LastSuperpower blog
Frances Pearson is a Canadian author on Aboriginal issues there. Her blog, Offended by Offence, has a recent article “Developments in Australian Aboriginal Policy”. The article discusses the work of Noel Pearson and Peter Sutton.
It appears that the discussion here when we mentioned a review of Widdowson’s book “Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry” might have helped to connect Widdowson with Pearson’s work.
Jason Walsh has a review of a new book called Green Capitalism: Manufacturing Scarcity in an Age of Abundance at forth magazine. According to the review, the book says that business today tries to increase its profits not through greater production, but by creating artificial scarcity that enables prices to rise.
Of particular interest to Strange Times partisans is this quote from the review:
Heartfield’s argument will not be welcome either on the left or in green circles, which is a great pity. Today’s left has, for the most part, enthusiastically embraced the green agenda, seeing it as a useful vehicle for framing a critique of capitalist social relations. Unfortunately, much of the green critique of capitalism is misplaced, focussing on individuals’ consumption and favouring retrograde measures in production that cause real world rises is commodity prices, from inefficient organic farming at one end of the scale to carbon trading, which not only encourages lower productivity but also functions as a barrier to new entrants to industry, at the other.
The left’s opportunistic attachment to the green ideal is a world away from the productivist visions of the likes of Marx. In fact, it amounts to a renunciation of the left’s key goal. The left’s goal has traditionally been not the amelioration of poverty through management but the liberation of all humanity through massively increased efficiency. This vital point is now completely obscured and ill understood by the vast majority of people who call themselves left wing today. Confusing social liberalism and today’s social democracy with socialism is now so commonplace that the word socialism itself is all but meaningless.
Green Capitalism can be purchased through forth’s Amazon store if you click here. Comments are of course welcome here, but I’d also suggest visiting the original review and commenting there too.
These pictures are from yesterday’s Equal Love rally in support of same-sex marriage in Melbourne. You can also see a set of 100 photos from the rally here.
Sixteen tons
Whadaya get?
Another day older
And deeper in debt
Saint Peter don’t you call me
‘coz I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store.
‘Sixteen tons’ is one of many songs about alienation under capitalism. The song was recorded in the USA in 1946 by Merle Travis , whose father had worked in the mines of Kentucky. Merle’s father often used the phrase “another day older and deeper in debt” around the house. The song has been covered by many country artists, as well as blues and rock performers – my favourite version is by Eric Burdon. (Merle Travis’ version is here:
Check out Eric’s too:
The ‘sixteen tons’ refers to work, specifically in the coal mines during the era of the ‘truck system’ (under which workers in company towns were paid with vouchers recognized only by the local store rather than paid in cash). This may seem to date the song, even make it irrelevant to the current time. However, I think ‘sixteen tons’ can mean any kind of work people do for wages under a system in which wealth is socially produced yet privately appropriated. It’s certainly true that mechanization and automation continue to reduce the numbers of people doing such work; the kind of toil that my father always referred to in my youth as ‘dirty work’. (He worked in factories and used to nag me: “Son, study hard and go to uni and then you’ll be able to become a school teacher. Don’t end up in a dirty job.”).
Continue reading ‘ALIENATION: from Karl Marx to Merle Travis and beyond’
Please explain….. I just do not understand why a large section of the ruling class is so actively into the promotion of green hysteria. One could almost begin to suspect some sort of weird science fiction scenario involving alien mind-control, or something….
Just have a look at this ad. produced for children by the British government (at a cost of $10.7 million dollars!)
Note: I got the video from You Tube, where the person who posted it has added a plug throughout for the film “Not Evil, Just Wrong” …… this may make you heave a sigh of relief, and think it’s a spoof … but it’s not.
Brendan O’Neil has an article about it in today’s Australian, by the way: Panic Little Ones, it’s the Carbon Monster.
I’ve just had an article published at a new Irish political website, forth. The publisher, Jason Walsh, is a contributor to Spiked and has branched out on his own. The politics are broadly similar to Spiked, including the anti-nanny-statism and the belief that we live in an age where politicians offer not politics, but bland managerialism.
My article is about how Twitter and other social media could have been used more effectively by Westerners supporting the Iranian protesters in July this year. I emailed a comment replying to another article, “Politics for Twats“, which had very little good to say about Western use of Twitter, saying it was mostly just posturing.
I agreed that that is what had happened, but it didn’t have to be that way. Despite missing out on a big opportunity to show solidarity with the Iranian protesters in the streets, that failure wasn’t caused because people were on Twitter, but because people weren’t using it correctly:
Despite [the Western supporters’] failings there was one very heartening sign among people using Twitter: an enormous amount of Westerners instinctively supported the protesters. Of course, good feelings and undirected sympathy aren’t enough, but without that support agitators have nothing to work with. Twitterers who supported the Iranians protesting against their regime may not have done enough to support them but that is not the fault of social media. Instead, it’s the fault of poor understanding and preparation and lack of willingness to take action.
I suggest you have a look around forth, its focus on Irish politics is interesting as that rarely gets reported in Australia, despite our huge Irish-descended population. They accept comments by email at the moment, and they hope to have a proper commenting system in place soon, which is good – I think one of Spiked’s biggest disappointments is not having comments.
A Denial of Service attack appeared to take down Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s website and other official sites, for a few minutes tonight at around 7.20PM AEST.
The attack was announced on the website http://www.09-09-2009.org using the name of Anonymous, the loose disorganisation of Internet users which has previously acted against the Church of Scientology.
There has been some criticism of this tactic, notably by Michael Meloni at the “Somebody Think of the Children” website. Stephen Conroy, the Minister with the political job of selling the censorship plan, has used his favourite lie – that the censorship will only affect things that are already illegal, and Meloni takes this down very well.
Meloni’s argument against the illegal attacks is that they “will do nothing to help the fight against net censorship” and that “…such methods and demands suggest little understanding of how political policy is changed in Australia. Acts like this have the potential to unravel the hard work already done by many to try and end this policy”.
Continue reading ‘Anti-Censorship attack takes down Australian Government websites’
I think everyone will enjoy this (especially Arthur!!)
It’s 200 dancers taking commuters by surprise at the Central Station of Antwerp with a performance of “Do Re Mi”. (Apparently they had only rehearsed together twice!)
Taliban beating women
Browsing today’s edition of Crikey just now I came across a little piece from Guy Rundle on Afghanistan. This paragraph stood out:
The plain fact is that any eight year war in a foreign land has become a war against the people, a little Vietnam. Guerrilla insurgency is about moving like a fish in the water of the wider populace — thus obliging the occupying power to drain the pond (or, in the words of one of Melbourne’s addled pro-war Maoists — burnouts getting their jaded jollies from righteous killing, as usual — “draining the swamps where terror breeds”).
He’s clearly referring to an article by me which was published in The Australian, back in 2006: Drain the Swamps where Terror Breeds. (It’s sort of nice to know that he still feels irritated by it….)
Interestingly Rundle is on the record with an appalling call for a bloodbath in Iraq. These are his words just before the war began in 2003:
`…it may be best in the long run if Baghdad . . . resists and there is a slaughter of some duration”
Continue reading ‘Guy Rundle’s support for “righteous killing”’
I recently had a look around the Santa Fe Institute website in order to see whether anyone there was seriously attempting to apply complex systems research to understanding capitalism, and the current economic crisis. ( links below.)
My reason for taking a look is that SFI is a major centre of cross disciplinary research into complexity, and I was wondering whether anyone there was taking a serious look at capitalism from that perspective. I think that sort of work would have to be valuable, regardless of the fact that it would be commissioned by capitalists wanting to find a way to keep capitalism on its feet, rather than with the intent of demonstrating that the system is mortal.
The reason that “The Austrians” do have a certain appeal, relative to the fundamentally mechanistic approach of the Keynsians, and most of the neo-classical economists is that they have some idea that disequilibrium is an intrinsic part of capitalism. What they just can’t comprehend is the idea that this very disequilibrium (and associated dynamism) can’t help but drive the system to a whole new level in which the continued ownership of the means of production will become something which very clearly stands in the way of what excites them about capitalism.
However, although we can say this, there is still a large amount of hand waving involved (especially when I say it!). In order to engage in serious debate with people who are in favour of progress but see capitalism as the best driver of this, we need to be able to engage in detailed argument at a much higher level.
Contrary to the straw man view of socialism which the Austrians have no great difficult in knocking down, I think we need to argue that socialism would not be a system without disequilibrium . Although I just don’t know enough to be able to produce a coherent account of how a socialist economy would actually work, philosophically I’m of the view that any system in permanent equilibrium would have to be a stagnating one. That of course is exactly the basis of the economic attack on socialism from the Austrians …. that it wouldn’t work because it would be a clunky top-down system driven by a rigid central plan, rather than a living, dynamic one.
The Instuture of Public Affairs has just brought out a paper heroically entitled “A Real Education Revolution: Options for voucher funding reform“. However, I am not sure that they are serious.
They appear to be put off by the cost of a universal scheme that would cost more than present funding if it were to be sufficient to ensure more or less free education and provide those currently funding their kids with the same entitlement.
There is no discussion of the whole issue of how you would create alternatives to choose from. This would involve more private schools and/or greater autonomy for government schools.
Instead they are focusing on groups with special needs – aborigines, the disabled and the poor. Indigenous students would be able to get out of isolated and toxic communities. The voucher would cover board as well as any school fees. With the disabled it would allow private schools to compete better with the public ones.
I am not sure how a voucher for poor students would work. You would need to determine eligibility to start with. As far as I can see the benefits from the scheme would have to come from a marginal shift in students forcing schools to smarten up their act. I don’t know how realistic that is.
There is some discussion of the paper at a number of libertarian blogs. These include , Catallaxy, Andrew Norton and the paper’s author, Julie Novak.
The current (July 26) edition of the Economist has a special report called “Waking from its sleep, a report on the Arab world”.
Also check out the leader article.
I have only had a glance but it looks rather informative and seems to get some things right.
Here’s a poem called ‘The future is bright… the road is hard’. I’ve performed it at a ‘poetry slam’ but, no, I won’t be giving up my day job!
Bigger version of map here
I was struck by an announcement from the World Bank about a book called Awakening Africa’s Sleeping Giant: Prospects for Commercial Agriculture in the Guinea Savannah Zone and Beyond that they have co-authored with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization
They are basically saying that if Sub-Saharan Africa can do in the vast Guinea Savannah zone what Brazil has done in the Cerrado and Thailand in its Northeast Region, it can vastly increase agricultural production.
Shown in yellow on the map, it is comparable in size to the EU, or half of Australia, Canada or the 48 States. Currently only about 10 per cent is used to grow crops. (source)
Agriculture has to expand dramatically if they are to become a net exporter of agricultural products while managing with a population that is expected to increase from 800 million to 1.5 billion before stabilizing later this century.
To me that looks like the need for a fivefold increase in output. There would have to be at least a two-fold increase in per capita food consumption if the people of the region are to chow down much like everyone else. Then they have to reverse their current position as a net importer.
Political and economic conditions will dictate the pace of this and other development in the continent. We can expect the greens and “NGOs” to run interference.
There is no free pdf version of the book. This is typical of the World Bank and UN agencies.
Ever wondered why it’s not possible to use a Kindle in Australia or why there is no branch of Amazon here? It’s because the Australian publishing industry is protected (it’s 70% foreign owned, anyhow … I’ll leave that to one side). It’s also why the books (especially non fiction and text books) cost so much here, relative to the rest of the world.
Fortuntely a recent Productivity Commission Report has recommended that restrictions on the parallel importing of books be reduced. 
The restriction on “parallel book importing” is the mechanism which gives Australia based publishers an effective monopoly on the book market. In a nutshell, any book which is physically published here cannot be imported by local bookshops. This includes all books, not only those by Australian authors. So effectively, bookshops are not permitted to purchase books at the cheapest price possible, and of course this means that there is a severe lack of competition. (And in any case books published here will be more expensive to produce, simply because of smaller print runs).
Naturally the publishing industry is up in arms about it and has managed to recruit a slew of Australian authors to the cause. The line they’ve swallowed is that this will be the death of the Australian writer, our kids will never come across Snugglepot and Cuddlepie again, we’ll be swallowed up foreign culture, this is an attack by neo-liberal free-marketism on everything we hold dear.
Continue reading ‘Cheaper books? But what about Snugglepot and Cuddlepie??’
Recent Comments