The Virtual Stoa

From the BBC:

Great Britain continued their winning run at the Paralympic wheelchair rugby tournament thanks to a 32-30 extra-time win over world champions Canada.The sides were tied at 27-27 after Troye Collins had a late goal ruled out with three seconds to go which could have won the game for Britain.

But extra-time scores from Ross Morrison, Collins, Alan Ash and two from Justin Frishberg gave GB victory…

Good stuff.

Brian Clough, legendary football manager and lifelong socialist.

UPDATE [22.9.04]: B&T Jamie has more.

Dorothy Emmet, philosopher, born 29 September 1904, died 20 September 2000.

This is.

He’s just become the first England player to opt out of the forthcoming tour of Zimbabwe. Over here.

More on Zimbabwe, incidentally, over here at Class Worrier, who’s just re-relocated to South Africa, from where we can expect quite a bit of SA/Zimbabwe blogging over the next few months.

I’ve just learned that earlier this morning the British Wheelchair Rugby team beat the Belgians in their opening match in this Paralympic Games in Athens.

“It all happened in the third quarter after a very slow start.�We put on two blocking chairs to contain the Belgians.”

I’m sorry not to be there myself, as an old friend, Justin Frishberg, is in the team, but my earlier plan to descend on Athens this week for the Games has been sidelined by other stuff keeping me here in Oxford, which is a shame.Go Justin…

UPDATE [6pm]: I’ve just seen a couple of minutes of highlights of this game on BBC2 — and just wanted to plug a documentary about the GB team (Sweet Chariots) that’s going to be screened on TV on Tuesday at 7.30pm…

Duncan Hallas, Socialist Worker, born 23 December 1925, died 19 September 2002.

It’s International Talk Like a Pirate Day today, for the first time in twelve months, so please feel free to use the comments box below to, er, talk like a pirate.

There’s advice here, and if you’ve never admired the Ergonomic Keyboard for Pirates then perhaps you should.

(Nice, too, that ITLAP day this year coincides with the French Revolutionary “jour de la raison”!)

UPDATE [4.30pm]: Arrrrrr!, they be talkin’ like parrots pirates’ over at Backword Dave’s and John B’s cabins, arrr! arrr!

Good lads.

Chris Young over at Explananda has posted a link to a page from which you can download the classic William Shatner tracks, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, “Mr Tambourine Man” and (one I haven’t head before) “Common People”.

Unmissable.

To bring an end to this surprising burst of Saturday-morning bloggerage, I’ll just remind everyone here of what I posted over at Matt T’s yesterday:

Prince Charles is reported to have said a couple of years ago that “”If the Labour government ever gets round to banning fox hunting, I might as well leave this country and spend the rest of my life skiing.”

Good.

It seems to be mea culpa mea culpa mea maxima culpa week across a chunk of the World of Blogs, as a couple of excellent liberal bloggers out there have decided to make this the time to discuss their transition from pro- to anti- on the matter of the war in Iraq in more detail than they have hitherto.

It started when Belle Waring posted this piece at Crooked Timber, which then led to this one back at John and Belle’s, which in turn managed to bring Nasi Lemak back from the ranks of the blogdead for further comment.

(Repentant hawks also include Gwyddion the Magician, or whatever he’s called, who has also clambered out of the blogcoffin just recently, and Matthew Yglesias, who offered a brief endorsement of Belle’s piece.)

Most interesting snippets, at least to me:

(1) Belle: “I should have let partisan opposition to Republicans guide my thinking more than I did. My mom, for example, said that even if I was right and the invasion was a good idea, that these bastards would screw it up. I guess I was lost in some post 9/11, spanning the political divide bullshit haze”. A commentator then glosses this nicely in the discussion that follows: “My desire not to let my dislike of Bush cloud my judgment on this war ended up, ironically, clouding my judgment in favor of the war.”

(2) Nasi Lemak: “I think this mistake was actually driven by my being a political scientist. I didn’t have to be an especially strong rational choice proponent to believe that elected politicians tend to try to avoid disaster, and that electorates tend to try to punish politicians who end up leading them into trouble. I thought these two things to be probably truths both as regards the US and UK governments”, which is followed by an excellent discussion of how both of these assumptions seem to have collapsed over the last 18 months.

No discussion of this kind of thing is complete without reference to at least three D-Squared posts, so I’ll put them here, here, here and here, all of which are ageing well.

When he isn’t sharing his excellent taste in blogs over at the Normblog profile, Paul Anderson is filling us in on what’s been going on at Tribune magazine:

Various correspondents have asked in the past few weeks whether I know anything about what’s happening with the editorship of Tribune, and the answer is that I do.Steve Platt and I put in an application for the job, vacated in summer by Mark Seddon (who took over from me in 1993), because we were worried that the august organ was about to go down the tubes. Despite an influx of about �350,000 investment from the trade unions (who now own it), it’s selling only 3,000 copies a week. But the paper’s board decided that we were damaged goods, and that was it. I don’t think either of us is that upset.

Now the job has been taken by Chris McLaughlin, until earlier this year political editor of the Sunday Mirror and currently a columnist on the Big Issue, who used to work way back when for Labour Weekly, the official party paper that closed in 1987. I know nothing else about him � to my shame I haven’t read the Sunday Mirror or the Big Issue for years � but his praises are sung in the Independent today by Bill Hagerty, who was an editorial adviser to Seddon. Whatever, good luck to him.

I can confirm that I buy one of those copies, and that another is delivered to the Magdalen College Senior Common Room. So that’s 0.0667% of the circulation accounted for.(I’m not quite sure why the SCR here gets Tribune — but then again I’m not quite sure why, given that fact, I get a copy myself — except for sentimental reasons about trying to keep struggling left publications for which I’ve a bit of a soft spot afloat.)

In other Anderson news, there’s a piece over at SIAW about the remarkable extent to which the analysis of his and Nyta Mann’s book, Safety First, has held up over time.

(This could become a survey of the first generation of New Labour lit — I wonder what the SIAW comrades made of Derek Draper’s Blair’s Hundred Days?)

A chat with a colleague yesterday about the useless idiots who stormed the Commons chamber the other day raised a few interesting questions to which I don’t know the answers. So here goes, just in case anyone can supply anything either more accurate or more entertaining, as I haven’t seen this discussed in the newspapers (not that I’ve really been reading the newspapers, except to giggle at the Dailies Mail and Telegraph on the day after the fox-hunting debate).

Under standard accounts of parliamentary privilege / the Bill of Rights, etc., can anyone have jurisdiction as to what goes on on the floor of the House of Commons apart from the members of the Commons themselves? Can Peter Hain and/or the Speaker hand this matter over to the Metropolitan Police, on the grounds that these guys weren’t really MPs, or will the Commons have to try this case themselves? And if they did, would they get to vote on the important matters of (i) whether to lock them up and then also (ii) whether to throw away the key?

(With the return of impeachment to the Commons, or not, as the case may be, it’s fun to see the long neglected quasi-judicial function of the legislature returning to public consciousness…)

And does any of this have anything to do with the custom whereby MPs can’t actually die in the Commons chamber, but have to do their dying elsewhere? I forget the reason for that one, but vaguely remember that it was entertaining, and/or rooted in constitutional tradition.

Matthew Turner has enlisted the help of Steven den Beste in order to establish what will happen in the event of a new English Civil War between the Countryside Alliance and the UK government. It’s inspired stuff.

As you’ll already have noticed, the annual cycle of French Republican holidays has begun, those days which don’t belong to the regular months of the Republican Year, but come between the end of Fructidor and the start of Vendémiaire, which kicks off the new year. Today, for example, is the Jour de la Vertu.

But it’s more exciting than usual this year. Steve, who once upon a time wrote the code for the excellent French Republican calendar which adorns this blog (and who now has his own blog) has emailed to remind me that this is a French Republican Leap Year, with the result that next Tuesday is the quadrennial (and, in the circumstances, entirely aptly named) Jour de la Révolution!

Be sure to indulge in suitable celebrations.

The previous post reminded me of one of my favourite bits of Ralph Miliband (DSW, #95), from his essay on “The Coup in Chile” published in the surprisingly large 1973 volume of the Socialist Register:

In so far as Chile was a bourgeois democracy, what happened there is about bourgeois democracy, and about what may also happen in other bourgeois democracies. After all, The Times, on the morrow of the coup, was writing (and the words ought to be carefully memorized by people on the Left): “… whether or not the armed forces were right to do what they have done, the circumstances were such that a reasonable military man could in good faith have thought it his constitutional duty to intervene.” Should a similar episode occur in Britain, it is a fair bet that, whoever else is inside Wembley Stadium, it won’t be the Editor of The Times: he will be busy writing editorials regretting this and that, but agreeing, however reluctantly, that, taking all circumstances into account, and notwithstanding the agonizing character of the choice, there was no alternative but for reasonable military men… and so on and so forth.

The quote from the Times is from the leader of 13 September 1973, with Miliband’s emphasis added. The quote from the Register in on p.452.

Victor Jara, Chilean socialist songman, born 23 September 1932, murdered about 16 September 1973 in the repression following the coup of 11 September.

Finally, the military brought Victor Jara and other political prisoners to the Stadium of Chile, the place where the concert for Allende has previously been held. There the military men tortured and killed many people. They broke Victor Jara’s hands … so that he couldn’t play his guitar, and then taunted him to try and sing and play his songs. Even under these horrible tortures, Victor Jara magnificently sang a portion of the song of the Popular Unity party. After this, he received many brutal blows, and finally was brutally killed with a machine gun and carried to a mass grave.

There’s more on his songs here.

Osugi Sakae, Japanese anarchist, born 1885, died 16 September 1923.

Here’s some more.

Labour Defended, &c., Episode Five Six

[Previous Episodes: One, Two, Three, Four and Five.]

Capital which thus engrosses the whole produce of a country, except the bare subsistence of the labourer, and the surplus produce of fertile land, is, “the produce of labour,” “is commodities,” “is the food the labourer eats, and the machines he uses;” so that we are obliged to give that enormous portion of the whole produce of the country which remains, after we have been supplied with subsistence, and the rent of the landlord has been paid, for the privilege of eating the food we have ourselves produced, and of using our own skill in producing more. Capital, the reader will suppose, must have some wonderful properties, when the labourer pays so exorbitantly for it. In fact, its claims are founded on its wonderful properties, and to them, therefore, I mean especially to direct his attention.

Several good and great men, whom we must all respect and esteem, seeing that capital did obtain all the large share I have mentioned, and being more willing, apparently, to defend and to explain the present order of society than to ascertain whether it could be improved; have endeavoured to point out the method in which capital aids production. From their writings I shall extract some passages explanatory of its effects. I must, however, beg not to be understood as doing this invidiously. The only motive I have for selecting these authors, as the representatives of the political economists, is, that they are by far the more efficient and eloquent supporters of the doctrine I do not assent to.

Mr M’Culloch says, “The accumulation and employment of both fixed and circulating capital is indispensably necessary to elevate any nation in the scale of civilization. And it is only by THEIR CONJOINED AND POWERFUL OPERATION that wealth can be largely produced and universally diffused.” [This is taken from the Article "Political Economy", in the Supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica -- Ed.]

“The quantity of industry,” he further says, “therefore, not only increases in every country with the increase of the stock or capital which sets it in motion; but, in consequence of this increase, the division of labour becomes extended, new and more powerful implements and machines are invented, and the same quantity of labour is thus made to produce an infinitely greater quantity of commodities.

“Besides its effect in enabling labour to be divided, capital contributes to facilitate labour, and produce wealth in the three following ways:

“First. — It enables us to execute work that could not be executed, or to produce commodities that could not be produced without it.

“Second. — It saves labour in the production of almost every species of commodities,

“Third. — It enables us to execute work better, as well as more expeditiously.”

Mr Mill’s account of these effects, though not so precise, is still more astounding. “The labourer,” he says (page 40) “has neither raw materials nor tools. These are provided for him by the capitalist. For making this provision, the capitalist of course expects a reward.” According to this statement, the capitalist provides for the labourer and only, therefore expects a profit. In other parts of his book it is not the capitalist who provides but the capital which works. He speaks of capital as an instrument of production co-operating with labour, as an active agent combining with labour to produce commodities, and thus he satisfies himself, and endeavours to prove to the reader that capital is entitled to all that large share of the produce it actually receives. He also attributes to capital power of accumation. This power or tendency to accumulate, he adds, is not so great as the tendency of population to augment — and on the difference between these two tendencies he and other authors have erected a theory of society which places poor mother-nature in no favorable light.

My brother Michael’s blog is now in both the gold and silver medal positions on google for “Worthing sex entertainment“.

As he writes, “This suggests that either I inadvertently provide a great deal of it (I do hope not), or that there’s not a lot to be had.”

Back in the days when we were playing around with uncollapsible dichotomies, SIAW’s Patrick proposed “Klingons or Clangers?” Everyone sane plumped for Clangers, obviously, but the revolutionary case for Klingon has just received a boost from someone’s decision to translate the Internationale from French into Klingon (here, and scroll down).

“I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” has also been Klingon’d. [via]

In one of his more constructive recent interventions at the Virtual Stoa, David Duff interrupted his characteristically repellent and trollish behaviour (see comments threads below in the DSW) in order to ask about definitions of key concepts. As it happens, Hodgskin was just coming around to that…

Labour Defended, &c., Episode Five

[Episode One was posted here, Two here, Three here and Four immediately below.]

“The produce of the earth,” says Mr. Ricardo, — “ALL that is derived from its surface by the united application of labour, machinery, and capital is divided among three classes of the community; namely, the proprietor of the land, the owner of the stock or capital necessary for its cultivation, and the labourers by whose industry it is cultivated.”

“It is self-evident,” says Mr M’Culloch, “that only three classes, the labourers, the possessors of capital, and the proprietors of land, are ever directly concerned in the production of commodities. It is to them, therefore, that all which is derived from the surface of the earth, or from its bowels, by the united application of immediate labour, and of capital, or accumulated labour, must primarily belong. The other classes of society have no revenue except what they derive either voluntarily or by compulsion from these three classes.”

The proportions in which the WHOLE produce is divided among these three classes is said to be as follows: — “Land is of different degrees of fertility.” “When, in the progress of society, land of the second quality (or an inferior degree of fertility to land before cultivated,) is taken into cultivation, rent immediately commences on that of the first quality, and the amount of that rent will depend on the difference in the quality of these two portions or land.” [More here - Ed.] Rent, therefore, or that quantity of the whole produce of the country which goes to the landlords, is, in every stage of society, that portion of this produce which is obtained from every district belonging to a politically organized nation, more than is obtained from the least fertile land cultivated by, or belonging to, that nation. It is the greater produce of all the land which is more fertile than the least fertile land cultivated. To produce this surplus would not break the back, and to give it up would not break the heart of the labourer. The landlord’s share therefore, does not keep the labourer poor.

The labourer’s share of the produce of a country, according to this theory, is the “necessaries and conveniences required for the support of the labourer and his family; or that quantity which is necessary to enable the labourers, one with another, to subsist and to perpetuate their race, without either increase or diminution.” [More here - Ed.] Whatever may be the truth of the theory in other respects, there is no doubt of its correctness in this particular. The labourers do only receive, and ever have only received, as much as will subsist them, the landlords receive the surplus produce of the more fertile soils, and all the rest of the whole produce of labour in this and in every country, goes to the capitalist under the name of profit for the use of his capital.

Apologies for the gap in the serial… We’ll get going again, and post a few more chunks over the next few days.

Labour Defended, &c., Episode Four

[Episode One was posted here, Two here and Three here.]

The claims of capital, are, I am aware, sanctioned by almost universal custom; and as long as the labourer did not feel himself aggrieved by them, it was of no use opposing them with arguments. But now, when the practice excites resistence, we are bound, if possible, to overthrow the theory on which it is founded and justified. It is accordingly against this theory that my arguments will be directed. When we have settled the question, however, as to the claims of capital or labour, we shall have proceeded only one step towards ascertaining what ought now to be the wages of labour. The other parts of the enquiry will, I trust, be entered into by some of my fellow-labourers, and I shall content myself at present with examining the claims of the capitalists, as supported by the theories of political economy.

I admit that the subject is somewhat abstruse, but there is a necessity for the labourers to comprehend and be able to refute the received notions of the nature and utility of capital. Wages vary inversely as profits; or wages rise when profits fall, and profits rise when wages fall; and it is therefore profits, or the capitalist’s share of the national produce, which is opposed to wages, or the share of the labourer. The theory on which profits are claimed, and which holds up capital, and accumulation of capital to our admiration as the mainspring of human improvement, is that which I say the labourers must, in their own interest, examine, and must, before they can have any hope of a permanent improvement in their own condition, be able to refute. They indeed are so satisfied, that by their exertions all the wealth of society is produced, that no doubt on the subject has ever entered their minds. This is not, however, the case with other people, and whenever the labourers claim larger wages, or combine to do themselves justice, they hear, both from the legislature and the Press, little or nothing about the necessity of rewarding labour, but much about the necessity of protecting capital. They must therefore be able to show the hollowness of the theory on which the claims of capital, and on which all the oppressive laws made for its protection are founded. This will, I hope, be a motive with them for endeavouring to comprehend the following observations, as it is my excuse for directing them, not so much to show what labour ought, as to what capital ought not to have.

Sarah’s back from her summer blogging break with four queer-themed posts…