greengalloway

Philosophiae Magistrum

2009-07-11T08:52:00.002+01:00

Galloway Levellers finished

2009-06-21T20:55:00.000+01:00

Here is the finished version Of Galloway Levellers dissertation.

Towers Open Fire

2009-04-24T07:08:00.000+01:00

Enjoy this trip

2009-03-20T17:24:00.001Z

Nearly finished Galloway Levellers

Until then....

YouTube - We are all prostitutes - The pop group

2009-03-06T19:15:00.001Z

YouTube - The Mekons - Where Were You? (Single)

2009-03-06T18:59:00.001Z

Today's charity

2009-02-21T21:04:00.001Z

Ireland leads the way?

2009-02-21T19:46:00.003Z

Up to 120,000 protest in recession-hit Ireland

2 hours ago

DUBLIN (AFP) — Up to 120,000 protesters brought Dublin city centre to a standstill on Saturday over government austerity measures aimed at stabilising the once high-flying economy now wracked by recession.

The demonstration came a day after the global economic crisis led to another political casualty elsewhere in Europe, with Latvia's prime minister quitting as his country grapples with deepening recession.

Organised by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) and featuring teachers, police, civil servants and others, the Irish protest was the "first step in a rolling campaign of action," ICTU general secretary David Begg said.

Police put the number of protesters at up to 120,000.

Marchers are particularly opposed to a pension levy on some 350,000 public servants which is designed to save about 1.4 billion euros (1.8 billion dollars) this year.

According to IMPACT, Ireland's biggest public sector trade union, the levy will cost low to middle-income earners between 1,500 euros and 2,800 euros a year.

Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen is bringing in an initial two-billion-euro package of cuts designed to stabilise the one-time Celtic Tiger economy, which entered recession in the first half of 2008.

Cowen has said the economy will shrink by up to 10 percent by 2010 and warned of total savings of 15 billion euros needed over five years in a bid to stabilise Irish finances.

In a statement to coincide with the demonstration, the government said it recognised that the measures it was taking "are difficult and, in some cases, painful" but they were also "necessary and fair."

"They are necessary because it is essential that we show a credible start on the correction of an emerging unsustainability in our public finances," it said.

"Failure to show that credible start means that we impact directly and severely on our international reputation among investors and, in particular, on our capacity to raise funds, and on the direct cost of servicing the borrowing which we are able to undertake."

The ICTU describes the government's measures as "lacking in fairness and focussing only on 'stabilising' the public finances at the expense of economic renewal and job protection."

The global economic crisis, which has hit several European countries hard, has led to political instability in several parts of the continent.

Iceland's government became the first political casualty of the downturn when it was forced to step down on January 26 following months of protests against politicians and central bankers.

A new interim government comprising the Social Democrats and the Left Green party has been in power since February 1, and new elections are expected to be held in April.

Meanwhile Gardens 1983

2009-01-29T06:51:00.006Z

Mob at Meanwhile Gardens

The end of objective reality

2009-01-28T21:06:00.003Z

I am sitting here listening to Hawkwind's Space Ritual/ Pink Fairies's What a Bunch of Sweeties. There are 31 books stacked up in arms reach around me, five lever-arch files, three big maps (one of Northern Ireland) and a small mountain of photocopies, some of which have avalanched onto the floor.

Word count tells me I have written 8545 words in the past 12 days which means I now have 45 963 words of “Against the poor, the rich prevail...” my dissertation on the Galloway Levellers Uprising of 1724. Damn, I hadn't added it all up until now and it should only be 40 000. And it isn't quite finished.

It nearly is, just trying to fill in some gaps and summarise/ draw conclusion. I guess I will have to cut my 5000 word Introduction to create some more room. But I have been writing up this damn dissertation for 18 months now – got up to 60 000 words last September, then threw 40 000 of them away to create space for editing and re-writing.

I guess it is a moving target. If it was all printed off would look like a big thick solid wodge, but it isn't fixed, it is unstable, shifting and changing as I find new bits to add – like all the Irish connections which came about from the Plantation of Ulster when thousands of Protestant Scots were given land by king James I (of England, VI of Scotland) which had belonged to Irish Catholics. Some of these Scots (well quite a lot really) moved from Galloway across the North Channel to Ulster. To make money from their Irish lands, they sent cattle from Ulster to England via Scotland. That started about 1620. English farmers didn't like it so in 1667 they banned Irish cattle.

I knew about the last bit, but tracking down all the Irish links - like which Galloway landowners owned which bit of Ireland and for how long - was a bit harder. A then I found that a big chunk of County Derry/London/Derry was inherited by one of Galloway's Roman Catholic families who owned the Irish land from about 1650 to 1720.

Enough. Tomorrow I will get up early and go for a long walk in the mist and fog. I will think very hard about how to make some kind of sense of the 45 963 words of confusion. Then I will tidy up all the books and stuff. Then I will write a Conclusion, delete my Introduction and replace it with the Conclusion.

And then?

Well I need to start checking a nearby wood to see if (once it gets a bit more springish) there are any plants in it like wood anemones and bluebells which mean it might be an ancient wood. Which means I need to brush up on my plant identification skills.

Then there is “the end of objective reality”
- from http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/502/lukacs.html

Commodity fetishism is the central, definitive characteristic of capitalist society.

What is extraordinary about Lukács is that he was one of the few Marxist philosophers who really added something to Marx’s views. Lukács goes further than Marx, developing the notion of reification in a way it is not developed in Capital. For Lukács, commodity fetishism was the “basic phenomenon of reification”, which refers to the process through which the exchange of the products leads to the transformation of social relations among human beings into apparently natural relations among things.

The problem is that Lukács identifies reification with objectivity, whereas they cannot be considered socially or conceptually identical: “It is in Hegel that we first encounter alienation as the fundamental problem of man in the world and vis-à-vis the world. However, in the term ‘alienation’, he includes every type of objectification.” Thus ‘alienation’, when taken to its logical conclusion, is identical with objectification. Therefore, when the identical subject-object transcends alienation it must also transcend objectification at the same time. But since, according to Hegel, the object, the thing, exists only as an alienation from self-consciousness, to take it back into the subject would mean the end of objective reality and thus of any reality at all.

History and class consciousness follows Hegel in that it too equates alienation (Entfremdung) with objectification (Vergegenständlichung). It is necessary to make such distinction, because only in certain forms of society is there reification of external objects. And without this distinction, it means that de-reification will imply that there are no objects, material or social.

I have read History and Class Consciousness after reading a suggestion by Joppe that it was an important source for Debord's Society of the Spectacle. It is a hell of a read. As dense,complex and confusing as the works of Kenneth Grant, who is also a great fan of the word 'reification'. Could a synthesis between Lukács and Grant be created? Which could then, in a Hegel style dialectic , become the thesis against which to oppose/ negate the notion of Marx as an ecologist proposed by John Bellamy Foster (Marx's Ecology and Ecology Against Capitalism) and Joel Kovel (The Enemy of Nature) – all which I have skimmed through recently.

Should keep me busy once I have finished the dissertation.

Enemy of Nature

2008-12-22T23:27:00.002Z

Just been reading this book.

Down in the sewer...

2008-12-04T18:19:00.001Z

A rainbow

2008-11-30T13:07:00.000Z

Mutoid Waste Co,

2008-11-30T08:06:00.004Z

The Limits of Electoral politics : Ken Knabb

2008-10-30T07:12:00.001Z

THE LIMITS OF ELECTORAL POLITICS
http://www.bopsecrets.org/recent/beyond-voting.htm

Roughly speaking we can distinguish five degrees of "government":

(1) Unrestricted freedom
(2) Direct democracy
(3) Delegate democracy
(4) Representative democracy
(5) Overt minority dictatorship

The present society oscillates between (4) and (5), i.e. between overt
minority rule and covert minority rule camouflaged by a facade of token
democracy. A liberated society would eliminate (4) and (5) and would
progressively reduce the need for (2) and (3). . . .

In representative democracy people abdicate their power to elected
officials. The candidates' stated policies are limited to a few vague
generalities, and once they are elected there is little control over their
actual decisions on hundreds of issues -- apart from the feeble threat of
changing one's vote, a few years later, to some equally uncontrollable rival
politician. Representatives are dependent on the wealthy for bribes and
campaign contributions; they are subordinate to the owners of the mass
media, who decide which issues get the publicity; and they are almost as
ignorant and powerless as the general public regarding many important
matters that are determined by unelected bureaucrats and independent secret
agencies. Overt dictators may sometimes be overthrown, but the real rulers
in "democratic" regimes, the tiny minority who own or control virtually
everything, are never voted in and never voted out. Most people don't even
know who they are. . . .

In itself, voting is of no great significance one way or the other (those
who make a big deal about refusing to vote are only revealing their own
fetishism). The problem is that it tends to lull people into relying on
others to act for them, distracting them from more significant
possibilities. A few people who take some creative initiative (think of the
first civil rights sit-ins) may ultimately have a far greater effect than if
they had put their energy into campaigning for lesser-evil politicians. At
best, legislators rarely do more than what they have been forced to do by
popular movements. A conservative regime under pressure from independent
radical movements often concedes more than a liberal regime that knows it
can count on radical support. (The Vietnam war, for example, was not ended
by electing antiwar politicians, but because there was so much pressure from
so many different directions that the prowar president Nixon was forced to
withdraw.) If people invariably rally to lesser evils, all the rulers have
to do in any situation that threatens their power is to conjure up a threat
of some greater evil.

Even in the rare case when a "radical" politician has a realistic chance of
winning an election, all the tedious campaign efforts of thousands of people
may go down the drain in one day because of some trivial scandal discovered
in his (or her) personal life, or because he inadvertently says something
intelligent. If he manages to avoid these pitfalls and it looks like he
might win, he tends to evade controversial issues for fear of antagonizing
swing voters. If he actually gets elected he is almost never in a position
to implement the reforms he has promised, except perhaps after years of
wheeling and dealing with his new colleagues; which gives him a good excuse
to see his first priority as making whatever compromises are necessary to
keep himself in office indefinitely. Hobnobbing with the rich and powerful,
he develops new interests and new tastes, which he justifies by telling
himself that he deserves a few perks after all his years of working for good
causes. Worst of all, if he does eventually manage to get a few
"progressive" measures passed, this exceptional and usually trivial success
is held up as evidence of the value of relying on electoral politics, luring
many more people into wasting their energy on similar campaigns to come.

As one of the May 1968 graffiti put it, "It's painful to submit to our
bosses; it's even more stupid to choose them!"

--Excerpts from Ken Knabb's "The Joy of Revolution."
The complete text is online at http://www.bopsecrets.org/PS/joyrev.htm

* * *

SOME CLARIFICATIONS

My intention in circulating these observations is not to discourage you from
voting or campaigning, but to encourage you to go further.

Like many other people, I am delighted to see the Republicans collapsing
into well-deserved ignominy, with the likelihood of the Democrats
recapturing the presidency and increasing their majorities in Congress.
Hopefully the latter will discontinue or at least mitigate some of the more
insane policies of the current administration (some of which, such as
climate change and ecological devastation, threaten to become irreversible).

Beyond that, I do not expect the Democratic politicians to accomplish
anything very significant. Most of them are just as corrupt and compromised
as the Republicans. Even if a few of them are honest and well-intentioned,
they are all loyal servants of the ruling economic system, and they all
ultimately function as cogwheels in the murderous political machine that
serves to defend that system.

I have considerable respect and sympathy for the people who are
campaigning for the Democratic Party while simultaneously trying to
reinvigorate it and democratize it. There are elements of a real grassroots
movement there, developing in tandem with the remarkable growth of the
liberal-radical blogosphere over the last few years.

But imagine if that same immense amount of energy on the part of millions
of people was put into more directly radical agitation, rather than (or in
addition to) campaigning for rival millionaires. As a side effect, such
agitation would put the reactionaries on the defensive and actually result
in more "progressives" being elected. But more importantly, it would shift
both the momentum and the terrain of the struggle.

If you put all your energy into trying to reassure swing voters that your
candidate is "fully committed to fighting the War on Terror" but that he has
regretfully concluded that we should withdraw from Iraq because "our efforts
to promote democracy" there haven't been working, you may win a few votes
but you have accomplished nothing in the way of political awareness.

In contrast, if you convince people that the war in Iraq is both evil and
stupid, they will not only tend to vote for antiwar candidates, they are
likely to start questioning other aspects of the social system. Which may
lead to them to challenge that system in more concrete and participatory
ways.

(If you want some examples, look at the rich variety of tactics used in
France two years ago -- http://www.bopsecrets.org/recent/france2006.htm .)

The side that takes the initiative usually wins because it defines the terms
of the struggle. If we accept the system's own terms and confine ourselves
to defensively reacting to each new mess produced by it, we will never
overcome it. We have to keep resisting particular evils, but we also have to
recognize that the system will keep generating new ones until we put an end
to it.

By all means vote if you feel like it. But don't stop there. Real social
change requires participation, not representation.

BUREAU OF PUBLIC SECRETS
P.O. Box 1044, Berkeley CA 94701, USA
http://www.bopsecrets.org

KLF What Time is Love Pure Trance

2008-10-28T21:33:00.001Z

Bowie - Life on Mars -1973 video

2008-08-23T09:26:00.001+01:00

Before there was punk there was glam.

T Rex - Jewel (Live)

2008-08-23T08:54:00.002+01:00

Here and Now 2005

2008-08-16T11:18:00.001+01:00

Kai Tracid - Trance & Acid (FULL SONG)

2008-08-13T09:21:00.003+01:00

Just found this song. In a parallel universe this is what chaos magic would have sounded like, but the song only came out in 2002. So it goes.

There is a website for Kai Tracid http://www.tracid.de/

Climate Change - steam vs water power

2008-08-12T00:42:00.003+01:00

Thinking out loud

I've just written a piece for KYPP http://www.killyourpetpuppy.co.uk/news/?p=851 Direct Action, direct experience inspired by the Kingsnorth climate change camp which got a 'thank you' comment by Derek Wall who is a long time Green Party activist.

In the piece I used some quotes from Anselm Joppe's Guy Debord (1999). From the same text I have found this, which connects to my Galloway Levellers research

http://libcom.org/files/Imbeciles%20Guide%20to%20the%20Spectacle1.pdf

There are in fact two competing views to be found in Marx, the one envisaging liberation from the economy, the other liberation by means of the economy; nor may the two be simply assigned to different phases of his thought, as some would like to do. In his critique of value, Marx thoroughly exposed the “pure form” of the society of the commodity. At the time, this critique constituted a bold piece of anticipation; only today is it able truly to apprehend the essence of social reality. Marx himself was not aware, and his Marxist successors even less aware, of the gap that existed between his critique of value and the content of the greater part of his work, in which he scrutinized the empirical forms of the capitalist society of his era.

He could not have perceived how laden that era still was with precapitalist features, and consequently many of the characteristics he described were still very different from, even sometimes opposed to, what was to emerge later from the gradual victory of the commodity-form over all the relics of precapitalist times. Marx thus treated as essential traits of capitalism features that were in reality expressions of a still unfinished form of the system. Among such features, for example, was the creation of a class that had of necessity to be excluded from bourgeois society and its “benefits.”

The connection is that in the “What happened next” ( i.e. what happened after 1724) part of my research I have found that a small group of men from Galloway played a key role in the development of industrial capitalism in north-west England/ Manchester between 1770 and 1840.

The most influential was John Kennedy (1769- 1855), who was the second son of a hill farmer from Knocknalling farm in Kells/ New Galloway parish in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, Dumfries and Galloway, south west Scotland. In 1784, aged 15, he became apprentice to William Cannon (or Cannan) – also originally from Kells parish -who was a millwright in Chowbent/ Atherton near Preston. After finishing his apprenticeship, Kennedy moved to Manchester where he began making cotton making machines in association with other Galloway apprentices of William Cannon before becoming a cotton manufacturer in his own right. His firm, Kennedy and McConnel, became the largest in Manchester and the first to successfully apply steam power to cottton spinning. As a result Kennedy became a good friend of James Watt. Later, in 1825, Kennedy became a promoter of the Liverpool to Manchester railway and a friend of George Stephenson. In 1829 Kennedy was one of the three judges at the Rainhill Trial which was a competition to find the best steam locomotive to use one the new railway and which was won by George and Robert Stephenson's 'Rocket'.

At the same time that John Kennedy was helping to kick start a coal/ fossil fuel powered industrial revolution in Manchester, James Murray (died 1799) was trying to spark a water-powered industrial revolution in Galloway. From 1760 onwards Murray developed the hamlet of Gatehouse of Fleet (Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, Dumfries and Galloway) into an industrial town. In 1790 the first water powered cotton mill was built in Gatehouse. This was followed by three more, . In 1792 , out of a population of just over 1000, 500 were employed in Gatehouse's cotton mills – see Old Statistical Account for parish of Girthon -

http://stat-acc-scot.edina.ac.uk/link/1791-99/Kirkcudbright/Girthon/11/315/

These water-powered cotton mills survived to be mentioned in the New Statistical Account for Girthon parish but by then (1840) employed only 200 -see

http://stat-acc-scot.edina.ac.uk/link/1834-45/Kirkcudbright/Girthon/4/302/

and soon afterwards closed completely whilst Manchester's coal/ steam-powered mills went from strength to strength. Meanwhile Galloway's society and economy became fixed in the rural/ agricultural form it bears to this day.

Why did this happen? If John Kennedy had returned home to Galloway in 1791 rather than move to Manchester, could he have made Gatehouse of Fleet into an industrial success story rather than a failure? Probably not. The geology of Galloway contains no coal measures so the transition from water power to steam power could not have easily taken place. Another significant factor is that extreme tidal range of the Solway Firth made and makes it difficult for large scale shipping of goods in and out of Dumfries and Galloway.

So what is my point? I am not sure yet. I think that if Anselm Joppe (see above) is right about Marx 'misreading' the early (Manchester/ Engels 1844 Condition of the Working Class in England) form of industrial capitalism then there may be something of value in my research as it touches on the structural difference between John Kennedy: Manchester: steam power :: James Murray : Gatehouse of Fleet : water power.

That - from an early 21st century global climate change perspective- the most significant aspect of late 18th/ early 19th century industrial development was the physical difference between water and steam power as the energy source rather than the social/ economic impact of the factory system of manufacturing.

A Sphinx Replies to Externalities

2008-07-27T21:05:00.003+01:00

Dear Alistair. Well. I'm not going to reply to all of the Externalities business only to some of it. There is too much for that and in all honesty my familiarity with Hegel is not up to par – and that actually is maybe the big weakness of my previous reply to your 'progress is the enemy', the superficial summarizing of Hegel. Some of the ideas you throw around about Hegel are very interesting and maybe could get somewhere. That having been said I would also like to make sure you realize that I am going to the time and trouble of writing you a reply because I quite like some things you have written on your blog in the past, I could even say that they have influenced me quite substantially at times. But I am not writing to be nice but instead to criticize what I see as well lazy and sloppy thinking from a thinker I had expected so much more from.

1.
The question of history being inevitable or not – from one point of view this question comes down to the free will vs destiny/determinism question, something philosophy grappled with but it's also a question that Crowley's Thelema as well as the Chaos Magic criticism of Thelema had to come to grips with. Are things as they are because they could be no other way or are we free to do as we will. Are we all doing our True Will or do we have to find it in order to do it or is there no such thing and we are all completely free from any external constraints. This comes down to questions of practice rather than of abstract theorizing (“a phony issue, one that is dissolved in practice rather than solved through reasoning.” - Knabb) “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” And that is Marx on the matter – and that is not the mechanical determinist that the Marxists of the Second International and its followers fetishized, but rather a dialectician resolving the question in the marriage of objective conditions and subjective self-creation/praxis. This subjective aspect of Marx is perhaps best summarized in the First Thesis on Feuerbach

“The main defect of all hitherto-existing materialism — that of Feuerbach included — is that the Object, actuality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in opposition to materialism, was developed by idealism — but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such.” And the Third: “The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated...The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.”

Now I am certainly not advocating everything Marx said – I do not identify myself as a Marxist nor do I think it is useful to speak of Marxism as a living current any more – but Marx has to be understood if one is to come to grips with revolutionary theory and its development, and that understanding necessarily entails comprehending where the truly revolutionary aspects of Marx differ from those of the vulgar Marxists whether they are social-democrat reformists or Leninist or Trotskyist statists etc. ("Are you Marxists? Quite as much as Marx when he said, 'I am not a Marxist.'" I.S. #9) So getting back to your text the quote says “They believed that human society and individual man could be perfected by the same application of reason, and were destined to be so perfected by history. On these points bourgeois liberals and revolutionary proletarian socialists were at one.” Identifying revolutionaries with the bourgeois liberals misses a major point.

Fucking around on the internet I came across Loren Goldner's site and his review of Bloch's Principle of Hope (http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/bloch.html) which I have not read as it has gone missing from the library, but the review sparked off a little flame again (the little flame that used to be kept burning from some of your writing too). Here are some quotes:

“When The Principle of Hope appeared in Germany in 1959 (two years before Bloch's self-exile from East to West Germany), the weight of opinion throughout the West (and nowhere more than in the English-speaking world) conceived of Marxian materialism, whether in praise or damnation, as more or less indistinguishable from the bleak determinism of mid-19th century Manchesterism or the more recent Dzhanovism, the grey-ongrey world in which "the brain produces thought as the liver produces bile." For nearly a century pamphleteers and ideologues, most recently in the employ of the Soviet state and the Western European communist parties, had earned a living in amplifying this view. Just as capitalist apology and Soviet raison d'etat found a common interest in portraying the bureaucratic nightmare as "communism," so did harried epistemologists of both sides of the Cold War enjoy shrouding Marxian thought with stock phrases such as "economic determinism" and "mechanistic materialism," undergirded by "iron laws of history" grasped by the faithful in the "recognition of necessity." It is not necessary to linger here over the relatively well-known history of publications and commentaries on one hand, and the events and climate heightening their "reception," on the other, which relegated this view of Marx to well-deserved oblivion. From the international diffusion of the "1844 Manuscripts" through the decanting of the long-obscure Grundrisse to the clarification of the deep and life-long debt to Hegel evidenced in such "late" writings as the unpublished Chapter Six of Vol. 1 of Capital to the working-class upsurges of 1968-1973 and thereafter, it was as if two decades of history conspired to drive home the truth of the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach in which Marx distinguished himself from all previous materialists by his emphasis on the active sensuous constitution of reality by real historical actors and on vulgar materialism's failure "to understand activity as objective. As one of a tiny group of early 20th-century pioneers in the "recovery" of this view of Marx, Ernst Bloch came to international prominence in the Marxist renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s as someone finally in his own element.”

“In a work that touches substantively on themes as diverse as Paracelsian alchemy, late medieval millenarianism, Kabbalah and Jewish messianism, modern physics, Indian and Chinese philosophy, opera, landscape painting, and architecture (to name only a few), it is necessary to extract certain main lines of a polemic and to situate it with respect to its principal adversaries. One might say that the three volumes of The Principle of Hope are a long footnote to Marx's remark that "humanity has long possessed a dream which it must only possess in consciousness to possess in reality." Bloch's project, situated (in his language) in the "warm" as against the "cold" stream of Marxism, is to appropriate for the concrete, practical utopia of the future the broadest spectrum of historical creations of the human imagination, to show their this-sidedness and their truth. In doing this he is merely generalizing the Marxian critique of religion to a much broader array of such creations than most Marxists would care to take on. Indeed, most Marxists, and a fortiori most commentators of Marx, rather badly misconstrue Marx's critique of religion, "the presupposition of all possible critique" as he put it, and its role in Marx's work. Marx and Bloch do not criticize religion as "wrong" from the vantage point of some reductionist "science" that possesses the truth; the project of Marx and Bloch is to show the human truth of religion (as one of several products of the human imagination in society) and to prepare for the realization of that truth in social conditions that would no longer require the illusion of religion. Bloch looks to some of the late medieval millenarians, whose heresy went to the point of negating God as an obstacle to full realization of the earthly kingdom, as antecedents of this kind of atheism, as opposed to the conventional 18th-century Enlightenment atheism usually attributed to Marx.”

“Bloch shows that the active human constitution of the world through historical activity separates Marx from any previous "Democritean" materialism. Bloch does not merely follow Marx's lead in taking over "the active side developed by idealism" (Theses on Feuerbach which takes most students of Marx no farther than Hegel and Schelling; he shows figures such as Giordano Bruno, Paracelsus, and Jacob Boehme to have actually elaborated, in the Renaissance and Reformation periods, a view of humanity-in-nature as the reconciliation of natura naturans and natura naturata as discussed in theology and philosophy from Erigena to Spinoza, a conception of an active, living matter infused with imagination that was buried by GalileanNewtonian physics...instead of demarcating a world of "Geist" from the "instrumental" world of nature and natural science, Bloch follows Bruno and Paracelsus into a view of nature itself as part of the "active" side, cutting the ground from beneath vulgar, mechanical materialism in its very stronghold...The challenge posed by Bloch to the contemporary left intelligentsia, as articulated in The Principle of Hope and elsewhere, is his affirmation of a single unitary science which sees nature, matter, and the cosmos itself as a sensuous, living, and historical process which human history continues.”

“There, indeed, we have what we want!” - Hegel after reading a passage in Eckhart.
After reading that I went on to Goldner's The Renaissance and Rationality (http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/renaissance.html):

“One of the more serious errors today, of those on the left who wish to critically defend the Enlightenment, is their hurry to draw a line of direct continuity from the Enlightenment to Marx...But there was another critique of the Enlightenment afoot in Europe well before the French Revolution, the German Sturm und Drang movement, which included figures of no less stature than Herder and Goethe, and which prepared the way for another critique of the Enlightenment, romanticism....The romantic philosophers Schelling and Fichte developed an idea that also exists nowhere in the Enlightenment, except as adumbrated (at its end) by Kant: that human activity constitutes reality through its praxis. G.F.W. Hegel, who critiqued both the limits of Enlightenment and of romanticism, pulled all these elements into a philosophy of history that was, as Herzen said, the "algebra" of revolution. There would have been no "Theses on Feuerbach" without these figures, and hence no Marx as we know him today. What did the "Theses on Feuerbach" say? They said "all previous materialisms, including Feuerbach's, do not understand activity as objective". Marx here is explicitly referring to Enlightenment materialists such as Hobbes, Mersenne, and Holbach, emphasizing the importance of the "active side developed by idealism", by which he means Schelling, Fichte and Hegel, none of whom can be considered "Enlightenment" thinkers...

Another major distinction between the Enlightenment and Marx is the attitude toward religion. This is particularly important since most Marxists have tended to think that Marx's view is basically identical with that of Voltaire: religion is "wrong", "false", l'infâme. But Marx, coming after 50 years of the rich philosophical discussion of religion in German idealism and then in his materialist predecessor Feuerbach, saw religion "as the heart of a heartless world, the spirit of a world without spirit". Religion for Marx was a prime case of what he called alienation, whereby human beings invert dreams of a better life into an other-worldly form. But a Voltairean would never have said, as Marx did, that "you cannot abolish religion without realizing it". Simple Enlightenment atheism never asserted there was anything to "realize", because such a view accords its (alienated) truth to religion...A straight line from the Enlightenment to socialism which does not exist, makes both an easier target for the post-modernists as a "master narrative" of "domination", resting on schoolboy notions of "materialism" which derive from Newton's atomism.This telescoping of Enlightenment and socialism is actually (and usually quite unintentionally) reminiscent of Stalinism, which did not have much use for the post-Enlightenment (not to mention pre-Enlightenment) sources of Marx (as sketched above)either...The problem of many contemporary defenders of the Enlightenment is their failure to see that the bedrock foundation, what the Enlightenment itself accepted as its undisputed point of departure and its model of the power of rational thought was Newton's physics. But Newton's physics (which were, in their time, undoubtedly revolutionary) were not merely about physics, or nature: they stood for 150 years, and in reality for 300 years, as the very model of what "science" was and ought to be...

Newton's physics were, once again, not merely a physics, (the latter undoubtedly being of great power, a guiding research program for over 200 years), they were little less than an ontology, and they were unquestioned by the Enlightenment. Few contemporary defenders of the Enlightenment have much to say about Newton's alchemy, astrology, Biblical commentary, history (attempting to confirm the truth of Old Testament chronology), anti-Trinitarian theology or search for the Egyptian cubit, a body of work which Newton himself placed on an equal footing with his physics and of which, for him, his physics was only a part. (Interestingly, and revealingly, the Frankfurt School and the Foucaultian critics of the Enlightenment have little to say about them either.) Many of these pursuits were already becoming unfashionable in Newton's own time, and Voltaire's popularization of Newton on the continent after 1730 already passed them over in total silence. But the discovery of this Newton is already enough to show that he was not exactly, or certainly not only, an "Enlightenment" thinker...Newtonian science, and hence the Enlightenment, defeated the kind of church-sponsored obscurantism represented by the trial of Galileo, or the earlier trial and execution of Giordano Bruno. But it also defeated what I would call Renaissance- Reformation cosmobiology, as the latter is associated with names such as Nicholas of Cusa, Bruno , Paracelsus, John Dee, Robert Fludd, Boehme and above all Kepler. Elements of it persist as late as Leibniz, co-inventor with Newton of the calculus, and who already polemicized against Newton's mechanism. Newton, as sketched above, still had much of the Renaissance magus about him. This cosmobiological world view further found its cultural expression in figures such as Dürer, the Brueghels, Bosch, Shakespeare and Rabelais, just as later Pope and Dryden attempted to create a literature in keeping with Newtonian science. In this transition, an empty , atomistic space and time, based on an infinity understood as mere repetition (the infinitesmal) deflated and expelled a universe brimming with life, in which, further, human imagination was central. One need only think of Paracelsus, the peripatetic alchemist, astrologer, chemist, herbalist , tireless researcher and medical practicioner who called the human imagination "the star in man" (astrum in homine) and who placed it higher than the mere stars which preoccupied astronomers. But no figure is more exemplary than Kepler, who looked for the Platonic solids in the order of the solar system and who attempted to demonstrate that the distance between the planets was in accordance with the well-tempered tuning of the "music of the spheres". This was the world view-- the cosmology-- which was deflated and replaced by Newton's colorless, tasteless, odorless space and time, and the latter deflation reached into every domain of culture for 300 years. And this cosmobiological world view was an indisputable precursor of Marx's "sensuous transformative praxis" (sinnliche unwälzende Tätigkeit) and hence of modern socialism. By its notion of human participation of the constitutition of the world (whereby it smacked of heresy for the Church), it was closer to Marx than any of the intervening Enlightenment views...In reality, while most of the figures of Renaissance-Reformation cosmobiology were at least nominally Christian believers of one kind or another (although in the case of Bruno, one wonders) their significance is precisely that they represented a "third stream", an alternative to both the dominant Aristotelian scholasticism propogated by the Church and to the atomistic materialism that congealed in the Enlightenment. This "third stream" was also often combatted, along with atheist materialism, by the Church as the highest heresy. And this "third stream" and its significance were essentially hidden for three centuries by the Manichean portrait of the past developed by the Enlightenment and taken over in the ideology of modernity.

This "third stream", of which again Kepler is the culminating figure, was hardly, as Enlightenment ideology portrayed it by assimilating it to "religion", hostile to science or to scientific research. Indeed, Kepler's work provided one part of the key to Newton's theory of universal gravitation.

It is significant that neither the pro-Enlightenment Habermasians or the anti-Enlightenment deconstructionists and Foucaultians have much use for Renaissance- Reformation cosmobiology, and the reason is that all of them tacitly accept the Enlightenment linear view of history and progress as the sole possible kind of progress, in which the "third stream" disappears into the "religion" of the "dark ages". There is an unacknowledged agreement here between opposing sides which makes possible a recasting of the debate. This largely unspoken agreement accepts the division of the world between culture and nature, (or Geist and Natur as the Germans would say) and, however differently various figures may treat the world of consciousness, they concede the world of nature to the mechanists. Such a division was only possible after Newton and the ideological suppression of the cosmobiological "third stream", which, whatever its flaws, presented a unitary vision of consciousness and nature. The reaction to the implications, for consciousness, of the Enlightenment program was quick in coming, and many took up Donne's lament of "all coherence gone". But from Pascal to Rousseau to Hegel (for whom nature was "boring", the world of repetition) to Nietzsche to Heidegger, all the different formulations on the impossibility of treating human consciousness on the model of mathematical physics (which is indeed impossible) took off from the assumption of dead nature, in which "life" had to appear not as Paracelsus' astrum in homine or Leibniz's vis vitae but as some "irrational" "vitalistic" force.

Nor should the reader get the impression that Renaissance- Reformation cosmobiology did not have political implications, as atomism and mechanism shaped the political thought of the Enlightenment. Its first and major political implication stems from the fact that it was decidely an ideology of "interregnum", appearing between the collapse of the medieval Holy Roman Empire and the consolidation of English capitalism and above all continental absolutism, both of which eradicated it everywhere. In a meaningful sense, the Renaissance and Reformation as a whole can be understood as an interregnum phenomena, but many other currents within them competed with what I call cosmobiology. These political implications were not as well articulated by its theoreticians as was the Enlightenment, partly because the concept of the "political" (itself recognized by Marx as an alienated separation) only autonomized itself later and partly because these movements, unlike the Enlightenment, were primarily of the lower classes, and thus were completely defeated, and their history mainly written by the victors. Their finest hours were the radical wing of the Reformation (essentially, the Anabaptists and their leader Thomas Münzer) and the radical wing of the English Revolution, the Levellers, Diggers and smaller sects. (Gerard Winstanley stands out as a spokesman for this milieu.) One only fully appreciates Newton's political meaning when one understands the importance of his tirades against these "enthusiasts", as they were called. Here it can be seen clearly that the English Enlightenment triumphed not merely by defeating reactionary Stuart absolutism but also by defeating radical currents to its left.

When the interregnum was over, ca. 1650, the radical social base of the "third stream" was socially and politically defeated, and the Enlightenment could begin, with its two contending models of English constitutional monarchy and French absolutism, the latter becoming the model for most of the continent. But left defenders of the Enlightenment, pass over in silence the fact that the Anglo-French Enlightenment triumphed over a radical as well as a reactionary rival, and always bore the markings that fact.

Stated briefly, the spirit of Marx's underlying world view is more truly the direct heir, the "realization" of the sensuousness of figures such as Shakespeare, the Brueghels and Paracelsus, than of any subsequent phase of the Anglo-French Enlightenment and its aftermath.

One might well ask what such a critique of the Enlightenment, from the vantage point of Renaissance-Reformation "cosmobiology" means today, in political terms.

What it means is this. From the French Revolution until the 1970's, the dominant currents of the Western left, and the movements it influenced in the colonial and post- colonial world, were indeed heirs of the Enlightenment. They were this because, in practice if not always in rhetoric, they inherited the tasks of completing the bourgeois revolution, tasks for which the Enlightenment, as the most advanced outlook of that revolution, was eminently suitable. First Social Democracy, from the 1860's onward, and then Stalinism, from the 1920's, took over a large part of the Enlightenment attitudes toward science, the state, technology, heavy industry, rationality, nature, a linear view of progress, philosophy and religion. That view was at bottom atomistic and mechanistic, even when dressed up as "dialectical materialism". Their statist development ideology and strategy was most successful in countries where no liberal bourgeoisie was strong enough to fight in its own name for the Enlightenment program against pre-capitalist social relations. Social Democracy and later Stalinism took over the full weight of Enlightenment statism of the continental variety. This was not surprising, since they gained influence mainly in the same backward countries in which Enlightenment statism had been successful, for essentially the same reasons. With the virtually universal spread of state bureaucracy for the century up to ca. 1975, whether in liberal democracy, Social Democracy, Stalinism or Third World nationalism, this Enlightenment ideology was rooted practically in a vast global stratum of middle-class state civil servants, whatever else they may have disagreed about. Not accidentally, their theory of history, when they felt they needed one, was articulated by the state civil servants par excellence Kant, Fichte and Hegel...

The international left is in crisis because it uncritically took over the Enlightenment, and thereby confused the tasks of the bourgeois revolution with those of the socialist revolution; the left's claims to fight for social emancipation got completely entwined with the state bureaucracy and civil service, which are irreducible obstacles to full social emancipation. There is nothing more to be done with the Enlightenment, taken by itself, because there is no more bourgeois revolution to make. There is also nothing more to be done with the Enlightenment view of nature, derived as it is from Newton's atomism and mechanism. The Enlightenment grasped in a one-sided way the impact of the natural environment on man but, lacking the idea of constitutive practice, has little to say in an era such as our own, so shaped by the problems of man's impact on the environment. This is not because, as the post-modernists say, Western science and technology are nothing but "domination", but because the unique role of humanity in the biosphere, its "species-being" to use Marx's term, was articulated not by the Enlightenment but by the "active side developed by idealism" as Marx put it in the "Theses on Feuerbach". The Enlightenment looked to Nature to underpin its abstract theories of Natural Man; it did not understand that human history constantly creates "new natures", and hence new "human natures", by its interraction with the biosphere.

The Foucaultian and Frankfurt School critics of the Enlightenment live off the impoverishment of the left by its extended romance with a one-sided appropriation of the Enlightenment, by the left's century-long confusion of the completion of the bourgeois revolution by state civil servants with socialism, and by the worldwide crackup of that project. The pre-Enlightenment, Renaissance-Reformation cosmobiology which passed through German idealism into Marx's species-being means even less to them than it does to figures such as Habermas. Yet the usual critique of them is undermined by the tacit agreement across the board that "nature is boring", i.e. the realm of mechanism, as Hegel, articulating the ultimate state civil servant view, cut off from practice in nature, said. Both sides of this debate still inhabit the separation of culture and nature, Geist and Natur, which came into existence through the Enlightenment's deflation of cosmobiology. It is the rehabilitation, in suitably contemporary form, of the outlook of Paracelsus and Kepler, not of Voltaire and Newton, which the left requires today for a (necessarily simultaneous) regeneration of nature, culture and society, out of Blake's fallen world of Urizen and what he called "single vision and Newton's sleep".

See also History and the Realization of the Collective Imagination: (http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/imagination.html) andMarxism and the Critique of Scientific Ideology (http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/physics.html) both of which are also very sharp.

And finally two more sources are the Theory of Decline Part 2 (http://www.geocities.com/aufheben2/auf_3_dec2.html) in the excellent Aufheben with good summaries of movements emphasizing the subjective elements of history (Socialism Or Barbarism, the SI & the Italian Autonomists), and the Marxist Philosophy of History (http://www.geocities.com/cordobakaf/history.html) by Castoriadis – if you go to the trouble of reading them I think you will get the point that the picture you have painted of Marx and later currents is one-sided and limiting – and that Marx's conception of history is far from the simplified charicature you've presented it as.

There is more here (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/index.htm) the index of Cyril Smith's writings but I have barely scratched the surface of reading them.

2
You said “Capitalism is not such a coherent entity. It is more like Debord's Spectacle...there is no Spectacular class. There is no equivalent to Marx's proletariat”. Come on Alistair. Thesis 114: “...The proletariat has not been eliminated. It remains irreducibly present within the intensified alienation of modern capitalism. It consists of that vast majority of workers who have lost all power over their lives and who, once they become aware of this, redefine themselves as the proletariat, the force working to negate this society from within...” You are really wide off the mark here. It simply isn't possible to understand situationist critique without reference to worker's struggles, to wildcat strikes and the occupations of factories, to urban riots and insurrections (which are understood as mass gut-level reactions to the domination of the commodity form), to the rejection of bourgeiois democracy, bureaucracy, trade unions, the Party or the State, and instead the setting up of worker's councils as the only viable form of revolutionary organization, located within the tradition of proletarian uprisings from the Paris Commune until May 68. (Maybe the most clear text on this matter is Vaneigem/Ratgeb's From Wildcat Strike to Total Self-Management) And all this in the context of a total revolution encompassing all of life (as subjective practical activity; the realization and suppression of art, religion, philosophy etc) and not in simple economistic-deterministic terms as in the “vulgar marxisms” of Kautsky, Lenin et al. Leaving this out of the situationist critique is essentially reductionism or rather recuperation and it is so typical of the english and american presentation of the SI today...

And “Marx's proletariat” is a pretty lazy term too since the proletariat was not some abstraction cooked up by Marx's imagination but the reality of the living conditions, activity and relations of the masses of people forced tosell their time and labour-power in order to survive; and also the reality that it was the same masses who reproduced the system and therefore had the actual power to change it if only they became aware of it, rebelled and organized. And while things are no doubt very different, people's jobs and living conditions are not the same today as then, the vast majority of people are still forced to labour for capital, and rising food and fuel prices are making things a lot harder. “Marx declared that the proletariat were the revolutionary class, not only on the basis of their objective role in the economy, but on the supposition that this objective role led to an objective "class consciousness" that would make them capable of overthrowing the system. But Gramsci pointed out that this "good sense" was overlaid with "common sense" which develops to keep individual working people docile, obedient, and in all other ways able to survive in actually-existing capitalism. I have argued on this blog that the technologies of promoting "common sense" have leapt ahead since Gramsci's day, with the powers of mass-media marketing and psychology. We need to make that quantum leap ourselves, or keep talking to ourselves forever.” (Doloras from Chaos Marxism)

3.
Magee I remember accuses Marx for secularizing Joachim's millenarianism, and you are doing the same thing interpreting Marx as “inevitabilizing the eschaton”. I had said “If Hegel imagined the end of history, revolutionary theory reinterprets it as the end of pre-history – a qualitative shift which is not an end-point but a new beginning.” This is consistent with Debord's Thesis 80 “The inversion carried out by Marx in order to “salvage” the thought of the bourgeois revolutions by transferring it to a different context does not trivially consist of putting the materialist development of productive forces in place of the journey of the Hegelian Spirit toward its eventual encounter with itself [Note that this is how you have presented it] — the Spirit whose objectification is identical to its alienation and whose historical wounds leave no scars. For once history becomes real, it no longer has an end. [!!!] Marx demolished Hegel’s position of detachment from events, as well as passive contemplation by any supreme external agent whatsoever. Henceforth, theory’s concern is simply to know what it itself is doing. In contrast, present-day society’s passive contemplation of the movement of the economy is an untranscended holdover from the undialectical aspect of Hegel’s attempt to create a circular system; it is an approval that is no longer on the conceptual level and that no longer needs a Hegelianism to justify itself, because the movement it now praises is a sector of a world where thought no longer has any place, a sector whose mechanical development effectively dominates everything. Marx’s project is a project of conscious history, in which the quantitativeness that arises out of the blind development of merely economic productive forces must be transformed into a qualitative appropriation of history. The critique of political economy is the first act of this end of prehistory: “Of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class itself.”

You had said “As Hobsbawm continues, a further step was taken by Karl Marx “who transferred the centre of gravity of the argument for socialism from its rationality or desirability to its historical inevitability”. Marx saw in history a series of 'inevitables' as each stage of social evolution lost its progressive edge as its internal contradictions became impossible to contain. Inevitably resistance to change created opposition which no less inevitably triumphed, eventually in turn collapsing itself into a crisis ... capitalism being the latest in this sequence of progress. But after the inevitable final crisis of capitalism, a stage of perfection would be reached, one containing no internal contradictions. Thus the driving force of history would end with the eternally inevitable triumph of socialism. But not just yet. Capitalism itself had to become fully fledged.” But where does Marx mention a stage of perfection containing no internal contradictions? Why the disinformation?

Again the same drift comes across in 138 “modern revolutionary hopes are not an irrational sequel to the religious passion of millenarianism. The exact opposite is true: millenarianism, the expression of a revolutionary class struggle speaking the language of religion for the last time, was already a modern revolutionary tendency, lacking only the consciousness of being historical and nothing more…The peasant class could achieve a clear consciousness neither of the workings of society nor of the way to conduct its own struggle, and it was because it lacked these prerequisites of unity in its action and consciousness that the peasantry formulated its project and waged its wars according to the imagery of an earthly paradise.” You didn't reply to this refutation (of the theory that revolutionary theory is simply misplaced/immanantized religious millenarianism) but instead got talking about the inevitability as it applies to the peasant class...

4
Like you I am uncomfortable with the positions of Marx that all societies must necessarily pass through capitalism in order to arrive at a liberation... at his most extreme Marx for example spoke in favour of the conquest and industrialization of North America (Will Bakhunin reproach the North-Americans for waging a 'war of conquest' which, of course, meant a severe blow to his theory based on 'justice and humanity', but which was carried out successfully to the advantage of civilization only? Or is it by chance that the wonderful California was snatched from the lazy Mexicans, who didn't know what to do with it? Is it a misfortune for the wonderful Yankees to exploit the gold mines there, to increase the means of transport, to make, in a few years, of the most appropriate coast of that peaceful ocean, a place with a high density of population and a busy trade, to build big cities, steamboat lines, a railway line from New-York to San Francisco, to really open for the first time the Pacific Ocean to civilization and, for the third time in history, give a new orientation to world trade? Neue Rheinische Zeitung, cited in Communism no. 7, April 1992) and in the Communist Manifesto the passages you quoted speak of the inevtability of capitalism and its antecedent communism. (I never liked the Manifesto or subscribed to it). There is a tendency in Marx & especially Engels to over-objectify and neglect the subjective. This is why it is silly to be simply a Marxist. But remember that even Engels would make clear “According to the materialistic conception of history, the production and reproduction of real life constitutes in the last instance the determining factor of history. Neither Marx nor I ever maintained more. Now when someone comes along and distorts this to mean that the economic factor is the sole determining factor, he is converting the former proposition into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase..Marx and I are partly responsible for the fact that at times our disciples have laid more weight upon the economic factor than belongs to it. We were compelled to emphasize this main principle in opposition; to our opponents who denied it, and there wasn’t always time, place and occasion to do justice to the other factors in the reciprocal interaction. But just as soon as it was a matter of the presentation of an historical chapter, that is to say, of practical application, things became quite different; there, no error was possible. Unfortunately it is only too frequent that a person believes he has completely understood a new theory and is capable of applying it when he has taken over its fundamental ideas – but it isn’t always true. And from this reproach I cannot spare many of the recent “Marxists”. They have certainly turned out a rare kind of tommyrot.” (Engels to Bloch 1890).

But what I did come across was Roads to Freedom or Did Marx Change His Mind (http://republicancommunist.org/articles/EL002/EL002Goupillot.html) following on from the sources on your Externalities posts. The author Bob Goupillot describes the late Marx (and not as I would have expected Marx in his youth) sympathetic to the Iroquis and understanding that western european style urban industrialization is not the only way towards the transcendence of capitalism and there are some books mentioned that look interesting – relevent also for the fact that the author is Scottish and it ties up with some of your concerns re peasantry and proletarianization.

5
As for the question of industrialization, when you said capitalism being a by-product of industrialization (the opposite of Marxist Theory) which I found so oversimplified... is there any other reasonable answer to this question than to reply that the two are in a dialectical relationship rather than simple cause and effect?? If 'science' is understood as an organized body of knowledge and 'technology' is its use to affect change in the environment, how can one divorce the development of industrial technology from the desires and needs of the artisans, merchants and scientists who undertook the task...Science was enlisted to generate more profits within the general climate of the bourgeois revolution and its materializing ideology, although the latter would not have been possible without the accompanying technological developments. I don't understand how you can claim this one-sided cause/effect relationship when, paradoxically, further up you gave such a good account of the conditions of trade and slavery etc which gave rise to the industrialization of the textiles industry...(“Europe's insatiable demand for sugar and tobacco drove the slave trade, which in turn stimulated Britain's industrial development through the production of trade goods and supplies for the slave plantations.” etc) Reading up on science and industrialization in this regard I gained a lot from Phil Meyler's And Yet It Moves (http://revoltagainstplenty.com/archive/global/andyetitmoves.html) as well as Goldner's essay on Scientific Ideology mentioned above.

6
Finally “Hegel's system brings the Absolute into being through magic words which evoke its shape. Eat your heart out Kenneth Grant! Was Crowley a very Young (unborn) Hegelian? Or did Hegel anticipate Thelema? Or perhaps a better analogy is with chaos magic – not what it has become, but what it had the potential to be before it was reduced to sigilisation. And Magee shows that Hegel was familiar with Kabbalistic thought.” What a disapointment this paragraph is! It's as if you feel forced to bring in some of the magic stuff in order to fit in with the rest of the blog only to end up sounding like a pastiche of your earlier self... is that the only way you can link these things up with magic? I would understand if you just failed to mention magic since you are a father in a small town where it is probably not wise to get into details of magical practice and get stigmatised etc, but since you are going to the trouble of mentioning it why not go further than these superficial platitudes?? There is so much more meat on this bone.

Chaos in Glasgow, Anarchy in the UK

2008-07-05T23:05:00.003+01:00

According to some commentators, if Labour lose the Glasgow East by-election, the United Kingdom will soon fall apart... The chances of Labour losing were increased when their chosen candidate failed to turn up for his selection meeting. Skeletons under the floorboards? This may be one...

From http://www.allmediascotland.com/media_releases/2952/eleven_glasgow_labour_councillors_under_investigation

Eleven Labour Glasgow City Councillors, including Councillor George Ryan, who last night suddenly pulled out of the contest to represent Labour in the crucial Glasgow East by-election, were reported to the Standards on 18 June 2008 in connection with a controversial land deal in the city centre.

The complaint surrounded their conduct in relation to the controversial attempt to close down the 150 year old Paddy’s Market in the city and obtain land on which the market is currently located.
The complaint which was submitted to the Standards Commission of Scotland by a representative of Paddy’s Market traders claimed that Councillor Ryan misled the council in a report he presented to the council’s Executive Committee which recommended the council purchase the head lease of the land where the market is situated and for the historic Paddy’s Market to be closed down.
The report which was presented by Councillor Ryan at a meeting on 20 March 2008, and subsequently led to the council’s endorsement of its recommendations, stated that the owners of the land had agreed to provide the lease at a reduced rate to the Council. However, the forty page complaint document submitted to the Standards Commission included information that clearly indicated that no such deal had been made with the council.

Councillor Ryan also faces investigation for other breaches of the Code of Conduct in relation to this matter along with ten other high profile Glasgow City Council Labour councillors including the Council leader, Steven Purcell.
Paddy’s Market representative, Brian Daly said:

“This market has been here for over 150 years, and my family has been trading here for three generations. The Labour councillors who are intent on closing us down have failed in their responsibilities as elected members to engage with us at any time in relation to this. They have, instead, chosen to make backroom decisions and bulldozer them through without any regard for the democratic process.
“The whole affair has been one of misrepresentation of the facts to the public, the media and to the council itself. We live in a democratic society yet, some of those who we trust to carry out duties on our behalf have chosen to make decisions and disregard the wishes of the electorate.
“Labour councillors refused to share vital information with other elected members from other political parties who also represent this area or include them in the vital stages of the decision making process. Instead there has been a sustained approach by some Labour councillors and council officials to make unsupported claims both in council and through the media locally in an attempt to gain public and council support for their project.
“Elected members who behave in such a way should and must be held fully accountable for their actions, and whilst it would be inappropriate for me to pre-empt the findings of the Standard Commission investigation, I believe the evidence against those Councillors involved is pretty damning. We won’t put up with the bully boy tactics of the council any longer. We very much look forward to the outcome of the investigation.”

For further information please contact Caroline Weintz – Fan Hitter PR on: 07717 326 919 or by email at caroline@fan-hitter.co.uk
Editors’ Notes
The other ten Labour councillors have been reported to the Standards Commission are: Councillor Steven Purcell – Council Leader
Councillor James Coleman – Deputy Leader of the Council
Councillor Aileen Colleran – Council Business Manager Councillor
Stephen Curran – City Treasurer
Bailie Gordon Matheson – local councillor for Paddy’s Market Bailie Hanzala Malik
Councillor Stephen Doran Councillor Archie Graham Councillor Ruth Simpson Councillor Shaukat Butt
The Code of Conduct for Councillors forms part of the Ethical Standards in Public Life etc. (Scotland) Act 2000
Paddy’s Market traders have submitted an alternative proposal to the landowners which, if accepted, would see them take over the head lease and to operate the facility on a community based co-operative system or trust. The Paddy’s proposal details how they will regenerate the area whilst maintaining the current market community. It also places a strong emphasis on community involvement and social inclusion plans which would ensure that it continued to assist people from all walks of life.
Contact: Caroline Weintz
Phone: 07717 326 919
Email: caroline@fan-hitter.co.uk
Website: http://www.fan-hitter.co.uk

Externalities Part 2

2008-06-25T22:13:00.000+01:00

Externalities part 2

There may be no internal contradictions, but there are some external Absolutes up against which we are bumping. They are the finite nature of geological reserves of oil, coal and natural gas, and the chemical and thermodynamic consequences of the emission of greenhouse gases and the impact on climate.

Which is as far as I had got with part 1 before hitting a 'can't save' problem so had to copy and paste to blog.

I had been speculating that Hegel's Science of Logic was an early version of an artificial intelligence program, one which resolved the problems with such projects George Dyson had explored in Darwin Amongst the Machines. Indeed, Hegel moves beyond artificial intelligence to show how, through time as history, the mechanical interaction of binary opposites (Being and Nothing, 1 and 0) can give rise to a self-aware/ self-conscious intelligence. What Dyson achieves is to show how various attempts to create artificial intelligence and artificial life can help us to realise that natural processes possess similar 'intelligence', that there is an evolutionary intelligence which operates not through design, but through countless sequences of trial and error.

I then suggested that if Debord's Spectacle rather than Marx's Capitalism was a more accurate description of social reality then it was effectively an evolutionary dead end, lacking the internal contradictions which Marx (following Hegel's logic) argued would inevitably push the system beyond its limits, thus triggering a crisis which could only be resolved by the proletariat fulfilling its historic destiny....

I also suggested that industrialisation rather than capitalism was the revolution which happened between 1750 and 1850, capitalism being a by-product of industrialisation (the opposite of Marxist theory). And I threw in a section on Alan Turing and the evolution of the Colossus computer in WW2 as a form of collective artificial intelligence.

This last example is relevant here. It was the external threat posed by Nazi Germany which pushed the British state to mobilise its resources as efficiently as possible – a necessity driven by survival.

One outcome was the rapid evolution of an artificial intelligence system in which electro-mechanical, mathematical and human resources were combined into a single system. One significant output was that Alan Turing's mathematical and theoretical model for a computer was actualised.

The nuclear bomb was another such outcome.

The challenge posed by these externalities is undisputed (even the climate change sceptics now accept its reality, even if they believe it is a natural rather than human created problem). But what should be the response? UK prime minster Gordon Brown has suggested 1000 nuclear power stations will be needed to combat greenhouse gas emissions and reduce dependency on oil. The use of genetically modified crops and other similar technical fixes is also proposed.

Yet if it was the process of industrialisation which has got us into this mess, can even more of the same get us out of it ? What we have hit are the limits of that process, limits which are external yet reveal a set of internal contradictions which the Spectacular reconfiguration of Marx's capitalism has until now homogenised. One such contradiction is between the Enlightenment belief in the perfectability of nature ( which includes traditional human societies as being in a state of nature) and the somewhat imperfect results – results which have been incredibly destructive and disruptive.

What if, to follow Dyson's line of thought, there is a 'natural' intelligence having a structural similarity to 'artificial' intelligence, and which is embedded/ embodied in the physical world? If so, then is it not possible that traditional (pre-Enlightenment) human societies, which had demonstrated their sustainable credentials by surviving within the external limits imposed by local or regional ecosystems, exhibited collective intelligence rather than the stupidity alleged by enlightened improvers? Suggesting a dialectical process – natural intelligence > enlightened intelligence > ecological intelligence.

Since enlightened / industrial intelligence emerged out of 'natural' intelligence, this would also be a process of re-integration. A synthesis. To add a science fictional or Dysonesque element, some inclusion of artificial intelligence (as itself an output of enlightened/ industrial intelligence) may be necessary to manage the constantly fluctuating electrical output of wind, wave and solar energy sources...

Could a synthesis between Hegel's Absolute and Lovelock's Gaia thus emerge?

Externalities

2008-06-25T18:21:00.001+01:00

Inevitablising the Eschaton or how to Immanentise the Absolute

Working to finish off the first draft of my Galloway Levellers research project I have been turning over some questions posed by Noisy Sphinx.¹ I have also been trying to work out what, if anything, I can conclude from the research project. This is quite important since one possible output from the project is a book. If it is to become a book, it would be useful to find a contemporary theme or themes since an academic study of an obscure period in the the history of an obscure region of Scotland is unlikely to appeal to many readers. Richard Oram has written a fascinating and detailed study of medieval Galloway ² but it is a wee bit intimidating for most folk.

What I would like to do is write something which is more accessible. One possibility is to make a link to Robert Burns. In July 1793, Burns and his friend John Syme did a tour of Galloway, or at least the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright and I have found that they visited in several places with Galloway Leveller associations and met people with family links to the Levellers – Gordon of Kenmure, Murray of Cally, Heron of Kirroughtrie and the Earl of Selkirk ( Basil Hamilton's grandson.) Syme claimed that Burns was inspired to wrote Scots wha hae whilst walking over the hills from Airds of Kells/ Boat of Rhone to Gatehouse of Fleet. This claim is disputed. It is more likely that Burns got the idea for Scots wha hae in July, but wrote the finished text in Dumfries in August 1793.³ Although looking backwards to Robert the Bruce and Bannockburn, Scots wha hae

was no less inspired by the French Revolution. One of Burns' close friends was Dr William Maxwell who had been closely involved in the events and been present at the execution of Louis XVI.

From a different angle, Burns can be connected to the Galloway Levellers as the 'improving' tenant farmer of Ellisland farm near Dumfries. Most significantly, after trying and failing to improve Ellisland as an arable farm, Burns introduced Ayrshire cattle and, with the help of his wife, tried to run it as a dairy farm. This attempt also failed, but it was a revolutionary innovation. In the 19^th century, the Ayrshire style of dairy farming replaced arable farming as the main type of farming in lowland Dumfries and Galloway – as it remains to this day.

At the same time that Burns was struggling to make a go of improved farming at Ellisland, the son of a Galloway hill farmer was having more success as a cotton manufacturer in Manchester. This was John Kennedy who came from Knocknalling farm on the edge of the Rhinns of Kells ( a range of hills rising to 2600 feet on the Stewartry/ Ayrshire border). In 1778, Kennedy had moved south to Chowbent ( or Atherton) near Preston to work for William Cannan (or Cannon) who himself was from Galloway and was a millwright/ carpenter. ⁴ By 1791, Kennedy had moved to Manchester and in that year established the first successful steam powered cotton mill there. Kennedy went on to help create the Liverpool and Manchester Railway and was one of the judges at the Rainhill Trials, won by George and Robert Stephenson's Rocket. Kennedy was a friend of both James Watt and George Stephenson. The Murray brothers, who also came from the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, were contemporary Manchester cotton manufacturers. In Liverpool, Wellwood Maxwell, again from the Stewartry (and whose grandfather John Maxwell was an eye-witness to the Levellers actions), was a cotton trader and an early supporter of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.

The steam powered industrialisation of Manchester and Liverpool overwhelmed attempts to create the water powered industrialisation of Galloway by James Murray of Gatehouse of Fleet, William Douglas of Castle Douglas and others. By the 1840s, when the New Statistical Account of Scotland was being written, it had become clear that the enthusiasm for improvement through manufacturing industry noted in the Old (1790s) Statistical Accounts for parishes in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright had passed. It had become clear that the region's future lay with agriculture rather than manufacturing.

Was this an inevitable outcome?

This is the critical question. It is a question which is of acute contemporary and practical importance. A question which gets to the heart of 'progress is the enemy'...

When John Kennedy succeeded in 1791 where Richard Arkwright had failed ⁵ in 1780 and harnessed the power of fossil fuel powered technology( a steam engine) to the spinning of cotton, an industrial revolution was born.⁶ This revolution had been gestating since 1750 when Abraham Darby III of Coalbrookdale had begun the large scale smelting of iron using coke rather than charcoal – an innovation first perfected in 1706 by his grandfather. Other innovations, like James Watts' development of a thermally efficient steam engine, of the mechanisation of cotton spinning, the application of steam power to land and sea transport and the civil engineering skills of canal and road builders laid the foundations for this revolution, but it was the meteoric rise of the cotton industry which lit the touch paper.

But what lay behind this meteoric growth, behind the huge plumes of smoke and carbon dioxide which first began rising up from John Kennedy's Manchester factory in 1791?

In 1765 the British government purchased the fiscal rights of the Isle of Man from the Duke of Atholl, ostensibly to end the smuggling trade but in reality reacting to pressure from influential members of the English East India Company which was suffering competition with Dutch East India Company goods which were available on the island. The Liverpool Guinea trade had benefited greatly from its proximity to the Isle of Man – one of the main reasons why Liverpool became the principal slave trading port in Europe. After 1765 the Guinea merchants were forced to purchase their cargoes in London. This provided an incentive to develop British versions of the East Indian cloths that composed a high percentage of the Guinea cargoes. By the end of the eighteenth century Manchester and other places in the north-west of England were producing cotton and other cloths for the slave trade.⁷

Europe's insatiable demand for sugar and tobacco drove the slave trade, which in turn stimulated Britain's industrial development through the production of trade goods and supplies for the slave plantations. When the Isle of Man was no longer a source of cheap (because tax free / smuggled) Indian cottons, a market for cheap UK produced substitutes emerged. However, as Hobsbawm⁸ noted, the existing UK woollen and linen could not be expanded rapidly enough to meet this demand. The UK farming industry was still 'traditional', was only beginning to under go its agricultural revolution. The situation in America was very different. There cotton production could be rapidly increased using slave labour on land from which the indigenous inhabitants could easily be removed. The result was a viciously explosive cycle of exploitation. The more slaves that were needed to produce the cheap cotton, the more cheap cotton that was needed to trade for and cloth the slaves. As the cost of production went down, the cheap cottons were then exported to India whilst imports of Indian cotton were hit by huge tariffs,leading to the collapse of the India cotton industry which fed the demand for more slave produced cotton.⁹

The weak point in this cycle was the manufacturing process. The existing small scale home cotton industry, which had developed out of the linen industry, could not keep up with the huge volumes of cotton arriving in Liverpool. This stimulated technological improvement and the development of the factory system. Spinning was the first process to be industrialised, then weaving. The time lag led to the impoverishment of the hand-loom weavers whose numbers and prosperity had grown whilst spinning alone had been industrialised, but who then could not compete once factory based mechanical weaving became possible.

Once set in motion, this juggernaut proved unstoppable. Although the Bridgewater canal was built to carry coal to Manchester in 1761, as explained above, the coal was not yet used to power cotton mills. The first cotton mills were water powered. The canal system was later extended to carry cotton from Liverpool to Manchester (other canals were also built, especially around Birmingham), but once the steam powered cotton factories began to dominate, the need to create a more efficient transport system led to the building of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Railways had been developed in coal mining areas like north east England as a cheaper alternative to canals. The development of railways stimulated the iron industry, as did the development of steam powered iron ships. The cotton the railways and steam ships carried was still being produced by slaves in the southern USA until the 1860s.

Progress?

There was only one Weltanschauung of major significance...the triumphant rationalist, humanist, 'Enlightenment' of the eighteenth century. Its champions believed firmly (and correctly) that human history was an ascent, rather than a decline or an undulating movement about a level trend. They could observe that man's scientific knowledge and technical control over nature increased daily. They believed that human society and individual man could be perfected by the same application of reason, and were destined to be so perfected by history. On these points bourgeois liberals and revolutionary proletarian socialists were at one.¹⁰

As this 'ideology of progress' was developed after 1789, the paths of bourgeois liberals and revolutionary proletarian socialists diverged. As Hobsbawm continues, a further step was taken by Karl Marx “who transferred the centre of gravity of the argument for socialism from its rationality or desirability to its historical inevitability”. Marx saw in history a series of 'inevitables' as each stage of social evolution lost its progressive edge as its internal contradictions became impossible to contain. Inevitably resistance to change created opposition which no less inevitably triumphed, eventually in turn collapsing itself into a crisis ... capitalism being the latest in this sequence of progress. But after the inevitable final crisis of capitalism, a stage of perfection would be reached, one containing no internal contradictions. Thus the driving force of history would end with the eternally inevitable triumph of socialism. But not just yet. Capitalism itself had to become fully fledged.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. ¹¹

The Communist Manifesto was written 160 years ago. The inevitable has been delayed. Capitalism may yet collapse beneath the weight of its internal contradictions, but it seems more likely it will grind to a halt or rather seize up before then through the external contradictions of peak oil plus global warming. Or is this confusing industrialisation with capitalism? Not if the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the means of production. Without industrialisation there would have been no capitalist revolution. The capitalist revolution was the industrial revolution. Slavery was a necessary starting condition for industrialisation, but it was the exploitation of coal and then oil which secured the revolution. Georgian Britain emulated the classical splendour of ancient Rome and achieved a similar level of development. Victorian Britain was like no other human society, was something new and without parallel.

But was the change from the Britain of 1750 to that of 1850 an inevitable process, an inevitable progress? How contingent was the change? What if there had been no break with the north American colonies in 1776? No break, no war of independence. No war of independence, no need for the French state to nearly bankrupt itself supporting the Americans and so no need to try and raise the taxes which triggered the French Revolution...

There is no inevitability about history. No historical absolutes. It is relativity all the way down. So where did Marx get the idea from? The notion of 'historical inevitability' came from Hegel. But Hegel's ideas about history had been influenced by the French Revolution and the rise to power of a world-historical individual- Napoleon. Hegel was also influenced by the gnosticism of the hermetic tradition.

We can now already glimpse the end of Hegelian philosophy in its beginning. In Absolute Knowledge the drive to totally grasp the object, and to annul the subject-object distinction, will be realised. Absolute Knowledge will be the total grasp of an individual in its uniqueness. In fact it will be be the total grasp of the only true, unique individual there is: the Absolute...in Hegel's thought substance has become subject: “what seems to happen outside of [the self], to be an activity directed against it, is really its own doing, and substance shows itself to be essentially Subject.” Knowledge of this individual is simultaneously self-knowledge.¹²

Marx is supposed to have removed all such mystical speculations before applying Hegelian theory to revolutionary practice, but if Hegel's system is occult in its origin and in its totality, how practical was this? Could Marxism be a type of advanced mystification and not revolutionary at all? An Enlightenment version of a millenarian / apocalyptic cult, a secular version of the contemporary protestant sectarians and expansionist Islam Hobsbawm talks about.¹³ Which would make Marxism an attempt ' inevitablise the eschaton' rather than immantetise it. But the end days are both always with us and ever delayed.

At this point I could, perhaps should, elaborate on the 'Hegel was an occult philosopher/ punk magician' theme before moving on to Neil Davidson's defence of inevitability as applied to 18^th century Scotland. I will cheat a bit by sampling Magee's text at page 93.

Hegel's system is a complete conceptual speech about the whole, but it is not merely a network of abstract concepts. Instead it takes the form of a concrete totality...Hegel defines philosophy as the “actual knowledge of what truly is”... it is the totality of the system that gives us this reality. Every “provisional definition of the Absolute” within the system, that is every category, must fall short because no one category can express all of what the Absolute is. Thus, the system does not describe the absolute, it gives form to the Absolute itself. Hegel's philosophy does not tell us what Substance or the Absolute is (in the manner, for instance, of Aristotle), it brings the Absolute into being. Why? Because it is through speculation that the Idea becomes for-itself, that “God” achieves self-awareness and thus completion. This complete or actualised divine is the Absolute.

Every individual is a blind link in the chain of absolute necessity, along which the world develops. Every individual can raise himself to domination over a great length of this chain only if he realises the goal of this great necessity and, by virtue of this knowledge, learns to speak the magic words which evoke its shape. The knowledge of how to simultaneously absorb and elevate oneself beyond the total energy of suffering and antithesis that has dominated the world and all forms of its development for thousands of years – this knowledge can be developed from philosophy alone.

The magic words are the categories of Hegelian philosophy. The magic power is dialectic guided by recollection....access to this power is through a form of imagination.¹⁴

Hegel's system brings the Absolute into being through magic words which evoke its shape. Eat your heart out Kenneth Grant!¹⁵ Was Crowley a very Young (unborn) Hegelian? Or did Hegel anticipate Thelema? Or perhaps a better analogy is with chaos magic – not what it has become, but what it had the potential to be before it was reduced to sigilisation. And Magee shows that Hegel was familiar with Kabbalistic thought.¹⁶

But back to the inevitability of progress through capitalism.

The notion that capitalism was unnecessary for development has enjoyed a degree of popularity among radicals, but it is important to understand the implications of this position. The theory of uneven and combined development has certain political implications in the imperialist epoch of capitalist development which began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Broadly these are that states in the underdeveloped world can, given certain conditions, overleap the stages of capitalist development to that of socialism. Two of these conditions were that a world capitalist economy already existed and that, through participation in this economy, a working class had been brought into being in the underdeveloped world which could act as the agent of revolutionary change. This is not what the aforementioned radicals are proposing. Far from the dominance of the capitalist mode of production being a necessary precondition of socialism at the international level, the entire capitalist system, from its genesis in Europe during the sixteenth century, is said to have acted as what Immanuel Wallerstein calls a 'virus' infecting other- presumably healthy- societies and preventing them developing in alternative ways. I regard this veiw as being profoundly mistaken, but for the purpose of this argument, th point is that it is impossible for Marxists to accept.

The expansion of the productive forces brought about by capitalism has been a necessary but insufficient condition for the ultimate goal of human liberation. Necessary, because without it there will be neither a working class to seize power from the capitalists, not a sufficient level of material resources with which to feed, clothe, house or educate the world's population. Insufficient because unless the working class is conscious and organised it will not succeed in achieving its revolutionary potential.¹⁷

The reason Davidson is so keen to stress the necessity of progress through capitalism (how ever bloody and barbaric) was that in the 1990s some Scottish socialists had tried to chart just such an alternative (Scottish) path to socialism. Marxist orthodoxy held that the Union of Scotland and England in 1707 was a necessary (and inevitable) development. Thus the bourgeoisie revolution had to be imposed from above on an underdeveloped Scotland. Marx himself had used the Highland Clearances in Capital Volume 1 as an example of how capitalism forced rural labourers people off the land and into cities where they became the urban proletariat. Some Scottish socialists objected to this argument. Davidson agreed, arguing that by the time the Highland Clearances, capitalism was already fully fledged and so the Clearances were not an inevitable necessity. Unlike Culloden.

Davidson argues that the battle of Culloden was a necessary part of a 'bourgeoisie revolution from above' which had to be imposed on the Scots since they were incapable of eliminating feudalism on their own. There could not have been an alternative 17^th century Scottish 'revolution from below' since the historical forces necessary did not exist then. Only after 1707 could the Scottish 'revolution from above' happen. Emancipation and Liberation, the journal of the Scottish Republican Communist platform of the Scottish Socialist Party (pre Tommy Sheridan sex scandal) gave extensive coverage to this debate.¹⁸ There is also a connection to the Galloway Levellers, since Allan Armstrong (one of the 'radicals' Davidson has to correct for deviation from Marxist orthodoxy) invoked them as an example of Scotland's radical tradition and Davidson includes them in Discovering the Scottish Revolution¹⁹ - but as an example of a 'peasant insurrection'.

Were the Galloway Levellers 'peasants' ? From my research, I have concluded they were not. There were no peasants in Galloway and there hadn't been since 1455, when the Douglas Lordship of Galloway was forfeited to the Scottish Crown. What there were in 1724 were several hundred owner-occupier farmers who worked their farms in partnership ('half-manner' ²⁰ ) with several hundred tenant farmers, supported by 3 or 4000 cottars and crofters who were also trade or craft workers – smiths, masons, tailors, weavers, dysters, cobblers, millwrights and the like. There were also about 50 'heritors' who owned estates of half a dozen or more farms and one or two who owned more than 20 farms. These farms were bought, sold, mortgaged and leased back. Although some farms stayed with the same family for several generations, others changed hands with bewildering rapidity. Tenants and cottars were also used to moving from farm to farm. They were not fixed or tied to any particular plot of land, nor did they have a 'feudal' relationship with the land holders.

I am still working on the pattern of land holding, having provisionally identified 593 individuals claiming to be landowners (out of 2887 named individuals ) between 1659-1674 and 696 (out of 3770 named individuals) for the period 1675 -1700 in Volumes I and II of the Kirkcudbright Sheriff Court Deeds.

Back to Hegel

I am not quite sure how he does it, but in Chapter One of Science of Logic²¹ manages to show that Being is in fact Nothing and that Nothing is altogether the same as pure Being. I wonder if the same or similar logic can equate Absolute with Relative? It would be a rather neat way of not answering Noisy Sphinx. How could it be done? What if Absolute has the qualities of being fixed and unmoving. And Relative has the qualities of being fluid and in motion. Thinking in pictures – which Hegel frowned on – I see the Galloway river Dee flowing down from its source at Loch Dee below the granite of the Dungeon Hills to Solway Firth beyond Kirkcudbright. Which is the fixed and which is the fluid in this landscape?

The river would seem the more fluid and the rocks the fixed, yet through time the river remains the constant, the Absolute whilst the rocks are worn away or fractured by ice and so are Relative. To think with more pictures, the Absolute must be a totality, the totality. The picture is of the entire universe as a single flawless crystal, timeless, eternal. The counter image would be of a sea of indeterminacy, the quantum foam or ocean, a shimmering mist where (if I have grasped the physics correctly) virtual sub-atomic particles flicker in and out of existence. The synthesis would be that what appears from outside as the single flawless (undivided) eternal crystal is the shimmering mist when viewed from inside. But this picture-image itself breaks down since there can be no position outside of the Absolute, outside of space/time from which to observe its external appearance. Any such observation must be that of an observer ( a spectator?) existing within the Absolute and so must be Relative, that is partial and provisional, subjective rather than objective.

This brings us back to Hegel:

Every “provisional definition of the Absolute” within the system, that is every category, must fall short because no one category can express all of what the Absolute is. Thus, the system does not describe the absolute, it gives form to the Absolute itself. Hegel's philosophy does not tell us what Substance or the Absolute is (in the manner, for instance, of Aristotle), it brings the Absolute into being. Why? Because it is through speculation that the Idea becomes for-itself, that “God” achieves self-awareness and thus completion.²²

Compare this with Descartes, who said

. - Archimedes, that he might transport the entire globe from the place it occupied to another, demanded only a point that was firm and immovable; so, also, I shall be entitled to entertain the highest expectations, if I am fortunate enough to discover only one thing that is certain and indubitable.²³

which originally came from Plutarch:

Archimedes, however, in writing to King Hiero, whose friend and near relation he was, had stated that given the force, any given weight might be moved, and even boasted, we are told, relying on the strength of demonstration, that if there were another earth, by going into it he could remove this.

Without a firm and immovable point, there can be no leverage. A Galloway Leveller standing in a boggy spot would be unable to throw down a dyke, would just sink into the bog no matter how big a lever she or he was using. (The dyke itself would sink into the bog though.) Now back to Descartes. Descartes, and all other philosophers up until Hegel, believed that a fixed point, a solid foundation for their speculations must exist, requiring only to be discovered through hard thinking. Once the solid ground was found, all else would logically follow and reason would drain the swamp of superstition and irrationality so it would become fertile ground. The Honourable Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture (discussed previously in my Galloway Levellers texts) were very keen on draining bogs to create fertile fields, although the ultimate solution had to await the creation of tile drains.²⁴

As Magee shows, Hegel rejected this approach. There was no Absolute firm and fixed point 'out there' waiting to be discovered and described, rather the Absolute was an emergent property of the process or system itself. This is very interesting. Although I have wrestled with Hegel's texts, I am taking Magee on trust for this point. Assuming Magee is correct, this gives a convergence with George Dyson's Darwin Amongst the Machines²⁵ which is a study of artificial intelligence in computers. This is a very fraught area, full of bold claims which have yet to be substantiated. Dyson gets around the problem by suggesting that rather than compare computer generated intelligence with human intelligence (which shows up the computers as pretty dumb) the comparison should be made between the 'intelligence' of computers and the 'intelligence' of natural/ evolutionary systems through the emergence of complexity out of simplicity. Computers are very good at number crunching, running through billions of simple binary (0,1) equations to reach a stable result through trial and error. The output of evolution is similar, running through billions of minor mutations to reach a stable result.

Hegel's Science of Logic starts with a piece of binary code – Being (1) and Nothing (0) then runs the program through 800 pages of variations on this theme to conclude with 'self-comprehension'. Unfortunately Dyson does not consider Hegel in his text, but I suggest Hegel could be read within Dyson's context as showing how 'intelligence' as self- comprehension (self-awareness, self-consciousness) can emerge out of a a mechanical/biological system.

Pause for thought. Could this mean that Hegel's Absolute is equivalent to an artificial intelligence? To William Gibson's 'Wintermute'?²⁶ And what about Marx?Where does he fit in? To continue with the computer/ artificial intelligence metaphor, then with his Science of Logic Hegel achieved the equivalent of Alan Turing's 1936 paper On computable numbers which led to the construction of actual computers during WW2.²⁷ But the actual computer (called Colossus ) was only part of a massive organisation employing 10 000 mainly female workers. It was this organisation, which in turn relied on the British state's mobilisation of the resources of the whole country and empire, that was the artificial intelligence which successfully decoded and made sense of the German codes. But capitalism is not such a coherent entity. It is more like Debord's Spectacle. The Spectacle is not controlled and directed by Spectaclists, there is no Spectaclism, there is no Spectacular class. There is no equivalent to Marx's proletariat. The Spectacle a swamp of Relativity in which there are no fixed or Absolute points, no internal contradictions to provide the leverage which would overturn it, bring about its antithesis.

Externalities

1See previous blog entries

2Oram : The Lordship of Galloway : 2000

3Snyder: The Life of Robert Burns : 1932, McIntyre: Dirt and Deity, A life of Robert Burns : 1995

4 www.ancoatsbpt.co.uk/docs/AJwinter05.pdf ,www.electricscotland.com/hiStory/other/fairbairn_william.htm and Trotter : East Galloway Sketches:1902: 333-342

5http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/T/timeteam/2006_manc.html

6Hobsbawm: The Age Of Revolution, Europe 1789-1848: 1962

7Wilkins : Dumfries & Galloway and the Transatlantic Slave Trade: 2007 : 33

8Hobsbawm: Age of Revolutions :1962

9Williams : Capitalism and Slavery : 1944, Blackburn: The Making of New World Slavery : 1997

10Hobsbawm: Age of Revolutions: 1962, - 1973 edition: 286

11Marx : Communist Manifesto :1848

12Magee: Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition : 2001 : 141

13Hobsbawm: 1962/ 1973 : Ch. 12. Ideology: Religion

14Magee: 2001: 93, including central quote from Rosenktanz: G.F.W. Hegels Leben :1944: 141

15Kenneth Grant former Outer Head of the Typhonian OrdoTempli Orientis , disciple of E.A. 'Aleister' Crowley and author of the seven part 'Typhonian trilogy'.

16Magee: 2001 :167

17Davidson: Discovering the Scottish Revolution 1692-1746 : 2003: 299

18 http://republicancommunist.org/journalsindex.html

19Davidson: 2003 : 216- 220

20 http://www.dsl.ac.uk/ as 'half-manure'

21Miller (trans) : Hegel's Science of Logic : 1969 : 82

22Magee: 2001: 93

23 http://www.math.nyu.edu/~crorres/Archimedes/Lever/LeverQuotes.html for this and following.

24See http://www.genevahistoricalsociety.com/Johnston.htm

25Dyson: Darwin Amongst the Machines: 1997

26Gibson :Neuromancer :1984

27http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/