A Brief Note on Friedrich Engels (1884) on þe Relative Autonomy of þe State, & Worthy ¶s
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SUBJECT: A Brief Note on Friedrich Engels (1884) on the Relative Autonomy of the State
First, glossing the Communist Manifesto’s “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”—“Die moderne Staatsgewalt ist nur ein Ausschuß, der die gemeinschaftlichen Geschäfte der ganzen Bourgeoisklasse verwaltet”—“the modern state is nothing but an association for managing the affairs of the business class”:
Friedrich Engels (1884): The Relative Autonomy of the State <https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/03/friedrich-engels-1884-_the-origin-of-the-family-private-property-and-the-state_-the-state-is-normally-the-stat.html>: ‘The state... is normally the state of the most powerful, economically ruling class, which by its means becomes also the politically ruling class, and so acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed.... The ancient state was, above all, the state of the slave-owners for holding down the slaves, just as the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern representative state is the instrument for exploiting wage-labor by capital.
But Engels finds that the Communist Manifesto’s 1848 formulation is not adequate for any productive discussion of what was to him modern politics and of political strategy. And so in 1884 Engels issues a very important qualification indeed:
Exceptional periods, however, occur when the warring classes are so nearly equal in forces that the state power, as apparent mediator, acquires for the moment a certain independence in relation to both. This applies to the absolute monarchy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which balances the nobility and the bourgeoisie against one another, and to the Bonapartism of the First and particularly of the Second French Empire, which played off the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. The latest achievement in this line, in which ruler and ruled look equally comic, is the new German Empire of the Bismarckian nation; here the capitalists and the workers are balanced against one another and both of them fleeced for the benefit of the decayed Prussian cabbage-aquires.
In short, “the modern state is nothing other than an association for managing the common affairs of the business class” needs to be substantially qualified in every case the later (1884) Engels runs up against in his day:
Moreover, there is another qualification that Engels finds necessary: In the “low stage” of state development, property in its form of the extraction of resources is closely tied to the power to say what the law is and will be—to jurisdiction directly, to legislation, or to the choice of magistrates. But just as the modern market economy makes everyone formally equal in their economic rights, so the “highest stage” state—the democratic republic— makes everyone formally equal in their political rights:
Further, in most historical states the rights conceded to citizens are graded on a property basis, whereby it is directly admitted that the state is an organization for the protection of the possessing class.... This political recognition of property differences... marks a low stage in the development of the state. The highest form of the state, the democratic republic, which in our modern social conditions becomes more and more an unavoidable necessity and is the form of state in which alone the last decisive battle between proletariat and bourgeoisie... no longer officially recognizes differences of property.
But in Engels’s eyes formal equality is in fact the opposite of substantive equality, because of simple corruption and, indirectly, “by an alliance between the government and the stock exchange”:
Wealth here employs its power indirectly, but all the more surely. It does this... by plain corruption of officials... and by an alliance between the government and the stock exchange, which is effected all the more easily the higher the state debt mounts and the more the joint-stock companies concentrate in their hands not only transport but also production itself…. In addition to America, the latest French republic illustrates this strikingly, and honest little Switzerland has also given a creditable performance in this field.
And the control of the government by the stock exchange is not limited to democratic republics:
But that a democratic republic is not essential to this brotherly bond between government and stock exchange is proved not only by England, but also by the new German Empire, where it is difficult to say who scored most by the introduction of universal suffrage, Bismarck or the Bleichröder bank.
It is, however, not completely clear to me what Engels is pointing to as this “alliance between the government and the stock exchange”. Today it is very clear: in the public sphere the government’s performance is scored by the media and by the well-thinking by whether stocks go up or not. But this was not true, or not true to the same degree, back in 1884.
Finally, Engels needs to reassure the faithful, and to say that, in spite of what he sees around him, eventually the New Jerusalem will descend from the Heavens, adorned like a bride:
The oppressed class... the proletariat... in the measure in which it matures towards its self-emancipation... constitutes itself as its own party and votes for its own representatives, not those of the capitalists.... On the day when the thermometer of universal suffrage shows boiling-point among the workers, they as well as the capitalists will know where they stand…
¶s:
I am finding it increasingly hard to believe that Elon Musk is a Turing-class entity, rather than some pattern-matching algorithm that, as Matthew Yglesias likes to say, is most helpfully analyzed by “adopting a non-intentional stance and attributing behavior to hormonal fluctuations, caffeine consumption, serotonin levels or what have you”:
Annabelle Timsit: Elon Musk Calls Tesla Electric Car Factories ‘Gigantic Money Furnaces’: ‘Factories in Austin and Berlin are ‘losing billions of dollars’ amid supply-chain disruptions and challenges in battery manufacturing…. “There should be like a giant roaring sound, which is the sound of money on fire,” he added. Both factories opened earlier this year to much fanfare…. Musk said these issues would “get fixed real fast, but it requires a lot of attention.”… Musk told Tesla employees in June, after the interview was taped, that 10 percent of the company’s salaried workforce would be laid off as he expressed concerns about a possible future recession in the United States…
How incredibly far we are from being able to perform first-principles analyses of biological systems. Finding hierarchy-based ways of conceptualizing and classifying is our only hope for generations to come. And yet even with our own microelectronic systems, there is enough bug=based leakages across hierarchy levels that we have explicitly designed in to keep us jumping. What will we do with biological systems where the only bug-catcher is Darwin?:
Bharath Ramsundar (2016): The Ferocious Complexity Of The Cell: ‘Fifty years ago, the first molecular dynamics papers allowed scientists to exhaustively simulate systems with a few dozen atoms for picoseconds. Today, due to tremendous gains in computational capability from Moore’s law, and due to significant gains in algorithmic sophisticiation from fifty years of research, modern scientists can simulate systems with hundreds of thousands of atoms for milliseconds at a time…. The scope of this achievement should not be underestimated; the advent of these techniques along with the maturation of deep-learning has permitted a host of start-ups (1, 2, 3, etc) to investigate diseases using tools that were hitherto unimaginable. The dramatic progress of computational methods suggests that one day scientists should be able to exhaustively understand complete human cells…. Following the historical example … and assuming that Moore’s law continues in some form, we are at least 50 years of hard research from achieving thorough understanding of the simplest of human cells…. How far is human science from understanding a human brain?… Assuming Moore’s law continues, we are at least 100 years of hard research from achieving thorough understanding of the human brain…. Both estimates above are likely low. An important, but often ignored fact about biological systems is that all nontrivial biomolecules exhibit significant quantum entanglement. The wavefunctions of biological macromolecules are quite complex, and until recently have remained beyond the reach of even the most approximate solvers of Schrodinger’s equation. As a result, most simulations of biomolecular systems use crude approximation to handle fundamental biological phenomenon such as phosphorylation or ATP processing. More accurate simulations of cells will require extremely large quantum simulations on a scale far beyond today’s capabilities. We have to assume that a Moore’s law for quantum computing will emerge…
LINK: <https://rbharath.github.io/the-ferocious-complexity-of-the-cell/>
I have not read this. But is seems important to me, important enough that I should move the book to the very top of the pile:
Timothy Burke: The Read: Daniel Laurison, Producing Politics: ‘There’s a good analysis… of why parties are in many ways so very far away from the communities that make up their political base—and why many idealistic young people who want to forge a relationship to the party they prefer end up alienated by being used as canvassing foot soldiers, a grueling and unpleasant task that is undertaken mostly by organizations that are paying for canvas operations to increase their on-paper membership rolls. (The short time I worked for a PIRG while in college was easily the worst work experience I have ever had.)… [The] social glue that welcomes people into an elite identity (often through selective higher education)—that sense that you are in charge of managing these predictable, controllable bundles of people and things, of discerning how atomistic individuals scale up into communities, electorates, populations, groups, nations, economies. And the one thing that can’t be abided in that work-defined identity is the empirical and philosophical fact of unpredictability and uncontrollability that is rooted in… humanity…
LINK:
Also briefly noted: https://ec22.sigecom.org/