also began to deliver on its main manifesto pledge to address the city’s housing crisis, clear slums, and build new council houses.

    The councillors were met with resistance from a senior layer of council management. But they were ready and told the directors in no uncertain terms they must follow instructions or resign. At this point the capitalist class started to take note and began a media-led campaign of vilification against the council. However, although the media’s biased coverage did result in an increased vote for the Liberals and Tories in the 1984 local elections, this was buried under an avalanche of working-class votes for Labour. The victory was a shock to the establishment and the following month the Tories sent their environment minister Sir Patrick Jenkins to the city to try to bring the council into line. This backfired when Jenkins reported at a press conference that he was appalled by the slums he had witnessed.

    The Tories, who were fighting on two fronts with the 1984-85 miners’ strike still raging, were forced to retreat and released £30 million of funding (equivalent  to £120 million in today’s money). Unfortunately for the Tories the council was well drilled, with experienced organizers in leading positions. As a result, not a single council worker was made redundant during this period. Eventually, with the Tories still refusing to provide the additional funding needed, the  council went outside normal borrowing procedures and took out loans directly from banks. The rental income on new homes would pay for the loans, and the improved conditions would reduce costs on other services dealing with the social problems that arise in slum areas.

    Around this time there were many public meetings, union meetings, and rallies in the city. These  meetings were often hundreds-strong and included scores of delegates from the trade unions in workplaces from across Liverpool, taking part in intense and often heated debate. However there were no elections in Liverpool in 1985, which was unfortunate as it would have shown that support for the council was still strong. At the Labour Party conference that year, Labour leader Neil Kinnock lambasted the whole campaign; his treacherous speech revealed him to be an agent of the ruling class and was a threat to other Labour councils not to join the rebellion. In 1986, Kinnock followed up on his threat, orchestrating a witch-hunt of the left.

    The workers’ movement in Liverpool only came to an end in 1987 when the Labour councillors were removed undemocratically by Kinnock and Thatcher. The councillors were also given £350,000 fines; this money was raised by working-class supporters with a huge surplus of tens of thousands of pounds. Even after these attacks, the council took a leading role in defeating Thatcher’s hated Poll Tax, spearheading a campaign that resulted in millions refusing to pay and Thatcher being forced out of office. Along with defeating the poll tax, the lasting legacy of the Liverpool council is the 5,000 council houses that were built to replace the slums, which are now well-established estates among the most popular places to live in the city.

    There are many lessons we can draw from this episode in Britain’s recent political history. The first is that it is perfectly possible for a genuinely left-wing administration to take control of a British council. The second is that having taken control, there is no need to enact cuts, even if they are mandated by central government. The third is that people who seem apathetic and disillusioned with politics can become re-engaged given the right set of circumstances. The fourth is that the capitalist class will give up any pretence of championing democracy as soon as doing so becomes inimical to their interests. And the final lesson is that the leadership of the Labour party has been acting against the interests of working people for many decades now. The end of this rotten party cannot come soon enough.

  • We are ruled by monsters

    The Epstein files are currently in the news. These files comprise 6 million pages of documents, images, and videos detailing the criminal activities of American financier and convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his social circle of public figures, which included politicians and celebrities. Three days ago over 3 million pages from these files were released, including 2,000 videos and 180,000 images. Details are still emerging and people are still sifting through the evidence to find out exactly what is in there, but what has emerged so far has been deeply disturbing to say the least. The number of people who appear to be implicated is also shocking. The files are an appalling reminder how our rotten political system shields the rich and powerful from accountability.

    One person who appears to be very deeply implicated in this is Donald Trump, which is somewhat surprising as it was Trump who first floated the idea of releasing the files during his 2024 presidential campaign. Another is Peter Mandelson, who let’s not forget was deliberately rehabilitated by the present leadership of the UK Labour Party. Then there is Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the pedophile formerly known as ‘Prince’, who has inevitably appeared at the centre of this scandal (it would have been a huge surprise if he hadn’t). And pedophile is definitely the correct word here. Epstein and his clients were not ‘having sex with underage women’, as some seem to want to argue. They were raping children.

    We may recall that Mandelson was one of the principal drivers behind the ‘antisemitism crisis’ fraud that took down Jeremy Corbyn and his left-wing movement. Now that Mandelson has been disgraced (again), I wonder if any of those who colluded with him on this will care to revisit it. I won’t be holding my breath. Mandelson is Jewish, which gave his bogus claims about the ‘antisemitism crisis’ some weight. Epstein was also Jewish. Needless to say, neither represent all Jews; to suggest that they do is itself anti-Semitic. However, the fact that Epstein, Mandelson, and many others implicated in the files are (or were) Jewish seems to be no mere coincidence. One thing that is becoming clear is that Epstein and many around him were Jewish supremacists who saw non-Jews, or ‘goyim’, as inferior.

    The picture that is emerging from this release is that of a Jewish supremacist paedophile ring. No doubt some would accuse me of antisemitism for pointing this out; indeed, some have already been accused of antisemitism for doing precisely that. But the fact that Epstein and his cronies considered their victims to be inferior ‘goyim’ goes some way in explaining why they were able to abuse them with apparently such little remorse. Another implicated in this scandal – surprisingly to many on the left (including me) – is Noam Chomsky, who is of course also Jewish. Whilst there is no suggestion that Chomsky was directly involved in the abuse, he was clearly close with Epstein and must surely have been aware of what was going on.

    The same goes for Mandelson. This scandal should really bring down the Starmer government, as Mandelson was the key co-operator of Starmer’s Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney and mentored the entire organization. Again, though, I won’t be holding my breath. More likely it will just be swept under the rug. Newspapers in the US and UK are covering this story but are downplaying the significance of it. For example, they are refusing  to cover Ehud Barak’s hugely revelatory communications with Epstein from the latest release, which show that as Barak was leaving official government service in Israel, he turned to Epstein for guidance. Clearly, Epstein was in cahoots with senior politicians from the US, UK, Israel and elsewhere. But the media in these countries are compromised just as much as the politicians are. I am not aware of any Western media outlet even mentioning Epstein’s obvious ties with Israel.

    Something else that seems to be at the centre of this is bitcoin. I don’t think many saw that one coming. Apparently 75% of bitcoins code comes directly from Jeffrey Epstein’s investments, which means that bitcoin investors have basically been funding an elite global pedophile ring. The scope of this scandal really is something else. Even the physicist Stephen Hawking was involved apparently. This is all the more remarkable considering something which becomes obvious as soon as you hear Epstein speak: the man was not particularly charismatic. How, then, did he manage to get himself into such a position of power? This is not entirely clear, at least not to me. Perhaps this is something that will become clearer with time as more details from the files emerge.

  • The economic calculation problem

    The socialist calculation debate was a discourse held in the 1930s and 1940s that centred on how a socialist economy would perform economic calculation in the absence of private ownership of the means of production. The debate was primarily between the ‘Austrian School’, represented by economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, who argued against the feasibility of such calculation; and neoclassical and Marxian economists, most notably Cläre Tisch, Oskar R. Lange, and Abba P. Lerner, who argued that such calculation was feasible. Although primarily a debate between proponents of capitalism and proponents of socialism, a significant portion was also between socialists who held differing views regarding the utilization of markets and money in a socialist system.

    Hayek and von Mises argued that centrally planned socialist economies cannot efficiently allocate resources because they lack market-determined prices for factors of production (like labour, land, capital). According to them, without private ownership and competition creating price signals reflecting supply and demand, planners can’t know how to best use resources, which leads to inefficiency, unlike in market economies where prices convey crucial information. The problem of efficiently allocating resources in an economy is referred to as the ‘economic calculation problem’. In a recent (2022) article, the Finnish economist Jussi Lindgren came up with a mathematical formulation of the problem, which I will now briefly describe.

    Lindgren formulates the problem of economic planning as that of minimizing a loss function over a specific time period. He considers an economy in which there are M commodities and N agents. For such an economy, a price vector is an Mx1 vector specifying the price of each commodity. For each price vector p there will be an expenditure vector e(p), an Nx1 vector specifying the minimum expenditure each agent must make in order to meet their demand for goods and services. The loss function is then given by L(p,u) = muTu/2+ne(p), where u(t) = p(t+1)-p(t) is the Mx1 vector of rates of change of prices, m is a constant, and n is a 1xN vector of constants. The aim of the economic planner is to pick a sequence {u(t)} so as to minimize the quantity J = ∑ L(p(t),u(t)), where the sum is over a fixed time period.

    In words, Lindgren formulates economic planning as a dynamic minimization problem where the aim is to find an optimal trajectory for prices, given the individual expenditure functions and a quadratic common penalty cost related to the time-derivative of the price vector. This quadratic penalty cost can be understood as a transaction cost for changing prices. In theory, the problem can be solved using a technique known as ‘dynamic programming’. In practice, it is not possible to do this, for two reasons. First, the expenditure vector depends on individual preferences of every agent in the economy, which can’t possibly by known by a central planner. And second, even if it was possibly to know these preferences, the problem suffers from something known as the ‘curse of dimensionality’.

    The term ‘curse of dimensionality’ was coined by the American applied mathematician Richard E. Bellman, the inventor of dynamic programming, and refers to computational issues that arise when the dimension of a problem becomes large. The dimension of a problem represents the number of independent variables, parameters, or degrees of freedom required to define it. The economic calculation problem as formulated above has a dimension which is astronomically large, as it includes expenditure functions for each individual which must be specified at each possible price level. This renders the problem insoluble in practice. Lindgren concludes that the economic calculation problem would be “impossible for a central planner to solve”.

    However, Lindgren’s formulation reveals more than he realizes. In his model, the expenditure vector defined using utility functions. A utility function represents a preference ordering by assigning a real number to each alternative in such a manner that alternative A is assigned a number greater than alternative B if and only if the individual prefers alternative A to alternative B. Lindgren’s formulation is based on the assumption that each individual in the economy has such a function available to them (and only them) which is both immutable and fully specified for every possible combination of commodities. This is obviously nonsense. Never mind his problem being impossible for the central planner to solve; it would be impossible to specify, even in principle.

    The implicit claim that capitalism is somehow able to solve this problem is therefore also nonsense. All Lindgren has done is devise a problem which neither capitalism nor socialism can solve, because it cannot even be specified in the first place! Sadly, this is what passes for ‘research’ in mainstream academic economics. In any case, the idea that capitalism as a system acts so to minimize expenditure for individual consumers whilst still satisfying their demands, as Lindgren’s model implies, is for the birds. The optimization protocol driving capitalism is not minimization of the discrepancy between supply and demand; it is maximization of profits. This should be clear to anyone who has lived under capitalism for any length of time.

  • Value, price and profit

    Value, Price and Profit is a transcript of a lecture series delivered in 1865 by Karl Marx. Having just finished reading it I thought I would provide a short summary. In this text, Marx sought to refute the theoretical basis for the economic policy of his contemporary John Weston, who argued: “(1) that a general rise in the rate of wages would be of no use to the workers; (2) that therefore … the trade unions have a harmful effect”. Marx begins by pointing out that because there is an economic law governing the value of commodities – namely, the labour theory of value – capitalists cannot raise prices at will. Nor can they lower wages at will, as wages represent the price of labour power, which is also a commodity under capitalism.

    Marx argues that profit is derived not by selling commodities above their value (in which case capitalists could raise prices at will), but by selling commodities at or near their natural value, because workers are only paid for that portion of their labour which pays for their own labour power. The distinction between labour and labour power is crucial here. Recall that labour refers to work done, whereas labour power refers to the capacity to do work. In physical terms, labour has units of energy, whereas labour power has units of energy / time. Workers are paid for their labour power but the value they produce is based on their labour. In general, the value produced by a worker’s labour is greater than the value of their labour power; and this difference, according to Marx, is the source of profit.

    To make this a bit more rigorous, consider an economy which produces m commodities using n types of labour. For such an economy we can define a commodity vector as a nonnegative mx1 vector, and a labour vector as a nonnegative nx1 vector. The economy is defined by an activity set, with the interpretation that an element (x,u,y) of this set represents a possible configuration of commodity inputs x, labour inputs u, and commodity outputs y. We may also define a price vector as a nonnegative 1xm vector, and a wage vector as a nonnegative 1xn vector. As noted above, Marx begins Value, Price and Profit by arguing that wages and prices are determined by the labour theory of value. How can we represent this mathematically?

    For simplicity, let us assume that there is only one type of labour, so that n = 1. This can be thought of as representing Marx’s concept of ‘abstract labour’. Saying that wages are determined by the labour theory of value can be represented by stating that w = pb, where p is the price vector and b­­­ is a ‘subsistence bundle’ of commodities, a nonnegative mx1 vector. This represents the idea that wages are precisely sufficient for the subsistence bundle b­­­ to be affordable. Or to put it another way, that wages are determined by the value of commodities, expressed in monetary terms, required to produce the labour power that workers are then forced to sell to capitalists. Given an element (x,u,y) of the activity set and a profit rate r, the price vector is determined by the equation: py = (1+r)(px+wu) = (1+r)p(x+ub).

    To make things more concrete, suppose that the activity set is such that x = Ay and u = Ly for some mxm matrix A and 1xm vector L. Such an economy is referred to as a ‘Leontief economy’ after the Russian economist Wassily Leontief. Then from the above, we have: py = (1+r)p(A+bL)y; and since y was left undetermined, we must therefore have: p = (1+r)p(A+bL). This is equivalent to saying that p is an eigenvector or the matrix A+bL with eigenvalue 1/(1+r). In order to find conditions under which a nonnegative p and r exist that satisfy this equation, we need to invoke something called the Perron–Frobenius theorem, named after the German mathematicians Oskar Perron and Georg Frobenius. This implies that under a fairly weak condition on the matrix A+bL, such a p and r exist and are unique.

    Thus, under this weak assumption, the price vector p and profit rate r are uniquely determined in a Leontief economy, which validates Marx’s claim that capitalists cannot simply raise prices at will. Furthermore, as w = pb, if we assume that the subsistence bundle b is uniquely determined, then wages are uniquely determined too. We can ensure that b is uniquely determined by assuming that if there is more than one subsistence bundle, wages will be determined by using the one with the lowest price. The total value of output is given by v = C+V+S, where C = vA is the value of constant capital, V = vbL is the value of variable capital, and S = (1-vb)L is surplus value. Thus, v = vA+L. Assuming that the matrix I-A is invertible, we can write: v = L(I-A)-1.

    The labour embodied in the subsistence bundle b is then given by: vb = L(I-A)-1b. Furthermore, the rate of exploitation is given by: e = Sb/Vb = (1-vb)Lb/vbLb = (1-vb)/vb. It can be shown that r is positive if and only if e is positive; in other words, positive profits implies exploitation and vice-versa. This is known as the ‘Fundamental Marxian Theorem’. The key step is the identification of surplus value with the quantity (1-vb)L. This can be understood by noting that for a given output level y, Ly represents the labour required to produce this level of output; and for a given amount of labour u, vbu represents the value received by the worker; hence vbLy represents the value received by the worker for the when the output level is y. The difference Ly-vbLy is therefore the surplus value received by the capitalist.

    As I mentioned in a previous blog post, a critic might argue that the definition of ‘value’ used by Marxian economists is contrived and chosen specifically to produce a desired result – namely, the Fundamental Marxian Theorem. I will return to this point in a future blog post.

  • The state of Cuba

    The Cuban Revolution was a left-wing movement that overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, who had ruled Cuba from 1952 to 1959. The revolution was led by Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl, who began by launching an armed assault on the Moncada Barracks, a Cuban military post, in 1953. The attack was a failure and the co-conspirators were arrested; but at his trial, Fidel Castro gave a two-hour speech that won him national fame as he laid out his grievances against the Batista dictatorship. The Castros were exiled but consolidated their strategy and subsequently re-entered Cuba in 1956, accompanied by Che Guevara. This time they were more successful and toppled Batista and his regime just under three years later.

    The revolution had significant repercussions with regard to Cuba-United States relations. The US has maintained a comprehensive trade embargo against Cuba since 1960 – the most enduring trade embargo in modern history. The sanctions were loosened slightly during the ‘Cuban thaw’ from 2015 to 2017 but were subsequently tightened again. The US government tightened its embargo further in January last year, orienting around ‘maximum pressure’ strategy. The aim is clearly to destabilize the country and bring about a collapse of the government. According to Cuban intelligence officials, the US also made 638 (!) attempts to assassinate president Fidel Castro between 1959 and the early 2000s, using methods ranging from exploding cigars to poisoned diving suits to Mafia-style hit attempts.

    The impact of the US embargo on Cuba is comprehensive and impacts all sectors of the Cuban economy. For the 30 year period following the revolution, Cuba was supported by its ally the Soviet Union, mitigating the worst effects of the sanctions. In return, the Soviet Union was allowed to deploy nuclear missiles on the island; this led to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when the world was brought to the brink of nuclear war. In 1989, with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Cuba witnessed its most devastating economic crisis. During this time – euphemistically referred to as the ‘special period’ – Cuba’s GDP plummeted 34%, the total value of its exports to fall by 61% and the total value of its imports dropped by 72%.

    At this point, Cuba had become isolated from the rest of the world. However after the rise to power of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 1999, Cuba and Venezuela formed an increasingly close relationship, with the latter providing the former with a steady flow of oil. In 2006, Fidel Castro fell ill and withdrew from public life; the following year, Raúl Castro became president. This led to improved foreign relations and in 2012 Cuba received its first American goods in over 50 years, following the partial relaxation of the US embargo to permit humanitarian shipments. The severe economic strife suffered by Venezuela in the mid-2010s lessened its ability to support Cuba and may have contributed to the thawing of Cuban-American relations.

    The subsequent re-tightening of the embargo under president Trump in 2017 led to a downturn in Cuba’s fortunes. The downturn was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic; this decimated the island’s economy, which had come to rely increasingly on foreign tourism. Today, Cuba resembles a failed state. The island is experiencing its most severe economic and social crisis since the special period in the early 90s, characterized by extreme shortages of food, medicine, and fuel, coupled with chronic, daily power blackouts. The nation is also reeling from recent hurricanes and earthquakes, which have damaged infrastructure and disrupted essential services. The economy is facing potential collapse and the island is dealing with a significant surge in mortality caused by mosquito-borne diseases.

    How much of this is attributable the US embargo, as opposed to mismanagement of the economy by the Cuban government? It should be noted that the Cuban regime is far from perfect. Although Cuba claims to be a socialist country, it is not really socialist, at least not in the strict sense of the term. As with the former Soviet Union and its satellites, power is concentrated in the hands of a small bureaucracy which runs the country as it sees fit. Through this bureaucracy, the government directly owns and operates most means of production, with a high percentage of the labour force employed by the state. There is no real democracy to speak of – and certainly no worker control of the means of production, the true hallmark of socialism.

    That said, I don’t think it is fair to blame the state of Cuba today on its government, as corrupt and authoritarian as it may be. The more you look into this the more obvious it becomes that the US is the root cause of Cuba’s problems. When the revolution happened back in 1959, Cuba had an agrarian economy designed to produce sugar and tobacco for export, mainly to the US. The imposition of the embargo not only removed Cuba’s ability to sell produce to its largest and most natural trading partner; it also removed its ability to build up any sort of manufacturing or industrial capacity over the subsequent decades. That’s why if you travel to Cuba today, most of the cars you will see on the road were built in the 1950s, prior to the revolution.

    This lack of capacity makes it very difficult for Cuba to produce medicine, which also cannot be imported due to the embargo. The government’s response has been to move to a preventative model of healthcare, whereby illnesses are caught and addressed early, before symptoms develop. This contrasts with the Western model, which basically involves allowing people to get sick and then treating them for their symptoms. The Cuban model requires training and maintaining an army of healthcare professionals – which explains why it has the highest doctor-per-capita ratio of any nation. This model obviously works well as life expectancy in Cuba is similar to many Western countries (including the US). And its not just in healthcare where Cuba excels; its literacy rate is one of the highest in the world.

    Critics of the regime would argue that living for a long time isn’t so great if you have no quality of life. And there is no doubt that life is extremely hard for most ordinary Cubans. But we need to be clear about who is responsible for creating these conditions. The economic warfare waged on this small island nation by its superpower neighbour has heaped misery on its citizens for decades and brought the country to its knees. That it has still not succumbed to this imperial assault is testament to the strength of the revolution and to the resilience of the Cuban people.

  • Is AI overrated?

    Last summer I entered a competition run by the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence. The competition involved forecasting the incidence of Lyme disease, a bacterial infection transmitted to humans via bites from ticks. The way the competition worked was that the Alan Turing Institute provided data on Lyme disease incidence for a number of years then asked participants to forecast the incidence for the following two years. These forecasts would then be judged based on how close they were to the true figures on Lyme disease incidence for those two years, which only the institute had available to them. I knew nothing about Lyme disease but I had some spare time on my hands so thought I would give it a go.

    In the end, I submitted a forecast using a technique called linear regression, an extremely simple method that first I learned about when I was doing A-level statistics. I didn’t hear anything back for six months and had all but forgotten about the competition when a couple of weeks ago I received a phone call from the competition organizer informing me that I had won! I was quite surprised by this news, particular given the simplicity of my approach. My initial thought that I must have been the only entrant so had won by default; but apparently there were around 20 other participants. The competition organizer invited me to visit the Alan Turing Institute two days later to receive my prize (a bottle of champagne and a couple of books).

    On the train on the way home I found myself wondering how I had managed to win this competition using such a simple method. I must have been up against some people who had used some very advanced data science and artificial intelligence techniques – yet I had somehow managed to beat them using a technique I learned in school! One explanation is that I just got lucky. That is of course possible, but there is a better explanation. I think what had happened is that I had chosen the most appropriate technique for the task at hand, which was itself actually quite simple. There is no need to use an advanced approach to solve a simple problem; doing so is a classic example of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

    This got me wondering about artificial intelligence more generally and whether we as a society might be using it to solve problems that we don’t actually need to use it for. Is it possible that we don’t really need it at all? In order to answer this question, we must first define what we mean by ‘artificial intelligence’. Broadly speaking, artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processes by computer systems, enabling machines to learn, reason, solve problems, perceive environments, and understand language. It can be classified into three types: ‘narrow AI’ (also known as ‘weak AI’); ‘generative AI’; and ‘general AI’ (also referred to as ‘artificial general intelligence’, or AGI). Let us go through these in turn.

    Narrow AI is designed to excel at specific tasks, such as voice assistants (e.g. Siri, Alexa), recommendation engines (e.g. Netflix), or image recognition. Such artificial intelligence has been around for some time now and is undoubtedly useful in certain contexts. Generative AI is a subset of artificial intelligence that creates new content, including text (e.g. ChatGPT), images, and code. This is relatively new technology and we as a society are currently in the process of figuring out how to make the best use of it. General AI, on the other hand, is a theoretical, future form of artificial intelligence that would possess human-level intelligence across all domains. As I understand it, we are still a way off developing such technology.

    There is reason to be skeptical about the usefulness all three types of AI. Although (as already noted) narrow AI is undoubtedly useful in certain contexts, these contexts usually involve trivial tasks that could easily be performed by humans, such as deciding what to have for dinner or watch on TV. As the forecasting competition demonstrated, when performing a more complicated analytical task, you are better off sticking to a tried-and-trusted analytical technique. Generative AI is also useful in certain contexts but again these usually involve fairly trivial tasks. There is a widespread misconception that generative AI creates new content, when all it is really doing is summarizing and collating information originally generated by human beings.

    That leaves general AI, which obviously isn’t very useful as it hasn’t been invented yet. If such an AI could be developed then it would potentially be able to solve problems that humans can’t, which would set it apart from narrow and generative AI. Personally, though, I am skeptical that such technology will be developed any time soon. I think the gap between an AI which can summarize information generated by humans and an AI which can understand the world on a level similar to humans is a lot larger than many people realize. Generative AI doesn’t understand the world any more than a pocket calculator does. The idea that such AI can eventually be scaled up to general AI seems to me to be at best hopelessly naive and at worst deliberately misleading.

  • How to convince people

    In a previous blog post I argued that spiritual and political awakening are two sides of the same coin. I also mentioned the main problem with going such an awakening: namely, that it makes it painfully obvious when others haven’t. It can start to feel as though you are the only awake person in a sea of sleepwalking zombies, which can be very isolating. As I pointed out before, I am not trying to claim any superiority here; I was lucky to have gone through such an awakening. Moreover, one of the consequences of waking up in this way is that it increases your compassion and empathy for your fellow human beings. After all it was not that long ago that I, too, was one of the people I now look on as sleepwalking through life.

    The natural response to try and wake others up too, to try and shake them out of their slumber. Indeed, that is precisely what I did; but it didn’t work. They say you shouldn’t wake a sleepwalker abruptly because they are in a deep sleep and can become confused, scared, or agitated, potentially lashing out or injuring themselves or you in a ‘fight-or-flight’ response. I now realize that the exactly same is true of those who are metaphorically sleepwalking through life. You can try to explain to them that they are being propagandized, that everything they thought they knew about how the world works is a lie, that money doesn’t really exist, that the career ladder is a trap to prevent people from achieving their true calling, and so on. But in all likelihood, all that will happen is that they will resent you for it.

    This can be incredibly frustrating and brings to mind lyrics from the song Wake Up by the American rock band Rage Against the Machine: “What do I got to, what do I got to do to wake you up?”. The outro features the band’s singer Zack de la Rocha screaming “Wake up!” eight times in a row – and I can feel his frustration. But yelling at people to wake up will not work; it will only make them resent you further. So what should we do instead? I had naively assumed that presenting people with facts and figures would convince them, but that does not work either. It is remarkable how little this works in fact. People are generally only convinced by facts and figures when they confirm what they already believe to be true.

    To understand out how to convince someone of something, we first need to understand why they might be unwilling to be convinced of it. In a previous blog post I argued that people often resent well-thought-out, reasoned arguments because they subconsciously perceive it as an attack on their ego. Or perhaps a better way to put it is that their ego senses it as an attack and acts to defend itself. The ego perceives such an argument as another ego trying to assert its superiority – even if that isn’t what’s happening at all. This explains why trying to convince people using facts and figures rarely works. The more well-thought-out and reasoned an argument is, the more likely the ego is to perceive it as an attack, and the more likely it is to be rejected!

    In order to convince someone of something, therefore, we need to act in a way that doesn’t inflame their ego. Here we can elicit the help of the 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. According to Schopenhauer, the best strategy to get by in life is to act ignorant. Schopenhauer advised ‘playing dumb’ in social situations to avoid triggering envy, resentment, and hostility from others. He believed that showcasing high intelligence makes average people feel inferior, leading them to dislike you. The same is true when showcasing a higher level of spiritual or political awakening. Pretending to be less aware than your really are is a strategy that ensures social harmony and avoids goading others’ egos into a response.

    The key is to let people think that they came to a realization of their own accord. But how do you convince someone of something whilst also pretending to be unaware of it yourself? The best way is by asking open but leading questions. The danger is that they might feel like you are trying to manipulate them – which in a way is true. Ultimately, though, if the aim is to convince people of something that you already know to be correct, and that will have a transformative and positive impact on their life, is a little manipulation really such a bad thing? It is surely better than the alternative: allowing them to continue to sleepwalk through the rest of their life, doomed to being constantly manipulated by capitalist propaganda.

  • Moral ambition

    A month ago today I received an unexpected Christmas present: a book by the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman entitled Moral Ambition. I had read and enjoyed Bregman’s first book, Utopia for Realists, so I was keen to give this one a go as well. Fast forward a month and, having just finished reading Moral Ambition, I thought it would be helpful to pull out some key themes. Bregman begins his book by highlighting the deep and corrosive ennui experienced by so many people who find themselves doing jobs that are (at best) pointless. Here Bregman is channeling the late, great American anthropologist David Graeber, who first highlighted this in an article published in 2013 entitled On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.

    I still remember the feeling of elation when I first read this article over 10 years ago. It felt as though Graeber had managed to articulate everything that I intuitively knew was wrong with the working world. I had already been working in office jobs for around 10 years at that point and had always felt like a square peg in a round hole. There was a phoniness and a lack of authenticity about it that gnawed away at me. Graeber’s article enabled me to finally see that what I had always suspected: I wasn’t broken, the system is. We live in a world where millions of people spend the majority of their working lives doing jobs they secretly think don’t need to be done. Being forced to perform such bullshit jobs inevitably takes a toll on your mental well-being.

    In Moral Ambition, Bregman argues that the financial, organisational, technological, and analytical skills that so many of us currently waste doing bullshit jobs could be used instead to make tangible improvements to the world. Of course, we all know that is true in theory, but Bregman makes the case that it is also true in practice. He does this by citing a number of historical examples of people who have used their skills to improve the world, from people sheltering Jews in Nazi-occupied France and the Netherlands, to people in the 20th-century US naming and shaming naked abuses of corporate power, to people in the 18th century decisively campaigning to end slavery. And to be fair, these stories are genuinely inspiring.

    Moral Ambition also has important things to say about the nature of effective leadership, including distributing responsibilities and allowing room for people to take ownership. Whilst provocatively claiming that to make a difference, you have to create something like a ‘cult’, Bregman is clear that top-down decision-making is ineffective and can be actively harmful. He is rightly critical of the so-called ‘effective altruism’ movement and its nonsensical belief that it is possible to accurately quantify the future costs and benefits of any particular course of action (see my previous blog post on the philosophy of utilitarianism for more details on this). Bregman also argues that to achieve our goals, we sometimes need to make alliances with people we don’t 100% agree with.

    In making this last point, Bregman seems to be having a not-so-subtle dig at those of us on the left of the political spectrum. It is a well-known cliché that the left always ends up expending all its time and energy on factional infighting instead of actually getting anything done. Whilst this claim is wildly exaggerated, there is definitely a kernel of truth to it. Just the other day I witnessed a Twitter spat between two leftists I otherwise admire which was sparked by the first criticizing ‘Trotskyists’, a group to which the second claims to belong. I don’t really see why we need to factionalize ourselves based on a long-dead leader of a country that no longer exists. This kind of infighting is unhelpful and alienates the left from the ordinary people it claims to represent.

    More broadly, a debate is currently being waged on the British left on whether we should give our support to the Green Party or to Your Party. Proponents for the Green Party argue that it is much better organised, is not mired in infighting (unlike Your Party), and has a much better chance of making gains at the next general election – all of which is undoubtedly true. Proponents for Your Party, on the other hand, argue that the Green Party is a reformist organization that does not represent working people, has no program to dismantle existing power structures, and will not bring about the end of capitalism – all of which is true as well. For these people, supporting the Green Party makes little more sense than supporting Labour.

    Bregman would almost certainly argue that this precisely the kind of situation where we on the left need to form an alliance with people we don’t 100% agree with (i.e. the Greens). In Moral Ambition he describes a number of successful movements that have made tactical compromises and accepted delay in order to arrive at a more secure if less positive outcome. However in putting forward this argument, Bregman seems to negate his book’s central thesis, which is that we should aim high! This highlights a conundrum that we on the left need to grapple with. On the one hand we must stick to our principles, but on the other hand there are times when we need to be pragmatic and do what needs to be done to achieve our short-term aims. The key is to do the latter whilst making sure we also do the former.