Sidewinder

 

In The Abstract

I want to return to an area that I first entered into many years ago in "The Production of Use Values" and have since wrestled with in the context of immaterial production.  That is the distinction between the various stages necessary in producing a use value, whether material or not.  My initial attempts were based on a simple two-stage model based on the object oriented programming model.  That is, an abstract "object" design/model of which each material product would be an instantiation.  Aside from its, to me now, transparent platonism, the two-phase model simply combined too many disparate things and eventually blocked further progress.

However, since the time of the initial "Product of Use Values", my work life experience with software engineering, gradually illustrated clear differentiations within the layers preceding actual materialisation (in the case of material products).

My current framework has evolved from a two stage to a four stage model. In addition to the multiplication of stages, there is also a passage from the very "thing-centred" conception of OOP - i.e. Object/Instance - to a more process-centred conception of creative labour. Let’s outline the phases of the use value production process:

1. Specifying

The end product of the specification process is, where it is formalised, the Functional Specification.  This specifies the use value in terms of it’s useful functions whether it’s inserting nails into timber, transporting goods from A to B in mountainous terrain without roads or cutting grass.

2. Designing

The end product of the designing process is a Technical Design which may include blueprints, documented specifications for components and so on.  For any given functional spec. many different technical designs are possible.  For example cutting the grass could be achieved equally well by a modern petrol-driven lawn mower as by a scythe, depending on the availability of fossil fuel or muscular energy (and skill) available.  For transporting goods in unroaded mountainous terrain you could choose to go with a transporter helicopter or the humble yak or llama.  The process of creating a given functional spec. into a technical design is both non-trivial and creative. Needless to say, different designs, even taking the same basic approach and using similar components, can be radically different in their efficient use of resources.

3. Planning

The end product of the planning process is an Execution Plan.  Having designed the Model T, Henry Ford then had to work out how his workforce were going to make them.  The production line was part of the execution plan.  In manufacturing, the work of producing an execution plan is now the speciality of the process engineer.

4. Execution

"The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men, gang aft agley" as Robbie Burns wrote.  Despite the best efforts of Taylorist time and motion experts to de-skill the execution of the tasks of production, outside of the McKitchen, in most production processes, the task of actually executing an execution plan will require elements of both skill and creative interpretation. The end product of the execution process is the use value embodied as product.

While the above model may be difficult to apply to an integrated artisanal creative process like writing a novel, it is fairly flexible when applied to the realm of social production.  This is probably best illustrated with a few diverse examples.

Examples

Model T

With the Ford Model T we start with the basic functionality of the automobile already having evolved in the luxury market.  Ford’s great innovation, at the level of functional specification is to see that the automobile can be transformed from a luxury product for the exclusive enjoyment of a rich, mostly non-productive, minority, to an enabler for a mass market of working people engaged in production, both rural and urban.  The functional specification of the Model T then is to make a robust vehicle, capable of carrying people and produce over farm tracks and unpaved roads, produced at a price the ordinary worker can aspire to owning.

The design of the Model T is famously, the work of Ford alone.  He exercises absolute sovereignty over the design - "You can have any color you like, so long as it’s black".  Indeed absolute sovereignty is the watchword for Henry Ford’s entire world-view, in this way he is the historical dark capitalist epigone of utopian socialists like Owen and Fourier of a century before.  As such he commands the hero-worship of not only American capitalists, but also Hitler and Stalin.

But in order to fulfil the functional requirement of affordability the design must also take into account the execution plan for workers to produce the Model T.  Not simply in the price of the raw materials and component parts that will be used in it’s production, but also more subtly, in the way that production will be carried out and by whom it will be carried out.  Ford’s previous experience in the luxury car market had convinced him that he wanted a car that could be produced by mostly unskilled workers.  Hence the design had to fit the mass production plan that Ford had to produce it - this included the famous production line, interchangeable parts, and above all, an assembly process that could be taught to unskilled, recent immigrants with little English (and no union cards!).  Here we see an important general point - the incomplete separation between the levels of function, design and plan.  That is there is a need for a communication of needs between the levels.  The needs of the production line (interchangeable parts) must inform the technical design and so on.  We call this process articulation.

But finally, the plan for production must be executed by workers, and here we have a whole history of struggle where things did very much not conform to Henry Ford’s pretensions to absolute sovereignty. Ford’s initial plan to use unskilled and non-unionised labour from the pool of recent immigrants did not work out too well.  The workers were far from being as supine as Ford had hope their precarity would make them, but most of all they tended to leave as soon as they’d acquired enough English and social contacts to get a better job or head West. The turnover and lack of stable skills was killing the firm.  In the end Ford went for a bold move - the famous $5 day (after 6 months in service).  But the flipside of the $5 coin was his new Gestapo-like Security Depart of the $5 coin was a new Security, charged with examining every detail of the worker’s habits and home life, and above all, of repressing any hint of attempted union organisation.  This resulted in massive battles throughout the 30’s.  Ford always said he would close the company rather than recognise the union, the final crisis came with a UAW led sit-down strike that seized and occupied the River Rouge plant.  Ford was only persuaded not to carry out his threat to shut down the company by his wife Clara’s threat to leave him (after 53 years of marriage) if he destroyed their son and grand kids legacy.  Ford capitulated and the company became the last US motor manufacturer to recognise the UAW in June 1941.

SQL

To take an example from a different arena entirely, let’s examine a SQL (Structured Query Language) query of a database in a commercial environment.  The output from this query can be used for any purpose, be it finding book-buyers that a new book should be suggested to (e.g. as Amazon does), stock control of medical supplies for an busy hospital Accident & Emergency ward, through to calculating the Net Asset Value of a hedge fund (probably not one run by Bernie Madoff, though). All of these operationally essential pieces of information will ultimately come from a sql query.

First of all we have the functional specification, this is the information the query must correctly calculate and return from the appropriate records selected from collections of potentially hundreds of millions.  This is the functional specification of the query.

Second we must produce the actual sql query itself.  There are many, many different potential sql queries that will fulfil a significantly complex query.  But they are not all equal.

From a given sql query subjected to the database, the database program will automatically produce an execution plan.  Each execution plan will (eventually) return exactly the same information specified by the functional spec.  However, the efficiency with which they do so, varies drastically - not in an arithmetic way, but exponentially.  For two queries that will return the same information one can run within 10 milliseconds, another will take over 10 hours to complete.  A bad plan can not only take an unacceptable length of time to complete, it can put such a load on the systems resources in terms of memory, cpu and disks that it can bring down the whole system.  Clearly hear we have a need for articulation between the design (sql query) and execution plan stages.  Even though the execution plan is automatically generated by the database program, rather than the sql author, the skill of the sql writer is to understand the workings of the database sufficiently to predict what kind of plan will be produced by a particular sql query and have the knowledge to capture the plan and understand it, before submitting it to be run by the computer(s).

Finally, the query(s) are scheduled to be run (often on a regular basis).  Again the stage of actual execution is automated, but still there are complicating factors requiring some articulation.  Whether a plan is good or bad is dependant on the actual quantity and specific properties of the data which it is querying.  Hence most production database programs will examine the execution plan at the time of each execution and decide whether to re-use that plan or whether, if the data in the database has changed sufficiently, to justify generating a new plan.  This can lead to problems if the process of articulation required has not extended to foreseeing this.  In the end, foresight is far more limited than the potential contingencies of complex systems, so issues do occur and it’s the job of the DBA to sort them out.

Returning to the level of generality, first we have moved to the realm of immaterial production and secondly we are encountering the question of automation. Taking the second item first, we can state that automation is not just a factor in the field of immaterial production. Take a modern Toyota factory producing entirely material trucks where robots have replaced human workers at many stages along the production line. What we can say is that generally at the level of execution that automation is taking place. The sql example is unusual in being one of the few areas where automation is reaching up the chain to the execution plan level. Although this is still most common in IT, there has also been development for many years in machine tool based engineering for automation of generating the CNC plans directly from the engineer’s CAD design, but what proportion of engineering is fully automated up the plan generation level I don’t know right now.

The other aspect of the sql example, as already mentioned, is the immaterial production aspect. I don’t want to go into it too much here as it’s somewhat out of scope for this piece, but suffice it to say that what is immaterial is the product, not the production process. Although nowadays the execution phase is almost always automated to some degree, let’s not forget the original computers were women using adding machines to calculate range tables for new artillery pieces being produced as part of the US war effort in WW2. To reiterate, the production process for immaterial production is no less dependant on capital goods/means of production, including server halls, computer hardware, comms networks and electricity, together with the brain and muscle power (even if only reading and typing) of workers. The difference lies in the ability to generate additional product through means of replication, rather than repetition of the execution process.

Many more example applications of the model in creative and concrete production (including examples outside of capitalist social relations) are possible, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader for now.

This World We Must Leave

What’s more interesting with this model is how it applies for broader questions of social transformation.

Marx and Engels famously reproached the early socialists they christened Utopian Socialists, for providing ready-made technical designs for new societies. Consequently, when pressed on the topic of what a post-communist society might look like, Marx tended to reply that he was not in the business of providing blueprints.

Indeed all of us who work in the tradition that "the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself" would see the creation and selection of a specific design for a post-capitalist society will have to be the collective work of the risen proletariat, or it cannot be a moment of self-emancipation.

However, just because we are wary of creating or advocating specific social designs, does not mean that we cannot usefully talk about the functional specification of a post-capitalist society.

And here we return to our theme of articulation, because the process of specifying the functionality of a post-capitalist society is inextricably linked with the process of critically analysing the dysfunctions of capitalist society.

It is possible to invert the four level model and use it for deconstruction and critique rather than creation. In the inverted model we move down from individual instances of injustice or inefficiency, through the operational processes or work tasking that is producing them, down to the design faults of the bodies or institutions that create these S.O.P.s and then, ultimately, to the fundamental dysfunctions in the society that produces and requires these institutions.

As an example, consider police racism or brutality.  On the first level we have the acts of racism and brutality of individual cops.  On the second level we have the operations culture that means the shift these cops work on does not challenge their behaviour or may even encourage it.  In addition we have the connivance of the duty staff at the police station who turn a blind eye to beatings in the cells, deny access to medical aid or solicitors, lie to family of friends phoning up to find their loved ones and falsify the necessary paperwork. At the design level we find institutional racism or de-humanisation of whole sections of the urban working class.  Here the rot goes to the very top level (and not just of the organisation itself, but also its supporters in the government, establishment and media), is ingrained within not only the culture of the organisation, but is part of the motive for it’s foundation.  The police were founded specifically as the "thin blue line" to protect "respectable society" from the "dangerous classes".  Finally we move down to the dysfunction of capitalist society that needs and creates police forces to manage the stresses and conflicts of class society.

In the Here and Now

Our challenge in our propaganda is to link the levels to create an articulated critique that allows people to see the connections between instances of injustice, such as acts of police brutality, right down the chain to the irreformable failings of capitalist society itself.

It must be noted that this double-articulation between the inverted critical 4-phase articulation and the creative 4-phase articulation is not symmetrical.  One articulation is analytical the other is active and open-ended.  One is, in theory (if not in practice) practicable at an individual level, the other is necessarily a collective process.

We have to see also, that although the ultimate project of the creation of an entire post-capitalist society must await "that glorious day", that does not mean that we do not need to pay heed to it in the here and now.

All actions are creative.  The problem of capitalist society is that often actions can end up being re-creative of capitalist social relations even despite the consciously willed aims of the actors.  We are all familiar with how the actions of the best intentioned can end up reproducing passivity and dependency culture within the wider class.  As the English councillist group Solidarity said so well, a good few years ago:

"7. Meaningful action, for revolutionaries, is whatever increases the confidence, the autonomy, the initiative, the participation, the solidarity, the equalitarian tendencies and the self-activity of the masses and whatever assists in their demystification.  Sterile and harmful action is whatever reinforces the passivity of the masses, their apathy, their cynicism, their differentiation through hierarchy, their alienation, their reliance on others to do things for them and the degree to which they can therefore be manipulated by others - even by those allegedly acting on their behalf."

(from "As We See It")

So even within our smallest collective activity and organising we need to be mindful of the pivotal axis of the doubly-articulated 4-phase model, namely the dysfunctional capitalist social relations (and how they can replicate themselves within the group dynamics of even the smallest collectivity) and the conversely required post-capitalist dynamics and practices that serve to block the former and free creativity.

 

1. Capitalism works by breaking down - The relation of crises to capitalism

The capitalist apologist view of the relation of crisis to capitalism
is pretty clear. Crises are seen as undesirable, pathological or
threatening to "business as usual". Crises are seen as an "external
shock", as an exception to capitalist normality, which is growth.

Some critics of capitalism also see crises in a similar light - as the
result of internal contradictions (i.e. pathology) and ultimately
threatening the continued existence of the capitalist system. Many of
the people who hold to this view (and they include both Marxists and
non-Marxists) believe that there will be a series of ever-increasingly
severe crises until "the final crisis" brings about the collapse of
capitalism itself. We call these "crisis theorists". Note the
similarity of their take on the growth/crisis relation to the
apologist one.

By contrast, those of us who reject both capitalist apologetics and
crisis theory see crises as neither external nor potentially terminal
events for capitalism. Rather crises are a full and entirely necessary
part of the capitalist system. Capitalism could not function without
crises. Every period of sustained growth within capitalism is creating
the conditions for the next crisis. But these crises are both internal
and constitutive of capital. To answer the question posed on a recent
SWP poster round our way - this is not the end of capitalism, it’s the
means of capitalism.

To use an analogy. We recognise that within wars, the majority of
participants spend the majority of their time being relatively
inactive with the major threat they face being boredom. However, these
long periods of tedium are episodically interrupted by (mostly) brief
periods of death, destruction and chaos. Yet no-one attempts to say
that these latter periods are somehow not part of the normality of war
- exceptions or breakdowns in the war process.

Having said that, we need to move from the general constitutive
relation between growth and crisis, to the particularities of the
current crisis which, in terms of recent government actions alone
(nationalisations, bailouts putting hundreds or billions or even
trillions onto the public accounts of supposedly cash-strapped
governments, etc.) is clearly of a different order (at least as far as
the West is concerned) from the last crash (2001 internet bubble) or
the proceeding ones (1997/8 crisis, 1987 crash, etc.). So we need to
look at what is specific to the current crisis.

2. The global context

2.a. The imminent collapse of the Third Supercell

I have a nascent hypothesis of global level economic supercells, still
at the intuitive rather than theoretical stage at the moment. Based on
the metaphor of the large scale weather systems that breed hurricanes
or tornadoes. I’m looking at this as contrasted to steady-state or
homoeostatic flow systems, such as convection cells for e.g.

Possibly the first* supercell in this model would be the North Atlantic
slave trade triangle. The end result of which is the (relative)
depopulation of West & Central Africa, the growth of the North
American colonies and the feeding of the industrial revolution in
England. When this supercell breaks down it leaves England as the
dominant industrial power.

The second epochal supercell is again North Atlantic. It’s the flow
set up by WW1 of repayments by Germany to France & UK, then from these
two to the US (to service debts) and then from the US back to Germany
as credit. This breaks down into the depression and then WW2 (still
heavily dependant on North Atlantic flow - both to UK & Russia). But
the entire sequence breaks down with the dominant industrial power
being the US.

The third supercell is Pacific, linking the US, Japan and, post-Nixon,
China. With the passage to neoliberalism in the US and the turn to
"socialism with chinese characteristics" in China under Deng Xiaoping,
this supercell has assumed monstrous velocity and intensity.

Whether this supercell breaks down in this crisis or the next, the
writing is on the wall, the end result is going to leave China as the
dominant industrial power.

2.b. The proletarianisation of China

The other side of this story is the big picture drawn by David Harvey
(iirc?) that we have moved from a situation of 1.5 Bn of humanity as
proletariat, mainly in the West, to one where we have 3 Bn
proletarians, the bulk of that 100% increase being in the East, mainly
the mass proletarianisation of the Chinese peasantry. Any attempt by
the West to go for a return to Keynesianism (even were such a thing
technically possible - a new gold standard? - see section on money
below) is not going to take us back to the world of unchallenged US
and European industrial dominance that the loyal British imperialist
that Keynes was, worked so hard to preserve. Let’s face it, if the
defence of western economic dominance of the globe was ever** one of
the aims of neoliberalism, then it is one of the biggest own goals in
history.

From a working class point of view, it now means that we have to
overcome the geographic, cultural, linguistic and political barriers
that separate the western working class movements from the Chinese and
other eastern ones. Well, we always said, "workers of the world,
unite", now we have to mean it for real!

3. The real subsumption of money

The other precipitating factor of the current crisis that makes it
potentially epochal rather than periodic, is a technological
revolution in money.

Money pre-dates capitalism by many centuries. At the birth of
capitalism, although the new social system completely redefines
people’s relation to money (the majority, base class is now unable to
subsist except via money), the actual form of money itself remains
unchanged (gold or silver specie, albeit increasingly represented by
paper tokens). We can call this the "formal subsumption" of
money. However as capitalism progresses, the link to pre-capitalist
forms of money becomes harder and harder to manage. With the fall of
the original Keynesian Bretton Woods system in 1971 with the US’s
suspension of gold convertibility, the final link to pre-capitalist
money is severed. The story of how the post gold standard world
generates the rise of financial derivatives to manage the volatility
created by this break is told in Bryan & Rafferty’s "Capitalism with
Derivatives" upon which I based my own efforts on the same subject.

They posit that derivatives represent a new form of money, specific to
the needs of capitalism. Similar to the concept of techology moving
from the mode of formal subsumption to real subsumption in Capital.

But whether that means anything to you or not, IMO the post-Bretton
Woods evolution of money has exposed the inadequacy of (all) our
existing understandings of what money actually is, how it proceeds.

Analytical failings aside, the current crisis involves a breakdown of
the current money system. It is partly a "system crash" in the
computer sense of the term. The new money system is, after all,
computer based. From a capitalist perspective, they have a technical
fault to fix, as well the dual-headed political crisis mentioned above.

For us, it means that we need to create a theory of money that is fit
for our purpose. After all, aside from the need to understand the
dynamics of capitalism, if our aim is the abolition of the money
system, we first need to understand what it is we’re abolishing in its
functional sense as well as its political sense. The new, really
subsumed, capitalist money is dynamic, rather than inert and
inseparable from risk and credit. That is we need a theory of value
that incorporates risk, credit and productivity dynamics through time
that doesn’t get caught in circularity, given the role of time in the
base definition.

A pretty big job for us, but I can’t see anybody else inclined to do
it. Another case of Primo’s Levi’s "If not us, then who?"***

—-

* Well, OK, probably the first, small scale cell would be the Portugal
- Madeira circuit (sugar, slaves, sailpower, etc.). Followed by the
South Atlantic slave trade that took Africans to the Portugese and
Spanish colonies in South & Central america - like i say, i’m not
really at fully thought out theory stage yet.

** Arguably, neoliberalism was so following the money (and local class
power) so blindly, that having this as a strategic aim may have
slipped their mind - hence the belated realisation by the neo-cons
that they better do something fast to have a chance at a New
American Century. The fact their main strategy was to try and
monopolise global oil reserves is, in a way, a kind of concession
that maintaining industrial dominance was already a lost battle.

*** Apparently this is Primo’s reformulation of a quote from the
Mishnah. I like the original so much, I’ll quote it here
gratuitously:

"Avot 1:
13. He [Hillel] used to say: He who increases his name [=reputation], loses his name
And one who does not add, will perish.
And one who does not learn deserves death.
And one who makes use of the crown will perish.
14. He used to say: If I an not for myself, who will be for me?
And when I am for myself, what am I?
And if not now, when?"

"one who makes use of the crown will perish." Amen to that!

 

I certainly have my differences with Mario Tronti. For instance his loyalty to the PCI and a certain nostalgia for Lenin, have no resonances for me at all - quite the opposite. But I have been an admirer of much of his "labour of articulation" nonetheless, from operaismo to the current day. I also have some interests in the whole Deleuze & Guattarian trends in recent radical political thought. However I had to smile at this rather dry sarcasm from Tronti on this subject:

The famous transformations of work are like the equally famous transformations of capitalism: when everything has been said, nothing has changed. The storytellers of the social come and describe the state of affairs: the liquid instead of the solid, what melts into air rather than what sediments on the ground, the whole that must become flexible, the production that becomes molecular, the power that is everywhere and nowhere like the holy spirit, because it is micro and no longer macro, and then the immaterial, the cognitive, the politics that is bios, made to measure for the asocial individual – forget about women and men of flesh and bone who organise themselves for the struggle. With limitless patience we read and listen, careful not to let what we don’t know slip through our fingers. 

 Ouch! Touché, signor Tronti!

This is excerpted from the Institute of Conjuctural Research blog’s translation of a recente article from Il Manifesto  "Politics at Work" http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2008/10/old-guard-on-new-crisis-pt-2-mario.html

 

Strategies for breaking up assemblages must be based on an understanding of the different possible relationships between the components of the assemblage. To examine two different types of assemblage we will consider the chain and the starfish.

The chain is an assemblage of links. For the chain assemblage to maintain it’s integrity under stress, every single link component must not fail. The failure of any single link brings about the catastrophic failure of the entire chain assemblage.

The appropriate strategy for breaking a chain is to find it’s weakest link and concentrate your force of attack on that. Thus we say that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

The starfish is an entirely different assemblage from a chain. It is a living organism whose assemblage has been shaped by the force of evolution rather than human artificing.

Starfish have the unusual capability to regenerate legs that are severed. This goes beyond the ability of a lizard to shed its tail. Depending on the starfish they can either regrow severed limbs from a whole centre, half a centre or even just an intact fifth of a centre. A very few need even less, such as the Linckia starfish or Blue Sea Star. This remarkable creature does not need any section of centre, it can regenerate entirely from one of its constituent legs. A surviving single leg will sprout four tiny legs, in which state they are called comets, from their appearance, and will eventually regrow to its full five-limbed form.

Of course evolution has produced many wonders in the natural world that we are currently unable to reproduce with our current levels of technology - the use of turbulence by the bumble bee for flight for example. However, before we shift to the sphere of human-artificed objects, let’s take a quick detour via the ancient mystical speculations of the east.

The great Japanese scholar and translator of Zen for a western audience, D.T. Suzuki, often referred to an image from his favourite sutra, the Lankavatara Sutra. In this sutra repeated references are made to a net of jewels which Suzuki interprets as a metaphor where within each jewel are tiny reflections of all the other jewels in the net.

This being the realm of the mystical, the jewelled net is of course infinite. However, returning to the realm of the material, finite and human-made, the principle of an assemblage of differing parts which contain within themselves resonances of other parts of the assemblage has found application in the world of computer systems engineering.

Like all systems engineering, IT systems administration has to deal with the fact that all made things are limited in their performance and their working lifespan - everything fails in the end. This provides twin challenges in the realm of disk storage. How to overcome the performance limitations of I/O speeds for current disk technology and how to engineer your systems such that disk failures do not lead to the irretrievable loss of the data stored upon them? The stupid answer would be to spend more money on making disks faster and more long-lasting. This is dumb for two reasons. First to throw money at an engineering problem to try to exceed the current tolerance levels quickly becomes a case of diminishing returns in cost-benefit terms. Secondly, you’re not solving the problem, simply putting it off.

The most common solution is what’s called a RAID array, originally standing for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (the Inexpensive is now increasing replaced by Independant, as being more marketing-friendly). In this a number of disks are arranged in an array so as to appear as one virtual disk to the system. There are several different assemblages of these multiple disks which solve the twin engineering challenges of performance and recoverability in different trade-offs. They are designated by different numbers such as RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 5.

RAID 0 addresses the performance issue by setting multiple disks side-by-side and dividing a chunk of data written to the virtual disk into a number of sub-segments, as many as there are disks in the array, and writes or reads them in parallel as a "stripe". So, say we had a 4-disk RAID 0 array, we could read and write a given chunk of data in roughly one quarter of the time it would take us to read or write to a single disk.

However RAID 0 doesn’t help at all with the problem of disk failure. The loss of any disk in the array will lead to the loss of all data since the data on the remaining disks will be corrupt without the missing stripe. Worse, by multiplying the disks, you multiply the chance of a failure occuring in a given time period. RAID 0 is thus analogous to our chain assemblage.

RAID 1 is a simple solution for the problem of disk failure. You have two disks, one being the exact mirror of the other. So long as you have a separate disk controller for each disk, writing is not much slower than it would be for a single disk. Reading can be faster, because you can read in parallel from both disks, but the main advantage of RAID 1 is that when a disk dies, you still have a copy of your data. You can replace the failed disk and rebuild the mirror from the survivor.

The big disadvantages of RAID 1 is that it doesn’t give you great performance and its the most expensive way of getting failure-proofing, called redundancy in systems engineering after the most common means of achieving it (think parachutes). For every unit of storage of your virtual disk, you need the double in physical disk storage.

RAID 5 is an attempt to combine the performance gains of striping, like RAID 0, with redundancy like RAID 1. In RAID 5 a virtual disk is made up of a multiple of disks (NB not 5 disks, the RAID levels have nothing to do with the number of disks involved) which must be at least 3. Similarly to RAID 0 a chunk of data to be written to the virtual disk is divided up into chunks to be striped across the disks, in addition a parity stripe is calculated by combining all the data stripes by binary arithmatic. The data segments plus parity are then written to the RAID stripe. Which disk gets the parity stripe is taken in turn. When a disk failure occurs the missing segments of the stripes can be recalculated from the remaining data segments and the parity segment for that stripe. The failed disk can then be swapped out of the array for a new replacement and rebuilt using the same mechanism.

Clearly the performance of RAID 5 is lower than RAID 0 and the recuperation of the data from a lost drive takes more work than having a full second copy as in RAID 1. But it has redundancy for much less disk resources than mirroring (e.g. a 4 disk RAID 5 array would make 75% of physical storage available as virtual storage, as opposed to just 50% for RAID 1) and performs multiple times faster than a single physical disk due to striping. It’s a relatively cost-effective engineering compromise that is still in widespread use in the industry, even though SAN and network storage technologies are slowly making other RAID configurations (e.g. RAID 1 + 0, a.k.a RAID 10 which creates stripes of mirrored disks) and more complex dynamic solutions more common.

RAID 5 is then like our five-footed friend the starfish. The removal of a single component will not destroy either the starfish or the RAID 5 array. On another level RAID 5 takes redundancy beyond that of the starfish type - similar to RAID 1 - that can only regenerate a single pattern. RAID 5 has more of the nature a Lankavatara net of jewels. Each disk in the assemblage contains reflections of the diverse contents of all the others within in it, thanks to the parity segments (and the power of binary encoding which makes parity simple).

So what implication does this have for strategies for breaking up assemblages? Clearly if the assemblage has self-repairing features like a starfish or RAID 5 array, then the strategy of striking at the weakest link will fail entirely.

This has serious political implications depending on whether the complementary institutions of capitalist society - the state, private property, exchange and the wage - are a brittle, mutually-dependant assemblage of the chain or RAID 0 type, or a self-reinforcing, self-regenerating assemblage of the starfish or RAID 5 type.

In his "Critique of the Gotha Programme", Marx made his opinion on this question clear - to him the removal of the institution of private property meant the retention of the money and wage form as well as the state, unproblematic. Both the latter institutions, although they still had the appearance of their capitalist fore-runners, "content and form are changed" by the prohibition of private property in the means of production.

For Marx then, the relations of capitalism are a chain assemblage, where the removal of the private property link will mean that the "lower stage of communism", even though it still contains exchange, the wage and the state, will inevitably proceed to develop the forces of production to the level where distribution will be according to needs rather than contribution and the state, already become the mere "administration of things", will wither away.

In contrast the classical anarchists moved from Proudhon’s initial promotion of a society that eliminated the state while retaining both private property and exchange, to a collectivist position that put the means of production into the hands of the producers. But it was not the controversy between Bakunin and Marx which led to the initial split in the International, that developed anarchist politics, but the "Public Services" debate between the Belgian syndicalist César de Paepe, and the Italo-Swiss Bakuninists. In the course of this debate de Paepe argued that public services such as health and education should be provided at a general social level rather than exchanges between individual collectives, and should be freely provided whether the recipient was currently capable of productive work or not. For the provision of these services, members of the producers collectives would have to be prepared for deductions from their earnings to pay for it. Naturally a social body should be responsible for collecting these deductions and organising the provision of these public services, that body should be the Worker’s State, in de Paepe’s view.

De Paepe’s challenge provoked responses from Bakuninists such as the Swiss collectivist Adhémar Schwitzguébel which was as long as attacking the Worker’s State for the evils of statehood, as it was short on actually answering the public services question.

It was this inability of the collectivists to answer de Paepe’s challenge - that to abolish private property but retain exchange, necessarily implied the retention of some form of state - that pushed the classical era anarchists into re-examining the possibility of communism rather than collectivism as a possible solution to the conundrum. In the end they concluded that de Paepe was basically right - even with the abolition of private property of the means of production, to retain distribution in proportion to contribution to production, could only lead to the regeneration of the state. The relations of capitalism were not a chain, but a starfish assemblage.

So,is capitalism RAID 1 or RAID 5? It’s a question that is of prime relevance today. Despite the historical evidence of the 20th century. Namely, that abolishing private property in the means of production while retaining the state and the wage, leads to a transition not from capitalism to communism, but from feudalism to capitalism, as demonstrated by both Russia and China, there are still those today who claim that these outcomes are the results of purely contingent political factors. Further there are many who still appear to claim, along with Schwitzguébel, that there are no inherent contradictions in a new world free from both capital and state, but retaining the wage work ethic, that cannot be ignored if you try hard enough.

For libertarian communists though, the answer is clear and the lessons are that we must examine the specific inter-relations of capitalist social institutions with care and build a strategic direction that is aware of the necessity to not only fight but to break through on multiple fronts if we are to make a new world that transcends the ability of capitalist social relations to re-compose their net of coprolites.

Crisis? What crisis?

Unless you’ve been stuck in cave for the last few months, you’ll have noticed a certain amount of hysterics in the media about the current financial crisis. A crisis judged so severe by the Taoiseach that he recently decided to back all the top Irish banks with €400 billion. That’s nearly twice our annual GDP and €100,000 for every man, woman and child in the state. Money that wasn’t available for our broken health system or our children’s crumbling schools, apparently.

So what’s the cause of all these alarms, it’s link to the gathering recession and what does it bode for the future for ordinary workers and tax-payers?

Pyramids not houses
The official story is that the origins of the current crisis lie in the collapse of the US subprime mortgage market - i.e. poor people not paying their mortgages. Although this may have been the trigger event, it is not the real cause. The real cause lies in pyramids not houses. Specifically the enormous debt pyramid built up by the Western countries, particularly those following the Anglo-saxon economic model - which, unfortunately for us, includes Ireland.

The financial framework constructed to support the globalisation of trade and production, has enabled the growth of a huge, unregulated credit sector known as the "Shadow Baking System" which has allowed the ballooning of credit not backed up by any capital reserves. Now this system is collapsing and the banks are having to take the bad debts back onto their balance sheets meaning that most US and European banks are in danger of not having enough of the reserve cash required by law to back up the loans - many of them dodgy property loans.

The result has been the biggest wave of nationalisations in the Western world since the aftermath of WW2. However we are not nationalising railways, mines or manufacturers but banks.

Nationalisations = Socialism!
Some blowhards in government and media have labelled this outbreak of nationalisations as a return to socialism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Here the only thing that’s being socialised is the risk and the losses while the profits remain privatised. Socialism is about redistribution from the parasites to the producers, not theother way around.

Some commentators on the Paulson Plan’s $700 billion bail-out have noted that the figure almost exactly matches the amount the US has spent on its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but only in passing, as a coincidence. In fact, there is an indirect connection here. After the tech bubble burst and 9/11, then Fed Secretary Alan Greenspan, lowered the dollar interest rate right down below 2% to prevent a crash. He then kept interest rates very low, right through to 2004, dropping down to 1% just after the US invasion of Iraq. It was this ultra-low rate, in part motivated by the need to provide cheap money to fund the Iraq adventure, which contributed to the growth of the property bubble. In the American neo-cons’ original plan, the Iraq adventure was supposed to pay for itself with seized Iraqi oil. Now it looks like the US taxpayers will have to pick up the bill. But they will not be the only ones to pay. As the collapse of this debt pyramid drags us into a global recession, we will all end up paying.

Normal service will not be resumed
"Raw capitalism is a dead end", US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson now says. The political and business establishment are suddenly agreed that government intervention and regulation are not only a good thing, but a vital necessity. Well they’ve sure changed their tune. These are the very same people who have been bashing us over the head since the1970s with the neoliberal dogmas that regulation is bad, that markets can look after themselves far better without government interference. The whole neoliberal catechism is now in shreds. So we will not be going back to the way things were before this crisis. Nor will we be going back to the way things were before neo-liberalism, to a revival of the previous, Keynesian international system. Keynesianism was founded on a post-WW2 world order where the USA was the unquestioned industrial superpower of a non-Soviet world, still ruled by the West. That world order is no more. Globalisation has meant the shift of industrial power to the East. China is now the workshop of the world. With its failure to seize control of the world’s oil reserves, US power to continue to dictate the terms of trade and the global economy is waning.

What’s next?
Capitalism is no stranger to crises. In many ways crises are seen as an opportunity to overcome obstacles to profitability that tradition or popular resistance have established over time. The capitalist solution to the crises they create is always to try and make the workers pay. In concrete terms this means an all-out assault on wages through the rotten partnership process and further assaults on public services like health, education and public transport. Our response must be to fight back and not let them saddle us with the bill for their screw-ups.

"The market heals itself". "The less government intervention in the market the better". Such are the dogmas of neoliberalism that the current financial apocalypse has now consigned to the dustbin of history. But we need to look behind the media spectacle of crashing banks and panicking stock market traders if we want to understand the real causes and meaning of the current crisis.

While politicians and economists fight over whether this crisis is a crisis of liquidity or solvency, we say both and neither. This crisis is above all a crisis of globalisation and of distribution, that is to say, of class power.

Neoliberalism allowed capitalists to outflank western workers power over production by the relocation of production to the Far East. To do so they had to create a global financial system that transcended the power of nation states to regulate or control them. This new system in turn formed the basis of a shadow banking system on which the currently collapsing pyramid of unsecured debt was built. This is the crisis of globalisation.

Credit for workers has been part of the foundation of consumer capitalism since the 1920s. However, under neoliberalism, since the mid-70s, workers real wages have fallen. The gap in aggregate demand has been increasingly filled with credit. The rich got the profits, the workers got credit cards and home equity loans.

The crisis of the banking system is a breakdown of the wholesale money market. Banks get their income from retail deposits - from workers - and wholesale lending - from the rich, via money and hedge funds. The huge redistribution of money to the rich from the workers brought about by neoliberalism, means that when the rich withdraw their cash from the interbank lending market it seizes up, throwing the whole capitalist financial system into crisis. This is the crisis of distribution.

None of the current solutions being put forward address the distribution problem. So although neoliberal ideology may be bankrupt, it’s regressive distributional drive carries on. Until the question of "aggregate demand" - i.e. worker’s income - is raised again, the current bubble-burst will morph into a general depression in the West. Those questions will not be raised as long as workers do not have the strength to force them onto the social agenda.

If a surfeit of workers power brought Keynesianism to its knees in the mid-70s, it is a dearth of it that has now brought about both the creation and the collapse of the Western debt pyramid. It is a geopolitical irony for Western capitalists that in using globalisation to undermine Western workers power, they have mistaken profit for power, power which is increasingly shifting to the Far East.