Thoughts in Honor of Yawm an-Nakba

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

--Rosa Luxemburg, Die Ordnung herrscht in Berlin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thawra hatta an-nasr!

Is Marxist Economics a Science? (Part 1)

The answer is: No. Sorry, guys.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May Day (International Workers' Day)

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

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

This is what it looked and sounded like in Tunis:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.