29 May, 2017

Building the Left




Where will we find the resources?

What must be our policies?

Who should we target?


The approaches pursued by the Left for decades have never been effective!

Yet, the circumstances over the last 25 years, and increasingly since the economic collapse of 2008, could not have been more conducive to an informed, vigorous and appropriately-directed push, within the Left, to finally marshal the forces to change things fundamentally.

The Social Democratic "Left" has invariably revealed its total inadequacy to the necessary tasks, and when they get the chance to act, merely line-up with the Right to make the Working Class pay for the current, irreparable mess that is 21st century capitalism. When they get into power, even with a mandate from the Electorate to dump Austerity, they simply betray-and-administer that essentially the-very-same Austerity.

They are totally bankrupt politically - observe France!


"François Hollande's vision of an anti-austerity Europe was just a dream"
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/30/francois-hollande-anti-austerity-europe-dream


What is needed is a real Socialist Agenda - for the End of Capitalism! And, the resources to do it must be the Youth.

But, we must not be diverted into social-adjustments, which do not permanently address the real problems. The issues of Gender, Race, Jobs and Health must be predicated upon the fight to change the Capitalist Economic System.

Capitalism - if essentially left unchanged, can only make the situation worse - observe Trump!




It's got to go - this must be our Prime Objective.

All the many consequent evils of that system must still be pursued, and even more vigorously, BUT with an insistence upon these necessary political objectives.

When seeming allies warn against bringing politics into particular struggles, drive them out: they don't agree that Capitalism is the major engine for all our problems, and any gains they make will be both inadequate and temporary.

We must bang the drum for Real Socialism!

Oppose any inwards-turning or purely local "suggested solutions", whether they concern Racism, Jingoist Nationalism, Gender Equality or even Defence of the NHS. All of these battles will be lost without economic change. All must be centred upon the main thrust of Socialism!

And, the Youth will be the Vanguard.

Recruit them within all activisms as polemicists and partners for the Main Purpose! For example recruit Moslem Youth, Black Youth, Unemployed Youth, Striking Youth, Demonstrating Youth, Student Youth, Homeless Youth, Young Musicians, Young Artists and Youth at Music Festivals.




They must be our forces for change!

But, we must also be serious about Socialism. We must know what we are talking about, and why. We must be Marxist!

We must understand what we are fighting and what we will need to replace it with.

And the time for this type of struggle is NOW.

25 May, 2017

The Fake "Prevent" Initiative




Yesterday (see below), I wrote about the Manchester Bombing in the City in which I was born and brought up, and about the responses literally across the board, commending a "we will not be intimidated" response. Literally everybody interviewed blatantly ignored the real causes in a constantly repeated hymn to so-called British Values and Intransigence.

How dare they include us in their guilt, and their way of coping with it! We didn't cause such an inhuman reaction: they did.

And, when it couldn't be avoided any longer, they finally got around to what was already being done, and could in future be done, to combat the rising tide of militant Islam, among Moslem youth. And, "everyone agreed" it was this Prevent Initiative, only more so, that would do it! What a proof of both blatant lying and implacable incompetence.

As if such a web of their lying words could gain-stay the real causes of such hate, namely intolerance, racism and even imperial invasions, as have been, and are still being carried out by the Western Capitalist Governments across the Middle East and North Africa.

And a whole range of people from Politicians, and Experts-on-Terror, to even "moderate Imams" were paraded out to support this mockery of a policy.

"Prevent!" - such a fake smokescreen merely covers up their real motives -they somehow want a quiet and quiescent Middle East, so they can get their valuable OIL cheaply and in peace.

The only valid policy, is for the Left to recruit moslem youth in large numbers into the anti-capitalist fight across the World.

Workers of all countries must unite against the war mongers and the murderers!

For Socialism and Freedom!

Manchester Bombing: Who is really to blame, and what is the solution?




I have to say I am disgusted with the reaction of the Prime Minister, other political leaders, many celebrities and literally all the media to the bombing in my home city! Bleeding-heart "sympathy" and rigorous seeking for the perpetrators can never be a solution.

After all, these people actually commit suicide to further what they believe in. What could have possibly pushed them into such a final crisis?

There is but one solution: You have to remove that cause. And, not a single contribution, in almost 40 hours of a positive avalanche of "comment", has even mentioned the clearly evident causes.

First Cause: there has been the crucial colonial conquests, interventions and even full-scale invasions in Moslem countries such as Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Algeria, Tunisia, Bahrain, Kuwait, and even Bosnia Herzegovina, should have made clear that a coherent, and aggressive agenda was being pursued by the West.

Second Cause: it is the major global area for the production of OIL! Colossal supplies of that vital substance still reside under many of those countries leading to resource wars.

Third Cause: global inequality, the regular recessions and failures of capitalism, and now the current-and-still-devastating 2008 event, is causing havoc in Western Capitalist Economies, and so scapegoats-are-required!

And, guess what - Moslems are easily recognised and are pouring into Europe to escape the current wars in their countries.

So, why are these causes not being addressed?

It is because the capitalists cannot change what they are doing. It is imperative for Capitalism-in-Crisis! Absolutely NONE of the supporters of Capitalism can do anything else.

But, the Enemies of Capitalism, and the leaders of Working People everywhere, the Socialists, and, only they, can act! We can give workers of all countries and creeds a much better commitment than that offered by the Extreme Islamists by instead welcoming everyone to:-

Both Live-and-Fight for the overthrow of the True Enemy, and for the establishment of countries that are both for the people, and ruled by the people.

Our success in such an historical imperative is the only way to remove those pernicious causes of terrorism.

21 May, 2017

Latest Wolff


Marxism: A generally applicable philosophy




Greetings, friends, comrades and colleagues.

I have a perhaps surprising message to bring you from my occupation.

For, I came to my present political stance not only from my criticisms of Capitalism, or even from how it treats my profession, with regard to Funding or Training, but primarily from the inadequacies of the current stance in my field of study, Physics.

I am a professional physicist, and the current stance in that subject, trumpeted loud and long, in almost every University worldwide, and pursued vigorously at great expense with things like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland, all the way to the Space Policies of NASA in the USA, which are, without any doubt, the results of a major, doomed-to-failure diversion, due to a badly-flawed stance both philosophically and scientifically.

And, such damaged perspectives and policies are not limited solely to just my profession: the malaise is endemic throughout the whole range of investigative disciplines from Economics to Biology, and Sociology to Chemistry. The philosophical stance, across the board, has backed itself into a whole series of related crises, which cannot be transcended by any of the usually-employed means. Our Culture in such areas is heading for a collapse!

Now, it might be wondered why I am bringing this up here, to an audience with mainly political concerns. "What have the problems in academic research got to do with our general concerns, which actually affect absolutely everybody?", for such seems to be a perfectly justifiable response. Well, they are intrinsically connected. And, the debilitation of these disciplines is a serious problem for everybody, considering what has to be done.

We are in politics to transform Society in fundamental ways, and we will need intellectuals on our side, in the building of the World that we seek.

Now, it is not by chance that the investigative disciplines have been diverted into their present dead-ends. Ever since Hegel's revolution in Philosophy and Marx's conversion of those gains into Materialism, the natural allies of that switch just had to be these intellectuals.

But, though it happened in Economics with Marx's book on Capital, it didn't happen in the other disciplines, and especially in the Sciences. For, the fact that these disciplines were historically totally staffed with people from the privileged classes, made it easy, via the similarly-staffed Universities to maintain the Old Order, and keep any revolutionary developments out! There were occasional exceptions, of course, but they were few and far between, and their privileged audiences were generally not enamoured of what these "mavericks" had to say.

And, in my professional discipline, Physics, the unavoidable crises were the most devastating, and the "solutions" employed, the most debilitating. The prior amalgam of Pragmatism, Idealism and Materialism, which previously underpinned Science, was radically modified by dropping the most important of the three - Materialism!

At the Solvay Conference in 1927, physicists accepted the suggestion of Bohr and Heisenberg to drop Physical Explanations, and rely instead only upon Formal Equations, as the actual drivers of Reality. Clearly, all that remained was Pragmatism and Idealism: the former kept Technology going, but only idealist speculation was left for the development of Theory.

The tales about Multiple Dimensions and Strings of Pure Energy, along with inventions such as Wave/Particle Duality, all fitted up with purely abstract Forms from Mathematics are indeed accurate pillars of the now universally subscribed-to Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory. Explanations of the prior sort are gone, to be replaced with unfounded Speculations, based upon Formal Equations alone.

Now, "All very interesting!", I here you say, "But, how does it affect our primary concerns?"





Well, it does, because the Philosophy that is the foundation of the serious critique of Capitalism, namely Marxism, has finally not only completed Marx's intention by recently delivering The Theory of Emergences, but, in addition has also torpedoed, once and for all, the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory. The shackles limiting Physics have finally been cast off. And, not only Physics, but all the other disciplines can henceforward develop as real reflections of the Reality they study, for the cornerstone of all the sciences, Physics, has been liberated!

These, and many other, contributions have been being published, monthly, on the Internet in the SHAPE Journal over the last 8 years, amounting to over 700 papers in 100 Issues






18 May, 2017

Issue 49: The Tree Metaphor - Modelling Human Knowledge






This issue looks at various analogies for the evolution of human knowledge, and how they might reveal where we have gone wrong.

Can we establish a sound metaphor for how we usually establish Human Knowledge - a Model or Pattern for how we do it now, and maybe how we should do it in the future?

The purpose of such an idea is that it delivers an overt Model for how we have done it, heretofore, which, at the same time, gives us a basic framework, to enable us to both criticise and improve upon it, independently of the content that we pack into it. Put in another way, we are attempting to make clear the philosophical bases for this vital process, which are, usually, not only implicit and undeclared, but also rarely even questioned.

17 May, 2017

David Malone & Chaos Theory


Revisiting David Malone's High Anxieties documentary from 2008 (you can watch it below), he seems, at first, to blame the collapses in social situations to ordinary people's own-and-increasing lack of confidence - their damning negativity, but, he then moved on to explaining that negativity upon to the discovery and vocabulary of The Mathematics of Chaos. 





He also recognised a generally-adopted Prejudice-of-Safety, which he put down to the prior widespread belief in Stability, as the absolutely necessary norm for Reality - for it, alone, seemed to allow the delivery of both reliable Predictions, and effective human Control of natural phenomena, via a mechanistic Newtonian-Laplacian kind of causality (taken from Mathematics).

But, clearly, the main assumption in such a stance, was the idealist-belief that what happened in the Real World was wholly determined by wholly-separable and eternal Formal Laws.

Remarkably, in the documentary, dominated by images of the debris of crumbling, abandoned factories in what had once been flourishing, industrial cities like Detroit, Malone sticks to his "revelation" that absolutely nothing is exempt from the ultimate inherent Chaos latent in literally everything that exists.

It is easy to see why some people, including Malone, are so pessimistic.

The only possible conclusion seemed to be, "Give up now, you'll never do it!", for you can't do a thing about it!


Detroit

Malone, and seemingly his version of the rest of humanity, are all locked into a philosophical Dead End, totally ill-equipped to deal with such cataclysmic events. There is not the wherewithal, in their assumed stances, to suggest anything that could possibly be done about these unavoidable calamities: "they are inbuilt into all aspects of Reality!"

But, of course, he is wrong!

The universal stance, which he tried-and-failed to accurately describe (and blame?) is not the only possible position to take philosophically. If you study Philosophy, with a view to equipping yourself to actually get closer to understanding things, you can trace its development from the Pragmatism of early Homo Sapiens with, "If it works, it is right!", down through the Idealism of the Ancient Greeks, as shown in both Euclidian Geometry and Formal Logic, and then to the beginnings of Materialism with Aristotle.

All of which, surprisingly, then co-existed with prior stances for literally millennia, which were due to the universally-subscribed-to Principle of Plurality that crucially made all causative factors separable-from-each-other, so that they could (though only very occasionally) be extracted as eternal Laws.

But, even, at the very outset of this adopted amalgam, the Greek Zeno of Elea did discover-and-reveal (in his famous Paradoxes) important contradictions, due entirely to this messy-and-incorrect mix-of-stances, but, even he had no idea what to do about it. Indeed, it wasn't properly addressed for a further 2,300 years. And, long before that turning point was finally reached, Mankind had found a pragmatically-effective way of "making-it-all-work-out", by imposing a version of Plurality upon defined and controlled areas of Reality, which they had constructed deliberately to reveal, as clearly as possible, a single, targeted, causative factor.

Now, this turned out to be a major breakthrough, because it enabled the reliable use of what could then be extracted, as long as the situation-for-use exactly replicated the prior situation-of-extraction!

Indeed, without further developments, this important change enabled the whole Industrial Revolution via sequences of processes, each one delivering only a single causative factor, so that after sufficient of these stages, the required, "predictable outcome" was finally achieved.

And, it was this that enabled the mounting growth and dominance of factory-based Capitalist Economics!


Abandoned factories in Detroit

Now, Malone seems to be totally unaware of this trajectory, and instead, can only mistakenly-identify its definite undermining via "discoveries in Mathematics". But, all his conclusions are only true, if all the underlying conceptions and consequent resultant Laws are assumed as being absolutely true.

And, that they most certainly are not!

The amalgam of Idealism and Materialism, made "possible" by Plurality, and the flaws of this illegitimate amalgam, got around by the regular use of Pragmatism, was bound to generate multiple contradictions.

The resultant Dead End was true only if such a mixed stance really did reflect Reality.

And. the initial proofs that this certainly wasn't the case were delivered by Hegel around 200 years ago, when, on the basis of the very different Principle of Holism - "Everything affects everything else!", was able to show that Dichotomous Pairs of contradictory concepts were inevitable with the current mistaken pluralist stance, and even showed how such impasses could be transcended by the seeking-out, finding and correcting of the underlying premises that had led inevitably to these dead-stops in Reasoning.

It was, of course, his assumption of Holism that alone gave him a handle upon the real situation of Reality, and which led to the addressing of qualitative changes - impossible with the pluralistic fixed-and-separable Natural Laws.

A very different stance was established, which had complex mixes of causal factors, which didn't merely "sum-unchanged" in varying amounts, but, instead, actually modified one another, until some sort of balance was obtained, which invariably consisted of the dominance of one of them, within a balance of the rest!

Such a situation, which mostly only changed as a variability, around a single dominant relation, was defined as a Stability, which had the appearance of being both predictable and permanent.

BUT, in fact, the actually simultaneously-acting multiple factors could not be extracted as they really were.

And the one-factor-at-a-time method that had been developed, always gave different factors to the ones actually acting together in unfettered Reality-as-is.

So, the sequence of processes, one for each factor, though they produced an end product which could be predicted, NEVER delivered what unfettered Reality-as-is would deliver naturally.

And, most important of all, the times when the Stability in the Real world situation was finally undermined by small but crucial qualitative-changing of the contributory factors, for then, things changed in a major qualitative way, which could never be delivered by the pluralist methods described.

Hegel realised that a situation under study in the real world, without both the simplifications and idealisations into separate processes, would instead by a varying nexus of factors, emerge often with two exactly opposite possible dominances, and which of these predominated depended upon the changing mix of contributory factors.

His studies of such situations, which he termed Dialectics, could identify these opposites and consider what might occur due to the particular changes involved.

He termed his method the Interpenetration of Opposites.

But, of course, there was an important handicap! Hegel was an idealist, so he was speaking only of Thoughts, whereas these alternatives were much more generally true. Indeed, as I have slipped into describing them above, as of Physical processes too.

So, to do more than be a criticism of Formal Logic, Hegel's Dialectics had to be transferred wholesale to a Materialist stance - a task begun by Karl Marx.




Thus, the whole analysis of the situation which Malone was attempting to deliver, in High Anxieties, was like asking a non-scientist to explain Quantum Physics. Neither he nor his supposed audience would have ever been equipped with what is necessary to address such questions, and, of course, social positions with a whole array of political beliefs as well!

07 May, 2017

What is missing in Žižek’s Marxism?





When attempting to deal with someone like Žižek, you are constantly trying to cope with, both a way of thinking, and a whole consequent vocabulary, that are saturated, nay determined, by his still-idealist premises. He claims, of course, to be a Dialectical Materialist - a Marxist, but that is evidently just the coat-and-hat that he feels it necessary and comfortable to wear.

And, it is made even more difficult, when there are parts of his stance that you not only agree with, but would have to defend alongside him, against the massive consensus, which takes a very different position upon these shared premises.

The most evident shared premise is, of course, Dialectics. But, much more basic than that, is the shared subscription to the Principle of Holism, rather than the consensus belief in the exact-opposite - the Principle of Plurality.

The trouble is that Marxism, or more correctly Dialectical Materialism, was not totally and finally defined by Marx, for he had a Social Revolution to prepare-and-organize for, and much still had to be done to maximise the reach and power of this revolutionary attempt, to ultimately unify both Philosophy and Science, into a single coherent, comprehensive and consistent stance.

For, in spite of Michelet’s brilliant History of the French Revolution, the task not only required the full participation in such an epochal Event, but also the professional Knowledge and Understanding of a scientist, to be able to move towards a generalised, indeed, a true comprehensive stance.

And, the main trouble is with crude, basic Holism!

For Holism and Plurality are a Dichotomous Pair of alternative concepts - indeed, the extremes generated as the result of incomplete premises as Hegel himself had crystallised in his Dialectics - the more real-and-active alternative to Formal Logic, in dealing with Abstractions. Indeed, “Ultimate Holism” as embodied in “Everything affects everything else”, is true, but totally unusable, in almost all circumstances: for absolutely Nothing is fixed, and in its most basic application - absolutely everything changes along with everything else, all the time.

How could any sort of Reasoning be possible on that basis? And the answer is, “None!”.

The possibilities of a kind of Reasoning were, however definitely achievable with the opposite concept of Plurality. But, Plurality - as it is usually defined, is yet another crude concept, for it assumed that all elements to be used, in any way, MUST be fixed: so that they don’t change at all!

The cornerstones of Plurality are the ideal-fixed-forms of Mathematics, and the eternal Natural Laws of Physics. So, as long as these incorrect assumptions are made, some progress in dealing with complex mixes seem possible.

And, it certainly was in Mathematics, for a great deal of purely formal complication was, indeed, possible: a whole world of Pure Mathematics could be built.

But, it wasn’t our World!

Major “engineering” was necessary to make our real world fit-in with Plurality. In what became known as Science, literally nothing was possible, historically, until Mankind learned how to control, modify, and maintain limited situations to approximate to a pluralist state , but only for a given sought-for relation.

And, that wasn’t all! The Greeks not only gave us Pure Mathematics, but also Formal Logic - again made possible by making Statements fixed and unchangeable too!

Now, any thinking about these crucial areas had to be by Reasoning, and so it too was severely hog-tied by Plurality.

As before, it worked in “maintained circumstances”, where things were constant, but failed miserably, when things naturally changed into something else.

Now, the reader can imagine that these ideas could be pursued comprehensively, and we could and indeed would go a very long way, if I was to carry on with it.

But, this isn’t a treatise upon Epistemology, but merely “The trouble with Žižek”, and that is difficult enough!

Clearly, for him, and everyone else, crude Holism is a major problem, and his total solution, as you might expect, is Hegelian Dialectics. But, in dealing with quantum physicists, he cannot oppose them, as he should, with ‘The Full Monty’, so he uses a combined approach with Engels’ Dialectics of Nature methods of revealing resonances between Dialectics and unavoidable opposites in the Copenhagenists’ researches and theories: the “look we are the same” technique, while, at the same time accepting their idealist retreat from Materialism!

He can do it because that is his real position too - retreating from materialism into idealism at every turn!

Not himself being a real scientist, he cannot intervene, as a Dialectical Scientist would, by resorting to concrete Reality. He cannot do that because his Holism is of the crude type. He hasn’t had to, as a true Dialectical Materialist scientist would have to do, develop holism into a new Level involving long standing Stabilities, involving multiple processes, systems of processes and self-maintaining super systems that can then act, as if they are independent of context for long periods, but ultimately are, at first, just sorely-threatened, and then defeated by Crises, with an ultimate inevitable Collapse towards Chaos.

In other words, he should have further developed Dialectical materialism, first to explain why Stabilities occur, and then, how the major transformers of such seemingly permanent states - major changes usually termed Emergences, or in Social Organisation - termed Revolutions, can transform things radically!

How can I say this?

It is because I personally have done just that, via my:-

Truly Natural Selection
The Theory of Emergences
The Physical Theory of the Double Slit
The Theory of a Universal, yet undetectable, Substrate and my demolition of The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory via A Physical Explanation of Quantized Orbits
An Explanation of Energy Propagation though “Empty Space”
An Explanation of so-called Quantum Entanglement and Pair Creation and Pair Dissociation

That is what a real dialectical materialist scientist can do!


This paper is from our latest special issue of the Journal



George Galloway standing in my old home town (West Gorton)