Life under Capitalism

Most workers would rather bugger off today then tomorrow

Life under Capitalism, UK politics
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Found at Pere Le Brun, this offensively stupid quote by Iain Duncan Smith:

Most workers want to work on when they reach 65, Iain Duncan Smith claimed yesterday. He insisted that higher life expectancy meant people should – and usually want – to work for longer before taking their pension. The Work and Pensions Secretary made the extraordinary claim on the eve of unveiling reforms that could push the retirement age beyond 70.

It’s the same old tired propaganda any government puts out when they’re wanting to fiddle with pension ages: people like to work and want to work longer than they’re allowed to. Usually you then get some wanker complaining about age discrimination because he’s forced to retire at age sixtyfive and he would like to play at being a g.p./lawyer/accountant for a few years longer. Oddly enough you never get a builder saying the same…

But honestly how many people really want to continue to do their jobs if it’s not necessary to survive? I know that if I could retire now and still get the same money I earn, I would take that offer in a heart beat. And I don’t think I’m the only one. Work is a necessary evil and even with our current supposedly too low a retirement age of sixtyfive, on average you’ll have worked and gone to school some sixty years, starting with kindergarten at age five. For the overwhelming majority of people that’s long enough, if not too long.

March 26

Life under Capitalism, Socialism, Tories, UK elections, Unions
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Lenny gets to the heart of things with what conclusion should be drawn from the march:

It was something that I haven’t really seen en masse before. It was something that some people had written off. They said was a bit old hat, doomed to a slow, dwindling death, if it even really existed. It was the working class. Not the working class in the shitty, nostalgic, culturally regressive sense that people invoke, not the deus ex machina mobilised to berate black people and gays for being too assertive of their legitimate rights. It was the working class as an agent of its own interests; it was a class for itself. It was the labour movement, every bit the multicultural entity that Cameron reviles. And that movement, comprising several millions of people, having lain dormant for years, is now looking decidedly up for a fight. If you’re a socialist in one of those workplaces on Monday morning, you should have an easier job arguing for militant strike action now, because people now know what they could not be sure of before: that we are many, and they are few.

Jamie puts the violence and necklace clutching about it in perspective:

sign reads: for every cut I will teabag a Tory

I suppose there’ll be a lot of angst about the violence from fringe elements. There already seems to be an attempt to conflate it with UK Uncut’s various political comedy stunts off the line of march. I don’t think it will make much difference to public opinion on the issue itself. The Poll tax demo back in 1990 was the Gordon Riots in comparison to anything that happened today, but that didn’t change anyone’s mind; if anything it helped convince the government that Thatcher’s time was up, so one up there for the Great British street fighting man. And opposition to the government’s education polcies actually increased after that young fool threw a fire extinguisher off the roof of Tory Party hq and the Duchess of Cornwall endured a light goosing.

Flickr used bogus copyright to censor the Egyptian revolution

Internet, Life under Capitalism, Real Life Revolutions
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Egyptian blogger 3arabawy has done sterling service in documenting the Egyptian revolution over the past few months, putting up thousands of essential pictures both taken by him and other Egyptian photographers. There’s just one problem: Flickr’s guidelines says you cannot put up photograps you yourself haven’t taken and that’s why they’re disabling his account. Never mind that thousands of other Flickr users — including president Obama — do the same and are not interfered with, never mind that 3arabawy has permission from the original photographers, rules are rules and hence the account is disabled. As the Flickr p.r. flacks point out, they could’ve deleted the account outright but wanted to be reasonable about it. (Not that this wasn’t an implied threat if 3arabawy would continue to complain of course). Plenty of people in the thread are also very helpfully explaining why Flickr was right and why violating house rules is so much more important than chronicling the Egyptian revolution and beside, you’re just vain and egocentric.

What bugs me is that Flickr seems to enforce its terms of service much more strictly when it concerns political activists, punishing them for supposed bad behaviour not used against “normal” users. The rule that you cannot post pictures you haven’t made yourself normally has only been used to swat obvious spammers stealing pictures from e.g. the NYT or something, not people who upload their mum’s family album. I suspect that Yahoo/Flickr, like most Big Business, is allergic to everything political, its basic instinct to delete anything controversial. It’s a painful reminder for all political activists not to put their faith in the cloud; while it’s easy, cheap and the best way to quickly spread news, using a commercial service like Flickr always makes you vulnerable to censorship. And it’s not just Flickr, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and any other popular “web 2.0” service have proven to be vulnerable to political pressure, whether external or self imposed.

That’s the fundamental paradox for political activist using the cloud/web 2.0 services: you need to use them if you want people to pay attention, yet using a commercial service like Flickr rather than creating your own makes you vulnerable to its owners. You’re using it on sufferance.

That LSE – Khadaffi scandal

Life under Capitalism, Real Life Revolutions, Sleaze, UK politics
Published on 2 Comments on That LSE – Khadaffi scandal

Justin puts it in perspective:

So, we’re all jolly cross at the London School of Economics for taking Gaddafi’s cash. We’re less cross (if at all) at the arms trade for doing the same. I haven’t heard any calls for the head of BAE Systems to resign, for instance. After all, BAE Systems were only flogging anti-tank missiles while the LSE were flogging management training, the bastards.

Which is fair enough, but when this sentiment mutates into something like what Charli Carpenter argues:

The graduation of a plagiarist raises my eyebrows (as you might guess) but as recent discussions have suggested going easy on academic dishonesty is hardly a problem limited to LSE. And simply the choice to make good-faith engagements with authoritarian elites or their children should not be treated, in hind-sight, as evidence of collusion.

Then methinks you’re protesting too much. If getting easy PH.Ds for the children of dictators as part of a general buttering up for the purpose of getting lots and lots of arms and other sales for British industry is not collusion, what is? Why should the LSE “make good-faith engagements with authoritarian elites”9or their children) in the first place? What does that even mean?

From where I’m sitting it’s clear the LSE let itself be used in a general campaign to butter up Khadaffi so that he would buy loads and loads of weapons and other equipment from British industry while also allowing Khadaffi to improve his own p.r. image through that research fund his son set up at the LSE. Now it’s reaping the whirlwind of that decision to get in bed with a dictator. That this is s.o.p. for most or even all UK elite universities does not make it right. It’s hard to feel sorry for them and it’s no use to bray about “politics of the mob” when you’re so clearly in the wrong, even if others were just as wrong or more so. That just means there are others that need to make amends too. No gangster’s pal ever won his trial by pointing out others were friends with Capone as well.

More generally, this attitude that it’s alright to do business with dictators as long as they’re our dictators is why the Middle East has never managed to become free: because our governments, businesses and universities always priviledged money over morality. It no longer suffices to argue that we should be realistic and not blame people for getting into bed with dicators because there was no alternative: the people of Egypt, Libya and Tunesia have shown us otherwise.