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.