The subject matter of the discussion, besides being of deep interest, is timely. True to the Marxian observation that, contrary to the law of bourgeois revolutions, the law, obedient to which the revolutionary movement of the proletariat acts, is to "criticize itself constantly; constantly to interrupt itself in its own course; to come back to what seems to have been accomplished in order to start over anew; to scorn with cruel thoroughness the half measures, weaknesses and meannesses of its first attempts; to seem to throw down its adversary only in order to enable him to draw fresh strength from the earth, and again to rise up against it in more gigantic stature; to constantly recoil in fear before the undefined monster magnitude of its own objects - until, finally, that situation is created which renders all retreat impossible, until the conditions themselves cry out: Hic rhodus, hic salta ! - true to that Marxian observation, the Labor Movement of America is today thoroughly criticizing itself.
Daniel DeLeon, As To Politics, 1907
To complete our homage to Empires of the Sun and their builders, one thing you don’t learn fast enough is that Seattle and fenomena de tipo Seattle Turn You Adornian: previously you knew well enough that you had no business bothering them, or “fooling with the Marx”, but all of a sudden you’d be a true, scientific, and genuinely revolutionary Communist a la Paul Levi if you only could. In the meantime you’re going to try to get a union job, try really hard, learn you can’t because the unions are corrupt, learn you could if you were worth a damn like people who put themselves “on the line” every day, learn you can be a cultural producer, learn culture is evil, learn it’s okay, learn philosophy is better, learn philosophy must be truly materialistic to succeed at what is worth achieving, talk to unhappy women some more, try something else out, avoid creeps who tell you to “get spiritual-minded”, outwit them, beat them up, write ballads, novels, plays, theoretike works that you disown and other ones you don’t.
You’re almost good enough, almost good enough, almost good enough to make the “social-justice” team: then, after a period when the traffic lights they turn on blue tomorrow and the “big birds” leave town, you figure out you were the problem anyway and one step more means an Instant Ticket to the Power Team: you tell someone off with Goethe they’re fixin’ to love, if they could figure out what the durn thing means, make a major motion picture or somethin’ that you intentionally don’t get credit for and “hit the skids” — where it all is, where it all is safe and straight, where she is. Preferable at least to Vancouver, British Columbia, where you have to claim you’re from LA and say yo’ name only till it sounds like singing, rather than a “target market” for true juvenilia (on account of all the people wearing the structure). And now we’re going to quietly listen to the combined anthem of Britain and the United States:
Fuck the Wiedergutmachungstuhl and all your ‘frenz’.
Now, for a very serious “confession of faith”. Circumstances in the United States of America compelled me — and whoever else – to employ genuine Leninist communist methods in the years 2003, to avoid a spurious “revolt” by those in power, and 2008, to let the genuinely popular Presidential candidate win the legitimate election. The “tail-ending” of these efforts, which were conducted using those Communist methods which allow genuine and unforced consensus-formation by the people, resulted in the radically altered character of the George W. Bush administration during the second term and the radical transformation of the American polity following Obama’s inauguration. The truth of the matter is that these efforts have revealed that we, the people of the United States of America, were lied to about the character of Communist politics: really, it is a totally modern and democratic procedure for allowing the genuine rule of law and personal freedom, steeped in the best thoughts of the bourgeois era. However, “enough is enough” is a truth of all time.
Although I have been a Marxist socialist, and an activist, since early adolescence and have a great respect for the scientific contributions of communist intellectuals like Gramsci, Lukacs, and Adorno and the precipitated tragedies of countries with effective Communist parties I never believed in Communist methods before they became absolutely necessary and I don’t believe in them now. I don’t believe in an unstructured “libertarian communism” that allows useless idiots like Michael Hardt to opine about the revolutionary character of your job at Whole Foods, but more seriously — and exploitative shitheads like the corpo-commie Hardt and his oppressed friend Antonio Negri pressing dangerous and unrealizable ideals on vulnerable members of the working class is pretty serious — once a genuine republic, the secret core of the communist demand, has been achieved the continued improvement of every aspect of life using genuine science can only lead to a monstrous disaster: the fabrication of “a bridge too far”, complete perfection within and without the bureaucracy, to suit the sybarites of humanity. Any life is flawed; all life is flawed; what is not flawed is not life. Too much of a bad thing is rough, but it’s not too bad; when it’s much too much you know it’s time to do it to you-know-who again; right now, it’s all right and anyone who doesn’t think so has a problem.
On this, the seventh day of the week, let me share an observation about labor law with you. It is a piece of “common knowledge” that the sit-down strike, where laborers occupy the factory until their demands are met, was a popular tactic in the ’30s but became illegal with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1948. However, my considered opinion is this: actually, sit-down strikes were illegal under the Wagner Act as well — one of the basic principles of property law is akin to the Third Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, in that you just can’t be forced to house people on your property if you don’t want them there. There is one way, however, to get around this, and that is if the crimes that have been committed against the workers are so great that they legally own the factory, as it would be required to be deeded to them in damages were the matters ever to come to trial: and really, this is the story behind the famous unionization of General Motors thanks to the sit-down strike at the Fisher Auto Body plants in Flint, Michigan from December 1936 to February 1937. They just couldn’t be removed, and don’t think Midwestern “authorities” are not highly motivated with respect to such issues: however, it would have been impolitic to actually entirely seize control of the means of production.
Back to the “rough ground” for a minute (although more properly speaking said ground is soggy, soggy and cold). There’s been a lot of enthusiasm recently for Quentin Meillasoux’s theory of the “ancestral”, the material aspects of the world which are epistemically inaccessible to us and thusly fall outside a Kantian “correlationist” view of the relation between the mental and the physical. Without speculating on Meillasoux’s theory before I’ve gotten around to carefully reviewing it (twenty dollars is a lot to spend on an afternoon’s reading), I’d like to generalize the thought as it is stated and apply it to other dimensions of time and to consider the relationship of Marx to his German forebears in that light.
For the sake of the argument, consider a thumbnail sketch of Platonism: Plato was the inventor, not only of the “truth as correctness” much bemoaned by the later Heidegger, but of the ideal: the Socratic dialogues are the first place in Western literature where the question of establishing what is really the case, what is really good, what is truly true gets raised. The Ionian ‘physicists’ do not ask these questions; the various religious prophets of the Near East, including the interpreters of Greek civic gods, had no time for them. The same cannot be said for Leibniz, Kant and Hegel. The reintroduction of Plato’s works into the Western intellectual milieu helped give form to Leibniz’ early attempts at “logistic”, and Kant’s self-professed crypto-Wolffianism surely takes the form of an attention to rationalistic surety about the purchase of concepts of totality on the realm of “appearances”.
Hegel maintains all of this Platonism, but within the more precisely established bonds of intersubjectivity, or Geist. For Hegel all ideals, including the ideals of religion, realize themselves in community standards and practices. We can cheer this as a ‘precursor’ of pragmatism (although why exactly equalibertarians were ever supposed to be enthusiastic about Metaphysical Club member and Peirce’s good bud Oliver Wendell Holmes is mysterious to me); that’s not, however, the only thing it is. Rather, Hegelian intersubjectivity is a form of actualist presentism about norms and the non-normative powers that underwrite them: he probably would not even go so far as to say “the truth is what is fated to be agreed upon by all”, holding that philosophy only “comprehended its time in thought” and failure to make peace with the signposts of the age was indicative of a lack of conceptual acuity.
Perhaps we could say that Marx had something like Meillasoux’s idea of epistemically inaccesible reality in mind when conceptualizing the proletariat, although in the direction of the non-espied future rather than an ancestral past. The proletariat is fated to rule the world, according to Marx, because they simply are the forces of the future at work today: the elements of practice and revolt we do not understand today, working an effect on contemporary society at a non-conceptual level, will determine the normative concepts of tomorrow — not an “originalist” fidelity to an ‘originary’ source of insight. So perhaps we should think of Marx’s favored name for his project, “historical materialism”, in some such robustly metaphysical way.
Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition <marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu>
date
Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 8:57 PM
subject
The Credit Crunch and the Elections
mailed-by
gmail.com
A quick thought, from someone who is more sociologically than economistically inclined: is the financial crisis not a “depth charge” indicating the net weight of the American political system in the world system? However much we might wish a third-party candidate was viable at the moment, or however much we might secretly cherish the prospect of pulling the lever for Obama, both candidates will not only represent but structurally be radical breaks with the Bush administration: Obama will perversely deepen the bilateral ties between the Third World and developing European nations that developed this decade, ties Bush exploited to put together the “coalition of the willing” but will presumably assume the shape of a “Good Neighbor policy” in Obama’s hands. McCain’s genuine distaste for torture will snap the faux security state Securing a ”Homeland” and wagging dogs in what could otherwise be meaningless low-level conflicts with an Axis of Unpleasantness.
Neither candidate does what is economically essential over the long term, realizing that the US cannot be a “prestige” economy piratically exporting Ideas to other countries in exchange for cheap goods in lieu of being a normal country and having domestic industrial production for domestic consumption. But in some short term we are all living, and eagerly bowing to Schadenfreude over gnomes somewhere or other whose failed wizardry caused the material facts of production to topple over does a disservice to the possibility of American democracy — an excellent idea, and a reality which waxes and wanes with effective control over representatives and the executive by the great masses. This plays into the hands of bailout phonies and Brilliant Executives who are looking for excuses to stop going concerns rather than pay out to an empowered proletariat.
A little while ago Richard Zach, whose LogBlog offers an excellent view into the world of serious logic, pointed out something interesting: a new blog aggregator, “Blogging on PseudoScientific DoucheBags“, features as its logo the sequent calculus for Girard’s linear logic. Professor Zach wonders why they would choose a perfectly legitimate and coherent logical formalism as a symbol of quackery; I have to say that my experience has definitely been that the Internet “skeptic” community has a limited appreciation of logical research (I used to get told on Usenet that Alfred Tarski was a fraud, and even the cleverer sort of autodidact often has an insufficient understanding of how slick people like Tarski and Roman Jakobson were). However, I believe in making people’s dreams happen, so here’s a speculative application of linear logic that’s been knocking around in my head for a while: I’ll skip the diagrams as a gesture of friendliness, but I expect those looking for pseudoscience will find it.
Linear logic is sometimes explained (as in the helpful Wikipedia entry) as a logic of resources. In ordinary logic, premises are indefinitely available for use in inference: but there are situations where we only want to draw conclusions from “fresh” information. By modifying the “structural” inference rules of Weakening (where an irrelevant premise can always be added to an inference) and Contraction (where a redundant premise can always be removed from an inference), and splitting apart the connective rules into “context-sharing” and “context-free” versions, linear logic makes it possible to set precise bounds on the applicability of a piece of information. This is very useful for reasoning about the behavior of programming languages with state, but there’s a “real-world” phenomenon it resembles as well: industrial production. In manufacturing goods from raw materials, we use the materials up — and this places constraints on how economic systems arising around production can operate.
Now, a man famously tried to show how all this worked: Karl Marx, in the three volumes of Capital. Marx’s “circuits of capital”, like the sequence of production for profit M-C-C’-M’, symbolically represented the processes of industrial capitalism; the consequences he spun out from the basic processes of production and exchange under capitalism (putatively) showed the fundamental limits to this economic system. What would Marx think of linear logic? I think he would be impressed by the way linear implication takes resources that are available simultaneously (determined by applications of the “context-sharing” rules) and resources that are only available discretely (determined by applications of the “context-free” rules) and represents situations where information, or whatever, is consumed in the production of a logical result.
I think one could make a strong case that in the context-sharing rules we have a formalization of Marxian “use-value”, those features of the world (including the natural world) that make a real contribution to life, and in the case of context-free rules we have a formalization of exchange-value, the rationalistic processes by which economic agents (capitalists and laborers) shape the direction of economic activity. I don’t know enough about linear logic yet to say whether there is also a “tendency of the rate of proofnets to fall”, but its “economy of the sign” is a real one — and should perhaps be especially interesting for people tracking the dynamics of the capitalist system in the order of thought, as well as that of reality.
If you were in a charitable mood, I suppose you might describe my intellectual project as moving analytic philosophy to its Marxist moment — with the understanding that this project might not go off without a hitch. At any rate, one of my core intellectual principles is something like a Marxist theory of truth, and I’d like to explain what that entails. Although I think it’s a minor scandal that “new theories of truth” like Kripke’s and the revision theory are not widely studied for their philosophical implications, as opposed to going around and around disquotation, I don’t myself have anything clever to say about them at the moment and so my remarks here will be “philosophical” rather than formal.
Donald Davidson once tried (rather unsuccessfully, in the eyes of most) to show that “coherence implies correspondence”, that the idea of truth as adequatio falls out rather trivially from a logically well-integrated web of belief. However, I think the implication in the opposite direction is not quite as trivial as people make it out to be: getting any use out of the idea of true statements as mirroring facts actually requires going quite far into “ideological” features of discourse. Why? When we assess an utterance for its truth or falsity, we are interested in “what is said” — not just the surface form of the words, but the concrete and relevant meaning of them. In formal theories what is said is stipulatively clear, but in natural language a whole host of “pragmatic” phenomena combine to make figuring out the contribution of a statement to communication difficult.
Principles for dealing with these phenomena model social life — what it is rational to think someone said in a context depends on one’s model of their position within society and one’s model of their understanding of that position. So much so, in fact, that I think there is some point to simply identifying the real meaning of a statement with its role as a “move” within society, as a contribution to social action. This is not a “sceptical solution to sceptical doubts” along the lines of Kripke’s interpretation of Wittgenstein: although custom obviously plays a role in the role of words as an element of practices, we are very far from being required to view tradition as the fundament of “social meaning” and to exclude the role of novelty (think of Wittgenstein’s picture of language as a city, with narrow old streets and regularly plotted suburbs). We are also far from having to view language as “smooth and homogenous” in the words of Richard Rorty: the structure of “social practice” involving meaning is not any simpler than the structure of society in general, with its various divisions and conflicts.
Obviously, for communication to occur an utterance must coordinate ego and alter: someone making an “offer you can’t understand” is subverting the function of communication for “reasons” that are at least eccentric. In traditional Marxism and sociological theories following on from it, this coordination is the function of ideology, and what I am saying is that there is not another “alethic” dimension beyond communicative coordination — truth is good ideology, which coordinates people in constructive ways. This is a redefinition of traditional problems of truth and truth-telling, not a restriction of it to a particular “materialist” province; it’s not any easier to see what will really constitute a good ideological program at a particular point in time than what is “really real”. But it is at least coherent to look at things this way, and to think that there are no “politically incorrect” truths, or politically correct falsehoods.
(An Historically Materialist Analysis of the “Elitism” Flap, With Very Limited Apologies to Merle Haggard)
A few days ago the blogworld was aflame with concern regarding Barack Obama’s “misstep” at a San Francisco fundraiser, where he said working-class voters frustrated with economic hardship turned to “values” politics as a coping mechanism; the New York Times column where William Kristol helpfully explained this in terms of a Political Science 101 reading of Marx added more fuel to the fire. People seemed to have moved on to the “boy” comment, but since one of the things I have managed to successfully be in my life is a Marxist I’m still concerned. The “Marxist” charge has legs: but in a way it’s very unfair, and in the way it’s not unfair it should be no discredit to Obama in the eyes of anyone.
If elected, Obama would be the first president to have received his schooling after the tumult of the ’60s had institutional effects: and since he has always been a left-leaning person, part of the effects on him were almost certainly the effecting of a fairly thorough acquaintance with Marxist theory. But his choices as an adult and politician are not “Marxist”: no variety of Congregationalism views itself as an opiate of the people, and his advisers Austan Goolsbee and Samantha Power have never been Marxist heroes (to put it mildly). Obama has not opted for a life on the radical left, which is why he’s acquired the clout and support that has gotten him so far in the presidential contest; and to suggest that his convictions are a throw rug concealing a two-way radio to Moscow is McCarthyite garbage.
But there is a sense in which Obama has clearly profited from acquaintance with Marx and Marxists, although I won’t have to get out my East German copy of the Grundrisse to discuss it. Like Marx and the better sort of socialist politician, Obama is a grown-up in his analysis of society: what he was really doing in saying “It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations” was challenging the maturity of political discourse concerning the woes of the “heartland” (which as an Illinois politician he has a much greater connection to than either Clinton or McCain).
This strikes a nerve, since the arrogantly-useless product of nepotism W. has set the cause of mature American leadership back immensely, and the sedulously adolescent message-tweaking of Clinton and tantrum-throwing of McCain are unlikely to offer major improvements in this area. The US can ill afford to have another intellectually and emotionally immature president who sells us and the world idealistic garbage in tandem with pointlessly killing people abroad and undermining our society at home; and even if you like guns or God or nursing a grudge, you should recognize the “Marxist” Obama is the one who will try to be “as radical as reality itself”.
I was recently rereading the 1794 Wissenschaftslehre (in translation, but it just seems wrong to call it the Science of Knowledge); although it’s certainly an interesting and important work, Fichte is not a very convincing guy by the standards of this era — and probably those of his own. All the careful work Kant does in establishing the essential order present in spatiotemporal appearances, familiar to the analytically-informed from Strawson and Gareth Evans, is tossed out in favor of a heavily voluntarist theory of cause and effect. But one thing is “sun-clear” to me: German Idealism was part of a profound revolution — not necessarily in ontology, but in the semantics of personhood. I say “part of” because the revolutions in German literature around the turn of the century were just as important as the philosophical advances, and closely intertwined with them: relatively a lot of people will know about Hegel’s carrying-on with famous writers like Goethe, Heine, and his friend Hölderlin, but all the German litterateurs of that period were very philosophical (though it probably would have helped some if the philosophers were more literary).
That’s actually a pretty uncontroversial assertion; but what might it have to do with Marx’s relation to the German philosophical tradition? Marx started out as a “left Hegelian”, and retained some key phraseology (“subject-object”, etc) into his maturity, but what does he really have to do with Romanticism and the idealist vision of self-consciousness? I think one could say that his transposition of the “expressive” power of the language of the self into a materialist theory of society takes this form: society is an expressive totality. In a manner similar to Luhmann’s definition of society as “the totality of communications” (though without its idealist tenor), Marx posits that the total workings of society form the ultimate bound of the power of the human mind to act and think in a “free” way; there can be no real Robinsonades, everything that an individual can accomplish takes the form of social praxis. Perhaps this serves as an anticipatory critique of that other legacy of Idealism pointed out by Horkheimer and Adorno, that fascist assimilation of social life to “willpower” and “resolve” which had a quite pointedly Fichtean disregard for the “non-self”.
I sometimes talk to people who want suggestions for reading material in politics or philosophy; a great resource for both categories is the Marxists Internet Archive. Run by volunteers, the MIA was started to transcribe and make available the vast amount of printed material from Marx and Marxist politicians that had effectively entered the public domain as a result of the Soviet bloc’s collapse: but it’s since expanded to be something of an omnibus introduction to modernity, stretching backwards in time to the Enlightenment and forwards to the present day, offering material in a wide variety of languages. Their main site was recently disabled by Internet attacks emanating from China (some speculated that the wealth of material on Mao and other Chinese Marxists not favored by the current regime played a role), but everything appears to be back on track. Check it out.
