Thursday 22 February 2024

SHARING REALITY

In 2021 I began to write a sequel to Sampling Reality, my book that outlined a materialist theory of mind and perception, published in Kindle format and paperback on my website here:

https://sites.google.com/site/dicknewsite/home/materialism

Sharing Reality is intended as the second volume, sketching ways to apply that theoretical scheme - perception, emotion and imagination - to politics, economics and the other social sciences, by examining the historical methods of Marx, Nietzsche, Veblen and Santayana, and by adapting material originally written in these blog posts and book reviews.

Sharing Reality remains unfinished because I'm quite unable to write a satisfactory final chapter 10. World events are proceeding in such alarming directions and at such pace that all my attempts have seemed absurd - the geopolitical temper feels almost as febrile as 1914 or 1939, and to predict the next few years means steering some path between sensationalism and complacency that evades me. I finally decided to put what I have on this blog for free (missing chapter 10, a bibliography, and the ordering of later chapters needs rethinking): 

DOWNLOAD SHARING REALITY PDF

Saturday 11 November 2023

LIVING AMONG THE SHARDS

"Capitalism no longer dreams of a unified world. Instead, market radicals have shattered the globe into thousands of zones, enclaves, and special jurisdictions. And they’ve left the rest of us to live among the shards."





That quote is from a NYRB review by Professor Daniel Immerwahr of Quinn Slobodian's book Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. We're all aware of the Panama Papers, of tax havens, special zones and free ports, but Immerwahr's review places these all into a context that I personally hadn't fully grasped -- carefully constructed components of a long-term effort by neo-liberal and libertarian strategists to suppress social-democratic politics, dismantle financial regulation, sap the revenues of welfare states and secede from democratic control. This strategy is neatly summed up in a well-known quote from billionaire ideologue Peter Thiel: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. The great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms.” 

There are plenty of reasons to believe that getting rid of our current Tory government is the most pressing priority for the next year, but among the very strongest of those reasons is that were the Tories to gain another term they've made it clear that they want to enlist the UK in this hideous new world of unrestrained market forces, with free ports and other fiscal devices. I'm by no means convinced that the Left in the UK understands the urgency of this task, distracted as it is by identity politics and sectarian strife between 'Corbynism' and 'Blairism'. 

I made my own opinion on this distraction fairly clear in my review of one of Thomas Piketty's books in The Political Quarterly, from which I'll repeat the relevant bits here:

I suggested earlier that these two books between them offer hints as to why the Left is languishing rather than flourishing since the 2008 crisis, which demands some further explanation. Piketty offered these terse explanations in Capital And Ideology, namely that “a dis­illusionment, a pervasive doubt about the very possibility of a just economy, which encourages identitarian disengagement” followed from the collapse of Soviet communism, and that “the less educationally advantaged classes came to believe that the parties of the Left now favour the newly advantaged educated classes and their children over people of more modest backgrounds”. Both of these observations suggest that Marxist ideas of class and class-struggle no longer retain much political traction among Western working populations, who were relatively happy with the compromises won by social-democracy after WWII and whose anger at having them removed by neo-liberal reaction is easily deflected onto immigrants and college-educated Leftists who tell them off for not struggling hard enough.

The legacy of Marxism to Western Leftists, faint as it is, has been mostly a hindrance: a vote-losing moralism and a contempt for social-democracy as a partial solution that falls short of full state socialism. This has generated an important debate among contemporary Marxists about the precise nature of late, technological capitalist states and their huge increase in inequality: are capitalists losing faith in investment and innovation altogether and becoming pure rentiers; have they become less reliant upon extracting surplus value through the wage mechanism and now expropriate value directly (for example when Google and Facebook ‘steal’ users’ data for free); is colonialism really over or does it persist in disguised forms?

A few, Piketty included, synthesise these doubts into a more realistic picture which abandons dogmatic adherence to Marx. From its inception during the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution, ‘capitalism’ has never been purely dependent on surplus value extraction but has always plundered too – South American silver and gold, slavery, unpaid housework, cheap eastern labour – and reinvested the proceeds into ‘pure’ European capitalist production. Jason Moore, another unorthodox critic puts it thus: “capitalism thrives when islands of commodity production and exchange can appropriate oceans of potentially Cheap Natures – outside the circuit of capital but essential to its operation.” In A Brief History Piketty moves further in this direction, extending his earlier concerns of property, borders and education toward greater emphasis on gender politics, racial and colonial matters, as well as by frankly describing his recommendations as both democratic and participatory socialism.

I follow the blog of the Marxist economist Michael Roberts, and his latest post meshes rather well with Immerwahr's NYRB piece (which is largely what prompts me to write this post after a rather long silence...) Reviewing the book 'Visions of Inequality' by Branko Milanovic, Roberts goes into an illuminating discussion of post-Marx theories of income distribution, from which this paragraph is the most relevant (Roberts himself still defends the first two more orthodox theories, but is prepared to grant credence to the third):

To sum up, Milanovic says that “we have on offer three theories of income distribution in capitalism. First, there is Marx’s theory, by which increasing concentration of ownership of capital and decreasing rate of profit ultimately leads to the death of capitalism through zero investments. Second, we have Kuznets’s hypothesis of a wave of rising and then decreasing inequality — or as I have argued, successive waves. And third, now, there is Piketty’s theory of unfettered capitalism that, left to its own devices, maintains an unchanged rate of return and sees the top earners’ share of capital income increasing to the point that it threatens to swallow the entire output of the society, and only a political response can prevent such an outcome.”

What Slobodian/Immerwahr explain so well is how we're already perched on the edge of the dystopia Piketty hints at: Silicon Valley tycoons, US libertarian Republicans and gangster/oligarchs combine to deploy AI-powered automation and inaugurate a de-politicised, minimal waged society: 

Zones, it turns out, can transform countries’ politics even without changing their policies. Rather than seek to overthrow governments they dislike, capitalists can “underthrow” them, as the venture capitalist Michael Gibson puts it. Instead of attacking the welfare state, the theory goes, they can play a zone defense, outrun its regulations, and sap its revenues. Slobodian notes how eager the wealthiest today are to “opt out, secede, and defect from the collective.” They live in compounds, fly on private jets, sail superyachts, hoard art in free ports, buy islands, found online worlds, build bunkers, establish alternative currencies, or launch themselves into space.

Immerwahr's review is at https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/11/23/zoning-out-crack-up-capitalism-quinn-slobodian/

 

Saturday 20 August 2022

GAS LIGHT


I'm not a football fan and probably know more about Ryan Gosling than Giggs, but one aspect of the latter's current trial grabbed my attention: he has been accused of 'gaslighting' his girl friend in addition to battering her, and that term is now to be regularly heard on mainstream TV news.

The term has become part of the lexicon of identity-political complaint in recent years, alongside others like 'doxxing', 'grooming', 'swatting' and many others, but I imagine few people who use it know where it came from. Wikipedia correctly asserts that its current use derives from the 1944 Hollywood thriller 'Gaslight', by George Cukor, in which a villainous husband deliberately tries to convince his young wife she is going mad. It also mentions that that movie was in turn derived from a UK stage play 'Gas Light' written by English novelist/playwright Patrick Hamilton.
Hamilton, who died in 1962 is one of my very favourite authors, though his reputation is sadly depleted nowadays. He was a difficult character, alcoholic and misanthropic, but an excellent prose stylist and a political radical, unlike contemporaries Waugh and Wodehouse who were firmly of the Right (Wodehouse very much so). My favourite of his novels is 'Hangover Square', a grimly comic satire of London bohemian life just before WWII, but closely followed by 'The Slaves of Solitude', which seems rather horribly appropriate to our present situation. It's about an assorted crowd of people evacuated from London during The Blitz and thrown together in a suburban boarding house. Mr Thwaites, perhaps the nastiest creation since Dickens, is in perpetual argument with the heroine Miss Roach.
I'm reminded of Thwaites every time I hear Truss, Sunak, Raab, Shapps or Gove on the box, and find myself thinking Miss Roach's famous closing line, delivered to the sound of falling bombs, which rather surprisingly is a prayer: "at last she put out the light, turned over, and adjusted the pillow, and hopefully composed her mind for sleep - God help us, God help all of us, every one, all of us."

Wednesday 2 March 2022

CULTURE WAR BECOMES WORLD WAR?

What if the charmed lives we "baby boomers" have lived are owed to a happy historic accident, namely the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933? At that time the isolationist wing of the US Republican Party would have been happy to see Hitler take over Europe (as without US intervention he would surely have done). But as Robert Reich points out here, we can rely on no such luck this time around.

Putin's cynical abuse of the Soviet-era rhetorical goals "anti-fascism" and "de-nazification" to justify his invasion of Ukraine is a disgraceful insult to the millions of Russians who died fighting the real thing in WWII, and the naivety of those on the UK Left who accept such excuses is equally disgraceful. Putin may be keen to create historic parallels with anti-fascism and de-nazification, but actually far better parallels are with the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Prague Spring in 1968. In both cases pro-democracy insurgents were portrayed as "fascists" in order to excuse massacring them with tanks, as will soon be happening in Kyiv and Kharkiv. 

We should be slightly encouraged that our own government seems to have finally seen the folly of its shameless courting of Putin, but the records of their party's donations from Russian oligarchs must cast some doubt upon their commitment to effective sanctions:


 


Sunday 8 August 2021

SHARING REALITY


I've rather reluctantly decided to publish in PDF format an incomplete version of 'Sharing Reality' -- the second, companion, volume to my 'Sampling Reality'. It's a tentative application of those ideas to the social sciences, and I'm publishing it incomplete as I've been unsatisfied with all attempts at the final chapters for several years now. The tempo of our current multiple crises makes all efforts at prognostication feel ridiculous. 

Find it on my website at http://www.dickpountain.co.uk/home/materialism or just click the cover picture at left


Friday 16 April 2021

DAMNED EVERY WHICH WAY

What feels like a very long year ago, in April 2020, I devoted my PC Pro magazine column to the looming Covid-19 pandemic, describing the way in which the official response was attracting competing advice from immunologists and social psychologists, the gap between what we needed objectively to do and what we could subjectively be persuaded to do. Looking back now the UK’s pandemic performance has been poor, with a relatively high absolute number of deaths and deaths per million compared to many other countries (see Our World In Data). It has been partly redeemed though by a roll-out of vaccination faster and more efficient than most.

In retrospect, carrying on scientific arguments about testing, social distancing, mask-wearing and vaccination via the mass media hasn't been so much “transparent” as a cause of mass confusion and destruction of public confidence. Consider a couple of random clippings about the pandemic I’ve collected from newspapers:
"We now know the new variant spreads between 30% and 70% faster than others and it could be 30% more deadly for some people"
"Around 8% of participants in the AstraZeneca efficacy trials were aged between 56 and 6 years old, only 3 to 4% were over 70. This does not result in an efficacy of only 8% among seniors.”
How much information such reports impart to most readers must be doubtful -- people whose daily lives don’t involve mathematics aren’t generally very good with percentages, tending to think of them as additive when in fact they’re multiplicative. “30% more deadly for some people” isn’t entirely meaningless, but all it actually means is simply “be afraid” (that trigger word “deadly”) while giving no idea whether you in particular need to fear since “some” isn’t quantified: is it 10%, 50%, 80%? And the AstraZeneca clip, strewn with figures like pepperoni on a pizza, made my eyes glaze over (and I’ve been tutored in statistics).

Statistics are employed precisely to iron-out individual differences, so they tell us how many people on average are likely to get sick after catching the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and how many of those on average are likely to die of it – hugely important to people who have to plan allocation of hospital beds, PPE and so on, but not so to non-technical citizens whose own personal chance as an individual is what matters. 

Stats don’t quite offer nothing though, because the one area where most non-technical citizens do intersect with statistics is sport: batting averages, betting odds etc. Hence it’s not too surprising that as the world’s pharmaceutical companies continue trials of the 200+ Covid vaccines currently under development, the efficacy figures they release are being interpreted by both media and public as a competition. Give people numbers and they’ll play games with them (anyone remember bus-ticket poker?)

Despite the unprecedented speed with which they were developed, all the Covid vaccines now in use have been thoroughly tested and shown to produce immunity, with those that failed testing either abandoned like Australia’s UQ/CSL or delayed for further work like the French Sanofi. All the pharma companies whose vaccines do work are obliged to publish efficacy figures, which immediately become a horse race: Pfizer in the lead on 95%, Moderna coming up on rails at 94.1%, Astra-Zeneca hanging back at 72%. These figures actually tell you what percentage of the test group didn’t catch symptomatic Covid, but they’re not directly comparable because their test groups differed in size and age composition. Then there’s the question of two doses versus one and what interval between them, which for a while became a dog fight with advantage shifting by the week: Pfizer went down to 52% for one dose, but then back up to 90% on the same test figures. Being exposed to this level of detail does nothing but increase popular fear.

The problem has become especially acute since the discovery of a rare blood clotting condition in a very small number of people inoculated with the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines: use of these vaccines has been restricted or paused in several countries, and the gift to anti-vaccine propagandists has been enormous. Sensational press reporting of this problem has severely damaged the reputation of vaccines that have several advantages - in storage, dose number, price or licencing - over the others. This PR disaster is well explained in the theBMJ journal, and should you want a (highly technical) further explanation of the clotting issue, there's this in The Atlantic magazine.

All the current vaccines are good enough, even with one dose, to reduce hospitalisation and transmission, preventing health services being overwhelmed, moving us closer to a level of community immunity that could demote SARS-CoV-2 to a manageable endemic virus like seasonal flu. Whatever you do though, don’t call this “herd immunity”, even if that is the epidemiologists’ preferred technical term. Most Brits are individualistic to the verge of anarchism, and sentimental, and competitive, so “herd” is deeply offensive, almost a swear-word. It makes extreme libertarians, who form a sizeable sect within the current ruling party, start frothing at the mouth (which you can easily detect because they won’t be wearing masks).

Shocking as it might feel to say this out loud, at 1 to 3% mortality Covid isn’t lethal enough to terrify most people under 50 into properly conforming to test, trace and isolate, but it is quite lethal enough to trigger empathy towards the old and the vulnerable, and this being so any government will be damned every which way when trying to decide on lockdown easing or vaccine distribution.






Sunday 21 February 2021

A COMPOUND EYE ON HISTORY

To describe the effect of digital technologies on journalism as 'a mixed blessing' would be quite an understatement. The ubiquity of highly functional, easy to operate video cameras - in the form of the smartphone - makes possible the 'selfie', the ultimate expression of narcissistic solipsism, and a torrent of trivia and misinformation. But it also makes possible this extraordinary assemblage of 500+ individual videos which launches a wholly new kind of reportage that doesn't yet have a  proper name. Like the compound eye of some huge digital insect, this ProPublica webpage combines 500 peoples' views of an historic event: 










SHARING REALITY

In 2021 I began to write a sequel to Sampling Reality, my book that outlined a materialist theory of mind and perception, published in Kindl...