Month: May 2012

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Gramsci: Maximalism and extremism

A new translation of Maximalism and Extremism, from l’Unità, 2 July 1925

Comrade Bordiga is offended because it has been written that in his ideas there is much maximalism. It is not true, and cannot be true—writes Bordiga—. In fact the most distinctive trait of the extreme left is an aversion for the maximalist party, which disgusts us, makes us vomit, etc., etc.

The question however is something else. Maximalism is a fatal and mechanical conception of the doctrine of Marx.

There is a maximalist party which from this maximalist conception draws an argument for its opportunism, to justify its collaborationism masked with revolutionary phrases. Bandiera rossa trionferà [The Red Flag will triumph] because it is fatal and inevitable that the proletariat must win; Marx said so, who is our sweet and doting master! It is useless to move ourselves; why move and struggle if the victory is fatal and inevitable? Thus speaks a maximalist of the maximalist party. But there is also the maximalist who is not part of the maximalist party, and can instead be in the Communist Party. He is intransigent, and not opportunist. But he too believes it useless to move and struggle day by day; he awaits only the great day. The masses—he says—cannot not come to us, because the objective situation forces them towards the revolution. Thus let us wait for them, without so much talk about tactical manouevres and such expedients.

This, for us, is maximalism, just like that of the maximalist party. Comrade Lenin has taught us that to defeat our class enemy, who is powerful, who has many means and reserves at his disposal, we have to exploit every chink in his armour and we must use every ally possible, even be they uncertain, wavering and temporary. He has taught us that in the war of armies, one cannot reach the strategic aim, which is the destruction of the enemy and the occupation of his territory, with having first reached a series of tactical objectives tending to break up the enemy before confronting him in the field. The whole prerevolutionary period is presented as a mainly tactical activity, with the aim of acquiring new allies for the proletariat, of breaking up the organizational offensive and defensive apparatus of the enemy, of exposing and exhausting his reserves.

Not taking account of this teaching of Lenin, or taking account of it only theoretically, but without putting it into practice, without making it become daily practice, means being maximalist, that is pronouncing great revolutionary phrases, but being incapable of moving one step closer to the revolution.

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Gramsci: Unions and councils

Gramsci: Unions and councils

A new translation of Antonio Gramsci’s article, Unions and Councils, from 1919.

 

The leaders of the organization do not notice this deep and widespread crisis. The more it clearly appears that the working class is not organized in forms corresponding to its real historical structure, the more it happens that the working class is not lined up in a configuration which incessantly adapts itself to laws which govern the intimate process of real historical development of the class itself; the more these leaders persist in their blindness and force themselves to “juridically” settle dissent and conflicts. Eminently bureaucratic spirits, they believe that an objective condition, rooted in the psychology which is developed in the living experiences of the factory, can be overcome with a discourse which moves feelings, and with an order of the day unanimously voted in an assembly made ugly by hubbub and oratorical meanderings. Today they force themselves to “rise to the height of the times” and, as if to demonstrate that they are also capable of “hard thinking,” refashion the old and worn-out union ideologies, tediously insisting on relations of identity between the soviet and the union, tediously insisting on affirming that the present system of union organization constitutes the system of forces in which the dictatorship of the proletariat must be made flesh.

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How peer review really works

Peer review is the process which scientific journals use to help editors decide on what to publish and what to reject. It is not perfect and not always a pleasant experience but on the whole it works and researchers freely, and unpaid, give their time to make it work.

The exact experience of peer review for a researcher submitting to a journal depends on the field they work in, but is much the same for most reputable publishers. First, you have to write a paper: you might already have a journal in mind when you start, or you might decide where to send it after you write the paper. You might be boycotting Elsevier or you might not. Either way, you pick a journal.

The choice of journal depends on how good you think the work is and who you want to read the paper. Most people want their work to appear in a good journal, if only as reassurance that the paper is of a certain standard. There is also the pressure to publish in `high quality’ journals which bring prestige to your CV and your department. If your work is good, you also want it to be read by the right people. This might mean other researchers who will appreciate the elegance of your method, or it might mean end-users who will make practical use of your work.

So you format the paper according to the requirements of the journal and submit it through their online system, by uploading a PDF. You might also be asked to nominate an editor to handle the paper, and maybe some potential reviewers. If the editor does not reject the paper immediately, as not within the scope of the journal say, she sends it to the reviewers for advice on whether to publish.

If you are one of the reviewers, you receive an email with some information about the paper, asking if you will take the job on. Usually, you do: other people are doing the same for your papers, so you should do likewise. Your first job is to read the paper. The editor wants to know if the paper should be rejected or accepted. Your second job is to say yes or no, giving reasons and conditions, with a commentary on the paper.

If the author has written a decent paper, the usual response is `Publish with changes’, meaning that the work is good enough to appear in the journal, and is of the right type, but it needs some changes, either to clarify some points, or to give some more evidence for the claims made. Often, this is the first time the paper has been read by another expert, so comments like this are useful and welcome.

The editor gets the reviews, after a month or two, and passes the comments on to the author, possibly with a few words of their own, along with a decision. If the decision is `Accept’ with no changes required (very unusual), the manuscript is sent to the publisher and a few months later, it appears online, and in a printed volume a bit later. If some changes are required, the author sets to work and rewrites the paper: this might take a day or it might take a year, depending on what is required. If it looks unfeasible, they might simply withdraw the paper and send it somewhere else. Likewise, if the paper is rejected, for reasons other than being rubbish, you reformat for another journal and send it to somebody else.

When the paper appears online, it is a `publication’ and you add it to your CV. If you are part of the Research Excellence Framework, you might submit the paper to be included in your department’s submission. Then you start all over again.

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Under pressure

A recent issue of the London Review of Books had this:

The unit of measurement of this pressure is the atmosphere, named after the weight of the air bearing down on us at sea level. We don’t normally think of the air as having weight, but it does. Hold your hand out flat, and imagine an invisible column of air above each of your fingernails stretching up from where you are to the top of the Earth’s atmosphere. That column weighs 1.03 kg per square centimetre—in other words, about one kilogramme’s weight of air bears down on each fingernail. That amount of pressure is one atmosphere.

What is wrong with this is that it misses the point of pressure. The misconception is not unusual. A GCSE physics site says that atmospheric pressure is “about the same force as having over a dozen cars piled on top of you!”

So why are these statements wrong? The error is in the idea that pressure “bears down”. As engineers learn in their first course on fluid mechanics, pressure acts equally in all directions. When John Lanchester says that one kilogramme’s weight of air bears down on a fingernail, he would have been just as right, or wrong, if he had said that one kilogramme’s weight of air bears up on a fingertip. The force on the end of your finger, or anything else, is about one kilogramme of air pushing down, balanced by one kilogramme pushing up: in sum, almost nothing.

But, you object, things get squashed by atmospheric pressure, or by pressure in the deep ocean. The reason is not the pressure, but the pressure difference. When pressure inside a submarine, or an aeroplane, or a soft drinks can, is not the same as the pressure outside, the force is out of balance and the structure has to carry a load to maintain its shape. If you inflate a balloon, you can see how the material stretches as the internal pressure is increased until it is greater than the pressure on the outside. The rubber of the balloon stretches so that the total force due to the difference in pressure, and the tension in the rubber, is zero. Likewise, though you cannot see it, the shell of a drinks can expands slightly to balance the difference in pressure between inside and outside. An aeroplane fuselage behaves the same way; a submarine hull likewise, though with the high pressure on the outside, rather than the inside.

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Gramsci: The development of the revolution

A new translation of Gramsci’s journalism, from L’Ordine Nuovo, 1919.

The fundamental theses of the Communist International can be summarized as follows:

1) the world war of 1914 – 1918 represents the tremendous demonstration of that moment in the process of development of modern history which Marx synthesized in the expression: the catastrophe of the capitalist world;

2) only the working class can save human society from the abyss of barbarity and economic collapse towards which it is pushed by the emboldened and maddened forces of the owning class, and it can do so organizing itself in a dominant class to impose its own dictatorship in the politico-industrial field;

3) the proletarian revolution is imposed and not proposed. The conditions created by the war (extreme impoverishment of the economic resources required to satisfy elementary needs of collective and individual life, concentration of the means of production and international trade in the hands of a small group of owners, colonial subjection of all the world’s countries to Anglo-Saxon capitalism, concentration, at national level, of the political forces of the owning class) can create these outcomes: either the conquest of social power by the working class, with its own methods and tools, to arrest the process of dissolution of the civil world and lay the basis of a new order in which it is possible to recommence useful activity and a vital energetic and rapid impulse towards higher forms of production and social life; or the death from hunger or exhaustion of a large part of the workers; or permanent slaughter for social decimation until the reestablishment of a balanced relationship between capitalistically managed production and the consuming masses.

Read the rest on the Marxists Internet Archive.