On the money

Nice bit by Dave Osler on turncoat politicos, something I've blogged about a bit before. This bit is bang on target for most of us actually:

In psychological terms, when they denounce these forces, they are really denouncing their earlier self.

A lot of my critical posts about the Left are basically an argument with that ill-informed ranting 20-something I used to be. STill, at least now I have a son to take it out on...

Ex-RCPers in The Times

The Thunderer has a bit in today entitled Karl Marx: did he get it all right? They then ask six lefties to give their view on the bearded one’s prophetic powers. What is surprising is that three of the six (Frank Furedi, Mick Hume and Claire Fox) are ex-RCP. Whilst well-known on the Left for its contrarian stance and cult-like membership, the RCP was pretty small outfit so they’re a strange mob to go to for comment (in comparison the much larger former CPGB only gets two – Martin Jacques and Eric Hobsbawm). Some might think this is further evidence of the RCP’s alleged media entryism. Probably more likely is lazy journalism. Hume is a Times columnist, so it’s not too much of a stretch to ask two of his mates to knock out a 100words is it?

Sunday snippets

Just got back from a really nice long weekend up on the Norfolk Broads. I managed to forget the right lead for my iPod speakers so I was without music for most of it, but actually I didn't really miss it. We went down to Beccles, which is a really nice little market town, and then on to Geldeston Locks, which is as far as you can take a boat down the River Waveney. Geldeston village itself is pretty small, but the Locks pub is nice. I also managed to get a fix of geeky disused railways thrills, as we managed to find the old village station.

Even though it was very relaxing, I couldn't quite leave it all behind and read most of The Black Swan. As I've said before, I really enjoyed Fooled By Randomness, so I was quite looking forward to it. And, about three quarters of the way through, I'm enjoying this one too, though for slightly different reasons. His attacks on fitting narratives to explain events is obviously going to be right up my street. He also makes a lot of references to Daniel (or 'Danny' as he calls him) Kahneman, and confirmation bias is dealt with in quite a bit of detail. Plus a lot of the book is really about epistemology. And when he starts talking about how many forecasters are really in the entertainment business I think most of my boxes have been ticked.

To be honest, a lot of this stuff is not new to me really - but I still enjoyed the book. That made me realise that I what I really like is the thing that most people seem to most dislike about the book - Taleb himself. I agree that he's got a big ego, I agree that he's making a lot out of some fairly well-known ideas and I find some of his stylist quirks (like primo, secondo etc and calling himself NNT) irritating. Yet overall I really like his style, and he does come across as the sort of bloke you'd want to have a conversation with over a few beers. There's a bit somewhere in the book where he says something along the lines that if you accept that some of the biases that affect us (like our desire for narrative) are very powerful, then you might as well use them. And I think that basically he pulls this off. As such I think it's a good book even if I'm not really learning that much from it.

Anyway, back on planet blogging, I've had a quick scan around and noticed a) Labour Outlook has had a rather nice makeover and b) there's quite an interesting Trot scrap going on over on Socialist Unity in a discussion about anti-fascism. The interesting stuff is in the comments where the rather good Socialist Party blogger AVPS has been slogging it out with Swuppies.

Someone has kindly posted a link to Socialist Worker's front page response to 9/11 which is worth a read just to remind yourself what a font of knowledge and wisdom the vanguard party of the working class is. I particularly like the way they state in the second para that no-one knew who was responsible, but by the end of the sixth para are able to state that the attacks were born out of desperation (whose we don't know) and by the final para we are being given guidance on how to make the most of our revulsion.... towards the US. Bleurgh!

Answers versus decisions

A great woman* once said, in reference to magazine cover designs, that there are no answers, only decisions. It strikes me that this rather insightful comment can actually be applied far more widely, and probably explains why we get ourselves in a mess about politics so often.

We like the idea of 'answers' because they are clear, and unambiguous. On the other hand 'decisions' involve judgment and compromise. Our desire for 'answers' is tied up with the idea that there are 'correct' responses to problems, whereas 'decisions' suggest that things are a lot more finely balanced than that, and that we actually have significant scope for choice. The idea that there are definitive answers also makes life seem much more knowable. With hindight it looks like we can see what the best thing to do was, so we can see if someone chose the 'correct' option, or at least a 'good' one. But surely a field like politics, where many things cannot be empirically proven, must always be primarily about decisions rather than answers.

It's definitely a muddle that affects politics. For example, a lot of non-Labour lefties can tell you what socialism isn't, and why examples of it in practice are not 'real' socialism. They often are rather less good at pointing to real-life examples of what they do like, as opposed to text book theories or very limited experiences from many decades ago. In some cases the correct version of socialism hasn't even been implemented, yet despite this they 'know' that it is the right one, and will be good thing for those of us that will experience it. That suggests to me a rather large focus on a very specific 'answer'. I'm not sure if it's just a coincidence that it's an answer that is very hard to prove wrong.

In case you haven't guessed, I prefer the 'decisions' camp. I think we spend out time more effectively considering the actual decisions that our leaders make, and whether they have a positive or negative impact, than attacking them for failing to provide the right 'answer'. Much of the rhetoric about Labour's 'betrayal' looks a bit daft when you think in these terms. Sometimes you get a good result with the wrong answer.

On a personal level I'm really bad at making decisions myself. And that's in no small part because in the back of my mind I think there is an optimal choice that I will be able to identify if I only take the time. I'm always grappling for 'the answer'. But at least in politics I think I'm teaching myself to spot what is good enough, rather than 'correct' and I think that is a smallish step forward.

* Mrs Tom

Rees-pect news

Don't ask me why but I was looking at the website of Rees-pect (SWP wing) earlier and in amongst the usual guff I spotted something actually slightly interesting in this story. Have a butchers at this:

The meeting erupted when Deputy Mayor Bill Tyson ruled against taking motions from Respect councillor Michael Lavalette (on pension disinvestment in the arms trade)...

So Rees-pect is now backing disinvestment from arms companies. As I have blogged about before, I am not a fan of disinvestment except in extreme circumstances. I think engagement is a better strategy, even with defence companies. I usually find calls for disinvestment to be knee-jerk reactions to a given issue that aren't properly thought through, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised to see the SWP and its fellow travellers involved in such a move.

Elsewhere it's all going belly-up for the SWP since Respect's People's Front of Judea moment. They've seen a card-carrying SWP member defect to the Tories. They've been told they can't use the Respect name in elections. They've been stung again over taking a dodgy cheque to fund a union conference. In the finest tradition of sectarian posturing they've hilariously decided to stand against a Respect (Galloway wing) candidate in the GLA elections. And they've seen Mark Steel leave after a couple of decades of membership. Those on the Galloway side of eth split hint darkly that there is more bad news to come...

The USSR: it did what it said on the tin

I was intrigued by this post on the popular* Trot blog Lenin's Tomb. I guess the point is that analysis of the USSR typically fails to seriously consider alternative interpretations of what was going on in the USSR, such as those developed by Trotskyist thinkers. What the USSR actually was and why it (and other regimes like it) went so badly wrong are clearly important questions, and it is notable that in the comments under the post there are references to other books which appear to seek to defend the drive behind the Bolshevik project and separate that from what the USSR did in practice.

I just don't buy it. The more I read about the USSR the more convinced I am that it was simply a genuine and serious attempt to put a Marxist version of socialism into practice. They had 70 years to get it right, admittedly including two serious attempts to destroy the regime. For most of the time the Soviet leadership had unchallenged power and as far as I can see all they tried to do whilst in power was put Marxism into practice. This is from A Short History of Soviet Socialism (which is probably guilty of 'ideologoical conformity' too):

"[O]ne of the striking features of the theory and practice of Soviet socialism was the degree of continuity and stability exhibited between 1917 and 1985. The worldview of Bolshevik Marxism-Leninism - constructivist, rationalist, productivist, technocractic - continued to underpin the process of building socialism in the USSR after 1917 (and indeed remained during the early stages of perestroika). The CPSU also maintained a striking commitment to the core features of "socialism" as a transition phase, as derived from their readings of Marx, Engels and Kautsky and from the practice of the German war economy: central planning, state ownership, central direction of social processes, leading role of the comminist party, proletarian internationalism. The stability or rigidity of the core features of the ruling ideology has long been remarked upon by Western commentators. Although the precise meaning of many of these features was subject to periodical reinterpretation in the light of political imperatives (especially the leading role of the communist party, and the commitment to proletarian internationalism), the party maintained that socialism was a transitional society defined according to a set of structural features to be consciously constructed."

Personally I don't think it is unfair to judge a Marxist version of socialism by the results of the regimes established in its name. Whilst I think it is always useful to keep an open mind about how things might have turned out there is a lot of evidence available to us - 70 plus years of the USSR, 50 plus years of the PRC and the experience of plenty of other regimes. In effect the same experiment was run a number of times in a number of countries and yielded similar results - undemocratic, inefficient and unpopular regimes with poor living standards. In contrast those that argue that a Marxist version of socialism could have been different a) tend to rely on dispositional explanations of previous failures (ie if only Trotsky had beaten Stalin) and b) don't have anything like the same level of evidence to back up their position, it is principally theoretical speculation.

As such my view is that it is the Trots who have got it wrong - they fail to take the stated ideological aims of Marxist regimes seriously and as such allow themselves to ignore a huge amount of problematic evidence.

(* Lenin seems to get very chippy about his traffic stats.)