Thursday 21 July 2011

A Bedtime Story


Once upon a time, a long time ago, there wasn't a giant robot. Back then, no one needed one.

Everyone was miserable, but at least everyone was equally miserable. Then people found ways to make things that made them less miserable - like more food, better clothes, painting and music.

Soon, there were enough good things for a few people to not do much work - provided everyone else still worked hard. These people decided they liked not doing much work, so they built a little robot to organise everyone else's work.

Some people didn't want to do what the robot said, so it was given teeth to encourage them. Over time, the teeth got quite large. Soon, the people forgot there had ever been a time without the robot. They forgot that people had made it, so they forgot people could take it apart again. Sometimes it didn't work very well, but most of the people had also forgotten it could be repaired.

Under the robot, people made more and more things, and so there was more for the robot to do. It got bigger and bigger, until it got so big no one could see all of it at once.

The roboteers realised too late that it controlled them too, but it provided them with the nicest things made by the ordinary people, so they didn't mind too much.

The ordinary people though, were not happy. They had some nice things, but they were more and more miserable. The robot was having them made pointless things just for the sake of making things.

Often it bit people for no reason, and told them they deserved it. When two roboteers fought over a mountain of shiny things, the robot made the ordinary people fight in their place.

Many of the people dreamed of becoming roboteers themselves, because then they thought they could get into the robot's brain and reprogram it.

Some tried to persuade them to make a few tweaks - to make the robot nicer. But even the few roboteers who wanted a nicer robot found it had made ways to protect itself from tampering.

Lots of people decided there was an old, bigger, friendlier robot out there. One which loved the people and would do some reprogramming if everyone obeyed its hundreds of lifestyle rules. But the bigger robot was just the big robot in disguise.

Others dreamed of going back to a time before the robot, but they didn't know how. Many tried to set up their own, littler and friendlier robots, but the big one stamped on them.

A lot of the younger people thought that, if people were sensible, they could organise themselves much better than the robot could. But while the robot was there, it made people silly. If only there were a way to make people sensible enough to destroy the robot, then they'd become sensible enough to organise themselves - and destroy the robot.

Then one day one of the youngsters realised that if all the people got together, they could smash up the robot, and then...what?

Everyone could be a roboteer! And everyone could build a better robot together! Smaller, easily reprogrammable, and set up to do what the people as a whole decided they wanted - not a small lazy group.

Life was now too complicated to do without an organising robot of some kind, and the people wanted the nice things that came from the organising. In fact, there could be a lot more nice things! (If that's what people really wanted).

But some of them decided the robot would rust on its own in time, so they didn't need to do anything. And most of them didn't trust any of the others to build a better robot properly.

Most of the time they argued over who was in charge, and who had the correct schematics of the robot. They found they liked arguing about things better than doing things.

And so the robot continued to stand, barely noticing them, for a very long time.

THE END.


Monday 4 July 2011

Star Quality


There's an idea under capitalist ideology that leaders are specially gifted. Because if they weren't, they wouldn't be leaders, right?

There's also the corollary that when someone gets thrown out from their leadership position, their special giftedness always turns out to have been an illusion - and suddenly everyone knew it all along.

It's related to the idea that the rich deserve to be rich and the poor deserve to be poor - with the same corollary that when a poor person becomes rich, their poorness is rewritten as a temporary aberration - a brief failure of the universe to recognise that they deserved to be rich.

There's another idea that intellectual work is superior to manual work - and thus intellectual workers are superior to manual workers, and thus if a person is superior, it must be because they're a skilled intellectual worker. In other words, if someone is admirable, they must also be smart, because how did they get to be admirable if they weren't smart already, right?

When these two ideas collide, they produce an offspring: the idea that leaders are intellectuals. Thus Lenin was a great thinker, and although Plekanov was his mentor in theoretical matters, Plekanov was somehow less brilliant because, well, Lenin was the man in charge.

George Bush Jr was an idiot, and the left attacked him for it, saying a idiot like him should never be permitted political power. Which means, following the logic through, they were saying if he hadn't been an idiot, he would have deserved his power, and his policies been more justified. They were a lot kinder to the smart and educated Bill Clinton, whose policies weren't that different.

Now, it generally is better to have intelligent people than dumb ones in power, simply because they're more likely to understand the situation and be competent to deal with it. In fact that's almost a tautology, because that's largely what 'intelligent' means.

But to flip the correlation from "Intelligent people tend to make better leaders" to "Leaders are all intelligent" is a logical blunder a child could spot - and most do, before they grow up and lose their clarity.

Marxists ought to be able to see through this ideological trainwreck, but the reality is they can't. And that includes their leaders - who are always hailed as great intellectuals, and who always see themselves in that way.

Indeed, they tend to see themselves as great thinkers in all areas, whether they know anything about the subject or not.

Max Eastman was educated in science - Leon Trotsky was not. Karl Liebknecht and Nikolai Bukharin knew about science and philosophy - Rosa Luxomburg and Vladimir Lenin did not. Indeed, they both claimed to be uninterested in such matters - when they weren't writing about the errors of bourgeois scientists.

So of course it was Trotsky who spent hours shouting his "corrections" at Eastman, Lenin who remarked on Bukharin's ignorance of "real science", and Luxomburg who tells us Liebknecht didn't grasp Marx's philosophical insights.

While writing his aborted biography of Lenin, Trotsky found himself obliged to read Hegel. He managed thirty pages of Phenomenology of Spirit before giving up in exasperated incomprehension. This didn't stop him explaining the limitations of Hegel's genius in ABC of Dialectics - in terms lifted unattributed from Plekhanov.

It seems even the greatest marxists have trouble applying their insights to themselves, but it also goes for those who aspire to be leaders within marxist groups.

Those of us who've spent years sitting in rooms with a dozen revolutionaries know the type - the one whose ambition is to run their own branch (or party), who has a confident, decisive opinion on everything despite knowledge that's usually minimal and often just plain wrong.

I once had a comrade who liked to lecture on how higher mathematics and quantum mechanics proved marxism. Eventually I saw the one science book on his shelf - The Physics of Star Trek.

Sometimes I'm ashamed to call myself a marxist.

Saturday 2 July 2011

The Masterplan


Marx never got around to describing his method, though he planned to do so, but there are clues.

In the preface to the second edition of Capital, he refers to an article by an unnamed author in The European Messenger (May 1872, pp 427-436), on the subject of Marx's method, which calls his method "severely realistic" but his presentation "unfortunately, German-dialecical".

In other words, the author says Marx thinks like a hardnosed scientist, but writes like an idealist philosopher, indeed as "the most ideal of ideal philosophers".

Marx quotes the author at length:

"The one thing which is of moment to Marx, is to find the law of the phenomena with whose investigation he is concerned; and not only is that law of moment to him, which governs these phenomena, in so far as they have a definite form and mutual connexion within a given historical period. Of still greater moment to him is the law of their variation, of their development, i.e., of their transition from one form into another, from one series of connexions into a different one. This law once discovered, he investigates in detail the effects in which it manifests itself in social life. Consequently, Marx only troubles himself about one thing: to show, by rigid scientific investigation, the necessity of successive determinate orders of social conditions, and to establish, as impartially as possible, the facts that serve him for fundamental starting-points. For this it is quite enough, if he proves, at the same time, both the necessity of the present order of things, and the necessity of another order into which the first must inevitably pass over; and this all the same, whether men believe or do not believe it, whether they are conscious or unconscious of it. Marx treats the social movement as a process of natural history, governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but rather, on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness and intelligence. ... If in the history of civilisation the conscious element plays a part so subordinate, then it is self-evident that a critical inquiry whose subject-matter is civilisation, can, less than anything else, have for its basis any form of, or any result of, consciousness. That is to say, that not the idea, but the material phenomenon alone can serve as its starting-point. Such an inquiry will confine itself to the confrontation and the comparison of a fact, not with ideas, but with another fact. For this inquiry, the one thing of moment is, that both facts be investigated as accurately as possible, and that they actually form, each with respect to the other, different momenta of an evolution; but most important of all is the rigid analysis of the series of successions, of the sequences and concatenations in which the different stages of such an evolution present themselves. But it will be said, the general laws of economic life are one and the same, no matter whether they are applied to the present or the past. This Marx directly denies. According to him, such abstract laws do not exist. On the contrary, in his opinion every historical period has laws of its own.... As soon as society has outlived a given period of development, and is passing over from one given stage to another, it begins to be subject also to other laws. In a word, economic life offers us a phenomenon analogous to the history of evolution in other branches of biology. The old economists misunderstood the nature of economic laws when they likened them to the laws of physics and chemistry. A more thorough analysis of phenomena shows that social organisms differ among themselves as fundamentally as plants or animals. Nay, one and the same phenomenon falls under quite different laws in consequence of the different structure of those organisms as a whole, of the variations of their individual organs, of the different conditions in which those organs function, &c. Marx, e.g., denies that the law of population is the same at all times and in all places. He asserts, on the contrary, that every stage of development has its own law of population. ... With the varying degree of development of productive power, social conditions and the laws governing them vary too. Whilst Marx sets himself the task of following and explaining from this point of view the economic system established by the sway of capital, he is only formulating, in a strictly scientific manner, the aim that every accurate investigation into economic life must have. The scientific value of such an inquiry lies in the disclosing of the special laws that regulate the origin, existence, development, death of a given social organism and its replacement by another and higher one. And it is this value that, in point of fact, Marx's book has."
(pp 23-24)


He then immediately comments:

"Whilst the writer pictures what he takes to be actually my method, in this striking and [as far as concerns my own application of it] generous way, what else is he picturing but the dialectic method?"


So Marx says that an author describing his (Marx's) method, is describing the dialectical method - the one Marx extracted and demystified from Hegel, but never explained fully.

It's a long, wordy quote, but it boils down to two things:

1) Every economic epoch has it's own laws. There are no universal economic laws - that would be ahistorical.

2) There are "special laws that regulate the origin, existence, development, death of a given social organism and its replacement by another and higher one".

So...there are universal, ahistorical economic laws, not governing economic systems, but governing the transitions between economic systems. And they have a teleology, because systems are replaced by "higher" ones.

It seems Marx really did think history was on his side, that the revolution was inevitable, that society really does have a master plan, and that he'd unlocked it.

Marx, the idealist.