This blog is dead...

...it was shit.

on Tibet

Since a band of blue-tracksuited thugs began herding the Olympic flame around the globe following so soon after ethnic riots in Tibet, the cause of Tibetan nationalism, embodied in the 14th incarnation of the Dalai Lama, has never been higher profile. Of course for decades since the Chinese army expelled the ruling elite from Tibet and officially annexed it as a province of greater China, the Free Tibet movement has maintained a core support from a rag-tag band of activists, students and politicians. With celebrity endorsement and the unstinting PR campaign from the exiled Dalai Lama himself, not to mention depiction in a Hollywood film, Tibet has been firmly fixed as one of the those places in the world where ‘something bad is happening’. Chuck in a Nobel Peace Prize for the Dalai Lama himself, a virtual secular sainthood, and even as success breeds a degree of rehabilitation for China, Tibet remains firmly a classic case of good versus evil. But, at least to me, a sense of unease accompanies the narrative of Tibetan nationalism. Perhaps unsurprisingly in a world of shallow dramatised public debate, there is surely so much more to be said, so many more shades of grey obscured as one or another world leader rushes to be seen at a joint press conference with the Dalai Lama, or condemn gross human rights abuses to an approving western audience (albeit whilst simultaneously trying to drop a reassuring wink at the Chinese leadership).

At its forefront lies the Dalai Lama himself, the man whom the Chinese leadership seems to intent on somewhat irrationally painting as the anti-Christ, at least partly no doubt in reaction to the reverence in which he is held in the western world. Partly for his message of spirituality and peace, but probably more for the fame his exile has brought him, he has come to be bracketed among the likes of Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter or Desmond Tutu as a freelance moral authority, something of a thinking-man’s pope. But this global assumption obscures the question of just what or who the Dalai Lama is.

The position of Dalai Lama (literally “Ocean Teacher” – teacher who is spiritually as deep as the ocean), the leader of Tibetan Buddhists worldwide, is filled by what is believed to be the reincarnation of the Buddhist Master(s) who, through reaching enlightenment, escaped the wheel of life and death but have elected of their own free will to continue to be reborn in human form in order to teach mankind. Upon the death of the Dalai Lama, a search begins in consultation with the Nechung Oracle, to find his reincarnation who must then undergo a training whereby eventually he full embodies the ‘mindstream’ of the Dalai Lama and is able to take up his position as the next Dalai Lama.

We tend to spell enlightenment with a capital “E” in the West, and I doubt too many people (Richard Gere perhaps excepted) would take this meta-physical jump. Indeed if it is true it must simply be coincidence that the emergence and persistence of the Dalai Lama is intimately connected to dominant power structures.

Created in 1578 out of the position of Grand Lama, a position created by Emperor Kublai Khan to govern the other Lamas (“teachers”), the title of Dalai Lama was first bestowed upon Sonam Gyatso, the de-facto (Chinese-backed) spiritual ruler of Tibet. Depending on who you believe, the title was either given to him by the Mongolian ruler Altan Khan (Mongolia then also being part of the Chinese empire), or, according to the present Dalai Lama, was merely a term of high esteem the emperor used to address Sonam Gyatso which simply ‘stuck’ and became his adopted title. Still other accounts suggest the title was most actively promoted by the man himself. Sonam Gyatso then post-humously recognised two previous incarnations of himself thus making him not the first Dalai Lama, but in fact the third, and so begun the line that stretches to the present and 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso.

Rather than being a predominantly spiritual position the Dalai Lama’s emergence was thus inherently political. From a Buddhist perspective however, this needn't matter. The desired spiritual event was brought about even within a corrupt and unjust system. Events must follow their course.

However the theocracy not only emerged and flourished in a corrupt political environment, but its religious teachings actively buttressed its class order. The poor and afflicted were taught that they had brought their troubles upon themselves because of their wicked ways in previous lives. Hence they had to accept the misery of their present existence as a karmic atonement and in anticipation that their lot would improve in their next lifetime. The rich and powerful treated their good fortune as a reward for, and tangible evidence of, virtue in past and present lives. This form of violence enforced a rigid and oppressive feudal hierarchy, in which the peasantry suffered as near slaves until the Chinese occupation in 1949. Far from being the oppressors of the Tibetans at that time, the Chinese occupiers actually abolished the feudal structures that underpinned Tibetan society. The (CIA funded) resistance movement that until the 1960s fought a sporadic guerrilla campaign was neither supported by the majority of the population, nor fighting for spiritual or cultural freedom. With the Dalai Lama as its figurehead it consisted largely of the dispossessed Tibetan ruling elites and their supporters looking to regain control of their lands and the people who worked them.

Perhaps, following in a similar vein of logic as before, the Dalai Lama survives these facts relatively untouched. Whatever matrices of power he was a part of and exploited by, the Dalai Lama is a spiritual leader who was not responsible for the material conditions that surrounded him. Yet the behaviour of the Dalai Lama(s) themselves throughout history has been anything but indicative of spiritual enlightenment. For example, on acceding to power the 3rd(/1st) Dalai Lama seized monasteries from competing sects and is believed to have destroyed Buddhist writings that did not accord with his new claim to divinity. His successor, the 4th(/2nd) Dalai Lama led a wild lifestyle of parties, mystresses and general excess, behaviour hardly befitting his incarnate status. For this he was consequently murdered, a fate no fewer than 5 other Dalai Lama’s were to share for reasons Jigme Norbu, the elder brother of the present Dalai Lama, argues were almost certainly either “for being Chinese-appointed impostors, or by the Chinese for not being properly manageable”.

Maybe the present Dalai Lama should not be burdened with the mistakes of history (though are they not technically his own mistakes?), but even in his present incarnation he has exercised some pretty questionable judgement. Since he fled from Tibet Tenzin Gyatso has travelled the world at least ostensibly promoting the cause of Tibetan independence, or, in recent years the more pragmatic cause of Tibetan autonomy within China. Keeping an exiled government in place is not cheap, and it has led him to associate with some dubious people. Following donations to the Tibettan cause by Shoko Asahara, the leader of the Aum Shinrikyo cult which carried out the 1995 sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway, the Dalai Lama repeatedly wrote certificates or letters of recommendation for Shoko Asahara to the authorities of Tokyo, hailing Shoko Asahara as “a very capable religious teacher” and hoping the authorities would “allow the Aum Shinrikyo Sect to be exempted from tax payments and propagandize its credo”. It is one thing to accept donations from dubious sources in the name of a greater good (though perhaps better should be expected from a man of the status of the Dalai Lama), but the support of the Dalai Lama went far beyond this. The German weekly Focus reported that without the his help, it would have been absolutely impossible for Shoko Asahara to build up his sect empire and, within a short period of very few years, gain status as a cult leader in Japan.

None of this is allowed to form part of the public perception of the Dalai Lama, nor the cause of Tibettan nationalism. China is without doubt engaged in a sort of non-violent ethnic cleansing in an attempt to settle the question of its sovereignty in Tibet, but despite this the irony is that Tibet and the Dalai Lama, both of whose past tells a story less of spiritual enlightenment than the complex and dirty web of power in which we all are wrapped, are once more enjoying a resurgence not for the moral urgency of their cause but precisely because of the dynamics of dominant power structures today. An emergent, seemingly increasingly powerful China, at once inspires fear and fascination from the rest of the world. At a time when it is about to hold the Olympic Games, in many ways the crowning glory of liberal internationalism, China is coming under increasing pressure to show it will play by the rules of an international system it did not shape, and indeed played at least some role in its historic subjugation. But perhaps the lesson from history is that this latest outburst in Tibet points to China’s continued weakness at a time when everyone seems to obsess about its emergent strengths. China’s control has never been absolute in Tibet. It has tended to follow that as the central authority’s power has weakened, so Tibet’s autonomy has risen to the point where it operated as a virtual independent state. As the Chinese leadership seeks to re-define itself, an increasingly conscious population is engaged in a variety of struggles for rights and freedoms. The question is whether in Tibet, those would be better provided in the long-term by the return of the exiled Tibetan leadership or not. Maybe, just maybe, the question is more open than many realise.

on Truthiness

"Hillary Clinton's embarrassed writhings after it was revealed that she had not actually come under sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996 are emblematic of this strange melding of fact and imagination. In her own mind Mrs Clinton did not lie, or even exaggerate, but rather “misspoke”. Appropriating the broader reality of a situation for political gain was nothing more than a “minor blip”...

...At all levels of the culture, the ability to spin a good yarn is valued more highly than its veracity...There is even a new word for this sort of fakery: “truthiness”. Coined by the American television comedian Stephen Colbert, truthiness describes anything that a person claims to know intuitively without regard to actual experience, evidence or the facts. In Colbert's words: “We're not talking about truth, we're talking about something that seems like truth - the truth we want to exist.” When Mrs Clinton remembered dodging the bullets in Bosnia, she was indulging in truthiness, adopting an experience she wanted to be true."

Which way is up?

One of the most prominent failures of the economics profession is its inability to explain why some countries get rich and some do not. Would this be equivalent to physicists not being able to explain gravity? Some seem to think so - Bob Davis of the Wall Street Journal seemed to suggest as much here (though not without reply).

To me it seems more a case of the economics professions own arrogance coming back to haunt them. So often in the past economists have seemed to suggest this was an easy question, and have fallen flat on their faces as a result. Suddenly the discipline that likes to think it can have something to say on pretty much anything, using (suspicious) models of human-behavior and some clever statistical tricks to make 'scientific' claims about all manner of things, has been exposed as all too often having been far more ideological than scientific. When you think you can do anything, you better not be building your house upon sand.

It is all too tempting then to paint economists as the dumber cousins of 'real scientists' like Physicists, but it seems to me a little unfair to compare economic growth to gravity. That being said, we might be a lot closer to actually understanding growth had it not been for the fact that the economics profession spent so long with blinkers on. Now at least it seems mainstream economists seem to be finally getting the message (thanks to the work of some among them like Dani Rodrik) that growth is a lot more complex, contingent, and context specific than they first thought.

The Dalai Lama Eats Babies!!!

According to reliable NEWZZZ sources (China's People's Daily), during their attempts to maintain their quasi-religious feudal enslavement of the Tibetan people by resisting the liberating Chinese revolutionary forces in 1959, the Dalai Lama and his forces are known to have "killed a nine-year-old boy Samni...cutting open his belly and eating his heart. Then, they cut the boy into small pieces and had him hung from a tree."

FACT: The Dalai Lama eats babiez - babiez with names!!!!

on another inconvenient truth

The Democrats are more fucked than a prison-boy with girlish hips. The idea everyone will just forgive and forget when all this is over and they have actually picked between a post-racial or a post-genitals candidate is looking increasinly ridiculous. In the wise words of Steven Ybarra, an uncommitted superdelegate from California:

“If I piss on your leg, and the next day I say I didn’t really mean to piss on your leg, but if you look down and see the yellow stain, you’re going to say, 'Come on'’”

But here's a thought - could the sexual post-2000 Al "Hollywood" Gore unite the party following a divisive election campaign...?

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!

(no)

on the wealth of nation(al)s

Another article that has really caught my eye recently was published through the Center of Global Development by Michael Clemens and Lant Pritchett which attempts to provide an entirely new statistic (I'll try to avoid the temptation to ask if yet another number is what the economics or development professions need right now), what they call 'income per natural'. This is the mean income of persons born in a given country, regardless of where that person now resides. As they put it:

"Most of humanity was born in a “low-income” or “lower middle-income” country. How much money do those people earn each year? No one knows. Armies of statisticians have spent decades carefully estimating how much people in poor countries earn or produce. It is a simple matter to learn the income or output of a person who resides in El Salvador or Albania. But no one has made systematic estimates of the income of a typical Salvadoran or Albanian...[p1]

...[I]f income per resident is used as the measure of Salvadorans’ welfare it leads to untenable conclusions: if a Salvadoran moves from the countryside to San Salvador to get a factory job that raises her income 30%, this will be recorded as a welfare improvement for Salvadorans on average, but a 500% increase in income from a factory job in Texas does not (with, at best, only the portion remitted to residents counted)...[p1]

...42.8 million people live in countries whose income per natural is 50% higher than its income per resident; 235 million people live in a group of countries where the difference is 20% or more, and for 1.1 billion people the difference is 10%...[p1]

...Put differently, for those billion people [for whom the difference between naturals and residents is 10 %] departure from the country is one of the largest national “industries” in terms of its contribution to average material welfare per person of naturals. It is likely that by a reasonable international standard of poverty, two of every five living Mexicans who have escaped poverty did so by leaving Mexico; for Haitians it is four out of five...[p23-4]

This means that departing one’s country of birth is today one of the most important sources of poverty reduction for a large portion of the developing world. If economic development is defined as rising human well being, then a residence-neutral measure of well-being emphasizes that crossing international borders is not an alternative to economic development, it is economic development" [abstract; emphasis added]

These are deliberately provacative (and attention grabbing) words, and I am not at all sure I agree with the polemical level to which they go to emphasise the benefits of migration. I think in order to make a political point about the barriers that put up to the movement of labour they overstep the mark. As much as it is "people, not patches of earth, have well-being", people would most likely attach importance themselves to those patches of earth, and perhaps even more importantly it marginalises production as the single most important global phenomenon. Nevertheless, to focus too much on these conclusions misses the point I think. This new statistic really illuminates more than it obscures, and in that sense I welcome it.

so green we go red (part II)

A while back in what was, in point of fact, my second post, I had a little ramble about just what might happen if we do start taking this environment business seriously (or indeed if we don't have any other choice but to). Well it has been interesting in recent days to read a couple of interesting articles developing this same point, my favorite of which is this - "Risk, Inequality and the Economics of Disaster" published in what used to be called the Post-Autistic Economics Review . The author is bringing a very different theoretical framework in the shape of Amartya Sen's rights as capabilities approach with the hope of truly fulfilling the liberal vision of a free and fair society. I think for all my flirtations with radical leftism it is here that I feel most comfortable. Perhaps the limit lies in my imagination, for as Zizek puts it, that which is considered realistic is what allows everything to remain pretty much the same. For now let it suffice that there are substantive reasons to think that climate change really will impose significant changes on the material world we inhabit, and reason to believe that the coming project will be to define how that can be done most progressively.

As the author puts it:

"[T]he market fundamentalism of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, the inspirational twin intellectual dynamos of the profession for the past three decades or more, will soon slip into oblivion because climate change will push all of us to understand that unlimited capitalism is, in the end, inextricably connected to the disposability of human beings...

...[C]limate change destroys market fundamentalism by showing why market based inequalities necessarily lead to hierarchies of pleasure and suffering where the well-off regularly sacrifice the well-being and lives of the poor and vulnerable...[C]limate change poses such severe collective risks to societies that polities must explicitly choose whether to reorient national and local economic policy in ways that share these risks in an egalitarian manner or to deliberately shift these risks to the bottom of society."

The marketised society is one founded on the ideology that everyone has the right to be treated equally, and furnished with the same freedoms. The closer to this ideal we get, then the more necessarily true it is that the distribution of benefits that arise from the workings of a free economy cannot be unjust, though they might perhaps be unfortunate. Any interference to correct these however is almost inevitably unjust since it must engage in a form of social engineering which alters the balance of outcomes that arise from a relatively fair set of economic processes. Outcomes might perhaps at times be unfortunate, but to change them in any significant ways does harm to those who have done nothing more than succeed where others have failed.

However as Amartya Sen taught us the inherent flaw in this perspective is that it elevates a particularly limited number of formal rights over the substantive ability to exercise those rights. It is when disaster strikes that the true distribution of the capability to exercise rights becomes startlingly apparent, for example amid the burst banks of the canals of New Orleans. And it becomes even more clear when considered in light of the likely realities of climate change.

"The public in the rich world will soon have to face up to the fact that its wealth has been purchased at a vast human cost as well as choose whether or not to resist changing their methods of production and habits of consumption...In other words, the hierarchy of pleasure and suffering on a global scale is slowly becoming quite plain to citizens in rich societies, just as their willingness to either accept or resist change will soon tell the world whether fighting or negotiation will be the mechanism for allocating the right to use high concentrations of [Green House Gasses] to drive the growth of national wealth... [O]nce citizens of rich societies realize that they have purchased their well-being at the expense of the lives and well-being of others living far away, they may become curious about whether this system of pleasure and suffering exists closer to home. Imagine what would happen to white middle class America’s faith in markets if enough of them were to honestly ask if their pleasures required the suffering of others in their country?"

Faced with an ethical commitment that clearly implies some sort of sacrifice on the part of those that profess to hold it, the choice becomes starkly clear; it must be obeyed or it must be sacrificed. It is precisely the bourgeois morality in which the vast middle classes of the industrialised world wrap themselves that may force them to fundamentally reorient what are considered to be the political limits of justice. This is a remarkable possibility, beautifully expressed in the words of the author himself...

"Climate change will, in time, push even the most market obsessed societies to see the ethical and practical sense of Sen’s analysis of freedom, discrediting the Hayekian nightmare as the radical, nearly predatory mantra of a dangerous cult."

Progressive disaster theory anyone...?

on hapiness

Take a look at this really interesting (and really quite significant) study that looks at the available data on the relationship between happiness and wealth. As far as I am aware it is by far the most comprehensive of its type in terms of its comparative work that looks at data across a wide range of countries at different stages of development. The relationship it finds between the two is fairly unambiguous - greater wealth is associated with greater happiness. Perhaps it may sound obvious to some, but I am sure I am not the only one who can admit on occasion to have given in to the temptation to romanticise of the poor. The graph below is the best visual guide to the study's findings.

There are some interesting outliers - Indians for example according to this data are happier than the Chinese despite having a lower per capita income, which I'm sure could add fuel to many an ideological fire! The correlation between wealth and happiness however appears fairly clear and convincing, though I'm sure there would be some people with methodological concerns. Most fascinating to me is that it would appear that with each increase in age group the relationship between the two becomes closer and closer to a straight line i.e. less and less diminishing returns to wealth with each increase in age bracket.

"Money, money money, makes the world go round"

ABBA, 1976

on Human Rights

Human rights is the ethical language of our time; a secular groping for a universality that simply does not exist. As a language through which to express something, a need, a yearning, a struggle, it need not be problematic, but as an expression of something that is somehow ‘out there’, a fact of nature that we have discovered through the application of reason to the world, it is worse than useless. What does it mean to say that the human rights of Palestinians, or the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, are being systematically abused? So the Israelis or the US government have no 'right' to do that - so what? What have we learned? What have we gained? What possible illumination has been cast on the problem that is of any use whatsoever? The problem as ever is, and always will be, a fundamental question of power. At their most political, intelligent proponents of human rights talk would suggest that the language of human rights can be used to oppose power, by providing a standard that those in power at least nominally profess to share by which their behaviour can be held to account. But this is to misunderstand the issue. Where this would work the struggle against power has already yielded some results, for example in the legal systems of the countries of the developed world. This is why in the second example, the legality of what is happening in Guantanamo Bay can, at least theoretically, be questioned in an American court. This is important when we consider the first example; there is simply no mechanism through which the Palestinians can wage their struggle other than through violence. Violence is political expression; it is a language of resistance. Claiming human rights means nothing; creating human rights, that on the other hand is everything.

Utopia has been sanitised

This is the era of transferable skills. Of ambition held for ambitions sake. We train to work; we work to live; we live to change. Groping for substance we meditate, medicate, accumulate and copulate, in accordance with the scriptures. Our ethics a question of consumption, to be bought with coffee beans. Our recycling a metaphor for who we are. Perhaps we are entitled to ask if it was ever any better than this? But surely yes; things were political once. Now multi-coloured wristbands and marches for soundbites (not causes) stand in pathetic parody of history, packaged revolution for the media age (the revolution will in fact be televised). All violence has been evacuated from The Dream. In the era of transferable skills it is only natural the celebrity can replace the intellectual. A moronic and banal generation clothed only in our cynicism. We deserve this.

do you know what I hate...?

you and the fucking horse you rode in on.

also heath ledger is dead. didn't see that coming.

on Israel

Far left media outlets like the BBC and CNN have been broadcasting a sickeningly distorted picture of Israel's battle for survival against the terrorism. Its time for a new course of action - the hola-course; sometimes we gotta hola out for all the Jewz in need. Billions of dollars of military aid and a jokingly one-sided international policy response are not enough; they also need to feel our love.

This then is for Israel. Leave...her...alone...

because today I feel idealistic

For all those who believe in a better world.

on toilet art

"...life is like a pint of Guinness: 90 % black with 10 % white sitting on top..."

There is a toilet in my workplace, and in that toilet (3rd floor, 1st cubicle, my seat of choice) can be found the subject of this enquiry, something not entirely dissimilar to the above. I spend time there (quality time), but recently these precious moments are losing just a little of their magic. Gradually, what I had assumed originally to be a fairly banal racist joke, the product of some hairy knuckled monkey, once handed a tie and a desk, who might (if he has the capacity for ambition) aspire one day to marry his own cousin and breed a new generation of rebuttals to the critics of eugenics, began to concern me more and more with each subsequent visit.

If it was an attempt at racism, it didn't make any sense (allowing for the kind of mind in which such thoughts ever might make sense). Neither London, nor the UK, nor the planet in general is 90 % dominated by black people, with a 10 % minority white population, so whatever kind of commentary on race relations the half-arsed ejit had meant, their product had its own independent meaning. So slowly, but most surely, it got interesting. At first, still not convinced, I sought an answer within the racial paradigm. Perhaps a cultural angle? In our MTV base generation perhaps (pop-)culture has become 90 % black...but even if this is even mildly true, like the blind kid who just masturbated in the bath, I just couldn't see the white floating on the top. Ultimately the mechanics simply didn't work however I looked at it. I was free to abandon the racism thesis, and cast out in new and exciting directions....what did it mean???

Briefly I considered the idea that it is some sort of sub-Freudian reference to the workings of the human psyche. Like the metaphorical iceberg, the tiny part of the workings of our mind that are apparent (even to ourselves) are but a fraction of its true depths. Below the ten percent of relatively pure (white) operation lies a heavy mass of dark (black) neuroses, base instincts and carnal desires. The white of course is not something separate and of itself, but rather is in essence the very same. Indeed its appearance is a product of the workings of the darker mass, but it remains there, the filter through which everything deeper must pass. But then I realised I was being a twat.

As things stand my working hypothesis is this: life is largely mundane. You spend 8 hours of your day in an office, which is an extremely bizarre environment, doing things that on the whole you wouldn't choose to do. You probably spend a further hour and a half at least traveling to and from work. At times it feels like you barely see the light of day. The pressure that then gets placed on you social time to be 'fun' is immense; the more sparse the supply the greater the need for payoff. But in truth, the time you have to yourself is also largely mundane. So in fact most people's existence is, lets say for argument's sake, about 90 % mundane (mundane at least in comparison to some sort of expectation that I think may resemble an episode of The Real World). But then are those moments, those shining moments, where just for a fleeting time it feels like you really are an interesting person with interesting friends who together do interesting things. That is the magic 10 % of your life. The 10 % of your life that, should it ever have occasion to flash before your eyes will actually have cause to give you at least some small motivation, whatever the mortal danger you find yourself in, to somehow survive to keep on padding that 10 %.

So in short this commodal etching (which inspired hormonal bitching) is art in the truest of senses. Once released it has a life of its own. Or maybe the lesson is simply that I need to find a new cubicle-of-choice. A marriage to Kevin Federline is on balance better for someone's mental health than this kind of thought process when you're taking care of business.

on the (newly crowned) King

FACT: Elvis sired Benazir Bhutto's firstborn

on Hilary

Hilary Clinton cries; a campaign is reborn. But had Mitt Romney cried in similar circumstances to those of Mrs. C, so closely trailing his rivals in both New Hampshire and the wider contest, what would have been the consequences? Would he have had an electoral bounce? Would there have been suggestions that we had all of a sudden glimpsed his 'human' side? Nope. Instead, while headlines trumpeted his 'cracking' under the pressure, his support would have evaporated, and pretty soon he would have limped backed to console himself with his vast fortune and perfect hair. But because Hilary is female, showing emotion conformed to behavior that was not only acceptable as a woman, but possibly even in her case desirable, since like any successful woman in politics to survive she has to possess traits that make her as a woman seem somehow cold or inhuman, but nevertheless in a man are seen as strengths. Lets be honest it worked on all of us. What we've got to ask ourselves though is, is that ok...?

So green we go red...?

To borrow (as is always wise) from a man much smarter than I, the role Marx’s work plays today is to inspire that part of the critical left which is not openly Marxist in much the same way that Freud inspires our angst-filled discussions of our emotional lives. That is, based not so much on a reading of any of his work itself, nor even necessarily consciously drawing on his ideas, but simply because the basic critique of capitalism, at least the parts of that have any coherence, filtered into our social worlds via a dozen intermediaries, till we forgot, or even never even came to think, to question from whence they came.

Far from smart and original we’re just regurgitating stuff that entered our consciousness, later to spew back out in our own specific inadequate reinterpretation. Get something that passes for an education, cite him once or twice in an essay, and then move on, secure in the knowledge you more or less have a handle on the whole Marxism thing, because in the final analysis history has proved him wrong on his most fundamental point – that the innate contradictions of capitalism will inevitably lead to its destruction as the dominant mode of production in the global economy. Capitalism is still here, and going strong, whilst those who embarked on the great socialist experiments are either long gone, or are languishing behind the standards of living that are enjoyed by so many in the most developed capitalist countries. What does Marx have to say to those seeking to find some way out of the political mess that constitutes the Arab world? Or to the ‘bottom billion’ for whom capitalism has never even swung by to give them the chance to be exploited to the benefit of capitalist elites? Or a world which many feel we can’t entertain a theory which suggests that utopia can only lie the other side of the wrenching transformation of industrial capitalism? Pick different battles, smaller injustices - free Palestine, stop American aggression, temper market fundamentalism, get Britney some help. Whatever the cause might be there is no outright need to adopt the unfortunate label ‘Marxist’, one of the few social groupings that can make me feel fashionably dressed.

But perhaps its time for all those like me that find themselves in this description to reassess their relationship to a body of work that already informs us, directly or indirectly, but we assume that though useful and incredible analysis for its time, no longer has anything greatly interesting to say that cannot be better expressed within a new idiom, be it talk of multitudes, empires, social constructionism, or neo- or post- or whatever kind of colonialism. What has pushed me to this unpalatably revolutionary point was, of all things, an article that appeared recently in the Financial times, written by Martin Wolf one of capitalism's most consistent attack dogs. My feelings towards the beret-wearing, frequently-leather-clad, coffee-stained-fingernails of the often appalling Marxist left have begun to be reluctantly reassessed by the idea now fixed firmly in my head, that in going green, are we actually in serious danger of going red?

“[I]f there are limits to emissions, there may also be limits to growth. But if there are indeed limits to growth, the political underpinnings of our world fall apart. Intense distributional conflicts must then re-emerge – indeed, they are already emerging – within and among countries.”

For some two hundred years the entire world system has been buttressed on the misleading truism that 'a rising tide raises all boats', during which time the immense dynamism and ‘creative destruction’ of capitalism has delivered unprecedented standards of living even for those at the very fringes of its reach. As such a liberal democratic system has become institutionalised whose leadership has passed peacefully from one hegemon (the UK) to another (the US), whose leadership the majority of the capitalist rest are willing to follow (albeit with frequent tantrums) riding the wave of prosperity that is has brought.

Are we genuinely going to give saving the planet a go, as the most optimistic reading of the recent conference in Bali would suggest? If so a dark cloud (more pertinent than a specter) hovers over the global economy, for this means accepting, as Martin Wolf appears to fear, that the amount of carbon that can be emitted in its functioning has limits. But if we accept that there are limits to what we can emit, then we have also to accept that there are limits to what we can produce. But once you understand capitalism through the prism of Marx's analysis there are very good reasons for believing this to be immensely problematic.

One of capitalism's most enduring laws is that total production must continually rise. In a competitive economy producers must continually find ways to lower their costs if they wish to survive, which in the long-run means investing in new technologies that increase productivity. Hence the trend for goods which begin as expensive items to fall in price over time, bringing them within reach of more and more people, as companies battle to get the largest market share they possibly can.

Unfortunately it is not sufficient to rely on falling prices to bring products within reach of more and more people. Ultimately in order to continue selling all this ever increasing production firms need to find new markets, and hence the relentless expansion of the capitalist economy across the planet by a variety of means. As long as this process has no limits then, contrary to Marx's own analysis, despite continual 'crises' in different parts of the global economy over time, the system itself is not under threat. It is empirically true that on aggregate all have benefited from capitalism's expansion. True enough anyway to distract from the fact that these benefits are very unequally distributed.

But a world with limits on emissions challenges the very process that so characterises the capitalist mode of production; its very strength becomes its greatest, and possibly fatal, weakness. The endless drive to increased productivity, the endless creativity of its destruction, must meet the limits of nature before it ever meets the limits of man's ability to exploit his fellow man. For it is as we approach that moment when the tide can perhaps no longer continue to rise that capitalism as a mode of production's true colours, so artfully hidden in a system that is at once both emancipatory and oppressive, could re-emerge into full view. It is conflict and struggle that are the grinding cogs at the heart of the capitalist machine.

It is time for those of us on the critical left who have learnt suspicion of the grand narrative to reaquaint ourselves with it. This is a generation of unparalleled challenge, but also unparalleled opportunity. However as Marx once wrote:

"[h]istory does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this."

Do we stand a chance?