August 17, 2015
And now to these thoughts conceived in the Chilean countryside …
Language … as a constantly increasing effort to “replace” what our senses register with a word-reflection. Language is essentially humanity’s way of “mirroring” both external and internal events. Our time’s neurotic obsession with registering/documenting everything is actually an attempt to stop the passage of time … so that everything “material” or “sensory” finds its equivalent in the form of words, diagrams, or numbers. We believe we will eventually be able to reconstruct everything that has happened in the past!
Another thought that suddenly intrudes … there is an almost compulsive association between socialism and planning – likely rooted in the five-year plans of Stalin’s Soviet Union. But in reality, there is nothing that says development must take such a path! Neither Marx/Engels nor Lenin expressed ideas in that direction. The planning aspect has been present in, among others, China and Cuba as well as in the entire Eastern European real-socialist system – except for Yugoslavia, which chose a different path. Much has changed today, and only China and Cuba remain, with partially “liberalized” economies. The socialism that was based on planning turned out not to work … and instead, we got an unchecked return to a liberalism that doesn’t stand for free development but rather for the market’s dictatorial “laissez-faire” where the strongest wins (a return to the law of the jungle). It is not the best ideas that prevail, but those backed by the greatest economic power.
And science is probably not “objective” in the sense that “true” progress follows some kind of deterministic path – rather, it seems that a certain type of society “chooses” a certain path where scientific advances have the opportunity to develop. Why, for example, did the Chinese not choose to develop their knowledge of gunpowder into weapons to conquer the world?
Some further thoughts on the collapse of real socialism … it likely has to do with the fact that it sought to “break” the dialectics of reality (i.e., that everything is in motion) – and that when Stalin built “socialism in one country” (the Soviet Union), he tried to exclude the existence of an inner self-movement, a “play of opposites,” even when, in revolutionary zeal, one tries through conscious planning to guide the future (for that is, in reality, what socialism seeks to do).
Seen from such a perspective, Asimov’s Foundation trilogy becomes incredibly interesting as an attempt at a dialogue between the “forces of planning” (Seldon) and the universe’s self-movement (the free traders and the Foundation’s development toward a new galactic empire). Seldon in his time vault becomes a “solution key of history” – which suddenly becomes outdated when the mutant Mule appears and reshuffles the pieces of the game in a new way. But once this “singularity” has disappeared, the wheel of history resumes its march forward – though now with the Mule’s intervention indelibly etched into its story. What has changed is the “solution key” (the theory of planned historical development) that the Seldon Plan symbolized. At least, this is what happens on the surface – since the Foundation project lives on in the form of the more psychologically advanced “Second Foundation.” And behold! It turns out that history does have a “plan” … and that humanity, through its superior brain and its products (that which distinguishes us from other animals), ought to be able to try to steer the future and not leave it to a game of chance (which in Foundation would mean thirty thousand years of barbarism compared to the Foundation’s thousand – if the Foundation’s and Seldon’s interventions are allowed to take effect).
It is not hard to see here the reflection of a dialogue between liberalism (“let the invisible hand take care of it!”) and socialism (“let humanity and the products of its knowledge development/science play a greater role in shaping the fate of humankind”). And if the latter perspective is to be allowed to break through, then the “randomized” thinking that leaves it to “the market” to create the future must find forms that involve both planning and a freedom to discover new paths (i.e., that the future paths are not locked into structures that only allow certain kinds of thinking – which is also the consequence if market thinking is allowed to fully dominate, as this leads to a “dictatorship of the economically powerful” without democracy).
I’ve been thinking for a few weeks now about continuing this letter-writing.
This is probably related to a thought that came up, tied to Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. Of course, it’s difficult to trace the true origin of his project, but “experts” suggest it is a mix of Gibbon’s four-volume work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and the historical philosophy of Toynbee – or for that matter, Spengler – (the idea that empires/cultures have their rise, golden age, and decline).
For Spengler, cultures grew into civilizations, passed through a life cycle, and eventually died – like “organisms.” The “organic” metaphor – drawn, I understand, from Goethe – was fundamental to Spengler.
For Toynbee, civilizations developed in response to survival challenges imposed by their physical environment. The most advanced civilizations arose where the environmental challenge was neither too mild (as with the Polynesians) nor too extreme (as with the Eskimos).
(http://www.paulburgess.org/cycle.html)
Interestingly, Toynbee became a strong critic of the Anglo-Saxon West in the 1950s, with his main criticism directed at the U.S. (as the great power that succeeded Britain).
Naturally, other interpretations of the Foundation trilogy are possible. One might – as I hinted in a phone call not long ago – read it as an analogy for the struggle between free-market liberalism (= the unchecked decline of the Empire into 30,000 years of barbarism) and planned socialism (= the Foundation and 1,000 years of reduced barbarism).
It seems Asimov – although he portrayed the First Foundation with its commercial success as a fairly typical liberal market economy with inherent monopolistic tendencies – was also drawn to the planning influence (though hidden) represented by the Second Foundation. (That could perhaps be interpreted as an “intelligent communism” with an avant-garde party in the form of the leading core of that Second Foundation.)
Of course, it’s also possible to bring the Foundation saga into the present, with its ideas of networks (as seen in the quote below), statistics, physics, etc. – and that’s mainly the perspective this letter addresses:
Among the newest of the enterprises — and closest to the spirit of Asimov's psychohistory — is a discipline called sociophysics. The name has been around for decades, but only in the 21st century has it become more science than slogan.
Like Asimov's psychohistory, sociophysics is rooted in statistical mechanics, the math used by physicists to describe the big picture when lacking data about the details. Nobody can track the trillion trillion molecules of air floating around in a room, for instance, but statistical mechanics can tell you how an air conditioner will affect the overall temperature.
In a similar way, science cannot describe how any given individual will behave. But put enough people together, Asimov's psychohistorian Hari Seldon reasoned, and laws of human interaction will produce predictable patterns — just as the way molecules move and interact determines the temperature and pressure of a gas.
Statistical mechanics math is nowadays routinely recruited for problems far removed from its standard uses with gases or chemical reactions or magnetic materials. Everything from the flow of funds in the stock market to the flow of traffic on interstate highways has been the subject of statistical-physics study. And more and more, that math is used to describe people as though they were molecules, by physicists who are, in effect, taking the temperature of society.
Physicists have invented many forms of social thermometers. Among the most fruitful are those that construe society as a mixture of many complex networks …
… All these approaches still generate but a shadow of Asimov's full-scale psychohistory. Everybody knows there's much more work to be done to match the predictive power achieved by Hari Seldon. Ironically, some of that needed new work may come from scientists who are unwittingly following in the footsteps of Seldon himself.
In later prequels to the "Foundation Trilogy," written decades after the original stories, Asimov described how Seldon gathered the data needed to perfect psychohistory — by visiting different cultures spread across the planet Trantor. By observing a variety of societies, Seldon discovered the common features of human social behavior needed to make sound predictions …
… In the end, better-informed public policy is what human science is all about. It's an old dream, predating Asimov's psychohistory by centuries. Many philosophers have envisioned laws of human behavior analogous to Isaac Newton's laws of motion. Early sociologists discovered mathematical regularities in birth and death rates and height and weight and even in crime rates. (In fact, such statistical analysis of human affairs influenced the development of statistical mechanics in the 19th century by the British physicist James Clerk Maxwell.)
But past efforts have been, to put it charitably, far from perfect. Science today has much more to work with — the mathematics of statistical physics, economic game theory and networks merged with modern neurobiology, brain scanning and anthropological experiments. All these tools and the new scientific fields built with them suggest that the efforts of earlier centuries were not misguided, just premature.
It's becoming clear that Asimov's psychohistory reflects an undoubtable truth — that all the world's different social networks interact in multiple ways to generate a single future. From people to corporations, cities to governments, all the pieces of society must mesh. What appears to be the madness of crowds must ultimately have a method, a method that science can discover.
The thinking described in this long quote is related to the ideas of “emergent properties” or “emergence” that can be traced back to Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine. And this line of thought is, in turn, related to Hayek’s idea that it’s not possible to “mortgage” the future through social or economic planning and make oneself “invulnerable” to whatever the future may bring.
But, as part of the quote above says – “put enough people together, Asimov’s psychohistorian Hari Seldon reasoned, and laws of human interaction will produce predictable patterns — just as the way molecules move and interact determines the temperature and pressure of a gas” – one gets a fascinating conceptual structure that fundamentally touches on the dream of being able to plan the future – if only the number of participating units is large enough (“… that all the world's different social networks interact in multiple ways to generate a single future”).
We spoke about this just yesterday … that the future is uncertain, and that one possible outcome is a single World State (which, incidentally, appears to be a kind of Monstrum). At times, I get the impression we are heading in that direction … The Internet, to be fair, is a counterforce to traditional mass media, but one should never forget who owns the Internet. It is not the people, but the infinitely wealthy corporations that also own and control today’s media. How can these tendencies be resisted?
And from this long speculative journey through Asimov’s and the Foundation’s world, I return to the three core principles of dialectical materialism:
a) That reality exists “out there” and does so regardless of whether I exist or perceive it;
b) That it is possible to gain knowledge of this reality (though never complete knowledge, and that is why Lenin says that our knowledge constantly grows without ever becoming absolute);
c) That the knowledge we believe we have about reality must be tested in practice (we must constantly return from our hypotheses about reality and its various aspects to concrete reality itself, to verify or falsify our hypotheses).
Whatever we may think about the future we are heading into, we must still ultimately imagine it as meaningful and intelligent … as a quest for knowledge where humanity must be entrusted with the ability to create a future that does not mean collapse.
The hopeful aspect of (natural) science is that, in order to survive as science, it must constantly test its results against reality. Insofar as science attempts to develop through falsifications and inflated propaganda lies, it is doomed to wither or end up in dead ends.
By the way, have you read or heard of Thomas Kuhn? He’s a philosopher of science who speaks about paradigms (mental frameworks within a given science), which replace each other throughout the history of science. And it's not necessarily the case that a new paradigm overtakes an old one because it is more scientifically advanced – but rather because the scientists of the old paradigm die of old age and no one is left to defend that conceptual world (which, in turn, may have been built on scientific "hardware").
Saturday, August 18, 2018
I come in from the terrace, where the first clear signs of autumn are showing … strong winds, a dark evening, and a different feeling in the air altogether. The apple tree is bending under the weight of ripe apples, and we must pick as many as possible over the coming weeks.
Some time ago, I found a strange book online, in English; I downloaded it but never read it—until today. It’s something as curious as a combination of modern mathematics and a branch of the Russian Orthodox Church!!?? I’ve made it a bit into the first chapter, which deals with set theory and the crisis in mathematics that seems to have arisen in the late 19th century—especially regarding how to define “infinity.” Well, I’m not a mathematician, so I’m reading with some excitement … particularly given the idea that “infinity” and “God” might be seen as comparable (mathematical) concepts. The line of thought sounds a bit like something from Peter Nilsson’s The Space Guardian.
Now, back to politics and economics. Let me bring up two concepts that are foundational in Marxism—productive forces and relations of production. When one—like us—discusses planned economies, determinism, and the impossibility of predicting developments (economic or otherwise), these two concepts inevitably come to the foreground.
The term “productive forces” refers to how material production in a given historical epoch processes nature in a certain way. This can include the level of knowledge, science, labor organization, and technology. These forces relate to the “relations of production”, which refer to the social and societal organization that surrounds them.
The term “mode of production” describes how productive forces interact with the relations of production. Marx referred to these as “progressive epochs of the economic formation of society,” distinguishing between Asiatic, ancient, feudal, bourgeois, and communist modes of production. People’s ways of thinking can often be understood in this context, where the economic base of society—“the sum total of the relations of production”—stands in relation to the societal superstructure, referring to the political, legal, and ideological conditions.
Social development occurs through a transformation from one historical epoch to another. According to the technological view of history, this is due to the relations of production hindering the development of the productive forces, leading to stagnation that may result in transformation and revolution. According to the class struggle perspective, it is instead the contradictions in the relations of production—between capitalists and proletarians—that lead to revolution (Wikipedia).
The reason I bring up these concepts is that I recently read about them in a text by Mao Tse-tung (On Contradiction). Essentially, Mao writes the same as in the above quote, but adds the following (which is, of course, also part of the Marxist theoretical framework):
The fundamental contradiction in capitalist society is between the social character of production and private ownership. This contradiction appears in the opposition between the organized production of the private enterprise and the disorganized production of society as a whole. Expressed in class terms, this contradiction is the opposition between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
Continuing this line of thought: today’s modern society is marked by rapid technological development. We’ve seen how the relations of production in the Eastern European model hindered the development of the productive forces—unlike in the West, where this didn’t happen to the same extent.
We also experience today how political labels (left–right) are no longer an obvious way to express society’s contradictions. In Marxist terms, there seems to be a mismatch between the economic base and the societal superstructure (political, legal, ideological, and cultural relations) … and perhaps this is what is radically new in today’s world.
That postmodernism tries to deny the idea of progress is a different matter (though one could also say that the “superstructure”—people’s thinking in a certain kind of society—often clings to the past and fails or fears to see what is emerging). Most often, it is the case that the relations of production (thinking in the superstructure) don’t keep pace with the productive forces (which sooner or later force a change in how we think and function in society … just consider how we, like it or not—for the sake of efficiency—now sit at our computers and pay our bills…).
“The spontaneous order”! Without a doubt, this is tied to the development of the productive forces. And these are difficult to predict. Perhaps this was the great mistake of Soviet communism. Ludwig von Mises (economist and classical liberal from the early 20th century) had the following thoughts on this:
The fundamental objection advanced against the practicability of socialism refers to the impossibility of economic calculation. It has been demonstrated in an irrefutable way that a socialist commonwealth would not be in a position to apply economic calculation. Where there are no market prices for the factors of production because they are neither bought nor sold, it is impossible to resort to calculation in planning future action and in determining the result of past action. A socialist management of production would simply not know whether or not what it plans and executes is the most appropriate means to attain the ends sought. It will operate in the dark, as it were. It will squander the scarce factors of production both material and human (labour). Chaos and poverty for all will unavoidably result.
Whether today’s modern China can manage the tension between “the spontaneous order” and the will to steer societal development is far too early to say. One should not forget, however, that the idea of planning production (and not leaving it to chance) is one of the foundational ideas of Marx and Engels. Engels put it this way:
With man, we enter history. Animals also have a history—one that includes their origin and gradual evolution to current forms. But this history is made for them, and insofar as they participate in it, it is without their knowledge or will, while humans, on the other hand, have increasingly created their own history consciously, the more they distanced themselves from animals in the narrower sense. As a result, the influence of unforeseen effects and uncontrolled forces in this history becomes ever smaller. Historical results correspond more and more to predetermined goals. But if we apply this yardstick to human history, even in today’s most developed nations, we find a colossal discrepancy between intended goals and achieved results. Unforeseen effects dominate, and the uncontrollable forces are much stronger than those mobilized by plans. This cannot be otherwise, as long as humanity’s most essential historical activity—the production of life’s necessities, i.e., today’s social production—is primarily subject to a play of unforeseen effects and uncontrollable forces, and only rarely achieves the intended results, often quite the opposite. In the most advanced industrial countries, we have conquered natural forces and harnessed them in human service; thereby, we have multiplied production a thousandfold, so that one child today produces more than a hundred adults once did.
Engels’ formulation is also a brilliant tribute to modernism, to science, and to the idea that humanity, as a species, is capable of rising above animals and consciously shaping its future.
Darwin didn’t know what a bitter satire he wrote about humanity—and especially his fellow countrymen—when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, is the normal condition of the animal kingdom, even while this same free competition was celebrated by economists as the greatest triumph in history. Only through the conscious organization of social production, where production and distribution are conducted according to a plan, can humanity rise above the rest of the animal kingdom socially, just as production in general has enabled it to do so biologically. Historical development makes such organization more necessary every day, and at the same time, makes it more possible each day. From this new organization of society, a new historical epoch will be dated, in which humanity—and with it, all its spheres of activity, especially natural science—will advance in a way that will overshadow everything that came before.
What today’s Marxists, leftists, and socialists mourn is precisely how the hope for a planned future has failed, and that we once again—just as before the 1930s—seem abandoned to the forces of chance and to an economic system where the strong prevail. The welfare state, built in the post-war period, was a project aimed at countering this “might makes right” dynamic. Today, that welfare project lies in ruins, and we are all waiting to see what will replace it.
I’ll stop here for tonight. My thoughts got a bit scattered, and perhaps there were too many quotes. But—the quotes express, in a more deliberate way, ideas that lie beneath the surface of today's political debate. As you’ve probably gathered, I am fascinated by the concept of “the spontaneous order”, even as I distrust it (since it practically contradicts modernism and the Enlightenment ideal, which championed humans as the creators of their lives and reality, in contrast to early history’s more fatalistic view of “God” as responsible).
So—“the spontaneous order” … are we to leave the shaping of our future to the harvests of chance—or is this, paradoxically, the wisest way to steer into the future?
The simplest way of expressing the major thesis of the theory of spontaneous order is to say that it is concerned with those regularities in society, or orders of events, which are neither (1) the product of deliberate human contrivance (such as a statutory code of law or a dirigiste economic plan) nor (2) akin to purely natural phenomena (such as the weather, which exists quite independently of human intervention). While the words conventional and natural refer, respectively, to these two regularities, the ‘third realm,’ that of social regularities, consists of those institutions and practices which are the result of human action but not the result of some specific human intention.
What our dialogues have led me to is once again to reflect on the bourgeois society we actually live in (we have never lived in a socialist society) and on the historical laws and forces that affect us today in ways we may not fully comprehend. Marx and Engels devoted their lives to trying to understand—and predict—the course of events in the bourgeois society of their time (in which capitalism began exerting increasing influence). These two theorists (who were also politically active) were by no means blind to the revolutionary power the bourgeoisie possessed. Just read their description from the Communist Manifesto:
The bourgeoisie has played a most revolutionary part in history.
Wherever it has gained the upper hand, it has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.”
It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism in the icy water of egotistical calculation.
It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade.
In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigor in the Middle Ages, which Reactionists so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence.
It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former migrations of nations and crusades.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.
Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes.
Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.
In an almost lyrical way, Marx and Engels describe the role the bourgeoisie had played in history up until then (considering that in 1848, when the Manifesto was written, the bourgeoisie was only at the beginning of its dominance). The French author Balzac depicted that time in his 19th-century novels—books that are fascinating and, as Jan Myrdal describes, represent a conservative and backward-looking author’s detailed portrayal of how the new class—the bourgeoisie—rises to power. And in many ways, the description is almost admiring, despite Balzac’s hatred of these upstarts. The Marxist literary critic Georg Lukács argued that Balzac’s books on the triumph of the bourgeoisie are evidence of “the victory of realism,” i.e., that regardless of Balzac’s opinion of the new class, he cannot avoid giving a realistic portrait of it.
Why do I return to the Communist Manifesto? Because the description above still applies in many ways to the confusion and lack of clarity prevailing in today’s world. New technology, capitalism’s renewed dominance—not only economically but also politically (who today remembers Keynes and the welfare states of social democratic Europe?)—and a growing forgetfulness about what led the world to two world wars have made the future feel more uncertain than it has in a long time. One might even long for the days of the Cold War balance of terror between the Soviet Union and the USA (which provided a sort of theoretical stability in the world), when the future, paradoxically, seemed more predictable.
So are we in the midst of a revolutionary process? What we thought was stable and secure is dissolving… because the only way for the bourgeoisie and capitalism to survive is to constantly drive forward a revolutionary development that challenges tradition and familiar ways of life. The Marxist economist Samir Amin (who passed away last year) addresses the Communist Manifesto in a commemorative essay (The Communist Manifesto 170 Years Later):
There is no other text written in the mid-nineteenth century that has held up as well as the Communist Manifesto of 1848 by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Even today, entire paragraphs of the text correspond to contemporary reality better than they did to that of 1848. Starting from premises that were hardly visible in their era, Marx and Engels drew the conclusions that the developments of 170 years of history fully verified.
Were Marx and Engels inspired prophets, magicians able to gaze into a crystal ball, exceptional beings with respect to their intuition? No. They simply understood better than anybody else, in their time and ours, the essence of that which defines and characterizes capitalism.Marx, more than anyone, understood that capitalism had the mission of conquering the world. He wrote about it at a time when this conquest was far from being completed. He considered this mission from its origins, the discovery of the Americas, which inaugurated the transition from three centuries of mercantilism to the final, full-fledged form of capitalism.
As he wrote in the Manifesto: “Modern industry has established the world-market, for which the discovery of America paved the way… The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.”
Marx welcomed this globalization, the new phenomenon in human history. Numerous passages in the Manifesto testify to this. For example: “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.”
As well as: “The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns… and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy [isolation—Ed.] of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.”
The words are clear. Marx was never backward-looking, lamenting the good old days. He always expressed a modern point of view, to the point of appearing Eurocentric. He went a long way in this direction.
Marx (and Engels) were revolutionaries! They wanted to change the world, to break up the old order and give people better conditions for living freely. But they were not blind to the consequences of this revolution: the old society collapsing, and many people losing their livelihoods—leading, for example, to the rise of the “machine breakers” as a protest movement against the advance of industry. Compare this to the Rust Belt in the USA today, a group of people left behind by development who vote Trump into power—even though he, like other politicians, cannot stop the triumph of the productive forces sweeping across the world (these productive forces being, among other things, the new technologies and the “new world” they give rise to).
Marx and Engels identified a new class (the proletariat) that, in a way, was to “redeem” this situation. By becoming aware of their power as a collective (moving from being a class “in itself” to being a class “for itself”), they would seize power and at the same time eliminate the conditions for class society by abolishing private ownership.
Marx and Engels never believed, neither in the editing of the Manifesto nor later, in the spontaneous revolutionary potential of the working classes, since “the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.” Due to this fact, workers, like others, subscribe to the ideology of competition, a cornerstone of the functioning of capitalist society, and, hence, “the organization of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves.”
Therefore, the transformation of the proletariat from a class in itself into a class for itself requires the active intervention of a communist vanguard: “The Communists… are on the one hand practically the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.”
It is interesting to contrast the Marxist “solution” to modern society’s problems with that of Hayek, for instance. Hayek views this very solution (i.e., the collective taking power) as a return to a more primitive society, to tribalism, which liberalism and capitalism aim to leave behind—to create greater freedom for the individual. Paradoxically, Marx and Engels have the same goal—by transferring the means of production into the hands of all members of society, they want to create greater freedom for the individual. And they are highly critical of the economic thinkers whom Hayek, Mises, Friedman, etc., must be considered successors of.
Marx’s criticisms of the limitations of bourgeois thought, and in particular of its economic science, which he rightly described as “vulgar,” is masterful. Since it is incapable of understanding what capitalism is in its essential reality, this alienated thought is also unable to imagine where capitalist societies are going.
Will the future be forged by socialist revolutions that will put an end to the domination of capital? Or will capitalism succeed in prolonging its days, thus opening the way to the decadence of society?
Bourgeois thought ignores this question, posed by the Manifesto.
Indeed, we read in the Manifesto that there is “a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”
This is what I’ve been thinking more and more about over the past six months: to return to the bourgeois society, its revolution (which continues today), and what one, as a Marxist, can think about this. Because it doesn’t help—as the new left tends to do—to sweep away the questions of economy, class, revolution, etc., in order to instead focus on things that don’t threaten the actual power in society (that held by those who possess the so-called “privilege of defining problems,” as Lars Gustafsson so wisely put it).
In short... we are living in a revolutionary time (but not the revolutionary time we Marxists have dreamed of), and this time forces us to constant adaptation, constant flexibility, to keep our eyes open. It might even be that our present time is more revolutionary than we could ever imagine and is leading us in a direction we never anticipated. (Marx described how the worker would eventually be ruled by the products he created… and viewed through today’s lens, in today’s society, we must admit that Marx was right: We are, to a large extent, governed by the products humans produce, and these products/the technologies that shape our societies have in many ways become a kind of “second nature.”).
Journey into the Unknown ... Modernism, Postmodernism ...
190314
Resumed reflections on the world we live in, which is currently undergoing a rapid process of transformation — where the old still lingers on as a kind of “shadow” while the new increasingly begins to emerge. (I wonder, by the way, how Asimov would describe such a transformation process in the Foundation trilogy — as a gradual process that increasingly takes over, or as a leap-like “awakening” into a partially new and unfamiliar world with new “coordinates”?)
In this line of reasoning, one could also include the opposition between modernism and postmodernism. Modernism stands for striving forward toward the new horizons taking shape (or — to quote another science fiction classic, namely Star Trek — “to boldly go where no one has gone before”); whereas postmodernism, objectively speaking, becomes “reactionary” (“the future has already been here and, in any case, we have nothing good to expect from it”).
An interesting text from what is now the Communist Party in Sweden about the phenomenon of “postmodernism” states the following:
What is postmodernism?
Postmodernism is an attack on the entire tradition of humanism and Enlightenment — a tradition once carried by the revolutionary bourgeoisie and which Marxism has inherited and developed. Hence the prefix “post”, which comes from the Greek word for “after.” The core belief is that we live in a new era, after the society of modernism or modernity that took shape from the Enlightenment onward — we live in a post-industrial, post-capitalist, and thus also post-Marxist era...
... If we dig a bit deeper, the philosophical foundations of postmodernism can be summarized in the following five points:
That there is no objective reality independent of human perception.
That “the human being” is not a rational, reasoning creature — instead, we are “desire machines” shaped by external influences and imposed contexts.
That history is not a causally driven, progressive process that can be understood and influenced.
That societies are not coherent social formations that, despite internal contradictions and complexity, form a unit that can be analyzed and consciously changed.
That social classes are not actually existing groups created by societal relations emerging from the conditions of production.
As I may have mentioned, I’m reading an exciting “biography” of the Soviet era, written by a former chairman of the Communist Party. The book is called Journey into the Unknown and attempts, partly based on new archival material following the fall of the Soviet Union, to shed light on the real discussions, problems, and questions that these constructors of “a new world” were preoccupied with.
In reality, they didn’t have any actual “recipes,” clear ideas, or templates to follow — they often had to improvise solutions, which sometimes remained as permanent features of the Soviet system (e.g., the Five-Year Plans), and sometimes disappeared fairly quickly (like the NEP policy, which was a form of market economy).
Ludwig von Mises, colleague of Hayek and opponent of socialism, had the following to say specifically about the planning aspect of socialism:
The fundamental objection advanced against the practicability of socialism refers to the impossibility of economic calculation. It has been demonstrated in an irrefutable way that a socialist commonwealth would not be in a position to apply economic calculation. Where there are no market prices for the factors of production because they are neither bought nor sold, it is impossible to resort to calculation in planning future action and in determining the result of past action. A socialist management of production would simply not know whether or not what it plans and executes is the most appropriate means to attain the ends sought. It will operate in the dark, as it were. It will squander the scarce factors of production both material and human (labour). Chaos and poverty for all will unavoidably result.
What becomes increasingly clear as I read further in Journey into the Unknown is that — contrary to the usual image — there wasn’t much actual planning involved. Instead, they constantly had to deal with the reality that arose (as a result of their own or others’ actions). In this way, they were in fact highly dialectical, i.e., they adapted flexibly to what the new situation demanded — and in that sense, they were highly pragmatic. The world of ideas constantly had to yield to the real world — although, ideologically, they would usually justify themselves with appropriate quotations from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, etc.
And I would argue that this continued largely past the Khrushchev era, and that it wasn’t until the “neo-Stalinist” Brezhnev that the system truly stagnated and became static. But this was also the period where the “New Left” took its point of departure (in feminism, student activism, exegesis, Maoism, etc. — and perhaps eventually postmodernism as well!).
It is undeniably interesting to reflect on this development, which came to shape the entire 20th century — partly as a counterweight to liberalism, but also to the more conservative totalitarian social movements. It is likely that socialism (as a struggle for equality) will return as a social phenomenon, but then in a new “costume” — and still drawing much of its vitality from the real class contradictions that postmodernism has failed to “magically erase” (Trump and the populist parties are, in fact, a class-based protest against a societal development that leaves the new “proletariat” outside of society and without a voice).
The Excluded, Spontaneous Order, and Contemporary Society
190318
A quote from Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations will introduce this part of the letter:
But the annual revenue of every society is always precisely equal to the exchangeable value of the whole annual produce of its industry, or rather is precisely the same thing with that exchangeable value. As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestick industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the publick interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.
One could even describe both the right’s and the left’s “revolts” as movements aimed at the consequences of the actions of the “invisible hand” (i.e., of the market, of liberalism).
Seen in this way, both the far right and the far left would actually be conservative, backward-looking movements, each in their own way attempting to give “the excluded” a voice (in practice, a democratic process); that it is a matter of a crisis for those who cannot adapt flexibly enough to changed social and life conditions (who are unable — or unwilling — to quickly redraw the “map” needed to navigate the “terrain” of society; compare this to the feeling one has when landing in a foreign metropolis without knowledge of the “logic” that governs the behavior and thinking of its inhabitants).
Certainly, it’s about “adapting” to the society one lives in — but an active adaptation that makes it possible to rethink and think anew (not least if one embraces Hayek’s and his followers’ idea that one cannot plan the future — but must confront it as it becomes visible or arises).
One might say that “the spontaneous order” reigns... and it is this order that people today are trying to cope with.
Despite the complexity of the social world, which seems to preclude the existence of regularities which can be established by empirical observation, there is a hypothetical order which can be reconstructed out of the attitudes, actions, and opinions of individuals and which has considerable explanatory power. What is important about the theory of spontaneous order is that the institutions and practices it investigates reveal well-structured social patterns, which appear to be a product of some omniscient designing mind yet which are in reality the spontaneous coordinated outcomes of the actions of, possibly, millions of individuals who had no intention of effecting such overall aggregate orders. The explanations of such social patterns have been, from Adam Smith onwards, commonly known as “invisible hand” explanations since they refer to that process by which "man is led to promote an end which was no part of his intention." It is a major contention of the theory of spontaneous order that the aggregate structures it investigates are the outcomes of the actions of individuals.
But — and here comes a truly interesting question — what happens if this “thought dominance of spontaneous order” is made to yield to another way of thinking? It is likely that much of the first 10–15 years of the Soviet Union’s existence was about introducing a different way of thinking (some form of ideological counterweight) to the global economic thinking that liberalism represented at the time.
And I’ll stop here for tonight. I’ll return when new thoughts emerge as a result of my readings of various texts.
Vygotsky, Hayek, Marx … and Contemporary Political Developments, Žižek
190806
Back again to my reflections on the world we live in and the fact that we cannot escape the changes that societal development imposes on us. This concerns, not least, how technological advancement compels us — as biological beings — to seek adaptive mechanisms that are "operative" in the “brave new world” we now inhabit.
An interesting observation in this context comes from the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky regarding human psychological processes: that the lower (or more fundamental) psychological processes, which are connected to our biological development, actually undergo a (qualitative) transformation when they become subordinated to the higher psychological processes (which are products of human cultural development). These higher psychological functions cannot be understood without being studied sociologically and historically — that is, they are not the result of biological evolution, but of the development of social behavior.
In the course of historical development, humans change the expressions and procedures of their behavior, transform innate codes and functions, and develop and create new forms of behavior, especially cultural ones. This is because culture (and its associated needs) creates specific behavioral forms and alters the modes of expression of psychological functions.
A well-known illustration of this is the story of the donkey between two haystacks, which, due to its inability to choose, ends up starving to death. In such a situation, the human solves the dilemma by introducing an element unique to her world — she simply flips a coin! In this act, rooted in human society, the biological is also integrated into behavior.
Human higher psychological functions (as products of society and culture) provide a new "playing field" for the (biological) lower psychological functions to express themselves. If one compares the repertoire of innate behaviors used throughout a person’s life with learned behaviors, it becomes clear that the latter vastly outnumber the former. One could also say that biological development itself is conditioned and made possible by the social relationships that always serve as mediators in the human biology's interaction with nature (both external and internal). Thus, the higher psychological functions are a development from the lower ones but cannot be reduced to them.
It is societal and cultural processes that have created the higher psychological functions — the very ones that distinguish humans from other animals (though the lower psychological forms are not lost; they are integrated into the higher ones).
In Marx’s theoretical framework, machines and technology play an important role (as products of precisely those higher psychological functions developed throughout human history). They are part of progress, but they also change humans’ role and position in production. The penetration of technology into virtually every aspect of human life today inevitably places the lower psychological functions in a new situation (this new "playing field" is thus the result of the social and cultural development humanity has undergone).
Living in a 13th-century society is simply not the same as living in the 21st century — even though it is still possible to find “fossilized remnants” of old behavior patterns within the behavioral repertoire of modern humans, remnants of social formations that no longer exist (but which may nevertheless be studied as behavior patterns that reached their final form... at least that’s what we think). It is thus not only the development of the cerebral cortex that separates humans from animals, but also the qualitative transformation brought about by our socially conditioned evolution — one that has moved us far beyond the limits of a purely animal existence.
Here, one probably shouldn't attempt to predict exactly how humans will function some years into the future (as Soviet futurologists tried to do on behalf of the Politburo in the early 1960s — see an earlier email). But it is probably not too bold to say that technological development will continue to leave deep imprints on both society and the human psyche.
190819
Resumed email, now “branching off” in a slightly different direction. I picked up Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom again, hoping to find a connection to Marx and to the more or less unspoken “thesis” Hayek presents regarding “totalitarian regimes” — whether these stem from the extreme left or the extreme right.
The thesis? That collectivist solutions (whether communist or social democratic) lead to societies that stifle individual creativity.
If one wants to be dialectical here, one could parenthetically pose the antithesis: that collectivist solutions actually encourage individual creativity. The synthesis between thesis and antithesis would thus be a both-and proposition (i.e., a condition that includes both thesis and antithesis, but which transcends them on a higher, more advanced level).
But back to the book. Early on, I come across things that make me question how much Hayek actually has to stand on in objective terms — and how much his ideologically driven worldview leads him to overlook forms of reasoning in liberalism (the “true” liberalism) that he would never accept from, for example, left-wing proponents. He writes of the “abandoned road” from the late 19th century, arguing that “true” liberalism never had a fair chance due to obstacles put up by its opponents.
Well, this may be said — but the very same (and even more strongly) can be said about the obstacles capitalism’s proponents put in the way of building a socialist society. If one is allowed to blame external conditions as hindrances, then every ideology can claim this right!
Then there are some purely factual claims that make me do a double take. Hayek claims that Lenin said that nine-tenths of a population could be sacrificed, as long as the communists got their way. There is a reference to Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 2 — but with no page citation. It seems highly unlikely to me that Lenin ever said or wrote anything like that.
Hayek also refers to a “golden age of liberalism” at the end of the 19th century, supposedly destroyed by socialism’s meddling. Has the good Hayek no historical understanding of what that “golden age” looked like for workers, the poor, and what we now call the underclass? To be fair, he does compare that time with how things were 100 years earlier — but considering that the book was written in the 1940s, the comparison seems largely irrelevant.
I have long promised some sort of written reflection on Hayek, Marxism, (neo‑)liberalism, today’s world and where we are heading. This morning, as the spring sun finally starts to break through the clouds, I suddenly feel inspired to begin. Perhaps it is because yesterday I started reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s Recollections, which covers the years 1847–1849, the moment when liberalism suffered its first great defeat with the February Revolution in France and Napoleon III’s coup d’état (which ushered in a regime lasting until the Franco‑Prussian War of 1870‑71 and, directly afterward, the Paris Commune). Tocqueville’s reflections are highly interesting and can almost be read as a commentary on events in today’s world.
The basic reason I am writing is that your thinking has taken a political course unfamiliar to me — namely a form of liberalism that, to my mind, is extreme (and whose tone, as I recall it, reminds me of the left‑wing sectarianism of the 1970s). In other words, I encounter a new worldview whenever we discuss liberalism and socialism. Well — not entirely new, I should add; Lars Gustafsson has at times hinted at similar ideas, as has the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, who is something of the Spanish‑speaking world’s Lars Gustafsson in his positions.
What is probably “shockingly new” in the picture of the world you present (and, by extension, in Hayek and his followers today) is the rehabilitation of an economic — and even political — ideology that I (and probably most people born before 1970) have regarded as hopelessly discredited. I mean the liberalism and economic doctrines that finally foundered with “the Great Slump,” the depression of 1929, and the chain of consequences that followed — fascism, Nazism and, ultimately, another world war even more brutal than the first (which until then had been viewed as a horror that must never be repeated).
Keynes, social democracy, and communism in its Stalinist form came to be seen as salvation in a world that was capsizing. In retrospect, one can also see that Keynes and social democracy received considerable help from Stalin’s Soviet Union as a warning to the bourgeoisie, the economic elite and liberalism of what could happen if they did not at least begin to address a fairer distribution of resources. You should know that well into the 1950s Stalin was viewed very positively across much of the Third World, almost as a protector of the colonised nations struggling toward freedom.
Hayek and his school make a political leap of acrobatics when they claim, first, that socialism and its offshoots (in the form of social democracy, the welfare state, communism, fascism, Nazism, etc.) are the great enemy (fascism and Nazism do fit) and, second, that liberalism — the pure and genuine kind from the mid‑18th to the mid‑19th century — would have been the cure if only it had been allowed to operate as intended. What bothers me in this reasoning is, on the one hand, lumping socialism and social democracy together with fascism, and on the other, Hayek’s seeming obliviousness to the enormous suffering that the liberal era he praises inflicted on those who fell victim to it.
Marx’s greatness as a thinker lies in the fact that he could see this liberal epoch as progressive (it unleashed enormous productive forces) while also condemning the cruelty with which it was carried out. The period may have been marked by great economic advances, but also by immeasurable human suffering (which, in hindsight, can be compared to the price the Russian people paid for industrialisation and collectivisation in the 1930s — and the Chinese during the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s; though in all likelihood far fewer died in the latter episodes than during the period when liberalism was allowed to run free).
Back to the thread I began. I do not feel particularly at home in the world of ideas I encounter when I discuss with you (even though, intellectually, I can familiarise myself with it). At times I have difficulty following your reasoning and conclusions — and I am sure you can also have trouble following me and mine (how can I remain a convinced communist despite everything actually existing socialism has done while in power?). What encourages me is that we can still maintain a free discussion and recognise the value of each other’s arguments.
To become more at home in the ideology you advocate, I began reading a book by a Chilean professor about Hayek (partly set in relation to Milton Friedman and the Chicago School and how they have shaped Chilean society and economy ever since they were given “secure frameworks” during Pinochet’s rule). Besides that book, I have access to everything Hayek and Mises wrote (through the site where I download Spanish‑language books). The title is “Mercado y sociedad. La utopía política de Friedrich Hayek” by Jorge Vergara Éstevez — Market and Society: Friedrich Hayek’s Political Utopia in English.
Below follows a short summary of what I understand to be Hayek’s ideas (seen through the Chilean professor’s “lens”). Here you can act as a corrective, adjusting anything that has been distorted or does not reflect Hayek’s perspective. As far as I can tell, the book is a serious attempt to present Hayek, and I recognise many ideas that I have heard from you or read elsewhere.
Okay, with this little “foreword” I will end the first part of my written reflections. What comes next is a brief comparison between Hayek and Marx (drawn from one of the book’s chapters). I hope you find the reading worthwhile.
Hayek and Marx
Marx asserted that “the human essence consists of social relations.” Since these are historically variable, there is no eternal human nature or structure. In each society, therefore—based on the prevailing mode of production—there are different ways of being human, different “human essences.”
“Man is the father of man,” says Marx; in other words, humanity as a species has created itself throughout the course of history. Humans remain natural beings whose existence depends on their relationship to nature. However, they have created their own order—the human world—which has its own laws.
Marx’s theoretical position differs from Hayek’s in that the latter constructed a conception of the human being as a set of universally valid claims regarding permanent human characteristics. In contrast to Marx’s historical or historicist view of the human, Hayek developed a naturalistic view based on evolutionary theory, according to which human societies, like animal societies, are governed by the principle of competition. Hayek even believed that the fundamental patterns of human behavior are inherited and that today's societies are essentially governed by archaic legacies, and that the minority composed of successful individuals in the market owes its evolutionary advantage to those inherited traits (Hayek, 2007a). Based on such ideas, he questioned the socialists' desire for a fairer distribution:
“The desire to achieve a just distribution of wealth, based on the principle that each citizen should receive only what they have earned through cooperation, is, in the strictest sense, a purely hereditary burden which in turn is based on mankind’s most primitive emotional attitudes.” (Hayek, 1982c, p. 287)
Hayek’s idea that only individuals exist and that society is merely a term to describe the total sum of exchanges between individuals is an ontological statement. (Ontology—derived from the Greek on, genitive ontos “being,” and logia “study,” from logos “word”—is in philosophy, anthropology, and related disciplines the study of being: how the world or things are constituted and what their essential properties are.)
Marx, on the other hand, does not take a position in the debate about social ontology concerning the individual and society. Instead, he emphasizes that every individuality—no matter how original—has been shaped under specific historical-social conditions, meaning that every individuality is historical in nature.
Hayek, for his part, characterizes what he calls “true individualism” as a theory of society, since it seeks to “understand the forces that determine human life in society” (1986, p. 320).
Marx’s formulation of the relationship between history and society is more complex. On the one hand, he acknowledges the existence of social laws, but these are neither universal nor permanent; they are modified as the modes of production change. This does not mean he shares Hayek’s thesis about the existence of “forces that determine social life.” Contrary to what is often claimed, Marx was not a social determinist—even though some of his statements make such an interpretation possible. He adopted Vico’s idea that “it is man who makes history” (Marx, 1965); however, there are also texts that support Hayek’s interpretation, suggesting that Marx posited the existence of laws pointing to a necessary development or direction of history.
The supposed general laws of evolution, derived from observation, have nothing to do with legitimate evolutionary theory, which merely informs us about the process of evolution itself. The aforementioned evolutionary laws are derived from various “holistic” views, typical of Comte’s, Hegel’s, and Marx’s historicism, and in reality highlight the mystical necessity that evolution should follow a predetermined path (Hayek, 1978a, p. 47).
Marx was aware of the difficulty in reconciling the idea of social laws with human freedom, and thus he formulated the idea of the existence of tendential laws, whose effects could be controlled through conscious action (Marx, 1971, vol. I). In this way, there would be no absolute opposition, as Hayek presents it.
In some texts, Marx states that humans make history under conditions not of their own choosing; similarly, that people are free under circumstances not created by themselves. This removes the aspect of necessity—or “mystical necessity”—from historical development that Hayek asserts.
There is another aspect of history in Marx which Hayek does not mention. Marx and Hayek adopt different stances regarding the past and the possibilities of overcoming present crises. One could say that Hayek’s view—directly related to the Spenglerian idea of the West’s decline—is “written into” the matrix of decadence. According to Hayek’s version, there once existed a state of equilibrium, corresponding to the liberalism of the 18th and 19th centuries; but with Bismarck, a hundred-year period of decline began, extending to the present day. Hayek saw his work as an attempt to recreate true liberalism, which includes true individualism, a true concept of liberty, and the rule of law. He also developed a reform proposal to overcome the crisis and decadence, thereby realizing his utopia of a truly liberal society.
Marx’s stance is different and expresses the emancipatory tendencies of Modernity. He criticized all modes of production, capitalism included, as systems of domination. He saw theory as revolutionary praxis and argued that within capitalist society lie the potentials for a new socialist society, which in turn constitutes the transition to the communist stage of human emancipation. This would be a society entirely without institutions, without a State, without a market, without alienated labor—a society composed of freely associated individuals (Marx, 1965). The communist stage does not mean returning to a past stage, but the beginning of history—history understood as conscious and collective action (or decision). In a compressed form, Marx’s thoughts are expressed in the following famous preface from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859):
“In the social production of their life, men enter into definite, necessary relations, independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production—or, what is merely a legal expression for the same thing—with the property relations within which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.
With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations, a distinction must always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophical—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.
Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social productive forces and the relations of production.
No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.
Therefore, mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.
In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society.
The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production—antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of one arising from the social conditions of life of individuals; yet the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for the solution of this antagonism. With this formation, therefore, the prehistory of human society comes to an end.”
(Marx: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Preface).
Resumed writing today, May 26 … a brilliant spring day, sitting on the terrace with the grass reasonably freshly cut, the bird cherry is blooming, and so is the apple tree … birds singing and pleasantly warm. A scene that makes one think better … or at least more slowly (and possibly deeper) … allowing one to pause and observe. What could be a better scenario to continue reflecting on Hayek, Marx, and such topics we usually discuss?!
First of all, a small clarification – I obviously don’t believe I can change what you think or how you think about the world and reality. Nor do I intend to do so with what I write. In general, I don’t think it’s possible to change someone else’s worldview just by arguing. Usually, something else is required too, something that makes one’s previous worldview (or “map” of the world and reality) no longer feel sufficient …
What I mean by what I write here is to make my worldview (or worldview) clearer (or more understandable) … and thereby perhaps also make an (today) “inexplicable” image of the world, history, and thinking (maybe outdated or old-fashioned) more accessible. I reason this way because of a theme we’ve touched on – namely that I do not recognize myself in your image of what is today’s “left” and that I have difficulty reading “leftist texts” nowadays (finding it hard to see that what is presented there would be “left”) and that I therefore become a bit “homeless” in the political spectrum we live in. I feel significantly more at home in the world “Proletären” paints; it is an analytical framework I recognize and is much more realistic than the world I encounter, for example, in the leftist newspapers “Flamman” or “Arena” (of a social-democratic type).
So when I tackle “understanding” Hayek, neoliberalism in its various shades, and ultimately the worldview or perspective you reason from, it seems to me a natural starting point to begin with Marx and classical Marxism. I can’t help but include in the text a quote from an imaginary interview with Karl Marx in which he comments on certain phenomena in today’s world (Imaginary Interview with Karl Marx by Donald Sassoon from Prospect October 2003):
“Karl Marx
The fashion-following apologists of the propertied classes, now and again, try to find an adequate rival for me. They just can't bear the thought of lacking a recognised genius. So they resurrect Hayek one summer and, by the next spring, they are all wearing Popper (now that's someone with only one idea in his head and, boy, did he flog it to death and irrefutably so!). The very lazy ones go for Isaiah Berlin — so easy to comprehend, so stupendously unoriginal, so devastatingly tautological. Of my contemporaries only Darwin made the big time. And I understood it at once. Friedrich convinced me to dedicate Das Kapital to him, but Darwin, coward to the last, turned me down. On reflection, he was probably right. Had he accepted, natural selection would have been regarded as yet another Marxist conspiracy.Donald Sassoon: OK. No one underestimates your renown. But you must agree: Marxism is not what it used to be...
KM: In reality, my work has never been as important as it is now. Over the last 40 years or so it has conquered the academy in the most advanced countries in the world. Historians, economists, social scientists, and even, to my surprise, some literary critics have all turned to the materialist conception. The most exciting history currently produced in the US and Europe is the most "Marxistic" ever. Just go to the annual convention of the American Social Science History Association, which I attend regularly as a ghost. There they earnestly examine the interconnection between institutional and political structures and the world of production. They all talk about classes, structures, economic determination, power relations, oppressed and oppressors. And they all pretend to have read me—a sure sign of success. Even diplomatic historians—or at least the best of them (a small bunch admittedly)—now look at the economic basis of great powers. Of course much of this work is crude economic determinism. But you can go a long way with "vulgar" Marxism. Look at the success of simplistic theories propounding the view that empires collapse because they spend too much. Well, at least the economy is back in. Social history, the history of ordinary men and women, has supplanted the idiotic fixation with great men. Of course, many things have moved on. Thank God for that. I was never one for standing still. Das Kapital was unfinished, and not just because I died too soon but because, in a very real sense, it could not be finished. Capitalism moves on and the analysis always trails behind.
...
KM: The Russian revolution was not a socialist revolution waged against a capitalist state. It was a revolution against a semi-feudal autocracy. It was about the construction of modern industry, modern society. Industrial revolutions always occur at great cost whether led by communists or pukka bourgeois. Your modern political accountants, as they scavenge through history to make the case for the prosecution, have they totted up the deaths caused by colonialism, and capitalism? Have they added up all the Africans who died in slavery on their way to America? All the American Indians massacred? All the dead of capitalist civil wars? All those killed by the diseases caused by modern industry? All the dead of the two world wars? Of course Stalin and co were criminals. But do you think that Russia would have become a modern industrial power by democratic, peaceful means? Which road to industrialisation has been victimless, and undertaken under a benign system of civil liberties and human rights? Japan? Korea? Taiwan? Germany? Italy? France? Britain and its empire? What were the alternatives to Lenin and Stalin and the red terror? Little Red Riding Hood? The alternative would have been some Cossack-backed antisemitic dictator as cruel and paranoid as Stalin (or Trotsky; frankly I have no preference), far more corrupt and far less efficient.
DS: So was it all inevitable?
KM: That I don't know and neither do you. But don't you dare to reproach me with one drop of blood or one writer in jail. May I remind you that I was a political exile because I defended freedom of speech, that I lived all my life in shabby conditions and that I died in 1883 when Lenin was 13 and Stalin four. I could have written a bestselling "Black Book of Capitalism" and listed all the crimes committed in its name. But I did not. I examined its misdeeds dispassionately, in a balanced way as I would examine now those of communism. Much as I like polemic I knew capitalism was better than anything that preceded it and that it could lay the basis for the realm of true freedom, freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom from the state, which is what communism is.”
Of course, the “interview” is a thought experiment, but with a serious purpose – to try to bring the discussion back to what “Marxism” stands for.
I am stopping here for today. The reason I use parts of the imaginary interview is that I think it (in a somewhat playful way) highlights ideas that “accompany” our conversations… and I also believe that you may have at some point wondered if I could recommend something good to read about Marxism, etc. Now the “interview” partly serves as a substitute for a text I should have produced by this point.
Written at work on a Tuesday morning and inspired by a text by Lars Gustafsson that unexpectedly appeared on the back of some notes I had made during a course (on stress) I took in 2014. Gustafsson’s text is about a short story by Edgar Allan Poe and a crystal globe that, when held the right way, gives the observer insight into another dimension—one from which the observer in our own dimension is simultaneously being watched (by something birdlike from the other dimension). Gustafsson’s conclusion:
“The globe conveys information” … followed by a reflection on a theoretical physicist (Jimmy Wheeler at the University of Texas, Austin) who entertained the idea that “time and space are secondary phenomena, derived from something more fundamental—information… Could it possibly be that four-dimensional space-time is derived from something more like a surface, a hologram, simply put? Holograms… have a remarkable quality: the image loses nothing if we remove a larger or smaller part of the image surface.”
(This excerpt comes from Lars Gustafsson’s book “Mot nollpunkten. Matematiska fantasier” – which you may have received from me; Poe’s story comes from the 1895 collection “The Stolen Bacillus.”)
Anyway—since I last wrote (and I think that was about Hegel, viewed through Arnold Ljungdahl’s “The Worldview of Marxism” and its perspective), I’ve explored various types of reading: Ernst Wigforss’ memoirs (Swedish Minister of Finance from roughly 1932–1950, who laid the foundations of much of the Social Democratic welfare model—and thus was frequently vilified by conservative newspaper columnists), a couple of books commenting on Hayek and Michael Polanyi (and Hayek’s—along with sci-fi author Isaac Asimov’s (!)—core idea that the future cannot really be planned or predicted in a rational way; put differently in Lars Gustafsson’s novel “Bernard Foy’s Third Castling”: “Make a plan—it will come to nothing”… because so many unpredictable variables inevitably arise and overturn the plan).
This line of thought was also present in the group-analytic training I completed in the early 2000s:
“Forget the idea that as group leader you can control each individual and the group process! Lean back instead and allow the process to take its own course, focusing on what emerges into the foreground (or ‘figure’ in Gestalt psychological terms) in relation to the background (or context) that accompanies every process (or figure/foreground).”
The moment I try to follow a predetermined plan, I lose sight of the overview and of what’s actually happening here and now (the CBT trend in psychology, after all, is highly preoccupied with planning and ensuring plans are carried out—with the downside that such “therapy” often degenerates into “information delivery” disconnected from the client; or to put it differently: clients receive answers to questions they never asked).
Yes, perhaps it’s no coincidence that I’m writing today—since the course commentary on the back of which Gustafsson’s text appeared concerned a CBT-influenced training I took in 2014. That course constantly wrestled with the tension between the presence of a “plan” (with homework assignments) and the fact that each course member had their own “agenda,” which clashed with “the plan” (i.e., the course leaders’ plan for the training).
There’s a term with origins in 1920s England that might help conceptually describe the unpredictability that Hayek (and Polanyi, etc.) focused on. The term, “emergent,” was revived by Ilya Prigogine (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1967); it concerns “emergent properties,” which lead to the arising of something new and unpredictable, and where the process cannot be “reversed” in such a way that the original components of the emergent phenomenon can be identified.
In the more recent Argentinian social-psychological theory to which I’ve been devoted since the mid-1980s (and which I’ve translated quite a bit), the concept of “emergent” is a central term, forming part of the analytical unit: “existing – intervention – emergent – new existing – new emergent,” used to illuminate group or therapeutic processes. Here, “the existing” is the current situation (what we have to work with, here and now); “intervention” is what we do to initiate a process in the existing; “emergent” is what grows out (sometimes unexpectedly, sometimes foreseen) as a result not only of the intervention itself but also of what “the existing” contains (as a sort of “prism” that refracts incoming rays in various directions). From the emergent we get a “new existing” with slightly altered content and form.
I suspect this is the perspective one must apply to Hayek’s ideological thinking. He always operates within an “existing,” which should ideally be allowed to take its own course—but where there are constant interventions from society to ensure the process doesn’t “derail.” It’s rather like how referees are used in hockey (and other team sports): to ensure that the match is played broadly within the rules. However, referees can’t be allowed to influence the outcome of the match (unless, of course, one team has bought off the referee and he’s calling the game unfairly).
So in reality, even Hayek is interested in a “controlled” process—and perhaps it’s here that his ideological thinking becomes quite transparent. The “boundaries” or “enclosures” within which economic and societal processes are allowed to move under Hayekian thinking are in no way freer than the frameworks used by the Social Democratic welfare state from the 1930s onward.