On the destruction of Glenn Greenwald's partner's computers and data by the British government

An article in TechDirt gives a good general account of some of the democratic issues involved in the case of the British government's harassment of the Guardian journalist involved in the Snowden whistle-blowing affair, Glenn Greenwald and his partner, David Miranda.
TechDirt Data destruction orders direct from Cameron

Since the article ignored both historical and class perspectives I made the following comment rooted in the perspective of the Permanent Revolution, ie that the bourgeoisie as a class is totally incapable of taking society forward even to realize bourgeois democratic ideals that are incomplete or even quite absent, and that such ideals can only be achieved in passing by the working class when it achieves the broader goal of emancipating all humanity in a non-capitalist world run by associated producers on socialist lines:

Clear enough for an article lacking historical and class perspective. Should be enough to stimulate any remaining serious bourgeois democrats to take action. Ha-fucking-ha.
We should be clear that there will not be any massive bourgeois democratic response against this violation of fundamental bourgeois democratic rights. The only defenders of such democratic rights on a mass scale are organized socialist movements - workers and poor peasants fighting against the capitalists and imperialists who are daily ruining their lives with overwork in harsh conditions or enforced idleness, and the poverty accompanying both.
The only way to put an end to this kind of inhumanity - both the violation of rights and the brutal exploitation - is to replace capitalist society with a non-capitalist one. The great bourgeois democratic reforms (parliamentary rule, universal franchise, equal legal rights for all, universal education, national liberation) have been achieved in most places, and the bourgeoisie is quite satisfied now, thank you very much. Historical change is class-led, by the class with most to gain and nothing to lose. That used to be the bourgeoisie, from around 1500 to 1789, say. Now it isn't any more. It's the working class and the poor peasants who are one bad harvest away from dispossession and the megacity slums.
So any serious non-socialist radical democrats had better start reading up on history and class and put their effort behind creating an alternative society removing power from the worn-out, incompetent, brutal and incorrigible capitalist bourgeoisie.

David Hawkes in the TLS and Chomsky (eclectics and science)

On FaceBook a mate of mine linked to an article by David Hawkes in the TLS about Noam Chomsky: How Noam Chomsky's world works

I made the following comment:

This is a weasel article full of half-truths and very slippery deductions. Chomsky himself is to blame (as always  ) for not going the whole hog and following reason along the path it beat after Kant and the French revolution using Hegel and especially Marx. But Hawkes is either disingenuous or blind to his own analytical shortcomings here (pot kettle black as Chomsky might be tempted to say). 

In the first place, rooting language in a biological capability doesn't turn people into objects or language into a non-social phenomenon. We use our brains to orient ourselves in the world as subject (or let's say a self-orienting object among non-self-orienting objects) and language is one of our special human faculties for doing this. Science and logic and so on have nothing to do with capitalism as such, they are formalized and institutionalized human capacities and activities that have developed in various kinds of societies to improve our self-orientation. Capitalism as a form of society drove this development much further than any previous society. Now capitalism is incapable of taking things any further and socialism will either take over the baton or humanity will collapse into an unimaginable state of barbarism.

Hawkes gestures abstractly at Marxism in what he writes, but makes damn sure not to give chapter or verse or make any concrete observations.

Chomsky is empirical and rational, and driven by scientific curiosity. Once something appears to him to be empirically and rationally validated he takes it as a basis for a next step. In this he is ruthlessly logical. The US government lies and goes to war using violence and atrocities for the benefit of big capital. The US media establishment supports it to the hilt. So get used to it. Structuralist and behaviourist linguistics only scratched the surface of human language and drew all kinds of misguided conclusions about it. Chomsky blew them out of the water by taking structuralist method as far as it would go and transcending it, as any good philosopher and/or scientist would. As Syntactic Structures brilliantly demonstrated in 1957, and I was privileged to discover in 1965.

Anyhow, more of a conundrum in Chomsky is the modesty of his approach. What is revolutionary is the ruthlessness with which he holds to scientific principles and the insistence with which he asserts his findings and pursues their logic, not the content of his findings as such. The problem for reactionaries and trimmers and eclectics (like Hawkes) is that they don't understand the depth of his certainty and conviction once his principled conditions for reasonable proof are met. The trimmers are swept around like dust by winds and tides (Dante has them blowing about helplessly on the banks of the Styx, despised even by Charon and refused even the basic courtesy of admission to Hell - they have done nothing worthy of eternal residence anywhere  ). Like all good scientists, Chomsky gives us an Archimedian "pou sto" (somewhere to stand) - a stable fulcrum that we can use our levers with to move the earth. One that winds and tides swirl around, not one swirled around by winds and tides.

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.

Snowden isn't alone

This is a very general comment I made on FaceBook about the Snowden debate:

What scares the US imperialist government is that Snowden (and Manning and Assange and and and) aren't alone. They represent millions of people. They alone did what they did, but not in social or political isolation. They are the tip of a huge iceberg. In the old days it was the mass struggle for bourgeois democracy (aka civil rights, freedom from arbitrary government intrusion and oppression), these days it's for a much wider and broader goal including human rights like health education and welfare for all and economlic equality (aka socialism). This is a war (we can call it class war, between the class of those who own the factories and facilities we need to make and do things and the class of those who don't own shit but are forced to work hard for these others just to stay alive).
And this class war and the representative role of Snowden etc is why the scandals and political fighting don't just evaporate despite all the efforts of lickspittle apologists for tyranny to belittle, criminalize and intimidate.
The big problem for most people today is that the official surface discussion in the US and other states around the world is one big lie never ever naming things by their real names or explaining what all the drama is about. So some people really get hung up about Snowden's girlfriend being a pole dancer or about the fact not that he had to run for his life from the "land of the free TM ha-fucking-ha" but that he ran to this or that other country where he was able to find shelter.