The task of scientific socialism in the 21th century should be to understand the laws of motion that govern capitalism in order to ultimately, replace them with  the “laws of socialist planning”. Both parts, the descriptive analysis of “the law of value” and the development of  a political program in accordance to a future “law of socialist planning”  are crucial for the  existence of a lively and healthy research program for scientific socialism.

However,  I would argue that the current research program of scientific socialism is degenerate, and almost dead, even if there is a an existing community of thinkers and writers that develop radical theory.  Since the critical theory turn of the Left after the 1960s, partly due to the absorption of marxism into the humanities,  the “scientific” impetus of  what was once known as “scientific socialism” has been more or less lost.  The  main reasons for the degeneration of the socialist science are: (i) extreme, self-referential formalism, (ii)  a turn towards the critical and descriptive, but without prescription,  and {iii} disdain for the empirical and quantitative.    The original purpose of this blog, was in fact, to combat these three anti-scientific tendencies,  by offering  prescriptive, transparent, and eclectic content that could generate discussion.   I will describe these three issues in the following paragraphs.

Issue (i) is the one that definitely bothers me the most – namely that much of radical theory has  devolved into an a closed, exercise of exegesis – from graduate students finding the meaning of the universe in Marx’s Capital or the Grundrisse, sectarian cadre getting their political education from primary source pamphlets (e.g. Lenin, Marx, Mao),  to  cultural capital waxing in the form of opaque prose that cites  dead frenchmen. This exercise takes the form of a closed self-referential loop that employs a horde of writers, thinkers and sect gurus but does not say much about the world. Contemporary  marxism is completely diseased with this problem,  where a social or economic phenomenon suddenly becomes a platform for the exegesis of Marx’ s Capital (or in its sectarian form, a pamphlet of Lenin or Mao), with academics, bloggers,  and autodidacts finding every excuse to cite a chapter of Capital in every paragraph of an essay/book.  It is a form of primary-source dogmatism  that forms a closed, self-referential system of signals and glyphs that refuses to open up to the outside.   Instead of, for example, engaging academic, secondary sources in sociology, history,  finance,  “bourgeois” economics, and business, in order to synthesize information using Marx as a rough, heuristical guide, all empirical reality is simply filtered through the passages of Capital.  This primary-source dogmatism reveals itself in the numerous reading circles that exist around Capital, rather than that time being spent more fruitfully  reading a secondary source on Capital (in the same way physicists learn Newton’s Laws through a textbook not through the Principia) and instead engaging with current scientific literature  to form a synthesis.  Indeed, if anything, this is entirely the opposite of what Marx did! Marx studied  the cutting edge of his era  in mathematics, “bourgeois” economics, and history,  to form a synthesis; he didn’t  bind  every paragraph he wrote to a reference from Hegel’s Phenomenology!

One probable sociological cause behind  issue (i) is the phenomenon of gate-keeping.  Privileging  the mastery of obtuse and unreadable subject matter and also a specific form of method  creates a pecking order of gurus and academics who use this “mastery” to justify their social or economic position, not unlike the function of medieval guilds.  Yet  this extreme formalism is  often confounded with the traditional form of specialization – where  a doctor an engineer require authentic mastery of technically challenging skills to be adept at their work.   Instead, the formalism acquired in academia or through politico-sectarian education can often act as a straightjacket because it imposes limits into how much can be imported from other disciplines, or how much  can the method change; in their eyes, going beyond method and discipline turns you into a “crank”, “dilettante”  or “eclectic”. However, as Feyerabrand once pointed out, young scientific research programs require precisely of “cranks”, epistemological anarchists that throwing shit against the wall and see what sticks, in order to flourish.

Issue (ii), the lack of positive, political programs as opposed to the overproduction of descriptive criticism, is deeply connected  to issue (i) given that it is related to the  academic-formalist straightjacket for two reasons: (a)  reluctance to engage in interdisciplinary research with other academic sciences inhibits to ability to formulate solutions because of lack of knowledge of the concrete (logistical, managerial, financial, scientific) issues of capitalism, and (b) it is much more academically respectable to engage in descriptive criticism as opposed to formulate radical, concrete solutions. In the case of (a),  the hard physics of capitalism are disregarded  (which require knowledge on finance, economics, computer science and logistics which can only be acquired through inter-disciplinary and  crank-eclectic study) and instead the discourse is saturated with “soft” concepts such as alienation, power, and knowledge, and “value” (some of these concepts related to the formalism of literary and critical studies), so that the discourse is too abstracted to formulate a concrete, political solution to a given problem.  In the case of (b), it’s just simply more congruent with academic formalism to dissect critically the problems of capitalism (and civilization)  without suggesting a political solution that amounts to more than just soft, fuzzy platitudes.  The problem is that, although it is understanding why academia does not have space for radical, political prescriptions, this “critical-descriptivism” is exported outside academia, to the more general radical millieu.  Although a partial, neutered shell of the the old “scientific marxism” still endures in some history or sociology departments, the fact is that these tools are merely used to academically dissect social phenomena without asserting a positive prescription for a better world.

Finally, issue (iii), the general disdain for the quantitative and the empirical, is simply a result of innumeracy and scientific ignorance that comes from the “academic-formalist” straight jacket described in the preceding sections.  Although it is understanding that a person cannot master all subjects, the language and culture of the Left is very alienating to trained scientists and engineers that could collaborate, and the opacity of radical theory due to self-referential formalism gathered from pamphlets or “dead frenchmen” makes it hard for trained scientists to access. Finally,  since the 60s, the Left has developed a counter-enlightment and “social constructivist”  critique of the quantitative positivism of the hard sciences, which often makes the milieu uninviting to  engineering/science types.

It used to be that the workers’ movement was a haven for unorthodox, eclectic-crank types that definitely made the socialist research program alive and useful.  Some names that come to mind are: Bogdanov, Dietzgen, and Preobrazhensky.  Many of these thinkers were often wrong, and often their ideas amounted to little more than crackpot fodder. Yet,  the fact that they were not shy to throw shit against the wall and see what sticks gave rise to politically (and also academically) useful narratives on imperialism, revolution, and socialist planning.  This old, eclectic crank spirit has been replaced by ossified pamphlets and sterile academese.  For the sake of scientific socialism in the 21th century, we must reinvigorate the eclectic-crank once again, as opposed to the measured and methodical “academic” thinker, or the dogmatic guru of the fossilized sects.

A worrisome trend in anglo-saxon societies is the way that freedom of speech as a principle has been recuperated as a rhetorical device  by misogynists, “anti-feminists” and racists, while the left wing has more or less refused to defend it, often by rightfully pointing out that the whole free speech spiel of racists, transphobes and misogynists is mostly a convenient cover for  rotten beliefs. Yet, this leftist deconstruction of the principle of free speech is often done from a negative, critical perspective, without postulating a positive and socialist freedom of speech. I find this trend worrisome for two reasons: (i) freedom of speech is an important principle to defend that actually has a long tradition in the socialist movement, and (ii) freedom of speech as a principle is extremely popular in western societies, even if people tend to be hypocrites when applying it at the practical level.

First let us deconstruct this new reactionary and “anti-progressive” freedom of speech that has recently been used against various social movements fighting for gender or racial equality.  In the last decade or so, a  constellation of  youtube demagogues, rogue professors,  sub-reddits, and self-help scammers have emerged under the umbrellas of “Men’s Rights Activists”, “video game activists”, “alt-lite”, “centrism”, and “classical liberalism”.  Given that I am unaware of any label they would accept that describes them as a group, I will refer to them as the “alt-reaction”. One of the common threads that unites the alt-reaction is a belief that liberals/leftists have eroded the principle of freedom of speech. This belief is a reaction to leftists/liberals confronting cerain forms of speech (often racist and sexist) that the  left deems problematic, which often results in doxxing, or administrative action (e.g. the firing of the utterer who made the problematic assertion).

One of the problems with this discourse around free speech is that the legal versus the practical aspect  of this principle is often confounded. I will make a difference between  the “strong program” and the  “weak program” of freedom of speech. In the weak version,  no utterances are criminal (with the exception of harassment),  yet their legality does not hinder institutions from taking disciplinary measures against the utterer in the form of employment dismissal, economic coercion, or censorship enforced by private institutions (e.g. websites, newspapers).  In contrast, the strong form of free speech is absolute, where the utterer cannot be penalized by any institutional mechanisms, whether employment dismissal, legal action or censorship.  The weak form of free speech more or less exists in the United States, and Canada asymptotically approaches this state, given that the Canadian, legally binding definition of “hate speech” is fairly extreme (e.g. the literal advocacy of genocide), which excludes most garden variety racist or misogynistic statements.  Given that the weak form of free speech more or less operates in the  anglo-saxon sphere, the kerfuffle must be  related to a perceived infringement of the strong program  of freedom of speech.

First, the strong form of free speech has never existed historically. There hasn’t been any society that does not penalize utterances or statements deemed threatening, whether through legal means, such as  criminalizing certain forms of speech, or through other, more indirect means, such as economic coercion (e.g. through employment or through a business contract) or by private censorship. So the narrative given  by the alt-reaction that “Social Justice Warriors”, feminists, etc. have eroded  the strong form of freedom of speech, is a cynical lie.  Anglo-saxon institutions have disciplined throughout modern history people for saying the “wrong things”, from seemingly apolitical utterances that nevertheless constitute as harassment, to having unacceptable political stances.  The only thing the alt-reaction can really point at  is that some of the discourse they cherish (e.g. purposely misgendering people,  advocating a white ethno-state,  implying female intellect is incompatible with science, apologizing and encouraging for rape etc) is finally becoming unacceptable and therefore liable to be disciplined by private/public institutions.  In other words, now that the people targeted aren’t communists but vocal misogynists and racist trolls,  they cry pathetically and suddenly become  “classical liberals”, “rational centrists“, etc. or whatever dumb buzzword they looked up in wikipedia.

However, even if I have very little sympathy for these people, I think they do point at something real. Namely  that the weak program  for freedom of speech is too abstract to protect most people in a  practical sense.   In capitalism, livelihoods are tightly coupled to employment, and therefore getting  blacklisted or sacked due to having an “incorrect opinion” is an effective way to silence someone and therefore suppress the free exchange of ideas.  The alternative to not “tow the line” so to speak is to become homeless and destitute.  Many liberal think-pieces have retorted to the alt-reaction by claiming that freedom of speech (in its weak form) does not mean you cannot get disciplined by the employer, yet these think-pieces simply state this discipline is desirable. Although the wrong utterance can cause destitution, especially for more vulnerable demographics that depend on wage-labor to survive, mainstream commentators only care that freedom of speech is respected from an extremely abstracted and legalistic vantage point. Coincidentally,  this is a common socialist criticism against liberal legalism, where the arguments that emphasize only abstract equality before the law, do not take into account how the law overwhelmingly targets the poor and marginalized.  A similar argument could be made about the liberal, extremely abstract defence of weak freedom of speech, where they are merely satisfied by the existence of the abstract right rather than the practical realization of it.  Incidentally, James Damore reflected that his autism might have blinded him from the possible repercussions of his diatribe, which also points about how disciplinary actions  against taboo speech make people who are “neuro-divergent” or poorly socialized for whatever reason, more vulnerable to repression  (even if Damore’s behaviour cannot be excused by his autism).

So, capitalism cannot even enforce the weak program of freedom of speech, given that it does not protect the individual from  destitution if a taboo statement is uttered.  Therefore,  the only way to realize the principle of freedom of speech is through a socialist economy, given that a safety net in the form of public goods, such as housing or food, could shield an individual from  ruination due to their unpopular opinions.  While I can’t condone the “strong program” of freedom of speech,  given that certain places must become  psychologically safe spaces for their optimal function,  such  educational settings and social work spaces (e.g. a social worker shouting racial diatribes should be fired immediatedly), dissenting and taboo  views, no matter how disgusting and reactionary, should be allowed to exist without the threat of material destitution.  One (of many) of the issues of the old “bureacratic-socialist” movement,  is that the principle of freedom of speech was not really respected,  starting all the way back  with the banning of factions in 1921 by the early Soviet state, and the violent suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion, the latter which had as a demand, the freedom of the press.   This disdain for freedom of speech has followed the movement all the way to the present,  partly because of the historical heritage of marxist-leninism and maoism, but now making its way to more “mainstream” left as well.  I think part of the reasons is that the early socialist movement became victorious  in peripheral regions of the world where a culture of liberal democracy had not been cultivated, and instead socialists had inherited the culture of authoritarianism of tsars and empires. Yet, we must revitalize the early, socialist defence of freedom of speech, an issue that Marx was very passionate about.  Not only because it is the ethical thing to do, but also, as a tactical issue, given that many people rightly identify with this principle.

I consider my small intervention, in the form of this blog, in the continuity of the Bolsheviks and the October Revolution.   Not only because I want all forms of  oppression, exploitation, and misery to be destroyed, but I also desire an ambitious, positive program as well,   such as how Bogdanov dreamed of socialism in Mars, or how delegates representing millions of workers around the world, met in the First Congress of the Communist International to  draft a program for a world, socialist republic.  I desire a planetary, democratic community, where individuals of all nations, genders, and ethnicities, get together to direct and plan the world-system for the purpose of  emancipating humanity from toil and misery. In contrast,  the capitalist economy  is a blind and purposeless demiurge  that turns children in the periphery into soldiers and  slaves,  citizens  in the first world  into emotionally damaged and  medicated  automatas, and cruel idiots into presidents, CEOS and autarchs.

I expect  for this month that the internet will be bursting with  didactic lessons on the October Revolution – how certain, socio-economic conditions  of Russia and tactical decisions of the Bolsheviks determined  the revolutionary overthrow of the Constituent Assembly, and what these lessons mean for socialists today.  Different groups, depending on academic pedigree or sectarian loyalties, will excavate different lessons  – with some claiming that we need a party modelled  by the bolshevik approach, while others will suggest that the era of ambitious political programs  is over, given that the structure of capitalism today has essentially fractured the identity of the old mass worker which the  radical socialist program was built upon.  Finally, some like certain maoists, will argue that revolution is a “science” that is updated by revolutionary events, with China updating Russia, and Russia updating Marx.

The large spectrum of different conclusions  implies that the problem of didacticism is hard. However, I think it is because all these agents are asking the wrong questions.  Revolutions are abrupt changes: extreme, highly variable, non-linear, almost unpredictable, but usually under-predicted – in short, they are black swans. I’ve talked about the black swan before – basically it is a pop-finance/statistics term that describes highly impactful but unpredictable events, like the invention of the internet, the publication of Ulysses by James Joyce, or  the October Revolution. Other black swans are earthquakes, nuclear meltdowns, and terrorist attacks. This “black swan”  dynamic makes revolutions incredibly epistemically opaque to us, and also bounds the type of questions we can ask about them.

Trying to forecast whether revolution is possible on not in a given timescale is like trying to forecast the next earthquake and its magnitude.  Many radicals treat revolutions as a function of certain inputs – for example, how the pressure of a gas is proportional to its temperature.  So if you can excavate from history the variables that are coupled to revolution, you can analyze those parameters and predict whether revolution is in the horizon and how it will look like.  However, the statistics of revolutions are more comparable to earthquakes – earthquakes, like revolutions,  have technically concrete, quasi-deterministic causes, but they are usually epistemically opaque to us. You can in hindsight analyze the dynamics of earthquakes, by solving a set of physical equations in a computer, but you cannot possibly know when will the next earthquake be, or what will be its magnitude. Similarly,  historians can analyze in hindsight what were the causes of a specific revolution, but they are incredibly ill equipped to delimit the possibilities/impossibilities of the next revolutionary event.   This does not mean that future prognosis based on longue durée history is epistemically prohibited, but that history can only be used to forecast slow-changing, long averages, not shocks and sudden jumps. Revolution, if anything, is the quintessential  example of a historical shock, therefore no amount of PhDs and “brilliance” can  prognosticate the possible horizons of the next revolution.  Whole traditions of socialism  exist that have “caked” in them a strategy of revolution or social change, but many of them are nothing more than dogma.

The October revolution actually gives us an empirical example on the unpredictability of revolution.  The soviets and the bolsheviks didn’t entertain the possibility of overthrowing the Constituent Assembly until  a few months before the assault of the winter palace, after a long and gruelling polemic about whether  Russia was ripe for socialism or not.  The revolutionary timescale where everything was done and decided in their case was less than a year long.  In fact, the Marxist orthodoxy based on  longue durée historical analysis at that time predicted that Russia was not ready for socialism, given that it was underdeveloped and hadn’t gone fully through capitalism yet. Yet, countering all intellectual and theoretical expectations, and therefore embodying a statistical black swan,  Russia experienced the first socialist revolution in history.

In contrast to the “historical-academic” approach, a better method  for the study of revolutions from the perspective of a socialist is inverse risk-management. Just as how engineers and planners might design buildings to withstand earthquakes or massive floods – events of low probability but with high impact, socialists  should be “prepared” for the revolutionary window.   Revolutions  are low probability, high impact events, and the only possible epistemic approach to them is to be prepared. Just as how the capitalist state has plans in case of social decomposition, such as how the United States  subsidizes agricultural production in order to have food sovereignty in case of a world-historic break-down, socialists should build their own infrastructure and presence in society, in a patient, thoughtful manner, in order to be prepared to ride the earthquake, so to speak.

What does this preparation consist of?  That is the million dollar question.  However one cannot extract  the solution to this problem by looking simply at longue durée history, because such a study concerns with long, slow moving time-scales, while the concrete actions that need to be taken are short-termed  and granular and extremely contingent to the conditions that exist now. Therefore, an “apple to apple” comparison between the old socialist parties, and how socialist parties in the 21th century should look like is impossible.   Indeed, some socialist “pessimists” explain their position by simply stating that the conditions now are very different than the ones of 1917, and therefore a  revolutionary, socialist party is an impossibility.  However, the only thing we can know from such an argument is that a socialist party would look different than the one of 1917, which is a very banal assertion. Perhaps, a better approach is to look at the current existing social averages to start building a party in the mean time, while having flexible enough tactics that can be modified depending on future social contingencies. Such an approach would require engaging with current tried and tested modes of financing, organization, and media that are being developed by current, bourgeois organizations, while at the same time, taking into account longue durée historical analysis to develop a radical, principled socialist “maximum program”. Therefore, such a program would be  inspired from the historical experiences of socialists, but “filtered” by granular tactics informed by modern scientific disciplines, current aesthetics and present values.

In the previous post, I outlined a hypothetical, centrally planned world economy. A question that naturally arises is how would  this world, planned economy deal with the economic imbalances between core and periphery.  I  have argued  before that garden variety anti-imperialism, where a peripheral region gains political independence from imperialist, core countries would still be economically subordinated (and therefore, in some sense politically) to core economies because there is almost no possibility for self-sufficiency/autarky in a global division of labour where the production of basic goods (clothing, medicine, computers) requires the coupling of resources/labour/technology across planetary scales. In other words, ultimately peripheral states, regardless if they are legally independent from core states, would require the purchasing of goods from imperialist countries, and therefore  will be forced to use  money that is valued in terms of  imperialist/core currency (e.g. dollars). So in my opinion, the destruction of imperialism can only be brought by a world, socialist economy, where the economy is planned at a  global scale in accordance to  planetary  constraints related to productivity, technological capacity, ecological limits and amounts of natural resources. This approach contrasts to development plans that assume a global market, given that the market will always favour those at the top of the geopolitical order.

An important question the socialist approach to resolving imperialism raises is whether workers from more affluent core regions would have to “foot the bill” so to speak.   It is important to answer this remark given that we live in a dark era of reaction where oppressed demographics, especially if they are not white, are considered deadweight and a drain. Furthermore,  much of the Left does not help, given that they phrase the question of emancipation of oppressed nations as ultimately resolved by zero-sum mechanisms, such as wealth redistribution, or “sacrificing” privilege. To put in another way,  it is implied that the more affluent and “white” working class will have to sacrifice their standards of living in order to emancipate oppressed nations.  I don’t believe that movements arise out of merely altruistic impulses, but from the realization that change will bring material betterment for the movement’s members.   If socialism requires that the majority of people in core regions sacrifice, then the whole project will be doomed unless there is a a sudden restructuring of the world economy that causes massive pauperization of core states.  Yet, I don’t believe that the resolution of the core-periphery asymmetry will appear as a zero-sum movement of wealth from the Global North to the Global South; in fact, this  argument comes from the corrupted perspective that material wealth is accurately represented by money.  In other words,  because social security, bailouts, and loans take the form of money that is extracted from taxes,  popular intuition renders the question of equalization as a transfer of wealth.   Yet,  a key issue to eliminate the core-periphery asymmetry is the  destruction of money as the mediator of wealth.

Why is the destruction of money important to eliminate imperialism? Money does not only mediate natural resources, or real capital (e.g. factories and technology), but embodies an opaque set of relations that includes financial and geopolitical/military balances of power. The value of the dollar and other global, reserve currencies is a function of the  geopolitical, military and financial balance of power that has been determined by centuries of wars, colonialism, and technological dominance. To put in another way, in the era of fiat money, reserve currency embodies credibility and trust, which is merely the representation of existing power relations that were imposed often through decades or even centuries of violence.  This is clearly evidenced in Greek debt crisis, where Syriza, an ostensibly anti-capitalist party that won the elections under a euro-sceptic platform in 2015, ultimately decided against pulling out of the euro-zone and against printing their own currency, given that Greece would be in the losing end of the balance of power, and therefore their currency would  be worthless to the global economy.  Instead, Greece  chose to be tied to the euro, which embodies the credibility and dominance of Germany, the latter a country with a long imperialist history. One of the means in which the core maintains its dominance over the periphery is that wealth is mediated by global reserve currency, the latter’s value which is determined by the dominance of  core states, and therefore it does not reflect necessarily a country’s available natural resources, labour power, and productive capacities.

Currency dominance couples to the opaque intellectual property of the core economies, where the engineering and science behind capital intensive technologies is rendered a trade secret, or simply becomes gated away by complex intellectual property laws.  Modern life in virtually every corner of the market requires access  to capital intensive technologies in order to produce even the most basic needs, such as electricity, automobiles, computers and medicine.  Although many peripheral regions, such as Africa, have the available natural resources to produce these technologies, they lack the technical expertise and  the trade secrets that are gated away in the core states. The imperial pecking order thus forces peripheral states to sell their natural resources cheaply for “imperialist” currency so that they can use the same currency to have access to commodities that require capital intensive technologies, commodities which are ultimately sold by core states.  The only alternative is to reverse engineer the core’s trade secrets,  which is a slow and labor intensive process that will still leave the periphery in a disadvantageous position, as ultimately, the core will keep increasing productive capabilities, making it impossible for the periphery to catch up in the global market. A good example of this phenomenon is the way many peripheral countries with oil reserves end up buying  gasoline from core states. Although some of these (semi)peripheral countries, such as Mexico, have the technological capacity to refine oil, they can never do it as efficiently and cheaply as the core economies, constraining the periphery to use global reserve currencies and also become dependent on the cores’ technological secrecy, deepening the core-periphery asymmetry.

A socialist, planetary economy would have to decouple itself from money,  as the value of currency does not reflect social need, but the balance of power, and ultimately the dominance of the core states. Instead, the development of the periphery should be planned in accordance to the available labour pool and natural resources, and under the assumption that information and technical expertise is widely available.   Today, the game is rigged for the periphery, and their contribution  to the global economy, in terms of  natural resources and labour, is under-valued, given that  the value  of global reserve currency, and the prices themselves, are  shaped by the geopolitical, financial, military and technological might of core states. A  socialist development program would not depend in lowering the standards of living of core workers,  as it will not take the form of a “tax” extracted from core workers and transferred to the periphery, but rather, it would be enforced by the transfer of technical expertise and the loaning of capital-intensive technologies to the periphery,  and ultimately, in fully integrating peripheral labour and resources into a  large-scale and planetary, world socialist republic. Such a plan would not just be carried out of humanitarian concern for the fellow human, but simply by the well known fact that elevating everyone to a decent standard of living  will have long-term, positive consequences for core workers as well.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, economic marginalists triumphally proclaimed that the market is the only realistic system to manage our complex, global civilization of billions of people.   Although homelessness, vacant houses, starvation and food waste persist, the marginalist will argue that the market is not perfect but that no better alternative exists. Yet, an incoming catastrophe in the form of climate change may pose the question of a democratic and globally planned, socialist economy – after all, it seems self-delusional to think that an economic system made of competing firms and nation-states can respect the planetary boundaries. Global warming was almost entirely caused by the laws of motion of  capitalism, which lead to the wear and tear of bodies and the Earth, given how competition drives firms and nation-states to harvest the cheapest labor and natural resources.  Furthermore, the  fact that the length of the working day has not decreased in almost a century, and imperialism has exacerbated predatory asymmetries between the core and the periphery, should make the question of global, economic planning central for socialists.

The planned economy  has a bad rap, even amongst socialists.   The debate seems to have been settled in the first half of the 20th century with the so called “socialist calculation problem”, where  marginalist economists such as Hayek and  Mises  criticized the inability of centrally planned economies to compute the authentic demand and supply for specific goods. Hayek in particular, gave the most sophisticated attack, with his essay,  The Use of Knowledge in Society where he argued that the market acted as an unconscious, distributed computer where resources are efficiently allocated through the computation of the demand of goods by price signaling between different parts of the system (e.g., individuals and firms).   Many socialists have  criticized Hayek’s arguments throughout the last century, yet many of the socialist retorts are posed from a philosophical and epistemological perspective.  However, I believe the argument for central planning can be contextualized using new mathematical sciences, such as computer science, and nonlinear dynamics – fields that didn’t exist in Hayek’s day. So I will attempt to contextualize Hayek’s argument using a more “mathematical”  ( but not quantitative) method and I will retort from a pro-planned economy, socialist perspective.

The theme of Hayek’s argument is that the central planners have no possibility of knowing all information required to efficiently allocate goods in  a society. In contrast, the market acts as a giant, distributed computing system, where firms and individuals act as “parallel processors”, where each individual processor computes a small, local problem: a shop-keeper computes that a particular brand of cigarettes is very popular in  their neighbourhood, and consumer calculates their individual demand  on cigarettes the moment they look at the available cigarette brands.  The parallel processors, which are embodied in individuals, firms, and institutions, then in turn communicate with each other,  finally collectively computing the price of a particular commodity, which embodies the aggregate demand and supply of a particular good. To conclude,  central planners can never  acquire all the required information to compute efficiently the needs and wants of a particular good, while the market, which acts as a distributed network of processing cores, can efficiently allocate goods because each processor computes a smaller, simpler problem (e.g. the want of an individual for marlboro cigarettes over parliaments, or the observation by a small shop keeper that 5 ft long USB cables sell out abnormally fast in a particular Best Buy), and communicates with other processors through pricing and purchase, leading to the allocation of goods where they are demanded.

However,  the old socialist would counter that there is nothing efficient about the market, given the vacant houses, food that goes to waste, massive poverty, the business cycles,  etc. However the marginalist would retort that the market as a distributed computing system has its problems, but it will still always be better than  central planning,  citing toilet paper shortages, and long bread lines.  Hayek argues that  problem is ultimately about information – the central planner will never have enough or timely information to plan the demand at the granular level – e.g. the demand for a specific brand of cigarettes, or for the right size of a smartphone, or a particular laundry machine.

However, the Hayekian attack on central planning is only valid at the granular level. If the strong form of the Hayekian attack against central planning were true,  then the natural sciences would be invalidated.    The lack of information at the granular level is actually a common problem in the natural sciences – where for example, we can predict the climate (e.g. the average temperature of the Earth averaged throughout ten years) but are unable to forecast the weather (the temperature, precipitation, etc for one hundred kilometre squared at a given day). Similarly, we can predict the average thermodynamic properties of a gas, such as temperature or pressure, but we cannot predict the movement of an individual molecule in a gas.   This can be understood in scientific parlance as random noise at local scales that makes theories more uncertain at smaller scales but still allows for predictions and modelling at larger scales.  The  “random noise” can be thought as unpredictability arising because of lack of information at smaller scales. For example, in the case of weather forecasting,  the lack of information about all the variables affecting the weather, such as precise temperature measurements,  numerical errors arising from the computers solving the hydrodynamic equations that govern the air flow, the  inadequate modelling of the physical geography etc, rapidly leads to  inaccurate results at the local level. However, in the case of making predictions about the global scales of climate, such as the average temperature of the whole earth in the next ten years, the statistical noise at smaller scales becomes irrelevant. What Hayek implies,  is that because  statistical noise  exists in a given economic system, that economic planning is absolutely impossible. He frames his argument as informational, stating that the central planner has not sufficient information on the demand of goods at the local level. Yet, many natural sciences have to deal with extreme statistical noise at small scales, making forecasting only possible at larger scales, so his argument would seem to invalidate the natural sciences such as astronomy, climate science, and ecology as well. Therefore, a physical scientist would reply that his argument only applies to the smaller scales where the noise dominates, and does not say anything about larger scale systems.  Hayek argued  that one cannot compare the economic and natural sciences, because the latter is concerned with objective, natural laws, while the economic sciences are concerned with subjective, human wants; however that argument is irrelevant, because it’s obvious desires can be quantified,  which is precisely what psychologists or firms like Amazon do. Finally,  empirical evidence invalidates his argument against planning, for the institution of private property and the rule of law, which are necessary for the existence of the market, are large-scale, national and sometimes even international systems that require inordinate amount of coordination and planning, given that these institutions have incredible overhead in the form of the police, the paper-pushers, the lawyers and judges. These institutions are formally necessary for the market in general, even if social welfare or food regulations don’t exist.

Another interesting assault against planning comes from Nassim Taleb, who has revived the Hayekian argument in spirit but with the use of modern statistical tools.  His most important point is the existence of “black swans”, rare and unpredictable, extreme events that can  trigger radical changes in a given system.  Some  black swan examples are terrorism,  massive floods of coastal cities, and nuclear melt downs. All of these are rare events with extreme and almost unpredictable consequences. For example. terrorism’s body count is highly variable, from a couple of people dying at a given event, to thousands of people. Terrorism can also   trigger unpredictable  social instabilities in a given polity.   Other black swans come in the form of famous works of arts,  economic crises, the overthrow of governments, and   world-historic events. The problem with economic planning, then, is that by its own nature it’s blind to black swans; thus  planned economies are very fragile to unpredictable shocks, not unlike a very complicated clockwork that can crumble the minute one of the cogs breaks. However, the existence of black swans such as economic shocks is not really an argument against economic planning, given that  human societies throughout history have always been endangered by black swans and shocks, with disease, wars, and technological inventions wiping out whole societies. So whether the  economy is planned or not, dangerous black swans could still appear. A way to deal with black swans is with sensible risk management; although we cannot predict black-swans, we can design systems to be robust to shocks.  For example, buildings in seismically active regions are built to withstand earthquakes, the latter which are black-swans,  given their rarity, extreme nature, and unpredictability. Hypothetically, there is no reason why economies can’t be built to withstand shocks.

My retort to the Hayekian argument is highly abstract and formal given that the original form of  Hayek’s argument is very formalistic. However, it would be interesting to see how a global, central planned economy would look like, and how the granular uncertainty Hayek pointed at would be dealt with.   Economic planning could be made of two processes: a distributed, decentralized planning from below, and a broad-stroke centralized planning from above.  The broad-stroke, central planning would be directed by elected and recallable councils but would deal with planning at the central, global level, dealing with planetary objectives  such as making sure the economy doesn’t surpass ecological constraints (e.g. global warming). Another global, planning objective would be reducing the length of the working day. This latter point is important given that marginalists like Keynes promised a short working day that will triggered by the movement of the market. However, now it is obvious that the working day is entirely a planned and political thing, and cannot be reduced just by the stochastic behavior of the market. In fact, the historical shortening of the working day happened entirely because of legislation triggered by the militant activity  of  the working class. Finally, global central planning would have to deal with global problems capitalism  exacerbated such as global inequality and imperialism.  The  distributed, decentralized planning from below, would be in charge of the micro-economical calculations of supply and demand for particular goods, such as the appropriate way to stock stores for consumers.  Capitalism is  competent at the micro-economic  part, stocking shops  with commodities based on the supply and demand as mediated by price signals – this latter point was at the heart of Hayek’s argument. Yet, there is no reason why efficient, micro-economic calculation couldn’t be made by local, democratic councils with the aid of advanced computers.  Input data on consumer wants and needs, which can be signaled from what individuals pick up at stores, can be quickly processed by machine learning algorithms, not unlike how in capitalism purchases and pricing propagate the information of supply and demand. In fact, this sort of big data processing is already done with intra-firm planning today, with companies such as Amazon and Wal-Mart planning resource allocation based on consumer data that is processed with machine learning algorithms.  The socialist democratic councils that would plan micro-economic movements could act as semi-autonomous, but publicly owned, firms as well, using a similar micro-economic calculation approach to modern capitalist firms, but without having to depend on price signals, and instead using consumer big data and information related to global  constraints such as world resources, global development plans,  ecological risk,  global resource allocation etc (these global constraints  would  be outputted by global planning councils).

Global planning is a very big hypothetical, and would require the existence of a world, socialist council republic.  However, given the hard, planetary constraints that global warming unearthed, it’s urgent to argue for alternatives to the anarchy of the market.  If socialists don’t argue for an alternative, factions of the capitalist class, such as fascists, will certainly come up with their own forms of centralized, authoritarian economies given the social and political threats that global warming would bring to the table.  Global warming is going to trigger humanitarian disasters that will lead to unquantifiable social and political consequences, such as a massive refugee crisis that will embolden reactionaries and nationalists. Therefore, the problem socialists face will not only be ecological, but political, and if we do not bring our own alternative to the table, our enemies will.

It seems the Left’s conception of nationalism as a reactionary force froze by WWII.    The nationalism Leftists oppose is the one that summons images of workers killing each other in inter-imperialist wars,  and men in brown shirts and boots thirsty for revenge against Jews, immigrants and other minorities.    Leftists oppose a right wing nationalism that they see as mystification that blurs class divisions for the sake of  manipulating workers into the defence of the state and capitalism. Yet, although the nationalism of angry white men driven into violent hatred for anyone that looks and speaks differently still exists, the mainstream of nationalism is not the one of the blood, soil, and the fatherland, but that  of technocratic management of capitalism. In other words, the nation-state is, at a first order approximation a  national firm, and civic nationalism is the managerial ideology that encourages the firm to become more competitive and profitable. Not only that, the well being of the average worker is also tied materially to the profitability of the firm, given that the citizen receives indirect “dividends” through infrastructure, public services, and decently paid jobs.  Because the nation-state is a firm, leftists projects that amount to the management of the nation-state simply become the management of the firm, and therefore, will always be constrained the imperatives of competitiveness and profitability.

The ideology of the  national firm can be  gleaned from the way pundits, politicians, and the everyday workers talks about the nation.  The national firm has a ” national economy” that is a function of not only the exogenous factors like the global economy, but endogenous dynamics, such as policy and labor regulations.  This gives rise what is commonly known as “politics” in western, developed countries, which more often than not, is merely a technocratic debate about policy and management, rather than a real clash of world-views. This technocratic discourse contrasts to early 20th century, fledging liberal democracies  that appeared in Europe, where political discourse took a highly ideological flavour;  political parties not only waged a battle for  fundamental values in parliament/congress  in contrast to just managerial policy (e.g. socialists and communists versus conservatives and fascists), but had large parastatal  infrastructures including street-fighting units  and partisan taverns.   This shift in the nature of politics, from a worldview based discourse, that was also enforced in the streets through partisan formations,  to technocratic managerialism, also came with a change of the ideology of nationalism. In short, the  conversion of the narrative, from a highly ideological nationalism speaking about blood, soil,  and the fatherland, to a technocratic nationalism that concerns itself with the health of the national economy as a function of managerial decisions and policy,  correlated with the transformation of the nation-state into  a national firm.

Discourse is  only one aspect of the national firm and is ultimately tied to a real material element. The State, a  bureaucracy made of career politicians and institutionalized paper-pusher,  has at its end goal to  maintain economic growth for the national firm. This behaviour is analogous to the corporate management of the traditional firm, which is also focused on competition and profitability.  Much of austerity, the slashing of labour regulations, and the offshoring of jobs into the third world, is more often than not justified as necessary for maintaining the competitive edge required for increasingly marginal returns.  One could say, that as a first order approximation, the policies of the national firm are a function of economic growth and strengthening of the national currency.   Therefore, it would be quite vulgar to simply state that  the policies of the “national firm” are merely a function of enriching the capitalists – they are about, first and foremost, generating profit for the national firm, which sometimes could mean  that it could affect negatively the interests of certain factions of the capitalist class.

It is in this context that modern, 21th century nationalism should be understood.   It is the ideological expression of the nation-state as a firm,  an ideology that comes in all sorts of political flavours, from the leftist nationalism of the “oppressed”, which was associated with the developmentalist regimes in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, to the right wing nationalism that conjures the libidinal impulses of overzealous men protecting marble Rome from hordes at the gates.    It’s not merely  a “mystification” to manipulate workers and poor into the defence of the nation-state and therefore capitalism,  or a psychological conspiracy to extract the primal impulses of the populace in order to render them to the service of the mighty State, but also the rational expression of a population that is tied materially to the future of the nation-state as a firm, where the availability of jobs, social programs, and infrastructure is contingent to the profitability of the firm.

The Left has many examples where their governments collapsed due to reduced profitability of the nation-state as a firm.   Venezuela’s PSUV, Brazil’s Worker’s Party, and Greece’s Syriza, are some of the more recent examples where ostensibly “socialist” and “anti-capitalist” governments collapsed due to attrition of the national firm’s returns.  Unemployment,  scarcity of basic goods, and collapse of the national currency’s value were not merely willful conspiracies enacted by the capitalists against leftist governments, but a real effect rooted in the reduced competitiveness of the national firm.    This is if anything, evidence of the materiality of nationalism – that it isn’t merely a “mystification”, but the rational expression of a global  economy mediated by nation-states in competition. Indeed. Modlbug, the neoreactionary intellectual, in a moment of clarity where he understood his position as the spokesperson of purified capitalism, argued that the nation-state should be managed literally as a corporation, with shareholders deciding the board of directors, where he called his model neo-cameralist. Yet, he failed to notice, that liberal democracy, the system he loathes, already asymptotically approaches his fevered dream.

Sometimes it seems  the condition of the nation-state as a firm is better understood by the liberal centre and the conservative right wing than the left wing, even when this nature is almost never vocalized, with the exception of Moldbug.  Canadian “progressive” immigration policy, is for example, almost entirely a function of  technocratic policy making, with the amount of available visas, work permits, and  permanent residentships, being contingent to  national demand of certain trades and professions.   The far right,  although  drunk  with ideological wine, makes arguments that appear to defend the profitability  of the nation-state, with exaggerated statistics on the fiscal and social cost of immigrants.  However, the Left positions itself in an ineffective, contradictory, and weak-kneed centre: it pays lip service against imperialism, border-controls, austerity, and outsourcing, while promising to maintain the national firm competitive in order to keep workers employed at acceptable salaries, and infrastructure and social services functioning.  In short, it has cornered itself into the same logical framework that drives centrist and right wing  policy making, which is the profitability of the national firm, while defending universalistic and humanistic values that run counter to market imperatives.

The form of the national firm has not been friendly to Leftist aspirations – from reduced profitability destroying leftist governments, to Leftists getting cornered to the defence of imperialistic and xenophobic policies (e.g. Lexit) given the constraints of the national firm. Yet, because the popular imagination remains bounded by the market – where the possibilities of this world are always imagined to be embedded in a system made of rational agents and firms, not unlike the most boring textbooks of micro-economics, the Left chooses to frame its arguments in these existing logical frameworks.  Yet,  the battle for the national firm will be a battle that the Left will ultimately, always lose,  because the aspirations of a more humane, internationalist, and leisurely society run counter to the optimized imperatives of national competitiveness.  Rather than the Left merely jumping into the constrained discourse of the national firm only because it is the only narrative available, they should create their own discourse that exists beyond nations, borders and capitalism – that aspires for  a global and universal, worker’s republic.  With the advent of climate change, a global phenomenon that cannot be tackled in a system made of fractured national firms that compete against each other, perhaps  Einstein’s aspiration for a universal republic is now more necessary than ever.

In the  english speaking internet, a cultural war wages between the Left and the Right, that is perhaps representative to an extent of anglo society as a whole, which was recently chronicled by the controversial book “Kill All Normies” by Angela Nagle.   The Left side of the war, which is embodied in tumblr, “social justice warriors”, etc., usually explains the disadvantages faced by women, transgender people, and people as color, as  produced by socially constructed systems, such as  rape culture, the patriarchy, white priviliege, etc. – constructs that were developed in the annals of humanities’ academia. The online right wing, in contrast, explains the disparities and inequalities  faced by women and marginalized minorities as rooted in biological sources, using a  “scientific” language that refers to  evolutionary psychology, behavioural psychology, the distributions of IQ, etc., as  evidence.  The ontologies used by both sides are in some sense incommensurable – the Left uses humanities’ assumptions such as the relevant social forces being  abstract and socially constructed and therefore hard to measure – while the right wing  explains  perceived social disparities   as sourced in biological variables that are tractable and measurable.

Previously, I criticized the “pseudo-scientific” aspects within the far-right for their tendency to correlate complex social phenomena with one or a couple of biological variables. I speculated that a psychological source of the “univariate mind” of right wingers  is the training of the people who make these sort of arguments – typically engineers, programmers, and system administrators,  and the like, who were exposed to simple, univariate systems and beginner statistics in their undergraduate curricula.  However,  a similar   epistemic cage of method also constrains the Left (although I am using the term “the Left” this post specifically addresses the Left in the english-speaking world, rather than the Left in general).  Since the Left’s march through the academe in the 60s, the Left has acquired an alienating  language and methodology  that can only be parsed by the “initiated” (hence the term “woke”).  One of the main, alienating assumptions is  that the categories and frameworks we use to make sense of reality, from common sense, all the way to experimental science, are shaped by the ideology  of the powerful to the point that  these frameworks are always suspect. Furthermore, the Left, because it refuses to embrace a sort of universalism – a common human experience that transcends gender and race,   is unable to reach out to those who aren’t “initiated”, given that the Left is not vested in creating a universalized language. Instead, the Left has produced a labyrinth of “woke” signalling, that can only be understood  and accepted by members of a specific subcultures – in this case, the Left, and the humanities. The Left’s hostility against universalism is related to  the post-structuralist turn in academia, where all broad statements about humanity are rendered suspect, because all knowledge, even the superficially objective type,  is always tainted by power structures. For example, a common  post-structuralist attack against “positivism”, the tendency of science to abstract all social and physical phenomena into well defined, quantitative laws,  is that it is rooted in euro-centric understanding of the world; in other words, the fact that we accept positivism as valid is connected to the dominance of western civilization.

Given the language and assumptions embraced by the Left, namely that  all knowledge is tainted by the power, including   scientific knowledge, scientists will sometimes find the Left ridiculous and alienating.   An interesting example of this phenomenon happened the 90s, with the so called science wars, where Alan  Sokal, a physicist and   sympathizer of the old, materialist Marxist left, submitted a bunk article to one of the top humanities’ journals at that time, Social Text. His troll article, which got accepted,  argued that quantum gravity was a social and linguistic construct.  One could criticize his approach as bad faithed and counter-productive, but what was interesting about the affair is that he wasn’t really looking to discredit literary criticism and “postmodernism”, but to defend the Left from what he thought as negative anti-scientific  influences:

My goal isn’t to defend science from the barbarian hordes of lit crit (we’ll survive just fine, thank you), but to defend the Left from a trendy segment of itself..

It’s useful to analyze the history of the relationship between the Left and science.  Before WWII, it seems that Marxism and social anarchism, both which postulated a knowable, material world as the  basis of  social reality, had a friendly,  even if sometimes contentious, relationship with science.  For example,  Einstein had well publicized anarchist and socialist sympathies, and  the American state purged the Manhattan project of  “communist physicists”, such as Oppenheimer and David Bohm.  Nowadays, however,  the presence of the Left in scientific and technical milieux has dwindled, atleast in the United States.  Superficially, this lack of prescence is obvious in the “online wars”, where most of the writers  and social media personalities that  promote leftist views are overwhelmingly from the humanities,  while the right wing  that peddles anti-feminism, libertarianism, and “pseudo-scientific” racism have almost always technical backgrounds. Nowadays,  you can always guess that any public intellectual that leans to the Left has some sort of humanist background – from Richard Seymour to Zizek.  Furthermore in  the  United States, professionals and workers outside “blue-collar work” that tend to be unionized are public servants, such as teachers, university white collar workers, and bureaucrats – which tend to come overwhelmingly from the social sciences/humanities backgrounds. This contrasts to technical workers, such as programmers, which tend to not be unionized.

Is there an unbridgeable chasm at play – with anti-positivistic “critical theory” versus science? Since the abandonment of the pre-suppositions of the old materialist left, such as enlightenment and scientific humanism, the chasm  seems real.  However I don’t think the chasm is unbridgeable, and the raison d’être of this blog is partly  a leftist “intervention” of sorts  into the scientific and technical millieux.  For example, I think the talk of “systems” in some of the more “materialist” minded left, such as white supremacy, capitalism, or the patriarchy, can be  translated into “mathematical” language using the tools developed by complexity theory and nonlinear dynamics, namely, that society exhibits complex emergent phenomena, such as systematic discrimination of women, exploitation of workers, and systemic racism, that cannot be reduced to the properties of the individual units of the system – such as how psychology cannot be reduced to the action potentials of a neutron, or  temperature to the random motion of one molecule.  This stands in contrast with the pseudo-scientific crackpots  from the right that try to reduce gender disparities in STEM or  income inequality amongst races, to a couple of biological variables such as IQ or amount of testosterone.  Finally, capitalism, and its increasingly more intricate division of labour can also be blamed for the widening of this chasm – scientifically minded people fall into “everything can be explained by a measurable number” idiocy and humanists retreat to textual and cultural analysis,  frolicking in their innumeracy, and flaunting their cultural capital with increasingly more opaque and polysyllabic language.

We shouldn’t leave STEM at the hands of libertarians, racialist crackpots, and resentful anti-feminists, that recuperate the language and methods of technical workers and scientific professionals for reactionary agendas.   Instead, we leftists should wage a  culture war within STEM,  and make it understood that science can be used to build a better and freer world, rather than leaving science at the hands of myopic reactionaries with hard ons for biological essentialism and bad statistics. Therefore, leftists should become more educated in the “hard” sciences, rather than dismissing them as irrelevant for explaining social phenomena. Finally,  we should embrace a universal human experience as the basis of our politics, with scientific discourse forming part of the universalist language, rather than posit that humans of different nationalities and genders are divided by incommensurable experiences, which is implicit in much of the “post-structuralist” left.