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Getting it wrong

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.

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Vice-Chancellors’ pay

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.

 

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Gramsci: Unions and the dictatorship

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.

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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.