BOKO's Open Salon Blog

Zinn versus "Empire"

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 18:12:31 -0500

Introduction: Looking Out from Here

As the crisis deepens, and nationalism and religious belief, the twin last resorts of capital, are mobilized around the world to set working people everywhere against each other in the false name of "democracy," it might help us to ask what exactly is being built. Up until now, the anti-capitalist critique, of which until recently there was an enormous production, has focused on the failures of neoliberalism and what, if anything, the global financial ruling class was attempting to maintain by staying in power. But the processes of capital do not stop. It is just as much a fantasy to speak of arresting them as it is to speak, like the neo-Keynesians, of reversing them and returning to a previous era. In fact one of the main impetuses for the rapidly rising stench of nationalism in America right now is the belief that if only certain things are done, we will return magically to a (mostly fictional) time of vast productivity and relative peace between the classes. This myth is constantly pushed in the media and even here on OS, while the ruling class goes on setting one area of the country against another, aligning one sector to demolish all the rest, much like the same goal is being pursued in Europe by setting one group of "richer, more developed" eurozone nations against the "poorer, more indebted" ones. Never mind that the poverty being described in both cases was created by capital's viciously uneven and wildly unplanned development.

But again, instead of focusing on fantasy, let's ask ourselves, "What is being built?" For as the savage plans of austerity politicians and financial traders move forward, society does not cease to evolve. Rather it evolves at an increased rate. And we are not, in fact, headed into the past, as some ex-left and pseudo-progressive critics would have it. We are moving into an altered future, one that is steadily being transformed by capital in its attempts to hold a power structure in place that has obviously failed on every level to deliver for social need. In this sense, capital is doing what comes natural to it--expanding, while trying to keep its core structures intact--and as it wallows in its objectifications of people's misery as "laziness," "recalcitrance," "faithlessness," and finally, and most deadly of all, a lack of belief in one's nation (does everyone have their made-in-America uniforms yet?), the cycles of production, and social reproduction, continue. And we find ourselves more and more dependent on a system that is capable neither of extricating itself from its core structural problems, nor even of accurately perceiving the tremendous dangers created by its increasingly precarious real-material conditions. Steeped in its own fantasies of faith and nationalistic self-delusion, it is descending into ruin, and taking us with it.

Old Empire and New

In this situation, where everything is dovetailing quickly with the nation and the state, where capital has fled to protect itself from the growing disorder caused by it, and the unrest of the multitude, it is perhaps useful to remind ourselves of the work of Howard Zinn, the anti-imperialist historian who labored for many decades against the power structures of America and what he saw as the threat of global hegemony. As the privileged site from which the most violent movements of global capital are already being projected--finance, militarism, the murderous "diplomacy" of a false internationalism--America has a special role to play in the coming future, the one that capital is busy trying to inaugurate, whether its individual agents are aware of it or not.

This is not exactly the future predicted by Zinn's tireless warnings against traditional imperialism, either, as another pair of authors, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, have sought to point out in their trilogy of books focusing on the recent evolution of global power. Like with many powerful critiques that point to a possible future, and caution against it, Zinn's ideas were bounded by his own time and his own background, in his case the post-War period and non-violent resistance movements. This led him to take up a principled stance against what he saw as the main threat to democratic freedom and a better society for the vast mass of people--American imperialism. In the first in their own series, Empire*, Negri & Hardt point out some of the limitations of traditional anti-imperialist criticism and maintain that what is being brought into existence by the spread of information economies, control societies, and the new structures of global capital--all the most unique outgrowths of the recent evolution of power under capital--is a kind of "floating empire."

Negri & Hardt's idea of empire is one that exists not as a direct consequence of the actions of only one nation, but rather as a structure that operates through multiple, interlocking mechanisms, all for the benefit of an emerging global ruling class. This is centered around finance, but it has many arms, including a kind of monarchy in the militarism and "cooperation" of the richest and most powerful countries (the G20, especially those "blessed" with nuclear weapons); a series of legislative bodies (in the various false internationalist organizations, the UN, EU, IMF, which really serve the interests of the monarchy exclusively); and a war machine (mostly the US and NATO) and finance control mechanism (global monetarism) which act as the main levers in a global control society. This is not your grandfather's imperialism.

But this emerging Empire is not yet able to affect control over all nations or absorb all movements of resistance, and as a result it seeks rather blindly instead to concentrate on its own internal structures. These are not the structures of capital exactly, but the reflection of past dreams of hegemony of the traditional imperialist kind denounced so eloquently by critics like Zinn. All nations that tried to dominate their own time attempted to suppress the power of other nations, and other groups, that threatened (or that were pictured by hegemonic power as threatening) the interests of the empire. With Negri & Hardt's Empire, too, the basic goals of domination and hegemony are starting points. But with contemporary means of control available--the micro-control of information economies, global trading, "international" financial organizations, privatized security, hyper-technologized and "unmanned" warfare etc.--the possibility of a truly global Empire, one no longer centered in a single nation, comes into view.

With the end of the cold war, and America emerging as the victor, it seems obvious to the traditional anti-imperialist that an era of American super-domination would begin. But beyond the illusions of American wardening of the world, and beyond the murderous lies of "humanitarian intervention" and "wars for democracy," the development of Empire continues. This is no conspiracy, either, although the series of developments involved may contain within them any number of conspiracies, ideological flattenings, and deceptive moments: the "project for a new American century;" the "bloodless" corporate invasions of smaller states that resist global capital's influence; the repurposing of regionalism, once a nationalistic military strategy, to fit the needs of the G20; even the spread of not-for-profits and non-governmental organizations in the name of "peace" and "cooperation" (when in reality they play a major part in the destabilization of national economies, loosening them up for restructuring and plunder by disaster capitalism).

All this makes the recent rise in nationalism among capital's critics (including here on OS) especially stupid and worthless. The theories of neoliberalism and neoconservatism have already become the property of a new point of view, one that cares nothing for national self-interest, and that sees it only as a means to manipulate workers and prevent resistance from reaching a critical point. For any effective dissent in our own time, as a basic requirement, would have to ignore national boundaries and local chauvinisms. This is why it is so useful to power to keep the ex-left, and pseudo-left, around--locked into their partisan and identitarian boxes (or worse still, the sentimental idiocies of religious belief), they are invaluable to Empire. Without this distraction, the multitude might emerge--Negri & Hardt's term for an effective mobilization of the vast mass of people, across national boundaries (us v. them, US v. China, etc.) and internal segmentations (black v. white, immigrant v. native born)--which would challenge Empire for the global position. Worse yet for power, and for the aging bourgeois interests of capital, a new form of society, with new political formations, might emerge out of the struggle.

The Coming Multitude...Still Coming...

Before going on with Negri & Hardt's concepts, it might be helpful to review a few of the characteristics of traditional imperialism and hegemony detailed by Zinn in his essays.** In his work, Zinn gives us a series of strategies deployed by power around the construction of historical "fact," both in how we talk about the present and how we represent the past. These insights are not mutally exclusive to Negri and Hardt's point of view. It is rather necessary to understand them if we're to grasp how these strategies are still being used by power, and how their use differs, within the new framework of Empire.

1. The Massacres of History:

This concerns which massacres are remembered--those useful to power, especially those that can be used to stir up nationalistic sentiment and keep the founding myths of a nation (which obscure the founding violence) intact--and those which are forgotten, especially those where the victims are the subjects of power, slaves, minorities, indigineous peoples, workers (the murder of the American Indian, the expropriation of the Palestine, the systematic destruction and absorption of left parties in the West, and the East for that matter). These power structures last into the present, where they continue to operate, and share in the operation of the state and corporations.

Today this is used to differentiate between events that are pictured as purposeful and "democratic," or democracy-supporting (like power would have us believe the invasion and takeover of Libya was), and "destabilizing" and therefore dangerous (like power would have us believe about the continuing ferment in Egypt). The metric used is also obviously nothing "on the ground," or real in terms of the experience of the vast mass of people, but rather the current direction of markets, or the analyses of think-tank observers, or the talking points of corporate media, or all three. Empire is speaking to us. And it's speaking to us about history in real-time. And its opinions are not limited to the interests of any particular nation, not even America. If this were the case, then the debt ceiling debate between the US Congress and White House would not have turned into a massive demonstration of the power of the banks to direct government to do whatever it is they want government to do. In Europe, the situation is a little worse, with the technocratic control arm of Empire wrenching democratically elected leaders (albeit ineffectual ones) from power and replacing them with dopplegangers.

2. Repurposed by Power:

Zinn points out in one essay how Veterans Day in the US, a day originally meant to celebrate peace--the armistice ending World War I, the war supposedly to end all wars--was turned into a celebration of militarism. This demonstrates the perversion of history, both past and present, by power, and the extreme nature of this perversion. It is often a total inversion, a turning-inside-out of the facts of the case, and a "repurposing" of previously radical tools for some of the more hideous purposes of power: war and internal strife. The pattern is not limited to the meaning of national holidays, either. Institutions created for international unity and consensus can be turned into machines in the service of Empire.

In Europe right now, Greece, the poorest nation, is being blamed for a crisis brought on by the financial sector and its recklessness. The situation is backed up by the threats of the EU and IMF. Notice too how in America there has been a steady increase in racially fueled beliefs about how awful working conditions and wages--long-term functions of capitalist control--should be blamed on Latin American immigrants, the poorest, least powerful people in the system. All the main agencies of power--political, corporate, national media--participate and help to spread the lies. Here are two examples of extreme direct inversion of the realities: economic crisis brought on by capital turned into the "laziness" of the poor, and exploitation produced by capital transformed into the "threat" from illegal immigration.

3. Their Atrocities and Ours:

Zinn compares the coverage given in the media to Serb atrocities, especially those against Kosovan Albanians, during the Serbian War following the breakup of Yugoslavia, to the far less extensive and less sensationalistic coverage given to the effects of NATO and US bombing. Zinn runs through a number of ugly implications: our atrocities are better than their atrocities; our atrocities are more rational than their atrocities (just because we had a "larger purpose," which of course coincides with the purposes of Empire); and our atrocities were a necessity, while theirs were preventable. The last argument is perhaps the most insidious and, as Zinn says, the least true. Bombing civilians--always part of the murderous course of modern war--is also always preventable.

The implications for today hardly need to be drawn out. The media coverage, what little there is, of Iraq and Afghanistan, speaks for itself. Murder is turned into liberation, and our atrocities are always made to seem to pale in comparison to theirs.

4. A Diplomatic Solution, and Beyond Machiavellianism:

During his six decades of work and activism, Zinn reapplied many of his insights to other examples as they came along: the Vietnam War (1 and 3); the UN sanctions against Iraq following the '91 war in the Gulf (2 and 3); even the way in which World War I and World War II are seen by Hollywood (all three). All the time he was cross-checking and readjusting his conclusions. Zinn may have been an activist-scholar, but was no less meticulous as a scholar due to his political beliefs. In one of his best later moments, he took on some of the dearest shibboleths of American foreign policy theory, comparing the officially sanctioned ideas to the often horrifying results in their application. What he saw running through the picture that emerged was, in his understated words, "a distinct Machiavellian thread."

Zinn was suspicious of contemporary ideas about diplomacy. Always a complex way for the various players to get what they want in any situation, diplomacy between nations in the twentieth century also became a way for some very narrow interests, corporate and class interests, to make sure they were represented at the table. The argument will be made that this was no different than what had always been the situation. However the narrowness of the interests represented, and the way in which they tended to squeeze out all other concerns, including even a vague reflection of the concerns of the vast mass of people, these were certainly unique and troubling developments.

To Zinn this trend doesn't merely refer back to the abstractions of contemporary political theory, and some deep problem within it, but rather to the lived realities of people who have to suffer daily under such an amoral and conniving system. This strikes at two of political theory's most sacred, and most unremarked assumptions: egalitarianism and commonality of purpose within democracies. Zinn writes:

"The notion that all our interests are the same (the political leaders and the citizens, the millionaire and the homeless person) deceives us. It is a deception useful to those who run modern societies, where the support of the population is necessary for the smooth operation of the machinery of everyday life and the perpetuation of the present arrangements of wealth and power."

In other words, to cast the matter into Negri & Hardt's way of thinking, nationalism, quite paradoxically, is necessary for the maintenance of a free-floating, multi-mechanism, global Empire. It is the gap that allows the deception of a "common" interest in. If there really were a global government, with a single conspiratorial mechanism controlling everything, it would be open to attack from below. It would be subject to the same questioning and the same rigors, the same political dialectic, as all previous systems of power that have experienced challenges, interruptions, ruptures and revolutions. But if Empire is everywhere, it cannot be opposed. Or at least it can only be opposed effectively if the opposition takes on one of the multiple forms of the multitude. What this does not include are the traditional political formations held out by power, at least as they are given. If one accepts this limited menu of options as the final word on permissable politics--as many of the pseudo-left and ex-left critics do--one remains trapped within the impotent confines of Machiavellian game theory. This will always serve power in the end.

What we need to do is to change the rules on the system. We need to interrogate and violate and undermine and mutate and improve on those rules. They are, after all, our rules (the multitude's), and not theirs (the various agencies of Empire). We are the origin of sovereignty, not anyone or anything else.

Here is where the break occurs between Zinn and the other traditional anti-imperialists on the one hand, and Negri & Hardt on the other. Zinn was limited in what he felt were acceptable means of resistance. And while Negri & Hardt share his disdain for violence, one must keep in mind that the system today increasingly defines violence as any act at all perpetuated against the growth and spread of Empire. To accept such limitations is to accept one's own extinction, and in all probability the extinction of life.

______________________

*Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Harvard UP, Cambridge, MA, 2000.

**Howard Zinn on War, Howard Zinn, Seven Stories Press, New York, 2001.

Michael Hardt talks about democracy, empire, and an even dirtier word than politics--Love. To skip the goofy introduction, go to 2:20.

Relativity for Traveling Carolers

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:12:21 -0500

The title is a bit of a holiday joke. Of course there's nothing easy about understanding the theories of special and general relativity first developed by Einstein, and now expanded to include multiple theories about gravitation and how the universe really works. Since relativity is very far away indeed from how we understand the perceptible three-dimensional space we occupy, and which we've evolved to be able to navigate, it's a concept at which we're all literally beginners.

Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, however, are well beyond where most of us are at on the subject, and fortunately they've written a book about it for the rest of us: Why does e=mc²?

Cox is a particle physicist and works on ATLAS, one of the four main projects going on at CERN's Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, Switzerland. Yes, it's been in the news lately, but more on that later. Forshaw is a theoretical physicist and one of the youngest people on the planet ever to understand this stuff. In their book, the two scientists set out to do something elegantly, beautifully simple (well, simple for them anyway): derive Einstein's famous equation about the relationship between matter and energy starting with nothing more complicated than Pythagoras's 2500 year-old theorem about triangles, x² + y² = z², where x and y are the lengths of approximate sides of a triangle and z is the opposite longest side, and ending up with a description of the work being done right now at CERN. Along the way, they attempt to explain, in as simple a fashion as possible, the theory of special relativity, and, in what is more of a postscript, give some outline to general relativity as well.

Ah, Mr. Faraday...

The story starts with experiments by Michael Faraday (1791-1867) into electromagnetism--how currents can be made to travel along a conducting material in the presence of a magnet, and how magnetism is effected by electricity--and the powerful equations of James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) which helped to explain the processes involved.

Maxwell's work in turn provided predictions about the velocity of light-- about 299,792,458 meters per second--and once the obscuring idea of "ether" was dispelled, scientists came to the very strange conclusion that the speed of light will be the same everywhere, for everyone, regardless of the source of the light or our (the observer's) position in relation to it.

This was a disturbing conclusion to reach, as Cox and Forshaw point out, because previous work by some very convincing minds, including Galileo, had already made it clear that the problem with measuring the distance traveled by objects in space is that there literally is no fixed place on which to stand and from which an absolute result can be obtained. This effectively ruled out the idea of absolute space, while retaining the idea of absolute time (for the time being).

The rest of the picture had to wait to be filled in for Einstein's discovery that time, too, was relative. (As an aside, Einstein was born the same year that Maxwell died.) Einstein did this with, amongst other proofs, the famous thought experiment involving an observer standing on a train platform watching a train whizz past, with another person as a passenger on the train measuring time with a "light clock" . . .

The Light Clock Experiment

The "light clock" is a device made up of two mirrors between which a beam of light bounces back and forth, each circuit equalling one "tick" of the clock. If the mirrors are 1 meter apart, then the light has to travel 2 meters (at the speed of light, 299K+/meters per second) in order to measure a single "tick," or approximately 150 million "ticks" in a heartbeat.

But, to let Cox and Forshaw explain, since the train is moving "the starting point of the light beam's journey is not in the same place as its end point according to the person on the platform, because the clock has moved during the tick." That is, if the clock continues to tick at the same rate "the light must travel a little bit faster," which is what happens in Newton's world-in-a-box type physics (which works just fine on a rough scale in three-dimensional perceptible space). But according to Einstein's example, following Maxwell, the speed of light is the same for everyone.

Therefore, from the perspective of a caroler singing away on the platform the clock must take longer to complete one tick than it does for the caroler sitting beside their light clock crooning away on the train. Time slows down for the caroler on the train relative to the caroler on the platform. In this case, it's a very negligible difference, since we'll assume the train is traveling at very low velocity compared to the speed of light. For instance, if the train is going 300 kilometers per hour, traveling on it for 100 years would extend your life one-tenth of a millisecond relative to the person on the platform. But if you could go very very fast, then you could draw out your Ho-ho-ho's almost forever.

This tells us that not only measuring distance in space, but time as well, is relative. Using nothing more complicated than Pythagoras's theorem about triangles, and a simple equation (distance = speed x time, or time = distance / speed), we can derive an expression to tell us by how much the light clock on the train will run slow as measured by the caroler on the platform, a quantity known as gamma: 1 to the square root of 1 less v² over c² where "v" is the speed of the object measured by a known quantity and "c" is the speed of light. If you look at this closely you'll see that as long as the speed is small compared to the speed of light, gamma will remain close to 1; when the speed reaches a significant fraction of the speed of light, gamma starts to deviate from 1, and all sorts of interesting things start to happen.

In fact as the quantity for the velocity of an object becomes appreciably closer to the speed of light, the effect becomes more extreme, until it seems that one could extend the object's lifespan almost indefinitely. This is what is predicted to happen at the event horizon of a black hole where the matter being sucked in is speeded up to very near the speed of light and time appears to stop. That is until the elongated, squeezed matter reaches the singularity, a point of extreme density, and gets sucked down into it.

This is a little much to take in, but it's been proven many times by, amongst other methods, accelerating muons (a heavy type of electron) in accelerators and observing that as they increase to about 20% the speed of light their lifespans are extended many times. Instead of making about 60 circuits before decaying and breaking down, they make about 400. In this way you can watch while time slows down for them, just like the lucky caroler on the speeding train.

Minkowski Had a Plan

So all this not-having-any-firm-place-on-which-to-stand business is beginning to add up. But we're only part of the way to Einstein's beautiful equation E=mc².

If space and time really act this way, then, as Einstein's contemporary Hermann Minkowski put it: "From henceforth, space by itself, and time by itself, have vanished into the merest shadows and only a kind of blend of the two exists in its own right." In other words, we need the concept of spacetime if we want to continue.

But this presents us with some pretty onerous problems if what we want to reach are invariant quantities and rules about how the universe behaves. So far all we have that we know we can rely on are the speed of light and gamma. And it looks as if measuring distances in spacetime will require abandoning regular old Euclidean geometry. If we stick with it, we end up with some truly ridiculous results, including messing up causality, that is, instead of Event A causing Event B, we end up with a universe where B can happen before A. We have to switch to using hyperbolic space or Minkowski spacetime.

This also means that we're limited to a "cosmic speed limit", which we'll call c, and which no caroler and nothing else in the universe can exceed. It's part of the structure of the universe, of the way things act. This means that it's an invariant speed. It's beginning to look a lot like the speed of light, but we haven't proven that yet.

Actually it turns out that whether c is the speed of light or not is not all that important. Light just happens to use up all its speed in spacetime with its motion. This is because, as far as we know, photons (bits of light) are massless, and anything that's massless has to travel at the "cosmic speed limit" in order for Minkowski spacetime to work and to keep B from happening before A. If we discover at some point in the future that photons do have a tiny mass, that won't mean that Minkowski spacetime, and Einstein's theories, fall apart, but rather that c is still a constant, and still the "cosmic speed limit," just not the speed of light. Either way the quantity c will remain the speed of massless particles.

And what we're implying when we talk about speed really is energy. Matter and energy, therefore, must have a deep relationship. Where matter is packed very closely together, like near the center of an atom, the nucleus, where the strong nuclear force is acting, tremendous amounts of energy must lie hidden.

This energy can be freed by bombarding the closely packed particles with other particles and breaking the strong nuclear force so that some matter is destroyed and energy is released. Or it can be done by getting certain particles, especially protons, close enough together so that their repelling force is overcome and they "fall" toward each other and produce other particles and a burst of energy. The former process is known as fission, the latter as fusion. Fusion occurs at very high temperatures, which is an increase in kinetic energy--acceleration. Besides accelerators, fusion happens at the cores of stars like the sun. Every second the sun converts around 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium through fusion. One type of particle produced as an effect of the fusion of hydrogen atoms near the sun's core are neutrinos. An enormous bombardment of neutrinos is constantly striking the earth, about 100 billion per second per square centimeter. A rather famous experiment near Hida, Japan (the Super-Kamiokande) involving a large buried tank of pure water surrounded by photomultiplier tubes, extremely sensitive detection devices, bears this out. The neutrinos pass through almost everything, but show up as flashes of light when some of them hit electrons in the water.

By now it should be obvious--as it was for Einstein by working much of this out mathematically--that mass, or the amount of stuff in what we call matter, and energy, are different expressions for the same thing in the universe, and that the speed of light, or the "cosmic speed limit," is the exchange rate in the transformation of one into the other. Therefore the equation, Energy = mass x the speed of light (or speed of massless particles)². This completes the picture for the theory of special relativity.

But this leaves us with a very thorny question: Where the heck does mass come from to begin with? That is, why is anything attracted to anything else? Or repelled from anything else for that matter? Why are there things in the universe, and not just light and tiny particles whizzing around?

Return All to the Void...*

Cox and Forshaw point out that as modern physics has gotten more complex, and our understanding of the universe, especially of the interactions of particles, has expanded, our ability to observe experimental results to back up or bar hypotheses has been reduced. What once required simple materials and a laboratory, now requires complicated and expensive equipment. Faraday conducted most of his investigations into electromagnetism using materials anyone could find. The design wasn't too esoteric either.

At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) tests are being done to try and find an elusive and very important particle predicted by theory to be a determining force in how all the most basic pieces of the universe operate. The LHC is the biggest and most complicated scientific experiment ever undertaken, however, it's still based on something rather simple.

During the 1950s and 60s particle physicists and mathematicians worked out the Standard Model, the most mathematically streamlined expression of all the possible interactions between the elementary particles in the universe, including protons, different types of electrons, neutrinos, and some ghostly things known as the W and Z. Add in gluons, the weak and strong forces, and electromagnetism, and you have a working model of the universe--minus gravity.

One of the things predicted by the Standard Model--which works pretty well as far we know from experiments done at previous colliders, including the LEP, the antecedent to the LHC on the same site--is a particle known as the Higgs boson. At first physicists weren't even sure that it was a particle. Perhaps it was a universal equivalent, they thought, a shadow of how all the fundamental particles and forces interacted. But a recent detection at the LHC seems to suggest that they've closed in on the Higgs, and that it's located, or rather that it occurs, exactly where the Standard Model predicts it to be.

Hold on though. It's not a done deal yet. The data obtained so far only squeezes the window for the allowed mass range of the Higgs. Within the still allowable mass range there are some fluctuations. ATLAS and CMS, the two projects at the LHC looking for the Higgs, will continue to work within the allowed mass range and should eventually report a detection. Still it's good to keep in mind that the Standard Model expresses everything in probabilities (in keeping with quantum theory) and uses field equations, with "gauge" phase values, to narrow things down to a limited number of possible locations for each type of particle and precisely when, during the phases of each of these fields, we might find one. This expression defines, from the point of view of the Standard Model, what a particle is.

If we find the Higgs it might mean that string theory, one of the candidates for a unified theory--a theory that could be used to determine how gravity fits into the picture--has outlasted its rivals. String theory, the M-theory, predicts that there should be partner particles for all the most basic particles included in the Standard Model, and that at some point we should look for these, too. Other theorists would argue that if the Higgs turns out to be exactly where the Standard Model puts it (as the case appears to be shaping up) Einstein's theory of general relativity, along with the processes described by the Standard Model and confirmed by experiment, should be enough. And that the so called partner particles might be the shadows, the equivalents for the interaction of the Higgs with everything else. And then there are other candidates for a unified theory . . .

What they all have in common is that they agree on the principles set forward by Einstein's theory of special relativity. None of them deny the existence of spacetime or its special (that is, its local and invariant) effects. If you look far enough back in time at the conditions in a very young universe, things were different--even the most fundamental forces acted differently. Nevertheless, we're all subject to the laws of an old, complicated, and rapidly cooling universe. (It's only a few degrees above absolute zero.) And we live in this universe because . . . well, because this is where we are. The universe is the way it is, according to physics, because it can't be any other way. Even theoretical models that predict alternate universes--stacked up beside each other like infinitely thin slices of pie--have to provide for certain invariant conditions like causality and relativity and their significance in our understanding of spacetime. There's no way out of that.

Probably.

______________

Quotations from Why does e=mc²? (And Why Should We Care?) by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, Da Capo Press, Cambridge, MA, 2009.

*from Hung Ying-ming, The Roots of Wisdom, translated by William Scott Wilson.

Brian Cox explaining what goes on at the Large Hadron Collider:

A video that proves that time travel is indeed possible, and stranger even than anticipated by theory:

Brian Cox giving his opinion of people who believe the world will end in 2012 because the Mayan calendar says so:

EXHAUSTION, & POPULAR DISCONTENT

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 16:11:19 -0500

In the wake of the massive layoffs, failures on the part of politicians and corrupt business leaders, and the re-emergence of neoliberal savagery in the first world, it is easy to mistake the reaction for an alternative. It is even easier to assign previously existing alternatives--weak reformist dialogue, watered down radicalism, timid cultural politics, and ecologically based appeals for "new capitalism"--the role of the alternative that we are now searching for. But becoming is quite real, and it is a social fact. What the present movement from below in Europe, the Middle East, and now America proves, is that the set of existing definitions, and the coordinates they refer back to, belong to a situation that is now past. Neoliberalism, along with its utopian dreams of a global-capitalist future, are dead. What we are left with is a partially and poorly globalized production system, with all the familiar attendant problems of capital in crisis, disorganization, waste, overproduction and underconsumption, not to mention war, starvation, ecological destruction, and rapidly rising social disorder. On the other hand, the establishment responds with increasingly transparent attempts to ratchet up nationalistic hostilities between the major powers. And the markets try to manipulate the political direction taken by the so-called democracies, going even to the point, in Greece and Italy, of replacing leaders (albeit ineffectual and collaborationist ones) with their own technocratic dopplegangers.

Again in the middle of this riotous situation, it is easy to become confused, and to assign significance to the insignificant and lend a sheen of newness to tired, disastrous ideas. In particular the resurrection from its recent grave of the dream of a "green economy," along with illusions about a non-predatory capitalism, is distracting and potentially fatal for any attempt to focus on the main issue at hand: class conflict and the collapse of global capital. Regenerative or progressive politics, with their empty rhetoric about localism and self-reliance, merely recapitulate the ideas of the ruling class. They are an invitation to a future dominated by nationalistic conflict where different sectors of the global working class will be pitted against one another in a deadly competition for disappearing wages and resources. It is the Ariadne's thread that leads off a cliff, and not to some promised escape from the present situation.

But once the issue of class has been raised--as it has in Europe by the defection from the impotent, traditional politics of the trade union bureaucracy and social-democratic confessional parties by large sections of young people and workers, and increasingly in the Middle East in the maturation of the "Arab Spring" through the efforts of a new generation of revolutionaries, and finally in America in the form of the recent protests against wealth accumulation and market control--then there is ample space in which to articulate any number of deductive interpretations and analyses of these actions, while leaving aside or attempting to cover up the gaping wound of capital, the living fact that is located at the center of the system and that brings them all together: exploitation.

It is this rage to analyse the situation that defines the role now being played by the ruling class and their middle class counterparts--or at least those still willing to follow the cynical and fantastical belief in "recovery." Here is a term with many meanings, one worth analysing (instead of the protestors, whose message is crystal clear). But all the meanings of the illusion of recovery point in a single direction--to the politics of the ruling group, and their dedication to the further misery of the vast mass of people.

The recent cry of the movement in America against the 1%, and for the 99%, are not only a reflection of the desperation to which people are now driven, but represent the most succinct, most pointed politics to come to this country in a long time. Far from being unfocused or unrealistic, the movement against economic disparity is the clearest articulation of the real problem at the heart of today's unrest. It is the only platform, in fact, which makes any sense out of the reality that the vast mass of people live today. Free of the encumberances of objectification and the pre-existing rationalizations of privilege, it is the beginning of a real politics, and a real movement, and it has thrown into naked relief all the virtual and impotent politics being offered by the present system of economic power.

At the point of exhaustion, people revolt.

And all the pre-existing conclusions, all the post-festum politics on display in Washington and London and elsewhere--whether of conservative or progressive or social-democratic or "green" varieties--should be judged anew, in light of this standard: whom do they serve, the 1%, or the 99%? And what is useful to accomplishing the abolishment and criminalizing of economic disparity should be kept, while all that is not useful to this purpose should be discarded. This is not the time for sentimentality about the past. If the savagery of the ruling class, as represented by their vicious attacks upon the people, the various austerity and other financial-control measures, are to be beaten back, and we are to inaugurate a new society based upon the essential insights into class exploitation and injustice offered by the crisis, then we must be ruthless when we need to be ruthless, and gentle when we need to be gentle, and above all clear-sighted and vigilant at every moment.

The protestors in the streets of New York, and Athens, and Rome, and London, and Cairo, and elsewhere, need no-one to tell them the direction in which to go. Obviously they, along with hundreds of millions of others, now know. They know it through their suffering. It has been revealed to them by the profound morbidity, failed utopianism, and anti-social violence of the present system. They see it everywhere--at work, at home, in the streets of their respective countries.

What we need is something truly new, and not a return to the tired and timid reformism of the past. We hear our leaders talk about the "potential unraveling" of the Eurozone--when in fact it is obvious that this nefarious institution of financial control, this false internationalism, has already collapsed into rioting and chaos. It is only in the utopia of the totally discredited, sadistically manipulative world of financial speculation that this collapse can still be pictured as a future event rather than a present lived reality. The same can be said for the much talked about "potential secondary recession" in America. For the millions upon millions of Americans who are already living through it, this discussion is merely a means to encourage despair. To rise above these feelings, and these illusions, requires adherence to our own sense of what is happening. What the recent protests have opened up is a space in which to realize this essential insight:

No-one is coming to save us.

There is no stock of ideas amongst those considered permissable by any segment of the ruling class that will suffice. This has always been the real significance of the politics of the situation against the politics of the system. And any meaningful political agenda for revolutionary structural transformation must be derived from this.

That is what is to be done.

Recent events have not altered my opinion. And so, once again, I repeat:

People should do whatever they think is right.

Video of the "un-diverse" movement in action; imagine this simultaneously in a hundred American cities:

One of my favorite videos from the early days of the protests:

Incredible video of the protest against police brutality after initial showdowns over Zucotti square; protestors converged on NYPD headquarters. (This video was hardly shown outside the internet.)

Doesn't look like a negligible bunch of "hippies" and white middle class kids to me. What bullshit this nation has wrapped itself up in. It makes one wonder, who exactly are the lies for anymore? Who doesn't know?

STAGNATION

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 17:10:56 -0400

While Occupy Wall Street continues to grow, and attempts to find a coherent voice, we might wonder what happened to the recovery? More than a year ago, analysts were predicting a solid rate of growth in most sectors of the American and core European states, but instead what we've seen is a continuation of high unemployment, slowly but steadily rising prices on key commodities, and a disturbing expansion in long term trends. These last include the widening phenomenon of failing "healthy businesses," that is, businesses that entered the recession with relatively low debt burdens, and the erosion of wages and benefits throughout all sectors.

What we're obviously experiencing--and nobody wants to seem to admit it--is simple stagnation. Neither a second-dip recession, nor the big fall-off predicted by some believers in "long waves" have occurred. Instead we are stuck in a holding pattern, with businesses, especially small and medium sized outfits, struggling under the burden of trying to make up for almost two years in lost sales and payments from clients, while at the same time attempting to rebuild productive capacity in a climate where everything from supply chains to real credit remain unstable or unavailable. Both the World Bank and all the major ratings firms predict far slower than expected growth for at least the next couple of years, and the concerns about the Eurozone and the ability of leaders there to find and decide on a solution continue to drag down investments (never mind that the Dow is happy to see even a contingent deal go through, the Dow has never been tied to any particular version of "reality" other than its own).

The worst part of the current situation is that in real terms of growth what the major capitalist countries would have to be doing right now in order to make up for the enormous losses of the recession would be to produce at something like three or four times the rate of growth that we were experiencing before the slump, which was itself a considerable step backwards from the more productive economy of the 90's. Even this optimal state of things would only make up for a small part of the true loss in value from the recession. And besides, since the 90's large parts of business in America went into finance, insurance, marketing, real estate speculation and other unproductive activities. The recession came at about the worst possible time, and the loss of value was even bigger due to the rigged composition of the economy. Conservative estimates of lost value--which hover around the 12 to 15 trillion dollar mark--suggest that the current malaise could last for many years, perhaps even a decade. Problems with rebuilding whole constellations of businesses in a climate where it's still hard to get real credit (and not the kind sold on the cheap for "restructuring" old debt) and problems with policy direction (including the continued pathological attachment to austerity) make the future seem much more troubling.

In short, there is no political will for further stimulus, and there is no reason to think that anything other than a massive expansion into some new area of productivity--something that would produce even greater results than the initial hi-tech boom--or the opening up of a big new market--like the one-time liberalizing of the Chinese economy--would be enough to regain sufficient value to reverse the up and down trend of job losses, cost-cutting, and healthy failures. In fact it's more likely that all these things will increase with time, as the recession revealed some awful pre-existing conditions in the global economy, none of which have been addressed by a global financial class set on continuing high unproductive profits in speculation at the expense of everything else.

The most disturbing of these revelations came in the immediate wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers when it was discovered that the real rate of profit increase had been artificially pumped up for some time. This is a fact that has gotten almost no attention in the subsequent media coverage of the economic crisis, either here or in Europe, but it is probably the single most important insight to take away from the collapse. From about 2003 to 2008 overall corporate profits appeared to be skyrocketing, and markets responded accordingly. This in spite of the fact that on the ground big companies were experiencing a tug and pull effect of globalization--something noted by economists like Anwar Shaikhh and commentators like John Ralston Saul, but almost never mentioned by the official economists of the system and its institutions, or the various mouthpieces for globalism in the popular media.

When a company expands rapidly into new markets, either through sales or production or both, and regardless of whether it finds local capital to cooperate with it, it goes through a period of temporary losses, sometimes very large losses incurred in retooling, retraining, relocating and readjusting to new supply chains and local sub-contracting for everything from basic supplies to new facilities construction. These costs were often offset by taking out lines of credit from institutions that were more than happy to fuel the globalist trend so long as they made a good return. And since lower labor and materials costs and simplified production and streamlined factory-to-store delivery systems seemed to offer a solid investment, there were very few companies turned down for the duration of the big global boom. This really didn't get going until the mid 1990's, spurred on by China and the relaxing of a host of financial regulations to help offshore money as well as production. Weird theories about "weightlessness" and "burden-free" organizations helped to hide the huge costs.

All the interruptions meant that the real productive profits of many of these companies remained relatively minor or just plain flat throughout much of this period. Even though the paper profits of these firms, which were rewarded by Wall Street for taking the offshoring route, went through the roof, the process exposed many of them to long-term debt problems and repeated attempts to find newer and ever cheaper locales for their operations. The result was that the on-the-ground economy got further and further away from the financial representation, with more and more debt being built into the system at all levels. Combined with the after-effects of a "corporate governance reform" movement that actually ended up consolidating more power and more money in the hands of finance, and the inability of many domestically tied businesses to perform at the same astounding rates as partially offshored ones, the wonderful experiment in globalisation quickly turned into a disaster.

The long-term crisis trends in global capital--including especially the tendency of the rate of profit to fall--were exasperated by this movement, and the recovery, such as it is, continues to be expressed as little more than a period of extended stasis for most workers. Already released by the end of the "cold war" logic and the massive arms expenditures it made possible, the effects of the crisis trends were amplified through the partially globalised system, which is now busy collapsing back into regional blocs of capital. Meanwhile stock markets have fully recovered (their instability is a permanent feature, not just an after-shock of the recession), but the profits being made there can hardly be fed back into productivity without causing a general collapse again. The abstract world of speculation and hedge maneuvers is, paradoxically, the safest place to be right now. And a global financial elite thinks that's just fine. For the rest of us, the "recovery" looks and feels an awful lot like more of the same...

Next: EXHAUSTION

Obama and Empire, Part 2

Wed, 7 Sep 2011 19:09:12 -0400

In The Empire's New Clothes, Paul Street criticizes the foreign policy direction of the Obama administration, and the large degree to which it represents a continuation of the Bush years. But Street's analysis would be sharper if he had included more material on the coincidence of Obama's foreign policy with the administration's response to the recession. Here Obama has been depressingly predictable, and equal to his foreign policy adherence to past mistakes.

At first it may have seemed as if Obama were charting a new course: the stimulus, clamping down on poorly regulated industries, some promises to limit direct future interventions in the markets (once the bailout was complete), and even some amelioration of uneven trade practices, specifically the provisions accompanying the stimulus which required that certain vital products used in government-funded infrastructure projects, including steel, come from America. But the steam soon ran out of the domestic reform engine, just as it became apparent that there would be no real change in direction on the global front. And here's where things really began to look bad for Obama-the-president versus Obama-the-candidate.

On global trade Obama had promised a fresh approach--revisiting old trade agreements that put the U.S. at a disadvantage, doing more to help real development, as opposed to "disaster capitalism" and policies organized around the formation of more exploitive "economic development zones." It was these policies that perhaps had the greatest potential for change on a grand scale, and it was these policies that went by the wayside the moment the candidate settled into the Oval Office. Perhaps they're being held in solitary confinement now in Guantanamo Bay along with all the broken promises on torture and the multiple wars in which we're involved.

Looking a little closer at the history of Obama-the-politician, though, we shouldn't be too surprised that this is the direction things have taken. Tariq Ali, usually known as an analyst of imperialism, includes a striking and insightful critique of Obama's domestic policies in his book The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad. He begins with an examination of Obama's early years in politics. Bobby Rush, who took on Richard Daley for mayor of Chicago, and subsequently found himself payed back by having his district seat challenged by a relatively unknown Daley machine product, Barack Obama, gloats over his drubbing of the future president in the 2000 primaries:

"Barack was just no threat. The forces that created him were the same forces that were always coming after me."

By this Rush means big money and what he terms "the liberal elite cadre or cabal" of Hyde Park. (This is not a bad description, I think, based on my own knowledge of the area and its politics.) But when Obama ran again, on the South Side, he adapted, and later, running for the U.S. Senate and then for the presidency, he raised huge sums from corporations to make sure he wasn't too dependent on one group of political patrons. Ali writes:

"Obama raised more money--most of it, contrary to campaign mythology, in large corporate donations--than Hillary Clinton before and during the [2008 presidential] primaries, and much more than his Republican rival during the actual campaign."

But with his supporters all that mattered was the general tone of criticism, and not its economic or political content. The triumph of emptiness in politics is hardly new. Still Obama's donors included some of Wall Street's and corporate America's biggest players at a time when they were worried about a massive shift to the left in a country that had just witnessed the biggest robbery of public funds by private interests in history. These donors included Goldman Sachs, which gave close to a million dollars, Microsoft which gave more than $800,000, UBS which gave more than half a million, Lehman Brothers (prior to their collapse and absorption) which gave more than $300,000, and JPMorgan Chase which gave close to $700,000. Not to be left out, the telecommunications industry, always worried about their place at the table, chipped in large contributions, and three of the most powerful corporate law firms in the world threw in a total of $15.8 million. This last group of donors is significant because it's largely law firms that do most of the heavy lobbying in Washington on behalf of their clients, a trick that gets them around much of the doubtful campaign regulatory apparatus and does the extra job of making most of these deals secret as privileged legal communication.

Once elected, Obama promptly caved to these interests on healthcare reform, financial reform, and repealing the Bush tax cuts for the rich which would have cut into investments and the bottom line of Wall Street significantly. The move against taxing the rich--or at least not taxing them any more than they were before the Bush cuts, a paltry difference overall--effectively ended any discussion of even the most minor reforms, since the funds for new projects and increased regulatory enforcement would not be available. Starving the government for revenue during an economic crisis in order to weaken it, and make it less likely to be used as an instrument for social change, has always been a strategy of the ruling class. Instead the discussion turned toward debt reduction.

On the methods of Obama for achieving these regressive ends while retaining at least some genuine voter support inside his own party, Ali has this to say (and I think it's worth quoting here at length):

"Unable and unwilling to deliver any serious reforms, Obama has become the master of the sympathetic gesture, the understanding smile, the pained but friendly expression that always appeared to say, 'Really, I agree and I wish we could, but we can't. We really can't and it's not my fault.' The implication is always that the Washington system prevents any change that he could believe in. But the ring of truth is absent. Whether seriously considering escalating an unwinnable war, bailing out Wall Street, getting the insurance company lobbyists to write the new 'health care' bill or suggest nominations to his cabinet and the Supreme Court, the mechanism he has deployed is always the same. A better option is put on the table for show, but not taken seriously. A worse option is rapidly binned. And a supposed compromise emerges. This creates the impression among party loyalists that the prez is doing his best, that a team of serious thinkers is hard at work considering every possibility, but that the better alternative simply isn't feasible. This is followed by the spin doctors coming down hard to defend some shoddy compromise or other." [emphasis mine]

Ali further points out that this entire "strategy" was designed from the beginning to attract a center-right to extreme right conservative audience. Thus the FOX News appearances. Thus the fawning all over the "tea party" in the form of critical attention at the White House and in corporate media in general. Being a corporatist and having always been a dedicated member of that particular sect, Obama must have known what the lack of structural reform would lead to: years of brutal predatory policy aimed at reducing and denigrating labor.

After all, a certain gross attention to Marxist insight on economy--detached from its ethical and class significance--has always been part of the neoliberal toolbox. A politician like Obama, a careerist, astute by establishment standards, must have realized that the banking bailout would not be enough to fortify the position of the ruling investment class. As a result, a system was concocted to allow the near unlimited shoveling of public funds into the system. Recently there has even been open talk about a new "recapitalization" scheme for Bank of America. Evidently some think that a sufficient amount of time has passed to bring up such an infuriating idea. Gross theorizing dedicated to profit and gain is no substitute for real insight and courage.

The business of managing empire at home is messy and as it has become increasingly obvious to many of Obama's supporters from '08, no help is forthcoming. The critical point hasn't been reached by all, though, and that is due by this point in time--in the face of overwhelming pain and economic ruin all around--to the success of one of the most persistent myths about Obama: his image as some kind of twenty-first century advocacy politician. The myth begins with his self-congratulatory autobiographies, but such a claim would not stand up even to the meager scrutiny of corporate media if it threatened the interests of Obama's main corporate backers, the investment banks. Therefore rather than portraying himself as a tireless defender of the poor, or trumpeting his many victories as a community organizer--of which there were precious few, beyond the elimination of asbestos from a single Chicago housing project--Obama prefers to cut the figure of a midwife to hope and change. This puts him near the action, but off to one side, a "pained" observer to the pain of others, who is able to rise above the irrational emotions that the situation understandably calls up in those going through the crisis in order to mastermind an imaginary escape. The neutral tone is important because it removes any real responsibility for the results, or the lack of them.

The situation gives the political right's loud denunciations of Obama as a "socialist" an eery ring--as if what they were really trying to do was to convince as many of their intellectually limited numbers that this is what a socialist's policies look like. And so, the implication goes, what we need to do is to head hard to the right of the administration, that is, to head hard to the right of...the right. But the liberal version of Obama is even more confused. Ali:

"The portrayal of Obama as a good man in a bad world is no more convincing. The argument that compromises are sometimes essential to achieve limited progressive aims is correct. The problem is that Obama, while an extremely intelligent human being, is not a progressive leader by any stretch of the imagination. Wishing that he were is fine but does not bring about the required transformation."

Obama, like all neoliberals, is fond of saying that he believes corporations have a role to play in the fight against poverty. It's pretty obvious what that role is: control. One could say that the "turn" here, to use the post-modernists' terminology, doesn't amount to much more than the acceptance of the status quo.

__________________

Source:

Tariq Ali, The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad. London: Verso, 2010.