Miscellaneous blogging
A mostly strict translation of Qualcuno Era Comunista by Giorgio Gaber. More links welcome.
Huh? No, it’s not true, I’ve no regrets. I mean … I’ve done nothing serious.
My life? A normal life. I never stole, not even at home, I’ve killed nobody. Go figure! … The odd impure act, but that’s normal, no?
MI5 are advertizing for Russian speakers in today’s Guardian:
Have they never watched Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpQzYywTiO4]
Ed Vulliamy has some reasonable things to say about the Mayan `prophecy’ of the end of the world but he gets it wrong here:
The Maya were no fools. Likely inventors of the figure zero, their mastery of astronomy – bequeathed to history through various codices and stoneworks – was breathtaking not only for its time, but for all time. Their systems for measuring time were more sophisticated than ours, with pivotal numbers of 13, 18 and 20, based upon lunar, Venusian, astronomical and mathematical measurements, and expressed in glyphs.
Vulliamy seems to confuse obscurity and sophistication. Our Arabic-numeral, place-system, method for arithmetic is much more sophisticated than one based on different `pivotal numbers’, because it makes things simpler for the person using it. By having one, and only one, set of rules, all calculations are the same, no matter what size of problem you deal with, a point which will be appreciated by those who had to learn the pounds, shillings, pence system of currency, or by those in benighted countries which continue to use imperial measures. Try doing mental arithmetic switching from base 13 to 18 to 20, without mechanical aids.
Vulliamy then talks of `lunar, Venusian, astronomical and mathematical measurements’, without saying what a `mathematical’ measurement is, and how it might differ from the other three he mentions.
Finally, he is impressed by the Mayans’ use of glyphs: `glyph’ is a fancy word for `character’ or `letter’.
We seem to have here a journalist falling for the idea that any ideas which survive long enough are `ancient wisdom’ and therefore better than our own. Actually, mathematics, and arithmetic, are areas where we can be fairly sure that the modern state of knowledge is definitely better than what people had X centuries ago.
Lev Davidovich Trotsky
Got out of many tight spots. Key
To his defenestration
Was Stalinist degeneration.
I support the Council for the Defence of British Universities, but there is a slight issue with their images.
Their site includes this image:
Dubliners, or those who have visited Dublin, will recognize the Campanile of Trinity College Dublin (I used to live just under the `of’). British university, is it?
A new translation of Gramsci’s The events of 2–3 December (1919), L’ordine nuovo, 6-13 December 1919.
Petit bourgeois
The events of 2–3 December are a final episode of the class struggle. The struggle was not between proletarians and capitalists (this struggle develops organically, as a struggle for wages and hours and as a tenacious and patient labour for the creation of an apparatus of government of production and of the masses of men who might replace the present apparatus of the bourgeois state); it was between proletarians and small and middling bourgeois. The struggle was, in the final analysis, for the defence of the liberal democratic state, for the liberation of the liberal democratic state from the confinement in which it is held prisoner by a part of the bourgeois class, the worst, the vilest, the most useless, the most parasitic: the small and medium bourgeoisie, the “intellectual” bourgeois (“intellectual” because in possession, through a simple and cursory career in middle school, of low and middle certificates of general study), the bourgeoisie of father-son public functionaries, shopkeepers, small industrial and agricultural proprietors, businessmen in the city, usurers in the country. This struggle developed in the only form in which it could develop: disorderly, tumultuous, with a raid in the streets and the squares with the aim of freeing the streets and the squares of an invasion of putrid and voracious locusts. But this struggle, be it indirectly, was connected to another struggle, to the higher class struggle between proletarians and capitalists: the small and medium bourgeois is in fact the barrier of corrupt, dissolute, putrefying humanity with which capitalism defends its economic and political power, servile, abject humanity, humanity of goons and lackeys, today become the “boss servant” which wants to take from production a larger slice not only of the salary earned by the working class, but of the same slice taken by the capitalists; to expel it from the social field, as a swarm of locusts is expelled from a half destroyed field, with fire and iron, means freeing the national apparatus of production and exchange of a leaden bridle which suffocates it and stops it functioning, means purifying the social environment and finding oneself against the specific adversary: the class of capitalist owners of the means of production and exchange.
Continue reading “Gramsci: The events of 2–3 December (1919)”
A new translation of The Problem of Power, L’ordine nuovo, 29 November 1919
The historical position currently reached by the Italian class of the exploited is summarized in these general terms:
Public order. An assembly of about three and a half million workers,peasants and employees, corresponding to about fifteen million of the Italian population, represented in Parliament by one hundred and fifty five socialist deputies. In the political order the Italian class of producers who do not possess the instruments of labour and the means of production and of exchange of the national economic apparatus, has managed to bring about a concentration of forces which places an end to the function of Parliament as the base of state power, as a
constitutional form of political government; the Italian class of the exploited has thus managed to inflict a tremendous blow on the political apparatus of capitalist supremacy, which is founded on the circulation of conservative and democratic parties, on the
alternation, in government of various political firms which paint in unvarying colours the capitalist brigandry, the rule of the bank vaults.
Today’s Sunday Independent reports on a Boeing 757 flying from London to Boston which had to land at Dublin, due to “technical issues with the Boeing 757-200 plane’s nose-wheel steering”. You might ask why an aircraft with duff nose-wheel steering might not simply continue to Boston to be fixed there.
Somebody with a clue gives us some more information:
When the left hyd sys is u/s consequences are:
– 1 autopilot (out of 3) inop;
– No autoland;
– No Autobrakes;
– Some spoilers on each wings inop;
– Rudder ratio inop;
– Left thrust reverser inop;
– Electric slats and flaps extention required (takes longer time and less flaps must be used for landing, Flaps 20 iso Flaps 30);
– Alternate gear extension required (then it is not possible to raise the gear knowing it makes a lot of drag);
– Alternate brakes inop (reserve and narmal brakes are still working);
– Yaw dampres inop;
– Nose wheel steering inop (towing required after landing).
Of all the things that weren’t working, the Sunday Independent noticed the minor one.
This is a speech I made at the recent Congress of the University and College Union. It went down well, so I have tried to reconstruct it. If anyone has some notes of it, I’d be grateful for a look to get closer to what I actually said.
Michael Carley, University of Bath, moving Motion 12.
I have in my hand a piece of paper. It’s a great piece of work. I can say this, because I didn’t write it. It’s an analysis of the pay of our Vice-Chancellor. You can get a copy over there, where the South West delegation is sitting. We carefully used the figures in such a way as to show our Vice-Chancellor in the worst possible light. I recommend you try doing the same.
The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bath is paid two hundred and eighty four thousand pounds per year, figures two, eight, four, and a pension contribution of sixty five thousand. She is paid more per member of staff than even the head of Harvard. She is paid one hundred and fifty pounds per member of staff, which is, oddly enough, last year’s pay rise for the rest of us.
This motion is not about cutting Vice-Chancellors down to size–that’s a happy side effect. It is a motion which aims to restore some balance to universities. Universities essentially run themselves: “whilst the performance of a university may be `moulded’ by the characteristics of its leader, most of the variability is explained by non-leadership factors.” We know this because, ironically, our Vice-Chancellor carries out research on university leadership [pause for hysterical laughter to die down] and she said so in a recent paper. In other words, the Vice-Chancellor makes very little difference.
But we know this. The one thing you can guarantee in a university is that most of the staff are smarter than the boss. All you need to do with most academics is slide a pizza under the door now and again, keep us fed and watered, and let us get on with doing what we love doing. Most of us are eternal students: we went to university because we loved learning and scholarship and we stayed there to work because we still do. We want to do research, develop knowledge, and pass that knowledge on to students. But universities are run by CEOs, by people who think that Alan Sugar is good management.
The aim of this motion is to restore the idea that a Vice-Chancellor is one of us, primus inter pares amongst the academics (only the second use of Latin today, standards are obviously slipping). A Vice-Chancellor, and indeed other senior staff, should be elected by the staff of the university. They should be respected scholars, prepared to take on the job of chairing the committee that does the essential work required for the administration of the university. They should have the same interest as the rest of us in seeing a university run well for the benefit of learning. What we want are the people who are almost reluctant to give up their scholarly work. We want them to be elected because that makes them legitimate–they command the respect of their peers.
We propose that Vice-Chancellors’ pay be capped at ten times that of the lowest paid member of staff [which would still be a salary of about £150,000]. A large difference in pay and incentives leads to a difference in interests: leaders disconnected from the university’s academics do not act in the interest of scholarship. We want to restore the idea of a university being a community of scholars who want to do scholarship. We want our universities run by people like us, not by a bunch of jumped-up Alan Sugars.
A new translation of
Unions and the dictatorship by Antonio Gramsci.
The international class struggle has culminated in the victory of the workers and peasants of two international proletariats. In Russia and in Hungary the workers and peasants have established the proletarian dictatorship and in Russia as much as in Hungary the dictatorship had to sustain a bitter battle not only against the bourgeois class, but also against the unions: the conflict between the dictatorship and the unions was thus one of the causes of the fall of the Hungarian soviet, since the unions, though they never openly attempted to overthrow the dictatorship, operated always as “splitting” organisms of the revolution and incessantly planted discontent and cowardice amongst the workers and the red soldiers. Even a rapid examination, of the reasons and the conditions of this conflict cannot fail to be useful in the revolutionary education of the masses, the which, if they must be convinced that the union is perhaps the most important proletarian organism of the communist revolution, because on it must be founded the socialization of industry, because it must create the conditions in which private enterprise disappears and cannot be reborn, must also be convinced of the necessity of creating, before the revolution, the psychological and objective conditions under which will be impossible every conflict and every division of power between the various organisms in which the struggle of the proletarian class against capitalism is embodied.
The class struggle has assumed in all the countries of Europe and of the world a strictly revolutionary character. The conception, which is due to the Third International, according to which the class struggle must be directed towards the installation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, has the upper hand over the democratic ideology and spreads irresistibly amongst the masses. The socialist parties adhere to the Third International or at least they adhere to the fundamental principles developed at the Moscow Congress; the unions on the other hand have remained faithful to “true democracy” and miss no occasion to induce or oblige the workers to declare themselves adversaries of the dictatorship and to refuse demonstrations of solidarity with the Russia of the soviets. This stance of the unions was rapidly overcome in Russia, since the development of the organizations of trade and industry was accompanied in parallel and with a more accelerated rhythm by the development of factory councils; it has instead eroded the base of proletarian power in Hungary, has caused in Germany great slaughters of communist workers and the birth of the Noske phenomenon, has caused in France the failure of the general strike of 20—21 July and the consolidation of the Clemenceau regime, has blocked until now every direct intervention of the English workers in the political struggle and threatens to sunder deeply and dangerously the proletarian forces in every country.
The socialist parties are acquiring ever more a definitely revolutionary and internationalist profile; the unions tend on the other hand to embody the theory (!) and the tactic of reformist opportunism and to become merely national organisms. From them is born an unsustainable state of affairs, a condition of permanent confusion and of chronic weakness for the working class, which increases the general imbalance of society and favours the sprouting of ferments of moral breakdown and of barbarization. The unions have organized workers according to principles of class struggle and have themselves been the first organic forms of this struggle. The organizers have always said that only the class struggle can bring the proletariat to its emancipation and that union organization has precisely the aim of suppressing individual profit and the exploitation of man by man, since it is proposed to eliminate the capitalist (the private proprietor) from the industrial process of production and to thus eliminate classes. But the unions cannot immediately bring about this aim and so they turn all their strength to the immediate aim of bettering the conditions of life of the proletariat, demanding higher salaries, reduced working hours, a body of social legislation. Movements followed movements, strikes, and the condition of life of the workers became relatively better. But all the results, all the victories of union action are set on the old basis: the principle of private property remains intact and strong, the order of capitalist production and the exploitation of man by man remain intact and thus are complicated in new forms. The eight hour day, the pay rise, the benefits of social legislation do not touch profit; the imbalances which union action immediately brings about in the test of profit recompose themselves and find a new accommodation in the play of free competition for the nations in the world economy such as England and Germany, in protectionism for the nations with a limited economy such as France and Italy. Capitalism, that is, directs to the amorphous national masses or to the colonial masses the increased general costs of industrial production.
Union action thus shows itself incapable of overcoming in its domain and with its means, capitalist society, shows itself incapable of leading the proletariat to its emancipation, of leading the proletariat to the achievement of the high and universal end which it had initially set itself.
According to syndicalist doctrines, unions should have educated workers in the management of production. Since the industrial unions, it was said, are an integral reflex of a particular industry, they will become the cadres of workers’ ability to manage that particular industry; the union roles will act to make possible a choice of the best workers, of the most studious, of the most intelligent, of the most apt to master the complex mechanism of production and of exchange. The worker leaders of the leather industry will be the most capable in managing that industry, and so on for the metal industry, for the book industry, etc.
Colossal illusion. The choice of the union leaders was never made on criteria of industrial competence, but of merely legal, bureaucratic or demagogic competence. And the more the organizations became larger, the more frequent became their intervention in the class struggle, the more widespread and deep their action, the more it became necessary to reduce the leading office to an office purely of administration and accounting, the more industrial technical capacity became a non-value and bureaucratic and commercial capacity took the upper hand. There was thus formed a real and proper caste of union functionaries and journalists, with a corps psychology absolutely in contrast to the psychology of the workers, which ended with assuming towards the working mass the same position as the governing bureaucracy towards the parliamentary state: it is the bureaucracy which reigns and governs.
The proletarian dictatorship wishes to suppress the order of capitalist production, wishes to suppress private property, because only thus can the exploitation of man by man be suppressed. The proletarian dictatorship wishes to suppress the difference of classes, wishes to suppress the class struggle, because only thus the social emancipation of the working class can be completed. To reach this end the Communist Party educates the proletariat to organize its class power, to make use of this armed power to dominate the bourgeois class and to set the conditions in which the exploiting class will be suppressed and cannot be reborn. The task of the Communist Party in the dictatorship is thus this: to organize powerfully and definitively the class of workers and peasants in a dominant class, check that all the organisms of the new state really develop revolutionary work, and break the ancient rights and relations inherent in the principle of private property.
But this action of destruction and control must be immediately accompanied by positive work of creation of production. If this work does not succeed, political strength is in vain, the dictatorship cannot hold: no society can hold without production, even less so the dictatorship which, establishing itself in conditions of economic breakdown produced by five years of war worsened by months and months of bourgeois armed terrorism, thus needs intense production.
And this is the vast and magnificent task which should be opened to the activity of the industrial unions. They precisely will have to begin the socialization, they will have to initiate a new order of production, in which the enterprise will be based not on the owner’s desire for wealth, but on the common interest of the social community which for every branch of industry comes out of the generic formlessness and solidifies in the corresponding workers’ union.
In the Hungarian soviet the unions absented themselves from all creative work. Politically the union functionaries placed continual obstacles before the dictatorship, constituting a state within the state, economically they remained inert: more than once the factories had to be socialized against the will of the unions. But the _leaders_ of the Hungarian organizations were limited spiritually, they had a bureaucratic-reformist psychology, and they continuously feared losing the power which until then they had exercised over the workers. Since the function for which the unions had developed until the dictatorship was inherent in the predominance of the bourgeois class, and since the functionaries did not have technical industrial capacity, they maintained the immaturity of the proletarian class in the direct management of production, they maintained “real” democracy, that is the maintenance of the bourgeoisie in its principal positions of the proletarian class, they wanted to perpetuate and worsen the era of the agreements, of the labour contracts, of social legislation, to be capable of making their competence valued. They wanted the international revolution … to be awaited, not being able to understand the international revolution was happening precisely in Hungary with the Hungarian revolution, in Russia with the Russian revolution, in all of Europe with the general strikes, with the military decrees, with the conditions of life made impossible for the working class by the consequences of war.