As a materialist, i seek to establish the correlation between economic change and technological development with the manifested political and ideological situation.

At the present time, the underlying global economic situation is having profound effects on the ideological and political context. Polarisation is occurring at a rapid pace, and ideological and political positions are shifting. Reality is being distorted for political ends. Historically, similar periods have resulted in catastrophic wars. Propaganda will replace objective analysis. The main stream media (MSM) is already being used as a vector for transmission of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD). Political opinion from US military and intelligence sources is being represented as fact, even though these sources have been exposed multiple times as being partisan and not reliable. It will be difficult for the true picture to be visible.

Overall, capitalism, with its many faces, suffers from stagnation globally. Despite continuing financialisation and digitalisation, capital's productivity has stalled. The real rate of profit is declining in many established sectors and inflation is but one of its symptoms. Monopoly capital is now doing all that it can to increase the rate of exploitation of labour. Globally, living standards are in retreat for the post boomer generations and class friction is consequently exacerbated. There are many national examples of increased social polarisation. Increases in the cost of housing are a manifestation
of labour exploitation as increases in rents and mortgages are returned as profit to owners of capital.

The contradiction is that the capacity for global production is continually increasing. Real economic growth continues because all of us work. The problem is the reliance of the capitalist system on an unsustainable rate of profit which distorts the distribution of production. Capitalism requires an inequitable distribution.

In the current era, communications and logistics entail that the impact of the capitalist economic system decreases national and regional isolation. However, there are clear divisions between the situation of the international working class dependent on national governments and whether the nation state is imperialist.

The imperialist core (the US, UK, some parts of the EU and US pacific allies, Japan, Republic of Korea (ROK) and Australia) continues to maintain trade and financial relationships that exploit and constrain the economic development of the Global South. The emergence of the People's Republic of China (PRC) as a competitor for global surplus value (profit) presents a threat to the status quo. Monopoly capital has mobilized to counter the threat with protectionist trade barriers, reinforced with the threat of military power. Similarly, the imperialist bloc will act to impede the export of capital from PRC to the global south.

Concurrently, the propaganda of the capitalist elites will deploy the term "Cold War 2.0" as a description of inter bloc rivalry to engage the national working class to support an arms war. Similarly, the capitalist elite will deploy the term "deterrence" as a justification for the diversion of resources to arms production. Already there is an increasing intrusion of "news" items in the MSM concerning new arms production programs justified as a response to "Cold War 2.0". (AUKUS is the overarching program in Australia)
It is important to be conscious of the institutional ownership of arms production corporations and the use of the respective national government to channel profits to these corporations. War and the preparation for war fuels the profits of monopoly capitalism free of market constraints

The enlistment of the ordinary people of the imperialist bloc nations in nationalist participation in the imperialist project is supported through the tolerance and encouragement of racism, unconscious colonialism and fear of losing the privilege of wealth resulting from citizenship. Border protection and selective immigration policies are entwined with the requirements of capital for labour supply. Notably, immigration is increased as wage demands become militant during periods of growth. Capital is free to cross national boundaries, whilst labour is restricted. Historically. elements
of the working class will be traduced by the the imprecations of nationalism, whilst the internationalist element adheres to international solidarity and humanitarian values.

Global warming and the consequent necessity to reduce carbon emissions is imposing significant change on capitalist production and demands for investment.

Existing capital invested in carbon resources is fighting a rear guard action to avoid being "stranded". The inability to establish energy policy in Australia over the past decade is a good example of the machinations of capital to protect profit in existing carbon deposits and impeding adoption of non carbon alternatives. The accumulation of individual capitalist investment decisions result in regressive outcomes at a national scale as the demand for profit trumps non profitable humanist values.

Globally, the foremost example of a number of threads for this article is the auto manufacturing industry. Production of both internal combustion and electric vehicles is now most efficient in the PRC. Automation and the installation of robotics in the PRC outstrips comparable competitors in the US and EU. Both the EU and the US are unable to compete with Chinese productivity. This is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future and trade barrier protections will increase the cost of transition to lower emission transport globally. It is unlikely that protection barriers will increase the productivity of EU and US manufacturing. It may increase the uptake of low emission transport in China and will also impact the global south as Chinese capacity looks for new markets, however it will slow transition to low emission transport in the EU and US at a time when it should be getting faster.

It should be interesting to watch how the Australian government will react to pressure from the US and the EU to increase protectionist barriers to Chinese vehicles as China remains Australia's most significant trade partner on the basis of volume. Falling in to line with that pressure will simply increase the cost of buying vehicles for Australian consumers with no offset benefit.

The MSM will be used to introduce questions of "national security" and create doubt about the reliability and trustworthiness of product sourced from the PRC, despite decades of consumption with no evidence
of ulterior motives. The more expensive product sourced from the imperialist bloc will be presented as benign despite the risk being equal. Paranoia will be fostered with no evidence in the service of profit.

More contentious though is computing chip production and the ongoing development of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The US leads in chip design and Taiwan and the Nertherlands, Japan and the Republic of Korea
are essential to the production at scale of advanced compute chips for the infrastructure of the internet, data processing, corporate productivity and digital communications. Increasingly important are specialist graphical compute chips that are used for AI. Current frenzied investments in AI and the data centres required indicates that AI is has been ordained as offering extraordinary profit potential. It is viewed as
a strategic capability for production and military purposes. Theoretically AI is based on the aggregation , distillation and storage of human skill and output alienated from the source and marketed in a consumable
product. The deployment of AI will revolutionize the conditions of work and types of work for large and important sectors of the global workforce. It is still in its early stages and so implmentations are not delivering
expected productivity, however, in the future deployment at scale by capitalism will degrade the value of labour for large sectors of the workforce..

AI software requires a rapidly increasing installed capacity of  advanced compute chips. This sector is now at the forefront of technological competition between the US led imperialist bloc and PRC.  As a result, the
US has applied considerable pressure on the Netherlands, Japan and ROK to limit exports of advanced chip manufacturing tools to the PRC.

Taiwan (ROC) has the most significant installed production capacity for advanced compute chip production. This manufacturing capcity and US reliance on its output is perceived by the US as a key supply chain vulnerability.

PRC also has considerable capacity for advanced chip production, however it trails the imperialist bloc at the leading edge development and production of the most advanced compute chips. Despite restriction in the export
of advanced technology from the imperialist bloc, PRC is closing the gap. The US views it as a strategic priority to maintain its technology lead.

This is the background to Taiwan being seen as a flashpoint for the US strategic posture. Strategic competition with the PRC is now official US doctrine.

PRC holds the position that Taiwan is historically a part of China and has a stated objective of incorporating the island nation as part of the PRC. The US does not recognise Taiwan as the Republic of China (ROC). The US does however supply weapons to ROC. This is known as the "One China policy" - historically the policy arose in the 1970's as Kissinger and Nixon first formalised diplomatic relations with the PRC.

The perceived or manufactured threat of the PRC acting militarily to incorporate Taiwan into the PRC is now used as the foremost element of the US threat scenario that justifies US sabre rattling and military build up. The PRC is the first nation since WW2 that can present as a credible rival to US military power. It has galvanised the US to pressure allied
nations to raise expenditure on arms. Japan has undertaken to increase spending on arms by 65% by 2027. Australia has signed up for nuclear powered submarines under AUKUS. Similar arms building has been initiated in in the EU nations and NATO has been expanded. The war between the Russian Federation and the Ukraine cannot be seen in isolation from US global strategy. Deployment of US military forces to Australia has reached its highest level since WW2.

The reality is that the US and its allies in the imperialist bloc are acting to contain the economic growth of the PRC to maintain their dominant position in the global economic order. Continuing arms race escalation and brinksmanship increases the risks of war. Strategic deterrence  may mitigate the risk, but the likely outcome is an increasing number of proxy conflicts that will be tolerated under the US rules based order as part of the strategy.

And as all of this goes on in the background, life seems to go on in the imperialist bloc even as two major wars continue in Palestine and the Ukraine. The war in the Sudan is creating a massive human catastrophe with untold human loss. The embedded racism and colonialism of imperialism means that the next Australian election will be determined by housing supply and not how to make a society that works to
make the world a better place to live for all of us.

The Australian government has announced that it is providing $4.6 billion to a private company in the UK to develop its manufacturing capability. Ostensibly, this is to facilitate a future delivery of ballistic missile submarines for the Australian Navy. No one is saying whether the expectation is that the submarines delivered will be nuclear capable. It would be naive to believe that they wouldn't be.

This follows a similar investment made into US naval ship yards which facilitates building more new ballistic submarines for the US navy. Australia may be able to inherit some second hand submarines from the US as a reward for this subservience.

This is approaching a $10 billion commitment to a future weapons platform that is according to Richard Marles, Minister of Defence in the war party.:

"These are the most complex machines that humanity have ever built"

Marles is saying that the pinnacle of human achievment is to be able to manufacture a weapons platform with the purpose of engaging in armed warfare.

Somehow doing this will increase the capability of Australian industry and create jobs for Australians in the war industry.

This is a diversion of the creativity of Australian labour against itself and against our sisters and brothers in the Global South. Its an investment in war and a global system that perpetuates colonialism.

Its a travesty that the policy makers of the ALP fund preparation for war and fund the industrialisation of war with the justification that it means jobs and the development of Australian industry. Australian workers do not wish to be part of creating the tools of the next war, they would much prefer building peace. The money sent overseas to build weapons platforms could be better invested in developing the transition to a carbon free future in Australia.

There is conflict in the world and there are contending ideologies, and yet the common interest of ordinary people is always to avoid war, to not be involved.

The people do not want war, and yet it is forced on us. The first point of resistance is to oppose conscription.

At some point, ordinary people realise that no matter what reason is given for war it is they who suffer the greatest loss. And it is ordinary people who survive war, who live with its aftermath. The people survive war.

Revolutionary Defeatism

V.I. Lenin is often credited with advancing the concept of revolutionary defeatism during WW1. It was the most advanced position of resistance to war. It proposed that the interests of ordinary peope would be better served by ending the war irrespective of which side might be deemed as having been declared the winner. It advocated acting against the interests of the state, for mutiny in the armed forces and non-participation in national wars. The scale of casualties incurred during WW1 can never be justified in any nationalist terms. All nations suffered catastrophic loss of life. Australia may have an ANZAC story but it should not be glorified. The loss of lives has never been justified, except that it was war. There was no purpose for the loss of millions of lives except imperial ambition.

Capitalism might wish to characterise its role in war as legitimate - i.e. war shouldn't be run at a loss - War is profitable. The destruction of human life, habitat and environment is actually the outcome, rebuilding is profitable.

It is unreasonable to ask any humanist to participate in war, its preparation, or its manufacture. It is a human right to oppose war - if you assert it.

War is now Out Sourced

Professional armies are deployed by rich nations to continue colonial exploitation. The repetitive failure of forward deployments of the imperialist West should indicate some fundamental faults in the system and yet they are duplicated in a strangely destructive cycle. And the profits of the industrial war machine correlate with the body counts.

The government pays for employment in the war industries. Ordinary people are coerced into supporting war - when they do not want to be part of it. We need to start saying no and support others who say no.

Some Will Be Seduced by the money

The war machine is profitable. There is a lot of liquidity. People you know may be offered better pay to work in the war industries. When survival is determinable, people choose.

We have to convince them that there are alternatives - equally satisfying or better.  The people do not want war. No ongoing conflict should continue without a democratic vote. No Australian personnel should be put in harms way without a vote in parliament.

War is such a stupid thing that it should not be allowed easily. It should be resisted.

War is about capital, it is about who owns it and who exploits it

Hell no - we won't go.

Its been a while since I posted.

Work keeps me busy during the day, and messing about with computers distracts me at night.

I've posted a few of these on FB, but will post here to keep them in memory

The Dollar is still a symbol of US Imperialism

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/The-Big-Story/Will-China-s-digital-yuan-vanquish-the-dollar

A more distant view

https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/Interview/China-s-yuan-likely-to-become-Asia-s-central-currency-Kenneth-Rogoff

Sex Positive

"Furthermore, she despairs of the relationship many feminists now have to state power: “In the late 60s, women were rethinking everything. There was this radical exuberance. But over two decades, those energies have been subverted and redirected to politically problematic ends. Suddenly, it’s more cops on the street, more men of colour in prison, foreign wars… the carceral state.” When feminists call – as they did after the murder of Sarah Everard in London last March – for “action” on male violence, they need, or so she believes, better to understand what that might involve in practice; what groups they will end up working against, as well as for. Her feminism is, in other words, the polar opposite of that espoused by writers who go on about the individual, about empowerment and self-kindness."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/08/amia-srinivasan-the-right-to-sex-interview

Enemy of the People

Murdoch is a master at the manipulation of liberal principle to undermine those fundamental structures that provide the fig leaf of legitimacy of democratic enfranchisement. This is the end of the fantasy that a progressive government can be elected in Australia.

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/opinion/topic/2021/08/14/the-four-stages-sky-news/162886320012272

Class struggle is always here

https://redflag.org.au/article/irans-new-wave-strikes-and-protests

Practicing Good

"Practicing the Good sets out to show how contemporary leftist theory resists anti-capitalism by dismissing its radical other: the concrete experience of Soviet socialism. In short, Chukhrov analyzes why the capitalist subject never really desires abolishing capitalism. Against this backdrop, Chukhrov argues that even what is aestheticized today as anti-capitalist critique unwittingly affirms the capitalist status quo. Instead of striving for radical transformation, the Western Leftist prefers her bourgeois bubble, narcissistically ‘leading the revolution one Guardian article at a time’, as Adam Lehrer recently put it. Consequently, for the capitalist subject, socialism as radical de-alienation, sublated desire, and the abolition of libidinal phantasmagoria is an uncanny dystopia.
"Chukhrov’s analysis of sexuality in socialism opens with a sharp criticism of Judith Butler’s gender theory. As Chukhrov argues, Butler’s notions of gender, melancholy, performance, and subversion are deeply rooted in the logic of capitalist economy and thus not fully applicable to former socialist societies. Chukhrov’s main criticism is that Butler understands subversive deviation and emancipation from alienation as an individual trouble rather than a collective struggle. A consequence of this ‘lack of commons’ (129) is a fatal atomization of social discourse: rather than a tool for communality, language is misconceived as a ‘Big Other’ (125) hostile to our individualized identity production.

https://mronline.org/2021/08/07/review-of-keti-chukhrov-practicing-the-good-desire-and-boredom-in-soviet-socialism/

Misreading Foucault

https://lisaduggan.substack.com/p/whos-afraid-of-michel-foucault

The capitalisation of rental housing continues apace. Globally renting as a proportion of the housing market is increasing, which indicates a gradual shift in social relations.

https://www.smh.com.au/business/banking-and-finance/macquarie-takes-1-9b-bet-on-uk-housing-market-20210630-p585qc.html

https://gh3.100flowers.tech/the-same-only-different/

100 years - whether you like it or not - its an historic milestone:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-30/china-rappers-movie-stars-monks-communist-party-cpp-100/100252156

The ethics of the pandemic - who's had the jab:

https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/24/companies-navigate-ethical-minefield-to-build-proof-of-vaccination-apps/

Work will change location - work from home and be forever at work:

https://diginomica.com/hybrid-working-not-halfway-house-its-future-work

A series of articles on China's development of digital currency and blockchain technology - the dominance of $US is no longer assured:

https://www.scmp.com/business/banking-finance/article/3138777/blockchain-ambitions-will-china-get-first-mover-advantage

https://www.scmp.com/business/banking-finance/article/3139030/blockchain-ambitions-chinas-e-yuan-kick-starts-rush-mint

https://www.scmp.com/business/banking-finance/article/3139217/blockchain-ambitions-geopolitical-implications-chinas

Music

Paywalls are information disruptions introduced by capitalism. We just have to fight to eliminate them. Publish what you want and make it freely available.

By Yuan Yang
June 10, 2021

Source

By the time he arrived at Alibaba, Tim had been working to get there for years. Raised in a small town in Zhejiang province, he’d competed to be at the top of every school class.

As a student at one of China’s best universities, he knew tech giants rarely hire without prior work experience, so he competed for internships at social media companies Tencent and ByteDance. And as a recent graduate, he competed in four rounds of interviews and a written exam before finally receiving an offer.

After a few months working at the company’s Hangzhou campus, Tim was called into a meeting with the other four graduates hired in his round. “At the end of the year,” their team leader told them, “one of you will lose.”

This “loser” was a feature of Alibaba’s ranking system. Workers earn a base salary and, at the end of the financial year, nearly everyone gets a hefty bonus. The losers – those bottom-ranked by management – get little or nothing no matter how productive they are. Often they take it as a sign they should leave. Tim felt angry as he realised he was being pitted against his own teammates. Compete, or else.

Afterwards, the new hires discussed their new reality. They found it “foolish and hypocritical” when the team leader told them the scheme would help them grow. “Very talented people can thrive in an environment filled with competition, while ordinary people are better in cooperative settings,” says Tim. “I used to think I was the first kind of person, but I realised I was the second.” The others had fought as hard as he had to get there and, now that they were, they “couldn’t stand it”. They fell silent and got to work.

Forced ranking is just one of many recent flashpoints that have generated scrutiny of workplace practices at China’s large tech companies. Allegations of overwork, abuse and injury have become the subject of heated nationwide debate. Last December, the deaths of two young staffers at one of Alibaba’s competitors, Pinduoduo, fuelled the fire. (One collapsed on the way home from work. The other died by suicide.)

Such working conditions compelled Chinese software developers to launch a campaign to raise international awareness of their working conditions, christened “996 ICU”. The name refers to a colloquial saying among tech workers that if you work 9am to 9pm, six days a week, as some managers demand, you’ll end up in intensive care. Over the past two years, 996 ICU has crowdsourced allegations of mistreatment from employees at more than 200 Chinese companies.

Even for the large number of engineers working under less brutal conditions, a pervasive sense of the drudgery of uncreative, repetitive tech work has led them to self-identify with manual and agricultural labourers. Many refer to themselves as “code peasants”, and the most common nickname for the tech giants as a group is “big factories”.

Some employees sardonically compare tech companies to “fortified cities”, a reference to a 1940s novel which satirised marriage and other aspects of middle-class Chinese society: when you’re outside, you want to get in. But when you’re inside, you want to get out.

Consumer-facing internet companies such as Alibaba, Tencent and Meituan are a crucial part of the country’s economy and its most valuable publicly listed corporations by far. (Alibaba and Tencent combined are worth more than $1.1tn.) They helped remake the global image of Chinese power by creating the world’s original mobile-first marketplace in the 2010s.

But after a decade of explosive growth, a rift has emerged between generations. While older workers have a stake, both financial and cultural, many of those born after 1995 fear they missed out. This new generation wants an end to long working hours and cut-throat competition. In short, they want an end to everything their predecessors thought essential.

Chinese tech founders have taken plenty of inspiration from American business. ByteDance chief executive Zhang Yiming got his “always day one” motto from Jeff Bezos of Amazon and frequently cites Jack Welch’s book Winning. Alibaba maintains the small apartment in which Jack Ma founded the company as a kind of work shrine, not unlike HP, which acquired and refurbished the Palo Alto garage where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard launched their business. Even gripes about life as a “code peasant” distantly echo Silicon Valley developers referring to themselves as “code monkeys” in the mid-1990s.

Western technology giants have faced serious workplace problems, ranging from exploitative human resources practices to race and gender discrimination. The major differences between companies such as Facebook and Apple and their counterparts in China are speed and scale. From 2019 to 2021, for example, ByteDance grew its staff from 60,000 to 100,000. Alibaba more than doubled its number of employees in the past year to exceed 250,000.

By comparison, it took Google four years to double its ranks to 140,000. In other words, issues that might be adjudicated over the course of a half decade can compound in the span of 12 months.

“Chinese tech companies never get old,” explains Kai-Fu Lee, a globally known investor in China. Lee founded Microsoft Research Asia, which incubated the founders of many of China’s tech behemoths. He characterises consumer-facing companies as having a quasi-permanent “lean start-up” approach that necessitates rapid shifts in objectives. Rather than starting with a predetermined notion of what consumers want, the companies experiment with a product, change it according to market response and continue evolving it rapidly.

“Meituan began as a Groupon for China. Now it’s delivering groceries, takeaway and medication,” he says. “Because of the gladiatorial environment, they’ve always had to stay paranoid and change constantly.”

What is being lost as a result of the pursuit of hypergrowth is widely debated in China. Netizens have latched on to a newly fashionable term: “involution” (nei juan). Anthropologist Clifford Geertz popularised the word in the 1960s in work describing unusual aspects of one rural economy in Java, Indonesia. Geertz posited that, over the course of centuries, ever-increasing amounts of labour had poured in but output remained constant. No innovation had occurred. Geertz called this involution.

In 2018 and 2019, the term became popular in China thanks to the writing of Cao Fengze, a PhD student in China’s top school of engineering at Tsinghua University. Cao’s posts chronicled intense, zero-sum competition between classmates for admission to elite universities. He argued the result of so much competition for so few spaces is that students work harder and harder without gain.

“Every effort is nothing other than an attempt to push another snowflake over the edge,” Cao wrote, alluding to the proverb “every snowflake in an avalanche is responsible”. For him, involution is catastrophe.

Cao, whose hundreds of thousands of online followers call themselves the “Cao School”, believes the root of involution is the struggle over limited resources. The metaphor of resource competition is one of the most pervasive in Chinese society. Discussions about the country’s problems tend to culminate in the assertion, “there are too many people in China”.

China’s consumer-facing technology companies have clearly benefited from the number of people – all potential users – and likely from artificial competition as well. For their most promising projects, many companies run “horse races” in which several teams pick the same goal. At the end of the race, one winner is crowned by the company or, in some cases, by users after products are released to compete with each other on the market. For example, multiple internal teams raced to create the final incarnation of WeChat, Tencent’s all-in-one messaging and payments app which has become an essential part of daily life.

So-called “hot-housing” or “closed-door projects” are another attempt to recreate the start-up atmosphere. At ByteDance, for example, a dozen or so designers, engineers and product managers hunker down in one room for a month to work round the clock. A company illustration explaining the concept emphasises that afternoon tea and midnight snacks are provided as well as regular meals. “Tell your family and friends,” a cartoon boss orders workers, “you are about to enter a very special period.”

In 2014, Alibaba’s version of hot-housing led to DingTalk, which now has an 80 per cent share of China’s enterprise communication users. As if on pilgrimage, Alibaba sends participating employees to the cramped Hangzhou apartment where the company was born. (The company owns additional apartments in the same block.) Teams working on special projects live and work there, barely leaving the compound, for months at a time.

Yet for all the glorification of innovation, a lack of creative work is common for the vast majority of technical employees. “They don’t have the time to come up with ideas or control the direction of their work,” says one ByteDance employee. “They have so much mental load from the tasks they have in the narrow scope they’re given, that they don’t have the latitude to think about anything extra.”

According to a Tencent manager, squeezing employees’ time is often an intended outcome of the management system, rather than an inefficiency. “When we consider why some products succeed, it’s not necessarily because they have better technology,” he says. “It’s because they simply have more people labouring away.” Most developers, he says, are in fact completing repetitive tasks known as “create, read, update and delete” work, such as changing the minute details of a user interface over and over.

“The growth of China’s tech giants has not come from true innovation but from labour intensity. It’s very difficult to automate certain parts of the software sector,” says Xiang Biao, a professor of social anthropology at Oxford university. “Forced ranking is not about efficiency or fair reward, but about control. This single method destroys all solidarity between peers. It generates obedience and fear towards the person above.”

At 10.30pm on a Tuesday night, the pavement outside Tencent Mansions in Shenzhen is dotted with staff wearing blue lanyards around their necks. Some queue for the bus, while others wait for ride-shares. Behind them, an illuminated panel displays a government advert advising residents to “relax” and “release pressure” next to cartoons of adults flying kites and skateboarding.

Jun, a 23-year-old working for Tencent Cloud, is in the queue. He says half of his team is still in the office and notes that older staff with kids get to go home earlier. He tells me he’s happy to trade long hours for a high salary.

Entry-level technical positions can fetch total remuneration, including bonuses, of as much as Rmb300,000-Rmb400,000 (£33,000-£44,000) per year, more than double the average for graduates of China’s top engineering university, Tsinghua. For him, the 12-hour workday is acceptable since Tencent staff still have weekends, unlike many other tech giants. And his commute is short.

Like all staff working past 8pm, he gets a night snack voucher, which he uses to buy a meal deal at the McDonald’s downstairs. Other staff are more extravagant. On a table for takeaway deliveries outside Tencent’s foyer sits an entire hand-shredded chicken. The receipt shows it was ordered at 9.59pm.

As for the work itself, Jun says he feels it is difficult to break into the ranks of employees who really “used their minds”. He beat 80 other engineering masters graduates for his position, but the company “hires masters graduates to do something a high school student could also do”, he says. When I ask him why, Jun responds, “involution”.

How a second generation of tech workers such as Jun is adapting or clashing with the work cultures of China’s internet economy companies is a topic of long discussion when I visit a restaurant in the suburbs of Hangzhou. I’m eating with Jason, a man in his mid-thirties who has worked at Alibaba in ecommerce for 10 years, as well as his wife Cathy, a talkative product manager at Ant Group, the company’s mobile payments affiliate. They bought their nearby home with a company loan and describe themselves as “Ali people”. Cathy says, “The problem we as a company now face is how to transmit the Ali culture down to new staff.”

Jason adds that the company’s hiring process includes an HR person dedicated to “sniffing out the culture. You can smell Ali culture on someone.” Cathy explains the culture is “about doing things of value to others while also developing yourself”. She recalls that when she struggled with a change of role, Jason employed Ali culture by telling her change was an opportunity to challenge herself.

Cathy acknowledges there is a generation gap between the couple and newer recruits, who mostly missed out on the years of rapid growth and equity shares. She says younger employees feel frustrated by how much harder it is to achieve “economic freedom”. The couple agree this can make the post-1995 generation trickier to manage. “They don’t like criticism, they want self-realisation,” Cathy says. “They’re not as willing to suffer as we were”.

Tim, the recent Alibaba hire who spent years competing to get there, describes the company’s values as “more like ‘chicken soup’”, slang for a meaningless story told merely to soothe the listener. Another term he uses in describing the relation of older managers to younger employees is “PUA”, short for pick-up artist. He and his colleagues mostly use it to describe managers who over-promise opportunities for advancement to the point of creating a dishonest or even abusive relationship. PUA is another neologism. In China, the linguistic space for complaining about your boss has been expanding lately.

Over the past two years, even before the pandemic, local media has been preoccupied with a surprising trend among the nation’s top graduates. They’re increasingly attracted to careers in the polar opposite of tech: government.

Lily, a 26-year-old woman from a small city in Guangdong province, is one of them. Last year, she accepted a job at Bilibili, an online video portal that she describes as the nation’s home for “two-dimensionals” like herself. (The term refers to superfans of anime, cartoons and games.) But Lily soon began having doubts about her new life in Shanghai.

Bilibili was expanding rapidly – within four months of Lily joining, the number of staff had doubled – and managers heaped on the pressure. Her team leader had come from a fast-growing competitor with an aggressive corporate culture. “Whenever she criticised something,” Lily recalls, “she would make it about you personally rather than the issue at hand, making you feel like trash.”

After sustained overwork, Lily’s health deteriorated. She began hearing ringing in her ears, feeling dizzy and was eventually put on an IV drip in the hospital. “In addition to those who left, there were also those who got depressed,” she says of her team. “I didn’t have the energy to think of other options.” So she quit, returned home and became a civil servant. She says, “I no longer have the feeling of danger that I used to have more or less all the time.”

Lily’s experience may become more common. In 2019, the highly renowned Peking University revealed that, of all the graduates that year who had signed university-approved employment agreements, 17 per cent went into China Communist party work or other parts of government, up from 11 per cent four years prior. In total, counting those who had gone into state-administered institutions and state-owned enterprises, three-quarters of graduates had gone “into the system”. In the same period, the proportion of graduates going into private businesses such as tech had been halved.

A tech worker writing anonymously in a local newspaper editorial last year summed up the feelings of many by describing his envy for friends working in state-owned enterprises and foreign companies. “Many of us are drained, ‘elderly’ middle managers just holding on,” the person wrote. “Just because we laid the bricks of an incredible wealth boom, doesn’t mean we’ll ever be allowed past the gates.”

So far, scrutiny of tech work practices has mostly played out in social media and online. Despite socialist-era labour protections in Chinese law, local governments are loath to enforce prohibitions on forced overtime. In fact, many seem more inclined to accommodate the companies on which they rely for economic growth and tax revenue. And while in the past half-year the central government has reprimanded tech companies over a variety of violations of financial and antitrust regulations, there have been no such high-level accusations over the treatment of workers.

But late last year, Chinese media began widely reporting the contents of a leaked Alibaba email from chief people officer Tong Wenhong. In an unusual move, Tong acknowledged it had been the “most challenging year” in the company’s 21-year history. She noted the “immense” dispute over forced ranking. Alibaba’s senior-most management seemed to be reflecting on its own problems, problems younger employees have been vocal about. (The company did not deny the accuracy of the memo’s contents.)

Tong went on to announce that forced ranking would be relaxed. Not every team would have to assign the bottom 10 per cent loser status. This year, Alibaba has also handed out more shares to junior employees. “Talent is Alibaba Group’s most important asset. We strongly believe that an open and transparent work culture is key to fostering innovation,” wrote a spokesperson in a statement to the Financial Times. “The company’s robust and competitive compensation system reflects our clear priority in cultivating the next generation of talents.”

To Tim’s surprise, the promises were kept. None of his colleagues were deemed losers. In fact, all of them received respectable bonuses. “This is the only fair outcome,” he says, adding that he isn’t grateful since he feels this is how his employer should have been conducting itself all along. “There are more and more young people in the company, and I think the management style will have to change.” Tim was talking to me over the phone on a Tuesday just before midnight. Recently, it’s the only time he’s been free to chat.

Yuan Yang is the FT’s deputy Beijing bureau chief. Additional reporting by Qianer Liu in Shenzhen

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2021 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Please do not copy and paste FT articles and redistribute by email or post to the web.

One of the characteristics of capitalism over time has been its capacity to absorb accumulated social change and trends driven by material economic circumstances. In some respects this has ameliorated the tendency to crisis, although the potential does still exist. Fiscal and monetary policies have served to offset the severity of crises, notably the GFC, by pushing the problem further into the future. The most recent economic recession is a case in point, as governments have opened purse strings to prop up social incomes to offset the forced closure of businesses as a result of health imperatives. Accumulated deficits are now at historic highs.

In the west, the broad trend since the GFC however has been to stagnation, despite unjustified growth in stock markets largely driven by the expansion of revenues derived from increases in internet profits and commodities (in Australia, mining). The clear indicator is central bank dictated low interest rates that have not yielded the growth hoped for. Inflation remains below target. Wages are falling behind as automation and the threat of automation compound the effect of low unionisation. It must be expected that this persistent regime will have consequences with significant effect on social relations.

Asset bubbles have followed as institutional and private investment has chased investment returns and this is most clearly indicated with the global trend to property price rises that are disproportionate to supply factors. In Australia, personal debt levels are at historic highs, predominantly related to mortgages held for home buying.

"In the 1970s and 1980s, the OECD’s house price-to-income ratio averaged around 76 for Australia, rising to an average of 85 during the 1990s. The ratio surpassed 100 for the first time in 2002 and, over the past five years, has averaged nearly 140.

Unsurprisingly, given the increasing number of people being priced out of housing, since the mid-90s, the proportion of renters has risen from below 20 per cent in New South Wales and Victoria, to approximately 30 per cent."
Source.

The numbers indicate a gradual shift to an increasing proportion of renters in the market, with a generational cohort being priced out of home ownership, a traditional form for growth of wealth in private ownership of the family home.

Change over decades often goes unnoticed by the population and its only academics that keep tabs on the underlying trends. Even so, when Peter Hartcher, socially conservative writer for The Age comments on an issue and highlights a significant change in the Australian social contract, then the issue is getting serious.

In the US, institutional investors have moved on the single dwelling rental market. These investors include Blackstone, an investment vehicle of Black Rock, one of the largest hedge funds in the world. Their processes are impacting the social relations of renting, with regular rent increases and the imposition of transaction costs and other new imposts, all to maintain the high returns expected and their methods are slowly permeating into the larger non-institutional market.

Similarly, In Australia, the rental sector is not dominated by the institutions (if you discount the role of the banks), its more middle wealth families that hold more than one single dweller rental courtesy of negative gearing. More recently, landlords have started out sourcing the collection of rents utilising online payments.

What's clear though is that a number of problems will emerge once interests rates shift higher. Capitalism does not have a social conscience and cannot avoid the impact that rising mortgage payments will lead to increased defaults unless wage incomes increase proportionally. Already, homelessness persists at levels not seen previously. Inadequate programs introduced by the states lack the scale required to mitigate the issue. Without major reform, the velocity of income inequality will increase as entry into the housing market becomes more difficult and renting displaces equity in mortgages.

The recent move by New Zealand to require the central bank to assess the impact of monetary policy on housing price stability remains an isolated example.

Home ownership as a key element of the Australian dream (and a significant element of retirement security) is fading into the past.

This will have a gradual impact on class consciousness as class division takes a starker form. Having a landlord who takes a regular slice of your weekly income is a lot different from watching your equity grow as your mortgage declines.

Source
Source

This the first protoype of a media source curation that has no pretension to authority. Its the culmination of a personal project that has, at the very least, the objective to  provide a demonstration of what is possible, how alternatives to dependence on algorithmic curation might still have some value and place, in an increasingly automated world. Systemic dependence and control relies on submission.

The underpinning technology is not significantly sophisticated. The software is open source and the hardware is second hand. (which means it could quite easily fail at any moment, so no guarantee of service is on offer. A later post will provide detail for those who might be interested.) The important point is that the creation and publication of internet media need not be relinquished to media monopolies.

The curation will take the form of email notification if you subscribe, but will be available publicly at https://gh3.100flowers.tech.

It is possible to have a linked Facebook page but its not quite ready for that.

Off Centre will be quite individual and idiosyncratic because it can be and because its not algorithmic.

It won't replace anything and consumption is voluntary.

European TU view on immigration to EU

The human crisis of economic refugees is not going away any time soon.

https://socialeurope.eu/eu-migration-and-asylum-pact-abandons-compassion-and-human-rights

The Colonial view of Latinos in Hollywood

https://www.latimes.com/projects/latino-gap-timeline-history-latinos-hollywood-movies-tv/

Life wars

The debate on the ethics and morality of artificial gestation is only just starting. Science is getting ahead of legislation, but freedom from reproduction, Shulamith Firestone's theoretical prerequisite for women's liberation is getting closer.

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/replotting-the-human-the-thorny-ethics-of-growing-babies-outside-the-womb

Stay Calm and Liberal

A long time contributor to The Economist traces the history of liberal economics in the UK

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/essays/condemned-to-be-liberal-why-britain-cant-easily-break-with-economic-laissez-faire

We are all just small screws of a big machine

"Workers are not being replaced by algorithms and artificial intelligence. Instead, the management is being sort of augmented by these technologies," said Nick Srnicek, a Lecturer in Digital Economy at the King's College of London. For example, with the development of digital technologies, management can monitor workers who are not in a centralized space, he said.

"Technologies are increasing the pace for people who work with machines instead of the other way around, just like what happened during the Industrial Revolution in the 18th Century," he said. "The same thing is happening today. Humans just have little autonomy over that."

Whilst this article unsurprisingly focuses on China, similar practices are evident in the US (most egregiously by Amazon).

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/The-Big-Story/China-s-tech-workers-pushed-to-limits-by-surveillance-software

Entertainment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06ht9MyJLT4

Where mining meets rainforest: the battle for Tasmania’s Tarkine

Campaigners say plans for a new tailings dam threatens wilderness that should be declared a heritage area

inklAdam Morton Environment editor

The velocity of wealth transfer from labour to capital is increasing. The pandemic has assisted it's acceleration. The problem with articles like this that they reinforce the ideological inertia associated with the acceptance of relations within the modern economy. The legitimacy of property relations is no longer questioned.

There’s an extraordinary wealth transfer happening right now and the RBA has played a part

The Reserve Bank is throwing just about everything it has at boosting wages and inflation, but all it seems to be achieving are surging asset prices, further widening the gap between the haves and have-nots.

ABC News

The irony of the WSJ describing the development of capitalism in China is disorienting, but enlightening. As a metaphorical analogue, Bitcoin mining exposes the dynamic of modern capitalism versus the destruction of the natural environment.

China Reconsiders Its Central Role in Bitcoin Mining

Entrepreneurs who create bitcoin have long flourished in the nation, despite an uneasy relationship with the central government. A recent warning of a crackdown highlights the cryptocurrency’s tenuous status in China, and might send some crypto miners to the West.

The Wall Street JournalJames T. Areddy

Irrespective of whether Biden does scrape through and wins, there is more to discern in the US presidential election than meets the eye.

Ideological shifts are hard fought especially when times are tough. Polarisation increases tribal loyalties and the distrust of the democratic liberal elite is well embedded. Bombastic invocation of patriotism and imperial power overpowers rational liberal democratic overtures when it doesn't matter. The hope invested in a Biden win by many, even outside the US is doomed to disappontment one way or another.

Its a false dichotomy. The system of the Democrats is one and the same with that of the Republicans and the people know it. The Democrat administration of Barack Obama did not alter social inequality. The economic recovery post GFC had greater impact. In a sense, social wefare policy is merely a policy of containment. It controls poverty and does not alleviate it whilst it cannot replace employment as a secure income source.

And so the contest is in a substantive sense only ideological. The grinding poverty of a minority persists under both. Biden had no "New Deal" on offer. It becomes merely a division of spoils between competing tribes.

Sociologically, class remains determining but somehow that discussion is absent from discourse and subsumed in distraction, an outcome of liberal atomisation, the divsion of the community to the individual.

The social relations of capitalism enforce an ideological hegemony determined by necessity and the requirement of conformity, there is tolerance of any difference but class consciousness or violent opposition.

And so in the next few weeks, we will be distracted by false hope, that it will make a difference.
But it won't.

Some will point to a difference in policies that affect the environment as a differential, but the division of class interest is most apparent when its ignored.
Transforming the economy to meet lower carbon emission objectives will be unattainable whilst employment is subject to market forces.

Engaging a class conscious majority that understands that is the challenge.

The issue of regional employment in Australia in the carbon extraction industries is economic.

Highly paid workers feed their income into the regional areas they live in, a so-called multiplier effect.

To address regional employment in highly paid industries means therefore that transitional arrangements won't come cheap. But highly paid jobs are not a generational inheritance. New jobs might not be as well paid. Income support must be broad-based.

Ok. That is the decision point that Labor does not have the courage to grasp. Transition has to address the economic shock of the relatively higher pays of workers in carbon extraction. Many are older, many are highly leveraged and many face property
deflation as prices related to location change. This is the inflexion point that Labor finds difficult to transition.

They're wrong to resist what's necessary.

The Covid epidemic has demonstrated the state's capacity to be agile and fluid with the demonstrated need of the community.

Those who talk of transferring debt to younger generations don't understand accounting.

The economy still runs. It just becomes more relative. Australia has a long way to go before reaching the debt levels of the US. I will and can ignore the debt of my children.

The more important indicator is incomes distribution. Debt is merely an instrument that underpins property as the defining aspect of social relations. (more on this in a later post).

How come each new generation gets their own mortgage?

At a more macro level, the value of the dollar is still riding on the back of iron-ore, gas and coal exports, however coal and gas revenue will decline over time. What then?

From a marxist economists perspective, the value of the dollar is simply a measure of the value of Australian labour relative to that of other nation states with national control of currency. Iron-ore and coal inflate the value of Australian labour. The value of the dollar determines the cost of your mobile phone - but strangely international capital makes them affordable by even the lowest paid in every nation. The cost of living is determined at a national level.

The logic suggests that we can expect a decline in the value of the dollar over time without being able to replace the perceived value of coal and gas.

The question is whether Australia's time in the sun is transitioning to shade.

The truly bizarre aspect of the moment is that both parties of capitalism, the ALP and the LNP do not recognise the opportunity they have at this point in time. The politics are fluid.

Nation building is more than supporting small business.

Nation building is providing the resources and the environment for the expression of life by all of its inhabitants.

Australia has an underdeveloped energy capacity with solar and wind power that can only be realised with state support. Capital is actually ready and available to do it.

Defending the stranded assets of carbon  is a reactionary diversion  from developing future energy value.

The rules of the past don't provide solutions to the future.

Capital will remain decisive, whilst we let it be so, but lets be logical at least.

I was asked today about interacting with the internet, knowing that my traffic is monitored tracked, indexed and stored. That contact details and the content of my email is treated the same.

But interaction is almost impossible to avoid. A Tibetan teacher I knew was very fond of his mobile phone.

I think that freedom is made through exercising it. But our time is limited. I want to accumulate good karma when I spend time.

I think our energy is important, that it shouldn’t be extracted for profit and at the end of the day its a tradeoff. Is what we’re doing assisting change to introduce peace, end poverty and provide a truer existence.

We will always want to communicate, its part of us. FB and Google monopolise the network because they have the capacity to connect to the biggest numbers. They have the capacity to connect us to millions, but they have control of that connection. They onsell that capacity and are receiving streams of revenue. They aren’t going away soon.

The insidious profit dynamic, the monetisation of services provided requires revenue.

At least we are told that, that the laws of property and capital are inert. Strangely, government deficits increase as needed by capital, but for people, the purse strings are tight.

In the end it is our participation that keeps them afloat, but we can only abandon them when we’ve constructed an alternative. Or they hand over the keys.

There is always strength in numbers.