BT Climate Change Denial

Well this proves that in order to be a true card carrying conservative in Canada you must, despite all evidence to the contrary, continue to deny the scientific evidence of Global Warming. Not because you don't believe it but because it's the rigorous (as in rigor mortus) position you MUST hold or all is lost.

As evidenced by the following Blogging Tory posts:
PCC Report Doesn't Prove Causality
By the Numbers
"The best CTV push-poll yet..."
A Voice of Sanity at the Globe
From the people who brought you...
"The semantics of climate change"
The forecast calls for pain
National Post reinforces my point
"Global Cooling" ?
It?s very likely, said the groundhog
It is VERY LIKELY!

etc. etc. ad nauseum.

The irony is that like their Great Leaders denial of the science of climate change/Global Warming back in 2002 when he called Kyoto a 'money sucking socialist' scheme, these poor deluded folks don't get it.

Kyoto is meant to save capitalism from itself. It has to do with ameliorating the worst excesses of the market by creating a market to exchange carbon credits, thus producing a new form of stock market. That is capitalism in action. Nothing socialist about it. Well except for government regulations, which even capitalists agree are needed to keep the playing field level.

Of course these folks are correct in pointing out Kyoto doesn't work, nor can capitalism when it comes to changing the course of its own inherent crisis as the result of its creation of self sustaining technology.

See:

Environment

Kyoto

A Critique of Kyoto Capitalism Is NOT Sustainable

Socialism

industrial ecology

Social Ecology

Green Capitalism

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Helium For Health

It helps you you with smokers cough and you get to sound like Donald Duck

Researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada have discovered that by combining helium with 40 per cent oxygen allowed patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) to increase their exercise capacity by an average of 245 per cent. COPD is a disease of the lungs caused by smoking and includes the conditions of emphysema and chronic bronchitis.



See

Smoking



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Feds Attack Alberta Again

Repeat after me Income Trusts are the New NEP.

Klein calls on PM to withdraw trust tax

Then there is Harpers musing of including natural resources as part of his fix for the fiscal imbalance. Which is NEP2.

Is this Harpers real hidden agenda? To promote Alberta Separatism.

Get out the guns and the survival gear, let's build that firewall around the Republic of Alberta.

See:

NEP

Alberta Separatism

Income Trusts

Ralph Klein



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Ed Stelmach Hires Scab

Paul Stanway editor and columnist with the Edmonton Sun and former Edmonton Sun reporter Tom Olson the political affairs columnist for the Calgary Herald are Premier Fast Eddie Stelmachs new media mouthpieces.

Several other Edmonton Sun legislative affairs reporters graduated to become media flacks under the Klein government too.

To their credit bloggers Daveberta covers it, and Mark Wells exposes Tom Olson as a scab during the heated and controversial Calgary Herald Strike.

Something none of the other columnists in the MSM bother to mention. Water under the bridge and all that.

Except for the reporters who fought the good fight and lost to Conrad Black's union busting efforts in an anti union province. In the home of the neo-con movement in Canada, in the city which gave birth to that movement. This was a major strike in the history of the province and in the fight for workers rights in Alberta and journalists rights across Canada.

The same Conrad Black who is now facing criminal charges in the U.S. for embezzlement of Hollinger funds.

‘Hollinger went from being an expanding business to becoming a company whose sole preoccupation was generating current cash for the controlling shareholders, with no concern for building future enterprise value or wealth for all shareholders,’ the committee found. ‘Behind a constant stream of bombast regarding their accomplishments as self-described proprietors, Black and Radler (former publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times) made it their business to line their pockets at the expense of Hollinger almost every day, in almost every way they could devise.’

Black and his wife, Barbara Amiel Black, a former columnist for The Daily Telegraph, as well as the Radler family used Hollinger as a ‘piggy bank’ for personal expenses, the panel said. The company bought a Challenger aircraft for Radler for $11.6 million and leased a Gulfstream IV jet at $3 million to $4 million a year for the Blacks. Hollinger allowed the Blacks to ‘swap’ Park Avenue apartments with the company, which ‘rigged’ the transaction so the Blacks could obtain Hollinger’s apartment for $2.5 million below its market value, the report said.

The Herald strike cost Edmonton Journal columnist Linda Goyette her job, because she would not post her column in a scab paper, the Herald.

Catherine Ford says "delicate mental gymnastics" helped her decide to scab for the Herald from the comfort of home. I'm not sure what kind of gymnastics she's talking about for, despite having portrayed herself in her first post-strike column as the only brave journalist left in the free world, it takes no courage at all to cross a picket line via computer from the coziness of Mount Royal. Ford is entitled to her opinions but her refusal to back up her convictions, face the pickets and physically cross that line shows that she is thinking not for herself, but only of herself. By accusing other journalists of being little more than ciphers for the unions they belong to, Ford casts vile aspersions on her Southam colleagues working at other unionized papers in the chain - and on journalists at unionized papers everywhere. Do you want to see real conviction, Catherine? Linda Goyette gave up her Edmonton Journal column rather than have it published in Calgary's scab-run newspaper. That's courage.

As another example, Linda Goyette, an NNA winner, got the unionization bug at the Edmonton Journal about shortly after the Calgary Herald types did. The Journal had some management problems of its own. The unionization drive failed, but some of the Journal's problem issues were resolved.

As for the highly respected writer Goyette? As I understand the story, her job description changed somewhat after the union threat abated. Some of those rumours had her basically doing glorified file clerk work.

She eventually left the paper. Other ringleaders also drifted away.

It was a long an ugly strike and it sowed the seeds for the end of editorial independence in Canadas newspaper industry.

The combination of Black's editorial agenda, reportedly forced upon his papers, his heavy-handedness with which he is alleged to deal with employees, his purported obsession with the 'bottom line' over editorial content, his alleged intolerance of opposing viewpoints in a profession which is supposed to hold opposing ideas paramount, and his critics' perception of Black as possessing disregard for the fundamental concepts behind the 'free-press', give many cause for alarm.

With the birth of Blacks right wing booster rag for the Canadian Alliance; The National Post, Southam/Hollinger bled red ink. But it was all for a good cause.
The reconstruction of Canadian newspapers from being the voice of an urban liberal middle class to being the political arm of the new right.

The strike coincided with Conrad Black hiring former Alberta Report righwingnutbar Lorne Gunter to give balance to the supposedly liberal Edmonton Journal. As he would begin to populate not just the National Post but all his papers with Canadian Alliance stalwarts and former reporters from the Alberta Report as editorial board members and columnists.

Soon after leaving parliament, Harper and Tom Flanagan co-authored an opinion piece entitled "Our Benign Dictatorship", also commended Conrad Black's purchase of the Southam newspaper chain, arguing that his stewardship would provide for a "pluralistic" editorial view to counter the "monolithically liberal and feminist" approach of the previous management.

This was not the only strike to hit the chain after Black bought it out, and they eventually led to Hollinger selling the papers to CanWest a year later.

Canwest/Global proceeded to further concentrate media ownership in Canada and undermine editorial independence and fire editors and layoff workers at a record pace. Ironically Canwest/Global continues to bleed red ink with the National Post.

Problems at the Herald surfaced under former publisher Ken King, a local go-getter who ran the city's popular and efficient Winter Olympics in 1988. The Herald had managed for more than a century without a union when King was named publisher in 1996, following Hollinger's takeover of the Southam chain. King came along with a new idea: Fairness, Accuracy and Balance. Nothing wrong with that, until senior writers and editors realized the FAB dictum had an unspoken meaning. No more muckraking. No more jabs at friends of the publisher -- who was, it turned out, friends with everyone who counted. No more being mean to the provincial government. The Herald under King was to stop picking on Calgary's problems and pay more attention to events arranged by and for the leisure class.

What's Conrad angry about now?

Despite Mr. Black's insistence that the strike at the Calgary Herald is not affecting his profits, his stock continues to plummet, his readership is down and advertisers are looking elsewhere to place their ads.
Last Thursday, Andy Marshall, striker and President of CEP Local 115A met face-to-face with a finger-wagging Conrad Black. When asked about returning to the bargaining table Black said: "We're amputating gangrenous limbs. If they have the grace of conversion and want to function as employees instead of staging an NDP coup d'etat in the newsroom, they'll be welcome." He also suggested the dispute will end one of two ways: decertification or come back to work with no agreement on such basic clauses as seniority and wage grids! Andy Marshall said no thanks.

And why should we care that Tom Olson was a scab, or that media in Canada is concentrated in the hands of a few private interests? Because now that same right wing is in power in Ottawa, as well as in Alberta, and they dominate the mainstream media in Canada.

See

Labour

Unions

Media Bias

Media

Alberta

Ed Stelmach

Conrad Black

Paul Stanway

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Tom Olson, Paul Stanway, Edmonton Sun, Calgary Herald, Calgary Herald Strike, scab, union, Alberta, journalists, Ed Stelmach, Premier, Conrad Black, Hollinger, National Post, Lorne Gunter, LindaGoyette,
media, Alberta, Canada, politics, Edmonton Journal, union, CEP, labour, labor

Flat Earth Society Meets In London

The New Flat Earth Society is officially meeting in London England to respond to the UN Global Warming report issued by the IPCC in Paris.

And its all paid for by Exxon Mobil.

And it is a tax write off because they are a registered as a charity in Canada and the United States. Yep your tax dollars help pay for this right wing drivel.

Their sypmathisers at the National Pest round up the usual suspects to be 'objective' in their reporting on global warming. If being objective means quoting folks about why the world is flat.

These guys are the grass roots base of the Harper government so the fact the New Canadian Government opposes Kyoto should come as no surprise.

And just because they have scientists on their side don't forget so did these guys;

The Flat Earth Society was founded in 1956 by Samuel Shenton, a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Geographic Society, as a successor to the 19th century Universal Zetetic Society. The Flat Earth Society devised detailed arguments, based on scientific observations and references to the Bible, to support their claim that the Earth is a motionless disc not an orbiting globe.


A tip o the blog to Buckdog, Far and Wide and Mike Marin

See

John Baird In Exxons Pocket?

Climate Change Skeptics the New Flat Earthers

Fraser Institute

Environment

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Baby Fat

Talk about thin skined. The Tories are all in a huff over Liberal Leader Stephane Dions references to their Glorious Leader being called Fat.

And interestingly the sturm and drang over this began with the Blogging Tories , you know those senstive types who refer to their opponents as moonbats, and then the whole gang at the PMO got involved.

Being an average Alberta male The Glorious Leader's paunch could be dismissed as a traditional Molson Six Pack.

I think what the Conservatives are upset about is that their Glorious Leader looks like he still has baby fat.

Well at least he doesn't suck his thumb.



And even with the baby fat he is still not as cuddly as Mike Duffy.


But just in case the PMO is worried about the Glorious Leaders paunch here is a solution.



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Israeli Rabbi Says Wipe Out Arabs

I wonder if this comment will generate the same world wide outrage and denounciation as comments made by the President of Iran.

The spiritual leader of Israel's ultra-orthodox Shas party, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, has provoked outrage with a sermon calling for the annihilation of Arabs."It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable," he was quoted as saying in a sermon delivered on Monday to mark the Jewish festival of Passover. Rabbi Yosef is one of the most powerful religious figures in Israel, He is known for his outspoken comments and has in the past referred to the Arabs as "vipers".

And while there are apologists attempting to excuse his comments let us not forget that in Israel the law is too stike ones enemies first.

The Iranian nuclear threat is uppermost in the minds of many Israelis and Jews around the world who care for their coreligionists living in Israel . However, it seems that the case for a preemptive strike against Iran has not been properly made. From a Jewish legal standpoint it is clear according to Halacha (Jewish law) one must rise first and strike a person who clearly intends to deliver one a fatal blow.

Even if that threat is only 'percieved' and not a real one. Such was the case of Israels attack in the past on Iraq. An act that was a violation of international law.

And with the ramping up of politics of fear, which is what the War on Terror really is, Israelis are getting an itchy trigger finger.

Israel’s powerful deterrent is continually being downplayed by those who insist that the Israeli state is essentially as vulnerable as the Jews of Europe were in 1939.

Of the dozens of articles and speeches which express that fear, one stands out. It is by Benny Morris, one of Israel's top historians who made his name by exploring the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem. He is no right-winger (although he has moved rightward lately) which makes his words especially significant.

In an essay in the "Jerusalem Post," called "This Holocaust Will Be Different," Morris offers this prediction.

"One bright morning, in five or 10 years, perhaps during a regional crisis, perhaps out of the blue, a day or a year or five years after Iran's acquisition of the Bomb, the mullahs in Qom will convene in secret session, under a portrait of the steely-eyed Ayatollah Khomeini, and give President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, by then in his second or third term, the go-ahead.

"The orders will go out and the Shihab III and IV missiles will take off for Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa and Jerusalem, and probably some military sites, including Israel's half dozen air and (reported) nuclear missile bases….

"With a country the size and shape of Israel (an elongated 20,000 square kilometers), probably four or five hits will suffice: No more Israel. “

The most distressing part of Morris's analysis (or prophecy) is its utter fatalism. “America will do nothing. Iran will get the bomb. Iran will use it on Israel. Israel will be destroyed. It's all inevitable.”

But Israel may not have to go it alone as the United States has ramped up its rhetorical hysteria over Iran in preparation for a potential attack, either by it or Israel.

Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser in the Carter administration, delivered a scathing critique of the war in Iraq and warned that the Bush administration’s policy was leading inevitably to a war with Iran, with incalculable consequences for US imperialism in the Middle East and internationally.

The United States is planning what will be a catastrophic attack on Iran. For the Bush cabal, the attack will be a way of "buying time" for its disaster in Iraq. In announcing what he called a "surge" of American troops in Iraq, George W. Bush identified Iran as his real target. "We will interrupt the flow of support [to the insurgency in Iraq] from Iran and Syria," he said. "And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."

Like WMD the evidence of Iranian involvement in Iraq is also suspect.

Evidence is still inconclusive on Iran involvement in Iraq

Bush administration officials acknowledged Friday that they had yet to compile evidence strong enough to back up publicly their claims that Iran is fomenting violence against U.S. troops in Iraq.

Administration officials have long complained that Iran was supplying Shiite Muslim militants with lethal explosives and other materiel used to kill U.S. military personnel. But despite several pledges to make the evidence public, the administration has twice postponed the release — most recently, a briefing by military officials scheduled for last Tuesday in Baghdad.

As far as Tehran's involvement in Iraq is concerned, Lionel Beehner of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote Wednesday that " enormous controversy" still swirls around the issue of Iranian influence.

...much of the evidence the United States cites as proof of Iranian involvement remains secret and in some cases is disputed by the Iraqi government, too. This has created an uncomfortable analogy to the period before the Iraq invasion, when secret intelligence ultimately discredited pushed the United States toward war.

With the Real Politick of Fear, evidence does not matter to Israel of the United States, the mere use of pompous rhetoric and inflamatory statements by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is being used as an excuse to prepare for war with Iran by chicken hawks in both countries.

When Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared last week at the Herzliya conference that Israel could not risk another "existential threat" such as the Holocaust, he was repeating what has become the dominant theme in Israel's campaign against Iran – that it cannot tolerate an Iran with the technology that could be used to make nuclear weapons, because Iran is fanatically committed to the physical destruction of Israel. The internal assessment by the Israeli national security apparatus of the Iranian threat, however, is more realistic than the government's public rhetoric would indicate. Since Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power in August 2005, Israel has effectively exploited his image as someone who is particularly fanatical about destroying Israel to develop the theme of Iran's threat of a "second Holocaust" by using nuclear weapons. But such alarmist statements do not accurately reflect the strategic thinking of the Israeli national security officials. -antiwar

As usual what is forgotten is that the President of Iran does not run Iran, like the President of the United States runs America. He is only one voice which is controled by the Mullahs and their councils.

The Baltimore Sun, in an editorial : "Iran is hardly a monolithic, march-in-step country; everything Iranian is not evil. But that's a hard sell to make in Washington...Iran's interests, in fact, are in some ways parallel to America's. Iran would not benefit from an Iraqi collapse into total anarchy, or from a wider sectarian war. Right now, Iran and the Sunni regime of Saudi Arabia, one of America's traditional allies in the region, have been trying to mediate a settlement in Lebanon.

The fact that this whole issue arose from Irans need to develop nuclear energy, not a bomb, in order to expand its infrastructure is completely lost in the whole chicken little reaction that nuclear energy = nuclear weapon. It is a deliberate obfustication of what Iran wants, which is nuclear power contracts like Pakistan and India have, not weapons, but access to nucelar technology and uranium.

They need an alternative energy source to grow their capitalist infrastructure since their domestic reliance on gas and oil is now restricted because of export demand.

At the meeting with Secretary of the Russian Security Council Igor Ivanov in Tehran over the past weekend, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said: "Our countries could set up an OPEC-type organization on gas cooperation."

Judging from the initial response, the majority of analysts think that this proposal is rooted in politics rather than economics.

This is not the first time the idea has been put forward. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad offered to Russian President Vladimir Putin at their meeting in Shanghai in June 2006 to establish what he described as cooperation "in fixing gas prices, and major flows in the interests of global stability."

Indicatively, the same idea was discussed during the recent Algerian visit of Viktor Khristenko, Minister of Industry and Energy: Algeria and Qatar could join the two countries. The resources of this potential cartel are very impressive - they account for more than 30% of the world's gas production, and their aggregate proven reserves exceed 60% of the total, which is comparable to OPEC's respective share in the global oil reserves - about 68%. The would-be cartel could include other members as well.

Malaysia has warned it will drop free trade talks with the US if it is asked to scrap a multi-billion-dollar gas deal with Iran, a news report said yesterday.

US House of Representatives' Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos has urged the suspension of negotiations to forge a free trade agreement with Malaysia until it halts a US$16 billion deal to develop gas fields in southern Iran.

The proposition of war with Iran is saber rattling by Israel and America, because their very visible military failures in Lebanon and Iraq have given strength to their regional enemies, which have increased not decreased thanks to Bush's War On Terror.

Now they must strike back, at least rhetorially, ramping up the threat that they will take unilateral action. Whether that threat will come to pass is another question. But it bodes ill for any resolution to the crisis of Middle East. Chickens, home, roost.

See:

Oil the New Silk Road

US Declares Economic War On Iran

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Damn Accurate

Gee them groundhogs sure are accurate, or damn close. They predict that Spring will be in six weeks. Gosh that just so happens to be March 16.

Thus spring will be early, since it is only five days prior to the official first day of Spring March 21st the Vernal Equinox.

Shows that the pagan tradition of popular prestidigitation by pests is almost as accurate as science.

Groundhog Day or Groundhog's Day is a traditional festival celebrated in the United States and Canada on February 2. It is a cross-quarter day, midway between the Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox.



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Gay Marriage and Adoption

Diogenes Borealis, a Blogging Tory, has an excellent Libertarian, yes libertarian, post on the controversy over gay rights in Britain and Canada. In which he correctly points out the difference between public services, and publicly funded organizations and those of privately funded organizations. Gay marriage & adoption - some libertarian thoughts

Which reminded me of the Delwin Vriend affair in Alberta, where the Christian Reform Church Kings University College, fired him because he was gay. Kings College accepted public funding for students and state accreditation as a post secondary institution. Despite their claims that they were a 'private' institution,and claiming they were firing him for religious reasons.
Can't have it both ways as Diogenes points out.

And of course it should never have gone to the Supreme Court, because it was a violation of his rights, and the Alberta Government failed to represent those rights (his case was against the Government not the College), but Social Conservatives are NOT libertarians.


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Capitalism Creates Global Warming

I don't often agree with the right wing flat earth society of climate change and global warming deniers, but in this case I will.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), report issued today in Paris is a prime example of deliberate obfustication of the real source of global warming.

"Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations," it says.

Like the flat earthers I find it presumptious to blame humanity for a problem that is not created by people perse but by the political economy we have created.

For tens of thousands of years, humanity has existed, slowly changing our natural envrionment and ecology to meet our needs. However it is with the ascendancy of industrial based capitalism in the period of one hundred years that global warming has increased.

It is not people,"humanity", to blame for this, it is not a "man made" crisis , as if we as a society had consciously created this problem, it is the political economy of capitalism that has produced the climactic, environmental and ecological crisis we now face.

Headlines like this, and generalizations that say humanity is impacting the climate avoids laying the blames squarely where it belongs with the political economic system of capitalism.

Which is exactly what the flat earthers say, they too know that the science and politics of climate change expose capitalism as a zero sum game when it comes to the ecological and environmental crisis we face. Which is why they label all climate science as left wing.

But it is not what the scientists say. They still hide behind euphimisms like "man made", "human activities", than to say what we all know is true. The environmental crisis is the ultimate crisis of Capitalism. But unlike the previous economic crisises of Capitalism this is not one it can solve.

Thus the scientists give cover to the capitalists and their state claiming that we as individuals are to blame for the crisis. You can see it in the campaigns to make us all responsible for our part in helping solve this problem. By consuming of course. Green cars, enviornmentally friendly light bulbs, solar heating, blah, blah.

Global warming man-made, will continue

PARIS - International scientists and officials hailed a report Friday saying that global warming is "very likely" caused by man, and that hotter temperatures and rises in sea level "would continue for centuries" no matter how much humans control their pollution.

Smoke rises from a chemical company's stacks in Hamilton, approximately 50 km (31 miles) south of Toronto, February 1, 2007. Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper moved yesterday to mend his government's frayed international reputation on climate change by dispatching his Environment Minister to Paris for a key conference and promising to join an emergency UN summit on the issue. [Reuters]

The head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, called it a "very impressive document that goes several steps beyond previous research."

A top US government scientist, Susan Solomon, said "there can be no question that the increase in greenhouse gases are dominated by human activities."

The reality is those human acitivities are very specific, they are not the tribal or communal village life we once led. Indeed they are not even the result of hundreds of years of coal burning or thousands of years of slash and burn agriculture.

They are the direct result of coal based steam technology that saw the creation of the industrial revolution and mass manufacturing. The capitalist Fordist production model of the 20th Century and its current expansion in the newly capitalist economies in Asia are resulting in mass climactic, environmental and ecological crisis.

Amadeo Bordiga outlined this crisis of capitalism fifty years ago in his book Murdering The Dead, Capitalism and Other Disasters. Bordiga's Left Wing Communism was not like those of the rest of the left, whether Lennist or the Council Communists, his was a communism that viewed a future society as the administration of things, of processes as Adam Buick writes;

The aim of socialism was to abolish property, not to change its form. Socialism was therefore to be defined not in terms of property in the means of production but in terms of social arrangements for using them:

When the socialist formulas are correct the word property is not to be found but possession, taking possession of the means of production, more precisely exercise of the control or management of the means of production, of which we still have to determine the precise subject. [1958]10

Bordiga went on to identify 'society' as this subject, so that he was in effect offering the following definition of socialism: a system of society based on the social control of the means of production.

Bordiga was adamant that socialism did not mean handing over control of the use - and thus effective ownership - of individual factories and other places of work either to the people working in them or to the people living in the area where those factories or places of work were situated. Commenting on a text by Marx, he wrote that socialist society was opposed:

to the attribution of the means of production (the land in our case) to particular social groups: fractions or particular classes of national society, local groups or enterprise groups, professional or trade union categories. [1958]11

Furthermore:

The socialist programme insists that no branch of production should remain in the hands of one class only, even if it is that of the producers. Thus the land will not go to peasant associations, nor to the class of peasants, but to the whole of society. [1958]12

Demands such as 'the factories for the workers', 'the mines for the miners' and other such schemes for 'workers' control' were not socialist demands, since a society in which they were realised would still be a property society in the sense that parts of the productive apparatus would be controlled by sections only of society to the exclusion of other sections. Socialism, Bordiga always insisted, meant the end of all sectional control over separate parts of the productive apparatus and the establishment of central social control over all the means of production.

So, for Bordiga, in a socialist society there would be no property whatsoever in the means of production, not just of individuals or of groups of individuals, but also not of groups of producers nor of local or national communities either. The means of production would not be owned at all, but would simply be there to be used by the human race for its survival and continuation in the best possible conditions.

Scientific Administration of Social Affairs

The abolition of property meant at the same time the abolition of social classes and of the state. With the abolition of property there would no longer be any group of people in a privileged position as a result of controlling land or instruments of production as their 'property', and there would be no need for any social organ of coercion to protect the property of the property holders and to uphold their rule in society. Social classes and the political state would eventually, in the course of a more or less long transition period, give way to 'the rational administration of human activities'. Thus Bordiga was able to write that 'if one wants to give a definition of the socialist economy, it is a stateless economy' [1956-7]. 13 He also wrote that, with the establishment of socialism, social organisation would have changed 'from a social system of constraint on men (which it has been since prehistory) into a unitary and scientifically constructed administration of things and natural forces' [1951].14

Bordiga saw the relationship between the party and the working class under capitalism as analogous with that of the brain to the other parts of a biological organism. Similarly, he envisaged the relationship between the scientifically organised central administration and the rest of socialist society in much the same terms. Indeed, Bordiga saw the administrative organ of socialist society as the direct descendant of the party in capitalist society:

When the international class war has been won and when states have died out, the party, which is born with the proletarian class and its doctrine, will not die out. In this distant time perhaps it will no longer be called a party, but it will live as the single organ, the 'brain' of a society freed from class forces. [1956-7]15

In the higher stage of communism, which will no longer know commodity production, nor money, nor nations, and which will also see the death of the state. . . the party. . . will still keep the role of depository and propagator of the social doctrine giving a general vision of the development of the relations between human society and material nature. [1951]16

Thus the scientifically organised central administration in socialism would be, in a very real sense for Bordiga - who was a firm partisan of the view that human society is best understood as being a kind of organism - the 'social brain', a specialised social organ charged with managing the general affairs of society. Though it would be acting in the interest of the social organism as a whole, it would not be elected by the individual members of socialist society, any more than the human brain is elected by the individual cells of the human body.

Quite apart from accepting this biological metaphor, Bordiga took the view that it would not be appropriate in socialism to have recourse to elections to fill administrative posts, nor to take social decisions by 'the counting of heads'. For him, administrative posts were best filled by those most capable of doing the job, not by the most popular; similarly, what was the best solution to a particular problem was something to be determined scientifically by experts in the field and not a matter of majority opinion to be settled by a vote.

What was important for Bordiga was not so much the personnel who would perform socialist administrative functions as the fact that there would need to be an administrative organ in socialism functioning as a social brain and that this organ would be organised on a 'scientific' rather than a 'democratic' basis.

Bordiga's conception of socialism was 'non-democratic' rather than 'undemocratic'. He was in effect defining socialism as not 'the democratic social control of the means of production by and in the interest of society as a whole', but simply as 'the social control of the means of production in the interest of society as a whole'.

It was a solution to the crisis of capitalism that, as Adam Buick correctly points out, had much in common with a North American Syndicalist idea; Technocracy.

" The technocratic aspects of Bordiga's 'description of communism' were ignored by most of those influenced by him, including to a large extent the members of the group with which he was associated (the International Communist Party)."

Technocracy evolved out of the post WWI crisis of the limitations of Fordist production, and influenced by Thorstien Veblen viewed the crisis as one of the domination of capitalism over efficient, effective use of resources, human, material and energy. They called it the crisis of the price system.

And like Bordiga their solution was a centralized administration of energy and material resources. The abolition of wages, prices, labour value, all exchange values and the rational distribution of resources based on their ultimate use value, that is of their worth as energy outputs.

And like Bordiga, Howard Scott the main proponent of Technocracy saw not a democratic structure for his Technate, the directorship of Technocracy in North America, but a scientific community responsible for the organization and distribution of scarce resources.

As Marx pointed out advanced Capitalism is all about the commodification of all relationships, and as such leads to the ultimate end of competing capitals into a centralized capital.

That production rests on the supreme rule of capital. The centralization of capital is essential to the existence of capital as an independent power. The destructive influence of that centralization upon the markets of the world does but reveal, in the most gigantic dimensions, the inherent organic laws of political economy now at work in every civilized town. Marx

It is this centralization of capitalism that allows for the centralization of administration and planning through the governance of a self managed society which is what socialism is. And only with the socialization of production and consumption can we solve this ultimate crisis of capitalism which is the challenge of living without producing waste and its resulting environmental and ecological imprint which is what global warming is.

Since the modern form of Capitalism is Fordism, mass machinery, the automation of production, which includes its modern forms such as computerization, mass communications, it also provides us with the technology to liberate ourselves from capitalist production. It allows us to use technology to centralize production in an ecologically sound manner. It is the centralization of automation, computerization, not of people.

This was the vision of Marx who identified automation as the final stage of capitalism and the machinery of its doom. Like Veblen and Scott, the scientist Norbert Wiener showed this was possible with his work on cybernetics. And current studies in the organic nature of technology, that it functions as biological organism, was already predicted by Marx in his work the Grundrisse.

As long as the means of labour remains a means of labour in the proper sense of the term, such as it is directly, historically, adopted by capital and included in its realization process, it undergoes a merely formal modification, by appearing now as a means of labour not only in regard to its material side, but also at the same time as a particular mode of the presence of capital, determined by its total process -- as fixed capital.

But, once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages. In the machine, and even more in machinery as an automatic system, the use value, i.e. the material quality of the means of labour, is transformed into an existence adequate to fixed capital and to capital as such; and the form in which it was adopted into the production process of capital, the direct means of labour, is superseded by a form posited by capital itself and corresponding to it. In no way does the machine appear as the individual worker's means of labour.

Its distinguishing characteristic is not in the least, as with the means of labour, to transmit the worker's activity to the object; this activity, rather, is posited in such a way that it merely transmits the machine's work, the machine's action, on to the raw material -- supervises it and guards against interruptions. Not as with the instrument, which the worker animates and makes into his organ with his skill and strength, and whose handling therefore depends on his virtuosity. Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes coal, oil etc. (matières instrumentales), just as the worker consumes food, to keep up its perpetual motion. The worker's activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite.

The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker's consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself. The appropriation of living labour by objectified labour -- of the power or activity which creates value by value existing for-itself -- which lies in the concept of capital, is posited, in production resting on machinery, as the character of the production process itself, including its material elements and its material motion.

The production process has ceased to be a labour process in the sense of a process dominated by labour as its governing unity. Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active) machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism. In machinery, objectified labour confronts living labour within the labour process itself as the power which rules it; a power which, as the appropriation of living labour, is the form of capital. The transformation of the means of labour into machinery, and of living labour into a mere living accessory of this machinery, as the means of its action, also posits the absorption of the labour process in its material character as a mere moment of the realization process of capital.

The increase of the productive force of labour and the greatest possible negation of necessary labour is the necessary tendency of capital, as we have seen. The transformation of the means of labour into machinery is the realization of this tendency. In machinery, objectified labour materially confronts living labour as a ruling power and as an active subsumption of the latter under itself, not only by appropriating it, but in the real production process itself; the relation of capital as value which appropriates value-creating activity is, in fixed capital existing as machinery, posited at the same time as the relation of the use value of capital to the use value of labour capacity; further, the value objectified in machinery appears as a presupposition against which the value-creating power of the individual labour capacity is an infinitesimal, vanishing magnitude; the production in enormous mass quantities which is posited with machinery destroys every connection of the product with the direct need of the producer, and hence with direct use value; it is already posited in the form of the product's production and in the relations in which it is produced that it is produced only as a conveyor of value, and its use value only as condition to that end. In machinery, objectified labour itself appears not only in the form of product or of the product employed as means of labour, but in the form of the force of production itself.

The development of the means of labour into machinery is not an accidental moment of capital, but is rather the historical reshaping of the traditional, inherited means of labour into a form adequate to capital. The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically of fixed capital, in so far as it enters into the production process as a means of production proper.

Machinery appears, then, as the most adequate form of fixed capital, and fixed capital, in so far as capital's relations with itself are concerned, appears as the most adequate form of capital as such. In another respect, however, in so far as fixed capital is condemned to an existence within the confines of a specific use value, it does not correspond to the concept of capital, which, as value, is indifferent to every specific form of use value, and can adopt or shed any of them as equivalent incarnations. In this respect, as regards capital's external relations, it is circulating capital which appears as the adequate form of capital, and not fixed capital.

Further, in so far as machinery develops with the accumulation of society's science, of productive force generally, general social labour presents itself not in labour but in capital. The productive force of society is measured in fixed capital, exists there in its objective form; and, inversely, the productive force of capital grows with this general progress, which capital appropriates free of charge. This is not the place to go into the development of machinery in detail; rather only in its general aspect; in so far as the means of labour, as a physical thing, loses its direct form, becomes fixed capital, and confronts the worker physically as capital. In machinery, knowledge appears as alien, external to him; and living labour [as] subsumed under self-activating objectified labour. The worker appears as superfluous to the extent that his action is not determined by [capital's] requirements.

The full development of capital, therefore, takes place -- or capital has posited the mode of production corresponding to it -- only when the means of labour has not only taken the economic form of fixed capital, but has also been suspended in its immediate form, and when fixed capital appears as a machine within the production process, opposite labour; and the entire production process appears as not subsumed under the direct skillfulness of the worker, but rather as the technological application of science. [It is,] hence, the tendency of capital to give production a scientific character; direct labour [is] reduced to a mere moment of this process. As with the transformation of value into capital, so does it appear in the further development of capital, that it presupposes a certain given historical development of the productive forces on one side -- science too [is] among these productive forces -- and, on the other, drives and forces them further onwards.

To the degree that labour time -- the mere quantity of labour -- is posited by capital as the sole determinant element, to that degree does direct labour and its quantity disappear as the determinant principle of production -- of the creation of use values -- and is reduced both quantitatively, to a smaller proportion, and qualitatively, as an, of course, indispensable but subordinate moment, compared to general scientific labour, technological application of natural sciences, on one side, and to the general productive force arising from social combination [Gliederung] in total production on the other side -- a combination which appears as a natural fruit of social labour (although it is a historic product). Capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production.

Marx Grundrisse Ch. 13

To end our enslavement to the machines as alienated labour, hence the frustration and powerlessness we feel when confronting this current ecological crisis, by recognizing the limitations of their use by capitalism, can only be resolved through the transformation of capitalist society into a socialist society based on industrial ecology and social ecology.

This cannot be done by carbon credits, green policies, caps on industrial pollution, etc. etc., but by the end of capitalism and the liberation of the machinery of capitalism to be used to solve our ecological crisis. Green consiousness is not enough, we need a real Green Revolution, a socialist revolution.

It requires no great penetration to grasp that, where e.g. free labour or wage labour arising out of the dissolution of bondage is the point of departure, there machines can only arise in antithesis to living labour, as property alien to it, and as power hostile to it; i.e. that they must confront it as capital. But it is just as easy to perceive that machines will not cease to be agencies of social production when they become property of the associated workers. In the first case, however, their distribution, i.e. that they do not belong to the worker, is just as much a condition of the mode of production founded on wage labour. In the second case the changed distribution would start from a changed foundation of production, a new foundation first created by the process of history.
Marx Grundrisse Ch. 16

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