Class structure and production relations in the U.S.S.R.

This thesis analyses the extent and forms of class relations in the Soviet Union. The theoretical approach adopted to the analysis 'of the Soviet class structure is based on a critique of the classical Marxist approach to class, as well as of common sociological approaches to class, particularly the Weberian conception of class. These issues are the concern of the Introduction, which outlines an alternative approach to class structure based on a conception of relations of production which differs from the classical Marxist approach, particularly in avoiding any reliance on the labour theory of value for defining relations of production and hence for demarcating class boundaries. Chapter One provides an outline of developments in the Soviet rural class structure in the 1920s, and by criticising common conceptions of such developments argues that the strategy of socialist transformation adopted in the policy of forced collectivisation was economically unnecessary and politically disastrous. The purpose of this Chapter is to throw the contemporary class structure of the Soviet Union into historical relief, by indicating the historical context out of which many contemporary features of the Soviet Union developed. It is hoped that this will indicate that many features of the contemporary social structure are historically specific, rather than being necessary features of a state socialist society. Following from this, the analysis of relations of production in the 1960s and 1970s is begun in Chapter Two, where the relations between different kinds of economic agents, particularly collective economic agents (economic units) are examined, using the approach developed in the Introduction to analyse the relations of production as relations between economic agents, which affect the relative economic capacities of agents. It is argued that, because such capacities are always subject to change through processes of struggle and negotiation, an important but hitherto rather neglected aspect of the relations ,of production concerns the policies of economic agents. Consequently, the manner in which agents at various levels in the economy calculate both their own internal state and the course of action which they adopt with respect to other agents is subjected to detailed scrutiny in this Chapter. Chapter Three analyses the legal and political conditions of the relations of production, since in the Soviet Union such economic relations are operative primarily between state agencies, or collective agencies whose relations to the state agencies are legally and politically regulated by the state. Consequently, the issue of the 'withering away of the state' with the decline of private property is considered, as well as various common Western conceptions of Soviet politics. Following on from this, the analysis of politics in terms of a series of 'arenas of struggle' is proposed, and in the light of this approach the capacities of the main central party and state agencies to regulate the economy (and hence to determine the relations of production by implementing effective economic plans) is reviewed. The conclusion from this review is that there are serious limits on the capacity of such central party and state agents to co-ordinate the division of labour, so that theories of an all-powerful totalitarian party or elite dominating Soviet politics and the economy are misguided. Nevertheless, it is argued that there is sufficient central control of the state agencies for one to be able to say that various state agencies do not pursue autonomous objectives. In other words, political relations between state agencies are not such as to preclude socialist planning of the overall economy. Chapter Four examines welfare and social policy as a means of assessing the importance of non-wage forms of income, and concludes that the overall effect of such forms of public expenditure is probably, as intended, to equalise incomes. This point is taken up again in Chapter Five, where the occupational structure and wage differentials are examined, prior to an overall assessment of the distribution of income, which concludes that a policy of income equalisation has been pursued fairly successfully over the past twenty-five years or so. While such a policy may now be running into difficulties of various kinds, in so far as it has been successfully pursued, it has meant that the connection between the distribution of income and the access of agents to the means of production has been partially undermined. Hence class relations have been seriously weakened in the Soviet Union, and it is concluded that they are non-existent within the state sector of the economy. However, this does not mean that there is no class structure in the Soviet Union since collective farm members are still in a different class position from state employees. There may also be capitalist relations in the so-called 'parallel economy' but their extent must be severely limited by the official prohibitions on such activities which means that, if resources are diverted from official purposes, this is largely done on an individual 'self-employed' basis. It is also argued that the 'intelligentsia' cannot be considered as a single, separate stratum from the state employed 'working class' or the collective farm members. Consequently, the official theory of the Soviet class structure must be considered to be seriously deficient

Gyrokinetic electron acceleration in the force-free corona with anomalous resistivity

We numerically explore electron acceleration and coronal heating by dissipative electric fields. Electrons are traced in linear force-free magnetic fields extrapolated from SOHO/MDI magnetograms, endowed with anomalous resistivity ($\eta$) in localized dissipation regions where the magnetic twist \nabla \times \bhat exceeds a given threshold. Associated with $\eta > 0$ is a parallel electric field ${\bf E} = \eta {\bf j}$ which can accelerate runaway electrons. In order to gain observational predictions we inject electrons inside the dissipation regions and follow them for several seconds in real time. Precipitating electrons which leave the simulation system at height $z$ = 0 are associated with hard X rays, and electrons which escape at height $z$ $\sim$ 3$\cdot 10^4$ km are associated with normal-drifting type IIIs at the local plasma frequency. A third, trapped, population is related to gyrosynchrotron emission. Time profiles and spectra of all three emissions are calculated, and their dependence on the geometric model parameters and on $\eta$ is explored. It is found that precipitation generally preceeds escape by fractions of a second, and that the electrons perform many visits to the dissipation regions before leaving the simulation system. The electrons impacting $z$ = 0 reach higher energies than the escaping ones, and non-Maxwellian tails are observed at energies above the largest potential drop across a single dissipation region. Impact maps at $z$ = 0 show a tendency of the electrons to arrive at the borders of sunspots of one polarity. Although the magnetograms used here belong to non-flaring times, so that the simulations refer to nanoflares and `quiescent' coronal heating, it is conjectured that the same process, on a larger scale, is responsible for solar flares

Calibration model transfer in mid-infrared process analysis with in situ attenuated total reflectance immersion probes

Process applications of mid-infrared (MIR) spectrometry may involve replacement of the spectrometer and/or measurement probe, which generally requires a calibration transfer method to maintain the accuracy of analysis. In this study, direct standardisation (DS), piecewise direct standardisation (PDS) and spectral space transformation (SST) were compared for analysis of ternary mixtures of acetone, ethanol and ethyl acetate. Three calibration transfer examples were considered: changing the spectrometer, multiplexing two probes to a spectrometer, and changing the diameter of the attenuated total reflectance (ATR) probe (as might be required when scaling up from lab to process analysis). In each case, DS, PDS and SST improved the accuracy of prediction for the test samples, analysed on a secondary spectrometer-probe combination, using a calibration model developed on the primary system. When the probe diameter was changed, a scaling step was incorporated into SST to compensate for the change in absorbance caused by the difference in ATR crystal size. SST had some advantages over DS and PDS: DS was sensitive to the choice of standardisation samples, and PDS required optimisation of the window size parameter (which also required an extra standardisation sample). SST only required a single parameter to be chosen: the number of principal components, which can be set equal to the number of standardisation samples when a low number of standards (n < 7) are used, which is preferred to minimise the time required to transfer the calibration model

A chronic fatigue syndrome – related proteome in human cerebrospinal fluid

BACKGROUND: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), Persian Gulf War Illness (PGI), and fibromyalgia are overlapping symptom complexes without objective markers or known pathophysiology. Neurological dysfunction is common. We assessed cerebrospinal fluid to find proteins that were differentially expressed in this CFS-spectrum of illnesses compared to control subjects. METHODS: Cerebrospinal fluid specimens from 10 CFS, 10 PGI, and 10 control subjects (50 μl/subject) were pooled into one sample per group (cohort 1). Cohort 2 of 12 control and 9 CFS subjects had their fluids (200 μl/subject) assessed individually. After trypsin digestion, peptides were analyzed by capillary chromatography, quadrupole-time-of-flight mass spectrometry, peptide sequencing, bioinformatic protein identification, and statistical analysis. RESULTS: Pooled CFS and PGI samples shared 20 proteins that were not detectable in the pooled control sample (cohort 1 CFS-related proteome). Multilogistic regression analysis (GLM) of cohort 2 detected 10 proteins that were shared by CFS individuals and the cohort 1 CFS-related proteome, but were not detected in control samples. Detection of ≥1 of a select set of 5 CFS-related proteins predicted CFS status with 80% concordance (logistic model). The proteins were α-1-macroglobulin, amyloid precursor-like protein 1, keratin 16, orosomucoid 2 and pigment epithelium-derived factor. Overall, 62 of 115 proteins were newly described. CONCLUSION: This pilot study detected an identical set of central nervous system, innate immune and amyloidogenic proteins in cerebrospinal fluids from two independent cohorts of subjects with overlapping CFS, PGI and fibromyalgia. Although syndrome names and definitions were different, the proteome and presumed pathological mechanism(s) may be shared

Pathogenetics of alveolar capillary dysplasia with misalignment of pulmonary veins.

Alveolar capillary dysplasia with misalignment of pulmonary veins (ACDMPV) is a lethal lung developmental disorder caused by heterozygous point mutations or genomic deletion copy-number variants (CNVs) of FOXF1 or its upstream enhancer involving fetal lung-expressed long noncoding RNA genes LINC01081 and LINC01082. Using custom-designed array comparative genomic hybridization, Sanger sequencing, whole exome sequencing (WES), and bioinformatic analyses, we studied 22 new unrelated families (20 postnatal and two prenatal) with clinically diagnosed ACDMPV. We describe novel deletion CNVs at the FOXF1 locus in 13 unrelated ACDMPV patients. Together with the previously reported cases, all 31 genomic deletions in 16q24.1, pathogenic for ACDMPV, for which parental origin was determined, arose de novo with 30 of them occurring on the maternally inherited chromosome 16, strongly implicating genomic imprinting of the FOXF1 locus in human lungs. Surprisingly, we have also identified four ACDMPV families with the pathogenic variants in the FOXF1 locus that arose on paternal chromosome 16. Interestingly, a combination of the severe cardiac defects, including hypoplastic left heart, and single umbilical artery were observed only in children with deletion CNVs involving FOXF1 and its upstream enhancer. Our data demonstrate that genomic imprinting at 16q24.1 plays an important role in variable ACDMPV manifestation likely through long-range regulation of FOXF1 expression, and may be also responsible for key phenotypic features of maternal uniparental disomy 16. Moreover, in one family, WES revealed a de novo missense variant in ESRP1, potentially implicating FGF signaling in the etiology of ACDMPV

Variation in the transmission near-infrared signal with depth in turbid media

Transmission near-infrared (NIR) measurements of a 1 mm thick aspirin disk were made at different positions as it was moved through a stack of eight 0.5 mm thick disks of microcrystalline cellulose (Avicel). The magnitude of the first derivative of absorbance for the aspirin interlayer at 8934 cm-1 was lower when the disk was placed at the top or bottom of the stack of Avicel disks, with the largest signal observed when the aspirin was positioned at the central positions. The variation in signal with depth is consistent with that observed previously for transmission Raman spectrometry. In both cases, the trend observed can be attributed to lower photon density at the air-sample interface, relative to the center of the sample, owing to loss of photons to the air. This results in a reduction in the number of photons absorbed or Raman photons generated and subsequently detected when the interlayer occupies a near-surface position

Interview with Gary Littlejohn

An interview conducted by Vanessa Rockel in 2012 with Gary Littlejohn. Part of a series carried out at the Institute of Commonweath Studies as part of the Ruth First Papers project

Detection of counterfeit Scotch whisky samples using mid-infrared spectrometry with an attenuated total reflectance probe incorporating polycrystalline silver halide fibres

Two methods of analysis were developed to permit detection of counterfeit Scotch whisky samples using a novel attenuated total reflectance (ATR) diamond-tipped immersion probe for mid-infrared (MIR) spectrometry. The first method allowed determination of the ethanol concentration (35-45% (v/v)) in situ without dilution of the samples; the results obtained compared well with the supplied concentrations (average relative error of 1.2% and 0.8% for univariate and multivariate partial least squares (PLS) calibration, respectively). The second method involved analysis of dried residues of the whisky samples and caramel solutions on the diamond ATR crystal; principal component analysis (PCA) of the spectra was used to classify the samples and investigate the colorant added. Seventeen test whisky samples were successfully categorised as either authentic or counterfeit in a blind study when both MIR methods were used