The F word again

One of the rarer of blogging pleasures is, for me at any rate, provoking a reader to write a comment. Apart from family and friends, I have only one such reader – who happens to be a fellow-blogger, Arthur Bough, aka Boffy – an economist whose blog contains detailed  Marxist exegesis and an excellent leftist blogroll.

He’s been good enough to include me in his blogroll on which he clearly keeps an eagle eye – ever ready to join battle. My last post on Paul Mason’s latest book on Fascism struck a nerve – with Boffy’s opening shot being an accusation that the Ukraine War seems to have revealed Mason in his true colours as a strong supporter of NATO. As an old supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament this was (bad) news to me.

But I take the line that we shouldn’t allow our prejudices about authors to interfere with our judgement on the coherence of a book’s argument (eg I have enjoyed Niall Ferguson’s recent books). And I find Mason consistently worth reading – not least for the breadth of his reading and the way he integrates useful references into the body of his text.

And, further, my post had actually been about Mason’s most recent book on Fascism – not his earlier one on PostCommunism which Boffy had critiqued extensively (in a series) to which Boffy refers again in his comments

Boffy’s basic argument seems to be that Mason’s support these days for a Popular Front is hypocritical as Stalin and the Comintern held the line so strongly against any common front with Socialists (although Mason reveals that, for some reason, Stalin conceded to Georgy Dmitrov when the Bulgarian leader told him to his face that this was unacceptable). But Mason was, of course, a Trotskyite and, as such, always opposed to Stalinism. As always happens in leftist disputes, I am therefore left a tad confused.

And this is perhaps the point at which I should come totally clean - and confess that I have always had an inclination toward the liberal rather than radical side of social democracy. I may have been a regular reader of New Left Review from its very first edition in 1960 but, when push came to shove, it was Gaitskell and Crosland I supported in the struggles for the soul of the Labour Party – although, in 1979, I appeared on platforms with Tony Benn and never shared the popular vilification of Jeremy Corbyn – whose 2017 electoral platform electrified me. Perhaps I’m simply becoming more radical as I grow older – but the way Corbyn was vilified by the UK media (including The Guardian) and put under military and MI5 surveillance proves to me that UK democracy is non-existent. This is a revealing and harrowing hour-long interview with Corbyn about that experience from Declassified UK which has attracted 1400 views – so much are voters starved of basic political power. How can a country imagine it’s democratic when the duly elected leader of the Opposition Party is the subject of sustained abuse from the country’s newspapers? Basically the message is

“we allow you to vote every 4-5 years – but only if we agree with the harmless remedies your party supports”

If I had my time again, I would return to the spirit I showed in 1977 when I penned a thoroughly critical long article exposing the fragile foundations on which democracy was built.

Fascism Resource

Why do I get the feeling that Fascism is pigeon-holed academically? There seems to be something deviant about people who show interest in the field – is this unfair?

Interview with Paul Mason on his latest book

Three Faces of Fascism; Ernst Nolte (1966) This book by a German historian about French, German and Italian fascism attracted a lot of criticism at the time – for being too sympathetic

The regime model of fascism (2000) a long academic article which compares Austrian, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Romanian and Spanish forms of Fascism.

The Anatomy of Fascism Robert Paxton (2004) as the title says

Studying Fascism in a post-Fascist Age Roger Griffin (2011) a fairly personal article about the academic field written a decade ago

Visualising Fascism – the 20^th century rise of the global right ed J Thomas and G Eley (2020) A curious book co- edited by an historian who has specialised in Germany which focuses more on the aesthetic side of the subject.

a Curate’s Egg

Paul Mason is an engaging writer but, now that I have finished his Post Capitalism – a guide to our future, I have to admit to a feeling of great disappointment.

The book simply fails to live up to the promise of its subtitle. Indeed at least one third of the book is actually devoted to writers and events of more than 100 years ago. Now I am someone who deeply respects the contribution which long-dead writers and people made and which is too easily forgotten – but I do draw the line at suggestions that we have something to learn from the travails of the early soviets of the Russian revolution (p267).

And it is nothing short of breath-taking that his reference to the potential of cooperatives and social enterprise (which employ tens of millions workers globally) dismisses them as “experimental and small-scale” and says that “with the exception of thinkers such as Bauwens and Wark, few have bothered to ask what a new system of governance and regulation might look like” (p 267).

This simply does not begin to do justice to the extensive material which is available – some of which can be seen in such posts as The undermining of cooperation, No Excuse for Apathy and Beacons of Hope

But I am grateful to the book for drawing my attention to the writings of these “thinkers” one of whom is the founder of the p2p Foundation and the other the author of a famous Hacker’s Manifesto. Although I don’t find their accounts coherent or easy to place in the wider literature - they seem the scribbles of young geeks….  

The other text, however, which Mason references and of which I was also unaware, is much more serious – it is Jeremy Rifkin’s 2014 book The zero marginal cost society – the internet of things, the collaborative commons and the eclipse of capitalism  (the link gives the google book).  This does seem a sustained examination of the phenomenon which, despite the title of Mason’s book, he fails (in my view) to treat properly…..   

Rifkin summarises his thinking in this article and here

There is also this review; this interview and a long review from the Ken Wilber integral school

Rifkin’s book does, however, get a fairly severe mauling from the right - the left – and others in between

In short I find Mason’s book a bit of a Curate’s egg - ie good and bad….and suffering badly from the fault to which I draw increasing attention – not even trying to build on the relevant work of others…

Post-Capitalism is here?

How might one read most beneficially a book which, from my google links, looks to be one of the most appreciated and reviewed of the past decade? 

Paul Mason’s Post Capitalism -   a  Guide to our Future came to my notice a year ago but it was only yesterday that I actually picked it off the shelves and started to read it.  

I was unable to apply my litmus test to it since it lacks a bibliography – but I knew enough about it to have confidence that it would repay my study – I had, after all, thoroughly enjoyed his Meltdown – the end of the age of greed (2009) and his earlier Live Working or Die Fighting – how the working class went global in 2007. 

This is someone, after all, who has combined an early career as a militant with a later one as both a print and television journalist – reporting on political and industrial struggles against capital…  

The early pages of reading (the opening “Neoliberalism is broken” chapter) produced my usual squiggles which indicate appreciation but my attention started to wander in the middle of the subsequent discussion of the Kondtratieff waves - despite the earlier nice little intellectual vignettes of people such as Marx, Rosa Luxembourg, Rudolf Hilferding and Jeno Varga. 

So I started to google for the reviews since these give me the questions which ensure that I am reading more closely. 

And I came across at least 30 quite long reviews of the book to which I will give links at the end of this post…..

Chris Mullin was a contrarian Labour MP who wrote a couple of amusing memoirs about his life in parliament and was therefore someone I felt would have some sympathy for Mason’s book but his review is a tough one – 

one has to plough through more than 200 pages of analysis in the course of which the author examines one by one the various economic theories advanced by 19th- and 20th-century political philosophers and various IT gurus….At no point on this long road are there any references to the impact of majority affluence on politics in the developed world. Nikolai Kondratieff (inventor of the wave theory of capitalism) occupies almost an entire column in the index. JK Galbraith and Tony Crosland do not merit a single mention….(Crosland actually has one!)
We have to wait until page 263, a chapter headed “Project Zero”, to discover what the author has in store for us.

Methinks that Mullin is a tad too impatient – analysis and diagnosis are important!

The first part of the book ends with a series of annotated graphs which Mason suggests best summarise the massive shifts in debt, performance and inequality which characterise the decades of the last "wave". I really had to concentrate to get the points being made in the graphs

 “Prophets of Postcapitalism” introduces the second section of the book (at page 109), paying tribute to the questions posed by the great Peter Drucker (then in his 90s) in his little 1993 book “The Post-Capitalist World” and to others who have understood the significance of the technological and social changes which have been shattering our worlds in recent decades eg Jeremy Rifkin, with his 2014 book The Zero Marginal Cost Society

It is at this stage that I needed one of these maps which identify the link between various intellectual schools – such as this one from the very useful Commons Transition website

In that context, this article from Open Democracy seemed to me to set the Mason book in an appropriate context

Anyway I am now half-way through the book but stuck in the section on the labour theory of value – whose relevance I am struggling to understand

For those with more patience, I came across at least 30 quite long reviews – in a few cases of more than 6 pages long…

- Ann Pettifor, for example, prepared a very thoughtful commentary on the book for a discussion she had with the author – suggesting, for example, “we are not the subject of impersonal forces but have human agency” and that capital gains (rather than rate of profit) is the main motive for owners…

- a long and rather pedantic Real-World Economics review focuses on the book’s main thesis about low marginal costs and the new sharing economy

- Prospect gave Mason an interview

- one academic devoted 50 pages to his analysis – in 3 separate The first part here,I can actually understand. The longer parts here and here I have to confess I find largely incomprehensible

One of the best reviews is one from an Australian green Senator and this one is good on some of the book’s contradictions

A sample of other reviews

very good, clear and focused one is here; a much more critical one here

a more sympathetic one from the Take Back the Economy people

http://www.counterfire.org/articles/book-reviews/18008-paul-mason-postcapitalism-a-guide-to-our-future

http://www.alternet.org/world/post-capitalism-utopia-bit-farce

http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/reviews/2015/2008

http://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/paul-mason-post-capitalism-a-guide-to-the-future/

http://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2016-02-21/post-capitalism-via-the-internet-according-to-paul-mason-%E2%80%93-dream-or-reality

https://peopleandnature.wordpress.com/2016/04/04/from-the-russian-revolution-to-socialism-on-mars/

http://the7circles.uk/the-end-of-capitalism-postcapitalism-by-paul-mason/

https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/paul-tritschler/is-there-life-after-capitalism

https://www.fastcoexist.com/3056483/welcome-to-the-post-work-economy

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/owen-hatherley/one-click-at-a-time

http://socialistnetwork.org/book-review-mick-brooks-evaluates-paul-masons-postcapitalism-a-guide-to-our-future/

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/16/have-we-really-entered-the-age-of-post-capitalism/

https://www.popularresistance.org/post-capitalism-rise-of-the-collaborative-commons/

https://www.popularresistance.org/issues/

Labour

The scything season is getting underway – bit later than usual (I think) because of the spell of cold and wet weather last month. And there is nothing like an hour’s work with a scythe from 07.00 with the sun not yet burning your back – followed by a scrub down on the veranda with water from a traditional bowl and pitcher. Right now (at 08.00) the mercury is measuring 35 degrees on the veranda but, as it is Sunday, I have a powerful excuse for not working!

Earlier this year, I confessed my failure, as a leftist politician in Scotland, to engage properly with trade unions. I was an early example of the breed whose social science training led it arrogantly to assume that they (and their officials) had become a brake on progress. One of the books in the latest Amazon package to arrive this week – Paul Mason’s Live Working or DieFighting - is a powerful and exciting coverage of key events in labour history. As business correspondent for BBC's Newsnight (and the author of subsequent Meltdown) Mason is in a great position to use his knowledge of contemporary capitalism, and the working class it is creating, and marry it with his knowledge of labour history. 

Each chapter begins with a sketch of the conditions suffered by a group of workers subjected to the rule of globalised capital in the modern world. This leads us into the description of a moment from the creation of the unions, the annals of the left or a fleeting revolutionary upheaval shedding light on present problems. 

‘[This] history needs to be rediscovered because two sets of people stand in dire need of knowing more about it: first, the activists who have flooded the streets in Seattle, Genoa and beyond to protest against globalisation; second, the workers in the new factories, mines and waterfronts created by globalisation in the developing world, whose attempts to build a labour movement are at an early stage. They need to know…that what they are doing has been done before…Above all they need to know that the movement was once a vital force: a counterculture in which people lived their lives and the main source of eduction for men and women condemned to live short, bleak lives and dream of impossible futures.’ (x)

The various chapters compare mutilated workers in Shenzhen, China, today and the Battle of Peterloo, Manchester in 1819; silkworkers in Varanasi (Benares), India now and in the Lyons, France, revolt of 1831; the casual labourers of a Lagos slum in 2005 and the Paris Commune of 1871; oilworkers in Basra, Iraq in 2006 and the invention of Mayday in Philadelphiain 1886; and immigrant office cleaners in London’s East End in 2004, and the Great Dock Strike of unskilled workers in London’s East End in 1889. If we eventually reach the globalisation of unskilled workers’ unionism in 1889-1912, we are later confronted by ‘wars between brothers’ amongst miners in Huanuni, Bolivia, today and German workers’ failures to condemn the war of 1914-18 and to bring about a revolution at its end. There are several more such stories in this panoramic work, often expressed in the words of the men and women activists involved.

 “Politically, the labour movement has debated strategy in terms of reform versus revolution. Practically, to the frustration of advocates of both approaches, workers have been prepared to go beyond reform but settle for less than revolution.’ (xiii)

In his concluding chapter, Mason does go into interpretation, offering an explanation for the Post-World War Two loss of working-class independence, and incorporation into two ruling-class projects, one in the West, the other in the East. However:

 ‘It is very different now. Today the transnational corporation is the primary form of economic life. In addition, global consumer culture is breaking down all that was local, insular and closed in working-class communities. There is, for the first time, a truly global working class. But it has not yet had its 1889 moment,’ (page 280)

back again

Return to basics! When I’m a hermit in the mountain house, I focus on my thoughts – and home repairs don’t appear in my daily schedule. But "she who must be obeyed” identifies very quickly the tasks needed to keep the house purring (and of my lack of practical skills). Wednesday it was tree planting and a visit to a traditional, derelict Romanian house between Sirnea and Pestera which is owned by our old neighbour - who wanted to show us the various heirlooms (clothes and wooden instruments); today it was sawing planks to make an extension for the table – and then doing the work. First thing in the morning required transporting the empty gas canister to the shop for a replacement (which is quite a challenge for the uphill carry!).
Apart from the physical labours (including scything), my time has been taken up with reading Paul Mason’s marvellous study of the financial crisis – Meltdown; the end of the age of greed And here's Mason in full flight.
Haldane, in a Bank of England discussion paper today, compares the situation with the one facing Roosevelt in 1938, when Congress forced him to rein in stimulus, prompting a double dip: he ripped up bank regulations and forced banks to LEND. Policy "went macroprudential" and the recovery took off.
Fisher, as quoted in an excellent post by the FT's Isabella Kaminska , says:

Non monetary factors, not monetary policy, are retarding the willingness and ability of job creators to put to work the liquidity that we have provided… Those with the capacity to hire American workers - small businesses as well as large, publicly traded or private - are immobilised. Not because they lack entrepreneurial zeal or do not wish to grow; not because they can't access cheap and available credit.
"Rather, they simply cannot budget or manage for the uncertainty of fiscal and regulatory policy... According to my business contacts, the opera buffa of the debt ceiling negotiations compounded this uncertainty, leaving business decision makers frozen in their tracks.

Paul Mason comments on his blog -

Jeff Sachs in today's FT flays the global rich for their capture of fiscal policy, condemns the outcome of globalisation and issues a plea for a policy u-turn: The path to recovery now lies not in a new housing bubble, but in upgraded skills, increased exports and public investments in infrastructure and low-carbon energy. Instead, the US and Europe have veered between dead-end, consumption-oriented stimulus packages and austerity without a vision for investment. Macroeconomic policy has not only failed to create jobs, but also to respond to basic social values too."
There is, as the elite stare out of windows of business class at the blue skies and do some thinking, something big starting to change. Let's dissect it into bullet points:
• By deciding to bankrupt states instead of banks we avoided a Great Depression
• But some states can no longer take the strain
• The recovery is faltering in the West: in the US, UK and Eurozone. It could easily become a double dip
• Monetary policy has been now, publicly, tweaked towards semi-permanent QE and zero interest rates (except in the Eurozone where as Sachs points out policy is in the hands of dysfunctional institution and has basically had to go free form)
• There is no more money for fiscal stimulus
• The option of inflating away debts, public and private, is being quietly pursued but its impact is to flatten consumer demand
• Thus those who dream of a return to consumer and house-price led growth are being disabused.

There is, in short, a zombified situation well known to small businesses and households. Nobody wants to spend, or invest because they cannot predict the future.
Large numbers of businesses are being kept alive because banks cannot afford to declare them busted, or the liabilities rush onto the books. Ditto for many households - Haldane points out 35% of unsecured debt in the UK is with zombie households.
Fisher of the Fed is pointing to the same problem: businesses are awash with cash but - as all orthodox monetary economists know from reading Milton Friedmann - this can become a bad thing. In 1933 the build-up of unspent cash in the economy, as the money supply fell, provoked the final crisis. So what to do?
It is strange to see Jeff Sachs, the man who unleashed neo-liberalism onto East Europe, calling for a global version of the New Deal, but that is effectively what is emerging as the option.
To reorient tax policy to protecting the poor, raising their skills, focusing the investment flow towards green energy etc you would have to do something approaching a political revolution in the US: because from K street to Capitol Hill politics is set up to deliver the opposite.
The Bank of England's Andy Haldane prefers the realm of the possible - the new boss of financial stability policy in the UK is musing publicly about a "macro prudential" intervention into banking policy - effectively encouraging the banks to become more risk prone, throwing off fear-induced aversion to lending.
But this rather runs counter to the wave of regulation being forced onto the banks (let alone the proposed Financial Transaction Tax That Will Save The Eurozone). And since Haldane is still speaking the Bank of England's riddle language, where nothing is ever concrete, we will have to wait and see.
One interpretation is that he has given up the idea of forcing a major shift in power between banks and states (Andy Haldane, Pittsburgh 2009) in favour of forcing the banks to once again act like Masters of the Universe.
What everybody is toying with is the idea of a big, government-led structural change within capitalism: whereby the priorities are re-oriented so that private sector growth does not return at the price of impoverishing developed world consumers and workers.
At times like this I always come back to Hyman Minsky, the unorthodox neo-Keynesian economist who predicted the crash and whose work contains the kernel of what a 21st Century structural change might look like.
Minsky, who has followers on both the left and right, argued: socialise the banking system, rip up regulation for the private sector non-financial economy so it can grow, and abolish welfare, making the state the employer of last resort but forcing the unemployed to work.
By socialise, he meant: reduce banks to the basic function of collecting and lending the savings of the population, in a variety of non-speculative businesses. Today that could be mutuals, nationalised banks, Landesbanks, credit unions etc. The difference between this and Glass Steagall is that you actively discourage the existence of a financial speculation sector.
We have come to call the crash of 2008 the "Minsky Moment" - but in hindsight it wasn't. Not until something big goes bust, and millions of people lose their money, is it really a Minsky Moment. Everything policymakers have done since 2008 has been designed to delay the reckoning.
So why is the thinking beginning to change?
One of the most brilliant observations in Alistair Cooke's memoir Six Men concerns the difference he observed in Edward VIII's mien, with and without access to intelligence briefing. Cooke wrote:
"Daily possession of 'the papers' is, in fact, the main and most deceptive perquisite of high office". (Cooke A, Six Men, 1977)
Without them, Edward would fume as they hustled him onto a plane at the outbreak of war: "We know damn all about what is happening."
That is the situation for most of us today. I interpret the sudden flurry of blue skies thinking as a sign that those who do get "daily possession of the papers" are bracing themselves for more trouble in the autumn - banking trouble, real-economy downturn trouble and political protest trouble.

For more on the crisis see here, here and here.
And a good comment on the Uk riots

Finally an excellent case study of the disease of privatisation

How technology enrages - a great post on the current unrest

Good old BBC! Paul Mason of BBC had yesterday one of the best posts I have ever read on a blog. It put down some random thoughts he had about the possible causes of the unrest which has broken out in the Meditarranean Arab world. For those wanting to assess the European reactions to the unrest, Gavin Hewitt's BBC blog also had a great overview. And another article (from the Economist stable) draws some useful parallels from the 1989 revolutions in my part of the world.
Knowing how lazy my readers are, I reproduce the Mason post in its entirety below -

We've had revolution in Tunisia, Egypt's Mubarak is teetering; in Yemen, Jordan and Syria suddenly protests have appeared. In Ireland young techno-savvy professionals are agitating for a "Second Republic"; in France the youth from banlieues battled police on the streets to defend the retirement rights of 60-year olds; in Greece striking and rioting have become a national pastime. And in Britain we've had riots and student occupations that changed the political mood.
What's going on? What's the wider social dynamic?
My editors yesterday asked me put some bullet points down for a discussion on the programme that then didn't happen but I am throwing them into the mix here, on the basis of various conversations with academics who study this and also the participants themselves. At the heart of it all are young people, obviously; students; westernised; secularised. They use social media - as the mainstream media has now woken up to - but this obsession with reporting "they use twitter" is missing the point of what they use it for.
In so far as there are common threads to be found in these different situation, here's 20 things I have spotted:

1. At the heart if it all is a new sociological type: the graduate with no future
2. ...with access to social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and eg Yfrog so they can express themselves in a variety of situations ranging from parliamentary democracy to tyrrany.
3. Therefore truth moves faster than lies, and propaganda becomes flammable.
4. They are not prone to traditional and endemic ideologies: Labourism, Islamism, Fianna Fail Catholicism etc... in fact hermetic ideologies of all forms are rejected.
5. Women very numerous as the backbone of movements. After twenty years of modernised labour markets and higher-education access the "archetypal" protest leader, organizer, facilitator, spokesperson now is an educated young woman.
6. Horizontalism has become endemic because technology makes it easy: it kills vertical hierarchies spontaneously, whereas before - and the quintessential experience of the 20th century - was the killing of dissent within movements, the channeling of movements and their bureaucratisaton.
7. Memes: "A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures." (Wikipedia) - so what happens is that ideas arise, are very quickly "market tested" and either take off, bubble under, insinuate themselves or if they are deemed no good they disappear. Ideas self-replicate like genes. Prior to the internet this theory (see Richard Dawkins, 1976) seemed an over-statement but you can now clearly trace the evolution of memes.
8. They all seem to know each other: not only is the network more powerful than the hierarchy - but the ad-hoc network has become easier to form. So if you "follow" somebody from the UCL occupation on Twitter, as I have done, you can easily run into a radical blogger from Egypt, or a lecturer in peaceful resistance in California who mainly does work on Burma so then there are the Burmese tweets to follow. During the early 20th century people would ride hanging on the undersides of train carriages across borders just to make links like these.
9. The specifics of economic failure: the rise of mass access to university-level education is a given. Maybe soon even 50% in higher education will be not enough. In most of the world this is being funded by personal indebtedess - so people are making a rational judgement to go into debt so they will be better paid later. However the prospect of ten years of fiscal retrenchment in some countries means they now know they will be poorer than their parents. And the effect has been like throwing a light switch; the prosperity story is replaced with the doom story, even if for individuals reality will be more complex, and not as bad as they expect.
10.This evaporation of a promise is compounded in the more repressive societies and emerging markets because - even where you get rapid economic growth - it cannot absorb the demographic bulge of young people fast enough to deliver rising living standards for enough of them.
11.To amplify: I can't find the quote but one of the historians of the French Revolution of 1789 wrote that it was not the product of poor people but of poor lawyers. You can have political/economic setups that disappoint the poor for generations - but if lawyers, teachers and doctors are sitting in their garrets freezing and starving you get revolution. Now, in their garrets, they have a laptop and broadband connection.
12.The weakness of organised labour means there's a changed relationship between the radicalized middle class, the poor and the organised workforce. The world looks more like 19th century Paris - heavy predomination of the "progressive" intelligentsia, intermixing with the slum-dwellers at numerous social interfaces (cabarets in the 19C, raves now); huge social fear of the excluded poor but also many rags to riches stories celebrated in the media (Fifty Cent etc); meanwhile the solidaristic culture and respectability of organized labour is still there but, as in Egypt, they find themselves a "stage army" to be marched on and off the scene of history.
13.This leads to a loss of fear among the young radicals of any movement: they can pick and choose; there is no confrontation they can't retreat from. They can "have a day off" from protesting, occupying: whereas twith he old working-class based movements, their place in the ranks of battle was determined and they couldn't retreat once things started. You couldn't "have a day off" from the miners' strike if you lived in a pit village.
14.In addition to a day off, you can "mix and match": I have met people who do community organizing one day, and the next are on a flotilla to Gaza; then they pop up working for a think tank on sustainable energy; then they're writing a book about something completely different. I was astonished to find people I had interviewed inside the UCL occupation blogging from Tahrir Square this week.
15. People just know more than they used to. Dictatorships rely not just on the suppression of news but on the suppression of narratives and truth. More or less everything you need to know to make sense of the world is available as freely downloadable content on the internet: and it's not pre-digested for you by your teachers, parents, priests, imams. For example there are huge numbers of facts available to me now about the subjects I studied at university that were not known when I was there in the 1980s. Then whole academic terms would be spent disputing basic facts, or trying to research them. Now that is still true but the plane of reasoning can be more complex because people have an instant reference source for the undisputed premises of arguments. It's as if physics has been replaced by quantum physics, but in every discipline.
16.There is no Cold War, and the War on Terror is not as effective as the Cold War was in solidifying elites against change. Egypt is proving to be a worked example of this: though it is highly likely things will spiral out of control, post Mubarak - as in all the colour revolutons - the dire warnings of the US right that this will lead to Islamism are a "meme" that has not taken off. In fact you could make an interesting study of how the meme starts, blossoms and fades away over the space of 12 days. To be clear: I am not saying they are wrong - only that the fear of an Islamist takeover in Egypt has not been strong enough to swing the US presidency or the media behind Mubarak.
17. It is - with international pressure and some powerful NGOs - possible to bring down a repressive government without having to spend years in the jungle as a guerilla, or years in the urban underground: instead the oppositional youth - both in the west in repressive regimes like Tunisia/Egypt, and above all in China - live in a virtual undergrowth online and through digital comms networks. The internet is not key here - it is for example the things people swap by text message, the music they swap with each other etc: the hidden meanings in graffiti, street art etc which those in authority fail to spot.
18. People have a better understanding of power. The activists have read their Chomsky and their Hardt-Negri, but the ideas therein have become mimetic: young people believe the issues are no longer class and economics but simply power: they are clever to the point of expertise in knowing how to mess up hierarchies and see the various "revolutions" in their own lives as part of an "exodus" from oppression, not - as previous generations did - as a "diversion into the personal". While Foucault could tell Gilles Deleuze: "We had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began to understand the nature of exploitation, and to this day, we have yet to fully comprehend the nature of power",- that's probably changed.
19. As the algebraic sum of all these factors it feels like the protest "meme" that is sweeping the world - if that premise is indeed true - is profoundly less radical on economics than the one that swept the world in the 1910s and 1920s; they don't seek a total overturn: they seek a moderation of excesses. However on politics the common theme is the dissolution of centralized power and the demand for "autonomy" and personal freedom in addition to formal democracy and an end to corrupt, family based power-elites.
20. Technology has - in many ways, from the contraceptive pill to the iPod, the blog and the CCTV camera - expanded the space and power of the individual.
Some complications....

a) all of the above are generalisations: and have to be read as such.

b) are these methods replicable by their opponents? Clearly up to a point they are. So the assumption in the global progressive movement that their values are aligned with that of the networked world may be wrong. Also we have yet to see what happens to all this social networking if a state ever seriously pulls the plug on the technology: switches the mobile network off, censors the internet, cyber-attacks the protesters.

c) China is the laboratory here, where the Internet Police are paid to go online and foment pro-government "memes" to counteract the oppositional ones. The Egyptian leftist blogger Arabawy.org says on his website that : "in a dictatorship, independent journalism by default becomes a form of activism, and the spread of information is essentially an act of agitation." But independent journalism is suppressed in many parts of the world.

d) what happens to this new, fluffy global zeitgeist when it runs up against the old-style hierarchical dictatorship in a death match, where the latter has about 300 Abrams tanks? We may be about to find out.

e) - and this one is troubling for mainstream politics: are we creating a complete disconnect between the values and language of the state and those of the educated young? Egypt is a classic example - if you hear the NDP officials there is a time-warped aspect to their language compared to that of young doctors and lawyers on the Square. But there are also examples in the UK: much of the political discourse - on both sides of the House of Commons - is treated by many young people as a barely intelligible "noise" - and this goes wider than just the protesters.
(For example: I'm finding it common among non-politicos these days that whenever you mention the "Big Society" there's a shrug and a suppressed laugh - yet if you move into the warren of thinktanks around Westminster, it's treated deadly seriously. Dissing the Big Society has quickly become a "meme" that crosses political tribal boundaries under the Coalition, yet most professional politicians are deaf to "memes" as the youth are to the contents of Hansard.)

That's it - as I say, these are just my thoughts on it all and not researched other than through experience: there are probably whole PhD theses about some of this so feel free to hit the comments.
Likewise if you think it is all balderdash, and if you are over 40 you may, vent your analog-era spleen here