The Necessity of Political Organization (part 2: What Is an Organization?)

This should have been part 1, but the temporality of thought does not always match up with logical structure. (One of the intrinsic weaknesses of the blog as a mode of publication is that it is organized by temporal succession.)

What is an organization? It is not an emanation of an Idea (or of an ensemble of ideas called a Program), nor is it a Thing-in-Itself (or an End-in-itself). It is an ensemble of social relationships embedded within a wider set of social relationships, whose purpose is to carry out certain defined aims.

It is from the aim of an organization that its type can be deduced, and its structure and functioning should be determined from the relations within which it exists as a means toward relations of its aims. If an organization, in its internal functioning and interaction with the wider sphere of social relationships, does not accomplish its aims within a reasonable time-scale, then the suspicion would be well-grounded that its actual aims differ from its stated ones. It would thus be a cynical organization.

A political organization is one that is engaged in politics. (Sorry about the apparent tautology.) For that to make sense, however, requires a definition of politics. Among those calling themselves Marxists, most definitions of politics center around the question of the State and State power. This is an adequate definition for most purposes, but it does not include several of the every day uses of the word, nor even all its uses within the corpus of writings by Marx and Engels themselves. For example, let's take one of the places where Marx makes his famous statement that the class struggle is a political struggle, from the Poverty of Philosophy:

Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The combination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle. In the bourgeoisie we have two phases to distinguish: that in which it constituted itself as a class under the regime of feudalism and absolute monarchy, and that in which, already constituted as a class, it overthrew feudalism and monarchy to make society into a bourgeois society. The first of these phases was the longer and necessitated the greater efforts. This too began by partial combinations against the feudal lords. Much research has been carried out to trace the different historical phases that the bourgeoisie has passed through, from the commune up to its constitution as a class. But when it is a question of making a precise study of strikes, combinations and other forms in which the proletarians carry out before our eyes their organization as a class, some are seized with real fear and others display a transcendental disdain.

Note that Marx refers to strikes and "combinations" (e.g. unions) as nascent forms of proletarian political organization. There is no hint of ultimatism which would insist that workers move beyond such activities in order to have their activities christened with the name of politics. Neither a political party engaged in parliamentary struggle, nor a soviet engaged in an insurrectionary seizure of state power, are preconditions to proletarian politics (though they can, as history has shown, be key forms of it). Instead, he refers sarcastically to the attitude that would set such preconditions as "transcendental disdain". Such activities and organizations may not be sufficient to particular tasks, but they are not ends in themselves, rather means toward the formation of the identity of an oppressed class.

Let us also consider some every day uses of the word: "office politics" or "workplace politics". "Family politics." "School politics" or "academic politics". Though all of these can be said to involve the state, to one extent or another, at some level of abstraction or analysis, rarely do these directly involve struggle within, against or over the state, and thus escape the commonplace definitions of politics. The commonplace uses of the word politics tend to bring us back to its etymological root, as the doings that go along with being part of a polis, a member of a civilization.

There are human social relationships that can seem at times to escape the bounds of politics, i.e. those of love and friendship. To borrow language from another philosophical tradition, they can seem so when we treat another person as an end, rather than a means. Viewed from the position of what escapes it, politics is the domain in which human beings relate to one another as means toward an end. To engage in politics is to accept that. No political organization could ever base itself upon Kantian ethics.

This is not an intrinsically bad thing. Means can be justified with reference to the ends that they enable, and some ends are more to be desired than others. A capitalist uses the workers he employs as a means toward the creation of surplus value. The workers, when they engage in collective struggle against that capitalist, treat him as a means toward gaining a better standard of living, and one another as a means of building solidarity and strength in that struggle. Antagonistic social relationships--relationships of class--mean antagonistic ways of engaging toward political ends.

So when Marx says that class struggle is political struggle, a corollary that derived from accepting that view of the world is that political organization is class organization that is sufficient for class aims. What are those aims? Moving right along in Marx:

The condition for the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of every class, just as the condition for the liberation of the third estate, of the bourgeois order, was the abolition of all estates and all orders. The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society. Meanwhile the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a struggle of class against class, a struggle which carried to its highest expression is a total revolution. Indeed, is it at all surprising that a society founded on the opposition of classes should culminate in brutal contradiction, the shock of body against body, as its final denouement? Do not say that social movement excludes political movement. There is never a political movement which is not at the same time social. It is only in an order of things in which there are no more classes and class antagonisms that social evolutions will cease to be political revolutions.

This is one of the clearest statements of the basic hypothesis: that the political aim of the proletariat is its own abolition, as part of the abolition of classes, and therewith the abolition of politics (the relationship of human beings to one another as means) as such. An ambitious hypothesis, that requires ambitious means for its testing and realization (or perhaps, though I shudder at the thought since the likely alternatives are so dire, negation). A fundamental test, then, of whether a given organization is a proletarian political organization (even if in embryonic form) is the vigor of its activity and the scope of its implications.

The counterposition with which I began this--"It is not an emanation of an Idea (or of an ensemble of ideas called a Program), nor is it a Thing-in-Itself (or an End-in-itself)"--was not accidental. When an organization presents itself as the emanation of an Idea or Program ("we represent the genuine continuation of..."), or when its protagonists treat its growth and preservation as an end in itself ("the movement is everything, the goal is nothing"), that is a clear sign that, whatever its other representations it is either not a political organization, or to the extent that it is political, its actual aims differ from any hopes of revolutionary transformation it may put forward.

The Necessity of Political Organization (part 1: Internationalism)

This has been sitting in the "Edit" box too long. Rather than complete it, I'll go ahead and it put it out as yet another "Part 1".

There is nothing like a double-whammy of family obligations and personal illness to remind me of this simple fact: I can't do it alone. Neither can you. It doesn't matter who you are, how talented you are, or what "it" is--though this is especially true when discussing political action. Nothing requiring sustained effort and responsiveness to unfolding events can be the work of a single human being.

In the history of class society, the illusion of individual effort and accomplishment has been a mark of privileged status. Aristotle's view that the "the sciences which do not aim at giving pleasure or at the necessities of life were discovered ... first in the places where men first began to have leisure," establishes the "priestly caste" as the precondition for pure knowledge. From a proletarian standpoint there can not yet be any pure knowledge. Knowledge that aims at life's necessities and pleasures emerges necessarily from a research process that takes account of its own material (physical, biological, economic and social) limitations, and thus one that to function and achieve its aims must be collective. The necessity of organization flows from materialism, which flows from the proletarian standpoint, not in a logical sense but as a matter of practical necessity.

In other words, the attempt represented by this blog to develop and expound the necessity of a new type of political organization in a rigorous manner, proceeding through fundamental principles, polemic, counterposition and empirical observation, was bound to fail because the author of these lines was doing it on his own. The author of these lines does not have the time and leisure to accomplish that, at least not at the pace demanded by political events. And if he did have the time and leisure, he would not have a social position such that his thoughts on the matter could be given any credence. It's a paradox that can only be surmounted by means of organization. But if the aim of organization is a new such organization, then to surmount it means to pull one's self up by one's own bootstraps, a la Baron von Munchhausen.

So the pretense to rigor has to go. To get something done, I'm just going to have make assertions, in the hopes that others can help fill in the gaps over time.

So the basic question is, What type of political organization is necessary today for political practice that would test the hypothesis that humanity will supersede capitalist society and with it all divisions of class?

The first characteristic that becomes clear is that it must be international.

Revolutionaries remain arrayed against a defined state, which remains in most instances a national state. There are, of course, significant exceptions to this: multi-national institutions (EU, ECB, IMF, World Bank, NATO, UN, as well as the several multinational corporations) that assume state or para-statal powers; forces of occupation; states that inhibit or prevent the formation of national identities, etc. Whether these phenomena are exceptions that prove the rule of the still-national structure of capitalist state power, or indices of transition to new forms of rule, remains to be seen. But even if we accept as given the hegemonically national character of capitalist rule, the syllogism that would derive from that a necessarily national character of the opposition to it is a false one.

For those leftists who regard national parties as necessary preconditions for an international, the usual reference point is the Second, Socialist International. Yet the reference contains its own refutation. The very formation of national parties took the international as a presupposition. Lars T. Lih has argued quite compellingly that Lenin understood himself not as a theoretician of a "party of a new type", but as an organizer of a party on the model exemplified by the German SPD under the leadership of Kautsky and Bebel. (I wrote a document several years ago for an internal LRP educational conference, on the First Three Internationals, that came to similar conclusions though with a different emphasis. At some point soon I'll likely publish it.) Yet the only reason why Lenin could dedicate himself might and main to building the RSDLP, and why he and Martov and Plekhanov and Trotsky and Luxemburg could argue so vociferously over how that was to be done, was because they all (with the signal exception of Luxemburg) regarded the SPD and the Bebel-Kautsky leadership as a model. National parties drew their sustenance from the International. The crisis of 1914 consisted precisely in the fact that the International proved not to have been as real as many of its protagonists had once believed.

By the early 20th century, a national orientation was already reactionary. If we regard the developing productive forces as harbingers of the changes to come, then we must recognize that they are even more so now. What ended in tragedy 100 years ago can only be a farce today. While each grouping of revolutionaries must confront the state which most immediately rules them, within class struggles that most often (though not always) take a national form, there is no compelling reason why they cannot learn from those engaged in more advanced struggles in other countries, or be able to point out the international horizons of struggle authoritatively to their fellow workers.

Most political organizations today, however, are not international. Either federations of local or national groupings (or local groupings pretending to be national), or pseudo-international projections of a single local or national sect. How to overcome that leads to the second necessary characteristic: That it must be organized based on an understanding of politics as a scientific endeavor. That will be the topic of the next post.

Thoughts in Honor of Yawm an-Nakba

Your "Order" is built on sand. By tomorrow the revolution, to your horror, will rise once more to the heavens with a clatter and proclaim with trumpet-blasts: I was, I am, I will be!

--Rosa Luxemburg, Die Ordnung herrscht in Berlin

The intifada proclaims, "I was, I am, I will be." The Palestinians proclaim, "We were, we are, we will be."

The State of Israel, the only state I've encountered whose citizens--well, those from the privileged grouping--refer to it un-self-consciously as "The State", as if its very existence were a Hegelian-type realization of the Absolute Idea, says, "You never were, you are not, and we will not let you become anything at all." On its side are its own riot police and soldiers, of course, its hate-filled demagogic windbags, and an overwhelming portion of its own citizenry, not to mention the capital and war materiel, measured in units of billions, from the U.S. But also the Egyptian Army, blocking the march to Gaza, also Khaled Meshal, political leader of Hamas, urging Egyptians to stand down, and thus implicitly also his guardian and sponsor, Bashar al-Assad, engaged in his own bloody crackdown on the people he rules.

The Party of Order is marshaling its ranks, which always makes for some strange juxtapositions. On the opposite side, with nothing to lose, are the great majority of Palestinians, battling against their ongoing, ever-mounting dispossession.

Yet what has had me dumbstruck for the better part of a week is how much of the so-called left can stand somewhere off to the side, nitpicking in the name of internationalism. The moment of shock came at that Historical Materialism conference when someone (my policy in talking about the conference will be name podium speakers, but not speakers from the audience unless they are public figures by virtue of their publication history) made the jaw-dropping statement, "There are no oppressed nations." In response, I pointed to the Palestinians as just one example of why this was an absurd statement, that fundamentally confused nations with states. However in the speakers' closing statements, Arya Zahedi solidarized with the claim, arguing that nations were formed by states as part of the process of capital accumulations, etc., etc.

At which point my only thought was, "What planet are you from?" As if the national consciousness of the Palestinians, their oppression by the State of Israel, or the national character of that oppression could be conjured out of existence by way of definitions or syllogisms.

Nations are indeed formed by states, yet often in ways that cannot be comprehended by scholasticism: The State of Israel, through the trauma of the Nakba, gave the experiential basis for the felt, shared sense of Palestinian nationhood. And yet its defining ideology, Zionism, in presenting the State as the state of all the world's Jews, negates the very possibility of an Israeli nation, as pointed out by the Internationalist Socialist League (scroll down to the section entitled "Are the Israelis a Nation?"). A paradox? Only for a scholastic, not a Marxist.

I came to an understanding of the significance of the struggle for Palestinian self-determination through autobiographical contingency: Like many Jews of my generation, there was no way I could attain to internationalist consciousness without negating Zionism. And given the depth of my former, infantile Zionism, that could not take place without significant historical study and a deep understanding of Marxist approaches to the "national question." Yet it has a universal significance as a standing refutation of any scholastic, definitional approach to understanding the politics of class struggle. In a nutshell, as the "Russian question" once was (and still is in some respects), the "Palestinian question" is a standing counterexample to most of what passes for Marxism, a living example of its ideological (non-scientific) status. If a "Marxist" cannot proclaim, without reservation, discomfort, stipulations or footnotes, "Palestine will be free," he is no Marxist. And if he can, but has no functional strategy for how Palestine will be free, then he still is no Marxist.

For the better part of a week, in the midst of an unusually brutal set of workday concerns, I have also been agonizing over how to speak of the peculiar absurdity mentioned above. The Palestinian masses, with what seems to be shaping up into a third intifada, are once again pointing out the way.

To translate Luxemburg's proclamation in a different way, into a different language:

Thawra hatta an-nasr!

Is Marxist Economics a Science? (Part 1)

The answer is: No. Sorry, guys.

More seriously, there are a few distinct questions embedded in this one. The first is quasi-ontological. Is there really any such thing as Marxist economics? Now, I am not one to rule out the existence of a phenomenon on the basis of definitions and syllogisms, and I won't do that in this case either. There are people who call themselves Marxists who were trained in and/or teach in economics departments, or who otherwise publish work which they refer to as "economics" or, in a conscious turn of an old phrase, "political economy". In that sense, there are Marxist economists, and the work they publish can be called, if they insist, "Marxist economics" or "Marxian political economy".

But the fact remains that Marx did not refer to his own work as "political economy," but as the "critique of political economy." By which he meant the historicization of the fundamental conceptions of political economy, in order to demonstrate the limits of their ability to describe capital's existence, coming-to-be and hypothesized passing away. Such a step was necessary to move from the realm of ideology--the eternalization of bourgeois relations of production--into science. The purpose of this argument is not to ultimatistically insist that any Marxist interested in the domain of economic relationships refer to her or his work as forming part of the corpus of the "critique of political economy"--the phrase is a mouthful, and the mere avowal of its importance does not make the underlying work true and accurate any more than extensive citations of Marx can make a work Marxist. But it is to say that unless such work operates with the methods and spirit of critique--that is, the examination of economic phenomena in their genesis, immanent contradictions, antagonistic relations and ultimate perishability--then it is neither Marxist nor scientific.

The question then becomes whether there is any such work taking place, whether under the heading of "Marxist economics," "Marxian political economy," or (as Sy Landy would joke to express a justifiable impatience with debates over nomenclature) "Herbie": And to that I would give, based on a sampling of the work I saw presented at the Historical Materialism conference, a provisional "Yes."

There remains another question, however, namely whether the work currently being carried on in the spirit of the critique of political economy is being carried out as a collective effort, in which new investigations either build upon or explicitly and evidentially contradict prior ones and, while there is extensive debate over various questions of interpretation, there are shared methodological approaches to the identification, extraction and analysis of key data. And here, based on the same sampling, as well as recent readings and attendance at other recent events, lead me to the conclusion--still provisional, but with a bit more probability--"No. It has not for some time, and not yet."

On this basis, I would be tempted to hypothesize that the critique of political economy has not been carried on as a collective, non-ideological, theoretical and fact-seeking endeavor for quite some time. The tipping point may well be pinpointable, to the arrest by the Stalinists of I. I. Rubin, though that's an even more tentative hypothesis.

Nonetheless, when I go to left events that are focused on theoretical questions, I tend to focus on the sessions labeled as having to do with "Marxist economics," because I find the topics treated interesting, and I have hope that the presenters and participants are animated by a scientific, truth-seeking spirit. That I am often disappointed in the latter hope gets weighed against the times when I am surprised by its fulfillment.

As an example of the phenomena that lead to disappointment, I will point to the seemingly endless debates on how to calculate the historical rate of profit in U.S. capitalism. A number of scholars have made recent attempts to calculate it. They differ sharply on the statistics to use in the calculations and the way to analyze those statistics, and the results are a variety of different historical curves. For the moment I will bracket the question of who's right and who's wrong in the various methodological debates, and just present a few of the resulting figures:

That comes from "The Crisis of the Early 21st Century: A Critical Review of Alternative Interpretations - Preliminary draft," by Gerard Duménil (who spoke at the conference to present on the questions covered in that paper, and whose talk I attended) and Dominique Lévy.

That one is from Anwar Shaikh, The First Great Depression of the 21st Century, who was not at this conference, but apparently had had a bit of a debate with Duménil in the same venue the previous year.

That comes from “The Destruction of Capital” and the Current Economic Crisis by Andrew Kliman--he did give a talk at the conference, though in a different session than Duménil, which I did not attend. I heard from some who did that his presentation was very similar to the one he gave at last November's conference on Economic Crisis and Left Responses.

I would have liked to have also included a chart by Fred Moseley, but encountered a few technical problems. Follow that link, and you'll find a good number of papers and presentations.

The point of this display is to indicate that while there may be some common trends indicated by all the graphs, there are significant enough variances between them to show significant differences of either underlying statistics, methodology or both. And yet they purport to be describing the same thing. Examination of the papers of these various authors will show that this is indeed the case, with debate over such matters as whether or not to subtract any taxes from the nominator (mass of profits), and if so which ones.

Nor can the questions simply be settled with an appeal to the text of Capital, to find out, "what did Marx think?" That's a necessary task if what you are doing is taking Marx's definition of the rate of profit, and analyzing historical data to see if bears out certain key predictions of Marx's, like the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. And that at least is one of the tasks that most of these authors purport to be taking on. But it is not the sole scientific task at stake. There remains the question of whether Marx's definition of the rate of profit was correct, not least because he gave several distinct formalizations of his definition depending upon the context (e.g., one at a single-enterprise level within a single cycle of production, another at an industry-wide scale in a process of simple reproduction, then it gets more complicated when we start talking about accumulation, etc.) And let us not forget that anything from Volumes 2 or 3 was unfinished business at the time of his death, and had to be worked over by Engels to make it at all suitable for publication. Such formalizations are insightful, necessary, an excellent starting point for the examination of the realization of surplus value in the circulation process, the distribution of surplus value among the propertied classes, etc., but only that: A starting point.

But this gets to the question of the purpose served by Marxist academics (and I include in this latter phrase anyone who, by virtue of their social position, even if they do not have a formal affiliation with an academic institution, has the training and leisure to devote a preponderance of their waking hours to research). If one takes as a starting point the view that the proletariat, by virtue of its position within the class struggle, is uniquely positioned to see through the fetishistic relations of capital to understand the real social relations beneath, then a scientific understanding of social phenomena is impossible without a proletarian movement. Without a proletarian movement, there can be no Marxist science, no critique of political economy. But by virtue again of their exploitation by capitalists, atomized proletarians, without the assistance of an organization, cannot create the time or replicate the training needed to crunch the numbers to quantify, visualize and test theories against their underlying phenomena. (By virtue of my white-collar training, then with a three-volume set of Capital, a high-speed internet connection, some trial and error with public-access datasets, and a copy of Excel, I could probably produce something that looked like one of the above charts. But I'd either have to quit my job or stop sleeping for a while. And it wouldn't look as good as it would if I had access to SPSS.)

The role of the academic, then, if Marxist, is as a technician. That is, not determine the problems or the methods, but conduct the kind of heavy analysis toward the problems that they are well-suited to perform. In so doing, they can also point out possible problems emergent from the data that otherwise might not have been noticed.

There is no such science because there is not yet the type of proletarian movement that could authoritatively give direction to such technicians. It is hardly the academics' fault qua academics (though, to the extent that some of them also attempt to function as political leaders, they do bear their share of responsibility as well). And in the absence of that, the best they can do is stumble, happenstance, into the kinds of interesting problems that a renewed proletarian movement, based on a genuine science of revolution, would be able to investigate, and practically settle.

And so the next installment of this essay (which may or may not be preceded by installments of other essays in the works), will do that, discussing some of the interesting problems whose presentations I happened to stumble across at the conference--and then, time permitting, some of the not-so-interesting blind alleys.

Lit Review: "The Socialist" on Child Care

The Socialist is the print magazine of the Socialist Party USA. It's a rather slight publication, sixteen pages total, with articles capped at 1,250 words apiece. Even some of the shorter entries on this blog would fall afoul of that word limit. Thus I hadn't previously paid much attention to it. Nor do the supporters of that organization tend to call much attention to it; I got it only because a young man was cantering through the May Day crowd at Union Square, barely looking people in the eyes and thrusting the magazine toward their hands rather randomly, seemingly hoping for someone to grab.

Yet it was the only publication I got at that event which I made a point of skimming while still there, rather than waiting until I got home. And the main reason was that it had two articles on a topic which I have never seen treated in print in print in a leftist publication, yet which occupies a good portion of my daily mental effort: child care. (Please note in fairness that I have not said "never been" but "never seen." Anyone familiar with other treatments of the topic, please link to or cite them.)

I am trying not to get too autobiographical in this project, but I do think it's necessary to state that I think about this a great deal because I have a young daughter. Young enough that the political economy of the issue has a routine impact on my life and hers, and also the fact that my child is a girl colors my thoughts on it: All her non-familial caregivers have, without exception, been women, and when a given occupation is so visibly gendered it cannot but have an effect on her own perceptions of how the world is structured, and how that structure governs her possibilities and horizons.

Why not have this be a routine topic of revolutionary propaganda, alongside such currently routine topics as unions, wars, immigration or access to higher education? Is it that child care is only a particular concern of a "section" of the working class? If anyone made that argument in earnest, then I would have to reply: Bullshit. Not only will most working-class people have to deal with it at some point as parents, but we ought not to overlook that all people--workers, too!--begin lives as children, and live within a horizon that is extensively shaped by the care arrangements they experienced as children. This should be a trivial observation, but it's not: Too many leftists fall prey to the rationalist conceit that their audience consists of disembodied consciousnesses, whose histories, emotions and current interests can and should be placed behind something like what the liberal philosopher John Rawls called "the veil of ignorance."

The adults of a class that would meekly accept, or ignore in favor of supposedly "more important" matters, or worse yet complicitly perpetrate the physical, emotional and intellectual brutalization of its own children would be in no fit state to liberate themselves or anyone else. A struggle for emancipation is a struggle for the future and thus, definitionally, a struggle for the interests of the youngest. And factually, such struggles often begin conceptualized as such. Any "particularization" of the issue of child care presumes, more or less consciously, its privatization as a "family" (read: female) responsibility, and is thus essentially sexist.

So my first reaction to the articles was simply to be happy that they existed. But the two articles were rather varied in their qualities. The first, "Why Unions Are Good for Children," is by Kristin Schall; the second, "Expanding What We Child Care Workers Know About Empowerment," by Susan Dorazio. (I was somewhat disappointed that both authors were women; the de facto delegation of certain topics to women is a common sign of tokenism. It's better than having the issues ignored entirely, but it's not optimal. I'll be most impressed when I see men besides me also raising the question, without being prodded or reminded.)

The thesis of Schall's article is stated clearly in the title and argued relentlessly throughout, backed up with established facts and tight reasoning. To sum up, the early childhood education sector is hardly unionized at all, with low wages, low-to-non-existent standards of training, and long hours, resulting in conditions that are exhausting and burn-out inducing for the staff and dreadful for the children. If that were all there were to it, it would be flawless.

Unfortunately, there is a recurrent thread of elitism in her arguments. She notes with frustration that "it is possible to work in this field possessing only a high school diploma and thus be without even a rudimentary understanding of child development and psychology." She notes that parents able to pay very high fees can place their children in accredited centers that "employ qualified teachers who have studied or are in the process of studying early childhood education." And her proposed solution, that public schools be extended down to infancy, is touted as giving young children "the same benefits of highly qualified teachers that children in kindergarten through 12th grades are afforded."

It is this kind of elitism that has helped set up teachers and their unions as targets for the populist resentment that is being so well deployed by both Democratic and Republican politicians. Its underlying fallacy was obvious to me, and offensive, as it would be to many a working-class person. (And here, I must lapse again into anecdote and autobiography.) Frankly, my mother with her GED, though by no means a flawless caregiver, had a much better "understanding of child development and psychology" than many--no, most--of the "highly qualified teachers" whom I encountered in my K-12 education. While many child care workers need better training--an assertion which as a parent I would readily affirm--her argument is undermined by the presumption that competence, training and formal education are synonyms, a presumption that "is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society." After all, "the educator must himself be educated."

The very notion that such an extension of public schooling is "the simple solution," as Schall presents it, seemingly so sane and realist, is completely abstracted from the very real situation of public schools and teachers under an all-sided political attack. (And that leaves aside the valid question of whether the school as an institution, keeping children and their putative education cloistered away from adult productive activity, is compatible with a socialist understanding of human development.) To attempt to do so under capitalism, with the requisite training, would necessarily divert a tremendous mass of human labor away from value production, i.e., from the activities that make profits for capital. Such an eminently sensible vision is purely utopian if not coupled with any notion of the revolutionary transformation of society as a whole.

Even with a revolution, the care of the very young will remain a knotty, persistent problem, not susceptible to day-after miracles. To transform what, in value terms, is clearly a little appreciated task into one of the highest of shared social responsibilities will require the widespread activation of human personality, and engagement of many who never would have conceived of it as a vocation in that shared labor. And we will hardly have the time or resources to enroll all those people in Master's programs in child psychology. How to make that change? As Karl said, "The materialist doctrine that people are products of circumstances and education, and that, therefore, changed people are products of changed circumstances and changed education, forgets that it is people who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The joining together of the changing of circumstances, and of human activity or self-transformation, can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice." While fighting for key partial gains--unionization, living wages, better training, better working conditions--such struggles can only succeed if made a conscious element of the human self-transformation that can only come through revolutionary practice.

If Schall makes a strong argument for a limited and thus ultimately self-defeating perspective, Dorazio makes a meandering case for what seems like a more global outlook on the problems of child care workers. Addressing her case to fellow child care workers, her argument seems to be that child care workers can learn from activism, and activists can learn from child care workers. But this begs the questions, what kind of child care, and what kind of activism? The recurrent valorization of such phrases as "bottom up", "leaderless group" and "diversity of tactics," makes certain preferences clear. But they are nothing more than that: Preferences. And subjective preferences, as opposed to observation of the ways that leadership is exercised (and abused), established and contested, can only lead to metaphysical nonsense-statements like, "leadership springs from within." No, it is a social relationship, that is structured and conditioned within any given setting by the full range of social relationships that govern our interactions.

Do activists often reproduce and reinforce alienated social relationships that in other contexts we rebel against--or that we would expect and want our own children to chafe against? Yes, and if this is part of the point Dorazio is trying to make, she has one. But this is a phenomenon I have observed at least as often from champions of "bottom up" and "diversity" as from the dreaded "vanguardists."

Indicative of that, she makes several insistent points as to what child care workers "must" do: e.g., "take the time and make the effort to connect with individuals, organizations, and cultural and political projects that offer and model alternatives to the status quo," or "take an active role in the global drive for the creation of, and full participation in, truly democratic systems and structures where human rights and social justice for all workers and communities come first." The hortatory tone is recurrent, and overbearing, and takes little note of the objective conditions that Schall describes so well in her article: That many child care workers work in small home settings, and/or work long hours, with little training and education, and thus little opportunity to take the lead as she so vehemently urges. Misrepresentation of the question of leadership feeds right into evasion of confrontation of the leaderships that do exist in order to prevent the formation of new struggles and alliances. And thereby, the responsibility is turned back where it rests the least easily: On the shoulders of the atomized, individual worker.

Again, the Socialist Party is to be commended for having leaders who consider this to be a worthy topic of consideration. The commendation can only go so far, however, when the solutions proposed lead to dead-end politics.

Revenge of the Brand-New Same-Old

Living in New York City today leaves a bad aftertaste, a foul belch of ten-year-old bilge assaulting the tongue and nostrils with the stench of well-rotted patriotism.

As for the broader political context, others have beaten me to their keyboards. As Dave Stockton of the League for the Fifth International put it a bit too understatedly:

A 2002 analysis by The Guardian estimated that as many as 20,000 Afghans died in 2001 as an indirect result of the initial US air strikes and ground invasion. According to the UN Population Division as of mid-December 2009 it is estimated that in occupied Afghanistan violent deaths total 1.1 million.

A secret US government tally puts the Iraqi (civilian) death toll from 2003 to 2010 at over 100,000.

It is obvious that war criminals of this sort are not entitled to sit in judgement over the likes of Osama Bin Laden.

Martin Suchanek of the same tendency says, "The revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East have shown a real alternative to all shades of Islamism and individual terrorism: the mobilisation of the workers and peasants, urban poor, youth and the women across all religious barriers."

Again, this is too understated. The revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia showed just how irrelevant Al-Qa'ida had become. The U.S. has just given it, or more precisely, the international constellation of Bin Laden's imitators, a new lease on political life.

As'ad Abu Khalil gets a good deal right:

The question remains whether there is any political significance to his death. It is clear that Al-Qa`idah has largely been put out of commission since the US invasion of Afghanistan. It is clear that Bin Laden, and even maybe Al-Dhawahiri, don't have operational links with their followers. It is clear that many of Bin Laden's lieutenants were either captured or killed and that he lost the nucleus of the organization. It is also clear that a small (terrorist in this case) organization can inflict a lot of harm on civilians, if that is what it wants to do. But it is also clear that the danger of Al-Qa`idah after Sep. 11 was transferred to copy cats: groups and gangs that don't have direct links with Bin Laden and his lieutenants but who are inspired by the deeds of the mother organization, so to speak. But what is not yet acknowledged here in the US is that Bin Laden is a product of horrific US policies in the Cold War: of their alliance with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The people in Pakistan and Afghanistan would be relieved today: not because they hated Bin Laden (many do sympathize with him only to spite the US), but because scores of Afghans and Pakistanis have been killed over the years during the campaign to get and kill Bin Laden.... Bin Laden made life more difficult for all Muslims (and for all if you consider the travel effects of Sep. 11): my mother hates him for what he did to the image of Muslims worldwide, not to mention his callous justifications of the murder of civilians (Muslims including). US is desperate for a victory and this one will be a chance, although the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are going terribly for the US. Obama yesterday basically signed the death sentence of the Pakistani president for thanking him for his role. How dumb is that? Even if he thought to falsely claim that the US did not violate Pakistani sovereignty near the capital of Pakistan. Public opinion surveys will soon give a tremendous boost to Obama, who may have increased his chances for re-election. I mean, no one in the Republican camp can now accuse him of pacifism or of reluctance to bomb and kill. Obama has proven that he can outdo Bush, in wars and bombings and killing, etc. Tell that to those who voted for him. On the Muslim side, I can report to you that wild conspiracy theories are already circulating on Twitter and Facebook and Arab websites: it will be like the conspiracy theories about Sep. 11. People are saying that either he was not killed, or that the US had him for a long time, or that he was dead even on Sep. 11. Those unfounded conspiracy theories trouble me: because we--as leftists--need to distinguish between crazy and non-crazy conspiracy theories. So in sum, not much will change in the world after this announcement because Al-Qa`idah has been largely weakened since Sep. 11. Ayman Adh-Dhawhiri has no chance of reviving the fortunes of Al-Qa`idah: he not only has to protect himself but he has the charisma of a cucumber and the speaking skills of Sa`d Hariri (and he is as boring as the latter).

"Not much will change in the world," indeed, but for the U.S., that itself would be a victory, if the prediction is borne out. When the world has been stubbornly, rapidly changing, the best that those who enjoy power can hope for is to "stand athwart history, yelling Stop." There is no more "radical conservative" today than the president of hope and change.

May Day (International Workers' Day)

This is what May Day looked and sounded like in Cairo:

(Sorry, non-Arabic speakers: I only understand enough to be inspired, not enough to translate.) For context, Al-Jazeera has done a story on how the revolution essentially started among the workers in Mahalla (and this is the English version):

This is what it looked and sounded like in Tunis:

(Note the pictures of Stalin brandished by what must be the Communist Workers Party of Tunisia (PCOT). There is a woman identified as belonging to a "Socialist Workers Party"--don't know if this is a new grouping that I hadn't previously heard of, or a mistranslation of the PCOT's name.)

And in Casablanca, Morocco, it's a bit rainy, but loud:

Apparently, in the Maldives (a small island nation in the Indian Ocean), it is day two of some volatile protests over skyrocketing commodity prices:

In Kenya, the Trade Unions are calling for 60% wage increases, and a general strike in 20 days:

In Hong Kong, the focus is also on the minimum wage:

In New York, I attended the Union Square May Day demonstration, with various immigrant workers' groups and dominated, from the podium, by the constellation around the Workers World Party, not the rival Foley Square demonstration with official union support. Left groups that were also visibly present at the one I attended (in order of my seeing them):

• Internationalist Group (hard to miss, with a huge banner, a decent-sized contingent, and several placards)
• Anakbayan
• League for the Revolutionary Party
• Revolutionary Communist Party
• Spartacist League
• Socialist Alternative
• Freedom Socialist Party
• Socialist Party
• International Socialist Organization
• Socialist Core (new U.S. franchise of the LIT, focused around the PSTU of Brasil)
• Bolshevik Tendency (after a hiatus, they're once again active in New York)
• Kasama Project (known only because I asked one of their supporters if he could spare a red flag, and he said they were for his contingent, so I asked "which contingent?")
• Freedom Road Socialist Organization / OSCL (that one, not the other one, with a rare banner to identify themselves)
• MIUCA - El Acción por el Cambio (Dominican left group that had decent chants and better drumming)

Since the purpose of this blog is not Leftist Trainspotting, I will note a conversation of political significance: The BTer I spoke with, to his credit, pressed me for a quick summation of why I'm no longer with the LRP. It's not a bad thing to be able to sum such things up in one or two sentences. It was only after we ended our conversation that a summation, however, occurred to me: That much of the left, LRP included, treats the question of political organization in a religious manner, not a scientific one, and does what it does on the basis of varied understandings of a tradition of choice.

A realization I had, ironically enough, on the closest day a Marxist materialist has to the High Holidays. Elaborations on this to come.

Work and family obligations have disrupted my self-imposed weekly schedule for the installments of the Badiou critique. Moreover, I am going to read the literature I picked up today, and to the extent that there is anything worth commenting upon, will likely do so. This will likely prevent me from posting more reading notes on Mészáros any time soon, either. And I will be at the Historical Materialism conference next weekend. Apologies in advance.

Myth and Reality of the "Information Age"

One test of the scientificity of a research program is how it responds to counter-evidence. One of the basic hypotheses underlying this effort is that the inherited organizational forms of the revolutionary left have been rendered incapable of decisively shaping events, rather than simply reacting to them, by the changes of social relations triggered by recent technological developments in the means of communication. And that therefore, to continue to test the basic hypotheses of proletarian revolution requires setting such forms aside and investigating the forms the emergent forms of proletarian political organization. (It's worthwhile to restate this from time to time, since the excurses on the likes of Badiou and Mészáros, made necessary by the need to define such terms as "scientificity", "hypothesis" and even "event" by way of counterposition, can distract from that.)

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, while hardly concerned with questions of political organization (revolutionary or otherwise), presents a serious challenge to one of the underlying assumptions of that hypothesis: Namely, that we are currently living through a qualitative change in the ways that human beings interact with one another as mediated by communicative technology. The article, 5 Myths About the 'Information Age' by Robert Darnton, a librarian at Harvard, does not negate that assumption outright, but complexifies it, and does so with supporting data.

(I have access to the article from work, but I think it's behind a pay-wall. My apologies to those who can't access it. To avoid a DMCA violation, I am not going to reproduce huge block quotes, but I will do my best to fairly reproduce the argument.)

Darnton begins by speaking of a kind of "collective false consciousness," a pretty classic definition of ideology. Darnton does not explicitly say so, but we can discern that there is a kind of fetishism at work in the generation of such a consciousness, in which the interconnection of a series of cables, storage devices and processors relaying the words and other data of a finite set of human beings is reified (transformed into a thing)--and moreover, treated as a sentient being with its own imputed consciousness, functioning and properties that are taken to exist and develop independently of the actions of the people who govern it and interact through it. We have a signpost here of something to avoid whenever discussing the topic.

Darnton identifies five basic "myths" that constitute this "collective false consciousness," this ideology of informationism if I may coin a phrase:

1. "The book is dead."
2. "We have entered the information age."
3. "All information is now available online."
4. "Libraries are obsolete." (Understandably a major concern of his, given his profession, and the reason why this article was being buzzed about for over a week among librarians of my acquaintance before it came to my attention.)
5. "The future is digital."

What I would contend is that whereas Darnton's counterarguments to myths 1, 3 and 4 are unassailably factual, the arguments against myths 2 and 5 are no less ideological than the myths themselves, and are based on a misperception of the nature of historical transformation.

For example, his counterargument to Myth 5 points to an important set of historical facts, and then completely misses their significance: "Research in the relatively new discipline of book history has demonstrated that new modes of communication do not displace old ones, at least not in the short run. Manuscript publishing actually expanded after Gutenberg and continued to thrive for the next three centuries. Radio did not destroy the newspaper; television did not kill radio; and the Internet did not make TV extinct. In each case, the information environment became richer and more complex. That is what we are experiencing in this crucial phase of transition to a dominantly digital ecology."

Missing from this is any sense of the role played by a predominant mode of communication in transforming social relationships, or of the possibility of "combined and uneven development," whereby societies or social strata that went relatively untouched by an earlier revolution of technique "skip stages" and find themselves disrupted by the latest developments. Let me present a thought experiment that is based on historical precedents that can be documented. Imagine a hitherto isolated village in a developing country where there are only a few literate individuals, all from elite strata: Perhaps a landlord, a cleric, and/or a schoolteacher. The Gutenberg revolution has barely touched this place. To learn about political developments in the capital, or in other parts of the world, most of the people are dependent upon the good will of those educated individuals, an uncertain prospect with little promise of reward.

Now, in comes a radio. (How the radio comes in is an important variable, but to start out I'll try to abstract from that.) It has information that is clearly, immediately useful--crop price reports, weather forecasts. It has entertainment of various types. But it also has other sorts of information that are now readily accessible that had not been before: News of national and international political developments. It has other information that is not presented as such, from which the villagers can learn, such as exposure to the spoken dialects of urban areas or other parts of the countryside. What does this do to the power relations within the village? To the various forms of political consciousness (class, national, religious) among the peasantry? In several political uprisings of the 20th century, the radio played a significant role in the crystallization of political consciousness among the peasant class.

Note that it did not release that peasant class from a state of intellectual dependency. In each of these cases, the political tone was set by a dominant or emergent urban class with access to the technical prerequisites for dissemination and an existing political program to govern what was to be disseminated (e.g., the urban proletariat in the case of Russia 1917, or the radicalized intelligentsia on Cuba's "Radio Rebelde"). Radio did not give the peasantry its own voice. But it made it possible for it to play a political role on a national or even international scale that could not have been foreseen in the 19th century, when Marx could honestly say that "the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes." The change in technical means of communication did not dictate either the existence or the outcomes of those revolutions. It did not solve the manifold problems of the peasantry. In fact it created new problems, but it also created new means by which to attempt to solve both the old and the new problems.

Nor did it render print communication obsolete. The mass literacy campaigns that followed both the Russian and the Cuban revolutions stand as evidence of that. But the significance of literacy had been transformed by the advent of radio.

Darnton's response to Myth #2 is even more ideological in nature: "[E]very age is an age of information, each in its own way and according to the media available at the time. No one would deny that the modes of communication are changing rapidly, perhaps as rapidly as in Gutenberg's day, but it is misleading to construe that change as unprecedented." A precedent or a metaphor, however, is not an explanation. The fact of rapid change is not unprecedented. The nature and content of those changes, however, may well be unprecedented, or at least so different from prior changes as to limit the value of any precedent.

Darnton has a basic presumption of the essential gradualism of historical change, revealed by way of negation when he claims that these myths "present things ahistorically and in sharp contrasts—before and after, either/or, black and white" and argues for a "more nuanced view". Yet the example he provides of his own most recent scholarly work undermines that very presumption. His most recent book "describes how street songs mobilized public opinion in a largely illiterate society. Every day, Parisians improvised new words to old tunes, and the songs flew through the air with such force that they precipi­tated a political crisis in 1749." His point in giving the example is to talk about how great it was to bundle an electronic supplement with recordings of those songs.

But let's look at it from another angle, in comparison to the recent uprisings in the Arab World. Consider the spread of the slogan "ash-sha'ab yurid isqat an-nizam" (the people want the fall of the regime). Instead of it spreading within a single city, it has become the watchword of a diverse range of mobilizations spreading across a continent-sized stretch of states. Its rhythmic qualities account for that in part. So does the fact that one can hear it readily--on radio, on Al-Jazeera, or on YouTube. The role of song and poetry as a means of spreading political consciousness and resolve can appear as a constant, from Paris in 1749 to the Arab World in 2011. But the differences are too significant to downplay: In France before the revolution of 1789, there was barely a common language linking the capital city to the provinces, or the provinces to one another. In the Arab world today, while it is broken into a series of prison-states, and there are a wide variety of local dialects, there is a standard common language that has been spread through radio, television and now the Internet which is readily understood and used.

Revolutions--sudden, rapid moments of transformation that impose a black and white, either/or, before and after structure to our understanding of the world--happen, and revolutions matter. Revolutions in technique (in the forces of production, of which the forces of communication are a subset), social revolutions (in the relations of production) and political revolutions (in the ways of governing the predominant relations of production) are distinct from each other, but interact upon and can hasten or retard one another.

The ideology of informationism, the fetish of the Internet as an unknowable thing-in-itself, presents the technical revolution as the only one that matters, tearing it out of its historical, political and social context and ruling out transformations in those realms as irrelevant. Thus it junks the past and leaves us stuck in an eternal present mis-labeled "the Future". But the notion that the technical revolution is unreal, insignificant, or can be leveled off into a gradual accretion of purely formal changes is just as a a-historical as the denial of any other revolution (including the ones happening right before our eyes).

We do not live in the "information age". We still live in the capitalist age. But we need to recognize the changes in how that dominant mode of production is propagating itself, and is being combated.

Social Determination of Method (Introduction)

If I did not seem quite as eager to write part 2 of my critique of Badiou as I was with part 1, there's a simple reason: I wasn't as eager. In good measure, it's because, having started reading the first volume of Mészáros's Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness, "The Social Determination of Method," it now seems to me that much of the work has already been done. (Though Badiou is not an explicit target of Mészáros's polemics.)

Before I get too glowing in my praise of Mészáros, it is only fair to inform the reader that I approached this book predisposed against it. We are told not to judge a book by its cover, but when the largest featured back-cover blurb cites Hugo Chávez, enemy of the working class, praising the author as "the pathfinder of socialism," I must be skeptical.

Alternately, before I get too harsh in my criticisms of this book, it is only fair to inform the reader that I approach the author predisposed to take him seriously. His scholarship in the early 1970s did a great deal to bring attention back to the work of his former teacher, György Lukács, and was quite insightful. If, forty years later, those insights do not seem terribly fresh, it is only because their validity has been taken for granted by most who have written about Lukács since.

Even though I've already made it through several chapters, I will break my comments up in a more piecemeal fashion. For now, I confine myself to the Introduction, which does a good job of laying out the structure of the work. This volume is devoted to describing and connecting to "the need to articulate and defend determinate social interests" (14) "the methodological characteristics of the various systems of though, which emerge within the historical framework and in support of capital's formation." (13) The first seven chapters of the book are each devoted to a methodological characteristic identified by Mészáros as one of "the most important," which he described as follows:

1. "Programmatic orientation towards science and the key methodological/theoretical as well as practical role assigned to natural science."
2. "General tendency to formalism."
3. The standpoint of isolated individuality and its enduring methodological equivalent, capital's "standpoint of political economy...."
4. "Negative determination of philosophy and social theory."
5. "...suppression of historical temporality."
6. "The imposition of a dualistic and dichotomous categorial matrix on philosophy and social theory...."
7. "The abstract postulates of "unity" and "universality" as the wishful transcendence of the persistent dichotomies--in place of real mediations--and the purely speculative supersession of the major social cotnradictions without altering in the slightest their causal foundations in the actually existing world."

Attentive readers will likely guess that I was most dubious of #1. Indeed I was, and the chapter devoted to it is the weakest of the chapters I have read thus far. I will also have a few things to say about #4. It is worth noting that #2-7 can all be related rather directly to Badiou's work with minimal effort. If one accepts Mészáros's basic contention that such methodologies furnish the consistent, interlocking means through which thinkers "not only adopt but actively and ... consciously shape--both when they originally articulate and when they subsequently renew--the position corresponding to the vital interests of the capitalist system," (16) then a rejection of Badiou would be a comparatively trivial step.

The final, and longest, chapter of the volume is devoted to "method in a historical epoch of transition." That would be an apt way of summing up what I'm on about, even if I end up disagreeing significantly with his formulations. In that section, presumably, is where we will find what Mészáros considers to be "those elements of the theories in question which must be and can only be "aufgehoben"; that is, dialectically superseded/preserved by being raised to a historically more advanced level, so as to be put to a socially positive use." (23)

Nonetheless, he puts a rhetorical foot wrong early on, when he claims that "the methodological parameters of the various theories which coherently articulate the fundamental interests of this class basis, notwithstanding the difference of the particular thinkers ... are set for the epoch [of capital] in its entirety...." (12, emphasis added) This can lead even an attentive reader to mistakenly draw the conclusion that Mészáros is arguing that the core features of capitalist thought are basically invariant. Yet further on, he contrasts Descartes insistence "on the importance of making knowledge practical and useful" to Husserl's "rigid opposition between 'the theoretical attitude' and 'the practical'" (21) as an example of a "most revealing" "contrast between the views of the great thinkers of the more remote past and some twentieth century conceptualizations of the same problem." (20) The implication, which ought for political reasons to be made more explicit, being that there are clear differences that can be demarcated with the capitalist epoch, between the period of transition to the rule of capital, the period of its apogee, and the period of its senescence. And when he goes on to praise Descartes for being "fully conscious of the importance of carrying on the work of intellectual creation as a genuine collective enterprise," stating that "Only by reviving such ethos, and meaningfully enhancing it in accordance with the urgent requirements of our own time, can we really face up to the issues we must confront," (21) I can only say, "Hear, hear!" (Yet I must then ask: Why not make explicit what is only implied, that the proletariat can learn from the ethos of the bourgeoisie in the period of its rise? And is that ethos of collective effort quite as dead as the word "reviving" would make it seem?)

Where Mészáros's thought appears to be most provocative, and where I suspect any disagreements would acquire the greatest political force, therefore, is on the topic of "historical necessity". (There's that phrase again!) "Historical necessity is truly historical not simply because it emerges with undeniable firmness from highly complex dialectical determinations in the course of its unfolding, but also because it becomes in due course a "disappearing necessity" ... in Marx's words. Voluntaristically ignoring this vital aspect of historical necessity can produce devastating socioeconomic and political consequences, as we had to learn it in the twentieth century from the tragic failure of some major strategies pursued in the socialist movement." (20) The emphasis both on the reality of historical necessity and on its complex, fleeting character is welcome. The talk of a single "socialist movement" suffering tragedy due only to the failure of one or another "strategy," as if the problems with Stalin or Mao could be summed up in terms of their being too "voluntaristic," is rather more dubious.

Communists and Islamists in Syria

According to As'ad Abu Khalil: I am getting information from comrades in Syria that the [Communist Action] party has been active in the protests, especially in the sit-in in Homs. So no, not all the protesters are Salafite nuts, but Salafite nuts are there too. That can't be denied.

Anti-Badiou, Part 2

If I had been in an organization large enough to admit of extensive specialization, rather than one in which specializations were necessarily multiple, relative and contingent (and thus hardly specializations at all), it's at least probable that I would have had to track developments in Marxist philosophy, and with that the extensive literary output of István Mészáros over the last 16 years. Instead, I'm catching up by working backwards, beginning with the two volumes (to date) of his Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness. Critical notes thereon will be forthcoming, and frankly, more interesting than anything that can be said about Badiou. In fact, much of what remains to be said about Badiou has already been said by Mészáros about more interesting thinkers (e.g. Sartre).

Ideas without History

Having elided a conjecture, misnamed as a hypothesis, into the hoary Platonism of the Idea, it remains for Badiou to articulate what he means by "Idea"--since despite the acknowledged debt to Plato the underlying metaphysics are plainly not identical--what he means by "communism," and what these have to do with one another. On page 235, we finally find a definition of "Idea," and even though it is incomprehensible without the full text of the six pages preceding (and barely comprehensible with), I will give it to you anyway:

"A formal definition of the Idea can immediately be given: an Idea is the subjectivation of an interplay between the singularity of a truth procedure and a representation of history.

"In the case that concerns us here, we will say that an Idea is the possibility for an individual to understand that his or her participation in a singular political process ... is also, in a certain way, a historical decision. Thanks to the Idea, the individual, as an element of the new Subject, realizes his or her belonging to the movement of History."

Now, I could unpack that for you by referring to his earlier definitions of "Subject", "subjectivation", and "truth procedure", or I could sum it up by giving a humorous example of exactly the kind of paradox this embodies:

"I'm not," indeed. For like the reluctant false prophet Brian, Badiou takes the grounding assumption of bourgeois ideology, the primacy of the individual, and projects it into a natural (or, more true to his rhetoric, ontological) law. On the preceding page, he provides a very revealing parenthesis. In describing the decision "to become ... a militant of this truth," he states, "This is the moment when an individual declares that he or she can go beyond the bounds (of selfishness, competition, finitude...) set by individualism (or animality - they're one and the same thing)."

To presume that individuality and animality are one and the same is to immediately give ground to the capitalist presumption that the way things are is grounded in the very nature of the human being as a sentient animal. From such an individualist standpoint, the Pythons satirize the very possibility of political militancy, under cover of a rationalist critique of religion. (Case in point: Splitter!) Badiou, from the same starting point, retreats to the Christian view of an ascetic overcoming of the sinful, animal, material shell of the human body in this world to join as spirit in the transcendent Subject with a capital-S.

(Yes, I keep making Monty Python references throughout this post. No one who refers, without detectable irony, to "my friend Slavoj Žižek" [237] could have a good faith objection to a philosophical argument that uses vulgar jokes from silly movies to make its points.)

Part of what makes The Life of Brian funny, funnier perhaps than its creators even realized, is its recurrent anachronism, and the same anachronism takes on a much graver mien in Badiou's work. The very notion of universal individualism would have been impossible to conceive in a society based on slavery and tax farming. The hermeneutic attempts of Protestant theologians to read it backward into the Gospels are themselves a comic-apologetic instance of the anachronism that in Python is reduced to a purely comic residue. The notion that the decision of an "individual" to join with an (unspecified) historical Subject is something of metaphysical significance dehistoricizes individuality. It can more truthfully be said that there were collective historical subjects before the individual, as a substance that could be abstracted from the determinations of gender, family, property and the state, ever existed. If one takes individualism as one's starting point, one never arrives at a collective historical subject, or does so only by way of paradox. That such a paradox describes the normative, meteoric trajectory of many a middle-class intellectual into and out of proletarian movements over the last 150 years of history makes it no less of a paradox.

How can I fairly say that Badiou dehistoricizes? After all, has he not said that the individual "realizes his or her belonging to the movement of History"? But Badiou says it himself, or rather, he tells us that "History does not exist". "What does exist, however, under the real condition of organized political action, is the communist Idea, an operation tied to intellectual subjectivation and that integrates the real, the symbolic and the ideological at the level of the individual." (241)

So how does one belong to the movement of something that does not exist? One belongs to it as a "representation", in which one integrates reality into a symbolic order coherent with an ideology that one avows individually. Put another way, "Only the true Messiah denies his divinity." And He never really comes: "I should know, I've followed a few."

I had hoped to get to Truth without Facts, but I'll save it for a week or so later. I'll try to post some comments on Mészáros in the interim.

Notes for Later: Typologies

I am hesitant to cite mass media science journalism, lest I point toward a green jelly bean, but I found a wonderful quote in an article in today's New York Times. In an article about the identification of 3 different human "enterotypes" (ecosystems of digestive flora). For what it's worth, to my non-specialist eye the NYT does not appear to contradict the Nature article on which it is based. (I have full text access to Nature at work, but not at home, and I write this blog from home, so any quotes will be from the NYT.)

The quote that caught my attention comes from the lead investigator, Peer Bork of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg: "We didn't have any hypothesis. Anything that came out would be new."

It reminded me of a key set of steps in scientific discovery, which often get short shrift by philosophers of science because they do not seem to bring us any closer to capital-T "Truth," concerned as they are with disparate and seemingly contingent phenomena. These are steps that often, though not always, arise when a science is relatively young and still in the process of being formalized. They are:

• observation
• description
• classification

At these stages, hypotheses are not necessary. In some cases, they can be a hindrance, as they predispose the investigator to confirmation bias.

Nonetheless, an observational, descriptive, and/or classificatory study can provide the basis for further hypothetical investigation. From the findings of Dr. Bork and his colleagues, one can now formulate several testable hypotheses, for example, that human digestive microbiomes can be classified into a relatively low number of distinct "enterotypes," whose distinguishing characteristics can be clearly defined. Further investigation will either refute or tend to confirm that hypothesis, or possibly tend to confirm it while introducing new enterotypes, or other as yet unforeseen variations.

There will be controversy along the way. There are several possible objections to the study, some of which Dr. Bork himself anticipates: "Researchers will need to search for enterotypes in people from African, Chinese and other ethnic origins. He also notes that so far, all the subjects come from industrial nations, and thus eat similar foods." One can also note the relatively small number of human beings whom the researchers have enterotyped thus far: An initial study of 22 Europeans, confirmatory analysis of 13 Japanese and 4 Americans, and now an expanded study of 400 people. The point is that the observation and classification of previous unnoticed phenomena can form the basis for a research program.

So how does this relate to the basic program of this blog? One of my basic contentions, currently being developed in the polemic against Badiou (of which you can expect the next installment over the weekend), is that the basis for communist militancy is the commitment to test the following interlinked hypotheses:

1. That capitalism necessarily develops the preconditions for a classless, communist society;
2. That the proletariat, through its struggles against the capitalists, necessarily develops consciousness of its revolutionary tasks and capacity to bring about such a transformation;
3. That the necessary expression of such consciousness is a revolutionary vanguard party of the working class.

There is a fourth hypothesis, that forms the (necessarily temporary) justification for the existence of this blog. This hypothesis, for the time being, takes a negative form: That the forms of organization previously considered to be necessary precursors to such a party have outlived their usefulness, been superseded by developments in the technical basis for human social relations that will necessarily give rise to new organizational forms. Negative, because it negates what has been without indicating what is to take its place. And this is the place of "observation, description, classification." One of the ongoing tasks of this blog--and, I hope, of any readers/commenters who see value in such an endeavor and take it to heart--will be find, observe, describe and classify emergent forms of organization in the proletarian class struggle. And only then, to begin to formalize the investigation of them, to show how they have lawfully developed from the substrate of today's capitalist social relations.

Anti-Badiou, Part 1

Looking at my notes on Badiou, I'm realizing that this critique is likely to become a multi-page essay, not suitable to a single blog post. So I'm going to break it into pieces, and intersperse the postings with other topics. This leads to an administrative question: Anyone know of a resource for free, anonymous posting of PDF files?

Badiou and “Communism”: Ideas Masquerading as Hypotheses

Why should we care about Alain Badiou?

From a narrow perspective of political tendency, it would be hard to make a case. For nearly twenty years now, he has been associated with a practice of “politics without parties,” based on a syllogism that directly links the Bolshevik Party to the Stalinist party-state. As with any strict syllogism, the premise must be accepted to for the conclusions to follow. From a perspective that traces Stalinist rule to the annihilation of the Bolshevik Party, however unpopular such a view may conjuncturally be, then either the conclusions are false, or must be derived from different premises.

The reason to care about Alain Badiou is that, after decades of functioning as a (post-)Maoist militant and a metaphysician, he has discovered his true talent, his real calling, as a marketing genius. The juxtaposition of an adjective and a substantive, or a subject and a predicate, in a deliberately provocative manner may have been an ur-technique of the surrealists ("conquently the lion is a diamond"), but it was raised to the level of conscious artifice by the profession of advertisers and image-makers. So to the ranks of “revolutionary whitening systems,” “unforgettable mascara,” and “the children of Karl Marx and Coca-Cola,”—Godard, his fellow ex-“mao,” was also a bit of a publicist—we can now add “the communist hypothesis.”

Which is not to say that the phrase is innately false. As it happens, communism is a hypothesis. Or, more precisely, a nexus of interlinked hypotheses. But a hypothesis is not what Badiou presents it as, and neither is communism, at least not if it is to be understood as a hypothesis. He could have just as easily, and more precisely, said “the Idea of Transcendence,” as we will demonstrate. But that sounds like what it is, the stock in trade of metaphysicians and theologians for 2,500 years. It certainly isn’t provocative; it doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that would be put forward by someone whose thoughts on matters as timely as Sarkozy or the Tunisian revolution, or historical matters like the Paris Commune or the Chinese Cultural Revolution, would be of interest. But “the Communist Hypothesis:” Well, that we can sell!

I do not mean to suggest that such crass, commercial considerations were foremost, or even consciously present, in Badiou’s mind when he conceived the phrase. But in the capitalist world we have yet to transcend, ideas have power to the extent either that they inspire mass movements, or are assimilated to the commodity form. Badiou matters because his ideas have power, but not the sort of power needed to put the communist hypothesis to the test.

(For the purposes of this critique, I refer solely to the materials collected in the book The Communist Hypothesis, (London: Verso, 2010). Though Badiou makes repeated references to his earlier philosophical works, such as Being and Event and Logic of Worlds, for fuller expositions of his basic concepts, he at least has the decency to attempt brief definitions of them in the course of the book. That is good, because I firmly believe, regardless of whether of not Badiou would agree with me, that books should stand on their own; in the finitude of human lifetimes, no one should be expected to review a full corpus before confronting a thesis.)

Hypotheses and Conjectures

On pages 6-7, Badiou gives an illustrative example of a hypothesis, that is perhaps more illustrative than he intends. I will quote it at length, and do him the favor of correcting the presentation of Fermat's Last Theorem (which seems to have fallen victim to bad translation and typographical errors):

Take a scientific problem, which may well take the form of a hypothesis until such time as it is resolved. It could be, for example, that 'Fermat's theorem' is a hypothesis if we formulate it as: 'For [integer values of n>2], I assume that the equation xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ has no [positive integer] solutions (solutions in which x, y and z are [positive integers]).' Countless attempts were made to prove this, from Fermat, who formulated the hypothesis (and claimed to have proved it, but that need not concern us here), to Wiles, the English mathematician, who really did prove it a few years ago. Many of these atempts became the starting point for mathematical developments of great import, even though they did not succeed in solving the problem itself. It was therefore vital not to abandon the hypothesis for the three hundred years during which it was impossible to prove it. The lessons of all the failures, and the process of examining them and their implications, were the lifeblood of mathematics. In that sense, failure is nothing more than the history of the proof of the hypothesis, provided that the hypothesis is not abandoned.

For anyone familiar with the histories and terminologies of science and mathematics, this begs the question of why he chose an example from the history of mathematics, rather than an example from the physical sciences (e.g., the Theory of General Relativity). The answer cannot simply be Badiou's (in)famous love of mathematical illustrations. The example leads to some immediate objections:

1. Where scientists usually speak of hypotheses, mathematicians speak of conjectures. Anyone who has ever tried to prove a mathematical statement with an adequate degree of rigor knows the frustrating experience of being able to formulate a statement and say, "I think it's true, it seems like it's true, but I cannot yet devise a proof that establishes its truth, step by step, from what we already know to be true." If the statement is of a high enough level of significance, and one has a high enough degree of certainty, one can publish it as a conjecture and thus set to work an army of interested mathematicians to fill in the missing steps. (If one is a frustrated undergraduate, grappling with something one's professors consider "trivial," one considers changing one's major to philosophy.) If proven true, a conjecture becomes a theorem. This begs the question, however, of whether the statement is thus retrospectively determined to have already true when it was first formulated as a conjecture, a question that would receive conflicting answers. Philosophers of mathematical realist, formalist or structuralist schools, and probably most working mathematicians, would say "yes," George Lakoff and others would say "no," while I, borrowing arguments from Poincaré and Lakatos would say, "yes, but...". Arguing for that would take us far afield of the immediate point, but it's a topic worth researching/pursuing. The point for now is that the example does not demonstrate what it purports to. Rebranding a conjecture as a hypothesis obscures more than it elucidates.

   By contrast to a conjecture, a hypothesis in the physical sciences is never proven true in the mathematical sense. At most, it is plausible, based on the available evidence and received theory. As evidence accumulates in its favor, it can be regarded as a theory, meaning that it still has a provisional, hypothetical nature, but can be regarded as "true enough" for the purposes of serving as a basis for continuing investigation. If superseded by another theory, this does not wholly negate the evidence that the original theory was true, but reveals it to have been "true enough" within a defined sphere. A canonical example of this is the theory of gravitation: Newton's laws were readily testable on a terrestrial scale, even on the scale of the solar system, and demonstrably "true enough" in that sphere. Einstein's theory of general relativity began with a mathematical demonstration of the consequences of applying special relativity within a gravitational frame of reference, and showed slight divergences from Newton's equations. Einstein himself proposed several phenomena that could be observed to detect phenomena that would differ between Newton's model and his own. The first such observation came within a few years, with Arthur Eddington's observation of evidence of the deflection of light from a distant star by the sun, during a solar eclipse. In a certain sense, despite the compelling nature of Einstein's derivations of the Theory of General Relativity, up until that point it was more an ingenious hypothesis than a theory.

   While mathematical demonstration was important for both Newton and Einstein, neither of their sets of equations can be taken to be "true" in the way that Fermat's Last Theorem is. They are not true with reference to a given mathematical formalism, but true with reference to an observable phenomenon.

2. It is inaccurate to refer to the history of the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem simply as a history of "failures". It is true that until Wiles connected it to elliptic curves, no prior attempt was successful. But there were several partial successes. Had Fermat himself not already demonstrated the theorem for the case of n=4, it is likely that, despite his reputation as a brilliant mathematician, his conjecture would not have been taken as seriously as it was. The next major steps forward were by Leonhard Euler, who proved it for n=3 (and thereby, indirectly, for all even multiples of 3), then Sophie Germain and Adrien-Marie Legendre, etc. Wiles' proof ended up using strikingly different methods, using mathematical concepts that could hardly be said to have existed 100 years before. Ironically, it was Legendre who originated several of the branches of mathematics that ultimately contributed to Wiles' proof, while working on problems that to him seemed unrelated to the task of proving Fermat. Special cases do not prove a general rule--every mathematician knows this. Yet mathematicians are human, and human psychology, with our mental tendencies to generalize (and over-generalize), can trick us into thinking that the proof of a special case is a sign of progress toward the general rule, or at least a hopeful sign that the general rule may be provable. Without the incremental progress on special cases--and sometimes transformative progress, as with Ernst Kummer's proof for all regular primes--it is more likely that Fermat's conjecture would have been set aside as uninteresting, implausible, or both.

   Again, Badiou's example does not demonstrate what it seeks to, namely that failures do not matter, so long as you hold on to the misnamed "hypothesis". Failures do matter, but in human endeavors, of which mathematics is just one, they are given their meaning by the incomplete successes they enable.

So what is Badiou on about? That became clear to me as soon as I turned the page, to page 8, and found the following statements: "Universality, which is the real attribute of any corpus of truths, will have nothing to do with predicates. A real politics knows nothing of identities, even the identity - so tenuous, so variable - of 'communists'. It knows only fragments of the real, and an Idea of the real is testimony to the fact that the work of its truth is ongoing."

My marginal note there was "Platonism." I thought I was pretty smart, until I got to page 229, the first page of his concluding essay "The Idea of Communism," where he frankly acknowledges it, in main text and footnote, and gives citations of his past and forthcoming work on Plato. At least he admits it. By the end of that essay, he admits, though in an evasive manner, that the entire book is misnamed: "We can give new life to the communist hypothesis, or rather to the Idea of communism." (260) What we are dealing with, then, is not a hypothesis, which emerges in time, has a history, is never absolutely demonstrated and can, if necessary, be abandoned, but an "Idea" with a big, fat capital-I, which is more real than this icky, contingent, historical mess, and is true whether proven or not. In that respect, it is not even a conjecture in the mathematical sense. Either Badiou does not know what a hypothesis is, or he used it as a kind of disguise, smuggling the old, dusty heritage of metaphysical idealism in under a modern, scientific-sounding guise (like Lenin slipping out of Petrograd clean-shaven and wearing a toupée).

It is still necessary for me to clarify what it means to speak of a hypothesis in the realm of history. After all, I've already pointed to the example of the physical sciences, where the guiding ideological assumption of its practitioners (to the extent that they think about such things, and as opposed to how things actually work) tends to be falsificationism, the creation of Karl Popper, who explicitly used it to deny the applicability of scientific methods to history. And I will do that.

But first I need to finish dealing with Badiou, who, if he did not exist, would have to have been invented by a Popperian, as a living example of a cartoon communist in the post-Soviet world. One for whom "History does not exist," (243) or who speaks of "the non-factual element in a truth." (244)

Alas, as a historical materialist, before I write I need to think, and before I think I need to eat, and before I eat I need to cook. So the next portion will wait until later. Next installment (not necessarily the next post): Ideas without History, Truth without Facts.

Arab Spring, African Summer, or Both?

Want to get this out there while it's still fresh in my mind. I promise, the Badiou critique is still coming.

Less reported on than the uprisings in Arabic-speaking countries have been a spate of mass protests, riots, and uprisings in Sub-Saharan Africa. And let's not forget that Tunisia and Egypt are both part of Africa. This is a map I've put together, showing all countries on the African continent that have had significant protests since the flight of Tunisia's Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. At least, all that I could find. This has not yet been researched in detail:

Highlighted in red, that's:

• Algeria
• Angola
• Benin
• Burkina Faso
• Cameroon
• Côte d'Ivoire
• Djibouti
• Egypt
• Equatorial Guinea
• Ethiopia
• Gabon
• Kenya
• Liberia
• Libya
• Malawi
• Mauritania
• Morocco
• Mozambique
• Nigeria
• Senegal
• Sierra Leone
• Somalia
South Africa
• Sudan
• Swaziland
• Tanzania
• Tunisia
• Uganda
• Zimbabwe

Not all is for the good. While the dictators of Libya and Côte d'Ivoire were justly reviled, the revolutionary uprisings have been hijacked. (If anything, the capture of Laurent Gbagbo is a greater success for Sarkozy than anything NATO has accomplished in Libya so far.) In many countries, established bourgeois opposition figures have been able to place themselves at the head of the protests. In others, repression seems to have worked. In the two most populous and powerful Sub-Saharan countries listed above, Nigeria and South Africa, there are significant obstacles to the emergence of working-class-led political alternatives: In Nigeria, a recent and on-going history of sharp sectarian and ethnic clashes; in South Africa, the continued hegemony of the (increasingly uneasy) tripartite alliance (ANC, SACP and COSATU), and a dark undercurrent of popular hostility to immigrants from other African countries. (And, let me be honest: There's a lot I just don't know about. Anyone more familiar with African politics, please comment.) Yet the sheer scale of the revolts, and the diversity of their locales, is itself a hopeful sign.

On the other hand, despite the imperialist-sponsored stalemate in Libya, and the bloody crackdown in Bahrain, events remain interesting in the Arab world, with new developments in the mashreq: Syria may be the next to go--Bashar, didn't you learn from Ben Ali and Mubarak that concessions just whet the masses' appetites? And even the Saudis have problems.