Most of us do useless work

Life under Capitalism, socialism
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Most white collar workers are useless:

I’ve been fond of saying for a while now that one of our dirty economic secrets is how little actual work is done by the fairly well-paid, so-called white collar worker, myself included. IOZ talks about middle management, that layer of general ineptitude and uselessness one encounters virtually everywhere. But in my experience, large swaths of office workers have relatively little to do (whereas others, I am well aware, work very long hours indeed). Of course, this is because there is relatively little that really needs to be done. The jobs that most of us have are utterly unnecessary. But we have to be kept working, or at work, don’t we? Heaven forbid we have time to ourselves, without need to worry that someone is looking, and without need to worry that we’ll starve. Meanwhile, that work that is necessary (which is generally not found in an office) could easily be spread around, so that no one would be over-worked or under-compensated.

But surely office work must be necessary, as every civilisation seems to generate so much of it…

More to the point, that is one of the key points of socialism, isn’t it? The idea that “to each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities”, to make a honest, fair division of labour benefiting everybody by sharing the fruits of our shared labour while nobody has to be over or underworked. In our current capitalist society surplus labour is of course turned into profit:

More generally – Tronti and the workerists argued – capitalist development is parasitic on workers’ intelligence and creativity, which they use in the refusal of work. You get the job done with half an hour to spare and sneak off for a fag; your employer cuts your working day by half an hour and cuts your pay accordingly. Result: profit. You do eight hours’ work in six hours; your employer increases your workload by 33%. Result: profit.

This looks to us like the normal, expected state of affairs because we’ve grown with it, never seeing the complexity of the system that makes this possible, let alone any alternative to it. Yet we did not always live this way, nor do we need to continue to do so.

The killing of Theo van Gogh – five years on

Islamophobia
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On this day five years ago Theo van Gogh was shot and killed by Mohammed B, in Holland’s first (and so far, only) Islamist terror attack. At this late date I’m not sure I still stand entirely by what I wrote at the time, as I tried to push back somewhat too hard against an unrelenting stream of Islamophobia that his murder unleashed. I tried to explain what might have driven van Gogh’s murderer at a time when his motivations were still far from clear, as well as why his murder didn’t make van Gogh into a free speech martyr. Looking back I came on too strong and my point was lost in te confusion.

But I still believe it is wrong to call van Gogh a martyr of free speech. His killing was a political deed, intended as a a warning and threat to those Mohammed B. saw as enemies of Islam, but this in itself is not enough to make him a martyr, just like John Lennon wasn’t made a martyr when he was murdered by a deranged fan. Van Gogh never had to fear state prosecution, or social ostracation for his views, no damage to his career. That one random nut decided he needed killing therefore did not turn him retrospectively into a martyr.

This myth however has served as a focal point for Dutch Islamophobia, confirming the supposed dangers Islam offers to our liberal, tolerant society. Van Gogh’s murder shows the dangers of allowing this alien philosophy to grow unchallenged, showing the need for strict measures to make sure Muslims living in the Netherlands fully share our values — or leave the country. He provided the excuse for all sorts of people to let loose their id, all in the name of freedom of speech, aimed at a part of the Dutch population increasingly seen as alien and unbelonging by a growing segment of (white) voters. It was only after van Gogh’s murder that Islamophobia found its official voice in Geerd Wilders’ PVV, which since than has grown larger and larger, while the established parties seem to have no answer to its rightwing populism, waffling between joining in and condemning it.

A recent and telling example is how the current social democratic minister for integration, Eberhard van der Laan, who today took a strong stance against Wilders by calling his party “dangerous”, while alos having been in the news last week for feeling “uncomfortable” about Turkish and Moroccan people living in council housing while saving up for a house in Turkey or Morocco to retire to — real Dutch people never buy houses in Spain to spent their winters in, apparantly. This sort of me-tooish populism helps legitimise Wilders, while the attacks on him make him look the victim of the “Den Haag establishment” as well as the only honest man there, not changing his opinion ever other day.

Van Gogh’s murder accelerated an already present tendency towards intolerance in the Netherlands, fetishised the idea of free speech as being as rude as you want to without consequences, paved the way for the PVV to quite possibly be the largest party at the next elections, while setting back any serious attempts to deal with integration problems. It may therefore have been the most important political event in the country’s recent political history.

Books read October

books and books review, posts interesting only to me
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Slightly up from September, but there’s no way I’ll equal last years record of 150 books read.

Northern Shores — Alan Palmer
An attempt to write a comprehensive history of the Baltic, from prehistory to contemporary times. It didn’t entirely succeed, as some parts of the book lose the focus on the Baltic as a whole, instead telling the histories of the countries surrounding it in turn, losing the commonality.

Industrial Evolution — Through the Eighties with Cabaret Voltaire — Mick Fish
Is it just me, or did most of the more interesting music scenes in the late seventies, early eighties in the UK were in dying industrial towns? Liverpool with the Teardrops and Echo and the Bunnymen and such, Manchester with the whole Factory scene and Sheffield, with Cabaret Voltaire and the Human League. Mick Fish was a drug addled, boozed up hanger-on there, having a job in a London council garbage dump, spending his weekends in Sheffield, but he doesn’t half write funny and entertainingly.

Buried Treasure — Victoria Finlay
An interesting idea, to look at nine different sorts of jewels, ranked according to the Mohs scale, but unfortunately it’s all a bit shallow, more about Finlay’s travels to far, exotic places in search of these gems, rather than about the gems themselves.

The Constants of Nature — John D. Barrow
One of the greatest problems is astrophysics is the existence of various physical constants, like the speed of light, the gravitational constant and the fine structure constant, whose values have all been observed but which cannot be predicted from theory. They might just random properties of the universe we live in, something with which physicists are never comfortable with, or they may be something more our current science cannot explain yet. This book tries to explain this problem to a lay audience and did it well, though it is math heavy and sometimes neglects to explain its maths.

The Stars my Destination — Alfred Bester
After a series of disappointing science fiction books, I wanted to read something good. This was just the ticket.

Globalhead — Bruce Sterling
A collection of short stories, most written while the eighties turned into the nineties, the Cold War ended and nobody knew what would happen afterwards yet.

The Extravagant Universe — Robert P. Kirshner
An excellent overview of recent developments (well, 2002) in cosmology, for once written by an astronomer rather than an astrophysicist. The emphasis is on how supernovea have been used to drive research into whether or not we are living in an ever expanding universe, one that is going to rebound eventually or one that’s right on the edge.

Unseem Academicals — Terry Pratchett
The latest Discworld novel, the first one to be dictated, rather than written, after Terry was diagnosed with Alzheimers. It’s good as any of them: this time it’s all about football.

The Instrumentality of Mankind — Cordwainer Smith
Back in the seventies Ballantine/Del Rey collected all of Cordwainer Smith’s fiction in four volumes. This is the last one, collecting all the odds and ends that didn’t fit elsewhere. Luckily, Smith’s odds and ends are better than many a writer’s best stories.

Socialist unity considered irrelevant

British left
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Dave’s Part on an all too common occurrence, as three socialist parties will stand in the Glasgow North East by-election:

The picture was complicated in 2005, as former Labour MP Michael Martin sought election as Speaker of the House of Commons. In accordance with convention, the ballot paper did not describe him as Labour, and neither the Tories nor the Lib Dems ran against him.

To general astonishment, the Socialist Labour Party secured 14.2%, an all-time high for the Scargillites, almost certainly thanks to confusion on the part of the electorate. The SSP tally came to an additional 4.9%.

[…]

But nothing can excuse the wilful display of light-mindedness the division flags up in neon lights to potentially sympathetic punters, just months ahead of a general election. Credible this is not.

The far left, both sides of the border, should remember that until it starts taking itself seriously, there is no reason why anyone else should do so.

That there will be three socialist parties with broadly the same ideology and policies standing in this by-election is silly, but it’s not the cause, nor even a sympton, of the socialist left’s irrelevance in UK politics. In fact, it’s the obsession with unity that shows how much the left has declined in the past three decades. Healthy parties do not bother with alliances and bpopular fronts; they rely on their own strengths. And as each of the various initiatives undertaken in the last ten years — Socialist Alliance, Respect, the Campaign for a New Workers Party etc — they don’t work: little electorial succes, no real gain in membership or activists and infighting soon ruining all of them. The most succesful of these projects is the SSP, which did go from an electorial alliance to being a real party, only to be nobbed by the whole Tommy Sheridan affair.

The differences on the left, between social democrats and socialists, socialists and communists, communists and trotskyists have alwas been there but didn’t matter when the left was healthy. If the left makes a turnaround it won’t be through desperate unity projects, but through hard slog and by confronting the realities of 21st century Britain. Some group or party will get it right, go their own way and become “the next Labour party” — maybe even the Labour party itself.

Photographic

Music, video
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It struck me, when this song came up on the Ipod, that nobody born after about 1989 or so will understand the stalkeriffic lyrics about “bright lights – dark room”, or films like Blow-up. That whole idea of taking a limited number of pictures and then having to take them home to develop them and be surprised at what you photographed is gone, so the plot of those sorts of movies cannot happen anymore. Not a novel observation, of course, but a good excuse to put that video up.