Monday 10 December 2012

Why We Can't Solve Big Problems | MIT Technology Review

I highly recommend this thoughtful piece on technology by the editor-in-chief of the MIT Technology review. Its serious, concerned and informed tone is a very welcome antidote to the vacuous bullshit we're continually  showered with by the spin-doctors of the IT/Communications Complex, and by the frothing ranters of the Republican Billionaire Climate-Change Denier axis:

Why We Can't Solve Big Problems | MIT Technology Review

Thursday 6 December 2012

A New Age of Sabotage

I haven't posted much recently because every time I think of something to say, the extraordinary pace of events makes it sound lame by the next morning: New York under water, Obama re-elected, News International in the dock, rockets falling on Tel Aviv, and that's even before we reach the Mayan apocalypse on Dec 21. However I've finally plucked up courage to wade into the torrent of the miraculous-horrific thanks to a fortunate discovery on the web. In this previous post I confessed an increasing interest in the radical Norwegian-American economist Thorstein Veblen, but that interest was quite narrowly based on reading only three of his works, namely The Theory of the Leisure Class, The Theory of Business Enterprise and his important essay The Socialist Economics of Karl Marx and His Followers. This wasn't just due to laziness but to the difficulty of obtaining many of Veblen's books, which have been out of print for a long time.

But I re-read Veblen's Wikipedia entry all the way to the bottom, and there found links to some recent online editions. The book I'd most wanted was The Engineers and the Price System of 1921, and sure enough there was a link to a free PDF from Batoche Books of Kitchener, Ontario, Canada dated 2001. Reading it was similar to my experience on first reading The Leisure Class — it felt like an important truth about the way society operates that has somehow been lost, obfuscated or concealed from popular consciousness. In Leisure Class that truth was the opposition between predatory and workmanlike economic attitudes, while in The Engineers it's a truth about "sabotage", which Veblen defined as follows:
    “Sabotage” is a derivative of 'sabot' which is French for a wooden shoe. It means going slow, with a dragging, clumsy movement, such as that manner of footgear may be expected to bring on. So it has come to describe any manoeuvre of slowing-down, inefficiency, bungling, obstruction.
[The Engineers and the Price System, p4]
Veblen isn't easy to read because of his repetitious style, his love of playing of devil's advocate which can confuse the unwary, and his straight-faced sarcasm which even extends to the terminology he employed ("sabotage" being a perfect example). He appropriates this familiar term and gives it a technical economic meaning broader than, though clearly connected to, its popular usage. He delighted in thus provoking the economic establishment by mocking and ironic use of terms like "idle curiosity" (science), "captains of industry" (business men) and "parental bent" (altruistic behaviour).

So, a partisan dynamiting a railway line, a striking worker who drops a spanner into his machine, or the ISP who throttles your internet feed because you've watched too many movies this month, are all committing sabotage in Veblen's terms. That is, they are deliberately reducing productivity to achieve some definite end. Veblen defined sabotage more succinctly as "conscientious withdrawal of efficiency" and always employed it in a non-pejorative sense, proposing that:
"...the common welfare in any community which is organized on the price system cannot be maintained without a salutary use of sabotage... such restriction of output as will maintain prices at a reasonably profitable level and so guard against business depression".
This amounts to a claim that the "free market", which neoliberals have managed to raise to the status of graven idol over recent decades, is a sham. Pricing has become a science that creates strange paradoxes: you might naively believe that maximum profit would be obtained by producing the largest amount of some highly-desirable commodity, but that's very far from the truth. Most often maximum profit can be achieved by somewhat restricting supply in order to raise its price.

The archetypal case is of course the De Beers family's rigid control over the world supply of diamonds, but the oil industry is a pretty good example too. For most of the 20th century there was always a large surplus of oil reserves, but oil companies wouldn't pump too much because that would lower the price too far. OPEC was set up for no other purpose than to restrict (ie. keep high) the price of oil. The drug pricing policies of the big pharmaceutical companies are equally instructive examples. Contrary to free-market dogma, companies not only do not enjoy competition but very large companies will go to great (sometimes too great) expense to avoid or subvert it. Sabotage is seen at its most blatant in the energy sector, and recently became a source of great embarassment to David Cameron's plucky little band of free-market adventurers, who can only wriggle and smoulder as the energy companies sabotage their chances of re-election through naked profiteering.

For Veblen the problem with using sabotage to control production is not that it's morally wrong, but that it creates unemployment and waste. Whenever you deliberately curtail production to raise prices you tend to thereby employ less labour:
"The mechanical industry of the new order is inordinately productive. So the rate and volume of output have to be regulated with a view to what the traffic will bear — that is to say, what will yield the largest net return in terms of price to the business men who manage the country's industrial system. Otherwise there will be 'overproduction', business depression, and consequent hard times all around. Overproduction means production in excess of what the market will carry off at a sufficiently profitable price. So it appears that the continued prosperity of the country from day to day hangs on a 'conscientious withdrawal of efficiency' by the business men who control the country's industrial output."
Marx thought that capitalism makes overproduction structurally inevitable, because the extraction of surplus value by owners guarantees that total wages paid will be insufficient to purchase all of the product. For Veblen sabotage is capitalism's mechanism for controlling overproduction, and Keynes later added to this that governments could intervene during crises of overproduction to sustain demand via public works and welfare payments — though he conceded that such measures would only delay the problem, which must periodically recur and drive the dreaded boom/bust cycle. Our current global economic crisis is ultimately caused by overproduction, and more particularly by the cheap credit that was freely ladled out to temporarily hold it at bay. The overselling in the USA of cheap mortgages (still too dear to be repaid) prior to 2007 lead directly to contamination of the world financial system by the resulting bad debt, cunningly concealed inside the sugared pills of complex and unfathomable financial derivatives. This contamination has not yet been removed — despite all the quantitative easing and other fiddles employed over the last five years — and can't be without imposing massive losses on banks, investors and bond holders that might sink the whole ship. With banks unwilling to lend and employers unwilling or unable to invest and hire, it would seem that sabotage is becoming the norm, just as it was in the mid-1930s. And the spread of debt contagion to states themselves, in the shape of sovereign debt, renders Keynesian intervention less and less feasible.

So how then could the current crisis be solved? One solution, advanced by some anarchists and Occupy communitarians is to abandon the pricing system altogether and make everything free. Experience teaches that this leads to massive overconsumption (the so-called "tragedy of the commons") and that eventually goods would ration themselves by some other means. Most of those means — like Mao and Stalin's famines, or our post-war rationing — are not nice, worse in fact than the problem. A similar (and equally doomed) illusion, embraced by almost all of the far Left and some of the far Right, is that this crisis will so impoverish the masses as to cause a renaissance of militancy and the eventual overthrow of capitalism, in favour of a planned socialist economy or corporate state. There's little evidence that this is about to happen in Europe or the USA: political involvement is everywhere in decline rather than rising, with all party memberships falling, while the democratic Right is already successfully pitting hard-pressed employed workers against the unemployed, for example by carefully juggling the levels of tax credits and welfare cuts. George Osborne's recent fable about working people going to work in the morning and seeing their lazy, dole-dependent neighbours sleep-in is a perfect example — it twangs the appropriate raw nerves and smothers Labour's attempts to revive an anachronistic class solidarity.   

A return to that semi-stable state of almost-full employment and fairish wages that prevailed for 30 years or so following WWII, by paying employees better within a market economy at the cost of some forgone profitability, might be the most desirable solution but there are reasons to doubt whether most people would actually welcome it. In our book Cool Rules David Robins and I anatomised the profound change of attitude created by the 1960s counterculture, a collapse of the Protestant Work Ethic to be displaced by an outlook based on individualism, hedonism and withdrawal of deference to authority. This collapse of previously prevailing mores applied just as much to the economy as to the rest of the "fabric of society" (the irrational exuberance and cocaine-fuelled greed of the recent financial boom was of a kind with the orgiastic lifestyles of rock and movie stars). Since the '60s the political Right has been seeking to restore older puritanical rules to society in the so-called "culture wars", but not to the economy, whereas the Left would like to restore them to the economy but not to society. It's hard to imagine that any such restoration is possible at all, but if it were then it would have to be for both.

A return to post-war social democracy in the UK seems unlikely then for at least three reasons:
1) It would require repeal of most of Thatcher's anti-union legislation and renewed agitation for higher wages on a massive scale, which no imaginable Labour government is likely to embrace.
2) The Tories' "anti-scrounger" assault proved quite effective at the last election and may too in the next. You may object that they failed to secure a majority and were forced into coalition, but had the crash been pushing popular sentiment to the Left they ought to have done far worse.  
3) Most crucially, it may be that younger generations are adapting to the current casino economy with all its gross inequalities. A most noteable feature of the last three decades' economy has been a decoupling of reward from effort, visible not only in bankers' bonuses and "fat-cat" managers' salaries but also in the lifestyle and remuneration of sportsmen, popular entertainers and other celebrities, lottery winners, not to mention drug dealers and gangsters. Slavoj Žižek analyses this phenomenon through the notion of a "surplus wage" entirely unrelated to productivity, which gets paid to insiders accepted into certain cliques and professions:
"Far from being limited to managers, the category of workers earning a surplus wage extends to all sorts of experts, administrators, public servants, doctors, lawyers, journalists, intellectuals and artists. The surplus takes two forms: more money (for managers etc), but also less work and more free time (for–some–intellectuals, but also for state administrators etc). The evaluative procedure used to decide which workers receive a surplus wage is an arbitrary mechanism of power and ideology, with no serious link to actual competence; the surplus wage exists not for economic but for political reasons: to maintain a ‘middle class’ for the purpose of social stability."
          ["Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie", London Review of Books, Vol 34 No 2, 26th Jan 2012]

It's therefore possible, depressingly, that our current economic stasis and austerity might become a permanent state of affairs. That post-war period of social democracy was a kind of semi-stable equilibrium in which relatively high wages and welfare provision maintained mass consumption and kept overproduction within bounds, but systems as complex as human economies typically exhibit more than one stable or quasi-stable state, at different levels of key parameters. It could be that we've flipped into such an alternative state, a low-wage, welfare-poor economy that's grossly unequal, with a small hyper-rich elite and a bare majority in poorly-paid and insecure employment, but in which many people are sustained by a slim hope of gaining entry to the privileged ranks of the surplus-waged, by hook or by crook, by luck or by nepotism (like winning the lottery, wangling a local government sinecure, starting an internet business or making it in football, writing a hit tune in their back-bedroom or being discovered as a model).

The world already contains many societies that display almost all these features, currently concealed behind robust growth through exporting to us the things we no longer make. I'm referring of course to the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) which many economists applaud and would have us emulate. There are already signs that stagnation in the Northern hemisphere is beginning to curtail their growth, and what remains will look far from pretty. The whole world economy appears to be converging toward a burned-out condition that in some ways resembles a modern feudalism, with huge local concentrations of wealth that foster corruption of the public and favour private fiefdom. (When a star has burned up all its hydrogen and helium it collapses to become a "Red Dwarf", an irony that might not be lost on ex-readers Black Dwarf and Red Mole).

If that hasn't depressed you too far to read any further, there remains the environmental question. Climate-change sceptics of both Right and Left want a resumption of economic growth — in the Right's case to carry on business as usual and in the Left's to repair the partly-dismantled welfare state — while climate-change believers demand zero growth (or less) to avoid catastrophic global warming. The latter might eventually be prepared to accept, even perhaps to welcome, the sort of static and enfeebled economy that is emerging, which would be an instance of sabotage so extreme it would have Thorstein Veblen spinning in his grave. On the bright side, that Mayan apocalypse probably won't happen.

Wednesday 19 September 2012

All Downhill

WAGES AS PROPORTION OF GDP FROM 1955-2008



This graph, based on one printed in Stewart Lansley's excellent book "The Cost of Inequality: Three Decades of the Super-Rich and the Economy" (Gibson Square 2011), tells you almost everything you need to know about the roots of our current crisis.

It depicts the percentage of UK GDP paid out as wages from 1955 to 2008. It starts around the ~59% level that prevailed almost from the end of WWII until the 1973 oil crisis, then shows the sharp spike up above 65% during the union militancy of the mid-70s (whose impact on prices and profits drove the country into the arms of Thatcher). In effect it's a graph of the British class struggle over that crucial half century.

A steady downward trend following 1979 as labour lost out more and more has taken it below 54%, a level at which demand in the economy is severely curtailed. The answer is not more QE to put cash into the banks, but to put cash in people's pockets, restore this measure to around 59% and restart the economy.

[Subscribers can read my review of Lansley's book in the next issue of The Political Quarterly, Volume 83, Issue 4 (not yet online), and my PQ reviews over two years old of other books are readable on my blog here]







Saturday 15 September 2012

Elders of Zion >> Zinoviev Letter >> Innocence of Muslims

Given the current febrile state of the world the temptation to succumb to conspiracy theories is very strong indeed. Nevertheless I can't restrain myself from saying this: doesn't this Arab rioting, and killing of the US ambassador to Libya, just two months before the US presidential election, smell of a provocation to anyone else? In the grand old tradition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Zinoviev Letter? Remembering what happened to unpopular Democratic president Jimmy Carter after the Iran Hostage Crisis in 1980? All the usual suspects are involved: petty criminals with pseudonyms, bogus consultants, mad evangelical pastors. But no connection to the Republican Party (yet). 

Saturday 7 July 2012

Higglety Pigglety Pop

Finally we have the answer to the nature of Matter, the Universe and Everything (and it isn't 42 after all). It's all a vast herd of quarks (some strange but many charming) milling around in Peter Higg's field until they get heavy. Now we know, can we please shut the fuck up about it and concentrate on the real problem, which is to prevent a tiny elite of greed-crazed rentiers from stealing our grandchildrens' lunch money.

Saturday 30 June 2012

A Sad Canticle

A Sad Canticle is a computer-generated tune I created using Ableton Live with a vocoder filter that gives a no-language/all-languages or Esperanto effect. Its punning title is deliberate, alluding to the horrors being perpetrated in Syria. Readers new to this blog might form the impression that I'm only interested in politics, but nothing could be further from the truth.

In particular I've been passionately interested in music for most of my life. I started listened to, then playing, black American music - blues, R&B and soul - in the early 1960s, progressed to jazz, particularly bop, post-bop and '60s free jazz, which lead me onto modern composers like Debussy, Stravinsky and Bartok . From there I explored backwards in time to absorb the classics from Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert to Wagner and Richard Strauss. I've spent many, many nights at the opera and concert hall and am a regular patron of the Wigmore. My tastes in popular music are highly eclectic and highly selective, stretching from rock, bluegrass and country to reggae, as a glance at my Spotify playlists will confirm.

I haven't bought many records or seen live performances of popular music for decades - I was once keen on new wave bands like Talking Heads and Pere Ubu, as well as dub reggae, but as for many people of my generation the era of hip-hop and dance music became a big turn-off: too old for raves and clubbing but the music not sufficiently interesting for me to just listen. However the last few years have seen a change in my attitude. Though popular music is now fragmented as never before and the extraordinary animus between fans of the myriad different genres is pretty off-putting, I recently find myself attracted to a lot of the experimental music being produced - it feels as though, bored with the blandness of commercial pop, young musicians are rediscovering for themselves the fascination with pure sound that was there in free jazz and other '60s modernisms. The technology of music production has also advanced enormously, so that they can now create on a laptop computer extraordinary sounds that once were the exclusive domain of the avant-gardists of Paris's IRCAM. Some of the sounds coming out of the dubstep scene and its million descendents, or from musicians like Beck, Jack White and Saint Vincent, are really very exciting indeed, recalling the spirit of Coltrane, Mingus, Coleman, Shepp and Albert Ayler.

As a keen practitioner of obscure computer programming languages I've also, since the early 1990s, been interested in computer composition (more about my efforts in algorithmic composition on my website here) it was pretty well inevitable then that I'd eventually buy myself a copy of Ableton Live (the tool of choice for much dance music) and start to produce electronic music of my own. I'm all too acutely aware of the potential for ridicule in the spectacle of old codgers getting "down wiv da kidz", and so I deliberately steer clear of attempting house, techno, dubstep and other beats-oriented genres. In any case I'm not really interested in getting people to dance as there's a surfeit of people doing that already.

I'm more interested in playing with sound and rhythm for their own sakes and to disturb various musical conventions. I've recently been experimenting with synthesised nonsense vocals that nevertheless, because they so resemble real human voices, have an emotional effect that's devoid of overt meaning: I suppose if a label is needed it would have to be "expressionist", because I constantly find myself creating tunes that remind me of my outrage at certain current political events. This music is rather a long way from easy-listening, but I do hope that people might at least be upset by it. (I have to warn that if you don't like either modernist music or free jazz, you're unlikely to enjoy this at all). I post my most successful compositions on the popular SoundCloud website, which is mostly frequented by young dance music composers, and here's a widget through which you can hear some of my pieces:    




Tuesday 8 May 2012

Hemmed in by Language

Charles Rosen is one of a handful of living writers whose work I always look forward to reading, which for me mostly means articles on music that he writes for the New York review of Books. Rosen is a first-class pianist who had a professional career on the concert platform (his recording of the Goldberg variations is one of my favourite interpretations). He writes marvellous articles on the appreciation of composers like Chopin, Ravel and Liszt: since the arrival of Spotify I may sometimes spend a whole evening reading one of these pieces while concurrently listening to each of the performances he mentions (I hope music schools have discovered what a great resource Spotify is).

Rosen also has broader interests beyond music, and occasionally writes about philosophical matters and art theory, with a special interest in Romanticism. For example in the latest NYRB (May 10th 2012) he has a piece called "Freedom and Art" in which he typically digs far deeper than the guff one normally reads on this subject (Dada against the bourgeoisie, Constructivism for the revolution, Abstract Expressionism as Cold War weapon, Pop against elitism etc etc ad naus). In this article Rosen starts by discussing the constraints on freedom posed by fixed meanings and having to learn language, and comes out with this extraordinary sentence:

"Of all the constraints imposed on us that restrict our freedom—constraints of morality and decorum, constraints of class and finance—one of the earliest that is forced upon us is the constraint of a language that we are forced to learn so that others can talk to us and tell us things we do not wish to know."

It struck me that in this single sentence he summarises, in an arresting and comprehensible way, everything post-modern theorists have been banging on about in such deliberately exclusive jargon for the last 40 years.

PS As a postscript to this thought, my partner Marion's grandmother often professed a belief that monkeys could actually talk, but they didn't because they knew that if we found out we would make them work...

Sunday 1 April 2012

Thought Prompted by the Petrol Strike Debacle

"We are likely to find ourselves as intellectuals or political philosophers facing a situation in which our chief task is not to  imagine better worlds but rather to think how to prevent worse ones."
Tony Judt
In a week where cabinet ministers appear to be urging voters toward Buddhist-style self immolation, I thought that perhaps an automobile metaphor might be apposite. If you imagine society as a motor vehicle then the capitalist market is its engine and social democracy is its braking system. Hands up everyone who wants a car without brakes. OK, just Osborne and Clarkson then...

Saturday 3 March 2012

A Very British Coup?




 






In 100 years time the last week of February 2012 will be remembered as a turning point in UK history, for three events that don't seem all that remarkable at first sight.

The first event was the appearance of Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan police Sue Akers at the Leveson inquiry, where she claimed that there was a "culture of illegal payments" at the Sun newspaper, in which police officers and other civil servants were not merely paid for specific information but were in effect kept on retainer to leak regularly. Akers testimony coincided with James Murdoch finally resigning the chairmanship of News International, the Sun's holding company. 

The second event was the announcement that the West Midlands and Surrey police authorities have invited bids from G4S and other major security companies on behalf of all forces across England and Wales to take over the delivery of a wide range of services previously carried out by the police. A West Midlands spokesman said that "Combining with the business sector is aimed at totally transforming the way the force currently does business – improving the service provided to the public". Needless to say Home Secretary Teresa May is an enthusiastic promoter of this scheme, which she hopes to have in place by next spring.

The third event was Prime Minister David Cameron's admission that he had indeed repeatedly ridden a horse loaned to former News International CEO Rebekah Brooks by the Metropolitan Police.

Now to anyone with a modicum of political nous it should come as no surprise to learn that the so-called "ruling class" is nothing of the sort - it is not a class, nor is it singular, nor does it "rule" in any straightforward way. Complex social democracies like that of the UK are ruled by a collection of powerful institutions that pass around power and funds between them, not with much sense of solidarity but more like a Darwinian struggle for dominance. These three events shine a spotlight on three of the most powerful of the institutions, two public (the Tory government and the Metropolitan police) and one private (News International), but other equally powerful ones like parliament and the judiciary are currently involved in a titanic struggle that almost amounts to coup and counter-coup.

That News International has had a baleful influence on British politics for the last 30 years is scarcely news to any but a blinkered few. During its 18 wilderness years the Labour party developed such a debilitating fear of the Sun's power over its natural voter base that NI in effect controlled the mainfesto of New Labour, dictating a continuance of Thatcherite economics and a hands-off policy on the media regulation that might have set them free. However it is somewhat newsworthy to learn that Cameron's "detoxified" Tory party too is almost completely integrated with News International, socially as well as politically.

It appeared for a while that News International's hubris had actually brought it down - the flagrancy of its illegal and anti-democratic behaviour over phone hacking lead to public revulsion and a revolt by parliament and the judiciary: to the Leveson inquiry, the closing of News of the World and the downfall of both Rebekah Brooks and James Murdoch. Last week Sue Akers testimony suggested that the Metropolitan Police, feeling the strength of the gale that's blowing, had changed sides in this struggle and decided to clean out the corruption, sever links with News International and start doing its job again. And then, POW!, we learn that the power of the police nationwide is to be dissipated by hiving off many of its activites to private sector security firms already known to be rapacious, inefficient and mired in corruption. What a coincidence.

I had a foretaste of what's to come when my motorbike was stolen a couple of years ago. The police found it, damaged and immobile, just outside London, but the officer who came to my door explained they could no longer return it themselves: instead it was being held by a private recovery company in Stevenage who charged £150 storage for every day I didn't reclaim it. On contacting my insurance company they were unfazed by this and having assessed my claim eventually paid some £900 storage fees (though of course I and everyone else ultimately pay in increased premiums). The bike was written-off rather than repaired as a result. This is the thoroughly British way of corruption, an insurance claim (whiplash, a "burned hearthrug", a privately-stored motorbike) rather than a handful of banknotes as in India or Latin America, or a newspaper parcel of home-grown cucumbers in the old Soviet Union.

This campaign poses the biggest threat to rule of law since Robert Peel first established a public police force. Combined with the concurrent assault on the NHS, it threatens to change entirely the nature of British society, driving it in the same dysfunctional and collapsing direction as the USA. Business interests will ensure News International eventually wriggles off the hook. Corruption will dominate everyday life as people strive to pay for their health-care and protection from crime. Private security firms will effectively become warlords in the poorer parts of the country. And all this is from the Detoxified Party of Law and Order. I think I preferred the toxic version, at least you knew where you were.

Saturday 14 January 2012

New Year message?


New Year message?, originally uploaded by dick_pountain.
These spent fireworks boxes seem to contain a not-so-subliminal message about the prospects for the world economy this year. I've devoted many posts on this blog to proclaiming my belief that social democracy is the only possible civilised form of government, and the one which most of the so-called 99% of the world's people would aspire to given the chance. It appears they are not to be given that chance - the workings of the neo-liberal economy and its hard-line ideologues conspire to bankrupt all the world's states and return us to a Hobbesian state of nature, while supine politicians are powerless to stop them.

Social democracy is in essence an armistice in the class war - labour agrees not to rise up and expropriate the owners of capital if those owners reciprocate with fair wages, good working conditions and paying taxes to support a welfare state. The benefit to both sides is that it minimises the need for coercion and makes possible the continuance of democratic freedoms. It's becoming hard to escape the conclusion that the 1% have broken that armistice and have no intention of renewing it. Reviving the world economy requires putting money back into the pockets of working people whose wages have been falling in real terms for several decades, but are now plummeting under the deficit-reducing policies of governments. It seems less and less likely that this can be achieved by democratic means, and after a century of social democratic experiment it might still come to a repudiation of all debt and the expropriation of private property. It didn't have to end this way: regulation of the sort devised by Keynes and Roosevelt might have been modernised and extended given the will, but that will is conspicuously lacking. This neat little video by David Harvey offers a reminder of those Marxist facts of life that never went away under social democracy.

There are crackpots on the extreme right who seem to believe that some kind of fascist/neo-feudal regime - under which the rich retire into gated communities and buy the protection of private armies and high-tech surveillance equipment - offers a possible resolution of the crisis. A moment's reflection will tell you that the extraordinary technological achievements of recent decades have only been made possible by mass-consumption and could never be supported solely as luxury goods (the economies of scale of silicon chip manufacture or lithium batteries are prime examples). The unfolding environmental crisis means that such mass-production is already problematic and requires regulation in the same way as finance capital, but that can never happen under "free market" conditions. The only alternative to a restoration of social democracy is slow decline into chaos as systems we've come to depend upon, like transport and the internet, begin to collapse. Meanwhile Ed Balls tells us that Labour will not reverse Osborne's cuts. Happy 2012!   

GILT BY ASSOCIATION

I don’t have any special credentials as a commentator on geopolitics, but occasionally, like now, I feel obliged to have a stab at it. The c...