Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Friday, May 20, 2011

Revolution and Scientific Breakthroughs

From http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/05/201151275441474476.html

[....]

Scientific enquiry and politics have always been bound together. The birth of a recognisably modern scientific establishment in Britain coincided with the end of absolute monarchy. An oligarchy of landed and learned gentlemen oversaw the creation of the Royal Society in 1660.

The origins of this institution lay in the secretive world of magical research and court politics. But its founders now aspired to work for the good of all mankind in a spirit of fellowship, and they used the open surveillance of peer review to enforce honesty. These men identified with the state - indeed they saw it as their ally in the great work of human progress, but they no longer risked torture or exile if their work offended an all-powerful monarch.

'Silting up'

Over time, the system created in the seventeenth century opened its ranks to talent from all over the world. Women and men without property can now become scientists, a development that would have astonished many of the first members of the Royal Society. But in important respects science still belongs to a pre-democratic age. Scientific experts collaborate with their patrons in the state and other powerful institutions to determine what is researched. Once the objectives have been set, the institutions of science are left to get on with it. This is the autonomy permitted to science. The public is kept at a distance by the mystique of technical complexity. Science in the West has not yet escaped its origins as successful magic, even if the white coat has replaced the wizard's robes.

Since the Second World War, the US state and its corporate sector have been vastly generous patrons of science. As I noted in my last piece, science has been shaped by their desire for new weapons and marketable goods. Science has been subordinated to organised violence and the orchestration of human desire. The results are all around us, in the technology of satellite surveillance and drone attacks as much as in the proliferation of entertainment online. As Harvey Brooks, one of the architects of the US system of science once remarked, the two per cent of GDP the US government spends on science has a "disproportionate social leverage, since the whole thrust of the economy is determined by scientific and technical research". If you are wondering why US companies dominate the internet, the answer is to be found in patterns of state investment.

There are signs that the West's system of science is silting up. The focus on military and commercial applications for science has drawn highly trained experts into fields that generate private profits but do nothing to enhance the public good. Brilliant medical researchers become engrossed in the search for patentable treatments for the diseases of affluence. Drugs that are scarcely more effective than placebos generate billion dollar revenues.

The sales promotions for these drugs infiltrate plausible myths into scientific discourse. The best mathematicians in the world design software that gives banks a minute speculative edge over their rivals. Or worse, they concoct risk models that give reckless fantasy the appearance of sober calculation. Engineers spend their careers trying to develop must-have gadgets. Decades of investment culminate in a frenzy of manufactured excitement for the latest smart phone or mp3 player.

I would like to believe that science in Europe and the United States can reform itself and open up decisions about its objectives to a wider public. Money that comes from taxpayers is currently being used to subsidise research that only occasionally and accidentally delivers public benefits. There is no longer any justification for denying the population at large a say in the objectives of science.

Setting energy free

But the political changes in the Middle East hold out more hope of radical change - and rapid progress - in the conduct of science. The region has been held back from achieving its full scientific and technical potential in recent times by a number of factors - political tyranny above all. And while there are some that now want to integrate science in Egypt and elsewhere with the demands of the globalised economy, the opportunity now exists to do far more. Open debate about the objectives of publicly funded science can establish programs of research that contribute to the general welfare more surely and more swiftly than the West's preoccupation with gadgets and gunnery.

Any attempt to chart a new course for the Middle East will have to take account of science's power to determine 'the whole thrust of the economy'. Research doesn't have to serve the interests of global corporations. It can be used instead to generate public goods, on the basis of democratic debate. It isn't for me to decide what a democratic science would concentrate on. But we have clear and pressing needs. We need plentiful and healthy food. We need secure and affordable houses. We need medicines that work, and schools and hospitals that serve the needs of their communities.

Above all, we need abundant and safe energy - energy that is effectively free and collectively owned. At the moment we have the opposite - energy that is expensive and controlled by a relative handful of people. By subjecting scientific research to democratic control we could change that, and quickly. Indeed, only a democratically directed science can achieve the rapid breakthroughs that are necessary if we are to feed, shelter and employ a growing global population.

We might want to start by considering the potential of the sun. Why not make Egypt the world centre of research into solar technology? We know that renewables - above all, solar - can meet the bulk of the world's energy needs. If a free people resolved to make energy free, by harnessing the sun, then that would be an Enlightenment worthy of the name.

Dan Hind has worked in publishing since 1998 and is the author of two acclaimed books: The Return of the Public and The Threat to Reason. He is this year's winner of the Bristol Festival of Ideas Prize.

Follow him on Twitter: @danhind

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Videos: The Return to Hegel

Preface to recent edition: Engels’ Dialectics of Nature

http://www.marxist.com/preface-engels-nature-wellred.htm

by Rob Sewell

[....]

Engels was an exceedingly modest man by nature. His extensive contribution to Marxist theory was outstanding, and not just "in a few special fields". His fruitful collaboration with Marx was far from one-sided. He was probably the most widely educated man of his day. He not only had a profound knowledge of economics and history, but his encyclopaedic mind enabled him to discuss the exact meaning of an obscure Latin phrase concerning Roman marriage law, or the reactions taking place when pure zinc is immersed into sulphuric acid. The Selected Correspondence of Marx and Engels illustrates the close affinity between both men.

"This morning in bed the following dialectical points about the natural sciences came into my head", wrote Engels, "The object of science: matter in motion, bodies. Bodies cannot be separated from motion, their forms and kinds can only be apprehended in motion; nothing can be said about bodies divorced from motion, divorced from all relation to other bodies. Only in motion does a body reveal what it is. Hence, natural science obtains knowledge about bodies by examining them in their relationship to each other, in motion. Cognition of the various forms of motion is cognition of bodies. The investigation of these various forms of motion is therefore the chief object of the natural sciences." (2)

Engels saw in the processes of nature a confirmation of the laws of dialectics, of the general laws of change, not only in society and human thought, but also in the external world. His notes on science, compiled in the Dialectics of Nature, were an attempt to comprehend the whole of science from the materialist standpoint.

Lenin, who would later take up the defence of materialist dialectics utilising the revolution in physics, in his Materialism and Empirio-criticism, had little to say on astronomy, geology, chemistry or biology. These scientific fields were however extensively examined by Engels in The Dialectics of Nature, although much of his observations consisted merely of rough notes, which he hoped to correct and expand later.

Many of his manuscripts appear to have been written between 1872 and 1882, a year prior to Marx's death. Readers clearly need a degree of patience with some of the chapters, which deal with the science of more than a hundred years ago. Words such as "force", "motion" and "vis viva" are used, where today we would speak of energy. The chapters on Basic forms of Motion, The Measure of Motion-Work, and Heat deal with controversies over various theories of energy, long resolved. These chapters are interesting from the point of view of how Engels analysed these issues, rather than the issues themselves. The essay on electricity is even more dated, but still revealing.

Needless to say, other parts, most notably the factual data used by Engels, have been rendered obsolete with the rapid progress of natural science. For example, the Kant-Laplace theory of cosmology is outdated. It has been established that the velocity of the electric current cannot exceed that of light. Whereas Engels refers to "albuminous bodies", today we would talk of DNA, RNA and protein molecules. Elsewhere there are incorrect statements in the text, for example in the section on stars and protozoa. With the invention of carbon dating, the estimated time spans used by Engels have also been drastically revised. Engels cannot be blamed for these errors. He simply followed the views of some of the best astronomers and zoologists of his day.

The development of science has vastly increased our knowledge over the last 130 years and many corrections have been introduced into our scientific understanding. It should also be appreciated that the ideas contained in the Dialects of Nature were Engels' preliminary thoughts on different subjects. He even ended the book with the phrase, "All this has to be thoroughly revised." (3) The surprising thing is not that there are mistakes in Engels' work, but how far Engels' ideas have broadly stood the test of time. More importantly, the general method and conception of the book remain completely valid.

Engels' work was recently brought to public attention by none other than Stephen Jay Gould, the celebrated palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist, who praised Engels' "trenchant political analysis of why Western science was so hung up on the a priori assertion of cerebral primacy." (4)

Gould went on to explain, "Engels had a keen interest in the natural sciences and sought to base his general philosophy of dialectical materialism upon a ‘positive' foundation. He did not live to complete his ‘dialectics of nature,' but he included long commentaries on science in such treaties as the Anti-Dühring. In 1876, Engels wrote an essay entitled, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man. It was published posthumously in 1896 and, unfortunately, had no visible impact upon Western science." (5)

Today, the Dialectics of Nature should be read in conjunction with its modern counterpart, Reason in Revolt, Marxist Philosophy and Modern Science by Alan Woods and Ted Grant. The latter provides an up-to-date analysis of the latest discoveries of modern science, including chaos theory and complexity theory, from the standpoint of Marxism, and reveals that many of these new trends are strikingly similar to the theories of dialectical materialism worked out by Marx and Engels more than 150 years ago. With each passing day, new discoveries are being made which confirm the non-linear dynamics of science, in other words, the dialectical workings of nature.

The latest developments in physics, including the new theory of Ubiquity, have revealed new "power-laws" remarkably similar to the laws of dialectics. Ubiquity theory explains that everything tends towards a state of non-equilibrium, i.e. a critical state. This corresponds to the concept of quantity into quality (and vice versa) in dialectics, where quantitative changes at a certain critical point result in a qualitative change.

According to Mark Buchanan in his book on the subject, "... catastrophe theory, despite its provocative name, has very little to say about the workings of anything like the earth's crust, an economy, or an ecosystem. In these things, where thousands or millions of elements interact, what is important is the overall collective organisation and behaviour. To understand things of this sort, one needs a theory that applies generally to networks of interacting things, something for which catastrophe theory is ill prepared." (6)

He continues: "At the heart of our story, then, lies the discovery that networks of things of all kinds-atoms, molecules, species, people, and even ideas-have a marked tendency to organise themselves along similar lines. On the basis of this insight, scientists are finally beginning to fathom what lies behind tumultuous events of all sorts, and to see patterns at work where they have never seen them before." (7).

If you compare what Engels wrote 130 years earlier, you can clearly recognise the parallels. "The general nature of dialectics to be developed as a science of interconnections, in contrast to metaphysics ", wrote Engels in the Dialectics of Nature (8). Again, "Dialectics as the science of universal inter-connection." (9) Dialectical thinking considers things "in their interconnection, in their sequence, their movement, their birth and their death." (10). "The great basic thought that the world is to be comprehended not as a complex of ready-made things but as a complex of processes, in which apparently stable things no less than the concepts, their mental reflections in our heads, go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away..." (11).

Engels furnishes us with an outline of the main laws of dialectics: "transformation of quantity and quality-mutual penetration of polar opposites and transformation into each other when carried to extremes-development through contradiction or negation of the negation-spiral form of development." (12) While each level of development is governed by its own specific laws, these merge with the higher general laws of motion governing all spheres of existence and development, as outlined by Engels.

"If one wants to learn about the rhythms of history (or, shall we say, its dis-rhythms), one might just as well become familiar with the process by which, say, earthquakes happen", states Buchanan. According to him, "the critical state does indeed seem to be ubiquitous in our world." (13). For physicists, the heart of this concept is "non-equilibrium physics" or "the physics of complex systems". Marxists have consistently drawn comparisons between revolutions in history and upheavals and catastrophes in nature, whereby slow gradual changes result at a certain point in explosive developments, where quantity changes into quality. Again, physicists describe the point of transition as a "phase transition". "When ice melts in a gin and tonic, or when a puddle evaporates and is lost to the air, these too are phase transitions: each being the transformation of a substance from one form or ‘phase' to another. In every case, there is a change in the internal workings of the stuff, as its atoms or molecules organise themselves differently." (14).

Let us again compare this to Engels: "The rock comes to rest, but weathering, the action of the ocean surf, of rivers and glacier action continually destroys the equilibrium. Evaporation and rain, wind, heat, electric and magnetic phenomena offer the same spectacle. Finally, in the living organism we see continual motion of all the smallest particles as well as of the larger organs, resulting in the continual equilibrium of the total organism during normal period of life, which yet always remains in motion, the living unity of motion and equilibrium. All equilibrium is only relative and temporary." (15)

Studies were made in the 1960s of the changes from vapour to liquid of substances as diverse as oxygen, neon and carbon monoxide. Each critical state can be expressed through a power-law with its own mathematical number. There are many different critical states, each with a different critical number. However, researchers found while comparing the changes in diverse elements, exactly the same critical numbers repeatedly occurred. In the 1970s, Leo Kadanoff, a physicist from the University of Chicago, put his finger on the explanation:

"In studying the critical numbers that pop up in the critical states for different phase transitions, Kadanoff found that the basic physical dimension of the thing in question, of the very space in which it lives, is one of the factors that matters. He also found that only one other detail seems to matter, this being the general shape of the individual elements. In a gas of xenon, for example, each atom is like a tiny billiard ball. It can move around, but it can't point. In a magnet, the atoms are like arrows, and can ‘do' more since they can potentially point in lots of directions. When the individual elements have more options, you can imagine that it is harder for order to propagate from one place to another. Sure enough, this detail also affects the precise form of the self-similarity in the critical state.
"Incredibly, however, Kadanoff found that nothing else whatsoever seemed to matter. So forget the atomic masses and the electrical charges of the particles involved. Forget whether those particles are atoms of oxygen, nitrogen, krypton or iron. Forget even whether they are made of single atoms or are more complicated molecules made of several or even a hundred atoms. Forget everything, in fact, about the kinds of particles and how strongly or weakly they interact with one another. None of these details affects the organisation of the critical state even a tiny bit. Physicists refer to this considerable miracle as critical state universality, and it has now been supported by thousands of experiments and computer simulations.
"In the critical state, the forces of order and chaos battle to an uneasy balance, neither ever fully winning or losing. And the character of the battle, and the perpetually shifting and changing strife to which it leads, is the same regardless of almost every last detail of the things involved." (16)

Not surprisingly, other branches of science have also come very close to the concepts of dialectical materialism. Stephen Gould and Niles Eldredge both came forward with the revolutionary theory of "punctuated equilibria", which explained evolution not as some slow, steady, gradual change for the better, as outlined by orthodox Darwinism, but a process full of leaps, breaks and transformations. This challenged the dominant Darwinian view of gradualism. Although Gould and Eldredge are not Marxists, they were certainly influence by materialist dialectics. "I am no Marxist", wrote Niles Eldredge, "and neither for that matter is Steve; learning and adoption are two different things." (17)

Eldredge went on to explain that new dialectical models on the lines of punctuated equilibria have turned up throughout science: "I am still not quite sure what to make of the zeitgeist of our own times, in which, quite apart from Marxism (or so I believe), paradigms similar to punctuated equilibria have shown up in a wide range of academic pursuits. Before us, there was the celebrated case of Thomas Kuhn, whose Structure of Scientific Revolutions became a best-seller in the early 1970s. His central thesis was essentially that science proceeds as status quo paradigms in stasis, integrated by rapid events that finally throw out the old paradigm in favour of a new one that handles all the anomalies swept under the table by its predecessor. Catastrophe theory, similarly, became a hot topic in mathematics as the 1970s wore on. Archaeology and political science have also seen new theories emerging along similar lines (some, I am happy to report, explicitly derived from punctuated equilibria). There may well be a general reaction against models stressing smooth, linear continuity emerging in the intellectual community generally-models of which punctuated equilibria is but one example." (18)

In his criticism of Charles L. Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson, Stephen Gould made use of Engels' brilliant essay on human evolution contained in the Dialectics of Nature, which has clearly stood the test of time.

"Ironically, for the man's work is anathema to Wilson, who senses the evil influence of Marxism behind all radical criticism of his socio-biology, the best nineteenth-century case for gene-culture co-evolution was made by Frederich Engels in his remarkable essay of 1876 (posthumously published in the Dialectics of Nature), The part played by labour in the transition from ape to man.
"Engels, following Haeckel's outline as his guide, argues that upright posture must precede the brain's enlargement because major mental improvement requires an impetus provided by evolving culture. Thus, freeing the hands for inventing tools (‘labour' in Engels's committed terminology) came first, then selective pressures for articulate speech, since, with tools, ‘men in the making arrived at the point where they had something to say to one another,' and finally sufficient impetus for a notable (and genetically based) enlargement of the brain:
" ‘First labour, after it, and then with it, articulate speech-these were the two most essential stimuli under the influence of which the brain of the ape gradually changed into that of man.'
"An enlarged brain (biology, or genes in later parlance) then fed back upon tools and language (culture), improving them in turn and setting the basis for further growth of the brain-the positive feedback loop of gene-culture co-evolution:
" ‘The reaction on labour and speech of the development of the brain and its attendant senses, of the increasing clarity of consciousness, power of abstraction and of judgment, gave an ever-renewed impulse to the further development of both labour and speech.'" (19).

In the field of biology, Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin have championed the dialectical approach. In fact their book, The Dialectical Biologist, published in 1985, was specifically dedicated to the memory of Fredrick Engels. Although Engels was limited by the material at his disposal at the time, recent science has confirmed his outlook in so far as "opposing forces lie at the base of the evolving physical and biological world." (20).

"The dialectical view insists that persistence and equilibrium are not the natural state of things but require explanation, which must be sought in the actions of the opposing forces", state Levin and Lewontin. "The conditions under which the opposing forces balance and the system as a whole is in stable equilibrium are quite special. They require the simultaneous satisfaction of as many mathematical relations as there are variables in the system, usually expressed as inequalities among the parameters of that system.
"If these parameters remain within the prescribed limits, then external events producing small shifts among the variables will be erased by the self-regulating processes of stable systems. Thus in humans the level of blood sugar is regulated by the rate at which sugar is released into the blood by the digestion of carbohydrates, the rate at which stored glycogen, fat, or protein is converted into sugar, and the rate at which sugar is removed and utilised. Normally, if the blood sugar level rises, then the rate of utilisation is increased by release of more insulin from the pancreas. If the level of blood sugar falls, more sugar is released into the blood, or the person gets hungry and eats some source of sugar. The result is that the blood sugar level is kept not constant but within tolerable limits. So far we are dealing with the familiar patterns of homeostasis, the negative feedback that characterises all self-regulation. However, the pancreas might respond weakly to a high sugar level, which could result in diabetic coma. Or the blood sugar level may fall so low that the person is incapable of eating.
"The opposing forces are seen as contradictory in the sense that each taken separately would have opposite effects, and their joint action may be different from the result of either acting alone. So far, the object may seem to be the passive victim of these opposing forces. However, the principle that all things are internally heterogeneous directs our attention to the opposing processes at work within the object. These opposing processes can now be seen as part of the self-regulation and development of the objective. The relations among the stabilising and destabilising processes become themselves the objects of interests, and the original object is seen as a system, a network of positive and negative feedbacks." (21)

Dialectics of Nature deals extensively with such problems of dialectics as causality, necessity and chance. Here Engels criticises the one-sided outlook of the scientific establishment, its "commonsense" philosophy, and its metaphysics, which treats chance and necessity as two separate entities, with one or the other taking precedence. "In contrast to both conceptions, Hegel came forward with the hitherto quite unheard-of propositions that the accidental has a cause because it is accidental, and just as much also has no cause because it is accidental," stated Engels (22). In other words, necessity is inseparably linked to accident and expresses itself through accident.

According to Engels, it was this method of looking at things that allowed Darwin to make his epoch-making discovery. "Precisely the infinite, accidental differences between individuals within a single species", stated Engels, "differences which become accentuated until they break through the character of the species, and whose immediate causes even can be demonstrated only in extremely few cases, compelled him to question the previous basis of all regularity in biology, viz. the concept of species in its previous metaphysical rigidity and unchangeability. Without this concept of species, however, all science was nothing." (23)

The theory of Ubiquity also ventures into many different fields, even touching on human history and human behaviour, including free will. "Once you become accustomed to the idea, it is not so hard to accept that the essential logic of the critical state might arise in simple physical things such as a pile of grains, or even in the rocks of the earth's crust or the trees of the forest, where definite physical laws control how activity spreads from one place to another", states Buchanan.

"When the stress becomes too great somewhere along a fault, the rock slips, shifting stress onto the rocks further down the line. In cases such as this, there is no need to reckon with anything so ineffable and capricious as a thought or an emotion. But once people become involved, things are not so simple... aren't we making a dangerous leap in supposing that the critical state has anything to do with human history?" (24)
"... To understand any particular revolution, historians surely need to study all the social conditions from which it springs. To understand what makes a person take up arms, go on strike or decide not to have children, the historian indeed has to try to get inside that person's mind, and weigh up all the social pressures and influences to which the person is responding. Only in this way can the historian come to understand what sparked a revolution, as many people's actions followed in some understandable way from the conditions they were in. But the historian really needs also to know more about the way in which influences of all kinds can propagate through a population. To understand why mass movements are not rare and history is as interesting and as varied as it is, we need to understand the character of the critical state." (25)

After looking at examples, ranging from the making of trails to the movement of populations, the author concludes "there can be a mathematics for people. It cannot tell you, of course, what any one person will do, and yet it may be able to say what kind of patterns are likely to emerge out of the millions." He goes on to explain, "One of the messages of universality is that understanding something often means looking past the surface details to spy the deeper logic beneath."

Here the proponents of Ubiquity are attempting to come to grips with concepts dealt with by George Fredrick Hegel some 200 years ago. Hegel talks of understanding not only the "appearance" but also the "essence" of things, not in isolation but in their inter-connections, in their endless action and reaction. This is the deeper logic that lies beneath the surface of things. We need to understand things in their movement and change, their identity and difference, their contradictory nature, which is the essence of things.

"Necessity has been defined, and rightly so, as the union of possibility and actuality", stated Hegel. Necessity is blind only as long as it is not understood. Freedom and necessity are not mutually exclusive, but intrinsically bound together. Hegel was the first to understand this relationship. To him, freedom is the appropriation of necessity. It means no independence from natural laws, but knowledge of such laws, allowing them to work for us. The more we understand, the greater is our freedom.
"In this way, necessity is transfigured into freedom, not the freedom that consists in abstract negation, but freedom concrete and positive. From which we may learn what a mistake it is to regard freedom and necessity as mutually exclusive. Necessity indeed qua necessity is far from being freedom: yet freedom presupposes necessity, and contains it as an unsubstantial element in itself... In short, man is most independent when he knows himself to be determined by the absolute idea throughout." (26)

Hegel's reference to the "absolute idea" is but an idealistic expression for objective necessity. Freedom does not exist in the illusion of independence from these natural laws. As Engels explained, it is blind only so long as it is not understood. Freedom comes through the knowledge of these laws, and the possibility of making them work in a particular way towards a definite end. "Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on knowledge of natural necessity", wrote Engels.

We cannot circumvent the laws of nature, but through knowledge we can make them work for us. The more we extend this knowledge, the more we begin to conquer nature. Today, we have no control over the weather, and can only predict the weather with accuracy no more that three or four days in advance. However, in the future, with increased understanding of this non-linear system, we can begin to influence and eventually control our weather patterns. Until that time, we remain slaves of blind necessity.

With every step forward in "regulating" nature, new freedoms are opened up. Marx explained that the shortening of the working day was a precondition for true freedom, meaning that it allowed time for people to develop their physical and mental potential to the full. For Engels, the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of socialism meant the leap from the Realm of Necessity to the Realm of Freedom, where conscious planning replaces the anarchy of production.

Buchanan makes an interesting observation: "After a great discovery, scientists suddenly see everywhere that which they had never seen before." (27) For a long time, false philosophical ideas have exercised a negative influence on scientists. Now, in a number of fields, they have stumbled upon a dialectical view of nature, although many still refuse to call it by its correct name:

"If many historians [and scientists - RS] have searched for gradual trends or cycles as a way of finding meaning and making sense of history, they were using the wrong tools. These notions arise in equilibrium physics and astronomy. The proper tools are to be found in non-equilibrium physics, which is specifically tuned to understanding things in which history matters." (28)

It is this accidental discovery of a non-linear (that is, dialectical) view, which has opened up all kinds of new possibilities and allowed scientists to see things in a different way, in their interconnection and contradiction.

Causality exists in nature, and objective laws govern the whole of nature. This represents objective necessity within the material world, and is not an arbitrary invention of the human mind. There exists a natural, objective interconnection between the phenomena of the world. Engels speaks of the "law of nature", of the "necessities of nature". These laws assert themselves unconsciously "in the form of external necessity in the midst of an endless series of seeming accidents." (Engels). Such accidents are things or events, whose interconnection is so remote that we regard them as non-existent or negligible.

Dialectical thinking, which has grown out of the dialectics of nature, gives us a far deeper comprehension of things. By a process of successive approximations, permitting more precise concretisations, and giving thought a richness of content, human thought comes ever closer to living phenomena.

The dialectic is materialist, because its roots are deep in objective reality, in nature. There is no place in this system for Heaven, Hell or the immortal soul. There exists only the material world, made up of infinite processes and not motionless categories. Consciousness grew out of the unconscious, psychology out of physiology, the organic world out of the inorganic, and the solar system out of the nebulae. In essence, this constitutes the materialist view of nature.

The movement towards a dialectical view of nature by a number of leading scientists is of fundamental importance. It marks a shift away from the mysticism that has crept into a number of scientific areas such as cosmology and some branches of theoretical physics. It cuts right across all attempts to reconcile science with religion, of which there are numerous examples.

The physicist Stephen Hawking concluded his best seller, A Brief History of Time, with the words "the ultimate triumph of human reason" was "to know the Mind of God". Paul Davis, another physicist, talks in his book, The Mind of God, of the need to embrace "the mystical path". Even Ilya Prigogine concludes his very good book with "time is a construction and therefore carries an ethical responsibility" and makes references to the "God of Genesis". The Catholic Church has embraced the "Big Bang" as evidence of the Creation, while the President of the United States, George W. Bush, the most powerful person on the planet, has openly embraced Intelligent Design-another way of saying Creationism-the clearest example of Christian fundamentalism masquerading as science.

The republication of the Dialectics of Nature, a classic in its own right, is a welcome addition to the arsenal of the new scientific revolution. It will also help provide the philosophical weapons needed in the fight against religious obscurantism, and arm the new generation with the scientific outlook of modern dialectical materialism. This will enable us to attain a better understanding of the world in which we live. Such an understanding is the prior condition for a successful struggle to change the world, to rid it of poverty, hunger and war, and to make it a fit place for people to live in.

Preface to the new edition of Engels’ Dialectics of Nature

Buy the book from Wellred

"Philosophers have interpreted the world", stated Marx long ago. "The point however is to change it." However, we leave the last word to Fredrick Engels who to the end of his life displayed such an undying optimism for the future of humankind:

"With man we enter history. Animals also have a history, that of their descent and gradual evolution to their present position. This history, however, is made for them, and in so far as they themselves take part in it, this occurs without their knowledge and desire. On the other hand, the more that human beings become removed from animals in the narrower sense of the word, the more they make their history themselves, consciously, the less becomes the influence of unforeseen effects and uncontrolled forces on this history, and the more accurately does the historical result correspond to the aim laid down in advance. If, however, we apply this measure to human history, to that of even the most advanced peoples of the present day, we find that there still exists here a colossal disproportion between the proposed aims and the results arrived at, that unforeseen effects predominate, and that the uncontrolled forces are far more powerful than those set into motion according to plan. And this cannot be otherwise as long as the most essential historical activity of men, the one which has raised them from the animal to the human state and which forms the material foundation of all their other activities, namely the production of their requirements of life, i.e., in our day social production, is above all subject to the interplay of unintended effects from uncontrolled forces and achieves its desired end only by way of exception, but much more frequently the exact opposite. In the most advanced industrial countries we have subdued the forces of nature and pressed them into the service of mankind; we have thereby infinitely multiplied production, so that a child now produces more than a hundred adults previously did. And what is the result? Increasing overwork and increasing misery of the masses, and every ten years a great collapse. Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind, and especially on his countrymen, when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the animal kingdom. Only conscious organisation of social production, in which production and distribution are carried on in a planned way, can lift mankind above the rest of the animal world as regards the social aspect, in the same way that production in general has done this for mankind in the specific biological aspect. Historical evolution makes such an organisation daily more indispensable, but also with every day more possible. From it will date a new epoch of history, in which mankind itself, and with mankind all branches of its activity, and particularly natural science, will experience an advance that will put everything preceding it in the deepest shade." (29).

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Saroj Giri on Libya

"Libya in Context: Imperialists No Longer Paper Tigers?"

http://www.opendemocracy.net/saroj-giri/libya-in-context-imperialists-no-longer-paper-tigers

Saroj Giri, 04th April 2011

Maybe saving the lives of civilians by taking away their fundamental political agency is the real problem with UN-NATO interventions, rather than some hidden economic self-interest.

About the author

Saroj Giri is a lecturer in Political Science, University of Delhi, Delhi. He writes on contemporary social and political issues and is an activist.

Soon after the first rejuvenating flush of democratic assertion sweeping the Arab countries a not-very-optimistic situation has emerged in Libya today. The upbeat mood among left and democratic sections about the Arab spring has suddenly given way to disappointment: not the Arab masses but the US and NATO are the active subjects now who are setting the agenda – UN mandated armed intervention, arms supply to the Libyan rebels and so on.

The left response has been either to find your own pragmatic position on an agenda and framework set by the big powers (do you support the humanitarian intervention?) or to engage in strong denunciations of the hypocrisy and double standards of imperialist powers, opposing the intervention outright. We need to get out of this double bind and go beyond both pragmatism and an immobilizing moral righteousness. Making a big moralist hue and cry about the imperialists - in the guise of protecting innocent civilians or protecting democracy - acting in their own interests, looks as though we secretly hope that imperialism can be reformed into something benign, with the left in the role of conscience-keepers. Exposing the hollow claims of the big powers that they defend democracy and freedom in front of the public and the media is of course important, but not when that is all the politics that is left. A shift in the focus of our analysis is needed here.

Let me use an anecdote. This is a leftist meeting in New Delhi in solidarity with the Maoist rebels’ struggle in Nepal in the face of Indian and US imperialist designs to crush it (an armed intervention by India was feared but never happened). One speaker expresses his anti-imperialist solidarity by saying that we must campaign against the arms supplied by India and the US to the Nepalese army. The Maoist leader however surprises the audience by saying, “Don’t worry comrades about the arms supply; let it come, for they will soon land up in our hands!” How should one respond? One might well complain that Maoists are violent and fetishize arms. But the political logic behind this statement is absolutely sound. That is, imperialism might desire and plan one thing, but the outcome might be something else, depending on the strength of the anti-imperialist struggle. Big powers indulge in morally outrageous activities like arming dictators but with the right strategy the outcome can still be favourable for progressive politics – not always but sometimes. The lesson: moral denunciations against such outrageous acts cannot be a substitute for good strategy. The most armed and violent penetration and destruction unleashed in Vietnam did not yield the desired outcome for US imperialism.

During the Vietnam war, General Vo Nguyen Giap did not waste time in condemning US imperialist aggression as murderous and immoral. That was taken as understood. Powerful and militarily superior as the US was, the General saw that strategically the invasion would eventually favour the Vietnamese resistance. He pointed out: “At this point, the more open is the United States aggression, the more isolated and differentiated the puppet army and administration, and the sharper the contradictions between the United States imperialists and their placemen. Those people in the puppet army and administration who still have some national feeling will become more conscious of the real situation, and the number of those who cross over to the people's side will increase.” He concludes: “Consequently, the introduction of more United States troops, far from retrieving the predicament of the puppet army and administration, aggravates the mercenary army's destruction and disintegration, and the puppet administration's collapse in the face of our people's resistance. When the American imperialists' crack troops are defeated by our people, the disintegration and collapse of the puppet army and administration will be all the more inevitable” (‘Once Again We Will Win’, January, 1966).

Imperialism contained ?

General Giap did not imagine a world where the subjective intentions of imperialists are the sole determining factor. Those intentions are in fact routinely frustrated. In the midst of the Vietnam war, he presents US imperialism as weak: “The strong points of the United States imperialists are limited, whereas their weak points are basic ones. As the aggressive war goes on, the latter will become more visible and more serious and will surely lead the American imperialists to ignominious failure.” Libya is no Vietnam, and inviting the full force of the US and NATO to come into Libya on the grounds that progress can still win with the ‘right strategy’ differs little as a position from supporting the Bush invasion into Iraq! But neither is there an iron necessity that a UN-NATO intervention will necessarily fulfil the desire of the big powers to contain the democratic wave in the Arab world.

As if announcing a major revelation, Tariq Ali writes that Libya is another case of selective vigilantism by the West: “It is absurd to think that the reasons for bombing Tripoli or for the turkey shoot outside Benghazi are designed to protect civilians” (‘Libya is another case of selective vigilantism by the West’, The Guardian, March 29, 2011). Well, had we expected anything other? Are we feeling betrayed by imperialism, or betrayed by our own secret investment in trying to reform it, restrain it – all this in the name of engaging in anti-imperialist struggle? No no, we are told, we must oppose the no-fly zone and the intervention in Libya since - well - the imperialists have imperialist designs! UN-NATO intervention, such commentators solemnly certify, will suppress and hijack the wave of democratic protests in the Arab world. That might happen – but can we for a moment imagine a different scenario?

Is it not conceivable that the UN-NATO armed intervention, particularly if it extends into occupation, might fail to contain the protests and instead provoke them to go beyond targeting just the regional dictators, even turning their wrath against those imperialist forces and designs that the left is wont to take as final and definitive? Is the left today capable of at least imagining a situation where there is a larger configuration of forces and balance of power which might be tilted against it? Unless one can imagine an alternative scenario, focusing on the big power interests and intentions as though they will surely come to fruition is like declaring imperialism victorious before the fightback has begun. Or avoiding any real confrontation.

Struggle on the ground

What is it about the democratic movement in Libya which has allowed such a situation as today’s to come about. Pham Binh points out in the latest Counterpunch [8]: “we shouldn't close our eyes to weaknesses within the revolutionary wave stretching from Algeria to Iran. Unlike in Egypt, Libya's revolutionaries have not appealed to the rank-and-file of the military to switch sides, nor have they sought to mobilize the country's workers to strike against the regime. This took social revolution off the table and confined the struggle between Gaddafi and the rebels to a purely military dimension, guaranteeing him the upper hand and setting the stage for the Libyan National Council’s desperate plea for help from the region's most anti-revolutionary force: the US government. This failure was no accident; many members of the LNC are top figures from Gaddafi's decrepit and brutal regime. Instead of mobilizing workers, they've issued proclamations honoring all contracts with foreign oil companies.”

Such a reading offers an assessment of the strength or weakness of the democratic struggle which the big powers have to reckon with. The latest maneuverings in Libya might allow the US to contain the Arab protest wave. But who says the Arab movement cannot turn around and instead start containing big powers and their strategies. The challenge is to address the reality of the threat without permitting the take-over of the big powers, so that they become the sole agency and arbiters – even if they do ‘save civilian lives’. Maybe saving the lives of civilians by taking away their fundamental political agency is the real problem with UN-NATO intervention rather than some hidden economic self-interest.

Already the agency of the Arab movement is displaced from mass protests to fights over the wording of UN Resolution 1973. The struggle is now among the big powers (China, Russia abstaining) and some opaque ‘Libyan opposition’ over the issue of ground troops or occupation of any part of Libyan territory, beyond aerial strikes and a no-fly zone. It is about the supply of arms to the Libyan rebels, which might give them greater say over the path they want to choose while lessening the control of the big powers, but might lead to a civil war in which no Libyans win. While in each case we might take a position against big power interests (saying no to occupation or to use of ground troops, calling for or against arms supply to the rebels etc.) the wider democratic movement in the Arab movement is displaced, not least through the figure of ‘innocent civilians’ - no more active agents, but victims whom the big powers or the international community must save.

Discipline and sacrifice

General Giap seems to be saying, if the US aggressors are thrusting this war upon us then well, let them come in, we have our strategy laid out in a way that will trap them, defeat them. This refusal to back out of war and instead counter-strategise to win it, might from today’s left perspective look rather hawkish – good for anti-imperialism for an earlier time, but not for today. Vietnam stands for resistance to US imperialism, but look closely at the details and today’s moralizing left might be disappointed to discover quite so much of the militaristic, homogenizing discipline and self-sacrifice, smacking almost of a fascist authoritarianism.

Hence the ruckus generated by Slavoj Zizek’s review of the film 300 [9] by Zack Snyder. With parallels to the Libyan case, the film shows Sparta under attack by the powerful invading Persian army. The Spartans resist through discipline and sacrifice. Some commentators accused Zizek precisely of overlooking the fascist overtones of discipline and sacrifice as values. But doesn’t he have a point when he agrees with Alain Badiou that all the poor have is ‘their discipline, their capacity to act together’ and to organize, and that taking moral positions and being shocked falls far short of what is needed for resistance to be effective. Strategy, discipline and sacrifice – these are categories the left needs to revisit so that anti-imperialism can go beyond conscience-keeping and imperialists can once again begin to look like paper tigers.

Obviously the situation in Vietnam with a powerful and mass-based anti-imperialist camp cannot be compared to the situation in Libya or any other Arab country today. But the current conflict between the big powers and the Gaddafi regime is precipitated by the rising fervour of the democratic upsurge. The pressure to put up a pro-civilian face means that the US is forced to act in ways that might overpower and defeat Gaddafi’s repressive apparatus. This could allow the democratic movement the space to expand its base - involving more youth and workers, and preventing the slide into civil war. But once this happens and the Gaddafi apparatus is eliminated, it is not entirely inconceivable that the movement will turn its focus on imperialist machinations. Indeed the further the US-NATO go beyond the UN mandate, spreading their more ambitious tentacles, the more likely that the flames of anti-imperialism will be stoked in the Arab world.

[....]

Shooting of New Film to Begin Soon

Saturday, May 7, 2011

Remarks on Plato's Parmenides. etc.

Inside Job trailer

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Bureaucracy Joke

from http://www.smilespedia.com/glossary/countries_jokes/usa_jokes/

Bureaucracy lives forever – [Smilespedia]

The US Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That’s an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that’s the way they built them in England, and the US railroads were built by English expatriates.

Why did the English people build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that’s the gauge they used.

Why did “they” use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Okay! Why did the wagons use that odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long distance roads, because that’s the spacing of the old wheel ruts.

So who built these old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts? The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made for or by Imperial Rome they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

Thus, we have the answer to the original questions. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification (Military Spec) for an Imperial Roman army war chariot. MilSpecs and Bureaucracies live forever.

So, the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse’s ?%! came up with it, you may be exactly right. Because the Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back-ends of two war horses.

—

There’s an interesting extension of the story about railroad gauge and horses’ behinds. When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at a factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.

The railroad line to the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than a railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses’.

So a major design feature of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system was determined by the width of a horse’s ass!