And now, a word from Karl Marx

The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state…. The necessaries of life occasion the great expence of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expence of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be any thing very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expence, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

Oh, wait. That was Adam Smith.

I remember reading that quote years ago in this brilliant little email that was circulating. Anybody have that lying around? It's not on Google. Anyway, after I read that I started tittering every time conservative hacks argued for market fundamentalism using Adam Smith as an argument.

(I totally stole this post from Edge of the American West, btw, which you should all be reading.)

Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam*

Here's George Orwell on what he calls neo-pessimism (which some of you may recall is a topic which interests me at embarassingly great lengths):

The danger of ignoring the neo-pessimists lies in the fact that up to a point they are right. So long as one thinks in short periods it is wise not to be hopeful about the future. Plans for human betterment do normally come unstuck, and the pessimist has many more opportunities of saying ‘I told you so’ than the optimist. By and large the prophets of doom have been righter than those who imagined that a real step forward would be achieved by universal education, female suffrage, the League of Nations, or what not.

The real answer is to dissociate Socialism from Utopianism. Nearly all neo-pessimist apologetics consist in putting up a man of straw and knocking him down again. The man of straw is called Human Perfectibility. Socialists are accused of believing that society can be—and indeed, after the establishment of Socialism, will be—completely perfect; also that progress is inevitable. Debunking such beliefs is money for jam, of course.

The answer, which ought to be uttered more loudly than it usually is, is that Socialism is not perfectionist, perhaps not even hedonistic. Socialists don’t claim to be able to make the world perfect: they claim to be able to make it better. And any thinking Socialist will concede to the Catholic that when economic injustice has been righted, the fundamental problem of man’s place in the universe will still remain. But what the Socialist does claim is that that problem cannot be dealt with while the average human being’s preoccupations are necessarily economic. It is all summed up in Marx’s saying that after Socialism has arrived, human history can begin. Meanwhile the neo-pessimists are there, well entrenched in the press of every country in the world, and they have more influence and make more converts among the young than we sometimes care to admit.

I identify with the last paragraph in particular. Socialism in the twentyfirst century should be a policy of cautious optimism, if for no other reason but that it's the only way we'll ever get anything done. But this should not prevent us from setting big goals. It's like Heat, the book by George Monbiot I keep rambling about: it sets a goal of a 90 % reduction in carbon emissions by 2030. Monbiot has very little hope that this will be accomplished, but shows that it is in fact feasible, if only the political will could manifest itself. But there is a really good balance in that book there between hope and vision on the one hand and feasibility on the other. Even if we don't reach those goals - in which case we have worse things to worry about - we might aim for them, and maybe we'll get much farther with them than we would without them.

Striking the right balance between idealism and pragmatism or vision and realism seems to be a huge problem for the left wing. There's an enormous battle between people on the far left who refuse to do anything unless they can do everything at once (hangover from the revolutionary days, I suppose) and those who are so far into the minutiae of practical politics that they forget they have a vision they need to clarify and work towards.

* * *

And by the by, in another section of the column, Orwell quotes a figure of 5000 Carthaginians in Carthage when the city was razed. In fact, there were half a million, 50.000 of whom were sold as slaves. So to amend Orwell's point: the annihilation of an enemy was never easy, even in an age where human life was cheap.

How cheap? Know what the word "decimate" means? It's the Roman word for killing every tenth person in a legion that had been mutinous; they had a word for it. Those crazy Romans.

* * *

Oh, and for those of you who crave, nay, demand knowledge of my home cooking projects, I woke up this morning and the sourdough was all bubbly and smelled like yoghurt and almonds and beer. I feel like Dr. Frankenstein. Igor, more flour, please!

* Because what this blog really needs is more titles in latin.

Microbe Socialism

Whatever Carl Woese writes, even in a speculative vein, needs to be taken seriously. In his "New Biology" article, he is postulating a golden age of pre-Darwinian life, when horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not yet exist. Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information so that clever chemical tricks and catalytic processes invented by one creature could be inherited by all of them. Evolution was a communal affair, the whole community advancing in metabolic and reproductive efficiency as the genes of the most efficient cells were shared. Evolution could be rapid, as new chemical devices could be evolved simultaneously by cells of different kinds working in parallel and then reassembled in a single cell by horizontal gene transfer.

But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency. That cell, anticipating Bill Gates by three billion years, separated itself from the community and refused to share. Its offspring became the first species of bacteria—and the first species of any kind—reserving their intellectual property for their own private use. With their superior efficiency, the bacteria continued to prosper and to evolve separately, while the rest of the community continued its communal life. Some millions of years later, another cell separated itself from the community and became the ancestor of the archea. Some time after that, a third cell separated itself and became the ancestor of the eukaryotes. And so it went on, until nothing was left of the community and all life was divided into species. The Darwinian interlude had begun.

The Darwinian interlude has lasted for two or three billion years. It probably slowed down the pace of evolution considerably. The basic biochemical machinery of life had evolved rapidly during the few hundreds of millions of years of the pre-Darwinian era, and changed very little in the next two billion years of microbial evolution. Darwinian evolution is slow because individual species, once established, evolve very little. With rare exceptions, Darwinian evolution requires established species to become extinct so that new species can replace them.
-- Freeman Dyson, "Our Biotech Future"

Which basically means that in the simplest stages of life, we were socialist. Then, as we developed into multiple cells, Darwinian competition took over, and we, as a species, became capitalists. Now we're trying to get past the simplistic, childish world-views of competition and capitalism, in order to reach socialist utopia.

Ok, I'm kidding, but I'm only half-kidding. But read the whole article. It's very interesting.

socialism & basic income

I'm hard at work alternately painting walls in our new apartment in Oslo and doing a pretty big translation job, but I do find some time to sneak in a little political work ("work") as well. This weekend I was at a seminar of the left wing of Oslos under-30 crowd, and I've got to say, I haven't felt this energised by politics in a long time. Not least by the fact that there seems to be a sort-of agreement that the thing to do is to try to build a broader left-wing alliance, to which I say: it's about time. On the left, we have been too fond of dividing ourselves into thinner and thinner fractions for a long time.

In my copious free time, I am attempting to find out why the socialist left (in Norway, at least - what's it like abroad?) is not interested in the idea of a guaranteed basic income.

(I like the Norwegian word better: borgerlønn, which means wage for being a citizen, or literally a 'citizen wage').

In Norway, only the centre-right liberal party Venstre is advocating this solution. I'm still just starting out researching the question, but everything I've been reading makes it more interesting as a potential, practical idea for a redistribution of wealth and power, and a radical restructuring of society. Not least because it increasingly seems to me to resonate wonderfully with socialist ideals. Why it has remained a centre-right-liberal idea in Norway is beyond me. I'm going to be looking into this for the next couple of months if and when I find the time.

But anyway, I just wanted to share this post at Crooked Timber with you: Should feminists support basic income?

Also check out the interesting discussion which follows. The post is a discussion of potential outcomes of a guaranteed basic income, as seen from a feminist viewpoint. What would happen to the role of women in a society with a basic income? It's possible that the gender gap in work/pay would widen, according to the author. Some interesting arguments, which would need to be taken into consideration if the basic income idea is going to work. The post is based on this 16-page paper (.pdf) which is much more thorough, but I haven't read the whole thing yet. Also more info and links in this post. I'm also going to have to read this article by Philippe Van Parijs, which I've seen several references to.

If anyone knows of any good books or websites discussing this, leave a comment. Also if you have any good arguments pro or contra to the idea. I need to find out more about this.