Dunbar again…
Okay, here is a short video with a broad outline of the Dunbar thesis… a fuzzy concept, but not necessarily invalid on that account.
The reason it’s fuzzy is because Dunbar’s number – 150 as the fuzzy constant – is the number of significant relationships a person can manage without interlocutors, that is, emotional cut-outs who attend to administration, management, and conflict resolution.
If you are my hiking buddy twice a week and my second cousin, we have a primary relationship. If you are my insurance agent or my boss, we have a formal, rule-mediated relationship.
I can only handle about 150 I-care-you-care relationships… for the simple reason that this number reaches certain cognitive limits that may be organic, and because there is simply not enough time for more without diffusing the quality of all relationships.
Obviously, the number is fuzzy, because with changes in culture come changes in relationships – so there’s that shifting boundary in addition to existing cultural variability – and relationships themselves are difficult to define precisely because they are not quantifiable.
One could go on and on about what is imprecise about this claim; but imprecision is not sufficient to dismiss the general concept.
We do have some limits on our temporal and cognitive capacities to do the things we need to do to maintain our personal, unmediated relationships.
So if we want to use 150 as a hypothetical constant, and it turns out to be – as it likely is – variable across some range, then the range itself is a valid premise for further fuzzy conclusions… again, whose fuzziness is not sufficient to dismiss them.
If you can’t provisionally accept that, then stop here, because this is one of the premises upon which I will base a kind of conclusion.
The next premise is that the break between primary and secondary relationships, that is, covenantal and contractual relationships, is a break where mutual care is replaced by the structural suspicion between the secondary relations.
A boss, an administrator, a manager or even a specialized conflict resolver will always put systems and rules before care. In fact, care is antithetical to the foundation of rule-based relations. They become the caretakers of impersonality, invested personally in impersonality; and that impersonality accrues power to itself over and against the individual.
In friendship or kinship, the relationship is not one of mutual suspicion (created by rules), but of mutual aid… or, if you will, service.
I’m not prepared to say that all institutions, administrative apparatuses, management, and governance organizations should be abolished outright.
First, it’s an absurd fantasy; and second, we can’t possibly know the consequences, given that society is currently self-organized around its formal organizations. Massive institutional disruptions do not always spell liberation. 2008-to-now is an institutional disruption, and we aren’t free of capital yet. On the contrary, we are seeing a terrible surge of suffering.
What I am prepared to say is that we ought to begin right now subjecting every institution to scrutiny, and work against the institutional tendency to transform from an in-itself into a for-itself.
Every time friends become a committee, we ought to exercise the precautionary principle; because our desire to get bigger and stronger to pursue tempo tasks can blind us to the more formidable strength we risk losing by neglecting – and underestimating – primary relations.
If we spend 80 percent of our time managing secondary relationships, then we need to figure out how we can flip that to 80 percent of our time nurturing primary relationships.
One of the reasons we have so little power to act creatively in the face of so many crises is that we are fragmented, yes, but cut off in a much deeper way by the lack of social cohesion that can only happen in the small, intimate group.
It is not hyperbole to say, I don’t think, that Management is the enemy of social cohesion, because it substitutes secondary weak bonds for primary strong ones.
It only seems symmetrical to suggest that by restrengthening primary bonds, we develop a greater capacity to resist, but also to creatively adapt to, the forces that seem so threatening now.
I’d welcome other thoughts.
Stan:
Thinking now of Polanyi’s description of ‘embeddedness.’
12 November 2010, 11:18 pmStan:
Walked into town today to get the rent money and hit the farmers market. The route between our place and town is a one-channel deal, no alternate routes without circumnavigating the province. Very built up, an urban tunnel with hundreds of houses and shops built literally wall to concrete wall. This is earthquake central here… a 5.9 fifteen miles from here just a few weeks ago… and reinforced concrete construction is the name of the game in the cities. Each house, shop, school, clinic, et al, is gated, most gardened inside, and of course I see the same people now over and over, even if I don’t know them, because they live, shop, and work along this concrete corridor. There’s also a big Hanes underwear factory nearby along this strip.
At any rate, over time and with snippets of conversation with the guy who sells me juice oranges, or the local matriarch of the church office, or the mentally disabled guys that sit across the street from the high school, we learned that this street is populated with various kinds of cousins, in-laws, siblings, grandbabies, an so on… that this cluttering method of building houses along this thoroughfare represents an accumulation of effort over time of just three or four kinship groups.
As a rootless cosmopolitan, my first view of this place is that it is a culture, something I can get my head around and control. This is Costa Rican culture. But it’s not, or at least that only scratches the surface, because this physical place was built and is maintained by a pretty intimate meshwork of at least semi-primary relationships.
The town reminds me in many ways of my childhood, especially the period between 4 years and 12 years, when we lived in St. James, Missouri. That would be 1955-63 iirc. This town is a big town, around 25K, a commercial center in the middle of an agricultural region. St. James was 3,000 people, whose livliehoods depended on the market for concord grapes. Not the same in more ways than they are… so why am I reminded of St. James in Grecia, Costa Rica?
I think the similarity is in the level of embeddedness, and the stage of progressive disembeddedness. I think Grecia is at some similar stage in the early post-WWII dissolution of embedded communities. St. James had family clusters – of which we were not members, and somewhat considered outsiders. Grecia seems similar, and also because the general attitude of the people here is to accept crazy people and disabled people and public drunks as familiar members of the community, and it may be that they are related to someone who is related to someone…
I also see the same signs that were there in St. James that were impenetrable to a child. The encroachment of box stores, the apotheosis of convenience, the increasing male fascination with automobiles, so much the same. The relationships here, even the etiquette norms, ie, how men and women greet each other, seem archaic. And they look very like that stage in history when I was a child in the US, hovering somewhere in the late 50s early 60s in its yearning for middle-class respectability and its seemingly naive faith in the dangerous notion of progress… but still living the structural realities of an older, more embedded existence.
Suggesting that there is – even in the absence of any existing measurements – a phenomenon we can call embeddedness, certain identifiable pressures for disembedding that are – as Hornborg describes – related to imperial economics.
Or maybe I need to go back to bed. (-:
13 November 2010, 10:59 amPeach McD:
My first encounter w/Dunbar – interesting thesis. Reading this reminded me yet again that one of the most revolutionary things going on in the sacrament of the Eucharist is the little-by-little expansion of our finite concept of ‘self’ into infinitude. If my little egoness can only handle primary, caring, compassionate relations w/x# of ppl, then the path to peace is breaking out of that little egoness. If my most basic conception of my self is as a member of the Body of Christ (practice practice practice) then my Body is immense and diverse, w/members who haven’t yet been born. My compassion has no boundaries in space OR time, and those with whom I have primary relations = the number of sentient beings.
13 November 2010, 2:25 pmStan:
A beautiful description of the Eucharist.
13 November 2010, 6:22 pmMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
I was not able to follow the eucharist comparison, which I say not as a criticism, but out of curiosity =-)
Elaina said I had to come here to read a thread that included the words “Dunbar’s Number,” “management,” “administration,” and “conflict resolution,” all within the first two sentences, but that prolly is only funny to ~100-150 people in the world :: rimshot ::
Anyway, I planned to wait for someone to jump in and claim you’d gone mad, so that I could offer the counterpoint, but I’ll jump in and say that while I agree with the main ideas, I think your vision may not be ambitious *enough*.
Specifically, you say that the outright abolishment of all institutions, administrative apparatuses, management, and governance organizations is an absurd fantasy. Now, while I might agree with you, I will also point out that this happens to be *my* fantasy, and that I also have to say that it also seems like the most likely outcome, given a long enough time scale.
What of the Zapatistas? My understanding is that they use a Congress of delegates which act literally only as delegates, not as “representatives” as they do here in the USA.
13 November 2010, 9:24 pmStan:
It was never an easy or particularly precise point, and I could have used a better term than absurd fantasy. My point, I guess, is that many people are going to continue to want to do things that require admin/management. It’s inescapable at a certain scale, and even advantageous for a time. But the same way a healthy, fresh peach will eventually turn into a pile of mush, admin/management will eventually fulfill its potential to become over-against-above, leading us into managerial dog-waggery.
Believe it or not, there is something about this in the Bible. (-:
When Jesus tells his lawyerly critics that the Sabbath exists for people, not people for the Sabbath, he is telling them that their tail has come to wag their dog… that rules and rule enforcers have come to overshadow the original purpose of this Good Thing, and turned it into something over-and-against people.
Been around a long time, this tendency. “The perversion of the best is the worst.”
I understand the kinds of telos that underwrite various political constructs, like anarchism, communism, etc, where an ideal condition defines the true north of practice… abolition of the state, or governance by workers councils, and so on. These things serve as strategic orientations, kinda like commander’s intent in an op-order.
The danger of them, for me, was that my own ideals turned me into a cop waiting for other people to fail some litmus test. Then again, I was organizing a lot then, which can easily shift from being a labor of love into the manipulative quest for an obsession.
The danger of ideals – speaking more generally now – is that they can tempt us into thinking that if we just do this one thing, we will be moved significantly toward that ideal.
The One Thing is given precedence over all else for a time – a tempo task – and that’s when we have been captured by the dynamic of The Game, ie, we have come to prioritize instrumental efficacy designed to defeat someone… so we have lashed ourselves to an enemy, who will come to define us in the course of The Game, and we have subordinated ourselves to a game-strategy.
This is a tough dilemma, and I have no idea why I chose this to chew on like cud. But this is what I think Illich meant when he said “To hell with the future. It’s a man-eating idol.”
So I tend to downplay ideal-futures, sometimes in a way that is ham-handed, like my terminology above. (-:
If it’s about ethical action, then that’s a different realm than the future, even if that ethical action is consciously exemplary of some ideal… “be the change you want to see,” eg.
I believe in trying to live with integrity, as imperfectly as we all can. Again, my personal experience has taught me – painfully, at times – that I can become a cop on this account, and one that wants to judge people based on my own standards, to which most people haven’t even been exposed, much less can they be held responsible for abiding by my ethical standards. I can be an absolutist asshole, who so relentlessly politicizes my own environment that no one wants to be around me.
When I learned to elevate my acceptance and lower my (so very important) expectations, I tossed less in bed at night. Pop-therapy from Stan and the 12-steppers.
Dunbar is not going to go down well with big-idea people. We have big-idea people here… because it can call into question pretty much everything we think we know about (1) organizing, (2) relationships, (3) everything we have written or said that was based on another premise, (4) strategy, etc. Stepping away from that is scary, and even moreso when people like me who are recommending this fuzzy notion might be crazy as a shit-house mouse.
I hear you on the Zapatistas, and these formations can serve as inspiration, and even glimpses of the possible, but they are also part of a history and culture that is so dramatically different than ours that it’s unlikely we could or would evolve a similar grid of relations, political or otherwise. Good inspiration, but not a model for anyone except the Zapatistas.
In fact, the basis of resilience theory – not advocating it as the grand-unified-theory-of-the-universe – is that local diversity increases resilience… the imitation of nature’s method of stabilizing systems against catastrophic shocks.
This applies to a diversity of practices, too, even strategically, because it’s harder direct a strategy against a diversity of practices.
I’ve gone so far afield here… disculpe.
Thanks for the tweak, Marcilla.
14 November 2010, 8:06 amDeAnander:
“If you were the Establishment, what would you rather see coming through the door? One lion? Or five hundred mice?” — Flo Kennedy, ‘Born in Flames’
15 November 2010, 2:47 amDwayne:
I live out here in NE South Dakota (a city of 25,000, incidentally) and in this area are the Hutterites. They are a subdivision of the Anabaptists, some other members of the Anabaptists are: the Amish, the Menonites, etc. They’re like Menonites in dress, communal living, and pacifism, but they drive huge GMC trucks and do chemically intensive farming. Anyway, I understand that when a Hutterite colony reaches around 200 individuals, they split off and form another colony, trying to keep a maximum colony size of 150 individuals. An example of Dunbar’s number, perhaps?
15 November 2010, 10:02 pmAndy:
A friend of mine had a term for your One Thing – “The Cause.” It becomes the thing that turns into a code, and to police people over. It is the obsession to till, sow, tend, and reap all at once without realizing that the important thing is simply “living with it,” living with the land you work and guard (to use Genesis language). It sounds like that’s the distinction you’re trying to make – living with a way of life, and not looking at it as a means subordinate to an end.
15 November 2010, 11:22 pmMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
@Dwayne, I once used the Amish as an example of how people, even in the USA, were able to live without a State to keep them governed. The response was something to the effect that the Amish were basically freeloading off the US military, who were keeping them safe, even though they weren’t contributing. I knew that’s when we had reached the end of any constructive conversation and arguing for argument’s sake had taken hold, lolz! That’s interesting to know about the dividing factor =-)
@Stan, as much as our visions may parallel, I think our worldviews diverge at a much more fundamental level. If I understand correctly, you personify your universe. Dunbar’s Number (or Planck’s Constant, or general relativity, etc) were decided, at least on some level, by this entity to which you commit your subordination. It isn’t like that for me. The universe I live in is just that – it’s just a place. The things here (laws of nature included) all have a *reason* for being here (in prior states, etc), but they don’t necessarily have a *purpose*. That, for me, is a human construct, and a changing one, at that. I’m not the center of the universe, but I don’t worship the universe I live in, either.
I mention this because I get this “spidey sense” that you feel like our species can’t possess a non-authoritarian world because we don’t deserve it. And while I can see why you might feel we’re unworthy, I also don’t think that is the deciding factor. Kind people suffer and cruel people rejoice. Not all the time, but it happens. I don’t expect supernatural justice, so I don’t factor it into my (mostly intuitive) forecasting model. Our species could theoretically come together, nurse the biosphere back to health, sing Kumbaya, and still be taken out by a comet six months later. What would it mean? Nothing, that’s just what happens, sometimes. But on the flip side, we could be total dicks from now until the rev, and still end up with sudden, sweeping, positive social changes. Sometimes, that’s just what happens.
It concerns me if you would feel you needed to lower your expectations in order to raise your acceptance, but I’m glad you sleep better at night =-) I have certainly been in a similar situation (and now that I think about it, I was also sleeping horribly at the time), but I did not see the problem as dreaming of visions of an “ideal state,” the problem was my internal authoritarian. My internal authoritarian was “The Martyr” and held everyone in contempt who seemed too apathetic or unappreciative. Well I pulled her off the cross and burned her on the pyre, and I got to keep my ideal states (which I now realize change at least as often as my ideals do). Now, I wouldn’t want to speak for you, and maybe this is wrong to inject the personal into a blog post, but you came right out and named your internal authoritarian – “The Cop.”
I started as a strictly political Anarchist, but I find its roots creeping into the other areas of my thinking – epistemological Anarchism, philosophical Anarchism. “Consensus” used to be my touchstone, but for now, I think it’s “negation.” I seek “meta-anarchism,” or a constant re-evaluation of self under the terms “what kind of anarchist would I be, if I didn’t know what kind of anarchist I thought I was supposed to be?”
16 November 2010, 7:54 amStan:
The “lower expectations and elevate acceptance” is an old 12-step dictum that refers to how we relate inter-personally. It’s a corrective for me. The Cop isn’t my internal voice. It’s that person in meetings or groups who watches for deviations from “our” values, the scratches that will certainly turn into gangrene if we don’t confront, confront, confront. When I acted like that, it was anything but internal… I externalized it on others.
I do try to submit to a “higher authority,” an ironic term… but I won’t digress into theology, except to say that that higher authority is a community. Just speaking for me here – when I took myself as the final authority, things didn’t go well. (-:
Acceptance, for me, just means that I accept that I can not change people, and I don’t have to be mad at them when they don’t. It means one doesn’t have to share my every thought and value – that one might even hold views or do things that I don’t approve of – and I can still choose to treat that person with respect, even affection. (Shit, I wouldn’t have a single family member I could get along with otherwise.)
The reason I bring that up in this context is another one of my swats at an amorphous left that traces its lineage to the 19th C – many as putative historical materialists – yet they organize as if changing people’s minds precedes changes in action, and spend a good deal of their time debating – eventually with each other, because no one else is listening – instead of figuring out how to change practices, and trusting their own philosophical insight about ideas reflecting practice.
Dunbar has me thinking about those primary relations, and the contradiction of geography. My family is spread all over. My interest-affinities are virtual – people far away that communicate textually. I’m not any kind of ***ist. I share concerns with marxists, with anarchists, etc., but to claim one camp as my own… every time I did that, someone from the same camp wanted to put a straitjacket on me. Maybe it’s this 60th-year thing, but now I have more faith in the transformative value of cleaning up an empty lot with neighbors than giving a fight-speech to strangers.
Primary bonds are always stronger. But we can’t make them – locally – if we want philosophical agreement on our ontology. That is the cul-de-sac of philosophical idealism masquerading as historical materialism. The materialism is there in word only, and the practices are chosen based primarily on ideas (and recruiting to ideas). So we are weak, because our bonds are secondary, and easily weakened, dropped, exchanged.
All the old expectations I had of a “good comrade” have to be set aside if I want to form a relationship with a neighbor (where I am going, they will be one-generation off the farm, predominantly Catholic, with 25% unemployment).
[Oh yeah...might as well put that out there. Sherry's parents need someone close by right now, and probably for quite a while. We are the ones who are flexible enough to go. We are leaving CR in a month, and moving to Michigan in Jan. Long story, but there's the outlines.]
17 November 2010, 6:55 amCurt:
That is really a bummer that you have to at least temporarily give up on your CR move. What you write about changeing actions before changing people’s minds is interesting. I might be a slow learner though. Changing peoples minds has seemed for my life to be a good first step becasue if you do not change their minds they will not have any interest in taking that first step to change their actions.
17 November 2010, 1:10 pmIs that not true? Yet I can also see the sense in having an example that appears to be working to help overcome people’s scepticism to change.
Then of course I imagine people that are comfortable now are going to fear that the short term pain of change will be to great to bear. Of course it might be possible to scare the hell out of them by pointing out how much pain that they are going to suffer if they do not change. Still, they may think, well maybe those dire predictions about what will happen if I and we do not change may be overblown, even a down right conspiracy of fear.
The prospects seem grimm.
Henry:
Re: Primary bonds are always stronger. But we can’t make them – locally – if we want philosophical agreement on our ontology.
Good point. One of the fundamental differences between modern societies and traditional ones is that the latter are “unanimous.” Of course, aside from some tribal groups there are no more traditional societies and civilizations. They pretty much vanished last century.
17 November 2010, 3:27 pmm.c.:
@Stan,
If you’re going to be near Ann Arbor, they have a good law school & journalism school. Since its public, the libraries, including the law school library are open to the public. My concept was(originally for journalism) to encourage non-law school students and others to teach themselves how to use the ls libary. A legal asst./paralegal is roughly to a lawyer what a nurse is to a doctor. They say nurses do most of the work & the doctor does the paperwork.
18 November 2010, 12:35 pmCharles:
I can only handle about 150 I-care-you-care relationships… for the simple reason that this number reaches certain cognitive limits that may be organic, and because there is simply not enough time for more without diffusing the quality of all relationships.
^^^^
18 November 2010, 4:07 pmI’m thinking if part of the definition of an I-care-you-care relationship is that a minimum amount of time is spent in caring for that other, in caring activities, then since we only have so much time, this would create a limit on the number of relatives and close friends. I’m skeptical about there being an organic cognitive limit. With enough time, we could remember enough about more than 150 people’s feelings, thoughts, lives to be close to them. There might be limit on how much sadness one can handle without becoming majorly depressed. So, that might set a limit on how many unhappy friends one could handle. I think of that as an emotional , not cognitive, limit
Charles:
I live out here in NE South Dakota (a city of 25,000, incidentally) and in this area are the Hutterites.
^^^^
As a side note, I had an anthro professor, Gertrude Huntington, who did fieldwork with the Hutterites. Sort of frozen 1800s German peasant culture.
http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/541326
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/241794.Gertrude_Enders_Huntington
http://msupress.msu.edu/authorbio.php?authorID=24
18 November 2010, 4:23 pmCharles:
Primary bonds are always stronger. But we can’t make them – locally – if we want philosophical agreement on our ontology. That is the cul-de-sac of philosophical idealism masquerading as historical materialism.
^^^^^
Could you reiterate this in different words ?
Given that Marx , Engels and Lenin , the original historical materialists, wrote and spoke about 100 volumes, their model seems to be trying to persuade with ideas. Raising mass working class and socialist _consciousness_ is their aim. I think Marx solves this riddle with his famous ” when an idea grips masses it becomes a material force.”
^^^
The materialism is there in word only, and the practices are chosen based primarily on ideas (and recruiting to ideas).
^^^^^
moving to Michigan in January
^^^^^
18 November 2010, 4:35 pmWelcome in advance ! Come visit us in Detroit.
Stan:
Marx and Engels writings say little about their activities, and mostly seem, to be working out the intellectual implications of their own synthesis of Hegel and socialism. Their model for action did not require attention to Dunbar because that concept was nonexistent then, but also because they adopted a military model of strategy – an overthrow.
On this key point, I think they were wrong for all the reasons I think overthrow strategies are still wrong. Overthrow strategy still leads to management and hierarchy (what did Engels say about a ship needing a captain?), and these are necessary to pursue overthrow strategies.
You might win, but you usually won’t. Whether or not you win, the adoption of heirarchies to establish a war footing changes the participants into war-fighters, and that never goes away. Once established in power, there is no impulse to relinquish power.
Thanks for the invite. We’ll be butterflying around during January just getting a place and transportation (I’ll be in the market for an app 2003 Ford Ranger pickup… some projects I’m already plotting will be farmer-ish.) You know any of these folks?
http://permaculture.org.au/2010/03/20/permaculture-detroits-urban-agriculture-movement-what-is-done-not-what-is-said/
19 November 2010, 7:01 amCharles:
I didn’t mean to connect M, E and L to Dunbar’s number,but to say that the activity or practice of historical materialism involves trying to influence people’s thinking , to get ideas to grip masses, which might seem like “idealism” but is not ( since they started all the criticism of “idealism” from “materialists”).
As to use of the military “strategy-tactics” metaphor, yes they definitely conceived of class struggle or “warfare” as critical to revolutionary change. Intuitively or in my gut, I know what you are getting at in criticizing this; intellectually, I’m not fully convinced of your critique. I’m especially not persuaded of no need for large and holistic plans. A main aspect of the Marxist critique of capitalism is that its production is anarchistic. I do not believe the experience of the Soviet Union means that substantially planning the fundamental aspects of the _whole_ economy is not optimum for humanity.
The hierarchy and militarism-lack of democracy that ruined the Soviet Union was forced on them by imperialism waging the biggest war and war threat in history on the SU ( this is a precise statement of military history) Imperialism was able to cause the SU to ruin its socialism by forcing it to militarize the whole society for legitimate defense. Only a world wide socialist revolution that ends imperialism and capitalism will allow socialism to develop without hierarchy , without a _state_. Recall Marxism anticipates the withering away of the state. This is only possible when there are no more capitalist states left in the world, for they will always wage war on socialism. This is what we have learned from the first efforts to build socialism.
19 November 2010, 3:25 pmCharles:
I’m getting this message right now:
Unable to connect
Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at permaculture.org.au.
Will try later.
Maleek Yakini is a main activist in this area in Detroit.
More later
19 November 2010, 3:30 pmCharles:
From the article: “I had an opportunity to speak with a local leader actively addressing the myriad issues related to food security there. He’s an African American man named Malik Yakini who heads an organization called the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. Many of those reading this may bristle at the organization’s title – the ‘Black’ part, anyway. As if that holds any special significance or deserves mentioning in the discussion about food security or urban agriculture.”
^^^^^
19 November 2010, 4:51 pmPro-Black is not anti-white. Perversely, under Reaganite racism the main “racists” are Black people.
Kim Sky:
The Seed Lady of Watts –amazing story
“I practice direct action by building free, organic gardens for people who suffer from HIV/AIDS, cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, and other illnesses. My advocacy takes me to drug/alcohol/mental health facilities, community centers, schools, inside of housing projects, and to shelters that house women who are returning to our community from prison. I teach people how to grow their own food, organically. But that is not all I teach them.”
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/our-planet-our-selves/seeds-of-justice-seeds-of-hope
great radio interview
19 November 2010, 8:02 pmhttp://archive.kpfk.org/parchive/m3u.php?mp3fil=30567
Marcilla Elizabeth Smith:
I am no fan of capitalist imperialism. I am absolutely opposed to capitalism. It hurts people; I feel anger towards it. I think there is a tendency, maybe, if we hate “too much” – if we hate something without being able to think about why that is or what it means to feel that way, then we ascribe powers commensurate with the intensity of the feelings we have.
IOW, there are right-wing authoritarians who hate Muslims because they feel fear. They don’t consider that, so they have no realistic analysis of the threat (or lack thereof) posed by Islam. In order to justify the intensity of their feelings, they have to search until they find evidence to support a belief that Muslims are as dangerous as their hate for Muslims would dictate. Similarly, I think left wing authoritarianism has overstated the threat imposed by the right, deflecting internal analysis of how the left has contributed to being its own worst enemy.
When I read something about how capitalist states will always wage war on socialism, it just has not been the case – or at least it does not tell the whole story. I believe the top three nation-states in terms of income equality are Denmark, Japan, and Iceland. I don’t think anyone would say that these countries are on the top of the USA’s hit list. That doesn’t mean that capitalism is not threatened by Socialism and that it doesn’t seek to destroy it, but it does seem to rebuff vanguardist ideology that says “no war but the class war.” There really *are* struggles beyond the workers’ struggle. And a system that decides to militarize, decides to militarize. If capitalism can always “make” Socialism militarize, then capitalism really *is* stronger than Socialism and we’re all working for the wrong side. Fortunately, I don’t subscribe to this model.
20 November 2010, 10:27 amStan:
nice links Kim. cheers
20 November 2010, 11:04 amStan:
This is actually very helpful in moving the discussion along. Thanks.
I think the “anarchism” of production isn’t the same thing as the kinds of decentralization suggested, for example, by relocalizers. Apple and orange.
What I mean is, Marx was describing this disorganization as a specifically capitalist phenomenon, inside the boundaries of a liberal capitalist conception of property. The “anarchy” is a characteristic of the capitalism he observed in the 19th C. Capitalism today seems far more centralized and integrated, and the anarchic element of the earlier epochs has given way to the Dollar-Wall Street Regime and the US state.
In any case, the decentralization that I argue for does not eschew a strategic orientation; it questions whether or not goals can be pursued more effectively through institutionalized strategies or through non-institutionalized ones. I’m making a secular argument about efficacy.
Per capita, small, tightly knit groups that cohere around common practices are far more effective than contractually-cohered, rule-based, impersonal groups… even if there is ideological unity. Moreover they can concentrate their efforts in actual physical alterations to their surroundings (a practice that is grossly undervalued by ideologues)… and here’s the materialist part… these changes in the built environment change consciousness.
You could decide howsoever, for example, that there is a good strategic reason to value the goal of 1000 rain gardens (these are drainage and soil filtering systems). If the network and capacity is there, you can share technical information, and let a thousand different groups of 2 or 3 figure out where, when, and how.
1000 rain gardens can have 1000 signs that explain what a rain garden is – a pretty, ecological way to prevent storm drain runoff, and pre-filter urban runoff to protect waterways. Now people see a thing that is easy, pleasant, and responsible; and that gets them thinking.
And a thousand groups are seen by neighbors as the nice people who built the nice rain garden, and they talk to them while they work, and they get to know new people, or they find other people who’d like to do the same thing.
No controversy, therefore no resistance (you could sell a rain garden project to a Republican Board of Aldermen). But at the end, you have changed the very built environment in a way that not only gets people thinking, but – here’s the best – actually contributes to the solution for urban runoff.
You could get a Southern Baptist Church to go for a rain garden volunteer project, and you could get the local food hippies there with them. When you make it practical, there are more bases for unity (you and I both know how to use that brick hammer or shovel). When you make it ideological, there is more basis for division.
So there is not only a great deal of protective coloration going on, there is this granular redundancy as opposed to interdependency. Granular redundancy means it takes a lot of effort and a lot of time to get rid of you. Hierarchical interdependency gives opponents a keystone to topple. So you are hard to see, you don’t call a lot of attention to yourself, and you are everywhere… like rhizomes.
If you don’t have matching institutions, you cannot win institutional conflicts. No conventional military is going after the US military, eg. Power strategy only works for the powerful. I really think the epoch – drenched in blood as it is – has passed a point of no return for The Strategy. Asymmetry is out of the bag. Everyone knows that anyone can destroy something and no one can stop them. We enter into that, we enter the rip current of exterminism. Then “we” lose. Big time.
It’s a strategic argument, aimed at a process. But you point at the USSR and the topic of state economic policy, about which my tactical treatise doesn’t say much. Well, it actually does… but only in a tendential way. That is to say, no government will ever be able to ‘plan’ an economy as well as local people. The conditions are too varied and dynamic to subordinate to a rule-bound, abstracted, absentee institution.
20 November 2010, 11:53 amMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
Stan, I have more for you, but I hope you can forgive me when I pick apart what you say on here. It isn’t that I am trying to be argumentative (I trust you know that already), but instead a personal interest in how you think (which may well be the greater crime in this type of public forum [interjecting the personal]).
Maybe it’s just my personal issues with 12-step programs, but my thought is that if expectations need to be lowered, there is a bigger issue of whether they are even appropriate expectations. Using the addict example: when I was in drug treatment, you would see people whose expectations were basically a “free ride” in exchange for quitting drugs. And as ridiculous as that seemed to everyone else, the sense of entitlement was very real. Should these folks expect the same thing, but just “less” (a huge discount, even if not a freebie?) from their case workers, et al? I don’t think so. I believe the thinking patterns are just inappropriate. Apparently the Mythbusters succeeded in polishing a turd, but it still seems like an exercise in futility (the “polished turd” here being expectations which are still inappropriate, despite having been lowered).
As to your voice, it is your call seeing as it is your voice. For me, it’s hard to imagine why or how you would externalize “the cop” without having “the cop” inside telling you, “these people are getting out of line, and you are letting it happen, mister.”
But this could go back to those fundamental, cosmological differences (sorry, but as Salman Rushdie said, “no one is more obsessed with God than an Atheist.”). And I don’t presume to fully know your theology, so I’m probing a bit here, but I’m guessing you subscribe to the “free will of the soul” model. I feel like I don’t even know sometimes what people mean by “soul” and “free will” – I’m doubtful of conscious choice, even. But this is going way beyond Dunbar, so let me get back to at least talking cosmology in terms of Dunbar…
I am sorry to hear that things did not go so well when you took yourself as final authority. I know what you’re driving at, especially if I drift back to the “getting off of drugs” part of my history. I’ll contrast my own experience of things not going so well for me when I took a god as final authority, though
but I’ll add that we likely worshiped different gods. I think for me, I don’t think of a “higher power” so much as an ultimate substrate of reality. For me, all realities eventually converge at a singular, but likely unknowable “objective reality” much as the 11 dimensions of space-time can be reduced to a singular membrane. Continuing the quantum physics metaphor, the “super strings” and “super gravity” of my model of reality would have to be my own perception of reality and the physical reality of my environment. Objective reality would be at the point of collapse of these two. So while I wouldn’t say the community provides me with ultimate authority (what then is my responsibility in a mob?), I would say that as part of my environment, it co-creates objective reality along with me. I am a check on excesses of the community, the community is a check on my excesses, and similarly, each of us influences the other to recursive change.
I assume you mean you cannot *force* people to change, as I would think none of us can help but to change the others around us. I know I can say the things I have read from you I can recall specific instances where I have taken from that and passed it along =-) For me, I had to come to the conclusion that not only do I have no capacity, but I have no *desire* to control people. Part of that is recognizing that some people are idiots, some of that is recognizing that I can be an idiot, too, and trusting in the eventual outcomes of collective action. Or I came up with this way of saying it earlier, “my asshole may be convinced that if my mouth would just quit eating, it wouldn’t have to deal with so much shit, but my stomach and all the cells that depend on the nutrients think my asshole is just being an asshole.”
But I don’t know that I was clear on why I originally brought up cosmology – I don’t see the future as a “choice” to be made as in “will the rev happen, or not?” Whatever fits the pattern of history is what will happen, I would say. It then remains as to how clearly we can see the pattern of history and therefore forecast the future. In this sense and in my mind, the next revolution in human evolution is imminent, and must be a return to something more compatible with our genetic predisposition to Anarchism.
Of course, that may sound like philosophical idealism to some, but I would remind them that I am an ideologue to the philosophy that denies its own supremacy
22 November 2010, 10:49 amCharles:
When I read something about how capitalist states will always wage war on socialism, it just has not been the case – or at least it does not tell the whole story. I believe the top three nation-states in terms of income equality are Denmark, Japan, and Iceland. I don’t think anyone would say that these countries are on the top of the USA’s hit list. That doesn’t mean that capitalism is not threatened by Socialism and that it doesn’t seek to destroy it, but it does seem to rebuff vanguardist ideology that says “no war but the class war.” There really *are* struggles beyond the workers’ struggle. And a system that decides to militarize, decides to militarize. If capitalism can always “make” Socialism militarize, then capitalism really *is* stronger than Socialism and we’re all working for the wrong side. Fortunately, I don’t subscribe to this model.
^^^^
Hi Marcella,
I understand what u mean about Denmark, Japan and Iceland. I guess you are calling them “socialist”. I consider them capitalist, and therefore not marked for destruction by imperialism.
Yes, to make a long story short, socialist revolutions only succeeded in economically much weaker countries than the main capitalist powers (US, England, France, Germany, Japan, et al), so as history went down capitalism was economically stronger than the USSR. Let me put it this way. Socialism needs peace to succeed; capitalism needs war. Humanity needs peace, so socialism is “stronger” for humanity than capitalism. It is humanity that loses when socialism losses to capitalism.
Communists have always maintained that there are struggles beyond workers struggles, and all the liberation struggles are integrally intertwined. “No war but the class war ” means workers in capitalist countries should “boycott” imperialist wars, like WWI. It doesn’t mean to say there are no women’s liberation or national liberation struggles.
On militarizing, the immediate decision for the SU was militarize or be conquered. Liberation or death, is the general slogan for this. It’s like John Brown “militarized” to overthrow slavery. I can’t argue with that decision.
22 November 2010, 3:24 pmm.c.:
I just checked. Denmark & Icelend are members of NATO(OTAN in French); which is basically a fancy way of saying the U.S. has military bases & military personnel in their countries. The U.S. also has a similar relationship with Japan, and earlier this year I believe the then recently elected PM of Japan resigned when he couldn’t keep his campaign pledge of getting all U.S. soldiers etc. to leave Okinawa.
22 November 2010, 10:32 pmCharles:
What I mean is, Marx was describing this disorganization as a
specifically capitalist phenomenon, inside the boundaries of a liberal
capitalist conception of property. The “anarchy” is a characteristic
of the capitalism he observed in the 19th C. Capitalism today seems
far more centralized and integrated, and the anarchic element of the
earlier epochs has given way to the Dollar-Wall Street Regime and the
US state.
^^^^^^^
Now that’s nice idea to chew on. Yes, indeedy, the centralization or monopolization (focused in finance) and “advances” of bourgeois economic science are allowing economic dictatorship rather than anarchy. This planning is in the interests of a small minority and not the _whole_ population , so it’s not holistic planning; or at least the part of the plan for the working masses is not in their best interests.
^^^
Republican Board of Aldermen)…Southern Baptist Church
^^^^^
I’m thinking you’ve already tested this on some Republicans and Baptists.
^^^^
So you are hard to see, you don’t call a lot of
attention to yourself, and you are everywhere… like rhizomes.
^^^
I want to say guerrillas but I won’t (smile). “Peace-illas”
^^^^^
It’s a strategic argument, aimed at a process. But you point at the
USSR and the topic of state economic policy, about which my tactical
treatise doesn’t say much. Well, it actually does… but only in a
tendential way. That is to say, no government will ever be able to
‘plan’ an economy as well as local people. The conditions are too
varied and dynamic to subordinate to a rule-bound, abstracted,
absentee institution.
^^^^^
23 November 2010, 5:25 pmThe planning _must_ be done in cooperation between the locals and the whole. There should be constant reciprocal communication. It is optimum for localities to both produce for themselves and specialize in some production for the whole. _Both_. The local units should not be utterly economically autonomous like feudal manors. They should be complementary , specialized units of the whole. Local units should be interdependent upon each other. Interdependence is a virtue , in my opinion. It’s a cooperative economy as a whole. Or a communal whole, communist whole.
Stan:
I agree that interdependence can be a virtue. But interdependence with a power differential is the same old same old.
Workers and bosses are interdependent.
Feudal manors were not autonomous. They were segmented, and the lord still ran it, not the people. In fact, almost every lord was himself someone’s vassal.
This is not about optimizing. Taylorism is optimizing.
It is not possible for a state not to act like a state. The child of a tiger is a tiger, as the Haitians say. Local people can communicate with people in other localities, and cooperate just fine without a bureaucratic intermediary.
The state example of cooperation that comes to mind is a more seemingly benign one: interstate highways. The power to realize this vision was only invested in the state, and it is too much power. The state did not foresee the ungodly mess the interstates have made. Unintended consequences get lots bigger as our projects get bigger.
Localization limits damage by limiting the scope of our mistakes. That’s another of those resiliency principles growing out of the strength of diversity.
24 November 2010, 6:03 amMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
Charles, I think we may be talking past each other because it seems to me that you are discussing ideal states. I am discussing things as they seem to be.
Believe me, I have anarchist friends who insist we can never grow beyond (relatively) tiny communities. I think we will have to find something else because 1) we tried that before as a species, and this is where we ended up, and 2) there are problems that are just too big for 100 people to deal with (ex. the North Pacific Gyre).
Call it “central coordinating,” if you like, but make it by a consensus (of delegates, not representatives) and guarantee sovereignty to each level from those more central. Then the incentive is the same for the individual (or individual community) and the larger community (or meta-community), to make use of the economies of scale granted through cooperative effort. There is no coercion necessary because either side can back out without retribution, but there is incentive to stay to avoid the economic cost of smaller scale.
24 November 2010, 10:13 amDeAnander:
Ummm Stan, remember that the US insterstate highway system started out as a military project: a means to transport missiles and other war materiel and personnel rapidly throughout a large nation. So it was already a State-violence-oriented project. Hardly surprising then, that it was pursued with that contempt for biotic health, the life of communities, etc. that marks military projects every time.
The strongest argument for a State at a level higher than the town meetin’ seems to be the danger for isolated communities to lapse into parochiality, xenophobia, etc — though as we’re seeing, modern technology can easily replicate the ignorance, insularity and xenophobic hostility of the smallest village even in the wealthiest and most cosmopolitan of nation-states. The classic USian case is Birmingham Alabama, I guess… it was Federal “interference” that overturned segregation (legally, that is) and in the end backed the local resistance against the local oppressors; and “local governance” and “states’ rights” are still tainted by the memory of local racism and apartheid.
OTOH the imposition of a Federal policy in a non-consensual, force-backed process seems to have left a resentment behind that gathers “the freedom to be flagrantly racist” into a sentimental, revanchist dream of the Good Old Days. If the racist policies had been rejected locally by a clear majority (rather than outlawed by Federal fiat) might there be less nostalgia for them now? This really vexes me. It seems morally indefensible to refrain from a larger scale of governance when there is wickedness on a local scale that might be outlawed — the Reformist impulse, the Abolitionist impulse — and yet if the use of overwhelming centralised State power to outlaw such wickedness leaves a nostalgia for it in the resentful hearts of locals, is it really a victory for justice? Or just a temporary “we’ll behave only because Teacher is standing there with a big stick, but just wait ’til she turns her back!” situation?
I dunno. The problem of “governing” (and I think of this like the governor on a diesel engine, a device that keeps things from overrevving out of control and destroying the mechanism entirely) large groups of people seems intractable. My gut feeling is that at the most global scale only the most simple and global principles can be agreed on — stuff like “slavery is wrong,” “torture is wrong,” “murder is wrong,” “biocide is wrong,” “aggressive violence is wrong,” etc. Resource issues get tricky fast because they impact both the local and global levels — a local commune might decide in good faith and through a consensus process to pursue some use of their local watershed that has negative impacts for neighbours a thousand miles downstream. Some council or forum needs to bring representatives from the local areas to a global table, and somehow (here a miracle occurs) the resolutions of that council have to be made acceptable to the locals, not just enforced by more Men With Guns.
Sorry, I get incoherent when I start mulling over any forms of government for 7 billion people. The brain boggles.
24 November 2010, 1:46 pmMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
Stan, have you seen the book A Thousand Plateaus? I ask because of the rhizome metaphor.
24 November 2010, 2:38 pmStan:
Not yet. (-:
@ De. You are all over the ambiguity of this topic. I wonder if strengthening locally doesn’t give us more power vis a vis the existing meshworks of hierarchy. They aren’t going away, even if they have to contract – which they eventually will… the metropolitan state is one of if not the least sustainable of all human activities.
But the degree of autonomy (in the utilitarian, not ideological sense) that people can consolidate (off the grid) and the immovability of geographic communities seems bound to strengthen local folks in their relation with officialdom.
It is a power-building small-s strategy. Not to overthrow or even confront the establishment, but to see what can practically be achieved at the local level. With the latter as the strategic focus, our own strategy is itself independent of the establishment (neither for nor against), and so we are not bound to an adversarial dynamic where we are required to react to an adversary’s every move.
“See what can practically be achieved at the local level.” (you have the initiative, unopposed except episodically)
“Take power from an adversary.” (power can pay for the initiative, you are required to react because your adversary IS your objective, opposition defines you both)
The local option lets you evolve local methods for decision-making and conflict resolution, and when you come into contact with the establishment, relations are negotiated on an ad hoc basis, struggled over if necessary.
Keeps all conflict at the skirmish level, never generalizing into a movement that requires a general staff. But it also allows for highly localized resolutions that are not one-size-fits-all.
We don’t have to plot out a new system. We can just infiltrate this one. That’s what a rain garden does. It increases infiltration. (-:
Here’s one I swiped from MM today:
24 November 2010, 10:31 pmhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_management
DeAnander:
I have been thinking a lot lately about rejecting the Machine Metaphor. About the difficulty of doing so, should we wish to. It came to my attention again just a day or so ago, when I overheard my own train of thought (ahem!) chattering to itself about “defense mechanisms” — *mechanisms*? Do I really think of human or animal behaviour as just a collection of mechanisms? How very Cartesian. And this got me into thinking about just how much of daily speech — particularly technical and technocratic, managerial, psychiatric, medical and other elite speech — is based in machine metaphors (and warfare metaphors, but leaving those aside for a moment). Consider for example, the common phrase “personality disorder.”
Well, “disorder” means untidiness, or “incorrect function”. But — as I and the Archdruid and a lot of other folks have been pointing out for a few years now, a healthy biotic “order” often looks a lot more like chaos than like a nice, neat, clean, tidy machine or machine-shop. Purity and ultratidiness is something machines require, not living creatures (I was about to say “living *systems*”, which I fear leads us back into machine metaphors again). The idea that a personality can be “out of order” (like a broken machine) implies the idea that there is a “correct” (or dare we say “efficient”?) way for a personality — all personalities, because machines are standardised — to function (*function*?), and that deviations from this standard, approved function are “disorderly”. And these “disorders” or defects are unitary, discrete, repairable, like defects in identifiable parts of a machine. Would we have a DSM-IV if we did not have Chilton’s Repair Manuals?
I found myself wondering, what would happen to our concepts of mind and self if we thought of our personalities — like other organisms large and small — as more like a garden, forest, or other ecosystem? what if we thought of personality traits as being like plants in a garden: each having its virtues and its role in the ecosystem as a whole, perhaps becoming harmful if hypertrophied, fed with excessive or synthetic inputs (*inputs*?), but harmless in its appropriate niche?
Instead of thinking of the healthy mind — or the healthy body — as a factory floor, a place to be swept clear of all debris and mess, purified of all irregularity, kept in A-1 order according to exhaustive and authoritative engineering specs, what if we thought of ourselves as (gee) living ecosystems? Untidy, self-organising, redundant, fractal, re-entrant, synergistic?
What if we thought of our community similarly as a garden, coral reef, or other living ecosystem? How would this affect our attitudes to law, policing, etc?
What if we thought of politics as a gardening activity rather than as a struggle over access to the “levers of power” (the control console of some vast machine)?
What if we talked about ideas and movements becoming part of the “compost heap” rather than the “trash heap” of history? Not discarded like an obsolete machine, but recycled into the fodder for new ideas and movements?
What if I had originally spoken of, say, a *vine of thought* (something twining and re-entrant, full of not-really-random tendrils, constantly growing) rather than a *train of thought*, a mechanical juggernaut hurtling down a single path defined by steel rails, able to make only gradual turns of large radius, unable to ramify or diverge? (Yes I realise that the phrase “train of thought” probably pre-dates the steam locomotive, but I imagine that most modern speakers reflexively associate it with choo-choo trains rather than with the trailing hems of robes of state or other more archaic defs).
It’s late, I’m goofy with too much CAD time (and too much sub-freezing weather), so if this is crazy rambling (vinelike, exploratory, divergent) so be it
but it is interesting to me to listen to myself and others talking, and to hear the presence of the machine metaphor (almost as strong and persistent as gender metaphors like “balls”-for-courage) in our daily speech.
25 November 2010, 2:45 amHenry:
I don’t think it’s crazy at all. I think you are quite right. The machine metaphor is central to the scientific-technocratic dehumanizing mindset, and it definitely makes its full entry with the cartesian bifurcation of nature into the res extensa and res cogitans. Henceforth, the “physical world” is what is measurable and quantifiable. The concrete realities we experience as nature are relegated to the res cogitans. Now we have a “mind-body problem” on our hands, an enigma that is a function of the bifurcation. It’s interesting that this machine metaphor already prefigures this whole mechanistic universe that culminates with Newtonian mechanics a century or so earlier as Europe became enamored of all kinds of clockwork mechanisms that began to be invented. I imagine the deep root of this is in the nominalist philosophy and also in the greco-roman atomism that was something of an anomaly in those times and then came to be idolized by moderns as “genius” prefiguring scientism. As Whitehead pointed out, with Newton the universe becomes meaningless, just material being shuffled back and forth endlessly. In a sense, it would seem that evolution tries to inject something of meaning into this shuffling, even while its machine metaphor unconscious studiously avoids even a hint of “teleology” as being unscientific. As a psychological phenomenon, evolution functions almost like a religious dogma for many minds.
26 November 2010, 3:02 amStan:
Just to confuse things, here’s a summary of the Deluezean “machinic phylum.”
http://christianhubert.com/writings/Machinic_Phylum_or.html
26 November 2010, 7:40 amvictor:
As an anarchist who has always seen the state as a predator, I have warn you that you are beating your head against a brick wall making these kinds of arguments to the modern left, Stan. Marxists most of all have had such a long, dirty and brutal love affair with state power that they are mostly incapable of seeing that the entire project was wrong from the begining. In the end you just end up with a very sore head, a lot of bitterness & an even lower view of the left.
27 November 2010, 1:09 amHenry:
Interesting and wide ranging interview with Nicole ‘Stoneleigh’ Foss of Automatic Earth, during the second half of the Max Keiser Report. Peak Oil, peak credit, permaculture gardens in downtown Detroit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTdLgtzD9eU&feature=player_embedded
27 November 2010, 1:20 amStan:
@ Victor, I’m not quite as prepared to buy the category “the modern left” as you are. I’ve seen a fair amount of diversity under the umbrella called left (to the point of being sectarian lunacy from time to time). As I have seen from anarchists.
I can’t claim to be either.
@ Henry, nice link, thanks.
27 November 2010, 7:02 amMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
Sometimes, I find myself wishing I could “like” comments on here (a la FaceBook), but I suppose that’s also a kind of industrialized (or post-industrialized) reaction against taking the time to engage in “real” communication. Then again, so is writing :: pause for head nod ::
On the machine metaphor, I like the synthesis of thought going on here. Isn’t there a saying about how people shape machines and then the machines shape the people? I think we are being driven cyclically by our technology. Maybe this would make a good “meme-bar”, but I guess if I write it out, it would look something like:
horticulture —> village —> management —> property ownership —> writing —>
trans-national trade —> city-state —> guilds —> feudalism —> printing press —>
industrialization —> nation-state —> corporations —> labor-as-commodity —> telepresent communications —>
Now, that’s off the top of my head, and I feel like at a minimum there’s a religious/philosophical/scientific element that’s missing, but maybe someone would like to offer a critique :: shrugs ::
If I can throw in another quote about “the map is not the terrain,” I think that’s applicable. I remember a text in grad school titled “Images of Organizations” that went through some various and sundry ways of mind-mapping public organization by analogy to other things. I like the garden one =-) Of course, it probably works best in conjunction with Stan’s ideas of putting people back in gardens, as I suspect many of the subtle points will be lost on most contemporary suburbanites. I think people are looking for something familiar, and in our industrialized world, that looks like a machine.
One metaphor that I like (although it may be even more distasteful than the machine metaphor) is that of an information processing network. Especially when on the internet, I mean, here’s your metaphor right in front of you. The internet is something that as much as it tries to be a hierarchy, has to rely on consensus-built compatibility in order to grow. Designers assume it will work one way, but people use it however they see fit. It is a hydra that grows back 10 heads for every one cut off. And it has made possible what is possibly the largest collaborative project in history in terms of the open source software movement.
Comparing voting with direct democracy is like comparing a 300 baud cradle modem to modern broadband. A vote is a “yes” or a “no”, a 1 or a 0, a single bit of information! Direct democracy involves logic (“this is why I think so”), natural language processing (“I kinda do, but I kinda don’t”), social interactions (“Look, we support you in what you’re doing, but this measure might need to be tabled, for now”), and spatial information (“let me show you what I’m talking about”). A voting system is INCREDIBLY “dumb” in terms of how much information is being processed versus compared to a system that utilized interconnecting congresses of direct democracy!
But to put this back into a more organic model (and deal with the question of how to shrink down a world of 7 billion), I imagine a world where every household (avg 3 people) is surrounded by a garden full of food and renewable building materials. Our household is part of a “cell” (like the old “blocks”) of 12 households which come together to help each other make repairs, share meals, and work out any issues. Two delegates (staggered in seniority) represent our (consensus) decisions at the “tissue” (like the old “development”) where 12 cells would mean 24 delegates meeting. For those things that can’t be handled at the tissue level, the “organ” approximates the old “subdivision” (~5.000 – 6.000) when 12 tissues come together similarly (24 delegates). For even more extraordinary circumstances, there would be the “system”, about the size of the old “bedroom communities” (~60.000 – 75.000), still with just 24 delegates needed. Twelve systems would make a “body”, which interestingly enough, would be about the size of many modern day cities (~500.000 – 1 million). Bodies would form “families” (~8-10 million), families would form “blocks” of >10 Million, and continent-sized “neighborhoods” could handle over a billion, leaving a (rotating) global council of <24 to handle those very few tasks that couldn't be resolved at a more local level (only the largest of ecological issues, for example). In this scenario, even in the unlikely event that one were to have a sudden issue of global proportions (maybe you accidentally discover that global warming is controlled by an as-yet unknown factor), it would not even require *TEN* conversations before it was heard at the global level, and then could be disseminated just as easily.
27 November 2010, 12:34 pmStan:
Illich kind of traces a progression from machine-metaphor to systems metaphor, where systems thinking is folded into com-tech language. Immune system is one of his hobby-horses, when we begin to think of our own bodies as a collection of systems. He’s talking about how we view ourselves, but there are shifting metaphors in other realms, too… war seemingly the most persistent (sigh).
It gets relearned though. Little while in the army, and you start talking about reconning things in every day life, about thunder being the Big Ranger, about slacking off as “half-stepping” and so forth.
“The map is not the terrain” is my favorite way to say abstraction is not the same as reality. I got that from the army, too. (I can do a whole riff on maps, terrain, compasses… along with medical training, land navigation gave me own of my formative metaphors for life.
What you say about voting, Hornborg says about money.
27 November 2010, 1:24 pmHenry:
Re: abstraction is not the same as reality.
Very true. But wouldn’t you agree that there are such things as accurate maps and inaccurate maps? For me, a map compiles and organizes information concerning concrete reality, and presents a sufficient and intelligible representation. A good map is relevant to the task at hand: crossing a mountain range, determining population densities, and the like. Philosophers who disdain thought in favor of experience or “existence” seem fundamentally contradictory to me. To be human is to think; and to think is to abstract. At any rate, no one can think in the void, we require data. Some philosophers believe that the only legitimate data comes from sense perception; others have a Platonic outlook and posit an inward connection with a greater intelligence, immanent in the cosmos. St. John speaks of the true light that lights all men, in which, presumably, essential or principial truths inhere, and which is also that power that existentiates and informs all things. Doctrines are like maps, and refer to different “topographies” and “types” of data. As you say, they are not the territory. They are keys to the territory–or a territory–if they are good maps. At any rate, despite the apparent split of subjct and object, the universe must be fundamentally homogeneous, otherwise–among innumerable other things–here would be no consensus possible regarding experience, even between subjectivities that aren’t human, as in the case of animals.
27 November 2010, 3:56 pmStan:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_%28fallacy%29 Here’s the danger of confusing map with terrain.
A map is still a “two-dimensional representation of a portion of the earth’s surface, drawn to scale, as seen from above.”
The ground changes after the map is made.
The map only represents that which can be shown “to scale,” in other words, a 1/50,000 map can only show you 1.50,000 of the detail of the land you will traverse. It won’t show you a line of blackberry brambles that blocks your way, or the way the rain makes this or that area impassable, or the people you might encounter… so it gives you good information on how to get started, but only 1/50,000 (so to speak) of the relevant detail along the way… and that changes throughout the day, the month, the year.
The map is far less strenuous to read than the terrain is to traverse.
The map does not work without a compass (to find north) and protractor (to translate this geometry to the map), knowledge of how to calculate declination.
No one is saying don’t use the map. I’m saying we begin to talk about the map as if it is the terrain. We begin to reify our own abstractions.
We study only the map, and fail to move onto the terrain as if the map is sufficient to form conclusions.
If I have a good map, and I enter an area, then I’ll use the map for a while, until I become so familiar with the terrain that I no longer need the map except to tell others how to find something there.
A map is a two-dimensional representation. The terrain is four-dimensional, breathing, thick, tangible, full of sounds and smells and sights and textures and living things.
As Heraclitus says in the attached piece, you do not step into the same river twice. But the map shows the same river all the time.
Liberal law is a map that has trumped the terrain, eg. Formal, legal equality is not the same as being equally valued in society. When we begin to talk like it is, then we are adrift on the sea of abstraction… and I’m mixing way too many metaphors this early (-:
28 November 2010, 6:53 amStan:
Uh oh, look what was buried in the wiki entry on reification:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation
28 November 2010, 7:01 amStan:
FULL
28 November 2010, 7:05 amMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
Absolute agreement about money. A single metric by which to share all economic information? Preposterous in this age of broadband communications!
And on top of all else, I’m loving the new category name =-)
29 November 2010, 11:36 amM. D.:
We port (a representation of) our wages on VISA cards.
VISA ACCOUNT BALANCE = How much of each of food, water, shelter, heat, and doctor/medicine one can obtain.
29 November 2010, 8:00 pmM. D.:
Or, we port (a representation of) the perceived value of our labor on VISA cards.
VISA ACCOUNT BALANCE = How much of each of food, water, shelter, heat, and doctor/medicine one can obtain.
29 November 2010, 8:01 pmHenry:
California Dreamin’
Part1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuiEsm8RrDo&feature=player_embedded
Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5PQolzuVVU&feature=youtube_gdata
Part 3
30 November 2010, 12:12 pmhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuGtT08xdjA&feature=related
Charles:
I agree that interdependence can be a virtue. But interdependence with a power differential is the same old same old.
Workers and bosses are interdependent.
^^^^^
Certainly. Agree completely with u here. I meant a situation with “All “power” to the People, though if that were true it would no longer be “power”.
The center is a coordination center.
This is the interdependence more on the order of a “Bigman” and “tribe” in pre-class society. See Durkheim’s “organic solidarity”.
^^^^
Feudal manors were not autonomous. They were segmented, and the lord still ran it, not the people. In fact, almost every lord was himself someone’s vassal.
^^^^^
They were economically self-sufficient units. There were no national economies. Nations,as the term is used today, arise with capitalism.
Agree with your description of the politics. But the Lord got all his food and other material necessities from the local manoral productive unit. Trade or commodity exchange with beyond the manor was a minor portion of the “economy”. The Lord did take all this surplus by force or threat of force, i.e. knights would rip it if the peasants didn’t give it. Knights were the special repressive apparatus.
^^^^^
^^^^^^^
This is not about optimizing. Taylorism is optimizing.
^^^^^
For me it’s about optimizing that is not Taylorism. That Taylorism is opitimization doesn’t mean all optimization is Tayolorism.
Optimization is making sure everybody, (every last person in the world !) has material basics and leisure too. “To a person ! ” is our slogan. Can’t do that without a plan for the whole.
^^^
It is not possible for a state not to act like a state.
^^^^
True. Won’t have “optimum” until all capitalist states are gone and the socialist states whithers away.
More later
30 November 2010, 12:53 pmCharles:
It is not possible for a state not to act like a state. The child of a tiger is a tiger, as the Haitians say. Local people can communicate with people in other localities, and cooperate just fine without a bureaucratic intermediary.
^^^^^
True , but history shows that while there are still states in the world , they will “go over” and conquer these “local communities”. For example, the Indigenous American or Oceanian communities were relatively “local” and stateless societies. However, the Europe states conquered them in genocidal usurpation of the entire Western Hemisphere.
The isolation of human communities from each other is part of the historical root of racism, White Supremacy or other xenophobias. We know from the last 7,000 years that a peaceful world must be a Global Village, One Race/the Human Race.
^^^^
The state example of cooperation that comes to mind is a more seemingly benign one: interstate highways. The power to realize this vision was only invested in the state, and it is too much power. The state did not foresee the ungodly mess the interstates have made. Unintended consequences get lots bigger as our projects get bigger.
Localization limits damage by limiting the scope of our mistakes. That’s another of those resiliency principles growing out of the strength of diversity.
^^^^
30 November 2010, 2:03 pmDiversity tends to contradiction and contradiction to antagonism without Unity. Unity in the Diversity : E Pluribus Unum is one the money (smile). We need a unity and peaceful interaction of the diverse parts of the Whole human species.
Charles:
Charles, I think we may be talking past each other because it seems to me that you are discussing ideal states. I am discussing things as they seem to be.
Believe me, I have anarchist friends who insist we can never grow beyond (relatively) tiny communities. I think we will have to find something else because 1) we tried that before as a species, and this is where we ended up, and 2) there are problems that are just too big for 100 people to deal with (ex. the North Pacific Gyre).
^^^^
Well, for the first 200,000 years of our species we were in tiny, anarchic, communist societies. About 7 thousand years ago some of them started growing larger spontaneously. If we go back to small communities again without their being connected to this historical experience and connected to each other, some are likely to start growing in the bad sense again. We cannot lose the communication and connection of the whole species with itself without risking a repeat of this history of the rise of class divided and state society.
^^^^^^^^
Call it “central coordinating,” if you like, but make it by a consensus (of delegates, not representatives) and guarantee sovereignty to each level from those more central. Then the incentive is the same for the individual (or individual community) and the larger community (or meta-community), to make use of the economies of scale granted through cooperative effort. There is no coercion necessary because either side can back out without retribution, but there is incentive to stay to avoid the economic cost of smaller scale.
^^^^
30 November 2010, 2:13 pmI agree with what u say here. “Free association of free producers” as Whiskers and Fred put it. You describe the higher form of communism ( the “lower” is the communism of pre-state, pre-private property , pre-historical societies, sometimes termed “primitive”)
Charles:
How about we reform human society as all the historical modes of production from hunting and gathering/foraging through gardening to agriculture to modern industry. People would rotate around to the different locals with the different modes. Some people would be in hunting and gathering areas for say, 6 months or a year, and then rotate over to another local where a different historical mode, like agriculture, was recreated, and others would rotate into the hunting and gathering areas. Children might spend a lot of time in the hunting and gathering and gardening areas.
I got the idea from Haeckel’s maxim ( which I think has been disproven) : ontogeny reiterates phylogeny. It is “ontogeny reiterates human social evolution.”
30 November 2010, 4:39 pm(Boer) Tom:
Why should the state/hierarchical structures be a natural outcome of Dunbar’s hypothesis? Are alternative mechanisms necessarily either impossible or unstable (more so than the state)?
2 December 2010, 9:28 pmStan:
I wouldn’t say the limitations suggested by Dunbar inevitably lead to hierarchy. I’m saying that exceeding them leads to the necessity for administration and management, and that the development of administration and management tends strongly toward the consolidation of powers which then creates the dogwaggery… the servant, administration, becomes the master.
Administration creates a new relation between the administrator and the administered, impersonal, leaving only abstractions and principles to define the character of that relationship. Our relations become legalistic, and the degree to which they do is the degree to which they become antagonistic. We are all forced to become interpreters of the rules to pursue our interests. and multiple interpretations of the rules leads to antagonism.
I don’t know what kind of mechanisms you’re referring to, so I’ve no idea about stability. The state is certainly stable, in large part because it has assumed responsibility for administration.
3 December 2010, 6:44 amGreg:
Mental Ghettos Weaken the US: People Who Lie to Themselves
…On the other side, are millions of people who vote for Democrats because they have been sold rhetoric about reforming the government system, as if Democrats are not also in the pockets of a number of special interests that will not accept truly needed deep reforms. Why have we not seen President Obama pursue punishment of many people and companies in the banking, mortgage and financial sectors that caused the economic meltdown? He had received huge campaign contributions from them and then surrounded himself with cabinet officials and advisors from them. Otherwise intelligent people vote for Democrats because of their psychological stupidity based on false promises of change and reform that they have succumbed to.
Psychological stupidity has become a kind of cultural epidemic that no one is addressing, so it just gets worse. It invites manipulation and the continuing corrosion and corruption of government. The rich and powerful know how to take advantage of this stupidity, obtaining government policies and programs they want, selling products and services that consumers do not really benefit from, and grabbing more of the nation’s wealth.
Those afflicted with psychological stupidity are also likely to exhibit moral superiority, making it even more difficult to have intelligent and productive conversations with them. Such arrogance strengthens their defenses against facts and information that conflicts with their cherished views. The answer: Associate with others having exactly the same views and only get information from like-minded media sources, creating mental ghettos (such as the Tea Party and Fox News) that others can take political or commercial advantage of (Republicans and companies selling gold).
Self-deception is the widespread legal narcotic lubricating the slide of American society into the toilet that other once great nations ended up in. Maybe this old Arab proverb warrants respect: People who lie to others have merely hidden away the truth, but people who lie to themselves have forgotten where they put it.
Which mental ghettos do you belong to?
Full: https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/mental-ghettos-weaken-the-us-by-joel-s-hirschhorn/
3 December 2010, 1:00 pmStan:
Lots of heat. Little light.
More philosophical idealism. No mention of the family as carrier of culture (ahistorical), and no mention of the structures of society that reproduce and validate these “wrong ideas.”
This is the I’m-smart-and-everyone-else-is-stupid argument, the inevitable conclusion for this particular species of idealism. People are not captives to the system; they are just too stupid to see the Truth… except me. I am not stupid, or I couldn’t say that others are stupid. I am, in fact, one of the superior intellects that doesn’t fall for the lies.
PS-This approach doesn’t oblige anyone to do anything, because we are faced with a problem that can be boiled down to intractable stupidity, which we can’t fix… que sera. So we will just sit on the sidelines and point and call out “stupid.”
I call this the misanthropy excuse for inaction (except in support of individualistic survivalist fantasies).
4 December 2010, 7:03 amSteve:
Well, Stan, honestly, you come across that way yourself, in my view. And rather strongly at that. It’s as if you’re the carrier of a perspective that someday we’ll all be mentally liberated enough to accept as self-evident. I think you’re a very good political analyst, however.
4 December 2010, 7:45 amMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
Charles, I’m very glad we found some agreement =-) I have concern, however, that you’re addressing me as though I’ve never read Marx, or perhaps not beyond the Manifesto. I don’t mean that it’s some sort of personal slight, and I don’t mean to hold it against anyone who has not read this, that, or some other thing (the whole of political theory and philosophy is probably just obscure nonsense to most people, anyway). What I mean to say is: if we’re going to re-enact the First International, can we at least get period costumes first?
Or, if you are unfamiliar with Mikhail Bakunin, could I ask you to at least respond to general anarchist rebuttals to vanguardism, and specifically the idea of the “socialist state which whithers away.” I’m asking that we not rehash arguments that already took place over a hundred years ago, or that we at least include something from the more than a century’s worth of history which has transpired in the meantime =-)
Stan, it’s funny to me that you mention the family and culture, as I was just thinking yesterday about how I think that I can find a statement upon which fundamentalist neo-cons and myself can both agree: many of the problems in modern society can be traced to the breakdown of the traditional family. Of course, the neo-cons would be referring to a mythical “traditional family” that exists more in people’s minds than in the historical record. Something more like what they remember seeing on an idyllic television program like “Father Knows Best” (perfect title), than that for which any anthropologist can make a strong case. The “traditional family” of which I speak is the more dynamic, more fluid, more organic families which one finds in foraging societies and Indigenous Natural people (“primitive communists” for the Marxist-types, paleo-anarcho-communists in my taxonomy). The family clan, the local economy, the local government, the media, the diplomats, the department of defense, the judicial system, the bankers, the intelligence community, the parents, the children, the revolutionaries, the society as a whole: these elements which we think of as distinct and oftentimes competing would be impossible to divide into distinct, discrete categories within the non-authoritarian society. I think this also goes along with what Stan has said regarding generalism vs. specialization, and maybe with what Charles is saying about ontogeny.
I think this says something about the misanthropic philosophical idealism, also. If there are some of us with our “eyes open,” it seems to me that it’s mostly because we’ve had the good fortune of life experience to put us in that place – it’s hardly something about which I think it’s a good idea to look down upon others. I think this also has the side benefit of leaving oneself more open to self-criticism and therefore growth (ie, if I think I’m more aware and thus better than others, I have no reason to challenge my beliefs, and will have a greater tendency to stagnate. If I refuse to “believe my own press,” if I question myself about the possibility that someone else knows better in any particular instance than I do, then I will have a tendency to evolve and therefore have a greater understanding, in part because I don’t use it as an excuse for intellectual laziness.
Our early human ancestors were separated geographically, speciated, but then came back into contact and co-existence. There is even evidence that they had children together, and that as much as 4% of DNA from some European and Asian descended people may be neandertal in origin. I wonder if we could be witnessing something akin to this happening not within the physical realm, but in the abstraction of that realm known as the conceptual. What I mean is, it seems to me that as time goes on, I have more and more difficulty distinguishing the writings of the paleo-conservative from those of the new left. On the surface, that which is old and right-wing should be polar opposite of that which is new and left wing. But the critiques of both of these groups upon modern life seem to focus more and more upon the authoritarianism of the hyped-up pseudo-dualism of the Democrat/Republican binary. Could there be a kind of dialectic at work here? Will we see a convergence of right and left authoritarianism and right and left anti-authoritarianism, leaving us with more of a “top-down vs. bottom-up” rather than a “right vs. left” social struggle? I think we are already well on our way. I think our species, having been divided conceptually, or perhaps by “philosophical geography,” may be getting thrown back in the mix together. The result may be some “interbreeding” of our own on the conceptual level. Are the right fascists learning the power of control through social programs from left fascists? Are left fascists learning more about the power of demonizing political enemies? Are right libertarians letting go of their individualist denial of identity-based social movements? Are libertarian socialists ready to concede that there may be more to “FEMA camps” and “NORTHCOM” and other “NWO conspiracy theories” than just the fantastical ramblings of Alex Jones?
In my mind, there are an infinite umber of ways to do fascism because there are an infinite number of ways to make the arbitrary decision of who is “most deserving of power.” Therefore fascists can never truly be unified, only temporarily bound to one particular form. OTOH, I can see only one way to truly be anarchist, which is to see the best interests of the self and the community as indistinguishable. Therefore, there can be fewer competing interests between people the more they approach ideologically pure anarcho-communism. From this I deduce that some kind of neo-anarcho-communism is the only social structure which can ultimately emerge from our species. In my mind, it’s not so much normativity as it is mathematics.
4 December 2010, 10:08 amNorman:
The Leftmost City: Power and Progressive Politics in Santa Cruz (2009)-by William Domhoff
Co-authored with Richard Gendron. This book tells the exciting story of how an unlikely coalition of socialist-feminists, environmentalists, and neighborhood activists stopped every development proposed by the previously unchecked growth coalition after 1969 and then took over the government in 1981, making Santa Cruz the leftmost city in America for the longest period of time in recent American history. The book was written because Santa Cruz is the ideal atypical case to show that growth coalition theory is right on target and that public-choice theory, Marxist urban theory, and regime theory are wrong.
http://pages.uoregon.edu/vburris/whorules/
http://www.theyrule.net/
4 December 2010, 5:48 pmNorman:
Power at the Local Level: Growth Coalition Theory
by G. William Domhoff
April 2005
Power structures at the city level are different from the national power structure. They are not junior editions of the national corporate community.
That’s because local power structures are land-based growth coalitions. They seek to intensify land use. They are opposed by the neighborhoods they invade or pollute, and by environmentalists.
To the shock and dismay of land-based elites, the workers who poured into the cities between 1870 and 1920 challenged elite rule through Democratic Party machines and the Socialist Party. So the growth elites created a “good government” ideology and a set of “reforms” that literally changed the nature of local governments and took them out of the reach of the upstarts.
The theory presented here explains all the key case studies of the past, including the most important ones, such as Atlanta and San Francisco, and the one that had the most impact, political scientist Robert A. Dahl’s study of New Haven, which turns out to be wrong on almost every key point.
The city-level pluralists (who have now morphed into public-choice theorists in some cases) have an inadequate theory of city power because they rely on classical free-market economics, ignore the fact that growth does not benefit everyone in the city, and downplay or ignore the genuine conflicts that exist between growth elites and neighborhoods. There is little or no concern with power in their theory.
Marxist theory fails at the local level because it does not take its own distinction between “exchange value” and “use value” seriously, focuses almost entirely on finance and industrial capital, treats neighborhood as a residual category (merely a place to reproduce the working class), and interprets every conflict as a “class conflict” even though the primary battle in cities is between land-based growth coalitions trying to increase “rents” and neighborhoods that are trying to defend their use values.
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/local/growth_coalition_theory.html
4 December 2010, 5:54 pmStan:
@ Steve. Asserting a position in a debate is not the same as claiming one’s debate adversaries are stupid. Terms like intelligent and stupid can denote actions, that do not adhere to the person as a personal characteristic. When they are applied to people, these terms denote something intrinsically negative about people, that they lack “native intelligence” – it is misanthropy. The claim that when people fail to do what we think they ought to it means they are stupid is not a valid claim, yet it serves as a catch-all explanation that forecloses more complex explanations.
Believing one is right, and defending one’s positions, does not require the dismissal of criticism or disagreement as stupidity, though it may claim outright that an adversary is ignorant of certain facts, ideas, or interpretive methods.
If I come off as treating people like they are stupid, I apologize. I try to speak respectfully, even in heated debates, and if I have personally disrespected anyone, I am genuinely sorry. I certainly do not assume that people are stupid because they disagree with me. This does not mean one doesn’t defend a position to the best of her ability; and this defense is not tantamount to calling one’s opponent stupid.
I used that term – stupid – a lot during the Bush administration to describe the Prez, and I regret it on reflection. The vast majority of people are very bright and creative in my personal experience, in spite of all the things a dominant culture does to muddy the waters. I’m actually writing on this topic now, and will post today.
5 December 2010, 6:16 amCurt:
Norman,
5 December 2010, 1:22 pmthat is some really unique perspectives that you have pointed out about city politics. I have never given city politcs any thought before. I am not sure that I want to. I am not saying that it is not a very important line of inquiry only that it is a new path that I am not sure that I personally want to explore. If I decide that I do I will be sure to look at your links.
(Boer) Tom:
I was thinking along the lines of council communism/anarchism/parecon derived structures. My suspicion as to the instability of councils is that they take too long to react to new realities (due to the problems that you point out with large groupings, and due to the schedules of assemblies and councils) and inhibit initiative (having to obtain permission for even small scale activities). So the structural framework that I’m thinking of is councils and assemblies for corrective measures and administration (localized, by and large), but initiatives and enterprises start with smaller groups (e.g. affinity groups), so that new economic activities can start on a small scale, and/but are to be announced at the next council or assembly, for broader planning approximations (societal feedback), and so that the impact of new technologies brought into the new enterprise can be studied by interested outsiders to that enterprise. I’m trying to sketch a communism with a freedom of enterprise comparable to or greater than the state-capitalist setup we have in North America – with a day per week to pursue such an activity, and with basic capital (tools, raw materials, etc.) available on a limited scale, more innovation (we need low impact/energy inventions, no?) should become possible.
Also, within such structures (recallable councils, assemblies), one “get[s] used to winning, and [one] get[s] used to losing” in one memorable quote (from N Klein’s The Take). While most of the other problems that you point out remain, having initiatives on a small scale should make the administrator reactive, and coping mechanisms can develop for larger groups, while retaining some initiative.
As to management, coming from an anarchist background, I support self-management, outside matters affecting the broader society, with e.g. rotating or electable/recallable management, to the extent that administration becomes an issue.
5 December 2010, 11:22 pm(Boer) Tom:
Relocalization and Dunbar: An old farmer (Sask.) suggested to me some years ago that cities should bus their children to rural schools, rather than the other way round, as it costs about the same (a bit less, actually, as the bus can pick the children up at one location in the city), as there are generally less deleterious influences in rural schools than urban schools, a connection is maintained with agriculture, rural schools can have highly trained teachers, etc. For his scheme to work, most rural schools would probably be taking more than 300 students, and probably 20-30 per grade (that isn’t disappearing tomorrow :p ) – some form of (roughly) democratic structure would have to address the concerns of the (predominantly urban) parents. I don’t know if the rest of North America is comparable to sask, but here we have lots of small towns with e.g. 40 (sic) to 500 people.
5 December 2010, 11:35 pmCharles:
Our early human ancestors were separated geographically, speciated, but then came back into contact and co-existence. There is even evidence that they had children together, and that as much as 4% of DNA from some European and Asian descended people may be neandertal in origin.
^^^^^
To me the riddle here is that “same species” means able to mate and produce viable, fertile offspring. “Different species” means can’t do this. So , if the groups separaed and speciated or formed different species, how could they come back together and produce viable, fertile offspring.
I ask this question all the time of in the anthropology discussions.
15 December 2010, 11:48 amSam:
Re: I ask this question all the time of in the anthropology discussions.
And you will never get a good answer, because evolution is not science, it is ideology. And no, I am not a “creationist.” Take away all the pseudoscientific, well-financed, blather, and you will not find a single–not a single–instance of evolution. Evolution is not science; it is ideology. The origin of the species is sheer conjecture–or “hypothesis,” as it is deemed in some circles, as if in question were a chemistry or physics experiment–without a shred of evidence. Your problem seems to be that you have intellectual integrity, and have pointed out that the emperor has no clothes. You will not have an easy time of it in evolutionary circles. You will not be forgiven.
15 December 2010, 3:27 pmHenry:
@Charles: I ask this question all the time of in the anthropology discussions.
What sorts of answers do you get?
15 December 2010, 5:15 pmCharles:
What sorts of answers do you get?
^^^^^
16 December 2010, 8:46 amNobody solves the riddle, Henry.
Charles:
Charles, I’m very glad we found some agreement =-)
^^^^^
Me too :>)
^^^
I have concern, however, that you’re addressing me as though I’ve
never read Marx, or perhaps not beyond the Manifesto. I don’t mean
that it’s some sort of personal slight, and I don’t mean to hold it
against anyone who has not read this, that, or some other thing (the
whole of political theory and philosophy is probably just obscure
nonsense to most people, anyway). What I mean to say is: if we’re
going to re-enact the First International, can we at least get period
costumes first?
^^^
Ok sorry.
Actually, I prefer dressing up like a Bolshevik ,if we are going to do
16 December 2010, 8:48 amperiod costumes. I do like to think of myself as like Lenin when I
wear three piece suits :>) Gotta get a Greek sailors’ cap.
Charles:
One of Lenin’s responses to the anarchists was that Marxists are for
abolishing the state, just not in 24 hours. Of course, the anarchists
could counter now, “Comrade Lenin, it has been much more than 24 hours
and the state still hasn’t whithered away”. On the other hand,
capitalism has won the struggle against the first historical efforts
to build socialism, so the state wouldn’t have whithered away
^^^^^
Or, if you are unfamiliar with Mikhail Bakunin, could I ask you to at
least respond to general anarchist rebuttals to vanguardism, and
specifically the idea of the “socialist state which whithers away.”
I’m asking that we not rehash arguments that already took place over a
hundred years ago, or that we at least include something from the more
than a century’s worth of history which has transpired in the meantime
=-)
^^^^^
16 December 2010, 8:49 amThe Marxist idea is that communism is a world system. The Russian
Revolution was not followed by a revolution in a Great Power nation.
These imperialist powers, materially more powerful than the SU of
“backward Russia” ,were successful in destroying the Soviet Union
through war and threat of war (nuclear war). They certainly did the
opposite of Lenin “peaceful coexistence and competition of different
social systems.” So, obviously , a world revolution failed. Ergo, no
end of capitalism, no whithering away of _the_ state. State couldn’t
whither away in just one socialist country, as it was needed for
defense against the biggest war attacks in the history of humanity.
Charles:
Henry:
What sorts of answers do you get?
^^^^^
Nobody solves the riddle, Henry.
By the way, Henry, the issue is not a riddle for me, because I don’t subscribe to that version of the origin of the human species. I go with we emerged in one location and then migrated all over the globe,not that different precursor species “reunited”.
16 December 2010, 11:10 amHenry:
Re:Nobody solves the riddle, Henry. By the way, Henry, the issue is not a riddle for me, because I don’t subscribe to that version of the origin of the human species. I go with we emerged in one location and then migrated all over the globe,not that different precursor species “reunited”.
16 December 2010, 4:04 pm—————
True, nobody solves it. The problem centers on the words, “we emerged.”
Charles:
Henry:
Re:Nobody solves the riddle, Henry. By the way, Henry, the issue is not a riddle for me, because I don’t subscribe to that version of the origin of the human species. I go with we emerged in one location and then migrated all over the globe,not that different precursor species “reunited”.
—————
True, nobody solves it. The problem centers on the words, “we emerged.”
^^^^^^^
What problem is there in those words ?
“Emergent” in the dialectical sense, qualitative change, or in the sense that all species emerge or originate in the Darwinian theory, descent by modification.
A group of hominids evolved and a new species emerged.
17 December 2010, 4:34 pmCharles:
And you will never get a good answer, because evolution is not science, it is ideology
^^^^^
17 December 2010, 4:47 pmThere is a good conjectural or ideological answer to the question I’m asking though. The human species emerged in one population and then radiated. That poses no riddle or contradiction within the Darwinian ideological system.
askod:
I asked a biologist about the definition of specie and learned that one specie becomes two when they can no longer interbreed, from biological or behavioural factors. Since behaviours can change more easily then biologics, given this definition there appears to be no problem in humanity or any other animal splitting up in two groups and then reuniting.
17 December 2010, 5:01 pmHenry:
Re: What problem is there in those words ?
“Emergent” in the dialectical sense, qualitative change, or in the sense that all species emerge or originate in the Darwinian theory, descent by modification.
A group of hominids evolved and a new species emerged.
——————————-
lol. No problem at all. Just a world of questions begged: in the dialectical sense, of course.
17 December 2010, 9:16 pmStan:
My my, lot of water under this bridge since I’ve been on the road. Some good stuff, too. Norman, thanks for those links. I’ve been a fan of both for a minute now. I am going with my son today, who is going to take me for my first ever golfing (aside from putt-putt), and if we had video, I’d entertain everyone here with my inevitable incompetence. When I get back I want to read these.
I’ll be a little hit-and-run, and I thank De (wherever you are) for moderating while I’m doing this family stuff. Got a 2 yo grand daughter and a three-legged dog that demand lots of attention.
Hugs to all.
18 December 2010, 11:47 amMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
If the plan for left wing authoritarianism begins with “step 1, create a global system of state socialism…” I can’t help but think of these ultra-liberalist right wing authoritarian plans that begin “step 1, raise a bazillion dollars…” It’s no wonder to me that revolutionaries either end up as fascists or anarchists! In the end, I think there are just systems that reinforce powerholding (positive feedback loop), and systems that minimize powerholding (negative feedback loop). This idea that one can pit economics against politics or vice versa, it doesn’t make any sense to me theoretically, and it doesn’t seem to be able to work itself out in the field, either. I see politics as an abstraction of the more fundamental economic questions. Trying to pit the one against the other is (in my mind) like trying to pit acceleration against velocity – it doesn’t make any sense to me. I think these strategies must only make sense once they become so “abstracted” to the point that if all the individual sentences make sense, it is hard to see that the idea as a whole makes none.
I am finding that my life works better as I give up and these grand and glorious long range strategies, or focusing my energies on events at a distance, and instead, I put more attention on how I make my small, day-to-day interactions as in line with my anarchist principles as I can. I can feel our little tribe, here, taking more shape as a result, which feels amazing =-D
I hope for people that follow Marx, that they are aware that I do not hold myself infallible. I am learning things every day, I promise. So it could be that Marx knows what he is talking about, and I am just too ______ to follow. It would be true that he has sold many more books than I have. But I would ask that if someone follows Marx, that they live their principles with gusto, and hold nothing back! If they do that, I have a feeling they will find that they have some ideas *better* than Marx!
And remember, if y’all would ever consider it, we have anarcho-communists and Marxist anarchists in the fold (I would call myself an anarcho-communist), so you can still be a “commie,” even as an anarchist
20 December 2010, 6:32 amStan:
Oddly enough, you just restated a main premise in Marx’s argument against the anarchists, that the state is an epiphenomenon of economic class antagonisms.
His argument becomes mechanical, however, when he opines on the necessity to take over the levers of control of the state to see its eventual abolition. This is actually the nub of this whole Dunbar-obsession… and one that the hirsute one also identified, ie, that control over the head of government does not translate into control over the state, which is comprised of a giant administrative apparatus, with people gaming the system at every level.
Stalin used this insight to great advantage in his battle with Trotsky for control of the Party. While Trotsky was playing General and charismatic, Stalin focused on taking over the unglamorous administrative apparatus. People still refer to this as an ideological struggle, a peculiar claim from marxists who claim to see the ideology as an expression of material relations.
When I think of the world’s nuclear arsenals (and nuclear power plants, chemical plants, etc, that are pre-positioned weapons of mass destruction waiting for someone to activate them), I realize that there are custodial responsibilities that are an embarrassment to anarchism, which never takes these realities into account, and cannot offer up a solution for this dilemma.
I don’t believe that state will disappear in this century, unless nuclear war or some other calamity befalls humanity. I don’t believe we will see the end of money. I don’t believe we will escape the necessity for organizations that exceed the magic number.
Remembering a great line from one of my favorite movies, Matewan, where the protagonist explains the tactical situation in a union-organizing campaign in the W VA coal mines: “We’re in a hole full of coal gas here, and one spark could blow us all to hell. We have to chip away very carefully at this situation.”
If I use “we” here, I guess it just means people who want to see a society that is fair and compassionate and committed to stopping unnecessary suffering.
If “we” are better able to understand the characteristics of human organization, we might improve the efficacy of what we do and better understand why we fail so often in the face of those who have a more Neitzchean/Spencerian outlook.
Rehashing 19th Century Russian arguments (eg, Marx-Bakunin-Kropotkin) while fun, hasn’t yielded any positive results that I’ve seen so far, and has contributed to a lot of people getting tangled up in arcane disputes that inevitably isolate us from a larger society that (rightfully in my view) doesn’t care, because there are more urgent matters to attend to in their lives.
“We” may, in fact, need administered organizations for some things (tho not nearly as often as we think, imo); and we will better be able to monitor and counteract the power-consolidating tendency of these organizations, and be more willing to dissolve them when their primary tasks are completed. God knows, “our” organizations seem to get their asses kicked often enough that we ought to do some kind of deep-review of the whole concept of organization, instead of tweaking tactics and constantly finding mew ways to tilt at windmills and fail.
Thinking hard now (smoke drifts from ears) about the difference between covenantal and contractual relations, and whether we ought to be focusing on multiplying the former as a counterforce to the latter.
I’m getting cut short now by three dogs and a two-year-old, so I’ll try to finish my thought later…. or not. (-:
20 December 2010, 11:45 amStan:
Ugh, now connectivity problems. Hope this goes through.
There will be thousands of ways to do that chipping away, and the reason I won’t call myself communist any more, or socialist, or anarchist, is that – for me – when I was claiming that affinity, my particular *ism was another abstracted measuring instrument for everything I or anyone else did, and it foreclosed (in my own mind) any option that failed to pass muster with the “principles” of communism, the national question, etc.
I’m just extremely skeptical that about “universal” principles of action, and I don’t see how what works on one culture can be transposed onto others. 19th Century Russia is pretty dissimilar from the present-day US, and for that matter, Wisconsin is pretty different from Oklahoma is pretty different from California…. and Los Angeles is different from Barstow.
20 December 2010, 12:22 pmCharles:
^^^^^^^^
21 December 2010, 12:22 pmFYI
http://www.peoplesworld.org/families-arrested-at-bank-in-foreclosure-protest/
^^^^^^^
March on Wallstreet !
Charles:
If the plan for left wing authoritarianism begins with “step 1, create a global system of state socialism…” I
^^^^^^^
21 December 2010, 12:24 pmWell I certainly don’t cop to the plan as “leftwing authoritarianism” (smile)
Charles:
I asked a biologist about the definition of specie and learned that one specie becomes two when they can no longer interbreed, from biological or behavioural factors. Since behaviours can change more easily then biologics, given this definition there appears to be no problem in humanity or any other animal splitting up in two groups and then reuniting.
^^^^^^^
21 December 2010, 12:28 pmWell sure if populations never came into contact with each other, they couldn’t interbreed, because they couldn’t have sex with each other from a distance. But that’s sort of cheating on the question at hand. Humans in North America couldn’t interbreed with humans in the old world at a certain point because they were thousands of miles apart, but they weren’t different species.
Charles:
There is a good conjectural or ideological answer to the question I’m asking though. The human species emerged in one population and then radiated. That poses no riddle or contradiction within the Darwinian ideological system.
^^^^^^^
21 December 2010, 12:30 pmThis is , by the way, one of the major hypotheses within the anthro profession. It’s not my little amateur idea. I’m just subscribing to one of the competing major hypotheses.
Charles:
lol. No problem at all. Just a world of questions begged: in the dialectical sense, of course.
^^^^^
21 December 2010, 12:32 pmho ho ho Please elaborate
Henry:
Ok, to put it briefly, I view evolutionism as pseudo-metaphysics in spurious scientific garb, because it encroaches on non-scientific territory. That is what I meant by the “world of questions begged” indicated by the word “emerged,” and what I meant by “True, nobody solves it. The problem centers on the words, ‘we emerged.’”
A kind of sign of its quasi-religious status is that to disagree with evolution is like kicking over a hornet’s nest; it arouses intense passions. That’s why I simply asked what sorts of answers you had received.
21 December 2010, 5:27 pmaskod:
Stan,
21 December 2010, 5:57 pmI prefer Goldman when it comes to reading anarchists. She is less focused on theory and the general and more focused on action and the specifics of the situation, always with an eye to how power corrupts.
Michaael Anderson:
Thank you again, people…haven’t participated much lately, and just looked at this topic down through the comments. I have the misfortune of having to spend Xmas eve with the family of a hard-core neo-con who thinks Julian Assange is an anarchist (something I doubt, after reading a couple of those links on the other topic of Conspiracism). Some great conceptual info here to bring to the verbal “battlespace”….I’m grateful.
21 December 2010, 8:58 pmMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
I have heard that Mr. Assange is an “Individualist Socialist”, so could be considered a kind of limited Anarchist, just to add some depth. He is not what I could consider a “hardcore” Anarchist, in the same way I would have a critique of someone such as Subcommandante Marcos.
This was true on the level of individual organisms, but I don’t know that this can be shown in terms of whole populations. At most, for a few thousand years, I suppose. Is that long enough to bother making a distinction between homo sapiens sapiens troglodytes and homo sapiens sapiens Americanus? I guess that is a question for the individual…
Don’t you worry about self-fulfilling prophecies? It seems to me that as long as you believe a thing is not possible, you would have difficulty experiencing it, even if it was right in front of you.
22 December 2010, 2:45 pmHenry:
The Future is Streaming Content to Any Device, Anywhere and at Any Time
Interview with Michael Whalen
[...]
Whalen: There are two ways to look at the end of television as we have known it for 70 years…. The first is that mobile devices killed television because Americans are dealing with life on the run. The traditional picture of the family all gathered with their dinners together in the living to watch an evening’s entertainment does NOT happen. If you’re not working in TV like me, you may not get what a big deal this is. Television producers are scrambling to change EVERY part of how television is created for an audience whose life is literally on the run.
[...]
All of this kind of talk scares the crap of the TV networks and film studios who have lasted so long by keeping their grip on content. In the new future – that conversation is OVER because the audience is now demanding that it be over. The future will simply be created by the people for the people – it’s nice, isn’t it? It’s been by controlling content, that the “big” boys have stayed relevant – I’m surprised that they have lasted this long as purveyors to the public with their content and programming and news. The slow economy has slowed down our sprinting towards this future and finishing the work of building the networks that will carry all of this content – especially the wireless networks. But these walls are tumbling down now. What I like about the possible future we are talking about is how it’s a VALUE conversation versus a captive one or a proprietary one. The Internet “attitude” has changed the rules for all these players by making content king and choice the other important metric. That said, the digital administration fence that Steve Jobs (or someone able to capture the digital ocean) might throw around “lake” of content may have us move from one kind on controlled experience to another… Will there be a toll taker in this future? Probably… It might even have an AAPL logo on it. We’ll find out very soon
25 December 2010, 3:52 pmStan:
Believe it or not, the Crazy Dane has something to say in all this. The so-called existentialists were wrestling with these questions a while back, and the two great moral philosophers who most influenced post-modernism – Nietzsche and Kierkegaard – represented two opposing viewpoints within this method of doing philosophy.
I fall on the side of the Dane, but Nietzsche cannot be underestimated for influence, because the Big Pomos, Foucault and Derrida, were – at bottom – Nietzscheans. The postmodernism that prevails in the Academy right now is Nietzschean, an irony when feminists claim it, since Nietzsche was a world-class misogynist… but not to worry, the philosophical soundings of this tendency have become increasingly more shallow, as consumerism (“aestheticism,” for Kierkegaard, and the crux of his rebuttal of Nietzsche, tho he never knew or read Nietzsche) had found such a comfortable home there (something the German couldn’t have anticipated). “Light-minded aestheticism” is the philosophical stance of the chattering class – the peitit bourgeoisie.
My hope in posting this is that Kierkegaard’s account of abstraction is so much more eloquent than mine, and abstractions come up again and again as the cohort or rules, institutions, and *ism tendencies.
25 December 2010, 3:56 pmCharles:
I’m now thinking the Existentialism is European Libertarianism (Or Libertarianism is American Existentialism) They share Individualism as their essential quality. They apothesis “The” Individual. They fetishize uniqueness. They emphasize our differences rather than our commonalities and unities. Thus, they are , obviously, modern bourgeois philo, resonating with the great mass of alienated individuals; and importantly from the point of view of the ruling class, they theoretically affirm the atomization, division and spintering into a “thousand ( a billion) points of light” the Working Class.
However, Libertarians have the logical sense to be anti-philosophical, and avoid Kierkegard’s criticism.
As hinted at in Kierkegard’s statement, the assertion “The” Individual is logically contradictory. There is no typical individual, by definition of “individual”. There is no General Individual.
Nietszche is a real piece of work. He is the champion of the ruling classes of all times ( See Geneology of Morals). He criticizes “slaves” for resenting their masters. I kid you not. Nietszche is a kind of anti-Marx, as I say, championing oppressor classes over oppressed classses _all down through history_. Ubermensch/Supermen are his imagined new master class. Those who Will to Power rule and should rule. Hitler had the right one when he posed with Nietszche’s bust, as much as Nietszche fans try to play it that Hitler didn’t understand him or whatever. “Game knows game”. Nietszche , philosopher of _all_ ruling classes in general. Yukko !
4 January 2011, 12:01 pmCharles:
We might infer from Nietszche’s famous atheism (“God is dead”), and from other corroborating evidence, that ruling classes are atheistic. Religions are for ruled classes. Part of the success of ruling classes down through history is due to their atheistic consciousness relative to the religious consciousness of those they rule.
5 January 2011, 9:44 amCharles:
“In community, the individual is, crucial as the prior condition for forming a community. … Every individual in the community guarantees the community; the public is a chimera, numerality is everything…”
– Søren Kierkegaard, Journals
^^^^
5 January 2011, 10:12 amPace Kierkegaard, of course , for we social determinists , this is absolutely backward, fundamentally wrong. The social, the communal, the community is prior to individuals. Kierkegaard’s statement is a basic maxim of bourgeois ideology, whether as existentialism, libertarianism, Social Darwinism, positivism, Reaganite, Tea Partier et al. In all , “the” individual is primary over and determinative of the social. It is an error in the understanding of the levels of organization of reality, and specifically of human life. Human culture, society and history constitute an emergent level of reality, in which the whole is more than the some of its parts, and is determinative of the parts. It is a philosophical error concerning the relationship of the whole and the parts. “The” human individual is a social individual. Even Kierkegaard was; he just didn’t know it. So, is the most radical libertarian; they just don’t know it. Our species name should be, not homo sapiens, but homo communis. Our high level of sociality is the differentia specifica of our species.
Stan:
Sartre is perhaps the most famous of the European existentialists, and he was a Stalinist.
And you have entirely missed what Kierkegaard was saying, that is, he is making a distinction between “community” which has flesh and blood individuals, and “the public” which reduces people to numbers. The relation between individual and collective is recursive, not hierarchical. Chicken… egg… chicken… egg. That was not the point he was making.
And Nietzsche’s statement about God being dead was phenomenological, not ontological.
5 January 2011, 12:00 pmStan:
Carolyn Merchant on the male origins of the dead universe.
5 January 2011, 12:11 pmm.c.:
James Madison I believe, wrote about the tyranny of the majority in the Federalist Papers, a la The Ox-Bow Incident type deal. This is why he talked about protecting the rights of a minority. The smallest minority if you take it all the way is the individual. So during the Scopes trial for example, you don’t have a majority faction of narrow minded very ignorant Southern Baptists controlling the trial, as H.L. Mencken worried.
5 January 2011, 3:10 pmJames M:
The Carolyn Merchant link doesn’t work (in my browser at least).
6 January 2011, 11:48 pmCharles:
Sartre is perhaps the most famous of the European existentialists, and he was a Stalinist.
And you have entirely missed what Kierkegaard was saying, that is, he is making a distinction between “community” which has flesh and blood individuals, and “the public” which reduces people to numbers. The relation between individual and collective is recursive, not hierarchical. Chicken… egg… chicken… egg. That was not the point he was making.
^^^^
Yeah, I know about Comrade Sartre and his interaction with the Party. Pablo Picasso was a “Stalinist” , too. So was Angela Davis. “Stalinism” is not as uniformly bad as the bourgeois intelligensia would have one think. The general usage of “Stalinist” causes one to throw out a lot of babies with the bath water.
Sartre had a better position than the FCP( the “Stalinists”) on the French war in Algeria.
This is not the first time I’ve encountered Kierkegaard. My criticism of him as Individualist predates this thread. His designation as the father of Existentialism corroborates the criticism. I’ve been examining Existentialism for a long time , too.
The generalization I make above is based on a lot of deliberation on Existentialism going back 40 years.
Are u saying Existentialism is not Individualist.
^^^
And Nietzsche’s statement about God being dead was phenomenological, not ontological.
^^^^
Are you saying N is not an atheist or this statement is not atheistic ?
Phenomenology : surface appearance; ontology: nature of being ? Either way, my thesis is that ruling classes are atheistic relative to the classes they rule.
11 January 2011, 2:53 pmStan:
NOTE TO ALL: Still out in the country, no internet. Trying to get a place, move in, etc. Thanks to De for catching the moderation. Hope to light in a couple of days more. Understand now the cry of the great Alaskan Kee Bird…
Keee-keee-riste it’s cold out here! (-:
13 January 2011, 12:20 pmMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
Ok, I know in 2011 that Barack Obama is a “Socialist” and everything, but if I may be allowed to pretend that words still have some level of meaning that transfers from one person to another, I’d like to make some distinctions about “Libertarianism.”
“Libertarianism” was used by Anarchists (particularly Anarcho-communists) over 100 years before the old “east coast liberals” of the USA had been so squeezed out of the Republican Party by the influx of the neo-cons (who were themselves fleeing the movement towards populist social progressivism in the Democratic Party) that they appropriated the word for themselves in creating the “Libertarian” Party. Some people distinguish between “left libertarianism” and “right libertarianism,” but I prefer “liberalist libertarianism” and “radical libertarianism” as both more descriptive and more accurate (also more global in viewpoint). Not to be a “word nazi,” and I’m open to other ways of talking about things, but I’d prefer not to talk past each other, is what I’m saying.
So as a *radical* libertarian myself, I would certainly not hesitate to say that I am dependent upon community. As an individual, I am a community of cells, tissues, organs, and systems; and I live within a community of family, friends, and even people whom I may never meet, but with whom I share interconnectedness. No hesitation on that. I would say, however, that just as my existence as an individual is predicated upon the pre-existence of cells, the larger human community is predicated upon the pre-existence of individuals. Isolation is torture, but it is not non-existence. A community without individuals is non-existent.
14 January 2011, 10:49 amMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
And Stan, I’m almost sorry to come back to this when you are so preoccupied, but I find it interesting that you brought up the “God is dead” phenomenological vs. ontological question. It seems to me that if we take at surface that “god” (god-nature) exists, but “god” (god-evidence) does not (or maybe, “god exists somewhere in some sense, but does not live in the hearts of the people of this world”), then the question is one of how such a thing would be reclaimed. I know some Radical Christians and Gospel Anarchists who believe we need to go back to how Christians were living in the first century CE. It strikes me the resemblance this bears to the TEA Party ideology of, “if we want to reclaim America, we need to go back to the way things were in the beginning.” The other examples of movements from the last 100 years based on the idea of “we’re gonna reclaim past glory” are even less appealing, I’m afraid.
Of course, i have to watch this myself, seeing as how Anarchism how foundations in the primordial ways in which people lived. However, primordial Anarchists do still exist in little pockets of Indigenous Natural people, and as a neo-Anarchist, I have my own critique of primordial Anarchists and the ways in which they have internalized authoritarianism (particularly the exploitation of non-human Animals).
14 January 2011, 11:02 amStan:
I’m back, at least for an afternoon… but I’m stealing some unknown person’s wireless access, which is sketchy at best. I really want to write something on gun culture, given the news lately, but I’ll try to respond to the ever-more-arcane topics afoot here (all these ists and isms, goodness!). We’ve gone far afield of the Dunbar/management theme, but I guess philosophical debate is inevitable when we start looking at the really, really deeply entrenched epistemes.
I never really liked the term existentialism – a modernist prejudice, because the term is just not definable. Kierkegaard is a long way from Camus, for example. The preoccupation that gave rise to this category was phenomenology, which is not how it is defined and dismissed above. IIRC, Husserl gave it a name, but it has to do (broadly) with experience, as opposed to “objective” reality, experience residing inevitably in the individual. That doesn’t make it individualist, which is an ideological term as used above. Apples and oranges.
Nietzsche didn’t give a hoot about objective anything. He was a subjective philosopher. That was his schtick. If you want to see a truly Nietzschean character in film, look at Paul Maclean, Brad Pitt’s character in A River Runs Through It… this is closer to the Zarathustra/ubermensch notion of Nietzsche than the grotesque distortions of this idea by the Nazis. It’s a character who is constantly overcoming himself… a kind of restless seeker, which has been rendered trite by overuse as a successful story convention in mass media. There’s a touch of Nietzsche in Hannibal Lecter, too, with the whole “beyond good and evil” thang, especially the book character, as opposed to the AV character.
FN’s claim that God is dead was his comment on his own zeitgeist, where the beginnings of disestablishment were visible everywhere in Europe, as science began breaking down the institutional dogma of the established churches (his dad was Lutheran preacher).
Many Europeans living in the centuries before the Enlightenment were possessed of a simple and unshakable faith which, for example, made a protracted and painful death preferable to a sudden, relatively painless one, because there was more time to prepare oneself for what came after.
The profound doubt that accompanied the loss of credibility of the church after Copernicus and Galileo – when the church had constructed an entire universe that reflected its own hierarchy (the great chain of being) – undermined that faith, and Nietzsche was interested in what that meant to the individual, to be cast adrift, so to speak. The question of whether there is or is not a God (a silly question that cannot be answered the way we can answer a question like the airspeed velocity of a fully laden sparrow) didn’t get much ink.
(Mencken, btw, was a huge fan of Nietzsche, a fellow hater of women, and a hater as well of farmers, peasants, and other country people.)
As to Stalinism, I just point out that Sartre, who is classified as an existentialist, believed in barracks communism, but refuted the idea that an individual who chose this path had some ultimate philosophical authority s/he could appeal to to justify it (we’re back now to FN’s loss of God… if there is no God, then all kinds of new things are possible, for good or evil, or as FN said, beyond good and evil).
On anarcho-Christians (I am not one), I don’t know that they want to revert to 1st Century CE culture (that is simply not possible), but return to the gospel roots of neighbor-love, enemy-love, pacifism, etc., with a strong critique – mostly cribbed from post-Enlightenment anarchists – of the state and hierarchy. I see this as pretty syncretic, more Bakuninism than pistus Christou, imo, but que sera, sera.
The tea party reactionaries are hearkening to a constitutional originalist myth, that drips with gun culture and frontier masculinity. I don’t see the similarity.
Kierkegaard never knew any of these guys, never heard the term “existentialism,” wrote frequently under pseudonyms, and was describing the experience that Nietzsche later extrapolated… that of faith in the face of doubt. The actual faith he adhered to was communitarian from the outset.
15 January 2011, 12:22 pmCharles:
I was just looking through facebook at the list of people with whom I have mutual friends ( but are not my facebook “friend”). I noticed that when I crossed from two mutual friends to one mutual friend I stopped recognizing anybody. Seems like there might be a bit of a test of Dunbar’s number in all that.
20 January 2011, 2:46 pmCharles:
The preoccupation that gave rise to this category was phenomenology, which is not how it is defined and dismissed above. IIRC, Husserl gave it a name, but it has to do (broadly) with experience, as opposed to “objective” reality, experience residing inevitably in the individual. That doesn’t make it individualist, which is an ideological term as used above. Apples and oranges.
^^^^^
20 January 2011, 2:53 pmI’m not dismissing phenomenology above, but offering a tentative way to understand it. What u say above sure doesn’t do much to dispel an individualist critique of it. Anytime “The individual” is used there is failure to recognize the fundamental contradiction in such usage. There is no “the” individual; there are only “an individuals”. The project of finding experiences that are inevitable in all people, all individuals, is inherently flawed ,even if one is a big time intellectual like whathisname who founded phenomenology. All the discussion here is “ideological”, not just mine.
Charles:
Wow, Hannibal Lecter has a touch of Nietzsche, but the Nazis distorted him. Come on.
German soldiers recited sections of Thus Spoke Zarasuthara (spelling) marching to battle in World War I. Hitler, by the way, was in the German infantry in WWI. He probably understood N better than all the left intellectuals who claim him now.
Left intellectuals’ fascination with N is truly a bizarre “phenomenon”, very troubling. N goes “beyond good and evil” , yeah right. N is a left intellectual disease.
20 January 2011, 3:00 pmCharles:
FN’s claim that God is dead was his comment on his own zeitgeist, where the beginnings of disestablishment were visible everywhere in Europe, as science began breaking down the institutional dogma of the established churches (his dad was Lutheran preacher).
^^^^^^^
He was a historical linguist .
FN irrationalism is an expression of petit bourgeois alienation from capitalism particularly as it entered its imperialist phase. The Nazis mass social base was petit bourgeois, by the way.
“His own” zeitgeist ? Zeitgeists are social, not individual phenomena.
20 January 2011, 3:06 pmCharles:
University of Michigan college students ,Leopold and Loeb committed murder based on their N philosophizing. No doubt they didn’t “get it ” either LOL !
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_and_Loeb
Leopold, age 19 at the time of the murder, and Loeb, 18, believed themselves to be Nietzschean supermen who could commit a “perfect crime” (in this case a kidnapping and murder).[2] Before the murder, Leopold had written to Loeb: “A superman … is, on account of certain superior qualities inherent in him, exempted from the ordinary laws which govern men. He is not liable for anything he may do.”[3]
20 January 2011, 3:09 pmCharles:
the larger human community is predicated upon the pre-existence of individuals.
^^^^
With due respect, this is the crux. Social determinists r saying that the community is not predicated on pre-existing , independent, isolated individuals, or “selves”. Rather the opposite: Society preexists the individuals. There have never been a bunch of preexisting individual persons who then got together and made the group. Robinson Crusoe is a myth so to speak.
Even more an individual ideas are all rooted in their culture. Take remarkably unique individuals like Mozart , Newton or any genius. Their ideas are developments of socially generated topics. Newton understood this and said he stood on the shoulders of giants, most of them dead when he lived, by the way. This is a key point. Human Society includes dead generations. Maybe this makes it clearer how society preexists individuals.
Ironically, the word itself gives the message. Individuals are not divisiable, or can’t be divided out from society.
20 January 2011, 3:24 pmCharles:
Bad faith
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith_%28existentialism%29
A critical claim in existentialist thought is that individuals are always free to make choices and guide their lives towards their own chosen goal or “project”. The claim holds that individuals cannot escape this freedom, even in overwhelming circumstances. For instance, even an empire’s colonized victims possess choices: to submit to rule, to negotiate, to act in complicity, to resist nonviolently, or to counter-attack.
Although circumstances may limit individuals (facticity), they cannot force persons as radically free beings to follow one course over another. For this reason, individuals choose in anguish: they know that they must make a choice, and that it will have consequences. For Sartre, to claim that one amongst many conscious possibilities takes undeniable precedence (for instance, “I cannot risk my life, because I must support my family”) is to assume the role of an object in the world, merely at the mercy of circumstance—a being-in-itself that is only its own facticity
21 January 2011, 12:46 pm^^^^^
CB: Well yes, Comrade Sartre, Ye Olde problem of free will and determinism. Humans do have free will; so do dogs. But a human individual still exercises her choices among alternatives that are given to her _by society_. The alternatives or “menu” from which she chooses do not originate and well up from within her individual being or person. The feelings and emotions that determine her choices are learned from her society and culture; their genesis is not in her individual infinite “soul” or “psyche” or “Mind”. Valuing supporting one’s family is learned and socially determined.
m.c.:
During the Weimar Republic, Germany had a sizeable Communist Party, Social Democratic Party, and a conservative Christian Nationalist Party movement(many high ranking ex-military types who tended to slide into politics like most European aristicratic nations), in addition to the National Socialists. Hitler used poor economic conditions to co-opt most of the Nationalists to join him, and scapegoating to discredit the Communists. The moderate Social Democrats were thus outnumbered politically, but we need to remember the embargo imposed by the allies during and after the war(wwi). Most Germans were angry at their own former semi-fuedal ruling classes and willing to grasp at wildcard political straws.
21 January 2011, 1:17 pmStan:
Again, Sartre was writing from a phenomenological perspective, not delineating some timeless principle. The zeitgeist – or spirit of the time, the milieu, is certainly a cultural, and therefore historically determined, setting. But Sartre and others, including Nietzsche, were describing their specific milieu, post-Enlightenment, with its increasing cultural uprootedness and alienation, that left the individual adrift. They describe the EXPERIENCE (as far as I know, experience still resides in the individual, unless we use it merely figuratively) of living in a world without an authority for final reference that is not shrouded in doubt. They describe freedom in a world where meaning has become unmoored.
Michel Foucault was among the next generation of philosophers, and he, too, is a Nietzschean in this sense, not as an ideological follower of Nietzsche (Nietzsche was anti-ideological), but as the one who redressed other so-called post-modernists for ignoring the role of power in the creation of the zeitgeist (for example, his study of discipline and prisons).
You are shadow boxing here, Charles, because no one is denying that history and culture is formative.
Apples.
Oranges.
This form of philosophy shifts emphasis, from the empiricism of science (as an ultimate truth claim) to a geneological approach (not totally unlike Marx’s approach) to questions like morality and power, and to understanding the role of stories in the formation of the individual psyche. No one is claiming that stories are not cultural carriers. They are, however, stating – correctly – that without individuals to experience them, these stories don’t hover in the atmosphere later to descend onto out consciousness.
As political organizers, we often wonder why we can’t provoke the same kinds of mass actions as were provoked in the past. Part of the answer, a big part I suspect, is that we live at the end of an epoch where there are fewer and fewer shared stories that have the power of the metanarrative. Pluralism for the masses (and, of course, capital accumulation for the rulers, as their metanarrative). The problem is, the genie will not go back in the bottle for the masses. So we struggle in vain to resuscitate that old-tyme religion (be it the one, holy, apostolic church or the dictatorship of the proletariat).
22 January 2011, 8:38 amCharles:
Famous (and benevolent( individualist anarchist:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
26 January 2011, 1:50 pmCharles:
The zeitgeist – or spirit of the time, the milieu, is certainly a cultural, and therefore historically determined, setting. But Sartre and others, including Nietzsche, were describing their specific milieu, post-Enlightenment, with its increasing cultural uprootedness and alienation, that left the individual adrift.
^^^^^^^
Their milieu, and culturally, and therefore historically determined, setting was capitalism, entering its imperialist phase. N doesn’t even use the concept of capitalism.
N off in some delusionary world of his imagination, so he is not likely to contribute to solving the problem of alienation and estrangement. In fact, he basically contributes to the fascist response to these crises of capitalism. The superman concept is ripe for fascism; lends itself to theories of racist superiority.
Alienation and estrangement under capitalism was not a new topic when they wrote. Failure to derive “the individual’s” alienation and estrangement from the wage-labor/capital relation puts one’s analysis “adrift”.
“The” individual is adrift in this new “milieu” ? Not really. That’s another illusion that can only be reached from an individualist premise that u seem to say no one has – “no one is denying that history and culture is formative “. Even in capitalist alienation individuals are highly interconnected in a thick social network.
Or lets put it this way: cogent analysis cannot end with phenonmena; it must deal with noumena or explanations for immediate experience. To me the very name “phenomenology” is a give away as to the weakness of Husserl’s project. Focus and centering and starting with individual experience is a form of “psychology”. We need “sociology”.
In this historical milieu, underlying the alienated , absurd experience of individuals is a social system, capitalism.
^^^^^^^
They describe the EXPERIENCE (as far as I know, experience still resides in the individual, unless we use it merely figuratively) of living in a world without an authority for final reference that is not shrouded in doubt. They describe freedom in a world where meaning has become unmoored.
^^^^^^^^
Evidently they are describing some experience that they allege is typical among many individuals. So, the fact that all experience takes place at the individual level is true but not relevant to what is in dispute here. Put is this way. Widespread alienation and sense of meaninglessness ( of course _experienced_ by individuals) has a social cause. It is due to the dynamics of capitalism. N has no critique of capitalism whatsoever; in fact he champions ruling classes.
Sartre , of course, deals with Marxism, even saying Marxism is the philosophy of our time, tries to reconcile Marxism and Existentialism.
^^^^^^^
They are, however, stating – correctly – that without individuals to experience them, these stories don’t hover in the atmosphere later to descend onto out consciousness.
^^^
CB: This is arguing with a strawperson (shadow boxing). _Nobody_ claims that these stories and ideas hover in the atmosphere ; well maybe Hegel does lol. But Marx is famous for standing Hegel upright off his head onto his feet.
Another point: to confine one’s analysis to phenomena _is_ empiricism.
1 February 2011, 3:49 pmCharles:
A personal note on Existentialism especially appropriate for this radical feminist blog: In 1973 or 4 my grandfather, Dehaven Hinkson, MD, wrote to me in a letter advising me not to be an Existentialist but that I should rely on “Mother Wit” (!). Now I hadn’t declared myself an Existentialist, but Existentialism was widely discussed publicly in those days. Sartre and Camus had made it known outside of academe or esoteric intellectual circles. The Theatre of the Absurd was famous , too. I certainly analyzed my early intellectual life in its terms in part. I recall I thought I had “existential ennui” as a freshman/sophomore in college. At any rate, my grandfather’s advice certainly influenced me.
Anyway, I’ve been paying attention to Existentialism for longer than I’ve been studying anthropology or Marxism.
By the way, he was a gynecologist , lol . His father died when he was young, so my great-grandmother was a single mother in the early 1900′s.
4 February 2011, 4:18 pmCharles:
Existence preceding Essence, one of the Existentialist slogans is a version of _carpe diem_ or live for today, seize the day. You are not bound by the past or history or culture. There is no “essence” to you from your history or culture that defines u. Rather u aren’t anything until u “exist” or experience today. It is an everyday philosophy.
4 February 2011, 4:23 pmCharles:
Another Sartre notion – condemned to be free or to freedom – is in a away a French version of American “personal responsibility” rightwing rhetoric. Society is not the blame. One has a choice. One has free will.One chooses a life of crime and has personal responsibility for one’s choices. This is fundamental to the Reaganite counterreform against social responsibility and social explanation.
10 February 2011, 12:55 pmStan:
Only if you accept the dichotomy between social influence and free will.
10 February 2011, 2:09 pmCharles:
On the face of it, social influence and free will are not synonyms.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
11 February 2011, 2:02 pmCharles:
Ah, here’s the Thesis on Feuerbach that speaks directly to the Existentialist, libertarian, positivist, phenomenlogist, all Individualist’ shortcomings:
6
Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man [menschliche Wesen = ‘human nature’]. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations. Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence is hence obliged:
1. To abstract from the historical process and to define the religious sentiment regarded by itself, and to presuppose an abstract — isolated – human individual.
2. The essence therefore can by him only be regarded as ‘species’, as an inner ‘dumb’ generality which unites many individuals only in a natural way.
11 February 2011, 2:56 pmCharles:
From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital,
money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolised,
i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be
transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment,
you say, individuality vanishes.
You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other
15 February 2011, 11:33 amperson than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property.
This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made
impossible.
Curt:
Charles, that is a very thought provoking comment. On the face of it such a comment could be considered very frightening to many people. Even someone such as myself who owns a home outright, who has no debts, and even a little money in the bank, at least for today. (Luck certainly played the major role in achieving this situation.) Yet I do not think that there are revolutionaries anywhere who would deny a person a place to live and to have the consumer goods found in many homes throughout the world today. Of course there might be some exceptions. Family Deep Freezes for example might be something that a reasonable society should prohibit. A reasonable society MIGHT want to plan on phasing out cars.
15 February 2011, 2:36 pmThe glitch that I see with the comment is that there is no clear line to draw in the sand and say, “Ahhha! I caught you. You just crossed over the line between having what you should have and having things that you should not have.” Of course many people are way over the line and many way under it.
I do not know how you are defining a “middle class owner of property” but I think that if you define it as a person who simply has more than almost any other people have you will then clearly get stuck in the Buddhist Cycle of Rebirth trying to, “make the middle class owner of “property(?)” impossible.”
Of course if your definition of “property” is the capital to produce consumer products that could be a more managable and worth while task.
Charles:
Yes , you ask an important question Curt. I’d differentiate between personal property and private property in basic means of production. Everybody must be guaranteed a right to live ( not the anti-abortion thingy; they stole that phrase) that is right to food , shelter, recreation, work. You own your own tooth brush, etc lol. But big stuff is social property. I think the following addresses your question:
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.
Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private property?
But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labour. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.
15 February 2011, 4:34 pmCharles:
To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.
Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.
When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class chara
15 February 2011, 4:35 pmCharles:
Let us now take wage-labour.
The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the labourer in bare existence as a labourer. What, therefore, the wage-labourer appropriates by means of his labour, merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.
In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.
In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.
15 February 2011, 4:36 pmm.c.:
@Charles,
I gather you didn’t get the memo. Communism is Kaputt & has been for a long time!!!
17 February 2011, 12:37 pmCharles:
m.c.:
17 February 2011, 5:06 pmNothing lasts forever, including capitalism.When it ends it will be communism or barbarism. lol
m.c.:
Even in Cuba, they are allowing limited Private Property, for example, barbers & hair salons are able to keep some of their profits(after taxes). Ambition & Motivation, at least on the low end, are human traits that needed to be addressed and Capitalism did that long ago, ancient Egypt or China or somewhere. Go back and read Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene(don’t project too much of your ideology though and get back with your conclusions)…. Homework
18 February 2011, 1:09 pmCharles:
I’m a teacher ,too (smiles)
Genes don’t have “selves”. Social Darwinism ( which is ideology also) or the notion that capitalism is in our genes is a false theory.
Here’s some anthropological and historical evidence ( not “ideology”):
Humans have existed for at least 200,000 years. The first 190,000 the societies were communist. We got our genes from the people in those societies.
Indigenous peoples of North America didn’t have capitalism or bourgeois “ambition” or “selfishness”. They were motivated enough to work sufficiently to survive and thrive for millenia.
Capitalism has only existed for 500 years. If it’s in our genes, how come it didn’t start 200,000 years ago ?
Also, capitalism has had setbacks since its beginning about 500 years ago. Socialism only began about 93 years ago, and having setbacks now does not foreclose its revival.
Also, u say Cuba has a little private property. The US and other capitalist countries have large amounts of public property. Canada, France and Britain have socialized medicine. In the sixties and seventies , the leading economics textbook writer , Samuelson, described US economy as “mixed” , i.e. part capitalist part socialist.
The struggle continues; victory is certain (smile)
18 February 2011, 4:49 pmCharles:
m.c. , thanks for mention of “selfish gene”. It and all social darwinism are other examples of individualist theory.
18 February 2011, 4:53 pmm.c.:
I never said Capitalism/Economic Liberalism was fair or egalitarian or non-exploitative. For society to actually get a middle class property owning(non-slave owning) bourgeois was a big deal. The Magna Carta for example was a big deal for the non-Royalty/Nobility/Church.
The New York Times has a great Chart, “Empire at the End of Decadence” on the Op-Ed Page(p.A 19, Saturday, February 19, 2011)
p.s. Marx never ran anything outside of the British Museum reading room, sponging off Engel’s dads money. Keynes in contrast for example, was the bursar(chief financial officer) of his college; govt. official; financier; and owner of a farm(hence at least some practical experience in agricultural economics.)
I paraphrased this from Robert Lowth(1710-1787) Bishop of London, liberal theologian, Professor of Poetry at Oxford.
Oxbridge: “Societies of emulation without envy, ambition without jealosy, contention without animosity.”
20 February 2011, 4:24 pmCharles:
^^^^^^^^
http://www.alternet.org/story/149980/what_the_right-wing_assault_on_women,_unions,_the_environment,_health_care_and_pbs_is_all_about_?page=entire
“Conservatives believe in individual responsibility alone, not social responsibility. They don’t think government should help its citizens. That is, they don’t think citizens should help each other. The part of government they want to cut is not the military (we have 174 bases around the world), not government subsidies to corporations, not the aspect of government that fits their worldview. They want to cut the part that helps people. Why? Because that violates individual responsibility.”
25 February 2011, 1:06 pmCharles:
Engels’ money was his own, not his father’s. LOL Engels did “run” something. He was a capitalist at the family firm. Using his money to support Marx was money well spent for humanity. Engels did quite a bit of writing himself. Call it Engelsism if u want.
25 February 2011, 1:11 pmm.c.:
Charles,
You got my joke that an Economist is someone who has a reputation for being good with numbers but doesn’t have the personality to be an Accountant?
I don’t live my life entirely by what Adam Smith, David Ricardo, or Thomas Malthus wrote either…
25 February 2011, 1:32 pmCharles:
Some quotes for the day:
An absolutely new idea is one of the rarest things known to man.”
Thomas More
You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will, / But the scent of the roses will hang round it still.”
… Thomas More
James : Samuel Johnson on a young writer’s work: “Much of what you write is great & much of what you write is original. Unfortunately what’s original isn’t great & what’s great isn’t original.” paraphrase
An absolutely new idea is one of the rarest things known to man.”
Thomas More
Charles Brown : ^^^^^
Actually, there are no absolutely new ideas. All geniuses stand on the shoulders of giants, as Newton said he did. New ideas are always development of old id…eas, even if they are negations of old ideas, and thereby not absolutely new.
And creativity in thinking is over-rated in importance. Individual creativity , so-called, is especially overrated. Kant’s “think for yourself” is a misdirection. “Think together; one for all and all for one” is much better.The origin of human society was the discovery of group thinking elevated over individual thinking. Apes and chimps thinking more individually. The main problems with society are not that we need a lot of new ideas. We need to implement a lot of ideas that were thought of a while ago.
2 March 2011, 12:46 pmCharles:
m.c.: I’m thinking about ur comment hmmmmm Economists are Worldly Philosophers giggles ????
Adam Smith is actually about ten times better than the orthodox and dominant school of economists of 2011. We’d do a lot better living by Adam Smith than Larry Summers.
2 March 2011, 12:50 pmCharles:
Fred Plotkin
The Wisconsin Lie Exposed – Taxpayers Actually Contribute Nothing To Public Employee Pensions
blogs.forbes.com
Pulitzer Prize winning tax reporter, David Cay Johnston, has written a brilliant piece for tax.com exposing the truth about who really pays for the pension and benefits for public employees in Wisconsin. Gov. Scott Walker says he wants state workers covered by collective bargaining agreements
CB: This is why we need accountants on our side in the struggle (smiles)
2 March 2011, 1:06 pmCharles:
Quote of the day:
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.(Gospel of St. Thomas)”
Jesus Christ quote
CB: Most of what is “in” u is not inborn. It is learned from society after birth.
2 March 2011, 5:34 pmCurt:
St. Thaomas sounds kind of like a New Ager or perhaps a Buddhist I bet his gospel was one left on the editing room floor.
2 March 2011, 6:20 pmm.c.:
From The View From the Ground(1987)
“Dear God, please don’t let Mrs. Thatcher, the Sword of Capitalism, destroy British TV by making it like American TV. Dear God, please lead Mrs. Thatcher to understand that cultural assets are more enduring than here-today-bust-tomorrow commercial assets. Fundamentalist Christianity, as also seen in TV documentaries, implies that Jesus has changed His mind; no longer the scourge of the money-changers in the Temple, He is all in favor of money now, especially for his preachers….”
3 March 2011, 1:08 pmm.c.:
Another social/political/cultural comparison(not exact but useful enough to both U.S. & U.K. people)
Last year in the U.K. talking with an English friend about the differences between the two countries I said, “We don’t have an Eton in the U.S. The closest thing would be the Rhodes Scholarship( & Marshall Scholarship). People think you’re a genius…” My friend finished the sentence,”Or you’re clever enough to make them believe that you are.” We both got a slight chuckle out of that as we finished our beers.
8 March 2011, 1:08 pmCharles:
^^^^^
CB:Genes don’t have selves^^^^^
Commentor:PART 2 SELFISH GENES: Richard Dawkins’ “selfish genes” metaphor has been almost universally misunderstood. “Selfish genes” does not mean a selfish person. It’s simply a way of looking at evolution as though animals act on behalf of their genes:”It rapidly became clear to me that the most imaginative way of looking at evolution, and the most inspiring way of teaching it, was to say that it’s all about the genes. It’s the genes that, for their own good, are manipulating the bodies they ride about in. The individual organism is a survival machine for its genes.” – Richard Dawkins
9 March 2011, 11:51 amCharles:
^^^^^^^
CB: Well, the species that acted in ways that perpetuated
themselves ,that biologically reproduced a new generation that
reproduced a new generation that produced a new generation…over many
generations such that the species still survives at the point at which
Dawkins is discussing them “manipulated” their bodies in a way that,
yeah, they passed on their genes. That’s what happens in reproduction;
genes are passed on. The genes, too, “survived” because by definition
a species’ genes “survive” when it survives. And the genes of a
species go extinct when a species goes extinct. But , as is mildly
implied by using the word “selfish” to modify”genes”, this doesn’t
mean that the genes have something like consciousnes or subjectivity
or “agency” (in post-modern terminology) or “selves”, such that they
direct the bodies (bodies that grow out of their codes through base
pairs making proteins, etc.) to act in ways that improve chances of
survival of both the genes and the bodies and their future
generations. Genes don’t have selves, I guess is the best direct
criticism of Dawkins’ theory.Dawkins’ theory is something of an
obverse, or reverse or whatever LaMarckianism. LaMarckianism ( a form
after the discovery genes) holds sort of that the motions of a species’
bodies can directly modify/”mutate” genes based on the “experience” of
said bodies to cause the genes make bodies in the next generation
adjusted and adapted to those experiences of the previous generation. Selfish-gene
theory holds that it is the genes that are causing the bodies to act as
“machines” or instrumentalities to assure the survival or perpetuation
of the genes.In the one the bodies influence and control the genes. In
the other ,the genes influence and control the bodies.It’s a truism or
trivially true from the premises of Darwinism that ,_for species that
do survive and don’t go extinct_, “the individual organism is a
survival machine for its genes, “. However, for species that go extinct
their organisms are not survival machines. Both these sort of
opposite, complementary statements are trivially derived from Darwin’s
and Mendel’s basic ideas. Dawkins formulation about selfish-genes,
doesn’t add anything that is not already trivially true in Darwin’s
_The Origin of Species_, and Mendel’s genes.
^^^^^^
9 March 2011, 11:56 amCharles:
Ralph Dumain wrote:> The selfish gene metaphor surreptitiously
reintroduces teleology into evolutionary discourse, esp. in the
popularization and metaphorical extension of evolutionary thinking.
Dawkins’ bullshit concept of *memes*> immediately illustrates the
danger.
CB: It just occurred to me this time in going up the
9 March 2011, 11:59 am“selfish-gene”hill one more time, that a key error is that it
anthropomorphizes genes. It’s like genes are little people inside
organisms or little organisms inside bigger Organisms.So, as God behind
teleology is an anthropomorphism of history and evolution, an
Intelligent Creator, these are Intelligent Creating Genes, as you
suggest, conscious, free-willing Genes, directing the consciousness of
the bodies in which they are. Sort of Genes as God within us (and other
species) directing evolution. It is anthropomorphizing Nature or
teleology ,as you say.The discovery that some of our genetic code we
inherited from viruses suggests something potentially interesting
perhaps a metaphor in the direction of “selfish-viruses”, though,
viruses are not people or full organisms. -
Charles:
Flora strike back !
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110302171309.htm
Four New Species of Zombie Ant Fungi Discovered in Brazilian Rainforest
ScienceDaily (Mar. 2, 2011) — Four new Brazilian species in the genus
9 March 2011, 12:04 pmOphiocordyceps have been published in the online journal PLoS ONE. The
fungi, named by Dr. Harry Evans and Dr. David Hughes, belong to a
group of “zombifying” fungi that infect ants and then manipulate their
behavior, eventually killing the ants after securing a prime location
for spore dispersal.
Charles:
The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realisation of their social Utopias, of founding isolated “phalansteres”, of establishing “Home Colonies”, or setting up a “Little Icaria”(4) — duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem — and to realise all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees, they sink into the category of the reactionary [or] conservative Socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science.
10 March 2011, 8:14 amCurt:
Charles,
10 March 2011, 10:40 amYou seem to be indirectly calling someone names.
Yet with out knowing who you are calling names I can not really make any sense out of your last post.
Or, is it meant to be some kind of Rorshack test?
Charles:
harles,
You seem to be indirectly calling someone names.
Yet with out knowing who you are calling names I can not really make any sense out of your last post.
Or, is it meant to be some kind of Rorshack test?
^^^^^
CB: Nope not calling any _person_ names. I’m analyzing ideas. All my comments refer to ideas, not people.
Localism has characteristics that are similar to the ideas of Utopian communities from the 1900′s. Those communities sought to be self-sufficient.
12 April 2011, 10:27 amCurt:
Charles,
12 April 2011, 1:24 pmI normally really like your comments. As to your comment from March 10th though, probably because my background in Marxism is very shallow, I do not understand it at all. I can imagine that I am not the only one who does not get it. Maybe if we who do not get it had the missing background information we would appreciate the comment much more.
Californian Commrade Curt
Charles:
Thanks Curt. I just saw this. Let me take a look.
3 May 2011, 1:54 pmCharles:
I got it from _The Manifesto of the Communist Party_ Chapter III. Socialist and Communist Literature where Marx and Engels critique ( both positive and negative; they don’t claim that utopianism is without merit in contributing to the development of communist theory) other Socialist and Communist ideas in their era. Engels also wrote a book years later _Socialism; Utopian and Scientific_. I admit (smiles) I thought of localism as a modern utopian socialist project. Here’s the whole section:
-3. Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism
We do not here refer to that literature which, in every great modern revolution, has always given voice to the demands of the proletariat, such as the writings of Babeuf and others.
The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends, made in times of universal excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown, necessarily failed, owing to the then undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary literature that accompanied these first movements of the proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form.
The Socialist and Communist systems, properly so called, those of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, and others, spring into existence in the early undeveloped period, described above, of the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie (see Section 1. Bourgeois and Proletarians).
The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as well as the action of the decomposing elements in the prevailing form of society. But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy, offers to them the spectacle of a class without any historical initiative or any independent political movement.
Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the development of industry, the economic situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer to them the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. They therefore search after a new social science, after new social laws, that are to create these conditions.
Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action; historically created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones; and the gradual, spontaneous class organisation of the proletariat to an organisation of society especially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their social plans.
In the formation of their plans, they are conscious of caring chiefly for the interests of the working class, as being the most suffering class. Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist for them.
The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without the distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?
Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel.
Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a fantastic conception of its own position, correspond with the first instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of society.
But these Socialist and Communist publications contain also a critical element. They attack every principle of existing society. Hence, they are full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class. The practical measures proposed in them — such as the abolition of the distinction between town and country, of the family, of the carrying on of industries for the account of private individuals, and of the wage system, the proclamation of social harmony, the conversion of the function of the state into a more superintendence of production — all these proposals point solely to the disappearance of class antagonisms which were, at that time, only just cropping up, and which, in these publications, are recognised in their earliest indistinct and undefined forms only. These proposals, therefore, are of a purely Utopian character.
The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realisation of their social Utopias, of founding isolated “phalansteres”, of establishing “Home Colonies”, or setting up a “Little Icaria”(4) — duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem — and to realise all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees, they sink into the category of the reactionary [or] conservative Socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science.
They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the working class; such action, according to them, can only result from blind unbelief in the new Gospel.
The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists in France, respectively, oppose the Chartists and the Réformistes
3 May 2011, 2:03 pmCurt:
Thank you Charles
3 May 2011, 3:32 pmStill a bit Foggy with so many terms from two centuries ago to deal with.
Curt:
Charles,
4 May 2011, 3:41 pmIn November 1972 when I was 12 years old I would have voted for Nixon instead of McGovern had I been old enough to vote. I can forgive myself because my frontal lobe at that time was probably the size of a quarter. Now when I think about the 1972 election I laught through my tears because I doubt that McGovern, a man who flew combat missions over Germany, could even get 5% of the vote nationwide, assuming that he was a younger man again.
95% of Americans would say that now my frontal lobe is the size of a penny.*<)
Charles:
Yeah, Curt, I know what u mean on the terminology. The idea is not absolutely anti-Utopian. Certainly they were honestly trying to make things better. Owen was cited in the US Congress at the time.
9 May 2011, 2:48 pmCharles:
Yes, the American national political consciousness has gone backwards from 1972. We have been infected with Reaganism. However, we shall overcome… again.
It wasn’t the size of your frontal lobe, but the socialization that had gone into it. I think u have wised up a lot since then. At least u’ve gone in the opposite political direction of the country , which has been going backward.
9 May 2011, 2:51 pm