Posted 8:47 PM by Ken

"... my simple belief that atheism and feminism are hallmarks of the left"

Jaizi of Workers' Liberty writes:

Once upon a time I was a Tao-y arty little hippy whose family happens to be flaming scarlet. It happens that I know a good deal about the diversity of the Islamic tradition, or at any rate more than [George] Galloway, [Lindsey] German and [Ken] Livingstone, who appal me and my simple belief that atheism and feminism are the hallmarks of the Left. What follows is certain reflections on religion and the proposed legislation against inciting religious hatred which may be of interest to comrades.

New Labour seems to view religion in terms of the devotees of Yahweh-Allah-Jehovah, a chap not a girl’s best friend. The National Secular Society chronicles Blair’s enthusiasm for ‘faith communities’. I do not think Zen, wicca and feminist theology are embraced at these meetings. MAB’s hypnotizing of some on the Left is known. Women Against Fundamentalisms remains a little-known organization. Southall Black Sisters operate on a shoe-string. Something has gone wrong and it seems to me that it is bad news for all women.

Read all of this spirituality-friendly rationalist rant.

Posted 8:36 PM by Ken

Sexing-up the dossier

A few years ago, when I was a computer programmer at Edinburgh University, I went to a meeting where two members of the SPGB were putting the case for socialism to a student society called, I think, Third World First, and dedicated, as far as I could see, to the promoting the kind of delusions (trade bad, aid good) that have done so much to keep the Third World third.

After Brian and Matt, the two Socialists, had put their case for the immediate global abolition of the market, some Frequently Asked Questions came up. One of them was: 'Who will do the dirty work?'

Some well-meaning sap in the audience - it may have been me - gave an earnest exposition of the Frequently Delivered Answer: that lots of the dirty work could be automated, that the objectionable thing about dirty work wasn't the dirt but the social stigma, etc. (You can find the rest of it in Bebel.)

'Ah,' said Brian, sounding disappointed. 'I've always thought it would be Matt.'

In the same spirit, I can now exclusively answer the question of who was responsible for distorting the intelligence from Iraq. It was me.

At least, I started it. I set the ball rolling.

Many years ago, when I was a postgrad at Brunel University, I and a Kurdish exile and an Irishman drafted an article for the student paper, Le Nurb. Control of Le Nurb rested on who had seized the means of its production - a golf-ball typewriter, some sheets of Letraset, an X-acto knife and a jar of paste - that week, so its editorial line fluctuated wildly from Tory to Trot to Anarchist to Young Liberal.

That week, it was Trot. The article I was drafting was based on a telephoned report from Iraqi Kurdistan to our Kurdish exile friend. (The Kurds, then as now, needed all the friends they could get.) An official demonstration in Sulimaniyah, under the slogan 'The Kurds are Ba'athist!' had turned into an angry anti-regime demonstration, under the slogan 'The Kurds are hungry!' (It was a pun in Kurdish.)

I transcribed all this.

'"... which could only be put down by the use of troops,"' added my Irish friend.

'You can't say that,' said the Kurdish guy. 'I have no information about the use of troops.'

'Oh come on,' said the Irish guy. 'You think there could be a demonstration like that, in Sulimaniyah, and it wouldn't be put down by troops?'

'Well ...' said the Kurdish guy, 'perhaps ...'

'There you go,' said the Irishman.

Reader, I wrote it, and Le Nurb published it. A couple of weeks later that article was lifted, with permission, by the much more widely read Militant, and shortly thereafter Militant's article was excerpted - imaginary troops and all - in the even more widely read Intercontinental Press. I don't know how many people who are now Labour MPs read either of these journals in their youth, but I'd hazard more than a few. How many minds were changed, how many opinions hardened, by that fictitious fusillade?

None, in all probability. But the lie still makes me blush.

Posted 10:25 AM by Ken

The 911 days of Sodom

Seymour Hersh, on what you ain't seen yet from Abu Ghraib:

"The boys were sodomised with the cameras rolling, and the worst part is the soundtrack, of the boys shrieking. And this is your government at war."

Posted 8:15 PM by Ken

Why Robots?

Robots, an interactive exhibition sponsored by, among others, Heriot Watt University, is running at Callendar House in Falkirk until September 5. When I was asked to give a talk about robots in SF as part of the associated evening lecture series I said, 'I don't know much about robots in SF.' That's all right, I was told, you must know more about it than most people.

So, some weeks and a hasty shufti into The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction later, I was given a lift to Callendar House by Heriot-Watt's efficient publicity person, Frances Williams. The exhibition includes an Electrolux Trilobite vacuum-cleaner (sadly showing an empty battery symbol at the time), an astonishing animated sculpture from Glasgow, an interactive remote control for a robot arm in the University's laboratories, and a lot of toys and posters. The venue is an attractive place in its own right, and the exhibition is well worth a visit.

Why are we interested in robots?

Our ancestors were predators and prey. This makes us pattern-recognising animals, and jumpy animals. The patterns we are best equipped to recognise are those distinctive of other animals, and especially other humans. We see faces in fires, in clouds, in leaves. Sigmund Freud said that the uncanny is the experience of being uncertain whether something is alive or not. And from our own - often early - experiences of wondering whether the scratching at the window is of twigs or fingers, or the shape in the corner or behind the door is a figure or a dressing-gown, we see how he was right.

We are also tool-making animals, with an opposable thumb and a flexible hand unique in the animal kingdom.

So the idea of a tool, a machine, that replicates our most distinctive features - a machine with a face, a voice, a mind, a hand - is disturbing and uncanny. In the exhibition you can see many toy robots, and you can see how much design effort goes into making them less frightening, indeed cute, for young children, and more frightening for older children.

The robot in SF has a dual ancestry. One forebear is the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Another is the real practice of building automata, described in Tom Stanage's The Mechanical Turk. The Frankenstein motif of a creation that destroys its creators appeared in Karel Capek's R.U.R. and rampaged through early SF, along with more nuanced presentations. An unambiguously sympathetic portrayal arrived with Eano Binder's I, Robot and was carried forward in Asimov's stories collected under the same title. Asimov, you might say, wrote the book on robots, though other stories - Anthony Boucher's brilliant Thomist fable 'The Quest For St Aquin' and Brian Aldiss's hilarious and elegaic 'But Who Can Replace a Man?' - stand out, as do Philip K. Dick's android dreams and nightmares. From the 1950s to the 1970s, robots carried a heavy weight of themes - humanity, identity, labour, slavery - on uncomplaining metal shoulders.

And then they went away. They became, as I recall Paul MacAuley saying on a panel at Trincon 2, dead tech, like food pills and psi powers and tractor beams. They died and went to heaven - into satire and skiffy, in Red Dwarf and Star Wars, and into cyberspace, where their dematerialised descendants haunt our imaginations as the AI.

But the AI is another story, and another talk.

Posted 11:42 AM by Ken

Health warnings

The recent claim that government health campaigns against sunbathing could result in an upsurge of vitamin D deficiency has prompted the Carcinoma Retardation Charity to defend its slogan 'Sunlight Kills!'

'We know it isn't strictly true, but we have to be a little bit strident to put the message across,' a spokeswoman said, coyly adjusting her burkha. 'Ordinary people can't be relied on to know the difference between agonising sunburn and a mild golden tan.'

Meanwhile, the environmental campaign Greenpiss has admitted that illustrating a warning about declining male fertility with a picture of the minute genitals of a cherub from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel 'may have been a little over the top'. Its earlier claim that 'Humanity is a plague species that will with any luck be wiped from the face of the Earth in the cleansing fire of nuclear holocaust' is still under review.

Earlier today, the government suffered acute embarrassment when a drafting error resulted in the House of Lords approving a bill that bans smacking in pubs.

Posted 11:30 AM by Ken

George not King, Judges rule

Revolution still in danger but far from dead. This is all beginning to look like the pacier pages of Lord Macaulay. (Via.)

Posted 11:30 AM by Ken

Arguments and Fights

The trouble with liberals (though not these, bless their shivs and toecaps) is that they often mistake a fight for an argument, and the right never does. Though this article on the respected and influential Nazi (yes, really) political philosopher Carl Schmitt comes down on the woolly side of the fence, it includes plenty of quotes from which to draw a different conclusion for the days that we have been given: always fight. (Via.)

No wonder that Schmitt admired thinkers such as Machiavelli and Hobbes, who treated politics without illusions. Leaders inspired by them, in no way in thrall to the individualism of liberal thought, are willing to recognize that sometimes politics involves the sacrifice of life. They are better at fighting wars than liberals because they dispense with such notions as the common good or the interests of all humanity. ("Humanity," Schmitt wrote in a typically terse formulation that is brilliant if you admire it and chilling if you do not, "cannot wage war because it has no enemy.")

It has now.

Posted 10:54 AM by Ken

Crumbs

Today's Independent carries a full-page obituary of Anthony Buckeridge (1912 - 2004), who died yesterday. The author of the Jennings books (comedies about boys at an English boarding school) turns out to have had a full as well as a long life.

There's often something sad about comedy, or so I find it. When I was around the same age as their protagonists, I read the Jennings books, the William books, and the Molesworth books, and their effect was very different. Nigel Molesworth is clearly a boy well in touch with his inner adult, who is doing something unpleasant in Personnel. William Brown, whose adventures I read voraciously, is a creature - a wonderful creature - of the imagination, not, or not so much, of observation. What William and Nigel have in common is a sense that growing up and becoming an adult is something you are doomed to, and that's what gives them their poignancy behind the laughs.

Buckeridge has no truck with that. The adults in Jennings world are, as it were, on the same level as the boys. The whole trick is that you see the teachers' point of view at the same time as seeing that of Jennings and his pals. The collisions of their world-views are the engine of the comedy, and the product is pure laughing gas, an unalloyed joy to read. The Jennings books made me laugh more than anything in print before I met Jeeves.

Posted 11:02 PM by Ken

Surveying Information Age Warfare

Socialism in an Age of Waiting is back, and very much welcome, not least for linking to a deeply depressing paper on the future of warfare (text download) by the late Paul Hirst. The good news in Hirst's paper is that there is unlikely to be a war between the major powers. The bad news is that in every other respect the 21st century is likely to be worse than (e.g.) the one I imagined in the Fall Revolution books. It's likely to be worse than John Brunner imagined. Hirst concludes:

This is not a pleasant prospect. It could be that this analysis is too pessimistic and the forces outlined here will be less powerful, that climatic change will not be so dramatic, that the R[evolution in]M[ilitary]A[ffairs] will prove more limited in scope, and that the developed countries will shift resources dramatically to tackle poverty on a world scale. For that to happen the attitudes of ordinary citizens in the developed countries would have to change radically: accepting the massive reduction of emissions (and the changes in lifestyle that would have to accompany such moves) to check climate change, paying for more for aid, welcoming migrants, and seeking to eliminate the sources of conflict rather than repress those who take up arms. It would be a remarkable reversal and it will have to happen soon.

It is not, of course, likely to happen at all. The comrades at SIAW would no doubt see the considerations adduced by Hirst as an argument for the democratic socialist world revolution for which they are waiting. But if the economic calculation argument is valid, we must accept that (Marxian, non-market) socialism, however democratic (etc, etc), would result in industry grinding to a halt and people dying like flies, as indeed it has done whenever it has been seriously attempted. (Fortunately it has not been seriously attempted in most socialist countries, hence the otherwise inexplicable prevalence of state capitalism, and the inevitable reversion from state to private capitalism.) If so, it's time for responsible Marxists to follow Hirst's excellent example and stop blathering on about socialism, in the sense of some post-market order about whose actual economic mechanism that is supposed to replace the market they (like the rest of us) have (when you part the thickets of wearisomely familiar verbiage) no fucking clue, and which won't arrive no matter how long we wait.

There is, however, hope, and it does lie in the proles. For if socialism has been the crushing disappointment of the twentieth century, proletarian revolution has been its smashing success. Marx was absolutely on the money about the revolutionary potential of the urban working class. He was just wrong about its liability to establish a socialist order. Proletarian revolutions have been frequent and are increasingly prevalent, but socialism in Marx's sense is still news from nowhere.

(A perhaps avoidable digression: There was one proletarian socialist revolution, and it went to the devil as swiftly as any medieval millennarian commune, due in large measure to the unexpected and (in 1918) quite novel and inexplicable phenomenon of industry grinding to a halt and people dying like flies. ('If you don't mind me saying so, that's a very Soviety bridge,' remarked an old women to Lenin and Krupskaya as they picked their way across some rickety deathtrap over a freezing torrent. Lenin, to his undying credit, promptly added 'Soviety' to his already extensive thesaurus of pejoratives. But to his dying day he never did understand why a Soviety bridge was a rickety bridge - he thought it had something to do with bureaucracy, and put Stalin in charge of sorting the matter out, a decision he lived just long enough to regret but not, alas, long enough to rescind.) 1917 aside, the proletarian revolutions have not been socialist, and the socialist revolutions have not been proletarian.

For lack of even the most essential data, also excluded from this study is the People's Socialist Republic of Nambuangongo, established around February 1961 in the Dembos forests in north-western Nambuangongo (between the rivers Loge and Dang) in the immediate wake of the 1961 rising in Luanda. The republic will probably remain the most distant and curious echo of the Bolshevik revolution. Therefore, in spite of the fact that it has not proved possible to unearth any data on this example, it does seem important that its existence should be put on record.

Bogdan Szajkowski, The Establishment of Marxist Regimes, Butterworths, 1982.

(The book painstakingly and almost tediously documents the non-proletarian social basis of every single establishment of a self-styled Marxist regime, other than the one established by the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet in October 1917 (Old Style).) Some of the most impressive proletarian revolutions have been anti-socialist: Hungary 1956, Poland 1981, Rumania 1989, China 1989. Not all were victorious but, as Perry Anderson said of the 19th-century English workers, even when they won no victories, their defeats were astonishing. What The Economist said of 1981 can stand for them all: Marx's irresistible force met Lenin's immovable object. Sometimes the irresistible force was stopped, and sometimes the immovable object ... moved.)

Not long ago the commonest form of unconstitutional governmental or regime change was through military coup, with guerilla war running a distant but respectable second. These days it's through proletarian revolution: mass, urban, working-class insurrections have toppled governments across the globe. The wage and salary earners are now the largest class on the planet, and by far the most decisive one. They've been throwing their social weight around to good effect. The unappeasable crowd in Republic Square, the converging columns of the rural poor, the snowstorm of secret police files from the broken windows of the gutted Ministry of the Interior, the armed workers and students reading the news in the national television studio - such formerly once-in-a-generation epochal events have become so common in the years since 1989 that they sometimes fail to make the front pages of even serious bourgeois newspapers. The governments they put in have so far not been outstanding at advancing the interests of the working class, but no doubt we'll get the hang of it eventually.