Pathfinders: Earth Version Two (2007)

The Pathfinders Column from the September 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Earth Version Two 

Possibly the deepest fault-line in the territory of that large and disparate body of people describing or thinking of themselves as ‘socialist’ concerns the question whether people are either smart enough to organise their own revolution or dumb enough to have to be led to it. On one side we have the ‘vanguardists’, a motley collection of would-be leaders convinced, mostly on the basis of historical arguments relating to under-educated rural peasants, that the vast majority of the world’s people have always needed and will always need to be told what to do. Thus, many left-wing organisations feature a top-down hierarchical structure, entirely the same as the capitalist structures they supposedly abhor. On the other side we have another motley collection of would-be revolutionaries, sometimes called ‘libertarians’, who consider this kind of hierarchical thinking to be precisely part of the problem, and do not foresee any realistic prospect of emancipation from capitalism while this sort of oppressive mentality remains a part of the picture.

There are interesting hints that the same ambivalent attitude towards the working class is to be found among scientists too. While pundits often debate the question of what workers think of science, rarely does anyone ask what scientists think of workers. Perhaps it is supposed that the boffins are above such value-judgments, solely concerned with their test-tubes and tunnelling microscopes. But of course, scientists are human too, and it would be nothing less than astonishing if they didn’t share some of society’s prejudices. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, for example, plainly struggles to contain his contempt for weak-minded people who believe in elves, pixies and celestial beings, having convinced himself that religion is the root of all evil despite the abundant evidence that atheists can be evil too. In a recent discussion with the eminent physicist Lawrence M Krauss, the two debate the best way to go about weening the population away from fairy stories and into the sunlit uplands of rational science (Scientific American, July 07). The ‘softly softly’ Krauss seems to persuade the firebrand Dawkins to the conclusion that the working class must be ‘seduced’ out of ignorance rather than beaten over the head with it, a conclusion one can’t imagine Dawkins ever sticking to. But what is uncomfortably apparent in their language is a mental image of the worker as an Alabama redneck with a gun in one hand, a crucifix in the other, and who has only ever read two books, both of them about UFO’s.

Of course, it may be true, as Sam Goldwyn used to say, that nobody ever went broke underestimating the public intelligence, and the resurgence of Christian fundamentalism and anti-evolution in America will certainly lend weight to that particular prejudice. But the last time ‘Intelligent Design’ (creationism) was in the news, it was being publicly humiliated in Pennsylvania as working class parents, some of them Christians, took the battle for rationality to court and forced the entire Dover School board of governors, who advocated teaching creationism in class, to resign in ignominy.

In the past, the views of individual scientists about the mental or intellectual capabilities of workers was a matter merely of private discussion. Now, however, the question has begun to erupt into the foreground, and all because of ‘Web 2.0’.

The World Wide Web is changing fast, and whether we like it or not, it has become interactive. More and more, on every hard news or information site, we are seeing invitations to readers to send in their pictures, their articles, reportage or opinions. This is not simply a crafty way to pad out pages at no expense, it is what is called ‘user-generated content’, the new fully interactive Web – Version Two Point Nought – where every consumer is potentially a producer. And the implications are beginning to expose a fault-line in society which exactly mirrors that found among radical political groups. For some, the ‘democratisation’ of the means of communication marks a thrilling phase-change in the pace of human progress. For others, it is the start of a catastrophic dumbing-down which threatens to drown civilisation in a welter of mediocrity.

Leading the charge against what he sees as a colonisation of genuine expertise by an invasion of insipid, inaccurate and second-rate vanity publishing is the Californian entrepreneur Andrew Keen, who argues in his controversial book The Cult of the Amateur that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment” (quoted in New York Times, June 29). And why might this be? Because the crowd is now in charge, and “history has proven that the crowd is not often very wise, embracing unwise ideas like slavery, infanticide, George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, Britney Spears.” This is a curious argument, considering that the same crowd subsequently abolished slavery and infanticide, and will very likely do the same to the war in Iraq and even, with a bit of luck, Britney Spears. Keen is obviously not keen on the politics of Web 2.0, likening it to Marxism or a ‘communist utopia’: “It worships the creative amateur: the self-taught filmmaker, the dorm-room musician, the unpublished writer. It suggests that everyone—even the most poorly educated and inarticulate amongst us—can and should use digital media to express and realize themselves.” This last quotation comes from his entry in Wikipedia, a user-generated phenomenon which Keen has stated he despises, because anyone can write anything they like in it without being a tenured professor, on the basis that the crowd holds more collective wisdom than the individual. To Keen, this is tantamount to pulling down the Library of Congress and replacing it with the Tower of Babel.

Keen and others have made much of Wikipedia’s potential for inaccuracy, while absurdly ignoring the fact that Wikipedia is dynamically self-correcting. One may as justly accuse science of getting things wrong sometimes. Indeed, comparison of Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica articles on science by the magazine Nature revealed a roughly equal number of errors in both (BBC Online, March 24, 06).

Ridiculed by the ‘digerati’ as a mastodon railing against the warming winds of change, Keen is certainly a minority voice, although probably the vocal end of a significantly large silent rearguard. Whereas elitist notions of worker stupidity tend to predominate in left-wing circles, they are definitely infra dig among the online community. And to give credit to Keen, he is honest enough to admit that he may have overstated his case: “I think I idealised mainstream media … I concentrated on the good things. I didn’t write about the Sun newspaper. I didn’t write about Fox” (Guardian, July 20). No, he didn’t. And he didn’t consider the fact either that his historical crowds, wherever they acted stupidly, undoubtedly did so because the ruling elites kept knowledge to themselves in order to maintain their power and prestige. If the advent of Web 2.0 forces this kind of prejudice into the foreground, so much the better. Keen, if he gets lonely, could always go and join the mastodons of the left-wing. Socialists however will feel more at home among the trail-blazing digerati of the interactive revolution. Roll on Earth 2.0.

Paddy Shannon

Jenks on politics. (1905)

From the July 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

By Politics we mean the business of Government, that is to say, the control and management of people living together in a Society. A Society, again, is a group or mass of people, bound together by a certain common principle or object. A mere chance crowd is not a Society; it has no definite object, it collects and disperses at the whim of the moment, its members recognise no duties towards one another. It has no history, no organisation.

Professor Jenks.

Pathfinders: Crowd Atlas (2013)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Crowds are supposed to be predictable, but they’re not, and you can never be entirely sure what they’re going to think and do next. The British governing class found that out just recently when, to its disgust and embarrassment, the death of one particularly obnoxious old fart in her care home at the Ritz prompted, not the expected outpouring of respectful eulogies, but thoroughly tasteless ‘death parties’ and the explosive propulsion up the pop charts of a silly song entitled ‘Ding Dong the Witch is Dead’.

The nature of crowds is changing. They used to be made up of bystanders, innocent and often ignorant observers at some remove from the action. Today, crowds are the action, the mass protagonist, a new type of collective intellectual resource made possible by the wired world. According to the reasoning, if one person with a computer is smart, then a crowd of ‘n’ people is smart to the power of ‘n’. If the individual knows her local geography, then the crowd is an atlas. This collective thinktanking is called crowdsourcing  and is all the rage these days among nerds, netheads, geeks, social media junkies and other tech-savvies who despite this probably get out more than we do. Normally they see themselves as virtuous heralds of a bright and innocent future, but in Boston Massachusetts after the recent marathon bombing, it all went hideously wrong. A crowdsourced amateur photo-enquiry was launched and the wrong people got ‘identified’ as bombers, forcing them into hiding in fear of their lives. The organiser on Reddit issued a sincere and abashed apology, but the fiasco was a sobering lesson to the digerati that despite their supposed sophistication and tech know-how, there’s still a fine line between a crowd and a lynch mob.

Crowdsourced labour in the form of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk comes in for sharp criticism too, on the grounds that it exploits a great number of anonymous workers who get paid next to nothing for their efforts. Though it’s true the contributors don’t get paid much, this overlooks their intrinsic motivations. They’re not really in it for the money anyway.

Crowdsourcing is generating a lot of excitement. Crowdsourcing is already being used as a translation service, beating the pants out of machine translators. There is talk of using it as a missing persons agency. It has already been used to solve a number of scientific and technological problems including some prize competitions, such as the Netflix algorithm Challenge, the DARPA balloon experiment and the X Prize. It is an increasingly favoured form of low-risk investment, used to fund start-ups traditional investors wouldn’t look at. Now Crowdmed, a start-up medical diagnostic service, is hoping to exploit this collective intelligence in a novel way (‘How crowds, not doctors or supercomputers, could diagnose rare diseases’, Gigaom.com, 16 April).

The implications for capitalism are ambiguous. Of course it is all in favour of innovation which leads to new sales and new profits. But is there a downside of having smart crowds? Could it be that crowdsourcing is smuggling in, and is itself part of, a set of new crowd-based political attitudes too?

Those that believe that nothing ever changes must have their heads inserted somewhere dank and dark, because we are living in the middle of one of the greatest human revolutions of all time, and nobody is really sure where it’s taking us. Politically, ideas which seemed immutable are being challenged openly, specifically ideas about leaders and followers, and the sacred cow of private ownership. A significant property of aggregated humans is that they are more knowledgeable and hence more likely to come up with right answers than individuals, even individual experts. This is one of the founding principle of socialism, so it’s not surprising that it’s spawning challenges to old capitalist shibboleths. First there is Open Source, the idea that information wants to be free and that therefore intellectual ideas and collaboration should be free too. From this follows by extension the idea that all software should be free, and not just software. There is considerable and growing opposition to genome patenting, on the grounds that living organisms should not be owned. An extension of this militancy against ownership is the aspiring ‘respectability’ of digital piracy culture, and the hero-worship of Julian Assange and Wikileaks. With 3D printing the militancy will extend beyond the binary into the physical. And in response to a recession which is blatantly massacring the livelihoods of the world’s poor while leaving the rich not only untouched but actually richer than ever, we see the new moral challenges of the Occupy Movement and other related protests. As the stock of politicians falls ever lower, and with it the credibility of sole leadership as a concept, the smart crowd brings with it a new sense of potency. Taking all this together, are we seeing the emergence of some kind of broad-based communistic trend? 

We wish. To be sure, these aren’t new protests or impulses, and the digital pioneers don’t necessarily join the dots and see their ideals as logically anti-capitalist. Each generation reinvents the ideas afresh, as if they had never been conceived before, but there is something different this time round. Now they have a radical new force behind them, the engine of a communications revolution. There’s a sense of a monstrous genie climbing out of a tiny bottle. Workers have always been angry and uppity, but now they’ve got something which is genuinely dangerous to capitalism. They’ve got smart.

In terms of material productive capability, the world could have turned socialist a hundred years ago. But culturally and socially it was still backward, mired in tribal prejudices and rigid top-down control of information. Instead of turning socialist it turned to world war, twice. Could it do so again, in an age where your ‘enemy’ is an email away and every skirmish and scandal is on Youtube? Maybe, but we hope not.

Capitalism doesn’t like too much democracy. No democracy is bad for business, but too much is worse. Capitalist leaders depend on a kind of confidence trick in which ‘democracy’ means ‘rule by the people’ as long as the people are kept disorganised, confused and distracted, in fear of ‘chaos’ and the spectre of ‘mob-rule’. But democracy and mob-rule are the same thing, the only difference being information. When you have a globally-connected population with good information, new things are possible, politically as well as technologically.

The digerati are excited and for good reason. It’s as if the Earth is slowly growing itself a brain, huge, superfast and super-connected. Not too many of them yet are asking the key question a socialist would ask – will such a sentient super-entity tolerate a regime in which one tiny portion of it, like a malignant cancer, is allowed to destroy the entire organism in blind reckless pursuit of its own growth? Would a thinking, rational planet tolerate capitalism? Even leaving aside any moral questions of social justice, such a tolerance would surely be seen as ultimately suicidal. In the long run, a wired world would have to reject such destructive lack of concern for its best collective interests. And if in the long run, why not in the short run? Why not now, in fact? What is there to wait for?

Can capitalism continue to keep control when such questions are hanging in the air? That depends on the people, and that is the trouble with crowds. You can never be entirely sure what they’re going to think and do next.

Paddy Shannon

French Revolution (1968)

Book Reviews from the June 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

History of the French Revolution by Jules Michelet (edited by Gordon Wright) University of Chicago Press. 32s

The Crowd in the French Revolution by George F. Rudé OUP Paperback 8s. 6d.

At some stage in the year 1789—the precise moment is debatable—there occurred in France a great social and political upheaval. This French Revolution gave rise, in embryonic form, to important concepts such as the class struggle, revolutionary dictatorship and, in the later stages, “elitist egalitarianism" in the form of Babeuf’s Conspiracy of the Equals.

Those, however, who see the revolution as a popular, egalitarian movement have failed to understand its true character. The French Revolution was a successful attempt by the bourgeoisie to destroy the feudalism which shackled their economic enterprise with old-fashioned regulations and which denied them the political rights they felt were their due. Throughout the, revolution’s course it was the bourgeoisie which controlled the various legislatures and executives, and its results were trade and commerce emancipated from feudalism, a law banning any trade unions (le loi Le Chapelier) and a system of indirect election benefitting the well-to-do. This was, of course, before Napoleon imposed upon the revolution the dynastic ambitions of the Buonaparte family.

There are, indeed, those who have protested that the first National Assembly, far from being a body composed of strictly bourgeois elements, was in fact packed with lawyers and other members of the liberal professions. But lawyers have always represented the interests of trade, commerce and industry—activities which are essential to their prosperity. The doctors, journalists and other professional people who sat as legislators were all notably in sympathy with liberal economic doctrines, and they were always shown to be afraid of popular uprisings such as that in Paris in July 1789. Thus the professions had effectively allied themselves with merchants, industrialists, bankers and agriculturalists, and could be relied upon to serve their interest.

These two books represent, in widely differing form, attempts to understand the role of the common people in the revolution. Michelet’s History first appeared in seventeen volumes in the 1840’s (of which this edition is a continuous selection). As such it is a good example of, and a grand monument to its age. Michelet is as much French Romaniticism’s representative historian as Victor Hugo is its representative literary figure. With a vigorous style, full of life, Michelet gives us his impassioned, apocalyptic and panoramic view of the revolution as the climax of the spiritual battle between the Catholic Order and the “principle of Justice”.

Unfortunately, in his eagerness to present the revolution as the victory of a united force—“the people”—Michelet overlooks important points of detail and produces certain inaccuracies. So insistent is he, for instance, in asserting that the revolution was a spontaneous outbreak of “Justice” and “the People” against a misery and oppression which he paints very eloquently, that he overlooks important differences in the interests of the bourgeoisie and “the people”, the main one being the contradictory demands of free trade and controlled bread prices.

Michelet’s book, however, has certain valuable aspects. It contains a brilliantly eloquent denunciation of Christian theology and extremely shrewd assessments of the true character of the so-called Absolute Monarchy and the mediaeval church in France.

Totally different in character and outlook is George Rudé The Crowd in the French Revolution. Originally published in 1959 and now available in paperback, it was described by one historian as “a significant book which opened up some entirely new sources and showed how statistical precision can be brought to the study of riots”. It is indeed a close study of the behaviour and composition of the Parisian crowd. Rudé, writing from the Marxist viewpoint, is concerned with breaking away from the tradition which until recent times treated the crowd, as he says, “as a disembodied abstraction and the personification of good or evil”, and with examining the crowd in a more scientific spirit. (The book is amply supplied with tables showing the composition, geographically and class-wise, of the crowd and the prices of various commodities at different stages of the revolution).

The crowd, or sans-culottes—called thus because they could not afford breeches—was a heterogeneous body, composed not only of the working class but of small shopkeepers and independent craftsmen as well. Rudé paints a picture of a working class still in transition between feudal and capitalist societies, and not truly distinct from other sans-cullote elements.

However, although the wage-earners in Paris had as yet developed little class solidarity, they did have a vague idea of their cohesion as a class. The breakup of the guild system had accentuated the gulf between masters and journeymen, and there had been a strike as early as 1724. Disputes over wages and conditions continued up till 1789. However, the large demands which food made upon a man’s wages produced a situation where the crowd was concerned more with keeping down prices than with raising wages.

Rudé points out that a variety of motives existed for the crowd’s revolutionary actions, among them dismay at high prices and uncertain food supplies, a belief at first in the king as its champion against the aristocracy and the church, and then in a republic. The crowd was not a totally inarticulate mob merely seeking immediate economic gains. Although economic factors may have influenced them, strongly and often, these went hand in hand with beliefs, however unsophisticated, in political principles.

In this context, Rudé well notes that the bourgeoisie, even at that early stage, were determined to prevent the wage earners gaining any influence, and that, although “whenever it (the crowd) advanced . . .  the aims of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, it has been represented as the embodiment of all popular and Republican virtues”, the bourgeoisie were unwilling to share power with this “virtuous” body. Property qualifications were required from would-be representatives. Rudé also points out “the ferocity with which the bourgeois . . .  of the National Guard dispersed the Champs de Mars demonstration” (a protest at Louis XVI’s flight from France).

Rudé’s book is an informative and extremely readable study of the popular aspect of the French Revolution.

Amit Pandya