Analysans

• There’s a good interview with Lee Smolin at Quanta on his relational view of nature, which you can also find in his Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. His view is inspired by Leibniz’s metaphysics in The Monadology, and it reminds me of the Ladyman and Ross thesis that “everything must go” which is also a relational and naturalised metaphysics. I’ve got some sympathy with Smolin’s view, and it’s worth exploring as a hypothesis and seeing what insights it might provide us. Beware, though, that we’re in our minds but that doesn’t prevent us from doing cognitive science. Smolin’s view about being stuck in the universe is not unlike the impulse that drove behaviourist psychology. I’d slightly, perhaps you might say significantly, tweak the relational idea. Perhaps it’s better not to see it as an ontological or metaphysical theory, of how the world is, rather to think of it as an epistemological thesis. Science is relational, however the world might fundamentally be, to the extent that a lot of it is based on discerning mathematical relationships holding between entities, concepts, variables, and so on. It is that relational aspect that enables us to make predictions, even if nature is ultimately hidden from us. Say there are two physical entities x and y whose fundamental nature is mysterious, but the relationship between the two we nonetheless discern through mathematical and empirical reasoning. Knowing the relationship means we can make predictions, and even make applications based on that predictive power without ever really knowing what x and y fundamentally are. Recall the way Turing invoked applications in debate with Wittgenstein in favour of a realist view of science. Science is full of equations, and what do equations do if not relate one side of an equation with the other, so we’ve got “the unreasonable effectiveness of equations in the sciences.” Consider Wheeler’s famous pithy encapsulation of Einstein’s field equations of general relativity; “Space tells matter how to move. Matter tells space how to curve.” What’s space and what’s matter? The jury is still out on that, but we’ve got the relationship and so we can make predictions and develop applications. Question; is the relation thereby real? Good question, no answer I’m afraid. Our theories of nature are relational, and their relational because their mathematical, and it could be that it is our minds that are mathematical not nature. The inverse square law is a relationship, but it’s no longer the relationship fundamental to our understanding of gravitation. That also applies to Einstein’s field equations, presumably, given the overwhelming majority of physicists subscribe to the view that general relativity must make way for quantum gravity. Which brings us back to the question; are these relationships real?  The relational aspect to nature that Smolin sees could be an insight into how we construct scientific theories and how those theories come to make sense to us, which would be more an epistemological than a metaphysical philosophy. But relations, it seems, are not enough. For the mind to develop relations linking or networking concepts it first requires concepts, and I don’t see how a concept can be construed as a relation. I notice that Smolin has just published a book on quantum mechanics, where he defends a realist interpretation. I have not read the book but have seen a lecture he delivered at Perimeter. I have, however, recently read Philip Ball’s Beyond Weird which is one of those books that is so fuckin’ good it awakens one from one’s dogmatic slumbers. What a tour de force! I shall review it here at some point (alongside Karl Sigmund’s history of logical positivism Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science and Peter Hylton’s Quine both which I have also recently read). Consider the appearance of Einstein in Smolin’s title, which is often repeated in texts that take a realist view of QM. We should remember a simple point; Einstein was a man, not an angel, and that makes him fallible. Consider his “greatest mistake”, his words, namely the cosmological constant. That mistake came from a preconceived idea, or a prior intuition, of how nature ought to be. Einstein’s intuition was formidable but not infallible.
• Massimo Pigliucci has just published a little essay on beauty in physics, and how it can lead us astray, at Aeon which reaffirms Sabine Hossenfelder’s popular thesis that “the trouble with physics,” to borrow from Smolin, is that it is “lost in math.” The trouble of which Pigliucci writes comes from theories that have no predictive power, even in principle, such as the multiverse or cosmic landscape but which provide a conception of nature that is mathematically beautiful and simple. Because we so cherish beauty and simplicity we too readily allow ourselves to be seduced and bedazzled by theories that show us how we think nature ought to be rather than how she really is. To paraphrase David Hume, one cannot derive an is from an ought as much as one cannot an ought from an is. The mathematician Peter Shor, however, has a good rejoinder in an interview with John Horgan at Scientific American “I think that the physicists have been led astray, but I would disagree that what led them astray is their obsession with beauty. Rather, I think that what has led theoretical physicists astray is that they are no longer grounded in experiment.” Mathematicians have always been in this position and “they learned this over the years by trial and error, discovering that if you try to do mathematics without relying on rigor, you are likely to be led astray by your intuition.  The culture of physics doesn’t have this constraint.” This then leads to a cultural and sociological process, what Roger Penrose called “fashion, faith and fantasy,” and “this sociological process leads high-energy physicists to collectively accept ideas prematurely, when there is still very little evidence in favor of them.  Then the peer review process leads the funding agencies to mainly fund people who believe in these ideas when there is no guarantee that they are correct, and any alternatives to these ideas are for the most part neglected.” This is surely correct, and there’s a similar phenomenon at work, one with more obvious human consequences, that is in economics. Here you have highly mathematical models of general equilibria, closely connected to neoliberal ideology and policy, that are said to follow on from considerations of mathematical beauty and simplicity. Here we have rational and efficient markets, yet we know that markets are hardly rational or efficient. Economics, that is neoclassical economics, is thereby also “lost in math.” This is a criticism often made, but it’s fallacious all the same. The problem with economics isn’t that it is based on notions of mathematical beauty and simplicity, rather the issue lies in ideological preconceptions about the nature of capitalist society which themselves are reflective of the interests of the dominant centres of economic and political power. So, you end up having, to borrow from Shor, “funding agencies who fund people who believe in these ideas” whatever reality and justice might say of the matter. Pigliucci begins his article by arguing that Feynman was a bad philosopher. I rather think Feynman was a good philosopher, and one whose (reported) insights are too often neglected. Invoking Feynman in the context of “the trouble with physics” is at any rate odd, for Richard Feynman was one of the earliest and most vocal critics of superstring theory and that precisely on experimental grounds. Richard Feynman does not deserve to be put in the company that Pigliucci implicitly puts him.
• The Hong Kong protests continue to attract attention, if only for their impressive scale and daring actions. The protest movement is clearly animated by ideas of democracy and freedom. It is a movement which opposes an authoritarian order based on a very tight nexus between centralised state power wielded by a political elite, beholden to the boss in Beijing, and large corporations owned and managed by an economic elite beholden to global capital. Nobody on the Left that values democracy can find themselves in opposition to the Hong Kong protesters. The Hong Kong protests are a very visible manifestation of a trend sweeping the world over, in both societies considered democratic and authoritarian. Don’t forget that a key feature of neoliberalism in practice is the reorganisation of society by a state-corporate nexus, which by design is reflective of the interests and concerns of corporate managers and investors. The opposition to all this, pretty much everywhere, doesn’t so much concern the material as it does democracy. That’s extremely interesting, and it tells you something about the nature of human beings. What is at the centre of concern is democracy, self governance, and dignity. People yearn to live in a world that is of their making, not one moulded for them by power in the interests of privilege. Neoliberalism can trace its origins to the Manchester School of political economy, to the agitation of Malthus, Ricardo and others to repeal the poor and corn laws in the 19^th century, rather than to Adam Smith and other pre-capitalist classical political economists. The Chartist movement, which arose in reaction to the ravages of 19^th century capitalism, was an organised working class movement whose central concern, like today’s protest movements including that in Hong Kong, was democracy. It was the Chartists who invented the strike, especially the general strike, waged for political purposes. This is what we are missing today. We are missing Chartism. The democracy movements must think about opening a new front in the arena of struggle against state-corporate power, that is into the workplace through pickets, strikes and occupations that have essentially political objectives. Workers must strike a new charter for democracy. If you look at the pro democracy demonstrations and insurrections of today, you’ll see that the Chartist weapon of the political strike is sorely lacking. Imagine if, in Hong Kong, the same two million people organised and mobilised in a leaderless and decentralised fashion on the streets qua citizens were similarly organised and mobilised in their workplaces qua workers? We need a decentralised and leaderless working class movement striking for a democratic society. The established trade and labour unions are not up to the task, even if they wanted to be.
• The protesters that stormed into the Hong Kong legislature can be faulted not for their forcible entry into the Legislative Council but for their leaving. A protest movement takes hold of a parliament to the extent that it is serious about revolution, anything less betrays uncertainty about both objective and strategy. This is the point the Serb sociologist, Jovo Bakic, made when protesters a couple of months ago stormed into the premises of the Serbian public broadcaster. The obvious lack of a political strategy let alone a follow on plan, enabled the regime of Aleksandar Vucic to engage in a propaganda offensive, which helped to take the wind out of the sails of an 8 month pro democracy movement. That movement diminished in scale not long thereafter (the storming and leaving of state TV was not the only factor), but it is picking up steam again and shows no sign of going away anytime soon. Dragan Janjic has a good article here on the protests, but there are two weaknesses to the analysis. Firstly, Janjic does not point out, in an article that speaks much of Bakic’s analysis of affairs, that an important factor accounting for the problems of Serbian society arises from its place in the periphery of the world capitalist system. Bakic is noted for seeing matters thus. Secondly, Janjic claims that the “international community” is opposed to Vucic’s rule. That is false. Indeed, one of the more important reasons why the pro democracy movement has struggled to achieve any real political change is because the “international community” supports Vucic. That too is a point often made by Bakic. Indeed, we can go one further. What we today call Aleksandar Vucic, the former ultranationalist turned Eurocrat that has learnt the errors of his ways, was created by “the international community.” It is well known that Western embassies, especially the German, helped to siphon Vucic away from Vojislav Seselj and his ultranationalist Serb Radical Party. The idea being that Vucic would provide for a more stable neocolonial dependency than then President Boris Tadic (a social democrat whose government engaged in Yeltsin style privatisations, even though he himself was and is clean). The Vucic regime is based, to an important though not total (see point above about privatisations), degree on the remnants of the regime of Slobodan Milosevic. The lesson learnt is pretty clear; just say yes to the boss without so you can do as you please within. That’s the essence of the contract. The remnants of the Milosevic era have retained their political culture, it is their stance toward what Janjic calls “the international community” that has changed.
• The tax cuts of the Morrison government will now pass through both houses of Parliament, with the “Liberal” party securing the support of the crossbenches in the Senate. The Labor Party has hitherto opposed the last, third, tranche of the government’s tax cuts, however there has been more than a little wavering on their part. It is still not clear that they will firmly oppose the passage of the third tranche. This is the tranche that is by far the biggest, and which takes the most out of government revenue. It is the third tranche which seeks to fundamentally reform Australia’s income tax system toward a regressive flat rate regime that would further entrench rising inequality. Watching and reading Australia’s corporate media, but also the public broadcaster the ABC, has been an interesting exercise. The dominant position has been that Labor must support the third tranche, a good indication of how the corporate media in capitalist society is used as a tool to discipline Labor. For this reason the episode serves as a good indication of how friend, formerly comrade, Anthony Albanese’s leadership of the Labor Party will swing. Thus far the signs are that friend Albanese will be a good boy who’ll take his instructions from Bellevue Hill and Point Piper. That was the message of the 2019 Federal Election; class war is a matter reserved for the rich. On the third tranche specifically friend Albanese’s negative comments have been instructive. He has referred to them as the “triumph of hope” over experience. What does that mean? It means that friend, formerly comrade, Albanese hopes that the tax cuts can be delivered in full, however experience shows that it’ll probably lead to a budget deficit in future. See how the concern isn’t that the tax cuts are skewed toward the rich, and that they’ll entrench a regressive flat rate component to Australia’s income tax system? In fact, friend Albanese “hopes” that this can be done, but alas pesky experience suggests otherwise. There’s a good, critical, article at the ABC webpage today on the Morrison tax reforms, but notice it takes an Albanese character to it. Most of it by far is devoted to the likely effect on the budget bottom line. Only at the end does it begin to discuss how the tax cuts function as a form of tax reform in the interests of the rich. It’s buried at the end, “lost in math,” and has no bearing on the title. That’s as far as criticism can go in the mainstream media. The whole thing is like Bob Hawke and Brian Howe’s (of the “socialist left” faction) opposition to John Hewson’s Fightback! neoliberal reform package. Their criticism was that the “feral abacus” got his sums wrong. Presumably, if the feral abacus got his sums right the package had much to commend it. Yet Fightback! was a highly ideological vision founded for, of, and by the rich and that applies all the same to the Morrison tax reform (not tax cuts). But that’s not why friend Albanese opposes them (for now). Neoliberal reforms in Australia cannot take an indefinite and permanent form without bipartisan support, and friend, formerly comrade, Albanese shows little sign that Labor is prepared to withdraw that bipartisan support. Which, of course, brings us back to Chartism. It’s said that democracy in Australia, such as it is, came to no small degree with the Eureka Stockade. Don’t forget the Chartists were front and centre at Ballarat.

Update: As I wrote news broke that friend Albanese announced that Labor would not oppose the full tax reform aka tax cuts package in the Senate. What a fuckin’ turd.

• The business about the DIA’s assessment, it is not clear that this assessment is shared by the US IC as a whole, continues to attract attention. Likely this is related to a push from within the US nuclear weapons complex for testing nuclear primary hydrodynamics using scaled plutonium primaries. Experiments in nuclear primary hydrodynamics at full scale, i.e. the full size and geometry of a fissile primary, employ metal other than plutonium. But as a, brief, report by the JASONs (mandated by Congress) states these metals do not support a neutron chain reaction thus, “the material properties of surrogates differ from those of Pu so that surrogate experiments require extrapolation and interpretation; they complement rather than replace subcritical experiments in Pu.” The United States, like other nuclear weapon states more broadly, does conduct hydrodynamic experiments with very small and very thin quantities of plutonium known as subcritical hydrodynamic tests. A scaled nuclear hydrodynamic experiment uses a scaled model of a plutonium primary, that is smaller but of the same geometry, and it additionally uses plutonium metal. The Union of Concerned Scientists has reported that the National Nuclear Security Administration would eventually like to do scaled experiments with models 70% the size of a full scale plutonium primary. Because the amount of plutonium used in a scaled experiment is not sufficient to sustain an explosive chain reaction, scaled hydrodynamic tests do not produce a nuclear yield. The JASON letter to Congress on scaled plutonium primary testing states, “Subcritical experiments are integrated experiments, which are valuable because they test all the processes together and provide a check on the overall design and construction of the primary.” That’s important in the context of the LEP for the W78 Replacement Warhead (which arms the Minuteman III ICBM and formerly known as Interoperable Warhead 1 under the Obama stockpile plan. Note usage of “replacement warhead” to which we return), currently in Phase 6.2 development, as it seeks to provide an inter operable warhead compatible with the Minuteman III Reentry Vehicle, the Trident II D-5 SLBM Reentry Vehicle, and the RV for the planned successor of the Minuteman III the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent. The plutonium pit is that of the W78, but many of the other components of the primary are new. You can see why the quote from the JASON letter is important in this context. It becomes even more important in the context of the BM-Y and BM-Z Ballistic Missile Warhead envisaged for the replacement of the Minuteman III ICBM and the Trident II D-5 SLBM respectively. Little is known about both, even to the extent whether it will be based on an existing plutonium pit. According to the JASON letter, “For all weapons in the current stockpile, at the present time margins are adequate and uncertainties are within margins, both for normal operation and for nuclear safety should accidents occur.” But, and it is an important but for our purposes, “future aging of these weapons and their remanufacture may increase uncertainties, and JASON finds that scaled experiments in Pu may significantly reduce uncertainties that may arise in the future due to aging, or in certification of weapons through future life extension programs (LEPs) or alterations (ALTs), or through remanufacture or reuse of weapon components.” This is likely relevant to the W78 Replacement Warhead and it is certainly relevant to the BM-Y and BM-Z. The FY2019 stockpile management plan calls for developing, “an operational enhanced capability (advanced radiography and reactivity measurements) for subcritical experiments by the mid-2020s.” Scaled hydrodynamic testing of nuclear primaries requires investing in more enhanced diagnostic equipment, and the statement just quoted is of direct relevance to experiments employing scaled plutonium primaries. According to the JASON letter, “Only x-rays of sufficiently high energy can penetrate the Pu and produce a radiographic image. JASON has reviewed the required penetration (in report JSR-11-340, in subsequent technical interchanges with the physics labs, as well as in the present study) and concurs that an electron energy above 10MeV is required for useful radiography at late times. In particular, the two existing CYGNUS sources (2.2 MeV) at U1a, while performing as designed and useful for other experiments, are inadequate for late-time subcritical experiments in Pu.” I suspect that hawkish elements in the nuclear weapons community would like the BM-Y and BM-Z warhead programme to resemble the Bush era Reliable Replacement Warhead (recall change of nomenclature for W78 LEP).The JASON group concluded the conservative design chosen for the first of the Reliable Replacement Warheads, the WR-1, could not be certified without explosive testing to a nuclear yield. So, I think the matter of unsubstantiated allegations of Russian nuclear yield testing is related to the push for scaled experiments in the US, and potentially a resumption of the Reliable Replacement Warhead programme. At the outer edge of speculation, a resumption of nuclear testing by the United States, and the other nuclear weapon states, opens up the prospect of work on new enhanced radiation weapons. Intelligence going back to the 1990s, publicly available, has suggested that the development of low yield enhanced effect weapons has been a desire of hawkish elements within the Soviet (now Russian) weapons complex. You know the same holds in the US, given the manufacture of a kerfuffle over EMP effects from time to time by hawkish elements. Don’t forget that full scale nuclear testing can be conducted for either of two purposes, the first to validate designs, the second to gauge weapons effects, or a combination thereof. If the DIA assessment is related to a push for scaled experiments in the US then the DIA could have shot the hawks in the foot. That’s because if the assessment is demonstrated to be both false and based on the view that Russia has conducted scaled experiments then the allegation functions as a recognition that scaled experiments are contrary to the CTBT and the memorandum of understanding on zero yield testing between the established nuclear states. That would make acquiring approval for scaled testing that more politically difficult, given the need to appropriate for enhanced diagnostic equipment among other things.
• On June 13 The Drive reported that the US conducted the first captive-carry flight test (on a B-52) of the Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW), which is an air launched hypersonic boost glide weapon. No picture of the ARRW was released. Most discussions of US hypersonic weapons focus on the other two planned types, the Tactical Boost Glide hypersonic weapon and the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept. It would be good to get a look at the dimensions of the business end of the ARRW. The ARRW is designed to be accelerated by a booster rocket to hypersonic speed whereupon it will be able to glide to its target with a quasi-ballistic flight profile. Hypersonic weapons like the ARRW will enable planners to strike time urgent targets, such as command and control and any strategic assets whose location is known, in a very prompt fashion with little to no warning, and they’ll be able to beat missile defences. When North Korea tested the KN-23 SRBM, a solid fuelled missile able to manoeuvre on a quasi-ballistic trajectory, beat missile defences, and promptly hit time urgent targets on the Korean peninsula, it was widely reported that “missiles like these will start the war.” One effect of hypersonic weapons is that they’ll encourage further research and development in missile defence technologies, something not often discussed, which will encourage further investment in new nuclear delivery technologies. A RAND report on hypersonic weapons argued that there’s a 10 year window for arms control efforts to arrest the dangerous potential effects that hypersonic weapons will have for strategic stability. The thing here is that arms control has a poor track record of curtailing technological, qualitative, advances in weaponry systems.
• Let’s change tack and deal with a more uplifting theme. Quanta has a good article, invariably one gets nothing but quality fare at Quanta, on Hartle-Hawking no boundary proposal or “the wavefunction of the universe” theory on the origin of the universe. This Hawking developed in collaboration with James Hartle in the 1980s. Everybody that has read, as opposed to making it a lounge room ornament, Hawking’s popular A Brief History of Time knows of it. I like this snippet from the Quanta article

“Likewise, Hartle and Hawking expressed the wave function of the universe — which describes its likely states — as the sum of all possible ways that it might have smoothly expanded from a point. The hope was that the sum of all possible “expansion histories,” smooth-bottomed universes of all different shapes and sizes, would yield a wave function that gives a high probability to a huge, smooth, flat universe like ours. If the weighted sum of all possible expansion histories yields some other kind of universe as the likeliest outcome, the no-boundary proposal fails.”

This is a reference to Feynman’s path integral, or sum over histories, approach to quantum mechanics. Now the interesting thing here is that the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe, in the 1990s, is not something that the no boundary proposal predicted. The model was based on the universe that we knew in the 1980s (same goes for inflation). Therefore, the no boundary proposal, as originally formulated, yielded a universe as being the most likely which subsequent experiment showed cannot possibly be the most likely. So it was wrong. But, one implication taken from the Quanta article, is that the no boundary proposal has degenerated from being wrong to being not even wrong. Lakatos might have something to say at this point.  The no boundary proposal was not the only quantum cosmology developed in the 1980s. That became a bit of a cottage industry. The idea one might regard as being puzzling. The empirical evidence on the accelerated expansion of the universe is consistent with a small, albeit nonzero, value for the cosmological constant. Quantum mechanics produces a value for the vacuum energy, i.e. the cosmological constant, that is many orders of magnitude off from experiment. Quantum mechanics is seen as complete, that is as a consistent and complete theory of physics, but it cannot be so long as this mismatch with experiment obtains. It is hoped that a quantum theory of gravity would remedy this, but “dark energy” is not gravity rather its opposite, and at any rate a quantum theory of gravity involves a unification of the quantum with general relativity where the latter is modified whilst quantum mechanics remains unsullied given the assumption of completeness. Perhaps “quantum gravity” is not quite the right label for thinking about these things, better would be “quantum spacetime.” If cosmology indicates to us that quantum mechanics is incomplete, whence then “quantum cosmology?” We are in a situation just like before Newton; our cosmology is at variance with our physics, and it is our physics that must bend to make our world whole again. Anyway, I think the question of the origin of the universe demonstrates how science is based on a faculty of the mind that produces a range of admissible hypotheses, a hypothesis space, so we end up with the same ideas; a singular origin, cyclic universes, steady states, eliminativism. The no boundary proposal could be seen as a type of eliminativism (so goes with inflationary cosmology). A verifiable hypothesis that lies outside of a cognitively permissible, for humans, hypothesis space cannot be formulated, so therefore would be beyond science.  That is how it might be with the question of the origin of the universe.

• In the first rendition of my weekly imprints, on a range of topics of interest to me, I began with an observation about Jovo Bakic, the most popular public intellectual in Serbia who, incidentally, regards himself to be a libertarian socialist. Since that post he has been called into questioning by the police, after a routine interview with a leading current affairs weekly and not long after the President, the former ultranationalist disguised as a Eurocrat who is improving, Aleksandar Vucic challenged him to a physical duel. The calling in for questioning was clearly an act of intimidation, and to the extent that the police is at the beck and call of the political whims of the President we can conclude that it functions, in part, as a type of political police. Recently a former leading police official, in an interview with media that monitor corruption, charged that the Minister for Health and the former State Secretary of the Ministry of the Interior both have links to the criminal underground including that faction responsible for the 2003 assassination of then Prime Minister or Premier, Zoran Djindjic, known as the “Zemun Clan.” In a recent lecture, where he showed off his non-existent PowerPoint skills (a virtue not a vice), on the Belgrade on the Water development, designed as a gated enclave for the rich and powerful on the standard third world model, as a case example of urban planning in the periphery of the world capitalist system, where the former Yugoslavia now finds itself, he made the point that authoritarianism and neoliberalism are intimately connected. This was just before his calling into questioning by the police, which serves as a type of empirical validation of the themes of his lecture. That doesn’t just apply to the periphery. In Australia, right after the May 2019 federal election which saw the Liberal government of Scott Morrison returned to power, the Australian Federal Police raided the premises of a journalist and the Australian Broadcasting Service in what the, government appointed, director of the ABC called “an act of intimidation.” The AFP conducted both raids in relation to reports of plans to enhance government surveillance of citizens and of alleged war crimes by Australian troops in Afghanistan. The Government showed itself to be in no hurry to share information regarding both to what democratic theory takes to be its master, namely the citizenry. There’s a neat symmetry here. The first deals with plans to enhance the power of the state within Australia, the second with concealing evidence of war crimes from the public so protecting the state’s prerogative to act externally unconstrained by its most feared deterrent which isn’t international law. This is about protecting the internal and external sovereignty of the state. In that sense the AFP functions, in part, much as the police has shown itself, in part, to do in kleptocratic Serbia, that is as a type of political police. That demonstrates that enhanced state power over the individual, that is authoritarianism, is strongly correlated with neoliberal rule. The people of Hong Kong have shown, in their millions, that a people has rights to the extent that they are prepared to rise up to defend them. News that one’s police functions as a type of political police cannot be allowed to pass unchallenged, and should be greeted by throngs in the millions on the streets at least it would be by those who value their freedom.

• Jovo Bakic is perhaps the only left wing, by that I mean genuinely socialist, public intellectual in the Serbian public sphere. That’s most unfortunate, however, there is a flip side to this. Although Bakic, who describes himself as anarchistic, is not in good company among his fellow intellectuals he is by far the most popular public intellectual in Serbia. That tells you something about the anti-oligarchic and anti-systemic mood that pervades the society. Bakic argues that the regime of Aleksandar Vucic is a clientelist-authoritarian regime rooted in a sort of state-mafia nexus. That, he argues, follows on from Serbia descending, post Yugoslavia, into the periphery of the world capitalist system. The Vucic regime is functional for that system to the extent that Serbia, like the rest of the Balkans, remains a stable neocolonial dependency. That has always been my impression.  I disagree with Bakic on two things, however. Bakic has often called for the formation of an activist left party consisting of cadres rather than mass membership to confront the Vucic regime. His argument for this at first blush seems plausible; membership of political parties in Serbia is clientelist with people changing parties depending upon which way the wind blows and the benefits flow. To arrest the danger of a left party being dominated by opportunists it should be cadre based, Bakic argues. However, there really is very, very, very little that a cadre party would be able to achieve in a society like that of Serbia today. In the dispute between Bakic and Borko Stefanovic (of The Left Party which Bakic helped form prior to his disassociation with it) on this question, I think Stefanovic has the better of the argument.

That said, Bakic is noted also for making the argument that the real opposition to the regime in Serbia consists of activist groups based in the cities which engage in mutual aid, solidarity actions with the poor especially those facing evictions, actions against privatisations of public corporations and utilities, actions against grand neoliberal white elephant schemes of glitz and glamour that favour the tiny oligarchic elite, and the like at the local level where their voice and presence can be prominently seen and felt. Such groups can be found most especially in Belgrade, Nis, Novi Sad, Valjevo, and Zrenjanin.  They are dominated by young, intelligent, and energetic activists who adhere to ideas of autonomous self-governance.   These groups could develop into a political party to be sure, better not cadre if so, but the astute reader can detect here more than a whiff of the anarchism of Murray Bookchin.  In Serbia such ideas have a long tradition going back to the rural self-governing communes known as the Zadruga (like the Russian Zemstvo)

The other area of disagreement I would have with Bakic, perhaps disagreement is too harsh a word, is with his frequent calls for revolution. I think he is definitely right to make those calls, however we might argue about the character of that revolution. Bakic argues that a clientelist-authoritarian regime, especially one that draws roots to the mafia, does not relinquish power voluntarily. The regime of Aleksandar Vucic, which controls the state, the media, and much else besides, needs to be chased on the streets. Even if they lose an election they won’t leave voluntarily, as the regime knows jail beckons. A revolution, or better still an insurrection, is necessary, I agree, however it is not sufficient. What is needed is action in the workplace, that is action motivated by the same ideas and same ethos of the municipal activist groups. There’s a certain misreading of the October 5, 2000 revolution that overthrew Milosevic which still retains currency and that colours, in part, Bakic’s call for insurrection. Milosevic fell not just because of the mobilisation on the streets but because of the widespread worker occupations of industry. The directors and the wealthy elite around Milosevic feared that they would lose the source of their wealth and power, and so they turned on him.  The regime should be chased on the streets, yes, but also in the workplace.

• Graham Farmelo has written a book that explores why nature is mathematical that is attracting reviews. The book is entitled The Universe Speaks in Numbers: How Modern Maths Reveals Nature’s Deepest Secrets. The title gives you a flavour of the argument. The nature of mathematics is something that has interested me for most of my life and there’s been a lot written lately about the interface between mathematics and nature. There’s the ideas of Max Tegmark and Nima Arkani-Hamed, for instance, that see the universe as being essentially mathematical in nature. Then there’s critiques of the role that mathematical beauty has played in theoretical physics most especially coming from Sabine Hossenfelder. She argues that ideas of mathematical beauty have led physicists astray to be “lost in math” as she puts it. That argument has been made before, in the context of general relativity. It’s been argued that French physicists, unlike their American, British, and Russian counterparts, did not make signal contributions to the renaissance of general relativity because they too were “lost in math.”  Of course, at the time French mathematics was dominated by axiomatic programmes such as that of the Bourbaki group. It would appear that rubbed off on the physicists. Others argue that exploration of the underlying mathematical structure of general relativity and quantum field theory might provide insight into how theoretical physics might be made more consistent.  That’s kinda ironical as one is reminded of the great French mathematician Alexander Griothiendeck (also an anarchist) who uncovered many of the deep structures of algebra and that during the hey day of the renaissance in general relativity. My own view is that we are asking the wrong question when we look at these matters. The question shouldn’t be why nature is mathematical but rather why physics is mathematical. Those questions appear the same, but they are subtly different. Physics does not reveal nature’s deepest secrets. They remain in that obscurity to which they ever were and ever shall remain, to borrow from David Hume. Physics gives us theories of the world that are understandable to us, and it is mathematics to no small degree that makes our theories understandable. It is not then that we might say of the universe that it speaks in numbers, rather it is we that speak in numbers and to make ourselves understood we naturally speak in our language not the universe’s. Of the all the positions spoken above it is the search for shared mathematical structure underlying fundamental theory that is the most consistent with the view I have just articulated.

• Speaking of mathematics and nature The New York Times had a great article on mathematical patterns among plants and their significance for increasing our understanding of the plant kingdom. However, much more significantly a scientific paper was just published on the loss of plant biodiversity which is described as a “massive scale of destruction.” According to a report in Nature on the findings

“The world’s seed-bearing plants have been disappearing at a rate of nearly 3 species a year since 1900 ― which is up to 500 times higher than would be expected as a result of natural forces alone, according to the largest survey yet of plant extinctions.”

Further,

“A map of plant extinctions produced by the team shows that flora in areas of high biodiversity and burgeoning human populations, such as Madagascar, the Brazilian rainforests, India and South Africa, are most at risk.”

We should remember that the most significant impact of global warming upon diversity, both flora and fauna, is projected for the future. On the one hand we marvel at the patterns, structures and subtleties of nature yet on the other we are destroying nature. Go figure.

I’m sure we’ve seen the stories about the recent deaths of climbers on Mount Everest, largely due to the large standing lines from base camp up to the summit. The reports emphasise how this follows on from the commercialisation of the mountain, in which case Mount Everest has become a type of commodity, not just a geological structure, the climbing of which has been turned into a fetish. That’s a type of commodity fetishism. The deepest point in the Earth’s oceans is the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, where deep sea explorers not long ago found plastic waste. That’s a neat symmetry that symbolises the Anthropocene. One of the most important questions we face is; what are the most appropriate social, political, economic, and cultural forms for the era of the Anthropocene and how might we bring them into being?

• Finally, events post the 2019 federal election support my contention, made in a post to more detail below, that its central message was that class war is reserved for corporate power and wealthy investors not for workers and the poor. They also underscore the further Americanisation of Australian society. I’m not speaking here just of the role of religion, and miracles, in Australian politics. The Morrison Government’s proposed tax cuts have two interesting, and revealing, features to them. Firstly, the tax cuts represent a significant shift toward instituting a regressive flat tax regime in Australia. The third tranche of the tax cuts seek to bring about a 30% flat rate for incomes from $45,000 to $2000,000 per year. Flat income taxation has always been associated with hyper Reaganite flat taxers like Grover Norquist in the United States. That third tranche is geared toward the rich, and by far most of the Government’s proposed tax cuts come from that regressive third tranche. The politics of this also comes straight out of the Republican playbook, for example George W Bush instituted his administration’s regressive tax “reform” in stages by first offering modest cuts for low income and wage earners before bringing on the big party for the rich. The Liberal Party, notice, is doing the same thing. Secondly, economic growth in Australia is below expectations which means that budget forecasts of a surplus might not eventuate even in the absence of tax cuts. Now the Liberal Party in its election propaganda emphasised that it’s the more responsible economic manager on grounds that the Liberals are superior to Labor when it comes to balancing the budget. Putting aside the false equation of the government budget with the household budget, what we see here is the Government’s determination to go ahead with its tax cuts skewed toward the rich despite the likely impact on the budget bottom line. It is low income earners and wage earners that must disproportionately sacrifice their interests for the budget not the rich. The common good is for you not for them. That’s class war precisely, yet we’re told the 2019 election represented a rejection of class war. Actually, the message was; class war is for us not for you.

On top of all that the financial press, but also the corporate press and the ABC more broadly, has been dominated by various calls for what can be termed supply side economics to boost productivity. As noted, the Australian economy is growing below expectations, and the demand is for supply side measures such as tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, flexible work arrangements, and infrastructure spending to kickstart productivity. What is being explicitly rejected is redistributive measures to low income earners and workplace laws giving labour more bargaining power to encourage economic growth through greater spending (the economy is in a retail recession). Not only is that Reaganite voodoo economics, notice how the tax cuts for the rich in this scheme functions as a type of trickle down economics, but it so obviously is class war. A feature of the neoliberal era has been rising labour productivity but a lower take for wages in the wages-profits share. The proceeds of rising labour productivity go disproportionately to corporate profits and wealthy managers and investors. That’s class war, and one important reason for rising inequality. What much of commentary has been calling for since the election is boosts to labour productivity but not in ways that lead to higher wages for workers and more spending on the poor through the social wage. That’s because class war is for us not for you.

A big debate in Australia focuses on US-China rivalry in the Asia-Pacific and what that means for Australia. Must Australia choose between America and China, asks Hugh White. What that all ignores is that we are more and more becoming America.