Category: Uncategorized

George Jones has died at the age of 81. He is one of country music’s immortals. Here are two favourites of mine.

See also the several George Jones songs in my Momma ‘n’ Daddy Archive, and the legendary tale here at ‘George Jones’s lawnmower‘.

If you’ve seen the Van Persie wonder goal (the first one here), you may not need it described for you. Matthew Syed describes it anyway (£):

When Wayne Rooney received the ball, he was more than 65 yards from goal. His team-mate, Robin van Persie, was one third of the way into the opposition half, guarded by two defenders. The idea that with two touches the ball would end up in the back of the Aston Villa net was not just fanciful; it was almost inconceivable.

But over the course of the next second and a half on Monday at Old Trafford, a number of things happened. First, Rooney spotted the position of Van Persie and computed the trajectory of a pass that could reach his Manchester United team-mate. The calculation was based on a critical assumption: that Van Persie would, at the precise moment of conception, begin to run towards the square foot of space, 20 yards farther up the pitch, at which Rooney was now aiming. In other words, Van Persie had to perfectly anticipate Rooney’s intention.

Half a second later, as if remotely connected to Rooney’s grey matter, Van Persie did indeed start a darting run. His acceleration was impressive, but the direction was decisive. He sprinted the first five yards sideways, parallel to the goal. It was an attempt to get up to speed while remaining onside. Then, the body swerve, as the Dutchman began the demented dash towards the edge of the box.

The goal itself was poetry. The ball travelled almost 50 yards, with a slight left to right arc, into the path of Van Persie. He didn’t need to break stride as he cocked back his trigger boot, only at the last moment glancing over his right shoulder to lock on to the precise trajectory of the ball as it fizzed downwards. The strike was plumb, the ball hitting the meat of Van Persie’s boot, and finding the corner of the goal, just inside the left post.

And in that moment, the United faithful knew two things. They had won the league for an unprecedented twentieth time. And they had witnessed another moment of beauty in the Theatre of Dreams.

Syed also has some words for those who think that sport is no more than oafs engaged in sweaty nonsense:

Van Persie and Rooney touched millions with that detonation of genius that capped a superlative season for United. But it also demonstrated an important and overlooked truth. When we watch the world’s top footballers, we are watching some of the most skilled individuals on the planet.

On two previous occasions I’ve drawn attention to the plight of the Rohingya in Burma and the Rohingya refugees from Burma. Now Human Rights Watch details further alarming developments:

Burmese authorities and members of Arakanese groups have committed crimes against humanity in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims in Arakan State since June 2012, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today.

The 153-page report, “‘All You Can Do is Pray’: Crimes Against Humanity and Ethnic Cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Burma’s Arakan State,” describes the role of the Burmese government and local authorities in the forcible displacement of more than 125,000 Rohingya and other Muslims and the ongoing humanitarian crisis. Burmese officials, community leaders, and Buddhist monks organized and encouraged ethnic Arakanese backed by state security forces to conduct coordinated attacks on Muslim neighborhoods and villages in October 2012 to terrorize and forcibly relocate the population. The tens of thousands of displaced have been denied access to humanitarian aid and been unable to return home.

“The Burmese government engaged in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya that continues today through the denial of aid and restrictions on movement,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director. “The government needs to put an immediate stop to the abuses and hold the perpetrators accountable or it will be responsible for further violence against ethnic and religious minorities in the country.”

Following sectarian violence between Arakanese and Rohingya in June 2012, government authorities destroyed mosques, conducted violent mass arrests, and blocked aid to displaced Muslims. On October 23, after months of meetings and public statements promoting ethnic cleansing, Arakanese mobs attacked Muslim communities in nine townships, razing villages and killing residents while security forces stood aside or assisted the assailants. Some of the dead were buried in mass graves, further impeding accountability.

Human Rights Watch traveled to Arakan State following the waves of violence and abuses in June and October, visiting sites of attacks and every major displaced person camp, as well as unofficial displacement sites. The report draws on more than 100 interviews with Rohingya and non-Rohingya Muslims and Arakanese who suffered or witnessed abuses, as well as some organizers and perpetrators of the violence.

All of the state security forces operating in Arakan State are implicated in failing to prevent atrocities or directly participating in them, including local police, Lon Thein riot police, the inter-agency border control force called Nasaka, and the army and navy. One soldier told a Muslim man who was pleading for protection as his village was being burned: “The only thing you can do is pray to save your lives.”

Displaced Rohingya told Human Rights Watch how in October security forces stood by or joined with large groups of Arakanese men armed with machetes, swords, homemade guns, and Molotov cocktails who descended upon and attacked their villages. In some cases, attacks occurred simultaneously in townships separated by considerable distance.

See also this BBC report and David Aaronovitch here. (Just incidentally, David makes the uncomplicated assumption that propagating hatred might have a noxious causal effect.)

(Thanks: IH.)

If you want to see how far a certain kind of contemporary liberal will go in order not to have to recognize something perfectly obvious about one brand of modern terrorism, you need look no further than a piece by Oliver Burkeman going under the title ‘What caused the Boston Marathon bombings? It’s complicated…’ Oliver begins from commentators – apparently including Andrew Sullivan – who think that those who carried out the Boston bombings were motivated by their religious views and that this is ‘a sufficient explanation’. Oliver isn’t satisfied, and rightly not. However complicated the issue might be, one thing that is very simple to observe is that the vast majority of religious people and, more specifically, the vast majority of Muslims do not go around murdering others by the random placing of bombs. So the religious views of the perpetrators is not a sufficient explanation for acts of terrorism.

Oliver goes on to say the matter is complex, as it surely is, that ‘what constitutes an “explanation” is irredeemably murky’, and that deploying the concept of ‘evil’ won’t resolve the difficulty. He contrives, however, to pass over the observation, just as simple as the one recorded in the paragraph above, that there has been a strong correlation in recent times between people committing acts of terrorism and adherence to a murderous ideology – called sometimes Islamism, sometimes jihadism. This does not mean that that ideology is, for its part, a sufficient explanation of acts of terror. But it is a reasonable hypothesis that the ideology is a large contributory cause of terrorism. In social explanation it is entirely common for no single cause to be sufficient in itself, but that doesn’t show that no putative cause is ever of significant weight. People adhering to an ideology justifying random mass murder of civilians are more likely to murder the innocent than, say, sincere pacifists, Quakers, a cross section of cycling enthusiasts, members of the Labour Party, and so on. In just the same way, young men rejoicing in racist attitudes towards immigrants are more likely to commit acts of violence against them than are those of cosmopolitan outlook – or sincere pacifists, Quakers, a cross section of cycling enthusiasts, members of the Labour Party, etc. This bit isn’t all that complicated therefore.

Just to be clear here, Islamism/jihadism is not unique in justifying the terrorist killing of innocents. The IRA went in for the same kind of thing on the basis of ideas having nothing to do with Islam or Islamism.

In his yearning for complication, Oliver decides to throw in the following at the end: ‘sorry to bring this up, but free will might not exist’. Well, if it doesn’t then the ‘benefits’ of its non-existence in acquitting people of responsibility for what they do will need to be extended to racists, torturers and those who wage wars that Guardian liberals typically oppose – to categories of people, in other words, they tend not to wring their hands about. Oliver describes himself as ‘the worst kind of handwringing liberal’. Fortunately, there’s another kind of liberal – one who can see what is both simple and clear in the connection between ideologies of hate, on the one hand, and terrorism, on the other, and who does not run with the oh-so-complicated obfuscation.

I kind of like this: it tells how Michael Chwe, political scientist at UCLA, has discovered an early proponent of game theory in Jane Austen. Yes, you read that right. Thus:

[A] century and a half earlier [than von Neumann], Mr. Chwe argues, Austen was very deliberately trying to lay philosophical groundwork for a new theory of strategic action, sometimes charting territory that today’s theoreticians have themselves failed to reach.

First among her as yet unequaled concepts is “cluelessness,” which in Mr. Chwe’s analysis isn’t just tween-friendly slang but an analytic concept worthy of consideration alongside game-theoretic chestnuts like “zero-sum,” “risk dominance” and “prisoner’s dilemma.”

Most game theory, he noted, treats players as equally “rational” parties sitting across a chessboard. But many situations, Mr. Chwe points out, involve parties with unequal levels of strategic thinking. Sometimes a party may simply lack ability. But sometimes a powerful party faced with a weaker one may not realize it even needs to think strategically.

Take the scene in “Pride and Prejudice” where Lady Catherine de Bourgh demands that Elizabeth Bennet promise not to marry Mr. Darcy. Elizabeth refuses to promise, and Lady Catherine repeats this to Mr. Darcy as an example of her insolence – not realizing that she is helping Elizabeth indirectly signal to Mr. Darcy that she is still interested.

It’s a classic case of cluelessness, which is distinct from garden-variety stupidity, Mr. Chwe argues. “Lady Catherine doesn’t even think that Elizabeth” – her social inferior – “could be manipulating her,” he said.

I said I kind of like it, but I’m also not convinced. Is Chwe really on to anything other than what large numbers of Austen’s readers could have told you yesterday or even last week: that she had a sharp intelligence and an astute grasp of the intricacies of human motive and interaction?

I have two spare copies of this book – The Legacy of Marxism: Contemporary Challenges, Conflicts, and Developments, edited by Matthew Johnson – to give away. First two emails to reach me secure them.

Update at 12.15 pm: Offer closed; I’ve already had half a dozen email requests.

Van Persie’s second goal last night is my favourite Manchester United goal…

… since this one by Wayne Rooney…

Spot the overlapping element.

In view of what this post is going to be about, I had better start by saying that it is not about how the authorities in Boston handled the hunt for the perpetrators of the bombings at the Boston Marathon. There are opinions concerning whether locking down a city was appropriate in the circumstances, but I don’t have one myself – not yet, at any rate – and it isn’t what I’m interested in discussing here.

What I’m interested in discussing is the way in which virtually every time a terrorist incident, or apparent terrorist incident, occurs, there are those seemingly at the ready to suggest that the reaction to it is over-excitable, exaggerated, uncalled for, to offer statistical comparisons in support of the suggestion, and to say that the overreaction plays into the hands of those who use terrorism as a weapon. So it has been on this occasion. One never-failing voice in this connection didn’t fail: ‘The terrorist craves us to give him publicity, reaction and retaliation. The media is his megaphone… This week’s media has shown no inclination to deny terror the oxygen of publicity.’ The same thing here:

But by letting one fugitive terrorist shut down a major American city, Boston not only bowed to outsize and irrational fears, but sent a dangerous message to every would-be terrorist – if you want to wreak havoc in the United States, intimidate its population and disrupt public order, here’s your instruction booklet.

It is a case, apparently, of Americans ‘allow[ing] themselves to be easily and willingly cowed by the “threat” of terrorism’ – with the word ‘threat’, you will notice, enclosed in scare-quotes. Then there are the statistical comparisons: some of these not at all to the point and others of some relevance perhaps but – as I shall go on to argue – not decisive for all that.

Not at all to the point (£):

None of this fear has anything to do with rationality. The libertarian writer Ronald Bailey recently calculated the chances of an American being killed in a terrorist attack over the past five years is one in 20m. The risk of being struck by lightning is one in 5m. The risk of dying in a car accident is one in 19,000. More strikingly, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism found that the number of terror attacks in the US in the decade before 9/11 was 41 a year. Since 9/11, it has been 19 a year. And yet our terror panic endures – and even grows.

And not decisive, even if of interest:

On an average day, 85 people are killed by a bullet. The US has three times more assault deaths than any other OECD country.

And again:

…more than 30,000 Americans die in gun violence every year (compared to the 17 who died last year in terrorist attacks).

And once more:

More than 85 people – including eight children – are killed with guns on an average day in America and more than twice that number are injured.

If I say that the statistics about forms of accidental death aren’t to the point, this is because rightly or wrongly – and I would say rightly – people tend to get less excited and upset about the chances of accidental death than they do when they see a boy of six killed by the deliberate act of another in planting explosives or people having their legs blown off at the end of a race. I’ve made this point facetiously once before, but it’s a perfectly serious point, one that will be obvious to most ordinary people. The supposed ‘overreaction’ to terrorist attacks isn’t primarily about the extent of risk relative to accidental death, or about fear for one’s own safety. It’s about people taking quite proper exception when, finding it morally outrageous indeed that, individuals moved by some grievance or other and/or the tenets of a murderous ideology, freely choose to put the innocent in peril by random acts of violence.

As for the statistical comparisons with gun deaths in America, I don’t dismiss these as irrelevant. It is a matter for both surprise and dismay that the opposition to effective gun control in the US remains as stubborn as it is in face of so appalling a death rate. Yet, that doesn’t show that the ‘excitability’ about terrorist killing is unjustified; it shows only that the lack of excitability vis-à-vis gun killing should also be a cause for upset and action to put this right. After all, it’s no argument against how upset people get about gun killings in American schools that the typical statistics on genocide are worse.

One other point worth making is that the belittling of the terrorist threat tends to slide across, or minimize, the global context over what is becoming a long period. It’s as if each incident were a mere blip. But it isn’t. Even if one begins only with 9/11, the list of terrorist incidents visited upon civilian populations going about their business continues to lengthen: 9/11, Bali, Casablanca, Istanbul, Madrid, London, Mumbai, Burgas, and how many in Iraq, and how many in Israel, now Boston. And anyone can quickly ascertain for themselves that this list is far from complete, especially if one adds the many failed attempts. Moreover, 9/11 should have sufficed to convince all but the most blind that if the opening for a bigger terrorist atrocity than that one ever became available there would be those willing to take advantage of it.

The advocates and perpetrators of terror will eventually lose, but the battle against them needs to be fought and fought relentlessly, because it is a battle for democracy, human rights and civilized values and against wanton murder. It has to be fought by intelligence, detection and prevention, by capture or killing, by prosecution and punishment, by moral and political argument – and a certain amount of mockery would also not come amiss. Belittling the terrorist threat as something we take too seriously is, on the other hand, wrong-headed – and that’s putting it kindly.

[This is the fifth and last of a series of excerpts from the joint paper by Mark Harvey and me ‘Marx’s economy and beyond’. The first four excerpts are here, here, here and here. This final excerpt is section III of the paper and draws some general political conclusions from the analysis of Marx’s Capital that precedes it. For a link to a full PDF version of ‘Marx’s economy and beyond’, containing the footnotes omitted from these blogpost excerpts, see the end of this post – NG.]

The foregoing analysis has implications for contemporary left thinking about strategies for change – strategies aimed in the first instance at reducing inequality, and holding out the prospect in the longer term of a society thoroughly grounded in just and realistic principles of equality.

There is a long tradition of socialist commitment to democracy, and of activism to defend and extend it. From his earliest writings Marx held out the vision of a form of democracy that would transcend the boundaries of parliamentary politics, to run the length and breadth of the social order; and in his mature political writings he asserted, as a necessity for the workers’ movement along the way to a better society, the importance of fighting for democratic gains through trade unions, the ballot box, parliamentary representation and social reform. Even the Leninist tradition, with its instrumental attitude to what it called ‘bourgeois’ democracy, was generally opposed to the ultra-leftism of those who adopted an abstentionist attitude to electoral politics: a workers’ movement unable to make serious headway through democratic elections where these were available to it was unlikely to find itself in a condition to win power by insurrectionist means. In the interwar period Leon Trotsky, for his part, waged a fierce battle against those in the Communist movement who dismissed the differences between parliamentary democracy and fascist dictatorship as being of no account.

Alongside these traditions, however, there were other tropes that were to prove fateful for socialism in the 20th century, justifying as they did – in the name of class struggle and the harsh necessities of political combat – now terror, now the erosion of democratic norms and practices, now out-and-out dictatorship and a wanton disregard for civil liberties and the protections of human rights. There is no need here to rehearse all of this sorry history, but one important aspect of it was the propensity amongst some on the left in parliamentary-democratic countries – people living under the rule of law, with whatever limitations this may have involved in any given case – to make excuses for undemocratic actions, and even open tyranny, elsewhere. The apologetics by western communists and fellow-travelling socialists and liberals for Stalinism (for the purges, the show trials, the gulag) were only the most glaring expression of that propensity. They reflected habits of mind that have persisted on the left to this day, long after the effective demise of the international communist movement.

For there are still voices in this quarter ready to identify with, or at any rate to make exculpating noises on behalf of, undemocratic movements and oppressive regimes. Thinking on the left about the relationship between anti-capitalist struggles, on the one hand, and struggles for democracy, on the other, sometimes displays a tendency to regard anti-capitalism as the primary commitment while democratic norms and procedures are treated as more open to compromise on its behalf. This tendency may perhaps be prompted by standard impulses of political partisanship: on account of which the ‘enemy of my enemy’ becomes, if not my friend, then at least someone to be looked on with greater indulgence. Thus, if capitalism is the main object of antagonism, then movements and regimes regarded as anti-capitalist, but which are also undemocratic, may be given an easier ride than the elected governments of capitalist democracies. But the tendency has some independent theoretical underpinnings as well. It treats the capitalist economy and the political structures of democracy as occupying separate domains, as it were, so that efforts to shift the former in a more egalitarian direction or to replace it with something radically different can, depending on circumstances, take or leave the democratizing requirements of a truly self-active popular movement.

Rescuing the socialist idea from the failed experiments of the twentieth century and the persisting tendency, in a part of the left, towards anti-democratic apologetics must continue to involve (as it has always involved) the insistence that central to the very conception of a transformative socialist-egalitarian practice is that it is democratic at the root: which means in every sphere of economic and political organization. Democracy is not just an optional extra. The commitments to anti-capitalism and democracy are indissolubly linked. The force of the critique of capitalist economies and polities is only weakened by any relaxation of that link in projected socialist-egalitarian alternatives to them. Egalitarian struggles have, today, to be part of the culture of universal human rights that has developed since World War II and is now backed by a global civil society. In light of the previous history of socialism, no mature political populace will readily accept the rationalizations of an earlier epoch regarding the supposed need to curtail democratic rights and liberties because of ‘the struggle’ or of the necessities of economic development.

But beyond these general points, we would argue, in addition, that there are considerations specific to the ‘instituted economic process’ approach that strengthen the case for not driving a wedge between economy and polity.

First, there is no pure or universal model of the capitalist economy or of the relationship at its heart, that between capital and labour. The economy not being a closed system, it and the capital-labour relation are always and everywhere partly formed by political processes and legal norms; they are not simply a product of economic power. As we have attempted to show in the previous section, such legal, political and other social structures are co-constitutive of the pressure on the possessors of labour-power to exchange it. All the more reason to see the project of improving and extending the democracy of the polity and that of establishing just principles of economic equality as intimately related.

It is, after all, an old socialist theme that the democracy of the state is bound to be flawed, at best, where it coexists with economic relations in which wealth is distributed as unequally as it is in every capitalist country (with whatever variations). In these circumstances political power and influence, too, are bound to be unequal. But the causal relationship runs in the opposite direction as well. A state, a party or a movement from which political democracy is absent, or in which it is severely restricted, is not well fitted to achieving egalitarian objectives. The historical evidence is overwhelming that power which is not responsible and accountable to those over whom it is wielded will tend towards decisions unduly favourable to the interests of those who exercise it and the social groups – classes, strata or whatever – to which they are most closely linked. Democracy with exceptions, curtailments and apologetic excuses will not only be uncongenial to any politically experienced electorate today, casting doubt upon the sincerity of the egalitarian ideals professed by those seeking power in pursuit of change, it is also inadequate to the tasks of a transformative egalitarian movement. Political democracy and social and economic equality are profoundly interdependent, and the want of either must distort and weaken the other.

Second, it is no longer feasible to think of socialist-egalitarian progress as turning upon a single axis of change, in which capitalist exploitation in the classic Marxian meaning is abolished. It is no longer feasible because the model of relative economic advantage and disadvantage on which that conception relied was itself too simple, as we have shown. There is not a unique and universal differentiation according to which one class simply owns productive material assets while another class simply does not. Though this is indeed still a relevant and crucial dimension of economic differentiation and one yielding great relative benefits to those on the better off – that is, the possessing – side of it, real capitalist societies are also characterized by a multiplicity of other differentials of comparative advantage, not all of them reducible to that which divides the owners of material means of production from the non-owners. There are gendered inequalities, differences in access to educational opportunity, differences in access to available work, or to well-paid work, and to space and housing and health and insurance, and to a clean environment and to water, and more. Combating exploitation cannot, consequently, be thought of as simply undoing the appropriation by one class of the surplus produced by another. A more comprehensive conception of what a just egalitarian distribution of advantages and disadvantages would look like is required.

Nor can this issue of the multiple sources of comparative advantage be finessed by referring it to the Marxian distinction between productive and unproductive labour – so that the essential division is said to be between capitalist exploiters and those engaged in productive labour for profit, while other categories of ‘unproductive’ worker supposedly share in the surplus appropriated by the capitalist class, share in it in exchange for servicing the consumer wants of that class. The very distinction between productive and unproductive labour is predicated on the theory of value – value as labour-determined – that we have shown to be conceptually incoherent. This distinction cannot survive the theory’s demise, and neither can any secondary theoretical argument which depends on it.

Furthermore, there are grounds for thinking that the Marxian focus on the (class) distinction between those monopolizing the means of production and those without access to any such material means played its part in what went wrong with the would-be anti-capitalist revolutions of the 20th century. There was an assumption that collectivization of the means of production and state planning would, in and of themselves, halt the genesis of fresh inequalities at their source, so to speak. Abstracting from other possible sources of inequality, however, disguised from supporters of those failed socialist experiments the danger of new inequalities posed by state ownership of property itself.

The multiplicity of dimensions of comparative advantage is a conclusion with far-reaching theoretical consequences. It means, at bottom, that the conception of a route to socialism based on the abolition of class exploitation must give way to – or evolve into – one of a route based on a more comprehensive theory of just egalitarian distribution. The latter denouement is an ironic one. It is ironic when one bears in mind the dismissive attitude of so many within the Marxist tradition to normative liberal theory. But, in any case, realities of political economy – always the primary domain of Marxist research and argument – themselves dictate that outcome, since they are the site of many inequalities, multiple sources of differential advantage, dividing not only owners from non-owners, but also high-earning scientific personnel and earners in other relatively privileged categories from cheap labour; male from female workers; those with and those without higher education; people with ample pensions and people without; some with access to free or easily affordable medical care and others without; and so on. A society free of exploitation in the classic Marxian meaning would not, in and of itself, be a justly egalitarian one unless it were based on more generally just principles of distribution.

On the left today we are therefore confronted with a task of analysis and advocacy in support of the case that just distributive principles are egalitarian ones, and of explaining further what specific concept of equality is to be supported. For it is a well-known feature of the general notion of equality that it needs to be further specified before one can know what it entails. A plea for equality always invites the question equality of what? In face of the plurality of existing differences of comparative advantage and disadvantage, should the left be arguing for equality of resources, or equality of well-being, or equality of opportunity, or Rawlsian inequalities justified only when they benefit the least well-off, or something else again? We shall not undertake the necessary task of analysis and advocacy here, but only insist on its being necessary, and the more so in the light of an ‘instituted economic process’ approach, highlighting as this does the many dimensions of privilege and lack that exist across contemporary capitalist economies.

We will add, merely by way of indication, that exact equality of resources cannot be the aim where differences of need are taken into account, and equality of well-being is also problematic as an objective if the free choices of individuals are to be respected, since free choices inevitably generate unequal results – owing to differences in luck and to good and bad judgement – and it is debatable whether, or how far, such different outcomes ought to be ‘levelled’ by interventionist public policy. Equality of opportunity is also not unproblematic. What is often called ‘equality of opportunity’, as things are, is plainly not at all that, given how inequalities in one generation get passed on to the next. The advantages which richer parents can buy for their children, in terms of better physical surroundings, better health care, better education, better everything, are bound to mean that their children have greater opportunities than poorer children. Genuine equality of opportunity – or something approximating it, for perfection in this domain, as in most, is likely to be unattainable – could only be based on a greater equality of condition in the parental generation, so to put it, and on serious efforts to counteract the disadvantages among its offspring that are passed on willy-nilly.

Thinking through these problems and proposing solutions to them is an indispensable theoretical undertaking, and its necessity and difficulties throw a cruel light back on the self-satisfied stance of those Marxists who still profess to believe that Marx, though he supplied so little in this domain, was pretty much just ‘right’ about the things that matter most.

Because an egalitarian, non-exploitative society would aim to provide a decent life for all its members according to just criteria of need, effort, desert and so on, the democratic political institutions of such a society cannot be persuasively theorized purely by reference to abolishing divisions of class. Everyone is to be included in rights of citizenship and covered by the basic protections afforded by human rights. A reconstructed materialist politics must be as insistent on democratic rights and liberties as it is on the necessary transformation of global capitalism; as committed to the democratic traditions that have evolved within bourgeois societies as to the task of creating more egalitarian economic forms.

It is a striking feature of recent times and of the economic and financial crises with which the institutions of national, regional and international governance are still struggling that the left has mostly not been the clear beneficiary, in gaining fresh and vigorous mass support. Here and there Marx’s name is invoked and his theories are commended as having a new – or revived – relevance. But such talk is principally at a superficial level; it is not translated into serious programmatic argument or policy recommendation, a state of affairs suggesting that the old Marxian ‘unity’ of theory and practice remains sundered. In the light of what has been argued by us here, this should not surprise anyone. Former models of socialist strategy or egalitarian politics, based as they centrally were on the closed-system conception of labour, exploitation and the capitalist economy more generally, need to be rethought from the bottom up.

They need also to be integrated – as they never properly were in the traditional Marxist political vision – in a fully elaborated ethical critique and alternative. One of the signal strengths of the original conception of a transformative socialist politics founded in historical materialist analysis was to insist that its critique of capitalism must be more than merely abstract criticism. It was to be grounded in (a) an understanding of real socio-economic tendencies, and (b) a real social movement capable of effecting change. At the same time Marx bequeathed to the tradition he founded a one-sided rejection of moral advocacy (sometimes formulated in overtly relativizing terms) that was out of harmony with the commitment to certain universal values implicit in his critique of exploitation. A reconfiguration of materialist thinking towards progressive change needs not only to improve on the economic analysis founded by Marx, but in so far as such improvements are called for, as we have argued above that they are, it must also be able to engage with normative arguments in the area of human rights and different conceptions of equality and justice. No more than in Marx’s day will a moral critique of capitalism suffice; but unless there is a moral case for socialism there is no case for it, and it needs to be properly articulated.

[For the full paper (PDF), ‘Marx’s economy and beyond‘, click through the link. See also ‘On working together‘.]

On the eve of World War II, Poland had the largest Jewish population in Europe, with 3.3 million Jews making up one-tenth of the country’s population. More than 3 million Polish Jews were killed in the Holocaust; thousands more survivors left in the wake of postwar pogroms. Still more departed in the 1960s amid anti-Semitic campaigns by the Communist regime.

But with the fall of communism, there has been a revival of Jewish life in Poland and a movement by Jews and non-Jews to reclaim Jewish culture.

That’s from a report about a new museum about to open in Warsaw, ahead of the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising:

Krzysztof Sliwinski, a longtime Catholic activist in Jewish-Polish relations, gazed wide-eyed at the swooping interior of this city’s Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

Nearly two decades in the making, the more than $100 million institution officially opens to the public this week amid a month of high-profile, state-sponsored events marking the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

“It’s incredible, incredible, incredible how things have changed,” Sliwinski told JTA. “I remember commemorations of the ghetto uprising under communism when only a few people showed up. How good it was that we were optimistic.”

The rest is here.