Gadget Anarchy

When those who wish to monopolize the market place they like to claim to being doing it in the name of the 'free enterprise'. The reality is that there is nothing free about their marketplace, capitalism is about monopoly. They are in fact attempting to monopolize the market and restrict it to benefit from it. Which is why real advocates for a 'free' market are libertarians not capitalists.

To paraphrase Proudhon; Intellectual Property Is Theft!

Generals, Gadgets, and Guerrillas

The age of the media gadget is here, with Apple steamrolling the big distributors. But when consumers have the power to get content anywhere, anytime, for free, even Steve Jobs should be worried.

by Michael Wolff

Vanity Fair December 2007

A marketer would call this empowerment—as a consumer you’re getting the service you want at the time and place you want it, more cheaply than you could have ever hoped to get it, as well as, often, critical help in stealing the particular service or tune.

Men with big jobs in big corporations have a word for this anywhere-anytime (let-us-help-you-steal-it) breakdown in distribution norms: anarchy.

They’ve, in fact, had laws passed to inhibit it.

But more and more, as gadgetism explodes, as it undermines every fixed notion of who delivers what to whom, as the big men with big jobs try to develop their gadget strategies, it’s comedy too. Everybody in charge of distribution channels is running around like a chicken with its head cut off. People at music companies, television networks, movie studios, cable providers, phone companies, and satellite systems are all trying, vainly so far, to figure out their place in a gadget-driven world, and are, mostly, looking like fools. NBC, in a huff, recently pulled its stuff from Apple’s iTunes downloading service because it believes its shows are worth more than $1.99 apiece. Then, in an about-face, the network announced it will give away its shows for free—figuring that somehow they’ll rig it up, those technological geniuses, so that after you download a show to your gadget and you see it once or twice, the show will dissolve or explode, or some such.

And this is a good example of the products of capitalism and capitalist production creating the conditions for a hi-tech gift economy. One that is the basis of real communism that is the freedom from labour. Thus a real free market coordinated through the free association of individuals through disembodied production and disembodied distribution. The ultimate leisure society.

The full development of capital, therefore, takes place -- or capital has posited the mode of production corresponding to it -- only when the means of labour has not only taken the economic form of fixed capital, but has also been suspended in its immediate form, and when fixed capital appears as a machine within the production process, opposite labour; and the entire production process appears as not subsumed under the direct skillfulness of the worker, but rather as the technological application of science. [It is,] hence, the tendency of capital to give production a scientific character; direct labour [is] reduced to a mere moment of this process. As with the transformation of value into capital, so does it appear in the further development of capital, that it presupposes a certain given historical development of the productive forces on one side -- science too [is] among these productive forces -- and, on the other, drives and forces them further onwards.

To the degree that labour time -- the mere quantity of labour -- is posited by capital as the sole determinant element, to that degree does direct labour and its quantity disappear as the determinant principle of production -- of the creation of use values -- and is reduced both quantitatively, to a smaller proportion, and qualitatively, as an, of course, indispensable but subordinate moment, compared to general scientific labour, technological application of natural sciences, on one side, and to the general productive force arising from social combination [Gliederung] in total production on the other side -- a combination which appears as a natural fruit of social labour (although it is a historic product). Capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production.

Marx Grundrisse Ch. 13

Beginning with cybernetics, and the resulting evolution of machine automation into personal computers, the internet, the resulting software and gadgets are all a glimpse of the shape of things to come; from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs.

Notes:
Raoul Victor
Free Software and Market Relations
But the logic of free software situates itself outside of exchange itself. When someone "takes" free software off the Internet, even if its production required millions of hours of labor, there is nothing given in exchange. One takes without furnishing any counterpart. The software furnished is not exactly "given," in the classic sense of the term, since the provider still has it after the taker has helped himself. (In this sense, the term of "economy of the gift" that certain people use apropos free software is incorrect.) There is indeed the transmission of a good, but with neither loss of possession nor counter-party. The foundation of capitalism, exchange, is absent. In this sense already, free software has an intrinsically anti-capitalist, potentially revolutionary nature.

But it does not suffice to be "anti-capitalist" to be revolutionary historically, as shown by the nostalgic anti-capitalist thought of a less dehumanized past. If free software possesses a revolutionary nature, that is also because its method rests on the concrete will to liberate the powers contained in the new techniques of information and communication. This method is the result of the simple acknowledgment on t he part of several universities that certain aspects of market relations gravely impeded their utilization. If this happens with electronic techniques and not with other techniques of production, that is not only because the scientific ethic contains non-market aspects but also because, and above all, in this domain it is very easy, and costs nothing, to ignore the market laws. In this sense, the method of free software situates itself inside the movement of history (in the measure in which the development of society's productive forces constitutes the only dimension that, "in the last instance," permits one to detect a direction in it), in the direction of the surpassing of capitalism.


"The center of the free software movement's success, and the greatest achievement of Richard Stallman, is not a piece of computer code. The success of free software, including the overwhelming success of GNU/Linux, results from the ability to harness extraordinary quantities of high-quality effort for projects of immense size and profound complexity. And this ability in turn results from the legal context in which the labor is mobilized. As a visionary designer Richard Stallman created more than Emacs, GDB, or GNU. He created the General Public License."

from E. Moglen, "Anarchism Triumphant", First Monday 4/8, 1999.



New Left Review 15, May-June 2002

Julian Stallabrass on Sam Williams, Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software. The iconoclastic hacker who is challenging Microsoft’s dominion, using ‘copyleft’ agreements to lock software source codes into public ownership. Cultural and political implications of treating programs like recipes.

JULIAN STALLABRASS

DIGITAL COMMONS


Stallman argues that while companies address the issue of software control only from the point of view of maximizing profits, the community of hackers has a quite different perspective: ‘What kind of rules make possible a good society that is good for the people in it?’. The idea of free software is not that programmers should make no money from their efforts—indeed, fortunes have been made—but that it is wrong that the commercial software market is set up solely to make as much money as possible for the companies that employ them.

Free software has a number of advantages. It allows communities of users to alter code so that it evolves to become economical and bugless, and adapts to rapidly changing technologies. It allows those with specialist needs to restructure codes to meet their requirements. Given that programs have to run in conjunction with each other, it is important for those who work on them to be able to examine existing code, particularly that of operating systems—indeed, many think that one of the ways in which Microsoft has maintained its dominance has been because its programmers working on, say, Office have privileged access to Windows code. Above all, free software allows access on the basis of need rather than ability to pay. These considerations, together with a revulsion at the greed and cynicism of the software giants, have attracted many people to the project. Effective communities offering advice and information have grown up to support users and programmers.

The free exchange of software has led some commentators to compare the online gift economy with the ceremony of potlatch, in which people bestow extravagant presents, or even sacrifice goods, to raise their prestige. Yet there is a fundamental distinction between the two, since the copying and distribution of software is almost cost-free—at least if one excludes the large initial outlay for a computer and networking facilities. If a programmer gives away the program that they have written, the expenditure involved is the time taken to write it—any number of people can have a copy without the inventor being materially poorer.

An ideological tussle has broken out in this field between idealists, represented by Stallman, who want software to be really free, and the pragmatists, who would rather not frighten the corporations. The term ‘free’, Eric Raymond argues in his book The Cathedral and the Bazaar, is associated with hostility to intellectual property rights—even with communism. Instead, he prefers the ‘open source’ approach, which would replace such sour thoughts with ‘pragmatic tales, sweet to managers’ and investors’ ears, of higher reliability and lower cost and better features’. For Raymond, the system in which open-source software such as Linux is produced approximates to the ideal free-market condition, in which selfish agents maximize their own utility and thereby create a spontaneous, self-correcting order: programmers compete to make the most efficient code, and ‘the social milieu selects ruthlessly for competence’. While programmers may appear to be selflessly offering the gift of their work, their altruism masks the self-interested pursuit of prestige in the hacker community.

In complete contrast, others have extolled the ‘communism’ of such an arrangement. Although free software is not explicitly mentioned, it does seem to be behind the argument of Hardt and Negri’s Empire that the new mode of computer-mediated production makes ‘cooperation completely immanent to the labour activity itself’. People need each other to create value, but these others are no longer necessarily provided by capital and its organizational powers. Rather, it is communities that produce and, as they do so, reproduce and redefine themselves; the outcome is no less than ‘the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism’. As Richard Barbrook pointed out in his controversial nettime posting, ‘Cyber Communism’, the situation is certainly one that Marx would have found familiar: the forces of production have come into conflict with the existing relations of production. The free-software economy combines elements associated with both communism and the free market, for goods are free, communities of developers altruistically support users, and openness and collaboration are essential to the continued functioning of the system. Money can be made but need not be, and the whole is protected and sustained by a hacked capitalist legal tool—copyright.

The result is a widening digital commons: Stallman’s General Public Licence uses copyright—or left—to lock software into communal ownership. Since all derivative versions must themselves be ‘copylefted’ (even those that carry only a tiny fragment of the original code) the commons grows, and free software spreads like a virus—or, in the comment of a rattled Microsoft executive, like cancer. Elsewhere, a Microsoft vice-president has complained that the introduction of GPLs ‘fundamentally undermines the independent commercial-software sector because it effectively makes it impossible to distribute software on a basis where recipients pay for the product’ rather than just the distribution costs.


Tangentium


TANGENTIUM is an online journal devoted to alternative perspectives on IT, politics, education and society.Tangentium tries to take none of these things for granted. We seek to discuss IT with a critical, political eye. We are not technophobes: far from it. Our intention to use the WWW in the most constructive, Web-literate way we can should serve as evidence (if not proof) of that. But we are aware of some of the great problems which can arise from taking the abovementioned as read.

We also base our discussions, wherever possible, on less orthodox political perspectives. Our favoured viewpoint is a general scepticism towards the political and corporate institutions which currently dominate society.


The Free Software Movement - Anarchism in Action

Asa Winstanley | 22.12.2003 23:45 | Technology

The Limits of Free Software
Asa Winstanley

Of course, the left is not a homogeneous mass; some seem to have a more realistic view. For example, in an article from the New Left Review: "[although] the free exchange of software has led some commentators to compare the online gift economy with the ceremony of potlatch, in which people bestow extravagant presents, or even sacrifice goods, to raise their prestige, it fundamentally differs in that the copying and distribution of software is almost cost-free -- at least if one excludes the large initial outlay for a computer and networking facilities" [4].

December 19, 2005

Someone call Karl Marx

The means of production is in the hands of the masses and a revolution is under way

BRIAN D. JOHNSON

The iRevolution is reversing the engines of the Industrial Revolution, and repatriating the means of creative production from the factory to the open hearth of cottage industry. In fact, it could be argued that the home studio is fostering a democratic renaissance in the arts the likes of which we've never seen. Traditionally, the major cultural industries -- movies, TV, radio, music and publishing -- have been controlled by large corporations. If you wanted to be a filmmaker, broadcaster or rock star, you had to rely on the system to sponsor your dreams. Media conglomerates still monopolize pop culture, bankrolling production and distribution. But their grip on the creative process is slipping. With affordable pro technology, artists can create at home and distribute via the Internet. It's a phenomenon that Tyler Cowen, economics professor at Virginia's George Mason University, calls "disintermediation" -- a seven-beat word that means removing the middle ground between producer and consumer.

f open-source data and software invite the democratic overthrow of copyright, sampling is the engine of promiscuity that drives it. And it's changing self-expression the way the sexual revolution changed romance. In cyberspace, everything is up for grabs. We're filtering, filing and recombining data at an unprecedented rate. It's as if we're all busy editing the world -- at least those of us who are hooked up to the IV drip of the Internet. In just a decade or two, we've become a mass culture of file clerks.

In the iWorld, where Google is God, we all behave like tiny search engines, running on the internal combustion of data. Even economist Tyler Cowen admits his daily blogs are a rummage bin of recycled material. "Three-quarters of my posts are me filtering something I've read. I'm parasitic on other people. It's more like being an editor than a writer."

Yet the daily hit of readership is addictive. Cowen says that, like most of his colleagues, he's written scholarly papers that have been read by no more than 20 people. Every day he reaches 10,000 readers with his blog (marginalrevolution.com). He talks about crafting each instalment as if it were a pop song -- "there's always a hook." Just as the iRevolution is democratizing music and film, it's sweeping through the cloistered world of academics, and forcing scholars into the spotlight. The whole notion of "intellectual property," the mortar of academia, is under assault. "My gut feeling," says Cowen, "is that copyright as we know it will collapse."

magine a dance club where everyone's heartbeat is wired for broadcast, and the deejay mixes the amplified tribal pulse into the music. What kind of mass cardiac feedback loop would that create, especially if you factor in designer drugs? Or how about feeling your lover's heartbeat as a vibrating ring tone on your cellphone? Valentine's Day may never be the same. McLuhan talked about media as an extension of our skin. And his metaphor is taking on a more literal truth as technology becomes wearable. The iPod, the camera phone -- and My doki-doki -- are just the beginning. McLuhan's global village is shrinking into the global toytown.

As technology becomes more intimate in scale, the human body will be the last frontier of the iRevolution. The idea of the body as broadcast medium may sound far-fetched -- like something out of David Cronenberg's eXistenZ. But there's no reason to assume the new technology won't be incorporated into fashions of tattooing, piercing and cosmetic surgery. Inevitably there will come a time when wireless communication will be grafted and implanted as interactive media in the flesh. And McLuhan's playful spin on his famous slogan -- the medium is the massage -- will go deeper than he ever could have imagined.

During the Sixties, the New Left created a new form of radical politics: anarcho-communism. Above all, the Situationists and similar groups believed that the tribal gift economy proved that individuals could successfully live together without needing either the state or the market. From May 1968 to the late Nineties, this utopian vision of anarcho-communism has inspired community media and DIY culture activists. Within the universities, the gift economy already was the primary method of socialising labour. From its earliest days, the technical structure and social mores of the Net has ignored intellectual property. Although the system has expanded far beyond the university, the self-interest of Net users perpetuates this hi-tech gift economy. As an everyday activity, users circulate free information as e-mail, on listservs, in newsgroups, within on-line conferences and through Web sites. As shown by the Apache and Linux programs, the hi-tech gift economy is even at the forefront of software development. Contrary to the purist vision of the New Left, anarcho-communism on the Net can only exist in a compromised form. Money-commodity and gift relations are not just in conflict with each other, but also co-exist in symbiosis. The 'New Economy' of cyberspace is an advanced form of social democracy.

Free, anonymous information on the anarchists' Net

By John Borland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Published: April 26, 2000, 1:15 PM PDT

London programmer Ian Clarke is putting a little bit of anarchism back in the Net.

Clarke and a growing group of allied programmers are creating a kind of parallel Internet called "Freenet," where censorship is impossible, surfers are anonymous, and content is moved and hosted automatically to points near the people who want it.

The nascent system is a kind of cross between the Net-speeding tools developed by Akamai Technologies and the Napster MP3-swapping software, which is now shaking the music world. Some developers say the mix has created a system that stores and moves content much more efficiently than the ordinary Web.

But at the network's heart lies its creators' conviction that freedom of information should be built directly into the networks, rather than left to the good graces of companies and governments. Freedom from censorship could protect political dissidents and other unpopular speech, but it also means Freenet could provide a safe haven for pornographers and copyright pirates.

And that's fine with its creators.

"Freenet can't afford to make value judgments about the worth of information," said Ian Clarke, the London programmer who began creating the network as a student thesis. "The network judges information based on popularity. If humanity is very interested in pornography, then pornography will be a big part of the Freenet."

Freenet is the latest entry, and perhaps the most ambitious, in a field of new "distributed" network services that are making themselves felt far beyond the technology community.

Programs like Napster, Gnutella, Scour.net's Exchange and others have brought individual computers into the role once played by massive Web hosting services. Want a song, or a video or an image? Instead of searching for it on a Web page, it's now easy to boot up a small program and download it directly from another person's machine.

On a technological level, that's already causing ripples as Internet service providers grapple with the implications of their customers' computers becoming content hosts in their own right. Cox Communications has threatened to drop some San Diego Excite@Home cable-modem subscribers who use the Napster music swapping software, noting that the software clogged its network.

The new technologies are making even more of an impression on the entertainment trade. Napster, Gnutella and their rivals have thrown a panic into the record industry, which sees music listeners trading song files directly, without buying expensive compact discs. Other industries, such as Hollywood filmmakers, also see themselves potentially threatened by the easy file swapping.

Freenet takes these earlier file-swapping programs a step further.

The system is built around the efforts of volunteers, who set up Freenet network "nodes," or connection points, on their own computers to store content. Once a song, document, video or anything else is uploaded into this system, it is distributed around participating computers, automatically stored in nodes near the users who ask for the content, and removed from machines where there is no interest.

The system is designed to be almost entirely anonymous. The actual content on any given host computer changes over time, and will ultimately be encrypted, so no host will know what is on his or her machine. The keywords used to search the network for files are also scrambled, making it extremely difficult for authorities to find out who is hosting what, or who is looking for what particular piece of information.

Critics say this anonymity could protect distribution of genuinely illegal material, such as child pornography or pirated software, music and movies.

While it's impossible to tell how many people are using the system at any given time, about 20,000 people have downloaded an early version of it in the last few weeks, Clarke says.

Anybody can load files into the system and have them hosted by the network's volunteers without paying for bandwidth or a Web site's server space. Clarke uses the example of a band that wants to put its MP3 files online, but can't afford Web space. The band could upload its song onto the system, and as long as people occasionally searched for the song, it would live inside the Freenet.

But others say this is simply transferring the very real costs of bandwidth and storage space to the volunteers in the network. That could make it difficult to keep people participating, as they see their own network connections slowed in the interest of other people's downloads.

"To technologists, that's sexy," said Gene Kam, a Wego.com programmer who is developing Gnutella software. "But to consumers, it's not as good as just logging in and getting free MP3 files."

Others say Freenet, if it is able to get out of its early stages, could be the final nail in the coffin for organizations trying to prevent online piracy. Since Freenet is wholly decentralized, there is no central company to sue for copyright violations. And because each "node" is encrypted, and users anonymous, it will be nearly impossible to track down any individual pirate or pirated work.

"If this takes off, then the (record industry) and (movie industry) are swiftly moving into a world where they have no hope of curbing what they see as a rampant misuse of technology," said Rob Raisch, chief analyst for technology consulting firm Raisch.com.

Industry analysts say the potential for this kind of system, which has added new twists to commercial Internet technologies, has yet to be realized, however.

"I don't think you should think of this as a content distribution system," said Peter Christy, a Jupiter Communications analyst who closely follows the caching industry. "You should think of this as a technology that will allow something else new and exciting that people haven't thought of yet."

A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet

by John Naughton
Published in the UK by Weidenfeld and Nicolson on October 1 1999.

The IBM lawyers were no doubt as baffled by this as they would have been by a potlatch ceremony in some exotic tribe. But to those who understand the Open Source culture it is blindingly obvious what was going on. For this is pre-eminently a high-tech gift economy, with completely different tokens of value from those of the monetary economy in which IBM and Microsoft and Oracle and General Motors exist.

"Gift cultures", writes Eric S. Raymond, the man who understands the Open Source phenomenon better than most, "are adaptations not to scarcity but to abundance. They arise in populations that do not have significant material-scarcity problems with survival goods. We can observe gift cultures in action among aboriginal cultures living in ecozones with mild climates and abundant food. We can also observe them in certain strata of our own society, especially in show business and among the very wealthy".

Abundance makes command relationships difficult to sustain and exchange relationships an almost pointless game. In gift cultures, social status is determined not by what you control but by what you give away. "Thus", Raymond continues, "the Kwakiutl chieftain's potlach party. Thus the multi-millionaire's elaborate and usually public acts of philanthropy. And thus the hacker's long hours of effort to produce high-quality open source".

Viewed in this way, it is quite clear that the society of open-source hackers is in fact a gift culture. Within it, there is no serious shortage of the 'survival necessities' -- disk space, network bandwidth, computing power. Software is freely shared. This abundance creates a situation in which the only available measure of competitive success is reputation among one's peers. This analysis also explains why you do not become a hacker by calling yourself a hacker -- you become one when other hackers call you a hacker. By doing so they are publicly acknowledging that you are somebody who has demonstrated (by contributing gifts) formidable technical ability and an understanding of how the reputation game works. This 'hacker' accolade is mostly based on awareness and acculturation - which is why it can only be delivered by those already well inside the culture. And why it is so highly prized by those who have it.

See:

Tick, Tock, We Live By The Clock

Technocracy In Canada

Not So Green Apple

Capitalism Creates Global Warming

Black History Month; Paul Lafargue

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Marx, Ipod, mobile phones, cell phones, manufacturing, intellectual property, socialism, free market, Proudhon, workers councils, slaves, Ipod, Apple, Steve-Jobs, codes-of-conduct, labour, labor, work, high-tech, manufacturing,

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Technocracy In Canada

The Beaver, the Canadian History magazine has a great article on Technocracy Inc. in Western Canada. Here is a short excerpt.

Walter Fryers lives in Edmonton and leads the Technocracy chapter here. Which meets at the Stanley Milner Library Tuesdays and Sundays at 1:30 Pm

THE LAST UTOPIANS
by Ray Argyle

Technocracy promised Depression-weary Canadians an end to their hardship. But the offer came with a catch.

The abandoned farms and empty streets of Depression-ridden rural Manitoba filled the view through the windows of the railway coach as Walter Fryers, a twenty-three-year-old university student, journeyed back to Winnipeg.

It was the fall of 1936 and Fryers had spent the summer trapping muskrats in the delta of the Saskatchewan River, working for little more than “board and a bunk.” Now he was anxious to return to his science studies at the University of Manitoba.

During the long train trip from The Pas, the young student took to heart the dark reality of the dust bowl. It had been the hottest North American summer on record. Across the Prairies, dark clouds of dust rose off the drought-stricken land, burying livestock that lay dead and dying in the fields, and caking the faces of the hungry and haggard families who grimly trekked to the cities, leaving their devastated farms behind. Against this backdrop, Fryers pondered the failure of society to provide a better life for the millions impoverished by the Great Depression.

This continued to weigh on Fryers’ mind after he arrived in Winnipeg, with its bread lines and its boarded-up businesses. Here, a chance encounter — spotting a poster for a lecture on something called “Technocracy” — was to rapidly change the direction of his life.

The lecture introduced the young man to a radical new doctrine that seemed to satisfy his yearning for a scientific solution to the world’s problems. Technocracy’s adherents claimed it would eliminate want by putting power in the hands of a capable few — not politicians, but an elite group of engineers and technicians, known as the Technocrats.

Within months, Fryers was himself preaching Technocracy’s merits to the media. The Winnipeg Free Press gave front-page space to his declaration that the existing economic system was the root of the problem, because, in order for it to work, “a scarcity must be created and maintained. That is why, in a world of plenty, we have widespread poverty.”

Technocracy flared like a comet in the darkness of the dirty thirties, promising to replace a collapsing capitalist system with a non-political government of scientists and technicians. It attracted thousands of members in Canada, survived a wartime banning, and enjoyed renewed, but brief, popularity after World War II amid short-lived fears that Canada might return to Depression-like conditions.

Of all the protest movements that flowered in the Depression, Technocracy was a unique creation. Largely overlooked by historians and neglected by most political scientists, the movement never elected an MP or fomented a riot. But to workers without jobs and farmers without crops suffering through the hungry thirties, Technocracy’s proffered world of plenty seemed a utopian paradise: Unemployment would be a thing of the past and all would share equally in the abundance of the machine age. Sir Thomas More’s sixteenth-century conception of a “happy island” stricken of all poverty and crime might at last become a reality, thanks to modern technology.

Founder Howard Scott’s design for what he called the “Technate of America” did away with borders and merged the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Central America into a single nation under a regime of engineers and technicians. Political parties, along with money and all the trappings of the present price-based economic system — which Scott saw as incompatible with the distribution of industry’s output — would be things of the past. The economy would be based on energy (the capacity to perform work) and the new currency would be “energy certificates,” qualifying every citizen to an equal share of the continent’s wealth. People would work four hours per day, four days per week, between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five.

Technocracy spread quickly in Canada — although its strength here, as in the United States, was concentrated in the West. Eight chapters were soon organized in Vancouver, and the magazine Technocracy Digest was launched. Branches were set up throughout British Columbia, as well as in Edmonton, Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, Hamilton, and Toronto. For many, Technocracy served as a fraternal organization. The Winnipeg Free Press reported on a 1940 technocratic wedding, noting the groom and his attendants wore Technocracy grey suits and “twelve men in Technocracy grey formed a guard of honour.” In Vancouver, a Technocracy orchestra was formed.

I disagree with the authors claim later in the article that the idea of the Technate, technocracy's model of governance over production and distribution systems, is authoritarian and anti-democratic. He mistakes representative parliamentary democracy as being the only form of democracy.

It is a technical model for production and distribution.Indeed the idea of the technate is the administration of things not people. Technocracy did not offer up a political system to replace capitalism per se.

And in fact in a paper I presented on Technocracy, Socialist Industrial Democracy and Syndicalism, available upon request until I post it, I showed that it coincides with North American models of workers control. That is the Technate can be adapted to be used by worker controlled industries as an alternative to the wage system. Especially in light of the Norbert Weiners applications of cybernetics to industrial production that was attempted in Allende's Chile.

The fact that it was popular in Western Canada shows again that radical alternatives to capitalism were sown here for most of the early years of the twentieth century. And that radicalism was NOT conservative individualism as the right wing pundits and other neo-cons of today assert.

Today many of the predictions of Technocracy about the crisis of energy demand in an advanced industrial society are being accepted as common knowledge; namely their assertion of the crisis of Peak Oil.

SEE:

Technocracy Inc. Predicted Oil Crisis Over 50 years ago

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Dietzgen and Dialectics

A follow up on my previous post on Dialectics I mentioned Joseph Dietzgen in passing as having discovered dialectical materialism prior to Marx and Engels.

I also referenced him in this post;
Dialectics, Nature and Science.


A brief bio can be found here.

As well as in Wikipedia.

In fact Marx is reported to have introduced this auto-didactic working class intellectual as "Our Philosopher" to fellow members of the First International
( the International Working Man's Association, IWMA).

Joseph Dietzgen and the History of Marxism

Joseph Dietzgen (1828–1888) had an important role in the history of Marxism. One reason for this is that he coined the phrase “dialectical materialism” — the hallmark of “orthodox” Marxism. Another reason is that at the beginning of the 20th century, in the absence of Marx’s early writings, humanist critics of “orthodox” Marxism like Anton Pannekoek appealed to Dietzgen. An understanding of Dietzgen’s thought sheds new light on our understanding of “dialectical materialism” and on the debate between “orthodox” and “Hegelian” Marxists.

Tony Burns, in his study "Joseph Dietzgen and the History of Marxism," looks again at this remarkable and still little known German printer who independently developed the essential doctrines of (what came to be called) Marxism; in fact, the first use of the term "dialectical materialism" is attributed to him. Burns emphasizes Dietzgen's contribution to philosophy, especially his attempt to overcome what he saw as the one-sidedness of both classical materialism and idealism, and his early emphasis on psychology in relation to consciousness. Recalling Dietzgen's original contributions today contributes to our understanding of a number of present-day debates -- especially the rift between "orthodox" and "Hegelian" or "western" Marxism

Dietzgen was a contemporary with the Haymarket Anarchists and with one of the martyrs; August Spies jointly published the German Anarchist Social Democratic daily Chicagoer Arbeiterzeitung.

My pal Larry Gambone does an excellent job outlining his view in his Dietzgen political biography; Cosmic Dialectics. He also has the The Joseph Dietzgen Page

Cosmic Dialectics

chapbook / 22 pages / publisher: Red Lion Press / main creator: Larry Gambone / $2 / 1579 Centre, Montreal, PQ, H3K 1H5

This booklet offers a quick look at the life and libertarian philosophy of Joseph Dietzgen (1828-1888), a German socialist who moved to the States and continued his radical political activism until his death. Why should we care? Because "What makes Dietzgen important is that he deals directly with the underlying problems of cognition, and while one can find many similar ideas in the writings of the great libertarians and anarchists such as Proudhon, Tucker, Stirner and Malatesta, these concepts remain scattered throughout their works and can be easy to ignore. (And have been ignored). Too often libertarian social and political ideas are adopted while the underlying philosophy remains authoritarian. Dogmatic, Positivist and absolutist thinking has never been lacking in the movement. Dietzgen is a powerful antidote to this contradiction." So there.

Adam Buick outlines Dietzgen's views in Joseph Dietzgen - The Workers Philosopher

From 1928 we have this centenary celebration of Dietzgen published in the One Big Union the Western Canadian Journal of the Socialist Party of Canada.
Dietzgen was highly influential on the self taught working class intellectuals involved in the One Big Union and the Socialist Party of Canada as Peter Campbell observes in his book Canadian Marxists and the Search for the Third Way.

There are some striking ambivalences, if not paradoxes, about the role which Fourier designs for himself here: the proletarian who is uncontaminated by official philosophy, and determined both to excel in it and to overthrow it. The character was to have hundreds, if not thousands, of real-life embodiments in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and America. The most notable, probably, is Joseph Dietzgen (1828-88), the Rhineland tanner and Social-Democrat whose name became a byword f or "proletarian philosophy" from St Petersburg to Chicago and New York, Glasgow, Liverpool, South Wales, the Netherlands and on to Petrograd again [ll]. There were also fictional versions, such as Earnest Everhard, the exigently named "proletarian philosopher" hero of Jack London's The Iron Heel (1908). The proletarian philosophers are robustly evolutionist, materialist, and socialist; what is hard to make out is why they saw their revolutionary project as requiring them to pay any attention at all to philosophy. Why didn't they just ignore it, as one of the most insignificant of all the elements of the old immoral world?

Dietzgen influenced not only the autodidact Marxists in Canada but was influential on the working class autodidact Marxist movement in England and the U.S.;especially the followers of Daniel De Leon. "Our philosopher" thus had to be refuted by Lenin when he attempted to adopt the mantel of Marx's philosophic heir and spokesman for European Social Democracy.

V. I.Lenin
Preface To The Russian Translation Of Letters By Johannes Becker, Joseph Dietzgen, Fredericik Engels, Karl Marx, And Others To Friedrich Sorge And Others

Lenin: On the Question of Dialectics
Philosophical idealism is only nonsense from the standpoint of crude, simple, metaphysical materialism. From the standpoint of dialectical materialism, on the other hand, philosophical idealism is a one-sided, exaggerated, &uumlberschwengliches (Dietzgen)development (inflation, distention) of one of the features, aspects, facets of knowledge into an absolute, divorced from matter, from nature, apotheosised. Idealism is clerical obscurantism. True. But philosophical idealism is ("m o r e c o r r e c t l y " and "i n a d d i t i o n ") a road to clerical obscurantism through o n e o f t h e s h a d e s of the infinitely complex k n o w I e d g e (dialectical) of man.

On the Significance of Militant Materialism

At any rate, in Russia we still have - and shall undoubtedly have for a fairly long time to come - materialists from the non-communist camp, and it is our absolute duty to enlist all adherents of consistent and militant materialism in the joint work of combating philosophical reaction and the philosophical prejudices of so-called educated society.Dietzgen senior (4) - not to be confused with his writer son, who was a pretentious as he was unsuccessful - correctly, aptly an clearly expressed the fundamental Marxist view of the philosophical trends which prevail in bourgeois countries and enjoy the regard of their scientists and publicists, when he said that in effect the professors of philosophy in modern society are in the majority of cases nothing but "graduated flunkeys of clericalism".

Our Russian intellectuals, who, like their brethren in all other countries, are fond of thinking themselves advanced, are very much averse to shifting the question to the level of the opinion expressed in Dietzgen's words.But they are averse to it because they cannot look the truth in the face. One has only to give a little thought to the governmental and also the general economic, social and every other kind of dependence of modern educated people on the ruling bourgeoisie to realise that Dietzgen's scathing description was absolutely true.One has only to recall the vast majority of the fashionable philosophical trends that arise so frequently in European countries, beginning for example with those connected with the discovery of radium and ending with those which are now seeking to clutch at the skirts of Einstein, to gain an idea of the connection between the class interests and the class position of the bourgeoisie and its support of all forms of religion on the one hand, and the ideological content of the fashionable philosophical trends on the other.

August Thalheimer, the old German Bolshevik, used the 1928 Centenary to once again suggest, as did many of his detractors, that Dietzgen should not be read until one is well founded in the basics of Marx and Engels, and probably some Lenin.

Not surprisingly we find Dietzgen embraced by the Avant Garde modernist revolutionary cultural intellectuals around DADA

For Marxists and revolutionary thinkers who found Lenin too stringent in his ideology Dietzgen offered an intellectual alternative;

Josef Dietzgen and the Materialist Dialectic A chapter from Dialectics: The Logic of Marxism, and Its Critics--an Essay in Exploration

His influence on Anton Pannekoek and the German/Dutch Left Communist movement is documented in Chapter II of Anton Pannekoek and the socialism of workers' self-emancipation, 1873-1960.

The Workers' Councils in the Theory of the Dutch-German Communist Left

For that the contribution of Dietzgen is fundamental to explain the birth of the Dutch Communist left and the development of the theory of the Workers’ Councils by Pannekoek.

For the Dutch left, the revolution is not a product of rough material forces, like in the physical field, but primarily a question of development of the spirit: there is initially a victory of the spirit before all material victory.

This is the reason why its adversaries often presented it as an "idealist current".

The Dutch Left was a Marxist current which, like all the "radicals", such as Rosa Luxemburg, underlined importance of the consciousness factor in the class struggle, factor that in these times was defined –according to the terminology– as "spiritual factor".

The intellectual guide of the Dutch Marxists, throughout their first fights against the Revisionism and the mechanicism of the "Vulgate-makers" of the Marxism, was incontestably Joseph Dietzgen.

You can read Pannekoek on Dietzgen in his Lenin As Philosopher.

Bertell Ollman also points out the importance of Dietzgen's work in humanizing dialectical materialism and its influence on Pannekoek and the Left Communists. Whom today we would view as humanist Marxists, more interested in the dynamic of the relationship between individual development and our alienation from production/consumption.

Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society
Bertell Ollman
Chapter 3
The philosophy of internal relations

Marx never dealt with the special problems raised by the materialist content he gave to the philosophy of internal relations. No doubt this would have been part of the work he wanted to do on Hegel, but the pressing claims of his social and economic studies and of political activity never allowed him to begin. Provided that he could successfully operate with his relational view, he gave low priority to its elaboration and defense. This task was undertaken to some degree by Engels, particularly in his writings on the physical sciences, but more directly by the German tanner, Joseph Dietzgen. "Here is our philosopher," Marx said on introducing Dietzgen to the Hague Congress of the First International (Dietzgen, 1928, 15).¹³ Yet, despite further eulogies by Engels, Dietzgen's work remains relatively little known.¹⁴ However, Dietzgen's views provide a necessary supplement to Marx's own. The relationship between these two thinkers is clearly set out by Anton Pannekoeck, who claims that Marx demonstrated how ideas "are produced by the surrounding world", while Dietzgen showed "how the impressions of the surrounding world are transformed into ideas" (Pannekoeck, 1948, 24).¹⁵

Mindful of the dangers of using what one thinker says to support an interpretation of another, I shall limit my comments to features which Marx could not have missed in praising Dietzgen's work. Like Hegel, Dietzgen affirms that the existence of any thing is manifested through qualities which are its relations to other things. Hence, "Any thing that is torn out of its contextual relations ceases to exist" (Dietzgen, 1928, 96). So, too, Dietzgen declares—in almost the same words as Hegel-"The universal is the truth," meaning that the full truth about any one thing includes (because of its internal relations) the truth about everything (Dietzgen, 1928, 110).¹⁶ But unlike Hegel—and Marx too—who proceeds from these foundations to an investigation of the whole in each part, Dietzgen's inquiry is directed toward how such parts get established in the first place. For Hegel's and Marx's approach suggests that the preliminary problem of deciding which units of the whole to treat as parts has already been solved. Yet, it may legitimately be asked whether the unity posited by this conception does not preclude the very existence of those separate structures in which they claim to have caught sight of this unity. This is essentially the problem of individuation, or "abstraction", and it constitutes a major stumbling block for any philosophy of internal relations.

Dietzgen's contribution to the solution of this problem is his account of what can occur in individuation and what does occur. He asks, "Where do we find any practical unit outside of our abstract conceptions? Two halves, four fourths, eight eighths, or an infinite number of separate parts form the material out of which the mind fashions the mathematical unit. This book, its leaves, its letters, or their parts—are they units? Where do I begin and where do I stop?" (Dietzgen, 1928, 103). His answer is that the real world is composed of an infinite number of sense perceptible qualities whose interdependence makes them a single whole. If we began by applying the relational conception to social factors and then to things, we see now that it can also apply to qualities. Because the process of linking up qualities may be stopped at any point between the individual quality and the whole, the ways of dividing up the latter into distinct parts called "things" is endless. One result is that what appears as a thing here may be taken as an attribute of some other thing there. Every quality can be conceived of as a thing, and every thing as a quality; it all depends where the line is drawn. So much for what is possible.¹⁷

What actually occurs, that is the construction of units of a particular size and kind out of the "formless multiplicity" presented to our senses, is the work of the human mind. In Dietzgen's words, "the absolutely relative and transient forms of the sensual world serve as raw material for our brain activity, in order through abstraction of the general or like characteristics, to become systematized, classified or ordered for our consciousness" (Dietzgen, 1928, 103). The forms in which the world appears to our senses are "relative" and "transient", but they are also said to possess the "like characteristics" which allow us to generalize from them. "The world of the mind", we learn, finds "its material, its premise, its proof, its beginning, and its boundary, in sensual reality" (Dietzgen, 1928, 119). In this reality, like qualities give rise to a single conception because they are, in fact, alike. This is responsible, too, for the wide agreement in the use of concepts, particularly of those which refer to physical objects. Yet, it is only when we supply these similar qualities with a concept that they become a distinct entity, and can be considered separately from the vast interconnection in which they reside.

According to Dietzgen, therefore, the whole is revealed in certain standard parts (in which some thinkers have sought to reestablish the relations of the whole), because these are the parts in which human beings through conceptualization have actually fragmented the whole. The theoretical problem of individuation is successfully resolved by people in their daily practice. The fact that they do not see what they are doing as individuating parts from an interconnected whole is, of course, another question, and one with which Dietzgen does not concern himself. He is content to make the point that, operating with real sense material, it is the conceptualizing activity of people that gives the world the particular "things" which these same people see in it. Even mind, we learn, results from abstracting certain common qualities out of real experiences of thinking; they become something apart when we consider them as "Mind" (Dietzgen, 1928, 120).¹⁸

Dietzgen's practical answer to the problem of individuation suggests how structures can exist within a philosophy of internal relations, something which Althusser for one has declared impossible.¹⁹ Yet, if individuation is not an arbitrary act but one governed by broad similarities existing in nature itself, there is a necessary, if vague, correlation between such natural similarities and the structures conveyed by our concepts. This is how the study of any conceptual scheme, whether based on a philosophy of internal relations or not, teaches us something about the real world (unfortunately, this cannot be pressed—as many insist on doing—beyond what is common to all conceptual schemes). That Marx, through his study of capitalism, came to stress certain social relations as more important does not in any way conflict with his conception of each part as relationally containing its ties of dependence to everything else. The fact that some ties are preferred and may, for certain purposes, be viewed as forming a structure is no more surprising than any other act of individuation (conceptualization) based on real similarities.

The significant service Dietzgen renders Marx is to show how a proper balance can be reached on a relational view between accepting the reality of the external world (including, too, the general trustworthiness of sense perception) and holding that the conceptual activity of human thought is responsible for the precise forms in which we grasp the world. Marx's support for Dietzgen and, more so, his own practice in conceptualizing new social units show clearly that he accepted such a balance. Yet, by stressing the first part (in criticism of his idealist opponents) and neglecting to develop the second, he left his epistemology open to misinterpretation as a kind of "naive realism"; and it is this belief that lies behind the widespread, mistaken use of ordinary language criteria to understand Marx's concepts.²⁰

Walter Benjamin another 'humanist' Marxist refers to Dietzgen in his Theses On History;

XI

The conformism which has been part and parcel of Social Democracy from the beginning attaches not only to its political tactics but to its economic views as well. It is one reason for its later breakdown. Nothing has corrupted the German working, class so much as the notion that it was moving, with the current. It regarded technological developments as the fall of the stream with which it thought it was moving. From there it was but a step to the illusion that the factory work which was supposed to tend toward technological progress constituted a political achievement. The old Protestant ethics of work was resurrected among German workers in secularized form. The Gotha Program * already bears traces of this confusion, defining labor as ‘the source of all wealth and all culture.’ Smelling a rat, Marx countered that ‘…the man who possesses no other property than his labor power’ must of necessity become ‘the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners…’ However, the confusion spread, and soon thereafter Josef Dietzgen proclaimed: ‘The savior of modern times is called work. The …improvement… of labor constitutes the wealth which is now able to accomplish what no redeemer has ever been able to do.’ This vulgar-Marxist conception of the nature of labor bypasses the question of how its products might benefit the workers while still not being at, their disposal. It recognizes only the progress in the mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society; it already displays the technocratic features later encountered in Fascism. Among these is a conception of nature which differs ominously from the one in the Socialist utopias before the 1848 revolution. The new conception of labor amounts to the exploitation of nature, which with naive complacency is contrasted with the exploitation of the proletariat. Compared with this positivistic conception, Fourier's fantasies, which have so often been ridiculed, prove to be surprisingly sound. According to Fourier, as a result of efficient cooperative labor, four moons would illuminate the earthly night, the ice would recede from the poles, sea water would no longer taste salty, and beasts of prey would do man's bidding. All this illustrates a kind of labor which, far from exploiting nature, is capable of delivering her of the creations which lie dormant in her womb as potentials. Nature, which, as Dietzgen puts it, ‘exists gratis,’ is a complement to the corrupted conception of labor.

*The Gotha Congress of 1875 'United the two German Socialist parties, one led by Ferdinand Lassalle, the other by Karl Marx and Wilhelm Liebknecht. The program, drafted by Liebknecht and Lassalle, was severely attacked by Marx in London. See his ‘Critique of the Gotha Program’

Dietzgen's work continues to be the basis of all critical thinking around dialectics and contributes to a Marxism that is a living critique not an ossified ideological testament.

One of the most prominent Serbian philosophers, Bogdan Šešić was born in Valjevo on July 4, 1909. After 90 years of active life, he died in Belgrade on February 10, 1999.

Living in tumultuous times of the breakthrough and later disaster of the Hitler's Nazism, rise and fall of the Stalinism, as well as in times of the Yugoslav socialism of self-management, professor Šešić encountered numerous difficulties and conflicts, trying to maintain a theoretically consistent and ethically proper attitude, often defying the "fooleries" of his own time and milieu, with a feeling of "a hunted game".

As a teacher of philosophy at the Philosophical Faculty of Belgrade he acted calmly and thoroughly. His public appearances and comments in journals, although very polemic, were chiefly based on theoretical rather than ideological arguments and explications which were not much compliant with the spiritual climate of the time.
Professor Šešić is one of the most prolific writers among the Yugoslav philosophers. He published a considerable number of works in the area of logic and gnoseology. He also dealt with the problems of other philosophical disciplines such as: ontology, anthropology, axiology, esthetics, modern Marxist philosophy, philosophy of science, etc.

His opus published in Serbia includes:
1. Dialectic Materialism of Joseph Dietzgen. 1957.

Even the 'intellectual giant' of the new right; Ludwig Von Mises refers to Dietzgen, disparagingly of course in his simplistic philosophical counter to Dietzgen's dialectics. Dialectical Materialism was always an anathema to Von Mises as much as it is today to his followers. His is a universe of inputs and outputs, one where alienation does not exist it is simply an excuse for being lazy. Von Mises, like many of his right wing students sees no difference between the Nazi's and Marxists, which is where this quote comes from.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century no one ventured to dispute the fact that the logical structure of mind is unchangeable and common to all human beings. All human interrelations are based on this assumption of a uniform logical structure. We can speak to each other only because we can appeal to something com­mon to all of us, namely, the logical structure of reason. Some men can think deeper and more refined thoughts than others. There are men who unfortunately cannot grasp a process of inference in long chains of deductive reasoning. But as far as a man is able to think and to follow a process of discursive thought, he always clings to the same ultimate principles of reasoning that are applied by all other men. There are people who cannot count further than three; but their counting, as far as it goes, does not differ from that of Gauss or Laplace. No historian or traveler has ever brought us any knowl­edge of people for whom a and non-a were identical, or who could not grasp the difference between affirmation and negation. Daily, it is true, people violate logical principles in reasoning. But who­ever examines their inferences competently can uncover their errors.

Because everyone takes these facts to be unquestionable, men enter into discussions; they speak to each other; they write letters and books; they try to prove or to disprove. Social and intellectual coöperation between men would be impossible if this were not so. Our minds cannot even consistently imagine a world peopled by men of different logical structures or a logical structure different from our own.

Yet, in the course of the nineteenth century this undeniable fact has been contested. Marx and the Marxians, foremost among them the "proletarian philosopher" Dietzgen, taught that thought is determined by the thinker's class position. What thinking produces is not truth but "ideologies." This word means, in the context of Marxian philosophy, a disguise of the selfish interest of the social class to which the thinking individual is attached. It is therefore useless to discuss anything with people of another social class. Ideologies do not need to be refuted by discursive reasoning; they must be unmasked by denouncing the class position, the social background, of their authors. Thus Marxians do not discuss the merits of physical theories; they merely uncover the "bourgeois" origin of the physicists.

The Marxians have resorted to polylogism because they could not refute by logical methods the theories developed by "bour­geois" economics, or the inferences drawn from these theories demonstrating the impracticability of socialism. As they could not rationally demonstrate the soundness of their own ideas or the un­soundness of their adversaries' ideas, they have denounced the accepted logical methods. The success of this Marxian stratagem was unprecedented. It has rendered proof against any reasonable criticism all the absurdities of Marxian would-be economics and would-be sociology. Only by the logical tricks of polylogism could etatism gain a hold on the modern mind.

Polylogism is so inherently nonsensical that it cannot be carried consistently to its ultimate logical consequences. No Marxian was bold enough to draw all the conclusions that his own epistemological viewpoint would require. The principle of polylogism would lead to the inference that Marxian teachings also are not objec­tively true but are only "ideological" statements. But the Marxians deny it. They claim for their own doctrines the character of abso­lute truth. Thus Dietzgen teaches that "the ideas of proletarian logic are not party ideas but the outcome of logic pure and sim­ple."[xi] The proletarian logic is not "ideology" but absolute logic. Present-day Marxians, who label their teachings the sociology of knowledge, give proof of the same inconsistency. One of their champions, Professor Mannheim, tries to demonstrate that there exists a group of men, the "unattached intellectuals," who are equipped with the gift of grasping truth without falling prey to ideological errors.[xii] Of course, Professor Mannheim is convinced that he is the foremost of these "unattached intellectuals." You simply cannot refute him. If you disagree with him, you only prove thereby that you yourself are not one of this elite of "unattached intellectuals" and that your utterances are ideological nonsense.

For Von Mises and his followers both Fascism and Socialism are ideologically driven not market driven. They are ideals imposed on the market, not arising from the conditions of the marketplace. Once again mistaking the very real political structures of existing capitalism for an idealized free market, which never has or will exist. Fascism, the New Deal, Stalinism, indeed even post-WWII welfare capitalism is anathema to the Von Mises school. But the fact is that they are the historical development of capitalism not as 'free enterprise' but as state monopoly capital, regardless of their ideological clothing.

Von Mises ideal capitalism evolved in the 2oth Century in order to deal with its own internal contradictions and crisis's. Something that the idealists of his school of thought fail to recognize even today. They still promote the ideal of some mythical free market that exists only in their own imaginations. Thatchers England, Reagan's America, these are the creatures of Von Mises imagination.

As the economic boom of the 1980s proceeded, 'stage-set' schizophrenia - where every shopfront resembled an art-installation and every pedestrian a method actor -- proved prophetic: repro-pubs with mocked-up drawing rooms and fake book-shelves sprang up overnight. Leeds City Centre was overhauled so that the very alleys looked like Disney's concept of Victoriana. Visiting London's Docklands was like a trip round a toystore hallucinating a building in each gaudy trinket. The film Bladerunner and cyberpunk Science Fiction made Philip K. Dick's schizoid alienation a prize commodity. William Burroughs was read more and more widely. Those in regular work reported that 'straights' were all taking drugs. The certified experience of schizophrenia certainly made me cynical about its use as a kind of sugar on the pill of various academic novelties:[2] Jean Baudrillard, for example, read like a cash-in rather than a fellow-traveller. Finally, only the dialectical philosophy of Marx, Dietzgen and Lenin was up to dealing with the relativity of ideology in a material world that is still there when you reopen your kaleidoscope eyes.

During the eighteen months of depression that followed the 'hyperactivity' of the visions, the poet found solace in literature. By concentrating on the paradoxes of representation, certain writers -- Christopher Dewdney, J. H. Prynne, Philip K. Dick -- demonstrated that the disturbance of normal perception had been a product of social being rather individual consciousness. In 1991, Iain Sinclair's Downriver proved that 80s schizophrenia was not so much an individual affliction; more a national event. The poet resorted to writing imaginary reviews in non-existent literary journals.

Indeed Von Mises, Ayn Rand and the other deep thinkers on the right still lack the depth of philosophic inquiry that Dietzgen, the self taught worker intellectual, was capable of. Von Mises misrepresentation of dialectics and Dietzgen actually fails to grasp the liberatory conception of the importance of the individual to Dietzgen. So shrill is he and his followers in equating dialectics=Marxism=authoritarianism.

Dialectical materialism is a way of confronting the false precepts of idealism not by conquering them but absorbing them which is a libertarian process. In other words the Left promoted individual liberty before the Right claimed to be its champion. Which is why in the world of real politics the New Right gave way to the political machinations of the Protestant Evangelical Moral Majority under Reagan who only paid lip service to libertarianism.

The doctrine of being of materialism fights the one of idealism by absorbing it rather than by rejecting it. Materialism considers idealism as being neither a truth nor a falsity, but rather a gnoseological INCONSISTENCY. "The inconsistency does not lie in the fact that IDEAL driving forces are recognized, but in the investigation not being carried further back behind these into their motive causes" (Marx-Engels 1959: 231). "Ideal forces" are present indeed in the existence, but they are GENERATED by the highly complex material conditions. Plainly and concretely, the starting point of the materialist doctrine of being can be exemplified as follows:

"My desk as a picture in my mind is identical with my idea of it. But my desk outside of my brain is a separate object and distinct from my idea. The idea is to be distinguished from thinking only as a part of the thought process, while the object of my thought exists as a separate entity."

(Dietzgen 1906a: 62-63 - published in 1869)

If we neglect for the moment the HISTORICAL praxis that produced the desk Joseph Dietzgen (1820-1888) is specifically referring to and eventually placed it in front of him and him in front of it, we isolate, with that example, the two fundamental ontological principles describing the relationship between matter and spirit according to materialism.

"The first principle of materialism can therefore be put like this: that causal process in space and time, given to us in sensation, exists or continues INDEPENDENTLY of any mind or spirit, consciousness or idea. The second principle is the complement of this, and DENIES the INDEPENDENT existence of anything non-material. Perceptions, ideas, intuitions, feelings, purposes, ideals, consciousness and mind only exist as products of particular kinds of material processes. They are the perceptions, ideas and so on of material organisms, products of the functioning of specific organs of their bodies, formed in the conditions of their material mode of life.

(Cornforth 1968: 45)

It is ironic that Von Mises missed reading Eugene Dietzgen's work, see below, which compared his fathers writings with the father of individualist anarchism, Max Stirner. Dietzgen had more in common with the anarchist thought of American individualists like Benjamin Tucker than the apologists for idealistic capitalism like Von Mises.

At the Marx Internet Archive they have posted two works by Dietzgen

And his works are still available in print.

• Nature of Human Brain Work: An Introduction to Dialectics
  by Joseph Dietzgen
  Hardcover, Charles H Kerr Pub Co, ISBN 0882861050 (0-88286-105-0)
  Softcover, Left Bank Books, ISBN 0317185586 (0-317-18558-6)

A German version is available here and can be translated by Google. Which is what I have done with the link.

His work on Brain work is echoed in the writings of Kropotkin who also saw no difference between mental or manual labour.

Google has his Philosophical Essays On Socialism And Science, Religion, Ethics: Critique-of-reason And The World-at-large available as a limited access online text.

A full digitalized version of the book in PDF and other formats is available from the University of California for free online here.

Far from being considered irrelevant today Dietzgen is brought up by Stephen Lyng in his book Holistic Health and Biomedical Medicine -A Counter System Analysis in comparison with Althusser; The Dialectical Paradigm

Joseph's son Eugene Dietzgen preserved his fathers legacy of ideas and
published them through the Chicago Socialist publishing house Charles Kerr.
Which he helped finance.

He was involved with DeLeon's Marxist Socialist Labor Party. DeLeon like many
Marxists suffered from authoritarian tendencies to be the sole voice of the class
and the party.

The despotic sway of DeLeon had not been
relished and bad feeling existed all over the country.
Some were jealous of it, others were disgusted by it.
Of these latter was Eugene Dietzgen of Chicago, whose
father, Joseph Dietzgen, had been a compatriot with
Karl Marx. Dietzgen saw how DeLeonism was perverting
the movement and rebelled against it. He had
been friendly to the Social Democratic Party, and this
was made a pretext by some of DeLeon’s henchmen in
Chicago to prefer charges and to ultimately expel him.
He issued a pamphlet in March against DeLeonism
under the title Leze Majesty and Treason to the “Fakirs”
in the Socialist Labor Party, and sent it to every section
of the party in the country. This, in conjunction with
a weekly onslaught on DeLeonism which Wayland’s
Appeal to Reason was making in the interests of a united
socialist movement, had some effect.

Eugene went on to become a successful Chicago manufacturer of slide rulers,
survey equipment and the first table top printing process in the U.S.
known as Diazo type.

His essay on the importance of his fathers work is;

AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE PROLETARIAN METHOD OF RESEARCH AND CONCEPTION OF THE WORLD.

MAX STIRNER AND JOSEPH DIETZGEN.

BY EUGENE DIETZGEN.

LOCARNO, March, 1905.

("Philosophical Essays", Joseph Dietzgen. Publ.: Charles Kerr & Co., Chicago 1917)

(Translated by Ernest Untermann.)

(Scanned, proof-read and slightly improved translation by Richard O. Hamill and Svein O. G. Nyberg, Edinburgh 1998)

For further reference see:

PROLETARIAN PHILOSOPHY

Bricianer, Serge. Pannekoek and the Workers' Councils, intro. by John Gerber, trans. by Malachy Carroll. St. Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1978.

Burns, Tony. "Joseph Dietzgen and the History of Marxism", Science & Society, vol. 66, no. 2, Summer 2002, pp. 202-227.

Dietzgen, Joseph. Philosophical Essays. Translated by M. Beer and Th. Rothstein; with biographical sketch and introduction by Eugene Dietzgen, translated by Ernest Untermann; edited by Eugene Dietzgen and Joseph Dietzgen, Jr. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1917.

Dietzgen, Joseph. The Positive Outcome of Philosophy. Introduction by Dr. Anton Pannekoek; translated by Ernest Untermann; edited by Eugene Dietzgen and Joseph Dietzgen, Jr. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1906.

Easton, Loyd D. "Empiricism and Ethics in Dietzgen," Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 19, no. 1, Jan. 1958, pp. 77-90.

Macintyre, Stuart. A Proletarian Science: Marxism in Britain 1917-1933. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Mehring, Franz. "Philosophy and Philosophizing" (1909), trans. Rubin Gotesky, Marxist Quarterly, April-June 1937, pp.293-297.

Nizan, Paul; Fittingoff, Paul, trans. The Watchdogs: Philosophers and the Established Order. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972.

Rée, Jonathan. Proletarian Philosophers: Problems in Socialist Culture in Britain, 1900-1940. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.

.

Joseph Dietzgen, a companion of Marx and Engels, once said that an old man who looks back on his life may see it as an endless series of mistakes which, if he could only have his time back again, he would doubtless choose to eliminate. But then he is left with the dialectical contradiction that it was only by means of these mistakes that he arrived at the wisdom to be able to judge them to be such. As Hegel profoundly observed, the self-same maxims on the lips of a youth do not carry the same weight as when spoken by a man whose life’s experience has filled them with meaning and content. They are the same and yet not the same. What was initially an abstract thought, with little or no real content, now becomes the product of mature reflection.

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