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.

A Good Meeting

Last night I had the distinct pleasure of attending a meeting.

The phrase "pleasure of attending a meeting" is rare enough in its utterance as to be nearly a paradox, particularly in New York.

The meeting itself is somewhat hard to describe. Its title was "From Wisconsin to New York: Crisis, Austerity and Resistance". It has a Facebook page, so those of you who have a Facebook login (which I don't) can view it at http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=194911303884295. It was convened by a nameless group of mostly-young leftists who seem to be more or less in an academic orbit, who refer to themselves, perhaps somewhat disingenuously, as "a group of friends who are interested in revolutions." The conveners seem to be largely of a left-communist cast. This was the second such meeting I attended; the prior one, last month, was about the revolutions in the Arab world. At the earlier meeting, the Solidarity organization was in evidence; if its supporters were present at this one, they were not known to me.

The speakers included Loren Goldner of Insurgent Notes, and two younger guys who are not public figures in the same way Loren is, and who therefore I do not know if they would appreciate having their full names published in this connection. Loren spoke on his observations of the Wisconsin protests, in much the same vein as this article. There was also a well-researched historical presentation on the 1975 New York City fiscal crisis and the politics of austerity, and the third speaker gave a presentation of the austerity measures contained in the newest New York State budget. (A presentation which, in content and style, seemed to reflect his job in the legislative office of a New York City council member more than his professed anarchist politics, but which was nonetheless informative.)

For now, however, I will not comment so much on the content of the discussion as on its style. For, in a room that included left-communists, anarchists, Trotskyists (in addition to myself, there was Jan Norden of the Internationalist Group), as well as several people whose political viewpoint was more difficult to pinpoint (social-democrats?), the discussion remained cordial and (mostly) focused throughout. Even Norden, who did filibuster a bit, contributed in a meaningful way and a comradely tone. In fifteen-plus years of leftist militancy, I don't think I've ever attended such a meeting. (The prior meeting called by this grouping certainly couldn't have been described that way.)

A couple of suggestions, however, addressed not only to the conveners of this meeting but to anyone trying such an enterprise:

1. We need to do away with the academic norm of repeatedly giving the original speakers in a discussion the chance to respond. Yes, if they've been asked a direct question, let them respond, briefly, but if it's done after comments as well, it interrupts the flow. More problematically from a perspective of human emancipation, it derives from a presumption of hierarchical expertise. In this particular case, it did not seem to me to result in anyone not getting their say, but it often has that effect.
2. I am greatly tempted to propose a rule that no political meeting disperse without a democratic vote on at least one concrete action of follow-up. Even if the concrete action is just to call another meeting. Toward the end, there was a palpable sense in the room that this sort of thing should continue, but no one (and I certainly include myself in this) made an attempt to propose something specific. The initiative remains with the informal "group of friends," and I hope they'll take it.

The main thing it helped me to do was to clarify my thinking a little bit on the question of proletarian political organization. The basis of the need for such organization is not the existence of different ideas in the minds of individual workers, but the need for the immediate interests of the most exploited and oppressed to be brought forward, as they coincide the ultimate interests of the class as a class-for-itself. Otherwise, the tendency to break into sectoral patterns within the framework of capitalist politics will prevail, as remains the case so far in anti-austerity struggles in Wisconsin, California and New York. (With the struggles in the last location being far behind the prior ones in scope and militancy.) More on this later, but not immediately.

A note on the next post: I believe it was about eight years ago that Sy Landy gave me a photocopy of an old Hal Draper article, entitled The "Inevitability of Socialism": The Meaning of a Much Abused Formula (The New International, December 1947), a polemic against arguments by C.L.R. James (then in the Socialist Workers Party) and George Novack. Draper had, many decades before, been Sy's mentor, and much of his theoretical work amounted to critiquing and setting aside much of what he had been mis-taught by Hal. On this article, he had a gut feeling that Hal was wrong, but neither were James and Novack right, and he wanted someone with more philosophical training to take it on. On and off over the following year, it turned into a sprawling project that took me through Hegel, Plekhanov, Althusser, the philosophy of science, various schools of "ideology critique," etc., going far beyond the original ambit of critiquing what is, actually, a rather slight and amateurish article. The question of "historical necessity" proved to be way more complicated than Draper or his SWP opponents wanted it to be. The results were sheafs of hand-written notes in my barely legible scrawl, and occasional e-mails to various people about what I was thinking about--not even an internal discussion article, because more urgent questions abounded. But the upshot of all this was my conclusion that the necessity of a classless, communist society was a historical hypothesis.

So imagine my disappointment in 2008 as the ex-Maoist, and incurably obscurantist philosopher Alain Badiou was making a splash with his notion of a communist hypothesis--which uses the exact same words I had fastened on four years before, but gives them a very different meaning.

The point of this is not to claim intellectual priority or make a claim to some kind of copyright--Badiou can keep his royalties unperturbed. It's to indicate why, in setting out my thoughts about politics, I now have the duty of beginning with a polemic against Badiou. That will be the subject of my next post. (Probably not today, but hopefully by tomorrow night.)

Introduction to a Research Program

A Note on the Title

The title of this blog is a pun. Sorry.

In the jargon of capitalistically-organized science, the Principal Investigator (PI) is the man or woman (usually a man) who is designated as being responsible for the expenditure of grant funds and the supervision of the accomplishment of research aims. As such, he functions as a kind of straw boss, hiring, firing, and directing the work of a greater or lesser number of students, technicians, research scientists, etc., while answerable to those who provide the funds, the space and institutional setting for his work. He takes most of the credit and usually gets most of the blame, sometimes collaborating but most often competing with other PIs in the search for new knowledge within a given disciplinary framework.

The author of these lines is not a Principal Investigator, nor do I have any desire to become one. I intend, however, to be a Principled Investigator. Now just what does this have to do with my subtitle, and its talk of "proletarian revolutions"? Let me explain.

The politics of proletarian revolution, known variously as "Marxism," "revolutionary socialism," "communism," etc., has often presented itself as being grounded in, or working toward, a scientific understanding of its object. I begin from the premise that this aim is both desirable and attainable. However, this science would have a distinct relationship between subject and object. (For now I'm using these terms in the philosophical sense, as the knowing subject and the known object. This is confusing, since in the jargon of research the object of study is often referred to as the "subject". At some future point I'll try and de-confuse this.) In the physical sciences, as well as in the "social sciences" as academically defined, the subject (the researcher) and the object (what is being researched) are distinct, discrete and non-overlapping. The object of a science of revolutions, however, would be history. Not history, however, an aggregate of facts and judgments about a remote past, but history as something still in the process of being made, and as a guide to those who would make it consciously. "People make their own history, but not out of whatever they wish, not in circumstances of their choosing, but in immediate circumstances carried over, handed down and given to them." The investigators, the subjects, and what they study, the objects, are, or ought to be, one and the same. To be a subject of such an endeavor one must first of all regard oneself objectively. (Any reader familiar with the usual practices and attitudes of the radical left has probably snorted in disbelief. That gap between what is and what must be is one of the objects of a science of revolution.)

This is also where principles come into it. We have no "institutional review board" looking over our shoulders, making sure we are doing no harm to ourselves and our fellow human beings / collaborators as we strive to remake the world that has been "carried over, handed down and given" to us. In revolutionary politics there is much talk of principles, which can give it an ethical appearance. In truth, it is a matter of practice: If the ends justify the means, then they only justify those means that are appropriate to the ends. To say that a given political practice is unprincipled means, ultimately, to say that it doesn't work, that it does not get us any closer to testing our basic suppositions--i.e., that history can be remade--but leads us down a dead-end. (And it shouldn't be so hard to see: Often, such dead-ends have been marked with piles of skulls.) The ethical appearance masks a practical and epistemological essence. More plainly: It's not about what we ought or ought not to do, and that's that; it's about figuring out how to do what we have to do to know what we have to know (so we can do what we have to do to know what we have to know, so...).

So that is "A Principled Investigator". "A", because it's necessarily a collective effort: Even if I am only one, I can only be one as one of many. This blog functions as a call to the many, a standing invitation to collaboration, debate and putting theories to the test.

A Note on the URL

The French Revolutionary Calendar has been a rich source of metaphor for those who have pursued revolution as a science: e.g. 18th Brumaire, or Thermidor. Ironically, the very metaphor is an example of "nervously invoking the spirits of the past to service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language." The use of a name from that same calendar is a irony re-doubled upon itself, borrowing language from the borrowers. After all, the ancient Mayan calendar probably has greater resonance in today's intellectual culture than the festivals of republican France. And yet one of the topics of this blog is to combat the stereotyped use of outmoded language to describe new tasks.

Still, I have my reasons. The Sansculottides were the five to six days without a month tacked on at the end of the calendar to bring the decimal framework into alignment with the solar year. The very name celebrates the plebeian and proletarian masses that drove the revolution forward. (I had briefly considered entitling the blog "Science without Pants", but decided that would not exactly convey an appropriate degree of gravity.) And that is in fact what they were, at first, a time for the masses to celebrate themselves. So the name signifies:

• a festival of the oppressed;
• a hiatus between the old and the new;
• a clumsy attempt to bridge the gap between a rigid schema and a messy reality.

This blog takes each of those phenomena as potential topics--and perhaps unintentionally exemplifies one or more of them.

A Note on the Writer

The writer of these lines was, until recently, a supporter of the League for the Revolutionary Party (LRP), and a "frequent" contributor to its magazine Proletarian Revolution (at least insofar as anyone can contribute frequently to an infrequent and irregular publication).

The central realization that made it impossible for me to continue in good faith in that relationship was that the basic form of organization regarded as a necessary prerequisite for the creation of the revolutionary party, namely a democratic-centralist propaganda group, needed to be understood historically as having been conditioned, in the last analysis, be the development of the productive forces. And as a historical product, it was necessarily transitory, and, I would now argue, overcome. One would have to be blind or willful to deny that we are currently experiencing a revolutionary transformation in the means of communication. Today, revolutions blaze with the immediacy of image, sound and chatter in near real time. Nor is this confined to wealthy nations and privileged strata: Combined and uneven development have made it so that cities and villages where nary a land-line telephone can be found are, in many parts of the world, abuzz with cell phone rings and text messages. In such a social environment, even the most effective organization based on a 70-year old form, while it may be able to have significant local impacts based on a tactical concentration of efforts, will necessarily tail behind world events. If the aim is to shape world events, then the form must be superseded.

Note: I am not using this to argue against the need for organization, for propaganda, or even against (that much-misunderstood bête noire of so much of the left) "democratic centralism" (though its historic significance still needs to be excavated from beneath a heap of archeological rubble). Only that the specific concatenation of those concepts, and the resultant meanings that have been "carried over, handed down and given" to us, need to be radically rethought, and that rethinking put to the test. As such, the questions of the impact of technological development on capitalist social relations, the ways it has conditioned a reordering of political struggles, and the future forms of proletarian organization emerging from such struggles will be a primary theme of exploration in this blog.

An immediate trigger for this was close observation of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and the role of new media technologies in helping (though by no means being solely responsible for) the acceleration of events. So long as those revolutions remain living phenomena--long may they live, deepen and spread--that will be a major secondary theme. Unfortunately, I do not have sufficient Arabic-language skills to do that on my own (working on it). Comment from those who do, especially those who are participants in the events, is most welcomed, even if we disagree.

Other likely themes, off the top of my head and by no means exhaustive:

• Marxism, philosophy of science, and the philosophy of Marxism as science
• History and development of the far left in the U.S.
• Political events in Latin America
• Arts and culture (most likely infrequently)

Some Final Notes on Policy

• Links are not endorsements. I will link to pages in the blogroll because I find them interesting enough to want to remind myself to check them regularly, not because I agree with all or most of the content to be found that way. I do welcome suggestions (in the comments). I also link within the text of blog posts, so that readers can familiarize themselves with the texts, organizations, individuals, phenomena, concepts, etc. to which I am referring.
• Debate is welcome. Debate is not abuse, which is not welcome. Comments will be gently moderated against abuse. Mischaracterizing debate as abuse, however, is a way of avoiding debate, and thus is also not welcome.
• Racism, sexism and bigotry of all forms is a form of abuse particularly unwelcome when the object of inquiry is the liberation of all humanity from oppression. Don't even try slipping it past.
• English is the primary language of this blog, but comments in other languages are most welcome, so long as they fit the rest of the policies. I'll do my best, using my knowledge and/or Google Translate, to help make such comments intelligible to readers who need English. When linking, I will link to English-language documents first if available, original-language documents next if I understand them, and documents translated into a third language if necessary. I do reserve the privilege of re-translating quotes, however, for reasons of grammar, precision or felicity.