I was talking with one of my grandsons on Christmas Eve about the development of quantum physics. During the discussion, my grandson, who's pretty well versed in just about everything, including politics, noted that Einstein was a committed Communist. I had known that, but I had never given politics in science much thought. I was aware that the Nazis burned pretty much everything dealing with 20th century physics, but I hadn't given that much thought, either. In discussing quantum physics further, I realized that pretty much everyone involved in the development of quantum mechanics, now, I guess, science, and even the development of the atom bomb were Marxists.
For those educated in the United States who think Marxism is just another name for people helping people, let me put the term in some context. Marxism grew out of the inequities that developed at the beginning of the industrial age, the first centuries of production based societies. Feudalism was the specific form of society at the time. At a distance, feudalism looks like the wealthy exploiting the poor, but, while there are always abuses when wealth is perpetuated, the reality was exactly the opposite. The times before the invention of production were pretty lean times, when the number of people outstripped the amount of resources and the basic resource was the land upon which to grow the food needed to survive. Territorial wars were constantly fought by expanding populations (or to get rid of expanding populations, note The Crusades). People need food to eat and when they don't have it, they will kill their neighbors to get it, in the case of the world, the neighbors being competing societies.
The land had to be protected and the strong among society became the protectors, or in some cases, the vanguard that ventured forth to capture other's lands. Thus, the strong protected the weak who were needed on the land to grow the food. The rule of feudal society was that the feudal nobility protected the food growers in exchange for a share of the food. Of course, the feudal nobility owned the land though the ultimate authority, the monarch, and the workers owned nothing much of anything, but the workers got fed and were protected in their activities.
When the Agricultural Revolution displaced vast numbers of the farmers, the nobility had to find other ways to meet their commitment to support the people. This led to the invention of the factory that created jobs for the dislocated farmers and led to production. Production produced vast wealth, and in the beginning, when England had a monopoly on production, the wage component of production, the component that replaced the obligation to provide food, clothing and shelter, was sufficient. However, when other countries began to become production based, the source of the raw materials and the markets for production became points of contention, replacing the territorial battles for land to grow food for simple survival. Instead of warring over food, nations began to war over resources and markets for production. The only component of production that was variable was wages. Just as famine could destroy the food supply, competition among nations destroyed the wage factor. Just to keep production going, wages were driven into the basement, creating the appearance of feudal lords profiting from the starvation wages of the workers.
While this was again the opposite of reality, if wages hadn't been driven down, the production would have closed, eliminating all wages together with the prosperity it produced, nations began to go to war simply because one country's competition was forcing another country's wages into the starvation zone. It isn't too hard to get a hungry population riled up for war, and that's pretty much the story of the 20th century. After two devastating world wars, we seem to have learned that production should not be destroyed, but preserved, because there are a lot more people without the prosperity production produces than there are with that prosperity. While maybe 5% of the world's population enjoyed that prosperity at the beginning of the 20th Century, probably 20% enjoy it now, and the goal is to increase that percentage. There is no secret that freedom and equality follow prosperity.
But the Marxist model was devised in the 19th Century, specifically early in the century when the inequities were great. The first expressions of Marxist ideology were the 1848 revolutions. While all of these were suppressed, it scared the heck out of pretty much everyone with prosperity, and the model of Marxism took root, the oppressed worker under the heels of the rich factory owner. Because Marx couldn't label the factory owners feudal lords and because he had absolutely no concept of economics, he invented the term capitalist as a pejorative, claiming that the factory owners aggregated capital by stealing profits from the workers in the form of reduced wages. Building factories did not, and does not, take amassing capital, it involves lending money into existence. The profit component of production is either interest, for money lent into existence, or dividends from existing money lent. Without the profit factor, there can be no factory because there will be no way to attract capital. Profit, in fact, the ability to pay interest and dividends, allocates money lent into existence into successful enterprises, enterprises that produce what consumers want. Profits are the only objective way to allocate resources to production. The profit component, however, is minimal when compared to the wage component and, in fact, the wage component is the most important component because, as Henry Ford put it, "if I don't pay my workers enough to buy the cars they make, who's going to buy the cars?"
Marx remained a philosophical construct until a new form of oppression developed to deal with the international conflicts over resources and markets that led to the 20th century wars. This new form of oppression took the form of dictatorships, governments that had seized power in the name of some glorious goal, but which, upon gaining power, established a secret police system, interrogation operations, inflexible ideologies against which to measure not only people's behavior (something feudal societies did simply to keep the peace) but also people's thought process. Prisons, concentration camps, population dislocations all became a part of this new form of government. While the governments took many forms, most were Marxist based, and even societies that were open, whose production was creating democratic forms of government and prosperity (it is impossible to have a closed government in a prosperous society, too many people have the time to have their say) had a form of Marxism.
The first form and probably the most prevalent, although one that does not utilize the repression of others, at least in its early stages, is socialism. Socialism, in fact, had its roots in governmental attempts to alleviate the adverse conditions to labor caused from international competition by taxing those with money to support those without resources. Communism is probably the best known form of Marxism, with the proposition that the state own the means of production. Nazism was another form of Marxism, with the proposition that the state does not have to own the means of production, but the owners of the means of production have to subordinate themselves to the interests of the state. Fascism, the Italian form of Marxism, involved the means of production be set up in 22 strictly supervised corporations. True Marxism was the claim Mao used to rule China, where there basically were no means of production (and Mao was the ultimate user of Marxism to gain power, he was probably the most bloodthirsty, albeit the most crafty, human being ever to set foot on the face of the Earth &endash; see Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday published by Knoff in 2005 if you have the stomach for 600 pages detailing some of the most horrific events I've ever read and I read the unabridged volumes of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, the indelible monument to Stalin). When Mao confiscated all of the iron and steel implements of the farmers, under the pretext of starting production, in the process leaving millions upon millions of his citizens to starve to death, he had no intention of jump-starting production. Rather, he was intent on building a Pacific fleet that could challenge the United States. Needless to say, history has shown that none of the Marxist systems produced prosperity of any sort, although Nazism's retention of private property allowed it to build up a vast military machine, and while Nazism is painted as being the only form of Marxism that is racist, every form of Marxism, because it leads to severely limited resources, becomes centered on ethnic and racial considerations.
Production societies, on the other hand, produce the prosperity that results in democracy. When there is plenty to go around, there is little reason for ethnic or racist restrictions, and socialist impulses are pretty much affordable as a result of the rising level of prosperity. While most of the members of democratic societies live from paycheck to paycheck, the paycheck has replaced the day-to-day reliance on the weather and the defense against outside invaders. In addition, members of prosperous societies have the ability to move around, not just within the country, but all over the world, something that didn't occur in feudal societies, where hardly anyone traveled further than 25 miles from where they were born unless it was to be maimed or killed in a war.
Which brings us to the subject of this column, Marxism and empirical science. When I thought about Marxism being pretty common to quantum theorists, I reasoned that theorists were theorists, most were extremely ideal, if not naive, and I could see why Marxism would take root in the, shall we say, vanguard, of empirical thought. As my grandson pointed out, Marxism doesn't influence empirical thought, although the great internal debate of these theorists, as evidenced by Einstein's famous comment, "God doesn't play dice with the world," went to the secular nature of the belief system. I couldn't, however, find Marxist footprints in quantum mechanics and thus I pretty much left the analogy alone.
Then I came across Ronald and Allis Radosh's Red Star Over Hollywood (Encounter Books, 2005). The Radoshes, both former card carrying Communist Party members and now anti-communists, subtitled their book The Film Colony's Long Romance with the Left. Again, I was more than familiar with the subject matter. After all, artists are notoriously idealistic and naive, and the efforts of the Communist Party to infiltrate the New York theater community and then the Hollywood movie community have been well documented and even covered by PBS. It's certainly no secret it infiltrated writers into the studio system, organized the back lot employees and used stars to front their front organizations. The fact that the Communist Party of the U.S. was funded by Moscow has been verified from documents from the once again Russian side, and the release of the Venona papers goes into detail about who specifically was on the Kremlin payroll. All of these things are pretty much old hat, and I wondered what new the Radoshes could add other than detail, of which, I admit, they provide plenty, including the interesting fact that Ronald Reagan, in his twenties, single-handedly stopped the takeover of the major studio unions by the communists using his oratorical skills and unbending determination. And he was a liberal Democrat at the time!
Nor was the Radosh's description of communist methodology new to me. Not only was the communist form of control well known by the fifties, it has seeped into what some might term effective management control of workers. It was the sheer fury of this control illustrated in the Party's Hollywood takeover effort combined with the detail, the repetitive attempt to use the methodology to keep everyone in line, that finally made me think once again about the analogy of Marxism to empirical science.
First off the line is recruits. The Communist Party didn't recruit so much as proselytize because its members were people who were looking for something. The proselytizing, of course, posited that communism held the answer to all the world's ills, and the prospective recruits were those who were missing something in their lives, had abandoned religion and main stream politics in the face of inequality, poverty and seemingly endless war. Of course, it was the bubble of prosperity that highlighted all these ills. When everyone is struggling, survival is the sole goal. When we become prosperous, we have time to think and we have time to read, travel, and see others less fortunate than ourselves. We naturally feel embarrassed when our prosperity is held up against the vast poverty of others. Some of us are driven out of empathy to act on the discrepancy, but we don't know how to, so we take up causes. The Communist Party merely had to proselytize that it had the answers in order to have interested people walk up to it.
The analogy is to those with a scientific bent who want to understand some of the bigger questions in life, who are we, why are we here, where are we, how did it get here, how do the things in the world get the way they are. These potential recruits to empirical science aren't solicited. Empirical science endlessly proselytizes that it has the answers, and interested people are attracted and walk in the empirical gates, the doors to the educational institutions that contains the received wisdom.
Wanting to join wasn't enough for the Communist Party, however. Not just anyone could join. First, voluminous reading was required, readings in Marx and other non understandable interpreters who had for a century split the hairs of Marxism in an attempt to make the ideal match reality. Hours of discussion groups were required, and the discussion leaders graded the recruits on their understanding and tried to fit them into future slots where they could prove of use to communism. Only after long and arduous vetting did the happy recruit receive his card in the Party. Sounds pretty familiar doesn't it? Years of arduous training and the newly minted empirical scientist is awarded with empirical credentials, a diploma in one of the many areas of interest in empirical science.
Now comes the really interesting part. Once admitted to the ranks of communism, the newly minted communist falls under the authority of the Party and has to support all aspects of communist doctrine mindlessly. This requires that he be aware of all the twists and turns the doctrine takes, keep up to date on the Party line so that anything he might say or do does not come into conflict with that doctrine. He must have all his speeches and writing vetted by appropriate members of the Party so that anything he says or does in public is preapproved. Sounds a little like peer review to me. And, of course, we know that all empirical scientists tow the line in their own fields and give blanket support for all pronouncements made by the empirical scientists in other fields.
What happens if the communist doesn't tow the line? First he must subject himself to self-criticism, and when the violator has evidenced sufficient remorse to make a convincing case, he is required to make a public admission of his errors and correct any comments he made or writings he published, contradicting, in many cases exactly what he had said or written before. If he doesn't, or the Party doesn't think him sincere, or if the damage is too great, he's kicked out.
Well, here's a difference from empirical science. The Communist Party gives its apostates a second chance. Empirical science just kicks your butt out and keeps on kicking until you're bloody dead.
However, what happens next brings the analogy right back to life. When the Party boots someone, it spends its time making sure the former communist's reputation is blackened totally, spreading lies and rumors everywhere. It attempts to keep others from employing them, it makes sure none of its members speaks to them. In short, it tries to disgrace them and ruin their lives.
Well, just read column 06-01 for the latest example of empirical viciousness, and this guy's acts were unintentional. Where empirical science has one-up on the Communist Party is, it's like the Communist Party in Russia before the fall of the Soviet Union. It's pervasive. It can actually cause a former member to lose his income, his career, his reputation, his friends, everything.
How's that for power?
And how's that for an accurate analogy?
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com