A commodity looks simple enough, says the pro-capitalist economist. Most such economists say a commodity is any object with a use value that somebody wants and is willing to pay for, and its value is determined by supply and demand. Nothing drives such a common sense economist more to distraction than reading Karl Marx who says a commodity is “a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” What can Marx mean? Economics is a science, even a mathematical science, what has it got to do with metaphysics and theology?

Take a wooden table, says Marx. It is just wood that human labor has turned into a table and taken to market. Wood + Labor = Table. Where is the mystery? When it gets to the market, the table finds itself in the company of the stool and the chair. All three have use values, are made of the same wood and may be in equal supply and equal demand — yet each has its own different price.

Why these different prices? Same wood, same demand, same supply. They are all the products of human labor. What is the difference among them that justifies different prices? The prices are reflections of the underlying values of the products. Could the values be different? What does Marx say determines value? It is the different quantities of socially necessary labor time embodied in the commodities.

The table, the stool and the chair are three “things” that are related to each other as the embodiment of the social relations and necessary labor of human beings that created them. Human social relations have been objectified as the relations between non human things. The chair may be more valuable than the table, but the reason is now hidden away from the perception of people.

“A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing,” Marx writes, “simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relations of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour.”

To find an analogy Marx tells us we have to turn to the “mist-enveloped regions of the religious world.” In that world, the inventions of the human mind take on an independent existence and humans begin to interact with their own fantastical creations as if they were really independently existing objective things. This is similar to the Fetishism of Commodities. All the commodities we see about us are part of the sum total of all the socially produced objects and services created by human labor in our society. People all over the world are making things which are traded, shipped, sold, resold, etc. But their use values cannot be realized until they are sold — i.e., exchanged, especially exchanged for money. But why are some more expensive than others? Why do some have more value than others? Supply and demand has a role to play in setting price, but it merely causes price to fluctuate around value.

The fact that we know that value results from the socially necessary labor time spent in making commodities “by no means,” Marx says, “dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves.”

This is because we are so used to how the market operates under capitalism, how prices fluctuate, commodities rise and fall in prices, working people, as consumers, naturally just think the values (which we usually don’t differentiate from prices) are products of the natural world, that is, are functions of the things for sale or barter themselves. This is why “supply and demand” seems to be the basis of the value of things. We often fail to see it’s all really the result of the socially necessary labor time expended in the labor process that is the determining factor in value

This confusion of price and value leads Marx to say, “The determination of the magnitude of value by labor time therefore is a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities.”

We are reminded that to understand the real nature of a social formation we have to reverse our knowledge of its historical development. We begin with the full-fledged capitalist system and try to figure why the prices of things are the way they are. Looking at the mature system, we don’t really see its primitive origins. In the same way many religious people looking at a human being fail to see an ape in the historical background.

Marx continues: “When I state that coats and boots stand in a relation to linen, because it is the universal incarnation of abstract human labor, the absurdity of the statement is self evident.” This has been remarked upon both by the most astute of thinkers (Bertrand Russell) and the most pedestrian (Ayn Rand).

The problem is that pro-capitalist ideologues look upon an historically transient economic formation, its own, as an eternally existing social order. Of course prices are set by supply and demand. What is that crazy Marx talking about? As the economist Brad Delong said, he had never known anyone who thought that way.

Well, let’s look at something other than the full-blown capitalist system at work. Marx says, “The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labor as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.”

To help explain, Marx gives the example of Robinson Crusoe. He chooses the fictional character Robinson because he was a popular example used in the texts of the day. Robinson has to make everything for himself, obtain his own food, and provide his own shelter. Obviously, the things that are most important for his survival are those he expends most of his labor time upon and are consequently the most valuable to him.

Marx then says we should consider a community of free people working together cooperatively to make all things necessary for their society. Whereas Robinson was just making use of values for himself, in this community a social product is being created. The people have to set aside part of the product for future production, but the rest they can consume. How would they divide it in a fair manner? They would divide the product in proportion to the labor time each individual had contributed to the joint production of the social product.

This is how barter went on in the Middle Ages. Peasants knew precisely how much labor time was involved in making cheese, for example, and in making a pair of shoes. If it took twice as long to make a pound cheese than a pair of shoes, no one was going to trade more than a half pound of cheese for his shoes. It is only in the complicated processes of commodity production, especially in capitalism, that the Fetishism of Commodities begins to manifest itself and the true nature of the source of value is lost.

The loss of knowledge about value produces generally a confused consciousness in our world. Our alienation from our own social product, the effects of commodity fetishism, and the continuing influence of religion all work together to keep us confused and off guard. But seeing what our condition is with respect to such mental blights also tells how far along the road to liberation we are and how far we have to go (quite a distance I fear).

The world is reflected in these distorted forms of consciousness. “The religious world,” Marx tells us, “is but the reflex of the real world.” And, for our capitalist society where all human relations, and relations of humans with the the things they create, are reducible to commodification based on the value of “homogeneous human labor,” the best form of religion is Christianity. (And since Catholicism represents a pre-bourgeois view of human nature more suitable to feudalism, at least in a Western or European framework, it is the Protestant form that is more congruent with capitalist conceptions.)

Why is this? Marx says it is because the idea of “abstract man” is the basis of the the religious outlook of these systems. A religion based on an abstract view of “human nature” is just the ticket for an economic system that capitalist ideology says is also based on “human nature.” The religion reinforces the basic presuppositions of the capitalist view of abstract humanity.

As long as humans are alienated and confused about how capitalism works and are mystified by their relation to the objects of their labor they will never be free, or free from the spell of religion, according to Marx. “The religious reflex of the real world,” he writes, can only vanish “when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature.”

The next two sentences from Marx are extremely important as they explain, in very general terms, the failure of the Russian Revolution and the downfall of the socialist world system. The first sentence served as the basic idea for the Bolsheviks many years after it was written: “The life processes of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan.”

This is certainly what was attempted — first by war communism, then the NEP and then by the five year plans, forced collectivization and industrialization. But why the failure? Where were the “freely associated” people?

To pull off this great transformation, the goal of communism, Marx wrote “demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.”

In other words, the seizure of power was premature. The material ground-work had been insufficiently developed. If Lenin represented the negation of the Czarist regime, Gorbachev and Yeltsin represented the negation of the negation — brought about by the failure of that long and painful process of properly developing production by freely associated people. For all its efforts, the socialist world still belonged to that world in which the processes of production had the mastery over human beings and not the other way around. So we must still put up with the Fetishism of Commodities for a while longer.

The present crisis gives us an opportunity to think about the Fetishism of Commodities as it applies to the real world. General Motors is about to be 70 percent owned by the US government, and the UAW will have a stake of about 17.5 percent. This leaves 12.5 percent in the hands of the capitalists. The commodities that the workers make (vehicles) don’t have a life of their own. Their value is determined by the socially necessary labor time it takes workers to make them. They are extensions of the being of the working people rather than capitalists who have proved themselves totally incompetent.

The working people of this country far out number monopoly capitalists — both industrial and financial. The UAW and the AFL-CIO as well other unions should demand that the government represent the interests of the working class majority. Ideally, the 87.5 percent joint government-worker control of GM would not be used to return control to private interests, but to rationalize the auto industry by means of worker control, eliminate the capitalists and the Fetishism of Commodities that keeps people thinking private interests have a role to play in production.

Such actions might lay the ground work for future nationalizations of basic and vital industries, and, by extension, a more socially planned and democratically determined distribution of the benefits of our labor.

First, both movements were made up of oppressed poor people from the lower ranks of society. Christianity was a religion of slaves and people without rights subjugated by the state and very similar to the types of poor oppressed working people that founded the earliest socialist and worker’s organizations in modern times.

Second, both movements held out the hope of salvation and liberation from tyranny and oppression: one in the world to come, the other in this world.

Third, both movements were (and in some places still are) attacked by the powers that be and were discriminated against, their members killed or imprisoned, despised, and treated as enemies of the status quo.

Fourth, despite fierce persecution both movements grew and became more powerful. After three hundred years of struggle Christians took control of the Roman Empire and became a world religion. The worker’s movement is still struggling. After its first modern revolutionary appearance as a fully self conscious movement (1848) it achieved a major impetus in the later part of the nineteenth century with the growth of the First and Second Internationals, and the German Social Democratic movement. It too is now a world wide movement with Socialist, Social Democratic and Communist parties spread around the world. [The rise and fall of the USSR was a bump in the road the consequences of which have yet to be determined.]

The Book of Acts reveals that the early Christians were primitive communists sharing their goods in common and leading a collective life style. This original form of Christianity was wiped out when the Roman Empire under Constantine imposed Christianity as the official religion of the state and set up the Catholic Church in order to make sure that the religious teachings of Jesus and the early followers of his movement would be perverted to protect the interests of the wealthy and the power of the state.

With few exceptions, all forms of modern day Christianity are descended from this faux version, based on a mixture of Jewish religious elements and the practices of Greco-Roman paganism, and only the modern working class and progressive movements (basically secular) carry on in the spirit of egalitarianism and socialism of the founder of Christianity.

Engels points out that there were many attempts in history (especially from the Middle Ages up to modern times) to reestablish the original communistic Christianity of Jesus and his early followers.

These attempts manifested themselves as peasant uprisings through the middle ages which tried to overthrow feudal oppression and create a world based on the teaching of Jesus and his Apostles.

These movements failed giving rise to the state sanctioned Christianity of modern times. Engels mentions some of these movements– i.e., the Bohemian Taborites led by Jan Zizka (”of glorious memory”) and the German Peasant War. These movements are now represented, Engels points out, by the working men communists since the 1830s.

Engels reveals that misleadership is also a problem in these early movements (and still today I would add) due to the low levels of education found amongst the poor and oppressed. He quotes a contemporary witness, Lucian of Samosata (”the Voltaire of classic antiquity”). The Christians “despise all material goods without distinction and own them in common– doctrines which they have accepted in good faith, without demonstration or proof. And when a skillful impostor who knows how to make clever use of circumstances comes to them he can manage to get rich in a short time and laugh up his sleeve over these simpletons.” The Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwell types have been around for a long time. I am sure readers can add a long list of names.

Part Two

Engels views on early Christianity were formed from his reading of what he considered “the only scientific basis” for such study, namely the new critical works by German scholars of religion.

First were the works of the Tubingen School, including David Strauss (The Life of Jesus). This school has shown that 1) the Gospels are late writings based on now lost original sources from the time of Jesus and his followers; 2) only four of Paul’s letters are by him; 3) all miracles must be left out of account if you want a scientific view; 4) all contradictory presentations of the same events must also be rejected. This school then wants to preserve what it can of the history of early Christianity. By the way, this is essentially what Thomas Jefferson tried to do when he made his own version of the New Testament.

A second school was based on the writings of Bruno Bauer. What Bauer did was to show that Christianity would have remained a Jewish sect if it had not, in the years after the death of its founder, mutated by contact with Greco-Roman paganism, into a new religion capable of becoming a world wide force. Bauer showed that Christianity, as we know it, did not come into the Roman world from the outside (”from Judea”) but that it was “that world’s own product.” Christianity owes as much to Zeus as to Yahweh.

Engels maintains that The Book of Revelations is the only book in the New Testament that can be properly dated by means of its internal evidence. It can be dated to around 67-68 AD since the famous number 666, as the mark of the beast or the Antichrist, represents the name of the Emperor Nero according to the rules of numerology. Nero was overthrown in 68. This book, Engels says, is the best source of the views of the early Christians since it is much earlier than any of the Gospels, and may actually have been the work the apostle John (which the Gospel and letters bearing his name were not).

In this book we will not find any of the views that characterize official Christianity as we have it from the time of the Emperor Constantine to the present day. It is purely a Jewish phenomenon in Revelations. There is no trinity as God has seven spirits (so the Holy Ghost is impossible Engels remarks). Jesus Christ is not God but his son, he is not even equal in status to his father. Nevertheless he has pretty high status, his followers are called his “slaves” by John. Jesus is “an emanation of God, existing from all eternity but subordinate to God” just as the seven spirits are. Moses is more or less “on an equal footing” with Jesus in the eyes of God. There is no mention of the later belief in original sin. John still thought of himself as a Jew, there is no idea at this time of “Christianity” as a new religion.

In this period there were many end of times revelations in circulation both in the Semitic and in the Greco-Roman world. They all proclaimed that God was (or the Gods were) pissed off at humanity and had to be appeased by sacrifices. John’s revelation was unique because it proclaimed “by one great voluntary sacrifice of a mediator the sins of all times and all men were atoned for once and for all– in respect of the faithful.”

Since all peoples and races could be saved this is what, according to Engels, “enabled Christianity to develop into a universal religion.” [Just as the concept of the workers of the world uniting to break their chains and build a world wide communist future makes Marxism-Leninism a universal philosophy.]

In Heaven before the throne of God are 144,000 Jews (12,000 from each tribe). In the second rank of the saved are the non Jewish converts to John’s sect. Engels points out that neither the “dogma nor the morals” of later Christianity are to be found in this earliest of Christian expressions.

Some Muslims would presumably not like this Heaven, not only are there no (female) virgins in it, there are no women whatsoever. In fact, the 144,000 Jews have never been “defiled” by contact with women! This is a men’s only club.

Engels says that the book shows a spirit of “struggle”, of having to fight against the entire world and a willingness to do so. He says the Christians of today lack that spirit but that it survives in the working class movement. We must remember he was writing this in 1894.

There were other sects of Christianity springing up at this time too. John’s sect eventually died out and the Christianity that won out was an amalgam of different groups who finally came together around the Council of Nicaea (325 AD). Those who did not sign on were themselves persecuted out of existence by the new Christian state.

We can see the analogy to the early sects of socialists and communists, says Engels. We can also see what happened after the Russian Revolution (Leninists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, Bukharinites, Maoists, etc., etc.). Here in the US today we have the CPUSA, the SWP, Worker’s World, Revolutionary CP, Socialist Party, Sparticists, and etc., etc.).

Engels thought that sectarianism was a thing of the past in the Socialist movement because the movement had matured and outgrown it. This, we now know, was a temporary state of affairs at the end of the 19th Century with the consolidation of the German SPD. The wide spread sectarianism of today suggests the worker’s movement is still in its infancy.

Engels says this sectarianism is due to the confusion and backwardness of the thinking of the masses and the preponderate role that leaders play due to this backwardness. The Russian masses of 1917 and the Chinese of 1949 were a far different base than the German working class of the 1890s.

“This confusion,” Engels writes,”is to be seen in the formation of numerous sects which fight against each other with at least the same zeal as against the common external enemy [China vs USSR, Stalin and Trotsky, Stalin and Tito, Vietnam vs China border war, Albania vs China and USSR. ad nauseam]. So it was with early Christianity, so it was in the beginning of the socialist movement [and still is, peace Engels!], no matter how much that worried the well-meaning worthies who preached unity where no unity was possible.”

Finally, for those fans of the 60s sexual revolution, Engels says that many of the sects of early Christianity took the opposite view of John and actually promoted sexual freedom and free love as part of the new dispensation. They lost out. Engels says this sexual liberation was also found in the early socialist movement. He would not, I think, have approved of the excessive prudery of the Soviets.

Part Three

“Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number IS Six hundred threescore AND six.”– Revelation 13:18

In the last part of his essay Engels explains that the purpose of the Book of Revelations (by John of Patmos) was to communicate its religious vision to the seven churches of Asia Minor and to the larger sect of Jewish Christians that they represented.

At this time, circa 69 AD, the entire Mediterranean world much of the of Near East and Western Europe were under the control of the Roman Empire. This was a multicultural empire made of hundreds of tribes, groups, cities and peoples. Within the empire was a vast underclass of workers, freedmen, slaves and peasants whose exploited labor was lived off of by a ruling class of landed aristocrats and merchants. In 69 AD the empire was in essence a military dictatorship controlled by the army and led by the Emperor (from the Latin word for “general”– imperator).

At this time there were peoples but no nations in our sense of the word. “Nations became possible,” Engels says, “only through the downfall of Roman world domination.” The effects of which are still being felt in the Middle East and parts of Europe, especially eastern Europe.

For the exploited masses of the Empire it was basically impossible to resist the military power of Rome. There were uprisings and slave revolts but they were always put down by the legions. This was the background for what became a great revolutionary movement of the poor and the exploited, a movement that became Christianity. The purpose of the movement was to escape from persecution, enslavement and exploitation.
A solution was offered. “But” Engels remarks, “not in this world.”

Another feature of the work is that it is a symbolical representation of contemporary first century politics and John thinks that Jesus’s second coming is near at hand. Jesus tells John, “Behold, I come quickly” three times (22:7, 22:12, 22:20). His failure to show up by now doesn’t seem to pose a problem for Christians.

As far as the later Christian religion of love is concerned, Engels reports that you won’t find it in Revelation, at least as it regards the enemies of the Christians. There is no cheek turning going on here: it’s all fire and brimstone for the foes of Jesus. Engels says “undiluted revenge is preached.” God is even going to completely blot out Rome from the face of the earth. He changed his mind evidently as it is still a popular tourist destination and the pope has even set up shop there.

As was pointed out earlier the God of John is Yahweh, there is no Trinity, it is He, not Christ, who will judge mankind and they will judged according to their works (no justification by faith here, sorry Luther), no doctrine of original sin, no baptism, and no Eucharist or Mass. Almost everyone of these later developments came from Roman and Greek, as well as Egyptian
mystery religions. Zoroastrian elements from the Zend – Avesta are also present. These are the idea of Satan and the Devil as an evil force opposed to Yahweh, a great battle at the end of time between good and evil, [the final conflict] and the idea of a second coming. All these ideas were picked up by the Jews during their contact with the Persians before their return after the Babylonian captivity and transmitted to the early Christians.

Once we realize all this we can also see why Islam was able to rise to the status of a world religion as well. Those areas of the world that were not the home land of Greco-Roman paganism were open to Islam which spread in areas of Semitic settlement and where Christianity had been imposed by force, so could Islam be.

We will give Engels the last word, the Book of Revelation “shows without any dilution what Judaism, strongly influenced by Alexandria, contributed to Christianity. All that comes later is Western , Greco-Roman addition.”

Smail’s thesis is that our actions are based on the long ago evolutionary development of our neurochemistry. Smail also reverses the biology-culture relationship that holds that culture is derivative from biology. At least this is what Mithen says. We will see that this is not the case since it is going to be neurochemistry (biology) which shapes culture and history.

History doesn’t really begin at Sumer. It begins way back in the Old Stone Age (the Palaeolithic) when the major neurochemical agents influencing our brain evolved. Many of these Palaeolithic chemicals are still at work today. Smail says: “What passes for progress in human civilisation is often nothing more than new developments in the art of changing body chemistry.”

Mithen tells us this is not just a rehash of the “crude evolutionary psychology” of Steven Pinker, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby and others, but is a “far more sophisticated” theory. We shall see.

Smail says human history begins way before the advent of writing five thousand years ago and the view that there was an “unchanging prehistoric past” and then “history” is wrong. Mithen, who is an archaeologist, is in tune with this view. So, apparently, is everybody else these days.

This is a terminological problem (or non problem). Marxists use the term “history” to refer to the advent of class society basically about five thousand or so years ago in the Middle East and “gentile” or “clan” society for the non class societies of “prehistoric” times. They do not believe that prehistoric societies (and what is “historic” and “prehistoric” varies in different parts of the world) were “unchanging.” Rather they were dynamic and rapidly evolving, or stagnant, depending on the physical environments they found themselves in and that they had to adapt to to survive.

Homo sapiens arose from Homo erectus about 200,000 years ago, and Mithen thinks, as do many archaeologists, that there was a radical break in human prehistory about 70,000 years ago “when the first unambiguously symbolic artifacts and body adornments are known” (Blombos Cave, South Africa). Right after this time H. sapiens began to spread out of Africa into the rest of the world. Mithen thinks that this has something to do with the final evolution of language. He also thinks, because of the “radical break” that Smail may be wrong to deny some period of historylessness to the period prior to 200,000 years ago. Mithen says, “… ‘the myth of Palaeolithic stasis’ may, in fact, be the reality prior to Homo sapiens.” By the tenor of his own argument, it might be the reality prior to the “radical break” as well.

Using the word “history” in a greatly expanded, and I think unhelpful manner, he says that Smail is right about “history” itself going farther back than H. sapiens. Mithin agrees that even chimpanzees and baboons “have history.” This is because their current social reality is based on their past social reality. So almost everything is historical. Why stop at baboons? Why not include the birds and the bees? It is far more useful to apply the term “history” to the written or remembered record and keep the term “prehistory” for the deep past. If your group has no consciousness of “history,” you probably don’t have a history to be conscious of.

New problems spring up when we leave the Old Stone Age for the New — for the period called by Vere Gordon Childe, the great Marxist archaeologist of the first half of the 20th century, the time of the “Neolithic Revolution.” This is the period of about 8000 to 3000 B.C. (at least for Europe and its immediate neighbors). The previous “mode of production” had been hunting and gathering. Now we settled down to farming and soon to building towns and cities, classes, and the first state structures. So, I think, history does begin at Sumer after all. This doesn’t mean prehistory is a blank. Childe call the Neolithic a Revolution because, as a good Marxist, he saw the new mode of production, large scale agriculture, as a qualitative leap and change from the hunting and gathering of the past.

This was due, as Mithen points out, to H. sapiens reaction “to the start of the Holocene some 11,600 years ago, with its warmer and wetter climate than the preceding Pleistocene.” Smail calls this period “the fulcrum of the great transformation” of human history. This is exactly what Childe thought as well.

Now we come to Smails’ special theory. As a result of the Neolithic’s new living conditions — humans began to settle down and give up the hunting gathering life style. At this time, says Mithin, Smail says “our Palaeolithic-evolved neurophysiology” begins to assert itself. The primate social structure, as seen in chimpanzees and baboons and based on domination “often” brought about by “random acts of violence” to keep lower ranking members of the group fearful and stressed out, begins to reappear.

This argument does not seem to hold water. Mithen points out most hunter gathers have egalitarian societies. He says the evidence is that the “majority of Palaeolithic hunter-gathers were egalitarian” as suggested, by the way, by Engels in his discussion of “primitive communism” in “The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.” So the neurophysiology that we evolved in the Palaeolithic would not have resembled the chimp-baboon model necessary for Smails’ theory.

Mithen, however, finds some of this new theory fairly persuasive. Smail says the new political elites that developed to control trade and agriculture “needed to control the brains and bodies of their subordinates by manipulating their neuro-chemistry.” So they ruled by relying on “random acts of violence” against their people to keep them down through fear and stress, via the head baboon, since “control of agricultural surpluses or trade routes was not enough to maintain their power base.”

This is just completely unscientific speculation worthy of a vision of the Neolithic conjured up out of reading too many Edgar Rice Burroughs novels. Of course, Smail holds that the rulers were not aware of what they were doing — Mithin says, “they were simply repeating what had seemed to work in gaining them power. Random violence is a winner every time.”

There is no evidence that the political elite in the Neolithic period used random violence against their people to maintain power. This is just speculation and guess work. Mithin however says that it wasn’t just physical violence. People who know about the Neolithic site of Chatalhoyuk (Anatolia: 7000 BC) will find Smail’s views “particularly striking and persuasive.” Why is this?

Because, at this site “we find horrendous wall paintings and sculptures showing decapitated people and monstrous animals.” This is very emotive. Lets give a more scientific formulation. Here “we find strange (to us) wall paintings and sculptures showing headless people and large unknown mythological animals. We do not know what the purpose of these images was. Perhaps it was religious.” This is not the conclusion of Mithin.

He simply asserts that these images show “a culture of suppression through terror, with– no doubt– a priestly caste benefiting from these visions of a Neolithic hell.” Terror was used to “attack the body chemistry” of the people (evolved during the baboon Reign of Terror)to make them fearful and afraid of those “intent on maintaining power.” These speculations are completely without merit.

From the Neolithic we advance into the historical period proper. Since our neural states “are plastic and thus manipulable” we find that “new forms of economic, political and social behaviour emerge during the course of history.” The six most important vis a vis our neurochemistry have become also the most important for human culture. The six are “religion, sport, monumental architecture, alcohol, legitimised violence — and sex for fun.” At least random violence is not on the list. These six are the “most effective in moulding and manipulating our body chemistry.”

So the Romans had it down with bread and circuses. First put the subject population under stress, then provide relief which advantages the ruling class. “What better way,” Mithen notes, “for elites to build and maintain their power than to create stress within a population by a culture of terror and then very kindly to offer the means for its alleviation by arranging such events.” Examples today would be professional sports, movies, and especially great events such as the Olympics. Mithin quotes Etienne de la Boetie who in 1548 referred to sporting and theatrical extravaganzas as “tools of tyranny” and “drugs for the people.”

Methods used by others to influence or control our brain and body chemistry Smail calls “teletropic mechanisms.” Those we use on ourselves are “autotropic.” Mithin points out that it “is far better for those in power to be in control of their subordinates’ body chemistry than to leave it to the subordinates themselves.” This is why many religions, for example, as ruling class tools, reject such autotropic mechanisms as masturbation, sex for fun, alcohol, and recreational drugs. The state, in fact, seeks to regulate and control autotropic mechanisms as far as possible.

The plot thickens. The world historical change from the Middle Ages to our modern world may be better explained by the manipulation of neurochemistry than by Marxist theory. The European discovery and use of tea, chocolate, coffee, and tobacco allowed people to regulate their own brain chemistry, for these items are all autotropic. The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of the struggle between autotropic and teletropic mechanisms. Smail is credited with Mithin’s comment that the: “Making of the Palaeolithic relevant to the drinking of tea is no mean feat.”

Two quotes from On Deep History and the Brain sum up the argument and bring us to the book’s grand conclusion. “We can finally dispense with the idea, once favored by some historians, that biology gave way to culture with the advent of civilisation. This has it all backward. Civilisation did not bring an end to biology. Civilisation ENABLED important aspects of human biology, and the drama of the past five thousand years lies in the fact that it did so in ways that were largely unanticipated in the Palaeolithic era.” The second quote is “we need not dig only in the dusty topsoil of the strata that form the history of humanity. The deep past is also our present and future.”

What Marxist would disagree with this first comment. It only says that human potential has been increased by the inventions of civilization and that these inventions were not foreseen in the Old Stone Age. What Smail means is that the brain chemistry that evolved in the Old Stone Age was not adapted for the changes that lay ahead, it being oriented towards the teletropic. But we have already seen that H. sapiens in the Palaeolithic was largely egalitarian (primitively communistic) and so autotropic. The evolution of our brain chemistry fits into any type of society it would seem. As for the notion of the “deep past”: it is of course true that we are the product of evolution, of animal ancestors and that this heritage remains with us today and forms part of our nature. Who, since Darwin, would deny that.

The question remains, how are we best to understand history, the rise of capitalism, the contradictions of imperialism and the way to overcome them and proceed on the road to socialism? Historical Materialism, the theories of Marx, Engels and Lenin are still to my mind the best methods to use to answer these questions. It is true that candy is dandy, and that chocolate, masturbation, and alcohol are handy autotropic devices, but they won’t replace class struggle and the analysis of the means and modes of production as ways to change the world. Political power does not grow out of a Hershey bar.

“Fraught with Ought” reviews two new books concerning the American philosopher Wilfred Sellars (1912-1989). These are a collection of papers about Sellars by Jay Rosenberg (Wilfred Sellers: Fusing the Images, Oxford, 2007) and an anthology (In the Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfred Sellars, Harvard, 2007). Why all this interest in an academic philosopher, unknown to the general public, and dead for almost twenty years? And what has any of this to do with Marxism?

Briefly, Sellars was an analytic philosopher, a member of a school stemming back over a hundred years, that grew out of the rejection of the European philosophical tradition growing out of German Idealism, especially Kant and Hegel. Marxism also grew out of this German tradition.

Recently some analytic philosophers have come to believe that the wholesale rejection of Hegel and others in the classical tradition has been a mistake and was based on a faulty understanding of their works by some of the founders of the analytic movement, especially Bertrand Russell.

Sellars’ philosophy is being examined in this light and is taken by some to be useful in reclaiming Kant and Hegel, for example, and using them as part of the program of analytic philosophy — viz., of using the analysis of ordinary language usage and the philosophy of language to find the solution to philosophical problems. Rehabilitating the thinkers from whom Marx and Engels learned so much and whose ideas they grappled with in forming their own is also a way of reminding the contemporary world of the continuing relevance of Marxism.

One of Sellars’ most important works was his 1956 paper “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” Although not in this work, Sellars gives an interesting definition of the aim of philosophy: “The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.”

This really is quite general and could be said of the natural and social sciences as well. The aim of Marxism could be said to be to bring about the end of human exploitation in the broadest possible sense by the most effective means, considered in the broadest possible sense, of eliminating capitalism and abolishing classes.

Marxists also share a common aim with Sellars. He wanted, in his own words. “to formulate a scientifically oriented, naturalistic realism which would ’save the appearances.’” The last expression refers to a desire not to stray too far from common sense. His love of science is the same as that of all true Marxists and is very clearly expressed by him when he writes, “in the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not.”

In other words, he shares with Marxists the idea, as Crane says, that philosophy’s “fundamental task” is “to explain how things seem (in the broadest sense of that term) consistent with what science has told us about the world.” The term “scientia mensura” is used by Sellarsians (it could be adopted by Marxists as well)to sum up this view. The job of philosophy is to bridge what Sellars called the “manifest image” of the world [i.e., common sense] and the “scientific image” [we are just a bunch of vibrating strings or atoms, etc.] Crane says Sellars developed his own “systematic philosophy” to deal with this problem. Let us see how far it agrees with Marxism.

Many philosophers such as Sellars have been bothered by three things about the manifest image of the world, according to Crane, namely intentionality or meaning, value, and consciousness. All bourgeois realists, just as all Marxist materialists, accept “that there is a world independent of thought.” Bourgeois realists are in fact materialists. Sellars, however, has a problem with how we become aware of the world and how we use language to describe it.

Marxist and non-Marxist realists alike tend to see language as somehow reflecting or referring to the objects of the world. We learn what “cat” means by referring to a real cat. “According to this view,” Crane says, “things in the world cause our minds to form certain representations, which is why they represent what they do.” This is what Lenin thought when he said consciousness or sensation is a picture of reality. Crane says it is the view of the early Wittgenstein (of the Tractatus). But Sellars doesn’t buy this. He has his own theory by which he replaces “reference” with “inference.” As Crane puts it, “To talk about the meaning of a word is not to talk about the relation it bears to the object it stands for. Rather, it is to talk about what inferences — what legitimate patterns of thought and reasoning — that word can be used in.”

This is a very dicey development. It seems to grow out of the later Wittgenstein (the Philosophical Investigations) and his notion of a “language game.” Whether this view can be reconciled with materialism is still being debated. What is really distinctive in this view is, Crane says, the role that normativity comes to play in the system. Sellars refers to words as “natural-linguistic objects” and we have to learn the rules (norms) for their use: “they tell us,” Crane points out, “how words should and should not be used. Signification and meaning are normative matters.” This leads us to a very important key concept of his philosophy — namely, “the myth of the given.” I’m not sure this “myth” is really a myth.

Sellars thinks of thought as “inner speech”, as Crane says, “as employing the concepts one has learned in the course of acquiring a language to make inferences which result in dispositions to make ‘outer’ verbal judgments.” So thinking, just as speaking, is subject to rules and norms.

Crane uses the example of a fig tree to clarify Sellars’ views. An old fashioned materialist (such as Lenin) might say that we have the notion of a fig tree as a result of having learned how to use the words “fig tree” as a result of our early education. Our senses were presented with a particular object, our parents say “fig tree” and we learn that this “given” is to be referred to as a “fig tree.”

This is an example (but not a good one) of “the myth of the given.” Sellars says “all awareness is a linguistic affair.” As crane puts it “the perceptually given” is not “a mental episode which is prior to thought and language.” This has the smell of idealism clinging to it.

Let’s try to be clearer. Crane says Sellars holds, “Every episode of taking something in is really a case of conceptualizing it, and conceptualizing requires being subject to the norms which can only come with the acquisition of a language.” Sellars is really saying it is wrong to think there was a “concept of x” in the mind of the child just waiting to be given the name “fig tree”. It was only by learning a language that a fig tree could present itself to the child as a fig tree and not just some kind of perceptual static.

Sellars’ ideas about sense perception are weak, I think, and I agree with Crane when he says he thinks them “unconvincing.” I think, for example, that consciousness and consciousness of objects have evolved from organisms that were precursors of H. sapiens. Other animals certainly have awareness and can even think yet are without “language” — or least without what we humans think of as “language”. Sellars appears to believe that only humans have language. If we grant this and restrict ourselves to “human language” then Crane thinks Sellars’ ideas are “clearer and more tractable” if we confine the inferentialist theory to thought and language and leave sense perception out of it.

Now thought, language, meaning, and inference are the result of brain processes that can be studied by science. This is the case even if meaning, thought, and knowledge will not themselves be, as Crane says, part of “the scientific image as such.” Why is this so? Sellars writes that it is because “in characterising an episode or a state as that of KNOWING, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says.” And Crane reminds us, this also goes for saying and thinking. If I say, think or know that e.g., my redeemer liveth, or that workers by uniting will only lose their chains I must give reasons that logically lead to a justification for these statements. I am not just referring to some chemical or neurological activity in my brain.

What is important about this part of Sellars’ theory is, according to Crane, that questions dealing with “meaning and significance” are not about facts — “questions about what is the case” — they are questions concerning “what ought to be.” They are not questions for science. Sellars thinks they are normative because we have to follow rules for justification which are located in “the logical space of reasons.” Sellars says. “If they are thinking THIS, then they OUGHT to think THAT too.”

What is going on here? It seems natural to distinguish between factual (scientific) statements and value (moral, un- or non- scientific) statements. But, says Crane, Sellars has gone beyond this dichotomy: “not only moral value, but also thought and consciousness, are (in his words) ‘fraught with ought.’” There are problems with this I think. If I give justifications for my belief that united workers have only their chains to lose those justifications are intended by me to be true factual statements about the world and thus subject to scientific scrutiny. It is scientific socialism to which I appeal. It is another question, indeed fraught with ought, whether that commitment logically forces me to embrace the dictatorship of the proletariat as well.

Some have come to think that Sellars’ views would cause a “sea change” in philosophy. Crain disagrees and thinks Sellars’ “inferentialism” with respect to “meaning and thought” can be weaned away from other elements in his system and adopted by those with “more traditional” attitudes towards “the self and the mind.” I think that there is no need for Sellarsian extremism on the question of the “scientia mensura.” To save the appearances, the “manifest world”, we don’t have to divorce it so completely from the “scientific world” as Sellars maintains. We only need show there is no manifest contradiction between the two worlds. There is no contradiction between our being human beings running about with “minds” on the one hand, and being ultimately vibrating strings or atoms on the other.

Marxists view the human world of consciousness as a higher level organization of matter (that stuff existing independently of the human mind from which the universe and everything in it derives) and what science ultimately discovers this stuff to be will not be in contradiction to the view that the manifest world is part of the continuum logically derived from the knowledge of the scientific world. Thus, Marxists can adopt some portions of Sellars’ inferentialism, especially with regard to the consistency of their thoughts with respect to what they ought to believe and do given what they say they believe and do.

Russell tells us straight away that he is only looking at history “as a pleasure,” as an enjoyable way to pass one’s free time, and that his approach is that of an “amateur.” Nevertheless, he thinks this approach will show what he has usefully derived from history and what others may also. Let us see.

He divides history into two parts — the large, which leads to an understanding of how the world got the way it is, and the small, which “makes us know interesting men and women, and promotes a knowledge of human nature” (supposing there is such a thing independent of culture). He thinks we should begin the study of history not by reading about it but rather from watching “movies with explanatory talk.” I think he has very young children in mind, because even “historical” movies are more fiction than history.

Russell maintains there have been only “three great ages of progress in the world”: the first being the growth of civilization in the Near East (Egypt, Babylonia), the second being Greece (from Homer to Archimedes), and the third being from the 15th century to the present. This scheme appears to be Eurocentric.

Russell appears to credit “progress” or historical development to men of genius. He says the proof of this is that the Incas and the Maya never invented the wheel. But they certainly had men of “genius,” as they had monumental architecture and the Maya and others had invented writing. It doesn’t occur to Russell that inventions such as the wheel are called forth from certain needs within a culture. The Maya and the Inca did just fine without the wheel. What they needed was gunpowder to give a proper greeting to the Spanish.

Russell also thinks that we would still be living at the productive level of the 18th century if “by some misfortune, a few thousand men of exceptional ability had perished in infancy.” This begs the question. Do the social conditions people find themselves in call forth their ingenuity and inventiveness, thus leading to progress, or is it all due to men of genius. Russell apparently believes in the ‘great man theory of history,’ but this theory rests on the logical fallacy I mentioned above (begging the question.)

Russell does not approve of those who “desire to demonstrate some ‘philosophy’ of history,” and he singles out “Hegel, Marx, Spengler, and the interpreters of the Great Pyramid and its ‘divine message’.” When it comes to Hegel, he even maintains that his view of history “is not a whit less fantastic than the views of those who divine by the Great Pyramid.”

In all fairness to Hegel, he and Russell may share more ideas about the nature of history than the latter thinks. In a nutshell, Hegel saw history as a gradual increase in human self-consciousness of freedom, finally leading to a condition where all human beings would be equally respected and their rights recognized. Hegel also appeals to empirical evidence, i.e., history itself, to justify this conclusion.

The end which Hegel envisioned has had its ups and downs, but the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (part of the UN Charter) is the type of progress he had in mind, even though there must still be a long process of development for the ideals of this document to become translated into actuality.

In theory, I am sure, Russell would not disagree with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, despite residual racist and misogynist opinions he might have shared with the people of his generation, not to mention latent eugenicist tendencies.

For instance, he believes female behavior should be “circumscribed by prudential considerations”. Women who have been free to do as they like, i.e., women who have become rulers (”empresses regnant”) have, in the main, “murdered or imprisoned their sons, and often their husbands; almost all have had innumerable lovers” (one would think Russell might have approved of this considering his private life).

“If this is what women would do if they dared,” he writes, “we ought to be thankful for social restraints.” The only example he gives is Catherine the Great. Henry VIII or Nero do not elicit similar thoughts about male behavior. We are also told that “men of supreme ability are just as congenitally different from the average as are the feeble-minded.” This is a view he shares with Nietzsche.

The following opinion, however, is more in accord with what Hegel would believe. “Although,” Russell writes, “history is full of ups and downs, there is a general trend in which it is possible to feel some satisfaction; we know more than our ancestors knew, we have more command over the forces of nature (this is highly problematic since our economic system seems to be in the process of destroying us and our natural environment), we suffer less from disease and from natural cataclysms [also problematic].” He adds that “violence is now mainly organized and governmental, and it is easier to imagine ways of ending this than of ending the sporadic unplanned violence of more primitive times.”

We must remember that Russell was writing in 1943 in the midst of World War II. Nevertheless, his “general trend” is a nod to progress, and for him the founding of the UN, the growth of the concept of universal rights, and the spread of social democratic ideals are all in accord with Hegelian notions. Despite his dislike of the notion of a “philosophy of history”, Russell’s “general trend” is in accord with Hegel’s outlook.

Besides being a closet Hegelian, it is interesting to note that this essay also reveals a Platonic bent to Russell’s thought, and a decidedly non-Hegelian cyclical approach to history.

“The greatest creative ages,” Russell writes, “are those where opinion is free, but behavior is still to some extent conventional. Ultimately, however, skepticism breaks down moral tabus, society becomes impossibly anarchic, freedom is succeeded by tyranny, and a new tight tradition is gradually built up.”

What is striking about this passage, besides its mechanical way of thinking, is that it seems to be in agreement with Russell’s conservative critics. Russell, the “passionate skeptic,” was himself accused of breaking down conventional moral beliefs, and it was objected that his teachings would lead to social breakdown and anarchy, and hence he should not be teaching at the City College of New York.

On the basis of the preceding passage, it appears that Russell might have even made the following statement: “It is true that I, Russell, am a skeptic, that I do think many conventional moral tabus are nonsense, and if my views are generally adopted a tyranny will replace our freedoms, since views such as mine lead to social breakdown and anarchy. Now, how about that teaching job?”

To be fair, Russell realizes this problem, which he later calls, “the dilemma between freedom and discipline.” Russell needs a method to break the cycle described above, and he finds it in science, allied with what he calls “intelligence” (a rather amorphous concept).

“Genuine morality,” he writes, “cannot be such as intelligence would undermine, nor does intelligence necessarily promote selfishness. It only does so when unselfishness has been inculcated for the wrong reasons, and then only so long as its purview is limited. In this respect science is a useful element in culture, for it has a stability which intelligence does not shake, and it generates an impersonal habit of mind that makes it natural to accept a social rather than a purely individual ethic.”

But this cannot be right. Here are some German scientists in 1943: “Well, personal ethical considerations aside, our society has asked us to figure our how much Zyklon-B should be delivered to Auschwitz to eliminate x number of social undesirables per day, and is Zyklon-B the best chemical for the task at hand. Let us calculate together.”

The above comments and considerations seem to me to point out serious difficulties with some of Russell’s ideas about the lessons one can learn from reading history the way he recommends — as a pleasurable leisure-time activity, one that assiduously avoids any attempt to formulate a philosophy of history.

“The men who make up philosophies of history,” he writes, “may be dismissed as inventors of mythologies.” His two primary bug-a-boos here are Hegel and Marx. He sees only two functions for the study of history. First we can look “for comparatively small and humble generalizations such as might form a beginning of a science (as opposed to a philosophy) of history.”

This is pretty arbitrary. Why not the beginning of a philosophy as well as a science? Hegel insisted that philosophy was to be pursued as a rigorous scientific procedure, just as any other discipline claiming to arrive at knowledge. Marx also praised the scientific method and claimed his ideas were scientific.

The second function of history, according to Russell, is to seek “by the study of individuals … to combine the merits of drama or epic poetry with the merit of truth.” This is an Aristotelian approach. The first function “views man objectively, as the heavenly bodies are viewed by an astronomer; the other appeals to imagination.”

I think it safe to say that Hegel and Marx fully agree with Russell’s first function, but would object to his second function as having no place in an objective study of the historical process. In fact, the basis of Russell’s animus towards Hegel and Marx is his opinion that they mix up his own second function with the first. I would like to conclude this brief presentation with a few remarks on Russell’s criticism of Marx’s views.

After a lively survey of the development of the West and an appreciation of some of the most interesting classical historians one ought to study (Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch, and Gibbon), Russell comes to Marx, whom he, in another essay, considers a free thinker and compares to Robert Owen and Thomas Paine.

In this essay, however, Marx is credited with founding the current interest in the economic interpretation of historical events. “Modern views,” Russell says, “as to the relation of economic facts to general culture have been profoundly affected by the theory, first explicitly stated by Marx [and Engels], that the mode of production of an age (and to a lesser degree the mode of exchange) is the ultimate cause of the character of its politics, laws, literature, philosophy, and religion.” Russell fails to mention the relations of production, a factor of prime importance for Marx and Engels.

Russell then says — and this is something that Lenin would certainly have agreed with, as would all who have been influenced by the Marxist classics — that this view “is misleading if accepted as a dogma, but it is valuable if used as a means of suggesting hypothesis.” Russell adds that “It has indubitably a large measure of truth, though not so much as Marx believed.” Just what was excessive in what “Marx believed” merits its own discussion, but in Russell’s essay Marx’s faults seem to be sins of omission rather than commission.

The “most important error” in Marx’s thought, according to Russell, is that “it ignores intelligence as a cause.” It is difficult to understand this objection. Russell says that “men and apes, in the same environment, have different methods of securing food: men practice agriculture, not because of some extra-human dialectic compelling them to do so, but because intelligence shows them its advantages.”

Granted that Marx was trying to explain the development of human society and not ape society, the question becomes, where did this “intelligence” come from? It appears that it just fell from the sky into human beings. A little dose of Darwin is needed here, and if Russell had read and been influenced by Engels’ essay “The Role of Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man,” he would not, I think, have had such a reified notion of “intelligence.”

Russell says he does not want to imply that “intelligence is something that arises spontaneously in some mystical uncaused manner.” He grants its causes are partly social, partly biological, and partly individual, and that “Mendelianism has made a beginning” into understanding its origins.

My point is that Marx did not “ignore intelligence as a cause.” He did not single it out as a primary factor, because he saw it as part of the human condition that arises as a response to the evolution of the species and its interactions with the natural and social environment.

Russell’s concern with “intelligence” appears to be the result of the prominence of the eugenics movement in his time and is reflected in his comment, quoted above, about the differences between the feeble-minded “average” folk and people such as himself (”of supreme ability”).

How to Read and Understand History is an enjoyable introduction to some of Russell’s ideas, but although one can enjoy it, one cannot, I think, understand history from reading it.

In that book he proposed that ONLY humans have language and that the claims that other animals have language abilities as well is bogus. “For Pinker, children learn language because their brains are specifically prepared by evolution to do so.” King will take issue with some of Pinker’s ideas but I am a little bit dubious as to her motivations. She implies he is not “even handed” because he has said religious beliefs are “akin to astrology or alchemy,” which, in fact, they are. However, that said, we will see that her review draws some justifiable critical conclusions about Pinker’s work as she presents it.

Pinker thinks the key to understanding human nature is to learn how we put our ideas and feelings into words. King tells us that he uses “conceptual semantics” to do this. Pinker himself says, “Linguists call the inventory of concepts and the schemes that combine them ‘conceptual semantics.’ Conceptual semantics — the language of thought — must be distinct from language itself, or we would have nothing to go on when we debate what our words mean.”

Pinker’s book is full of examples of how we express ourselves in speech that show we have an underlying of reality to which language conforms. King gives one. “Why, driving home from the grocery store, do we refer to a gallon of milk in our car, but never a gallon of blood (even though blood circulates inside our body as we sit there)? Because we conceptualize our bodies as solids rather than as containers.” Expressions such as this lead us to think about space and time, cause and effect, and substance, “through which in turn we may identify the deeper rules of conceptual semantics.”

Pretty thin gruel! If our bodies are conceived as solids why do say we put too much food in our mouths, or have a pain in our stomach, or too much gas in that self same organ? I fear we cannot draw Pinker’s conclusions based on the different idiomatic expressions of different languages and cultures.

Half way through the book, we are told, Pinker reveals the key to his speculations. One of his inspirations is the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, of whom he says:

“Kant’s version of nativism, with abstract organizing frameworks but not actual knowledge built in to the mind, is the version most viable today, and can be found, for example, in Chomskan linguistics, evolutionary psychology, and the approach to cognitive development called domain specificity. One could could so far as to say the Kant foresaw the shape of a solution to the nature-nurture debate: characterize the organization, whatever it is, that makes useful learning possible.”

This is a strange theory for an evolutionist to hold. The human mind has a built in abstract framework a la Kant which is there to organize our experiences into categories (domains) before we even have them. Only humans have this with regard to languages, so the first humans to have a language must have come with this ready made. This is a pre-Darwinian outlook.

According to Darwinian notions language ability would have gradually developed by natural selection and there is no reason “lower” forms in the evolutionary sequence would not exhibit different stages of this ability.

Pinker thinks that the way evolution worked was to form different domains in the human brain each with its own task to fulfill. King says, for Pinker, “The human past constrains our present human nature because it has so closely shaped our brain modules.” Pinker says, for instance, that it is necessary to “pry our mental modules free of the domains they were designed for.”

This is not good science. Our so called modules were not “designed” for anything. Our responses evolved as the result of environmental adaptations. There is no reason to think that this process halted sometime in the paleolithic and is no longer functioning.

King quotes Pinker as saying that “left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways.” The solution, he says is, by education “to make up for the short comings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world.” This outlook is basically that of Confucianism as put forth by Xunzi well over two thousand years ago and in our time by Freud. We are apt to let the Id take over if we are not educated to be social by Ivy League Super Ego types.

Marx asked who educates the educators. King is fairly critical of Pinker and thinks his views could lead to a “ranked hierarchy” of humanity antithetical to democratic values. She says he back pedals a bit from his basic theory when he grants that some of the properties he finds in the domains may not be, in his words, “necessarily direct reflections of the genetic patterning of our brains: some may emerge from brains and bodies interacting in human ecologies over the course of human history.”

King thinks this much more likely than Pinker allows. Marxists would think it is the most important factor and agree, I think, with King when she concludes that our real “human nature” is much more creative and contingent than the pre-programmed computer brains (her analogy) of Pinker’s pre-Darwinian Kantian humans.

The review says that the title of his book refers to not giving up one’s political views and ideals and that, “There is no doubt about Bolton’s vision of himself as the dauntless defender of US principles as he sees them.” And what principles he sees!

A jingoist, xenophobic, America-runs-the-world-so-get-out-of-the-way attitude more or less sums up the Bolton world view which derives, Urquhart believes, not from the neocons but from his early 60s encounter with and support of Goldwaterism. Urquhart alludes to a Col. Blimp flavor to some of his pronouncements, but this does Col. Blimp a disservice. For all of his pomposity and foolishness, Col. Blimp was kindhearted on a personal level. Bolton reveals himself to be petty, nasty, and small-minded.

Urquhart reminds us that as an undersecretary of state, before his stint at the UN, “he did much to undermine America’s leadership and position in the world.” Actually, not a bad thing as undermining and weakening the power of the number one imperialist power strengthens the world progressive movement. Perhaps Bolton is a secret anti-imperialist? What Urquhart has reference to, however, is Bolton’s role in undermining the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the International Criminal Court. Of course he could have only done this with the consent of his masters Bush, Cheney and the ineffective Colin Powell.

When Condoleeza Rice took over State, Bolton was bounced over to the UN job, but he was so incompetent for the position that he could not even get confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate. He got a recess appointment in August 2005 — he lasted about a year or so and had to resign when it became obvious that the new Democratic-controlled Senate would never confirm him; he was such an embarrassment.

His role at the UN was basically disruptive, as he had no regard for the institution, its goals, or international organizations and treaty commitments in general. His book also reveals his personal animus towards those he disagrees with, blaming them for policy failures which were the results of the actions of others. So his book seems not to be a trustworthy account of his record and the actions of the UN.

For example, he has a great dislike for Kofi Annan whom he says “was simply not up to the job” of Secretary General, a view that history is not likely to validate. He blames Kofi Annan for the Oil-for-Food scandal in Iraq. “It was,” however, Urquhart says, “the Security Council, including the US, that allowed Saddam Hussein’s government to negotiate deals and kickbacks directly — without UN supervision — with the hundreds of commercial firms involved.” He also fails to note UN success stories. His book appears to be just a nasty-minded, distorted account of his activities with little regard for truth or accuracy.

He is also stupidly indiscreet. He reveals that when seeking a replacement for Kofi Annan, Rice told him, “I’m not sure we want a strong secretary general.” They then agreed on Ban Ki-moon. Urquhart calls this “a gross disservice” to Ban Ki-moon and, I might add, to Rice as well — but it is good to know what is really going on, so thanks, John, for spilling the beans.

Bolton now works out of the American Enterprise Institute (where else?) and has become a favorite of the corporate media (The New York Times, The New York Sun, etc.) who love to quote his quaint and outrageous opinions on all major world issues. Urquhart tells us that “Reporters seem to feel that if they quote him, they will have included a ‘tough’ conservative point of view.”

Bolton doesn’t think the US should talk with its adversaries. Threats and conventional military actions are all that’s really needed to enforce the Pax Americana. Urquhart calls this outlook an “anachronism” and quotes William Pfaff (born in 1928, Pfaff has written eight books and is a frequent contributor to the NYRB) from a 1998 piece: “[T]he belief that America as ’sole superpower’ would or could dominate the world, widely held after communism’s collapse, rested on the illusion that military and economic power directly translate into political power, and that power is identical with authority. The exercise of authority requires consent, and rests on a moral position.” A moral position is something Bolton and his coterie of admirers most certainly lack.

His credo is summed in the following four propositions based on Urquhart:

1. Only US interests count. The UN should serve those interests.
2. Allies are not to be trusted and hostiles must be treated by force as they will never abide by their commitments. The hostiles include North Korea, Iran, any enemies of Israel, and others.
3. Hostiles should not be negotiated with on a long tern basis or rewarded for a change of behavior. Force and violence are always a possibility on our part.
4. Idealists, liberals, multilateralists and “most Democrats” are “almost” the same as the hostile foreigners who oppose our country.

Urquhart concludes, as any rational person must, that Bolton’s views and behavior “are a luxury the United States can no longer afford.”

The impression most Americans get from the popular, mostly right wing and conservative, media is that Islam is a backward religion run by medieval throwbacks to the Dark Ages. To counter such outlooks progressives can refer the neocons to the web site of the Lebanese cleric Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah. Now don’t expect a Marxist, but the GA has decidedly progressive views when compared to the Christian right in this country and many of the more backward looking reactionary Islamists.

What is a Grand Ayatollah? Well, an Ayatollah is someone so respected for his knowledge of Islam that his faith community (in this case the Shia branch of Islam) grants him that title. A GA is an Ayatollah the other Ayatollahs respect and elect as it were. He can pronounce fatwas, that is, give an authoritative interpretation of Islam for the faithful to model their behavior on. It is a nonbinding but very powerful statement of what is good conduct and vice versa.

GA Fadlallah is reported to have outraged “conservative” (i.e., culture bound reactionary) Muslims with his fatwas based on more enlightened and modern perspectives. Here are some examples. “A woman can respond to physical violence inflicted on her by a man with counter-violence as a self-defense measure.” The reactionaries considered this fatwa from the highest-ranking cleric in Lebanon scandalous. He also ruled against “using any sort of violence against a woman, even in the form of insults and harsh words.”

The GA is also quoted as saying, “The belief that it is disgraceful for the man to manage household tasks is derived from the social culture and not from Islam. Personally, I think that no woman would be obliged to bring her social life to a standstill just because she is being occupied with her children.”

What this shows is that it is NOT Islam per se that is to blame for the many negative characteristics selectively reported in the US press, but the surrounding cultural conditions and level of societal development. It is analogous to not blaming the democratic process because Huckabee won in some states.

GA Fadlallah is also politically advanced. He is opposed to US imperialism and at the same time to Islamic extremism. “I think,” he said, “the current Iranian president lacks diplomatic skills, and I think he creates problems for Iran.” Very diplomatically put.

As far as the notion of a worldwide Shia anti-Western movement is concerned, the GA says: “I don’t see there is a unity in the situation of Shiites in the world.” Marxists would agree since they see religious views as tempered by the economic and productive forces at work in a society.

He also has progressive views with respect to women’s rights to education stating that “Knowledge is a merit for man and woman equally, and the importance of acquiring it is identical to both of them.” The GA Fadlallah is an example of a relatively progressive voice within Islam. We in the West should be reporting on and becoming more aware of such voices.

The policies of the Bush administration and its military adventures and diplomatic fiascos in the Middle East and elsewhere only strengthens the hand of Islamic reaction. It is US policy that is responsible for the so-called “threat” of militant Islam and that makes the views of clerics such as GA Fadlallah and other liberal minded clerics more difficult to spread in the Islamic world.

Gates says that “We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well.” Those aspects are the exploitation of human labor power and the extraction of surplus value from workers. It will be a nice trick to see how this will happen.

Gates wants to further what he calls “creative capitalism” and use the technological revolution to help the poor of the world. “The rate of improvement for the third that is better off,” he stated, “is pretty rapid. The part that is unsatisfactory is for the bottom third — two billion of six billion.”

He at least concedes capitalism has left behind two billion people. The number may be greater than that. Other experts think that the figure should be four, not two billion — i.e., a bottom two thirds (C.K. Prahalad from the University of Michigan).

The “free” market, the cause of this misery of the poor, will be used to help the impoverished billions out. Don’t panic capitalists! Your role is to design products and systems that help the poor AND make a profit for yourselves at the same time! “Such a system,” Gates tells us, “would have a twin mission: making profits and also improving lives for those who don’t fully benefit from market sources.” But you can be sure, no profit, no benefit.

Is this a realistic plan? “The idea,” he says is “that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy — even beyond the market opportunities — that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.” But this is just not how the market works, not the way globalization operates. While company X is using its resources “beyond market opportunities” company Y moves in and takes the market share that X failed to appropriate. Gates sounds good, and has set up big aid programs, but all this won’t make a real dent in the poverty caused by monopoly capitalism.

The WSJ quotes a critic of this utopian scheme, a past economist at the World Bank and now a teacher at NYU, William Easterly, who is quoted as saying, “There’s a lot of people at the bottom of the pyramid but the size of the transactions is so small it is not worth it for private business most of the time.” This means most of the poor will stay poor. Easterly wrote a book in 2006, the Journal reports, The White Man’s Burden, in which he maintains that even though $2.3 trillion has been expended in foreign aid in the last 50 years nothing much was really accomplished for the masses of the world’s poor.

Gates is reported to dislike this book and to have publicly “snapped” at Easterly for his criticisms. Easterly rejoined that, “The vested interests in aid are so powerful they resist change and they ignore criticism. It is so good to try to help the poor but there is this feeling that [philanthropists] should be immune from criticism.”

Bill Gates is not deterred. He says that “If we can spend the early decades of the 21st century finding approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce poverty in the world.”

Again the stress on capitalist profits, without which we can’t be rid of poverty. But business can’t even keep its own workers employed, even when it make profits. In fact it sometimes fires its own workers in order to increase its profits. Can we really think that capitalists will forego opportunities to maximize profit margins just to help the poor. I don’t question Gates sincerity but If he is really committed to ending poverty I suggest he spend less time reading Adam Smith and more reading Karl Marx.

To make a long story short, the US and other First World countries account for about one billion people who out consume, on a per capita basis, the 5.5 billion people in the developing world by a factor of 32 to 1.

That is we use oil and gas and metals and “produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases” at a rate 32 times that of the non developed world. On this scale of 1 to 32, China is about a 3 and India even lower. So the problem with pollution and depletion is clearly in our back yard.

The problem is the poorer countries want to have a better life style; they want to develop, but it is just impossible for them to catch up to our 32 level. Diamond gives the example of Kenya. Kenya has about 30 million people, its consumption level is 1 while the US with 300 million has a 32 level. We have 10x the population but consume 320x the resources. If the poor countries, including China and India, really attained out advanced consumption levels it would be as if the present 6 billion earth population became 72 billion at present consumption rates. This is impossible since the earth’s resources cannot sustain anywhere near the equivalent of 72 billion people.

Therefore, the idea that globalization, honest government, democracy and the free-market will allow poor people to advance gradually to a first world living standard is “a cruel hoax.” In fact, China alone will never get to our level, let alone the rest of the non developed world. What can prevent eventual disaster?

Diamond says third world peoples are aware of the consumption disparity between us and them. This leads to the development of, or condoning, of terrorism, it is the real cause of terrorism. “There will be more terrorist attacks against us and Europe, and perhaps against Japan and Australia, as long as that factional difference of 32 in consumption rates persists.”

Diamond doesn’t say so, but if his thesis is correct, it means the War on Terror is really a preemptive move by the US to maintain its “way of life” by making sure the third world remains backward and exploited. And, there will be a real problem with China as it cannot rise without pulling our 32 level down. At present levels, China’s catching up with the US “would roughly double world consumption rates” (and don’t forget India!). “The world is already running out of resources, and it will do so even sooner if China achieves American level consumption rates. Already, China is competing with us for oil and metals on world markets.”

Have we seen something like this before? Dust off your history books. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the advanced countries scrambling for the control of markets and resources not only among themselves, but against new rising powers. This led to two world wars.

Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism is still the best guide to what this entails for the future. Already the US is militarily engaged in the Middle East, having invaded one oil rich country and still threatening another.

Diamond says the only way China and other countries might be induced NOT to try and develop to our levels would be to “make consumption rates and living standards more equal around the world.” To stave off and prevent my Leninist vision of Armageddon the US, for example, would have tone down it living standards and share the goodies of the world with the have nots.

Diamond thinks this possible, so he is optimistic about the resolution of this great contradiction between the aspirations of the third world and real politic of the first. The “world doesn’t have enough resources to allow for raising China’s consumption rates, let alone the rest of the world, to our levels. Does this mean we are headed for disaster?”

Diamond says “No.” Better planning is all that is needed. In fact “Real sacrifice won’t be required.” We can have our cake and eat it too. Americans are wasteful. Western Europe uses 50% less per capita oil and gas than the US, yet their living standards are higher than ours. We could conceivably, by better planning, reduce our oil consumption by 50% and still raise or maintain our living standards (more or less, no more Hummers).

Other examples, from Diamond, of misused resources that are about to collapse but could be maintained by proper management are the world’s fisheries and forests. All we lack, he tells us is the “political will.”

What is the problem here? We have just seen the EPA shoot down California and other states’ attempt to impose fuel efficiency standards on automobiles. The fisheries and forests will, presumedly, continue to be overexploited (we have known about this for years yet it continues).

The basis of capitalism is maximizing profits. Exxon-Mobile and other corporations are not going to give up market share and profits to make the world a fair place for everyone. That is just not the nature of capitalism.

What Diamond is asking for is a world wide regime based on central planning that could rationally allot and share the world’s resources. Who could administer such a regime. The United Nations? Is there any hope that the US or any other of the major capitalist powers would cede their economic sovereignty to the UN or any other transnational organization and renounce the “free-market” as the means for regulating globalization in favor of a central planning and management scheme?

Reality may force this upon the world and my hunch is that if it does it will be rather messy. A specter is haunting Europe once again.

World hunger is one of them. The last century was dotted with mass famines, all of them man made. Surely the UN and the leading nations of the world would not let that sorry record repeat itself?

It appears, however, that they will. The UN is doing its part to help prevent famines, but the UN can only do what the leading nations, represented on the Security Council will allow it to do. We must remember that any criticism of the UN is in reality a criticism of the five permanent members of the SC.

At any rate, the UN has warned us that a famine of Biblical proportions may be on the way.

Tuesday’s New York Times has the story. “World Food Supply is Shrinking, U.N. Agency Warns,” by Elisabeth Rosenthal (12-18-07). Here is the gist of it. Jacques Diouf, who runs the UN Food and Agriculture organization has stated that there “is a very serious risk that fewer people will be able to get food” in the coming years. That doesn’t sound very good at all. Rosenthal, reporting from Rome, says his reason for announcing this is that because of “an ‘unforeseen [?] and unprecedented’ shift, the world food supply is dwindling rapidly and food prices are soaring [good old supply and demand] to historic levels.”

There appears to be only 12 weeks worth of wheat and 8 of corn left in storage (based on world wide consumption levels.) to feed the world in case of an emergency. One reason for this is that it is more profitable to grow non food crops than food crops. There has been “a shift away from farming for human consumption to crops for biofuels and cattle feed” [more McDonald's burgers for the First World obese]. And, don’t overlook the fact that “the early effects of global warming have decreased crop yields in some crucial places.”

The leader of the World Food Program, Josette Sheeran, is quoted as saying, “We’re concerned that we are facing the perfect storm for the world’s hungry.” Other experts are equally glum. A major, crop disease or climate change in an important area would put the hungry in “a risky situation.” This has already happened in Australia (lack of rain) and In Ukraine (also climate change) with less food being produced.

The UN’s Diouf thinks the advanced countries will have to come up with new ideas to reflect the new economic and environmental realities. New ideas are in the works, but they may be based on putting people before profits. When has the US done that lately?

But not to worry here in the USA. We will be able to ride it out. Ms. Sheeran noted that, “In the U.S., Australia and Europe, there’s a very substantial capacity to adapt to the effects on food — with money, technology, research and development. In the developing world, there isn’t.” It’s comforting to know that if disaster strikes it will be the poor of the Third World who die off while we will continue to pollute the atmosphere, destroy the climate, and have all the junk food we need to see us through.

Cohen is in Caracas, presumably to observe Sunday’s constitutional referendum, and this column reveals the thoughts of a man who has no sympathy at all for the interests of the people of Venezuela but every sympathy for the interests of US imperialism and its supporters.

He begins his article by saying, “It was a fascist general in 1930s Spain who coined the phrase “Viva la muerte” or ‘Long Live Death.’ We are then told that although Hugo Chavez doesn’t like fascists “he has not hesitated to deploy the imagery of death to bolster his leftist brand of petro-authoritarianism, now operating under the ludicrous banner of ‘Fatherland, Socialism or Death.’”

Somebody should tell the patriarchally inclined Cohen that Patria, Socialismo o Muerte means ‘Motherland[or Homeland], Socialism or Death.’ It is no more “ludicrous” than the slave owning Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” and means about the same thing. It also means just about what those New Hampshire fascists meant when they turned to the imagery of death for their state motto: Live Free or Die.

It should also be pointed out that what Cohen calls “petro-authoritarianism” is actually a government that has been democratically elected by its people in a country with a vibrant opposition press and ruled by a constitution approved by the Venezuelan people.

Knowing this, when Cohen calls Chavez an “oil-gilded caudillo,” he is just being emotional and abusive. He might just as well write for the New York Post or the Washington Times. The Times is in fact slowly approaching that level of writing by adding Cohen’s right wing blather to that already provided by David Brooks.

Cohen’s rant against Chavez stems from his aversion to his policies leading Venezuela towards socialism and especially the new powers he may get as a result of the democratic choice of the people in the Sunday referendum. Cohen fears his new powers will allow him “to expropriate private property” [God forbid!] “and create the second formally socialist nation in the Americas alongside Fidel’s” [it's about time].

“The measures amount to a constitutional coup,” laments an opposition newspaper editor quoted by Cohen. So now he doesn’t know the difference between a coup [Pinochet] and a free election. This is typical of the American mass media and its pundits.

Cohen certainly doesn’t embrace the notion of People Before Profits. He grudgingly admits Chavez “has reduced poverty [the UN says "extreme poverty" has gone from 15.9 % to 9.9] but this has been at the “expense” of the underfunded oil industry.

I don’t understand Cohen’s concern about the establishment of “socialism.” He says Chavez has actually been instituting a “crony capitalism” for his own benefit. The US has lots of experience dealing with crony capitalist regimes, so what is all the fuss about? In the rush to see all things evil about Chavez [Cohen has seemingly only interviewed opposition people, not one supporter of Chavez has anything to say] he can’t make up his mind about what kind of regime is being built. Is it a second socialist state that is coming to be, or just another run of the mill Third World crony capitalist state with lots of oil?

Here is some really keen reportage. Cohen says you can’t find eggs or chickens to buy due to “price controls.” “Chavez’s socialism [so he a socialist again, good] delivers subsidized gasoline and glittering malls but no milk.” But is it really “price controls”? Other reporters have pointed out that the real reason for these sorts of shortages is hoarding by producers trying to sabotage economic reform and create a climate to help defeat the referendum. The pro-capitalist Cohen can only see the bumbling hand of socialism at work and not the invisible and criminal hand of price fixing capitalists creating an artificial shortage to further their class interests.

Cohen reveals his ignorance of what is going on when he says that since the US buys so much oil from Venezuela, “Chavez’s ’socialism’ [now it's back in quotes] and his chumminess with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad [what has that got to do with anything: Saudi Arabia is even worse and the US is very chummy with it] do not extend to cutting off the ‘imperialist empire’. Chavez is too shrewd to sever his lifeline.” Nevertheless, despite the malinformed Cohen, that is just what Chavez has threatened to do. He has publicly stated that he would cut off oil to the US if it continues to interfere in Venezuela’s internal affairs. The Chinese will take all the oil they can get, by the way. But poor Americans would suffer as Chavez sells discounted oil to poor communities in the US whom he cares about more than their own government does.

Towards the end of his article Cohen appears to have completely lost his mind. He says that, in effect, by taking his socialist vision of Venezuela’s future to his people to vote upon, his actions are as “grotesque and dangerous– as Fascism was– a terrible example for a region that has been consolidating democracy.” That’s right folks. By putting his ideas before the people to vote on them, Chavez is a bad example for democracy. It’s positively Fascist!

He then approvingly quotes the hereditary Bourbon monarch of Spain, installed by a real Fascist, Franco, who told Chavez to “shut up” recently at an international meeting. He thinks Venezuelans should “follow suit on Sunday” by voting down the proposals in the referendum. Fair enough, the voting is free after all.

But as a journalist there is only one word for Cohen. That is “hack.” I wish the New York Times had higher standards and told him to “shut up, already.”

Capitalism, for instance, is often justified or explained as a part of “human nature” [as is war, male supremacy, and “innate” racial differences in intelligence] inherited from our remote past. These claims, among others, have led Dr. Fodor to question Darwin’s theory that the mechanism driving evolution is “natural selection.”

This article will look at his arguments as presented in “Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings” from the 18 October 2007 issue of The London Review of Books. I will try to establish that his arguments against natural selection are not convincing and are based a mechanical interpretation of Darwin that is a characteristic of contemporary Western thought. That when Darwin is read dialectically, as he was by Marx and Engels (cf. Engels’ Dialectics of Nature) the objections to natural selection as the main motor of evolutionary change evaporate.

Fodor tells us that natural selection “purports to characterize the mechanism not just of the formation of species, but of all evolutionary changes in the innate properties of organisms.” An organism’s phenotype, “the inventory of its heritable traits, including, notably, its heritable mental traits,“ is an adaptation to it environment.

The rub here is “mental traits.” Physical traits can be mapped on the genome and have some basis in material reality. This is much harder to do with so called mental traits. Most all of the current nonsense about evolutionary explanations of human behavior based on inherited mental traits is the result of idle speculation concerning hypothetical genes that could, maybe, be responsible for the behaviors in question. At most, however, we can only discuss the capacities that humans have inherited. The vast majority of specific behaviors are better explained by external causes, mostly of cultural and historical origin, which have nothing to do with an organisms phenotype. Nor did Darwin, I think, suggest otherwise.

Adaptation works this way. Organisms are living in an environment and competing for food and reproductive success. Some type of genetic mutation comes along [a cosmic ray zaps one of its genes say] that gives the organism a slight edge in finding a mate and reproducing. More babies carrying the new gene show up in the next generation, etc. Eventually all the organisms have the new characteristic: a new species. This very simple, but you get the idea. It doesn’t have to be a new species. It could be a gene for eye color and so you just have variation within a species, for example.

Now Fodor says that Darwin’s theory has two components. The sequence of changing phenotypes. We can see the connection phenotypically, genetically, that puts baboons in our family tree. No doubt about that. But how did that happen? It is the answer “by natural selection” that he wants to question. No, he is not a creationist, he is looking for a purely scientific answer, no mysticism, to replace natural selection because he sees flaws in that explanation. Flaws that I will attempt to show do not exist.

Fodor reports that there is something that “ails” us as a species living in the contemporary world. Marxists agree and attribute it to our economic arrangements — i.e., capitalism and its logical consequent of human exploitation for profit which leads to imperialism and war. Fodor says the Darwinists explain the problem by saying we inherited a mind adapted for life 30,000 years ago and is unequipped to live in the complex world of today. He will attack natural selection because he thinks this Darwinist answer is wrong.

But this is not Darwin’s answer at all. It is modern misinterpretation of Darwin that has arisen as a refection on the modern world in societies which, due to the class nature of science and education, do not fundamentally challenge the prevailing order [TINA] and thus reject ab initio a Marxist reading of evolution.

What ails humanity is for Darwinists, according to Fodor, “that the kind of mind we have is an anachronism; it was selected for by an ecology that no longer exists.” This being the case, Fodor says, “if the theory of natural selection turned out not to be true, that would cut the ground from under the Darwinist diagnosis of our malaise.”

Fodor is right about that. But it is wrong to think that natural selection has provided us with an anachronistic “mind.” The so called Darwinists who argue that way are very far from Darwin or any scientific understanding of the human brain.

What natural selection has provided us with is a brain with the capacity to adapt the organism to many different social and cultural climates. It is no more the product of events 30,000 years ago on savannahs then it is of modern industrial societies. As far as anyone can say it also has the capacities to adapt to future social and cultural conditions as yet unimaginable. There is no need to reject natural selection “to cut the ground from under the Darwinist diagnosis” because the characterization given by Fodor, while maintained by many social “scientists” and some shallow schools of “evolutionary psychology, is a totally unscientific version of Darwinism.

But suppose as a matter of fact natural selection is still incorrect. Fodor says it has two problems that might undermine it: one is conceptual, the other is empirical (”more or less.”) Let’s look at these two.

I must admit, I don’t really see the conceptual problem. Here is what Fodor says it is. Natural selection can be seen as holding that “environments select creatures for their fitness; or you can say that environments select traits for their fitness.” But I wouldn’t say that environments “select” anything. Organisms (”creatures”) are born into environments and their ability to survive and reproduce depends on the traits they have. If a frog has a mutation giving it three legs it may not live to reproduce. If it has a mutation making it resistant to a virus that infects and kills frogs that trait may allow it to reproduce better than other frogs.

Is not it confusing to talk of “forces of selection,” as does Fodor. These forces must select individual creatures on the one hand, but on the other they must select traits “since it is phenotypes (”bundles of heritable traits”) “whose evolution selection theory purports to explain.”

This whole discussion of a “conceptual problem,” of a mechanical contradiction invalidating natural selection, is itself a conceptual problem [a category mistake], or better a terminological one. Let’s get rid of needless metaphysical entities such as “environments making selections,” and “forces.” Next, consider that “phenotypes” are not real existing separate entities. They are intellectual abstractions that we as scientists or philosophers use to describe the workings of our theoretical explanations for what we find in nature. Only the organisms exist.

I think, therefore, that the conceptual problem is bogus. I will therefore skip over the rest of the conceptual discussion, which concerns itself with Venetian architecture, Darwin’s analogy between selective breeding techniques and natural selection (and Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker article about the same), and associated problems with metaphors such as God and Mother Nature.

Let us now turn to the empirical problem. It is not so much a problem as an “issue” for Fodor. He starts by saying that as a matter of fact some new empirical explanations for evolution are being proposed that do not base the mechanism of change on natural selection. He says he can’t discuss all of these new ideas but will give us a “feel” of two of them.

First, Fodor points out that “phenotypes don’t occur at random” — i.e., for me that means we don’t group organisms together arbitrarily. We group them together because of the similarity we see, or think we see, between organisms. Because, for example, all the animals we see in the cat family are more similar to each other in ways than they are to organisms we classify as members of the dog family we conclude they have an evolutionary connection and their membership in the same family id non-random.

Fodor says the nonrandomness of the phenotypes is due to the nonrandomness of the environment. He tells us the “theory of natural selection in a nutshell” is if the nonrandomness we see between phenotypes [i.e., organisms] and their environments isn’t due to God, “PERHAPS [my emphasis] it is a reflection of the orderliness of the environment in which the phenotypes [i.e., the organisms-tr] evolved.” In other words a fossil fish may indicate that there was a watery environment, and a fossil bird would suggest an environment conducive to flight.

But, Fodor says, “this is not the only possibility.” “External environments are structured in all sorts of ways, but so too, are the insides of the creatures that inhabit them” [natural selection may have something to do with this -- tr].” There is another possibility, an alternative to the view that phenotypes [our mental constructions based on knowledge of real organisms-tr] reflect the environments they evolve in, “namely that they carry implicit information about the endogenous structure of the creatures whose phenotypes they are.”

“‘Whose’ is a possessive and we should remember that it is organisms that “possess” phenotypes not the other way around. But let us grant “phenotypes” the same ontological status as organisms. Fodor has not really put forward an alternative view. This view, by the way he refers to as “Evo-Devo” (evolutionary-developmental theory).

Darwin’s theory of natural selection regarding an organism’s response to the environment, and evo-devo, the organism’s internal structure are two sides of the same coin. They are not alternative explanations, but, as Marxist dialectics would have it, they are a unity in difference.

Gene theory developed after Darwin. So now we know that the mechanism by which natural selection, response to the environment, takes place is by changes in the genetic make up of the organism. How, or what, causes the genes to change is another question. Fodor has a reduction to biochemistry down to quantum mechanics, “for all I know.”

This is pointless as far as the theory of natural selection is concerned. The organism either adapts to its environment and successfully reproduces itself or it becomes extinct. So when Fodor says, it is “an entirely empirical question to what extent exogenous variables are what shape phenotypes; and it’s entirely possible that adaptationism [natural selection] is the wrong answer” he is way off base. The inner and the outer (genome and environment) are two aspects of the same thing — the living organism.

Now Fodor asks a very strange question. Granted that when we ask Darwin why two phenotypes (organisms) are similar this can be explained by common ancestry. But what if you ask “why is it that some phenotypes don’t occur, an adaptationist explanation often sounds somewhere between implausible and preposterous.” If you ask, that is, why some sort of organism did NOT evolve natural selection can’t give a satisfying answer. How would natural selection explain why there are no pigs with wings?

Fodor says they lack wings “because there is no place on pigs to put them.” You would have to “redesign pigs radically” to have them have wings. Natural selection won’t let you go back “and retrofit feathers” [of course mammals don't need feathers to fly]. For Fodor, this means there are constraints “on what phenotypes can evolve that aren’t explained by natural selection.” This is just so wrong.

Natural selection explains perfectly well why pigs don’t have wings. Again it is pigs, not “phenotypes” that lack genes for wings. Lets look at the real question. Why do bats have wings. Bats and pigs are both mammals and they at one time shared (with many other kinds of animals) a common ancestor. The common ancestor to bats and pigs, et al, was a much more generalized animal to any of its many descendants.

Natural selection says that mutations with positive adaptive (reproductive) values that happened to the ancestral common ancestor and its offspring gave rise to all of its descendants different mutations leading to different adaptations to the many possible environments which these animals could live in. Bats have wings and pig’s don’t because the organisms that eventually turned into bats and pigs had genetic changes that allowed them to exploit different parts of our common earthly environment.

Fodor’s question doesn’t really make sense. Why don’t pigs have wings is the same as asking why didn’t pigs become bats. Or why are there pigs? Natural selection also answers the related question as to why horses don’t have a single horn on their foreheads.

Fodor calls this kind of speculation “channeling.” But all the restraints that have been placed on pigs to prevent from flying have channeled by the operations of natural selection. How would natural selection take place in order to result in a flying mammal. It is to the bat genome, not the pig genome that we should look. So much, I think, for the “feel” of the first alternative to natural selection. It really ends up supporting natural selection.

Let us look at Fodor’s second alternative and a get a “feel” for it as well. Fodor thinks that evolutionary traits that come about by natural selection are supposed to enhance fitness. So it a suite of traits shows up in the evolutionary record that doesn’t enhance fitness, something must be wrong with the theory of natural selection.

He discusses a forty year experiment to breed tameness into silver foxes. The experiment was successful and after thirty generations of inbreeding a strain of very tame foxes was the result. But besides tameness the foxes had many other new traits as well — floppy ears, short curly tails, short legs. etc.

He thinks this is evidence against adaptationism (natural selection). He says, “the ancillary phenotypic effects of selection for tameness seem to be perfectly arbitrary. In particular, they apparently aren’t adaptations; there isn’t any teleological explanation — any explanation in terms of fitness — as to why domesticated animals tend to have floppy ears [cats?].”

In the first place these foxes did not come about by natural selection, but by deliberate breeding. All tame foxes were bred by human design so any “ancillary” traits were bred also (who knows if they would have survived by unaided natural selective processes.”

In the second place, natural selection’s main point is that positive traits that further reproductive success will tend to be propagated, negative traits that hinder reproductive traits will tend to be eliminated, and neutral traits may or may not be eliminated. A neutral trait like floppy ears, associated with a positive trait like tameness (in the experiment) will get a free ride as a neutral trait even without a positive adaptive function.

There is nothing strange or mysterious about this. It is standard operating procedure in Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Although Fodor definitely would not agree, the floppy ears and other reproductively neutral traits are flukes.

I think nothing in his article poses either conceptual or empirical problems for the theory of evolution by means of natural selection as proposed by Darwin. As far as evolutionary psychologists and sociobiologists are concerned, let them come with specific genes located in the human genome for the characteristics they claim humans exhibit as a result of living in a primitive savanna like environment in the prehistoric past. The springs of human behavior are not frozen in the past.

Additional information:

*8 million Iraqis require emergency aid

*About one-fourth of Iraqi children are malnourished

*5 million Iraqis depend on the country’s food rationing system; only 3 million have reliable access to it

*3 to 4 million Iraqis are internally or internationally displaced

*80% of Iraqis lack effective sanitation

*70% lack sanitary water

*50% unemployment

*12,000 doctors have left Iraq due to the violence

– From the United Nations, International Red Crescent, Oxfam, IRIN News, United for Peace and Justice

I relate some pertinent facts about the current situation in Iraq from Packer’s article, then present my justifications for the above conclusion. He tells us that Moqtada al-Sadr (the Mahdi Army, a fearsome and powerful Shia militia is loyal to him) is “perhaps the most important political figure” in the country. A most interesting observation considering that the US has spent four years fighting in Iraq, and spent billions of dollars trying to undermine him. At one time Bush and his generals even talked about “arresting” him. The dreams of a paper tiger!

Packer’s article appeared before the Petraeus-Crocker farce was performed on Capitol Hill (and for Fox News) last week. He reported that everyone concerned knew in advance what they were going to say, namely “military progress, a political stalemate among Iraqis, more time needed.” He got that right.

Packer, who has been to Iraq, and whose New Yorker connections has given him access to the high and mighty, is in a position to tell us what the insider thinking is about Iraq, as opposed to the pabulum dished up in the mass popular media, And that is, with reference to the “military progress” that “the inadequacy of the surge is already clear, if one honestly assesses the daily lives of the Iraqis.” The fact that the surge is being touted by Bush, the Republicans, most of the press, and of course Petraeus (the new Westmoreland) is because none of them ultimately give a hoot about the daily lives of the Iraqis.

And, as any freshman ROTC student could tell Petraeus, when an incompetent, but highly armed conventional army floods an area, the insurgency melts away only to return after the invading troops have shot their wad. Thus, Packer writes, “The militias, which have become less conspicuous as they wait out the surge, are nevertheless growing in strength….”

The surge and heightened troop levels cannot be maintained. Special advisors to Gen. George Casey (Army chief of staff) have “estimated that the number of soldiers and marines who can be kept in Iraq into 2009 will be, at a maximum, a hundred and thirty thousand.” That is pre-surge level. They will be facing, if what Packer said is correct about the growing power of the militias, an even more formidable insurgency that will emerge. Then, the boys playing soldier at the Pentagon will have even more problems.

Packer next discusses a report entitled “Phased Transition” put out by a think tank called the Center for a New American Security, which he calls “center-left.” Only in America would this right wing pro-imperialist outfit be nominated “center-left.”

It argues for a reduction of troops to 60,000 by 2009 and a “complete withdrawal by 2012. Thus not only would Iraq be the subject for next year’s presidential election, but the next one after that as well. How long is Bush’s albatross to be us?

The purpose of this timetable is to allow us to train the Iraqis to take care of themselves. This is an old refrain and we have already seen how likely it is that the comprador group we placed in power is likely to pull this off.

Packer talked to Colin Kahl who teaches “security studies” at Georgetown and helped write the report. “Kahl argued, President Bush needs to be forced to compromise now, or else the war will end in a precipitate, chaotic flight.”

He then quotes Kahl directly, “If Bush keeps the pedal on the surge until the end of his Presidency, we will rocket off the cliff, and it guarantees that the next President will get elected on a pledge to get us out of Iraq now.” But that is just what the left, and I would argue, everyone who has the real interests of the American people at heart and is not a shill for the big corporations, wants. Not a rocket off a cliff, but a pledge to get us out of Iraq now. Perhaps, however, rocketing off a cliff would be less costly in terms of human life and the erosion of our own values through this mindless warmongering of the Republicans and their allies than prolonging the agony of defeat another four years.

The President and his general are telling us that the surge is working, especially in Anbar province where the Sunnis are “working with us.” But, Packer points out, “without a functioning state in Iraq, U.S. support of these Sunni forces could easily lead to renewed violence and warlordism.”

That the Iraqi “state” is nonfunctioning, a joke really, was recently demonstrated when it attempted to expel the U.S. State Department’s murderous mercenary private army, Blackwater, from the country. One phone call from Condoleezza Rice put Prime Minister al-Malaki in his place and let him know who really runs the show in Iraq: Blackwater stays.

So, what are the options for solving the problems we have created for ourselves and the Iraqis by Bush’s criminal intervention. Since Congress won’t impeach him and turn him and his accomplices over to an international war crimes tribunal and then pay for the reconstruction of Iraq and compensate the Iraqi victims of this mass murderers assault upon them (the only just solution), some less satisfying resolution is necessary.

How about “partition”? This is Senator Biden’s solution. He thinks he is playing Risk. “But,” Packer reminds us, “the idea of partition can’t be imposed by outsiders [sorry Senator] and, so far, has no support from Iraqis [except the Kurdish minority].”

There has been a positive development, from the secular point of view. That is that “Civil war and sectarian rule have tarnished the prestige of religious parties and increased the appeal of a nonsectarian government.” One of the weaknesses of this article is the lack of any comprehensive discussion of the role of the labor movement, or the Communist Party and other secular forces (the women’s movement for example) in the current struggle to rid the country of the illegal occupation.

But what if there is no good way to exit Iraq? What it the choice is either build up more troops and fight to the finish, or immediate withdrawal a la our flight from Saigon and the rest of Vietnam? Packer quotes Stephen Biddle (Council of Foreign Relations) who says all the step by step withdrawal plans involve a reduction of combat forces, but it is our forces that are protecting us and “capping violence around the country” so gradual withdrawal “means that the violence is only going to increase.” This increase will fuel demands to just get out entirely. So why not just “do it sooner” and save all the lives that would be lost in the meantime. An excellent argument for an immediate withdrawal.

Packer also gives us the opinions of David Kilcullen who was an advisor on General Petraeus’s staff. The issue for him is “What do we want Iraq to look like” once we are on the way out and finally gone. The question shows the problem of imperialism. It doesn’t matter what we want. Its up to the Iraqis to do what they want.

As long as we are in the “we want” mode the killing will go on. Kilcullen also participated in a “strategic-assessment team” (these people have no idea what they are doing) that at least put the lie to Bush’s version of what is going on in Iraq (democracy and freedom). The team decided that we should work, over the next two years, on attaining “sustainable security” but it also appears that most of the team “believed that it was too late to achieve this goal.” Nice.

We must work for “core American interests” in Iraq. Kilcullen lists six that he gave to the State Department and White House. We are really in a bad way if they hadn’t figured these out on their own. They are all either outrageous and/or ridiculous and are unattainable because of the war not attainable as a result of it. Here they are, with suitable comments of my own.

1. Keep the oil and gas flowing. The real purpose of the war — to steal the Iraqi oil, as even Greenspan now tacitly admits. It will flow after we leave.

2. No safe haven for Al Qaeda. The evidence is that Iraqis will get rid of Al Qaeda on their own. Al Qaeda gets more powerful because we are in Iraq.

3. Contain Iranian influence. Forget it.

4. Prevent a Rwanda scale humanitarian catastrophe. He’s got to be kidding. We have already caused a humanitarian catastrophe that is greater that Rwanda.

5. Restore American credibility. Get out of Iraq, stop threatening Iran, and put the screws on Israel until it makes an honest deal with the Palestinians, gets out the West Bank, and returns the Golan Heights. Otherwise, forget it.

At this point in his article Packer ceases to be a reporter and becomes an advocate for the failed imperialist policies of US monopoly capitalism. He also, if he really believes what he says, shows he has learned nothing about the causes and consequences of US policy.

“The notion,” he writes, “that Iraq and the Middle East will be more stable without an American occupation, as the Center for American Progress claims, misunderstands the role that America has come to play in Iraq: as a brake on the violent forces let loose by the war.”

Let me get this right. The US starts the war, it becomes violent, and the US is the brake to stop the violence. Mr. Packer should be a contestant on “Do You Know More than a Fifth Grader.” But he better not take the Middle East as one of his subjects. This is the argument the Germans gave after taking over Poland and other areas of Europe. Gott in Himmel, we can’t leave now, look at the violence that would breakout.

If we don’t remain an occupier, Packer says, “Iraq’s predatory neighbors will take advantage of the power vacuum to pursue their own interests.” Well, all the neighbors have said, and it is objectively true, that their best interests would be a free, independent and stable Iraq free of a foreign occupation. The only predator is the US who has invaded and taken over (or is still trying to) a country in a, lets hope, vain attempt to control its oil and set up a government to its liking regardless of the interests and desires of the people.

It is incredible both that Packer can advocate for such a brazen criminal continuation of war and murder and that The New Yorker would give him the pages to do so.

Packer also says, “the burden of proof lies on anyone who claims that Iraqis without Americans around won’t be substantially worse off and might even fare better.” This simple minded attempt to shift “the burden of proof” away from the warmongers to the peace movement and the critics of Bush’s folly won’t stand up.

The millions of Iraqi dead and wounded, the displacement of millions more as both internal and external refugees, the destruction of the country’s infrastructure, its medical and educational systems, the barbarous treatment of the civilian population by the occupation forces and its mercenary contingents, the attempts to privatize and loot its natural resources, the creation of sectarian violence, the murder of hundreds of thousands of its children, all this is the gift of the Americans and the continued occupation promises more of the same.

In the face of this The New Yorker has the cheek, and the moral insensitivity to publish an article that says that those who advocate peace and the cessation of war and occupation “have the burden of proof” that the Iraqi people would be better off without us. Well, just ask them. Every poll shows they want us gone, one way or the other gone, and they don’t want to be occupied. There has never been an imperialist power that didn’t think the “natives” were better off under its control than on their own.

Packer could care less for the Iraqi people. What is important is that “Iraq still matters to the United States, whoever is in the White House, and it will for years to come.” The reason? Iraq sits “in the geographical heart of the Middle East, on top of all that oil”– don’t forget that OIL (we want it desperately — it should be ours). Oh yes, there is “radicalism” too. Where does that come from? Could people be radical because we occupy their country? Let’s occupy their country to prevent radicalism.

Packer knows all of this by the way. But national (corporate) interest will out. “Whenever,” he writes, “this country decides that the bloody experience in Iraq requires the departure of American troops, complete disengagement [Iraqis be damned!] will be neither desirable nor possible [!]. We might want to be rid of Iraq, but Iraq won’t let it happened.” Not as long as it is “on top of all that oil.”

His opening sentence reflects the “the conventional view” about Tony Blair, a view that is, incidentally, true so far as it goes– i.e., Tony Blair “was a talented leader whose career was sadly over shadowed by Iraq.” Brooks thinks this view “is absurd.”

Brooks says that Blair wasn’t making an error of judgment when he went into Iraq along with Bush. His decision “grew out of the essence of who he is.” And that would be? Well Tariq Ali says Blair is a second rate politician with a third rate mind. That is one kind of essence.

He jumped into a war that was the result of lies and is responsible, along with Bush, for hundreds of thousands of needless deaths. That is the essence of who he is. Now Brooks will pull out the baloney to try and turn this sad and rotten essence into one of shining purity. God will even play a role (via a theologian) in the redemption of a man with the essence of a mass murderer.

We are told that Blair believes that globalization is making us all more dependent on one another and that “the world will flourish only if the international community enforces shared, universal values.” Such values, I presume, as waging wars of aggression and occupation on other people’s countries without the sanction of the UN and clearly in violation of the wishes of the international community.”

Actions speak louder than words. Blair believes nothing at all about a world of shared, universal values. He has his own values and if the world begs to differ, too bad.

Where do his values come from? It all began long ago when little Tony was 11 years old. His father had a stroke and Tony was led to the theologian John Macmurray. Brooks quotes Blair. “If you really want to understand what I’m all about you have to take a look at a guy called John Macmurray. It’s all there.”

So, lets take a look. By way of preface I can only say that the late John Macmurray would not take comfort in the thought that he was the inspiration for a war criminal.

There are certain themes running through the theology of Macmurray. One is that action should prevail over thinking. First comes the act, then reflection. Well, Blair did this in Iraq. First invade, then think about the consequences. It’s not really a very good philosophy, or in Macmurray’s case “theology.”

Macmurray has written that science “is characteristically Christian.” He calls it, “the intellectual life of faith.” But science deals with the physical world and empirical evidence. Faith deals with hopes and unseen non-empirical pseudo-entities. This is also characteristic of Blair who believes in “Iraqi democracy” with reference to a militia dominated fundamentalist Iraqi government. Faith based politics, yes, scientific understanding, no.

Macmurray also bases his thinking on the “God of the Hebrews” (the genocidal demon that was worshiped in Old Testament days) not the God of the Greeks (Zeus had a libido problem but he didn’t engage in genocide.) I think philosophical reason is really meant with respect to the Greeks.

More positively, Macmurray was interested in the “human community.” For him “”community means a “common life” through religion while “society” means a “common purpose” to be found through “politics.” Like many Islamists (and Blair’s buddy George Bush), Macmurray thinks politics should be suborned to religion. If Blair is really a Macmurryite he is a strange ally for the US which was founded on the separation of church and state. Maybe not so strange since Britain has a state church and president Bush, in complete violation of his oath to uphold the Constitution has. tried to break down the wall of separation between church and state.

Macmurray says life has two aspects. The first is the realm of the “functional” workaday world in which we live, it is a sphere of inequality (this view is amenable to conservative status quo thinking). The second is the realm of the “personal” where human equality reigns. In other words, as human persons we are all equal, but in the real world don’t forget to salute officers and bow and scrape before your betters. Or, as Macmurray puts it: “The functional life is for the personal life: the personal life is through the functional life.”

One of the great values celebrated by Macmurray is that of “freedom.” And now we get to Brooks again, and the “essence” of Tony Blair. Macmurray tells us that: “We can preserve our freedom only by sharing it.”

Tariq Ali is right. Only a third rate intellect would interpret this lofty theological abstraction as a license to wage an armed crusade against another people bringing them death and destruction and calling it “freedom.”

This is how Brooks tries to dress up Blair’s criminality and wretched chauvinistic beliefs. He quotes Blair on the war and aftermath of 9/11: “This is not a clash between civilizations. It is a clash about civilization [i.e., we are civilized. our enemies are uncivilized]. It is the age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who embrace and see opportunity in the modern world [such as being able to launch aggressive wars of conquest] and those who reject its existence.” Yes indeed. Tony Blair’s world of war and death, which he shares with president Bush, should be rejected, it is definitely about civilization and Blair is no spokesman for the side of the civilized.

Brooks now outdoes himself in illogicality in describing how Blair concluded he must support Bush’s middle eastern crusade.

Blair “concluded that Britain had to combat those who would divide the human community even without the support of the multilateral institutions that he cherished.”

But the multilateral institutions are the institutions that “the human community” has devised in order to help preserve itself from war and misadventure. What Brooks is saying is that Blair decided he must combat the human community to save the human community. Third rate thinking at its best. Brooks’s baloney, on the otherhand, is first rate.

We all know that capitalists guiding interest is to make the biggest possible profit. They hate regulations (bad for business) and when they are regulated will try to get around the regulations anyway they can.

The Bush administration, very capitalist friendly, has really helped the American capitalists by pushing deregulation, supporting “voluntary compliance” (i.e., no compliance), and failing to use the federal regulatory agencies to really regulate. Thus OSHA doesn’t inspect, the Labor Department doesn’t properly function, we don’t how much mad cow disease is in the country because of the Agriculture Department, unsafe drugs are on the market because of the FDA, etc., across. Bush is the best president from business, the worse for people.

Now the Chinese are finding out how capitalism works as well. The Times reported earlier that the same contaminant that is killing American pets is routinely put into people food in China as well as animal feed.

The chemical is melamine. Its has the wonderful property (besides making you sick and maybe killing you) of showing up on food testing not as melamine but as protein — it is also very cheap. So, if the food product you are making to sell doesn’t have enough protein so you could not past government inspection and sell it, just dump some melamine into it, definitely don’t list this in your ingredients, and Presto Change-O, your product now passes with flying colors as good nutritious food (just don’t eat any of it yourself, or, if its pet food, let you own pets near it.)

Even better, just use the melamine in your product because it is so cheap so you don’t have put so much expensive protein in your product in the first place.

This is par for the course for capitalism. The Times tells us that, “A similar practice once took place in the United States and in China involving a related compound called urea, but that compound is now more widely tested for and is banned from certain feeds in the United States.”

The Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Company, operating under the “its good to get rich slogan” is, the Times says, one of the two companies that sent the tainted wheat gluten to the US.

They got the stuff out of China by labeling it as nonfood so they were not inspected. That means they knew what was going on. They then sold it to the American pet food companies as a food additive. Goodbye Fluffy!

The theory is that the two firms that sold the food additive didn’t even make it (although they are on record as having done so). They just bought it from many little companies around China (the Chinese government said 25 other companies were in on it), which indicates that there is wide spread food contamination going on in the country.

“This is simple greed,” said Marion Nestle, an NYU professor of public health, food and nutrition. Its really not all that simple. It is rather just how capitalism works. It tries in every way to maximize its profits. That is why deregulation is a bad idea.

Capitalism is an inherently self destructive system, its leads to environmental pollution, wars to gain control of markets and resources, and exploitation of workers and consumers. The more government regulates it the less dangerous it is, but the danger will always be there until the day we can abolish the system altogether.

This little piece shows very clearly how the Bush Administration is its own worse enemy ( we already know it is the enemy of
the American and Iraqi people.)

What we find, big surprise, is, that while Bush makes his own “reality,” actual reality has been undercutting any chance for his
having a “victory” in Iraq.

The most revealing part of this little piece is the quotes from a gentleman named Michael Bell who was the chairman of the
International Reconstruction Fund Facility for Iraq. Mr. Bell, a Canadian ended his two year stint in March.

This fund is very important. After the US destroyed the Iraqi infrastructure, the population (most of whom now say they were better off under Saddam), were thrown upon hard times: no electricity, deteriorating living standards, etc. To keep the support of the people, and thus make an insurgency less likely or, at least, smaller and with less popular support, it was necessary to rapidly extend reconstruction aid to the population.

In order to do this you had to know what you were doing and have some idea about what the Iraqi people really wanted and needed. But the Bushites failed on both counts. They simply did what they wanted to do and assumed because that is what they wanted it would come about and the people would be happy and love us.

Instead our actions fueled the insurgency and destroyed any possibility that we could do meaningful reconstruction in Iraq. What did we do? I will just quote Mr. Bell, who tried his best to use the Fund on behalf of the Iraqi people. If Mr. Bush had just let him do his job he might not be neck deep in the Big Muddy right now.

“Reconstruction,” Mr. Bell said, “is difficult enough in a relatively pacific environment. In this environment it is almost impossible, if not impossible. Over all, the picture is dire, dire.” He had read a recent report saying that seven big reconstruction “successes” touted by the Bush administration as evidence of its progress were, in fact, defunct. This is really symbolic of Bush’s policy as a whole including General Westmoreland’s, excuse me, I mean General Petraeus’s [or is it Gen. Betray US?] big “surge.”

The failure of reconstruction was helped along, according to Mr. Bell, by both the US and UK because, instead of actually laying the foundations for sustainable reconstruction (training people for maintenance, for example) they insisted on expensive flashy propaganda coups, preferring instant gratification and currying domestic support for their war policies, but leaving the Iraqi people out of consideration except for trying to make them think they were getting real improvements.

“The objective,” Bell said, “was to improve the conditions of life for Iraqis through infrastructure so Iraqis would conclude that they were better off and prospering from the new situation. In retrospect, it was too much, to soon.” Since these “projects” did not make the people “better off” or “prosper”, the population became more hostile.

Bush also helped undermine his own propaganda by having as “an overriding objective” turning the infrastructure over to private, rather than public, ownership– something the Iraqis were not too keen about. No doubt because the contractors were mostly foreign and taking reconstruction money out of Iraq without really providing anything for the Iraqis.

And, growing instability reversed the flow of Iraqi professionals and skilled workers who had returned to help in reconstruction. With no security and ill planned projects, they soon left.

The UK is getting out of Iraq as soon as it can. It declared “victory” (or at least self-management by the Iraqi forces allied with the US and UK) in Basra where British forces are being withdrawn.

“The city,” Bell remarked, “is controlled by gangs. It is self-managing in a very primitive way. It is self-managing if you call a protracted series of microwars in the city normal.” As Basra goes so, the US will find, goes Baghdad.

And don’t blame the pro-US government for the current mess, Bell says.

It’s not a case of wanting or not wanting to deliver the goods on reconstruction. The “reality is that nobody can deliver the goods.” This, by the way, I think, is Bush’s big problem.

The Iraqi government is dysfunctional and will fall apart the minute the US leaves. But staying only makes matters worse. Staying in a situation that is getting worse runs the risk of having the government fall apart all around you a la Vietnam. What to do? Hope and pray you can hold on until January 2009 and turn the mess over to the next president. Then whatever happens will be his or her fault. What about all the people that will killed in the meantime. Tough petootey!

Particularly upsetting is US behavior. Much of the aid has been wasted and many projects have failed because US officials want to control everything [even though they are ignorant of the language and the feelings of the people.]

The Americans “go in and tell their guys how to do things. It’s a microcosm of what the Bush administration has tried to do with the intervention. But you can’t impose mindsets.”

But Bush still thinks he can impose his “mindset” on Iraq and the world. It is a narrow, fundamentalist, ignorant mindset. It is not the mindset of the majority of the American people. The Congress has the opportunity to send it packing. It should do so.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has publicly praised democracy and said he wants a more open society. The political testament of Long March veteran
Lu Dingyi (who died in the 1990s) which calls for change in the system has also recently been published.

None of this means that the government is interested in “Western style democracy.” Kahn doesn’t tell us why that is so, so I will. Western style democracy, or bourgeois democracy, has its roots in the English revolution of the 17th century and the Great French Revolution of the 18th. It is a system designed to maintain the capitalist class’s political domination and economic control and to ensure that state power does not fall into the hands of the working class.

Thus Western style democracy (including Swiss democracy) would be an inappropriate model for a communist government which represents the interests of classes antagonistic to the bourgeoisie (workers and peasants.) This does not mean that the bourgeoisie cannot be used to advance the economic development of the state and civil society, just as long as it does not gain control of the state apparatus as has happened in the former Soviet Union and other areas that were formerly socialist. A better model would be that of Cuba.

Kahn suggests that the Chinese leaders (Wen along with President Hu Jintao) may just be posing as “progressives” and trying to court younger party members and the intelligentsia in order to curry favor at this year’s upcoming party congress. The leadership is up for reelection at this congress (they have five year terms). The democracy advocates want more officials elected rather than appointed.

If this will happen or not is problematic. Officially the government says that China is already “democratic” because the party rules in the interest of the “demos”– i.e., “the people.” The question is, do the Chinese masses think this is the case or not.

Kahn next makes what I think is a false contrast. He says some democracy advocates are calling for the use of elections “as a force that can help party leaders stay in touch with the people and provide a popular check on corruption.” This is contrasted with what Kahn says would be “a new political system in which people choose their leaders in free elections.”

This seems to imply that nothing the party does short of giving up power (”a new political system”) would count as being “democratic” in the true (i.e., the bourgeois) sense. But capitalist “democracy” is not the only form of democracy possible.

Kahn says that President Hu, in an internal party document, said that “tight discipline” was needed “to prevent the promotion of a figure like the former Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.” Gorbachev is considered as “a traitor to socialism.”

I think Hu is on solid ground here. China right now is in the midst of an economic revolution consisting in the transition from a backward underdeveloped country with feudal remnants into an advanced industrial state. In the process many capitalist methods are being employed (and as a consequence a capitalist class is coming into existence and growing more powerful as time goes by).

In a transitional period such as this the Party must be firmly in control of both the political and economic levers of power. It would be naive not to believe that potential Chinese Gorbachev’s abound in and out of the party. No one who has seen what has happened to the Soviet people’s material interests, health, and well being as a consequence of Gorbachev’s counterrevolution would wish this on the Chinese people (except representatives of the capitalist powers.)

The fact that “freedom” and “democracy” are being widely discussed is, however, a progressive development. That they have “Chinese characteristics” rather than “Western” is only natural. Kahn quotes the economist Lu De who says, “What we are seeing is a repudiation of Deng Xiaoping’s edict that the party should focus exclusively on economic development.” I think this is an advance. However necessary Deng’s edict may have been at the time, it was one-sided and led to important socialist
values taking a back seat to economic development alone (such as the abandonment of socialized medicine and the rise of corruption.)

Mr. Lu, who advises the State Council (cabinet), also said, “I think Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao have caught up with the thinking of party leaders from an earlier era, who understood that political change and economic change had to proceed hand in hand. Of course, they must move step by step. It will not be one big leap and we’re there.”

But are the leaders sincere? Kahn suggests that they are not (just look at his headline). One retired official told him, he says, that, “They want democracy to belong to the party, not to people who oppose the party. If the party can define what democracy is, then it will not be as dangerous.”

Let us not treat this quote abstractly. Classes want to keep power. This quote applies to capitalist parties as well as socialist parties. The Republican Party in the US, for example, routinely attempts to interfere with and deny voting rights to people “who oppose the party.”

They challenge and intimidate minority voters at the polls, and try and disenfranchise whole segments of the population in some states only days before an election, and they enact laws regarding voter identification cards which discriminate against poor people, the elderly and non-English speaking citizens. I read about all this frequently in the Times.

The Republicans do this to keep power in the hands of the most reactionary sections of the capitalist ruling class in the US which their party represents. They want democracy to belong to their party and they define what it is – it’s being in favor of “free trade.” Don’t think the Communist Party of China, which represents the workers and peasants of China, is any less active in defending the interests of the classes it represents. Republicans are not bothered by what their party does and Chinese Communists should be not be bothered by what their party does. There is still class struggle going on in this world after all.

Earlier I said that socialist and bourgeois democracy were antithetical, but Marxist dialectics allows for historical antitheses to be synthesized and the result to be a higher developmental phase which retains what was most positive in each of the antitheses. Thus, when Prime Minister Wen says, “Democracy, rule of law, equality and fraternity do not belong solely to capitalism,” we have no reason to doubt his sincerity.

Kahn reports that President Hu has said the party should be more responsive to the masses, and has coined the term “harmonious society.” This slogan, he writes, “has become the ideological umbrella under which China has taken the first steps toward developing a redistributive welfare program.” I think it is a positive socialist value to redistribute wealth to the people, but I have reservations about the slogan. It smacks of “a state of the whole people” and seems to deny the existence of class struggle in China. Class struggle will be with us until we reach the stage of advanced communism and a classless society (if ever.)

So, is democracy fact or fiction in China? Once you realize that a concept such as “democracy” is not a “one size fits all” sort of concept, you rephrase the question to “what kind of democracy or what level of democracy exists in China?” The answer to this question will vary with each observer depending on his or her class outlook, political philosophy, and ideas about communism.

My own view is that the party is still committed to the socialist project (or why fear a Gorbachev), which is inherently democratic, and that the level of democratic rights is steadily increasing for the people of China: the increase being directly proportional to the material well being of the population and the ability of the CPC and its leadership to build a society committed to socialist construction.