On Pythons & Media Generated Paranoia

My partner and I have been talking much about the horribly tragic death of two boys in New Brunswick a couple of days ago. KP is snake-o-phobic and this just confirmed her worst fears, especially with a reptile shop around the corner that sells large snakes.

For me, while it horrified me as a father of two young children to think of losing my kids so senselessly, what was also striking was how utterly random and titillating it was meant to be as a news item. I was reminded of one time when I was standing on a subway platform, waiting for the train and reading the newsfeed screen. There was a "breaking story" that kept scrolling again and again across the bottom of the screen: 12 people had died when their boat capsized in Lake Victoria. In case you don't know, Lake Victoria is the world's second largest freshwater lake, next to Lake Superior. It also happens to be in Africa, providing an interior coastline to Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.

Now what, you might ask, is the purpose of telling me (and a couple of hundred thousand other commuters) about the tragic deaths of 12 people in a boating accident on the other side of the world? Probably the same thing as telling us about the tragic deaths of two young boys in New Brunswick, more or less. I won't be the first to say this but the widespread publicizing of events like this reminded me that these items are publicized for a reason. It's not that the individual stories, in and of themselves, provide us with any sort of useful information. (Well, I suppose it might be useful to wear a lifejacket when on a boat or to ban predatory, wild animals that are large enough to kill children. But I don't think that's why these stories are in the paper.)

I mean, look at the follow-up on the python story. A quick glance at thestar.com and I can see a video on the eating and hunting habits of the African Rock Python. There's an accompanying story that suggest the python might have been attracted to the boys because they had been petting farm animals earlier in the day and they smelled like prey as a result. And, finally, there's a story about how the python has been killed in punishment for the crime of being a large, deadly predator. There will be more in the days to come but that's four stories on one news site in two days. Millions of people are talking about this story, forming opinions on it, arguing about it over coffee and drinks, at the water cooler at work, etc. etc.

It's my opinion that the reason stories like this are considered news in this way is the fundamental acceptance of the political and economic system under which we live. Sure, there are pushes by newspapers to win support for their particular reformist bent - the Star wants less austerity, the National Post wants to cook and eat the poor to save money so the rich can buy bigger yachts. But they both fundamentally accept the dynamics of a system based upon profit and competing nation states. Thus the problems in the world aren't fundamental to the system itself. They are of the nature of accidents, individual acts of cruelty, or stupidity. It becomes difficult to differentiate in importance between a boat capsizing in Lake Victoria and a drone attack in Yemen or a war in the Congo, sponsored by different major powers jockeying for control of important resources.

In other words, the media through its undifferentiated focus on tragedy as a series of disconnected accidents, tells us that the world is incomprehensible and that accidents, personal foibles and, especially, crime and criminals are as much a threat (or more) than political and economic decisions. The latter are seen in isolation from their impact. The poverty in Africa that leads to mechanically faulty boats still sailing Lake Victoria, crammed with people to save money, isn't connected to the competition to keep the price of smartphones low, using key minerals from Africa, etc. etc. The relationship between keeping enormous pythons that kill children and immediate political and economic policy is rather less straightforward (and we should allow for some people to be the kind of idiots who think that such dangerous predators are charming pets). But I do believe that the craving for the exotic - usually defined in relationship to colonialist narratives of the dark continent and places like the Amazon - and for adventure is related, on the one hand to the mundane and monotonous existence that most people have to endure (go to work, repeat tasks endlessly & without purpose, come home to repeat tasks endlessly, go to bed, go to work...on the weekend get drunk to forget about the week, repeat). On the other hand the definition of what is exotic and exciting is shaped by historical and continuing policies in relationship to the developing world.

Nonetheless, the larger point here is that the media obfuscates the truth not just in terms of misrepresenting actual events, through the use of language that shapes meaning (is someone called a "Jamaican immigrant" or a "bank CEO", for instance) but also through the repetition of meta-themes (eg. tragedy is the result of accident, etc), the placement of articles in relationship to each other, etc. This has the impact of making the world more difficult to comprehend and generating a kind of paranoia of everything amongst the population. Death and injury could be lurking anywhere at any moment, when the truth is that most premature deaths and serious injuries in the world are the result of being features of the system and the policy choices that flow from it.

It also means the media shamelessly exploits the unfortunate tragedies suffered by ordinary people in order to sell newspapers. A good story is defined by how much gory detail a particular newspaper can uncover. It is not defined as something that allows us to better understand the world in order to change it and make it less tragedy prone. Given that almost all media is dominated by major corporations, this shouldn't surprise us. It should, however, disgust us.

Blogging, Democracy and Revolution

I came across this well-written piece on the role of social media in social change, written by Jesse McLaren. I've often thought that the role of new media, social media etc etc has been under-theorized by Marxists. You tend to see stuff that goes in one of two directions: either an uncritical boosterism about social media as the motor of revolutions or completely dismissive and contemptuous. Jesse has a nice balance, pointing to the contradictions - the corporate dominance of the internet, on the one hand combined with the internet's ability to spread information rapidly; the fact that social media is nothing without the mobilization of actual people combined with the equally relevant fact that social media can provide a powerful mobilization tool, broadening and deepening activist networks, etc. As he concludes:

To make the most of social media we need to see it in context: as a communication tool that can magnify resistance movements, and whose online potential is related to its connections offline.

In all those senses it is a welcome tonic to the one-sidedness that has dominated most discussions I've come across. On the other hand I did feel like it missed some key points that were worth exploring. For instance, Jesse says the following about the mixed nature of ideas:

Social media doesn’t inherently “erode normal human relations” any more than it has magical powers. It simply reflects the ruling ideas, and as the German socialist Karl Marx argued: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.” These ruling class ideas don’t completely dominate: most people have contradictory consciousness—and the experience of collective struggle can expose the contradiction and through the process people’s ideas can change.

But this isn't just that people accept living under capitalist relations and therefore the online ideas reflect that. It's like the film industry. It's not just that people like right wing action movies or celebrity-worshipping superhero blockbusters because they reinforce the experience that workers have every day. It is a much more active process: Hollywood will spend upwards of $100 million on marketing alone to get that $100 million superhero movie on the lips of everyone in North America, Europe and, increasingly, China. The same thing applies to the internet. Perform a search for any particular product or service you might want, or for an artist whose work you love. You will be met first and foremost by a series of "sponsored search results" courtesy of Google's adwords program. Those who pay more are more likely to end up at the top of search results.

Secondly, the internet fits into the web of media that provides global advertising and ideological coverage to reinforce the dominant players. Some of that $100 million blockbuster marketing budget goes into banner ads, sponsored twitter campaigns, Facebook campaigns, cross-platform marketing campaigns (including complementary video games, youtube videos with sponsored ranking and banner ads), pinterest campaigns. You name it, the big players have that social media covered.

Thirdly, the dominance of the big players also applies to news and the message that gets out about domestic and international events of any importance. I may write this blog on what happened in the Middle East this week or last but when you check the news in your Google search it won't be my blog that provides the top hit. Not to mention that while it's great to get news instantaneously, most news content is now written by a few large newswire services like Reuters. Newspapers from the New York Times to the Globe & Mail use the newswires for their stories, ensuring a nearly homogenous worldview is conveyed by the big media players.

Fourth, the internet seems to exist in the ether: I just type an e-mail and it ends up in your inbox, like magic. But it doesn't. It requires a lot of physical infrastructure to make it work and that infrastructure is easily monitored - as we've seen with Snowdon's revelations about the NSA's global data-mining of innocent people - and easily disrupted. During the Arab Spring governments regularly shut down the internet in their own countries. In Egypt, of course, they discovered that the revolution wasn't really on Twitter after all because even shutting down the internet didn't stop Egyptians from overthrowing Mubarak. Here in Canada, effectively all of the internet infrastructure to homes is owned by a few companies like Rogers and Bell. Even the smaller, "independent" ISPs rely upon renting infrastructure belonging to one of the big players.

All that said - and the above discussion could be deepened and expanded much further - the internet is overall a positive thing. Just like the printing press allowed capitalists to more efficiently produce propaganda to win support for, say, an unjust war - so too did the printing press allow the workers movement to organize and share ideas and experiences. The internet takes the printing press, makes it instantaneous and international. It allows us to perform research into, for instance, the historical economic data on the USA going back to the 19th century - without having to pay the outrageous sums demanded by university libraries if you aren't faculty or a student there. In Toronto recently, the internet met smartphone tech to demonstrate brilliantly that while there is increased surveillance (watching from above) there is also increased sousveillance (watching from below). When the cops shot and killed 18-year old Sammy Yatim, the sheer brutality of the response was known by tens of thousands within a few hours because people nearby filmed it on their cellphones and then uploaded it to YouTube. That helped to generate the response that brought thousands of protestors on the streets within 24-hours and put the police on the back foot.

But these points really only expand upon what Jesse wrote in his piece. The bigger absence, the elephant in the room if I may, is the lack of discussion of blogs and the blogosphere. Blogs basically fit into the overall discussion about the relationship of social media to progress, social change, freedom, etc. However, there is a significant debate in some socialist organizations - in particular, in the socialist Tendency of which Jesse is a part, the International Socialist Tendency - about the role that blogs can play in relationship to debates in the party, in the movements, etc. The general view has been that individual blogs are OK, if unimportant, when they comment on the broader world. But they are to be shunned as tools to further debate and clarity inside of socialist organizations. They are deemed "unaccountable", "elitist", "undemocratic", et al. because they are the preserve of unaccountable individuals, not to mention being subjected to the same sorts of selection pressures as discussed above (though a discussion about how items and blogs and videos go viral is in order, as it provides an exception to the rule of big money dominating the internet).

However, the flip side of this is that the internet can provide a means to encourage and spur spontaneous and horizontal engagement and activism. It may be chaotic and inconvenient but surely we want our members and activists debating with each other in each and every forum possible. This can lead to problems - like substituting internalized debate that isn't tested in practice in the outside world for the kinds of activism that can help clarify ideas. It can lead to expanding small differences into large ones. And, of course, anybody can write anything - a lie, etc. and might not have to fear suffering the consequences. But all these things apply to all forms or media and all forms of organization. Even without social media socialist and activist organizations were quite able to end up in unproductive infighting, with people making defamatory claims and counter-claims against each other. In the 1980s ACT-UP, an AIDS activist group that had some explosive growth as the AIDS crisis radicalized tens of thousands of LGBTQs, imploded a few years later as it turned inward. Similar things have happened to other movements in the last 30+ years. It happens. Avoiding debate is not the way to deal with it. Better is to build an organization of outward looking cadre with strong and clear politics, unafraid to grapple with debate and challenges because they are confident in their politics.

What's more blogs and other forms of social engagement - Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, et al - offer the opportunity for people who never get published to have their say. They don't have to have perfect grammar or a university degree. There is much less pressure to be perfect because the stakes are lower - there's no printing bill to pay, no need to organize distribution via physical shipping, etc. It allows for spontaneous and ad hoc groupings of radicals and activists to unite around a virtual publication, engage in debate and then, once the struggle has passed or the moment of crisis that generated the flurry, the publication can shut down. It can re-emerge later in a new form, with a new collective, etc. Counterposing formal structures of accountability to this kind of dynamic and fluid method for engagement is conservative and bureaucratic in its impetus. Of course our movements need structures but debates, crises, and upsurges don't wait for approved structures to emerge and take account of them. They emerge already in motion and our structures must adjust to meet them and engage with them. Structures and structural traditions can help to shape such insurgencies into accountable forums. And insurgencies are the lifeblood that make structures relevant and renewed.

Genes, Robots & The Internet: How Capitalism Revolutionizes The Planet

I was hoping to get to this sooner but life intervened (and technology in the form of a sick computer), along with the second Egyptian revolution, which has been riveting, inspiring, frightening. Nonetheless I wanted to complete my thoughts on the question of Marxism, capitalism and technological advancement – at least this portion of it. In the future I want to write something on Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity movement, which has accumulated a significant following, particularly amongst a section of the Silicon Valley types and the geek diaspora. Kurzweil’s ideas are often reduced to "mind uploading" as the ultimate goal (this side of the Singularity) but are actually more complex and philosophical than that and deserve a fuller treatment. But I digress. Thus far what I’ve argued has been that Marxists have too often denied the dynamism of capitalism, seeing only its propensity to crisis and have confused macroeconomic stagnation with the end of growth, progress and innovation under capitalism. They’ve also confused the fact that capitalism is obsolete – in the sense that the technological level of society is sufficient that a better, more efficient and humane economic system is possible – with the idea that it can no longer advance.
On the other hand, as I argued in my second piece on the subject, technological advancement under capitalism is systematically distorted by the need to generate profit, leading to a number of negative elements in its development and application. In fact, in retrospect, my analysis of capitalism’s failings in this regard was too focused on economic and political pressures and missed at least one other distorting factor: capitalist ideology. This requires a fuller discussion than I’m going to give it here but the basics are that the way that we organize production, with bosses, corporations, forced labour (did you have a choice about going to work this morning?), imperialism, oppression, etc. lead to a set of ideas about human nature, the natural world, etc. that serve to justify the present set-up. So, for instance, in its sociological form we are taught that humans are naturally greedy, violent, etc. In other words there is a certain notion of a fixed human nature. In its scientific form this leads to genetic reductionism: the search for the gene for crime or alcoholism or intelligence. While the failure of the Human Genome Project to deliver easy answers to the causes of inherited diseases (let alone complex behaviours) has led to a rethinking of the role of genetics. At least I believe that's the case amongst biologists who actually work with genetics, if not amongst ideological warriors of the evolutionary psychology ilk (such as Richard Dawkins). In fact, I just read an excellent overview of the history of genetics in the most recent issue of the International Socialism Journal by socialist scientist John Parrington. Definitely worth a read.
Yet, nonetheless, capitalism develops technological and even social advancement and innovation and this can’t be denied, as I’ve suggested previously. The rise of the steam engine and the development of computer tech that led to Moore’s law are just as real as the importance of electricity, which Lenin saw as an enabler of socialism. China has gone from no high-speed trains to something like 15,000 miles, more than the rest of the world combined, in about ten years. These are real advances. How is this possible? There are a number of elements that are worth exploring and have an impact on how we situate Marxism as an ideology and methodology for social transformation. In fact, I would argue that the ability of capitalism to continue to advance, in the face of all its distortions and inefficiencies, is one of the strongest arguments for socialism.
Let's start at the economic level and work "up" from there. The first place to start is in the very foundations of the system: competitive accumulation. This is the alpha and omega of the system, the drive for profit, and is expressed through both individual companies, regions, nation states, trading blocs, etc. The struggle to stay ahead has many effects upon the production process and upon society - not all of them, or even most of them, directed towards technological and social advancement. Competition creates pressure to pursue shortcuts, to externalize costs (like dumping carbon into the atmosphere for someone else to have to clean up), to lie, cheat, murder and steal. But it also has made capitalism the most dynamic system in history, pushing different sizes of capital to innovate, a fact that Marx started from in the Communist Manifesto in a lengthy discussion of the transformative power of capitalism. It is this competitive power that is behind recent innovations in robotics. America has lost a lot of manufacturing jobs to low wage districts and simply can't compete for those jobs on the basis of labour costs. Doing so would cause massive economic damage - and even short-sighted capitalists would be loathe to want to reduce the purchasing power of domestic workers as low as, say, Bangladesh. Better to invest in labour-saving capital that makes it cheaper to produce domestically given the unavoidable costs of shipping around the world. This has led to several developments in the area of advanced manufacturing. DARPA, the advanced research arm of the Pentagon has, for instance, a program for developing advanced 3D printing technologies to make custom manufacture cheap and scalable. In the private sector Rethink Robotics, one of several robotic manufacturing companies, founded by Professor Rodney Brooks (who previously founded iRobot) came out of stealth mode last October to launch Baxter an advanced industrial robot for light manufacturing that will cost USD$20,000 instead of hundreds of thousands - at minimum - and which doesn't require a team of engineers to program it, as most industrial robots do. An unskilled warehouse worker can "train" the robot to, for instance, pack widgets into boxes in about 15 minutes.
There's also a second reason why innovation and dynamism continues to be a central feature of capitalism. Even though the capitalist imperative demands that all production and innovation be for profit, ie. competitive accumulation, this is not without an in-built contradition. That contradiction, fundamental to capitalism, is between use-value and exchange-value. That is to say, capitalism produces use-values – things that we need like shoes or food – but does so for the purpose of exchange in the service of profit.  This suggests a number of things.
The first thing is that a large number of innovators are driven by use-value as well as exchange value (and sometimes exclusively by use-value only to reap exchange value as an initially unintended side-bonus). The discovery of antibiotics is an obvious one - pharmaceuticals make billions from the production (and over-use) of antibiotics. Yet its initial development was not for the purpose of generating profit - ie. its exchange value - it was to save people who were dying from bacterial infections like TB. But in a perhaps less obvious way I was also struck recently by a Google campaign to provide internet to Africa using high altitude balloons. Google is one of the largest and most profitable corporations on the planet and and yet there is a drive to provide for human need, whether in the form of autonomous cars or internet for the two-thirds of the planet that lacks this. I'm not one of those cynics that believes that even those who run corporations as large as Google are simply driven by profit as the alpha and omega. But at the same time, whether meeting a human need is sought (or generated with marketing), the ability to sell for a profit is what ultimately determines whether an innovation is developed further or not. I discussed this previously in relation to cancer research and whether a certain type of immunotherapy would be developed because it would be difficult to patent and, of course, if it cured cancer (as opposed to making it a manageable disease, which meant the continued sale of drugs), this would cut off future profits for the pharmaceuticals.
This further suggests the need for a concrete and specific analysis of the ways in which the drive to create use-values (literally useful things) is distorted by the pressure to meet the demands of exchange value (ie make a profit). Sometimes this is straightforward and obvious, particularly where industries are long-established (like petrochemical corporations that seek to retard cleaner competitors) or where it directly serves imperialism (such as the design of smart weapons). Other times it has a more indirect relationship such as with the internet, which the powers-that-be struggle to control. Particularly in the latter case a very specific and nuanced, concrete analysis is necessary to understand the ways in which exchange-value distorts use-value and thus how in a society based upon production for use, democratically determined (ie. socialism) certain technologies would be different or transformed. Literally, what would we retain and what would we dispose of. This isn’t always obvious. Lenin, famously, at the head of a new revolutionary republic insisted upon introducing Taylorism (modern factory methods) into Russian manufacturing, even in the face of severe criticism from radicals. He understood that until they could produce enough to meet the needs of their country there would be no possibility of socialism.
Lack of resources isn’t a problem that we face today (the reallocation of defence spending could solve illiteracy and hunger, for instance) and yet what we’ve forgotten is that technology is still something that we need to make a better world possible. I have a feeling that the isolation of Marxism has combined with the anti-modernism of the 1960s – the last period of significant and sustained social radicalization – to blur the vibrant modernism of earlier Marxist thought. In the defeat of the strongest elements of that period – the Black Panthers, French general strike of 1968, et al - we have taken on board the weakest aspects of that period’s critique, which is a rejection of modernity. Marxists ought to celebrate modernity’s advances without being seduced by them or forgetting that they are subservient to the imperatives of capital.
Back to the spaces that exist within capitalism that allow for advance we need to also account for a theory of agency within constraints. Marx wrote that "humans make history but not in circumstances of their own choosing." Typically Marxists apply this to the political struggle - for instance, in Egypt the people are fighting for liberation and are making history but they are doing it in the context of imperialism, Islamism, etc etc. However, this also applies to the economy and to technology. The economic manifestation of that is in the uneasy marriage of use-value and exchange-value as discussed above. It means that capitalism, while a "totalizing system", is not always a totalitarian system. In fact, it needs to leave open a managed space in which people can think and create more or less freely in order to keep capitalism vital. That space changes and is ultimately subordinate to both profit and political stability (in order to secure profit) but it rarely disappears entirely. Even in North Korea, perhaps one of the most repressive regimes at present, the system must allow for a certain amount of "innovation" at least in the field of rocketry and nuclear technology (and perhaps in means of repression as well - freedom for the purposes of repression?). And this was the logic behind Glasnost and Perestroika in the waning years of the USSR. It was an attempt to open up space for greater innovation to save the Soviet economy. Besides the governmental and economic limitations on this freedom there are also ideological (self-policing) limitations, for instance in the field of embryonic stem cells. But, again, that space always exists. However, the fact that it must be managed in order to be measured against an inefficient and parasitic "middleman", ie. profit or repressive ideology, is a demonstration not only of the fortitude of human creativity but also of the need to move beyond an inefficient system.
This also implies something else: human creativity always threatens to go beyond the artificially imposed limits of capitalism. Marxists have always understood this, again, in relation to political struggle. Ideology tells us that capitalism is the end of history, there is no better way to organize society - there is no alternative - and yet we see from the upheavals in Egypt, Turkey, Brazil, et al that workers resist the capitalist imperative to accept speed-ups, pay and benefit cuts, service cuts, etc. The same applies in the realm of technology (brilliantly discussed by Walter Benjamin pre-WWII in his essay "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"). Not only are technologies invented that are problematic for capitalism in that there is no immediate way to generate profit from them but even those that are invented with profit in mind have gaps and holes in which non-profit or anti-profit uses take hold. Again, the internet is one of these. If you've read this far you'll be aware that I'm not generating any personal profit from this activity but at a more significant level the internet constantly challenges the ability to make profit from the distribution of information - piracy of films, software and music being the most obvious example. The struggle by corporations to control the internet has been going on for at least two decades without success. The attempt by Adobe, for instance, to recently launch a cloud-based version of its expensive Creative Suite software in part as a means to circumvent piracy was hacked within one day even though they spend tens of millions on digital rights management.
At a more abstract level, this suggests a theory of historical time that is polyphonic (if that's the right term). Basically, we experience time as a singular stream of events - each day has 24 hours, each year 365 days. One thing follows another all at the same time. And yet the pace of history is not uniform. Sometimes the political developments move quickly and sometimes much more slowly, and always at different paces from country to country and even region to region. Egypt is going through a period of rapid history in which the masses and their culture are changing more quickly in months than it did previously in years, perhaps decades. The Mubarak dictatorship had lasted decades and then was gone. The Muslim Brotherhood was the only domestic opposition for even longer and they are now in disrepute and have lost the support of millions of people in the space of a year. Politics is moving much more slowly in Canada at present. But there are also other layers of society - the economy, technology, sports, film - that move at their own pace. Even as they are related, of course, they have their own relative autonomy (as the old Marxist phrase goes). Technology can also develop more quickly than, say, political consciousness. We see some of this, for instance, in the rapid dominance of Chinese manufacturing in significant sectors of the North American economy, without, for a long period, the impact of this being felt in terms of political and cultural developments. All of which is to say that history has many streams that exist side-by-side, that pour into each other and then separate again or, perhaps more accurately, history moves in a way similar to fluid dynamics, involving multiple vectors and velocities within the same space. To understand history - in order to change it - we must be able to understand at each moment how these different streams interact with each other.
How does this effect Marxist propaganda? Of course the primary role of any radically oppositional ideology will be to expose the failures and weaknesses of the system. But we ought not to highlight the succeses of the system and attempt to pretend that they are failures. For instance, the generally brilliant writing of Hilary and Stephen Rose has dismissed the Human Genome Project and genomics more generally as a failure. And yet, as John Parrington points out in his article, while the naive expectations in the flush of success were unfounded, the HGP has revolutionized the field of gene research. It's also true that genomics and synthetic biology are serving industrial needs in ways that are potentially dangerous and, especially in agricutlure, really about forcing farmers to buy seeds of dubious value. But it is not the case that those sciences are in and of themselves a failure and have provided no advances. Recent work in regenerative medicine, stem cells and gene therapy (including work on improving results in heart failure recovery, fighting autoimmune diseases, HIV, Muscular Dystrophy, etc) has advanced enormously in part as a result of the insights gained by the HGP and the more recent work on epigenetics that was the focus of the ENCODE project. The problem, that this suggests, is not that capitalism doesn't provide revolutionary advances in science, technology and production. It is that it does so in a way that is inconsistent, contradictory, inhumane and often just downright destructive. To take full advantage of the gains that capitalism has wrought we need a system whose sole purpose is the satisfaction of human needs, not as an occasional and secondary by-product of profit-making.

SEE ALSO PARTS ONE & TWO IN THIS SERIES:

1) Marxism, Capitalism & Technology

2) Frankenfoods, Toothpaste, & Justin Bieber: Capitalism & Technology II

Massacre in Egypt: Is Revolution Worth The Price?

As I sat down to write this post the news of a tragic massacre of at least 32 Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated protestors, and the injury of 300 more was plastered all over the internet. That much is clear, the rest is yet to be disentangled (if ever) from two completely opposing stories by the Egyptian military and people on the scene. This is now one more massacre in a two year revolutionary process in which hundreds have died, chaos has reigned and nothing has been settled. I'm sure that millions of people in Egypt and even more around the region and around the world are asking: Is this what is necessary to win democracy and freedom? Is the price worth it?

There is obviously the danger of being glib in writing a judgment on the value or danger of  revolution from the safety of my office in Toronto, Canada - a country founded on the solid business principle of avoiding the messiness of revolution; a country that hasn't seen war in any significant way in 200 years. I'll try to avoid that as much as possible.

For certain the revolutionary process in the Middle East more generally, since the launch of what has become known as the Arab Spring, has had its share of chaos and tragedy. Dozens died in Bahrain in the struggle for democracy against a US/Saudi client regime - and suffered greater repression as a reward for their efforts and aspirations. In Yemen hundreds died only to see their aspirations deflected into a shabby compromise  that suited regional power-brokers - Saudi Arabia and the US (their involvement in aborting democratic movements is a theme and not a coincidence). In Libya, the west and their backers in the Middle East, in particular the Qatari emirate, swooped in quickly to ensure that the initial explosion of grassroots opposition to the Gaddafi dictatorship was controlled using western arms and logistics to suit the ends desired by the big oil companies, the US state department and the agenda of the EU. In Syria the repression of a popular movement led to civil war and the sickening sight of various imperialist powers - all of whom have happily repressed democratic movements around the world for generations - jockeying to gain the upper hand through the cynical manipulation of the various players caught in the Syrian tragedy. As always it is at the expense of local civilians, whether man, woman or child. As a former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, once put it when asked about US sanctions against Iraq that had killed perhaps a million children: "We think that the price is worth it."

And yet, it isn't as though the region or Egypt, in particular, is descending into tragedy from a state of pre-revolutionary bliss. The meddling of imperialism - from US financing of the military in Egypt and of the Occupation in Israel/Palestine to Russian arming of the Syrian dictatorship - has ensured a repressive and inhumane set-up in the region. And for the people of Egypt, in particular since the Camp David Peace Accords of the late 1970s, which won the compliance of the Egyptian state to the American agenda in return for billions of dollars in "aid", it has meant decades of, effectively, martial law, police repression, torture and dictatorship in all but name. The compliance of the Egyptian regime also freed Israel's hand to steal more land, kill more Palestinians and launch wars and attacks on their neighbours whenever it suited their colonialist agenda. All this was largely ignored by western media who, when they even bothered to notice, usually put the blame at the feet of "uncivilized Arabs" who needed "strong regimes" to maintain control and protect Israel, the "plucky little democracy" of the region.

What has changed in the present moment is that the masses, the tens of millions of people who have endured the tender mercies of imperialist-backed dictatorships, have attempted to force their way onto the political and historical stage. The "chaos" and "instability" that the media and governments bemoan is really the emergence of democracy in the form of the people waking up to their own power to control their destiny. In the first instance this is, by definition, chaotic as the old institutions, designed to guarantee dictatorship and the rule of both state and market capital, are destabilized and collapse. The ruling class loses many of the levers, primarily fear and quiescence, that it once had to maintain "order" and "stabillty". On the other hand, the newly awakened people haven't yet created their own institutions to replace the old. In this gap between old and new is a ferment of experimentation. Some of it involves the creation of new forms of organization - Egypt saw neighbourhood committees to defend the revolution appear and disappear, only to reappear again during the past two and a half years. There has been an explosion of independent trade unions involving millions of Egyptian workers, after decades of top-down, state controlled "unions". 

But they also attempt to use their old organizations and old institutions in new ways. Thus the Muslim Brotherhood, which has existed for almost a century as an organization that sought to alleviate the conditions in Egypt through charity and moral uplift (basically, obedience to a hierarchical and conservative interpretation of Islam) became the immediate beneficiary of a revolution that they didn't support. Similarly, the military has retained the allegiance of the masses from the reflected prestige of Gamal Abdel Nasser, who led the Free Officer's Movement that overthrew the Egyptian monarch and promoted a form of secular nationalism that challenged imperialism (before being sold off to US imperialism by his heirs) and delivered land reform and social progress. The revolution has become an intense testing ground for these institutions and organizations to see if they fit the needs of the masses.

First the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces took over the direct rule of the country after they facilitated the overthrow of the dictator Hosni Mubarak. But their habitual use of repression, torture and corruption, not to mention genetic opposition to the extension of democracy and social justice created growing anger and mobilization that forced them to surrender office to the Muslim Brotherhood. For the SCAF the conservative MB seemed an excellent vehicle to contain the aspirations of the revolution. They would allow the MB to implement their cultural agenda, a certain degree of Islamization of the Egyptian state, and in return the MB wouldn't touch the institutions of the state security apparatus, including the SCAF itself. The bourgeois led MB also happily went to the IMF for loans and imposed austerity on their own supporters at home in order to implement a neo-liberal agenda. The result was an increasingly mobilized opposition that drew up to 20 million demonstrators on June 30.

It was this "dangerous" mobilization, as with the overthrow of Mubarak, and the threat of major strikes that pushed the SCAF to remove Morsi from power and attempt to replace him with another set of faces, a grand coalition, that would be more acceptable to the masses, It was a pre-emptive attempt to prevent a deeper, more radical revolution. In this sense it was a major victory.

There are several dangers unfolding and that will continue to unfold until the revolution can be completed (and spread to other countries in the region at least, especially Saudi Arabia). Because the military facilitated the removal of Morsy it can empower and embolden them to use their renewed popularity to clampdown not only on the MB but also on the revolutionaries and the popular organizations as well. SCAF's intervention "from above" can also stop the rapid disintegration of the MB that was taking place "from below", giving them the mantle of victim of a Mubarak counter-revolution. This can draw even those skeptical of the MB leadership's intentions and abilities to rally round them in the belief that they are defending the revolution - a revolution that the MB leadership never supported and tried to abort as soon as Mubarak was gone, including supporting the SCAF at every turn (except the one that booted them out the door). This polarization of "masses against masses" as opposed to "masses against the state" opens the door to a potential civil war, on the one hand, and provides an excuse for the SCAF to elevate themselves as being above the fray and thus the legitimate vehicle to separate the two sides and impose a neutral order on the Egyptian people. 

It remains to be seen if the massacre of MB supporters outside of the Republican Guard barracks today was the result of a MB attempt to storm the facility and free former president Morsy from his arrest (with the side benefit of portraying themselves as victims of an army assault if they failed) or the army decided to raise the stakes to provide justification for declaring a state of emergency - or if it were all the result of trigger happy soldiers firing on riled up MB supporters who got too close to barricades (there is no shortage of such "accidents" of history). What is clear is that navigating this confusing terrain and clarifying the next steps in the struggle will require a clear leadership with roots amongst the Egyptian people in order to avoid the twin dangers of supporting the army against the MB or falling in behind the MB as the defenders of the revolution - either of which could lead towards a civil war and defeat of the revolution. That leadership isn't about a few brilliant individuals calling the shots, it will have to be a collective leadership of thousands and tens of thousands of revolutionaries whose collective experience will help them to navigate the chaos and work with others inside the revolution to move things forward. In other words, a revolutionary party.

That doesn't exist yet in Egypt but there are thousands attempting to build one. In the meantime, what is clear is that as in all places the people who have power have no interest in giving it up and will stoop to any depth necessary - murder, torture, conspiracies, lies - to defend what they have. The tragedy and chaos of the present moment is not the result of the revolution, it is the result of that unaccountable an unequally divided power. The solution to ending the tragedy of massacres and misery is not to surrender to the power that imposes such tragedy upon the people. It is to decisively defeat that power so that it is unable to prevent the people from living in freedom and true democracy.

Frankenfoods, Toothpaste, & Justin Bieber: Capitalism & Technology II

In a previous post I argued that too often Marxists fail to recognize the ways in which capitalism remains dynamic and continues to advance technologically and socially. This one-sidedness distorts analyses and perspectives and threatens to give Marxism the feel of a millennial doomsday sect. Instead Marxism ought to be perceived as a powerful critical tool for explaining the contradictions of capitalism and providing strategic answers to create a better world without them. To do so means that Marxism must be flexible and dynamic. It must not fear the strengths of capitalism but rather must build itself on the ways that capitalism has made a better, more efficient and humane system both possible and necessary. That failure is a result of an ideological defensiveness and ossification arising from the isolation of Marxists from workers struggle (at least in the English-speaking world) for longer than a generation. I want to now posit some thoughts on the way that technological development takes place under capitalism, how it is distorted by the profit-motive and by the prerogatives of the capitalist state – and yet still manages to create forms of progress that are often quite dramatic.

To summarize what I previously argued, billions of people now have access to the internet (though two-thirds still do not). China and a number of other “developing nations” are growing at a rate unprecedented in modern times, at least in terms of scale. China has plans, for instance, to urbanize an additional 500 million people over the next decade or so. Private companies, most notably SpaceX, are bringing down the cost of space travel (potentially by a hundred-fold if they manage to establish reusable rocket components) or, in the case of Planetary Resources, developing business plans to mine asteroids. Regenerative medicine is working on the development of 3D printing of organs, regrowing lost teeth and even reversing male pattern baldness. Gene therapy, long shunned after some earlier false starts, is moving a number of therapies for MD, AIDS, hemophilia, blindness and even the common cold, through clinical trials. Moore’s Law has advanced computing to the point that supercomputers from the 1970s that were housed in entire buildings are now contained in a smartphone that can be bought for under $500. The world has never seemed to change as quickly in human history as it is today.

And yet there are serious problems and great dangers that face humanity from hunger, diabesity (diabetes and obesity) and poverty to war and climate change. Ice caps are melting, the economy is stagnating (though with recent signs of life in the USA) and we face challenges never before faced. How is this possible? It is fundamentally rooted in the contradictions of the way that capitalism organizes the economy, research and more. I want to argue that the problems are rooted in at least six ways that capitalism distorts research and technological development. These are as follows:

1) Capitalism only develops technologies that can generate profit, and usually only those that can generate short-term profit. This has a few results:

a. Capitalism produces technologies that we don’t need. We don’t need a new smartphone every year or a new flat screen TV or remote controlled lawn mower. More than anything capitalism uses advertising and marketing to get us to buy dumb shit. This is rooted in part in alienation from our own productive capabilities as human beings. Because our labour is forced we seek reward in consumption, literally in buying things or in our animal desires – eating, sex, etc. – rather than in what makes us human, our ability to labour (ie. Transform nature) because that ability is taken from us by forced labour (work for someone else or starve).

b. Capitalism doesn’t develop technologies that we do need. If it doesn’t produce an obvious profit, technologies are neglected. 

c. Capitalism produces stuff that is simply garbage and doesn't work but which continues to be produced because it generates profits. Think of GMOs, these are very big business. Yet, many recent studies suggest that they don't do what they say - increase crop yields. (There are also many potential dangers in relation to human consumption, et al). But GMOs have the benefit, from the point of view of capitalists, of allowing agribusinesses to dominate the agricultural production because they can patent the seeds and thereby outlaw their "illegal use" such as seed banking (which would permit farmers to avoid having to buy more seed and fertilizer every year. It also allows the corporation to generate sales of ancillary products like fertilizer and pesticide, since their seeds are designed to be used in conjunction with their specific products. Again, with no clear, uncontested evidence of the seeds being useful for producing more of anything except profit.

2) Related to that last point, capitalism is only interested in technologies that it can enclose using legal measures like copyright, patents, etc. We are all aware of the music and film industries and their struggles to stop “piracy” (much of which is actually just freely sharing, involving no money or profit) but this extends to many fields, including the recent decision by the US Supreme Court to negate the right of companies to patent naturally existing genes (as opposed to synthetic genes, such as with GMOs). While it's good that companies can't go so far as patenting, in this instance, the genes that lead to higher breast cancer risk, in the years to come patented synthetic genes will become an obstacle to research and meeting human need - just as patented pharmaceuticals have contributed to tens of thousands of deaths from AIDS in Africa, where people and governments couldn't afford the exorbitant prices.

3) Capitalism produces technological developments that achieve false, rather than true, efficiencies by externalizing as many costs as possible – on the environment, onto workers, etc. The most obvious one here is fossil fuels. There has been talk for decades, for instance, as to when solar power will achieve the same cost as coal, natural gas, oil, etc. But if we account for the future cost of cleaning the environment; the cost of extreme weather events and the melting of the polar ice caps; the cost of healthcare for children with asthma, the cost to the deterioration of buildings in cities, etc. – this point was probably already reached a while ago. The inefficiencies are hidden and offloaded to the general population. At a more "mundane" level, the recent deaths of over a thousand garment workers in Bangladesh is a stark demonstration of exactly what it means to "externalize costs" onto workers.

4) The technologies that capitalism invents that could make life better – for instance robotics and other forms of automation, etc. – instead cause dislocation through unemployment and provides a downward pressure on wages through deskilling, offshoring, etc. This is pretty straightforward – the rise of the internet has made international trade more possible, permitting the off-shoring of jobs, from low-skilled manufacturing to service jobs. Websites like designcrowd.com and Elance.com allow the hiring of freelancers in the developing world for half or less the cost of paying for those services in the first world. Foxconn, which produces the iPhone and many other high-tech items announced a plan in 2011 to utilize three million robots within a few years. This will come at the expense of jobs in China.

5) Capitalism attempts to use technology to solve problems that are created by social conditions, not lack of technology.

a. An obesity pill is a really obvious human health issue. Obesity is caused by the rise of processed foods that lack nutrition but which are craved by time and cash-strapped working families.

b. Greater crop yields – Monsanto and other companies seek to patent genetically modified crops (related to the above point about enclosing tech and bogus technology) but the problem is not production it is that people can’t afford food. There is no food shortage, there is a shortage of “effective demand” – people who can afford to buy the food.

6) Of those technologies that capitalism is interested in that don’t have immediately apparent profit opportunities, the only ones that usually get developed have benefits for the state, usually in the form of its military arm.

a. Drones – these have become widespread, first for foreign military purposes (literally to bomb people in the Middle East and places like Afghanistan). They are now being utilized by police and security services as a way to perform surveillance on domestic populations.

b. Even in healthcare, the areas that get funded are in large part that have a military component, like treating soldier’s who suffer major trauma.

These are, of course, only a small sample of technologies and technological dynamics that are distorted by capitalist dynamics. I may well have missed some and invite other to add to this list. But it nonetheless suggests that capitalism is both inefficient and destructive in the ways that it develops technology.


SEE ALSO PARTS ONE & THREE IN THIS SERIES:

1) Marxism, Capitalism & Technology

2) Genes, Robots & The Internet: How Capitalism Revolutionizes The Planet

Deflected Marxism: The Poison Of The Intelligentsia

I was thinking recently of an apocryphal story that was told to me many years ago as I sat in a dank basement drinking from a keg of beer. Apparently Lenin was listening to Beethoven with the Russian novelist Gorky and commented something along the lines: “ah, the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. Sometimes they produce such beauty that one wants to reach out and pat them on the head. But you mustn’t, they must be beaten with a stick.” This also reminded me of Marx’s irreverence towards the German intellectuals, in particular the Young Hegelians, and his response to Bruno Bauer known as “A Critique of Critical Criticism” (or The Holy Family). What these recollections stirred in me was that true Marxism has at its root a disdain of the intelligentsia with their high falutin ways.

This has current relevance because the lack of working class radicalization and mobilization in the English-speaking world means that Marxism has largely become the preserve of academics. Marxism is no longer the ideology of the leading edge of the working class movement. On the one hand it is important that someone keeps alive the ideas of working class revolution and the powerful critical and theoretical tools of Marxism to analyze capitalism. On the other hand the dominance of intellectuals has a high cost.

I have seen over the years a number of arguments about how professors (and teachers) have become proletarianized, their control over their conditions of work eroded. There has been much discussion and analysis of how they face job instability and a curriculum, particularly amongst teachers in elementary and secondary education, that is more tightly controlled by the state. For sure neo-liberalism has eroded the conditions of work of teachers and professors. But, nonetheless, they continue to enjoy privileges and conditions of work that make them unique from other workers and this shapes both their consciousness and practice to the detriment of Marxism. I want to focus on professors here though a lot of this – other than ideological/theoretical production and its impact on consciousness – can also be said about teachers. The first thing that ought to be apparent is that teachers and professors are supervisors. They have a power over their students as the object of their work that is unique amongst workers. They develop a habit of speaking and being listened to, of disciplining others with deadlines, threats of punishment (even if they choose not to use that power), and grades that can determine the future success of their students. For most workers, their day-to-day work lives are about evading power, resisting discipline and even cheating the grading process. They have power over no one, except insofar as they bond together to resist their managers through implied or actual threats of strike action, workplace slowdowns, etc. To say that this doesn’t effect consciousness is to deny material reality.

It is true that the conditions of work of academics have been undermined with tenure becoming more difficult to attain as neoliberalism (and now with Massive Online Open Courses gaining popularity). But the irony of this increased competition for the privilege of a job for life is that it is likely to make academics more subservient to the more odious aspects of academic life, in particular the tendency towards splits over minutiae as well as the tendency to sycophancy towards those with tenure.

The tendency of Marxist organizations led by professors to split and fracture is a direct result of the fact that professors prove their merit at work by demonstrating the novelty of their ideas. You are expected to specialize to the point of spending your life exploring a niche discipline that is usually utterly obscure to the broader population. And you become successful insofar as you can generate some original idea that sets you apart from other academics. The easiest way to do this is not to use an existing methodology to more profoundly understand society so that the masses can more effectively win change. Rather, like the perpetual cycle of the fashion and consumer-products industry, you must come up with something unique – a fusion of this and that thinker, finding the fault in some elevated member of a canon or another professor who is respected in your own field. This leads to a pressure to seek out difference as an end in itself. Novelty sells books, gets you on panels at academic conferences and, ultimately, is how you get to be the head of your department, get tenure, junkets, sabbaticals, etc. For workers, being different and challenging the company’s methods gets you fired. In a similar vein, professors are rewarded for individual effort and work. If they can increase their output of books, papers and placement on prestigious academic panels, they are more likely to receive significant material rewards. For most workers, while some might be promoted to management, rewards accrue to the degree that workers can come together collectively to resist the discipline and conditions of the workplace. You want a raise – you go on strike or form a union. Professors want a raise – publish a book.

Professors have prestige. It may be more difficult to get a full appointment now than it was in the 1980s but the goal of every academic is that position in which people look to you for your ideas. Most workers have no illusion that doing their job well will get them listened to in anything more than the most cursory, tokenistic way (I remember well the suggestion box at Kodak Canada – you dropped in your ideas and never heard from them again). And, of course, it isn’t the sessional professors with unstable employment who, by and large, provide the modern ideological development of Marxism – it is the tenured professors with prestige and job stability.

And those professors have far more free time than do workers. Teachers get two months off every summer and professors get upwards of four months with a year off out of every five to pursue their field and publish a book. Most workers get two to three weeks off if they’re lucky. That has an impact, combined with the pressure to differentiate, in allowing academics to play a destructive role. Literally, they have more time to muck about.

Of course, I’m not the first person to notice this pattern. Besides Lenin, assuming the apocryphal story is true, Tony Cliff also wrote about the role of the intelligentsia in the context of third world revolutions as a critique and updating of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. This relatively recent article described Cliff’s argument about the intelligentsia as follows:

“The desire of this group is always to rise above society. These tendencies can be checked when the intelligentsia are involved in mass politics, but when they are free of the constraints and discipline of a wider movement, ‘they show clearer and much more extreme tendencies towards elitism, arbitrariness, as towards vacillation and splits’.”

As this quote suggests, it is not to say that professors (and teachers) can’t be useful participants and even leaders in the socialist movement. They have the luxury of developing ideas and analysis, with access to research assistants and other forms of resources, which are out of reach for the vast majority of workers. But their habits of domination and elitism, deriving from their day-to-day practice are a strong pull and leads them towards practices that are destructive to the socialist movement. They must be held to account in a profoundly sharp way. Like union officials – and the reality is that the most activist-inclined leftist or Marxist professors have a relationship to the workers movement that is mediated through the union bureaucracy – they are prone to high-handed methods and unused to democratic accountability. Challenge your professor and you’re likely to get a failing grade.

Insofar as they are allowed to hold offices of responsibility in the socialist movement they must be disciplined by the workers and not the other way around. Their habits of unquestioned authority from students who are desperate for good marks, especially grad students who hope to be the next in line for these positions, must be constantly challenged. The only real way to challenge the bad habits of intellectuals – the tendency to splitting over personal slights elevated to the level of theory, to authoritarianism and command rule, etc. – is a mobilized and confident working class with an organized leadership of worker-intellectuals, whose authority comes not from social power but from the respect of leading collective struggles. I’m often reminded of a story told to me by a postal worker militant who reminisced about my grandfather, also a militant. In the 1970s, when the postal workers were a powerful and leading edge of the Canadian working class, wildcat strikes were a regular occurrence. They would keep their bosses in line by having one of them pick a fight with a supervisor and when the supervisor lost their temper and disciplined them, the whole workplace would walk out (and go sit on a patio and drink beer). Workers who will risk their jobs to challenge people who have real social power over them will also challenge the pretensions of professors who want to provide ideological leadership to the movement.

And that brings us to the problem of today: the working class is not confident and mobilized. There are no significant rank-and-file movements in the English-speaking world, outside of a few pockets. The passivity of the working class has left Marxism to be the preserve of a few workers, students and academics, which gives the academics greater weight inside of Marxist organizations. That leads those organizations to becoming sclerotic and bureaucratized, to become inculcated in habits of deference and prestige mongering, where the brilliance of this or that individual is valued over the collective experience of the worker-members. And, of course, where individual “brilliance” and “achievement” become more highly valued, these traits tend to accrue to those from higher social classes, who have the confidence to dominate through wit and rhetoric. It isn’t an accident that few people from working class backgrounds become professors and where they do it usually is the result of “fitting in” to the predominant modes of advancement and recognition. From being the servants of the workers’ movement, giving it ideological strength and depth, they become more like a form of gout, weakening and hobbling the movement further, causing splits, acrimony and cliqueism (after all, in academia, currying favour, aka brown-nosing, is the next best thing to splitting hairs when it comes to winning personal advancement).

A quick survey of most Marxist organizations in the western world will illustrate this point. Until the working class begins to move in a serious way the tyranny of the intelligentsia will continue to make Marxism a form of career advancing rhetoric that lacks the kind of life that is necessary if it is to be a vital movement. Like my previous discussion of revolutionary bureaucracy, the lack of struggle can only lead to the dead hand of orthodoxy and cliqueism. To be a vital and revolutionary ideology, Marxism will have to smash the domination of what Lenin called the “committee men” and academics, whose experience tends to lead them towards a natural alliance. They will have to fear and revere the working class more than the dean of their department, the heads of the academic publishing houses or, indeed, the full-time leadership of revolutionary organizations.

Marxism, Capitalism & Technology

Thoughts on Marxism & Technology Part I There is a joke about Marxist economists that goes something along the lines of “Marxists have predicted five of the last four recessions”. I was reminded of this joke recently as I debated with a comrade about capitalism and progress, specifically around technological advances in modern capitalism. I suppose that for Marxists, as radical critics of the present system that we will tend towards always pointing out the weaknesses and contradictions of the system; the way in which it develops technology – the means of production – in a distorted way that leads to economic, environmental and humanitarian crises. These critiques are important tools for puncturing the arrogance and pretensions of the present system and pointing to a better, less destructive way, to organize society.

And, yet, there is a danger that we look like Luddites or moaners, scoffing at everything and seeing no good in anything, perhaps not to each other – we expect “ruthless criticism of everything that exists” - but certainly to most working class people. I remember this well in the 1990s as the internet was expanding rapidly and changing the way that we communicate, access information, etc. Of course, it wasn’t only us who were grappling with this. I was in university at the time and there were debates about how to treat internet-based research for papers – was it an academically valid resource; how ought it to be footnoted in papers, etc? But our own reaction to the internet, and now web 2.0, looks quaint to say the least. We have had two reactions, which typify in general the reaction of contemporary Marxists to technology. These are 1) deny its significance (“only middle class people use the internet”, “it hasn’t changed anything about how we organize or communicate”) and 2) emphasize its destructive aspects (British Marxist Alex Callinicos recently referred to the “dark side” of the internet, leading to much chuckling).

The real problem, of course, lies not with the failure of capitalism to innovate and transform the lives of people, not only in the developing world (to which I’ll return) but also those in the developed world. Of course this transformation includes a serious destructive element – the rise of smartphones has led to proxy wars and trade maneuvers towards securing and manipulating rare earth metals that are key elements in smartphone manufacture, for instance. In terms of the economy, the irresistible pressure of Moore’s Law, which describes the tendency for the number of transistors on chips to double every 18 months or so, has not only given us the aforementioned smartphones, it has also led to the deskilling of a whole number of fields, technologically-driven unemployment, etc. Not to mention the destructiveness of mining practices, etc.

But there is also a progressive side to this development. It is a good thing that we can access information instantaneously. I am someone who works from home for a company in another province. In the course of a given day I receive material in pdf format via e-mail. I input my expenses into an online bookkeeping website that calculates and itemizes all of my expenses and income for me (for free). I pay my bills online and send money electronically, which saves me hours of standing in line at the bank. I purchase or sell second hand products from another country and have them shipped to my home. I pay another freelancer to design a poster or do research for which I’m ill-equipped. This list doesn’t even touch on social media. As I write this I’m involved in a crowd-funding campaign for a movie that I co-directed that has raised several thousand dollars. A lot of that money has come from people I haven’t personally seen for a decade or more but with whom I maintain a semblance of contact through Facebook. I’m not that old but when I was in public school there weren’t even personal computers and our introduction to computing was filling in punch cards using binary language to perform simple math problems. We sent off the cards to be processed and they returned a week later. To say that advances in computers have transformed our culture – even if it hasn’t eliminated capitalism, is stating the obvious.

On a society-wide scale the transformation of China is nothing short of breath-taking. A generation ago the vast majority of Chinese lived in the countryside without phones and TVs and were illiterate. China is now an urban nation with 100 times more cities above 1 million people than the US, with income in the top 50% of the planet, and with literacy around 95%. As a result of innovation the Chinese company that manufactures Apple’s iPhones and the Kindle, with a workforce of about 500,000 in China alone, is moving towards adding up to 3 million robots to its manufacturing process. The Broad Group, originally a manufacturer of air conditioning units, will break ground next month on what will be the world’s tallest building using factory fabrication techniques. The 838 metre building will be erected in about six months – compared to six years for the current record holder, the Burj Khalifa. Of course there are problems – China is a dictatorship; the major cities of China are rife with corruption, pollution and smog, gridlock, etc. These are not insignificant but to deny that capitalism has transformed China is to deny reality.

The same exploration of technological advancements could be applied to multiple fields. In many ways, in my opinion, we are in the midst of a new industrial revolution that brings together a conjuncture of materials science, computing power, biology, robotics, space technology, in a way that is transforming our society. This combines with the effects of post-colonialism in significant areas of the world – belated and problematic as that is. The penetration of China into Africa, where the previous relationships were almost purely about capital outflows, is transforming that continent as well. Just as the industrial revolution didn’t eliminate exploitation, neither do present advances, but it is nonetheless transforming our world.

Is there a crisis gripping capitalism internationally? No doubt about it. Greece has been in meltdown for half a decade. Spain is not much better with close to 50% unemployment for youth. Japan has had a decade of deflation. The list goes on. But without revolutions to resolve these crises it is certain that capitalism will itself solve them – through destructive and inhumane means, to be sure. But if capitalism could survive the Great Depression (with a world war that cost tens of million of lives) it can survive the present stagnation. There are whole swathes of the world from Africa to Latin America to Asia that are still in the early stages of development and can provide an outlet for the system. War and imperialism provide another mechanism.

What about the environmental crisis? The problem of carbon emissions and climate change is absolutely devastating. Severe weather patterns will become more and more the norm, particularly in regions where this was already the pattern – hurricanes, monsoons, tornadoes and more. This is radicalizing millions of people and making them open to the argument that this system is fundamentally destructive. But we ought to take a lesson from the ozone crisis of the 80s and 90s, which was then considered to be the looming apocalypse. It didn’t materialize and capitalism was able to reduce the use of CFCs to the point that the ozone layer is no longer depleting and the ozone hole has shrunk. Of course carbon-based fuels are much more central to the economy than CFCs but we shouldn’t kid ourselves that capitalism is structurally incapable of overcoming its dependence upon fossil fuels. The growth of renewables and nuclear forms of energy are proceeding at rates sometimes five times the rate of growth of the global economy. They are still a small component of the overall mix of energy sources but capitalism, with the aid of the state, can shift quickly where necessary. Of course these are problematic, particularly nuclear power (though research into deep burn fission may well resolve the problem of nuclear waste). However, in China where energy use is growing most rapidly (in the US carbon emissions have actually declined since the onset of recession in 2008) there is a concerted effort, for national security reasons and because of smog in the cities, to both increase energy efficiency and to move away from dirty coal and to increase renewables in a significant way. Will it be enough? Hard to say but it might be and, while arguing against capitalism’s dependence on fossil fuels we ought to be prepared for the distinct possibility of moving towards significant carbon reduction and even carbon neutrality. The only thing that capitalism absolutely needs is profits, everything else is more or less contingent.

We can take a lesson from Marx when it comes to how we view capitalism. In the Communist Manifesto, written more than 150 years ago, Marx begins by praising the power of capitalism to transform the planet. That power is no less diminished today than it was in Marx’s time. If anything it has increased exponentially. The belief that the dynamic period of capitalist development has passed is a myth. China’s rise – and the imminent rise of Africa and Latin America - ought to be proof enough of this. Of course it is true, more than ever, to say that capitalism is obsolete but that is not the same thing. Capitalism is obsolete because capitalism itself has made other ways of organizing the system both possible and necessary to end the ongoing destruction of our planet and the brutal exploitation of humans. But it is not the same to say that capitalism no longer is dynamic and no longer produces advances that will aid a future society in which profit and imperialism are no longer the driving force for advancement.

The real challenge for Marxism is not the continued existence of capitalist dynamism and development. The real problem is that Marxism as a living, mass movement has been isolated for generations. The impact of Stalinism followed by the decline of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s has led to an ideology of retrenchment. We have lost confidence and that has made us defensive, which has had an impact on Marxism at both the level of organization, leading to bureaucratic and brittle methods, and at the level of theory. Lenin, at the head of a victorious revolution could declare that communism equaled Soviet power (basically a new model of democracy organized through workplaces) plus electricity. Imagine declaring anything similar today viz the internet or biotechnology or robotics. We now fear anything that seems to undermine the millennial dreams of Marxism, such as the continuing power of capitalism to transform millions of lives. The idea that capitalism could still progress suggests falsely that our goals are obsolete, rather than giving us confidence that the advances of capitalism make the possibility of socialism more palpable. We need to return to Marx in engaging critically with the technological advances that are coming fast and furious. We shouldn’t pretend that genomics is irrelevant or the equivalent of phrenology, the 19th century quack science of measuring skull bumps to determine criminality, for instance. Pointing to genetic reductionism – the idea that there is a gay gene or a gene for criminality or even one gene responsible for most diseases – is to shadow box with arguments from ten or fifteen years ago. The arguments and those methods have largely moved on as a result of experience. This is not to say that there aren’t still problems with genomics and the field of genetics more broadly. From GMOs to genetically modified algae that produce diesel, to medical treatments, genomics often seeks to treat problems whose origin lies elsewhere, in socially created problems that arise from capitalism itself. Nonetheless, we should see the revolutionary potential that these advances hold if they are harnessed towards human ends, rather than those of profit. We should celebrate their liberatory potential while resisting their capitalist implementation that serves profit or imperialism at the expense of humans.

This is not simply of academic importance. It effects the work of Marxists in two ways. On the one hand it is important in terms of relating to working class people’s experience and not coming across as a cult that denies that the world is round. When growing numbers of people with cancer have more effective treatments because the genome of their tumours can be analyzed to prescribe the most effective medication we look foolish to say that genomics is irrelevant – as opposed to pointing to the role of environmental and dietary pressures that lead to higher rates of cancer, or the fact that most people lack access to these treatment options. And, on the other hand, denying reality distorts our analysis and perspectives, which shapes how we act and organize to change the world. If we are “predicting five of the last four recessions” it speaks, in a humorous way, to a weakness in our approach: a desire for capitalist catastrophe to prove our theory correct, rather than a desire for popular mobilization to prove our theory correct. The irony is that we don’t need catastrophism to demonstrate the power of Marxism. We don’t need to fear scientific advance and the dynamism of capitalism as a threat to our ideology. The dynamism of capitalism is creating an ever-larger working class whose interest remains the overthrow of their exploiters. The rulers of China are scared more than anything by the rebellion of their population – who resist far more militantly and regularly than the North American working class. And the scientific advances demonstrate that capitalist authoritarianism and private property are hindrances to realizing the full potential of those advances, and that the democratization of science is the only means to avoid the destructive application of those advances.

SEE ALSO PARTS TWO & THREE IN THIS SERIES:

1) Frankenfoods, Toothpaste, & Justin Bieber: Capitalism & Technology II

2) Genes, Robots & The Internet: How Capitalism Revolutionizes The Planet

Marxism & Religion: Part 3

Religion is the origin of all social thought – philosophy, science, law, ethics, etc. Like the social thought that we now consider secular, it is also imbued with a referent principle that provides a foundational justification for its imperatives and truth claims. For religion the foundational principle is the will of God, for liberal society it is natural law, for Marxism it is human species-being, which is the ability to perform creative labour (thus transforming self and world). My argument is that it is not necessarily the case that the first and the last are in contradiction. Or, rather, accepting certain conceptions of the “will of God” doesn’t preclude a philosophical framework in which one relies upon the notion of species-being for the foundation of human action. Certain understandings of Islam, for instance, conceive of God as the sum of everything in the universe [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_science]. To engage in scientific research is another road to seek an understanding of God’s will through understanding the natural laws, which are partial expressions of God Himself. Similarly, one can argue that God, understood as described above, created humans with a certain species-being and to struggle for that species-being to be liberated from alienation and exploitation is a righteous struggle to bring humans into harmony with their God-given nature. That is, religion is not necessarily a barrier to rational examination of nature and society. It can, in fact, provide an impetus.

The key determination of religion’s role is political and historical. Going back to my previous discussion of Kautsky and his examination of the rise of Christianity in the context of the growing Jewish revolt against Rome in the 1st Century CE, he notes that the messiah must be understood not as someone who will lead people to righteousness through cleansing them of sin by his own death. Rather, the messiah is a warrior prince who will lead the Jewish people, under the yoke of both the Romans and a compliant and corrupt local ruling class, in a revolutionary war to win their freedom. The messiah is understood as much in practical as spiritual terms. When Josephus, the first century eyewitness, and chronicler of the Jewish revolt discusses the various self-declared messiahs leading tens of thousands into the desert or to the banks of the River Jordan – usually to be slaughtered by the Roman army – these have to be viewed not as we would contemporary religious cults. These were religiously inspired political revolts that were crushed but reappeared again and again, though the insurmountable character of Roman power shifted the presumed character of the messiah increasingly in the direction of the supernatural. The Jewish and (likely) Christian urge to insurgency as a core religious principle probably wasn’t broken until the second Jewish revolt, or Bar Kokhba Revolt, that took place some 60 years after the first Jewish war against Rome in 66-72AD. It took two profound defeats, with tens of thousands captured into slavery, tens of thousands slain, the local political and religious leadership shattered and sent into exile and the Jewish capital destroyed in order to bleed Judaism (and the minor Jewish sect of Christianity) of its rebelliousness, at least in the ancient world. In this sense, the rise of the Catholic Church has to be understood in a sense similar to Stalinism – it is the product of a world historic defeat of Christianity, not its victorious triumph. Nonetheless, this is a profound demonstration of the ways in which belief systems, including codified dogma, are subject to the fire of historical experience and molecular transformations over long stretches of time.

Now, before I am handed the long list of crimes by organized religion throughout history and around the world, let me just say that these, while true, don’t negate my point. Certainly all forms of idealistic dogma, infected by pessimism turned into principle, or by ruling class ideas given eternal justification through imputing them to be the wishes of God (or Fuhrer or Great Helmsman, whatever) can act as an obstacle to revolution or even to justify horrors from the Inquisition to the Holocaust. This applies to Marxist ideas and Marxist thinkers as much as it does to religion, witness the earnest defenses and denials of Stalin’s genocidal policies during the Great Purges by well-meaning, self-identified Marxists. Of course we try to test our principles against reality but let’s be honest, at least amongst ourselves, shall we. It is the rare Marxist who honestly and regularly engages in the kind of “ruthless criticism of everything that exists” urged by Karl himself towards one’s own principles – whether that be the “socialist character” of the former USSR or China or Cuba or the validity of Trotsky’s transitional program or the continued relevance of a strategic focus on the working class. Not to disparage any particular position on any of these things but just to point out that we operate on faith based upon past insights or, indeed, prejudices more often than we care to admit. The fact that they are coded into a rational discourse doesn’t change one iota the faith-based character of many of our present positions. The doctrine of the Third Period, in which the Stalinized Communist Parties around the world went on a rampage against everyone else on the left during the late 1920s, was given a perfectly rational form of argument to justify utter madness. At a more mundane level, it is simply not possible or desirable to constantly critique and review all aspects of the canon. At a certain point the past argument decay like radioactive half-life leaving behind an act of faith to justify positions – particularly when the level of struggle is low for an extended period of time. That is why not only religious ideas have provided justification for terrible crimes and for resisting social change – so too have liberal ideas and, more recently, Marxist ideas. The traditional Trotskyist escape route, to point to the pressure of material circumstances leading to the degeneration of the Bolshevik Revolution apply with equal justification to religion. As noted above, Catholicism was the product of the defeat and decay of revolutionary Christianity.

Karl Kautsky, expelled from the Marxist canon for so long because of his renegacy, is a prime example of the transformation of a revolutionary into his opposite. We apply labels for such phenomenon that have descriptive power and provide a convenient shorthand – renegade, centrist, reformist, etc. But those labels also freeze in aspic a process that is ongoing and dynamic. It allows us to forget that our own ideas remain in process, probably until we fly up to heaven on gossamer wings. This is a problem for two reasons. The most obvious is that it blunts our own critical faculties. The self-righteous mind is an uncritical mind. But it also means that we lose the good in the teachings of those who later “betray the faith”. We have forgotten the power of Kautsky’s analysis. Years ago I read The Algebra of Revolution, a book on the Marxist dialectic, by John Rees. It still informs my approach to dialectics and for that I’m grateful. Yet it contains a critique of Kautsky as having rejected dialectics and that this is at the root of his inability to see and understand the bureaucratization of the German SDP – thus explaining his becoming a renegade and counter-revolutionary. I accepted this on faith and even repeated it now and again, though Kautsky has been so thoroughly expunged that he rarely comes up. But then I read the Foundations of Christianity and what did I find – not only a sophisticated use of dialectical materialism to analyze historical events, but also a beautiful use of the idea of combined and uneven development (always ascribed to Trotsky in my Marxist education). There’s also an analysis of the rise of bureaucracy in the workers movement that is thrown into the book in such a casual way that it is obvious it had been discussed elsewhere. In fact, Kautsky’s analysis is much better than Lenin’s analysis of the labour bureaucracy laid out in “Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism.” All these years I thought that Tony Cliff and the IS Tradition had pioneered a sophisticated materialist analysis of the labour bureaucracy that superceded Lenin’s “crude materialism” and here I read it in a book about Christianity by a renegade published in 1908. And yet, notwithstanding Kautsky’s sophisticated and supple Marxism he was, indeed, a renegade against his own principles. Rather than intoning his crimes it ought to give us pause to reflect on the frailty of all movements and systems of thought, especially those of individuals, which seek to remake the world. And it ought to remind us that, insofar as history gives a damn at all about us, it will judge our shortcomings harshly as well.

The point of this journey through the crimes and misdemeanors of history is that we must not mistake the degeneration of movements, doctrines and modes of thought with those things themselves. All these things evolve historically and must be studied in their specificity, including particular expressions of Marxism and Marxist movements.

Nonetheless, most Marxists would argue that while religion might be flexible, and might play role in the struggle for social liberation, as it has repeatedly in history, it is nonetheless a product of class society, which will wither with the victory of socialism. Even were that true would it make religion any different than Marxism, which is first and foremost a theory of social combat? In this sense it too will have been rendered irrelevant once class struggle ceases to be the motor of history. I agree that such an event, to be hoped for, would absolutely transform important aspects of religion and cause a rethinking of many key elements of both religious dogma and ritual, along with shattering reactionary religious institutions, like the Catholic hierarchy – as it will transform every field of human activity: sex, the family, work, medicine, sports, et al. At the same time, I want to argue that religion will absolutely not cease to exist as a community of belief united by a series of principles derived from an awe of the incomprehensible vastness of the universe and the puny finiteness of human life. And this is an important point that Marxists forget. Religion’s first point of origin is not class society, though it is sullied by it along with everything else. The religious impulse derives from the mysteries of the universe. By and large we no longer believe that Gods inhabit trees and rocks or are the cause of lightning. We no longer expect the kind of miracles we see in the New and Old Testament, of turning water into wine or parting seas – partly because most of the miracles have been surpassed by technology and now seem rather pedestrian and amateurish. But the universe is still largely a mystery and probably will be for centuries or longer. In the contradiction that exists between our ability to grasp this vastness, Freud described it in Civilization and its Discontents as an oceanic feeling, and our experience of the infinitesimally smaller thing that is a human life – or even human society – is the space in which religion becomes possible. As long as people die and we haven’t ourselves ascended to godhead we will seek to find ways to grapple with that gap emotionally, ethically and morally. The hardened Marxist will of course scoff: “we will conquer the mysteries with the power of science liberated from class society.” But this misses (at least) a couple of things. Intellectual and abstract understanding cannot satisfy all of our emotional needs. Understanding the laws of the conservation of matter and energy isn’t much use at the funeral of a loved one. Knowing the role of genetics, epigenetics, proteomics, nutrition and human biology doesn’t stop a parent’s heart from filling with emotion and awe at the birth of a child. It feels like a miracle because it is a miracle that such a thing should happen in the whole of the universe and arise from apparently nothing. Stripped of the distortions of class society and the reflections of class struggle, religion will nonetheless continue in some form to provide an outlet for the still natural condition of mortality and finiteness in an infinite universe. Of course the exact form it will take is as impossible to understand as the dynamic and multitudinous ways in which a post-capitalist society will be organized democratically from the bottom. To attempt to describe the precise character of it is as silly as attempts to describe the precise ways that economy and culture will be organized under socialism precisely because these will the product of mass participation and experimentation over an extended period of time. All any proponents of radical transformation can do in the here and now is to struggle to create the conditions to unleash human creativity. The reason why we need to show respect for religion, to include expressions of it in the pantheon of potentially powerful ideologies of social change, is to increase the likelihood that humanity will achieve the liberation to ignore our dreams and to create their own. Opening the gates of Marxism to include those who accept the basic premises – self-emancipation, materialist conception of history – in a world where religion continues to dominate, is an important strategic consideration.**

** I should say that I’m an “atheist”, have been since before I was a Marxist, and have never even been baptized. This is a strategic and epistemological argument for a certain kind of philosophical pluralism within a strategic, materialist unity. A Muslim who fights for the unity of the working class and for permanent revolution is more valuable to me than an atheist Stalinist who seeks alignment with bourgeois “progressives”.

Marxism & Religion: Part 2 - From Hatred to Brotherhood

Marxism is a child of the Enlightenment. It was born of the revolutions in politics, philosophy and economy that shook Europe and America from the 17th Century through to the 19th Century. As such it was tempered in part in the polemics and struggles against religious authority. After all, religion was the ideology of the European ruling classes, used to justify the right of kings and popes to do as they pleased at the expense of the people. To be against religious authority was to be against the feudal order. It was to be in favour of equal rights and natural law, as opposed to the rights and privileges of estates.

But Marxism was also a break with the Enlightenment. It developed after the retreat of the great French Revolution, long after the ossification of the English Revolution and the disappointment and slavery that issued from the American Revolution. The experience of revolt and disappointment deepened the critique of Marx and Engels. This was particularly true after their very direct experience of the German revolution in 1848, which was defeated by the treachery of the bourgeoisie, the class that had led the Enlightenment and the revolutions of the previous century. But even before Marx raised the call for permanent revolution to sweep away the bourgeoisie as well as the old feudal order, he and Engels had reached an understanding that the phenomenon of religious ideas and religious practices has to be understood as an expression of the experience of contemporary humans:

“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.”

It was no longer the case that religion was a trick pulled on the masses by the ruling classes. Certainly the ruling class used religion for its own purposes but even if it hadn’t, the conditions of oppression would have generated it so long as the oppressed masses didn’t have the confidence themselves to resist their conditions. It was, in that sense, a painkiller – an opiate – that made oppression easier to bear. Though at this point Marx still holds that criticism of religion frees the mind of man so that he is free to resist real oppression, by the time of the Theses on Feuerbach in 1845, two years later, he argues that to get rid of religious ideas one must annihilate the social practices from which they emanate (“Thus, for instance, once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must itself be annihilated theoretically and practically”). Thus, I think that if we’re going to analyze religion we ought to at least start from the level that Marx began at way back in 1843 and not revert to the position of the Young Hegelians.

This marks a big step forward, I would argue, and begins to bring materialism back into the critique of religion. But, of course, Marx isn’t the final word on Marxism in general nor on the question of religion in particular. It’s interesting that in Engels and later, Kautsky, we seem some important evolution of the idea. Kautsky, for instance, quotes Engels as saying:

“The history of primitive Christianity presents remarkable coincidences with the modern workers’ movement. Like the latter, Christianity was originally a movement of the oppressed; it first appeared as a religion of slaves and freedmen, of the poor, the outcasts, of the peoples subjected or dispersed by Rome. Both Christianity and Socialism preach an approaching redemption from servitude and misery; Christianity assigns this redemption to a future life in Heaven after death; Socialism would attain it in this world by a transformation of society…”

Kautsky agrees overall with Engels parallel but notes that there are a few limitations to Engels views: “Christianity can hardly be called a religion of the slaves; it did nothing for them. On the other hand, the liberation from misery proclaimed by Christianity was at first quite material, to be realized on this earth, not in Heaven.” What is interesting is that Kautsky traces the “collapse” of primitive Christianity into an idealistic religion of servitude and bureaucracy to many of the same kind of material pressures that transform the workers’ movement. He does not, first and foremost, fetishize the details of early Christian ideology. It is the pressure of material conditions that corrupts the Christians.

“Like Christianity, this movement is obliged to create permanent organs in the course of its growth, a sort of professional bureaucracy in the party, as well as in the unions, without which it cannot function, which are a necessity for it, which must continue to grow, and obtain more and more important duties. “This bureaucracy – which must be taken in the broad sense… - will not this bureaucracy in the course of things become a new aristocracy, like the clergy headed by the bishop? Will it not become an aristocracy dominating and exploiting the working masses and finally attaining the power to deal with the state authorities on equal terms, thus being tempted not to overthrow them but join them?”

The conclusion we ought to draw from this is that rather than dismissing religion as a phenomenon incompatible with an ideology of revolution, in general, and of Marxism, in particular, we must examine it in its concrete specificity. We also ought to have a certain amount of humility as Marxists as religiously inspired people have been resisting oppression through revolutionary struggle a lot longer than have we, though I suppose that it is in the nature of all youth to disrespect their elders.

PART 3: Would there be religion under socialism?