Groucho Marxism

Questions and answers on socialism, Marxism, and related topics

  • 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 leadership? It should be noted that the Cuban government is far from perfect. Although Cuba claims to be a socialist country, it is not really socialist in any meaningful sense. 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 economy, 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 government 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.

  • Buddhism and Marxism

    Buddhism and Marxism seem unlikely bedfellows. But according to the British philosopher Graham Priest, they have much in common. Buddhism is largely concerned with ethics, whereas Marxism is largely concerned with political philosophy, particularly the nature of capitalism and its negative consequences. There is obviously a strong connection between ethics and political philosophy, as ethics determines the kind of society in which we should live. So it seems plausible that we can combine Buddhist ethics with Marxist political philosophy to form a more comprehensive picture, drawing on the strengths of each. Before we attempt to do that, though, we first need to define what we mean by the terms ‘Buddhism’ and ‘Marxism’.

    The core of Buddhism is encapsulated in four principles referred to as the Four Noble Truths. The first is known as the Truth of Suffering (Dukkha): life inherently involves suffering, dissatisfaction, or unease, encompassing obvious pain (birth, sickness, death) and subtler forms like dissatisfaction from change or attachment. The second is known as the Truth of the Origin of Suffering (Samudaya): suffering arises from craving, attachment, and ignorance, leading to a cycle of desire and clinging. The third is the Truth of the Cessation of Suffering (Nirodha): it is possible to end suffering by letting go of craving and attachment, leading to a state of peace (Nirvana). And the fourth is the Truth of the Path to the Cessation of Suffering (Magga): the way to end suffering is by following the Noble Eightfold Path.

    The Noble Eightfold Path is the Buddha’s practical guide to ending suffering, through eight interconnected practices. These are fall into three groups: cognitive practices (right view, right intention);  ethical practices (right speech, right action, right livelihood); and mental practices (right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration). The most relevant for our purposes is the first (right view). Buddhism teaches us that a major cause of craving lies in the fact that we misunderstand the world in which we live. Each of us misunderstands our very nature, taking this to be some kind of substantial entity, some abiding self. But as I explained in a previous blog post, the self is an illusion constructed by the mind. (More on this below.)

    Marxism views capitalism as a socio-economic system driven by a single objective: the pursuit of profit. This inevitably involves the exploitation of workers, who make up the vast majority of the population. Thus, under capitalism, almost everyone ends up getting exploited. This exploitation is achieved in various ways: paying workers as little as possible; maintaining an ever-present threat of unemployment; producing commodities using as little labour as possible; allowing workers no say in the way firms are run; disenfranchising workers; using techniques of advertising (thought-manipulation) to create spurious desires; and deceiving people through propaganda. The last applies to capitalists as well, who are often just as deceived by their own propaganda as the workers it is primarily intended for.

    Having defined what we mean by ‘Buddhism’ and ‘Marxism’ – albeit briefly! – the next step is to ask what they have in common. One point of similarity concerns the nature of the self. We have already seen that Buddha rejected the notion of self; similarly, Marx was a materialist who had no truck with the notion of soul, which is essentially the Western equivalent. The difference between them is that Buddhism emphasizes the importance of self-conception in what it is to be a person, whereas Marxism emphasizes the social nature of people. Of course, these two things are not inconsistent with each other. Indeed, they can be seen as complementing each other, each contributing to a more rounded picture.

    Marxism complements Buddhism in other ways too. Buddhism locates the cause of suffering in desire, but says little about the social factors which create this; Marxism, in contrast, says a lot about these social factors. Buddhism claims that people misunderstand the world in which they live, but says little about the social world; Marxism shows how, by the ideology of capitalism, people are engineered to misunderstand the nature of the social world and their place within it. Buddhism is a philosophy of compassion, but the Buddha could have had no idea of the forces that capitalism can bring to bear to undercut this; Marx, of course, had a very good understanding of these forces. Buddhism claims that the self is a construction; Marxism explains how such constructions are created under capitalism.

    Conversely, Buddhism complements Marxism in several ways. Marxism claims that the exploitation that inevitably occurs under capitalism is bad, but doesn’t really explain why; Buddhism explains this, by locating capitalism in an overarching perspective of human suffering. Marxism tells us that capitalist ideology legitimizes self-interest; Buddhism shows us how the notion of self-interest is based on the metaphysical illusion that people are social atoms existing independently of their surroundings. Marxism explains how capitalism engenders a particular power-structure, with those who own capital exerting great power over those who don’t; Buddhism can widen our attention to other pernicious power structures, such as those of race and gender.

    There other ways in which these two pictures complement and reinforce each other (see Priest’s article, of which this blog post is largely a synopsis). A consequence of both worldviews is that we should work to destroy the illusions on which capitalism is based and thereby hasten its demise. We also need to ensure that when capitalism does end, it is replaced with something better. The question is: how? It is clear from historical experience that systems must be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. The challenge for us socialists is to figure out how the many coordination problems that exist in modern society can be solved in a bottom-up way. I will leave this challenge for a future blog post.

  • The discrete Schrödinger equation

    In a previous blog post I derived discrete versions of two key equations in quantum mechanics: the canonical commutation relation between position and momentum, and the Schrödinger equation. I did this by considering a particle moving in discrete time and space where time was taken to be imaginary. The eagle-eyed reader would have noticed a problem with the discrete version of the Schrödinger equation though: the imaginary constant i appears on the wrong side! Specifically, the equation I derived was: ft = -iħfxx/2m; whereas the ‘true’ Schrödinger equation is: ift = -ħfxx/2m. This suggests I didn’t have quite the right formulation. In this blog post I will try again using a slightly different approach, where instead of imaginary time, I will use complex probabilities.

    As before, consider a particle moving in discrete time, let x(t) denote the position of the particle at (discrete) time t, and let dt denote the increment between successive time steps. Define the ‘forward’ velocity of the particle by u(t) = [x(t+dt)-x(t)]/dt, and define the commutator between position and velocity by [x,u](t) = u(t)x(t+dt)-x(t)u(t) (note that this has the opposite sign to the definition I used previously). Then it can be easily shown that [x,u] = 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 imaginary probability i/2. Then using revised definition [x,u](t) = E[u(t)x(t+dt)-x(t)u(t)] where E is the expectation operator, gives [x,u] = idx2/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-i, we can see immediately that the function f() satisfies the relation: f(x,t+dt)=if(x+dx,t)/2+(1-i)f(x,t)+if(x-dx,t)/2. 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. From our expression for f() above, we have ft(x,t) = i[f(x+dx,t)/2-f(x,t)+f(x-dx,t)/2]/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 = i(dx2/2dt)fxx. In other words, the function f() satisfies a discrete version of the diffusion equation, with diffusion constant idx2/2dt.

    Let m denote the mass of the particle and set dx = ħ/mc, set dt = ħ/mc2, where ħ is the reduced Planck constant, c is the speed of light, and i is the imaginary constant, so that i2 = -1. Then idx2/dt = (iħ2/2m2c2)/(ħ/mc2) = iħ/2m = so [x,u] = iħ/m, or equivalently, [x,mu] = 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: ift = -(ħ/2m)fxx, where this time the imaginary constant is on the correct side of the equation. This suggests that considering the motion of a particle as a random walk with complex probabilities is the ‘correct’ formulation. But how are we to interpret such probabilities?

    In the standard (continuous) formulation of quantum mechanics, the function f() that satisfies the Schrödinger equation is referred to as the ‘wave function’. The interpretation is that when a measurement is performed, the probability density of the particle being in position x at time t is proportional to |f(x,t)|2, where for a complex number c = a+bi, |c|2 = cc* = (a+bi)(a-bi) = a2+b2. In theory, we can apply exactly the same interpretation in the discrete case, except that now it is the probability rather than the probability density that is proportional to |f(x,t)|2. This suggests that in the discrete case, the quantity f(x,t) represents a ‘probability amplitude’ rather than a probability, just as in the continuous case.

    There is a problem with this interpretation however. In our derivation of the Schrödinger equation, we used the fact that f(x,t) represent a probability, rather than a probability amplitude, when we wrote down a recursive relation for it. Thus, in our formulation, we must interpret f(x,t) as a probability directly – which again leads to the question of how to interpret it. Perhaps we shouldn’t get too hung up on this though. After all, physicists have been arguing about how to interpret the standard (continuous) formulation of quantum mechanics for 100 years, and they still haven’t come to an agreement on what the ‘correct’ interpretation is, or if it even makes sense to talk about a ‘correct’ interpretation. However there is another formulation which obviates the need to deal with imaginary probabilities.

    Let us revert back to our original formulation, where the particle moves left or right with (non-imaginary) probability 1/2, except now let us set dt = -iħ/mc2­. Then, from the definition of the commutator given above, we have: [x,u] = dx2/dt = (-ħ2/m2c2)/(iħ/mc2) = iħ/m, or [x,mu] = iħ, as before. Also, we have: ft = (dx2/2dt)fxx = (iħ/2m)fxx; multiplying both sides by i yields: ift = -(iħ/2m)fxx, which is the ‘true’ Schrödinger equation. Thus, we can derive the canonical commutation relation and Schrödinger equation in a discrete framework using imaginary time by simply flipping the sign of the time increment. This seems like the most promising approach to me. I will leave the question of how to interpret ‘imaginary time’ to a future blog post.

  • Indo-European velars before *o

    In an ever-expanding series of recent blog posts I have argued, based on data compiled by Lars Steensland in his 1973 PhD thesis, that Proto-Indo-European – henceforth PIE – had two rather than three types of velar consonant: plain velars and labiovelars. I have also set out the phonological rules by which the plain velars remained intact in the satem languages, and by which labiovelars were delabialized in the centum languages. Although these rules account for a large proportion of the observed reflexes, they do not account for all of them. For a complete two-velar theory, I think we need to invoke another phonological rule: namely, that plain velars were remained intact before *o in the satem languages. In this blog post I will set out the supporting evidence.

    Steensland provides 31 examples of words with palatovelars occurring in word-initial position before *o, when not preceded by *s; 20 examples of words with plain velars in this position; and 12 examples of words with labiovelars in this position. He then shows that of the 12 examples of words with labiovelars, the labiovelar in all but 1 could have been introduced analogically from a related where the labiovelar occurred before *e, and concludes that there is no clear evidence of labiovelars occurring before *o in PIE. However, of the 31 examples of words with palatovelars, the palatovelar in all but 9 could also have been introduced analogically in a similar way. Moreover, none of the 9 remaining words stands up to scrutiny.

    The first word is *k’oinos ‘hay’, which supposedly yields reflexes in Balto-Slavic and Greek. However, the Greek word may simply be an inflected form of another Greek word derived from a different root. The second word is *k’olH₂mos ‘straw’ which yields reflexes in Balto-Slavic, Italic, Germanic, and Greek. The original paradigm may be reconstructed as *k’elH₂m ~ *k’lH₂mos, in which case the palatovelar could have been introduced analogically from the *e-grade. The ‘gutturalwechsel’ (velar interchange) in the Baltic-Slavic reflexes provides further evidence that this root originally contained a plain velar. The third word is *k’onghos ‘shell’, which supposedly yields reflexes in Indo-Iranian and Greek, but the correspondence is irregular so these are probably false cognates.

    The fourth and fifth words are *k’ormnos ‘acid’, which yields reflexes in Balto-Slavic and Germanic; and *k’ormos ‘pain’, which yields reflexes in Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, and Germanic. Both of these words can be traced back to a root *k’er(H)- ‘hurt’, which is attested in the *e-grade in Greek. The sixth word is *g’houHos ‘call’, which yields reflexes in Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic; this word can be traced back to a root *g’heuH- ‘call’, which is attested in the *e-grade in Indo-Iranian. The seventh and eighth words are *k’okH₂eH₂ ‘branch’ and *k’onkos, both of which yield reflexes in Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic, and Germanic. These words can be traced back to a root *k’ek- ‘sway’ with a nasal infix variant *k’enk-, which are attested in the *e-grade in Albanian and Indo-Iranian respectively.

    Hence, the palatovelar could have been introduced analogically in words four to eight. The final word is *k’opH₂elos ‘carp’. This word only has reflexes in the satem languages, and as these were contiguous, can therefore only be traced back as far as ‘proto-satem’ rather than to PIE. We can conclude from the above that Steensland’s data is consistent with the hypothesis that the split between palatovelars and plain velars before *o occurred separately in the satem languages, and therefore that there is no need to reconstruct a separate palatovelar series of consonants before *o in PIE. This hypothesis also has the advantage of explaining numerous instances of ‘gutturalwechsel’: alternations between palatovelars and plain velars across different satem languages.

    For example, the word *g’hordos ‘enclosure’ yields both palatovelar and plain velar reflexes in Balto-Slavic, along with a plain velar reflex in Albanian. The underlying root *g’her- is attested in the *e-grade in Indo-Iranian. The gutturalwechsel in *g’hordos ‘enclosure’ can therefore be explained by positing that the word originally contained a plain velar that was blocked from palatalizing before the *o, with the palatovelar reflexes later being introduced analogically from the *e-grade. Similarly, the word *k’oimos ‘home’ yields both palatovelar and plain velar reflexes in Balto-Slavic, and the underlying root *k’ei- is attested in the *e-grade in Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic, so the gutturalwechsel can be explained in the same way.

    Another example is the word *bherg’hos ‘fortification’, which yields palatovelar reflexes in Indo-Iranian and Armenian, and plain velar reflexes in Balto-Slavic. The velar in the underlying root *bherg’h- would have occurred before *e in several Indo-Iranian and Armenian reflexes, so again the gutturalwechsel can  be explained by positing that the word originally contained a plain velar that was blocked from palatalizing before the *o. These explanations have the advantage of uniting what are usually reconstructed as separate roots with the same meaning: *g’her-/*gher- ‘enclose’, *k’ei-/*kei- ‘settle’, and *bherg’h-/*bhergh- ‘protect’. It seems much more plausible that these each represent a single PIE root with the divergent velar reflexes being the result of secondary developments.

  • A brief history of US imperialism

    If 2026 has had a theme so far, it has been US imperialism. The year has already seen US interventions in Venezuela and Iran, and threats of future interventions elsewhere, such as in Colombia and Greenland. Many seem to be surprised by these events, but they really shouldn’t be. The US has a long history of meddling in other countries’ affairs, often with disastrous consequences for the people living in those countries. Anyone who thought Trump’s ‘America first’ policy meant discontinuing this practice was deluding themselves. Indeed, the reason the US does this is precisely because it is putting its own interests first, above the interests of other countries. Or more accurately, the ruling class in the US is putting its interests first, above the interests of everyone else.

    The US has intervened militarily in dozens of countries throughout its history, with estimates varying from around 70 nations to over 100, depending on your definition of military intervention. This policy has its roots in the so-called Monroe Doctrine, first articulated by President James Monroe in 1823. The Monroe Doctrine is a US policy position that opposes any foreign interference in the Western Hemisphere, and effectively established the Americas as a the US’s sphere of influence by asserting that any new European attempts to colonize or intervene in there would be seen as hostile acts against the US itself. It was later interpreted to justify US military intervention in Latin America as the nation gained power.

    The first such intervention was the Mexican-American war of 1846-1848, which the US started by invading Mexico. Although ostensibly a border dispute, the US’s real aim was to fulfil it’s ‘manifest destiny’: the 19th-century belief that the US was divinely ordained to expand across the North American continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. This war marked the beginning of US military imperialism. However, although the US won the war easily, it had its fingers badly burnt as the conflict subsequently led to the American Civil War (see my previous blog post on this for more details). As a result, the US did not attempt any serious military interventions again until 1898. This time, it invaded and occupied Spanish-controlled Cuba, leading to the Spanish-American war.

    Again, the US won this war easily. However, unlike the Mexican-American war half a century prior, this time the US profited significantly from its victory. The peace treaty saw Spain cede control over its colonies of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the US, and to Cuba effectively becoming a US puppet. This emboldened the US, and between 1898 and 1935 it launched several interventions in Latin America, resulting in significant US military presence in Cuba, Honduras, Panama, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua. By the time WWII broke out, the US was effectively in control of most of Central America and the Caribbean. At this stage, though, the US had largely limited itself to intervening militarily in its own back yard.

    That all changed after WWII. The US formed North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949 to resist socialist expansion, and over the next 40 years supported resistance movements and dissidents in dozens of socialist countries around the world. Although this period became known as the ‘cold war’, during this time the US took part in two ‘hot wars’, in Korea (1950-1953) and Vietnam (1955-1975). It is often said that the latter war was a disaster from the US’s point of view. But both wars achieved the primary aim of the American ruling class, which was to stop the spread of socialism. Largely as a result of these and other interventions, we now live in a world where the idea of socialism taking hold globally seems like an impossibility to most people.

    Anyone who thought that the end of the cold war and global decline in socialism would result in a corresponding decrease in US imperialism would have been sorely mistaken. US imperialism has continued unabated since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the attention shifting away from preventing the spread of socialism and towards protecting American oil interests. This has resulted in many military interventions in oil-rich nations, particularly Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Libya. The recent interventions in Venezuela and Iran are a continuation of this policy of oil imperialism that has now been going on for over 30 years. An invasion Greenland would also represent a continuation of this policy.

    However, a US invasion of Greenland would also mark a qualitative shift from previous interventions. Greenland is owned by Denmark,  a NATO member, so an attack by the US on Greenland would represent an attack by one NATO member on another, which would be unprecedented. In theory, other NATO members would be obliged to defend Greenland against such an attack, which would entail them going to war with the US. In practice, no national government in its right mind would even consider doing such a thing, as war with the US would mean almost certain annihilation. However, a US invasion of Greenland might mean the end of NATO and a significant weakening of relations between the US and Europe. That would only be a good thing in my view.

  • What’s going on in Iran?

    Anti-government protests have been going on in Iran for the past two weeks. The protests were sparked by rampant inflation and the collapse of the Iranian currency, but have since spread across the country and morphed into more general protests against the Iranian regime, with people in more than 100 cities participating in the demonstrations. Although largely leaderless, many demonstrators have been demanding the return of the exiled Reza Pahlavi, Crown Prince of Iran, who has called for a peaceful transition and a referendum to decide Iran’s future political system. Indeed, the protests escalated following calls from Pahlavi to intensify them. The demonstrations have drawn international attention with solidarity demonstrations being held in major cities around the world.

    Iran is widely considered a theocracy because its government and legal system are directed by a powerful, clerically-appointed Supreme Leader and various religious bodies. I am personally against theocracy and would like to see reform in Iran, as I’m sure many others on the left would. However, there is good reason for us not to give our support to the current demonstrations. In particular, we must understand that Pahlavi, the figurehead of these protests, is strongly pro-Zionist and views Israel as a crucial strategic partner for Iran’s future. He has advocated for renewed ties between the two countries and expressed admiration for Israel’s strength. Pahlavi even visited Israel in 2023, meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu and praying at the Western Wall.

    And it goes deeper. Investigations by several news sources (though none in the West of course) have exposed coordinated Israeli-backed digital operation in Iran. It appears that hundreds of fake Iranian digital accounts have been created pushing AI content, deep fakes, and staged content, all to create the impression that Iranians want to elevate Pahlavi as Iran’s next leader. Of course this isn’t to suggest that Iranians are not frustrated with the existing regime; clearly many of them are, and I’m sure with good reason. But it seems equally clear that this anger is being hijacked by Israel, a hostile foreign power, so that they can install a puppet pro-Zionist leader. What we have here is a case of synchronized information warfare.

    The Israel and the US are clearly trying to bring about regime change in Iran, ostensibly in the name of freedom and democracy, but in reality to install a puppet monarchy run by the son of a dictator known for brutal political repression. They are doing this because Iran represents the main bulwark against complete US-Israeli domination of the region. The US has imposed grotesque economic terrorism on Iran for decades, the aim of which has been to break the collective will of the Iranian people to the point that either the regime is forced to acquiesce to the US’s demands, or there is an internal uprising. The regime has not done the former, so now it is facing the latter. People in Iran are angry, poor and hungry; but who was it that created these conditions?

    What isn’t being reported in the West is that along with anti-government protests, massive pro-government protests are also going on across the country right now. It seems that Ayatollah Ali Khomeini and his government aren’t as unpopular as the Western media would have us believe. Maybe the people of Iran don’t want a pro-Zionist puppet as their leader after all. Meanwhile, we in the West are being told that the Iranian government is on the brink of collapse! The only explanation for this is a coordinated psychological operation aimed at the Western public to make us think that regime change in Iran is an inevitability, rather than something that is being deliberately instigated by the US and Israel to further their own interests.

    Western governments have all been falling in line to support the ant-government protests in Iran, apparently because they care so much about freedom and democracy. Yet these same governments are more than happy to support similarly authoritarian regimes in Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, the UAE, Qatar, and so on. It must be remembered that the US and UK overthrew democracy in Iran in order to protect their oil interests in the country (sound familiar?). Under the Shah, who was installed as leader by the US, Americans were free to do anything they wanted in the country and the Iranian government had no right to prosecute them for any crimes committed. This is the level of imperialism that Ruhollah Khomeini, the first Ayatollah, was fighting against.

    Ultimately the future of Iran must be decided by the Iranian people, not by the US, Israel, or any other foreign power. The same goes for Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland, Sudan, and any other country or region the US and its allies are either meddling or threatening to meddle in. We must stand up against imperialist intervention in all its forms as a matter of principle, regardless of the nature of the regimes that are being intervened with. And in doing so, we must be clear that we are not supporting these regimes per se but the broader principle of self-determination. This principle is central to modern international law and is enshrined in the UN Charter, but the US and Israel are making a mockery of it with their actions in Iran and elsewhere around the world.

  • Is the UK occupied?

    There can be no doubt now that the Zionist lobby has a huge influence on UK politics. Some go so far as to argue that the UK government is effectively occupied by Israel. In the past I have rubbished this claim – mainly because it sounds ridiculous, but also because it seems to come dangerously close to the ‘Jews control the world’ trope: the idea that a small, secretive Jewish cabal manipulates national governments for malevolent purposes. Recently, though, I have been starting to wonder whether there might be some truth to the idea that the UK government is effectively being controlled by Israel, to the extent that labeling it an ‘occupation’ might not be so ridiculous after all. In this blog post I will go through some of the evidence behind this claim.

    Before getting into the evidence, though, I need to head off the charge that just by considering this as a possibility I am giving tacit support to the ‘Jews control the world’ conspiracy theory. A theory is only a conspiracy theory if it is not backed up by evidence. As soon as a theory is backed up by sufficient evidence it stops being a conspiracy theory and becomes a fact. We also need to be clear that we are talking specifically about Israel and the Zionist lobby here, not Jews in general. However, we do need to take into account the maxim popularized by the American physicist Carl Sagan: ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’. The claim that the UK government is occupied by Israel is certainly extraordinary; the question is whether the evidence is sufficiently extraordinary to support it.

    Let’s start with the treatment of the Palestine Action activists. Six political prisoners associated with Palestine Action currently being held in British jails are on hunger strike. They are demanding to be released on bail and the right to a fair trial. Most have already been held on remand far longer than the normal six-month maximum which the law allows before trial, and their condition is deteriorating rapidly. All have been accused of being involved in Palestine Action campaigns carried out before the ban on the protest group was implemented earlier this year. Recall that Palestine Action was infamously banned as a ‘terrorist’ group by the British government last summer, following a relentless lobbying campaign from Israel and its representatives in the UK.

    The idea that Palestine Action is a terrorist group is obviously nonsense. Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve political or ideological aims. The crime committed by the Palestine Action activists involved throwing red paint on some military planes. These activists didn’t just avoid targeting any non-combatants – they avoided targeting people altogether. Who exactly was being ‘terrorized’ here? This is about as far from terrorism as it is possible to get! The real reason Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist organization becomes clear when you find out the Yvette Cooper, who was Home Secretary at the time, received a concurrent £215,000 bribe from the Zionist lobby.

    It gets fishier though. Palestine Action’s co-founder, Palestinian-Iraqi activist Huda Ammori, was at the High Court this week challenging the ban. Last month the judge on this high-profile case was replaced at the last minute by a three-judge panel led by Victoria Sharp, a former principal adviser to Robert Maxwell, an Israeli spy. That’s the same Robert Maxwell who was the father of Ghislane Maxwell, who in 2021 was found guilty of child sex trafficking and other offences in connection with the deceased financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It is becoming clear that Epstein was in personal contact with political leaders from around the world, including the UK. Influential former Labour politician Peter Mandelson, for example, maintained a close friendship with Epstein.

    Many prominent British politicians have links with Israel. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has family in Israel, has strong connections to pro-Israel groups, and has promoted UK-Israel ties. He has also gone on record as saying he supports Zionism “without qualification”, has repeatedly refused to condemn Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and has received donations from the Labour Friends of Israel lobbying group. Starmer and Cooper are not the only British MP to have received bribes from the Zionist lobby: the entire Labour cabinet is apparently on the Israeli payroll. And it’s not just Labour either. According to Declassified UK, some 180 of Britain’s 650 MPs in the last parliament have accepted funding from pro-Israel lobby groups or individuals.

    Then there’s the obvious bias in the British media. Many journalists working at Britain’s most prestigious newspapers and TV channels have expressed concern at pro-Israel bias inside their organisations – although few have expressed these concerns in public, for fear of losing their jobs. The pro-Israel bias should be clear to anyone who has witnessed the mainstream media’s coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This is perhaps most acute at the supposedly impartial BBC. According to the Centre for Media Monitoring, the BBC treats Palestinian deaths as less newsworthy, systematically uses language bias favouring Israelis, suppresses genocide allegations, and interviews significantly fewer Palestinians than Israelis (and the figures all back up these claims).

    Taking all of the above into account, the idea that the UK is occupied by Israel starts to seem a lot more plausible. And this is hardly the full extent of the evidence; we have barely scratched the surface. It seems the more you look into this, the more you find the Zionist lobby pulling the strings. If we really want to understand where power lies we have to follow the evidence – and the evidence points unequivocally to Israel.