The Critique of Science: Historical, Materialist and Dialectical Studies on the Relation of the Modern Sciences of Nature to the

Bourgeoisie and Capital

Will Barnes

An Institute for the Critical Study of Society of Capital Publication

The Critique of Science: Historical, Materialist and Dialectical Studies on the Relation of the Modern Sciences of Nature to the Bourgeoisie and Capital Will Barnes Institute for the Critical Study of Societies of Capital St. Paul, 2011

Having finished his lecture on the formation of the galaxy, solar system and planets, Bertrand Russell asked his audience if there were any questions. An elderly woman raised her hand and started to speak: You know, young man, that none of thats true. Pausing, she resumed, The Earth, as you know or ought to, rests on the back of a turtle. Russell was taken aback by her remarks, but recovering quickly, he replied, And, madam, just what does the turtle rest on? Not to be deterred, she responded, You think youre smart, dont you. Smiling, she triumphantly concluded, There are turtles all the way down.1

We tell this story a little differently than, among others, Stephen Hawkings (A Brief History of Time). More to the point, here this story has a far different meaning and import which we directly counterpose to that intended by Hawkings. See the Preliminary Remarks, immediately below.

Contents Preliminary Remarks Introduction The Modern Science of Nature (2001, Nov 2009) Social Basis of the Formation of an Organic Intelligentsia of the Bourgeoisie; Science and the Bourgeoisie; Elements of the Conceptual Structure of Science; Note on the Classical Evaluation of Labor First Study Science at its Origins The Problem of Motion: Galileo and Aristotle (Jun-Aug 2010) Aristotle; Galileo; Galileo and Aristotle; Notes on Observation, Experience and Experiment in Galileo, on Galileo and the Jesuits, and on the Modern Bourgeois Evaluation of Labor First Interlude (Nov-Dec 2009, Mar-Apr 2010) Fundamental Forms of Sociation; Formal Domination; Real Domination; Eras of Capitals Domination in the History of Capitalism; Retrospect and Anticipation Second Study New Departures in Science: The Sciences of Life (Sept 2009, Dec 2009-Feb 2010) Malthus and the Problem of Population; Darwin and the Evolutionary Development of Life; The Modern Synthesis (Neo-Darwinism); Foundations of the Malthusian-Darwinian Nexus in Potential Species Productivity; Decisive, nonMalthusian, non-Darwinian and non-Mendelian Determinants of Life; Some Conclusions Third Study (Short Study) New Departures in Science: The Modern Science of Nature Renewed. Three Sketches (2001, Nov 2009) Science without Foundations; Three Sketches, Heisenberg, Bohr and Einstein: The New Physics. Heisenberg, Bohr and Quantum Mechanics; Einstein, Simultaneity and Relativity, Technological Civilization; Bohr and Einstein Fourth Study The Critique of Scientific Reason (Apr-Jun 2010) Theorization Apogee of Science for Capital: Karl Popper, the Philosopher as Functionary of Capital The Weight of Traditions; Poppers Concept of Science; The Antinomies of Scientific Thought; Critical Rationality and Liberalism Second Interlude (Mar-Apr 2010, Aug 2010) Autonomization of Capital; Totalizing Domination; Trajectory of Contemporary Capitalist Development Fifth Study The Role of Life in Planetary Death (Jun-Aug 2009) Darwinian and Malthusian Mystifications in Capitals Sciences of Climate Change: Life on Earth in its Medean Aspect; The Physics and the Geophysiology of Life on Earth; Science and Capital; Alternatives, Scientists and Science, Climate Change Conclusion (Jun 2010) Capital and Science Postscript Summary and Prospects (May 2010) Lest our Hopes and Dreams Become an Endless Nightmare: Capitalist Technology, the Modern Science of Nature and the Movement of Capital

Preliminary Remarks This text concerns just one, socially determined form of knowledge in the millennial old history of humanity, but a form that, as it rises from daily life in order to provide intentional direction to that life, thinks itself that is, its wholly uncritical conceptual structure holds out no option for self-reflection on underlying assumptions, while its bearers confusedly think it detached from context, universal and objective, the omniscience of a god privy to an absolute truth, an unconditioned speech about nature valid at all times and places... Such is the intended sense of the epigram that prefaces this work... This is science, the modern science of nature, by which we mean a social and historical form of knowledge, originally generated by a class (the bourgeoisie) acting in a single and singular epoch of history, a history that itself stretches from the origins of agriculture and stratified societies down to the present. In the following, we intend to study only those moments in the history of science beginning with its origins that are immediately and directly related to the development of capitalism at which the obfuscatory and self-justificatory veils masking its relation to capital drop. Beyond a general statement of the relation of science to the bourgeoisie determined by the project of nature domination (which in and of itself is illuminating), what we intend is to demonstrate that the most important new departures in science (e.g., Darwinian evolutionary theory), even the most radical ones (e.g.., quantum mechanics), remain governed by the original class teleology of the bourgeoisie even if at the moment of their elaborations they embodied only the imperatives of capital. We shall tentatively specify the former in terms of a social intentionality and the project that informs it, which, as we said, is nature domination comprehended as degradation, despoliation (plundering) and destruction which recreates earthly nature as a holding arena consisting solely in unprocessed resources, for which all of reality has the meaning of a raw materials basin for capitalist commodity production 1 It is this project as it came to historically develop and its social and historical content took eventual shape in forms driven by a systems-imposed compulsion (i.e., the logic of capital) that mystifyingly justifies an endless development of productive forces as the alleged foundation of the genuine human community. This is not intellectual history as it is often referred to, far from it. Instead, in an inversion of its usual confused sense, we are engaged in writing the inner history of science, disclosing the structure of those privileged moments at which the ultimate meaning and significance of science for humanity is laid bare.

Variations on this formulation of the meaning of nature domination will recur throughout the various studies. Based on the entirety of this work, an elaboration of its full sense is presented in the Postscript, and its transcendent significance in the section of that Postscript entitled the Geophysiology of Earthly Nature, below.

Introduction The Modern Science of Nature In the remarks that immediately follow, we shall merely sketch out the lineaments of our position. In the course of our investigation this initial theorization will be refined and remade in a continuous encounter between it and that investigation in which the theorization and the materials presented are subject to inquiry, examination and scrutiny each in light of the other. Here that position is offered tentatively. The five studies forming the entire body of this presentation are designed to demonstrate the truth and efficacy of this thin analysis and assessment, culminating in our postscript where this position, now mediated and concretized, is forcefully and fully stated. Social Bases of the Formation of an Organic Intelligentsia of the Bourgeoisie The development of large urban enclaves in the tributary West exhibited the simultaneous rise and decline of different social strata. Two strata in particular are discernible. Over historical time these two strata fused to form the crucial layer of an organic intelligentsia of the bourgeoisie, a development that was itself decisive for the appearance of the latter as a class in history. The first stratum was made up of great artisans, or master craftsmen. The Renaissance (particularly in what today is called Italy) was not merely characterized by a potent intellectual ferment which included the discovery and critical evaluation of ancient (Greek and Latin) sources as well as the intellectual production of a conception of human activity as central to the production of the world (Bruno, Pico dell Mirandola), but more fundamentally also by the formation of powerful, territorially based political states (immediate antecedents of modern capitalist, national states). The new monarchies at once rested on landed aristocracies and political alliances with or conquest of wealthy urban merchant patriciates of cities such as Florence, Barcelona, London, etc. These monarchies, together with that enormous temporal power, the Church (a power which little recognized had already past its zenith), engaged in massive displays of their wealth, not just in pomp but in contributions to the objective substance that characterized the civilization they were central to. On the one hand, empire building required suitable weaponry. On the other, urban administrative centers housing those princes and clerics were the sites of ongoing building construction of vast proportions, cathedrals, palaces, lavish homes, etc. The great merchant patriciates of coastal cities (Genoa, Venice), too, engaged in similar building construction and aggressively pursued empire building, that is, the competitive creation of commercial empire. Advance of their trade required storage facilities, docks, and fleets of ships and the armaments to protect them as well. This building construction and merchant commerce gave rise to and supported a huge army of master craftsmen and lesser artisans. Master craftsmen numbered amongst themselves men such as stonecutters, goldsmiths and masons, and mariners, shipbuilders, carpenters, foundry men and miners, that is, artisans more or less directly related to the activity of building construction and overseas commerce. Amongst them also could be found a group of superior, because formally (if not humanistically) educated, artisans, artisans that included artists such as painters, sculptors and architects, surgeons, makers of nautical and astronomical instruments as well of distance meters for surveyors and gunners, surveyors and navigators themselves, musical instrument artificers, and most importantly artist-engineers such as Alberti, da Vinci, Cellini and Drer.1 Not a few were inventors. Marine compasses and guns, paper and stamping mills, and blast furnaces, for example, all date from this era. The artist-engineers, in particular, were responsible for construction of lifting engines, canals and sluices, guns and fortresses, as they went well beyond their roles in cathedral construction and casting statues.2 The great artisans of this hugely enlarged stratum were often employed in their own right with their workshops journeymen and apprentices. Their status in society and society itself were changing over time. No longer artists, these great craftsmen were becoming bourgeois,3 and they maintained and sustained themselves as capitalists in the strict sense, i.e., through employment of waged labor. Because of their greatly expanded role in production and society, and because they still operated in a cultural climate in which the traditional degradation of manual labor and the mechanical arts in favor of a sterile pursuit of truth (of the vision of goodness or beauty depending on whom
The category of superior artisan is developed by Edgar Zilsel (who also provides this enumeration), The Sociological Roots of Science, 552-553. 2 Ibid, 552. 3 Paola Rossi, Philosophy, Technology and the Arts in the Early Modern Era, 21-22, 30.
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among the ancients one followed) was dominant, they chafed under the humiliation of their imputed lowly status. Their activities, in contrast to Schoolmen and the humanist intelligentsia as well (whose activities were oriented toward syllogistic explication and speculative theological disputation, and learned assimilation of ancient sources and models and careful philological criticism, respectively), were concerned with how effects are produced, intent on discovering rules of operation and engaged in the investigation of causes.1 Rationality here, then, had an entirely different, observationally-experientially (not yet empirically) based meaning. On the ground of these often sophisticated, techno-experiential activities they sought to elaborate for themselves a perspective on the relation of knowledge to activity, work and production that was qualitatively different from that embedded and explicit in the inherited traditions of the West, so called. In writings characteristically crude by contemporary intellectual standards, they polemicized against the bookish, pedantic culture of the academies and Schoolmen; their published works were publicly accessible (i.e., non-esoteric) and experimentally based upon observation of things2 (as opposed to discourse about sensibly contentless concepts); and, implicit in their thought, was a view that technical operations of artisans and mechanics on nature gave rise to a form of knowledge which itself constituted insight into the dynamics of natural phenomena. Accordingly, they held an altogether different evaluation of, one that esteemed, the mechanical arts and artisan labor The second stratum consisted of declassed humanist intellectuals, which had two further sources that respectively constituted a single layer, first, sons of those aristocratic families of the countryside (England, Italy, Holland) who experienced decline as a consequence of the commercialization of agriculture and, second, the youngest sons of smaller patriciates in the great cities, particularly those of Italy and the Low Countries, who in the face of stiff great merchant competition could not be supported by the family business. The urbanization of the peripheries of the tributary formation of the European continent and the newly emerging social order, which culturally and civilizationally comes down to us by the name of the Renaissance, entailed a certain marginalization of seigniorial lords. Ancient noble families, landowners but resident to the cities, were politically and juridically subordinated by the rising burghers. Thus, for example, in 1292-1293 following a long struggle, the Florentine patriciate based in banking and trade issued a series of decrees (Ordinances of Justice) through its control of the communes polity, the Signoriate, and brought the warring old aristocratic families of the Florentine hinterland (contado) under control by abolishing serfdom and providing for the wholesale alienation of land. (In the coming decades, the great families of Florence bought up land in the countryside, establishing a form of exploitation, sharecropping tenancy or mezzadria disguising a form of rural proletarianization, which lasted down into the twentieth century.)3 The educated sons of the older, noble families, now essentially expropriated, formed one root of declassed humanist intelligentsia. (Humanist here, of course, does not have its contemporary sense, but more than anything referred to training in the use of, intense study of and familiarity with ancient sources in the original Latin and ancient Greek.) At the same time, new men, commercially oriented landed proprietors and, socially and economically intertwined with them, wealthy merchants, lawyers, bankers and cloth manufacturers, who had taken together begun to emerge as well-defined social layers, exhibited real social power. These groups were not homogenous. Based in part on commodity production on the peripheries of one great feudal, tributary formation of the West (existing largely between the Loire and the Rhine), strata within these groups engaged in long distance trade as well as the marketing of largely luxury goods for local consumption generating a thoroughgoing competition, between, e.g., merchants and manufacturers in the historically primitive sense.4 There were the proverbial winners and losers, amongst which were sons of trading classes that did not fare as well as
Zilsel, Ibid, 548-549. Rossi, Ibid, 1-7. 3 For all this, see our The History of Florence and the Florentine Republic. 4 The communes collectively (and Florence particularly) played a central role in the creation of an international market, a precondition for the emergence in the West of the capitalist production as the basis of a distinct and novel social form. Merchants, as opposed to industrialists, do not in and of themselves constitute an alternative to seigniorial social orders. Historically, the merchant has stood outside production and, thus, cannot leverage the reorganization of society as a whole. The merchant merely accumulates money-wealth, not "capital, by extracting profit from the exchange (circulation) that it mediates between producers Here see Marx, Kapital, Bd. III 20. Kapitel (Geschichtliches ber das Kaufmannskapital)... The existence of commercial classes in the late Roman Empire clearly indicates that these social groups are not capable from out of their own activity of generating capitalist development. Nonetheless, from the retrospective standpoint of the accomplished development of capitalism as an international system, the merchant classes of the Italian republics, to the extent they created a world market, money as a transregional medium of exchange,also created a historical condition for the emergence of world capitalism. This should, of course, be understood merely as a condition.
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others. In the early part of the chronological fourteenth century, these young men found their way into the citys polities,1 occupying for most of the century positions attached to their city government (most often engaged in the conduct of foreign affairs), and articulated and elaborated a vision of social life based on the autonomy, sovereignty and primacy (in social life) of the polity, organized participatorily in the narrow oligarchical sense, a democracy as it were of great families if you will. (Development of this sort will be repeated elsewhere: By the end of the next century for a period of roughly a hundred years, 1390-1480, western Europe began to see the formation of a third major zone of commodity production in England, the first two being the Italian Peninsula and the Low Countries. This development, though, started from the countryside, and took shape objectively, historically and at a certain moment consciously in contradistinction to the consolidation of the kingdom of Castile.2 Both were ill-defined national territories in the process of becoming such.) Yet the same changes that saw the political consolidation of the power of this merchant patriciate dominating Europes urban enclaves, the rise of an artisan class engaged in construction of built environment (cathedrals, residents) including (what we would call) infrastructure (docks, canals), shipbuilding and instrument manufacture, witnessed the decline of the humanist intellectuals in official positions as a lengthy struggle (ending, for example, in Florence in 1530) ensued between the great tributary monarchs and the city Republics, a struggle that dramatically drained, virtually exhausting, the resources of the latter and made these native intelligentsias expendable. Declassed, they tended to form a free literati seeking out the same bankers and merchants as patrons, but, more likely (as, e.g., in the case of Machiavelli), attached themselves to princes, rulers of small domains statelets in southern Europe, as instructors of their sons (while, of course, attempting to garner favor in the form of appointments to academic chairs in the universities of France and Italy). This was the second root of rootless, cosmopolitan humanistic intelligentsia. The dislodgement of this free literati from official positions, and in many cases their newly dependent status, gave rise to a call for creation of a new type of gentleman. This new man (our term) was to be one who could respond to and exploit ongoing social change, one who would exhibit the requisite ability in politics, diplomacy, culture, manners, and competence in military and navigational skills (here citing Gilbert, who, had he been able to reach back in time a half century and known him, could have been engaging Machiavelli), skills that were rapidly becoming more important than blood and birth.3 This call also obviously entailed a different evaluation of manual labor and the mechanical arts.4 That evaluation was practically exhibited in the greatest, if later, figures of this stratum, Galileo, Gilbert, others such as Bacon, for whom personal contact with skilled, knowledgeable artisans was the rule.5 Gilberts call for a new man, at any rate, was concerned with development of technical skills. The programmatic aspects of this new formation (Bildung) were consciously set in opposition to the explicitly speculative-theoretical one that held sway in the universities. Rhetoric was, for example, yoked to political oration and military speeches, political philosophy to the various functions of the policy of states, beginning with their histories and inclusive of their types, administration and finance; the study of nature philosophy and mathematics was viewed largely in their technical aspects, that is, insofar as they yielded insights into fortification, strategy and artillery usage; astronomy and geography were presented with a view to navigation; etc.6 Such a novel perspective clearly signified the contempt for labor and mechanical activities traditionally held by aristocratic lords and leisured gentlemen had to be discarded (a path that Machiavelli, as a member of one Florentine twenty-five great families, the Ottimati, had already trodden down). At the same time, it was fully congruent with, and, to boot, a historically essential propaedeutic to assimilation of, the conceptual framework of the modern science of nature. Finally, there was another group that consisted in disaffected clerics.
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Zilsel, Ibid, 549. See the First Study, Part II, Castilian Empire in Early Modern Europe, Capitalism and Formal Domination, below. Non-chronological and deployed as conceptual premises to illuminate the relation of science to the bourgeoisie, an alternative periodization is offered in the First Interlude, below. 3 Rossi, Ibid, 9, cites the example of the Englishman, Humphrey Gilbert; also Zilsel, Ibid, 555. 4 For the classical evaluation of labor, see the appended note under the same heading, below. 5 For contact, Zilsel, Ibid, 555 (Gilbert), 555-556 (Galileo). 6 Rossi, Ibid, 9-10.

Nearly all of Galileos well-known pupils, Benedetto Castelli, Giovanni Ciampoli and Vincenzo Viviani for example, as well as many of his correspondents, intellectual peers, and supporters (ranging all the way to the top of the Church hierarchy, e.g., Maffeo Barberini) wore Roman collars.1 With a view to the new science, their significance was not social... they did not form a separate stratum and many of them were reintegrated into the Church intelligentsia, importantly with the Jesuits... Rather, their significance was intellectual in the narrow sense: Where they were of import, they transmitted theologically mediated, doctrinal contents of the new science, either to their pupils or, in some cases, by leaving behind texts. Science and the Bourgeoisie Though it is common productivist error to grasp the connection between modern science and abstract labor in terms of the general development of society, hence to see in science the intellectual patrimony of humanity, it remains an error. Science is neither: The internal, necessary relation of science to the bourgeoisie can be grasped in different, distinctive ways; first, in the vision of the world (man, community, nature) projected by science in its struggle against the old tributary order and in contradistinction to the old nature philosophy and its vision, theoretically expressing the organization of that old order; second, it can be grasped in the internal conceptual structure of science itself in its structural similarity to the value form; third, in the homology between the original, social and precognitive telos of science at its origins and bourgeois tasks (expansion of productive forces); and fourth, societally, in the validation of scientific laws through technological achievements linked to expansion of productivity. Summarily demonstrating this connection imposes two requirements on us, namely, exhibiting the internal, historical connection of the bourgeoisie as a class to science as theory, and demonstrating that significant elements of the internal conceptual structure of science are inseparable from the bourgeois process of accumulation, that is, seeing and recognizing the constitution of science as theory is indissolubly linked to production of the socio-historical world we call capitalism. Let us begin by emphasizing that we are speaking of the bourgeoisie as a class. The concept of the bourgeoisie as it appears here is not designed to mask national differences, distinct life situations and the conflicting interests of this new class as a whole as it first emerged in history. This much said the concept remains unitary, one that cannot be relegated to the status of a construct, to say an ideal type. Instead it refers to the most enlightened individuals, especially to the social groups in which they were situated and which provided them with reality and their identities. In this respect, it was this essential sociality, a shared objective position in society that permitted these individuals to mutually recognize one another and to realize and appreciate that the new class they relationally formed could not freely breathe the air of the old order, rather its atmosphere would choke and suffocate them and it. The first of these enlightened individuals began to appear among new social groups late in the history of the urban enclaves of a Mediterranean tributary formation, especially in the Italian Peninsula and then in the Low Countries. As we have seen, they first appeared in two distinctive, quite different social strata in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, namely, as master craftsmen among the great artisans and as declassed humanist intellectuals Their children, as we know, will be bourgeois... Across these distinctive social strata, objectively without recognition, they came together in elaborating a critique of Aristotelian nature philosophy, or its medieval, Scholastic development and presentation. After 1600, however, they became familiar with one another; there was active, subjective convergence: They sought each out. Modern science at is origins bore the mark of their critique, and cannot be understood apart from it. Central to and decisive for this relation was the type of technical knowledge formed in the activities of the great artisans: It was self conscious knowledge, so what declassed humanistic intellectuals recognized in it was that which great artisans already understood: This technical knowledge was characteristically, and in its inner essence (so many of the intellectuals argued), inventive, cooperative, progressive, and perfectible. It followed, and these intellectuals explicitly noted, the methods and procedures of artisans, technicians and engineers were cultural forms leading to a progressive, cumulative enlargement of knowledge on which society and within it large social groups one they might some day hegemonize itself could be based. Science, as the elaboration, refinement and deepening, and theorization, of these methods and procedures (taken together constituting a qualitative transformation of them), developed out of this convergence, interaction and practice of these two strata no longer distinct but as a bourgeois intelligentsia over two or three generations. Learned men writing and publishing in the vernacular as
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An extensive list of these clerics vis--vis the new science can be found in Pietro Redondi, Galileo, Heretic, passim.

opposed to the traditional Latin symbolized their convergence, whether the language was English, Italian or French. As layers of a class in the historical process of formation, as large merchants and cloth manufacturers, great artisans becoming industrialists, big peasants becoming capitalist farmers, differentiated themselves out of tributary strata in the tributary West, an identifiable organic intelligentsia of bourgeois origins the first true men of science began to appear by no later than 1600 and, as intellectuals, set themselves apart by uniting methodical, rational procedure with experimental and observational practices. Among the very greatest of these men we number Galileo, Bacon, Gilbert and, perhaps Descartes (perhaps, because there was very little in the way of experiment and observation in his work). Retrospectively, we can see that on the basis of the critical elaborations of the relations of the mechanical arts to theory carried out by several generations of late 16th century urban great artisans and declassed humanist scholars, an intellectual layer of 17th century classical bourgeoisies (i.e., educated social layers born of the strata above as they emerged in the Italian republics, Dutch and French urban enclaves, and in London and the English countryside) created and developed the modern science of nature complexly mediating the daily bourgeois practice of accumulation. But how and when? Step back and examine that moment at which the new class implicitly recognized itself, i.e., in its divergence from the old order. It was the life-activities (accumulation of money wealth, later capital) of this new class that permitted it to raise itself to this understanding: Usury laws, guild regulations, a religiously sanctioned cultural atmosphere dictating the obligations of the lord as master of labor and limiting exploitation of that labor (or, alternately, in the case of bourgeois intellectuals establishing the onto-theological premises of inquiry which it could not question), etc., hamstrung its activity and made it clear it could not flourish in the old order, particularly with a view to unquestioned Church authority, and craft and seigniorial relations governing production. And, in this regard, science? Science, an intellectual production disclosing the structure of the naturally real, was designed by its creators (again, Galileo and Bacon, Gilbert, Descartes, others) as a theoretical weapon in a genuinely fierce struggle against the Church and its largely cleric intelligentsia, the Catholic princes who supported it, even the massive peasant strata that dumbly provided the Church its social basis, a struggle over the vision of the world (in astronomy and physics) and for the autonomy of thought (i.e., those innovators who think). Simultaneously it, science, was a conceptual formulation of both the practical and theoretical conditions and means of the mastery of nature to lessen the labor of man (Descartes), i.e., to increase the so-called productive forces of society.1 Stated differently, in opening up vistas of nature mastery and domination it was science that allowed this class as a whole as it formed from merchants, great artisans and big farmers to intuitively albeit obliquely grasp an understanding mediately by concepts of personal salvation, doing Gods work, self-enrichment and creation of national wealth the significance of the compulsion that at any rate gripped it, the expansion of productive forces of society and humanity. In the objective historical sense, it was a theory mediating the practice of a rising class slowly becoming conscious that its existence, social independence in the pursuit of its life practices and its cognitive elaborations (science itself and later its specific study or science of society, political economy) required its own societal hegemony. That is, this understanding came together and resolved itself into the insight that the creation of a new social order had to be theoretically mediated in a new way. In the end, it was this shared insight, and all its ramifications as they were grasped, that cohered the bourgeoisie allowing it to appear and act as a class in history. In this context, we should recognize that nature domination was (and continues to be) the point of contact between science and the bourgeoisie, a cognitive-cultural form that mediates itself to the class in whose life it is rooted and whose activity it intentionally directs. Beyond this, science legitimizes the bourgeoisie socially and historically: In its capital accumulative pursuit of nature domination in the interests of humanity as understood from the perspective of bourgeois society, science has and continues (especially today as a fused techno-science) to function as an
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Discourse on Method, Part I. We may believe, mythologically and ideologically, this struggle was merely an internal development within the intellectual history of the West or an argument among individuals over competing theories of nature, but these men (Bacon, Descartes, etc.) clearly understood what was at issue and what was at stake. We merely recall the title of one of Galileos great works, Dialogues Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, and note the structure of this dialogue in which the Peripatetic views are subject to scrutiny and critique. See the First Study, Part III, Polemic and the Logics of Argument in the Dialogue, below.

ideational underpinning of the consciousness of a class that once aspired to universality, a belief that today has its translation in the vain, arrogant conviction that it is the only class that can organize society as a whole. It should be clear, then, this elaboration of science, as the critical moment in the struggle against the old order resting on the insight that the creation of a new social order had to be theoretically mediated in a new way, involved the further insight among all bourgeois individuals that took even a passing interest in scientific studies that their science was no mere theory. Rather it was embedded in dialectically premising, issuing in and strengthening a world vision. A dizzying flood of insights constituted the contents of this vision: Efficacious to this day, it entails a view of man, society and nature (man, i.e., humanity, consists in privatized and egoistic individuals, society is organized around commodity production and exchange that pits these individuals each against all and, nature is an open, infinite, and deterministic universe formed of indivisible, individual elements). Science in this sense, that is, as a world vision, was intuitively transparent to the bourgeoisie because it immediately and practically illuminated its activities in production and society, and because it provided it with a sense of its role and function in history (a sense of which was emerging). It was not objectivity (i.e., position in society) and it was not activity as such, though to be sure there are formal points of identity; rather, it was precisely this understanding that, as we said, cohered the bourgeoisie allowing it to appear and act as a class in history. It is this vision of the world, and the science that underlines and in the end renders it intelligible, that has internally and historically connected the early commercial bourgeoisie (the cloth manufacturers, merchants, bankers and traders of the urban enclaves on the edges of the Mediterranean tributary Europe), who accumulated money-wealth but who had never engaged in capital accumulation, to later industrialists, capitalists in the strict sense (those who, more and more as mere personifications of capital, have since the latter nineteenth century systematically pursued accumulation through the organization of the work processes and their subordination to capitalist rationality), whose worldly outlook was thoroughly scientific and yet whose social existence lay three centuries into the future beyond the formative period of science.1 For us, what are the implications of this world vision? If science is not a mere theory, in the societally efficacious sense it is dialectically underlain by and issues in, while reinforcing, a vision for which the production of the world (the built environment, the universe of use objects, meanings and significations, humanized nature, humanity itself) is without agent, a world in which men and women appear as mere objects among other objects to be used up as raw material in production, a world whose moments are merely said raw material for the production of commodities. This is a world whose constitution is subjugated to the logic of capital accumulation, to the value form. It is a world in which an autonomous and autonomized subject lacking will and consciousness (capital or value) has power over and commands a mystified, productive one, and in which objectified and materialized dead labor dominates sensuous, active human beings. Such an inverted vision constitutes the precognitive infrastructure of the bourgeoisie as a class considered world-historically. This world vision, effectively science, was originally and continues to be grounded in bourgeois lifeworld activities, in accumulation, was (and is) thrown up as a theoretical mediation guided by the teleology of nature domination, projecting itself as operative assumptions about man, nature, and the good life. These assumptions, premises and the practices they issue in, themselves socially validated anew with each scientific advance, were initially if only tacitly made and formed sui generis on the basis of accumulating practices but, socially reproduced in and through these activities, have in turn historically come to intentionally direct accumulation and related activities. Tentatively, then, this satisfies our first requirement linking the bourgeoisie as a class to science as theory, specifically as a weapon in its struggle against leading elements of the old order in a struggle for societal dominance. Elements of the Conceptual Structure of Science Second, we are required to trace out the internal connection or unitary structure that exhibits the inseparability of the internal conceptual structure of science and the bourgeois process of accumulation. This can be achieved largely by showing that this structure is indissolubly linked to the constitution of the socio-historical world we call capitalism by
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This is not to say that there was no connection between the development of specifically capitalist practices and those intellectual productions that formed the necessary conceptual foundations for the development of the modern science of nature. But if the modern mathematical presuppositions of science developed together with modern forms of capitalist accounting, this is a movement strictly in thought and says nothing about the intuitions that arose on the grounds of daily practices, insights that, dialectically, explained those practices and in turn, once generalized (i.e., as intellectual intuition of essential relations, not inductively), created the moments of a vision of the world that illuminated everything else. For the homologous relation of mathematics and bookkeeping, see Zilsel, Ibid, 546-547.

way of nature domination (and, in doing so, we shall also attempt to further exhibit the homologous identity of this conceptual structure with that of the intelligible structure of this world, that of the value-form).1 The development of productive forces is not what distinguishes the bourgeoisie as a class in history, particularly at its origins. Understood as a structure characterizing human history in its entirely, productive forces is a gross conceptual abstraction without real referent. The reality of productive forces is constituted during the course of capitalist development; but at its origins the latter cannot be understood in terms of the former. The fundamental social requirement for the emergence of productive forces, the productivity of labor, etc., is the institutional separation out of an economy from socially undifferentiated precapitalist formations, which in actual history rests on the social generalization of capitals formal domination over labor in production.2 Until this development occurs, it is utter nonsense to speak about productive forces and their role in history or, here, at the origins of capitalism. What does distinguish the bourgeoisie as a class in history is the project of nature domination. At the same time, at its origins and prior to all explicit theorization and experimentation, the modern science of nature is motivated by the same telos of nature domination, an atheoretical yet comprehensive goal of scientific activity embedded in the internal conceptual structure of science as an anticipatory projection of a mathematized nature. (And it is the societal meaning of a mathematized nature that is at issue.) While reconstruction of this project as the hidden telos animating modern science can be undertaken from the standpoint of the technological achievements of scientific practice, it is important to recognize that it is not necessary to do so. Rather, this project, one that necessarily presupposes bourgeois life-practices centered on money (and later capital) accumulation, can be read off, as we are suggesting, the internal conceptual structure of science itself. Begin with early modern science. This beginning is not arbitrary: To make a case legitimizing the ambitions it pursues, a rising class is compelled to array any number of arguments, some rational and discursive, to justify itself, its social analysis, its prescriptions, those pursuits: Early modern science was the intellectual moment in a broader political struggle for societal hegemony. Its proponents effected a confrontation with the hitherto reigning cultural form of nature theory, medieval (Aristotelian) natural philosophy. That confrontation brought the conflicting, because incommensurate, conceptual and logical structures of the two competing theories into play, and, to a certain extent, the conflict itself allowed the advocate-practitioners of the new science to become conscious of this incommensurability. To precisely this extent, these men also brought the broader political struggle itself to bear on the confrontation, i.e., in extra-theoretical efforts to legitimize their new science they made claims to a universality the burden of which their theory (and their social class), it was fervently believed, could shoulder. In appeals to a newly forming concept of mankind, one taken over the narrow medieval concept of humanitas essentially the community of Christian believers, they revealed their personal convictions animating this new science and, beyond this, the structural, enduring class teleology that underpinned it. Francis Bacon, commoner and (thirty-six year) member of the House of Commons, theorist and experimentalist, was one of those enlightened individuals who fully understood the creation of a new social order had to be conceptually mediated in a new way, that, accordingly, all must consider what are the true ends of knowledge, and seek it not either for pleasure of the mind, or for contention, or for superiority to others, or for profit, or fame, or power, or any of these inferior things; but for the benefit and use of life For from out of the critique of the old theory of nature together with the elaboration of a new one from science according to Bacon, there may spring helps to man, and a line and race of inventions that may in some degree subdue and overcome the necessities and miseries of humanity.3 If nature mastery could subjugate necessity rooted in (socially organized) material scarcity, then, on the basis of its science, the bourgeoisie would be carrying out this task in the very interests of humanity, instead of merely being a particular class engaged in the exploitation of labor by way of nature mastery. The forgoing merely summarizes this entire movement. And, though we shall return to it where the confrontation is clearest (in Galileo, in his three great works, The Starry Messenger, The Assayer and Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems), we shall not follow it here. Instead Unfolding in a political struggle against the old order, early modern, scientific self-consciousness conducted this struggle with methods and concepts describing a new theory of nature. That much was simply crucial. On empirical
1

To secure this insight, it must be as valid for the new physics (quantum mechanics) as for the old (classical physics). See the first of three sketches in the Third Study, below. 2 And on the inauguration of real domination. Both are discussed at length, below. See the First Interlude. 3 Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration, 16, 25-26.

grounds alone, the new science would have never gotten past its initial hearings: Galileos mature astronomy could no better account for natural phenomena than the impetus theory he had attempted develop as a young man. And, moreover, in some cases the new theorization was simply inadequate, for example, if the Earth was not the stationary center of the universe, if it did move and spun with the tremendous velocity proclaimed by Copernicus, why didnt objects and beings, ranging from stones and rocks to animals and men, fly off at its surface into the heavens? 1 (Recall that Galileo lacked a theory of gravity). On Ptolemaic assumptions of an immobile Earth, the AristotelianPeripatetic doctrine of natural places, the downward motion of heavy bodies, the upward motion of light bodies, and natural motion, violent motion and impressed impetus had least had the virtue, its aprioras aside (e.g., the requirement that motion upward always be accompanied by a mover so that the medium, air or water, itself, pushed an object along), of providing such an account.2 Yet the new science did prevail, and in its triumph characteristically claimed that its activity produced (1) a systematic body of knowledge based upon a description of reality as natural, the contents of which are to be public and communicable though always technically so, and hence transmittable and codifible;3 (2) a systematic body of knowledge which is theoretical, i.e., not merely a compilation of rules or precepts, but deriving its prescriptions from general principles referring us back to if not based upon a totality of verifiable facts; and (3) a body of knowledge which does not rely on authority, that is, demands rational explanation rooted in results that can be checked and confirmed by means of practical proof The first two points at least, of course, concern the self-understanding of science at its origins, and not the character of science as its immanent historical development reveals it. For example, the scientific description of facts is based on observation that is theoretically organized prior to any description; results are experimentally constructed and not merely given; and, much later (after 1925, though some say beginning with Galileo),4 we find a view that science is deductive proceeding from an axiomatic systematization whose basic postulates provides the scientist with hypotheses which can be experimentally tested... As descriptive, public and transmittable, and theoretical and rational, the theories formulated by Galileo, Bacon (representing two entirely different traditions in modern science) and others modern scientific thinkers stood in sharp relief from and in naked opposition to speculative, esoteric and divinely inspired, dogmatic and religiously grounded medieval natural philosophy and Church social doctrine This too was crucial, for it was a question of the audience to which the new doctrine was addressed, and the societal context in which this discourse unfolded5 These men, as theorists of early modern science, polemically aimed at truth, i.e., a theoretical activity uncovering the intelligible structure of reality itself, in a countermovement to medieval, natural philosophy resting on Church dogma, that is, on the theologically determined Scholastic reading of Aristotle. Concealed in this countermovement to Aristotelian (Peripatetic) physics, was a view of the world, at once projected and presupposed by and in scientific thinking, that gave theoretical expression to the bourgeois view of man, community, and nature. Since the struggle against Peripatetic natural philosophy was carried out largely on the terrain of the truth-value of competing theories, the social contents and precategorial interest structuring and organizing scientific theory were occluded. Thus, early scientific theorists did not expose the internal connection of the world vision projected by and underlying the old natural philosophy to the organization of a tributary formation based largely on seigniorial social relations (i.e., the structural identity of a closed, hierarchically ordered, stable and static world, and the divinely ordained, unchanging world of lord, clergy, and peasant); nor, of course, did they then point out the former mirrored the latter, and that to the extent the former was declared unchanging and unchangeable it functioned as a cultural form justifying and legitimizing while masking

This specific issue is taken up in Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. It is discussed in the First Study, Part II, Polemic and the Logics of Argument in the Dialogue, below. 2 See the First Study, Part III, Galileo and Aristotle, I: The Question of Projectile Motion and Natural Place, below. 3 The account of the experimental arrangement and the recording of observations must be given in plain language, suitably supplemented by technical physical terminology. This is a clear logical demand, since the very word experiment refers to a situation where we can tell others what we have done and what we have learned. Niels Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, 72. (These remarks actually refer to the relation between quantum and classical mechanics. Thereby they exhibit the unity of the old and new physics elaborated on in the Third Study below. In point of fact, this understanding evinced goes to the roots of science itself.) 4 For Galileo and deductive reasoning, e.g., Alexander Koyr, Galileo Studies. Among theorists, postulative deductivism is characteristic of Karl Popper; and in a looser sense among scientists, Einstein starting especially from the nineteen thirties. See the Third Study, Part II, below. 5 See the First Study, Part III, Conclusion, I: The Triumph of Science, below.

the oppressive character of those social relations.1 The failure of early modern scientific thinkers to do so was not merely because the historical conditions under which the analysis of "ideology" could be elaborated had yet to develop.2 Such an indictment would have straightaway led to a similar insight: It would have revealed that the world viewed as an open, infinite, and internally unstructured universe (whose fundamental elements consisted of perceptually inaccessible, internally unrelated, and indivisible particles) mirrored a bourgeois society in the process of formation; that is, it transposed into, at once concealing and mediately expressing in, thought the structure and organization of a world of isolated because privatized and egoistic individuals confronting an incomprehensible other (society) that was coming to be unconsciously organized around exchange, transforming social relations in a bellum omnium contra omnes. Recognition of the social and, retrospectively, historical relativity of such an insight would have contradicted the principle of truth in the name of which struggle against medieval natural philosophy (Aristotelian physics) and Church dogma was carried out. (This very same principle of ahistorical truth and the blindness to an extra-theoretical, motivating interest were and remain intertwined. Taken together, they guaranteed the impossibility of thinking science at its origins as a social project and class-bound phenomenon.) At its foundations and origins, the new science was a mechanics, a study of bodies in motion that considers these bodies strictly in their quantifiable, measurable aspect. (As such, it also would and does have tangible advantages over Aristotelian physics, but only from the practico-technical perspective of nature mastery. It would otherwise be meaningless.) Galilean mechanics (similarly Newton) takes as its point of departure sensuous nature, always understood from its instances, as an aggregate totality of bodies in motion, that is, it is regarded solely in its formal bodily, and hence quantifiable, aspects. The point of departure, then, already rests on an abstraction (in Galileo, a geometrical one) since sensuous nature (the apperceived totality of perceptual phenomena) always presents itself as an undivided whole, a unity of qualitative and quantitative, emotive and aesthetic characteristics. On the basis of this initial abstraction, the scientist proceeds to select data (phenomena) with a view to possible connections that hold between certain quantitative properties of phenomena This was the key problem, a question of how to render phenomenal
1

This is a honored tradition in the Roman Church that reaches back over a thousand years... merciless pillaging by great lords, tributary exactions, and bands of men cut loose from social moorings engaged in rapine or, alternatively, mercenaries pursuing the same make the two eras similar if not fully contemporaneous across historical time Early in the fourth century in the common era, an emperor, desperately needing to re-legitimize a crumbling empire, thrust out a hand like a drowning man. This was Constantine, who converted and compelled a mass conversion of his subjects to Christianity in 313. Yet in his lifetime, he would not find a champion. That was Augustine, who early in the fifty century, and just as desperate to institutionally sanction hierarchical power over the faithful in the face of rising heresy (i.e., in the face of Donatist opposition to Roman authority, in particular, to the North African bishop's alliance with secular Rome), who with Optatus (Bishop of Mileue and older contemporary) grasped that hand, developing an elaborate theology to sanction an alliance at the top between secular power and the Church. Augustine was the bishop of Hippo, known as the hammer of the Donatists. See Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, 124-125, 129-130. ...There are two points worth making with regard to Augustine: For Augustine, the world (nature and human nature) is irretrievably corrupt, corrupted by Adam's sin. This corruption is endlessly transmitted by sexual union and the progeny it engenders (The City of God, Books XIII-XIV). So, first, while it is beyond the scope of these remarks to develop this, we can point out that here we find the repression of sexuality, its narrowing to a function, procreation, and the institutional sanctity of marriage, all characteristic of the Roman Church and all coming together at its origins. In Augustine the entire secular, transitory realm in its wickedness, its suffering, disease, etc., is counterposed to an eternal, perfect God. The city of God, the eternal city of the immortal soul is, of course, consciously opposed by Augustine to Rome, the city of man (Ibid, Books XI, XV, XVIII-XIX). So, second, indeed, no one more than Augustine would resist worldly change and demand submission, insisting on the necessity that the lowly and downcast, here the peasant masses, give unto Caesar... But to return to that honored tradition: This relation of cosmology to alleged unchanging social relations did not just find echoes in, but was transposed in toto into, natural philosophy in the form of an equally sharp contrast between non-generated, incorruptible, unalterable, indivisible and permanent or eternal and generated, corruptible, alterable, division and transitory, paired oppositions that underpinned Peripatetic cosmology, from the Scholastics at the end of the thirteenth century down to Galileo's time. Galileo was acutely conscious of this. During a heated discussion on the first day in the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, a discussion over the validity of precisely this Peripatetic natural philosophical foundations, he had Sagredo, polemically and almost blasphemously, say For my part I consider the earth very noble and admirable precisely because of the diverse alterations, changes, generations, etc., that occur in it incessantly. Ibid, 58. See the footnoted discussion of this issue in the First Study, Part III, Polemic and the Logic of Arguments in the Dialogue, below. 2 (From the previous page): Namely, formation of a system of production, an economy, as a seemingly autonomous regulator of social life in which the interests of social classes are constituted and, once constituted, on the basis of which ideal-typical and imputed because reified forms of awareness can be reconstructed.

qualities, that data of sense experience, what in the Aristotelian-Scholastic lexicon was termed accidents, quantitative, hence, subject to number, i.e., to mathematical analysis In and through a series of formalizing and mathematizing operations additional abstractions, products of methodologically canalized subjective capacities of the scientist (her subjectivity), sensuous nature regarded quantitatively is further reduced to a series of formulae that express the "lawful regularity" of natural phenomena. In later developments (beyond Galileo), this regularity constituted in its lawfulness for the purposes of prediction can be subject to experimental validation (that is, the prediction can be validated or falsified.) This methodological orientation has very specific ramifications for what passes as scientific knowledge. Epistemologically, scientific thinking has arrived at bodies in motion, i.e., constituted them as such, by proceeding with observation and description on the basis of (i.e., in fact, prior to all observation) a distinction between primary and secondary qualities, quantity and quality, and, more radically, reality and illusion. This construction (bodies in motion, "matter") signifies the elimination of not only the sensuous characteristic of objects of scientific investigation but of emotive and valuative ones as well.1 It renders those bodies remember science started from mechanics, so from bodies in motion subject to mathematical analysis (actually, the anticipatory mathematical projection permits this analysis), which, in turn, will make prediction, experiment and validation, the deconstruction and reconstruction (i.e., the manipulation) of phenomenon, etc., possible. Taken together, these abstractions thereby guarantee the postulate of a pseudo-perspectiveless objectivity. They are, though, theory-laden constructions resting on an ontological projection. That is, prior to all methodologically grounded strict observation and rigorous description is the anticipation and projection of a fundamentally mathematical world-in-itself, that is, an assemblage of bodies in motion calculable in advance which, having already ontologically weighted primary against secondary qualities, takes this world to be the really real... This projection can be found in the modern science of nature at its origins, in Galileo (as our First Study will demonstrate) and reaches all the way forward to its completion, as it were, in Einstein...2 The world of nature (including man as natural) that is anticipated is thus homogeneous, flattened out, bodies, events and processes in nature lack qualitative meaning and determination. Nature now appears as an aggregate totality of objects to be analyzed or decomposed, then reconstructed, manipulated and disposed, i.e., the fitting subject of capitalist development in its full sense (i.e., as a raw material basin) only if anticipatorily. It is only within the framework constituted by this projection (anticipation) that an event in nature can occur as such, i.e., become visible as an event. The distinctions of primary and secondary qualities, etc., and, more fundamentally, the anticipatory ontological weighing of the former against the latter taken together constitute the scientific projection of the world of nature as object-like (merely the other, ideal side of the reality of societies of capital). Object-likeness is thought, in reductionist and crude materialist terms at least since Descartes, as essentially and simply extension, as contentless, infinitely malleable "matter" subsisting in homogenous space, devoid of any internal logic, life or subjectivity. But "matter" is not "real" at least in the sense modern physical science suggests, but, in fact, is the product of scientific analysis and reconstruction. All modern physical theory is analysis, conceptually decomposes its object, natural bodies. This is how understanding is arrived at. Once achieved, a whole can be reconstructed, this object can be reconstituted from the elemental, itself a construct, on up. For example, scientific understanding of a rock one might wish to quarry is reached only when it is conceptually dissolved into its chemical components, themselves understood in terms of their atomic structures and their interactions. Only then can we say we have understood what this rock is, an ore consisting in so much magnesium, aluminum, iron, etc., components which themselves have such and such atomic structures and are related (bonded) in such and such ways, all of which allows us to understand the object (rock), to grasp it in terms of a raw material (iron ore) to be used in commodity production (steel). Thus, scientific understanding is always attained abstractly, in the movement from a whole to the most elemental, itself a conceptual construct. Only then are these elemental constructs aggregated, a whole reconstructed. That whole is an
1

Similarly, Bohr (Ibid, 68: The development of the so-called exact sciences, characterized by the establishing of numerical relationships between measurements, has indeed been further... [developed] by abstract mathematical methods originating from detached pursuit of generalizing logical constructions. This situation is especially illustrated in physics which originally understood as all knowledge of that nature of which we ourselves are part, but gradually came to mean the study of the elementary laws governing the properties of inanimate matter. We would take issue with the gradual character of this development: It, the development, was given with the project of nature domination in the form that and as it originally took shape prior to the elaboration of the modern science of nature in bourgeois practices of accumulation. 2 Nature is the realization of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas. Or, again, In the limited nature of the mathematically existent simple [electromagnetic, gravitational] fields and the simple equations possible between them, lies the theorist's hope of grasping the real in all its depth (emphases added). Albert Einstein, Essays on Science, 17, 19 respectively.

abstract totality, a conceptual whole that is in a practical sense entirely homologous with its elementary, infinitely malleable material components: Precognitively, this understanding penetrates awareness permitting the objects science has constructed to function as ideal, manipulable moments of bourgeois practices in accumulation It is here that the deep penetration of the value-form into the conceptual structure of science is disclosed, science with its reductionist method (analysis and decomposition of the object), its atomism (ontological primacy of indivisible, actually infinitely divisible, elementary particles) and its objectivism (nature absent productivity as its motive or its driving force; and subjectivity as a passively constituted and fully determined element, one element in the aggregate, lawfully governed whole that is nature) is fully homogenous, perfectly congruent, with capital, with its atomism (the commodity as the fundamental reality of bourgeois society), its reductionism (human activity rendered abstract, i.e., generalized, temporally quantified, materialized and objectified as "value, existing solely as an elementary object that, with other such elementary objects collected in production, take the shape of mechanically assembled, socially combined labor power, as abstract labor) and its objectivism (society as a deterministic system subordinate to laws discovered by political economy, likes those alleged to rule nature): Governed by the anticipatory projection of nature as an assemblage of bodies in motion (itself precognitively motivated by the telos of nature domination), atomism, reductionism and objectivism are spontaneous modes of the bourgeois apprehension of reality, and scientific categories are, or more generally the overarching conceptual architecture of science is, an elaborate, multifarious and multifaceted mediation of this immediacy This already presupposes too much and we should pause and state expressly from the standpoint of epistemology as social theory what is at issue here: Starting from the real domination of capital over labor, the value-form organizes daily life (i.e., the existential determinants of social life are formed in production), the categories (barbaric common sense) in which reality is immediately apprehended arise in the same daily life, and consequently tacit conceptual models and precategorial expectations of the structure of relations that obtain among events and processes are all ready to hand and, absent a critical-historical reflection on the genesis and formation of those categories, form the basis of higher order theorizations: It is not that scientific theorizations reflect or simply conceptually reproduce in thought the structure of value-form: They do not, but instead are first and foremost one of many qualitatively different forms (among which are the social relations structuring institutions, socially organized play and games, literatures of all sorts etc.), all complexly mediated, in which the order of capital itself finds expression and through which it shapes social life in its entirety...1 Return to the critique of science: The laws of natural and humanly natural phenomena allow the scientist to generate predictions. It is this very aim that demands extra-theoretical confirmation that, consequently, secures scientific validity. To be sure, if science is to be successful at predicting, it must at the level of concepts capture idealized, albeit fetishized aspects of reality itself. Nonetheless, the peculiar and widely recognized validity science as theory has achieved does not refer us back to its categorial accomplishments, its laws of phenomena, but to experimental verification at the level of scientific activity and to practical verification in the order of society. It is here, then, that confirmation is achieved, proof takes the extra-scientific form of socially generalized seeing, approval, and acclaim for the technological achievements based on and exhibited as nature domination: For the validation of those laws demonstrates, whatever else they are, they are also social prescriptions for the manipulation of infinitely malleable bodies, matter or raw materials, in the production of a world of commodities. The constitution of such laws is absolutely essential to rationalizing construction of a determinate socio-historical lifeworld, societies of capital. In the societal validation of prediction, science and capitalism are reunited, the categorial telos of scientific activity (prediction) rejoins the original class (bourgeois), pre-categorial, and hidden telos of the mastery of nature Ideationally produced through scientific method, this mathematized world of natural phenomena is an anticipatory projection of a socio-historical lifeworld constructed through the subjugation of society and surrounding nature to the production of commodities for exchange. The cognitive construct matter, contentless bodies subsisting in homogenous space, is the, albeit oblique, theoretical elaboration of raw material as it appears in commodity production, endlessly malleable natural objects ripped from decontextualized surrounding, visible nature. Science projects a nature that is flattened out and rendered a surveyable and manipulable object: Stripped of qualitative determination and reduced to a gross abstraction, it has become an a priori quantifiable series of points determined exhaustively by positions given with objective time and extended space. It is an abstraction without
1

For further elaboration, see the Fourth Study, Part I, Theory of Truth, below.

purpose or internal logic to its moments (bodies) and without inherent or defining characteristics apart from those mathematically projected. From the side of demystified daily experience, however, science's nature can be best comprehended as an ideational product masquerading as real. At the hands of (capital's) science, nature, appearing in history at once as its ground and as a product of a development inseparable from its interaction with social development, has become aesthetically ugly stuff. It is, in other words, a product of domination, of what science and capital have made of it. This is nature as matter, as raw material for commodity production on a capitalist basis... Need it be said that the bourgeoisie is the first class in history where nature has this sense, 1 where its relation to subordinate social groups, strata, Stnde or classes is immediately and directly mediated by nature domination, where a theorization of this relation is not mythological or religious, but rational (as in the modern sense of economically rational) and this theorization itself has become an issue? Science, then, is not only bourgeois in the narrow cultural sense. It is, historically, a theoretical mediation of the activity of capital in the utilitarian-pragmatic reduction of nature to raw material for capitalist production. This development was immanent to science itself. For the theoretical anticipation of this utilitarian-pragmatic, i.e., technological, reduction of nature is modern science: It is as science that the conceptual framework for this reduction is constituted, and out of which production of a capitalist world can be undertaken, a world in which science is at home and without which it would be a stranger without a home (hence, theoretically barren), i.e., which constitutes the societal presuppositions of science's full development and without which it would be undevelopable Having provisionally fulfilled our second requirement (sketching out the immanent relation of significant aspects of the total conceptual structure of science to the bourgeoisie as a class considered historically), thus having formulated the contours of our position, and recognizing that this position is cumulative in the specific sense that at every moment of our presentation has its own previous development as its premise (i.e., each aspect, phase or section of the following studies as it unfolds is internally connected and a necessary development of what has come before it), we can pursue our various inquiries that, in expanding, elaborating and refining this position, concretize it, effectively evolving its validation and justification.

See Some Remarks on the Role of the Working Class in History, Part I.

Note The Classical Evaluation of Labor The classical evaluation of labor as it has come down to us through the Renaissance rediscovery and, in some cases, reconstitution of ancient sources should be treated carefully. This is not merely a matter of recognizing philological glosses are always interpretations based on, in part, the reality of daily life and the socio-historical determinants that operate in that life in which the philologist or commentator is situated. Our point is more and other: The classical evaluation of labor so-called is not a question of counterposing a contemplative life to an active one (which is an Aristotelian, not even Platonic, valuation that is not echoed in but finds its elaborate development in Christian religious thinkers, ascetics and, institutionally in, religious orders). Rather, the classical evaluation of labor is an assessment from the point of view of those leisured gentlemen who, as landowners, not only did not labor but who viscerally believed that, in principle, laboring should, for starters, disqualify one from the good life understood in terms of participation in polis activity. Craftsmen, the urban merchant and peasant smallholders, not to mention slaves and women, the mass of those who did labor, did not share this view.1 Entirely consistent with the anti-democratic, oligarchical politics of classical civic humanism or, if you prefer, classical republican theorization, it should come as no surprise, however, that the views of labor of ancient philosophers (particularly, Plato, Aristotle and, least we forget, Socrates) and Roman orators, statesmen and even poets (Cicero, Seneca, Horace, Juvenal) were sharply counterposed to those of the demos.2 The ancient ruling classes held concrete labor in contempt (they did not know the abstract labor of capitalism). It was the reason for their absence from their estates and the use of slave overseers, slave clerks in the executive offices of the "state," a slave police force, etc. Life for free citizens was community life that consisted in governing their own affairs. This presupposed an entirely different subjective-class evaluation of the meaning and ends of life from our own (with its frenzied desire for wealth accumulation), one with an objective-social impact. For the ancients, especially the Greeks (and here it is moot whether this characterization should be restricted to Athenians, though in Athens at least it should also include those laboring classes because they broadly participated in popular assemblies and engaged in jury deliberations), this evaluation was political (the one area from which slaves and women were without exception excluded) and centered on citizen self-government. Labor, here, it is noted refers to those activities (largely agricultural in the ancient world) that socially reproduced the community as a whole, both directly (hoeing, planting, harvesting in agriculture by peasants and slaves, fabricating wood and metals among craftsmen) and indirectly (market mediated distribution involving small merchants, domestic tasks and even state administrative activities of slaves). If we probe a little more deeply we can elicit what was at issue in the ruling class attitude toward labor. It was, first, a class based hostility toward the mob, the lower orders, who, by way of their insinuation (i.e., their long historical struggle incorporating themselves) into the polis community of self governing citizens, after all, with their incessant demands threatened established wealth if not always power.3 It was, second, a perspective on the world, a vision in which the private and the public realms, those of the household and the family and that of the polity or, in terms that are more familiar to us, natural necessity and freedom, were unquestionably assumed to be ontologically separate, and in thought keep distinct. The former, the private realm of the householder inclusive of the productive and domestic activities slaves and women carried out, was considered the order of natural necessity devoted to the reproduction of human life. Here force and violence were permissible, nay requisite: Slaves had to be driven to complete their tasks (for which an overseer was hired). Slaves and women were prepolitical creatures confined to prepolitical spheres of activity, activity always engaging them in the performance of necessary tasks that humans as natural beings cannot escape. In this context, it was the right and justified, unthinkingly so, to employ violence to master necessity (keep slaves and
1 2

For restriction of this contempt to the ruling classes, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave, 137-138. Wood, Ibid, 22-24, 137-145; Moses Finley, Economy and Society in Ancient Greece, 99, 187-188, 194. 3 The ancient polis cannot be understood in the Marxist sense as the domain, raised above society, in which an otherwise internally divided ruling class achieves unity requisite to societal hegemony and, simultaneously, as the institution consisting of an array of repressive agencies and organizations (courts, judiciary, prosecutors, prisons, cops, military, etc.) that enforce class rule. The institutional separation that characterizes capitalist modernity in its entirely, here the constitution of the state as specific sphere with its own distinctive shape on the basis of which society is mediately organized, simply did not obtain in ancient (Greek) society where the polity remained embedded in social life and popular classes through social struggle had achieved a modicum of participatory control in the community, enough at least to ameliorate the worst aspects of the productive-based exploitation of free men.

women in line, nowhere did women participate in polis activities): It was only through prepolitical acts of violence that householders emancipated themselves from necessity and raised themselves to the level where they might experience the freedom of polis based, community life. There all men were equals (the inequality of affairs that tending to human nature imposed were transcended), a domain in which men did not command still other men, but rather one in which men neither ruled nor were ruled, neither led nor were led; instead, there men strove to distinguish themselves through action understood as great words and deeds. (Speechmaking, eloquence too, was indeed a vital aspect of polis activity, excessively so by the lights of capitalist modernity with its orientation toward practice understood pragmatically and in utilitarian terms). Founded and sustained by those actions understood as great words and deeds, it is only in and through the political community, the polis, that men constitute for themselves an objectivity that endures, the only kind of stability and permanence that humans can, situated in the endless cyclical becoming of nature, attain, for it is only in the polis, characterized by this enduring institutional presence, that any specific man achieves lasting recognition in the memory of his contemporaries and his and their descendants. There is a certain amount of individualism (not bourgeois egoism) in this interpretation of polis life (whether it is retrospectively projected is an entirely different question, though it is consistent with what we known about the archaic, aristocratic and proto-statist communities from which Greek polei developed),1 but it goes a long way to explain why viscerally labor, the quintessential activity that engages the laborer in sphere of natural necessity, was held in contempt by self-styled great men. Now, it is not just the classical evaluation of labor that is overthrown in the (self) appreciation of technical skills among great artisans and the declassed humanist intelligentsia. Overcome with it, and logically presupposing this toppling, is the meaning and significance of nature as it is simply taken for granted, both nature in the sense of the encompassing reality in which humans are situated and the state of nature in the strictly political sense. Though the two are intertwined and intimately connected, the latter is not part of this discussion.2 But the former is at the core of it: As we shall have occasion to point out in the body of this text, Aristotelian cosmology, starting from a concept of fixed, unchanging and qualitatively distinct natural places, must be, simultaneously, overthrown if the understanding of nature underlying modern mechanics is to prevail. Here, we can cite a single example, one that may perhaps immediately appear anecdotal, but which in its perhaps tangential character, makes precisely our point: As a young man, Galileo assimilated and espoused the impetus physics of Giovanni Benedetti, an immediate predecessor (in logically reconstructed, if not entirely historical sense).3 In contrast to Aristotelian natural philosophy as it was understood late in the tributary era of central Mediterranean Europe (circa 1590), this physics had a fundamental mathematical component. It was Archimedean. Archimedes was an artisan. Among Galileos contemporaries in the broadest sense, two of them enunciated rigidly opposed valuations of Archimedes. Jerome Cardan, who, according to Alexander Koyr, was disposed to rank great men (meaning philosophers and thinkers), placed Archimedes above Euclid, above Aristotle, above Duns Scotus and Occam, placing him by himself in the highest category.4 Now, Julii Cearii Scaliger vigorously objected, and his objection was based on the grounds that Archimedes was an artisan. Patently, such an assessment (Cardans) turned the traditional valuation of labor upside down. In light of this and in closing this note, two further points both suggesting the early modern ascendancy of the inversion of the classical view of labor might be made: First, classical cosmology was already beginning to give way to a homogenized decentered space in impetus physics;5 and, second as we have already indicated,6 it was precisely artisan activity which functioned, at least in one tradition of science (Baconian), as a model for the development of experimental and technical knowledge that is characteristically rational, because observational, publicly accessible and affords insight into natural dynamics This brings us to Galileo.
1

This is our reading of Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 8-9,27-34, 196-199; for archaic aristocratic communities, see Finley, The World of Odysseus. 2 For the transformation of the culturally hegemonic sense of the state of nature, largely achieved by Hobbes, see F.O. Wolf, Die Neu Wissenschaft des Thomas Hobbes. Note especially the discussion at chapter 2.21, on the distinction between nature and art in Hobbes critique of Aristotelian theory of the zoon physei politikon. 3 Benedittis main work (in Latin) in this regard, Treatise on Diverse Mathematical and Physical Speculations, appeared in 1585. 4 Galileo Studies, 36. 5 Ibid, 35. 6 See Social Bases of the Formation of an Organic Intelligentsia of the Bourgeoisie, above.

Introduction The Modern Science of Nature Bibliographical Sources Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago, 1959 Augustine of Hippo. The City of God. Chicago, 1952 Bacon, Francis. The Great Instauration, in The Great Instauration and New Atlantis. Arlington Heights (IL), 1980 (1620) Barnes, Will. Some Remarks on the Role of the Working Class in History in The Crisis in Society and Nature and the Working Class in History, St. Paul, 20101 _________. The History of Florence and the Florentine Republic (Text and Fragment). Manuscript, 1989 Bohr, Niels. Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge. New York, 1958 Descartes, Ren. Discourse on Method for Reasoning Well and for Seeking Truth in the Sciences (1637). Accessed online at www.records.viu.ca Einstein, Albert. Essays on Science. New York, 1934 Finley, Moses. The World of Odysseus. Middlesex (Eng.), 1979 ___________. Economy and Society in Ancient Greece. London, 1983 Galileo Galilei. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Berkeley, 1967 (1632) Koyr, Alexandre. Galileo Studies. Atlantic Highlands (NJ), 1978 (French original, 1939) Marx, Karl. Kapital. Eine Kritik der Poliltischen konomie. Dritte Band, Buch III: Der Gesammtprozess der kapitalistischen Produktion. Herausgegeben von Friedrich Engels. Hamburg, 1894 Pagels, Elaine. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. New York, 1988 Redondi, Pietro. Galileo, Heretic. Princeton (NJ), 1987 Rossi, Paolo. Philosophy, Technology and the Arts in the Early Modern Era. New York, 1970 Wood, Ellen Meiksins. Peasant-Citizen and Slave, London, 1989 Wolf, F.O. Die Neu Wissenschaft des Thomas Hobbes. Zu den Grundlagen der poltischen Philosphie der Neuzeit. Stuttgart, 1969 Zilsel, Edgar. The Sociological Roots of Science, Journal of American Sociology, 47, 1942

All works cited under our name are available at the website, www.instcssc.org, unless otherwise indicated (as forthcoming, manuscript or unpublished).

First Study Science at its Origins The Problem of Motion: Galileo and Aristotle 1 The forgoing preliminary remarks start from a perspective for which it is impossible to intelligently and intelligibly understand concepts, theories and visions of the world and, mutatis mutandis, systematic conceptual constructs elaborated over generations such as the modern science of nature, together with the general forms of awareness that underlay them (i.e, the consciousness of social subjects that both articulate and embody them), as reflections of reality (world) that prove their truth in, say, corresponding to the facts or that are assigned a status as ideological reflexes of social groups. While a formal elaboration of this position will have to wait,2 here we shall simply note that a reflection theory of consciousness and a correspondence theory of truth are untenable because, first, the structure of each (theory and world) is essentially dissimilar and because,3 second, both the awareness of social groups and the theories and visions generated by them are active moments in the construction of the world itself (culture of daily life, society, humanized natural landscapes all within the context of earthly nature). As active, theorizations (i.e., we who theorize) engage the world a world that is not static (but first and foremost the social and historical world of daily experience, a lifeworld)... seek to uncover and disclose its structure and organization, address and query it, take up a dialogue with those who have explicitly pursued the same activity in the past. This recognition will impose two requirements on us: We are obliged, first, to briefly at least describe the contours of that social and historical world and, second, to situate the theorist and the traditions from within which he engages that world. For it is only in integrating the theorist and his world exhibiting the manner in which the latter shapes the concerns of the former, and the manner in which the activity of the former, as both representative and a component of a social group (and, in the case of particularly important theorists and their work, of a social class) goes beyond its determinants by illuminating it, and thereby suggesting action in it or transforming it that this life and the theoretical (scientific, literary, philosophical, etc.) work itself becomes intelligible.4 In taking up those requirements, we shall sketch out the relation between Galileo and the world, starting from his world as he consciously interrogated its traditions, the world in which his original understanding of it formed and his motivation for entering... the need or interest that compelled him to enter... into such a dialogue or, as in his case, polemic. In so doing, we shall return to the themes articulated above, to Galileo as one of the creators of the modern science of nature though, as we might suspect, this science as such is not fully formulated in Galileo to Galileo as a bourgeois, and to this science as the decisive moment in the constitution of the bourgeoisie as a historical class.

I.e., the Introduction, above. See the Fourth Study, Part III, The Materialist Dialectic, below. 3 All theory, and its structural components also (concepts), is ideal and, as the risk of being unduly repetitive, conceptual; the world as it's simply given (and this is what is, so it is argued, reflected) is real and sensuous-material. But to speak meaningfully about the world is already to apprehend it conceptually, so that the comparison that is being made is between a theory, or its structure, and the world rendered reflectively intelligible, i.e., in its intelligibility or as conceptually apprehended. This activity obviously, then, constitutes a comparison of concepts to concepts... which is legitimate practice (we engaged in it in discussing the homology between crucial conceptual elements of the modern science of nature and the structure of the value form)... but this is not the type of comparison that is assumed and defended in a reflection theory of consciousness. See the Fourth Study, Part III, Theory of Truth, below. 4 Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God, 7.
1 2

Part I The Ancient Mediterranean World in the Age of (Plato and) Aristotle1 Begin with a brief, synoptic view of the late ancient Mediterranean world. Unlike other social forms (e.g., hunting and gathering, free peasant communities based on farming and animal domestication or on shepherding and livestock cultivation) existing in the interstices between the great tributary formations of the late Mediterranean world (Persia, a growing Roman presence, Carthaginia, an emerging Macedonia, seafaring Phoenicia), the Greek cities of the Attic peninsula were, in part, anomalous Tributary formations are based on villages communities that practice sedentary farming, primarily grain and rice production, in which the peasant, if you will, working the land works it as a nominally free tiller (whether communally or as a family unit) subject irregularly or seasonally to corve labor. Villages, communities, manorial estates, etc., are spatially separate and unified by perhaps the earliest for of the state, an overarching kingship, often a divine personage and his entourage (especially, in ancient tributary forms). Kingship establishes itself doubly, on the basis of the surpluses accumulated, appropriated as tribute from the villages, and on the basis of its armed force together with an elementary bureaucracy (a tiny layer of priests, tax collectors, scholarly gentleman as in China, or any combination thereof). These societies are overwhelming rural, though they are fully compatible with urban enclaves that exist most often on their geographical peripheries, especially along or near coast waterway. Particularly in their modern shapes, tributary formations have rarely existed without these metropolises that are actually centers of restricted, i.e., luxury, production Within a tributary reality that nascently stretched as far back as 10,000 years ago, the ancient world was in the first place itself massively agrarian, not just in the sense of a dumb fact but in that, where they appeared, cities themselves were centers of consumption, often administrative, and not centers of production exhibiting only the barest rudiments of an economy, unlike those tributary formations that appear, say, from the time of Dante forward at least in the Mediterranean world and along the North Sea.2 Thus, in the second place, we do not speak about the economy as an institutionally distinct sphere. (Such an institutional evolution is a function of capitalist development, of societies that in history immediately predate its appearance and as such, where formal modes of capitals domination in labor have been instituted; of societies that are implicated in capitalist development, even where there is resistance, through the spread of exchange relations, through colonial and imperialist plunder; and, of course, of capitalist societies themselves.) Expansion in the ancient world was not economic" but geographical; or, stated differently, military conquest, entailing plunder, captives taken as, say, domestic slaves and tribute, was identical with expansion. In this regard, productive activity in the Greek world was conducted within a self-contained unit, the household (oikos), consisting of the fields, home and whatever other structures related to farming that may have existed. Production was carried out for internal consumption, not for a market. In the third place, slavery and slave production was far more important to the cities-states of ancient Greece than to the larger tributary formations of the ancient world where, while slavery existed, forms of nominally free, albeit oppressed peasant tenancy often predominated. (This, of course, did not preclude the periodic deployment of corve labor.) Productive activity was based on the oikos, the household, which was a separate and distinct unit of production. Households were separate units of slave production that were never integrated at this level, producing for self-subsistence first and then for a market thereafter. Their connection, then, was formed through exchange, the urban marketplace. Still even at this point they did not constitute a society or community. This was achieved, at least in Greece, uniquely through the polis, to which we shall come back shortly. Thus, unlike in the rest of the ancient world, in ancient Greece slavery existed as a primarily form of labor in farming as the basic form of production (corn, oil and wine being the three primary products of the ancient Greek world), meaning, first, that private ownership of the land prevailed, whereas in the great tributary formations, state ownership might be less, just
1

Aristotle

The following remarks rely on Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, 18-28 and Lineages of the Absolutist State, 150-153 by the same author; Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 28-37, 192-199; Ellen Meiksins Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave, 22-28, 137-145; the Introduction to our Civil War and Revolution in America and, especially, the discussion of non-capitalist forms of human sociation in our Nature, Capital, Communism. 2 Inclusive of the concept of a formal domination of capital over labor (as it appears in the following paragraph in the text), tributary formations are explored from a different perspective in the First Interlude, Fundamental Forms of Sociation in Human History, below.

as or more extensive that peasant tenancy and proprietorship; and, it meant, second, in this context, that of large landowners (and, we add, labor shortages), slavery in the ancient Greek world arose on the basis of the victorious class struggle of the demos and plebs against those large aristocratic landowners. That is, it rested on the resulting democratization of the polity and the popular expansion of citizen rights (that included a small class of urban artisans), and the consequent inability of landed elites to compel free men to labor for them. Finally, there was that truly anomalous development, the polis, far more aristocratic outside of Athens. The ancient Greek ruling classes as landlords who mastered men (slaves) and women (in the household), held concrete labor, the activity of those who worked (and, note, not the abstract labor of capitalism), in contempt. It was the reason for their absence from their estates and the use of slave overseers in the fields. Life for free citizens, for the great landowners but the plebs also, was urban, community life that consisted in governing their own affairs through a political assembly, the polis (a singular achievement in the history of human communities to the extent that it was a realm in which men neither led nor were led, an institution that existed only in assembly, beyond the realm of violence, where centrally speech, argument and persuasion held sway) As great cities, Athens, Alexandra, Carthage and Rome were coastal or situated on nearby inland rivers, not the least because trade, the one autonomous activity of urban centers in the ancient world, was most easily, and from the standpoint of merchants less expensively, conducted by water, and even this fact is significant because the ancient Greek (and Roman) city itself was atypical and uncharacterized, incarnating its own dominance in an overwhelmingly rural, agrarian world, a dominance made possible by the use of slave labor both within the household (women, washing, sewing, preparing food, cleaning) and in the fields freeing the great landowner for urban life and, he and his sons for the elaboration of a unique, even if aristocratic culture1 It was city life, but the ancient Greek cities, in which civic activity was paramount, formed an integrated unity, a free development within but encompassed by the countryside, unlike development, economic development no less, since at least the time of Galileo, that counterposes the (lords, masters and capitalists that dominated the) city to the (tenants and rural laborers of the) countryside as the former exploited the latter for its agricultural produce, tenant rents, and resources utilized to construct the sensuous-material structures (above all, the churches and palatial homes of the great merchants, bankers and manufacturers) that comprised the visible aspect of the urban environment. Unlike our world, in which accumulation for the sake of accumulation (the movement of capital) predominates, in which personal aggrandizement rooted in bourgeois egoism is merely the other side of this objective logic, civic life as understood by the ancient Greeks presupposed an entirely different subjective-class evaluation of the meaning and telos of life generally. For them, this evaluation was political (the one area from which slaves were without exception excluded) and centered on citizen self-government, in the sense of neither ruling nor being ruled, and neither managing and administering nor being managed and ministered to. It was on this basis that the enormous, quick development of Absolute Spirit in the Hegelian sense (as qualified in the footnote below) unfolded, short-lived to be sure, but all the more astounding for the rapid and transient efflorescence. Aristotle Given that there is no really good biography of Aristotle, lets see what we know. Aristotle was one of three children born to a wealthy, established Ionian family in 384 BCE. About the time of his birth his father, Nicomachus, became a physician to Amyntas III, king of Macedonia (and father of Philip who was father of Alexander), the most recent of a long line of distinguished physicians. His mother, Phaestis, was a wealthy aristocrat with landholdings and an estate home at Chalcis (Khalks) on the island of Euboea (Evvoia), 55 kilometers north northwest of Athens opposite the eastern edge of the Attica peninsula dividing the northern and southern waterways of the Voreios Evvokos. With Nicomachus new appointment he relocated his family to Pella (actually, it is simply unclear whether it was he and Aristotle or the entire family), the ancient capital of Macedonia where Aristotle spent his earliest years. Both of his parents were to die while he was relatively young, his father no later than Aristotles seventeenth year (perhaps caught in the crossfire of infighting among the royal Macedonian entourage), and his mother shortly thereafter before he turned eighteen. It presumed that Aristotle spent his youth in Pella, perhaps, as was customary, studying and absorbing what he could of his fathers medical practice. (There is internal evidence, that Aristotle did indeed live in Pella, since he makes reference to his distaste for court life, even princes and even as
1

Used here in the Hegelian sense entailing, institutionally and culturally, Objective Spirit (law, statecraft, civil administration) and Absolute Spirit (poetry and drama, religion, and philosophy) all, albeit grasped materialistically, that is, as human productions.

a later teacher of Alexander.) At any rate, with his parents death he became a charge of one Proxenus, the husband of his sister, Arimneste. At the age of seventeen, Aristotle was sent by Proxenus or he set off himself this too is not clear to study at Platos Academy in Athens. For the next twenty years, this was the context of his intellectual formation, for he was student, researcher and then, at the moment of Platos death in 347 BCE, a teacher at the Academy. It can be safely assumed that here Aristotle studied politics and law, mathematics and astronomy, and of course pursued more broadly philosophical inquiries, as each and all were understood in the ancient, particularly the Athenian, world. He is reputed to have excelled as a student, and was referred to even by Plato as the Academys intellect. As a teacher, he may have taught rhetoric and dialogue. Now the Academy was not the only school in Athens, Isocrates, a sophist enemy of Plato, for example, ran another one (as would Aristotle in his later years). These educative institutions were aristocratic, designed for the sons of the slaveholding landowners, intended to at once impart a culture distinctively characterizing and distinguishing this class as such and to prepare them for any roles they might assume as statesmen or military leaders within the Athenian community. Aristotle was not destined to assume directorship of this institution upon Platos death. (It is suggested legally he was not Athenian or Hellene. Since Philip sacked the Greek city state of Olynrhus in 348, there may well have been hostility toward him, as a foreigner, Macedonian and someone who had spent a good part of his early life in Philips fathers court, to boot.) Instead a nephew of Plato, Speusippus, assumed this post. Perhaps as a consequence, Aristotle left Athens with a companion, Xenocrates, and, traveled to Asia Minor, established a branch of the Academy in Assos, today in northwest Turkey. It is believed this city was controlled by a tyrant, a Greek mercenary named Hermias (of Atarneus) and an underlord to the Persian king. Hermias, having once been a member of the Academy (and infatuated with Platos lectures), struck up and developed a close friendship with Aristotle. Shortly thereafter, Aristotle married Hermias adopted youthful daughter (Aristotle was now 37), Pythias. She bore him a child (or he adopted one of hers as his own), a girl, but his wife died sometime later. For whatever reason, Hermias felt into disfavor with the Persians, and Assos was subject to attack. About 344 BCE, Aristotle left, journeying southward to the island of Lesbos, and there the city of Mytilene where he established another academy. Here he stayed for a couple years, making study of a lagoon that is reputed to have contributed to his biological theorizations. In 342, Philip, according to standard accounts, asked Aristotle to come (back) to Pella in order to tutor his son, Alexander. (Again, there are accounts that this is mere legend). If weve adequately related Aristotles geographical trajectory and presented some sense of his motivation, it would be fair to ask, as history records, why he returned. Reasons range from a full consciousness of the Platonic injunction concerning the significance of philosophers in statecraft to a concern to assist his friend Hermias in reaching an agreement that would bring a Macedonian expedition against Persia in Asia Minor. In the event, Aristotle crossed the proverbial Rubicon (some three centuries before Caesar actually crossed into Gaul) and returned to Pella. And, in the event, the Bildung that he imparted to Alexander over roughly seven years was, as he fully understood from the get-go, not philosophical, but rather moral in the broad sense. Alexander, it is believed by biographers, adopted the Achilles of Homers Iliad as a life model that served him in his ambitious kingship, living, like the ancient mythological hero, for honor, esteem and, of course, conquest. (Aristotle went to the length of preparing a special edition of this work for Alexander.) By 339, Aristotle had grown weary of life in Pella, a sentiment likely deepened by the tasks of tutoring other students at the Macedonian court. He left, retreated to his father home of Stagira, a small town north of Athens and roughly 80 kilometers east of Pella, but soon found the locale absent all stimulation. In 335, he was back in Athens, perhaps because Speusippus, heading the Academy, had died. (He was succeeded by Aristotle's old acquaintance, Xenocrates.) If Aristotle had had any designs on directing the Academy, he was quickly disabused, for anti-Macedonian sentiment was probably stronger at this moment than it had been thirteen years earlier when he had left Athens. Here Aristotle, it is believed, relied on protection of an Athenian diplomat and friend, Antipater. In Athens, Aristotle established his own school, known as the Lyceum, much along the lines of other competing institutions, aimed at the same youthful audience, young aristocrats, with the same broad curriculum and same aims, formation of noble character both with a view to what was distinctive about the great landowners as a social group and to statecraft. For, unlike Galileo, he had a strong moral sense (rooted in our view in a precognitive aristocratic ethos), and fully developed cognitive notion, of the right order of things, and accordingly, of their natural place.

The Lyceum was quite successful, and some of Aristotles most important works date from this period, that is down to 323, the year of Alexanders death. At this moment and for the occasion, an anti-Macedonian revolt took Antipaters treachery (i.e., his relations to the Macedonian kingship) as its object, which, as an alien, also endangered Aristotle. He fled. Again unlike Galileo, Aristotle retained this strong sense of place throughout his life: He returned to his mothers estate in Chalcis. Here, at the age of 62, he died in the autumn of the following year complaining of a stomach ailment (perhaps an ulcerous condition from which he slowly bled to death).

Part II Galileo and the World of Early Capitalism There are three significant traditions within bourgeois historiography that provide accounts of the origins of the modern science of nature. The first two are rooted in the crisis of physical theory that became full blown in the chronologically late nineteenth century, and were resolved, at least adequately enough to allow scientific theorizing to renew itself and develop anew, with relativist and quantum formulations. These traditions are counterposed, one, based largely on the enormous literary output and insight of Pierre Duhem, holds that the really important problems confronted by the new science were originally posed and received their first critical treatment by medieval cosmologists;1 the other, beginning from the work of Alexandre Koyr (who writing over twenty years after Duhems death, explicitly and regularly if only in footnoted fashion criticized him)2 holds the modern science of nature signifies a rupture with the world, problems, analyses and views of the fundamentally Aristotelian Scholastics and, later, Peripatetics, and, starting from Galileo, is in its genuine form Archimedean (more generally, mathematical) and Platonist. Best exemplified by the more recent work of Paolo Rossi,3 the third tradition also sees in the modern science of nature a counterposition to ancient thought, but more thoroughgoing. The former is opposed to the latter in its entirety, whether the ancients are considered Platonic or Aristotelian. In this respect, the modern science of nature is conceived unitarily with different complementary traditions (with points of departure in Galileo and Bacon), and it is explicitly grasped and understood in relation to the practice of social groups, primarily artisans, whose activity embodied and was guided by the central ideational features that made this counterposition to the ancients possible and actual. Our analyses owe something to each of these traditions. In some respects, formally similar to Rossis starting point, we shall try to tease out the relation between the theorization of modern science of nature as its appears in its most conscious creator, Galileo, and the world he was rooted. This world was radically different from that of urban centers (e.g., Athens, Alexandria) that existed on the edges of the ancient tributary formations in the Mediterranean and Asia Minor, and, increasingly superficial similarities aside, it differed markedly in all decisive ways from the world of more modern tributary formations which in the same regions are often referred to as the feudal or medieval West. We shall attempt to establish that this new science originated as a rarefied theoretical response to problems that emerged for the first time in this, the world in which men like Galileo lived and acted; to reveal that these problems were generated on the basis a societal project the formed out of the life practices of a specific social class of which men like Galileo were relationally part; and that, as such, the type of knowledge achieved and here, and in other ways that will become clear as this work unfolds, we radically depart from the various traditions that make up bourgeois historiography... was and is not a universal achievement of humanity a humanity that at any rate has yet to come into being in anything other than in a formal sense but doctrine, knowledge and understanding that is determinate, socially and historically specific and relative to the class and society in which that class formed and the civilization it has created. For even as this science underwent elaboration and lost any relation to these origins, it has retained and retains, hidden and tacit within its conceptual structure, the telos that originally animated it First, however, we need to start with Galileo and his world. Galileo, I Who was Galileo Galilei? Son of Vincenzo Galilei, Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa in February 1564, the oldest of seven children. His father was a musician and wool trader. Now Vincenzo had been born in Florence in 1520. (His mother, Guilia Ammannati was born in Pescia in central Tuscany about 65 kilometers northwest of Florence.) Note the date.
1

The first four volumes of Duhem's Systme du monde appeared in 1916, the fifth posthumously in 1917, and based on manuscripts, the sixth did not appear until 1954 and the four remaining volumes were published between 1956 and 1959. We use an English language selection (Medieval Cosmology) largely based on the later manuscript volumes that deals primarily with the theoretical basis of medieval cosmology. 2 Koyr most important works in this regard was his Galileo Studies with the French original (tudes Galilennes) appearing in 1939. 3 Summarized, above all, in Philosophy, Technology and the Arts in the Early Modern Era.

Twenty-six (26) years before Vincenzo was born Piero deMedici was expelled from Florence and the Republic was reestablished on the basis of French bayonets (December 1494); eleven (11) years before his birth Pisans finally submitted following upon three long years of fighting to incorporation into the Republican Florences imperial domains (1509); eight (8) years before Vincenzo was born the Florentine Republic collapsed (again), the Medici were restored following defeat of her, Machievalllis and Soderinis, citizen armies by the Spanish at Prato (1512); five (5) years after his birth the Republic, led by aristocrats of the great families such as Jacobo Salviati, Niccolo Capponi and Luigi Guicciardini, was restored (16 May 1526) immediately following upon the pillage and sack of Rome (6 May 1526) by German, Italian and Spanish soldiery, Imperials, that had worked their way down the Peninsula following upon their defeat of the French armies (to which Pope Clement VII, Guilio de Medici, was allied) at the battle of Pavia (24 February 1525) in which the Hapsburg imperials of Charles V (Austrian emperor and king of Spain) had crushed the French with their Florentine allies; and, ten (10) years after Vincenzo was born the final destruction of the Republic was accomplished (12 August 1530) ten days after then defeat of a Florentine partisan force led Francesco Ferrucci in hard fighting with overwhelmingly numerically superior Spanish Imperial forces under the Prince of Orange engaged in a siege of city as mercenaries under their captain, Malatesta Baglione, the ostensible defenders of the city, abandoned the fortified external Florentine perimeter. Guido de Medici, who as Pope had no trouble finding the wherewithal to do a deal (April 1529) with Charles V (codified in the Treaty of Barcelona), restored the Medici line as the rightful overlords of the great city and its territories. 1 The Medici would rule Florence as a Spanish duchy until its annexation by Austria in 1737. The restoration of the Medici in Florence in 1530 brought to a close, seemingly nearly forty years of fighting on the Italian Peninsula as the two great tributary power, France and a rising Castilian Spain fought over and again to decide who would rule. The Spanish had proven themselves masters of the Peninsula and this was confirmed in the Treaty of Cambrai. But, as if to remind Vincenzo, under watchful Spanish eyes, Cosimo, duke of Tuscany, brought troops to bear on Siena for over three years (1552-1555), which was finally successfully annexed in 1557. French incursions in the North, in Savoy (most of the modern day Piedmont) periodically recurred from 1536 to 1538, again from 1542 to 1544, the outcome of this struggle not being decided until after the Spanish victory at the battle of St. Quentin (1557); and, if this was not enough, losses of the Venetians overseas trading empire (this Republic had already surrendered all of its non-Adriatic fronting mainland possessions in 1509) the Aegean islands north of Crete in 1540, Cyprus in 1571, and Crete itself in 1669 to Ottoman expansion westward in the Mediterranean would remind him all over again. Of what was Vincenzo reminded? The world is not a safe place. The world is not a safe place, and Vincenzo knew. As a young man, he left Florence and settled in Pisa, though now under Spanish suzerainty nonetheless far from the Florentine maelstrom of events, where he married Guilia in 1563 and where Galileo was born a year later. (To the dangers of war we might also add that of famine, which were endemic. From the time of the rise of the Ciompi to the rise of another revolutionary group, the Jacobins, Florence would experience 111 famines. In 1528, while Vincenzo was a child, Florence was struck by famine, which would recur in 1540, and in both cases, the city closed its gates to the surrounding contado leaving the Tuscan peasantry to its fate.2 Pisa was no different except in one regard: It was a port city where ships carrying grain unloaded, and in the chain of recipients it stood in front of Florence.) A long line of the Galileis, Vincenzos family, had been made their livelihoods as wool merchants, though they were relationally part of the popolo grasso (neither the great merchants nor the Lana manufacturers, both of who had played central roles in the accumulation of Florentine wealth since the end of the thirteen century), but far closer to the arte minori, the small guildsmen, shopkeepers and traders, and among these a family that did quite well. Now, the wealth, splendor and power that accrued to Florence at the outset of the era of capitals formal domination (chronologically, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) did not primarily rest on banking and trade, but on the profitability of its cloth industry (and this, in turn, depended upon unchallenged control of the manufacturer-merchants

1 2

See The History of Florence and the Florentine Republic, Part IV and the Note on Giannotti. Famine was, as we said, endemic, a typical feature of towns and cities that characterized the entire epoch of divided societies down to the end of the 1830s, at least in the center of greatest capitalist development in the West. See the Third Essay, Part I, History and Malthus, below. What was unusual was that in 1528 and 1540, famine struck not only Florence but the countryside, evincing its utter severity. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Vol. I, 328-329 (where this atypical event is noted and from which we derive the figures and dates which we shall have occasion to site again).

over the total process of cloth, i.e, woolen, production).1 In that maelstrom of events, war, sieges, ransoms paid to mercenaries and regular armies to free individual men and whole cities from military occupation that had characterized Vincenzos youth (not to mention the three decades prior to his birth), woolen merchant fortunes had been undone over and again. Vincenzo had understood this perhaps before he could even articulate it. He longed for a quite life, and over generations his family had not only been spared the trauma of loss of fortune but had done well enough for him to detach himself from merchant activity. He had studied music in his youth in Venice, had developed real skill as a lute player and before Galileos birth he supported himself and his new wife as a music teacher. He had even performed certain experiments on strings to evince his musical theories, among which can be numbered his treatment of dissonance for which he is remembered today. Vincenzos sense of place never deserted him. In 1572, he, his wife and his children (less Galileo) returned home to Florence. But, as much Florentine glory lay in the past, the city he returned to was not the city he had left. Subordinated to the Castilian Hapsburg Empire, the dominant merchant manufacturing, merchant trading and banking social groups in central Italy, not just Florence, had for nearly a half century been functioning as a center of financial support for Spanish imperial ambitions and activities, which parasitically drained off the wealth generated in the region. This requires separate treatment since it bears directly on who Galileo Galilei was and in a complexly mediated fashion on the modern science of nature. Castilian Empire in Early Modern Europe, Capitalism and Formal Domination2 From the moment of the union of Isabelle and Ferdinand at which Castilian expansion in southward on the Iberian Peninsular, through Charles I (Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor) when he first assumed the Castilian crown (1516) until the conclusion of the War of Dutch Independence in 1659 (by which time the Spanish treasury had been bankrupt for decades), for newly two hundred years, Catholic, then Hapsburg Castile, now long past its zenith, engaged in nearly continuous warfare. Innumerable smaller wars of conquest that involved dynastic claims or objectives, imperial ambitions in the Mediterranean, the subjugation of northern (and at its periphery central) Italy, occupation of the Low Countries, provision for Christian Europe of a defensive bulwark against the Ottoman Turks a defense that involved a religious-ideological pogrom against Muslims and Jews and can be traced back to the martial alliance of those two religiously fanatical zealots in 1469 (the Castilian queen and the Aragonese king), and their development and employ of that black instrument of Christianizing terror, the Inquisition3 were all essentially supported by the revenues derived, first, from exploitation of the peasantries of Iberia, second and primarily, from the madly ambitious plunder of the peoples and resources of the Americas, and third, from the blackmail, looting, plunder and domination of the merchants and cities of Europe under its control. Gold and silver, and after 1550 exclusively silver, fed the machines (armies) that were the instruments of its aggrandizement: 4 Product of one of historys most infamous and sustained policies of genocide, the silver that poured in from the Americas allowed Castilian kings to be overcome by their own megalomaniac ambitions. At the beginning of the century (1525-1530), Charles I strangled the commercial centers of northern Italy, most notably Genoa and Florence. (The Spanish maintained five strategically important seaports, the Stato dei Presidi, the State of the Garrisons, which was administered from Spanish Naples and which increased the drain on Florentine-Tuscan resources.)
1
2

The History of Florence and the Florentine Republic, Part III, Note (on cloth worker exploitation). For Castile as discussed here, The Origins and Development of Catalan Nationalism: Catalan and Castilian Antagonism in Spanish History. 3 This was the Spanish Inquisition, preceding the Roman Inquisition by nearly three quarters of a century, the latter established by Paul III in 1542 to turn back Calvin, Luther, their offshoots and the Protestant Reformation. 4 Braudel, Ibid, Vol. 1, 476. In Bolivia, in the foothills of the Andes the city of Potos, founded in 1546 one year after the discovery of silver in the region, was center of silver production becoming the largest single silver mine in the world by 1611. Braudel chastises the Spanish for failing to set up new and profitable enterprises at home (Ibid, I, 478), but that was precisely the point: The non-bourgeois, non-capitalist Castilian crown was engaged in defense of the old tributary order against emerging capitalist social groups and institutions, and it spent this, a fortune achieved entirely by non-capitalist means, mostly by slavery and murder, to support its military machine, as Braudel backhandedly admits in citing (for us merely an instance exemplifying what was at issue) a contemporary source (a Venetian ambassador) who reported the 800,000 ducats worth of Peruvian silver was transported to the Netherlands where it was minted in exchange for artillery and powder, and, of course, with a merchants fee to arrange the transaction Ibid, I, 480.

Ruling from 1556 to 1598 Felipe (Philip) II, having originally involved Castile in, by the end of the century was still engaged in the midst of, a ninety year long attempt to conquer the Low Countries, an effort during which Spanish and foreign mercenaries in the pay of the Castilian crown repeatedly destroyed the flourishing towns of the Northwest: The great textile cities of the Mediterranean and Northern Europe, and as well their surrounding countryside on which they depended for food, were occupied and foraged off. Taken as hostages, wealthy merchants, traders, and bankers were held to ransom. Whole cities too were held to ransom or sacked (or both). Villages and countryside were pillaged. The wealth of urban centers (including their hinterlands) of the high middle age so-called, still early in the era of capitals formal domination, was drawn off to fed the Castilian war machines (its armies), and occupied or wrecked (or both), and their commercial vitality was stifled by imposition of rule from Madrid (eliminating autonomous republican institutions, the life blood of these oligarchical, commercial centers). Castilian kings thereby destroyed the loci of the wool-textile economy of the Mediterranean-European North, and thus allowed a new locus to develop in England. (Florence, in 1560 the greatest center of woolen production in Europe, purchased two thirds of its raw wool from Castilian Spain, and in turn numbered Spain, with France, as one of its most important centers of export of finished woolen cloth. By 1630, like fallen Spain, its woolen production had plummeted to 2% of the 1560 amount.)1 In so doing, ironically Castilian kingship undermined the network of commercial relations in which the great wool producers of central Spain were embedded in, and with it the hegemonic position of Castile in Europe. Call this in the objectively historical sense the openly military aspect of an assault by Europes most powerful tributary formation on those social groups who were bearers of a nascent capitalism; and, at the same time, call Castile's failure an expression of the exhaustion of tributary formations of western Europe, the endpoint of their ability to organize social life (a process that clearly was already underway by the midpoint of the Thirty Years War, evinced in the epidemics and famine that swept Europe in the 1630s and in misery, destruction and depopulation created by war and disease): For without the emergence of capitalism in the Low Countries and England symbolized, above all, by the triumph of the Dutch and Puritan bourgeoisies in war and revolutionary civil war, and then by the new science of nature at nodal sites in Europe, the achieved levels of culture, sociality and production would have fallen back to those levels that characterized Europe, that is, the Mediterranean hinterlands of Rome, just prior to the emergence of Merovingian kingship, in which state, extended family and village community could not longer sustain a civil sociality.2 The foundations of Castilian power and her emergence as a great European power rested, in fact, on an earlier phase of conquest, the unification of the Iberian Peninsula, that Fernando brought to a close.3 These conquests robbed the civilization of the Moors (Nasrid Arabs) of its substance, added untold great wealth to Castilian coffers and provided massive numbers of slaves and Moors who were enslaved (both often sold adding to wealth in coin form), and it added enormous tracts of land in al-Andalus to the patrimonies of Castile, in particular, to her great nobles, most of which had won their status in connection with the Crusades in which the warrior aristocratic military orders, foundation of noble power and bearers of the ideational orientation toward conquest, came into being. The vast tracts of land appropriated by the great nobles during the Spanish Reconquista provided the basis for a movement from cereal agriculture in old Castile to transhumant sheep farming on and between these great estates as herds in the hundreds of thousands passed seasonally from the central Castilian plateaux to Estremadura and northern Andalusia. An intricate commercial network survived Catalan collapse and tied these wool-producing estates to the great textile centers (Bruges, Ghent) of the Low Countries. 4 Castilian towns and, in far northern Iberia, Biscayan shippers grew and a few great noble families transformed small fortunes into vast wealth. That concentration of wealth was enormous: Two to three percent (2-3%) of the nobles controlled herds of sheep on occasion in the millions, owed 97% of the land, while half of this land was the patrimony of just a few great families who stood head and shoulders above the smaller gentry (hidalgo). (At the same time as the Catalan population had declined to about 278,000 in 1497, Castile boasted 5-7 million.) Most hidalgo were impoverished and land hungry, and formed the social basis for armies of conquest. Commodity production is at best merely secondary to a rural
1 2

Paolo Malanima, An Example of Industrial Reconversion: Tuscany, 64-65, 67. On this, see, e.g., Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, Vol. 1, 147-149, or Anderson, Passages from From Antiquity to Feudalism,122f. 3 In 1485 Ronda, in 1487 Mlaga, in 1490 Almeria, and in 1492 the city of Granada fell to Fernandos armies. 4 Depopulated by plague (the prebourgeois Catalan nations demographically density had collapsed, from some 600,000 in 1350 to 278,000 in 1497), torn by rural civil war and social struggle within Barcelona, the latter brought on in large part by waves of plague that made urban social life impossible, and with the institutional structures that sustained Catalan commerce rendered ineffectual by Castilian overlordship, the Catalan trading empire that had been built up over centuries and that had commercially mediated the wool trade in the western Mediterranean and in western Europe had virtually disappeared by 1500.

aristocracy of this sort, and as such it is only a means to wealth, its display, and in particular to power as the undisputed, absolute control over and disposition of men, resources, and things. Castilian Spain, a tributary formation based on sheepherding (not agriculture) and conquest, was emphatically not bourgeois:1 There was little if any capitalist activity in Spain outside the urban enclaves of Crdoba and Segovia where the domestic (putting out) system had taken hold, and on the Atlantic North (Bilbao) and the Mediterranean (Barcelona as it revived) until well into the eighteenth century. In fact, through centuries of "reconquest and thereafter, the assault on Moors and Spanish Jewry, the counterattack against Protestant Reformation, and the offensive against the Enlightenment that first emanated from France, in each of these cases spearheaded by first the Jesuit then Dominican Inquisition, the Spanish Church and Crown, purveyor of bodily torture and depth-psychological emotional abuse, was the main rampart against the insinuation of capitalist methods into productive activity in Europe. Since the Church and the royal Castilian entourage around Spanish kingship were intertwined and inseparable, we can state that in speaking about the former we are simultaneously speaking about the latter, so that in noting Protestant reform was inextricably bound up with the emergence of commercial and urban artisan classes, urban and secular developments, and somewhat later the growth and expansion of capitalist social relations particularly in agriculture, the Roman Church, the Inquisition, and the Jesuits in Spain spearheaded counterrevolutionary efforts to reverse the nascent formation of bourgeois society in Europe, we are referring to the entire phalanx of personages, institutions and social relations brought together by Spanish kingship The accusation of heresy thrust at Galileo was itself determined by this entire constellation of events and conditions: Aligned with the French whose foreign policy was effectively in the hands of Richelieu, as soon as Swedish forces under Gustavus Adolphus swept down over central Europe (entering the Thirty Years War in late winter 1631) the Barberini pontificate (Urban VIII) was forced to abandon the intellectual liberality of its early years (1620s) and aggressively undertake a pro-Spanish policy, at any rate demanded by the Jesuit faction within the Curia, and pursue a correspondingly vicious, intransigent persecutory campaign against heretics so-called and unorthodox innovators (among which stood Galileo), a campaign decided on the narrowest of ideologically rigid criteria (especially with regard to the doctrine of the Eucharist and transubstantiation)2 Still, even prior to and then against Spanish overlordship and sporadic occupation, incipiently, the movement of capital slowly penetrated production itself (i.e., not just in formal ways in commerce as in banking with its double entry booking and bills of exchange, or distribution as in the creation of markets for the sale of commodities) in its various forms beginning late in the historical period of the initial consolidation of state centralism over the carcass of republican institutions (1380-1485) on the Italian Peninsula.3 First, there were the Lana merchant manufacturers who by now firmly established themselves in production as a permanent fixture in, e.g., the Florentine landscape. Second, there was the sottiposti, waged laboring proletariat in the woolen industries of central Italy, the other side of the same social relation that engaged the Lana bourgeoisie. Third, in the central Italian countryside and in the North, serfdom had been abolished as early as the end of the thirteenth century (1292). In Tuscany relations of sharecropping tenancy (mezzadria) prevailed, while in Lombardy (known here as messaria) the same relations could be found, along with simply farm leasing and rural waged labor even, as a shift to domestic home production along more formally capitalist lines was already underway. (In fact, objects of that shift, pauperized tenants provided labor for these rural, domestic proto-industries). 4 While appearing as a type of petty commodity production formed through the activity of small olive oil and wine producers, and mulberry tree growers and cultivators after 1570 (the leaves of mulberry trees provided a domestic source of food for silkworms, for silkworm breeding and on this basis for production of silk yarn), sharecroppers were impoverished, indebted, and the prices they received for their produce were not determined by them with a view to market conditions but by the lords (with a view to the market and the various ways they could further extract surpluses, most often a matter of fixing their accounting books) from whom they rented their tiny plots: These peasants so-called were not independent commodity producers, but a rural proletariat disguised as sharecropping tenants who, to be sure, had bourgeois aspirations. The entire countryside of central Italy rested on this basis, on landless laborers who did
1

In the South (Andalusia) and the east (Valencia), latifundia agriculture based on serf tenancy had existed since the thirteenth century. In the North (Galicia, Navarre, Basque country, as well as Asturias), small peasant freeholds were predominant, in Catalonia and Aragon, a type of sharecropping tenancy had existed for centuries. But sheepherding does not entail tilling the soil, planting and harvesting; it is not agriculture, and the great Castilian lords were utterly contemptuous of the latter. 2 Pietro Redondi, Galileo, Heretic, 228-230. 3 For the periodization, see the First Interlude, Chronology and History, below. 4 For Lombardy in this regard, Angelo Moioli, De-Industrialization in Lombardy, 100.

work for wages taken together with the vine tenantcy, while in Lombardy peasants were dispossessed and worked as domestic laborers putting out cloth products under the auspices of a hierarchy of merchants starting from the villages, through the small towns to the great city (Milan).1 The situation was similar in Genoa, and with Venice and its countryside (though not as well developed), as that in Lombardy.2 Productive activity contracted during a good part, especially the early decades, of the chronological sixteenth century as a consequence of wars, of marching, encamping and marauding armies... woolen production nearly collapsed and, here, as elsewhere, gave way to silk manufacture.3 And it did all over again after 1585, beginning with poor crops and famine that lasted until the end of the century. Within Galileos lifetime, in his mature years, new waves of plague reappeared in both northern and southern Italy, and in Tuscany (1630-1631). Large cities such as Genoa, Milan, and Naples in the south, lost as much as half their populations, with loses of a quarter of the populations in Florence and its contado.4 The Thirty Years War (1618-1648), which again involved Spain (in fighting in the GermanAustrian principalities, against France and Sweden), drained off still further financial resources above and beyond the tributes extracted to support an army of occupation in the Netherlands; and, in the east, war between the Ottomans and the Iranians from 16231639 disrupted export markets important to the Peninsulas great cities, especially Venice. The crisis became open as the locus of formal capitalist development began to shift from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic (in the second decade of the seventeenth century), and did not reach a nadir until the midpoint of this inner historical period of that development (circa 1640-1650). The Spanish presence, of course, encouraged and reinforced a massive retrenchment, in particular the final destruction (which was well underway tendentially from the beginning of the chronological fifteenth century in cities no less than Florence) of Republican institutions, the power of the Ottimati, the oligarchies of great families based in merchant, banking and manufacturing, in favor of a deepening centralization along the lines of kingly government Now state centralism surely is not a product of capitalist development, or is such in only one of its (the most accentuated of its) forms. In certain tributary formations, in ancient China for example, centralism appears as a nascent bureaucratization and is borne by a class of landlords-become-intellectuals, a scholar-gentry. In modern tributary France in the time of the first convocation of the Estates General onward, a significant statification developed, and with it a centralized bureaucracy. Something very similar could be said about the Ottomans throughout the entire period currently under consideration. Yet in each of these cases and others, state centralism is called forth by the requirements of ruling an empire, whether landed and contiguous or overseas or both. The distinctive contribution of capitalism to state centralism concerns structure and policy (practices). The former is not at issue for us. We shall relegate it to a footnote.5 Policy is (practices are) different. Four significant practices were pursued by modern states that were central to early capitalist development. They were mercantilist trade

If it can be shown that the development of the putting out or domestic system of production in rural Lombardy in the sixteenth century did not arise spontaneously or naturally in the specifically social sense, but instead was a development spurred on consciously, as the consequence of deliberate intent of merchant who effectively reorganized production by geographically changing its spatial locus, the concept of the formal domination of labor over capital must be modified and the periodizing relation between formal and real domination will require further revision. It is not at all clear that this can be shown, as evidenced by, e.g., the research program formulated in Moioli, Ibid, passim. See the First Interlude in its entirety, below. 2 Braudel, Ibid, Vol. 1, 430-432. 3 Elsewhere in the Italian Peninsula, Venice, Genoa, Lucca, and throughout Europe. Salvatore Ciriacono, Mass Consumption Goods and Luxury Goods, 46. 4 Braudel, Ibid, Vol. 1, 332. 5 In the centralisms mentioned above, the state is indistinguishable from the persons and entourages of the ruler. Even where the ruler's armed force consists in an army, his nascent bureaucracy in priests or tax collectors, this armed force and these minions, though employed in enforcing domination over the rest of the community, are not institutionally separable from the ruler but instead form his personal entourage or his household. The modern state of capital is unique in its institutional and separate character, its appearance as a "public" force clothed in a sham objectivity that sets it apart from and over and against individuals, classes and society. (Its alien otherness masks its reality as a complex network of hardened social relations governed by the class teleology of the bourgeoisie and actually borne by individuals, themselves bourgeois, whose daily activities reproduce it as such.) While any modern, bourgeois state may come in the short run to be identified with a specific historical personage, what distinguishes it from states that appear in other past epochs is a seeming efficacy, permanence and reality that render it at once objectively independent in relation to society and independent of any specific ruler. It is only in this context that bureaucracy can appear rational, and that it develops in the form of seemingly endlessly proliferating agencies, bureaus, departments, etc., that are pyramidically unified by the institutional Executive. This kind of state only begins to appear in history in the wake of the first bourgeois revolutions, in England and in France. See Community and Capital, 162.

policies, infrastructural development, measures to protect domestic industries, and elimination of internal customs and trade barriers. Mercantilist trade policies are best exemplified by the English Navigation Acts (1651, 1663, 1673), legislative enactments aimed at securing for English merchants and the English state the benefits of the commercial activities of English colonies in the Americas and the West Indies by limiting Dutch trade with them.1 Infrastructural development such as construction of roads, canals and bridges, and docks and ports were generally undertaken by the state because its resources, i.e., tax revenues, give it access to money capital in a way which no single producer or aggregate of merchants' firms could marshal. These revenues permitted it, and it alone, to create the material premises without which development would not have occurred. (This assessment being as a valid today as it was four hundred years ago). The elimination of internal customs and trade barriers such as tolls encountered in passing from one region to another form the basis for development of an internal domestic national market... a bourgeois nation in the very process of formation... which, to be sure, over the course of time eliminated the less efficient and strengthened (by expanding their reach) the more efficient producers. This measure was usually complemented by protectionist measures, designed to prevent non-national producers from making too great an ingress into domestic markets at the expense of domestic producers. Protectionist measures had a direct bearing on the situation on the Italian Peninsula. To the extent that commodity circulation was not simply based on captive markets and burdened with extensive regulation (say, by guilds), and production was not solely for luxury goods, merchants, traders and manufacturers brought pressure to bear on the personage of the sovereign to break down barriers to trade such as customs, imposts, product requirements, etc. (while demanding others be set up),2 and effectively created a certain uniformity within the space(s) in which capital moved. This pressure itself emanated, we are tempted to say as a reflex, from competition among and between competing capitalists. Central Italian Lana manufacturers in the late fifteenth and the first half of the same sixteenth century were under enormous pressure from similar producers in Bruges and London. (In fact, this competition destroyed them.) While this is a much later development though it was tacit at the moment at which Galileo lived, the state then and later was required to legislatively and by fiat (diktat) establish a uniform market, one which in historical time expanded from nations to encompass the world In all this (i.e., the Spanish presence, marginally centralized kingly government developing over the carcass of Republican institutions), the seeming re-feudalization of the chronological sixteenth century, mercantile capitalist northern and central Italy was the other side of a dynamism of capitalist development of the same, broadly speaking, cloth manufacture in the Low Countries (while it is also clear that plague, smallpox and famine all played a role in this re-feudalization so called, which, at any rate, was limited to the Papal States and the Neapolitan regions, for in the Tuscan center, on the northern Lombard plain and the inland reaches of northeastern Venetian mainland, a quasiindustrial development based on formal domination following on a shift of production from the great cities to a smaller towns and the countryside occurred steadily after the 1630 plague);3 and the explosive development of capitalist farming in rural England and artisan cloth production (woolens, then silk) which, based on the domestic or putting out system, provided London merchants with a large competitive advantage over craft guild and artisan workshops of the Italian cities that resisted technological and organizational change, i.e, further control over (though not intrusion into) production by the great merchants: Facing stiff price competition from England and the slow emergence of a transAtlantic triangular trade (London, the Virginia planter colony and coastal west Africa), woolen production once at the heart of the great urban enclaves of the Italian Peninsula nearly disappeared (over time effectively replaced by silk manufacture which, aimed at traditional higher end markets, did quite well), banking continued to contract, as the great burghers often retreated to the country estates, and pursued investment in landed property and in cash crops such as olive oil and wine. As a specific form of capitalist competition and development, we shall tentatively periodize the forgoing in terms of the era of capitals formal domination over labor, that is, in terms of the predominance of the merchant in production, a social figure who, directly as a landlord (taking surpluses in kind) or through the mediation of money, siphons off surpluses in exploiting labor and does so without either reorganizing those productive activities or generating new
1

See the Preface to Civil War and Revolution in America, the section entitled A Note on the Politically Determined Basis of Monopolistic Control the English Navigation Laws. 2 Ciriacono, Ibid, 46-47, 48-49. 3 Moioli, De-Industrialization in Lombardy, 88-89, 89-90, 99, 100, 101, 102; Giuseppe Felloni, Structural Changes in Urban Industry in Italy, 156-157, 159, 160.

technical inputs to them, which in the event in both cases dramatically increase the productivity of labor (at this moment measured in terms of output). Appearing, as we have suggested, as a re-feudalization, 1 and as such contradictory, this developments most forceful outward form was at a specific level of the polity, in the ascendancy of great lords over duchies, over once free cities and their territories ruled by urban patriciates rising from great families based on banking, trade and woolen production. If these duchies had many of the trappings of the old order, royal courts and close alliances with the Church, at the same time it was among the underlords to these dukes (such as Cosimo I de Medici in Florence), in their own shifts toward exploitation of rural tenant and waged labor, that the foundations of a backward capitalism was laid, especially in agriculture. It was in this world that Galileo moved. Galileo, II Lets follow Galileos maturation and his intellectual development. Galileo was eight years old when Vincenzo and his family returned to Florence in 1572. However, he remained behind in Pisa and lived for two years with Muzio Tedaldi, related to his mother by marriage. When he reached the age of ten, Galileo left Pisa to join his family in Florence. His family had the financial wherewithal, and Galileo was privately tutored by Jacopo Borghini. Thereafter Vincenzo continued the young Galileos education at the Camaldolese Monastery at Vallombrosa thirty-two kilometers southeast of Florence. Pause here and examine the Camaldoli, for they neatly incarnated the contradictions that Galileo lived without fully understanding, that characterized the world to which he was born, and in which he lived and acted. Camaldolese were in the loose informal sense an outgrowth of the Benedictine practices established by one St. Romuald at the beginning of the eleventh century. For a century or more the Camaldoli had practiced the strict discipline of monastic monk life, strengthened by a solitary comportment that approached that of the hermitic ascetics of the early Church. At the same time, they also had developed a rigid internal social hierarchy, which would play a major role in the properties they acquired largely through gifts of beneficence (as a trustee of these possessions) and as the power of the great Guidi nobles was broken, as the quasi-feudal magnati of the Tuscan countryside were beaten down in confrontations with the militias of the great burghers of Florence in the twelfth and thirteen centuries. Taking hold of vast property in land, the Camaldoli poured themselves into this void formed by the historical departure of the Guidi nobles, becoming great landlords. By 1115, the Camaldoli exerted control over three hermitages, twenty-five monasteries, and a Florentine nunnery. By 1250, the order could account to its name over 300 monks and administrators. Before 1550, the Camaldoli of central Italy had seventeen monasteries, four
1

This was not feudalism. Feudal social relations had their geographical heartland in Normandy and central Europe from the Loire to the Rhine in the period 800-1200. They were characterized by a subject peasantry; widespread use of service tenement (i.e., the fief) instead of wages; supremacy of a social class of specialized warriors; ties of obedience and protection binding men to men, and, which, within the warrior class, assumed a distinctive form called vassalage; and fragmentation of authority leading to disorder. In the West, feudalism was a historical product of a violent dissolution of older tributary formations (e.g., Merovingian Gaul), was a form of social order which was neither centrally held together by kinship nor state centralism, but in the absence of these, by ties of personal dependence. These ties constituted the core social relation, one which was in principle personal, binding men to men unconnected with possession of the soil or place of abode. This much said in the West, as elsewhere, feudalism was a rural phenomenon. Feudal social relations bound an oligarchy of warriors (and a caste of priests) to a subject peasantry, an exploitative bond which gave the former rights to land revenues and, inextricably, politico-juridical authority, and the latter protection and defense. We can distinguish two other forms of social organization that in the vast tributary formation that engulfed most of western Europe, beginning around 800 in the common era. Taken together with the above delineated feudal form and the region it shaped, these two other forms of social organization that appeared and developed within the tributary formation in western Europe from 1100 at the latest down to 1750 were petty commodity production found in urban enclaves usually along the geographical edges of this tributary formation and sedentary-pastoral activity which could be found in certain spaces within its interior. The former developed largely in the Mediterranean, in lands stretching west from north central Italy to Catalonia, and, of course, included the central Italian zone south to the Papal States. In the petty commodity producing zone, social organization consisted in groups of individual producers living and working in communities, whether rural or urban. These individual producers held private property in land or in mobile property. Production was aimed at exchange on a market and only secondarily for the producers' own consumption. Long distance trade was, it should be noted, a necessary condition for and an activity engaged in by social groups constitutive of this form of social organization, and thus, its significance for Venice, Florence, Genoa and Catalan Barcelona. Characteristically class divided societies, petty commodity forms were dominated by merchants, who controlled other urban and rural classes (i.e., artisan, shopkeeper, and their dependents on the one side, and noble feudatories, sharecropping peasants and increasing a landless rural proletariat on the other) through oligarchically structured domination of political and economical forms of organized social life. See The History of Florence and the Florentine Republic, Part I, section I.

nunneries and priors tending to congregations in Murano in the Venetian Republic, in Turin and at San Silvestro on Monte Soracte near Rome. The land the Camaldoli held did not lie fallow, but was organized into small farms often as tenancies, on which grain and wine were planted, tended and harvested. Where land was not organizable agriculturally, trees were felled and wood entered general commerce, and once forests now pasture land for herding sheep and raising cattle, also extensive Camaldolese activities by the fourteen century, was created: Among those previously mentioned administrators a good deal were lay, for the Camaldoli employed a host of merchant middlemen (factors) to buy and sell those agricultural and livestock products. The Camaldoli were one of the many venues through which capitalist social relations took hold in agriculture on the Italian Peninsula, as, ironically, all the while the Church fought against the penetration and development of those relations. Now all this was but a whisper to Galileo, who, though, manifestly was aware of the manner in which this contradiction played out: For among these monks, this secular appetite created internal social conflict that was expressed in periodic outburst, struggles over the direction of the Camaldoli, whether toward engagement in cenobitic, i.e, monastic and communal, institutions (effectively engaged in agriculture) or as eremitic, i.e., hermetic, ascetic and impoverished individual, activity oriented to Godly transcendence and independent of secular and ecclesiastical power. And Galileo effectively took a position on this issue, without being politically alive to meaning of Camaldoli activity in terms of Church response itself contradictory since it opposed the social and cultural forms to which the very activity of its institutions was giving rise to the novel social relations in production, emerging class configurations, the new doctrines that had begun to appear in natural philosophy and, most of all, the apostate doctrines not those emanating from the various heretical sects, the Church had successfully dealt with them for over two hundred years that were taking institutional shape in various Protestant denominations: Galileo found life among the Camaldolese appealing. He intended to join the Order, becoming a novice. Vincenzo, relating to the experience of the Galilei family history (one of his ancestors had been a distinguished physician in fifteenth century Florence) and recognizing the income and security of a medical practice, had long desired that his eldest should become a medical doctor. He pulled Galileo out of the monastery, continued his schooling in Florence (among Camaldolese monks as a concession to his son, but where he could keep an eye on his development), waited until he was of the right age, sent him back to Pisa to live with Tedaldi and enrolled him at the University of Pisa in study devoted to medicine. This was 1581. Galileo had no interest in his medical studies, but he was fascinated by mathematics and natural philosophy, and it was in these studies that he attended lectures and courses At eighteen years, Galileos life had reached a decisive turning point. Well educated with a consuming interest in mathematics as it related to natural philosophy, and quite brilliant at that as we shall see, a strong preference for isolation indicating both self-discipline and willfulness, and hampered by politically flawed judgment (one that would haunt Galileo throughout his life, though, as we shall suggest, narrow Jesuit-like intrigue and guile was something he did assimilate), he was prepared to make commitments that would govern the rest of his life At Pisa, Galileo appeared most frequently in the courses of Filippo Fantoni, who held the universitys chair in mathematics Fantoni was a Camaldolese monk, the courses were by school statute heavy on Euclid and Ptolemy largely designed for medical student instruction,1 but actually oriented to occultist mathematics in the sixteenth century sense (cosmography and astronomy as the non-discursive, non-demonstrative study of the esoteric qualities of number as they reveal the really real) In the course year 1582-1583, he attended lectures of Ostilio Ricci, mathematician to the Tuscan Court and, of real import, a former pupil of Tartaglia. (The course was on Euclids Elements.) Niccol Tartaglia had translated, then published in Latin previously unknown works of Archimedes, as well as prepared an Italian version with commentary of an Archimedean work on hydrostatics 2 In the summer months, Galileo returned to Florence and, here his discipline was on exhibition, continued his mathematical studies. In that third summer while still enrolled at Pisa, Galileo invited Ricci to visit his family with the intent Ricci was in full agreement of convincing his father to relent in his insistence on medical studies. Vincenzo did not abandon his hopes, but permitted the open pursuit of mathematics (Archimedes in particular) in the Galilei home during summer months. In 1585, Galileo abandoned medical studies altogether, left the University of Pisa, and left without
1

Charles B. Schmitt, Filippo Fantoni, Galileos Predecessor as Mathematics Professor at Pisa in Studies in Renaissance Philosophy and Science, X, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59. 2 Stillman Drake, Introduction to Galileos Discourses on Bodies in Water, x.

completing degree work Now Ricci is more important than we might at first glance suspect. His sole work, or at least the one work that has survived is housed in the Italian National Library and bears the title Problemi di Geometria Pratica: Luso dellArchimetro (Problems of Practical Geometry: The Uses of Archimedes). His importance lies in reinforcing for Galileo the doctrines of Archimedes, which, at any rate, Galileo very much assimilated during this period of his life. We shall return to this in connection with his father, Vincenzo1 Galileo began to privately tutor in mathematics in Florence, and was publicly appointed to teach in Siena in 15851586. In summer 1586, he taught at Vallombrosa, and in the same year wrote his first work that brought together his mathematical studies in relation to natural philosophy. La Balancitta, The Little Balance, was a largely descriptive account of Archimedes method of discovering the relative densities, or specific gravities, of bodies employing a balance. In 1587, he made a journey to Rome to visit Christopher Clavius, a priest, astronomer and professor of mathematics at the Jesuit Collegio Romano. Now the centers of gravity was a subject much discussed by Jesuit mathematicians at this juncture, and Galileo, fully aware, brought along notes he had made with a view to findings in his study of Archimedes method that used the balance. Clavius was, needless to say, impressed. Galileo was developing a reputation as a very gifted, sound mathematician in central Italy. (With regard to that reputation, for example, dating from this same year, he has left us a correspondence with both Clavius and Guidobaldo del Monte, an older contemporary, a genuine intellectual, educated without degree at Padua, with interests and writings in astronomy, mechanics, and mathematics a la Archimedes.) In the following year (1588), he received an invitation, because of the institution quite impressive, to lecture on the dimensions and location of hell in Dante's Inferno at the Academy in Florence. And here he was impressive. In 1589, he was nominally appointed as Fantonis successor at the University of Pisa. (The appointment essentially provided Galileo an income.) He held this post for three years, during which he wrote Du Moto (1590). But in 1591 Vincenzo died, and Galileo, as eldest son obligated to support his mother and siblings (entailing, additionally, provision for dowries for his two younger sisters), was compelled to find more financially rewarding work. His reputation, now quite excellent, and his correspondents, Guidobaldo dal Monte in particular, made it possible for him to take a far more lucrative position with the University of Padua which he assumed in late 1592. Galileo was to spend eighteen years there.2 Lets pause here and reflectively ascertain where we are at. Galileos family, formation and experience provided him with two unshakable insights that make sense of all that experience.

See this Study, this section, below. If his Letter to the Grand Duchess (Christiana of Lorraine) in 1616 put his lack of political acuity on display (the Letter was highly polemical, attacking Peripatetics contemporary Aristotelians and revealed his previously privately held commitment to Copernicanism, not just as a mathematical calculation designed to assist locating the position of heavenly bodies but as an ontological account of the relation of these planets, moons and the sun to a cosmologically de-centered Earth, hence offering the Church an opportunity to compel a leading bourgeois and scientific intellectual to recant, initiating the lengthy period of suspicion and investigation that culminated in his infamous trial), the occasion of his departure in 1610 (where upon he took up duties as chief mathematician at Pisa, i.e., he had not teaching responsibilities, and the post of Mathematician and Philosopher to the Tuscan Grand Duke) exhibited his a Jesuitical guile: Palao Sarpi, friend, correspondent and state theologian of the Venetian Republic, wrote him in April 1609 to describe to him the construction of a telescope, a spyglass, in the Flemish Netherlands. As a mathematician with real craft skills, Galileo himself began to construct telescopes, a number of them, with the aim of enhancing their optical functioning. This he did, improving magnification from about 4 times over thirty times on his own account (The Starry Messenger, 29). Opportunistic Galileo. He at once grasped the military and commercial utility of the telescope, called a perspicillum, for seafaring ships. He kept Sarpi updated, and the latter made arrangements for a show in front of the Venetian Senate. Machinating Galileo. The Senate was, what shall we say, if not amazed or astonished, very, very impressed. He was offered a large salary increase in return for sole rights to fabricate the telescope. Sly Galileo. Having already (1607) publicly completed action against one Baldassar Capra for plagiarizing his compass, three years later he engaged in a virtually identical action (identical to Capra): He seized on the opportunity presented by Sarpi, failing to mention that the telescope was not his invention, that any patent he provided was meaningless. (His salary was frozen when the Senate discovered it had been hoodwinked. Galileo resigned and took up the posts in Tuscany.) Galileo was a bourgeois opportunist, vain and proud and arrogant, who most important political judgments were typically, if not rash, based on a misapprehension of constellation of forces in play (because the weight of his entire formation, isolation, intellectualism, subjective certainty rendered him incapable of situating himself contextually).
2

Galileo had lived in Pisa, Florence, Vallombrosa, Florence, Pisa, Pisa and Florence, Padua, and Florence with frequent journeys during the course of a lifetime to Rome and Venice. For him, first, there is little sense of place, no home to which one can return.1 Did he transpose this? Was the affective sense formulated in experience merely cognitively transposed into the perspective in which the world (cosmos, universe) is without center? Hardly. But, if this sense that rendered his personal experience intelligible did not form the horizon in which all understanding transpired, it nonetheless predisposed him toward suspicion regarding claims about naturalness in the world, it provided him with a direction, it, in other words, alerted him that something parading as natural may be far from complete or perfect in the cognitive sense, i.e., the theoretical doctrine in which this naturalness arose may not have the coherency that is generally attributed to it. Second, reality is not as it seems. His experience among the Camaldoli told Galileo this much. Yet all his training also told him that with right key, reality is intelligible, and all his experience told him that it is not as it is immediately observed, witnessed and appears to be. The key was mathematical. Vincenzo may himself nourished this insight: In his treatment of dissonance, he developed a nonlinear mathematical description of musical form that rooted in Pythagorean tradition went beyond it. As Galileo was later to tells us in a famous passage from his The Assayer (1613): Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering in a dark labyrinth2 If one does not recognize in Galileo a bourgeois, it is because the features that are generally held to characterize this social type are derived from a sociology of the era of the real domination of capital over labor, the compulsive accumulation of savings immortalized in Max Webers Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, for him personified in the figure of Benjamin Franklin. As social types (i.e., as idealizations that abstractly relate a form of personality to the broadest determinants of the social totality), we can ask whether, today, we recognize in the endlessly indulged, narcissistic personality engaged in profligate behaviors of all sorts a bourgeois? If this social type appears as such now, in the era of the totalizing domination of capital over society, it is arguable that Galileo was a bourgeois as this social type first appeared in the early history of capitalism, as it slowly formed inside the Mediterranean tributary formation, the era of the formal domination of capital over labor. We can, for now, forgo such the schematization, and with it a tentative and perhaps reductionist formulation. What sense, then, does it make to suggest that Galileo is a bourgeois, and his thought articulates some of the most important contours of a world vision that appears only with the development of capitalism, and that, more importantly, mediates the understanding of the world in order that his class may act effectively in and on it? First, there is the issue of this vision itself. Retrospectively it is clear that Galileo did formulate some of the central concepts including its basic law, that of falling bodies of the modern science of nature. And, while this presupposes our entire theorization, the lineaments of which have been laid out in the Introduction above, it is precisely science understood in terms of the vision of the world that underlay it and which it confirms, that unifies the various outstanding forms of the existence of the bourgeoisie as a class in history. Second, Galileo is nothing like his father. He was sly, scheming, opportunist and practiced guile. To boot, there was no place to which he desired to return. Galileo was in certain real sense rootless (though, if unfairly compared with the nineteenth and twentieth century situations of intellectuals, this reality withers), an intellectual (and cosmopolitan before the term had become fashionable) in the strictly modern sense, or, a bourgeois. He did not know and understand the meaning of (he surely did not live and experience those institutional realities that such an understanding was formed within) civic patriotism and republican loyalty, since these features that had characterized Florentine social life for three centuries and were the loadstars of Florentine intellectuals had long since simply disappeared.3 (In this respect, Galileo felt existentially comfortable in a politically despotic situation, within which he,
1

We'll only note in passing that this interpretation departs from the conventional interpretation for which Galileo pined to return to the land of Tuscany. (See, e.g., Drake's introductory remarks to Letters on Sunspots in Discovering and Opinions of Galileo, 69.) 2 The Assayer (1623), 237-238. 3 Here one thinks of Leonardo Bruni and his De Militia (1422), the paradigmatic document of the civil humanist tradition. See C.C. Bailey, War and Society in Renaissance Florence, and 360f where a critical edition of the Latin original of the De Militia is provided.

asserting his superior merits which itself speaks to bourgeois illusions about individual worth could curry favor and might be recognized as such.) Third, there was Galileo himself. Stubbornly determined and willful. In what familial form in history, clannish, extended, nuclear, etc., does one for the first time in that history find a son who can successfully counterpose his will and project to his family, especially weak or strong patriarchally formed families? It was only in the bourgeois family where this reality first appeared.1 Fourth, there was again Galileo himself, i.e., his practice. In 1597, he invented what he called a geometric and military compass, not a directional compass as we might understand but an instrument on the order of a sector. (A sector is a mathematical instrument made basically of a couple rulers attached one to the other at one end by a joint and scored with several scales.) Galileo had enough demand it was significantly improved version of an instrument in general use by military officers and engineers to employ a craftsman to make the compasses to meet this demand and for future sale.2 In the previously mentioned 1610 letter to the Florentine secretary of state, Vinta, he spoke of having manufactured thousands.3 In the same letter, he mentions the demand for his highly improved telescope, which, it is not unreasonably assumed, he was also having produced. In both cases, the relation between the craftsman he employed and himself was defined by a wage, making Galileo a not just a bourgeois but a (merchant) capitalist. Fifth, there was, once more, Galileo himself. For the sake of momentary monetary advantage, who but a bourgeois and an incorrigible individualist would attempt a transparent swindle aimed at Venetian Republic, the one polity that had a history of protecting its citizens against the Inquisition, and thereby abandon that republic (the greatest mistake of his life) and place his fate in the hands of a despot (i.e., a political figure lacking all institutional restraints on his behavior, without any politically justified commitment to free inquiry), he, his entire entourage and the intellectualliterary community of Florence subject to the buffeting winds originating in Rome, at the time in which he, Galileo, was publicly elaborating a heretical theorization, one that took direct aim at the philosophical underpinnings of Church sanctioned dogma? Sixth, there is one other feature of Galileos personal development, and because of it, there is something absent in him cognitively. Whether or not we hold that one can do something like a detached history of ideas, an intellectual history in which and for which the West is an object of study, perhaps even a mystifyingly substantial entity, Galileo does engage a tradition of thought that is philosophical and includes the study of nature understood as natural philosophy as one of its central aspects. In the tradition as it was revived during the long era in which the petty commodity producing, urban enclaves of the tributary formations that covered Europe beginning eight hundred years ago, especially during the initial period of state centralization (congruent with and effectively arising from the development of the first woolen manufacturers, bankers and trades) and the following era largely defined by the rise of a Castilian tributary formation in opposition to this very development, the whole epoch chronologically from 13701590, in which this revival was consciously carried out, philosophical thought began and ended by posing questions and answers about the form of community in which the good life is achieved. Its achievement is communal and political (in the ancient Greek sense). Nowhere, we believe, will we find such queries in Galileo: For him, the good life is a strictly private affair. In this sense, he is undeniably a bourgeois. Why is it important to establish that Galileo was a bourgeois, both socially and in terms of objective subjectivity (i.e, outwardly, in terms of his behavior)? Above,4 we argued the concept of the bourgeoisie is unitary (i.e. goes beyond and is not determined by provincial, regional and new national boundaries in the process of formation), does not base itself on ideal typification, but refers to the most enlightened individuals, and to the social groups in which they were situated (which, in Galileos case, we shall below specify in terms of a socially determinate audience he addressed in his writing in the vernacular) and which provided men like Galileo with reality and their identities (as the organic intelligentsia of the bourgeoisie as a class), and who, themselves bourgeois, were at once creators and bearers of the modern science of nature. The connection between the bourgeoisie and science, as we also noted, does not just transpire at the level of social class, for it is the opposition to the old order that in part defines these men, and the historical significance of this
1 2

See the Introduction to our Revolutionary Theories of the English Civil War. See Drakes remarks, Opinions and Discovered of Galileo, 16. 3 Ibid, 64. 4 See the Introduction, Formation of the Social Basis of an Organic Intelligentsia of the Bourgeoisie.

science itself as the world-visional infrastructure historically unifying this class itself that is of transcendent import.

Part III Galileo and Aristotle The relation of thought, theories, forms of knowledge (here science) and visions of the world to that world (built environment and humanly transformed natural landscapes, earthly nature in which they are directly embedded and nature in the encompassing sense, as a totality, the universe) cannot be determined from a division of labor that merely duplicates capitals development in thought, to one side, the purely mathematical and logical aspects1 and, to the other, the sociological aspects, so that the mechanistic concept of the world starts from the mechanical principles and concepts which derive the explanation of physics and the universe from the analysis of machines.2 This manner of understanding the relation of ideational constructs to the world is a development within capitalism (and like Mannheims Ideology and Utopia, a sociology of knowledge) in the most thoroughgoing sense (i.e., it affirms capitalism) ... not to mention as a species of a reflection theory it is incoherent... and it altogether fails to understand how socio-historical reality, and on this basis, a vision of world, is formed.3 An analysis of the mechanistic concept of the world does not start an analysis of the relation of Galileos On Mechanics to his study of simple machines (aimed at understanding the general uses and principles governing deployment of such devices),4 anymore than it does from Clausius study of steam engines (giving rise to the second law of thermodynamics) two and a half centuries later. It begins from the immediate appearance of the real itself, from the genesis, formation and development of an economy, i.e., a seemingly autonomous regulator of social life (a mystified and reifyingly apprehended sphere of community as society which appears)5 as an objectified mechanistic structure into whose division of labor individuals are ostensibly inserted like cogs in a machine. Before it becomes possible to anticipatory reproduce in thought the tendentially developing intelligible structure of the world, hidden to us and thus mystifyingly resting on and arising from transformation of one of its aspects (largely in production at the heart of daily activity), it is necessary for that structure, and accordingly, reality itself to begin to undergo change, for novel aspects that are projectively captured and fixed in thought to appear There were four developments within Galileos lifeworld that made the objective appearance of homogenous space possible. All of these developments will occur within a retrospectively reconstructed phase in the movement of capital within the old tributary order in which a confrontation between it... marked by the emergence of counterrevolutionary Castile... and a rising merchant and nascent mercantile bourgeoisie basing itself on formal domination of capital in production unfolded.6 Consider, then, these developments: First, there was the oceangoing exploration of foreign lands and the situating within those lands of locales and places that were marked for special exploitation (of resources such as timber and gold, of peoples). This required detailed mapmaking and geometric (Euclidean) projection provided the most advanced technique in this regard. Second, there was the movement of large armies in the field and in occupation with their attendant logistical and communications problems. Again, a geometrical projection of spaces, space and built environment to be traversed, assaulted or occupied as the case may have been was, for field commanders at least, a desideratum and among those forces and commanders that prized military efficiency, alacrity and offensive operations it was a necessity. Third, there was the development of siege warfare, the reduction of fortified cities and the use of cannon and projectiles to breakdown walls, ramparts, and ignite other structures. Here, questions of the accuracy of moving projectiles become paramount, and by treating the air at ground level (i.e., what we would today call the lower atmosphere) as homogeneous space and cannon balls, small boulders, ignited substances, etc., purely as bodies in motion, a mechanics based on geometrization of space would be superior. Fourth, the creation in production of a world of commodities, including raw materials (e.g., wools, silk, building materials) as commodities for production of more commodities as finished goods, and beyond this, their mediation by money (as in buying and selling) as transpired daily in local marketplaces and other venues of consumption, and, especially, the movement of price as it was followed in banking, trade and manufacturer actually generates the objective appearance of homogeneous space in which, in particular, money and commodities move.
Henryk Grossmann, Descartes and the Social Origins of the Mechanistic Concept of the World, 157. Ibid. 3 For elaboration, see the Fourth Study, Part III, Theory of Truth and the sources cited therein, below. 4 On Mechanics, 147-150. (Published in Paris in 1634, this work had long circulated in manuscript form, perhaps from as early as 1600.) The machines Galileo examined are the lever, balance, windlass, capstan, pulley and screw. 5 Community and Capital, 90-96. 6 See the discussion of formal domination, Chronology and History, in the First Interlude, below.
1 2

Any theorization that attempted to systematically treat the objects of nature (and those of society and humanity simply assumed to be natural) which appeared in this lifeworld and which itself was assumed to be natural would start from a conception of homogeneous space.1 To the extent such a theorization took an account of bodies in motion not just projectiles, and probably not all with an explicit view to the movement of price as its main objective, and the analysis of projectile motion was the weakest element in Aristotelian physics, the obvious point of attack for anyone aiming at a thoroughgoing critique, it, this mechanics, would necessarily attempt a mathematization (geometricization) of nature starting from a treatment of bodies solely in their quantifiable, measurable aspect. Galileo and Aristotle, I The Question of Projectile Motion and Natural Place Under the forgoing conditions, the world in its immediacy may or may not appear eminently, but is arguably immanently and mediately (i.e., is in its intelligibility), mathematical. For Galileo, this was not only likely, it was hard to imagine how it might have been otherwise He needed only to demonstrate it The evidence is, in our view, conclusive: His intellectual training from an early age, his early fascination with mathematics (including his studies of Euclid and Archimedes directed by Ricci)2 and his dogged pursuit of mathematical study as the center around which all his other studies revolved, and, then, his relation to his father, discussions he had and work he did with Vincenzo, all point in this direction and only this direction. Elaboration of the last point (Galileos relation with his father) may assist in rendering this claim patent and manifest. Stillman Drake, a leading twentieth century, English language authority on Galileo and one of his biographers, has argued that stemming from his fathers practice Galileo's musical knowledge may have helped him design experiments. Drake suggests that while Vincenzo performed these experiments in 1588, Galileo, living at home, was present and likely helped in the experiment.3 While It might be noted that Galileos account on Archimedes use of a balance to arrive at relative densities already involved experimental reproduction of this activity, and this was undertaken two years earlier, what is really significant here (Drake does not say or appear to realize this) is the following: Any relation to his father of this sort over the course of his youth, effectively pointed Galileo the way toward not just toward experimentation but to its manner, i.e., it exhibits for us the guiding ideational mediation (mathematically Archimedean) of this activity, Galileos studies, his whole trajectory after from the time he enrolled in the University of Pisa forward. Reality in its intelligibility is mathematical. This was Galileos fundamental insight. But demonstrating it, against Aristotle showing that the immanent logic describing nature is essential mathematical, was not so easy. For, like all his contemporaries, Galileo thought in received categories, conceptually apprehended nature in terms that were basically Aristotelian Let us, then, take the following proposition (and in this we are in complete accord with Koyr) 4 that as a physicist, Galileo's orientation from the outset was toward mathematizing nature, that is, he struggled to create a language to theoretically formulate what he merely understood so that it could be known as such. In advance of any specific experiments, reflections or lawful formulations Galileo undertook or achieved, he tenaciously held onto this objective. Beginning with his first systematic effort (De Motu) dating from 1590 to the end of his scientific life (Two New Sciences published in 1638) he pursued the elaboration of this basic insight, call it his Grundprojekt... but only as Copernican and, above all else, as tenaciously and fundamentally anti-Aristotelian.
1

Lest it be forgotten, dating time in years, months and days from the birth of Christ, and telling time in terms of hours and minutes (without regard to whether one employs the Julian or Gregorian calendar), already actually and in fact reconstructs reality and the experience of reality on the basis of an empty, linear temporality, which is the counterpart to homogenous space. 2 We should be careful here. Orsilio Ricci, it appears, may have explicitly thought mathematics was not a distinctive body of knowledge, but a specific, albeit highly developed mediation of problems that emerge in engineering and mechanics. Galileo, we shall argue, not only saw mathematics as distinctive, not only as a unique key that discloses for us the structure of the real, which is otherwise sensibly inaccessible, but he assimilated the one to the other, in the language of mechanics, mathematical objects to real bodies and vice versa. 3 "The Role of Music in Galileo's Experiments," 98-104. Vincenzo demonstrated that, in contrast to the classical (ancient) understanding of harmony, mathematically understood, certain ratios did not obtain: It was thought the ratio of lengths of two strings sounding an octave was 2 to 1, and that the ratio of tensions of strings of equal length tuned an octave apart. Vincenzo showed, to the contrary, that the ratio of tensions is 4 to 1, discovering this, the latter ratio by hanging weights from strings. For all this, see online The Galileo Project, entry under Vincenzo Galilei. 4 Koyrs formulation is wrong he says Galileo strove to mathematize physics (and not nature), but his (Koyrs) intent is the same. See Galileo Studies, 28, 37, 38, 67-68, 74.

Pursuing this aim, in De Motu (On Motion) Galileo sought to elucidate, systematize and crystallize the traditional, largely well established arguments of an impetus physics, which essentially is a mechanics of projectiles: For recall, as we have already noted, the account of projectile motion is the most vulnerable point in Aristotelian natural philosophy. Aristotles understanding of motion was not restricted to bodies, whose motion is, for him, a type or kind of motion, which is generally determined as the fulfillment of what is potential as potential or insofar as it exists potentially. 1 (Thus, the heating of a cold body is also a type of motion, a passage from cold to hot.) It is, in other words, a movement from potentiality to actuality. But to the extent we are concerned with bodies, motion is the change of place of natural bodies, that is, of the sensuous or perceptually presented real forms of daily life. For Aristotle, that a heavy stone, were it, for example, to be held at head height and released, falls to the ground is a case of natural motion. Such motion is natural (as opposed to "violent" motion that would force it from its downward course) because it is heavy (as opposed, e.g., to fire which is light).2 As heavy, it moves downward toward the Earth, and that is its "nature." The stone, an element in a structured, Earth centered and ordered world (cosmos) this account at once presupposed and demonstrated a broader cosmology, and this is important because Galileo will conceive motion only as local motion and criticize Aristotle on that basis like every other being or object in the cosmos, tends toward that place where it belongs. The cosmos is a well-articulated and highly structured world, one where all objects have their natural place according to their kind, that is, a place where each properly belongs. Thus, bodies are neither indifferent to whether they are here, there or there, nor are they quantitatively assimilable one to another. Such, we might say, is the form necessity takes in an Aristotelian cosmology. In our example the stone, having "found" its place, comes to rest, its natural state wherein it is fully itself, complete and, hence, perfect While such theoretical conservatism, perhaps intellectually satisfying to those who have achieved mastery of others (great householders owning slaves) in the world where social relations of mastery and domination have the appearance of naturalness, might be incongruous and less than fully intelligible and in this sense natural where little appears stable, that is, in the rapidly changing landscape of the urban centers of the early modern world (and it alone would not suit a revolutionary temperament, as, we shall suggest, was Galileos). For us, certainly it grates on our common sense; but, then, at its origins modern science, which has become a thoroughly theoretically mediated determining moment of our common sense (scientific inputs form decisive moments in actual production of material forms, forms which constitute the everyday sensible data of our experience), was also counterintuitive even for demographically thin, bourgeois strata engaged immediately in commodity production and its financial mediations Now, as we have already suggested, Aristotle distinguished between natural and unnatural, constrained or violent motions,3 the projectile being a paradigmatic instance of the latter. This is problematic for Aristotle. Natural motion has is cause within itself, and is antecedent, but violent or constrained motion has its cause outside of itself and really (as opposed to logically) succeeds (Aristotle says it is posterior to)4 that which is by nature. Thus, there can be no constrained motion without prior natural motion.5 Moreover, for him, there can be no motion without contact.6 So, in the case of the stone that is thrown, what causes its motion once it has left my hand, i.e., once it is absent contact? The cause of the motion is in the medium, the air, through which the projectile, e.g., the stone once it has left my hand, moves. The air pushes the projectile along with a movement that is faster than that of the natural locomotion of the projectile.7 This medium or, rather, its motion is not conceived unitarily but as a consecutive series of motions each of which pushes the next along, which at a certain point becomes less, and ceases when one motion in the series, or one of the different parts of the air that are moved one upon the other, no longer causes the next to move. Air, like water, is naturally adapting and suffering motion in this manner...8

1 2

Physics, iii, 1, 201a10, 201b5. De Caelo, iii, 2, 301a21ff. This is a qualitative, not a quantitative, determination, i.e., Aristotle is not speaking about weight in our sense. 3 Ibid, 301b18ff; Physics, iv, 8, 215a1. 4 Ibid, 215a4. 5 Ibid, 215a5. 6 We can defined motion as the fulfillment of the movable qua movable, the cause of the attribute being contact with what can move. Ibid, iii, 2, 202a7. Emphasis in original. 7 Ibid, iv, 8, 215a15ff. 8 Ibid, viii, 10, 267a3ff, 267b14.

Galileos central criticism regards the relations between the mover, projectile and medium. It amounts to a counter claim, namely, the mover imparting motion to the projectile cannot be in contact with it, if the surrounding medium moves it. He proceeds by making two types of arguments. The first is instantiation. Galileo cites examples that run in direction opposite to Aristotles position regard projectile motion. The second is argumentation in the strict sense: He suggests flaws in Aristotles reasoning.1 The examples are several. He asks how can a medium be elicited to explain, in what way is it causative, of the continuing motion of a spinning top or a wheel or objects, say a sphere set atop and rotating on an axis?2 He asks about lengthy bodies (i.e., those that are neither spherical nor irregularly shaped), such as an arrow, whose motion traverses great distances even as the arrow moves through a resistant medium, the air, when fired into a headwind. 3 He queries how it is that of two objects of the same size, one heavier than the other (say, made of lead) and fired from a cannon, the heavier one might be shot farther.4 Now, in point of fact, all these criticism do raise problems for an Aristotelian account of the motion of projectiles, but they are not criticisms of Aristotle who did little more than state a position but of elaborations of his position largely by ancient, Arab, Scholastic and Peripatetic commentators and philosophers, and, it should be added, that these elaborations were often based on Church doctrine that explicitly contravened Aristotles Physics5 It is already possible here glimpse the struggle that would break out into the open three decades later in the battle between the two chief world systems of the ancients and the moderns, i.e., between theoretical expressions of the forms of organizing social life, between the bourgeoisie and the phalanx of feudal lord, Church and clergy. For, in nuce, at that moment this struggle is best theoretically formulated in terms of the question, Is real being identical with mathematical being? and is, methodologically posed in terms of an account of motion, especially of that of a projectile Galileo pushed forward. If the air moves a projectile by a series of consecutive motions, what prevents this effect from recurring indefinitely? (Why, we might ask, must one of this series at a certain point become less?) Why might each displacement give rise to another indefinitely? Galileo suggests there might even been acceleration. 6 Without reason, this cannot granted because it contradicts the Aristotelian characterization of all (sublunary) motion as limited and finite.7 Summarily, Aristotle has merely displaced the problem from the mover that upon contact causes motion, and here we are talking about the constrained or violent motion of projectiles, to the medium, the air, which tacitly assumes the latter itself is possessed (our term) of a virtus motiva impressa, a virtue (quality) that impresses motion.8 Why does this medium, air, have a special status? If we are going to presume an impressible quality, why not dispense with the complex, convoluted account and opt for simple one, i.e., the mover itself imparts to or impresses on the quality of motion on the moved?9 This straightaway led Galileos effort to refine an impetus physics. Initially and tepidly explored, chronologically speaking, in the fourteenth century by Parisian nominalists (Jean Buridan, Nicole Oresme and especially Albert of Saxony)10 in response to Church pronouncements on what is and what is not orthodox doctrine, then forgotten, resurrected and systematized in the latter half of the sixteenth century (in an effort to grapple with the implications for
1 2

On Motion, 76, 78. Ibid, 75. 3 Ibid, 77. 4 Ibid, 77-78. 5 Duhem, Medieval Cosmology (369), writes, In 1277, Etienne Tempier, bishop of Paris, condemned the following two errors The First Cause cannot make more than one world God cannot move the heavens in a straight line, the reason being that He would then leave a void. Everything that Aristotles Physics asserted about infinity, place, and time shattered when it was confronted by the power of the condemnations of Paris. 6 On Motion, 76-77. 7 Physics, vi, 7. 8 On Motion, 78. 9 Koyr, Ibid, 55 n. 101, states this objection is unfair, since air is a medium which is especially liable to motion. In fact, Aristotle does say that air or water [are] naturally adapted for imparting and undergoing motion (Physics, viii, 10, 267a5, emphasis added), but this is mere assertion, it has a fiat character, in strictly logical terms it is ad hoc or a requirement of his theorization, it is not justified, i.e., it is neither an inference that the discussion at this point compels nor does Aristotle even offer an instantiation that would render it intuitively obvious. Aristotle simply asserts it, the nature of air is to be so adapted. It is, of course, precisely natures, i.e., the qualitative determination of motion, that Galileo is struggling against which, still operative in On Motion, will lead to his failure to successful mathematize nature on the basis of his impetus physics. 10 Emile Meyerson, Identity and Difference, 117.

understanding of reality of new military technologies as they, by way of the armies bearing them, massively intruded into daily life), the characteristic features of this doctrine can be stated briefly. Whether set in motion naturally or unnaturally (violently), every heavy body is moved by an impression that is stamped (our term), i.e., impressed, upon it and thus is adjoined to the moving body, and, even if disjoined or separated from the moving body, will permit it to move by itself for some time. That which sets the moving body in motion is the impetus. This motive force, if you will (i.e., disavowing the latter, technical scientific concept of force, especially as it appears in Newton, in favor of the intended, qualitative, and, quite frankly, indeterminate conception that characterized this partial break with Aristotle), is not a medium in the explicitly Aristotelian sense, water or air. It also is not a quality characteristic of the moving body itself (i.e., prior to being set in motion), though we might say that, in impressing it, the impetus penetrates or impregnates (our tacit sexual connotation is deliberate) as a result of its initial contact with the moving body. This is the basic conception, and there are many variations on it once its relation to specific problems of projectile motion are drawn out. Koyr suggests that it is a condensation of our experiences of lan and muscular effort and as a coherent explanation of these experiences (he cites the example of getting a running start in order to make a jump), as such formed the experimental basis of medieval dynamics1 The example is, though, misleading to this extent: Galileo still considers unnatural motion within an Aristotelian framework of up and down, that is, as privileged directions (though there is no goal at which they aim, i.e., a natural place) We would point out that it is only medieval if one draws a line between what came before and after a Galileo (duly noting his predecessors, Copernicus, Bruno, Tycho Brahe, and his older contemporary Kepler), and only if one refuses recognize the internal, intimate tissue that bind daily life, and especially its social and historical structure and organization (for it is hear that the line is first drawn), and Geist. But not to quibble. Rather, we shall merely state how it afforded those who theorized it (how it afforded Galileo) the opportunity of solving the problem of the Aristotelian account of projectile motion, and to suggest the limitations of this theorization, again for Galileo. The basic difficulty lay in indicating how the moving body continues its motion after it is no longer in contact, particularly in the case of unnatural or violent motion, with that which set it in motion and imparts to it its impetus. Beyond stating the position of impetus physics, this is largely done exemplarily while the specific instance Galileo invokes is the sound of a ringing bell.2 What are the limitations to this theorization? And how did Galileo recognize them? First, but retrospectively (i.e., for us, but not immediately for Galileo), Galileos impetus physics will not give us the law of inertia, because, for him, the impetus is consumed in the motion of the moved body, which means the body will slow down, eventually coming to a stop,3 which, in turn, means that endless motion is not possible. (Recall, the law of inertia states that a body in whatever state it is in, rest or motion, will continue in that state indefinitely if nothing mediates that state, if nothing interferes with it or intervenes to change it.)4 In other words, the impetus is consumed in the motion that is imparted to the moving body. Galileo eventually abandoned this view (i.e., he forsook the impetus physics from which it followed), but, as we said, he did not immediately recognize this. What was more important is that Galileo denied that there could be acceleration of a moving body. This is internally consistent. It is a necessary consequence of the consumption of the impetus imparted to a moving body as having been moved. Put in motion, a bodys movement, i.e., its fall, is due to its weight. (Already note here that unlike Aristotle, weight is not heaviness, i.e., not qualitative, or to state the matter more precisely, heaviness and lightness as qualities have now acquired a further relational if not entirely quantitative sense). Its weight does not change; just the opposite, it is constant. A constant weight will only produce a constant speed; hence, there is no acceleration.5 Accordingly, speed is relative to weight. Two bodies of the same weight will fall at the same speed, a heavier one will fall faster and a lighter one slower. This, though, is not acceleration.6
1 2

Koyr, Ibid, 22. Emphasis added. On Motion, 79-80. 3 Ibid, 84. We could split hairs here (it was done frequently) by saying the moving body would slow down indefinitely. In this early work of Galileo, this was not his position. 4 Retrospectively, we can recognize this is one of Galileos fundamental contributions, for it no less than Newtons first law of motion. 5 Ibid,100-101. 6 Galileo was, in fact, compelled to deal with the experiential fact of acceleration. While already suggesting his theorization is constructed mathematically (concerns ideal shapes in geometrical space and not real bodies in the space that is perceptually given to us as a relational

Unlike in Aristotle, heaviness (or lightness) is not an absolute, fixed quality, but is relational. A piece of wood that falls when dropped from a window of a building rises when submerged in water. That is, it is not (yet) weight in the sense we think of it, but weight (heaviness or lightness) relative to its medium and the circumstances of motion. Thus, specifying the circumstance, if a body is heavy in the medium it is in, it will fall. Otherwise, it will rise. The speed with which it rises or falls is measured by the difference between the bodys own (specific) weight and weight of the volume it displaces in the medium in which it is in.1 So that if it is heavier (quantitatively), it goes down, if lighter its goes up. This Galileo understood as a correction of Aristotle. Now, there are two features or consequences of this doctrine. First, the strictly qualitative determination of qualities of a moving body as they appear in Aristotle have been replaced by a quantitative, relational one which permits, in principle, their mathematical treatment. Second, it leads straightaway, contra Aristotle, to the assertion of the void: Bodies will move at proper speeds, i.e., speeds determined solely by their (true or absolute in the Aristotelian sense) weights in a vacuum.2 This means not only that motion in a vacuum is logically possible (eventually opening the door to the law of inertia and, more importantly, that of falling bodies), but we can conceive, again in principle, of a body moving in isolation from the rest of being, i.e., without reference to the cosmos in the Aristotelian sense. It is the implications of these insights which, in our view, demonstrated to Galileo the limitations of his theorization, brought to awareness at least in principle the conflict between it and what he aimed at, the project of mathematizing nature, permitting him to see in the very qualitative concept of impetus (definitionally vague but modeled nonetheless on the Aristotelian concept of form) its own weakness and shortcoming. Here we can glimpse the tendential direction of Galileos thought, the position he was being driven toward: In his early years at Padua, he would come to realize that the full implications of the position he had developed in his impetus physics. In his opposition to Aristotle, he would be compelled to overthrow Peripatetic natural philosophy at its foundations.3 He would see and understand nature geometrically (and to this extent mathematically, but not arithmetically, in terms of figures rather than numbers or magnitude) and conceive the universe, no longer a cosmos, as unbounded without center unlike those who following Aristotle grounded natural philosophy starting from the world as an orderly structure whole, treated moving bodies as teleologically impelled to their natural place, seeking validations on the basis of perceptually confirmable experiments and observations in order to resolve the issue in his favor by proving the motion of falling bodies is subject to laws governed by geometric conventions, unlike Aristotle and his followers who on different assumptions knew motion could not be understood in this manner. Reality (nature) in its intelligibility is mathematical. This is what Galileo wanted to demonstrate but couldnt as long as he operated with the qualitative concept of impetus, for impetus physics remained "pre-Galilean" or pre-modern, that is, determined from concepts of Aristotles physics. De Motu was abandoned and never finished. By the time Galileo left Padua (1610), he could fully account for the motion of bodies in a quantitative manner (i.e., as quantitative qualities). Attached to the Tuscan Court as, if you will, official mathematician and philosopher, in 1611 he was drawn into an open dispute with a Florentine archival, an Aristotelian philosopher named Lodovico delle Colombe, over the causation of the rise and fall (sinking) of bodies in water. Instead of settling the dispute dialogically and in person, Galileo left us a written account of his position. (He, upon rebuke by the grand duke, Cosimo, for what might degenerate into pedantic display, claimed a calm, reasoned written presentation would avoid a heated discussion in which digressions, misunderstandings, and ostentations were the more likely outcome),4 Galileo clearly exhibited the insight and understanding he had achieved. Colombe had asserted that cold acts on a substance by condensing it, citing ice as an experiential instance (that is, ice is condensed water). Galileo stated, to the contrary, that cold rarifies, reasoning that condensation diminished mass (understood by Galileo as volume, and not as it is understood in modern physics, as a quantity of matter as it appears in Newtons second law of motion) and increases gravity (also understood quite differently, merely as
context in which those bodies move), this explanation is convoluted: It involves a retreat to the Aristotelian concepts of heaviness and lightness impressed on the moving body and their interaction during its motion. See, Ibid, 88-89, 93-94. We shall not pursue this further in the text above. 1 Ibid, 38-39. 2 Ibid, 43-46, esp. 44-45. 3 We should be clear on this: Galileos evaluation of Aristotle was quite distinct from that of Aristotles contemporary followers. In a rather crude, very modern characterization they might be called ideologues of the Church, sycophants of its power. For Galileo's view, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (second day), 110-111. 4 Discourse on Bodies in Water, 2-3.

heaviness, as weight), while rarefication reduces a substance lighter and augments its mass. In freezing, water would increase its volume (mass) and at the same time would be lighter than that water. Hence, it would float.1 Now what was interesting were the responses of each party (as Galileo relates it, at the time the original dispute opened): Colombe stated the ice floated not because it was lighter, but because of its shape, which as large and flat would not penetrate the water due to the latters resistance. Galileo responded that shape, here flatness and great breath, was irrelevant, and that as proof pushing the ice down and submerging it would result in the piece of ice bobbing up and returning to the surface. Thus, the floatation or submersion of bodies is a consequence of lesser or greater gravity (weight) in relation to water.2 It is clear that Colombe, a Peripatetic philosopher, understood the relations that are constituted between a body and the water on which it sits (or in which it is submersed) qualitatively, that all explanations of causation are in terms of shape, form; while Galileo, perhaps recognizing quantity is itself a quality, understood that causation quantitatively in terms of a relation of relative weights, i.e., in a manner in which the determination (causation) can be set forth numerically, can be measured, one substance, a body in water, either floating or sinking, because it weighs more or less than the other, the water itself. But Galileo went further. In the days that followed this discussion, it was, according to Galileo, muted (experiments were also made) whether various forms (which he also identifies as figures, i.e., geometrically) did not alter their velocity according to their shape, as broad and thin and thus sinking far more slowing into water than shapes that are compact (to the point that in principle a shape might be so flattened that its downward motion in water might altogether ceases). Galileo denied this was possible.3 Having related this all in a preliminary, contextualizing fashion, he went further (stating his real point of departure) by offering in his Discourse an axiomatic systematization of principles on the basis of which the motion (floating or sinking) of bodies in water is thought in terms of relational quantities, principles or axioms (or definitions as one utilizes in geometry) from which all the relations of bodies to water can be deduced and are in principle susceptible to measurement.4 The relation of a body to a medium may or may not be the same for different mediums, i.e., water and air. There is similarity in that both mediums present resistance to motion;5 however, there is also one difference: An account in terms of specific and absolute gravities will not give and, for the motion of bodies in water, cannot give us the law of inertia: Even as the logical, limit case, one does not speak of a vacuum when speaking of water. (Galileo never arrived at a universal law of gravitation, for, unlike Newton, he did not have a concept of gravity, of attraction at a distance). The entire discussion of the Discourse on Bodies in Water is determined by the dispute with Colombe as evidenced by far the longest section of the work,6 in which Galileo attempted his demonstration of the proposition (the shape of body, shape itself, cannot causally determine its sinking or floating) that crystallized his opposition to
1 2

Ibid, 3. Ibid, 4. 3 Ibid. Whether his denial was made in the original discussion or only in recounting it is not clear from the text. 4 The definitions are really quite simple and include (1) equal specific gravity (grave in specie) which is achieved in a relation where two different (wax and wood) bodies are equal in mass (volume) and in gravity (weight); (2) equal absolute gravity (equal grave in absolute gravity) which is achieved where two different bodies (lead and wood) are of equal gravity (weight) and different in mass (volume), the wood having more mass; (3) greater specific gravity (more grave in specie) which is achieved where two different bodies (lead and tin) are equal in volume (mass) and different in gravity (weight), lead weighing more; (4) greater absolute gravity (more grave absolutely) which is achieved where two different bodies (wood and lead) are different in gravity (weight) without regard to mass (volume); (5) movement is defined as the virtue (using the Aristotelian term), force or efficacy with which the mover moves and the moved resists. Ibid, 5-6. From these determinations, Galileo deduced basic axioms such as weights that are absolutely equal, and that are moved with equal velocity, are of equal force and moment in their operation; the moment or force of weight is increased by velocity of a moving object (the two axioms of which come very close to a statement of Newtons second law, that of constant acceleration); weights that are absolutely unequal, alternately, counterpose and become of equal moment as their weights (in contrary proportion) answer to the velocity of their motions (meaning the amount that one body weighs less than the other determines the speed, faster, that it moves than the other). On this basis, Galileo then advanced to his discussion of which bodies descend, submerge, in water tending to the bottom and those that float. Ibid, 6-8. The fundamental theorization, as we would say, establishes the framework in which the discussion of the phenomena, now quantitatively determined, can be at all undertaken. 5 Water more than air, but only in the context of the relation of the gravities (weights) of bodies to that of the medium (its density or rarity), Ibid, 67. 6 Ibid, 26-45. By and large, Galileo does not even speak of bodies in this text. Rather, he used the geometrical term, shapes, which already suggest his mode of demonstration that we shall come to in the section that follows.

Colombe in the first place. We shall come back to inertia, but here and now we must stay with the peculiar nature of the kind of knowledge that Galileos thought and activity devolved on, namely, science in the entirely modern sense itself. At the same time, while recognizing that Galileo first established the modern sense of science, it is also necessary to note in what way his differed from the manner in which the modern science of nature developed: For Galileo, the experiment(s) that might yield measured results and that would function as a test of theorems or hypotheses derived (deduced) from his definitions (and thus at a remove might validate those definitions or axioms themselves), are, unlike the modern science of nature as it develops after him, altogether secondary or, stated more adequately, the experiment because it moves in the element of the sensuous and thereby constitutes for us perceptual evidence confirms for him what he already knew, what he had arrived at cognitively, and in this agreement (between the senses and the intellect, as he says)1 completes the demonstration, i.e., renders it sufficient and fully reasonable. Lets see if we can draw this out more fully. Galileo and Aristotle, II The Peripatetics (Aristotelians), Method and the New Science Named Professor of Mathematics in 1592, for the next eighteen years Galileo taught and conducted his research at the University of Padua. He published little: In 1606, he brought out his first book on a compass he invented; he engaged in lengthy correspondences with, among others, del Monte, Clavius, Kepler and Sarpi (who introduced him to the telescope and to whom, during 1609-1610, he adequately formulated the law of inertia); in spring 1610 just prior to his resignation at Padua, he published the Starry Messenger in which he catalogued the phenomena he had witnessed through his vastly improved telescope. What Galileo appeared to pursue most aggressively during this period of his life was an agenda of experimentation, not in our sense but in the sense of his new science. He began experiments on magnetism in 1602 (which he would again take up anew in 1626); by 1604, his research has given him a(n) (inadequately formulated) law of falling bodies (the law of constant acceleration, Newtons second law); in 1606, ongoing work culminated in invention of compass; in summer 1609, his efforts to redesign the telescope produced an astronomically adequate instrument both with commercial and military value he was quick to exploit and, of overriding import, the ability to engage in a thorough demonstration, that is, science as he understood it; finally, bringing this period to close, his experiments and reflections on bodies that float upon water beget a publication of similar title in 1612.2 What is important at this lengthy moment in Galileos development, as we are suggesting, was not the research, experimentation or reflections taken separately, but the manner in which they formed for him a unitary practice. While he did not engage in a discussion oriented exclusively to methodology in the modern sense, in that very sense his science was methodologically determinist. Thus, he expressly spoke of the centrality of grounds, procedures, and demonstrations for understanding the Copernican doctrine,3 and the positive assurances that experiments, long observation, and rigorous demonstration provide in validating astronomical propositions.4 For, it was here at this moment and it was Galileo who for the first time, first, produced the relations among theory, hypothesis, experiment and fact; second, consciously produced the complex of these relations, thus generating its form, which has been reproduced endlessly by scientists (with obvious modification as to testing) as a methodologically distinctive orientation to phenomena; and, third, laid out the meaning and significance of each of these terms (theory, hypothesis, etc.) within the whole of this relation. This is Galileos achievement, for all of these prevail in and essentially characterize the modern science of nature in contrast to Peripatetic (Aristotelian) natural philosophy and, beyond it, other culturally generalized forms of knowledge as they have appeared throughout human history We
1 2

Letters on Sunspots (third letter), 143. He would formulate the law of falling bodies in his final work, Discourses and Demonstrations, thusly, a heavy body has an inherent tendency to move with a constantly and uniformly accelerated motion The English translation of this work was mistitled Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences. For the citation, Ibid, 74 A corollary, if you will, of this law, is, in a medium totally devoid of resistance all bodies would fall with the same speed (Ibid, 72, which, curiously, having been arrived experientially and observationally, was highly probable: It was to this Galileo concluded" after observing the variations of the speed of bodies, specifically metals as they descend or arise in quicksilver and this in comparison to the same metals as they fall when dropped in normal atmosphere.) The law finds geometrically demonstrated, precise mathematical treatment at Ibid, 174, 215. 3 Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 195. 4 Ibid, 197.

must draw out this achievement, explicating examine and rehearse it, since Galileo himself this is not unusual in a revolutionary thinker may not have been fully conscious of precisely what he had accomplished1 The complex of these relations as we have characterized it, can be extracted from remarks and accounts of the published works of this period (Starry Messenger, Letters on Sunspots, Discourse on Bodies in Water from which we have already made a start), but it should also be noted that to exhibit these relations, their unity and their significance, i.e., the complex we call science, will, because Galileo did not systematically discuss them until his late in his life, compel to reach forward (beyond the period in question) to document his position.2 Note, first, the centrality of the construction of the instrument. Galileo offers a lucid, detailed explanation of how he produced his telescope (inclusive of accounts of the manner of determining magnification and measuring distances between stars).3 In part, the explanation may or may not be motivated by a legitimate pride in his achievement, but that is besides the point, for what Galileo intends in his meticulous description is to make its construction plain so that anyone can in principle produce a telescope, as a condition of reproducing his observational results. So what is really at issue here for him in this account is a characteristic feature of his science, namely, the public accessibility of his method of work4 (say, in contrast to esoteric scriptural interpretation among prelates behind closed doors as the foundations of Church dogma). The parenthetical remark is not an afterthought. Publicly accessible results, because they can be reproduced by anyone utilizing the same instruments and same procedures, are of the essence of Galileos new science, a science he explicitly counterposed to the mindless regurgitation of Aristotle, the commentators and pronouncements of the Church Fathers: there would be good reason to reject this, namely, prevailing opinion, for in the sciences the authority of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man.5 Manifest on every page, the Starry Messenger was a genuinely revolutionary work (Galileo knew it), and had to have been an extraordinarily exciting text for those to whom it was directed, a coalescing scientific intelligentsia of the bourgeoisie. (Thus, addressed to the individuals relationally constituting this social layer, it was written in Latin.)6 Taking a newly invented instrument, he qualitatively improved it and then did what no one else had ever done, put it at the very center of that demonstration (which in its most rigorous form, he considers mathematical, i.e. geometrical)) bringing his theorization, observations, their description and his conclusions together in a unity whole. While what he saw may to us appear quite transparent, after all, the telescope qua instrument gives us phenomena straightforwardly, i.e., everyone can see the objects that appear through its lenses (well, not everyone, there were those contemporaries of Galileo who questioned whether the telescope itself did not produces illusions), this is not so. Later on, once the instrument becomes more complex, i.e., becomes a grouping of instruments housed in the same setting or a laboratory in contemporary sense, which as a social development already presupposes systematization of scientific and technical inputs into production, and situations are experimentally produced (largely in laboratories) that do not occur in nature, the decisive character of instrumental mediation can be fully seen for what
1

See Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, 6, where Salviati, one of the interlocutors who conducts the discussion, states in reference to the Academician (i.e., Galileo) that according to his custom [he] demonstrated everything by geometrical methods so that one might fairly call this a new science. This is a self-misunderstanding of the extent and development of method in Galileo. 2 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) and Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences (Discourses and Demonstrations, smuggled out of Italy and published in Leiden, 1638). 3 Starry Messenger, 29-31. 4 The is clear throughout the three texts in question, but a particularly good formulation can be found (though not expressed in our terms) in the Letters on Sunspots (third letter), 136. 5 Letters on Sunspots (third letter), 134. As to the mere authority of ancient and modern philosophers and mathematicians, I say that has no power at all to establish a knowledge of any physical proposition. Ibid, 132. These modern gentlemen were Peripatetics. In a letter written with the explicit intend of mollifying opinion within the Holy See, they constituted a stand-in for Church theologians, rabidly, scripturally literalist preachers and the practitioners who ran the Inquisitional terror. 6 Serious scientific and intellectual work of international importance was written in Latin, for this was the language understood by the scientific community. Charles Schmitt, A Fresh Look at Mechanics in 16 th Century Italy in Studies in Renaissance Philosophy and Science, 167. Galileo noted he had made his observations for a period of two months (Starry Messenger, 31, 51). Why this period? Why not much longer (like the astronomical observations of Tycho Brahe)? Thirty days determines the complete cycle of all phases of the moons movement Earth's moon, not the Medicean (Jupiters) moons, was decisive for Galileos project, since it established, even without saying so, a de-centered Earth The first month (cycle) permits Galileo to make all his observations, the second to check, compare and confirm them. Two months, then, was the minimally requisite time he needed to complete this task. The work was self-consciously revolutionary, thus the Latin, the rush to get it into print, to put it in the hands of others like himself.

it is, and the significant of experiment in science, in mediating relations between science and technology, can be revealed. Again, the phenomena present are not given straightforwardly. Instead, they are constructed (in contemporary science particularly) on the basis of the experiment: The signification they achieve begins from a projection of a mathematical world-in-itself, an assemblage of bodies in motion calculable in advance; or, in very contemporary rendition, theory (as an aggregate totality of postulates or axioms, mathematical in form, at least in one tradition of science and the dominant one today) for the first time appeared in the distinctively scientific sense, that is, in the form of an axiomatic systematization.1 (Even in production and alignment of Galileos telescope, especially in the measurement of distances between stars, there is already presupposed a mathematical appropriation of the world, a certain level of competency in utilizing geometrical concepts.) And this deployment of the instrument as consciously constitutive of the knowledge achieved is different, and novel, for even among those Aristotelian philosophers and astronomers who themselves made telescopic observations (the most famous case being that of the Jesuit Orazio Grassi), this new insight and understanding did not enter into and shape the underlying theory (which, in Grassis case, as with all defenders of the old order both in thought and social practice, remained basically unchanged, and) which at best compelled the addition of adjunct hypotheses to the original theory. But let Galileo speak for himself So, second, in his account of the surface of the Earths moon he stated, the boundary that divides the dark part from the light does not extend uniformly in an oval line as would happen on a perfectly spherical solid;2 into the luminous part extended a great dark gulf [into] which a bright peak began to emerge, a little below its center Gradually growing, this presented itself in a triangular shape;3 in comparison, on earth the summits of several mountains close together appear to be situated in one plane if the spectator is a long way off and is placed at an equal elevation, while on the moon, regarding these from a great distance, [mountains lie] nearly in the plane of their summits and appear as arranged in a regular and unbroken line.4 In all these excerpts Galileo viewed the moon in its different phases in and around dawn and dusk as the sun rises or sets on it. Thus, the play of light and shadows (present in all his observations, but recognizable only in the first two of these excerpts) reveal mountains, ridges, craters, etc., i.e., reveal, much like Earth, an irregular, rugged and uneven surface. We shall return to the astronomical significance of this shortly, but here we stress the mathematical projection that underlay Galileos account. (In point of fact, an attentive reading of the text reveals that Galileos is what well call the extreme situation, one that is rarely the case among social groups and in a culture where this mathematical projection is present, for what he actually immediately apprehends, what he sees, what is present to him intuitively in perception, are geometrical shapes, lines, triangles, spheres within the context of the play of light and dark.) 5 It is only on the basis of this projection, and in a comparison with similar features as seen on Earth, that he relates that this patch of darkness is a crevice, ravine, valley or (to use our term) crater, that this shadow is the backside of a mountain and that light is a peak. (What is sensuously given in immediate experience for you or I, is, for him, constructed.) The prior theoretical organization of experience in Galileos experiments is even more evident in his discussion of sunspots (Letters on Sunspots), where he is presented with phenomena that are not immediately intelligible (and to which there is nothing comparable on Earth). For here he explicitly lays out the theoretical assumptions that are operative in understanding and explains their instrumentally mediated sensuous appearance. In this regard, he states, The different densities and degrees of darkness of the spots, their changes of shape, and their collecting and separating are evident directly to our sight.6 But the position and motion of sunspots are not. Accordingly, in order to show that the spots are contiguous to the sun and are carried around it by its rotation requires that they be deduced and concluded from certain particular events which our observations yield.7
1

As in, e.g., the contemporary philosophy of science, Karl Popper. See the Fourth Study, Part II, Science as Method, below. Starry Messenger, 32. Emphases added. 3 Ibid, 33. Emphases added. 4 Ibid, 38-39. Emphases added. 5 This is, we suggest, only possible for Galileo to the extend that the phenomena he immediately apprehended were those that appear familiarly in his lifeworld. If they were strange, foreign or entirely unfamiliar to him, they would not have appeared as immanently geometrically meaningful and he would have been required to make the mathematico-theoretical framework operative in his experience explicit in order to render such phenomena intelligible. 6 Letters on Sunspots (second letter), 106-107. 7 Ibid, 107.
2

Those events? It is seeing twenty or thirty spots at a time move with one common movement. But there is a problem here, for seeing them is a strong reason for believing that each does not go wandering about by itself, in the manner of the planets around the sun.1 So in point of fact they are not deduced from those events, which, because the events pertain to the sunspots and their motion, cannot generate a determination of their motion, a point which, in another quite similar context Galileo fully recognized.2 At any rate, immediately following this passage Galileo undertook to elaborate for us (his readers) this theorization on the basis of which the deduction was made. He tells us, In order to explain this, let us define the poles in the solar globe and its circles of longitude and latitude as we do in the celestial sphere. If the sun is spherical and rotates, there will be two points of rest called the poles, and all other points on its surface will describe parallel circles which are larger or smaller according to their distance from the poles. The largest of all will be the central circle, equally distant from the two poles. The dimension of the spots along the circles will be called their breadth, and by their length we shall mean their dimension extending toward the poles and determined by a line perpendicular to the which determines their breath.3 The theory is a specification of the mathematical projection or, if you prefer, the axiomatic systematization to which we referred above. Third, there is lengthy deduction itself. (We shall not rehearse it here.)4 Proceeding, i.e., developing his deduction, and along the way a critique of the inconsistency of other imaginable hypotheses,5 Galileo concluded it thusly: sunspots are situated upon or very close to the body of the sun; they are of material which is not permanent and fixed, but variable in shape and size; they are movable to some extent by little irregular motions they are all generated and dissolved, some in longer and some in shorter times [and] their rotation is about the sun. 6 All of these form a set of coherent, logical conclusions he drew from what he saw through the telescope and on the basis of his basic axiomatic assumptions. Fourth, these assumptions are a methodologically specified character. They are compact, entailing the minimal number coherently possible:7 dealing with science as a method of demonstration and reasoning capable of human pursuit, I hold that the more this partakes of perfection the smaller the number of propositions it will promise to teach, and fewer yet will it conclusively prove.8 Now the theorization (mathematical projection) from which these propositions are coherently deduced is the perspective of the Copernican system, i.e., the heliocentric perspective of the (local) universe for which the planets including the Earth rotate around the sun,9 and for which these bodies all of which including the Earth appear in the sky, are essentially no different one from the other, i.e., they are an assemblage of bodies in motion, and as bodies are indistinguishable from one another [and this regardless that some are terrestrial and others gaseous, a distinction which Galileo hasnt the technical wherewithal to recognize, though, to be sure, it would not be inconsistent with his fundamental assumption]. This basic theorization stood, of course, in sharp opposition to the Ptolemaic system in which the sun and other planets revolve around the Earth (in convoluted orbits, i.e., epicycles on circular motions)
1

Ibid. The insight can be found in a series of unpublished notes appearing in the critical edition of his Works, (Opere, v, 367-370), prepared perhaps for a response he intended to send to the Carmelite priest, Paolo Antonio Foscarini. Foscarini work, Letter Concerning the Opinion of the Pythagoreans and Copernicus (Lettera sopra lopione dei Pitagorici e del Copernico), had appeared shortly after at the Letters on Sunspots appeared (spring 1613). He defended Galileos discoveries and, in particular, the Copernican system from charges of heretical deviation from scriptural interpretations (see Drakes summary, Opinions and Discoveries of Galileo, 160), in particular earthly motion. The insight itself involves the movement of a beach seen from a ship at sea relative to the movement of the latter seen from the former, the point being if one saw the one or the other only and always from the other or the one, whether beach or ship, the one or the other would appear to be in motion when viewed from the other or the one. This was a counter critique of Roberto Bellarmino, known as the hammer of the heretics (Pietro Redondi, Ibid, 5, 39), one of the inquisitors of the Congregation of the Holy Office (alternately, the Roman Inquisition and the Holy Office or the Congregation of the Supreme and Universal Inquisition), and the leading authority in the Roman Church on doctrinal matters from circa 1590 until his death in 1621. Bellarmino's perspective formulated to demonstrate the absurdity of the Earth moving around the sun was that of the ship viewing the beach only. Opinions and Discoveries of Galileo, 168. 3 Ibid. 4 Galileo, Letters on Sunspots (second letter), 107-111. 5 Ibid, 111. 6 Ibid, 112. 7 Similarly, contemporary philosophers of science, for example, Karl Popper. See the Fourth Study, Part II, Science as Method, below. 8 The Assayer, 239-240. 9 Thus, on this basis Galileo was able to recognize the stars are countless bright bodies grouped together in clusters at great distances from the Earth. (The galaxy is, in fact, nothing but a congeries of innumerable stars grouped together in clusters. Starry Messenger, 49.)
2

and the stars are fixed, permanent and perfect bodies attached to a celestial firmament. Thus, on these assumptions Galileo could in the Starry Messenger systematically compare the Earth and moon with a view to these similarities: the boundary which divides the dark part from the light [on a waning moon] does not extend uniformly in an oval line as would happen on a perfectly spherical solid, but traces out an uneven, rough, and very wavy line; there is a similar sight on earth about sunrise; meanwhile more and more peaks shoot up as if sprouting now here, now there, light up within the shadowed portion And on the earth, before the rising of the sun, are not the highest peaks of the mountains illuminated by the suns rays while the plains remain in shadow? The similarities are, in other words, unmistakable. To say this was itself a revolutionary undertaking: Galileo had completely abandoned the old (Aristotelian and Scholastic) metaphysics. He did not consider the sublunary and celestial spheres qualitatively dissimilar and ontologically distinct the surface of the moon is not smooth, uniform, and precisely spherical as a group of philosophers believe it (and the other heavenly bodies) to be, but is uneven, rough, and full of cavities and prominences, being not unlike the face of the earth, relieved by chain of mountains and deep valleys.1 Though this is not Galileos term, call these hypotheses Galileo and Aristotle, III Law, the New Science, Anti-Aristotle The theorization itself has certain important, logically secondary features, first corollaries, call them laws, which like the core of the theory itself are not subject to immediate and direct verification (which is to say that hypotheses like the ones just recounted, are). These laws are also present in Galileo, the most prominent being the law of inertia, which not by coincidence (if not well integrated with the rest of the text) found its first published formulation in the Letters on Sunspots. Speaking about the movements of spots relative to the sun, then in a general way about the possible types of motion of bodies, and in a lawful way about these motions, he states, And it [a body] will maintain itself in that state in which it has once been placed; that is, if placed in a state of rest, it will conserve that; and if placed in movement it will maintain itself in that movement. 2 Though following upon him it is no longer specific to Galileo,3 there is something here that is unique in his thinking; that is, it occurred for the first time with him. It is manner in which the law is arrived at. This is thought experiment (Gedankexperimente), or what we might more adequately refer to as the imaginary formulation of laws governing natural phenomena, their movement, interactions, etc., understood merely as bodies. For in what conditions, pray tell, do we find that a body will maintain itself in that state in which it has once been placed indefinitely, whether in motion or at rest, unless it is acted upon by some force, thus dis-placed? The situation can only be found in vacuum, which is, according to Galileo, found in nature but only in nature to the extent that nature is identified with geometrical space. The second feature is something else that is unique in Galileo. Perhaps unique is the wrong term, or the right term only with a view to the entire history of the development of the modern science of nature, for what is distinctive and singular in this regard is such because it has been lost in that development, especially in the ubiquitous physicalist formulations of this science.4 It is the epistemological connection between intellect and our senses the agreement between which constitutes the endpoint of a demonstration.5 It is, and this is of paramount significance, an agreement that is constituted as, and only as, the senses are brought into agreement with the intellect, with reason, while, dialectically, once achieved, once perception has aligned itself with reason, the demonstration is conclusive. Thus, Galileo stated, it seems to me a matter of no small importance to have ended the dispute about the Milky Way by making its nature manifest to the very senses as well as to the intellectual. 6 (I.e., the galaxy can no
1 2

Ibid, 31 (citation) and passim. Letters on Sunspots (second letter), 113. A complete formulation of the law of inertia is found in the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (second day), 147. 3 See the Third Study, the various discussions of Einstein and Heisenberg, below. 4 I.e., an axiomatic systematization, the fundamental propositions of which in this case are reductionist assumptions, atomistic postulates of a theoretical analysis projected as real, as underlying realities. See the Fourth Study, Part III, The Materialist Dialectic, below. 5 Letters on Sunspots (third letter), 143. 6 Starry Messenger, 28. And, in speaking of the shape of Saturn, he states, I, who have observed it a thousand times at different periods with an excellent instrument, can assure you that no change whatever is to be seen in it. And reason, based upon our experience of all stellar motions, renders us certain Letters on Sunspots (second letter), 102. Emphasis added. Similarly, in his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 179, 182, 183-184, 186, 197 and 209, what is true is in accordance with senseexperience(s) (or manifest sense or manifest experience or direct experience) to the extent necessary demonstration (or rigorous

longer be considered a firmament, an abode, at it were, of fixed, permanent, perfect bodies. Instead, it is made up of innumerable stars configuring themselves in clusters, with different degrees of brightness). Contrary to the theoretically rigid determination of contemporary science (axiomatic system, theory, experiment, testing as verification), Galileos hypotheses at least those large-scale astronomic ones could not be tested (not until recently, i.e., not without satellite imagery and probes), but testability was not in this sense part of his science. (This is clear from our discussion above of the text, Discourse on Bodies in Water, where the mode of demonstration is narrow, strictly geometrical... which to be sure, it decisive for Galileo... and logical, i.e., argumentative, without any recourse to experiment in our sense.) Instead, his science is the unity of theorization, the phenomena that are instrumentally mediated and perceptually or sensuously adduced as evidence, and the rigorous (mathematically based) argument to comprehend the latter in terms of, as confirmation of, the former: It is this deduction as a whole, or what elsewhere1 he calls the necessary demonstration (or, as in the Starry Messenger, simply demonstration), whose necessity is that of the rigor and logic or force evinced in geometric demonstrations 2, that constitute his science, arguments [that] depend upon observations precise and demonstrations subtle, grounded on abstractions3 and that might, misleadingly and inadequately to be sure, be termed as what counts as a test. And it would be misleading: While Galileo engaged in countless experiments, precious few of them would today pass muster as an experiment in our sense. This is simply because in that, our sense, experiments had no meaning for him. An experiment, for Galileo, was not intended to validate a hypothesis; it did not aim at verifying (or falsifying) a conjecture, because in these senses it did not function as a control, it was not based on artificial conditions that obtain nowhere in nature and was not aimed at prediction. (Recall, again, that the modern science of nature did not emerge full-blown or fully developed in Galileo.) For him, experiment was not de rigueur, and it was not a necessary requirement of his science: As a function of sensuous perception it was not designed to do anything other, coming at the end of a process of reasoning, than complete a demonstration by aligning itself with that reason (intellect). Thus, in the Dialogue, Galileo has his interlocutor Salviati say, tell this philosopher, in order to remove him from error, to take with him a very deep vase filled with water some time when he goes sailing, having prepared in advance a ball of wax which would descend slowly to the bottom so that in a minute it would scarcely sink a yard. Then, making the boat go as fast as he could, he should gently immerse this ball in the water and let it descend freely, carefully observing its motion. And from the first, he would see it going straight toward that point on the bottom of the vase to which it would tend if the boat were standing still. To his eye and in relation to the vase its motion would appear perfectly straight and perpendicular, and yet no one could deny that it was a compound of straight (down) and circular (around the watery element).4 The experiment thereby demonstrates that the latter, analogous to the circular motion of the Earth as it rotates on its center (axis), is common to the ball and the watery element and continues to be imperceptible, while the downward motion of the ball is peculiar to it and not shared and hence perceptible.5 The experiment completes the demonstrating aligning our senses, here what we see (upward or downward motion, animated motion as in the flight of birds, etc.), with what we have reflectively reasoned to (that the common or shared motion of the Earth is not sensibly given). But if an experiment did not complete a demonstration, i.e., if it was in our terms unsuccessful, it was simply irrelevant, discarded (and Galileo, as it were, moved on). Now, in point of fact, some of Galileos experiments (such as those in which he argued his theory of bodies floating in water with objects placed in a bucket of water) were quite impressive, convincing to those who witnessed him (which was the only reason why he preformed them). But there was no necessity that inhered in these demonstrations, in making these impressions: It should be obvious that winning the certainty of an other or casting doubt in the mind of still an other alone did not and could not make them intrinsic to his science. They werent.

demonstration) brings it into line with thought (intellect). 1 Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 182 (twice), 183-184, 186 (twice), 209. 2 Letters on Sunspots (second letter), 119. 3 Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 200. 4 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 250 (second day). 5 Ibid. These remarks anticipate the final section of this Study, Polemic and the Logics of Argument in the Dialogue, below.

Galileo and Aristotle, IV Social Elements in the Struggle for and against the Theocratic, Tributary Order Throughout the entire life of Galileo, the Roman Church was the largest and greatest landlord on the Italian Peninsula. During this period (Galileo's lifetime), several forms of labor (and tenure) co-existed in the countryside. These included a free peasantry that, regardless of the quality of life and livelihood its activity generated, constituted a social relation at the center of which stood the peasant as proprietor of land, tools and cottage; waged labor; and a sharecropping tenantcy. The last was the predominate form in Tuscany and perhaps all of central Italy (Moderna, Ferrara, Emilia, Romagna). It is important not simply because waged labor was largely adjunct to sharecropping, both forms additionally found in the same peasant personages, but because it incarnated really and tendentially a hidden form of proletarianization, i.e., it was an important social form through which capitalist social relations penetrated the Italian countryside. Called mezzadria, sharecropping tenancy stretched back to the early thirteen century (and forward down to the first imperialist world war). It was a contractual relation, though not one that was formalized in a written contract. The landlord, i.e., aristocrats such as Galileos friend, Frederico Cesi, and above all the Church institutionally embodied in its orders and monasteries, provided the land, the peasant tenant the labor.1 It had the simultaneous appearance of a tributary and small capitalist tenancy, but it was neither one nor the other: The peasant, altogether absent capital (in money form), took advances of seed, whatever draft animal may have been used in plowing or harvesting and thus in fodder also, and, though perhaps possessing a hoe and rake of his own, tools and equipment (plough) requisite to his activity. If the contract called for an equal split (share) of the product, the tenant invariably crushed by the weight of debt, rarely if ever saw equality in shares and just as rarely lived above subsistence (which in the socially and historically specific sense sunk to an appallingly low level). Now, there were other, further forms through which the peasant and his family were robbed of his and their livelihood (e.g., accounting practices which, always conducted by the landlord, just as invariably were conducted on his behalf), that appear again and again in other historical forms of sharecropping tenancy, but what concerns us here are those which reinforce the tributary or seemingly feudal nature of this relation.2 These included the performance of services to the lord (digging ditches to improve property), and provisions to the owner gratis of a portion of the agricultural product, olive oil or wine, wood for fuel and game killed as food. Like the situation as it prevailed on the Junker estates east of the Elbe from the middle nineteenth century through the thirties of the following century, these services manifestly had the appearance of feudal dues. And they were forms of tribute, but they were not feudal having none of the decisive characteristics of the latter already described.3 Neither the Church nor lords like Cesi were magnati (among the most enlightened landlords, there was a tendency to liberate themselves from the ignobility of this ancient form of exploitation, to forgo this tribute in favor of a strictly business relation): Far more important than services provided to these lords, all of them (and the patriarchal paternalism which was the other side of this relation), was, first, the waged labor that the peasant (and his family) provided the lord, or a merchant representing the Church (which was ironically and unknowingly encouraging the insinuation of a social relation, in the form of capitals formal domination, that would eventually undermine its social and political power), that went uncompensated but was calculated as a monetary setoff for the debt incurred, and, second, and this is crucial, the total situation of the peasant (family). First, sharecropping is a form of lease, and has appeared in history (in England, and western Europe) as a solvent of the customary proprietary rights (whether formally free or not) that protected peasants from the naked financial relation that characterized capitals formal domination.4 Second, the sharecropper was not an independent proprietor, either as a peasant or capitalist farmer. He did not produce exclusively for himself and his family a subsistence (nor did he produce for
1

Often referred to as Prince Cesi, he was titular head of the Academy of Lynceans, the group of oppositional intellectuals of which Galileo had officially been a member since 1611 (a membership he prized) and who, on the basis of Galileos draft, by prior agreement edited and brought The Assayer to publication. For the latter, see Redondi, Ibid, 45-46. 2 These other forms... bilking, swindling, defrauding, robbing and plundering the tenant... can be found in almost all forms of this odious relation. See, for example, Civil War and Revolution in America, Theses on Racial Apartheid, the Origins of Sunbelt Capital, and the Re-Ascendancy of Southern Property in the American Polity, for the situation in the United States from the end of Reconstruction until the last imperialist world war; and, Frank Snowden, The Fascist Revolution in Tuscany, 20-21, 28-29, 31-33, 41-42, 53-55, 99-100, for the same set within the context of the crisis situation in mezzadria relations from 1870 down to the eve of the first world war. 3 Reference is footnoted discussion concluding Castilian Empire in Early Modern Europe, Capitalism and Formal Domination, above. 4 This is extensively developed, below. See the various discussions under the heading formal domination in the First Interlude.

himself and provide the state with a portion as tribute). He also did not produce for a market with a view to the conditions the prevailed in it, and on this basis decide what and (if not what, then) how (much or little) to produce. Yet the value of his product was determined by the market and, after the share out, his return on his and his familys labor were decided on this basis (and lowered, often vastly, but a cheating landlord, his factor, or merchant). Instead, the produce which he kept for self-sufficiency amounted to, had the structure of, a concealed wage below its value in the market. Thus, he was effectively a disguised proletarian on the land subject to a relentless effort to drive that concealed wage down far below reproductive costs (i.e., family subsistence levels). If the formal domination of capital over labor was insinuated in this manner, it was tributary features of this relation that, for all the advantages accruing to the landlord, retarded the unequivocal, and unrestrained penetration of the value form, and rendered capitalism as it did develop on the Italian Peninsula backward all the way down to the first imperialist world war (1914) especially in central Italy, the rest of the Papal States and even more so in the Neapolitan regions of the south. Now it was (the appearance of) these tributary social forms, and the patriarchal paternalism (a gift from the lord at a peasant wedding, monetary assistance from the Church, e.g., a congregations priest, in times of really dire need) that arose from and reinforced them, which the Church defended, for it was on the basis of this mastery of masses of men and women, peasant families largely, that formed the visible, material aspect on which Church power and the old order rested. For the old order which the Church organized, and, especially for its conscious self-defense conducted by its vanguard (and here we have the Jesuits in mind), the theoretical struggle against scientists and philosophers, the literati, dramatists, poets and musicians, in a word, the innovators, who raised the banner of a new science, philosophy on different foundations and a literature that was sensuous, debased and expressed in new forms, was just another front in the struggle to maintain its hegemony, to sustain itself as Power. Against heretical deviations like those of Foscarinis effort to assimilate Copernicus, or Galileo invocations of a different, more tolerant Augustinian tradition in The Assayer, following the Council of Trent (1545-1563), Rome opted for an allout defense of the Aristotelian Scholastic cosmology and the literal significance of the Bible,1 not because this cosmology had any truth value this has never been an issue for those men who self-consciously defend Power but because it was the traditional manner in which the Bible was philosophically interpreted, and its was on the tripartite pillars of tradition, tribute, and scriptural literalism that its power and mastery rested. Above all, as the institutional expression of the power of a priestly caste, it was Biblical interpretation from which this caste had derived its own legitimization, the justifications for the right (i.e., existing) order of society, sanctions and rewards that accrued within this order (and the afterlife) that the Church had elaborated for over a thousand years and its exclusive right to that interpretation on which its immediate control over and mastery of the demographically dense peasantry was based. From Copernicus to Galileo, the new astronomy directly challenged and contravened the scriptural account of the world sanctioned by the Church and elaborately, convolutedly, defended by the clerical orders (especially the Jesuits) and Peripatetics. It was because in astronomy Galileo had crossed a line in The Assayer he did far more than cross a line from a prudent hypothetical position regarding the motions of the Earth and sun (one for which mathematical calculations were merely said to aid in determining, e.g., the locations of stars in a fixed celestial firmament) to a positive assessment of their relation (i.e., an assertion of the real heliocentric structure of this relation), that Galileo came under Jesuitical Inquisitional scrutiny.2 Historically Specific Themes in the Work of Galileo Materialist Atomism, Copernicanism, Anti-Aristotelianism Galileos distinctively different positions with regard to astronomy and physics in his later works have to be understood within the context of his submission of the domain of his fundamental theorization to the Church, and the Counter-Reformatory, implicitly counterrevolutionary struggle against, not merely heresy, but against dissent,
1 2

Redondi, Ibid, 40 (citation). Redondi states, The principal fronts of the Counter-Reformation struggle are neither the corridors of the Curia nor the salons of the Academy, but rather the plains and cities of Hungary and Bohemia, where the fathers of the Society, following the imperial line regiments, are triumphing in the territories just wrested from the Protestants, whole populations are reconverted en mass to Catholicism, by every means, at all costs even with solid coin, as Cardinal Bellarmino had cleverly suggested. Ibid, 47. Prudence, hypothetical, and positive are terms that the ubiquitous Bellarmino used to describe the contrasting positions in a letter to a correspondent concerning Foscarinis work. Cited in Drakes introductory remarks to the letter Galileo wrote Christina (mother of the Duke of Tuscany), Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, 163.

deviation and unorthodoxy, against profanation and the merest scent of sacrilege with a view to maintaining Power, here sustaining the Churchs ideological, political and socio-economic domination within the old order, a struggle at the heart and as a vanguard of which we find the Jesuits. 1 What is at issue were Galileos shifting positions, i.e., from entertainment of Copernican view of the solar system as a hypothesis to the assertion of its validity as an ontologically real description of planetary relations and a still later return to the former, a very Christian view of human cognitive limitations to a Promethean concept of those capacities, and mature defense and later abandonment of an atomistic metaphysics in favor of a mathematical phenomenalism (from a sort of an encompassing theoretically coherent, experientially and experimentally ungroundable framework underlying an axiomatic systematic and from which, as a point of departure, specific projects for further, future investigation of natural phenomena could be undertaken, call it a program for research within science to a set of hypotheses, helpful for instance in calculations of planetary motions or placement of stars.)2 Such hypotheses, which as mathematical, were believed to neither imply nor require pursuit of a commitment to a determination of the essence of things or to an ontological assessment of the structure of nature and the universe3... If we hold, and argue,4 such an orientation is impossible, an illusory project (it was nevertheless fully congruent with the Churchs evaluation of the role of philosophy, mathematics and logic, i.e., their subordination, in relation to theology in Galileos times)... If, as a research program, this metaphysics was perhaps the most interesting, intriguing and arguably the most productive perspective Galileo might have more fully developed (regrettably he did not), it was not at the center of his selfunderstanding of his own theorization, and though it implications (discussed below) created a good deal of trouble for him with the Church, the response to it was only an element in a socially overdetermined complex of pressures brought to bear on him that were decisive for his shifts in position and perspective. There are three features of this situation that must be grasped if his changing perspectives are to be adequately explained. These were the Barberini pontificate and the liberalizing opening it created, the political struggle within the Curia for supremacy in guiding overall Church policy and practice, and the specific doctrinal contents of the Roman Churchs dogma (the Eucharist phenomenon, geocentrism, unquestioned clerical authority). All were central to the Churchs emotive, political and cognitive hegemony over masses of women and men. Effectively Galileo challenged all three. Start with the papacy. Maffeo Barberini was the son of a Florentine aristocrat, i.e., a wealthy landlord with large holdings in the Tuscan countryside. His father died when he was only three, and, desirous that he have a Jesuit education, his mother relocated to Rome (where another branch of the family resided and) where eventually he was enrolled in the great Jesuit school, the Collegio Romano. Living with his uncle, Francesco, he was ordained, and in 1589 he graduated as a doctor of laws. His rise in the Church was quick.5 On 6 August 1623, days after the death of Gregory XV (a Ludovisi and pro-Spanish), Cardinal Maffeo Barberini was elected pope, taking the name Urban VIII,
1

As in our own case, it may require a personal formation within the Roman Church, and perhaps a personal acquaintance with the Order of Jesus to fully comprehend (that is, to understand and know) the Jesuitical suspicion of Galileo. Redondi is, nonetheless, helpful in this regard. Dissecting Grassis aggressive dispute (written under the pseudonym, Lothario Sarsi) aimed at Galileo earlier works and essays discussed above, Redondi states, the Libra [Libra astronomica ae philosohica 1619] transcends the terms and style of a normal scientific dispute. It reveals the controversial and apologetic matrix that saturates all forms of Jesuit polemic. The mysterious Sarsi betrays an invincible propensity to introduce into the scientific dispute hypocritical conclusions and insinuations about his opponents religious opinions Ibid, 43. There is no fight the Jesuits ever entered without the unshakable conviction that they engage the most dangerous of opponents in a life and death struggle, that there are no means that are not licit in the defeating this enemy, and without the overwhelming sense they are pursuing a divinely inspired mission. 2 For usage within modern science of the concept of a research program in this sense, see, for example, the entire discussion of the closing sections to Karl Poppers Quantum Mechanics and the Schism in Physics. 3 In the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 341, Galileo has Salviati provide a concise statement of this attitude: you must know that the principle activity of pure astronomers is to give reasons just for the appearances of celestial bodies, and to fit to these and to the motions of the stars such a structure and arrangement of circles that the resulting calculated motions correspond with those same appearances. They are not much worried about admitting anomalies which might in fact be troublesome in other respects. 4 See the Fourth Study, Part III, The Materialist Dialectic, below. 5 In 1592, he was made Governor of Fano; in 1601, he was assigned the position of papal legate to the French king, Henry IV; in 1604, he was appointed archbishop of Nazareth, which, apart from the rise in the Church hierarchy, was meaningless since the entire Levant was in the hands of the Ottomans; at the same time, he was made papal nuncio at the French court; in 1606, he was made a cardinal formally attached to at the Church of S. Pietro in Montorio (late S. Onofrio); in 1608, he was appointed bishop of Spoleto; and in 1617 he was made papal legate of Bologna.

by an overwhelming majority (fifty of fifty-five) in the conclave of eminences designed specifically for that purpose. The vote was significant, not because it exhibited agreement between the two opposing factions with the Curia (the one pro-French led by Cardinal Prince Maurizio of Savoy, the Cardinal of Savoy, the other pro-Spanish led by Cardinals Ludovicio Ludovisi and Francesco Borgia, the Borghese faction), but because of the depth of the French support the new pope achieved. Maffeo Barberini was also a literary figure (he had two volumes of poetry published in his lifetime), possessed a liberal sensibility with a view to the objectifications of Absolute Spirit in the Hegelian sense (art, philosophy, religion), was considered lively and a brilliant conversationalist; and was far more political than religiously doctrinaire in his appreciation of the great events of the day. (He also had the distinction of practicing nepotism in the Church to an extent not seen before or since his time.) His elevation had two immediate consequences. First, it created the hope, then the reality, of a cultural liberalization in a Roman atmosphere stultified by Aristotelian-Scholastic orthodoxy. 1 Second, a policy shift within the Church was directly forthcoming: His explicit pro-French leanings lent tacit support, absent monies or men, to the Richelieu guided French (financial) commitment to Protestant forces against the great French nemesis, the Hapsburgs (Austria and in particular, Spain), in the Thirty Years War. This put Barberini in opposition, not yet open (since before 1630, Hapsburg armies were largely ascendant in the various phases of the struggle then to date), to the Society of Jesus with its clearheaded assessment of the balance of forces in the war and its unequivocal defense of the program of renewal and struggle set forth by the Council of Trent for the CounterReformation Church2 embodied by Catholic Castile. Barberini did not, it appears to us, have a particularly astute analysis of the depth of the opposition in Europe to the Roman Church. He patently did not grasp a tendency of all social struggle the second feature of Galileos situation wherein two historically significant and diametrically opposed forces confront one another, namely, a polarizing tendency in which each forcefully asserts and defends what it considers fundamental to it, in the case of the Church, its power and that from which it was derived, unquestioned authority in matters of specifically religious concern, theological doctrine. But he was right about one thing, namely, the secular character of the struggle that was, for us, inseparably intertwined with its religious features: For every pious prince, lord or even burghers who objected to mandatory fasting, to priestly confession, to the worship of saints, relics and images, to indulgences, to the belief in purgatory, to Latin languages services, to the orders and monasteries, etc., etc., there were two, three, four or more princes, lords and (towns and cities who leading lights were) burghers who coveted church lands and pursued a policy and practice of expropriation. The Tudor king who financed (but alas, for him, only in part) a fruitless war with France (1543-1551) on the basis of the sale (to local gentries, effectively the origins of parliamentary power in England) of the monastic and chantry properties he seized is only the most outstanding example of the era. 3 And, on the continent, any forceful reassertion of Catholic power would have led to an effort to retake those properties and lands. Thus, the Austrian Hapsburg Ferdinands promulgation (1629) of the Edict of Restitution But let us return to Barberini. Even among those forces that opposed pope Urbans papal direction and orientation (most prominently for us, the Jesuits), the papacy as an institution, hence Barberini as its bearer, carried a lot of weight within the Curia. It was Bellarmino who, for example, not only had argued for papal infallibility (long, long before it became doctrine) but for the subordination of secular princes to his temporal as well as spiritual power,4 and it was the same Jesuits who were the greatest supporters of the papacy as an institution. They, moreover, fully supported Spanish hegemony in Europe, their military efforts to retain and enhance it, since in their Castilian brethren they recognized themselves, a spearhead against Protestant heresy, which they saw as a threat to Church political and ideological hegemony, a genuine threat to the old order, or at least the supremacy of the Church within it. Obviously, the Jesuit focus on the struggle against the Reformation put them at odds with the liberalizing Barberini with his political sensitivities to the French, and his (largely unsuccessfully realized) territorial aggrandizing appetites and proclivities for military
With regard to nepotism (see the text, immediately following), Barberini elevated three nephews and a brother to the status of cardinals, and distributed among them lucrative sinecures that vastly enriched his family. For this as well as his rise in the Church, see the Catholic Encyclopedia online. Search under Urban VIII. 1 Redondi, Ibid, 48. 2 Ibid, 47. 3 Here, we are of course speaking about Henry VIII. See the Introduction to Revolutionary Theories of the English Civil War. 4 Redondi, Ibid, 104.

expenditure restricted largely to the Peninsula During his pontificate, Barberini lavished monies on fortifications (constructing Fort Urbano at Castelfranco, strengthening defenses of the Castel of Sant Angelo on Monte Cavallo, and on the right side of the Tiber River in Rome) and armaments (remaking Civitavecchia into a military port, establishing a weapons manufactory at Tivoli) In considering the third feature of the socio-historically specific situation of Galileo, namely, its ideational moment, we can start in medias res, with The Assayer. Though we need not linger here,1 we can remark upon severe noteworthy features of the work. Written by a stylistic master, a witty, urbane, culturally refined man who, by all appearances was deeply immersed in the high culture of his day, The Assayer was a breakthrough event, one that proclaimed what had the taste and feel of a genuine cultural opening, a torrent aimed squarely at the rigid traditions defended by biblical literalists (largely ordinary clerics, especially among the Dominicans), above all, the university Peripatetics and Aristotelians, and most recently and most dangerous to Galileo, the Jesuits. 2 In this regard, it was presented in Rome as the official manifesto of their intentions and as their effort at polemical legitimization vis--vis the crushing force of institutions which based their power on tradition and authority.3 But if it was effectively thrust in the face of those guardians of the prevailing Scholastic culture, we should point out that, among them, the range of Jesuitical dogmatism was restricted to the core issues of Church doctrine (and, of course, the conviction that all reason should bed subordinated to Roman theology). In other respects, in astronomy for example, they kept abreast of all contemporary scientific development, and assimilated much of it or at least as much as did not even mediately infringe on that doctrine. Thus, for example, they had the very latest in modern instruments (e.g., telescopes) and their astronomers were first rate. Christopher Clavius with whom Galileo had corresponded up until the formers death (1612) was an accomplished astronomer (and mathematician). The said could be said about Orazio Grassi, astronomer, mathematician and perhaps the best architect on the Italian Peninsula of his generation. So, even as a bourgeois, in penning the manifesto of a tiny, cultured bourgeois stratum on the out, in taking aim at elements of Scholastic civilization, Galileo consciously took on Jesuit intellectuals onetime supporters (as long as he had respected Church strictures on astronomy), and he had to have known that the pseudonymous Lothario Sarsi was in fact Grassi. Now Galileo had long been wrong on his specific characterization of the motions of planetary bodies. (Like the Ptolemaic tradition tenaciously clung to by the Peripatetics, he maintained their orbits were circular, and thus to deal with retrograde motion he similarly was forced to uphold epicyclical motion.) He did this in full knowledge of Keplers work (The New Astronomy, 1609)4 in which, basing himself on Tycho Braches meticulous decades long observations, he, Kepler, explained orbital motion as elliptical. In The Assayer Galileo continued an ongoing dispute, one in which he was also wrong against Grassi in regard to comets. Grassi had, in astronomically modern Jesuit fashion agreed with and added new observations supporting Tychos view that as real phenomenon comets originated from deep within the solar system beyond the moon. Galileo, not unlike Aristotle himself, had argued comets were solely and strictly optical effects, the outcome of atmospheric refractions. 5 In his manifesto, Galileo had gone a long, long way toward effectively, if only for polemical purposes, embracing Aristotle and even if solely on this specific issue... merely in order to counterpose himself to a don of the reigning Scholastic culture. Galileos remarks, his puns and witticisms, his entire mode of presentation, were haughty and arrogant. He had made the issue personal. And it would come back to haunt him, though Grassi, a highly disciplined warrior, knew how, where and when to draw the line, and Galileo provided him with precisely an issue that would contribute to his later undoing. That issue was atomism. In The Assayer, Galileo explained heat in terms of the motion of the velocity (speed) and sheer quantity of small (invisible), indivisible particles in relation to our sense organs.6 Clearly laying down a marker that would come to characterize all scientific theorizing in the following centuries, Galileo not only distinguished between qualitative and
1

See the Note, Galileo and the Jesuits: Atomism and the Eucharist Controversy, below. Redondi, Ibid, 174. 3 Ibid, 29. The their refers to the literati and innovators, amongst them Galileo and Cesi, most immediately housed in the Academy of Lynceans but also in the various literary palaces and saloons of Rome. 4 This is confirmed by a 1612 letter of Kepler to Galileo. See Emerson McMullen, Galileos Condemnation. 5 The dispute dates to Galileos Discourse on Comets (1619) where this argument was original made. 6 The Assayer, 277.
2

quantitative characteristics of things (in the Aristotelian-Scholastic language he employed, substances), he not only determined that the essential features of things are its shape (in the geometrical sense) and its occupancy of objective space and time, in a word, its extension,1 he designated the objects of sensible perception (what is seen in seeing, what is heard in hearing, etc.) as qualitative and purely subjective without independent reality, as words and words only.2 In an anonymous denunciation to the proper tribunal of the Holy Office (i.e., to the Inquisitional body constituted for this purpose), Grassi had identified the core doctrinal liability of atomism, or at least Galileos formulation: If those sensuous qualities that characterize a substance the case in point being the bread and wine prior to the pronouncement of those words that signify the act of transubstantiation has occurred, for example, the white color of the wafer, its texture as it touches the tongue disappear if and when there is no sensing being to perceive them, if they are as Galileo said annihilated,3 then the specific nature of the transubstantiation the transformation of the bread and wine into Christs body and blood all the while the qualities, accidents or sensuous appearances that characterize the bread (and wine) remain just as they were cannot be true. Such was an error of the grossest, most heretical sort, at least according to the denunciation.4 At this historical moment at least, however, determination of the relations between substance and accidents could not be so unequivocally set forth, for the dogma as laid down by the Council of Trent was not intended to theologically parse doctrine, and did not employ a language that would permit such to be done.5 This was not, though, the case with Copernicanism, or what had been subsumed under that term, namely, the view that the sun is the center of the universe and the Earth itself not only is not but also moves (about the sun). Interestingly, this was not a doctrinal aspect of the work of the Council of Trent. There was in principle no reason, after all, why these issues could not have been addressed: Copernicus De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs) was published in Nuremberg in 1543 in the year of his death, and the Council, meeting first in 1545, did not finish its work until 1563.6 (The Council operated in three phases, the first, 1545-1547, in which procedural, ostensible reform and some doctrinal issues were taken up; the second, 1551-1552, devoted mostly to doctrine especially sacramental issues; and, the last 1563-1565 in which disciplinary concerns predominated. In no phase was the chief, burning non-Catholic issue of the role of the papacy in the Church ever addressed.) In point of fact, the Council itself was a rearguard action, one in which wagons were circled, the core doctrines that Church could and would defend in defense of itself as Power were identified and spelt out, and the spirit if not the specific institutional arrangements (especially, the Inquisition) on the basis of which the Church might go over to the offensive was unleashed. Beyond this, as Galileos one-time friend Paolo Sarpi eloquently demonstrated, the Council and its aftermath was shot through with controversy, dissension and maneuver which gave a lie to its veneer as the rampart constructed against heresy; above all, Sarpi viewed the Council and its outcome as tragic, and demonstrated the great hopes and high expectations of Church reform that were vested in it were frustrated from the outset.7 In this respect, the Jesuits, as an order founded in the decade prior to its initial
1 2

Ibid, 276. Ibid, 277. 3 Ibid, 276. 4 Redondi, Ibid, 159-165. 5 Again, see the note, Galileo and the Jesuits: Atomism and the Eucharist Controversy, below, where this question is discussed in detail. 6 There were, in fact, problems with Copernicus work: In a strict sense, astronomers took their point of departure in their calculations from the Earth as fixed body in respect to the heavens. Copernicus required that the Earths orbit itself now assume that point in regard to celestial bodies. But these, the stars also assumed to be fixed, did not indicate the Earth was in motion (annually) by showing an annual parallax (i.e., a apparent difference of location, a spatial displacement, motion, with respect to the fixed stars). If Copernicus was nonetheless right, the heavens had to be vast and immeasurable in a sense not previously imagined. It would be largely due to Keplers effort working out a theorization, its details, with observations to substantiate them that a non-geocentric universe would become not only conceivable but reasonable. 7 History of the Council of Trent. See, e.g., the account of the years 1551-1552 in Book IV. Sapris work, in some respects reminiscent of Guicciardini (his History of Italy was first published in 1561), was in one respect at least strictly modern and critical: In it, he explicitly sought to not merely engaged in narration or recounting events but to compose a history based upon available sources that permitted him to disclose the real course and logic of events. (See, for instance, his remarks in Book III, 253). Sarpi was Catholic, but more important effectively the state theologian of independent Venice. He himself was no stranger to controversy, having been citizen and official theologian of Venice in 1605-1607 when Pius V had imposed an interdict on the city, denying it administration of the sacraments, all pubic religious services and had, to boot, excommunicated the entire Venetian Senate all in a dispute over ecclesiastical rights. (In retaliation, among others things, always contentious, always in the middle of disputes, the Jesuits had been expelled from Venetian territory.;

convocation, were a perfect instrument for pursuit of its real aims, the rollback of Protestantism, the prosecution and persecution of all those who might be deemed enemies, the banishment of ideas that did not fit the mold and the affirmation of Church dogma as the sole valid expression of the truth of God and man. Copernicanism in its astronomical aspects decidedly did not fit the mould. But it was not until 1615 that this became clear. Based on his recent publications (1610-1612), a Florentine Dominican cleric had accused Galileo, no less, of contradicting Scripture. The monk had been questioned in Rome. Galileo made his own deposition. Entirely consistent with their astronomical modernism, Jesuit astronomers informed Bellarmino that Galileo had demonstrated the Ptolemaic system was largely erroneous (perhaps that it had generated a convoluted complex of auxiliary hypotheses to do what Galileo could do with much more simplicity and eloquence on different assumptions), but he had not proven the validity of Copernicuss heliocentric system. A committee of theologians examined Galileos ideas at Bellarminos request. (This was procedurally de rigueur.) They (all eleven) concluded that Copernicus was philosophically and most of all theologically erroneous. On 25 February 1616, Paul V instructed Bellarmino to warn Galileo not to specifically hold the Earth moved or the sun was at the center of the universe. It was an injunction, but there was no official criticism or accusation of heresy. From 1616 (Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina) onward, though, Galileo had more and more openly, always carefully, indicated his support for a Copernican view of the universe, that is, the relation of the Earth and the various known planets (Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn)1 to the sun. Barberini himself may have been Copernican, and not just in the sense that he considered On the Revolutions a statement of an elaborate, consistent mathematical hypothesis.2 But the success, including papal support, which The Assayer had enjoyed permitted Galileo to pursue in earnest, as long as his health held out, a project he had first announced as far back as 1610.3 Without any real opposition, with a benevolent pope smiling on his efforts and output, the whole decade of the twenties, its liberality and tolerance, had to have swirled about in Galileos head, vastly encouraged him, told him that now the moment to forcibly as possible formulate and openly state his Copernican convictions, to once and for all in this regard undercut and destroy the Aristotelian scaffolding that supported his Ptolemaic and Peripatetic opponents. The book on the system of the world had been reviewed by the usual array of Church censors, and had all the proper religious seals of approval.4 In early spring 1632, Dialogue Concerning Two Chief World Systems appeared in Florence. Under official Church sanction of Copernican doctrine, Galileo would not without a clear conviction that there would be no consequences have lightly engaged in an open, rather ferocious attack on basic elements of Aristotelian metaphysics (Physics, De Caela) from the perspective of Copernicus. But this precisely what he did in his Dialogue. In his introduction, he stated the tasks he set himself... they were threefold... all mediately or directly flowing from the intent to affirm the Copernican view of the universe (solar system).5 While speaking the language of astronomical hypotheses, this intent manifestly demonstrates where Galileos views lay and what he aimed at, namely, establishing the reality of the Copernican view of the world (universe). One does not assault Aristotelian thought at its foundations unless he plans to overturn it. And Galileo did: From the get go (Day One),6 articulated by Salviati and Sagredo he presents an extended critique of the ontological basis of the distinction that between the celestial heavens and the terrestrial sphere between perfection, the immutability, inalterability, invariance, etc of celestial bodies when counterposed to the dregs of the universe, the sink of all uncleanness,7 the Earth itself which, if not
Actually, there were six bodies were designated as planets, since Earths moon was also considered one. In his essay on Galileo, Emerson McMullen relates the following: While Galileo was writing the Dialogue, an interesting conversation occurred between Urban and Tommasso Campanella in 1630. Campanella told the pope that he had had the opportunity to convert some German gentlemen to the Catholic faith and they were very favorably inclined; however, having heard about the prohibition of Copernicus, etc., they had been scandalized, and he had been unable to go further. Urban answered with the following exact words: 'It was never our intention, and if it had been up to us that decree would not have been issued. See Galileos Condemnation and the sources cited therein. 3 The Starry Messenger, 43. 4 Here it might be appropriate to remark that we should not underrate either the extent or the thoroughness of Church practices of surveillance and censorship: At the gates of the cities, messengers and merchants are searched for new books; bookstores are watched and policed; bequests to libraries are not granted without scrupulous inquires; the catalogues of international fairs are under control of the omnipotent Congregation of the Index, which collaborates with the Holy Office in the work of surveillance and intimidation of authors, publishers, bookstore owners, and private libraries. Redondi, Ibid, 81. 5 Dialogue Concerning Two Chief World Systems, 6. 6 Ibid, 40-50, 58-60, 84-85. 7 Ibid, 60.
1

a metaphysical bulwark separating the Earth in its inferiority from the heavenly bodies, nonetheless, constituted a broadside against Aristotelianism It was in late May that a limited number of copies of Galileos work appeared in Rome. So, if Galileo's publication was sanctioned, why was an Inquisitional tribunal assembled against him shortly after the Dialogue reached this city? The Thirty Years War had been ongoing since 1618. It was fought in the most backward parts of Europe, overwhelming in the central continental zone that was politically dominated by the Holy Roman empire. The latter included imperial Hungary, Hapsburg lands (Tyrol, Carinthia, Styria, Austria, Moravia, Bohemia, Silesia and Lusatia), and in excess of a thousand, largely German speaking quasi autonomous statelets and principalities nominally under the suzerainty of the emperor among which the largest where Brandenburg, Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Bremen, Saxony, Bavaria, Hessen-Kassel and Wrttemberg as well as bishoprics and archbishopric centered in cities (Fulda, Wrzburg and Bamberg, and Cologne, Mainz and Trier), and countless smaller political units some amounting to no more than the private estates of nobles.1 Because this, the arena of the war, was the largest region (considered as a region) where the formal capitalist development in Europe had taken hold the least, the armies that conducted the war were unlike, for example, in England where in the same era a civil war was fought and historically novel social strata, artisan proletarians, capitalist farmers and capitalist tenants figured decisively in one, Cromwells, of the armies composed of tributary social groups led by large landowners holding noble titles and formed by various peasant strata. Formally free cities (e.g., Bremen), and burghers, where they were involved, and such was minimal, lined up behind Protestant princes but played no independent role in any phase of the conflict. In any case, these were not national armies2 In speaking of phases, we have adopted the language of conventional, bourgeois historiography merely as a matter of convenience and not with a view to any inner logic of development of the war or even an adequate reconstruction of that development. Since we intend no account of either, this conceptual usage is passably legitimate. Thus, in the first two phases of the struggle (the Bohemian, 1618-1625, and the Danish, 1625-1629), Catholic forces emerged vastly victorious, so that, the Spanish faction itself within the Roman Curia felt no necessity to intensify its pressure on Urban to change course, to plead or argue with, to cajole or even threaten, Maffeo Barberini as pope to abandon his pro-French policy orientation. The Barberini pope was, accordingly, able to impose his line: The war is largely a secular affair. It is territorial aims that dominate it. As Galileo was deeply involved in writing his Dialogue, in its latest Danish phase, Austrian Catholic Hapsburg forces fielded two armies. Wallenstein (Albrecht von Wallenstein, duke of Friedland) had assembled a large army of mercenaries and hired his services out to Ferdinand; while the forces of the still intact Catholic League (largely recruited from southern German principalities and loyal to the Roman Church) were commanded by Tilly (Johannes Tserclaes, graf von Tilly). In April 1626, Wallenstein defeated units of the Protestant Danish king Christian's army at Dessau in Germany; and 26 August 1626, Tilly destroyed the main body of Christian's army at Lutter am Barenberge (Germany). Together, the combined forces of Wallenstein and Tilly, the latter known as Imperials, overran all of northern Germany, plundering towns and villages in their wake. Christian's forces retreated into the next year to the Jutland Peninsula with Wallenstein's mercenaries in pursuit. Here they attempted to regroup, but there was no further fighting. On 6 March 1629, Ferdinand II, Austrian Hapsburg and Holy Roman emperor, decreed the Edict of Restitution, a document voiding Protestant titles to all Roman Catholic property expropriated since the Peace of Augsburg (1555). On 22 May 1629, Danish king Christian capitulated, signed the Treaty of Lbeck, and on this basis gave up a number of minor holdings in German lands. Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister of French king Louis XIII, had been alarmed by the settlement achieved by Ferdinand, that is, the aggrandizement of Hapsburg power and prestige in central Europe. Internal crisis had
1 2

Richard Brzezinski, Ltzen 1632. 8 (map), 9. In the third, Swedish phase (1630-1635), Gustavus Adolphus army had Swedish, Finnish, German speaking and Scottish and English infantry units, the cavalry was Swedish, Finnish and Germany speaking. In the same phase, the Hapsburg Imperials consisted in German speakers, Austrians, Czechs and Poles, Magyars, Croats, Italians, and even Walloons. The latter enumeration, moreover, does not include the ethnicities of Wallensteins mercenary army. Ibid, 19-20, 23.

prevented his intervention, but he had made overtures to Protestant Gustav II Apolph (Gustavus Adolphus), king of Sweden. Gustav had long been inundated with appeals from German Protestant princes. With the promise of French financial support, and with territorial designs of his own in the Baltic region, the Swedish army entered the fight. In summer 1630, his well-trained peasant army beached on the coast of Pomerania and opened a new phase in the war. The princes of Pomerania, Brandenburg and Saxony, had promised support but afraid of a fight, especially with a view to a dozen years in which Hapsburg combat forces had largely carried the day. Indecisive, they wavered, delaying the campaign, costing Gustav the advantage of surprise and the offensive. Tilly, in sole command of the Imperials, laid siege to Magdeburg (Germany), a city in which nearly the entire Protestant population had risen against the Holy Roman emperor. His forces captured, then pillaged, sacking the city, destroying much of it on 20 May 1631. That summer, Tillys Imperials advanced on the Swedes three times and were beaten back on each occasion. Notably, the last battle (Breitenfeld), 17 September 1631 (in which the Saxons had broke ranks, fled, exposing Gustav's left flank), the Swedes had nearly lost. In their subsequent regroupment, they routed Tilly's forces. (Six thousand were killed or captured.) This was a turning point, because it opened up central German lands to Gustav, whose army marched uncontested into southern Germany down Clerics Alley (i.e., through the Catholic bishoprics of Fulda, Bamberg and Wrzburg, taking the cities of Frankfurt am Main and Mainz, the latter of which as an archbishopric was the seat of one of the seven Electors of the Holy Roman emperor), where winter camp was made.1 In late March, Swedish forces broke winter camp. They had all the appearance of being unstoppable. In Rome, there was panic. The struggle between the opposing forces at the pinnacle of Roman power exploded into the open. The pro-Spanish cardinals demanded that the Barberini regime abandon its liberality and tolerance, and renew its at any rate halfhearted commitment to the fight against Reformation in all its manifestations, in particular to the struggle against heresy and the subversive ideas of the innovators; and that it drop its pro-French orientation and align itself with the Spanish (meaning, of course, with Catholic forces in the field, i.e., the Austrian Hapsburgs).2 Against the background of events in Bavaria, a secret concave, a council of state of the Roman Church, opened. Supported by the entire array of cardinals of his faction, Borgia read a statement openly denouncing Urban, Barberini as pope. It condemned him for a heretical alliance with the Swedish Protestant king. Barberini ordered him silence, but the entire Spanish party, both its cardinals and Italian cardinals in the faction, gathered around him protecting him while he finished the statement. News of these events, and the accusation that Urban hid heretics under his wing, was carried to all the embassies, and official secretariats of Europe. Spanish and Austrian ambassadors demanded immediate, direct and open support.3 The secret concave reopened on 11 March. There were further recriminations from both sides. On the 18th, Urban struck back, expelling Cardinal Ludovisi, second among equals in the Spanish party, from Rome. There was no resolution. At the end of March, acting as special representative of the Austrian Hapsburgs, Cardinal Pazmany arrived in Rome. To the pro-Spanish partys demands for abandoning the French alliance, in addition he insisted on the Austrian need for money. In the heart of the southern German speaking lands, the Swedes attacked Tillys Imperials on the banks of the Lech River on 14 April 1632, Tilly himself was mortally wounded, and Mnchen was taken. Hapsburg forces were in disarray.4 In Rome, the pro-Spanish Borghese faction threatened Barberini with an apocalyptic scenario: Gustavus Adolphus, with his army now sitting astride Mnchen, is preparing to debouch from the Alps and descend on Rome. They have already plundered the Jesuit colleges and expelled the order in toto from the city.
1 2

Ibid, 9-11. Redondi, Ibid, 229. 3 Ibid, 229-231. 4 At this point, Ferdinand II, the emperor, immediately recalled Wallenstein (who had been dismissed following upon much pressure from high ranking Imperial officers who disliked his mercenary status, and the powers and wealth that had accrued to him in the years of war). Wallenstein possessed vast military resources of his own and was able to very rapidly assemble a creditable, massive mercenary force. He soon had his army in the field, and by the end of May 1632, he had already recaptured Prague, held by the Saxon allies of Gustavus. Brzezinski, Ibid, 11.

Memories (none living) of a little over a century old event were immediately stirred, for on 11 May 1526 a Castilian army of Charles V sacked Rome. Recounted in Francesco Guicciardinis History of Italy,1 which every literate Roman (and native of the Italian Peninsula) without exception had read, still a hundred years later the event left an indelible impression on clerics rapacious plundering, rioting and even murder without regard to faction or personage, i.e., without respect to whether or not one was of the old Roman oligarchy, held position and status within the Church, or was a wealthy foreign merchant which is difficult for us to either imagine or describe. Whether it was a ruse or the surfacing of depth-psychological anxieties or both (the latter underpinning the former), the Borghese faction exploited a fantasy fear that provoked a nightmarish dreamscape of Protestant atrocities (not unlike that white masters in the old planter South imagined in the American Civil War when male black slaves were left alone with white mistresses while the masters gathered in legislatures at state capitals they werent doing any fighting to plot ways and means of running the Union embargo on cotton). After all, it had happened once before (carried out by a Catholic army to boot). Feeding the fantasy was the knowledge of the vast treasures of Rome, the center of the universe of western Christendom for the past 1500 years, much of which was illicit gain, and, incident upon the logic of the master that knows he has wronged those he oppresses, rightfully the object of plunder. The fear was imaginary.2 Imagining or no, the Church hierarchy had no man in its midst of military stature, and even less one with enough insight to adequately assess Gustavs intentions. Fantasy, and the real forces that underlay it supremacy within the Curia and a return to a pro-Spanish, i.e., openly counter Reformation policy freely ran amuck. By late May, Barberini capitulated to the pressures engulfing him. Published earlier in the spring, at the same moment (late May 1632) the first copies of the Dialogue reached Rome. At this moment, the Jesuits were quick to examine the Dialogue. The text was grist for the mill of the renewed Counter-Reformation, now triumphant inside the Curia. At this moment, the charges against Galileo Eucharist heresy,3 Copernicanism, a blasphemous elevation of man in relation to God resurfaced. A preliminary quasi-Inquisitional tribunal was convened Barberini protected his papacy from a scandal that might have deposed him and ruined Galileo by using procedurally extraordinary measures to control these developments, and Galileo was convicted as a disciplinary offender4 he admitted to violating the terms of Bellarminos 1616 injunction to neither teach nor defend Copernicanism, and was given in
1

Guicciardini, The History of Italy, 376, 384-385, wherein he expresses some of the horror this event symbolized for a contemporary thirty-five years after the event. 2 First, the Swiss army would have to climb mountainous terrain, sometimes narrow passages, with armor (infantry), horses (cavalry), artillery pieces in excess of a thousand pounds, their caissons, the entire train of food supplies, and officer accommodations carried into the field. This was no mean feat in and of itself but its enormous difficulty would have been magnified since the most reliable, shortest route from Mnchen to Milano was through the Austrian Hapsburg Tyrol and was over 360 kilometers, two-thirds of which was mountainous and snow covered, passages which would have likely been manned by small Imperial detachments. Second, a line of communications over the mountains and a line of supplies could not be maintained. The Swedish army would have been forced to forage on the countryside, multiplying and vastly deepening any pre-existing hostility it was sure at any rate to encounter. Third, beyond the Alps lay 535 kilometers of march by way of Bologna and Florence, a portion (that between the two cities) which was also mountainous (the Apennines), though nothing like the Alps, and which would have surely hosted irregular peasant guerrillas defending their faith and its institutions with whatever damage they might inflict on the Swedish army. Mercenary forces could also be mobilized on the Peninsula, along with the comparably far smaller forces of Tuscany, Emilia, Romagna, and the Papal States. Fourth, Gustav had no immediate, practical reason to risk his forces in such an adventure, one that might trap him on the Italian Peninsula without recourse. Wallenstein was still in the field and could (and did) compel certain tactical adjustments on the part of Gustav. The Swedish kings ally and in part his financier, the French, had been right up to this moment supported by the papacy under Barberini, who had studiously avoided the conflict until this time maintaining the Thirty Years War was secular, territorially motivated and involved dynastic ambitions. Fifth, though the cardinals assembled in Rome could not have known with any certainty, Rome was not the object of the Swedish campaign. Rather, putting an end to the war there and then... by assaulting Vienna and toppling the entire edifice of the Hapsburg Empire... was much more in tune with Gustavs sensibilities, but even this he could not pursue. Wallenstein dictated this much. On this, the last point, see Brzezinski, Ibid, 13. 3 The 1624 charges were, in fact, resurrected by Melchior Inchofer, who, as one of the members of the pope's Inquisitional inquiry, had recommended that the charge of atomism be added to the others. In this regard, a Jesuit archival document that surfaced early in the past decade confirmed Inchofers role and authorship of the document that basically recapitulated Grassis 1624 position and accusation. See two pieces, the first by Mariano Artigas, Galileos Troubles and the second by Artigas, Rafael Martivez and William Shea Revisiting Galileos Trouble with the Church. The Inchofer document is reproduced in the second piece in the original Latin with translation. 4 Redondi, Ibid, 243-248, 259-260 (extraordinary procedural measures to protect the Barberini papacy and Galileo), 326 (disciplinary condemnation).

social and historically terms a relatively light sentence (house arrest, prohibition on publication). The sacrifice of Galileo was the price that the Barberini regime had to pay in order to demonstrate that it had accepted its role as spiritual leader of the old order counteroffensive against not only heresy within and without (Protestantism) the Church but against the innovators (especially those whose systematic thought lay the foundations of a new form of knowledge independent of faith), inclusive of their very material accompaniments (financing, provision of troops if required, etc.) in the struggle on the ground against the bearers of these perverse ideational doctrines.1 Polemic and the Logics of Argument in the Dialogue On first reading the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, or at first glance, Galileo appear cautious and strictly abides with the Church guidelines set down sixteen years earlier by Bellarmino. Salviati, Galileos voice in the dialogue, remarks to the ostensibly undecided Sagredo that I act the part of Copernicus in our arguments and wear his mask. As to the internal effects upon me of the arguments which I produce in his favor, I want you to be guided not by what I say when we are in the heat of acting out our play, but after I have put off the costume, for perhaps then you shall find me different from what you saw of me on the stage. 2 Thus, Salviati refers to the Copernican account of the Earth to heavenly bodies as a hypothesis,3 similarly in offering a determination of whether the Earth is a fixed or moveable body he states I am undecided about this question,4 in one of the many highly developed discussions about the motions of bodies (this concerning whether it is possible for a body to naturally have two motions), he tells us, nor do I pretend to draw a necessary proof from this; merely a greater probability,5 and, in setting forth some of reasons for the Copernican case for the rotation (motion) of the Earth, he expressly remarks, Nor do I set these [reasons] forth to you as inviolable laws, but merely as plausible reasons.6 Yet Galileo was censored. Among those charges, he was accused of discussing Earths motion as real, not hypothetical; dealing with the same as simply undecided; treating opponents of Copernican thought without respect (in fact, this treatment was on occasion disdainful bordering on ridicule). Moreover, he was also indicted for affirming a fundamental, if limited, equality of divine and human minds with regard to geometrical subjects (and, in doing so, he was further accused of presenting this equality as a basis for the conversion, our term, of supporters of the Ptolemaic system to that of Copernicus, and not the other way around. For example, he has Sagredo say he laid awake most of the night considering the reasons adopted by each side in favor of these two opposing positions).7 In all instances, the charges, while hardly exhaustive, constitute a fully adequate assessment of the Dialogue from the perspective of Church orthodoxy.8 Again for example, with a view to the equality of divine and human minds Salviati states, the human intellect does understand some of them [propositions] perfectly, and thus in these it has as much absolute certainty as Nature itself has. Of such are the mathematical sciences also in which the Divine intellect indeed knows infinitely more propositions, since it knows all. But with regard to few which the human intellectual does understand, I believe that its knowledge equals the Divine in objective certainty, for here it succeeds in understanding necessity, beyond which there can be no greater sureness.9 The last statement might very well have been
1

The Thirty Years War, however, did nothing to advance capitalist development, and if anything was a setback for it. It was notably the Thirty Years' War which annihilated the most important parts of the productive forces in agriculture, through which, as well as through the simultaneous destruction of many cities, it lowered the living standards of the peasants, plebeians and the ruined city inhabitants to the level of Irish misery in its worst form. Friedrich Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, chapter 7 (Significance of the Peasant War). In this, an objective historical sense, the Thirty Years War effectively reinforced the hold of the old order, if not the Church, over the mass of men and women in central Europe. 2 Dialogue Concerning Two Chief World Systems (second day), 131; and late in the same day, Salviati reminds Simplicio that, I am impartial between the two opinions, and masquerade only as Copernicus only as an actor in these plays of ours. Ibid, 256; and, again on the third day, he asks his fellow interlocutors to continue our plan, which is to examine the validity of the arguments brought forward by each side without deciding anything Ibid, 369. 3 Ibid, 10 (opening speech, first day). 4 Ibid, 131 (second day). 5 Ibid, 118 (second day). 6 Ibid, 122 (second day). 7 Ibid (Third Day), 276 (citation). 8 Stillman Drake, editor of the English translation of the Dialogue that we have utilized, gives a summary of the charges in his Notes to the text, Ibid, 474 (n. 103). 9 Ibid, 103 (first day).

considered blasphemous. The only error Galileo avoided was a recapitulation of the atomism of the Assayer. And, hidden, even this was present. (We shall return to it later in this section.) Situated in a historical moment of central European war, which, in the view of the most powerful faction in the Church hierarchy, threatened its existence, Galileo was crushed by the Churchs response as a warning to wayward intellectuals. His fate was not preordained. Having long ago left Venice (Padua), he had subjected himself to enormous risk (to the possibility of Church condemnation and proscription) in stating his most firmly held, rationally defensible convictions; politically obtuse and dependent upon the arbitrary whims of great men, he was unable to independently assess the cultural climate in which he operated; and, these failings were exacerbated by the simple facts that he was vain, proud and arrogant, all of which together led him to miserably misjudge the intellectual atmosphere in which he finally published the Dialogue.1 He simply assumed an enlightened milieu, an open-minded setting for theoretical work that, having abruptly collapsed (but not without warning, one that any perceptive political observer would have noted), no longer existed, and, on this assumption, he most forcibly asserted the entire range of arguments affirming Copernicus theorization.2 Still he recognized the metaphysical element so-called in this affirmation could not produce a comprehensive demonstration in his sense of the term since such proofs are exclusively mathematical not logical3 In other words (in terms of our discussion of demonstration above), he could not conclusively demonstrate the position that he put in Salviatis mouth. We know this because of all the proofs he undertakes none are fully mathematical (i.e., have a stand alone mathematical component). He was compelled to argue his (Salviatis) position on a different basis, a basis which, literarily reproduced, was in fact, in our view, modeled on his own experience of insight, discovery and theorization. To grasp this, we are required to review the structure of the argument in the Dialogue. There are three participants in the Dialogue, Sagredo and Salviati whom we have already met and both of whom were real historical personages, good friends of Galileo whose company he greatly prized.4 The third interlocutor is Simplicio, likely a composite character bringing together all those features above all, an unswerving, dogmatic commitment to Aristotle, or his texts, as the sole and final authority in all matters that concern humanity, the community, nature and the universe that Galileo found personally repugnant in his Peripatetic opponents. The discussion among the three unfolds over the course of four days, as each day forms a major division within the text. At its core the Dialogue has the character of the Socratic-Platonic dialogue. Salviati, as main interlocutor, attempts to guide the discussion through a maze of seemingly tangential issues, digressions and peripheral questions all of which do have a more or less mediated and often hidden but important bearing on the main issue in order to produce a coherent account of the relation of the Earth and the celestial bodies to the universe. Throughout Salviatis method is Platonic in a double sense, that is, the dialogical logic of analysis is dialectical in the Socratic manner and the doctrine of reminiscence is constantly invoked as Salviati recurrently insists with regard to Sagredo and Simplicio (especially Simplicio) that resolution of even most intractable problems their discussions pose can be achieved through recollection, by probing ones own awareness and recalling what is already known The central question is whether or not the Earth is motionless and at rest or itself moves (circularly). But Galileos dialectic, particularly as it initially unfolds (first day), lacks the sharpness, and unswerving persistence with which questions are posed that, through the interplay of regressions, dead-ends and advances, achieves resolution of the question in Platos Socratic dialogues: Unlike Socrates, now Salviati, then Sagredo struggle to maintain the course, while (as literary bearers of Galileos views) permitting themselves to get waylaid by engaging in polemical detours and secondary critiques of the Peripatetic vision of the world. Galileo stated the aim of the discussions that form the Dialogue in his introduction. It is threefold: He wished to show that no amount of experiments can demonstrate the Earth moves since all are equally adaptable to its motion and rest, to investigate celestial phenomenon since he held such would reinforce the Copernican hypotheses rendering it all but unassailable, and to examine the ocean tides for, on the premise the Earth moves, he believed he might
1

And Galileo was incapable of suppressing this vanity, so that in the Dialogue he has Salviati remark, my ambition... enjoys itself when I am showing myself to be more penetrating than some other person noted for his acuity... Ibid (second day), 211. 2 Perhaps all this is unfair to Galileo. He did have a Roman imprimatur and his book was examined thoroughly by censors all of whom we Dominicans. Its just that Jesuits, not Dominicans, ran the Inquisition, which of course Galileo knew. See the Note, Galileo and the Jesuits, below. 3 Ibid, 35 (first day). 4 Ibid, 7, where this is explicitly acknowledged.

discern its causation.1 In a very rough sense each of these aims define the content of the discussions of the second, third and fourth days, respectively. The swirl of issues that sweep through the first day renders it different. It is formed in and through an exploration and critique of fundamental Aristotelian assumptions as such conceptual determinations of upward and downward motion, circular and straight motion, infinite and finite motions and with a view to these the similar determinants of celestial and terrestrial bodies. But not only is it unsystematized in even the loose sense, it is difficult for alternatively Salviati and Sagredo to keep divergences and digressions from overwhelming the proposed thematic content of the discussion to hand. Perhaps Galileos intense desire (or anxiety) to hit on all the crucial underlying questions those that immediately and directly impinge on a vision of the world lay at the source of the continuously shifting thread of the discussion. These same basic assumptions appeared in Peripatetic astronomy (i.e. the various types of motion), but they were not observational or experimental but metaphysical in the strict sense (i.e., the theorization which the propositions forming these assumptions generates has no real referent and is independent of any and all possible objective subjectivities in scientific terms, observational frames of reference and dependent on none for its validation, and, thus, are only formed logically and speculatively). It is in this context that Galileo at once politically nave and brave soul that he was undertook a rather ferocious attack on basic elements of Aristotelian metaphysics in its astronomical aspects (Physics, De Caela) from the perspective of Copernicus. It is this in the first day that concerns us most. If Galileo was to successfully argue his Copernican view of the universe, it was inescapably necessary to firmly establish that celestial bodies (planets, sun and stars) and the Earth were, as bodies, uniform or, better stated, homogeneous. This is the key, the central argument around which the entire Dialogue revolves: The matter that made up the Earth is no different, in principle, from that of Mars, Jupiter, its (Medicean) moons, the sun or the stars, and that, accordingly, the perfect circular motion of celestial bodies and their characteristics, permanence, inalterability, either belonged to both (those bodies and Earth) or neither. Again from beginning to end, this is the core of his position. So with one eye to Church strictures (i.e., to putting forth his position merely as a hypothesis that assists in astronomical calculations), he states, if it is denied that circular motion is peculiar to celestial bodies, and affirmed to belong to all naturally movable bodies, then one must chose one of two necessary consequences. Either the attributes of generable-ingenerable, alterable-inalterable, divisible-indivisible, etc., suit equally and commonly all world bodies as much the celestial as the elemental or Aristotle has wrongly and erroneously deduced, from circular motion, those attributes which he has assigned to celestial bodies2 Of course, since the distinction between gaseous formations (vaporous ones or those emitting exhalations, as Galileo would say) and solid ones arose for him just as it does for us, it is patent that only an atomism of a thoroughgoing reductionist kind would permit him to make his view of the homogeneity of all astronomical bodies stick. Within fifty years, atomism in its various forms (e.g., socially and politically in Hobbes, philosophically and metaphysically in Leibniz and his monadology, psychologically and philosophically in the empiricism of Locke), will have become self evident to bourgeois thinkers, will be the dominant form of stating fundamental assumptions. But for Galileo it was proscribed: He was forbidden open articulation of atomism because of its theological consequences.3 To boot, he confronted a further problem, for he could not proceed at least initially in the same phenomenalist manner, if you will, as he had in the Starry Messenger where recall he reconstructed, describing, the basic identity of the terrestrial features of the Earth and the moon, such as mountains, ravines and valleys. In this respect, the problem was that in 1612 the Jesuits in the astronomy section at the Collegio Romano had already recognized the cosmological significance of these lunar features and had undertaken a doctrinal revision around the edges, arguing that the underlying character, substance in Aristotelian-Scholastic terms, of celestial bodies remained unchanged even if their
1 2

Ibid, 6. Ibid, 37. The axiomatic assumptions on which Peripatetic natural philosophy was based find their precise counterparts in the theology of a perfect, eternal God which is counterposed to a corrupted, transitory and wicked world (including man). At their origins, theology and philosophy come together because the metaphysics of good and evil in Church doctrine and the underlying categories in Aristotelian physics are formally identical. This is cognitively appealing. The conceptual oppositions were consciously transposed back and forth (between theology and natural philosophy) by the early Scholastics. See the footnoted discussion of Augustine in the Introduction, Elements of the Conceptual Structure of Science, above. 3 Again, see the Note, Galileo and the Jesuits, below.

phenomenal features, accidents, may not.1 These modifications in doctrine, though slight, greatly secured the inner core of doctrine and made it that much more difficult to challenge, not to mention change. To boot, all this was now in the open so to speak, since In 1626, the 1612 discussion was made public in a work (Rosa ursina) by the Jesuit priest Christopher Scheiner (who could also claim priority over Galileo in discoveries concerning the lunar surface)... After some preliminary sparring Salviati (Galileo) argued that Aristotle (and following him the Peripatetics) inferred, deduced was Galileos term, the content of the relations of real, astronomical bodies from the logical structure of concepts that have been produced to describe them, an illicit practice which we shall refer to below as an abstract dialectic of concepts:2 none of the conditions by which Aristotle distinguishes celestial from elemental bodies has any other foundation than what he deduces from the different in natural motion between the former and the latter.3 In pursuing this analysis, and at any rate consistent with his basic anti-Aristotelian predilections, Galileo had no choice but to mount a direct assault on the fundamental distinctions that underlay Aristotelian-Scholastic (i.e., Peripatetic) cosmology as such: Before he could undertake an account of the essential similarity of earthly and celestial (e.g., lunar) appearances (accidents), he was compelled to confront the issue of alleged qualitatively different underlying substrata (substances) head on. The basic distinctions which (conceptually) grounded Peripatetic cosmology were the paired oppositions, nongenerated-generated, incorruptible-corruptible, inalterable-alterable, indivisible-division, permanent (eternal)-transitory4 It is worth noting that, taken together, the first terms in each pair constitutes descriptively the meaning of substance for the entire Aristotelian tradition right down to the time of Galileo Thus he (in the person of Salviati) continued to argue in this manner (in the manner of Simplicio, abstractly, by way of the elaborating of conceptual content without real referent), until recognizing it was fruitless, he methodologically and expressly eschewed arguments about strictly logical content of concepts Salviati warned both Simplicio and Sagredo, even as the latter opposed the Peripatetic position, against further proceeding in this mannerI see we are once more going to engulf ourselves in a boundless sea from which there is no getting out, ever 5 not however before formulating and stating his own position, the integral parts of the world [are assumed] to be disposed in the best order, and as a necessary consequence excludes straight motions of simple natural bodies as being of no use in nature.6 Thereafter he, Galileo (Salviati), undertook to resume the discussion from mutually accepted characterizations of celestial and especially earthly motions (largely ignoring the theoretical determinants embedded in these characterizations), what he called observations (and we might call facts):7 By forgoing efforts to logically parse explicit, speculative Peripatetic conceptual elaborations, Galileo was able to hypothetically pose, only if fleetingly, his underlying metaphysics (atomism)8 as an alternative without having to acknowledging what he had
1
2

Redondi, Galileo, Heretic, 234. See the Fourth Study III, Abstract Dialectic of Concepts. 3 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 37. 4 Ibid, 37, 38, 40-43, 46-47, 49-50, 58-60, 84-85. 5 Ibid, 44. 6 Ibid, 46. This is Sagredos summation. Salviatis appears a few lines earlier. (As to motion by a straight line, I do not see how it can be of use for anything except to restore to their natural location such integral bodies as have been accidentally removed and separated from their whole, Ibid, 45). Now the opposing Peripatetic views, Simplicios (also summarized by Sagredo) is that sublunar bodies are by nature generable and corruptible, etc., and are therefore very different in essence from celestial bodies, these being invariant, ingenerable, incorruptible, etc. (Ibid). The significance of this is not obvious and may not be clear. In the initial sparring, Salviati had already explained (Ibid, 37) that we should have the grace to abandon the view that the natural instinct of the various parts of bodies (say, the Earth) is to go toward the center of the earth, rather they tend toward the center of the universe, meaning that we do not know where that may be, or whether it exists at all. Even if it exists, it is but an imaginary point; a nothing, without any quality (Ibid). This is already to have entirely abandoned the Aristotelian, Ptolemaic and the Church vision of the cosmos it is to have abandoned, if only in thought, the old order and to have drawn the conclusions that the world (universe) is effectively without center, boundless if not infinite, one in which bodies are homogenous and subject to quantitative, mathematical treatment. 7 If we are to get on with our main question it is necessary [to] proceed to demonstrations, observations, and particular experiments. Ibid, 44. 8 In contradistinction, most important here was the Peripatetic belief based directly on Aristotle (De Caela, i 3, 270a 15-18; Physics, i 7, 191a191b) that generation and corruption (philosophically, we would say coming into being and passing away) arise from contraries Generation and corruption transpire only where there are contraries, contraries were said to found amongst simple natural bodies, contrary motions are made or found in straight lines between opposite ends (away from or toward a middle, that is, up or down), these motions characterize the Earth, ergo (Ibid, 39) This is an abstract dialectic of concepts, what Simplicio calls argument a priori (Ibid, 50), what from Kant onward would be called (a series of) synthetic a priori judgment(s), a conceptual elaboration without experiential foundation.

done (not to mention rehearsing its criticisms), even if in so doing, he had to permit Simplicio to retreat to his narrow (experientially ungrounded) explications of conceptual content, which, at any rate, served as grist for his mill (criticism of Peripatetic natural philosophy at its weakness points) and established a setting for stating his perspective (in its strongest aspects). From this point forward, Galileo shifted the terrain of the discussion. For the most part, Salviati no longer argues about concepts without referents, metaphysically it is no longer a question of a dispute over the logic of concepts as concepts (incorruptibility, immutability, etc.), but largely a quarrel that is sustained by reference to the evidence provided by the heavens and the Earth itself. Thus, always with an eye to exhibiting the homogeneity between various heavenly bodies and the Earth, Salviati points to changes in the heavens, to the supernovas of 1572 and 1604 the former of which was so bright that it remained visible in the light of day for three weeks. 1 As new stars that appeared then disappeared, these changes were bona fide evidence of the mutability of celestial bodies. (Hence, the identity in underlying nature with the Earth; thus, the substantial homogeneity of all bodies populating the universe.) Then, he pointed to sunspots (and their friend, Galileo himself, who with his telescope had provided them with an excellent account in his Starry Messenger): They are demonstrably contiguous with the sun, real not illusory, change size and shape, vary motions, and come into being and pass out of it.2 Finally (to close out their first day), the three interlocutors discussed the moon and its relation to the Earth at great length,3 a discussion that was punctuated by lengthy excursuses into mirrors and refracted light,4 and the brilliance of light as reflected respectively by polished and ruff, dark surfaces.5 The discussion of the play of light and shadow and lights reflection were not digressions, because, like that of sunspots (whose reduction in speed and size are apparent for anyone who knows how to observe them and calculate diligently),6 the meaning and significance of the lunar phenomena are not always immediately given in perception (i.e., in seeing them through the telescope). Observation is not perception.7 While Galileos astronomical critique of Peripatetic doctrine is evidentially grounded, it is nonetheless largely a logical, discursive argument with important analogical moments that are aimed at bringing the argument to intuitive clarity. This is even more manifest in the second days discussion, and before closing this section we shall cite one, the central argument in that discourse to make this clear. Discussion on the second day is largely given over to the question of whether the Earth is mobile or at rest. Salviati present seven reasons (arguments) why he is rationally convinced the Earth periodically revolves around its own center (motion that is diurnal, completely occurring in a period of a day, twenty-four hours), and those bodies that include the moon, sun, planets and stars and that make up the celestial sphere do not revolve around a stationary Earth. For our purposes here (i.e., to exhibit the manner in which he argues and the form of his argument) it is necessary and important to enumerate them even if in compressed form: First, considering the immense size of the starry sphere relative to the minuteness of the Earth, a relation that he identifies as many millions of times greater, with a view to the immeasurable velocity (speed) required for this vast sphere to turn over in a single day, it
Salviati suggests that contraries may not have existence in nature. He ridicules Simplicio and the Peripatetics (teach me natures method of operation in quickly begetting a hundred thousand flies from a small quantity of musty wine fumes, showing me what the contraries are in that case Ibid, 39-40), cities experiential instances of which this concept (of contraries generating anything) not only does not illumine but confuses our understanding of phenomena (Ibid, 40), and then concludes, Besides, I never was thoroughly convinced of any transmutation of substances (always confining ourselves to strictly natural phenomena) according to which matter becomes transformed in such a way that it is utterly destroyed, so that nothing remains of its original being, and another quite different body is produced I do not think it is impossible for transformation to occur by a simple transposition of parts, without any corruption or the generation of anything new (Ibid, 40). Now in counterposing the transposition of parts, i.e., individual, indestructible particles, to the generation and corruption of substance, Galileo was not only negating and denying the distinctive feature of the Earth (as opposed to celestial bodies), that is, arguing for their homogeneity and posing an alternative that undercuts the Peripatetic-Church doctrine, he was not only tacitly reasserting his atomism (in this context, Ibid, 45, 46, he distinguishes the elements of fire, water, etc., from their particles), his account went right to the heart of the Eucharist dogma undermining it. (Was not, for his contemporaries, bread a natural phenomenon? If so, how could its substance be transmuted, how is transubstantiation possible?) 1 Ibid, 51, 52, 57-58. 2 Ibid, 52-54. 3 Ibid, 62-71, 86-91, 95-101. 4 Ibid, 71-77. 5 Ibid, 77-84. 6 Ibid, 54. 7 See this Study, the Note, Observation, Experience and Experiment in Galileo, below.

is far more reasonable and credible that it is the Earth that rotates.1 Second, astronomical observation incontrovertibly shows that planets in their orbits move slightly west to east. But if the Earth is at rest and heavenly bodies as a whole, this sphere, moves around it, this motion must then be made to rush the other way; that is, from east to west, with this very rapid diurnal motion. If, however, the Earth rotates, then a single motion that is west to east accommodates all the observations and satisfies them all completely.2 Third, the rotation of the entire heavenly sphere upsets the orderly circulation existing among those specific bodies with which were are familiar, and about the period of whose motion we are certain. The greater the circle described, the longer the period of rotation. Thus, Saturn completes its rotation every thirty years, Jupiter in twelve years, Mars takes two, the (Medicean) moons of Jupiter, sixteen, seven and three and a half days and forty-two hours respectively, beginning with the largest orbit and ending with the smallest. Yet, if the vastly larger celestial sphere is to rotate around the Earth it must be done in twenty-four hours.3 This is absurd. (While if it was conceded the Earth revolves around its own center, on its own axis as we say, it would disrupt none of these relations. The absurdity would disappear.) Fourth, there is a question of the immense disparity between the motions of the various stars. Some would be required to move very quickly in very, very large circles; others at a snails pace in very small circles according to their location relative to the poles. For someone with the sensibility of a mathematician, this is a matter of bad judgment, and would reflect rather poorly, Galileo merely hints at this, on the wisdom and insight of the Creator.4 Fifth, observations of the heavens go back in the traditions to which Galileo related two thousand years. It is patent that some stars have shifted position over this period of time. Some that were found on the celestial equator are found in our time to be many degrees distant.5 Thus, these stars have and will be required to keep changing their orbits and velocities, some will of necessity be required to slow their motion describing smaller orbits. Further, over a great expanse of future time some will be required not only to slow, but to stop and then restart their motion.6 Sixth, the Peripatetic view characterizes the starry heavens as solid, and by this means that the various stars are fixed firmly in the places (our term) within the celestial sphere, that they do not change places amongst themselves. This is simply not compatible with the disparity of motions that the same view requires in order to assert the immobility of the Earth. Seventh, attributed to the vast sphere of heavenly bodies innumerable numbers of which are much larger than the Earth, the diurnal rotation would have to be of enormous strength and power carrying the planets in a direction opposite their orbit as well. Yet the Earth, a small and trifling body in comparison with the universe, would be unmoved by this entire motion.7 Galileo was compelled to make these arguments some of them based on recent astronomical observations (especially those made over decades by Tycho Brahe and later systematized by Kepler if for no other reason that, based on Ptolemaic theorization, the Peripatetic universe was merely a development of immediately given perceptions codified as common sense: After all and most obviously the sun goes round the Earth, it rises in the east each and every day and sets in the west, again each and every day; to boot, if the Earth does rotate on its own center, is it not reasonable to believe objects would fly off it? Why aren't rock and animals... thrown toward the stars and why do buildings remain attached to their foundations?8 So the first thing he had to establish was a principle (and the presentation of its formulation precedes the enumeration of various facts, his seven arguments) that accounts for our experience, the datum that you and I standing here on solid ground do not and cannot immediately perceive the motion of the Earth: Motion, insofar as it is and acts as motion, to that extent exists relatively to things that lack it; and among things which all share equally in any motion, it does not act, and is as if it did not exist. 9 A good case can
1 2

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (second day), 115 (second day), 396 (third day). Ibid, 117. 3 Ibid, 118-119. 4 Ibid, 119. 5 Galileo used the term celestial sphere in both the Ptolemaic sense that counterposes it to sublunar bodies primarily the Earth, and in a more technical, astronomical sense. With regard to the latter, The background of stars upon which the precessing path of the Earths spin axis is traced is called the celestial sphere. The celestial sphere is a coordinate system defined by a fictitious sphere of infinite radius on the inside of which are projected the positions of the fixed stars and the geocentric coordinate system defined at a given epoch Thus, the celestial north and south poles and the celestial equator are the projections of Earths North and South poles and Equator on the celestial sphere. Herbert Shaw, Craters, Cosmos, and Chronicles, 32. 6 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 119-120. 7 Ibid, 120. 8 Ibid, 188. The question is posed by Sagredo. Salviati provides a lengthy and, on Galilean assumptions, convincing response at Ibid,190-197. 9 Ibid, 116.

be made that this principle rises from a systematic reflection on experience in one of its non-mundane, comparative modalities itself. Salviati points out that, the goods with which a ship is laden leaving Venice, pass by Corfu, by Crete, by Cyprus and go to Aleppo. Venice, Corfu, Crete, etc., stand still and do not move with the ship, but as to the sacks, boxes, and bundles with which the boat is laden and with respect to the ship itself, the motion from Venice to Syria is as nothing, and in no way alters their relation among themselves.1 Thus, the central theoretical moment of immediate understanding itself is not given with that experience. Galileo must drive it home We do not witness the motion of the Earth because it is common to all of us and all share equally in it2. But Galileo, the Dialogue and two centuries of the development of the modern science of nature cannot make this so. It is counterintuitive and can only be understood analogically, e.g., by reference to the situation in shipping between Venice and Syria. But once science systematically entered production and reshapes the world of daily experience in and through the production of a world of commodities on a capitalist basis,3 the modern science of nature began to become part of our thoroughly theoretically mediated common sense. Science became a decisive moment in the actual production of material forms, these forms and the broadest, albeit inexplicated theoretically scientific categories they presuppose became embedded in and tacitly live in that experience itself, as those forms constitute the everyday sensible data of that, our experience. But until this moment, generations of humanity are stuck, so to speak, with this analogical form of understanding, and the logic of Galileos, and scientific, arguments must devolve on it: If, from the cargo in the ship, a sack were shifted from a chest one single inch, this alone would be more of a movement for it than the twothousand mile journey made by all of them together.4 Only on this basis, do the astronomical observations that Salviati relates (especially, those contained in arguments two, three and five) and explicitly theoretical arguments that he makes (those contained in arguments one, four, six and seven) make sense. But even on this basis, these (theoretical) arguments are not immediately intelligible to Peripatetic common sense. Another principle, bound up with the first, characteristic of bourgeois thought itself, is intertwined with the rest of the argument(s). This principle entails regularity, efficiency and economy in thought and practice, and here specifically in heavenly motions. It invokes Ockham. In offering his third argument in which he indicates a rotation of the whole heavenly sphere upsets the orderly circulation existing among those specific bodies, Salviati speaks of the alteration of a very harmonious trend and explicitly notes that the times he calculates for rotations of Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn with that of the requisite twenty-four hours for the entire celestial sphere is the minimal disorder that can be introduced. In his fourth argument, Salviati refers to the difficulty of the immense disparity in the motions of the stars as indeed a nuisance. In his sixth argument, he opposes the rotation of the Earth to that of the celestial sphere as more effective and convenient.5 Disorder of any sort whether minimal or tending toward maximal, difficulty that constitutes a nuisance, effectiveness yoked to convenient are not necessary expressions of a psychological state shaped by a compulsion for orderliness (though they may be), but a logical requirement of a type of argumentation and cognition for which economy in thought is, not just desirable but, de rigueur and essentially characterize rationality as such. The principle is present and operative from the start: Salviati concludes his first argument by asking, who is going to believe that nature has chosen to make an immense number of extremely large bodies move with inconceivable velocities, to achieve what could be done by a moderate movement of one single body around its own center? 6 This is an astronomical statement of the Ockhamist principle that the worth, value and effectiveness of argument and explanation is to be found in its economy, or, in Galileo's formulation a parenthetic portion of the previous citation
Ibid. Ibid, 116, 374 (third day). Galileo returns to this later over the course of several pages and in pursuing several digressions on the second day making the same point, again and necessarily analogically, by reference to a heavy stone dropped from the mast of ship, while it is stationary in harbor and while underway, moving by sail upon the winds of the sea (Ibid, 141-155). Salviati summarily remarks, the experiment will the show that the stone always falls in the same place on the ship, whether the ship is standing still or moving with any speed you please. Therefore, the same cause holding good on the earth as on the ship, nothing can be inferred about the earths motion or rest from the stone falling always perpendicularly to the foot of the tower (which references another discussion and experiment). Ibid, 144-145. 3 We identify this moment in the history of the development of capitalism with what we call the real domination of capital over labor. See the First Interlude, below. 4 Galileo, Ibid. 5 Ibid, 119, 119 and 120, respectively. 6 Ibid, 117.
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omitted by way of ellipsis by general agreement nature does not act by means of many things when it can do by means of few;1 or, as Sagredo much later argues more forcefully, Nature does not multiply things unnecessarily she makes use of the easiest and simplest means for producing her effects [and] she does nothing in vain2 Thus, we see that in central discussions of the Dialogue (the second day and as we shall see the third also),3 Galileo proceeded by polemically counterposing his Copernican perspective to the underlying Ptolemaic and Peripatetic view of the universe in a clash between concepts and theories (e.g., substance and accidents versus implicitly atoms and local motion) that are speculatively and logically grounded (i.e., where questions of consistency and internal coherence and not those of evidence are supreme), and, then, having established a perspective of weight and at least equivalent validity, he further developed his arguments on analogically sensible (perceptual) (second day) or geometric grounds (third day) and developed them by proceeding logically in the necessaritarian (not syllogistic) sense (i.e., if this, then that). It is within this framework that Galileo's (Salviati's) presentation is governed by demonstration in his sense in which, epistemologically, our senses are brought into agreement with intellect by way of theorization, observation and experiment.4 The structure of the argument on the third day follows far more than less the same format. After a lengthy discussion inclusive of extensive calculations disposing of a residue issue from the first day (the question of whether the supernova of 1572 and 1604 were celestial or sublunar phenomena),5 Salviati turns to the question of whether the Earth, like the other planets, rotates or orbits around a fixed center,6 which neatly dovetails with his avowed purpose of considering celestial phenomena in their relations to one another in order to buttress the Copernican perspective7 (or hypothesis, as he calls it). He begins by formulating the fundamental underlying position (one that is metaphysical because it lacks a real referent, where the sense of real is shared) that governs the Aristotelian-Peripatetic perspective: Whether the earth is or is not at that center around I say it turns it is necessary that we declare ourselves as to whether or not you and I have the same concept of this center.8 Simplicio responds straightforwardly: By center, he means that of the universe, the world, the stellar sphere, the heavens.9 But, in stating such, he misses the basic issue, for as Salviati indicates, I might very reasonably dispute whether there is in nature such a center, seeing that neither you nor anyone else has so far proved whether the universe is finite and has a shape, or whether it is infinite and unbounded.10 Galileo quickly much quicker than on the second day and for good reason11 grants Simplicio his unfounded Peripatetic assumption, eschewing the metaphysical question, and proceeds to evaluate the arguments for Earths centrality,12 but not without remarking that none of Aristotles arguments held unless this assumption was made for they all rested on it.13 (Thus, concession was made merely for the sake of argument, which no doubt
1

Ibid. Ibid, 397. 3 We shall forgo discussion of the fourth day. It is devoted to Galileos theory of tidal causation it is not accepted today (for this, see Drakes remarks, Ibid, 489, n. 415, the theorization itself appears at Ibid, 426-431, 431-434, 435-436) but what is most important for us is that, unlike in days two and three, Salviati does not legitimately buttress the Copernican perspective on the solar system. Instead and to the contrary, he explicitly presupposes (Ibid, 426) both the Earths diurnal and annual motions to make the case for that theorization. 4 See The Peripatetics (Aristotelians), Method and the New Science above, and the Note, Observation, Experience and Experiment in Galileo, below. The disparate results, and the inadequacy of the senses in and of themselves, is stated most forcibly by Galileo on the third day. In reference to the annual motion of the Earth around the sun, Salviati tells Sagredo that, I repeat, there is no limit to my astonishment when I reflect that Aristarchus and Copernicus were able to make reason so conquer sense that, in defiance of the latter, the former became mistress of their belief. Ibid, 328. 5 Ibid, 280-319 (third day). For the significance of this discussion the novas came into being and quickly passed away indicating that, if they were celestial in origins and nature, they were also transitory and mutable see this section, above. 6 Ibid, 319. 7 Ibid, 6. 8 Ibid, 319. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 As Drake points out (Ibid, 486, n. 319), this was dangerous ground for Galileo to tread since it was precisely for intransigently declaring the universe infinite that the Inquisition condemned Giorgione Bruno to death. 12 Ibid, 319-320. 13 Ibid, 320.
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enhanced the risk Galileo was taking.) As he did on the first day, Salviati continues, renewing his point of departure, by invoking powerfully convincing observations,1 i.e., theoretically mediated accounts of phenomena that are, as accounts, largely shared (viz., the specific theoretical premises mediating these observations are not apparent). Whereas on the second day, Salviati himself formulated the basis several (seven) arguments supporting the proposition the Earth turned on its own center on which the crucial discussion of that day hinged, by the third day discussion, argument and persuasion have come far enough that it is none other than Simplicio who articulates with Salviati deploying the Platonic mnemonic methos to assist him that basis (at least in the consideration of the motion of the planets), which consisted in (an instrumentally mediated) mathematical (calculative) and geometrical assessments of the spatial relations (distances) between Earth and the sun respectively, to one side, and the six planets (Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and the Earths moon) to the other side, all with regard to opposition and conjunction.2 On this basis (which entails the production by Simplicio of a correct diagrammatic representation3 of the known solar system on heliocentric assumptions that include a fixed center), the crucial discussion of this, the third, day hinged and follows, and in unfolding proceeds by way of, the same format, opposition of the two chief world systems (Copernican and Ptolemaic) and consideration of their relative merits with a view to coherency and the fullest account of celestial phenomena. From here on, the discourse in its structure shifts ever so much from the second to the third day: Simplicio quotes Aristotle less, is also less certain of his Peripatetic convictions; while Salviati proceeds with more confidence, more often putting forth both potential Peripatetic criticism of Copernican,4 as well winning responses, and Copernican criticisms of Ptolemy,5 which appear unchallengeable. Of particular interest and import were the three major difficulties of the Ptolemaic-Aristotle view of a geocentrically centered solar system: For here, natural bodies with circular motions, the sun, planets and the moon, were described in terms of irregular motion with respect to their own centers but regularly around the Earth; to conform to observable movements (to appearances), these bodies were made to move in contrary directions (retrograde motion); and, to move at varying speeds, that is, to move fast at one moment, slower at another, and even to stop and then advance. (Thus, Ptolemy was compelled to introduce epicycles to account for these observed characteristics, where observation, of course, is relative to, the Earth-bound observer.)6 Within the mathematical (i.e., geometric) limits of his explanation,7 Galileo was able to offer a diagrammatically described, far simpler and far more elegant account on his heliocentric assumptions.8 This, the consideration of planetary motion and in particular retrograde motion, planetary stoppings and advances, constitutes the first major investigation of the third day; the second major investigation is formed in the account and discussion of sunspots.9 While the discussion is lucid, more elegant in the Galilean sense than that of the Letters on Sunspots, the presentation being geometric and visual (i.e., graphic), and while Galileo reaffirms his Ockhamist commitments in his (Platonically) dialectical and critical examination of the Ptolemaic account of sunspots, what is really interesting in the discussion is methodological and philosophical.10 Methodologically, in his account of
1 2

Ibid, 321. Ibid, 321-326. Opposition and conjunction are astronomically relational events, used by Galileo to designate the relations among sun, Earth and a third heavenly body (the moon or one of the known planets). The former occurs as the Earth, sun and say the moon, all at the same celestial longitude, are on a line with the Earth between them. It will produce a full moon or (infrequently) a lunar eclipse (at the point in the moons orbit when it is closest to the Earth). Conjunction, on the other hand, occurs as, on the same celestial longitude, the sun and moon are on the same side of the Earth (moon is positioned between sun and Earth). It will produce a full moon or (rarely) a solar eclipse. 3 Ibid, 323. 4 Ibid, e.g., 329-330, 334, 339-340. 5 Ibid, e.g., 331-333, 335-336, 337-339, 340. 6 Ibid, 341-342. 7 For this limitation, see Conclusion, II, below. 8 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 342-344. 9 Ibid, 347-351. The third and final major investigation of the third day involves making the case for alterations and differences that ought to be perceivable in the fixed stars so-called on the basis of annual movement of the Earth. Ibid, 368-379, and, less directly, 390-396. 10 Ibid, 353-355. Salviati recounts the Ptolemaic account and shows it requires four distinct motions. He states, Now if these four motions, so incongruous with each other and yet necessarily all attributable to the single body of the sun, could b reduced to a single and very simple one then really it seems to me that this decision could not be rejected. Ibid, 355. In point of fact there is more at stake than this. The incongruities require a series of ad hoc hypotheses (see Ibid, 354-355) or the abandonment unacceptable to Galileo and the science he founds and that undergoes extensive development starting from him of universal causality.

his Lincean Academician friend (i.e., Galileo) Salviati (again, Galileo) began from, undeveloped to be sure, a heliocentric projection of solar system relations, made a series of observations, elaborated his initial theorization and returned to observation, now carried out systematically and carefully over a number of months, and then formalized the theorization (inclusive of its geometric form of presentation). This practice, mutually mediating theorization and (observational) experience is, methodologically speaking, a process of concretion and dialectical in our sense.1 Philosophically, against the force of his own arguments which in various places he (Salviati) declares convincing, sound, doubtless, free of incongruities and inanities and based on correct demonstrations2 Galileo continued to uphold the charade that he does not give the arguments the status of either conclusiveness or of inclusiveness, since his intention has not been to solve anything about this momentous question, but merely to set forth those physical and astronomical reasons which the two sides set forth. 3 (Salviati refers to the entire exercise in terms of neither affirming or denying anything, but merely a practice in which the participants philosophize jokingly and in sport, having made certain assumptions and desiring to argue about them among[st] themselves, among friends.)4 The problem is that the further the interlocutors develop their discussion, the deeper Salviati probes, the clearer it is that compelling logic and evidence support his Copernican position Is the Dialogue Science? With academic philosophers and historians of science who defend this paradigm of bourgeois theory (i.e., the modern science of nature) as a universal human achievement, the Dialogue is largely believed to be something a little less than real science. Among those whose works have been cited herein, Koyr exemplifies this attitude: The astronomical part of the Dialogue is particularly weak. Galileo completely ignores not only Keplers discoveries but also even the concrete content of the works of Copernicus. The heliocentrism offered us here by Galileo is of the very simplest form (the sun in the centre with the planets in circular motion around it), a form which Galileo knew to be false.5 Of course, not all philosophers of science agree with this assessment.6 The larger part of Koyrs argument, of course, is that Galileo was a Platonist 7 for Koyr, there are only two authentic forms of philosophizing, Platonic and Aristotelian that genuine science is mathematical and Platonic, i.e., proceeds deductively to generate laws in Koyr it appears this is ex nihilo, that is, without reference to sensuous instances (in science, experimentally generated observations) that exemplify the law (universal) as, say, in Husserl, but then, there is that curious account in the Discourses and Demonstrations of the law of falling bodies where bodies of different weights are said to fall at the same speed in a vacuum, an account which is initially observationally grounded, not deduced8 Galileo did ignore Keplers findings,9 but then he did so consistently from 1609, from that time at which we know with certainty he was aware of them, right down to the end of his life (thus, inclusive of the 1638 Discourses and Demonstrations, real science for Koyr). The heliocentric view Galileo defended it was not exactly what Copernicus defended is not as simple as Koyr makes it out to be since the stars that constitute the celestial sphere, and knowledge, understanding and calculations of their motions weighed heavily in his assessment that the
1

Ibid, 347, 352. In our sense the dialectical character of Galileos method is briefly discussed in the account of the alignment of the senses with intellect (reason), this Study, Galileo and Aristotle, III: Law, the New Science, Anti-Aristotle, above, and in the further discussion of a priori and a posteriori arguments in Note 1, Observation, Experiment and Experience in Galileo, below. Further, see the Fourth Study, Part III, The Materialist Dialectic and Theory of Truth, and Part IV, Critique of Historicism, the concluding three paragraphs, below. 2 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, passim. 3 Ibid, 357. 4 Ibid, 358. 5 Galileo Studies, 222, n. 115. See also the critical remarks vis--vis Koyrs unconsciously ideological understanding of Galileo in the Note, Observation, Experience and Experiment in Galileo, below. 6 Drake's appreciation of Galileos science is broad yet specific, and, from the perspective of Galileos crucial and irreplaceable work in the development of science, goes far beyond Koyrs petty criticism. See his notes to this (his) translation of the Dialogue, e.g., Ibid, 476-477 (n. 165), 478, (n. 194, 199, 201), 479 (n. 213, 216), 480 (n. 223, 228, 230), 486 (n. 319), 487-488 (n. 372), and 490 (n. 451). 7 Galileo Studies, 205, 207, 208, 223 n. 223 and 226 n. 188. Then, of course, there is Koyres Metaphysics and Measurement which devotes an entire chapter to Galileo and Plato, 16-43. 8 Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, 72-74 , discussed in the opening paragraphs of The Peripatetics (Aristotelians), Method and the New Science, above. See the second footnote in the section. 9 In this respect (i.e., with regard to the Dialogue), see Drakes remarks, Ibid, 490 (n. 455, 462).

Earth must revolve on its center and around the sun. Galileo recognized the positions of these stars are not fixed, as, for example, evinced by the discussions of the supernovas. 1 The sun is a star, even on Ptolemaic assumptions a part of the celestial sphere. Tacitly, in this regard (that is, as a star) Galileo also recognized the sun has its own motion, and explicitly in the discussion of sunspots on the third day, this was particularly important for his argument he asserted the sun rotated around its own axis (or its center, and that axis is tilted, not perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic)2 The year 1632 is not 1939, and even if there are formal similarities (central Europe in its entirely is at war) the Thirty Years War is not a historical analog to the last imperialist world war, for in the first case it is the old tributary order which is struggling to retain its limited hegemony against nascent capitalism, and in the second case the conflict within capitalism between the democratic imperialists and their atavistic, totalitarian counterparts. The formal freedoms to publish that Koyr took for granted (which could be taken for granted to the extent that science and the technologies of capital it animates are decisive, determinate inputs to production, i.e., precisely because science is at home in the world of capital) had little relevance and even less meaning in the world in which Galileo lived and operated. Galileo knew the form of heliocentrism that Koyr imputed to him is false (and we assume he did, but then it was not what he defended). His position was patently contradictory, but not so much logically but as a lived contradiction in the sense that Galileo was too far ahead of his times... We shall come back to this shortly... Here note though, first, that nowhere did he fetishize the heliocentrically fixed position of the sun (as we indicated, his arguments implicitly suggested otherwise); and, second, that he was, above all and for better or worse, a man of and for his times, a passionate anti-Aristotelian committed to Copernicanism as the sole framework in which he could openly defend the new science, a project which had its first premise getting the work (the Dialogue) by the censors, stamped with Church (Dominican) approval. Having made the fateful decision to leave Venice (i.e., compelled by his own bourgeois instincts that found him hoodwinking the Venetian Senate over his telescope) and return to Florence, this project was necessarily pursued under carefully scrutinizing Church eyes... Had he been able to consistently develop (and develop here entails publishing and openly discussing) his atomistic predilections, this research program, the Dialogue might well had an additional, more scientific aspect (in Koyr's sense). But, then, developments of this sort were made possible by, socially and historically presupposed, precisely the struggles that he went through (which, is not to say and affirmation of this is part of the sense of our argument, that his work cannot be reduced to an effort to avoid the censors). Koyr, whose self-appointed task appears to be to preserve the sanctity of a Platonized science (i.e., one detached from its lifeblood, capital, which is ironic since science is as just as abysmally parasitic, as the vampire, capital, it draws its strength from), does not, emphatically does not, grasp the methodological significance of his truly great works The Starry Messenger, The Assayer, and the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems and their import for the new science of the bourgeoisie as it was beginning to emerge as a historical class. Instead, he vastly prefers the lifeless abstractions of the Discourses and Demonstrations, a study of simple bodies based on geometry, a straightforward accompaniment to his study of simple machines (On Mechanics) dating from his last decade at Padua. Published outside the Italian Peninsula (in Leiden), the Discourses appeared as Galileo knew his life was nearly its end, and, though atomism does appear in the latter,3 it appears strictly within the confines of a mathematical phenomenalism disconnected from its philosophical (here or in this case, astronomical and cosmological) implications and consequences: It is devoid of animating character as, what we today would call, a metaphysically constructed set of assumptions for the purpose of forming a guiding research project for scientific inquiry and analysis (as Galileos atomism in The Assayer functioned). In this respect, the Discourses and Demonstrations sadly symbolized the internalization of Church strictures on his work. Published abroad, in it Galileo could have fully explored that atomistic research program. He did not. Instead, it was the work of a man who had been castigated, humiliated and beat down. Make no mistake about it, it was the work of a defeated man.
1

Ibid, 461-462, where without even reference to the supernovas Salviati asserts the extremely accurate measurements may detect minimal motions of the fixed stars that otherwise remain imperceptible. 2 Ibid, 350, 351-352. 3 Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, for example, 49, 51-52, 55, 60-61, where Salviati provides geometrical arguments for the necessary of vacuums (vacua) within the framework of an account of indivisibles (even called atoms) in the constitution of a infinitely sided polygon as it is projected on to a circle.

Conclusion, I Triumph of the New Science There are historically transcendent themes in Galileos new science that derive from his project of mathematizing nature. The conceptual elaboration call it his new science he developed to realize this end (telos) included methodological determinism, his orientation toward quantitatively expressible laws, the truth and efficacy of demonstration constituted in bringing the senses into agreement with the intellect, die Gedankexperiment. These cannot be exhausted in terms of an extreme historicist thesis: It cannot, for example, be reduced to a manoeuvre (e.g., forgoing elaboration of an atomistic metaphysics) aimed at avoiding heretical condemnation and further proscription The mathematization of nature (proceeding by way of the geometrization of space, if you will by way of Archimedes) was, in fact, crucial for the development of the new science. It is crucial because without it the problem of motion cannot be solved, i.e., until motion is quantified it is impossible to technically elaborate practical procedures involved in systematic nature mastery. Short of this, for example, all machines or devices that do work will at best be modeled on movements of (parts of) the human (or animal) body, with the sharply curtailed multiples of human (or animal) effort this entails, which, effectively, is merely the equivalent of recruiting additional labor, manpower if you will, to complete a task or project. Once the problem (of motion) is solved (it is only inadequately so in Galileo), it will in principle become possible to create means, procedures, instruments and tools, always as we shall see yoked to capital accumulation, that vastly multiply human effort and that, precisely they have such capacity, have no analogue in the human (or animal) body1 Aristotles account, involving from our standpoint an expansive sense of causality (including material and final causes absent in Galileo), is of course, qualitative, and cannot, without at least doing violence to the sense of Aristotelian concerns, be mathematized. Aristotle, then, started from the experience of daily life and, within both the cultural and theoretical contexts in which he moved and operated, developed an elaborate, sophisticated theory of natural motion. Mathematization (geometricization) of these bodies means that Galileo, on the other hand, was dealing with ideal shapes (circles or spheres, straight lines or level planes, etc.) Stated differently, these bodies are dealt with purely in their quantitative aspect, and it is sufficient to consider them as such. The core of the debate between the two, Galilean and Aristotle, physics remained the difference in accounts of "bodies in motion." Accordingly, for Galileo, there was nothing on the order of "natural places" recall it is this assumption, together with that of the Earth as the stationary center of the universe, that made Aristotles account of the free fall of bodies so intuitively obvious Galileo's world, the world of science, begins with theoretical projection of a centerless, i.e., nonEarth-centered, perhaps infinite, or, preferably, boundless universe. While various formations within that universe may exhibit symmetry, without a center and limitation there can be no natural place to which bodies tend toward and where they rest Its presentation too begins with a theoretical projection, Gedankexperiment or thought experiment. (Who, pray tell, has ever seen or witnessed a frictionless body moving in a straight line endlessly?) Only those with the crudest notions of the role of theory in human existence think otherwise. At any rate, everyone in daily life is a good Aristotelian, knowing that this body will gradually slowdown eventually coming to a full stop If ideal shapes moving, as it were, in geometrical space are not real bodies moving in real space, Galileo, to the contrary, took mathematized shapes as real instances of bodies: For him, bodies could accordingly be indifferent not only to place but also to one another: In principle, they are, given similar masses, interchangeable. For him, these bodies tend toward perpetual motion, and, under ideal conditions (conditions that Galileo considered real), bodies will regardless of weight (whether rock or feather) move the same distance in the same period of time. But, to be sure, eternal, straight-line motion is an ideal condition: It is in principle unwitnessable and unverifiable; it occurs in an imaginary, empty (vacuous) and boundless space; and, it is a product of this imaginary experiment It is enough to have stated these differences to grasp that, materially (that is, as regards contents) and logically, the two theories in question are not comparable. Even more broadly and in point of fact, late sixteenth century impetus theory with its quasi-Aristotelian cosmological assumptions, Galilean physics with its Copernican metaphysics and Newtonian celestial mechanics all account for the phenomenon of daily life, say a projectile, the motion of a thrown stone after it has left the hand, and do so with similar facility and consistency. Of course, that consistency is internal, i.e., refers us to the relation of the terms of the description of such phenomena to their basic theoretical assumptions.
1

Under the heading of Capitalist Technology and Technologies of Capital, see the discussion of de-organization in the Postscript, below.

To boot, the latter are not reducible one to another, for example, Galilean physics cannot be explained as an instance of Newtonian mechanics, and the concepts which as propositions form the basic assumptions of one theory cannot be defined coherently integrated into another, say, impetus theory into Newtons mechanics,1 or, in our language, the theories are incommensurate. Thus, not only were both theories that of Galileo and the Peripatetic elaboration of Aristotle in the experimental sense coeval (that is, both could in the same measure make predictions within the same margin of error),2 but within the framework of daily culture of the tributary West (i.e., exclusive of the merchant, banking, great artisan layers of the rising class situated largely along the coastal edges of this social formation), Aristotelian assumptions with regard to natural phenomena constituted prosaic common sense.3 On this basis alone, Galileos mechanics should never have scientifically established, much less triumphed. Why, then, did it? Galileo was aware of this situation, whether his audience was or not. A master stylist, in his major works he parodied Aristotle and the Peripatetics with an intelligent yet foolishly misguided speaker who defended the Peripatetic perspective. Familiar with both intellectual perspectives, in all likelihood Galileo recognized there could be no outright theoretical victory over Aristotle, or the Aristotle as understood by the Peripatetics. Yet, it is just as likely that he recognized the world familiar to contemporary Aristotelians was not the world his audience lived and acted in The logical and content-based incommensurability of the two theories probably escaped this audience, the middling groups in the tributary Italian Peninsula and beyond, the fabled rising bourgeoisie 4 For his audiences standpoint, the intellectual content of Galileo's argument, we suggest, simultaneously appeared theoretical and social: Galileo's critical destruction of Aristotelian physics would have also been taken, even first and foremost taken, as an element in an attack on a hegemonic but declining tributary culture, in particular on the Church, its concerns, expectations, demands all of which impinged on banking, merchant and artisan-becoming-industrialist practices (regarding, e.g., usury, questions of the treatment of the poor, the exploitation of labor). And, thus, for this reason (one that has otherwise mystified certain scholars) Galileo wrote in the vernacular.5 In the context of an account of motion congruent with the commerce- and work-based concerns of the emerging active bourgeois elements in the societies of Europe, the absence, or, rather the successful elimination, of forms and final causes, obliquely implying the devaluation of the moral order of the world the Peripatetics were rooted in, largely constituted the substance of Galileo's victory over Aristotle.

See Paul Feyerabend, Explanation, Reduction and Empiricism, 46-62; and the same authors Realism, Rationalism and Scientific Method, 62-67, for a discussion of incommensurability with reference to Newton mechanics and 16th century impetus theory. Similarly, Duhem states that it is impossible to establish any relationship between the first principles of this dynamics and the essential axioms of Newtonian dynamics, Medieval Cosmology, 374. The unidentified dynamics refers to that of the tradition as he, and others who write strictly intellectual histories, reconstituted it, running from the ancient commentators on Aristotle, through their latter Arab counterparts, Ibn Bajja, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), to the Scholastics and even to 14th century Parisian nominalists. A quite different (though analogous) situation developed in nineteenth century physics. Meyerson described the dilemma that arose in experimental verification of the principle of the conservation of energy. In determining the quantity of heat required to increase the temperature of a point water by 1 F, Joules data were not only wildly at variance with those of Sadi Carnot and J.R. Mayer, but with themselves. Meyerson concluded, it becomes really difficult to suppose that a conscientious scientist, relying solely on experimental data, could have been able to arrive at the conclusion that the equivalent must constitute, under all conditions, an invariable datum. Identity and Reality, 194-195. Meyerson understood the problem of the character of energy (its tendency to dissipate itself) in terms of the necessary linkage of the specific conditions of the experiment to the principle (law) formulated (Ibid, 195-196). Granted. Further, if, as we hold, specific theoretical elements enter to the construction of an experiment, we may also have to reach back and examine that relation. 2 Feyerabend, Realism, Rationalism and Scientific Method, 59-60, 275 n.66, 318-322. For example, Ptolemy gave the maximum distance of the Earth to the sun as 1210 terrestrial (i.e., Earth) radii; Copernicus gave it as 1179; and Galileo gave it as 1208. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Stillman Drake's notes to the text, 487 (n. 359). All distance vastly underestimated by a factor of roughly 19 the distance as measured today. Ibid, 482 (n. 253). See also Ibid, 294-307 (third day) and, in particular, Drakes remarks on this discussion, Ibid, 484 (n. 297), 485 (n. 302). 3 Feyerabend, Ibid, 318-322. 4 Stillman Drake (Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, 2) makes the same point less the class specificity. 5 Confirmed in a negative way by Charles Schmitt, who wrote in a remark cited above that Latin was the international language of the scientific community.

Conclusion, II Quality, Measurement, Quantity The modern science of nature did not spring from the head of Galileo, fully elaborated. A long development postdated him, in its mathematical aspects receiving novel treatment well down into the middle of the nineteenth century and beyond. For Galileo, to mathematize nature meant to merely geometricize it, to conceive and understand its underlying intelligibility in terms of ideal perfect shapes, triangles, straight lines, spheres, etc., which, existing only in areal Euclidean space, he took to be really real. Methodologically in Galileo we do not, furthermore, find an orientation toward prediction, which, in turn, yields a separate and distinctive, fetishized practice of testing. This orientation was not a matter of whim or caprice. It did not emerge in Galileo because it could not: Effectively for him, and for the entire development of the modern science of nature at its origins which took shape and then crystallized in polemical opposition to Aristotelian natural philosophy, geometrical shapes are measurable qualities, which are accorded primacy in relation to perceptual ones. In this singular feature, Galileo did not go beyond Aristotle or, more preferably, Peripatetic natural philosophy as it had developed over the past three quarters of a century: His thought was tied to it precisely because its development, genuinely novel as it was, was fully and always in opposition to it Perhaps it is characteristic of all rationalist philosophy as such, and surely of the modern science of nature, but Galileo was also further tied to Aristotle in fundamentally positing not merely orderliness in nature, but the best order,1 meaning nature maximizes order (e.g., symmetry) and, beyond Aristotle (or following Ockham), economy Thus, a fundamental shift has yet to occur, and it would only occur when these measurable qualities were reduced to quantities (and not just to quantitative qualities), which, in turn, has allowed for numerically determined predictions validated by experimentation now understood as testing. In this regard, Galileo did not, in other words, attempt an arithmetization of geometry (for which nature has the meaning of mere spatio-temporal magnitudes). Thus, his mathematized nature had not undergone a decisive transformation for which it, nature, has the sense of functional relations holding between pure numerical configurations.2 This was the limitation of the Galilean science of nature. In our view, the first and decisive step in its remedialization was undertaken by Leibniz and Newton in their respective, independent creations of an integral calculus, for, because the calculus can provide us with rates of change of a given quantity (figure the slope of a curve at a given point, calculate the area bounded by a curve, permit us to compute minimal and maximal values of functions, etc.), it was here from this point forward that motion could be understood without reference to qualitative determinants, strictly in terms of number. Once a start on arithmetization is made, the road to a technification of method, so to speak, an ongoing improvement centered upon elaboration of formalizing aspects in the development of laws, of lawful formulae, can be and was undertaken, without regard to initial content (i.e., quantified determinants themselves become content). It is in this technification that the origins of those phenomena, the qualitative features and characteristics of bodies as they are perceptually experienced, is completely lost sight of, forgotten or, avoiding all subjectivizing, methodologically concealed, then obliterated, i.e., beginning from the phenomenal distinction between primary and secondary qualities, the separate of quantity from quality is, automatically if you will, transposed into a doctrine (metaphysical in the scientific sense, to be sure) that rests on the radical, ontological distinction between reality and illusion. The specific contemporary form of this doctrine is what we call physicalism.3 For it is only when a purely quantitative determination of natural phenomena became possible, that statements about these phenomena, first, can take the form of general propositions about functional dependencies obtaining between measured quantities, and then, be formulated as laws concerning these functional dependencies, laws that are in the strict sense numerically expressed, laws that give rise to predictions which are, in turn, subject to experimental testing. Eventually, on this basis nature can without further reflection simply be assumed to have the meaning of spatio-temporal magnitudes.4 At this moment (and every step along the way as aspects of movement that rises to
1

The integral parts of the world [are assumed] to be disposed in the best order. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 44 (first day), 46; 115 (second day), 242. 2 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Science, 43-48, esp. 44. 3 See the Fourth Study, Part III, The Materialist Dialectic. 4 Husserl, Ibid, 45.

this moment), the elaboration of scientific method in and through which sensuous surrounding (earthly) nature and the totality (of nature) in which it and we are embedded, rejoins the original projection of nature as a mathematical world-in-itself, a purely quantitative assemblage of bodies in motion, which has its everyday common sense counterpart in the immediate intuition of nature as a raw material basins for capitalist production, a point that in the history of the development of capitalism we identify with the real domination of capital over in production.1 From this moment forward, the modern science of nature is strictly determined in the methodological sense. Discussion of this development will have to wait until our Fourth Study.

See the First Interlude, Real Domination, below.

Note1 Observation, Experience and Experiment in Galileo Alexander Koyr wrote, The only role in the birth of classical physics played by observation, in the sense of simple observation, the observation of common sense, was that of an obstacle.1 Yes, in Galileo, observation is not perception, that is, it is not immediate experience in its sensible (sensuous) form. For him, it is nonetheless a form of experience, but complexly mediated. In a passage already cited above, Koyr also stated, As for experimentation the methodical interrogation of nature it presupposes both the language in which its questions are to be posed and a terminology which makes it possible to interpret natures replies.2 While this tacitly begs the question of just how language and a terminology, i.e., concepts and their syntheses as theories, originate, setting aside this question, indeed, this too is so. But if observation is not perception, then, in Galileo, neither is it experiment as we understand the term, i.e., it is not one in which investigation entails a carefully designed, theoretically prepared artificial situation that, in testing a prediction, presents us with results that validate or falsify a hypothesis, law, theory, whatever, from which the prediction had been derived. However, Koyrs reading of Galileo, as a Platonist pure and simple, is simply wrongheaded (perhaps an attempt to assimilate him to the exalted science of his own day, e.g., relativity physics, and distinguish him from its, one gets the sense, bastardizations in the Anglo-American world, the practice of which has always been tacitly and today has openly become synonymous with science as such). And while it is correct to say that in Galileo, The experiment supports or weakens an argument. It does not replace it,3 it is simply mistaken to state, The experiments which Galileo, and others after him, appealed to, even those which he did actually perform, were not and could never be anything more than thought experiments,4 and not just because to actually perform an experiment, to sensuously engage oneself in a bodily acting that involves the deployment of instruments, is to go beyond merely thinking (i.e., imagining), but it is fail utterly and miserably to grasp the role and significance of the activity of experimentation in Galileo: He did invoke experiments (including those with real bodies) as well as observational experience in his attempted refutation of Aristotle or the Peripatetics as the case may have been, it is just that he cited, invoked or rested his case on experiment only as a concluding moment in a demonstration, one that renders it, the demonstration, intuitively self-evident. Koyr provoked indignation from those that argue for the centrality of experimentalism (with, if not empiricism then, its eschewal of any mathematical Platonism) in Galileo, and tacitly in the modern science of nature (Rossi, Drake),5
1
2

Galileo Studies, 2. Emphasis in original. Ibid. Similarly, Emile Meyerson: But does not the very manner in which Galileo presents the facts show clearly that it is a question of experiments that are not real, but merely imagined ones, what the Germans call thought-experiments (Gedankexperimente)? It was in his imagination that Galileo set up his infinitely smooth plane, and there he inclines it less and less, sometimes in one direction, sometimes in the other; this is why he does not deem it necessary to give a single precise datum, a single figure resulting from these experiments. Moreover, Galileo himself takes care to warn us of this. The passage from the Sixth Day [sic?] is only the development of another passage, probably of old origin, which is in the Fourth Day. This begins with the words: Any moving body projected upon a horizontal plane I conceive of by Thought (mente concipio) as isolated from every hindrance' What is the real foundation of Galileos demonstration? On the horizontal plane motion is uniform, for there exists no cause of acceleration or of retardation It must, moreover, be remarked that every degree of velocity which is found in a moving object is, by its very nature, impressed upon it in an indelible fashion when one removes the external causes of acceleration or of retardation, as takes place in a horizontal plane alone It follows equally that motion on a horizontal plane is eternal. [He, like] Descartes[,] always presents inertia as a pure deduction scarcely mention[ing] real circumstance. Identity and Reality, 143-144. Finally, we can cite Einstein who, in asserting the logical impossibility of abstracting fundamental concepts and postulates from experience, touched on the problem of incommensurability in this way: It is perfectly evident from the fact that we can point to two essentially different principles, both of which correspond with experience to a large extent, proving at the same time that every attempt at a logical deduction of the basic concepts and postulates of mechanics from elementary experiences is doomed to failure (Essays on Science, 16, 17). 3 Koyr, Ibid, 99. 4 Ibid, 37. 5 This statement is preceded by the following, An Archimedean physics means a deductive and abstract mathematical physics; and it was just such a physics that Galileo was to develop at Padua. A physics of mathematical hypotheses; a physics in which the laws of motion, the law of the fall of bodies, are deduced abstractly, without involving the idea of force, without recourse to experiments with real bodies (emphasis added.)

those for whom Galileo fused an empirical mechanics and the science of motion into a solid whole of theoretical knowledge,1 and who recognize, for science, a fact is only that which is arrived at on the basis of precise criteria of a theoretical character.2 So what does an experiment, not merely a thought experiment, in Galileos sense look like? In the Dialogue, toward the end of the first day, Salviati proposes and undertakes experiments aimed at demonstrating to Simplicio that the moon is not a sphere possessing a polished surface, but has the same, broadly speaking, rough surface as the Earth (i.e., the one, a celestial body, is homogenous with the other, a terrestrial body). There are two experiments, each concerning reflected (sun) light. They involve mirrors and walls,3 and a (folded) piece of paper. Consider both, especially the latter. Arguing the Peripatetic position, Simplicio believes that a polished and smooth surfaced body reflects light far more than a rough surfaced body with irregular features. This is an inference from the view that celestial bodies, qualitatively dissimilar to the Earth, as immutable and inalterable are noble and perfect; and that, as perfect, are spherical and have a surface that is smooth. The discussion and (first) experiment with mirrors and their reflected light as it appears on a courtyard wall and an interior wall establishes that a mirror reflects light brilliantly (more vividly), but it concentrates that light, whereas a rough (and moreover dark surface) defuses it so that the reflected light appears to illuminate a much greater surface area.4 It defuses light because the surface of the rough wall is composed of countless very small surfaces placed in an innumerable diversity of slopes, among which of necessity many happen to be arranged so as to send rays they reflect to one place, and many others to another, thus this dispersal creates the diffusion over the entire surface on which the light (suns) rays fall.5 The reflection of the suns light on a rough surfaced wall analogously exhibits why the moon does not possess, like the Earth, a polished, smooth surface such as that of a mirror. Salviati summaries, the same body on which the illuminating rays fall shows itself lighted and bright all over when looked at from any place. Therefore the moon, by being a rough surface rather than smooth, sends the suns light in all directions, and looks equally light to all observers. If the surface, being spherical, were as smooth as a mirror, it would be entirely invisible, seeing that that very small part of it which can reflect the image of the sun to the eyes of any individual would remain invisible because of the great distance6 Sagredo queries why the greater irregularity of the surface makes the reflection of the light more powerful (remember Galileo in the person of Salviati has just stated that it is better understood as more diffuse). Salviati responds that, assuming the same source of light, a surface is more or less illuminated depending on whether rays of light fall upon it less or more obliquely, the greatest illumination occurring where the rays are perpendicular to the surface. He offers to show Sagredo just how and this is the second experiment by taking a sheet of paper and folding it, so that one part makes an angle with other, and then exposing it to the light reflected from the wall opposite to us (which is reflecting sunlight). He comments, you see how this part that receives the rays obliquely is less light than this other where the rays fall at right angles. Then, tilting the folded piece of paper, he notes, the illumination becomes weaker as I make it receive them [the rays of light] more and more obliquely. 7 Typical of Galileos experiments with real bodies (here the piece of paper), this is quite simple, and easily reproducible. One

And elsewhere (Ibid, 97) Koyr asserts, it is scarcely necessary to say that, as is almost always the case with Galileo, it is a matter of a thought experiment Drake states Galileo taught his students what later became to be known as experimental philosophy. It was not appreciably different from what we call scientific method, and then in a footnote offers the following gloss: Modern scientific method is characterized by an inseparable linkage of theory to experiment, in such a way that no theory may properly be called scientific unless it implies experiments or observations capable of supporting or destroying it Introduction to his selections from The Assayer in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, 226. This too is a view that cannot be sustained, as Koyr states and as we shall show. 1 Paolo Rossi, Philosophy, Technology and the Arts in the Early Modern Era, 112. 2 Ibid, 114. Emphasis in original. 3 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (first day), 71-77. 4 Ibid, 74, 76-77. 5 Ibid, 77. 6 Ibid, 78. 7 Ibid.

can, in fact, do it oneself with, of course, the same results1 (and, of course, in the modern science of nature this reproducibility ad infinitum is essentially characteristic of the publicly accessible character of science). Galileos experiments those conducted with real bodies do not entail the meticulous construction of a situation that does not exist in nature (rather they involve objects that are present in the world of daily practice, objects that are ready to hand);2 they do not produce novel conditions (but instead attempt to merely reproduce existing natural conditions); and they are not undertaken to test a prediction in order to validate a theory or hypothesis which, in turn, is governed by the aim of nature domination (whether it is socially formed human nature, animal nature, abiotic nature, their interstices or the system of their interrelations). His experiments are of a different order. They were undertaken in order to illustratively facilitate understanding thereby concluding a demonstration by bringing about intuitive clarity. In this respect, Galileo, entirely un-modern and anticipating nothing of the future traditions of experimental philosophy with its designs of manipulating natural phenomenon, preserves a remnant patrimony of Italian humanism. Koyr is ideationally blind to this, the distinctive sense of experiment in Galileo because he is polemically committed to one of the older forms of false consciousness among the historical generations of bourgeois intellectuals, that is, to a history of ideas that unfolds independently of social development, for which science is a cognitive product, a profound insight into the structure of the (naturally) real, and which, of course, permits him to sever in thought all ties of science to society, i.e., the bourgeoisie and capital. Koyr is missing a key component of Galileos science, experiment in a practical sense that together with observation, and reflection or theorization forms a unitary structure that is his science. This is a gross misunderstanding and blindness, which can be traced back to a misapprehension of the character of knowledge itself and how it is produced. Galileo himself provided us with the basis for understanding this misapprehension in this manner: In reference to Aristotle and remarking on Simplicios distinction between arguments a priori and a posteriori, Salviati states, What you refer to is the method he uses in writing his doctrine, but I do not believe it to be that with which he investigated it. Rather, I think it certain that he first obtained it by means of the senses, experiments, and observations, to assure himself as much as possible of his conclusions. Afterward he sought means to make them demonstrable.3 Because as we have established for Galileo observation and experiment contain theoretical elements, Galileo contra Koyr, Meyerson, and others implicitly argues here for a dialectical relation of theory and perception, one for which, epistemologically, knowledge including scientific knowledge at its origins is inseparably deductive and inductive (or, if you prefer as we do, neither deductive nor inductive). How so? How does he know this about Aristotle? He knows it because, it is also his method, but not just his method, but starting from the distinction between the logic of investigation and that of presentation in its formal aspect the method of thought itself. Thus, those like Koyr who insist that Galileo is a Platonist only grasp the end product The Dialogue is not in fact a book about astronomy, nor even about physics. It is above all a critique, a polemical and combative didactic and philosophical,4 but it is only a semi-scientific work.5 Here science appears only in its objectified, finalized form, as the contents of the presentation so that in Galileo it only appears most fully developed in the Discourses and Demonstrations (which represent[s] a very much higher level of abstraction,6 i.e., formalization). Only on the basis of a narrow, onesided analysis that merely understands thought in terms of its objectified products can Koyr (and others) claim, sort of a bourgeois reflex, that this is Galileos science tout court.7
1

See also, Ibid, 83, where Salviati, folding it another way, uses the same piece of paper in order examine another aspect of obliquity in illuminating a surface. 2 The best examples (reference to which will recur in this work) that point up this situation come from biological sciences modeled on the modern science of nature and not physics; for example, an octopus with its ganglia detached or a decerebrate cat anatomical and physiological conditions that are not found in nature butchered in order to construct a reflex physiology (i.e., a science of social control of human beings and animal nature understood as systems of internal causal relations) or fruit flies massed in a glass jar to determine a rate of reproduction isolated from those actual conditions predation, seasonal changes, etc., under which species reproduction is achieved. 3 Ibid, 51. 4 Koyr, Ibid, 158. 5 Ibid, 97. 6 Ibid, 197. 7 Theoretically elaborated on the basis of other insights or merely tacit assumptions that have been made explicit as the case may be, the issue further devolves on to the theorization of the real that underlies the manner of presentation. While, Koyr argues, in Galileo it is the abstract

Note2 Galileo and the Jesuits: Atomism and the Eucharist Controversy Maffeo Barberini was not merely Galileos patron. There was retrospectively at least an element of friendship involved in their relation. For example, in 1612, at that moment in which the debate between Galileo and Colombe concerning bodies floating on water was still articulate (verbal, not written) and open, in public (i.e., before Cosimo intervened), in at least one setting representatives of the two sides took up positions in a formalized debate. Maffeo Barberini defended the Galilean position and acted as interlocutor of his Colombe representing opponent. Barberini was a cardinal at the time. As pope he enormously elevated Galileo: In everything but a position and sinecure, Galileo was not only the obvious favorite among the literati and innovators of Rome but the official scientist sanctioned from the very pinnacle of the Church.1 Barberini was a highly refined, even secular, aesthete, but with a view to his politics within the Curia, he was absent the same level of insight, judgment and savvy. Perhaps he ignored, or merely was not attuned, to the subtle niceties of Eucharist controversy, but the later as doctrine and dogma was one of the hinges, the theological-theoretical one, on which the bloody political, religious and territorial struggle called the Thirty Years War in its various phases hung. In the end, he would discover that he could not pursue a liberalizing policy against the resistance mounted by the bearers of a traditional, now ossified Scholastic culture and at the same time hold onto Church Power in the face of winds of religious, political and economic change In The Assayer, Galileo, in discussing what he claimed was the illusorily luminous nature of comets, sketched the contours of an atomistic theory of heat and motion (as well as hinting at the rudiments of a corpuscular theory of light). There is a lengthy passage in particular parts of which require citation and detailed examination:
I must consider what it is that we call heat, as I suspect that people in general believe that heat is a real phenomenon, or property, or quality, which actually resides in the material by which we feel ourselves warmed. Now I say that whenever I conceive any material or corporeal substance, I immediately feel the need to think of it as bounded, and as having this or that shape; as being large or small in relation to other things, and in some specific place at any given time; as being in motion or at rest; as touching or not touching some other body; and as being one in number, or few or many. From these conditions I cannot separate such a substance by any stretch of my imagination. But that it must be white or red, bitter or sweet, noisy or silent, and of sweet or foul odor, my mind does not feel compelled to bring in as necessary accompaniments. Without the sense as our guides, reason or imagination unaided would probably never arrive at qualities like these. Hence I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned, and that they reside only in the consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.2

Recall our argument above.3 Epistemologically, in Galileo and in science one does not start from (in the sense of what is perceptually given) but arrives at bodies (in motion), i.e., constitutes them as such, by imaginatively projecting them. Having done so one proceeds with observation and description but only on the basis of a distinction between primary and secondary qualities. (This distinction is prior to all observation. Note the textual emphases, as he himself indicates his argument is imaginatively and conceptually constructed, it does not start from experience, from experiments or observations in the non-scientific sense.) These distinctions between being bounded, having size and shape, relationally situated among other bodies, and as self-same (distinct from other bodies), that is, as quantitatively determined extension subsisting in objective space and time to one side, and color, taste, audibility and odor, that are qualitative features to the other side quantity and quality, have, in the more radical sense as it is present in Galileo and largely in science, ontologically different statuses, that of reality and illusion. (While people in general believe heat is a real phenomenon, Galileo does not.) He says, that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are
space of Euclidean geometry (making the invention of the law of inertia possible) which he, Galileo, counterposes, substitutes, for the concrete space of pre-Galilean physics (which itself rests on the assumption of reality as a Cosmos), it is a question of the origins of this theorization. For Koyr, concepts, theories themselves, are handed down, reworked, new insights are occasionally generated, all as part of an intellectual tradition, and thus the question of origins is merely pushed back but never resolved. Koyr cannot pose the question of the origins of ideational contents, concepts or thought itself. They remain ungrounded. The whole issue is discussed from another standpoint below, see the Fourth Study, Part III, The Materialist Dialectic and Theory of Truth. 1 Redondi, Ibid, 28, 193, 243, 258. 2 The Assayer, 274. Emphases added. 3 See the Introduction, Elements of the Conceptual Structure of Science.

no more than mere names. They are as we say today merely subjective, or, as he says, they reside only in the consciousness or, in other words, they are objectively illusory or have no reality or objectivity other than in awareness. There are three points to be made here. First, that aspect of this perspective which refers to the status of qualities as mere names derived from a tradition that can be traced back to William of Ockham 1 (actually much further back, a century, to the Scholastic Roscelin, but Ockham presented its most forceful formulation and defense against the background of the initial political development of the One in early urban Europe, sort of a principled basis for a rarified cognitive opposition to that development, at the moment of the rise of nascent state centralism over the corpse of oligarchical republicanism or chronologically in the early fourteenth century, Ockham himself being a political refugee from Church tyranny)2. This is nominalism, and it had a direct bearing on own problem, and Galileos, to the extent that his Jesuit opponents were all acutely aware of the heretical (among others, the tri-theistic) implications of nominalist doctrine (together with his excommunication, and his flight to Mnchen where he sought and found political asylum). In adopting a nominalist strategy, Galileo was inviting censure, walking down a welltrodden path that in the past found the Church wrenchingly divided and its intellectuals subject to proscription, arrest or exile, and rarely execution. Second, the construction of bodies as quantitative, as fully and exclusively (in the sense of essentially) determined by extension, signified, once again as we argued above, the elimination of sensuous (emotive and valuative) characteristics of objects. In principle, it permits those bodies to be subject to mathematical treatment, which, in turn, will make prediction, experiment and validation, the deconstruction and reconstruction (i.e., the manipulation) of phenomenon, etc., possible, will permit bodies solely grasped extensively to form the substance of nature-becoming-reduced to a raw materials basin for capitalist production, even if the conceptual aspects of this development were not part of Galileos science. Third, if white or red, bitter or sweet, noisy or silent, and sweet or foul odor are not necessary accompaniments, are not objective qualities, are instead features or (in the language of the Schoolmen, the Peripatetics and the Jesuits) accidents of a material or corporeal substance, then Galileo had run afoul, at this point unknowingly, of the hegemonic (though not the doctrinal) account of sensuous qualities as they pertained to the theological dogma of transubstantiation. The prevailing, dominant interpretation of this relation was based on an updated version of classically AristotelianScholastic matter-form analysis of transubstantiation. (Mediated, or modernized if you will on the basis of the work of no other than Ockham and John Duns Scotus, by Jesuits such as Francesco Surez in light of the dogma laid down by the Council of Trent, i.e., in Galileos youth.)3 Matter is quantitative, extension, and consists in the body of any phenomenon, here the Eucharist, and form, a qualitative moment, gives the phenomenon its specific features or properties as well as its agency (forms the motive for its activity). Matter and form together constitute substance. In this modernized interpretation, theoretical clarity is gained by condensing and concentrating the Eucharist mystery in, reducing it if you will to, a single miracle, that moment at which the body is separated from its extension4 this is Ockhamist to the extent it betrays an important principle of theorizing enunciated by him, the efficacy of explanation lies in its economy, while criticism developed from this principle is commonly referred to as application of Ockhams razor: The substance of the bread, all of it, is transformed into Christs body, that means both matter and form inclusive of characteristic qualities. Yet, in all appearances, the bread remains, or seems to, unchanged. What Thomas had affirmed, and this was his innovation, was that those appearances, accidents or qualities, sensuous phenomena had in the act of consecration, remained. This was, philosophically (i.e., theologically) speaking, the miraculous event, for what we have in terms of a rational explanation (that is, one that undertook to systematically, discursively and logically explicate and clarify an arational, non-rational and anti-rational event) is accidents without a subject (substance): All the accidents or qualities, in particular, color, texture (taste) and odor persisted, remained,

1
2

Redondi, Ibid, 63, 214-215, 216, 222. William of Ockham, born in Surrey, England (circa 1285), was a Franciscan doctor of the Church, teaching a Oxford from 1309 into 1319. The most formidable of all opponents of Thomas and Scholasticism, he was denounced and persecuted by the Avignon pontiff John XXII for his writings. Held captive for four years (1324-1328) under house arrest in Avignon, France, he escaped and fled to Mnchen. (The dispute was over the Franciscan commitment to poverty, which Ockham defended.) He was ex-communicated. Living in exile, he wrote against the papacy until his death in 1347 (likely from plague). 3 Ibid, 222-223. 4 We are following Redondi here, Ibid, 212-213. See also Hans Hillerbrand, The Division of Christendom, 390.

just as if the substance (the bread) is present and despite its absence. This rationalist religious dogma, faith, was patently tied to a metaphysics of matter,1 for which accidents had to be understood as objectively real It was manifestly this rationalist dogma, a philosophical construction necessarily affirming the primacy of the Church and its theologian intelligentsia in Scriptural interpretation (hence, its power in spiritual matters, and, of course, all the more mundane things, e.g., land holdings, that accrued to it out of deference for this spiritual leadership, to coopt it, buy it off, etc.) that Luther most vehemently rejected. Notably it was also on this account, the character of the Eucharist, its presence (whether, real, spiritual, consubstantial, etc.), that Lutheran reformists (among them, Zwungli, Schwenckfeld, Carlstadt, even Melanchthon) diverged, that sectarian splintering resulted from, and that the Anglican Church waffled2 It was here at precisely this point that Galileo had run afoul of the prevailing doctrinal interpretation, which, as Jesuitically promulgated, was consciously, immediately and directly linked to the struggle against the Reformation, against Protestantism, e.g., Luther with his doctrine of substantial co-presence (consubstantiation, for which Christ is in, under and with the substance of the bread, a miracle sustained by the power of the word of God and one, relying strictly on faith, whose justification was much easier to accept than the rationalistic theological explanations offered by the Roman Church), not to mention any number of non-denomination, more extreme heresies. First, Galileo had ontologically, not miraculous, separated the matter and form of bodies and, second, he had subjectivized the forms in a radical manner, for not only were color, taste, etc. not part of the object (body, substance), but remove the subject (us) and they simply disappeared or were annihilated Return to that passage in The Assayer. Having given an ontologically bifurcated matter-form, quantity-quality account of sensuous tactile perception, Galileo turned to an explanation of two other, less material senses. He tells us that
there are bodies which constantly dissolve into minute particles, some of which are heavier than air and descend, while others are light and rise up. The former may strike upon a certain part of our bodies that is much more sensitive than the skin [as in touch], which does not feel the invasion of such subtle matter. This is the upper surface of the tongue; here the tiny particle are received, and mixing with and penetrating its moisture, they give rise to tastes, which are sweet or unsavory according to the various shapes, numbers, and speeds of the particles. And those minute particles which rise up may enter our nostrils and strike upon some small protuberances which are the instrument of smelling; here likewise their touch and passage is received to our like or dislike according as they have this or that shape, are fast or slow, and are numerous or few To excite in us tastes, odors, and sounds [there has just transpired a formally identical account of sound we have passed over] I believe that nothing is required in external bodies except shapes, numbers, and slow or rapid movements. I think that if ears, tongues, and noses were removed, shapes and numbers and motions would remain, but not odors or tastes or sounds. The latter, I believe, are nothing more than names when separated from living beings, just as tickling and titillation are nothing but names in the absence of such things as noses and armpits.3

This is an entirely consistent atomist explanation, otherwise known as corpuscular theory (sort of a particle physics if we were to suggest a contemporary analog congenial to modern empiricism, for example, with its doctrine of sensedata) for which indivisible particles impress themselves on our sense organs. It is wholly subjectivist, again denying reality to those qualities or accidents which were, according to Scholastic theology and Peripatetic philosophy, said to possess a reality independent of us as sensing beings. Here, again, Galileo ran afoul of that prevailing doctrinally Jesuitical interpretation of the underlying relation of qualities to (necessarily as part of) substance Galileo had, in 1624, been aware that in Rome his work, The Assayer, had been denounced. Well, if we accept Redondis reconstruction (and with a view to evidence and coherency there is no reason not to), this is not exactly correct: Galileo was aware something might be afoot, but he was not able to divine what it was, whether it had merit or was a serious charge against him. (Such was largely due to fear-motivated inability, then incapacitation, of his
1

Redondi, Ibid, 213. Redondis account of the underlying, hidden issue of the Eucharist in relation to atomism and corpuscular theory broke new ground, revealing the preferred manner in which the Jesuits wished to silence the innovator, Galileo. If his account is tendentially historicist to the extent it neglects the novel, situationally transcendent features of Galileos science, it remains extremely valuable, well developed and insightful, quite brilliant really, if somewhat convoluted. 2 Hillerbrand, Ibid, 101, 133, 150, 184, 240, and 389-393 for a summary. 3 The Assayer, 276-277.

Rome-based correspondent to gather the requisite intelligence.) Unbeknownst to him, Giovanni Guevara (who Redondi calls the authoritative provost, i.e., father general) of the once important Catholic order, the Regular Minor Clerks, a theologian of some repute and an ally of the Barberini pontificate (he had contributed to its sole significant diplomatic success, annexation to the Papal States of the Duchy of Urbino, which certainly had to have made Maffeo, as a territorial expansionist, happy), had upon a procedurally required request by the Holy Office presented a theological opinion concerning the relation of the Eucharist to its sensuous appearance, its accidents. Not to permit his order devoted to good works, and to contemplative reflection on the doctrinal and sacramental mysteries of his Roman faith to be tacked to the coattails of the Jesuits dogmatic and controversial theologians, aggressive warriors, grand strategists of the Church Guevara presented his and his orders views affirming a long since abandoned, traditionally Thomist albeit unorthodox position for which the accidents constitute impressions of species (i.e., qualities), using a very old Scholastic term, images impressed on the sense organs. Guevaras position was legitimate because, in laying down the theological dividing line that separated Catholicism from heresy with a view to the doctrine of the Eucharist (in this respect, whether Lutheran or more generally Protestant was irrelevant), the Council of Trent had not engaged in a detailed explication of nature of sensible appearances of the consecrated bread (and wine) and had merely designated them (using the same older Thomist term) species. Counterposed to Jesuit realism, to the objective reality of absolute accidents, this was a subjectivist position that at this moment (1624) fully vindicated Galileo similarly subjective account (with regard to the reality of qualities) embedded in his corpuscular theory of individual bodies imprinting themselves on our sense organs in his discussion of heat and how it is recognized as such.1 But this all transpired behind, as it were, a screen and a veil. Galileo had no knowledge of it. Instead, his intent was to push ahead: Perhaps not by the standards of his time a pious Catholic, he nonetheless understood that the Scholastic metaphysics underlying the Eucharist theory and other doctrinal dogmas would not withstand the onslaught of, once confronted with, a coherent and cogent systematization of the premises that were necessary to elaboration of modern science of nature. In this respect, his Augustinian appeal to the separation of orthodoxy and its doctrine from science was an effort to place Catholic faith beyond the realm of rational inquiry and thereby to preserve it in the face of his new science with its ostensibly universal truths.

For Guevara, Redondi, Ibid, 142-143,150, 166-167, 168 (annexation of Urbino), 170-171 (varieties of Eucharist doctrine).

Note3 The Modern Bourgeois Evaluation of Labor We have already pointed out the classical evaluation of labor was not a question of counterposing an active life to a contemplative one as in Aristotle, and in particular as in the theologians in that era when Catholic thought defined the culture of the Mediterranean and western European tributary formation that evolved in the long aftermath of Romes collapse. Rather, this evaluation was an assessment from the point of view of those leisured gentlemen who, as landowners, not only did not labor but who viscerally believed that, in principle, laboring should, for starters, disqualify one from the good life understood in terms of participation in polis activity. Galileos perspective was not only different from the ancient Greek landowner he upheld a genuine esteem for labor it also differed qualitatively and was opposed to the onto-theological attitude of the Churchmen and the Peripatetics both of which stemmed from Aristotle. In the former case (Galileo as well as the ancient landowner), it was a question of the type of knowledge that was generated on the basis of artisan activity. We have had occasion to describe Galileos intellectual trajectory, that in a purely abstract way he drew on the texts of certain non-Aristotelian ancient sources (Philoponus, Hero of Alexander), defended and then abandoned (superceding) the impetus physics of the Parisian nominalists, above all, he went beyond the revival of 16th century Archimedeanism. In particular we have exhibited, once he largely (not entirely) overcame his youthful, contradictory Aristotelian assumptions, how he began to operate outside the hegemonic Peripatetic tradition of the philosophers, mathematicians and theologians which taken together constituted the most important layers of the Church's intelligentsia, and all of whom were, like him, ensconced in the universities and courts. He did battle with them, and he took it to them (from relatively early on, in texts like his Letters on Sunspots). Thus, for the most part Galileo published in the vernacular Italian and not Latin. But his science went way beyond this. Thus, it should come as no surprise that his science, and his personal practice, would exhibit genuine opposition to the classical conception and its bastardization at the hands of the Church intelligentsia, together with (opposition to) the necessary, internally connected accompanying valuations (the noble, esteemed and admirable nature of what is invariant, immutable and non-corruptible, and eternal, which are precisely what are the objects of contemplation). Galileo was in regular contact with technological development as it was objectively embodied in the work, both the planning and the output, of artisans, master craftsmen and engineers, and those such as military officers and even men of affairs to the extent they stayed abreast of technical developments. He noted how the former group of men in particular operated with a concept of knowledge that required a certain mathematization, perhaps limited, of the spaces, planes and surfaces they worked with and on, that looked to past practice itself as a basis for theorization, that was inventive and cooperative. (Galileos workshop or, if you prefer, his laboratory, was not the product solely of own individual efforts but had the appearance of a small craftsmens workshop with a handful of employed engaged in a common labor, he, of course, being in this analogy the master craftsman.) It was not so much a question of the labor itself, and it was craft labor, but of the type of knowledge it generated, a technical knowledge that is experimental (though here not in the modern sense) and characteristically rational in the sense of observational, publicly accessible and reproducible. The latter is significant: Knowledge of this sort could in principle be subject to methodological determination and reproduced by anyone so engaged, and was generated as a knowledge that is, if not entirely progressive, cumulative in character. This type of knowledge (and, reflexively, its very conception) is distinctively modern, that is, it is bourgeois. To be sure, this is not the abstract labor of capitalism as work appears once it, capital, is established on its own foundations; it is not the labor power that (exchanged for the monetary means requisite to maintaining and sustaining a historically specific form of human existence), confronting means of production (as the property of the capitalist), it, capital, sets in motion; it is not this labor because the latter is reduced, abstracted, in production, is generalized, temporally quantified, and objectified and embodied in commodities as value. Instead, it is craft labor that controls its own means and instruments of production, generates or participates in the workplan, and creates a whole product, craft labor as a characteristic of capitalism at its origins and early development, the lengthy era of the formal domination of capital over labor1 It is craft labor to which Galileo was oriented. That orientation, polemical and hostile in character at least vis-- vis the Peripatetics (characteristics that simply cannot be derived from the intellectual tradition from which he started, or, we should say that it was a feature of the
1

For all this, see the First Interlude, below.

tradition he was effectively in the vanguard of creating), when taken together with scientific outcome of his successful efforts to mathematize nature, made him a revolutionary Galileos attitude of hostility in opposition to the classical, and Church evaluation of craft labor, as we said, extended forcibly to all the accompanying valuations. Sagredo states this unequivocally in the Dialogue in remarking, For my part I consider the earth very noble and admirable precisely because of the diverse alterations, changes, generations, etc., that occur in it incessantly.1 In this regard, it is worth repeating while holding the chair in mathematics at Padua, the university operated by the Republic of Venice, lecturing within faculties largely dominated by Peripatetic intellectuals, Galileo spent much time at the Republics great arsenal and shipyards in Venice with their artisans where he engaged the craftsmen employed therein in discussions.2 Galileo's curiously aggressive hostility to Aristotle and, in particular toward the Churchs organic intellectuals was merely the other side of the arrogance of that hegemonic intelligentsia which, subjectively certain of its speculatively constituted truths, held the labor of craftsmen in contempt and their knowledge at best deficient.3 In some albeit limited measure, Galileos reciprocal enmity derives from the context of this practice, his interaction with the artisans and craftsmen with whom he surrounded himself If theorization and experimentation in the scientific sense peculiar to Galileo was far from identical with those developed by craftsmen, it should be stated clearly that they were entirely congruent Rossi manifestly captured the sense of Galileo efforts in stating that, the image of Galileo as remote from the knowledge of technicians and experimentalists indeed assertively averse to this knowledge is absurd; that we find in Galileo the thesis that investigation (filosofare) must take into careful consideration the work of technicians and bear on the activity (pratica) of artisans, but also find explicit the recognition that the work of master craftsmen constitutes a help to the investigation carried on by studious minds;4 that Galileo was certainly keenly aware of the fact that the elevation of a theory shifts to another level, or, as he said, far outweighs the testimony and the observations of empiricists and technicians and that Galileo understood the difference between knowledge (the cognition of truth of a fact) and understanding why this happens 5; and, that in Galileo, the function of so called theoretical models in the realm of scientific knowledge was without doubt explicitly proposed and recognized. For science, a fact is only that which is arrived at on the basis of precise criteria of a theoretical character6 Thus, Galileos appreciation of craft labor was not oriented toward the activity itself, but, as we pointed out and Rossi indicated, toward the type of knowledge that forms on its basis. In this respect, a revolutionary and communist perspective this comes much later is as distinct from Galileo and counterposed to science as Galileos evaluation was distinct from that of the Churchs theologians (not to mention Aristotle himself):
1

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (first day), 58. This remark is preceded by the following one, making the contrast even more explicit: I cannot without great astonishment I might say without great insult to my intelligence hear it attributed as a prime perfection and nobility of the natural and integral bodies of the universe that that they are invariant, immutable and unalterable, etc., while on the other hand it is called a great imperfection to be alterable, generable, mutable, etc. Ibid. Here, of course, it is to be recalled that, first, in Aristotle and among the Aristotelians of Galileos time, the Peripatetics, the celestial vault was perfect because immutable and invariant and, as such, counterposed to the Earth precisely because of alteration and mutation, of coming into being and passing away; and, second, this view had to be undercut if Galileo was to successfully assert his Copernicanism. It was, moreover, this view which he so compellingly and convincingly assailed in the Letters on Sunspots in his demonstration that the surfaces of the Earth and its moon are qualitatively similar. 2 See Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, 1, where Galileo in the person of the interlocutor Sagredo, explicitly stated he frequently visit[ed] and conferred with the greater artisans. Galileos revolutionary temper was dialectically constituted: On the one hand, he was intellectually and personally abused by Peripatetic intellectuals some of whom would not even condescend to consider the experimental evidence he brought forth, at their insistence no less though for good reason no less, since experiment had a different practical meaning and objectives for both. On the other hand, this distasteful experience found reinforcement among kindred souls, craftsmen, with whom he had regular contact, who openly exhibited their resentment toward the Peripatetics, and with whom he shared, if perhaps more refined and sublimated, that hostility. That hostility, in turn, gripped him. His work displayed it at every term. See, for example, the posthumous published poem, Against the Aristotelians (Contro gli Aristotelici) of 1623, translated and appearing in Telos, 4. 62-79. 3 See, e.g., Stillman Drake in his introduction remarks to The Starry Messenger, 5; Paolo Rossi, Philosophy, Technology and the Arts in the Early Modern Era, 116, 117. 4 Rossi, Ibid, 112. 5 Ibid, 113. 6 Ibid, 113-114.

For the former, thought itself produces the concepts in and through which the world in its immediacy is apprehended, and in specific forms, on the basis of which reality in its intelligibility is comprehended and explained. But thought, and theory, are, in this perspective, themselves forms of activity Again, this excludes that activity we call abstract labor (or includes it to the extent it is contradictory, at once activity that is passive), labor as it exists for capital Both pro-duce, in the etymologically ancient sense they bring forth something new into the world. The one (thought, concepts) lives in (is immanent to, embedded in) the other, rendering the other meaningful and intelligible to itself; the other as the activity of an incarnate subject operating on the sensuous material surroundings, in making and, especially, in transforming the given (whether that given is the objects of labor, situations or the very world itself as in revolutionary activity), illuminates novel arrangements presented by the new objects it has created, illuminates situations or the world itself, by generating concepts in this very doing (in this sense, activity as negativity, as transformative, is itself spontaneous thought).1

For abstract labor, see the First Interlude, Capital as Capital, and for the relation of theory to activity, see the Fourth Study, Part III, The Materialist Dialectic.

First Study Science at its Origins Bibliographical Sources Anderson, Perry. Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism. London, 1974 _____________. Lineages of the Absolutist State. London, 1974 Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago, 1958 Aristotle, De Caela (On the Heavens) in Richard McKeon (ed.), The Basic Works of Aristotle. New York, 2001 ______. Physics in Richard McKeon (ed.), The Basic Works of Aristotle. New York, 2001 Artigas, Mariano. New Light on the Galileo Affair (May 2002). Accessed online at www.metanexus.net Artigas, Mariano, Rafael Martivez and William Shea. Revisiting Galileos Troubles with the Church (February 2001). Accessed online at www.metanexus.net Bachelard, Gaston. The New Scientific Spirit. Boston, 1974 (1934) Barnes, Will. Nature, Capital, Communism. Revised edition. St. Paul, 2010 __________. The German Road to Renewed Imperialist World War, 1870-1938. St. Paul, 2008 __________. Community and Capital. St. Paul, 2001 _________. The Origins and Development of Catalan Nationalism: Catalan and Castilian Antagonism in Spanish History. Unpublished, 1999 _________. Civil War and Revolution in America. St. Paul, 1999 _________. Revolutionary Theories of the English Civil War (Text, Fragments and Notes). Manuscript, 1991 _________. The History of Florence and the Florentine Republic (Text and Fragment). Manuscript, 1989 Bayley, C.C. War and Society in Renaissance Florence. Toronto, 1961 Bloch, Marc. Feudal Society. Vol. 1: The Growth of Ties of Dependence. Chicago, 1961 (French original, 1940) Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Vol. 1, New York, 1972 Brzezinski, Richard. Ltzen 1632: Climax of the Thirty Years War. Westport (CT), 2005 Catholic Encyclopedia. Accessed online at www.newadvent.org Ciriacono, Salvatore. Mass Consumption Goods and Luxury Goods: The De-Industrialization of the Republic of Venice from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century in Herman Van der Wee (ed.), The Rise and Decline of Urban Industries in Italy and the Low Countries. Leuven, 1988 Drake, Stillman. "The Role of Music in Galileo's Experiments," Scientific American 232 (Jan-June 1975): 98-104 ____________. The Evolution of De Motu (Galileo Gleanings XXIV), Isis, V. 67, no. 2 (June 1976): 239-250 Duhem, Pierre. Medieval Cosmology: Theories of Infinity, Place, Time, Void, and the Plurality of Worlds. Chicago 1985 Einstein, Albert. Essays in Science. New York, 1934 Engels, Frederick. The Peasant War in Germany (1850). Accessed on line at www.marxarchive.org Feyerabend, Paul. Realism, Rationalism and Scientific Method. Philosophical Papers, V. I. Cambridge (Eng.), 1981 ______________. Explanation, Reduction and Empiricism in Herbert Feigl and Grover Maxwell (eds.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. III (Scientific Explanation, Space, and Time). Minneapolis, 1962 (28-91) Finley, Moses I. The World of Odysseus. Middlesex (Eng.), 1979 Felloni, Giuseppe. Structural Changes in Urban Industry in Italy form the Late Middle Ages to the Beginning of the Industrial Revolution: A Synthesis in Herman Van der Wee (ed.), The Rise and Decline of Urban Industries in Italy and the Low Countries. Leuven, 1988 Galileo Galilei. Against the Aristotelians (Contro gli Aristotelici) of 1623, translated and appearing in Telos, 4, 1969 ___________. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Berkeley, 1967 (1632) ___________. Discourse on Bodies in Water. Urbana, 1960 (Facsimile reproduction of the translation by Thomas Salusbury. London, 1663, with an Introduction by Stillman Drake) ___________. On Motion in I.E. Drabkin and Stillman Drake (eds.), On Motion and On Mechanisms. Madison (WI), 1960 ___________, On Mechanics in I.E. Drabkin and Stillman Drake (eds.), On Motion and On Mechanisms. Madison

(WI), 1960 ___________. The Starry Messenger in Stillman Drake (ed.), Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo. New York, 1957 ___________. Letters on Sunspots in Stillman Drake (ed.), Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo. New York, 1957 ___________. Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina in Stillman Drake (ed.), Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo. New York, 1957 ___________. The Assayer (largely excerpted) in Stillman Drake (ed.), Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo. New York, 1957 ___________. Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences (Discourses and Demonstrations, Discorsi e Dimonstrazioni, Mathematiche). New York, 1914 (1638) The Galileo Project. Vincenzo Galilei. Accessed online at www.galileo.rice.edu Goldmann, Lucien. The Hidden God. A Study of Tragic Vision in The Penses of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine. London, 1964 Grossmann, Henryk. Descartes and the Social Origins of the Mechanistic Concept of the World, in Gideon Freudenthal and Peter McLaughlin (eds.), The Social Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution. Texts by Boris Hessen and Henryk Grossmann. Dordrecht, 2009. Guicciardini, Francesco. The History of Italy. London 1969 (1561) Hillerbrand, Hans. The Division of Christendom: Christianity in the Sixteenth Century. Louisville (KY), 2007 Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Science. Evanston (IL), 1970 (German original, 1936) Koyr, Alexandre. Galileo Studies. Atlantic Highlands (NJ), 1978 (French original, 1939) ______________. Metaphysics and Measurement: Essays in Scientific Revolution. London, 1968 Malanima, Paolo, An Example of Industrial Reconversion: Tuscany in the Sixteenth and Seventh Centuries in Herman Van der Wee (ed.), The Rise and Decline of Urban Industries in Italy and the Low Countries. Leuven, 1988 Meyerson, Emile. Identity and Reality. New York, 1989 (French original, 3rd expanded edition,1926) Moioli, Angelo. De-Industrialization in Lombardy During the Seventeenth Century in Herman Van der Wee (ed.), The Rise and Decline of Urban Industries in Italy and the Low Countries. Leuven, 1988 McMullen, Emerson T. Galileo's Condemnation: The Real and Complex Story, Georgia Journal of Science (2003). Accessed online at www.metanexus.net. Palano, Pietro Soave.1 History of the Council of Trent. Translated by Sir Nathaniel Brent. Whitehall (London), 1675 Popper, Karl. Quantum Mechanics and the Schism in Physics. From the Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Edited by W.W. Bartley, III. Totowa (NJ), 1982 Redondi, Pietro. Galileo, Heretic. Princeton (NJ), 1987 Schmitt, Charles B. Studies in Renaissance Philosophy and Science. London, 1981 Shaw, Herbert R. Craters, Cosmos, and Chronicles: A New Theory of the Earth. Stanford (CA), 1994 Snowden, Frank. The Fascist Revolution in Tuscany, 1919-1922. Cambridge (Eng.), 1989 Wood, Eileen Meikens. Peasant-Citizen and Slave. The Foundations of Athenian Democracy London, 1988

Pseudonym of Paolo Sarpi.

First Interlude The following discussion is intended to provide context and justification for our perspective on the relation of the bourgeoisie and capital to the modern science of nature. Forms of Sociation, I Fundamental Forms of Sociation in Human History Here we shall speak of forms of human sociation and (where they exist) productive forms. We shall not speak of modes of production, which, in our view (one that is eminently and rationally defensible) implies a metaphysical commitment to a unilinear notion of historical development. This can be seen most clearly in the case of feudalism to which the vast tributary formations that stretch in historical time from the ancient world until (and far beyond) the rise of capitalism (and in historical space across the entire world) is often assimilated:1 Feudalism found only in the agrarian world, characterized by the presence of an unfree peasantry and extensive use of service tenement instead of wages, dominance of a social class of specialized warriors, ties of obedience and protection binding men to men, which, within the warrior class, assume a distinctive form called vassalage, and fragmentation of political authority and the absence of state centralism is generally and most immediately identified in terms of a large serf presence. 2 Now what are we to make of strata of substantial serfs, a characteristic feature of most servile peasantries in central and eastern Europe prior to the short twentieth century?3 Working, relatively speaking, a large holding with commercial potential, this social figure was able to avoid unpaid labor services and tributes (e.g., provision of wood or game, of crop or produce to the lord, etc.) by employing waged labor in his place.4 Such a historical reality makes a mockery of the dialectic which refuses to grasp the historical specificity and indeed rarity of feudal social relations, counterposes in historical time feudalism to capitalism the latter following on the former, and sees in both stages in a universal societal development Though numerous, distinct forms of sociation have historically appeared and reappeared at different times and in different places (e.g., hunting, hunting and gathering, farming and animal domestication, shepherding and livestock cultivation) we can, broadly speaking, distinguish three great epochs in human history, the first by far the oldest and longest lasting, each designated by their dominant form of sociation, and comprehended by their fundamental activities and the central social features that characterize them. These epochs are the archaic, the tributary and capitalist modernity. Archaic communities as distinctive communities, and not as a fusion of forms (fused precisely to the extent they share features in common with stratified agricultural societies), are distinguished by a settled social life (which separates them from hunter-gatherer bands as nomadic groups that stretch back in geological time all the way to humanitys hominid origins), the absence of property in production, the nonexistence of coercive political power (a state), by a material abundance and by social individuals who lack an elaborate need structure, are absent egoism and the extremely individualized subjectivity raised upon it, which taken together renders social labor largely superfluous. These communities are further absent an economy (that is, a separate sphere of material production). Archaic communities have existed largely (though not exclusively) into tropics where a natural abundance provided the requisite resources for a social life without labor. Though, as politically decentralized, feudalism as a rare species of tributary formation appeared in northwest Europe (circa 800-1200) and Japan (ending circa 1868), and with it the private property in production that in part but only in part (and not decisively) distinguished it, tributary formations are by and large characterized by village-based
1

I.e., by Marxists. While there have been individuals exempt from the following criticism, the same cannot be said for every significant Marxist tendency within the history of the workers movement. Discussed above in various notes to the First Study, the whole problem of feudalism is thoroughly, if far from exhaustively, discussed from the perspective of revolutionary communist theorization in the Third Study, Part II, The Debate over Capitalism and Transcendence of the Capitalist Mode of Production in Russia in our Bolshevism and Stalinism (Urgeschichte). 2 For example, Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, passim. 3 M.L. Bush, Tenants Rights and the Peasantries of Europe under the Old Regime, 142. For the concept of a short twentieth century, and a tentative schematization of the prehistory of capitalism in the West generally, see this interlude, Chronology and History, below. 4 Bush specifies holdings sizes: Circa 1750, in Poland substantial serf holding were nearly forty acres; in Brandenburg, nineteen acres; in Bohemia, sixty-one; in Hungry, thirty-four; and, in East Prussia, no less than forty-five acres. Ibid. Now, in historical contexts in which servile peasantries have worked as little as half-acre plots, these were truly substantial holdings.

sedentary agriculture, administrative towns, a state that is resident, so to speak, to the town and is identified with the personage of a king and in a more remote sense with his household, 1 and is largely external to the daily life of the village communities (which often particularly in ancient forms inhibits the penetration of capital through a regular division of communal lands). Linked to both ancient and modern precapitalist civilizations, these social formations exhibit de jure statified forms of property in production while in practice the villages engage in farming (not agriculture) in which their lands are cultivated communally. The village communities stand opposite the state which oppresses them first and foremost by the extraction of tribute, then, in the ancient world in particular, by the periodic conscription of labor in massive construction of dikes and dams, irrigation ditches and canals, in temples and burial sites. (Varies forms of labor, slave, corve, serf, etc., may have also been important determinants of social life especially in later tributary forms, such as feudalism in western Europe.) Above the village level these societies are highly stratified, perhaps in some cases based upon class differentiation, material inequality is at once rampant and extreme. Before the first tributary formation ever reached its apotheosis, stated more secularly, before ancient tributary formations fully matured and characterized a distinctive epoch in human history, writing in its various early forms had appeared, metals such as bronze and copper had become widely used in productive activities, a monumental art and architecture (as in temples, pyramids, etc) had already long advanced beyond its initial development2 We shall recount the origins of capitalism shortly. Although first appearing sequentially (they are also simultaneous), these broad forms of sociation are not stages in human formation, do not constitute a development: We can document that the archaic has covered the face of the Earth beginning some 10,000-12,000 years (and its lineaments extend further back, though the evidence is more sketchy) and that tributary societies were well formed (but not fully developed, i.e., not yet ancient civilizations) some 6,500-7,500 years. The two co-existed long into the epoch of capitalist modernity, in fact into the twentieth century. Generally, these two great forms of human sociation did not undergo internal collapse in the sense that they could no longer sustain themselves on their own foundations. This is not to say that these communities did not experience disturbance, these social formations did not erupt in opposition. Some quite massive, numerous peasant revolts occurred in every dynastic period of Chinese history. And while external disruption in particular invasion and conquest led to the destruction of all the ancient tributary formations (e.g., Sumner, Egypt of the Pharaohs, Rome, Inca Peru) and countless archaic communities (one need recall the fate of many of those archaic communities bordering the ever expanding Inca empire or their destruction in the tropic zone of the Americas by Spanish and Portuguese conquerors as reported by Bartolome de las Casas), in the historically significant sense, it was not their internal contradictions of development so-called, but capitalism, the value form or, if you prefer, the penetration of waged labor, which has been the solvent of both modern tributary formations and surviving archaic communities, for, in both cases (with the singular exception of that aforementioned rare species, feudalism), dominant social relations blocked the movement of capital (especially on the basis of the internal differentiation of a large capitalist farmer out of the peasantry, and development of an internal market). Forms of Sociation, II Between Tributary Formations and Capitalist Modernity The actual emergence of capital and capitalism the distinction will become clear in the course of this presentation into human history was a contingent event, which is not to say that the once capital appeared its development did not possess a certain necessity (we shall return to this).
1

This identity can be seen as late as, for example, Egypt in the middle of the long nineteenth century. As an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire since 1805, the greatest overlord of Egypt, the Khedive (roughly, Viceroy), embodied in his person the state. Thus, Rondo Cameron notes that, in regard to the debt controlled by foreign capital, The exact amount of the debt, as well as its origin, has always been a moot point owing to the fact that there was no clear distinction between the debts of the Viceroy and those of the government. France and the Economic Development of Europe, 468 n. 30. In contradistinction, the modern state of the bourgeoisie and capital stands out sharply: The modern state of capital is unique in its institutional and separate character, its appearance as a "public" force clothed in this sham objectivity that sets it apart from and over and against individuals, the underlying social classes, and society at large. While any modern, centralized state may come in the short run to be identified with a specific historical personage, what distinguishes it from states that appear in other past epochs is a seeming efficacy, permanence and reality that render it at once objectively independent in relation to society and independent of any specific ruler. 2 Henri Frankfurt, Kingship and the Gods, 15, who, referring exclusively to ancient Egypt of the Pharaohs, we have generalized.

Since what we aim at here is a determination of the concepts of formal and real domination in production, one that includes a periodization of the entire history of capitalist development, and on this basis an account of these forms of domination as eras in the history of capitalism in their relation to historically significant, novel departures in the history of modern science, we are required to integrate discussion of the specificity of forms of domination with the conditions of the formation of capital. We start from the previous reconstruction and analysis of real historical, fundamental forms of sociation in order to summarily recount the formation of capital in its recognizably modern shape as self-valorizing value. At its origins (beginning with its antediluvian forms), it did not, however, and could not have this character. This account (the following schematization) will effectively yield, as we shall see, a determination of formal domination (in Marx, the formal subsumption of labor under capital),1 which is the first of those forms of capitals domination in production and which, returning to the schematization of historical development permits us to reconstruct not just those forms (formal and real domination) but, in the latter case, its various phases. It is only on this basis that we can elicit a determination of the relation of forms to eras of domination in the history of capitalism and demonstrate the internal connection of the latter to novel, historically important departures in the history of science There is, certainly, circularity in all this: It appears that our presentation presupposes a prior, operative concept of the conditions necessary for the formation of capital as capital. This is true. This circularity largely resolves itself into the difference between the (method of) investigation and (that of) presentation: If we have stressed the meticulous, detailed study, scrutiny and assimilation of historical contents effectively the work carried out by Marx in his preparatory studies to Capital2 in so many words, the element of investigation, we can recognize there is a logic or a method to investigatory activity. This logic is dialectical, that is, there is no essence that can be extracted without analysis of the various forms of phenomena as they exhibit themselves, the investigation admits of no absolutely valid starting points, does not move forward in a straight line, recognizes each particular moment, detail, fact, idea or category receives its significance only as it assumes its places in the totality, a totality that simultaneously can only be grasped as its partial, incomplete moments, the facts which form it, coalesce. The logic of investigation moves from tacit theoretical assumptions to detailed historical analysis, facts, and back to the theory, more or less modified and back to analysis in a circular movement that concretizes both moments and totality, analysis and theory; and, it is in this movement that specific determinants here the conditions for the formation of capital emerge. The logic of presentation also has, albeit distinctively different, a well defined, methodologically necessary structure: Like Hegel (and Marx), we always begin with an object that is simply given or immediately present, what is isolated and abstract,3 understanding that what is there immediately, undetermined and implicit in the beginning is there concretely fully mediated and determined, fully developed in the end, and is thus comprehended and no longer merely undersood:4 The logic of presentation demands the points of departure and arrival, capital, are formally identical, that in the end we return to our initial situation, now conceptually determined, comprehended and explained...
1

Marx, Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses This is the today well-known and so-called 6th chapter of Kapital, unpublished in Marxs lifetime or, for that matter, until the 1970s. As a matter of both nuance and clarity the English translations are most often too literal we have used the German and presented our own translations of this text as well as other works of Marx from which we cite. 2 In English, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Grundrisse, The Economic Manuscripts of 1861-1863, Works, Vols. 30-33 and The Economic Manuscripts of 1861-1864, Works, Vol. 34.. 3 Allerdings mu sich die Darstellungsweise formell von der Forschungsweise unterscheiden. Die Forschung hat den Stoff sich im Detail anzueignen, seine verschiednen Entwicklungsformen zu analysieren und deren innres Band aufzuspren. Erst nachdem diese Arbeit vollbracht, kann die wirkliche Bewegung entsprechend dargestellt werden. Gelingt dies und spiegelt sich nun das Leben des Stoffs ideell wider, so mag es aussehn, als habe man es mit einer Konstruktion a priori zu tun. (Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyze its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connection. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subjectmatter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction.) Cited from the Nachwort to the second German edition (1873) of Kapital. Our translation. 4 jener Unmittelbarkeit und Einfachheit des Angangs ist es darum gleich Es ist das Werden seiner selbst, der Kreis, der sein Ende als seinen Zweck voraussetzt und zum Anfange hat, und nur durch die Ausfhrung und sein Ende wirklich ist. (Immediacy and simplicity are characteristic of the beginning It is the process of its own becoming, the circle which presupposes its end as its purpose, and has its end for its beginning; it becomes concrete and actual only be being carried out, and by the end it involves.) Hegel, Vorrede, Phnomenologie des Geistes. Our translation.

Capital can only appear on the basis of social division, where agriculture, social stratification with fixed positions in a division of labor and a state are already present. So if we return to tributary formations we can note that it is here that capital first appeared (and manifestly not in its modern form), but not in all such formations at all times: We recall that they rested on village communities. In a general way, all human needs within such communities are fulfilled from within the community itself. The presence of agriculture is massive and overwhelming. The land is worked, is considered it is merely straightforwardly taken for granted the patrimony of the community whether free peasant families work it and the householder is effectively the proprietor or whether a higher unity (i.e., kingly power, the state whether in the person of a pharaoh, an emperor, a tsar, or a divine king) is owner and the relation of the community members to the land is one of usufruct. In any case, land and soil are related to those who work it in a matter in which they cannot be detached, are inseparable, or in Marxs pregnant phrase, the Earth is the inorganic body of those who work it and this is an objective characterization, i.e., the soil is the unorganische Natur vorgefundner Leib seiner Subjektivitt.1 Those needs satisfied in and this relation are, to be sure, narrow or restricted, and where they transcend the immediate family, it is someone with non-agriculturally special skills (say a smith) who is nonetheless indistinguishably part of the community, a member of the village, that provides for the requirement, e.g., fabricates an iron fitting for a cartwheel. The narrow or restricted character of needs here makes it possible to characterize this situation in terms of household production (where, of course, a household may include a family of several generations all working the land jointly, not the nuclear family of the modern bourgeois era) Following upon collapse of the old Roman tributary formation down to emergence of towns, all production in the West started from the self-sufficient household (oikos), either that of free peasants or that of the lords manor or both It was in these interstices were a modicum of intercourse within the vast rural fabric of tributary social formations and within which exchanges took place and, thus, wherein a medium of this exchange, precious metals (gold, silver), was created. A lengthy historical development led to formation of market towns, to a division of labor in which the merchant appeared not just as a trader who exchanges goods of one community with another but as a fixture within the division of labor who helped to bring this medium in its most abstract form, money, into being and who accumulated wealth in monetary form: It was only on the edges of great ancient tributary forms (e.g., the Greek cities along the western perimeter of the Persian empire) and in the urban enclaves of modern tributary formations such as feudalism in Britain, France, Italy or Japan that capital appeared and appeared only in its antediluvian forms which, following Marx, were merchants capital and usury.2 Within these towns, the merchants original function was to dispose of what tiny surpluses the villages generated (where they accrued at all). But with their development, an internal, relatively elaborate division of labor formed, craftsmen and small-scale commodity production first appeared. It is at this moment that production lost its strictly local character (i.e., its relation centered largely from its standpoint on the surrounding villages as its hinterland). A social significant layer of merchants constituted over time characterized by a relatively fixed division of labor within this community a layer formed not just by traders who mediated exchange among the villages, but by merchants who related town to town in terms of a broader-based exchange of products, and by merchants who specialized in money itself, i.e., by bankers all of whom created a regular outlet and market for products (among individuals who are strictly town dwellers), accelerated the development of crafts with their array of artisans, and a craft social structure (master, journeymen, apprentices) with its institutional embodiment in the guild. We can speak of production of this sort, that which corresponded to the formation of towns within tributary formations and within which an accumulation (a hoard) of monetary wealth as merchant capital appeared, as (handi)craft production. Craft production developed with the formation and development of towns, with merchant capital mediating the commerce carried out among towns. But the full elaboration of this form leads beyond itself.
1

The soil is the objective, nature-given inorganic body of his [the toilers] subjectivity (our translation). Marx, Grundrisse, Heft IV (Formen, die der kapitalistischen Produktion vorhergehen), in Marx-Engels Werke, Bd. 42, konomische Manuskripte, 1857/1858, 385. 2 Es is vielmehr durch Wucher besonders auch gegen das gruneigentum ausgebten und durch Kaufmannsgewinne aufgehuftes mobiles Vermgen Geldvermgen, das in Kapital im eigenlichen Sinn, industrielles Kapital verwandelt wird... soweit sie... nichts als selbst Formen des Kapitals, sondern als frhere Vermgensformen erscheinen, als Voraussetzungen fr das Kapital... Die Kapitalbildung geht daher... vom Kaufmanns- und Wuchervermgen. (The money wealth which becomes transformed into capital in the authentic sense, into industrial capital, is rather the mobile wealth amassed through usury -- particularly that practiced against landed property and obtained by mercantile [means] They themselves do not appear as forms of capital, but as earlier forms of wealth, as presuppositions for capital The formation of capital thus emerge[s] from merchants and usurers wealth.) Marx, Ibid (Grundrisse, Heft V, Formen, die der kapitalistischen Produktion vorhergehen), 412. Our translation, all emphases added.

On the edges of the feudal and manorial tributary formations that took shape in western Europe, in present day Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, northern and eastern Spain and pockets on the Italian Peninsula, the development of the towns gave rise to the great cities of the high medieval era: The big men of these cities the oligarchy of old families among the great bankers, cloth merchants and long distant traders actually conquered the feudal lords of their surrounding countryside in Florence the populo grasso mobilized the small townsmen in militias to defeat the magnati of the contado (the strictly rural, seigniorial great noble clans) and established a popular communal regime based on the most productively significant guilds. This conquest freed the great merchants, permitted them to participate fully in, mediating, the social elaboration of a growing detailed division of labor in craft production. With their detailed regulations covering all aspects of daily life in production, the guilds protected the structure of the crafts, first and foremost the great craftsmen, the masters, who often became detached from production, merchants in their own right. Where on the basis of craft production merchants developed a culture of their own, they could make great inroads into tributary forms of production recall the situation in late fourteenth century Florence briefly alluded to above but they did not revolutionize and transform it (production): Their aim remained amassing money wealth for the purposes of its display, so, though, exchange may have been vastly expanded, markets greatly enlarged and the geographical reach of merchant activity no longer local may have encompassed large distances on a regular basis, the craft control over production signified that social relations which rose from it remained, in a highly mediated way, relations... that express[ed] a prevalence of use value and production oriented toward use value, as well as a real community which is itself still immediately present as a premise of production1 (our translation, our emphasis). In the end, production did not exist for its own sake, did not aim at reproducing and expanding what had yet to fully come into being, capital. Thus, to return to Florence (Genoa and perhaps Venice) where this development went further than anywhere in history, not only did Ottimati (oligarchical) power collapse long before the capitulation of the Republic to Charles Vs Castilian columns in 1530, in the face of growing, successful competition emanating from the Low Countries by no later than the first quarter of the chronological fifteen century Florence was already undergoing a de-development as its Medici leadership pursued state-sponsored mercantilist trade practices oriented to the defense of Florentine merchants, and the great urban patricians retired to their country estates giving the semblance of a re-feudalization of social relations satisfied with their accumulated mercantile, family wealth and the vicious exploitation of sharecropping tenants (mtayers).2 And, even though a form of capitalist domination in production had indisputably appeared within Florence (as far back and further than the moment of the Ciompi Revolution, 1378) among the sottoposti the proletarian element of which was composed of clothworkers (primarily wool but also silk workers), the corders and beaters who performed the least skilled tasks in the clothing botteghe, who were clearly the most homogeneous stratum, and who were regularly propertyless wage earners (not hourly but by contract)3 its appearance there at this moment was local or sporadic, and did not amount to a development: Barriers to further penetration of the value form remained: The guild structure of the community which was fully integrated into Florentine great merchant dominated polity on which the latter rested; production which was restricted by the size of the market and by the merchant desire to produce profitability on the basis of the restricted character of luxury goods and not production for productions sake; the practice of the great merchants (bankers and traders) that aimed at the accumulation of money wealth for display, not for its own sake. In terms of the formation of capital, the whole situation can, as we noted above, be conceptually apprehended as one of its (two) antediluvian forms, as merchants capital that, eventually led beyond itself: This restricted development effectively inaugurated the movement of capital, for the presence of its antediluvian forms (merchants and usury capital), here at least, gave rise to the formal domination of capital over labor in production in a hybrid or bastard, stagnating form in which, extracted from peasants by lord and landlord, service (tribute) was fused with that strictly economic domination. The same development can, however, generate a far different historical outcome. In this, the latter case, merchants, a great craftsmen or a country lord, as the case may be, pursue, from the perspective of production, the accumulation of social wealth in its various forms for its own sake:
1

Verhltnisse, die ebensosehr ein Vorherrschen des Gebrauchswerts und der auf den umittelbaren Gebrauch gerichteten Produktion wie eines unmittelbar selbst noch als Voraussetzung der Produktion vorhanden realen Gemeinwesens ausdrcken. Ibid, 416. 2 See The History of Florence and the Florentine Republic, Part III, Section 3. 3 Ibid, Part III, Section 2.

In the English countryside, a small lord, a gentry gentleman, a large tenant (especially a large tenant with a customary tenure that permitted him to exploit the difference between the fixed rent he paid a great lord and the economic rents he charged small peasants) each began to pursue accumulation, not just of money wealth but, of land, and instruments deployed in agriculture (oxen, cattle, ploughs) Regardless of whether they were formally free or not, customary tenure provided peasants with the right to hereditarily hand down that tenure to a son, set his rent on his lords land at an amount fixed by custom (and not by, e.g., the nascent movement of price), it allowed him access to the lords uncultivated lands for grazing his animals, gathering wood for fuel, picking berries, nuts, mushrooms, etc., to supplement his and his familys diet and gathering herbal plants for food and medicinal purposes; and it gave him the right to participate in local governance such as manorial courts or village assemblies...1 Always aimed at eliminating customary tenure, ruthless struggle was undertaken by landowners and large tenantsbecome-capitalist farmers to effectively expropriate poor freeholders and copyholders, with the objective historical outcome the dissolution of customary right, peasant subordination to capitals formal domination, and proletarianization. Whether in England, western, central or eastern Europe, the entire history of the development of the formal domination of capital over labor in agriculture crystallized in the fight for and against customary tenure In the cities, for example those on the Italian Peninsula the social formation developed in one direction, where masters distributed work in their own large domestic workshops among journeymen and apprentices that were here, at this moment, formally proletarians, and yet it developed in another direction as great merchants, the heads of great guilds or corporations in England, they were called companies parceled out work, piecework if you will, among laborers that operated out of their own dwellings. In either direction, craft control in production slowly began to dissolve. Highly socially organized, production of this sort can be characterized as a domestic system. In Tudor and Stuart England (which is the model here), this was the historical moment of the subordination of towns to national unification, the initial emergence of the national economy that immediately predated the first theoretical reflections on these developments otherwise known as political economy. Here we have come to a break in a lengthy historical process with its own presuppositions, in particular, simple commodity production for exchange on local markets; the development of money as a universal medium of exchange; accordingly, a generalized circulation of products and money; an accumulation (or, as Marx says, the piling up) of money wealth, its concentration in the hands of a tiny social layer of individuals, often on the basis of usury (constituting a free fund with which the purchase of land, instruments and capacity to labor was made). It is at this crucial point it appeared first in history in the West, on the Italian peninsula in an aborted manner (aborted precisely because the tributary forms based on services provided by proletarianized peasants did not entirely disappear) and in England where capitalism did first appear that a fateful development occurred. There is a passage from Umberto Ecos The Name of the Rose that, albeit novelistically, neatly summarizes this development, a movement in which, described objectivistically, the monetarization of social relations opens up a fissure in the structure of society, a structure which from the standpoint of production characterized all hitherto existing forms in which an undeveloped (and if not undeveloped then an indeterminate) sphere of material production began to undergo a startling change, from production for the sake of consumption (in however hierarchical a form distribution was organized and the benefits of production were appropriated) to one in which increasingly something other, at first merely an intermediary, took precedence: Money, in Italy, has a different function from what it has in your country, or in mine. Money circulates everywhere, but much of life elsewhere is still dominated and regulated by the bartering of goods, chicken or sheaves of wheat, or a scythe, or a wagon, and money serves only to procure these goods. In the Italian city, on the contrary, you must have noticed that goods serve money. And even priests, bishops, even religious orders have to take money into account2 This, the development of primacy of exchange over production, the unfolding ascendancy of mercantile wealth over goods and services which Marx called use values, was also a long historical process and it was not capital (or capitalism) in its recognizably modern form, but this movement, ideally reconstructed, did signify and point back to an actual historical transformation of momentous importance, a process of dissolution in which old bonds of personal dependence rural as well as urban were cut, cast aside.3
1 2

Bush, Ibid, 137-138. The speaker is Ecos protagonist, Brother William of Baskerville. 3 In allen diesen Auflsungenprozessen... da Verhltnisse der Produktion aufgelst werden, worin vorherrscht: Gebrauchswert, Produktion fr den umittelbaren Gebrauch; der Tauschwert und die Produktion desselben das Vorherrschen der andren Form zur Voraussetzung hat; daher auch in allen diesen Verhltnissen Naturallieferungen und Naturaldienste ber Geldzahlung und Geldleistung vorherrscht. (In all these

What is at issue here is the process of dissolution, its historical significance: A mass of individuals, whole social layers or strata, were cut loose from their place in the division of labor within a community to which hitherto they were seemingly indissolubly bound. If they were serfs, free peasants, or tenants and they worked the soil, this bond was so intimate the Earth was simply sensuously-materially given, appearing as their inorganic body; if they were craftsmen (masters, journeymen, apprentices), previously they had real, practical control over or (the prospects of) proprietorship of the instruments and tools of their craft, all of which was heritable and not alienable. Through a lengthy historical process, all these were alienated and became freely available, purchasable, to those with the wherewithal to make that purchase. All the individuals, laborers, were left with was their capacity to labor.1 Now if the separation of a mass of individuals from the objective conditions of their productive realization, from the means and materials of labor, is the first historical condition of the formation of a system of social relation known as capitalism, the second is the other side of the same event (i.e., historical process), the creation of this "free" labor together with its exchange on a market for money in return for reunion with those same means and materials of production. It is only when these conditions were satisfied and became socially generalized, accordingly, when the laborers, stripped of their control or proprietorship over both instruments of production and property in production, met another who possessed both and with whom the laborers exchanged their capacity to labor in return for the "opportunity" to earn the monetary means to provide for their vital needs (while that other, now a capitalist, retained possession of the product as his property), that the valorization process, and hence the creation of capital, can be instituted. These are the foundations of capitalism; they remain extant, are repeated daily in countless exchanges, and constitute the necessary conditions without which it cannot be reproduced. The same historical development, as necessary, concurrent consequences, dissolves all hitherto existing social relations (e.g., personal dependency as in the case of the slave or serf, proprietorship as in the case of the free peasant, inheritability of craft, tools and skills and their status as property as in the case of the craft master) and, as well, the institutional framework which these social relations were created and within which they functioned (e.g., guilds as in the case of craftsmen). Under these conditions finally the very relation between the owner of the conditions of labor and the worker is dissolved into a pure relation of buying and selling, or a monetary relation (our translation, emphases in original).2 Admixtures, seigniorial, patriarchal and sacred, disappear from the relation of exploitation: The formation of capital is inaugurated Formal Domination, I Chronology and History Let's pause and recapitulate the tentative determination of the formal subsumption of labor under capital (formal domination) offered above: First rising historically from the struggle of peasant proprietors against dispossession, formal domination is activity undertaken from outside the production process proper usually by a merchant. He siphons off surpluses in exploiting labor and does so without either reorganizing those productive activities or generating new technical inputs to them no technological transformation or reorganization of that process itself is undertaken which in the event in both cases dramatically increase the productivity of labor (at this historical moment
processes of dissolution the relations of production are broken up: where use value prevails, production for immediate consumption; where exchange value and its production rests on the prevalence of the other form; and, thus, in all these relations payments in kind and services in kind predominate over cash and money payments.) Marx, Ibid (Grundrisse, Heft V), 410. Our translation. 1 Capacity to labor translates literally and, in our view, far more preferably than labor power Arbeitsvermgen. Auf der einen Seite werden historische Prozesse vorausgesetzt, die eine Masse Individuen enire Nation etc. in die Lage, wenn zunchst nicht von wirklichen freien Arbeitem versetzt haben, doch von solchen, die es dynamei sind, deren einziges Eigentum ihr Arbeitsvermgen und die Mglichkeit, es auszutauschen gegen vorhanden Werte; Individuen, denen alle objektiven Bedingungen der Produktion als fremdes Eignetum, also ihr Nicht-Eigentum gegenberstehn, aber zugleich als Werte austauschbar, daher aneigenbar zu einem certain degree durch lebendige Arbeit. (To the one side, historic processes are presupposed which have placed a mass of individuals in a nation, etc., in the situation of formally free workers; if not so at first, then so dynamically [i.e., objectively and historically, individuals] whose only property is their capacity to labor and the possibility of exchanging it for values that are to hand; individuals who confront all objective conditions of production as alien property, not as their own property, but at the same time as values, as exchangeable, thus acquirable to a certain degree through living labor.) Marx, Ibid (Grundrisse, Heft V), 409. Our translation, all emphases in original. 2 ...endlich das Verhltnis der Besitzer der Arbeitsbedingungen und der Arbeiter selbst in ein reines Kauf- und Verkaufverhltnis oder Geldverhltnis auflst. Marx, Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses.

measured in terms of agricultural output) Rather, the producers are simply" subordinated to exchange, the market and the merchant, but not to the production process itself. Let's see if we can develop this determination as it was historically constituted... We distinguish between the simple chronology of bourgeois historiography and a revolutionary, communist perspective for which the movement of capital shapes inner historical development, creating both that history as universal history and major divisions within it, the grand periodization (epochs of formal and real domination) within which this movement unfolds, and the perspective within it from which that entire development can be leveraged with a view to its revolutionary transcendence (i.e., abolition of capital, its movement and the objectively separate institutional and the cognitive forms it has given rise to). Perhaps seemingly otherwise, this history has been neither linear nor progressive: The development it recounts is only that of capital and the increasingly integrated specific societal envelopes that formed its medium and content. The movement of capital has ceaselessly shifted spatially unfolding in Florence, in the Low Countries, in England or elsewhere and temporally, has unfolded at rhythms and tempos that vary in kind and duration from place to place and from one time to another (i.e., constituted those various times in their inner historicity). In the general regions where this development occurred, whole areas the larger part of Europe and the Americas were for the longest time never drawn into, remaining subject to the different temporalities and historicities of specific tributary formations. Consider, then, a periodization of major divisions within, that as a conceptual lever provides us with genuine insight into, this movement and development. We make no claims as to the ultimate real value of this periodization, and we shall proceed by utilizing chronological history as a point of reference and contrast. The divisions began with the rough date of 1200, which (starting from circa 800) marked the close of the period of social relations of feudal tribute in their geographical heartland concentrated in Normandy but, generally, in northwest Europe from the Loire to the Rhine. In point of fact, the first date is merely a midpoint, an average, since, as we shall shortly see, nowhere else in Europe besides in this heartland is it adequate. The first period came to a close with the very initial creation though not in this core zone alone of a sphere of social life that was detached from the rest of society, i.e., the formation of petty commodity producing regions based on economies of urban manufacturers, banking and trade. This occurred perhaps first in old Cataluya, about the same time in the Low Countries (Flanders and Brabant in the northwestern reaches of the old feudal heartland), somewhat later in Florence and still later in England, i.e., in the great urban center of London, with a far more radical, rural version based on the establishment of waged labor appearing for the first time at this same moment in its, Londons, immediate north along the eastern English coast, its west in the midlands and the southeast. In class terms... and these terms are in every era the decisive reference point because it is social and class struggle and their institutional outcomes that reconstitute society on a different basis and inaugurate new moments or novel phases in this periodization... the period ended with the submission of the noblesa castral in the Barcelona countryside (and the wresting of control of the surrounding villages from Moorish freebooters and land pirates), the proscription of the magnati or great landed nobles of the Florentine contado, and the movement of textile production in the Low Countries from its rural origins to the towns, creating cities (Antwerp, Bruges); formally, its end was marked by the formulation of codes that governed relations between town and country and the classes that inhabited both, the Catalan Usatges developed and formalized from 1050 to 1125, the promulgation of the Ordinances of Justice in Florence in 1292, for what had disappeared here was the effective dominance of feudal tributary relations in Catalonia, on the Italian Peninsula, though not (yet) the Low Countries.1
1

Feudal, in the Catalan case at least, was a misnomer: When set aside the pastoral zone that dominated central to northern Iberia and latifundia slavery and petty commodity production in the Moorish center and south, the comparison allowed Catalonia to appear by way of contrast as feudal. But the specific type tenantcy, the fundamental social relation on which the entirety of Catalan countryside in this era rested, here the production of wheat, olives and vines and with it the handing over of halves in kind, was not feudalism. (See the extended note, First Study, Part I, Castilian Empire in Early Modern Europe, Capitalism and Formal Domination, above.) In the Catalan countryside, the central social relation of feudal society, reciprocal ties of personal dependence, that is, the provision of labor services in return for protection, were largely missing. Once he had forced his peasants to the wall as tenants, the Catalan overlord extracted surpluses on the basis of a productive relation: A rent in kind was delivered up to the lord in turn for lease of the land. Yes, extra-economic measures, namely taxes, were imposed to enhance the lords revenue. Yet the fundamental social relation on which the lords form of life depended exhibited mutual dependency only in the formal economic sense. In return for the means to his existence, the lord reciprocated nothing: There was no internalized obligatory relation which compelled him to provide his peasants with protection and defense. In Catalonia,

Emphasizing again that these temporal demarcations taken together form a schema designed merely to facilitate comprehension of the movement of capital in terms of its formal ascendency in production, we can note the various phases, eras or periods that followed. The first following close upon a feudal tributary period witnessed the institutional consolidation of the Roman Church and in Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) and Scholasticism (later, Albert of Saxony, d. 1294, who though was not a Scholastic philosopher) the greatest elaboration of Absolute Spirit, which came after the substantive developments and achievements in production and the material culture of daily life had already reached their zenith and had begun to undergo decline. It lasted until about 1380, two years after the Ciompi struggle for full incorporation into the Florentine political community, marking the genuine historical terminal points of the internal political and regional economic expansion of the medieval Communes as such, and, even more significantly, forty years after the craftsmen, wool weavers, of Bruges had, aligning themselves with peasants, engaged in insurrectionary actions for a decade that once and for all laid low the power of the feudal nobles of Flanders.1 The next phase (again, understood merely as a retrospective, tentative schematization and not as the structure of a necessary historical development) began from these defeats and was characterized by the rapid rise of political forms (oligarchical governance and on this basis individual tyranny, kingly government) far more congruent with the power of the great bankers and manufacturers that had developed in production, and an initial centralization that was necessary to further development. It had already completed its inner development by 1485. In one of the advanced zones (from the standpoint of capital coming into being) this last date designates the Battle of Bosworth, last battle of the English dynastic civil wars (War of the Roses). Thirty years (1455-1485) of struggle amongst the English feudal nobility exhausted and ruined it, in raising armies, in actual fighting (major battles were fought in 1455, 1460, 1470-1471 and 1485), in intrigue resulting in murders and executions. In the balance, the English crown was vastly strengthened, i.e., centralized, by the financial resources that accrued to it as both of the great noble families (Lancaster and York) engaged, while holding the crown, in estate confiscations to fund their fighting... Such was the institutional outcome of this internecine struggle... Absent the bloody internal class fighting, never having been feudal and based in urban cloth manufacturer and in the financial institutions generated to support, in central Italy the Florentine oligarchy traced out a similar trajectory as the Medici family (through maneuver, proscriptions, abolishing some and packing other bodies of communal government) gained control of the various republican institutions, centralized them, and reduced them to empty shells and rubber stamps of the activity of an individual tyrant.2 At the same time, the end of this era signified the close of the period of initial elaboration of those forms of Objective Spirit, namely, law and civil administration, which were crucial for later growth and expansion of capitalism in Europe and North America. From 1470 until 1590, four events unfolded and defined a new era or phase: First, Castile rose and a Spanish tributary formation committed to stopping the spread, then annihilating, both republican and non-Catholic forms of awareness consolidated itself, all the while it plundered the wealth of tributary formations in the Americas, second, laying the groundwork for the penetration of capital (and with it a backward capitalism) in the New World, so called. Third, the petty commodity zone in the Low Countries rapidly expanded on the basis of the development of towns in the previous period. Fourth, these two (Castile and the Low Countries), and the forms of organized social life each rested on, clashed in a war that lasted ninety years. By the closing years of the chronological sixteenth century (i.e., from 1590), the monstrous Castilian military machine (especially the Army of Flanders) began to consume its own foundations, which in its own way contributed mightily to the triumph of the formal domination of capital over labor in these three zones (England primarily in the south and east, the Italian Peninsula in the center and north, and the Low Countries), thus, to its periodization which we can retrospectively, on the basis on the entirety of the forgoing, date to end of tributary relations in at least two of the initial core zones, circa 1290. This is significant for already a transcontinental economy had formed with its centers in the great coastal cities, London, Bruges and Antwerp,
a social structure was established on the foundations of a system of land rent, as opposed to service: The lord did not reciprocally provide protection to his tenants. For this see the discussion of the Counts of Barcelona in our The Origins and Development of Catalan Nationalism: Catalan and Castilian Antagonism in Spanish History. 1 See chapter 2 of Henriette Roland Holsts De Revolutionaire Masse-Actie, the section entitled De massa-acties van de middeleeuwse stadsbevolking. Concluding the same development, we would note the peasant insurrections, the large jacquerie in France in 1358 and the uprising associated with the names of Tyler and John Ball in England in 1381, briefly discussed by Roland Holst's in an earlier section entitled De massa-actie van de middeleeuwse landbevolking. 2 See The History of Florence and the Florentine Republic, Part III in its entirety, where theses major developments in this history are traced out.

Genoa, Florence and Venice, and with these and other cities (Barcelona, Marseilles) mediating the passage of unfinished goods and raw materials from interiors and regions such as Tuscany, the Midlands, CastilianEstremadura-Andalusia (where the great Castilian sheep lords gazed their herds) to the crucial centers, those coastal cities. Extending into the Levant (and soon into the colonies of North America) by way of trade, this world economy was based largely on textiles, especially woolens and then silk. (Each center possessed its own specific auxiliary industries, for example, in Venice, glass and mirror, wax, sugar and soap production.) It was Spanish warring that undermined much of this and set the stage for a massive, famine-war-epidemics enhanced contraction of productive activity circa 1600-1640, and thereafter the shift of the center of this economy from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic (concentrated in the triangular trade between London, plantation agricultural Virginia and the West Indies, and central, coastal West Africa). It was also during this phase that those historical events and practices forming the objective basis for a theorization of homogeneous space - we have Galileo in mind - unfolded, thereby creating a central, decisive condition for the elaboration of the modern science of nature Castile was exhausted in its struggle with a nascent Dutch capitalism and then battered largely by the French in the final phase (1634-1648) of the Thirty Years War. Not even the vast treasures plundered in the Americas and annually returned to it could it avoid the bankruptcy of its treasury. Occurring simultaneously and at the midpoint of this period, the decline, then collapse, of the greatest tributary formation that appeared in Europe in the entire epoch prior to capitals real domination was the other side of the triumph of the Puritan, parliamentary bearers of British capitalism, which was based on that triangular trade, and which points to the two of the three other significant events of the period, namely, the growing establishment of national boundaries, the appearance of bourgeois nations as the basis of capitalist development, and, unifying this development through mercantile policies and practices, the creation by ruling class social groups, sometimes quite diverse (e.g., with landed aristocratic and urban, great merchant components), of a national state. The fourth, and retrospectively by far the most significant, feature of this phase of the inner history of the development of European capitalism was creation of the novel, modern science of nature, an event that stretched in time from Galileo earliest efforts (Du Motu, 1590) to Newtons Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), dates which define this phase. (This is the period with which the First Study has been most concerned.) On the heels of the first great bourgeois revolution and its Commonwealth defense and transformation, the era which follows was inaugurated by the demise of English kingship in the historically significant sense at one end (1689), with that event which firmly established the class alliance that would first bring into being in Britain the real domination of capital over labor in production, starting from the Industrial Revolution as it is called. At the other end (1789), it is circumscribed by the onset of the greatest single revolutionary-transformative event of this history to this moment, the French Revolution, which, in its turn, established the basis for the penetration of the value form as real domination in the zone of western Europe as a whole. If we now move beyond the historical framework in which capital's formal ascendency in production unfolded, we can note three further phases in this schematization, as it were contemporary elaborations beyond formal subsumption. Thus, it was precisely the institution of real domination that has created the contemporary world starting from, beyond Britain, by way of Napoleonic conquest, occupation of the French revolutionary armies and with both the institution of the complete material premises, the legal and social codes promulgated by Napoleon, of this form of domination in this zone (contemporary Belgium, Luxembourg, the Rhine lands, Bavaria, and outside continental Europe, Haiti, and Louisiana in the United States). This is the period of the long nineteenth century lasting from 1790 until 1914, in which, further, modern science begins to most forcibly assert its sway over daily life (through its fusion with technology and in which it creates, at it were, real domination as it systematically ingresses into production, and, of course, it is the class bearers of science who were the real agents here) and in which the rise of the first great international capitals (in Germany, Britain, France and the United States) and their competition is carried out in the arena of the world, in the imperialism that brings large regions of the world under the sway of capitalist development (both formal and real) and which is consummated in imperialist world war.1 While the formal domination of capital over labor in production reaches back to its first appearance in the Mediterranean west (Barcelona) and center (Genoa, Florence and Venice) and coastal northwest Europe (Bruges, Antwerp) circa 1200 and forward to the general crisis of capital in the first half of the last century, in the aftermath of that prolonged crisis marked by two world wars and a Slump which was its most massive, concentrated
1

See our The German Road to Renewed Imperialist World War, the Introduction in its entirety.

expression we can fix the date 1950 as that moment at which real domination of capital over labor in production itself stretching back to the origins of capital as capital, the Industrial Revolution so-called had begun to effectively hold sway over the largest parts of the world. Standing, as it were, at its midpoint, this date is circumscribed by the short twentieth century (1915-1991): At one end, we can look back to that general crisis, while the collapse of the entire zone of highly bureaucratized, state capitals, the ongoing decline of the reigning American hegemon, and the rise of alternative world centers of accumulation in East Asia, signaling the beginning of another, historic shift in the locus of the movement of capital, delineates it at the other end. We can conclude by noting that, utilizing the date 1992, the last period in this schematization, a transitional, perhaps even novel development in the history of capitalism has been set off by the inauguration of the totalizing domination of capital over society,1 the reemergence of a tendential drift toward renewed imperialist world war and, heightening all the contradictions of this development, by a climate change that itself is the product of the dynamics of capitalist development and, in particular, product of the depth penetration of techno-science into, reshaping, the foundations of life in earthly nature. Based on planetary warming, ongoing climate change threatens to destroy the entire edifice (built environment, humanized natural landscapes, and the material embodiments of capitalist civilization) raised on the basis of this development Throughout the rest of this work, reference to various eras, periods, phases and even centuries, as a temporal framework defining and defined by specific developments is, unless otherwise indicated, to the forgoing discussion understood in terms of a mere conceptual schematic, whose aim is to illuminate the historical formation of capital in its mediate relation to the modern science of nature and whose moments serve as points of reference. Formal Domination, II Social, then Class Struggle and the Inauguration of Capitals Domination in Production Struggle on the ground against the formation of capital is of paramount import, even if it appears here in this presentation as a digression: It goes straight to the heart of the matter. First, in the historical sense that social struggle against this new, naked form of exploitation and the oppression that peasants (villeins, copyholders, tenants, etc.) fought against created classes in the strict socio-economic sense (as opposed to their largely politico-juridical sense prior to the advent of capitalism, e.g., throughout the history of the Florentine Republic),2 and, second, in the profound sense that capitals domination in production and thereafter specific forms of that domination have never been established without resistance, without enormous struggle against exploiters who would further rob those who actually worked the land of proprietorship (or control over or both) of their natural conditions of production (that land, soil), and the means and materials of labor In this regard, we can unreservedly affirm where the struggle of the oppressed and exploited has been successful that domination has not been instituted If we turn to capitalism (real domination) at is origins, to its geographical home in England (and Wales), 3 we can note that the period of from that time at which towns in the Low Countries had really undergone growth and expansive capitalist development on the basis of formal domination (say, 1520) to down to the onset of the English Civil War (1640) was crucial. Among other things, in this period the population of England doubled. This enormous demographic pressure provided an impetus to agricultural production, which, in turn, disrupted traditional tributary social relations between lord and peasant in the countryside.4 The historical outcome was threefold: (i) private property in land through enclosures of "waste and common land became generalized; (ii) agriculture underwent concentration, small farms began to disappear and larger units of agricultural production emerged;5 and (iii) there emerged in England novel waged, social relations at once premising and developing on the foundation of a market economy based on maximizing profitability in exchange, i.e., the historical process of the formation of capital was, so to speak, set in motion.

See the Second Interlude, below. The History of Florence and the Florentine Republic, Section I. 2, and passim. 3 See the Introduction to Revolutionary Theories in the English Civil War; and R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century. 4 We say tributary, and not feudal. In England, tributary social relations were centered on a manorial estate and their courts, for there, a customary legality played a decidedly important role in organizing those social relations from the get-go. 5 Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 67-68.
2

In this period, nearly a century and a quarter, England underwent massive agricultural and urban development in conjunction with a perhaps more well-known, but nonetheless profound religious transformation (the emergence and consolidation of a popular Puritanism). This development put an end to seigniorial and paternalistic social relationships in the countryside, witnessed the differentiation of the peasantry and the emergence of antagonistic social classes therein - the most productively significant of which was the capitalist yeomanry, and saw the growth of the largest metropolis in the world, one base upon both historically large units of artisan and craft production and on a booming mercantile-protectionist export trade and one forming the nexus of a newly emerging integrated national market. A yeomanry engaged in grain production and sheep grazing and dairy farming, the craftsmen and masters engaged in woolen production, a multiplicity of "entrepreneurs" engaged in small scales manufacturers1 and the trading people and smaller merchants engaged in the distribution and export of wool taken together formed the central classes in the rise of capitalism, known in their own time as a "middling sort."2 As roughly the moment Castilian power reached its zenith (1550), wool, the chief English export, and grain were the two main commodities in English trade.3 Wool production was decisive. It gave rise to a characteristic development of the division of labor the non-rentier, landed classes owning sheep, poor workers, their wives and children spinning it, artisans weaving it, clothiers handling it, and merchants exporting it.4 In the countryside, sheep grazing, the material premise of woolen manufacturer and processing, was carried on by the English yeomanry, who at the end of this whole process transformed himself into the big capitalist farmer5 and who also engaged in the other central economic activity of the entire period, namely, grain production. The yeoman farmers were, historically, primarily responsible for actually performing enclosures6 - of common pasture lands, wooded areas, wastes, fens and hillsides - as well as the destruction of forests, the drain of marches not to mention the specific exploitative practices of forcing small copyholders to the ground, rack-rents,7 the resurrection of ancient feudal fines, subdivision of landholdings, legal challenges to copyhold title, as the struggle developed and grew more vicious which brought new acreage under cultivation and made the enormous increase in grain production possible, a necessity at once growing out of and supporting population growth. The enclosures pitted an emergent capitalist farmer against the small tenant peasantry. Capitalist farmers created great misery in disposing the smaller peasants and recreating them as landless laborers and vagabonds who swelled the urban areas (especially London), i.e., as actual and potential (rural and urban) waged labor, for, to repeat, in dispossession (separation of the peasant from the soil and his instruments of production) and free labor the conditions for the formation of capital and the system of social relations we call capitalism have taken shape. In summa, a ruthless struggle was inaugurated by landowners and ended successfully in the violent expropriation of poor freeholders and copyholders - most with only a faltering grip on a tiny plot. This struggle proceeded by means of enclosures, reclamation projects, lying, cheating, theft, fraudulent means of all sorts, legal and otherwise, but always with Power (here, the force of law) sanctioning the action. The struggle produced a sharp differentiation of the peasantry, creating a tiny stratum of successful capitalist farmers when measured against the similarly created mass
1 2

Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects, 2, 6-7. Revolutionary Theories in the English Civil War, Ibid. 3 Stone, Ibid, 70. With the century-long, demographical explosion dating from this time, grain would become more and more important. 4 Stone, Ibid, 68-69; David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed, 43. 5 Brian Manning, The English People And The English Revolution, 113. 6 Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, 9-11; Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 115-124. For a nuanced view of the enclosure themselves, see Joan Thirsk, Tudor Enclosures. 7 Copyholders were, as far back as the thirteen century, English peasants who security of tenure or hold on a plot of land was customary and guaranteed by manorial courts, where they may or may not have had documentation of their tenure (said to be by copy of the court roll), and may or may not have had explicitly a tenure at will, at the pleasure of the manorial lord. The enormous effort in the historical sense to dispossess English copyholders to reduce the size of their hold, to ramp up rents, to force them off the land altogether since a novel conception of the purpose of the land and the tenant occupying it gripped the yeoman farmer, no longer, as Tawney (Ibid, 4) suggests, concerned with the provision of services but with pecuniary gain especially in the chronological sixteenth century (though this struggle stretched back well in the previous century), is the precise historical analog of Marxs discussion (Grundrisse, Formen) of the ideal genesis (i.e., the logical requirements as they have been extracted from actual social and historical development) of the formation of capital. For a taste, a sense of this struggle, albeit it dry, removed and legally focused, see Tawney, Ibid, 47, 52-54, 287f. The rack-rent was an invention of the English yeoman-becoming-capitalist landlord. It refers to the practice on big estates of substituting short leases with reduced entry fees but higher annual rents for, replacing, long leases with high entry fees and low annual rents. Manning, Ibid, 117. These higher annual rents often reached the value of the property. For the entire question of peasant exploitation, see Manning, Ibid, 112-138.

of tenants and agricultural wage laborers. This gigantic class struggle, which retrospectively appears as a hundred and fifty year long historical "process" of violent expropriation, created, in England, those two central conditions for the appearance of capital. Now capitalism in starting from the dispossession of rural proprietors and their recreation as free (i.e., waged) labor does not always start from a gigantic class struggle. In the rural hinterlands and peripheries of world capitalism today, these conditions are also achieved without a fight by the encroachment of megacities (with developers or bureaucrats wielding the force of law to carry out dispossession) that swallow up farming villages, 1 in a strictly tourist make over of village communities where the armed force that is the state stands fully behind the bulldozing of homes for purposes of constructing hotels, shops and restaurants along a scenic seashore,2 and in the capitalistically driven destruction of intensely humanized peasant ecologies,3 in all cases leaving peasants with nothing but their capacity to labor to sell We stress the more than century long differentiation of a class of capitalist farmers out of a peasant mass because we think an autonomous agricultural transformation has historically demonstrated priority over the urban transformation, and is accordingly the really revolutionary road, in the development at the origins of capitalism. This can be seen in a contrast between English Midlands in the eras of Castiles rise (1470-1590), and with it the Churchs counter-reform, and its decline (1590-1689) where capitalism originally took root and Florence, in the eras of institutional consolidation of the Roman Church (1290-1380) and Communal decline together with initial political centralization (1380-1485), where the urban merchant patriciate, having defeated the feudal lords and controlling the countryside (contado), reduced peasants once subordinate to the magnati to sharecropping tenants, while these great merchants and bankers (befitting their prestigious standing in Florentine society) retired to their country estates to engage in a grand, gentlemanly display of wealth, and thus played a major role in the blockage of the further development of capitalism (beyond its formal nature). The primacy of agricultural over urban transformation in the rise of capitalism is demonstrated, further, in modern warfare in the bourgeois epoch in which total mobilization reigns and when it is fought symmetrically by conventional militaries (as opposed to asymmetrical warfare pitting a hierarchically organized standing, a conventional force against irregulars, or if you prefer, guerrillas), which have achieved relative parity in organization in speed, mobility, decentralized field command, leadership initiative, etc and who have comparable industrial-technological bases. That war will be prolonged, a war of attrition; 4 and, the issue will be decided by the superiority of a nationalistically motivated soldiery drawn from the industrial working class and capitalist tenants and farmers with their advanced industrialized agriculture in a struggle against peasant armies drawn from backward agriculture and motivated by loyalty to a sovereign (kaiser, tsar, emperor, sultan, etc.). The case in point was the first imperialist world war in which backward agriculture belonged to capitalist latecomers (Germany, Austro-Hungary and Russia) who suffered defeat at the hands of the older great capitalist powers (Britain, United States) whose advanced agriculture was already intensively organized by real domination, whose soldiery was largely industrial workers Formal Domination, III Ideal Genesis and Development of Capital Before 1600, a world economy, global capitalism in the era of its formal domination, was beginning to form. Its centers were in London and the eastern countries in England, Bruges and Antwerp in the Low Countries and Genoa, Florence, Venice and Milan on the Italian Peninsula, and in cities such as Barcelona and Marseilles mediating the passage of goods from interiors and regions to the major centers. By 1650, formal domination had become firmly entrenched and dominated the advanced zones of capitalist development, even if its determinate presence was not irreversible
1 2

Gregory Guldin, Whats a Peasant To Do?, 14-17. The events in question have occurred over and again in southern China. Jeremy Seabrook, In the Cities of the South, 16-24. The no longer extant coastal village of Batu Uban on the isle of Penang off the western Malaysian coast is the case in point. 3 This destruction is carried out by massive logging, in the place of forests establishment of monoculture crop plantations, and with both erosion, flooding then drought. Ibid, 27-28. The practices and processes summarized here refer to the Thai interior. For an overview of the whole process, see Contemporary Capitalist Agriculture: Capitalist Criminality, the Green 'Revolution' and Destruction of Biodiversity in Nature, Capital, Communism. 4 Civil War and Revolution in America, Chapter 4, the section entitled Napoleonic Warfare. Jomini, and Robert Epstein's Napoleon's Last Victory and the Emergence of Modern Warfare, 171-183.

Ranging from the Ottoman territories of the eastern Mediterranean west to the British planter colonies of Virginia and South Carolina, and Barbados and Jamaica in the West Indies, and south to coastal west Africa, this economy was based largely on textiles, but also on the production of agricultural staples such as corn, wheat and barley, livestock such as hogs and cattle, luxury items such as tobacco and sugar, and in good measure in its western reaches on the slave trade. Production remained largely production of luxury goods (so that expensive woolens and silk were the primary textiles), not in any sense mass production and not for mass consumption. The merchant was the dominant figure in each and all of these economies, and states played decisive roles in affording each mercantilist protections against competition. Competition, as in all phases of capitalist development, was fierce, within the nascent system of social relations specific forms of productive activity provided competitive advantage, first, with a view to the manner of integration of the city with the countryside and, second, in terms the form of that activity itself took. The latter governed the former so that the putting out system which was coming to dominate in England fully integrated Londons rural hinterland precisely because centers of production were dispersed to the dwellings of farmers, laborers and the village poor as merchants provided materials and market in return for the waged labor that produced woolens as raw materials. From the standpoint of the development of capitalism, the putting out system was historically advantageous relative to guild domination of production and the restrictions it imposed that survived on the Italian Peninsula throughout the era of the rise of Castile. At the same time, here in the countryside largely antagonistic, tributary services were intertwined with wages, and landlords tended to exploit these services like rents (the purely financial relation had yet to triumph), while often the state prohibited or limited the development of industries in its hinterlands to preserve the urban center (as with Venice). Decline, so-called, did occur within Italy but only relative to the advanced forms of production in the other great centers, i.e., these were all developments within capitalism as can be seen from Lombardy where the putting out system had begun to develop at the end of the historical (not the chronological) seventeenth century, which would on the basis of its advanced productive complex (relative to the rest of the Peninsula) take the lead in the nineteenth century struggle for unification. (Before Lombardy has ever emerged, however, the entire locus of this world system would shift to the Atlantic centered on London, the planter colonies of Virginia and South Carolina and coastal West Africa, with its central products tobacco, sugar and slaves, as an incipient form of mass production began to appear).1 It within this actual historical context that we situate the development we theorize as formal domination The first historical shape in which the formation of capital develops occurred as the buyer of laborers capacity to labor confronted those laborers. The former provided the means and material of labor land and implements with which to work in the case of agricultural labor, tools and material to work on in the case of craft labor, the latter provided their capacity to labor in exchange for a wage, and the buyer of this capacity to labor claimed the products of labor as his own, taking them to market. These are the actual historical premises for formal domination of labor by capital; nothing more: For the production processes continues just as before, just as they were conducted before serfs, peasants, craftsmen, etc. loss their proprietorship in land, craft and tools, etc. The buyer of labor, more adequately of capacity to labor, the employer or capitalist makes no attempt to reorganize the work processes (e.g., by housing a large number of workers under the same roof, by assigning partial tasks to each worker in the production of the outcome, the product, a commodity that the employer will take to market with the intent to sell), nor does he make any effort to deploy novel means of production, tools, instruments, machines, or even natural substances to accelerate production. The production process remains just as it was before, it is formally the same even as proprietorship has shifted. Historically, then, the initial formation of capital occurred (and continues for a lengthy historical period) under conditions of the formal subsumption of labor under capital, formal domination. Grasping the actual historical conditions within which the formal subsumption of labor under capital occurred2 has required that we reconstruct the formation of capital, meaning the movement of capital at its origins. Unlike the situation in Florence in the era of Communal decline and initial political centralization, this examination has two premises, first, that, as we have shown, development proceeds only in a systematic way, that is, with a view to capitalism as structured whole, a totality of social relations (and not, say, with a view to capital's occasional and sporadic appearance on the margin of social formations which as a whole exhibited limited or restricted market
1

For Venice, Ciriacono, Mass Consumption Goods and Luxury Goods, esp. 42-44. The premise of this shift was the victorious wars of the English in the Anglo-Dutch wars, the third and last of which ended in 1674. 2 Community and Capital, 90-99.

characteristics); and, second, that at its outset this development was "spontaneous," that is, it took shape neither as the central moment of a Statistpropelled conscious effort to "modernize" (e.g., the development of a military capitalist sector in Tsarist Russia after 1862, Japan from 1868 forward) nor as efforts by statist politicians of one society to compel the transformation of the basic productive relations of another society during or in the aftermath of a war (e.g., United States military occupation of and war with Vietnam, 1965-1972). In the logical sense, its genesis occurred as middling social layers as a group (class) formed and became the first in history to exclusively pursue the accumulation of money wealth (not conquest or plunder, not honor or glory) for its own sake. We would note that, accordingly, rooted in this, its life activity (as in counting its hoard) the bourgeoisie was already given over to understanding man, society and the cosmos purely and simply quantitatively. Thus, we must specify the historical, contingent conditions under which capitalism first emerged. This returns us (above) to the "spontaneous" emergence of capital as it first occurred in a tributary formation in the northwestern Europe, England during the era of the rise and dominance of Castile (1470-1590) Within the circle of this development, two epochs of capitals historical movement can retrospectively be distinguished with a view to forms of domination in production. Initially, in the historical sense, the capitalist merely takes over an existing labor process (e.g., peasant or guild production) with the proviso, of course, that labor, while "free," is no longer independent (in those cases where it had been). In this sense, politically mediated personal relations of domination and dependency (as in the cases of slaves or serfs) more or less disappear, more than less where there capital's domination was firmly established. In fact, though a new form of supremacy and subordination develops in the work process, at first it appears, on the basis of a "freely" engaged transaction between commodity "owners" (proprietors of means and instruments of labor, on the one side, and the capacity to labor, on the other), that domination and dependency have been dissolved into a purely financial relation. Based on the supervision and direction of the work process by the capitalist, this new form of supremacy exhibits its limits. It is restricted by the mere formal control the capitalist exercises over labor. Exploitation, the extraction of surplus value, is achieved absolutely, only by the greater continuity of production expressed in the lengthening of the working day, i.e., by increasing the quantum of commodities produced, without any corresponding compensation of labor. Increased production is at all possible because, unlike peasant production which is largely for self-sustenance or artisan production which depends upon the vagaries of a limited, personally acquired clientele, production now is for the market (a much enlarged base) and is driven by the capitalist desire to reduce labor costs to the socially necessary minimal time, a project which can only be achieved by expanding the quantity of commodities produced. The revolutionary character of this, albeit limited, capitalist takeover of the work process is visible in the fact that it, again, more or less eliminates all patriarchal, political or even religious connections to the relation of exploitation (our translation)1 such as personal fees, corves, ecclesiastical services (mortmain), etc. The epoch that can be characterized by this first form of the domination of labor by capital, the formal subsumption of labor under capital (again, Marx), formal domination, is, then, determined by activity undertaken from outside the production process proper, largely by merchants who provide materials and productive instruments to, e.g., a situation that characterized work under conditions of the domestic system of production from roughly Henry VIIIs break with the Roman Church (1535) to down to the Industrial Revolution so-called (1760) in England.2 No technological transformation or reorganization of that process itself is undertaken.3 Rather, because, as we have indicated, the producers are "merely" subjugated to exchange, the market and above all to the capitalist, and not to the production process itself, the community remains distinct from an economy in the process of formation, the determinants of the formers structure are not even tendentially reducible to those of the latter (which, at any rate, is as yet not fully constituted). It is questionable whether here we can speak of society in the strict sense described above: In the entire historical epoch in which capitalist activity initially developed, capitalist production (if ever, it is not permissible to go so far as to speak here of a capitalist mode of production) was of subsidiary significance for the
1

...das Exploitationsverhltnis von allen patriarchalischen und politischen oder auch religisen Verquickungen ausscheidet. Marx, Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses. Emphasis in original. 2 George Unwin, Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. 3 The contours and outstanding features of daily life under conditions of formal domination as it first developed in England, though not described in the terms above, are recounted with a view to urban, craft work in Unwins work cited immediately above and with a view to rural agricultural activity (especially with the development of rural industry) in Thirsk, Ibid.

entire social formation; at least at the outset, it constituted a subordinate productive form, a largely mercantile moment in a vast tributary formation as it existed in various forms in western Europe. Real Domination, I The Real Subsumption of Labor under Capital Where the producer whether in agriculture or in urban crafts, according to Marx it makes no difference himself assumes the role and function of capitalist hiring [exploiting] labor and robbing his former compatriots, workmates, fellow laborers, similarly situated producers, of their independence as producers, reducing them to proletarians in the fullest sense, i.e., introducing changes into the work processes by way of their reorganization, new inputs or both the really revolutionary way to capitalist development on its own basis opens up1 Under propitious market conditions, particularly increased demand, the capitalist employs more workers. The growth of demand also leads to enlargement of the scale of production. At a certain point, a point different for each industry and at least initially in the historical sense for each capitalist, this increase in the volume of capital employed commits the capitalist (who had previously merely supplied means and materials of production to "his" laborers) to directly taking control of the process of production itself. This commitment transforms him from a merchant into an industrialist, a capitalist who actually intervenes in and organizes the forms labor takes in the workplace, and who transforms the means of production by bringing to bear on them new technological inputs (machinery). The capitalist now preferentially extracts surplus value relatively by means of increases in labor's productivity. He loses his individual character, i.e., he increasingly behaves as a personification of capital (he has assimilated and internalized the logic of accumulation, see below), while capital itself assumes direct social proportions. Production itself calls forth a growth in population, new branches of industry multiply and diversify their subspheres, a greater productivity of labor and cooperation of labor on a massive scale and an increasing mass of existing and novel commodities now all appear. Each of these features in turn calls forth the others In this specific respect, the advent of the railroads was the decisive event in the development of real domination in production. It brought into being the largest permanent workforces to date in the history of capitalism, it required a qualitative increase in the division of labor within the enterprise, pushing beyond national boundaries from the get-go its scale was continent in scope, it required funding on a scale never previously encountered and with novel means of financing, and it created a new form of capitalist organization of the firm2 This whole movement, in the strict sense, inaugurates the capitalist production proper or, the real subsumption of labor under capital, call it real domination. The central feature of this development, which secures capitalism as a system of social relations and makes its progress irreversible, is the direct application of science and technology to the production process. By the middle of the chronological nineteenth century, the magnitude of strictly capitalist operations is large enough to call forth this development (which at any rate, as we have argued, is given with the very character of science itself), for in this subjection of production wholly to scientific determination capitalism established itself on its own foundations In this respect, we might ask if the worlds of ancient and modern tributary formations knew iron, copper, lead, silver and gold, how, apart from the scientific exploitation of mineral resources, might have manganese, nickel, cobalt and aluminum been discovered, utilized, and then become incorporated into specific, industrial processes early in the epoch of the real domination of labor under capital? Recognizing that at its origins this ingression of science into production was (and is always) carried out by human beings as bearers of scientific theories, concepts and practices engaged in productive activities, science entered production in one of two ways. First, the relation was irregular as in the case (discussed below) of Josiah Wedgwood the china manufacturer and Joseph Priestly scientist and chemist,3 the latter who as a scientist consciously, deliberately and with a view to utilitarian outcomes pursued science largely as experimentation (in the fully modern, not Galileos, sense). In this manner, a number of important innovations and inventions resting on scientific knowledge and understanding were embodied in devices, processes and procedures between, say, 1760 and 1825. For example, Claude Berthollert
1

In point of fact, historically it has made a huge difference whether the producer was a capitalist farmer or a master craftsman, as we argued above. For Marx, Kapital, III, 347, where he states, Dies ist der wirklich revolutionierende Weg. 2 Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand, 81-144. 3 See Historical Forms of Real Domination in Production, below.

created chlorine bleach, which, as Rondo Cameron indicates,1 formed the foundations for heavy chemical industry throughout the early epoch of real domination; and, even if James Watt was not especially scientifically adept, work with his steam engine and its developments formed the basis for elaboration of the laws of thermodynamics, particularly the second proposed by Rudolf Classius in 1850. Second, the relation was systematized by the state through the establishment and funding of higher educative and technical schools that, employing renowned scientists as faculty, methodically trained imparting the methods of measurement (for example, the metric system), calculation and classification originally developed in the sciences of nature and mathematics students in various fields of constructive human endeavor, in mineral extraction (mining), in surveying, in road, bridge and rail, in canal and port, in civil and naval architectural and in fortifications construction, etc., with the same aims, now institutionally incarnated, of advancing scientific knowledge for the purposes of exploiting the Earth, understanding, harnessing and even creating (new) material processes in nature. Obviously, the civil engineer occupied pride of place in all these developments, and the French starting from the Convention of 92-93 and from Napoleonic decree were the first to establish a whole series of schools, institutes and facilities which embodied these aims, 2 which trained military and civilians engineers, technicians and scientists engaged by private firms, all of whom in turn brought scientific concepts, methods and rationality directly to bear on production. Abroad, not just within the territorial confines of France, the various courts and regimes of Europe and further afield employed French engineers and scientists for some of the most important productive developments from 1825 down to the advent of imperialism in the arena of the world (1870): Trained in the various great high educative and polytechnic schools, French engineers developed the coal and steel industries of Russia (including todays Polish Silesia); introduced the Bessemer converter and an internationally competitive locomotive factory in Austria; were responsible for the advance of iron manufacture (introduction of the rolling mill, improvements in puddling process) and a good deal of the industrial infrastructure of central Italy; developed safety and technical mining procedures in Westphalia; undertook and were in charge of infrastructural development in northern Egypt (irrigation, embankment and damming in the lower Nile, and road, canal and port construction in Alexandria); and similar infrastructure (roads, bridges, ports, public buildings and sanitation systems, and railways) in Wallachia (Romania), and built, having designed, bridges spanning most of Europes great rivers as well as harbor and dock works for half Europes seaports.3 Students from all over Europe studied in French schools, and in this way bourgeois notions of order, efficiency and rationality, and material progress, were diffused through the bourgeoisie and business classes on the continent and in areas of colonial penetration. This was (and is) the movement from science to capital (generating it in its fixed form) at its origins. But the movement was (and is) reciprocal: Once scientific procedures organized work processes, and once machines constructed on the basis of scientific principles were deployed in production, the mastery of work, production and machinery required and demanded the assimilation of the common understanding of science of the day (at whatever level this understanding existed), and, as in the case of the steam engine alluded to above, even occasionally was the point of departure for novel scientific theorizations. In the same manner, capital investment where there had been none or little before constituted as such a diffusion of science and modern technology. (And, similarly, where work, production and machinery have already been fully placed on scientific foundations, capital investment that incarnates advanced or even novel scientific principles raises the level of that common understanding, or there is no mastery of production and work) It is at this precise moment, that at which inputs to (machinery in) production require scientific understanding and awareness to minimally operate and maintain them, that real domination in production, the development of capitalism, capital as capital, became irreversible There is here is a movement from capital back to science, which completes an incessantly growing and developing circle that is necessary for and essential to the expanded reproduction of capital. This is the service science renders capital, demonstrating their internal affinity and inseparably, which becomes ever tighter the more real domination develops as a periodization in the history of capitalism
1

Cameron, France and the Economic Development of Europe, 44. Similarly, Eric Hobsbawm (The Age of Capital, 42) remarks, the artificial dye-stuffs industry came from the laboratory to the factory. 2 Cameron, Ibid, 43, 45-54. 3 Ibid, 57, 58, 55, 59, 93, 95, 96, 101. Those seaports included Antwerp and Zeebrugge (Belgium), Lisbon and Oporto (Portugal), Cdiz (Spain), Leghorn (Livorno) and Genoa and Trieste (Italy), Fiume (Rejeka, Croatia), Salonica (Greece), and Constantinople (Istanbul, Turkey) among others. Ibid, 101, n. 54.

With the systematic ingression of science into production, the familiar face of capitalism now appears or, stated differently, what now appears is the subjugation of the work processes themselves to capitalist rationality. This subjugation is achieved through scientization of work rhythms and tempos. It has as its consequences the constant revolutionizing of production itself, and the loss of actual worker control over and understanding of both instruments of production and that process as a whole. Tendentially, producers begin to appear as a "collective worker" (Gesamtarbeiter), increasingly appendages to the production process as a whole, no longer "merely" subjugated to exchange, the market and the capitalist; communities undergoing societal amalgamation tendentially lose their compactness and distinctness in relation to the economy, the determinants of the structure and movement of the latter increasingly and directly shape the former, the categories of the critique of political economy are first reflectively grasped and explicated (as in Marx) on this very basis as science passes into and reshapes production. At the same time, this ingression has the further consequence of rationalizing activities within society (in order to achieve penetration of the value form, to commoditize and market aspects or objects connected with those activities and the activities themselves, to produce them according to a capitalist logic, i.e., in accordance with the waged relation and the exploitation of labor, all in order to generate surplus value): Rationalization recreates social activities as distinctive institutional spheres within society mediately subordinated to the logic of capitalist development, to accumulation, distinctive because in their very rationalization they develop their own norms and rules which govern human behavior within these newly forming institutions. This movement (rationalization) that creates this development creates society, i.e., transforms communities into a system of social relations, which, hardened and congealed (i.e., institutionalized), form a network of seemingly separate institutions that are connected by their mediate subjugation to the logic of accumulation. Society, whose formation is a simultaneously generated product of the same movement of capital that creates an economy (i.e., the objectively institutional connective thread), now necessarily appears as a system into which individuals as abstract units are inserted, and which can be scientifically analyzed and mathematically described on the model of the modern science of nature,1 creating objectivistic psychologies (such as behaviorism), economics that explains social development in terms of consumer choice, etc., whose information, data and facts, in turn, are utilized in producing technologies of social control (e.g., the instruments, weapons, procedures and techniques employed by the states armed force, cops, gendarmes and soldiers, in dealing with large groups of people in the presence of politically important personages, during spectacular events, in riots, etc.) In the whole course of history with exception of those communities that are implicated in the immediate run up to capitalism, a massive, reified institution, congealed social relations formed in and through productive activity, an economy, has not separated itself out from the community, has not formed an institutionally distinct sphere.2 For these communities, productive life simply does not possess the autonomy and immanence, and has not the socially determinate weight, that it does for capitalist societies established on the basis of real domination in production. For here, the economy has not only become differentiated out from the activities of daily life that constitute the community, it is not institutionally separate, it does not tendentially form an autonomous regulator of social life in its entirety. This is crucial: In emerging and expanding capital creates itself as a movement that appears without agency, or as self-agency without foundation. This movement rests on the abstraction of labor in production: Beginning from concrete, purposive labor, but as the capacity to labor employed and deployed in production, labor is rendered abstract, i.e., generalized (unspecific), temporally quantified, materialized and objectified as "value," as the substance of products produced for exchange, as commodities, a surplus of which is realized as such only in its phenomenal form as profit that in turn can be reinvested by purchasing capacity to labor, means of production, raw materials, which in this sense means that value is capital. This process (valorization) generates the actual, effective shift in societal practice from concrete human beings as workers to capital. Capital is the real subject of society under capitalist production
1

Kosik, Dialektik des Konkreten, 84. This analysis is the basis for understanding the development of sociology as a science in the empirical sense. See the Fourth Study, Part IV, The Critique of Historicism, below. 2 Under capitalism, institutional differentiation is, as already suggested, not restricted to the economy: In the practice of daily life, separate activity contexts beginning with work take on a life of their own, each with distinctive norms governing behavior and expectations. In this sense, we speak of the institutionally separate spheres of the family, education, etc., and most importantly the state.

This movement and its moments (commodities, price, profit, as well as the higher order abstractions, stocks, bonds, their markets, etc., mere abstract moments of a social relation appearing as things, yet historically constituted real abstractions) form the foundations for the collectively constituted institutional abstractions (such as workplaces embodying productive materials, instruments and machinery, business firms, industries, regulatory agencies, etc.), that, taken together, with this movement and its moments, constitute this "economy": The economy is the objective institutional context in which capitals personifications, capitalists, function and operate In reshaping social life in its own image, capital literally creates the "economy." The "economy" does not immediately appear as the practice of social groups and the social relations that arise on those practices and thereby form it: The "economy" is reified, appears thingly, a real movement that shapes what it seemingly encompasses. It is autonomous and self-regulating because it is in an immediate, practical sense a mystified and objectivistically understood sphere of society. In its relentless drive to create surplus value, capital's movement tendentially reduces all social relations to productive relations, to those of the economy. (That is to say, social relations, such as between parent and child, student and teacher, etc., tend to not only find their model in the relation between wage earner and capitalist but become mediately subordinate to the logic of accumulation.) To the extent productive relations have come to dominate social relations, to that extent capital accumulation is the internal, hidden yet objective logic organizing society: Under conditions of real domination in capitalist production, capital is the subject of society. This seemingly autonomous movement aimed at extraction of surplus value constitutes the meaning and significance of speaking of capital as capital, as self-valorizing value. To the extent productive relations have come to dominate social relations, to that extent capital accumulation (valorization) is tendentially the internal, hidden yet objective logic organizing society as a whole. Real Domination, II Capital Simply as Capital The principles governing scientific practice, its fundamental theorizations (such as those designed to formulate a concept of matter in motion in relation to the project of nature mastery) and specifically (as we shall show later) modern technological relations to nature, are embedded in the social practices that form and renew society itself, and are comprehended by the concept of capital, a concept that, in turn, refers back to a real, historical totality of relations between social groups in production, only one of which (in the whole history of divided societies) is capable of historically significant action. What is capital? Capital is at once a social relation between groups of wage laborers and those who employ them, the production process in which this relation is formed, and a product of this relation. The concepts of commodity, capacity to labor, concrete labor, abstract general labor, value, exchange value, etc. are all abstractions that refer us back to the actual production process in which they are constituted. So lets begin with the relations formed in that process, always with a view to elaborating an understanding of the essential features of those relations. Propertyless, workers exchange their capacity to labor for the monetary means to sustain themselves. In producing commodities our labor is reduced or abstracted, that is, it is generalized and quantified, meaning it is measured in units of time, labor is reduced to quantitative measurable units, which, since this process is at the heart of capitalism, it is or should be obvious that rationalization of the sort is structurally congruent (i.e., homologous) with the rationalization of activity and creation of institutionally separate spheres of social life, and with the division of nature into separate and seemingly autonomy spheres in science each with distinct knowledges of their objects. Now it is not, in fact, the concrete, purpose incarnate labor of workers that a boss, employer or capitalist purchases. Labor under conditions of capitalist production is, as indicated, capacity to labor or labor power. For it is not the product of concrete labor that capitalists are interested in (and it is decidedly not workers themselves), but the return over their investment in this capacity to labor, profit, or what we call the surplus of value that is or can be realized in selling the product made by workers. To boot, the product in its specificity is not germane, any product will do and that is why, prosaically, specific products identifiable in terms of appearance, weight and size, (or if immaterial such as a service in terms of description) and purpose are called product or, if you prefer, commodities. So commodities are abstract in the sense that all specific characteristics and designations excepting of course that return, the profit, generated in their actual sale are irrelevant to the capitalist; similarly, the labor that is embodied in them in producing them, is equally abstract, it is abstract labor: It is generalized (unspecific), quantified (measure in

quantitatively temporal units, so many hours in production), and objectified and materialized in commodities. Call it value: Embodied in commodities by and as abstract labor, realized in their sale, value is the substance of commodities. As a group rarely do capitalists achieve monopoly conditions in sales of their products (commodities). Product scarcity can generate monopoly, but such a situation runs in a direction opposite the actual course of the historical development of capitalism, which tends toward superfluity and overproduction. Rather, it is competition that characterizes this development, competition that compels capitalists to technically innovate, and competition that generates the scientifically shaped and structured machine inputs that in the hands of abstract labor create product superfluity. Competition is the fundamental condition that all capitalists confront, for in their own language they must match or better the price of the competition. It is said in the stock market investors know only two emotions, fear and greed. This statement is, though, merely a specification of the affectivity of all capitalists (for, as capitalist competition drives them to invest in new technical and technological inputs to achieve that fabled competitive advantage), so that flowing from this fundamental condition is capitalists fundamental affect or emotion, fear of competitive ruin. Now in markets where advertising, salesmanship, additional utilities, etc., have no impact, that is, in those countless situations and exchanges where commodities sell simply as commodities a situation that exemplifies the nature of market competition and the conditions under which commodities are produced the following situation obtains: Always fearful of being competitively wrecked, capitalist strive mightily, and often frantically, to achieve a cost advantage vis--vis one another in the production of their commodities. If we designate the average costs of production in any given industry the socially necessary labor time embodied in any given commodity, then capitalists only profit if they attain lower costs, if their commodities embody less socially necessary labor time, if their costs or raw materials, labor and means of production are lower than the industry average In any given industry, there are those capitalists that do achieve lower costs and those that dont. Over time, these equalize producing a tendential average, those who attain the lower costs do so largely temporally (they stay in business) and those that dont go belly up Again, over time it is rare indeed that any capitalist consistently obtains lower-costing means of production or raw materials these too are largely commodities that sell strictly as commodities so that the only consistent manner of obtaining competitive advantage is in lowering labor costs. Here, we add, the real character of profit, the manner in which it is achieved, becomes manifest. It is manifest in the effort quite relentless really that capitalists expend to drive down their costs of labor. Assuming it is successful (and obviously at this point class struggle or its absence becomes the decisive determinant), such a reduction secure capitalists profitability because labor embodied in a commodity (as quantified and measured temporality) have been forced down below what is socially necessary to produce it. In other words, since what characterizes commodities as commodities is the value (i.e., abstract and general, temporally quantified, and objectified and materialized labor) they embody, the achievement of a reduction in labor costs is quite mundane, it occurs by diminishing the quantity of time required in production of the commodity at hand absent, of course, an equivalent compensation to the producers. Call this an increase in the productivity of labor. There are only two ways to realize it (actually there are three): It is achieved either in lengthening the working day to augment the mass of commodities produced, or in restructuring the labor processes (either restructuring the pace, tempos, rhythms or organization of work and workers or introducing novel technical inputs, which, additionally, as a rule renders a portion of the existing body of workers redundant) to produce more commodities in the same or shorter period of time (or in both lengthening the working day and restructuring the labor processes). In all cases, the productivity of labor socalled increases because the mass of commodities increases (and only if that mass is sold, if value is realized) and only if workers are not compensated for the increases, so this lack of compensation is not an absence of a subjective capitalist act of recompense but is systemic feature that is can be said to occur if and only if the augmented mass of commodities are in fact sold. Thus, this uncompensated relation is an essential, necessary feature and structural condition of capital accumulation. It is neither arbitrary nor subjective. We call it exploitation. The excess of value (surplus value) created through increased productivity is realized as such and appears phenomenally (as profit) when the commodity is sold. Once sold, profit, actually excess or surplus value, can now be returned to the capitalist. Forcing down labor costs (by competitively positioning themselves in the marketplace in order to insure their profitability) is accomplished by capitalists in manifold, often overlapping ways, including speed-ups, imposition of more onerous production norms, subjugation to machine rhythms (where they hadnt previously existed), even harassment, and certainly in outright wage cuts and benefit reductions or losses (where they had previously existed).

These means and methods almost always organized scientifically siphon off workers creativity, energies and our very humanity numbing our sensibilities, repressing our affects, suppressing our thoughts and experience (which, for capitalists, at any rate, merely get in the way, impede their main object, which is, of course, producing commodities at a competitive advantage by lowering labor costs). These methods and means capitalists deploy give special meaning to the production processes in and through which concrete labor (purchased by the employer as the mere capacity to labor) is literally recreated as abstract labor. In its own way, this process of abstraction carried out in production is as miraculous as religious fantasies of a godly embodiment in bread and wine, for it is precisely specifically human aspirations, concerns, sensibilities, and even mundane human products such as sweat, that are transubstantiated into abstracted and generalized, quantified, objectified and materialized, emptied (socially necessary) time, i.e., into "value" Lets pause, take stock and engage in an incomplete summation: First, the succeeding are moments in the production of commodities: The entire work process itself on the basis of which commodities are produced, inclusive of "inputs, of means of production (tools, instruments, machinery and other equipment) that are directly used in the production of commodities; goods (raw materials) that are incorporated into a final product during the work process beginning with their purchase as commodities; structures (plant, warehouse, office, etc.) employed in the production of commodities; the institutional forms (firms, corporations) that make up the socio-legal context in which commodities are produced; and, the money on the basis of which these various components of the production process are purchased. Because they each and all are employed or engaged in the production processes in and through which capitalism as a system is created and reproduced, they are all capital. But these components in the production of commodities do not exhaust, really they do not even get at capital's real nature. We shall come back to this shortly... Second, capital as an objective process begins subjectively with insatiable desire, that is, with the compulsion of the capitalist to accumulate, to turn money into capital and capital into quantitatively more money. (In the social practice of daily life, as an extant process it is dialectically circular, i.e., it has no beginning since all its moments are simultaneously present and, for this system of social relations, capitalism, to function at all, simultaneously produced and reproduced.) Considered as an objective process, this formula is inverted, since it begins with capital, capital is transformed into money, and it emerges from the process as incrementally greater capital. And, it is exactly this inversion - capital as objective process - that appears so forcibly in all its immediacy in the practice of daily life. Accordingly, capital does not immediately appear as a social relation, but as a thing or, better yet, capital appears as a subject, as society's real subject, that is, not only as a being endowed with will, consciousness, and the capacity for action (as a subject) but as that being that presents the appearance of responsibility for the unfolding and development of the entire system of social relations called capitalism (as society's real subject). Third, capital is value, i.e., congealed, abstract and general, quantitatively temporalized and objectified labor, as well as the process of its "valorization," by which we mean and intend, the social relation of workers and capitalists that at once encompasses the practices in and through which abstraction is formed this is the valorization process proper in which the capacity to labor is reduced, abstracted, and reappears as value embodied in commodities and, only then is it indivisibly and only analytically distinct, the subordinate work process, its various moments and components (means of production, raw materials, etc., enumerated above) as well as its useful end products. Since, as this discussion has suggested, capitalist production tendentially encompasses the social practices that form and renew society itself, capital and its movement, its production and expanded reproduction, its valorization, constitute society's intelligible structure and form its real "subject" Fourth, at once driven by the desire to amass capital and fearing competitive ruin, the capitalist strives to lower costs of production of his commodity below that of his competitors. But each and every capitalist as a capitalist is both driven and motivated by the same desire and fear. Each and all pursuit the same practice of driving down costs (of the production of commodities they seek to produce). The activity of all capitalists taken together exercises a compulsion on each one, creating an objective necessity beyond the control of any individual capitalist, a systems logic that compels each and all individuals who enter (or are trapped in) the waged labor-capital relation. Let us call this objective necessity the logic of accumulation. It is a temporal logic, one that unfolds historically: It is synonymous with the movement of capital, with capitalist development. For the capitalist who confronts this necessity (as well as for proletarians engaged in waged labor), production appears to have a lawlike character ("lawlike" in sense of unchanging, immutable natural law, not positive or statutory law).

Fifth, since each and every capitalist is compelled to force down production costs, the amount of socially necessary labor time embodied in each commodity changes. It is not static as over time, it diminishes (as the mass of commodities produced is augmented). But this same diminution also confronts each and every capitalist as an objective necessity, an event of a total societal production process utterly beyond his control, while remaining and precisely as it remains the outcome of the same capitalists', each and every ones, compulsion to reduce production and specifically labor costs. Thus, each capitalist is just as necessarily forced to produce more to compensate for declining prices. The purpose of production is that the individual product should include as much unpaid labor as possible, and this is only achieved by producing for the sake of production" (our translation, emphases in original).1 This pervasive and unavoidable pursuit augmenting production leads to an impasse, to a crisis, to a situation in which, considering their enormous mass, not all commodities available for purchase can find buyers. Similarly immense resources are poured into preventing just such a crisis of overproduction. (Think, for example, of the massive amounts of profits that are diverted into advertising campaigns in order to create new needs to absorb the mass of potential commodities readily available with existing productive capacity.) But the real dangers of a crisis of overproduction are depression, social unrest and war as the last hundred and twenty-five years have demonstrated. (Witness the great depressions of 1873-1877, 1893-1897, 1929-1939 and the two imperialist world wars.) In system's terms, however, the crisis of overproduction is an integral phase of capitalist development: Both outcomes are forms of crisis resolution, the characteristic and ubiquitous underutilization of productive capacity during a depression results in massive deflation, a collapse of existing prices which effectively devalues enormous amounts of existing capital, and war produces an equally massive destruction of capital in its sensibly embodied forms (human life as potential capacity to labor, plant, equipment, raw materials, and commodities) Crisis means that lives are ruined as, first, wage levels decline precipitously, unemployment follows, standards of working class life collapse, impoverishment and immiseration compel masses of men and women to struggle against the owners of capital, as the full force of the state, its repressive agents and organs (cops, prosecutors, courts, even the military) is brought to bear to protect the order of capital; war, world war, may follow In the end (a temporary one, to be sure) resolving the crisis may require that those who carry, as it were, within themselves these social relations are now different (in war, workers and still others, cannonfodder in ruling class struggles over surpluses that circulate internationally, die), but this destruction of attained levels of social development (not just the mass of circulating commodities, or plant and equipment, but also the man-made landscapes to the extent they can be distinguished from structures housing industry, finance, service, communications and transportation institutions) permits the production process to begin anew, constitutes a devalorization achieved through the very dynamics of capitalist development (achieved through crisis based destruction of the level of the value embodied as capital in these various forms), a devalorization in which and through which the entire system of social relations we call capitalism is formed to renew itself, that is, to begin anew. Identical with renewed expansion of productive activity, what reemerges is, of course, the logic of accumulation that drives this entire development. It is, in other words, the unity of subjective and objective logics, the activity of competing capitalists out of which originates that compelling objective necessity that subordinates each and every individual capitalist: Capitalism is, then, a system of social relations beyond the reach of capitalists themselves; it is, moreover, a system whose the very movement creates itself by way of wrenching contraction and expansion. Capitalism unfolds and develops through this cyclical process of expansion and contraction. In the systemic sense, contraction, then crisis, is a product of overproduction, an inability of existing markets to absorb commodities as products of existing (productive) capacity, an inability to realize surplus value through exchange. For, in all this, what is most forcibly apparent is the lack of conscious agency. Only if the wrenching movement produces such awareness can the system in principle be overthrown, abolished and transcended. Real Domination, III Historical Forms of Real Domination in Production We can very briefly recount the major forms of real domination in production as they initially emerged in history. The factory first appeared circa 1760 in England. Its development, its creation as the nodal point of system of capital1

Ihr Zweck, da das einzelne Produkt etc. mglichst viel unbezahlte Arbeit enthalte, und dies nur erreicht durch die Produktion um der Produktion willen. Marx, Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses.

ist social relations, was inseparably bound up with the production of mechanical power from steam.1 Particularly in textile production, the emergence of large firms to meet increased demand that resulted from demographical growth constituted the first systematic insinuation of genuinely capitalist methods into production:2 Waged labor, that of "surplus" female labor from the countryside, began to appear for the first time on a permanent basis, almost exclusively in textile production which, as our presentation has suggested, had deep roots in productive activity in Europe going back to rise of merchant power in Florence, Barcelona and the Low Countries following on the popular, urban subordination of the great seigniorial lords of the surrounding countrysides. In England before the French Revolution, in the production of clothing, existing machine technology in spinning and weaving processes were integrated in a single structure or building in a single locale and thereby generated qualitatively greater output in each process. Yet while the resultant isolation of workers from the elements constituted a break with the seasonally adjustments traditionally made in agricultural and craft labor, the limited attention to the work processes engaging waged workers entailed in early textile production, the partnership structure of the firm, and employment of traditional double entry forms of bookkeeping, and, above all, the integration of production processes as opposed to their rationalization (fragmentation or subdivision) did not give rise to the constant transformation of production and its organization that is essentially characteristic of fully industrial, mass production methods. 3 Based on a primitively horizontal integration of production, this development albeit also characterized by personal oppression, by paternalism, not merely by the wage relation was the first form of real domination in production. The factory system brought masses of human beings together under one roof to engage in production as mere operatives. In fact, at its origins, factory work in cloth, textile and garment production was carried out by young women, farm girls, whose families, accustomed to home work and agricultural labor on a small plot had been proletarianized the patriarchal extended family farm with its primitive non-mechanical tools (plough, hoes), natural power (horses, oxen), seasonal work, and production for self-sufficiency with small surpluses for sale on the market (which in agriculture was tradition itself) was gone: Small copyholds had been stolen, expropriated by force of law, access to commons to gather dead wood for fuel and gleanings (corn) for food had been confiscated by enclosures Over time factory owners would introduce new machines to quantitatively improve worker output, called productivity. Textiles was not, however, the only form of productive activity subject to the new capitalist methods in England. Josiah Wedgwood (Charles Darwins maternal grandfather), a master potter with a pronounced scientific bent, had built a ceramic, earthenware and china factory in Burslem (near Birmingham) in the 1760s. He employed chemical processes and treatments in his works that were directly related to his scientific interests. After 1780, he was in close contact with Joseph Priestly (after the latter set up his ministry in Birmingham), supplying him with equipment for his laboratory, subsidizing his experiments. Priestlys experiments, in turn, afforded Wedgwood with insight that, related to clay and color, improved output in his china factory.4 Other facets of industrial production, iron (one of the most advanced industrial processes) for example, had undergone important technical change before the end of the century: The use of coke, instead of charcoal, had become more common (and would be ubiquitous by 1815). Puddling furnaces and rolling mills to enhance blast furnace products had been in use since 1783. It should also be noted that the steam engine was deployed in mining, metallurgical factories, brewing and distilling as well as textile production.5 Englands industrial revolution was essentially completed by 1830, while some of the developments which it had passed through were still ongoing in France, Belgium and the western German speaking statelets along the Rhine (industry that owed its development to the abolition of feudal legal codes, internal custom barriers and exclusive local
1

However, it was already anticipated in plantation agriculture in tobacco production over one hundred years earlier in the British North American colony of Virginia. See the remarks in the section, Eras of Capitals Domination in the History of Capitalism, below. 2 Hedged by guilds here, patent requirements emanating from states everywhere, arguably there was, moreover, a certain slowly evolving technological dynamic that was, when viewed continentally (Lyons, Rouen, Beauvais, Amines; Florence, Vicenza; Silesia; the different English and Dutch centers) evinced in textile production in its various phases (woolens, silk, fustians) and forms (dyeing, finishing, printing) starting especially from the period (1590-1689) we have called the inner historical sixteenth century. See, e.g., Ciriacono, Mass Consumption Goods and Luxury Goods, 50-55. 3 Chandler, The Visible Hand, 67-68. This situation was even more characteristic of Massachusetts circa 1820 than in England early in the era of the so-called Industrial Revolution. 4 Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin, 7-8. 5 Rondo Cameron, France and the Economic Development of Europe, 7.

privileges, the civil code with its protection of contract, and the alienability of property in production achieved through Napoleonic conquest).1 A second form, a development of real domination in production and this was not restricted to England, but was universal as a country, state or region that came to capitalism after 1830 and before the first imperialist world war experienced it was centered on a singular complex of technological inputs that revolutionarized production. We refer to the advent of universal machinery. Presupposing, of course, the historical expansion (much of which was still ongoing) of infrastructural (particularly roads, canals and rails) and extractive industrial (mining) development, as well as specific and very basic industrial activities such as iron (later steel) production developed in foundries and mills, and employed in metalworking operations (most importantly in this era, the manufacture of locomotives, freight and passenger cars; steam engines especially those of ships; textile machinery; lathes; etc.), universal machines had three major components, the lathe, capstan and turret. Most important was the lathe: Rotating the piece worked around a horizontal axis, shaping the iron (later steel) with a sharp edged, fixed cutting tool, the use of the lathe required great skill and dexterity that was acquired through years of a theoretically mediated practice (among other things, the physics and chemistry of metals and alloys came into play here). The turret is a fastener, a revolvable and pivoted holder attached to the lathe and securing the piece worked on. The capstan is a stationary piece of equipment, a machine with which the weight of the pieces to be worked was hoisted and moved about by way of a winding cable wrapped around a rotating vertical drum powered by steam (in later applications by electricity). With these primary machines, work could be cut to any shape, the machines were not fitted to any specific production schema (hence, the designation universal machine). The skill developed had something in the nature of a craft about it: Workman apprenticed for 5-7 years before they could be deemed skilled. Now the extensive use of universal machinery it entailed precision work, the skilled stratum that was engaged with it constructed locomotives and ship engines, the historically most important products of the age, this phase of real domination in production transformed the working class of the factory era. If artisans stood outside the industrial proletariat in 1825, in 1870 they no longer did; instead, the working class was deeply divided, split into two strata, a tiny highly skilled, generally native and urban layer that was hereditarily proletarian in the broad sense and a vast stratum of unskilled, often immigrant workers with peasant, semi-peasant and even serf social formations. These differences were profound, and rendered the class internally antagonistic.2 The work processes here were unequivocally determined by the real domination of capital over labor and in production, but in terms of a periodization of the history capitalism, this era formed a "twilight zone" somewhere between the period of formal domination of labor by capital, defined in class terms by the long historical struggle in which employers came into being as employers by stripping artisans of their ownership and control over the means of production and the period of the real domination, which, defined in terms of the revolutionization of production through transformation of the labor processes, had its deepest roots in the latter half of the long nineteen century and whose decisive moment was the failed struggle of workers against employer-introduced, technologically driven mass production, dilution and "deskilling," a later development in real domination shaped by imperialist world war and shaping proletarian revolution. Now skill" is an historically relative category, and the industrial workers in question here were to form the skilled stratum when "skill" still had the meaning of the knowledge and mastery of the machines, tools and equipment that made up those means of production with which workers have a living, non-alienating relation. The absence of estrangement in work and the condition of mastery was unique to the history of capital as capital, and gave rise to its overriding historical import and significance: In the confrontation over the technical transformation (so-called) of the work processes, this stratum from St. Louis, Chicago, and New York, through Glasgow, London, Paris and Turin to Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna, Budapest and Petrograd formed the backbone of the revolutionary, councilar movements that posed the greatest challenge to employer domination of work in the history of capitalism.3 A third form and development of real domination, itself like the others an outcome of the victory of first the bourgeoisie, then capital, in fierce class struggle, began, at least in terms of effective history, at Bethlehem Steel in
1 2

Ibid, 9, 28-30, 329. In the Tsarist world (the capitalist military sector), these differences were so deep that they found linguistic expression: Skilled workers were employed in plants (zavody), the unskilled masses in factories (fabriki). See our Bolshevism and Stalinism in the Epoch of Imperialist World War and Proletarian Revolution (Urgeschichte), First Study, Part I, Section III. 3 Ibid, First Study as a whole.

the last years of the chronological nineteenth century: Frederick Taylor fought with argued, bullied, and disciplined skilled production workers over who would control production. He also diligently studied the relation between men at work and machines they used. Like his contemporary Henry Ford (and later Lord Keynes), Taylor was a vanguard of capital. His major work entitled Principles of Scientific Management is testimony to his place and role in the class struggle. There is at least one very striking admission in this work. It goes like this, "the shop was really run by the workmen, and not by the bosses. [That, of course, created the problem which lay in the] ignorance of the management as to what really constituted a proper day's work. [For] although he was foreman of the shop, the combined knowledge and skill of the workers who were under him was certainly ten times as great as his own."1 Taylor was to enunciate three central, soon to be materially embodied principles of his theorization, principles that Ford incarnated in his first really successful auto assembly line that opened in Highland Park in 1914. Those principles included separation of work-processes from worker skills, and of execution from conception. The function of these principles was to tear knowledge and understanding from the worker, to de-skill him or dilute his skill and to push the knowledge formed in and through skilled activity upward into layers of management and ownership. "All of the planning which under the old system was done by the workman, as a result of this personal experience, must of necessity under the new system be done by the management."2 Achieved by reorganizing the work processes, planning had the formal structure of scientific method; it entailed a projection in advance, methodical, systematic and duly calculated, of all the aspects of the labor processes actually involved in work. This, in turn, was dialectically the premise and outcome of actual material embodiment, the reconstruction of work by way of specialized machinery as the basis of continuous flow production. Because successfully executed, this project of reorganizing work robbed workers of skill and knowledge, rendered them machine minders who could learn fragmented, partial tasks, be trained, in a matter of weeks.3 Materially these principles were incorporated into and animated the very sensuous construction and organization of the newly launched, mass production machine technology. These mass production machines were largely introduced during the first imperialist world war, especially in munitions and truck, aircraft (and at the very end of the war, tank) production. They were no longer machines individual workers could master, their design militated against this, and, accordingly, it took workers decades of shopfloor struggle to lean again how here only marginally to control the pace and tempo of the labor processes. "Universal" machines such as the prewar lathe and turret, that is, those not fitted to any specific production schema and as such the material premise of craft mobility and knowledge, were replaced by "specialized" machinery, that is, machines sequentially arranged and connected - each machine performing a single operation on a single aspect of a product. No amount of preparation, training, and apprenticeship permits an individual worker to master this machinery. These new machines allowed for and demanded the production of a new type of worker, call her a mass worker. They required (and they still require) a specialized worker, one tied to a single, fragmented task on a single machine, one whose every motion is dictated by that single machine a product of design largely on the basis of stop motion studies also inaugurated by Taylor and one for whom an apprenticeship in the traditional sense is meaningless and irrelevant. Such machinery is sequentially arranged, functionally inoperative in isolation, constructed to performed exclusively single operations and paradigmatically found in and taken together constitutes continuous flow assembly line production. We can designate the extraordinary development of real domination in production, this event, as capitals technical revolution. Waged in and over production, it was not by and large a struggle won at the immediate point of production: In the interwar period, employers established continuous flow production only through repression of workers' organizations. Resting on the politically achieved dismantling or ruin of workers organizations (e.g., the IWW in the United States), the mass murder of militants (fascist mobilizations in Italy and Germany), and the destruction of a proletarian oppositional culture as the case may have been, this technical revolution remained the historically significant, qualitative development of capitals real domination in production because it did not merely result in a temporary solution, but transformed the very structure of, recomposed materially and politically, the working class at the level of the world.
1 2

The Principles of Scientific Management, 48-49. Ibid, 38. 3 "The net result of the application of these principles is the reduction of the necessity for thought on the part of the worker and reduction of his movements to a minimum." Henry Ford, My Life and Work, 80.

Real Domination, IV Workers Struggles against Forms of Real Domination in Production The victory of the bourgeoisie over workers in various struggles to introduce new inputs (machinery) into production and to reorganize the work processes in the effort to achieve efficiency and maximal output is at the same time really and in fact the victory of capital over the bourgeoisie, the disappearance of the latters subjectivity and agency in history. We shall return to this later,1 but, for now, we wish only to briefly recall that the institution of real domination in production was not an automatic process. The factory system was a product of the triumph of industrious, scientifically minded men, like Josiah Wedgwood, in a lengthy struggle against laborers of the villages, men and women without stable positions in agricultural production, but really ramped up in a truly vicious fight against established, skilled men, croppers and woolcombers in contradistinction to earlier textile workers, factory operatives largely women. It was these skilled groups of workers, who, in a life and death conflict against the owners, against the loss of skill, work and livelihood the new machines represented, brought into being a systematic, organized opposition in the Luddite movement.2 As a phase of real domination in production, as newer forms have appeared the factory system has characterized the most backward sectors of capitalism (e.g., garment production) and extends down to the historical present. It was, in fact, in what we called the twilight era (1870-1914) of formal domination as a period in the history of capitalism that the factory system, existing in the space of the economy alongside facilities built around universal machines, found its most extensive deployment in that history. While the factory system has for the greatest part of its economic existence generated worker resistance, that phase of real domination in production at the center of which we find the universal machine did not to our knowledge ever occasion worker opposition. The reason should be obvious: This was perhaps the only form of machinery in the four hundred year long history of capitalism which not only did not rest on deskilling labor but dramatically elevated the role and function of skill, knowledge and experience and the worker who developed them in production. The belligerent and deadly struggle of capitalist states against each other in imperialist world war provided the occasion and justification for the introduction of continuous flow production to secure mass production of weaponry and munitions. In Britain, Russia, in Germany (and Austro-Hungary, in the United States and to an extent in Italy), it also generated a workers struggle, first, against the dilution, then against capitalist control in production and finally against the war, though thoroughgoing only in Russia. In Britain,3 a shop stewards movement had come into being in late 1915. It was forged in a dual struggle against wargenerated dilution and the conservative craft union leadership. Led by revolutionary workers, the movement was based among and for the most part confined to engineers, turners, and fitters in the metal industries, particularly among armament producers. During January 1918, the movement broadened and came within a breath of linking the struggle against dilution to that of a rapidly growing anti-war movement. Instead, it degenerated into a sectional struggle against the conscription of skilled workers. In Germany, systematic workers' opposition appeared only often the collapse of the last great, spring 1918 offensive of the High Command's armies on the western front. Spearheaded by Berlin metalworkers, this opposition really ramped up and began to effect a transformation of German society after Hindenburg and Ludendorf suddenly and dramatically announced the war was over and an armistice went into effect in early November (the 11 th) 1918: The Kaiser's autocracy... a militarized constitutional monarchy in which the generals and their immediately subordinate commanders exercised de facto, close to absolute control over German society... collapsed, large vocal tendencies within the Social Democracy formed new centrist and revolutionary parties (the Independents, the Communist party), and the Social Democrats themselves were installed in the state, heading up a fig leaf parliamentary regime: For behind the Social Democratic right (Erbert, Schneidermann and, above all, Noske) stood the various fragmentary officers' corps groups, coming together as the fascistic and terrorist Frei Korps (and behind them, the large industrialists and great Junker landowners). In a revolutionary confrontation that developed more or less in all major cities Bremen, Hamburg, Berlin, etc. - saw the formation of workers' councils, the development of dual power and

See Real Domination and Autonomization of Capital in the Second Interlude, below. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 472-602, esp. 547f. 3 James Hinton, The First Shop Stewards Movement, 255-272; Bolshevism and Stalinism (Urgeschichte), First Study, Part III, Section V.
1

an ill-fated, if not entirely aborted insurrection, the German Revolution was drowned in the blood of leading workers, militants and revolutionaries in January 1919.1 In Russia,2 starting from the struggle against the revolutionary democrats on the heels of their assumption of power following the collapse of the Tsarist regime, workers created factory committee (the political parties reestablished soviets) in attempts to assert control over and restrict the most deleterious effects of immediately return to production on a wartime basis. In this struggle, skilled workers formed an internal class vanguard mediating the relations of the largest part of the class (namely, unskilled, new or nonhereditary workers) to the party of Bolsheviks, a mediation, developed nowhere else, that was a necessary condition for the realization of revolutionary possibilities generated by the crisis Highly skilled Russian workers who played leading roles in the factory committee movement of 1917 were not isolated figures. Though lacking a craft-based context of skill formation and thus differing significantly from their counterparts in the rest of the capitalist world, the thin layer of skilled workers in Russia were nonetheless members of the political vanguard of a world working class. Major industrial centers dominated by similar skilled strata had developed in latter 19th century from Petrograd in the east to St. Louis in the west and all major urban centers of capitalist development in between. The crafts were exclusive and worker associations were usually occupationally based, with occupation itself based upon a lengthy 5-7 year apprenticeship, and work organized into a hierarchy of apprentice, journeyman, and foreman. Yet this was not a craft conscious backwater but a political vanguard, those who were most involved in creating councils, was formed and formed itself out of a historically specific life practice, one which, in turn, was inextricably bound up with a historically specific phase of real domination, and a form of capitalist technology (universal machinery) in production. The type of worker dialectically formed out of this life practice was doomed to extinction with the "technical" revolution of capital continuous flow production that employers achieved offensive against workers everywhere in the aftermath of the imperialist world war3 Eras of Capitals Domination in the History of Capitalism Capitalist production only appears in history long, long after the emergence of agriculture, social stratification based on rigidly fixed positions in production, and institutions (in particular, the state) that intensify and exacerbate the central problem of human existence (social division) this development has created. Because it is restless movement (a cannibal consuming all that is other in its relentless quest for surplus-value), capital poses this central problem strictly in historically specific ways that rise from the historical forms of its domination in production The problem of social division can only be resolved by mobilizing societal resources in order to transcend those forms, but capital, and earlier the bourgeoisie, has never been able to resolve this problem, only magnify and aggravate it It is manifestly socio-historically hegemonic forms of domination in production (formal, real and totalizing) that are at issue here. As actually dominant and determinate, these forms further create a periodization of eras of domination in the history of capitalism The categories of formal and real forms of the domination of capital over labor refer to both a productive based sense (for which formal domination conceptualizes the merchant and landlord activity, uninvolved directly in production, of extracting surplus value absolutely by lengthening the working day, and for which real domination conceptualizes the industrialist directly intervening in the labor processes, which includes not just machine inputs but the reorganization of the work processes, and extracting surplus value relatively), and the sense of epochs in the history of capitalism that, though originating sequentially, can be found to simultaneously spatially or geographically coexist: Once real domination in production has developed, at any particular time in the history of capitalism, in any specific branch of industry, any industry, even in a singular workplace, these forms can exist, have existed and do exist at the same time. The tendency among capitalists to extract surplus value at once absolutely and relatively is universal. There are two questions here, then; first, what decides which form is most important, primary and determinate for capitalism at any moment in its history; and, second, at what point does, or did, formal domination pass over into real domination as an era in the history of capitalism. Consider the first problem from the perspective of situations that have existed at different times in the history of capitalism.
Pierre Brou, The German Revolution,73-258. Bolshevism and Stalinism (Urgeschichte), First Study, Part II. 3 Ibid, First Study, Conclusion.
1

Plantation agriculture is actually very old, a form of productive activity that not only predates real domination but reaches back to the earliest phases of capitalism and extends down to the present. At its origins, as tributary Castile entered decline and national states pursuing mercantile policies began to appear, the early Virginia settler colony in British America (and the Caribbean colonies of the West Indies) pursued New World plantation agriculture that was a part of capitalist development from its very beginning: The production of staples (especially tobacco and sugar, but also indigo, dyestuffs, and cotton) on the basis of plantation agriculture was called into being by the new sensibilities of the emerging bourgeois societies of England and Holland. In fact, from its beginnings, plantation agriculture was distinctively capitalist: Unlike conditions that generally obtained under labors formal subsumption (wherein handicraft or putting out production was usually farmed out to individual laborers working out of their homes), the plantation agricultural setting actually anticipated (by roughly one-hundred and fifty years) the industrial factory: It involved work of a specific, new sort, that is, closely supervised labor (and, thus, engaging merchants who originally organized this labor directly in this supervision, so that they did not stand at all outside productive activity simply seeking to extract money-wealth from the exchange, as in formal domination). A capitalist form of economic rationality appeared for perhaps the first time in the organization of labor. On this basis, the labor process itself, organized in the form of work gangs who toiled for long hours during large parts of the year at bodily demanding tasks, constituted a regime of labor that achieved a new order of exploitation. Finally, this exploitation was multiplied by the rationalization of tasks and their simplification in tobacco and sugar production as well. The labor employed in the earliest plantation agriculture was, moreover, not fully servile (slave labor); rather, as bonded labor, in a highly mediated sense it was waged1 Antediluvian forms of capital can reappear: The role of the kulak, not a capitalist farmer but an usurer in the Soviet Union, circa 1928, is a case in point.2 Similarly, there was something of an usurious exploitation in the sharecropping tenancy that developed in the United States in the aftermath of Reconstruction (circa 1880-1940) more than a century after formal domination became generalized at the level of the world, and as real domination in production had begun its ascendancy.3 In the contemporary garment industry in South Asia, at Dhaka, in various production sites in Bangalore, Dhaka, Phnom Penh, Saigon or Shenzhen (China), it is migrants from the countryside, again overwhelmingly female, who do the sewing, sorting, washing, etc. Technological inputs (not just sewing machines, but plant also), though industrial, are not high tech and vastly less capital intensive at least relative to auto plants (not just big factory complexes like those of Ford in Detroit or the Fiat Mirafiori plant in Torino once were), far smaller ones like those such as the Ford, Honda, Mitsubishi, Proton and Daihatsu/Perodua plants in Malaysia or similar GM, Hino, Honda, Mitsubishi, Nissan and Toyota plants in Thailand. In the contemporary South Asia garment industry, there is little, if any, assembly line labor in the sense of continuous flow production. The machines do not determine the pace and tempo of work (though they do decide worker rhythms). It is the supervisor who, personifying capital in mediating owner imperatives, holds the process, as a process of the exploitation of labor in the capitalist sense, together. And, in so doing, the supervisor, to boot, re-introduces personal domination through intimidation, sexual harassment and the threat of violence. Thus, elements of both formal and real domination are present in the same labor process present, but there is also actual reversion to forms of domination in production that predate capitalism, in the sense (Marxs) that formal domination in production eliminates all patriarchal, political or even religious connections to the relation of exploitation.4 In addition, we can also mention the extensive use of child labor which appears to mark these production processes as instances of formal domination. However, if we contextually shift from the immediate point of production to the level at which capitalism operates, to the worldwide network of capitalist relations, it becomes apparent that the cheap consumer goods (such as knit shirts, khaki pants, etc.) produced in such low-tech factories
1

For plantation agriculture, see the Preface to our Civil War and Revolution in America, the section entitled New Merchants and the Distinctively, Modern Capitalist Nature of Production as well as the sources cited therein. 2 For this, see Bolshevism and Stalinism (Urgeschichte), Second Study. 3 Civil War and Revolution in America, chapter 10 in its entirety. 4 Marx, Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses (cited above). At the same time, in these low tech operations there is more more than the most oppressive forms of personal abuse (e.g., sexual blackmail) in which the reassertion of absolute surplus value extraction is clothed at stake for capital, namely, its own mobility and opportunity to utterly maximizes all prospects for exploitation: Industrialization in the South is very different from early industrialization in Britain, whose rise, consolidation and decay occurred over six generations. By contrast, the garment industry in Dhaka did not exist ten years ago [circa 1985]; if cheaper labor can be found elsewhere, it may not exist ten years from now. Seabrook, In the Cities of the South, 27.

that form the garment industry in South Asia (and China) are part of a globally functioning organization and system of production, distribution and circulation, and consumption, that is anything other than technologically backward and labor intensive, one thoroughly and immediately permeated by the law of value.1 Formal domination, though fully integrated into the circuits of production, distribution and consumption of commodities shaped by real domination, is important to capital precisely for the surpluses its generates. Migrant workers, immigrant workers and ethnically distinct workers who function as minorities outside their homelands, as well as garment workers, are important to capital precisely because they are engaged in the dirtiest, most dangerous and lowest paid work, that is, because in a world in which the real domination of capital over labor reigns these workers are subject to the most brutal forms of the extraction of absolute surplus value. Such specific production sites, industries, industrial branches and labor processes that are low-tech and labor intensive are integrated and integral features of capital's real domination at the level of the world, as much so as design of computer software in Bellingham, Washington or the production of computer chips in Silicon Valley. It is the system of social relations at the level of the world, as we say, the operation of the law of value, and the complex networks of production, circulation and consumption in which it is grounded and on which it operates that determine the reality and primacy of one form and era of domination over another. So, in a minimal sense when we speak about the hegemony of real domination we are speaking about its tendential universality in the actual organization of production, which is decisive for determining the periodization of the history of capitalism Lest it be forgotten, no form of capitals domination in production is ever instituted without a struggle against workers and, accordingly, since the periodization of any era of domination in the history of capitalism depends on the predominance of a specific form of capitals domination in production, the establishment of the former is, mutatis mutandis, similarly dependent upon capitals success in major class confrontations against workers In a more encompassing sense, real domination is constituted in reshaping not just production, but is penetration of other institutional spheres (e.g., family, state, military) and its tendency to re-structure them according to the logic of value accumulation, a tendency which once it becomes actual inaugurates a still newer form of domination of capital.2 A connection between the two senses of formal and real domination (as designations of forms of surplus value extraction or domination in production counterposed to signification in terms of eras of the history of capitalism) would allow us to specify a moment at which the one passed over to the other. Such a specification has a rather singular meaningful reference.3
We intend here the broadest sense of this usage, namely, the tendential reduction of social relations to productive ones, that is, the disciplining and regimentation of former by the latter implied in the regulation of production of commodities and expanded reproduction of the total social capital by socially necessary labor time. 2 For this, see the Second Interlude, below. 3 We shall forgo an extended discussion and critique of capitalist retrogression, decadence, for which assigning a date to the passage from formal to real domination as eras in the history of capitalism has the sense of a passage from an ascendant to a decadence phase or epoch of capitalist development. Here we can offer only the following: The sense or meaning for decadence theorizations is that capitalism as a system of social relations develops through a wrenching movement of expansion and contraction, and only re-equilibrates itself through the periodic destruction of the mass of objectively embodied values (plant and equipment, human capacity to labor, the mass of commodities especially as they enter as inputs into the means of production). In capitalisms ascendant phase, this devalorization was carried out through a deflationary collapse beginning with agriculture; in its decadent phase, through destruction of the means of production as in imperialist world war. A date at which capitalism entered its decadent phase, namely, 1914, is generally assigned. A test of this theorization, then, would be a demonstration that the last imperialist world war resulted in an unprecedented destruction of the means of production (as distinct from urban and humanized natural landscapes that did not embody fixed capital, which were often devastated) creating a serious decline in and restriction of productivity in the capitalist sense. But what is demonstrable is that in most of the capitalist combatant countries, the capacity to produce remained unchanged at the end of the war (or actually surpassed that at wars outset). It would take us too far afield to show this (though it can be shown), but the problems that confronted capital in the wars immediate aftermath were bottlenecks in fuel provision, transportation of raw materials and finished goods, distribution of food, and, less immediately and less narrowly economic, the return and reintegration of returning political prisoners and slave laborers. Productivity was not lost as a result of so-called destruction of the means of production (killed in combat, murdered en masse as genocides deliberately carried out, even with the destruction of human beings as productive forces) The failure to assess that moment at which real domination (it was not 1914), hence capitalist retrogression so-called, becomes effectively actual in the sense of an era of real domination exhibits a propensity toward a theorization for which historical contents do not enter into it and shape it. Alternately, the qualitative determination of the meaning and significance of real domination in terms of the exponential growth in abstract labors productivity not so much as technically innovative development (which can be understood narrowly) but as systematic incorporation of science and technology into production, offers no way to validate this affirmation, no way in which to measure it against social and historical developments, no way in which to connect that two senses in which formal and real
1

It refers to the historical moment beyond the immediate process of production at which all other domains of social existence and spheres of activity no longer possess the internal coherency to maintain a considerable degree of autonomy from the law of value, but instead become tendentially subject to it: Social relations of all kinds (for example, in educational institutions the relations between student and teacher) are under increasing pressure, they are increasingly subject to a logic that organizes them on the model of the relation between wage earner and capitalist, and they more and more become directly subordinate to the imperatives of capital. But the overriding import of real domination is that, on the basis of the transformation of immediate production processes, it, real domination, has become effectively actual in large parts of the developed capitalist world, that is, abstract labors productivity has become great enough to transform the world in its entirely according to the old Marxist notion of universal abundance. It is at that moment that capitalism is truly redundant, that, in an older language, the material presuppositions for socialism had fully matured. However, real domination did not hold sway over production even in the most advanced citadels of capitalism even at that moment (914) at which the short twentieth century was inaugurated, if we take this domination to mean effectively actual in the sense just formulated. This can be demonstrated beginning from an account of the reorganization of labor processes (capitalists directly intervening to reorganize work, its rhythms and tempos; scientific and technological inputs, especially continuous flow production) in the metropolitan centers of capitalism. The emergence of the factory system is the historical point of departure for the appearance real domination in production. But with a view to the structure of work, the factory system circa 1760-1840 cannot be identified with the mass production assembly line in the United States exemplified by Ford some eighty years later, or the largely horizontal rationalization that took place in Germany in the latter 1920s. That is, real domination has, as we have shown, existed in difference forms in the immediate production processes. Yet it has not been just any form of real domination that has made capitalism redundant, socialism in the narrow sense (i.e., with a view to its so styled material presuppositions) really pregnant within the extant configuration of production. It has only been continuous flow production based on sequentially arranged, specialized machinery and machine complexes that has raised abstract labors productivity exponentially, and in so doing created real domination as a periodizing determinant of the history of capitalism as such. Real domination based on this form of organization of production was, not to overstate the case, socially isolated in 1914: Fords Highland Park facility, the first mass production complex in the world, opened in 1914. Until the early twenties in the U.S. it was confined to steel, automobiles (from whence it expanded into production of agricultural means of production, tractors, combines, reapers, trucks, etc., and manufactured durables such as radios and refrigerators) and light manufacturing final assembly (e.g., G.E.s Schenectady light bulb plant), while the weight of technological inputs had begun to reorganize other, highly advanced sectors such as mining in Butte, Montana, though not along the lines of continuous flow production. In Germany, the new production economy of fixed costs, an internal time economy based on continuous flow production was developed by the great cartelized capitals at the heart of rationalization movement that seriously began in 1925. For all Lenins late life rants about the necessity of applying Taylorist methods to Soviet production, in the early thirties Soviet technicians could be found inside the Fords Detroit River Rouge plant as observers monitoring assembly lines in an effort to unlock the secret of continuous flow production. In 1946, the once massive Renault works at Boulogne-Billancourt was the sole major plant and facility in France that, fully rationalized, was systematically organized along lines of continuous flow production. Until 1960, Nissan had been entirely dependent upon manual labor in auto assembly producing 33,000 passenger cars in 1959. Gearing up for mass production, in 1960 it purchased its first welding machines. In 1964, Nissan manufactured 213,000 autos In line with the sense of this specification, we can fix a date, about 1950, as that moment at which a revolutionary proletariat could have leveraged the world to socialism (never mind that proletariat would have been productivist, and that socialism constructed on a productivist model of endless development of productive forces and technologies of capital aimed at nature domination forecloses on a genuine general human emancipation), that moment in which real subsumption of labor under capital had become effectively actual in large parts of the world, capitalist productivity great enough, to transform the world according to the old Marxist notion of universal abundance. It is at that moment that in principle a fundamental tendency of capitalist development under conditions of real domination became necessary and unavoidable, even though it would not become historically real for over another decade. This is the
domination are utilized.

tendency of capital to expel labor from production while simultaneously incorporating strata outside the waged laborcapital relation (especially petty producers in the capitalist periphery) into that relation, suggesting at this point that one specific and important sense of communism, communism as the suppression of work, had an actual foundation in the production process of capitalism at the level of the world Retrospect and Anticipation If earthly nature is the encompassing framework in which a free subject actively and contradictorily forms itself, a concept of and practice aimed at realizing human freedom has appeared, and appeared late, in historical time. This realization is intertwined with historical necessity that is simultaneously at work in it. We are, however, required to specify what this necessity is and what it is not. The sphere of popular autonomy, selfdetermination and independence can be, but need not be, enlarged. History is not of necessity rational. Rather, it can be rendered rational. History is not the progressive realization of human freedom. For in history this realization... to the extent a general emancipation has become possible... has unfolded dialectically: The realization of freedom is never linear; it is subject to setbacks, regressions, and mere partial realizations. But, if and then when, freedom is realized, has been achieved, history will be rendered fully rational. De jure, human freedom is inextricably and inseparably at once bound to social justice, and to the end of the domination of nature. De facto, they are almost always separated. In the epoch of universal history inaugurated with the development of capital, the meaning and significance of social justice and human freedom are socio-historically relative to achieved levels of objective substance (levels of material culture), forms of Objective Spirit (economic, legal and social and state institutions) and the classes and social groups that constitute society, though it is unachievable because at the same time it rests on an ongoing reduction of nature to a raw materials sink History in its expansive sweep and its entirety is not the domain of the realization of freedom. Only as capital historically appeared and systematically (not sporadically) began to hold sway became decisive for human sociation, understood mystifyingly (as a strictly a political event), obfuscatorily (as starting from something other than the abolition of social division) and restrictedly (realizable only for those who are proprietors of property in production), for the first time universal human freedom was posed as a problem, though narrowly and abstractly. In each era of capitals domination, a whole complex of overlapping, intertwined problems converge on the question of human freedom. And in each era, a specific thrust and interpretation of that problem comes to the fore and gives it, the problem of human freedom, reductionistically, a singular cast falsely suggesting its resolution. In the era of formal domination, it is the problem of motion as the measure of nature mastery (First Study). In the era of real domination, it is the problem of surplus labor (Second Study). In the era of totalizing domination, it is the problem of remaking the Earth to sustain capital in the face of the climate change it has engendered (Fifth Study). Always driven in the fundamental sense exclusively by a frenzied compulsion to accumulate value, the bourgeoisie, today a mere personification of capital in all socially and historically significant events, has never pursued freedom, only the magnification and intensification of the dual, intertwined and practically indistinguishable problems of creating and exploiting abstract labor and constructing a technical framework for recreating nature as a source provisioning commodity production.1 The problem of creating and exploiting abstract labor is one side of the relation of science to the bourgeoisie: As the theoretical anticipation of nature domination realized in the achievement of bourgeois tasks, in endless expansion of productive forces, science legitimizes, justifies and reinforces capital's hegemony over society and the social relations in production on which control over that production, moral and cultural authority in society and political power in the state are all grounded: In and through the mediation of science the domination of nature has become, if it has not always been, inextricably bound up with class exploitation, and with the oppression and bigotries that rest on the latter.
1

In point of fact, it was not strictly speaking bourgeois but middling groups... those who have largely disappeared from history, middling farmers fighting against the arbitrary power of tributary lords, seigniors and magnati over masses of serfs and other rural producers, but above all early artisans engaged in struggles against institutionalized religious occlusion and against divinely sanctioned, absolutist kingly Power and its arcane legalisms... who were the first social groups in history to develop a consciousness of universal freedom. It was a restricted view to be sure (for which freedom is grounded in property as a means of securing personal autonomy in and a livelihood from production), but significantly it had nothing to do with expansion of productive forces. Pride of place here goes to the Levellers in the English Revolution. For their struggle and the elaboration of this awareness, see Revolutionary Theories of the English Civil War.

Inseparably, constructing a technical framework for the recreation of earthly nature is the other side of a relation in which the bourgeoisie is no longer capable of actively partaking in, 1 that of the relation to capital to nature: The movement of capital recreates nature as a raw material basin for that production. It is no other than an anti-human, anti-nature cannibal. Its logic and actual development has generated an immense, perhaps humanly intractable problem, aporia and grand cul-de-sac into which all of living, earthly nature is being propelled headlong. Abandonment of the project of nature domination, creation of a new science and novel technologies to mediate our relation to nature, and simultaneously and on the basis of the self-elaboration of the consciousness of revolutionary subjectivity are the necessary if still inadequate conditions for making human freedom actual.

See the Second Interlude, below.

First Interlude Bibliographical Sources Barnes, Will. The German Road to Renewed Imperialist World War, 1870-1938. St. Paul, 2008 __________. Community and Capital. St. Paul, 2001 _________. Bolshevism and Stalinism in the Epoch of Imperialist World War and Proletarian Revolution (Urgeschichte). Three Studies (1979-2000). St. Paul, 2000 _________. Civil War and Revolution in America. St. Paul, 1999 _________. The Origins and Development of Catalan Nationalism: Catalan and Castilian Antagonism in Spanish History. Unpublished, 1999 _________. Revolutionary Theories of the English Civil War (Text, Fragments and Notes). Manuscript, 1991 _________. The History of Florence and the Florentine Republic (Text and Fragment). Manuscript, 1989 Brenner, Robert. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550-1653. Princeton (NJ), 1993 Brou, Pierre. The German Revolution, 1917-1923. Chicago, 2005 (1971) Bush, Michael L. Tenants Rights and the Peasantries of Europe under the Old Regime in Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe since 1500. M.L. Bush (ed.). London, 1992 Cameron, Rondo. France and the Economic Development of Europe, 1800-1914. Princeton (NJ), 1961 Chandler, Jr., Alfred. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge (MA), 1977 Ciriacono, Salvatore. Mass Consumption Goods and Luxury Goods: The De-Industrialization of the Republic of Venice from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century in Herman Van der Wee (ed.), The Rise and Decline of Urban Industries in Italy and the Low Countries. Leuven, 1988 Desmond, Adrian and James Moore. Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist. New York, 1991 Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Trans. by William Weaver. New York, 1983 Epstein, Robert. Napoleon's Last Victory and the Emergence of Modern Warfare. Lawrence (KS), 1994 Fischer, David Hackett. Albion's Seed. Four British Folkways in America. New York, 1989 Ford, Henry. My Life and Work. London, 1922 Frankfurt, Henri. Kingship and the Gods. A Study of Ancient Near East Religion as the Integration of Society and Nature. Chicago, 1978 (1948) Guilden, Gregory. Whats a Peasant To Do? Village Becoming Town in Southern China. Boulder (CO), 2001 Hegel, G.W.F. Grunlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Philosophische Bibliothek, Band 124. Leipzing 1911 (1821) ___________. Phenomenologie des Geistes, Vorrede. Accessed online at www.marxarchive.org. (German original, 1806) Hinton, James. The First Shop Stewards Movement. London, 1973 Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Capital, 1848-1875. New York, 1996 Kosk, Karel. Dialektik des Konkreten. Eine Studie zur Problematik des Menschen und der Welt. Frankfurt am Main, 1971 (Czech original, 1963) Lenin, V.I. The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1896) in Collected Works, V. III. Translated from the 4th Russian edition (Sochieneniia, 1941-1950). Moscow. 1960-1970 Manning, Brian. The English People and the English Revolution, 1640-1649. London, 1976 Marx, Karl. Kapital. Eine Kritik der Poliltischen konomie. Dritte Band, Buch III: Der Gesammtprozess der kapitalistischen Produktion. Herausgegeben von Friedrich Engels. Hamburg, 1894 ________. Nachwort to the second German edition (1873) of Kapital. Accessed online at www.marxarchive.org (Archiv sozialistischer) ________. Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses Das Kapital. I. Buch. Der Produktionsprozess des Kapitals. VI. Kapitel. Frankfurt, 1969. Accessed online at www.marxarchive.org (Archiv sozialistischer) ________. konomische Manuskripte, 1857/1858. Marx-Engels Werke, Bd. 42. Berlin (DDR), 1983 Moore, Jr., Barrington. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston, 1966. Roland Holst, Henriette. De Revolutionaire Masse-Actie. Een studi. Rotterdam 1918. Accessed online at www.marxarchive.org (Archiv sozialistischer)

Seabrook, Jeremy. In the Cities of the South: Scenes from a Developing World. London, 1996 Stone, Lawrence. The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642. New York, 1972 Tawney, R.H. The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century. New York, 1969 (1912) Taylor, Frederick. The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) in the collection entitled Scientific Management. New York, 1947 Thirsk, Joan. Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England. Oxford (Eng.), 1978 _____. Tudor Enclosures. Pamphlet published for the Historical Association [Great Britain]. London, 1959 Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York, 1966 Unwin, George. Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Oxford, 1904

Second Study New Departures in Science: The Sciences of Life Complexly mediated perhaps, but authentically new departures in science only occur if society itself, i.e., the order of capital whether just emerging or well established on its own basis, has itself reached an impasse of sorts, and thus first poses a question that must be, at least in part, theoretically solved before a path appears down which resolution in societal practical can be undertaken... There is a novel line of conceptual development that, beginning with T. Robert Malthus, stretches from the late 18th century all the way down to the present. Line and development are misleading inasmuch as the central themes as originally stated recur but with none of the clarity socially speaking that they possessed at those origins, and with little in the way of more sophisticated elaboration. But the line runs, nonetheless, from Malthus through Darwin down to contemporary neo-Darwinists. It has its explicit formulation in the notion of an unalterable relation between the reproductive potential of living population groupings and the restriction that nature (usually understood as subsistence) places on it; but in the historically significant, even if tacit sense it concerns the dual problem posed by the growing development of the productive forces of capitalist society, that of the productivity of abstract labor and with it, most manifestly, that of propertyless men expelled from production. It is a singular event in the order of society, broadly speaking, that occasions this theoretical reflection. It was the subordinate of labor under capital in production, the initial appearance of real domination in the form of the factory system which in establishing capitalism on its own basis may well be the most important development in its history and consequent upon it the response of artisan workers to their concentration as propertyless men. It was this congregation of masses of angry, fearful men facing an existence without a social anchor in work in a moral economy of production, under assault from capitalists, parliamentary politicians and sheriffs, and capitals organic intellectuals largely domiciled clerically that, in posing for these groups a danger to order in society (an evolving order to be sure, more and more understood as laissez faire, as unrestricted competition as the organizing principle of social life), stimulated this reflection. Once this reflection is developed in Malthus, as an unalterable relation of population to resources it is appropriated as the basis of the study of life understood as nature, as natural or organic life in Darwin, as an undifferentiated concept of life in its evolutionary development. At this point, theory returns to the order of society, that is, it anticipates and simultaneously expresses conceptually a linkage (that was tacit in the very notion of nature domination at the origins of science) that is a bondage (that really, effectively reinforces class exploitation): In the incessant reordering of the labor processes by way of scientific-technological inputs (real domination in production), the domination of nature becomes inseparable and operatively indistinguishable from class exploitation, the problem of propertyless men absent work increasingly pressing. This whole development is appropriated in thought anew, in order to further elaborate it, rationalize it, conceptually fix it, render it narrow, doctrinaire and authoritative, render it more scientific the modern synthesis, neo-Darwinian dogma and finds its contemporary theoretically prepared devolution in technologies of capital, in genetically-based biotechnologies of social control under conditions of totalizing domination and massive casualization, and in geoengineering aimed at nature itself.

Part I Malthus and the Problem of Population Malthus An Essay on the Principles of Population, published anonymously, was first penned in 1798 as a short pamphlet running to some 55,000 words, about 125 pages.1 Malthus (identifying himself through his writings as T. Robt. or T.R. Malthus) is best know for his formulation of a natural law, call it his population law (an arithmetic increase in food production always lags by growing orders of magnitude over time a geometric increase in population), the validity of which he sought to establish. Because the historical development of capitalism itself since Malthus time has demonstrably refuted this presumed law, shown it is ideological prejudice raised to the level of a necessary feature of human existence, a critical account must proceed immanently in order to recount what in his own time led him to believe otherwise. We shall attempt to elicit the historical experience that gives the lie to his account. In this regard, we can recall one of Marxs many, pointed and succinctly formulated criticisms: Malthus demonstration relies on a compilation confusedly thrown together from historians works and travelers' accounts2 (our translation). But, because his law has survived, nay lies at the foundations of cognitive endeavors, any number of sciences down to this day,3 we must confront Malthus logic, exhibit that on its own terms his conclusions are not warranted, are as we have just indicated, nothing more than class bigotry. We can begin by developing the historical context in which Malthus wrote and, having done so, we shall invert the order of presentation and begin with the latter, with an analysis of the cogency of Malthus argument. Ostensibly, the Essay undertakes to refute the views of well-known contemporary thinkers, men who for Malthus were without serious politics, daydreamers as they might be called today (and may have been called then). If so, then Malthus remarks constitute a polemical rejoinder to two authors, Godwin and Condorcet (as is obvious from the full title of the text), regarding their speculative views on, in Malthus words, the future improvement of society. Now Godwin and Condorcet both were convinced the mankind could achieve an infinite perfectibility. And, it is precisely such perfectibility that Malthus could not stomach, because, for him, the views articulated suggest something quite far from mere innocuous fantasies. They were, if you will, a Trojan horse. Stated differently, there is a subtler subtext here: The argument may be explicitly directed against Godwin, but it also takes aim at the emerging communist and utopian movements that first appeared in France. Condorcet (and Godwin) is (are) important because, on the heels of the French Revolution, i.e., in the eruption of fundamental historical change carried out by masses of men and women, the plebeian sorts of humanity, Enlightenment thinking exhibited a tendency, a strong one, to undergo transformation: There is a division within the bourgeois order at a moment in history when such division was significant, when it mattered: To the Enlightenment thinking of Godwin and Condorcet which Malthus suspected opened the door to the twin abominations of the suppression of private property in production and the community of goods, i.e., to Babeuf s earliest formulation of the communist project or, in Malthus words, to a society all members of which should live in ease, happiness, and comparative leisure (chapter 1) to this he opposes the class rationality of the great bourgeoisie with its own traditions that he, Malthus, embraces and which he identifies with the names of David Hume, Adam Smith and a little known Scot minister named Robert Wallace, all British.4
1

Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principles of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other Writers. 2 Marx refers to Malthus bunt Zusammengewrfelten Kompilationen aus Geschichtsschreibern und Reisebeschreibungen. Grundrisse, Heft VI (Theorien ber Mehrwert und Profit) in konomische Manuskripte, 1857/1858. Marx-Engels Werke, Bd. 42, 507. 3 See the Fifth Study, below. 4 It goes without saying that Malthus was a British nationalist. Condorcet, French, was a far more important thinker than Godwin. Yet Malthus, devoting just two chapters to Condorcet, ranges over five chapters of criticism of Godwin, who of course was British. (Additionally, one chapter is dedicated to both.) For the chauvinist, an opponent as a fellow national is always superior to a foreigner, especially if he is a hereditary enemy (with whom, at any rate, one has now been at war for the better part of a decade, openly since February 1793, with whom one has struggled against for wealth, prestige and territory up and down the two great rivers of known North America, the St. Lawrence and Mississippi, and as far afield as India) and even if his thought possesses greater clarity and his argument is more forceful. As for Gracchus Babeuf, on 6 November 1795 he re-launched his paper, Tribun du people, on 5 December the Directory issued an arrest warrant for him (he went underground). His action followed on a poor harvest the previous autumn and rampant inflation and speculation in goods prices in the cities. On 30 March 1796 an insurrectionary committee was formed including Babeuf, Sylvain Marchal, Filippo Michele Bounarotti, Antonelle, Auguste-Alexandre Darth and Flix Lepeletier. Betrayed by one of this committees military agents, Babeuf was arrested on 10 May. He was executed a year later (26 May 1797). Albert Soboul, The French Revolution, 1789-1799, 482-483, 486, 490, 491, 492. Should anyone doubt the sincerity of his convictions, at his trial he openly affirmed them. In the often quoted passage, he stated, The sole

Malthus embodies and represents the dark side of the bourgeoisie, one which had broken with the optimism that was a decisive element of the world vision that at its origins cohered various middling strata allowing the bourgeoisie to appear and act as a class in history.1 Almost in its entirety this break can be laid to, as we stated, the emergence of masses of men and women into, making, history. In Malthus Britain, the communist views of a Babeuf, Marchal or Buonarroti had potentially a social embodiment in layers among the dangerous classes, even if the radicalized laboring men in Britain situated themselves in the tradition of Tom Paines Rights of Man and not that of the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and a communism of distribution. (For Malthus, one does not distinguish between the Conspiracy of Equals and menacing men, croppers, woolcombers and other artisans, who opposed the incipient factory system as, for example, it was being introduced in West Riding beginning in 1795, men who within a decade would engage in Luddite machine wrecking.2 We should not forget that the hereditary enemy was now exhibiting the practical import of the radical, Enlightenment derived doctrine in its export of revolution, that the aristocratically allied industrial ruling class of England was at war with the aristocrat decapitating, new bourgeois order that was emerging in France as Malthus wrote the Essay). Both were intolerable, hideous excretions from a society in which the fundamental balance constituting the social order a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence (chapter 1), operating, we add, politically and forcibly if not from nature has been lost. Thus, exhibiting this less than sanguine persuasion, in his Preface he writes, The view which he [i.e., the author, Malthus] has given of human life has a melancholy hue, but he feels conscious that he has drawn these dark tints from a conviction that they are really in the picture, and not from a jaundiced eye or an inherent spleen of disposition. Or more to the point, he thinks man is condemned to a perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery, and after every effort remain still at an immeasurable distance from the wished-for goal (chapter 1) While later editions of the work offer a panoply of conditions obtaining in societies across his contemporary world that Malthus believed buttressed his position, the original text merely states that position and makes what Malthus took to be compelling arguments in its defense. Lets examine this position. The Argument Keep in mind that, underneath everything the position put forth, the arguments supporting it, their logic and structure the natural inequality between population and production in the earth, and the supremacy of the latter over the former, i.e., the checks that the latter place on the former, and its consequence, the insurmountable obstacle that the latter places in the way to the perfectibility of society (chapter 1) what Malthus takes aim at is the very possibility of a classless society, the transcendence of inequality rooted in material abundance, and starting from this the abolition of class rule, hierarchy and subordination in the institutional sense. In the conclusion to this discussion we shall return to this Why is the question of human perfectibility posed now? How is it posed? And, what is it in regard to this question that Malthus holds? There are, according to Malthus, four more or less contemporary, great events that pressingly pose the question. Those are the recent discoveries of natural philosophy (i.e., the modern science of nature, physics), the dissemination of general knowledge stemming from the spread of printing, in some sense following from these a critical spirit of inquiry among the literate, and the French Revolution, a verdict (whether it inspire greatness in men or lead to inconsolable tragedy) on the historical significance of which remains, so he tells us, as yet undetermined. He thinks these four events signal broad changes that will be fateful for mankind, and pose the question whether man shall henceforth start forwards with accelerated velocity towards illimitable, and hitherto unconceived improvement, or be condemned to a perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery, and after every effort remain still at an immeasurable distance from the wished-for goal (chapter 1). Though we might note that before ever posing the alternatives, he had, of course, already made up his mind.

means of arriving at [equitable societal arrangements] is to establish a common administration; to suppress private property; to place every man of talent in the line of work he knows best; to oblige him to deposit the fruit of his work in the common store, to establish a simple administration of needs, which will distribute these available goods with the most scrupulous equality, and will see to it that they make their way into the home of every citizen. (Cited by Murray Bookchin, The Third Revolution, 7.) 1 See the Introduction, above. 2 For an unsurpassed account and analysis of this entire period, see E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 472-602.

In his own terms these opposing alternatives can be restated in terms of a question of the relation of population to subsistence: The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the Earth to produce subsistence for men." This relation, one in which the production of subsistence always falls and increasingly continues to fall behind the growth of population, has a more precise, mathematical formulation (one that since Malthus had been repeated ad nauseum by bourgeois apologists), namely, Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio (chapter 1). Malthus is satisfied to merely state his position because to him, and the like-minded, it is so intuitively obvious and otherwise taken for granted. 1 Atop this, it was after all also confirmed for him in another source, the hitherto mentioned Dr. Wallace, in his Various Prospects for Mankind, Nature and Providence (1761) who, in a discussion of a perfect Government, i.e., society absent disease, famine and social strife, stated mankind would encrease so prodigiously, that the Earth would at least be overstocked, and become unable to support the numerous inhabitants.2 Returning to our introductory remarks, we shall forgo the temptation to simply state historical development has proven Malthus wrong and let it go at that; to say, If the humanly formed, natural world, overwhelming rural, agricultural and non-capitalist, supported at most a billion people circa 1800, today that world circa 2010, largely urbanized, industrial (and post-industrial) and capitalist, supports nearly 7 billion people. End of discussion. Instead well note that, as Malthus wrote, the era of famines and mass death by famine was just coming to a close, and the era of surpluses in the citadels of modern capitalism, i.e., the first sites of real domination, lay on the immediate horizon; that this was as true for Babeuf (whose community of goods, was predicated on what we would call pejoratively from Babeufs perspective - stagnation in production, so that each man might receive his share of the total social product, but no more than his share) as it was for Malthus There is, of course, more to it, at least in the historical sense and in class terms, for the like-minded can only be described in class terms; and it is not just that, This [relation] implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence, and that, This difficulty must fall somewhere and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind (chapter 1). It is also necessary, since it is an obvious truth, that population must always be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence (Preface, emphasis added), which is to say that the a large portion of mankind, the underlying classes and strata proletarians, proletarianized tenants and peasants as well as other layers of petty producers in the non-capitalist periphery, must be, if necessary, forcibly held to subsistence levels. This is a ruling class perspective as articulated by one whose relation to it, the English ruling class, was determined by his status as an element of its organic intelligentsia. Now, for Malthus, everything which can be assimilated to his perspective is patently obvious: His opinion can be laid down, established, concisely and simply, in a plain statement of which little more appears necessary with in addition (and not on the basis of) the most cursory view of society, which is cursory (Preface) because it is so obvious and otherwise merely taken for granted. I.e., Malthus believes his views are obvious to any reasonable observer... operative assumptions footnoted below are merely added to clarify his position, they merely illuminate what every rational man already knows... In point of fact, those assumptions do nothing more than establish the class basis on which his views are elaborated. History and Malthus Before discussing the structure of his argument, lets pause and consider both where Malthus was situated within the historical moment at which he wrote, and that moment itself. Malthus was the sixth of seven children including five girls, born to Daniel and Henrietta Malthus. Going back to the previous century, the Malthus line had a history as apothecaries to the royal family, as clerics, and as merchants and
In point of fact, Malthus begs our leave to make two further assumptions: I think I may fairly make two postulata. First, That food is necessary to the existence of man. Man must, to paraphrase one materialist tradition, produce his means of subsistence, in our terms, man is a being in nature. Secondly, that the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state (chapter 1). The reproduction of humanity understood narrowly and reductionistically as a biological species implies, though hardly logically, that demographical expansion at current levels will remain constant. Thus, the significance of the term passion The question of passion between the sexes will recur, as we shall duly note in the text below. 2 Cited in Patricia James, Population Malthus: His Life and Work, 59. She indicates that Wallaces influence on the young Malthus went very deep indeed (Ibid, 58).
1

modest landowners (the last two of which in this era in England often went hand in hand), essentially part of the small gentry. He, his siblings and his parents lived in a countryside dotted with small towns, formerly Surrey County, that were no long mere adjuncts to the surrounding country but carried on capitalist commerce, and were immediately west of London. In the 1760s, the Malthus relocated and settled in another one of those towns (some were better described as villages), Albury, while Thomas Robert, born in 1766, was still a child. 1 His father, a man of genuine culture, was personally acquainted with both David Hume and Jean Jacques Rousseau, and was one of the latters literary executives.2 Malthus was educated to the level of the day by his father until he was ten, after which a private tutor was employed. This education was liberal, both in the classical and the original political and historical sense. Not surprisingly, Malthus was sent to and pursued that education at Cambridge (Christ College), excelling in Latin and English declamation, from which he graduated in 1788, the same year he was ordained a minister, and where in 1793 he was elected to a fellowship which provided him with a stipend as long as he remained unmarried. In that year, he became a curate in Okewood, a small village also in Surrey, a position that provided his with an income for the services (weekly sermons, baptisms, overseeing burials and, on his own, ministering to, perhaps comforting, the sick and dying) he rendered to the village population.3 Okewood, as we shall have occasion to indicate below, was noteworthy for its rural impoverishment The moment at which Malthus wrote was toward the end of the era of famines, a period in the history of the great tributary formations of western and central Europe, pre-revolutionary France of the Bourbons and the Cabots, Castilian and Hapsburg Spain, Prussia, Sweden, in which crop failures and poor harvests led to food shortages and, on the basis of generalized impoverishment, savage inequalities and market mediation of distribution of foodstuffs, to famine, starvation and socially significant depopulations, an era which in the West, predating, is nonetheless coextensive with the era of capital's formal domination of labor.4 (Famine is endemic to agriculturally grounded stratified societies in all its historical forms, and though the periodization was different, the same situation confronted the three other great tributary formations in the world, Tsarist Russia, Mogul India and dynastic China.) It was also a moment of crisis in these regimes and the productive forms that underlay them, a crisis in part defined by strenuous aristocratic efforts to re-impose the seigniorial burdens inclusive of dues and taxes on already heavily weighed down peasantries. The crisis, and this is also an element of its definition, reached, if not its zenith then, a point at which explosive resistance heralded a period of qualitative societal transformation in France in the peasant eruptions (1780s) that signaled the advent of the Revolution. The crisis was, however, if anything overdetermined, that is, in a purely objectivistically descriptive sense, it was exacerbated by the contradiction between opposing modes of production, between capitalism forming within a western European tributary formation misapprehended as feudal and that formation itself, between in-kind and monetary lordly extractions and the concentration of small farms into hands of large capitalist farmers (carried out by expropriation of small producers). This contradiction characterized the situation in France5 as much as in England at a much earlier date: In both cases, we are speaking about propertyless men, proletarianized peasants, and about urban concentration. In France, Paris was the scene of greatest demographic concentration, a situation that formed within a vastly expanded urban division of labor as masses of petty producers servicing not only the requirements of a great administrative center (the king and court even if at Versailles, his retinue, the offices through which his reign over the country was effected) but their own needs as layer upon layer of the sans-culottes population. In England, though, the trajectory was different, there had been the same proletarianization starting from enclosures of copyright holdings (which were still ongoing in Malthus' time, but deepening as rural, already waged poor laborers lost non-market supports due to enclosures, as men were robbed of fuel, wood, and food, gleanings from cornfields): So that squeezed endlessly by wages that had been declining since 1760 and rising food costs, not only had large capitalist farms appeared but the factory system 6
1 2

James, Ibid, xvii-xviii (chart showing family tree); Thomas Peterson, Malthus, 21. Peterson, Ibid. 3 Ibid, 23-38; James, Ibid, 19, 25-34. 4 A single, not uncharacteristic example is suggestive. Florence was subject to 111 famines between 1375 and 1791. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Vol. 1, 328. 5 Soboul, Ibid, 488. 6 J.L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer, chapter 5. The authors point out (Ibid), Nathaniel Kent, writing in 1796 [Notes on the Agriculture of Norfolk] says that in the last forty or fifty years the price of provisions had gone up by 60 per cent, and wages by 25 per

which we identify with the first phase of real domination as it originally appeared in England and which had seen the rise of large cities, Birmingham, Sheffield, Manchester in additional to the increasing demographical densification of London formed and spread. The era was overdetermined in still another sense. Unifying dispersed economically growing manufacturing capitals and landed property on which gentry power as capitalist farming intertwined with the sheriffs and magistrates rested, the British Parliamentary state stood behind the counterrevolution, behind aristocratic French refugees graciously offered them the city of London in which to hatch their plots and conspiracies. But the movement of capital itself churned up opposition: The creation of great capitalist farms was accomplished through expropriation of the lands of small men; mentioned above, the spread of the factory system with its new labor saving machinery rendered skilled artisans redundant. In 1795, price inflation pushed the working poor, especially women, into the streets in food riots across the country, during which rioters so-called seized flour, corn and meat (from farmers, merchants and shopkeepers), and during which these rural and small town proletarians generated their own forms of selforganization (called by the Hammonds leagues of consumers), committees to regulate food prices.1 The whole power of this state at the various levels it operated was mobilized against this resistance as laws were enacted, women and men who opposed and defended themselves against the movement of capital were hunted down, tried and imprisoned . It was in this maelstrom of events that an Anglican cleric with the moral sensibilities of John Calvin himself, that the Reverend T.R. Malthus, responding to these events, wrote. The Structure of Malthus Argument Malthus begins from the intuitive certainty of his basic assumptions It is an obvious truth that population must always be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence. The only question was the means of popular suppression, the means by which this level is effected. (The answer, never mentioned by Malthus, was provided by the Aliens Act and the Treacherous Correspondence Act both of 1793. These were modifications to the Law of Settlements dating from the reign of Charles II, from 1662, themselves modified irregularity over the next hundred years. In question were provisions that, absent 52 weeks of annual employment, confined laborers to their own parishes. They were used by capitalists cum magistrates to uproot and shift labor from parish to parish, were invoked to deploy soldiers then the courts against popular outbursts, and, of course, to imprison those who resisted.) In a purely speculative manner, Malthus then logically retraced a series of propositions that formed the foundation of this assumption, his obvious truth, in order to bolster his position.2 To clinch the argument, he provided his readers with a series of contemporary based instances by way of which he merely restated his argument (and on the basis of which, though never the only possible conclusion, he affirmed the necessity of his intuitively certain assumption and its foundations). Now none of Malthus examples are even derived from that confusedly thrown together compilation of historians works and travelers accounts. Many are simply imagined. We shall examine such an instance. Malthus tells us, In a state... of great equality and virtue, where pure and simple manners prevailed, and where the means of subsistence were so abundant that no part of the society could have any fears about providing amply for a family, the power of population being left to exert itself unchecked, the increase of the human species would evidently
cent, 'but this is not all, for the sources of the market which used to feed him are in a great measure cut off since the system of large farms has been so much encouraged.' Professor Levy estimates that wages rose between 1760 and 1813 by 60 per cent, and the price of wheat by 130 per cent [Large and Small Holdings]. If we can identify this first phase of real domination with factory labor in its earliest phase, we can also acknowledge that it can be further specified in terms of the opening of an era in which socially-agriculturally famine begins to retreats, and within a quarter century disappears from the metropolitan centers of world capitalism. 1 Ibid. Among other towns, Aylesbury (in the south, west northwest to nearby London), Carlisle (in the far north, just south of the border with Scotland), Ipswich (in the center and east near the North Sea coast), Bath (in the southwest near Bristol) and Guildford (in the south, just southwest of London) are mentioned. 2 Enumerated in part above, these include (a) the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, (b) Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio, (c) given that food [is] necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal, implying (d) a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence, (e) This difficulty... must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind, (f) The... race of man cannot, by any efforts of reason, escape from this natural necessity, and (g) misery, is an absolutely necessary consequence of it. Vice is a highly probable consequence... (chapter 1).

be much greater than any increase that has been hitherto known (chapter 2). However, just two passages earlier, he told us that, no state has hitherto existed (at least that we have any account of) where the manners were so pure and simple, and the means of subsistence so abundant. Whats the point? If no state has ever existed, at least none that we know of, how do we know that the power of population left unchecked would entail a demographical increase much greater than any hitherto known? How do we know? We know simply because it is so intuitively obvious, i.e., it is a speculatively construction that accords with our deepest convictions (i.e., class bigotry). That much is certain; for, if there is no evidential basis for such knowledge, we are merely asserting belief, conviction (and not rational conviction) in the guise of logical inference In point of fact, we do know today and have known since at least the second quarter of the short twentieth century that communities based upon a fundamental, material equality, societies without states, have existed since the first emergence of agriculture some 10,000 years ago, and that these communities were ones of great natural abundance in which social labor aimed at subsistence was so limited in duration that it did not figure as a determinant of these societies, and that these communities demographical density never exceeded that capacity to socially reproduce themselves from that natural abundance1 While imagining is a large part of Malthus method of presentation, and it buttresses intuitive certainties, that is all it does. Arguments of this sort are unevidenced, offering the appearance of being merely (harmlessly) speculative. Detaching the logic of argument from history and society, they are also vacuous. Defense of the Argument Malthus does not think of his speculation as speculation. He believes himself an intensely acute observer who, penetrating to the essence of the human condition, engages in the formulation of laws of nature that govern human behavior and activity.2 The position is certainly dubious. Validation, if you will, or defense of Malthus position (in argumentative discourse the two categories are distinct, the first suggesting evidence, the second generally conducted in the manner of logical demonstration, though here they are indistinct largely because in Malthus validation is defective speculation run rampant, imagination is illicitly deployed and the two practices comprehended by the categories are collapsed one into the other) is carried out by employing, among others, a second and a third method, that of the gross abstraction and that of an illicit generalization from a single instance. Here, we can recount the following: In the United States of America, where the means of subsistence have been more ample, the manners of the people more pure, and consequently the checks to early marriages fewer, than in any of the modern states of Europe, the population has been found to double itself in twenty-five years (chapter 2). For the moment, let us grant that in the United States in the early years of the Republic, in the presidency of John Adams, first, amble subsistence could be found across all classes, that, second, men and women tended to marry earlier and, finally (assuming, as does Malthus, that all marriages are animated by a desire for progeny and fecundity in this regard is natural) that the population of this country would go onto double (and had in fact doubled) in twentyfive years. Note here that assumed points one and two characterize the method of gross abstraction: Malthus as a rule proceeds from a culturally formed abstraction here amble subsistence and the people with their manners (customary social behavior) the one without regard to access mediated by and undifferentiated with regard to wealth, standing and power to the statistical abstraction, population, as in, This ratio of increase, though short of the utmost power of population, yet as the result of actual experience, we will take as our rule, and say, that population, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every twenty-five years or increases in a geometrical ratio (Ibid, emphases added) Noting our emphases, we would again stress that while it may be tempting to subject Malthus to censure for his grasp of an immense increase in produce in his projection of future production on the basis of a linear extrapolation of present levels of production, this again only amounts to an ahistorical criticism of a man who did not (at least at this point in his life) live in an era in which the qualitative transformation in production within the existing capitalist mode were manifest
1
2

See the discussion, Nature, Humanity, Forms of Sociation: Archaism and Agriculture, in its entirety in our Nature, Capital, Communism. Laws have their corollaries, and justified by the same intuitive self-evidence, are also universal: The happiness of a country does not depend, absolutely, upon its poverty or its riches, upon its youth or its age, upon its being thinly or fully inhabited, but upon the rapidity with which it is increasing, upon the degree in which the yearly increase of food approaches to the yearly increase of an unrestricted population (chapter 7).

Flawed argumentation (that of the gross abstraction) of this sort allows Malthus to engage in an illicit generalization from a single instance: Let us now take any spot of earth, this Island for instance, and see in what ratio the subsistence it affords can be supposed to increase. We will begin with it under its present state of cultivation. If I allow that by the best possible policy, by breaking up more land and by great encouragements to agriculture, the produce of this Island may be doubled in the first twenty-five years, I think it will be allowing as much as any person can well demand. In the next twenty-five years, it is impossible to suppose that the produce could be quadrupled. It would be contrary to all our knowledge of the qualities of land. The very utmost that we can conceive, is, that the increase in the second twenty-five years might equal the present produce. Let us then take this for our rule, though certainly far beyond the truth, and allow that, by great exertion, the whole produce of the Island might be increased every twenty-five years, by a quantity of subsistence equal to what it at present produces. The most enthusiastic speculator cannot suppose a greater increase than this. In a few centuries it would make every acre of land in the Island like a garden. Yet this ratio of increase is evidently arithmetical. It may be fairly said, therefore, that the means of subsistence increase in an arithmetical ratio. Let us now bring the effects of these two ratios together. The population of the Island is computed to be about seven millions, and we will suppose the present produce equal to the support of such a number. In the first twenty-five years the population would be fourteen millions, and the food being also doubled, the means of subsistence would be equal to this increase. In the next twenty-five years the population would be twenty-eight millions, and the means of subsistence only equal to the support of twenty-one millions. In the next period, the population would be fifty-six millions, and the means of subsistence just sufficient for half that number. And at the conclusion of the first century the population would be one hundred and twelve millions and the means of subsistence only equal to the support of thirty-five millions, which would leave a population of seventy-seven millions totally unprovided for (Ibid). At this point in Malthus imagined construction, he takes note of a population loss due to immigration, so to counteract its effects, he goes for broke, taking an ever higher level abstraction, the population of the entire world as his object. (Why not?) But to make the argument more general and less interrupted by the partial views of emigration, let us take the whole earth, instead of one spot, and suppose that the restraints to population were universally removed. If the subsistence for man that the earth affords was to be increased every twenty-five years by a quantity equal to what the whole world at present produces, this would allow the power of production in the earth to be absolutely unlimited, and its ratio of increase much greater than we can conceive that any possible exertions of mankind could make it (Ibid, emphases added). But starting from the gross abstraction(s) on which it is contingent, this generalization to the entire world is illicit: Without understanding the differences in consumption as they are constituted between different classes or strata within society, between different societies and forming within them between different basic forms of productive activity as they operate at the level of society (i.e., without regard to a dominant form of production within a social formation), we, that is, Malthus, can only inadequately, misleadingly and falsely, engage in induction of this sort. And in this he laid down a pattern of argumentation that after two centuries still endures Todays Malthusians argue, for example, that now in excess of a billion people the massive further, future population of India must be checked, while the population of the United States at roughly thirty percent of that of the subcontinent is unmentioned. Employing a legitimate abstraction, at least from the standpoint of this argument, it might be noted that, comparably, the difference between the consumption of children in the United States exceeds on average that of children on the subcontinent by nearly two orders of magnitude (ninety times). We shall return to this... Malthus does, in fact, engage a typology of stages of human development (chapters 3-5) typical of the age savagery, nomadic pastoralism and civilization. In so doing, however, he merely amplifies his methodological errors. Here to see the same method at work we need only consider the rudest state of mankind, savages. Always operating with the statistical abstraction, population, he is required to account for low population density. Exhibiting an absolute minimum of insight, he indicates savages engage in hunting as their principal occupation, which insures population, comparably speaking, is necessarily thin since food sources are scattered over a large territory. Here

Malthus fastens on to North American Indians as exemplary. (Indians is itself another abstraction, i.e., formulated without regard to varying forms of social organizations, the presence or absence of stratification, and so on.) Since, as he explains, population density is comparably thin, he is further required to suggest at least that under the right conditions (our term), savages, North American Indians as the case in point, too would soon reproduce outstripping available subsistence. Thus, it is necessary to consider passion, by which obviously he does not mere ardor or sexual appetite but merely species multiplication through what are only sexual means and which among North American Indians is more apathetic than among any other race of men. Nonetheless, a comparatively rapid population... [increase] takes place whenever any of the tribes happen to settle in some fertile spot and to draw nourishment from more fruitful sources than that of hunting, and it has been frequently remarked that [this occurs] when an Indian family has taken up its abode near any European settlement and adopted a more easy and civilized mode of life (chapter 3). No doubt, but then against the gross abstraction, forms of humanization (socialization) means nothing; yet this Indian family has abandoned its community, and has effectively assimilated a capitalist form of sociation, yeoman farming with its need for large families to do agricultural labor at once for subsistence and for the market. In point of fact, Malthus has proven nothing: It is not the intrinsic character of individuals, or abstractions like man, mankind or population, but the ensemble of social relations, that constitutes an individual or family. In this vein Malthus continues, The North American Indians, considered as a people But which peoples? And this indeed is the point, for the various Indian groupings are peoples, not singularly but in the plural. So which form of life among those that are characteristic of natives at this time, what forms of productive activity, hunting and gathering, hunting and farming, which Indian peoples are we speaking about? The Plains Indians? Societies that, with the spread of the horse northward from Central American (where the conquerors had brought it over from Spain), uniquely, abandoned one settled form of life to engage in another, this time mobile, hunting buffalo almost exclusively, within the framework of material equality and a stateless communal self-organization? The Indians of the Pacific coastal Northwest?1 Those, who were not only sedentary but went beyond village life, achieving large scale societies (in the pre-modern sense), in which a certain amount of social wealth circulated and was concentrated in a small, single stratum, exhibited important hierarchies encompassing slavery and societal differentiation and producing strata of nobles and commoners? Just to mention these two important groupings of peoples among North American natives points to the decontextualized, de-socialized, undifferentiated and indeterminate abstractions that are methodologically decisive for Malthus. Malthus, though, is not deterred; happily he has arrived at that which he was unshakably, intuitively certain from the very beginning: Taking the population of the world at any number, a thousand millions, for instance, the human species would increase in the ratio of -- 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, etc. and subsistence as -- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, etc. In two centuries and a quarter, the population would be to the means of subsistence as 512 to 10: in three centuries as 4096 to 13, and in two thousand years the difference would be almost incalculable, though the produce in that time would have increased to an immense extent (chapter 2) In the course of 19 chapters, Malthus devotes the better part of three (chapter 3-5) to his typology of forms of human sociation, and several more to the problems that in his view his theorization confronts, those events and processes in human history such as immigration and the foundation of colonies (chapter 6) and epidemics and famines (chapter 7) that might, in his view, tend to affirm or negate his argument. In all cases, Malthus treats of his subject with the same abstractness. So, since no methodologically new ground is broken, the important questions, for us, then are twofold, first, what are his criticisms of the men whom he identifies as his main intellectual opponents (Condorcet and Godwin); and, second, since he is ostensibly as a Christian cleric committed to human welfare, what programmatically he advocate with a view to the future improvement of society? Condorcet and Godwin: The Critique of Human Perfectibility Malthus first criticism is that those writers, Condorcet and Godwin in particular, who concern themselves with human perfectibility simply and wholly fail to recognize the force of his argument well, dead four years Condorcet really couldnt... Irrelevant, since he, Malthus, is not only mystified but irritated: To a person who draws the preceding obvious inferences, from a view of the past and present state of mankind, it cannot but be a matter of astonishment that all the writers on the perfectibility of man and of society who have noticed the argument of an overcharged
1

Here see Alain Testart, Les chasseurs-cueilleurs ou lorigine des ingalits.

population, treat it always very slightly and invariably represent the difficulties arising from it as at a great and almost immeasurable distance (chapter 8, also chapter 1 where the same criticism was originally aired). Malthus takes as his object of discussion Condorcet's Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progres de l'esprit humain which he notes, perhaps somewhat skeptically, was penned while in hiding after warrant for his arrest (implying certain death) was issued.1 Relatively speaking more substantial, the criticisms that follow address the issue of propertyless men. Following Condorcet, Malthus tells us that a critical survey of the civilized nations of Europe, that is, the most economically developed countries (developed with a view to actual population and their extent of territory, their cultivation, their industry, their divisions of labor, and their means of subsistence), cannot exist without an industrial proletariat. Industrial refers to the early factory regime. For, according to Malthus, it would be impossible to preserve the same means of subsistence, what today would be called standards of living, and, consequently, the same population without a number of individuals who have no other means of supplying their wants than their industry (chapter 8). Malthus renders us a fair representation of Condorcet on this issue We would note, as we have more fully and more contextually elsewhere,2 the significance of maintenance of existing population levels for this argument is exemplary of the terrain on which this argument had until recently always been conducted, that of the ideological discourse of proponents of capitalist national states for whom large populations secure equally large industrial reserves of labor as well as men as cannon fodder in wars of conquest, arguments made by the early English and French political economists in defense of mercantile capitalism. In this sense, men on either side of the Channel made and accepted this argument exhibiting their ultimate allegiances Condorcet indicates, and Malthus readily agrees, that such men could only manage very small, unstable incomes and that, accordingly, There exists then, a necessary cause of inequality, of dependence, and even of misery, which menaces, without ceasing, the most numerous and active class of our societies (Ibid, Malthus citing from Condorcets Esquisse). Consistent with his mathematical training and his service (under Louis XVI) as Inspector General of the Mint (1772-1791), Condorcet, making actuarial and interest calculations, proposed to meet this situation by instituting a fund to guarantee assistance to the elderly, to women and children who lose their husbands and fathers, and to young people to establish themselves in life. The fund would be derived from savings, those who would benefit it and those who died before they could benefit from it (chapter 8), which we take to mean, since they could not be expected to save, from a tax on wages. This proposal as formulated by Condorcet in his Sketch in 1794 in intent and funding appears in the United States today to be effectively identical with Social Security. On the basis of further similar calculations, Condorcet also proposed to qualitatively widen the foundations of the use of credit in society (extending its usage beyond the very narrow range of the really wealthy), making it accessible generally both to individuals and small capitalists, merchants, etc. Here again, there is a contemporary analogue in certain financial institutions within the banking system that function as credit markets. Malthus will have nothing of either, stating that their application to real life generates results that are absolutely nugatory (Ibid). Putting aside that fact that the history of capitalism condemns Malthus idiotic judgment, he interprets Condorcets program, his vision of state administered system of social security as a kind of English Poor Laws (more of which later). Malthus reading is deficient, but his main objection recall this discussion (which, for us, aims at a minimalistic safety net that does not touch the contradictions that shape capitalism and provide it with its dynamic) concerns human perfectibility is, consistent with his assimilation of it to the Poor Laws, that it reproduces
1

Malthus says, it is said, under the pressure of cruel proscription with reference to the situation of Condorcet. The warrant was issued 27 March 1794. Suspecting he had been long under watch by Montagnard spies of the Committee of Public Safety, Condorcet fled Paris. He was arrested three days later, imprisoned and, following just two days in the goal, was found dead in his prison cell. To this day, it not known whether he took his own life (using a poison from a friend) or, fearing popular reaction to the prospect of guillotining, he was murdered by agents of his political enemies. Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, titled Marquis de Condorcet, was educated in Jesuit Colleges in Reims, Collge de Navarre and Collge Mazarin both in Paris. In 1765, he published An Essay on the Integral Calculus and was elected to the Acadmie des Sciences in 1769. In 1772, he published another mathematical treatise on the integral calculus. In 1777, he was appointed Secretary of the Acadmie. In 1785, he published his most important work, on probability and the philosophy of mathematics, Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions. This obviously was a work in the development of the theory of probability. Reaching back to Leibniz and Newton, to boot he developed his thinking and wrote a treatise on (never published), 1786, the differential and integral calculus, giving a new treatment of infinitesimals. He wrote biographies of Voltaire and his friend Turgot (whom, as Comptroller General of Finance, he served under while at the Mint). 2 The Critique of Productivism in our Nature, Capital, Communism.

that the dynamic, as he understands, of unrestrained population growth: Were every man sure of a comfortable provision for his family, almost every man would have one, and were the rising generation free from the 'killing frost' of misery, population must rapidly increase (Ibid). Here Malthus is mistaken precisely because he had (ideological) deduced (our term) the consequences of Condorcets program from his own intuitively certain assumptions, when (according to him and coming from him, this is precious), in deciding these issues we must pose the prior question of how do we know this but from experience? Theories must be founded on careful and reiterated experiments, so that we do not return again to the old mode of philosophizing and make facts bend to systems, instead of establishing systems upon facts (chapter 9). On this question, Malthus was, again, not just logically and methodologically mistaken, but simply mistaken: Legitimately noting historical outcomes (i.e., here appealing to the only basis on which a practical judgment can be rendered), it is because the history of capitalism is that experience and the experiment, and capitalism has proven Condorcet right on this account Eminent mathematician and mathematical theorist, physiocrat and anti-clerical (Malthus indubitably knew this), liberal champion of the Assembly against the Crown and its, the Assembly's, secretary, author of the plan that to this day lays at the foundation of the French educational system, a Republican as the Assembly under the pressure of the Parisian sans-culottes underwent radicalization, author of the moderate Girondist constitution, a historical figure of import, Condorcet was a man of action without being a politician (honesty and forthrightness, his manners, determining his comportment). Entirely unlike Godwin, he died for his convictions. Nonetheless Godwin is clearly germane here. Also an Enlightenment figure, he was a theorist, articulating an exceedingly coherent, conceptual frame of reference of philosophical, i.e., bourgeois and humanist, anarchism (as opposed to, say, anarchist currents that circulated among workers in Spain, France and elsewhere in the twilight era of formal domination, from 1870 down to the last imperialist world war). It is his major work, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), that is the object of Malthus criticism. The core of Malthus opposition to Godwins perspective is articulated in two chapters. Effectively Malthus criticism flows in two directions, first, there are fundamental disagreements over basic features of the human condition, and, second, there is a direction confrontation over the rationalist scaffolding that supports Godwins views of human perfectibility (chapter 14). For our purposes here, it is the former that merits consideration.1 Now Godwin is interesting, that is to say, in direct opposition to Malthus he holds that there is in human society a principle, as it were, that prevents population growth from outstripping resources that are required to sustain humans; that oppression, exploitation, degradation, i.e., evil or in Malthus words misery and vice (an expression that if it appears once appears a dozen times), are as they appear in civil society a product of human institutions; and, that the spirit of oppression, the spirit of servility, and the spirit of fraud...are... immediate [out]growths of the established administration of property. They are alike hostile to intellectual improvement (chapter 10), i.e., hostile to autonomous personal formation. Godwin is, in other words, interesting because he holds that private property in production, and bourgeois institutions the family particularly, are the basis on which misery and vice rise. Now Malthus devotes far more space and words to Godwin, as opposed to Condorcet, because Godwin is his bte noire, the opponent to whom he has no real response, to whom he can only oppose his own views but whom he cannot, other than reiterating those views, successfully counter.2
1

The former is taken up in chapter 10, the latter in chapter 14. In between, Malthus criticized Godwins views (as he did Condorcets) on the prolongation of human life (chapter 12) and his views of the centrality of rationality in human constitution (chapter 13), arguing instead that humans are compound beings, that passion as well as rationality is constitute for mans nature. In this regard it might be noted that, in contradistinction to his earliest presentation of his fundamental perspective in which sexuality appears as the merely as the means of propagating the species, wherein it must function exclusively as that activity that insures an excess of progeny (population) over subsistence, against Godwin he argues for sensual enjoyment, virtuous love, exalted by friendship awaken[ing] the sympathies of the soul and producing the most exquisite gratifications (chapter 11) all in begetting progeny. (Malthus wanted it both ways.) It should be noted that this volte-face forms merely an appeal, not an argument, in the face of Godwins utilitarian morality, for which behavior results from the calculation of consequences. For Godwin, sensual, here sexual, pleasure with unpleasant consequences, e.g., a progeny that could not be supported with available resources, incomes, etc., would not be pursued. Though it does not follow with any necessity, Godwin like himself, as Malthus points out, does not advocate promiscuous intercourse. In this context, against variety, diversity and promiscuity, he writes, The love of variety is a vicious, corrupt, and unnatural taste and could not prevail in any great degree in a simple and virtuous state of society (Ibid), demonstrating his affinity to Calvin, even if they were not of the same denominational persuasion. 2 Godwin was not an entirely laudable character. As we said above, Godwin was unlike Condorcet who died for his convictions (which is not the say that principled men and women must prove themselves by dying for their convictions); rather, he, as an anti-statist theorist, has the anomalous distinction of living out his life as a governmental pensioner, and under a Tory regime no less.

In all this Godwin developed the following position: Absent private property in production and the brutalizing effects of human institutions under capitalism (civil society), In a state of society where men lived in the midst of plenty and where all shared alike the bounties of nature, these sentiments would inevitably expire. The narrow principle of selfishness would vanish. No man being obliged to guard his little store or provide with anxiety and pain for his restless wants, each would lose his individual existence in the thought of the general good. Nicely stated. Malthus can only retort: But that it is merely an imaginary picture, with scarcely a feature near the truth, the reader, I am afraid, is already too well convinced. Really? And why, pray tell? Man cannot live in the midst of plenty. All cannot share alike the bounties of nature. Here Malthus reveals his real visceral commitments as well as intellectual parentage, Hobbes: Were there no established administration of property, every man would be obliged to guard with force his little store. Selfishness would be triumphant (chapter 10, emphasis added). Yes, of course. Bourgeois egoism is characteristic of humanity as such, a universal condition that no human can escape. But only if, against Godwin, selfishness is not generated under conditions of socially determined scarcity, only then would the subjects of contention be perpetual. Every individual mind would be under a constant anxiety about corporal support, and not a single intellect would be left free to expatiate in the field of thought.1 But it is a specific historical experience, that circumscribed by capitalism (or perhaps we should say forms of sociation based on fixed places in a division of labor wherein material inequality seeps down into the community itself) that, contra Malthus, experientially grounds this assessment. To either side of capitalism... the archaic past, a liberatory future that stands before us yet to be made... history belies Malthus' judgment. Here Godwin is clearly superior. Reduced to foaming, Malthus strategy is twofold. Most importantly, to disingenuously sigh, to debunk, to ridicule, to laugh: The whole is little better than a dream, a beautiful phantom of the imagination. These 'gorgeous palaces' of happiness and immortality, these 'solemn temples' of truth and virtue will dissolve, 'like the baseless fabric of a vision', when we awaken to real life and contemplate the true and genuine situation of man on earth (Ibid). Why? The black train of distresses would inevitably be occasioned by the insecurity of property (Ibid, emphasis added) This is wholly consistent with his judgment on the French Revolution (and not just in its Jacobin, but in all, phases): Here we can see the human mind in one of the most enlightened nations of the world, and after a lapse of some thousand years, debased by such a fermentation of disgusting passions, of fear, cruelty, malice, revenge, ambition, madness, and folly as would have disgraced the most savage nation in the most barbarous age. For Malthus, bourgeois that he is, the revolution threatened property and this is the real issue. And what can he offer in support for his assertion of the centrality of private property in production for human existence, not for the good life but for society to be possible at all? He can only dogmatically reiterates his mathematical ratio (and such is the second strategic element): I have already pointed out the error of supposing that no distress and difficulty would arise from an overcharged population before the earth absolutely refused to produce any more. Further parodying Godwins utopian projections, Malthus then proclaims, With these extraordinary encouragements to population, and every cause of depopulation, as we have supposed, removed, the numbers would necessarily increase faster than in any society that has ever yet been known (Ibid). And, of course, he once again (spare us) provides us with an exacting mathematical reductio ad impossible. Of course. If Malthus can only oppose his intuitively certainty-based calculations to Godwins position, there remains that one nagging question, that principle in human society, by which, for Godwin, population is perpetually kept down to the level of the means of subsistence. How is this so? How is this possible? The sole question is, what is this principle? Is it some obscure and occult cause? Is it some mysterious interference of heaven, which, at a certain period, strikes the men with impotence, and the women with barrenness? Or is it a cause, open to our researches, within our view, a cause, which has constantly been observed to operate, though with varied force, in every state in which man has been placed? (Ibid).

In the course of all this, Malthus does provide us with a glimpse of his own utterly backward and reactionary utopia. It is agricultural: Let us suppose all the causes of misery and vice in this island removed. War and contention cease. Unwholesome trades and manufactories do not exist There are no towns sufficiently large to have any prejudicial effects on the human constitution. The greater part of the happy inhabitants of this terrestrial paradise live in hamlets and farmhouses scattered over the face of the country. Every house is clean, airy, sufficiently roomy, and in a healthy situation. All men are equal. The labors of luxury are at end. And the necessary labors of agriculture are shared amicably among all (chapter 10).

Malthus is baffled. He can only retreat to his laws of nature, entirely unevidenced as they are: Is it not a degree of misery, the necessary and inevitable result of the laws of nature, which human institutions, so far from aggravating, have tended considerably to mitigate, though they never can remove? Based on specific descriptions brought back from the lengthy period of the conquest of the Americas (among which Bartolom de las Casas was the most analytically incisive, most thorough, most credible, and to be sure, unfamiliar to Malthus), to this, however, Godwin opposes the fundamental insight of all opponents of capitalist modernity as it first began to develop on its own foundations, the recognition of different societies, of history and a moment in history within which socially determined scarcity did not reign. Malthus paraphrases, among the wandering tribes of America and Asia, we never find through the lapse of ages that population has so increased as to render necessary the cultivation of the Earth. To this Malthus has no answer; he can only offer denial Program As we have already suggested, Malthus is miffed by the utter inability of his great opponents, and not just them even those (Wallace) with whom he otherwise sees eye to eye fail to grasp the exigencies of the situation, to understand that the truth is that the argument given in this Essay is far from being remote, but is imminent and immediate, (chapter 8) meaning that, indubitably, his program is in urgent need of being carried out. Expressed as such (programmatically) this urgency is, as we shall see, what so manifestly and patently renders Malthus capitals non-political Representative, i.e., he not only formulates the naturalistic and reductionist premises of the eternality of the existing system of social relations, but he articulates the perspective of capital though at the tail end of the curve of its movement.1 So what does he offer? Malthus begins from a critique of the Poor Laws. Return to the curate in Okewood. The latter was a genuine backwater located in the forest region at the center of Surrey. It did not become a parish until 1853, so in the seventeen nineties Malthus had no experience as a guardian or visitor (see immediately below): That is, he was not in any official capacity tied to the administration of those Laws, though, since Okewood was administered as component in a larger parish, Malthus was quite aware of how implementation of the Poor Laws were overseen and the sentiments of laboring men toward them. In this regard, the village had at least two noteworthy features that stood out for Malthus (both biographers we have cited point them out): It was exceedingly poor, its laborers and their families undernourished and underclothed; yet its baptismal records for the entire chronological eighteenth century indicate a rather amazing generative capacity among the poor in the amidst of poverty, malnourishment and squalor.2 Malthus did not write words like the following merely to fit an ideological argument: The sons and daughters of peasants will not be found such rosy cherubs in real life as they are described to be in romances. It cannot fail to be remarked by those who live much in the country that the sons of laborers are very apt to be stunted in their growth, and are a long while arriving at maturity. Boys that you would guess to be fourteen or fifteen are, upon inquiry, frequently found to be eighteen or nineteen. And the lads who drive plough, which must certainly be a healthy exercise, are very rarely seen with any appearance of calves to their legs: a circumstance which can only be attributed to a want either of proper or of sufficient nourishment (chapter 5). It was because this described, without exception, his daily experience fulfilling his obligations as a curate, an experience which he could not shake, that he was unable to see beyond it In England, the 1795 food riots frightened parliamentary gentlemen, those staunch defenders of the emerging order of capital. Samuel Whitbread, as sympathizer of the working poor, brought a minimum wage bill before the Commons.3 In those riots, working men and women especially exhibited their own ad hoc, informal organization, combination. (To be sure, recognition and institutionalization of any self-organization were beyond the pale, since combination was and remained illegal, outlawed.) Led by William Pitt as Prime Minister, behind whom stood capitals early personifications dressed up in the formidable phraseology about the impartial justice of capitalist markets (in the Hammonds words all the interests and instincts of class were disguised under the gold dust of Adam
See the previous footnote. It was the eighteenth-century baptisms in the Okewood Register which so much astonished subsequent clergymen, who knew nothing whatsoever about Malthus. They noted with amazement that there were so many pages and pages of baptisms, and that the baptisms were so greatly in excess of the burials. James, Population Malthus, 46. 3 For the various positions assumed and maneuvering during the course of debate, see the Hammonds The Village Labourer, chapter 6.
1

Smith's philosophy),1 the campaign to defeat the bill was successful. In an effort to blunt these spontaneous eruptions, Pitt brought out his own bill, a Poor Law Reform, an attempt to update and modernize what from the standpoint of capital were increasingly archaic means of controlling and mobilizing waged labor. Pitts bill too was sent down. So the anachronisms that Malthus alleged remained in place. In what did they consist? The Poor Laws date from an enactment (1601) in the reign of Elizabeth. In taking over assistance to the poor from the Church, the English state retained its institutional framework in the parish. In various amendments (1722, 1789) administration of relief was reorganized so that by the mid-1790s Justices of the Peace appointed parish overseers who collected and set the rates (of assistance). Distribution of relief was executed by paid guardians (one for each parish), who were appointed by the justices on the basis of lists tenured by parishioners. Justices further appointed a visitor for each parish who monitored the work of the guardians as he saw fit. Relief, a shilling or two, was provided weekly at the home of the recipient (known as out relief), and in a workhouse, poorhouse or in a capitalist firm (indoor relief). Dreaded by the working class poor, provision through the workhouse was the earlier and far most common form of relief, and it was mandatory (at penalty of losing this miserly income), workhouses (and poorhouses) being constructed at parish expense.2 Malthus primary objection to the Poor Laws was just as archaic as the law itself, a thin mask for his real concerns (which, at any rate, he states): His criticism invokes precapitalist political concepts, for this assistance which some of the poor receive the whole class of the common people of England is subjected to a set of grating, inconvenient, and tyrannical laws, totally inconsistent with the genuine spirit of the constitution. The whole business of settlements, even in its present amended state, is utterly contradictory to all ideas of freedom (chapter 5, emphasis added). It is not the classically republican (i.e., oligarchical) critique of state-mediated capitalist tyranny that concerns him (in variant grammatical forms, the word appears three times in a single short paragraph), but the obstruction such relief presents to the movement of capital (wherein, of course, the plight of labor is always invoked): [The] obstructions continuity occasioned in the market of labor by these laws have a constant tendency to add to the difficulties of those who are struggling to support themselves without assistance (Ibid), which, as a liberal in classical (Smithian) sense, he really believed might go the longest way toward ameliorating a poverty that would, in his view, never disappear: Offering a mathematical demonstration of sorts, Malthus tells us, the parish laws of England have contributed to raise the price of provisions and to lower the real price of labor. They have therefore contributed to impoverish that class of people whose only possession is their labor. But this is only part of the issue, for workmen [would] save a part of their high wages for the future support of their families, instead of spending it in drunkenness and dissipation, if they did not rely on parish assistance for support in case of accidents. In the end, the Poor Laws lead to idleness and dissipation (Ibid). So what is the remedy? The evil is perhaps gone too far to be remedied, but I feel little doubt in my own mind that if the poor laws had never existed, though there might have been a few more instances of very severe distress, yet that the aggregate mass of happiness among the common people would have been much greater than it is at present. The conclusion must follow, were I to propose a palliative it should be the total abolition of the present parish-laws. With his backward looking eye to agriculture, such an enactment would give liberty and freedom of action to the peasantry of England, and for peasantry (which no longer existed anywhere in England) we should read capitalist farmers (or the large capitalist tenants, of which there were more than a few), but more importantly, the market of labor would then be free, and those obstacles removed which prevent the price [of labor] from rising [or falling] according to demand (Ibid). With a view to the capitalist farmer or tenant, Malthus proposes, Secondly, premiums might be given for turning up fresh land, and it possible encouragements held out to agriculture above manufactures, and to tillage above grazing. And, even if Malthus glance is backward looking, he recognizes the necessity of liberating the country from the grasp of feudal restrictions in order to constitute a uniform national market in labor, even if he only sees this national market in terms of agriculture. So heres the crux, Every endeavor should be used to weaken and destroy all those institutions relating to corporations, apprenticeships, etc., which cause the labors of agriculture to be worse paid than the labors of trade and manufactures. For a country can never produce its proper quantity of food while these
1 2

Ibid. Ibid.

distinctions remain in favor of artisans. Such encouragements to agriculture would tend to furnish the market with an increasing quantity of healthy work[ers], which in large measure was precisely the point. Lastly, we should note forget the role of the state, for cases of extreme distress, county workhouses might be established, supported by rates upon the whole kingdom, and free for persons of all counties, and indeed of all nations. The fare should be hard, and those that were able obliged to work, who, it goes without saying, the manufacturers and capitalist farmers alike could draw on as required. Marxs Criticism of Malthus Consider now Marxs critique (or that part of it which he took up and concerned the Essay): Malthus theory, which incidentally [was] not his invention, but whose fame he acquired through the clerical zealotry with which he pushed it forward, actually only by way of the emphasis he placed on it, is doubly important: (1) because he gives brutal expression to the brutal viewpoint of capital; (2) because he asserted as fact overpopulation in all forms of society. Proved it he has not, for there is nothing more uncritical than his compilations confusedly thrown together from historians' works and travelers' accounts [emphases added]. His conception is altogether false and childish (1) because he regards overpopulation as being identical in kind in all the different historic phases of economic development; failing to understand their specific difference[s], and thus stupidly reduces these very complicated and diverse relations to a single relation, as two natural series confronting one another, in which the natural reproduction of humanity appears in one and the natural reproduction of consumable vegetation (or means of subsistence) in the other, in progressions the former geometric and the latter arithmetic1 (our translation). Marx brilliantly grasps that an undialectical relation of specific social groups to their surrounding (humanly) natural world as a relation of mutual externality will necessary naturalize the former. Thus, he continues, In this manner he transforms the historically distinct relations into an abstract numerical ratio, which he has fished purely out of thin air, and which rests neither on natural nor historical laws2 (our translation, emphasis added). In our terms, Malthus thinking is unevidenced, abstract and speculative. The conclusion is clear, namely, There is allegedly a natural difference between the reproduction of mankind and e.g. grain,3 but no difference within nature itself (i.e., Malthus is incapable of theorizing the recognition that man is humanly natural, even if his examples often proceed on this basis). Thus, This ape [i.e., Malthus] thereby asserts that the increase of humanity is a purely natural process, which requires external restraints, checks, to impede its geometrical progression. This geometrical reproduction is the natural reproduction process of mankind. In history he would find that population advances on the basis of very different relations, and that overpopulation is likewise a historically determined relation, in no way determined by abstract numbers or by the absolute limit on the productivity of the necessaries of life, but by limits set by specific conditions of production. [And] numerically limited as well. How small do the numbers which for Athenian meant overpopulation appear to us!4 (Our translation.) This insight is, well, simply beyond Malthus.
1

Malthus Theorie, die brigens nicht seine Erfindung, sondern von der er sich den Ruhm angeeignet durch den pfffischen Eifer, mit dem er sie verkndete, eigentlich nur durch den Akzent, den er auf sie legte, ist nach 2 Seiten hin bedeutend: 1. weil er der brutalen Ansicht des Kapitals brutalen Ausdrck verliehn; 2. weil er das fact der berpopulation unter allen Gesellschaftsformen behauptet hat. Bewiesen hat er sie nicht, denn es gibt nichts Unkritischeres als seine bunt zusammengewrfelten Kompilationen aus Geschichteschreibern und Reisebeschreibungen. Durchaus falsch und kindisch ist seine Auffassung, 1. weil er die berpopulation in den verschiednen historischen Phasen der konomischen Entwicklung als gleichartig betrachtet; ihren spezifischen Unterschied nicht versteht und diese sehr komplizierten and wechselnden Verhltnisse daher stupid auf ein Verhltnis reduziert, wo einerseits die natrliche Fortpflanzung des Menschen, andrerseits die natrliche Fortpfalzung der Vegetabilien (oder means of subsistence) sich als zwei natrliche Reihen, von denen die eine geometrisch, die andre arithmetisch fortschreitet, gegunberstehn. Marx, Grundrisse (Heft VI, Theorien ber Mehrwert und Profit), in konomische Manuskripte, 1857/1858. Marx-Engels Werke, Bd. 42, 506-507. 2 So verwandelt er die historisch verschiednen Verhltnisse in ein abstraktes Zahlenverhltnis, das rein aus der Luft gefischt ist und weder auf Naturgesetzen noch auf historischen beruft. Ibid, 507. 3 Es soll ein natrlicher Unterschied in der Forpflanzung des Menschen z.B. und des Getreides stattfinden. Ibid. 4 Der Affe unterstellt dabei, da die Vermehrung des Menschen reiner Naturproze ist, der uerer restraints, checks, bedarf, um nicht nach einer geometrischen Proportion vorzugehn. Diese geometrische Fortpflanzung ist der natrliche Fortpflanzungsproze des Menschen. In der Geschichte findet er vor, da die Population in sehr verschiednen Verhltnissen vor sich geht und die berpopulation ebensosehr ein geschichtlich bestimmtes Verhltnis ist, keineswegs durch Zahlen bestimmt oder durch die absolute Grenze der Produktivitt von Lebensmitteln, sondern durch von bestimmten Produktionsbedingungen gesetzte Grenzen. Sowohl der Zahl nach beschrnkt. Wie klein erscheinen uns die Zahlen, die den Atheniensern berpopulation bedeuten! Ibid.

Secondly, restricted according to character. A surplus population of free Athenians transformed into colonists is significantly different from a surplus population of workers transformed into workhouse inmates. Likewise the surplus population of beggars that consumes the surplus produce of a monastery is different from that which takes shape in a factory1 (our translation). Here, we affirm our own critique of the fixed because abstract (socially undifferentiated) character of socially specific conditions (and perhaps events), and the social relations that underlay them. This is to say that these conditions are fixed because they are not historical, for while they are (meaning that they are transient, not permanent, features of the human condition), this has no meaning for Malthus. It was the French Revolution, the significance of which Malthus rejected, that opened up the perspective of history. As a bourgeois thinker basing himself on that rejection, it was impossible for him to grasp and explicate the significance for his, for any, theorization of transient historical conditions. Thus, Marx is ahead of himself (i.e., fails to engage Malthus immanently) when he states (albeit correctly, at least for us and for later Malthusians who have no excuse) that, It is he [Malthus] who abstracts from these determinate historic laws of the movements of population, which are indeed the history of the nature of humanity, natural laws, but natural laws of humanity only as a specific historic development, with the development of its own historical process determined by the development of productive powers. Malthusian man, abstracted from historically determined man, exists only in his brain; and thus also the geometric method of reproduction corresponding to this natural Malthusian man. Real history thus does not appear to him as the reproduction of his natural humanity abstracted from the historic process of real reproduction, but to the contrary appears inverted: Real reproduction is an instance of Malthusian theory. Thus, for him, the immanent conditions of population, and overpopulation as well, appear at every stage of history as a series of external checks, which have prevented population from developing in Malthusian form. The conditions in which humanity historically produces and reproduces itself appear as barriers to the reproduction of Malthusian natural man, who is a Malthusian creature2 (our translation). In contradistinction to Marx, we would only recall that the historically constituted stagnation of production which is eternally given for Malthus (or at least cannot keep pace with geometrically increasing population growth) is in essence the same reality as Babeuf understood it. Marx in this respect does not explicitly grasp, comprehend, that he lives in the shadow of the French Revolution. Malthus least of all can grasp this. It is, then, necessary to return to our original perspective: What is intuitively certain in Malthus is an appeal to, or better, a naked assumption of, the fixed character of socially (and historically) specific conditions (and perhaps events) and the social relations that underlie them beyond Malthus thinking, all of these (conditions, events and relations) are transient, not permanent, features of the human condition (our term) as Malthus intended them. Masked by rational demonstration (deductive inference) these assumptions are congealed expressions of bourgeois prejudice. They are best explained (as in Malthus discussion of the Poor Laws) as the class bigotry of the capitalist (and bourgeoisie) It is not that Malthus, mired in bourgeois prejudice, does not see this of course, he doesnt But more importantly, all those who take up, or take over, his simple mathematical formula, carry over tacitly but necessarily, that prejudice. This brings us to Darwin.

Zweitens dem Charakter nach. Eine berpopulation von freien Atheniensern, die in Kolonisten verwandelt werden, ist von einer berpopulation von Arbeitern, die in workhouse inmates verwandelt werden, bedeutend verschieden. Ebenso die bettelnde berpopulation, die in einem Kloster sein Surplusproduce verzehrt, von der, die sich in einer factory bildet. Ibid. 2 Er ist es, der abstrahiert von diesen bestimmten historischen Gesetzen der Populationbewegungen, die, da die Historia der Natur des Menschen die natrlichen Gesetze sind, aber nur natrliche Gesetze des Menschen auf bestimmter historischer Entwicklung, mit bestimmten durch seinen eignen Geschichtsproze [bedingter] Entwicklung der Produktivkrfte. Der Malthussche Mensch, abstrahiert von dem historisch bestimmten Menschen, existiert nur in seinem Hirn; daher auch die diesem natrlichen Malthusschen Menschen entsprechende geometrische Fortplfanzungmethode. Die wirkliche Geschichte erscheint ihm daher so, nicht da die Fortpflanzung seines Naturmenschen eine Abstraktion von dem Geschichtsproze, von der wirkliche Fortpflanzung, sondern umgekehrt, da die wirkliche Fortpflanzung eine Andwendung der Malthusschen Theorie. Was daher in der Geschichte die Bedingungen, immanenten Bedingungen sowohl der Population als berpopulation auf jeder Stufe, erscheint bei ihm als eine Reihe auerer checks, die die Population verhindert haben, sich in der Malthusschen Form zu entwickeln. Die Bedingungen, in denen die Menschen sich historisch produzieren und reproduzieren, erscheinen als Schranken der Reproduktion des Malthusschen Naturmenschen, der eine Malthussche Kreatur ist. Ibid, 507-508.

Part II Darwin and the Evolutionary Development of Life In Malthus, a little digging easily uncovers the class prejudice of the bourgeoisie against the labor on which it is existentially dependent. In Darwin, the same bigotry is present. It is, however, less visible because it is more refined and highly theorized, taking shape as a systematic reflection on the course the evolution and development of life itself. Precisely because it is not manifest, it is necessary in the course of explicating it to exhibit the actual social linkage of this thought, otherwise appearing detached, to the concrete conditions and events of the time and place in which it took shape. Then, and only then, will we be able to fully comprehend, having already worked through, the basic theoretical orientation of its author, Darwin, and demonstrate that in fact, and how, bourgeois class concerns determined and shaped this orientation. Malthus and Darwin In Malthus, the optimism that characterized bourgeois existence at the origins of science, as science as a social class project mediated the becoming of the bourgeoisie as a historical class (one acting in history), has largely disappeared it will reappear and disappear again For in Malthus, the problem of surplus labor... objectively and historically mediated by scientific and technological inputs into production... labor in its abstract form, first became conscious. But the ubiquitous presence of propertyless, disquieted men is only the first form. From Darwin down to the neo-Darwinians who, as modern men, synthesis Mendel and Darwin, the problem of surplus labor will become institutionalized, and as such only a background feature of capitalist development dealt with by capitals theorists of labor, economists, as an industrial reserve army of the unemployed. This background feature will only leap to the foreground and become thematic during periodic eruptions in crises of capitals movement, economic contractions, slumps and in proletarian oppositional upsurges against the order of capital. It is only in our own time that the problem of surplus labor has taken on the proportions that make it difficult simply to ignore, as megapolises, cities of slums, barrios and shantytowns of the capitalist periphery and not just those of the periphery, have become a planetary feature, as the tenuous hold on life and society of casualized labor and unemployable surplus populations make increasingly regular large scale natural disasters a function of weather at its extreme characterizing the initial phase of climate change, itself a necessary outcome of capitalist development massive human tragedies. As Darwin writes though, this still all lies in the future Malthus had a detailed, albeit ruling class-based understanding of the situation at the origins of real domination (proletarianization on the basis of the factory system) as it unfolded on the ground, and before it ever gave rise to the parliamentary fight between bourgeois factions over the attempted reform of the Poor Laws beginning anew in 1796: His work as a cleric ministering to the Okewood village populace, most of whom were propertyless men, poor laborers, permitted him to see upfront and close the social impact of the Poor Laws, once administered. His population law is rooted in this experience together with his clerical (Anglican, Christian) convictions, which might be summarized in the expression the poor will always be with us. Darwin was different. Darwin was a country gentleman who, among other things (raising a family), engaged in plant cultivation and fossil collection as part of those studies. He was, in other words, a leisured gentlemen in a sense that very much corresponded to the classical conception of leisure,1 one in which the householder did not labor, and this as a prelude to participating in the good life. Unlike the ancient householder, he did not, however, participate in politics Then, again, the British Parliament was not a (socially restricted) community of ostensible equals engaged in their own self-rule, but an arena in which the political Representatives of great capitals struggle against one another and forged a precarious unity that permitted them to overcome, at least in part, their otherwise antagonist relations, in order to enact a legal order which would form the social premises of the activity of those capitals But this leisure did provide Darwin with the requisite time to reflect on and think through the population law with a view to the entirety of life on Earth and the development of that life over geological time. The son of an established, wealthy physician (who was also the son of an established, wealthy physician, Erasmus Darwin, poet, writer and naturalist of some repute), Charles, a middling or average student, was educated at Cambridge (like Malthus, at Christs College); spend five years aboard the HMS Beagle as companion to Robert Fitzroys (ships captain, naval officer, hydrologist and meteorologist) in the capacity, common during the era, of a
1

What his more recent biographers call a Whig gentlemen on a private fortune, Desmond and Moore, Darwin, 199.

naturalist on a voyage of exploration around the world (for the most part in the Southern Hemisphere); on his returned he eventually settled in London (until 1842), married a first cousin, Emma, of the very, very wealthy Wedgwood family (china manufacturing) in 1839 and, with an annual allowance from his father, and the dowry and an annual allowance provided by the marriage courtesy of English workingmen exploited in Wedgwood facilities retired to a country home in the village of Down in Kent where he pursued his studies Ideal-Cultural and Experiential Presuppositions of Darwins Theorization (Paley, Lyell especially) Even if not popularly generalized, at least among important social layers the meaning of nature had undergone significant transformation since the advent of capitalism in the West, especially England: It no longer invoked the same fears, or awe, as it did among social groups composing the various tributary formations in the world. Among the educated and the well to do, a romanticism, especially in the literatures of England, Germany and France (and in a peculiarly American, viz., isolatedly individualistic, form, witness Thoreau), had already emerged before the second decade of the chronological nineteenth century that embraced nature, counterposed to the evils of the factory system, as the repository of what was authentic in human relations. Nature was in this respect considered benign and in it inhered a model for humanity situated within it but, increasingly distinct, alienated from it. It was, then, tame, possessed of beauty and repose - always with the proviso here we are referring to the new middling groups that were forming in the heart of early capitalism. Among one of those middling layers that predated the rise of industry, the clerics, its study as natural history had become an acceptable pastime. 1 Similarly, this preoccupation could be said to characterize elements within newer social groups (recall Erasmus Darwin, a doctor). There was a difference, however: These personages constituted a transitional social assemblage, for the pursuit itself was undergoing professionalization, its bearers increasingly academicians, its content increasingly technical, The Origin of Species being perhaps, as George Levine remarks, the last major scientific text fully readable by nonscientists.2 Darwin certainly owed something to an older naturalism, that is, a natural theology foremost amongst which was William Paley and his book by the same name,3 not the least his form of argument that, entirely unlike Malthus (who argued deductively), was cumulative and largely inductive. In other words, abstractly setting aside fundamental assumptions Darwins argument by and large proceeded from a mass of evidence to generalization based on it. Of similar import was attention to the same features constituting, in a formal sense, the content of the argument (what Darwin would later call "my theory"), namely, the transcendent significance of adaptation understood as a relation of utility, a relation that connected a given organic structure to its function in terms of the benefit the organism in question derived from it.4 Of course, for Darwin the benefit is not firmly, i.e., hereditarily, established, unless it is only formed over generations (as Darwin says, it is selected), and affects the organism to the extent it is a member of a species, or, if you prefer, largely in the aggregate sense... together additively with all other adaptations... it is these adaptations that distinguish a species as such. But this was Darwin in 1859: Right up to his return to England, until he began regular discussions with the coterie of Whig Malthusians in London, Darwin remained firmly tied to Paleys perspective; and Paley (wealthy, a cleric with his own parish, Anglican archdeacon not to mention a Doctor of Divinity at Cambridge),5 for his part, had pointed to these adaptations as evidence of divine effort, creativity, and solicitude for the creation. In respect of these similarities and in particular what distinguishes them (here, in the formal sense only), there were two further features whose effect, once mediated by Malthus (who would come later), was to place a yawning chasm between Darwin and Paley. The first was ideational, a temporal perspective which Darwin for the most part owed to Lyell, what (appropriating Braudels term) we shall call the geology of the long dure for which the Earth and life
1

[By] the eighteenth century nature was sufficiently tamed enough to be idealized, at least by educated men who did not themselves have to labor on the land. The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were the heyday of the cult of a benign and edifying nature, while the Fall receded more and more into the theological background Natural history became an approved clerical hobby. J.W. Burrows, Introduction to The Origin of Species (1979), 18. 2 From the Introduction to the edition of The Origin of Species (2004) we are using, Ibid, xiii. This is a reprint of the first edition. 3 The full title of Paleys work in question is revealing in this regard: Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, collected from the Appearances of Nature. Originally published in 1802, by the end of the following year it had undergone four more editions. 4 Burrows, Ibid, 23. 5 Desmond and Moore, Ibid, 78.

on it is millions of years old.1 Of course, developments in embryology and especially anatomy were important here, and important to and for Darwin It is said that anatomys founder, Georges Cuvier, could identifiably reconstruct an extinct species from a single bone The second difference between the young Darwin and Paley was experiential: On the Beagle voyage Darwin was witness to a huge assortment of the life forms which he collected, described and catalogued and of which he was able to assess their likenesses and differences with regard to type. It is doubtful that the experience of the latter would made much sense, or at least the same sense, had he been unfamiliar with Charles Lyell. But that was not the case: Darwin spent that time aboard the Beagle with Fitzhugh, a personal servant (named Covington), the ships crew, and at the various stops (some extended, three years down and around the southern cone of continental South America, five weeks in the Galapagos Islands, and long stays in Tahiti, New Zealand and Sydney, Australia, Tasmania, Coco Islands 1850 miles northeast of Perth and 700 miles southeast of Jakarta, Mauritius, Cape Town) during the course of the voyage.2 His other close companions were Lyells Principles of Geology (the first volume which he carried with him was published in 1830), a gift from FitzHugh, the first two volumes in English translation of Alexander von Humboldts Personal Narrative of his travels (Humboldt had explored equatorial South America some thirty years prior to Darwins travels), and Miltons Paradise Lost.3 Darwin collected a large variety of specimens among them were seashells, corals, rocks, sand compressed to quartz-like stone, tiny pelagic organisms caught with cloths or nets in the open ocean, fish, insects, snakes, the skins of animals and birds he shot (in the latter case a dozen a week when on dry land), skeletons dug out of the dirt or exposed on the sides of embankments due to erosion, some of which he recognized and other which he did not At Bahia Blanca on the eastern edge of the Argentine Pampas, he found several skeletons of which he numbered a four legged creature, closely related to armadillos but as large as a horse, and close by near Punta Alta Darwin uncovered a weird mammalian skeleton, he thought as large as rhinoceros, of which most intact were the bones making up a small long face and a huge pelvis4 This was summer 1833. In London, three years and months later, the great Tory anatomist, Richard Owen, would identify the latter skeleton as coming closest to that of an ancient, giant Cape anteater5 The conceptual framework with a view to geological time that Darwin was slowly assimilating by way of his reading of Lyell permitted him to grasp the temporal significance of these discoveries. In the case of this skeleton it was ancient: Its entombed position had been undisturbed, seashells had postdated it since they had been found in an upper layer. A sea or watery body had covered the land after the animal whose frame was formed by the skeleton roamed the Earth. How long had it taken for that to occur it could not have been a catastrophic event for sediment had been deposited gradually and by what evolutionary development in or processes of nature had such a massive organism come into being, and how had it become extinct? Darwin pondered these questions. Counterposed to the geology taught at Cambridge which saw in nature catastrophic developments, violent crustral movements, wrenching strata and mountain thrusts,6 floods and volcanic eruptions Lyells natural world evolved slowly, with past development not differing in any essentials from the present (in this regard, note the subtitle of his work)7: These developments were uniform and had occurred over long periods of time Lyells Principles made him
1

Mediated by developments in the youthful new science of life, against the overwhelming Victorian and Christian sense of humanitys and the Earths duration, Darwins states explicitly the ancient character of man and the Earths geological age. See The Origin of Species, e.g., 75, 77, 81, 104, 109, 158. 2 Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, passim. Darwin dedicated the second edition of this work to Lyell, explicitly acknowledging the importance for him of the study of Principles of Geology. For the library aboard the Beagle available to Darwin, John Bowlby, Charles Darwin, 104. 3 While along the eastern South America coast, docked at Montevideo, Darwin received a post from London containing Lyells second volume. It was published two years after the first, in 1832. This, the second volume unlike the first, was not of the same order of importance to Darwin. In it, Lyell propounded his view of adaptation, that each species was entirely and perfectly adapted in situ: Environmental change would not result in mutation, but elimination of the species, its extinction. Lyell believed more than less in a wholly un-divine, and inexplicable, formation of new species as more ancient ones disappeared, went extinct. (The main argument appears in the second volume wherein he indicated the fossil record is inconclusive, and suggests no progress in development, specifically toward humanity. Principles of Geology, Vol. 2, chapter 2). 4 For Bahia Blanca, A Sketch of the Deposits Containing Extinct Mammalia in the Neighborhood of the Plata, Paul H. Barrett (ed.), The Collected Papers of Charles Darwin, Part 1, 44-45 [This was a paper read before the Geological Study of London on 3 May 1837.]; for Punta Alta, Voyage of the Beagle, 88-89, 159-160. 5 Ibid, 89; Desmond and Moore, Ibid, 141, 205. 6 Ibid, 117. 7 Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earths Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation.

the leading proponent of uniformitarianism in the eighteen thirties1 signifying that todays climate and planetary movements (crust, volcanic), geological contemporaneity itself, was all that was required to explain a deep geological past, or in his own language, actualism was the heuristic key to the past In the third volume he undertook what by our standards today was a highly limited reconstruction of that past history of the Earth Once the voyage was underway this perspective, Lyells, was to make more sense to Darwin from the get-go: At the first stop, St. Jago in the Cape Verde Islands three hundred miles west of the northern African coast (west of contemporary Mauritania), he noted, on entering the harbor, a complete level white band in the face of the cliff running for miles along the coast at a height of roughly forty-five feet above the water line. Studying it, he recognized the white band was made up calcareous material, that is, residues of the calcium deposits of hard-shelled bodies of plankton and other pelagic organisms including shells themselves. The band itself was lay atop ancient volcanic rock, and has been covered by a stream of basalt, at a moment in time when the pelagic calcifiers lay at the bottom.2 Obviously, then, a land formation forty-five feet above current sea levels had once been underwater. Yet, within historical times, as Darwin pointed out, there had been no disruptive natural activity or movement, no signs of volcanic activity. 3 Yes, indeed, Lyell was making much sense out of Darwins experience... Special Creation of Separate Species Let's now consider Darwin's mature views in some detail. This, of course, leads to a thematic discussion of some of Darwin central concerns in The Origin of Species. There was one feature of contemporary thinking (actually two) regarding the natural world that very early on in the course of his lengthy studies Darwin came to reject. This was the notion of special creation of each separate species. (The second was the fixity of species, which was, for Darwin, inseparable from the first). The two were related (for Darwin, the second stood or fell with the first),4 but to get at this and fully understand what he objected to, we must go back to what Darwin intended when he spoke of the origin of species. Darwin did not take speciation as such as the subject of his study, the question of how the taxonomic category, species, expressing a real development in nature, first appeared (if for no other reason than it never occurred to him that some form, an entire kingdom, of organisms did not speciate).5 Rather, Darwin proceeded phenomenally and phenomenologically. In this regard we can compress a mass of material and still follow him with a set of examples of our own. Examine the enormous number of varieties (breeds) of the domestic cat. When would one become a distinct species? Or, are bobcat and lynx varieties or separate species? (The mountain lion, cougar and panther in the western United States are names for regionally distinctive, yet identically the same species and cannot even be differentiated each from the others as varieties.) Why are the Bengal tiger and the Siberian tiger not species but varieties (in this case, subspecies)? Darwin devotes considerable space (not to these specific questions but) to questions of this kind: Varieties are variations on a type, a species, and Darwin concludes that it is only over geological time the distinction between one and the other can be seen, for species are only strongly marked and

See Principles of Geology, Vol. 1, chapter 7, wherein Lyell formulates the theorization, and chapter 8, where he examines the ancient climate of North America in relation to its geological formations in order to test and defend the theory. 2 Voyage of the Beagle, 15. 3 Ibid, 16. During the voyage, that is, on land, Darwin experienced natural arrangements of this sort frequently, leading to the same conclusion. Witness, for example, his description of the plain through which the Santa Cruz flows and the estuaries from which it debouches as they are fed runoff from the Cordillera Mts. (on the national border between contemporary Argentina and Chile at roughly 50 south latitude). See the section of a paper (On the distribution of the Erratic Boulders on the Contemporaneous Unstratified Deposits of South America) entitled Border Formation in the Valley of the Santa Cruz, The Collected Papers of Charles Darwin, Part 1, 148. 4 Darwins critique of independent creation is a critique of species fixity, for once we admit that species belonging to the same genus are lineally descended from other, by and large extinct species forgoing the notion of an independent creation of each separate species the concept of species fixity has to be abandoned. Darwin himself expressly refers to the latter just once (in his Introduction), stating that, I am fully convinced that species are not immutable. The Origin of Species, 15. Nonetheless, the two concepts were distinct, even if on evolutionary assumptions the former entailed the latter. Having demonstrated the Earth was geologically very old, Lyell, for one, holding to species fixity, did not accept an evolutionary view of life. Darwin deals with the latter, species fixity or immutability, in a less direct manner in chapter 10 in its entirety by way of a discussion on, or concerning, the geological succession of organic beings (the title of the chapter), see 251-276, esp. 252-253, where immutability is explicitly addressed. 5 See this Study, Part IV, below.

permanent varieties, which, in turn, are nascent (or, as hell say, incipient) species1: The distinction is not hard and fast, for varieties pass over into species, in fact this movement constitutes, for Darwin, the origin of species. [Wherever] many species of the same genus have been formed, or where the manufactory of species has been active, we ought generally to find the manufactory still in action, more especially we have every reason to believe the process of manufacturing new species to be a slow one. And this certainly is the case, if varieties be looked at as incipient species.2 If this can be shown, then individual species, each and every one, are neither the product of a special creation nor is their reality fixed, permanent and unchanging3 With its theological justification rooted in Genesis, the divines who had hitherto dominated the newly emerging study of the natural history of the Earth, geology, elaborated the notion of special creation. Were not the beaks of birds, the tails of monkeys, the claws of crabs, was not all of the creation exquisitely fitted each to its situation in the world? There were two further aspects to this. Beyond utility, the creatures making up nearly the entirety of the creation exhibited a natural beauty in appearance, in movement that only a Divinity could be held to account for; and these, utility and beauty, themselves were integral moments of a natural harmony that only God in his benevolence, magnificence and sublimity could have authored. Darwin, however, was to find something quite different operative in nature. First, there is the experimental and experiential evidence itself. For example, I should never have expected that the branching of the main nerves close to the central ganglion of an insect would have been variable in the same species [Yet] quite recently Mr. Lubbock has show a degree of variability in these main nerves, which may almost be compared to the irregular branching of the stem of a tree.4 And, there is the well-known [instance] of the primrose and cowslip, or Primula veris and elatior. These plants differ considerably in appearance; they have a different flavor and emit a different odor; they flower at slightly different periods; they grow in somewhat different stations; they ascend mountains to different heights; they have different geographical ranges; and lastly, according to very numerous experiments they can be crossed only with much difficulty.5 Second, then, on this basis there were enormous, confusing problems of classifications, that, in turn, pointed back to the inherent difficulties in sorting out the differences between varieties and species: These problems were several: (a) Compare the several floras of Great Britain, of France or of the United States, drawn up by different botanists, and see what a surprising number of forms have been ranked by one botanist as good species, and by another as mere varieties. (Examples of such classifications are cited.) Amongst animals which are united for each birth, and which are highly locomotive, doubtful forms, ranked by one zoologist as a species and by another as a variety, can rarely be found within the same country, but are common in separated areas. How many of those birds and insects in North America and Europe, which differ very slightly form each other, have been ranked by one eminent naturalist as species, and by another as varieties, or, as they are often called, geographical races!6 If species are this indistinct how is it possible to speak of a special creation of separate [i.e., recognizably distinct] species or to hold their distinctive characteristics are fixed, for the distinction between species and varieties is entirely vague and arbitrary.7 (b) There was the logical, classificatory analysis of increasingly more general types of determinants based on organ, anatomical, functional, etc. relatedness that linked subordinated organisms, groups of organisms, types of organisms to increasingly smaller groups and types of organisms.8
1 2

Varieties are species in the process of formation. The Origin of Species, 97. Ibid, 55. 3 Ibid, 18, 47, 49, 50, 54-58, 59-60, 93, 97, 98-99, 106, 146-151, and 378 where the most salient arguments against special creation are summarily marshaled and counterposed to species immutability (fixity). 4 Ibid, 47. 5 Ibid, 50. 6 Ibid, 49. 7 Ibid. Similarly, A considerable catalogue, also, could be given of forms intermediate between two other forms, which themselves must be doubtfully ranked as either varieties or species and this shows, unless all these forms be considered as independently created species, that, the one in varying has assumed some of the characteristics of the other, so as to produce the intermediate form. But the evidence is afforded by parts or organs of an important and uniform nature occasionally varying so as to acquire, in some degree, the character of the same part or organ in an allied species. Then to clinch it, Darwin casually notes that he has collected a long list of such cases. Ibid, 138-139.

(c) There was a question of efforts bordering on absurdity to account for what were otherwise specific characteristic of a species when these appear in another species classified within the same genus. He who believes that each equine species was independently created, will assert that each species has been created with a tendency to vary, both under nature and under domestication, in this particular manner, so as often to become striped like other species of the genus [a horse like a zebra]; and that each has been created with a strong tendency, when crossed with species inhabiting distant quarters of the world, to produce hybrids resembling in their stripes, not their own parents, but other species of the genus.1 Third, there was the logically argued summation of much experience in the form of methodical observations. In the larger genera the species are apt to be closely, but unequally, allied together, forming little clusters round certain species. Species very closely allied to other species apparently have restricted ranges [The] species of a large genera present a strong analogy with varieties. And we can clearly understand these analogies, if species have once existed as varieties, and have thus originated; whereas, these analogies are utterly inexplicable if each species has been independently created.2 Fourth, there was a problem of differences and similarities of structure in related organisms. On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, why should that part of the structure, which differs form the same part in other independently created species of the same genus, be more variable than those parts which are closely alike in several species? I do not see that any explanation can be given.3 Then, returning to experience, there is the larger question based immediately and directly on Darwins own experience: Why in the isles of the Galapagos Archipelago did the giant tortoises exhibit small (and, for Darwin, difficult to ascertain) variations from island to island? Natives could unfailingly surmise from which island a tortoise had come4 The point? The more strongly different species from contiguous locales (or in different geological eras in the same locale) shared defining characteristics, the more probable it is that these species had a common ancestor and the less probable the notion of a special creation of separate species.5 The weight of evidence and argument against this notion extended to species fixity. As geology itself developed with accumulating fossil discoveries, the temporal dimension of the Earths age itself became more and more a problem and subject to argument and analysis.6 The age of fossils may not have been rigorous determinable, but they did provide indisputable evidence that many species, now extinct, predated the appearance of humanity and were in this sense ancient. To preserve the biblical timeline (roughly 4500 years from the creation to the present), divines, theologians and clerical naturalists (often in the same personage) had responded that this could be understood in terms of successive creations: Species that once inhabited the Earth, or portions of it, had been destroyed by some catastrophic event and new species had been divinely created. But this brought us back to Lyell, to the fossil record, to an (uniformitarian) argument that geological events, relations and formations are to be understood solely in terms of ongoing geological processes, in terms of changes which can in principle still be witnessed. If, as Lyell
8

It is a truly wonderful fact that all animals and all plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other in group subordinate to group, in the manner in which we everywhere behold namely, varieties of the same species most closely related together, species of the same genus less closely and unequally related together, forming sextons and sub-genera, species of distinct genera much less closely related, and genera related in different degrees, forming sub-families, families, orders, sub-classes, and classes. The several subordinate groups in any class cannot be ranked as a single file, but seem rather to be clustered round points, and these round other points, and so on in almost endless cycles. On the view that each species has been independently created, I can see no explanation of this great fact in the classification of all organic beings Ibid, 113. 1 Ibid, 143. Darwin continues, To admit this view is, as it seems to me, to reject a real for an unreal, or at least for an unknown, cause. 2 Ibid, 57. 3 Ibid, 133. 4 The Voyage of the Beagle, 398-399; and more generally, The Origin of Species, 316-317. Darwin makes the point against the notion of a special creation at every opportunity he can, for example, with regard to the fertility and sterility of hybrids and mongrels, Ibid, 224. 5 Throughout the work, Darwin periodically (and perhaps tangentially to theme he is developing) elicits still other arguments against the notion of a special (or independent) creation (of each species). For example, in his discussion of geological distribution of species, he points out that, A volcanic island, for instance, upheaved and formed at the distance of a few hundreds of miles from a continent, would probably receive from it in the course of time a few colonists, and their descendants, though modified, would still be plainly related by inheritance, to the inhabitants of the continent. Cases of this nature are common, and are inexplicable on the theory of independent creation. Ibid, 284. 6 Darwin provides us with his own sense of the enormous temporal expanse of Earth history in his calculation of the age in excess of 300 million years of a English geological formation called the Weald. Ibid, 231-232. See the entire discussion of chapter 9 (On the Imperfections of the Geological Record).

himself observed, we accept the laws of nature are unchanging and enduring, the argument for the geology of the long dure will appear more cogent as, we add, will Darwins opposition to the independent creation of separate species.1 Natural Selection Yet as late as the conclusion of the Beagle voyage, Darwin still had not constructed a coherent alternative to the notion of independent creation that his theoretically mediated experience and an experientially mediated theory had led him to reject. When he finally did, he would call it natural selection with explicit reference to and as distinct from domestic selection2 (in the evolutionary sense, domestication) as practiced by breeders of cattle, sheep, horses, dogs and especially pigeons (among which, he could count himself), as well as in plant horticulture (culinary and flower cultivation) and agriculture. The concept is fairly straightforward, and, while it can be stated concisely, it is also heavily theory laden. It is, however, the sense of the complex of further concepts, what they mean and signify and what they dont, which natural selection entails and which require exploration. Start, though, with natural selection. Selection acts in nature by modifying and adapting living beings to their various conditions and places (in nature). 3 What Darwin calls natural selection is a purely passive outcome of the action and interaction which, contrary to Darwin, are primary and which are governed by biological values of self-preservation, self-maintenance and selfenhancement of species individuals in specific milieux and ecologies. These biological values, though, are not important for Darwin (this statement of natural behavior would be unintelligible to him), but what is of the utmost significance is variation: For as all the inhabitants of each country are struggling together with nicely balanced forces, extremely slight modifications in the structure or habits of one inhabitant might give it an advantage over others.4 These extremely slight modifications are what is meant by variations. The variations are extremely slight because natural selection can act only by the preservation and infinitesimally small inherited modifications, each profitable to the preserved being, and natural selection acts solely through the preservation of variations in some way advantageous, which consequently endure.5 Why is this purely passive process the outcome of the action and interaction which Darwin calls a struggle for life or existence of species individuals in their various milieux? What drives the whole process in the first place? And, why must organic beings be exposed during several generations to the new conditions of life to cause any appreciable amount of variation?6 This answer, which Darwin tell us we must always remember, is that many more individuals are born that can possibly survive,7 so that in the course of thousands of generations individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and procreating their kind.8 The struggle among organisms is ongoing, constant, even relentless, so that after any physical change, such as climate or elevation of the land, etc.; and thus new places in the natural economy of the country are left open for the old inhabitants to struggle for, and become adapted to, through modification in their structure and constitution.9 So that in the end, the outcome is always the preservation of favorable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, [which] I call Natural Selection.10 The extremely slight modifications, the variations, are preserved
The geological age of the Earth is also implicated in Darwins discussion of geographical distribution of species that comprises two entire chapters (10 and 11), Ibid, 276-325. Therein he pursues a sustained polemic against the notion of the independent or special creation of separate species. See 284, 310, 313, 314 and 315 where the intent guiding this construction becomes explicit, 343-344 (resemblance), 357, 358-359 (rudimentary or vestigial organs) where arguments from design, and the final chapter where various arguments (some originally put to other purposes) are briefly recapitulated and the notion of special creation is systematically attacked, 370, 371, 372-373, 373-374 (instinct), 375-376 (geographical distribution), 377 (embryology), 379, 383-384. 2 Ibid, 74-75. 3 Ibid, 112. 4 Ibid, 76. 5 Ibid, 86, 96. Emphasis added. 6 Ibid, 17. 7 Ibid, 74. Emphasis added. each species tends to increase inordinately Ibid, 259. 8 Ibid, 74-75. 9 Ibid, 92-93. 10 Ibid, 75.
1

hereditarily, thus on the basis of sexual reproduction, though the specific mechanisms were not known to Darwin as he readily admits.1 (Thus, we can speak of, as later Darwinians do, the differential sorting of whatever this hereditary mechanism is that follows upon individual organisms reproduction success.) Darwin provides us with a summary statement of the entire position: As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive, and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.2 There are several ramifications of this conception that we are required to briefly explore for the sake of fuller clarity. First, it is important to note that Darwin is not, at least in the immediate and direct sense, what we today call an environmental determinist. Over and again, he expressly states that conditions of life such as food, climate, etc., the direct action of heat, moisture, light, food, etc., play some role, but only a minor one producing very little direct effect in determining species constitution.3 Organisms are related to their environment and this relation is unilateral, from environment to organism only by way of complex mediation, i.e., by selection based on competition, as described above. Second, Darwin assumes, openly, that this relation is utilitarian, the assumption of course perfectly attuned to bourgeois existence: While some modifications cannot be directly and immediately related to use (i.e., some are mediately so), the organic import of most and all important modifications is decided by its use. In the case, for example, of a series of modifications over geological time, he states each grade[is] useful to its possessor, natural selection might easily specialize, if any advantage were thus gained, as natural selection acts bythe preservation of individuals with any favorable [i.e., useful] variation, and by the destruction of those with any unfavorable deviation of structure, natural selection [accumulates] slight modifications to any extent, in any useful direction.4 But the world (nature) is not formed simply to satisfy bourgeois needs (for utility, efficiency, economy in use or expenditure, superiority of competition in generating desired resulted), compulsive at that,5 as Darwin, albeit obliquely and not fully, understood. Thus, he cites several laws of inheritance (actually he discusses only two), and what he calls sexual selection as further determinate of modifications, or more generally of species constitution.6 The two laws of inheritance he calls reversion and correlation of growth. 7 In each case, a modification has no direct use, but is nonetheless mediately related to selection, use and adaptation. The latter law will assume
1 2

Ibid, passim. Ibid, 14. Emphasis in original. 3 Ibid, passim, 20 [citations], 19-20, 78, 93, 12, 116, 117, 122, 138, 142, 164, 170, 318. 4 Ibid, 156, 159, 163, 200. Given limited resources, selection, it should be stressed, is largely competition amongst organisms (interspecies, but especially intraspecies), which relative to climate plays the far larger and vastly more important role. 5 Yes, yes, even the bee is busy and efficiency is one of its virtues: certain insects [depend] in main part on its [a plants] nectar for food. I could give many facts, showing how anxious bees are to save time. Ibid, 85. The choice of words is not just a formulation lacking in precision, but fully expresses the manner and the only manner in which Darwin, as a bourgeois, sees and is capable of seeing and understanding the world. The following sections shall demonstrate this. 6 Sexual selection depends, not on a struggle for existence, but on a struggle between the males for possession of the females; the result is not death to the unsuccessful competitor, but few or no offspring. Sexual selection is, therefore, less rigorous than natural selection. Generally, the most vigorous males, those which are best fitted for their places in nature, will leave most progeny. But in many cases, victory will depend not only general vigor, but on having special weapons, confined to the male sex. A hornless stag or spurless cock would have a poor chance of leaving offspring Ibid, 81. Having said this much, Darwin later notes the (lack of) relation of sexual selection, as it calls it, to utility: The effects of sexual selection, when displayed in beauty to charm the females, can be called useful only in a rather forced sense. Ibid, 166. 7 Reversion refers to the reappearance after their absence for at least a generation of features or characteristics of an earlier ancestor in the current, living generation. For Darwins discussion, Ibid, 22-23. Stephen Jay Gould engages in an extensive discussion of this and its significance for a critical Darwinism in his Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA, 1977). By correlation of growth, Darwin meant, that the whole organization is so tied together during its [the organisms] growth and development, that when slight variations in any one part occur, and are accumulated through natural selection, other parts become modified. This is particularly true with a view to the relation between the embryo and the mature adult, for the several parts of the body which are homologous, and which, at an early embryonic period, are alike, seem liable to vary in an allied manner: we see this in the right and left sides of the body varying in the same manner; in the front and hind legs, and even in the jaws and limbs, varying together. The tendencies I do not doubt may be mastered more or less completely by natural selection Ibid, 124.

qualitatively greater significance in our discussion of non-Malthusian, non-Darwinian and non-Mendelian determinants of life (Part V, below). The third feature of the conception of natural selection concerns the way in which it is related to the other, alternative traditional biological theorization of the basic determination of species constitution (namely, inheritance of acquired characteristics), which in Darwin and his followers, we add, amounts to a position on the fundamental determination of life itself. Contrary to the consensus that emerged following the discovery of Mendels work (circa 1900), and the rigid interpretation of adaptation that characterized the unification of these two lines of analysis and investigation (which will become apparent in Part III of this Study), Darwins and Mendels, Darwin did, in fact, accept a form of the hereditary transmission of acquired characteristics. Thus, he tells us, I find in the domestic duck that the bones of the wing weigh less and the bones of the leg more, in proportion to the whole skeleton, than do the same bones in the wild duck; and I presume that this change may be safely attributed to the domestic duck flying much less, and walking more, than its wild parent.1 He, further, has no doubt (and says so) that use in our domestic animals strengthens and enlarges certain parts, and disuse diminishes them; and thus such modifications are inherited, that many animals have structures which can be explained by the effects of use. This, however, does not extent to mutilations (i.e., they are not inherited), and it must be stressed that inheritance here is a question of the long continued effects of disuse in progenitors, and that, finally, much of this should itself be put down to natural selection.2 So that, for example, during thousands of successive generations each individual [Madeira] beetle which flew least, either from its wings having been even so little less perfectly developed or form indolent habit [sic], will have had the best chance of surviving from not being blown out to sea. 3 Thus, Darwin willing grants the acquisition of characteristics due to use or disuse, but not in the Lamarckian sense, not as characteristics acquired in a single lifetime and passed on hereditarily to the next generation. If we return to the summary determination of natural selection offered by Darwin and cited above, we can note a final, fundamental and decisive concept prodigious species productivity, that, referring us back to a reality of alleged competition with other species individuals (especially of the same species), implies excess population relative to available resources, thus necessitating a struggle for life tying together the various components of the theoretical explication of species constitution. This requires an extended discussion. Struggle for Life Evidence in Darwins Theorization and its Critique The conceptual terrain on which Darwin operated, earthly nature as a whole, is abstract and in a far larger way than that, human society, on which Malthus operated. The enlargement is abstract, first because the meaning and significance of nature is not unchanging and hence immediately and invariantly available but is, for us, always socially mediated; second because, like Malthus unmediated and indeterminate concept of society (as a population grouping), Darwins concept of life is entirely undifferentiated and completely homogenized. In other words, Darwin formulates his core concept on the model of the modern science of nature: Life, like matter, and organic beings, like bodies, are abstractions (the one without conceptual content, the other absent sensible content) and lack sensuous-material or real referent. In so doing, he is entirely uncritical, i.e., he never articulates the meaning of life (or of organic beings), conceptually capturing and fixing its determinants, while, to boot, in the service of mystification his reductionism is not even thorough (he does not suggest life and organic beings as well are illusory modalities of matter and bodies subject to chemical and physical analysis). Thus, in Darwin life, wholly undifferentiated with no form of it escaping total determination by its reality, has some undefined independence vis--vis matter. The conceptual terrain on which Darwin operated is abstract, third, because in generalizing Malthus population law to life as a whole he is unaware that this simple mathematical formula is a congealed expression of bourgeois prejudice. Though he is unconscious (maybe not), it does not follow and it does not mean that his manner of presentation and that presentation itself do not express a certain duplicity in this regard: The undifferentiated concept of life masks the direction of his argument (from society to nature), a direction that is only hidden by a series of mystifications. Lets pull these veils aside
1 2

Ibid, 20. Ibid, 118. Emphasis added. The whole question receives extended treatment, 117-121. See also 175, 179, where use and disuse mediately determine acquisitions that are hereditary gained or lost with a view to instinct. 3 Ibid, 119.

In the approximately 160,000 words that form the written text of The Origin of Species of the reprint of the first edition we use, the term struggle for existence appears with just as much frequency as the term struggle for life; crucially, though, the former appears in Darwins Introduction, as the heading of the chapter we are about to discuss, and during the course of the presentation in this chapter where the term is defined as such, a determination to which we shall return shortly. Because Darwin even refers to the struggle for life the title of the work as it originally appeared is The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Race in the Struggle for Life the far more frequent deployment of the term struggle for existence in later editions is a concession to the popularity, and notoriety, of the term that was more rightfully associated with the name of Herbert Spencer. The frequent use of one term in the early editions, the other later on points to a fundamental ambiguity in Darwins conception of the actual situation through which selection occurs. Return to the previously mentioned determination: I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny.1 While the position Darwin argues and the term itself suggests an intensely competitive fight for life among organic beings, or more precisely for the resources that are available to sustain life and immediately and directly signifies the projection into nature of the bellum omnium contra omnes that characterizes a historically specific form of social life under conditions of capitalist production Darwin would contradictorily enlarge the sense of his term, rendering it of course ambiguous but, far more importantly, obfuscatory. His argument consistently moves from society (and humanized nature) to nature in its geographical and geological sweep, where the former forms a model and the basis for understanding the latter. This is necessary; it is unavoidable: Nature is not essentially, ubiquitously or predominantly an arena of combat between genera, species and, most importantly for Darwin, species individuals, even if society, that is capitalist society, is.2 The expansive definition recognizes this: It tacitly acknowledges the importance of the dependence of one being on another (which in his argument and descriptions weigh far more heavily that competitive struggle), hence its paramount importance: As his primary example illustrates,3 it is the interrelatedness and reciprocal dependency as they actually constitute natural relations among various organisms (as they, in turn, co-exist in interconnected ecological niches, within milieux and across regions) that is determinate for organic beings. If hereditary and selection are the mechanisms by which species come into being and pass away (and they are only in highly
1 2

The Origin of Species, 61 (chapter III). Thus, in speaking about the geological succession of organic beings reconstructed from fossils found in sedimentary deposits, Darwin states when by sudden immigration or by unusually rapid development, many species of a new group have taken possession of a new area, they will have exterminated in a correspondingly rapid manner many of the old inhabitants (Ibid, 258) If not his model, then the congruency between it and he European settler colonial populations engaged in genocides of native peoples in the Americas would have, for him, confirmed his views. 3 We shall cite at length: In Straffordshire, on the estate of a relation several hundred acres had been enclosed twenty-five years previously and planted with Scotch fir six insectivorous birds were very common in the plantations the effect of the introduction of a single tree [has been potent], nothing whatever else having been done, with the exception that the land had been enclosed, so that the cattle could not enter. But how important an element enclosure is, I plainly saw near Farnham, in Surrey. Here there are extensive heaths, with a few clumps of old Scotch firs on the distant hilltops; within the lat ten years large spaces have been enclosed, and self-sown firs are now springing up in multitude I went to several points of view, whence I could examine hundreds of acres of the unenclosed heath, and literally I could not see a single Scotch fir But on looking closely between the stems of the heath, I found a multitude of seedlings and little trees, which had been perpetually browsed down by the cattle. Here we see that cattle absolutely determine the existence of the Scotch fir; but in several parts of the world insects determine the existence of cattle [In] Paraguay neither cattle nor horse nor dogs have ever run wild, though they swarm southward and northward in a feral state; and [it has been] show that this is caused by the greater number in Paraguay of a certain fly, which lays its eggs in the navels of these animals when first born. The increase of these flies, numerous as they are, must be habitually checked by some means, probably by birds. Hence if certain insectivorous birds (whose numbers are probably regulated by hawks or beasts of prey) were to increase in Paraguay, the flies would decrease then cattle and horse would become feral, and this would certainly greatly alter the vegetation: this again would largely affect the insects; and this, as we just have seen in Staffordshire, the insectivorous birds, and so onwards in ever-increasing circles of complexity. We began this series by insectivorous birds, and we have ended with them. Not that in nature the relations can ever be as simple as this Ibid, 6769. Thus, in the long run the forces are so nicely balance, that the face of nature remains uniform for long periods of time, and, accordingly, it may well be that over this long period of time the merest trifle (Ibid, 69) might be hereditary transmitted, in Mendelian terms, by way of genetic mutation, but this is not driven by an abstraction, the population law, as it has been extracted as a model governing a specific social and historical configuration of social relations and then applied to nature.

restricted way as we shall demonstrate below), it is not in any significant sense on the basis of a competitive struggle for existence that this occurs. Here, then, the metaphorical employment of the term struggle for existence (or life as the case may be) is a mystification, an illicit, obscene inversion of the practical sense of, if not cooperation (to be sure, an equivalent mystification) then, ecological integration and mutual dependency by subsuming both under the concept of competition, whose central sense is humanly natural and historical, referring to antagonism, aggression and belligerency as they form in the life practices of the bourgeoisie and, as capitalism comes to hold sway, as competition is generalized across society (and thus appears more and more to characterize behavior among all social strata).1 The struggle for life is not, however, causi sui. It is founded elsewhere: It inevitably follows from the high geometrical ratio which is common to all organic beings more individuals are born that can possible survive;2 stated similarly yet differently, it inevitably follows from the high ratio at which organic beings tend to increase as more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life.3 This is, of course, Malthus or, as Darwin himself says, Malthus applied with tenfold force to nature in its entirety.4 The evidence that Darwin brings to bear on this determination confirms our (not his) forgoing analysis, while revealing the entirely bourgeois methodology operative in that, his analysis.5 The evidence is of three kinds: (a) calculations of the geometric rate of increase; (b) various animals in a state of nature so-called, i.e., our domestic animals of many kinds which have run wild in several parts of the world,6 citing cattle and horses in South America and Australia; and (c) experiments, assumed to reproduce events in nature A Digression Now each form of evidence for the population law in the determination of the struggle for life is characterized by abstractness. We might digress here to describe how a type of thinking one which has emerged only in commodity producing societies in which the abstraction of exchange value from use occurs on the basis of market transactions, one which receives its most extreme development in societies of capital, that is, societies in which labor is abstracted

This is not the only time Darwins primary example demonstrates precisely the opposite of what he intends (suggesting that, on Darwins assumptions, the theorization tends to be non-falsifiable, i.e., all evidence can be conceptually integrated without effecting the structure of the theory): In discussing the Chalk of Europe (i.e., sedimentary formations that form the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary, circa 66 million years ago, visible in, e.g., seaside cliffs not just in Europe but around the world), Darwin states, This great fact of the parallel succession of the forms of life throughout the world, is explicable on the theory of natural selection (Ibid, 261, the entire argument appears from 259-262), meaning, among other things, that the succession of species as witnessed by the geological record is a slow development that occurs over millions of years. In point of fact, the K-T boundary marks one of the five great mass species extinctions in the Phanerozoic, that is, the last 600 million years, and this particular extinction occurred quickly, in geological time in an instant (over several months). See Peter Ward, Under a Green Sky, 10-11, 31-33. On one side of the boundary species disappeared en masse, and on the other side new species emerged rather rapidly too (i.e., not over million of years). Niels Eldridge's and Steve Goulds theory of punctuated equilibrium is, in a highly modified Darwinian framework, intended to meet this problem. See The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 745-922. 2 Ibid, 368 3 Ibid, 61-62. Between the ellipses the passage reads: Every being, which during its natural lifetime produces several eggs or seeds, must suffer destruction during some period of its life, and during some season or occasional year, otherwise, on the principle of geometrical increase, its numbers would quickly become so inordinately great that no country could support the product. 4 On the Variations of Organic Beings in a State of Nature; on the Natural Means of Selection on the Comparison of Domestic Races and True Species in Barrett (ed.), The Collected Papers of Charles Darwin, Part 2, 4-5. This was an unpublished paper dating from 1844 and presented before the Linnean Society in conjunction with a similar paper drafted by Alfred Russell Wallace. (On 18 June 1857, Darwin received a letter from Wallace who, while suffering from malaria, was in New Guinea. The letter detailed the synthesis of dizzily, feverishly one might say, accumulating insights in which he, starting from Malthus population law, too had arrived at natural selection. Well appraised of Darwins years of meticulous and laborious investigation and seeking to insure recognition of such, Hooker and Lyell resolved the situation by way of the joint presentation of research summaries that took place early the following year.) 5 See the Introduction, Elements of the Conceptual Structure of Science, above. 6 The Origin of Species, 62. Emphasis added.

in production1 penetrates and shapes the methods, epistemology and the entire outlook of the form of knowledge (science) characteristic of modern capitalist society. Abstractness is constituted methodologically in the movement from a pre-given, sensible whole, an apperceived totality of perceptual phenomena to an isolated aspect (or aspects) of this totality which, decontextualized and deemed fact(s), is (are) characterized as essential determination(s). The relations, mere correlations, between these facts are declared laws governing the phenomena, the totality is aggregately reconstructed, its wealth lost, its manifold determinations ignored, the given fact is fixed and frozen, expressing correlations obtaining among facts abstract laws (and not genesis and formation) organize and structure events, processes and relations. In science, i.e., bourgeois theory, this is done for purposes of the prediction, that is, control of nature. It is this form of thinking, call it what you will (obfuscation and self-mystification), that is abstract, in which that which is presumed isolated and elemental is held to be primary. To be sure, genuine thought always begins by splitting the whole, by isolating an aspect, but it does so only to return to the whole (totality) by way of a movement back and forth from moment (aspect, part) to that whole in which those manifold relations, the interrelatedness of the phenomena, are explicated, their connection to each other and the whole they form are made explicit. This, a practice of concretion, is the method of thought. We call such thought dialectical. Distinctively counterposed to abstract thought (what Hegel called the Understanding, itself a reification of cognitive activity) dialectical thought, then, constitutes itself in the effort to grasp and explicate the contours of actual movement, to catch, fix, and theoretically reproduce and anticipate the structures (natural phenomena, humanized natural relations, social relations, institutions, social formations, etc) that at once emerge from and shape the daily activity of human beings. In this respect, dialectical logic is constituted as an ideal formalization of the relations among the abiding structures that recur in this movement. Thus, in dialectical logic it is recognized that ideally, for thought, form can be abstracted from content. But it also recognizes that in the practice of daily life form and content are inseparable because they penetrate and mutually determine one another. (Similarly, dialectical thinking recognized the necessity of rejoining form and content when ideal analysis returns to real, practical situations.) New forms can emerge from changes in content, and form can undoubtedly but only with great violence to content be imposed on it, thereby effectively expressing the hegemony of abstraction. Transformation of forms necessary implies prior changes in content, and changes in content will sooner or later necessitate novel forms. In daily life, form cannot be mechanically counterposed to content. If the substance of daily life undergoes change, the forms of expression of that life cannot maintain their original character without change or alteration. Darwins efforts to formulate laws, say of variations, were clearly pursued with a view to the modern science of nature as model. His thinking is abstract in the precise sense specified here Struggle for Life Evidence in Darwins Theorization and its Critique, Rejoined The calculation is paradigmatically abstract: It does not rise from the phenomena, from the relations between species or species individuals (or between species and milieu, physical conditions), but is externally imposed. Accordingly, it can only be justified by fiat, in the logical sense by postulation, so that Darwin tells us that, all organic beings are exposed to severe competition, a struggle for existence inevitably follows from the high ratio at which organic beings tend to increase, every single organic being [strives] to the utmost to increase in numbers,2 etc., or by mystification (allegory, metaphor, whatever). Here Darwin has deduced real events (conceptualized as a struggle for existence) from the concept (a high ratio) which allegedly rises from, theoretically fixing and explaining, those events: Isolated as a mere aspect from real relational context and content, nature in its diverse and manifold relations, processes and events, the law expressed mathematically by the calculation is presented, i.e., posited, as
1

Abstraction is a real, necessary and essential feature of production constituting capitalism as capitalism (real domination): In the actual work processes, labor is abstracted, i.e., the concrete labor of a worker engaged in producing a useful object is transformed, it is reduced (i.e., abstracted), that is, it is generalized, quantified and as such it is measured in units of quantitative time, as labor time objectified and materialized in its similarly abstracted issue (once the useful production, now a commodity to be sold and bought, its value determined without regard to any concrete, i.e., sensible and useful, qualities by its monetarily expressed price, just like the once concrete labor). You say you dont believe in miracles? The exploitation of concrete living labor accomplished in capitalist production processes every day constitutes a transubstantiation the transformation of specifically human affections, sensibilities, corporality, experience and reflection into value (capital) at least as mysterious to bourgeois thought as the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. 2 Ibid, 60, 61, 64, 368.

real, abstractly determining those relations, processes and events... In a later discussion, we shall discuss a complex of non-Malthusian, non-Darwinian and non-Mendelian determinants of species life as they rise from relations and processes in nature. Because Darwin contradictorily operates with an undifferentiated, and vacuous concept of life, he can straightforwardly offer as a second form of evidence domesticated animals that, he asserts, are no different from their feral counterparts (abstractly they arent), and he can argue (that is, assume) they can essentially be found in a state of nature. The issue here concerns that difference between humanized nature and an earlier nature, a nature before the evolutionary appearance of humanity. There is an epistemological problem here, in this very formulation (we have addressed it elsewhere),1 but then Darwin is blissfully unaware of it which all over again situates him squarely in the traditions of science, of its metaphysical realism and its atomism That difference is this: Nature on Darwins own analysis is formed by complex and multifaceted, changing but tightly knit and well integrated relations and processes between and amongst organic beings that involve predation, mutual dependency and, contrary to Darwin, adequate or sufficient resources. The human introduction of a new or different species into a niche, local ecology or region disrupts those relations and processes This is not to say that man is not somehow part of nature, not in nature, not himself humanly natural, and it does not mean that humanized nature is not as aspect, today decisively so, of new natures as they incessantly appearing in geological time Instead, this disruption creates conditions that are otherwise rare (infrequently a cascade of extinctions, a loss of biological diversity in the short run, epidemics) and that require time, historical if not always geological time, to form and re-establish an ecological equilibrium, a new but balanced fauna and flora, literally a new nature. In citing (the interjection of) domestic species in(to) milieux where they had not previously existed, Darwin fastens onto conditions such as inadequacy of food supplies and famine that can frequently arise but only during a period of disruption, and he does this by isolating or abstracting that period of disruption a product of human interaction in nature and with nature and the temporal framework in which this has occurred from the total evolutionary context and proclaims them characteristic of the entire evolutionary development of life as it has occurred over tens of thousands of millennia. Thus, he is able to arrive at Malthus population law. The third form of evidence Darwin presents is experimental. He clears a plot of ground of such and such dimensions, making sure they cant be choked off by other plants and sows seedlings of various species in rows. Most are killed by slugs and insects that dine on them, but amongst those that mature only nine of twenty survive as the other eleven perish for lack of vigor.2 This experiment is an early form (early in the history of the evolutionary life sciences) of the laboratory recreation so-called of natural conditions. It conjures entirely artificial conditions (i.e., conditions that do not appear in nature, e.g., one of the authors favorites appears in animal physiology, the use of decerebrate cats), and it generates a specious argument about plants that grown together en masse forcing others to the ground. Two points should be noted in this regard. First, it is ecological disruption that by and large creates conditions in which unbalanced, here excessive, forms occupy a niche that wont support them. Second, plants cultivators that are created through human activity are entirely dependent on human cultivation and propagation, i.e., on another, lately appearing form of life in nature and do not appear without it, without its propagation and cultivation. No conclusions can be drawn from this regarding life on earthly nature, especially with respect to the sustainability of species life, as it has developed over eons of geological time. To this point the evidence Darwin offers, because it is illicit, reaffirms the population law. Is there are any other evidence? Yes. Darwin discusses predation as an alternative to (insufficient) food resources as it determines the average numbers of a species. In his first turn to nature itself, i.e., conceptually un-abstracted, non-experimental relations that involves non-domesticated life (here mammals and birds), he states, there seems to be little doubt that the stock of partridges, grouse, and hares on any large estate depends chiefly on the destruction of vermin. If not one head of game were shot during the next twenty years in England, and, at the same time, if no vermin were destroyed, there would, in all probability, be less game than at present, although hundreds of thousands of game animals are
1

See the introductory remarks to Climate Change in our Nature, Capital, Communism, where the problem is concisely formulated, directly confronted and resolution is offered. (Briefly, the epistemological issue is that the assumption of an earlier nature prior to man is independent of any and all possible observational frameworks, that is, of the experience and directly evidential knowledge of all possible subjects or human beings. The problem goes far beyond this, but for our purposes here it is enough to state it epistemologically to exhibit the flawed evidence Darwin brings to bear on his problem.) 2 The Origin of Species, 65.

now annually killed1 Remove the ideational veil, and what do we discover? Contrary to his intent, what is revealed is a natural balance as a rejoinder to the geometrically increase projected as the decisive real natural process, that denies, negating, the population law.2 But instead of relations inhering in nature, Darwin is compelled it is the logic of his argument, the manner of thinking and, for him, likely conceptually coherent, fully consistent to think of predation, climate (i.e., seasons of extreme cold or drought), epidemics and predation again,3 to think fully natural relations as checks that come into play as if, having started from a gross abstraction (the population law parading as a real relation and existential determinant), the account of those real relations and existential determinants is somehow external, and thus must come into play4 in the course of natural life. In the critical sense unconvincing, the argument cannot end here since it is constructed by and large without reference to real natural relations (or, as such, they appear only as externally imposed, as checks); it is, in other words, conducted metaphorically, i.e., with reference to competition, to the economy of nature, to the great battle of life, to advantage over competitors, beaten in the great race for life,5 that is, it is conducted on the terrain of bourgeois society and in the language of bourgeois thought. But whatever else Darwin says, tacitly he grasps the inadequacy of the argument, even if he doesnt explicitly recognize it is not a question of advantage (but a lack of ecological niche integration, a question of a structure of relations formed during temporary disruption that is fastened onto and conceptually fixed as characterizing the history of life on Earth as such). Thus, he expressly invokes imagination, asks us to imagine, in order to convince us6 (well, yes, starting from the population law, one can imagine, one can convince oneself of what is primarily, namely,) of the importance that we keep steadily in mind [the better to cast that ideational veil] that each organic being is striving to increase at a geometrical ratio.7 [Yep, there can be no doubt, the law of population geometrically formulated inheres in relations among all organic beings.] He concludes the discussion with a sentimental yet genuinely bourgeois pageant to life in its struggle with, for and against itself: the war of nature is not incessant no fear is felt death is generally prompt, and the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.8 Perhaps, but likely not We at any rate must give more serious consideration to the question than a celebration of bourgeois asociality: If the evidence does not support the population law, while the latter is nonetheless the foundations of Darwins evolutionary construction, what is the actual ground on which Darwins theorization rests? Darwin and Malthus Darwin differed from Malthus in at least three significant ways. First, Malthus demonstration of his population law is deductive, while Darwins argument is cumulative. Second, and correlatively, Malthus evidence is anecdotal and lacks internal coherence, Darwins, though illicit, is systematic and coherent. Third, Malthus guarantees the rationality of his deduction(s) by invoking the veracity of God, more precisely, the power, goodness, and foreknowledge of the Deity (chapter 18), while Darwin reconstructs the population law without the guarantor relying only on the force and weight of the (flawed) evidence he presents, the coherency of his argument (and, relative to these, the assumptions effectively asserted by fiat and underlying the argument).
Ibid. It wont do to say that every species must be checked by destruction at some period of life or the consequences of the geometrical tendency to increase (Ibid, 63) descend with full forcefulness, because the destruction so-called, here predation, is ongoing, a regular feature of the existence of the prey, a condition it constantly and continuously liable to, not an event that happens at some period of life. We are not engaged in hairsplitting, logic chopping, a mere mincing of words. Darwins position is a necessary outcome of the utterly abstract manner in which he poses the problem. 3 Ibid, 65, 66, 67, 276. 4 Ibid, 70 and passim. 5 Ibid, 72, 73, 253. 6 Ibid, 73. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. The pageant is repeated, more elaborately, at the very close of the work: Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, have been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, are being, evolved. Ibid, 384.
1

Yet in all this, Malthus presence is almost tangible; in Darwins words, his is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms1 Malthus' reflection concerned society: Conceived as a law of nature, his population law determines the possibilities (nil) of a free, undivided society incorporating material abundance as one of its premises; in other words, Malthus concerned himself with specifically human society. Because Darwin operated with an undifferentiated concept of life, human existence in its social and historical modalities is not distinct from life generally. He simply took it for granted that it is entirely licit to apply Malthus doctrine with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms. But in Darwins case, it is 1859, not 1798 (the date of publication of Malthus Essay). That is, even as they appear over and again in the capitalist periphery toward the end of the long nineteenth and into the short twentieth century (in the Bombay hinterland of those Indian regions under British colonial administration, in Shaanxi province in northern China and elsewhere),2 in the core capitalist countries of the West (England, France and Belgium), the era of famines rooted in a dependency on the vagaries of nature, on seasonal fluctuations in agriculture, on crops and harvests had come to an end no later than 1843. One can, as we did, infer this from the prodigious development of productive capacity in the United States after 1843, for as we describe immediately below (The Panic of 1837), the transAtlantic economy had already long ago inseparably tied capitalist development in Britain and western Europe to that in the United States, and less immediately to Prussia, as well as more isolated centers of development in East and South Asia. Given the mutual penetration of the economies of western Europe and the United States, growth in the latter would not have been possible without similar expansion in England and on the continent.3 But It was clear that here capitalism had generated a modicum of a surplus. Why didnt Darwin see this? The signs of it abounded, especially in the milieux in which Darwin moved (the environs of London, one of three centers of the capitalist universe), and the information and accounts of developments he had access to (i.e., bourgeois newspapers recording new, ongoing technologically-based advances in production, transportation and communication): In 1845, rail lines existed largely in Britain, France, Belgium and eastern and western (today Midwestern) United States; by 1855, five continents had developed at least one major rail line, having quadrupled in extent, in the United States alone, rails which in 1828 had cover three miles (4.8 kilometers) had by 1859 cover 21,750 miles (35,050 kilometers).4 In the same period, tonnage of steamships (as a measure of their presence both on inland waterways and the high seas) increased by a factor of eighteen (18 times).5 And everywhere railroads went, electric telegraph lines were set up in parallel and alongside. What was the significance of all this? The historical moment of the simultaneous widespread adoption of the railroad, the telegraph, and the ocean-going steamship" constituted "the really critical ... [period] in American economic history" before the Civil War. After 1846, these methods became, "almost overnight, standard vehicles of transportation and communication."6 The same could be said about Britain and the developed areas of Europe (Belgium, France, Switzerland and the west bank of the Rhine). The generalization of these forms of transportation, distribution and communication rendered the markets for capitalist production commensurate with development of productive forces that had been ongoing since the end of the Napoleonic wars on the continent,7 and thereby, crucially, overcame the localized nature of the market,8 integrating
1
2

Ibid, 62. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, Parts I and II, and their summation, 205-209. 3 Ibid, chapter 2, Parts I, II; similarly, albeit with less elaboration, Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 30. 4 Worldwide, in 1856 railways covered 68,150 kilometers. Ibid, 310, Table 2.2. For the U.S. figures, Civil War and Revolution in America, chapter 2, the section entitled, Population Movements, Technological Change, Class Recomposition and Sectional Alliance. 5 Tonnage rose from 32,000 in 1831 to 576,000 in 1856. Hobsbawm, Ibid. 6 Alfred Chandler, Jr., "The Organization of Manufacturing and Transportation," 137-138; and his The Visible Hand, 188-189. 7 Hobsbawm, Ibid, 33. 8 In Russia and elsewhere, it was not uncommon for people to die of starvation in one area while only a few hundred miles away grain rotted in the fields for want of a market. This situation was best expressed quantitatively in the price of grain: The average price of rye in Moscow and St. Petersburg for the years 1797-1803 [note the dates with an eye to the first two editions of Malthus Essay] was almost three ties as high as in Kiev. Cameron, France and the Economic Development of Europe, 12. We would only add that between 1837 and 1873, a world price, particularly in grain agricultural products (wheat, rye, barley) as well as corn, formed. Now the capitalist market and its generalization brought an end to the era of famines only on the prior, historically necessary condition of material inequality based on fixed social or class positions in production. If this market is a mystified social relation that in its immediacy appears as an equitable exchange between buyer and seller (it is), in the entire epoch of divided societies stretching back 10,000 years, famine

every geographical space and place regularly touched by capitalist commerce into the rhythms and tempos of capitalist development. It was on this basis, that the era of famines came to a close. Why didnt Darwin see this? If not in 1848 or 1849 five or six years following the expansion that was well under way by 1844, then in 1850 or in particular following up the suppression of the revolutions of 1848 and the sharp upturn in capitalist development after 1851, in 1854, 1855 or 1856? Marx and Engels saw and then explicitly honed in on the issue in 18481 So what about Darwin? He was an extraordinary acute observer (witness the descriptions in his account of the Beagle voyage, his Origin, Notebooks and his letters). He was a systematic thinker who even added an entire chapter in which he gave detailed considered objections to his theory, 2 everyone but one or so it appears. This was not an issue of cognitive capacity or insight. It was a class issue, an issue of the fundamental, underlying and precognitive assumptions that organized the experience of society and society in nature as such. Had Darwin grasped that the population law was a projection on to nature of conditions that did not in all cases obtain in human society (humanity itself being part of nature), a projection of historically transient conditions, then he would have been compelled to admit there was a part of nature in which the population law was not valid. Had he recognized this, then he would have been further forced to question whether it was valid with regard to the rest of nature, that is, living nature. And, if this, then his entire construction would have been jeopardized. Darwin didnt recognize this because he couldnt. To do so would have required him to see beyond commodity production and market exchange including the exchange of labor and to see them as specific historical forms of the organizations of human existence, beyond the organization of manufacturing around the poles of capital and abstract labor, beyond the conditions of his life whose status as a leisured gentleman depended upon that organization of social life, beyond bourgeois society, and to see through the claim that modern science was a universal form of knowledge. To see beyond each of these would have been to adopt a standpoint that was utterly alien, and mostly likely unintelligible, to him, to forgo the claims of science, to acknowledge that there was something like a bourgeois standpoint in the first place and then that it was not universal, that this society might well be historically transient and its science as its highest cultural achievement might well be also. Darwin could not, for none of this even seeped into consciousness. Such is the meaning of bourgeois prejudice Prosaic Foundations of Darwins Theorization in the Life Practices of the Culture of Class Malthusianism had been born in the reaction against the French Revolution, to the scarcity and hunger driven utopian strivings of masses of men and women, against the hope that the future might offer the prospects of overcoming the scarcity and the fixed place in society accorded the lowliest, now largely synonymous with a waged, propertyless class. But Malthus vision hadnt been solely backward looking: Following (Adam) Smith, he believed societal problems could be ameliorated by greater competition in production (mostly as it effects the price of labor), and by free trade in exchange. And now, thirty three years later, a great reform movement had sprung against the old Corruption, the whole system of rotten boroughs and virtual representation on the basis of which a tiny stratum of politically dominant great commercial and landowning aristocrats, Tories to a man, continued to hegemonize Parliament. (If Cambridge University, where fanatic Tories such as the Anglican clerical administration, the dons and few else voted, was represented by and elected two members of Parliament, the town of Cambridge had no representation.) But in those last thirty years capitalism developed a very, very large foothold in Britain, and the industrial bourgeoisie, which had more than less made its peace with reaction and counterrevolution, was beginning
has always been a socially mediated facticity, never a natural given. The market guarantees nothing, and in many cases secures the possibility of a truly horrendous outcome: In Mysore (India) in 1877-1878, brought on by crop failure, famine and starvation was the outcome of big farmers and merchants who kept grain of which there was plenty off the market, hoarding it, together with the leading British imperialist voices (Robert Arthur Gascoyne-Cecil, Lord Salisbury; Owen Meredith, Edward Robert Lord Lytton; Sir Richard Temple; Sir George Couper; et.al) who sat by not just letting the deaths happen but who rationalized the situation with social Darwinian pronouncements. In the end perhaps 1220 million (no one really knows) Indian peasants died of starvation. See Mike Davis, Ibid, 21-59. 1 The Communist Manifesto, especially the section I entitled Bourgeois and Proletarians. 2 See The Origins of Species (chapter 6), where he groups those objections into four general categories of questions If one species has descended from another by way of gradually accumulated, naturally selected advantageous traits, why are there no transitional forms, say in the fossil record? Is it possible that one species could have descended from other with entirely different structure and habits? Can instincts be transmitted and changed or transformed through natural selection? How does one account for crossed species producing sterile offspring, while the crossed varieties are fertile? which once examined reveal that Darwin considers the foundations of his theorization so secure as to be unchallengeable. Ibid, 145-146. He further considers objections to selection embracing instincts and its modifications separately, in chapter 7 (see his summation, 197-200), as well as hybridism in chapter 8 (see the summation, 224-225).

to lift its tail, not its head for it was a popular movement of artisans, working men and poor laborers who first raised the banner of reform during the crisis of 1831-1832, the middle classes followed. The Reform Act (1832), enlarging enfranchisement, also followed. But the crisis had not run its course: Working class agitation for universal male suffrage, which found organizational expression in an upsurge of political unions so styled, continued well in 1834,1 and sprang up anew in the late thirties. At that moment, a range of middle class reformists attempted to seize control of the mass movement known to history as Chartism, and the most coherent among them were illuminated by a vision of free movement of men and capital including freedom from the poor laws for the masses in the streets, and of course a freely elected Parliament. In this respect, Malthus thought was fully congruent with that of the reformers: Call the perspective of these groups that based themselves on industrial capitalism Whig Malthusianism When he returned from the five years (1831-1836) he spent aboard the Beagle, Darwin stayed in the London apartment of his brother, Erasmus Alvery known to his friends as Eras. (He got his own room and lodgings down the street from his brother in March 1837.) From here, Darwin was close to the structures housing the major scientific societies and institutions, the Zoological Society, the Geological Society, the Linnean Museum and the British Museum, all of which he often frequented. He found intellectual succor in literary dinners and evening discussions with his brother, together with an old family friend, a young man named Hensleigh Wedgwood, cousin to the Darwin brothers, a philologist who was seeking to understand language in terms of lawful development and in this sense historically (but not in the dialectical sense, the upsurge of novelty, the incessant creation of new forms out of changing content). Hensleigh and the Darwins were often joined by Harriet Martineau, a political novelist of sorts, that is, a first rate propagandist offering popularized explanations of Whig legislated reforms to the Poor Laws 2 Looking much like a couple, Eras and Harriet had been having an affair And, yes, it was the very same Poor Laws that Malthus had polemicized against, and in no mere ironic coincidence, Martineau had met the old man earlier in the decade shortly before his death at which time he passed the baton to her: Martineau was a fiery Malthusian, fiercely so, and what Charles was imbibing was a Whig Malthusianism together with a lawful developmental model, nicely complimenting, reinforcing and deepening the geology of the long dure assimilated from Lyell, for understanding that nature he had seen, walked in, collected copious samples of and make notes about during the Beagle voyage. This was heady stuff. Martineau, in fact, was a radical and a freethinker, calling for the enfranchisement of workers and a firm believer in womens rights (marital equality, property ownership). Desiring nothing so much as tranquility and respectability,3 and personally attuned to the conservatism of his family, his father and that of the Wedgwoods, Charles would begin to move away from this crowd and marry conventionally shortly thereafter (i.e., would refuse subordination to the Martineau doctrine), but not Malthusianism. It was in the air every bit as much as evolution He would soon (March 1938) get around to reading the Essay on Population4 for it, Malthusianism, was originally an intellectual effort to grapple with the situation on the ground, to grab control of the reform movement in order to liberate society from its shackles,5 the perspective on the world of the manufacturers, mill owners, iron makers, in other words, leading elements of the industrial bourgeoisie, but even the shopkeepers, all who wanted done with the old order.6 But simultaneously it more, far more, than this...
1 2

E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 807-808. Desmond and Moore, Ibid, 198, 216 (Hensleigh and the dinners), 153 (Harriett Martineau). 3 E.g., Ibid, 203. 4 The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 120. In the air? Beginning from the 1832 reforms, this Whig restructuring was an assertion of middle-class Malthusian values. [Upon his return] Darwin found that Malthus had acquired a new meaning. His name was on everybodys lips, as either Satan or Savior. His doctrine of population, progress, and pauperism was no longer academic. It was the every kernel of poor-law policy: the stuff of inflammatory rhetoric [witness Martineau], popular defiance, and government propaganda. Desmond and Moore, Ibid, 197. 5 The shackles included old aristocratic and gentlemanly, Tory-Anglican control over the organizations of science. Desmond and Moore, Ibid, 199. Darwins family, it might be noted, was Whiggish and Unitarian, though the latter hardly ran to dissent (and among the dissenters Martineau had to be counted), a tendency that in the case of Darwins father, Josiah, was thoroughly detested. 6 In point of fact, the relation to Malthus was personal: Malthus daughter (Emily) was a bridesmaid at Hensleighs marriage to Emily Mackintosh whose father, Sir James, had been a close friend to Malthus himself, both having lectured at the East India College. Ibid, 201. In this context, it should not be forgotten that Darwin married Hensleighs sister, Emma, completing the circle of relations, at it were, between Darwins and Wedgwood in this generation. What stood between the two families was religion: The Wedge woods were Anglican.

The Panic of 1837 To get a real, visceral sense of the relation to Malthusianism to the industrial bourgeoisie and its political expression in Whiggery and from here Darwins relation to it, we must look to the objective context, the economy, in which the order of society was constituted, in which the wealth, status and power of the industrialists was won. What was really significant in this regard was collapse of a boom based on cotton production... Beginning from capitalist finance, the Panic of 1837 was inextricably bound up with the transAtlantic trade in cotton... cotton, it might be recalled, was at the center of production, exchange and trade in a nascent world capitalist economy1... and atop there was the question of speculation on the trade by English investors. (Cotton production, of course, was not the only activity undergoing dramatic expansion, its reified movement as price not the only abstraction that was dramatically rising. In the United States, driven by the frenzied activity of speculators the massive increases in land sales and their thingly objectification in the mounting "price" per acre of land sold west of the Appalachians, also played a major role in creating inflationary pressures in the Jacksonian economy.) In fact, a real boom in cotton (and land) had been underway since the early 1830s.2 England, the United States' primary creditor in transAtlantic trade, had itself undergone rapid banking expansion in the thirties. In 1836 alone, forty-two new banks of issues were established with branches that brought the total to two hundred new institutions. Much of this was spurred by speculative activity, a boom in business ventures that saw over 70 companies of every sort form during a three month period in the same year in Liverpool and Manchester alone. Banks provided the credit, albeit short-term, to pursue these ventures. The total number of banks in that year came to a full six hundred seventy. 3 Easy money fueled inflation, a rise in the prices of commonly consumed goods as well as industrial raw materials ranging from 25%-100%. This enormous expansion of demand stemming from these "country" banks and, most importantly for the speculatively fed course of events, from investment houses tied to the American trade, stripped the Bank of England of much of its gold reserves. In response to this depletion of reserves (and likely with a view to the alarming price increasing), James Pattison, the Bank's director, raised the Bank's discount rate in June 1836 (to 4%) and again in August (to 5%) to counteract the continuing drain on those reserves.4 As it began to dawn on the Bank's directors that the British money market was concentrated squarely in transAtlantic trade with the United States, word of the Specie Circular directive reached Pattison. 5 He was alarmed. Now the Bank of England was effectively a central bank in the modern sense: All the power that normally accrues to a centralized banker was available to Pattison. He leaned on British import houses whose activities were centered on American trade: He did so by instructing the Bank's Liverpool agent to refuse the notes of specific investment houses whose trade was predominately American based. By October, bankruptcies among mercantile houses and trades in the American East began to appear. Still the price of cotton, brought to market in October (following a late August-early September harvest), held up. Then, in the late winter British manufacturers' demand for cotton slackened and its price fell. As a result, in early March 1837, an important New Orleans firm, Herman Briggs and Co., failing to meet its obligations incurred in cotton purchases, went belly up. (Already in December 1836, a large Manchester bank, the Northern and Central, had
1

After 1832, prices for cotton had begun to climb. Thus, in 1833, a pound of cotton fetched 12.32, in 1834 12.90, in 1835 17.45, in 1836 16.50, and in 1837 13.25. And, of course, at the same time the demand, primarily English, for southern, slave labor-produced cotton continued to grow. Douglass North, The Economic Development of the United States, Table A-VII, 232. Volume for the same years as measured in bales of cotton was 559,210; 641,435; 760,923; 788,013; and, 916,960. Ibid. 2 The movement of cotton prices in the middle decades of the thirties put additional money in the pockets of those involved in cotton exchange, especially in the forms of commissions on profits (importers, exporters, brokers, bankers) and advances on cotton sales (planters engaged in or aspiring to luxury consumption), but also merchant retailers in Northern cities in the United States where planters often summered. Reflected in the figures for American imports, large parts of those growing incomes went into the purchase of British finished goods. 3 H.N. Hyndman, Commercial Crises of the Nineteenth Century, 43. 4 Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America, 457; William G. Shade, Banks or no Banks, 34; Hyndman, Ibid; Jacob Riesser, The Great German Banks, 787 n. 18. 5 The Species Circular refers to one of two actions taken in the U.S. in summer 1836 that exacerbated the Panic once underway. In August, Andrew Jackson instructed his Treasury Secretary, Levi Woodbury, to issue circular enjoining federal land agents to accept only specie (gold or silver) as payment for purchase of public lands. (The first had been a legislative enactment requested and signed by Jackson, a "deposit act," that is, legislation that made mandatory return to state governments of any surpluses that might accrue to the national Treasury.)

sought relief from Pattison and the Bank of England.)1 In New York and New Orleans, the same scenario was repeated, this time by several firms. On one side of the Atlantic, demand from British manufacturers for cotton was collapsing, and the Bank of England had proscribed the trade of certain houses with, to prevent further deepening of, their already overwhelming dependency on the American trade in cotton; on the other side of the Atlantic, the Americans found themselves unable to buy, sell, borrow or pay. Business was coming to a screeching halt, and panic was setting in. By 1 April, the Panic was underway. In the United States, a national government under the new Presidency of Martin Van Buren, Jacksonian on bank matters to the bone, refused to treat in anything but metallic currency. It essentially stood by as American banks were presented with their notes, and in short time were unable to meet the suddenly overwhelming demand for specie. In May, beginning with those in New York, banks refused to honor their own notes. Suspension was soon generalized. By the end of the year, six hundred eighteen banks had failed.2 And in the United States the crisis, not merely urban and commercial, engulfed the large eastern cities and their immediate hinterlands, i.e., the East in its entirely, precisely the region of the country which had gone the furthest down the road of capitalist development, that is, integration into the transAtlantic commercial economy. Producing cotton, thus central to its exchange and integrated into its transAtlantic circuits, southern planters felt the crush immediately and responded brutally: In 1837, the price of cotton fell twenty percent and planters savagely exploited their chattels realizing an increase in production of a sixth (16.3%). Incomes nonetheless fell nearly a third. The following year, 1838, brought another large fall in the price of cotton.3 In objectivistic and reified terms, the "cause" of the downturn and contraction lay outside the American economy proper. In an advanced industry, new centers of textile production (beyond Manchester, Lyons and Lowell) appeared in Saxony, Prussia and Brussels, Belgium and taken together knit the nascent capitalist world into a global economy. These recently opened spinning mills increased world capacity, and cut into the English share of that market. Commercial houses responded with failures in Canton, Calcutta, Brussels and La Havre. A European recession began to unfold. In Britain, grain harvest, poor in 1838, failed in 1839: Wheat and other grains had to be imported. Coupled to an inordinate and massive development of British railway construction and excessive stock speculation (that included the immoderate purchase of American bonds), Bank of England gold reserves, large amounts soaked up by industrializing projects, had flown out of the country to pay for imported grains: Suspension of specie payments was again imminent.4 English manufacturers cut deeply into their purchases of American cotton. In the United States, the Bank of the United States in Philadelphia, no longer a federal depository and heavily involved in cotton exchange since the Panic of 1837, its specie reserved drawn off in this maelstrom of events, suspended specie payments in October 1839. Other American banks soon followed. Metropolises within the commercial capitalist world undergoing incipient industrialization had been subject in those industrializing centers to simultaneous crises, financial and industrial (overproduction). They dragged their hinterlands into a full-scale depression. Business failures multiplied. In the United States, a quarter of all firms in New England had already gone under. An estimated 90% of all factories closed before the beginning of 1838. The working classes of the East were ravaged; among the remaining employed, the wage structure collapsed; meager state and privately philanthropic social set nets were established; social and class conflict intensified as classic bread riots (New York City) and anti-rent riots (upstate New York) erupted, sheriffs were forcibly removed from office in Mississippi, nativism raised its ugly head in the big cities of the East. In Britain, Chartist rallies in the great industrial cities railed against the old order embodied by Tory control of the state (not just the Parliament, but the universities and their faculties, the scientific societies, etc.): The cry was for reform, for universal (male) suffrage, salaried Members and annual elections. But Chartism was countrywide, a mass movement, and on its edges the depression emboldened desperate men and women to riot especially against the reformed Poor Law, the state compulsion to work where there no work or face the poorhouse

Riesser, Ibid. Hyndman, Ibid, 46. 3 Cotton brought 10.14 per pound in 1838. Production in bales was 788,013 bales in 1836 and 916,960 in 1837. North, Ibid, Table A-VII, 232. Prices rose in 1839, but it was already too late: The Panic had given way to depression. 4 Hammond, Ibid, 502-503, Hyndman, Ibid.
2

and workhouses, which, under attack as visible symbols and embodiments of the Poor Laws, were fire-bombed, burned, not infrequently destroyed1... The depression that followed renewed (1839) panic was an early instance of a classic shake-out but one primarily in the sphere of circulation (especially among merchants and retailers), overlaid and underpinned by a crisis of overproduction of finished cotton goods centered on Britain but within the European and transAtlantic economy as a whole. The slump dragged on into 1843... Nature and Society Collapse of a speculative bubble, the financial Panic of 1837, and the subsequent depression: Accumulation in the capitalist sense was coming to a sudden halt. It was not just that a swelling army of the unemployed greatly increased the costs of poor relief, the financing of which fell on the middling groups, but the threat of revolution hung in the air. Taken together it was this, all this, that really welded the industrial layers of the bourgeoisie to Malthusianism, that, in a stunning way, clarified for this class its relation to society as a whole. Recall the Whiggish reforms (the Reform Act, 1832), or more precisely industrialists and manufacturers support for them Reform was opposed by Tories, commercial and landed capital with its aristocratic veneer; supported by the middling groups, by small manufacturers and the artisan proletariat they employed (where it existed), by large factory owners, by those tied to the new capitalist firms (factories) as supervisors of labor, as accountants, and as planners and organizers of production, by the newly emerging professions (e.g., in the sciences), by storekeepers and retailer merchants, and not merely supported, some of these people were in the streets forming the public pressure that got the bill passed. The Reform Act secured seats in the Commons for the largest of the cities that had emerged during the Industrial Revolution (i.e., in our terms, the event announcing the institution of real domination in production), and abolished seats in Parliament in the least densely populated rotten boroughs, those models of virtual representation that until the moment of passage of the Reform Act made Parliament a gentlemans club without any electoral base in English society. After the Act was legislated all of one in six adult males in a population of 14 million were enfranchised. (Workers, of course, were not.) It was the circles and institutions created by these strata, themselves attached to large industrial capitals that were consolidating their existence in part through the Reform Act (and other legislation) itself, in which Charles Darwin moved Darwin would theorize, formulate and then in his publication of The Origin, articulate a world vision in the grand sense of an encompassing perspective on man, his place in the world and the universe fully commensurate with, illuminating and going beyond, the relation of Malthusianism to the life practices of this emerging class of industrial capitalists. But here and now in 1838-1839, only the lineaments of this vision appeared End the relief. Get the poor off the dole. This was de rigueur: It creates an reservoir of free waged labor and forces the price of labor down competition and, to boot, it lowers taxes on the manufacturer and industrialist (both by eliminating the taxation on incomes to support the system of relief and by lower taxes relative to increased income). It helped the laboring poor, paupers, themselves. Made them self-reliant. This was Malthus. And if this was not enough, if they simply do not fall by the wayside and disappear (i.e., starve, die), get rid of them, somehow ship them abroad if need be. This was still Malthus. (In the last, sixth, edition of the Essay published by during his lifetime, Malthus sanctioned emigration.)2 Still Malthus did not quite grasp (at least in 1798, actually in 1834 he still hadnt) the dynamics of capitalist development, of growth by way of contraction, depression and shake-out, the creative destruction of existing values (deflationary devalorization) because this wreckage itself formed the premise of a renewal of the system of capitalist social relations, the basis for recommencing the production of commodities on an expanded or an enlarged basis. Instead he, Malthus, was focused on those geometrical ramifications of population growth relative to arithmetically growing resources (food supplies). But what held in nature, held in society. In both, we would find the Malthusian rush for life.3 There were checks in nature: Predation, starvation (inadequate resources), natural disasters; similar checks could, if one wished to state it, be found in society: predation, starvation, industrial disasters (e.g., collapsed mineshafts, factory fires). More importantly, population pressure pushed aside the weaker individuals within a species It did more than push them aside, it was a force like a hundred thousand
1 2

The first riots had already occurred in May 1835 in the counties south of London, Desmond and Moore, Darwin, 196. And, in fact, at many as 400,000 workers, with or without families, left Britain annually for Australia, the Cape Province and the United States during the slump following on the panic. Ibid, 266. 3 Paul H. Barrett, et al (eds.), Charles Darwins Notebooks, 1836-1844: 639 (Abstract of Macculloch [1838], 28).

wedges thrusting themselves into every kind of adapted structure in the gaps in the economy of Nature 1 Like plant cultivars, among the laboring masses the few best adapted varieties would eventually prosper pushing aside the huge mass of the less well adapted, the lazy, the unambitious, all of whom would in the long run disappear Later Darwin would find a formulation to capture this situation, as all organic beings are striving, it may be said, to seize on each place in the economy of nature, if any one species does not become modified and improved in a corresponding degree with its competitors, it will soon be exterminated2 With the competition came the selection: Under depression conditions with the beggars scavenging in the streets, only the best among them would survive. Society like nature was at war with itself we should not allow ourselves to be misled by quiet war of organic beings going on [in] the peaceful woods & smiling field, it is dreadful,3 and we couldnt be misled by the raging class struggle. On his way to Linnean library or the British Museum, wherever necessary Darwin took sides streets to avoid knots of congregating workers, those mobilizing for a Chartist rally or demonstration and those that were fit would, over generations, improve species life, here humanity. Here was indeed a creative force, it lifted the species. This was progress, not smooth and unilinear but brutal and crushing, in society as in nature Population in this rarified form was a transmutation of surplus labor This, then, was Darwin; and, some of it was very nasty indeed: Decades before social Darwinism appeared and was popularized, flowing from his class and existential orientation Darwin had accepted, assimilated, and spoke not entirely ambiguously but guardedly to be sure... offering a theoretical solution, i.e., capital's justification, to the problem of surplus populations... in the refined and rarified language of what was indeed a vicious Malthusianism.

Ibid, 375 (Notebook D, 135). Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 91 (chapter 4, Natural Selection). 3 Charles Darwins Notebooks, 429 (Notebook E, 114).
1

Part III The Modern Synthesis (Neo-Darwinism) The problem of population reappears at the moment of the most concentrated expression of the general crisis of capitalism, a crisis whose most open, forceful manifestation was the Slump itself: The problem exploded in truly massive unemployment not just in the core capitalist nations (Britain, Germany and the United States) but throughout the capitalist periphery in areas where penetration of the value form might not have otherwise been immediately apparent.1 Not fortuitously, the problem of population also reappeared, constituting a genuinely new departure in the sciences of life, in the work of evolutionary theorists (hardly any of whom were actually biologists) as an explicit theoretical concern For, here, evolution is understood as a change in the genetic composition of populations2 From the perspective of the immanent development of science, sciences of life so-called, the genetic composition of populations has no comprehensive meaning apart from nature domination, from the development of technologies of social control, of social groups of humans understood as natural beings subjected to manipulation and control. From the perspective of the systemic crisis of capitalism, this explicit theoretical concern, however mediated, rarified and obliquely it appeared, is an expression of the problem of surplus labor and, generalized (a generalization effected by the very movement of capital), the problem of surplus population. From both perspectives, this theorization was elaborated far in advance of its internally driven practical consequences and outcomes. Still, a general crisis in the objective context in which an entire civilization had developed enters into theorization, for example, precisely in the conceptual shift from the individual organism to species as population groups as the proper object of evolutionary theory:3 All the major works that formed the basis of neo-Darwinian thinking the shift from the individual organism to population groups and a determinism based on adaptation are its central, novel features appeared in this period (most between 1931 and 1937). Because this theorization is highly rarified and seemingly developed solely on the basis of its own logic, it is necessary to recount, scrutinize and critique it on its own terms. So here we shall examine just one of those major works, Dobzhanskys Genetics and the Origin of Species reputed to be a central document, a genuine theoretical synthesis, of the entire development at its origins In the last work of his life, a massively sprawling historical-critical effort to re-theorize the foundations of Darwinian evolution, Stephen Jay Gould devoted a short section (relatively speaking) to neo-Darwinism, otherwise known as the modern synthesis.4 He examined the elaboration of neo-Darwinism in terms of what he identified as a twophase process of integration around a renewed Darwinian core, that is, the unification of various subdisciplines within biology (e.g., botany, zoology, cytology, anatomy, physiology, morphology, etc.) around the by then traditional perspective of small scale, continuous variability as the primary source of evolutionary change. The specific character of the synthesis is the assimilation of Mendelian genetics, that is, its mathematical formalism (the demonstration that small selection pressures acting on minor genetic differences can produce evolutionary change), to that traditional perspective.5 The main achievement of this first phase was to establish the self-sufficiency of a Mendelian mediated traditional Darwinism by way of exclusion of the leading contending theorizations, the competing Lamarckian functionalism, and saltational and orthogenetic views.6 Significantly, he dated the beginnings of the first phase from 1918, from a pivotal essay of Ronald .A. Fischer. (It is the date that is significant: Against the foreground reality of the Russian Revolution, for a bourgeois any theorization that stresses incremental change would
1

For example, on the rubber plantations of Malaya, Ceylon and the Dutch East Indies: These estates did poorly, disappearing as capitalist enterprises, the waged rubber workers cut loose and forced to return to their homeland (India). See the Prologue to The German Road to Renewed Imperialist World War, the section entitled The Slump: How Bad Did It Get? 2 Theodosius Dobzhansky, Genetics and the Origin of Species (1951), 16. 3 In Darwin himself we find a shift from selection acting on individual organism to species (The Origin of Species, 167-168). This can, similarly, be seen to be the case with regard to instinct (Ibid, 175). But these are single and singular passages; they neither convey the overall sense of his argument which at any rate is specific, the organism is the object of study nor do they even remotely suggest his focus. 4 The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge (MA):2002. 503-584. 5 Ibid, 504. 6 Ibid, 507-508. Crudely, Saltationists hold the evolutionary change occurs in jumps or leaps, not through the accumulation of small-scale changes (mutations). It is not inconsistent with a hereditary mechanism of change. Orthogenetists, on the other hand, hold that evolutionary change develops along well-defined, narrow pathways generated by factors internal to the organism itself. Though it too is not inconsistent with a hereditary mechanism, it is counterposed to Darwinism in that evolutionary change is neither random nor controlled by environmental pressures, but is directional.

have been at once emotionally gratifying and intellectually satisfying.)1 In contrast to the first phase of integration and consolidation, one in which he thought that within the synthesized framework a pluralism of views could in principle co-exist, Gould deemed the second phase decidedly one in which views hardened, in which natural selection was elevated to the exclusion, effectively speaking, of all other determinations as the mechanism (Gould said agent) of evolutionary change. Gould indicated this hardening took on the shape of orthodoxy for which alternative views even within a Darwinian framework were cavalierly dismissed out of hand.2 This is the situation that we face today in really crude theorizations such as Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene. In order, however, to achieve a critical perspective on this synthesis it is necessary to grasp its significant and seminal elements, not to mention its most coherent formulation, and to do this we must return to the period of its formation. Organic Diversity and Adaptation We shall take our cue from Steve Gould, and examine that moment at which this hardening became apparent, between the first (1937) and third (1951), and final, editions of Theodosius Dobzhanskys Genetics and the Origin of Species. The very presentation of this work, and with it its theoretical content and the aim guiding its construction, underwent a change from first to last edition: As Gould himself noted, Dobzhansky deleted two chapters (IV and V, Chromosomal Changes and Variation in Natural Populations) from the original 1937 edition, those that contained the bulk of the material on non-adaptive or non-selected natural phenomena (albeit some of this material was incorporated into other chapters)... In a world (that of capital as capital) in which the objectifications of Spirit are, complexly mediated, entirely isomorphic in relation to and homologous with the objective shape and organization of productive activity (itself a mystified, alienated objectification of the same Spirit as tacit, irreducible anonymously functioning subjectivity), this hardening, revealed here if only in part in these deletions, was a piece with, cut from the same fabric (even though to be sure both develop according to their own logics) as the suppression of open class struggle and the stabilization of social life following on the receding, then disappearing revolutionary wave announcing capital's general crisis and following in particular on the victory of the democratic imperialists over their fully modern totalitarian and fascists rivals... Dobzhansky further added a chapter (V, in the 1951 edition) called adaptive polymorphism. Most importantly, he abandoned a broadly based, open perspective on evolutionary causation, and adopted a rigorous if not entirely inflexible adaptationist account. In the last edition, Dobzhansky argued adaptation aims at the best solution in recounting the dynamics of evolutionary development, and he posited the relation of environment to organism as determinate, niche specific and unilateral, and optimal. This is evident from very early on, from a first chapter that underwent an extensive rewrite. In the first edition, Dobzhansky tells us that organic diversity is experientially given, obvious and self-evident; that a scientific study of it can methodologically proceed in one of two ways, first by way of examination of both living and fossilized beings with a view to anatomical structure and function, proceeding to classificatory schemes based on perceived regularities as generalized. This was the method of evolutionary theory at its origins; but a second method has emerged since the chronological eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the basis of a shift from the observationalism of the past to a predominance of experimentation. While critical of the fetishization of quantitative and experimental methods, he opted for the latter: For genetics, his interest and discipline, falls within the purview of such an approach since the problem of organic diversity on which the discussion has been focused is best treated as an aspect of unity through a study of the mechanisms which may be responsible for the production and maintenance of variation, an analysis of the conflicting forces tending to increase or to level off the differences between organisms. In this context, the aim of the present book is to review the genetic information bearing on the problem of organic diversity. It was and is not concerned with the problem in its morphological aspect.3
1

This is neither incident nor an external consideration: The Russian Revolution was a foreground, not background, reality, that dwarfs the events of 9 September 2001, even as those events have been amplified by continuous and ubiquitous media spectacular indoctrination and propagandization, in its impact and the force which it shaped the consciousness of all classes in all societies of the world. Now all these early twentieth century figures in evolutionary biology remained genuinely, even if academically attached, bourgeois gentlemen, and for the bourgeoisie, the Russian Revolution was a profound, thoroughgoing and utterly terrifying challenge to the order of capital. 2 Ibid, 505. 3 Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937), 4,5, 6,7.

In the last edition, however, the aim and orientation has shifted and could not stand out more. Here we begin from the assertion that the adaptedness of organisms, their structures, functions, and modes of life, to their environment is striking. It is adaptation to local diversities of habitats that brings about the diversity of organisms that occupy the same territory The observed discontinuity in the body structures and in the ways of life [of different species] is a result of adaptation to the discontinuity of the secular environments on our planet 1 Here too, Dobzhansky tells us, organic diversity and discontinuity of organic variation are perceived by direct observation. But now, diversity and discontinuity and adaptation to the environment are causally related both as a profitable working hypothesis and as a matter of natural surmise.2 From the deterministic perspective of the methodologically modeling modern science of nature, this working hypothesis may illuminate qualitatively more observations and may advance the attempt to experimentally ground theorization, but we fail to see in what way it would be profitable (other than to note that the very expression, also commonly and unconsciously employed by Darwin, is indicative to the extent to which the thinking in which the sciences of life in their evolutionary formulations had become embedded in the daily language that appears and is reproduced in the matrix of those practices aimed at capital accumulation). Moreover, this working hypothesis is emphatically not a natural surmise or, alternately, is only immediately apprehended as such by those whose daily lives move within this matrix and for whom those practices serve as model of human practice generally. But, as we just stated, Dobzhansky is, in this regard, unconscious, so that, to drive home the enormous change in emphasis from the first edition, the present book is devoted to an inquiry into the nature of this [causal] relation between organic diversity and discontinuity and adaptation to the environment.3 Genotype, Phenotype, Environment In point of fact, Dobzhanskys theorization of his position is incomplete and contradictory: He recognizes dialectical causality in the relation of populations to their environments, yet this understanding is untheorized, unintegrated, and confusedly presented. The genotype is the sum total of the genes of an individual or population; the phenotype, immediately, observationally accessible, is formed by the organisms structures and functions, what a living being appears to be to our sense organs.4 Genotypes produce (engender) phenotypes, the total range of which can be created in all possible environments, and constitute the set of potentially possible phenotypes, a set designated as the norm of reaction of the genotype5 Both logically and with a view to the real situation it conceptually summaries, this is immediately at odds with the assertion that phenotypes develop in response to environmental influences which recur regularly in the normal habitats of a species6: If phenotypes develop in response to the environment, they are not created by the genotype unless of course the genotype is active, agency, unless in other words the stability of the genotype is not due to a chemical inertness of the genes and any phenotype that may be formed is necessarily a response of the environment to the activity of a genotype. 7 To render this determinism as it flows from the genotype to the environment intelligible, it would have to dialecticized, the determinism would also flow from the environment to the genotype. Dobzhansky will say it does (he effectively did say this in the remark just cited), but not dialectically for in the latter case the notion of possibility and actuality could not be ontologically separate... in Dobzhansky, as separate the former logically characterizes the genotype, the latter is the existential status of the phenotype (its capacity, so to speak, to exist, to exist as a real specification of different unrealized or possible phenotypes, that existence and reality catalyzed by the action of the genotype in reaction to different environments)... but instead possibility would be embedded in their relation itself, as latent developmental possibility. But to state this is to give up the concept of determinism altogether. Dobzhansky will not have that.

1 2

Genetics and the Origin of Species (1951), 255. Ibid (1951), 3-4, 8. 3 Ibid (1951), 8. 4 Ibid (1951), 20. 5 Ibid (1951). 6 Ibid (1951), 22. 7 Ibid (1951), 20-21, 21. None of these passages even appear in the first, 1937 edition.

For him, the environment remains undetermined, but presumably (and contradictory as already suggested) in the broadest sense is formed, relationally, by the sum of all other organisms confronting a population group together with its inorganic-chemical substratum appearing as geological landscapes (in the end the Earth as a physical body in objective space (Newton) or space-time (Einstein) described by modern science), in the narrow sense referring merely to the latter. The basic problem is the metaphysical frame of reference, one in the form of a reductionism and an epistemologically unjustifiable distinction between genotypic essence and phenotypic appearance, the former generating the latter: But in nature, the nature within which we are situated, only living beings act we shall offer a determination of life below1 and act only in concert,2 but, for now, we only need to note that genes, as non-living, components of living cells, do not act, do not modify and transform their surrounding milieux as do all living beings as moments and aspects of largely living totalities, and certainly do not bring forth novelty (as do humans), a world of mutually implicative real and ideal objects that mediate the relation of humanity to nature. Genes merely replicate, for the most part unerringly duplicate, themselves, but they transform nothing, bring nothing new into being, in nature. Only living beings beings that dynamically maintain their own internal organization and structure in the face of milieux undergoing change, that reproduce themselves and, in all this, that modify their surroundings only sentient respiring (breathing), feeling, suffering beings with affects (no matter how diffuse) and needs (no matter how unspecialized), even at the level of vital feeling, drive or impulse as in plant life that does not respond to a specific stimulus, rather to the total situation within the environment within which it is rooted.3 only such beings have being in and for themselves, subjectivity whether it is the sensory-motor awareness of animals (what we call animal sentiment of self), vital impulse (plant life) that interposes its nutrient, growth and reproductive requirements between itself and its immediate surroundings, or cellular life that in a continuous chemical exchange of an inside with an outside (metabolism) exhibits its capacity for self-maintenance and self-reproduction. Yet Dobzhansky, presupposing agency and action, cannot pose the philosophical question of subjectivity his science precludes it and he cannot even ask, why genetics? the physiology of inheritance and variation the answer why other than the manipulation and remaking of nature and human nature in order to continuously reconstruct earthly nature in its entirely (including humanity) as a raw material basin for capitalist production of a world of commodities is not just utterly beyond the scope of his science, but reveals that science as a methodological-experimental product of scientists as functionaries of capital. Dobzhansky wants dialectical circularity, intimates it, tries hard Nevertheless, what counts in evolution are the phenotypes which are produced by interaction of the genotypes of the organisms with the environments that are encountered in different parts of the world4 but cannot quite reach it in the end it is determinism he holds fast to this is a limit of bourgeois thought, specifically science The position is contradictory, and not in the dialectical sense: For Dobzhansky in a logically contradictory way... this will become clearly momentarily... holds it is the genotype, this gross abstraction from the living organic unity, that exerts pressure on its environment 5 So instead, his presentation engenders grammatically and syntactically confusion: A genotype is potentially able to engender a multitude of phenotypes, which can be realized if the environments needed to have the potentialities
See Part IV, Lynn Margulis: Symbiosis and Genuine Evolutionary Innovation, below. If, for example, we describe action among humans, we can, again for example, say the John, Richard and I lift in order to move the piano, but if we ask who is the subject of this action, it is not John, Richard or I individually or even aggregately, but in concert, it is we who lift it and we who are the subject of this action. (Here, among humans, in concert presupposes mutual recognition, each acknowledges the efforts of all, and each undertaking the action as part of this we, so that in this very doing we count, all together now, one, two, three, lift.) 3 Thus, the plant moves up and down, not in specific directions but only indiscriminately toward, say, the light. It this sense we say impulse is vegetative, meaning it is essentially oriented toward that which is outside it. It does not have sensation, hence no specific memory, just its present dependence upon its life history in its entirety. See our From Metaphysics to Philosophical Anthropology: Max Schelers Mans Place in Nature. 4 Genetics and the Origin of Species (1951), 21. 5 Ibid (1951), 15, 19, 20 (citation), 21. Dobzhansky is firmer in the first edition formulation, where his more flexible, less adaptationist position does not engender the contradiction: The genetic constitution of an individual, its genotype, determines its reaction to the environment; the appearance or phenotype is the resultant of the interaction between the genotype and the environment Ibid (1937), 15. Here, though the genotype remains undetermined - it is not the sedimentation over generations of specific regularly recurring phenotypes continuously modified by and forming those phenotypes, it is not abstracted from the individual organism that carries or bears it even if the relation between the individual genotype and its milieu involves interaction.
1

come to light are available or can be created1 meaning that the genotype can generate a specific phenotype relative to the presence of a specific environment but stating far more, raising the question as to who or what would create and how the needed environments would be created, a particularly dicey question and thorny problem (i.e., stated as such, it is unintelligible on his own assumptions): For Dobzhansky holds the genotype itself, and the kind of changes it is capable of producing, are in the last analysis environmentally determined; noting furthermore this environment is not the one that presently prevails, but is the sum of the historical environments to which the organism, mediately the genotype (which is finally on his assumptions the correct manner in which to state the issue), had been exposed in its phylogeny.2 To cut through this awkward and perplexed presentation, as well as the mystifying determinism, it is necessary to grasp that living beings incessantly make and remake the environments that shape them, that life and the environment mutually penetrate and form one another there is no causal primacy of one over the other3 in a temporally unfolding, evolutionary process that is developmental (i.e., entails the continuous emergence of increasingly complex, novel forms of life over geological time) A Digression, Again The notion of possible and actual worlds appears over and again in various forms of thought that characterize this epoch, one wracked by a general crisis of capitalism as it was driven from one imperialist world war to another by way of its most concentrated expression, the Slump... We could only fruitlessly speculate on depth psychological motivation, but... Cognitively, for example, it appears in Husserl (the later volumes of Ideas, his Formal and Transcendental Logic) for whom transcendental subjectivity in acts of meaning bestowing genesis is correlated with the world of daily experience as one world among many possible worlds; in Heisenberg for whom the mathematical formalism (on the basis of which quantum mechanical results can be rendered intelligible) permits him to say that, given its velocity (or position), the position (or velocity) of a subatomic particle is described statistically by a series of probabilities;4 and, here, in Dobzhansky, where the genotype is potentially able to generate any number of phenotypes. What was the relation between crisis and this thought? That relation is simultaneously existential, logical and methodological. Existentially, as the culmination of capitalist development this world revealed that at its innermost core bourgeois civilization is irrational. Not to belabor the point, it was against the backdrop of the overwhelming, daily presence of this world, its events and contours, that all thought developed.5 Logically, this notion is an expression of the fundamental problem of bourgeois thought, namely, an underlying substratum that resists penetration by thought and remains external to the conceptual system it generates.6 Starting from Kants Copernican Revolution, attempts to overcome the irrationality of contents provided the motive force for the development of German Idealism (Fitches Ich that produces the world from its own self-activity, Hegels Geist that in coming to itself comprehends the totality of what is in an absolute self-consciousness). But the world confronted in German Idealist thought was qualitatively different from the world determined from the crisis of capital. Methodologically, all these forms of thought are formalistic. As such, they cannot in principle overcome the independence of content, but are always left with an irrational residue, whether, as in Husserl, it is an nonspatial, atemporal transcendental ego that, generating all conceptual productions based on, is somehow rooted in temporal and worldly precategorial experience; in Heisenberg and quantum mechanics, experimental facts whose explanation is contradictory, which present a situation in which certain facts that can be explained thoroughly and fully only on the basis of the assumption that
1 2

Ibid (1951), 21. Ibid (1951). 3 See Part V, the section entitled Dialectical Circularity in the Determination of Life; also the Fifth Study, Part I, Remarks and Reflections, both below. 4 See the Third Study, First Sketch, below, devoted to a discussion of this issue at the heart of quantum mechanics. 5 In Husserl, this was explicitly stated in his introductory remarks to his Crisis (1936); in the Preface to the third edition, Dobzhansky refers to the convulsion of the War as the background against which his second edition was written. 6 The entire problematic was, of course, brilliantly developed by Lukacs in his analysis of the Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought in History and Class Consciousness. It is critically examined here in its further development beyond (in the temporal sense) Lukacs in the analysis of Karl Popper's theorization of the philosophy of science. See the Fourth Study, Part III, The Problem of Foundations (Irrationality of the Substratum), below.

light consists in waves and not particles, and others which can only be accounted for in terms of particles and cannot be rendered intelligible in terms of waves (or, if you prefer, position and momentum); or, it is an agency, the genotype, that is fully determined through the mediation of its merely possible product, its phenotype, by the environment as in Dobzhansky. Genes, Mutations, Populations One is not required to accept especially on Dobzhanskys and later neo-Darwinian accounts the genetic determination of life. We certainly do not1 With the exception of a singular insect (Drosophilia, a fruit fly) that figures in a decidedly paramount manner in Dobzhanskys presentation, most of the genetic formulated determinants of living organisms are, politely speaking, superficial as in hair color, eye color and secondary sexual characteristics. If nothing else, genetically based biology demonstrates what is decisive, namely, the behavior, activity and the contents of awareness (even if this awareness is only a generalized orientation toward an outside) which provide for the living organism its own life, its being in and for itself, cannot be determined from its analyses. This said, let us return to Genetics and the Origin of Species Dobzhansky does not start from of an account of the organic genotype understood in terms of populations and populations understood in terms of organic genotypes. He can discuss populations and genes separately, considering the latter first and then the former instead of examining each in relation to the other, because his recognition that genes interact and his claim (to which he is committed) that population groups (species) are ontologically real notwithstanding (and thus having falsely gone beyond a primitive atomism), his basic orientation to this relation, the manner in terms of which he immediately apprehends it, reproduces all over again what we have characterized as metaphysically atomistic. Thus, his consideration of genes and populations goes beyond separate accounts. The reality of life is dualistically organized: When a hereditary variation is produced and injected into a Mendelian population it enters... into the field of actions of factors those factors consisting in natural and artificial selection, the manner of breeding characteristic for the particular organism, its relation to the secular environment and to other organisms coexisting in the same medium that obey rules sui generis, rules of the physiology of populations, not those of the physiology of individuals.2 Abstractly mediated by the heredity variation (mutation), each level, i.e., order of vital reality, is distinct and is not determined from its relation to the other. This no integration of levels in which the new order founds its autonomy on the basis of its dependency, its unique and novel structure is not related to an older or earlier, underlying level (all our terms) from which the newer one emerges. So having come this far, i.e., having recognized different levels or orders of the real, Dobzhansky starts from each new level with its most elementary feature (which, at each level, he never transcends, i.e., integrates). So in following Dobzhansky, we are obligated to consider the gene first. Operating at the level of the organism, heredity is intrinsically conservative, hence the genotype is stable. Gene mutation and, containing the genetic material, chromosome or more specifically chromosomal change is the source of evolution. Mutation counteracts this stability, as an opposing agency3 Here we would note, entirely consistently with Dobzhanskys metaphysically atomistic reifications, a real process, evolution, is the outcome of an abstract dialectic of concepts, that is, the interaction of ideal (i.e., theoretically fixed) moments of the genotype projected as real, its mutation counteracting its stability Mutations are changes in any existing gene(s) whose sum total (an aggregate totality) makes up the genotype. Dobzhanskys formulation for this is a genetic change in ancestral types. They occur as sudden changes, that is, there is no slow or incremental change (however the latter might be conceived) or passage between the original and the novel or mutant type.4 These abrupt changes vary greatly and are measured by the visible departure form the ancestral condition in the structural and physiological characters or, you prefer, traits or phenotypes 5 And while he
See this Study, Part V in its entirety, below. Ibid (1937), 120; (1951), 50-51 (citation, emphasis in original). 3 Owing to the inherent stability of the genotype, heredity is a conservative agent. Evolution is possible only because heredity is counteracted by another process opposite in effect namely, mutation. Ibid (1951), 25. 4 It is sudden in the sense of no gradual passage through genetic conditions intermediate between the original and the mutant type. Ibid (1951), 26-27. 5 Ibid (1951), 27.
1

would like to restrict the meaning of mutation to gene changes, there is, at least at the moment he wrote, a problem here, namely, there were simply no available methods to make a direct comparison, chemical and structural in nature, between the novel mutant and the ancestral genes. Instead, the only available evidence for change in the gene structure was phenomenal, not Dobzhansky's term at this point but perfectly congruent with his intent, namely, the appearing phenotypic variant, which, like the genetic structure itself is, according to Dobzhansky, subject to the laws of Mendelian inheritance. But a change in chromosomal structure, and this is the problem, whether that change is deficiency (loss) or reduplication, rearrangements due to inversion or translocation,1 also follows Mendelian laws.2 Thus, there would, for genetic experimentalists operating at this moment, have been no way to distinguish the two, genetic and chromosomal changes Now varying greatly encompasses a range of changes, from those that in the early stages of development of organism are deadly, lethal as Dobzhansky says this is known through the experimental extermination of various species individuals of Drosophilia en masse to changes so small that it was extremely difficult if not impossible to detect them.3 Genes can produce changes in more than one trait, and as such their effects are many or said to be pleiotropic. or to have manifold effects. While the frequency of such genes was not, circa 1950, well known, the bulk of mutations that generate changes that are noticeable or even striking do so in a single character or trait. Pleoitriopic effects, where they occur, involve changes that seem to be insignificant, even trivial.4 But, it should be stressed, and this is hinted at above in the reference to inversion and translocation, genetic effects are not simply the product of the relation of a single gene, its structure, but to its locational relation with other neighboring genes. These effects the relation is patently understood causally Dobzhansky in accordance with the literature of his day calls positional and they extend to the phenotype, e.g., to the morphology of flies.5 This perspective differs significantly from the nascent genetics that emerged at the beginning of the chronological twentieth century with the (re)discovery of Mendel: For the latter was atomistic in the extreme, believing that genes could cross over or chromosomes break without engendering any difference in mutational change since genes were considered independent entities whose arrangement, though constant, was accidental, their properties inherent not relational.6 Thus, a chromosome is to be deemed a system of interdependent genes and this without regard to positional effects.7 Finally, we can say that mutants, gene changes starting from an ancestral type, are by and large very infrequent, rare if you will (and though he asserted this in his preparatory theoretical discussion of genes, Dobzhansky later noted this view does not hold with regard to certain species), since they appear in single individuals among masses of unchanged representatives of a strain.8 With this elemental presentation in hand, we can, continuing to follow Dobzhansky, turn to populations. While population dynamics are, according to Dobzhansky, essential to evolutionary theory, the careful examination of phenotypes as they occur in nature cannot in principle secure a systematic knowledge of genetic variability.9 Nonetheless, populations can be understood in an entirely lawful manner in the mathematical sense: The evolutionary processes in populations can be known and understood by deducing their regularities mathematically from the known properties of the Mendelian mechanism of inheritance.10 Experimental work at once permits researchers to empirically verify these laws and to develop their significance for the genotypic development of populations.
1

Dobzhansky defines inversion as a change of location of a block of genes within a chromosome by a rotation through 180 which while retaining the same genes changes their arrangement. Ibid (1951), 29. This is a purely experimental and artificial change, one that does not occur in nature. Translocation refers to a shift in the location of a gene within the genotypic structure. 2 Ibid (1951). 3 Ibid (1937), 78-79; (1951), 31. 4 Ibid (1951), 33. 5 Ibid (1937), 13; (1951), 36. 6 Ibid (1951), 36, 37. 7 Ibid (1951), 37. 8 Ibid (1951), 39. 9 Ibid (1951), 51, 65. In the latter passage it is stated, No matter how carefully one examines the phenotype of wild representatives of a species, the information thereby gained about the genetic variability in natural populations will be incomplete. Contextually, incomplete has the sense formulated above in our text. 10 Ibid (1937), 120; (1951), 51. The formulation is the same in both editions.

What becomes clear at this level is a qualitative difference in the understanding of heredity on the basis of the modern synthesis and that of one of its two legs, Darwin himself (Mendel being the other). In Darwin (and among his contemporaries who accepted his views), it was argued that crossing species individuals produce offspring for which the hereditary material is mixed, amalgamated as Dobzhansky says. What is important here is that the difference between the ancestral hereditary materials was supposed to be either lost entirely or at least impaired by passage through the hybrid organism.1 Over generations, that ancestral material would be irretrievably lost, halved in each and every generation until at least in principle complete homogeneity would be produced. (This homogenization would, for Darwin, never be reached: Only the original material would be lost since continuing hereditary change would introduce new variations which in turn would be hereditary transmitted.) There is a problem here, one experimentally discovered: Unless variability arises anew, above or at least at the level of that produced by crossing, mutations rates must occur with prodigious frequency. But this is not what is observed. (Low mutation rates are.) Dobzhansky calls the view and these, its, consequences shared by Darwin and his contemporaries a blending theory of inheritance and opposes a particulate perspective to it. If the genetic material has an essentially self-contained or, better, a discrete character, it is preserved in the mathematical fashion, say recessively, as demonstrated by Mendel. For Mendel, the free assortment of genes will result in recombinations that do not reduce the amount of variation, but of course will have as its consequences in cases of species individuals or the interbreeding of species the disappearance of formerly distinct groups as population groups, their (phenotypic if you will) homogenization.2 The free assortment of genes as theorized is a law of Mendelian genetics. But it is not fundamental at least for evolutionary theory established on the basis of population genetics. Instead, this honor is reserved for a determination of the relative frequency of genes in a population that is a product this is a thought experiment, an imagining that constructs a situation that does not and cannot in principle exist in or on earthly nature introduced into a previously unoccupied territory characterized by its geographic isolation where no new populations are introduced and no departures (emigrations) take place. This population consists of two strains of a sexually reproducing organism, strains that are cross fertilizing, well adapted to this imagined environment, that are distinguished only by a single gene (AA and aa) and that reproduce and generate new offspring randomly. Under these conditions, the gene frequencies (specified as q and 1-q, respectively) will not vary, remaining constant through all future generations. The distribution of the genotype in this population (actually the population in question consists in three genotypes) is given in the following mathematical formulation, q2AA + 2q(1-q) + (1-q)2 aa = 1, a formulation describes the equilibrium condition in a random breading population.3 The significance of this law is largely twofold, and both consequences stand out in contradistinction to Darwins now classical perspective. First, once achieved, variability in a population stays constant and does not slowly and irretrievably disappear by crossing. Second, and this is decisive, accumulating mutations in a population occur without regard to whether they are useful4 or deleterious to organisms, and occur with far greater frequency than strictly useful mutations.5 In stark contrast to Darwin (who maintains that this is not possible), deleterious mutations too accumulate as part of the genotype.6 Mutations, good or bad, and their rates of frequency are then central to Dobzhanskys analysis. In fact, known as polygenic a continuous or constant and ceaseless variability featuring relatively small or minor changes in

1 2

Ibid (1937), 121-122; (1951), 52. Ibid (1937), 122; (1951), 52. For Darwin, see The Origin of Species, e.g., 251-276 (chapter 10) and passim. 3 Ibid (1937), 123-124; (1951), 53 (citation), 79. The rule is called the binomial square or Harding-Weinberg law, after the two geneticists (G.H. Hardy and W. Weinberg) who in 1908 first hit upon it. 4 Darwin, of course, recognized not are adaptations are immediately decided by use. See Part II, Natural Selection, above. 5 Ibid (1937), 124, 125; (1951), 53, 55, 67, 82, 91. 6 For Darwin, see this Study Part II, Natural Selection and the sources cited therein, above. This is not the only place where Dobzhansky seeks to correct, i.e., reinterpret the meaning and significance of problems first systematically taken up by, Darwin. Chapter 6 in the third edition (1951, 135-178) called race formation, seeks to account in Mendelian terms for transitions between sympatric polymorphism (genotypically heterogeneous groups within the same species living within the same region, territory or environment) and allopatric races (obviously genetically distinct subspecies or varieties to use Darwins terms living in different geographic locales). For Darwins discussion of varieties and species, see Part II, Special Creation of Separate Species, above.

developmental rates is likely the form of mutation of greatest import in evolution.1 These incremental changes are stored, as it were, as part of the genotype of the population. (Thus, the infrequent incident of freaks of nature, of non-viable organisms, hereditary disease and monstrosities to use Darwins term.) Given that a population with high mutability will have a higher absolute quantum of deleterious mutations as part of its genotypic repository (our term), selection will on these assumptions obviously adaptively favor genotypes in which mutation rates are lower, kept at a minimum as Dobzhansky says2 It is too selection that we now turn. Selection According to Dobzhansky, the Mendelian theory of mutation fills a gap in Darwins theory of evolution by accounting for the origins and forms of hereditary variation. This is indisputable. As we indicated at the end of the last section, deleterious mutations, unlike in Darwin, also accumulate as part of the genotype. As a rule, those mutations whose adaptedness, as it were, develops as a response to recurring environmental influences and conditions are those Darwin deemed useful, those that are in Dobzhanskys terms adaptively valuable modifications. To the other side, those adaptations that are made to rare, unusual or haphazardous environment conditions and influences, adaptations Dobzhansky calls morphoses, are harmful, injurious or deleterious: They have not as he states, gone through a process of adjustment in the evolutionary history of organisms on which the genotypes of the population grouping (species) are based.3 With respect to this, Dobzhansky offers a more exacting definitional determination of adaptive value, as the capacity, relatively speaking (because it is a constantly varying quantity), of various bearers of a given genotype to pass on their genes to gene pool of succeeding generations.4 Thus, a strictly or entirely injurious gene has an adaptive value of zero. Again, the determination is made quantitatively, so that it is statistical concept that emphasizes or, better, measures (our term) the reproductive efficiency of a genotype in a certain environment.5 This is how Dobzhansky understands Darwinian fitness: This is important because he, Dobzhansky, argues this concept, fitness, can be detached from competition and struggle, as in the struggle for life or for existence, at least in the sense of direct combat between individuals.6 Well, yes, but then Dobzhansky is intentionally playing on the ambiguity of the concept because, direct combat is the most narrow of readings of Darwin and what he, Darwin, intended was much broader: Noting the presence of Malthus in Darwins thinking, he restates Darwins straightforward reading of the population law, organisms tend to produce more offspring that can survive without eventually outrunning the food supply. (Dobzhansky again hedges Darwin here, stating the slowest breeding organisms.), noting further that it is the differential mortality of different genotypic bearers constituting a population that makes, in the further abstract (from organic interaction) peculiarly neo-Darwinian reading of the old man, selection effectively actual. He adds that, however, metaphors such as survival of the fittest and the struggle for life were unfortunate, played to propagandists (i.e., social Darwinians), and more picturesque than accurate7 A kindly reading of Darwin, but obfuscatory not to mention altogether mistaken Instead, he offers the following determination of selection, the carriers of different genotypes in a population contribute differentially to the gene pool of the following generations.8 Now this peculiar determination of selection (in principle, unrelated to competition and struggle) is entirely consistent with Dobzhanskys statistical concept of adaptive value, but it is also unsustainable. In reference to a principle elucidated (1934) by the evolutionary biologist, G.F. Gause, and later affirmed by other leading neo-Darwinians (e.g., Ernst Mayr), he appears to reiterate this interpretation by deconstructing Gauses principle (namely, two species with the same ecological requirements cannot share the same environment indefinitely because the more efficient one will eventually outbreed and supplant the other)9. Since no absolutely uniform and absolutely constant
1 2

Ibid (1951), 71. Ibid (1951), 73. Here Dobzhansky unequivocally states that a number of researchers have demonstrated that injurious changes form the majority of mutations. 3 Ibid (1951), 22, 82 (citation), 135. 4 Ibid (1951), 78, 79. 5 Ibid (1951), 78. 6 Ibid (1951). 7 Ibid (1951), 77. 8 Ibid (1951). 9 Ibid (1951), 109. This argument appears nowhere in the original 1937 edition.

environment could be inhabited by a single species, i.e., it is made heterogeneous by the original species very presence, Gauses principle is unrealistic (yes, unrealistic but then the absolutely uniform and absolutely constant environment is theoretical, i.e., ideal, areal or, if you prefer, unrealistic). Having rejected the principle, Dobzhansky proceeds to reinstate it: He relates that, in fact, different species with the same ecological requirements can coexist in the same environment (thus they are said to be sympatric) if the territory is heterogeneous, i.e., if they do not coexist spatially or temporally, 1 which is another way of stating that in the same time and place they cannot coexist, thus reaffirming in a wholly backdoor manner Gauses principle, and rendering his statistical concept of adaptive value unrelated to competition and struggle incoherent and, as we said, unsustainable. In this regard, we can note just how far Dobzhansky has come in his embrace of evolution as essentially a process of adaptation to the environment through natural selection,2 of a mediated, yet fully unilateral relation of organism to environment by way of selection through adaptation: In the first edition of Genetics and the Origin of Species, he cites two recent works (both appeared in 1936), one by Ronald Fisher that comes down hard on the side of adaptation, calling evolution progressive adaptation and nothing else, and the other by Robson and Richards that asserts, among other things, that, There are many things about living organisms that are much more difficult to explain than some of their supposed adaptations. Dobzhanskys position was that, No agreement on this issue has been reached as yet.3 In the final edition, he cites the same authors (and in Fishers case, the same passages) and concludes that among the two opinions just cited, the first [Fishers] is believed by a majority of modern evolutionists to be much nearer the truth than the second. He includes himself among that majority, since, for him, The development of population genetics over the previous two decades has considerably strengthened the theory of natural selection.4 It would be remiss not to note that Dobzhanskys own narrowly based evolutionary studies (sixteen published between the dates of these two publications), relating almost exclusively to Drosophilia, bear most heavily on this judgment. (With respect to this, see the final section in this, Part III.) Just how far Dobzhansky was willing to push his adaptationist perspective can be seen in his discussion of bacteria. 5 He speculates bacteria possess genes that are discrete entities that undergo changes independently of each other, that a nuclear apparatus has been discovered in bacteria, and that the genetic mechanisms in bacteria are not radically different from those in other living beings, here speaking of sexual fusion and recombination, all of which intends that reproduction in bacteria is Mendelian. However, starting from the late 1960s when usage of the recently invented electron microscope became widespread, an entirely different understanding of bacteria has formed. In particular, three decades of work by Sorin Sonea have resulted in the following 6: Bacteria do possess genes, but no nucleus, genes changes are neither independent of each other nor independently carried out within the cellular confines of an individual bacterium. Most importantly, bacteria do not speciate, the dynamics of genetic transfer among bacteria is decidedly non-Mendelian and non-adaptive (Sonea calls it cooperative), and they possess a singular, global genome (genotype) which is accessible to all bacteria. Masked by experimental references, Dobzhanskys speculation (and that of those sources he cites) is determined by his theoretically adaptationist and selectionist bigotry, by a heavily theory-laden experimentalism that prejudices the evidence it generates.7 We shall return to this.

1 2

Ibid (1951). Ibid (1951), 99. 3 Ibid (1937), 151. The citations from the other three authors appear in Dobzhanskys text. 4 Ibid (1951), 77. 5 Ibid (1951), 86-90, esp. 88. 6 See the discussion, in particular its footnoted elaborate in Part IV, the section headed Lynn Margulis: Symbiosis and Genuine Evolutionary Innovation, below. 7 Dobzhanskys position appears contradictory, for at one point he seems to recognize, but only in part, the distinctive character of bacteria, noting that individuals in a clone of bacteria are genotypically alike, unless mutation has intervened. And while this poorly states the case, he nonetheless further seems to understand their reproduction is neither sexual nor Mendelian: He continues, Sexual reproduction has brought a new form of biological integration. Individuals are combined into reproductive communities, but he then retreats calling these communities Mendelian populations Ibid (1951), 260. He retreats because he can understand it no other way.

Species, Evolutionary Development, Adaptive Landscapes Species are not just a taxonomic or classificatory grouping. They are interbreeding communities, Mendelian populations which, in turn, are spatio-temporal objects, real or objective and, moreover, the fundamental realities of the living world1 an interesting and ambitious assertion but one that retrospectively, that is, in light of the role of bacteria in planetary life and in particular in sustaining a world hospitable to life, is flat out mistaken 2 Species are not unchanging and static groups Darwin knew and said this but constitute a moment, Dobzhansky says a stage, in an evolutionary process of the development of life one outcome of which is divergence3: They form as interbreeding groups of Mendelian populations split up, separate into two (or more) reproductively isolated groups, and, for Dobzhansky reproduction is sexual, which itself generally is conditional on geographical or spatial isolation4 which Darwin also knew and said. In fact, following a long line of his contemporaries, Dobzhansky tells us that the essence of speciation is development of (sexually) reproductive isolation (as opposed to asexual forms of reproduction).5 Mendelian populations are products of adaptive evolution, whose genetic structures tend to diverge, a gradual process, in response to changes and differences in environment.6 How is this evolution to be characterized? Since it, not a visible or tangible reality, is a lengthy geological process, how might it be imagined? The causal relation is explained metaphorically deploying a conceptual schema taken over from Seward Wright characterizing adaptive landscapes7: In an entirely abstract, non-comprehending manner characteristic of modern science, an organism, all organisms, species, can be imagined to be possessed by specific traits and genes that their shape their development. Some of these traits are shared by different organisms, making them species individuals, some are not, but the organismic unity of actually existing traits and the combination of all potentially possible ones, the former constituting an immeasurably small portion of the latter, can be further imagined as a multi-dimensional space in which every real or possible organism has a place.8 Now these combinations, all of them, can be graded with respect to their fitness to survive in the environments that exist in the world. The vast majority is simply unfit for survival in any environment, but among those that are they can be assigned to certain habitats and ecological niches to which they are suited. Related gene combinations are, on the whole, similar in adaptive value.9 In imagining we can visualize: Visually, this imagining would form a topographic map characterized by peaks and valleys: Clusters of successful (at surviving) gene combinations the patterns with superior adaptive values would be represented by adaptive peaks, the unfavorable combinations symbolizing those unfit for survival and perpetuation would form in the valleys lying, as it were, between the peaks, and would in the form this argument takes be essentially empty.10 The clustering signifies the ascertainable fact that genes and traits do not form randomly, they do not constitute a mass of otherwise arbitrarily assigned niches and habitats, but are nonetheless discontinuous; instead, these genes combinations are related, so that we can speak of families of related gene combinations. In terms of actually existing species, the ecological niche occupied by the species lion is relatively much closer to those occupied by tiger, puma, and leopard than occupied by wolf, coyote, and jackal. Continuing with this metaphoric imagining, these families too are related, the peaks go together as do those in a mountain range or, again, in actual terms, the feline, canine, ursine, musteline, and certain other groups of peaks form together the adaptive range of carnivores, which is separated by deep adaptive valley from the ranges of rodents, bats,
1 2

Ibid (1951), 256, 262. This assertion does not appear in same discussion in the original edition, see (1937), 311. Species are not, however, tangible natural phenomena (Ibid (1951), 263: They may be real though epistemologically Dobzhanskys entire presentation would have to undergo fundamental change to make the case for this but they are not perceptual. Who has ever touched a species? See this Study, Part IV, Partisan of the Monera, below. 3 Ibid (1951). 4 Ibid (1937), 230-232; (1951), 180-182. 5 Ibid (1951), 263, for the list of contemporaries who hold this position; (1937), 316-321 and (1951), 273-274 for the asexual difference in this regard. Consistent with a more advanced understanding of asexual bacterial reproduction (which, only to be expected for he is absent the contemporary instruments particularly the electron microscope to examine bacterial interaction), Dobzhansky appears to recognize that, logically at least, asexual obligatory organisms do not speciate. Ibid (1951), 274-275. 6 Ibid (1951), 261, 287. 7 The Role of Mutation, Inbreeding, Crossbreeding, and Selection in Evolution, Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Genetics, I: 356-366. 8 Ibid (1951), 8. 9 Ibid (1951). 10 Ibid(1951), 8-10, 255 (citations).

ungulates, primates, and others.1 Adaptive ranges can be subsumed under broadest taxonomic classifications, ones that separate (mammals from birds or reptiles) and other that unify at increasing higher levels of generality2 (the classes of mammals, birds and reptiles are all members of the subphylum vertebrate, phylum cordate). This hierarchical arrangement of the classification of living beings reflects the objectively ascertainable discontinuity of adaptive niches, that is, the discontinuous manners and means by which organisms that inhabit the world derive their livelihood from the environment.3 This unilateral, causal relation of environment to organism, to species, is displayed most forcibly in the characterization of the manner in which genotypic adaptivity declines. This occurs in one of two manners. First, as a consequence of either geological changes or mans interference with the habitats of organisms, 4 adaptive values are lowered. (Remember adaptive value is a statistical concept.) Second, this value declines as a species finds its way from the adaptive peak it currently occupies to another, occupied or unoccupied 5 (though, it should be said that to be consistent here Dobzhansky should have held out the possibility that the species genotype may fit well with its new milieu). Thus, early on Dobzhansky patently exhibits the appetites of neo-Darwinian thought, in which and for which adaptation causally relates organism to environment in a way that is, as we have indicated above, determinate, niche specific and unilateral, and, for those who follow him, optimal.6 Aimed at genetically ascertaining how the static structure of the topographical arrangement of species is constituted, the neo-Darwinian project is vastly at odds with Darwin with his orientation toward the genesis of, the temporal constitution over geological time of the relation between, varieties and species.7 This a tribute, one might say, to the extent to which capitalism even in crisis has been naturalized as the context of contexts in which all scientific, hence uncritical and essentially ahistorical theorizations, as categorial elaborations of the experience of immediacy (even if already mediately immediate, i.e., experimentally constructed), move and return to their ungrounded foundations. Dosophilia and the Experiment in Genetics Dobzhansky was a Russian migr. Both before and after coming to the United States his work in genetics was experimental, focused on the fly genus Dosophilia about which he was a reputed expert. But what had been often overlooked was in Russia, unlike the whole of the Anglo-American world, experimental work based on Mendelian genetics had been successfully and in a far reaching manner synthesized with the traditions of taxonomy and natural history. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Dobzhansky also specialized in the taxonomy of ladybirds (the coccinellid beetle).8
1 2

Ibid (1951), 8, 9, 10 (citations). Ibid (1951), 10. 3 Ibid (1951). 4 In this regard, Dobzhansky concluded (1951) by considering biological and cultural variable of human evolution. He tells us, the interrelationships between biology and culture are reciprocal, that it is a demonstrable fact that human biology and human culture are part of a single system, unique and unprecedented in the history of life, that human evolution cannot be understood except as a result of interaction of biological and of social variables, and finally, that social life, and especially the development of civilization, have influenced the evolutionary patterns of the human species so decisively that human biology is incomprehensible apart from the human frame of reference by which he means cultural reference frame. Ibid (1951), 304-305. But he is unwilling to say that not only does culture not start where biology leaves off, but that culture reaches back beyond humanity at its origins and shape that biology, so that in what is uniquely, i.e., distinctively, human, the two cannot be distinguished. (For all this, see the discussions of Humanity in our Nature, Capital, Communism). Yes, man can and must be understood evolutionarily, but not on Dobzhanskys terms, not adaptively. For him, it remains the case that biological adaptation has determined and doubtless will continue to determine, All subsequent evolutionary history of the human species, that a distinct biological reality can still be separated out, so that the biological meaning of the diversity among humans is adaptation to the variety of the environments which an organism encounters or creates (Ibid (1951), 305, 309), noting that if a being creates its environment, i.e., fundamentally changes earthly nature and creates a distinctive human world in and through this activity, it is not adapting to it, i.e., causality is circular or, better, dialectical. 5 Ibid (1951), 277. 6 For our purposes here, i.e., in grasping the neo-Darwinian thrust, it is irrelevant whether, as Gould asserts, Dobzhansky has illicitly appropriated Wrights model, whether he has, in fact, raised the model to an inappropriate level by shifting its meaning from an explanation for nonoptimality (with important aspects of nonadaptation) to an adaptationist argument about best solutions. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 527. 7 See, for example, chapter 9 where he dealt with the geological record, The Origin of Species, esp. 226-227. 8 Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 519-520.

But what is really important here was his experimental work with fruit flies. There are two points that require disentangling. First, it is one thing to argue that continuous geographical variability in nature is Mendelian and not different in the qualitative sense from discontinuous variability as it, for example, appears in laboratory experiments.1 It is an altogether different proposition to argue actually it is never explicit, always assumed that the experimental results of work on organisms constructed on the basis of artificial conditions that prevail in a laboratory situation tell us something essential about organisms as they live and act in nature. It is simultaneously reductionist and, more significantly, confuses, obliterating the distinction between and altogether failing to grasp where they intersect, two orders of significance and the realities they refer back to. Work with Drosophilia may be highly productive: It is not a particularly complex organism, and perhaps because of this gene substitutions, inversions and translocations can, e.g., reposition a wing on the body of the organism, x-rays will destructively break chromosomes In the space of less than two chapters (total 56 pages), Dobzhanskys discussions of various species of this fly genus and experiments on species individuals appear on no less than thirty pages The elucidation of the formal characteristics of organisms by way of the manipulation of the component elements of living beings imperceptibly slides over into a determination of organic behavior, not because scientists do not grasp the difference (and by and large they patently do not), but because the absence of this difference is presupposed as such, as the only assumption consistent with the class based project embedded in and guiding the modern science of nature. Rising from these experiments in systemic and systematic practices of the manipulation of life, its viability, its quality as lived, and its length (e.g., by organ change producing what is popularly called freaks of nature), the question forms, Why engage in experiments? To satisfy a perverse and criminally scientific curiosity (criminal because it emotionally gratifies repressively desublimated sadistic and murderous impulses of otherwise well integrated, i.e., socially accepted compulsive, personalities)? Yes, but though correct, this analysis is limited and hardly adequate. Then why? Because the entire edifice of contemporary science, inclusive of its massive state funding, its physical structures that house its laboratories, the instrument and machine complexes utilized therein, its associations, its educative forms of developing the individuals who bear this project called science and its hierarchical organization all form the institutional framework in which domination and control of nature and human nature is achieved strictly in accordance with the requirements of the ongoing reproduction of the order of capital. Second, there is something identifiably far more sinister here (below the consciousness of individual scientists, though not in all cases). This must be developed at some length.2 In his analyses of modernity and its (contemporary) outcome, Foucault deploys the category of incarceration, referring to what he calls carceral society. In English and French, carceral is a neologism etymologically derived from the verb, incarcerate (incarcrer), but imprisonment here is not understood in terms of restriction of mobility and spatial confinement. Rather, those concentrated places, spaces and sites where masses of human beings congregate daily (dwell, work, consume) within the societies of the world form a carceral archipelago in which Power is instituted and arises by way of control of bodies As a study of the underlying substratum of living bodies, as scientists would reductionistically have it, genetics is access to the control of bodies par excellence While the body that is incarcerated is a living body (Leib), that of a practical, vital, breathing and suffering beings possessed of affects and needs, one that lives and experiences, a body intertwined with and on the basis of which subjectivity (personality) develops, is cultivated and shaped, this body is not the body theorized. The latter is the same body objectified and instrumentalized (and as a dead body it is also the object of Western medical science, a cadaver), die Krper. Yet it is, nonetheless, the basis for control through imprisonment in its most forceful sense and, in terms of the discussion can be experienced as an instrument; and, in fact, it is all the time, in labor specifically and in practical activity generally, for example, when I bring my weight to bear on an object in order to move it. Here I am a LeibKrper. It is simultaneously the structure of reality itself, its constitution as integrated levels organic synthesis of inorganic molecules, primordial cellular life forming from the reorganization and restructuring of organic molecules, eukaryotes from a syntheses of prokaryote forms, etc., humanity on the basis of complex mammalian animal forms,
1

Dobzhansky, Ibid (1937), 56-57. We will have occasion to return to the experiment and its relation to science and capital in the following section, in the Fifth Study and in the conclusion to this entire work. 2 For a full treatment of what follows, see our Alan Milchmans Essays on the Holocaust, Foucault and Heidegger: A Meditation on the Nazi Genocide, its Origins and its Historical Contemporaneity.

each newly emerging level reforming and reorganizing that on which it is based, appearing irreducible and novel, its autonomy as a new order of existence established on the basis of this very dependency and the uniquely human capacity for self-objectification of any and all of our cognitive, emotional and physiological states, processes and activities that permits the living body to be treated strictly as an object and instrument, for example, the ingestion of chemicals that shift a hormonal balance and upset my affective life, that induces a stupor, etc Thus, in the contemporary world of capital before Power, as the state, ever openly appears (and shapes individual, personal life) as groups, agencies and bodies of armed men, as the force of law and institutions of coercion of all kinds, it, as micro-power, develops through the various types of control (e.g., genetic modification, drug, psychological manipulation of affective life, of fears, anxieties and hopes, etc., a control itself insinuated into the most intimate and private domains, family life, sexuality, and the hidden recesses of personal life, dreams, fantasy, the buried pains of childhood), that is, through control of the need and emotional structure of embodied subjectivity, creating docile bodies that willing self-integrate into a system of hierarchical social relations of command and obedience, and only then and from here takes shape as institutionally separate Power, as the state The foundations of this control rest, first, on the peculiar character of human beings as human beings, on the socio-cultural in-forming of a supposed biological substratum, hence on the social and historical character of need, and, second, on the capacity to dispose of the activities of social labor, that is on the peculiar, self-instrumentalizing and character-forming practice of a LeibKrper At this, the latter level, Power constitutes itself, in part at least, and largely legitimizes itself positively, in administering and ministering, managing and regulating daily life of underlying populations, through an array of technologies of control (domination) that are brought to bear on that population grouping by a plethora of (and ever proliferating) agencies of the state. The more sophisticated those technologies of control (today, these are exemplified by informational technology and the bio-technology of genes), the more control over the intimate details of daily life is exercised. Thus, the state and it is manifest how the science of genetics facilities this task aims at reconstituting the various classes in society as a massified, inherently manipulable demographical totality, i.e., an abstract population grouping such as the nation; its policies, practices and interventions constitute a bio-politics of this population, its primarily form of self-understanding exists as political economy, its theory today is largely the science of genetics and the neo-Darwinian behaviorisms it has spawned, and its means of control in the classical sense (armed force) are embodied in its technical apparatuses of security and policing (and, as it were, as a reserve, a second order army of social workers, psychologists and institutional administrators) and, more and more today, in the practices of its array of medical institutions, establishments and personnel oriented toward pharmaceutical and increasingly genetic controls bringing us back to that point at which we began this discussion These practices developed in the old metropolitan capitals of the capitalist world... Stretching back to Darwin and his fellow naturalists and forward to the work of men like Dobzhansky who systematized the experimental and methodological basis for these practices If one cannot see in the explicitly intended effort to kill land-shells by twenty days of submergence in salty seawater, and when this is ineffective to remove the animals' thick calcereous operculum and to re-immerse them for fourteen more days,1 a straight line of development that, leading through methodical and meticulous use of lethals, nonadaptive, injurious recessive genes - whose carriers are crossed with other organisms, knowing full well that in some of the progeny these genes will become dominant and kill the new organisms,2 further leads to the experiments on human beings by freezing, organ removal, injection with deadly bacteria and is consummated in the industrialized world of mass death in Birkenau, Majdanek, Chelmno, Sobibr, Belzec and Treblinka, then this failure to see, grasp and understand is a function of the severe compartmentalization of affectivity, schizoid personality organization and perhaps even recognition that this is the price capital extracts for material comfort based on the rationalized development of daily life under conditions of capitalist production3
1 2

Darwin, The Origin of Species, 317-318. Dobzhansky, Genetics and the Origins of Species (1937), 24; (1951), 31-32. 3 In the United States these practices appeared from the time of the first imperialist world war onward, but were largely confined to the eugenics movement situated primarily in the formal educative institution of higher learning, and did not come into their own until the aftermath of the last imperialist world war: In its antagonism toward the Soviet Union, a new form of bureaucratized, statist and capitalist Power, a confrontation unfolded, not just ideologically but, on the plane of a fierce competition over the type of societal organization that would mostly readily advance material security and comfort, forming thereby an ideal situation for the elaboration of a bio-politics of population. It was at this moment that the heirs to the eugenics movement were swept into the agencies (existing and newly forming ones) of the American state and, as it were, thereafter descended into the streets.

Since they first appeared on the backs of unitary communities torn by social division, states as states, in their most rudimentary form bodies of armed men, held the capacity to inflict death. In the modern epoch, murder of populations, genocide in its extreme form, has been within the reach of state power. In the contemporary era as Power pursues a bio-politics of population aimed at enhancing a highly controlled and regimented form of life, it at the same time gathers to itself the capacity to industrially administer death. It was in Germany, beginning with much the same higher educative social Darwinian and eugenics orientation, that the Nazis, starting from the central, biologically understood category of race, developed a bio-politics of populations that reached its then contemporary highpoint in man-made mass industrial death of whole populations, in the death worlds for which Auschwitz served as a model.1 And this is the point: Capitals science of genetics is the cognitive framework in which a bio-politics of populations at its origins develops and in and through which it is today constantly elaborated.

We should be clear as to what is at issue here vis--vis the Nazis. It is the relation of Nazi criminality to modern science: The specificity of Nazi crimes can in part be grasped with a view to method: They were systematically, coldly, and bureaucratically carried out on the basis of western scientific rationality. It is crucial to grasp that, beyond outward appearance, that system was central to Nazi genocide. "System" in the case of the Nazis refers to the intentionally directed, methodical, and meticulous and experimentally based practice that attempted to comprehensively identify, destroy the culture of, and then "extirpate", "exterminate", that is, murder human beings who, according to crudely theoretical criteria (i.e., to biologically-naturally grounded and, hence, allegedly permanent and unchanging, imputed behavioral, moral, and cultural characteristics) were ahuman, "subhuman", and presumed unfit, "life unworthy of life". But it is system in this sense that, for the liberal, tolerant and humane, characterizes the highest cultural (Kultur) or civilizational achievement, science, of the West as such. Coextensive with the science, capitalist civilization is the foundation upon with Nazism development, and it is science as theory that underpinned the Nazi genocide in its specific form as industrialized mass murder.

Richard Dawkins' Selfish Genes A Note on the Apogee of and Absurdity in the Neo-Darwinist Doctrine of Adaptation Adaptation is crucial to Dobzhanskys perspective: Organic diversity may be considered an outcome of the adaptation of life to the diversity of the environments of our planet.1 Yet though the causality operative here, as we pointed out at the outset of this discussion, is determinate, niche specific, and unilateral, it is not nonetheless rigid as in, for example, entailing a one-to-one correspondence from the environment by way of the phenotype to the gene (or, for that matter, vice versa). Dobzhansky recognizes position effects (gene effects on organismic development are not only controlled by that genes structure but in relation to other genes with which it grouped);2 not unlike Darwin, he recognizes migration and geographic isolation also enhance or lessen the effects of selection thereby indirectly mediating the relation of genetic structure of populations to their environments;3 he is acutely aware that evolution sometimes exhibits characters (traits) whose adaptive values are not at all apparent, are what he terms adaptively neutral, and that this neutrality may represent only an aspect of a larger whole, that the evolutionary fate of a gene is determined by its effect on the overall adaptive value of the genotypic gestalt; 4 that, relatedly, a mutation or mutant gene may have adaptively unfavorable effects relative to its genotype but in relation to another genetic complex, in combination with other genes, it might be favorable;5 and, that similarly dominance and recessiveness of genes is decided by the entire genotypic structure.6 Even if the last (1951) edition of Dobzhansky work exhibited a hardening, as Gould says, whose most important feature was the centrality of adaptation for all evolutionary theorization, later Neo-Darwinism development, especially as it reached its highpoint (a dominance that it has not relinquished to this day), say as it was propounded after 1970, cannot be said to have shared this openness. The first significant statement of this, the later evolution of neo-Darwinism came with Edward O. Wilsons Sociobiology. But Wilson, while providing one among other theoretically rarified and reified elaborations of capitals technologies of social control, is too consistent, too reasoned, too difficult, in other words, altogether out of the tune with capitals culture of the daily life dominated by its spectacle, and in this respect by its immediacy, its inanity, its dissembling, its mendaciousness, its mystifications and obfuscations. In most regards, not so with Dawkins' and his selfish gene. Here the issue is not adaptation as one category, among others, operative in the relation of organism to environment (the argument, if that is what it can be called, does not rise to this level), but articulation of the viewpoint that goes far beyond mere adaptation in Dobzhanskys sense, that of the gene as selfish agency that is determinate, even if mediately, for life as a whole precisely because, first, every (phenotypic) trait characteristic has its corresponding gene or genes and, second, each and every organic trait, structure and function is itself an adaptation... For us, it is the entirely diversionary standpoint of a work wholly immersed in the culture of capital. What is there to argue with a genes-eye view of nature or the genes eye view of Darwinism? Other than an article, a and the, is there a difference between nature and Darwinism? 7 How is such a standpoint achievable? Does it occur to Dawkins that a genes-eye view is epistemologically absurd? Does Dawkins understood that the invocation of our familiar criteria of verification and falsification8 refers to categories of the evaluation of evidence and truth that are, again, epistemologically incoherent? How can we argue with someone who believes that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes? That the fundamental problem of genetics entails a demonstration that selfishness, not altruism, governs biological development?9 That humans evolved by natural selection? Who, in reaching back to the origins of eukaryotic life, can only see a highly competitive world in which survival and only survival is at issue, in which the predominant quality securing success is ruthless selfishness, and sees the war carried out between and among genes? For whom are fitness and the struggle for existence the defining
1 2

Dobzhansky, Ibid (1951), 254. Ibid (1937), 13; (1951), 36. 3 Ibid (1937), 140-147, 181-186 (migration), and chapter 8 (isolation); (1951), chapter 7 (isolation). 4 Ibid (1951), 99. 5 Ibid (1951), 259. 6 Ibid (1951), 104. 7 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, viii, ix. 8 Ibid, ix. 9 Ibid, 2, 3, 123.

features of life engaged in a fight to the death against itself over limited resources? How is it that the gene makes its living in the gene pool? That sub-branches and sub-branches of plants and animals as survival machines evolved each one excelling in a particular specialized way? Is the currency used in the casino of evolution survival? Does evolution as a casino suggest life is a crap shoot?1 Is a cost benefit determination a universal feature of human life, or merely that of bourgeois (egoistic) man? 2 In all these cases, the specific features of daily life under conditions of capitalist production, its massified subjectivity, its abstract labor, its bellum omium contra omnes, are transposed into an undifferentiated nature understood atomistically in terms of genes. How is it that these fundamental units, genes, have the character of replicators, whose most important feature is individual fecundity? How is it that we, that is, all animals, plants, bacteria, and viruses, all are survival machines?3 On what grounds does Dawkins lump the living (animals, plants, bacteria) with the non-living (viruses)? Is an organism genetically programmed with a list of nasty things such as various sorts of pain, nausea, an empty stomach to which it accordingly responds in the manner of a computer program responds to software instructions?4 Who or what makes the assessment that survival of the fittest is really just a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable? And what does this suggest with necessity about a being in nature characterized by reflexivity? And what is the status of such a being? Is it merely another stable thing, i.e., a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name?5 What is a thing? What justifies Dawkins genetic reductionism and atomism?6 The fact that genes are immortal, possessing an expectation of life that must be measured in thousands and millions of years? What metaphysics lurks here, making a gene a good candidate as the basic unit of natural selection? 7 I.e., if genes collaborate and interact in inextricably complex ways, both with each other and with their external environment, and if the effect of a gene depends on its environment, and [if] that includes other genes, if genes which are in no way linked to each other physically can be selected for their mutual compatibility, if a compatible combination of genes is selected together as a unit, then how is it possible to speak of a unilateral relation based on a one-to-one correspondence between gene and trait, for example, how is it possible that sexuality versus non-sexuality [is to] be regarded as an attribute under single-gene control, just like blue eyes versus brown eyes? What evidence does Dawkins' offer for the assertion that the same genetic unit or gene is to be regarded as the nearest thing we have to a fundamental, independent agent of evolution.8 And if consciousness, choice, behavior (sedimented or internalized social norms governing daily life) and action (collective doings that transform the social world and, or, remake surrounding nature) disappear in this potpourri of genetic determinism, how do they reappear, especially at levels below where they are by and large deemed to operate? How, for example, is it that a mother monkey grieving over the loss of an infant and, in steal[ing] an infant from another female is excoriated for a double mistake, since the adopter not only wastes her own time, but also releases a rival female from the burden of child-rearing? Is the monkey to engage in reflection? Choose an alternative courses of action based on a cost benefit analysis of her situation? 9 To momentarily reflect on this is to be struck by its ridiculousness. There is a singular fundamental feature, cellular size, that distinguishes females from males in organisms which sexually reproduction: Female gamates are significantly larger. Moreover, it is possible to interpret all the other differences between the sexes as stemming from this one basic difference.10 Dawkins has been roundly criticized for the blatant sexism of this entire account (among other things its manifest politically reactionary character), for example, in the discussions of courtship, stepchild adoption and desertion.11 This is, further, a question of the
1 2

Ibid, 2; 7; 10; 17, 18; 45, 46, 55. Ibid, 69, 98, 116, passim. 3 Ibid, 17, 21, 46, passim. 4 Ibid, 57. 5 Ibid, 12. Emphasis in original. 6 See the characterizations of a behavior pattern and single gene, e.g., Ibid, 60, 62. 7 Ibid, 34; 36, 40. 8 Ibid, 37, 39, 40 (emphasis added), 84 (emphasis deleted). 9 Ibid, 102-103. 10 Ibid, 141. 11 Ibid, 147-150. He grudgingly acknowledges and accepts the criticism in his 1989 Preface, Ibid, x.

thinking that is operative in accounts of this sort, a reductionism that is utterly abstract, that is in principle incapable of grasping the specificity of various natural and human forms of sociation, and it is equally apparent in his characterization of the physiological situatedness of genes (here sexual genes that spend about half their time sitting in male bodies, and the other half sitting in female bodies)1: Sexuality is not genetically determined in the sense Dawkins would have it, i.e., in terms of its social significance. To the contrary, it is this social determined signification that pervades the entire experience, affectivity and physiology of human beings (under specific, and specifiable, socio-historical conditions of sociation) and other, e.g., higher primate, forms of life. His discussion of the genetic determination of cooperative interaction2 similarly stems from this reductionism, and here it brings the whole utterly crude bourgeois character of his conception of the gene, as selfish, to the fore. Like the political economists of old (but with none of their sophistication), he starts from the gross atomistic abstraction, this fundamental unit, the gene (in their case, the egoistic individual). The meaningless and absurdity of his account resides in the fact that he cannot, and does not even undertake to, discuss and render intelligible communal forms of activity, and the reason, obvious, is that he does not start form social organization of labor and production.3 In the end, he admits his own vacuity, stating, There is no end to the fascinating speculation that the idea of reciprocal altruism engenders when we apply it to our own species. Tempting as it is, I am no better at such speculation than the next man4 Meaning, in his smug, self-satisfied manner, that all such discussion is speculation, an entirely gratuitous and wrongheaded assertion. The extracts above are entirely summary with regard to Dawkins views, that are in point of fact underwhelming with the mass of examples, and in particular, metaphors and analogies that otherwise dominant his presentation. This vast preponderance of metaphors and analogies permits Dawkins to avoid making an argument directly, for an argument as such would demonstrate the meaninglessness, in some cases the ludicrousness of the points he believes he is making, of the position he formulates. As we suggested immediately above, what is there to argue with here? The position is impregnable (what Dawkins himself would call unfalsifiable), since he, in his own words, merely speaks the arbitrary and capricious (i.e., expressing nothing more than personal preference) language of convenience5: Deploying a babble of metaphors and confused analogies, Dawkins rejects argument as a form of persuasion. His entire position strongly suggests he rejects tacitly or otherwise rational norms of discourse. (But, then, where do his real interests lie? In selling books, as sales figures and library placements might indicate? In success or personal aggrandizement as his responses to reviews might suggest?) Dawkins believes he theorizes nothing, he does not engage thought in gene determination of plant, animal, and human behavior and activity. His perspective, if we may grace it with this characterization, is a step back, nay several steps back with regard to the modern synthesis at its origins. Its not just that he is a popularizer (so was Steve Gould), it is that his analyses are grossly undertheorized, incoherent once they aspire to achieve this level (theory), and completely insulated to boot. Dawkins work pap, swizzle and garbage can and should be dismissed with a cavalier wave of the hand, if for no other reason than his central polemic against altruism and in favor of the selfish gene is an anthropomorphic projection. This issue is false, the problem non-existent.

1 2

Ibid, 145. Ibid, 168. 3 Ibid, 166-188. 4 Ibid, 188. 5 Ibid, 47.

Part IV Foundations of the Malthusian-Darwinian Nexus in Potential Species Productivity Neo-Darwinism, especially in its second dogmatic phase, though dominant is not the sole form in which evolutionary biology is understood and practiced in the Anglo-American world today. Beginning in the early 1970s (actually dating back to the early twentieth century in Russia), a form of biological theorization has developed that eschews the conceptual straightjacket of adaptation, assertion of a unilinear relation running from environment to organism, and mathematical models of population groups as the object of evolutionary analysis. Instead, this alternative affirms the self-organizing, self-sustaining and self-reproducing and self-determining (autonomous) character of life as synthesis (inclusive of lifes capacity to maintain itself, its structure and organization in the face of dramatic changes in its milieu). Rather technically referred to as serial endosymbiosis, this theorization is associated more than any other figure with the name of Lynn Margulis (who, unlike Malthus, Darwin and Dobzhansky, is a living contemporary of ours). Because it is oriented to a genuine account of speciation as such and pursues this account in the context for which life is inseparably shaped by and shapes the nonorganic world in which it has evolutionarily developed, and thus reaches back to life in its earliest known stable forms in their relation to earthly nature, Margulis is able to... albeit from the perspective of a still too highly undifferentiated concept of life and on the basis of a theory that retains in essential form the Malthusian concept of population... develop a mystified critique of humanity and civilization that nonetheless raises her standpoint far above that achieved by normal science. Lynn Margulis: Symbiosis and Genuine Evolutionary Innovation Against the rigidity of neo-Darwinian doctrine (she explicitly characterizes it on the model of religious dogma),1 Margulis lays claim to an authentic Darwinian voice in our own era.2 And, in fact and for the purposes of this discussion, she does reach all the way back to Darwin, to the very foundations of his theorization in his identification of the essential core of natural selection found in 'lifes' potential productivity. This is of the utmost significance: Margulis focus in this regard brings into clear relief the underlying basis that connection evolutionary biology at its origins (Darwin) with its most recent developments, that exhibits its continuity and sustains this relation across its entire history, and that sustains it as a rarified, sometimes oblique, theoretical reflection on problem of surplus population as it rises from capitalist practice. We can demonstrate this continuity by examining the concept of potential productivity as elaborated by Margulis.3 We shall start tentatively by offering a determination of life at its origins, reveal its fundamental division (according to Margulis), demonstrate the essential relation of life to its immediate milieux decidedly counterposing Margulis comprehension of life to neo-Darwinians and, on this basis, exhibit the continuity (her fidelity to Darwin) that she asserts. Having done so, we shall have laid bare the central motif that has guided the construction of all evolutionary biological thinking since its origins, effectively affirming the relation of the science of life to capital, its problematic and the tasks in one of its forms that it, capital, sets for its theory (science) beyond which it, science, does not transgress... As it first emerged on Earth some 3.8 to 4 billion years ago, in its most original, archaic form life consisted minimally in a cellular membrane, a greasy little lipid bag containing phosphates and nucleotides that, in metabolism, in a continuous chemical exchange of an inside with an outside, grew increasingly complex and capable of selfmaintenance and, eventually with real consistency, self-reproduction. Starting from here we can further formulate a basic distinction that, as it turns out from the standpoint of life considered simply as living, is fundamental, namely, the distinction between prokaryote and eukaryote.4

1
2

Big Trouble in Biology, reprinted Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis, and Evolution, 271-272, 279, 281. See the entire essay referred in the previous note. 3 We would be remiss if we did not explicitly note the importance of Margulis re-theorization of biology and its evolutionary foundations: The body of her work taken together, especially her Symbiosis in Cell Evolution, is not merely the proverbial major contribution to her field. Rather, it forms a systematic, fundamental rethinking of evolutionary biology as a whole, and devolves on to a coherent series of reflections on earthly nature and life, and, beyond this, to a summary statement of the place and role of humanity in this nature. 4 Etymologically, the term prokaryote is derived from the ancient Greek, pro and karyon signifying before or prior and seed or nucleus.

Prokaryotes are bacterial organisms (including blue-green algae and grass green Prochloron organisms) as well as some multicellular bacterial type organisms (actinomycetes and gliding myxobacteria).5 Characteristically, they lack a nucleus: A membrane does not enclose the genetic material internal to a bacterial cell, instead it floats freely in the cytoplasm. In geological time, bacteria precede the appearance of nucleated organisms (hence, before the nucleus), the eukaryotes; that is to say, in our complexly conceptually mediated evidential reconstructions of early life inseparable from the history of the early Earth, the fusion, unification, or symbiosis of two originally distinct and independent bacterial organisms (a spirochete, a flagellated or mobile bacterium, a swimmer, and an archaebacterial host), this coming to and as it were living together as one (cemented by the integration of spirochete DNA into the host genome), constituted nucleated organisms at their origins, a process called eukaryosis.6 Eukaryotic cell organization is the foundation of all, more elaborate life, plant, fungi and animal; or, to engage in the reductionism typifying biological analysis that assume (as does Margulis) life can be adequately understood in terms of its most elementary forms, plant, fungi and animal forms are eukaryotes.7 Margulis proposes (she was not first) a two super kingdom, five kingdom taxonomy.4 The two superkingdoms are, of course, prokaryota and eukaryota; and the five kingdoms are monera, and protoctista, plantae, fungi and animalia. The monera, essentially non-nucleated organisms, are divided into two types (subkingdoms) of bacteria, archaebacteria and eubacteria.5 Generally speaking, the former groups of bacteria respire anaerobically, that is, they do not rely on oxygen (which is lethal to them) in metabolism; the latter group is either simultaneously anaerobic and aerobic like the cyanobacteria, or aerobic, that is oxygen dependent for respiration. It was from Margulis that the author first learned (though she emphatically was not the first to recognize, the insight going back to the late nineteenth century among students of bacteria)6 that the Earth was not always atmospherically of oxygen-nitrogen composition. Composition of the primary atmosphere, made of gases that emanated from the solar system nebula as
5

Lynn Margulis, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution: Microbial Communities in the Archean and Proterozoic Eons, 29. Symbiosis in Cell Evolution is Margulis major work, a theoretical summation of her scientific investigations, reflections and analyses, what we might call a fundamental and grand evolutionary biology. The first edition of the work was published in 1981, and the second, utilized here, constitutes a major revision in which new developments in early cell biology permitted Margulis to reinterpret the bacteria to organelle transitions that formed the eukaryote. For remarks in this regard, see the Preface to the second edition, Ibid, xxi. 6 Ibid, 6, 269, 300. 7 It would be helpful to further distinguish bacterial prokaryotes from eukaryotic cells by way of a brief discussion of the genetic-hereditary implications of the absence or presence of a cellular nucleus. Bacteria live in large, densely crowded communities often comprising billions upon billions of organisms, communities that appear interconnected spatially. Within a bacterium, DNA molecules are loosely packed in circular shapes known as large replicons. There are also similar molecules or fragments or aspects, if you will, of those molecules within a cellular structure called a small replicon. The small replicons are not bounded by the bacterium, fated as it were to exist within its membrane. Instead, they can seep out and into other bacteria, through a molecular construct that neutralize the bacterial cell wall of a new host. In this form, they are known as plasmids or prophages. They are vital to the reproduction of bacteria, since groups of similar bacteria, known as strains, possess fewer genes that are necessary for the strain to exist in any given natural milieu. The bacterium is, as the strains are, incomplete as an organism. The small replicon as a prophage, say, will carry from one bacterium to another the genes that are necessary for its existence, perhaps mutations and especially in the case where a novel, existentially dangerous event, process or situation develops in its environment Bacteria can exchange genes rapidly and reversibly The entirety of replicons together with communities of bacteria and their genes constitutes a global gene pool, or global genome, that any strain can draw on at any given time (Sorin Sonea and Lo G. Mathieu, Prokaryotology) In this regard, Sonea and Mathieu speak of a uniform global clone (Ibid, 75) and a global superorganism (Ibid, 77). Critically, we can note this global bacterial organism so-called is not bounded by a membrane, at this global level metabolism cannot legitimately be spoken of, and there is no reproduction of the superorganism as such. The characterization is a hypostatization, the problem here is in conceptualization. The authors fail to adequately theorize the unity in difference and difference in unity that essentially distinguish bacteria taken together. We can and should recognize a functional unity but not a living one Heredity, then, is not an accomplishment of intracellular DNA, and mitosis (cell division in which duplicate male and female chromosomes form the basis of reproduction) is not the means of the generation of new bacteria. Bacteria evolve without speciation, they do not speciate (Sonea, Bacterial Evolution without Speciation, in Margulis and Fester, Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation, 95-105.). In fact, bacteria do not have an identifiable life cycle, and though their existence can be terminated (by introduction of a foreign, destructive and inassimilable chemical force within their environment, by predation), they are not born, and do not mature, age and die (Ibid). 4 Symbiosis in Cell Evolution, 24-26 (charts). 5 Among the former are counted methogens (methanomicrobiates, methanobacteria), thermophiles and halophilic bacteria; among the latter we find green non-sulfur bacteria, purple bacteria (which gave rise to animal mitochondria after their assimilation by other bacteria at a later stage of eukaryosis) and cyanobacteria (which gave rise to plant chloroplasts, again, after their assimilation by other bacteria, discussed below, and otherwise known as blue-green algae). Ibid, 62-63, 65 (figures). 6 See Liya Nikolaevna Khakhina, Concepts of Symbiogenesis: A Historical and Critical Study of the Research of Russian Botanists, and Jan Sapp, Symbiosis by Association: A History of Symbiosis, passim.

various planetary, secondary (moons), asteroid, meteorite bodies were differentiated out, is no longer accessible. The earliest Earth atmosphere may have been largely nitrogen with a significant methane component. Low oxygen environments still exist in abundance on Earth (wherever warm temperatures dominate, for example, at the mid-oceans ridge vent systems and geothermal hot spots, in boiling hot springs, hydrogen sulfide-rich geothermal springs, hot brine lakes, on the edges of active terrestrial volcanoes and within the crater and plumes of an erupting submarine volcano, within rocks in the polar deserts, on the floors of ice-covered lakes and sea ice in the Antarctic, and in deep aquifers from one to over three kilometers below the surface of the Earth, even in low oxygen muds that can be found temperate zones), but they are obviously no longer ubiquitous and determinate for life as a whole. It is Margulis estimation (one that is conventionally shared), that such an atmosphere existed, no later than circa 3.8 to 4 billion years ago, and persisted for a long term, at least until say 2.5 billion years. Now among eukaryotes none of these features and conditions that characterize prokaryotes obtain. The former do possess membrane bound DNA that individuates them as organisms, their internal cell structures are qualitatively dissimilar to prokaryotes, DNA is not transposed from one organism to another of the same type, all the necessary hereditary features are contained intercellularly, eukaryotes form physiologically and hereditary (with the exception of diverse secondary characteristics) identical individuals within a type (they speciate), and they all have a life cycle beginning in birth and terminating in death of the organism. So how did eukaryotes originate? Margulis answer is that eukaryotes, a genuine evolutionary novelty of the first order of significance, owe their origins to merger of distinctively different bacteria (prokaryotes). Her theorization points to a development in which four different unifications led to essentially two distinct forms of eukaryosis. The theory (serial endosymbiosis or symbiogenesis) is generally accepted with the exception of one of those symbiotic events that involved eukaryotic motility. While we shall not attempt a detailed explication of these unifications,1 we can briefly describe them. Like the origins of life itself, the last common ancestor to these two kingdom-level forms of bacteria is no longer accessible Now that means that this reconstruction is highly speculative which further means, beyond marshaling available, albeit thin evidence for this event, the reconstructed event as an event plays little role in the presentation of the theorization in Symbiosis in Cell Evolution2 But archaebacteria still exist and it is a form of this bacteria, a sulfur respiring and heat tolerant bacterium (a thermoacidophil which contributed most of the protein making metabolism) together with a, relatively speaking, smaller, elongated and mobile bacterium, a swimmer (the origin home of bacteria was aqueous) and anaerobe known as a spirochete whose unity formed the original symbiosis. The nucleated organisms were small, obviously microbes, mobile and anaerobic (swimmers living in non-oxygenated, aquatic milieux). Margulis believes these environments were always characterized by scarcity of food, the organism itself subject to lethal toxicity and desiccation, at least relative to intracellular environments that are characterized by an abundance of food (here we are speaking of inorganic chemicals that can be synthesized) and aqueous. She believes the swimmer was able to breach the membrane of the archaebacterium, thus having access to nutrition and energy.3 The swimmer, who Margulis believes was extremely hardy, was to sustain itself within the other bacterial organism, both eventually undergoing transformation as a consequence, giving rise to the nuclear cytoplasm of eukaryotes as we see them today.4 (The nucleus, however, developed by internal differentiation of the nucleocytoplasm, not by symbiosis.)5 This first eukaryotic cell remained anaerobic and was heterotrophic (i.e., it metabolized preconstituted organic compound molecules).6
For such an account, see our Lynn Margulis: Partisan of the Monera. Manuscript, 2009, where we have also undertaken a detailed evidential and methodological critique, and examined her relation to neo-Darwinism. 2 Symbiosis in Cell Evolution, 204-208, esp. 205. 3 The Symbiotic Planet, 44. 4 Margulis (Symbiosis in Cell Evolution, 17, 341) tells us that no known prokaryote feeds by engulfing, then digesting, other living cells (a practice known as phagocytosis), so, she excludes the speculative hypothesis that the archaebacterium engulfed the spirochete. 5 This much appears clear, first, from the inability of the nucleus itself to produce proteins it is not an autonomous system and second, from continuity between the outer nuclear membrane with the endoplasm reticulum (a string like cytoplasmic substance that surrounds the nuclear membrane and extends into the latter itself), itself a continuation of the balance of the endomembrane system (outer nuclear membrane, endoplasmic reticulum, outer membrane of other organelles and Gogli apparatus), all of which strongly suggests a developmental process of internal differentiation. Ibid, 31 (line drawing and sketch), 220, 218. 6 Ibid, 7.
1

There were three other evolutionary developments, all symbiotic, which are crucial for eukaryotic life. The first of these,1 the evolutionarily next development was the assimilation of an oxygen breather, a purple bacterium (proteobacterium). These were aerobic eubacteria with a cytoplasmic system capable of the total oxidation of carbohydrates producing carbon dioxide and water, able to live in acidic aqueous milieux characterized by high temperatures.2 They eventually became cellular mitochondria, and are as such responsible for the oxygen respiratory-based metabolism of the novel evolutionary development, which is now trigenomic (i.e., has a genetic structure that integrates aspects, not all, of the once specific genomes of each of three once distinctive bacterial organisms). The second of in this group of evolutionary developments3 (and, the third recounted here) involves symbiosis by way of which an original, primitive eukaryotic just described developed the capacity for photosynthesis, which involved its merger with a prokaryote capable of sourcing energy from light. The prokaryote, a cyanobacterium, was at once capable of sustaining itself in both non-oxygen and oxygen environments.4 The bacterium that this cyanobacterium assimilated resulted in the formation of chloroplasts, and thus involves the origins of plant life: Heterotrophic protists those organisms that are nucleated (eukaryotic) yet are not animal, plant or fungi, which are dependent upon organic molecules as sources of both energy and carbon symbiotically acquired fully developed, aerobic prokaryotes whose energy source was light (making them oxygenic and phototrophic). 5 For Margulis, like the previous mentioned merger, this one also was a bloody struggle as the oxygen respirator engulfed and ingested, attempted to but was unable to assimilate a bright green photosynthetic bacterium. This incorporation in the literal sense of the word transpired only as the un-assimilated green bacterium endured and unification was achieved. The green bacterium would become a chloroplast, i.e., a specific form of a plastid, a cellular organelle possessing a hereditary system that does not derive from and continues to function relatively autonomously in relation to the nucleus their systems are interdependent, yet the organelles reproduce differently that the nucleus reproducing the rest of the cell constituting within the cell a moment of non-Mendelian heredity as is similarly the case with mitochondria. Now, the photosynthetic function in plants together with organelle dependency on products of nuclear genome demonstrates the increasing tendency toward interdependency in cell evolution.6 In fact, in each of these mergers, the development takes over large stretches of geological time, occurs over and again, and involves a growth in the size and complexity of the new organism. These symbioses are what Margulis calls obligatory, i.e., they are irreversible and become so by genetic integration of the symbionts. In all cases, the novel organism reproduces prolifically, selected (though by way of non-Mendelian inheritance), better fitted in the Darwinian sense to sustain itself in being. The last, but actually the second evolutionarily significant symbiosis7 (the fourth as we are presenting it here, one not generally accepted by microbiologists and evolutionary biologists) concerns the origins of another mobile bacterium (which would become the mobility organelle, the undulipodia), a swimmer also, for as we might note the only environment of living beings, organisms, on Earth for perhaps as much as the first three billion years of evolution was aqueous. On Margulis account, this organelle originated from spirochete bacterium, which means that it was the evolutionary outcome of the union of spirochete bacterium with the protoeukaryote described above (that is, the outcome of the first merger), an archaebacterium itself undergoing evolutionary change, itself the product of the original symbiosis. She thinks that spirochetes originally attached themselves to the protoeukaryote in order to feed, specifically on small organic molecular compounds that seeped through the membrane of the host.8 Once integrated into the host, the latter achieved an enormous selective advantage, namely, rapid motility
1 2

Ibid, 305-326. Ibid, 306. 3 Ibid, 327-344. 4 Photosynthesis developed in anaerobes in the absence of molecular oxygen, photosynthetic organisms that release gaseous oxygen were a later development, and only after significant amounts of atmospheric oxygen had been produced over thousands of millennia to transform Earths atmosphere did obligatory oxygen respiring organisms appear. 5 Ibid, 328, 330. 6 Ibid, 338. 7 Ibid, 217-303. 8 Ibid, 6.

Between Endosymbiosis Theory and Darwinian Evolution Return to the point of departure of this discussion: Obviously, there is a relation between prokaryotes and eukaryotes. It is evolutionary. The process of the formation of the first eukaryotes (first in geologically reconstructed time), called eukaryosis, was, according to Margulis, symbiotic, the union of two distinct bacteria into a single cellular organism. Symbiosis is evolutionary novelty (innovation). These stages, steps or unifications in the evolutionary process of eukaryosis can and should be understood as a series of qualitative transformations that, only beginning with distinct kinds of bacteria, cellular life underwent. Clearly, then, Margulis thinks that the most significant evolutionary innovations in the deep history of life on Earth were twofold, first, the creation of metabolic pathways fundamental to all life1 and, second, the symbiotic unifying phases of a development that led from prokaryotic cellular life to eukaryotic life, eukaryosis. For just as manifestly, for her, there is simply nothing comparable in that entire history which rises to the level of change and transformation as this passage: For Margulis, to account for the developing structure and organization of the prokaryotic cell, and its symbioses, from the first merger through the others with their increasing cellular complexification, is to account for the major evolutionary development in that entire history, before which all others pale. Why? Eukaryosis, as the symbiotic process of cellular nuclearization, is co-extensive with mitotic sexuality (with self-contained cellular DNA, chromosomal division, male and female contribution of half their DNA and on this basis with organismic reproduction) and hereditary reproduction of individuals that are the same as to type, that is, with speciation. While bacteria with their global genome do not speciate, eukaryosis is at the origins of species, and an account of eukaryosis is an account of the origin of species. So, if in respect to origins Margulis has gone beyond Darwin, for her, how is the pre-eukaryotic conception of what is truly innovative in evolution fit with a Darwinian theorization that is based upon highly complex eukaryotes, plant and elaborate animal (the overwhelming portion of which Darwin discusses is insect and mammalian) life? What, conceptually, if not geological-temporally and evidentially in the analytic sense, links her to Darwin? What connects serial endosymbiosis, for which nothing of evolutionary significance occurs after the appearance of eukaryotes, with the Darwinian theory of evolution? In Darwin, natural selection has the meaning of a differential sorting of the content of whatever the specific hereditary mechanism is consequent upon the reproductive success of individual organisms. So that, might any inherited differences decide how many progeny some organisms have in relation to other (species similar) organisms, patently then the inheritance of the following generation would have contributed to that numerical difference in progeny. In terms of reproductive success, we are of course speaking of offspring whose chances of survive and reproduction (again relative to other organisms) are enhanced by this inheritance. Now for Darwin, as we have seen, it is the Malthusian insuperable numerical preponderancy of the offspring an organic being produces over what, in competitive struggle with other such beings especially those of the same species, can survive, it is this situation that renders natural selection so extraordinarily efficacious. For Margulis, any (meaning all) organism(s) subject to natural selection will evolve in Darwins sense. Why? Such is the case merely for the simple reason that all the potential products of reproduction can never survive,2 where potential products means progeny or offspring. Margulis is quite clear:
Natural selection is a simple consequence of the fact that too many autopoietic entities are potentially self-produced than can possibly survive. Natural selection is the inability, in any given case, for the biotic potential to be reached. Biotic potential, the capacity for organisms to self-produce (fission into, hatch, give birth to, etc.) other organisms, is measured by the units: organisms produced per generation (or organisms per unit time).3
1

Having forgone this discussion, we can simply cite Margulis: During the Archean age of the anaerobes it is probable that all of the major prokaryotic metabolic and enzymatic systems had evolved: nucleic acid - protein-based autopoiesis and DNA repair; fermentation; glycolysis; biosynthesis of ester- and ether-linked lipids; methanogenesis; cell wall and spore wall formation alkanoate reserve deposition tricarboxylic acid pathways both for synthesis and for ATP generation; the various pathways of carbon dioxide fixation; nitrogen fixation; anaerobic photosynthesis the oxidation of hydrogen sulfide to sulfur; the deposition of elemental sulfur, sulfate, and sulfide; iron and manganese oxidation and reduction; and so forth. Ibid, 130. More to the point, The pre-Phanerozoic world was composed of small organisms but an evolutionarily powerful biota; major trends and innovations of the extant biosphere were established Fermentation, photosynthesis, aerobiosis, symbioses, mitosis, meiosis, morphogenesis, and embrogenesis had made possible by then the modulation of the planets surface by life. Ibid, 343. 2 Slanted Truths, 101, 98 (citation). 3 Ibid, 104.

Or, Darwin recognized that all populations, given unlimited resources had the capacity to grow exponentially. He called the many checks that keep all populations from ever reaching their reproductive potential natural selection.1 Again, We know about the inheritance of variation and biotic potential more individuals are produced than can possible survive in the populations of all creatures at all times.2 Perhaps, most forcefully, the failure to grow and reproduce at maximal capacity (that is, failure of biotic potential to be reached) is equivalent to natural selection.3 Margulis account of this motor of evolution at its origins suggesting a world of material scarcity, here starvation, as the great driving force for unification is at the level of biological accounts of the origins of life modeled on one of the two great variants of humanitys origins in bourgeois literatures. (The other is the world of natural abundance in which the original community is primitively egalitarian, socially undivided. The figure most often associated with this vision is Rousseau): Please, if you will, note the formal identity of points of departure between Margulis and the great bourgeois thinkers Locke for example, Hobbes surely, but more to the point Malthus in particular Man appears in the state of nature that is shaped by scarcity, by the brute facticity that there is not enough for all. As a theorization of the state of society, as a natural being, man is compelled by need to labor, to overcome naturally given scarcity through the development of technique, while scarcity itself makes it inevitable an individual or group will raise himself or itself over others, thus socially organizing this facticity, to secure himself or itself against its ravages Crudely, this is the social theory of the bourgeoisie. Patently such is the case in Hobbes (where security is guaranteed by sovereign Power), and in Malthus, where social division disappears to be replaced by the plight of the poor laborers, and the population law receives its formulation. In Darwin, (the categories of the analysis of) society is (are), as we have already indicated, transposed into nature. Margulis position in this regard can and should be recognized as a more abstract, rarified statement of Darwin himself, as in a struggle for existence inevitably follows from the high ratio at which organic beings tend to increase,4 or in her own words, the nearly infinite biological potential for reproduction.5 The difference is that, for Margulis, an unrealizable potential productivity characterizes all life inclusive of bacteria, a characterization that Darwin had he been aware of the significance of the monera would have indubitably affirmed. But the concept potential productivity should be identified as what it is, namely, a contemporarily refined, restatement of the Malthusian population law, but one insidiously projected backward in geological time to those moments at which in this reconstruction life in its elementary cellular form achieved its initial expansions (symbioses). This is a bourgeois, scientific theorization par excellence. Potential Productivity and its Critique Now, for Darwin, reproductive success (and hence natural selection) is inextricably bound up with the actual progeny of any given organisms. The emphasis on actuality is conceptually a piece with the hereditarily mediated, unilinear relation of organism to environment taken over from Malthus expressed in the neo-Darwinians by way of the mesmerizing concept of adaptation. If, however, organism and milieu incessantly shape each other, if we recognize the basic inadequacy of this flawed conceptualization (positivistically, the essentially falsified nature of this unilateral and unilinear concept), then the stress on potentiality in point of fact, beginning from an actually unreal, ideal and counter-real, impossible situation practically and logically with a view to events in nature, though not in a laboratory is a backhanded way to retain the linkage to Darwinism, effectively to justify selection, when the fixed organism (species) environment relation has been abandoned, after it is no longer meaningful to speak of natural selection as the general determinant of the constitution of species as such.6
1 2

Ibid, 214. Ibid, 252. 3 Ibid, 105. 4 The Origin of Species, 61. 5 Symbiosis in Cell Evolution, 171. 6 In her polemic with the neo-Darwinists, Margulis tacitly recognizes this, i.e., the artificial and ideal assumptions assumptions that entail, absent constraints, logical even if experimentally based, speculative constructs that are involved in positing potentiality as determinate for the reproductive success of living organism. There she states, natural selection just refers to the fact that biotic potential is not reached; the ability of populations of cells and organisms to maximally grow is always limited by the growth of different cells and organisms and their associated surroundings (Slanted Truths, 273). But, in doing so, she invokes precisely what she has rejected elsewhere, if not a competitive struggle, (survival of the fittest), then environmental determinism. In contradistinction, forms of life not only maintain their integrity (internal

In this regard, Margulis is not a maverick. The strategy she pursues is common among contemporary biologists who are alive to lifes decisive role in making its own environment. Thus, Manfred Schidowski, writing in the same volume to which Margulis is also a contributor, tells us that, It is well established that living systems possess an intrinsic property of being able to proliferate until they encounter externally imposed limits, striving to occupy all empty spaces available and thereby straining the spatial and nutritional carrying capacity of the supporting environment to virtual exhaustion.1 As if the organism could be considered apart from its ecological context, as if its existence was monadological, as if it existed in a vacuum. In thought, reflections of this sort are deemed speculatively abstract in the metaphysical sense. But, then, the modern science has created a context, the laboratory, in which that speculative seems to, in the sense of semblance, lose its abstractness, in which it appears concrete in, of course, the interests of the will to power, the nihilistic project of planetary domination also called nature mastery. What, pray tell, makes this so well known (Margulis) and well established (Schidowski)? Why is it so self-evident? To find out we must return (from Slanted Truths) to Margulis far less polemical, more scholarly work where our answer, in a throwaway line, awaits us. In a remark about the absence of division in kinetosomes (intracellular organelles at the base of the undulopia), Margulis notes, Even in Stentor... 20,000 oral kinetosomes can be experimentally induced to form in less than two hours2 Yes, stemming from the uniquely capitalist context in its perverse scientific practice otherwise known as laboratory experimentation, This is, indeed, a demonstration of the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms.3 Here, the potential character of natural productivity is artificially induced; it is not a development based on conditions in nature, but a laboratory experiment, that is, it is a situation wherein wholly unnatural conditions, conditions not obtaining in nature are created, for example, a living being is subject to organ removal, it is dismembered, dissected, stained, bleached, injected with molecular antibodies, e.g., anti-tubulin serum is applied to cellular structure made of tubulin proteins its life sustaining activities are inhibited e.g., fluid is introduced into a cellular organism that dissolves the cytoplasm it is thrust into a lethal gaseous or liquid environment e.g., an aerobic organism is subject to low oxygen concentrations, a pelagic organism is subject to abrupt, drastic changes in water temperature4 i.e., it, the organism, is gratuitously murdered. In a purely abstract way (again, in a way in which it does not occur in nature), we are dealing with a conditionkilling, as in predation that has the same outcome but is altogether absent the shapes of those that exist in nature but one which is explicitly precluded, set aside, in Darwinian evolutionary theorizations. Experiments, especially those with flies or bugs in jars, are too numerous to cite.5 An experiment on the model of bourgeois science is an artificial construct characterized by conditions that obtain nowhere in nature. It is only a question of its purpose.6 Here, the purpose of the equation of natural selection with the failure to achieve potential productivity is obvious, it is a question of retaining the linkage with Darwin, which, in some circles at least, is mandatory if one wishes to be read, understood and applauded as an evolutionary biologist. In an overlapping, albeit different context (one that is more than merely relevant to Margulis, with her commitments to Gaia that date back to the early seventies and a number of articles co-authored with Lovelock), G.R. Williams writes, The Gaia hypothesis, by suggesting that the high level of O2 in the environment is set by the requirements of a biosphere dominated by aerobes as well as being a cause of that dominance, risks turning Darwinian evolution into a [dialectically] circular argument. The only obvious escape
structure and organization) in the face of a changing milieu (self-maintaining as Margulis argues), but are self-limiting. The potential for exponential growth is not one of lifes well known properties (Ibid, 148), though self-limitation of actual reproduction is. 1 Quantitative Evolution of Biomass through Time: Biological and Geochemical Constraints, in Stephen Schneider and Penelope Boston (eds.), Scientists on Gaia. Cambridge (MA), 1991: 211. 2 Symbiosis in Cell Evolution, 300. 3 The Origin of Species, 62, and also Darwins Introduction (Ibid, 14) where he says the same in almost identical words. 4 Symbiosis in Cell Evolution, 298, 299, 300, 325. 5 Highpoints in a reconstruction of the history of these experiments, though, are mentioned in Schidowski, Ibid, 211-212. In this regard, a good sampling of a typically Malthusian and social Darwinian thinking will be found in the Fifth Study, Part IV, Malthus and Darwin, Darwin and Malthus, below. 6 Summarily, the purpose is exhibited most forcibly by the experiment, itself the core of a bourgeois and instrumentalist theory of nature. Aiming at its, natures, domination, as capital has undergone autonomization and the bourgeoisie has lost its role in history (has itself become a functionary of capital, a personification of economic categories), this domination takes the form of reduction of nature to a raw material basin for capitalist production, a reduction whose theoretical form and projection is the modern science of nature...

from such circularity is to define optimalization in such a way that it implies maximal exploitation of Earths surface by living organisms1 I.e., this escape saves the population law, and theoretically is the only defense that capitals science can present. But if all organisms, not as individuals but as groups, as communities of organisms, make or produce, alter or modify and thus transform their surrounding environments, there is no sense is speaking about natural selection precisely because it, as a concept, moves within the theoretical horizon of a passive organism necessarily and unilaterally determined by its milieu. Partisan of the Monera Distinguished by autotrophic nutrition, by habitat that is often anoxic, and in particular by morphology and structure that are essentially determined by freely situated cytoplasmic DNA (non-nucleation), bacteria form a kingdom, the highest or most embracing taxon in most common classificatory schemes of life. The traditional name given this distinctive form of life is monera. As Margulis (in all her publications whether popularized or technical and theoretically elaborate) and others indicate, the monera is for the largest part responsible for the ceaseless creation and recreation of Earth as a habitable planet, one suitable not just to human life, but to all forms of life itself included. It is the continual and constant chemical exchanges of gases and liquids that bacteria metabolically engage in that have produced an oxygen atmosphere, suitable surface temperature and the slightly alkaline hydrosphere, all of which are the essential preconditions of earthly life in aerobic form. It is, however, mistaken to suggest the dense demography of human populations on a worldwide scale the Malthusian problem of population rearing its head form an adequate ground for an encompassing theorization of the fate of the Earth. First, if Malthus had been correct, the resource base of humanity would have long ago disappeared; second, while the quality of human, animal and plant life may all well be grounds for restricting population growth, the ecological carnage visited on the Earth, and the ostensible anthropomorphically generated climate change warming, are not consequently upon the masses of human beings at any level of development. Note that today (circa 2007), for example, an Indian child (the Indian subcontinent being one of the most densely populated regions on Earth, India having the second largely population in the world) consumes 1/90th of the annual energy that her American counterpart does. The problem is manifestly forms of consumption and production, energy inefficient consumption not to mention recklessly extravagant consumption, and the type of development that underpins that consumption, i.e., it is capitalist development. As today the prospects of a climate change cataclysm in which an abrupt shift from a cold mode (an interglacial within a glacial) to a hot one in which the face of the landmasses and ocean chemistry will be radically transformed, most geologically contemporary species life and the largest portion of humanity will simply disappear become increasingly irreversible, the affirmation of life in the (bacterial) form that has hegemonized the Earth since its, lifes, origins, in opposition to that form, humanity, that seems to be the agent provoking climate change, is understandable even if, conceptually, it signifies a far from adequate grasp of the problem. For that problem is the logic of the development of a system of social relations: The problem is not man but the estranged, unrecognized and objectified product of our own social and collective activity that has taken on a logic of its own which, in turn, has come to systematically dominate us and our activity. The problem is capital. Does Margulis understand this? Patently she understands the transcendent value of microbial life within the context of a dynamically stable, yet evolving, self-differentiating and internally organized totality that is earthly nature. It is from within this frame of reference that, as a human being she articulates her position. But does the monera speak for itself? Has it not taken the entirely of the evolution of earthly nature to generate a being that can condemn itself as a pox? We should be fair here, Margulis position is not so much misanthropic although the title of the essay that occasion this remark may suggest otherwise2 as one that recognizes that dangers of a culture whose fundamental operative and practical assumptions are egregiously anthropocentric, that is, a culture that puts humans at the center of all things and only values the conversion of the biosphere into human habitat.3 With this characterization in mind we can situation her within certain middling groups of contemporary societies of capital, those who are tied at the hip to capitalist firms, to their research and development centers funded by the state (understood as the
1

G.R. Williams, Gaian and Nongaian Explanations for the Contemporary Level of Atmospheric Oxygen, in Schneider and Boston (eds.), Scientists on Gaia, 167. Bracketed word and emphases added. 2 A Pox Called Man (1995) reprinted in Slanted Truths. 3 Ibid, 260. Emphasis added.

institutional arena in which otherwise antagonist capitalist forge a partial, hierarchically organized unity) largely academic institutions who, grasping the dangers of this culture, are nonetheless existentially and personally without option, and who can, accordingly, only express disenchantment. While we think her assessment is essentially correct, it is altogether absent specification; It is the global culture of capital, its very movement producing social and natural transformations generated by a logic the logic of this movement, of capital accumulation the objective necessary result of which is the utter wreck of earthy nature destruction, albeit geologically temporary, of its self-regulatory, cohesive character that, controlled by life in its biospheric aspect, has made that life generally, and humanity specifically, possible. It is in and through the movement of capital that homogenization of the Earth and its wreckage occurs, as it tends toward the creation of nature existing at two poles, uglified raw material basins (denuded forests, open mines, desertified grasslands, etc.) at the start of a cycle of commodity production and toxic wastelands (wetlands turned into landfills, decaying urban centers, etc.) at the end of that cycle, i.e., with commodity consumption. Lacking a historical alternative to the order of capital, it is within this overall context that we can characterize Lynn Margulis as a partisan of the monera.

Part V Decisive, non-Malthusian, non-Darwinian and non-Mendelian Determinants of Life1 Against neo-Darwinian (and, whether consciously or not, Darwins own) reductionism, Margulis affirms the specificity and uniqueness of bacteria within life, while, by force of similar prejudice, engaging in materially the same reductionism with a view to eukaryotic life (which, for her, is undifferentiated): She is unable or willing to see the specificity of humanity within earthly nature and, more seriously, fails to grasp the novelty of emergent beings within the structure of integrated levels that characterizes that nature. This recognition permits us to formulate five major limitations to efforts to understand life in its various forms in terms of Malthusian, Darwinian and Mendelian determination. By a considerable margin the most important in the fullest and qualitative sense is dialectical causality. Dialectical Causality in the Determination of Life As we have noted, neo-Darwinists propound formal mathematical explanations of the evolution of organisms. That is, changes that arise by mutations are chemical changes, change in the DNA sequence of organism beginning from the cellular level. In this way, for neo-Darwinism chance mutations, understood in terms of physical determinations of life governing the organisms existence, are asserted as the origin of all evolutionary change. Accordingly, this theorization will center all explanation in the fundamental sense as an outcome of organismic organization reduced to, as Margulis correctly notes, survival requirements in its essential and unilinear determination by the environment, understood as adaptation.2 Even at its most basic level as cellular level, life is self-organizing, self-sustaining and self-reproducing and selfdetermining (autonomous) synthesis, what Margulis calls autopoietic, and is able to maintain itself, its structure and organization in the face of dramatic changes in its milieu. In contrast, neo-Darwinism, with its physicalistic, nonautopoietic understanding of life, holds tenaciously to a linear concept of evolution and, of course, its wholly uncritical and unswerving commitment to (in her succinct formulation) a mesmerizing concept of adaptation.3 The concept of adaptation is not merely problematic, it is a window on a systemic incoherency plaguing neoDarwinian theory: Life does not, communities of living organisms do not, as Margulis recognizes and as the neoDarwinians are blind to, in any sense adapt to a passive physio-chemical environment, one that is preconstituted, simply given. Rather, life actively makes and modifies the surroundings that shape it. Dialectical circularity in lifes causation is the first non-Malthusian, non-Darwinian and non-Mendelian determination of life. All life, not just humanity in forming socio-historical worlds, is ceaseless activity engaged in synthesis that makes and remakes surrounding nature of which it itself is part and in which it is formed. Once life appears, it engages in remaking its own inorganic conditions, which as such disappear. Life incessantly remakes those conditions that are themselves the product over thousands of millennia of the interaction of organic with inorganic earthly nature. From it very origins, life is autopoietic, meaning life literally makes itself and, derivatively, that life is independent, but an independence that is only formed on the basis of prior dependency. The very nature that is perceptually given in human experience is the outcome of thousands of millennia of the non-Darwinian co-evolution, of mutually penetration, shaping and transformation, of life in its multifarious forms and what is abstractly characterized as geological nature: The geological and tectonic processes (uplift, subduction and plate spreading, volcanism) that form mountains, oceans and atmosphere are all mediated controlling the pace of occurrence, transformed or literally created by life through plant accelerated weathering of rock, the deposition of sediments, by bacteriological metabolic production of gases and maintenance of temperature and oceanic alkalinity. There are no purely geological processes.4 Two instances, the first which Margulis herself offers, will suffice. Most of the worlds iron ore is geologically situated in banded iron formations (BIFs, alternating oxidized and reduced iron rich and iron poor layers of magnetite, and hematite or similar, associated minerals set in a silica medium), and can be found in less than ten locales, among which the Lake Superior region of North America, the Krivoy-Rog region of Russia, western Australia and southern Africa possess the richest deposits. The production of these BIFs was
Non-Darwinian, non-Mendelian refers to genetic processes in which neither selection nor the neo-Darwinian elaborated mathematical formalism is operative. 2 Slanted Truths, 270, 272. 3 Ibid, 272, 99. 4 For elaboration of this position, see The Geophysiology of Earthly Nature in the Postscript, below.
1

achieved through the metabolic activity of non-oxygen respiring (anaerobic) bacteria from roughly 2.5 billion to 900 million years ago, respiring iron reducers that breath (i.e., derive essential nutrients from) iron oxides, first by the reduction of iron oxide and iron hydroxide to ferrous iron compounds, second, by iron oxidizing bacteria of various sorts that precipitate iron oxides and, third, by microbial communities (cyanobacteria) that produce gaseous O2, the oxidizing agent.1 The second example is simply fundamental: The very atmosphere that makes aerobic life, for example, mammalian and specifically human life, possible is the outcome of the transformation of a methane-nitrogen atmosphere into an oxygen-nitrogen one: It is the product of the gaseous wastes of bacterial life over the past 2.5 billion years (only in the last 600 million years have plants become significant in this regard), and is actively maintained at a concentration that is, in terms of equilibrium chemistry, anomalous (not to mention, at a concentration above which spontaneous wildfires would break out across the Earth). As Margulis relates: The oxygen we breathe, the humid atmosphere inside of which we live, and the mildly alkaline ocean waters in which the basic organisms in the trophic sense find suitable surroundings none of these partial moments of earthly nature as a geophysiological totality (as the system of coupled systems in the cybernetic language of bourgeois science) are not determined by a physical universe run by mechanical laws. For in stark contrast with a mechanical, physics-centered world, the metabolizing biosphere is physiologically self-controlled2 and evolutionarily formed in, dialectically, an incessant process of reciprocal determination.3 Indeterminacy in Genetic Determination Suspending any judgment on the significance of genetic determination of behavior in organic populations,4 several non-Darwinian, non-Mendelian processes in and through which genes are spread throughout a population group have been identified by the highly respected geneticist and molecular biologist Gabriel Dover.5 Here we shall very briefly recount the most important. The first is gene conversion. It occurs, in the narrow sense, as a small, mobile piece of DNA made of many nucleotide bases (often in the thousands) assisted by an enzyme called a transposase detaches itself from, jumping out of, the chromosome of which it is part. The gap left in the chromosome is filled, not by closing up but, as the same small piece of the opposite alternate parental chromosome (remember this structure is that of a double helix) unwinds and copies itself also assisted by an array of host enzymes as a template. The copy inserts itself into the gap. This DNA with the re-inserted segment is reproduced by mitosis, as each of two members of a pair of chromosomes are separated in sexual division and enter into two new individual progeny. The process of detachment can be repeated with each new generation, occurring indefinitely, and in this manner spread through the population. But if the detached segment and its replacement were parts of the ancestral DNA what difference would it make? None. However, if the detached, mobile segment itself originated elsewhere, say with a different species, then the consequence over generations might be significant. This did in fact happen with two species of Drosophilia (willistoni and melanogaster) in the early decades of the last century. The segment in this case was known as a mobile P element and, transposed from willistoni, it had deadly consequences for Drosophilia melanogaster. While the sexual division is obvious Mendelian, the origins of the mobile segment, the precise analog of a mutation, was just as patently not. We can identify two more genetic processes. One is called crossing-over. It occurs as, and when, two chromosomes lying side by side undergo a break. This permits one end of one chromosome to connect up with the other end of the opposite chromosome forming two chromosomes, and involves the two strands of a double helix in each chromosome. The technical term for describing the two newly joined chromosomes is mosaic. If the break does not
1 2

Symbiosis in Cell Evolution, 74-75, 110. Slanted Truths, 280-281. 3 At the cellular level (and not that of life as such as Margulis would have it), it is chemical exchanges that involve the productive character of life itself, synthesis through metabolism, that involve gas and liquid exchange, i.e., breathing, eating, and excreting, that are detectable manifestations of autopoiesis, are material exchanges that are the sine quo non of the autopoietic system, whatever its identity, and are not rationally explicable in categories that do not start from this living autonomy and independence. 4 Our position in this regard is summarily set out in our Theses on Cynegetization. Reflections on Serge Moscovici's La socit contre nature, or a Speculative Reconstruction of the Paleontological Conditions for the Emergence of an Instinctually Deprived Being, 7. 5 Molecular Drive: A Cohesive Mode of Species Evolution, Nature, 299; Molecular Drive in Multigene Families: How Biological Novelties Arise, Spread and are Assimilated, Trends in Genetics, 2; Dear Mr. Darwin: Letters on the Evolution of Life and Human Nature.

take place in exactly the same places in each of the two chromosomes, it need not, then there is an unequal exchange of genetic material, a crossing-over, from one chromosome to the other. Again, this has the effect of mutation without such having taken place, and, again, the genetic change can be spread throughout a population over time, over numerous generations, by mitosis. The other, final genetic process is known as slippage. This involves the internal chromosomal structure, the double helix, specifically the two strands of nucleotides that in part constitute it. (Recall that on the model of a twisted ladder, the spirally represented strands are sugar-phosphate combinations, the horizon rungs are bases. One base combined with a sugar-phosphate section of a side to which it is attached is called a nucleotide.) In a short repetitive sequence where each repetition is likely less than ten bases, a slip can occur in the each of the two strands, so that there are only, say, nine of ten bases in the repetition matched to the each other with one repetition of each unmatched. What follows is either enzyme elimination of the unmatched repetition or, as in gene conversion, utilization of the unmatched repetition as a model or template to produce a complementary repetition on the opposing strand. Slippage is this occurrence as an ongoing process of the loss and gain of repetitions. Among forms of DNA turnover, slippage is most common and most frequent. Dover points out that a gene can generate repeats that are different as to kind and are interspersed with one another. He also indicates that all three forms of DNA turnover can result in the replacement of a family of genetic units by a variant form, leading to generalization of the variant. Now in each and all cases, these non-Mendelian forms of DNA turnover effect parts of genes, whole genes, or the regulatory region of DNA in a gene that contains several short stretches of bases bound to proteins (the regulatory agent) that determine gene transcription. And as suggested above, each of these forms of turnover, when linked to sexual reproduction, can spread novel genetic variations non-mutant, non-Mendelian genetic structures through a population grouping over evolutionary time, without regard to natural selection, i.e., in a non-Darwinian manner. (Obviously, none of this is Malthusian.) Dover calls that spreading on the basis described here (singularly as instances and collectively) a process of molecular drive.1 Symbiogenesis Life on Earth reaches back to its very beginnings some 4 billion years ago, and it does so in unbroken continuity largely due to the role of bacteria in the production of a breathable atmosphere (suitable to aerobic life forms), the maintenance of a slightly alkaline hydrosphere (especially the oceans), and a mean surface temperature that creates the conditions of habitability for plant and animal forms. Note the last remark: Today, the suns luminosity is roughly 35% greater than it was at the geological moment that Earth formed and cooled. Without qualitative development of the biosphere especially bacterial and but also plant life, its increasing complexity and growing integration with the chemical processes of the atmosphere and oceans through respiration and transpiration - this vastly increased solar radiation would have long ago rendered the Earth unbearably hot, a metabolically intolerable setting for any oxygen respiring beings, human beings in particular, rendered it a dead planet much like Venus. Thus, the often maligned bacteria lie at the very foundations of life on earthly nature. Recall that there are no bacterial individuals that are identical as to type, that, in other words, that they do not speciate, that the various strains of bacteria with their replicons form bacterial communities that together with their genes constitutes a global gene pool, or global genome, which any strain can draw on at any given time. As Mathieu and Sonea argue in opposition to Margulis transposition of a Malthusian-Darwinian vicious struggle for existence back into the evolutionary process of eukaryosis, this is a decidedly, and essentially cooperative community, not in the subjective sense (as in human behavior) but in the functional sense that includes a de facto division of labor in which various bacterial appendages and forms plays supplementary roles that sustain any given community of bacterial organisms.2 If we go back to the original eukaryosis (involving cyanobacteria, that is, non-obligate aerobic microorganisms), we surmise oxygen was present not atmospherically but in lakes or shallow surface oceans at roughly 2.7 billion
1

Other non-Mendelian, non-Darwinian forms of transformations of the genetic structure of populations are also recognized, some going back to the origins of the modern synthesis in the nineteen thirties such as neutral genetic drift (i.e., random fluctuations in gene frequencies in small populations that control diversification in these populations. Here see Dobzhansky, Ibid (1951), 156.). With regard to population groupings (species) generally, further genetically operative characteristics of evolutionary development such as exaptation and punctuated equilibrium have also been recognized. For this, see Steven Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Behavior. 2 Mathieu and Sonea, Prokaryotology, 99-100.

years ago. Yet complex multicellular eukaryotes do not appear in the fossil record until about 560 million years ago, largely coinciding with the beginnings of the Cambrian explosion. This means that bacteria forms of life dominated the evolutionary history of the Earth starting from 3.8 4.0 billion years ago for as long as 85% of the time of life on Earth or longer. Now bacteria are not only the oldest and longest living in geological time but also far and away the largest, qualitatively and quantitatively, communities of living organisms on Earth. Yet the reconstructed fact of symbiogenesis undercuts the universality of the principle of Darwinian-Mendelian heredity prior to both the formation of primitive organisms at their origins and in constitution of their internal organic structures (organelles). Bacterial transmission of genetic material is non-Mendelian, based on a functionally cooperative mode of interaction This is a simply huge, third limitation on non-Malthusian, non-Darwinian and non-Mendelian determination of life. Progeny, Productivity and Resources By and large, Darwin is wrong, evidentially (empirically as his acolytes might like to say) and theoretically (i.e., inductively generalizing), and he is wrong on both of the two sides of his proposition, that is, with regard to production of progeny to that point at which resources are inadequate to animal need and with regard to whatever inherent or innate tendency there is allegedly to prodigious productivity (i.e., his is a conceptual product masquerading as real, projecting itself as a determinant that actually inheres in natural relations). First, animal species not only do not always consume available resources rarely do they and then only under a narrow range of conditions... but are also capable of finding and shifting to entirely, never before utilized resources in situations where a geological or human event destroys original resources, thereby making further nonsense of a projection into nature of a unilinear relation and its devolution on to the inevitability of species superfluity (necessary overpopulation). Three examples can be offered instantiating this situation. In Madagascar, the lemur population fails to consume all the food available to it; and, on Eniwetok atoll, the crab population, nearly obliterated by atomic weapons testing, rebred and achieved its former population levels by eating the outer fibers of plants to offset the poor supply of algae (also devastated by the blasts).1 Under conditions of an incipit climate change warming, robins are wintering in the United States North without access to traditional food sources, worms, fresh fruit, and flying insects, eating largely seeds, bugs under bark where they can be found (rarely) and frozen fruit where it is still hanging (e.g., crab apples). Thus, animal populations tend to achieve and maintain a viable demographic density despite loss of primary food resources and the variability of those resources. Second, there is no tendency, innate, inherent, genetic or otherwise, to produce offspring in excess of reifyingly projected, allegedly fixed and available resources. Instead, it is animal sociality itself that limits progeny reproduction and limits it without regard to available resources, by way of self-regulatory social behaviors, i.e., behaviors that express a new, socially formed order of organismic self-preservation, self-maintenance and self-enhancement. This can be demonstrated empirically from research aimed precisely at deciding this question. In an article republished in 1969 (originally published in 1962), D.H. Stott reviewed the finding of several studies beginning in the 1930s through the 1950s that both in situ and in laboratory constructed conditions examined the relations between population groups of species and their milieux. One of his conclusions was that, The popular Malthusian notion that the number [within an animal or human population] surviving from year to year is determined by the current supply of food, with the excess dying from starvation, is no longer supported by any student of natural populations.2 Articulated in a troublingly contradictory conceptual framework, one that is altogether exploded by the evidence presented, this review (though not its theorization) demonstrates that any number of mammalian species (snowshoe hares, ruffed grouse, lemmings, muskrats, wild rats, mice, and humans), several species of birds (hawks, owls, storks, crows, eagles, guillemots, herons), and insects (specifically locusts) exhibit self-regulatory behaviors that limit reproduction under conditions (such as overcrowding) that would otherwise stretch immediately accessible food supplies.3 The acquired adaptive behavior is understood more or less teleologically (in terms of an ultimate value governing behavior), as is typical in otherwise quite dissimilar neo-Darwinian adaptive explanations. In one category
1
2

See Serge Moscovici, La socit contre nature, 172-173 for these two examples. D.H. Stott, Cultural and Natural Checks on Population Growth, in Andrew P. Vayda (ed.), Environment and Cultural Behavior: Ecological Studies in Cultural Anthropology.

of cases (incubatory behaviors of birds such as hawks, owls, storks, crows, and others), the behavior guarantees that the number of young raised should not produce a general [over]population in the region, but it is not adaptive, it does not ensure that such of the particular brood survive as their immediate food supply permits. In general (a generalization drawn from the instance of the breeding behavior of eagles in Kenya resulting in periodic infertility), the explanation offered is not [in terms of] an adaption to contemporary food-supply, but a means of checking population numbers before the danger-point is reached.1 Stott notes harassment and strife attendant upon overcrowding may produce psychosomatic illness in animals. Another researcher, Chitty, arrived at his theory of prenatal damage only after reviewing and dismissing all other feasible causes, such as disease, food shortage, predation and migration.2 Of particular interest here is the study of wild rats, a study the summary of which we shall quote at length:
[Calhoun3] bred a colony [of wild rats] from a few individuals in a pen of 10,000 square feet, allowing them an abundance of food at all times. If over the 28 months of the experiment that had realized their breeding potential they would have numbered 50,000. If they had been content with the two square feet per rat allowed for caged rats in laboratories there could have been 5,000. In fact the population stabilized itself at less than 200.

Here we would note that society in the sense of individual behavior shaped and formed in and through interaction among (species) individuals is not so an exclusively human feature.4 So that of paramount importance, the social behavior of the rat colony limited population growth in three ways. First, the rats split themselves up into local subcolonies, between which were maintained buffer zones without burrows. Second, with crowding the normal dominance hierarchy broke down, leading to unstable groups. The effect of this was reduced frequency of conception and poor viability of the suckling young. Among these young in turn, those few that lived beyond the period of weaning, very few in turn had progeny of their own. Third, crowding caused increased attack upon the young, and those who received severe punishment were likely to succumb.5 Thus, an innate (biological) drive the result of which is potential, prodigious or infinite species productivity, demystified and de-ideologized, is in fact and really a product of the interaction among species individuals: A social geography, group instability (itself deriving from an increasing population density) producing physiological restrictions on the occurrences of conception as well as on the very viability of progeny, and aggressivity aimed at the same are social in essence, in the strongest manner limit population growth so that the question of available resources is never posed, and is forcefully decided and can and must be understood without reference to a metaphysically imputed inherent characteristic of life. But the issue goes far beyond this: The behavioral breakdown of the rats living under conditions of social stress seems to have been many-sided: Those animals that had suffered excessive punishment were no longer [able to] made favorable use of their environment, that is, [they] became maladjusted, notably by losing their food-storage habits. Furthermore, the collapse of the social pattern also had a detrimental effect on fertility, beyond that of the young. Under conditions of crowding the dominant rats could no longer guard their own females from intruding males, for the latter pursued them and copulated frequently. Why the outcome was infertility may be gathered from the analogy of Bruces[ 6] experiments with mice. In her research, a chance observation, namely, pregnancy sometimes unaccountably failed in the laboratory, she was able to establish the cause as contact with a strange male. After mating with their
The conceptual fault lies in a Lamarckian effort to interpret behaviors in adult species members and their reappearance in their young as culturally acquired characteristics that are genetically transmitted a product of an adaptation in the Darwinian sense from one generation to the next (e.g., Ibid, 102), instead of grasping the behavior an internally generated social response to a milieu, to conditions as is said, in the adult generation that is either learned by the offspring or is reproduced by the young generation in confronting the same conditions. The example discussed of wild rats in this text is a case in point. 1 Ibid, 96. 2 Ibid, 97. 3 J.B. Calhoun, The Social Aspects of Population Dynamics, Journal of Mammalogy, 33 (1952): 139-159, cited in Ibid. 4 Moscovici, La socit contre nature, 18-24, 67-84; our Theses on Cynegetization, Theses 1, 2, and, in particular, Nature, Capital, Communism, Humanity (I): Hominidization.. 5 Stott, Ibid, 97-98. 6 H.M. Bruce, A Block to Pregnancy in the Mouse Caused by Proximity to Strange Males, Journal of Reproduction and Fertility, I (1960): 96103; and Further Observations on Pregnancy Block in Mice Caused by the Proximity of Strange Males, Journal of Reproduction and Fertility, I (1960): 310-311. Cited in Stott, Ibid.
3

familiar sire the females suffered a blocking of the pregnancy even if they only detected the odor of the intruder on nesting material. After some five days they came on heat again and could conceive, but a breakdown of social dominance and exposure of a succession of strange males would presumably inhibit pregnancy indefinitely.1 Here, we see crowding, maladjustment and rat anomie if you will, essentially social behavior and social relations sociality, society reaching back and shaping conception, pregnancy, physiology shaping biology and nature. In light of this the population law is utter nonsense. Still, the issue goes even further beyond this: Stott reports, a further effect of crowding in Calhouns experimental colony was that more and more individuals were stunted despite having plenty of food available. Such stunted rats seemed healthy they simply failed to grow very large and attained their mature weight very slowly. These stunted rats were also characterized by behaviordisturbances. Again one might infer prenatal damage So that, not only is the population law a mystification, it is worse than useless as an explanation, for when established forms of sociality decisively collapse, more than merely adequate food supplies (available resources) are simply and utterly irrelevant to the entire situation. Stott concludes, The regulatory mechanisms which Calhoun observed in rats, and Bruces pregnancy-block in mice, originated in the animals becoming aware that something was wrong in their environment. No doubt to avoid the controversial term psychological, Bruce described this type of influence as exteroceptive Leaving terms aside, it can be said that a situation of a certain type, namely a relationship with other animals of their own species, was appraised as unfavorable, and that this act of appraisal initiated physiological processes which culminated in infertility.2 How far does society reach back into nature? Referring to experiments conducted by a researcher named Barnett, 3 Stott relates that the former demonstrated that the male rats in the unfavorable situation of being bullied become subject to adrenal cortical depletion, which may be followed by death, even though they suffer no actual wounding It would appear that he induced in these bullied rats the condition of shock-disease which Green and Evans [4] described in the snowshoe hare during the phase of population decline. With Larson, Green made a physiological study of a number of afflicted animals [5], and Christian [6] recognized their description of the disease as similar to Selyes stress adaptation syndrome: the animals had died of adreno-pituitary exhaustion. Causally, the situation is from beginning to end essential social in nature: For it to recur, the socially stressful conditions of crowding must be reproduced: Such a psychosomatic reaction to a situation appraised as unfavorable or disastrous does not, in itself, [argue] for the continuance of the shock-state in subsequent generations, which did not experience the overcrowding. This could, however, result if the state of shock interferes with the reproductive processes, causing the next generation to suffer damage at the foetal stage.7
1 2

Ibid, 98. Ibid. Presumably agreeing in this respect with H.M. Bruce, Stott adopts the term exteroceptive to avoid the controversial term psychological. But his own caution notwithstanding, he obviously does not recognize there is something psychological, i.e., animal cognitive, in referring to, as he does, animals becoming aware and this act of appraisal. This is at the heart of troubling conceptual contradictory framework we noted earlier, for here Stott invokes something like animal sentiment of self as a mediation of behavior, while explicitly asserting an effort to avoid the terminology of a psychology of animal consciousness is underway. In referring to mental activities and mental habits, Darwin also speaks of animal sentiment of self in discussing instinct (The Origin of Species, 173, 179, 180). The term is Hegelian. Against Hegel, however, own usage is evolutionary, for we expressly situate mind (Geist) and its development in nature. See our Work and Speech: The Origins of Man: A Short Review of Trn Duc Thaos Investigations into the Origin of Language and Consciousness and Nature, Capital, Communism where animal sentiment of self is specified in terms of absence of explicit awareness of self for which the object is not detached from sensory-motor awareness but instead exists indistinctly, only within the field of drives and affects. 3 S.A. Barnett, Physiological Effects of Social Stress in Wild Rats. The Adrenal Cortex, Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 3 (1958): 1-11; and, S.A. Barnett, J.C. Eaton and H.M. McCalllum, Physiological Effects of Social Stress in Wild Rats, 2: Liver Glycogen and Blood Glucose, Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 4 (1960): 251-260, cited in Ibid. 4 R.G. Green and C.A. Evans, Studies on a Population Cycle of Snowshoe Hares on Lake Alexander Area, Journal of Wildlife Management, 4 (1940): 220-238, 267-278, 347-358. 5 R.C. Green and C.L. Larson, A Description of Shock Disease in the Snowshoe Hare, American Journal of Hygiene, 28 (1938): 190-212, cited in Stott, Ibid. 6 J.J. Christian, The Adreno-pituitary System and Population Cycles in Mammals, Journal of Mammalogy, 31 (1950): 247-259, cited in Ibid. 7 Stott, Ibid, 99.

How far does sociality, society, reach back into nature? A complex of social relations and conditions within species individuals produces stress, emotionally generates a deleterious physiological condition. This completes the dialectically circular relation of society to nature, for the novel physiological condition, resulting in death and thus terminating social behavior, returns us to nature, as conceived by the modern science of nature, in its most basic, inorganic sense Let us step back and formulate the significance of this research with a view to Malthusian-Darwin assumptions concerning productivity, resources and population. There is, as we have seen, a broadly based tradition within the study of animal behavior for which once the results of this research is stripped of its mystifyingly scientific trappings, the language and concepts of physiological animal psychology is exorcised nature and society are not understood in terms of opposition,even if the latter took shape in an evolutionary development that led from the former to the latter, as in the case of man.1 From this perspective society does not start off where nature ends, society and in the case of animal sociality as well as human society, culture, does not develop, overlay, and even merely enter into, reshaping as it were, biology. Within this tradition analysis have been developed that, once theoretically reformulated, shows that in contemporary animal communities, and will show in evolutionary and contemporary terms that among primate and hominid populations, an established hierarchy and a settled distribution of functions (division of labor), which embody a set of species specific skills developed over generations of engagement in resources exploitation all of which are decisively mediated by social behaviors and which, if disrupted, e.g., by crowding, will explode and led to a disintegration of established social relations and forms of animal community allowed and allows different species to maintain a balance between population and environment, where narrowly understood resources (food) fluctuated and fluctuate between and, occasionally at, the extremes of scarcity and abundance. Among primates and hominids in particular, social organization, or structure, taken together with associated behavioral practices mediate between population (community) and environment, govern breeding, feeding, migrations and division of labor within their respective community, and effectively have a greater bearing on genetic development than environmentally mediated differential sexual reproduction. In all cases, neither fixed resources nor potential productivity are determinate for the stability and continuity over time of communities of animal (largely mammalian) groupings, and cannot be said to decisive in the hereditary constitution of those traits or characteristics that might place a role in organismic viability. Operative in the kingdom of animalia among the class of mammalia (where the better part of Darwins examples and evidence stem from), this is a fourth limitation on non-Malthusian, non-Darwinian and non-Mendelian determination of life. Humanity in Nature A set of assumptions concerning life on Earth as it has formed in nature as a whole underlies the discussion in this section: The premises as well as the coherency of our position, as does ultimately any position, rest on a determinate conception of reality.2 For example, we have indicated at various places in the forgoing that Darwin operates with a conception of life in its reality that is simply undifferentiated. For Darwin, an overall conception of reality is never explicit but nonetheless tacit, and is constituted by an untenable dualism between life and dead (inorganic) matter. We characterize reality as a self-developing, self-evolving, well-structured whole, whose structure is constituted by different orders in the broadest manner, by the inorganic, vital and humanity with manifold internal gradations and levels within each order that is internally integrated from the lower to the higher, or, if you prefer, from the simpler to the more complex, in according with the principle of increasingly integration and complexification and within the overall, atemporal becoming of nature.
1

Moscovici Ibid, like us (Nature, Capital, Communism) albeit on different assumptions, has attempted to elaborate such a perspective. For Moscovici, Ibid, chapitre II, III, and footnotes 2 and 3 to these chapters listing bibliographic references, 418-420. In the stilted, mystifying language of social science, Stott, more narrowly, too concludes, Animal populations would seem to be adapted to their food resources by a variety of built-in physiological and instinctive mechanisms rather than by starvation, and these come into play in response to signals of incipient overcrowding in advance of serious shortage of food. Among these signals are certain exteroceptive or psychological stimuli; that is to say, the perception by the animal of some factor in its environment presumably unfavorable in the biological sense triggers off a physiological or instinctive mechanism which has the effect of reducing fertility or the survival-rate of the young Ibid, 113. 2 See the Fourth Study, Part IV, The Materialist Dialectic, below, wherein the basis of this argument is established.

Within this self-evolving whole, each newly emergent gradation, level and order appears and forms itself on the basis of the old, and, while integrated with that from which it emerged, it is genuinely novel, i.e., the principle[s] of organization and its structurization, is [are] irreducible. At the same time, it does emerge from the lower, simpler, and older, and because its organization forms on this basis, and integrates this base, while irreducible it is dependent on that from which it emerged, that is, dialectically it establishes its autonomy on the very basis of that dependency. In this respect, man is a development within nature: What distinguishes her, i.e., what makes various groups of humans different within nature (but not separate from the rest of it) are an integrated complex of capacities, aptitudes and practices that not only transform various aspects of nature, but that remake immediately surrounding nature by constructing a specifically human world (built environment so-called, material artifacts, ideational and symbolic constructs) in which those groups are situated. Our reconstructions1 indicate that the evolutionary appearance of man some 45,000 years ago (not just anatomically modern man Homo sapiens sapiens who appeared roughly 110,000, but modern man who over a million years of evolutionary self-formation, refined and developed specific cognitive functions and features on the basis of a practice we are about to generally describe), introduced into nature a being that actively forms itself by production of a mediating term situated between itself and that earthly nature in which she is situated. The mediating term through which man relates herself to herself, and on this basis to nature is an actively, humanly produced sociohistorical world of human landscapes formed within a humanized nature and consisting in sensuous-material structures, cultural and use objects inclusive of instrumentalities (e.g., tools), and significations and meanings in which she is relationally, institutionally and naturally embedded. This mediating term renders it impossible to describe and explain greater population density and increasingly complex sociality in Malthusian, Darwinian or Mendelian terms as an adaptation of population to environmental resources that are simply given, but must be understood in terms of activities, and the tools and instrumental complexes deployed in those activities, that rearrange, remade and qualitatively expand resources, activities that literally create new resources (e.g., grain agriculture, genetically formed foods) often by way of bringing new forms of being into existence within nature. Operative in the human order, this is a fifth, and final limitation on non-Malthusian, non-Darwinian and non-Mendelian determination of life. Summation Amongst the two dominant forms of life on Earth today, bacteria and humanity, Malthusian, Mendelian and Darwinian determinations are, as we have shown, simply irrelevant. Within species life, transposition, gene conversion and crossover vastly circumscribe the Darwinian and, in particular, the Mendelian determination of life at precisely the level where the latter is solely effective. (At this level, Malthusian determination has no meaning.) Mendelian determinations of the genetic constitution of life are in themselves restricted to speciated life, and even here for the most part they are superficial (e.g., eye, hair or fur coloration in mammals). Furthermore, in plants (from the perspective of the broadest classificatory category, the plant kingdom as a whole), coloration (which in plants is essential) is not entirely subject to Mendelian genetics, since the chloroplast, an integrated, once bacterial symbiont, contains its own DNA and is only not fully under the control of the cellular nucleus; similarly with cellular respiration in animals (again, from the perspective of the broadest classificatory category, the animal kingdom as a whole), for the mitochondria, also an integrated, former bacterial symbiont, too has its own DNA and is not fully under control of the cell nucleus.2
1

See the two, interrelated discussion of humanity (Hominidization and the Constitution of a Novel Being in Nature, respectively) in our Nature, Capital, Communism where the following position is developed and fully treated; and our The Cave in the Mind: Consciousness and the Problem of 'Active' Materialism in the Determination of Modern Man and the Origins of the Upper Paleolithic: A Critical Reflection on David Lewis-Williams The Mind in the Cave. 2 Mitochondrial DNA is double stranded, but forms a closed circle (unlike the cell nuclear DNA which is long and straight). Mitochondria reproduce by division, then fusion and redivision (nuclear DNA is mitotic, it merely fissions and fuses.) Plastid (here chloroplast) integration with the rest of the eukaryotic cell has gone much further, though this much is clear: The chloroplast organelles in plants retain their own DNA and RNA, and in some case various functions (e.g., its membrane protein activity) are not under full control of the cell nucleus. See Margulis, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution, 314-317 and 337-343, respectively.

Among animals in the narrowest sense (the taxonomic class, mammalia), an essential sociality that rests on social behavior and social relations determines the relation of the organism to its milieu. Malthusian and DarwinianMendelian determinants are decidedly secondary, if and where operative at all. Most importantly of all, life as a whole actively shapes, makes and incessantly remakes the conditions on which it is based to such an extent that it is not only legitimate but is necessary to speak about the geophysiology of the Earth, about processes and relations that are geophysiological as opposed to geophysical, not because the Earth is alive but because of the determinate role of life (the biota in its entirety) during the entire course of a largely nonMalthusian, non-Darwinian and non-Mendelian evolution of earthly nature as a whole. So where does this leave the sciences of evolutionary biology? There are two parts to the answer offered here. First, to the extent it is Mendelian the object of these sciences is vastly constricted in space, i.e., with regard to the internal, genetic space of the life forms which Mendelian analysis inadequately conceptualizes. To the extent it is Darwinian (which makes these sciences Malthusian also), their object is also tightly bounded in geological time. It is only briefest geologically temporal spans when the ecologically integrated, mutual penetrating relations among species, individuals forming species, and the various milieux in which they live and interaction have been disrupted by global climate change in its various forms (transition from a glacial to an interglacial within in a cold regime of earthly climate during those short geological durations of glaciation in Earth history; the extremely rare, extraterrestrial impact, such as an asteroid, that, large enough, blocks sunlight for an extended period or changes ocean chemistry; and, again, the rare transition from a cold to a hot mode of climate and vise versa, which in the former event have been brought on initially by volcanic outpourings that dramatically increase carbon dioxide and methane content, a warming that affect oceanic circulation and displaces the conveyor currents, the thermohaline circulation). In all case, the consequence is mass species extinction (in impact and warming extinctions, having occurred only five or six known times over the last 600 million years, 40-90% of species life on Earth has disappeared). In historical time, which we shall note is not geologically significant but nonetheless is the temporal framework on which the sciences of evolutionary biology, largely unknowingly, base their Malthusian and Darwinian claims, the occasional severe winter will, for example, threaten a very small number of species with a large falloff in population, human activity will, again for example, transport plant and animal forms from one region and climate zone to another thereby temporarily disrupting the local and, perhaps, regional ecology, introducing a new predator, species without predation in the new locale, etc. These spatial and temporal pinholes in the geophysical evolution of life on Earth simply do not, and cannot in principle, form the basis for a form of knowledge that offers itself as a universal, theoretical description of real, existential determination of the constitution of life. This brings us to the other part of our answer. Second, since it is only under these rare, altogether atypical conditions, that the relation of organism to environment is decisively decided by limited, available resources conditions that the crisis of capital is, however, (re)introducing to the world and which can now be seen in the behavior of certain species-individuals 1 Malthusian, Darwinian and Mendelian analyses that lay claim to universality are ideological, a central function which, as we have shown, an analysis of the internal conceptual structure of these sciences at any rate reveals, and which is disclosed all over again in their practical devolution. We shall take up the latter in our remarks concluding this Study. Yet the very reality of the human world is historical. The structure of the contemporary historical world sustains Malthusian illusions: The movement of capital, its crisis and tendential direction toward renewed imperialist world war and climate change catastrophe producing an expansion of drought stricken, desertifying regions and arid, wooded regions visited by increased frequency of wildfires as tropic climates move northward creating dramatically decreasing water supplies and producing growing loss of agriculturally productive lands, increasingly regular famine; producing a warming that generates ice cap melting and with it rising sea levels that will generate massive population displacements and stateless population living in camps of squalor and misery; producing water resources fights between regions... all intensifying internal racial, national social conflict, ethnic cleansing and genocides together with
1

Stranded without ice floats over which to traverse the otherwise open waters, Arctic polar bears starve or drown in the open water from hunger, and muscular and immunological weakening. In this setting, there have been several (seven in total) recently documented cases in which male bears have been witnessed driving off the females not the very young to get access to the females in order to cannibalize, kill and eat, the cubs. From the standpoint of species behavior, this is not normal but suicidal, but this is the situation to which bears have been driven by the capitalistically generated warming-based climate change, a development which has at any rate doomed them as a species. See the article Much Less Stable Ice for Polar Bears appearing in November 2009, accessed at www.culturechange.org, 2 December 2009.

balkanization of states and regions as imperialist powers struggle over markets as the production of agricultural foodstuffs are subject to frequent interruption and industrial raw materials production becomes less dependable... producing new demands on the infrastructural foundations of capitals movement that become increasing difficult to satisfy; and (re)producing ancient diseases and those confined to regions of poverty and de-development (dengue fever, malaria, perhaps smallpox and polio) not to mention diseases and disorders only recently de-localized through capitalist commerce such as west Nile that rapidly spread through demographical groups immunologically weakened by hunger, war, movement and a distraught spirit sustain Malthusian (and mediately Darwinian and Mendelian) concepts by rendering their theoretical accounts of a historically specific global societal configuration seemingly adequate expressions of the underlying basis of society and sociation itself.

Some Conclusions The devolution of evolutionary biology upon biotechnologies of capital aimed at social control (passports, drivers licenses and identification cards embedding scannable genetic descriptions, eye and body scans, computerized forensic and population genetic marker databanks, genetic fingerprinting, etc.) is not happenstance. It is, moreover, not merely a theoretical expression of the movement of capital as it confronts novel problems in the course of that movement (i.e., as a requirement of masifying and regimentation social groups in the course of pursuing expansion of productive forces). While, to be sure, affirming the creation of surplus labor as an objective outcome of capitalist practice has generated a societally determinate problematic which, in turn, has shaped the fundamental, underlying assumptions of the former (evolutionary biology) and while affirming the internal, necessary relation of science to technology a relation for which the technology of capital in question distills what is scientific ascertainable with regard to the organic substrate of humanity and crystallizes capitals resolution of the problem, the creation of means of disposing of surplus labor without disrupting the circuits of capital both relations (the devolution of evolutionary biology upon biotechnologies of capital aimed at social control and the internal, necessary bond of science with technology for which the former theoretically clarifies and illumine problems of capital that the latter, as technologies of control, is deployed to resolve) exist, and have taken the specific historical shapes in which they have appeared, because the practical problem of surplus labor (prosaically, excess population) has haunted capital from the moment it began to really hold sway over labor (real domination), and has deepened becoming ever more problematic as the growth of productive forces accelerates, as the scientifically mediated prodigious productivity of abstract labor is relentlessly developed. But the relation of science to capital for that is what we are discussing here cannot even be adequately posed in this manner. Instead, this relation can only be comprehended in terms of the being and reality of the state, as institutionally separate Power hierarchically unifying otherwise antagonistic capitals. Specifically, the relation of science to capital and technologies of capital (informational technologies, the bio-technology of genes, etc.) must be grasped in terms of state policies, practices and interventions that constitute a bio-politics of population elucidated above.1 For capital, the problem of propertyless men and women without anchorage in any productive activity, expressed in terms of casualization, has become global. Rooted in its very dynamics, the expulsion of proletarians from production is merely one side of the central contradiction of its own movement (the other, proletarianization of petty producers in the periphery) as it unfolds today. As the crisis of capital beginning from capitalist finance unfolds and deepens the old capitalist metropolises have just begun to exhibit forms of sociality and social geography once thought characteristic only of its periphery the formation of shantytowns, Hoovervilles and tent cities alongside urban ghettos, waged populations amongst as many as half of which can no longer find steady work, the rumble of sporadic revolt and occasional guerrilla styled outbursts in its own rural hinterlands this very movement reverses the historical progress declared by the bearers of science and embodied in a dictum, hic Rhodus, hic saltus, which tacitly may be said to have characterized scientific thinking at least since the time it had become aware of historical development. But, rooted in its very dynamics (competition between capitals, expansion of productive forces, devalorization of means of production and exponentially growing productivity of abstract labor, and the destruction of earthly nature and its reconstruction as a holding area of unprocessed resources for capitalist production), capital and science cannot go beyond this contradiction of simultaneous incorporate and expulsion of labor, and both will be subject to its consequences.2

1
2

See this Study, Dosophilia and the Experiment in Genetics, above. Of transcendent importance, from the perspective of the elaboration of consciousness of class among workers, the lived reality of totalizing domination, the experience of casualization, and the role of both in the recomposition of workers as a world class and as Gesamtarbeiter objectively confronting capital, this contradiction moreover appears central to the movement of capital today.

Second Study New Departures in Science: The Sciences of Life Bibliographical Sources Barnes, Will. Nature, Capital, Communism. Revised edition. St. Paul, 2010 _________. The Cave in the Mind: Consciousness and the Problem of Active Materialism in the Determination of Modern Man and the Origins of the Upper Paleolithic: A Critical Reflection on David Lewis-Williams The Mind in the Cave. Unpublished, 2009 _________. Alan Milchmans Essays on the Holocaust, Foucault and Heidegger: A Meditation on the Nazi Genocide, its Origins and its Historical Contemporaneity, Unpublished, 2008 _________. The German Road to Renewed Imperialist World War, 1870-1939. St. Paul, 2008 _________. Theses on Cynegetization. Reflections on Serge Moscovici's La socit contre nature, or a Speculative Reconstruction of the Paleontological Conditions for the Emergence of an Instinctually Deprived Being, Unpublished, 2002 _________. Bolshevism and Stalinism in the Epoch of Imperialist World War and Proletarian Revolution (Urgeschichte). Three Studies (1979-2000). St. Paul, 2000 _________. Civil War and Revolution in America. St. Paul, 1999 Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Vol. 1. New York, 1972 Barrett, Paul H. (ed.). The Collected Papers of Charles Darwin. Chicago, 1977 Barrett, Paul H., Peter J. Gauatrey, Sandra Herbert, David Kohn and Sydney Smith (eds.), Charles Darwins Notebooks, 1836-1844. Ithaca (NY), 1987 Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. Vol. 2. Cambridge (MA), 1986 (German original, 1959) Bookchin, Murray. The Third Revolution: Population Movements in the Revolutionary Era. Volume 2. London, 1998 Bowlby, John. Charles Darwin: A New Life. New York, 1990 Burrows, J. W. Introduction to The Origins of Species. London (Penguin), 1979 Cameron, Rondo. France and the Economic Development of Europe, 1800-1914. Princeton (NJ), 1961 Chandler, Jr., Alfred. The Invisible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge (MA), 1977 __________. "The Organization of Manufacturing and Transportation, in David T. Gilchrist and W. David Lewis (eds.), Economic Change in the Civil War Era. Greenville (DE), 1965 Darwin, Charles. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin. New York, 1958 (1888) _____________. The Origin of Species. New York, 2004 (1859) _____________.The Voyage of the Beagle. New York, 1937 (1845) Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nio Famines and the Making of the Third World. London, 2002 Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford (Eng), 1989 (1976) Desmond, Adrain and James Moore. Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist. New York, 1991 Dobzhansky, Theodosius. Genetics and the Origin of Species. New York, 1937 (1st edition), 1951 (3rd edition) Dover, Gabriel. Dear Mr. Darwin: Letters on the Evolution of Life and Human Nature. London, 2000 ____________. Molecular Drive in Multigene Families: How Biological Novelties Arise, Spread and are Assimilated, Trends in Genetics, 2 (1986): 159-165 ____________. Molecular Drive: A Cohesive Mode of Species Evolution, Nature, 299 (1982): 111-117 Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality (Vol. 1). New York, 1978 ______________. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London, 1977 Gould, Steven Jay. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge (MA), 2002 Hammond, Bray. Banks and Politics in America. Princeton (NJ), 1985 Hammond, J.L. and Barbara Hammond, The Village Laborer. London, 1911 Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Capital, 1848-1870. London, 1975 Hyndman, H.N. Commercial Crises of the Nineteenth Century. London 1967 (1892) James, Patricia. Population Malthus: His Life and Work. London, 1979 Khakhina, Liya Nikolaevna. Concepts of Symbiogenesis: A Historical and Critical Study of the Research of Russian Botanists. Edited by Lynn Margulis and Mark McMenamin. New Haven, 1992 (Russian original, 1972) Lukacs, Georgy. History and Class Consciousness. Studies in the Marxian Dialectic. London, 1971 (1923)

Lyell, Charles. Principles of Geology, being an Attempt to Explain the former changes of the Earths Surface, by Reference of Causes Now in Operation. 3 volumes,1830, 1832, 1833 Malthus, Thomas. An Essay on the Principles of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other Writers. London, 1798 Margulis, Lynn. The Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. Amherst (MA), 1998 ___________. Symbiosis in Cell Evolution: Microbial Communities in the Archean and Proterozoic Eons. New York, 1993 Margulis, Lynn and Dorian Sagan. Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis, and Evolution. New York, 1997 Marx, Karl. konomische Manuskripte, 1857/1868. Marx-Engels Werke, Bd. 42. Berlin (DDR), 1973 Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Manifesto of the Communist Party. Moscow, 1971 (1848) Mathieu, Lo G. and Sorin Sonea. Prokaryotology: A Coherent View. Montral, 2000 Moscovici, Sergei. La socit contre nature. Paris, 1972 North, Douglass. The Economic Development of the United States, 1790-1860. Englewood Cliff (NJ), 1961 Peterson, Thomas. Malthus. Cambridge (MA), 1979 Rezneck, Samuel. Business Depressions and Financial Panics. New York, 1968 Riesser, Jacob. The Great German Banks and their Concentration in Connection with the Economic Development of Gemany.Washington DC, 1911 Sapp, Jan. Symbiosis by Association: A History of Symbiosis. New York, 1994 Scheler, Max. Mans Place in Nature (die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos). Boston, 1961 (1928) Shade, William G. Banks or no Banks: The Money Issue in Western Politics, 1832-1865. Detroit, 1972 Soboul, Albert. The French Revolution, 1789-1799. New York, 1975 (1962) Sonea, Sorin. Bacterial Evolution without Speciation, in Lynn Margulis and Ren Fester, Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation: Speciation and Morphogenesis. Cambridge (MA), 1991 Stott, D.H. Cultural and Natural Checks on Population Growth, in Andrew P. Vayda (ed.), Environment and Cultural Behavior: Ecological Studies in Cultural Anthropology. Garden City (NY), 1969 Testart, Alain. Les chasseurs-cueilleurs ou lorigine des ingalits. Paris, 1982. Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York, 1966 Ward, Peter. Under a Green Sky. New York, 2007

Third Study (Short Study) New Departures in Science: The Modern Science of Nature Renewed Three Sketches: Heisenberg, Born and Einstein In a manner that is not merely a purely formal way of expressing the issue, the meaning of an authentically new departure in scientific theorizations is bound up with novel development in the order of society, i.e., the problem of populations as it shaped the sciences of life examined in the previous study rose on the basis of the appearance of real domination in social practice, in production as a decisive dimension of society, as class struggle in the countryside proletarianized men and women, left nearly all impoverished and many without work while at the same time over the course of its development brought an end to the era of famines in the metropolitan centers of world capitalism. Historically presupposing the necessary connection and the centrality of the bourgeoisie to science at its origins as it transpired in epoch of formal domination,1 explicating this relation (of a new departure in science to the appearance of real domination in society) required that we elaborate the productive meaning and epochal significance of the concepts formal and real domination (and, of course, the realities they referred back to).2 It further requires that we determine the lineaments of the growing integration of science into production, the event in the order of society which announced the irreversibly development of real domination: This integration was and continues to be itself a product of the autonomization of capital (which, in turn, itself is the outcome of real domination).3 On this basis, the relation of science in its purest forms to capital has been ideologized objectively mystified, obfuscated and diverted, and consciously a veil of reifications has been thrown over it. With an eye to this situation, we have taken a detour: Through a series of sketches or notes, one quite lengthy, the following has been designed to demonstrate that even the most rarified scientifically conceptual elaborations are mediately but nonetheless fully determined by the imperatives of capital, specifically by the underlying project linking science to it, by the domination of nature, and, it might be added, that it is precisely the situation in society that we characterize as the real domination of capital in production, determined from the systematic and sustained ingression of science and technology into production, on which the explosion of developments in the modern science of nature that coalesce in what we call the new physics as is manifest in our discussion of Einstein and theory of special relativity in our second sketch rests.

See the Introduction, above. See the First Interlude, above. 3 See the Second Interlude, below.
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Preliminary Remarks The Modern Science of Nature Renewed as Science without Foundations We shall argue in the Second Interlude (below) that the more real domination in production holds sway, the more the bourgeoisie no longer acts as a class but functions as a personification of capitals movement; that, accordingly, as we develop this textual account, we are thus required to forgo speaking of the relation of science to the bourgeoisie and must instead delineate the relation of science to capital If we momentarily return to science at its origins, hence to the bourgeoisie as a class forming and acting in history, we can recount the bare lineaments of our argument: There is a necessary, internal relation of science to the bourgeoisie that can be seen in the vision of the world projected by science at its origins, in the formal identity of the conceptual structure of science to that of the value form, in the unity of social and precognitive telos of science at those same origins with the bourgeois tasks in history; and in the practical and social validation of scientific laws. Even conceding our perspective, it might be objected that from the turn of the last century onward a "new" physics, one that has broken with the assumptions of classical physics and hence severed sciences ties to the bourgeoisie, i.e., to capital, has developed. A quick checklist of the purely chronological designated developments in theoretical physics that led to such an alleged breach might include Einsteins formulation (1905) of the special theory of relativity, Niels Bohrs papers (1913) proposing a quantum behavior for atoms, Wolfgang Paulis elaboration (1925) of a(n) (exclusion) principle concerning orbiting electrons in the atomic nucleus, and Werner Heisenbergs framing (1927) of uncertainty in quantum mechanics. On this view, these events would constitute crucial moments in the new physics, not all compatible, which, actually beginning with Max Plancks insight (1900) into the quantum character of energy exchange, led, so it is suggested, to a radical rupture with the universe (both conceptual and that projected as real) of classical physics (Newtonian mechanics). For us, there are several historically evolving features of the societal totality (of which science is a decisive moment) that come into play here. The fragmentation of social life, the development of institutionally separate spheres (e.g., family, work, organized religion, military) each with their subspheres and all subject to their own internally elaborated norms governing conduct and activity characterizes science... as much as any other separate sphere... with its distinct disciplines and their bewildering array of specialized pursuits. Rationalization, fragmentation and specialization are all essential features of capitalist development. In each case, the logic of development is the same, a specific activity or social process is repeated engaged providing it with a separate identity, the structure of the activity or process is tacitly or explicitly recognized by those who engage in it or are its bearers, others (those who dominate the activity or process) articulate the norms that govern the activity or participation in the process; in science, a natural phenomenon is analyzed with a view to its movement or behavior, the latter is experimented on (i.e., it is abstracted from the context in which it originated and treated separated under artificially constructed conditions), laws governing that movement or behavior are formulated. In all cases, the unification of separate spheres proceeds in an increasingly more abstract and general way, in an utterly rarified and completely formalized manner. In all cases, the norms and laws that govern activities, social processes, institutions or cognitive domains are self-contained, i.e., split off without ground. But it is only in crises, often internally generated, that this fundamental irrationality becomes visible. With the modern science of nature this feature is doubled, i.e., reinforced and exacerbated, by its claims continuous since its origins that it is absent a perspective grounded in the practice of daily life (here capitalist accumulation practices); it or, rather, its practitioners masquerade as godlike, proclaim it effectively presuppositionless, meaning it is detached from societal pressures, its account truthful, its basis factual, its descriptions objective, its position ethically neutral. In this regard, there are two developments here that require reflection on: They are Einsteins relativistic physics to the extent it altogether dispensed with the Newtonian formulation of the central concepts of mechanics, space, time and gravity, and Heisenbergs uncertainly principle (which, among other features, ties scientific knowledge to the development of scientific instruments)1 for which quantum mechanics fundamentally challenges a central
Crudely, Galileo's telescope gave him a new perspective on the Earth's moon as well as producing discovery of the moons of Jupiter, and refinements of it give us a vast number of new stars at various great distances. While the following was not the only conclusion that could have been drawn in the era of Castile's decline, the victory of bourgeois parliamentary forces in England and the rise and initial consolidation of the modern science of nature, these stars are not, accordingly, arranged spherically around the Earth and their distances are not fixed. In other words, Galileo's telescope gives us the theoretical projection of a centerless, i.e., non-Earth centered, perhaps infinite universe. NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite gives us temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, viz., it gives us "ripples" in the ubiquitous energy speculatively asserted to have been left over from the creation of the universe. These "ripples" are said to have
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epistemological assumption of classical physics.1 They demand an accounting in terms of our theorization, since they indicate, as so it appeared and still does appear, directions in contemporary physics that signify departures so radically novel that they must have broken with early, modern science and, with it, any relation to the social class in whose life it was originally rooted, or more precisely as capitalist development has become automatic and autonomized, to the social, class project (nature domination) which once linked the one (bourgeoisie) to the other (science). We shall argue otherwise. These developments do not constitute novel departures in the comprehensive sense: The social, class project of the bourgeoisie has not disappeared, since it continues to organize the internal structure of science, even as the bourgeoisie has disappeared as social agency For in this respect even the attempt to develop a unified theory of science that has dominated contemporary physics more or less since the middle of the short twentieth century, or even the ongoing elaboration of a temporal developmental cosmology of the universe at its origins, has not signified a break with the basic assumptions of the modern science of nature first formulated by Galileo. In this regard, a third sketch has been appended polemically tying the entire argument together. In respect to these two towering intellectual achievements, a chronological presentation of the problem, not always indicating the inner direction of historical development, is decidedly secondary. Here shall begin with quantum mechanics and then turn to the relativistic physics that preceded its historical appearance.

unbalanced the "smooth texture" of the primordial soup, causing the universe to lump together and, 13.7 billion years later, take its current form. In other words, COBE detected "hot" and "cold" spots in the cosmic microwave background confirms, so it is argued, basic theoretical propositions of the Big Bang theory of origins. (This confirmation, should be noted, is altogether moot: The immense stars generated in the formation of galaxies would have over the course of hundreds of millions of years fused the helium (from hydrogen) that is now observed in the universe; have exploded into supernovas, dispersed and spread out that helium through space; smaller main sequence stars would have formed out of this helium; and the energy the gigantic stars generated would have been soaked up by interstellar dust which, in turn, would emit the microwave background. And none of this would require the absurd hypothesis of a creation ex nihilo or, in our language, Nature could and should be considered endless atemporal becoming.) 1 The significance of quantum mechanics for physics and for society is well captured in the following remark by the nuclear physicist, Victor Weisskopf: The quantum revolution caused a major breakthrough in our view about the structure of matter and opened up many new horizons. Within a few years after the formulation of quantum mechanics, problems that had been considered unsolvable for decades such as the nature of molecular bonds,the structure of metals, and the radiation from atoms were finally understood. This sudden growth of knowledge and understanding of the structure of matter opened up many new ways of dealing with materials: it led to way to new forms of energy, new kinds of materials, and many new technical possibilities in chemistry, electronic, and nuclear technology Niels Bohr, the Quantum, and the World, 19-20.

First Sketch The New Physics: Heisenberg, Bohr and Quantum Mechanics With quantum mechanics the break with classical physics is most profound and self-conscious, that is, it was the founders and advocates of quantum mechanics, in particular its Copenhagen interpretation rightfully associated with the names of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg (Bohrs most original, advanced and promising student and, later, his peer), that most explicitly, systematically and radically opposed their theory to classical physics. But just how radical, or thoroughgoing, is this discontinuity, and to what extent has the "new" physics, especially quantum mechanics, abandoned classical assumptions? This abandonment as such has been discussed by Heisenberg as well as Bohr1 We should pause here and specify that classical physics, classical mechanics and classical theory each and all have the ambiguous sense of theorizations that begin with Galileo and are systematized by Newton, that reach an apogee in the late nineteenth-early twentieth century works of Boltzman, his formulation of the close relation of the laws of thermodynamics to statistical regularities displayed by mechanical systems, of Rutherford, his discovery of the atomic nucleus containing nearly the entire mass of the atom relative to its exceedingly small volume, and of Planck, his analysis of the laws of thermal radiation that led to the discovery of the quantum character of energy exchange; that, in other words, reached its highpoint in this short historical duration For classical physics, we can give a description of both the initial position and the velocity of a given body, e.g., a planet. Accordingly, these measurements would unequivocally and unerringly predict the future course of that body. Results of this nature were, moreover, expected to hold good for every order of the universe, ranging from the atomic right up to the macrophysical, to stars, galaxies and, most importantly, for the universe as a whole. Thus, general causality and a rigorous determinism was a crucial feature of classical physical theory. With the advent of quantum mechanics, though, we find a different situation holds for subatomic structures. To demonstrate this new situation (which hed already arrived at mathematically), Heisenberg constructed an ideal situation, i.e., he imagined a reasonably possible experiment. Assuming the very concept of an electron orbit is not dubious, it ought at least in principle to be observable. With a high-resolve microscope, we can examine the electron in its orbit around an atomic nucleus.2 (We would note that the experiment remains to this day imaginary, a Gedankexperiment, because observation of subatomic particles is below the power of resolution of the electron microscope, the latter failing to extend down even to the genetic determinants of cellular organelles as they molecularly differentiate.) Heisenberg assumed the Bohr atom: On the basis of the study of glowing hydrogen gas as it gives off light, in 1913 Niels Bohr had, counterintuitively and radically, suggested that electrons in atoms adopt stable states only at specific energies, that, accordingly, electrons must move from one state (inappropriately, an orbit) with a different potential energy to another instead of moving over a continuous range of energy. Electrons' behavior exhibits a preference for states of lowest energy, for these states are where they normally assemble. In making such a move, an electron does not traverse the distance from one state or orbit to another, but disappears from the initial state only to reappear in the new, higher energy state.3 In Heisenberg's thought experiment described below, it is the very observation, if you will the insertion of the -ray photon, that excites the atom to jump to a new state. In terms of daily experience, all this may be bizarre, perhaps even unintelligible, but it well explains a whole range of subatomic behavior, particularly in relation to light, and it is entirely inconsistent or incongruent, if you will, with the classical theorization... Return to Heisenberg. Visible spectrum light will not allow us to see the electron, but a microscope using -rays might permit us to accurately describe it. In making the observation, at least one quantum (photon) of -ray light will strike the electron, deflecting its motion. This is what we see. In a second observation, we can find the electron, seeing it again as it is deflected by the -ray photon. In each observation, we can locate the felectron, determine its position (i.e., the electron in its stable state as it has been deflected), but in each case the deflection changes the direction of its
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Physics and Philosophy. For Bohrs works in this regard, see the footnotes that follow. Ibid, 47-48. 3 In a later formulation, Bohr says, An atomic system possesses a certain manifold of states, the stationary states, to which corresponds in general a discrete sequence of energy values and which have a peculiar stability. The latter shows itself in that every change in the energy of the atom must be due to a transition of the atom from one stationary state to another. Atomic Theory and Mechanics (1925) appearing in Niels Bohr, Atomic Theory of the Description of Nature, 31.

motion, its velocity Recall that since Galileo, velocity is uniform, straight-line motion. Change of direction as well as acceleration (or deceleration) is change in velocity A -ray photon is a short wavelength, high-energy photon. In striking the electron, it deflects it to another, excited quantum state, randomly changing its motion. Heisenberg could have also used a long wavelength, low energy photon, say a radio wave. This would not change the direction of the electrons motion but, then, it would also not permit us to accurately describe the position of the electron. Its microscopic location would be fuzzy, indeterminate So that the elections position or its velocity can be measured, but not both In Heisenbergs imagining, the position of the electron can be accurately described but its velocity cannot The situation outlined here is characteristic of any examination conducted subatomically. (Expressed mathematically, mxv>h, meaning the smaller the uncertainty concerning position, the greater the uncertainty concerning velocity, and vice versa h is Plancks constant.) As a matter of fact, for us to do the experiment today we can, though it still entails an imagining we would be required to shine a beam of light and extract the information statistically based on how all the photons, not just one quantum of -ray light, interact with the election, and in practice the experiment would be conducted with a number of electrons. In principle, what we are imagining is the minimal interaction, examining the electron with just a single photon... Moreover, it should be noted that Heisenberg does not assume an ontological primacy of the electron, the latter does not represent a material point or point mass subsisting in real space and time. (While this in turn may be problematic, it had been the situation in physics since at least the 1870s, since the time of James Clerk Maxwell's unification of electrical and magnetic phenomena, after which at best one could realistically assert the primacy of electromagnetic fields vis--vis atomistically conceived material elements.) Rather, as we shall have occasion to indicate below, the entire subatomic situation recounted above describes (and this description is mathematical), for him, a series of probabilities all of which are possible... Basing ourselves on the situation described by Heisenberg, the following features are noteworthy since, in their mathematical formulation, they describe the essential elements of the microphysical situation. First, there are the necessary, "partially undefined and irreversible" interactions of the instrument of measurement or the complex of measuring apparatuses, as the case may be, and the observed subatomic situation Strictly speaking, Bohr indicates, the idea of observation belongs to the causal space-time way of description 1 This feature already constitutes a tacit critique of the classical project of the nature "discovered" (i.e., constructed) in physics: The nature known through quantum mechanics depends upon the conditions under which statements made about it can be verified.2 Classical physics, on the other hand, held a dogmatically realist position, affirming that any and all contents of statements about nature do not depend upon the conditions under which they can be verified; or, for classical physics, in our terms (since the very epistemologically careful formulations employed here belong to quantum mechanics and not to classical physics), nature is a closed, self-contained system existing "in-itself," and knowledge of it is entirely independent of observation, calculation and measurement by the scientist. Second, either the electrons position or velocity as it moves between two observations cannot be precisely indicated. Or, in Heisenberg's broader and somewhat more radical formulation, we may say that, "quite generally there is no way of describing what happens between two consecutive observations." Either we know the position of the electron or its momentum, but not both. Thus, since it is impossible to know what path the electron will traverse, our description of it as it moves between two consecutive observations will indicate a series of possibilities. This statement will take the mathematical form of a probability function, and what is described will not be "actual" but merely "possible."3 This position, too, is wildly at variance with classical physics. For the latter, given the initial (known
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Ibid, 67. Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 48, 81-82. 3 Similarly, Bohr: While, when following the motions of free particles, we can visualize the lack of causality by considering our lack of simultaneous knowledge of the quantities entering into the classical mechanical description, the limited applicability of classical concepts is immediately evident in our account of the behavior of atoms, since the description of the state of a single atom contains absolutely no element referring to the occurrence of transition processes, so that in this case we can scarcely avoid speaking of a choice between various possibilities on the part of the atom. Bohr, Ibid, 13 (emphasis added) Later (Ibid, 19-20) in the same discussion Bohr addresses the epistemological difficulties in linguistic usage that imparts a free choice on the part of nature Or, again, Bohr remarks, In fact, the indivisibility of the quantum of action demands that, when any individual result of measurement is interpreted in terms of classical conceptions, a certain amount of latitude be allowed in our account of the mutual action between the object and the means of observation. This implies that a subsequent measurement to a certain degree deprives the information given by a previous

or at least in principle knowable) condition (known or in principle knowable) natural laws entirely determine the future state of structures ranging from the subatomic situation to the universe as a whole. Philosophically speaking, the universe as classically understood is real (and not merely possible), and relations internal to it are not just causally decided but full determined. It is self-contained, closed and lacking in all fluidity. It is, as we say, deterministically structured. For quantum mechanics, however, the microphysical world is fundamentally fluid or, better, its structure between observations is undetermined... For the sake of this discussion, we can make a distinction between the strictly deterministic causality of classical physics, and a more formal notion of causality for which all events are connected by natural processes and occur as the result of other events and for which over time the longer term consequences of an original event in any given sequence may be indeterminate... The latter concept will not be found in Heisenberg, but it is classical causality has been abandoned.1 Third, quantum mechanics "does not simply describe and explain nature; it is a part of the interplay between nature and ourselves." For it, nature, is described in terms of its "exposure" "to our method of questioning." 2 The "method of questioning" we take to largely refer to the peculiar experimental condition in which nature is largely, artificially constructed in order to be understood. Heisenberg, though, understood here the inescapable presence of our instruments in the observational situation, a situation he referred to as "interference." It is observationally grounded "interference" that renders our knowledge of the subatomic world "uncertain."3 Our knowledge of the microphysical situation would, then, appear to be conditioned by the sophistication and the development of the instruments, apparatuses or instrumental complexes we deploy in observations. Stated philosophically, we can say that knowledge of nature need not be progressive, i.e., cumulative, and, perhaps more radically, our knowledge of nature is at once a product of our (instrumental) interaction with it and relative to the instruments we employ (though it appears none of these assertions would be amenable to Heisenberg).4 Uncertainty as a principle would be inadmissible for classical physics. For the latter, there are no structurally conditioned, inescapable blind spots in our knowledge of nature, not at least in principle. As a deterministic system, the universe of Newtonian mechanics can be in principle known from the smallest subatomic particle right up to the largest macro structures. Bohrs Discussion of the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics Bohr did not see eye to eye with Heisenberg on all issues that emerged in the discussions of quantum mechanical phenomenon, which, stated differently, means the Copenhagen interpretation itself was not unitary. What is noteworthy about Bohrs position is its radicalism. Approach this, by recalling Heisenberg. Bohr took exception to Heisenberg, to his formulations of the relation constituting the experimental situation in terms of interference. I warned especially against phrases, often found in the physical literature, such as disturbing of phenomena by observation or creating physical attributes to atomic objects by measurement.5 For Bohr, magnitudes derived from the analysis of quantum phenomena cannot be detached from the conditions of their application. [This] crucial point implies the impossibility of any sharp separation between the behavior of atomic objects and the interactions with the measuring instrument which serve to define the conditions under which the phenomena appear.6 Consequently, he writes in the same work, ambiguity [arises] in ascribing customary physical attributes to atomic objects.7 What Bohr is objecting to is the hypostatization of relational features that
measurement of its significance for predicting the future course of the phenomena Ibid, 18. 1 Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 48. 2 Ibid, 50. 3 In this regard, however, see the remarks by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen cited by Feyerabend, Realism, Rationalism and Scientific Method, 309, n. 31, and Feyerabends comments for which the concept of interference, though not the duality interpretation of quantum mechanics is dispensed with. 4 Nor, although patently obvious, indeed to almost all scientists. Gaston Bachelard, not incidentally in this regard a chemist turned philosopher, is an exception: Referring to tensor calculus, albeit it as a cognitive instrument, as the matrix of all relativist thinking, he states, Contemporary physical science has been created by this instrument, much as microbiology was created by the microscope (and, we might add, Margulis evolutionary symbiotic theory was created by the electron microscope). The New Scientist Spirit, 56. 5 Cited by Feyerabend, Ibid, 251, n. 11 6 Niels Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, 39-40. Emphasis in original. This formulation is repeated verbatim in Bohr's contribution to a celebratory volume, Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist excerpted in The Bohr-Einstein Dialogue in Niels Bohr: A Centenary Volume, 122-123. 7 Ibid, 63-64.

obtain only for the total experimental situation (what he calls the whole experimental arrangement): The mere interplay between measuring instrumental and experimental conditions does not permit us assert that real relations obtain between separate objects. Instead, the methods employed in the determination of experimental situation are of a formal nature only, that is, they provide us with certain numbers or magnitudes that express these relations, but they surely do not permit us to state that such and such objective processes or events underlie the appearance of these numbers.1 The relations, and what characterizes them (i.e., their numerical expressions) will change when the total experimental situation changes (as a function of a change in any of its decisive moments); they are not properties of ontologically distinct objects. What Bohr wanted to eliminate is a metaphysics of substantially different, preconstituted subject and object, i.e., the nave realism of the modern science of nature (and this, whether or no he ever explicitly stated it in these terms with reference to classical physics). Where does this leave us, i.e., what purpose does this theorization serve, say, specifically in relation to the ends of classical physical theorizing? If we are not attempting to understand an event that transpires in the real or outer world, we are oriented toward prediction within the context of ordering classical concepts (e.g., the wave concept of light) that otherwise cannot render quantum phenomena intelligible2 This unintelligibility must be taken seriously, for in a visualization or pictorial presentation of a photons behavior, as an (imagined) experiment wherein a mirror is placed in the way of moving photon, and there are two possibilities for the direction of that movement (two photographic plates which it might strike), we are compelled to state the subatomic object always chooses one of two ways but behaves as if it had passed both ways In this regard, it should be noted that Bohr (consistently we add) held that concept does not exhaust experience At any rate, the rejection of the ontological realism of classical physics and with it the metaphysics of counterposed substantial objects is the first moment of Bohrs radicalism. We shall come back to this3 In respect to this difference between new and old physics, Bohr noted the similarity between physics (i.e., quantum mechanics) and psychology (at least a non-reductionist psychology that took the whole person as its object as it was both theorized and practiced in some circles, e.g., in Switzerland, Germany, Denmark and elsewhere at the end of the long nineteenth century, chronologically in the early part of the twentieth century). Thus, he states, we are continually reminded of the difficulty of distinguishing between subject and object.4 But the subject in physics is not consciousness, that of the scientific observer; rather it the actual, material instrument of measurement itself that forms this agency, and this sensuous material instrument incorporates the equally sensuous-material (i.e., sentient) subject with its sense organs: In language foreign to Bohr, it is inclusive of the incarnate, perceiving subject (a body subject). This extension of the observer to include the measuring instrument (which is to read Bohr backwards, i.e., he starts from the instrument and incorporates embodied subjectivity) is a radical conception indeed; it has echoes of the Leib that labors, that instrumentalizes itself in work as a Leib-Krper, and (as such) of an objectively practical subjectivity.5 What is problematic is that no one, including Bohr himself, understood this relation in this manner.
1

The formulation is more or less Feyerabends (Ibid, 278) citing from an early essay by Bohr (important because it was written in the midst of ongoing efforts to grapple with the meaning and significance of quantum phenomena, prior to the solidification of the various interpretations), ber die Anwendung der Quantentheorie auf den Aufbau. I. Die Groundpostulate der Quantentheorie, Zeitschrift fr Physik, 13 (1923): 131. 2 Here, see the joint paper authored by Bohr, H.A. Kramers and J.C. Slater, The Quantum Theory of Radiation, Philosophical Magazine 47 (1924): 785, cited by Feyerabend, Ibid, 279. Bohr was consistent in this regard, for in paper concerning the application of quantum theory cited above (ber die Anwendung der Quantentheorie auf den Aufbau) he argued that quantum analysis, though formal unlike the claims made by classical physicists on behalf of Newtonian mechanics, is nonetheless an aid in the tasks of predicting, a remarkable one we might add and one that has had significant technological implications also, e.g., it made invention of the laser possible. 3 Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, 50-51 (for the imagined experiment which was Einstein's); 52 (for acknowledgment that reality cannot be adequately and wholly conceptually reproduced). Rejection of the nave realism of modern science can (say in Bohr, though not in Heisenberg) lead to a refusal of the ontologizing anticipation of reality as a mathematical world in itself. 4 Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature, 15. Emphasis in original. Earlier in the same text he states, the finite magnitude of the quantum of action prevents altogether a sharp distinction being made between a phenomenon and the agency by which it is observed (Ibid, 11. Emphasis in original). 5 For a general indication of Bohrs reading of the material instrument and the observer, Ibid, 98, 116-117. Consistent with the failure to raise this problematic as such to a level of explicit awareness, Bohr himself utilizes an example of feeling ones way in the dark employing a stick in hand that instantiates the practical concept of a Leib-Krper, Ibid, 99. For a qualitative development of this radicalism, see our Nature, Capital, Communism, where the constitution of this subjectivity is established on the basis of an evolutionarily theorization (where, for example, it is demonstrated that human reality cannot be understood from scientific accounts, anatomically, physiologically, etc., that, e.g., the brain cannot be understood as a physical object situated in Cartesian space of

While Heisenberg may be (unfairly) open to the criticism of subjectivization, this peculiar understanding of the absence of subjectivity characterizing the total experimental situation is the second moment of Bohrs radicalism1 Bohrs understanding of the fundamental situation in quantum mechanics differs from Heisenbergs also (though, in our view, this is a difference in emphasis, not substance). Bohr grasped this situation in terms of the duality of the experimental outcomes concerning light and matter.2 These outcomes appear in two forms, the first of which are facts of the order of the Compton effect3 can be explained thoroughly and fully on the basis of the assumption that light (or matter) consists in particles; the second includes those facts that can be explained thoroughly and fully on the basis of the assumption that light (or matter) consists in waves. The two outcomes as outcomes are contradictory: Those facts exhaustively accounted for in terms of particles cannot be rendered intelligible in terms of waves, and vice versa.4 (One sees here the same situation described by Heisenberg in terms of position and momentum. Moreover, we can relate this to the nature of the atom as understood by Bohr: In its stable or quantum states, an electron can be said to behave as a particle, but in its excited states as energy is supplied to it and it reaches or jumps to the next quantum state, this particle can be said to behave as a wave, as a specific vibration of an electron wave restricted by electric attraction that binds it to a space more or less close to the nucleus.) There are two significant features of the manner in which Bohr understood this duality of experimental outcomes. The first concerns the role of theory in those outcomes. A theory is not just ex post facto systematization, a conceptual framework that allows us to unify what might otherwise be unconnected facts, that is, experimental results. Theory enters into the constitution of these experiment results, so to speak, in advance, i.e., it shapes the very construction of the experiment. This is clear in wave experiments, cases that involve interference: In such cases, light must minimally be partly coherent (in the spectral sense). Thus, in setting up these experiments it is necessary to pay heed to the relative phases of the wave sequence, meaning that knowledge and understanding of wave theory is already explicitly operative in the scientists (scientific teams) preparation of the experiment.5 While
modern science, but only as organic substrate of embodied subjectivity, of an objectively practical being), and the implications of this theorization for the sciences of man are spelt out. 1 Here, we believe, what is intended by subjective is arbitrary determination. What Heisenberg has in mind is an inescapable interaction between method of observation and its object: There is no such method that doesnt interact with the observed object, e.g., the photon with the electron. The choice of words, interference, was unfortunate, and a hangover from the traditions of science with it detached objectivity in which he was trained. 2 Here we are following Feyerabend, Ibid, 314-317. The problem is succinctly summarized by Bohr in the 1925 essay. Elsewhere he states that from experimental outcomes it follows that we are not faced with a modification of the mechanical and electro-dynamical theories describable in term of the usual physical concepts, but with an essential failure of the pictures in space and time on which the description of natural phenomena has hitherto been based (Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature, 34-35). 3 In the classical theorizations, light of sufficient intensity will accelerate a charged particle within an electric field to relativistic speed causing radiation-pressure recoil (the electrons recoil) and an associated Doppler shift of the scattered light. This is called a Thomson scattering. But, at low enough light intensities this effect would become arbitrary, regardless of wavelength while, classically, it is predicted the scattered wavelengths should be equal to the initial wavelength. Here it is important to recall that, classically, photons have wave characteristics, in particular wavelength and frequency. In 1923, Arthur Compton (A Quantum Theory of Scattering of X-Rays by Light Elements, The Physical Review 21(5), 1923: 483-502) set up an experiment of this sort, one in which high-energy photons, x-rays, collided with a carbon target, atoms with loosely bound electrons on their outer shells. The scattered radiation was found to have a longer wavelength than that incident upon the target. The increase in wavelength did not depend on the wavelength of the incident photon (i.e., the wavelength of the scattered light was different from the incident radiation). This difference or increase in wavelength is the Compton shift (the entire situation being referred to as the Compton effect). It is this low intensity shift in wavelength that cannot be explained classically. What is proposed, and mathematically described, is that photons not only have wave characteristics, such as wavelength and frequency, but have particle or material characteristics as well, energy and momentum as characteristics of mass. On this basis the explanation offered for the Compton effect is that individual photons which collide with loosely bound single electrons transfer some of their energy and momentum to the electrons, which in turn recoil. In the instant of the collision, new photons of less energy and momentum are produced that scatter at angles the size of which depends on the amount of energy lost to the recoiling electrons. The entire shift can be measured purely in terms of the angle at which the photon gets scattered, and since energy and wavelength are related in photons (the energy of photons is directly proportional to their frequency and inversely proportional to their wavelength, so lower-energy photons have lower frequencies and longer wavelengths), a proportionality constant for the wavelength shift can be derived. 4 In his account, Feyerabend further states, There exists, at least at the present moment, no system of physical concepts which can provide us with an explanation that covers and is compatible with all the facts [in regard to] light and matter (Ibid, 315). See Bohrs formulation of the problem (Ibid, 107). We shall return to this in the Third Sketch. 5 The example is Feyerabends.

merely instancing our own view that the modern science of nature rests on the projection of the really real, nature, as an assemblage of bodies in motion calculable in advance for purposes of nature domination by way of prediction, a projection that itself is complexly and mediately grounded in the class practices of the bourgeoisie, and though failing to draw out the broader epistemological ramifications of this feature, this is nonetheless the third moment of Bohrs radicalism. (In precisely what sense we grasp this as instancing our own perspective will become clear in the next section wherein we exhibit the continuities between the new and old physics.) The second significant feature is indeterminateness (uncertainty), which circuitously brings us back to Heisenberg. For Bohr, a change from conditions that permit employment of the wave analysis to conditions that allow for use of the particle analysis cannot be anticipated in advance, cannot be theoretically known. They cannot be lawfully formulated (those laws would be statistical), signifying that change is indeterminate, the conditions under which each takes place (from one wave to particle and vice versa) are irreducible. Thus, the duality of wave and particle features that alternately characterize the total experimental situation (in Heisenbergs terms, position and momentum) will not, for Bohr, provide a complete, fully adequate and transparent description of the state of a physical system; such is, in other words, unachievable in principle. Thus, that situation never possesses the same deterministic character that obtains in classical physics. Bohrs perspective on the situation in quantum mechanics is, unlike Heisenbergs, largely qualitative, to a certain extent even philosophical. Indeed, as we shall have occasion to note immediately below, this is a central difference. As Heisenberg, in his tribute to Bohr, remarked that, I noticed that mathematical clarity had in itself no virtue for Bohr. He feared that the formal mathematical structure could obscure the physical core of the problem and was convinced that complete physical explanation should absolutely precede the mathematical formulation.1 But there was no disagreement on the relation of quantum mechanics to classical physics. Continuity between Quantum Mechanics and Classical Physics This discontinuity between the old (classical) and new (quantum) physics described by especially by Heisenberg was not, however, absolute, even for the first quantum physicists (especially Bohr who was most careful to formulate this relation). Bohr and Heisenberg both insisted that, though the concepts and laws of classical physics are not valid in the subatomic universe, nonetheless descriptions of quantum mechanical experiments are to be stated in terms of classical concepts and laws for it is only at the classical level that defined experimental results are achieved, thus presupposing the general correctness of concepts operative at this level2 and discursive demonstration of this non-validity (of classical physics concepts and laws considered subatomically) proceeds via use of instruments constructed according to same concepts and laws.3 In Bohrs word, recognition of the indivisibility of the quantum of action, and the determination of its magnitude, not only depend on an analysis of measurements based on classical concepts, but it continues to be the application of these concepts also that makes it possible to relate the symbolism of the quantum theory [i.e., its mathematical formulation] to the data of experience;4 or, concisely and unequivably, however far the phenomena transcend the scope of of classical physical explanation, the account of all evidence must be expressed in classical terms.5 This, then, is the first moment of continuity between the two physics. In Bohr, in fact, this relation of quantum theoretical symbolism to experimental data has the specific sense of a theorization that seeks to render intelligible that which (quantum phenomena) classical physics cannot, and this for the purposes of prediction quantum-mechanical formalism represents a purely symbolic scheme permitting only predictions as to results obtainable under conditions specified by means of classical concepts, or (to paraphrase Feyerabend), quantum mechanics is a predictive device for the proper ordering of classical concepts. 6 (In this regard, from early on quantum mechanics elucidated in depth the bonding of electrons in atoms and molecules, penetratingly
1 2

In S. Rosenthal (ed.), Niels Bohr, His Life and Work as Seen by his Friends. New York, 1967: 98 (cited in Feyerabend, Ibid, 274). [It] is only at the classical level that definite results for an experiment can be obtained, in the form of distinct events which are associated in a one-to-one correspondence with the various possible values of the physical quantity that is being measured. This means that without an appeal to a classical level, quantum theory would have no meaning quantum theory presupposes the classical level and the general correctness of classical concepts in describing this level. David Bohm, Quantum Theory, 625. 3 Physics and Philosophy, 53, especially 56-57; C.F. von Weizscker, The Unity of Physics, 182-187; Max Jammer, The Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics, 325; Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, 39, 88-89. 4 Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature, 16. 5 The Bohr-Einstein Dialogue, 122. Emphasis in original.

exhibited the formation and reactions of atomic nuclei, and integrated probability laws for spontaneous radioactive decay into the statistically expressed quantum mechanical account, none of which was in principle achievable within a classical framework. In Bohr's formulation of the relation, quantum mechanics presents a consistent generalization of deterministic mechanical description which it embraces as an asymptotic limit in the case of physical phenomena on a scale sufficiently large to allow the neglect of the quantum of action.1) This, the effort to salvage the predictive character and power of classical physics, then, is the second moment of continuity between the two physics. For it is internal to the modern and contemporary sciences of nature and, for them, by far the most important moment. Bohr further indicates that, despite the limitations of classical mechanics in adequately accounting for experimental results at the subatomic level, quantum mechanics nonetheless maintains the conservation laws of energy and momentum,2 which in the classical theorization are essential foundations of the account of general causality in nature. This is the third moment of continuity between the old and new physics. Both Bohr and Heisenberg (the one starting from a from more or less philosophical reflection, the other from a mathematical analysis) summarized rejection of the classical theory by reference to the naively realist character of the ontology projected as well as "arrived" at in it. The implications of the newly emerging view of nature that drove physicists to this break gave rise to astonishment and perplexity. Heisenberg's account captures these sentiments well:
I remember discussions with Bohr which went through many hours till very last at night and ended almost in despair; and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neighboring park I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can nature possibly be as absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?3

What was so absurd? Heisenberg indicated, "only such experimental situations can arise in nature as can be expressed in the mathematical formalism" (viz., in the equations of quantum mechanics). Here, he was looking for a physical interpretation that would provide the (mathematical) formalism with an operational meaning, i.e., an interpretation that would allow empirical relations ("experience") to be formulated in terms of a quantum mechanical, axiomatic analytic apparatus (the "mathematical formalism"). Yet on the face of it, the cited proposition is absurd. To render it intelligible, it should be rephrased in a conditionally interrogatory form: "If our experiments necessarily require a mathematical formulation of their results, then, when we pose questions to nature, what is it about what we are doing that imposes this requirement?" Bohr, again far more radical, indicated that the formalism defied unequivocal expression in classical physical language4 Note that scientific practice (experiment) is at issue, since in our daily practice we often interact with the surrounding natural world, yet the understanding thereby achieved never in principle need (and rarely actually does) take a highly formalized, mathematical form. The experiment is (and this is now commonly understood) a posing of a question to nature, and that posing is also (not so commonly understood) involves construction of natural phenomena.5
6

Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, 40 (emphasis added); The Bohr-Einstein Dialogue, 123; Feyerabend, Realism, Rationalism and Scientific Method, 279. 1 Ibid, 74. 2 Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature, 113. 3 Physics and Philosophy, 42. 4 [In] the indeterminacy relation we are dealing with an implication of the formalism which defies unambiguous expression in words suited to describe classical physical pictures. Thus, a sentence like we cannot know both the momentum and the position of an atomic object raises at once questions as to the physical reality of two such attributes of the object, which can be answered only by referring to the conditions for the unambiguous use of space-time concepts, on the one hand, and dynamical conservation laws, on the other. While the combination of these concepts into a single picture of a causal chain of events is the essence of classical mechanics, room for regularities beyond the grasp of such as description is just afforded by the circumstance that the study of the complementary phenomena demands mutually exclusive experimental arrangement. Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, 40-41 (Discussion with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics, emphasis added). In the case this formulation leaves something to be desired, Bohr explicitly states elsewhere (Ibid, 73) that what is mutually exclusively are the conditions for the very use of the concepts of space-time concepts to one side and dynamical conservation laws to the other, or, in Heisenbergs terms, the determinations respectively of position and momentum. To state this is to clearly understand why it is necessary to subordinate quantum mechanics to classical physics (first moment of continuity), and the central role of prediction in achieving this aim (second moment of continuity). 5 Ibid. Thus Heisenberg states (Ibid, 58), What we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Here we might note Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, 167-171 (also 133, 165), where the active, constructivist character of the modern science of nature revealed by the new physics is explicitly detailed. In the conclusion to this work, Bachelard, a philosopher of science trained

Quantum mechanics, both as model and exemplar of contemporary physics, constructs nature physically, as bodies in motion, as "matter." It is "matter" that is, if possible, even "thinner" than the "matter" constituted in classical physical theory. For there can be no more rarefied abstraction that quantum mechanical "matter." While in classical physics "matter" had the sense of a real body in motion essentially determined as an extended thing (res extensa), "matter" in quantum mechanics, whether as particle or wave, has not only lost its attribution of extension and its character of thingliness (and to this point quantum mechanics has been triumphant as all of contemporary physics takes it cue in this problematic from it), but even its status as real, since the probability functions that describe "matter" in the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics should be treated as descriptions of possibilities (i.e., of possible relations among elements moving in a field). Thus, the same series of initial abstractions from the qualitative character of the sensuous thing that distinguished the treatment of perceptual phenomena in classical physical theory are also presupposed in quantum mechanics. This is the fourth moment of continuity between the old and new physics. For classical physical theory, the abstraction from the sensuous qualities of the thing, and its treatment as a mere body in motion essentially determined as an extended thing, justified the denial of the immanent presence of emotive or valuative qualities in the thing. For quantum mechanics as well as the entirety of contemporary physics, this (series of) abstraction(s) has the same function: The same claims to "ethical neutrality" (usually combined with prattle about the "pursuit of truth") are present in quantum mechanics, to this day in contemporary physics. This outward appearance, viz., the entire discourse concerning value-free science, remains the phenomenal form characteristically concealing (and revealing) an inner structure whose essence is class-grounded and utilitarian-practical, i.e., is bourgeois and technological.1 Accordingly, the so-constituted instrumentalist character of contemporary physics necessarily renders it a productive force in capital accumulation and an ideological weapon of bourgeois domination. This is the fifth moment of continuity between the old and new physics. The question as to why produce the series of abstractions in the first place receives the same answer as it did in the case of classical physics: The abstractions are generated for purposes of measurement, calculation and prediction, that is, it aims at control of natural phenomena, or, it is given with the societal project of nature domination. Thus, the sixth, decisive moment of continuity between the old and new physics is that conceptually and teleologically both knowledge formations, as predecessor and successor, are motivationally grounded in the same largely hidden social intentionality, the societal project of the domination of nature that marks bourgeois civilization... Recognizing this objectively obfuscated motivation permits us, by the way, to provide the answer to the "absurd question" posed by Heisenberg: Our experiments necessarily require a mathematical formulation of their results because, when we pose questions to nature, what we are doing is attempting to dominate it. Given that to dominate we have found it most efficacious to treat nature abstractly as an aggregate totality of bodies in motion and therewith to quantify, mathematical formalism provides us with the most efficient, effective, and systematic means we have discovered in pursuit of this project, and at the same time its removed, self-contained intellectual structure neatly
as a chemist, attempts to ground a non-Cartesian epistemology on the new physics. To demonstrate the radical difference so-called in methods between classical and the new physics, he systemically contrasts Descartes analysis of a piece of wax (Discourse on Method) to a simple, contemporary scientifically experimental construction, he calls its composition, of wax. Here, in this exemplary instance Bachelard, so to speak, lets the cat out of the bag: Nature grasped scientifically has absolutely nothing to do with the nature as lived and experienced in daily life. The reader need not be overwhelmed with the sense that this nature is a thought-based (often imagined), laboratory construct, a complex product of a disciplined practice. Bachelard, calling it artificial experience, himself refers to the artificial, constructive intent of the experiment (Ibid, 167-168, 169), i.e., the experiment, the end product of an entire series of abstractions. The only significant question is, to what end? And, in this regard, Bachelard provides most of the answer, modern science coordinates its observations in search of the qualities [to remake or construct] matter (Ibid, 170). Why the experiment? Why remake matter? This, of course, brings us back to our theorization of internal necessary relation of science to the bourgeoisie. 1 Of course, this attitude, as scientific false consciousness and bad faith, is even more decisive today than at the origins of the modern science of nature. For instance, while being held by Allied forces at the end of last imperialist world war, German physical theorists (among them Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizscker) heard that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima by the American imperialists. The group, huddled together for closed mouth discussions, was horrified... One wonders how much horror Heisenberg experienced since as a former member of a Frei Korps militia soldier and the youth Wandervogel from 1939 to the end of the he headed the Nazi atomic weapons development program... Reflecting on this genocidal act, von Weizscker regurgitated the same pap that characterized the modern science of nature at its origins, affirming our task, now as in the past, is to guide this development [of science] toward the right ends, to extend the benefits of knowledge to all mankind, not to prevent the development itself. Recalled and cited by Heisenberg in his Physics and Beyond, 195. Compare von Weizsckers remarks with those of Bacon cited in the Introduction (Elements of the Conceptual Structure of Science), above.

dovetails with our self-justificatory bad faith in and through which we deny that we are engaged in anything other than the pursuit of truth"... The new physics, and for that matter contemporary physics in its entirety, prescribe "laws" for manipulation of sensuous nature as "matter." Quantum mechanics, since it prescribes pure possibilities for said task, might, it can be argued, be considered the highest form of this intellectual "art," i.e., science, of manipulation. In other words, to the extent it conforms to its model and exemplar, in aiming at prediction, in expressing itself in terms of classical mechanics, thus at once treating nature as "matter" and immanently connected to the historically dominant class of the bourgeoisie, it is as such technological in the modern sense, that is, orders nature as standing-reserve, ready-tohand raw materials (Stoffe) for capitalist commodity production; or, in Bachelards words, Natures true order is the order we put in it with the technical means at our disposal,1 i.e., science orders nature for the reproduction of societies of capital, the global system of which taken together form capitalist civilization.

Ibid, 108.

Second Sketch Einstein, Simultaneity and Relativity, Technological Civilization If quantum mechanics broke with the space-time coordination of atomic processes and with the universal causality of natural processes as underlay the classical theory beginning from Galileo, this was not the case with the relativity theory (in particular general relativity).1 The problem of the relation of science to capital is quite different here (since Einstein' commitment to universal causality makes his work the completion of classical physics and not its abandonment),2 and this can be developed by exhibiting the relation of science to that society, capitalist, in which it has developed, the sole society in the large historical sense with which it is fully congruent. In the analyses and perspective developed here, the internal necessary relation of bourgeois science to capitals technology holds for even the most rarified, removed scientific conceptual elaborations. Here in offering a single, singular example, we can reestablish those otherwise hidden foundations, that internally and necessary refer science back its basis in the practices of accumulation, no longer those of the bourgeoisie as a class but more and more as the central feature of the dynamics of capitalist development as a system of social relations... In 1905, Einstein published four significant papers, three seminal in the history of physics one of which, at the center of this discussion, had stood out more than all the rest. We are referring to On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies wherein Einstein posed the question of the frame of reference in which are the laws of electromagnetism are valid (the question, with respect to what frame of reference light moves at speed c?). Theoretically formulated, the question was one of the meaning of time itself, and it arose in the historical and technological context to which this formulation referred back. This cultural atmosphere was plagued by the problems this question summarized: From the most mundane, simplest difficulty of coordinating train schedules how can the various times, 7:45 here, 7:43 here, 7: 47 there in the various sleepy hamlets along the line from Geneva to Zurich while a telegraph connection revealed 7:46 at the metropolitan terminus, all be right? Which one is right? through the imperialist military requirements of coordinating troop movements a problem that had deeply bothered the German General Staff going back to von Moltkes campaigns that had made German national unification a reality to the vital issues of imperialist power resting on facilitation of international commerce an intense competition to technologically establish that time by creation of extensive network of undersea telegraph cables, that, in turn, allowed the victor to fix longitudes and redraw the global map, i.e., to facilitate hegemony among imperialist rivals struggling over territory (East Asia as a whole, i.e., the Philippines, Indochina, the Korean Peninsula, and China in particular), the victorious outcome of which secured direct access to natural resources to be appropriated as raw materials and provided the guaranteed opportunities for capital export and hugely profitable lending abroad all involved directly and immediately the meaning of time, and none could be effectively be resolved until the question, posed adequately, permitted of resolution. That is what Einstein did. The fundamental problem, as was prosaically exhibited in the daily coordination of train travel, is that two different reference systems (e.g., the official clock at the Bern station counterposed to the one in Geneva, not to mention the one at Yverdon) can, and did, at one and the same time provide two different readings (i.e., times) for the same physical system (e.g., the train as it pulls into a sleepy hamlet, Yverdon, roughly half way between the two cities). Einstein achieved a theoretical restatement of this question that, giving rise to its own resolution in the form of a statement of the meaning of simultaneity, provided procedural resolution through electromagnetic clock coordination... a procedural resolution, mind you, for which time is a convention, ascertained by measuration, which a long, long way from classical concepts such as Newton's for whom time was absolute, like space a sensorium of God. Einstein's work unfolded in the years before May 1905 in the context of simultaneity talk [that] was growing denser among physicists as they grappled with the electrodynamics of moving bodies. Simultaneity procedures lay thick in philosophical texts, in the cityscape of Bern, along train tracks throughout Switzerland and beyond, in undersea telegraph cables, and in the application in-pile at the Bern patent office. In the midst of this extraordinary material and literary intensification of wired simultaneity, physicists, engineers, philosophers, and patent officers debated how to make simultaneity visible. Einstein did not conjure these various flows of simultaneity out of nothing; he snapped a junction into the circuit enabling the currents to cross. Simultaneity had long been in play at many
1

Bohr, Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature, 53, 97. As Bohr too notes, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, 25, 70.

different scales, but Einstein showed how the same flashed signal of simultaneity illuminated all of them, form the microphysical across regional trains and telegraphs to overarching philosophical claims about time and the Universe. 1 In this statement of the meaning of simultaneity all these threads ranging from the most prosaic to the most exalted came together. The entire, inherited Newtonian framework, that of universal underlying ether blocked insight into this solution; for, if there was a basic substance itself at rest to which all objects in motion were related, then there was similarly a universal frame of reference that defined the temporal dimension of their motion... There were really two converging problems here, one theoretical and one experimental. The former exacerbated the latter (which we shall turn to shortly), and it, the theoretical problem, was both temporally prior and in the actual development of physics really the driving force. It began from Rutherfords discovery of the atomic nucleus (holding almost the entire mass of the atom in an exceedingly small volume) which immediately recommended treatment in mechanical and electrodynamic terms. The problem was that according to classical principles, motion of electrons around that nucleus would generate energy loss, a radiation that would result in a continual, rapid contraction of the orbiting electrons, collapsing in on the nucleus, implying their fusion in a center smaller in volume than those attributed to atoms... This universal frame of reference was a singular correct time by which, say, all clocks could be set and reset. In the history of late nineteenth century physics, attempts to elaborate a coherent description of electromagnetic and optical phenomena disclosed that observers in motion, moving relative to each other at high rates of speed, will organize events differently the one from another. Two observers will judge events that occur at distinctly different points in space differently in the quantitative sense, one judging them to be, say, simultaneous, the other transpiring at different moments. Effectively, this situation undercuts the view operative and explicit in classical mechanics that space and time are absolute, that light propagates instantaneously, thus permitting us to situate those bodies encompassing and around us without regard to their velocity and to arrange events in a singular, universal temporal frame of reference. But all physicists (and Michelson, Morley and Rutherford were well positioned to do otherwise) prior to Einstein proceeded cautiously and extremely conservatively, giving no indication of the necessity of a break with the classical conceptions of space (and time). In the paper referred to above Einstein abandoned the concept of an underlying substance, ether, at rest in relation to which objects are in motion, so it was long thought, declaring it a fiction.2 (This was a momentous paradigm shift.) He restated, conservatively, the principle that the laws of physics, the laws of motion, the laws of electromagnetism are valid for all observers in uniform motion, all frames of reference in uniform motion are equally good places to do physics, there is no preferred state of motion, no place is special at least as long as the motion is uniform.3 (No paradigm shift here.) The special theory of relativity applied to this special case of motion, exclusively to uniform motion, not to accelerating motion, not to rotating and circular (or elliptical) motions such as planetary motion, not to bodies (e.g., an airplane) subject to turbulence. For this special case (which concerns us almost exclusively in our daily lives), all observers in uniform motion will measure the same value for the speed of light, even if they are moving relative to each other. We can conclude, and the conclusion it should be noted is anything but conservative, if I measure the speed of light while walking at 3 mph, and you do the same in a jet moving at 700 mph or, for that matter, in a hypothetical starship moving at a quarter the speed of light, in each case as instances of uniform motion the speed of light will be same, because the speed of light (c = 300,000 kilometers per second) is constant, a position within the history of physics that followed from a famous set of equations developed by James Clerk Maxwell in the 1860s that identified light as a form of electromagnetic radiation. There was another thought experiment (Gedankexperiment) involved here: While on a trolley car riding to work, Einstein imagined the car speeding up, faster, still faster, approaching the speed of light, as the car and he moved away from a clock tower as it approached noon. He imaged himself moving at that speed, c, effectively riding a wave of light, light in the visible spectrum, which in the physicalist sense carried the information that it was noon: That
1
2

Peter Galison, Einsteins Clocks, Poincars Maps: Empires of Time, 261. Emphases in the original. The introduction of a luminiferous ether will prove to be superfluous inasmuch as the view here to be developed will not require an absolutely stationary space provided with special properties, nor assign a velocity-vector to a point of the empty space in which electromagnetic processes take place. Albert Einstein, On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies. 3 [The] same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good. Ibid.

clock would not move, yet his pocket watch ticked away the seconds, suggesting to him that time itself was relative to the frame of reference of the observer... This is called time dilation. It can be exhibited: Imagine two parallel mirrors with a pulse of light reflecting between them, each traversal constituting a tick. If a clock like this was to move rapidly past an observer at rest, the observer at rest would see the pulse following a sawtooth pattern. Each point traversed by the moving clock would follow a longer (diagonal) path than in the straight up-and-down path of a similar clock observed by someone moving in lockstep with this framework. Since light travels at the same speed in every frame of reference, Einstein concluded that a tick in the mirror frame would be measured as taking longer than a tick in the rest frame. Therefore, the rest observer must conclude time runs slow in the moving frame of reference.... This time dilation makes little or no calculable difference in daily life, but it would make a difference if high speed travel (as in fantasized spaceship travel), roughly at speeds in excess of 60% c. In space travel imagined at these speeds those aboard a spaceship would not age as rapidly as those living out their lives on Earth. Other effects are also observable. First, an object accelerated to the speed of light would have its length shortened to zero (this has been observed in subatomic behavior in particle accelerators); second, the mass of the same object as it approached c would approach infinity. It would constitute, as it were, a singularity, an infinitesimal point with infinite mass. Thus, no object with mass can travel at the speed of light. These insights drawn out speculatively but logically by Einstein were all given, implicitly, with his concept of simultaneity, the new paradigm explicating the meaning of time The paradigm shift stands at the foundations of Einsteins insight. A reconstruction of the history of physics late in the long nineteenth century might suggest that discarding the ether was a bold, but logical step. The Michelson-Morley experiment undertaken over the course of the 1880s, attempting to measure the movement of the Earth through the ether so-called, had failed to detect its presence. Yet Einstein makes only the vaguest allusion to it, and at the time there is no evidence that he was actually familiar with the experiment: If this is hard to believe, note that nowhere at this moment did he mention it, nowhere in his publications, in his correspondences or, in his work reports, to his confidants. Was he not aware of it at the time?1 Whether this remarkable analysis and complex of insights was formed, so speak, without a history or it took shape within the framework of problems posed by the modern science of nature as he understood it, they cannot be grasped in terms of a progressive development of knowledge... Einstein did later reconstruct the logical development of the problematic that led him to the theory of special relativity and he himself claimed he was reaching back to resolve a basic aporia of Newtonian mechanics...2 Nonetheless, as the whole weight of our analysis indicates, it is fanciful to account for this decisive paradigm shift by uncovering a logic of the development of physics that made it necessary, awaiting only Einstein, and from which almost everything else followed: Situated within the order of capital, it is only the total cultural context, and a grasp of the technological problems of the age, that permits to understand what had transpired. But return to simultaneity. What did Einstein himself have to say? If we wish to describe the motion of a material point, we give the values of its co-ordinates as functions of the time. Now we must bear carefully in mind that a mathematical description of this kind
1

It is hard to believe: R.S. Shankland (Conversations with Albert Einstein, American Journal of Physics, 31, 1963: 47f.) related the entire 1905 paper on special relativity is rather strange in the respect that Einstein reveals very little about what he knows to be experimentally verified and that he makes no specific reference to the work of others. The paper in fact represents an enigma in that it is very difficult to see how much is an inference from experimental results (or a theoretical formulation of them) of which Einstein had knowledge (cited by Feyerabend, Ibid, 275, n. 60. Emphasis in original). Shankland went on to pointedly indicate that Einstein had himself criticized Hilbert for failing to expressly state the methods on the basis of which he achieved his results. Inconsistency indeed! 2 Einstein traced out the logical development of the problem which led to relativity and intimated, not expressly stating, that the theory of special relativity originated in a reflection on Maxwell's equations which unified electricity and magnetism... easily and countless times verified, Maxwell provided a formula for the generation of magnetic fields from changing electrical ones and vice versa, and, noting that these changes propagate, akin to light or to waves moving at light speed, proposed these waves are light... It was the phenomenon of light which Einstein focused his attention on. See Einstein, Essays on Science, 17-18, 35-38, 43-45 for problem and its development, and 49, where he effectively acknowledged long after the fact that Michelson's experiment proved the equivalent legitimacy of all inertial frames of reference (instantiated in the problem of different train times, above). Note also, Ibid, 48, where he states, the theory of relativity... is no revolutionary act but the natural continuation of a line that can be traced through centuries.

has no physical meaning unless we are quite clear as to what we understand by time. 1 With no ether at rest as the basis on which one time will appear privileged in relation to all others, with no concept of a unique measure of time that does not depend upon a frame of reference, the temporal (i.e., clock) systems of every inertial frame of reference are equivalent, one as valid or true as any other. They only need be synchronized. What Einstein provided was a new definition of simultaneity.2 As stunningly simple as this sounds... to us... it took the paradigm shift (elimination of ether and with it the concept of absolute time) to generate this insight, to bring the metaphysics of time done to Earth, to assert a procedural resolution based on measuration. Einstein was attuned to his age, as the entire problematic of simultaneity cut back and forth across the era: If it weighted heavy on physicists as manifested in their texts, if it also ran across the tracks spreading out from Bern to the rest of Switzerland and beyond, and if it was similarly present in the underwater telegraph cables that connected geographically distinct metropolitan centers of capital otherwise oceans apart, in the clock towers that highlighted that citys architectural landscape, in the applications submitted to the Bern patent office, the conundrums of the problem of simultaneity were in the air, that is, they were neatly embedded in a cultural-ideal atmosphere completely saturated and fully charged with the eminently practical problems of a scientific society, bourgeois civilization, to which solutions were continuously offered (again, witness the patent submissions in Bern): If the train on which Michele Besse (Einsteins good friend) pulled into the Bern station at 8 am on a return trip from Zurich, the time of his arrival could be given in terms of electromagnetically synchronized clocks, none of which occupied a privileged position vis--vis the others. Einsteins theorization emerged very late in the long nineteenth century (or, if you prefer, chronologically the early 20th century) as the dominant framework for physical analysis not only because, starting from the laws of electromagnetism formulated by Maxwell, it was the most consistent, thoroughgoing and explanatorily powerful development of the mechanics at the heart of bourgeois science of nature but because, with his new concept of simultaneity, he had worked out the practical, technological problem that had confounded the leading elements of European and North American societies of capital for the previous thirty years. The coordination of times was an eminently practical problem of a scientific civilization, not merely a Gedankexperiment: It was decisive for the capitalist worlds most dynamic firms, the symbols and exemplars of the twilight era of formal domination, railroad capitals; it was crucial to imperialist militaries; and, not to be slighted, it was of overriding significance for the Swiss clock industryIf the determination of the meaning of time provided practical resolution to technological problems at the level of civilization, at the same time it also illuminated the entire intellectual landscape of foundational science (physics).3 Well, not quite. A problem still remained: If the first law of thermodynamics holds for each and every observational frame of reference, then total energy must be constant within a physical system without regard to the specific reference frame within which an observer is situated. But if mass increases with velocity (markedly as a moving body approaches the speed of light), then the
1

Einstein, Ibid. Emphasis in original. If at the point A of space there is a clock, an observer at A can determine the time values of events in the immediate proximity of A by finding the positions of the hands which are simultaneous with these events. If there is at the point B of space another clock in all respects resembling the one at A, it is possible for an observer at B to determine the time values of events in the immediate neighborhood of B. But it is not possible without further assumption to compare, in respect of time, an event at A with an event at B. We have so far defined only an A time and a B time. We have not defined a common time for A and B, for the latter cannot be defined at all unless we establish by definition that the time required by light to travel from A to B equals the time it requires to travel from B to A. Let a ray of light start at the A time tA from A towards B, let it at the B time tB be reflected at B in the direction of A, and arrive again at A at the A time tA. In accordance with definition the two clocks synchronize if tB tA = tA tB. We assume that this definition of synchronism is free from contradictions, and possible for any number of points; and that the following relations are universally valid: 1. If the clock at A synchronizes with the clock at B and also with the clock at C, the clocks at B and C also synchronize with each other. 2. If the clock at B synchronizes with the clock at A, the clock at A synchronizes with the clock at B. Thus with the help of certain imaginary physical experiments we have settled what is to be understood by synchronous stationary clocks located at different places, and have evidently obtained a definition of simultaneous, or synchronous, and of time. The time of an event is that which is given simultaneously with the event by a stationary clock located at the place of the event, this clock being synchronous, and indeed synchronous for all time determinations, with a specified stationary clock. Ibid. Emphasis in original. 3 Thus, for example, in his patent office work Einstein had become an expert on gyrocompasses to such an extent that he had contributed to one of the major patents of Anschtz-Kaempfe, a firm engaged in the production of advanced electrical machinery. Galison, Ibid, 251.
2

energy of this object, kinetic energy, does not conform to the first law (of thermodynamics). This could not be. Something had to be absent from the energy balance sheet. The first law refers to closed systems where the universe itself is conceived as such. Einstein, fervently believing the universe is a closed system, one in which a universal causality prevails (God does not roll dice),1 pondered the sorts of questions raised by the line of thinking in the last paragraph. A few months after publishing the 1905 paper under discussion here, he penned a note in which he resolved this dilemma. The energy balance sheet would preserve its equationary symmetric character (no new mass would be created in the universe), if the entire mass of a moving body could be converted into energy. It was mass itself that had been missing from that balance sheet. No longer: Mathematically formulated, mass possesses a rest energy that is the precise equivalent of its rest mass, m, multiplied by the speed of light, c, squared. E = mc2. Seemingly at the furthest remove of the conjuncture we have described here the necessary, internal relation of science to the bourgeoisie, or, in the era of real domination as the bourgeoisie increasingly functions and appears as a personification of capital, of science to capital the quantitatively ultimate expression of the fundamental structure of the universe, its underlying principle of intelligibility, simultaneously perfectly and precisely articulates anew the significance and hidden teleology of science as a class theory of nature domination; for, as we shall see, 2 it raise to a new, the highest existing level the meaning and import of capitalist humanitys relation to nature, a relation that is basically disclosed in capitalist modernitys technology.

1 2

ob der liebe Gott wrfelt. Fifth Study, Part III, Capitalism and Technology, below.

Third Sketch

Bohr and Einstein

ob der liebe Gott wrfelt. The discussion in which this remark occurred Einstein gently but mockingly posed it as a question took place in Brussels in October 1927 at the Fifth Physical Conference of the Solvay Institute. Einstein, Bohr and Ehrenfest, among others, participated in this specific discussion. The point at issue was a philosophical reflection on the quantum mechanical abandonment of causality,1 and with it the peculiar realist metaphysics characteristic of a science that identifies the fundamental structure of the real with a conceptually generated mathematical projection (all the while asserting that the projection as real exists independently of us).2 ...After 1915, Einstein increasing turned to cosmological speculation and increasingly insisted on methodological deductivism...3 we could call the latter a corollary of the former... In the same manner, the affirmation of this method constituted a self-misunderstanding of his own work prior to this time can be said to be a corollary of the projection of nature as a mathematical world in itself evinced in such statements as, ...pure mathematical construction enables us to discover the concepts and the laws connecting them, which gives us the key to the understand of nature... I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality...4 In discussion with Bohr, Einstein expressed a feeling of disquietude with the abandonment of universal causality in quantum mechanics...5 Existentially, this had become such a problem for him that he came to annual conferences such as Solvay armed with suggestions, arguments and proposed experiments the purpose of which was to demonstrate the necessity of a reinstatement of causality and space-time coordination in quantum mechanics... Einstein had attempted to finesse, if you will, the problem posed by Compton's work by suggesting a control of the momentum and energy transfer, involved in a location of the particle in space and time, [could] be used for a further specification of the state of the particle after it [passed] through the hole, referring to the insertion of a second diaphragm (between the first and the photographic plate) in the context of an experimental set up that involved a narrow slit in a diaphragm behind which was a photographic plate. Bohr demonstrated (clearly on his account) that there was no escape from the problem, for there could be no other way to deem a logically consistent mathematical formalism as inadequate than by demonstrating the departure of its consequences from experience or by proving that its predictions did not exhaust the possibilities of observation, and Einsteins argumentation could be directed to neither of these ends.6 Thus, Einsteins futile remark about a deity: It strongly suggests he agreed and, unable to mount a coherent rational response, was left with querying irony... Bohr had, it might be noted, responded with equivalent cosmic subtly, by pointing to the great care which ancient thinkers used in ascribing attributes to Providence in everyday language.7 Here one thinks not so much of ancient thinkers (i.e., Greek philosophers) but of the Old Testament injunction against the use of the name of God... Einsteins reputable for genius as a physical theorist was not the contemporary view... as late as 1934 Einstein himself appears to have thought the work of James Clerk Maxwell more significant that his own (he indicated the former's work brought about the greatest change in the axiomatic sub-structure of physics... since Newton, while he referred to general relativity as the last step in the development of the program of the field-theory inagurated by Maxwell)... and emphatically does not extend to philosophical theorizing where, contrary to a wholly uncritical, fawning opinion, his reflections gave expression to a contradictory and untenable position, to a nave realism:8 In
1

Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, 43-47, esp. 47. Not withstanding all novelty of approach, causal description is upheld in relativity theory within any given frame of reference, but in quantum theory the uncontrollable interaction between the objects and the measuring instruments forces us to a renunciation even in such respect. The Bohr-Einstein Dialogue, 124. 2 Compare, or if you will counterpositionally contrast, Nature is the realization of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas with The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science. Einstein, Essays on Science, 17, 40. 3 Ibid,16,17, 18. 4 Ibid, 18. 5 Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, 56. 6 Ibid, 57; The Bohr-Einstein Dialogue, 135. 7 Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, 47. 8 Einstein, Ibid, 40, 37. From the perspective of the past three quarters of a century, Einsteins major achievement appears as the theory of general relativity. (Continued, next page.)

other words, his cosmological speculations were unwarranted, scientific genius does not automatically give license to coherent philosophizing, does not a philosopher make...Lets return to the Compton effect. Above we noted its meaning thusly, the facts that exhaustively describe this situation in terms of particles cannot be intelligibly described in terms of waves, and vice versa.1 The Compton experiment (and others reproducing its results), demonstrating light can also behave as a stream of particle-light objects (quanta) whose energy is proportional to the frequency which is a wave characteristic and which together exhibits the irreducible, necessary dual nature of explanation of subatomic behavior, is today interpreted to exclusively support a particle interpretation of light. From the mid-1960s, mathematical formalism (quantum field theory or quantum electrodynamics unifying particle and wave characteristics of matter), not a system of physical concepts, developed initially by Paul Dirac and later elaborated by Gerard t Hooft, has been understood to form the foundations of an elementary particle physics which since this time, developing most forcibly in the later seventies, and has underlay the astrophysical direction of the modern science of nature (during the past four to five decades) Write this down to, first, the internal development of contemporary physics itself, including the claim, long ago no longer tenable yet made by any number of quantum physicists, that theirs was a complete theorization of the subatomic situation, a position refuted by the discovery of several particles smaller than the electron and proton, particles on which this theorization originally based itself, and to the further, logically required theorizations of several distinct levels of microphysical interaction (including strong or nuclear and weak or decay interactions, electromagnetic and gravitational forces); and write it down to, second, the success of experimental collisions in elaborate instrument complexes (particle accelerators), i.e., to explicit efforts to exhibit the new physics practical significance for capital (what immediate significance might an account based on the irreducible dualism of particle and wave have when contrasted with one starting from the equivalence of mass and energy?), especially its value for technologies of capital specifically those associated with military weaponry development This orientation demands a different understanding of the history of quantum theory, one which starts, coherency be damned, from an obliteration of the epistemological problem formulated by Bohr and Heisenberg This could not be more clearly expressed than in Bohrs discussions with Einstein.2
For it, the special case of uniform motion is a limited instance. Now at a theoretically generated remove, it rested on the same paradigm shift that made the reformulation of the concept of simultaneity possible, and it too also took for granted that nature is an essentially mathematical reality in the manner originally formulated by Galileo. But his theory of gravity for which it is synonymous with spacetime curvature itself produced by mass (by the mass of spatial bodies), was anything but intuitively obvious. And this is the point. Unlike any number of scientific theorizations, electromagnetism in Maxwell for example, confirmation stems a mass of data, countless experiments and observations. Prediction that permit of validation of Einstein's general theorization are exceedingly limited. His theory predicts, for instance, the universe is expanding. Confirmation did not come for years, first and significantly, because only, in the observations resulting from the work of Edwin Hubble in 1929, when, based on spectral analysis of redshifts, Hubble surmised that galaxies in the universe are receding, where recession was taken to be produced by the expansion of space (and not, say, by the motion of galaxies). As with so much of the theory of general relativity (e.g., the assumption that the universe is homogenous, that on really large scales matter is spread evenly throughout it), the redshifts and expansion of the universe, however, are open to several other explanations... Nearly all of Einstein's work after 1915 is cosmologically speculative (and elements of this enter into the theory of general relativity also). Thus, he holds like Peripatetic natural philosophers that the universe is finite and self-enclosed (Essays in Science, 52), that like the Peripatetics what hold cosmologically in the universe at large (i.e., spacetime curvature) does not hold terrestrially on Earth, that like the Platonists (inclusive of Galileo) reality in its innermost essence is mathematical (Ibid, 17). (By the thirties Einstein was going to great lengths to rehabilitate Newton's absolute space, the ether, arguing in a formal sense it was not inconsistent with general relativity. Ibid, 98-111.)... Einstein's demonstrations were carried out in a highly obtuse mathematical fashion: In publicly presenting the theory of general relativity, the New York Times related, perhaps apocryphally perhaps not, that Einstein himself had told his publishers that there were but a dozen people in the world that could genuinely grasp his theorization. There are two points worth making here, both with a view to their relation to the social totality and together seemingly contradictory. (They are related in terms of obfuscation to obfuscated). First, observationally uninformed mathematical demonstration is the precise historical analog to Scholastic speculative dialectics; and, second, mathematical formalism constitutes the most efficient, effective, and systematic means we have discovered in pursuit of the project of nature domination. (Here, for elaboration we point back to the final paragraphs in the First Sketch discussion of Heisenberg, above.) 1 There exists, at least at the present moment, no system of physical concepts which can provide us with an explanation that covers and is compatible with all the facts [in regard to] light and matter (Feyerabend Ibid, 315, and also Bohr's formulation of the problem cited in Ibid, 107). This is a true today as it was in 1981 when Feyerabend penned the remark. And, it characterizes perhaps the last well known philosophical effort to resolve the issue, that of Karl Popper (Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics, 25) who had fervently hoped otherwise. (Sources dating from as late as 1978 as cited in this text.) The effort to overcome the wave particle dualism with the intent of preserving a realist scientific metaphysics can, as in Popper, lead to some strange consequences (e.g., again, the effort, as in Einstein, to resurrect absolute space). See the relevant footnoted discussion in the Fourth Study, Part III, Abstract Dialectic of Concepts. 2 Discussions with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics (1949) in Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge.

In the end, though, Einstein threw in the towel as evidenced by his remarks in response to Bohrs reasoned insistence on the fundamental necessity of quantum mechanical principles for logically ordering results of subatomic experiments: To believe this [that in principle quantum mechanics offers the most exhaustive description of these phenomena] is logically possible without contradiction; but it is so very contrary to my scientific instinct that I cannot forgo the search for a more complete [i.e., universally causal] conception.1 Thus, Einstein Those discussions were not, however and as indicated, significant for the direction of physics: Focused exclusively on one class of phenomena (and thus ignoring so styled interference phenomena), the Compton effect has been elevated to such an extent that it is presumed to exhaust the meaning and significance of quantum phenomena.2 In 1913, two basic particles were said to compose the atom, electron and proton. As the consequence of more and more sophisticated particle accelerators, at last count there some twenty-four inclusive of flavors or classes of quarks and leptons: As we have argued (and this is one of the conclusions we draw from quantum mechanics), scientific knowledge of nature is a function, first, of instruments deployed in, second, posing questions to it (which logically is first, in advance of any experiment or results), i.e., elementary particle physics has its own problems, not the least of which is the apparent infinite divisibility of fundamental particles, division conditioned only by the sophistication of instruments used in the experiment Unless, of course, one wishes which to argue in accordance with the equation e = mc2 the enormous energy released by a small amount of mass in accelerator collisions creates qualitatively smaller amounts of new matter in accordance with the equation m = e/c2. This position (without reference to the equation) was in fact taken by Robert Andrews Millikan, an American physicist. Millikan suggested, consistently we might add, that a reconversion of energy to matter occurs in nature the conditions specified were space-time emptiness, the interstellar void, as Bachelard on whom we are drawing puts it, an absence of all things so that matter is created from radiation [i.e., energy], that an object is created by motion, by kinetic energy if you will3 In the constructions of contemporary astrophysics, matter is created, not in an interstellar void but in the energy factories of young stars, though oddly, in relation to what transpires in particle accelerators, this is emphatically not the argument made by elementary particle physicists, who are content to reassert the atomism and nave metaphysical realism that the modern science of nature is inured to...4 Contrary to Bachelard, his editor points out that Einsteins theory did allow for the complete conversion of matter to energy, and refers us to the atomic bomb (dropped eight years after Bachelard published the work in question).5 This is correct, Einsteins theorization does not have a residue: Todays physicists bolstered by philosophers of capital like Karl Popper6 to be sure retrospectively fully aware of the array of new particles, in 1982 Popper divines that at a later moment in 1950 Einstein was right against Bohr because there may be deeper layer of physical reality,7 realist bigotry if it has even been spoken however, have not only retreated from Einsteins contradictory position (they have never gotten as far as Bohrs entirely coherent one), but have returned to a nave classical realism, rendering them merely cognitive functionaries of capital. Witness Susskind
1

Physics and Reality, Journal of the Franklin Institute, 221 (1936): 349, cited by Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, 61. Also see Einstein's remarks (Essays in Science, 43-45) recounting Maxwell's contribution wherein he expressed his dissatisfaction with quantum mechanics (especially in Dirac's formulation) with its refusal to make any claim to describe physical reality itself (Ibid, 45). 2 As scattered X-rays are said to have bore the pattern of angles and energies [that] was unmistakably [that] of colliding particles. (Leonard Susskind, The Black Hole War, 310, emphasis added.) Thats it, problem solved. Susskinds is a decidedly popularized work, essentially pap, written in the vein of nave scientific realism, here the philosophically crudest of physicalisms. 3 Bachelard, Ibid, 71, 72 (citation). Bachelard notes that Millikan made these remarks in an address at a gathering of industrial chemists in New York City, and ironically comments what greater guarantee of positivism could there be than the combination of chemistry, industry, and the United States of America (Ibid, 71). In point of fact, there is no irony here at all, merely the veil masking the intimacy of the relation of science to capital has been ripped aside. 4 Though we be remiss if we did not note that this argument was made by the cosmologist George Gamov (The Creation of the Universe. New York, 1952) who, starting not from particle accelerators but from the atomic weapons tested in New Mexico (and Utah and Nevada) after the last imperialist world war, recognized the utter novelty of strange isotopes and particles that appeared (the most obvious case being plutonium, both fuel and byproduct of uranium based explosions). Gamov argued that if in a microsecond atomic weaponry generated new elements, then the universe at its origins could have begun in the same manner. He effectively formulated an early version of the big bang theory. 5 Ibid, 72, n. 11. 6 See the Fourth Study in its entirety, below. 7 Quantum Mechanics and the Schism in Physics, 6-7.

But the issue here is that without regard to his theorization, again we refer to the discussions with Bohr partially recounted above Einstein could not accept Bohrs fully adequate statement of the position. The point can be driven home by briefly examining the logical significance of concept of multi-dimensional space-time developed by Einstein in his theory of general relativity. For classical mechanics, an electrons position and its velocity can be measured. We know this is not the case for quantum mechanics. For the former, the electron is a real, material object existing in real space and time; for the latter, it is a moment in the total experimental situation and the analysis of this situation allows the physicist to make predictions with a high degree of success. What is it about the real object or, better, the reality of space and time (since it is the status of the latter which secures that of the former)? In the former case (a body for classical mechanics, a solid not a liquid or gas extended, with entirely intrinsic not contextual properties), its situation at any moment can be determined because a strict universal causality prevails. It is for this reason that an initial location and a velocity can be given. With the new physics what hold microphysically, also holds (for different reasons) macrophysically: On Einsteins account, space-time is unitary, so to speak about a state of the universe with reference to distinct spatial and temporal coordinates is, well, its meaningless1 Attempting to locate a discrete object both with regard to position and velocity presupposes an absolute space and a universal temporal continuum But for general relativity, the only state that it makes sense to speak of is a single three-dimensional cross section in space-time that may or may not impinge on nearby three-dimensional cross sections, but then the physicist is as likely as not able to determine that such is the case Or, again, the presence of dense, large body within a region of space warps space-time analogically and metaphorically, something like the surface of a soft mattress that has a bowling ball laid in its middle so that the relation between this body and another, say, for example, an asteroid, is not that of the attraction of the larger, denser body pulling as it were the smaller body with far less mass into orbit around it, instead the relation of the two bodies is decided by the highly localized curvature of space-time created by the presence of the large, dense body: It is this structure, not the gravitational attraction of the larger body, that accounts for the orbital relation of the one to the other, or, stated differently, this curved structure created by the mass of the larger body is gravity. This too is a straightforward ramification of Einsteins theory of general relativity, and localized warping of space-time is incompatible with absolute space in the traditions of modern science, a space that is a condition of a full, rigorous causality (i.e., determinism) operative within it (and one which, while rejecting the determinism, metaphysical realists such as Karl Popper, and later Einstein himself, revived absolute space in order to save contemplative, bourgeois science).2 And what Einstein wanted, as indicated in his discussions with Bohr (and elsewhere), was a universe that is causally determined in a rigorous way. But the causality that is operative here is not classical but mathematical (we dare say, a function of tensor calculus), generated by way of logical deduction, and not a real physical determination revealing something like a universal causality, which, regardless of his speculative considerations, is not possible on his theorization.3 Lets push this a little further. In the theorizations of the new physics, relativity theory and quantum mechanics, the object, e.g., an electron, appears to lose its individuality. Bachelard cites Marcel Boll in this regard: With the new physics, we must abandon the notion of object or thing, at least as far as atomic physics is concerned. Individuality is a property of complexity, and an isolated particle is too simple to be endowed with individual qualities.4 Bachelard, further following Chester Ruddick,5 attributes this de-realization (our term) of the individual object to the statistical law that subsumes it as an instance, the law itself formed on the premise that one member of the group is as likely to satisfy certain conditions as any other, the object losing its individuality, having it wiped away in the subsumption as an element of a logical class.6
1

This implication was developed by the mathematician Eli Cartan (Le parallelisme absolu et la thorie unitaire du champ, Revue de mtaphysique et de morale, January 1931, cited by Bachelard, Ibid, 105. 2 Again see the Fourth Study, in particular, Part I, Abstract Dialectic of Concepts. 3 The distinction is Cartans, Ibid, 106. 4 Ibid, 128. This same hold true for macro physical phenomena as conceptualized by Einstein with his theory of general relativity, bid, 129. 5 Chest T. Ruddick, On the Contingency of Natural Law, Monist, July 1932, cited in Ibid, 127. 6 Ibid, 127 (Ruddick), 128 (Bachelard). Bachelard continues, Deprived of their individuality, the elements of the real become indistinguishable from one another, but collectively they behave in what may be considered a rational manner, since reason is capable of predicting what will happen (Ibid, 130).

It is not chance coincidence that this has echoes of the conservative (i.e., philosophically anti-rationalist, politically rightwing) fundamental ontology of Heidegger with its das Man or the similarly conservative philosophical sociology (Revolt of the Masses) of Ortega y Gasset, all of which as theorizations (that of Bachelard, Boll, Ruddick, Heidegger, Ortega y Gasset, and beyond them, Heisenberg) are developed at roughly the same historical moment: The underlying reality to which each and all of these theorizations response, the utterly novel backdrop against which they are formulated, is a socio-historical world in which the tendential direction of the whole societal development can most adequately be described from the perspective of the autonomization of capital, the deepening penetration of the value form into every dimension of daily life, manifested most forcibly in the reduction of individuals moments, aspects, spheres within, institutions and social relations constituting, and concrete individuals as bearers of that daily life, to interchangeable components within the totality of this development all subordinate to the logic of its movement (not to mention that at the center of that historical moment at which all these authors wrote capitals autonomic movement, as it were, collapsed, imploded and the system of social relations began to disintegrate, a reality otherwise known as the Great Slump). We are not suggesting that somehow the entirely of intellectual life reflects a more basic reality. Rather, what is at issue here is the total and totalizing reality of capitalism once it has been established on its own foundations. Apart from it, are there historical instances of communities or societies in which concrete individuality, specificity or particularity are across the whole entire spectrum of conceptual reflection where it exists theorized as absent content, identical, interchangeable? Do the reconstructed mythologies of hunter gather communities that formed simultaneously with the development of agriculture and the rise of the state express such a situation? 1 Do those of ancient tributary formations?2 What of the forms of thought characterizing tributary formations in the social interstices in which capitalism in its era of formal domination formed? 3 Or forms of thought in modern tributary formations?4 How about theoretical reflections on society and nature as they come down to us from the urban enclaves that developed on the edges of ancient tributary formations?5 What of the mythologies fundamentally articulating the relation of archaic communities to nature and the world, as these communities now appeared at the moment of contact down to a fully developed capitalist modernity in the last quarter of the short twentieth century?6 Or what about the very forms of thoughts that are characteristic of social groups early in capitalisms era of formal domination?7 In each and every case, the response is emphatically no. The situation we have described is unique to a world (societies of capital) determined by the autonomization of capital, for this is a world in which science is at home and without which it would be a stranger without a home (hence, theoretically barren), i.e., which constitutes the societal presuppositions of science's full development and without which it could not be developed.

But the actual description of the elements of the real is something quite different, not relations of exteriority and subsumption, but a dialectic of moment and totality: Writing about the component structure of the atom, Bachelard, citing a chemist named Cabrera (Paramagntisme et structure des atomes combines, Activation et structure des molecules, 1928), states, valence is something more complex than once thought, which to do with the stability of new dynamical configurations of the outer electrons resulting from the mutual perturbation of atoms in contact with one another. It is clear that the details of this configuration and the degree to which it is stable depend on the structure of the atoms involved, so that, strictly speaking, valence is not a property of each isolated element but of all the atoms in a compound (Ibid, 159-160). 1 David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (London, 2002); Steven Mithen, After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000 5000 BC (Cambridge MA, 2003). 2 Henri Frankfurt, Kingship and the Gods (Chicago, 1978); Alfred Metrux, The History of Peru (New York, 1969); Owen Lattimore, The Inner Asian Frontiers of China (Boston, 1951). 3 Marc Bloch, Feudal Society. 2 Vols. (Chicago, 1961). 4 Bolshevism and Stalinism (Urgeschichte), Second Study. 5 Christian Meier, Athens (New York, 2000); Moses Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (London, 1980); The History of Florence and the Florentine Republic (1989). 6 Hlne Clastres Le Terre sans mal: le prophtisme Tup-Guaran (Paris, 1975); Pierre Clastes, Le Socit contra ltre (Paris, 1977). 7 Revolutionary Theories of the English Civil War (1991).

Third Study (Short Study) New Departures in Science: The Modern Science of Nature Renewed Bibliographical Sources Bachelard, Gaston. The New Scientific Spirit. Boston, 1974 (1934) Bohm, David. Quantum Theory. Princeton (NJ), 1951 Bohr, Niels. The Bohr-Einstein Dialogue in A.P. French and P.J. Kennedy (eds.), Niels Bohr: A Centenary Volume. Cambridge (MA), 1985 _________. Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge. New York, 1959 _________. Atomic Theory of the Description of Nature. Cambridge (Eng.), 1932 Einstein, Albert. Essays in Science. New York, 1934 ____________. On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, 30 June 1905. Accessed online at www.fourmilab.ch Feyerabend, Paul. Realism, Rationalism and Scientific Method. Philosophical Papers, V. I. Cambridge (Eng.), 1981 Galison, Peter. Einsteins Clocks, Poincars Maps: Empires of Time. New York, 2003 Heisenberg, Werner. Physics and Beyond. New York, 1971 ________________. Physics and Philosophy. New York, 1958 Jammer, Max. The Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics. New York, 1966 New York Times, Lights All Askew in the Heavens, November 10, 1919 Popper, Karl. Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics. From the Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Edited by W.W. Bartley, III. Totowa (NJ), 1982 Susskind, Leonard. The Black Hole War. New York, 2008 von Weizscker, C.F. The Unity of Physics. New York, 1971 Weisskopf, Victor. Niels Bohr, the Quantum, and the World in A.P. French and P.J. Kennedy (eds.), Niels Bohr: A Centenary Volume. Cambridge (MA), 1985

Fourth Study Critique of Scientific Reason The Theorization Apogee of Science for Capital: Karl Popper, the Philosopher as Functionary of Capital Karl Poppers The Logic of Scientific Discovery is perhaps the major work in the short twentieth century philosophy as it relates to the modern sciences of nature.1 It is embraced, often enthusiastically, by nearly all scientists who give themselves over to explicit considerations of the theoretical analysis of their specific fields and studies, 2 and this has been for good reason: In the manner of Kant who, taking Newtonian physics simply as given, attempted to provide it with philosophical foundations, Popper takes, deliberately and fully consciously, Kant as his model in this respect and has attempted to do for the new physics starting from and primarily understood as relativist theory what Kant did for Newtonian mechanics. In so doing, he has elaborated seemingly coherent epistemological and methodological positions with regard to modern science as a whole. While this is no mean feat, it has come with a rather expensive price, that is, Popper slavishly takes the methods of the physicists starting with Einstein (excluding quantum mechanics which, like Einstein, greatly troubles him) at his point of departure and his point of arrival He is entirely and consistently uncritical (if he is even aware) of the relation of science to capitalism, of the societal project that science as a utilitarian, instrumental form of knowledge pursues in relation to its object, nature This leads him to almost entirely methodological emphasis, and it certainly has its aporias and contradictions. Most importantly, absent awareness, sophistication and in compressed fashion he ironically recapitulates the trajectory starting from Kant... a trajectory whose culmination is an impasse, one that is unexplicated, suppressed and entirely hidden... that characterized the development of philosophy on the continent and which is summarily described as the antinomies of bourgeois thought (Lukacs). His commitments to critical reflection and rationalism notwithstanding, his attempts to explicitly conceptualize and systematize the operative activities of physicists not only wholly uncritically subordinate themselves to scientists practices, but at a crucial point leads him to accept, then theorize, experimental manipulation of results that conform to the precategorial logic of science, its concealed orientation to the telos of nature domination yoked to unending expansion of productive forces.3 He affirms this entire orientation and development in his political reflection on the separate sphere of society (whose artificial separation from nature he will methodologically, of course, assert should be reunified). In this regard, it is the class science of the bourgeoisie in its contemporary transformation, i.e., the science of capital, that is actually affirmed and little, if anything else. This, of course, remains to be shown. We shall begin with the philosophical context into Popper consciously injected himself and which shaped his understanding and grasp of theory and science.

The Logic of Scientific Discovery (2002). The first English language edition was published in 1959. While a handful of notes have been appended (largely in 1972) and this edition has undergone four reprints between this 1959 and 2002, the first English language has not been edited or changed. This text was based upon the original German language publication of 1934 entitled Der Logik die Forschung. In translation, the text of the German language original itself underwent no revisions, though significantly Popper added twenty-two appendices (as well as copious clarificatory textual footnotes), all elaborations, that, running to roughly 185 pages, amount to 2/3 the length of the original text. 2 This is apparent in very disparate fields of study, for example, E.O. Wilsons Sociobiology, 27-31 (where, in a manifestly Popperian vein, he defends real theory as postulational-deductive) and James Kirchners critique of climate change science, The Gaia Hypothesis: Are They Testable? Are They Useful? which is a straightforward, crude and rather badly understood regurgitation of Popper. 3 See this Study, Part III, Decisionism, below.

Part I The Weight of Traditions Logical Positivism (the Vienna Circle), Language Analysis (Wittgenstein) and Poppers Critique The logical positivism developed by the Vienna Circle, a group consisting largely but not exclusively of philosophers (it also included at least one theoretical physicist, a mathematician and a theorist of social sciences), was inaugurated in the first full decade following upon opening of capital's general crisis (the first imperialist world war), the early twenties of the chronological twentieth century. Its prehistory dates from the years immediately preceding that war at which time one of its central themes, the elimination of metaphysics from science, was already established.1 Organized by Morris Schlick (chair of philosophy of the inductive sciences at the University of Vienna), a regular series of meetings began anew (establishing the group by reputation) in 1922. The Circle included such luminaries as Phillip Frank (physicist), Otto Neurath (political economist), Hans Hahn (mathematician), Rudolf Carnap (philosopher) and, of course, Schlick among its older generation. Beginning in the late twenties the Vienna Circle held a number of congresses (annually between 1934 and 1937), issued an outpouring of publications, mostly monographs, and from 1930 also published a theoretical journal, Erkenntnis (Cognition). The Circle was disbanded by the Nazis when they came to power (1934) in Austria, but the journal and monographs continued to be published in exile from Britain and the United States.2 Though the exile of many of the Circles members greatly reinforced the transmission of this philosophical development to the Anglo-American world, logical positivism as a theoretical tendency had already taken root in both the U.S. and Britain before 1930, a number of years prior to the permanent transformation of exiles into migrs. In both nations (where theoretical reflection on objectified products of human activity, Absolute Spirit in the Hegelian sense, and the place and role of human existence in the world, is unhinged, without real center, by the depth penetration of that existence by the value form), to this day it is, along with its close kin ordinary language analysis, the dominant mode of philosophical reflection and has been for three quarters of a century. This should not be surprising since the previous homegrown theorizations of science (utilitarianism in Britain and pragmatism in the United States) lacked the theoretical power and sweep of logical positivism (not to mention that even within these native tendencies philosophy solely as a reflection on science had already systematically appeared, e.g., in the work of Charles Pierce in the United States), and since these societies are precisely those in which capital itself had undergone its most extensive development, in other words, are societies wherein science is most at home. Logical positivism stands at the center of several, post-Hegelian currents in science and the philosophy of science, above all Ernst Machs positivist philosophy of science but also the philosophies of sciences developed in France by Henri Poincar and Pierre Duhem, and studies in logic that appeared especially in Germany as well. In this regard, it should be noted that Ludwig Wittgensteins Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, appearing in the German language original in 1921 (and in English under the title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus a year later), was a central document for discussions organized within the Circle.3 In 1929, the Vienna Circle published a manifesto which formulated a general perspective articulating the central themes around theorization and reflection on the nature of science. Entitled The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle, the authors of the manifesto conceive of themselves as part of the spirit of enlightenment and anti-metaphysical factual research.4 The manifesto has two essential moments, the first epistemological and the second methodological. Epistemologically, this conception is empiricist and positivist, asserting the knowledge arises from experience (though, to be sure, experience is conceptually laden with atomism, that is, is understood contradictorily because metaphysically in terms of its elementary constituents, sense-data). In this conception as formulated by the Vienna Circle, knowledge that stands outside, and in this sense is beyond or goes beyond, experience is metaphysical. Methodologically, statements that are made as claims to valid knowledge are to be clarified (rendered intelligible or declared meaningless) by way of analysis that relies heavily on symbolic logic.
Some of the materials for this discussion is based on Mauro Murzi, Vienna Circle. Schlick remained in Austria and was murdered in 1936 by a Nazi student. 3 This history is actually traced out in some detail in the Circles manifesto (see what immediately follows in the text), reprinted in Sahotra Sarkar (ed.), The Emergence of Logical Empiricism, 321-340, especially 323-326. 4 The Scientific Conception of the World, 333. Dedicated to Morris Schlick, the document was authored by Hans Hahn, Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap. Ibid, 322.
1 2

Already hinted at, analysis of this sort (logical analysis)1 indicates there are two distinct forms of statements... and it should be noted for logical positivists, and Popper like them, genuine knowledge is always expressed in statements and thus is about words and their meaning, and not, for example, something that is intuitively given and understand solely in this manner... The first form, if fully clarified will reduce to statements at a basic level, to simple statements that directly refer back to experience or, containing logical mistakes, may be able to be reformulated and subject to scientific investigation. The second form of statement cannot be dissolved into simple statements and is thus meaningless. Many, many philosophical problems are based on logical mistakes and can be reinterpreted; metaphysics though, it goes without say, is constituted by statements of the second type. It addresses pseudo problems2... a point about which Popper, while not accepting metaphysical statements as scientific, will differ. The foundations of knowledge in experience means that logical positivists do not accept Kant's concept of synthetic a priori judgments (statements), that is knowledge that is achieved prior to all experience; instead, statements of this form are understood as analytic or tautological, i.e., self-referential explication of conceptual content. 3 For the logical positivists, genuine (that is, scientific) knowledge is synthetic a posteriori. Logical and mathematics are no exception, though they are a priori analytic statements: The notion that thinking can either lead to knowledge out of its own resources without using any empirical material is simply mistaken.4 Thus, within the Vienna Circle scientific and mathematical (and logical) statements, one synthetic and, when fully reduced, related directly to experience, the other analytic and developed by thought or reason alone, are the only two forms of authentic or valid knowledge. In this regard, the Circle considers itself characteristically empirical and positivistic.5 Not the only, but a perennial source of metaphysics to the extent it rests on logical error is ambiguity... equivocation, compression or elision of meaning... in the everyday use of ordinary (i.e., socio-historically or culturally specific) language.6 In this regard, the scientific conception articulated by the Vienna Circle aimed at the elaboration, or more to the point at construction, of a constitutive system, a project that would connect scientists, or their achievements, in different and varied fields, a system of statements reduced to concepts presumably represented by words that ultimately refer back to contents given in immediate experience. The system would itself be developed on the basis of a universal, neutral symbolic language a symbolism freed from the slag of historical languages7 which, of course, would be defined by its clarity and transparency. This system was summarized in a research program that aimed at development of a unified science, 8 and eschews philosophy as a distinctive reflective activity underpinning science or as a basic or universe science9... Such a program is impossible since it presupposes the absence of novelty in experience that emerges and forms... when it emerges... in human interactions in society and upsurges in nature, novelty the experience of which can only be comprehended and explained with new concepts... But, according to the manifesto, logical error is not the only, or even, primary source of metaphysics. It, metaphysics and certainly theology as well, is a theoretical form, in our view a conceptual expression and product, of forms of social and economic struggle. It is inextricably linked with reactionary social strata... though the manifesto while intending only vaguely suggests this... and thus the fight against metaphysics is at the same time a political struggle against anti-modern, and by implication anti-scientific, social and economic forms and forces.10 The sense of the Vienna Circle's quest for a neutral symbolic language entails a sharp break between ordinary language and science, or in Popper's terms, between common sensical and scientific forms of knowledge. A position which Popper, in asserting their continuity, does not accept. He, however, agrees and takes over from the logical positivists the rigorous emphasis on epistemology and methodology, and, furthermore, criticizes the Circle... for its
1

Analysis of this sort is the method of logical analysis. Ibid, 328, also 331. Emphasis in original. Interestingly, entirely unlike Popper, with a view to the rejection of metaphysical philosophy, the document (the manifesto) sees Freudian psychoanalysis as a promising development in the specific field of psychology. Ibid, 329. (For Popper, e.g., Science: Conjectures and Refutations in Conjectures and Refutations, 44-45.) 2 Ibid, 328. 3 Ibid, 330. 4 Ibid. Emphasis in original. 5 Ibid, 331. 6 "Ordinary language for instance uses the same part of speech, the substantive, for things ('apple') as well as for qualities ('hardness'), relations ('friendship'), and processes ('sleep'); therefore it misleads one into a thing-like conception of functional concepts. Ibid, 329. 7 Ibid, 328. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid, 338. 10 Ibid, 339.

lack of rigor. And, as we shall see, it is precisely the methodology and logic that he finds... impliciter in the activity of science that he would apply in framing his politics. But if the logical positivists affirmed modern science in a struggle against the most atavistic forces within capitalism, Popper defends a liberalism that has defeated those forces and whose struggle, ostensibly against the totalitarian pole of the same global capitalist development, provides cover for the anti-liberal and anti-individual despotism of capital. The intellectual milieu established and cultivated by the Vienna Circle formed both the touchstone and framework of Popper's thought... the very theoretical traditions in which he was immediately grounded... It is, in other words, this milieu that provided the conceptual mediations he at once employs and critiques. But before we can see where this leads, we are obliged to proceed by recounting the position he develops.

Part II Poppers Concept of Science Primacy of Epistemology and Method Always with a view to its history (but rarely explicitly stating such), sometimes with a view to physicists practice, Popper aims at a conceptual determination of science, one that distinguishes it from other forms of knowledge (metaphysics, forms of common sense) both methodologically and in terms of its product, namely, genuine knowledge.1 In this regard, Popper holds that the task of philosophy is the analysis of the procedure of the empirical sciences as he calls them, in other words, to give a logical analysis of their method.2 His use of logic is rigorous or, as we shall see, it is rigorous in his criticism of those to whom he primarily distinguishes himself (the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle), but fast and loose in confronting problems engendered by this analysis of the procedure of the sciences, in particular, that of the new physics. Popper conceives of this task as epistemological. Its outcome is the elucidation of the specific contours of scientific procedure, that is, the product of this epistemological labor is determination of the method of empirical sciences. In order to clarify our critique, we shall offer some preliminary remarks regarding both epistemology and method in Popper. Epistemology is at once traditionally and generally understood as the philosophical study of the nature and the grounds of knowledge, inquiry that necessarily also involves an account of the way or ways in which we know what we (are able to) know This perspective (of epistemology) conceals unavoidable assumptions concerning the nature of humanity and our place in the world, which we shall briefly explore, in contradistinction to Popper, in a concluding section to our critique of his scientific epistemology below... Within the confines of his task, Popper admirably provides an analysis of nature of knowledge as scientific knowledge; and while we may dispute his claim that scientific, and only scientific, knowledge is genuine knowledge, his argument on behalf of this position is forceful and commands respect (which, as we shall also see, does not mean it is coherent). In this regard, he limits what can be known (which according to him takes the form of statements) to that which can withstand the most severely devised falsifying tests. The latter provides, for him, the criterion (falsification on the basis of testing) for distinguishing science (knowledge) from metaphysics (a form of knowing that is not falsifiable and cannot be tested, which, in examining underlying assumptions or tacit presuppositions with a view to the grand problems of knowledge and philosophy with a view to cosmological issues sometimes leads to fruitful theories or hypotheses and sometimes is meaningless), as well as the criterion for distinguishing science from common sense. This is important for, as we shall again see, Popper, mistakenly, believes scientific knowledge is continuous with common sense contents (or knowledge). The grounds of knowledge, or as Popper understands it the origins and formation of the conceptual content of synthetic statements, is banished from his epistemological study. He does this with a sleight of the hand, by designating any and all methodological paths, queries, questions, problems and difficulties, or directions that tend toward contradiction as psychologistic. In particular, any account that seeks to uncover the genesis of concepts or entails an inquiry into the formation of ideas is psychologism, perhaps a fitting topic for the empirical science of psychology, but entirely unfit for epistemological analysis. The abandonment of inquiry into the grounds of knowledge permits Popper to avoid, remain oblivious to, the logic contradictions, aporias and otherwise insurmountable difficulties that philosophy as he understands it entails. We shall not, however, allow him to escape Since, according to Popper, scientific knowing generates genuine knowledge (i.e., tested statements that withstand falsification), it is the scientific method that can in principle be applied to any problem that emerges in the course of
1

In fact, Popper does recognize various forms of knowledge among which, he specifies their sources in inspiration, sympathetic understanding and tradition but none of these sources, unlike empirical science, can be logically validated. For those so specified, see Realism and the Aim of Science, 28. This work is the first of one of three volumes that make up the Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery. (The other two are The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism and Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics.) Originally written in the period 1951-1956 as what retrospectively could legitimately be called a draft, the Postscript (all roughly 800 pages of it) was intended as a sequel. As Poppers editor (W.W. Bartley) explains (Realism xi-xii), extensive corrections in the galley proofs and surgery to Poppers eyes delayed publication. Finally, pressure emanating from other work and commitments led to a still longer delay in publication (1983) of a work that was essentially completed in 1962. 2 The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 3.

daily life (whether said problem can be meaningfully resolved is another question). This is not, in fact, how Popper himself proceeded, e.g., when in 1953 requested to give a lecture on the development and trends in contemporary British philosophy,1 where, instead, he recounted the genesis, formation and development of those philosophical problems that preoccupied him during the course of his life. The development, as he readily admitted2 and which according characterized the entire temporal span of lifelong studies, did not unfold in a straight line manner, as a progressive elaboration of the central problematic in his lifes work which we would identify as the analysis he again and again returns to, the two fundamental problems of epistemology, the twin problems of induction and demarcation but was uneven, with partial confusions that abounded and insights that developed independently of testing, and it was marked by setbacks as well as strides forward, many occurring early in his life as a philosopher, some he had felt compelled to return to over and again. And while, once discovered or decided upon, application of the scientific method (as he recognized it) may have characterized the manner in which Popper pursued a specific problem during his lifetime, it does not adequately reveal the logic or structure of the method of his work it bears little resemblance to his claims for method over the course of that lifetime. In other words, all theorization presupposes a distinction one operative in Poppers work over his lifetime between the method of investigation which is neither cumulative nor progressive, but unfolds dialectically in the manner in which we, in reference to him, have just described and that of presentation, which is systematic, (ought to be) coherent, and complete (in the sense resolution, even if in principle tentative, to be problems set forward at the outset are achieved at the end). While we differ greatly from Popper,3 in the formal sense this is as true of Popper as it is of us. Science and Metaphysics Tentatively, we can say that, for Popper, science is a theorization that has the form of an axiomatic system; that this system must be capable of generating statements in the form of deductions that can be falsified, and that are validated only in this sense (i.e., such statements are never beyond the reach of falsification, are never validated once and for all); and that falsification is achieved through the most severe testing which, in turn, is based on observation of carefully controlled conditions, of experiment. Counterposed to empirical science, metaphysics, it would be fair to say also tending toward system, consists in statements that are not and cannot in principle be tested or falsified. Popper critically eschews all vulgar concepts of the relation of science to metaphysics, especially that of the logical positivists (and, though, he never says it that of the crudely scientific, crude in this specific sense of a selfmisunderstanding) for which metaphysics is constituted by meaningless statements (or, in some popular scientific versions, is simply beyond science, as non-falsifiable, and though perhaps personally intelligible, merely a matter of arbitrary preference), while science provides us with a reliable source of genuine knowledge. Tentatively, there are two reasons why Popper eschews the common, if crude concept of the relation of science to metaphysics. (We shall expand on these reasons in the following section.) The first is explicit: Metaphysical theories can be productive in the development not wishing to have anything to do with dialectical, specifically Hegelian and Marxist concepts, Popper says growth of scientific knowledge:4 It cannot be denied that along with metaphysical ideas that have obstructed the advance of science there have been others speculative atomism which have aided it.5 Moreover, contrary to assertions made by ordinary language analysts and logical positivists concerning the meaninglessness of metaphysics, not only are some metaphysical doctrines intelligible (i.e., meaningful) in the sense that they can be rationally argued, but some are subject to criticism from the perspective of science.6 The second reason is tacit. It concerns the penetration of fact by theory, or the realization that observation and empirical description are never free of conceptual determination as the former is always shaped in advance by the
1
2

Science: Conjectures and Refutations, reprinted in Conjectures and Refutations, 43. Ibid, passim. 3 See this Study, the concluding section of Part III, The Material Dialectic, below. 4 The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 15-16, 116 (example of Kepler), 315-316. 5 Ibid, 16. 6 Ibid, 199 n. *2. Popper, or his publisher, uses a peculiar convention of distinguishing footnotes added for the 1959 English language publication, and there are many, from those that belong to the original German edition by placing an asterisk (*) in front of each of the 1959 edition footnotes.

latter. If it is the case that, There is no sharp dividing line between an empirical language and a theoretical language: We are theorizing all the time, even when we make the most trivial singular statements, 1 then in principle it is possible that metaphysical concepts embedded in theoretical statements may enter into our empirical language. Popper never offers this as a reason for refusing, e.g., Wittgensteins and Vienna Circles, assessments of metaphysics in terms of meaninglessness, but it is tacit, as we said, in his determination of the relation of theory and fact. And it must remain tacit: For Popper to acknowledge the relation between this determination (of the relation of theory to fact) and his assessment of metaphysics would require that he pursue the determination beyond a simple statement of the relation. It would lead him down a path that would explode his entire theoretical edifice from within. We shall return to this2 At this point, the question that obviously arises is specifically, that is, methodologically, where and how do we draw the line between science and metaphysics? This leads to the problem of demarcation by way of the critique of induction. Two Problems of a Theory of Knowledge: Demarcation and Induction Popper refers to the question of where we draw the line between science and metaphysics as the problem of demarcation (and, we note, that in a purely formal sense he correctly puts logic and mathematics, producing only analytic statements, to the same side as metaphysics). 3 It has only been with the emergence of the modern science of nature (at any rate, tightly intertwined with and really only retrospectively distinguishable from Continental rationalist and British empiricist philosophies) that questions of demarcation became a problem and problematic Recall the argument set forth in the Introduction above,4 namely, that the modern science of nature was created in a struggle of the emerging bourgeoisie against the old order, against seigniorial relations in agricultural production, against guild restrictions in craft production, against controlled local markets with their notions of a fair price, against usury laws, against the dyadic hegemony of Church and lord, and, above all, against medieval Aristotelian natural philosophy deemed non-scientific (what later generations would call metaphysical) in a struggle that generated the insight that the creation of a new social order had to be theoretically mediated in a new way, i.e., scientifically In the modern, bourgeois traditions of philosophy the problem of demarcation has been solved primarily by inductive procedures. Poppers position is different. He states, that he rejects inductive logic and his main reason for so doing is that it does not provide a suitable distinguishing mark of the empirical, non-metaphysical, character of a theoretical system; or in other words, it does not provide a suitable criterion of demarcation.5 There are really two problems here, for not only do inductive procedures inadequately draw the line, the line (of demarcation) itself cannot, according to Popper, be sharply drawn. Consider the latter first. Whether we start from the position of Poppers erstwhile opponents as he understood the issue,6 that is, from the sense (meaningfulness) or nonsense (meaninglessness) of basic statements as the criterion of demarcation, or with Popper we start from testability (falsifiability or refutability) of theories or hypotheses, in either case we run up against all of the following situations that blur this line. First, Popper tells us that any number of metaphysical theories are meaningful, and can, moreover, be critically engaged.7 Second, many scientific theories began as myths. Popper cites the case of Copernican system in its relation (one of inspiration) to a neo-Platonic worship of the light of the sun.8 Third, some theories are formulated at such a high degree of universality that they operate beyond the level of testability of the day and devolve into a metaphysical system.9 Here atomism would be a case in point, as would the
1
2

Ibid, 443. Emphasis in original. See this Study, Part III, Abstract Dialectic of Concepts, below. 3 The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 11; The Demarcation between Science and Metaphysics in Conjectures and Refutations, 344. 4 See the Introduction, Science and the Bourgeoisie, above. 5 The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 9. Emphases in the original; also The Demarcation between Science and Metaphysics in Conjectures and Refutations, 342. 6 We are compelled to phrase the matter in this way because on Poppers own testimony Carnap, in particular, thought the differences between he, Popper, and the Vienna Circle were exaggerated, especially those differences that pertain to the issue at hand, the criterion of demarcation. Popper held otherwise. Ibid, 343. 7 Ibid, 341. 8 See the second part (The Problem of the Irrefutability of Philosophical Theories) of On the Status of Science and of Metaphysic in Conjectures and Refutations, 261-271, esp. 267-269. 9 The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 277. (Continued, next page.)

corpuscular theory of light as well as the fluid theory of electricity. 1 Fourth, in a related way some theories that were once considered scientific as a matter of consensus later have become increasingly metaphysical. Popper cites the case of Machs positivism and phenomenalism, especially in regard to the molecular explanation (Boltzmann) of the second law of thermodynamics2 Even as he is alive to these situations, it escapes Popper why they arise. (It is grounded in the mutual penetration of fact and theory, evidence and its conceptualization, empirical description and interpretation, of which Popper is cognizant)3 So if the line of demarcation cannot be sharply drawn and Popper arrives at its criterion through the criticism of the logical positivists concept of meaningfulness based on inductive inference, we are required to consider induction. Before we enter into Poppers critique of induction, it behooves us to specify what he means by induction. He goes back to Hume with whom the critique originated, and in these philosophical traditions (wherein we also situate Hume) the determination (of induction) is fairly straightforward: Induction is a form of inference, a type of passage from one form of proposition or statement to another in which what is asserted to be the case, to be valid or true, in the first is consequently assumed to hold for the second. With induction, or inductive inference, this passage is from singular statements (sometimes also called particular statements), such as accounts of the results of observations or experiments, to universal statements, such as hypotheses or theories.4 Or, again, an inductive inference can be counted as any reasoning from singular and observable cases (and their repeated occurrence) to anything like regularities or laws.5 Now it is important to note here that Popper is speaking about statements, and with induction about statements about (the results of) observations or experiments understood as experience. (We shall return to this determination of experience.) He is not speaking about experience itself, which is an approach that he rejects. (More on this momentarily.) So the problem of induction begins with the question, how do we establish the truth of universal statements which are based on experience, such as the hypotheses and the theoretical systems of the empirical sciences? Restating the meaning of induction as indicated above, Popper tell us, people who say of a universal statement that we know its truth from experience usually mean that the truth of this universal statement can somehow be reduced to the truth of singular ones, and that these singular ones are known by experience to be truth; which amount to saying that the universal statement is based on inductive inference. Thus to ask whether there are natural laws known to be true appears to be only another way of asking whether inductive inferences are logically justified.6 This entails establishing a principle of induction, a statement that will aid us in setting inductive inferences in a logically acceptable form,7 which means, primarily, that this principle of induction cannot be a purely logical truth like a tautology or an analytic statement in which case, there would be no problem with induction. Rather, the principle must be synthetic, a statement whose negation is not self-contradictory but logically possible.8 This amounts to adoption of the framework of Kant: In purely logical terms, a synthetic statement adds something novel, something that is not merely given in the (conceptual) explication of the statement. Popper states the situation this way, because he refuses to derive what is synthetic, here novel, from the (atomistically rendered) senses, from experience (narrowly as perception), from sense data, etc., rejecting this as psychologism, the doctrine that statements can be justified not only by statements but also by perceptual experience.9
In this regard, Popper indicates that he later came to the realization that there are degrees of testability, theories that are well tested, hardly testable and non-testable. The Demarcation between Science and Metaphysics in Conjectures in Refutations, 346. 1 The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 277-278. 2 Realism and the Aim of Science, 160. Machs phenomenalistic explanation discarded all efforts to explain so-called Brownian movement in terms of the structure of matter (i.e., the logical difficulties involved with a physical entity, a substance called matter.). Einsteins 1905 work on the same amounted to a crucial experiment that refuted the phenomenalist interpretation, rendering the latter obsolete. Ibid. 3 Taken up with its ramifications in this Study, Part III, Abstract Dialectic of Concepts, below. 4 Ibid, 3-4. 5 Realism and the Aim of Science, 31. 6 The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 4. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid, 5. 9 Ibid, 75. Though our account here is, Poppers argument is not circular. We shall discuss the reason(s) why he rejects the sensual derivation, not all forms or kinds of knowledge but, of genuine, i.e., scientific, knowledge in the following section entitled Psychologism.

In the logical sense (as opposed to the merely psychological), then, Popper has two basic objections to inductive inference. The first is that in the strict sense it is unjustified: No matter how many examples of a being, object, event, process or relation that is such and such I can instantiate no matter how many white swans I have seen or will see, I shall never see all swans that past, present and future have being I cannot account for all such beings, events, processes or relations, and thus I cannot validate the conclusion that all such beings, events, processes or relations are such and such I cannot legitimize the conclusion that all swans are white. 1 The inductive inference is, accordingly, illicit. The second objection is that the principle of induction leads to logical inconsistency:2 This principle, that which permits us to establish a logically satisfactory form for inductive inference, must in its turn be not just a statement, but a universal one. However, if we regard truth as experientially grounded, then the problem that made introduction of inductive inference necessary (passage from a particular statement to a universal one) will return with a vengeance: To justify it, we should have to employ inductive inference; and to justify these we should have to assume an inductive principle of a higher order; and so on. Thus the attempt to base the principle of induction on experience breaks down, since it must lead to an infinite regress.3 Such is the logical inconsistency. Thereby the logical positivists program of founding knowledge, that is genuine knowledge (science) on experience, collapses. In their fervent desire to eliminate metaphysics, annihilate is the term Popper following logical positivists uses, science itself will be overthrown: In the problem of induction, the logical positivists program comes to grief. For, as Popper points out, scientific laws, too, cannot be logically reduced to elementary statements of experience.4 Nonetheless, as he has pointed out elsewhere,5 one can argue that it is necessary to assume a principle of induction that itself is not based upon any further induction. This would denote the limits of empiricism, the view that all knowledge derives from experience. Poppers position, not stated in the text, is that this principle would then be metaphysical For Popper, the attempt to utilize inductive logic to justify scientific statements largely rests on confusion of psychological with epistemological problems.6 Psychologism The appellation psychologism is in ordinary usage generally deployed as criticism. It refers to an argumentative strategy to debunk, to dismiss the relevance, validity and force of a position, a view or simply a proposition by stating, revealing or even unmasking individual, personal or ideal motives that are alleged to have generated the position, view or proposition in the first place. In achieving its aim, this strategy does so without ever having to meet the position, view or proposition put forth on its own terms, without having to adduce evidence to counter, or logically ascertain the structure of, what has been put forth. Now, for Popper, this ordinary usage is itself psychologistic.7 That is, it deals with matters of fact, which fall under the heading of empirical psychology, but which do not concern the logical analysis of scientific method, whatever the

1 2

Ibid, 4. Ibid, 5. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid, 13. To cement the point, Popper quotes Schlick (Naturwissenschaften, 29, 1931: 156): The problem of induction consists in asking for a logical justification of universal statements about reality We recognize, with Hume, that there is no such logical justification: There can be none, simply because they are not genuine statements. Ibid, 14. Emphasis as it appears in Poppers citation. 5 Realism and the Aim of Science, 12. The following position was formulated by Bertrand Russell at a lecture Popper attended in London shortly after his arrival from Vienna in autumn 1935. 6 The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 7. 7 In a roundabout way, this is further evidence that Poppers position in recounting the method of science at the basis of scientific knowledge is altogether distinct from common sense and its methods, a position that he explicitly denies but which his actual account affirms. This is by way of anticipation. See this Study, Part III, Common Sense (Knowledge) and Scientific Knowledge, below.

position, view or proposition that is being argued.1 Instead, he states, I distinguish sharply between the process of conceiving a new idea, and the methods and results of examining it logically.2 The ordinary usage cited here, on the other hand, deals with matters that belong to the non-empirical, non-scientific subject of daily life, whether we are talking about grounding our arguments in logic, psychological motives or perceptual experience.3 This is a little broader than what Popper explicitly states, but then he is setting forth his position in contradistinction to (primarily) philosophers who would not be so base as to attempt to defeat an argument by way of impinging motives, but might think that all argued positions ultimately must refer back to evidence that itself originates in perceptual experience. So, for Popper, psychologism is the doctrine that statements can be justified not only by statements but also by perceptual experience4 The problem which Popper sees in this position the argument that without arbitration by the world of the senses, nothing can be added to our knowledge of the world of facts is this: If perceptual experience is the source of knowledge of the empirical sciences, then we obviously must consult that experience. But what is the criterion for the veracity of that experience? The response (according to Popper) is, By the immediate feeling of conviction which it conveys, we can distinguish the true statement, the one whose terms agree with experience, from the false statement, whose terms do not agree with it.5 Popper, in fact, offers two distinct arguments against the empiricist or sensationalist doctrine of sense experience. The first, which in our view is the more important to him, is a criticism of the merely subjective conviction central to sense certainty (the term is Hegelian, and Popper would abhor it). It once again entails a separation of the psychological aspect (so-called) of the problem from its logical and methodological moments: We must distinguish between our subjective experiences or our feelings of conviction, which can never justify an statement. and the objective logical relations subsisting among the various system of scientific statements, and within each of them.6 The second argument against sense certainty is quite different. Popper believes that sensationalist doctrine founders on the problems of induction and of universals. In nuce, universals, especially those that, as concepts, ideas or symbols that refer to immediate experience go beyond the specificity that is intended by sense experience. So that, for example, when I point across the wooded expansive in front of me and indicate, singling out, a hundred and fifty year old white oak, saying to my daughter, that is a very old tree, the concept of tree as stated in my exclamation is not present in the sense (Poppers sense) of verifiable by the observational experience.7 This is the line of argument Popper will pursue. Curiously, once the position formulated by Popper had won respect from those he most esteemed, that is, in the scientific community, the arguments against psychologism disappeared, largely superseded by his ongoing (decades long) critique of induction. There is, for example, no sustained discussion of psychologism in either the collection Conjectures and Refutations or in that portion of his Postscript, Realism and the Aim of Science, which directly confronts the issues of induction, demarcation, and science and metaphysics. (In neither book does the term even merit a single entry in the respective subject indexes.) This is because Poppers usage is polemical. His strategy is twofold, first, to separate his position from that of logical positivism by placing the entire discussion of science on a terrain that in principle excludes the type of account carried forward by the Vienna Circle; and, second, to circumvent any effort to undercut his position by way of a non-empirical, non-metaphysical critique. While pointing this out, it is important to not argue psychologistically (ordinary usage), i.e., it is necessary to engage Popper immanently, to show how the deployment of this concept papers over a real gap in his argument. If his strategic orientation is toward the first point, ours is toward the second. We shall have occasion to again discuss his account of induction, but for here and now we have simply been required to grasp what he means and intends.

The logical analysis of scientific knowledge is concerned not with questions of fact (Kants quid facti?), but only with questions of justification or validity (Kants quid juris?). Ibid, 7. Emphasis in original. 2 Ibid, 8. 3 The question of how it happens that a new idea occurs to a man whether it is a musical theme, a dramatic conflict, or a scientific theory may be of great interest to empirical psychology; but it is irrelevant to the logical analysis of scientific knowledge. Ibid, 7. 4 Ibid, 75. 5 Ibid, 75-76. 6 Ibid, 22. Emphases in the original. 7 Ibid, 76. Poppers example (This is a glass of water) and his account are, respectively, poor and garbled.

Science as Method: Falsifiability and Postulative Deductivism Poppers criterion of demarcation is what he calls falsifiability. What this means is, first, that science does not start from observation, sort of a gathering of facts, and then proceed by way of induction to theorization as has been argued in empiricist traditions.1 The problem here can be stated simply enough: It is that our ordinary language is full of theories observation is always observation in the light of theories.2 We are, then, compelled to start from theories, and in this respect, The empirical sciences are systems of theories.3 But in science they are theories of a very specific kind, namely, axiomatized systems. So that, second, falsifiability is inextricably bound up with theories as axiomatized systems. What is an axiomatic system? It is a group of assumptions, just those that are needed, to form the foundations or basis (both our terms), what Popper calls the apex, of the system, i.e., a logically well constructed series of interrelated, interconnected or integrated and thus a nucleus, of statements that are effectively hypotheses (a term which Popper often used interchangeably with theories). Here Popper tells us these assumptions, axioms or postulates, functioning as hypotheses, are chosen in such a way that all the other statements belonging to the theoretical system can be derived from the axioms by purely logical or mathematical transformations4 Presumably, this for him is the meaning of systemic integration This system cannot be directly validated, hence its axiomatic, i.e., simultaneously given and basic, character. Thus, the statements that compose the system are assumptions that are usually called the axioms (or postulates, or primitive propositions)5 Now an axiomatic system has, according to Popper, its own requirements. These are fourfold: The system of axioms need be free from contradiction, self-contradiction or mutual contradiction, i.e., internally coherent, (ii) it must be independent, that is, none of the axioms can be deducible from any of the others that form the system, (iii) the axioms must be sufficient [adequate] for the deduction of all statements belonging to the theory to be axiomatized, that is, no auxiliary hypotheses are permissible, and (iv) the axioms must all be necessary, there can be no superfluous hypotheses.6 All and all, this may appear a long way from falsification, but these requirements particularly those of a closed and an integrated system of statements, which for Popper are universal statements are precisely what makes falsification so important: For all these statements must also be testable, and although in a purely formal sense this is not a requirement of an axiomatic system, it is a requirement of one that is scientific in the sense Popper understands it. For predictions can be deduced from the universal, hypothetical statement (in the form of a singular or basic statement, one which can serve as a basis for an empirical falsification; in brief, a statement of singular fact) 7. It is these predictions that permit of testing, i.e., that allow us to construct an experiment that rigorously subjects the prediction to a trial and assessment of its validity thus, our designation of Poppers science as method with the term, postulative deductivism If the prediction holds, we can say that for now the theory (hypothesis) and the system of which it is an integral moment has been validated, i.e, the system itself offer an explanation of events, processes or relations in the world that holds until further notice, that is, until a more rigorous test can be generated in which case it may or may not hold. If it does not, we can say the hypothesis, and the system itself, has been falsified. Now Poppers theorization is not in any recognizable respect as cut and dried as the last paragraph, merely a shorthand summary, suggests. In the first place, to pass, as it were, a falsifying test is to make no claims concerning the truth of the statement (prediction) being tested, only that it has up to this point survived the most severe available test.8 In physics in particular, the concept of truth disappears as validation is described solely in terms of statistical
1 2

E.g., Science: Conjectures and Refutations in Conjectures and Refutations, 55, 61; Realism and the Aim of Science, 98-99. The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 37, n. *1. 3 Ibid, 37. 4 Ibid, 50. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid, 51. Popper had corresponded with Einstein on the crucial methodological issue of deductivism (for the latter's views, see the Third Study, Third Sketch, above), indicating his agreement with the great man in this regard. See Ibid, 481-484, where Popper reprints a letter from Einstein in which the latter stated his agreement. Agreement here should be written down to a more fundamental consensus on the defense of metaphysical realism in science or, as we prefer, the contemplative character of bourgeois theory. 7 Ibid, 21. 8 Ibid, 66.

probability.1 Second, this theorization, further, merely intends that a falsifiable refutation applies only to a reproducible effect,2 i.e., an experimental outcome that can be repeated in principle over and again by any scientist utilizing the procedure experimentally described. Third, it is important to recognize that Popper wants to rid science of what he considers the baggage of sensationalism: The empirical basis, captured as it were in singular or basic statements, does not consist in a relation that obtains between something that is perceptually given (as in an experiment) and manifest by inspection or feelings of conviction, both of which constitute a retreat to psychologism, but obtains instead in objective logical relation that holds among various systems of scientific statements.3 Scientific knowledge is not a question, posed epistemologically, of on what does our knowledge rest?; rather, it a matter of testing scientific statements by their deductive consequences.4 Fourth, testability is not uniform. There are degrees of testability hypotheses may be distinguished according to the results of their tests 5 that range from the well tested, among which there are those that have stood up to tests and those that have not, to those that have not been tested at all.6 Here too (in contradistinction to a concept of truth) probability decisively shapes our understanding, for Popper calls this range or gradation of hypotheses the degree of probability or, as he later prefers, the degree of corroboration.7 Like Popper who, as we have noted, is not concerned with questions of fact but only with those of justification, we are not concerned with the precise, detailed study of the method of falsification. It is, nonetheless, incumbent upon us to note that, stemming from the centrality of falsifiability and testing and the various forms the latter takes, probability, in fact, plays a very important role in his theorization of science, in particular in the form of what he calls a calculus of probability. Though in point of fact later we shall remark on certain features of this calculus, Popper himself, classically reproducing one of the limits of bourgeois philosophy (the logical analysis of statements denies the relevancy of experiential content, and cannot accordingly integrate form and content, the latter remains irrational in relation to a systematizing theorization), provides a justification in this regard, though he never rises to the level of classical bourgeois philosophy since his is merely a reflection on the science of capital. Furthermore (as if to confirm the criticism just made), he recommends that we as readers forgo the better part of the discussion of this calculus:8 It appears that Popper, like the highly rationalized science he defends, does not even grasp the meaning and significance of writing a work in which not all aspects are integral or in which some can be detached.9

A long chapter appearing in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (pages 133-207), as well as in the longest section of Realism and the Aims of Science (pages 201-401), is devoted to elaborating and describing Popper's specific concept of statistical probability. 2 The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 66. 3 Ibid, 20-21. Emphases deleted. 4 Ibid, 79-80. 5 Realism and the Aims of Science, 220. 6 Ibid. Compare the remarks forming the third paragraph of the section, Two Problems of a Theory of Knowledge, above. Whether anything like what Popper describes here in fact goes on in the actual practice of scientific communities is rather, well, dubious, both with a view to the rationality process as it is practiced, and with regard to his theorization of the relations of theory, experiment and facts established therein. A brief, good antidote to Poppers rigid systematization can be found in Paul Feyerabend, Has the Scientific View of the World a Special Status?, 136-139. 7 Ibid. 8 I suggest that sections 55 to 64 be skipped at first reading. It may even be advisable to turn from here, or from the end of section 55, direct to chapter 10. The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 149, n. *1. 9 Not to mention that one of the most interesting discussions of The Logic of Scientific Discovery, chapter 9 Poppers admittedly failed effort to invert what he characterizes as Heisenbergs metaphysical program for quantum mechanics research falls squarely within the recommended sections to be passed over.

Part III The Antimonies of Scientific Thought Common Sense (Knowledge) and Scientific Knowledge As we have indicated, for Popper epistemology is decisive in the analysis of science. He justifies this pursuit in the following way: While proponents of the primacy of language analysis in philosophy believe there are no genuine philosophical problems, he thinks there is at least one, one in which all thinking men are interested, namely, understanding the world, which, according to Popper, includes both ourselves and our knowledge as part of the world. He states this in such a matter as to problematize it.1 This leads him to epistemology, a reflection on the ways in which we know what we know, and specifically the central problem of epistemology which, baldly asserting it has always been and still is the central problem, is, for him, the growth of knowledge. Rather startlingly, he, continuing, then asserts further that the growth of knowledge can best be studied by studying the growth of scientific knowledge.2 This he calls a thesis that he would like to propound. Though he does, obviously, propose the thesis, he never sees fit to defend it. While it appears to us highly doubtful that Popper would challenge the statement that other non-bourgeois and prebourgeois cultures have elaborated forms of awareness that can be legitimately described as modes of knowing, and therein men and women would also develop those modes of knowing in order to understand the world, recognition of this would imply the necessity of defending a thesis that tacitly asserts the paradigmatic, if not superior, character of the modern science of nature as a form of knowledge. To do so would, further, appear to be a matter of concern for someone who has written an otherwise well thought out book that seeks to epistemologically ground this science, but to do so would to be to run up against an insurmountable barrier to his epistemological study. Well come back to this. Having also propounded the thesis that there is no method peculiar to philosophy,3 he nonetheless declares that there is one method of philosophy. Popper is quick to add that method, because it explicitly assimilates a critical attitude to rational discussion,4 is not, however, exclusive to philosophy, but is the method of philosophy and science. The method involves a clear statement of a problem and careful examination of the array of possible solutions with a view to challenging, refuting (our term), or overturning those solutions.5 In this connection Popper tells us that logical analysis and language analysis may be ways in which clarification and careful examination of a problem and proposed solutions can be carried out, but he objects to the claim that they are exclusive. He does, though, grant that the new way of ideas of Locke, Berkeley and Hume (i.e., the psychological method of analysis of our ideas by way of their origins in our senses) needs to be supplanted by a more objective, less genetic method, one centered on meaning and usage, thus entailing the analysis of sentences or statements, a new way of words.6 Popper, however, raises a grave objection to both new ways, in particular the replacement of the analysis of the former (ideas) by the latter (words) in the form of the analysis of ordinary language or commonsense knowledge. Why? The problem of the growth of knowledge remains completely hidden to this analysis.7 He suggests that, like him, those who pursuit the analysis of ordinary or common sense knowledge (identified as language analysis), believe there are two ways of doing epistemology, either in this form or by tackling the problem of scientific knowledge. He has opted for the latter, because it is the easier of the two to analyze. This much said, both he and those who pursue ordinary language analysis agree that, scientific knowledge can only be an extension of common-sense knowledge.8 Or, again, he states, experience in science is after all no more than an extension of ordinary everyday experience9 It is this after all, i.e., the taken for granted and simply assumed assimilation of scientific observation and experiment to one side and the ordinary experience of daily life to the other, that is at
1

Ibid, xviii. That problem in which all thinking men are interested is the problem of cosmology: The problem of understanding the world including ourselves, and our knowledge, as part of the world. Emphasis in original. 2 Ibid, xix. The entirety of this remark is emphasized, and we have de-emphasized everything but the word scientific. 3 Ibid. Emphasis deleted. 4 Ibid, xix. 5 Ibid. Popper uses the term overthrowing. 6 Ibid, xix, xxi. 7 Ibid, xxi-xxii. 8 Ibid, xxi. 9 On the Status of Science and of Metaphysics, a lecture given in Berlin and first published in 1958, reprinted in Conjectures and Refutations, 249.

issue The assertion of the continuity of scientific knowledge and common sense, or their counterposition as the case may be, is an abstract, false manner of posing the question of forms or modes of knowing in the first place in that categories in and through which reality is apprehended, then explained, are a function of practical subjectivity: For it is in childhood that the mass of humanity by and large assimilate and master a native tongue and with it those categories themselves. Accordingly, it is the conditions under which exceptions to this paradigmatic situation transpire that must be specified. But here and now we shall follow Popper When Popper states the logical analysis of scientific knowledge does not deal with questions of fact but only with questions of justification or validity in the Kantian sense,1 we shall demonstrate that, in opposition to explicit assertion to the contrary, this is a theoretical statement of the break of theory with ordinary experience, of scientific knowledge with common sense: The method of common sense, if that is what we can call it, does deal with matters of fact. It does so without regard to logical consistency or overall coherency, without making arguments or only by making arguments and pursuing the inquiry or investigation they entail with reference to an ungrounded foundation, that is, only in relation to assertions made by this particular personage (the speaker, I, whoever it happens to be). Questions of justification or validity are not dealt with as such, in a rigorously logical fashion, but solely with a view to that which is an ungrounded foundation, that which requires no justification because it simply asserts itself as such, it assert itself as I in all its particularly and specificity as self-grounded (and, completely unawares, entirely ungrounded). As we understand it today and as it has been in those societies where science has (slowly at first) most deeply penetrated over the last 400 years, i.e., in societies where capitalist development has gone the furthest, common sense is a historically and socially formed type of knowledge, largely a tacit understanding of means, excuses and self-justifications driven by egoism for the sake of gratification, affirmation or self-aggrandizement of the egoist (self, person) in question. It may or may not involve trial and error in a primitive sense (rarely the exalted sense of conjecturing and, even more rarely if ever, of consciously setting up tests aimed at refutation), but trial and error is only one of sundry methods of common sense as such, which Popper himself later acknowledged.2 Common sense is, methodologically, far more likely this too is not a necessary feature, because it is not universal to involve generalization (not induction, i.e., not universally valid statements, but purely psychological statements that are merely self-justificatory) from experiential instances, in more cases than not from single instances. Appearing elsewhere,3 the claim asserting the unity of common sense and science does not on the face of it stand up to common sense. It defies the self-understanding and cognitive store of knowledge of precisely that common sense which he, Popper, deems continuous with scientific knowledge: We need only refer to the doctrinal contents of the modern science of nature, especially its recent, qualitatively novel developments (the new physics as we have referred to these developments)4, such as space-time curvature (as opposed to gravitational pull) in general relativity or the Compton effect. To assert Heisenbergs mathematical formalism could be arrived at starting from common sense is ludicrous and absurd. Requiring not just highly specialized training in physics, its history and mathematics far beyond formal secondary education levels, but the leisure from work (in the sense of making a living), or alternatively theoretical physicists work in academia with that training, these analyses and the hypotheses put forth in their behalf cannot in any way, theoretically, experimentally or practically, be arrived at starting from common sense notions. In point of fact, Popper inverts the actual relation of scientific knowledge to common sense, since contemporary physics in particular (which is exactly the science that Popper explicitly discusses and takes as his point of departure) represents a genuinely radical break with the knowledge and understanding characteristic of daily life which common sense constitutes a reflection on. To boot, unawares Popper himself admits as much, by turning common sense so-called on its head,5 a logically contradictory position in his terms, as is demanded by his
1 2

The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 7. Emphasis in original. Realism and the Aim of Science, 39-40. See, further, the discussion below, this section. 3 scientific knowledge is merely a development of ordinary knowledge or common-sense knowledge (Ibid, xxii); and scientific knowledge can be more easily studied than common-sense knowledge. For it is common-sense knowledge writ large (The Logic of Scientific Discovery, xxv-xxvi, emphasis in original), and Truth, Rationality and the Growth of Knowledge in Conjectures and Refutations, 292-293. 4 See the Third Study, above. 5 Strictly existential statements, by contrast, cannot be falsified. No singular statement can contradict the existential statement, There are white ravens therefore I shall have to treat strictly existential statements as non-empirical or metaphysical (Ibid, 48). And, Popper may indeed be correct in doing so, but to call any feature of perceptual experience, especially visional experience whether or not anyone has ever

theorization, and he says so: For if common sense elaborates much of its knowledge on the basis of sense experience (and it does), then to say, Out of uninterpreted [i.e., experimentally reworked] sense experiences science cannot be distilled, no matter how industriously we gather and sort them,1 is to admit as much. Perhaps all philosophy is driven to suspend common sense in order to achieve genuine knowledge, no matter how this is conceived2 This becomes unambiguously clear as Popper is forced to defend (i.e., logically compelled in the course of making his argument) the objective character of empirical science. He states, I readily admit that only observation can give us knowledge concerning fact and that we can become aware of facts only by observation. But this awareness, this knowledge of ours, does not justify or establish the truth of any statement. I do not believe, therefore, that the question which epistemology must ask is, on what does our knowledge rest? or more exactly, how can I, having the experience S justify my description of it, and defend it against doubt? This will not do, even if we change the term experience into protocol sentence. In my view, what epistemology has to ask is, rather: How do we test scientific statements by their deductive consequences?3 Here we should note the ambiguity in the use of the term experience where it unclear whether Hahns experience and observation are those of science as formed on the basis of experimentation (Poppers sense of the term)4 or the experience of a living, sentient subject as it unfolds in daily activity. If this ambiguity is dissolved into experience in Poppers sense, then common sense and its knowledge already lie, distinctively and qualitatively differently, behind us; if the ambiguity is resolved by distinguishing these two forms of knowledge (common sense and scientific), then the whole force of the argument is to assert their difference since knowledge as common sense does not justify or establish the veracity of any statement. If it did, there would be no need for science in Poppers sense In a 1953 lecture,5 Popper identified, respectively, the theory and method of trial and error with that of conjectures and refutations. This is, presumably, what he has in mind when he asserts that common sense and scientific knowledge are continuous. Lets pursue this. In Realism and the Aim of Science, he further identified three manners in which we learn from experience (and here experience is contextually, but explicitly, the experience of everyday life from which common sense categories rise).6 These are learning by trail and error, by habit formation which he calls repetition proper, and by imitation which, for him, constitutes absorbing a tradition (and which, clearly unknown to Popper or not grasped by him is only one way, the precognitive one, in which traditions are assimilated).7 He then tells us among these three ways of learning that trial and error alone is germane to the growth of our knowledge, that is, alone is the manner in which we acquire new information discover new facts and new problems, practical as well as theoretical, and new solutions to our problems, old as well as new.8 And, at the risk of being unduly repetition, trial and error is synonymous with conjecturing and refuting, thus, is continuous with the methodological practice of science. But is this really what is going on when we learn, acquire new knowledge, when we say we know and understand? Please consider the following. On reading this text as it appears before you, the reader, on your computer screen, you read with facility, grasping the various concepts, reading, text, appearance, computer, screen, grasping them either nominally or verbally or adjectivally in their syntactical interconnections as wholes, as sentences, paragraphs, as a thematic line of
seen a white raven is to turn vaulted common sense upside down to do so, and openly belies his claim that the scientific knowledge is a mere development or extension of it. 1 Ibid, 280. 2 Classical and ancient philosophy (Plato) began with doxa (opinion) explicitly counterposing it to episteme (true knowledge) with the goal of achieving the latter. At the outset of modernity among the great bourgeois philosophers, Descartes began with (systematic doubt, i.e., with the suspension of common sense and its beliefs) and, at the end of modernity in the strictly philosophical sense (i.e., in the sense that its inner tendencies have been fully worked out), Husserl began with the daily experience constitutive of the lifeworld and worked back through a series of epochs to arrive at anonymously functioning subjectivity. 3 Ibid, 79-80. All emphases in origin. (The first two internal citation are from H. Hahns Logik, Mathematik und Naturerkennen appearing in Einheitswissenschaft, 2, 1933). 4 See the section immediately following. 5 In Science: Conjectures and Refutations, Conjectures and Refutations, 60, 68. 6 Realism and the Aim of Science, 39-40. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid, 40. Emphasis in original.

thought, in other words, you grasp meaning(s) immediately, intuitively. (These meanings are what are often called essences, which is the concept or the universal.) As an aside, we would note that the ontological status of essences is ideal unities of meaning. They are ideal, i.e., non-spatial (that is, a meaning, concept or essence is not in your or my head, not in consciousness) and objective, that is, they can be accessed by anyone (who shares the same broader socio-historical frame of reference, we shall return to this in the discussion of The Material Dialectic, below), because their production can be reproduced as such ad infinitum, which is what guarantees their objectivity and their unity. But return to our discussion. If, however, we say, In characterizing the noematic aspect of consciousness in terms of hyletic material, Edmund Husserl (the founder of the philosophical school called phenomenology) engaged in an empiricist construction and fell back into the natural attitude and was thereby unfaithful to his method, you, the reader, might stop reading, pause, read the statement again and, somewhat baffled, simply put this text down; or, alternately, you might pause, and inwardly comment, I know what hes getting at, Im just not familiar with some of the terms (that is, some of the concepts, their meanings, i.e., you grasp my intent but not their sense, the sense of the concepts). Putting aside all the meanings different traditions in the philosophy of the West assigned to these concepts, lets say in the first case, you neither knew nor understood what is intended; and, in the second alternate case, you knew but did not understand. In the second case, you dont like being baffled. You attend to specific terms then, aha! You, recalling a course in ancient philosophy, say, hyle, of course, (ancient) Greek we render as matter: You realize the empiricist construction means here, Husserl, in his own terms, was not attending to the things themselves simply as they presented themselves in perception, but instead constructed the object (the thing itself) out of, say, sensations in the manner of Locke. Now, you both know and understand... this intuitive recognition is das Erlebnis aha... a unity that in very narrowest sense we might designate as reason, while, for Husserl, the moment at which you understand what you know is the immediate experience of essence (Wesenschau): Everyone more or less clearly sees essences, and Poppers scientific method of conjectures and refutations not only cannot do without, but presupposes, this activity, necessarily presupposes the experience of a practical subject for whom this mode of knowing is constitutive, i.e., the orientation to the logical analysis of statements necessarily assumes and always operates on the basis of this more primordial form of understanding. Popper confuses one of several different ways of learning, asserting the primacy of a derivative, removed form over that which primordial, primary and founding. The method of trial and error, conjecturing and refuting, is not even a condition of learning, of knowing and understanding: One can learn, know and understand from a single instance And even in animals (mammals) learning occurs in this manner1 In insisting on the methodological separation of the logical analysis of knowledge (starting from demarcation) from the experience of daily life, Popper has reproduced the classical bourgeois philosophical problem of the irrationality of an underlying substratum. We shall also return to this. It is, to be sure, important to grasp that the seeing, its immediacy, only achieves objectivity if and when it is intersubjectively accomplishable, that is, can be repeated indefinitely by anyone who undertakes to do so.2 Unlike in Husserl, this immediacy is always transcended in experience: The dialectic of immediacy and mediation constitutive of the formal structure of consciousness, as each act of understanding beyond the original unreflected immediacy (itself mediated by all ones knowledge and experience) constitutes a new level of mediated immediacy, or to put a different name on it, intuition.3 To boot, all immediate, individual and personal awareness is socially and historically mediated, there is no logical analysis of knowledge that does not rests on these changing foundations, there is no first, an underlying, unchanging basis on which thought and reflection can be constructed.

Contrary to Scheler, Mans Place in Nature, 36. See also From Metaphysics to Philosophical Anthropology: Max Schelers Mans Place in Nature. The author has witnessed learning by way of seeing essence on the basis of a single instance among very young dogs. A detailed account will be provided upon request. 2 For a more detailed elaboration, see our Work and Speech: The Origins of Man A Short Review of Trn Duc Thaos Investigations into the Origin of Language and Consciousness, in particular, the section entitled Work and the Production of Ideality. 3 Immediacy is an integral moment of experience and consciousness: Yes, all immediacy is mediated, but then there can be no mediation without immediacy.

At any rate, the first response to Poppers claim that the subjectivist or intuitive basis of knowledge rested on feeling of conviction (see the following section) is that, no, to the contrary, it is not all a question of feeling or conviction. You need merely perform the operation, do it yourself. Confirmation resides strictly in its intersubjective character, in that you, I and anyone else can reproduce the same insight (or essential insight) In the history of those societies where the categories of the modern science of nature have penetrated the deepest into daily life, science has, and can in principle, only become common sense if the world is already scientized, presupposing real domination in production, i.e., massive, regular and systematic inputs of science and technology into production that have transformed the built environment and immediately surrounding nature in accordance with physical theory, and that are, according, integrally part of the structure of societies of capital. 1 Even then we are only speaking of Galilean science, of the modern science of nature: For the popular working masses (inclusive of the salariat) in these societies, such theoretical developments (i.e., contemporary physics) are not only counterintuitive but wholly unintelligible. Contrary to Poppers mere assertion, science is in no way a mere development of common sense; but he cannot hold otherwise because this unevidenced and unwarranted proposition is necessarily demanded by his assimilation of the ordinary experience of daily life to and his identification of it with the physicalistic and mathematical construction of experimental science known as empirical knowledge. We should and can be more precise here: This assimilation is neither consistent nor is it confusion; rather, it takes shape as Popper conflate two forms of subjectivity, that of the practical subject and that of logical subject, the former underlying the latter, the former the subject of ordinary experience as it unfolds in daily life and the latter the subject of empirical knowledge constructed in thought experiments (Gedankexperimente) and in actual experimental practice but always with reference to laboratory conditions. Conflation of Logical and Practical Subjectivities in the Concept of Experience The assertion that scientific knowledge is merely a continuation and development of common sense demands an equivocation: Based on observation and the results of experiment in science, experience according to Popper is conflated with the ordinary experience of daily life, when, as we have seen, their alleged existential unity is methodological constructed. Popper states, a subjective experience, or a feeling of conviction, can never justify a scientific statement within science it can play no part except that of an object of an empirical (a psychological) inquiry. No matter how intense a feeling of conviction it may be, it can never justify a statement. Thus I may be utterly convinced of the truth of a statement; certain of the evidence of my perceptions This, of course, includes intellectual insight (Wesenshau), not merely sensuous ones. Popper continues, overwhelmed by the intensity of my experience: every doubt may seem to me absurd. But does this afford the slightest reason for science to accept my statement? Can any statement be justified by the fact that K.R.P. is utterly convinced of its truth? The answer is, No; and any other answer would be incompatible with the idea of scientific objectivity from the epistemological point of view, it is quite irrelevant whether my feeling of conviction was strong or weak; whether it came from a strong or even irresistible impression of indubitable certainty (or self-evidence). or, as Popper adds, merely from a doubtful surmise. None of this has any bearing on the question of how scientific statements are justified.2 No doubt, but as we have demonstrated above, a feeling of conviction is not the only basis on which an appeal to sensuous experience can be justified. However, there is another, a genuine issue here. The commitment to scientific objectivity poses a problem for Popper, one of which he is fully conscious: In demanding objectivity for basic statements as well as other scientific statements, we deprive ourselves of any logical means by which we might have hoped to reduce the truth of scientific statements to our experiences.3 Engaging in this reduction is, after all, his criticism of Locke, Berkeley and Hume, and, at a remove (i.e., with regard to experiences reflected in our term or corresponding to or described by atomic propositions or protocol statements), Wittgenstein and the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle.
1

Here see the First Study, Part III, The Question of Projectile Motion and Natural Place, with a view to the immediate, largely unintelligible sense Aristotle's concept of natural place has for us. 2 Popper, Ibid, 24-25. Emphasis added. 3 Ibid, 25.

Effectively, Popper attempts to meet this stumbling block by constructing what we call a logical subject. This subject is that whose cognitive operations are strictly determined by firm adherence to canons of formal logic (and a calculus of probability), and which operates accordingly to a rigorously prescribed and controlled procedure, an exacting methodology, in its efforts to validate (i.e., tentatively affirm by testing for falsifiability) conclusions in its pursuit of knowledge and understanding. Popper does not construct this logical subject explicitly, for he would deny that his method of logical analysis, and scientific knowledge, rely on subjectivity in any of its manifold forms at all. The logical subject experiences, i.e., it is the subject of experience but only in the scientific sense, i.e., it is, like its supposed experience, a construction: For, I do not propose to speak of ordinary everyday experience. I intend, rather, to use the word experience in the sense in which we use it when we say that science is based on experience.1 Experience here means, an observation or the result of an experiment. Such is what is known by experience,2 i.e., by the logical subject or, state differently, the scientist to the extent she operates in accordance with the methodological canons Popper lays down as the subject of scientific activity. What is crucial here is experimentation which Popper rationalizes, i.e., breaks down into distinct operations, as hypothesis construction, testing (which is the experiment itself) and observation, which, in turn, is a continuous practice (though perverse, even the logical subject has a practice made possible, as we shall see, by the fact of an existential confusion) justifying the logically detachable, distinctive nature of the testing which is so important to Popper: In the field of the empirical sciences he [the scientist] constructs hypotheses, or systems of theories, and tests them against experience by observation and experiment.3 Now, not only is the logical subject methodologically (self) constructed by submission to scientifically normative behavior which, it is intuitively obvious (well, perhaps not to Popper, but then he ignores the issue), begins from a living, sentient subject, an objectively practical being but it requires that nature itself have a certain specific meaning and being as a world that is a priori mathematical in-itself, for, Only when certain events recur in accordance with rules or regularities, as is the case with repeatable experiments, can our observations be tested, and, of course, it is necessary that it be in principle testable by anyone.4 Indeed the scientifically significant physical effect may be defined as that which can be regularly reproduced by anyone who carries out the appropriate experiment in the way prescribed.5 Testing that can be carried out by anyone means the results can be reproduced, hence socially or intersubjectively verified: inter-subjective testing is merely a very important aspect of the more general idea of inter-subjective criticism, or in other words, of the idea of mutual rational control by critical discussion. 6 To be sure, that discourse can be conducted rationally, strictly in accordance with the framework of a formally logical review of experimental setups and outcomes, or can it? Do my gestures, the intonations and emphases in my speech, the forcefulness and angry, ironic or sarcastic polemic embodied in my presentation, do these provide a sensuous, enveloping context that shapes, perhaps decisively critical discussion? (Well, we could always altogether eliminate comportment by banning speech in favor of strictly formal, written presentation.) And while the question of origins and genesis is strictly forbidden in Popper, we can legitimately ask, what, pray tell, is the basis of this scientific social subjectivity (intersubjectivity)? Anticipatorily, we can answer by stating that it is bound to, as expression, a community of nonlogical subjects whose community is constituted in shared activity. We shall return to this also We might digress and ask, quite legitimately, what is Poppers position in regard to subjectivity in science. He calls any position that invokes a subject, subjectivist and tells that, The subjective theory of knowledge fails for various reasons.7

1 2

On the Status of Science and of Metaphysics in Conjectures and Refutations, 249. Popper, Ibid, 4. Emphasis in original. 3 Ibid, 3. Emphasis added; also, Ibid, 17, 70, 103, 446. 4 Ibid, 23. 5 Ibid, 23-24. Emphasis in original. 6 Ibid, 22, n. *1. Emphasis in original. 7 Realism and the Aim of Science, 92.

The (first) reason is its naivet,1 for it assumes that all knowledge is subjective meaning that we cannot speak of knowledge without a knower, a knowing subject,2 which, in the philosophical sense, is our position. Or is it? In Poppers sense, emphatically not; for he, in the incorrigibly and the most exceedingly crude bourgeois fashion, i.e., in a sense decidedly shaped by egoism (not philosophical reflection), means, intends and expressly identifies knowing with personal knowledge and understanding, so that the experience of the knowing subject is my own,3 is the knowledge and understanding of this specific, individual and possessive ego. Having set up this strawman it is really generous to designate it in this manner because Popper sincerely and idiotically believes that in those philosophical traditions where one speaks about a knowing subject, one is speaking about individualized, personal experience, a view that rests on, contains in it in a vastly compressed form all, the egoism that is the product of the entire historical development of bourgeois society he proceeds to demonstrate that scientific knowledge or, any knowledge for that matter, but for reasons entirely different that those of Popper cannot be reduced to personal knowledge.4 For Poppers edification, we would simply note that the knowing subject in science is the community of all living scientists who are the bearers of this knowledge,5 and we conclude this digression by further noting that Poppers critique of subjectivity in science rests on the false (here meaning contrived) opposition between personal egoism (subjectivity) and the arbitrariness it entails, to one side, and its banishment (objectivity) to the other, and constitutes a determination which is altogether at odds with his notion of an objectivity that is intersubjectively grounded as in inter-subjective testing or inter-subjective criticism The concept of experience in Popper is ambiguous, unclear because two quite different senses are deployed... the empirical reflection of the logical subject of his science and the experience of a practical subject: Statements in which only universal names and no individual names occur will here be called strict or pure. Most important among them are the strictly universal statements In addition to these, I am especially interested in statements of the form there are black ravens, which may be taken to mean the same as there exists at least one black raven. Such statements will be called strictly or purely existential statements (or there-is statements). Yet, expressed in a form of a proposition or statement, a black raven cannot be referred to without seeing (and perhaps indicating by pointing), that is, without relying exclusively on the veracity of the senses, on a practical subject's experience of seeing the black raven. The negation of a strictly universal statement is always equivalent to a strictly existential statement and vice versa. For example, not all ravens are black says the same thing as there exists a raven which is not black, or there are non-black ravens.6 Note here that the determination, the test of the validity of the universal statement (i.e., the strictly existential statement) is intuitive, not discursive, and its negation, which is intuitive, is the basis of the test, i.e., the logical subject of science presupposes and operates in all its activity on the basis of the practical subject. Prosaically stated, the scientist is a living, breathing human, a sentient being. The theories of nature science, and especially what we call natural laws, have the logical form of strictly universal statements; thus they can be expressed in the form of negations of strictly existential statements and thus assume the sense experience of a practical subject, as in the case of the seeing, a form of perceptual and practical immediacy, that in statement form affirms (counterintuitively) there does not exist at least one black raven and, in so
1

The second reason concerns the assimilation of scientific knowledge on the basis of traditions. The critique developed in the text that follows encompasses this reason because Poppers argument has the same contours, that is, it relies on showing that the scientific knowledge assimilated cannot possibly be identified with personal experience, with my knowledge. Ibid, 92-93. Emphasis in original. 2 Ibid. Emphasis in original. 3 Ibid. Again, emphasis in original. My own or my as, grammatically, a modifier of knowledge or experience appears, in italicized form, eight different times in the less than two page exposition of Poppers position. 4 We would also note that at this point Poppers argument depends upon a hypostatization of science: how many thousand things are known to science, but not to me Ibid, 92. 5 Consider the issue in terms of our own studies. Had Mendels manuscript work describing his genetic experimentation never been rediscovered, as it was circa 1900, would, assuming other early twentieth century lines of inquiries arrived at similar conclusions, the modern synthesis bore his imprint, would neo-Darwinian be a synthesis of Darwinian evolutionary theory and specifically Mendelian genetics? Yes and no. Yes in the sense that converging lines of the chronologically early twentieth century investigation may have produced a qualitatively similar genetics, but no in the sense that the work of Mendel would have been lost to biological science, for there would have been no community of biologists and geneticists for whom it existed, i.e., it would have been absence a knowing subject. 6 The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 47. All emphases in the original.

affirming would be sensuously tested, and in testing, in seeing and thus witnessing the reality of a black raven, would affirm (until in principle at least a further, more severe test could be undertaken) the universal statement, there are black ravens. We see that natural laws might be compared to proscriptions or prohibitions. They do not assert that something exists or is the case; they deny it. And it is precisely because they do this that they are falsifiable.1 And, in this instanced negation of a universal statement by way of affirmation of the negation of a strictly existential statement, the act of denial rests on, and explicitly stated, refers us back to, the seeing, to the activity of a practical subject. Thus, it is clear that the logical subject entails the practical (concrete, i.e., living, sentient and active) one, that Popper cannot do without an appeal to experience in the non-logical, non-scientific sense: Because there are two distinct meanings of experience operative in Popper, his overall use is ambiguous; because he uses one for the other, this usage is equivocal, though they are not mutually exclusive. The ambiguous, equivocal concepts of experience arise from the absence of the concrete subject, which nonetheless is appealed to as the foundations on which higher order scientific statements are generated. While, rather curiously, Popper appears to have no problem in speaking of intuitively acceptable strictly universal statements,2 i.e., laws of nature, he requires the real subject we whose ordinary experience forms the content of daily life thus, the equivocation because he cannot speak without making reference to it as a constantly renewed point of departure, as foundations to intuitive understanding, to perception (as integral and whole, not as a logical construct called sense data), as in I see, we see that, etc.3 While the logical subject, and the equivocation that makes it possible, may be unproblematic in Popper, for him it presupposes as its hidden foundation the desirability, triumph and the unending reality of the scientific edifice (and its premises, empirical research funded by the capitalist state, the necessity that calls that research forth, namely, systematic scientific and technological inputs into production, in other words, the civilization of capital)... The logical subject is a fiction, it experiences nothing; it is another construct, this one based on the practical subjectivity of the scientist as he mystifying himself engages in a schizoid experimental practice under laboratory conditions.4 The Problem of Foundations (Irrationality of the Substratum) Poppers Sisyphean effort to construct a logical subject is determined by his refusal of practical subjectivity, an objectively practical being, in an account of scientific knowledge at its origins. While forgoing all reference to
1 2

Ibid, 48. Emphasis in original. Ibid, 447-449. 3 In this context, compare the remarks about making the identification of the concept of simplicity with that of falsifiability intuitively more acceptable. Ibid, 126, n. *1, and those concerning his failure to carry out fully his intuitive program, Ibid, 155, n. *1. Popper explicitly introduces universal statements without any discussion of their genesis (Ibid, 40-47). This is taboo, strictly verboten, since he agrees with the logical positivists efforts to as far as possible to rid science of metaphysics, that it is necessary to replace the pseudopsychological method of analyzing our idea and their origins in our senses with a more objective and a less genetic method (Ibid, xxi. Emphasis added). While we object, against say Husserl and phenomenology, to raising intellectual intuition, that is, the clear seeing of essences (Wesenschau), to the status of reason itself, we submit in this regard that Poppers intent to write off their genesis as metaphysics (and the philosophical concept of intellectual intuition as, perhaps, mystical nonsense) is misplaced, contradictory and ultimately incoherent. See our remarks on intuition in the discussion, Common Sense (Knowledge) and Scientific Knowledge, above. 4 Of course, Popper illicitly assimilates empirical observation and experimentation to experience: Experiments and their outcomes, empirical results, are methodically set up according to strict procedures and guidelines. Their outcomes, those results, are established on the basis of conditions that exist nowhere in nature where, for example, in nature does one find a decerebrate cat, subject of experiments on the reflex arc so-called, on the relation of external stimuli to nervous physiology? These experiments, moreover, draw conclusions from such empirical results, outcomes and consequences that are valid only under laboratory conditions, in an artificially constructed, fully deterministic world. Such conditions do not exist in nature or society. Empirical observation, the activity of the logical subject that is wedded to the practical one, is entirely a function of this laboratory situation, or laboratory-like situations. It is a part, a historically and socially specific and extraordinarily limited aspect of human experience to the extent that subjectivity is methodologically canalized, that one functions as a scientist. But it is not identical with experience itself, its scope, range. To boot, scientizing subjectivity produces a Teilmensch, a fragmentary human being largely without identifiably human characteristics in particular, a conscience in the name of certain unknowingly normative commitments (value freedom, objectivity, detachment) that render it, the scientist, a fit functionary of capital. The overall context for this construction has been provided in the Introduction, above. See Elements of the Conceptual Structure of Science.

sensuous experience is a central aspect of the program of bourgeois science to sharply differentiate and demarcate itself from metaphysics (and while Popper, of course, full well knows that such is impossible), this effort leads straightaway to the problem of foundations. More broadly, in his assimilation of common sense to scientific knowledge Popper masks the subjectivity that generates this common stock of meaning or sense in the first place, the practical subject whose immediate experience in the everyday sense underlines all predicative efforts at validation (falsification). In effectively constructing a logical subject of scientific experimentation Popper conceals the practical subject on which it relies. In refusing the contents (meaning) of experience as the foundation of higher order abstractions, Popper refuses to confront the underlying irrationality of his construction, his logical and methodological analysis of scientific knowledge. Yet, demarcation, axiomatic systematization conjoined to testing, and psychologism are all effectively and objectively elements of a strategy to circle the wagons, bolt close the hatches and hunker down: Taken together, they constitute a formally integrated series of steps that insulate science from the form-content problem (insulation that produces, and thus reappears in a heightened, mystified and rarefied form in, an arcane, convoluted discussion of a propensity theorization of probability) and bring down an iron veil over the problem of the irrationality of substratum which is systematically precluded from discussion: On the core issues, his discussion remains problematic because his entire theorization is constructed in such a manner as to render it unrecognizable, as, deploying a perceptual metaphor, a construction obstructing a view of the problem in the first place. Given his explicit commitment to the problem of cosmology (i.e., to the problem of the world and our place and role in it), Popper's cavalier disregard for those specifically philosophical problems (e.g., the inaccessibility or unintegratability of the underlying substratum, the irrationality of contents, the contradiction between system and history1 all which appear in Popper and all of which are suppressed) and the systematic effort to bury, occlude and obfuscate them problems German philosophy from Kant onward made titanic, unswerving and dogged speculative attempts to resolve is revealed in his unshakable commitment to bourgeois science, actually the science of capital (since The Logic of Discovery in no way rises to the philosophical level of classical German idealism and since it is the culture and civilization of capital that he upholds). In Popper, logical analysis as such removes all that is philosophically significant and compelling, permitting science to function without direction or meaning, for capital, i.e., to be guided in all its constructions (and predictions) by the hidden telos of nature domination. Science, of course, could be no other way. In this is way Popper is the model of a philosopher as a functionary of capital. While it will be our task to restore the practical subject (as the premise and foundation of any new science and ensemble of technics through which we negotiate our relation to the nature in which we are embedded), Popper simply declares the problem of the underlying irrationality of the substratum, the practical subject, off limits, irrelevant and of no concern, banishing it by sheer fiat. Indeed, in an era in which the bourgeoisie is no longer capable of class creativity, it is only reasonable that a man who is wholly committed to its science would reduce the fundamental questions of that science to arational decision, which in his terms is uncritical and anti-critical: Fiat decisions are the only manner in which capitals science can be defended. In point of fact, decision is the methodological devise, the specific way in which the problem is posed and resolved, i.e., obfuscated, thus buried and thereby abandoned. Decisionism Compelled by the logic of his theorization to confront its absence of foundations, yet unable to coherently resolve this aporia, Popper overcomes (i.e., conceals, thus occludes and deserts) the rational systems-driven requirement for rational self-completion. Absence the rational completion of the system, axiomatic systems are generated by sheer fiat based on a decision,2 that, from the perspective of the rational speech as Popper pretends to, is arbitrary:
1

See Georgy Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, the justly famous essay, Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, in particular The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought (section 1). 2 The Logic of Scientific Discovery,15. The interpretation of an axiomatic system as a system of (conventions or) implicit definitions can also be expressed saying that it amounts to a decision. Ibid, 53.

My criterion of demarcation will have to be regarded as a proposal for an agreement or convention. As to the suitability of any such convention opinions may different and a reasonable discussion of these questions is only possible between parties having some purpose in common.1 Albeit hidden, that purpose is the incontestability of bourgeois accumulative practices and, intertwined, the nature domination and class exploitation on which it is based and which found capitalist civilization tout court, i.e., decision is a reflex, a visceral affirmation of the given, and it, for capital, is beyond reason: The choice of that purpose must, of course, be ultimately a matter of decision, going beyond rational argument.2 We might add that in this formulation there is no difference in principle between the purported rationality of Poppers position, inductive inferences that fail, phenomenological positions that found science in the self-evidence of intellectually intuited essences and mysticism. No? Then, I freely admit that in arriving at my proposals I have been guided, in the last analysis, by value-judgments and predilections, 3 i.e., by mere preference for science, bourgeois culture, and the order of capital. Decisionism is arbitrariness raised to the level of a (false) principle: For decisional thought, whether juridical and political in which case it is not the content of the decision, but merely the fact that the decision is made by the proper authority, whether existential in which case it is made in the resoluteness of authentic being (Da-sein) or scientific, as in the text at hand, in which case it is produced by use of the correct method, it is fiat that determines validity, use, significance, fruitfulness, etc. But in any case, there is no necessity that inheres in the decision But there is something else at the deepest societal level that underpins the personal reality that decides Decisionism: Vast, subterranean undercurrents of a whole culture and society hurdling toward disaster and collapse are summed up in this concept. In the ostensible higher culture of the bourgeoisie, it surfaced perhaps first in Carl Schmitt in the early twenties 4 against the background of enormous turmoil, major class confrontations one after other, the unfolding Great Inflation, the unstable Weimar Republic as jurisprudential (and political) doctrine stating the legal (or tacitly moral) principles are the outcome of decisions made by the institutional forms of class authority, by political bodies above all by the Executive. Before the end of the decade it has found its way into philosophy as fundamental ontology, in the existential analytic of the resoluteness of authentic Da-sein in the primordial disclosure of the truth of existence, a resolution (decision) that projectively discloses determination of actual factual possibility5 (i.e, reveals for itself the objective meaninglessness, essential givenness and irrationality of its existence forming the absence of a basis for decision). And, with the crisis of capital deepening as accumulation was at an impasse, ruling class social groups screaming for a decision resolving the crisis,6 Weimar gave way descending into early horrors of the Nazi purge of undesirable social elements as the President appointed a first world war trench runner, a messenger, to the chancellorship and Karl Popper wrote the Logic of Scientific Discovery Once decisional thought establishes itself on the basis of axiomatic systemization, arbitrariness and irrationality penetrate, albeit for the most part hidden, into the structure of the theorization: Methodological rules are here regarded as conventions.7 Of course, now this irrationality has the look of rationality as it appears in the guise of logically consistent demands: The theory of method, in so far as it goes beyond the purely logical analysis of the relations between scientific statements, is concerned with the choice of methods The decision here proposed for laying down suitable rules for what I call the empirical method is closely connected with my criterion of demarcation: I propose to adopt such rules as will ensure the testability of scientific statements; which to say, their falsifiability.8 And that arbitrariness and irrationality seep ever deeper into the theoretical construction: Also the view that the exclusion of metaphysics is likewise a matter for decision.9
1 2

Ibid, 15. Emphasis in original. Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Politische Theologie (1922). 5 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (1927). Der Entschlu ist gerade erst das erschlieende Entwerfen und Bestimmen der jeweiligen faktische Mglichkeit, 298 (60). 6 See The German Road to Renewed Imperialist World War, The Slump and the Nazi Ascent to Power. 7 The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 32. Emphasis in original. 8 Ibid, 27. Emphasis in original. 9 Ibid, 31, n. 6.

And deeper: I propose the following definition [of] a theory called empirical or falsifiable1 and, We may now lay down the following rule concerning basic statements2 And still deeper yet: As regard auxiliary hypotheses What auxiliary hypotheses, pray tell? Do not axiomatic systems refuse all such statements?3 We propose to lay down the rule that only those are acceptable whose introduction does not diminish the degree of falsifiability or testability of the system in question. 4 In a circuitous way, we come back to our point of departure: what is to be called a science and who is to be called a scientist must always remain a matter of convention or decision.5 But now, not only has arbitrariness and irrationality penetrated the depth structure of the theorization in the guise of a (pseudo) rationality, some of the very forms of thought here intuition that were rejected in favor of a critical, discursive approach now reappear: It is only from the consequences of my definitions of empirical science, and from the methodological decisions which depend upon this definition, that the scientist will be able to see how far its conforms to his intuitive idea of the goal of his endeavors.6 But at a certain point the insurmountable problem of the irrationality of the substratum returns with a vengeance: Every test of a theory must stop at some basic statement or other which we decide to accept.7 Perhaps this is not clear enough? Then, the basic statements at which we stop, which we decide to accept as satisfactory, and as sufficiently tested, have admittedly the character of dogmas8 With its fiat features, arbitrariness and irrationality, decision reaches into the very heart of Poppers construction, the determination of testing as the nuts and bolts of falsifiability in his calculus of probability. Here Poppers subordination of thought, theorizing and philosophical reflection to really existing science, i.e., to the science as capitals theorization, appears craven. For it is here, in the intricate and finely worked out details of testing that he arrives at a point at which he throws the entire theoretically elaborate and elaborated scaffolding of experiment and testing aside. Only an infinite sequence of events could contradict a probability estimate. But this means, in view of the considerations set forth [above] that probability hypotheses are unfalsifiable because their dimension is infinite. We should therefore really describe them as empirically uninformative, as void of empirical content9 But this is entirely problematic, in fact rational analysis with its outcome is unacceptable: Yet any such view is clearly unacceptable in face of the success which physics have achieved with predictions obtained from hypothetical estimates of probabilities. From the standpoint of the internal coherency of an argument, the problem is solved by fiat, by making a methodological decision to rule out, prohibit highly improbable events in the deployment of probability10 As we shall see, this problem reappears asserting itself still more forcibly: In an account of the concept of approximation in his discussion of a calculus of probability, Popper sets his entire well-developed criticism of the concept aside in favor of on his own account incoherent the physicists determination, and then proceeds by fiat to propose a methodological rule, to arbitrary decide, to banish the problematic character of the physicists determination11 The methodological decision is not, however, purely arbitrary to the extent there is a veiled logic at work here that we uncovered in our introductory remarks to these studies: The peculiar and widely recognized validity science as theory has achieved does not refer us back to its categorial accomplishments, and here not even to experimental verification at the level of scientific activity, but, based on physics success, to practical verification in the order of
1 2

Ibid, 65. Ibid, 84. 3 Ibid, 51, and Part II, Science as Method: Falsification and Postulative Deductivism, above. 4 The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 62. 5 Ibid, 31. 6 Ibid, 34. 7 Ibid, 86. 8 Ibid, 87. 9 Ibid, 182. 10 Ibid, 182. Emphasis in original. 11 Ibid, 190-192.

society. It is here, then, in the proof, i.e., in the socially generalized seeing, approval, and acclaim for the technological achievements based on and exhibited as nature domination.1 This solution an arbitrary decision occurred with the problem of decidability at the methodological level (i.e., probability considered solely from the viewpoint of its internal logical development). But, as we have already indicated, the same problem reappears in physics as practiced by the scientist qua physicist herself. In the case of some experiments, those that are chance like (such as, for example, the toss of a coin), frequent repetition produces outcomes with relative frequencies that, repeated over and over, more and more approach a fixed value that can be called the probability of the event in question. The entire experiment entails, then, establishing a value that is empirically determinable through long series of experiments. 2 This does not, however, agree with the calculus of probability (referred to above as methodologically developed): For only almost all very long segments, in this case of the physicists experimentally lengthy repetitions, are statistically stable, that is, behave convergently. Almost all has the sense, then, of very probable. But probability cannot be defined by this stability the argument is circular and the physicists determination is not acceptable.3 How does Popper resolve this problem? First, he returns to the physicists practice: In his experiment, the physicist must have a sense of what constitutes a lengthy repetition an intuitive sense that is a function of his reality as a practical subject that is, a sense of what is long? Without this sense, we cannot establish the degree of approximation. But this too, tacitly, is unacceptable (i.e., Popper does not say this expressly). So, second, Popper claims the physicist would never in the event go about an experiment in this manner, pursue an unlimited application, for he would never use them [applications] in this way. So, third, he put forward the following, I shall, decreeing the following, disallow the unlimited application of probability hypotheses. I propose that we take the methodological decision to explain physical effects, i.e., reproducible regularities, as accumulation of accidents.4 Now, in the first place the appeal to physicists practice is disingenuous: Popper lengthy argument is contravened by such an appeal, since it is a theoretical argument about the nature and (presumed) practice of science. (In a truly dishonest and perverse manner, he further rationalizes his argument by stating what he has illicitly conjoined is de jure separate: This objection does not affect my position, for I do not assert the identity of the physical and the mathematical concepts of probability at all; on the contrary, I deny it.) 5 What he is doing is proposing an ad hoc and de facto solution, an auxiliary methodological law (and not even a hypothesis), in an appeal to physicists use. In the second place, Popper has conflated the meaning of lengthy and unlimited: They are not the same, and in logic the difference between them cannot be bridged, for lengthy, no how long, is not unlimited, i.e., infinite. In the third place, largely hidden the real guiding intent briefly surfaces: The methodological decision concerns physical effects or reproducible regularities that serve scientific prediction, i.e., that decision is governed by the precategorial telos of nature domination: Poppers manipulation of his own theorization to bring it into line with physicists practice (i.e., with her calculations and experimental manipulation to obtain predictable results), the latters manipulation of her experiments in Poppers case the precise analog to the person who manipulates her own emotions to pursue her egoistic ambitions is not merely craven and unscrupulous all these behaviors are class reflexes, internalized and assimilated, of bourgeois practices of the manipulation of labor in production and hawking in distribution, a statement of the essentially egoistic formation and the nihilism of accumulative practices that characterizes this class in history not merely a wholesale abandonment of critical rationality (Popper thinks they are synonymous) 6 the guise under which he operates and that which he otherwise proclaims essentially characteristic of philosophy as philosophy and science (in light of the forgoing, a patently ideological and delusionary conviction and proving scientific rationality is not critical, but instrumental), but this logical, mathematical, probabilistic manipulation occurs because nature is not easily amendable and resists such treatment (witness climate change), and instead has to be de-structured, dismembered, dismantled, destroyed making science the theoretical anticipation of this reduction and destruction

Citing from the Introduction, Elements of the Conceptual Structure of Science, above. Ibid, 191. Popper cites M. Born-Jordan, Elementare Quantenmechanik (1930). 3 Ibid. 4 The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 192. Emphasis added. 5 Ibid. 6 He thinks that scientific practice embodies a paradigmatic critical rationality.
2

(an anticipation based on the very processes of abstraction described in more detailed in our analyses above)1 in order to render it malleable, to reconstruct nature in its autonomy, internal coherency and otherness as a raw materials basin for capitalist production of commodities.2 Abstract Dialectic of Concepts Popper recognizes the role of theory in the formation of even the most elementary concepts in science: Matter, or atom after Rutherford, and matter, or energy, after Einstein, meant something different from what they meant before: the meaning of these concepts is a function of the constantly changing theory.3 Theory is, according to Popper, ubiquitously present in all are activities and experience. He too recognizes, as we would then expect, its presence in ordinary experience of daily life (though he does not understand its genesis, role or function): there is no such thing as pure experience, but only experience interpreted in the light of expectations or theories which are transcendent4 Here, though Popper is mistaken: Experience is for the most part the constant interplay of the precategorial and categorial, and this is why there is no hard and fast dividing line between experience and theory. Yet there is pure experience. As such, it is ineffable, but reflectively identifiable in characterizations such as the shock of the new or being left speechless, i.e., there is astonishment, amazement, one is stunned but unable to immediately say what this is, i.e., there is immediate confusion for the concept is either absence in the upsurge of the new or in the ingression of novelty into daily life in all its predictability and banality, or itself is inadequate to the novel experience. The shock of recognition and das Erlebnis aha are precisely the discovery, recovery as we might say, we search our memory or the production of a concept that comprehends and explains the experience, renders it meaningful by making it intelligible In science, then, facts, givenness or facticity, are inescapably theory laden. Popper makes this unmistakably clear, for, Theory dominates the experimental work from its initial planning up to the finishing touches in the laboratory5 and observations and even more so observation statements and statements of experimental results are always interpretations of the facts observed; they are interpretations in the light of theories.6 One of the most important implications of this the absence of a sharp demarcation between science and metaphysics has already been discussed.7 So if, as Popper recounts, any number of metaphysical theories are meaningful, many scientific theories began as myths, some rarified theories operate beyond the level of testability of the day and devolve into metaphysical systems, and some once considered scientific as a matter of consensus later have become increasingly metaphysical, even, as we noted earlier, he is alive to these situations, and if they are grounded, as he argues in other contexts, in the mutual penetration of fact and theory, evidence and its conceptualization, empirical description and interpretation, if he is cognizant that an empirical language is also a theoretical one, that theory not only formulates the results of an artificially constructed situation but enters into and shapes that the laboratory experiment itself prior to its construction, then why, how is it, that he fails to grasp that the experiment itself utilizes instruments and instrumental complexes which are designed in terms of and thus can only be expressed in a conceptual language adequate to science to hand (that, in turn, presupposes the specific discipline, the level of development it has achieved and the entire history that is this development), then why is unable to see the significance of the situation Bohr refers us back to,8 that the analysis of quantum phenomena
Introduction, Elements of the Conceptual Structure of Science, above. For earthly nature in its coherency and otherness, see the Postscript, Part III, below, and Nature, Capital, Communism. See the first three sections of Climate Change and the first two of The Order of Nature 3 The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 113 n. *3. 4 Ibid, 446. 5 Ibid, 90. 6 Ibid, 90, n. *3. Emphases in the original. Our observational experiences are impregnated with theories Basic statements are test statements; they are, like all language, impregnated with theories (Ibid, 94. Addendum, 1972). 7 See this Study, Part II, Two Problems of a Theory of Knowledge: Induction and Demarcation, above. And, to be sure, for Popper this extends all the way back into ordinary language: "In fact, the most common universal terms of ordinary language incorporate a great number of empirical as well as metaphysical or religious theories (Realism and the Aim of Science, 110). We agree. 8 Third Study, First Sketch, Born's Discussion of the Foundation of Quantum Mechanics.
1

cannot be detached from the conditions of their application, which constitute the conditions of its, the empirical contents, genesis and formation? ...To cite Bohr remarks again, this crucial point implies the impossibility of any sharp separation between the behavior of atomic objects and the interactions with the measuring instrument which serve to define the conditions under which the phenomena appear1... Why is he unable to grasp that, generally, there is no sharp separation between the empirical content, the test (the equation is Poppers), and its interaction with the instruments of its measurement including, in Bohrs radical formulation, the scientist himself as part of the instrumental apparatus and not as some external observer, consciousness or subjectivity? Why, because accepting a generalization of Bohrs position (which in Bohrs formulation is strictly confined to the peculiar indeterminate conditions of the subatomic situation but in its generalized form insists on the indissolvable linkage of knowledge to the instruments within determinate laboratory conditions under which it, this knowledge, is produced), meaning that the outcomes, experimental results, have no reality, no ontological status apart from the overall conditions of experimentation, that astronomy, relativity physics, etc., are theoretical constructs whose supporting evidence is of course not only not sensuous, but based still further on highly theoretically, mostly mathematically, mediated constructs allowing interpretation of that evidence gathered by instruments that embody the same theoretical assumptions.. Popper cannot accept this on the face of it he would find it absurd because his entire understanding of this situation is thoroughly mediated by his metaphysically realistic perspective. So what does Popper accept, and what is he doing? In the first place, Poppers metaphysical realism, his rarified logical subject, a contemplative attitude expressed as experimentation and a correspondence theory of truth, all of which presuppose, nay explicitly assume, the world is pregiven, thingly and simply there confronting us, are elements of a theorization shaped in its fundamental contours by the overwhelming reality, societies of capital, in which the activity and products of a productive subject do not immediately appear as social relations but are transposed, beginning from the labor processes, into a interconnected, external network of abstract things commodities, price, profit, their institutionally social and legal settings, as well as the higher order abstractions, such as the economy and society, that rise from them a dumb thingly reality that starting in daily life immediately informs and shapes our sense of the world.... nature, community and the universe... its constitution and how it appears, a sense which Popper has merely mediated in and through elaboration of a reified methodology, epistemology and (probabilistic) logic. (Note, please, that we emphatically did not say the previous enumerated features of Popper's theorization are the expression of the class of capitalists as passive beneficiaries of the surpluses generated through the abstraction of living, practical subjects, proletarians, in production.) In the second, an epistemological sense, what, in a manner that vastly reduced the scope of classical theories of knowledge, Popper is doing, in validating by way of falsifying testing and formulating experimental results in statements, is merely matching concept to concept, those concepts expressing in statement form only those results that are congruent with those embedded in the instrumental apparatus(es) with which results are ascertained, i.e., quantitatively measured. Falsification tells us nothing other than that which is already present implicitly in the experiment itself, i.e., it tells us only that which is adequate (hence validated for now), or inadequate (hence falsified), to the goals posited in setting up and establishing the experiment in the first place.
1

Niels Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, 39-40 Emphasis in original. Poppers belief (Quantum Mechanics and the Schism in Physics, 9f, esp. 10, 18-22) that Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen put this issue to bed by way of a false transcendence of the wave particle duality in quantum interpretations of atomic phenomena is mistaken on both counts. Here, see Feyerabend, Realism, Rationalism and Scientific Method, 311-312, n. 38. At any rate, Popper not only admits the problem has not be put to rest and that the epistemological conundrum remains, i.e., the question of a full adequate interpretation of microphysical phenomena that avoids the requirement of two incommensurate and mutually exclusive frameworks (those of particles and waves) to achieve a satisfactory interpretation (Popper, Ibid, 25, anticipating an experimental refutation of quantum mechanics, my expectation appears to have been mistaken) but, in order to save his theorization (and that of Einsteins principle of locality), he pursues a course that expressly involves resurrecting the Newtonian concept of an absolute space. See Ibid, 25, 27-28 (the experiment designed to once again, in Poppers doggedly persistent fashion, challenge Heisenbergs thought experiment and the conclusions he sought to verify), and 29 (where the concept of absolute space is tentatively put forth). We might legitimately ask how this course can be justified in terms of his own determination that empirical science start from axiomatic systems that demands as one of their internal requirements the elimination of superfluous hypotheses (The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 51 and this Study, Part II, Science as Method, above).

This is the key: All genuine knowledge begins by recognizing that matching concepts to concepts is merely explication of conceptual content, where that content is embodied in an instrumental context or expressed in statements. Thus, it is expressly for this reason (with regard to the latter) that Popper is compelled to arbitrarily decide to lay down rule[s], since, otherwise, it is impossible to [determine] by analyzing its logical form, whether a system of statements is a conventional system of irrefutable implicit definitions, or whether it is a system which is empirical in my sense1 Let us pause and explicitly note that Popper is fully aware that (within the framework of his vaunted metaphysical realism) he is matching concepts to concepts, for example in his characterization of falsification: We shall attempt to characterize the falsifiability of a theory by the logical relations holding between the theory and the class of basic statements2 and, again, in this discussion of what he calls the problem of the empirical basis, that is, the foundation, as it were, on which statements in science can be falsified: We must distinguish between our subjective experiences or our feelings of certainty and the objective logical relations subsisting among the various systems of scientific statements, and within each of them.3 Or more significantly in his critique of Carnap: The logic of science has to investigate the forms of scientific language. It does not speak of (physical) objects but of words; not of fact, but of sentences. With this, the correct formal mode of speech, Carnap contrasts the ordinary or, as he calls it, the material mode of speech. If confusion is to be avoided, then the material mode of speech should only be used where it is possible to translate it into the correct formal mode of speech. Now this view with which I can agree leads Carnap to assert that we must not say, in the logic of science, that sentences are tested by comparing them with states of affairs or with experience: we may only say that they can be tested by comparing them with other sentences4 The matching of concept to concept, however, is not synthetic. It adds nothing new to our knowledge It may be nothing more than a convoluted, highly elaboration explication of thought experiments For knowledge is first and foremost a question of the adequacy of concept to goal (telos). We shall take this up shortly:5 But for Popper, science is epistemologically constructed on the basis of a logical subject. Thus, recognition of the motivational teleology at the origins of conceptual knowledge is inadmissible, for the telos is precategorial and thereby falls outside of the preview and the activity of the logical subject... Thus, at its most fundamental level (as a doctrinal body of knowledge), science does not effectively proceed by way of falsification; it is not at all the latter that decides the successful synthesis (synthetic knowledge for Popper, experimental validity for the scientist). For this event does not occur within the order of science itself (as in experiment, as in scientific cognition in statement form. Instead, synthesis is constituted by the realization of prediction that occurs in the order of society as the seeing, approval and acclaim for the technological achievements of science, i.e., in nature conquest (domination), i.e., in advancing the program of capital... Now we call this situation that of the conceptual apparatus of falsifiability as it rests on a procedure of matching concept to concept an abstract dialectic of concepts. It is abstract because it is suspended without foundations in the military language of tactical formation, it is in the air or, more precisely, it is determined by the whole hidden nature of science, by the experimental manipulation of inert substances and destruction of vital beings the purpose of which is testing a prediction aimed at directing and controlling those substances and beings as so much objectively contentless matter, by the hidden telos of nature domination in the service of endless expansion of the productive forces, i.e., by bourgeois aims in history, i.e., by the logic of capital, accumulation for accumulations sake.
1

The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 61. Emphases added. Popper calls conventional a system of thought for which the laws of nature are its own free creations, as the modern science of nature, in particular the new physics, is not a picture of nature but merely a logical construction. Ibid, 58. Unlike Bachelard who we cited extensively above, Popper is unable to recognize how this situation obtains, that the basis of which this science develops as an artificial, laboratory-based construct decisively shapes it. 2 Ibid, 64. 3 Ibid, 22. 4 Ibid, 77. Popper goes on to criticize Carnap for a psychologistic backtracking, stating that he smuggles back in experiences (through the use of protocol sentences that correspond to ordinary experience and that are to be deployed to align the experience, the given, sense-data according to Popper, with the formal mode of speech. Ibid.) Popper is citing from an essay entitled These der Metalogik appearing in the journal Erkenntnis, 2, 1932. 5 This Study, Part III, Theory of Truth, below.

Popper is uncomfortably, vaguely and confusedly aware of this. By 1960, he had come around to the view that, indeed, a theory of truth in the metaphysically realist form of the correspondence to the facts was required in order to the distance himself from more baneful scientific productions, e.g., atomic weaponry (recall a mass movement in Britain against nuclear testing had emerged in this year), or in his cryptic formulation, if we wish to elucidate the difference between pure and applied science, between the search for knowledge, and the search for power or for powerful instruments, then we cannot do without it [i.e., without an objective theory of truth].1 So what about Poppers correspondence theory of truth? For over three decades Popper admits to being confounded by a correspondence theory of truth, for he knew, as we pointed in the critique of Carnap, that it merely a matter of matching conceptual arrays one to another, a theory laden statement to another theory laden statement that claims to be more elementary (as in an atomic proposition or a protocol statement). Thus, he writes, it appeared hopeless to try and understand clearly this strangely elusive idea of a correspondence between a statement (or proposition) and a fact.2 But then along came Alfred Tarski.3 We shall follow Poppers reading of Tarski closely here, citing at length in recounting this account of a correspondence of statements to facts as the basis of a theory of truth. Popper presents us with two formulations, which state... very simply (in a metalanguage) under what conditions a certain assertion (of an object language) correspond to the facts. (1) The statement, or the assertion, Snow is white corresponds to the facts if, and only if, snow is, indeed, white. (2) The statement, or the assertion, Grass is red corresponds to the facts, if and only if, grass is, indeed, red. Now the decisive point, according to Popper, is that in order to speak of correspondence to the facts, and do (1) and (2), we must use a metalanguage presumably everything that, distinct from, reflects on the assertions concerning snow and grass in which we can speak about two things: statements; and the facts to which these statements refer.4 In Poppers account, no more is said about the relation between the metalanguage and the object, as if it were all so obvious. (For him, it is. He refers, for example, to the highly intuitive character of Tarskis ideas.)5 So, then, what does Popper mean and intend here? Truth is constituted in the meta-linguistic relation of what he calls the metalanguage to an object language, the latter being that assertion in which a synthetic judgment is made, as in, Snow is white. Therein lies the correspondence. But that correspondence is validated, on Poppers own account, if and only if the object language assertion corresponds to the facts, in the example cited, if and only if snow is white, while the object language assertion that Grass is red is, we assume, an instance of a falsifiable statement. But the point to note here is validation depends on the intuitive seeing, the perception, of snow that is white and grass that is not red, that, while validation proceeds in the same manner of testing by way of falsification (and thus Popper will speak only of an approximation to truth), the falsifying testing itself, and hence the correspondence to facts, rests on intuitive certainty, precisely what in all other cases Popper rejects. The object language so-called is the precise equivalent of and analog to atomic propositions and protocol statements. What Popper rejects in Carnap, he affirms in Tarski.6
1

Truth, Rationality and the Growth of Knowledge in Conjectures and Refutations, 306. Contrast this to Poppers attitude in 1935-1936 (the time at which the text in question, to be mentioned shortly, was drafted and a private presentation made) in The Poverty of Historicism (which, as late as 1957 the date of publication, Popper saw no reason to abandon): Whether the true motive of scientific inquiry is a purely theoretical inquiry or idle curiosity, or whether we should rather understand science as an instrument for solving the practical problems that rise in the struggle for life, this is question that need not decided here [i.e., it is an open, unresolved question, even though], the somewhat extreme view (to which I personally inclined) that science is most significant as one of the greatest spiritual achievements that man has yet known may be combined with a recognition of the importance of practical problems and practical tests [like the tests conducted over Nagasaki and Hiroshima] for the progress of science, whether applied or pure (Ibid, 55-56). Here practice is not merely experiment, but technological achievement as a measure of progress (justifying our bracketed remark). How could it be otherwise? In this regard, compare the remarks cited from von Weizscker in the penultimate note, Third Study, Second Sketch, Continuity between Quantum Mechanics and Classical Physics, above. 2 Ibid, 302. 3 Wahrheitsbegriff (1935), literally the concept of truth, but translated into English under the title Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics (1956). 4 Truth, Rationality and the Growth of Knowledge in Conjectures and Refutations, 303-304. 5 Ibid, 303. 6 Yet Carnap is nevertheless really retaining the fundamental ideas of the psychologistic approach to the problem; all that he is doing is to translate them into the formal model of speech. He says that the sentences of science are tested with the help of protocol sentences but

So the assertion of the continuity between common sense and scientific knowledge (is contradicted, as we have described, on several occasions by Poppers own account and) rests on the conflation of the constructed, logical subject with the concrete, practical one which, in its turn, opens on the problem of the irrationality of the substratum, the denial of what is always otherwise presupposed, namely that practical subject, a contradiction that, in turn, is papered over by a resort to the irrational and arbitrary methodological devise of decision, which, finally, demonstrates the science proceeds by way of an abstract dialectic of concepts that masks its real, hidden intentionality (telos) that guides its construction as (a) theory (of the domination of nature), an abstract dialectic that in the end, in its attempt to flee applied science (where it openly rejoins the bourgeois project of nature domination in its equally open linkage to capital accumulation) through a correspondence theory of truth, brings us back to the practical subject, to an objectively practical being. The Materialist Dialectic Epistemology as Revolutionary Social Theory, and Transcendence of the Aprioras of Logical Subjectivity in the Activity of an Objectively Practical Being The antinomies of scientific thought arise necessarily from the societal project it embodies, the endless expansion of productive forces through nature domination, the interests of a particular class in society dressed out in service to humanity. Common sense is largely at odds with scientific knowledge, the logical subject always tacitly refers back to the practical one in which it is grounded, these aprioras devolve on the irrational lack of foundations in science and the objectively necessary failure to accordingly reconstruct the basis of science drives the theorist to articulate an arbitrary, irrational decisionism, which in turn issues in an effort to found science in an objective, absolute theory of truth as a correspondence with the facts that, contradictory, rests on the same ground as the critique (of induction) from which the entire theorization started. Science as Popper demands and as he understands it strives to obliterate its foundations in objectively practical subjectivity, to reaffirm objectivism (i.e., a theorization of the world absent the subjectivity on the basis of which our knowledge and understanding arises) and physicalism: It is metaphysical, for metaphysics is precisely any theorization that is independent of any and all possible objectively practical subjectivities and dependent on none for its validation. Constituted in and through the theorization of the modern science of nature (in particular, the new physics), the axiomatic systematization and those fundamental concepts (matter, energy, subatomic particles, light, etc.) which form its core (are its foundation and mainstay) are reductionist assumptions, atomistic postulates of a theoretical analysis projected as real, as underlying realities. This is physicalism1 If the problems of the relation of theory and practice, and truth and falsity, are to have meaning, if the role and function of the modern science of nature and capitalist technology (together with technologies of capital) are to be critically assessed, we must not only forgo reductionist and physicalist realism, we must return to that point at which
since these are explained as statements or sentences which are not in need of confirmation but serve as a basis for all other sentences of science, this amounts to say in the ordinary material mode of speech - that the protocol sentences refers to the given: to the sense-data. The Logical of Scientific Discovery, 77. Perhaps the only difference is that in Tarskis case in the instances which Popper provides, there is a further appeal, namely to the given: to the sense-data, i.e., in Poppers own terms this is a psychologistic appeal to perceptual intuition. 1 Among other things, what Popper really affirms with his recognition that facts are theory laden is a commitment to this metaphysical theory we call physicalism. All universal concepts incorporate theories. And although some of these can be tested, they can ever be exhaustively tested (and can never be verified). The statement Here is a glass of water is open to an indefinite number and inexhaustible number of tests chemical tests, for example because water, like anything else, is recognizable by its law-like behavior (cf. the end of section 25 of L.Sc.D.). Thus water is dispositional [i.e., structural or relational], like every other universal concept. Even red is dispositional, for This surface is red asserts that this surface has a disposition to reflect red light (Realism and the Aim of Science, 109). Perhaps this statement, Here is a glass of water, is open to an indefinite number of tests, but only at a great remove and only under conditions of experimentation. As I survey the room looking for a glass or reach for a drink, the glass itself, however, appears inseparable from its meaning, and that meaning is immediately present to me in its very intuitive seeing that meaning is incarnate in the glass itself as a useobject for drinking because we produced it for that purpose, and in making it embedded that meaning in it. This is the fundamental situation, the statement to be tested is secondary (or tertiary), highly removed and does not even arise in daily activity. Likewise for the red surface: Red does not, emphatically does not, assert it reflects red light, a statement that presupposes the entire physics of spectral analysis. Instead, it asserts that perceptually, intuitively, that the surface has color that is precognitively assimilated in language acquisition, and refers back to visible qualities that appear in the world, nature, humanized nature and the built environment.

all the aporias, dead-ends and contradictions in Poppers account have been exposed: Whose activity generates common sense and scientific knowledge? The logical subject is conflated with what in Poppers concept of experience? What is the source of the problem of foundations (and why is the substratum irrational)? What is there only recourse to decision? On what basis would the movement (of concepts) in thought achieve concretion? We must return to subjectivity of an objectively practical being: We must start from that which we are most familiar (ourselves), which, as self founding, constitutes a foundation without being a ground in the classical sense of permanent, unchanging, self-sufficient and without cause Our primordial attitude toward reality is not that of a passive subject confronting an external reality. We are not objects among other objects, passively formed bodies in a world of mathematically and quantitatively determined ready-made objects, Poppers physicalist world. Reflectively we, contemporary men and women as historical individuals, find ourselves always, already actively engaged in a pre-given world of others, of nature, and a world of interrelated and mutually implicative, meaning embodying use objects and cultural objects. It is precisely in reflection - itself a secondary operation and form of human activity in and through which we disengaged ourselves on the basis of a precognitive telos - that we uncover this, our initial situation... Who are we? What is an objectively practical being and how is that objectivity determined? Primordially, objectivity is incarnate intersubjectivity: We have an inside, interiority, because as embodied subjects we have an outside, because we are visibility, tangibly and audible present to others not the Other who confirm us in our identities, and not because we are egos, Is, not because I am subjectively certain I am an ego that I discover in reflection a la Descartes or Husserl. An objectively practical being has the sense, philosophically, of a community of living, sentient beings (beings that live, breathe, eat, sleep, feel and suffer, and which are mortal, which die), conscious beings, men and women, who, in nature, as nature, act in concert, that is, form and shape a world, beings that make and remake themselves on the basis of pre-existing natural, social and historical conditions and circumstances. Objectively practical subjectivities are conscious beings. Consciousness here is not primarily egoic consciousness, embodied subjectivity is not primarily a theoretical awareness that generates the concepts of philosophy and science. These are thematic possibilities for an awareness that exists as a field in which the body as lived is already tacitly present and which opens onto the surrounding world in which it is immersed. Both figures (themes) and ground (field of awareness) are co-present. Invested with meaning, perceptual (sense) experience is the tissue in which we, from which Is at any rate arise, and the world are intertwined and interconnected1 As objectively practical subjects, our initial situation as it is formed is actively and communally constituted. This initial situation of being always, already engaged in a pre-given, but not ready made world takes the form of practico-sensible activity carried on within the context of a social and historical lifeworld, the unquestioned, familiar world of daily activity that includes, of course, others, our fragmentary communities, the built environment, and sensible nature often humanized natural landscapes, all of which we are immersed in. It is in and through our daily activity in (and formative for) this social and historical lifeworld that we, so to speak, over our heads and behind our backs produce and reproduce ourselves, this world, and our relation to nature. It is, further, on the ground of our daily activities that we pursue determinate goals, and at the same time that our immediate intuitions of reality arise. Both as a means to realize those goals and as explanations of reality, it is here the categories of common sense are, in concrete social contexts, generated
1

Sense experience invests the quality [of a sensuous object] with vital value, grasping it first in its meaning for us, for our body, when it comes about that it always involves a reference to the body. The problem is to understand these strange relationships which are woven between the parts of the landscape, or between it and me as incarnate subject, and through which an object perceived can concentrate in itself a whole scene or become the imago of a whole segment of life. Sense experience is that vital communication with the world which makes it present as a familiar setting of our life. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, 52-53. It should be obvious that the individual I at its origins starts from the assimilation (acquisition) of language, an active and a laborious effort (even if not recollected as such) undertaken in childhood, and rests on a community of speakers, a we, even if that community has sociohistorically narrowed to the confines of a bourgeois family of only mother and father. But we can also paleoanthropologically reconstruct the origins of human language as such. Here too the I rests on common activity, on wes. See our Work and Speech, in particular the discussion entitled The Origins of Consciousness.

It is ultimately with reference to this world, the world of daily practice, that other theoretical constructs, such as science, are produced. The physicalist world is a merely one such construct, an ideologically potent one that immediately captures and fixes the fetishized structure and organization of societies of capital formed through scientific and technological inputs into production and similar construction of built environment. But that physicalist world is itself based on a realistically metaphysical interpretation, such as in Popper, that in the end is, on its own terms, so utterly incoherent that not only does it seek to resurrect concepts that fly in the face of its embrace of the new physics but that violate its systemic requirements (i.e., its own proscription on superfluous hypotheses). This is, mind you, all in the interests of preserving that realism, that is, the program of contemplative exteriority vis--vis the objects of our knowledge, and the objectivity whose first required is banishing a subject that can and does act in the world. Reality, then, is not, even fundamentally "matter. If in science, for example, one speaks of the "primacy of matter," this is meant not merely epistemologically but also ontologically. That, of course, is nonsense. Understood at once as the substratum of nature, the basic element of which nature including man as natural is formed, and as the principle of intelligibility of nature, "matter" is a theoretical construct whose production (by early, scientific bourgeois intellectuals) was originally necessitated by the very class teleology motivating the construction of natural science itself, namely, nature-domination. "Matter" is a socio-historically specific theoretical construction of the meaning and significance of nature for human existence.1 This, the world of daily experience practically stripped of the veil of reifications enshrouding it, an act identical with its revolutionary transformation, is the real world No matter how elaborate, categories of any analysis whatsoever that fail to penetrate the immediacy of the lifeworld simultaneously fail to achieve an account of its intelligibility. Neither the categories of common sense founded immediately on our lifeworld activities, nor scientific concepts elaborated in a specific, methodologically determined theoretical activity, give an adequate account of the structure of reality, its intelligibility. They abstract from the concreteness of the real, and never proceed in thought to go beyond catching and fixing its forms that are already anticipated in the projection of a precategorial class teleology. Thus, the seemingly self-evident explanations of our world pose the problem of false consciousness. In general, false consciousness is precisely the failure to understand that the phenomena which present themselves to us in daily practice are mediately immediate, that these socially and historically constituted phenomenal forms of reality not only reveal but also conceal its structure. Reality in its intelligibility is not immediately present to us The world is here, immediately present to us, but it not known and understood in this mode. For each and every one of us, the world is always, already there, pre-given or in-itself, which is not say it is in-itself in the classical sense of self-sufficient and without cause, causi sui. (The pre-given world of daily life that is always, already there is, once demystified, a product of the daily activity of previous generations of men and women.) If the world is to become "for us, become our world (i.e., the world of our familiar dealings and activities we simply take for granted), we must actively come into contact with it: We must appropriate it. In the element of thought in which the theoretical appropriation of the world is accomplished, to know the real we must also first come into contact with it. But coming-into-contact is here very peculiar: To know the world requires a mediating (objectivating) operation, i.e, we must conceptually apprehend it It is in this mediating activity that we produce concepts. We produce concepts in and through which we ideally reproduce reality in order to act on it, that is, transform it by rendering it practically rational. While thinking, as the production of concepts, is itself a form of human creative activity, most concepts are assimilated in the acquisition of language, in childhood practice, but theses concepts originate somehow (they are not Platonic eide). They arise from negativity, need, which comprehends not only our anthropological-evolutionary

The only reality that nature as "matter" has is the aesthetically ugly stuff capitalism makes of nature. But nature, i.e., perceptually given, sensible nature, is part of the real world: It appears in the lifeworld as the humanly formed natural landscapes whose reality and existence we can reconstruct extend back to the origins of life on Earth, to the very origins of the Earth, and in this sense is the ground of our historical lifeworld. Thus this nature, that on the basis of which theories of "nature" (including nature as "matter") are constructed and that to which they ultimately refer back, is through and through socially and historically mediated both in its sensible form and inseparably in its meaning and significance.

and socially mediated and formed physiological constitution but affective craving, desire, etc. and cognitive need (e.g., the demand for consistency in thinking, writing or presentation) as well.1 We know and understand because we produce the concepts in and through reality is apprehended, and in producing, generating, them we bring forth something novel, the concept itself in and through we explain and comprehend the world in order to act on it and in it. But those concepts never exhaust that reality We do not cognitively, not even existentially, choose to interpret the world, that is, to comprehend and explain it in order to act in it. Decisionism is not germane to the reality and discussion of a practical subject. The effort to know and understand the world is a necessity rooted in our being, in the anthropological-evolutionary formed, sensory-bodily constitution of a being called man. For us, i.e., for our reconstruction of the paleoanthropological conditions of our formation as such,2 this necessity is at once an evolutionary and made product of upright posture, genetically fixed and a feature in the development of hominids... The logical conditions of the production of theories, perspectives and world visions immanent to concepts, language and speech are intertwined with and inseparable from the experiential, anthropologico-socially formed selfelaboration of the conditions of individualization. Because hominids and Homo sapiens, having made themselves,3 stand upright, they have small pelvic openings. This means that infants must be born while still immature, not just physiologically. Among higher, and the most complex forms of earthly life, human children alone (since all hominids and other Homo species and individuals are now extinct) required prolonged material care to compensate for this relatively short gestation period in the womb. This evolutionary fact itself magnified the complexity of social interaction, insuring it would reach back and shape human biology as it evolved: The essential steps in distinctively and specifically human development, a development similar to that occurs in the fetal period of other mammals, take place after birth in the case of human beings, especially during the first two years (but far beyond this period). An absence of specialized drives or instincts is the consequence. (Indeterminate, unfocused and chaotic, drives do exist in human beings at birth, but they are existentially bound up with, sublimated and libidinally cathected as, socially formed and canalized physiological, affective and cognitive needs and interests through socialization, i.e., in humanization.) This socially constituted, and actively made physiological fact is what makes men and women instinctually deprived world open beings: Our incomplete formation at the moment of our origins (birth with the lengthy postnatal period of initial humanization that follows) recreates us, as human, as deficient beings who in this immediate natally given form are existentially helpless, creating a basic condition: We do not have a ready-made nature, lack an innate moral purpose or compass, are not at birth uniquely fitted to a specific world, are absent specialized drives or instincts and a corresponding environment or milieu...

In another (polemic) context, Popper does recognize this but the insight has never been integrated into his thinking. Before we can collect data, our interest in data of a certain kind must be aroused: the problem always comes first. The problem in its turn may be suggested by practical needs, or by scientific or pre-scientific beliefs which, for some reason or other, appear to be in need of revision. The Poverty of Historicism, 121. Emphases in the original. 2 We speak of evidentially based reconstructions when referring to our critical assessments of scientific accounts of astrophysical, geological and paleoanthropological origins: Our standpoint is that of a social and historical reflection on the amassed experience of the working classes of the world, that an objectively formed world class, the Gesamtarbeiter, and the necessary conditions and presuppositions, here the most remote and mediated ones, of that reflection. For a theoretical justification of the position taken here, see Nature, Capital, Communism, particular the introductory remarks to the first part entitled Climate Change. 3 Human characteristics an upright posture, speech, the production of instruments for specific tasks involved in social reproduction, hierarchical social organization as they all existed prior to human development were the consequent of specific practices, particularly hunting, suggesting that man (in both known lines of his development) was self-made, his appearance a product of his own activity of becoming This should be qualified: The complex interpenetration and multiple determination of activity, biology, technique, nature (climate) and social relations does not just characterize anatomically modern man but is the central feature of hominid development (including archaic Homo sapiens) as such. In this sense, earthly nature and humanity have co-evolved since the first appearance of the hominid genus Homo Just as anatomical evolution did not precede social (cultural) and technical development, and just as it did not drive species development, the transition from animality to humanity was not a linear process. See Nature, Capital, Communism, the section entitled Humanity (II): Hominidization.

This fundamental, i.e., anthropo-ontological, situation is at the basis of activity in and through which a world and our identities are formed, compelling us to generate a self-interpretation, one that extends from ourselves to our place in reality in its totality. We are beings whose existence is a question and riddle without immediate answer or a pre-given solution, condemned instead to make our existence and capable of doing so only through ideal mediation (formed through speech and language) that is present and given with (yet constituted in and through) our activities. All our efforts in the world (whether in relation to others, objects, institutions, nature, etc.) are and can be carried out in no other way than by forming a precognitive view of the world that orients us practically in this world: We are compelled to illumine our activity by producing a self-interpretation that, arising on the ground of daily practice, contains tacitly or explicitly a sense of the totality, that is, extends from ourselves to our place in reality in its totality (ourselves, the world we have formed in nature as humanized nature, and nature in its unending, atemporal becoming), activity in which and on the basis of which reality and totality, reality as the totality, is itself understood and explained from common sense to philosophy: We as human always already, and necessarily, act on the basis of a determinate conception of reality and, inextricably bound up with it, a vision of the world we wish and need to create.1 We know and understand concepts because we produce them. It is not I but we that form the ground on which concepts are generated. It is under socio-historically and culturally specific conditions which we share that conceptual production rises from the common foundations of a collective sense of propriety and moral imperatives, of loyalties, sanctions and taboos, and of expectations and ideas about the world, all of which develop out social shared forms of activity and work (precisely those socio-historically and culturally specific conditions), all of which are established in the acquisition of language and through the lengthy practice of the socially informed formation of individuality and personality The production of concepts is the same time their intuition, and in this (not Husserls) sense is intellectual intuition (Wesenshau). The production of concepts is the creation of a subjective sense that establishes the meaning of this or that aspect of reality itself. These senses we produce are social (historical) products Theory of Truth A correspondence theory of truth (Tarski, Popper) is a variant of one for which consciousness reflects reality, and truth is a question of conceptually approximating the structure of the real so reflected. Our perspective is different: In general, the awareness of social subjects is embodied either tacitly, unconsciously, in common sense, its prejudices, moral sentiments, and its unreflected views and theories, or explicitly and self-consciously in systematic knowledge, ideologies and world visions. The concepts, conceptual constructs and theories that make up the former are generated without explicitly attending to their production (which is why their production is mistakenly assumed to be passive); those of the latter are actively produced. The unity of both forms of synthesis can in a narrow way be designated as consciousness. Neither is essentially passive in relation to the world. Neither reflects (refracts or distorts) that world and neither results in conceptual understanding that more or less approximates its structure. Consciousness does not reflect the world, first, because the structure of each is essentially dissimilar, and second, because both consciousness and theory are active moments in the construction of reality (world) itself... We have now produced the premises on the basis of which we can preliminarily ask about the meaning of truth, initially formulate the contours of a theory of truth.2 The attainment of truth, forming the critical activity of reason, is the decisive aspect of the theoretical appropriation of the world, an activity that each and all of us as practical subjects continuously undertake. But truth is not achieved in each and every act of theorization, it is not immediately accessible and reaching it requires genuine, arduous effort, Hegels labor of the concept. Truth itself is constituted in the element of thought as a product of a critical operation of disocclusion, as the unveiling of the structure of reality. In not straightaway grasping the structure of reality thought takes a detour. It is precisely because it makes a detour in seeking to constitute truth that thought, i.e., as practical beings we who think, can get lost (say, in a maze of
1 2

See Ibid, the concluding section entitled Totality. For elaboration of this and the previous section, see On Truth and Dialectic of the Concrete: Premises of the Theoretical Reconstruction of the Evolution of Earthly Nature appearing in Nature, Capital, Communism.

concepts). If systematic coherency is to have meaning at all, it does so in that it is our only guarantee against getting lost. That is, systematic coherency in the order of thought means the beginning of any inquiry (into an aspect of or reality itself) must be formally identical with its conclusion. The formal identity of the points of departure and arrival is our sole guarantor against losing our way. Stated differently, the method of thought is movement in thought, a movement from the immediately given and sensible (say, common sense, opinions) to the mediate and conceptual and back to the given: No longer given, but differentiated, contextualized, conceptually determined and intelligible. This movement is the materialist dialectic of concrete concepts, a process of concretion, is movement in which reality is ideationally reproduced, comprehended and explained, and through which we gain practical direction in acting in the world. The autonomy of thought, the logic governing its movement, does not pure and simple form a totality of formal rules applicable to objects, to the "matter" of thought. Because ideality is situated neither apart from nor prior to reality, but is itself an (ideal) aspect of reality, because thinking is a form of human activity, the activity of a practical subject, consequently worldly and temporal, any formal system of a priori, independent rules, as such a fetishistic logic, is originally grounded in and built up out of the relation of thought to the daily world of real objects, common sense intuitions, opinionated chatter, etc. Logic, then, is dialectical, a movement in and of opinion, its invalidation, and transcendence. None of this is by way of suggesting thinking is a psychological faculty; it is cognitive activity. But, genetically, the constitution of thought is mediated by the sensuous, practical production of reality, the real, human community of daily life. In this sense, the relation of thought to its object(s) is mutually implicative, co-penetrating, and reciprocally enriching. Systematic coherency and logical consistency, however, are formal, and not the sole, criteria of truth. In other words, reality cannot be conceptually exhausted, concept and its object are not commensurate. (It they were, Hegel would have been right, history would have ended, reality would have been comprehensively captured and come to itself in Absolute Spirit identical with self-conscious absolute knowing). If reality is not reducible to categories, then (as we have already shown with Popper and Tarski) neither is truth a question of matching concept to concept. Instead, questions of truth have a further dimension, namely, as questions of adequacy. This is not, though, a matter of the adequacy of concept (theory) to reality, which once again in the end would merely mean matching of concept to concept. At any rate, different and mutually incommensurate forms of knowledge can refer back to the same reality (community). Rather, inasmuch as all conceptual production is normatively governed by an intersubjective telos grounded originally in the lifeworld, that is, in the activity of a community of objectively practical subjects... meaning theory has a "material" aspect that concerns social justice... concepts or theories must be referred back to that telos that necessitated their production. Yet, the very activity of conceptual production (and its products), through which we comprehend reality and in which truth as the unveiling of the structure of reality is constituted, is a historically grounded activity. Is truth thereby relativized? Are there only the various truths, oftentimes contradictory, of historically determined intersubjective groups, social classes, and communities? Yes and no. Yes, for the obvious reason stated in the last interrogative statement. No because truth is at once possible and necessary for a subject whose very being requires it, us, to comprehend and explain reality in order to act on and in it. While a correspondence theory of truth brings together two rigidly and falsely opposed poles, that of an abstract logical subject and that of a massive dumb object, reality as the aggregate totality of its atomistic elements, the facts, the critical, theoretical operation of disocclusion aiming at the constitution of truth rises on the ground of daily activity and doings. It attains truth when: it takes up all other rival theories and performs an immanent analysis of their content, in other words, it evaluates them in terms of systematic coherency, consistency, and stated objectives; it demonstrates all other such theories, and itself as well, bear reference within themselves (itself) back to a sociohistorical community and specifies that reference, i.e., intersubjective telos, class, or community teleology; it retrospectively takes up the events and developments of a future that had at the moment of its original formulation yet to unfold and measures itself against these events and developments in order to determine how well it has accounted for them, whether it is in need of revision, amendment; whether some other theory could have better made that account, and hence it is in need of overthrow; It reflectively undertakes to justify its comprehensive meaning and purpose, its telos an operation modern science has never engaged in and cannot in principle carry out that is, it seeks to justify community-grounded norms of the

good life by demonstrating they could practically mediate construction of a world informed, pervaded, and shaped by principles of social justice; it states the conditions of the supersession of all competing theories, i.e., the conditions of the practical sublation of the contradictory social existence that gave rise to these theories, as well as the conditions of its practical transcendence, that is, the condition of the realization of social justice; and, its telos rendered explicit at the level of theory is practically realized and become fact Theory deals with the real world, the world of our community-based daily practice. In so doing, it takes a detour, that is, by way of articulating the intelligibility of reality, it returns us to ourselves as self-consciously practical subjects, to our initial situation now conceptually determined and fully mediated, comprehended, explained, and given practical direction.

Part IV Critical Rationality and Liberalism: The Class Politics of Science Mired in abstract individualism, the principles of a philosophical liberalism as articulated by Popper are entirely inadequate to comprehend developments within society, not to mention the development of society itself, and cannot just as simply be abstractly, i.e., methodologically, reunified with the scientific effort to understand nature. His politics are the rarified criticisms of abstractions, beginning with totalitarianism, proceeding to the methodological basis of utopianism, which devolves largely in (and presupposes) a defense of the bourgeois individual, today a whisper and product of the spectacle within the order of capital. At best the aim of realizing personal freedom is only formally achievable (for liberalism philosophical or otherwise, freedom is concretely first and foremost the unhampered ability to dispose of private property in production, and then, all witticisms and puns aside, merely the freedom to buy and sell. In todays world it has the singular, popular sense of consuming profligately, obscenely and entropically in capitalist markets). And, it is formally achievable only for a very tiny minority of personages and only within the context of a liberal public sphere, which as liberal has tended in history to transcend (and as such abolish) itself, while its institutional expressions have been shams institutions, a phenomenon well noted even before Popper himself has reached intellectual maturity. All in all, it is patent that he operates with a vastly restricted concept of freedom. The practice in and through which this slender threat of freedom is achieved finds its defense in the principles of philosophical liberalism, which are formulated in opposition to the massive reality of the state (a formulation which is completely homologous with the epistemological situation of a logical subject confronting a massively inert reality opposite it). In the actual course of historical development even as that development unfold contemporarily, here and now, this defense is a masquerade, a dense veil thrown over the actual, relentlessly ongoing annihilation of individuality that this dumb movement, that of capital, aims at. Poppers critique of utopianism similarly rests on the same abstract individualism, the same defense of narrowest concept of freedom, and the same inadequate or, better, altogether absent social analysis. He cannot really be situated in the conservative philosophical historiography of the rival totalitarians such as that of Hannah Arendt, 1 fundamentally because he works without an understanding of history, and then because he does not rise to the level of an analysis. In this respect, too, not only might we add that his critique of Plato is simply irrelevant,2 but the method and logic of scientific discovery blocks insight into the functionally totalitarian character of the order of capital that he defends. We shall start with one of those big isms, and proceed by way of a long detour dealing with the state to the individuality (philosophically comprehended by him in terms of minimalist liberal doctrine) that he defends, and end with that other big ism, historicism, methodologically the basis of the totalitarianism that he counterposes to the free individuality. We shall be critical throughout, and we shall apologize in advance for a discussion which is burdened with lengthy footnotes. The Critique of Utopianism: An Open Society? Its Enemies? For Popper, utopianism is intimately tied to totalitarianism, for the utopian mentalit carried into practice will under specific conditions (not formulated by Popper) leads to a totalitarian reality. The critique of what Popper calls totalitarianism seeks to unmask intellectual perfidy, the betrayal of so many of the intellectual leaders [sic] of mankind, among which, to name names, are Plato, Hegel and Marx. 3 Their treachery threatens our civilization, i.e., bourgeois culture and the order of capital erroneously identified with the West (which in the non-West, if you will, is often synonymous with European capitalism) and its alleged roots in ancient Greece, though the nature of the relation of these intellectual leaders to the threat, those reactionary movements which have tried, and still try, to overthrow civilization [sic] and return to tribalism [sic],4 presumably the social movements generally designated by the terms Nazism and Stalinism, is not entirely clear, unless it is threat to the
1 2

The Origins of Totalitarianism. The Open Society and its Enemies (Vol. 1). 3 Ibid, 3. For Plato, Ibid, 21-164; for Marx, Ibid, 274-384; and for Hegel, Ibid, 199-273. 4 Ibid.

critical powers of mankind1 (i.e., capitals scientific intelligentsias). Poppers project constitutes a vastly reductionist, the narrowest of forms of intellectual history. It is not our intent here to work through, discuss and critique the factious and facile assumptions, assertions and assessment put forth in this acerbic polemic. We have already confronted the decisive theoretical issues in the forgoing, those ontological, epistemological, historical and methodological premises that, unquestioned and largely unjustified, characterize Poppers work. Here we shall merely present summary remarks concerning two of those three previously mentioned traitors (one who must be relegated to a textual note)2 and, additionally, Popper himself, remarks that may serve as the basis for further, future discussion. First, then, there is Popper. There is a single aspect to this.3 It concerns the understanding of just what Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signified in socio-historical terms, and just what is being defended in abstract opposition to these societies. For, it isnt liberalism, freedom or civilization. In the unresolved crisis of capital in the aftermath of the first imperialist world war the statification of that institution of institutions that develops out of and specifically encompasses productive activity, the economy, proceeded in two distinct ways. The first was the seizure of the state by private capital, a feature of the developed capitalist economy which we shall refer to as the German model under the Nazis: and second, as a consequence of backwardness the absorption of private capital by the state, which can be characterized as the Russian model under Stalin. In absorbing private capital, in transposing capitalist methods of the organization of labor (Taylorism, continuous flow production), in abandoning councilar control of work for one-man management of nationalized and trustified (cartelized) property (subjecting workers to a work regime that rivaled any private capitalism for arbitrariness and brutality), in starting from a lower level of productive development exporting agricultural surpluses for the foreign exchange to import machinery manufactured in the capitalist metropolises, thus subjecting society to the relentless pressures of the world market and thereby mediately imposing the law of value, the Soviet state guided by Lenin had started down the road of state capitalism, stopping here at a way station called a mixed economy. In earlier theorizations of state capitalism, the bureaucracy, because it was immediately related to the disposition of industrial property, consisted first in the heads of trusts, directors and deputy directors of and managers within enterprises, and then those who headed organs and agencies within the state that controlled those institutions in which productive activity in its entirety was carried out. This is an adequate characterization as far as it goes, but
1
2

Ibid. Emphasis added. See the Note on Plato concluding this section. 3 Actually there is a second aspect also. Like the other right wing critics of the fascist and state capitalist developments of the thirties, those who actually lived through the period, Popper did not publish his rant until after the last imperialist world war was over. Whatever the motivation, in all cases this has the appearance of an utter lack of scruple, of hedging ones bets, of waiting to see who would emerge victorious in the struggle between the democratic bourgeoisie and its totalitarian counterparts. Popper published his Open Society in 1950, a highpoint, an early one and one of many, of the Cold War so-called. Fifteen years transpired between the moment he left Vienna in 1935 (fascists, Nazis, had grabbed state power in Austria over the bodies of the red Schutzbund in 1934) and the date of the publication of this work. He was silent for this entire period. Well, not exactly. He has a lengthy list of publications dating from this period, but none that deal directly with the totalitarians and totalitarianism. Among the former we can number countless revolutionary communists who did speak out and very, very early (while Popper was just beginning to think through the problems of induction and demarcation in 1919), such as Hermann Gorter and Heinriette Roland Holst who opposed Lenin as left communists Phillipe Bourrinet, The Dutch and German Communist Left, especially chapters 4, 5; the anti-Bolshevik communists Karl Korsch and Otto Rhle for Rhle, Report from Moscow (1920), The Revolution is not a Party Affair (1920), The Struggle Against Fascism Begins with the Struggle Against Bolshevism (1939)... Then there were men like Jehan van den Hoven, a Belgian communist and theorist in French and Italian left communist circles, who died in a Nazi concentration camp in early 1945; men like Ante Ciliga incarcerated in isolators (Stalinist political prisoner holding facilities) see his The Russian Enigma, Book III, chapter V (Political Life in Prison) and in particular the tendency he, among others, embodied; there were the revolutionary Spanish Marxists as a group who fought Franco fascists and Stalinists in Spain Victor Alba, Spanish Marxism versus Soviet Communism and even men like Henk Sneevliet, a Dutch communist who had played a criminally reprehensible role in the Comintern for example in China in 1926-1927 (the name Borodin comes to mind), yet who led the struggle against the Nazi in occupied Holland and who, along with his comrades making up the centre of the Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg Front were executed by the Gestapo in spring 1942 Wim Bot, Tegen fascisme, kapialisme en oorlog. Het Marx-Lenin-Luxemburgfront juli 1940 april 1942 (Amsterdam, 1983) And, of course, there was also that arch-totalitarian who fled Germany a couple years prior to Poppers departure from Vienna. We speaking of Herbert Marcuse, who lost no opportunity (beginning from the early thirties) to exhibit how Nazi totalitarianism was intimately connected to bourgeois society at its origins some three hundred years earlier The Struggle against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State (1934) reprinted in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory. Boston, 1968 The list goes on and on, but the reader get a sense of what we are driving at. The question remains, though, where was Popper in all this, that is, before the Cold War made his type of critique fashionable?

state capitalism cannot be determined solely from the difference between private and state capitals. State capitalism is possible only in the absence of those mediatory institutions (parliaments, trade unions, interest group associations and organizations, etc.) that have characterized private and democratic capitalism. It is with regard to this single, albeit essential feature, one of several, that the discourse on totalitarianism arises. State absorption of private capital derives, as we have already noted, from backwardness. The difference is more precisely that between those countries where a successful bourgeois democratic revolution was carried out (which did not in every case coincide with those countries where capitalism originated), and those latecomers where bourgeois democratic revolutions were either unsuccessful or were simply not carried out at all. State capitalism is a development starting from the latter. The first dramatic hurdle the pre-bourgeois classes of these societies, as latecomers to capitalism, had to clear was the capitalization of agriculture in order to revolutionize productivity in agriculture to simultaneously create a surplus and proletarianize the peasantry.1 Even where this problem was solved,2 these arriviste ruling classes faced another great barrier, namely, overcoming the similar disadvantages domestic industrial capitals faced in the struggle for resources and markets in the arena of the world. Among some of these formerly backward countries, these ruling classes gave way, either by a revolutionary overthrow (Russia, China, Vietnam after 1944, Korea in the north) or by conquest (the Soviets in eastern Europe) to the state as the motor of capitalist development. Here, the ascendancy of finance over industry (as in Germany from the 1870s onward) was itself superseded by absorption of the latter by the state. This was the socially and historically significant response to a crisis that, in Russia, reached back to 1856 and the Crimean War. Driven by the contradictions of world capitalism, this crisis exploded in imperialist world war in 1914. It found inadequate resolution in the revolutionary, working class overthrowal of Tsarism. (Inadequate because in the end the revolution in Russia was unable to link up to those aborted ones in Europe). The Bolshevik struggle against massive imperialist intervention that followed on the revolution generated a war communism response that alienated a massive peasant population. In relaxing the strictures, restrictions and terror against peasants the regime institutionalized features of the statification that had emerged in the civil war. Statification was of a mild sort, what after Keynes has been called a mixed economy, presided over by a state bureaucracy. But in 1928, the antagonisms between this bureaucracy and its designs on unimpeded control and its fears of the growth of a private economic sphere dominated by another class of large peasants inaugurated a radical transformation, brutally murderous, in which the bureaucracy, spurned on by a grain crisis in agriculture and its consequent inability to generate tributary surpluses to carry on its industrialization program,3 primitive accumulation as it is otherwise known, not only expropriated this class (the kulaks) and socially interpenetrated with them other rural strata but engaged in collectivization-based mass murder. Along with Stalins coterie, those self-professed Marxists who defended the Soviet Union were minions, scientists, theorists, administrators, etc., in the service of a despotic bureaucracy, minions whose ostensibly emancipatory politics were ideological veils cast over the development within capitalism of one more form of viciously oppressive and exploitative, divided social order. They were thieves, thugs and murderers, one and all The point here is that state capitalism, and with the polity that characterized it in its early formative period, which for political reasons (obfuscatory, ideological justifications for capitalism as it had developed in the West) is deemed totalitarianism, is a development with the global system of social relations that form capitalism, the order of capital which is what liberalism in its most open, honest professions defends. And to liberalism we shall return. Second, there is Marx. There is a single aspect here. It concerns Marx theorization, and its fundamental moments. It is what is called the theory of value. Popper thinks it is relatively insignificant within Marxs work as a whole: Usually considered by Marxists as well as by anti-Marxists as a cornerstone of the Marxist creed, [the theory of value], is in my opinion one of its rather unimportant parts.4 This is
Loren Goldner, Communism is the Material Human Community. Via a hybrid that entailed capitalist agriculture, seigniorial yet capitalist landed classes and a rural proletariat subject to ferocious exploitation by way of residue tributary obligations burdening its labor, as in Germany east of the Elbe (i.e., among the Junkers). 3 Ibid, Second Study, Part I, 1928, the Regime at the Crossroads. 4 The Open Society and its Enemies, 358. The claims made by Marx (and Engels), father to utopian and totalitarian progeny as Popper would have him (them), have been contradictory: At different times, i.e., relative to the level of revolutionary activity in England, the United States and on the Continent, Marx and Engels made assertions that when, decontextualized and de-temporalized, are patently contradictory. For example, in 1848 at the height of the revolutionary movement, their account stated they were merely recounting an ongoing developmentDie theoretischen Stze der
1 2

an interesting statement but not sustainable, for the entirety of the critique of political economy and the necessity that it discovers in the proletariat rests on it.1 Marxs critique takes its departure from the abstraction of the objectively practical subject understood under the aspect of concrete labor, but abstract in production, as labor reduced temporality, homogenized, then objectified and materialized in commodities as value. But let us not belabor this point. There is something else here, namely, it is in a strictly logical sense a matter of someone who, because she operates within a theoretical framework for which another is anathema, cannot see or recognize fundamental similarities between hers and that other framework, as is the case here with Marx and Marxism: For it is quite possible to read Marx, say in the opening sections of Capital, I, and find in the theory of value the central postulates of an axiomatic system and the body of the volume, the descriptive analysis, supported by statistics as Popper depicts it,2 as a series of tested hypotheses that confirm, validate, this system.
Kommunisten beruhen keineswegs auf Ideen, auf Prinzipien, die von diesem oder jenem Weltverbesserer erfunden oder entdeckt sind. Sie sind nur allgemeine Ausdrcke tatschlicher Verhltnisse eines existierenden Klassenkampfes, einer unter unseren Augen vor sich gehenden geschichtlichen Bewegung. (The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that world reformer. They are only general expressions of actual relations of an existing class struggle, an historical movement going on under our very eyes.) Marx and Engels, Manifest der kommunistische Partei, II Kapitel (Proletarier und Kommunisten) However, nearly twenty years later as the revolutionary movement hit a nadir, Marx stated that Capital described the laws of motion of capitalist society An und fr sich handelt es sich nicht um den hheren oder niedrigeren Entwicklungsgrad der gesellschaftlichen Antagonismen, welche aus den Naturgesetzen der kapitalistischen Produktion entspringen. Es handelt sich um diese Gesetze selbst, um diese mit eherner Notwendigkeit wirkenden und sich durchsetzenden Tendenzen. Das industriell entwickeltere Land zeigt dem minder entwickelten nur das Bild der eignen Zukunft. (Considered immanently, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that rise from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these effective tendencies unfolding with iron necessity. The industrially more developed country only shows the less developed the image of its own future.) Marx, Vorrede to the first German edition of Kapital (1867)... But even in asserting he was at work on a refinement of his initial description (Volume 1), with the meaning that the overall development he described is tendential, within which countervailing tendencies are a work (Volume 3) ...Kapital. Dritte Band, Buch III. XIV Kapitel (Entgegenwirkende Ursachen) Finally, assuming international support from advanced, revolutionary proletarian forces abroad, the perspective of taking the village community as a starting point for socialist construction in Russia, entailing a leap over the capitalist mode of production that explicitly signified abandonment of any of those ostensible laws of historical development, was that of Marx himself toward the end of his life as his drafts of letters to Vera Zasulich demonstrate See the 1881 drafts of a letter of response to Vera Zasulich, reprinted in Teodor Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road (New York, 1983), and also Camatte's remarks on Marx in his Community and Communism, 20-24 Now, to relate these statements to their specific historical contexts, and to say that both are illicit generalizations of assessments made within and of these contexts, not a very subtle task for a historian, is something that not only altogether escapes Popper, it is also a task which is to him anathema: He does not think any assertion about the societal development is legitimate, because he does not think scientifically one can be speak of society as a whole, the category of totality itself in his view being metaphysical. Such a view neatly dovetails with his philosophical liberalism, and his ideas of piecemeal reform. (In this context, it would be informative to get his perspective on the crisis of capital, beginning openly in September 2008 as it has unfolded to the present, June 2010, a crisis which has been clearly global, in which synchronized national economies, societies, have felt similar effects and which ruling class responses have been similar and in many cases identical. No social totality? If certain nodal aspects of the system of social relations, decisive aspects, for example those such as a specific type of mortgage lending in the housing market and a type of banking among investment houses, those engaged in derivative trades, did not structure that totality and, dialectically, at any moment any large-scale feature or significant event have not been contemporarily determined from the total situation of global capitalism at that specific moment, i.e., from the totality, then how, pray tell, would Popper account for the collapse of capitalism in the five months following upon Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, i.e, an immense devalorization that ruptured the global sequence of exchanges at countless sites and locales, and led to interruptions of trade and the large-scale shutdowns of production, all of which existed as fact? No pressure exerted by the whole? How would Popper reconstruct these events? Deploying nineteen thirties bourgeois economists zero method that he advocates in social analysis? By this I mean the method of construction a model on the assumption of complete rationality. On the part of all the individuals concerned, and of estimating the deviation of the actual behavior of people from the model behavior, using the latter as a kind of zero co-ordinate. I.e., the individuals so-called have assimilated the means-ends rationality of production and exchange, and behavior is, accordingly, based strictly on the compulsion exercised by socially mediated need to maintain and sustain ourselves through egoistic rational calculation. The Poverty of Historicism, 141. It should also be said that such a view entirely out of step with a historical development in which the unified nature of society has become a massive fact that forces itself on awareness, Popper cannot respond, he died in 2002 constitutes ideological defense of capitalist democracy against the dangers of working classes that have begun to move in response to, again, consciously synchronized ruling class, draconian austerity programs At any rate, while forcefully suggesting the intertwining of faux scientific claims and emancipatory intent and insight that suffuses work of Marx, the forgoing recounting of his views in regard to necessity and contingency in history exhibits just how difficult it is to accept Poppers claims of Marxs totalitarianism appetites and intellectual betrayal.

Thus, it is argued that Marx arrived at the system abstractly, that is, by way of the deduction of all the consequences of modern development, which include subjectively grounded actions as mere personifications of economic categories, from a system analysis predicated on an axiomatic value-concept.1 It is suggests this project was conceived as a scientifically "provable" instance of the theory of historical materialism, i.e., of the objectivistic dialectic of productive forces and relations: The system is closed, self-contained and the value concepts represent the least number of coherent statements from which the modern development can be deduced. For, though, such a conception rests on the operative assumption of, itself really projecting (or referring back to), a total reification of intersubjectively based action, of men and women as historical actors. I.e., it fails to return to the source and ground of the interaction of a community of practical subjects engaged in labor in production, i.e, to the practical subjectivity which anonymously, i.e., non-knowingly, produces and reproduces, and dialectically is produced and reproduced in, the congealed social relations that form capitalism as a system. This is a possible interpretation, one that we think frankly misses the whole point, but without regard to our judgment here, it simply will not do for Popper: It not only unacceptable, he, as we have suggested, never recognized it and for the reason we indicated. If Popper did recognize and seriously consider this similarity, i.e., logical and formal identity, he would be compelled to reconsider at least and perhaps forgo that criticism which he believes makes his argument genuinely compelling, namely, the prophetic,2 i.e., non-scientific, extra-rational and at best dreamy at worst pernicious, nature of Marxism. The criticism, here, then is not the assertion of law like behavior of social development (in the defense of individual freedom) as Popper believes, but of conceiving this development objectivistically, i.e., without a subject of activity that generates it in the first place, a criticism which holds for Popper far more than Marx (or even Engels), since this is consistently his view (and it only sporadically theirs). So what about individuality and the individuals freedom? Principles of Philosophical Liberalism Poppers liberalism upholds a minimalistic core of principles.3 He starts with the state.4 He considers the state a transhistorical necessity. Why? forgoing a Hobbesian justification, with great confidence Popper tells us state is justified and necessary in any world, for there are always weaker and stronger men, and the weaker ones would have no legal right to be tolerated by the stronger ones, but would owe them gratitude for their being so kind as to tolerate them every person should have a legal claim to be protected against the power of the strong, meaning that we need a state that protects the rights of all. 5 In this context, he considers the state is a constant danger, that is, an evil, though a necessary one. 6 This leads to a second, this time tacit, assumption: In classically liberal fashion,7 Popper believes that state stands above all conflict in society, and because of this standing it can under certain conditions fairly and equitably resolve conflicts in society.
See, for example, The Working Class, World Capitalism and Crisis specifically the brief discussion of abstract labor in the penultimate section. 2 Ibid, 354. 1 Interview with Cornelius Castoriadis, 143f. 2 Ibid, passim; The Poverty of Historicism. 42-45. 3 Karl Popper, Public Opinion and Liberal Principles (1954) in Refutations and Confrontations, 471-473. 4 We shall forgo examination and analysis of the remainder of these principles. (There are seven more). The next four are merely specifications of the first (text above), and assume its validity (i.e., the states transhistorical necessity and its standing above social conflict which is the basis for its impartial capacity to resolve conflict, in Poppers case that between stronger and weaker men). For example, Popper says a democracy can rid itself of its government without violence, a tyranny cannot. Maybe, maybe not. But the point is whether these forms (particularly that of democracy) have in the history of state ever existed as political forms, they are forms of the existence of the state: Those four principles in question stand or fall with the first. The sixth principle, or thesis as Popper calls it, states that a liberal Utopia is impossible. Indeed, we agree (but for a different reason, namely), any utopia is impossible if it rests on developments within the state (see the text, below). We also agree with the seventh thesis, stating that liberalism is an evolutionary creed (as opposed to a revolutionary one). The last, the eighth principle, concerns social traditions, among them a customary moral framework, which is the basis for a fair and equitable compromise between conflicting interests (Ibid, 473). It is not acceptable, since it assumes (as the first five principles) that the state is a neutral arbitrator standing above society, and, again, it also stands or falls with the first principle. 5 Ibid, 471. 6 Ibid. 7 See here Gudio de Ruggieros The History of European Liberalism. New York, 1967 (1927).
1

The state, however, is a historical reality... its logical status in relation to individuals is a wholly peripheral matter that is not pertinent to its analysis... and it embodies specific social group interests. Its reality cannot be logically deduced (if so, it is neither comprehended nor explained). Furthermore, the premises from which its necessity is logically inferred, egoistic individuality as a historically specifically form of human existence that has come into being under conditions of capitalist production (i.e., the individuals as Popper understands them) and is relative to that form of societal activity, does not have the existential status Popper attributes to it (and here actually this status is to all intents and purposes synonymous with effective presence in history) and that would justify the states necessity. Finally, Poppers assertion is really a moral demand masquerading as a logical inference, a requirement that the state must be such and such (and, in light of the role, function and reality of the state as it has existed in all times and places in history where it has existed, this inference is little, if anything, more than a weak plea). So what can we say about the historical reality of the state?1 The state appears as soon as a unitary community is torn by social division; that is, as social division (into estates, classes, etc., based on stratified positions within a fixed division of social labor) is institutionalized, the state takes shape as a congealed, hierarchical social relation of command and obedience. This institution is the state. The formation of a state, its institutionalization, requires coercion: A vast underlying population, relatively speaking, must be subordinated to a tiny minority that has formed a state to hegemonize this population. Certain communities may have been divided, hence, primitively statified, at their origins, i.e., as no longer specifiable groups of humans emerged from animality. Where, though, appearing with a fracture in originally undivided communities, states have their foundations in the introduction of innovation within those communities, for statist communities are those which bear within themselves change, innovation, historicity as an immanent principle of social intelligibility. States, then, are co-extensive with the histories of the communities on the backs of which they rise. Change or innovation at its origins cannot be introduced without upsetting an original stasis, and sustained domination over the rest of the community requires the maintenance of the very means of the destruction of the original bond, armed force that can range in its most rudimentary forms from a small soldiery band to its most developed, modern forms that comprise a standing army, a bewildering variety of police and policing agencies, material adjuncts such as prisons, detention centers and camps, and coercive institutions of all sorts especially that of a judiciary with its array of judges, prosecutors and courts. In all states, and, to be sure, especially with regard to the modern, bourgeois state, this force is arrayed against the rest of the community to secure control over and dispossession of material surpluses. Thus, those who constitute the state or man its institutions hold a monopoly on practical violence. The state, territorially based (whether boundaries are indeterminate frontiers or fixed borders) and territorially selfaggrandizing, genocidal, and marked by the appearance of a stratum of functionaries or officials attached to the ruler, ruling stratum, or ruling class, essentially concentrates armed force. No matter how sophisticated its forms of coercion, the monopoly of practical violence remains unchanged. This concentration of force is the essential, historical condition ensuring the continuity of rule. State formation is genocidal. In contrast to bands, groups, or communities that are nomadic, pastoral, or early agriculturists who resided in no fixed locale, states pursue territorial augmentation or enlargement of resource bases over time. These practices rest on the assimilation or incorporation of peoples and the destruction of autonomous cultures in their autonomy through creation of a single language, homogenization of space and culture, etc. Accordingly, these practices seek to produce a homogenized population, and are premised on the destruction, removal, or assimilation of indigenous peoples and on formation of classes, estates, or fixed social groups out of distinct peoples, ethnic groups or settler populations contradictorily unified through creation of a uniform and, in the modern era, a national culture. Obviously, the concept of genocide operative here is understood in terms of the destruction of the identity of a people as a people. We mention a social reality designated as the unitary community. Relations of command and obedience, Power in its most primitive form, predated the appearance of material surpluses, but once the latter appeared Power and those surpluses were (and have remained) inextricably tied

See Community and Capital, the fourth critique entitled simply The State.

together.1 It was on the basis of the activity of farming of its development (neither lineal nor dialectical) over centuries, a development which beginning with a set of different activities (hunting, fishing, gathering and plant cultivation) devolved into a sustained productive and subsistence strategy where human populations became existentially dependent upon agriculture to reproduce themselves and aimed at such in order to create reliable material surpluses that those surpluses first appeared. One type of subsistence farming in particular has always been conducive not just to production but to the accumulation of surpluses, in fact to large surpluses relative to, in a really crude and abstract manner, the sophistication of technical development. It is grain (wheat, rice, maize) farming, i.e., agriculture. Once these surpluses were produced and stored, then accumulated, social relations of command and obedience harden into societal stratification. The group that controls, later appropriating these surpluses, becomes separate, setting itself over and against the rest of the community. Once it has force at its disposal to ensure that control, rudimentarily a band of armed men, it has fully separated itself from the community: We can say that it constitutes a separate power, a state. What this means is twofold: First, the state appears in history and is not co-extensive with human sociation in all its various forms that have appeared throughout the course of human history (since man, in the taxonomic sense, Homo sapiens sapiens first appeared some 110,000 years ago. The state, in fact, first appeared in its most rudimentary or primitive form roughly 10,000 years ago.). Second, there are no instances that Popper can elicit, since there are none in history, in which the state did not arise from a more primordial social division and exacerbate, reinforce and amplify that division. The state embodies the material and ideal interests, and secures the wealth, status and power of those who rule, a tiny minority within society (today perhaps as few as five thousand in populations of 300 million), against the claims, legal and otherwise, of the vast underlying populace. In a mediated way (i.e., as long as the claims of those to be protected are subordinate to those who rule), the state further protects those strata who are attached to it in the various forms in which state and society have existed (e.g., strata of state priests, bureaucrats, and military chiefs, small capitalists and layers of the business classes, etc.) Popper concept of individuality betrays his hypostatization of a historically specific form of society and the individuals, formed into social groups, which compose it. There are three points here, the latter two of which are, as it were, two sides of the same coin. Within any society organized around competition in production and exchange (i.e., within capitalist social formations which over the four hundred years of their existence exhibit an array of different polities ranging from constitutional, through democratic to extreme tyranny, that is, to totalitarian political forms), humanity will be defined in terms of individuality. First and foremost, this determination will prevail because individuality is actually, practically, a byproduct, if you will, of all the character formative lessons learned, assimilated, and sedimented in consciousness in the struggle to make a living, to accumulate wealth in money-form, and to affirm oneself by possessing and showing once the value-form comes to organize social life in its entirety. It is an objectively subjective form of precognitive awareness, it is behavior in the strict sense, that arises in the fight of all against all under conditions of capitalist production. The moral depravity Popper fears develops as a consequence of the fierce competitively situation in work that produces the socially ubiquitous personal aggressivity and belligerence that, prior to the appearance of capitalism, is unique in the history of humanity. Popper says he can dispense with Hobbes,2 but in point of fact his presentation has Hobbes written all over it: The bellum omnium contra omnes is the fundamental possibility of all capitalist social life. His purely individualistic solution, namely, a state that secures the freedom of the individuals behavior,3 reproduces in thought this fundamental situation revealed most starkly in capitalism at its origins, articulates the sense of social life of the middling groups (small artisans, shopkeepers, retailers, the tiny freeholder or copyright in the countryside) more than any other buffeted and threatened by novel social relations in production, bases itself on a world of isolated because privatized and egoistic individuals confronting an incomprehensible other (society) that has come to be unconsciously organized around exchange, transforming social
1

What is really important here is the appearance of hierarchy predates the appearance of humanity. Once it reappears this side of human origins, it did so slowly, leading to fixed social functions, then to congealed social relations of command and obedience that characterized the activity of different social groups in all decisive social contexts, all production, rituals and ceremonies, consumption and leisure, forms of exchange inextricably tied to one another. For this entire discussion, Nature, Capital, Communism, Power and Agriculture. 2 Ibid, 471. 3 Ibid.

relations in a that war of all against all, and, in this basic respect is not significantly different from its theorization at the origins of capitalism.1 Thus, the individuality that Popper defends is itself a historical development, a unique one, a product largely of the social relations of production that these individuals enter into in reproducing themselves, at first individually, as social individuals. Popper abstracts from this entire societal context in which daily life is organized, specifically from those social relations and the hidden, social character of work (production) from which and on the basis of which individuality rises, from the ensemble of social relations that constitute the individual as such.2 This is the first point. The second point is that Popper defends the abstract individual in her abstractness, as a citizen or political being.3 This is, of course, at a remove entirely consistent with the socially pervasive self-assessment for which self formation is a personal, subjective or individual achievement. And, while this is objectively necessary illusion and false consciousness, because individuality grounded socially is founded in work, family life as it is decidedly shaped by work, and those other contemporary institutions, education, military, etc., as they too are structured by work, this assessment poses a moment of truth in that it recognizes that individuality is formed by and large entirely outside the political sphere. (Popper is, after all, speaking about a contemporary situation, and this too points to the narrow basis of his hypostatization of individuality). The third point (the flip side of the second) is that, in inverting the real structure of social life in asserting the primacy of political reality in individual life (and disregarding work and production), in defending an abstraction, Popper ignores the social relations that render individuals really defenseless (against capitalist exploitation and oppression): He not only leaving them defenseless, but in so doing he mystifyingly and ideologically reinforces the power of the capitals state over them as individuals. Thus, in most forcibly reaffirming the power of the state over individuals or, more adequately, the power of a ruling class over the various social groups and classes in society (especially those
1

Well, there was one difference. A covenant of the people issues from social action (unlike Popper who pleas with the state for protection), and indicates that in production the formation of individuality was contradictory, since it was from there that collective action issued. Thus, for theorists of the English Civil War era, the bellum omnium contra omnes was the essence of the "state of nature." The Levellers shared this view and held that the state of nature was governed by one principle, to wit, "every man... [must] preserve and defend himself the best he can." In Leveller thought, it is clear the state of nature could be transcended and civil government re-instituted by a "covenant," by an agreement in which all parties involved consciously committed themselves to a set of principles and to a programmatic practice for their realization. For the citation, "Agreement of the People" (10/1647), in Wolfe, Ibid, 226f. For the Levellers together with this theorization of social life at the origins of capitalism, see Revolutionary Theories of the English Civil, Part I. 2 Egoistic individuality, and its highly differentiating (yet objectively homogenizing) needs proliferate, yet constituted in production and exchange a complete system of interdependence is presupposed as the livelihood and happiness of all are dependent upon that of each, on each fulfilling her role in production or exchange. Die konkrete Person, welche sich als besondere Zweck ist, von Naturnotwendigkeit and Willkr, ist das eine Prinzip der brgerlichen Gesellschaft, - aber die besondere Person als wesentlich in Beziehung auf andere solche Besonderhiet, so da jede durch die andere und zugleich schlechthin nur als durch die Form der Allgemeinheit, das andere Prinzip, vermittelt sich geltend macht und gefriedigt. ("The concrete person, himself the object of his particular aims, is, as a totality of desires and a mix of caprice and natural necessity, one principle of civil society. But the particular person is essentially related to other such particular persons, in such a way that each establishes himself and finds satisfaction only through the mediation of others and as such simultaneously by means of the form of universality, the second principle here." Hegel, Grunlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 182. Our translation). "Society" resting on abstract labor is a network of interdependent egoistic individualities each pursuing its own selfish ends. 3 Similarly, Marx in his youthful essay, Zur Judenfrage: Die droits de l'homme, die Menschenrechte werden als solche unterschieden von den droits du citoyen, von den Staatsbrgerrechten. Wer ist der vom citoyen unterschiedene homme? Niemand anders als das Mitglied der brgerlichen Gesellschaft. Warum wird das Mitglied der brgerlichen Gesellschaft Mensch, Mensch schlechthin, warum werden seine Rechte Menschenrechte genannt? Woraus erklren wir dies Faktum? Aus dem Verhltnis des politischen Staats zur brgerlichen Gesellschaft, aus dem Wesen der politischen Emanzipation. Vor allem konstatieren wir die Tatsache, da die sogenannten Menschenrechte, die droits de l'homme im Unterschied von den droits du citoyen, nichts anderes sind als die Rechte des Mitglieds der brgerlichen Gesellschaft, d.h. des egoistischen Menschen, des vom Menschen und vom Gemeinwesen getrennten Menschen Die Freiheit ist also das Recht, alles zu tun und zu treiben, was keinem andern schadet. Die Grenze, in welcher sich jeder dem andern unschdlich bewegen kann, ist durch das Gesetz bestimmt, wie die Grenze zweier Felder durch den Zaunpfahl bestimmt ist. Es handelt sich um die Freiheit des Menschen als isolierter auf sich zurckgezogener Monade Aber das Menschenrecht der Freiheit basiert nicht auf der Verbindung des Menschen mit dem Menschen, sondern vielmehr auf der Absonderung des Menschen von dem Menschen. Es ist das Recht dieser Absonderung, das Recht des beschrnkten, auf sich beschrnkten Individuums Das Menschenrecht des Privateigentums ist also das Recht, willkrlich ( son gr), ohne Beziehung auf andre Menschen, unabhngig von der Gesellschaft, sein Vermgen zu genieen und ber dasselbe zu disponieren, das Recht des Eigennutzes. Jene individuelle Freiheit, wie diese Nutzanwendung derselben, bilden die Grundlage der brgerlichen Gesellschaft. Sie lt jeden Menschen im andern Menschen nicht die Verwirklichung, sondern vielmehr die Schranke seiner Freiheit finden. Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels, Werke, Band I: 363-364.

for whom the work peculiar to capitalism, waged labor, is determinate, the mass of individuals as they are styled), effectively, Poppers philosophical liberalism is, contradictorily, a veiled rationalization of this power of the state, and Popper himself is a functionary of that state, which, as the arena in which unity amongst otherwise competing capitals is forged, makes him as a philosopher a functionary of capital. The Liberal Public Sphere Popper speaks about public opinion. He considers it a (social) danger because it is by definition anonymous or so he suggests and as such as irresponsible form of power especially when exercised through the agency of the state.1 In contemporary societies of capital stretching back in historical time before the last imperialist world war, public opinion is an abstraction from real agency and an ideologization to boot: It does not just exist in the form of (while being promoted by) books, pamphlets and letters to the editors of the great newspapers, in parliamentary speeches and motions, and thus it is not just nor even primarily a kind of public response to the thoughts and efforts of those aristocrats of the mind who produce new thoughts, new ideas new arguments,2 but constitutes the manipulative creation of opinion by various factions or social groups within the ruling class with a view to mobilizing support for a change or to legitimize a societal policy agenda on the patently ideological assumption that the voice of the people [is] a kind of final authority and unlimited wisdom (vox populi vox dei), which Popper correctly characterizes as a classical myth.3 These written documents (books, pamphlets, letters) are the earliest form of its more developed, contemporary existence a form that reaches back to a former reality, the liberal public sphere, whose aims were predicated on and encompassed free discussion that Popper finds so important - an existence which is today primarily audio-visual, but also include print and audio forms in isolation (e.g., magazines, radio). Starting with very young, children, public opinion is created today in an immediate, primordial and depth psychological manner, largely by advertising, in the formation of needs to compulsively and profligately consume what appears on the capitalist market. Public opinion is, then, a function of the movement of capital. Not, historically at least, with the liberal public sphere. A public sphere is a social context, institutionalized or otherwise, in which open and informed free discussion, argument and persuasion create the possibility of rational decision making aimed at the enlightenment of political will.4 It is ostensibly a classless context, open to all, universal. Really existing liberal or bourgeois public spheres have run up against the order of capital and have been either shut down by repressive agents of the state, or have tended to transcend themselves, shorn themselves of their ostensible universality, i.e., emerged as an organ of a particular class making universalist claims (i.e., concerning a general emancipation), and started down a course of confrontation with the state. The outstanding historical examples of such social context all occur in periods of social upheaval, especially in revolutionary situations. They include the Leveller agitators in the streets of London and in the largely non-officered gatherings of Cromwells horse regiments, the Ironclads (1647-1648), in the Jacobin Clubs of the French Revolution, in the soapbox orations and discussions by Wobblies in the United States in the early twentieth century. These were all more or less non-institutional settings. In each case, these public spheres were forcibly shut down by the state. Among the Levellers, street agitators were constantly imprisoned for making impassioned pleas for the liberality and tolerance that Popper, for one, thinks essential to the functioning of a non-tyrannical social order. John Lilburne spent more than half a lifetime in prison fighting for a free public sphere. 5 The Committee of Public Safety banned the
1
2

Public Opinion and Liberal Principles in Conjectures and Refutations, 470-471. Emphasis in original. Ibid, 470. 3 Ibid, 467. 4 Jrgen Habermas, "The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964)," New German Critique, esp. 48-49. 5 Note we do not say a liberal one. In a society and culture suffused with notions of deference and openly structured by class and status stratification, Lilburne argued for, demonstrated for and demanded in the English courts rights where they did not exist. One of the personal consequences was the imprisonment referred to in the text. Lilburne defended convictions concerning a legal and institutional embodiment for the rights of every person to free speech, assembly and to petition for a redress of grievances against the great men who hold power; for a prohibition against quartering troops on the homes of honest working men and their families; for an end to unreasonable searches and seizures arguing for the necessity of warrants based on probable cause; for the right to a speedy and public trail by a jury of ones peers together with information of the nature and cause of accusation and the right to confront an accuser; and for the very right to a jury trial and against excessive bails and fines In the U.S. today, we can recognize these demands in codified form in the Bill of Rights. They form the historically transcendent moments of the really significant elements of any rearguard defense by proletarian groups against the state on the terrain of capital in any struggle to

Jacobin Clubs as a threat to public order, i.e., out of fear they would roust the sans-culottes to street action aimed at the Committee. Cops, sheriffs and their deputies regularly arrested Wobbly agitators, whose actions were still individual and did not (fully and yet) embody a class thrust, for violation of city and town ordinances on the basis of which their free speech campaigns were considered a nuisance and impediment to public order. Above all, there has been the historical appearance of revolutionary workers councils, the first and perhaps prototypical instance developed in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday in Russia (Petrograd), 9 (21) January 1905 as the St. Petersburg Gaponist Associations.1 With a revolutionary proletariat as its creator and animator, councils have concretized what philosophical liberalism only dreams about: Free discussion, argument, articulation of needs, consultation, formulation of projects, demands, etc., based on free assembly and full representation. In the context of, and motivated by, the dual confrontation with capital and the state, councils have functioned as a medium in which workers could have begun to raise themselves to an understanding of society in its totality. This is not enlightenment of political will in the abstract universalist sense, but in the historically concrete sense in which a particular social group is compelled by the very movement of capital, i.e., in a confrontation that forces it to act and in acting to become conscious, embodies tendentially universally human requirements and demands. (But then again in history, i.e., in the history of societies rooted in and based on social division, there has been no pre-given, already formed universality, which is merely another side of classical myth of the people). If, in running up against the limits of capitalist social organization, proletarian publics lead to the most outstanding institutional incarnation of a public sphere anywhere in history, it is because the councils are the actualization of an institutionally non-separate form of proletarian power.2 The council only appears in revolutionary situations. It stands in naked contrast to the modern state of capital, which is unique in its institutional and separate character, its appearance as a "public" force clothed in this sham objectivity that sets it apart from and over and against individuals, the underlying social classes, and society at large. While any modern, centralized state may come in the short run to be identified with a specific historical personage, what distinguishes it from states that appear in other past epochs is a seeming efficacy, permanence and reality that render it at once objectively independent in relation to society and independent of any specific ruler. In opposition to the state, in particular, the totalitarian state, councils form an interconnected system of transparent social relations, are a historically novel power, a sole power that immediately and directly holds sway over society without institutional separation, that is, a power that can only develop by way of the destruction and on the ruins of the state. The are the context in which a consciousness of the magnitude of a historical class becomes conscious of the tasks of reorganizing society develops, in which the programmatic features of this reorganization, conducted along universalist lines for the first time in history, are formulated. Carried out revolutionarily, it is the councilar form of the organization of society that offers the only chances of realizing human freedom, a genuinely free society in which individuality might flourish.3
abolish it... Lilburne's and the Levellers' fight was a struggle for freedom - albeit narrowly understood - on the terrain of the state. Together with their radical allies inside Cromwells Ironsides, they unsuccessfully fought to institute the legal conditions for provisions of a livelihood from work as artisans (and for all small property holders). See Revolutionary Theories of the English Civil War, Part I. 1 For this, see Bolshevism and Stalinism (Urgeschichte), First Study, Historical Note 1. 2 See the discussion of councilar power in Some Remarks on the Role of the Working Class in History. 3 In the final chapter of The Origins of the Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt pursued the question of what essentially distinguishes totalitarian polities from others as they have appeared in history. Resting on evidentially indefensible view that polities fully determine societies and that, moreover, their structure and organization are autonomous and can be examined as such, she arrived at the conclusion that the essence of totalitarianism is terror (Ibid, 464, 466, 475). Still, unlike Popper, her investigation was not devoid of the analysis of social forms, and it was not ahistorical. She further understood that intellectual developments, perhaps decidedly, but rarely decisively shape the life of a society, so that she both knew and understood that Platos totalitarian predilections, as Popper would have it, were in this specific case by and large not germane to developments in Hellas, and wholly irrelevant in relation to the classical Greek polis. Her own analysis, laid out in The Human Condition, demonstrates real insight into, affirming, the ancient Greek concept of freedom, while exhibiting a genuine appreciation for the paganism (in the narrow Christian sense) and the centrality of politics (not statecraft) for the totality of one, rather unique form of human social existence. This sensitivity to socio-historically specific phenomena, altogether absent in Popper, allowed her to arrive at rather nuanced assessment of contemporary developments, even if that understanding was greatly limited by her concept of totalitarianism. Thus, she wrote, What is so easily overlooked by the modern historian who faces the rise of totalitarian systems, especially when he deals with developments in the Soviet Union, is that just as the modern masses [based in the middling groups in society, small owners, the salariat attached to the capitalist firm, etc.] and their leaders succeeded, at least temporarily, in bringing forth in totalitarianism an authentic, albeit all-destructive, new form of government, thus the peoples [i.e., working class] revolutions, for more than a hundred years now, have come forth, albeit never successfully with another

Popper would call this utopian and, no doubt, dangerous, and it is, indeed, a long way from him, but then Popper is a qualitatively longer way, a distance that can not be bridged, from real historical development... Where they have appeared historically, liberal institutions are sham, illusory ones as was already recognized by a contemporary of a youthful Popper, Carl Schmitt.1 The most common liberal institution that pretends to be an arena in which political will is enlightened and rational decisions are made is the parliament or bourgeois legislature (Congress, Parliament, Diet, Duma, Reichstag, etc.). These have been derogatorily but correctly identified as talk shops, as media circles where posturing is the order of the day or, alternately as settings from which mystifications arise as ideologically an image of society is given back to itself. They are at one time or another, and sometimes at the same time, all of these, while further masking the conduct of real negotiations over issues and real deals that are made behind closed doors by men (invariably men, or so it seems) who can lay claim to be representatives, duly delegated or mandated (e.g., by election) of that mythical entity, the people. Instead the real function of these sham institutions, as state institutions, is achievement of unity among otherwise competing capitals (by a bourgeois stratum itself product of the capitalist rationalization of society) by formulating (legislating) a common program for capital; constructing (together with the Executive) the legal and organizational principles of capital's movement (that the Executive defends); and guarding and promoting mass loyalty to the capitalist system and bourgeois society as a whole. (Important here are the various medias, spectacular adjuncts to the state propaganda machine which create much of what passes today as public opinion.) The institutionalization of liberal or bourgeois public spheres invariably masks the power of ruling classes in creating their own unity against the underlying (i.e., exploited and oppressed) classes and social groups in society, for the very activity carried on in these institutions immediately and mystifyingly exhibits, like public opinion, precisely the opposite (that the peoples interests are represented, that legislation advancing those interests are being enacted, that policies on behalf of the people will be put in place). In the primordial sense, these institutions, again like public opinion, invert the real state of affairs, that is operate ideologically: Institutionalized, the liberal or bourgeois public sphere masks the activity of those who rule, and also their intend (to not only preserve but to expand and deepen that rule) by proclaiming, declaiming and declaring that it is the peoples interests that are being served and promoted, all the while the very possibility of the formation of something like a universal interest is constantly subverted. In defending and advocating a liberal vision of free discussion, here too, perhaps unwittingly (perhaps not), Popper as philosopher is a functionary of capital. Liberal Scruples and Social Analysis In its authentic incarnations, institutions of free discussion do not start from, do not advance by way of and do not end with scientific rationality, with the instrumental reason that insists that all truth is constituted methodology, by the method of conjectures and refutations. Instead, as recounted and hinted at above, actually existing public spheres, i.e., proletarian publics or councils, while a safe haven, as it were, from the occlusion and mystification that emanates from the states propaganda machine and its spectacular adjuncts, and from the deleterious impacts of subordination and passivity in daily life (production) itself, and while its work the work of the councils proceeds on the basis of free discussion, the statement of positions and perspectives, argument and persuasion, it is also riotous, a social and institutional context in which needs are articulated, demands are set forth, expectations proclaimed and even dreamy anticipations of the future are voiced. This is not only not irrational, but aids clarity by revealing the underlying precategorial bases of positions that are enunciated and projects that are pursued. It is the practical subject of daily life that comes to consciousness, achieves clarity here through self-clarification, mutual criticism and consultation, and that elaborates, expands and deepens that consciousness; it is emphatically not a logical subject with a ready-made method, already to hand (form) and made to impose itself on, to repress, the upsurge of the precategorial dimension (content) of social life.2
new form of government: the system of peoples [i.e., workers] councils to take the place of the Continental party system... (Ibid, 216) which did not merely aim at replacing a form of government, but at overturning society as a whole starting from the destruction of the state. Insight of this order is not particularly profound, but is far, far beyond Popper and for all the methodological reasons he believed are central to analysis of any phenomena whatsoever. See the Note on Plato, below. 1 Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus. 2 The Western rationalist tradition is the tradition of critical discussion of examining and testing propositions or theories by attempting to refute them. Public Opinion and Liberal Principles in Conjectures and Refutations, 474.

But this is merely one side of the paucity of or, rather the very inability to carry out social analysis in philosophical liberalism, in Popper himself. This inability is a straightforward (we daresay logical) consequence of a tacitly metaphysical assumption that the subject of free discussion is the individual in her individuality (motivated by her desire for an altogether abstract freedom): But the categories of the abstract analysis of individuals engaged interpersonally cannot be transposed to society, to the analysis of social groups and classes. First, it cannot because individual (the precise equivalent of the more openly philosophical man) is itself an abstraction from determinate social relations, that ensemble, which constitutes men and women in flesh and blood, as, first and foremost social individuals whose individuality rests on historically specific forms of sociality. Second, this transposition fails because the institutional setting for resolving social conflict is not the same as those for personal conflicts (bourgeois courts). Resolution of social conflict develops violently in the specific sense that it overturns existing social institutions (and not primarily in the sense of entailing personal violence. The more popular the overthrow, the more thoroughgoing it is, the less personal violence it will involve.)1 Here, it should be noted that Popper abhors violence personal violence is largely what he envisions and, while there is certainly nothing ignoble in this sentiment, is another limitation, not just personal (since it is conceptually integrated), on the ability to engage social analysis individuals in the sociality, in their belonging-together as integral to, as bearers of everything in conscious life that informs social groups.2 In fact, Poppers entirely abstract concept of free discussion exists only as ideality: As an asocial setting for rational discussion, it is a construction that derives from and is entirely congruent with (in the conceptual sense), because it is modeled on, the laboratory in which results are experimentally arrived in science. In all this, it is then not just Poppers liberal scruples (principles) that prevent him from engaging in social analysis, but scientific determination of them that render him and them unfit for (i.e., conceptually impede, block such) analysis.3 The Critique of Historicism Not so obviously Popper is, like Hayek (who he is fond of citing), a seemingly reasonable yet fanatical defender of bourgeois society and, underlying it, the order of capital. This is clear from his first work devoted to a narrow scientific understanding of the study of society. Drafted in late 1935 and read to a private gathering in early 1936 but unpublished until 1957, the basic thesis of Poppers critique of the social sciences is, the belief in historical destiny is sheer superstition and there can be no prediction of the course of human history by scientific or any other rather methods.4 To be sure, such belief is from the perspective of any number of rationalities superstition (though the explication of such belief can be eminently rational, and such belief itself will have its own logic); and, indeed, the prediction of the course of human history is not possible if by that we mean some logic of an overall development or a teleological movement. With certain reservations, we can agree with Popper that there is no law of evolution of the development of vital life in nature or social life in history;5 that the direction of a specific historical development cannot be comprehend as a law, but must be done as tendency (and not trend);6 the method of the study of nature and society is unitary;7 situational logics are operative in specific historical contexts and history is written interpretatively and as such is a
1

The councilar framework of a new social order one that does not engage liberal principles as Popper understand them is neither an existing feature of society, a setting at all; and nor is it an institution in the traditional bourgeois sense, that is, it is not characterized by separation: It does not appear as a "public" force clothed in this sham objectivity that sets it apart from and over and against individuals, the underlying social classes, and society at large. 2 Utopia and Violence in Conjectures and Refutations, 477. 3 Important here are the centrality of facts as opposed to tendential developments in society, the very concept of a society totality. See the The Critique of Historicism, immediately following. 4 The Poverty of Historicism, iv. 5 Ibid, 107-108, 117. 6 Ibid,120. Popper plays fast and loose here, for his initial criticism equates laws with trends and the latter with tendency. See, Ibid, 36, where he asserts the underlying unity of anti-naturalistic and pro-naturalistic historicism (described in the text, below) in terms of the doctrine of historical laws or trends. Emphasis in original. 7 Ibid, 130f.

function of a perspective;1 and, that specific conditions, often institutional, undergrid any tendential development.2 Is there, then, a problem here? Well, yes. The critique of historicism is incoherent, and we shall identify why by way of systematically counterposing the theorization of concrete totality in historical and social analysis to it. We can start with Popper and his determination of historicism, indicating limited points of agreement and, of course, developing our counterposition. Historicism, according to him, comes into two varieties. The first he calls anti-naturalistic and is characterized by the methodologically essentialist analysis of events, relations, processes in society, and society itself, by which he means that this analysis claims to penetrates to certain intrinsic properties that characterize the phenomenon in question. This form of historicism, once again on Popper's view, entails the view that historical generalization is not law like in the sense of physics; social phenomena exhibit an irreducible novelty and complexity in their constitution; all prediction in the analysis of society (Popper reduces this study to social science) is inexact; social groups are more than the sum of the individuals that compose them or the social relations that exist among them; that knowledge in the study of society is historical and based on a sympathetic (Popper says intuitive) understanding that has three forms (each of which constitutes an increasingly stronger claim), namely, understanding arrived at on the basis of analysis of genesis and effects, of situational value and of underlying historical tendencies of societal development; and, a certain reluctance to employ quantitative methods.3 Popper opposes analysis of this sort to methodological nominalism which seeks only to describe how things behave,4 and to which the other form of historicism is closer. Called pro-naturalistic, and of course more attuned with his predilections, it aims to be theoretical and empirical (of course, in Poppers sense),5 where theoretical means that it is required to explain and predict events as well by way of theories or universal laws, and empirical means it rests on experience (the experience here, Popper admits, is not laboratory constructed); its explanations and predictions concern observed facts, where observation is the basis for validation of any theory that has been put forth; and it, as sociology, has certain methods in common with physics, 6 e.g., a strong bent toward quantitative measurement.7 So, again, if we also reject the possibility of asserting a law that governs historical development (as a whole or at any level of that development),8 where do we and on what basis do we part company with Popper? The differences that are at the core of this dispute is the reality and concept of totality and intimately connected to it, the significance of the relation of a moment to totality, the role of decisive moments in the totality, the concept of tendential development as opposed to a trend, and the practice, underlying these concepts, that aims to transform the historical world of humanity and our relations to earthly nature on which the former rests in opposition to practices of social engineering and piecemeal technology,9 which underpin a scientific sociology and which stand or falls, as does alleged contradiction between laws of social development and the commitment to change,10 with the adequacy, coherency and validity of his criticism of totality. Bound up with these are a variety of specific differences that at once illumine the core of the disagreement and devolve from it. Begin with the really crucial concept, that of totality.
1 2

Ibid, 150-151. Ibid, 154-155, 155-156. 3 Ibid, 10-25. 4 Ibid, 27-29. The citation appears on 29. 5 See this Study, Part II, Science as Method: Falsifiability and Postulative Deductivism, above. 6 The Poverty of Historicism, 35-36. 7 Sociology as an empirical science, of course, rests on the very development of capitalism, specifically, the process of institutional rationalization (i.e., constitution as such) on the basis of which society itself as a massive presence confronting individuals, as a system of hardened social relations, of institutions, first appears, appears distinct from other institutions such as the economy and polity, and can be described physicalistically with methods taken over from the modern science of nature. See the First Interlude, The Real Subsumption of Labor under Capital (Real Domination), above. 8 In point of fact, it is only with the emergence of capitalism into history (i.e., with the constitution of a form of sociation that is capitalist) that the multitude of histories of different and varying communities and societies are overtaken by the expansion and deepening of the determinants of capital, and that a universal history begins to unfold in the first place. It is only on this condition that we can speak of a singular historical development at all. 9 Ibid, 58-70. 10 Ibid, 51-52.

In Poppers formulation, theories are prior to observations as well as to experiments, in the sense that the latter are significant only in relation to theoretical problems.1 But this is hardly radical enough, i.e., it does not go to the root of the issue. Whether commonsensical, scientific, philosophical, ideological, and so on, theories all views, standpoints or positions... tacitly assume no matter how vague and confused or expressly articulate a determinate conception of reality and, inseparably in practice, vision of the world we wish to make. (Analytically and reflectively, they can be consider separately.)... Thus, the method of the study of society and nature cannot, as Popper does, be divorced from a perspective on what reality is and how it is formed without impoverishing its content and misapprehending any tendential developments within in society or in nature; that method and that reality is not scientific but dialectical, and this perspective can be rationally justified, as we undertook above2... This situation is grounded in the constitution of human beings as human beings: As existentially deficient beings, humans produce concepts, views and theories in and on the basis of the world of daily practice to illumine that activity and act in this world. Theories, then, are relative to, first and originally, the lifeworlds in which they are produced, and here to the forms of work or activity through which they develop, and, second, to the cultures as total social facts that they develop out of and which they interpret... The problem of totality goes deeper in Popper, for he fails to grasp the very possibly that the concept of essence has (real and conceptual) meaning as part of the historical evolving concrete totality of society, history and nature. This is our perspective. His concept of essence, though, is metaphysical because it attributes the sense of permanency and unchanging to it: For him, it, essence, is independent of any and all real and possible subjectivities and refers back to none: He explicitly holds that processes, relations, events, institutions, etc., determined essentially have an unchanging,3 and permanent4 character; and, that accordingly, historical development cannot be constituted as change in the very fabric of society, if its substratum, presumably some aspect of society (he does not say), is unchanging. In this regard, he cites (rather extensively) Husserl5 (and the Husserl of the Logical Investigations no less). The concept of an essence, according to Popper, refers us back to a determinant that cannot be resolved into history, real movement. (Thus his concept is an absolute, a residue of pre-Kantian metaphysics.) To one side though he does not explicitly deploy theses terms, they are the sense of his remarks whether underlying substrate, substance, ultimate reality or really real, it, the alleged real referent (the essence), is characterized by its permanence (a term which, we have pointed out, he does use). To the other side, the concept (of an essence) and its moments (reflectively, the categories of analysis) are the theoretically revealed elements of this substantial reality (say, real determinants marking off societies situated along a line or about a course of historical development). With a view to the sweep of history (the whole of socio-human, historical development), of novelty and change, forms (concept and categories which we generate) do not emerge from real social movement (content), bending back on (conceptually catching and fixing) the abiding regularities that recur yet disappear in that ceaselessly changing movement. Instead, a permanent structure is said to underlay history, novelty, change: Form, as essence, is always present but this is merely an ideal reconstruction masquerading as a real determinant, imposed rather god-like, i.e., from a perspectiveless or objective position, on content (history, real movement). But in history essence has the sense of merely abiding regularities in experience, that themselves too can change, which form those structures that stand out among other internal relations that form the whole (totality) and which are decisive for its constitution; and, as they change the whole itself is transformed. The historical totality, capitalism, has its decisive moments in abstract labor, value (capital), use and exchange value, production, relations of production,
1
2

Ibid, 98. This Study, Part II, The Materialist Dialectic. For us, Popper's comment that, it seems not improbable that the historicist method might have originated as part of a general philosophical interpretation of the world (The Poverty of Historicism, 54) is either unduly repetitive or utterly thoughtless. 3 Ibid, 31-32, 33. 4 Ibid, 136, where he refers to methodological essentialism explaining facts by reference to a kind of permanent ghost or essence. Note the emphases (added). 5 It might be, so far as its essence is concerned, present at any other place and in any other form, and might likewise change whilst remaining in fact unchanged, or change otherwise than in the way in which it actually does. Ibid, 32. (The source of this citation from Husserl is not specifically identified.) From this very early Husserlian understanding of essence, Popper further inference that essence exists as potentiality, not dynamically, absurdly suggesting that Aristotle stands behind, as it were, the thinking (in its logical structure) of all historicisms (Ibid, 33). Not at any rate a historicism, the revolutionary concept of reality as a concrete totality cannot be understood in this manner. See below.

productive forces that sensibly embody capital, etc., concepts that have real referents which themselves have formed historically, that all refer back to the activity of practical subjectivity in production, that can be transformed, abolished even, through that activity, and that accordingly in this subjects activity as it and to the extent it issues in qualitative change can bring about the transformation, abolition, of capitalism as a historical totality.1 Neatly dovetailing (because it is entirely consistent) with, the second feature of the concept of totality that Popper does not understand is the relation of whole to part, moment to totality. Popper says the constitution of totality (say, a social group) as a whole is more than the parts. (The group is more than the mere sum total of its members, and it is also more than the mere sum total of the merely personal relationships existing at any moment between any of its members.)2 Well, yes, if essence, what he means when he says whole, is unchanging and permanent, then necessarily the whole would be more than the parts. But this concept constitutes a hypostatization of the whole over the parts, which, among other things, is the significance of our discussion (just concluded) of essence in Popper It is to be understood that reference to Popper is for the most part a reference to scientific thinking, not to him personally, the person Karl Popper, but only to him to the extent and because he rigorously thinks in this manner, in the manner of scientific thinking And, hypostatize is what he does, because it is how the whole is understood in science. Thus he illicitly compares the concept of the whole (operative in a revolutionary, dialectic theorization of society) to the biological concept of an organism. He speaks of the derivation of historical structure of society from a society as a phenomenon that experiences: The organism learns by experience. The same holds true of society, since society too experiences.3 This is the hypostatization: The whole is not prior to, above, more than or apart from the parts, but is simultaneously dialectically formed, i.e., constituted by and constitutive of those parts. Yet, for Popper, the attribution of an independent reality to the whole in the view he wishes to criticize is the only logically consistent manner in which to speak about it, for from the standpoint of the modern science of nature the whole either is an aggregated totality of parts, the sum of the facts, or it is a metaphysically autonomous reality. Let's consider the relation of whole to part, or moment to totality, in Popper more carefully.
1

Popper asserts that totality cannot be concrete, while he means it cannot be the object of scientific, i.e., bourgeois, theory and investigation, for he affirms the irrationality of the historical present, namely, capitalism, and our inability to transform it as a whole. Such practice leads to totalitarianism, the effort to transform man, the political problem of organiz[ing] human impulses.It is impossible, self-contradictory, utopian, Ibid, 62, 68-69, 73-74. In this regard, Popper states, there exists no physical analogy of holistic engineering or of the corresponding science. Ibid, 82. To the contrary, Popper lived long enough but did not recognize, because he could not understand, there is this ongoing planetary experiment called climate change (and recognized in the scientific community as such, though the sources are too numerous to cite, we can mention a single, popularized one by an eminent geophysicist, James Hansen, director of the U.S. NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Storms of My Grandchildren, New York, 2009), and its corresponding science is the modern science of nature (with all its attendant and auxiliary disciplines) itself. There are two ironies here, first, Popper returns to nihilist decisionism, to the assertion that all fundamental ends, and aims, are a matter of choice (Ibid, 74) and cannot, accordingly, be rationally justified (and here, we mean rationally in the revolutionary and dialectical sense); and, second, he does not recognize and this is a theoretically mediated, personal failure that it is precisely capital who is the totalitarian and barbarian, who has undertaken the project of remaking man: He does not understand the real totalitarian dynamism can be found in the development of capitalism, and must be located in the total societal situation, starting from the qualitatively deeper penetration of science and technology, not as inputs that shape and reorganize production but as techno-scientific production that is seamlessly a piece with a culture of daily life underlying which are the individuals whose souls and bodies are ceaselessly being techno-scientifically remade For it is capital's insinuation of itself into the culturally and historically constituted need structure of men and women, beginning with the formation and structurization of human need in children; that is, intertwined with and as substitutes for the depth-psychological absences (love, belonging) that are relational products of the bourgeois, nuclear family, an absolutely insatiable need to consume commodities is implanted (constituting a character-formative, repressive desublimation of those absences) Its introjection requires obscenely massive production of humanly worthless commodities that is inseparable from, and impossible without the plunder of nature, its reduction to infinitely plastic raw material in the matrix of production, and without the sciences of nature which constitute the theoretical framework in which this reduction is carried out This voracious need itself is for novelty, to have and possess whatever newly appears on the market, but with the proviso that in a really crude, phenomenal sense, a ubiquitous market is constitutive of society itself in its specific historical form This insatiable demand, lived as need, is the basis for remaking the whole inner life of man,, a remaking that calls forth capital to provide all social individuals so-formed (not just alienated and waged labor) with their (incomplete) fulfillment, an incompletion that is only experienced as ineffable longing and dissatisfaction which, in turn, is yoked to the consumption of commodities and, on that basis, to labor and production as provision of the monetary means of fulfillment... Such is the contours of the real, historically actual totalitarian reality. 2 Ibid, 17, also 76. Emphasis in original. 3 Ibid, 10.

In this criticism it is the very character of the parts (e.g., facts) as parts, as partial, to be numerically endless or as he says (and this is crucial for the argument) all. Thus, he refers to Gestalt psychology in terms of the totality of all the properties or aspects of a thing,1 and social wholes that embrace the structure of all social and historical events of an epoch. Accordingly, a part or aspect is merely one among others, one which may be clearly distinguished from other aspects, in which case, we study only an aspect.2 This conception (of Popper and science) rests on, because it presupposes the totality is an aggregated whole, a sum of all these aspects: It we wish to study a thing, we are bound to select certain aspects of it. It is not possible for to observe or to describe a whole piece of the world, or a whole piece of nature.3 So in the case of Gestalt theorization, Popper reduces the whole to an aspect, collapsing the meaning of the one into the other, admitting there are wholes (i.e., aspects) and denying the wholes have meaning, reality and existence in any other sense (in the case in point in the Gestaltist sense, but also as concrete totality)... Attempting to conjure away the import of Gestalt theory, it is a species argument, sheer sophistry, for, according to Koffka, Koehler, Katz, Goldstein, Gelb, etc., and their analyses (and theorizations as well) demonstrate it,4 it is in, through and on the basis of its immediate, intuitive or perceptual apprehension of the aspect itself that the whole, the Gestalt, is simultaneously given and present to awareness. (Husserl would say it, the whole, is appreceived.)... They are distinct, but inseparable. Their relations are internal. The aspect described by these theorists is precisely that decisive moment we described above, which emphatically can be observed or described, the structurally defining moment(s) of the totality that grasping, and explicating them, permits insight into it, the totality, its shape, organization and structure, its constitution, its formation In Popper, totality, then, is the whole apart from, other and more than the parts, but this is either a mystical or a metaphysical whole (which intuitively he recognizes, and accordingly rejects). But not only is the totality as real not detachable from its moments (while, ideally and analytically it may be), structurally significant moments or parts provide insight into the totality or whole, and the points of leverage on the basis of which it undergoes transformation. In this respect, and this is not Popper but in what he actually writes, he is compelled to deploy the concept of a decisive moment, a structural feature (or, as the case might be but not here, an interrelated number of them), from which the totality can be grasped, and which essentially characterizes it, and would thereby permit us to act on it (in society as part of it), to transform it. In a lengthy footnote in which he distinguishes his position from that of the renowned French physicist and theorist, Pierre Duhem, he states, Admittedly, Duhem is right when he says that we can test only huge and complex theoretical systems rather than isolated hypotheses; but if we test two such systems which differ in one hypothesis only, and if we can design experiments which refute the first system while leaving the second very well corroborated, then we may be on reasonably safe ground if we attribute the failure of the first system to that hypothesis in which it differs from the other.5 The theoretical systems are ideal (not real) totalities, the decisive moment or structural aspect is that hypothesis which differs in one system to another, it is decisive because it permits Popper to reject one system as uncorroborated, and this rejection constitutes in thought (in a methodologically perverse, i.e., scientific, form) action that transforms our entire situation, here our understanding of the reality the two complex theories refer back to It should be noted that Popper believes that concepts deployed, first consistently by Hegel, then Marx (and other lesser luminaries for whom his criticism may be appropriate) from the specific analysis of society, concepts such as direction, movement and force are derived from scientific use.6 In point of fact, these concepts derive from a specifically philosophical thinking about society that in Hegel (and, because he takes over the Hegelian mediatory conceptual framework, in Marx) is consciously non-scientific and moving within and arise from the confrontation with
1 2

Ibid, 76. Emphasis added. Ibid, 77, 78. Emphases added. Similarly, 89-90, where same concept of all reappears this time to justify the opposition to planning, which in its bureaucratic centralist, i.e., state capitalist, form a la the Soviet Union emphatically requires withering criticism, but not for the reasons Popper offers. In the second, internal citation Popper is citing Karl Mannheims Man and Society. 3 Ibid, and also 80-81. 4 For analysis and discussion, see, for example, Koffkas Some Problems of Space Perception in Carl Murchison (ed.), Psychologies of 1930 (Worcester (MA), 1930). For explicit theorization, see Kurt Koffka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology, 614-681, where of special interest some of these themes appear with reference to the attack mounted by the critics (like Popper) of psychologism. 5 Popper, Ibid, 131-132, n. 2. 6 The Poverty of Historicism, 113-114.

what is new in society itself (i.e., with the novelty of society itself).1 This inversion is typical of Popper, and it misses the historically significant point, namely, that the basic categories of the modern science of nature, its force, irreducible elements (identified latter as atoms), motion, etc., were concepts that were first encounter in the prescientific experience of bourgeois society as it originally emerged, specifically in the experience of the self-sundering, explosive and contradictory social unity, the bellum omnes contra omnium arising out of production and exchange. Poppers argument is one lengthy, polemical attack on a concept, and the reality that concept refers back to, both of which he never understands, and this is no more apparent in the tacit assumptions he makes about, and the examples he provides that derive from, a society and business culture that is presumed universal and eternally given2 The whole is a dialectical totality, a real, evolving whole, that is constituted by the parts, in their interaction: 3 It is not a different order of reality, and it is not independent of its moments (e.g., facts): It is not suspended above it, as it were, or hiding behind it.4 The counterposition of moment and totality, part and whole, does not consist in their presumed external relation. This is the contemplative viewpoint of science and the bourgeoisie, for here the object only appears within an artificially constructed context (the laboratory is exemplary) in order to view it in its externality, analyze it in its unperturbed form; observe, undisturbed and without interference from an underlying irrational substratum (which is eradicated, i.e., cannot appear as such in this artificial context), whether the experiment validates its laws, laws that permit the object, society and nature, to be decomposed, the living social components of the former to be exploited in the accumulation of capital and nature to be transformed into a sink of uglified, unprocessed matter for further used as raw materials in capitalist production Rather, in the dialectical concept of reality as a concrete totality, the relation of all moments to the totality are relations of internality; the objectively practical subject is itself a moment of the totality, it is that underlying substratum, that is, its relation is privileged, i.e., it is the standpoint within the totality from which all of reality can be leveraged; and, the opposition of moments and totality is to be found in the dynamic of the development of the totality and in its contradictory character... Because he does not grasp totality, and according it dialectical relation of moment to it in its, the totality's, constitution, Popper also is incapable of understanding actual tendencies of social and historical development. He is incapable of recognize that various groups of social facts, moments, or parts (whether activities, social relations, institutions or even the various layers forming social groups and classes) are interconnected, internally related, that those in their connectedness and relatedness stand out as structurally significant exhibit a weight' in the qualitative, socio-human sense that imparts a direction to historical development. Popper, on the other hand, assumes that in all theorizations that are not scientific, tendential development must mean trend, and he equals the latter with historical laws.5 In either case the concept in his hands has a large statistical and factual component, which, although it may be present in (one sense of) the concept of a tendency, never dominates that concept. The meaning and sense of historical tendency is ambiguous, irreducibly twofold and situationally determined: In either sense, it is immanent to a given socio-historical conjuncture. In one sense, it is a thematic unity of a series of social facts that suggest a direction of social development and presupposes that we, in an ongoing sense, merely produce and reproduce this reality over our heads and behind our backs (i.e., without awareness of the meaning of our activity). In the other sense, this reality itself (its structure formed by the movement of capital) has become so explosively contradictory that it compels specifiable social groups, workers, as the object and subject of capitalist production, to act and in acting to generate a growing awareness of this entire development, in which case tendential direction is the immanent potential incarnate in a social class for historically effective action, that is, for challenging and abolishing capital. In either sense, any future suggested by the tendential direction of historical development remains indeterminate, even as this direction suggest a really possible outcome that is may even be likely. That outcome is never probable or statistically calculable. To boot, the concept (of tendency, like that of totality) is only a function of the analysis of
1

See Manfred Riedel, Between Tradition and Revolution, 74-75, 112-113, 119-121, 123, 139-140, 148-150; and Community and Capital, 9097. 2 These reifications are scattered throughout The Poverty of Historicism, e.g., 59, 60 n.1, 62, 65, 86. 3 For elaboration, in a manner that in its nuances is quite distinct from us, see Karel Kosk, Dialektik des Konkreten, 34f. 4 Ibid, 136, where Popper states that methodological essentialism rests on an unchanging substratum that is either within or behind the changing observable events. 5 Ibid, 36, 115.

societies of capital and it is in its prosaic usage a function of capital only to the extent that its existence has been automatized. The determinate conception of reality operative and, in Poppers case explicit, in science, metaphysical realism, reduces investigative active to conjectures and refutations, to trial and error, and then, atop this, identifies this method with specifically human cognitive capacities and achievements.1 By the method of thought is something more and entirely other: The logic operative in (the method of) investigatory activity, whether socio-historical or natural (inclusive of humanized natural landscapes that appear within and without the built environment) is not that found in science, and it is not Poppers. It is dialectical, that is, admits of no absolutely valid starting points, does not move forward in a straight line, recognizes each particular moment, detail, fact, idea or category, receives its significance only as it assumes its places in the totality, a totality that simultaneously can only be grasped as its partial, incomplete moments, the facts which form it, coalesce. The logic of presentation has, moreover, a well defined, methodologically necessary structure: Like Hegel and Marx, we always begin with an object that is simply given or immediately present, what is isolated and abstract.2 (For Marxs comprehensive analysis, it is the pervasively present commodity.) This starting point is not and cannot be arbitrary: Dialectical circularity, i.e., the formal identity of the points of departure and arrival (the endpoint or conclusion to the entire presentation), is an epistemological requirement of theorizing: It is our only guarantee against getting lost (literally in a maze of concepts). This circularity secures for us a return to the original, immediately given object which upon return is no longer immediate, i.e., is no longer once we have worked through the forms of its movement and returned to the original object of our investigation now presented as articulated, mediated and concretized (i.e., it is comprehended and explained as a moment in the evolving totality, say, capitalism at the level of the world): What is present yet merely tacit, undeveloped and abstractly in the beginning must also be there, fully mediated hence concrete and actual, in the end.3 Poppers method, on the other hand, is one that breathes the rarified air of an abstract dialectic of concepts: He starts from and proceeds by way of general consideration of social and historical events, relations and structure stripped of their specificity, i.e., contentless, and arrives at a theoretically more elaborate, evidentially unmediated theorization of this immediacy. The entire concept of science is determined by this concept of an abstract totality, that is, by an understanding that reverts to science at its origins, by his opposition to metaphysics in a pre-critical, pre-Kantian sense. Popper may know totality, i.e., he can logically manipulate concepts, but he does not understand it, i.e., he does not grasp its sense, the reality the concepts refer back to because, for him (that is, within science), precognitively that reality has no sense unless it has been selected, abstracted and projectively elaborated with a view to nature domination, a nature that is thus artificially reconstructed. In this crucial respect (for that matter, in all respects), Popper's argument transpires within the order of capital, assuming it, affirming it, and reinforcing its stranglehold.

This is positivist, and empiricist vulgar nonsense. Cognitively we are, humanity is, as a distinctive, novel form of being that is nonetheless part of nature, in nature, is nature and as such is humanly natural, characterized, among other features, most importantly by two new principles of self-organization in nature, first, by what we call reason or spirit, not merely by conceptual thought (discursive, logical analysis), but also the production of concepts and the intuition of essences (where they are not identical) in which the objectivity of objects is constituted and given a second time as meaning; and, second, by an existential liberation from life, from nature understood vitally or from the organic world, by a freedom from the immediacy of life, and the ability to disengage ourselves from its pressures, permitting us as humans to objectify all dimensions, whether cognitive, emotional or physiological, of our existence. See Hominidization (II) in Nature, Capital, Communism. 2 For Marx, see the Nachwort to the second German edition (1873) of Kapital, cited at length in the First Interlude, Between Tributary Formation and Capitalist Modernity, above. Elements of this approach can also be, though understood in a narrowly methodological sense and though articulated as science, in Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God, 19-20, 89-90, 94-95, 97-98, 100. 3 jener Unmittelbarkeit und Einfachheit des Angangs ist es darum gleich Es ist das Werden seiner selbst, der Kreis, der sein Ende als seinen Zweck voraussetzt und zum Anfange hat, und nur durch die Ausfhrung und sein Ende wirklich ist. (Immediacy and simplicity are characteristic of the beginning It is the process of its own becoming, the circle which presupposes its end as its purpose, and has its end for its beginning; it becomes concrete and actual only be being carried out, and by the end it involves). Hegel, Vorrede, Phnomenologie des Geistes (our translation).

A Note on Plato Engaged in an ahistorical intellectual history, Popper, of course, knows nothing of the ancient world and, it appears, understands less than nothing of it, i.e., pursues an obfuscatory construction that beginning from Plato only mystifies this historical development. Plato? Popper does not, it appears, understand that Platos The Republic but also Parmenides (written toward the end of his middle period), and especially later writings, The Law and The Statesman, are a historically specific account in philosophical terms, and these are Platos terms, of the political conditions in the ancient Greek sense of the good life. Even if ancient Greek society (which had a developed petty commodity producing sector) peripherally suffered reification, the questions posed and solutions offered by ancient philosophy are, only in the most limited manner, commensurate with ours. Effectively, those questions and solutions are formed within a wholly different society, and give little clue to the aporias, impasses and contradictions that engage philosophy in the bourgeois era. In Platos case, his writings are designed to resolve a specific problem, emerging in an entirely different socio-cultural context, of his own place and time, to wit, Athens final defeat in the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), the Spartan imposition on Athens of the Thirty Tyrants and their ouster (404-403 BC), Socrates death at the hands, so to speak, of the restored Athenian democracy, and Platos flight and self-imposed exile from Athens. Plato can be considered utopian and totalitarian only in the most abstract, i.e., ahistorical and socially indeterminate, manner. Plato desired to indicate how society is governed, i.e., ruled, basing his analysis on who rules (the philosopher-king) precisely in order to, at least in principle, prevent a recurrence of what he saw as the democratic assembly-inspired tragedy of Athens (not to mention Socrates). It is only when we seek the theoretical justification for who rules that the notion of the Ideas (eide) emerges, since it is the philosopher-king that lays claim to the right to rule on the basis of insight, a seeing of the Ideas and the practical consequences this entails1

This is not to voice approval for Plato. But our critique starts from and aims at something entirely different. From the earliest priests deployed by ancient kings to modern intellectuals in the service of capitalist ruling classes, philosophizing is the obfuscatory masquerade that those who have created and hold power have utilized to mystified and enthrall, to oppress, to exploit: Plato stands in the metaphysically founded, philosophical traditions of "political theorizing" (i.e., of reflections on statecraft), the model for which is the philosopher or theorist (e.g., Aristotle and Hobbes, or Machiavelli) consulting the tyrant. Here the concern is with conditions of the possibility of Statehood, theorizing the ground of the tyrant's existence (e.g., Hobbes), or condition for the realization of "justice" as the measure of class domination (Aristotle), or again projecting the "best" state (Plato, the philosopher qua king, among statist forms, kingship as rule of the "One" being one of the most hostile to the freely constituted polity), i.e., projecting enlightened despotism. Metaphysically grounded philosophers as have left their mark on history because they have concerned themselves almost exclusively with the institutionalization of violence in human affairs, viz., with aggrandizement of the state. Plato is not only no exception, but a model in this regard, and Popper, far from having dramatically (as he thinks) distanced himself from him, share the fundamental, underlying assumption, namely, the unalterable reality and overriding necessity of the state. In this, the last regard, see this Study, Part IV, Principles of Philosophical Liberalism, above.

Fourth Study Critique of Scientific Reason Bibliographical Sources Alba, Victor (and Stephen Schwarz). Spanish Marxism versus Soviet Communism. The History of the POUM. New Brunswick (NJ), 1988 Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York, 1951 ____________. The Human Condition. Chicago, 1959 Barnes, Will. Nature, Capital, Communism. Revised edition, 2010 _________. Some Remarks on the Role of the Working Class in History in The Crisis in Nature and Society and the Working Class in History. St. Paul, 2009-2010 _________. 'Could Antarctica Melt? Revolution Imagined: Three Scenarios' and Consciousness of Class' in The Crisis in Nature and Society and the Working Class in History. St. Paul, 2009-2010 _________. Work and Speech: The Origins of Man A Short Review of Trn Duc Thaos Investigations into the Origin of Language and Consciousness. Unpublished, 2008 _________. From Metaphysics to Philosophical Anthropology: Max Schelers Mans Place in Nature. Unpublished, 2008 _________. The German World to Renewed Imperialist World War, 1870-1938. St. Paul, 2008 _________. Community and Capital. St. Paul, 20001 _________. Bolshevism and Stalinism in the Era of Imperialist World War and Proletarian Revolution (Urgeschichte). Three Studies (1979-2000). St. Paul, 2000 ________. Instinctual Deprivation, Fascism and the Fictitious Community of Capital. Unpublished, 1998 _________. Revolutionary Theories of the English Civil War (Text, Fragments and Notes). Manuscript, 1991 _________. On Truth. Unpublished, 1980 Bohr, Niels. Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge. New York, 2002 (1959) Bourrinet, Phillipe. The Dutch and German Communist Left. London, 1990 Camatte, Jacques. Community and Communism in Russia. London, 1978 Ciliga, Ante. The Russian Enigma (Au pays du grande mensonge). London, 1977 (1938) Feyerabend, Paul. Realism, Rationalism and Scientific Method. Philosophical Papers, V. I. Cambridge (Eng.), 1981 ______________. Has the Scientific View of the World a Special Status? in Jan Hilgevoord (ed.), Physics and Our View of the World. Cambridge (Eng.), 1994: 155-168 Goldmann, Lucien. The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in The Penses of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine. New York, 1964 Goldner, Loren. Communism is the Material Human Community (1992), accessible at the website, Break their Haughty Power Habermas, Jrgen. "The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964)," New German Critique, 3, Fall, 1974 Hegel, G.W.F. Grunlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Philosophische Bibliothek, Band 124. Leipzing 1911 (1821) __________. Phnomenologie des Geistes. Hamburg 1988 (1806). Based on the text of the critical edition of Hegel's Gesammelte Werke, Band. 9, edited by W. Bonsiepen and R. Heede Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Halle, 1935 (1927) "Interview with Cornelius Castoriadis." Telos, 23, Spring 1975 Kirchner, James W. The Gaia Hypothesis: Are They Testable? Are They Useful? Steven Schneider and Penelope Boston, Scientists on Gaia. Cambridge (MA): 1991 Koffka, Kurt. Principles of Gestalt Psychology. New York, 1935 Kosk, Karel. Dialektik des Konkreten. Eine Studie zur Problematik des Menschen und der Welt. Frankfurt am Main, 1971 (Czech original, 1963) Lukacs, Georgy. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectic. London, 1971 (1923) Marx, Karl. Das Kapital. Eine Kritik der Poliltischen konomie. Dritte Band, Buch III: Der Gesammtprozess der kapitalistischen Produktion. Herausgegeben von Friedrich Engels. Hamburg, 1894 ________. Nachwort zur zweiten Auflage auf: Karl Marx/ Friedrich Engels, Werke, Band 23 (Das Kapital, Bd. I), Berlin (DDR) 1968 (1873)

________. Das Kapital. Eine Kritik der Poliltischen konomie. Erste Band auf: Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels, Werke, Band 23. Berlin (DDR), 1968 (1867) ________. Zur Judenfrage auf: Karl Marx/ Friedrich Engels, Werke, Band I. Berlin (DDR), 1976 (1843) Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. Manifest des kommunistiche Partei. Werke, Band 4. Berlin (DDR), 1974 (1848) Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Perception. London 1962 (French original, 1945) Murzi, Mauro. Vienna Circle (2005). Pdf document accessed at www.murzim.net. Popper, Karl. Realism and the Aim of Science. From the Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Edited by W.W. Bartley, III. Totowa (NJ), 1983 __________. Quantum Mechanics and the Schism in Physics. From the Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Edited by W.W. Bartley, III. Totowa (NJ), 1982 __________. Conjectures and Refutations. New York, 2002 (1963) __________. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. New York, 1959 __________. The Poverty of Historicism. London, 1957 __________. The Open Society and its Enemies. Princeton (NJ) 1950 Riedel, Manfred. Between Tradition and Revolution: The Hegelian Transformation of Political Philosophy. Cambridge (Eng.), 1984 (German original, 1969) Scheler, Max. Mans Place in Nature (Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos). Boston, 1961 (1928) Schmitt, Carl. Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus. Berlin, 1923 __________. Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souverntt. Mnchen, 1922 The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle in Sahotra Sarkar (ed.), The Emergence of Logical Empiricism: from 1900 to the Vienna Circle. New York, 1996 Wilson, Edward O. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge (MA), 1975 Wolfe, Don M. Leveller Manifestos of the Puritan Revolution. N.Y., 1944

Second Interlude The tendency of the value form to expand beyond production, to abstractly unify the various rationalized institutional spheres of capitalist society and subordinate them to its logic, is a development as it becomes actual that transcends real domination itself: For, as we shall have occasion to point out, society is not production, production is not society, the historical tendency of capitalist development to reduce social relations to productive ones notwithstanding. This development introduces a new object and a new order of exploitation that we call totalizing domination. Moreover, the automatized and autonomic movement of capital (i.e., a movement that, because it is not actively challenged and, further, not abolished, appears autonomous) necessarily leads to catastrophic rupture in the fabric of earthly nature as the basic presupposition of all life, specifically, human life. In this novel historical constellation, it is not longer possible to think the object of capitalist exploitation (and potential agency of its abolition and transcendence) are productively distinct, national proletariats; it is no longer possible to think of the extraction of surplus value solely in absolute and relative terms; and it is no longer possible to think of the transformations of earthly nature that capital generates as partial, such as those achieved by the natives of North America in burning woodland areas to create grass lands, thereby transforming an ecological niche in order to attract certain types of game; or those carried out by a social class, farmers, who transformed forests into pasture land over large parts of Europe; or by small groups of different classes and social layers in production to construct dams to divert a river course or provide electricity; etc. These, and others like them, constitute merely partial, highly limited transformations. Today, however, capital is provoking changes that are altering the biosphere as a whole, changes that, within the 3.7 billion year old history of life on Earth, have hitherto taken minimally thousands of years and in some case over hundreds of millions of years, in other words, changes in the interrelated aspects of earthly nature (atmosphere-ocean, carbon and nitrogen cycles, etc.) that have always in the past preceded over geological time are now unfolding over highly compressed historical time. No form of life on Earth and, as we shall suggest, in the end that includes humanity itself is evolutionary constituted or socially and technically productive enough to accommodate or overcome, as the case may be, such a simply extraordinarily rapid pace of total, natural change engendered by capital as it has become a geological force. Starting from the movement of capital, we shall consider each of the moments and consequences of totalizing domination. Real Domination and Autonomization of Capital As we indicated above, the central societally manifest feature of the development designated as the real domination of capital over labor is the direct application of science and technology to the production process. It is this development that secures capitalism as a system of social relations and makes its progress irreversible (renewing the concept of progress, now understood strictly linearly): The very movement of capital places itself on its own foundations, i.e., capitalist development proceeds and can only proceed on the basis of what is specifically capitalist, namely, the constant revolutionizing of production, in other words, the incessant transformation of work processes by way of their regular reorganization, and of instruments and instrument-complexes such as assembly lines, sophisticated machinery, plant and building housing machinery by way of new machine inputs. In all this, capitalism has the entire history of its own development as its premise (inclusive of the necessary conditions of its original appearance in history, i.e., the alienation of property and the creation of free wage labor), and, it reproduces those premises in and through that development (that is, it patently, visibly, reproduces the most advanced moment of that development which contains congealed the entire previous development).1 In this way capitalist development becomes autonomized, i.e., that development requires no external causation, it exists on its own foundations and it
1

Antediluvian premises (e.g., the movement of money as money but not as capital) disappear... Sobald also die noch ausserhalb der Bewegung des wirklichen Kapitals liegenden Voraussetzungen des in Kapital bergehenden Geldes verschwunden sind... von denen es in der Produktion ausgeht... um sich als Kapital zu setzen zu den antidiluvianischen Bedingungen des Kapitals; zu seinen historischen Voraussetzungen, die eben also soch historisiche Voraussetzungen vergange sind... (As soon as those presuppositions of money have disappeared, presuppositions that are in the process of passing over into capital but still lie outside the movement of real capital[then] the conditions which form its starting point in production belong among the antediluvian conditions of capital to its historic presuppositions, which, as historic presuppositions and precisely as such, are past and gone.) Marx, Grundrisse, Notebook IV (Unsprngliche Akkumulation des Kapitals) in konomische Manuskripte, 1857/1858, 371-372 (our translation)... But those historical presuppositions that form the essential premises of its original appearance as part of its movement are (and, not always latently, compressed, congealed and) reproduced in the ongoing development of capital.

cannot exist apart from its own development as its own necessary premise, and it becomes automatized, i.e., tendentially absent a contravening opposition (which can only take shape as conscious agency) generated by its own development, it is self-regulating, self-correcting and reproduces itself as a matter of course. Self-correction, though, is limited, contradictory and tendentially self-annihilating: It occurs systemically, that is, on the basis of cyclical development and in particular through crisis, contraction and devalorization, which, if unchecked (lacking that conscious opposition), tendentially devolves toward worldwide social conflict (i.e., the real possibility of renewed imperialist world war) that, taken together with climate change generated natural transformations themselves grounded in the dynamics of capitalist development opens up the genuine prospects of the leveling destruction of the order of capital in its entirety The language in which this real social development is here theoretically formulated and expressed lacks any concept of a subject, that is, a conscious and volitional agent that through its action is responsible for the development. This is not a failure of words or an inherent linguistic deficiency, but conceptually captures and fixes the actual situation as it socially and practically unfolds: As conditions of real domination have more and more taken hold, as this development has become autonomic and automatic, capital itself has become the subject of society and a blind process governs societal development. The bourgeoisie no longer exercises control over its own fate or the fate of society, as society, today global, which, absent that contravening conscious agency generated by its own development (i.e., without a revolutionary proletarian transformation of society), tendentially develops toward a dual, unimagined catastrophe, imperialist world war intertwined with a climate change cataclysm. This is how the system of social relations appears. There are two decisive aspects that form this situation, historical and systemic. Historically, the bourgeoisie and science no longer have the same relation to each other deep into the era of real domination as they did as both first appeared far earlier in the era of formal domination: As we have already noted, by the middle of the long nineteenth century, the scale and the reach (geographically and societally) of strictly capitalist operations was large enough to call forth this entire novel development (real domination). But there has been another, otherwise noteworthy (and until now unnoted) feature that also reveals the inner reality of this movement (autonomization): The more extensively real domination has shaped production, alternatively, the further real domination develops in its epochal significance (i.e., not merely as the determination of capitalist production, but as a periodization in the development of capitalism that fundamentally tends to shape social reality in its entirety and its immediate natural or earthly setting, and in so doing goes beyond itself), the more that social class agency in and through whose activity capitalism originated has disappeared as a social agent, i.e., the more the bourgeoisie has been compelled as the price of its existence to assimilate, internalize and behave (no longer acting) on the basis of the logic of capital (here the logic of accumulation). As this class existence has increasingly resolved itself into a function of the movement of capital, its behavior has increasingly taken on the form, exhibiting no other content than that, of a functionary, i.e., it has come to behave in all significant social events and historical developments as a personification of economic categories, and this regardless of the individual beliefs and convictions of this or that capitalist, without regard even to the views of all capitalists aggregately. (This is emphatically not to say that capitalists or, for that matter, any other group in society are absent beliefs and convictions. It means merely what is stated, that in all social and historically significant events and in a whole lot more that are not significant, it is the internalized imperatives of capital, not those beliefs and convictions, that determine capitalists' behavior.)... What, for example, has the appearance of class strategy and creativity in open confrontations, in large scale struggles against workers, is nothing more than class reflexes, mechanical applications of tried and tested solutions to labor problems... At the moment of its triumph as it has irreversibly secured capitalist production, the bourgeoisie begins to just as irreversibly fade as historically effective societal agency. 1 It is at this
The moment from which the disappearance of the bourgeoisie as a historical agency commences can be specified as that moment at which late in the era of formal domination the real subsumption of labor under capital in production (real domination) begins to take hold in the most technically advanced industries. At this moment, among bourgeois individuals both elements those of the greatest class creativity and the withering and loss of subjectivity as a personification of capital are present. This counterposition can be seen starkly in the behavioral contrast between the Periere brothers (Emile and Isaac), men of large vision engaged in the inauguration of rail construction in Europe at the origins of real domination in production and founders of Crdit Mobilier (the creative, institutionally capitalist force in mid-nineteenth century Europe), and their nemesis James Rothchild, investment banker par excellence, absent vision, slow, reactive, adverse to risk, concerned only about building his financial empire, and of course entirely ruthless with a view to his competition (see Rondo Cameron, France and the Economic Development of Europe, 204-274, 285-325, esp. 206-207). In
1

moment the bourgeoisie, the individuals defined by this class relation as a class (i.e., as proprietors of means of production and of money wealth functioning as capital in relation to those determined only as nominally free, waged labor by their propertylessness and their capacity to labor), begins to undergo the mystifying process (mystifying because it is under impact of its own activity, its objectively determined subjective compulsion to accumulate) of losing its own class creativity, a condition that could not be more clear today in its automatic, mechanic responses to all of which exacerbate, intensify and amplify climate change... Society is systemically shaped by the autonomic and automatized movement of capital: It is a system, a functional, yet contradictory unity of various partial spheres and subsystems abstractly unified in that movement, an internally differentiated unity characterized by mutual dependency of those partial spheres,1 but a system that itself has, in the objectively necessary albeit illusory sense, become independent of the activity in and through which it is produced and reproduced. What does not fit, i.e., is not smoothly integrated as a functional element, is expelled or absorbed. (In this regard, bourgeois egoism is the prosaic glue that holds the system together.) This is not to say that there is not awareness and subjectivity surely not bourgeois in the historical sense, and unfortunately not proletarian but it is not the consciousness of class that can transform the system, abolish it as a system. Instead, it is purely personal and highly individualized, and this is what is absorbed. From the standpoint of the transcendence of capitalism, it is contemplative: As personal and individualized it is well integrated, that is, the cultivation of subjectivity of this sort the proliferation of personal needs does much to fuel capitalist development through the production of socially useless goods and services, i.e., the production of garbage, pap and swill. But it is not merely a question of the excessive, nay profligate production of trinkets and junk: If the elaboration of the critique of science, speaking pejoratively, reduces to sterile, arcane and convoluted polemics in which hardened positions clash on invitations only Internet lists (as opposed, say, to crystallizing in an analysis that, illuminating the class situation of productively significant layer of striking workers, connects with those workers), it contributes nothing to the elaboration of that consciousness of class and remains contemplative. For, again, it is only this consciousness become practical that can reorganize society, and which the movement of capital in generating its own opposition, produces, not as fact but, as a real historical possibility2 Like the capitalist who no longer, as it were, makes himself through his own activity (at least according to bourgeois legend), science is too characteristically absent foundations The revelation, though, is not sciences own (it is hidden to scientists), but has most recently been disclosed through the prolonged crisis of capitalism (1914-1945) This homology, though, is not merely formal: It is not possible for a social group to act in history, if the theory in the comprehensive sense described in our prefatory remarks to the Third Study above that mediates its activity lacks foundations, i.e., cannot be systematically related to the life of that class, that is, cannot be said to justify the role of this class in society and history both to itself and to the other classes and strata in society.

this contrast, Rothchild typically highlights the character of a bourgeois as functionary of capital. 1 Karel Kosik, Dialektik des Konkreten, 85-86. The contradictory character of the system of social relations we call capitalism is exhibited in and governs the very movement of capital. The contradictions are obviously systemic, they and their structure can be theoretically resolved, or so it appears, through analysis of the excess of capitalist claims (most of them speculatively grounded) on the total mass of surplus value as it circulates internationally. But this is an appearance only, since it is based on the understanding of this system objectivistically, i.e., solely in systems terms, and does not go to the root issue and cannot as such indicate the possibilities for its practical resolution. The same criticism holds for the understanding for which these contradictions flow from the basic irrationality of the system as it is expressed in the unhinging of the creation of real wealth from the production of value, though this manner of grasping and posing the question gets significantly closer to the real issue to the extent that the production of value, the compulsion exercised on abstract labor, implies the activity of objectively practical subjectivity, or, in the terms of reference deployed here, of living, concrete labor. It is the contradictory situation of workers as labor for capital, as abstract labor, that underlies the contradictory character of the system and underpins every phase in the movement of capital. In work and activity, we, workers, produce and in producing we act, i.e., we form ourselves as intersubjectively active, as a subject operating under a systems compulsion that, under such conditions, is simultaneously a passive object for capital: We are compelled to act, to create or innovate (in the etymologically precise sense to pro-duce, meaning to bring forth something new), i.e., to generate the means, the resources, the wherewithal to realize objectives that are alien, those of the capitalist(s), and in doing so, we form an intersubjectivity that is unitary in opposition to capital and depth-psychologically confronts it, and that, in a mass struggle against capital, generated by its, the latters very movement, pushes this precognitive understanding, forces it, into consciousness. 2 See the concluding discussion to Some Remarks on the Role of the Working Class in History.

Totalizing Domination, I Real Domination, Totalizing Domination at its Origins In the history of capitalism, productive forms of capitals domination over labor are largely coextensive with working class recomposition instituted as the outcome of struggle in major class confrontations that have ended in worker defeat In a narrowly objective, systems sense, the foundations of totalizing domination in production itself lie in the astounding productive capacity of labor, collectively, that has developed in the last one hundred and twenty years, and in particular since the end of the last imperialist world war. These foundations presuppose the injection of an extreme concentration of capitalist unity and resources, namely, the state, into the circuits of capital itself, at once to insure outlets for this amazing productive capacity and to secure the loyalty of the popular masses in society We shall come back to this But totalizing domination has its actual historical premise in real subsumption of labor under capital, in the mass worker, capital's "new man," but only as he exists the other side of the end of the upsurge of workers in the last international cycle of class struggle, and on this basis beyond the era of the big factory, stable work and high wages and, with these, on the basis of the disintegration of social life we see unfolding all around us.1 What has happened? The big factory first appeared in the twilight in era of formal domination, in large sites such as the Pulitov Works in St. Petersburg which had employed over 10,000 workers by 1902. But it was only established in workplaces, and it only signified a generalized regime of work (continuous flow production, with it the mass worker and on its basis relative surplus value extraction) pervasively found across the developed capitalist world, in the most advanced sectors (autos, farm machinery, consumer durables at sites like those of Ford, International Harvester and General Electric in the United States, in the various sites of steel production at Vereinigte Stahlwerke, Krupp and Gutehoffnungshtte in Germany, and later elsewhere) in the capitalist life and death fight against councils, workers committees, and mass organizing in the twenties, in particular in the employers offensive that followed the collapse of the revolutionary wave itself largely a response to the imperialist world war. Once generalized on the basis of continuous flow production (itself the foundation of relative surplus value extraction in its most effective, i.e., exploitative, form), the enormous surpluses generated posed, for capital and for the first time in the history of capitalism, the problem of overcapacity and overproduction as a daily reality that pervaded the organization of production, exchange and distribution (and not merely as the outcome of a lengthy phase of development culminating in cyclical capitalist crisis). This situation emerged first in the United States. Industrial union based organizing and the mobilization of thousands of workers in strikes compelled the state to provide legal sanction (National Recovery Act, 1933) to an explosion of mass activity that swept the American industrial landscape. Will nilly, to preserve itself capital, its personifications, adopted a novel strategy. Wages were allowed to rise (in order to push up effective demand), employment was reduced through public expenditure and unionization was encouraged on condition that wage increases were linked to productivity gains (a linkage that, in turn, institutionalized trade unions as guarantors of system stability). The objective, historical outcome was the development of class

International cycles of class struggle are retrospectively discernible, for the most part immediately related to questions that begin from conditions of real domination in work. They can be designated by the historical moments at which they have occurred. They are: 1904-1905, centered in Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland and European Russia giving birth to the mass strike and workers councils; 1917-1920, starting from the struggle against dilution and mass production the largest revolutionary upsurge in history; 1946-1948, appearing in the developed capitalist world in struggles against war-based production norms and suppression of workers wages (Britain, United States), against the regimes that conducted imperialist war in the first place (Italy, France), and little known against occupation regimes (Germany, Japan and Korea) for this see, Belfrage, Seeds of Destruction, David Halberstram, The Reckoning, 149-187 (mass struggle at Nissan), and Bruce Cumings, Origins of the Korean War, V. I, 295-381 and 1965-1978, particularly in the United States (producing the wildcat), in Italy (producing the autonomists) and, above all, in France (May 1968). Whether the most recent worker upsurge, 2005-2007 along the Asian industrial arc (in particular, India, Bangladesh and Vietnam), precisely because it formed in worker response to industrialization and real domination in once less developed regions in this part of global capitalism (here see Two Poles of Proletarian Activity in World Capitalism) without ever challenging, even tacitly, the order of capital, can be characterized as an international cycle of class struggle is at best debatable: For such explosions of gigantic class struggle form those moments in the history of capitalism as a world system at which it comes under the most stress, and from the perspective a potentially conscious challenge to capitals hegemony those moments at which the greatest opportunity for a breakthrough, the initiation of a movement beyond capitalism, opens up.

struggle, canalized by an emergent trade union bureaucracy and reduced to a limited struggle for wages and benefits, as the central dynamic of systems growth, i.e., of capitalist expansion, itself. In the wave of prosperity following the last imperialist world war, capital extracted a fateful series of trade offs: Union leaderships only too eager to comply, above all to secure their own bureaucratic power, then their privileges and to prove their jingoism and loyalty to capitals state, gave up organized struggle for control at the point of production in return for the wages and benefits necessary to sustain a consumerist project (and, subjectively projected, with these benefits came, among members, the efforts to fulfill aspirations and fantasies that dreamily underlay them and have remained long after the prosperity that made them possible disappeared). The daily performance of simple, repetitive, and fragmented tasks without connection to the production process as a whole under conditions of continuous flow productive work, subjectively (here emotionally-psychologically) creating a worker indifferent to the content and the activity of work, prepared the ground for this exchange, as it simultaneously prepared the ground for the sixties and seventies worker aspirations to suppress work. At the same moment capital, reacting to the threat of overproduction created by its own technical advance, has inundated us with advertising in every conceivable format and medium, with television and filmic fantasies, etc. In so doing, it has provided the material to nourish dreams of a human community in the form of imagined satisfactions of otherwise infinite longing and insatiable need. Revolt against capital, like the movement of capital itself, is not (yet) conscious, still part of capitals movement, if you will, a restless, contradictory movement that generates its own abstract negation, its own opposition The aspirations to suppress work constituted the first glimmering of historical awareness, but this opposition, the lived foundations of the last international cycle of class struggle, was defeated: Totalizing domination, then, does not uniformly characterize the entire capitalist world; it has only come into being where workers... starting from the big factory and the primacy of relative surplus value extraction... have suffered historical defeat in major class confrontations, and of course where the real domination of capital over labor has proceeded the furthest, thus only in the old capitalist metropolises. In the United States, for example, we can retrace these developments. The failure of the movements of the sixties to cohere, and in particular the failure of any of them to coalesce with a series of working class initiatives... at the level of the world starting from the gigantic upheaval in France in May 1968, these initiatives included in the U.S. the 1968 Dodge Rouge strike in Detroit, the 1970 wildcat by postal workers, the nationwide Teamster wildcat of 1970, GM's difficulties with absenteeism culminating in Lordstown Chevy Vega plant wildcat of 1972, and, returning to the global context, extending nearly the decade of the seventies with countless Italian worker actions... isolated a nascent workers movement aimed at the suppression of work from other dimensions of social struggle and thereby guaranteed it would remain merely a labor movement (i.e., a plurality of bureaucratically dominated unions, effectively if not formally controlled by the state through their integration, in the United States, into the Democratic party, seeking the best deal for labor as an object of capital). The penultimate international cycle of class struggle (beginning circa 1965) came to a close (in 1978) with the stalemated coal miners strike in the United States, and, concomitantly, the rise of neo-Right power affirmed by the defeat of the most significant reformist initiative (the Equal Rights Amendment) offered by social movements detached from workers' actions. Against this background in the United States, socially isolated, workers were beaten in series of major class confrontations fought largely as industrial struggles. These loses were, of course, the counterpart to that political reemergence of ruling class social groups of the Right, represented by Ronald Reagan who, as national Executive, sat atop the whole pile of shit. (In Britain, it was Margaret Thatcher.) The end of that cycle of class struggle together with this reemergence gave the signal for an employers' offensive announced with the PATCO firings by Reagan in 1982. Workers defensive struggles against capital, mediated by the reflex reaction of its personifications, included the losses at Greyhound, Dodge-Phelps, Hormel and Eastern Airlines in the mid-1980s, and closed with closing with defeats in the Decatur, Illinois war zone, first Caterpillar in 1992, then Bridgestone/Firestone. (In Britain, the 1984 coal miners strike was the decisive event and defeat.) The same defeats, abetted by the total abdication of union leaderships, were, so to speak, complemented by the breakup of the Soviet Union (which, in the most perverse, remnant, and ossified form, embodied an inverted and bureaucratized idea of proletarian, societal hegemony). Against this entire historical background, these losses taken together amount to a historical defeat, here, for Anglo and U.S. working classes, and inaugurated the era of the totalizing domination of capital, an era, brought into being by similar defeats, that more or less has its contemporaneous reality in other older metropolitan centers of world capitalism (in Japan and Europe).

Totalizing Domination, II Production and the Structure of Work The totalizing domination of capital over society starts from production in its most historically advanced form: Continuous flow assembly exhibits the deepening rationalization of the work processes of capitalism as moments of this process have been divided, separated and isolated, and this division, separation and isolation have been incorporated in the design and construction of machinery. On the basis of serial machinery, the unity of production has been sundered and reconstructed as distinct operations and separate tasks. Thus, in a more primitive assembly line set up one worker welds on a frame, another inserts a piece atop the frame, another attaches bolts that secure the frame and the piece together, etc. Where continuous flow production has not been automated (say, with robots performing tasks previously carried out by workers), and even where they have, we can say each worker objectively embodies a position within production borne by a someone who, for capital, is a mere functionary, one who attends to such and such a partial task. In its voracious pursuit of surplus value, capital subjects more and more once independent activities to the waged labor-capital relation, to itself, to its logic, and to rationalization, to fragmentation and parcelization of tasks. In each site of production, functions and tasks that make up work in different industries and spheres of production have historically been reunified on the basis of subordination to the logic of capitalist development (a reunification that is borne pyramidically by various management layers also as functionaries or, if you prefer, by personifications of capital). Moreover, different industries and spheres of production are unified through capitalist concentration and centralization of production, the latter by way of vertical and horizontal integration (all subjectively unified in the executive persons of top managers), and through the market. This mechanical, abstract integration of production from above and outside production itself renders it more and more difficult to identify specifically which, if any, groups of workers produce the commodities whose sale realizes surplus value; that is to day, increasingly it is labor organized, coordinated and synchronized by capital that has become the real agency in the production of surplus value, a real agency that following Marx can be identified as the collective worker (Gesamtarbeiter)... Go back to capitals voracious appetite for surplus value. The penetration of the value form into areas previously not organized by capitalist production, and their rationalization, has spread beyond the work processes, reorganizing these other dimensions of social life: As the work processes, production or what is called the valorization process the activities of labor in which capitalists extract a surplus from workers called value that is actually labor quantified as time, materialized and embodied in commodities more and more assert their primacy in relation to society, the tendency or direction over time is toward a reduction of social relations to productive ones. In other words, social relations such as between parent and child or student and teacher tend to not only find their model in the relation between wage earner and capitalist (a relation characterized by hierarchy, unquestioned authority and the capitalists power over the personage of individual workers as individuals), but social relations become more and more subordinate to the logic of the accumulation of capital (so that the rationality of decisions, say, in education are determined by efficiency and costs not by the learning requirements of students). In other words, society as a whole more and more becomes subject to this logic, to the movement of capital. To this extent that productive relations have come to dominate social relations capital accumulation (valorization) is the internal, hidden yet objective logic organizing society as a whole. It is at this moment, that at which capital tends to organize all of society according to its own requirements, that we speak of the totalizing domination of capital over society. Totalizing domination is constituted in the deeper psychological penetration, reshaping and reconstruction of the this real agency, the Gesamtarbeiter. Lets see if we can be more specific. Beyond the big factory, Fordism, mass production for socially generally mass consumption and the primacy of the production of relative surplus value, the totalizing domination of capital over society is not merely the prosaically old, capitalist economy with a view, say, to employment of waged labor, but, as we shall see, achieves something new starting from continuity with older forms of capitalist production: The networked computer with its workflow software reproduce the same workplace structure characteristic of mass production technology1 as white collar waged labor has become subject to the same continuous flow production that has its model and exemplar in the assembly line.
1

Simon Head, The New Ruthless Economy, 40-44, 85-94.

Comprehensible and describable through the analyses of two characteristic workplaces under conditions of totalizing domination, the call center and the managed care medical facility, the worksite of newer spheres of a tendentially rentier economy... which at the level of the world forms one of the two poles of capitalist development today...1 has been re-organized through the utilization of some very old capitalist techniques, by separating work processes from worker skills through careful study by restructuring engineers who decompose various aspects work into discrete activities This is, then, renewal of a dimension of capitalist rationalization of production that everywhere is pursued in the compulsion to extract surplus value generated by abstract labor, and to hasten the pace of that extraction So abstracted from the total work context, these aspects are, in turn, re-conceptualized for translation into a software program that determine tempo, pace and spontaneous content of work (through, e.g., formalization of carefully scripted dialogues with clients contacted in the call center, through computer determined staffing levels in hospital wards and route stops of drivers in public sector busing and transportation), and then mechanically re-unified in the software program that is controlled by an administrator, by managers (functionaries of capital, numerous layers of whom, with the increasingly centralization of work based dialectically on its increasing rationalization achieved digitally, are often rendered redundant or proletarianized). Embedding skill and knowledge once embodied in the persons of workers, contemporary computers with their enormous powers of measurement can now effect, beyond mere integration of different aspects of work within, for example, again the call center, integration of that center itself with purchasing, order pulling and shipping, credit issuance, billing and receivables, with the repair and servicing of consumer durables, and further with systems of worker monitoring and surveillance of operations. These have been typical features of firms that do not merely operate multi-nationally but globally, of a movement of capital production, circulation and distribution that is worldwide in nature; and, it has become more and more characteristic of firms who, adopting this model, merely function within a single region. Now the vast overwhelming majority of workers employed under conditions of the totalizing domination of capital over society are casualized, i.e., under these conditions the economy is best understood not just in terms of capitalist rationalization of work as activity, but simultaneously in terms of a recomposition of the working class as an object of capitalist exploitation.2 If computerized organization of networked work governs waged labor according to the imperatives of capital as expressed in Taylorized or scientifically managed work, as a function of totalizing domination digitally organized economic activity comes into its own in systems of worker surveillance through which not just marginally inefficient workers, but casualized work itself not too long ago considered peripheral to the dynamics of capitalist production can be integrated into those dynamics and be subject to relentless pressure and discipline to increase its productivity. Linked to the detailed scripting of call center workers or clerical workers in offices of all sorts, for example and much like the situation of nurses in the larger medical (hospital, outpatient, managed care and other auxiliary services) complexes or food service workers and retail clerks in chain operations real time monitoring allows capitals representative to focus on a workers soft skills, her warmth, amicability and civility, to determine whether her comportment creates and then reinforces the loyalty of customer to the firm employing her. While the coupling of different aspects of production and distribution (and all the various managerial structures that have been interposed within and between production and distribution with centralization and concentration of capitals) can be integrated through the same, networked and workflow software, it is arguably similarly integrated systems of worker surveillance that offer capital the opportunity to engage in a new order of exploitation, thus distinguishing, within the overall context of capitalist social relations, the activities of the rentierized economies where totalizing domination is most advanced from those of the older, disappearing mass production economy of the big factory. Here it would also be appropriate to consider the fate of the big factory.
1 2

See this Interlude, Structure of the World Economy, below. The casualized and casualization can be grasped in terms of historical contrast. In the era following the end of the last imperialist world war, American firms developed a system of hiring and promotion from within the firm that emphasized the internal development of the workforce. Characterized by promotion ladders and relatively clear rules and procedures governing workplace behavior and management expectations, the result was a relatively stable, "full-time" workforce, including wage earners, which could more or less take for granted job security and had guaranteed access to the firm's benefits programs, who in this context achieved a norm of a 8-hour day, 40-hour workweek (among workers subject to the highest rates of relative surplus value extraction often honored only in the breach). Casualized labor, on the other hand, presupposing the end of the post-war boom and the unfolding decline the old metropolitan centers of world capitalism, is characterized by the absence of full-time, benefited and stable work. Casualized labor is neither stable nor benefited. It is not organized (unionized). It is paid low wages, and is part-time, seasonal or temporary. Casualized workers regularly labor at two and sometimes three jobs. (A more comprehensive analysis can be found in The Working Class, World Capitalism and Crisis: A General Perspective.)

Take the Georgetown, Kentucky auto complex that builds Toyotas, Camrys specifically, and contrast it with a big factory, say the Ford Ranger plant in St. Paul, Minnesota. Both plants are in the United States, but this may be there only significant similarity.1 At the Toyota plant in Georgetown, production is carried out by a smaller workforce (relative to those auto plants that operated in the high era of the big factory and their remnant forms such as the Ranger plant), specifically by teams who produce a single vehicle from the starting point of assembly to completion as a finished product. This is distinctively different from the continuous flow production based on a series of specialized machines and lines such as the Ranger plant, which forces each worker to repeat the same time-motion study determined action (e.g., placing a seat in the front passage side) for the entire shift. Toyota build its auto complex qualitatively cheaper (suggesting less sophisticated technical inputs) than that, say, of the technologically sophisticated General Motors Saturn plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee built at about the same time, with lines that are not only non-robotic but were, even then, considered antiquated (and less mechanically advanced that the far older Ranger plant). Recruiting non-proletarians previously engaged in marginal agriculture work (tobacco farming), contingent workers, lots of rural folk, these participatory schemes have been effective, since the new workers, engaged in making a whole product, are not subject to the most degrading, fragmentizing effects of continuous flow production. The antiquated line and team production increase the productivity of labor, and with this increase the need for a very thin layer of skilled labor declines, particularly on the shopfloor. As a type, the worker required (and produced) in this kind of production, the Japanese call her an integrated worker, has few identifiable skill: Educationally or vocationally the main requirement is a fit with the team (in the United States, these workers are not hereditarily proletarian, they hail almost to a person from the northern Butternut belts regions, southern upcountry and cotton producing lowlands of the Civil War-Reconstruction era, that is, they are as a rule hostile to union organization, identifying themselves, not as workers but as Christians, Republicans, and part of the struggling middle class, a neat fit with paternalistic and non-union organized capitals). The skill and knowledge that is formed is collective, a product of the activity of the team; and, it, this achieved insight, can be incorporated into the physical assembly by a built-in feedback, as a member of the team, on occasion, stops the line and team members and supervisors evaluate the criticism. Thus, the requirements (and product) of work expel residue skill (in the historical sense) from the production process (holding down the remuneration of labor as a cost of production), and the structure of work and interaction allows for continuous incremental improvement that permits capital, in this case auto capital, to keep reducing its cost without novel technological inputs. There is, moreover, a flexibility that is absent in the specialized machinery based mass production line: Products changeover is, relatively speaking, far easier, can be done in qualitatively shorter time (and doesnt require a two or three week shutdown of production), more frequently and at far less cost. To boot, in a limited sense, batch (as opposed to mass) production is possible, since the line and team structure permit it and less expensive technological inputs means per unit costs do not require quantitatively massive product runs. The structure of the firm of this sort rest on further, important features that differentiate it from big factory mass production firms, starting with horizontal integration, that is, the presence on-site of component and parts manufacturers who, entirely dependent upon the great capital, do not share its ownership. To the contrary, on-site component manufacturers are always smaller, employ far fewer workers most of whom are casualized. But their presence makes possible a final, significant feature, the prompt, on demand delivery of parts just in time permitting the great capital to dispense with the huge inventories and their attendant costs that character traditional mass production capitals. Call it lean production, this capitalist activity is not just another form of the mass production that characterized the era of real domination (i.e., it is characteristic of an ongoing transition we have called totalizing domination). Here, though, what is crucial is the re-construction of soft skills, the effort to reshape personality, the development of the integrated worker.

For the following, see James Womack, et al, The Machine that Changed the World; and above all, The New Faces of Labor and Capital in the American South.

Totalizing Domination, III The Totalizing Domination of Capital over Society Here and in the next section, we shall first identify and then attempt to specify the three decisive features of totalizing domination. First, the whole of society is more or less immediately... no longer in a complexly mediated fashion... linked to production, and thereby to exploitation: More prosaically, the whole of society is directly mobilized to sustain the economy because the movement of capital, the value form, has so deeply penetrated, reorganized and reshaped society in its totality: The restructured capitalist economy with its firms predicated on casualization and lean production does not signify anything new in the sense that it goes beyond capitalism. Rather, it is novel in that it qualitatively deepens the iron grip of capital over human sensibilities. Capital no longer merely hegemonizes production and accordingly, and our era can no longer be defined merely in terms of production, as the real subsumption of labor under capital (real domination). Today capital holds society as a whole in its grasp beginning with domination of classes down to their individual moments, persons in their affective and need based foundations; hence, our characterization of the era in terms of the totalizing domination of capital over society (or, expressed differently, societies of capital). Historically and objectively, capitals response to generalized opposition itself a product of its movement, especially workers opposition, arising in the last cycle of international class struggle (1965-1978), and with its to the enormous productivity of abstract labor generated by the worldwide generalization of mass production thus, and this is the decisive feature of the entire development, the threat of overproduction and systemic crisis, collapse and devalorization as a consequence has been to integrate the individual into the order of capital, thereby to effectively remake society as a whole altogether beyond production. (Bourgeois egoism and the relentless capitalist effort to engender proliferation of endlessly diverse, minutely differentiated need structures are at the heart of this development). The movement of capital has exhibited radical development, i.e., it has taken aim, so to speak, at the root of society which the entire history of its development has produced, namely, the individual not the producer, member of the family, or the citizen, for example, as it appears in Poppers philosophically liberal theorization. These abstractions all impoverish the experience and content of daily life, and abysmally fail to apprehend the radical character of this novel form of capitalist domination... Instead, capitals movement aims at the individual in her essential sociality, as an internalized ensemble of social relations with its foundations in human need and affect, and accordingly its exploitation aims at reconstructing the essential sociality of the individual, its being as a component of the collective worker as it has formed under conditions of techno-scientific production. So, second, capital exploits the collective worker, and in so doing heightens abstract individuality. This is a dialectical development: Engaged in the work processes, in production, it is in mechanically assembling labor that capital successfully exploits it (the collective worker), but in society it is the proliferation and fulfillment of objectively homogenized needs that fuels capital's movement, that provides the motive force for its development. Thus, this movement creates increasingly vacuous individualities as abstract components of the collective worker, the needs are formally identical, differentiated only by the bare facticity of this or that I as their bearers: Totalizing domination can be understood from the depth-psychological penetration of the value form, the iron grip that capital has come to exercise over the whole person by way of the formation of human sensibilities, not just the conscious aspect even if here consciousness is practical and refers to speech and behavior. The domination of this abstract and alienated, asocial form of sociation, society, has developed through capital's invasion of the bodily substructure of a historical form of humanity (egoistic individuality) specific to capitalism, in particular, on capital's infusion and implantation into the culturally formed need structure of men and women: For it is capital itself that forms this culture that in-forms needs and interests. Needs are not anthropologically or physiologically given; instead, capital literally makes up and makes over this subjects socio-historically specific character. The penetration of the value form begins from the configuration of human needs in very, very young children, needs crystallized as, interwoven and interlocked with, and functionally depth-psychological surrogates that stand in for dearth, lacks or absences. (Thus, the term needs.) To be needy is to experience this absence, and we can say need is a negativity that compels the person to seek to fill in this dearth, lack, absence. Specifically, filling in need is overcoming the absence of uniquely affirmative love and a belonging that altogether transcends the narrow confines

of the bourgeois family. It can be seen early on in the parental substitution of sugar (chocolate, candy, soft drinks, etc.) or the visual media (especially, television) for love and affection, in the canalization of and substitution of that love and affection into buying, and in the culturally transmitted conviction (transmitted by the visual media, in musical CDs and filmic DVDS, in video games, in childrens books, etc.) that satisfactions derive from the possession and display of novelty that is purchased. At the very moment a child is mastering itself, creating its own motility and preobjective spatiality (learning to stand up upright, then walk), and in mastering itself becoming a self in assimilating speech, in forming defined affective and kinesthetic impulses the child intuitively grasps it is these canalizations and substitutions which she is to seek when feeling needy. Forms and modes of canalization (sublimation) literally take vital root, are physiologically intertwined with affects. Such absences or needs are the formative outcomes of the narrow, competitive social relations in which we are all embedded, and functioning in the context of them hardens the personality: Such social relations are parentally reproduced in and are constitutive of bourgeois, nuclear families, forming the abiding elements of their real relational content. Product of the culture of capital, this content defines itself as negativity: This negativity is lived and experienced as compulsion, as an absolutely insatiable need to consume commodities. The assimilation and internationalization of canalizations and substitutions constitutes a character-formative, repressive desublimation of those absences. (This sublimation is compulsive and it is repressive, that is to say it is affectively yoked to the reproduction of capital and its reactionary social order, because it is a reflex, i.e., needs and absences as they are generated in daily life are split off, their real significance is precognitive, the genuine absences they rest on are repressed, have never been worked through and are at best partially, often symbolically understood and unintelligibly recalled as in dreams). Need is fulfilled, i.e., incessantly requires sating, in having and possessing whatever newly appears on the market, yet this incomplete fulfillment is actually experienced as ineffable longing and dissatisfaction that, pursuing its satisfaction through the culturally available means, is yoked to the consumption of commodities. In all this capitals media spectacle is simply crucial, and it in this there is a double movement; first, capitals spectacle is the medium through which the intense desire yoked to the incessant consumption of commodities as a means of fulfillment is announced, promoted and achieved; and, second, it is increasingly and informally integrated into the state as its propaganda adjunct, affirming the eternal reality of capital and its state, and insuring mass loyalty to both. Lived and experience as such, insatiable need is the basis and the mechanism for configuring or re-structuring, as the case may be, the inner life of man in its entirety. Having insinuates itself into man as a being with needs that are formed in the social practices of humanization (here, socialization), it is precisely in the historically determined form of activity, alienated and waged labor, that the means to an incomplete and never fulfilling satisfaction must be found. Here the aim of capital becomes visible: In renewing ourselves through and as abstract labor, the systems imperative, the logic of capital executed by its personifications, is to render resistance to it, capital, wholly individual and cooptable, resistance itself commodified and marketable. This development is most fully realized among casualized layers of the working class, and it exemplifies that situation which the working class has yet to grasp, namely, that it no longer produces a culture of daily life of its own, but instead has assimilated the culture of capital mediated by the business classes Because need in this culturally specific form is insatiable, it is also compulsive; and that is what secures our incorporation into capitals orbit: Imagined for us in advertising, in mass media venues of all sorts, projected as fantasy made real (by seemingly endlessly novel developments of spectacle entertainment), its satisfaction is achieved in an aggressive, thingly cathected, reflex sublimation of abuse, wounds, humiliations, offenses, and resentments that are the regular diet, the sole steady and reliable features of life lived in all the central activity contexts of societies of capital (family, school, work, and various social venues of consumption). Capitalist practices of surveillance in the worksites of casualized workers and attempts to reconstruct workers personalities through modification of workers soft skills are seamlessly a piece with formation of workers as passive consumers in societies of capital through the mass culture of the spectacle. Similarly, that culture, biotechnology and the sciences of life as infinitely malleable genetic material underpinning it, and paternalistically authoritarian practices at all levels of the state (starting at its lower levels with municipalities, school districts and counties), are perfectly congruent with and are decisive moments of the totalizing domination of capital over society.

Trajectory of Contemporary Capitalist Development, I Gesamtarbeiter and the Struggle against Capital Third, while sites of exploitation within the labor processes are in principle identifiable, who is, or what groups of workers as groups are, exploited can no longer be specified. Instead, in the merely formal sense it is the collective worker, the Gesamtarbeiter, the various layers and strata of workers who are engaged in various forms of work within the labor processes of capitalism, who is the subject and object of capitalist exploitation: Casualization is perhaps the key development of totalizing domination. It suggests all other significant trends, in particular the growing lack of coherency of workers as a class in those regions of the capitalist world that are characterized by the domination of capital over society. As merely the contemporary form of capitalism, the distinctiveness of the totalizing domination as the form of capitalist control over society in and beyond production, and increasingly as an era in the history of capitalism, rests on the pervasive and deepening penetration of science and technology, not as inputs that are applied to production and enter into it from outside as if the modern science of nature and capitalist technology were essentially distinct, self-enclosed realities, but as techno-scientific production that is cut from the same cloth as the culture of daily life, that cloth being the order of capital that organizes science, technology, production, leisure so-called and venues of consumption, organizes society, and which, shaping daily life, ceaselessly, techno-scientifically forms and reforms the souls and bodies of those individuals, namely, us. Now, it is the figure of the casualized worker who outwardly symbolizes a symbol created by the media spectacle all these developments and personifies this capitalist culture of daily life, but capital does not start from the casualized, from the individual, integrated worker in specific worksites. It only functions beginning from its global movement, production that is international, commodities and surpluses extracted in exploitation of labor that circulate worldwide, distribution which is universal: Capital is a planetary reality in which the Earth in its entirety is incessantly undergoing re-formation as, and transformation into, a holding area of unprocessed resources for capitalist production of commodities. The labor that it exploits confronts it globally as a collective worker (Gesamtarbeiter). Casualized labor epitomizes the situation of workers under conditions of totalizing domination, but in so doing it is an outward form that masks (while in part revealing) the real totalitarian dynamic of the world economy, especially its metropolitan pole: It is the proletarianized populations of the world which are collectively mobilized for exploitation, at the heart of which is scientized work and all those auxiliary activities connected with (even mediately) and necessary to it (including masses of the casualized). Unlike the skilled labor in the era of formal domination and the mass worker of the era of real domination, in the era of the totalizing domination of capital over society, the extraction of surplus value carried out in production cannot be separated from its preparation across the various spheres of society: Capital extracts surplus value primordially (it is Urmehrwert), and this extraction is totalizing as it tends toward complete domination of moments and totality, the individuals and society as a whole.1 Production is no longer merely the object of capital; rather, needs and affect structures, psyche and body of individuals (solely as abstract class components) have become entirely objects of capital in their primal wholeness, are in the manifold activity contexts of daily life (family, school, venues of consumption and entertainment, church and military) shaped and formed to be predisposed toward exploitation by capital, and this prior to initial entry into work, so that this exploitation, is achievable in principle in all labor that is performed on the basis of the new technologies of production and, once that production achieved societal dominance, all labor tout court, whether those technologies only mediately deployed by that labor or are actually employed in and directly form it Operative at the level of the world, this at once constitutes a new object and new order of exploitation... Above we noted that the rationalization of work processes has created a situation in which each bearer of a function and each position is an isolated or abstract moment of the work processes. Effectively, each personage is objectively a Teilmensch, an element within collective work, and each position itself embodies the role and function of layers of workers within the collective worker, while production is mechanical and abstractly integrated from above and outside itself (by supervisors, managers, by machinery, by digitalized machinery, by computer software programs).
In past works, we have referred to this development within capitalism as absolute domination. This is a misapprehension of the phenomenon, since what is at issue here is the tendential direction of development: It is not finished or completed (and in principle cannot be), hence neither absolute nor total.
1

This, the growing and ongoing fragmentation of work, is one of two developments that characterize the expansion of capitalism historically and geographically once real domination in production (and, with its further totalizing development as domination of society as a whole) began to take hold. At the same time, the re-unification of partial tasks in work and society has been achieved through a pyramidal organization of labor and social processes at the top (by those very same supervisors, managers, administrators, etc.). This is the other development. It, the latter, deepens objective stratification within the work processes that are subjectively assimilated and internalized by superordinate personnel within work and society. Yet it is only within the order of capital these that objectively distinct positions within production and society are necessary moments of the division of labor. Effectively, in the labor processes these positions are generated, first, by the machine based configuration of work as processes since in their very construction those machine sensuously embody the imperatives of capital (hierarchy in the form built up in an endless rationalization peculiar to capitalism) and, second, by science through its massive inputs into production that reconstitute it as seamlessly a piece with that production, through the overwhelmingly decisive role of scientific knowledge in the very construction of machine complexes deployed in production, machines that more and more incarnate workers' skill (without the possibility of worker mastery) leaving workers deskilled functionaries performing partial tasks, and through the scientific requirement that knowledge of machines, their construction, their workings, their capacities, their raw material inputs and the processes within production they engender be embodied in still other layers of specialists, technicians and administrators, all minions of capital. In this respect, embodying capitalist hierarchy the machines themselves and science materially incorporated into them and into production are (before they are ever ideological) objectified-materialized defenses of the privileges and prerogatives of the bosses. In this respect, aimed at recreating nature as a raw materials basin and achieved through the technological processes of production, science as nature domination is inextricably tied to the exploitation of waged labor.1 Within the order of capital these objectively distinct positions within production and society form a situation that makes it, as we note above, more and more difficult to identify specifically which, if any, groups of workers produce the commodities whose sale realizes surplus value; that increasingly it is labor organized, coordinated and synchronized by capital that has become the real agency in the production of surplus value Marx calls this agency sozial kombiniertes Arbeitsvermgen, socially combined labor power or what is the same thing, mechanically assembled abstract labor, and he also refers to it as the collective worker (Gesamtarbeiter)2 Now this is a purely
1

Such is the underside of science bonded to class exploitation through it achievements (nature domination as the foundations of expansion of productive forces) that justify and strengthen capital's hold over society. (For this, see the Retrospect and Anticipation that concludes the First Interlude, above.) If a new science and a concrete technology of alliance with nature (see the Postscript, below) are essential moments of the abolition of capital, and they are, then the machines, techniques and technical processes so-called are at issue, or, more to the point, they too must be overcome, transformed, since they are inseparable from because constitutive elements of technologies of capital. This is not Luddite fantasy. It can be demonstrated through a detailed examination of the most important categories of machines, techniques and processes in the various decisive institutionally rationalized spheres of society, in production, distribution and transportation, communications, and consumption. To believe otherwise is to tenaciously hold to the conviction that it is necessary to be, in Adornos words (appropriating Baudelaire, though in both cases we could well be mistaken), absolutely modern, meaning we take our stand on the most advanced technical achievements of capitalism, those achievements form the material foundations of a genuine, general emancipation. To the contrary, it is instruments, machines and devices that can be found on the fringes of capitalist development, that are bypassed or rejected in that development (not to mention the theorizations they incarnate)... rejected precisely because their construction does legitimately portend the foundations of a development freed of capital or because its imperatives are not incorporated into them or both... that form the basis of a general emancipation. For an instantiation of this, see the final footnote in this entire work. 2 Da mit der Entwicklung der reellen Subsumption der Arbeit unter das Kapital oder der spezifisch kapitalistischen Produktionsweise nicht der einzelne Arbeiter, sondern mehr und mehr ein sozial kombiniertes Arbeitsvermgen der wirkliche Funktionr des Gesamtarbeitsprozesses wird, und die verschiedenen Arbeitsvermgen, die konkurrieren, und die gesamte produktive Maschine bilden, in sehr verschiedener Weise an dem unmittelbaren Prozess der Waren- oder besser hier Produktbildung teilnehmen, der eine mehr mit der Hand, der andre mehr mit dem Kopf arbeitet, der eine als manager, engineer, Technolog etc., der andre als overlooker, der dritte als direkter Handarbeiter, oder gar bloss Handlanger, so werden mehr und mehr Funktionen von Arbeitsvermgen unter den unmittelbaren Begriff der produktiven Arbeit und ihre Trger unter den Begriff der produktiven Arbeiter, direkt vom Kapital ausgebeuteter und seinem Verwertungs- und Produktionsprozess berhaupt untergeordneter Arbeiter einrangiert. Thus, with the development of the real subsumption of labor under capital or the specifically capitalist mode of production it is not the particular worker but rather socially combined capacity to labor that is more and more the real executioner of the labor process as a whole, and since the various capacities to labor which, in cooperating, form the entire productive machine participate in very different ways in the immediate process in which the commodity or, better, the product is formed; one more with his hands, another more with his head, one as a manager, engineer or

empirical, positivist account, one absent the deeper significance of the concept, i.e., the lived reality it refers back to, the active subjectivity on which the whole process rests, and on which it must necessarily depend: It is a strictly formal determination of the concept, Gesamtarbeit, for which collective labor is inextricably and necessary bound up with science shaping production and is constituted in the various forms of work within the labor processes of capitalism, and where Gesamtarbeiter merely refers to the various layers and strata of workers who are engaged within those processes. This determination is labor solely as it exists for capital, so many economic categories of labor power deployed in its service, and it rests on objectivistic and functional analysis and for which it is impossible to coherently affirm the possibility of the transcendence (abolition) of capital... From the standpoint of the revolutionary abolition of capital, the various fixed positions within the division of labor in capitalism constitute nothing more than moments of a functionally necessary parcelization of tasks: Anyone who has been engaged in waged labor as part of a large workforce doing highly socialized work understands class struggle is most intense at the immediate point of contact between workers and supervisors, that the latter consciously bear within themselves the imperatives of capital, that among them the disdain for waged labor rivals that of the great owners, and that supervisory personnel within capitalism (whether in labor or social life) are supernumeraries. The work supervisors, technicians and administrators do today could and will be absorbed into the activity of revolutionary councils: Where the work itself is necessary (not redundant, not destructive, and not work profligately and excessively aimed at producing garbage, junk and trinkets), the tasks will be functionally absorbed and rotated among members of assemblies and councils, carried out cooperatively (and not on the basis of hierarchy). This is not delirious fantasy, but will occur as a real movement of working class self-active, self-transcendence (proletarian selfabolition as a class and classes as such)... Under conditions of totalizing domination, the logic and movement of capital aims at recreating workers collectively in all aspects of daily life (not just in work) as mechanically assembled (aggregated) whole, but the living reality that capital begins from, that it relentlessly exploits, and that it aims to recreate is a reality quite different: This exploitation aims at the effective social murder of productively coordinated concrete living and breathing, sentient and waged human beings. As productively connected, concrete workers, capital forces us to function as socially assembled, mechanically synchronized labor-power, a socially combined capacity to labor (ein sozial kombiniertes Arbeitsvermgen)... There is contradiction at the very heart of the situation of abstract labor: In work and activity, we produce and in producing we act, we form ourselves as subjects while at the very same time rendering ourselves passive objects for capital... Absent proletarian resistance, capital reduces us to the passive side of this contradiction, collectively to an utterly insubstantial social figure, a reassembled mechanical abstraction (of which casualized labor is a mere component) engaged in the production of the total social product (capital).1 The struggle against exploitation is a struggle against this reduction. The recomposition of the working class across the world has vastly fragmented the various forms of class struggle, struggles against this reduction, against exploitation: Collective work can be found in the casualized labor of the janitor, fast food cook, and the medical and educational attendants in the metropolises; in the superexploited labor of the informal economies of the slums, barrios and shantytowns of the great cities of the capitalist periphery; in the industrial Fordist industries where they exist, in those capital intensive centers of autos in Japan, Korea, in the US South, and in the high tech export industries of Germany; in the new consumer goods manufacturing complex of Guangdong province, and the textile concentrations around Cairo and Dhaka; in informational technology-based sectors of Ludhiana and Bangalore, and their call centers and those spread across the United States; in the state and public sector everywhere, especially
technician, etc., the other as overseer, the third directly as a manual worker, or even a mere laborer, more and more of the functions of the capacity to labor are subsumed under the immediate concept of productive labor, and their bearers under the concept of productive workers, workers directly exploited by capital and altogether subordinated to its valorization and production process (our translation, emphases in original). Marx, Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses. 1 While it is the historically contingent development of abstract labor that has made a generalized human emancipation possible, it is not abstract labor that either we or Marx wish to liberate (his position... his analysis here can be contrasted to his intent... was contradictory), but the concrete worker struggling against abstraction, precisely the practical, vital, breathing and suffering human being possessed of affects and needs as we have described ourselves, not the enormous productivity of mechanically assembled abstract labor. We distinguish and oppose our concept of the Gesamtarbeiter a world class of productively connected, waged, concrete living and breathing, sentient human beings... to this productivist sense for which commitment to a vision of a free society is commitment to a highly rationalized capitalism based on unlimited progress and development of productive forces. On this, see our Nature, Capital, Communism. For Marx, see Ibid.

office workers and municipal proletariats; in university laboratories and capitals R&D centers housing lab technicians and other scientific workers; in the recently expanding industries of the old capitalist metropolis such as health care; and, among migrant workers around the world from the oilfields of Arabia to the industrial agriculture of the Californian Central Valley. In all these sites of work and types of labor, the various forms in which collective work exists are greatly splintered, broken up and isolated, as is class struggle ranging from personalized rows, quarrels over personal dignity and control of work, fights against rationalized work norms, through industrial battles, to efforts to resist capital's efforts to technologically reshape soft skills and assertions of the barest humanity against the immediate representatives of capital. Yet it is in and through these multifarious confrontations that a Gesamtarbeiter is counterposed to capital at the level of the world. A revolutionary struggle against capital is a question of whether these otherwise fragmentary skirmishes can in the course of the long drawn out crisis of capital cohere into an explicit opposition to exploitation, oppression and brutalization, that the unmediated resistance of the collective worker to capital can raise itself to consciousness and transform itself into a direct struggle for a novel councilar power. For it is only on this global terrain that the self-activity that can produce the awareness to illuminate these struggles can unfold and will become conscious of itself. Trajectory of Contemporary Capitalist Development, II Structure of the World Economy As a novel era of capitals domination in the history of capitalism, the totalizing domination of capital over society is characterized by return to cyclical development the end of the business cycle so-called, development through booms (largely based upon speculatively grounded, fictitious accumulation) and increasingly severe contraction and devalorization emanating from those regions where totalizing domination has undergone its greatest development. The system of social relations we call capitalism is, in other words, increasingly subject to determination by crisis. Within this framework, the tendential direction of capitalist development is today decidedly shaped, first, by the enormous and increasing productivity of abstract labor within the capitalist system of social relations at the level of the world, which has led to the growing expulsion of waged labor from production and inexorably to an absolute numerical decline of industrial labor relative to the total number of waged workers, and to, absent a proletarian challenge to the order of capital, the waning political weight of industrial workers within the world economy. For example, just two internationally operating firms, Caterpillar and Komatsu, manufacture and provide the vast majority of earth moving machinery for construction projects in the world today, while similarly Siemens and General Electric provide nearly all the turbines utilized across the globe in generating hydroelectric power from dams. All four firms have dismantled their big factories, all engage in far more extensive international operations, generate considerably greater volume and operate with vastly smaller workforces than in the recent past. This is characteristic of the entire situation of global capitalism. So that, in these terms, the Chinese proletariat alone is productive enough to satisfy the use value requirements of the entire world. In this sense, it is this development of the productivity of abstract labor that secures a regime of casualization and the increasing destruction of coherency of (the historical industrial core of) workers as a class. The tendential direction of capitalist development is today determined, second, by the rapacious plunder, despoliation, homogenization and transformation of earthly nature into uglified raw material basins (denuded forests, open mines, desertified grasslands, etc.) at the start of a cycle of commodity production and toxic wastelands (wetlands turned into landfills, decaying urban centers, vast stretches of ocean densely littered with plastic refuse, etc.) at the end of that cycle, i.e., with commodity consumption Return to the first determination. It is in this context that world capitalism today tendentially exists at two poles. At one pole, there are the old metropolitan centers of the system now downsized and hollowed by the past four decades of restructurings and outsourcings, centers that have tendentially become rentier economies, centers that are at least in part financed by the underconsumption of vast proletarian populations outside the metropolises, centers that, like so much else in capitalism, are undermining the very biospheric foundations of life on Earth, centers wherein the consumption, often profligate, of middling and increasingly narrower and narrower layers among metropolitan proletarian populations form by and away the largest markets in the world for a system of social relations whose legitimacy increasingly, and contradictorily, rests on its extraordinary capacity for commodity production This consumption in turn rests on a hidden technological dynamic already mentioned and to which we

shall shortly return... Fully habitualized to capitalist production, situated in this socio-economic context that is tendentially but in a decisive sense rentier, the industrial proletarian cores of the old metropolitan centers of capitalism have subjectively and objectively largely been destroyed... In the United States, casualization, unemployment and lumpenproletarian activities account for nearly two thirds of an actually and potentially waged workforce, active proletarian layers such as nurses and municipal workers form significantly less than one in twentyfive waged workers, and that traditional core is no longer capable of storming the heavens. As determination of the global capitalism is more and more subject to cyclical development and crisis, within the old metropolitan regions of the world system, financial groups within ruling classes increasingly dominate specific national states. (Dialectically, there is a double movement, the financialization of the state and the statification of financial capital, which is more and more carried out through internationally constituted organization of financial capitalist unity.)1 This hegemony insures the continuing accelerated subjugation of even the most remote aspects of nonproductive activity (in the capitalist sense) of various institutionally distinct realms of society to determination by the movement of capital and subordinate to the law of value under conditions of totalizing domination. At the other pole, there is the productively engaged, recently emergent industrial complex of East and South Asia. If we consider this new industrial center of gravity we can note a roughly semi-circular arc that stretches along the Asian continental coastline from the Korean Peninsula in the north and east to the Indian subcontinent in the south and west. That arc, call it the Asian industrial arc, more or less begins at Seoul at one end and more or less ends at Bangalore at the other end. In between, we find the major industrial centers, cities and regions that include Ulsan (Korea), Shanghai, the Pearl River between Guangzhou (Canton) and Shenzhen (i.e., Guangdong province), Singapore Saigon and Bangkok, and Dhaka and New Delhi, and so on. To either side, but especially to the south and east, secondary and tertiary zones (e.g., in Jakarta, Colombo) exist as elements of the chain of suppliers to the central industries along the arc. A twofold productive center is constitutive for this arc, namely, those sites at which non-hegemonic, subordinate imperialist foci of world accumulation that rival the dispersed U.S. and European centers have emerged. They consist in, first, a line that runs from Hong Kong-Taipei in the south to Osaka-Tokyo in the north, and, second a competing center of accumulation just the other side of the East China Sea along a line that runs from Shenzhen in the south to Shanghai in the north. All those centers of contemporary industrial production that do not fall directly along these lines whether textiles in Dhaka, computer electronic components in Saigon, autos in Bangkok, etc are integrated in contradictory fashion with it, either as suppliers of industrial components or a competitors in the markets of the capitalist world.2 Behind these centers (and forward of them as the arc in the south begins its bend westward), a vast rural hinterland is populated by peasants and tenants, petty capitalist farmers, even numerous groups of isolated and scattered peoples without developed agriculture existing largely outside the state systems of the region. In these regions agricultural foodstuffs and industrial raw materials are also produced, feeding the populations and the factories of the major metropolitan centers along the arc, the palm plantations of the provinces northwest of Jakarta in central Sumatera, the sugar plantations of northern Luzon and Layte in the Philippines, in Central and West Kalimantan province in Borneo and elsewhere in the archipelago where coffee, rubber and tea are produced, on plantations in Malaysia and Thailand where rubber is produced, in large estates in Bengal and Assam, northeast Indian provinces where tea is produced, and in Kerala in south(west) India where both private and state-owned plantations produce rubber, tea, coffee and cardamom; and, on numerous estates in Moneragala and Dickoya producing rubber and in Pussellawa in Sri Lanka where tea is produced. All of these agricultural products are processed on site or in factories in locales within the countries where production takes place as part of that chain of suppliers. The free peasants that occupy lands behind and in front of the arc (e.g., in Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, etc.) are ceaselessly being dispossessed of their lands, their village communities destroyed, they transformed into free (waged) labor employed in industrial export processing and assembling sites in order to makes way for developers intend on providing housing and venues of consumption for sprawling megacities, hotels and restaurants for tourism, in order to accommodate logging concession and then planting monocultural crops. In all this, mostly militarized
This is not, however, state capitalism. See our State Capitalism: Theses. Within this pole of capitalist development, the regions industrial dynamism has created demand for raw materials and industrial inputs that have dramatically accelerated a secondary re-industrializing capitalist development in different parts of the world (Australia, Brazil, Chile, Canada, which is also accelerating the kinds of ecological destruction, in the Amazon and in and around the Arctic Circle, that is enhancing warming induced climate change).
1 2

states insure capitalist development is pursued with a vengeance, that nature destruction is carried at a maximal frenzy, that any resistance where it forms is ruthlessly crushed. The two poles of capitalist development are inextricably linked, they are not loosely bound together, by the Taiwanese, Korean and Chinese coastal export industries which have been central to this entire development... already by 1995 a full 80% of the industrial proletariat in the world could be found in East Asia... 1 and whose primary purpose has been the manufacture of consumer goods for the old capitalist metropolitan centers in the West (United States, Britain and Europe) and Japan. As these news sites of capital accumulation have taken shaped and developed, especially as the various recently formed secondary centers of industry and component part producers have formed, and as a very old plantation agriculture has been fully integrated into the arc, the entire historical process marked by the dismantling of the big factory mass production complexes of the old metropolises has become irreversible: Leading this development, the U.S. economy as a whole has been transformed from the worlds industrial center and locomotive to a formation based, most importantly or so it appears, on financial services, insurance, real estate, and entertainment for which the creation of fictitious financial assets, taken together with middle strata consumption, seem to be decisive, but veil, as we said, a hidden technological dynamic not infrequently based on undersized capital intensive productive units (relative to the big factory) and small workforces. In contrast to Fordist industry based upon relative surplus value extraction (as it once existed in the old capitalist metropolises and as it exists especially along the East Asian industrial arc), today productive dynamism also takes another form that is perfectly compatible with, nay demanded by, wholesale casualization of proletarian populations and rentierization of individual national economies taken separately, abstractly. At the same time, it is important to recognize that technological dynamism (specified in a general way immediately below) does not stand outside of but is integrated with mass production industries along the Asian industrial arc (as well as industries that are throwbacks to forms of exploitation that predate real domination). In this regard, it is also necessary to note that rentierization is perfectly compatible with pockets of regional re-industrialization (as in the American Old South where the auto industry has undergone a renaissance of sorts by way of investment largely by Japanese capital.) Technological dynamism today is realized in a novel productive-societal elaboration,2 technologies of capital based on massive scientific inputs to production that take the specific forms of telecommunications and informational (at the core of which is software development), materials (incorporating engineering as well applied physics, and including composites, ceramics, nanotechnology products and micro devices) and biogenetic (including medical laboratory) technologies. There is no primary technology at the heart of this development. They are fully integrated as each form deeply penetrates the others and none is possible without the others,3 and this elaboration is fully consonant with, is a seamlessly a piece with the primal form of exploitation that characterize totalizing domination and the functionally totalitarian political form that has emerged along with it Largely militarily driven, this novel technological complex is the foundation of U.S. hegemony in the world system of social relations. But it is a hegemony threatened by growing competition as the great U.S. based capitals no longer have the resources to engage in long term research and development and as the U.S. state itself is more and more compelled to limit the same in its efforts to militarily maintain that hegemony and both to finance its own failing social system (decaying infrastructure, massively subsidization of entire sectors such as agriculture and banking, climate change induced destruction of urban landscapes) and to secure the financially based power of the dominant ruling class social groups (wholesale banking bailouts, interest on a ballooning national debt) If the structurally significant components of the system of social relations on a world-scale exist, as we think, at different moments (eras) in the history of capitalism (world history itself remains the arena of not-fully-synchronized histories of the periodization of capitalist domination), and the old metropolitan centers are subject to the totalizing domination of capital over society, then the new centers of accumulation of world capitalism in East and South Asia as a whole can at once be situated in the twilight of formal domination (in agriculture) and the advent of real
1
2

World Development Report 1995, 170. For a more extensive discussion, see the Conclusion to The New Productive Landscapes of Capital. 3 For example, the sequencing of gene (bio-technology) presupposes powerful computers and sophisticated software (information technology) to construct the sequence, novel plastics and metal alloys that exist nowhere in nature (materials technology) to construct the extraordinarily miniaturized instruments and devices (such as microscopes and cameras) and to carry out the actual operations of laboratory work, to visit the real sensuous correlate (a gene) that forms the actual basis of ideal sequencing.

domination of labor by capital (in industry), as they simultaneously entertain totalizing domination through capitalist exploitation based on the most technologically advanced forms of collective work.1 Yet in those old metropolitan regions of world capitalism where development of totalizing domination has gone the furthest, the penetration and reshaping of production by science and technology has developed to such an extend that it appears to rest on its own foundations. This is, of course, a development that rests on real domination, that is, on the autonomization of capital. But today it is technologies, not industries, which are at the center of this novel productive-societal elaboration. These technologies, in turn, have reshaped the very basis of production in the objective sense, transforming the form and content of the means and instruments and instrument-complexes of production. But it is not merely a question of the shape and material of capitals productive forces, since totalizing domination goes beyond the other, historical forms of capitalist control of labor: It aims at the production (recreation) of humanity and humanized nature as objects of exploitation as such, more specifically, at rendering humanity incapable of conscious resistance, at reducing revolutionary action to mere revolt, through implanting in, making and remaking, human beings as depth-psychologically heteronymous, personally sensitive and self-indulging subjectivities that realize themselves through the consumption of commodities, which, because they have been formed as existentially dependent personalities, can only function in the context of paternalistically authoritarian social relations. To this end, totalizing domination objectively and historically also aims at removing from, obliterating in, nature all traces of humanized otherness... In this respect, it has dramatically reinforced unfolding and accelerating climate change catastrophe Trajectory of Contemporary Capitalist Development, II The Contemporary Impasse: Intertwining of Capitals Movement, Ecological Catastrophe and a Climate Change Cataclysm There is a genuine confusion that is endemic to all forms of thought for which humanity and nature are counterposed. It is objectively grounded in the structure and organization of a society in which capitalist built environment is so massive and immediate that surrounding nature disappears, appears only in humanized landscapes, and reappears in its more elemental forms, as we are fond of saying, only in the visual media of the spectacle. This confusion is exhibited in the view that the crisis of value (capital) is somehow distinct from the reduction of earthly nature to raw materials basin for capitalist production of commodities. They are not. Both the crisis of value and the transformation of nature as an uglified sink of destructured, unprocessed matter are grounded in the same dynamics of capitalist development. From that moment at which real domination began to effectively hold sway over the world, capitalism has and can only develop through technological-scientific inputs that destroy natures substance and recreate it as homogenized, unrefined and unfinished resources and materials, a standing reserve, to provision capitalist production. Capitalist development proceeds by way of the disruption, dislocation and in all cases tends toward destruction of the selfcohering, self-regulatory character of earthly nature (rising atmospheric CO2 and CH4 levels, poisoning in the form of acidification of the oceans, shutdown and shift in locale of thermohaline circulation which has already begun). Capitals representatives lack the class creativity and have proven unable to even adequately pose, much less take up, climate change issues. Without the revolutionary proletarian overthrow of capital, and the establishment of a global (i.e., councilar) framework in which these problems can be addressed, among them not only climate change but those endemic to capitalist civilization (massive wealth inequality, famine and starvation, national rivalry and conflict issuing in xenophobic mass murders and genocide, etc.), a radical, thoroughgoing natural transformation will ensue reducing human populations, social development and objective substance (productive forces, urban landscapes, material and intellectual culture) below a level that made these developments possible and without any of the resources in nature on which they were originally based. This simply astounding productivity of technologically mediated, abstract labor reduces turnover times and the period of a developmental cycle, so that within each cycle resources are voraciously consumed at a pace that is rapidly outstripping the rate of technical innovation within capitalism required to shift the earthly resource base away from hydrocarbon fossil fuels and create a new order of raw materials on which the entirety of capitalist development can
And of course with this development comes casualization, no longer socially ubiquitous in the old metropolitan centers but in the new ones also. A single example is germane here: By the end of the year 2007, a full 60% of the Korean working class had been casualized. Figure provided in Loren Goldner, The Korean Working Class.
1

rest. it is increasingly manifest that technical innovations within capitalism will not keep pace with that change, and capitals sciences and technologies are not capable of addressing it in its scale and complexity What is described by the term voracious resource consumption has created a situation within earthly nature in which the latter is homogenized, reduced to uglified raw material basins described above. This ecological catastrophe, which includes within it, ongoing, the sixth mass species extinction in the nearly four billion year old geological history of life on Earth - a biological regression reversing tens of millions of years of natural evolution and undermining the basis of life (and specifically human life) itself - is unfolding within the still broader context of global climate change itself occurring at an extraordinarily rapid pace (historically as well as geologically). The initial onset of rapid climate change it is height of folly to think that it is not already underway which has occurred in the past in transitions from glacials to interglacials, is characterized today as in the geological past by what is media spectacularly deemed extreme weather (increased intensity of cyclonic and hurricane storms and the tornadoic events they spawn, increased frequency of drought and wildfires, unseasonable amounts of precipitation and periods of severe cold and intense heat, major flooding all from region to region and within regions, etc., generally, increasingly elastic seasonal weather regimes together with disappearing seasonal weather patterns), but promises much more: In the coming decades, as the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps melt, rising sea levels (as much as seventy five meters) will drown every major urban coastal metropolis in the world from New York to Shanghai and inundate, rendering useless, every acre of low lying agriculturally productive land contiguous with oceanic waterways. Glacial melts at mountainous altitudes across the world will reduce runoff in the great rivers of the world from the Andes and Rockies to the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau and turn once lush agricultural regions along those rivers in Peru, the United States, Pakistan, Vietnam, Cambodia, China and elsewhere into arid and desertified basins. By the time they reach 6 C (10.8 F), rising temperatures will make life unbearable within todays temperate zones compelling population movements into the higher latitudes. In the face of this what, to the contrary, characteristically exhibits the tendential direction of contemporary development of capital is the creation, enlargement and refinement of technologies of social control, and their integration with that aim, the social control of underlying, especially proletarian, populations In respect to this developmental direction, scientific integration into production is vastly accelerated, the dominance of capitals state over science has and continues to rapidly increase and science itself further continues to be reduced largely to a project of creating and refining technologies of capital The very fact that biogenetic, informational and materials technologies form the most dynamic societal productive complex within contemporary capitalism elegantly speaks to the issue at hand: The elaboration of the means and wherewithal of a novel type of totalitarian control signifies capitals retrenchment. The operative ruling class assumption is that is it necessary to pour societal resources into preparation for a maelstrom of social change (generated by natural change). These resources, societal wealth, are neither intended for nor aimed at meeting and curtailing the most dangerous effects of climate change. Over the coming decades, our situation will, absent a proletarian overthrow of the order of capital and the creativity of this potential class subject (a creativity organizationally incarnate in the council as the only social form that can in principle formulate, pursue and coordinate a global response to climate change), further worsen: The regimentation and repression of domestic working populations will be qualitatively racheted up to assure conformity with warming required, harsh restrictions on energy usages of all sorts; drought and famine, enormous pointless death; depopulation of coastal areas around the world, dislocation and forced relocation; creation of huge frontier zones and camps of displaced, homeless persons along national borders at this point the reality of surplus populations will become acutely problematic for capital refugees in the tens and perhaps hundreds of millions abandoned, living in filth and squalor without hope; resource wars between states, ethnic cleansing and genocides as a regular feature of daily life. A climate change catastrophe will make access to resources immensely more difficult, disrupt production of agricultural foodstuffs and introduce undependability and far greater infrequency into their production as well as that of industrial raw materials, will place demands that cannot be met on the infrastructural foundations of capitalism which capitals movement at once produces and which capital requires to reproduce itself on an expanded basis. As they unfold, all these problems, qualitative, utterly novel and unprecedented, will heighten inter-imperialist rivalries, tensions and struggle. Climate change is and will continue to dramatically narrow the basis in earthly nature for human activity in its contemporary capitalist form to a point from which it cannot be sustained.

Second Interlude Bibliographical Sources Barnes, Will. The New Productive Landscapes of Capitalism. Forthcoming __________. Nature, Capital, Communism. Revised edition. St. Paul, 2010 _________. Some Remarks on the Role of the Working Class in History in The Crisis in Society and Nature and the Working Class in History. St. Paul, 2009-2010 _________. The Working Class, World Capitalism and Crisis: A General Perspective in The Crisis in Society and Nature and the Working Class in History. St. Paul, 2009-2010 _________. State Capitalism. Theses. Unpublished, April 2009 _________. The New Faces of Labor and Capital in the American South. Unpublished, April-June 2007 _________. Two Poles of Proletarian Activity in World Capitalism. Unpublished, Dec 2006-Jan 2007 Belfrage, Cecil. Seeds of Destruction. The Truth about the US Occupation of Germany. New York, 1954 Cameron, Rondo. France and the Economic Development of Europe, 1800-1914. Princeton (NJ), 1961 Cumings, Bruce. Origins of the Korean War. Vol. I: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945-1947. Princeton, 1981 Goldner, Loren. The Korean Working Class: From Mass Strike to Casualization and Retreat, 1987-2007, 2007. Accessed online at Goldner's website Break Their Haughty Power Haberstram, David. The Reckoning. New York, 1986 Kosk, Karel. Dialektik des Konkreten. Eine Studie zur Problematik des Menschen und der Welt. Frankfurt am Main, 1971 (Czech original, 1963) Marx, Karl. Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses Das Kapital. I. Buch. Der Produktionsprozess des Kapitals. VI. Kapitel. Frankfurt, 1969. Accessed online at www.marxarchive.org. (Archiv sozialistischer) ________. konomische Manuskripte, 1857/1868. Marx-Engels Werke, Bd. 42. Berlin (DDR), 1983 Head, Simon. The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age. Oxford (Eng.), 2003 Womack, James, Daniel Jones and Daniel Ross, The Machine that Changed the World. New York, 1990 World Bank, World Development Report 1995: Workers in an Integrating World. New York, 1995

Fifth Study The Role of Life in Planetary Death Darwinian and Malthusian Mystifications in Capitals Sciences of Climate Change Galileo and Aristotle, Malthus and Darwin and Ward? Peter Ward operates with a view to underlying assumptions, coherency and theorization at level far, far below, qualitatively so, those genuine thinkers for that matter far below Dobzhansky, Margulis and Popperreferred to in the opening sentence of this Study. So why this Study in the first place? There are three reasons. First, this work in an entirety logical manner culminates in a discussion of climate change, and, starting from the modern science of nature, of those sciences that are in the vanguard of the investigation of this change. Second, it is precisely natural science itself that has under conditions of real domination (i.e., under conditions of its intimate, internal and necessary linkage to capitalist production) played a large and fateful role in the inauguration of climate change. Third, and not as remote from the immediacy of the concerns tacit in the first two reasons as it may appear, the level of analysis achieved (it is abysmal) by Ward validates an aspect of our analysis of the movement of capital, the growing incoherency of the bourgeoisie, here an important layer of its scientific intelligentsia, in confronting the problems of society in the face of what we might call first order natural transformation, namely, climate change. This discussion, then, is an extended, critical study of Peter Wards The Medea Hypothesis, itself a statement of the politics of a growing section of capitals scientific climate change community. So there is a final, fourth reason for this Study as it reiterates, further elaborating, the critique of science in its necessary, internal relation to capital: Assuming the unavoidability of massive, global climate change, the aforementioned politics, entailing planetary geoengineering as stopgap to salvage capitalist civilization, are predicated on a reactionary Malthusian perspective of overpopulation (with its claim of necessary, insatiable demands on inelastically finite resources) and outline a vanguard position within the order of capital. It a position that reaffirms the science and technologies of capital, and it tacitly accepts the totalitarian regimentation of social life to preserve this order. Now obvious, recognition of the role of humans as an undisputed, decisive force shaping the landscape and topography of the Earth manifest in urban mega-metropolises cities of slums, massive diversions of waterways, pollution of oceans, groundwater and terrains, more mediately in atmospheric pollution transforming the carbon cycle and heating the Earth has given rise in the past three decades to systematic research and a series of reflections, both often scientific in character, that come together around the problematic of climate change. In this regard, Wards book does not begin to rise to the level of reflection of those scientists, theoreticians and philosophers who were have queried and examined in the first four studies. It is a conceptually crude analysis that nonetheless attends directly to the central issue of our times even if it is not at this moment recognized as such one on whose outcome depends the very fate of by far the greatest number of forms of life on Earth not as they have developed over the past fifteen to twenty millennia years but starting roughly 55,000,000 years ago, the fate of modern, global civilization (capitalism) and perhaps even the very fate and destiny of humanity. This, the Fifth Study appears here in order to address and confront these issues, as well as the framework for understanding and explaining them If we set aside the disclaimers abounding in the media spectacle, within the scientific climate change community there is virtual unanimity, first, on the reality of, and second, as to causation and the agency of climate change. It is anthropogenic (a designation the genuine meaning and significance of which we shall in due course correctively specify).1 Within this community there have also been efforts, far fewer in number, to understand ongoing and unfolding climate change within a broad, geological-developmental and underlying framework, that of Earth history itself. Probably the only, a well known, relatively coherent paradigm to develop in the course of this research is called Earth system science Programmatically, this is an orientation within the order of capital, Lovelock a bourgeois scientific theorist It has emerged in the past fifteen years, largely from the work of James Lovelock, and with him (though to a lesser extent) Lynn Margulis. While Lovelock is occasionally characterized as romantic and speculative (largely by those who are unfamiliar with his work), among colleagues both he and Margulis, an atmospheric chemist and a microbiologist respectively, are highly esteemed, reputable scientists. Lovelocks name is inextricably tied to a theoretical position on the nature of the Earth he originally put forth, an anti-reductionist theorization for which the Earth, sometimes known as Gaia, is considering an evolving totality of physical, chemical and biological relations, events and processes, a self-regulating system of relations in which life itself plays a central role, and which aims at
1

See, below, this Study, Part II, Anthropocentric Climate Change?

habitability. More precisely and concisely, this theorization holds that the temperature and the gaseous constitution of the Earths atmosphere are ordered by the life in its entirety, especially microbiotic life, of the planet at its surface.1 Within societies of capital, the culturally hegemonic form of knowledge, understanding and practice vis--vis surrounding, earthly nature is guided by the modern, bourgeois science of nature (largely taking its point of departure in Galilean physics over four centuries ago), for which nature is essentially dead, inert matter, shapeless extension and, in our terms, raw material for the production of a world of commodities. Lovelocks work, on the other, has lent credence to the conviction that earthly nature is not dead, formless matter; it has, moreover, spawned a cottage industry of authors, authorities of various repute, that have sought to cash in, as it were, on the vast, diffuse anxiety, rising from unease to outright hostility, toward capitalist civilization, its science(s) of nature and technologies of capital. Within the scientific community there is both agreement with and opposition to Lovelocks theorization, but, at least until very recently, there has been little in the way of a systematic attempt to undercut what, sometimes derisively, is called Gaia theory. Peter Wards The Medea Hypothesis is just such an attempt.2 Wards work provides us with a clear view of the basic assumptions that animate contemporary scientific theorizations of climate change, the range of assumptions that underpin scientific thinking about the history of the Earth, and within this dual context the role and prospects of humanity specifically, life generally, on Earth. What, for us, stands out the most about Wards effort, especially in the formulation of that range of assumptions, is the continuity between his position and those (starting from Lovelock) who purport to being engaged in a different sort of analysis, and as such operating with a different set of assumptions. Not so. These assumptions are at home in a world of capitalist production. While societally dominant, they, these assumptions, are not neutral, are in the fundamental sense theoretically incoherent, yet are cultural expressions of a world vision specific to and pervasive within the order of capital as it careens toward a grand civilizational cul-de-sac. For us, the opposition between

Lovelock has made several observations in this regard. First, starting from a scientific reconstruction of Earths existence over eons (billions of years), he noted that the average temperature of Earths surface has remained more or less stable over four billion years, while, in fact, given the suns increasing luminosity over the same period, about 35%, that temperature should have risen a like amount. It has, though, remained within a range of 5C to 25C without ever reaching a boiling or a freezing point. Whether the Earth has undergone glaciation or tropical extremes, it has never become an unfit place for life. Second, the same reconstructions indicate the Earth has for an indeterminate period something less than the past two billion years had a roughly 20% oxygen atmosphere. An atmosphere at 21% or greater oxygen composition would result in spontaneously combusting wildfires at Earth's surface; below that level, the diversity of life as we know it, and have known if for at least the past 540 million years, could not exist. At the same time, equilibrium chemistry tells us an atmosphere with a 20% oxygen content should not be able to co-exist with the other major, a highly reactive gas, nitrogen, and minor ones as well, methane, ammonia and carbon dioxide. This is not a question of degree, for these other gases (gases other than oxygen) exist in Earths atmosphere at several order of magnitude of what they might be otherwise expected. For example, methane and nitrogen are explosively reactive; oxygen and nitrogen (which forms 78% of the atmospheric gaseous composition) at these levels could be expected to react and form large amounts of nitrogen oxides that are poisonous. They dont. We know, further, that the photosynthetic activities of plants, and especially microbiotic life algae and bacteria take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and, in life and death (and decomposition), store it, skeletally as animal shells (among oceanic planktonic calcifiers) or in compressed form (e.g., coal), eventually (over millions of years) to be returned to the atmosphere. We also know that over hundreds of millions of years the production of atmospheric methane has been controlled by microbiotic organisms (methanogenic bacteria). What Lovelock concluded was that on this basis and other similar systems of cycling of gases in which life forms are directly involved material exchanges that extends to liquids (oceans) and solids (landmasses as in weathering, see below) is that life on Earth responds to changes in the atmosphere increasing solar luminosity over time, the initial generation of oxygen on Earth three billion years ago and secures its own existence by maintaining a relatively constant temperature that effectively results in habitable planet at the surface. Criticized for the teleology alleged to inhere in such a perspective (Lovelock has always argued there is no conscious agency or intent in the relations that constitute the various partial systems that are earthly nature), Lovelock with Andrew Watson (one of his former graduate students) countered by producing a cybernetically conceived mathematical model of planetary temperature regulation. It is called Daisy World. It is based on a singular life form, daisies of two species, white and black. White daisies as white reflect sunlight, black ones as black absorb. The model demonstrates that growth of these plants, simply in respond to sunlight (too much or too little), produced temperature ranges within a narrow band that renders this simple model atmosphere dynamically stable, fit for life (here the daisies), merely as a product of well-known biological properties as organisms. No teleological imputation is necessary. See James Lovelock and J.P. Lodge, Oxygen in the Contemporary Atmosphere; James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, Atmospheric Homeostasis by and for the Biosphere: The Gaia Hypothesis; and Homeostatic Tendencies of the Earths Atmosphere; James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life; and Andrew Watson and James Lovelock, Biological Homeostasis of the Global Environment: The Parable of Daisy World'. 2 Peter Ward, The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destruction?

Gaian and Medean hypotheses is false, articulations within a perspective that linearly and technological projects the eternality of underlying social relations of contemporary societies of capital. Here, we shall exhibit this by way of a critique of Wards book. We shall proceed in three parts. A first part will summarize Wards argument and discuss the incoherency of its underlying, explicit assumption (axiomatically Malthusian, evolutionary in Darwinian in form) and the evidence he brings to bear on his assertion that life on Earth is fundamentally Medean. Stating what the second part consists in, since it already presupposes the first, requires more elaboration. As we indicated, it is anthropogenic warming so-called that in the broad cultural sense has provided the overall context in which discussions of this sort have arisen. To justify the position that Ward takes with regard to the solution he proposes to climate change warming, he is, peculiarly in our view, driven to a statement of the fundamental problem with earthly life, its tendency to reduce the atmosphere to a composition that will not support life. There is a disjuncture here (between the immediacy of an impending, anthropogenically generated climate change catastrophe and the death of the Earth some 500 million to 1.5 billion years in the future), but in a critique that proceeds immanently well just have to tease out how Ward more or less bridges the gap. So in the second part of this essay we shall consider both that fundamental problem and the relation of humanity to his characterization of life as Medean. A briefer third part, the concluding section, is offered. In it, by way of a return to Malthus and Darwin we situate The Medea Hypothesis as cultural product and ideological statement within contemporary societies of capital, and describe the positions both forth by both Ward and his Gaian opponents (as he would have them) as the world vision and prescriptions that underlie and attempt to justify the societal project of a ruling class that can do no other than articulate the self-preserving strategy of capital it personifies within the contemporary, historical world.

Part I Life on Earth in its Medean Aspect As one might expect, contemporary astrophysicists pay a lot of attention to stars. Among other things, these scientists have constructed a sort of phenomenology of the life of various stars, an account of the primary types of stars, the dynamics devolving in different phases or stages of typical stars life cycles arranged according to luminosity and temperature (entailing different atomic compositions, masses, and longevities). It centers on main sequence stars and, with some exceptions (supergiants, red giants and white dwarfs), it constitutes a classification that encompasses the greatest down to the smallest stars. Our, the Earths, sun is a class G star, which makes it a moderate sized star or, more precisely, puts it on the lower end of the middle of this classificatory scheme.1 The overall life of our sun is roughly ten billion years. Currently it is about half that age. According to this account, stars do not burn evenly throughout the course of their life cycle. This includes our sun. The sun burns hydrogen and, in burning it, it fuses hydrogen atoms into helium ones (fusing two single proton atoms into a single atom with two protons). Gradually, that is, over billions of years, the hydrogen at the stars core gets converted to helium, to the point at which the stars helium core is roughly 10% of its mass. But at this point the temperature within star is not hot enough to fuse helium atoms. (It takes far more energy to force four identically charged protons together than just two.) Because there are no nuclear reactions at the helium core, and since the surrounding hydrogen envelope is nonetheless not as hot as that core, the core contracts leaking radiation (protons) into its envelope. The core contracts as a result of this leakage, and subsequently the pressure of the contraction causes it to heat up. Helium atoms begin to fuse The hydrogen immediately surrounding the core forms a shell around it and, in fusing, increases the mass of the helium core which continues to fuse but not enough to prevent continued contraction: As a result of the increased interactions in the central region of the star, the core now emits more radiation: It has become more powerful, more luminous. Deposited, as it were, in the outer envelope, the extra radiation emitted from the core pushes this envelope outward. Thus, the star expands (to a red giant). The core continues to contract, heating up more, perhaps fusing helium atoms into unstable beryllium (heating up eventually to as much as 108 K). Toward the end of this cycle, perhaps about 4 billion years from now, the suns diameter will expand to encompass the orbits traced out by Mercury and Venus, and then Earth, which will be incinerated. Long before this, current estimates suggest about two billion years from now, the growing intensity of the sun as it burns will evaporate the oceans. The system of relations we call earthly nature, already under tremendous stress from increasing solar insolation (having risen about 33-37% since the origins of the Earth), will collapse and life will no longer be possible Not part of Wards presentation, this account is nonetheless presupposed: For, according to Ward, long before the Earth burns up as a consequence of the end of the cycle of the suns existence, life on Earth will become untenable, nay impossible. The Argument This is a short book (166 pages excluding bibliographical references but inclusive of diagrams, charts and an introduction with roman numeral pagination), and it could be far shorter, perhaps by as much as half: The argument is padded with two early discussions, one concerning the character of possible non-Earth life, an entire chapter on evolutionary success, and a late discussion that follows up on non-Earth life with a reflection on the possibilities for an off-Earth escape.2 The first and last are irrelevant, the middle one engages in a discussion that may on Wards own account be ultimately self-defeating, more often than not is subjective, and anthropomorphic.3 The argument is neither well presented nor tightly knit, and explications of some important assumptions are contradictory. Later we shall suggest this is more at matter of the class-based vision and perspective Wards articulates, than any absence of competence on his part Lets examine the argument.
1

It is a G2 where a sub-classification of each category (O, B, A, F, G, K and M) ranges from 9 down to 0, from hotter to cooler. The surface temperature of our sun is roughly 5800 Kelvin (its internal temperature may be as high as 107 K), and, as the measure of all other stars, has a solar luminosity of 1. Now outside the main sequence the giants, for example, have the same temperature as our sun but far greater luminosity (by a factor of one hundred, 102), which makes them far larger. 2 See the Postscript, the section entitled, A Note on the Absurdity of Viable Human Existence Off-Earth, where this fantasy is thoroughly discussed and disposed of. In his final accounting, Ward too arrives at the same position. Ibid, 150-155. 3 The Medea Hypothesis, 17.

Ward begins with a thought experiment,1 an imagining that as we discussed in an earlier essay has recurred at critical points in the history of science:2 He asks us to imagine lowering the Earths temperature by just a few degrees3 starting presumably from a warm interglacial climate (like ours today) if not from a hot mode (very warm, wet and humid climate of which there have been many in Earths history, say, like the Eocene some 65 million years ago prior to the disappearance of the dinosaurs).4 He proceeds to provide a classic description of the formation of ice sheets starting from the poles, of the dynamics and consequences of a glaciation that beginning in the highest latitudes spreads rapidly (in geological terms) toward the equator... As he notes, the formation of ice past a certain point is self-reinforcing: Its whiteness reflects incoming solar insolation that produces a deepening cooling effect as the cold allows for more ice to form, the ice (its whiteness) further reflects incoming heating by the sun, and the glaciations spreads toward the lower latitudes Some of those consequences are the destruction of tropic forests (they become savannah), more broadly the obvious transformation of topological face of the Earth, the end of all species life which is niche dependent on warm climes, in fact almost all species life generally. This scenario, if you will, is popularly known as snowball Earth, and our geological reconstructions of Earth history tell us it has occurred in the distant past, the last time about 600 mya. Though Ward does not explicitly tell us (it is implied), it is possible that a runaway refrigeration ends with a dead, because fully glaciated planet, an icy rock. The central thesis of this book will not permit him to further pursue this thought experiment. I shall return to this. Now we need only note that Wards point lies elsewhere: He indicates that that a runaway refrigeration is a killer, and that, moreover, heat (runaway warming) is another, even more effective killer. But his point is that life itself is the real killer:5 If left unchecked, it will hasten the ultimate death of all life on Earth.6 Ward develops this thesis polemically contrasting his position, which he calls Medean, to what he is wont to call Gaian theory.7 Proponents of the latter hold that, dominated by life, not only is the Earth an evolving system of inorganic and organic elements and components (such as the atmosphere, oceans and the carbon cycle as well as bacteria, plant life and animals) that in and through this evolutionary process together secure for life not only Earths habitability but, in the strongest form in which the theory is stated, tend toward its (lifes) own self-enhancement. To the contrary, Wards argues the evolution of life triggered a series of disasters that are inimical to life and will continue to do so into the future.8 As a necessary correlate, he further argues (again in contradistinction to his take on Gaian theory, largely at this point a straw man) the thesis that only human intelligence and engineering can postpone this fateful outcome.9 The formulation, assertion and validation of these positions largely define the contents of the book Ward pursues two separate tracks in making his argument. The first is a more theoretical account of Darwinian evolution as the fundamental framework in which all life and its development on Earth unfolds. For Ward, the significance of this account lays in a statement of its basic assumptions, which, he correctly intuits, come into conflict with, its proponents notwithstanding, Gaian theory.

1
2

Ibid, ix-xiv. See Galileo and Aristotle: The Problem of Motion, I, above. 3 The Media Hypothesis, x. 4 Hereafter, the term million years ago will be designated mya. 5 Ibid, xiv-xv. 6 Ibid, xv. Emphasis added. 7 Wards designation rises from his opposition to those scientists who support such a theory of life and its development on Earth, a position the contours of which will become increasingly clear in this essay. In Greek mythology, Gaia is mother Earth who relation to father heaven beget the first living creatures on Earth, which in the Greek imagination were of enormous size and power, like but unlike men, monsters. In the contemporary world, Gaia has since acquired connotations of prodigious productivity together with a powerful but benevolent figure. By way of contrast, Medea was human. She married Jason (of golden fleece fame). He was ambitious and cruel, cunning and duplicitous, uncaring and hostile, a terrible father to the children they had. Medea took her revenge for the mistakes she had made, having left her home (daughter of Corinths king) and her good, comfortable life. She murdered Jasons lover, and killed their two sons. Edith Hamilton, Mythology, 64, 127-130. For Ward, in giving rise to conditions that will eventually destroy it, life has more of a Medean than Gaian character about it. 8 The Medea Hypothesis, xx. Emphasis in original. 9 Ibid.

The second track he pursues is more empirical account of tendencies of the development of life on Earth, both as they have occurred in the past and as they might occur in the future. We have set the term empirical off in quote marks in order to draw attention to the character of this account: Aside from the fact that like the empirical analyses of typical scientific work, observations are artificially constructed on the basis of laboratory experimentation, the results of the bulk of Wards account here are computer modeled, are entirely dependent upon initial assumptions, and cannot without changing initial assumptions be corrected or changed on the basis of observation and measurement. Consider each track in turn. Darwinian Evolution Here Wards account is straightforward, if not that of Darwins (it is commonly called neo-Darwinian), i.e., like all contemporary Darwinians he accepts as a matter of course the genetic transfer of hereditary material based on DNA (insight into which originated with Gregory Mendel whose work was not discovered until 1900, a mechanism described by James Watson and Francis Crick in the middle of the short twentieth century, in both cases obviously unknown to Darwin) and he holds, again following a well established contemporary position,1 that species not individual organisms are the subject or, if you prefer as we do, the object of evolution. Since he intends to invert the Gaian evaluation of the role of life in maintenance of earthly habitability, what is important for Ward is that life as such, he believes, is evolutionarily Darwinian: One of the attributes of being alive is the ability for the entity to evolve in a way that would have been familiar to Charles Darwin2 Following the physicist Paul Davies,3 Ward offers a biological definition of life that includes the following essential features: Metabolism, complexity and organization, self-reproduction, development, autonomy (self-determination) and evolution.4 While development and evolution may at first appear to overlap, they are distinct: Development has a strictly biological sense referring to growth, change in shape (and size) and with that change possible changes in function, while evolution is narrowly Darwinian, that is encompasses genetic replication and species alteration (or change) on the basis of adaptation through natural selection. Even in biological terms this determination (of life) is not entirely adequate. (Life always has an inside and an outside, at the biologically fundamental, cellular level this differentiation is constituted by a membrane.) There are other perspective-based limitations: Physicists are apt to define life as bounded, unmediatedly limiting its own entropy by expelling it to its surrounding environment; chemists might describe life as macromolecular and specify the most important and common elements (hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon) on which it is based; biochemists and physiologists are likely to suggest life transpires within cellular borders that retain an aqueous setting.5 For a philosopher, on the other hand, life can be grasped behaviorally as the unity and basic identity of its psychic and physiological aspects, with an orientation toward its outside (environment) of which it is functionally and operatively part and which in this relation is phenomenologically characterized in a fundamental way by expressiveness.6 The point is that within and without the bourgeois scientific community there is no consensus determination of the meaning of life: It is analyzed, murdered (dissected) in the name of that science and, of course, observed, but definitions, though occasionally overlapping and though rational, are given and presented in relation to different levels of the real itself. Still Ward requires a determination, and he thinks he has achieved such in stating that Darwinian evolution based on DNA-RNA as the mechanism of inheritance is a fundamental property of life.7
1

See Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, 703-704, 714-744, where he not only argues the species, not the individual organism, is the fundamental unit of evolution (an argument now generally accepted), but provides a theoretical framework justifying his position. See also the Second Study, Part III, Species, Evolutionary Development, Adaptive Landscapes. 2 The Medea Hypothesis, 3. 3 The Fifth Miracle. 4 The Medea Hypothesis, 4-5. 5 James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, 256-257. To be fair to Ward by way of Davies, his concept of metabolism incorporates both chemical and physical moments inasmuch as it entails processing chemicals for purposes of energy intake, while metabolism is thus understood as organic processing and releasing of that energy. 6 Max Scheler, Mans Place in Nature, 12. See also our From Metaphysics to Philosophical Anthropology: Max Schelers Mans Place in Nature. 7 The Medea Hypothesis, 5, 7.

Ward insists on the necessity of evolution in its Darwinian form. (He obviously believes that evolution is Darwinian or does not occur at all). Without this more or less arbitrary determination, he cannot hope to make his argument. So what does he have tell us about Darwinian evolution? This is, again, relatively straightforward and, we add, brief: Though Darwin could not provide an account of the general mechanism (much less its specific features), that is, the gene transfer of heritable material, he advanced the concept of individual variation within species through inheritance. Following Malthus, and in following him raising this concept to the level of a natural law, he asserted that living populations are heteronymous in relation to available material resources. Population is in a strict, if technical, sense a dependent variable. Given both this unilateral dependency and a tendency toward excess production of progeny (some will later call this a survival strategy), some species individuals will expire, die long before their biological life has matured and aged, and irrespective of predation. Those, however, that do not perish do so because (and here we are not speaking of the lifetime of single individuals, but individuals over generations) they have hereditary features that make them in some crucial respect superior to those who perish. In an environment with limited resources (or alternately in one where parents produce in excess of available resources), these individuals are, from the standpoint of the species, more fit. In such environments, life is a competition in which the fittest survive, that is, existence itself is a competition. Understood this time from the standpoint of the evolution of species, the survival of the fittest is what Darwin called natural selection 1... In Ward (and if pushed hard enough, in Darwin too), all environments on Earth where life subsists are competitive...This, at any rate, is Wards understanding of Darwin. We can make several critical remarks. For Ward, following classical Darwinian theory, the environment, specifically food supplies (i.e., resources in the narrow sense), is an independent variable, population a dependent one that varies with climatically controlled resource availability. On this model, the only elasticity resources possess is natural in the strict sense: Resources, whether animal or plant life on which animal life ultimately depends, fluctuate with the adequacy of rainfall, sunlight, temperature, with, in other words, climatic and, broadly, geographic conditions. If a balance can be achieved, it is achieved between population and environment when the latter provides adequate food supplies for the former, in consuming all those supplies, to maintain a viable demographic density. Thus, for this perspective there is a unilateral relation of population to environment wherein the chances for survival and growth of a population, understood in terms of the genetic prospects of the fittest individuals, is severely circumscribed, directly described in terms of, and expresses environmental limitations As we have argued above, in its structure this is a metaphysical position, it is postulated and there is no evidence to support it at least in nature. 2 In fact, the evidence as it exists is manufactured, and this in the dual sense; first, it is a construction, that is what passes for evidence is artificially generated under laboratory conditions; and second, since it is natural conditions that are being described by this construct, and since what is described does not exist in nature (but only as an experimental product under laboratory conditions), the description is grossly inadequate, a misreading, false. But here let us return to Ward by way of Malthus. As a good Malthusian, according to Ward all species reproduce not just to the point of available resources, but beyond this point. In the formal sense, this point is a given environments carrying capacity. 3 Ward considers this an obvious truism. He cites a textbook example (actually a couple examples): Put some bugs, any kind of living, i.e., self-reproducing, insect, in a jar with a limited quantity of food. The insects rapidly reproduce, and as they multiply the
Darwin proposed a principle of variation: that life reproduces to produce slight different variants of the parent He also noted that most parents produce more offspring than can live because of shortages of food, or shelter, or other necessities of life. Because of a surplus of offspring, in most instances some will perish. Those that survived did so in the long run, Ward following Darwin is speaking of many generations, because they had characteristics that made them in some way superior to others of their own species. These characteristics, such as larger size must also be heritable that is, the characteristics have to be passed on to the next generation. Darwin saw this competition as survival of the fittest, and he gave the process the technical name natural selection. Over the long run, the survivors would be those with characteristics (hereditable characteristics, that is, ones that can be passed on to the next generation and not just ones acquired during the life of the individual) lending greatest fitness, or ability to survive. Ibid, 6. 2 See the Second Study, Part II, Darwin and the Evolutionary Development of Life, above. 3 be it beetles in a jar or humans on our planet, any given species of life seem to breed not only up to the point where all resources are spoken for, but beyond that point, so that there are more individuals than resources can sustain. Carrying capacity is a formal concept in ecology defining that limit. Ibid, 26-27.
1

food disappears just as rapidly. They starve, the last stage prior to extinction in some cases being cannibalism. (He mentions the latter on enough occasions that we are left to conclude he thinks it is really what clinches the argument for natural selection.) Conduct the experiment differently by adding food to keep its supply constant over time. Again he notes that the insects reproduce rapidly, but then their population levels off. Ward tells us, though, this leveling off is deceiving because the insects still reproduce themselves beyond available resources so that some are dying of starvation while others are being killed by others in a fight for the available food. There is no population stability that is achieved that keeps the insects in balance with available resources, or so Ward asserts on the basis of the experiment.1 Is there something wrong here? Well, most significantly a glass jar in a laboratory is, as weve suggested, not nature. There is no predation, and there are no natural conditions that limit population. (For example, among species of migratory birds that winter in South America and summer in the far, far northern United States, in Canada or even the Arctic, a large storm or even strong headwinds can kill hundreds of thousands as, unable to land and weak and hungry from the length of the flight over water, they do not possess the extra strength to completely traverse their migratory return north over the Gulf.)2 Consider laboratory experimentation as a model of cognition and the basis for generating and advancing knowledge: For decades physiologists, again for example, have told us that the reflex is a mechanical action, a well-determined defined physical or chemical agent acting on a locally defined receptor that generates corresponding well-determined reactions along a defined pathway, that there is a point by point correspondence of events in the external world (stimuli emanating from an object) to places along the surface of physical organs of an organism, when in point of fact what is actually demonstrable is that the outcome of an excitation is determined by its relation to the whole organic state as well as to the simultaneous or preceding excitations, and that the relations between the organism and its milieu are not linearly causal but are relations of circular causality. The physiological examples are based upon decerebrate cats, octopi with surgically removal cerebral ganglia, etc., i.e., on laboratory created conditions that cannot be found in nature. An experiment on the model of bourgeois science is an artificial construct characterized by conditions that obtain nowhere in nature.3 Neither this science nor its experimental constructs reveal any truths about nature, species populations or the natural world Now Darwinian evolutionary theory in this its close relation to Malthusianism has always been on tenuous ground, even in the analysis of non-human populations. (Ultimately, this discussion is about human populations.) In this unilateral determinism, this, the classical perspective is demonstrably false. Two examples will suffice. In Madagascar, the lemur population does not consume all the food available to it; and, on Eniwetok atoll, the crab population, nearly obliterated by atomic weapons testing, rebred and achieved its former population levels by eating the outer fibers of plants to offset the poor supply of algae (also devastated by the blasts). Thus, animal populations tend to achieve and maintain a viable demographic density despite loss of primary food resources and the variability of those resources.4 An inelastic environment (i.e., such that every environment up to and including the Earth itself has a carrying capacity) is not only not determinate, it cannot even be said to exist as such. Above, in the Second Study already referred, we have examined the entire range of life forms concluding that environmental inelasticity does not, and cannot, account for relation of life to earthly nature considered inorganically (and as such abstractly).5 Now Ward effectively admits this: As he moves from laboratory experiments for the purposes of polemic to theorizations of the relation of the various, partial systems (oceans, atmosphere, biota, the carbon and nitrogen cycles, etc.) that form Earth at its surface, his entire conceptualization undergoes radical transformation. Thus, the biota and environment have evolved in a coupled way,6 There will and will always be a change of the physical Earth because of the presence of life in myriad ways, and changes as well to many of Earth systems, such as the carbon and hydrological cycle, to name but two,7 There are indeed highly complex life support systems that produce
1 2

Ibid, 35-36. Miyoko Chu, Songbird Journeys, 67-69. 3 See The Sciences of Man in our Nature, Capital, Communism; Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior; and, our Pavlovs Dogs The Critique of Physicalism and Science: Physiology and Lower Forms of Behavior, Merleau-Pontys The Structure of Behavior. 4 Serge Moscovici, La socit contre nature, 172-173. 5 See the Second Study, Part IV, Potential Productivity and its Critique and Part V in its entirety, above. 6 The Medea Hypotheses, 32. 7 Ibid, 34.

planetary conditions, such as atmospheric composition and pressure, planetary temperature, and even geomorphic surface features, that are quite different from those of a lifeless planet, 1 and Each of these systems has changed through time and will continue to do so. The presence of life on the planet and the ability of life to evolve and increase in complexity through time have caused each of the nonbiotic Earth systems to be modified, and then caused feedbacks affecting life. These couplings linking the organic and inorganic components of the Earth have evolved in tandem over time as the Earth has aged, and as life has radically transformed itself into increasing diversity and complexity.2 The couple partial system relations and negative feedbacks as explained by Ward constitute an admission that the environment, the Earth itself, is an evolving product of the entirety of its own history, the relations between the various partial systems that first appear, develop and become increasingly complex and ever more integrated each with the others over geological time (an evolutionary direction with its obvious setbacks, especially mass extinctions); that the environment as such is a rather gross abstraction, that instead what we are speaking of is evolving biospheres, i.e., life in its entirety and inseparably the relations, conditions and processes that immediately support it, situated within the evolution of earthly nature itself, biospheres that come into being, disappear yet can be literally uncovered, geologically compressed as layer upon layer of ancient Earth that now form the current Earths lithosphere. (What Ward unequivocally rejects in all this is that this whole development together with life in its evolution, these interrelated relations, events and processes in the history of Earths evolution unconsciously aim, not always successfully, at habitability for life.) What is interesting, not to mention contradictory, is, then, Ward accepts, no matter how grudgingly, that various aspects of the Earth system are partial systems, and that the relation between them are dialectical, that they evolve over geological time and in evolving mutually condition and shape one another, that there are (both) negative (and positive) feedbacks. If, however, as he backhandedly and tacitly admits, the environment as a name of that inflexible setting on Earth in which living species are situated is hardly an independent variable, but is rather an abstraction, then the concept of available or limited resources has no real referent: It too is an abstraction. It is a tacit admission because he proceeds without ever openly acknowledging it and as if it was irrelevant: For if dialectical causality rules the relations between living organisms and changing natural settings (the environment so-called), then the whole reductionist-empiricist framework that is the fundamental Darwinian evolutionary formulation itself collapses. In this regard, then, carrying capacity has no existential meaning, only (as we shall later suggest) an ideological one. Again we stress that Ward, inconsistent and contradictorily, cannot admit such and appears blissfully ignorant of the fundamental incoherency of his own argument. This is, as well see, of overriding importance when we turn to Wards prescriptions We suggested earlier that, for Ward (as well as obviously for Malthus) the Malthusian conception was ultimately about human populations. In point of fact, contemporarily and in the evolutionary past, the entire notion of fixed resources (implying limited natural beings) can be demonstrated to be obviously and seriously inadequate. Among primates as they exist today, hominids in our evolutionary past, and humans throughout our history, social organization, or structure, taken together with associated behavioral practices mediate between population (community) and environment, govern breeding, feeding, migrations and division of labor within their respective community, and effectively have a greater bearing on genetic development than environmentally mediated differential sexual reproduction.3 Humanity (in the anthropological-evolutionary sense, homo sapiens sapiens) constitutes the emergence of a new order of being in nature, within the context of an evolving nature a being governed by its activity, relationally and dialectically determined by the objectified products of that activity (a socio-historical world inextricably intertwined with a symbolic universe): Humanity dynamically and evolutionarily-historically actively overcomes Malthusian determinism, or specifically, the humanly natural way of transcending this determinism is constituted in social practice: The relation of "environment to human population is never unilateral (proceeding from the culturally formed abstraction, carrying capacity that is assumed to be natural, to the statistical abstraction, population) because, within the framework of historically constituted social organization, to one side all human groupings practice various methods of population control, including prolonged breast feeding, sexual abstinence, and forms of contraception,
1 2

Ibid, 35. Ibid, 41. 3 Moscovici, Ibid, 47-91, and the sources cited therein; especially the Second Study, Part V, above.

and infanticide, and other explicitly social forms as well (i.e., warfare), and to the other side the same human groupings by varying the prey they hunt, by augmenting the numbers of the domesticated animals they slaughter, by increasing the areas of land they put under cultivation as well as bringing to bear new inputs on the crops cultivated and by producing novel species of crops in nature have continually expanded their given resource bases, having done so through a lengthy historical practice of altering the character and hence productivity of their food sources. Moreover, under the auspices of capital (capitalist development) in contemporary times human beings have mediated this so-called determinism by way of a non-organic technology, and have directly used those partial systems (water to create steam power and generate electricity, fission limitedly recreating the power released by the atomic nucleus) to utilize the powers of nature itself, have synthesized the compressed residue of bygone biospheric nature (coal, petroleum) to create a wholly unnatural power (e.g., the internal combustion engine), have modified genetic development to create organisms that appear in nature as species of bacteria, plant and animal life along side geologically evolved similar life in order to do work (i.e., reproduce capital), to be consumed, and so on. All of these practically generated developments actually invert the classically (i.e., Malthusian) assumed, one-way relation Life on Earth in its Medean Aspect, I Medean Features of Life Ward thinks that life is characteristically Medean (as opposed to Gaian). He elicits features that he believes justifies this characterization, and further he presents brief accounts of events in the history of life on Earth that further legitimize it. These accounts tacitly suggesting a framework in which the evolution of life on Earth is to be understood. We shall examine both, the Medean features of earthly life and Medean events in the evolution of life, in turn. Ward formulates four characteristics of life that are Medean so-called. 1 First, all species reproduce beyond carrying capacity, generating a death rate in excess of that under conditions in which a given population is harmonized with limited resources. (For Ward, this necessarily would obviously be an ideal condition that in no case, in fact, occurs.) Second, toxic substances are metabolic byproducts and poisonous in closed systems. (Ward thinks the Earth is a closed system.) Third, in any ecosystem with more than one species, extinction begetting competition for limited resources will ensue. Fourth, life produces feedbacks within the Earth systems in which it operates, and the bulk of these are positive (i.e., in Wards language, that of the bourgeois theory of abstract totality as a mechanic system, cybernetics, life produces responses to change, feedback, and the majority of those responses do not offset that change and re-establish an equilibrium, but instead proceed positively, amplifying the change. A process in which change is offset and an equilibrium re-established is called negative feedback.) In the first case, Ward cites the experimental example of insects in a jar. We have already revealed the artificiality of the laboratory experimentation as such and the prejudicial assumptions that, basing oneself on such activity, are incorporated into propositions concerning the nature of life. The second Medean feature assumes Earth is a closed system, that, accordingly, dominant species will produce toxic substances that are fatal to other species. In point of fact, Ward tells us Earth is closed with regard to material (since essentially we dont acquire new material from space beyond the planet) but it is open with respect to energy (that is to solar radiation), while organisms are open with regard to both. 2 The Medean feature consists in the possibility that some toxic materials excreted by certain organisms can or may build up, implying in this event they are not disposable (i.e., transformable into non-lethal substances) and (thus) are fatal for other organisms, though he cites no instances that might substantiate this position. He, of course, fails to note that there are lethal byproducts that are rendered harmless and useful to other organisms by the metabolism of still other organisms symbiotically interacting with those producing the toxic substances. (Some of the chemical components of foods that we, as well as most other animals, consume when digested are toxic. But these substances are rendered harmless by bacteria in the guts of organisms, ourselves included.) He is further required to that show there are different levels of toxicity, some that affect specific species, others that if pervasively present may affect life in its entirety. In this regard, Ward consistently moves from specificity to generality without mediation: He notes a species does this or that with that or this outcome (e.g., produces toxic substances), and then without qualifying interactions that eliminate the fatal
1 2

The Medea Hypothesis, 35-36. Ibid, 40.

character of the outcome, that connect the outcome with a view to one species to other species and then to life as a whole, he equivocally and confusedly attributes the entire process to life generally.1 The production of nondisposable, lethal outcomes is not in fact a general characteristic of all life forms (hence not of life generally), but of only one life form, humanity (emphasis on only) effectively, though not explicitly, Ward accepts this and humanity only to the extent it exists under universal conditions of capitalist production. (We shall return to this last point later in our discussion.) The designation of Earth as a closed system, which would only make sense of Earth on the model of dead planet (such a designation necessarily assumes it to be such), is at any rate irrelevant: Starting with plant life, Earth requires no new materials from outer space since plants synthesize sugar from sunlight and water physiologically reproducing and enhancing their existence (they grow), i.e., they create themselves (through photosynthesis they produce novelty, themselves as cellular tissue) and in another respect some offer themselves as material for the nourishment of other life forms, while human life can reproduce natural life as in agriculture (including forms of plant life and its fruits not found in nature), can chemically synthesize (i.e., recreate) all inorganic elements in nature (and others that are not found in nature), and starting from these elements can produce (i.e., create) new substances (e.g., steel and plastic) not otherwise found in nature. The third Medean feature of life is that where there is more than a single species, they will compete for resources, and this competition ultimately leads to extinctions (or migration of one of the original species). In observations and descriptions of different species we do find competition, on rare occasion plenty of it but in no sense do we find competition exclusively: Emphatically, it cannot be found at all times and all places it is rarely if ever the driving force of evolution, for over the greatest extent of evolutionary-geological time and in the respect to the most radically novel evolutionary developments in the history of life forms evolution in other than its Darwinian form have been decisive: What we discover is that in fact, really and actually, among different species, not just within the animal kingdom but among plants, fungi and microbiotic bacteria, is that symbiosis is also characteristic, and above these various levels of living activity it, synthesis, is further characterizes relations of humans to surrounding nature (say, for example, in the ecology of a humanly based agriculture as it exists, e.g., in parts of southern India). 2 Recall our the earlier discussion in which we cited studies demonstrating that with mammalian, avian and insect life, self1

For an analysis and theorization that is put forth so vociferously in opposition to that which it projects as a mortal enemy (Gaian theory), such inconsistencies, confusions and evocations are theoretically damning, not to mention personally annoying. We shall cite a couple of examples. Ward tells us, life on Earth is a question not only [of] survival of the fittest, but also survival of the best and fastest evolvers (Ibid, xxi). But he also states that, many hundreds of genera and thousands of species [of ammonites] evolved quickly, went extinct easily, yet were enormously common, while another [nautilus] evolved but a few species was always rare [evolution which was by way of contrast slow], but was virtually extinction proof (Ibid, 17). [Ammonites and nautilus, both animals, are classified in the phylum mollusks in the class of cephalopods.] The specific analysis does not ground the generalization, but contradicts it. The mass extinctions of the past were far more lethal than any war waged by humans, and they were not even primarily caused by complex life. Rather, microbes were at their root. But higher life forms were accessories to this murder, in that they allowed microbes to multiply to the point that they could begin their ruthless poisoning of air and sea (Ibid, xv). If high life forms, complex life, were not the direct cause of mass extinctions, but were nonetheless implicated as accessories, and thus are as part of the total complex (biosphere) of life itself to be held to account, what is it in their accessory capacity that indicates their guilt? Answer, they allowed it to happen by permitting microbes to multiply to a lethal level and presence. On his own evolutionary Darwinian assumptions, however, life, complex life (with the exception of man), Gaia itself (synonymous with a selfregulatory coupled system of which the biosphere is one of its terms), is not volitional, does not make choices, is not characteristically conscious being. [There is nothing conscious about lifes lethal activities (Ibid, xv).] There is an obvious equivocation here: On this assumption life, even higher life forms, allowed exactly nothing to happen. The presentation of the case for putting life itself in the docket (our term) is use of a legal metaphor, the presentation of a brief against the accused, which masks the incoherency in the account: The metaphor permits an otherwise unacceptable imputation of volition to life, treats it as a legal subject in order that it can be held accountable for the catastrophic extinctions, in other words so that Ward can make his case that life cannot be permitted to simply go on (as he sees it and, according to him, as his bte noir, Gaia supporters in and outside the scientific community insist) as it always has, in order to proceed to a justification and rationalization for bourgeois scientific intervention and the deployment of technologies of capital in planetary scale engineering. 2 Here, for example, we can follow the interspecies, intra-life, integrated nutrient cycle: Peasant agriculturalists constantly renew it following harvest, as dry crop leaf and stalk litter together with similarly dry litter from herbaceous plant species forms the basis for compost and, when combined and mixed with animal droppings, agriculturalists create a rich manure for future plant and crop fertilizing; the same litter together with green foliage is trimmed from trees and utilized as animal bedding; and, once again, the residue litter, is permitted to decompose, and as such guarantees a vast range and assortment of bacteria to breakdown this organic matter, decomposition insuring nitrogen to enrich the soil itself. Rotations, fallowing with slow decaying plant and crop residues unremoved, and mixed plantings anchor the soil, assure peasant agriculturalists topsoils that do not wash away during the monsoon season. See Vandana Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind, 1-30.

regulatory socially intraspecies responses and perhaps instinctual mechanisms (though we are personally dubious), and not adaptation to environment resource conditions or competition with other species, shape behavior. 1 There are further countless other examples but we can cite just one drawn from our own experience: In the late summer and early autumn oaks produce acorns. Blue jays and squirrels both shell and eat the acorns, neither species competes with the other nor does one species, unable to compete, emigrate.2 They do not consume all available resources, but in shelling acorns permit the latter to seed themselves (or, in the case of squirrels, by burying them advance the process of oak reproduction). These are examples of mutuality, symbiosis in the broadest, loosest sense, in contrast to competition among species.3 In fact, both animal species are exceedingly profligate: Even as mild drought has extended over the eastern edges of the North American (U.S.) plain for the past half dozen years now, each year my wife and I spend a couple hours picking hundreds of shelled and unshelled whole acorns out of one of our gardens beneath a large 80-90 year old red oak and younger white oaks. It appears that the animals are choosey, that not all acorns are to their liking. So after shelling from their perches in the trees, they merely let go of the acorns they dont want allowing them fall to the ground. In point of fact, squirrels and jays in this example do not reproduce to the extent that they put pressure on limited resources so-called: Squirrel populations fluctuate and tend not toward excess but toward levels far below what the total available resources would support; blue jay populations, on the other hand, are consistent from year to year with little fluctuation (in good and bad years with a view to resources) and given those resources their populations, like squirrels, appear to be far below what would be possible. This is the point: The situation of fierce competition resulting in extinctions (or emigrations) described by Ward is an extreme, and in our view entirely uncharacteristic, situation in nature that occurs in periods of disruption in the dynamic equilibrium of earthly nature (e.g., severe drought), or in the geologically rare periods of climate change and the accompanying transition (from a hot to cold mode or vice versa, from a glacial to an interglacial or vice versa) It may, however, be that systematic scientific inputs into production (real domination) has gone so far in the recreation of earthly nature as a raw materials basin for commodity production that this entirely uncharacteristic situation is beginning to approach something like normalcy in various regions of the planet Darwin was not cognizant of these global changes and transitions. (But Ward is.) As universal, his (Darwins) perspective was a theoretical expression and ideological projection of the bellum omnium bellum omnes typifying daily life under conditions capitalist production onto nature. (Ward has taken this over in toto in his theorization.') In an enduring, structural and organizing sense, there are far more of cohabitation, mutual dependencies, interspecies ecological integration and even symbiotic relations in nature that the dog eat dog (our term) cannibalism that Ward mystifyingly and obfuscatorily proclaims. Even predation in the broad ecological sense (i.e., going beyond individual species life which is what we are discussing) involves the close association, living together, of two dissimilar species, which is cohabitation though merely in the formal sense, but which at certain, recurring moments is mutuality in the full sense, embodying what we might call recognition at the level of animal sentiment of self.4 His, Wards, is a further theoretical inference from a theory that fails to capture and fix essential aspects of the movement of the naturally real. His counter-geological-factual position is dogmatic, Darwinian assertion, decidedly Malthusian and a vulgar expression of the most common bourgeois prejudice. The fourth Medean feature of life is that it generates feedbacks within the Earth systems in which it operates, and the majority of these are positive magnifying instead of limiting or transforming changes of that are inimical to life. The first point to note here is one of logic and substance (i.e., with substantial implications). It is not a question of the percentage of those feedbacks that are merely positive, amplifications of changes, but a question of which ones are wholly detrimental, hostile or lethal to life as a whole. The second point is to ask for a demonstration. Ward attempts to provide one of sorts in his discussion of Medean events in the (history of the) evolution of life.5
See the Second Study, Part II, the section entitled Darwin and the Evolutionary Development of Life, above. The author has personally watched this eating ritual for decades, over many generations of jays and squirrels (from 9-10 assuming a life cycle of roughly 5 years for each animal) and never seen any other outcome. 3 These usages (mutualism, symbiosis) are not technical in the manner in which these terms appear, say, in the literature of microbiology where each term indicates, not just a living together in close spatial proximity of varying degrees, but an assimilation of each life form one to the other in such a manner that the outcome over time is neither of the original organisms but a novel life form in nature. 4 Barry Holstum Lopez, Of Wolves and Men. New York, 1978, in particular, see the discussion (94f) of what Lopez calls the conversation of death. 5 On the basis of the purported features of this false construct Medean life, an analysis which we have shown is not defensible, Ward offers predictions and hypotheses that might test them. At least, in the latter case he claims to do so. What a careful reading reveals is that, starting
1 2

Life on Earth in its Medean Aspect, II Medean Events in the Evolution of Life Ward relates that eight major, distinct Medean events have occurred in the evolution of life on Earth (that is, in the history of the Earths evolution), the last event (the eighth) of which comprises four such similar events. We shall follow his enumeration, identifying and briefly describing each in turn. Well conclude this section by stating what they all have in common, which it can be noted is not what Ward ascribes to them. In an earlier discussion of possible non-Earth life that we described as irrelevant (see The Argument, above), Ward presented speculation on possible bases of life, life using different amino acids, chemically different DNA, with a metabolite solvent different than water.1 His first Medean event falls back on this discussion in order to suggest the form of DNA as it has existed for thousands of millennia was one among others such forms (all with different nucleotide sequences that code for specific amino acids) each using this different code or language to form DNA molecules. Deoxyribonucleic acid would not have been solely sequenced by nucleotides consisting of the four bases (adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine) attached to RNA, to a ribose molecule, but instead would have emerged superior in a struggle of the fittest to initially define the molecular basis of life... Since we know nothing of lifes molecular basis at its origins, and since we have been unable to date to experimentally, not even logically, reconstruct the emergence of complex (macro) organic molecules much less the genesis of an earliest form of life along the lines imagined by Ward, speculation of this sort is scientifically permissible, indicating possibilities that Ward believes likely: He further finds it hard to believe such intense competition, inherently Darwinian did not occur.2 Thus the first Medean event was a speculatively reconstructed, utterly un-evidenced DNA takeover, the suppression of other primordial forms of life by DNA life constituted as it has been since this original event occurred some 3.7 to 4 billion years ago, i.e., a dogmatic, fiat reassertion of underlying speculative assumptions. Ever so obviously, this circularity confirms the Medean-Darwinian nature of life. The second Medean event is not only speculatively predicated, but rests on the retrospectively projected actually of the first non-event (as, we shall see, is the third event in the form that Ward presents it, and which, circularly, merely restates the first): Though there is no evidence to support this assertion and there are substantive arguments that render it dubious,3 Ward postulates the earliest Earth atmosphere was predominantly composed of methane (which is not to say that sometime prior to the oxygenation of Earths atmosphere, methane was not a significant component), like that which exists on Titan (a moon of Saturns) and nowhere else in the solar system. Ward tells that the earliest form of life, he believes they were stromatolites bacterial structures that formed layered, sedimentary mats fossils of which have been found in shallow salty waters,4 and that were unquestionably photosynthetic though anoxygenically so,5 which made them a already highly developed bacterial form of life,
from simple truisms, he offers specious assertions* about their self-evidence (The Medea Hypothesis, 37); and, before ever developing his tests, he offers lengthy preliminary conceptualizations to frame his test and the results it produces, i.e., to construct then pillory a Gaian straw man (Ibid, 38f).** 1 Ibid, 11-13. 2 Ibid, 73. 3 Condie and Sloan, Origin and Evolution of Earth, 120. 4 Or, in Wards words, this life formed as a series of oil-like slicks and stacked bacterial layers and sediment. Ibid, 74. 5 Here, bacteria use sunlight to reduce H2S (hydrogen sulfate) or H2 instead of water to reduce CO2. The latter process yields organic carbon, the former does not. The former sequence is consistent with Wards speculation; however, he is undoubtedly the only one in the scientific community who thinks that the complex, highly developed stromatolite communities constituted the earliest form of earthly life. ___ * All organisms must consume resources, and by doing so deplete their local environments of those resources. Likewise all organisms must eliminate waste, and by doing so they pollute their environments Ibid, 37. ** Specific test will be the subject of the next two chapters. Before that the actual systems that affect life, its abundance, and its longevity need to be described. They are part of Earth system science, mentioned above (Ibid, 38-39), i.e., it is requisite that I construct a straw man while grudgingly relating those aspects (coupled relation of life to other partial systems such as oceans and atmosphere) of Gaia theory that must be acknowledged. What Ward finds most disturbing, it appears, is the resonance that Gaia theory has had outside scientific communities, especially since the sixties, among two or three generations of youth who, disenchanted and out of step with the world technological and scientific inputs into production have created and continue to create, no longer believe or accept that science, i.e., 18 th century materialism and Enlightenment rationalism, is a lodestar capable of guiding human life. He uses the dismissive term, New Age, to distinguish all those who are absent such belief or acceptance. Ibid, passim.

impossibly the earliest colonized the planet, producing a methane atmosphere. The production of methane (CH4) would have created a haze,1 adding a layer of clouds reflecting solar radiation back into space, further cooling an already cool planet (3.8 billion years ago, the suns was roughly 30% less luminous than it is today. It should also be noted global surface temperatures would have been warmer because of methane and the haze in the atmosphere, where warmer means above the freezing point of water). Wards point is that had the Earth been slightly farther out in space (i.e., further distant from the sun), hence even cooler, and had there been no volcanism on Earth (a feature contemporaneous not only with its entire existence, but in a mediated sense an essential feature of Earth as a planet harboring life) volcanic eruptions over geological time emit massive amounts of carbon dioxide which we known is a gas that traps solar radiation, hence warms the Earth2 well, then, the planet would have reached a temperature too cold for any kind of current Earth life,3 creating what Ward dubs the methane disaster that, we add, if it ever occurred (highly, highly dubious) could not have done so in the manner postulated by Ward. This is an intellectually sloppy, astonishing and, frankly, inordinately dishonest construction, a series of possibilities and suppositions that arrive at a non-existent event in Earth history permitting our author to assert his geological-evolutionary sequence that, in turn, allows him to assert the essential nature of life (as Medean). Moreover, Wards faultless logic runs up against severe substantial issues to boot. First, Titans atmosphere is about 98% nitrogen and 2% methane, but consistent with his speculation the early Earths would have been made up of roughly equal parts of carbon dioxide and methane with hydrogen (H2), levels dependent upon the amount of volcanic activity, and lower levels of nitrogen.4 They, the respective atmospheres of Titan and the Earth, are not in any way the same, and regardless of how commonly it is done the use of the one as a model for the other is at the very best questionably, if not methodologically illicit. Second, isotopically light organic, metabolically photosynthetic carbon has been found in rock (at 3.85 billion years old) predating stromatolite sediments.5 Wards third Medean event is the rise of an oxygen atmosphere, believed to have occurred later over a period of roughly a million millennia, beginning some 2.5 billion years ago. In this reconstruction (which in Wards hands has a large imaginary, i.e., fanciful, component), the earliest form of oxygen producing bacteria, called cyanobacteria (actually capable of both oxygenic and anoxygenic photosynthesis), destroyed existing methane-based life as its, the cynobacterias, activity transformed the atmosphere into one hostile to a methane metabolizing bacteria. (Methane, CH4, chemically dissociates in a high oxygen, O2, atmosphere.) Ward terms oxygen the first chemical weapon of mass destruction,6 inducing the massive mass extinction of methanogens (methane-based bacteria). If Ward is correct, it would be something to ponder for without this alleged mass extinction life on Earth would be an anaerobic bacterial sludge pond. But is he correct? First, methane-based bacteria have not disappeared from the Earth, but are present in low oxygen environments wherever warm temperatures dominate, for example, at the mid-oceans ridge vent systems and geothermal hot spots, in boiling hot springs, hydrogen sulfide-rich geothermal springs, hot brine lakes, on the edges of active terrestrial volcanoes and within the crater and plumes of an erupting submarine volcano, within rocks in the polar deserts, on the floors of ice-covered lakes and sea ice in the Antarctic, and in deep aquifers from one to over three kilometers below the surface of the Earth, even in low oxygen muds that can be found temperate zones. In this respect, methane-based bacteria are forms of hyperthermophilic organisms. And their mass destruction assumes they entirely dominated all the environments of Earth, a non-falsifiable assumption. It is far more plausible that methanogens retreated to those environments where they originated and where they can still
1

The haze, it is theorized, consisted in hydrocarbon aerosols constituted by photolysis molecular splitting by ultraviolet or visible radiation and charged particle barrages of atmospheric methane. Kump, Kasting and Crane, The Earth System, 209. 2 It is volcanism sustained over geological time we are speaking of here. Singular volcanic events have an opposite effect since such eruptions eject fine dust and aerosol particles that block out sunlight, which, depending on the amount ejected, can reduce global temperatures by increasing Earths atmospheres reflection of sunlight. E.g., Erupting in 1883, Krakatau (in Sumatra) ejected enough sulfide aerosol to increase its atmospheric content fivefold. It stayed in the atmosphere for 1 years and lowered global temperature for three years. 3 The Medea Hypothesis, 74. 4 Kump, Kasting, Crane, Ibid, 211, 234-235. 5 Ibid, 202. The presence of light carbon (12C isotopes) generally indicates biological activity. Now some, not all, of this rock has been reclassified from sedimentary to igneous meaning that in such cases but only in those cases biologically formed carbon would have had to form in molten magma, which is not likely. This issue remains disputed and undecided. Its resolution requires a thorough, critical review, for otherwise it can only be hoped that the issue is not decided by a merely logical requirement of establishing a basis for Darwinian evolution at lifes origins. 6 The Medea Hypothesis, 75.

be found today. To boot, the concept of a chemical weapon of mass destruction with a view to paleobiology and the Archean Earth is a logically illicit transposition from the domain of contemporary politics where, like in Ward, it has functioned, by design, to incite societal hysteria for the pursuit of an otherwise concealed agenda Second, scientific understanding of the primordial nature of these organisms is based on the construction of what is called the universal tree of life. Now this schema is constructed through a technique that sequences that part of the RNA molecule called a ribosome (the part of a cell where proteins are manufactured). Since all organic molecules, as we generally understand them, contain ribosomal RNA and protein production is a very old and slowly evolving metabolic activity, microbiologists think its sequencing provides a way at looking at evolutionary history. Sequencing results have permitted them to construct a tree, i.e., an evolutionary series that descends from early to later forms. But Ward has built his speculation on the possibility that different amino acids or a chemically different DNA may have been the basis of life at its origins, i.e., without recognizing he has done so he has questioned the very basis for constructing the universal evolutionary sequence of lifes forms that justifies his assertion that methanogens were earthly lifes most primordial form Typically, and throughout the history of life, bacteria swap DNA with other bacteria,1 meaning that this history developed through innumerably bewildering cross-links, that, accordingly, the view of unbroken branching tree of life based on DNA evolution from ancestor to descendant cannot be constructed, that phylogentic study will not yield a last common ancestor But, then, Ward is blissfully oblivious to both the methodological and substantive issues, and with regard to the former pursues a presentation that is contradictory and, in the logical sense, absurd. Third, the conviction that methane-based life dominated the Earth prior to 3.8 billion years ago is, as we stated above, commonly held by specialists in Archean Earth, but granting this does not entail accepting that through their activity early oxygenically photosynthesizing bacteria were responsible for the mass destruction methane metabolizing ones: On the infrequently contested assumption among scientists that the present is the key to the past (i.e., the modern biological, geological, physical, etc., processes can be utilized to understand ancient ones), today it generally held that nucleated, cellular (eukaryotic) life first emerged from the merger of Wards sulfide and heating loving bacterium after it underwent a number of further mergers that made it the ancestor of todays fungi, plants and animals (further mergers that perhaps 2 billion years ago included that of this anaerobe with an oxygen breathing bacterium, todays cellular mitochondria, and in some cases assimilation of a bright green photosynthetic bacteria, which eventually became cellular chloroplasts.) In the manner of this reconstruction, the sulfide bacterium, like other forms, was integrated into a larger nucleated cell established as such on this basis. (The final fusion gave birth to a swimming green algae, ancestor to all todays plant cells.)2 On this view, though, there is neither competition in the Darwinian sense nor did the sulfide bacterium vanish in a massive mass extinction. Fourth, an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, its oxygen component at least, did not simply appear all at once in the geological sense (which is what would give meaning to the assertion of a massive species extinction, never mind that bacteria do not form species3), but, as is commonly recognized,4 developed over a billion years (about 2.5 1.5 billion years ago), which renders the notion of an extinction simply vacuous. The fourth and sixth Medean events were periods of intense glaciation that drastically reduced life forms that existed in these periods. Geological reconstructions suggest the first (sometimes called the Huronian glaciations) occurred over a stretch of perhaps 100 million years beginning roughly 2.3 billion years ago. It is believed that if methane formed an important atmosphere gas component in the early Earths evolution, and if over say a billion years cyanobacteria produced copious amounts of O2 transforming this atmosphere, then the temperature of the Earth at its surface would have been dramatically lowered over this time span and allowed ice to form and to spread from land
1
2

Sonea and Mathieu, Prokaryotology, passim. Presented here quite crudely, developed and elaborated on the basis of earlier work of Russian symbiogenetic biologists, then verified (by way of the electron microscope invented in the 1960s) and systematized by Lynn Margulis, this theorization is called endosymbiosis. Margulis postulates a primordial assimilation, that by the sulfide bacterium of the cilia (a mobile bacteria, called a swimmer), and absent that merger hers is the scientifically accepted reconstruction of eukaryotic life. For example, all the sources cited herein, Kump, Kasting and Crane, Condie and Sloan, Wysession, and, of course, Margulis and todays protist biological community accept it as a matter of course. As a neo-Darwinian bigot with Medean appetites, Ward would, of course, be compelled to imagine a contrary, fantastic scenario that does not stand up to contemporary scrutiny. For Margulis, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution (2nd edition); and, for the Russian antecedents, L.N. Khakina, Concepts of Symbiogenesis; and the Second Study, Part IV, Symbiosis and Genuine Evolutionary Innovation, above. 3 Sorin Sonea, Bacterial Evolution without Speciation, 95-105; and Sonea and Mathieu, Ibid. 4 Kump, Kasting, Crane, Ibid; Margulis, Ibid; and Sonea, Ibid.

masses at or near the poles toward the equator. In the second reconstructed snowball Earth incident, occurring about 700 mya, multicellular, oxygenic photosynthetic plant life, having already appeared, which, together with greater continental land mass surfaces, drew down and removed enough CO2 from the atmosphere that a critical level was reached at which glaciation began and expanded along the lines already outlined, 1 and which were fatal to early life forms adapted to a warmer Earth. In the first case, the entire construction is hypothetical. But there is evidence of a sort (the age of amalgams, called tillites, of cobbles, pebbles, mud and sand that have compressed to form rock and form as glaciers break up and crush surface rocks and deposit them in rubble piles, moraines, that appear at glacial terminal points) that can be explained in this fashion. There is another point that should also be noted here: Though our purpose is not to defend a Gaian perspective (one which, at any rate, we can accept only in its most minimal form, and then only after it has been critically and dialectically reformulated and integrated in a broader materialist perspective), Gaian theorization assumes and rests on evolutionary development of life: Gaian Earth increasingly evolved and did not become the dominant characteristic of this evolution until complex and contradictorily developing life (at least according to Lovelock),2 multicellular and highly evolved life, not life at its origins and life that is anaerobic, had formed and evolved. In the second case, the geological reconstruction of the conditions initiating a glaciation depends upon geographical position of the greater landmasses, a significant portion of which were situated in the tropics. Because of this locale, silicate weathering (the chemical breakup of the most plentiful type of rock making up the Earths crust and exposed at the Earth surfaces) was over time able to draw down large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere.3 Ward, in fact, recognizes the importance of this process, and it is crucial in his ultimate explanation for the Medean character of life, as we shall see in Part II. It is the most important element in an explanation that at best is overdetermined. Thus, for Ward to suggest that life largely was responsible, that its development created the conditions for glaciation, is not only grossly inconsistent, it is wildly and polemically one-sided, as a stand-alone explanation constituting a fanciful imputation. If Ward had been a politician, he would be called an irresponsible demagogue. There was one more incident of a global glaciation in the evolutionary history of the Earth, occurring about 600 mya, which Ward fails to mention. Why? Already mentioned earlier in this Study,4 we shall return to this. The fifth Medean event was the formation of Canfield oceans vaguely suggested to have occurred between two and one billion years ago. Oceans were stratified and anoxic, possessing little or no oxygen. Carbon, reduced and collecting at ocean bottoms, was present. A peculiar sulfur reducing bacteria existed and exists at these bottoms. Instead of oxygen, it metabolizes carbon and sulfur (also present in the oceans) for energy and produces hydrogen sulfide as a waste product.5 Anoxic oceans thus were filled with this bacterial byproduct that is poisonous to life forms that require oxygen for respiration. Now Ward attributes the lengthy period of development from the first appearance of life some 3.7 billion years ago to the advent of true animals circa 600 mya as the outcome of the inhibition of life, and he attributes the inhibition to this bacterias production of hydrogen sulfide, and to its crowding out other bacteria that fix nitrogen in other compounds, something multicellular plant life cannot itself do.6 Maybe, but in principle highly doubtful precisely because it abstracts out a single life process from the concrete complex of processes without considering the role, function and significance of those others in the overall evolution of Earthly life, meaning that Wards perspective here is at best evidentially ungrounded and highly speculative. Ward also believes life, perhaps even in the form we known it, is indubitably Darwinian and not only exists on other planets in the universe but is likely common. Maybe To speak the language of Popper, of whom Ward is fond, the proposition of innumerable habitable worlds is not falsifiable But there are other perspectives. Life may have not developed with the facility and ease Ward ascribes to. It may have been slow to start and once started even slower to develop without regard to sulfur producing bacteria, a chance occurrence, to speak metaphorically a metaphysical roll of the dice. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, mind you, in the way of evidence that suggests that life should
1 2

See this Study, The Argument, above. For the glaciations, Ward, Ibid, 75-76, 78-79; Kump, Kasting, Crane, Ibid, 237-241. The Revenge of Gaia and The Vanishing Face of Gaia. 3 Kump, Kasting, Crane, Ibid, 241. 4 This Study, this Part I, The Argument, above. 5 The Medea Hypothesis, 77. 6 Ibid, 77-78.

have developed more rapidly, particularly on his own, commonly held assumptions, i.e., that anaerobic life forms were primordial and that only later did oxygen become a requirement for life. The seventh Medean event was a series of events, microbial mass extinctions dating from 395 to 365 mya. (The same bacteria here and in the fifth Medean event so-called were probably, according to Ward, responsible for three out of four other really large mass species extinctions that occurred later in geological time.) Temperatures rose rapidly, perhaps from volcanic outpourings of CO2, and this warming created a dislocation, shifting the ocean conveyor (thermohaline circulation) but, more importantly, bottom waters began to warm as low oxygen level warm water mixed with deeper waters, chemically and biologically changing the oceans. Shallow waters, increasingly less oxygenated, became anoxic, and, with mixing and warmer bottom waters, dark, nutrient rich cold waters gave way to warmer, clearer waters (the sun light then also penetrated deeper). A green sulfur photosynthesizing bacteria resident to the deepwater bottoms began to grow, expanding upward, and with additional sunlight it multiplied faster, pervading the shallower water regions. Warming in the higher latitudes reduced the equator to poles temperature gradient, and surface winds ceased, leaving the oceans still and appearing flat. These bacteria, with others, produce hydrogen sulfide (which is, as we noted, toxic and lethal to plant and animal life inclusive of humans should we ever confront this event) as a waste product of their metabolism. This waste is excreted by the bacteria and dissolves in water: In gaseous form it rises to the surface of the oceans and into the atmosphere as a great bubbles of poisonous hydrogen sulfide, as belches of sorts. The gas that rose was two thousand times as much as the methane that is atmospherically present today. The ocean, again known as a Canfield ocean, appears as quiet, flat and oily purple, endless expanse. Taken together, the heat generated by a carbon dioxide and methane warmed atmosphere and hydrogen sulfide generated a mass extinction of species.1 Originating with a warming developing from volcanic outpouring of carbon dioxide (is volcanism too a product of life?), and operating with an undifferentiated concept of life, for Ward, this suggests life is Medean, i.e., brings about consequences that are inimical to its future development. Arguments supporting the eight and last Medean event, actually comprising four such events (rapid global temperature alterations as a consequence of plant land colonization 400-250 mya, eutrophication events during the Devonian, the Cretaceous-Tertiary impact extinction of 65 mya and the contemporaneous Pleistocene ice ages of the past 2 million years), have basically a similar structure: Ward asserts that events which were once explained with a view to a causation independent of life, now must be understood in terms of a rather large, if, we add, indirect role of life. Instead of detailing these events and individually critiquing Wards presentation, let us pause here and redeem a promise that will illumine the entire problematic that determines Wards argument: The last incident of a snowball Earth, a global, glaciation occurred about 600 mya. Ward mentions it in passing and but does not discuss it. Why? Is its causation not attributable to life? Perhaps, we can shed a little light on the role of life in all this. In doing so we shall find that it is not as Ward has it. In the late Precambrian, an ice age began as the Earths temperature dropped. Ice formed from seawater, and the sea levels accordingly fell. Eventually, this fall in levels exposed the continental shelves where carbon absorbing life forms gathered. This exposure killed off these forms and disrupted the carbon cycle in its (by our standards) relatively less complex form, permitting the oceans to siphon off ever more amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere relative to the amounts returned to it: The less atmospheric CO2, the less atmospheric absorption of solar radiation, the cooler the Earth, the more freezing of ice (a situation reinforced, amplified, by the increasing ice itself, which, as white, does not absorb but reflects light, solar radiation, back into space). The consequence was a runaway refrigeration, a global glaciation as ice sheets spread even over the land masses in the tropics. Beginning 540 mya, the Cambrian opened the division in geologic time known as the Paleozoic, marking the advent of perhaps the greatest array of fundamental blueprints (basic body plans, phyla) of new life forms in the history of Earths evolution. The Cambrian explosion was distinguished in one decisive respect from the Precambrian (Proterozoic) by biomineralization, by the emergence of hard bodied, shelled organisms in contradistinction to soft
1

Sulfur reducing bacteria can to this day be found at the ocean bottoms. This has a unique significance as Ward explained in greater detail in an earlier, far more interesting and coherent, and less presumptuous work (Under a Green Sky, 131-140). Today climate change is the outcome of a geologically short-term warming caused by a large increase in greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane, that in particular warms oceans. The same hydrogen sulfide event (taking up to a thousand years to fully develop) could recur. It would dissolve the ozone layer and permit a qualitative increase in ultraviolet radiation that, in turn, would kill the remaining oceanic photosynthesizing phytoplankton, and those land and sea based plants and animals that survived the transition from a cold mode of earthly climate (the interglacial) in which we are currently situated to a hot mode.

bodied organisms that had characterized all previous life on Earth. Specifically, the Cambrian witnessed the development of pelagic (oceanic) calcifiers to be followed by a proliferation of cocolithophores and foramnifera (minute, shell forming plankton) during the Mesozoic. The emergence of these new life forms transformed the carbon cycle: Living in open ocean waters, these organisms, through respiration (cellular oxygen intake and carbon dioxide release), calcification (i.e., absorption of inorganic carbon from seawater to build their shells) and death (their calcified bodies accumulating as ocean floor sediments), reconstituted the primary site of the carbon cycle in terms of an ocean-atmosphere relation so that when the ocean fell as ice formed that cycle was not disrupted. Our best reconstructions indicate that atmospheric CO2 was no longer subject to depletion, a depletion that lessened the capacity of the early biosphere to maintain as balance between insolation (solar radiation) and the average Earths temperature at the surface without a runaway refrigeration.1 As a result, the incidence of ice ages has declined markedly and runaway refrigeration has never since recurred: Because of the evolutionary development of novel microorganisms situated at a different surface locale, a biospheric regulatory innovation prevented the carbon cycle from being interrupted, enhancing the further, future development of life, an event that flies in the face of Ward's presentation. Remarks and Reflections In his account of microbial mass extinctions dating from 395 to 365 mya, Ward states, the agents of these events live now, deep in the seas of the world, unknowingly awaiting a return to the abundance that they enjoyed for all but several hundred million years of the last 2 billion years, a stranglehold that would never have been released but for the slow, 500-million-year-long diminishing of the Earths atmospheric carbon dioxide as carbon was slowing pulled from the sky and sequestered into coal, oil, and limestone. 2 And who or what, pray tell, was the agency of this preservation of life as we have reconstructed it and as we know it, life at it exists today, life that includes humanity? The increased rates of carbon burial, starting in the 400-million-year-old Devonian period (the time when land plants became abundant on the continents) led to a dramatic decrease in atmospheric CO2 Remember that in the geologically reconstructed past it has been, and today under conditions of capitalist production it is, the rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 that threatens a runaway warming Vascular plants provide two ways of lowering atmospheric CO2 by increasing the rate of silicate rock weathering, and by transforming inorganic carbon to organic carbon and then removing it from the open air-water systems into relatively closed sedimentary deposits.3 Why, on Wards own account, in the geologically reconstructed past it was life itself that saved itself. This is not mere sarcasm on our part. The problem here is not that life is Medean or Gaian as the case may be. If Ward is correct, and the production of life ultimately creates the conditions of its own destruction since, according to him (see below) the sequestration of carbon dioxide inorganic carbon by silicate weathering and organic carbon by burial in sedimentary deposits will lower atmospheric carbon dioxide below levels where photosynthesis can be performed, then lifes problem is that it confronts Hobbesian choices: The lowering of atmospheric CO2 is a consequence of the overall functional orientation of the earthly nature in which life has predominated toward insuring habitability in the living geological present. For since the formation of Earth in the accretion process in which the solar system developed, the suns radiation has increased about 35%. Lowering atmospheric CO2 insures that life can continue in existence in the face of an increasingly warm planet4 Return, however, to Ward.
1

Cox, Betts, et al, Acceleration of Global Warming Due to Carbon-Cycle Feedbacks in a Coupled Climate Model, 184-187. The Medea Hypothesis, 82. Emphasis added. In his Under a Green Sky, Ward calls these agents, hydrogen sulfide producing bacteria, nasty forms, and refers to this unconscious awaiting as a destructive return, like a bad plague and to their abode, Canfield oceans with their great bubbles of hydrogen sulfide, as no life, but antilife. Ibid, 125, 126, 139. Similarly in an Internet article (Thanks to Our Fossil Fuel Addiction, We May Be Setting Ourselves Up for a Catastrophic Natural Event), Ward refers to methane hydrate based extinction as unannounced stealth nastiness, hardly the sympathetic victims, as he paints them, of lifes first chemically based mass destruction. 3 The Medea Hypothesis, 86-87. 4 This is commonly understood. See Worsely, Nance and Moody, Tectonics, Carbon, Life, and Climate for the Last Three Billion Years, whose reconstruction indicates that the atmospheric CO2 has, beginning from about 12,800 ppm 3 billion years ago, undergone approximately seven halvings (6 would be more accurate) until the present.
2

What his instances of Medean events have in common is, first, their largely speculative (in some cases, unevidenced) character; second, their disputable nature; and, third, the transposition of the remote causal presence of life into a singular, final cause. Momentarily, consider the speculative characterization. In most cases (the further back in geological time, the more this is true), Ward is logically (not empirically, and with the exception of one or two instances, not evidentially) arguing about possibilities. His syntax is replete with verbal constructions such as may have been, seems to be, could be, might be, etc. Modeling based, possible scenarios, processes or events are then by sleight of hand transformed into realities determined by lifes own tendency toward suicide. In these un-evidenced speculations, Ward comes perilous close to engaging in metaphysics (a theorization that is independent of any and all possible objective subjectivities and dependent on none for its validation). Nave realist that he, like most scientists, is, patently he has simply no idea of the enormous methodological problem that haunts the logic of scientific inquiry: He takes for granted without further question or thought that the world, nature if you will, exists or has being both independently of and prior to us as humans, of and to man. This assumption is logically indefensible, for in making the assumption, we abstract from ourselves: We postulate ourselves, the very being who so naively believes, as non-existent Observation, description, theorization cannot proceed independently of the subject that observes, describes and conceptualizes. Such is the perspectiveless position of omnipresent deity That assumption, if explicitly defended, is, to use the language of science, independent of any and all possible observational frameworks, i.e., it is metaphysical. The issue is resolvable, but not within the framework of science.1 Like us, Ward is engaged in a highly mediated, evidential account of earthly nature, and the logical status of this account is that of an ideal or theoretical reconstruction, a conceptual effort to reach back to those conditions that absent a real referent nonetheless appear, in and to thought, as necessary premises of a being whose exists in nature and depends on that relation for its existence. Unlike us, Ward hasnt a clue. To boot, his account is methodologically flawed in the still another serious manner. No matter how grudgingly Ward explicitly concedes the point, all his analyses either presuppose or conclude that earthly nature is an evolving totality of partial systems so-called that are increasingly complex and integrated. But such a perspective cannot rest on atomistic and reductionist foundations that are essential to Darwinian interpretations of evolution. It is precisely these foundations that have been superseded in such an account, and it is logically, methodologically and epistemologically illicit to reinstate them to mount a counter-argument. Wards criticism would need to be immanent, and not made on the basis of the importation of foreign assumptions, ones suspended by the very account he undertakes to undermine. As we pointed out in our discussion of Wards third Medean event, for his presentation a similar problem exists with the derivation of methanogens on the basis of a universal tree of life. There is a final methodological problem in Wards account. It is evident in merely restating his central contention, namely, in seeking its enhancement life actually diminishes the prospects for future life. Quite frankly, for a neoDarwinist (with reductionist appetites), one who hedges mightily the assignment of any ontological distinctiveness, and with it the necessary autonomy (i.e., independence relative to physico-chemical or, as the case may be, genetic determinism) to life, it is the height of absurdity, it is simply ludicrous, to impute futurity and intention to life where it only appears with a uniquely distinctive being not just in nature but within life itself, with man. If life, in ceaselessly interacting with inorganic nature in which changes are effected that enhance it, then the enhancement (habitability) that it aims at is strictly oriented toward present life. It can be no other way2
1 2

See the introductory remarks to the first section, Climate Change, of our Nature, Capital, Communism. Having already written this entire essay, we found two major figures in the Gaia debate (ongoing since the late seventies), Lee Kump and Tyler Volk both Earth system scientists, in essential agreement: If Gaia could evolve, one might expect just such a situation: regulatory capacities in the vicinity of an given present environment (emphasis added, quote marks in the original). Utilization of the term Gaia is misleading, especially since by it the authors more than less intent the same as ourselves, namely, life as a whole within earthly nature. See in Gaias Garden and the BLAGs Greenhouse: Global Biogeochemical Climate Regulation, Schneider and Boston (eds.), Scientists on Gaia, 196. (BLAG is an acronym for a global geochemical cycling model worked out by the geophysicist Robert Berner and his colleagues in 1983.) This much said, let us nonetheless give credit where it is due: Ward does explicitly recognize the role of biological processes in the formation of partial systems such as the atmosphere that make up earthly nature. (Here, for instance, see the account of his discussion of weathering, immediately below). In doing so, he has come a long way from the geologists and geophysicists of the recent past who explicitly argue otherwise and refuse to recognize the structuring of geological processes by biological ones. See, e.g., J. Veizer, The Earth and its Life: Systems Perspective, Origins Life Evolution Biosphere, 18 (1988): 13-39, and James C.G. Walker, P.B. Hays and James F. Kasting, A Negative Feedback Mechanism for the Long-Term Stabilization of Earths Surface Temperature, Journal of Geophysical Research, 86 (1981): 9776-9782, among others.

All this again raises the question of the meaning of life. And even without a consensual determination, it appears that the absence of a return on Earth to a global glaciation indicates, moreover, that life is not entirely Medean. It is not Medean for another reason also: The assumption, suggestion or implication that life is capable of unitary action cannot be validated, only asserted; such is the perspective of religion, theology and metaphysics. Life has a functional unity, and coupled to its other moments, so-called partial systems (oceans, atmosphere, landmasses; abstractly, geological processes such as lithospheric plates, mountain uplift, seafloor spreading, continental drift and volcanism driven by the internal energy of the Earth; carbon, sulfur and nitrogen cycles, etc.) that it shapes and is shaped by, and that taken together form earthly nature, it, entirely unconsciously (i.e., devoid of subjectivity, of will and the capacity for action), aims at sustaining habitability in the actual present. But life does not act, it is not a subject, and certainly not a reality that is distinct from its moments (the vast array of organisms that are subsumed by the concept, life). Might we then say that it is simultaneously Gaian and Medean? It is neither entirely one nor simultaneously both: To claim otherwise is again metaphysical, in the first case to attribute unity to the contradictory, dialectical behavior of emergent phenomena in nature conceptually homogenized (unified) in and for thought, in both cases to tacitly attribute a substantial reality to life as such.

Part II The Physics and the Geophysiology of Life on Earth Wards Medean hypothesis holds that in pursuing its own self-aggrandizement life actually diminishes the prospects for future life. Let us set aside the absurdity of this assessment at each of the levels at which it hitherto has appeared, and examine the additional evidence and arguments he marshals in defense of the view he has put forth. To further support this view he describes a physical aspect of the carbon cycle called weathering the process in which rocks are chemically broken down at the Earths surface. This process not only releases inorganic carbon that is then buried in sediments, hence sequestered or taken out of the carbon cycle, that is, its immediate cycling or circulation, but, as Ward also indicates, plant biota play a crucial role in the process. (Hence it is no longer, if it even was, simply physical an abstraction to which Ward, qua reductionist, clings tenaciously). He then proposes that plant life induced weathering has sequestered such enormous amounts of inorganic carbon over geological time that it has not only dramatically decreased overall atmosphere CO2 content, but this is the real unavoidable direction of earthly evolution, that in no less than 1.5 billion years atmospheric CO2 will drop below a level where photosynthesis, hence plant life and with it the entire chain of life that it depends on its for essential nutrients (food), becomes impossible. He, moreover, proposes that this is scientifically (if not empirically) demonstrable. The demonstration consisting in a modeled account showing that over geological time at least one measure and indicator of lifes productivity, biomass, has more or less consistently declined Biomass is no mere measure, since it is essentially quantifiable There would, then, on the face of it be a relation, for now we can call it a correlation, between atmospheric CO 2 and biomass. And if this relation is direct, i.e., if one wanes so does the other, and if they effectively proceed apace, we have demonstrated decreasing atmospheric CO2 and declining biomass as a measure and indicator of lifes productivity are necessarily linked We point out that this demonstration is a conceptual determination that does not aim at real conditions, i.e., those obtaining in nature as we geologically reconstruct them (conditions which are in principle not directly accessible to us). It does not even refer us back to these reconstructed conditions, but to a computer generated outcome based on static assumptions projected into the indefinite future. This is a telling criticism, which for now we shall suspend If, Ward believes, we can show this linkage we will have shown that lifes intervention in a physical process (weathering) will on geological time scales lead to the death of the planet. Ward thinks he has done this... And even in the face of the conclusion his modeling and simulation drives him to, Ward holds that all is not lost: There is one form of Medean life that is peculiar. It is humanity. Through human intervention, specifically scientific understanding guiding technological practice (that is, planetary engineering), this denouncement can be avoided even though in the longer run the fate of the Earth in relation to an expanding sun cannot. But, like all life, humanity remains Medean: In fact, it has created a global ecological crisis of simply enormous proportions that must be addressed first, climate change warming. If it is not so addressed (and does not establish a precedent and a methodologically assessable experiment for future efforts), we as humans, all life, and the Earth will be once again endangered by recreation of the conditions of an enormous mass species extinction (a geologically short-term but rapid spike in atmospheric CO2 content that produces the conditions for a return of Canfield oceans)... Set this aside, instead lets examine each of the salient steps in demonstration and argument. The Role of Weathering in the Carbon Cycle over Geological Time The presentation here is straightforward. Limestone is formed by mixing calcium (Ca2) with bicarbonate ions (minimally two, 2HCO3), which chemically gives us limestone, CaCO3, and carbonic acid, H2CO3. Silicate weathering, on the other hand, occurs as rock silicates, CaSiO3, combine with carbonic acid (here, again, minimally two molecules), 2H2CO3, and, in so doing, produce two bicarbonate ions (2HCO3), silicate dioxide (SiO2) and water (H2O). As the relation between surface Earth rock silicates exposed to air and water (precipitation) and the end product of the process, limestone, the weathering is given in the equation, CaSiO3 + CO2 CaCO3 + SiO2 (where the arrow, , indicates what is formed following chemical reaction).1 Thus, rock weathering as described here chemically releases inorganic carbon from silicate and carbonate rocks (e.g., quartz, granite), the breakdown products of which run off, are carried by waterways out to sea, and eventually
1

This process is well described by Ward, The Medea Hypothesis, 50.

accumulate in the form of limestone which is sequestered at the ocean bottoms (and which subducted, as one lithosphere ocean plate moves under another or under a continental plate, will eventually pass to the asthenosphere from which it can reenter the carbon cycle as carbon dioxide by way of volcanic eruption). Of special import here is the impingement of, integration with and growing determination by plant life on weathering, transforming physical reactions into a distinctively and inseparably biologically formed chemical processes. We shall let Ward depict the geological situation: The invasion of the land by plants over the past 500 million years [has] drastically changed weathering rates hence the cycle of CO2 among land, air, and sea.1 How so? Plants break up rock as they root in the soil seeking out nutrition: Rootlets, including symbiotic bacteria and fungi they hold, exude different organic acids across their surface area that effectively detach substrata minerals, nitrates, phosphates and other elements requisite for growth. Additionally, plant root systems vastly increase the water retention of soils, setting up a barrier against erosion, thereby establishing a minerals encompassing liquid environment that increases the rate of mineral and mineral material dissolution.2 These biologically generated processes accelerate rock weathering. Plant determination of weathering has, in fact, dramatically increased its rate, though whether this has directly affected atmospheric CO2 content is moot, as Wards own remarks strongly suggest (pointing to another problem here, the accumulating aporia and contradictions that rivet his analysis): The history of abundance over the last 100 million years has been one of overall decline. Much of this decline may have been driven by tectonic events, most notably the uplift and subsequent weathering of the Himalayan Mountains. Because this largest of the Earths mountain ranges is composed largely of silicate rocks, and because its extraordinary uplift (due to the chance collision of the Indian tectonic plate with Asia) created the thickest continent crust on the planet, this single event seems to have markedly changed atmospheric CO2 composition, and with it, Earths climate.3 Ward hedges any causation that adversely affects his thesis. So note that this decline may have been driven by tectonic activity, as (plant) lifes determination of weathering has suddenly on his account become patently more mediate (its causation more remote). But more significantly, it is disputable that at the elevations at which the Himalayas have formed, especially at the moderate to higher levels of the various ranges that make them up, plant life is as profuse as it is among surface rock at lower elevations. This means that weathering in the Himalayas, not to coin phrases, may have been an agency of weathering rates that are qualitatively less than those elsewhere, meaning that it is likely that life, plant life specifically, cannot be said to have been so forcibly and fundamentally determinate in the single event that has so markedly changed atmospheric CO2 composition, and with it, Earths climate4

1 2

Ibid, 63. Ibid, 85-86. 3 Ibid, 66. 4 The weathering in the upper Himalayas relative to those elsewhere is not precisely quantifiable; the entire question of the relation of the respective rates and their overall impact is indeterminate and speculative decided (i.e., assumptions that form the bases of evaluation are unevidenced), which is not to say that life, plant life, does not play a decisive role in weathering worldwide. The geologist and geophysicist Robert Berner (Atmospheric Oxygen, Tectonics, and Life, Schneider and Boston, Scientists on Gaia, 162) thinks otherwise. He maintains that oxidizing weathering of rocks is a moment of a geological cycle that is not biotically dependent: The relief of the continents is a function of tectonic uplift: Thus more uplift leads to higher relief, greater erosion, greater weathering, and greater consumption of O2. However, at the same time greater erosion means greater worldwide sediment deposition, greater burial of organic matter, and more rapid O2 production. Here we have a natural geological feedback system that is independent of biological phenomena (emphasis in original). This is mistaken at least in its formulation: It is vascular plant life that largely decides the rate of weathering, so, in fact, there is biotic determination. Largely means in most if not all cases, and it also means that weathering is not entirely causally determined. For Berner, this is a problem that he refuses to recognize, generalizing his neat causal construct in the very next sentence: An increase in weathering and O2 consumption is matched by an increase in sediment burial and O 2 production, and the overall controlling factor is tectonics, not life (Ibid). Unlike Ward (who struggles mightily against the implications of his own analyses), Berner is not willing to explicitly come to grips with the core problematic that the Gaia phenomenon so-called constitutes for science: Nature is not a closed, fully determined system. Here openly posed, elsewhere mostly suppressed, this is what is at issue in bourgeois theory (science): If nature is not a closed system, if it unconsciously exhibits a moment of negativity or productivity, the entire realist metaphysics that is underlines science, and that scientists insists on, collapses (and with this collapse, epistemological objectively, value neutrality, and class determination that scientists proclaim their theory escapes all crumble), the specificity of humanity in nature existential determinants such as practice, world construction, consciousness and freedom all come into play, and embeddedness of science in society and history, its situatedness as a class based project (nature domination) tied to human unfreedom (class domination), are open to question and examination.

This much said, Ward acknowledges, the primacy of biology itself invaded the mathematicians turf. 1 He is though, or so it appears, utterly incapable of grasping the manner in which this novel reality and its recognition undermines his own underlying perspective on life as it as co-evolved with the Earth. If life shapes the basic physicalchemical processes that shape it, then their relation, the causation so-called, is dialectically circular, not linear and not amendable to reductionist treatment, i.e., such an analysis openly and directly contradicts his DarwinianMalthusian perspective. Thus, in the case of weathering it is frankly more plausible to suggest that plant life as part of earthly nature functionally has for thousands of millennia engaged in maintaining habitability in the face of increasing solar insolation, that in this respect it may have been engaged in what appears as a rearguard action of life as a moment of an earthly nature which in its entirety regulates climate to sustain that habitability Biomass as Measure of Lifes Productivity Ward, like the largest part of the scientific community,2 believes that the growing or, alternately, declining measure of living matter over a strictly defined area (for example, kilograms per cubic meter but for his purposes here the entire Earth), its biomass, is an adequate indicator of lifes productivity. It should be noted that the latter is a reductionist concept that merely speculatively estimates that living mass: It is not internally or organically (no witticism intended) tied to conceptual efforts that refer back to, attempting to capture and express, lifes essential health, its sustainability, and its capacity for growth and development. No, the productivity entertained here is endless, constructed (whether Ward grasps this is irrelevant) on the model of capitalist production, and the concept so formulated is once the complex knot of mediations are untied inextricably bound to, because in the service of, the order of capital If the biochemical role of plant life in weathering and the relation of weathering to increasing carbon sequestration of atmospheric CO2 are granted, then, if atmospheric CO2 has declined over geological time, and if the planets biomass has also declined over the same geological time, we might say not only that lifes productivity is falling but that life itself is creating the conditions of its own, and the planets, demise. This Ward, as we said, will demonstrate, but that demonstration is suspect. How so? There are several features to note concerning deployment of the concept of biomass. The concept is, first, on Wards own account arbitrary, that is, by his own admission he cannot provide a rational justification for utilizing this measure. He states the initial option for any such measure is value-dependent and admits there are a number of possible ways of judging possible success of a species, in this case, all species, speciated life in its entirely. He accepts that all such ways are to a greater or lesser extent flawed, and acknowledges that, perhaps the whole exercise is futile to the point of being nonsensical.3 In the end, the list of species for which biomass is paramount is merely what comes to mind upon reflection.4 Actually the use of the concept is not arbitrary at all: Shaped by all his scientific training, spurned by his reductionist predilections and having fully assimilated, hence guided by, the bourgeois project of nature domination (we shall return to this), Ward pursues his polemical aim and, in so doing, with a certain necessity hits on the single concept that best mediates this project, framing in advance the conclusions he wishes to arrive at. Within the framework described above in the use, grammatically, of the future conditional, the concept of biomass as measure of lifes productivity will with rigorous necessary lead him to conclude that lifes productivity has over geological time dramatically declined, and continues to decline. How does the concept perform this function? By strictly limiting measure and indication to what is a priori quantifiable, it precludes other measures, ones that generate different insights and produce different conclusions. This exclusion is shaped by the conceptual status of biomass; it is, second, an abstraction (not a concrete concept, concrete in the Hegelian sense, a thoroughly mediated concept), one with a purely quantitative meaning and significance. Before an
1 2

The Medea Hypothesis, 63. The largest part, but not all: For example, in his The Structure of Evolutionary Theory the last work of his life written in full knowledge of impending death Stephen Jay Gould attempted to formulate a synthetic, theoretically comprehensive perspective that could frame the dynamics and evolutionary development of life. In a detailed index to the 1343 pages of actual text (exclusive of bibliography), the concept biomass does not even merit an entry. One can review other works, his collections of published articles such as The Flamingos Smile (1985), Eight Little Piggies (1993), Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995) and The Lying Stones of Marrakesh (2000) for the entire period from which Ward dates his sources for this discussion, and in no case is the concept worth an entry. 3 Ibid, 18-19. 4 Ibid, 19.

investigation even begins, characteristics of life there are two in particular which we shall discuss shortly that provide a different, even contrary indication are precluded. The concept is, in fact, taken over from the modern science of nature (physics or more properly mechanics, the bourgeois science par excellence)1 where it refers to objects as contentless, infinitely malleable "matter" subsisting in homogenous space understood simply as extension. The concept of biomass presupposes life or any of its components (i.e., species, genera, phyla and on up the taxonomic ladder) is composed of bodies that are indifferent to one another and indifferent to whether they are here, there or there, and that are qualitatively assimilable one to another, because variations in quantity are all that distinguish them. The various aspects of life as a whole are thus indifferent each to the other. But life in its various aspects is not indifferent to itself: This is completely at odds with the mutual dependency and interrelatedness of those aspects, of living plants on microbes and bacteria on dead plants (which in respiration and metabolism they decompose and thus enrich soil); of herbivores on plants, of carnivores on those plant eaters, etc. The dependency can be measured qualitatively, for example, in the outward appearance of vegetative life, its possession of vitality indicated by lushness in its coloration. Interrelatedness is similarly susceptible to determination. A local ecosystem is sick if its integration fails, if well-to-do homeowners compulsively fertilize the well-manicured lawns, creating an excess of nitrogen from phosphorous runoff producing a mass of algae blooms that cover a nearby lake, starving the lake of oxygen, killing other plant life, then the fish for lack of vegetation to feed on, eliminating a breeding and living milieu for ducks and other waterfowl, etc. Biomass as a measure of lifes productivity is well fitted with the Malthusian-Darwinian perspective from within which it is formulated. But species life is not, relations between species and species-individuals, mutually dependent and cooperatively integrated as the living aspects of ecosystems, hence uncompetitive in the existential (Malthusian-Darwinian) sense, are not. Dependency (here stated generally, but accessible only from its instances) and integration (the second example, itself a specific instance) are not quantitatively ascertainable. More to the point, they presuppose the context from which they are abstracted: They presuppose co-evolution of immediately surrounding world of nature and humanized nature (including humans as natural) that are unified through human activity, work and labor. But this nature is only immediately given to us in the historical present, and not in geological time. The assessment of lifes vitality will, as we shall see, have to be given within this framework, from standpoint of sensuous surrounding nature as a humanized nature that underlies and appears in a historical world constructed through human activity There is, third, no direct way to measure biomass in the geological past. Instead, Ward must resort to speculative constructions produced by modeling.2 He suggests among the most fundamentally distinct forms of life as they have existed on Earth, as anaerobic, as fermentative, as oxidizing, only the last has survived to evolutionarily colonize the Earth because it has achieved the greatest energy acquisition efficiencies. He asks about the role of biomass in the course of Earths evolution, how might biomass have been affected? He responds, assuming that life would increase to the point that it would use all resources the successive increase in energy acquisition through evolving metabolic pathways should yield ever-higher planetary biomass. In this context, he restates his basic assumption, namely, that life would increase to the point that it would use all resources, reminding it is, of course (yes, of course) one of the properties of Darwinian life.3 As we indicated above,4 the results of Wards computer modeled account are entirely dependent upon initial assumptions, and those assumptions, again as already indicated, are axiomatically Malthusian and Darwinian in form (i.e., they are simply asserted, are absent evidence and lack demonstration). Thus, it is this assumption (utilization of all available resources) that guarantees the desired result (namely, biomass is declining over geological time), but it precisely this assumption that vitiates the entire analysis, for as we have evidenced and demonstrated, the
Here, see the Introduction where this insight is tentatively put forth and the First Study where this treatment is further developed, both above. The Medea Hypothesis, 102. 3 Ibid, 103. Given the cul-de-sac that recognition of the dialectical determination of life and earthly nature in its inorganic aspect, recognizing that an oxygen atmosphere optimizes the biosphere for life understood as aerobic (in contradistinction to, say, fermentative, iron respiratory, etc.), leads to abandonment of evolutionary theorization in Darwinian form, it is a common strategy to define optimalization circularly, i.e., in manner that strongly suggest maximal utilization of Earth surface by living organisms, in particular defining life in terms of an imputed maximal reproductive productivity. This problematic is explicit, for example, in G.R. Williams, Gaian and Nongaian Explanations for the Contemporary Level of Atmospheric Oxygen, 166-173; for a detailed analysis of the problem, Second Study, Part IV, Potential Productivity and its Critique, above. 4 This Study, Part I, The Argument.
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assumption will not stand up to critical scrutiny and does not conceptually capture and fix the real movement that is life in its development co-evolving with earthy nature in its development. If the concept of biomass as a measure of lifes productivity is arbitrary, abstract and speculatively constructed, it is because its not a concept designed to assist us in evaluating the essential health, sustainability, and capacity for growth and development of the entirety of earthly life. It is, rather (as we shall elaborate later), a conceptual weapon of those who, functioning as personifications of capitals logic, develop, formulate and defend the intellectual premises and conditions (modern science) that are requisite to the production of a world of commodities through the practical remaking of surrounding nature and its reconstruction as an underlying holding area of unprocessed resources for that commodity production on a capitalist basis. This reduction is achieved through a complex of relations and instruments that mediate our metabolism as humans with earthly nature, a complex we call capitalist technology (or planetary technics), a relation whose overarching aim is capitalist production for its own sake (i.e., a social process in which through work occurs that miraculous transubstantiation of specifically human aspirations, concerns, sensibilities, and even mundane human products such as sweat, into abstracted and generalized, quantified, objectified and materialized, emptied socially necessary time, i.e., into value so-called, a social process in which an autonomous subject, capital, dominates the living working one and objectified and materialized dead labor dominates sensuous, active human beings, a social process that characteristically displays the primacy of profitability over need, of accumulation over social subjectivity, of dead over living labor). In contrast, we can ask, what is the significance of the essential vitality of life as a whole? That which is of overriding importance cannot be determined from modeling, and its assessment is not in need of the concept of biomass: Biodiversity sustains the interrelated and integrated life at Earth surface, the biosphere, and beyond this earthly nature itself: It is mediately responsible for its coherence because, the greater the number of species on Earth, the greater their integration and their mutually interdependence, the more stable and resilient is earthly nature as a whole, the more resistance (the entire complex of interdependent moment, so-called partial systems, including life) earthly nature is to dis-ordering, disruption or disease that attacks any of its moments or afflicts specific forms of life. Modeling the Fate of the Earth Let us temporally set aside the incoherency of an argument that rests on falsified assumptions. Ward employs two studies to booster his case concerning a rapidly aging planet, a dying Earth. To this end, he deploys methodologically determined conclusions and models generated by these studies, both which are in turn integrated as logically supportive (not evidential) aspects of that overall argument. In so doing, he brings together his penchant for possible scenarios (expressed in the syntactical use of conditionals and a preference for the subjunctive tense as we have already noted) that become realities, on the one hand, and with wildly illicit appropriation of the analyses and conclusions of those studies, on the other. Briefly consider those studies. The first is a study by John Alroy, Charles Marshall and others1 that compares two vastly different timelines in the Phanerozoic (the past 540 million years starting from the first appearance of complex, vertebrate life in an outburst of natural, phyletic creativity known as the Cambrian explosion) which suggests, at least to Ward, that lifes productivity did not expand from one to the other. From the late 1970s through 1990s, David Raup and others, in particular Jack Sepkoski - Raups colleague at the University of Chicago and a student of Stephen Jay Gould, produced a series of studies based on the compilation and analysis, hence the creation, of large-scale databases of fossil species. The databases have allowed scientists to make quantitative determinations of the manner in which mass extinction events have unfolded as well as their extent, have permitted them to retrospectively project rates at which new species emerge and to estimate the number of species on Earth over geological time. Those estimates are known as diversity counts. The Alroy, Marshall, et al study announced the creation of a new database (exaltedly called the Paleobiology Database) generated in part from museum collections in contrast to the materials that formed previous databases.2
J. Alroy, C. R. Marshall, et al, Effects of Sampling Standardization on Estimates of Phanerozoic Marine Diversification. Ward, disparaging Sepkoskis method of simply tabulating the number of species recorded in the scientific literature for given intervals of past geologic time (The Medea Hypothesis, 101), states Alroy, Marshall, et al assembled a more comprehensive database based on actual museum collections (Ibid, emphasis added). As opposed to what? Databases established on the foundation of ideal literary, fantasized or
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(These older materials primarily included published and systematic paleoecological and biostratigraphic research and analyses, unpublished faunal lists, and databases that authors had hitherto amassed for separate projects highlighting specific stratigraphic intervals.) It also sought methodologically to correct certain biases that inhered in the older, classical databases (especially, Ward suggests, those of Sepkoski). The bias so-called that has above all been at issue is, so it is argued, a tendency to undercount diversity in the deep geological past. (Two intervals of approximately 150 my each are studied. The first interval occurs in the middle part of the Paleozoic, and the second from the mid-Mesozoic to the mid-Cenozoic.) The new method(s) sought to standardize the quantity of data under review in each division of time examined, this in the belief that it would more closely approximate a genuine biological pattern.1 The authors relate that they employed eight different sample-standardized analyses of the database, and used four different sub-sampling methods together with two taxon-counting protocols to generate their graphic representations of their results, otherwise known as diversity curves. Now, the authors suggest (while Ward proclaims) these new methods raise misgivings about the long-held views that biodiversity has increased dramatically in the last 250 million years.2 This is not the place to undertake a critique of Alroy, Marshall, et al, though two critical points are immediately worth noting. First, the database purports to be a Phanerozoic terrestrial and marine fossil record for all geographic regions, while the study itself is severely, geographically circumscribed. It is based on marine invertebrate fossils located in collections restricted almost exclusively to the geologically contemporary Northern Hemisphere (North America and Europe),3 not to mention the limitations imposed by a restricted genera database.4 Second, effectively the study outcomes are methodologically determined. Though we shall have immediate occasion to return to this, we cannot pursue it in detail. Instead, here we shall merely note the authors own caveats, which Ward ignores. Totally four, these qualifications restrict the sweep and the firmness of the authors conclusions. They are, first, the geographical restriction of the sampled collection (the study focuses, as we said, solely on Northern Hemisphere marine invertebrates); second, the tendency of different methods of counting to inflate or, alternately, to deflate taxa counts, thereby potentially distorting diversity curves;5 third, the employment of methods (one weighting lists, another sampling occurrences instead of lists) that may over penalize the second interval (which concerns a large part of that last 250 million years in which biodiversity has long been thought to have markedly increased), thus producing curves that seem to indicate that diversity has remained remarkably steady over geological time; and, fourth, concentration on geographic regions that were at tropical latitudes from start to finish of the first period of study (middle Ordovician-late Carboniferous), and were at temperate latitudes in the second period of study. As the authors themselves point out, If a strong equatorto-pole diversity gradient existed during both of our study intervals, our sampling of higher-latitude faunas during interval 2 may mask an actual increase in global diversity. Though at the outset of this interval continental landmasses were different (Pangea was beginning to break up), such a gradient did exist during long periods of interval 2 (during the late Jurassic and from the middle Eocene to the present day).The possibility the authors themselves point to, then, is very real. Additionally, whether maximal diversity is an outcome of environmental
rumored accounts? In point of fact, of 7035 identified genera in the [Paleobiology] database, we used 4477 (63.6%) that are [already] identified in Sepkoski's compendium as belonging to the core taxonomic groups, Ibid. As we shall see, it is the methodological issue, not the source of fossil evidence, that is decisive; for it is the sampling methodology that controls the results, not the structure (pattern) of the diversity that is to be reconstructed. 1 Ibid. The collections (called lists) in each of the two main periods (intervals) are, in turn, divided into sub-intervals (called sampling bins) of about 10 million years. 2 Taxon (plural, taxa) is a division within a classification, taxonomy, of life forms, for example, species, genera, family, order, etc. The Alroy, Marshall, et al database consists in subspecies, species and genera, and bases its counts on the last. Sepkoskis database counted families, the next higher taxonomic level. 3 Ibid. 4 [We] analyzed only a core set of well-reported higher taxa: the Anthozoa, Brachiopoda, Echinodermata, Mollusca, and Trilobita. These taxa together constitute 19,319 (64.9%) of the genera in Sepkoski's unpublished compendium, and 9815 (62.6%) of the genera found in more than one of the stage-long intervals Our sampling is not yet adequate for other groups like the Bryozoa, Conodonta, Graptolithina, interval 1 cephalopods, and interval 2 anthozoans and malacostracans. Ibid. Emphasis added. Since when does well-reported necessarily entail representative? On what basis? 5 E.g. a sample counting method that inflates those counts where (i.e., in the Paleozoic) taxonomic turnover rates are persistently high; another that deflates counts where taxa cross bin boundaries (boundary-crossers) if bins are long or turnover rates are high.

stability or vice versa,1 it is clear that in the tropics the absence of extensive seasonal variation of solar insolation on geological timescales, temperature and rainfalls even during ice ages have changed only marginally and, as a consequence, both maximal diversity over geological time and environmental stability have characterized this region on Earth. Thus, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Alroy, Marshall, et al study of diversity is necessary biased toward the tropics and decidedly toward the first interval, meaning that overall diversity in the earlier interval is exaggerated, further throwing into serious doubt the major outcome of the study, namely, the proposition that biodiversity has been not dramatically increased, rather has been steady, over the past half billion years. This, then, is the general problem with the study: Contrary to the authors (and Wards hard reading of these) conclusions, the entire methodological orientation of the study, and the geographical distribution of the sampling in particular, necessarily weights the results toward greater diversity in the early Paleozoic. This produces results that demonstrate that taxonomic diversity may have neared Paleogene (i.e., 66-24 mya) levels during the Paleozoic (for purposes of the authors study, as early as 450 mya), thereby challenging earlier, classical diversity studies (i.e., those of Sepkoski) which suggested that the late Mesozoic and the Cenozoic (say, 100 mya to the present) witnessed a massive marine radiation that exceeded anything that had previously occurred. Wards claim for a decline in lifes productivity over geological time, though, rests squarely on those results unencumbered by any such stipulations, a claim asserted in the face of bias immanent in the samplings geographical distribution over geological time. Now, to be sure, there are problems with Sepkoskis studies, 2 but these do not give license to uncritically accept the results of studies that reach opposing, highly tentative and just as problematic conclusions. In Wards case, the conclusions he draws from the Alroy, Marshall, et al study are not warranted and do not support his claim for lifes declining productivity over geological time The second study is by Siegfried Franck and co-workers.3 Ward utilizes a series of graphic representations from this study, an investigation of the long-term coupled evolution of the Earths geosphere and biosphere. The findings imply that the Earths remaining lifespan so-called is considerably shorter (by a few hundred million years) than the computed by others (presumably on the basis of astrophysical models among others) Now Francks presentation is a clear, high-quality graphic re-presentation of results. But the analysis and investigations, not to mention a defense of assumptions, have been previously developed and are anything but part of the presentation. Not to short Franck, et al there is a pictorial-mathematical description of the model. The authors note there are four major component models that form the presuppositions for the mathematical calculation. They are atmospheric CO2 content, continental growth, rates of volcanism and other forms of tectonism, and biomass.4 According to Ward, these premising models provide not only the various parameters used but also the best estimates for those parameters. Do they? We have already shown the incoherency that underlies and seriously impairs the concept of biomass, and the models that are based on it. Briefly here, we shall consider continental growth, since in geological time it is
1
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Similarly, Kump, Kasting, Crane, Ibid, 184-185. For example, his database documents only first and last appearances of taxa regardless of where they occur in the world, and does not record other data, for example, the frequency with which taxa appeared or where they appeared. Thus, Sepkoskis database poses a leveling problematic: Those taxa that widely appear have identically the same status as ones that appear infrequently or rarely. It is this that raised questions concerning a systematic downgrading of occurrence of taxa in the deep geological past. Thus, it could and has been argued that the increase in diversity that has occurred as we approach geological contemporaneity may be largely a consequence of the greater volume of rock that is available and accessible in geologically more recent times. Sepkoski and Raup were well aware of these problems: As early as 1978, Raup had formulated the problem of the pull of the recent (Cohort Analysis of Generic Survivorship, Paleobiology, 4: 1-15) in the context of ongoing debate on the periodicity of extinctions. Taxonomically, the very use of families as the unit of analysis in the database (especially with a view to a discernible pattern to mass extinctions) was designed to eliminate this bias (discussed in their 1984 paper, D.M. Raup and J.J. Sepkoski, Jr., Periodicity of Extinctions of Families and Genera, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 81: 801-805.) To boot, both were members of the Alroy-Marshall team. In what capacity, we do not know; but Sepkoski did lend his database (and probably much more) to this group and it formed, as the citations above verify, a large and crucial part of the new Paleobiology Database. In the obvious sense, presumably both Sepkoski and Raup participated fully in the discussions in which methodological issues were raised and the framework for their resolution was elaborated. Sepkoski, it should be noted, died in 1999. He did not live long enough to see the results of the study. 3 Siegfried Franck, et al, The Long Term Evolution of the Geobiosphere (2006). The cover page bears a date of June-October 2007, so it has obviously been updated. Accessible online. Search under geobiosphere, then Franck. The presentation can be downloaded. It is made in pdf format. Francks workers are Werner von Bloh and Christine Bounama. 4 Frank, et al, Ibid, 12 (model description); Ward, Ibid, 80. Wards summary fails to mention biomass.

immediately related to atmospheric CO2 and mediately to volcanism: Or, to cite Ward, Because the rate of weathering is related to the amount of land that can be weathered, the size of the continent through time will have a decisive effect on CO2 levels.1 How is the future size of the continents determined? Well, unlike Ward, Franck, Lenton, Bounama, von Bloh and others that constitute the future, planetary geoengineering oriented cohort, and still others, there are those with reasonable doubts about useful calculation of the future size of continents: Among them, Michael Wysession points out projection of sizes raises a question that is really hard to answer. All we have is what the plates have done in the past and the direction theyre going now, well, thats pretty good, but essentially all were going to do is as well as meteorological forecasters do. And, you know, how well do you trust a forecast of what the weathers going to be like over the weekend? 2 Wysession adds, The best we can do is to take our current motions and project a little ways into the future. So lets start by asking how are current motions constituted? Geophysicists have developed a model of continental assemblage in terms of a determination of the age of the plates. It goes back about 750 million years: Oceanic and continental lithosphere actually form the material of the plates (though the reconstruction of oceanic history is based on the last 200 million years since this is the temporally how long it takes an ocean to open and close, to form and disappear). The model, which in this case is a geological reconstruction of continental assemblage, is based upon continental paleomagnetism: After rock cools it freezes in the magnetic field. The latitude at which continental rock forms can be determined by using the inclination of the magnetic field lines Earths magnetic field is predominately dipolar, and is fairly symmetrical about Earths axis. But the magnetic field lines change their tilt at different places at Earths surface, and that tilt is what is known as the inclination. From equation to poles, inclination rises from 0 to 90. So crystallized from molten lava (volcanism) once igneous rock cools below a certain point, called the curie point, it freezes in the direction of the magnetic field in the rock giving a paleomagnetic direction: That direction is the inclination, the latitude frozen into the rock at the time it was formed This method wont give us longitude If we take the rock and line its field up with the magnetic field of rock that exists today, we can discover how far it has moved in latitude and how much it has rotated. Once we find the age of the rock, we then have some record of how far it has moved from its origins until today. If we do this with enough rocks we then have a record of ancient plate motions that forms the model for current motions.3 It seems pretty straightforward. That, however, is deceptive: Universal utilization of this method masks its flaws. To put it mildly, the method requires care: Metamorphism can reset the magnetic field. Although not melting, rock temperature can rise above its curie point. If it does, and all reconstructions indicate it does repeatedly, the magnetic field is reset at the time the metamorphic event occurred. There are two ways to finesse the problem, both inadequate. One is to take a great number of measurements in various locales and, as Wysession remarks, hopefully things average out. The other is to take the oldest dates within a region, assuming that gives the date at which the rock formed and was not metamorphosed by some later event. In the first case, we are whistling in the dark, and in the second case there is simply no guarantor that the oldest dates themselves arent metamorphosed ones. Regardless of how pervasively it is utilized, the point is that the model forming the basis for current motions masks contingencies and is fraught with uncertainty up to and including the length of geological time in which continental masses are said to have assembled. Does this bother Ward? Obviously not. He ploughs on ahead Okay, assume the current motions and project them geologically into the future. (And, here also note Wysessions honesty, he says a little ways into the future, i.e., at the extreme maybe two hundred million years, the span of existence of an ocean. Franck and Ward are not bothered by such scruples. But in their case, it is not so much a matter of dishonesty as that of an unreflective methodology, a procedure governed by a set of deterministic assumptions that guarantee they can carry on without uncertainty or doubt, a procedure that also neatly dovetails with their objectives We shall return to the latter). Current motions of the plates suggest that the Atlantic Ocean will open for a while, an undetermined period of time, and the Pacific ocean will close up; that is, North and South America are moving westward and closing up the Pacific.
1
2

The Medea Hypothesis, 62. Michael Wysession, professor of geophysics at Washington University (St. Louis), from a 2008 lecture entitled History of Plate Movements. What follows is a standard account based on Wysession. 3 (Radiometric) dating is similarly flawed or, more preferably, conceals contingencies. This is lengthy, so we have appended some remarks in this regard. See Radiometric Dating, below.

But we dont know, and cant know, if theyll ever actually collide with Asia or whether the Atlantic Ocean will develop subduction in the near future and close up again like it has in the past We see that Africa is splitting up at the same time it is colliding with Asia. The African plate is moving toward Eurasia, and the other two subcontinental plates are breaking apart in the Rift Valley widening the Red Sea. The question is which is going to win out? The answer is that we do not know... But it is of decisive importance: Over great sweeps of geological time, say over the past 540 million years, periods of glaciation are in part tectonically determined by the collision of landmasses that, in creating continents (or supercontinents as the case may have reconstructively been), raise mountains, that are weathered and reduce atmospheric CO2 bringing about cooling, while periods of continental break-up, say as in the case of Pangea beginning roughly 180 million years ago, entail intense volcanism that ejects massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, bring about warming The process of India colliding into Asia, and with it the rise of the Himalayas, will end, and the latter will be reduced by erosion (weathering) to the Appalachians of Asia. But Australia is rapidly, geologically speaking, moving into south(east) Asia and will collide to the point that some day we could walk from Australia to China across a continuous landmass. This process will recreate mountains along the plate boundaries, and Australia-Asia will be part of one massive supercontinent. But, as Wysession indicates, how it goes from there, we still dont have any sense. For, there are so many uncertainties in the chaotic flow of the mantle, we just cant be sure (emphasis added). So beyond this, we would be well advised to view any predictions the same way youd view a weather report. In a qualitatively similar account Kent Condie and Robert Sloan state, Until we understand more about convection in the Earth and how it changes with time, any predictions about plate tectonics in the future remain speculative; and, given this caveat, If the major directions and rate of plate motions we see today remain roughly constant for the next 50 My or so, then dramatic changes on the order of those just described might occur.1 In purely scientific terms, what we have here, especially in Wysession, is an admission of a frankly unilinear prospective projection of development, and the inadequacy of such projection to a dynamic, open system in which feedbacks can alter the course of that development. Yes? No? Not convincing? Then consider a remark by Tim Lenton. His grey atmosphere model constitutes another of the parameters (Wards term) that Franck bases his mathematical calculation on.2 Increasing solar luminosity forces the model systems. First we considered the geostatic case in which sea floor spreading rate and continental area are held constant, then a geodynamic casein which changes in continental area and sea floor spreading rate provide an additional forcing. In the geodynamic case, past continental growth is linearly extrapolated into the future and sea floor spreading rate is calculated to decline gradually throughout. Continental growth tends to increase the sink while declining spreading rate slightly decreases the CO2 source, both effects tending to decrease CO2 with time.3 What is wrong here? Well, we can first note the prospective linear extrapolation of continental growth. Then we can also point out that the assumed gradual rate of seafloor spreading throughout the next one billion years is a necessary logical inference from gradual continental growth that is linearly projected from the model itself: An explosive collision of oceanic plates, the rise of mid-ocean ridges and an outpouring of volcanic magma, its rapid
1

Origin and Evolution of Earth, 420. Emphasis added. My means millions of years. Condie and Sloan describe three models of continental growth (that of rapid early growth, linear growth and episodic growth), indicating the last is today most widely accepted and noting that periods (episodes) of rapid growth in the North American and European continental crusts are supportive evidence. The authors further note the significance of episodic growth is not fully understood, and it is clear that episodes of rapid continental growth, nonetheless, correspond to times of major orogeny (Ibid, 112) orogeny refers to the rise of mountains confirming both the uncertainty we have already discussed in projected atmosphere depletion in view of the fate of the African plate. (Will it collide with Eurasia, raising mountains, increasing weathering and reduce atmospheric CO2, or break apart along the Rift Valley, with volcanism and with its ejections raise the amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, or both with perhaps no net gain or loss?) Cited as Condie (1990), Franck (Ibid, 12) employs Condie (Growth and Accretion of Continental Crust: Inferences Based on Laurential, Chemical Geology, 194) for the model of continental growth operative as one of his parameters. We have used the Condie and Sloan (1998) work cited above and Condies Earth as an Evolving Planetary System, which incorporates the analyses and conclusions of further work, published in nearly a dozen papers, done since 1990. In this update (actually the fifth version of Plate Tectonics and Crustal Evolution originally appearing in 1976), uncertainties and estimates that reflect poorly known or understood processes remain endemic to the model of continental growth set out in this work, Ibid, 290-291. 2 Frank, et al, Ibid, 12 (model description), where Linton grey atmosphere model is deployed to account for rates of solar insolation. 3 Timothy M. Lenton and Werner von Bloh, Biotic Feedback Extends the Life Span of the Biosphere (2000). Emphasis added. Accessed on line, 24 August 2009. Von Bloch is one of Francks colleagues at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Potsdam, Germany. This is not the specific article where Franck refers to the grey atmosphere model, though this article is cited in Franck graphic presentation and Lentons model is present in it.

cooling as basalt and, according, and equally rapid spread of the seafloor all of which has happened in the past as reconstructed and which would disrupt the gradualness of its assumed rate of decline is simply not a feature that is incorporated into the model. What is wrong here? A complete determinism characteristic only of closed systems so-called is taken for granted. Non-deterministic processes, events and relations that interact sometimes reinforcing, amplifying, others and other times suppressing others, non-deterministic processes, events and relations, even ones that for this formulation might appear stochastic (not evincing a causal regularity but one that is statistical), are banished. How else could we predict the future of planetary life? Logically forced to abandon cause and effort, to affirm a dialectical causation of reciprocal determination, Ward ignores the import of his position; even under obvious compulsion to abandon unilateral causality by forces in nature, e.g., plant life, that interdict as it were and transform what shapes them, Ward turns a blind eye to his own evidence (and argument); as, horror of horrors, indeterminacy and contingency in nature kick him in the face, Ward retreats to the conceptual sleights of hand, negative or positive feedback, that at once conceals while permitting a mystified, obfuscatory pursuit of that peculiar, because predictive scientific form of determinism which is quantitative and mathematical. (Prediction is decisive: It practically generates the real prospects of control, i.e., of nature domination, which, as we have argued, is inseparable for social domination.) But return to Franck Described mathematically, the Franck, et al model indicates that the future of the Earth portends a continuous decline in atmospheric CO2 below where photosynthetic activities become impossible, a product of lifes own activity.1 The upshot in Wards view is that this planet has been in its old age for some time.2 Is the planet dying? Well, if you accept the astrophysical account of main sequence stars described in the Introduction to the first part of this discussion above, then in roughly 2 billion years the expansion of a sun going red giant will incinerate the Earth. But today, here and now, is it no longer a vibrant, living planet but one that has already entered old age? An aging planet whose life mediating existence is no longer productive, aging due to biochemical weathering that is drawing down atmospheric carbon dioxide to that point in which it will die long before its astrophysically projected death? It turns out that this habitable zone collapses completely in some 1.4 billion years from now as a consequence of geodynamics (Franck), half a billion years if you allow yourself to be snookered by Ward. Even if the discussion was methodologically sound, even if it was not guided by the intent to make a case for planetary engineering (and what that entails), we ask, so what? What is the difference between 2 billion years (astrophysical models), 1.4 billion years (Franck), or .5 billion years (Ward) for a being, man that, in paleoanthropologically reconstructed terms, can date its (australopithecine) ancestry back perhaps 3 million years, that dates the formation of its genera (Homo) back 1.8 million years, that dates its appearance as a species (Homo sapiens) back perhaps 110,000 years, and its actual subspecies formation (Homo sapiens sapiens) back roughly 45,000 years? For such a being, these timescales are meaningless. In a practical sense, for us to concern ourselves about the fate of life on Earth in its geologically temporal extent, about the fate of the Earth some, minimally, half billion years into a future projected on the basis of a dubious construction (i.e., one whose fundamental assumption does not square with the forms and modalities of the past coevolution of that life with earthly nature), we must prove that we can extend our own existence another 45,000, 110,000, 1.8 million and then 3 million years (all extensions which are open to serious question) by integrating this concern with resolution of our own defining problems of social division and hierarchical social relations, material inequality, exploitation, oppression and countless bigotries, and, driven by capitalist development, the ongoing plunder, despoliation and destruction of the same Earth. This is no facile task: We are speaking here of a being whose attempts to understand itself and its place in the totality take shape on the basis of its, our, concerns, anxieties, hopes and aspirations that rise from its experience in daily activity. For such a being, without resolution of those defining problems, a half, one and a half or two billion years will remain so completely incongruent with that experience, so utterly incomprehensible in terms of any logically possible or psychologically conceivable experience as lived under conditions of social division, exploitation and oppression, that it will never be reached except by way of the most vacuous abstraction. It is, however, a diversion from precisely those issues and is not consciously part of a larger ideological effort to rationalize and legitimize the
1

Ibid, 28, graph, The Terrestrial Life Corridor. The Medea Hypothesis, 118.

regimentation of working population that social division specifically in the form of totalizing domination requires Such conceptualization is, moreover, congruent with (here expressive of) the infinity and vacuity that capitalist production aims at. That any such being (individual) would engage in this empty abstractive exercise obliquely expresses its functional existence as a personification of capital in its movement (development), and the project of nature domination it pursues as a means to production simply and merely for the purpose of future production of value (capital), a systems compulsion that seeks only its own self-expansion. Let us examine Wards consideration of that being in greater detail. The Contradictory Character of Medean Humanity In evolutionary biological reconstructions, the most basic division in life is between two forms, prokaryotes and eukaryotes. The former are single celled organisms lacking cell nuclei. They are composed of two great domains in the tree of life so-called, archaea and bacteria (though both are often called bacteria), Among them we find the earliest accessible forms of life, methanogens and cyanobacteria (appearing in our prior discussion of Medean Events in the Evolution of Life), the one engaged in sulfide based metabolism and the other capable of photosynthetic activity and responsible, or so it is believed, for the initial rise of an O2 atmosphere on Earth. Eukaryotes, on the other hand, designate organisms with cell nuclei and its machinery (membrane enclosed organelles such as mitochondria and ribosomes, and chloroplasts in plants). These organelles may have, in such reconstructions, had distinct prokaryotic beginnings but were later symbiotically subsumed by larger cells forming, at it were, the eukaryotes. Eukaryotes lay at the origins of macroscopic multicellular organizations, of species in the Darwinian sense. Ward tells us that in the evolutionary sense these two sides of lifes most basic division are behaviorally distinct:1 In his Darwinian world, when eukaryotes confront environmental changes, say an increasingly acidic medium, they evolve means to escape the harmful environment, they adapt, they change their morphologies, in the example employed here perhaps the lethal effect of increased acidity is reduced by production of a protective cell wall. Prokaryotes, though, behave differently: Confronting the same novel environment, they reaction by attempting to change their environment, in the example by exuding a chemical that decreases acidity. It is only with the emergence of humanity that, Ward believes, that this fundamental division undergoes change: For the first time, with humans, ones species of eukaryotes has begun to act more like microbes,2 i.e., like prokaryotes. (This is the first sense, Wards, of the contradictory character of Medean humanity.) He cites admittedly crude examples, but ones consistent with his analysis (i.e., with a Darwinian perspective for which relation of species to environment is straightforward and unmediated): If in the face of cold we put on clothes (eukaryote behavior), in the face of heat we transform our environment (immediate milieu) with air conditioning that alters air temperature around us (prokaryote behavior) of course the entire build environment, a social and historical world, that we bring forth as something new in nature, that we produce, and that through labor, work and activity mediates our relation to nature and our understanding of it, while transforming it, these practical, active mediations do not come into play in Wards absurdly reductionist analysis, instead we increasingly undertake to change conditions around us, we mimic prokaryotes.3 We are behavioral prokaryotes. We humans, according to Ward, are also behaviorally prokaryotic in still another, important way: Like the metabolic byproducts of microbes (methane, hydrogen sulfide) that are deadly to other organisms, the products of our social metabolism can also be deadly to other organisms, as our toxic waste includes plutonium, and, in particular, increasingly dangerous levels of atmospheric CO2. (This is the second sense of the contradictory character of Wards Medean humanity.) In this context, he returns to Malthus, explicitly referring to him. The single most intractable problem of a humanity that is prokaryotic is population growth: While our population numbers increase exponentially, human food supply tends to increase on a linear scale as more land is devoted to agriculture.4 He returns to the Malthusian-Darwinian theme of the Earths carrying capacity, by raising the specter of a population of 12 billion humans by 2150 even if current global human fertility rates fall from 3.3 children per woman to 2.5, and a population of 200 billion people in the twenty-second century if the current human population growth rates in the
1 2

Ibid, 92-93. Ibid, 93. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid, 94.

capitalist periphery (5.7 children per woman) are generalized worldwide.1 Within his framework of analysis, he notes the consequences of this mounting human density: Today, humanity consumes 40% of global plant production (measured photosynthetically in terms of plants transformation of atmospheric CO2 derived inorganic carbon into organic carbon as in plant tissue, living cells) in one way or another, as food, timber or grazing land. Such human activity translates among other things into the destruction of tropical forests, which contain upward 80-90% of all biodiversity on Earth.2 While, on the face it, it is difficult to disagree with the consequences of human activity as Ward and others characterize the problem, the entire framework is wrong, wrongheaded and is developed to suggest solutions that will not ameliorate but will exacerbate the entire situation. We shall return to this shortly Ward argues, though, there is a way out, a way forward and this lies in planetary engineering, a technological practice that itself entails a major paradigm shift, a transformation of worldview:3 This is possible because of the contradictory character of Medean humanity (a further third sense of the term): We humans have the odd distinction of being the only ones that either know or care, and it remains to be seen if we will stave off planetary extinction or hasten its onset.4 Odd, indeed, since from within Wards reductionist and Darwinian perspective it is impossible to comprehend what is distinctive about human beings as beings in nature. What is it that would permit we humans to overcome the tendencies of life around us and those of our own species to make the Earth a less salubrious (and eventually lethal) abode for life?5 What sort of being, not species, is that can change the rules and save the rest of life, as well as our own species, from itself? In a language that is entirely foreign to him one that nowhere else appears in this work, language that bursts the framework of his scientific metaphysics, Ward insists we must change from being witlessly destructive life forms to being consciously active anti-Medean life forms.6 If we are as Wards science would have us, how is that such change is possible for us? It is because we are actively conscious beings, but the meaning and significance of this escapes bourgeois science. Why and how is it that a worldview is of such extraordinary consequence that it must be transformed? It will not due to state, there is evidence for major brain changes with intellectual ramifications 35,000-40,000 years ago,7 when those intellectual ramifications are grasped and explained in terms of physicalistic reductionism. Instead, it is because, ranging from common sense to world visions, conceptual constructs rise from and, dialectically, impart meaning, sense and direction to daily activity. But recognizing, and then fully assimilating, this overthrows the theoretical foundations of science: If we must change it will change only because we can change, because mediated by activity that possibility inheres in our being as humanly natural beings. It cannot in principle be a matter that in the evolutionary sense humanity is behaviorally prokaryotic. A consciously active life form cannot be comprehended and explained from the perspective of modern science. Surely Ward is far from [his] comfort level in this discussion that called for philosophy and meditation; 8 or, more bluntly, he knows not what he speaks about, and by his own admission he is in over his head. To extend the metaphor, he is drowning. Only when we abandon the theoretical framework of modern science (and, in doing so, only by integrating its genuine insights), that we can arrive at a standpoint that simultaneously permits us to comprehend and explain humanity as a distinctive form of being within nature, an unfolding climate change catastrophe and the real possibilities for ameliorating its effects as they are already beginning to be felt.

1 2

Ibid, 94-95. Ibid, 95-97. 3 Ibid, 128. 4 Ibid, xv. Emphasis added. 5 Ibid, xx. 6 Ibid, 128. Emphasis in original. 7 Ibid, 133. 8 Ibid, 128.

A Distinctive Form of Being within Nature Here we shall make no effort to theoretically validate, to justify in the rigorous philosophical sense, the position that is formulated below.1 Instead, we shall merely and summarily state a position that permits us to go beyond the contradictions and incoherency that plagues Wards view of Medean humanity. The inorganic (abiotic), vital and human, socially yet naturally human, are integrated albeit distinct orders or levels of reality within nature as a whole. From this perspective society does not start off where nature ends (in any case, social organization characterizes forms of the vital order that are not even mammalian): Society and in the case of human society, culture, does not develop, overlay, and even merely enter into, reshaping as it were, biology. Instead, society reaches back into nature, as far back as its very vital foundations, while nature extends forward to the most advanced aspects of specifically human development. Man is a development within nature: What distinguishes her, i.e., what makes various groups of humans different within nature (but not separate from the rest of it) are practices that transform various aspects of nature, that remake immediately surrounding nature in which those groups are embedded, and that remakes them in and through production of a world (humanized natural landscapes, built environment, cultural forms and symbols, use objects) that, sustained by that human activity, is interposed between groups of humans and nature in its becoming. In the decisive evolutionary sense what is pre-man (in other words, hominid) becomes man through specific socially reproductive activities that entail an objectively (worldly) mediated self-making in relation to the immediately surround natural world: In, through and on the basis of said activity man becomes himself, becomes humanly natural. If we examine this development in evolutionary terms, we can, first, note the non-Malthusian, non-Darwinian character of human existence in nature is present from the outset, i.e., to the development of man as man: We base ourselves on evidentially reconstructed relation between hominid evolution, climate and climate change. We discover that every successful hominid species of the genus Homo exhibited greater population density, and a definite and perhaps increasingly complex sociality, developments that were accelerated within the geological time of specific propitious climatic changes (especially as these changes effected the shifting boundary between the central African savannah to the south and Sahara desert to the north) and which cannot be explained in Darwinian terms as an adaptation of population to environmental resources that are simply given, but must be understood in terms of activities that, explicitly anti-Malthusian, rearranged and remade, thus expanded resources, activities which, furthermore, over generations engendered organic transformations such as changes in dentition and posture that, genetically fixed, in turn transformed the species 2 We can note, second, sociality and activity, instruments, and anatomical-physiological self-making, literally, are evolutionary inseparabe aspects of the becoming of man as man. Spanning over three thousand millennia, the practices of the australopithecine, then the hominid becoming human that appear in and the basis of our reconstructions exhibit a unique conjuncture of activities, predation, the construction of tools set to a regular pattern (ideality), social interaction permitting a greater social intelligence, that created new skills while anatomically transforming this being during the course of its evolutionary development (e.g., shortening of the forelimbs and development of the hand in the making of tools to skin and gut carrion, bursts of speed to catch prey over short distances and, similarly, surveying, say a large plain better accomplished in an upright posture as were carrying objects such as a stone tool or that carrion). At the same time, elements of memory were linked to rudimentary foresight as it became important to note how other predators killed and prepared for such. An indicative, performative speech was laboriously elaborated: Beginning, perhaps, with the reproduction of animal sounds as lures or distractions, followed by gestures (in particular pointing) that are akin to signals and, accompanying these, their reproduction in audible form. Thus, an extremely limited vocabulary rooted in and clarifying aspects of the hunt was thereafter utilized in planning its details.
1

For this, see our Nature, Capital, Communism, and Work and Speech: The Origins of Man: A Short Review of Trn Duc Thaos Investigations into the Origin of Language and Consciousness. The position put forth here is further developed above, see the Fourth Study, Part III, The Materialist Dialectic. 2 We should note that the use of the terms species and genus are unreflective, and are hardly adequate in and of themselves to grasp the specificity of humanity as a novel form of being in nature. Their employment here is merely conventional Species such Homo habilis, Homo erectus, archaic Homo sapiens are in this regard little more than retrospectively reconstructed ideal types rising from, ideationally produced in reflection, in thought, as an essentialization from the mass of skeletally evidenced individuals.

While a number of methods and skills had been transposed here, from predation to hunting, a qualitative change had occurred: Systematizing of activities necessarily involved in hunting placed hominid existence on new foundations. New tools, and new skills as well, immediately began to appear; ear, eye and hands were increasingly coordinated, so that what appeared, if you will, in one field of perception (e.g., visibly to the eye) became simultaneously present to the others (e.g., tactually to the hand), in other words, a unified field of perception was slowly constituted and objects appeared as such. Shrouded in a sensuous (visible, tactile, audio, etc.) envelope, ideality (meaning, concept) became in principle possible. We can note, third, that consciousness forms as a novel, human and irreducible development in nature that rises on the basis of activity, sociality and self-making.1 Highly circumscribed, immediate social and practical speech led to the constitution of perceptual objects. Simultaneously through the social activity of hunting, it generated consciousness which is precognitive intentionality, a temporal stream of experience in which an object other than itself to which it intends together with it itself are simultaneously present or directly disclosed; in other words, precognitive awareness of itself as it grasps the object as other than and distinct from itself. It is a temporal flow of experience through formation of a field of awareness in which figure and ground are inseparably distinct and other: Awareness of itself is a background against which the object stands out as foreground, as separate and other (not immanent to), transcending itself This consciousness is neither self-consciousness (it is not the ego or the I, an outcome of a lengthy development still to unfold), nor simple animal sentiment of self for which the object is not detached from sensory-motor awareness and for which the object exists indistinctly, only within the field of drives and affects. The content of this primitive consciousness is still anonymous, the unity of self and others in hunting activity that intends an object and is unified, constituted, through this social and practical intentionality. This is consciousness at its origins which, in this entire long history of self-making that produces man, once constituted is irreducible We can note, fourth, symbolic language and the existential liberation from the pressuring demands of merely biological nature are the developments that, in principle, Ward's Medean humanity possible: The final moment in development of fully formed, anatomically modern man occurred, roughly 45,000 years ago, with the elaboration of systematized, articulate speech, with language that, in principle, is self-referential, self-enclosed: This elaboration proceeded by way of the detachment of sound from bodily envelopment, from contextualization, not just from the intuitive (perceptual), intersubjective (i.e., social) recognition of the unity of things, but of the thingness of things (intuitively grasping and understanding treeness as opposed to this or that strand of trees against the background of which it has been apprehended), thus to the objectivity of objects, and thereafter to the social constitution of ideal meaning, ideality (here, words embodying meaning distinct from their referents). Now it is this non-spatial meaning or sense, ideality (concept, universal), that is apprehended through naming and which can be reflexivity grasped as such: This intuitive grasping is the seeing of the thing, constitution of universality as ideality, as meaning, all of which is a precategorial act, an identification of the thing as such, founded on that perceptually unified field. Language and the production of ideality, conceptual thought so understood, is apparent in the sophisticated hunting artifacts, in the soft hammer technology, in jewelry and in cave wall art with all its symbolism that begin to appear from this date forward Only with language does fully symbolic thought come into being, and it does so in order to mediate the practice of daily life and here we intend mediate in the sense where symbolic thought constitutes a social imaginary that not only frees us from the pressing bondage of vital constraints but implies a practical capacity to direct and energize diverse social activities to orient that practice by comprehending and
Activity, sociality and self-making are, further, indissolubly intertwined with instruments and anatomy: Human characteristics an upright posture, speech, the production of instruments for specific tasks involved in social reproduction, hierarchical social organization as they existed prior to human development were the consequent of specific practices, particularly hunting, suggesting that man (in both known reconstructed lines of her development) was self-made, her appearance a product of her own activity of becoming This should be qualified: The complex interpenetration and multiple determination of activity, biology, technique, nature (climate) and social relations does not just characterize anatomically modern man but is the central feature of hominid development as such. In this sense, earthly nature and humanity have co-evolved since the first appearance of the hominid genus Homo Just as anatomical evolution did not precede social (cultural) and technical development, and just as it did not drive species development, the transition from animality to humanity was not a linear process. It had a multifaceted, ambiguous character. That transition occurred at various times and places with no single feature marking it. All these forms and practices of self-making were present but here it was weighted to one, bipedalism or speech or work, etc., there it was weighted to another, social organization or bipedalism or speech or work and tools within or without the context of environment processes and events (resource shortages, rapid climatic transformations, intervention of cosmic forces, etc.). All were all simultaneous and recurrent developments.
1

explaining the world in its totality (i.e., the meaning and significance of the cosmos and the role of humanity in it) and its specificity (i.e., us, family and kin, social group and our situatedness in the community and nature), thereby illuminating and organizing that practice. From this moment forward, the explication of the role, function and content of this symbolic thought in the life of a community of humans is an integral, necessary part of reconstructing the contours of that social life. We can note these developments in nature permit us, fifth, to a generate an appraisal of the naturally mediated social self-determination that is man, the premise for assertions like those of Ward with a view to the uniquely human possibilities for ameliorating the most baneful effects of cllimate change: In a formal sense, fully formed modern man has now appeared. From this moment forth, a distinctive and specifically human form of development occurring within nature can be counterposed to animality, a humanly natural development: That formation not only takes (as it also does among higher primates) on the basis interaction with society (and culture) mediated to it first and foremost through family, clan, social group, etc., but it also entails an unspecified relation to the immediate world: All other forms of developed animal life experience this environment in terms of tugs and pulls emanating from it (which amounts to a perpetual false consciousness as those tugs and pulls are instinct, mediated by an internally generated structure, a self-ordering behavior governed by biological goals of self-preservation, self-maintenance and self-enhancement of the animal that, as it were, constitute the field of animal activity, its milieu): Effectively, humans do not have an environment at all, and are absent specialized drives or instincts; rather, it is through activity and speech that human beings overcome this, as it were, "instinctual deprivation" and, in remaking immediately surrounding nature, form for themselves a world, a cultural and material universe of meaningful symbols and use-objects, and built environment that constitute the components for the active reproduction of social life. Historical communities of human beings transform those places within the natural world within which they are situated. We can call this socialization (identical with humanization). For humans, this is a constant practice of remaking the given, already humanized natural world, but as a moment of a total situation, this practice is a continuous process of change and reintegration, of the formation of novel, partial humanly naturally milieus (worlds) within earthly nature as a whole. The worlds are historical worlds, one of which, capitalist modernity, today constitutes a global reality and dominates the culture, society and the very earthly nature in which it is situated.

Appendix Radiometric Dating Given the dating of the age of sufficient numbers of rocks, together with paleomagnetic information about location (along with other geological evidence such as the development of mountains, basins, or the occurrence of rifting or volcanism), we can reconstruct of history of plate movements. How do we find the age of ancient rock? The standard technique is called radiometric dating. Lets rehearse just how it is done. Through a series of intermediate states, uranium 238 (238U) decays to stable lead 206 (206Pb), while uranium 235 (235U) decays to lead 207 (207Pb). The former has half-life about 4.5 billion years, the latter .713 billion years. Dual reference provides the most accurate age of rock. But discovering truly aged uranium and lead is not that easy. It requires a mineral that will not just hold the uranium within its crystal structure, but one that wont allow the lead to escape over time. A mineral that meets both requirements is uncommon to say the least. Something very hard must be utilized. For this purpose, the best crystal is zircon: Its harder than quartz, and it will hold uranium and lead within its structure for billions of years. How do we find the rather rare zircon crystal? Starting with a granite boulder, the latter is put in jaw crusher that grinds the rock up into gravel-sized pieces. The gravel-sized pieces are run through a roller mill that crushes the rock to sand-sized particles. From here there are a series of processes that are employed in an effort to isolate the zircon: The sand-sized pieces are strewn across a shaking table called a Wilfley table that separates rocks by density. Zircon is fairly dense.1 Rocks that are much more dense or much less dense are discarded. The sand-sized particles are then laid across still another table, a magnetic separator, which extracts minerals that might be rich in iron or magnesium. Starting from the residue, the zircon among the remaining particles is isolated by placing the particles in two different, dense liquids one after the other. The one has a density just less than zircon, the other a density just more than zircon Consequent upon this entire series of processes, the outcome is a small number of zircon crystals. But this is not the end: Zircon crystals that might be contaminated must be eliminated. Here we rely entirely on the subjective capacity of scientists to be sure, this is a function of experience, though in a formal sense a criterion does exist, i.e., is immediately related to the recognition in general terms of good form We must examine the zircon crystals through a microscope and pick out the best ones with a pair of tiny tweezers. Then, because the edges of zircon crystals might also be contaminated, we must grind them down and abrade their edges. At this point, we have in hand the final zircons. We count them. How? The crystals are dissolved in hydrochloric acid and shot through a mass spectrometer, which counts the different weights of the lead and uranium atoms and gets an age... A mass spectrometer has its own problems, but these do not concern us here There is plenty of room for error here, but in the end the entire process takes a good month starting with the boulder to get an age for the basis on the ratio of uranium to lead.

It has a density of 4.65 grams/centimeter cubed (gm/cm3).

Part III Science and Capital We can now situate The Medea Hypothesis within a social framework, contemporary societies of capital: We shall very briefly examine science, then technology, in relation to capital and its movement, and in relation to ecological degradation and an unfolding climate change catastrophe. Having done so, we can and shall describe the positions both forth by both Ward and his Gaian opponents (as he would have them) as the world vision and prescriptions that underlie and attempt to justify the societal project of a ruling class that is strategically pouring all its societal resources into preparation for a maelstrom of social change generated by societally mediated natural change. Nature, Science and Capital Ongoing climate change is inseparable from generalized ecological collapse and both are mediated products of the movement of capital. Homogenization of humanly natural landscapes, destruction of biodiversity as aspects of a generalized ecological collapse and climate change each and all have their grounding in the practical reduction of nature to raw materials for capitalist production. (The ensemble of activities and processes in and through which this reduction is carried out is modern technology.) The reduction is given with the aim that motivated the conceptual production of science, for this aim (telos) - its comprehensive meaning (nature domination), can only be grasped in terms of bourgeois tasks (endless expansion of productivity). As conceptual mediation, science is this reduction, for it is as science that the conceptual framework for this reduction is constituted. Having already examined that salient elements of this inner conceptual framework of science we can now summarily remark the thoroughgoing homology of this internal conceptual structure and that of the humanized nature in its ubiquitous, specifically capitalist form organized by the law of value should be visible. From here we must discover how it is that science is inseparably bound to technology both of which, in turn, provide for the reduction of nature to unprocessed matter for commodity production and capital accumulation. The latter, in turn, is the class pursuit through which ecological degradation and collapse is of necessity unfolding... As we have argued,1 the abstractions from sensuous nature that lead back to scientific theorizations are conceptually mediated constructions that rests on an ontological projection of a fundamentally mathematical world-in-itself, that is, an assemblage of bodies in motion calculable in advance. The world of nature (including man as natural) that is anticipated is homogeneous, flattened out, and lacks qualitative meaning and determination. It is only within the framework formed by this projection (anticipation) that bodies in the sense of a scientific mechanics can appear as contentless extension, as quantifiable and mathematically determinable objects, and in which an event in nature can occur as such, i.e., become visible as an event. This world is fully congruent and homologous in the structural sense with the sensible nature as it has been constructed through capitalist activity: A world in which abiotic nature, microbiotic, plant and animal life and humans too as natural elements are to be shaped, formed and used as raw materials in commodity production on a capitalist basis, essentially and simply extension, contentless, infinitely malleable matter subsisting in homogenous space, which as a whole (as earthly nature) is devoid of any internal logic, as vital nature is equally devoid of life, as humans devoid of subjectivity, and all are raw material in the sense of capitalist industry in which products appear as a sum of objects to be shaped, refined and passed on as processed matter in future commodity production. It is on the basis of this world that capital is cannibalizing surrounding nature, a world in which nature exists, as we shall already suggested and shall instantiate below, at two poles, uglified raw material basins (denuded forests, open mines, etc.) at the start of a cycle of commodity production and toxic wastelands and garbage cesspools (wetlands turned into landfills, decaying urban centers, etc.) at the end of that cycle, i.e., with commodity consumption And this world is further congruent and homologous with the structure of value characterized by the same qualitatively indeterminate and undistinguished uniformity, a practical product of the reduction of concrete labor that, objectified and materialized, is a generalized, congealed substance measurable only in terms of units of quantitative time Science is the theorization operative in the ensemble of capitalist practices reconstructing nature as well as in accumulation, and it is these practices, actually processes, with their operative theorization that is generating ecological collapse. Science in this sense is an anticipatory projection of a socio-historical world produced through the subjugation of society and surrounding nature to the production of
1

See the Introduction, Elements of the Conceptual Structure of Science, above.

commodities on the basis of the abstraction of concrete labor in waged work through its participation in capitalist work processes Capitalism and Technology In the millennia old history of humanity, the question of technology had never been, and could not in principle be, posed before the genesis of capitalism, in particular, before the development of capital on its own foundations, and the recreation of human creativity in work as, first capacity to labor (labor-power), then abstract labor. The actual historical condition of the very possibility of this reduction depends upon the separation out of an "economy" from the other as yet undifferentiated spheres of social life (and their constitution as separate spheres each with distinctive norms governing behavior and expectations), and its formation as an autonomous regulator of the totality of that life, i.e., upon the constitution of a system of social relations founded upon and continuously reproducing abstract labor, i.e., this reduction has as its condition the constitution of capitalist society. For capitalism under conditions of totalizing domination, technology and its development is of the essence of the productive forces of humanity. The assumption that technology (or, for that matter, productive forces, i.e., objectified and materialized human activity in the form of instruments deployed in materially renewing social life, in production) is (are) at all times in all places an objectively separate and distinct feature(s) of human society in its relation to surrounding nature is mistaken, because it retrospectively projects this recent historical development, the formation of distinct spheres of activity (primarily the economy, but family, military, organized religion, formal education, etc.), the formation of separate spheres of daily life out of institutionally undifferentiated, societally precapitalist wholes which were characterized by functionally distinct activities that may have corresponded to stratification within a division of labor; and because, even more recently, the coal-oil-auto productive complex on which current thinking about the transformative essence of man in relation to nature appears to be based is historically specific, rendering the claim that technology is a distinct ensemble of procedures and practices in human society an illicit generalization or, if you prefer, an ontologization. Thus, prior to the creation of institutional distinct spheres of society beginning with an economy, technology as such had no separate existence. It is the systems driven compulsion to accumulate generated by the activity of individual capitalists pursuing their own particular interests1 that necessarily leads to rationalization of activity devolving on institutionally separate spheres in society. Within this development, technologies are created through the conscious pursuit of formalized and codified means, procedures and processes that enhance capital accumulation, even if that enhancement is outwardly, ostensibly and inseparably aimed at, e.g., sustaining medically disabled or diseased populations, space exploration, improvement of athletic performance, etc. Under conditions of the real domination of capital over labor, this pursuit is done scientifically, and today scientific activity is increasing reduced to producing novel and refining existing technologies of capital. Every established and distinctive undivided community and tributary formation in history has its own ensemble of technics even if has there has never been a social consciousness of a distinct technological sphere, and for good reason because none existed, i.e., respective technical ensembles were bound up with, intertwined with and inseparable from an array of activities, productive, cognitive and otherwise all of which may been understood religiously, mythologically, politically in terms of the power of a divine king, etc Accordingly, it is only abstractly, and solely from a modern, capitalist (not an immanent) perspective that we can speak about in the whole era of divided societies stretching from the origins of agriculture, and the appearance of social stratification culminating in the formation of the state down to the present various historical forms of technics as socially dominant, instrumentally practical forms of our relation to nature that simultaneously expressed the mastery of a hegemonic social group, stratum or class in society. From this perspective all technical ensembles express social imperatives more forcefully, they embody and congeal social relations animated by a social group, stratum or class teleology, a teleology actually borne by and informing individuals (themselves relationally determined as elements of that social group, etc.) whose daily activities reproduce the technical ensemble as such Respectively ascertained, technology is neither neutral nor purely instrumental lacking in social content: 2 This holds even more forcibly for contemporary technology, i.e., technologies of capital and, taken together in their essential unity, capitalist technology.
1 2

See the First Interlude, Real Domination, II: Capital Simply as Capital, above. Bolshevism and Stalinism (Urgeschichte), First Study, Part IV, sections V, VI, VII, VIII.

So how do we distinguish capitalist technology from all forms of pre-modern technics? The latter were by and large organically grounded, either as a projection or extension of human organs (hand, arm, leg) or on the model of the motion of such an organ (or even animal motion). For example, a saw is originally modeled on a row of teeth, a hammer on the fist and a chisel on a fingernail. Even where something novel, an occasional technic or instrument that was non-organic, appeared, the ensemble of technics was heavily weighted to the organic side. Thus, the technology itself was organic. With modern technology, however, this changes. While instruments that are organically grounded continue to be utilized and to appear in the epoch of bourgeois civilization, the tendency especially with regard to machine technology is for the invention and production of instruments and technics that are non-organic or "artificial." For example, a sewing machine neither resembles (that is, is not modeled on) a seamstress who sews by hand, nor does it operate in the manner that she does; a gasoline-powered automobile has no analogue in the human body or the natural world. This tendency toward "de-organ-ization" makes the peculiar character of modern technology possible,1 and this de-organization is a development squarely based upon historically new orders of conceptual abstraction that have been, and continue to be, achieved in scientific efforts (beginning from physical theory linked to mathematics) to penetrate ever deeper the inner essence of nature. The modern science of nature is the cognitive, and indivisibly and indissolubly modern technology the practicalinstrumental historically specific, form of our relation to nature, at its origins the former a knowledge specific to the bourgeoisie as a historical class, at its meridian the latter the crucial, decisive means on the basis of which capitalism develops and which immediately and directly connects the former, science, to capital. The technological embodiment of social imperatives, and the immanent relation of science and technology, technoscience, to capital, indicate modern capitalist technology possesses only a sham independence. Yet the appearance of autonomous technology is an objectively necessary illusion, for the development of autonomous technology socalled is at the mechanical, dead heart of the process of capitals autonomization and with it the transformation of the bourgeoisie, which, regardless of beliefs and convictions, has come to behave in all significant social events and historical developments as a collection of capitals that are personifications of economic categories, meaning that it (i.e., the bourgeoisie as a class acting in history) is decomposed, signifying that if technology is actually out of control it is only because the entire system of social relations we call capitalism, its subject capital, is truly running amuck, most visibly in the acceleration of its essential feature vis--vis nature, the reduction of the latter to raw material for production of a world of commodities, a running amuck that will devolve into a climate change catastrophe Yet the romantic critique of technology fails to grasp this: Technology is neither autonomous nor out of control; or, it is both precisely to the extent that capital accumulation is an anti-human process without apparent agency, as long as conditions of capitalist production hold sway, as long as the real subject of society remains capital. Unlike modern machine technology (or contemporary electronic and biotechnology) that unfolds on the basis of the society of capital, no technology need necessarily be instrumentalist and one-dimensional, that is, centered strictly on economically rational conditions for the material-productive reproduction of society. Moreover, unlike the capitalist world in which modern machine technology has developed, the social practice of daily life in societies of the precapitalist past did not give rise to a specific, separate and allegedly autonomous sphere of technology and its achievements. Precapitalist cultures taken together demonstrate the reality of concrete technologies vis--vis nature, cultures in which sensuous nature is inhabited, in which nature yields itself up to society's needs without the violence inherent in modern, capitals, technology. If a new, free society (communism) is possible, then necessarily it will find practical and intellectual expressions in a new science and a novel technology. Here, we oppose ourselves to capitals project: Instead of work and human creativity reduced to a mechanically assembled, socially combined labor power, endless development of productive forces entailing a permanent army of occupation (technologies of capital) where nature is the enemy, a technocratic, totalitarian dystopia, we counterpose the possibility of constitution of the Gesamtarbeiter (productively connected, sentient human beings striving to abolish ourselves as abstract labor) and with it destruction of the value form; beyond the order of capital, a concrete technology of alliance with nature, an ensemble of technics through which we re-situate ourselves in the heart of nature: Living in nature, an end to the war with it, on this basis insight into its immanent intelligibility and the undertaking to co-produce sensible nature while making that home in it. This perspective cannot be reached from a mere projection of existing technology, only from a radically novel departure in science and technology, a new
1

Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. 2, 661-662.

science and a concrete technology of alliance with nature, that has the revolutionary overthrowing of the order of capital as its premise1 Today, mediated, driven and encompassed by capital (value) accumulation, specifically modern technology is the form that our practical relation to nature takes, and as such is deeply implicated in the dynamics of nature domination that has created anthropocentrically generated climate change that, as really and as fact, is actually generated and encompassed by the movement of capital. Capitalist Criminality: Destruction of the Foundations of Humanity and Life in Earthy Nature A climate change catastrophe as it unfolds today is encompassed by the movement of capital, though, within the next two decades as it grows in size and increasingly severity, the anti-human logic of that change will appear more and more autonomous, more and more threatening not just to human life but to life across the planet. What is important to recognize is that the criminality of capital goes beyond the vast and potentially catastrophic problems that climate change has introduced. Even if societies of capital were to come to grips with ongoing climate change in a manner that would allow them to maintain the achievements of capitalism (densely populated reserve industrial armies of labor, built environment in its capitalist form as industrial, financial, etc., structures and landscapes as means of production and the mass of circulating commodities), a highly dubious proposition, generalized ecological collapse beginning with the destruction of biological diversity as the foundations of life on Earth will not cease. This collapse originates, is developed and sustained by the movement of capital, its causation begins with the practical reduction of surrounding nature to raw materials for capitalist production, and its cessation can only start from the abandonment of the activity through which this reduction occurs. Climate change, then, is not without context. It is, in fact, occurring within the framework of global ecological transformations that too are ongoing, and that are being accelerated by it. If we consider several dominant forms of transformation, it becomes manifest that this framework itself is fully determined by capitalist development The consumption of hydrocarbon-based fossil fuels, oil, natural gas and coal, is producing a warming of the Earth that is melting the ice caps and raising sea levels, thus threatening the vast seaboard populations of the world, producing a shift in the regime of climate as it has existed for the past two million years on Earth, leading to geologically rare, if not unprecedented, mass species extinction. This is the climate change crisis, a change that promises, by historical and not merely geological standards, to be swift. Vast tracts of forest, land for lumber (for example, the hardwoods of the tropical rainforests), are clear cut and then the residues are burned, obliterated, in order to satisfy the aesthetic and profligate needs for consumption by the well-to-do middling groups of the old capitalist metropolises and those emerging in the new centers of accumulation on a world-scale. Equally vast tracts of monocultural agriculture created to capture food markets globally destroy intricate ecological balances among plant life, microorganisms, soils, and humans and their cultures dependent upon those forests for their form of live, further destroys plant life (here, forests with its luxuriant foliage and undergrowth) itself, creates nutrient poor soils and top soils incapable of holding water, produces aridity, eventually desertification, and destroys, making extinct, entire microorganic, plant, insect, bird and mammalian species dependent on forests and their canopies for their habitat and food which all, in turn, deprives humanity of incalculable medicinal wealth. Similarly, forests cleared for farming (as well as for grazing, timber and fuel) is undertaken and managed by agribusiness capitals: Massed farmlands producing exotic fruits and vegetable for markets in the capitalist metropolises, plantation estates (tobacco and sugar, also indigo, dyestuffs, cotton), and monocultural grain agriculture (corn, wheat, rice, soybeans) and tree forestries (pine, eucalyptus, etc.) are entropic and utterly unsustainable: They destroy bacteria, plant life, the animals and bird dependent upon that plant life, and with its loss soil productivity and the human farming practices that without regard to accumulation and profitability have been, outside that immediate metropolitan capitalist countryside, integral to this humanized nature - the existing plethora of humanly natural ecosystems created by hundreds of generations of previous agriculturalists, peasants, petty
1

It is not incumbent on us to elaborate the method, structure, organization and contents of a new science, together with what is characteristic of those techniques and processes (not to mention their construction and sensuous configuration) that as a whole mediate our relation to nature and that form a new technology. Such elaboration will occur in and through a historical practice that revolutionarily transcends capital or not at all. We have, however, attempted to exhibit the contours of both a science that aims at comprehending potentialities frozen in nature that would enhance human freedom inextricably bound to a concrete technology of alliance with nature that seeks to co-produce, remake, earthly nature with nature and not against it in our Nature, Capital, Communism. See the section entitled Communism and Nature (Earthly Nature).

producers and forest dwellers that have sustained rural, village-based forms of life for more than eight thousand years. These monocultures are generally water intensive drawing off water resources from elsewhere since they, absent diversity (much less creating it), lack the capacity to hold water through topsoils that merely wash away in heavy, seasonal rains; lacking variegated plant life, microorganisms that attack pests disappear, and pests now become a problem to be met with pesticides and herbicides, which in turn poison aquifers, streams, rivers and oceans and which creates the necessity of biotechnological genetic splicing that, in turn, introduces transgenes transmitted through natural interspecies crosses which, in turn, have allowed emergence of resistance superweeds and superpests, which, in their turn, demand the application of further chemical poisons, i.e., herbicides and pesticides, and further poison groundwater and waterways As sea levels rise, invariably these monocultural sites, situated in low lying areas, will be among the first to be inundated, rendered useless, and abandoned by capitalist practice Monocultural agriculture and forestry destroy the basis of life for agricultural populations who are not engaged in waged labor and not fully dependent on capitalist market in order to serve great agribusiness capitals and plantation agricultural capitals in efforts to achieve progress in feeding humanity, or so capitalist ideologues argue. In fact, what they achieve is a generalized lowering of nutritional intake, qualitative increase in chemically poisonous substances (pesticide and herbicide residues) as a feature of that intake, together with a restructuring of food production at the level of the world that on average has drastically lowered average caloric consumption for the masses of humanity, has dramatically increased the prospects for regularly recurring crop failure and famine (which has never been a biological question of excessive population pressure on the immediately available resources in nature, and which under conditions of capitalist development is socially mediated by commodity markets), and has vastly exacerbated the concentration of capitalist wealth with a corresponding casualizing proletarianization of hundreds of millions of petty producers. In point of fact, non-capitalist, small-scale bio-diversely grounded agricultures are more productive.1 Monocultural crop agriculture and forestry are moments of the homogenization of nature and society generated by the movement of capital: In destroying genetic diversity, monocultural life has no basis, it is a decisive aspect of the cannibalistic activity that is capital, is not sustainable, implies death, i.e., if pursued will contribute immensely to the recreation of the Earth as a dead planet... Must we point out that a general emancipation is not possible on a dead planet? ... The vast system of ocean transportation of petroleum from oil wells to locales around the world produces industrial accidents, massive oil spills fouling seawater ecology, destroying marine life and contaminating coastal land. The discarded, broken, pulverized plastic wrappers and containers of all sorts, the trinkets, baubles and assorted junk garbage intended for export to landfills criminally dumped by ships at sea, washed out from land during storms, accidentally lost overboard from container ships all largely petroleum based products generated by a form of productive activity that knows only the cannibalization of concrete humanity through its abstraction as waged labor has created a 10-million-square-mile oval (twice the size of Texas) known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre full of plastic, a million pieces per square mile floating on the ocean surface (and on the ocean floor a mass by weight six times as great as plankton), that is entering the food chain, killing more than a million seabirds, 100,000 marine mammals, and countless fish in the North Pacific each year, either from mistakenly eating this junk or from being ensnared in it and drowning, and among those further countless fish that survive this encounter, are caught by industrialized trawlers and served in restaurants and homes, the reside toxins product of the manufacture of these plastics, so consumed, are making their way into our blood, urine, saliva, seminal fluid, breast milk and amniotic fluid causing obesity, infertility and disrupting hormonal activity.2 The increasingly density of low level atmospheric pollutants - product of centuries of capitalist industry and specifically decades of the oil-coal-auto economy emissions - together with the accelerating movement of capitalist commerce have enhanced the virulent character of the most ubiquitous of human disorders, the common cold, its
1

Different systems of agriculture (capitalist monoculture and traditional rotational, mixed multi-crop agriculture, e.g., in India) do not generate shared terms allowing overall comparison of systems of agriculture; determination of the vaunted productivity of crop monocultures (e.g., wheat and rice) is largely a conceptual abstraction, a theoretically constructed category that rests on a de-contextualization, one based on a limitation of what counts as productive to a single aspect of agricultural practices, i.e., the comparison, when favoring crop monoculture, does so only when constructed on the basis of profitability; and when the outputs of hybrid seeds are set alongside high performance indigenous cultivators, the latter more often than not fare better than the former. 2 The greatest danger here is what is called trophic cascade: Remove one species, say protoplankton at bottom of the oceans food web, and extinction follows upon extinction as a basic life form, a critical food source for a host of other life forms and still more life forms tiered atop these, disappears.

occurrence today generally developing with bronchitis or bronchial asthma, creating an entire series of respiratory disorders as a new feature characterizing daily life, but an affliction which immunologically compromises humans, especially the mass of humanity that does not have proper access to medical care. In the pursuit of capital accumulation by way of a greatly enlarged worldwide markets for meat consumption (chicken, beef, pork), the scientific management of poultry and livestock based on principles of industrialized production is generating by massing literally thousands or millions of animals or birds, respectively, in tightly enclosed quarters (birds on the Tyson model) where naturally occurring disease can run, uninhibited, through these populations at frighteningly rapid speeds creating virally mutating highly pathogenic, potentially pandemic viruses (having in birds already produced wild waterfowl as a natural reservoir for A/H5N1). At the same time, industrialized methods of slaughter, in particular the organized massed animal murder on high speed, highly rationalized assembly line operations guarantees that unsanitary nature of the product through transmission of blood and feces in gutting, butchering and carving, thereby giving rise to life threatening strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria (E. coli, Campylobacter, salmonella, etc.). Endemic to highly stratified societies where animal domestication proceeded on the basis of extremes of poverty and wealth, viral (and bacterial) disease has emerged anew, i.e., in qualitatively more resistant, medically baffling and epidemic and pandemic forms, at the end of the chronological twentieth century. Statistically insignificant, few cancers are hereditary. For the rest, at their origins they are products of capitalist induced ecological imbalances in humanized nature (including man as humanly natural), irregularities and aberrations introduced into animal and human organisms. Introduction occurs, most commonly, through long periods of contact with contaminated water and polluted air, through life long ingestion of organically inassimilable fatty, pesticide covered or chemical-preservative ridden foods, and extreme exposures to sunlight which today with thinner ozone layers in the higher latitudes have markedly increased the incident of melanoma. The same can be said about coronary heart disease: Its dramatic upswing is directly and immediately a product of obesity in conjunction with sedentary living, both outcomes of capitalist development, the former traceable back largely to the consumption of processed cuisine, food created by contemporary capitalist production. Disease in the specific forms that devolve from capitalist development is compromising, in large strata undermining, humanitys own evolutionarily made health, its culturally formed biological foundations The movement of capital is leading to a massive and criminal termination of plant and animal species and microbiotic life forms, effectively synonymous with the destruction of biological diversity, an extraordinary contraction in the very basis of life itself, or, more precisely, the pursuit of exploitable "natural resources" for capitalist production on a worldscale has created a geological and biological regression reversing tens of millions of years of natural evolution. The primary cause of species extinction as currently occurring is habitat destruction, the ruin of complex, intricate, interdependent and often intensively humanly (agriculturally) shaped ecosystems. It is a consequence of the capitalist development determined from the penetration in depth of the value form into surrounding nature. The same socially necessary labor time required for the reproduction of capital that tendentially shapes and regiments social life by deciding capital flows or arenas for the most profitable exploitation of resources and utilization of money capital is also responsible for species extinction. Capitalist development entailing species extinction takes shape, first, in the forms of industrial development (plant construction); second, in real estate development issuing in suburban sprawl (home and office construction, and venues of consumption such as strip malls); then, in especially industrial logging, the clearing of forests for monocultural crop agriculture, and mining; and, finally, in road and highway construction which is determined as an infrastructural presupposition of all of these forms of development. In the history of the evolution of earthly nature, species, new ones, comes into being and they disappear: Human beings, abrupt climatic changes, and even the occasional (by geological standards) natural calamity originating from beyond the Earth in the solar system bring about extinctions, even the rare mass extinction. Yet this statement of geological reconstruction misses the point: If the Arctic polar bear dies out (as consequence of its inability to gain access to food sources as global warming melts the ice fields it uses to traverse distances and as a result of the early death of its young as PCBs, product of industrial emissions that fall in their greatest concentration to Earth in the Arctic, lodge in milk of lactating mothers bears), it is an unnecessary loss of a majestic creature, one that is final. Extinct species do not make evolutionary reappearances. Nonetheless this loss, unintended and undesired, is not of the same order or magnitude as that at which bourgeois civilization unknowingly takes aim. The problem is that specifically capitalist social transformations are borne along by an objective logic whose outcome is necessarily the

very destruction of the natural world in its autonomy, cohesion, diversity and otherness, that is, in its abiotic coherence, as living, and as a presupposition of specifically human life: It is the natural world as the totality of earthly nature (earthly nature as a totality and in its totality) that capitalist social transformation takes as its object. The grand sweep of capital's movement at the beginning of the twentieth-first century can only portend a future in which nature, because for capital nature is raw material for commodity production, at the very least undergoes continuous and ever greater homogenization, a homogenization that as product of the movement of capital is homologous with the formally identical homogenizations of agriculture (disappearance of vast variety of species of seed and plants) and domesticated animals, languages and cultures in the order of society, a homogenization that in the end together, overlapping and dovetailing, with rapid climate change may very well be finally consummated in a runaway warming that recreates Earth as a dead planet like Venus. Homogenization of the Earth has for some time now tended toward the creation of nature existing at two poles, uglified raw material basins (denuded forests, open mines, desertified grasslands, sea bottoms pocked with countless wells plumbed together, etc.) at the start of a cycle of commodity production and noxious wastelands and garbage cesspools (wetlands turned into landfills, decaying urban centers and the toxic grounds of abandoned industrial sites, vast stretches of roadways with trash and junk scattered to each side, endless expanses of ocean densely littered with plastic refuse, etc.) at the end of that cycle, i.e., with commodity consumption. What in a general way is the outcome of homogenization? It is the destruction of diversity within earthly nature: This diversity includes, among other things and relations, a variety of different climatic regimes and zones, a multitude of regional landscapes, and, centrally, a huge assortment of different life forms. Thus, it is precisely this internal diversity which humanity has co-produced and of which humanity is part that the movement of capital is destroying and (as this movement produces rapid climate change that comes together with, accelerates and intensifies the ongoing homogenization of nature) is irreversibly destroying. It is a humanly formed nature without which humanity cannot exist. Anthropocentric Climate Change? The entirety of the humanly formed built environment as its exists within humanized, earthly nature, and the social relations in which production, institutions and ideas are all formed, is an outcome of capitalist development. The subject of this societal development is a process without consciousness or intent, a systems logic that governs this development, one personified by individuals and social groups that have assimilated and internalized this logic (of accumulation). This is the overarching context in which climate change unfolds, for the latter encompassing event is comprehended by the movement of capital. It is not as if global warming has never occurred before. Over the course of tens of thousands of millennia down to, say, the last 30 million years, carbon dioxide concentrations had, we believe, on several occasions reached well in excess of a 1000 ppm. But, then, those occurrences took place on an entirely different Earth, one on which a far less luminous sun radiated (and thus one on which elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations helped maintained temperatures suitable to complex life forms), but one that would not support the most complex life forms (mammalian life, especially human life) as they exist today The overwhelming consensus among scientists and spokespeople of capitalist states in the world today (and among the most recalcitrant of states, say the United States, there is grudging acceptance) that, in terms of causation, man is responsible for warming induced climate change, or, in Wards language, it is the species. (We shall return to the mystifying concepts of man and species, and their roles in climate change.)1 For now, while the evidence is straightforward, the attribution both of culpability and the liable agent are effectively ideological, masking real agency and responsibility. Consider the evidence. First, current, ongoing climate change is a not a natural phenomenon: With a view to Milankovitch cycles, it is countercyclical, meaning that it is not which might be expected as the outcome of the geologically contemporary ice age glaciation. On this basis, we should be see indications (e.g., growing ice formation at the poles and at very high altitudes) of a renewal of glaciation. But what we are actually witnessing, to the contrary, is worldwide warming. Second, series of radical, far reaching and sweeping climate change events have in the geologically reconstructed past resulting in those mass extinctions that, for example, constitute the Permian-Triassic and the Triassic1

See the concluding remarks to the final section of this Study.

Jurassic boundaries occurred over several million years. (E.g., roughly 12 million in the case of the T-J boundary.) The current transformation concentrates a greenhouse gas-based warming and a (potential) mass extinction within the same brief historical timeframe, an event for which there is no precedent in earthly nature.1 Third, from the outset of the current interglacial some 11,600 years ago down close to the advent of real domination in production, the Industrial Revolution so-called, average global surface temperatures have risen slowly, very slowly, but steadily. This increase, it should be noted, is relative: Plot the average from the peak of the last ice age (last glacial maximum) 22,000 years ago, and that incremental increase (circa 9600 BC to 1760 in the common era) is not noticeable. But plot average global surface temperature from 1760 to 1870 and the line of temperature approaches a positive 15 angle of incline. Plot it from there to the present and the angle of incline rises to roughly 45. Back up and plot it from 8000 BC to the present, and those last 235 years present a nearly straight vertical rise. The current rate of atmospheric CO2 increase is not merely the fastest in the geologically recent (two thousand millennia old) ice age, this rate is the fastest rate of increase reconstructively known over the whole span of the last half billion years, for the present rate of increase is about one hundred times faster than those geologically ancient rates As we have argued elsewhere,2 we mark the beginnings of sedentary agriculture and pronounced social division at about 10,000 years ago, for it is there that of highly stratified societies based on material inequality that would give rise to the state could be said to have formed. And 1760 marks that point at which we can date the commencement of the mechanization of industry in the West (i.e., in capitalist England), that point from which we date the origins of the real domination in production of capital over labor. In the former case, initial agricultural life and with it rising population began to generate a human input, methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2), into the atmosphere, nothing that before 1760 might delay a glaciation, but incrementally over the entire period noticeable. The development of capitalist industry after 1760, however, has indeed transformed the chemical make-up of the atmosphere. How? On a geological time scale, atmospheric CO2 has ranged from lows of 200 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric air during the major glaciations of the current ice age to highs of 280-300 ppm during warm interglacials. Today, atmospheric CO2 concentration stands nominally at 390 ppm (if methane, nitrous oxide and CFCs are factored in, effectively those levels are currently... as of this writing, August 2009... at 430 ppm), and is rising in geological terms at an extraordinary and unprecedented rate with at this moment no end in sight. Best estimates put a tipping point, that point at which ice cap melting will qualitatively hasten and become irreversible, at which gas hydrates (clathrates) might dissociate from their ice-like structures, etc., as low as 460 ppm, reachable with even modern emissions reductions long, long before the exceedingly conservative estimate of 2080, designated at any rate to forestall immediate, decisive action. These, then, are the major pieces of evidence for anthropocentric based warming so-called. Consider, now, the attribution of agency and, accordingly, responsibility for climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells us man, his activity, is altering climate. In one sense, a very crude argument can and has been made (though not explicitly by the IPCC) that sheer human numbers, a global population of six and a half billion, and the outputs that result from the volume of activity of so many people, bear direct responsibility. This is the bte noir of the Malthusians like Ward. All those teeming masses in the capitalist periphery and the new centers of capitalist development along the Asian industrial arc want to live like us, Europeans and Americans. That, it is abstractly argued, would be disastrous. While the quality of human (and animal and plant) life may well be grounds for limiting population growth, global warming does not result merely from the activity of masses of humans at any level of development: Today, as we have pointed above,3 an Indian child living on the subcontinent in some of the most densely populated regions on Earth, consumes nearly two orders of magnitude less, 1/90th, of the annual energy that her American counterpart does. Patently, the problem is not consumption without regard to societal and historical context, but forms of consumption, in particular, not merely energy inefficient but profligate consumption, and (even within capitalism) the socially and historically specific forms of development that underpins that consumption, i.e., the problem is capitalist development or, if you prefer as we do, the movement of capital.
1

Stratigraphic evidence indicates the impact extinction (product of an asteroid collision) that formed the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary some 65 million years, lasting no more than 200 years, was the only other known rapid mass, or catastrophic, extinction that has occurred on Earth. 2 Nature, Capital, Communism. 3 Second Study, Part I, The Defense of the Argument (footnote), and Part IV, Partisan of the Monera, above.

Human population, either in the contemporary sense or the historical sense (going back some 10,000 years) or both, is, then, neither the agent nor, accordingly, responsible for climate change. Man (here, human population generally) as such is a merely formal concept without determinately real referent. Grant the force of this argument and we have dissolved one mystification. Perhaps, then, the industrial system is at issue. Or, perhaps, it is a question of man in the industrial system. In either case, we are dealing with empty abstractions. The issue is the historically specific configuration of groups of living men and women working within that industrial system, i.e., capitalist production. More precisely, the issue is the group that dominates that production. We refer, here, to those personifications of economic categories, capitalists (as well as the bloc of classes they have in tow including their intelligentsia, scientific social groups). Capitalists (and states that unify otherwise disparate or competing capitals) make decisions concerning the allocation of monies and capital, concerning what and the manner in which natural resources are exploited and utilized, and concerning the technologies on the basis of which those activities are carried out. Still, it not just those decisions, but the entire system of social relations at the level of the world, that is at issue in climate change. In this sense, it is the subject of society (a part of nature yet confronting it as a raw unprocessed materials sink for the capitalist production of commodities) that is the agent responsible for climate change: It is not man that is remaking, as it were, the earthly nature at its surface; that remaking is a product of his own objectified and alienated power. Man is not that subject: And capital, that empty logic of production for its own sake, of accumulation? Capital cannibalizes human creativity, beginning with its waged labor reduction (abstraction) in production (i.e., beginning with a form of violence and repression specific to the labor processes of capitalism, that is, with valorization, with the transformation of concrete, living labor into congealed, abstract and general, quantitatively temporalized and objectified labor as the formally first act in the process of the creation of value, of capital): This objectified and alienated power is capital. Capital is the real subject of human society under conditions of capitalist production (real domination). Capital, as objectified and alienated human power, is the agent responsible for climate change...

Part IV Alternatives, Scientists and Science, Climate Change On Wards premises and account he knows this, hints at it, but wont fully say it. the apocalyptically envisioned, terrifying world that awaits us for him without the fantasized direction of enlightened scientists, for us without the revolutionary abolition of capital is prospectively a very, very real possibility. Beginning from the melting of the Arctic polar cap, the Greenland ice sheet and the interior glaciers of Antarctica and with an approximately 75 meter rise of sea levels, industry and access to resources will contract enormously following abandonment of coastal metropolitan areas. With a 6C global temperature rise, increasingly arid, desertifying regions will vastly shrink available agricultural productive lands. Population migrations will not just begin from low lying coastal regions, but also from increasingly arid regions, areas plagued by water shortages undergoing actual desertification and qualitatively increased incidents of wildfires, and wracked by famine which is no longer periodic, but regular and frequent, by internal conflict and balkanizations, as still further productive agricultural lands are lost to the movement of arid tropic climates northward. A global productive apparatus and the world market in commodities built up on its basis will disappear. States will undertake autarkic development and pursuits akin to the Nazis in central and eastern Europe in the last century. Once thought part of the past (at least in the developed capitalist world), ancient diseases and those once confined to regions of poverty and capitalist de-development dengue fever, malaria, perhaps smallpox and polio not to mention diseases and disorders only recently delocalized (e.g., west Nile) through capitalist commerce will rapidly spread through demographical groups immunologically weakened by hunger, war, movement and a distraught spirit. Population movements from the American southwest, south, southeast and center to the Canadian interior, from European Mediterranean to the continental north into Scandinavia, from coastal Asia inland to the deep, higher latitude Asian interiors, etc will sharpen conflicts within nations, creating them where they do not already exist, over access to water and food, then by this time to minimalistic housing and social services. Crossing international borders, they will heighten and multiply ethnic, national and class conflicts. Ethnic cleansing, genocide, open conflict and war are likely to be regular outcomes of massive population migrations. In all this, moreover, in climate change generated social change what is largely unnoticed is the deepening stranglehold of the state over its underlying populations, facilitating a ubiquitous totalitarian regimentation: Absent a proletarian centered revolutionary transformation,1 the state with its agencies and resources will be the only institution with the capacity to deal with the human misery, displacement and destruction of objective substance (plant and equipment; built environment, that is, infrastructure and the urban landscape including dwellings insofar as each can be distinguished from industrial sites; and, the mass of circulating commodities) wrought by the changes in oceans, land masses and atmosphere And, in all this, states will pursue, if not outright euthanasia, social Darwinian policies and practice toward, not just the elderly but the weak generally, the cognitively impaired and bodily handicapped, old and very young in particular, and the same states will further operate as concentration camp regimes employing the forced labor of their own populations and the slave labor of others. Nuclearized war will be inevitable. It is with a view to these prospects albeit rarely if ever openly articulated that the internally divided, capitalist vanguard of the scientific climate change community formulates its alternatives. False Alternatives What kind of assumptions do Gaian and Medean scientists make? Why are they, or why are they not, alternatives to the existing order of capital and the transformation of earthly nature its very dynamics are engendering? Unified by an objective, productive complex that is global, in societies of capital that dominate the world today, at the apex hierarchically organized social groups within ruling classes (themselves hierarchically organized at the level of the world forming a contradictory structured global ruling class) hegemonize both production on the basis of which they generate the social wealth, power, standing and control, and the ideas and concepts commensurate with the project of organizing society on a capitalist basis through the exploitation of abstract labor together with the domination of nature. Those conceptual products ideas, concepts, systems of thought are the preserve of its intelligentsia, and subject to rationalization (a movement within the order of capital and science) as capitalism develops by way of an ever greater fragmentation of activities and institutions in and through which it is socially reproduced. The bearers of those
1

Our position in this regard, it clearly enunciated in Some Remarks on the Role of the Working Class in History.

conceptual products are attached at the hip to capital: First, there is the plethora of scientists (geologists, physicists, biochemists stand out) that are directly tied to capitalist firms, employed in research for oil and energy, biotechnological, pharmaceutical, auto and other great capitals; second, there are any countless former academic scientists who have left their university or publicly funded research institutes to establish high-tech start up firms, in recent years especially in the field of green technology (e.g., developing chemicals used in bio-based plastics or agricultural feedstocks as substitutes for plastics and specialty chemicals all derived from petroleum), though their seed money generally includes a large infusion of public cash;1 and, thirdly, men and women of Wards ilk, the outstanding scientific personnel they organize into research teams, and the laboratories, publications and the institutions in which they embedded. All these social groups within the scientific intelligentsia remain not just materially dependent upon capitalist civilization but ideationally reproduce it (as is monotonously manifest over and again each time a scientist speaks to the broader issues involved in warming induced climate change or in loss of biological diversity). An alternative to the organization of capitalist society is not present to them even at the outmost limits of their thinking and vision. And why should it be? Their wealth albeit limited, their standing in society and whatever social power that accrues to them,2 and meeting ideal needs, interests and projects all depend upon the contributions they make to ameliorating at the edges the social and productive contradictions engendered by capitalist development. Tacitly (because methodologically and ideationally blinded), but necessarily, they are existentially and uncritically committed to capital and its state as the acme of scientific civilization and, of course, as the source of their funding: Recall, as we argued above,3 that science, and scientists, are at home in the world of capital, for without it, it and they would be strangers without home (hence, science would be theoretically barren). Capitalism constitutes the societal presuppositions of science's full development: Without capital, science would be undevelopable But the world of capital is sundering: Beginning from capitalist finance, the crisis that is unfolding today before our very eyes is neither a mere cyclical moment in capitals development nor merely a crisis of capital in the crude economic sense of a cyclical contraction endemic to the business cycle, but is a crisis of capitalist civilization as such, a crisis in the entire fabric of society, one that reaches back and directly involves our relation to or metabolism with nature, and one that has already begun to shake, and will perhaps sooner than later irreparably rip the veils away from the mystifications and occlusions and, the ideological certainties on which capitalism is dependent. It is into this intellectual maelstrom that Ward has inserted himself. In the so-called counter-cultural Gaians,4 we find individuals within the middling groups in societies of capital who, personally struggling against the relentless rationalization social life incessantly undergoes as a necessary feature of capitalist development, disenchanted, reject the modern science of nature, not because it is intellectually incoherent and does not embody an alternative to the organization of society by capital (and not because the celebration of the mother goddess, of the mystifications of appropriated philosophies of the East, or mythical constructs retrospectively imputed to archaic communities leastways symbolize any genuine opposition to capital). This is an affront to Wards scientific sensibilities. He is likewise offended by Gaian scientists, those among them who have provided intellectual cover for such nonsense, who for him effectively betray modern scientific rationality. If the ideological and theoretical certainties of capitalism have begun to totter ever so little, the Gaians, scientists and counter-culturalists alike (Ward identifies the latter more narrowly as New Agers), believe in the invisible hand, the latter espousing an unconsciously romantic anti-capitalism. A vision of the world to be made whole, Wards planetary engineering is the visible hand, the precise counterpart of and false antithesis to the Gaian vision of permitting the Earth to heal itself: Within the order of capital, today these are the two alternatives.
In this regard, taking off in the late eighties, we might also mention those scientists in the materials sciences and those in various branches of biochemistry and physics who withheld publication of studies until patents could be obtained for substances and invention processes that provide not just income but a basis for the personal pursuit of private capitalist activity. 2 In the privacy of interpersonal discussions, grandiose claims on society in forms such as that of a Presidential leader who comes from a scientific background, a panel of inner advisers who are scientists and who, in the face of impending catastrophe would be empowered to allocate resources, personnel, even refashion institutions are all mooted. 3 Introduction, Elements of the Conceptual Structure of Science. 4 The Medea Hypothesis, 24-26, draws an entertaining sketch of these otherwise harmless, if altogether mystified individuals. Ward, though, is repulsed and frightened by their quixotic verbal assaults on his Enlightenment eighteenth century materialism, on physicalist reductionism and modern science.
1

The one is a vision, today strictly ideological (meaning here, mystifying and obfuscatory) that once arose, or so it is argued, on the basis of the spontaneous, socially cohesive and self-regulating relations among private individuals identified as those eternally given social relations constituted out of commodity exchange and social labor that, egoistically motivated, nonetheless provided us with an overarching explanation of how human society operated. Of course, this is a metaphysical construct that, in a crude Gaians theoretically debased form, is the equivalent not just of Smiths invisible hand but of the cunning of Reason (Hegel) or, more to the point, the intention of Nature (Kant). It was originally designed to give unity and purpose to human history, an effort that has been abandoned because as the temporal dimension of human sociation, society has been entirely conquered by capital commonly understood from its personifications (i.e., those among us, ubiquitously present, who have assimilated and internalized the logic of capital, and live the logic in and through all their actions), conquered by capital through fear and greed, egoism and selfishness, unconscionable individualistic activity in opposition to the common weal. Instead, the construct has been transposed to the arena of natural phenomena, to nature as the domain that is the last reservoir of untrammeled purity, humanly unformed beauty, spontaneous animal integrity absent human machination, etc. But nature as it appears for romantic, anti-capitalist sentiment does not square with human activity in nature, with those activities that form social worlds in and through our relation to nature is, intuitively or reflectively, understood: The entirety of the contemporary face of nature is mediated and formed by human activity, by work and labor (not just by capitalist agriculture and industry, beyond this by the whole history of more or less symbiotic forms of peasant and village community agricultures that span the past 10,000 years; by the ecological conquest of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere, accompanying the Spanish, Portuguese and British explorations, as the fauna and flora were transformed;1 etc.). Surrounding nature, as we experience and understand it today, is the product of a half thousand generations of human interaction with it in its immediately sensuous form. The other alternative is a vision that arises from the crisis of capital as it has recurred since the outset of the first imperialist world war. It takes its model from the historical reality of capitalist development, that is, from intervention in the sphere of these not so socially cohesive and self-regulating relations, from the introjection of the state into the circuits of capital (beginning with fascism in Italy and Germany, Stalinist collectivization and industrialization in Russia, and the New Deal in the United States, as the concentrated ruling class institutional efforts to overcome a general crisis in the history of capitalism, the Great Slump of the thirties, reaching, within a democratic capitalist framework, renewed heights today with regard to the assimilation of capitalist finance to the state and capitalist financial groups domination within that state). In respect to this incorporation of the state into capitals circuits, Wards Medean vision in a displaced manner far more captures the tendential direction of capitalist development: The concept of planetary engineering which is to scientifically reconstruct natural processes that (as consequence of capitals techno-scientific transformation of the face of the Earth) have gone amuck is homogeneous with a practice of capitalist social groups concentrated in the state interjecting themselves into an objective, productive context which is no longer (if it ever was) spontaneously cohesive, no longer self-regulating, the mechanism of that regulation, the market itself requiring reshaping. Such is the visible hand in nature and society or, if you prefer as we do, in society as it reaches back into nature. Unmediated and untransformed by the revolutionary overthrow of capital, projects such as engineering massive dams to prevent seawater from entering de-iced, low latitude regions of the world (to preserve them for monocultural agriculture) aim at systematic, conscious intervention in the topography of earthly nature by way of technologies of capital. But they those projects, those technologies cannot achieve liberation: They can only deepen the domination of nature, and inextricably tied to it, reinforce class exploitation, oppression and stratification, strengthen capitals regimentation of and stranglehold on social life, while all the time intensifying a climate change holocaust. Malthus and Darwin, Darwin and Malthus In the vision of man, community and nature that underlies all other perspectives, once the theoretical consciousness of the bourgeoisie as a ruling class, today science is a cognitive reflex generated by the movement of capital. Crudely articulated by its functionaries, that vision is not unitary. It is contradictory. Gaian and Medean characterizations at best partially disclose this situation, for, as our forgoing analysis would lead us to expect, in the end both aspects come together and exhibit their fundamental identity despite fraternal strife among their proponents: In their concern
1

See, for instance, Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Cambridge (Eng.), 1986.

over human population and the Earths carrying capacity both conceptions reveal the commitments to science and capitalist civilization. This is undoubtedly the case. However, proceeding solely in this manner we would inadequately capture their relations one to another. Because the contradictions in this awareness are deeper and different that what we might have otherwise anticipated, their relation within a scientific consciousness as the most advanced position aimed at preserving the order of capital, and its orientation to the climate change catastrophe we now confront, is best grasped and explicated by invoking two of the more towering figures in the history of bourgeois thought, Darwin and, for our purposes here, Malthus in particular. Now, in what follows, we do not intend a comparison between Malthus and Darwin to one side and Lovelock and Ward to the other (least of all Ward). To do so would be to belittle the intellectual achievements of the former, and to excessively elevate those of the latter (especially those of Ward, who, in contrast to the elegant, power and cogent arguments of a Darwin, is so terribly inconsistent, writes poorly and pleads his aversion to philosophical reflection. Against the atomism and reductionism of the modern science of nature, Lovelock at least has the distinction of generating original insight into the structure and organization of life on Earth and its relation to earthly nature, thus setting science down a road that has permitted it to grasp the geological and historical significance of climate change.) Nor, for that matter, do we intend to that other side an internal comparison between Lovelock and Ward. They are men of different generations (Lovelock is ninety as we write, Ward perhaps in his mid-fifties), the latter then the beneficiary of the intellectual struggle, the critiques, clarifications, reflections and actual investigations in which unorthodox scientists fought to forge a Gaian perspective on earthly nature. Rather, within the historically evolving conceptual universe of the bourgeoisie, the names Malthus and Darwin signify theoretical positions against which others figures can be measured. What, then, we intend is to examine these contemporary positions in terms of the similar visions of two intellectually outstanding figures of the past, visions that are basic to bourgeois civilization. The central question here concerns population excess and carrying capacity: All species, so it is argued, reproduce to a point beyond which available resources can support them. Lovelock has the merit of grasping just how vague, indeterminate and alterable the relation between population and carrying capacity is: There is no simple number for the carrying capacity of the Earth for people. It depends on the way the people live. Are they at one extreme vegans[ 1], or at the other carnivores? Do they farm and so displace natural ecosystems? Are they industrialized, and what is the impact of their industries? In addition to these human properties the Earth itself is not a constant. The number it can carry varies with its state. If mainly desert, the number will be small; if well watered and rich in nutrients, it can be as many per square mile as in Bangladesh. Were we hunters, carnivorous top predators, it is unlikely that even a fertile Earth could carry more than 10 million of us. As gatherers, especially if vegan, it could be 100 million or more. With science and technology, the numbers are imponderable, and we have proved that 7 billion... [can inhabit] Earth for a short period.2 In contrast, Ward is dogmatic on this point, be it beetles in a jar or humans on our planet, any given species of life seems to breed not only up to the point where all resources are spoken for, but beyond that point, so that there are more individuals than resources can sustain. Thus, Ward brings Malthus and Darwin together (as Darwin himself did): The inclusion of evolution as a required element of life include[s] competition even within a species.3 On the face of it, this is nonsense. As we pointed out,4 even animal forms of life do rarely consume available resources, and actual resources themselves are elastic to the point that resources seemingly central to a species reproduction can disappear, and other never previously consumed resources can become the basis for existence. Humans are distinctive in this regard. And, in his remarks on the role of technology, Lovelock at least has an inkling of human making, of social practice, of activity, work and labor through which human beings expand and even create novel resources.5 In an argument that should be made carefully, i.e., without appealing to a linear scheme of
I.e., vegetarians, herbivores. Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, 87. 3 The Medea Hypothesis, 26-27. 4 This study, Part I, Darwinian Evolution and the Second Study, Part V in its entirety, both above. 5 This much said, population is an issue: On the morrow of revolutionary transformation, not before, as we pursue a program of societal reconstruction in our assemblies and councils and as we, through the councils of others, jointly arrive at a program of allocating resources to those groups and regions in the periphery and metropolis of the world system of social relations as it is undergoing this transformation, we shall make an argument for restricting human population growth. Beyond making abortions and contraceptives freely available and engaging in literacy campaigns as a matter of course, we shall argue for a councilar policy encouraging restricted family sizes (regardless of the form this primary unit of socialization takes, e.g.,
1

development, to progress, and without intending any productivist implications, we would note that the human appropriation of nature has changed over time, not as a matter of cumulative advance (because, as we have argued, forms of human sociation and the productive activities on which they rest, are not sequential, and because the most dramatically instanced forms of appropriations occur solely within capitalism) from the appropriation of (ourselves as) human-social energy (i.e., collective labor as in coordinated group hunting), to the appropriation of social energy of animal bodies in labor (here domestication of animal labor in riding and the use of pack animals), to that of multicellular (eukaryotic) energy (i.e., yeast based production of bread as a life staple, food preservation by way of fermentation, e.g., cheeses, yogurts, beers, wines, jerked meats, etc.), to that of the capture of visible forms of energy present in natural processes (e.g., steam), to that of molecular energy of the atom's electron outer orbits by way of oxygen combustion of organic and inorganic chemical structures (i.e., decomposed plant matter, coal, mineral oils, natural gas, etc.), to that of atomic nucleus power (i.e., nuclear fission and fusion). Obviously, the resources appropriated and utilized by human being are not limited or fixed as they are naturally present and given as Ward intends, but are largely subject to variable, changing levels of utilization determined by historically varying technical ensembles and, embodied in them, conceptual orientations toward nature. But even as a Malthusian, Wards position is without doubt contradictory; but then so is Lovelocks. What he forgoes theoretically, Lovelock takes back with his practical prescriptions and he takes it back with a vengeance: We in Britain live on one of the safe havens where life can continue in the heat age. In certain ways the British are like the passengers aboard a ship that has diverted to take on board refuges escaping from some drought-stricken land. To the refugees we are their lifeboat, but the captain and officers of the ship have to decide how many we can take who can be allowed to board and who must remain and take their chances? Fairness suggests a lottery, but common sense rules out so simple a selection. The sick, the lame, and the old would have to stay behind and take their chances along with passengers who felt called to help them.1 Or, again, Gaia, like God, helps those who help themselves. There is little that could be more socially Darwinian and Malthusian, not to mention Protestant in the bourgeois sense. But Lovelock is not finished: Its not just that, We have no option to make the best of national cohesion and accept that war and warlords are part of it, this it being the brave new world of climate change. For island havens an effective defense force will be as important as our own immune systems we may have to increase the size and spending on our armed forces; 2 it is that, in foreseeing this, he welcomes it: In recognizing it, he embraces the prospects of a massive natural cull of humanity and a return to an Earth that freely regulates itself. At this point, the logic of his position is obvious. It demands, we marshal our resources soon, and if a safe form of geoengineering can buy us a little time then we must use it. Parts of the world, such as oceanic islands, the Artic basin, and oases on the continents will still be inhabitable in a hot world.3 But what Lovelock does not recognize is that with the loss of productive industry, access to resources following from abandonment of coastal metropolitan and arid, desertifying areas; with contracted agricultural bases, and the destruction of the world market in commodities, the renewal of capitalism through autarchic development; with all this a fully statist program constituted in the deepest ingression into the circuits of capital, namely, the incorporation and brutal subordination of peoples, states
nuclear, extended, entirely social and not biological), especially as relatively and absolutely impoverished groups and regions begin to obtain parity with those who experience is that of abundance. The long-term goal, we shall argue, is to over generations qualitatively lower human populations, by as much as two orders of magnitude. We see no reason to do otherwise, and we see the extolling the virtues of growing human populations as a backhanded productivism with statist intent, i.e., as an effort to divert a program aimed at putting the entirety of social relations, especially productive ones, on a new foundation into anti-Malthusian drive to infinitely reconstruct nature through technological innovation driven by endless population growth, that in the end will reintroduce practices that are, and a mentalit that is, capitalist. We think it can be shown this drive finds its model in and draws from the same sources as the compulsion to accumulate, that it is depthpsychologically a sublimation of socially formed brutal impulses into a quest for Power, though perhaps in a more refined form. Finally, we think that if human sociation can be reestablished on liberatory communist foundations, this drive will slacken and perhaps dissipate, thus isolating those who are ideationally fixated on the conquest of nature as the essence of human activity. 1 Lovelock, Ibid, 86-87. 2 Ibid, 95. 3 Ibid, 157. Legitimately, Lovelock remarks that, if we start by using a stratospheric aerosol to ameliorate global heating even if it succeeded it would be long before we faced the additional problem of acidification (Ibid, 156) suggesting, as he does, that the remedy would amplify other critically distressed partial systems within earthly nature, that additional inputs would heighten the overall problem, creating a more ferocious as we experience it response to dynamically re-equilibrate the system: We would find ourselves enslaved in a Kafkaesque world from which there was no escape (Ibid,157).

and territories to the larger economies of the great powers on the model of the Nazi Grossdeutschwirtschaft (or the Japanese Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere); with states thus operating as concentration camp regimes employing the forced labor of their own populations and the slave labor of others (not so much as a question of Lebensraum but for purposes of the seizure of means of production, raw materials, viable agricultural lands and climatically less inhospitable environs); with such a climate change maelstrom not only will current human demography collapse with countless death at levels never before seen not only will capitalist civilization be destroyed, not only will such an epoch issue in autarchy-based, universal totalitarian politics characterized by regimes of camps based on forced labor, not only in such a world will resource wars impel these regimes toward imperialist world war, in such a world little England will not survival. It too will disappear. On the basis of a commitment to an entirely abstract totality (Gaia) as the principle that illuminates the course of events and developments within nature and humanity, and within the framework for which the structure of society and the order of capital are simply given and cannot be transcended, Lovelock retreats to final refugee of all bourgeois, chauvinism and nationalism. It dovetails nicely with his practical Malthusianism. Wards position is, however, different, within the same framework it is even opposed to Lovelocks. Within this framework (unalterable social relations of capitalist production), Ward seeks precisely what Lovelock rightfully rejects out of hand, an international solution within the order of capital.1 Ward begins by stating what is, again within the order of capital, obvious, There is no doubt that to allay the unquestioned and global changes confronting this planet and all of its inhabitants over the next decades to centuries will require vast outlays of the Earths technological, human, raw, and monetary resources. It is becoming increasingly clear that humanity is in a fight it can no longer win. On battlefields in such situations, triage is undertaken: save what you can, but put your resources behind things that can be saved [The] Earth as we know it a planet with ice caps, extreme temperature changes from pole to equator, and major weather patterns varying with latitude and even longitude because of this latitudinal temperature gradient cannot be saved in its current state2 This recognition alone places Ward in front row among capitals scientific vanguard and justifies his inclusion in our studies Among all the transformations taking place, the rise of sea levels above current ones will dwarf the others. Warming will create new areas in northern Canada certainly, perhaps Scandinavia or the Russian Artic, and in Antarctica. where large-scale agriculture, soon to be enormously circumscribed, can be renewed in contrast to drowned coastal croplands and arid continental interiors. Plate tectonically, as the ice melts those regions where that ice had depressed Earths lithospheric crusts from its sheer weight Greenland and the Antarctic interior will bounce back up over short-term geological time (nowhere as quickly as the ice melts), and inland freshwater seas will form. Now there are a few entry points, chokepoints if you will, where seawater will rush in to fill these depressions. Along these points of entry, massive seawall and dams must be constructed to prevent saltwater from filling these depressions, to instead allow new freshwater lakes, the largest on Earth, to form, as water to supply populations and agriculture.3 Such would be one, among many other, planetary engineering feats that would preserve, vastly scaled down by the imperative imposed by the warming globally, the contours of capitalist civilization itself. Wards desire to save what can be saved for humanity at whatever costs moves him in a direction opposite Lovelock: Theoretically Malthusian, his commitments to Enlightenment rationality render him practically humanist and Gaian: The irony does not escape him, since, We must become anti-Medeans in our actions which would make us Gaians4 Wards gigantic geoengineering projects, however, presupposes the unity of classes and nations, masked by the terms humanity and the species. This is a logical sleight of the hand: Like that of man, humanity and species are formal concepts, not the subjects (consciously active agents) of the projected change. In the course of history, humanity (or, alternatively, the species) has consciously effected nothing. The changes have been accomplished by specific groups of people, not by the species or by humanity. Species and humanity are abstractions, they are not agency at least not yet.
1 2

The Medea Hypothesis, 95-96. Ibid, 143-144. Emphasis added. 3 Ibid, 145-147. 4 Ibid, 140.

Assumption of the false reality of a species subject avoids the problem of social division, the conflicts between ruling classes at the level of the world over surpluses, markets and resources, and societal conflicts between those classes and the vast underlying populations they dominate. It assumes the geoengineering transformation of nature Ward demands is possible without a social transformation, without the abolition of the order of capital, i.e., without the practice and consciousness in which, implicitly, a universal societal subject can for the first time in human history form. And, even if it, the internationally capitalist organized geoengineering of nature, were possible (it is not), it would leave in place the entire oil-coal-auto economy that underpins it, would merely sustain the order of capital inclusive of a science and technology that has created this impasse in the first place, and which under these condition vastly accelerating and deepen its development. In point of fact, Wards projection relies on states, and the ruling class social groups that are organized through and hegemonize them, and nations. Within the order of capital, that means reliance on the international organizations of states and capital, the United Nations, the Group of Seven and the Group of Twenty, or the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. The hierarchically organized economic organizations (dominated by the greatest capitalist states) are irrelevant, since they have been constructed solely to insure that the continuing flows of surpluses that circulate internationally accrue to the great power imperialist states. After the fact of decisions reached elsewhere, not before, they might fund such grand engineering projects. This leaves the organizations of states, like that body of thieves, thugs and murderers, the United Nations, led by its more august body of thieves, thugs and murderers, the Security Council. Unlike the League of Nations in the thirties, the United Nations is a well funded minion whose role and function is enforcement of the wills of the great imperialist powers, especially the United States (as, e.g., in Iraq); and like the League of Nations, such an organization cannot effectively and will not function at all in the midst of an accelerating climate change catastrophe, that midwifes the creation of enormous camps to house immigrants, slave labor regimes, resource wars, genocides, and finally nuclearized imperialist world war, all already implicit in the tendential direction of capitals movement as its crisis deepens. Witness the unheeded pleas of delegates of the island nations of the south Pacific, now drowning from the rising seawater of the last fifteen years, that have fallen on deaf years in the climate change forums of the world (including the UN General Assembly). Roughly a half million people populating these island nations, atolls and volcanic outcroppings (e.g., the Marshall Islands) are already doomed from rising waters: While the New Zealand state has reluctantly agreed to take a handful of people (maybe a couple thousand), these pleas to attend to global warming are ignored as the first climate change genocide unfolds without so much as a notice. There is no alternative to this unprecedented, largely unimagined catastrophe within the order of capital.

Fifth Study The Role of Life in Planetary Death Malthusian and Darwinian Mystifications in Capital's Sciences of Climate Change Bibliographical Sources Alroy, J., C. R. Marshall, et al, Effects of Sampling Standardization on Estimates of Phanerozoic Marine Diversification. National Academy of the Sciences, published online, 22 May 2001 Barnes, Will. Nature, Capital, Communism. Revised edition. St. Paul, 2010 __________. Some Remarks on the Role of the Working Class in History in The Crisis in Society and Nature and the Working Class in History. St. Paul, 2009-2010 __________. Pavlovs Dogs: The Critique of Physicalism and Science: Physiology and Lower Forms of Behavior, Merleau-Pontys The Structure of Behavior. Unpublished, 2009 __________. From Metaphysics to Philosophical Anthropology: Max Schelers Mans Place in Nature. Unpublished, 2008 __________. Work and Speech: The Origins of Man: A Short Review of Trn Duc Thaos Investigations into the Origin of Language and Consciousness. Unpublished, 2008 __________. Community and Capital. St. Paul, 2001 Berner, Robert. Atmospheric Oxygen, Tectonics, and Life, in Stephen Schneider and Penelope Boston (eds.), Scientists on Gaia. Cambridge (MA), 1991 Condie, Kent. Earth as an Evolving Planetary System. Burlington (MA), 2005 Condie, Kent and Robert Sloan. Origin and Evolution of Earth: Principles of Historical Geology. Upper Saddle River (NJ), 1998 (3rd edition) Cox, Peter, M., Richard Betts, et al, Acceleration of Global Warming Due to Carbon-Cycle Feedbacks in a Coupled Climate Model, Nature, 408, 2003 Davies, Paul. The Fifth Miracle. London, 1998 Franck, Siegfried, et al. The Long Term Evolution of the Geobiosphere (2006), accessed online at www.astro.washington.edu/courses Gould, Stephen Jay. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge (MA), 2002 Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. Harmondsworth (Eng.), 1969 (1940) Khakina, L.N. Concepts of Symbiogenesis: A Historical and Critical Study of the Reach of Russian Botanists. New Haven, 1992 Kump, Lee and Tyler Volk. Gaias Garden and the BLAGs Greenhouse: Global Biogeochemical Climate Regulation in Stephen Schneider and Patricia Boston (eds.), Scientists on Gaia. Cambridge (MA), 1991 Kump, Lee, James Kasting and Robert Crane. The Earth System. Upper Saddle River (NJ), 2004 (2nd edition) Lenton, Timothy M. and Werner von Bloh, Biotic Feedback Extends the Life Span of the Biosphere (2000). Access online (search under Lenton and the article title) Lopez, Barry Holstum. Of Wolves and Men. New York, 1978 Lovelock, James. The Vanishing Face of Gaia. New York, 2009 _____________. Gaia: A New Look at Life. Oxford (Eng.), 1979 Lovelock, James and J.P. Lodge. Oxygen in the Contemporary Atmosphere, Atmos Environ 6, 1972 _____________ and Lynn Margulis. Atmospheric Homeostasis by and for the Biosphere: The Gaia Hypothesis, Tellus, 26, 1974 ____________________________.Homeostatic Tendencies of the Earths Atmosphere, Origins of Life, 1, 1974 Margulis, Lynn. Symbiosis in Cell Evolution: Microbial Communities in the Archaen and Proterozoic Communities. New Haven, 1993 (2nd edition) Mathieu, Leo G. and Sorin Sonea. Prokaryotology: A Coherent View. Montral, 2000 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Structure of Behavior. Boston, 1983 (French original, 1942) Miyoko Chu, Songbird Journeys: Four Seasons in the Lives of Migratory Birds. New York, 2006 Moscovici, Sergei. La socit contre nature. Paris, 1972 Scheler, Max. Mans Place in Nature (die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos). Boston, 1961 (1928) Shiva, Vandana. Monocultures of the Mind. London, 2000 (1993)

Sonea, Sorin. Bacterial Evolution without Speciation, in Lynn Margulis and Ren Fester, Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation. Speciation and Morphogenesis. Cambridge (MA), 1991 Thil, Scott. Thanks to Our Fossil Fuel Addiction, We May Be Setting Ourselves Up for a Catastrophic Natural Event. Alternet, posted 3 July 2009 Watson, Andrew and James Lovelock. Biological Homeostasis of the Global Environment: The Parable of Daisy World, Tellus, 35b, 1983 Ward, Peter. The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destruction? Princeton (NJ), 2009 _________. Under a Green Sky. New York, 2007 Williams, G.R. Gaian and Nongaian Explanations for the Contemporary Level of Atmospheric Oxygen, in Stephen Schneider and Penelope Boston (eds.), Scientists on Gaia. Cambridge (MA), 1991 Worsely, Thomas, R. Damian Nance, and Judith Moody. Tectonics, Carbon, Life, and Climate for the Last Three Billion Years, in Stephen Schneider and Penelope Boston (eds.), Scientists on Gaia. Cambridge (MA), 1991 Wysession, Michael. History of Plate Movements. Washington University, St. Louis (MO), Lecture, 2008

Conclusion Science and Capital The nexus between capital and science is no longer formed by the class who activities created capitalism and whose existence has historically been cognitively mediated by science. The deeper the value form has penetrated into society, the more real domination has unfolded, the less the bourgeoisie has acted in history, the less its capacity to cohere itself whether through the domination it exercises in production, its unchallenged hegemony in the state or in and through the ongoing development of (its) science, so that today under conditions of the totalizing domination of capital over society, the bourgeoisie is no longer a class in the sense that it acts, for, cohered by the movement of capital, it existential determinations are theoretically expressed in categories that capture and fix... it is a slavish captive to... capitals movement: The bourgeoisie as such has ceased to exist, and the capitalist is a mere personification of those economic categories. Thus, having originated as a class theory in a struggle against the old tributary order, its fundamental assumptions arising from bourgeois accumulative practices, its conceptual structure homogeneous with that structure exhibited in the constitution of value, science is today more and more directly and immediately bound to capital: It is the experiment creating artificial conditions that exist nowhere in nature and testing predictions that make possible techniques and processes through which nature domination is realized.... that binds science ever closer to capital, and it is production in which capital recreates science as a central moment in its reproduction.1 Start briefly with production, the relation of science to capital from the side of capital. In an immediate sense, science is wholly dependent for its theoretical development on its bearers, scientists how else could it be? and thus mediately dependent upon that which its bearers themselves immediately depend, research and schools (universities) funded by capital's state, grants provided by the same, and incomes derived from revenues extracted from underlying populations... by the state... an institution that, in exercising a monopoly on incarnates armed forces in its manifold and diverse forms, simultaneously is the arena in which capitalist unity is forced, in which otherwise competing great capitals come together, in more stable societies of capital mostly often legislatively, and formulate a common program which serves as a framework for maintaining its hegemony in and over society... In respect to the function, role and comprehensive albeit largely hidden purpose of science as nature domination, it is tasked with provision of the conceptual mediations that expand productive forces: For it is only in the incessant development of new and refinement of old technologies of capital as they shape production that scientists, and thus science, can insure the continuity of those funds, grants and incomes... Now take the experiment, the relation of science to capital from the side of science. The experiment itself is artificial producing constructing conditions that exist nowhere in nature. Instead, in dealing with bodies and processes, the experiment proceeds by setting aside the decisive interconnected relations and conditions which penetrate and shape these bodies and processes, on which they rest and which taken together form the context (totality) that is effectively determinate for their reality and being. What is distilled in the experiment is precisely a grand abstraction, a practical construct that is absent real, concrete determination; rather, in fetishistically fixing and malignantly magnifying partial aspects, deemed essential, of the various orders of reality, whether inorganic, vital or humanly natural (not to mention the various gradations that shade off and into each other or those points at which they intersect), this experimental distillation permits these natures (bodies) to be manipulated so that they may be torn apart, ground up, destroyed and reformed as raw materials for the capitalist production of a world of commodities: If the modern science of nature (and those sciences for which it is a model) is able to exhibit the elementary constitution of bodies, no matter how fetishized the analysis, it in principle exhibits how bodies can be made up, and how they can be taken apart, de-structured or destroyed. The emphasis is not on forms or relations (excepting the purely quantitative) among various sensuous bodies, but on a type of understanding that is narrowly practical as such, i.e., pragmatic and utilitarian, prior to any application. The rationality here is, as we say, a priori instrumental. Now this character (as instrumental) is confirmed by the very internal conceptual structure of science, i.e., the very goal of theorizing points to the same conclusion: As a body of theoretical knowledge science aims at prediction, i.e., the doctrinal contents of science demand extra-theoretical confirmation which, in part and in turn, secure scientific validation (or, if you prefer, those contents remain unfalsified). But the peculiar and widely recognized validity,
1

It is in this, the scientific sense that experimentation is at issue, and not in the sense of the practical effort to reproduce existing conditions in nature or in the sense of giving free reign to potentials that inhere in nature (natura naturans).

meaning and significance that science has achieved as theory does not refer us back to its categorial achievements. Instead, the validation is sought in experimentation and in technological achievement, the real process of verification, in the order of society. For it is here, in this proof, i.e., in the socially generalized seeing, approval and acclaim for technological achievement revealed in and exhibited as nature domination, that science exhibits its a priori technological character, its instrumental rationality and the peculiar form of knowledge of beings as raw material that it produces. This leads back to our earlier analysis of the relation of capitals science to technology: Not only is this science dependent upon modern technology for its theoretical development, and not only is the latter, capitalist technology (because it incarnates explicit theorization), in turn, dependent on the former for its advances. Crucial for the sense of this mutual dependency is the experiment or, more precisely, the instrument, instrumental apparatus or complex of instruments employed in carrying out experiments: Scientific knowledge of nature is at once a product of our (instrumental) interaction with it and relative to the sophistication of the instruments employed. As technologically developed scientific instruments become more elaborate, refined and complex, scientific knowledge of nature (the universe) expands and is not infrequently transformed. This should be obvious: We only need refer to the role of contemporary accelerators (microphysically) and telescopically equipped satellites (macrophysically) in particle physics' and cosmological understanding, respectively, of fundamental matter and the physical structures so-called (e.g., galaxies) of the universe. Thus, we can affirm, on one side, the experiment employs practice for the sake of theory. But this heteronomy, as we indicated, is mutual: The kind of theory thereby achieved lends itself to, and thus encourages, the large-scale natural (and social) transformations requisite to the expanded reproduction of capital up to and including planetary geoengineering, transformations that once occurred only on geological timescales but today characterize contemporary technologies of capital. Thereby, on the other side, this qualitatively enlarged experiment employs this mutilated theory for the sake of its practice. But that is not all. That practice, in turn, becomes a fount of theoretical insights that cannot be acquired merely in the laboratory, or more precisely, the Earth as a whole has become a laboratory: The entire cycle recurs continuously as science and modern technology, mutually dependent, copenetrate each other and enlarge each other's domains through a societal process that remakes surrounding earthly nature as a holding area of unprocessed resources for capitalist production.

Postscript Summary and Prospects Lest our Hopes and Dreams Become an Endless Nightmare: Capitalist Technology, the Modern Science of Nature and the Movement of Capital
With its relations of production, of exchange and of property, modern bourgeois society, a society that has summoned up such colossal means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the underworld whom he has conjured up by his spells.
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto1

If technological man had conscience of his dependent position in the whole of nature, he would be better equipped to do a good job for himself because in the long run, a cosmological phenomenon might put an end to the adventure of man. This phenomenon is probably in the making, and it is quite possible that man is one of the agents of this making. Disregard for nature is, in any case, the worst premise for survival, let alone development.
Paolo Soleri, The Bridge Between Matter and Spirit is Matter Becoming Spirit (1969)

The movement of capital, and the social and natural transformations it generates, are borne along by the logic of accumulation whose consequence in the era of totalizing domination it can be not other way is the ongoing ruin of earthly nature, the destruction of its self-organizing cohesiveness and its otherness that is the very premise of vital and human life. Without the modern sciences of nature and capitalist technology these transformations are neither psychologically conceivable nor logically possible. Capital is perpetrating a crime for which there is no name, an enormous crime that (with the exception of the few details sketched in literature and films of anti-utopian science fiction) largely remains unimagined: It is the totality of earthly nature (earthly nature as a totality and in its totality) that the movement of capital is unraveling. This collapse in earthly nature is temporary, but measured geologically on a millennial timescale temporary has no meaning for the living generations of humanity and countless more to come

Die brgerlichen Produktions- und Verkehrsverhltnisse, die brgerlichen Eigentumsverhltnisse, die moderne brgerliche Gesellschaft, die so gewaltige Produktions- und Verkehrsmittel hervorgezaubert hat, gleicht dem Hexenmeister, der die unterirdischen Gewalten nicht mehr zu beherrschen vermag, die er heraufbeschwor (our translation of the text above).
1

Part I Capital and Nature Capitalist Criminality From that moment at which what Marx called real domination in production (determined by the systematic incorporation of science and technology into that production) began to effectively hold sway over the world, capitalism has developed and can only develop through destructuring nature in its objectivity, reconstituting it as a sink of unprocessed supplies, a standing reserve of matter whose meaning and existence is exhausted is being reworked in capitalist production. Capitalist development proceeds by way of the disruption, dislocation and in all cases destruction of the autonomy, coherence and otherness that is earthly nature (increased inputs to the carbon, methane, sulfur cycles raising atmospheric CO2 and CH4 levels, increasing acidification of the oceans, shutdown and then shifting of the thermohaline circulation which is in part already underway) that, creating rapid climate change, is already rendering access to resources more difficult, will interrupt and make production of agricultural foodstuffs and industrial raw materials less dependable, place more demands on the infrastructural foundations of capitalism which capitals movement at once produces and requires to reproduce itself on an expanded basis and vastly restricts the basis in earthly nature for human activity in its socio-historically specific, capitalist form It is height of folly to think that climate change is not already underway, that the increasingly elasticity of weather and seasons, the disruption of geologically formed patterns of weather, of weather and climatic regimes, most visible in what the media spectacle calls extreme weather, is not the initial phase of climate change Capitals representatives have proven unable to even adequately pose, much less take up, climate change issues, while it is increasingly manifest that technical innovations within capitalism will not keep pace with that change, and are not capable of addressing it in its scale and complexity Without the revolutionary proletarian overthrow of capital, and the establishment of a global (i.e., councilar) framework, climate change and the problems it presents, those it creates and those it exacerbates cannot even be addressed The movement of capital necessarily produces despoliation of earthly nature (recreation of the Earth as a raw material basin for commodity production), mass species extinction and climate change with the possibility of runaway warming. Scientific inputs into production raise the productivity of waged labor which, for the capitalist, is merely a capacity that is measured and calculated, hence quantified, in terms of terms of the time of its expenditure. We call it abstract labor This simply astounding productivity of abstract labor reduces turnover times the time required to produce and market a commodity and the period of a developmental cycle the period beginning from capitalist expansion through devalorization to the outset of renewed expansion so that within each cycle resources are voraciously consumed at a pace that is rapidly outstripping the rate of technical innovation within capitalism which would make it possible to shift the earthly resource base away from hydrocarbon fossil fuels and create a new type of raw materials on which the entirety of capitalist development could rest. It is voracious consumption of resources, the production of raw materials and what it entails, the so-called externalities (i.e., the plundering, waste and destruction generated by capitalist production), which is at issue: Determined from regular introduction of science and technology into production, from the moment that the real domination of capital over labor had become irreversible capitalist development has created a situation within earthly nature in which the latter is homogenized, reduced to uglified raw material basins (denuded forests, open surface mines, desertified grasslands, waterways suffused with oil) at the start of a cycle of commodity production and toxic wastelands and garbage cesspools (wetlands turned into landfills, decaying urban centers and crumbling infrastructure, vast stretches of ocean densely littered with plastic refuse) at the end of that cycle, i.e., with commodity consumption. Product of the movement of capital, this is despoliation... The current rate of species extinction is about one hundred times the natural rate, an average calculated over geological time. At this moment, the primary cause of species extinction is habitat destruction, the ruin of complex, intricate, interdependent and often intensively humanly shaped ecosystems. It is a consequence of the capitalist development determined from the penetration in depth of the value form into surrounding nature. The same socially necessary labor time required for the reproduction of capital that tendentially shapes and regiments social life by deciding capital flows or arenas for the most profitable exploitation of resources and utilization of money capital is also responsible for species extinction. Capitalist development forces species into extinction through habitat destruction, first, in the forms

of industrial development (plant construction); second, in real estate development issuing in suburban sprawl (home and office construction, and venues of consumption such as strip malls); then, especially in industrial logging, the clearing of forests for monocultural crop agriculture, and mining; in road and highway construction (as an infrastructural presupposition of all of these forms of development); in heavily mechanized ocean trawling of fisheries (here gillnetting and longlining has led to the near extinction, soon to be fact, of numerous, once extraordinarily large fish populations, species of salmon, tuna, cod, halibut, swordfish, marlin, shark and skates); and, beyond habitat destruction and on a relatively small scale, in trophy hunting and poaching carried out systematically by highly organized, capitalist and criminal syndicates, gangs and mafias and by proletarianized men driven to this activity by the loss of forests and farming land to which they previously owed their life and activity. Before mid-century, all wellknow large mammals, lions, all species of tigers, elephants, hippopotamuses and rhinoceroses, and great apes, orangutans and several chimpanzees species as well will be extinct as species (whether or not a few speciesindividuals survive in the zoos of the capitalist world). But this is not all, not by a long shot: The same movement of capital described in the above forms of production and development is inducing a climate change warming that in the very near future, irreversibly, threatens the vast bulk of aquatic life on Earth. As carbon-based pollutants are rained out and enter seawaters and the concentration of free hydrogen ions increases, acidification of oceans eventually destroys aquatic species. Increasing acidic oceans has already killed two-thirds of coral reefs in the oceans of the Earth, and is killing zooplankton. The greatest danger here is what is called trophic cascade: Remove one species, say phytoplankton at the bottom of the oceans food web, and extinction follows upon extinction as a basic life form, a critical food source for a host of other life forms and still more life forms tiered atop these, disappearsThese extinctions (which on the present course are inevitable), together with climate warming, will destroy nearly all ocean fish, and mammalian species (most species of turtles and penguins, species of seals, walrus, whales; polar bears, arctic moose, reindeer) that depend on ice, the arctic or these microorganisms for their existence and beings. Taken together, these amounts to a mass species extinction on the order of those that have, in geological time, occurred on five previous occasions in the past 490 million years: Product of the movement of capital, an ecological catastrophe is ongoing. It is occurring as the sixth known or geologically reconstructed mass species extinction in the nearly four billion year old geological history of life on Earth. It constitutes, moreover, a biological regression that is reversing tens of millions of years of natural evolution roughly 55 millions and undermining the basis of life, including human life itself. If you will, please keep in mind that mass species extinction is effectively synonymous with the destruction of biological diversity. We shall return to this Though analytically distinct, species extinction and climate change are (because consequences of capitalist development and because the latter is accelerating the former) as suggested otherwise inseparable The level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is now rising at a rate of 2 parts per million (ppm) molecules of air. This, the rate of capitalistically generated climatic forcing is four orders of magnitude, ten thousand times, more powerful than any current natural forcing (e.g., orbital eccentricity). The melting of the Greenland ice sheets may already be irreversible. The West Antarctic ice sheets are nearing collapse and the great ice pack on the east connected to the glaciers of the interior will soon begin to rapidly melt. Rising temperature will begin to melt Arctic permafrost to a depth great enough that the periodic release of gas hydrates will occur, portending the prospects of a truly enormous release of poisonous methane gas. Enough heat will be generated at the surface of the worlds oceans to create a warm layer thick enough to prevent cold, nutrient rich waters from rising, while at the same time the oceans will become so acidic as to prevent formation of carbon-based shell life. Warmer water diminishes the amount of oxygen that can be dissolved in the seas. The consequences will be twofold, slow suffocation of marine life and dissolution of calcium carbonate shell forms that have absorbed atmospheric CO2 for a half billion years. Releasing carbon back into the atmosphere instead of absorbing it is a particularly insidious form of a positive feedback, a natural process that not only continues but exacerbates, by intensifying and increasing the rapidity of, a given development, here warming. This would mark the beginning of the end of marine life, plant and animal, as such. Already occurring, continuous flooding of low lying coast areas will recreate them as permanent parts of the sea, and inundations of coast metropolises will be regular features that recur several times annually.

Mountainous glaciers in all the ranges of the world are disappearing. Flows during the spring rising from mountain and glacier fed rivers will slow to a trickle. In these regions, drinking water and water to irrigate agriculture will not be available from these riverine sources. Drought will become permanent, desertification will proceed apace, and habitable environs will accordingly contract. Driven not just by warming (but also by logging and clear cutting for agriculture usage), the tropic forest ecology, already rapidly disappearing, will succumb, the greatest source of biodiversity on Earth eliminated, as rainforests are reduced to scrub and eventually desert. The basis of life will dramatically and disastrously narrow still further, while rainforest collapse will produce a loss, this time of a truly decisive carbon reservoir thus enhancing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, still further exacerbating warming. Cyclonic seasons are beginning to move north. They will move to a latitude as far north as London (51.5N, the latitudinal equivalent of the Falkland Islands in the southern hemisphere), and appear below the equator where they have not before. Their seasons will be extended five or six weeks annually. Periods of searing heat, once one hundred year events, have now occurred (in Europe in summer 2003) and will become a regular feature of summer time in once temperature zones as arid tropic climates move north and south to the mid latitudes. Melting the great ice packs on Earth will raise sea levels at least 75 meters (roughly 250 feet). Taken together, rising seawaters and increasingly intense, severe storms and possible super storms (with increasing moisture in the air and as the atmosphere heats up creating fuel for such storms) will wreck coastal built environment not merely on the order of but far, far greater than Hurricane Katrina did. Lowing lying and coastal areas face inundation and salination wrecking havoc with drinking water supplies: The wholesale (and not just a partial, neighborhood based) abandonment of sea level urban metropolises will begin. This will include not just Bombay but much of coastal India and southern Pakistan, Bangladesh northeast to Dakar, not just Saigon and coastal Indochina, but all of coastal east Asia, especially Hong Kong, Shanghai, all of coastal Japan, the island archipelagos of Malay and Indonesia the islands of the South Pacific will disappear Borneo, Bangkok as well as Sidney, not just the Asian but the Dutch lowlands, together with Alexandra, Venice and most Mediterranean port cities, inland London, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Helsinki and their environs, not just New Orleans and Miami but the U.S. Gulf coast including coastal Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, a good portion of Florida, the Atlantic Carolinas and coastal and Tidewater Virginia, the West Indies, Panama City, Caracas, Recife and Rio, inland Buenos Aires, and islands like Hawaii and the Canaries, central coastal west Africa especially Nigeria, and so on. With desertion of these areas and regions, rising seawater and super storms will witness massive voluntary and chaotic, then forced and enforced massive population migrations, the likes of which the world has never seen... In a highly mediated way, this is capital's reaction to the problem of global surplus population it has created... Population migrations will not just begin from low lying coastal regions, but also from increasingly arid regions, areas plagued by water shortages undergoing actual desertification and qualitatively increased incidents of wildfires, and wracked by famine which is no longer periodic, but regular and frequent, by internal conflict and balkanizations as productive agricultural lands are lost to the movement of arid tropical climates northward Product of the movement of capital, this is climate change. No amount of technological innovation will be able to keep pace with the rapidity of these abrupt changes Capital The principles governing scientific practice, and specifically modern technological relations to nature, are embedded in the social practices that form and renew society itself, and are comprehended by the concept of capital. What is capital? To start, capital is at once a social relation between groups of wage laborers and those who employ them, the production process in which this relation is formed and which it forms, and a product of this relation Generally speaking, the labor that produces commodities is abstract or, as we say, reduced: Under conditions of capitalist production, human labor is reduced, viz., it is generalized, quantified and as such it is measured in units of quantitative time. Expressed from the perspective of actual production, the labor of a worker making a product (or participating in the making of a product) has been reduced to quantitatively measurable units. Measurement is made in units of time.

If the concrete, purposive labor of a worker is purchased by an employer, a capitalist insofar as he makes such purchases, then it is not even concrete labor that is purchased.1 Labor as a commodity is "labor power" or the worker's capacity to labor, since it is not the concrete, useful product of work the employer is interested in it, but the profit, the surplus of "value" or, prosaically, return over investment, that can be realized by selling this product, any product, as a commodity. Capitalist production renders concrete labor abstract, i.e., generalized or unspecific, temporally quantified, materialized and objectified as "value." Capitalists as a group, by and large, rarely achieve exclusivity in the sale of their commodities: Monopolies obviously exist but the mass of capitalists face competitive conditions when seeking to sell their commodities in the marketplace. Except under occasional conditions of product scarcity (which is a contra-historical, ideal condition opposed to the actual tendency, product superfluity, of capitalist development), capitalists must confront other capitalists who attempt to market similar if not identical commodities. Accordingly, capitalists must at least match or better the price of their competition. In markets where commodities sell largely as commodities regardless of their specific uses, a condition is reached that typifies the tendency of market competition, one that illuminates the uniquely capitalist conditions under which commodities are produced: Fearing competitive ruin, capitalists strives often frantically to achieve a cost advantage in the production of their commodities. Profit can only be realized if from the capitalists perspective costs of production of a commodity are lower than the average in the industry in question. (That average we call the socially necessary labor time embodied in a given commodity.) While occasionally there are individual capitalists or firms that achieve a competitive advantage in costs of means of production and raw materials, those costs tend toward an average for entire industries. Competitive advantage can be gained by introducing new machinery or technologies into production, but this may be beyond the means of an individual capitalist or a firm; but it can also be gained in reducing labor costs (pushing workers to fight back), and this is not beyond his, her or its means. Capitalists exert great effort to drive down labor costs. If successful, this reduction insures profitability because those costs have been driven below what is socially necessary to produce a given commodity. Since the distinguishing feature of commodities as commodities is their "value," i.e., abstract and general, temporally quantified, and materialized labor, the reduction of labor costs is constituted through decreasing the amount of time that is required in production (of the commodity in question) without an equivalent compensation to those who are producing (it). The decrease in time required in production of a specific commodity (viz., an increase in the productivity of labor socalled) can be achieved only in two ways (or by combining both); first, by lengthening the working day in order to increase the mass of commodities produced; or, second, by reorganizing, or incorporating new machinery into, the work process in order to produce the same or a greater mass of a specific commodity in a shorter period of time. Either way allows, obviously, for the production of more commodities. But in both cases, there is no increase in productivity unless workers are uncompensated for the increase: This uncompensated relation, which is an essential, necessary feature and structural condition of capital accumulation and hardly an arbitrary act, we call exploitation. The excess of value (surplus value) created through increased productivity is realized as such, and appears phenomenally, when the commodity is sold. Profit, actually excess (surplus) value, can now be returned to the capitalist. This effort (to drive down labor costs to competitively position herself in the marketplace to secure profitability) gives a special meaning to the abstractions in and through which concrete labor (purchased by the employer as the mere capacity to labor) is reduced. For the siphoning off of living labor's capacity to labor, the expenditure of labor's time in production, and not the formal act of exchange of capacity to labor for money, is the actual process in and through which concrete labor is abstracted and reduced: A worker's sensibility, affection, corporeality, experience and reflection are all irrelevant to the production of commodities; in fact, as a rule they get in the way, impeding capitalists main object, producing at a competitive advantage by lowering labor costs. During actual production, on the shopfloor, the assembly line, in the office, etc., these abstractions (in the form largely of speed-ups, imposed production norms, harassment, and subjection to machine rhythms) are constituted. They are, to be sure, repressive. Work under conditions of capitalist production renders labor for capital. It is a social process in which occurs that
1

The reader will note that we start from conflicting class subjectivities in production (and not from the commodity, or the constitution of the value form) in the account of the logic and movement of capital because this is a form of a return to foundations, to living, concrete subjectivity as the basis of our understanding of the world, and it is this form of presentation, this return, and we think it alone, that is theoretically and philosophically adequate to our project, to a proletarian-based, general emancipation.

miraculous transubstantiation of specifically human aspirations, concerns, sensibilities, and even mundane human products (such as sweat), into abstracted and generalized, quantified, objectified and materialized, emptied (socially necessary) time, i.e., into "value." The following are moments in the production of commodities: The entire work process itself which produces commodities, including the "inputs" in terms of means of production (tools, instruments, machinery and other equipment) that are directly used in the production of commodities; purchased as commodities, goods (raw materials) that are incorporated into a final product during the work process; the housing (plant, warehouse, office, etc.) employed in the production of commodities; the institutional forms (firms, corporations) that make up the socio-legal framework in which commodities are produced; and, the money on the basis of which these various components of the production process are purchased. Because they each and all are employed or engaged but only to the extent they are so utilized in the production processes in and through which capitalism as a system is created and reproduced, they are all capital. This is capital's real nature. Capital is value, i.e., congealed, abstract and general, quantitatively temporalized and objectified labor, as well as the process of its "valorization," i.e., the social relation of workers and capitalists that at once encompasses, on the one side, the practices in and through which abstraction is formed (viz., valorization process proper in which the capacity to labor is reduced and reappears as value embodied in commodities), and, on the other side, inseparable and only analytically distinct, the subordinate work process, its various moments and components (means of production, raw materials, etc., enumerated above) as well as its useful end products. The movement of capital (the entire cyclical process of its formation and development, its production and reproduction) constitutes society's intelligible structure; capital constitutes societys real "subject" Because each and every capitalist seeks to drive down production costs, the amount of socially necessary labor time embodied in each commodity is not, accordingly, static. Over time, it declines (as the mass of commodities produced increases). Because this decline also confronts each and every capitalist as an objective necessity, an event of a total societal production process utterly beyond her control, yet a product of each and every capitalist's efforts to reduce production and specifically labor costs We call this objective necessity the logic of capital. This logic creates capitalism as a system, as an interconnected, interlocking network of behaviors, practices, processes and institutions that incessantly undergoes change and development (expansion and quantitative enlargement). It is this change and development of capital (it is cyclical) that we call its movement Thus, each is compelled to produce more to compensate for declining prices. The all-around increase in production leads to an impasse, to a situation in which, considering their enormous mass, not all commodities available for purchase can find buyers. Colossal resources are poured in avoiding just such a crisis of overproduction. (Think, for example, of the massive amounts of profits that are diverted into advertising campaigns in order to create new needs to absorb the mass of potential commodities readily available with existing productive capacity.) But the real dangers of a crisis of overproduction are depression, social unrest and war as the last hundred and twenty-five years have demonstrated. Considered solely in terms of the movement and logic of capital, however, the crisis of overproduction is an integral phase of capitalist development: Two forms of crisis resolution stand out, the characteristic and ubiquitous underutilization of productive capacity during a depression results in massive deflation, a collapse of existing prices which effectively devalues enormous amounts of existing capital, and war, which produces an equally massive destruction of capital in its sensibly embodied forms (human life as potential capacity to labor, plant, equipment, raw materials, and commodities). Resolution of crisis may entail the bearers of these social relations (especially workers, cannon fodder, killed in fighting) are now different, but this destruction of achieved levels of objective substance permits the production process in which and through which the entire system of social relations we call capitalism is formed to renew itself, that is, to begin anew. What reemerges (and is synonymous with renewed expansion) is, of course, precisely the logic of capital (or, if you prefer, of accumulation), that is, the activity of competing capitalists out of which originates that compelling objective necessity that subordinates each and every individual capitalist. This suggests that not only is capitalism a system of social relations beyond the control of at least one group of bearers (capitalists) of these relations, it suggests that the very movement of capital that creates capitalism as a system is movement by way of wrenching contraction and expansion. Capitalism unfolds and develops through this cyclical process of rapid growth and retrenchment, expansion and contraction, boom and bust. In the systemic sense, contraction, then, crisis, is a product of overproduction, an inability of existing markets to absorb commodities as products of existing (productive) capacity, an inability to realize surplus value through exchange.

In all this, the capitalists, owners or employers who pursue the production of commodities, and the firms in which and through which this pursuit is conducted, behave in identical ways regardless of their personal thoughts, feelings and pronouncement: In all struggles against workers and in all socially significant events, capitalists behave as if they merely personified the abstract economic categories that describe the logic and movement of capital. They behave in this manner because they have fully internalized and assimilated this logic and it governs all their actions. It is for this reason that we speak of capitalists and firms as mere reflexes of its movement, as personifications of its logic, as capital.

Part II Science, Technology and Capital Nature, Bourgeois Science (The Modern Science of Nature) and Capital Even if societies of capital were able stave off the most disastrous consequences of ongoing climate change in a way that would permit them to maintain their achievements (e.g., prevent densely populated reserve industrial armies of labor, now a global surplus population, from being transformed into migrants and immigrants housed in enormous borderlands camps, capitalist polities from engaging in large-scale slave labor practices) at best improbable without establishment of revolutionary proletarian societal hegemony the destruction of biological diversity and pervasive ecological collapse, together the foundations of life on Earth, will not cease. This destruction and collapse start from, continues on the basis of and is developed by the movement of capital: It has its ground and is effected by the practical reduction of earthly nature to a raw materials sink for capitalist production. The modern science of nature is the theoretical framework which cognitively anticipates (projects) and mediates the technological process that actually achieve this reduction. This science is not without context, since it appears with the emergence of the bourgeoisie in history. What distinguishes the bourgeoisie as a class in history is the project of nature mastery through expansion of productive forces: It is important to recognize that reconstruction of the project of nature mastery as the comprehensive meaning of and hidden aim (i.e., its telos) animating modern science need not solely be undertaken from the standpoint of the perspective of the technological achievements of scientific practice. Rather, this project, one that necessarily presupposes bourgeois life-practices centered on money (and later capital) accumulation, can be read off the internal conceptual structure of science itself. Begin with early modern science. This beginning is not arbitrary. Early modern science was the intellectual moment in a political struggle for societal hegemony. Its proponents effected a confrontation with the hitherto reigning cultural form of nature theory, medieval (Aristotelian) natural philosophy. Unfolding in a political struggle against the old order, the bearers of early modern, scientific self-consciousness conducted this struggle with methods and concepts with which they formulated a new theory of nature. Characteristically, claims were made that its activity produced, first, a systematic body of knowledge based upon a description of reality as natural, the contents of which are to be public and communicable though always technically so, and hence transmittable and codifible; second, a systematic body of knowledge which is theoretical, i.e., not merely a compilation of rules or precepts, but deriving its prescriptions from general principles based upon a totality of verifiable facts; and, third, a body of knowledge which does not rely on authority, that is, demands rational explanation rooted in results that can be checked and confirmed by means of practical proof We note that the first two points characterize the self-understanding of science at its origins, and not as it appears on the basis of the most important tradition emerging from its immanent historical development, axiomatically with hypotheses that are deduced (not generated by inductive generalization) and verified by facts that are experimentally constructed, while the third point, concerning proof, does not refer us back to a form of practice, not to free creative activity as we understand it, but controlled experiment. Peripatetic accounts explained natural occurrences just as well as Galileo's, while Galileo engaged these gentlemen in experiments aimed at validation only when it suited him This much said, a descriptive, public and transmittable, and theoretical and rational science, sharply counterposed to, was a huge advance over speculative, esoteric and divinely inspired, dogmatic and religiously grounded Peripatetic natural philosophy and Scholastically based Church social doctrine. Galileo, Bacon, and others as theorists of early modern scinece pursued theoretical activity whose objective was to disclose the intelligible structure of reality itself... call it truth... These early scientists were quarrelsome, engaged in a quarrel with medieval, natural philosophy resting on Church dogma. Sometimes hidden, sometimes explicit in scientific accounts, always (or nearly so) in opposition to Aristotelian physics in the era of the decline of Castile (that of the rise in England of a Puritan bourgeoisie), was a view of the world, at once projected and operative in scientific thinking, that obliquely articulated the bourgeois view of man, community, and nature. Since the struggle between these two chief world systems was carried out discursively and competitively in this search for truth, social contents and the latent precategorial telos shaping and organizing scientific theory could not surface. Accordingly, early scientific theorists did not seek to rip aside the veil over and reveal the internal relation of the world vision embedded in the old natural philosophy and the organization of the western European and Mediterranean tributary social formations (namely, the formal homology of a closed, hierarchically ordered, unchanging cosmos and the divinely ordained, stable and eternally given world of lord, cleric,

and peasant); nor, to be sure, did they suggest that each might find the image of itself in the other, and that to the extent the former was proclaimed permanent, and unchanging, it effectively constituted an ideational veil thrown over, legitimizing, exploitative, oppressive tributary social relations. Functioning for the most part precognitively, there is in consciousness (in the broad sense) often a tacit sense of contradiction. Really it is just uneasiness. Here, early modern scientific thinkers did not expose this connection between the old natural philosophy and the old order because they in their whole beings were mobilized against a relativization of their own perspectives, for such a charge and accusation would have immediately compelled quite another recognition: Among these men, most of whom were theoretically penetrating and intellectually honest, it would have forced into consciousness realization that the world understood as an open, unbounded, and internally unstructured universe (whose underlying reality was constituted by perceptually inaccessible, internally unrelated, and indivisible particles, atoms) had the same formal shape as bourgeois society in the process of formation; that is, it reproduced theoretically the structure of a world of isolated, privatized and egoistic individuals confronting the dumb massive presence of society coming to be organized around exchange, where social relations were felt and lived very much on the order of a bellum omnium contra omnes. That realization... the social (and for the historical) relativity of such an insight... would have contradicted... this contradiction express and fully conscious... the principle of truth in the name of which struggle against Peripatetic physics and Church dogma was undertaken. (This principle of ahistorical truth and the blindness to precognitive motivating telos were and remain interlocked. Taken together, they secure the impossibility of thinking science at its origins as a social class project. This thinking is as powerfully operative today as it was four centuries ago) Mechanics was the study on which science at its origins was based. It was an inquiry concerned with bodies in motion, one that considered these bodies solely in their quantifiable, measurable aspect. In itself this was revolutionary, and, to be sure, such as study also had, and still does have, clear advantages over Peripatetic natural philosophy. Those benefits, though, only accrue from the utilitarian-technical perspective of nature mastery. Otherwise mechanics is meaningless. Galilean mechanics (similarly Newtons, as well as Einstein's relativity theorizations, and Bohr's and Heisenberg's quantum theory) starts from the abstraction of sensuous, perceptually given nature: Always understood from its instances, nature is regarded strictly in its formal bodily aspect, taken to be an aggregate totality of bodies in motion. Hence it is a priori quantifiable. This is crucial: Already resting on the abstraction from sensuous nature, the modern science of nature does not treat of nature as lived and experience (the apperceived totality of unitarily experienced perceptual, i.e., tangible, visible, audible, etc. phenomena) which always presents itself an undivided whole, a unity of qualitative and quantitative, emotive, valuative and aesthetic characteristics Today, the unrivaled hegemony of science as a cultural form shaping the common sense categories of everyday language notwithstanding, e.g., the linguistically embodied assumption that natural bodies are physical bodies, is the outcome of a lengthy historical development that really began to take hold as real domination in production begins to hold sway in society Guided by the aim of mastery (a comprehensive telos that methodologically governs all axiomatically grounded deduction, experiment, its assessment, etc.), the scientist proceeds on the basis of this initial abstraction: She selects data (phenomena) with a view to possible connections that may hold between certain quantitative properties of phenomena. There follows a series of formalizing and mathematizing operations. These additional abstractions are products of methodologically canalized subjective capacities of the scientist (her subjectivity). As a necessary consequence sensuous nature regarded quantitatively is further reduced to a series of formulae that express the "lawful regularity" of natural phenomena, a regularity constituted for the purposes of prediction. This methodological orientation decides what will and what will not pass as scientific knowledge Epistemologically, we are supposed to believe that scientific thinking has arrived at bodies in motion. In point of fact, it has constituted (i.e., constructed) them as such: It proceeds with experimental observation and description but on the basis of, i.e., starting from, a metaphysical projection of the world as a mathematizable assemblage of bodies in motion important determinants of which were a distinction between primary and secondary qualities, quantity and quality, and, more radically, reality and illusion. In point of fact, observation and description of sensuous nature itself is entirely irrelevant: This construction, call it bodies in motion or "matter," is product of both theoretically mediated laboratory conditions, of experiments whose objects exist nowhere in nature, and of scientific imaginings (so-called, these thought experiments have been crucial for science from Galileo down to Einstein and Heisenberg)

Taken together, these abstractions thereby warrant the absurd assertion of a (pseudo) objectivity, that god-like, effectively omnipresent and perspectiveless total view of a scientific object. They are, though, theoretically burdened constructions starting from an ontological projection. That is, prior to all methodologically grounded, allegedly strict observation and rigorous description is, we reiterate, the anticipation and projection of a fundamentally mathematical world-in-itself, that assemblage of bodies in motion calculable in advance which, having already ontologically weighted primary against secondary qualities, takes this world to be the really real. The world of nature (including man as natural) that is anticipated is thus one of homogenized bodies, events and processes, which lack qualitative meaning and determination. Nature, a calculable coherence of forces, now appears as, an aggregate totality of objects ready to be de-formed, de-structured and de-organized. It is only within the framework constituted by this projection (anticipation) that an event in nature can occur as such, i.e., become visible as an event, process or relation. The distinctions of primary and secondary qualities, etc., and, more fundamentally, the anticipatory ontological weighing of the former against the latter taken together constitute the scientific projection of the world of nature as object-like It is merely the other, theoretical or ideal side of the reality of societies of capital... Object-likeness is immediately apprehended and then thought, in reductionist and crude materialist terms at least since Descartes, as essentially and simply extension, as contentless, infinitely malleable "matter" subsisting in homogenous space, devoid of any internal logic, life or subjectivity Yet scientific concepts of the structure and organization of daily life remain abstractions, an ideological veil case over us, mystifying our activity as productive subjects But "matter" is not "real" in the ontologically primary sense assumed by the modern science of nature or, for that matter, by all sciences (biological, social, etc.) that, incorporating its methods, model themselves on it; rather, matter is the outcome and a product of scientific analysis and construction. All modern physical theory is analysis, conceptually decomposes its object, natural bodies. Analysis is constituted in the reflection on laboratory based, experimental conditions which, as we just indicated, do not exist in nature... My favorite example here is actually not done in physics (for obvious reasons), but is the testing of the physiological reflexes of decerebrate cats. You fucking kill, gratuitously murder, a cat for your experiment. (Actually it is done for you before it ever gets to your laboratory.) Wonderful. A cat without a brain is an abortion, what used to be called a monster of nature. It is not born alive, is not a pet, does not roam the streets or run feral, i.e., it does not exist in nature, but only in a laboratory... This is the basis on which understanding is arrived at and achieved in our example of the decerebrate cat, a reflex physiology that asserts a one-to-one correspondence between events of the external world and various places in the animals nervous system forms that understanding Once achieved, a whole can be reconstructed, this object can be reconstituted from the elemental, itself a construct, on up. Take up again the example described in the Introduction, above: Scientific understanding of a rock one might wish to quarry is reached only when it is conceptually dissolved into its chemical components, themselves understood in terms of their atomic structures and their interactions. Only then can we say we have understood what this rock is, an ore consisting in so much magnesium, aluminum, iron, etc., components which themselves have such and such atomic structures and are related (bonded) in such and such ways, all of which allows us to understand the object (rock), to grasp it in terms of a raw material (iron ore) to be used in commodity production (steel). Thus, scientific understanding is always attained abstractly, in the movement from a whole to the most elemental, itself a conceptual construct. Only then are these elemental constructs aggregated, a whole reconstructed. That whole is an abstract totality, a conceptual whole that is in a practical sense entirely homologous with its elementary, infinitely malleable material components: Precognitively, this understanding penetrates awareness at all levels of society permitting the objects science has constructed to function as ideal, manipulatable moments of bourgeois practices in accumulation and all the attendant activities, social relations and institutions those practices generate and integrate. Constructed by scientists, these laws of natural phenomena, and humanly natural events and relations in the society and history, permit the generation of predictions. And, it the prediction itself that requires extra-theoretical confirmation, validation beyond science, and that thereby secures scientific corroboration. Yes, if science is to be successful in its predictions, it must conceptually capture idealized, albeit fetishized aspects of reality itself (i.e., quantifiable thingly aspects). This much said, the usually broad recognition and confirmation that science as theory has achieved does not refer us back to its theoretical accomplishments, or to its axioms, hypotheses and laws of phenomena, but to experimental verification in scientific activity and, above all, to practical verification in the order of society: For it is in daily societal life that proof has become efficacious. It is public opinion and in the media

spectacle (and not in scientific journals and publications) that a socially generalized seeing, approval, and acclaim for the technological achievements exhibited in nature domination guarantees for science is reputation, its intellectual hegemony and its funding, and, thus, it is here that the theory is substantiated. There is solid reason for this, and that reason is constituted in the order of society: The confirmation of those laws demonstrates they are also social prescriptions for the re-structuring of object-like matter in the production of a world of commodities. If the relation of capital to nature is to exist at all, if the socio-historical world we capitalism as it has existed since the inauguration of real domination is to persist in being, then construction of that world requires the constitution of such laws: In the societal corroboration of prediction science and capital are reunified, the categorial telos of scientific activity (prediction) rejoins the original class (bourgeois), pre-categorial, and hidden telos of the mastery of nature Ideationally constructed in rigorous pursuit of scientific method, nature qua mathematized world is an anticipatory projection of a socio-historical lifeworld created and shaped in and through penetration of the value form into all institutions, relations and processes of society and earthly nature... this is the meaning of the conquest of nature... and their consequent subordination to the capitalist production of commodities for exchange. The cognitive construct we call matter, its sense and significance apprehended as contentless bodies subsisting in homogenous space, is the theoretical statement of the meaning and being of raw material as it appears in commodity production, infinitely malleable natural objects ripped from decontextualized surrounding nature. Science projects a nature that has lost its qualitative dimensionality and in this sense is a surveyable and manipulatable object that lacks qualitative determination (whether sensuous, aesthetic, productive, or otherwise): Nature exists as an abstraction, as an a priori quantifiable series of points determined exhaustively by positions given with objective time and extended space. This abstraction further exists without purpose, without internal logic governing its movement and moments (the bodies so-called), and without inherent or defining characteristics apart from those mathematically projected In the societally efficacious sense, this is the meaning and significance nature has now acquired At the hands of (capital's) science, nature, appearing in history at once as its ground and as a product of a development inseparable from its interaction with social development, has become aesthetically uglified matter, a product of domination (in the sense specified by entire development of this work), i.e, nature is what science and capital have made and remade it. This is nature as matter, as unprocessed resources basin for commodity production on a capitalist basis. Nature as science understands, though, is objectively necessary illusion: Starting from demystified daily experience, the nature of science can be best comprehended as an ideational product masquerading as real. The theoretical anticipation of this empirical-utilitarian, i.e., narrowly technical and technological, reduction of nature is modern science: It is as science that the conceptual framework for this reduction is constituted, and out of which production of a capitalist world can be undertaken, a world in which science is at home and without which it would be a stranger without a home (hence, theoretically barren), i.e., which constitutes the societal presuppositions of science's full development and without which it would be undevelopable Let us point out that the bourgeoisie is the first class in history for which nature has this sense, for which its relation to social groups, strata, or classes it hegemonizes is immediately and directly mediated by nature domination, for whom the theorization of this relation is not mythological or religious, but rational in the specifically capitalist sense of economically rational, and for whom this theorization itself has become an issue (as in the problem of climate change)... How, then, do we situate bourgeois science with a view to the despoliation of earthy nature, species extinction and climate change? Homogenization of humanly natural landscapes, destruction of biodiversity and climate change each and all have their grounding in the practical reduction of nature to raw materials for capitalist production The ensemble of activities and processes in and through which this reduction is carried out is modern technology The reduction is given with the aim that motivated the conceptual production of science, for this aim (telos) - its comprehensive meaning (nature domination), can only be grasped in terms of the social tasks of the bourgeois in history (i.e., in terms of the endless expansion of productivity). As conceptual mediation, science is this reduction, for, as indicated, it is as science that the conceptual framework for this reduction is produced. The thoroughgoing homology of the internal conceptual structure of science and the structure of the humanized nature in its ubiquitous, specifically capitalist form organized by the law of value now becomes visible:

The projection of nature as fundamentally mathematical world-in-itself, that is, an assemblage of bodies in motion calculable in advance is not only fully congruent and homologous in the structural sense with the sensible nature as it has been now been reconstructed through capitalist activity a world in which all of earthly being abiotic nature, a good deal of bacterial life, plant and animal life and humans too as natural elements is mere matter, organized and re-organized, existing only as extension, as contentless, infinitely malleable raw material in homogenous space, devoid of any internal logic, as vital nature is equally devoid of life, as humans devoid of subjectivity is raw material in the capitalist sense, in which products appear as a sum of de-structured, de-organized objects to be shaped, refined and passed on as raw materials in future commodity production, it is simultaneously and necessarily a world that is fully congruent and structurally homologous with the structure of value characterized by the same qualitatively indeterminate and undistinguished uniformity, a practical product of the reduction of concrete labor that, objectified and materialized, is completely homogenized, is in other words a generalized congealed substance measurable only in terms of units of quantitative time. Science is the theorization operative in the ensemble of capitalist practices reconstructing nature as well as in accumulation, and it is these practices, actually processes, with their operative theorization that is generating ecological collapse. Science in this sense is an anticipatory projection of a socio-historical world produced through the subjugation of society and surrounding nature to the production of commodities on the basis of the abstraction of concrete labor in waged work in capitalist labor processes. Capitalist Technology and Technologies of Capital The question of technology does not have the sense of this or that technique, industrial process and those devices, instruments and machinery that embody this technique or industrial process. (Such we call technologies of capital). Rather, what must be grasped is that which is characteristic of those techniques and processes taken together and as a whole (what we call capitals or capitalist technology), that is, the manner in which they mediate our relation to nature and the meaning this mediation and relation has for us. Technology is the ensemble of activities, fabricated things (in particular instruments), productive processes, and methods and procedures employed within those processes in which, through which and on the basis of which we as human beings form and negotiate our relation to nature, and it is one of the ways (today, the dominant way) we comprehend and explain to ourselves our place and role in the world (nature, and the universe). Modern technology and the modern science of nature are historically specific forms, one utilitarian-instrumentalist and the other deductively cognitive with experimental intent, of our relation to nature. If a new, free society (communism) is possible, then necessarily it will find practical and intellectual expressions in a new science and a novel technology, that are no longer separate, specialized knowledges and practices but are fully, consciously and freely integrated into daily life. In this regard, two points are germane. First, in seeking to uncover and explicate the relation of physical science to modern technology, we are not concerned with this or that technique embedded in this or that production process; rather, we are concerned with the comprehensive meaning and significance of this technology with a view to the role it plays in the entire spectrum of social relations that are at the heart of a specific human, historical-cultural form of life. Second, every culture in the sense of this determination has its characteristic ensemble of technics, its technology. Thus, unlike modern machine technology (or contemporary electronic or biotechnology) that unfolds on the basis of societies of capital, no technology need necessarily be instrumentalist and one-dimensional, that is, centered strictly on economically rational conditions for the material-productive reproduction of society. Such was the case in the social practices of daily life in communities and societies of the precapitalist past. In no known case was there a separate, (allegedly) autonomous sphere of technology. The deepest, underlying unity of science and technology is that unity formed at the level of the basic structure of the civilization that both are central to, namely, the logic of capital accumulation. As we have indicated above,1 forms of pre-modern technics were by and large organically grounded, either as a projection or extension of human organs (hand, arm, leg) or on the model of the motion of such an organ (or even animal motion). While instruments that are organically grounded continue to be utilized and to appear in the epoch of bourgeois civilization, the entire direction of development especially with regard to machine technology is toward the invention and production of instruments and technics that are non-organic or "artificial." For example, a gasoline1

Fifth Study, Part III, Capitalism and Technology, above.

powered automobile has no analogue in the human body or the natural world. This development makes the peculiar character of modern technology possible. It is a characteristic feature of the rationalization of life that proceeds apace, incessantly, under conditions of capitalist production. Technology, because it mediates our relation to nature, does not exist in relation to itself (or solely to humans) but itself is a relation to nature. Modern technology challenges nature. In this sense, it is all over again close kin to science which in its experiment poses a question to nature. Challenging nature is a setting upon an object (nature): This is a belligerency that presupposes and requires a specific type of humanity and society (i.e., aggressive, competitive egoistic individuality that arises out of daily life in societies of capital across the entire era of real domination); and, it is a belligerency that not merely transforms nature, but plies natural objects open, reconstitutes them through industrial processes, lays waste to all externalities involved in this anti-human process of unhumanly anti-natural construction, and reduces said natural objects to component forms in which they reappear as raw materials: Surrounding nature in its humanly shaped naturalness disappears as such, and reappears as raw material or matter, that is, it is transformed and prepared to function as raw material for commodity production in the world of capital. In setting upon nature, modern technology demands it provide the "energy" that is concealed within it, and that this energy be unlocked, extracted, transformed, stored up and eventually distributed (i.e., marketed): In reappearing as "matter," nature is at once "energy," literally, oil, electricity, or nuclear power that functions as a decisive commodity in capitals reproduction. This whole process constitutes a transformation, it is not a practice, in which habitat, ecological niches and entire ecosystems are destroyed, and species are extinguished: Product of its movement, the challenging and setting upon nature that is capitals technology is an objectively alien, unhumanly anti-natural societal process that wrests from nature, obliterating, its objective substance (i.e., its autonomy, self-ordering and self-mediating cohesion, and, consequently, otherness, denied, at any rate, to it by science), stated more prosaically, capitals technology robs earthly nature of, destroying, its internal diversity, in particular its biological diversity, it homogenizes distinctive landscapes and creates in their place agricultural, forestry and urban (metropolitan) monocultures, transforming natural settings and once humanly formed landscapes and prepares what can be extracted from them as matter or stuff for production in the world of capital. (Oil, coal and lumber are such components, raw materials. The polluted seas, stripped mined Earth and ravaged forest are all externalities The most basic component is energy as such. That exalted pinnacle of the new physics in its relativist formulation, the equation, e=mc2, perfectly summaries this whole movement, the essential feature of the relation described here.) Everywhere nature, natural objects and beings, now ripped open, reduced and so transformed, are commanded to be ready or immediately to hand. They are commanded and arranged, that is, produced and ordered, to stand by, to be merely present for further, future production and ordering, for the sake of achieving a maximum yield with a minimal expenditure: The meaning, significance and real being of nature is, to one side, wantonly destroyed residue, externalities, to the other, "matter" that is merely ready to hand or inventoried as unrefined material resources for commodity production. Phenomenally speaking, the entire societal practice is determined by the pursuit of profitability: The human-social logic that essentially governs modern technology, its import, function and development, is the logic of capital accumulation The romantic critique of technology fails to grasp this: Technology is neither autonomous nor out of control; or, it is both precisely to the extent that capital accumulation is an anti-human process without apparent agency just as long as conditions of capitalist production hold sway, as long as the real subject of society remains capital. Here, it is worth noting that curtailing the baneful human inputs producing climate warming is not a question of less technology or, for that matter, of more technology. Every human society in history has negotiated its relation to nature of which it is part through an ensemble of technics, a technology, it produces and masters. The question is how practically do we envision our relation to, or our metabolism, with nature: It should be clear here that it is not man humans are a part of nature, in nature, are nature, are humanly natural who is somehow an intruder in nature: The intruder, as it were, is the subject of that anti-human process without apparent agency, capital If we consider physical science and modern technology with a view to the manner in which each "relates" to nature, we note a decisive homology. Science projects nature as calculable assemblage of bodies in motion, a projection that permits prediction and control and implies the possibility of actual domination. Modern technology challenges nature and sets upon it in order to open it up, reduce or change it in its sensible form, and store this distillation or product. In so doing, modern technology, no longer engaged in mere mastery, realizes the domination implicit in physical science the crux of this relation is the experiment, especially on the vastly expanded social basis on which

it is conducted today1 In both cases, sensuous nature has disappeared. Precapitalist cultures taken together demonstrate the reality of concrete technologies vis--vis nature, cultures in which sensuous nature is inhabited, in which nature yields itself up to society's needs without the violence inherent in modern technology. "Matter" is an abstraction. The abstraction is crucial: It is of the essence of the process in and through which dominated nature is subjugated (viz., in and through which the abiotic world is despoiled, degraded and homogenized, in and through which microbiotic life resting on this inorganic foundation, interacting with and transforming it, and forming the crucial dimension of the biosphere, is undergoing rapid, severe contraction, and with it in and through which more developed life forms, including humanity itself, are impoverished, mutilated, and threatened with extinction). Thus, the abstraction itself we shall designate as at once regressive and repressive. The homology too is crucial: Not only are physical science and modern technology inseparable (with the being of each rooted in the practice of the other), the homology suggests they form a unitary structure. It reveals the essential affinity of these two cultural forms within bourgeois civilization, the distinguishing mark of which is repressive abstraction. That abstraction is grounded in the totality of capitalist work-processes themselves dialectically founding and founded on the bourgeois project of accumulation. Mediated, driven and encompassed by capital (value) accumulation, specifically modern technology is the form that our practical relation to nature takes, and as such is the dynamic through which the nature domination that has created capitalistically generated climate change unfolds and develops. The Solution is Not Acceleration and Intensification of Modern Scientific and Technological Development Here, we oppose ourselves to capitals project: Instead of endless development of productive forces driven by the logic of accumulation and entailing a permanent army of occupation (technologies of capital) where nature is the enemy, a technocratic, totalitarian dystopia, we take our stand with the possibility of constitution of the Gesamtarbeiter and with it destruction of the value form;2 beyond the order of capital, a concrete technology of alliance with nature, an ensemble of technics through which we resituate ourselves in the heart of nature: Living in nature, an end to the war with it, on this basis insight into its immanent intelligibility devolving in the undertaking to co-produce the forms of sensible nature while making that home in it. This perspective cannot be reached from a mere projection of existing technology, only from a radically novel departure in science and technology that has the revolutionary proletarian abolition of capital as its premise. A new science and technology cannot, though, start from merely from a theoretical development, they presuppose both the revolutionary overthrow of the order of capital and the elaboration of new emancipatory practices in daily life beginning with the suppression of work: Abolishing all in work that is socially unnecessary, undesirable and obscenely profligate. If whole industries would be shut down but shutdown by conscious decision of men and women in assemblies and councils then so much the better. It is of paramount importance to de-commodify, and following from this, de-reify, goods that we do produce. Thus, it will be necessary (as long as money or some form of exchange exists) to make as many goods as possible costless and lower others to the level of actual costs of production allowing goods to appear as simply useful, as pleasing to the eye, hand or ear, so that compulsion to personally accumulate and the allure of having and showing over time dissipates. On this basis, the surrounding world in its entirety would begin to appear different: Because sensuous nature as humanly formed at once appears as part of the landscapes that constitute the built environment and as the actual material-sensuous premise of human existence (as earthly nature), it too would appear different (negatively stated, it would not appear even indirectly as a forward arena for staging unprocessed resources and it would become increasingly difficult to construct our relation to it, i.e., to form and shape those technics that mediate our relation to it, in such terms).
Considered in the Conclusion to this entire work, above. Appearing in Marx, Gesamtarbeiter is a German language term that translates as collective worker. Defined by capitalist practice as a capacity to labor, as labor power, collective labor can no longer today even be conceived in narrowly national terms. The collective worker is global, it is not yet conscious of itself, and it tends to be what capital ceaselessly tries to make workers, namely, socially combined labor power put in motion by capital, producing solely for productions sake (i.e., for capital, to sustain accumulation), secured by capitalist organization and domination of the work processes. To this mechanically assembled abstraction, we take the Gesamtarbeiter as a world class of productively connected, waged concrete, that is, living and sentient human beings. For this, the Capital and the Gesamtarbeiter in the Second Interlude, above, and our pamphlet, The Working Class, World Capitalism and Crisis: A General Perspective.
1

A new science might or might not predict any natural processes or events with the same facility as contemporary science. The fundamental orientation of a new science would certainly, though, be qualitatively different: It would not have its underlying, precategorial goal in the domination of nature (which merely insures that endless expansion of productive forces): Arising from a new relation to nature such a science would include mastery but merely as a subordinate moment, and would be governed by the intent to protect and enhance life; this intent would be aimed at the liberation of natural potentialities which, suppressed, distorted or transformed by value relations, would enrich free, human societal arrangements. The internal conceptual organization of a new science would be novel, expressing that fundamental orientation: It is not possible that its laws would be the same, though in a genuinely free society it is unlikely we would speak about laws of nature in the first place. Thus, the basic objective of a new science would not to be to predict, which at any rate is aimed at domination and is linked to class exploitation and oppression: Prediction, like mastery, would as we said only at most be a subordinate feature. Nature itself would appear and be immediately understood differently, say, for example, as endless atemporal becoming, an infinitely productive, self-evolving and dynamic totality as opposed to a fundamentally mathematical assemblage of bodies in motion. Natural processes or events might be explained in entirely different ways, what we produce from nature, our homes, our venues of consumption, the sensuous-material structures in which we engage one another all might be designed, fabricated, manufactured with a view to what pleases the eye, what pleasurably engages the hand in touch, and with a view how those structures facilities human interaction and cooperation, and this basic objective would enter into and reshape the conceptual structure of science. Thus, the basic orientation would, to repeat, be to protect and improve life in the rational conviction that we depend on that life, the biosphere and earthly nature itself, in the form which it has evolved for the ease with we as humans in the anthropological sense reproduce ourselves and move about in the world. In all this, what is at stake here isour conscious entry into the geophysiology of Earth, the co-production of earthly nature, in other words, an endless, mutual formation that is achieved with nature and not against it, i.e., with earthly nature in its own incessant remaking (that is, the modification and transformation of the inorganic by life, especially microbiotic life, that is simultaneously shaped by abiotic nature): This notion, regardless of how vaguely articulated here, presupposes recognition that nature, here earthly nature, because it is visibly self-regulatory, has its own integrity, its own coherency of which we, as human, are part (and which we can contribute to and augment in our own self-expansive development), its own autonomy, its own presuppositions, which we can, as it were, enter into allowing us to remake, to jointly create, humanized nature anew, which in a non-Promethean, entirely unproductivist manner will augment natural evolution and development: What hangs in the balance here is a vision, sometimes tacit sometimes openly if fleetingly, appearing across millennia of human experience, creating the relation of a humanly natural being and a humanized nature in ways the assure our and its integrity, that improve, increase and intensify the well-being of both, for which a genuinely symbiotic and co-productive relationship with earthly nature generates a future, of course mediated by the past but unburdened by its dead weight, that instead emerges from a continuous practice of co-creation

Part III Geophysiology of Earthly Nature Remarks on the Reconstruction of the Geological Past The meaning of autonomy, cohesion and otherness with a view to earthly nature can be formulated thusly: The Earth as we immediately apprehend it, inclusive what we call the biosphere (life at Earths surface and the oceans, landmasses and atmosphere that support it, that shape it and are shaped by it), is a unitary phenomenon, its various partial moments (weather, oceans, atmosphere, abiogenic substances, organic life including man) are fully integrated and mutually dependent. It is self-regulating whole, a totality whose internal diversity (precisely that which capital without regard to climate change is destroying) provides it with its own coherence and guarantees the preservation of life on Earth. As the external envelope of Earth, the biosphere in particular orders the constant energy inflow from space (solar energy) on which it is dependent. The constitution of Earths moments, its partial systems, especially the biosphere, have qualitatively changed over geological time, meaning that life (the biota in its entirety) and the Earth abstractly understood as a geophysical reality have co-evolved, each inseparably from the other, hence in their co-evolution each transforming the other. While cosmologically the Earth is situated in a nature that can be understood physically, what is basic for the Earth itself as self-regulatory cannot be comprehended as a physical system: Fully mediated by life, especially prokaryotic life (bacteria), those moments or partial systems dynamically reorder and restructure themselves to maintain earthly natures equilibrium (expressed physically, inflow of solar heat equals its outflow over time). The equilibrium is achieved in a change of (raising or lowering) temperature at Earths surface. Subject to disruption and imbalances by way of cosmological perturbation, to determination by the Earth's own solar system situatedness (its eccentricity, obliquity and precession) and to capitalist development, climate change is the grand mediation that equilibrates disruptive change, and climate is the immediate expression of this constitution of earthly nature as the dialectical totality of integrated, endlessly interacting moments (in the language of the capitals science of cybernetics, coupled partial systems, e.g., oceansatmosphere) among which over geological time biospheric life is most important. To understand climate, and climate change, we must consider reconstructions of the Earths geophysiology on a geological timescale. While the Earth, at some 3.8 billion years of age (the period of its formation going back another 700 million years), is estimated to be nearly as old as the solar system, geological dating begins in evidentially based detail 540 million years ago with the emergence of truly complex, highly developed life forms (fish, insects, reptiles) in a phyletic eruption of new forms of eukaryotic (cellularly nucleated) life known as the Cambrian explosion. Within the entirety of this vast sweep of geological time down to present (in fact, going back another 160 million years into the preCambrian), we can designate two broad types or modes climate on Earth. These types are cool and warm, sometimes referred to as cold and dry and hot and wet, respectively. A simple determination of a type of climate can be offered, namely, the presence or absence of ice: A warm type or mode of climate is determined by the absence of ice, and a cool one by its presence. The latter can range to seasonable cold at high altitudes where ice covers the highlands associated with great mountain ranges as well as the higher reaches of mountains themselves, to the presence of an intense glaciation which, geographically, emanates from the poles covered with permanent ice caps. For, it is of the utmost importance to note, the latter, intense glaciation, has over the last billion years only occurred when there are landmasses very near or over the poles. It should be obvious that in recounting the geological history of the Earth over the simply enormous stretch of geological time of our reconstructions, there have been periods when landmasses were near or at the poles and periods when they were not. Since the late Precambrian, the temporal expanses of cool and glaciated climate have been highly limited in number and comparably short in duration (a duration measured in millions of years). Tectonic activity, because it is capable of shifting continental-sized landmasses, has played the largest role in making possible intense cold, especially glaciation: Antarctica split off from the ancient, gigantic continent known as Gondwana (encompassing present day Australia, Antarctica, South America, Africa and Asia Minor and Arabia) and arrived at it current locale over thirty million years ago. Before it reached what we identify as the southern pole it had already begun to glaciate in response to tectonic changes, to plate uplifting and volcanism. (It should be noted that the rate of uplifting is dependent on the amounts of the prior deposition of sediment that, having been subducted, has over geological time been vastly accelerated by the action of vascular plants since rock weathering is a biologically controlled chemical process as plants break up

rock as they root in the soil seeking out nutrition). The formation of the Southern Ocean, as an open waterway (with accompanying winds) sweeping round the Earth, isolated Antarctica by creating a partial atmospheric barrier against weather systems beyond this continent. Until recently, Antarctica has largely made its own climate, one very cold and dry, which, in turn, has helped cool an Earth that hitherto (prior to its separation and drift) was hot and wet, Gondwana largely a temperate rainforest. Some twenty million years ago, tectonic activity entered a period, still ongoing, of considerable diminution (after the continents as we know them today formed), lessening, for the geological time being, its determination in the formation of climate. (Continental drift has brought large landmasses near to the poles thus allowing the Earths orbital eccentricity to cyclically create ice ages.) These cooler, drier conditions were particularly noticeable in Africa. And, under these newly forming climatic conditions, species died off and new ones appeared. Among the latter group are hominid lines, including the larger brained hominids who appear to be our ancestors. Beginning about two and half million years ago, the dynamic climatic structure characterizing the most recent geological epoch stabilized, slowly taking on its present form beginning with the Pleistocene. So what does our geologically contemporary climatic structure look like? For an answer to this question we must consider astrophysical theory aimed at understanding the causation of recurrent ice ages (glaciation). Today, that understanding of the glaciation in the geological time frame we live in (it more or less slowly began fifteen million years ago but did not start taking its present form until 1.8 million years ago, which in geological time is that moment which designates the advent of the Pleistocene) has largely been resolved into three great cycles that drive the Earths climatic variability. (These three great cycles are sometimes called Milankovitch cycles.) The Earths orbit around the sun is elliptical completing a cycle roughly every 100,000 years. At its greatest as opposed to its smallest distance from the sun, a determination of the Earths eccentricity, there is a 20%-30% reduction in the amount of radiation (heat) that reaches the Earth. At that eccentricity, it is this relation (of sun to Earth) that has produced ice ages at more or less regular intervals over the last seven hundred millennia, and likely longer. The second cycle concerns the tilt of the Earth on its axis, its obliquity. Tilt determines where the most radiation from the sun will fall on the Earth. A full cycle occurs every 42,000 years. As the Earth revolves around the sun, tilt produces seasons. The last, shortest cycling, periods of 19,000 and 23,000 years, turns, so to speak, on the Earths wobble (called precession). Created by the magnetic mass distributed unevenly and off-center between the Earths inner core and mesosphere, wobble creates a shift on average every 21,700 years in its, the Earths, true (celestial) north (north determined along its axis in contradistinction from the geographical north pole) from Polaris to Vega. This shift affects seasonal intensity (e.g., hot summers, frigidly cold winters), and a half cycle is said to determine the average length of the warm periods between glaciations. In the case of all orbital cycles, the changes in radiation that reach the Earth are dramatically increased, amplified in the same cybernetic language of capital, by the amount present (more or less) of those gases, especially carbon dioxide, methane and water vapor (the first two are produced by plant and bacterial life), that trap solar radiation in the atmosphere. Involving the carbon cycle (which, in turn, revolves on the living presence of large tropic forests as carbon sinks and their relation to dynamically interacting atmosphere and oceans), this rapid and dramatic increase, amplification, is what brings about a geologically characteristic abrupt transition from cold to warm climates on Earth. We live in a cold, dry type of earthly climate, one characterized by glaciation: Within the cycle of this glaciation as it has unfolded beginning some 1.8 million years ago, each period of intense cold with extensive ice coverage especially in the Northern Hemisphere has been followed by a period of warming, one of much shorter duration - on average roughly 11,000 years called an interglacial. (This temporal determination excludes the abrupt warming period, say a couple thousand years, of transition from glacial to interglacial, and the far slower cooling period, say, as much as nine to ten thousand years, of transition from interglacial to glacial.) Humanity, as it exits and largely as we understand it today, beginning with sedentary agriculture, and the rise of the state and civilization, has appeared and developed in the current interglacial. In this regard and in terms of timescales, the historically contemporary warming moves in a direction opposite cyclical cooling (signs of which should be abundant) which is, absent capitalistically generated warming, what, in a geological timescale, would be expected. This current interglacial, transitions aside, stands out because it has already continued for an unusually long period, and with the ongoing warming, shows no signs of abating: Instead of growing ice sheets, we are witness their retreat.

Self-Regulatory Relations and Processes of Earthly Nature Earthly nature is formed as multi-layered and multi-ordered, interconnected totality of relations, processes and substances that in their interactions integrate the atmosphere in its thermal structure (troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere); oceans (warmer surface waters, cold, nutrient rich deep waters); and land masses with their specific features, extending downward to several kilometers of crust that are effectively compressed, dead, past or bygone biospheres, and include massive plates movements which are responsible for shifts in continental land masses, the silicate mantle, and the outer liquid iron core from which arises the magma that erupts in volcanoes and creates the uplift responsible for plate tectonic activity; and, the internal iron solid core (magnet mass), the shape, mass and the uneven, off-center distribution of which has created planetary wobble, hence determines orbital precession We refer to these processes and relations taken altogether as geophysiological as opposed to geophysical, not because the Earth is alive (as if it were some super organism) but because of the determinate role of life (again, the biota in its entirety) in its evolution The evolution of earthly life over geological time has entailed its increasing complexity (qualitatively so), as well as the creation and development of its moments, those various partial systems (and their increasing complexity) within the biosphere, that aspect of the whole of earthly nature that includes the lower reaches of the atmosphere, land surfaces, oceans, and the life forms that occupy them. These moments overlay and are integrated into the nitrogen, sulfur and, in particular, carbon cycles as they had evolved prior to the past two million millennia (i.e., over the past two billion years). They have been the relations and the processes through which the biosphere, the Earth in its selfregulatory aspect, controls climate in its specificity as it is determined in its generality by orbital forcings. Within the biosphere, cyanobacteria, algae and plant life in its entirety on land as well as in the oceans especially forests that cover the landmasses of the Earth as well as microorganisms and plant sea life (again, largely algae, all 15,000 species) play a special role: In photosynthesis, these forms of life absorbs radiant energy (sunlight), atmospheric carbon dioxide and water converting these into sugar (carbohydrates), i.e., nutrients (food), and oxygen (waste) which is released into the atmosphere. (As part of the same carbon cycle, animal life including humans releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in respiration.) Thus, plant life is a carbon reservoir (CO2), taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and chemically transforming it. In its death and decomposition as plant matter, a carbon form is chemically created anew, some of which is released back into the atmosphere but far more of which also sinks and forms a sink, i.e., carbon is buried and stored as methane (CH4), much like the carbon sequestered in limestone through the plant mediated process of rock weathering. The most important relations and processes that overlay and are integrated with the carbon cycle are the thermohaline circulation, the great rainforests, and ocean floor clathrates together with the methane frozen in Arctic permafrost. The thermohaline circulation is the global, deep ocean movement of seawater. In opposition to surface water currents driven by atmospheric winds, its motion is generated by geographic differences in the density of ocean water, density differences governed by temperature (thermal) and salinity (haline). In the North Atlantic this circulation transports warm, salty water from the tropics to the north: It acts as a vast conveyor of hot water from the Gulf, which, because it is heavier (a consequence of its greater salinity), drops toward the deep ocean floor in the area of Iceland, and in dropping thus pulls more water in behind it. There, during the winter, the water cools and releases heat to the atmosphere, warming the North Atlantic region (especially Britain and Scandinavia) by way of the prevailing winds. Because it is so saline, hence dense (as is all deep water), the newly formed deep water then flows very slowly south and rises to mid-depths around Antarctica, where it joins the Antarctic circumpolar current. The deep water around Antarctica flows northward into the Indian and Pacific Oceans, returns to the surface, and eventually flows back into the Atlantic. Just how slowly does deep dense water flow? Recirculating all the oceanic deep water, the entire circuit takes about 1,000 years to complete. The thermohaline circulation is responsible for upwelling and sinking regions, distribution of ocean ecological systems, and as ocean water is possessed of an obvious atmospheric relational component (land-sea temperature contrast, and interactions achieved through evaporation, precipitation, radiation and kinetic energy exchanges, the latter the effect of friction and winds), though this last feature largely characterizes ocean water as surface water not as deep water. The upwelling regions, like the sinking ones (such as the one between Iceland and Greenland), are particularly important: They bring nutrients that are found in oceans depths and rise with the cold water (as it is pushed up) to the surface. These nutrients feed the surface microorganisms and algae that absorb atmospheric

carbon dioxide. Our earlier discussion of the consequences of climate warming for the oceans, and the feedback responses changes in the oceans initiate, should recalled with a view to this relation. The great rainforests are largely tropical, to be found in South America, Central Africa and in the Malay and Indonesian archipelagos. (Far smaller ones can be found scattered in other parts of Southeast Asia, in Australia, the North American Pacific Northwest and Central America.) The role of forests in the carbon cycle is determined through their ability to store carbon and exchange it with the atmosphere. Plants absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, some of which is released through respiration or the decomposition as plant life dies, while the remainder is stored in biomass, necromass (i.e., fully decomposed vegetation) and the soil. Forests thereby act both as a reservoir (storing carbon) and a sink, absorbing (and transforming) carbon. (They are also a source of carbon, some of which is released during decomposition to the atmosphere in the form of methane.) Dense lowland forests specifically, and tropical forests generally are particularly important as a carbon store, because of their high biomass, containing on average 50% more carbon than temperate forests and as much as 20-50 times more carbon than cleared lands. The Amazons, Congo Basins and the Malay and Indonesian rainforests play a crucial role in climate processes through the exchange of water and energy with the atmosphere: Deforestation affects, changes, local climate, creating both a decline in rainfall and an increase in temperatures. These regions forests are also major driving forces of large-scale atmospheric circulations, and so land-use changes within each influence both regional and global weather patterns. Thus, deforestation within Amazonia, Central Africa and the Indonesian archipelago is beginning to issue in large-scale climate effects, changing temperatures, the distribution of rainfall and climate variability in other, distant parts of the world. Tropical rainforests have large-scale climatic effects, beginning with transpiration (and the Amazon, though not unique in this respect, does this in a qualitatively greater fashion): Plants (trees, especially those forming forests canopies) generate their own rainfall. So great is the water volume Amazonian tropic forest plant life gives off through its leaf structure that it forms clouds. These form in the east and, driven by the prevailing westward winds, are blown westward, where their moisture falls as rain, that, in turn, is repeatedly transpired. Atmospheric circulatory and convection processes over the Amazon, some rising from the very cloud formation just described, produce enormous thunderclouds, that, in turn, transfer or can transfer huge amounts of energy to higher altitudes. These air masses collide with those moving south from northern Canada, and when collisions of this sort occur, rain over the Midwest in the U.S. (as wheat and corn belts, precisely the region of greatest agricultural productivity) is the result. Already shrinking, the destruction of rainforest trees in the Brazilian Amazon is producing increase aridity over the American Midwest. The complete loss of the Amazonian rainforest is likely to extent deserts of the American Southwest northward and eastward Methane gas hydrates, called clathrates, are crystalline structures, solids that look like ice. They form as water molecules entrap smaller molecules in a cage like arrangement or structure. The methane in the gas hydrate is as a rule produced by the bacterial breakdown of organic matter in low oxygen environments. Hence, mediated by the action of earthly life they occur naturally and almost exclusively in the polar regions (high latitudes) and along the outer limits of the continental shelves (where there is sufficient decaying organic matter to generate methane), that is, in the permafrost and frozen peat bogs of the Arctic and on the ocean floors. It should come as no surprise that atmospheric methane levels have been lower during glacials than interglacials, and have, during the Pleistocene, been directly connected to warmings that have brought about the end of glacials within the overall ice age which leads straightaway to the (correct) suspicion that clathrate formation depends on thermal cold. Along the outer continental shelves, temperatures are close to freezing, and, of course, the Arctic ground is frozen. In fact, gas hydrates are stable at both low temperatures (permafrost) or high pressures or both (sea floors), and are, correspondingly, unstable, can and will at some point be dissociated (from their ice like structure releasing methane in gaseous form into the atmosphere) by climate warming. Three final points need to be made in this regard; first, taken together clathrates contain about 3,000 times as much methane as currently exists in the atmosphere; second, methane is in excess of 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide; and, third, it will take about a 3C (5.4F) rise to begin a natural process of dissociation especially in the Arctic, and a 6C (10.8F) rise to unleash a full scale release of clathrate-based, methane gas into the atmosphere. In this, the last regard, a release of this order is regularly mooted in the climate change science community as the immediate precipitating cause of the warming that inaugurated the Eocene, some 55 million years ago and the extinctions on land and in the oceans (some 40% of all sea organisms) associated with it.

The thermohaline circulation, the great rainforests, and methane gas hydrates, by no means the only, are by far and away the most important natural processes and forms that have become fully integrated with the carbon cycle over the past two million years (since beginning of a cooling of the outset of a renewal of ice ages on the Earth) There is, moreover, subject to the same climate change disruption, intensification or transformation, the Southern Oscillation, a see-saw in atmospheric pressure and rainfall recorded at stations across the Indo-Pacific region where increased (decreased) pressure in locations surrounding the Indian region (Cairo, Northwest India, Darwin, Mauritius, Southeast Australia and the Cape Colony) tend to be maintained by decreased (increased) pressure over the Pacific region (San Francisco, Tokyo, Honolulu, Samoa and western South America) and decreased (increased) rainfall over India and Java (including Australia). Trade winds movement westward generates a difference, differential gradient, between the low pressure warm pool in the western equatorial Pacific and the high pressure cold tongue in the east (western South America) that forces relatively cold, dry air westward where it is progressively heated and moistened over warmer water. The warm pool, with its atmospheric companion the Indo-Australian Convergence Zone (IACZ), is the most powerful of the earths regional heat engines (the other two being the Amazon Basin and Equatorial Africa), and sustains the largest organized system of deep convection, that is, the transfer of energy from ocean to atmosphere through condensation and release of the latent heat of water vapor. It is a kind of cloud factory where the warmest surface waters on Earth daily manufacture thousands of towering, cumulonimbus clouds. Warm pool movement is always accompanied by a vast canopy of tropical thunderstorms. The Southern Oscillation, a coupled ocean-atmospheric system, is response for the distribution of rainfall over large parts of southern Asia and, and even into central Africa, and, generated by reverse trade wind movements, for a massive build up warm oceans waters in the eastern Pacific (otherwise known as an el Nio) creating intense high pressure systems over North America Each of these important natural processes (thermohaline circulation, rainforests, methane hydrates) is subject to disruption. Take, for example, the thermohaline circulation. Warming induced melt of the Greenland glaciers add new fresh water to the North Atlantic at those points where deep water is formed. (This in opposition to seawater freezing in a climate with cold winters that concentrates salinity, increasing density, since only the water freezes.) Absent salt, the fresh water is far lighter. With a view to weight, the volume of this new, additional water changes the composition of the ocean at these critical points, that is, addition of enough fresh water-glacial melt will mean there is not sufficient heavy water to drop, thus shutting down the thermohaline circulation. (In perhaps a dozen places south of Greenland in the thermohaline circulatory upper branch, water dropping, funneling downward, can actually be seen. At a couple or three of these spots failures of water to drop, shutdowns, have been very recently been witnessed. The thermohaline circulation will start up again, but at a vastly different region of the oceans.) Significant capitalistically generated transformation of this or any of the other two great processes, resulting in their disruption by way of shutdown, destruction or release as the case may be, would initiate a cascade of events and further processes (involving all three great processes) the biospheric stabilization of which would create a new, hot and wet earthly climate. In each case, a disruption has the same root, climate warming: Under conditions of capitalist production, the huge development of humanity's objective substance (that which provides it with duration, if not permanence, in the ebb and flow of becoming and passing away within which humanity is situated, in other words, real societal wealth produced capitalistically, i.e., plant, equipment, industrial sites, infrastructure, urban landscapes and the mass of circulating commodities), taken together with the largely chemical byproducts of this development, are, in an ongoing sense, disrupting or reconfiguring (or both) those specific processes, relations and life forms by which the biosphere as self-regulating totality over geological time modified and transformed the general effects of Milankovitch cycles (orbital eccentricity, obliquity and precession), by which biospheric self-regulation has restricted the range beyond which cooling during glacial periods has not gone, has created warm interglacials, and in particular has distributed, as it were, specific, distinct climates across the face of the Earth. If unchecked, the current, continuing warming will end the two thousand millennia old ice age we live in It should be clearly noted that, at any rate, given the massive stacking of the atmosphere with carbon emissions the rapidity of climate change far offsets and overshadows the minute orbital changes that determine climate over tens of thousands of years: For several thousand years now, Earth orbital cycles should have indicated a cooling trend: The Earth is now closest to the sun in January which favors warm winters and cool summers in the Northern Hemisphere, which, in turn, generates growth of glaciers and ice caps in that hemisphere. The full impacr of this specific cyclical development may not be felt because Earths orbital eccentricity is small during this interglacial (Holocene). The third parameter, the Earths precession (tilt of spin axis relative to the plane of its orbit), is just beyond middling

significance: The minimal tilt will occur in roughly ten thousand years, and minimal tilt generates growth of polar ice sheets in both hemispheres. The warming trend is counter-cosmological, Milankovitch cycles have vastly eclipsed by the geological force that is capital The current warming will, inseparably distinct from the outcomes of capitalist recreation of earthly nature as a raw material basin at the beginning and a toxified wasteland at the end of the cycle of commodity production, precipitate a species extinction (one already underway) that will rival the greatest ones of Earths geological history, devastating biological diversity to such an extent that it will take 200,000 years to reach the barest modicum of recovery, one nonetheless entirely unsuited to adequately supporting human life. (In the evolutionary sense, this level of recovery would not have sustained specifically human life as it first emerged.) Three realities of the recent past captured in the names Verdun, Auschwitz and Hiroshima hint at the more immediate, ghastly future. But even as, unchecked, the current warming heightens the tendential drift of the movement of capital toward imperialist world war, and with its realization inauguration of autarchy-based, universal totalitarian politics characterized by nothing so much as death worlds based on forced labor, that warming will destroy humanity's demographic density (hundreds of millions and perhaps billions will die), bourgeois civilization, and the world capitalist market as the world sinks below the levels of objective substance as it existed at the origins of agriculture and stratified communities some 10,000 years ago. Origins of Life, Ancestral Bacteria, Biological Diversity To really grasp the force, reality and significance of climate change we must reach back to the origins of earthly life itself with a view to what is distinctive and characteristic about it. Since 1953 (the Miller-Urey experiment), we have known that in the presence of sunlight common molecular gases (methane, CH4, ammonia, NH3, molecular hydrogen, H2, and water vapor) found in a primitive planetary atmosphere can be synthesized by electrification, that is, by lightening strikes: Organic compounds will form, including amino acids (which, when molecularly bonded in long chains, form proteins). Organic compounds are, in textbook language, the building blocks of life Now the early Earth atmosphere, chemically, may not have had been primarily ammonia, methane, hydrogen, one that was concentrated and highly reactive. It may have been far more dilute and much less reactive (as geological evidence suggests), for example, predominately nitrogen and carbon dioxide based. To boot, macromolecules do not do well in highly energize environments (lighting, ultraviolet radiation) which ionize molecules, break down molecular bonds. At lifes origins, there need only have been sufficient carbon, water, energy present and there were many early Earths environments (e.g., at hydrothermal vents on the oceans floors) which chemically possessed these features At any rate, it is, of course, a long way from simple organic compounds to the complex arrangement that constitutes a living organism even in its most original, archaic form Shake oil with water and bubbles form, bubbles with insides separated from outsides. Something on this order occurred: In its most elementary form, when life on Earth first emerged some 3.5 billion years ago it consisted minimally in a cellular membrane, a greasy little lipid bag containing phosphates and nucleotides that, in metabolism, in a continuous chemical exchange of an inside with an outside, grew increasingly complex and capable of self-maintenance and, eventually with real consistency, self-reproduction This was the ancestral (proto) bacterium, and its origins was not an event that happened just once, but occurred simultaneously and sequentially countless times over in different earthly environments Energy would have been provided by sunlight, but what was important for this increasing complexity is synthesis (including the molecular syntheses of sugars, ATP, and proteins, even if unregulated): It is synthesis that defines life at all levels and orders from the most elementary (the simple prokaryote) to the most complex (man). In the Archean prokaryote cell, defined as non-nucleated, anaerobic cellular life (as non-oxygen respiring bacteria) that first identifiably appeared as life on Earth, this synthesis is metabolism (in its specific bacterial form), as the continuous transformation of inorganic molecules into organic ones within the cell itself and the elimination of molecu lar wastes expelled from the cell. In reconstructions of Earths atmosphere, we would note that the early atmosphere was not oxygen based, but likely rich in hydrogen (H2) and hydrates, say, hydrogen cyanide (HCN), ammonia (NH3) and methane (CH4). Over the course of an eon (about 2-5-1.5 billion years ago) cyanobacteria (blue green algae which are simultaneously anaerobic and aerobic) in the metabolic synthesis of inorganic molecules created the oxygen atmosphere as a waste product of that metabolism, an atmosphere that characterizes the world today and, because oxygen respiration is an essential necessity of life, is (with the exception of anaerobic bacteria) the foundation all life since. As much as 1.5 billion years old, that atmosphere is maintained today, as it has been over the past 400 million years, by synthesis,

first and foremost by bacteria, and then by the photosynthetic activity of plants (together with the same bacteria) in which carbon dioxide together with water and sunlight is molecularly transformed in plant metabolism producing oxygen, O2.. This metabolic process (production of oxygen) forms a decisive moment of the carbon cycle, and is integrated with other cycles (nitrogen, sulfur, etc.) that incessantly involve the bacterial transformation of inorganic into organic substances and vice versa in gaseous, solid and liquid forms and settings. Plants die, decompose through the work of bacteria, forming organic sediment, a land surface, which is compressed and compacted further forming layer upon layer of the upper layers of the Earths crust, effectively the landed aspect of bygone biospheres, that reappears and is utilized in synthetic human activity as hydrocarbon fossil fuel (coal, petroleum). Living symbiotically and interacting with trees roots, bacteria fix nitrogen (synthesize it in organic form) from the soil and bring mineral salts to these plants. Animals (in the taxonomic sense) produce methane as gaseous metabolic waste, and carbon dioxide in respiring, both atmospheric gases. Animals, mammals in the narrow sense, specifically cattle, horses, dogs, rats and mice, carry not fully digested plant debris in their guts, and, wherever they wander or travel in large groups (with humans), excrete these remnants as waste, which in turn seed soils and that in some cases in the historical past have transformed the entire flora of continents, not merely remaking visible landscape but transforming the nature and character of vegetatively biotic activity. Such was the case in New Zealand, with the Americas, etc., especially the North American continent in the centuries following the conquest. Life is in continuous interchange with itself and with biologically mediated inorganic nature, as one of lifes forms wastes is anothers nutrients. All life, not just humanity in forming socio-historical worlds, is ceaseless activity engaged in synthesis that makes and remakes surrounding nature of which it itself is part and in which it is formed. Once life appears, it engages in remaking its own inorganic conditions, which as such disappear. Life incessantly remakes those conditions that are themselves the product over thousands of millennia of the interaction of organic with inorganic earthly nature... With the exception of the most intensely tropic regions, visible nature did not appear the same 15,000 years ago as it does today, or as it did 250 years ago at the outset of capitalist development; it did not appear the same 150,000 years ago as it was 15,000 years ago; 1,500,000 years ago it did not appear the same as it did 150,000 years ago; and, 15,000,000 years ago it did not appear the same as it 1,500,000 years ago. In the early Cretaceous, just less than 150,000,000 years ago, the Earth was a mild ice house planet with snow and ice during the winter seasons and cool temperature forests covering the polar regions; the continents did not exist in their present locales and did not even exist in their current shapes (the British Isles did not exist, eastern North American north of the St. Lawrence River, Greenland and northwestern Eurasian landmass where contiguous, all of a piece; and Africa and South America had only begun to separate and only near the equator), the Pacific Ocean was perhaps three times its present size, and the Atlantic Ocean had not really begun to open yet, effectively it did not exist. (Just in excess of fifty million years earlier, a single continent, Pangea, formed Earths only landmass and it was very arid and hot as deserts covered the tropics of todays Amazon and Congo rainforests.) The primordial contours of Earth cannot be geologically and topologically reconstructed; when measured in geological terms, the face of the Earth has undergone incessant change; and while ongoing ecological collapse, species extinction and climate change can still be stemmed, there is no Earthly paradise, an Eden, to return to From it very origins, life is primarily and fundamentally autopoiesis, meaning, first, life literally makes itself and meaning, second, that life is independent, but an independence that is only formed on the basis of prior dependency. The very nature that is perceptually given in human experience is the outcome of thousands of millennia of nonDarwinian co-evolution, of mutually penetration, shaping and transformation, of life in its riotously diverse forms with what is abstractly characterized as geological nature: The geological and tectonic processes (uplift, subduction and plate spreading, volcanism) that form mountains, oceans and atmosphere are all mediated controlling the pace of occurrence, transformed or literally created by life through plant accelerated weathering of rock, the deposition of sediments, by bacteriological metabolic production of gases and maintenance of temperature and oceanic alkalinity. Unlike the other terrestrial planets in the solar systems (Mars and Venus) that are dead rocks, there are no purely geological processes on Earth For the matter, there are no other planets in the known universe like Earth... While bacterial communities are essential, and while for over three billion years of life on Earth bacteria (not humans) must be accorded primacy, it is not any specific form of life that shapes the geology of the Earth; rather, it is multiple, complex and differentiated life in its entirety that does: It is biological diversity that is crucial. For that diversity is at once the heart of the biosphere and its, lifes, own central presupposition as viable, self-sustaining life, and in this regard it is the presupposition of specifically human life

Beyond the meaning, the significance of the autonomy, cohesion and otherness of earthly nature can be formulated thusly: Because earthly nature is inescapably subject to cosmological and, product of its own interactions, seemingly purely geological disturbances, literally millions of different life forms, species, and billions of organisms, are requisite to maintain the necessary elasticity, responsiveness and even superfluity that functionally and interactively sustain the self-regulatory character of the biosphere in the face of instability and perturbation: Biodiversity sustains the biosphere, and beyond this earthly nature itself: It is mediately responsible for its coherence because, the greater the number of forms of life and species on Earth, the greater their integration and their mutually interdependence, the more stable and resilient is earthly nature as a whole, the more resistant it is to dis-ordering or disruption that attacks any of its moments, the more resistant biospheric life to disease that afflicts any specific form of life. The presupposition of homeostatic, biospheric nature (i.e., nature as a self-regulating totality capable of internally modifying and adjusting its moments to maintain stability and equilibrium in the face of external changes, e.g., increases in ultraviolet radiation) is sufficient internal diversity. This diversity includes, among other things and relations, a variety of different climatic regimes and zones, a multitude of regional landscapes, and, centrally, a huge assortment of different life forms. Thus, it is precisely this internal diversity that the movement of capital is obliterating. It is not just that life as a whole reaches into the Earths central dynamics, as it shapes them as they form it. Life on Earth reaches back to the most primordial conditions in nature to actively mediate its own cosmological presuppositions: In contemporary astrophysical theorizations, the sun is a class G star with an anticipated life of perhaps 10 billion years. Having reached roughly the halfway point of its existence, it burns far brighter than it did when the Earth first formed some 4.5 billion years ago. Today, its luminosity is 33%, 35% or 37% greater depending on whose calculations are used. Without qualitative development of the biosphere especially bacterial and plant life, its increasing complexity and growing integration with the chemical processes of the atmosphere and oceans through respiration and transpiration, and specifically absent temperature modified by life at Earths surfaces, the necessary and actual condition of which is biologically diverse life - this vastly increased light (solar radiation) would have long ago rendered the Earth unbearably hot, a metabolically intolerable setting for any aerobic beings and for human life in particular, a dead rock like Mars or Venus. A Note on the Absurdity of Viable Human Existence Off-Earth Confronting the rapacious plunder of nature and its cumulative consequences, there are those... including any number of revolutionaries so-called, largely those who grew up on Star Trek-Star Wars type pap and today are productivist... who believe we might escape, as it were, off-Earth, find a new planet in which the same shit can be begun anew. One here, for example, thinks of the Sigourney Weaver film, Aliens, with its deep space planet being made habitable by mechanical-technological production of a breathable atmosphere, when in point of fact scientifically knowledgeable organic intellectuals of capital, among others NASA scientists, fully recognize that before any terraforming is possible an uninhabited planet must, unlike Mars, have a strong enough magnetic field to deflect solar winds to prevent ablation, and then its surface must be inundated by a massive, viable living presence, that is, by a global bacterial, non-bacterial algae, fungi and plant presence such as on Earth. Such a presence which created Earths oxygen atmosphere as a waste product of its metabolic activity would presuppose a functioning hydrosphere and repetition of the evolutionary microbial colonization activity that occurred on Earth these earthly features are the outcome of roughly two billions years of geophysical interaction between early life and inorganic nature beginning with an already existing atmospheric presence of gaseous hydrogen, ammonia and methane, sulfides, formaldehyde, and so on. Even if all these gases were in place at once, generating a livable planet would take, even if that evolutionary colonization was compressed by several orders of magnitude, thousands of years, and then only base camps or colonies entirely dependent on Earth for food and supplies, could be established There is, however, no anatomical-physiological evidence to support the belief that human beings can reproduce themselves as enduring demographic groupings anywhere else than on Earth where the most minimal requirements, socially mediated, are not satisfied. (A sustainable population is opposed, for example, to another world colony dependent upon the larger populations of Earth and Earth-based resources.). The evidence indicates the opposite (and what to the contrary counts as evidence for technologically rendering a hostile planet habitable is completely

obfuscatory, exclusively filmic and novelistic science fiction). There is simply no grounds for believing that such a colony might someday be able to deploy an advanced technology currently beyond us in order to overcome these requirements: Demographically humanity cannot reproduce itself without sufficient water; without a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere for the ease with which we, humans, respire, an atmosphere that at the same time is thick enough to burn up common space debris (including smaller meteors) during entry and large enough to insure that it is not destroyed by large meteors or small planetoids; and, without a planet sized to a single gravity environment (i.e., humanity evolved and is anatomically and physiologically fitted for the ease with which we move about to a planet with the celestial mass of Earth) In all these respects, it is biologically diverse life that in its constant movement purifies and provides clean water and the very air we breath, that renews soils from which we grow the foods we consume, and that in death and decomposition provides the geologically compressed forms for fuels we burn to regulate temperature within the structures constituting our built environment... Earth is in the right location in our galaxy1 Most stars in galaxies are close to the center, but at the center stars and their orbiting planets are subject to innumerable (not thousands or millions, but over the life of the planet, trillions) of comet passes causing very high rates of bombardment. Moreover, intense radiation and frequent explosions of large stars would prevent the existence of life near galactic centers. Further, at the edges of galaxies, the nature of star light suggests that star systems are starved for metals (very low levels of silicon, iron, magnesium) and all the other requirements for planets and the building blocks of life Our sun is just the right size The life of large stars is too short for intelligent life to have developed. Further, they emit too much ultraviolet radiation. The habitable zone for our sun is about .95 to 1.15 times the distance of the Earth to the sun. For smaller stars that habitable zone is far closer to the sun because, for these planets (assuming they are not dead rocks) internally generate lower levels of energy. However, planets close to a sun risk the danger of solar flares. They, moreover, also tend to be tidally locked: One side always faces the sun and burns, while the other always faces away and freezes Jupiter is just the right kind of gigantic shadow planet It prevents Earth from getting bombarded by probably 1,000 times the number of comets and meteoroids that actually hit it, instead throwing them out into space. If Jupiters orbit were more elliptical, just ever so much, or if it were any larger, it would have the opposite effect and gravitationally destabilize Earths orbit and the asteroid belt. And, it might be noted, that all of the Jupiter-sized planets that have been observed so far in other solar systems have very eccentric orbits And the Earths moon is both the right size and at just the right distance from Earth The moon behaves like a gyroscope: It minimizes the changes in the tilt of Earths axis and steadies that tilt. What is the importance of this? First, it renders Milankovitch cycles small enough to maintain a relatively stable climate, and, second, it provides us with seasons. (Climatic variability producing seasonal and distinctive flora affects the geographical distribution of species, species isolation, and even on modified Darwinian assumptions is a crucial element in the evolution of life on the Earth.) Furthermore, the moons formation has provided the Earth a fast rotation rate that keeps day and night temperature swings from being too great. Finally, the Earths nearly circular orbit keeps it at just the right distance from the sun to maintain liquid water, a premise of life as it has evolved. To boot, there is no astrophysical evidence that within the lifetime of a single individual (even if todays average life span was doubled) that an off-Earth setting, a planet if not immediately habitable then not unalterably hostile, is within reach, within several light year travel. On relativistic assumptions, it might be recalled, that the mass of objects approaches infinity as the velocity of the object approaches light speed, that is, travel at light speeds is not possible (i.e., anti-gravitational drives, warp drives, etc., and their capacities for jumps to light speed are all fictional fantasies without real foundation in space-time).2

The points in this paragraph have been made by Michael Wysession, professor of geophysics at Washington University (St. Louis), in a 2008 lecture entitled History of Plate Movements during a discussion of the astronomical relation of internal Earth dynamics to the solar system and the galaxy. 2 It is speculatively conceivable that laboratory analyses of matter-antimatter interactions... on the assumption antimatter exists (there is no direct evidence) and where it is understood as negatively charged ordinary particles, a positron counterposed to an electron, an antiproton to a proton... might someday lead to the capacity to produce antimatter, which would form the only fuel that could generate the velocities requisite to interstellar travel, i.e., to close stars systems, those within a couple light years. This is at any rate a fantasy, product of productivist appetites, not to mention that it is far beyond science as it currently exists, and far, far beyond the order of capital.
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Those who, in the face of species extinction, climate change and the ongoing, mounting despoliation of Earth by capital, advocate abandoning Earth live in a dream As if there was a choice in this matter. The dream and the choice it seems to offer are born of fantasy fed by the visual media spectacle Instead this much is certain: Over the coming decades, our situation will, without the proletarian revolutionary abolition of capital, further deteriorate: Well witness a qualitative increase in regimentation and repression of domestic working populations to insure compliance with warming required, draconian restrictions on energy consumption; depopulation of coastal areas around the world, dislocation and forced relocation; creation of huge frontier zones and camps of displaced persons along national borders, refugees in the tens and perhaps hundreds of millions living in squalor without hope; drought and starvation, massive, unnecessary death; resource wars between states, forced population transfers, mass murders and genocides become mundane features of existence. A climate change catastrophe will, we stress, vastly diminish resource accessibility, interrupt and make production of agricultural foodstuffs and industrial raw materials less reliable, inconsistent and irregular, will qualitatively increase the pressures and stresses that the infrastructural basis of capitalism are subject to and which capitals very movement and its enlarged reproduction require, and will shrink the foundations in earthly nature for human activity in its current capitalist form to a point where it can no longer be sustained. As they unfold, all these problems, qualitative, entirely new and without precedent, will intensify inter-imperialist rivalries, tensions and struggle. If not ameliorated (it can no longer be prevented), climate change will generate its own denouncement that will reduce human populations, social development and objective substance (productive forces, urban landscapes, material and intellectual culture) below a level that made these developments possible and without any of the resources in nature on which they were originally based. The Situation Today During the entire 110,000 year humanity has existed Earths climate has never been as stable as it has been during the past 10,000 years. Moreover, there is no evidence that in the past 4 billion years it has ever undergone a runaway warming. But as a real possibility, this is the situation we confront today. While the process is far more complicated, carbon dioxide, water vapor and methane among other gases essentially trap solar radiation in the atmosphere producing what is commonly called a greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide, CO2, is chemically decisive. On a geological time scale, atmospheric CO2 has ranged from lows of 180-200 ppm during the major glaciations of the current ice age to highs of 280-300 ppm during warm interglacials. Today, atmospheric CO2 concentration stands nominally at 392 ppm, and formed as the output and waste of capitalist civilization, itself considered here as a historically formed phenomenon of geological significance, is rising in geological terms at an extraordinary and unprecedented rate with at this moment no end in sight. We estimate a tipping point, that point at which ice cap melting will qualitatively hasten and become irreversible, and at which gas hydrates (clathrates) might dissociate from their ice-like structures generating massive and deadly methane releases, as no higher than 500 ppm (and probably long before, say, at 460 ppm), reachable with at current levels of their production (not to mention accelerated ones) within three decades. Actually, not nominally, the situation is far, far worse. To grasp this merely requires we remind ourselves of three features that relate to this change: First, carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere about 100 years before breaking down. Second, in the language of capitals science of totality the atmosphere and oceans as coupled, partial systems, as integrated moments of earthly nature, constantly interact with one another particularly in terms of the carbon cycle. The oceans, as we know, are both the greatest reservoirs of heat on Earth and warm very slowly, meaning the full impact of existing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide have yet to be felt In point of fact, this is at the heart of the cognitive problem: Vast and deep, the oceans are slow to warm, but once they do, once it becomes noticeable to us, it will already be far too late as the heat they retain will be released for hundreds of years Right now, we are experiencing climate change that is a product of levels as they existed in roughly 1982, about 333 ppm. This means that if the coal-oil-auto economy were to grind to a complete halt today, at this moment here and now the full force of this change would first be felt decades into the future. Third, the entire conventional assessment of current levels of greenhouses gases is grossly inadequate: Today (May 2010), CO2 levels are as we said nominally at 392 ppm. There is something very unreal about these measurements, meaning that they do not measure

atmospheric CO2 levels as they are lived and experienced by almost all life forms, e.g., humans and the numerous domestic and feral life forms that attach themselves to humans, living in densely populated metropolitan regions. Thus, we stress their nominal character: Measurements for atmospheric CO2 levels are made at the U.S. states Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, 11,141 feet above sea level, that, due to the trade winds that blow over it, has some of the cleanest air on Earth. Noting that beginning from the irreality of 392 ppm, if methane, nitrous oxide and CFCs are factored in effectively those nominal levels are currently slightly in excess of 432 ppm A revolutionary transformation starts from the shutdown of all coal-fired power plants worldwide; from the end to all drilling for petroleum and its byproducts across the world; and from the non-market based rationing of existing stores of gasoline and other petroleum products. We similarly oppose, and the same revolutionary transformation would put an end to the construction of, massive dams cut out of riverine vistas and mountain gorges just to generate hydroelectric power and wind power as its exits today, as huge country landscapes of blade driven turbines, because these merely reproduce the situation of automated industry derived from the big factory (Fordist) era in today's conditions, and because at this point in the history of capitalism we oppose industrial gigantism as such. It is unnecessary, from the standpoint of a free society (communism), it is superfluous, and within the nature in which it operates it is vastly destructive (not to mention that this destruction continually deepens the linkages of itself to the exploitation of labor). We further oppose, and a revolutionary transformation will put an end to, nuclear power in all of its currents forms and usages. We oppose them not just because of the dangers they pose as exhibited by Chernobyl, but also, first, because they have immediate, direct military applications (as in enormously destructive weaponry) and, second, because, as colossally large operations requiring massive technical inputs and a scientific army of specialists, their operations are centralized, they are necessarily bureaucratic and they are inseparable from a gargantuan technological apparatus that exists only as technologies of capital, i.e., only as the medium of the exploitation of abstract labor in and through the plundering, degradation and ruin (if only geologically temporary) of earthly nature. A revolutionary transformation stand for and will entail worldwide decentralization, for novel technologies that are based on local control and that are constructed and connected through a universalizing knowledge and understanding of these novel technologies, primarily power derived from ocean waves where it is locally possible, from the radiant heat of the sun, from geothermal power where it locally makes sense and from the atomic nucleus in the form of what is called boron fusion, and for the reorientation of societal resources toward rapid development of these forms of power. Such a transformation stand for and will entail rebuilding the sensuous-material structures that make up the apartments, homes and neighborhoods in cities and towns not just with a view to their reconstruction as energy efficient but with a view to putting an end to suburbanization and the primacy of the automobile, truck and tractor trailer in social life, and thereby ending the enormous, extravagant consumption of resources this form of life entails. The necessity of all these measures should be and will become transparent...1
Questions arise. Most importantly, in regions of deprivation, of low levels of capitalist development and where it appears that the achieved standards of living are directly tied to massive industrial and technological elaboration, who would support such a program? If we can't offer a decent standard of living to every human being on Earth, decent at minimally achieved levels, who would support a revolutionary development? We can respond in part by exploring fusion technology and by exhibiting what boron fusion is and what distinguishes from the current destructive nuclear technologies of capital. This fusion would be the most elementary sort, that occurring on the model on the Earths sun where hydrogen nuclei fuse to form one helium nucleus (4He). Actually the energy we are speaking about it is derived from what is called boron fusion, symbolically represented as p + 11B 34He (and one carbon, 12C, and one beryllium, 12Be, atom), where the proton (p) is from a single hydrogen atom (1H). A device has been constructed. It has six sides (it can have more) each consisting in a circular magnet (the earliest models were a circular grid with copper wiring, no longer used, wrapped around it with a stainless steel shell covering the copper wire wrapped grid). The magnetic rings do not touch (this spacing makes it possible to reduce electron loss to the structure), but small joints on each side of the shells hold the structure together forming around an empty space, the interior. The magnets are all turned inward (say all six magnetic north poles are turned to the interior) so that the structure (called a polywell), sets up dynamic, repulsive electromagnetic fields in the interior. Inside, as repulsive, the magnetic fields create a comparably small (central) region where essentially no magnetic field exists. An electrical current pumps electrons into the polywell structure. The current, if high enough, permits formation of an electron cloud in the interior that behaves diamagnetically which is in part to say in a novel way that cannot be inferred from the individual behavior of electrons, i.e., as non-magnetic matter it develops new magnetic properties in response to the outside magnetic fields This formulation already presupposes a different understanding of matter starting at the atomic level, of matter possessed of its own productivity and negativity, of development in nature that entails its retheorization in terms of the emergence of novel structures and of integrative levels of natural being in which each new order or level establishing itself on the basis of what is more elementary evolves its own irreducible principles of organization, behavior and movement. Pressure on the magnetic fields which at first may appear to be solely a function of the density of the electron cloud is diamagnetically generated and
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There is in all, though, a further point, the concealed, mystifying and dynamic contradiction at the heart of fossil fuel consumption: If each gallon of petroleum (gasoline, diesel, etc.) and, by cubic volume, methane (natural gas) product multiplies human work manifold times, contains the energy equivalent of 40 man hours of work, it simultaneously masks the multiplication of resources consumed in its production. a simple loaf of white bread (with, no less, the nutritional value of styrofoam), beginning from the hydrocarbons deployed in wheat monocultural production, transporting the grain to a milling plant, milling it, reshipping it to an industrial bakery and baking it, then packaging it inclusive of materials, distributing the bread and advertising it, requires the energy of two men each working for a period of 40 man hours per week for two weeks Capital cannot reduce this consumption to levels that are congruent with existing resources, and it will not generate the technical innovations, revolutionizing itself, to open up a novel order of nature exploitation which, vastly less naturally burdensome, transcends the contradiction of fossil
forces the fields back cutting off those points at which electron loss, albeit already reduced, would otherwise occur. The electrons pushed into the polywell structure move in and out of the center rapidly, forming in that center a well (hence the name polywell). Ions are released into the structure. They move toward the center, and those (as positively charged) that are magnetically attracted to the well (it is a negatively charged formation) gain enormous speed, temperature, electron volts and energy, and as they fall into the well from different directions, at its center they collide, fuse and release energy. Energy can be produced from different particle relations: Deuterium + tritium (DT), deuterium + deuterium (DD), or boron + a proton (PBII). The DT collision is the easiest to achieve, but tritium is radioactive; the DD collision produces energy that heats the device, which could be transformed into steam (as a source of power). Both produce lots of radioactive neutrons. The PBII collision is the kinetically the most productive (and it is energy produced kinetically, not thermally), is the most difficult to fuse (i.e., requires the greatest velocity at impact) and, while the main reaction is not radioactive, has radioactive side reactions (x-rays). Almost all energy generated in the well comes out as charged particles, and it, that energy, can be drawn off in the form of electricity by decelerating the particles against an electric field. Yet the problem of radiation remains. Calculations have been made that place the radiation energy loss at 174% of fusion power, a huge loss in power. But boron itself with five protons does not require the same massive electron-electricity input to the polywell. The loss in energy output resulting form lower density ions and fuel dilution can be compensated, theoretically at least, by increasing the radius of the device, i.e., of the polywell, because it permits higher magnetic field strength and, of course, will contain more volume... The mention of radius is important. An efficacious polywell structure with 12 magnets would be about 6 meters in diameter, with a circular housing of say 8 meters, which with monitoring equipment and a small transformer station... it wouldn't be massive, the point is the polywell generation of power could be fed into the electrical grid at numerous points, transforming it, very soon eliminating the need for coal fired plants and massive hydroelectric generating facilities... projected into two dimensions, roughly 25 x25 meters, would make it two orders of magnitude smaller that the area, say 60,000 square meters, required by contemporary uranium core reactors with their cooling towers, electrical station and monitoring facilities producing the same power... Together an optimal ratio of hydrogen (proton) to boron atoms and a specific technical adjustment in the height of what is called the virtual anode in the well (the counteractive presence of boron as positively charged among negatively charged electrons, which in repelling each otherwise lose kinetic energy) appear to overcome the radiation energy loss reducing it to a manageable (if in our view still unacceptable) 5% of reactor power. This much said there is no radioactive waste material, it has no cooling tower, and does direct energy conversion at a rate approaching 85% efficiency (contemporary and fusion reactors achieve about 33% efficiency, with a theoretical limit at about 40%). See Thomas Ligon Polywell Interview (29 April 2010) with Matt Moyihan, where some of the problems of the polywell are also explored. A transcript is available in available in pdf format from moyihan.matthew@gmail.com. It can also be found at www.askmar.com/Bussard/Robert_Bussard.html. This will require a search of listings. (Robert Bussard, d. 2007, was the physicist who developed the theory and concept of the polywell, and worked with Ligon and others to produce it.) To unlock the energy of the fusion in this manner would be to forgo those forms of energy production (coal mining and oil drilling are the most outstanding examples) that are carving up the face of the Earth, that are heating up the atmosphere with CO2 emissions, that, in other words, are elements of a total societal project, the processes of capital accumulation, that recreate nature as a standing reserve of raw material. To forgo them already, in thought, requires a change of heart, abandonment of the compulsive practices of wrecking, destructive ordering and reordering merely for the sake of unending stockpiling to secure a being that is existentially insecure because absent a humanly natural home in earthly nature. Such a leap already on the horizon of existing science is, socially generalized, beyond capital. We once thought that this technology offered immediate, offensive military advantage. As the account above suggested, that is mistake. The basic issue is quite different: For highly statified capitals to unleash this technology is too risky, and not because of any fanciful, alleged threat of terrorist appropriation of weaponry based on it. (A practical design is ready for testing and is in the hands of the U.S. Department of War, Defense, where it languishes and will languish indefinitely): What is at issue is a significant, truly existential risk of creating generalized insight into the possibilities of the reorganization of social life on the foundations of a free, essentially inexhaustible, clean, potentially ecologically integral (i.e., non-destructive) source of energy. The possibility that all of the following could emerge into consciousness: The lived contradiction of life in death the senselessness of a life consumed in alienating labor for capital, rendering useless repressive apparatuses - the prospects of a genuine decentralization of social life, the possibility of seeing potentialities inherent in nature itself as an order with its own sensibility, autonomy and cohesiveness all of which would demand a new sensibility, a qualitatively different technical ensemble, a complete conceptual revolution in meaning and significance of knowledge for human existence, stirrings of a new science. The order of capital in its entirety is tacitly and precognitively attuned to this and is mobilized at any and all costs to prevent it, its preference is to pour resources into development of

fuel consumption. The necessity of all these measures, then, is transparent, and all these measures are merely a means to a life beyond capitalism.

technologies of social control to confront upsurges of social resistance in the face of the maelstrom of climate change.

Conclusion Origins of Man and Ice Ages If we examine the archeological reconstructions of the evolutionary development of humanity, we can note that anatomically modern man, someone we would perceptually recognize as a human being and technically known as Homo sapiens sapiens, first appeared about 110,000 years ago. (Homo sapiens sapiens is not simple redundancy: Based on a hierarchical scheme of the classification of organisms called a taxonomy, it signifies that humanity is both a species and its own genus.) By anatomically, we mean she was characterized not just in terms of a two legged creature who walks upright, but features such as (large) brain size, a specific type of jaw and dentition, a hand in which an opposable thumb is fully developed, and so on. You would recognize this being as a human, but if you engaged her in discussion with a relatively complex argument, you might find her slightly dull-witted. It was about 45,000 years ago, that the features that would make your discussion mutually intelligible appeared. These features included systematized, articulate speech (entailing language that is self-referential, meaning that concepts that do not make immediate reference to visible, tactile, audible, etc., things can be produced, expressed and understood). There are several other cognitive and existential features that underline this, her development and, though these features need not detain us here, we have explored them elsewhere (Nature, Capital, Communism) if you are interested. There is one more archeologically reconstructed date we would like just to mention: It is from about 10,000 years ago, that we can mark the origins of agriculture, the appearance of the first stratified societies based on fixed positions in a division of labor, and in its most rudimentary, undeveloped form, the state. Continue, if you would, by reviewing geological reconstructions of ice ages. Though the average annual temperature at the surface of the Earth had been cooling slightly over several million years prior to the date we are about to provide: About 1.8 million years ago the Earth entered an epoch called the Pleistocene and in a general way known as an ice age. What this means is that there is a year round ice cover over the poles and periodically, actually for long periods of time, the Earth undergoes a dramatic cooling in which that ice extends southward from the north pole into Siberia, European Russia, Europe (the last time it reached as far south as todays southern Germany) and over the northern half of North America, and it extends northward from the south pole over large parts of the Southern Ocean (that circles Antarctica), into Patagonia, even southern New Zealand and southeastern Australia. (The whole discussion must be stated this way because these same geological reconstructions tell us over the past 700 million years the continents have not always existed as we known them, have not existed in the same place as we find them now, and for the long stretches of geological time there has been no ice at the poles.) Starting no later than 700,000 years ago the ice age we are currently living in began to assume a recognizable pattern, a period of extensive ice coverage known as a glacial lasting roughly a 100,000 years followed by (a period of transition, but not always, lasting a couple thousand years and then) a warming lasting about 11,000 years known (in the strict sense) as an interglacial followed, always, by a lengthy period of transition leading to renewed glaciation. This shift from a glacial to an interglacial and vice versa is a genuine form of global climate change, though over the past 50 million years no such change has occurred in the radical manner we confront today, one that portends a rapid transformation ending the geologically current ice age and the shift from a cold, dry to a hot, wet climate. We can, then, conclude by relating these archeologically reconstructed dates to this geological reconstruction of ice ages. The Riss, the second last glacial, began to end about 128,000 years ago. Recall that anatomically modern man appeared roughly 110,000 years ago, that is, as the last interglacial was fully underway (and probably beginning to end). Note the Wrm, the last glacial, began to end about 16,000 years ago and bear in mind that all the human, social developments associated with what we call civilization (agriculture, class society and the state) begin to appear as the current interglacial, a warm and climatically settled period, was fully underway, some 10,000 years ago. Now those last 10,000 years have been, climatically speaking, extraordinarily stable (not, for example, subject to regular, sudden and devastating occurrences of extreme weather), the most stable of all the geological periods of Earth history that we have been able to reconstruct. It has been in this period, known as the Holocene, that all those contradictory developments, from the bane of human existence agriculture with its fixed positions in a social division of labor, stratification within the community, and the formation of the state as an organ of repression and popular regimentation to those most exalted human achievements a material abundance adequate to the nutritional requirements of healthy living and, with it, (long, long ago realized) adequate demographical density to maintain homo sapiens sapiens as a species on Earth, a (vastly overdeveloped) built environment to sustain human

life, in principle the technical wherewithal (itself in need of transformation) to provide living time to develop skills, aptitudes and practices of a high culture among masses of people have taken place. This contradictory development has proceeded largely on the basis of capitalist production, and on that basis by way of the rapacious plundering of nature: The domination of nature is inextricably linked to and inseparable from class exploitation and, complexly mediated (and secured and reproduced by the undisputed hegemony of capitalist civilization over all aspects of daily life) to various forms of oppression and bigotry which that exploitation grounds Now humanity has become a geological force, a force of nature, but humanity is torn and sundered by social division: Ruling classes intent only on accumulation and organized through capitalist states are wracked by nationalist rivalries and engaged in a fierce and intensifying struggle for markets and resources, a struggle played out across the world. Kyoto, Copenhagen, soon Cancun, the IPCC, their efforts to stem the most deleterious effects of climate change, are shams, circus performances and diversions. Only the working class and its revolutionary organization into councils can offer even the possibility of a global framework and a program to confront our situation. Only the return of the proletariat as a historical class, the revolutionary establishment of a worldwide network of federated councils, only councilar power so constituted and therewith the abolition of capital and its state, can avert a calamitous unprecedented, unimagined catastrophe that is now on the horizon. Only on these conditions can an indefinite extension of a warm interglacial, and its natural presuppositions in year round ice at the poles the geological basis on which humanity emerged from its nomadic existence, established a settled social life, and initiated a development that makes a general human emancipation possible be preserved. Yet there is power in nature that exceeds human mastery. Once fully underway, climate change is one such force, for proletarian revolution can come too late.