Groucho Marxism

Questions and answers on socialism, Marxism, and related topics

  • It’s time to ditch the royals

    Things are not going well for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the pedophile formerly known as ‘Prince’. Every time you think his reputation couldn’t possibly sink any lower, yet another revelation about his past comes to light. The latest batch of documents from the Epstein files includes emails that will damage his reputation even further – assuming that is even possible at this point. These latest documents highlight the need to investigate further Mountbatten-Windsor’s links to Jeffrey Epstein and his circle, and to force him to give evidence to the US Department of Justice. As a committed anti-royalist I can’t help but feel a certain amount of schadenfreude when contemplating Mountbatten-Windsor’s demise. Apart from anything else, it highlights just how incredibly stupid the man is.

    “Have you found me some new inappropriate friends?” someone called “A in Balmoral” asks in an email Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s friend and companion who is now serving a 20-year prison sentence in the US for sex trafficking. I wonder who “A in Balmoral” could possibly be?! He really covered his tracks brilliantly there didn’t he. Perhaps he was originally going to go with “Andrew in B” but thought it was too obvious. At other points he refers to himself as the “Invisible Man”. Yeah, that should really throw them off the scent Andrew. This isn’t just stupidity; it’s a toxic mix of stupidity and arrogance. Mountbatten-Windsor clearly thinks he is cleverer than everyone else and can easily fool people with these pathetic aliases.

    As enjoyable as it is to witness the downfall of this disgusting, pompous man, there is also a serious point to be made here which nobody seems to be making. It is only by an accident of history that Andrew is not our head of state. If his older siblings Charles and Anne had died before they were able to have any children, Andrew would have been next in line to the throne. This once again highlights the fundamental problem with a hereditary head of state: there is no way of ensuring that they are fit for office. As someone once said, a hereditary head of state makes about as much sense as a hereditary dentist. Nevertheless, there are many who try to justify the continued existence of the royal family on the basis that they don’t really have any power, arguing that their role is purely ceremonial. But is this really true?

    The short answer is: no. The royal family wields immense power in the UK; but this isn’t obvious as their power is exercised in a subtle, ‘soft’ way. There are several routes by which this is achieved. The most obvious is the private weekly meetings that the head of the royal family – currently ‘King’ Charles – has with the Prime Minister. We the public are assured that the monarch remains ‘politically neutral’ in this meetings, but this is obviously nonsense as nobody in the world is politically neutral. We all have natural political biases, and it is not hard to imagine in which direction the head of the royal family’s political biases would lean. In any case, there is no way for us to verify what goes on in these meetings as they are private, which in itself should ring alarm bells.

    Another method by which Charles wields power is through his infamous ‘black spider’ memos: letters and memorandums written by Charles to British government ministers and politicians over several years. Apologists for the royals claim that these memos are “harmless”, but that’s beside the point, which is that Charles clearly has the power to meddle in public affairs if he wants to. But the main way the royals exert their grip over the British people is through a subtle kind of propaganda. Wherever you go and whatever you do in the UK, you will see or hear the royal family being referenced: on money, stamps, the names of our armed services, the names of government departments, the names of tube lines, and so on. Not to mention the insipid ‘King’s Speech’, broadcast to every British home on Christmas day.

    All of this is done to create the illusion that the royals are an essential component of everyday British life. We scoff when we see images of North Korea with the ubiquitous pictures of Kim Jong-Il and Kim Il-Sung in the background, and wonder aloud how can the people who live there can possibly be so gullible as to give their unwavering support to these obvious mediocrities. The reason, we understand, is that the North Korean people have been brainwashed from an early age into believing that the Kim dynasty represents some sort of super-human family that is destined to rule over their country. Little do people realize that exactly the same dynamic is going on in the UK; the only difference is that here, the brainwashing is less overt.

    Ultimately, the royals have power over us ordinary people because they represent the ruling class, which has a monopoly on power. They are essentially the personification of this class. All the furore about Andrew’s appalling behaviour will not fundamentally change anything as long as existing power structures remain in place. Ask a royalist why we should retain the monarchy and the first thing they will probably say is that it creates stability and continuity. I think this is precisely the reason we need to get rid of it.

  • Is the universe superdeterministic?

    The American physicist Richard Feynman once famously remarked: “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.” The point Feynman was making is that quantum mechanics is strange, weird, counter-intuitive, and that some questions about it cannot or should not be asked. However, this strangeness disappears if we are willing to accept that one of the assumptions that is usually made about quantum mechanics is not realized in nature. This assumption is known as ‘statistical independence’. Loosely speaking, statistical independence means that spatially separated systems can be considered uncorrelated, so removing this assumption means that they will be correlated, even in absence of a common past cause.

    Statistical independence is an assumption that we make about nature which works well to describe our observations on the macroscopic ‘classical’ level; however, that doesn’t necessarily means it holds on the microscopic ‘quantum’ level. In quantum mechanics, statistical independence can be expressed as a lack of correlation between the ‘hidden variables’ of the theory and the detector settings of an experiment. The hidden variables represent all the information that is required to predict the outcome of an experiment for the detector settings. These variables are referred to as ‘hidden’ because they do not explicitly appear in the equations of quantum mechanics. Removing the statistical independence assumption means that the outcome of an experiment will depend on the detector settings.

    The theory that emerges on the removal of the statistical dependence assumption is known as ‘superdeterminism’, as it suggests the evolution of the entire universe, including our measurement choices, is completely predetermined and correlated. It implies that everything in the universe is connected with everything else. Superdeterminism is often considered a ‘conspiracy’ in which the detector settings of an experiment are influenced by hidden variables in just the right way to give the results of quantum mechanics. But this objection is based on the schoolboy error of confusing correlation with causation. All superdeterminism assumes is that the hidden variables and detector settings are correlated; it doesn’t assumes anything about the direction of causality.

    Another objection people make about superdeterminism is that it implies we have no free will, as it suggests that the choices experimenters make about what to measure are not truly independent but are predetermined and correlated with the particles being measured. But as I outlined in a previous blog post, free will is an illusion; and not only that, it is completely incoherent as a concept. I therefore take the lack of free will under superdeterminism as a reason to support rather than reject the theory. However, the main argument in support of superdeterminism is that it neatly sidesteps a well-known problem in the interpretation of quantum mechanics. This problem is encapsulated by what is known as ‘Bell’s theorem’, named after the Irish physicist John Stewart Bell.

    Bell’s theorem says that under the assumption of statistical independence, either realism or locality must be violated. Which is to say that either particles don’t have definite properties before measurement (realism is violated) or influences can travel faster than light (locality is violated), or both. The theorem has its roots in the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen thought experiment proposed by physicists Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen in a 1935 paper. Their paper suggested that quantum mechanics is incomplete because it allows for ‘spooky action at a distance’: instantaneous correlation between entangled particles, seemingly violating locality. They argued that to avoid this violation of locality, there must be some hidden variables that aren’t accounted for by the theory.

    Bell showed in 1964 that under the assumption of statistical independence, introducing hidden variables will not solve the problem of non-locality. In the words of Bell: “If [a hidden-variable theory] is local it will not agree with quantum mechanics, and if it agrees with quantum mechanics it will not be local.” But Bell’s theorem is predicated on the assumption of statistical independence; remove that assumption and the theorem no longer holds. In other words, removing the statistical independence assumption means that there might be hidden-variable theories that do not violate locality and agree with quantum mechanics. These hidden variables encapsulate definite properties of a particle, so both realism and locality are saved.

    I am far from an expert in quantum mechanics so my opinion on this carries little weight. For what it’s worth, though, I think superdeterminism has a lot going for it. As already noted, it reinforces the truism that we lack free will. It also suggests that everything in the universe is connected, which nicely counters the bogus Western philosophical idea that human beings are atomic decision-making agents interacting with an external world. In this sense it has a lot more in common with Eastern philosophy. But the main reason I like superdeterminism is that it starts with what we know from experimental data must true (quantum mechanics, realism, and locality) and then asks which of our assumptions must be incorrect in order to allow these things to be true simultaneously.

    Unfortunately, all too often we human beings do things the other way around. There seems to be something inherent to human nature that when faced with evidence that contradicts our prior assumptions, rather than re-examine our assumptions, our first reaction is to reject the evidence! Even quantum physicists, arguably the most intelligent members of our species, are guilty of this it seems. Academics are perhaps even more guilty of this than the general population, having often staked their careers on their prior assumptions being correct. This explains why so many academic disciplines end up going down blind alleys (mainstream economics being the most egregious example). If we are to have any hope of understanding the world around us, we have to start by looking at the evidence.

  • Why are we being prepared for war?

    The UK and other European nations are currently being urged to prepare for potential conflict with Russia. In a recent speech, NATO chief Mark Rutte said that Russia could attack a NATO country in the next five years. According to Rutte, “Russia is already escalating its covert campaign against our societies,” and we “must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured.” The problem with these statements is that they are impossible for the layperson to verify, so Rutte is essentially asking for us to take his word for it. It is tempting to invoke Hitchens’ razor – ‘that which is asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence’ – and simply dismiss Rutte’s claims. But let’s be generous and examine whether there is anything behind them.

    Rutte would probably argue that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is evidence that it is willing to attack other nations. It is conceivable that once Putin is finished in Ukraine, he may turn his sights to other nations that have significant Russian minorities – particularly Latvia and Estonia, whose populations are over 20% ethnically Russian. These nations were of course once part of the USSR, the dissolution of which was famously described by Putin as a the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe.” And Putin is not alone; most Russians view the Soviet Union’s dissolution with regret. According to the Wilson centre, a US-based think tank dedicated to research and policy discussions on global issues, many Russians believe the Soviet era was Russia’s best historical period, offering prosperity and opportunity.

    This nostalgia for the Soviet Union amongst Russians flies in the face of the standard Western narrative that capitalism is a superior system to socialism. But what do people in other former Soviet republics think? Something that isn’t often talked about in the west is that a referendum on the future of the Soviet Union was held in 1991, in which people from different republics were asked to vote on whether they wanted to keep the union together. The vote was boycotted by the authorities of in Armenia, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Moldova, but turnout was over 80% across the rest of the Soviet Union. In every republic where people were allowed to vote – Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and the central Asian republics – they voted overwhelmingly in favour of preserving the union.

    All the republics that boycotted the vote organized their own referendums, and in each of these people voted overwhelmingly in favour of leaving the Soviet Union. So it seems pretty safe to say that the people of Armenia, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Moldova do not want to go back to being part of a union ruled by Moscow. This highlights a qualitative difference between these states on the one hand and Ukraine on the other. Whereas the former have long histories that are independent of Russian rule, the histories of Ukraine and Russia have always been intertwined. It is well-known that Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, used to be the capital of an East Slavic state named Kievan Rus’ which is considered the precursor of modern-day Russia.

    I am not in any way trying to justify Putin’s invasion of Ukraine here. The point is that just because Putin invaded Ukraine, it does not necessarily follow that he will seek to invade other former Soviet states – and it definitely doesn’t follow that he will seek to invade other European nations. So it seems there is little evidence to back up Rutte’s assertion. At this point we make invoke another principle popularized by the American physicist Carl Sagan: ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’ Rutte’s claim that we must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured is certainly extraordinary, but the evidence for it certainly isn’t, so it can be legitimately dismissed.

    Why, then, are we being prepared for war? I can think of a few reasons. The first reason is to create a distraction. Things are not going well in Europe at the moment; the cost of living crisis is really beginning to bite, and people are looking for explanations as to why their lives are getting worse. It is helpful for the ruling class in Europe to create bogeyman on which to blame all of the continent’s problems as it distracts from the real problem – namely, the neoliberal capitalist system we are all being forced to live under. The second reason is to do with Europe’s increasing irrelevance on the global stage. The ruling elite of Europe thinks that if it can convince people they under imminent threat of war, they will be more willing to allow their governments to rearm, which will in turn grant them more power.

    The third reason relates to the role and relevance of NATO. It seems pretty clear that the eastward expansion of NATO was the trigger that led to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Again, I am not in any way justifying the invasion, the responsibility for which clearly sits primarily with Russia. But NATO must be held responsible too, as if it hadn’t expanded eastwards the invasion would never have happened. If people realized that NATO had largely manufactured this situation itself, they would be a lot less likely to support the alliance. It is in NATO’s interest to exaggerate the Russian threat as that justifies both its eastward expansion and its continued existence. This is probably the key reason for Rutte’s bellicose outburst.

    Unfortunately, Rutte’s statement has been unquestioningly parroted across the mainstream media, to the extent that many people across Europe probably believe that war with Russia is imminent. I suspect NATO’s strategy is to keep making this prediction until it eventually becomes self-fulfilling. It is important therefore that we on the left counteract NATO’s narrative and call out this dangerous warmongering nonsense, before it’s too late.

  • The true source of our insecurity

    I recently went through a rather unpleasant experience at work. I had applied for a professional qualification and as part of the application process was invited to what was labelled a ‘career discussion’. The point of this, I was told, was to go through my career history with a member of the relevant professional body so that they could make an assessment of whether my skills and experience were sufficient for them to award me the qualification. Fine, I thought; might even be quite nice to talk a bit about my career. After all, everyone loves talking about themselves don’t they! It was made clear to me that this was definitely not an interview and that I therefore didn’t need to prepare anything prior to the meeting.

    So I was somewhat taken aback when instead of a nice, calm discussion about my career history, I was subjected to an interrogation which lasted well over an hour. The meeting started badly when I was a minute late due to the inevitable IT issues (the meeting was held virtually, as most meetings are now). My attempt to clear the air by making a jokey comment about this went down like a lead balloon, and things only went downhill from there. For the next 80 minutes I was subjected to a series of increasingly aggressive questions about what I had achieved in my career, with each answer I attempted being met with a derisory comment or put-down. I could feel my self-confidence ebbing away. Things got so awkward that I was tempted to terminate the ‘discussion’ halfway through.

    As you can imagine, I came out of the meeting feeling like a failure. A few days later the results came back; needless to say, I wasn’t awarded the qualification. Not only that, I had been marked at a graduate level for around half of the competencies, despite the fact that I have 20 years of professional experience. No further feedback was provided of course. By this point, however, the shock of the meeting had subsided and I had started to get things into perspective. One advantage of having 20 years professional experience is that you learn a few things. And one of the things I have learned is that if somebody unfairly criticizes you like this, it is almost always coming from a place of insecurity. Applying this principle to my current situation, I suddenly saw it in a much clearer light.

    The reason I was given such a hard time, I realized, was not because my assessor thought I was incompetent; it was because deep down they believe themselves to be incompetent, and were subconsciously projecting their perceived incompetency on to me. For example, at one point my assessor made a mistake about something then chided me for not making it clear in my application. But when I looked at it my application again after the discussion, I saw that I had made it perfectly clear. The mistake was a result of my assessor not reading my application properly. Of course they knew this really, and blaming me was their way of subconsciously deflecting the blame away from themselves. My discussion had been littered with examples such as this.

    I began to realize that my entire career has been littered with similar examples. There is a profound irony here: the more competent you are at your job, the more you make others feel incompetent, and the more likely they are to then try to undermine you and bring you down to their level. This undermining isn’t done consciously, at least not usually; it mostly happens subconsciously. It is important to recognize this dynamic, for two reasons. First, it provides an explanation for why you can often come in for criticism from others even when (or especially when) you are perfectly good at your job. And second, it highlights just how insecure some people can be. Once you understand that, you immediately flip from disliking the people who unfairly criticize you to feeling sorry for them.

    Why are we humans so insecure? Is it just a part of our genetic makeup? If it is then there must be an evolutionary explanation for it, but I struggle to think what that could be. If anything, I would have thought that being secure in yourself would confer an evolutionary advantage. One explanation is that this insecurity stems from our natural competitiveness: when coming into contact with others we naturally size ourselves up against them, and if we feel we are falling short then that makes us feel insecure. This explanation ties in with the right-wing view that human beings naturally compete with each other in a kind of evolutionary survival of the fittest. But I think this explanation gets things backwards.

    In my view, the idea that human beings naturally compete with each other stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of evolutionary biology. It is true that competition takes place on the micro-level of the gene, but it doesn’t follow that competition also takes place on the macro-level of the human being. This is an example of the so-called ‘fallacy of composition’: the logical error whereby people wrongly assume that what’s true for the individual parts of something must also be true for the whole. It has been demonstrated time and again that micro-level competition between genes often leads to cooperative behaviour at the macro-level of organisms. We all know this well enough from observing human interactions in our everyday lives, the vast majority of which are cooperative.

    I think our insecurities ultimately stem from the system we are all forced to live under – namely, capitalism. It is a system which creates insecurity by maintaining a constant threat of unemployment and poverty for the majority of the population. It is also a system which forces us all to compete with each other, usually against our subconscious will, which reinforces this feeling of insecurity. The only way for us to rid ourselves of our insecurities is to replace capitalism with a system which discourages competition and encourages cooperation.

  • Indo-European word-medial velars

    In a previous blog post I argued that Proto-Indo-European (PIE) had two types of velar in word-initial position: plain velars and labiovelars. In the satem languages, labiovelars were delabialized and plain velars were palatalized apart from after *s, and before *r, *s, and *H₂; palatalization was also blocked before *l in Albanian and *lo in Balto-Slavic. In the centum languages, labiovelars were delabialized before *u, and labiovelars were also delabialized before *o and before consonants in the western languages. This raises the question whether the two-velar hypothesis holds in word-medial position too. This is a more difficult question to answer, as there are more environments word-medially that need to be considered.

    In his 1973 PhD thesis, Lars Steensland showed that in word-medial position, palatovelars occur everywhere apart from after non-syllabic *n; plain velars occur everywhere apart from after *e and syllabic *n; and labiovelars only occur after *e, *i, *o, and *n. Steensland also showed that only plain velars occur in words beginning with *st, whereas only palatovelars and plain velars occur word occur in words beginning with *m. This includes all of his examples of words with a plain velar after *i, and most of his examples of words with a plain velar after *o. The obvious explanation is that PIE had just plain velars and labiovelars in word-medial position, and the latter were delabialized in the Centum languages apart from after *e, *i, *o, and *n, and in words beginning with *m.

    The problem with this explanation is that it implies that the labiovelar developments happened independently in all of the centum languages. However, a closer look at the data suggests we do not need to assume this. Let’s start with the position after *H₂. Steensland provides three examples of words with a plain velar in this position, two of which are derived from the root *bheH₂g- ‘share’. The plain velar in these words is reconstructed on the basis of Greek reflexes meaning ‘to eat’, with a semantic shift ‘I received a share’ > ‘I consumed’ > ‘I ate’, which seems rather tenuous. The third word, *knH₂kos ‘safflower’, is clearly related in some way to the word reconstructed as *knH₂onks ‘honey’, where the plain velar would have been blocked from palatalizing after the non-syllabic *n.

    Steensland demonstrated that labiovelars do not occur after *u in PIE, but both palatovelars and plain velars do occur in this position. This is consistent with the two-velar hypothesis if we assume that plain velars were palatalized in this position in the satem languages and labiovelars delabialized in this position in the centum languages, which is plausible. There are two examples of words with a plain velar after *r: *H₂uergeti ‘turn’, and *(s)morkos ‘decayed’. The plain velar in the former may have been blocked from palatalizing in the nasal variant *(H₂)urengeti, whereas latter word is highly doubtful and may therefore be disregarded. Thus, we need not assume that labiovelars were delabialized after *r in the centum languages either.

    There is one example of a word with a plain velar occurring after *l: *uolkos ‘wet’. As this word only has reflexes in the western languages, it may have originally contained a labiovelar which was subsequently delabialized before the *o. There are five examples of words with a plain velar which begin with *m: *moghtis ‘might’, *muktis ‘freedom’, *(s)morkos ‘decayed’, and *H₃mighleH₂ ‘mist’. As the first word only has reflexes in the western languages, it may have originally contained a labiovelar which was subsequently delabialized before the consonant. Similarly, the second word may have originally contained a labiovelar which was subsequently delabialized after the *u. The third word may be disregarded, as noted above.

    The plain velar in the fourth word, *H₃mighleH₂ ‘mist’, is more difficult to explain. The word is derived from the root *H₃meigh- ‘drizzle’, which must surely be related to the root *H₃meig’h- ‘urinate’. We may hypothesise that they are in fact the same root, and that palatalization was blocked in descendents of the former but not the latter. As *H₃mighleH₂ is the only reconstructable word derived from the first root, we can posit that palatalization was blocked before the following *l. This works fine for the Albanian reflex, as palatalization was blocked before *l in Albanian. To explain the Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic reflexes, we must assume that palatalization was blocked before *leH₂ (> *laH₂) in these languages; this is rather ad-hoc, but aligns with palatalization being blocked before *lo in Balto-Slavic.

    Thus, except for the position after *u, there is no evidence that labiovelars were delabialized word-medially in the centum languages, other than in the positions in which they were delabialized word-initially. We are not quite finished yet though, as there are still a few words with plain velars occurring in word-medial position that require an explanation. The first is *tuekos ‘body’, which is reconstructed as *tuakos by Steensland, but the *a is based on a Greek reflex which is probably unrelated. We may posit that this word originally contained a labiovelar which was subsequently delabialized in the zero grade; this zero grade is attested in Anatolian, the only centum branch in which this root is found.

    The plain velar in *H₂uogseieti ‘enlarge’ probably represents an original labiovelar which was delabialized by the following *s, as the word only has reflexes in Germanic among the centum languages; alternatively, it may have been delabialized in derivatives of the root variant *H₂eugʷ-. On the other hand, the plain velar in *uogsos ‘wax’ probably represents an original plain velar which was blocked from palatalizing after *s in the metathesized form *uosgos from which the Balto-Slavic reflexes are derived. That just leaves one word with an unexplained plain velar: *loghos ‘lair’. The Greek reflex of this word precludes an original labiovelar, which makes accounting for the lack of palatalization in the Slavic and Albanian reflexes difficult.

    The absence of a palatalized reflex in the Slavic can be explained by a rule set out by Antoine Meillet in 1924 which states that in Slavic, palatalization was blocked in words containing *s. Two of the words used by Meillet to reach this conclusion – *g’heH₂ns ‘goose’ and *k’oseH₂ ‘hair’ – also have unpalatalized velar reflexes in Albanian, suggesting that the same rule operated in that language as well. If so then we have accounted for all the data, which demonstrates that the two-velar hypothesis holds in word-medial position too.

  • Stepping off the career ladder

    It’s end-of-year review time at the company where I work. This is always a stressful time and one which inevitably leads to disappointment for many people, particularly those who don’t get the rating / pay rise / promotion they were hoping for. Thankfully I am not one of them, having long ago given up any desire to climb the corporate ladder. I now take the view that as long as my managers are broadly happy with the work I am doing and my job isn’t under imminent threat, then all is good. However seeing the disappointment others go through pains me as I remember going through the same thing myself in my younger years. I therefore thought it might be helpful to explain what led me to stop worrying about progressing my career.

    I can still remember the bemusement I felt in my early career when I was unsuccessful in going for promotions and pay rises I believed I deserved and was ready for. Then one day someone gave me some life advice which completely changed the way I viewed the situation. The advice was this: If something bad keeps happening to you, instead of asking ‘why does this keep happening to me?’, ask instead ‘what is this telling me?’ So I decided to ask myself what my failed attempts at career progression were telling me. Quite a lot, as it turns out. The first and most obvious lesson is that hard work does not translate into promotions and pay rises. This is an idea we have drilled into us from an early age, but it’s just not true in the real world.

    The bemusement I felt stemmed from me not understanding that the ‘hard work leads to career progression’ idea is a fallacy. Once I realized that, my lack of progression started to make a lot more sense. But this raised another question: If hard work doesn’t get you promoted, then what does? The stock answer is that you need to work smarter not harder. Which is to say, you need to focus your efforts on things that really matter and not on things that don’t. But who decides what really matters and what doesn’t? It took me a while to figure it out, but eventually the answer dawned on me. In a capitalist society, it is the capitalists who determine what work counts as worthwhile and what doesn’t, and those who get rewarded are the ones who do work that capitalists deem to be useful.

    Under capitalism, ‘work’ is shorthand for ‘selling your labour power to a capitalist’, and the more valuable the labour power is to them, the more they will pay you for it. But what is valuable to the capitalist class is not necessarily valuable to society as a whole, contrary to what neoclassical economic theory would have you believe. Marx’s distinction between use value and exchange value is helpful here. The capitalist class is primarily interested in maximizing exchange value, as this is what increases their profits; whereas what would be beneficial for society as a whole would be maximizing use value. This highlights perhaps the key problem with capitalism as a system: namely, it maximizes the wrong thing.

    Those who are succussful in climbing the career ladder – that is, those who get rewarded by the capitalist class – are those who do work which maximizes exchange value rather than use value. It is the people who bring in the most money that get rewarded, not the people who produce the most useful output. A critic might counter that those who produce the most useful output will automatically bring in the most money; but this is just another fallacy. Marx took pains to point out that use value and exchange value are unrelated, and in this he was absolutely correct. The easiest way to make money under capitalism is to make something people don’t really need then convince them to buy it, rather than to make something people do actually need.

    On realizing all this, I immediately saw the career ladder for what it really is. The race for career progression is just a competition between workers to see who can be the most subservient to the capitalist class. Viewed in this light, the whole thing starts to seem rather pathetic. When people boast about how well they are doing in their careers – and sadly, people do this a lot (just have a look on LinkedIn) – they are really just broadcasting to everyone that they are a lickspittle. Rather than a high salary being a badge of honour, it should really be a seen as a badge of shame. Conversely, a low salary should not be taken as a sign that you are failing; on the contrary, it is a sign that you are probably doing something useful.

    This provides an explanation for the otherwise inexplicable fact that under capitalism, the people who actually keep society running – bin-men, cleaners, nurses, teachers, etc. – are treated so poorly, whereas people who add little to society – management consultants, investment bankers, corporate lawyers, actuaries, etc. – are rewarded so handsomely. The explanation is simply that the former don’t create any value for the capitalist class, whereas the latter do. As the late, great American anthroplogist David Graeber pointed out, in our society there is an inverse correlation between the value of someone’s work to society as a whole and the amount they get paid to do it. So the next time you are passed over for a pay rise or promotion at work, maybe take it as a compliment.

  • Discrete calculus and optimization

    Mathematical optimization is the selection of a best element, with regard to some criterion, from some set of available alternatives. The criterion is specified using an objective function on a given domain and the aim is to find the variable that maximizes or minimizes this function within this domain. Mathematical optimization is generally divided into two sub-fields: continuous optimization and discrete optimization. In continuous optimization, the domain is a set of real numbers between which there are no gaps. Because of this no gap assumption, continuous optimization allows for the use of calculus techniques. In the simplest case, to find the maximum of minimum of a function f(), we simply set the derivative, f’(), to zero, and solve the resulting formula.

    For example, suppose we want to find the minimum of the objective function f(x) = x2-x+1 defined on the real numbers. First we take the derivative: f’(x) = 2x-1; then we set it to zero, which yields x = 1/2. So the objective function is maximized or minimized when x = 1/2. To know whether it is a maximum or minimum we need to take the second derivative: f’’(x) = 2. As this is positive, we know we have found a minimum, and therefore the minimum value of f() is given by f(1/2) = 1/4-1/2+1 = 3/4. Easy! Thus there is a fundamental and perhaps surprising link between calculus, the mathematical study of change, and mathematical optimization. I say surprising because calculus was invented for an entirely different purpose – to describe the motion of projectiles and other objects.

    In discrete optimization, on the other hand, the domain is a discrete (usually finite) set. In a previous blog post I outlined a discrete analogue of continuous calculus for functions defined on finite domains (see that blog post for more details). This raises the question of whether discrete calculus can be used for discrete optimization in the same way that continuous calculus can be used for continuous optimization. Consider a function f() defined on the finite domain X = {0,1,…,N}. The discrete forward derivative of a function f() defined on X is given by D+f(x) = f(x+1)-f(x), and the discrete backwards derivative is defined by D–f(x) = f(x)-f(x-1). Suppose again that we want to find the minimum of the function f(x) = x2-x+1 defined on X. Can we use discrete calculus to do this?

    Taking the forward derivative of the function f() gives: D+f(x) = f(x+1)-f(x) = (x+1)2-(x+1)+1-x2+x-1 = 2x; and setting this to zero gives x = 0. On the other hand, taking the backwards derivative of the function f() gives: D–f(x) = f(x)-f(x-1) = x2-x+1-(x-1)2+(x-1)-1 = 2x-2; and setting this to zero gives x = 1. Immediately we see a couple of problems: we get a different value depending on which derivative we use, and both values are different to the value we get using the continuous derivative! The latter problem shouldn’t concern us as the value we obtained using the continuous derivative is not in the domain X; but neither is the value we obtained using the discrete backwards derivative. Clearly, we cannot simply apply the same technique for discrete optimization as we used in the continuous case.

    We can, however, apply the same logic. If a minimum (maximum) exists at a point x in X then we would expect D+f(x) to be nonnegative (nonpositive) and D–f(x) to be nonpositive (nonnegative). Thus, to find the minimum  of the function f(x) = x2-x+1 we need to find a value x such that 2x ≥ 0 and 2x-2 ≤ 0, or x ≥ 0 and x ≤ 1. The only values of x in the set X that satisfies these inequalities are 0 and 1. Does these give us the minimum? The answer is yes, because f(0) = f(1) = 1, and this is indeed the minimum value of f(x) when x is constrained to lie in the set X. So we have successfully used discrete calculus to find the minimum of the function f(x) = x2-x+1 on the domain X. The question that naturally arises is: does this method work in general, or did we just get lucky?!

    Let us consider a more general problem of finding the minimum of the function f(x) = ax2+bx+c. Taking the forward derivative gives D+f(x) = f(x+1)-f(x) = a(x+1)2+b(x+1)+c-ax2-bx-c = a(2x+1)+b, and taking the backwards derivative gives D–f(x) = ax2+bx+c-a(x-1)2-b(x-1)-c = a(2x-1)+b. Setting the former to be nonnegative gives x ≥ -(1/2)-(b/2a), and setting the latter to be nonpositive gives x ≤ (1/2)-(b/2a). For both these inequalities to hold, x must lie in an interval of width 1 around the point -b/2a. In other words, x must equal -b/2a rounded to the nearest integer, which might be two integers if -b/2a lies exactly halfway between them (as with our example above). We know from continuous calculus that the function f(x) = ax2+bx+c defined on the reals is minimized when x = -b/2a, so this is the correct result.

    In fact it obvious when you think about it that D+f(x) ≥ 0, D–f(x) ≤ 0 are necessary conditions for x to be a minimum of the discrete function f(), and that D+f(x) ≤ 0, D–f(x) ≥ 0 are necessary for x to be a maximum. These are analogous to the conditions f’(x) = 0, f’’(x) > 0 and f’(x) = 0, f’’(x) < 0, respectively, for continuous functions.

  • What is the US doing in Venezuela?

    The US has recently launched a military build up in the Caribbean, the likes of which has not been seen in the region for decades. Just last week, a Venezuelan oil tanker was seized by the US in an act of imperial piracy. It is pretty clear that the US is after Venezuela’s oil reserves: Venezuela has 303 billion barrels of crude oil in reserve, 20% of the world’s total and more than any other nation. Trump’s claim that his motive is targeting drug traffickers is obviously a smokescreen. Along with the naval build up, in preparation for further action the military base on Puerto Rico, closed following mass protests in 2004, has been re-opened. Puerto Rico, the last remaining US colony that was seized in 1898, has historically been a crucial base and training ground for the US military.

    The US has wanted to overthrow of the Venezuelan government ever since the election of Hugo Chavez back in 1998. Unfortunately for the US, Chavez was popular with the Venezuelan people and won sweeping victories in election after election, making him difficult to depose. When Chavez died in 2013 and was replaced by Nicolas Maduro, the US smelled blood and imposed crippling sanctions and an economic blockade designed to strangle the economy and force regime change. As result, Venezuela has only managed to sell 4 of its 303 billion barrels of crude oil reserves, and the economy has gone into free-fall. Hyperinflation and shortages have all resulted in a devastating social collapse, resulting in country-wide opposition to Maduro’s regime.

    How much this social collapse is down to US sanctions, as opposed to the corrupt and authoritarian Maduro government, is a difficult and perhaps even impossible question to answer. The US sanctions have clearly had a significant impact – they must have done, otherwise they wouldn’t have bothered implementing them – but Maduro and his government must take a lot of the blame too. The problem for the people of Venezuela is that removing Maduro will not necessarily improve their situation. The right-wing opposition in Venezuela is a vicious Thatcherite coterie that will be ruthless in seeking revenge and enacting repressive anti-working class measures if it comes to power. This explains why the leader of this opposition, Maria Corina Machado, is so feted by the West.

    Machado is so adored by Western nations that she was awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, apparently for “her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela” and “her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.” But what has Machado actually done? It’s difficult to find evidence of her doing anything other than protesting against Maduro in 2014 and leading the opposition to Maduro in the 2024 presidential election. Hardly seems worthy of a peace prize to me! Note also that there was a presidential election in 2024, as there was in 2018 and 2013. Frequent elections are not usually the sign of a dictatorship, although it should be noted that the 2024 election was mired in controversy and accusations of electoral fraud.

    The US is clearly is aiming at regime change in Venezuela. At this stage, the US has not amassed sufficient forces for a full ground invasion; this is unlikely, but cannot be ruled out entirely. It is important that we oppose this imperialist intervention in Venezuela, just as we must oppose imperialist intervention everywhere. The usual rejoinder that opposition to such intervention entails support for the Maduro regime is based on a fallacy. We must oppose imperialist intervention as a matter of principle, regardless of the nature of the regime that is being intervened with. At the same time, we must also condemn Maduro and his government for making such an intervention feasible through their corrupt mismanagement of the Venezuelan economy.

    The reasons the US is doing this now, as opposed to any other point in the 27 years since Chavez came to power, are twofold. First, the Venezuelan regime is weaker now than it has ever been during that 27-year period. And second, the Trump administration has decided to pivot away from starting wars elswhere in the world and towards starting wars in its own back yard. Trump has already intimated that Colombia might be next in the firing line, although that was probably an off-the-cuff idle threat. As already mentioned, the primary reason the US is attacking Venezuela is to take control of its vast oil reserves, which Colombia cannot match. No country can match Venezuela’s oil reserves, so it is really no surprise that the US has decided to attack it. The only surprising thing is that its taken them this long.

  • Marxism and MMT

    Just over a week ago there was an online spat between two high-profile left-wing bloggers, Grace Blakeley and Richard Murphy. The disagreement began after Blakeley left a comment on one of Murphy’s blog posts and centred on the relationship between Marxism and Modern Monetary Theory, or MMT. (I won’t explain what MMT is here – you can read my previous blog post on this for an intro.) In her comment, Blakeley, a Marxist, criticized MMT on the basis that it is naive and does not take into account the struggle between classes. Murphy, an MMT advocate, responded to Blakeley’s comment with two further blog posts, accusing her of making bad-faith arguments and attempting to undermine MMT. Blakeley then responded with a blog post of her own, doubling down on her position.

    So who is right, Blakeley or Murphy? The short answer is: both and neither. Both bloggers rightly accuse the other of attacking a straw man; but both are also wrong precisely because they are attacking a straw man! In this blog post I will attempt to pick apart their arguments and in so doing, argue that their disagreement is at best pointless and at worst actively harmful. Let’s start with Blakeley. In her original comment on Murphy’s blog, she wrote that proponents of MMT “… seem to argue that, *if only everyone else would just listen to them*, all the questions, debates and struggles around economic policy would simply disappear overnight”. This is our first example of straw man argument. I am not aware of any proponent of MMT ever making such a claim, or even implying it.

    She goes on: “If everyone woke up tomorrow suddenly accepting all of [Murphy’s] arguments, the structure of our society would not change…”. This is another straw man, as nobody is saying that it would (at least nobody I know). Henry Ford did once famously state that “If the American people only understood the corrupt nature of our money system, there would be a revolution before morning”. Ford was (presumably) being tongue-in-cheek, but there is more than a kernel of truth to his statement. MMT is obviously not going to fundamentally change society on it’s own; only a revolution will do that. However, a widespread understanding of MMT might lead people to start realizing that they are being lied to by the ruling class and their media-political lackeys, which would be helpful in raising class consciousness.

    Blakeley rightly criticizes Murphy for stating that “The public most definitely does not want class war… They want… a competent government that delivers”. In a way Murphy is right, as I’m sure the public doesn’t want class war; but as Blakeley points out, they are in one whether they like it or not! This is just the nature of capitalism, as Marx realized over 150 years ago. Murphy clearly does not understand that – but he is not a Marxist, and doesn’t claim to be. In fact he seems quite scathing of Marxists in general, for reasons that are difficult to fathom (we are on your side Richard!). But this doesn’t mean he is wrong about the nature of government spending and taxation; on the contrary, he is generally spot on when it comes to these things.

    Much as Murphy’s disdain for Marxists is difficult to fathom, so is the disdain many Marxists seem to have for MMT. After all, MMT is just an accurate description of how government spending and taxation work in modern capitalist societies – and why should anyone have a problem with that? In my view, to criticize MMT on the basis that it includes nothing on class conflict is to miss the point entirely. It is not a theory about class conflict, nor is it meant to be. We don’t need a theory of class conflict in capitalist societies as Marx has already provided us with one which is perfectly adequate. What Marx didn’t do was provide a theory of fiat money – that is, money with a value that is not linked to the value of a commodity such as gold – which isn’t surprising as fiat money didn’t exist in Marx’s time.

    The antagonism between Marxists and Modern Monetary Theorists is unfortunate because the two theories complement each other. Marx provided a comprehensive account of capitalism which is still relevant to modern capitalist societies, with the exception that it doesn’t include anything on fiat money. If fiat money had existed at the time, I’m sure Marx would have written about it. MMT is a theory that neatly fills this gap. Not only that, I think there is clear crossover between the labour theory of value advocated by Marx and the tax-driven nature of the value of fiat money advocated by proponents of MMT. (Recall that Marx’s version of the labour theory of value says that the exchange value of commodities is proportional to the social necessary labour time required to produce them.)

    Fiat money is a unique commodity in that it has no use-value, only exchange value. The existence of fiat money seems to contradict the labour theory of value as it requires zero labour to produce, yet still has exchange value. But MMT explains that the value of a fiat currency is derived from taxes. Governments levy taxes on their citizens which are only redeemable in the currency they issue; and the only way most people can get hold of this currency is by selling their labour-power. Thus, combining the labour theory of value with the theory of tax-driven money provides us with a complete theory of why fiat money has value. This shows that the only way fiat money can have value is by forcing people to sell their labour-power in order to obtain it, which tells us something fundamental about the nature of money.

    There are other ways in which MMT can help reinforce Marxist ideas. MMT demonstrates that governments are far more powerful and have far fewer constraints on them than we are usually led to believe. A widespread understanding of  MMT will not bring about a revolution on its own, but it might help people to imagine a society existing beyond capitalism – and surely that can only be a good thing.

  • Indo-European word-initial velars

    In a recent blog post I argued, based on data collated by Lars Steensland in his 1973 PhD thesis, that his proposed word-initial delabialization before *o occurred separately in the western Indo-European languages rather than in Proto-Indo-European (see that post for more details). This supports the hypothesis that PIE only two types of velar consonant in this position: plain velars and labiovelars. In this blog post I will investigate whether the same can be said for other word-initial positions. Let us start with the position after *s. Steensland argued that only plain velars occur here, except before *i where only palatovelars occur. In a recent (2014) article, Robert Woodhouse criticized this view, claiming that only plain velars and labiovelars occur here. Either view supports the two-velar hypothesis.

    Steensland provides two examples of words with palatovelars occurring word-initially before *H₂ (or *a in his reconstructions): *g’hH₂ensiH₂ ‘goose’ and *k’H₂eueH₂ ‘owl’. As noted by Steensland, there is a clear case of ‘gutturalwechsel’ (velar interchange) in the root from which the first word is derived, *g’hH₂ens ~ *g’heH₂ns. There is also is a clear case of gutturalwechsel in the root from which the second word is derived, *k’H₂eu- ~ *k’eH₂u- ~ *k’H₂u- ~ *k’uH₂-. These can be explained by positing that these roots originally contained a plain velar which was blocked from palatalizing before *H₂. This, along with the fact that there are no other examples in Steensland’s data of palatovelars occurring before *H₂, supports the hypothesis that only plain velars and labiovelars occurred in this position in PIE.

    There are four examples of words with a plain velar word-initially before *l:*gloH₁imos ‘moist’, *gluH₁nos ‘knee’, *gloiH₁uos ‘sticky’, and *ghloumos ‘joke’.  The first two only have Albanian reflexes among the satem languages, whereas none of Steensland’s 17 examples of words with a palatovelar have Albanian reflexes, suggesting that palatalization was blocked before *l in Albanian. The latter two only have Balto-Slavic reflexes among the satem languages; but palatalization was not blocked before *l in Balto-Slavic as 11 of Steensland’s 17 examples of words with a palatovelar before *l have Balto-Slavic reflexes. However, in only two of these 11 words is the *l followed by *o, and in both cases palatalization could have been introduced analogically, suggesting that palatalization was blocked before *lo in Balto-Slavic.

    Steensland demonstrates that labiovelars do not occur word-initially before *u in PIE, but both palatovelars and plain velars do occur in this position. This is consistent with the two-velar hypothesis if we assume that plain velars were palatalized in this position in the satem languages and labiovelars delabialized in this position in the centum languages. Here we have one instance where it seems plausible to posit a parallel development occurring independently across several languages, as delabialization before *u is a very natural sound change that has been observed occurring many times in different languages. Indeed, there is independent evidence for this sound change occurring in the different centum languages long after the breakup of PIE.

    There are two examples of words with a plain velar occurring before *n: *gnet ‘knead’ and *ghnid ‘nit’. As these only have reflexes in Germanic among the centum languages, we need only posit that labiovelars were delabialized before *n in Germanic to explain the plain velars in these words. In fact this is an example of a broader delabialization before consonants in the western languages – Germanic, Italic, and Celtic – which was first noted by Antoine Meillet back in 1894, and for which there is significant independent evidence. It is difficult determine the distribution of velars before *m or before syllabic resonants due to lack of data. Suffice it to say that there is no solid evidence against the two-velar hypothesis in these positions either.

    We thus arrive at the following picture. Proto-Indo-European had two types of velar in word-initial position: plain velars and labiovelars. In the satem languages, labiovelars were delabialized and plain velars were palatalized apart from after *s, and before *r, *s, and *H₂; palatalization was also blocked before *l in Albanian and *lo in Balto-Slavic. In the centum languages, labiovelars were delabialized before *u, and labiovelars were also delabialized before *o and before consonants in the western languages. This raises the question whether the two-velar hypothesis holds in word-medial position too; this is a more difficult question to answer, as there are more environments word-medially that need to be considered. I will therefore postpone attempting to answer this question to a future blog post.

  • Should we nationalize the economy?

    Former Labour MP Zarah Sultana caused a stir last week by suggesting that we should nationalize the entire economy. Put simply, nationalization is the process of transforming privately owned assets into public assets by bringing them under the public ownership of a national government or state. On the face of it this seems an entirely sensible thing to do and is in line with the usual socialist aim of abolishing private property. So it is somewhat surprising that Sultana’s suggestion has come in for a lot of criticism from people who claim to be on the left. The main objection seems to be that full nationalization, although a good idea in principle, has never been demonstrated to work in practice, and where it has been tried has only led to authoritarianism and destitution.

    Tempting as it is to dismiss such arguments, we have to be honest and admit that there is more than a kernel of truth to them. The 20th century is full of examples of socialist governments fully nationalizing their economies with often disastrous consequences: the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba, North Korea, and so on. To be sure, things weren’t all bad in these countries. The Soviet Union went from a backwards agrarian society in 1917 to effectively winning the space race less than 50 years later, lifting millions out of poverty in the meantime. China followed a similar trajectory. Cuba was doing fine until the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. And there was even a time when it looked as though North Korea might turn out to be more successful than its southern neighbour.

    There are many on the left who venerate these achievements and play down the obvious downsides of these regimes; but I am not one of them. I think it is important that we on the left are honest about the true nature of these states if want to have any credibility. Anyone who lived in any of these countries during periods of full nationalization will tell you that life was hard and characterized by chronic shortages of basic goods. Apologists for these regimes will point to the fact that they often faced outside sabotage from capitalist countries, which of course is true. In my view, though, it was primarily the nature of the regimes in these countries which made peoples’ lives so hard. We see this playing out in socialist countries today – particularly North Korea, which is a failed state, and Cuba, which is well on its way to becoming one.

    So it’s true that full nationalization of an economy has never worked in practice. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it couldn’t work. The question is: what was it about the regimes mentioned above that meant that nationalization went so horribly wrong? The obvious answer is a lack of democracy. Here, I am going to break ranks and criticize both Marx and Lenin (gasp!). I think the issues stemmed to a large extent from Marx’s concept of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, which describes a transitional phase between capitalism and socialism where the working class holds state power. Lenin interpreted ‘dictatorship’ as meaning ‘unlimited power, based on force and not restricted by law’, a concept that inevitably leads to authoritarian rule by a single party.

    Others, like the Austrian Marxist Karl Kautsky, argued that true ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ should not be a rejection of democracy, but rather an expansion of democratic principles to include the working class. The problem is that for most people, the terms dictatorship and democracy represent polar opposites. Therefore I think we would be better off ridding ourselves of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ concept altogether. In this respect I am more aligned with the 19th century Russian revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who advocated for the immediate abolition of all states, arguing that power inevitably corrupts and any new state would simply create a new ruling class. The events of the 20th century appear to have proven Bakunin correct.

    It is important to note that Marx and Bakunin were in agreement in advocating for a move to a stateless, classless society. Their difference of opinion lay in how they thought this should or could be achieved. Whereas Marx argued for the proletariat to organize as a political party to take over state power, Bakunin argued for the immediate establishment of decentralized, democratic federations of workers’ cooperatives, rejecting hierarchical and centralized power structures altogether. Of course I agree with Marx that it is necessary for the working class to organize to conquer the bourgeois state. But I also agree with Bakunin that once the bourgeois state has been conquered, a new state should not simply be established in its place.

    Returning to the original question, I think the controversy around Zarah Sultana’s suggestion that we should nationalize the economy stems from their being two different interpretations of the word ‘nationalize’. The first interpretation means creating a centralized workers’ state of the type advocated for by Marx and Lenin; whereas the second interpretation means establishing decentralized, democratic federations of workers’ cooperatives, as advocated for by Bakunin. People are rightly wary of the first interpretation, based on historical experience. But I think that the second interpretation represents exactly what most modern-day socialists envisage when they talk about ending capitalism and moving to a socialist society.

  • Proto-Indo-European velars

    In a previous blog post I explained how Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is usually reconstructed with three types of velar constant, which are referred to as palatovelars, plain velars, and labiovelars. I also mentioned that in 1973, Lars Steensland demonstrated a complimentary distribution between the three types of velar. Steensland first showed that in word-initial position, only plain velars occur after *s, except before *i where only palatovelars occur. He then showed that in word-initial position not following *s, palatovelars occur everywhere apart from before *r and *s; plain velars occur everywhere apart from before *e, *i, and what we would now call *h₁; and labiovelars only occur before *e, *i, *r, and what we would now call *H₁.

    Next, Steensland showed that in word-medial position, palatovelars occur everywhere apart from after non-syllabic *n; plain velars occur everywhere apart from after *e and syllabic *n; and labiovelars only occur after *e, *i, *o, and *n. Thus, in word-initial position, there isn’t a single environment where all three types of velar occur; and in word-medial position, all three types of velar only occur after *i and *o. Steensland also showed that only plain velars occur word-medially in words beginning with *(s)t, whereas only palatovelars and plain velars occur word occur word-medially in words beginning with *m. This includes all of his examples of words with a plain velar occurring after *i, and most of his examples of words with a plain velar occurring after *o.

    The obvious explanation for this distribution runs as follows. PIE originally had two types of velar: a palatovelar and a labiovelar. In the satem languages, plain velars became palatalized in word-initial position in all environments apart from (1) after *s, unless followed by *i; and (2) before *r and *s; and in word medial-position in all environments apart from (1) after non-syllabic *n, and (2) in words beginning with *(s)t. In the centum languages, labiovelars were delabialized in word-initial position in all environments apart from before *e, *i, *r, and *H₁; and in word-medial position in all environments apart from (1) after *e, *i, *o, and *n, except in words beginning with *m. There is a problem with the latter part of this explanation however.

    As I noted in my previous blog post, whereas the satem languages were geographically contiguous so could have undergone such changes together, the centum languages were not. The explanation above implies that the labiovelar developments described must have happened separately on seven separate occasions: in Anatolian, Tocharian, Greek, Germanic, Italic, and Celtic. This is implausible and removes one of the key arguments in favour of the two-velar reconstruction. However, a closer look at the data suggests we may not need to assume that all these developments occurred in all the centum languages. To see this, let us consider one environment where delabialization seems particularly common: word-initially before before *o.

    Steensland provides 20 examples of words with a plain velar occuring before *o in word-initial position, of which 11 only have reflexes in the western languages (Celtic, Germanic, and Italic). Of the remaining 9, three are derived from roots with a mobile *s, which accounts for the lack of palatalization in the satem reflexes. One of the remaining six, *kolH₂os ‘strike’, may be derived from a root *(s)kelH₂- ‘cut’, and another, *korios ‘army’, may be derived from a root *(s)ker- ‘cut’, both with a mobile *s. One of the remaining four, *ghordhis ‘garden’, is derived from a root *g’her- ‘garden’, which displays gutturalwechsel in the satem languages, suggesting that the word originally had a plain velar that was blocked from palatalizing in the zero grade *g’hr-.

    Another, *koH₂peH₂ ‘handle’, is derived from a root *keH₂p- ~ *kH₂ep- ‘grab’, where palatalization may have been blocked before *H₂. The plain velar in one of the remaining two words, *kom ‘with’, is based entirely on Albanian kë, which is now usually derived from the interrogative root *kʷ-. The final word, *kom, is a particle of unclear meaning and etymology which apparently only has reflexes in Anatolian among the centum languages, and even that isn’t certain, so we cannot be sure that this word contained a plain velar. Thus, to explain the data, we only need to posit that delabialization occurred before *o in the western languages – Germanic, Italic, and Celtic -rather than all of the centum languages. This seems a lot more plausible.

    One potential counterexample is *gʷous ‘cow’, which yields labial reflexes in Italic (Umbrian bum, Latin bōs)  and Celtic (Irish bó, Welsh  bu). One way around this is to posit a proto-form *gʷeH₃us and assume either that the delabialization before *o  occurred before the colouring of *e to *o in these languages. The problem with this is that the colouring of *e to *o is usually dated all the way back to PIE, or at least to a period very soon afterwards. Instead, we can simply assume that the change *gʷ > *b occurred in Osco-Umbrian and Celtic prior to the delabialization before *o in these languages (Latin bōs is known to be a borrowing from  Osco-Umbrian). This seems a better explanation as it does not create any issues from a chronological perspective.

  • Summarizing Das Kapital volume 1

    Das Kapital is the foundational theoretical text in Marxist philosophy, economics, and politics. It is one of the most influential works of social science ever written and represents the culmination of Karl Marx’s lifelong project to develop a comprehensive theory of capitalism. The central argument, which runs through all three volumes, is that capitalism necessarily involves the exploitation of workers. In putting forth this argument, Marx synthesized, critiqued, and built on three main intellectual traditions: the classical political economy of Smith and Ricardo; the dialectical philosophy of Hegel; and the utopian socialism of Fourier and Proudhon. Marx’s aim in writing Das Kapital was, in his own words, to ‘lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society’.

    The presentation of Das Kapital follows an ‘ascending path’, starting from the most abstract essence of capitalism and building up a theory from there. This is reminiscent of the axiomatic method in mathematics, which involves building a theory from a fixed set of axioms. Marx employs what he calls the ‘power of abstraction’ to analyse fundamental dynamics of capitalism. Das Kapital begins with a lengthy description of the commodity, which is a term used for anything produced by human labour that fulfills a human desire or want. The commodity may be considered the ‘elementary particle’ of capitalism. Hegel’s dialectic method is central to Marx’s approach in building up his theory; however, Marx adapts Hegel’s method by employing it in a materialist, scientific way.

    The writing of Das Kapital was a long and arduous process spanning several decades. Marx’s perfectionism and tendency to get sidetracked delayed completion, as did his fondness for alcohol. It is well-known that only volume 1 of Das Kapital was completed in Marx’s lifetime, with volumes 2 and 3 being completed posthumously by Friedrich Engels, Marx’s long-time collaborator. What is less well-known is that Marx originally planned to write six volumes! Perhaps we should be grateful that he only managed three, as reading just one volume involves a significant investment of time. I personally have only managed to read volume 1 (so far). In the remainder of this blog post I will attempt to provide a short synopsis.

    As mentioned above, volume 1 begins with a lengthy description of the commodity. There are two values associated with a commodity: a use-value, which is the value that arises from satisfying some human want or need; and an exchange-value, which may be defined as the proportion in which a commodity exchanges for other commodities. According to Marx, the ‘substance’ of exchange value is ‘human labour in the abstract’, and the magnitude of a commodity’s exchange value is determined by the ‘socially necessary labour time’ required to produce it. We now refer to this as the labour theory of value, although Marx himself never referred to it as such. This theory implies that exchange values are determined by social relations and are not properties of commodities themselves.

    Marx then goes on to discuss what he calls the transformation of money into capital. He first talks about the simple circulation of commodities, whereby commodities are produced, brought to market and sold for some amount of money which is then used to buy other commodities. This is usually how we think of markets working and may be characterized as ‘commodities-money-commodities’, or C-M-C for short. However, what actually happens under capitalism is that a capitalist first invests some money to produce commodities, which are then brought to market and sold for more money than was originally invested. This may be characterized as ‘money-commodities-money’, or M-C-M’, where M’ is greater than M. The difference M’-M is referred to as ‘surplus value’.

    A surplus cannot arise if equivalents are exchanged. So where does surplus value come from? The answer, according to Marx, is from workers – or more specifically from ’labour power’, the capacity to do work. Marx argues that in order for surplus value to arise, the value created by the labourer must be greater than the value of their own labour-power, which is what they receive in wages. Thus, the value that workers receive is lower than the value they provide, with the difference – the surplus value – being appropriated by capitalists. It is in this sense that workers are exploited under capitalism. This, I think, represents the key point of volume 1 and possibly even the whole of Das Kapital. The rate of exploitation is just the ratio of surplus value to wages, or ‘variable capital’ in Marx’s terminology.

    Marx then goes on to discuss two different types of surplus value, which he terms ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’. Absolute surplus value is created by capitalists prolonging working time for longer than is necessary for workers to produce what they actually need. Working time thereby becomes a locus of the struggle between capitalists and workers, with the former seeking to prolong it and the latter seeking to shorten it. In contrast, relative surplus value is created by capitalists shortening the socially necessary labour time required to produce a given commodity or commodities. They can do this through the concentration of many workers under the command of a single capitalist, the division of labour, the introduction of new technology, or a combination of the three.

    The final part of volume 1 concerns the process of capital accumulation. Under what Marx calls simple reproduction, the entire surplus is consumed by the capitalist. However, what usually happens under capitalism is that capitalists are driven to reinvest the surplus into further production; this is what is referred to as capital accumulation. Marx argues that capital accumulation relies on the constant maintenance of an ‘industrial reserve army’ of labourers – a permanent sub-class of unemployed workers. He then goes on to formulate what he calls the ‘law of capital accumulation’, which basically says that under capitalism, things only get worse for workers. Looking at how things are going at the moment, it is hard to disagree.

  • Should we be worried about AI?

    In the last few years there has been a rapid adoption of artificial intelligence across all sectors of society. This has been driven largely by the development if so-called ‘generative AI’ technology. Generative AI is a sub-field of artificial intelligence that uses generative models to produce text, images, videos, audio, software code, and other forms of data. Unlike traditional AI that analyzes data to support decisions, generative AI produces novel outputs in response to user prompts, using models trained on vast datasets. Businesses have been quick to jump on the generative AI bandwagon, mainly through fear of being left behind by their competitors. As exciting as this new technology seems, however, there are many potential downsides.

    The most obvious downside of the mass adoption of AI is often referred to euphemistically as ‘labour market disruption’, but is more accurately referred to as ‘mass unemployment’. This is something that inevitably occurs under capitalism with the widespread introduction of a labour-saving technology, and there are many historical case studies going back to the Luddites of the early 19th century and beyond. Usually, though, it is manual workers who are most at risk. What’s both interesting and novel about the current generative AI boom is that those most at risk of unemployment are high-skilled, white-collar professionals, such as writers, analysts, and legal assistants. I don’t think many people saw that one coming.

    At this point it is worth reminding ourselves of why unemployment is a problem in the first place. Unemployment being a bad thing is usually taken as axiomatic – that is, something that does not require any explanation. But if you think about it, it’s bizarre that our first reaction whenever a new labour-saving technology is introduced is to worry that it might mean us humans have less work to do! Shouldn’t that be a good thing?! The reason it isn’t a good thing is that we live under a system which requires 99% of people to sell their labour-power in order to survive. Under capitalism, if you are unable to sell your labour-power, you are in deep trouble. Labour-saving technology is seen as bad as it inevitably results in less opportunities for us to do this.

    This isn’t the fault of the technology though; it is the fault of the system we live under. What makes this even more perverse is that under capitalism, many people have jobs where the main objective is to devise ways to reduce human labour! We should not be surprised by this. It is just one of the many contradictions of capitalism, and these contradictions have existed for as long as capitalism has. However, the rise of generative AI has brought this contradiction into sharp focus. In the past, we’ve always been able to invent new jobs for people to do – even if a lot of them are ‘bullshit jobs’, in the memorable phrase of the late, great American anthropologist David Graeber. But the proliferation of AI is going make it increasingly difficult for us to invent jobs that can’t be done by a machine.

    There are other downsides to generative AI too. As these models are trained on vast datasets, they often perpetuate existing societal biases and stereotypes, leading to discriminatory outcomes in areas like recruitment. The ability to easily generate convincing, but false, information (hallucinations) and malicious content like deep fakes poses a threat to information reliability and security. We are not quite at the point where AI-generated content is indistinguishable from the genuine article, but we aren’t far off. Another major downside is that training and running large AI models require substantial energy and water consumption, which will inevitably exacerbate the climate crisis. Then there is the problem of over-reliance on AI leading to the erosion of essential human skills such as critical thinking.

    We would do well to remember that for all its supposed intelligence, generative AI is just compiling information originally created by human beings. This information is often obtained from specialist online forums. In future, generative AI might make such forums obsolete, so the information will no longer be created – and what happens then? Presumably, AI will start creating content based on information it has previously collated, effectively turning itself into a self-replicating feedback loop. It might be tempting to speculate that AI might then start to evolve and even become sentient, as self-replication is the key mechanism behind evolution by natural selection. Indeed, many people are worried about exactly such a scenario occurring.

    Personally, though, I think these fears are overblown. Evolution by natural selection requires more than just replication; it also requires a constant stream of new information. This is essential for the ‘selection’ part of the process to work effectively. As we have seen, new information would not be present under the scenario just described. A more likely outcome under this scenario is that generative AI ends up becoming irrelevant and simply stops being used. Given all the downsides of this technology, that might not be such a bad thing.