The ties that bind

Antiquity

In antiquity the social ties which bound society were personal, expressed through patronage.

Commodity items like slaves were atomised and disposable, not part of society.

Feudalism

Feudalism, a non-slave mode of production, was 'a way of structuring society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour' (Wikipedia).

Reciprocal - and personal - obligations were expressed vertically thus:

"A vassal would swear allegiance and pay homage to his lord in a commendation ceremony. The commendation ceremony was designed to create a lasting bond between a vassal and his lord. Fealty and homage are a key element of feudalism. The ceremony consisted of swearing the Oath of Fealty and the act of homage."

Capitalism

Capitalism, by contrast, needed contractual relationships between free labourers and capitalists as negotiated in the market, and fought against feudalism under the abstract principles of the Rights of Man.

Amazon link

Capitalism is a less organic form of society. As Marx hyperbolically observed in The Communist Manifesto,

"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”.

It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers."

Capitalism finds organic communities an obstacle to its own ultra-flexible development. The obduracy of the National Union of Mineworkers was sustained by the extraordinary social cohesion of the pit villages. Yet, as Marx noted, human communities are naturally conservative: capitalism propelled human progress precisely through its hostility to the natural human longing for a warm, supportive, harmonious and stable communitarianism.

Once established, capitalist economies sheltered under nation states and were happy to promote a nationalistic patriotism as the foundation of social stability. But post the sixties, globalisation moved into prominance. Economies now straddled the planet, peoples moved in their millions as migrant labour and sometimes just as migrants. Nationalism as an ideology jarred in this new reality. The narrative became 'multiculturalism' - an imagined, global, borderless and thoroughly-superficial 'community' of free and thoroughly-equal citizens.

All those first and second world war types, spouting their loyalty to King and Country, seemed so very anachronistic now.

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How useful is this new neoliberal ideology, branded by its enemies as political correctness?

For running a multiethnic, multicultural economic empire it's essential. But when push comes to shove, the shallowness (indeed fraudulence) of its social glue comes to the fore. If neoliberalism celebrates a transient and transactional individualism against communitarian values deemed non-inclusive and reactionary, it's always going to struggle to marshal mass support when confronting a non-compliant adversary.

Why don't we like Russia? Because they're hard on gays??? Saudi Arabia was never so demonised.

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The ideology of a triumphant capitalism endlessly trumpeted by the Mainstream Media has little to offer the masses outside the bubble .. and ordinary folk, feeling that in their bones, turn elsewhere. The revolutionary bourgeoisie of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the populists of their age, but populism is very suspect today.

The Marxist left believed that just as Marxism had unveiled the mystifications and obfuscations of bourgeois ideology, its vision of socialist freedom, of society working for the many, not the few (to borrow a phrase) would seize the masses, that essential engine of social progress. We know how that worked out.

I have an unappealing prognosis: with economic prospects unpromising, social cohesion unravelling and no easy answers, expect more populism and more crazy politics.

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As I write, we enter another Italian political and economic crisis.

The end of RTFM

It's a really old joke.

"Customer Support: "Ridge Hall computer assistant; may I help you?"

Caller: "Yes, well, I'm having trouble with WordPerfect."

CS: "What sort of trouble?"

C: "Well, I was just typing along, and all of a sudden the words went away."

CS: "Went away?"

C: "They disappeared."

CS: "Hmm. So what does your screen look like now?"

C: "Nothing."

CS: "Nothing?"

C: "It's blank; it won't accept anything when I type."

CS: "Are you still in WordPerfect, or did you get out?"

C: "How do I tell?"

CS: "Can you see the C: prompt on the screen?"

C: "What's a sea-prompt?"

CS: "Never mind. Can you move the cursor around on the screen?"

C: "There isn't any cursor, I told you, it won't accept anything I type."

CS: "Does your monitor have a power indicator?"

C: "What's a monitor?"

CS: "It's the thing with the screen on it that looks like a TV. Does it have a little light that tells you when it's on?"

C: "I don't know."

CS: "Well, then look on the back of the monitor and find where the power cord goes into it. Can you see that?"

C: "Yes, I think so."

CS: "Great. Follow the cord to the plug, and tell me if it's plugged into the wall."

C: ".......Yes, it is."

CS: "When you were behind the monitor, did you notice that there were two cables plugged into the back of it, not just one?"

C: "No."

CS: "Well, there are. I need you to look back there again and find the other cable."

C: ".......Okay, here it is."

CS: "Follow it for me, and tell me if it's plugged securely into the back of your computer."

"I can't reach."

CS: "Uh huh. Well, can you see if it is?"

C: "No."

CS: "Even if you maybe put your knee on something and lean way over?"

C: "Oh, it's not because I don't have the right angle - it's because it's dark."

CS: "Dark?"

C: "Yes - the office light is off, and the only light I have is coming in from the window."

CS: "Well, turn on the office light then."

C: "I can't."

CS: "No? Why not?"

C: "Because there's a power outage."

CS: "A power... A power outage? Ah, Okay, we've got it licked now. Do you still have the boxes and manuals and packing stuff your computer came in?"

C: "Well, yes, I keep them in the closet."

CS: "Good. Go get them, and unplug your system and pack it up just like it was when you got it. Then take it back to the store you bought it from."

C: "Really? Is it that bad?"

CS: "Yes, I'm afraid it is."

C: "Well, all right then, I suppose. What do I tell them?"

CS: "Tell them you're too stupid to own a computer."

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Do you remember manuals? When I got a new device my first step was always to read the manual. Hundreds of pages, it felt like! I struggled to absorb all that information. I was convinced that smartphones would never catch on, way too complex for most people.

It's been a while now since I've read a manual on any new piece of kit. Sometimes there's a small pamphlet with some wordless pictures - not often. How did we come to lose the manual?

It was a Darwinian process. An architecture + protocol swept to fixation: swiping, pressing, tapping and recognising three stacked horizontal lines. A device supporting a sufficiently smart interface permits even a dummy to use it.

So finally: no more tech support crying in anguish: "OMG RTFM!".

A Bank Holiday Monday at Brean Down

Looking south towards Burnham from Brean Down

Clare stepping up to the challenge

The peninsular track to the fort, looking towards Steep Holm

I was wearing a yellow tee-shirt which attracted flying black beetles by the thousand at the top of the steps.

Lynmouth Tales: 2 - A deckchair protocol

Deckchairs for hire on the bank to the left

It was a warm afternoon with a chill wind at Lynmouth. Deckchairs on the sunny bank of the Lyn promised a pleasant hour. The sign said: 'Deckchair tickets - £1.50 per day'.

We unloaded two from the half-empty rack and settled down to join the six or so other people sunning themselves out of the breeze. After a few minutes, a rather portly, suntanned man in his fifties wearing red shorts and sporting a leather bag approached.

"As it's three o'clock, there's a discount. That'll be a pound each."

We thanked him profusely.

---

"How many desk chairs do you think there are here?"

"About a dozen"

"So in theory, that's a revenue of £18 a day. What's the minimum wage?"

"About £8 per hour."

OK, so the total revenue from this site - taking his sign at face value - is just over two hours pay. But of course, we know it doesn't work like that. People don't stay and the moment they up and leave, someone else comes along and he charges them for 'all day' as well."

"At 3 pm the pretence of 'all day' is wearing pretty thin, so we got our discount."

"And if someone comes back with their ticket and all the deckchairs are occupied, then they'll just ask for a refund, which of course he'll give them. How often does that happen, d'you think?"

(Snorts). "They'd have to find him first. Bet he only comes along every couple of hours. We won't see him again until it's time to pack these things away."

"So he knows his sign is bogus and we all know it's bogus but any more complex timed reservation scheme would be more trouble than it's worth. You know what this reminds me of? Statistical multiplexing like the original shared Ethernet."

I looked, but she was already asleep.

---

After an hour we got up to return to our car. As we approached the steps we spotted another couple coming down. Clare approached and pressed our tickets into their hands.

"They're good for all day. Please have them. We're leaving now."

As we crossed the bridge towards our car, I saw them settling into two vacant deckchairs. Turning to Clare I said,

"You do understand you've just wrecked his whole business model?"

Lynmouth Tales: 1 - The TV at Breakfast

As usual, we're almost the last to breakfast in the unnatural calm of a morning pub bar. There's a quiet hubbub of conversation as we locate a spare table and settle to check out the menu.

As we work through our meal, a middle-aged man suddenly stands to address us all. "Does anyone want the TV on?" he asks, his manner faux-apologetic.

It's a tone which suggests that he is speaking for all of us - that he's the agency of our collective exasperation at the muted sounds of BBC Breakfast quietly burbling from the corner.

Naturally no-one says anything.

Triumphantly the TV is turned off. As the man returns to his place, a cathedral-like hush descends over the breakfast room. All conversation ceases, the slightest word can now be overheard by all.

In a classier establishment we'd have breakfasted to Radio 3 - with greater immunity, no doubt.

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This morning we were the last to come down and ended up on the table next to him. This was the table which everyone else had left vacant, the table which was too close to its neighbours. Its occupancy was the straw that broke this man's back.

He smiled at us - a fixed smile! - which was extended vaguely to the whole room.

"Does anyone want the TV on?"

He got up, mumbling quietly to himself about the irritations of background chat, and made his way to the corner of the room to turn the offending device off.

As he returned, Clare and myself started a (perhaps overloud) conversation about the merits of the recently-deceased Philip Roth, and whether he had had more success charting the niche of upper-middle-class American-Jewish male academics than Lee Child had had exploring the solitary vigilantism of hobo-class Jack Reacher.

I hope he was pleased at such an erudite conversation conducted eighteen inches from his ears but we'll never know, as he said not a word.

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Yesterday, when semi-private conversation had still been possible, I was telling Clare about an amusing Tommy Cooper sketch I'd flicked through the other day on Yesterday.

Cooper is grandiloquently introducing a clown act. "First he'll do some sums, then he'll do a song and dance routine."

The camera pans to the blackboard to show the definite integral from 0 to 1 of 1/√(1 - x²).

While I'm thinking about line integrals and the quarter circumference of the unit circle, the clown emerges from behind the curtain, runs to the blackboard and in a split second chalks π/2, then rushes across to link arms with Cooper where they do the raucous song and dance routine.

And the credits roll.

Genius.

AI: inference and causality

Franz Kafka statue in Prague

When Google Lens tells me the picture above is the Statue of Franz Kafka in Prague, glossed by Wikipedia as:

"The Statue of Franz Kafka is an outdoor 2003 sculpture by Jaroslav Róna, installed on Vězeňská street in Prague, Czech Republic. It is based on a scene in Franz Kafka's first novel, Amerika, in which a political candidate is held on the shoulders of a giant man during a campaign rally, and carried through the streets,"

Google's app is doing something really complex, leveraging artificial neural nets trained by massive datasets. But it's fundamentally inference:

The world we live in |= the pixel map of the photo and Google Len's summary text.

and

the pixel map of the photo |- Google Len's summary text.

Satisfiability and entailment.

All AI systems need to map their sensor/effector primary data to internal representations which allow inference (deductive, inductive, abductive etc) - regardless of the engineering mechanisms they adopt. Neural nets training their weights are optimising the probability of valid inferences about the world.

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Judea Pearl has a new book out arguing for the introduction of causality into AI systems. In a recent Quanta interview he said:

"All the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fitting."

Here's the book.

Amazon link

Causality is one of those constructs like Free Will, Consciousness and the intentional stance which don't exist in the underlying physics (the theories which the universe satisfies as far as we can tell), but which are emergent in a world of self-aware agents.

They usefully describe relationships between belief-and-goal-driven entities; they succinctly encode the effects of the second law of thermodynamics plus boundary conditions. We use these concepts .. and AI will have to if we are ever to create socially-competent artificial agents.

What Pearl is really asking for is an AI which utilises the intentional stance (specifically including reasoning about cause and effect).

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To find out more about Judea Pearl's work (without buying the book!) view the recommended slides at his website. For a review of Pearl's substantive contribution to causality theory, see here.

My own subjective response? I find his dense notation and cluttered semantics worthy but unexciting.

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Update: my further impressionistic, superficial and under-researched thoughts.

The difference between a mere association between P and Q (which could be a spurious correlation, or the result of an independent cause of both) and a causation, P causes Q, is captured by the modal operator of necessity []. See here for a detailed discussion.

To check P causes Q we need to check: [](P → Q) and [](¬Q → ¬P).

So we're in possible world semantics and we look to 'neighbouring worlds' to check the truth status of P and Q. But we have the usual problem that such worlds are way too 'big', too full of irrelevancies.

So like Situation Semantics, Pearl takes the engineering approach of restricting his worlds to just those entities and actions which seem relevant to the causality under investigation. These are his causal diagrams which he intends to counterfactually 'mutilate'.

A philosophical strategy similar to the modal analysis of epistemics etc .. and of similar utility.

Barrington Court (National Trust)

Sunny day, coldish wind. We were at Barrington Court today.

The brick path is striking

The leaf colours interest Clare

Your author in one of the walled gardens of flowers

The cafe/restaurant at Barrington House has a soviet-style system. You're meant to choose your (numbered) table first, then browse the cake room and finally queue at the till to order drinks and pay. A waitress then delivers tea or coffee to the table number you indicated.

The flaw in this system is not hard to find. Barrington Court is popular and there are few tables. When we rolled up there were none free and we blagged it at the till ("We'll be hanging around outside by the door.").

The cashier was unsurprised and we were found without difficulty. That hardly excuses the poor protocol but it's surprisingly hard to come up with a simple and robust reservation scheme.

Sequence me!

You want me to spit?

After much persuasion, the kit arrived today and now I just have to get her to spit; perhaps that's not as hard as it sounds.

Does she realise we can now bring her back?

"To Change the Church" - Ross Douthat

Amazon link

Ross Douthat is not very well known here but in the States he has a profile as a conservative commentator on the NYT. He is also a Catholic convert.

Here is what his fellow New York Times writer, Paul Elie, had to say about Douthat's work:

"To Douthat [Pope] Francis is an accommodationist, and decline has reached the apex of the church. “This is a hinge moment in the history of Catholicism,” he declares, “a period of theological crisis that’s larger than just the Francis pontificate but whose particular peak under this pope will be remembered, studied and argued about for as long as the Catholic Church endures.”

What immediately follows is an adroit, perceptive, gripping account of Catholic controversializing. Douthat sets out the liberal and conservative “master narratives” about the Second Vatican Council and then offers a third narrative that deftly blends the two.

He sketches the life and times of the future pope, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Argentine Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires. There’s commentary on past controversies and a brief history of Catholic teaching on marriage, from Matthew 19 (“What God has joined, let not man put asunder”) to Humanae Vitae, the 1968 encyclical in which Pope Paul VI upheld the ban on artificial birth control. ...

And then, as Douthat reaches what he sees as the heart of the matter — the Vatican synods on marriage and the family in 2014 and 2015 — his culture-warrior tendencies stir fully to life.

He casts the synods as a battle: warring factions, attacks and frontal assaults, purges and collaborators. Francis’ openness to the German cardinal Walter Kasper’s proposal to relax the ban on divorced-and-remarried people in Germany receiving Communion at Mass is framed as a liberal pope’s “crusade to change the church.”

Although Francis has invited free discussion more than any previous pope, his efforts to shape the synod’s outcome (he is the pope, after all) are seen as “stage-managing” and “deck-stacking.” The synod fathers’ disputes are rolled down the slippery slope and deemed a “full-scale theological crisis” in which the hope that Francis would foster unity and renewal is undone by the supposed liberals’ supposed desire to accommodate “the sexual revolution and all its works.”

Douthat’s own position is traditionalist-cum-literalist: Any relaxing of the Catholic teaching on marriage — one man, one woman, one time — means that core teachings can be changed; if core teachings can be changed, the Catholic Church is no longer the Catholic Church; and if the church is not the church, all hope is lost."

I started the book somewhat sympathetic to Douthat's position - Pope Francis has not endeared himself with his vague anti-capitalism, ecological posturing and seeming inability to sort out the Vatican.

Douthat is a smart guy but he has a problem - blind faith. Once he committed to switching his critical intelligence off to accommodate a strangely-invisible super-presence, the fount of moral authority and one which extruded a portion of itself into a low-key itinerant Jewish preacher some two thousand years ago .. well, he felt he had to commit himself to Jesus's reported words as divinely-inspired axioms for life.

No matter the grievous consequences to perfectly respectable people (remarried divorcees - the case in point - enjoined to live as 'sister and brother'), the letter of the law must be served or the heavens shall fall. In the face of such egregious nonsense one can only wish more power to Francis's elbow.

As Elie observes:

"Vatican II was at once the church’s response to a crisis and the perpetuation of it. In less than five years the council fathers made changes whose number and scale dwarf the modest proposals floated in Francis’ pontificate — made them over the objections of Bill Buckley and other pundits who styled themselves as more Catholic than the pope. The biggest change had to do with the church’s relationship to Judaism, other churches and other religions.

In a few strokes, Jesus’ hard saying “No one comes to the Father except through me” and its Catholic expression (“Outside the church there is no salvation”) were softened and qualified. The change was profound and tradition-defying. Ever since, the church has affirmed the integrity of other faiths; ever since, Catholics have had to ask themselves, “Why be Catholic, when other ways are O.K., too?” Ever since, there has been no one clear answer."

Outside the White House - August 15th 2001

I know this is not news, but rummaging around in Google Photos I thought we looked rather cute.

Covert operations under total surveillance

Osama bin Laden used nothing higher-tech than pencil, paper and couriers. Charles Stross suggested that when the NSA is on your case you're back to mediaeval tradecraft, Bruce Schneier frequently points out that against your kid sister almost any security will work, while against a first-world state adversary .. well, you're in trouble.

The main bottleneck facing the modern security state - despite ubiquitous CCTV, backdoor-enhanced routers and traitorous apps - is the shortage of smart oversight. Covert data enters as a firehose but actionable intelligence is vanishingly rare. The more extensive the surveillance, the worse it gets.

You read stuff like:

"You know there are bugs in here, and cameras?"

"Don't worry, they don't have enough staff. They've got AIs doing video review and keyword-tagging .. but if we keep it normal and general, most likely we're OK."

It's an arms race, but it's not linear. Each technology hits a ceiling and while the ongoing deployment of surveillance has a way to go, analysis at scale is much closer to topping out.

A covert agency knows that the best way to thwart security is to operate an innocuous cover-activity with maximal congruence to the mission. How many reporters were spies? How many bird watchers were terrain-mapping?

When activities look legitimate and only intentions might arouse suspicion, the analysing AIs flounder. But what you might call 'action steganography' has a short shelf-life. It gets burned. All reporters are soon viewed with suspicion; bird watchers near sensitive installations find themselves hauled in. Continuing success favours those with imagination and/or the use of activities which are widely popular.

I wonder sometimes at this new fashion for zooming around the countryside on high-tech human-powered machines, festooned with complex multi-function electronic devices.

I really don't recall cycling being that much fun.

Reflecting on the "Cogito"

377 years and we're still baffled, René

Descartes was prepared to doubt the evidence of his senses (illusions, errors, dreams), but "we cannot in the same way suppose that we are not while we doubt of the truth of these things; for there is a repugnance in conceiving that what thinks does not exist at the very time when it thinks. Accordingly, the knowledge, I think, therefore I am, is the first and most certain that occurs to one who philosophizes orderly." (Wikipedia).

An argument which seems compelling .. yet curiously hard to formalise.

Never, ever trust the logicians to lead you closer to truth. We have:

|- thinks(descartes)                                    [assumption]
|- ∃x.thinks(x)                                             [existential introduction]
|- thinks(descartes) → ∃x.thinks(x)            [standard logic]

and with a bit more effort one can conclude that x here must, or could be descartes.

All the heavy lifting here is being done by the existential quantifier ∃, simply reflecting the mundane point in logic that an individual exists as part of its assertion. If you replace 'thinks' by 'walks' the argument works equally well (or badly).

Had they worked (harder) to attempt:

|- thinks(descarte) → exists(descarte)          (*)

(and is existence a predicate?) one would have confronted the central mystery. How do we formalise 'thinks' and 'exists'? What axioms support a theory which has (*) as a theorem?

As an AI person, I'd rephrase the "Cogito" as a robot problem. How would we design a robot which could convincingly assert Descartes's thesis?

The "Cogito ergo sum" is an internal reflection; by definition it doesn't relate to the outside world. In the jargon, it's metacognition. We immediately hit a problem. What is going on in a robot when it asserts "I'm thinking"?

Presumably it's thinking about something in particular, which we normally model 'without loss of generality' as a deduction within the robot's database of assertions and rules, its world-model.

So consider an inferential process occurring in the problem-solving layer of the robot and a concurrent metalevel representation of that inference. (An inference which is occuring, or maybe has just occurred?)

If P and Q are a couple of arbitrary facts while P→Q is a rule, then something like this?

thinking (P, Q, t₁, t₂) :- database([P, P→Q], t₁), database([P, P→Q, Q], t₂), t₂ > t₁.

Lacks conviction, don't you think? One is drawn to the byways of self-referential languages.*

I'm inclined to view the "Cogito" as more about consciousness, more about feeling self-aware than logic. Probably explains why we're as far away as ever from a compelling formalisation.

I notice I wrote about this in a similar fashion for sciencefiction.com back in 2011.

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*  Reflective Prolog and "Reflection in logic, functional and object-oriented programming".

Clare at the dentist

As I write, Clare has just left the house for the dentist. She is to undergo a root canal procedure, tackling a problem picked up when she tripped at Ham Hill last October, damaging a front tooth.

Not a tooth in sight

What do you say as she puts on her coat, picks up her handbag and resolutely opens the door?

While she sits in the waiting room struggling with anticipation, the birds in the garden will still be unconcernedly raiding the feeders, hopping over the paving stones.

I say, "In an hour all this will be in your past."

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Update: I was wrong about even that. Nothing serious, but follow up, more specialist treatment is required.

"Kingdom of the Wicked" (Book Two) - Helen Dale

Amazon link

I wrote about book one in November last year: "A high-tech capitalist Imperium in 31 AD".

"I should say 784 ab urbe condita: it seems unlikely that Christianity is going to end up on top when the Roman army is driving around Jerusalem in armoured cars, toting assault rifles. And where a certain Yeshua Ben Yusuf will be on trial for terrorism."

In Helen Dale's two novels, the Romans experienced capitalist lift-off in 212 BC, and by Jesus's time look very much like a modern American occupying force in the Middle-East - with similar issues. At the end of the first book Jesus had been arrested on subversion charges and was about to stand trial, while the zealots have started bombing.

My order has been placed (for 27th May 18).

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You may think you know what happens next, but do you recall the Roman Empire deploying helicopter gunships?

The Comintern guide to armed insurrection (1928)

Amazon link ... and PDF

From Wikipedia (Third Period):

"The Third Period is an ideological concept adopted by the Communist International (Comintern) at its Sixth World Congress, held in Moscow in the summer of 1928.

The Comintern's theory was based on its economic and political analysis of world capitalism, which posited the division of recent history into three periods. These included a "First Period" that followed World War I and saw the revolutionary upsurge and defeat of the working class, as well as a "Second Period" of capitalist consolidation for most of the decade of the 1920s. According to the Comintern's analysis, the current phase of world economy from 1928 onward, the so-called "Third Period," was to be a time of widespread economic collapse and mass working class radicalization. This economic and political discord would again make the time ripe for proletarian revolution if militant policies were rigidly maintained by communist vanguard parties, the Comintern believed.

Communist policies during the Third Period were marked by extreme hostility to political reformism and political organizations espousing it as an impediment to the movement's revolutionary objectives. In the field of trade unions, a move was made during the Third Period towards the establishment of radical dual unions under communist party control rather than continuation of the previous policy of attempting to radicalize existing unions by "boring from within."

The rise of the Nazi Party to power in Germany in 1933 and the annihilation of the organized communist movement there shocked the Comintern into reassessing the tactics of the Third Period. From 1934, new alliances began to be formed under the aegis of the so-called "Popular Front." The Popular Front policy was formalized as the official policy of the world communist movement by the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern in 1935."

"Armed Insurrection" was published illegally (in German) by the Comintern in 1928, following the Sixth World Congress. This was a book which could get you arrested or worse. Surely something to keep the bourgeoisie awake at nights, shuddering in their beds? The contemporary reader's reaction is likely to be that the manual is surprisingly boring.

The book starts with the account of four failed insurrections: Reval (Tallinn, in Estonia) in 1924, Hamburg 1923, Canton 1927 and Shanghai in 1926-27. Subsequent chapters constitute guides to the preparation and conduct of the insurrection itself. It's an engineering DIY guide rather than a Marxist theoretical analysis. Any military student would nod along with the recommendations: the virtues of prior reconnaissance, the need for surprise attacks, how to build barricades.

At time of publication there were mass communist parties in western Europe. The capitalist class was still learning economic management and had allowed hyperinflation and mass unemployment to wreck their economies: the situation of workers (and peasants) was truly desperate. And yet no revolution succeeded. The Comintern military experts were of the opinion that no insurrection could succeed unless:

• large sections of the bourgeois military had been neutralised, or joined the revolution
• the Communist Party military wing was staffed with militarily-trained cadres
• quantities of arms, including artillery, were rapidly acquired.

It turns out that achieving these objectives under extreme repression - without much prior experience - is very, very difficult. Bourgeois military training, transforming civilians into effective infantry, takes months; the insurrection has only days to upgrade its proletarian militants. The modern transformation of surveillance and control, leveraging AI, CCTV, drones, DNA profiling and communications interception makes clandestine activity orders of magnitude more complex than 'A. Neuberg' ever envisaged. The bourgeois states across the world would have to be in an advanced state of decomposition for any contemporary insurrection to have the remotest chance of success.

Today is a different world. The tone of the manual is fervent, messianic and faintly blood-curdling. The summary execution of leading counter-revolutionaries is called for (it's noted that counter revolutionary forces historically do no less). The current left with its ideological core founded upon inclusive-values is as far removed as it is possible to be from the steely resolve of "Armed Insurrection".

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See also: "Socialist Revolution in the 21st Century?".

This photo is called "Cheesed Off"

Taken near Wookey Hole a few days ago - clicking on it makes it bigger.

No posts for a few days as we're busy. Here's a bonus picture.

A visiting badger in our front garden six days ago

The *star* amongst the sundry cats and pigeons .. .

May Day review of "Marx 200" by Michael Roberts

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Marx 200 is a punchy, readable and succinct review of Marx’s economics at the 200th anniversary of his birth. A renowned Marxist economist, Roberts rapidly takes us to the core of Marx’s great theoretical innovations, his three ‘laws’, addressing the many arguments of his critics. He then assesses how well Marx’s ‘predictions’ have held up. This short book highlights the current resurgence of Marxist economics; it does, however, also exemplify this tradition’s weaknesses.

Roberts starts with a brief biography of Marx. After reviewing the development of Marx’s thinking he introduces his three ‘laws’: (i) the law of value: only labour creates value ; (ii) the law of accumulation: capitalists are forced to accumulate more and more capital through competition ; and (iii) the law of the tendency of the rate of profit  to decline. On the latter, Roberts presents his usual trenchant and compelling arguments in support.

Non-Marxists are amazed to discover that Marx left us with no fully developed theory of crisis. Such a theory would require the synthesis of all the dynamical tendencies within capitalism - and contemporary Marxists differ in ascribing central causation. For Roberts, the cycle of crises is fundamentally driven by the cycle of profitability. He assembles an impressive amount of data to show graphical correlations and the superposition of short- and long-term economic cycles. He then turns to Marx’s critics: his main targets are the Keynesians and the relatively new school of post-Keynesian ‘heterodox economists’ (he includes a discussion of the ‘transformation problem’).

In his final chapter he addresses Marx’s predictions: how well have they held up?  Marx held that as capitalism developed, inequality would increase (both within and between countries). Roberts has ample data, particular since the inception of neoliberalism in the 1980s, to confirm that. Second is Marx’s point that capitalism is focused exclusively on capital valorisation and cares not a jot for environmental and ecological issues. Roberts see climate change as contemporary evidence for that too, although he underestimates the extent to which capitalist states can successfully cooperate to deal with global ecological issues they find proximately threatening. Finally he addresses the rise of AI and robotics, presenting the orthodox view that machines cannot create value so that total automation is incompatible with capitalist relations of production. Here his presentation is marred by failing to discuss the proximate economic and political effects of overwhelming automation: simply appealing to lack of surplus value leaves the discussion at too high a level of abstraction.

Let us now turn to the weaknesses and lacunae which Roberts’ book shares with other Marxist accounts.

1.  Capitalism is consistently criticised as historically obsolete, irrational and destructive. A socialist replacement is demanded. It’s clear that capitalism’s contradictions drive its dynamics and that its cyclical behaviour creates negative human consequences. Yet where is the credible alternative? How would a socialist state handle the motivational and coordination problems which capitalism, in its tough-minded way, routinely deals with effectively? János Kornai in ‘The Socialist System’ presents a chilling account of the failures of ‘rational planning’ in post-capitalist economies which did not differ qualitatively in development from those in the West today. Simply incanting ‘bottom-up democracy’ as the solution doesn’t do it.

2.  The replacement of capitalism is a serious business, the outcome of a bloody civil war. In the absence of proletarian success retribution has historically been terrible. The working class today in the advanced capitalist countries is about as unprepared as it could possibly be to conduct such a struggle. Yet there is no discussion at all by writers such as Roberts as to the strategy for a successful transition. In the absence of theory and debate, isn’t it obvious that all such calls to ‘abolish capitalism’ are either premature (capitalism not yet ripe for supersession), ritualistic or simply irresponsible?

3. Marxists may be the last community of scholars on earth to cling to the ‘blank slate’ ideology, the idea that humans of all geographies, states and ethnicities exhibit the same social capabilities. In his more extreme formulations, Marx was just wrong about this. Even the impeccably liberal David Reich, in his recent book, ‘Who We Are and How We Got Here’, knows better than that.  La Griffe du Lion wrote on the Internet about ‘smart fractions’ and the bourgeois economist Garett Jones wrote bravely about differential cognitive capital in ‘Hive Mind’ yet no Marxist economist seems to have noticed. The capitalist mode of production may be constituted by social relationships between people, but those people are not global clones. This has consequences for developmental economics - it’s just false to lazily blame a reified ‘imperialism’.

In conclusion, Michael Roberts has written a solid contemporary defence of Marx’s economic and political thinking. I just wish that he and his colleagues would move beyond a defensive posture and absorb new research into human capabilities, then conceptualise more compelling models of socialism and of how the proletariat might accomplish a successful global transition.