Historical materialism and the calculation problem

Over at A Trivial Knot, the socialism dicussion has turned to the calculation problem and the problem of incentives. I think looking too closely at mechanisms and analytic optimality is at best a red herring.

The economic calculation problem is intractable. Given a sufficiently complex economy, it is not possible in real time to determine even approximately the optimal production, distribution, and consumption of tradable goods and services. Worse yet, even if we have a well-defined and universally agreed-upon objective function, we can tell which of two outcomes is better or worse, but we cannot tell which of two outcomes is "closer to" or "farther away from" the optimum — it is not necessarily the case that the better outcome is closer to the optimum. As any student of calculus knows, a local maximum might be far away from the global maximum.

The calculation problem is intractable even given an objective function; the calculation problem becomes completely irrelevant if we do not have such an objective function, when, as Hayek asserts, "society cannot agree on its most basic ends."

But chasing such an intractable, ill-defined optimum is a fool's errand. People and societies do not actually agree upon some ideal outcome and then define, calculate, and then implement the means to achieve that outcome. What we really do is resolve immediate, concrete conflicts in specific contingent, historical, material contexts. Individuals do this, societies do this, and both an individual and a society is just the accumulated outcomes of all the conflicts thus resolved. It might be fun to speculate on some theoretical ideal and invent castles in the air to exemplify that ideal, and there's no harm and perhaps some value to doing so. But actual social change over time necessarily becomes dominated by the resolution of real conflicts.

The fundamental problem with capitalism is not its mechanisms — money, the price system, the profit motive, income and wealth inequality — and the solution is not some alternative mechanisms — social credit, central planning, the altruistic motive, enforced equality. Solving the fundamental problems will certainly entail new sets of mechanisms, but the specific mechanisms are not the real issue.

We get closer to the fundamental problem of capitalism by observing that rich people make all the important decisions, influenced only slightly if at all by the general welfare. Naturally, their first priority is always that they retain decision-making power.

Closer still, rich people took over decision-making power because 18th and 19th century industrialization favored rich people making decisions. The wealthy capitalists were able to resolve conflicts that the feudal/monarchical ruling class of that era was unable to resolve.

We know from empirical evidence, e.g. the Great Depression and the Global Financial Crisis, that the capitalist class is unable to resolve certain conflicts within capitalism. The professional-managerial class (PMC) temporarily took over decision-making power because the economic conditions of mid-20th century financial capitalism favored them making decisions. The PMC was able to resolve conflicts that the capitalist class was unable to resolve. The PMC did not, however, decisively resolve those conflicts in the same way the capitalists were able to decisively resolve the conflicts of feudalism, and their own inability to resolve conflicts led to a capitalist resurgence.

Now we face a new set of conflicts, conflicts that neither the PMC nor the capitalist class seem able to address, including but not limited to global warming, wealth and income inequality, the precarious economic state of the working and lower professional classes which seems destined to descend into outright immiseration.

Assuming humanity does not simply become extinct, we will resolve these conflicts, because we must. The specific way we resolve these conflicts, the institutions we adapt or create to systematize these resolutions, and the historically contingent path we take to a systematic resolution, will be our future society.

I want to emphasize that we (should) resist capitalism not because we do not want capitalist resolutions to these conflicts, but because capitalists cannot resolve these conflicts and still remain capitalists. (And if the capitalists can resolve these conflicts, they had better get busy, because their time is running out.)

The issue is not what we might do a 1000 years from now in a communist utopia. The question is what we do today to solve the conflicts of today. Theory is useful, but only insofar as it informs our resolutions of today's conflicts, and how we use the resolutions to advance the cause of human liberty.

Some specific advice, seems warranted. Modern Monetary Theory is interesting not because it is some groundbreaking revolution in economic thought (it's not, but that's OK; even Marx was just a "third-rate Ricardian"), but because it brings front and center a truth economists push to the background and that capitalists must fight with every fiber of their beings to deny, that money is a creation of the people, it belongs to the people, and it is a tool for the people — not the capitalists — to get what they want. Nobody can have everything, and very little is obtainable without effort, but there is a vast difference between "we cannot have this or that," and "with sufficient effort, we can have it."

We can, for more concrete examples, have the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, zero involuntary unemployment etc. We will have to work for it, just like we have to work for everything. Indeed, the idea that we can have these things for "free" is not only untrue, but undermines these programs. Hence the assertion that these are "free" comes from opponents, not supporters. All supporters say is that they are possible, which they are. As Stephanie Kelton says, "If it's technically feasible, it's financially feasible."

Money is just the social permission to act. When opponents complain that we cannot afford this or that, they are saying that those who presently have the money forbid us from working for it. And our response must be, "Fuck you. We don't need your permission." The only question is when we will develop the will and power to take what we need; eventually we must, if only out of desperate immiseration.

Historical materialism

The scenario imagined not only by the right but by some on the left starts with a good-enough society. There are real problems, some of them quite serious, but on the whole most people are working, eating, having fun, raising families, not rioting in the streets. But the socialists condemn this society as profoundly immoral. So they recruit a few hundred people, and get some guns. They storm the capital, arrest and imprison (or worse) the government, and install themselves as the new government. They then impose a more moral society on the recalcitrant population. Which, of course, completely fails, making society worse off than it was before.

The paradigmatic "real-world" narrative is, of course, the Russian Revolution. Russia has some real problems, some of them quite serious: notably, they are doing quite poorly in WW I under the Kerensky government. However, they are a functioning society. Lenin, however, after being infected by the Marxist brain worm, decides that he cannot tolerate the immorality of Russia's burgeoning capitalism. He assembles and arms a few hundred Bolsheviks, arrests the Kerensky government, and imposes Communism on the recalcitrant Russian people. A successful defense against a Western invasion, conquering an empire starting with only wood for fuel, becoming a nuclear power, developing a somewhat successful space program notwithstanding, Russia under Lenin and his successors starts off a complete failure and only deteriorates from there, proving that anything other than laissez-faire capitalism can do nothing but doom society to poverty and misery.

For those of you who unable to detect the creeping sarcasm, the above is complete and total bullshit. The first paragraph does not represent how any social change, much less a social change to socialism, actually happens. The second paragraph is not at all how the Russian Revolution happened.

There's another scenario: human society is making progress. Not any old progress (which is just the trivially true change over time), but a certain kind of progress. Our society today is better than it was 100 years ago, and that society was better than it was 500 years ago, which was it was a 1000 years ago, and so on. The progress has not been linear of course; there have been interregna and backsliding, but overall society has been progressing. We are not yet at an ideal society, but we are closer than we were. And progress towards an ideal society might be asymptotic, but we should be closer still in another century.

This scenario too is bullshit, albeit more subtle bullshit. There's no objective way to evaluate any society. Most of us like our own society because it's the society we were indoctrinated as children to like. And, of course, those of us with privilege like our society because we have privilege; therefore, we believe we deserve privilege, and it would be an injustice to lose that privilege to those less deserving. We see our society as closer to the ideal than any other kind of society just because it is what we actually have, not because it actually is closer to some mythic ideal.

Historical Materialism

Marx himself believed his great contribution to the world of ideas was not class struggle (Smith and Ricardo precede him) but the idea of historical materialism, which hardly anyone really understands or takes seriously. I take historical materialism seriously. I'm not sure I myself understand it, but I will share my thoughts anyway.

The "materialism" part means that human beings are constantly faced with material (concrete, real-world) problems presented by the environment Which berries are good to eat, and which will cause sickness or death? How can I kill this beast and eat its tasty flesh? What do we do about that asshole who hogs all the good food?

The "historical" part means that we reproduce these solutions in consecutive generations. Our children don't have to think too hard about the solutions their parents came up with, at least the solutions that work well enough. One specific part of these historical solutions are patterns of social relations. Hunter gatherers get used to one pattern of relating to each other, pastoral, horticultural, agricultural, and industrial societies get used to their own specific patterns.

Marx argues* that the material problems of the production (as well as distribution and consumption) of material stuff are of if not exclusive then at least primary importance and these problems "determine" (or at least strongly constrain) historically transmitted social relations. In other words, the means of production determine the social relations of production.

*Marx might not really argue what I say he argues. I put the arguments in his mouth not only to lend them additional authority but also because I present my understanding of Marx's arguments with considerable and possibly undeserved charity.

We have heritable variation and natural selection, so we expect that the "determinism" is in some sense evolutionary. Specifically, patterns of social relations that have relatively better (more or better distributed) material production will have a selective advantage over patterns with relative worse production.

Marx argues that "materialism" means that big changes in the means of production cause big changes in the patterns of social relations rather than the opposite. Marx further argues "historical" means that the the specific character of the pattern of social relations obtaining at any specific time and place as the means of production are undergoing a big change there cause the specific pattern of changes to the social relations of production in response to the changes in the means of production.

(Please remember social scientists look at causality very differently from physical scientists: societies have orders of magnitudes more moving parts than even the most complex engineering projects. I will try to be more precise in more detailed explanations, but for here, causality in the weak sociological sense, as opposed to the the physical or even economic sense, is sufficient.)

Although this basic description is good enough for now, we can improve this theory considerably (notably that social relations can also cause changes to the means of production, hence the alternative label of dialectical materialism). I will also discuss some good and bad criticisms of historical materialism elsewhere. Here, I want here to discuss some implications of Marx's theory assuming he's really on to something worthwhile.

One implication is the denial of idealistic progression as mentioned above. We do not, we cannot, improve society by coming up with radically new and better patterns of social relations. Instead, we change our patterns of social relations in response to changes in the means of production. Briefly, Adam Smith and capitalism did not cause industrialization; industrialization in the specific historical context of late 18th and 19th century Europe, especially Great Britain, caused capitalism and Adam Smith. Similarly, if we end up with something like "socialism", it will not be because we imposed a socialist pattern of social relations on a more-or-less working capitalist society, but because capitalist society has itself created the conditions for revolution.

Revolution

Revolutions happen because of the specific way we create social systems. Human beings rarely think everything through from first principles: that's a prohibitively cognitively expensive way to solve most problems. Instead, we "reason" by habit, analogy, and tradition. If the means of production are relatively stable, then social relations will stabilize and reach a local maximum of productive efficiency. However, when big changes to the means of production happen (whether exogenously or endogenously), the regime of social relations of production are adapted to the old means of production. We retain this old regime out of habit and tradition.

Marx argues that new patterns social relations better adapted to the new means of production emerge within the old pattern. Because social relations generally entail power differentials, those with more power under the old regime are loathe to change it, protecting their power with even the most frightful violence. But because the new regime is more economically efficient, it has a real opportunity to successfully overthrow the old, but usually only after violent struggle.

Coda: The Bolshevik Revolution

In Russia in 1917, the Tsar lost legitimacy and abdicated, Kerensky's bourgeois "democratic republic" lost legitimacy, and everyone else, including the soviets, lacked the power or will to form a government. The Bolsheviks were not just a few (or even a few hundred) people: they had influence and popularity across Russia. Once literally everyone who might have had more power bowed out, only the Bolsheviks had sufficient legitimacy to form a government. So they did. And then they started solving Russia's considerable problems. From that effort arose Soviet communism, with all its pros and cons.

The autonomous individual

What does it mean to be an "autonomous" person? This is a riddle, in Adorno's sense.

Briefly, Adorno argues that philosophy is not like science. Philosophy does not ask "questions" with "answers" in the scientific sense of the word. Philosophy does not ask questions like, "What is the charge on an electron?" with answers like, "1.602176565(35)×10⁻¹⁹ coulombs." Philosophy deals in riddles — negations, contradictions — which cannot be "answered" but must be "sublated" or negated again. A riddle is a negation: "When is a door not a door?" The response sublates the riddle, negates the negation: "When it's ajar." The whole system, riddle and response, dissolves the contradiction of the riddle, and, when nontrivial, creates a new level of meaning, or at least destroys a delusion. Adorno does not, however, argue that riddles are in any sense transcendental, that they have nothing to do with science; instead, science (broadly conceived), in addition to answering questions, poses or creates riddles; without science, there would be no riddles for philosophers to untangle.

Every individual's consciousness is constructed by his or her family, society, and culture. A person who develops without any human society does not develop any consciousness at all; consciousness, personality, is not by itself something latent in infants, in the same sense that a plan for their bodily development is latent in their DNA.* We have certain propensities latent in our physical neurology: the development of language, of empathy, of reason, and perhaps some instincts (or perhaps not), but there is not an actual personality latent in an infant mind; there is at most only the propensity to develop some personality.

*Yes, I know that the environment plays a crucial role in the development of the individual phenotype. But the difference between physical development is, I claim, substantively different from mental development. There is nothing at all in mental development even vaguely similar to the phenotype's genetic "latent plan."

Saying that individual consciousness is socially constructed is not, of course, to say that the development of any individual consciousness is predictable, even if it were, at root, deterministic. Development is far too complicated to be predictable in the same sense that the positions of the planets of the Solar System are predictable. But predictability is not the issue: the issue is construction of consciousness from the "outside."

So, if consciousness is constructed, if it is ineluctably social, cultural, what does it mean to be autonomous? If my consciousness is constructed by the prohibitions and compulsions of my society, in what sense am I ever anything other than radically unfree? Given that, how can we ever distinguish between a free and an unfree society? If a slave's psychology could be constructed such that he wanted to be a slave (and why could it not?) would he still be a slave?

There is also the problem of a critique of society and culture: the critic's own consciousness, the fundamental basis of his or her critique, is a construction of society and culture: all criticism is from the "inside"; it can never be from the "outside." Or at least not radically outside; every critique is from the inside of some society and culture. A judgment that a society is good or bad is not the judgment of an individual consciousness; it is the judgment of a society of itself.

Similarly, what about an individual's self-judgment? When I feel pride or guilt, about myself, where does that judgment come from? Whose judgment is it? My own? Society's? Can any judgment of myself be anything but society's domination of the self? Even this post is American capitalist culture, which constructed the consciousness and personality of that possibly fictitious thing called "Larry," questioning itself. Why should any resolution not be simply tautological?

The problem of autonomy is, I think, the true "hard problem" of consciousness. (What passes for the "hard problem" in contemporary philosophy, i.e. how can non-conscious matter form consciousness, seems to me, after years of study, to be a scientific question with an answer, or just a pseudo-problem.)

Commentary on Galbraith

No honest person who has even a layman's understanding of macroeconomics can doubt that James K. Galbraith's testimony is in its entirety accurate and perspicacious. He is not just correct, he is obviously correct. There are only three reasons to deny the truth of his statement — ignorance, delusion or mendacity — and only one honest reason to oppose his position: fundamental moral opposition to liberal capitalism.

As a communist, I myself am in a sense morally opposed to liberal capitalism, because I don't believe it is good enough; I do, however, believe that liberal capitalism is immeasurably more moral than laissez faire capitalism. My fundamental objection to liberal capitalism is precisely that it is defeatable by laissez faire capitalism.

Dagood has an interesting post on indirect and dishonest arguments for keeping "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. Just like the pledge, the direct argument for immediate deficit reduction and fiscal austerity is simply impossible to make. A direct argument would entail the claim that it is inherently good for the vast majority of people around the world — especially those presently enjoying a standard of living above bare subsistence — to become poorer, for a substantial number of people to fall to bare subsistence, and for many to literally starve and die. Arguments for fiscal austerity must therefore be indirect: without fiscal austerity the economy will collapse further; we cannot regain what we had; we can act now only to prevent further impoverishment.

And, like the arguments against changing (yet again) the Pledge, even the indirect arguments are fundamentally dishonest. I do not doubt that many, perhaps even most, advocates of fiscal austerity are sincere (and delusional). But neither do I doubt that some important, influential advocates know they are lying through their teeth — and are doing so to further their own interests.

But what interests are they furthering? One critical passage from Galbraith's testimony:

[W]hat does the present level of long-term interest rates tell us? As I write, thirty year Treasury bonds are yielding just over four percent -- or just a little more than half their yield a decade back. On the argument just given, this must be an extraordinary success of virtuous policy. It seems that Wall Street has made a strong vote of confidence in the fiscal probity of our current policies. This vote is unqualified, backed by money, contingent on nothing. It therefore represents a categorical rejection, by Wall Street itself, of the CBO's doomsday scenarios and all other deficit-scare stories.

It is crystal clear that the capitalist ruling class, when they are voting with real money, are voting for increased government borrowing. On the other hand, those selfsame parties are exerting political pressure (which requires only chump change) for less government borrowing.

Delusion cannot explain this apparent contradiction: if they were delusional, they would not be eagerly lending the government money at rock-bottom interest rates.

Another critical point from Galbraith's testimony: The Deficit Commission's secrecy breeds the suspicion that its purpose "is to defer public discussion of cuts in Social Security and Medicare until after the 2010 elections." Galbraith raises this suspicion to a near certainty by remarking that "the Commission has taken up the questions of the alleged "insolvency" of the Social Security system and of Medicare. If true, this is far outside any mandate of the Commission."

Since its inception, a faction of the capitalist ruling class has shown a profound and explicit antipathy and exercised vigorous opposition to Social Security and Medicare. Their efforts, both directly and indirectly (to take state power) have had as one of their explicit goals to eliminate Social Security.

I'm reluctant to invoke actual evil as a motivation. I do not believe that the Randian faction of the capitalist ruling class would actually take pleasure and satisfaction from the impoverishment and starvation of the elderly and disabled. (They do, however, openly show what a humanist would call depraved indifference.)

We cannot explain this antipathy on the basis of immediate material interests. Social Security does not even affect the capitalist ruling class or the upper levels of the professional-managerial middle class: Social Security taxes come from the working class and the lower and intermediate ranks of the middle class. Bill Gates pays no more Social Security tax than a first-year associate at a big law firm. Social Security taxes do not even affect the market for labor power; you work or starve until you're 65. (It's implausible to believe the capitalist ruling class wishes to use saving for one's retirement as an actual incentive for workers.)

We cannot even explain this antipathy to Social Security — nor the push for fiscal austerity — on the basis of long-term material interests. The capitalist ruling class as a whole would gain nothing material at any level from either the elimination of Social Security nor the long period of high unemployment that would result from fiscal austerity.

When you see a large group of people (too many to invoke literal insanity as an explanation) apparently acting contrary to their own interest, you have misunderstood their interest.

The immediate interest of the capitalist ruling class is intra-class competition. Within-class selection pressures ruthlessly and decisively eliminate or marginalize members of the capitalist class who lack the highest level of competitive spirit and the desire to win at any cost.

How would you — an ordinary working- or middle-class reader — feel if the government reserved and exercised the power to confiscate — for good use — your alarm clock at any time? It's a small, inexpensive thing, easily replaced by a minimally inconvenient trip to the store. You certainly pay many orders of magnitude more in time and money in ordinary taxes. If it's really for a good use, you're happy to pay for another alarm clock, but that particular alarm clock is by damn yours. And if the government can barge in and take your alarm clock today, why not take your computer tomorrow, and your car the next day. Personal property really is important, emotionally and materially, and there's a natural tendency to preserve the principle in even small things. Indeed, a principle that we don't protect in small things is no principle at all, which is why we have trials in court for traffic tickets.

When your entire being is focused on competition — and no one remains long in the capitalist ruling class whose entire being is not focused on competition — there is a natural tendency to regard what you win as yours. The New Orleans Saints would, I think, object to sharing the Vince Lombardi trophy with the St. Louis Rams, even though in a very real sense the Saints could not have won the trophy without the Rams... someone has to come in last.

The capitalist ruling class competes over ownership of the surplus labor of the working class. They regard this surplus labor as their property. To be told — and coerced — that even a little bit of this surplus labor — transferred from workers to the elderly and disabled — is not theirs is, in their view, to fundamentally undermine and erode not just their material interest but their fundamental raison d'etre.

One common misunderstanding is that dialectical (historical) materialism entails that members of a class always act to further their class's economic interests. If, for example, the capitalist ruling class opposes Social Security, or politically opposes fiscal stimulus in a zero lower-bound limited recession resulting in higher unemployment, it must be because they believe these actions to be in their material interest. The truth, however, seems more subtle than that.

Moral and ethical beliefs are in a dialectical relationship with economic relations. (And both are in a dialectical relationship with the physical means of production.) Entities in a dialectical relationship affect each other. Some economic relations materially change (by selection pressures) a distribution of ethical beliefs in each class, and these ethical beliefs produce (by the actions of those who hold them) materially change the economic relations. There is no objective ideal "optimum" towards which people strive: the "optimal" economic relations are in a sense defined by the ethical beliefs of the actors, and the ethical beliefs of the actors are in a sense defined by the economic relations.

What makes life (and economics) interesting is that this feedback system is not always convergent: particular economic relations can produce particular ethical beliefs that radically change the economic relations, which radically change the ethical beliefs. Sometimes this process is stable and convergent, sometimes stably chaotic and sometimes leads to catastrophic failure. And, of course, every now and again physical reality throws a monkey wrench into the works (or economic activity drastically changes reality), changing everything.

The failure of capitalism

As a communist I believe that capitalism is inherently immoral, in several different ways. But that's not the point today.

The point today is that:

1. We know both theoretically and empirically that there is a relative optimum for how a capitalist economic system operates
2. We know that the entire Western capitalist system is operating nowhere near its theoretical and empirical optimum
3. We know why it's nowhere near its optimum; indeed we've known for many years how to keep it near its optimum
4. We know how to return the capitalist system as it is right now to its optimum in less than a year

There's a lot of interesting and informative debate about how to fine-tune this knowledge, but there's no actual scientific, rational debate among relatively honest economists that we have the basic fundamental knowledge about how to both prevent catastrophic financial collapse and recover once the financial system has actually collapsed. The "debate" about fundamentals essentially mirrors the evolution/creationism debate: one side with all the facts and all the science; the other side with nothing but lies and bullshit.

One does not need Marx at all to come to this conclusion; all that's required (other than intellectual honesty) is a basic understanding of capitalist economics and recent (19th and 20th century) history. One does not even need to read Keynes (although it doesn't hurt): his conclusions are plain to see. (Keynes was a true genius, making the subtle obvious.)

I want to emphasize this point: We know exactly what it means to have a well-functioning capitalist system, we know how to make a capitalist system function well, and we know how to fix a broken capitalist system. And yet 20 months after the beginning of the collapse of the entire Western financial system — a collapse that was foreseeable and preventable — the capitalist system is not just a little sub-optimal, it is two or three orders of magnitude away from practical optimality; the collapse is still getting worse, not better.

In much the same sense, I think there are good arguments that the Microsoft Windows operating system can never be a fundamentally "good" operating system. Regardless of this conclusion, we know how to build a computer that will run Windows relatively well. We are presently in the absurd position of having a Windows computer that takes 10 minutes to bring up Notepad, we know that the reason it's running unacceptably slowly is that most of the memory is corrupt, and we have a faction of economists arguing that while Windows is the best and only operating system, it is somehow irrelevant, impractical, or actually immoral to replace the memory... because the system is running so slowly.

The only honest way to philosophically justify the "obstructionist" faction is to argue that whatever the capitalist ruling class does is good by definition, that there is no coherent independent measure whatsoever of how well the capitalist system is actually functioning. (In much the same sense, there is no independent measure of what the laws of physics "ought" to be, they just are what they are.) The obstructionist faction dares not make this argument, hence their reliance on lies and bullshit.

The progressive capitalist economists (especially Krugman and DeLong) have an honest and reasonably accurate understanding of capitalist economics, and know what we have to do economically to fix the capitalist system. Their failure, such as it is, is to implicitly attribute the failure to the outbreak of actual schizophrenia in half the population. Brad DeLong in particular is fond of asking why we can't have a better press corps, and why the Republican party is allowed to survive. He loves to ask the questions, and provides tons of evidence why the questions are perspicacious and relevant, but he never answers the questions.

No good scientist should ever blithely accept the hypothesis of mass insanity (nor should she blithely accept massive conspiracy).

The 20,000 foot answer to both the questions is: We have the press corps we have and the Republican party we have — as well as the incompetent, ineffectual and spineless Democratic party as well as the systemic financial collapse — because the alternatives have been selected against by the social selection pressures inherent in and essential to the capitalist system, i.e. the selection pressures created by the private ownership of the means of production.

First, we need complicated and expensive physical and technological means of production to maintain a standard of living above bare survival. Second, these means of production must be physically concentrated to some degree* to be maximally efficient at generating use-value. Once we had discovered the ideas (originally efficient steam power and cheap energy) that allowed us to accumulate surplus labor into efficient means of production, it was inevitable that any social system that did not accumulate and physically concentrate the means of production would be selected against**. There are theoretically many different systems that could have survived this selection pressure; for a lot of reasons, many historical and purely accidental, capitalism — which does in fact create and physically concentrate the physical and technological means of production — is the one that survived.

*Which is not to say that concentration is good in and of itself, or that more concentration is always better than less. There are diminishing returns to both excess concentration and excess distribution.

**Technically, the concrete selection pressures were more basic; the selection pressure against failure to accumulate capital is relatively abstract. Going deeper would be interesting scientifically, but we know empirically that these more fundamental physical selection pressures must result in the abstract selection pressure favoring the development and concentration of the means of production. Since it's an abstract selection pressure, it's relatively benign to discuss it as selection for, rather than strictly as selection against.

We have to ask these questions: What were the essential features of capitalism that allowed it to survive the early economic environment with selection pressure favoring development and concentration of capital? Between the origins of capitalism and today, how has the environment changed? How do the essential features of capitalism relate to the modern environment?

Selection-against

I suspect that not even evolutionary biologists pay enough attention to the fact that in any evolutionary process, selection is a fundamentally negative process. Natural selection in evolution does not select for, it selects against.

The usual narrative of evolution is that some heritable variation (such as a mutation) gives an individual a reproductive advantage. The individual's descendants inherit that advantageous variation, and because it is indeed advantageous, the variation comes to dominate the gene pool of the population. Not a bad story, and it gets the gist across, but it's missing an important component of the story: what precisely do we mean by "reproductive advantage"? The straightforward intuitive meaning isn't bad, but it misses important subtleties, especially when we want to intelligently direct evolutionary processes, such as social evolution.

A more accurate and direct narrative of evolution is that there is no selection-for, there is only selection-against. Some individuals have — for various reasons — a reproductive disadvantage; they fail to create descendants to inherit their individual variations. A specific variation can confer a reproductive advantage only indirectly, by changing the environment so that lacking the specific variation directly entails a disadvantage. A variation dominates the population's gene pool only when its competitors are selected against.

The selection-against narrative makes the creationist objection that, "If human beings are descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" more obviously fallacious, A naive or superficial grasp of the selection-for narrative makes this objection plausible, but the selection-against narrative makes the answer more obvious: because nature did not select against monkeys nor did nature select against humans; nature selected against that which we do not see.

Another somewhat less naive example is Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's book, What Darwin Got Wrong (reviewed by Ned Block and Philip Kitcher as well as PZ Myers). I don't want to excuse the authors — they're professional intellectuals, and they shouldn't allow themselves to be misled by superficialities — but it seems clear to me that a narrative of negative selection would make their thesis more obviously incorrect.

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini argue that

Darwinists say that evolution is explained by the selection of phenotypic traits by environmental filters. But the effects of endogenous structure can wreak havoc with this theory. Consider the following case: traits t1 and t2 are endogenously linked in such a way that if a creature has one, it has both. Now the core of natural selection is the claim that phenotypic traits are selected for their adaptivity, that is, for their effect on fitness. But it is perfectly possible that one of two linked traits is adaptive but the other isn't; having one of them affects fitness but having the other one doesn't. So one is selected for and the other "free-rides" on it.

The follow this critique up with a deeper philosophical critique. As Block and Kitcher describe

... Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini think that problems about selection-for are omnipresent... [b]ecause they envisage a vast space of properties and expect proponents of natural selection to discriminate among all the rivals. Not only is there a property of being-a-melanic-moth, there is also a property of being-a-melanic-moth-and-smaller-than-Manhattan. These properties are not only correlated in the world’s actual moth populations, they are correlated universally. Maybe it is impossible, even with the most rarefied genomic technology, to build a moth bigger than Manhattan. If so, the correlation between these properties could not be broken. How then could there be a sense in which one of the properties—being-a-melanic-moth—rather than the other—being-a-melanic-moth-and-smaller-than-Manhattan—caused the increased reproductive success?

Block and Kitcher would have us simply shrug off this object (nobody really cares whether nature is selecting for being-a-melanic-moth or being-a-melanic-moth-and-smaller-than-Manhattan), but even a definite error can be an opportunity to learn.

Block and Kitcher accept the narrative of selection-for, but they seem more flexible about its interpretation.

Natural selection, soberly presented, is about differential success in leaving descendants. If a variant trait (say, a long neck or reduced forelimbs) causes its bearer to have a greater number of offspring, and if the variant is heritable, then the proportion of organisms with the variant trait will increase in subsequent generations. To say that there is “selection for” a trait is thus to make a causal claim: having the trait causes greater reproductive success.

But a narrative of selection-against makes Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini argument more obviously invalid. We don't have to distinguish between selecting for being-a-melanic-moth and being-a-melanic-moth-and-smaller-than-Manhattan, because nature is not selecting for anything. Rather, nature in this case is selecting against getting eaten by a bird (before leaving descendants). It happens to be the case that being-a-melanic-moth (or perhaps being-a-melanic-moth-and-smaller-than-Manhattan) exempted individuals from this selection-against.

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini philosophical critique just doesn't apply to a selection-against narrative. A selection-for narrative makes what is being selected for ambiguous; it's easy to see, however, in a selection-against narrative that nature is selecting against being-eaten-by-a-bird and being-eaten-by-a-bird-and-smaller-than-Manhattan (and being-eaten-by-a-bird-and- anything else). There's no ambiguity we have to shrug off.

If you want to understand why different outcomes occur in different evolutionary scenarios, look for differences in the negative selection pressures.

Consider three modes of negative selection in a population with a fixed food source. There's never enough food for all the individuals in the population. Some individuals will starve (before they reproduce): nature will select against those individuals and their heritable characteristics. Under ordinary circumstances, without any relevant variation, this selection is random: some individuals are just "unlucky" and don't happen to find enough food. But random selection is still selection, and over time it will from time to time happen to be the case by pure chance that all or most of the individuals with some variation will happen to starve by accident. Thus the competing variation(s) will dominate the population even though there is no causal reason why the dominant variation is "better than" the eliminated variation. Selection-for creates a mystery; selection-against provides an explanation: sometimes shit just happens; given enough time, shit will just happen.

In the second case, consider a variation that appears to provide a "reproductive advantage": individuals with this variation are faster, smarter, stronger or whatnot, and more likely to find food... specifically food that, but for their "advantage", other individuals would have eaten. This variation will (probably) dominate the population, but it will do so not because it's advantageous, but because the competing variations have become disadvantageous: individuals without the variation are disproportionally selected against.

Consider the third case: a variation that gives individuals access — even a little — to an alternative food source. In this case, the individuals have a reproductive advantage — if they fail by chance to eat the primary food source, they might not starve and be selected against — but this advantage does not create an immediate corresponding disadvantage in the rest of the population: all the food that was available to individuals without the variation is still available. The outcome in this situation is unclear precisely because we don't know what negative selection-against will actually operate: we have to look more deeply into the situation to identify how nature will select against individuals.

The selection-for narrative does not really distinguish between these situations. Why does some particular trait dominate the population? Because it was selected for. Why was it selected for? Using a selected-for narrative encourages the adaptationist fallacy: we don't know that just because a trait dominates the population it therefore confers a reproductive advantage. We can simply invert the question: the trait was selected for because it wasn't selected against, which encourages the question: why wasn't it selected against. But that's still not quite the correct question. We want to ask: what was selected against, and why? The selection-for narrative leads us down a winding mental path with many pitfalls; the selection-against narrative leads us by the nose to the correct question.

Clarity and precision are important in their own right, but there's a more compelling reason to stress the negative nature of selection in evolutionary processes. Human societies also evolve — dialectical/historical materialism is evolution — and although the low-level mechanisms obviously differ greatly (people do not transmit ideas and beliefs to their children through their DNA) the abstract mechanisms of heritable variation and negative natural selection still apply. If we are to "intelligently" affect our social evolution, we must understand how evolution actually works, and the negative character of selection becomes critically important.

UTA: I don't want to minimize the importance and subtlety of forces other than selection: e.g. mechanisms of heritability and variation as well as accidents large and small. My point is that to understand how selection operates in an evolutionary system, you have to look at what is selected against, not for.

Social evolution and "social darwinism"

I believe that societies — collections of socially constructed ideas — evolve, and they evolve by virtue of a dialectical relationship between heritable variation and natural or artificial selection. However, this view does not entail or endorse the 19th and early- to mid-20th century idea of Social Darwinism and ; indeed social evolution is almost completely different from the latter two ideas.

First, Social Darwinism is fundamentally a moral position: that "inferior" human beings "ought" in some sense to be killed or otherwise prevented from reproducing. The sort of social evolution I'm speculating about is a scientific theory, and scientific theories do not in any way entail fundamental moral positions. A scientific theory can tell us how to achieve our choices, but it cannot tell us what we "ought" to choose.

Secondly, both Social Darwinism and Eugenics are genetic: they attempt to select against "bad" genes. Social evolution, on the other hand, describes change in the kinds and frequency of ideas.

Besides being prima facie morally objectionable, effecting social change by modifying human genetics by artificial selection is impossibly slow; it's easy to see empirically that our ideas have changed just over the last 10,000 years or so of recorded history far faster than even the fastest, most efficient artificial genetic selection would permit. Additionally, we have seen from our experience with animals that artificial selection can efficiently produce only single-purpose sub-species. Human beings, however, are general-purpose beings; a single-purpose human being is useless: we can usually achieve the same effect orders of magnitude more efficiently by creating new machines. new technologies or even entirely new technologies. It was, for example, much more efficient to create — from a standing start 10,000 years ago — logic, philosophy, the scientific method, classical physics, mathematics, quantum mechanics, semiconductors, and computers than it would have been to breed human beings who could perform arithmetic as quickly and reliably as a pocket calculator. Effecting social change by artificial genetic selection is like trying to repair a pocket watch with a sledge-hammer.

The specific physical mechanisms of variation, heredity and selection in the pool of ideas is almost certainly very complicated, and deserves careful, detailed and expensive scientific investigation... investigation that I personally am utterly unable to perform. But just a cursory examination of history available to any educated person is enough to reveal some obvious truths.

Most importantly, we can see that actually killing people (notwithstanding our moral objections) is a completely ineffective way to directly select against the ideas that people have. To gain even a small selective effect, you have to kill enormous numbers of people very quickly, and you have to make sure you kill all the people who have the idea. I think the last time killing people to effect social selection actually worked was in the massacre of the Albigensian. Neither the Inquisition nor the Holocaust even made a dent in Judaism.

Not only that but, human beings being who we are, killing a lot of people seems itself to select against the ideas of the people doing the killing. There aren't very many Nazis now not because we killed them all in 1945, but because most people reject (i.e. select against) the brutality, bigotry and obvious stupidity of their ideas.

So please keep in mind that when I'm talking about social evolution, I'm not talking about anything resembling Social Darwinism or Eugenics.

Consumer capitalism, then and now

In the 1930s and 40s, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democratic party did something profound and difficult: They transformed gilded-age capitalism into New Deal consumer capitalism. There were three main prongs of this transformation:

1. Raising the cost and reducing the supply of wage-labor
2. Draconian income taxes on very high levels of income
3. Severe regulation of finance capital

Taken together, these policies shifted an enormous amount of economic demand to the working class and created the professional-managerial middle class.

Needless to say, the capitalist class was not too happy about this. The hostility of the capitalist class to consumer capitalism is actually somewhat puzzling: the ruling capitalist class — people with enough money to not have to work and live on interest and dividends (profit) — actually increased in size, as did the professional-managerial middle class. (Middle classes are typically supportive of their ruling class, at least until the ruling class starts directly threatening their livelihood.)

(I've been watching Mad Men lately. One of the founders of the advertising agency is a big Ayn Rand fan. Ironic, given that New Deal consumer capitalism — Rand's bête noire — is the foundation of the character's wealth. Indeed consumer capitalism is the only way an advertising agency has any economic purpose.)

Why was FDR successful in establishing consumer capitalism? Why did he even try? How was he able to establish a cohesive faction of the capitalist ruling class to support him? (Populism be damned: had the capitalist ruling class closed ranks against FDR, he would have failed.) Why has the capitalist class turned its efforts for decades in eroding New Deal consumer capitalism?

Most importantly, the liberal capitalists, such as Paul Krugman, want to restore New Deal consumer capitalism. Hardly surprising: morally speaking, consumer capitalism is the best kind of capitalism we can hope for. Can we do so?

To answer this question, we have to compare and contrast the material economic conditions and the political climate then and now. Even before the Great Depression, there was a powerful anti-capitalist labor movement: socialists, progressives, anarchists and communists. The people themselves were becoming organized, focused, disciplined and committed to demanding their interests, and they were willing to fight for them. Even though there were a lot of factions within the labor movement, these factions were relatively cohesive and united against a common enemy: the capitalists. Furthermore, in the wake of the almost-successful socialist revolutions in Western Europe and the successful Bolshevik revolution in Russia (and the failed attempt to oppose it through the Russian Civil War) let a substantial portion of the American capitalist class to realize they were fighting for their lives, and victory was by no means certain.

It's a little harder to see today, especially for middle-class Americans, but in the 19th century market forces for labor power pushed the price of labor power to its true cost: most workers in the 19th century really did make just enough to survive. Every time there was a depression due to lassaiz faire capitalism's inherent cyclical swings (e.g. 1837-1842 and 1873–1879 (and subsequent recessions lasting until 1896)) large numbers of the working class without cushion or safety net were reduced to abject poverty and even starvation. The First Imperialist War also caused tremendous suffering, especially in Europe, to little or no obvious benefit to the working class.

Capitalism was then hit by two hammer blows: the Great Depression and the rise of fascism. The Great Depression is notable because it is the first catastrophic economic failure of Imperialism, finance capitalism plus colonialism at a whole new scale. Finance capitalism made the positive feedback systems in capitalism much faster, and colonialism and the nascent global economy made the catastrophic effects felt world-wide to an unprecedented degree.

It's important to understand that depressions are not in themselves contrary to the class interests of the capitalist class, in just the same sense that losing a battle or even a war was not contrary to the class interests of the feudal aristocracy. In both cases, the position and privileges of the ruling class were not threatened. The only class interest threatened by catastrophe among the ruled classes is social unrest and overthrow of the existing order, a relatively rare occurrence that happens only when the fundamental material economic circumstances have profoundly changed.

The rise of fascism put the American capitalist class in a quandry. On the one hand, they correctly realized that communism was the greatest threat to their class interests, and the chief enemies of the fascists were Stalin in the Soviet Union (vs the Germans) and Mao Zedong (vs the Japanese) in China. The fascists were fundamentally capitalists, and achieved power by appealing to capitalist class interests. On the other hand, both the Germans and Japanese threatened the short term class interests of the American capitalist class. Had the Germans managed to successfully colonize Western Europe and the Slavic states, had the Japanese successfully colonized China and South East Asia, the imperialist ambitions of the United States would have been severely limited, holding only Latin America as colonial possessions.

(Few at the time were really worried about the moral atrocities of the Germans and Japanese, and besides, Hitler didn't do anything in principle to the Jews that we didn't do the Indians, the only differences were of scale and efficiency. Roosevelt might have been concerned about the plight of the Jews, but he certainly didn't bend Heaven and Earth to save them, while he did bend Heaven and Earth to get in a war with the Japanese.)

In the first half of the 20th century, the capitalist class was still not particularly well internationalized. In the short run (in the long run, we're all dead) the Germans and Japanese — precisely because they themselves were successful capitalists — posed a greater threat to specifically American capitalist interests. Better to first defeat the Germans and Japanese and then turn our attention to the communists of the Soviet Union and China. Which is basically what happened.

The Second Imperialist War caused profound changes in the economic circumstances: direct competition from Western Europe was substantially diminished. More importantly, the colonial competition from Western Europe was completely eliminated: The United States faced only much less severe competition from the Soviet Union and China. Furthermore, the re-industrialization of Western Europe itself provided enormous scope for American economic growth. All of these factors led to a profound labor shortage; thus by internal capitalist competition the price of labor power rose well above its cost.

For about 20-30 years, New Deal consumer capitalism proceeds relatively stably. Strict regulation of finance capital and the power of the Federal Reserve Bank moderates capitalism's worst cyclical positive feedback effects. Given a labor shortage, the material economic interests of the working class (not counting, of course, blacks, women, and most of the residents of our colonial possessions) are more-or-less in harmony with the economic interests of the capitalist class.

In the early 1970s, New Deal consumer capitalism started to unravel, from both economic and political causes.

Economically, we had reached the limits of colonial expansion; American labor became less necessary for capitalizing and industrializing both our colonial holdings as well as Western Europe. Instead of being cheap sources of raw materials for internal industrial manufacturing, our colonies started to build manufacturing capabilities of their own. Slowly but surely, the systemic global shortage of manufacturing labor that characterized the 50s and 60s became a labor glut. Industrial production also achieved steady gains in true efficiency (producing more commodities with less actual labor), also reducing the labor shortage.

The dramatic expansion of the professional-managerial middle class also took away much of the working class's leadership. (I'm an "elitist" in the sense that I think there are profound differences in people's intelligence, wisdom and ambition; I'm an "egalitarian" in the sense that I think stupid, foolish and lazy people deserve human dignity and comfort.) Those members of the working class with intelligence and ambition got "picked off" into the professional-managerial middle class, either directly by obtaining a professional position or indirectly by becoming trade union leaders. As noted above, people in the middle classes predominantly identify with the interests of the ruling class, whom they must appease to keep what privileges they have.

The Civil Rights movement, the Feminist movement and the Anti-War movement had profound economic and political consequences. Economically, the Civil Rights and Feminist movements aimed to remove a class of people, black people and women, from the pool of forced cheap menial labor. No one cleans another person's toilet for peanuts unless the alternative is starvation (or lynching). Gains in true efficiency (washing machines, dishwashers, easier-to-clean dishes and kitchen surfaces) also reduced the labor necessary to maintain a household and raise children: sheer boredom was an important motivation for professional-managerial middle class women's participation in the Feminist movement.

These movements also had profound political consequences. You don't enslave, oppress and exploit a class of people for centuries (blacks) or millennia (women) without developing deep feelings that the oppressed class are profoundly and ineluctably sub-human; giving them the same rights and privileges as real people generates the same feelings of disgust as bestiality. These movements changed the polarization of American society from class lines to moral lines, according to Jonathan Haidt's categorization: the "left-wing", in whom empathy and fairness dominate their moral beliefs, and the "right-wing", where loyalty, authority and purity dominate. Indeed this polarization is actually reducing the effect of alternative components: right-wingers are beginning to see empathy and fairness not just as less important, but actually evil; and left-wingers — perhaps not quite to the same extent — see loyalty, authority and purity as evil. (Being iconoclastic, anti-authoritarian and personally deviant, I have to admit a certain sympathy for the deprecation of the right-wing "virtues".) But left or right, a working or middle class person conditioned to think politically along moral lines will not think and act in his own economic interests.

In the 1930s, we had a strong, disciplined working class movement focused on its economic interests. Today, we do not. In the 1930s working class leaders were forced to stay in and lead the working class. Today most of the potential working-class leaders have been for two generations co-opted into the middle class. In the 1930s, we had the potential for tremendous capitalist/imperialist expansion. Today, we have no such scope for expansion. (Our latest attempt at colonial expansion, the Afghanistan/Iraq wars, have failed miserably even by capitalist standards, in much the same sense that First Imperialist War was both impelled by and a miserable failure of feudal ambition.)

Also, at the detailed level, Republican Herbert Hoover (who would today be a leftist Democrat) presided over the inevitable — and inevitably ineffective — initial half-measures to alleviate the social unrest caused by the Great Depression, and thus linked those failures directly to the capitalist class. Today, however, it is Democratic president Obama who is presiding — almost equally ineffectively — over the initial half-measures to alleviate the present depression. Since we are now polarized along moral lines, Obama's failure will link these failed half-measures not to either the working or capitalist class, but to the "left-wing" moral position giving importance to empathy and fairness. Instead of seeing a backlash against the capitalist class as we did in the 1930s and 40s, we're going to see a backlash against liberal "left-wing" virtues in much the same sense as happened in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s after the failure of the socialist revolution and the relatively liberal capitalist Weimar Republic.

None of the material forces (other than impending material hardship) that caused the creation of New Deal consumer capitalism are present today. Material hardship by itself causes only some sort of radical change: under very similar circumstances in the beginning of the 20th century, material hardship caused New Deal consumer capitalism in the United States, Fascism in Germany and communist revolution in Russia. More importantly, the moral senses of loyalty, authority and purity are more deeply embedded in the human mind — they reach much farther back into our evolutionary history — than the relatively modern virtues of empathy and fairness, which require more abstract reasoning. We can thus expect that in the short and medium term, the right wing will win the political battle, driving the left-wing into a persecuted underground. It will be only after the right-wing virtues, when the limited and relatively sphexish nature of the right-wing virtues collide with complex, abstract economic realities, that the left wing will again have a chance to become resurgent.

Dialectical Materialism and evolution, part 2

There are three requirements for dialectical materialism*:

1. We have to have (at least) two of something
2. The two somethings have to be material somethings; they must be independently determinable aspects of the physical world
3. The two somethings have to be fundamentally irreconcilable; they can't just be two ways of talking about the same thing

*I mean 'materialism' in the looser, more general sense, technically philosophical physicalism.

In evolution, the two "somethings" are heritable variation and natural selection. They are material somethings: variation is physically inherited, mostly by DNA, plus some epigenetic factors (also material, mostly methylation and acetylation*). In other words, there's nothing outside evolution, no intelligence, no "absolute ideal", no grand scheme; everything in evolution can be reduced to material causes of genes (and other heritable information) and the natural selection of the material environment. (These material causes appear to be local as well, but locality might no longer be a strict requirement for materialism.)

*Thanks, CPP!

They are fundamentally irreconcilable because all the elements of heritable variation are fundamentally uncorrelated with selection. There are mechanisms of heritable variation that are correlated with selection, as Comrade PhysioProf notes. But these mechanisms themselves are material elements, and the mechanisms themselves evolved by heritable variations that were uncorrelated with selection.

Suppose there's some epigenetic mechanism that is correlated with selection. For example, when food is scarce, an animal might "turn off" heritable genes that promote the growth of its offspring. It's a variation, it's heritable, but the variation is correlated with selection: the parent correctly "knows" that its offspring will have better selective fitness when food is scarce if they're smaller. This specific mechanism of heritable variation, then, is not in dialectical contradiction with natural selection. However, this specific method evolved by uncorrelated variation: ancestor organisms turned genes on or off at "random" (i.e. uncorrelated with selection), and only the progeny of those ancestors that turned on or off the "correct" genes survived selection pressures.

The principle of irreconcilability or non-correlation does not mean that there's no teleology at all. Human beings are teleological — we can anticipate and plan for the future — and are still subject to dialectical materialistic evolution at many different levels. Even genetic information* is "teleological"; the genetic information "knows" a lot about the future adult organism. The principle of irreconcilability means only that there's if there's any teleology, it's part of the dialectical elements in contraction; there's no teleology outside the elements. (More precisely, at higher levels of abstraction like human social evolution, if there is teleology outside the system, there is something about the elements that is not subject to the outside teleology.) And there's no teleology at all outside the material, physical universe: no God, no Hegelian Absolute Ideal, no Platonic Ideal plane, no abstract truths that cannot ultimately be reduced to truths about the properties of material objects.

*DNA, heritable patterns of gene activation, the biochemical machinery of the blastocyst, the larger environment of the uterus or egg, etc.

Dialectical materialism and evolution

If you understand biological evolution, you understand dialectical materialism.

Dialectical materialism appears to go all the way to the "bare metal" of reality: motion is a synthesis of quanta's dialectically opposed material properties of being "smeared in a wavefunction" and "observed as an eigenstate", but quantum mechanics is weird and obscure. Evolution is much more amenable to philosophical study.

The fundamental dialectic of evolution is the opposition of heritable variation and natural selection. Both of these dialectical elements are material: heritable variation is a physical, material, independently observable change in an organism's genotype, an eminently material substance (composed mostly of DNA). Natural selection is also a material process: physical properties of an organism's physical phenotype determine whether it will run faster or slower, have more or less acute vision and hearing, stronger or weaker teeth, etc. Furthermore, an individual organism's reproductive success is directly a material property: The organism has to physically reproduce to be reproductively successful.

Because heritable variation is uncorrelated with natural selection, these two elements are in true dialectical contradiction*. Heritable variation doesn't "care" whether it makes the organism more or less susceptible to adverse selection; selection doesn't "care" whether some heritable variation might be intrinsically good. (For example, it's intrinsically bad that human beings can't internally synthesize vitamin C — whether or not we can eat it, it would be better if we could synthesize it at need — but because our ancestors' diet was abundant in vitamin C, the loss of the ability wasn't selected against.)

*A dialectical contradiction is different from a logical contradiction. The use of the term "contradiction" is mostly historical — Marx's dialectic materialism springs from Hegel's dialectical idealism, where logical contradiction powered the synthesis, but also because while "contradiction" might be too strong the alternatives — conflict, opposition, etc. — seem too weak.

It's instructive to consider Mendelian (established at conception) vs. Lamarkian (acquired during life) variation. It happens to be the case that terrestrial organisms exhibit Mendelian variation, but we might have exhibited Lamarkian variation. If so, there would have to be something uncorrelated with natural selection about how an organism acquired traits for there to be a true dialectical contradiction between Lamarkian variation and natural selection. If this contradiction didn't exist, if an organism deterministically and predictably acquired just those traits that improved its survival, we would not see the pattern of complex, emergent behavior in the long-term development of species.

There are also important dialectical relationships in biological evolution at more abstract levels. A fundamental dialectic is between predator and prey. Again, the elements are material: the predator must physically catch and eat the prey, or the prey must physically escape the predator. And the elements are in true dialectical contradiction: the predator wants to eat the prey, the prey does not want to be eaten. Yet another is the parasite-host dialectic, which often results in symbiosis.

An important consequence of evolution is that it's neither predictable nor random. In my most important quibble with canonical communist terminology, I assert that dialectical relationships and historical factors do not determine the synthesis, they constrain it. There are specific features, for example, that would make predators ineffective: lack of speed, poor vision, poor quality weapons (such as teeth and claws); we will never see a predator with a predominance of features that poorly afford predation in its usual environment. We can predict to some extent where evolution won't go, but we cannot predict where evolution will go, even retrospectively. If we took a snapshot of any historical evolutionary epoch, we could not predict with confidence much of how the contemporaneous species would change.

Indeed the parallels between dialectical materialism and biological evolution are so strong that the following bold conjecture suggests itself: all dialectical material relationships are fundamentally evolutionary: they consist of a dialectical relationship between some form of heritable variation uncorrelated with some form natural selection.

Rational self-interest

Hanlon's razor* says you should never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity**. But there's a related saying in economics: never attribute to stupidity what can be explained by rational self-interest. If people appear to be behaving stupidly, look for the underlying self-interest that you might have missed. Of course, people do behave stupidly, often en masse, so you won't always find an underlying rational self-interest, but you often will.

*Sometimes attributed to SF author Robert A. Heinlein.
**There's also Clarke's corollary: Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.

It is becoming a trope in liberal and progressive economics and politics that the right-wing and the Republican party are acting stupidly, irrationally, that they have become literally deranged, even at the highest level. I believe, however, that this view is problematic.

Part of the problem is that there's a huge equivocation floating around the economics profession concerning the definition of "rational self-interest"; similarly in philosophy and ordinary conversation, there's a huge equivocation about "rationality". At minimum, rational self-interest in economics means that people always act to maximize their subjectively conceived self-interest, and while they may make errors and mistakes, on the whole they act effectively to maximize their subjective self-interest.

This definition seems metaphysical and unfalsifiable: however people are actually behaving, we can hypothesize some subjective self-interest that the behavior maximizes, and we conclude they are acting in their rational self-interest. We can, however, talk about subjective self-interest separately from specific behaviors: we can actually test hypotheses about rational self-interest.

For example, if a lot of people are buying Acme razors, which cost 50% more than the objectively identical Potzrebie razor, we could make any number of competing hypotheses about subjective self-interest that's causing the behavior. Most obviously, we might have missed some property of Acme razors that really is objectively superior to Potzrebie razors: perhaps they last longer, or are more effective at shaving a man's upper lip or a woman's ankle bone. It might be that using Acme razors confers social status precisely due to its higher price. Perhaps people simply don't take the name "Potzrebie" seriously, and don't have confidence in its quality. It might be simply that people are persuaded by the advertising so they simply feel better using an Acme razor.

The last case highlights the specific, technical nature of the economic definition of rational self-interest. It's not relevant in this context that Acme razors don't objectively make a person feel better than Potztrebie razors: they don't produce a closer shave, they don't reduce the frequency of nicks and cuts, they don't last any longer, they're not any more comfortable to use. What's relevant is that a choice of behavior produces a difference in subjective feeling; people are acting "rationally" by choosing the behavior that really does produce the better subjective experience.

The first equivocation, then, in the use of rational self-interest is equivocating between the objective properties of the choice and the subjective consequences. But objective properties are never anything more than a means to an end — indeed one means among many — to produce subjective experience. It's often the case that people do make choices that correlate to objective properties: fresh food is objectively superior to spoiled food, and people almost universally prefer unspoiled food. But there are cases where the subjective experience, and thus the choice, is not correlated directly to the objective properties of the choices.

Similarly in philosophy and ordinary conversation, there's a sense of "rationality" that means concerned exclusively with objective truth, ignoring or excluding subjective factors such as emotion. Again, there's no problem with this definition per se, but it's clearly inappropriate to apply this definition to motivation, which is fundamentally subjective.

In one sense, "rationality" just means the true correlation between behavior and and subjective outcome; in another sense, "rationality" means having objectively true beliefs about the real world. If a lot of people believe that Acme razors give a closer shave than Potzrebie razors, they are acting in their rational self-interest by spending more for Acme razors, but this rational self-interest is predicated on an irrational belief, a false belief about the world. There's no contradiction: we're just using the word "rationality" to mean different things in different contexts, an ordinary and routine use of natural language. The fallacy of equivocation comes in when we pick the meaning from the "wrong" context.

The second fallacy about rationality and rational self-interest concerns the nature of the self-interest. There are subjective desires that are easy to empathize with, and desires that are more difficult to empathize with, and desires no one wants to admit they empathize with. It's easy to dismiss an odd or unusual desire as simply non-existent, or attribute some odd behavior to a false idea about reality. But some people, to use Winston Rowntree's example, just like lounging about in unconventional clothing, and so they do: there's nothing at all irrational about their behavior in either sense.

Materialism and "empiricism"

Commenter Thoughts directs our attention to his (?) essay, Materialists should read this first. This essay is, however, problematic on a number of points.

In his essay, Thoughts points out a contradiction in materialism, inveighs at great length against materialism and its dogmatic adherents, and suggests the alternative of empiricism.

On one hand I can't object to a general exhortation against dogmatism and an irrational attachment to outdated ideas contradicted by modern observations. On the other hand, it's not at all clear that Thoughts intends only such a facile reading.

There is a notable difference between the ordinary, common use of terminology and its use by experts and professionals. If I gave you tickets to a classical music concert, you would probably not be too surprised to hear Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Vivaldi on the program, even though a professional musicologist would consider only one of those composers (Mozart) to actually be classical. You might even be unsurprised to hear Aaron Copland or Leonard Bernstein. (And if the tickets turned out to be to Cosi fan tutti, you might well object, "That's not classical music, it's opera!") Likewise, professional philosophers have a detailed taxonomy of philosophical ideas and writing. A professional philosopher may use "materialism" to denote something very different from what an ordinary philosophically literate person might mean.

Thoughts does not explicitly disambiguate what usage of "materialism" he intends, but his use of broad generalities to characterize materialists and their intellectual failings suggests that he's talking about the larger audience. However, he presents a technical philosophical definition: "Materialism is the belief that everything is due to matter and the flow of matter from place to place." This apposition of the general population with the technical meaning is suspicious: one might similarly criticize the Philadelphia Classical Music Appreciation Society on the basis of its name alone for ignoring Bach (Baroque) and Beethoven (Romantic).

Furthermore, for all the many denunciations of materialists' dogmatism in his essay, Thoughts does not give us any concrete examples. It's one thing to simply mention a bad argument for an incorrect position as a rhetorical springboard to a good argument for a better position, but when an author lays the anonymous denunciations on so thick as in this essay, a careful reader suspects a fallacy of the converse and an ad hominem argument. And Thoughts strengthens this suspicion with a description of his preferred alternative — "empiricism" — that is thin to the point of vapidity, consisting mostly of the banal exhortation that we should pay attention to the evidence and keep an open mind.

Also too his choice of alternative is curious in the context. Materialism (and "dualism" (technically dualistic idealism or mentalism) are ontological positions: they purport to describe how the world actually is. Empiricism is usually taken, however, as an epistemological position: a methodology to gain knowledge about how the world actually is. (Empiricism as an ontological position — that all that exists is perception — is if anything even more philosophically discredited than naive materialism.)

It is a matter of historical fact that materialism as a formal philosophy was developed in the 18th century and achieved wide currency in the 19th century as classical, non-relativistic physics made profound advances and especially as scientific biology demolished vitalism. As such, the formal definition of materialism, that everything can be characterized by matter and its interactions, or more popularly as that everything is matter in motion, reflects this early scientific view. It is also a matter of historical fact that since the development of materialism, modern science has made additional advances — notably Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics — which have changed our understanding of physical reality as much as did classical physics. Thoughts argues that these modern scientific advances fundamentally demolish materialist philosophy. But do they?

If we take the terms of 18th and 19th century philosophical materialism literally, with matter meaning specifically atoms and motion in the specifically Newtonian sense of change in an atom's position in absolute space over absolute time, then of course materialism is at least in some sense incorrect, or at least naive. But we must ask: do people today who can reasonably be described as materialists subscribe to this view of physical reality? Do they actually "deny observation" to preserve their view? Is the view of physical reality as "matter in motion" essential to materialism? And most importantly, how much does our modern understanding of relativity and quantum mechanics actually change the philosophy of materialism?

One should always be skeptical of an opponent's description of an opposing philosophy. Wikipedia describes several notable philosophers and scientists as "scientific materialists" (presumably falling in the category of materialists that Thoughts criticizes), including Daniel Dennett, Willard Van Orman Quine, Donald Davidson, John Rogers Searle, Jerry Fodor, and Richard Dawkins. If Thoughts wishes to make his charge stick that materialists deny observation and ignore well-established modern physics, we should expect the support of citations and quotations from at least the most notable advocates of materialism. It might be the case that Thaddeus Hicklehooper* of Muncie, Indiana has a naive and out-dated view of physical reality, gleaned from his C- in Introduction to Philosophy at the Adult Learning Annex, but who cares?

*Not a real person

Thoughts' choice of critique of materialism is also puzzling. He critiques materialism not on the obvious grounds that reality is more complicated than atoms moving and bouncing around, but on the basis of a specific interpretation of time:

If everything is due to the flow of matter and time is like the succession of frames in a motion picture [emphasis added] then at every instant reality is a frozen three dimensional pattern, like a single frame in a movie.

Materialism does not allow the transfer of information from the past to the present except as recorded data so the frozen instant is all that exists in the materialist paradigm. The instant is frozen because there is no time for motion to take place at an instant.

Note how Thoughts apparently extends the definition of materialism in the bolded passage. This particular view of time is certainly not part of the stated definition of even 18th century materialism, and Thoughts offers not even an argument why we should consider this definition essential to materialism. And indeed this definition seems not only unjustified but perverse: if we consider materialism to be matter in motion, then motion must be an intrinsic property of material reality; viewing time as a succession of frozen images denies motion as an intrinsic property. Furthermore, the assumption of a continuum is a fundamental part of classical (and even non-quantum-mechanical relativistic) physics; if instants in time are "frozen", there must be not only infinitely many of them, but this infinity has to be the same cardinality of the real numbers. A lot of our prosaic intuitions simply fail even at the "lesser" infinite cardinality of integers. And of course it's astonishing to suggest that philosophers, scientists, and ordinary philosophically literate people have been for three hundred years unaware of Zeno's paradox until an anonymous blogger has brought it to our attention.

It is also surprising that Thoughts lumps physicalism in with materialism. [see comment] Thoughts correctly disambiguates materialism from physicalism. But pPhysicalism is precisely the technical philosophical term denoting the "modernization" of 18th and 19th century materialism to a modern relativistic and quantum mechanical scientific understanding of physics. If materialism in the technical sense is matter in motion, then physicalism is the sole existence of "physical substance", whatever the physics du jour proclaim that is the nature of that substance. (Physicists today considered this "substance" to be a collection of relativistic quantum mechanical fields.) Worse yet, the distinction between materialism and physicalism is a technical distinction in professional philosophy; it would be perverse to insist that ordinary people make this fine distinction, or to infer only from their terminology that they necessarily and essentially rely on an outdated view of physical reality.

And indeed the fine details of physicists' ontology are not necessary to materialism. The essence of materialism is not what can be deduced from a specific ontology, but rather the rejection of idealism and dualism, an essence specifically noted by Wikipedia, materialism

is different from ontological theories based on dualism or pluralism. For singular explanations of the phenomenal reality, materialism would be in contrast to idealism and to spiritualism.

In his essay, Thoughts actually notes this essential contrast: philosophers "have split into two main groups," materialists and dualists. The essential property of philosophical materialism is its monism, not the specific details of physics.

And, while they profoundly change our view of physical reality, the truth is that Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics don't much change philosophical views that rests on a classical understanding of reality. Relativity and quantum mechanics don't even change a lot of science; wide swaths of scientific and engineering endeavors can safely ignore relativity and quantum mechanics, including a lot of astrophysics, orbital mechanics, and even electronics (while transistors do depend fundamentally on quantum mechanics, most electrical engineers ignore the quantum underpinnings and work at the level of classical approximations of their emergent behavior). Newtonian classical physics might be a "special case" of relativistic quantum mechanics, if by "special case" we mean 99.999..99% of observable phenomena.

Even the 0.000.01% of "edge" cases of relativity and quantum mechanics don't affect our materialistic philosophy much. Relativity doesn't change anything important; if anything it reinforces materialism: time and space are now interactions of matter; they don't sit "outside" matter, actually eliminating a puzzling dualism within material reality. And the only aspects of quantum mechanics that pertain to a materialistic philosophy are the Copenhagen interpretation, which simply denies that science has anything to say about ontology whatsoever, and the role of the observer in quantum mechanics. But the first is just cowardice — quantum mechanics does have something to say about ontology; it's just too weird and counter-intuitive for many people, including many scientists, to believe. And the role of the observer is pure speculation; we have absolutely no evidence to prefer any special role of "consciousness" to more prosaic, materialistic (or "physicalist") views such as the Many Worlds or Transactional interpretations.

Finally, Thoughts exhortation that, "The problem of how we can experience anything will require a scientific rather than an ideological approach," falls flat. Even the relatively naive 19th century view of materialism is the result of a scientific understanding of reality, and the philosophy easily survives modern scientific knowledge just by tweaking the specifics of what we consider "substance" to be. Materialism hardly requires a massive denial of observation or a dogmatic rejection of the relevance of "any cosmology after 100 AD."

Dialectical Materialism, part 1

Marx's economic analyses were anticipated by earlier capitalist economists such as Smith and Ricardo, and his identification of the class struggle was hardly novel. Dialectical materialism is the absolutely fundamental element of communism, and (although he didn't label it as such, using the term "historical materialism") Marx's greatest contribution to general and political philosophy.

Dialectical materialism is most sharply contrasted with idealism, both explicit and implied, in the sense of the objective existence of ideas fundamentally independent of and distinct from the material reality of (intuitively) rocks and trees or (scientifically) the intrinsic, irreducible properties of quanta and quantum fields.

Examples of explicit idealism can be found in Plato's philosophy as well as Hegel's dialectical idealism, the direct precursor to Marx's dialectical materialism. A more subtle, implied form of idealism can be found in many people's — including many scientists — ideas about natural physical laws, the idea that physical laws have an independent existence from material reality. There exists a law of gravity, and the law of gravity itself actually exists independently of actual material things attracting each other. (To be fair, most practicing scientists do not worry deeply about or get too attached to the fine details of philosophical ontology, nor do they really need to do so. For their practical purposes ontological fuzziness is just as useful as informed skepticism.)

When we start talking about specifically political philosophy, the distinction between idealism and materialism becomes very important. According to the precepts of dialectical materialism, we have to re-think 99% of our discourse on political and ethical philosophy as at the very least using unwarranted and confusing idealistic metaphors and at worst being arrant bullshit.

Much of Western political and ethical philosophy consists of the search for the "correct" ethical and political principles. What are the correct set of property rights? How much freedom of speech should we have? Who should own the means of production? When do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few?

From a materialist viewpoint, these questions are at best metaphorical and at worst nonsensical. Ethical and political principles are not in any sense material entities (except as they exist as arrangements of neural properties in people's heads) and have no properties, such as correctness or goodness, independent of some physical, material representation. These questions can be interpreted as different kinds of metaphors: What kinds of property rights will lead to some desired outcome? What are the historical material causes of the collection of ideas in people's heads and in law books that we refer to in the abstract as "freedom of speech"?

Metaphor is fine for literature. An explicitly, consistently and more-or-less precisely defined metaphor becomes an unobjectionable label. But political philosophy is not literature, and its use of ill-defined, imprecise and poorly-understood metaphors does little to advance our understanding.

Paul Krugman gives us an excellent recent example of using an idealistic metaphor in political philosophy:

I’m also fairly conventional on how economies should be run. Self-interest is still the best motivator we know – or more accurately, the only consistent motivator. So I’m for market economies. But I’m for market economies with strong safety nets, with adult supervision in capital markets, with public provision of goods the private sector does badly (like basic research and much of education.) An idealized New Deal is about as far as I go.

If you construct "self-interest" in a reasonable, materialistic way, Krugman is correct that it is indeed the "best" motivator. I'm pleased that he's "for" strong safety nets, adult supervision and public provision of some goods. But how does self-interest motivate these activities? If he thought self-interest (or material factors) could motivate safety nets, etc., he wouldn't introduce these ideas with a "but". They are idealistic principles, presumably, that we "should" aspire to independently of and in some sense contrary to* our self-interest.

*Independence is vacuous if it cannot be contrary. If two things are always correlated, they are not actually independent, even if we can somehow speak of them separately; if two things are always correlated, then speaking of one is always speaking of the other. I cannot, for example, talk (informally) about satiating hunger "independently" of eating food... at least not until we invent neural implants that can directly affect our subjective mental states. And even then, I cannot talk even formally about my feelings of hunger independently of the neural states that represent those feelings.

We can see another example of Krugman's idealism in his book, The Conscience of a Liberal. Just the title betrays his idealism: the principles he expounds are matters of conscience, to be adopted because they are themselves "good" principles. He extols the virtues of New Deal regulated imperialist finance capitalism. As capitalism goes, New Deal capitalism was pretty good, and pretty good even for the capitalist class. He talks in a very abstract, indirect way about its instrumental goodness, but mostly in terms of other ideals, such as stability and distribution of income. He can't really talk in detail about the material effects of New Deal capitalism, since New Deal capitalism offered only the most marginal benefit in terms of the measurable, material well-being of billions of people: tens of millions of Americans and Europeans and a billion people in the exploited third word living in desperate poverty. (You're now just malnourished instead of actually starving to death! Yay capitalism!)

Furthermore, he does not talk about the causal history of the New Deal, and he doesn't explore deeply the causal history of the thirty-year erosion of the New Deal from the 1970's to the present. I'm not pretending I can read his mind, but I get the impression reading the book that he believes the New Deal sprang Athena-like from the mind of FDR and (to some extent) John Maynard Keynes, and its erosion was due to nothing more than inexplicable, irrational perversity.

Dialectical and historical materialism (if we take historical materialism to be dialectical materialism applied to political philosophy) purports to explain these phenomena in a rigorous, detailed, systematic and, above all, scientific way.