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.

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.

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.)