Hegel Boot Camp and grappling with Reason

On Mike Roberts's blog The Next Recession (arguing that the most important factor driving the current crisis in capitalism is the tendential fall in the rate of profit/LTRFP), there is a lively discussion in progress taking its starting point in the misrepresentations of Marx and his ideas perpetrated by Marxists without Marx such as Michael Heinrich and his sponsors the Monthly Review group. The discussion has ranged well beyond Heinrich and his shallow work and moved on to important differences between serious Marxist economists. These differences include the approach to fundamentals of scientific inquiry, which induced me to make the following proposal for a Hegel Boot Camp to bring all would-be Marxists up to speed on the Hegelian foundations of Marx's work:

Well, I’d like to send everybody here on a summer boot camp to work through Hegel’s Logic together.

Programme:
Prepare by reading the lot — Part One, Objective Logic, Book One: Being, Book Two: Essence; Part Two, Subjective Logic: The Concept.

Daily routine: participants take turns presenting papers in plenum, followed by group sessions. Morning and afternoon same story. Evening free form social hive buzzing over day’s harvest.

Expected course of events:
First week, “Being”: leads up to dissolution of Kant’s mind-forged manacles and Saturday night dance and barbecue round the bonfire of the Antinomies.
Second week, “Essence”: leads up to acknowledgment of contradiction as fundamental and inescapable ground of knowledge, thought and being. Dissolution of “induction” as a possible source of knowledge ;-)
Third week, “The Concept”: leads up to acknowledgment that Kant’s a priori insight was a damn sight more powerful than he ever imagined ;-) , and that Hegel didn’t exactly stand him on his feet regarding this but rather blew open the gates of concrete and steel that he misused the antinomies to construct in the path of scientific and philosophical inquiry.
Fourth week, Science and Philosophy: papers and discussion on Anti-Dühring, Dialectics of Nature, Empirio-Criticism, and free choice topics. Purpose: to digest general methodological consequences of weeks one to three.
Fifth and final week, Economics and Politics: “Capital” and Marx’s and Engels’s trajectory from the 1840s using the methodological foundations and consequences thrashed out previously.

After such a learning experience our present discussion would be much less of a mess. Fewer misunderstandings and grabbing the wrong end of sticks. Because everyone would have a much better grasp of criteria for scientific validity in general, and of Marx’s understanding of scientific procedure in particular.

For instance, we wouldn’t be sloshing around in the dark in an Arctic quagmire trying to wallop each other with cudgels labelled “induction” or “inevitability”. We’d have a much better idea of what Marx considered his categories of the theory of capitalism to be, as he presented their unfolding and development from the simplest “cell” of economics, the commodity, into the most advanced organism the capitalist mode of production could generate – the credit system.

There’s a technology of thought as well as machines, and except for a very few exceptions (Boolean logic, for instance) it’s been stagnating since 1848. The suppression of Hegel’s revolutionary advances on Kant, and Marx’s revolutionary advances on Hegel has been much more effective in crushing progress in thought than even the institutional and legal instruments of patents and copyright have been in crushing progress in material technology and culture.

As I’ve written earlier, there’s a difference between the collapse of capital as a mechanism of production and circulation (the immanent, ideal, “mathematical”, pure, deductive, theoretical, whatever aspect) and the collapse of capitalism as a social formation, a mode of production. Capital is a process involving dead elements of completed labour. Capitalism is a social formation composed of living human producers caught up in the capital process. Living labour trying to orient itself and navigate a violent ocean using alien instruments in a ship it has been forced to build to an alien design.

The better we understand the design of this ship Capital, and the currents swirling under it, and the strengths and weaknesses of its boiler and hull, and the way it is being sailed, the easier it is for us to mutiny, seize it and expel the capitalists from the bridge, sail it into calmer waters, and carry out a complete refit to our own design for our own ends.

This discussion is not just about Economics, it’s not even just about Political Economy. It’s about understanding political economy in the context of human society and history in general. And while digging into what Marx actually wrote is a sine qua non for being able to do this, and consequently a huge benefit emerging from this discussion of Heinrich and his distortions of what Marx actually wrote, we mustn’t stop there or we’ll just end up being so many clever dick Jack Horners admiring the plums our thumbs have pulled out of the pudding and pie. We have to understand why he wrote it, and how he was able to write it, and in what circumstances, both material and immaterial.

This is the challenge of social-historical practice, of thinking politics, and it is the challenge that would make our Hegel boot camp into a more exciting intellectual experience than most of us might imagine. Hegel is no agnostic, unlike Kant. He is after the Truth and won’t rest till he can grasp it, judging the correlation between ideas, reality and experience. And once you are in the hunt for the truth, you’re hooked: “das einzig konsequente Mittel gegen die Vernunft ist, sich mit ihr gar nicht einzulassen” (“the only consistent way to fight reason is not to engage with her at all”).

Andrew Kliman was good enough to comment on this:

I don’t think Morph’s comments sufficiently appreciate the differences between (a) philosophical knowledge of the kind that Hegel sought, (b) the kind of knowledge that Marx understood the LTFRP as providing, and (c) what people are engaged in when they make inductive inferences, which is not knowledge-acquisition. AFAICS, Hegel was saying that philosophy needed its own methods, not that other methods are incorrect in their own spheres.

and I responded:

Thanks for “engaging with reason” ;-)  We shouldn’t forget that our Reason is not just thundering in revolt, but is also Red in tooth and claw!
Hegel was concerned with the processes of thought and logic in relation to the truth. The energy with which he explored the foundations of every element involved in this is unexampled – his intensity is on a par with Marx’s and I’m not exaggerating. But it was a different field and more in thought than reality – although once he came to a conclusion he applied what he had learned in more applied fields of knowledge. So I think Andrew K needs to be more specific about “philosophical knowledge” before we can start comparing. But let’s say that Hegel sought the ultimate foundations of knowledge, continuing and developing Kant’s almost equally ferocious and dedicated drive in the same direction.
We can’t single out Marx’s view of the place of the LTFRP and compare it to this. We have to see it in its place in the totality of Marx’s public work, both intellectual and political to make a fair comparison. Marx tackled the whole of Western Philosophy head on as a student, as we know from his doctoral thesis among other things, and came to the conclusion that Hegel, using the whole of this tradition, had found the ultimate foundations of knowledge as far as they could be discovered using an idealist perspective. From then on Marx applied himself to continuing and developing Hegel’s revolutionary work on a materialist basis – the dialectical aspect of Marx’s work coming in from Hegel’s fundamental solutions of the problems of thought, which Marx had no reason to reject or modify, except as regards their roots in the spirit. We know this from his comments in the correspondence with Engels regarding the use he made of Hegel’s logic. (And as we also know, Marx never regarded anything as correct unless it arose from first principles, and he applied first principles everywhere and always, with a speed and sure-handedness that comes from long practice that makes it hard to spot sometimes).
So Andrew’s distinction between Marx/LTFRP and Hegel’s search for philosophical knowledge doesn’t really hold water. Marx was criticizing a whole mode of production, a whole civilization, and this is a very general agenda that has clear parallels with Hegel’s criticism of all hitherto practised philosophy, especially given Hegel’s extremely broad and inclusive view of philosophy as including thought and human practice – maybe I should have mentioned the Phenomenology or brought it in as part of the preparatory reading for my boot camp to make this clear.
As for inductive inferences not being knowledge acquisition this is nothing but verbal wand-play. I brought in induction in a slighting (not sleighting ;-) ) way because all induction is based on principles and axioms that can only be teased out deductively. This is the inescapable a priori of thought so to say, the revolutionary insight Hegel acknowledged in Kant, and an insight that freed up Marx to pursue such a ferociously (again) deductive method in his study of capital.
We could compare it to the gravitational power of a black hole – the deductive theoretical black hole of Capital centred on the commodity and the value theory sucking astronomical quantities of inductive empirical material into its orbit (eg the material on the 10-hours day, primitive capitalist accumulation and all the parliamentary Blue Books). Only I won’t, because we’d have to invert the whole metaphor and turn a black abysmal Inferno of a black hole into a Paradiso of clarity and light.

On the economic crisis which isn't really an economic crisis...

In response to Mike Roberts's blog about a Greek pensioner killing himself in despair outside the Greek parliament, and a couple of comments there, 

http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/04/06/tsolakoglou/

I wrote the following:

Well, from this and your previous blogs it's obvious that humanity's crisis at the moment is less and less narrowly economic and more and more overtly political. The Political in Political Economy is coming to the fore. As I showed a couple of blogs ago with lots of quotes from ch 27 of Book III of Capital (on the role of credit in capitalism), by 1867 Marx already considered that capitalism had outgrown itself and was taking on more and more socialized forms of production and circulation, although remaining trapped and crippled within bourgeois relations of production. So the problems to be solved aren't economic as such - the preconditions for a non-capitalist society run by democratically associated producers (socialism) are there and have been there for one and a half centuries.

The problem, the deepest crisis of humanity, is political. As Trotsky formulated it in the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International in 1938: "

The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat."

You can't put it much clearer than that.

The leaderships of the working class on a mass scale are class traitors, from the Labour Party in Britain to the Socialist Parties in France, Spain and elsewhere, to various "revolutionary" left government parties in Latin America, to the Social Democrats of Sweden. Not to mention the counter-revolutionary regime running the non-capitalist Chinese state. The unions are as bad in their way, backing these governments, worldwide, and in the US even backing an openly bourgeois pro-plutocrat party.

In an economic perspective the most glaring symptom of this betrayal is the total capitulation to the bourgeoisie on the economic theory front. Nowhere among the working class leaderships is Marxist economics taken seriously - and hardly even among the more truly revolutionary (and small) parties.

So the working class is not just politically blind, in that it is force-fed bourgeois policies and whipped into the polling booths to vote for its own flaying, but it is economically blind as to the part it plays in creating society's wealth (flaunted by super-rich individuals and corporations) and running the whole system of production and distribution (against its own interests).

So basically if we are to resolve the deepest crisis of humanity we need to fuse the two aspects of social life, and bring more economics into politics and more politics into economics.

Someone once characterized Soviet citizens as "ferociously egalitarian", and what we need is to be "ferociously revolutionary" if we are to remove the capitalist system and create an egalitarian and democratically run society.

The capitalist crisis in Greece

The Guardian today had an article on the Greek crisis dealing with the general European, Euro and German crisis too.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/18/greek-pm-gives-eu-leaders-rescue-deadline

It was followed by dozens of comments. I added mine:

Our media are liars. Our economists are more idiotic than the astronomers and priests who thought the earth was the centre of the universe. And they cheer on our rulers as if the sun shone out of their arses.
If any of this (or only a tiny fraction of it) had happened in the Soviet Bloc in the days of the Cold War, it would have been headlined as a catastrophic collapse and irrefutable evidence of an insane and absurd economy.
But it didn't happen. And the headlines screamed at us regardless.
Now we have a catastrophic collapse in the heartlands of capitalism, providing irrefutable evidence of an insane and absurd economy. And the media tell us it's all a readjustment. And the economists mumble into their beards. And our rulers work  half of us to our deaths, and leave the other half to rot.
But in this capitalist world is There Is No Alternative. Just as there was no alternative to the Pope ("burn em alive!") or the maggoty sorry mighty Catholic Church or the Kings and Emperors by the grease of god.
That's enough irony and sarcasm. There is an alternative - workers states running a non-capitalist economy. This will replace the outworn, worm-eaten capitalist system and sweep the capitalists and their lickspittle politicians, astrologers and ideologues into the cesspool of history along with the Popes and the Emperors.
The capitalist class has no time - it faces its historical exit - and so its policies are more and more destructive and desperate. The people who produce the things the capitalists own and sell can't be got rid of until our world is destroyed. But our struggle is urgent - if socialism doesn't replace capitalism in the near future, then capitalism will destroy our world.

Educational policy and gambling in Pompeii

An article in the Times Higher Education reported and commented on Mary Beard's remarks on Roman gambling being more honest than our government's current policy-making on education.


http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=410349


I commented:


Mary B's right. Why? Well, the factors involved in evaluating the risks and benefits of a high general level of education and of research are just not accounted for in the models being used in relation to higher education to close departments and exclude working class youth, etc. Same goes for the models used for creating bad schools and criminalizing working-class kids and their parents (aka promoting excellence and freedom of choice). (Criminalizing because parents can be jailed if their children play truant, for instance.) 
It's an obvious case of market failure that those running the system will never admit. The best example of this kind of thing is the market failure of capitalism itself. The models used there assume that the system is basically in equilibrium and basically rational. This isn't the case. The system is out of control, as its recurrent crises since the 1850s (say) demonstrate clearly enough, together with the permanent state of war within the system between the states constituting the system. 
People like Mervyn King talk of the economy returning to a "normal state" - but boom and bust are just as much normality as the ups and downs between them. So the assumptions used in the models explicitly exclude crisis, for ideological reasons. 
Education and economic systems are excluded from rational scientific investigation, whereas most insurance statistical work isn't. You can't be actuarial about developments you refuse to understand. So toss those dice! And shoot yourself when you lose the society you've staked on the outcome.