The Good Communism: Anarch-Syndicalism

The word Communism tends to be often prejudicially quoted as a synonym of authoritarianism/totalitarianism based on a nation state government administration. The authoritarian characteristics of the orthodox Marxian doctrine often represents the socialism aspiring to evolve to communism eventually. Then, the word communism is often seen as the enemy of Liberalism promoting individuals' liberty and autonomic right. However, there is another form of communism defying the existence of one single state authority commanding economy, the means of resource distribution, and society (the interaction of individual citizens), which is compatible with Liberalism. 

 

The United Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) was the former suzerain nation of the socialist nations following the orthodox Marxist doctrine advocating for the socioeconomic evolution towards communism. The USSR no longer exists while there are still remaining remnants of the nations which still retain the Soviet style socialism. These remnants are controversial because many of them seem to have abandoned their original political principle. Furthermore, the main point of this essay is to affirm that the orthodox Marxism is not only the political philosophy supporting communism.

Some Asian socialist states ruled by a Communist/Marxian-socialist party seem to have diverted from the direction of their original communist ideal. They have actually adopted the intense capitalist practices while they self-proclaim to maintain their Marxist principle as their excuse to prop up their one-party dictatorship. Therefore, their characteristics are actually opposing to the communist ideal aspiring for the egalitarian socioeconomic state.

Cuba might be only one socialist nation maintaining the orthodox Marxian style communism in a legitimate way. It still keeps the state ownership based economy as well as the diverse distribution of resources securing their reasonable standard of living. At the same time, Cuban government implements the Soviet style autocratic paternalism to cohesively unify her individual citizens under the oppressive one-party authoritarianism suppressing individual liberty. This is the factor that the orthodox Marxism is not compatible with Liberalism.

By contrast, there is another form of communism called Anarch-Syndicalism  which aspires to establish the egalitarian socio-economy without an autocratic paternalism such as the orthodox Marxian proletariat dictatorship. Its economy and political administration are run by cooperative unions of individuals which are spontaneously formed by individuals' voluntary cooperation without a cohesive force of any authoritarian organisation. Therefore, it relies on each autonomic individual citizen to manage their own political administration with their free will free from authoritarian oppressions. 

This is a anarchist political philosophy defying the existence of nation state government, the cohesive institutionalised authoritarian organisation. This is a radical socialist political philosophy defying not only the oligarchy by the capitalist class elites manipulating socio-economy but also the monetary market economy demanding an intense conformity for all individual citizens as the means of production. This is a libertarian political philosophy promoting equal treatments to all individuals regardless of their gender, ethnic, and physical characteristic origins inside this mutualist community avoiding any stratified institutional administration. 

Anarch-Syndicalism is perhaps only one anarchism having been practised in real through the history. The Second Spanish Republic centred in Catalonia in the early 20th century was the innovative state adopting the Anarch-Syndicalist system for economy as well as political administration. Even though it lost the Spanish civil war then, it can be said to be reasonably successful enough to maintain the state under such an administration sufficient enough to continue fighting back. 

Their participatory economy, where various business decision-making processes of one firm are democratically managed by its trade union members, was successful enough to maintain the productivity required to fight against their opposing force. Because their profit was returned to each individual worker participating their production, the motivation of their daily business activities as well as their contribution to the entire commune was high enough to fight back against their opposing force. This can be compared to the direct democratic state of the ancient Athens where individual citizens were so proud of themselves as its non-expendable core-members of their state that they had such a strong voluntary spirit to keep fighting in a war.

In Japan, there were some politicians who were advocated to Anarch-Syndicalism before the World War 2 (WW2). Even though this policy was not put into practice in real, this political movement was influential to the various contemporary rebellious political factions against the contemporary Western capitalist imperialism. This influence is non-negligible for explaining the spiritualism of the contemporary status quo Touseiha administration during the WW2 despite their different political characteristics.

A former Japanese government bureaucrat Kunio Yanagida was inspired by an anarchist communist philosopher Kropotkin whereas he was a strong Japanese nationalist at the same time. Mr. Yanagida had a unique attitude towards the issue of the Japanese monarchy Tenno system. He attempted to restore the pre-modern traditional Tenno system linked to the original Shinto shamanism while criticising the current modern monarchism strongly tied up with the modern nation state and its modern state capitalism. His own plan was to establish an Anarch-Syndicalist state of Japan based on the decentralised pastoralist environment where all the autonomous individual habitants mutually cohabit together with their own free will.

The idea of Communism should not be monopolised by the orthodox Marxists; There is a variety of Communism which actually challenges against the orthodox Marxian style and is compatible with Liberalism. There have been various new political philosophical movements of challenging the combination of capitalism and modern nation state government. Michel Foucault was a remarkable philosopher accusing the oppressive characteristics of the entire modernity. 

Foucault's philosophy is often criticised as an anachronistic because he seemed to romanticise the pre-modern feudalist society to a certain extend. Yet, his theory clarifies how the emerging modernity with its nation state and capitalism has deteriorated individuality of autonomous individuals by forcing the conformity to the ruling class interests and the entire monstrous mechanism of the modern nation state. His idea was to respect each unique characteristic of individuals not undermined by an institutionalised socioeconomic structure, and his policy is often introduced as the postmodern Anarch-Syndicalism. 

In conclusion, Communism itself is not a bad idea as long as its form is compatible with Liberalism such as Anarch-Syndicalism. For the time being, capitalism with its monetary based market economy prevails as a popular socio-economy. Nevertheless, it is always worth off to brainstorm to evaluate any other future socio-economic alternative. Hence, Anarch-Syndicalism as a good form of Communism can be a good candidate.

Database and Storage

 

The main components of computer are Central Processing Unit (CPU), Memory, and Storage. With comparison to human brain, CPU is the core part in charge of thought processes, Memory takes part of the short-term memory assisting these processes, and Storage covers the long-term memory storing information about experiences and knowledge. The computer server is composed of them while proportion of each component depends on the work duty of each server. A personal computer (PC) contains these three components together with a smaller scale inside it. People are often confused with the difference between the database (DB) server and the storage server because they tend to think both functions are the same or similar to each other whereas they take a part of different roles from each other. 

The DB server deals with sorting the data which must be ready to be downloaded, uploaded, and queried at any time the task is carried out inside this server network. Its weight on CPU and Memory is relatively higher than the storage server specialising in Storage. The DB server needs constant electricity supply all the time for running its CPU and Memory. There are basically two types of database, the vertically scalable database for the structured datasets, sorted out by the specialised programming language such as the Standard Query Language (SQL), and the horizontally scalable database for non-structured datasets. The former is good at the complex processes of handling the datasets required to be properly structured whilst the latter is for handling the multiple kinds of large datasets together at once. There are also furthermore specialised DB servers for such as data analysis, chart creation, data transfer, and data warehousing requiring a complex data query. In particular nowadays, the big data handling is so demanded all the more that an independent DB function each purpose is necessary to equip. Therefore, each independent DB server for each specialised task is more required than before. 

The storage server is for storing various sorts of information including the information of the already processed data and the archive memories of any workload of the entire server network. Although it does not need a constant electric supply, there is a required process for querying the information query. For example, with reference to Amazon Web Service (AWS), Amazon Athena, the interactive query service applying the standard SQL for analysis, is used for calling the storage service of AWS called Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). The snapshots of various archives are stored there as a backup for a sufficiently long time period, which requires the process for restoring them. The logs of actions taking places in a server network are often stored in the storage service because the quantity created for the logs is huge and they have to be stored without being modified for a long-term. A static website, not needing a constant feed of streaming data, can be located in the storage server such as Amazon S3 instead of the server instance such as Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2).

Overall, focusing on the difference between their tasks, it clarifies the difference between DB and storage specialising in their own unique tasks borne to each other. Specialised DB is demanded for various specialised data handling tasks. Various compliance issues demand a durable storage capable to store the information set with a substantially high volume in a sufficiently long term. The key to understand it is to understand the factors of these computer components.

Democracy of the modern world under challenge

 "Liberal Democracy V.S. Authoritarian" is a hotly debated topic especially while China and Russia involving their peer alliance non-democratic nations intensively interfere in various foreign affairs nowadays. In the meantime, both the words "Democracy" and "Liberal" are frankly quoted as the counterpart nations of these authoritarian nations ruled by an iron fist of one party or any other autocratic figure. Therefore, it is suspicious to define whether or not these so-called Liberal Democratic nations are truly liberal as well as democratic as what these original words' definition implies.

The point to be critically evaluated here is that almost all those nations are administrated under indirect democracy which selects the limited number of representatives controlling over the political affairs. Perhaps, Switzerland might be only the democratic nation involving the majority citizens actively participating in their political affairs nowadays. Politics of the other "democratic" nations is handled by the chosen elites called politicians self-proclaiming to represent the majority citizens. However, it is often questionable to define as truly representing the majority individual citizens. 

Technically, these citizens are entitled to cast their vote to select these politicians as their representatives. Nevertheless, in reality, indirect democracy hardly represents the majority citizens. In particular, those with the constituency based electoral system seldom represents their majority citizens proportional to their population. Even by adopting the proportional representation to their electoral system, it is still difficult to satisfy elected politicians proportionally representing the citizens. Politicians may manipulate their fellow citizens for their own favour rather than what these citizens really need and want. Politicians often form their factional group which selects opinions matching with this group interest while excluding each individual's own will. 

At the same time, it is also critical to evaluate that democracy does not always imply fulfilling individual liberty. There is a risk that some institutionalised citizens from their own peer group to marginalise the other individual citizens for their favour propped up by their peer pressure as same as the aforementioned politicians. In order to secure liberty for each autonomous individual's sovereign, it may require an invincible ethical principle promoting their decision-making process as a guideline while enabling politics to represent their opinion. This sounds like a religion, but this should be the morally neutral principle not favouring any particular religious organisation. 

The modern complex institutional structure demands the centralised bureaucracy requiring the elites highly trained with a complex skill as well as the friendly connection and apprenticeship with the elders of this established structure to administrate the entire politics. Therefore, this inevitably needs to select those specialising in political organisational skills and connections with their factional peer groups whereas the rest majority are often ostracised from these influential peer groups. The true nature of the modern indirect democracy is much closer to that aristocracy or oligarchy rather than what democracy really means. All in all, the modern indirect democracy tends to be diverting from what both democracy and liberalism attempt to accomplish.

Nowadays, instead of relying on the centralised political organisation such as nation state government, it will be more efficient to adopt a decentralised administration system propped up with the spontaneous interferences among individuals as as the peer-to-peer (P2P) system. Due to the current remarkable information technological (IT) development, it is more possible to organise the decision-making process at each non-scheduled scattered time period than the past relying on the congregations of representatives gathered at a scheduled time. It is really questionable to insist on the need of replying on the representation by politicians and bureaucrats nowadays. 

Both (the modern indirect) democracy and authoritarian can be obsolete already. Each individual will be able to directly reflect their opinion over the networks of where they want to reflect it upon The furthermore developed IT will help sorting out individuals' opinions and efficiently optimising resource-distribution plans. It will even no longer require a political congregation of direct democracy seen in the ancient Athens because each political decision-making is processed at each spontaneous time, place, and occasion by means of its need and want. This new ideal is a combination of anarchism by individuals and technocracy by the IT resources. 

The new alternative to religion will emerge to fulfil the ideal of liberalising each individual in the world. As all the individuals are connected to each other across the borders more than ever, their spontaneous interactions will bring up the shared objectives and guidelines not bound to their distinctive traditional religious, ethical, and social norms and values. As Aristotle said, human being are naturally social, the naturally derived spontaneous interactions of human individuals will induce them to voluntarily create their own minimum required guidelines and rules necessary to prevent them from unnecessary conflicts and miscommunications. Then, even without a paternalistic intervention, they will find their own optimum method of forming consensus through their own try and error. 

Sum up, describing the modern indirect democratic nations as "Liberal Democratic" is questionable. These indirect democratic nations are not quite identical to the true characteristic of what the word "Liberal Democracy" should be derived from. The border splitting individuals out itself is already an obsolete element disrupting the true liberal democracy spontaneously formed among individuals. Hence, the dispute over "Liberal Democracy" and authoritarian is not essential to consider accomplishing the true ideal of liberal democracy in general.

To divert Stagflation, the conservative macroeconomic measure prevails

 

The whole world is struggling with Stagflation which is derived from the combination of two words, stagnation (of the output) and (the price) inflation. This is also called the bad price inflation by all the economic theoretical perspectives regardless of their controversiality of defining the inflation effect on economy. The lacking aggregate supply repressing economy causes both the cost push for the suppliers and the real income depreciation of consumers and investors. This is the macroeconomic phenomenon nobody welcomes.

The last major Stagflation in the past took place in 1970s when the oil price shot up while the dependency of the major economies on the oil was already substantially high. At that time, many economists especially from the self-proclaimed liberal side or the left-leaning side supported to increase the aggregate demand. Their assumption supported the Philips curve theory assuming that the price inflation rate and the unemployment rate are negatively correlated to each other. Their main reasons are the inflations lowers the real wage of employees (i.e., the cost of employers to hire), and also stimulates the entire market economic activities. Then, they suggested that the perpetuation of the inflation was more tolerate-able than the perpetuation of the declining output.

These pro-inflationary economists expect that the inflation of both the demand push (good) and the supply short (bad) stimulates the market economy with a high incentive of consumption, investment, and production supply. Then, this stimulated market multiplier is anticipated to increase the output growth which offsets all the negative effects of the inflation. Therefore, instead of controlling the inflation, they tolerated the ongoingly rising inflation by overestimating the positive effects while underestimating the negative effects of leaving the high inflation at the contemporary time period. This is why they advised the contemporary government to inject more money instead of tightening it.

Nevertheless, in reality, the negative effects of the price inflation such as increasing  suppliers' costs and depreciating the real income of citizens were more significant than their assumed positive effects. The inflation has rather discouraged the production motivation of suppliers because of the surging cost prices. The incentive of consumers' consumption expenditure and asset investment was hardly stimulated. These citizens rather suffered from the lack of reasonable employment opportunity and the depreciation of their real income taking account of their living cost. The excess money backed up by the government expenditure flowing into the contemporary economy did not seem to have improved the quality of the contemporary socioeconomic environments.

This is the time that the anti-inflationary conservative economic theorists, most notably Monetarists, emerged as the counter-revolutionary against these self-proclaimed liberals and the left leaning economists. They claimed for the extermination of the price inflation even by incurring the negative output gap (slowing or penalising an economic production level) in the short run. Their conservative measure against the inflation was detested by many contemporary citizens whereas it succeeded in stimulating the macroeconomic performance deserving these citizens in consequence later.

First of all, the interest rate must rise for suppressing the excess flow of money even as well as preventing the real interest rate from being substantially low. Secondly, they are highly sceptical about the positive effects of the price inflation such as the incentive for suppliers supplying more and the motivation of investors and consumers purchasing more. Instead, they insist on the bad side effects of the perpetuated inflation rather than the temporary shrinking output level.

 Nowadays, the US government and the Federal Reserve Bank (FRB) as well as the European central banks are aware of this lesson in the past so that they decided to raise the interest rate and tighten the money supply even by slowing the economy down further with still hunting socioeconomic sufferings from the pandemic. What the current US government under the Democratic party administration is imposing some unnecessary regulations on business activities in spite of the still stagnant world economy, which seems to be rather irrelevant to suppressing the inflation. Therefore, the current US policy of the interest rate as well as the quantitative tightening are something not to blame for the current stagnant performance of the US economic policy.

On the other hand, the current Japanese government performance under this currently ongoing Stagflation is notably poor. They are reluctant to raise the interest rate even with both the surging price inflation and the Japanese Yen (JPY) value depreciation in the foreign exchange. The reason of both the current government and the Bank of Japan (BoJ) rejecting the interest rate rise has been explained in another article so please kindly find it to read. In addition, they still keep their loose money supply as favouring their peer corporations while the majority Japanese citizens are suffering from the income shortage in their daily life. 

The other suspicious phenomenon is that the opposition parties present no effective policy against the current stagnation. In Japan, no party promises to raise the interest rate at all whereas their manifesting policies are only the temporary countermeasure against this ongoing Stagflation such as tax cut. Even if tax cut may offsets the real income depreciation by sparing the disposable income, the steadily increasing price level caused by the surging costs of both domestic suppliers and imports will depreciate their income furthermore in the middle run. Moreover, investors are less likely to split their extra income gained from tax cut to invest it into their domestic capital market because the currently ongoing currency depreciation is steadily reducing the assets value in the domestic market.

In the meantime, Japanese politicians should be concentrated on tackling Stagflation at first for the time being. The interest rate rise as well as the quantitative tightening are supposed to be implemented.  In particular, the money supply to those corporations of the government peer group must be tightened because it seems to be excess and unnecessary under the current macroeconomic environment. Otherwise, the damage which Japan and its majority citizens will suffer will be even more severe soon. Their real income depreciation will keep steadily impoverishing the majority Japanese citizens.

In conclusion, the pragmatic policy implementation is the key to solve the suddenly emerging problem by referring to the past example of solving it. At the time of Stagflation in particular, the conservative measure is worth implementing even through not supporting the conservative policies in general.

As a service (●aaS) via the public cloud

 

The information technology (IT) services are categorised into various levels nowadays. At this time, the business models providing customers and clients with the services via the online connection such as the internet rather than using services only within the on-premises environment. Most notably, there are three categories of services, the software as a service (SaaS), the platform as a service (PaaS), and the infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

Nowadays, many IT service providers offer the subscription service available online rather than the offline purchasing. The notable advantages are agility, availability, and scalability of the resource preparation as well as reliance on the providers for the content and security update and the physical space saving for the physical stuff. The shared access offered by the public cloud is now popular than ever.

The internet connection is not only the online connection option. There is a service called the direct connect connecting users' computer and the server network of the provider located in a remote data centre. The internet connection requires to secure the connection security preventing various incidents such as data breach and information fraud as well as the available IP address allocated to this connection. Then, the direct connect service to the public cloud system is often preferred in order to keep the stable access with an efficient financial cost per use (the internet connection tends to be more expensive for a regular high volume information transaction). For example, there is a movement for various financial institutes to shift their crypto asset management from the internet connection to the direct connect access to the specialised data centre. 

The most familiar service may be the SaaS because it is convenient for users to start using it. The software is already prepared by the providers so that they can simply use the ready-made application and data by just accessing it. Many companies adopt the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) outsourced as subscribing to this service via online instead of purchasing cartridge, CD, or the licence cord offering the software product. The disadvantage is its inflexibility of customisation and modification of applications and data adapted to the users' own requirements and environments.

The PaaS offers a more flexible service for customising and modifying applications and data via the platform composed of the operating system (OS) e.g., Microsoft (MS) Windows, middleware, and runtime is ready. When MS introduced its public cloud service MS Azure, many people thought its compatibility with the commonly distributed OS, the MS Windows, would be high. By contrast, the operation system and its server network architecture may require more flexibility enough to customise their own platform. Then, the IaaS introduced in the next paragraph can be the option.

The IaaS has become popular for the IT engineers to install since Amazon introduced its public cloud service called Amazon Web Service (AWS). The notable benefit is reducing the workloads for maintenance and security update as well as saving space and labour for the physical infrastructure composed of servers, databases, and their network in their on-premises. It is even beneficial to combine the already established on-premises environment and the public cloud services as a hybrid. Another notable useful point is Autoscaling elastically adjusting the volume use by means of its fluctuant demand, which is beneficial not only for the access and service maintenance management but also the financial accounting including the cost calculation and the tax payment. Because AWS was the first pioneer having popularised the public service, this seems to be the main business core of Amazon nowadays. 

In conclusion, considering these characteristics, it is predicted that more businesses will shift their IT basis to this "as a service" due to their convenience and resource scalability. In one of the Bank of England press conferences in 2021, the adoption of the public cloud services by many major private banks was hotly debated. Regardless of its controversy over the national compliance issues, it seems to be the unstoppable inevitable phenomenon across the border in 2020s like the globalisation movement of socio-economy seen in 2000s.

Autoscaling

 * Without Autoscaling: The fixed cost approach

 * With Autoscaling: The variable cost approach

Autoscaling is one of the remarkable advantages of using the public cloud because of its elasticity of the volume usage. This factor is also beneficial by means of the financial accounting.  However, Autoscaling is not that perfect as much as the salespersons from the public cloud providers advertise.  This short essay picks up the typical benefits and challenges of installing the public cloud especially because of its Autoscaling.

Autoscaling is a notable advantage of the public cloud which is usually emphasised in the introductory guideline of the public cloud advertisement. First of all, it allows its users to elastically adjust their quantity usage at each time period, instead of fixing the quality usage, depending on the fluctuant quantity demanded at each time period. This is useful to avoid both the dead-weight of the volume usage while the low access traffic and the volume shortage while the high access traffic.

Focusing on the accounting aspect, it can covert its usage cost to the variable operational cost instead of the capital or fixed-cost = liability. In many cases, it is often advantageous because it is likely to avoid paying the high tax levied onto the capital expenditure. By contrast, the cost covered for the public cloud is often accounted as the variable operational cost which is actually useful to reduce the total tax payment. Regardless of the total cost amount, in many administrative accounting cases, it provides individuals and their firms with the tax payment advantages.

At the same time, Autoscaling does not perfectly work as the textbooks and the introductory guideline of the public cloud explains. In reality, there is a limit of calling for extra instances at once because there is a certain maximum number of the server instances within a certain time period e.g., being able to call 5 instances per minute. There is a physical barrier of scaling the instances depending on each situation.

Furthermore, there is a case that the load balancer misjudges the health check of each connected server instance and the access control. This load balancer can accidentally call unwanted instances by falsely detecting as broken, deleted, or over-capacity or some errors of the monitoring tools and the metric/log information. In addition, there can also be a human error of typing the programmes of directing the traffic control or the security/monitoring setup. This may incur a considerable financial disadvantage of excess instances called by Autoscaling. 

All in all, the Autoscaling mechanism is still an attractive characteristic of using the public cloud to optimise the operational availability as well as the financial efficiency. Nevertheless, it must take an account of the dysfunctions of Autoscaling such as the latency of calling the instances and the extra possible costs caused by both machinery and human errors. On the top of what the salespersons and the textbooks indicate, the users had better refer to the actual experiences of its real application.