Neuromyths and Neurosexism
May 18, 2009
SEARCHING OUT DIFFERENCE – neuromyths and neurosexism
Anarchist communists believe in an egalitarian society, where people are no longer judged on differences in ability and are no more or less entitled to the benefits from our collective society. As long as it is not used to discriminate, we just don’t see difference as a problem. But could this make us insensitive to scientific claims about the discovery of innate differences between men and women, or do these claims need to be better understood, and challenged by non-experts?
Over the last couple of decades, intense interest in brain research, including the 1990s ‘Decade of the Brain’, has helped bring together many different fields of scientific enquiry, especially biology with psychology. From biology, the physical structure of animal and human brains and their electrical and chemical processes are better understood than ever. Computer imaging like MRI scans, as used in medicine, are being applied to find out how brains change when people perform basic tasks with words or pictures. Animal and human behaviours, and theories of the mind from psychology, can now be put to the test by looking for variations in chemistry, electrical activity or blood flow in the brain. Some of these experiments have been directed at searching for differences between the sexes and factors that might be related to sexuality. Where differences have been detected, it is tempting to feel that we are nearer the truth than ever.
On the other hand, we know that scientific enquiry can so easily be used to back up prejudice. In the 19th century almost all scientists believed that people of colour and women were intellectually inferior to men and this just needed proving. An experiment with brain size by anthropologist and craniologist Paul Broca, performed by filling up skulls with seeds and measuring the difference in volume, would do nicely. Since the female brains were on average 10% lighter that the males’, this proved a lack of the region of the brain where the intellect was located! Most notoriously, in 1879 Gustav Le Bon used these results to compare the brain size of women unfavourably with those of gorillas, children and “savages”, using this as good reason why women should not be educated. By 1909, it was clear that brain size was really just a reflection of body size. Never mind that any connection between brain size and intellect is a fantasy. Never mind that even the figure of 10% from original data is questionable due to age, disease, and other effects on body growth not being controlled (most of the women in the original experiments were older than the men, and brains can shrink with age-related degenerative diseases). Apart from size, supposed differences in the number of folds on the surface of one part of the brain showed women’s inferiority; then, in 1909, it was shown that there was no difference. The story goes on and on, with differences in variability of brains being used to show male superiority – men were less “average” than women, an idea that carried over into the IQ tests of the 1970s. A similar story from the 19th century can be told about the linking of left-handedness to criminality, and incidentally, the possibility of brain abnormality causing criminal behaviour was investigated only as long ago as 1997 to try and explain Ulrike Meinhoff’s ‘slide into terror’ as a member of Red Army Faction – her brain had been preserved for 26 years, then given to a neurologist!
Over many decades, genetics has provided insight into sex differences at a molecular level. Before discovery of DNA, it was already understood that certain diseases are inherited differently by male and female children. This is described in terms of passing on chromosomes, DNA sections of a person’s entire genome that are present in cells of the body. Most cells have all the chromosomes, but sperm and eggs have only one of either sex chromosome, X or Y. When the egg and sperm come together, the foetus’ cells become either XX (female) or XY (male). This is not always the case, though, and some people have XXY, XXXY, XYY, although having a Y is usually necessary to give you balls, so to speak (apart from the rare ‘XX male’ condition where the relevant SRY gene from Y jumps to the X). It becomes more complex still. Hormones are involved with a chain of events that activates a male baby’s SRY gene and results in him growing testes. Some of the same hormones, and others, are involved continually after birth. These levels of so-called male and female sex hormones in the body are not static over time or age. For example, testosterone is thought of as the male hormone, but many women have higher levels than men. Levels change over a woman’s menstrual cycle and with age. Coming sexually aroused makes hormone levels go up temporarily, and so on. A lot more is now known about how the brain takes part in processes involving hormones. For example, some receptors in the brain respond to hormones from other parts of the body. Interestingly, most testosterone has to be converted to oestrogen (a so-called female sex hormone) before it is received by the brain, so the actual effect of hormones on the brain is very similar in men and women.
With all this knowledge, it would be nice to think things have changed in the 21st century from the days of Gustav Le Bon, but it seems that sexism is alive and kicking, and we can now talk reasonably about neurosexism. Books entitled ‘The Female Brain’ and ideas of left-brain versus right-brain types of people are now part of popular culture. They use a mixture of science and myth to explain why women don’t get so bored when ironing, why working women inevitably get confused juggling work and home life, can’t fly planes safely and so on. Many of these ideas have some origin in scientific experiments which attempt to measure hormone or brain activity levels. When a difference is found, explanations about innate, ‘hard-wired’ behaviours are usually offered. More ludicrously, origins of these behaviours within our evolutionary past are explained using theories about the way early ‘hunter gatherer’ societies could have been structured. For example, you obviously need a different brain to go hunting, an unpredictable activity, than to find nuts and grubs, or stay at home cleaning the cave, don’t you? These kinds of stories are woven from studies of “primitive” tribes living now, since the fossil record tells us so little. One brilliant example of the kind of madness coming out of the field of ‘evolutionary psychology’ is a study claiming to explain why girls prefer pink, since prehistoric gathering required identifying pink berries, apparently. Never mind that the study on 21st century twenty-somethings only asked about preference and not ability to distinguish colours, you only have to go back to 1914-18 to find magazines saying things like: “There has been a great diversity of opinion on the subject, but the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger color is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” (Ladies Home Journal, 1918). Pink for girls came in the 1940s. Oops, so much for the prehistoric berry theory then.
For another example of neurosexism, let’s look at the idea of spatial awareness differences between genders, arising from psychology experiments where people sit down to look at and compare shapes, or locate objects on a page. Rats running around and getting lost in mazes have also been studied. These experiments have arguably shown some differences between sexes, and it is from these that popular books back up their just-so stories, like why women can’t read maps or park cars as well as men. Still, a difference is a difference, right? Not quite. Aside from the possibility of different life-experiences, what was once thought of as better general spatial awareness in men is now known to be much more complicated. With further research, on average, women seem to be better at some spatial tests than men and vice versa. So, was it that the definition of “spatial” was not well enough defined, or is there not really so much difference? The goal posts move yet again. Neuroscientists also claim that there are different “thinking styles” in men and women, or in homosexual and heterosexual people.
Now bring in the hormone levels and MRI scans. People doing spatial or other cognitive tests (visual, audio or language tasks) have hormone levels measured in their blood, saliva or urine. Can a difference in hormone level be related to their ability to perform the task? Bizarrely, in some tests men with higher hormone levels do worse than other men, but women with higher than average hormone levels do better! So is there really a causal link between hormones and spatial test results, or was is just due to individuals having spent more playing with lego as children? As with hormone levels, studies with MRI scans claim to have shown differences between men and women in the way particular volumes of the brain have greater or less blood flow when doing a task. Recently, though, it seems that many of these differences go away when the experiments are done properly. In spite of early experiments to the contrary, MRI now provides evidence against both localisation (psychological events relating only to defined locations in the brain), and lateralisation (psychological events relating mainly to only one side of the brain). This of course puts, or should put, into question previous experiments that purport to show innate and permanent differences between men and women. Unfortunately, these neuromyths are hanging on so strongly and are now so pervasive in society that educationalists are starting to worry that learning in schools will be affected by this assumed knowledge with little scientific basis.
One example of how things can come unstuck was a study of gender identity in girls with a condition called adrenal hyperplasia, who have masculinised genitals. Data came from asking their mothers about behaviour that was compared to a sister without the condition. Results of one study showed evidence of increased energetic play, or “romping”, which is normally attributed to boys. Quite apart from the possibility of mothers treating sisters differently, or typecasting gender behaviours, the killer blow came in a later study comparing children with adrenal hyperplasia and those with diabetes. Both groups were found to exhibit the energetic behaviour, suggesting that childhood illness in general was the common factor, nothing to do with gender identity. But without this last study to show otherwise, how many of us would continue to believe the gender identity theory?
So, as revolutionaries, we have to be careful not to fall into the neuromyth trap. The assumed “facts” about difference gleaned from scientific experiments have to be understood in greater depth and broken down before taking any media headline even slightly seriously. Was the experiment just a psychology experiment asking a bunch of student volunteers to look at pictures, or did it involve some measurement of hormones or brain activity? How was the hormone level measured, and was menstrual cycle taken into account? Was the experiment done on rats where the results may or may not apply to humans? Could the results have an environmental origin, as in the example above? Does a scientist doing a psychology experiment really have the expertise to make claims about hormone levels or judge theories about prehistoric society, or are they making connections that are just not there, based on prejudice? Do they perhaps want it to be true, like Simon Le Vay who hoped his (flawed) experiments showing brain differences between homo- and heterosexuals could help lesbian and gay men become more accepted? Are they even a racist like James Watson, one of the co-discoverers of DNA who got a Nobel prize? (Rosalind Franklin, the woman on the research team, didn’t, by the way!) This is not to say it’s easy to get to the bottom of media headlines about gay-genes or female brains, especially as the details of the experiments are buried in scientific journals that you have to pay for unless you study or work in a university.
Finally, here are two things that often get left out of discussions about innate abilities or behaviour. Firstly, we know that it is possible to change our ability by practising a task or change behaviour by learning to think differently. It may take a few hours or days or years, but we know we get better over time when we practise something, the opposite if we don’t. One practised individual can easily overcome small differences in averages between experimental groups of men/women or gay/straight (assuming these differences exist at all). So to a great extent we can just choose what to become good at, given the opportunity. Secondly, in spite of inequality in upbringing, education and diet, cultural diversity, and discrimination due to racism, sexism and homophobia, the amazing thing about human beings is the overriding similarity in so many of our abilities and capabilities. How much more will this be so when inequalities are removed as they would be in an anarchist communist society?
The main sources for this article were:
• Steven Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 1996.
• Lesley Roberts, Sexing the Brain, 1999.
• Steven Rose, The 21st-Century Brain, 2005.
• John Hall, Neuroscience and education – what can brain science contribute to teaching and learning?, 2005.
• Betta Schnitzel, Gender and ethically relevant issues of visualizations in the life sciences, 2006.
• Ben Goldacre (Bad Science blog), Pink pink pink pink pink moan, 2007.
• Greg Downey (Neuroanthropology blog), Neurosexism, size dimorphism and not-so-‘hard-wiring’, 2008.
Expanding the Anti-Primitivist Library
May 3, 2009
I just added another anti-primitivist text to the sidebar links. This one, Critiquing Primitivism, Anarcho-Primitivism, and General Anti-Civilizationalism, was written by a revolutionary socialist rather than an anarchist.
So if primitivism is such a completely absurd idea, why waste your time arguing against it and its adherents? It is after all an extremely fragile ideology once it is put to the microscope. My primary point of contention with the primitivist school of thought is how, both by implication and often in its calls, seeks to have its followers reject rationalism for pseudo-mysticism and “oneness” with nature. If we look back on history we see that they are far from the first irrational ecological movement to do so. A good third of the German Nazi party came from forest-worshipping cults and soil movements that sprung up in Germany in the aftermath of World War I.
Some Anarchist Principles
May 1, 2009
The local (Chicago) group I am involved with, Four Star Anarchist Organization, recently celebrated its one-year anniversary by publishing its guiding Statement of Principles. This is meant to be a short and accessible overview of our politics and goals, without going into detail on strategy or specific ideological points (we’ll address those, as they arise, in other published statements). It’s rather difficult to collectively write political statements –especially short ones — that aren’t laden with jargon or anarchist in-group terminology, but I think we did a decent job. We also made an effort to talk more about what we want, rather than just throwing out a laundry list of things we opposed. Feedback is, of course, appreciated.
Here is the statement in full:
The Four Star Anarchist Organization believes all people must have control over the basic conditions of their lives. Core values of cooperation, equality, and direct democracy guide our struggle toward a free society that transforms our relationships with our neighborhoods, workplaces, culture, the world in which we live, and each other.
- In our families, women, children, and all members must have equality and freedom from violence. We must be free to develop healthy, supportive relationships of our choosing as opposed to living conditions and arrangements resulting from economic, religious, cultural, or government coercion.
- In our neighborhoods, community and economic development must be freely decided by all. All people are entitled to quality housing, safe communities, healthcare, education, and other necessities of life.
- In our workplaces, we must have direct democratic control over the conditions of our labor and effort. Bosses must be replaced by the cooperative decisions and actions of those who work in homes, stores, offices, hospitals, schools, factories, and all other workplaces. This work must be based on fulfilling real needs rather than creating profits for the wealthy.
- In our communities, people must be free to develop and maintain culture–art, music, sport, and food–that reflects the best part of daily life in our society. Justice, respect, and passion can only thrive in a world where our popular culture is both social and cooperative.
- In our world as a whole, we must engage scientific principles and appropriate technologies to ensure a thriving and sustainable planet for all. Most people are experts on their own needs and we are able to solve even the biggest problems when we work together.
Four Star is committed to struggling against the lethal combination of oppression and domination that characterizes life in our society: capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, environmental devastation, and the state. Our vision is to help develop affinity and empower people by providing direct support to groups, communities, and individuals who are identifying solutions in their lives. To make this happen, we involve ourselves with social movements and promote anarchism, direct democracy, and militant direct action.
Think GalactiCon
April 30, 2009
I’m thinking of putting together a panel/workshop for the ThinkGalactiCon radical sci-fi convention in Chicago (June 26-28). So far what I have in mind is along the lines of discussing feminism and transhumanism — specifically why, despite its emphasis on reproductive and morphological freedom, transhuman sci-fi, writings, and activism are all male-dominated areas. There is a lot of related material that could fit into such a discussion: eugenics issues, uploading/resleeving and gender identity, repro tech, and so on.
That’s one idea anyway. Another is to discuss sci-fi examples of using H+ technologies (specifically AI, nano, and communications tech) to achieve anarchist/horizontal/egalitarian societies and/or social change. Perhaps related to this could be the development of an anarchist approach to science and technology.
Any of our readers planning on going? Have an interest in any particular topic? You can see some of the other panel/workshop ideas being discussed here.
Twitter Revolution
April 19, 2009
Twitter’s been getting a lot of hype lately, but this account of its role in organizing protests against the Moldovan elections is interesting:
The elections brought a larger-than-expected victory for the incumbent Communist party. “We decided to organise a flash mob for the same day using Twitter, as well as networking sites and SMS.” With no recent history of mass protests in Moldova, “we expected at the most a couple of hundred friends, friends of friends, and colleagues”, she said. “When we went to the square, there were 20,000 people waiting there. It was unbelievable.”
The demonstrations continued into Tuesday peacefully. But later that day, with no response from the government, protesters swept police aside to storm the parliament building and the towering presidential palace opposite. Fire broke out in one wing of the parliament, and the young protesters vented their fury by wrecking computers and office furniture.
“Not only did we underestimate the power of Twitter and the internet, we also underestimated the explosive anger among young people at the government’s policies and electoral fraud,” said Morar.
This morning election officials in Moldova began a recount of votes, which was ordered by President Vladimir Voronin following the protests.
Via grinding.be
FBI Spyware **Updated**
April 18, 2009
Some more details have emerged about the spyware that the FBI has used in a number of cases to gather evidence. It’s safe bet to say they use software like this for political surveillance and not just criminal investigations.
What does the software do? According to Wired:
The software’s primary utility appears to be in tracking down suspects that use proxy servers or anonymizing websites to cover their tracks.
Naturally, quite a few radicals use anonymizers specifically to deter government surveillance. Wired also has more details:
it gathers and reports a computer’s IP address; MAC address; open ports; a list of running programs; the operating system type, version and serial number; preferred internet browser and version; the computer’s registered owner and registered company name; the current logged-in user name and the last-visited URL.
After sending the information to the FBI, the CIPAV settles into a silent “pen register” mode, in which it lurks on the target computer and monitors its internet use, logging the IP address of every server to which the machine connects.
The documents shed some light on how the FBI sneaks the CIPAV onto a target’s machine, hinting that the bureau may be using one or more web browser vulnerabilities. In several of the cases outlined, the FBI hosted the CIPAV on a website, and tricked the target into clicking on a link.
The Wired article suggests that the Feds routinely seek out search warrants in order to use this spyware, but given the continued expansion of state surveillance powers and their documented willingness to regularly break their own rules, this shouldn’t be assumed.
One question to wonder is: if details on this spyware were to come to light, would non-US based security software vendors enable their programs to detect it?
UPDATE (4/19): Wired also posted the actual documents, and they note the feds also talk about engaging in wireless hacking.
Image credit: Sophos
Pirate Bay Bad News
April 17, 2009
So the Pirate Bay lost their Court case, which is a shame. What really made me nearly choke on my breakfast though was this quote from one of the music industry mouthpieces:
“There has been a perception that piracy is OK and that the music industry should just have to accept it. This verdict will change that.”
This quote couldn’t illustrate more how clueless they are, and why they are ulrimately doomed to failure. As a friend of mine put it, widespread cultural attitudes are not going to change because of laws, so no matter how many people they prosecute and put in jail, people are not going to just turn around and uninstall their torrent clients. Instead, they’re going to get more pissed off, fight back more aggressively, and in the end they’ll win.
On a tangent, however, while reading up on the Pirate Bay stuff, this also came to my attention — that the fourth defendent in the case is actually a well-known suspected neo-nazi. This doesn’t seem to have been widely reported, but it looks like the Pirate Bay crew took in serious donations from Carl Lundstrom, who is heavily involved in extreme-right politics.
Some of the news regarding the links between Lundstrom and the Pirate Bay crew seems exaggerated (claims that he was a stakeholder, for example), and the Pirate Bay trio also claim that Lundstrom was included in the lawsuit because he has a bad reputation and so it helps to make them look bad. When it comes down to it, however, there are no excuses for making such alliances, even if the Pirate Bay was only taking donated money and equipment. If anything, that potentially puts them in a position where they hold obligations to an extreme right figure.
While the Pirate Bay’s fight should be supported, their actual politics have often come across as shallow and sometimes opportunistic in the past, which is unfortunate. Likewise, working with the extreme right in any capacity is something that can only be condemned.
Image credit: Atom X
Anarcho-Futurist Games
April 17, 2009
One of my recurring critiques of the anarchist movement is that it is focused too much in the past, whether that means adhering to the philosophies of thinkers who died a century ago or glorifying and seeking to replicate ad nauseum more recent victories like the Battle of Seattle. In relation to transhumanism, the anarchist movement is certainly either blind — or worse, reactionary, like the primitivists — when it comes to envisioning some of the practical and liberatory uses of technology to create the society we envision. When you factor in that anarchists hope to establish a future horizontalist social system, you would think there would be more effort placed into strategically planning how we go from here to there.
When it comes to the current economic crisis, there’s been a lot of effort to simply explain what’s going on and what the causes were. Even though there’s general acceptance that capitalism is going to be transformed once again, there’s hasn’t been much done to forecast what the outcomes might be. This is important for developing an anarchist strategy to this crisis, as the organizing to take advantage of an economic collapse is going to be quite different from organizing in anticipation of a more repressive yet social democratic state.
Guessing the future is never easy. Most futurists get it wrong, sometimes drastically so. Transformative black swans such as personal computing or the internet are often overlooked entirely. The point of playing the forecasting game isn’t too predict with absolute accuracy, however. Futurists typically assemble different scenarios that represent likely, or at least possible, outcomes, and then use these as a way to think about what *might* occur. This scenario-based approach lets people think about and prepare for the future with some flexibility, and also allows us to identify what some of the common themes are that appear in multiple scenarios and so identify those as (perhaps) more likely, or at least worthy of extra consideration.
With that in mind, I think it’d be a good exercise for anarchists to start writing up different scenarios for how this global economic crisis might play out. Perhaps there are already some scenarios out there that I haven’t stumbled across yet. I don’t have the time to write up a bunch of scenarios in detail myself, but I can at least get the ball rolling by providing some potential scenario seeds. So here are a few short blurbs on what I think some potentials outcomes might be:
Scenario #1) Business As Usual
Obama & Co. work hard to save the system and let the financial sector continue on as is. Rather than nationalization, however, the private sector gets bailed out and remains autonomous while the public takes the losses. This system is not easily sustained, however, so for an indefinite period we see increased economic hardship as the bankers continue to take risks that everyone else pays for, increased military action as the US seeks to dominate and open up new markets, and increased repression as the the state puts down those who get fed up enough to fight back.
The Quiet Coup spells out this scenario a bit:
The first involves complicated bank-by-bank deals and a continual drumbeat of (repeated) bailouts, like the ones we saw in February with Citigroup and AIG. The administration will try to muddle through, and confusion will reign.
Boris Fyodorov, the late finance minister of Russia, struggled for much of the past 20 years against oligarchs, corruption, and abuse of authority in all its forms. He liked to say that confusion and chaos were very much in the interests of the powerful—letting them take things, legally and illegally, with impunity. When inflation is high, who can say what a piece of property is really worth? When the credit system is supported by byzantine government arrangements and backroom deals, how do you know that you aren’t being fleeced?
Our future could be one in which continued tumult feeds the looting of the financial system, and we talk more and more about exactly how our oligarchs became bandits and how the economy just can’t seem to get into gear.
Scenario #2) Economic Collapse
Despite the best efforts of the financial capitalists to save their system, the crisis has already progressed too far, and the house of cards finally comes tumbling down.
Again, The Quiet Coup spelled out how this might look:
The second scenario begins more bleakly, and might end that way too. But it does provide at least some hope that we’ll be shaken out of our torpor. It goes like this: the global economy continues to deteriorate, the banking system in east-central Europe collapses, and—because eastern Europe’s banks are mostly owned by western European banks—justifiable fears of government insolvency spread throughout the Continent. Creditors take further hits and confidence falls further. The Asian economies that export manufactured goods are devastated, and the commodity producers in Latin America and Africa are not much better off. A dramatic worsening of the global environment forces the U.S. economy, already staggering, down onto both knees. The baseline growth rates used in the administration’s current budget are increasingly seen as unrealistic, and the rosy “stress scenario” that the U.S. Treasury is currently using to evaluate banks’ balance sheets becomes a source of great embarrassment.
Under this kind of pressure, and faced with the prospect of a national and global collapse, minds may become more concentrated.
The conventional wisdom among the elite is still that the current slump “cannot be as bad as the Great Depression.” This view is wrong. What we face now could, in fact, be worse than the Great Depression—because the world is now so much more interconnected and because the banking sector is now so big. We face a synchronized downturn in almost all countries, a weakening of confidence among individuals and firms, and major problems for government finances. If our leadership wakes up to the potential consequences, we may yet see dramatic action on the banking system and a breaking of the old elite. Let us hope it is not then too late.
Of course, what happens in the wake of such a collapse is a big question. It might propel us towards a regrouping of capitalism, perhaps steering towards one of the scenarios below. It could create an opening and an awakening that spurs mass action to instill a new, more egalitarian and horizontal system. It could also create an opening for a resurgent fascism (see below). Or it could be Mad Max, who knows.
Scenario #3) Neo “New Deal” Capitalism
Many people are looking back at the New Deal for methods to restore the economy. These usually incorporate initiatives like major public building projects, job and relief programs, nationalizing banks, and increased entitlement. This Alternet article spells out such a plan in detail. While it doesn’t seem that Obama’s current plan is likely to steer this way, there’s a small chance that popular pressure might force some of this into being (and this outcome is possibly preferable to the ruling financial interests than many of the other options).
Scenario #4) Reformed/Social Capitalism
Bowing to public pressure, and pressure from non-risk-taking capitalists, capitalism is forced to re-invent itself, taking on more of a social-democratic/socialist aspect. There’s already a sizable portion of the US population that is amenable to non-revolutionary forms of socialism, such as those found in many western European countries.
This scenario is spelled out a bit in Jump! You Fuckers!:
The choice is not simply between state control and private capitalism, whatever the empire-builders in the state and corporate bureaucracies would like to tell us. The structure of companies has an important, a crucial, bearing on the opportunities for financial speculation. Employee ownership reduces them to zero. A system revised at the level of transnational capital flows must also be reformed at the level of the enterprise. State bailouts should be followed by employee buyouts as a matter of course. It is only a kind of intellectual exhaustion to insist that once the economy has been nursed back to health it should be returned to the supervision of its tormentors.
As Richard Wolff points out, employee ownership and control, with oversight of management being seen as normal part of working life, will make a reformed global financial system more durable, by giving knowledge and economic power to those with an interest in defending it. Financial engineering gives way to, well, to engineering, and other materially productive activities, since owners who are also workers and future pensioners will have little interest in accelerating the balance sheet by selling assets and loading up on debt.
Employee ownership ensures a more even distribution of wealth within companies and in the wider society. And, by offering workers an alternative, it forces companies that remain privately held to pay their employees better. Trade unions need to be given enhanced powers to ensure that workers are able to secure a greater share of the wealth that they, after all, create. They can also play an important role in balancing the inevitable asymmetries of information and expertise that exist between management and the bulk of the workforce.
Kim Stanley Robinson also lists a number of suggestions for pushing things in a pro-science and pro-ecological direction. Global Guerrillas also notes a list of ways to make the capitalist system more resilient (none of which will ever fly).
Scenario #5) Transitional Economy/Servant Capitalism
In this version of the future, the social pressures brought on by new technologies (as we transhumanists are familiar with discussing) will reform capitalism into incorporating more cooperative and eco-friendly elements. This is quite similar to Scenario #4, except that new technologies are the catalysts for change that really push things along (you didn’t think I was going to leave transhumanism out of this discussion, did you?). On a longer scale, this could perhaps be looked at as a transitional phase from current capitalism to the potentials of post-scarcity opened up by nanofabrication and other abundance technologies. Key factors here include increased digital networking and connectivity (bypassing information barriers and mixing cultures), the rise of open source and other challenges to copyright like creative commons, sousveillance (universal surveillance of all by all) and the participatory panopticon, minifacturing and RepRap models, roboticization and artificial intelligence, unlocking proprietary knowledge, and so on.
From After Capitalism:
To find insights into how the current crisis might connect to these longer-term trends we need to look not to Marx, Keynes or Hayek but to the work of Carlota Perez, a Venezuelan economist whose writings are attracting growing attention.
Perez is a scholar of the long-term patterns of technological change. In Perez’s account economic cycles begin with the emergence of new technologies and infrastructures that promise great wealth; these then fuel frenzies of speculative investment, with dramatic rises in stock and other prices. During these phases finance is in the ascendant and laissez faire policies become the norm. The booms are then followed by dramatic crashes, whether in 1797, 1847, 1893, 1929 or 2008. After these crashes, and periods of turmoil, the potential of the new technologies and infrastructures is eventually realised, but only once new institutions come into being which are better aligned with the characteristics of the new economy. Once that has happened, economies then go through surges of growth as well as social progress, like the belle époque or the postwar miracle.
Before the great depression the elements of a new economy and a new society were already available—and encouraged the speculative bubbles of the 1920s. But they were neither understood by the people in power, nor were they embedded in institutions. Then, during the 1930s, the economy transformed, in Perez’s words, from one based on “steel, heavy electrical equipment, great engineering works and heavy chemistry… into a mass production system catering to consumers and the massive defence markets. Radical demand management and income redistribution innovations had to be made, of which the directly economic role of the state is perhaps the most important.” What resulted was the rise of mass consumerism, and an economy supported by new infrastructures for electricity, roads and telecommunications. During the 1930s it wasn’t clear which institutional innovations would be most successful (fascism, communism and corporatism were all contenders), but after the second world war a new model of state regulated capitalism emerged characterised by suburbs and motorways, welfare states and macroeconomic management, which underpinned postwar growth.
Seen in this light the great depression was both a disaster and an accelerator of reform. It helped to usher in new economic and welfare policies in countries like New Zealand and Sweden that later became the mainstream across the developed world. In the US it led to banking reform, the New Deal and the GI Bill of Rights. In Britain depression, as much as war, led to the creation of the welfare state and the NHS.
One implication of Perez’s work, and of Joseph Schumpeter’s before her, is that some of the old has to be swept away before the new can find its most successful forms. Propping up failing industries is in this light a risky policy. Perez suggests that we may be on the verge of another great period of institutional innovation and experiment that will lead to new compromises between the claims of capital and the claims of society and of nature. In retrospect these periodic accommodations are as integral to capitalism as financial crises—indeed it’s only through crisis and institutional reform that capitalism adapts to a changing environment and rediscovers the moral compass that is so vital for markets to work well. The late 19th century accommodation came in response to fear of revolution and gave us state pensions, universal schooling, trade unions and universal suffrage, putting paid to the ideals of 19th-century liberalism. A second accommodation came 50 years later out of depression and war, and made variants of social and Christian democracy the norm in every rich country, pushing up states’ share of GDP and introducing visible hands to guide the markets’ invisible one.
***If another great accommodation is on its way, this one will be shaped by the triple pressures of ecology, globalisation and demographics. Forecasting in detail how these might play out is pointless and, as always, there are as many malign possibilities as benign ones, from revived militarism and autarchy to stigmatisation of minorities and accelerated ecological collapse. But the new technologies—from high speed networks to new energy systems, low carbon factories to open source software and genetic medicine—have a connecting theme: each potentially remakes capitalism more clearly as a servant rather than a master, whether in the world of money, work, everyday life or the state.
Scenario #6) Global Government/Social Democracy
Thanks to globalization, capitalism no longer has borders and the world’s various state economies are increasingly intertwined. At the same time, communications and travel technologies have broken down cultural barriers and barriers to information exchange like never before (arguably spurring Islam’s current war against Western modernism). In this model, the threat of a world-wide economic collapse spurs a coalition of nation states to install a set of new, more empowered, global regulatory bodies, replacing the UN and structures of the past with the framework for a new gloval government. Over time, as this institution becomes more adept at responding to an increasingly globalized world population, it accumulates powers and responsibilities, superceding nation states in relevance. While a One world Government has generally been consigned to libertarian conspiracy theories in the past, the current situation does make it a possibility more than ever before.
From After Capitalism
Capitalism’s crisis is, of course, a global one, and has shown up the limitations of the global institutions that took shape half a century ago. China is set to become a dominant player in a strengthened IMF and World Bank, followed by India and Brazil. The G20 is edging out the G8 as the club that matters. And waiting in the wings are possible new institutions to police and manage carbon, to handle everything from global migration to the regulation of biotechnology, alongside less formal institutions to help the world’s public to engage, from e-parliaments to global campaigning platforms like Awaaz, an online newspaper.
What a global social democracy is most likely to be about, of course, is serving as a sort of “collective capitalist” force.Don Hamerquist sums this one up nicely in a response on the Three-Way Fight blog:
This is where Global Social Democracy enters the scene. The general capitalist class interest in stability and order is undermined by competing requirements for achieving it in certain national economies. This cannot be resolved by some laissez faire process any more than any other of the current issues of political economy can. It requires a state intervention, but one that will incorporate concession as well as repression. Who will decide which squeaky wheels are to get the grease? Will it be the Greek students threatening to ignite the spirit of ’68, or the bedraggled autoworkers of Michigan? An EU response will go in one direction, an U.S response will go in another direction, but ultimately there is far too little flexibility to grease everything.
This is going to be approached by some kind of global social democracy designed to materially buttress capitalist hegemony at points of stress. The material side is quite straightforward, even if it is currently difficult to see what instrumentalities will make it work. There is a less obvious ideological side that I can see working, not by distributing benefits, but by presenting a posture of willingness to do so that is being obstructed by social forces operating out of narrow self interest. This, then, will constitute the mythical ‘good’ capitalism which the metropolitan left has traditionally supported in its benighted way as an alternative to presenting its own plan of revolutionary reconstruction.
Scenario #7) Resurgent Fascism
Lest we forget that this is not just a struggle between capitalism and a more egalitarian and horizontal society, we must acknowledge the possibility of a renewed fascism. Many of the original forms of fascism grew out of the economic crises that gripped the world in the 1920s and 30s, as angered proletarians sought scapegoats and change and were seduced by appeals to populism, nationalism, and authoritarianism. We are likely to see quite a few angry prole sin the years to come, and it is likely than many of them will be seduced by the extreme right. Navigating the Storm offers one framework for this kind of resurgent fascism could play out. We’ve already seen a growing fracture in the Republican Party in recent months as party leaders first scorned and tried to distance themselves from extreme ideologues in their movement like Rush Limbaugh, but were then forced to apologize and and make amends when their large reactionary and racist mass base erupted in response.
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These scenario seeds are just a start. It would be nice to see some of them fleshed out in more detail, if anyone feels up to the task. These scenarios are not, of course, even mutually exclusive — one outcome could easily lead to another. Hopefully these will at least be in some use for radicals who are seeking to strategize about what our response to this crisis may be. Preparing for an economic collapse in the near future, for example, is going to require a much different orientation than settling in for a long, protracted death-ride of neoliberal capitalism over the next few decades and a subsequent transition to social capitalism. We can’t predict which way things will go, but we can choose the strategies and tactics that will serve us best no matter which of these outcomes (or something else entirely) come to pass.
Minor Change
April 16, 2009
Some basic reality of Obama’s first 80 days:
* Obama has escalated the illegal war in Afghanistan with an additional 21,000 troops.
* Obama has expanded the war into Pakistan areas, using troops and unmanned drones.
* Obama has extended the deadline for withdrawing troops from Iraq to 2010—and even that date may be extended by the Pentagon.
* Obama said he plans to leave 35,000-50,000 troops plus 50,000-100,000 mercenaries in Iraq after that, effectively continuing the illegal occupation.
* Obama said he would close Guantanamo within 1 year, yet prisoners there are still being force fed with tubes shoved down their throats.
* Obama approved $60 million to double the size of Bagram prison in Afghanistan.
* Obama’s Justice Department has defended the Bush policy of illegal warrantless wiretapping and asserted far broader claims of executive branch immunity than even the Bush regime.
(This list is just the start. It doesn’t cover, for example, how Obama has appointed 5 former RIAA lawyers to the Justice Dept, or how he has failed to follow through with many of his promises of transparency.)
You know, it’s not often that I read something from the RCP that I actually like, but they hit the nail on the head with the above in this piece on Obama:
This is what Democracy looks like. Peddling illusions and steering a movement to support the daily horror that this means for the people of the world, is what a movement in utter collapse looks like.
The best we’re ever going to get with Obama is capitalism with a friendlier face. All of the people who were pro-Obama will hopefully recognize that the many problems we face aren’t just the result of Bush and the Republicans, but problems inherent in capitalism itself. The only way to fix that is to eliminate capitalism … and right now capitalism is on its knees like never before.
Ethical Robot Killers
April 12, 2009
The news that the military is working on killer drones that will operate autonomously was in the news again recently. Y’know, like none of us have seen this coming. Or that entire movies franchises haven’t been built off of this plot. Is anyone really surprised? The military, of course, is talking about how such machines will be programmed with a set of robot ethics, so that they don’t get in trouble for killing the wrong people, or say, someone trying to surrender. We all trust the military, right?
Jamais Cascio addresses the issue more concretely with a draft set of his own Laws of Robotics. These are a good start, noting both that humans are ultimately responsible for robot behaviors and actions and that we need to consider that robots are going to increasingly become more *like* humans. Also of importance is that these robots will also be programmed in accordance with dominant social customs and norms:
Law #2: Politics Matters
The First Law has a couple of different manifestations. At a broad, social level, the question of consequences comes down to politics–not in the partisan sense, but in the sense of power and norms. The rules embedded into an autonomous or semi-autonomous system come from individual and institutional biases and norms, and while that can’t really be avoided, it needs to be acknowledged. We can’t pretend that technologies–particularly technologies with a level of individual agency–are completely neutral.
These are not just issues and concerns that we should be applying to those in power. Increasingly, robots and drones will be proliferate and become accessible to others — including anarchists. If a tech savvy anarchist insurgency was to employ its own drones, say to assassinate capitalist leaders or sabotage corporate or military facilities, these issues will also need to be considered and addressed in a careful and principled manner.
