Four questions I asked Bard recently

[Bard's answers have been shortened for readability].

Q1. Tariq Ali said once that Ernest Mandel confided to him, very close to death, that he thought that the revolution he had fought for his entire life would now not become a reality for perhaps hundreds of years. He said that this view should not be shared with the comrades of the Fourth International because it would only demoralise them. Do you have the exact quote?

I'm unable to locate the exact quote from Tariq Ali about Ernest Mandel's pessimistic view of a future revolution. While it's possible such a conversation occurred, without a specific source or context, it's difficult to verify its authenticity.

However, there are some details to consider:

* Mandel's optimism: Ernest Mandel was known for his optimistic and unwavering belief in the inevitability of socialist revolution. This is reflected throughout his writings and interviews. A complete reversal of such a deeply held conviction towards the end of his life seems somewhat contradictory.

* Ali's perspective: Tariq Ali has been a vocal critic of certain Trotskyist tendencies, including Mandel's Fourth International. While he respected Mandel personally, there might be an element of bias, intentional or unintentional, in his recollection of a private conversation.

* Lack of supporting evidence: Despite extensive research, there appears to be no other mention of this conversation or Mandel's supposed pessimism in biographies, articles, or interviews related to either figure.

[Follow-up question]: Tariq Ali may have deleted the recollection and the quote. Perhaps it's still in an Internet Archive formed soon after Mandel's death (which was when?).

You're right, it's possible that Tariq Ali may have removed the recollection or quote about Ernest Mandel's pessimism. It's also a good suggestion to check internet archives from around the time of Mandel's death, which was on July 23, 1995. …

Comment: I distinctly recall reading this around the time of Mandel's death. It would not surprise me if Tariq came under great pressure to delete the observation based on Mandel's clear wishes. I believe Mandel drew his final bleak conclusion from the utter collapse of the Soviet bloc and its total reversion to capitalism.

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Q2. Can the Pauli Exclusion Principle be derived from QFT?

Yes, the Pauli Exclusion Principle can be derived from Quantum Field Theory (QFT), although it's not a straightforward or simple derivation. QFT offers a deeper understanding of why this fundamental principle holds true for fermions (particles with half-integer spin).

Here's a simplified explanation:

* Particles in QFT: In QFT, particles are not localized objects but excitations of underlying fields. Each type of particle corresponds to a specific type of field. For example, the electron field describes the presence or absence of electrons at different points in space and time.

* Creation and annihilation operators: To manipulate these fields, QFT uses creation and annihilation operators. Creation operators add a particle to the field at a specific location, while annihilation operators remove one.

* Anticommutation relations: For fermionic fields, creation and annihilation operators obey anticommutation relations. These relations essentially say that you cannot have two identical fermions in the same quantum state. Trying to add a second fermion to an already occupied state results in zero, meaning the state no longer exists.

This anticommutation behavior is a consequence of the deeper mathematical and statistical properties of fermionic fields, which originate from the connection between spin and statistics, known as the spin-statistics theorem.

Comment: insofar as I understand this, I think it's accurate.

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Q3. In what book does an author from the Jesus Seminar discuss the formation of the Resurrection narrative from the Jewish ritual of the act of atonement and its two lambs/(goats).

Unfortunately, your description doesn't pinpoint a single book from a Jesus Seminar author. Several possibilities exist, as the Seminar involved multiple scholars researching diverse themes. Here are some potential leads:

1. The Resurrection of Jesus: A Sourcebook (Jesus Seminar Guides Vol 4) by Robert W. Funk: This book features essays by various Seminar members, including one by Arthur Dewey on the Gospel of Peter, which contains a resurrection narrative with unique parallels to Jewish sacrificial rituals.

2. The Historical Jesus: Five Views That Matter by John Dominic Crossan: Crossan, a prominent Jesus Seminar member, explored Jewish roots of early Christianity in several works.

3. Beyond Jesus: The Search for the Real Rabbi by Marcus Borg: Borg, another key figure in the Jesus Seminar, emphasized Jesus' Jewish context and explored how early Christian communities adapted and reinterpreted existing traditions.

4. Who Killed Jesus? The Resurrection of Myth and Reason by Robert M. Price: While not directly affiliated with the Jesus Seminar, Price is a prominent critic of traditional interpretations of the resurrection and delves into its possible cultural and mythological roots.

Comment: In fact the right answer is "The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus" by John Dominic Crossan. And it's the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur.

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Q4. Reacher Hope and Despair book?

The book you're referring to is most likely "Nothing to Lose" by Lee Child, the 12th novel in the Jack Reacher series. It features two towns with contrasting names: Hope and Despair.

Plot Summary:

Reacher is on a cross-country trek when he stumbles upon these two towns in Colorado. Hope is a small, friendly community, while Despair is a desolate, one-man town controlled by a fanatical preacher.

Reacher's curiosity is piqued by the stark contrast between the two towns, and he soon finds himself uncovering dark secrets lurking beneath the surface of Despair. The town is dominated by a powerful recycling plant that seems to be more than what it meets the eye.

As Reacher digs deeper, he becomes entangled in a web of corruption, violence, and conspiracy. He must use his formidable skills and unwavering sense of justice to protect the innocent and expose the truth about Despair.

Comment: spot on.

A Roadmap of Crisis Theories

This post could also be entitled, 'The Gurus of Contemporary Marxist Theory', interpreting 'Marxist' rather broadly.

A year ago, when I started to pay more attention to economics, I was clueless as to where to go for high-quality Marxist analysis (even at the start of my search I was not in any doubt that neoclassical economics - in its denial of the class structure of capitalism - was intellectually bankrupt).

I knew about Ernest Mandel of course, but who else was worth reading, and what were the key issues in contemporary debates?

On the latter question I soon discovered that the most important issue was, of course, the Marxist theory of crisis.

From Michael Roberts

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On page 15 of Michael Roberts's book, "The Long Depression", he shows a variant of the roadmap below from the San Francisco Bay Area Marxist Study Group (click on image to make larger and more legible).

San Francisco Bay Area Marxist Study Group via Nick Johnson

Incidentally I'm comfortable with Michael Roberts's take on the world because, like him, I'm hard left on the diagram above all the way down 😎.

Roberts is also not that tribal, seeking to understand rather than denounce. This is just as well as he secretly seems as convinced as I am that capitalism has at least another century before the imminence of total automation make production solely for the valorisation of capital essentially impossible.

This view of capitalism's likely future rather depends upon Marx's law of the ‘tendency of the rate of profit to fall’ (TRPF) applying over the long-term. I'm good with that as an empirical reality, increasing automation being the causal mechanism.

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So who are the top gurus of Marxist thinking today? I've already mentioned Michael Roberts who has a prolific blog. I should also mention Sam Williams at "A Critique of Crisis Theory".

Moving now to the superstars, we have Dave Harvey, Michael Heinrich and Anwar Shaikh. I have bought books authored by all three. I'd also mention Andrew Kliman, whose book (below) I've just acquired.

Amazon link

While not a Marxist, radical Keynesian Steve Keen gets an honourable mention for bearing the wrath and fury of the entire neoclassical establishment with courage and fortitude. Roberts writes about him here.

So I'm very much a work-in-progress at the moment, struggling hard to get an intuitive view of the dynamics of capitalist economies at all time scales (Michael Roberts's views on cycles are persuasive).

In the background Marx's own writings, Capital Vols 2, 3 and 4 are still on the stack.

The next Kondratiev wave?

Wikipedia article

Fortunate we are to develop our careers in the rising phase of a Kondratiev wave. As new platform technology is widely introduced, the economy grows, wages and salaries rise and a host of fascinating and challenging socio-technological problems present themselves. Work can be fun!

Yes, I remember the late 80s through the mid-2000s, when the Internet was bright and young and we made a new world of computing and telecoms!

The stagnation and depression phase of a Kondratiev wave is something else. The economy flatlines, wages and careers stagnate, everything is flat and immobile; the story of the last ten years.

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A new wave starts with new platform technologies, sufficiently mature to make a practical difference, which revolutionise production at a higher level. At the same time, the required (and vast) capital investment has to be profitable with a promise of demand sufficient to absorb the new products.

Are we there yet?

It's been predicted for a while now that the next Kondratiev wave will be driven by a combination of AI (in its new neural net incarnation), robotics and genomics - driving industries such as pharmaceuticals and healthcare - but in practice almost everything.

I don't think we're at the lift-off point yet. None of these technologies are ready for prime-time: they're niche and require too much scarce expertise to make work. Nor is it clear that the political conditions are in place for massive new investments.

Peter Turchin has predicted that we're in for a rough decade, suggesting civil turmoil until the mid-twenties. His view may be no more than inappropriate curve-fitting: we shall see.

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Ernest Mandel (Late Capitalism - PDF) correctly observed that massive investments in transformational new technologies will not occur unless they are profitable, which, he argues, requires that working class resistance (to losing jobs and perhaps lower wages) has been broken. He sees fascism and the second world war (thirties and forties) and Thatcher's union-busting (eighties) as typical precursors to new waves.

The next wave would, however, seem to require very little in the way of cheap unskilled labour (which in fact it proposes to - eventually - replace). If we take Google as the current industry leader in next-wave technologies, the economic and political strength of the working class en large hardly seems to matter as regards their truly enormous investment in AI and robotics.

But if the impact of the next wave will be the massive elimination of both middle class and working class jobs, then a precondition for across-the-board capital investment would surely have to be a belief that such high rates of job loss and unemployment could be successfully achieved.

Is such an outcome politically deliverable today? Plainly not.

I anticipate the next decade to be one of the steady imposition of job-elimination technologies, accompanied by increasing worker resistance. Those states which succeed by force and/or inducements in advancing total automation will open the floodgates for the next wave.

Revolution back on the agenda?

Amazon Link

Marxist theory has a 'non-constructive' kind of proof that the capitalist mode of production is not the final form of society. This is simply the fact that capitalism is a class society: private ownership of the means of production (factories, machines, land, raw materials, etc) ensures that the production process replicates a class of capital-owners on the one hand, engaged in commodity production for exchange in the market, and a class of workers on the other, who own only their ability to productively labour and can do so only through employment by capitalists.

Surely this asymmetry in social role between bourgeoisie and proletariat will not echo down the centuries for ever?

So far, so arid. But Marxism also has a seemingly-ethical dimension. It is claimed that capitalism cannot develop the productive forces of society without ongoing oppression of the mass of the people. So it's not only rather inelegant as a social-structuring mechanism, it's also inefficient and bad.

You won't get a good answer from Marxists as to whether capitalism has a built-in failure mode. Some have thought that it will collapse through its own contradictions (Marx's theory of the declining rate of profit is often fingered as the proximate mechanism) but as V. I. Lenin observed,

"... there is no such thing as an absolutely hopeless situation, since the bourgeoisie can – in principle – always find a way out."

No one disagrees however that capitalism is subject to regular cycles of boom-and-bust. In the 'bust' phases the elites are always just fine; it's the masses which end up unemployed and desperate. (I remind you about Peter Turchin's forthcoming book, "Ages of Discord", although I believe Charles Murray's "Coming Apart" would tide you over until September).

Marxist theory suggests that the working class can take advantage of an acute crisis to transcend capitalist relations of production, (this would be the violent revolution, led by a revolutionary communist party), and bring about a post-capitalist society in transition to communism.

With 168 years of research since the publication of the Communist Manifesto (1848) what can we say about the viability of such a post-capitalist society?

Marx very wisely declined to speculate - there simply wasn't the data. This meant of course that his discussion of the target society was very abstract - and in some cases plain weird (Chapter 2):

"... nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.

"Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.

"Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women.

"For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private."

Lenin, having observed workers and peasants councils (soviets) in the Paris Commune and the 1905 revolution in Russia proposed that the politics and economics of the post-capitalist society would indeed be organised by a hierarchy of soviets (local, regional, national, by industry and so forth).

How would this work in detail? I recall Ernest Mandel suggesting that opinion polls might do the work of capitalist speculative investment in new product introduction, although I'm not sure that Apple would ever have happened if it had required a senior soviet to vote the financial resources. The socialist Steve Jobs would have had plenty of oversight in his work, and would not have been permitted remuneration beyond that of any 'skilled worker'.

So here is the heart of the problem. Marxists have supposed that absent capitalist reification - the opacity of social relationships leading to atomisation of society - humanity's inherent social solidarity would emerge and we would all work cooperatively together to eliminate oppression and develop society's productive forces in harmony together indefinitely.

This was the root of E. O. Wilson's famous critique of Marxism, "Wonderful theory, wrong species."

Human nature makes us rather clannish and nepotistic, with sharp clines of empathy. Given that we are not all clones of each other, this makes rational evolutionary sense so will not go away.

What would actually happen in the post-revolutionary state? We know what Oscar Wilde thought about socialism, 'too many meetings', and we know what happened to the post-revolutionary states in Russia, Eastern Europe and China - bureaucratisation and stagnation.

Stalinism was explained away as 'inadequate development of the productive forces' but Marxist blank-slatism is the real villain here. In the end, the people who control resources at the centre of society will make decisions based on their own interests and all the 'delegated powers' and 'rights of recall' will count for nothing, as the mass of society gives up on 'all those endless meetings' and demobilises.

When it comes down to it, we just don't care that much about non family-and-friends.

Is there a form of society which is post-capitalist, freer and more potentially successful? I have no idea, but the Marxist model in its current human-nature-naive form isn't it.

Perhaps a combination of super-automation and widely-spread social ownership of the robots will propel every last one of us, proletarian or bourgeois, to the status of ancient Greek aristocrats with a lifetime of luxury to look forward to.

Sounds as likely as anything else I've heard about the future.

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This is not as bizarre or speculative as you might think.

Improving AI-driven automation will increase overall productivity and decrease costs for things like robotic personal assistants (just beyond the state of the art right now).

This could eventually fund a 'basic income' which, with a mature virtual reality infrastructure, could keep the left-hand side of the bell curve quiescent for ever. They might even tell you they were already in paradise - before returning to 'Call of Duty VR'. No doubt there will be more highbrow versions extending - how far, I wonder? - up the right-hand side.

In such a process of runaway automation, note that the former working class has in fact been expelled from the process of production. Literally, they are no longer proletarian, but a group wholly parasitic upon the automated economy.

An analogy would be to imagine a people who inhabited such a benevolent natural environment that all their needs from the most basic (food, shelter) to the most refined were instantly and effortlessly available to hand.

If such an AI-automation economy is the means by which 'communism' (full abundance) is to be achieved, we should be careful what we wish for.

As well as the dysgenic dangers of relaxed selection (which we already experience in the West), I suspect that without any meaningful challenges, the population would rapidly disintegrate into chaos, anomie and violence .. unless this utopia provides for omnipresent VR capable of realising any fantasy-endeavour whatsoever.

And it was for this that the great wheel of human history turned?

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The second part of this article: "Communism would be like - what?".

Click on the link to read it.

The commie robots are coming!

The Economist Blog has a post, Real Robot Talk, which asks what we do when the approaching army of cheap, smart robots makes it not cost-effective to employ the left-hand side of the bell curve.

Suggestions include legislating (in a Luddite manner) to ban such technology, or just accepting that masses of people will never find a productive job .. and simply pay them an entitlement wage - humans as pets.

Of course, as AI programs like IBM's Watson suggest, it's only a matter of time until the right-hand side of the bell curve faces a similar prospect. What on earth are we all going to do then?

I even remember having these discussions in the 1970s as a young marxist, when Ernest Mandel wrote that a society with 100% automation could not be capitalist: no work so no one got paid and there was no demand. Communism via automation not revolution.