Brief Reports (2012)

The Brief Reports Column from the July 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

David Cameron has announced he wants to cut housing benefit for people under 25, in order to reduce the welfare bill. In an interview in the Mail on Sunday, the Prime Minister said he wanted to stop those who were working from feeling resentment towards workshy and parasitical loafers who relied on a something for nothing culture. He added: ‘We’ve got enough of those in the House of Lords’.

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Police Minister Nick Herbert has used parliamentary privilege to name an undercover police officer who allegedly planted a fire bomb at a London department store in 1987. He said: ‘Undercover operations are sometimes necessary to protect the public. I think we should commend the difficult job performed by our undercover officers. Sometimes they have to step outside the law in order to frame the right people. Without their sterling work, some innocent people who deserve to be put away might get off scott free.’

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Low-paid workers who take strike action will no longer be able to claim working tax credits. The Work and Pensions Minister Ian Duncan Smith says the fact that the current benefit system compensates workers and tops up their income when they go on strike is ‘unfair and creates perverse incentives to defend their pay.’ He added: ‘The current benefit system is an expensive mess anyway. We’re aiming to replace the whole thing with a single universal benefit that nobody gets.’

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The Roman Catholic Church has dismissed a poll suggesting the majority of Scots support same-sex marriage. A church spokesman said asking whether people support the right to do something solicits a positive response: ‘The gay lobby is clearly biased. When we do our polls we ask people if they think godless poofters destined for hellfire should be allowed to abolish our most precious institutions, and we tend to get the answer no.’

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Many people in their fifties appear to be planning to work past the current state pension age (SPA) of 65, research suggests. The number of people working beyond the SPA has almost doubled since 1993, to stand at 1.41 million in 2011. A spokesman for the CBI said: ‘The business community fully supports people’s right to work until they drop.  Pensions are derisory anyway. It’s much cheaper for people to be carried out of the factory gates and into the knackers’ yard.’

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Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is requesting political asylum in Ecuador, the country’s foreign minister has said. Mr Assange is facing extradition to Sweden as a first step to rendition to the United States. He was previously offered asylum in Greece but turned it down. ‘You must be joking.  I’d rather be in Guantanamo. At least they’ve got food there’, he was reported to have said.

Pathfinders: Crowd Atlas (2013)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Crowds are supposed to be predictable, but they’re not, and you can never be entirely sure what they’re going to think and do next. The British governing class found that out just recently when, to its disgust and embarrassment, the death of one particularly obnoxious old fart in her care home at the Ritz prompted, not the expected outpouring of respectful eulogies, but thoroughly tasteless ‘death parties’ and the explosive propulsion up the pop charts of a silly song entitled ‘Ding Dong the Witch is Dead’.

The nature of crowds is changing. They used to be made up of bystanders, innocent and often ignorant observers at some remove from the action. Today, crowds are the action, the mass protagonist, a new type of collective intellectual resource made possible by the wired world. According to the reasoning, if one person with a computer is smart, then a crowd of ‘n’ people is smart to the power of ‘n’. If the individual knows her local geography, then the crowd is an atlas. This collective thinktanking is called crowdsourcing  and is all the rage these days among nerds, netheads, geeks, social media junkies and other tech-savvies who despite this probably get out more than we do. Normally they see themselves as virtuous heralds of a bright and innocent future, but in Boston Massachusetts after the recent marathon bombing, it all went hideously wrong. A crowdsourced amateur photo-enquiry was launched and the wrong people got ‘identified’ as bombers, forcing them into hiding in fear of their lives. The organiser on Reddit issued a sincere and abashed apology, but the fiasco was a sobering lesson to the digerati that despite their supposed sophistication and tech know-how, there’s still a fine line between a crowd and a lynch mob.

Crowdsourced labour in the form of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk comes in for sharp criticism too, on the grounds that it exploits a great number of anonymous workers who get paid next to nothing for their efforts. Though it’s true the contributors don’t get paid much, this overlooks their intrinsic motivations. They’re not really in it for the money anyway.

Crowdsourcing is generating a lot of excitement. Crowdsourcing is already being used as a translation service, beating the pants out of machine translators. There is talk of using it as a missing persons agency. It has already been used to solve a number of scientific and technological problems including some prize competitions, such as the Netflix algorithm Challenge, the DARPA balloon experiment and the X Prize. It is an increasingly favoured form of low-risk investment, used to fund start-ups traditional investors wouldn’t look at. Now Crowdmed, a start-up medical diagnostic service, is hoping to exploit this collective intelligence in a novel way (‘How crowds, not doctors or supercomputers, could diagnose rare diseases’, Gigaom.com, 16 April).

The implications for capitalism are ambiguous. Of course it is all in favour of innovation which leads to new sales and new profits. But is there a downside of having smart crowds? Could it be that crowdsourcing is smuggling in, and is itself part of, a set of new crowd-based political attitudes too?

Those that believe that nothing ever changes must have their heads inserted somewhere dank and dark, because we are living in the middle of one of the greatest human revolutions of all time, and nobody is really sure where it’s taking us. Politically, ideas which seemed immutable are being challenged openly, specifically ideas about leaders and followers, and the sacred cow of private ownership. A significant property of aggregated humans is that they are more knowledgeable and hence more likely to come up with right answers than individuals, even individual experts. This is one of the founding principle of socialism, so it’s not surprising that it’s spawning challenges to old capitalist shibboleths. First there is Open Source, the idea that information wants to be free and that therefore intellectual ideas and collaboration should be free too. From this follows by extension the idea that all software should be free, and not just software. There is considerable and growing opposition to genome patenting, on the grounds that living organisms should not be owned. An extension of this militancy against ownership is the aspiring ‘respectability’ of digital piracy culture, and the hero-worship of Julian Assange and Wikileaks. With 3D printing the militancy will extend beyond the binary into the physical. And in response to a recession which is blatantly massacring the livelihoods of the world’s poor while leaving the rich not only untouched but actually richer than ever, we see the new moral challenges of the Occupy Movement and other related protests. As the stock of politicians falls ever lower, and with it the credibility of sole leadership as a concept, the smart crowd brings with it a new sense of potency. Taking all this together, are we seeing the emergence of some kind of broad-based communistic trend? 

We wish. To be sure, these aren’t new protests or impulses, and the digital pioneers don’t necessarily join the dots and see their ideals as logically anti-capitalist. Each generation reinvents the ideas afresh, as if they had never been conceived before, but there is something different this time round. Now they have a radical new force behind them, the engine of a communications revolution. There’s a sense of a monstrous genie climbing out of a tiny bottle. Workers have always been angry and uppity, but now they’ve got something which is genuinely dangerous to capitalism. They’ve got smart.

In terms of material productive capability, the world could have turned socialist a hundred years ago. But culturally and socially it was still backward, mired in tribal prejudices and rigid top-down control of information. Instead of turning socialist it turned to world war, twice. Could it do so again, in an age where your ‘enemy’ is an email away and every skirmish and scandal is on Youtube? Maybe, but we hope not.

Capitalism doesn’t like too much democracy. No democracy is bad for business, but too much is worse. Capitalist leaders depend on a kind of confidence trick in which ‘democracy’ means ‘rule by the people’ as long as the people are kept disorganised, confused and distracted, in fear of ‘chaos’ and the spectre of ‘mob-rule’. But democracy and mob-rule are the same thing, the only difference being information. When you have a globally-connected population with good information, new things are possible, politically as well as technologically.

The digerati are excited and for good reason. It’s as if the Earth is slowly growing itself a brain, huge, superfast and super-connected. Not too many of them yet are asking the key question a socialist would ask – will such a sentient super-entity tolerate a regime in which one tiny portion of it, like a malignant cancer, is allowed to destroy the entire organism in blind reckless pursuit of its own growth? Would a thinking, rational planet tolerate capitalism? Even leaving aside any moral questions of social justice, such a tolerance would surely be seen as ultimately suicidal. In the long run, a wired world would have to reject such destructive lack of concern for its best collective interests. And if in the long run, why not in the short run? Why not now, in fact? What is there to wait for?

Can capitalism continue to keep control when such questions are hanging in the air? That depends on the people, and that is the trouble with crowds. You can never be entirely sure what they’re going to think and do next.

Paddy Shannon

Brocialism and Manarchism (2013)

From the December 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Late October saw a few incidents which ‘feminists’ criticised. The Anarchist Bookfair in London saw a transwoman abused and an outdoor Catholic (not a religion known for being pro-women) called Ciaran O’Reilly heckled by ‘feminists’ (Sam Ambreen) shouting “kill all men”. At a meeting about Wikileaks in Liverpool, the same speaker was apparently harassed on account of rape apologism in respect of allegations against Julian Assange. Meanwhile Laurie Penny criticised Russell Brand (2 Nov 2013) for sexism after he wrote his views on revolution in the New Statesman.

The issue of feminism raises many questions. Do women bear the brunt of sexism? Generally, yes. Are women more likely to be victims of rape and domestic violence? Yes. Are allegations made by women less likely to even be investigated when reporting rape? Yes. Some have been surprised to find attitudes of sexism from ‘socialists’ and in the labour movement, (see Women in the Labour Movement statement) and even negative attitudes to disability (see LINK).

Feminists have characterised these problems as ones dismissed by socialists or relegated to the future, accusing sexist men of ‘brocialism’ (a portmanteau of brother and socialism) or manarchism (man and anarchism), but they must be speaking to the wrong so-called ‘socialists’. These observations are not ones dismissed by genuine socialists, as these problems have solutions that genuine socialists want and act to implement now. ‘Socialists’  perpetuating sexism only expose themselves as non-socialists. ‘Intersectionality’ is a modern term for different forms of oppression intersecting – for example, sexism intersecting with class society – but these types of concepts and connections were observations writers like Engels made way back in the nineteenth century.

Our socialism is in a sense  ‘feminist’ (although a better term would be egalitarian) as it is the socialism of the pioneering anti-sexist works of Lewis H. Morgan, Friedrich Engels, August Bebel and Eleanor Marx.

Wikid Games (2011)

From the January 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Wikileaks is currently under heavy attack.

In order to make it impossible to ever fully remove Wikileaks from the Internet, Wikileaks is currently mirrored on 1426 up-to -date sites (from WikiLeaks website)

Once upon a time, if you wanted to keep a secret, you locked it in a drawer and held the only key. When states wanted to keep secrets, they used huge underground warehouses with security locks and armed guards to store the vast quantity of information compiled by their spies, spooks and secret police. Most of this information was useless, and most of it never saw the light of day. Then the information revolution happened.

A very large wired information network looks exactly like a sieve, and that's essentially what it is. Information leaks out of it in any number of ways, on purpose or by accident. When you can hold the personal details of 50,000 people on a pen-drive no larger than a cigarette lighter and when these can fall out of pockets on the tube train home, the potential for leakage is gigantic. Then there is email, which is not secure and which has become the preferred mode of communication for all businesses and public services. Just a few emails brought about 'Climategate' in 2009, in which a few careless phrases by researchers at the University of East Anglia fatally undermined the authority of the Independent Panel on Climate Change.

The recent WikiLeaks' exposure of the private lives and opinions of the world's movers and shakers has been so prodigiously covered in the press that the details are scarcely worth covering again, yet from a socialist standpoint the furore deserves to be set within a wider context than the conventional media never discusses. The capitalist class, as indeed all hitherto ruling classes, owes its power not only to its private ownership and control of wealth but also its private ownership and control of information, and inevitably socialists must ask themselves to what extent the overthrow of the latter is likely to lead to the overthrow of the former.

While controlled leaks have always been a tool of government, or internecine feuds within government, it was rare until recently for damaging information ever to escape and when it did, retribution was punitive. When in the 1970s Philip Agee, a CIA agent working in the UK, published an exposé of CIA operations including names of operatives, the US authorities reacted with fury, had him deported and mounted a smear campaign against him involving sex allegations and alcoholism that ran to 18,000 pages (Guardian, 19 December). In 1971 Richard Nixon was tape-recorded speaking thus of Daniel Ellsberg, another Pentagon mole gone public: "Let's get the son of a bitch into jail.... Don't worry about his trial. Try him in the press."

Mud, glorious mud
The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has made no secret of his involvement in the leaks, so one would be astonished not to see governments trying to fling whatever mud they could at him. And sure enough, he is currently on bail in the UK and facing possible extradition to Sweden to answer sex crime allegations, followed by a possible further rendition to the US to face a lifetime wearing an orange jumpsuit in a certain Cuban seaside resort.

That these allegations are a frame-up is a conclusion that many people have leapt to with a conviction thus far unsupported by the known facts, however it is undeniable that the whole business looks damned fishy. If the UK or Swedish authorities go one step further and allow the Americans to get their hands on him, the affair may well blow up to become the Dreyfus case of the 21st century.

But how do you try a website? WikiLeaks is a game-changer for state security forces and radicals alike, challenging the whole notion of secrecy and calling into question what if anything can be kept secret. The universal state condemnation of WikiLeaks rings increasingly hollow and comical when one looks at the massive public support for it. The vast number of mirroring sites – sites that duplicate WikiLeaks – means that WikiLeaks could not realistically be shut down without shutting down the internet.

It isn't only source websites which pose a problem for state security, it's also destination sites. If you wanted to leak a confidential document in 1950, there would only be a few newspapers or small printing presses to leak it to, most of whom would not risk touching it. Conventional media tend to have a symbiotic, back-scratching relationship with government which ensures that newspapers are self-regulating so direct news bans – D notices – are rarely invoked. Media bosses are capitalists themselves and have no interest in rocking the boat. But the other side of the information equation is publication and distribution, and the internet has created unlimited scope for both.

Thus Wikileaks can sidestep conventional media and leak to anywhere, even to the Socialist Standard if it chose to, which means that the capitalist class has for all practical purposes lost control of the mass media. It cannot hope to strike mutually agreeable deals with every media outlet, especially not those avowedly hostile to it, and any attempt to coerce or threaten such outlets would be likely to blow up in its face and make matters worse.

Off with their heads
Aside from the allegations against Julian Assange, Wikileaks itself is not however above criticism. Its foundation in 2006 is shrouded in some mystery. Founders allegedly include Chinese dissidents, mathematicians, technologists and journalists, yet none have been identified. There is supposedly an advisory board of 9 members, yet one 'board member' has said that his involvement is minimal and that the board is merely 'window dressing'. One volunteer told Wired Magazine that Assange considers himself "the heart and soul of this organisation, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organiser, financier, and all the rest". Indeed, WikiLeaks is not even a Wiki anymore because Assange has removed public editing access to it, and has moved away from being a mere whistleblowers' conduit to a full publisher in his own right. Whether or not he set out to do so, Assange does seem to be going for personal glory but in doing so is drawing down all the fire on himself. One-man-bands don't play well when they're playing against the state. One way or another, American and European state agencies are out to get WikiLeaks which is why the obvious move is to go for a decapitation strike against Assange himself.

Even if they succeed in bringing down Assange, there is no stopping what he started. This month a former Wikileaks advisor is set to found a new website called OpenLeaks, which aims to avoid the problems WikiLeaks has encountered, specifically by being governed democratically and by remaining as a conduit for anonymous information rather than empire-building into a publishing enterprise. At heart is the open source philosophy which holds that cooperative and transparent endeavour is more productive and progressive than the secretive and territorial ethos which underpins most capitalist activity: "Our long term goal is to build a strong, transparent platform to support whistleblowers – both in terms of technology and politics – while at the same time encouraging others to start similar projects" (Wikipedia, OpenLeaks). There is a parallel here with file-sharing sites, which started as centrally controlled databases (Napster) that were easy to target and kill, before evolving into distributed peer-to-peer systems which had no centre and could never be nailed down and neutralised. There is a further parallel to be made here with democratic models in politics. Socialists oppose leaders and vanguardist leadership-based groups on the left, not only in fact but also in theory, because top-down hierarchy structures are too easy to neutralise. In fact, as a distributed, egalitarian and transparent organisation, we could lay claim to being the original political Open Source movement.

All of a Twitter
There is a momentum of workers' disgust at capitalism at the moment, at least in the western countries, starting with the sub-prime collapse which exposed nonsensical business logic, then massive bail-outs and bankers bonuses, together with squalid parliamentary expense fiddles, followed by the most savage cuts in living memory and attacks on the poor and those on benefits. Anyone who thought 'the yoof of today' could never be motivated by politics is having to eat their words as students pour onto the streets, camcorders in hand to record and upload police cavalry charges onto YouTube just as the police attempt to deny them. Meanwhile 'hacktivists' attack banks with massive Denial of Service offensives and the spontaneously organised UK-Uncut group occupy and picket the stores and offices of banks, mobile phone companies and high street stores accused of large scale tax avoidance. Though one could always quibble with these activists' grasp of the bigger picture over tax, or their tactics in singling out individual companies when, after all, they're all at it, you've got to admire how the digital native generation are mobilising their opposition in ways that the ruling class has not anticipated and is ill-prepared for.

The grubby game that is capitalism is being exposed as never before in its history, and more people are getting to know about it every day. The genie is out of the bottle, and there's no putting it back in. These are interesting times for socialists.

Paddy Shannon