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Nov 23rd

Is Labour still a socialist party?

The Labour party forms the current national government; it won its way into power in the 1997 election. It calls it self ‘Britain’s democratic socialist party’ but is it still socialist?

The Labour party was formed out of the trade unions. It was a party for the working class. It began with ideas of rights for workers and state ownership of industry in order to protect the rights of the workers. The party believed in redistribution of wealth through taxation and the welfare state. They supported free health care and education.

The labour party today is quite different. In the winter of 1978 the labour party fell out with many trade unions. It tried to enforce a limit of 5% on pay rises within the private and then the public sector. The trade unions went on strike. What followed is referred to by many as the winter of discontent. In this winter there was a 3 day week, electricity cuts, bread queue’s. People blamed the unions for there strife. This lead to the election on a Conservative government in 1979 and Margaret Thatcher being in power.

From this point Labour radically rethought its strategies as it was obvious voters had lost faith in the unions. The third way was chosen. New labour abolished block votes, meaning trade unions had no influence on the labour party votes. They changed to a more democratic system ‘One member one vote’. Meaning only members of the Labour party could vote in party votes where previously trade unions had a 40% block vote. This affectively severed the link of power with the trade unions. They also promised to keep the new Conservative laws limiting trade union power.

However Labour still supports free heath care. As such waiting lists are down by 614,000 since 1997. The NHS still provides free healthcare to all. It’s one of the largest areas of public spending. Anyone who needs health care can get it for free from the government … unless its dental care, eye care, subscriptions or been sold out to the private sector in which case it may cost more or be provided by the same company for a cost. But it would be hard to say that Labour doesn’t have an egalitarian outlook towards health care disregarding this and the privatisation of the building of new hospitals.

Education is still free and provided by the government. Every child from (5- 15) can go to school and learn for free. But like hospitals new schools are built on a contract by a private company and then leased back t the government, Academies take investment from private companies and finally private schooling whereby the wealthy get more expensive education is endorsed, given charitable status by the Labour government. It is hard then to see how this is in support of the welfare state or an egalitarian view to education.

Socialism is often summarised as an economic system in which the basic means of production are primarily owned and controlled collectively usually by the state. Appropriately the original Labour party had in its constitution the following clause:

“To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.”

This has no been removed and replaced with:

“The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone…”

All mention of communal ownership removed. What then is socialism without communal ownership to the means of production and the economy? The arms industry, the phones, the trains, the busses, gas and electricity are now private sector business. Where then is the public sector economy? Lucky we (the public) still own the nuclear power, the post office and the roads, possibly because they don’t make any money. Recently the banks have been ‘injected with finance’ and stricter limits applied to the economy. But has there been any real reform in our economy towards socialism? Labour party electoral manifestos have not contained the term socialism since 1992. Where has the Labour party born of the socialism movement gone?

Has it followed the working class? No. While the working class jobs have been moved to less wealthy nations there has been little or no attempt to investigate workers rights in other countries. Our labour government actively does business with countries with known human rights violations like Saudi Arabia. Where then is the ‘protection of the rights of the workers’ or ‘communal ownership to the means of production’? Our society has rather than deal with the problem of class difference and the disregard of human life has instead moved it overseas and out of mind, to places like China, India Vietnam and Columbia, where the rights of the worker don’t have t be upheld and children will work for nothing. This happens while the people of our country move up into the ‘middle class’ still with a large class difference but now with slightly less ideological difference. Politics is moving to the centre ground.

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Nov 7th

Is the Turing test a useful way of helping to decide whether machines may be persons?

The Turing test is a test for computers intelligence in comparison to humans. It works by comparing a machines ability to answer questions in a way indistinguishable from humans. This is tested by having a judge ask questions of both a human and a machine (while they are in different rooms) and then try and decide which of the two sets of answers was given by a machine. If 70% of the time the judge cannot tell the difference or guesses wrongly it is said that the computer is capable of ‘doing what we (as thinking entities) can do’.

The Turing test is useful in assessing the apparent intelligence of a machine and a machine’s ability to maintain a convincing conversation. It is assumed that humans are capable of thinking and communicating. The Turing test is criticized as not being useful in answering Turing’s original question: ‘Can machines think?’

This is because the Turing test is assessing the ability of a machine to make convincing conversation and not necessarily its understanding. This criticism is expressed in a thought experiment called ‘The Chinese room’ by John Searle. The Chinese room simply supposes that one would assume that someone or something speaking Chinese through a slot in a wall understands Chinese. In fact they might be using a look-up table to find responses to your questions. If this was the case the person on the other side of the wall to you would not necessarily understand Chinese. It is easy to see the comparison between this situation and the Turing test. If this lack of understanding can exist in a person then surly it might exist in a computer. If there is not definitely understanding surely there is not definitely thinking in the sense that we as thinking entities do.

“Syntax by itself is neither constitutive of nor sufficient for semantics.”- John Searle

It is not sufficient to be able to structure language to be able to understand it. This means that however well a computer scores on the Turing test it may still have no genuine though. Having the found that the Turing test does not necessarily test anything more that a machines ability to manipulate language it follows that this test is not very useful in the testing of machines for personhood. This is as intelligence is only one characteristic defining a person from a non-person. If we could make a test that was also fool proof in testing understanding, that would mean we could test for reason, social interaction, and autonomy, but currently it is only useful in measuring one kind of intelligence.

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Oct 14th