Freedom: a couple of comments

Freedom needs to be considered in a social context for it to be fully meaningful.

At the core of the notion of freedom is personal is choice and absence of restraint, but there are three other ingredients to freedom that need to be considered.

First, freedom occurs in a social context, so the freedom of one person can be the unfreedom of another. (My right to play my piano against your right to quiet enjoyment of your property) To resolve this problem, we need the help of J. S. Mill’s rule that one has the maximum amount of liberty consistent with everyone else having the same freedom.

Second, the amount of freedom and the degree of choice one has is dependent on the level of development of society and the resources (wealth, education) available to its citizens. Poverty and ignorance restrict choice and therefore freedom.

Finally, collectives never enjoy freedom, individuals do, so the freedom of every individual counts. We therefore judge the level of freedom in society not by the average, but by the amount enjoyed by the person with the least freedom.

Dialectics Explained Simply

In Marxism the concept of dialectics is often complicated and mystified. It needs stating simply.

Dialectical theory describes and explains the development of systems which exist in the world. Here I will try to explain dialectics as a conceptual tool for understanding society.

What society is: a sketch map

To start, we have to answer another question: what is society? For Marxists – and indeed most other sociologists – society is conceived as a system made up of a complex network of interactive causes and effects. A change in any one element in the social system affects the others. For instance, a rise in unemployment causes an increase crime, which in turn changes the role of police, which has further effects, and so on.

If society is thought of as containing all the causes of change in society, then it follows that change originates from within the social system itself. In other words, at any given point, society contains within itself tensions and pressures (often called contradictions) which are the cause of social change. And when a new situation has established itself, there are yet again new tensions and pressures which lead to further social change, and so on.

A metaphor for understanding all of this is to see society as a huge piece of fungus, constantly changing over time because of developments from within.

Dialectics

The traditional explanation of dialectical change (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) is only a linguistic re-organisation of the points above. The argument is like this. Everything in a social system at any point in time is either a something (i.e. a thesis) or not that thing (i.e. its antitheses). As a result of the interaction of thesis and antithesis a new situation in society (i.e. synthesis) emerges for which the original thesis and antithesis have interacted and merged.

I think, however, that the theory of dialectics is better thought of as a summary or abstraction of the rules for understanding change in a social system. Dialectical analysis identifies pairs of social elements which co-exist, are dependent on one another and which interact with each other. Let us take an example.

Human beings and nature. We can clearly conceptualise everything that exists as either human beings or as nature minus human beings. We cannot imagine society without people, nor could we have a society without things (food, cupboards, water, etc). Nature affects us and we affect nature through building dams, houses, etc. Thus, it is said that the relationship between human beings and nature is dialectical.

Marxists in their analysis do not identify dialectical pairs (i.e. theses and antitheses) on an arbitrary basis, nor do they see the direction of historical change as entirely arbitrary or accidental, but what drives history forward is beyond the scope of this discussion.

To sum up, a dialectical analysis of society recognises that social change comes from tensions or pressures within the existing state of things. And when a new state of affairs has been created, then that too is subject to change for the same reason. When explained like this, dialectical theory can be seen as something which is almost certainly correct, but if not linked to other theories and observations, it is not very revealing.

Why dialectics is a dirty word

The theory of dialectics provides a number of valuable observations about the functioning of a any living system - be it the social system, or of the cosmos itself. But during the years of historical communism 1917-89, and particularly during the years of Joseph Stalin’s rule from the end of the 1920s till his death in 1953, dialectics was misused to explain and justify the decisions and dogmas of the Communist Parties in the World. After that the dialectical baby was thrown out with the Stalinist bathwater and people were reluctant to use the term.

In many instances, to avoid summoning up prejudice unnecessarily, the use of the term interaction will effectively substitute for dialectical; and, in addition, it is more easily understood. Of course they are not quite the same: dialectics implies a whole theory, whereas interaction merely means that X affects Y and vice versa.

Hot Potato Issues

The accepted wisdom around certain issues is so strong that that one can incur criticism merely by discussing them.

Hot potato issues are a fact of life. Antisemitism is one; rape is another. Basically there is widely accepted core discourse on the issue, which everybody accepts, save a small extreme fringe. Conflict arises when someone talks about the issue, accepting the socially accepted facts and principles, but adds details, probes the logic of argument and/or makes comparison with something else. The cry immediately goes up that the commentator is relativising, and therefore undermining and attacking the principle or questioning the facts.

Hot potato issues are often kept hot for political reasons, reputable or disreputable. But the best way of probing these issues politically is not always to jump in where angels fear to tread.

The working class and socialist consciousness

Capitalism can, but does not inevitably, produce either class or socialist consciousness

There is debate among the left today about the passivity of ordinary working people in Britain and elsewhere in the face of mushrooming inequality and general economic insecurity. But what, if anything, do developments tell us about working class and socialist consciousness?

In the last two centuries, the development of capitalism in western Europe produced the preconditions for class consciousness, i.e. a relatively homogenous geographically-stable proletariat which experienced a shared sense of its own exploitation and oppression. The working class - if here understood to be all those who live by selling their labour power - came to comprise a majority of the population; and a majority of those who were working class saw themselves as such.

Class consciousness is a necessary but an insufficient condition for socialist (or even social democratic) consciousness: if self-recognition of class were all that were needed, then socialism would have been successfully achieved in Western Europe and in North America. What went wrong?

Marx was right to suggest that capitalism produced within itself the seeds (i.e. the potential) for its own destruction (i.e. a vast exploited working class with an interest in transforming the system), but was wrong in his prediction that proletarian concentration, homogenisation and universal impoverishment would (i) continue uninterrupted as an sociological fact, and (ii) that – even if it did – it would of itself lead to socialist consciousness. History has taught us otherwise.

The movement for social progress - whether for amelioration of conditions within capitalism or for the overthrow of capitalism altogether - is political. The production and reception of political ideas and practices are indeed influenced in major part by the class structure, but politics is not a mere reflection of class structure. Political structures and systems of ideas exist to some extent independently of class relations, have their own history and rhythms of development.

Looking at Britain in the last decades, it seems that the development of the working class, in all its economic and political aspects, can facilitate socialist consciousness, as it did in Britain in the last century up until the 1970s (Hobsbawm: The Forward March of Labour Halted). Or capitalist development can undermine both class and socialist consciousness in the working class, as has happened under market fundamentalism which has held sway from the 1980s. The actual situation depends on a combination of economic, political and ideological factors, which is why the answers are always going to be found in analysis not dogma.

The Myth of Marxist Ethics

Marx's achievement was in constructing a new way of understanding and interpreting history, not in the discovering a new ethics.

I would argue that there is no such thing – any more than there is a Newtonian ethics or Freudian ethics.

Marx’s achievement was the discovery of historical materialism: i.e. the development of conceptual tools which help us comprehend human history. And Marx himself was of course the first to undertake such studies within historical materialism. The construction of statements of fact which result from these studies cannot of themselves create ‘ought’ value statements.

Now of course Marx himself was passionately associated with a particular politics: namely that of moving towards a communist society, an ideal which was already formulated in Enlightenment thinking. Yet there is no theoretical originality in this: all Marx did was to take the results of his sociological analysis and argue: if communism is to be achieved then X, Y and Z ought to be done and happily for him what ought to be done was what he thought was actually happening in nineteenth century society. Hence Marxist politics was born, which involved an interesting interrelation between what is and what ought to be done.

Marxist politics has however re-entered historical materialism in one sense: the choice of value-laden terminology to describe factual states of affairs. For instance, the more value neutral concept extraction of surplus value is referred to by the value-laden term exploitation, implying that the extraction of surplus value, a fact of capitalism, is morally wrong.

Islamophobia is not a modern day Anti-Semitism

More than once I have heard it said, “Islamophobia is the new Anti-Semitism” It is not: the two phenomena are characterised to a far greater extent by their differences than by their similarities.

What is meant by the two terms? Islamophobia can be defined as political disapproval of Islam; and anti-Semitism as political disapproval of Jews. In political discourse both terms are used pejoratively, i.e. as negative labels to apply to attitudes or behaviour, but for the purpose of this piece of writing, I will use them simply as descriptive concepts.

Disapproval of Islam is opposition to a religion. A religion is a set of alleged facts about how the world is and a system of beliefs about how it ought to be. Opposing Islam is not of itself racist as Muslims may be of any racial background. People labelled as Islamophobic are from both the left and right.

The left criticise Islam because many of it adherents make demands for changes in the rules that govern society. These demands typically entail the subordination of women and imposing restrictions on the freedom of expression. The political right, on the other hand, attack Islam for entirely different reasons: they dislike a separate unintergrated group living in "their" society.

The left and the right differ on another point. The left criticises Islam, not because it is Islam per se, but because its supporters seek to diminish political and social freedom. The left levels the same opposition against against similar illiberal and intolerant social demands by other religions, particularly fundamental Christianity. The right however endorses the demands made on society by the Christian religion, but reject those of Islam.

Anti-Semitism, a movement of Europe's political right, is hostility to Jews on account their ethnic origin. The attack on Jews in the 1930s in Western Europe was not based on the contents of Judaism or any demands that Judaism made on society (the majority of Jews were atheistic, non-observant or had converted to Christianity), but on the "threat" of an "alien" element that had “infiltrated” into society and was “polluting” it from within. Anti-Semitism was a rejection of assimilation by Jews into gentile society.

In other words, the attack by the right on Jews was for successful assimilation into society, while the attack on Islam is for separateness. The common thread in right-wing thinking is dislike of sharing living space with ethnic groups other than their own, whether those groups be assimilated or not.

In conclusion, we can say that apart from notions of hatred, disapproval and/or criticism, Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism have nothing in common. To conflate the two is simply wrong.

Crises: the thirty year rule

By strange coincidence system-changing crises tend to happen every thirty years.

A crisis in a politico-economic system is when the practices, behaviour and structures that have allowed the system to reproduce itself are no longer comfortably able to do so. Crises may eventually resolve themselves in the restoration of the current system, or they may lead to the breakdown of the existing system and the establishment of a new state of affairs. The tricky thing is to identify a crisis while it is happening; often, we are only able to identify crises after the event.

Those of us living in the advanced capitalist countries have seen only one system-changing crisis in the period since the Second World War, namely in 1973-80 when the Keynesian political, economic and social consensus - the so-called thirty post-war golden years of growing prosperity - gave way to market fundamentalism in the US, Britain and less dramatically and more slowly in continental Europe.

Are the thirty years of market fundamentalism (1980-2010) coming to an end? Well, if they are, what does the next epoch look like? It's very hard to tell.

Is it merely coincidence that these historical periodisations last thirty years? For instance the years of catastrophe in the mid-twentieth century (1914-1945) also lasted thirty odd years, as did, roughly, the age of imperial monopoly capitalism (1880s-1914).


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Historical Materialism: a short working definition

Historical materialism, the theory of society developed by Karl Marx (1818-83), needs a clear practical definition.

Historical materialism is a theory about and a method of studying human society. In the first instance, it is a theory about the workings of society as a whole; i.e. it is a macro theory. Its starting point is that human beings live on the planet Earth, are part of the Earth and extract the means to life from the Earth. Human beings live socially: i.e. not as Robinson Crusoes, but in society. They produce and reproduce their lives socially. Historical materialism is a theory of technique: i.e. it asserts that how we socially produce the means to life, and how we have historically produced the means to life, determines what we are as a society.

Historical materialism is an inclusive, not an exclusive science. Aspects of life are also governed by geography, human physiology, psychology, etc. These sciences are related to and are enriched by historical materialism, but are not deducible from it. Historical materialism is a macro-sociology; i.e a study of human behaviour in the whole of society.

Historical materialism stresses history because what exists today is the result of the past. It stresses materialism because at root human society is the complex result of people producing the means to life from nature. Some people produce but everybody lives from what is produced. What people think they are doing and the ideas that they have in their heads are important in determining what happens, but are necessarily secondary to what actually is happening.

Historical materialism thus recognises the basis of human existence as a collective production of society from nature in a process which develops over time. This fundamental point plays two roles in the further development of historical materialism.

First, it is a core statement of meaning about what society and human existence is.

Second, it provides the first tool for viewing the world, asking research questions and developing concepts to interpret and understand the social world.


Observations underlying historical materialism

Moving beyond the short working definition above, historical materialism can be seen to draw on three simple observations from human history. These should be spelled out.

First, as stated above, human history is the result of humans beings socially working on nature to produce the means to life. In that sense, humans aren’t different from other gregarious creatures like ants or bees. But what makes human society unique is twofold: first, human beings get better at conquering the natural world by means of developing their technology and skills, and in so doing change not only nature (e.g. the building of dams) but also change the kinds of lives they live. Second, human beings are unique in having the ability to think about, reflect on and express in language, art, music, etc. what they are doing and what they think and feel about it. Hence, for instance, the theory of historical materialism itself.

Second, all hitherto existing society has been characterised by a division of labour. Those divisions may stem from efficiency considerations (e.g. electricians not doing the work of plumbers and vice versa), cultural roles (e.g. men’s work, women’s work) or from different access to wealth and income, (e.g. factory worker, leisured gentleman). As society changes, so the divisions of labour change.

Third, all human society is based on a scarcity, or perceived scarcity, of desired things, such as money, wealth in the form of material assets, status and power. Therefore, there is a struggle for these things, which means that the principles governing their allocation are usually a matter of dispute.


The labour theory of value

The labour theory of value is an integral part of historical materialism, and needs to be stated in such a way that it applies to all human history, not just to capitalism. And for the sake of easy comprehension, the theory should be explained without mathematics.

The core idea is simple. Most of the things which we need in order to live are the products of human labour, e.g. food clothes, houses. That is, of course, not true for everything; for instance the air we breath is available without any effort. But crucially, we cannot live without those products which can only result from human labour; and that is true even in modern times when many products are manufactured by machines, because those machines have to be built and maintained by human labour.

It is a observable fact that throughout history the vast majority of people spend a huge part of their lives involved directly or indirectly in the making of useful products - or else are engaged in services to support that production. But by contrast only a minority own and control what is produced and the means of producing it, and this minority hugely benefits as a result.

In the terminology adopted by Marx, the value of a good is equal to the amount of labour time that went into making it. (And here it is vital to avoid a misunderstanding: do not confuse the value of a good in the Marxist sense with its market price because the price of a good is determined by several factors, not just the labour time that went into making it.) Some of the value resulting from produced goods is given to those involved in its production; another part (the so-called surplus value) is given to people who have legal ownership or other rights over the product, but who did not participate in the work to produce it - the landlord, factory owner, banker, etc. The higher the proportion of surplus value, the greater the level of exploitation.

The terms value, surplus value and exploitation should be understood as technical expressions, and do not always mean the same as they do in everyday speech.


The superstructure

Not everything that happens in society is directly about economic production, distribution and exchange. What lies outside the economy is termed the superstructure because, using a spatial metaphor, non-economic institutions and activities are seen as being located on top of the economic base. The superstructure consists of two elements: organisations and ideas.

Organisations, sets of relations between people, include governments, militaries, churches, schools, pressure groups, etc. Of course some organisations may be mainly based in the economy, for instance multi-national companies, but others less so, and some hardly at all. Organisations mould people’s ways of thinking and help form their identities and therefore play a key role in determining what people do and what happens in society.

Ideas include the whole way in which people see the world, both in terms of how the world is and how it ought to be. Some ideas, for instance the view that the world is round, are held by almost everybody, while other ideas are held by some but not all of the people. Like for organisations, some ideas concern the economy, for instance marketing, while others are not related or are more distantly related.

A word of caution should be introduced here. The two superstructural elements, organisations and ideas, are interconnected. Ideas are promoted and articulated by organisations, for instance schools, churches, the media; and conversely, ideas play an indispensable role in binding together organisations (e.g. militaries, governments).

The key question now is: what is the relationship between the superstructure (i.e. organisations and ideas) and the economy? Clearly, the relationship varies from place to place and over history, but here we are answering the question, not for any specific historical period or place, but universally.

First, although organisations and ideas play a key role in what happens in society, they have limits set for them by the economy and what is materially real. Organisations are things and do things; they cannot be something made impossible by the economy: for example, a twenty-first century army in a primitive tribal society. Likewise for ideas: goals, plans assumptions, if they are not grounded in what exists, have limited effectiveness. Yet - and this point needs stressing again - because organisation and ideas have boundaries set by the economy, it does not mean that organisations and ideas cannot play a vital role in determining what happens in the economy.

Second, it is possible to talk about a relative correspondence between superstructure and base. Quite clearly, if the economy, organisations and ideas were completely uncoordinated, society could not function. Some level of correspondence is needed for society to exist, but equally the absence of absolute coordination creates social tensions, known as contradictions; and these contradictions are an important cause of change in society.

Third, the economy involves people doing things with some benefiting more than others from the results of human production. How people relate to the economy - through their position in the functional division of labour (e.g. electrician or plumber) and through access to the rewards of economic activity (e.g. factory owner or labourer) - plays the biggest part in determining the social position of people in society. And from the position people find themselves in, so they see the world. Their socio-economic position, in other words, determines their interests and perspective; thus the different social outlook of the senior manager and the office cleaner. Through this analysis, we can identify a clear line of causality: from the economy, to social classes and other social divisions, and then to people's viewpoint and outlook on society.

To sum up, we can see the economic base of society setting limits to human organisation and thinking. We can see the need for some degree of coordination between economy, organisations and thinking. And finally, the economy gives people interests which affects the way they think.

Of course in particular periods of history (e.g. advanced capitalism), more can be said about the relationship between the superstructure and base (i.e. economy). The comments above are intended to provide (i) an understanding of what the superstructure is, and (ii) give an overview of how it links into the economy.

Functionalism

Functionalism is a sociological theory which suffers from deficiencies and can provide an underpinning for conservative world views.

Functionalism (and its resultant method of research, which leads to the comparison of institutions in different societies) is far from useless. Postulating that in order to exist an institution has to do X, Y and Z and then asking how it does it raises key questions for investigation and analysis.

The problems lie in what is NOT asked in the functionalist paradigm.

History: in Society A a function is fulfilled by activity P. In Society B the same function is fulfilled by activity Q. But why the difference? It has to be explained by the different histories of societies A and B, and not by the comparison between them.

The functionalist paradigm also ignores what political actors themselves think they are doing.


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Facts and Opinions: some basic points

It is worth making a simple basic distinction between facts and opinions.

A fact is a proposition which is constituted by socially agreed terms (i.e. the words in the sentence)and verified by socially agreed means: e.g. Sweden is seeking Julian Assange’s extradition.

Opinion is of two kinds.

First, opinion can pertain to a proposition asserted by someone which cannot be either verified or falsified: e.g. Julian Assange has engaged only in consenting sexual acts. The weight of an opinion which alleges a fact is dependent on the likelihood of the alleged fact being true.

Second, opinion can consist of an “ought premise” e.g. All those who engage only in consenting sexual acts ought not be punished. Ought premises cannot be deemed true or false; they can only be judged consistent or inconsistent with other ought premises.

Ought premises, if universal, can be combined with facts or “opinion facts” to produce new ought premises. For example:

All those who engage only in consenting sexual acts ought not be punished.
Julian Assange has engaged only in consenting sexual acts
Therefore, Julian Assange ought not be punished

All this is very formalistic, but it does provide a means for decoding texts which mix, fact, alleged fact and opinion.

Stalinism: its meaning and role

It is unhelpful to use the term “Stalinism” to discuss contemporary British politics.

In nearly every case, it is much better to use: authoritarian, illiberal, intolerant, bureaucratic, arbitrary, etc., depending on the exact meaning one wants to convey. Comprehension is always aided by choosing precise language to represent social phenomena. But what is Stalinism? And when is it correct to use the term?

I think it is possible to distinguish two valid uses of Stalinism. In a narrow usage, we can talk about the politics of Stalin in the Soviet Union, and by extension in the world communist movement, from the late 1920s through to Stalin’s death in 1953. In discussions of British politics that usage is only relevant for reflecting on the history of the British Labour movement.

In a broader sense, however, we can use Stalinism to refer to Stalin and his henchmen’s poisonous bequest to the worker’s movement across the world. Stalinism has the following characteristics:

- The party is committed in name to realising the interests of the working class and bringing about social progress.
- A hierarchical top-down managed party is desired in which members are required to obey the leadership.
- Party policy has the form of a directive which is binding on all members; dissent amounts to treason.
- Intellectual and cultural matters are subordinate to party policy and thinking.
- All other organisations should be brought into line with party policy.
- Maintaining the leading role of the party is the first priority of all activity and trumps all moral and other political principles.

When parties of this kind come into power the whole of society is organised around these principles. These ideas formed the backbone of communist rule in Eastern Europe 1948-89; though often in practice some of these principles were compromised.

In the first three quarters of the twentieth century, Stalinism cast its dark shadow, not just within communist parties, but also as a pathology which came to plague many people on the wider left. Let me give one extreme example to indicate the pathology.

Artur London, a Czech communist, suffered the show trials of the early fifties, and despite his wife calling for the severest penalties to be inflicted on her husband, he was merely sentenced to life imprisonment. On rehabilitation in the early sixties, he was asked whether his confession had resulted from torture. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘but had I insisted upon my own innocence, some people would have believed me and that would have undermined people’s faith in the Party.’

The Artur London syndrome, namely total personal identification with a political movement, functioned effectively because it drew on two sources. One was to summon up a subconscious desire for religion and submission to a God, though in this case a secular one, the Party. The other was the practical idea (but in my view a false one) that a monolithic body of people acting always in unison could achieve the Promised Land whereas an assembly of free individuals never could.

Today, the influence of Stalinism in Britain remains in two locations, both quite marginal. One is the tiny groups of people who run political parties, which resemble sects or political museums. The other is a generation of older New Labour politicians who were themselves once members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, e.g. John Reid, Kim Howells, who carry their Stalinist political baggage like a prisoner with a ball and chain.

Can the state wither away?

The nation is an imagined community; the state is not illusory at all.

I agree that both Stalinism and social-democracy seek to enhance the role of the state: the former wishes to replace the market and build up state repression; the latter wishes to substitute the market to some degree and expand social welfare. In both cases the instrument is the state.

Marx’s notion of the “withering away of the state” is largely nonsensical. The state, an entity confined by history and geography, is an amalgam of law, administration and coercive violence in which each element is dependent on the other two. To imagine society in the absence of these institutions is fanciful.

The question is not whether the state, but what kind of state.

The meaning of community

I think we need to be careful and not expand the meaning of ‘community’ to include any form of human association or relationship. Community involves both social and geographical attachment.

Community entails a network of human contacts arising from daily life. These will typically include neighbourhood, school, work and leisure activity. To the extent that relationships with and within these institutions are regarded as belonging to the people as opposed to being merely commercial transactions, one has community. Community is further evidenced and reinforced by the voluntary formation of civic organisations and initiatives (e.g. parties, pressure groups, clubs, etc)

The geographic element is a sentimental attachment to place (Heimat). “This place is where I live; it’s mine although I share it with others and I care about it”

A community is universal/secular to the extent that anybody living in the area is considered as a potential member of it.

(The use of the word “community” in the sense of “the gay community” is something else entirely; i.e. to describe a collection of people who share a common characteristic.)

There was no golden age of community, if only because community was never 100 percent and the community of yesteryear also maintained repressive and conservative values. I believe, for example, that the rapid advancement of gay rights and acceptance in Britain after 1997 (which I support) owes something to the diminution of community.

Marxism as science

I adopt a broad definition of science: a paradigm of concepts and a system of propositions related thereto which have claim to truth value on the basis of reason and evidence. (I avoid the Popperian definition of science, if only because I can see no inherent dependency between the truth of a proposition and our ability to disprove it).

Within the definition of science that I have just outlined, I do see a historical materialism as scientific. There is a Marxian paradigm of concepts; there are related propositions which stand on the basis of evidence and reason.

Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy theories often engender two pathologies. One is that of the deferential who accepts the official version of everything from 9/11 to the deaths of Dinah and Dr Kelly; the other is perennial paranoiac who never fails to sees the hand of omnipotent shadowy agents pulling the strings behind courts, the media and so on. (In fact the paranoia narrative is most common in the most deferential of countries the US where a regular film scenario is of trusting patriotic Joe stumbling on a web of government mis-doings and then being called on to put matters to right).

There are times when the conspiracy theorists are absolutely right (e.g. the Zinoviev Letter, 1924) but more often the unexplained and unexplainable would, if explained, show hitherto unknown details which at best would add a new dimension to the accepted master explanation. And I believe that is probably the case with the 9/11 events.

Every political event has unknown aspects and these unknown aspects throw up ‘clues’ which cannot be readily explained. It is job of historians and political scientists to probe, seek the facts and provide the best possible explanations.

Some political concepts defined non-academically

What is capitalism?

System where the means of production, distribution and exchange are largely in private hands and are used for profit. Such a system has huge impact on people and society (e.g. wealth and power distribution)

What is the working class?

All those people in the poorest two thirds of society who live largely or exclusively from their wages and who are engaged in production, distribution, exchange, R&D, education, and in state bureaucracy. Add on to that people who would be doing that (the unemployed and sick) and those who did (the retired).


What is the Left?

Advocates of a fundamental transfer of economic resources to the working class, (except perhaps lazy bastards and criminals)

Supports extension of civil liberties, personal freedoms and democratic political rights

Left right attitude table of attitudes in polarities

Internationalist: Nationalistic
Golden age in future: Golden age in past
Equality: Hierarchy
Reason: Intuition
Secular: Religious
Rights: Duties

Some Reflections on Happiness

Happiness is rarely in the present and dissolves if we achieve it.

In most people's minds our purpose in life is to be happy. I am not thinking here of whether that involves being selfish or altruistic, but of happiness in a broad sense in which we do things to make ourselves, or others, happier. When we act we have the purpose in our head of making ourselves happier. What constitutes greater happiness varies from person to person, time to time and from one social group to another. Happiness may consist of possessing a new car, a walk in the countryside, giving a child an ice cream or having a leg amputated. Yet all of the above examples are the same in one fundamental way; we desire to move from our current situation (A) to a new situation (B); and that new situation (B) gives us more happiness than if we had done nothing. If the analysis were left like this, the world would, other things being equal, become progressively happier. Unfortunately, two factors work against this conclusion.

First, it is extremely difficult to reach a state of happiness because often the happiness we strive for lies in the future, and like tomorrow we are never there. In other words, most of us are walking along what we hope is the road to happiness, rather than actually being there; or to quote a popular adage, 'Tis better to travel hopefully than to arrive.' We execute acts not for their own sake but in order to attain a purpose that always lies in the future. We acquire money, not because we want the money for itself, but because we know that other people want our money and will give us things or do things for us in return for our money. We buy a ticket not, not for the sake of buying a ticket, but in order to travel, in order to reach our destination, etc. The holiday refreshes us so that we can get back to our normal lives in a better state, so that, etc. We often have as much difficulty attaining that future state of happiness as we do jumping over our own shadow.

Second, any given state of happiness that we might reach is subject to decay. For instance, the other day I decided to have a warm bath; I poured myself some wine, put on some jazz and relaxed in the warm water. I had attained a state of sensual happiness, but it was a happiness that started to decay. The jazz began to irritate me after a while; the water started to get cold and I got fed up with the wine. I had to destroy my previous source of happiness by getting out of the bath and switching off the music. The notion of the inevitable decay of happiness could equally be applied to sex, food, holidays and everything else that we strive for. The pleasure peaks and then decays, which of course can be devastating. Once a friend wrote to me and said he was completely happy in every aspect of his life. I wrote back to say how sorry I was, as from thereon his life could only deteriorate. Happiness then is merely a temporary prelude to its diminution. Total happiness is therefore to stand at the gate of depression, decline and failure.

In conclusion, we can see that, although we have the freedom to make choices in our lives, our ability to attain happiness is cruelly limited. Happiness too often lies in a future which never comes and when it does, it proves to be temporary and subject to instant and inevitable decay. How is it then that human life and action revolve around the pursuit of something which is so intangible and ephemeral? Quite simply, we pursue that evasive happiness simply because we have no other choice.