Why Marxism is on the rise again

Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian, Wednesday 4 July 2012

Class conflict once seemed so straightforward. Marx and Engels wrote in the second best-selling book of all time, The Communist Manifesto: “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” (The best-selling book of all time, incidentally, is the Bible – it only feels like it’s 50 Shades of Grey.)

Today, 164 years after Marx and Engels wrote about grave-diggers, the truth is almost the exact opposite. The proletariat, far from burying capitalism, are keeping it on life support. Overworked, underpaid workers ostensibly liberated by the largest socialist revolution in history (China’s) are driven to the brink of suicide to keep those in the west playing with their iPads. Chinese money bankrolls an otherwise bankrupt America.

The irony is scarcely wasted on leading Marxist thinkers. “The domination of capitalism globally depends today on the existence of a Chinese Communist party that gives de-localised capitalist enterprises cheap labour to lower prices and deprive workers of the rights of self-organisation,” says Jacques Rancière, the French marxist thinker and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. “Happily, it is possible to hope for a world less absurd and more just than today’s.”

That hope, perhaps, explains another improbable truth of our economically catastrophic times – the revival in interest in Marx and Marxist thought. Sales of Das Kapital, Marx’s masterpiece of political economy, have soared ever since 2008, as have those of The Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse (or, to give it its English title, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy). Their sales rose as British workers bailed out the banks to keep the degraded system going and the snouts of the rich firmly in their troughs while the rest of us struggle in debt, job insecurity or worse. There’s even a Chinese theatre director called He Nian who capitalised on Das Kapital’s renaissance to create an all-singing, all-dancing musical.

And in perhaps the most lovely reversal of the luxuriantly bearded revolutionary theorist’s fortunes, Karl Marx was recently chosen from a list of 10 contenders to appear on a new issue of MasterCard by customers of German bank Sparkasse in Chemnitz. In communist East Germany from 1953 to 1990, Chemnitz was known as Karl Marx Stadt. Clearly, more than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the former East Germany hasn’t airbrushed its Marxist past. In 2008, Reuters reports, a survey of east Germans found 52% believed the free-market economy was “unsuitable” and 43% said they wanted socialism back. Karl Marx may be dead and buried in Highgate cemetery, but he’s alive and well among credit-hungry Germans. Would Marx have appreciated the irony of his image being deployed on a card to get Germans deeper in debt? You’d think.

The Herald / Daniel Sanderson, Scottish Political Correspondent / Wednesday 9 September 2015 / News

The survey of 1023 adults for TNS mirrors the results of an Ipsos Mori poll last week, which also predicted that support for independence had surged since 55 per cent voted against leaving the UK in September last year.

When asked by TNS how they would vote if another referendum took place tomorrow, 47 per cent said they would vote Yes, 42 per cent No with 11 per cent undecided. With don’t knows excluded, Yes is ahead by 53 to 47 per cent.

A second poll in little more than a week predicting that a majority of Scots would back independence is likely to increase pressure on Nicola Sturgeon from some within her own party to seek a mandate for a second referendum at next year’s Holyrood election.

Tom Costley, head of TNS Scotland, said: “The apparent change of mood towards independence gives the SNP a difficult decision on whether to include a commitment to a referendum in its manifesto for next year’s elections.

“On the one hand, some will argue that ‘just one more heave’ will get the Yes vote over the line, and will be disappointed if there is no commitment to try again. Others will argue that a six-point lead can be overturned in a long campaign, and that a second lost referendum would make it hard to make another attempt for the foreseeable future.”

Younger voters remain the most committed to independence, with 59 per cent of 16-34s supporting a Yes Vote, with 28 per cent for No (and 13 per cent don’t know). Among those aged 35-54, Yes leads by 53 points to 39 (8 per cent don’t know), and the over-55s favour a No vote by 58 per cent to 31 (12 per cent don’t know).

The survey also shows that the long-time Labour stronghold of Glasgow, which went for Yes in the referendum, is still in the pro-independence camp: the Yes lead in the city is 50 per cent to 38 per cent (12 per cent don’t know). The No side has a six-point lead in the North East (49 to 43, with 8 per cent Don’t know) and a five-point lead in the Lothians (45 per cent to 40 per cent, 15 per cent don’t know).

Meanwhile, the SNP’s lead in the polls for next year’s Scottish Parliament vote has narrowed slightly. 58 per cent of those who expressed a preference would back the SNP in the constituency section of the vote for the May 2016 Scottish Parliament elections, down from 62 per cent a month ago.

Labour rose three percentage points to 23 per cent, Conservative support stood at 12 per cent (unchanged) with the Liberal Democrats on 5 per cent (up 2 points). This represents a seven point cut in the SNP lead to a still formidable 35 points.

In the regional vote, 51 per cent of those expressing an opinion supported the SNP (down 3 points) with 24 per cent for Labour (+4), 11 per cent for the Conservatives (-1), 6 per cent for the Liberal Democrats (+2) and 6 per cent for the Greens (-2).

According to the Scotland Votes seat predictor, if the results are repeated next May they would leave the SNP with 75 seats, a comfortable majority, with Labour on 32 MSPs, the Tories 11, the Lib Dems six and the Greens five.

There was much excitement this week at news that a new “superhenge” has been found just down the road from Stonehenge in Wiltshire.

The 500m site at Durrington Walls apparently features up to 90 15ft standing stones (okay, they’ve actually fallen down), and forms part of a far more complex web of Neolithic henges, burial sites and shrines than was ever previously imagined.

“This is archaeology on steroids!” wooped Vince Gaffney, head of the project that made the discovery. I know he was probably just hyping up the lingo to get some media coverage, but Mr Gaffney and his colleagues should be careful what they wish for. After all, look what happened to Stonehenge.

On the day I visited five years ago, I got lost on the way and accidentally drove by the site on the busy A303. My companion and I waved from the car as the famous stones whizzed past in seconds. We should have kept on driving.

Instead, we doubled back, paid our £14 entry fee and queued up with hundreds of others to be herded through the World Heritage Site. As I stood behind the little rope and looked across at the stones I tried to be impressed, I really did. But since you’re not allowed to walk through or touch them, it’s hard to make much of a connection; the constant sound of lorries on the A303 tends to halt the flow of imaginative juices.

Nothing much came in the way of feelings all. Except of the murderous kind when one of the other visitors – a very posh white bloke with dreadlocks who smelled of patchouli oil – started telling his young daughter a load of hokum about Stonehenge’s links to the Illuminati.

We exited through the gift shop. Overpriced key rings and fridge magnets were purchased. Underwhelmed is an understatement.

It couldn’t be more different up at Callanish, on Lewis. As you walk freely through and touch the extraordinary stones there, as the wonderful Hebridean light passes over them, as you survey the dark and mysterious landscape beyond, your imagination comes to life. And it’s free.

Being within a few hours’ drive of London has not served Stonehenge well. So, what now for the Wiltshire sites? Perhaps we’ll soon be able to visit Hengeland, a Disney-style theme park complete with Neolithic rollercoasters. Or maybe Center Parcs would do something a bit more, you know, middle class, with Stone Age bungalows and axe-making workshops for the kids.

Or perhaps they should be transported to Lewis and given the Callanish treatment? Actually, scrub that. I wouldn’t wish the posh dreadlock brigade on my worst enemy.

Are We Living Inside a Computer Simulation?

DEC 16, 2012 01:42 PM ET // BY RAY VILLARD

(reblogged from http://news.discovery.com/space/are-we-living-in-a-computer-simulation-2-121216.htm)

The popular film trilogy, The Matrix, presented a cyberuniverse where humans live in a simulated reality created by sentient machines.

Now, a philosopher and team of physicists imagine that we might really be living inside a computer-generated universe that you could call The Lattice. What’s more, we may be able to detect it.

In 2003, British philosopher Nick Bostrom published a paper that proposed the universe we live in might in fact really be a numerical computer simulation. To give this a bizarre Twilight Zone twist, he suggested that our far-evolved distant descendants might construct such a program to simulate the past and recreate how their remote ancestors lived.

He felt that such an experiment was inevitable for a supercivilization. If it didn’t happen by now, then in meant that humanity never evolved that far and we’re doomed to a short lifespan as a species, he argued.

To extrapolate further, I’d suggest that artificial intelligent entities descended from us would be curious about looking back in time by simulating the universe of their biological ancestors.

As off-the-wall as this sounds, a team of physicists at the University of Washington (UW) recently announced that there is a potential test to see if we actually live in The Lattice. Ironically, it would be the first such observation for scientifically hypothesized evidence of intelligent design behind the cosmos.

The UW team too propose that super-intelligent entities, bored with their current universe, do numerical simulations to explore all possibilities in the landscape of the underlying quantum vacuum (from which the big bang percolated) through universe simulations. “This is perhaps the most profound quest that can be undertaken by a sentient being,” write the authors.

Before you dismiss this idea as completely loony, the reality of such a Sim Universe might solve a lot of eerie mysteries about the cosmos.

About two-dozen of the universe’s fundamental constants happen to fall within the narrow range thought to be compatible with life. At first glance it seems as unlikely as balancing a pencil on its tip. Jiggle these parameters and life as we know it would have never appeared. Not even stars and galaxies. This is called the Anthropic principle.

The discovery of dark energy over a decade ago further compounds the universe’s strangeness. This sort of “antigravity” pushing space-time apart is the closest thing there is to nothing and still is something. This energy from the vacuum of space is 60 orders of magnitude weaker that what would be predicted by quantum physics. The eminent cosmologist Michael Turner ranks dark energy as “the most profound mystery in all of science.”

We are also living at a very special time in the universe’s history where it switched gears from decelerating to accelerating under the push of dark energy. This begs the question “why me why now?” (A phrase popularly attributed to Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan in 1994 when she was attacked and crippled by an opponent.)

If dark energy were slightly stronger the universe would have blown apart before stars formed. Any weaker and the universe would have imploded long ago. Its incredibly anemic value has been seen as circumstantial evidence for parallel universes with their own flavor of dark energy that is typically destructive. It’s as if our universe won the lottery and got all the physical parameters just right for us to exist.

Finally, an artificial universe solves the Fermi Paradox (where are all the space aliens?) by implying that we truly are alone in the universe. It was custom made for us by our far-future progeny.

Biblical creationists can no doubt embrace these seeming cosmic coincidences as unequivocal evidence for their “theory” of Intelligent Design (ID). But is our “God” really a computer programmer rather than a bearded old man living in the sky?

Currently, supercomputers using a impressive-sounding technique called lattice quantum chromodynamics, and starting from the fundamental physical laws, can simulate only a very small portion of the universe. The scale is a little larger than the nucleus of an atom, according UW physicist Martin Savage. Mega-computers of the far future could greatly expand the size of the Sim Universe.

If we are living in such a program, there could be telltale evidence for the underlying lattice used in modeling the space-time continuum, say the researchers. This signature could show up as a limitation in the energy of cosmic rays. They would travel diagonally across the model universe and not interact equally in all directions, as they otherwise would be expected to do according to present cosmology.

If such results were measured, physicists would have to rule out any and all other natural explanations for the anomaly before flirting with the idea of intelligent design. (To avoid confusion with the purely faith-based creationist ID, this would not prove the existence of a biblical God, because you’d have to ask the question “why does God need a lattice?”)

If our universe is a simulation, then those entities controlling it could be running other simulations as well to create other universes parallel to our own. No doubt this would call for, ahem, massive parallel processing.

If all of this isn’t mind-blowing enough, Bostrom imagined “stacked” levels of reality, “we would have to suspect that the post-humans running our simulation are themselves simulated beings; and their creators, in turn, may also be simulated beings. Here may be room for a large number of levels of reality, and the number could be increasing over time.”

To compound this even further, Bostrom imagined a hierarchy of deities, “In some ways, the post-humans running a simulation are like gods. However, all the demigods except those at the fundamental level of reality are subject to sanctions by the more powerful gods living at lower levels.”

If the parallel universes are all running on the same computer platform could we communicate with them? If so, I hope the Matrix’s manic Agent Smith doesn’t materialize one day.

To borrow from the title of Isaac Asimov’s novel I Robot, the human condition might be described as I Subroutine.

Here are the rules for Non-Fiction Friday:

1. Each week a different student brings in an article they are interested in and believes will be a good spark for class discussion.

2. On Tuesday, the student and I have a quick discussion about the questions they will pose to the class.

3. On Wednesday, we pass out the article to the rest of the class.

4. All students have until Friday to read, annotate and respond to the article in a mini-essay – approx. 200 words.

5. Everyone comes in on Friday ready to talk. Your essays are your notes of points you want to make.

6. The student who chose the article moderates the discussion.

7. After the discussion, the student who gets to choose next week’s article is selected.