Consider, for example, welfare provision. The issue here is not simply one of more or less state support, but about how that support is provided. Conservatives don’t actually want (too many) people starving in the street; but they do want those who receive state support to be directly disciplined, probably by highly moralizing institutions (hence the conservative support for certain kinds of religious charity). Liberal welfare provision, on the other hand, requires that the recipients be disciplined by the amorphous institutions of the market. Thus raising the tax threshold is an eminently liberal policy, an attempt to improve the position of the poor by embedding them further in market mechanisms, not by limiting the influence of the market. In this context, Lib Dem skepticism about tax credits is rather baffling; perhaps the best example of a liberal welfare policy is Milton Friedman’s suggestion of a guaranteed minimum income, that is, a universal tax credit.

So a lot of what those of us on the left see as dismantling the welfare state may well be a restructuring which, from a liberal point of view, is entirely fair and progressive. The Lib Dem claims to have received concessions from the Tories aren’t desperate spin, they’re true, we just have to understand that what look like Tory policies are sometimes actually concessions to the Lib Dems. What gives the Lib/Con coalition the air of tragedy is that those concessions the Lib Dems have been able to wring from the Tories are of course precisely those that expose the limitations of liberal “fairness,” where the marketization of welfare emphasizes the marketization rather than the welfare. However, the fact that so many people experience the Lib Dem role in the government as a betrayal suggests they have a much more robust sense of what is genuinely progressive and fair than the Lib Dem leadership do.

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The English people believe they are free, but they are grossly mistaken. They are only so during the election of members of parliament. As soon as these have been elected, the people are immediately consigned to slavery, they are nothing. The way they use their freedom during the brief moment when they possess it means that they thoroughly deserve to lose it. (Rousseau)

The options in the constituency I’m eligible to vote in are sufficiently uninspiring that I didn’t get round to registering as an overseas voter, though now I rather wish I’d selected a proxy to spoil my ballot for me. Here’s hoping for an unexpectedly strong showing for “World Socialism.”

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The response to the failed pants bomb has at least provoked a bit of a backlash, although the focus on the privacy violations of the pants-scanning machines strikes me as misconceived. “Privacy” keeps getting construed as a mere matter of personal modesty, as if the point of rights was to avoid momentary embarrassment. But I don’t care if some security guy gets a quick peak at my cock, and you shouldn’t care either about the mere visibility of your quasi-naked body. The point of rights isn’t just to prevent us feeling uncomfortable, but to prevent against abuses of power, and there are potential abuses here; the scanners might be used to size up targets for various kinds of sexual harassment or assault, for instance, but most objections don’t seem to be couched in those terms. This is, perhaps, a logical endpoint of the concept of individual rights: when the concept of right is wholly wedded to the individual, it becomes impossible to imagine, not only forms of collective right or power, but to imagine even that these individual rights might have political significance.

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Just take a look at the funding for his campaign. I mean, the final figures haven’t come out, but we have preliminary figures, and it seems to be mostly financial institutions. I mean, the financial institutions preferred him to McCain. They are the main funders for both—you know, I mean, core funders for both parties, but considerably more to Obama than McCain.

There are a couple of ways of taking this. Usually, this kind of claim gets transformed into a claim that the majority of Obama’s funding came from financial institutions, and thus he’s been “bought.” This claim is, as far as I know, not true. The largest single organiztion collecting contributions for Obama’s compaign was actually the University of California; the second largest was Goldman Sachs, but Goldman’s fundraising efforts only contributed a little bit under a million dollars out of the $750 million the campaign collected.

This actually seems pretty understandible, because the idea that state power is bought by capitalists doesn’t really make sense: it’s already their state, so why would they spend money trying to acquire what they already control (if there’s one thing finance capital knows, its how to make a profitable investment). As is so often the case, the supposedly cynical position is actually a way of maintaining ones illusions: if the problem is the corruption of democracy by money, then there’s nothing essentially wrong with the institutions of American democracy. In fact, the situation is much worse than the cynics imagine, because capitalist control of the state is not “corruption”; it’s an essential (in fact, intentional) feature of the structure of bourgeois democracy.

The other way of interpreting the data on campaign contributions is somewhat more interesting, that we might look on these sums of money not as attempts to buy influence, but as expressions of support by different factions of capital, kind of like a very expensive bumper sticker.

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The New Labour project was always based on appealing to some imagined Dail Mail reader. But this fantasy now seems somehow too obvious, too desparate. What has happened to New Labour’s fantasy, to cause this collapse?

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Because the specific details of a president’s policy pronouncements are not the most important thing. More interesting to me, I think more important and also harder to figure out, is how a particular president will affect the opportunities for political action outside the bourgeois-democratic sideshow. There may be some reason for hope here. I certainly don’t agree with some ultra-left friends who hoped for a McCain win to radicalize the population; the past eight years of Republican rule don’t seem to have done much for the left, and I don’t see any reason to think that would change (it’s amusing that advocates of sharpening the contradictions are a mirror-image of faithful liberals: “just give them another four years! Then the people will get really immiserated, you’ll see!”). On the other hand, I’m not persuaded by those who see a great hope in people’s forthcoming disillusionment with Obama; I don’t think that automatically translates into support for the left, certainly, disillusionment with New Labour has led to apathy, not revolution.

I do hope, though,  that Obama’s election will put paid to the kind of “state of emergency” thinking that has dominated the left in the Bush years, in which everything is read as a sign of imminent fascism, preventing any pause, any attempt to try and comprehend the wider dynamics of the situation or form any kind of coherent response to capitalism as such, rather than to its epiphenominal crises. Admittedly, the ongoing financial crisis seems to be continuing this line of thinking, as can be seen in the abstract rejections of “the bailout” (a demand which is doubly impotent, as those making it know it won’t be listened to, and wouldn’t want it to be listened to if it were). But it seems to me that the coming few months at least will be a period of left down-time, with the attacks on the working class either less egregious or less obvious, and with public opinion more focused on (real or imagined) possibilities available within the capitalist state. This could be a good thing, the precondition for substantive left opposition to Obama as the character of his administration (and, perhaps more importantly, the global political-economic constraints on that administration) become clear.

So, although “don’t celebrate, organize” is a snappy slogan, I guess what I actually want to say is, “celebrate, and prepare.”

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Well, not that I know enough about the specifics of the Bolivian situation to say anything definite about what Morales should or shouldn’t do. But the question in general of how the revolution should relate to the state is always an interesting one. I’ve been reading The Civil War in France, which is Marx’s attempt to address the question of state power. Sometimes nowadays Marxists adopt Weber’s definition of the state (well, Weber did attribute it to Trotsky), perhaps adding a quick reference to the class nature of the state. One of the things that’s particularly interesting about The Civil War in France is that it’s a mature work by Marx that maintains the very clear rejection of the state from his earlier works, because it rejects this way of understanding the state. Marx says that the state “inmeshes the living civil society like a boa constrictor” (162); aside from the vitalism of this phrasing (which is another link to the early Marx), the metaphor suggests the alienation of the state that, Marx thinks, is a fundamental part of class rule. This is why revolution can’t just involve taking over the state, replacing a bourgeois state with a workers’ state (a phrase which, as far as I know, Marx never used positively). Now, that’s not to say that the revolution shouldn’t or can’t use coercion, but violence doesn’t necessarily make for a state (contra Weber and Schmitt); what matters is whether the means of coercion are directly employed by the whole mass of the people, rather than being organized in an alienated form.

Given this, it’s odd that Marx says so little in The Civil War in France about the actual means of organization of the Commune. He writes much more about the composition of the ruling class, and the maneuvers of individual ruling-class statesmen. It’s possible that this is because Marx thinks that, with the abolition of alienated power, politics becomes transparent; there’s no need for the kind of tea-leaf reading and scrutinizing of political machinations that you get in a state. This seems like some kind of hippie-Rousseauianism to me, in which unalienated organization is simply natural; I don’t think this is Marx’s view. Another possibility is that Marx’s main concern is in the tactical room for maneuver opened up by fissures within the ruling class. But this would suggest that Marx held a surprisingly bourgeois understanding of political agency, with the working class figured as a unified agent, with its freedom to act a matter of a lack of restraints, a negative freedom. Neither of these strike me as satisfying interpretations of The Civil War in France.

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If questions or issues about creationism and intelligent design arise during science lessons they can be used to illustrate a number of aspects of how science works.

In response to which the New Scientist compared him to Sarah Palin, and a couple of Nobel laureates are calling for him to be sacked from his position as education director of the Royal Society. And of course Dawkins got involved.

I initially posted this just because I thought it was amusingly stupid. But now I think there may be something a bit more pernicious going on. A number of people objecting to Reiss have said things like “teach creation in religious studies,” or “keep it in philosophy class” (see e.g. the comments on that New Scientist blog post). What’s wrong about this is the suggestion that philosophy of science, or the question of the nature and bounds of science, is irrelevant to science itself. This is a problem because it implies a belief that a scientific worldview is somehow obvious, rather than a particular way of thinking that took a long time and a lot of trouble to develop.

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If Zoe Williams thinks chavs are poor or victims of deprivation, she clearly knows as little about them as she does about the basis of comedy. Chavs are rarely lacking in disposable income and if they’re deprived of anything, it’s taste. Why do we have to be subjected to Ms Williams’s unsubstantiated Islington/Hampstead/Putney view of the world?

As opposed, you see, to the view of the world held by the author of the letter, from Sutton-at-Hone, Kent.

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