Dialectic, Cosmos and Society
Issue Number 10
Table of Contents
Introduction
Ernesto Cardenal: Cuestiones Cuánticas/Quantum Questions
Irina Dobronravova: Dialectic as a Means for understanding Nonlinear Science
Anthony Mansueto: Organizing for Synergism
Introduction
In this issue we continue our analysis of the philosophical implications of recent
developments in the sciences. Our lead article, by Irina Dobronravova of the
University of Kiev, draws on the categories of the Hegelian dialectic in order to
understand the significance of the new theory of self-organization advanced by Nobel-
prize winning chemist Ilya Prigogine and his collaborators. Prigogine's work is
fundamental for the larger project of synergism. He argues that far from being in a
perpetual state of entropic disintegration, there is a fundamental tendency in matter
towards self-organization --towards the development of ever higher degrees of
differentiation and integration. This insight is fundamental to any effort to reground a
doctrine of cosmohistorical progress --indeed any effort to understand the universe as
ultimately meaningful. Professor Dobronravova's article focuses on the implications
of this insight for our understanding of the conditions for the stability of emerging
organization. This then leads her to identify various distinct levels of organizational
integrity, or totality, a question which ultimately involves the status of the universe as
a unified system.
This issue also includes "Cuestiones Cu nticas," a new poem by Ernesto Cardenal,
which broaches related issues regarding the ultimate meaning and destiny of life and
intelligence in the universe.
Finally, this issue marks over five years of work by the Foundation for Social
Progress. We thus include a major report assessing our achievements, analyzing the
current situation, and outlining our strategy for the future.
Cuestiones Cu nticas
Ernesto Cardenal
"Despu‚s de Einstein se demostr¢
que se envejece m s despacio
mientras se avanza m s rapido."
¨Y una velocidad infinita
no es un tiempo sin vejez?
Para Einstein el espacio es real
y el tiempo imaginario, o viceversa.
¨Y si hay un espacio-tiempo espiritual
escondido en las part¡culas elementales
y que la ciencia no puede detectar?
¨Y si la resurrecci¢n de los cuerpos
ser de esas part¡culas elementales
que estuvieron tambi‚n en otros cuerpos,
part¡culas elementales tras de las cuales
ya no hay nada m s, sino s¢lo Dios?
Todas las c‚lulas de nuestro cuerpo
tienen los mismos cromosomas, sean
del ojo, del coraz¢n, del h¡gado
¨y si las part¡culas de los cromosomas
son la misma part¡cula toditas,
todo el cosmos como un solo cromosoma?
As¡ entendemos mejor, aunque vagamente, Carmen,
el dulce dogma de la resurrecci¢n de tu carne.
El vos dentro de vos,
tu m s profundo t£,
consciente de su conciencia,
reflejo de espejo en espejo
(o sea infinitos espejos)
es lo que no muere. Pero no quiero
un vivir despu‚s de la muerte
s¢lo como pura informaci¢n.
¨El alma s¢lo informaci¢n?
Como Bohm sostiene
(y no s¢lo Bohm)
todo es uno solo aunque lo vemos por partes.
Pero las separaciones sentidas como v lidas
Un trapecio en mi infancia meci‚ndose
en un kiosco en casa de me t¡a Antonina,
muy borrados ahora trapecio y jard¡n ...
Todo est conectado con todo,
aun part¡culas sub-at¢micas
separadas por billiones de a¤os.
Desde los quasares a un candelita de cumplea¤os.
Lo que Bohm ha llamado "no localizaci¢n."
Nada est en ninguna parte.
A nivel sub-at¢mico todo junto en todas partes.
La primera dial‚ctica fue el Big Bang,
compresi¢n/expansi¢n.
Cielo y tierra estaban separados desde Arist¢teles
y por eso la luna no se ca¡a.
Hasta que Newton descubri¢ que ‚ramos lo mismo
el cielo y la tierra, y por eso la luna no ca¡a.
La implicaci¢n universal de la ca¡da de la manzana.
Si la manzana no cae es porque todo cae sobre todo.
Y arriba y abajo es s¢lo en el planeta.
A escala del universo no hay diferencia
si decimos un a¤o o mil a¤os. Y un jard¡n ya lejano.
The red shift.
El espacio se expande, no las galaxias. Pero
¨en qu‚ se expande el espacio? ¨en otro espacio?
La estrella que colapsa sobre s¡ misma
por su densidad y desaparece
¨para d¢nde va?
Oh Bohm, que sea cierta tu teor¡a.
El misterio que llevamos dentro o mente.
¨Es la manzana roja la misma para ti que para m¡?
La misma fue para Ad n que para Eva
aunque eran distintas sus neuronas
(y las de Newton).
Las manzanas se pudren y las neuronas
pero algo que no muere sale como una mariposa
de la complejidad del cerebro y la simplicidad de la mente,
de este universo de 3 libras de peso.
Quantum Questions
Ernesto Cardenal
"After Einstein it was proven that one ages more slowly, while one advances more
rapidly."
And an infinite velocity --isn't that a time without old age?
For Einstein, space is real and time imaginary, or vice versa.
And if there is a spiritual space-time hidden in the elementary particles, which science
cannot detect?
And if the resurrection of the body will be of those elementary particles
which were also in other bodies,
elementary particles besides which there is nothing else, but only God?
All the cells of our body
have the same chromosomes, be they
eye cells, or heart cells or liver cells.
And if the particles of the chromosomes are the same particle,
the whole cosmos like one single chromosome?
Thus we can understand better, even if only vaguely, Carmen,
the sweet dogma of the resurrection of your flesh.
The you within you
the you more profoundly you
conscious of your consciousness
mirror image in mirror image
(or perhaps there are infinite mirrors)
is that which does not die. But I don't want
a life after death
only as pure information.
The soul only information?
As Bohm holds
(and not only Bohm)
Everything is one even though we see it by parts.
But the separations are felt so strongly.
A swing from my childhood, slowly rocking
in a pavilion at the house of my Aunt Antonina,
very fuzzy now, the swing and the garden ...
Everything is connected with everything else,
even subatomic particles separated by billions of years.
From the quasars to a birthday candle.
What Bohm called "nonlocality."
Nothing is anywhere in particular.
At the subatomic level everything is linked together everywhere.
The first dialectic was the Big Bang,
compression/expansion.
Heaven and earth were separated since Aristotle
and because of this the moon doesn't fall down.
Until Newton discovered that we are the same
the heaven and the earth, and that that is why the moon doesn't fall.
The universal implication of the fall of the apple.
If the apple doesn't fall its because everything is falling on everything else.
And up and down makes sense only on the planet.
On the scale of the universe it makes no difference
if we say one year or a thousand. And a garden already so distant.
The red shift.
Space expands, not the galaxies. But
in what is space expanding? in another space?
The star which collapses on itself
because of its density and disappears
where does it go?
Oh Bohm, that your theory might be certain!
The mystery which we carry within, or mind.
Is the red apple the same for you and for me?
It was the same for Adam as for Eve
even though their neurons were distinct
(and those of Newton).
Apples rot and also neurons
but something which doesn't die goes out like a butterfly
from the complexity of the brain and the simplicity of the mind,
from this universe of three pounds weight.
Dialectic as a Means for Understanding
Nonlinear Science
Irina Dobronravova
Why study theories of the self-organization of complex systems? There is a tendency to
represent nonlinear science as primarily a science of chaos. But while the results of nonlinear
theories of chaos are very impressive, they do not exhaust the results of this promising area of
scientific investigation. Furthermore, from the standpoint of an effort to establish a new unity
among the natural sciences on the foundations of nonlinearity, theories of self-organization are
far more important. I have in mind here the possibility of understanding the relative stability of
dissipative structures as a dynamic stability, as the self-reproduction of self-organized systems.
This allows us to see stability from an evolutionary point of view. And it is precisely the
problem of stability which is the main problem in the unification of modern science, integrating
"the physics of being" and "the physics of becoming," to use Prigogine's expression, by
retheorizing the content of both classical and non-classical physics from a nonlinear point of
view.
The contemporary revolution in the natural sciences is associated with the creation and
development of two new scientific programs, which both involve the study of nonlinear processes
of self-organization in complex systems: the research program of unitary gauge theories and the
research program of synergetics. These two research programs have resulted in a new style of
scientific thinking, which we call "nonlinear (Dobronravova 1990)," oriented towards the
analysis of whole systems in the process of becoming. Among the defining characteristics of
this new style of thought, we identify:
a) a focus on the investigation of the conditions of an unstable state initial system (the
principle of spontaneous symmetry breaking), and
b) the analysis of alternative possibilities for the emergence of new stable formations (the
principle of coherence presupposing a correlated behavior of initial medium elements that
compose the parts of a new whole, which can be shown mathematically by the
emergence of new symmetries).
This new style of thinking is associated with formation of a new world picture, where the world
is presented as a self-organizing entity, both when taken as a whole and on many levels of
organization. It might seem at first sight that only unitary gauge theories bear on the existence
of the world as a whole, because they help ground modern cosmological models. And it is true
that most synergetic theories concern mainly macroscopic objects. I hope to show, however, that
only the new synergetic understanding of the integrity of self-organized systems makes it possible
to say something about the world as a whole. This is because synergetics --the theory of
self-organization-- has made variable existence in its becoming and transiency the subject of
investigation, while nonclassical physics (of which unitary gauge theories form a part), like
classical physics before it, is directed towards the search for the essence, and the universality of
the laws of it discovers is interpreted as a manifestation of invariability of the essence sought for.
Such a static theory cannot comprehend the universe as a self-organizing, and thus evolutionary
totality. Synergetics makes this possible.
The extension of the object of mathematical natural science from conservative to dissipative
systems, from linear to nonlinear dynamics, from equilibrium to strongly nonequilibrium
situations, from stability regarded as invariability to dynamic stability, has, to be sure, changed
our understanding of reality and universality and their relation to natural laws. In so far as they
focus on universal, invariant laws, classical and nonclassical physics --the physics of being-- both
treat reality as substance. Self-organization is not, however, a fully regular process. The
"choice" by a system of one path of development over another at bifurcation points is not
determined by law. This makes the destiny of a self-organized system irreversible. Thus,
natural science acquires the features of historical science. Its object is no longer nature "as the
being of things, so far it is determined by general law" (Kant in Prolegomena, paragraph
14 ), but also the becoming these things as well as the formation of the general laws which
govern that process of becoming. These means that the stable existence of a system will have
a different ground than those envisioned by the physics of being, a ground which cannot be
reduced to the continuous action of linear laws which are invariant with respect to the direction
time. From the very beginning the description of self-organized systems has aimed at the search
for the conditions of their stability. Moreover, the discovery of several types of stable solutions
for nonlinear equations means that the historic commitment to generalization, which has always
characterized scientific method, can be retained. For all the unpredictability which characterizes
the development of self-organizing systems, as they opt for various alternative paths of
development, synergetics has discovered that mathematical modeling is possible and that we can
arrive at some general theoretical principles. Even if these principles are interpreted rather
modestly as just a set of typical ways to realize self-organization, their discovery shows that the
specific features of a natural science oriented to the cognition of the general have been retained.
The ability of science to retain its main features, even when its objects and methods are
changed, is rooted in the development of fundamentally new styles of thinking and the
development of new categories of thought. These new categories play a vital heuristic role at
certain stages of scientific development. Thus to comprehend the situation of bifurcation with its
break in the functioning of laws, when a system is transiting from one relatively stable state to
another in which it will obey new laws, the limited categorical forms effective for the physics
of being are inadequate. Paired categories of necessity and randomness, possibility and actuality,
cause and effect within the conception of probable causality enable us at best to comprehend
randomness as a manifestation of necessity, retaining the prearrangement of the necessity which
initially limits the realm of the possible. Within the framework of these categories one cannot
pose a question of the emergence of new a necessity governed by new laws, of the role of
randomness in this becoming, or of the grounds for the emergence of the possibility of such a
becoming and of conditions of preservation of what has become.
Fortunately, the philosophical tradition does have resources which can help us solve this
problem. Among the most important of these is the Hegelian dialectic, with its analysis of the
process of form building. Categorical analysis of theoretical descriptions of self-organized
systems has already demonstrated the usefulness of the dialectic in the understanding of
self-organization (Dobronravova 1990: 98-116). Here I would like to make particular use of
categories derived from Hegel's Science of Logic. While the first definitions of becoming are
given in the "theory of being," it is the "theory of the essence," which forms the middle part of
the work which I find most useful. This is because the categories of being and becoming
describe systems in their immediacy, whereas the quality is self-organization is something which
comes to the fore only after analysis --i.e. only after theoretical mediation. Such phenomena as
laser performance or a heart beating do not reveal their similarity as self-organizing processes
to the naked eye as it were, but do so only through the lens of scientific theory. Besides, the
relations of necessity, which are interesting for us, are described by Hegel in his theory of the
essence.
Before proceeding, I would like to explain the way in which I use philosophical categories
to interpret scientific results. I treat the philosophical heritage not as a historian of philosophy,
investigating the grounds of the appearance of one or the other philosophical idea, but rather
as a philosopher of science, trying to find in the history of philosophy the means to understand
the current situation in science. I doing this, I draw freely on M. Mamardashwily's notion of
philosophical inventions --ideas which, once developed, may be freely used by others as the basis
for the development still other ideas (Mamardashwily, 1990, 94-95). I thus use one such
philosophic invention, Hegel's dialectic, to help us understand recent developments in nonlinear
science. More precisely, I will use certain parts of Hegel's "Science of Logic" as an
instrument for theorizing the concept of "self-organization." Given the powerful prejudice against
Hegel among philosophers of science, I need to stress that I am not embracing Hegel's larger
idealism or his attitude towards nature, but simply using some of his ideas, which he elaborated
specifically as logical means for understanding becoming and the evolution of new totalities.
The advantage of his approach is that it permits us regard a whole from the inside and thus to
comprehend it in the process of its own becoming and self-reproduction. I would also like to
stress here that my use of Hegel does not entail a critique of or a departure from scientific
rationality. The basic character of scientific rationality has remained unchanged: the same
reasoning and discursiveness, no special logics. That is, the phenomenon of becoming which is
comprehended in the Hegelian dialectic is mathematically described by nonlinear dynamics and
bifurcation theory, supplemented, where necessary, by probability descriptions.
***
The new whole which emerges as a result of self-organization may be generally described as
a coherent structure. The problem just how a new structure emerges may be properly formulated
as a problem of finding the ground of the becoming in the conditions of its realization, rather
than the problem of a result obtained due to a certain cause. Categorical analysis of theories of
self-organization has demonstrated (Dobronravova 1990: 98-116) that medium nonlinearity should
be regarded as the ground for the emergence of new coherent structures New wholes form due
to the transition to ordered motion of medium elements whose motion prior to this transition was
chaotic and noncorrelated. Until the problem can be described in linear equations (e.g. chemical
kinetics equations), fluctuations (deviations from the average values which provide a solution for
linear equation) may be neglected, because they are extinguished by the chaotic motion of the
medium elements. However, at the critical control parameter value near the non-equilibrium
phase transition, when medium nonlinearity becomes crucial, solutions to the nonlinear equations
describing the system generally have two (or more) values. This phenomenon is called
bifurcation. Here fluctuation is no longer a deviation from the average (which does not exist).
Rather, the system makes a random choice between two equally probable solutions. It is the
fluctuation, which "selects" one of two solutions of equations possible at a certain critical
parameter value (condition), that can be understood as the cause, whose action is the formation
of a coherent structure, i.e. the choice by the system of a certain evolutionary pathway. Hence
the situation, where the choice may be both possible and random, is prior to the formation of the
cause.
The application of Hegel's doctrines to bifurcation analysis thus allows us to understand that
with the nonlinearity of medium as the ground, as the control parameter approaches its critical
value, a system confronts objectively different isomeric and equally probable possibilities. The
"choice" of a particular path of development is determined by fluctuation, and is thus a random
choice. But any chosen solution appears to be necessary: it is determined by a real state of the
system prior to phase transition. Thus, the randomness is an addition to the necessity. All
possible paths of development have their own grounds and their own conditions of realization,
and besides, the fluctuation value and the very situation of choice have objective grounds. As
Hegel put it, "real necessity contains chance (Hegel 1974: 180)." This characteristic gives a
profound description of the situation of self-organization, where the system is subjected to
macroscopic laws between the bifurcations. In the vicinity of a bifurcation, a random choice
returns the system to the way of necessity.
It is necessary to emphasize that fluctuation as a cause of order is far from being a "small
cause of big effects". In a phase transition fluctuations are not small: they have not only a large
amplitude, but also a long range (Prigogine 1985: 150). "There is no content in the action other
than in the cause" (Hegel 1975: 146). A new coherent structure represents a large-scale
fluctuation which shows the behavior of an integral macroscopic whole despite the short-range
nature of the interaction between the medium elements, which cannot be compared in scale with
the fully developed fluctuation. In some cases we are dealing with one fluctuation which,
developing faster than the others, according to the "slaving" principle (G.Haken) "captures" the
whole system, giving coherence to the action of its elements. In other cases many fluctuations
appear simultaneously, and among these fluctuations a coherence is established which is
supported by external conditions.
As it was mentioned above, among the conditions of self-organization a special place is
occupied by the conditions which provide for the stability of newly formed coherent structures -
-i.e. for new wholes. The physics of being concerned itself with age-old systems the stability of
which was grounded in laws which function uninterruptedly. But if the subject of natural science
is to involve the formation of systems along with the laws which regulates their existence, then
we need to understand the conditions under which these systems become stable in the first place.
In discussing the determination of form-building in the light of Hegel's dialectic, we
considered the form building of the whole. This is important from a methodological standpoint,
since the interrelation between the whole and the parts in the investigation of the becoming of
the whole is opposite to the reductionistic principle, which regards the parts as something
separate from the system and their inter-relationships as eternally stable. Indeed, from a
dialectical viewpoint, a whole forms its constituents in the process of becoming. This categorical
attitude enables us to adequately comprehend the action of the "slaving principle" - one of the
fundamental principles of synergetics. This principle illustrates the situation within a process of
self-organization wherein the most rapidly developing fluctuation "captures" the entire space of
the initial medium, forming its constituents from the medium elements. Slower processes have
no time to develop. Thus, at autowave formation synchronizing effects are observed: medium
elements perform the oscillations with a frequency imposed by the most rapid source (i.e. in
cardiac contractions rhythm is established). The same submission principle acts during the
formation of thermal structures in plasma, of turbulences in the flow of liquid, of periodical
vibrations in chemical reactions and so on. In all such cases, though the interactions between the
medium elements are of a short range nature, instability may lead to the emergence of a
long-range order due to which the system functions as a whole.
If, however, self-organization is understood as the becoming of a new whole, the problem of
the stability of this new whole is replaced by the problem of its possible self- reproduction.
Self-organization can lead to the formation of wholes with different degrees of stability. Thus,
coherent structures with limited stability, which are opened into the future stream of becoming
(e.g. thermal structures in plasma), are formed by a certain arrangement of the elements of the
medium. Here a permanent exchange with the medium takes place and, in the long run, the
properties of the nonlinear medium appear to be crucial (determination by the ground, the system
"forgets" the initial conditions of its formation). However, the stability of such systems is
limited, since there is no way in which this new whole can reproduce itself within the medium.
Such a possibility is realized by stationary coherent structures in open systems - i.e.
dissipative structures. For them too the form is determined first of all by the ground of their
existence - that is, the properties of the nonlinear medium. But external conditions also enter into
the determination of their form: the dimension and the geometrical form of the initial system.
As for the possibility that other external factors may affect the process of self-organization,
it should be taken into account that even a weak effect upon the nonlinear system in the vicinity
of bifurcation may determine its destiny, while much stronger effects out of the vicinity of
bifurcation cannot disturb the stability of the dissipative structure. To the conditions of this
stability I. Prigogine assigns the remoteness from equilibrium and the openness of the system
which provides for a local decrease in entropy connected with dissipative structure formation and
maintenance of this state related to a higher level of organization. The flux of energy and matter
passing through the system provides for the export of excess entropy to the medium. Apart from
this, the dimension of the system is important because "the stabilization of dissipative structures
requires a great number of degrees of freedom" (Prigogine 1985: 156- 157), though in the
vicinity of bifurcation the law of large numbers is violated. The connection between the internal
and external for dissipative structures as well as for open nonstationary integrities remains very
close, and the boundary between them is conditional. All the elements of the medium in this area
become "internal" for dissipative structure performing certain functions within its constituents.
The elements however are not secured with these constituents. They can perform different
functions moving from one constituent to another (e.g. ascending and descending convection
fluxes which form the walls of Benard cells and their central part). Besides, under external
parameter changes (temperature, system dimensions, etc. ) the same elements form different
structures.
An entirely different degree of segregation between the internal and the external is found in
systems whose degree of stability is such that we can understand them only by reference to the
category of totality. Hegel defines totality in this way: "a separate circle as a totality in itself
breaks through its elements' limit and grounds a wider sphere..." (Hegel 1974: 48). By totalities
I mean those self-organized systems which have such a level of self-reproducing stability that
they may serve as elements for the systems with higher levels of self-organization. They are the
structural units of the matter: nuclei, atoms, molecules, and living organisms(1).
The categorical differentiation of integrity, whole, and totality helps us avoid the confusion
of different types of self-organized systems. It also helps us to comprehend that the degree of
integrity of living organisms, though they do form dissipative structure hierarchies, is much
higher than in usually investigated dissipative structures including those which perform certain
functions in the organism as a whole. The stable integrity of living organisms is comparable only
with the quantum integrity of the structural units of matter.(1)
Analyzing the stability of nucleus, atom, and molecule as a dynamic stability --i.e. a constant
reproducibility of form-- allows these traditional subjects of the physics of being to be regarded
from the inside, as totalities in the Hegelian sense (Hegel 1974: 48). From the point of view of
physics this means taking into consideration the openness of these systems with respect to the
physical vacuum of those fields whose quanta are the system's elements. This openness is
associated with a constant virtual energy exchange with the vacuum which is manifested in
experimentally observed effects such as Lamb's shift. Such exchange cannot be identified as a
dissipation in a literal sense (electrons lose no energy), but metaphorically it is possible to refer
to "virtual dissipation". The study of nuclei, atoms, and molecules as dynamically stable
self-organized structures, virtually opened with respect to physical vacuum, makes it possible to
situate the content of the nonclassical physics of being in the context of the evolutionary ideas
of the nonlinear worldview.
During the becoming of a totality a transition from the internal into the external and back
occurred, i.e. self-organization took place. However, these processes could occur only under
conditions different from the conditions of stability of the objects under study: at different
energies, at different stages of development. Here the self-reproduction of the whole also takes
place, but it is determined, as if by law, by the stable object structure which has become a form.
The stability of the totality itself, its ability to survive in the course of evolution, showed the
conformity of the form to the inner content of stable objects as well as to the conditions of their
formation.
Having undergone a "natural selection", the totality demonstrated the necessity of its own
existence, i.e. its reality. Thus, we recognize the "absolute anxiety of becoming" (Hegel), which
is a necessary initial point of development, though it is only one of the points. We also
recognize the irreversibility of development which, with the account of dialectics of randomness
and necessity in the process of becoming, assumes the stable reality of the object which became
a dynamically stable entity and may serve as an elemental ground for further complexity. If I.
Prigogine is proceeding from "being to becoming," making a notable step from being to
understanding its genetic grounds, we should not forget about the way from becoming to being,
about the importance of the theoretical reproduction of evolutionary irreversibility and about the
understanding of the grounds for the origin and existence of dynamically stable objects as
necessary stages on this path.
***
Application of the category of totality to the most stable self-organized systems suggests the
need to consider one more aspect of this category of Hegel's dialectics. The totality of a separate
circle, which "breaks through the limit of its elements and grounds the wider sphere" (Hegel
1974: 48) is more than the property of a given circle. The totality of every circle is possible as
a moment of the whole. Not in vain the category of totality was used by Hegel in
phenomenological description to characterize the world of phenomena. (Hegel 1974: 135).
Indeed, the integrity of nuclei, atoms, molecules, and living organisms cannot be described as
a totality without bearing in mind that they fit into the totality of the world, since the common
destiny of its development determined both their elemental composition and the kind of
interaction which takes place within them, as well as the permanent connection with the physical
vacuum which gave rise to these elements. The category of totality thus necessarily raises the
question of the universe.
But what if, as some trends in modern cosmology suggest, the "universe" which we perceive
is just one of many "swelling universes" (Linde 1984) that emerge as fluctuations of the primary
vacuum which is natural under the conditions of primordial chaos. How would this affect our
thinking about totalities?
From the point of view of unitary gauge theories the formation of a set of elementary particles
and their interactions are treated as a result of spontaneous initial symmetry breaking under phase
transitions carried out within the period of decreasing temperature in the expanding space of the
universe. (Weinberg S.: 1981). Synergetics allows us to understand the emergence of the
universe as a process of self-organization (Prigogine and Nicolis 1990: 317-326). This leaves
open the possibility of other random choices under symmetry breaking and of the existence of
the other worlds, respectively.
The problem of the plurality of the worlds is not new in the history of philosophy, but the
questions put forward in modern cosmology (How does the matter emerge from nothing? What
was prior to the beginning of time?, etc.) with their paradoxical form touch the limits of
comprehension of specific scientific statements. Since the limits of meaning in human thought
are given by its categorical structure, the correct formulation and solution of such limit problems
of knowledge requires that we clearly identify the content of both scientific and philosophical
categories and that we specify just how they relate to each other. In this case we are dealing with
the category of "matter" in its relation with the category of the "world" and the cosmological
notion of the observed universe. Clarification of the relationship between these ideas should give
us the philosophical foundations we need for the construction of a scientific picture of the world
on the basis of new cosmological theories.
One attempt to comprehend the content of these categories has been made by Ukrainian
philosophers S.B. Krymsky and V.I. Kuznetsov (Krymsky and Kuznetsov 1984). They suggest
that complete realization of the potential latent in matter should be identified not with the
"world," but with the Universum. The notion "world" which is related to the cosmological
universe observed is just peculiar state of the matter with hindered peculiarities.
Defining the content of the notion of the "world", the authors of the above paper identify a
number of characteristics associated with this notion in the philosophic tradition. Among these
they include the integrity of the world as unity in diversity, and monadicity of the world whose
borderline of peculiarity goes through every object which is the bearer of this specific form of
material existence determined by the system of laws that function within this world order. All
these and the other attributive characteristics of the category of the "world" are appropriately
specified in the modern physical picture of the world. Thus, the harmony of the world order is
realized via the principles of symmetry which determine the possible types of laws of physics.
The type of local symmetry breaking determines the meaning of physical constants and the
peculiar elementary composition of all the objects in the given world, etc.
This approach to understanding the basis for the existence of the various elementary particles
changes the status of the laws which determine the origin of these particles by associating them
with the specific destiny of the specific world, making them no longer universal but rather
specific to a particular world. The problem of universality however remains unsolved. The
description of our world as one of many possible variants in a complex evolutionary process
makes it possible to discuss other variants. There may be an anti-world e.g., where quarks
cannot be transformed into leptons, and antibarions would prevail over barions, unlike in our
world, where at the moment of the initial symmetry breaking between the strong and electroweak
interactions the number of particles exceeded the number of antiparticles.
This is the way to solve the problem of the existence of anti-worlds with respect to modern
physical picture of the world. This problem was posed within the framework of the quantum-field
theories ideas of an earlier worldview: the particles could be born in vacuum only in combination
with their antiparticles, so the existence of an anti-world was presumed to be parallel to the
existence of our world. The concept of the world as a self-organized whole interprets the origin
of the world rather than anti-world as a random irreversible choice in the process of world
formation and explains the absence of a real anti-world parallel to the world while retaining the
idea of the possibility of its existence in the Universum.
Thus, a state of matter different from the one characteristic of our world can become the
subject of a physical theory, irrespective of whether matter actually exists in such a state in the
actually existing world. The mode of its existence presupposes a relative stability as well as the
possibility to grow more complex up to the level of life and intellect, or else the physical
constants related to the other possible symmetries and their breaking will make the existence of
this form of matter unstable and its constitution into a world impossible.
It would appear most reasonable to refer the universality of laws to their realization in the
Universum. It should be emphasized however, that only our world is actually existent for us, and
the other worlds are only theoretically possible (Krymsky and Kuznetsov 1984: 95-96). The
metaphor "island universes" used by cosmologists unintentionally provokes the image of a certain
enveloping space, which is fundamentally wrong, because space-time exists as the space-time of
a given world only from the moment at which the gravitational interaction became separated from
the other fundamental forces (supergravitation theory) (Freedman and New Van Hejsen 1979).
Matter, therefore, can be understood properly only in the context of a particular world, defined
by a particular pattern of symmetry breaking.
Within the framework of the nonlinear worldview, the problem of the universality of the most
general physical principles can be formulated only with reference to the whole complex of
possible worlds. We bear in mind the assumption that fundamentally different possibilities for
the origin of worlds whose mode of existence might be based on symmetry principles other than
those which dominate our own world can be offered at the expense of chaotic virtual oscillations
of initial vacuum in cosmological scenario of "swelling universes". True vacuum, as a lower
energy state of certain types of fields, carries with it definite symmetry principles, the value of
physical constants, and possible variants in their breaking at world formation. Here the range of
possibilities is already determined, and while a particular world is yet unchosen, we deal with
the special instead of the general.
Now it is evident that in the modern scientific worldview, the problem of the world's being
cannot but be regarded as the problem of its becoming and transiency. Retention of this being
for a certain period of its transient existence can be understood heuristically proceeding from the
experience of nonlinear natural science only as a dynamic stability determined by the coherence
of it constituents.
REFERENCES
Dobronravova I.S. (1990) "Synergetics: Becoming of Nonlinear Thinking". Kiev: Lybid Press.
(in Russian)
Freedman D., New Van Hejsen P. (1979) "Supergravitation and Unification of Physical Laws",
UFN, vol. 128: 22-34.
Haken G. (1980) "Synergetics ", Russian translation - Moskow: Mir.
Hegel G.W.F. (1975) "EnzykolpÄdie der Philosophischen Wissenschaften", vol. 1. Berlin:
Academie-Verlag.
Hegel G.W.F. (1975) "Phenomenologie des Geistes". Berlin: Academie-Verlag.
Hegel G.W.F. (1974) "Wissenschaft der Logik". Berlin: Academie-Verlag.
Krymsky S.B., Kuznetsov V.I. (1984) "Weltanschanung Categories in Modern Natural
Sciences". Kiev: Naukova Dumka. (in Russian)
Linde A.A. (1984) "The Swelling Universe", UFN, 144: 177-214. (in Russian)
Mamardashwily M. (1990) "The Idea of Succession and Philosophical Tradition", in
Mamardashwily M. "How I Understand Philosophy". Moscow: Progress Press. (in Russian)
Prigogine I. (1985) "From Being to Becoming". Russian translation - Moscow:Nauka Press.
Sit'ko S.P., Andreev E.A., Dobronravova I.S. (1988) "The Whole as a Result of
Self-Organization", Journal of Biological Physics, 16: 71.
Veinberg S. (1981) "The First Three Minutes", Russian translation - Moscow: Atomizdat.
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1. One of the reasons for creation of the quantum physics of the living was the discovery of
characteristic eigen-frequencies in the mm-range electromagnetic radiation and the interpretation
of this event as a correlation of living systems with the criterion of the stable integrity of
quantum systems, i.e. the living was regarded as the next step following the molecular step on
the quantum ladder. The existence of the alive as a dissipative structure hierarchy is considered
to be a condition of such integrity. (Sit'ko S.P., Andreev E.A., Dobronravova I.S. 1988: 71).
Organizing for Synergism
Five Years of the Foundation for Social Progress
Anthony Mansueto
I. History and Achievements
A. Context
This year marks the completion of five years of work on the part of the Foundation for Social
Progress, and it is a useful time to take stock of our work, to assess the current situation, and
to map out the next steps in our project. The Foundation was established in 1991 in response to
a deepening crisis of the human civilizational project. On the one hand, the long crisis of the
market system continued. Markets have no access to information regarding the impact of various
activities on the integrity of the ecosystem and the social fabric or on the development of human
social capacities. The penetration of market forces into every sphere of social life transforms all
activity into just a means of advancing individual consumer interests. The result was ecological
crisis and social disintegration and stagnation as ever more resources were allocated to luxury
consumption, and less and less to infrastructure, education, research, and development. The
socialist system, on the other hand, was in collapse around the planet, partly, perhaps, because
it was unable to manage the implementation of the new information processing and
communications technologies which came on line in the 1980s, but mostly because it was unable
to contain the growing consumerist pressure generated by residual market structures. Clearly it
was necessary to fundamentally rethink the next steps in the human civilizational project.
But it was precisely this task which both the hegemonic neoliberal trend and what remained
of the socialist movements seemed unable to carry out. Neoliberalism, of course, felt itself
triumphant, its claims for the superiority of the market system vindicated by the collapse of the
Soviet bloc, and saw no impasse whatsoever. The entire socialist spectrum, on the other hand,
had largely lost touch with the fundamental aim which had driven it during its phase of
expansion: the full development of human social capacities, and ultimately the expansion of
complex organization throughout the universe. Social democrats, for the most part, yielded to
the new neoliberal orthodoxy, as did the right wing of Leninism --the perestroika group in the
Soviet Union and the Deng Xiao-ping group in China. The Leninist left, meanwhile, remained
fixated on centralized state planning structures which had certainly demonstrated their
appropriateness to the tasks of industrialization, but which hardly represented the "solution to the
riddle of history." What was left of the "new left" descended into postmodern nihilism and
despair. Indeed, it often seemed as if it was only the social conservatives who were addressing
the social crisis at all --and they only by attempting to hold together by means of repression what
the market was rapidly tearing asunder.
B. Our Starting Point
Our aim was to create a center for research, education, and organizing dedicated to
developing and implementing a vision and strategy adequate to the next steps in the human
civilizational project. We approached this task from a very definite point of departure, both in
terms of our general perspective, and in terms of the strategic assets which we had at our
disposal. As a result of several years of research and organizing experience, I had become
convinced that the crisis of socialism derived from a contradiction at the heart of dialectical
materialism. On the one hand, dialectical materialism proclaimed that matter is self-organizing
and develops towards ever higher levels of organization, gradually giving birth to intelligence,
civilization, and ultimately communism. This drive towards higher degrees of organization in
turn defines a kind of moral imperative. The problem with the market system is that it holds
back the progress of human civilization, and thus of the universe.
The dialectical materialist doctrine is, however, incomplete. Dialectical materialists were
always somewhat ambivalent about the ultimate destiny of life and intelligence --especially after
von Helmholtz proclaimed the impending heat death of the universe. This meant, among other
things, that Marx and Engels ended up opting for atheism. This is because the claim that the
universe develops necessarily towards ever higher degrees of organization, ultimately giving birth
to a qualitative infinity of different forms, is convertible with the claim that the universe is divine
--i.e. infinite and necessary. A universe in which the process of development is cut short,
however, and which ends in entropic death or in a kind of eternal cycle of birth and decay is a
universe without a God. In such a universe the drive towards higher levels of organization is
just one tendency among many, and not ultimately the dominant one. This hardly provides an
adequate ground for a moral imperative to promote progress.
Different trends within dialectical materialism responded differently to this contradiction.
Soviet philosophy, following Engels, attempted to remedy this problem, criticizing the errors of
bourgeois scientists in a number of fields, from cosmology through biology to political economy.
But the underlying error couldn't be corrected without approaching the question of God. In the
end the Soviet party substituted itself for the missing ontological ground, laying the groundwork
for dangerous authoritarian tendencies. Most European Marxism, on the other hand, only made
the problem worse by rejecting the "dialectics of nature" in favor of the pessimistic bourgeois
cosmology, so that human history became just an island of meaning in a universe otherwise given
over to chaos and contingency. This had the effect of leaving the whole drive towards social
progress ungrounded even in nature, and of reducing socialism to an aspiration of certain specific
social groups. This in turn opened the way for postmodernism, which asked the obvious question:
Why should the proletarian drive towards progress through productivity be paramount? Why
labor? Why not race? or signification? or sex? or sadomasochism? The implications of the line
of reasoning are now apparent. There is no stable vantage point from which to criticize the
market order or sanction a nonmarket allocation of resources.
If we were to address this crisis we needed to recover and reground a vision of the universe
as a unified, structured system developing necessarily towards infinitely high levels of
organization, in which human civilization plays a critical role as a center for the development
of dynamic organized complexity. Such a vision would necessarily involve an affirmation of the
reality of God.
There had, to be sure, been some tentative moves in this direction during the postwar period -
-most notably in the dialogue and collaboration between the Catholic Church and other religious
institutions and the International Communist Movement. But this process was never really
consummated, either intellectually or politically, in large part because the institutional interests
of both partners were threatened by a real synthesis. The Party, heir to the old imperial
mandate, had grown accustomed to its status as the "highest level of organization of humanity,"
and thus of the universe, and did not want its leading role in the human civilizational project
subject to prophetic criticism from the standpoint of a philosophical doctrine which might find
the socialist state wanting, even if it was also judged superior to the market system. The
Church, for its part, claimed the prophetic as well as the priestly office for itself, and could not
tolerate criticism of its exercise of the latter fully legitimate function from a standpoint outside
the celibate male clerical corporation. Clearly, if we were to move beyond the eclectic religious
socialist amalgams of the 1970s and 1980s and work an authentic synthesis we needed to create
a new kind of institution, neither Church nor Party, but intimately related to both, which could
serve as the bearer of the prophetic-philosophical office.
Each of the founders of our institute brought an essential ingredient to this synthesis, as well
as somewhat different ties to both of the institutions involved in the old Catholic-Communist
dialogue. I had been raised in the tradition of Sicilian anticlerical and socialist Catholicism, more
devoted to the Virgin Mother than to Jesus. I was steeped in the dialectical tradition --Hegel,
Marx, Gramsci, Lukacs, and Althusser. I knew the strengths of this tradition and was deeply
aware of the fact that it was in crisis. While I rejected atheistic materialism almost from the very
beginning, and had strong roots in the rapprochement between the Catholic and the communist
movements which dates back to Gramsci and Sturzo, I approached the question more from the
Communist than from the Catholic side. My formal study of religious traditions, certainly, had
been from the standpoint of a strategic interest: understanding the role which popular religion
in particular appeared to be playing in the global resistance to the market system. My wife and
cofounder, Maggie Mansueto, on the other hand, brought to our work a solid foundation in
scholastic, and especially Thomistic philosophy and theology, though her perspective was
enriched by the influence of a diversity of thinkers, including Eckhart, Fuller, Fromm, Miller,
and Daly. And institutionally, she approached our collaboration from the standpoint of the
mission of the Church. This inner core was surrounded by collaborators reflecting a wide range
of different perspectives, ranging from a traditional dialectical materialism through liberation
theology and Spiritual Zionism to Russian religious idealism.
We began our work under very difficult strategic conditions. We brought, to be sure,
unusually strong assets in theory, leadership development, organizing, and political-theological
operations. More specifically, we enjoyed an extraordinary comparative advantage in the areas
of social analysis, philosophical and theological reflection, and strategic analysis. We were both
excellent teachers and during my time serving as Director of the Justice and Peace Commission
for the Catholic Diocese of Dallas, I had developed a unique approach to leadership development
which integrated training in social analysis, social ethics, organizing, and political strategy with
careful positioning, mentoring, and reflection on practice. I had also built a large institutionally
based political organization in alliance with the Industrial Areas Foundation and had developed
a mass base and local leadership core in the Dallas metropolitan area, as well as strong
relationships to progressive Catholic organizations nationwide.
But the Foundation was established the year the Soviet Union collapsed --a time of global
defeat for the progressive forces. We had also suffered marked setbacks during our last year in
Dallas --a necessary but costly break in our alliance with the Industrial Areas Foundation, and
an equally costly struggle with the right-wing organization Opus Dei. The leadership core we had
built there was all but destroyed, and our relationship with base organizations undermined. The
few who remained were, furthermore, demoralized by both our local setbacks and the global
political situation. Nationally I was regarded with a mixture of respect and suspicion. Both my
plans for the Foundation and my critique of the IAF evoked interest and even admiration, but
little in the way of concrete financial or institutional support.
This complex cluster of considerations determined the way in which we defined both the full
portfolio of activities in which we wanted to be engaged, the way we positioned ourselves vis-a-
vis potential constituencies, allies, and adversaries, and the way in which we defined our
principal tasks. Our reading of the current situation placed a high degree of priority on the tasks
of developing a new vision and strategy adequate to the next steps in the human civilizational
project, but also called for building an organization which could implement that strategy and for
action directed at reorganizing institutions in the light of our vision. The way in which we
understood our comparative advantage and the way in which we defined our mission and tasks,
however, meant that our potential constituency was very narrow. We needed people who either
already possessed or who had the capacity and drive to develop, the very highest order
intellectual (political and theoretical), moral and spiritual capacities, willing to make a high order
commitment to difficult work --initially at least, and perhaps permanently, without compensation.
We hoped to build on our experience in Dallas, rebuilding and consolidating our core there and
replicating the experience on a national and eventually international scale. This meant a
significant secondary focus on relationship building and on advanced leadership training. Finally,
while the loss and or collapse of our base organizations ruled out direct political action, we
wanted to retain some active engagement at the institutional level, more as a way of building
relationships and recruiting than for the direct political impact which we expected. Since we
brought skills rather than numbers to the table, we decided to focus on the development of
consulting relationships with local congregations and community organizations, providing
leadership training and strategic planning services, in the hope of recruiting advanced leaders,
and perhaps gradually building our own network. We also hoped that these consulting
relationships, together with dues from a growing membership base, would generate sufficient
revenue to enable us to support a small staff.
C. Achievements
1. Research
Our achievements have been most dramatic in the theoretical field. I have completed one
book, Towards Synergism: The Cosmic Significance of the Human Civilizational Project
(University Press of America, 1995), which attempts to chart a vision and a strategy adequate
to the next steps in the human civilizational project. I have begun work on a second book which
will ground that vision and set it in the context of a philosophical system which revitalizes and
synthesizes the Catholic and dialectical traditions in the light of developments in the physical,
biological, and social sciences. I have also conducted research on strategic questions, both
domestic and international. During 1993-1994 I conducted a study of congregation based
organizing in the Chicago metropolitan area and have published articles on both this question and
on developments in the former Soviet bloc. While I have done most of the actual writing on these
projects, Maggie's training in theology and human development, as well as her capacity to
generate insight after insight in nearly every field we approach, has made her an absolutely
essential collaborator.
Maggie has continued her study of Catholic theology, while drawing increasingly on social-
psychological and comparative historical studies of human development. Her aim is to develop
a new theological anthropology and a doctrine of virtue: an account of what it means to be an
excellent human being, and of how one gets there, with a particular emphasis on the broader
social conditions of human excellence.
The result of this theoretical work has been the elaboration of what we call "synergism,"
which we believe is a new and compelling vision of humanity's place in the universe, and a
powerful new strategy for the next steps in the human civilizational project. We see the universe
as a unified, structured totality which develops towards ever higher levels of organization. This
process of evolution is logically necessary, and takes place through concrete material interactions,
but is ultimately grounded in and driven by the incredible beauty, truth, goodness, and unity of
God, in which the universe participates to the extent of its development. Human civilization plays
a critical role in this process as a center for the creation of dynamic, organized, complexity.
Social progress requires the centralization and allocation of resources for human development.
The best way to do this depends on the level of development of human social capacities. New
technologies make old ways of organizing obsolete. But the market system, which has no access
to information regarding the impact of various activities on the integrity of ecosystem or the
development of human social capacities, and which transforms all activity into just a means of
advancing individual consumption interests, has demonstrated that it is always and everywhere
an obstacle to development. The progress which has taken place under the market system is due
almost entirely to nonmarket forces: either direct centralization of resources for development by
nonprofit institutions or by the state, or by the private sector acting under sheltered conditions -
-tariff protection, regulation, government contracts, etc. The crisis of socialism was partly a
result of an inability to accommodate new technologies, but primarily a result of a failure to
actually transcend market relations --and thus the consumerism generated by the market system.
Humanity needs to discover a new way of centralizing and allocating resources, which is more
flexible and less centralizing than the old Soviet system, but which also definitively breaks with
the market system.
As we have developed our vision, we have found a small but growing number of collaborators
--including a number of well respected scientists, scholars, and literary figures, the most senior
of whom constitute the Foundation's Council, or Board of Directors. Some of these people have
come from our historic core constituency on the Catholic left: Rev. Francois Houtart, Director
of the Centre Tricontinental at the Universite Catholique de Louvain, and the poet Ernesto
Cardenal, former Minister of Culture for the Republic of Nicaragua. Others, like Bulgarian
philosopher Dejan Pavlov Kreculj, come from the orthodox dialectical materialist tradition. But
we have also attracted a number of people from the former Soviet bloc, from Africa, and from
Latin America who are trying to come to terms with the simultaneous crises of socialism and of
the market system: Pavel Gurevich, a Laboratory Director at the Institute of Philosophy of the
Russian Academy of Sciences, Boris Gubman, Tver Regional Director of the Russian Academy
of Social Sciences, the economist Samir Amin, and others. My own efforts to reground the
dialectical tradition in recent developments in the physical, biological, and social sciences has
drawn attention and support from people working in these sciences: physicists Rich Olenick, Eric
Lerner and David Brin (also a science fiction writer), biologists Curt Naser and Irina
Dobronravova, etc., as well as philosophers interested in these questions: Errol Harris and
Helena Knyazeva among others. In short, we are gradually putting together an authentically
global research network, which includes people working in different disciplines and from
different theoretical perspectives.
We have also enjoyed increasing success in publishing and disseminating our work. Our
emerging vision goes very much against the tide. We are neither neoliberals nor postmodernists,
and this has made publishing difficult. Our own journal, Dialectic, Cosmos, and Society, while
its circulation remains very small, is beginning to have some visible impact, especially in the
former Soviet bloc. And we have begun to break into such established academic journals as
Filosofskie nauki, the Journal of Religion, Social Compass, and Studies in Soviet and East
European Thought.
2. Building a Leadership Core
The Foundation for Social Progress has developed a unique approach to leadership
development which integrates training in methods of social analysis, reflection on mission which
is at once philosophically informed and grounded in the religious and cultural traditions of the
community with which we are working, and rigorous training in building and exercising power.
We understand power in a relational sense, as the ability to develop and realize human potential.
We train our leaders to analyze and tap into the capacities, interests, and relationships of
individuals and organizations, building strong public relationships, and to think strategically about
developing and deploying their most important asset: human creativity.
Leaders who have participated in Foundation programs currently serve or have served in such
capacities as Mayor of a small city, Vice-President for Recruitment and Training of a major
corporation, Director of Research and Evaluation for a major public school district, Budget
Director for a county mental health agency, and Founder and Executive Director of a nonprofit
center for displaced steel workers.
The scope and depth of our leadership development activities has, however, been severely
restricted. We have had difficulty interesting contacts in an ongoing relationship with the
Foundation, consolidating relationships with the people we train, and integrating them into the
work of the Foundation. There are a number of reasons for this. First of all, our potential
constituency appears to be even more narrow than we initially realized. Neoliberal and
postmodern ideology maintains a real hold even on those who question it. We find that many
people are attracted to our vision, but stop short of really embracing it. Many, even among the
intelligentsia, lack the philosophical training necessary to understand fully what we are doing.
And the marketplace really does make the universe appear to be just a system of only externally
related atoms ...
Appetitive as well as intellectual factors, must, however, be taken into consideration. The
most important of these is probably the demoralization which resulted from the collapse of the
Soviet bloc in 1989. Whatever people may have thought of the Soviet Union, it did serve to
demonstrate that alternatives to capitalism do exist, and it provided a valuable strategic reserve
for the progressive forces. In the wake of the crisis of 1989, relatively few people wanted to
invest time and energy in training to lead a fundamental reorganization of human society. And
without hope, temperance, fortitude, and justice become far more difficult. People fear --and
not without reason-- that their consumption interests, their friendships, their careers, and possibly
even their lives will be threatened if they collaborate too closely with us. Maggie, after all, has
been living under a death threat from Opus Dei since 1991.
Strategically, we may have underestimated the need of having a well developed vision and
strategy, accessible through both our own and other publications, in order to attract intellectual
leaders. In this regard, at least, our position has improved significantly. We may also have
concentrated too much on recruiting intellectuals, rather than on developing a new intelligentsia
out of the proletariat. Intellectuals, as we will argue below, are far more susceptible to
ideological hegemonization by the market than members of the other working classes. Tactically,
we have been inhibited by the dispersed character of our networks. The only way to cultivate
temperance, fortitude, justice, and hope is by building a community in which people can be
challenged to develop morally as well as intellectually, and this is very difficult to do with a
loose global network. Even in the "information age" all real politics is local.
These are all issues which we need to address in the coming period.
3. Reorganizing Institutions
The Foundation helps the organizations it works with to analyze both their own resources --
especially their human resources-- and the social context in which their are operating. We put
a special emphasis on helping organizations to reflect on their mission in a way which focuses
attention on their specific contributions to humanity's larger vocation, and on helping
organizations to develop effective ways to organize, develop, and deploy their resources.
While this kind of institutional organizing work plays a central role in our understanding of
the transition to a postmarket system, and thus in our global strategic vision, it has played only
a supporting role in our work over the past five years, as a means of recruiting leaders, and
building financial and political support.
We have employed two main tactics in this organizing work. On the one hand, we have
attempted to position ourselves and others in our network within institutions in a way which
permits us to exercise significant influence over their development. At the same time, we have
attempted to negotiate contractual consulting relationships between the Foundation and various
institutions.
Both tactics have met with serious obstacles. This is due primarily to the strength of the
hegemonic neoliberal ideology in the political-economic arena, to the influence of postmodernism
in the academy, and to the continued rightward drift in the Catholic church, all of which have
combined to create a decidedly inhospitable atmosphere for our work. This has made it extremely
difficult to position ourselves within strategic institutions, difficult to motivate those in our
networks who are well positioned to use their power to affect the institutions within which they
work, and difficult to secure consulting contracts.
Our strongest institutional ties continue to be with the Catholic Church --especially Catholic
parishes, which we have helped come to terms with interethnic and intrastaff contradictions as
well as with the aftermath of clergy sexual abuse --all problems which reflect ongoing tensions
in the larger institution. We have also helped parishes think about longer range questions of
pastoral strategy and leadership development. I have developed a strong relationship with the
University of St. Mary of the Lake in the Archdiocese of Chicago, where I taught Philosophy
in the Autumn of 1995, and we have good relationships with clergy and lay leaders in Chicago,
Dallas, and the El Paso/Juarez/Las Cruces border region. Several members of our network
continue to serve as active leaders in the Catholic Church. I continue to have relationships with
Catholic social action directors around the country, as well as with key members of the USCC
social justice staff. What we have not yet been able to do is to transform this network of
relationships into real support for the Foundation or real impact on the institution.
Our second area of concentration has been within the academy. Here we have run up sharply
against ideological barriers which are, in fact, much higher than in the Catholic Church. The
hegemony of neoliberalism and postmodernism has kept us out of most secular institutions --and
out of increasingly secular Catholic institutions as well. Even where explicit ideological tensions
have not been an issue, the highly specialized character of most academic research has been.
Academic freedom, at least in the United States, has been bought at the price of staying away
from fundamental questions --and thus at the price of forsaking the historic vocation of
philosophy. We know of individuals holding tenure-track appointments at major universities who
are open supporters of terrorist organizations; they are tolerated so long as they restrict their
research to modest scholarly articles and books which analyze the work of others. Any claim
to say something really original about the nature of the universe or humanity's vocation therein,
however, is branded "intellectual arrogance," and condemns one to exclusion. This trend is no
doubt global, but it is far less advanced outside the United States, which is why our work has
met with a better reception there.
We have negotiated a small number of research and/or consulting contracts with universities
and research institutes including the University of Illinois at Chicago/Office of Social Science
Research (UIC/OSSR), Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the Steel Industry Heritage Foundation.
We conducted a study of congregation based organizing in Chicago as part of the Religion in
Urban America Project for UIC/OSSR and revised the Religious Studies bibliographies for the
new online version of Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Steel Industry Heritage Foundation
contracted with Bob Anderson, a member of our network with many years experience organizing
in the Southwestern Pennsylvania Steel industry, to conduct an in-depth interview study of
worker resistance during the steel crisis of the 1980s.
During 1992-1993 we made some effort to connect with the academy, and especially the
scientific research community at a rather different level --the question of financial support for
basic research and the development new civilian technologies. We found that the vast majority
of scientists are disconnected from the larger political struggles which are shaping the global
research agenda, and that the science managers who are engaged in these questions seem
committed to an alliance with either the military industrial complex or with civilian industry.
On one occasion we were explicitly barred from contacting scientists at the Very Large Array
in New Mexico, and most of the contacts we made at Los Alamos and (to a lesser extent) Sandia
National Laboratories were either apolitical or leaned sharply to the right. Interestingly enough,
this was as true of people involved in basic research or in developing civilian technologies,
including solar energy, as it was of those involved in areas related to weapons research. The
solar energy community in particular seems to have an extraordinary confidence that the market
will make solar systems profitable. We continue, however, to believe that this whole sector is
important and hope that relationships we have developed on the basis of our basic research will
help provide us with insights regarding the best way to organize scientists.
We have continued to maintain relationships in the political arena, both at the base level and
with other leadership organizations. Our historic relationship with the community organization
movement has suffered from the growing hegemony of the organizing institutes, especially the
Industrial Areas Foundation and Gamaliel, and by the decline of independent community
organizations as the networks associated with the institutes have expanded. The IAF and Gamaliel
have established an effective monopoly on congregation based organizing and we expect them
to maintain this monopoly for some time. Our attempts to demonstrate that these networks are
actually deeply at odds with their predominantly Catholic base ideologically have met with little
success, probably due to the larger Augustinian drift of contemporary Catholic theology, which
makes this contradiction all but invisible. While we are aware of considerable dissatisfaction with
the actual achievements of these organizations among their constituencies, this seems to make
little difference to the Catholic ordinaries who support them. Clearly there is room to enter into
competition with the IAF, but we do not currently have the right relationships or the necessary
resources for such an undertaking.
Our relationships with the organized left have suffered from the crisis of the left on a global
scale. We have collaborative relationships with leaders in the Balkans working to revitalize the
tradition of multinational political unity which characterized the region before the crisis of
socialism, with leaders of Renovaci¢n Sandinista in Nicaragua, and with leaders throughout the
Americas, Europe, and the former Soviet bloc working to come to terms with the crisis of
socialism and chart the next steps for their movement.
II. The Current Situation
As we develop our plans for the coming period, it is necessary to take stock of the current
situation. As we have argued in previous documents, it is possible to understand the current
situation only in the context of a global analysis of the unfolding of the human civilizational
project.
Human civilization plays a critical leading role in the larger cosmohistorical evolutionary
process, as a center for the creation of dynamic, organized complexity. Civilization progresses
because we humans develop new ways of organizing and reorganizing physical, biological, and
social matter, and thus new ways of creating higher forms of organization. This organizing
activity in turn requires some structure for centralizing and allocating resources. In order for
civilization to progress, it is important that these structures be adequate to the level of
development of human organizing capacities. Village communities are not adequate to the task
of building complex irrigation networks, temple-observatories, etc. and new structures, such as
the state are thus required. Failure to develop new structures adequate to emerging forms of
organization can lead to stagnation.
The more important obstacle to progress, however, derives from structures which permit
exploiting classes to emerge and siphon off surplus for use in warfare and luxury consumption.
Two such structures have emerged on this planet. Beginning around 3000 B.C.E. communities
occupying unfavorable ecological niches, but with access to bronze weapons technology
discovered that they could develop more rapidly by conquering and exploiting other communities
than by investing in new technologies. The result was the warlord state, which dominated most
regions of the planet between 3000 B.C.E and roughly 1500 C.E. This development was
accompanied by the displacement of the archaic matriarchy with a patriarchal regime. Later,
around 700 B.C.E., the development of specialized agriculture in the Mediterranean Basin and
other areas led to the emergence of large scale trade and eventually --over a long period, and
with many reversals (indeed, the process is only now nearing completion), the formation of a
global market, first in consumer goods, then in labor, and finally in capital. The emergence of
markets was, once again, a result of the fact that certain individuals or communities found they
could develop more rapidly through trade rather than through productive labor.
Both of these structures held back the development of human social capacities --the first by
letting warlord elites siphon surplus through rents and forced labor to support warfare and luxury
consumption, the second because markets have no access to information regarding the impact of
activities on the development of human social capacities, and thus lead to an irrational allocation
of resources.
In order to resist these structures social movements emerged: salvation religions, which sought
to restore humanity to harmony with the divine order, and later, as markets undermined
humanity's faith that there even is a divine order, philosophical movements which attempted
to reground our knowledge of the Beautiful, the True, the Good, and the One, and to lay the
groundwork for the construction of a society which serves these values. Not surprisingly, these
movements were themselves subject to deformation by the social structures in which they
emerged, but nonetheless made very significant contributions to social progress. Socialism must
be understood in the context of this larger history, as a stage in the development of the
philosophical tradition which, under the alienating impact of market structures, lost sight of the
first principle, and thus produced a vision and a strategy which were ultimately inadequate to the
tasks of the period.
We now stand at a crucial juncture. The capitalist system has been in a general crisis --in the
sense of constituting an effective brake on social progress-- for some time. While it is clearly
difficult to quantify and thus to measure social progress, a number of indicators converge to
suggest two critical junctures. Two of these indicators are technological --rate of growth in
energy production per billion human lives and fundamental technological innovations-- and the
third scientific --underlying breakthroughs in basic science (physical, biological, or social). The
underlying stagnation seems to date from the late 19th or early in the 20th century, but there
seems to have been a brief resurgence in the rate of social progress in the middle of the 20th
century, and then a crash after about 1970. This, in any case, is the pattern we find when we
analyze the rate of growth in energy production. Measured in terms of major technological
innovations the results are still more startling. After the invention of the airplane in the 1900s
we get no major technological innovations except for the television (1920s) until the 1940s and
1950s, which bring the transistor, the computer, radar, nuclear energy, the laser, and rocket
technology which makes possible space exploration and a satellite network. Much of the so-
called new technology which drives the "information society" is really just an application of these
older basic advances. In reality it amounts to little more than a collection of neat gadgets --new
consumer items which do very little to actually increase human creativity. Those technologies
which do save labor, such as the use of information processing technologies for factory and
office automation, are being implemented in a way which marginalizes large numbers of
workers, driving down wages and increasing relative exploitation, leading to the further
expansion of the rentier elites, and not in a way which frees up time and talent for more creative
work.
Behind this technological stagnation lies a stagnation in the sciences. We are, in a very real
sense, still living off the scientific capital of relativity and quantum mechanics, which gave us
nuclear fission energy and microelectronics --and even, to a very large extent, off advances in
electromagnetism and thermodynamics which were made in the nineteenth century, which provide
the underlying technology behind most of the electrical appliances which we still use, and behind
such wasteful devices as the internal combustion, jet, and rocket engines. Much of the new
science is in fact speculation which exploits, but does not resolve, contractions within and
between relativity and quantum mechanics, or between these disciplines and new experimental
and observational evidence.
Why the depth of the current stagnation? It is interesting to note that the onset of the crisis
coincides with the intensification of the underlying contradictions of capitalism identified by Marx
--declining rates of profit in high technology sectors, and a tendency towards underconsumption
as capital compensates by redeploying to low wage, low technology activities. The resurgence
around the middle of the century coincides with a reassertion of nonmarket, mostly state-
centralizing structures: socialism in the Soviet Union, social democracy and social liberalism
in Europe and North America, and, for that matter, fascism. And the crash after 1970? It was
after 1970 that the contradictions of social liberalism and social democracy began to become
apparent --rising debt burdens and the use of taxation increasingly to pay interest to rentier elites
rather than to finance new development. And it was after 1970 that the limitations of the Soviet
model of development became apparent --an inability to accommodate information technologies,
and an inability to contain growing consumerist pressure generated by residual market relations.
This global stagnation set in motion a broad movement to restrict and even transcend the
market system. The student movements of the 1960s and 1970s were first and foremost
movements of resistance to the proletarianization of the intelligentsia and to the restriction of
creative activity this implied. This same period witnessed an upsurge in strike activity and a
number of electoral advances for the European left. But most notable in this period was the
intensification of political pressure from the periphery of the system, mostly from national
liberation movements with a strong peasant base and a socialist or communist leadership. These
movements drew support both from the Soviet Union, which was becoming increasingly aware
of the internal contradictions of its own model of development and of the need to seize the
geopolitical initiative before it was too late, and from the Catholic Church which increasingly
saw its future among the workers and peasants of Latin America rather than in the increasingly
secularized and consumerist countries of Europe and North America.
Capital met this challenge with a complex and subtle strategy. The student revolts were put
down with a combination of increased market pressure and consumerist hegemonization. This
is the significance of the transformation of the "yippie" into the "yuppie." The final and
definitive formation of a unified global market undermined the political weight of organized labor
and undercut the political initiatives of the European left. An emerging neoliberal-conservative
alliance exploited mass discontent with high rates of taxation to mount an assault on the welfare
state, while the national liberation movements were defeated partly on the battlefield and partly
through financial pressure on progressive regimes already in power.
The socialist countries, meanwhile, proved unwilling and/or unable to respond to this
challenge. The Chinese had already opted out of the global struggle for socialism in favor of
an alliance with the U.S. against Soviet "social imperialism." And the Soviet leadership
apparently felt that direct confrontation with the U.S. was too dangerous --especially after 1980,
with the trigger happy Reagan regime in power. The election of John Paul II as Supreme Pontiff
set in motion a sharp turn to the right on the part of the Catholic Church, which meant an end
of Catholic support for liberation movements in the Third World and the beginning of an active
effort to de-stabilize the socialist regimes of Eastern Europe --most notably in Poland.
By 1986, the Soviet leadership, under growing pressure from its own citizens to expand
production of consumer goods, and thus to reduce military spending, began a systematic retreat -
-a retreat which opened the door for the events of 1989-1991. By 1 January 1992, the
international workers movement had been effectively defeated, and capital was free to make the
world in its own image.
What kind of world is capital trying to create? We need only look at the organic ideology of
the hegemonic sectors of finance capital --what I call information theoretical neoliberalism. In
its pure/complete form this ideology regards the universe as a whole as an information processing
system. Matter is the "hardware" component of the system, the laws of nature the "software."
Drawing on the information theory developed by Shannon and Weaver (1949), theorists such as
Frank Tipler argue that the organization of a system is its negative entropy, or the quantity of
information encoded within it. "Life" is simply information encoded in such a way that it is
conserved by natural selection. A system is intelligent if it meets the "Turing test," i.e. if a
human operator interrogating it cannot distinguish its responses from those of a human being
(Turing 1950).
This broad ideological framework has given rise to a very specific vision of humanity's future
--a system which might best be called infokatallaxis. By infokatallaxis we mean a system in
which capital has become instantly mobile and is instantly reallocated to the most profitable
activities. This is a kind of pure finance capitalism in which entrepreneurs, managers, and
workers are all fully subordinated to investors, who in turn behave in perfectly market-rational
fashion. In such a system, innovations are excludable only to the extent that they have not yet
been reverse engineered, and monopoly rents on skill --indeed any differentiation between
products-- thus vanishes in a time which converges on zero. This is the kind of hypercapitalist
utopia promoted explicitly by people like Frank Tipler and implicitly by the entire neoliberal
right. Tipler himself has gone further, proposing to re-engineer the entire universe using self-
reproducing automata, in order to create a kind of cosmic supercomputer (Omega) which will
experience infinite subjective time and process an infinite quantity of (all logically possible)
information --and in the process, incidently, resurrect the dead in the form of computer
emulations (Tipler 1994).
Infokatallaxis is a world without a state. Indeed, it is a world in which politics itself has
disappeared in favor of the nonpolitical allocation of resources and activities determined by the
market. And this is, in fact, the trend at present. As the working classes are forced to sell more
and more of their labor power, less and less is left over to invest in building and maintaining the
structures of community life. Working class organizations of every kind begin to disintegrate,
even as capital benefits from tight labor markets. Fewer and fewer workers learn to build and
exercise power, and the prospect of organizing against capital becomes ever more difficult, as
there are fewer and fewer existing networks and emerging leaders to work with.
The decay of political organization does not, however, affect only the working classes. On
the contrary, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the market undermines political
organization in general --even the political organization of the bourgeoisie. This is apparent on
a number of fronts. First and foremost, as the global market becomes increasingly integrated
and capital increasingly mobile, state structures become less and less effective instruments of
policy. If the state acts in a way which conflicts with the interests of one or another firm, then
that firm can easily relocate to a more favorable venue. Second, there has been an increasingly
obvious --indeed and increasingly eerie-- tendency for political leaders representing capital to
self-destruct in scandals which are either substantively trivial or which reflect very poor political
judgement. Many of those who have not been implicated in scandals have chosen to retire. One
is tempted to look for an explanation in intra-capitalist contradictions, but the fact is that the
pattern of destruction is broad based and affects political leaders associated with a wide range
of different interests. It may be that the stress and strain of high level office in a market society
is too much for many to bear, or that it is simply becoming increasingly apparent that the real
power no longer lies with the Senate but with Wall Street. But it is also quite possible that capital
is anxious to constrain the emergence of any leadership whatsoever, even leadership which
clearly supports the neoliberal program. After all, political leaders by definition respond to
nonmarket forces, and thus represent a constraint on markets even when they offer political
support to the market system.
Infokatallaxis, finally, is a social system in which meaning and value have disappeared.
Knowledge gives way to information, which in turn is simply pattern with out referent and
without end. If the entire universe is simply an information processing system, then the "value"
of an idea derives not from its ability to encode the underlying structure of the system, but rather
to increase its overall information content. Things are real to the extent that they are thought --
and they are thought to the extent that people want to think them. Everything, in the end, is
reduced to consumer preference.
A few words are in order here regarding the ideologies which present themselves as
alternatives to neoliberalism: religious fundamentalism on the right, and postmodernism on the
left. Both of these trends are, in fact, mechanisms of bourgeois hegemony. Religious
fundamentalism has an authentic popular base. It articulates the rage of the dispossessed at the
disintegration of the social fabric, but it attempts to restore the frayed social fabric by imposing
order "from the outside," or more precisely "from above." In so doing it implicitly confesses
faith in the principal tenet of the neoliberal creed: that matter has no organization of its own,
except what emerges from random variation and natural selection. That religious
fundamentalists, unlike neoliberals, regard this "spontaneous order" as radically inadequate
matters little. What is important is to keep people from realizing the organization latent in
matter ...
Postmodernism plays a similar role on the left. The ethics of diff‚rance has a real base
among peoples who feel their culture being undermined by the hegemony of the market system.
But postmodernism defends difference by denying the whole in the context of which difference
has meaning, purpose, and value. Indeed, as we have seen, though it emerges from a very
different intellectual tradition --Francophile rather than Anglo-Saxon, linguistic rather than
mathematical-- postmodernism in fact reproduces most of the principal theses of information-
theoretical neoliberalism. It simply radicalizes them and draws out their logical implications,
demonstrating that infokatallaxis is just one more new "grand narrative," no better grounded than
its predecessors.
The fact is that "infokatallaxis" is impossible, at least for human beings. First of all, so long
as production actually involves the reorganization of physical, biological, and social matter, the
instantaneous reallocation of capital is impossible. This is, of course, why finance capital aspires
to the creation of a pure information economy, and attempts to retheorize all activities, from
growing corn to making steel to cooking food as forms of information processing. One would
in fact have to be at Tipler's Omega point in order to construct anything like a pure
infokatallaxis. But even so, special relativity places definite limits on the speed with which even
electronic information can be transmitted. Nothing can move faster than the speed of light. So
it appears that even at Omega perfect markets are impossible. One is tempted to call
infokatallaxis an angelic capitalism --but then angels, already being perfectly what they are,
don't consume.
But let us assume for a moment that such a system could be constructed. What would it be
like? Far from being progressive, as Tipler and his allies contend, infokatallaxis, to the extent
that it tends towards perfect equilibrium, in fact tends towards entropic death, for the reasons we
have identified above. When all capital has finally been allocated in an optimum fashion and the
instantaneous exchange of all information has eliminated the possibility of monopoly rents on
innovation, there will be no further reason to reallocate capital, and thus no investment in new
research and development, and no further progress (Martens 1995). Our neoliberal visionaries
in fact aspire to nothing more nor less than eternal death.
When a society's vision of its own future becomes focused on paths which are physically
impossible, and which, were they possible, would lead necessarily to the end of all interesting
organization in the universe, then the structures which have organized the development of that
society are clearly spent. Progress requires a break with those structures, and the creation of
something radically new. In our case this means a break with the market system.
The struggle against the market system has historically been the struggle of the working
classes. In order to complete our strategic analysis we must, therefore, analyze the situation of
the working classes, their current situation and level of organization, spontaneous activity, etc.
Here we are immediately confronted with a profound contradiction. In one sense, the most
advanced sector of the working class is simply the most skilled sector of that class: the
intelligentsia, and skilled workers especially in high technology fields, etc. One would expect
that this stratum would thus also be the most progressive, because its development is most
markedly held back by the social stagnation engendered by the market system. But this is not
the case. Intellectuals generally, and the technical intelligentsia in particular, seem to have been
effectively hegemonized by neoliberalism and postmodernism, and to have largely adapted
themselves to the neoliberal regime. There are a number of reasons for this. First, the market
system itself determines what kinds of skills are cultivated, and what kinds are not. The result
has been a massive development of technical skills and of those theoretical skills which support
technical development --especially formal abstraction-- and a neglect or even an erosion of
political skills and of the highest order theoretical skill --i.e. the capacity to comprehend the
transcendental principles of value. And the market system tends, if anything, to undermine the
cardinal moral virtues of temperance, courage, and justice. These tendencies are not,
furthermore, confined to the technical intelligentsia; on the contrary, they increasingly extend
both to the managerial and humanistic intelligentsias, which are increasingly under the hegemony
of neoliberal and postmodern ideas which reject out of hand the existence of transcendental
principles of value. As a result, the most skilled strata of the working classes are also those most
likely to accept market driven criteria, which tend to undermine any drive to imagine a new and
more interesting future. Indeed, people who attempt to grasp the transcendental principles of
value, and develop a vision and strategy grounded in those principles, tend to be weeded out of
the academy and find their promotion, and often their further intellectual development, blocked
by the ideological agents of the market system. Those who do continue to think about social
progress are often drawn to the alienated hypermarket visions of thinkers like Frank Tipler, while
those who do master the disciplines necessary to reason about transcendental principles of value
find themselves drawn towards socially conservative institutional settings, and to the extent that
they resist the market they do so on conservative rather than progressive grounds.
This tendency is exacerbated by the rapid polarization of the intelligentsia into proletarianized
and rentier strata. On the one hand, successful members of the technical and managerial
intelligentsia find themselves drawing large salaries with significant benefits packages, which they
are often able to transform into comfortable stock portfolios which permit them to retire early
as "consultants" or (if they are really successful) as New Age "seekers." Tenured faculty at
major universities, similarly, often live off of endowment income. Both of these fractions of the
intelligentsia, freed as they are from market pressures, often produce ideas which do not
specifically serve, and may even contest the market, but only from a consumer standpoint. Their
resistance to the market is a "lifestyle choice" made possible by effective freedom from market
pressures. The lower strata of the intelligentsia, on the other hand, including many who have
developed capacities which allow them to see at least partly beyond market criteria, find
themselves economically marginalized and forced to sell their labor power under conditions
which make it very difficult for them to exercise their vocation as organizers and directors of the
working class --e.g. as university lecturers with outrageously high teaching loads and almost no
security, high school teachers, minor bureaucrats, etc.
Among the middle and lower strata of the working classes the hegemony of neoliberalism and
postmodernism is much weaker, but so too is the commitment to the idea of progress. Here
residual village community structures --parishes and other religious institutions, urban
neighborhoods, etc.-- help to conserve the capacity to grasp organization and thus value, but the
economic marginalization engendered by the "information society" and the emergence of a
unified global market make progress seem like something which always and only leaves them
behind. Some struggle to keep up by seeking higher education, others accept their situation as
evidence of their own inferior ability, and still others are drawn to the conservative resistance.
The situation in the peasant communities is not fundamentally different. Peasant movements
have always focused on resisting the incursion of market relations and on restoring the land rights
of the village communities. This is an objectively progressive stance because of the profoundly
progressive potential of village community structures, but peasant movements generally
understand themselves as conservative. It is only the integration of peasant movements into the
global movement towards socialism in the period between 1894 and 1989 which led to the
dissemination of explicitly progressivist ideologies among the peasantry, and with the crisis of
socialism, we have seen a growing tendency for these ideologies to give way to various forms
of populism and ind¡genismo. Of particular interest in this regard are the new movements in
Mexico, which seem to be advancing a "purely peasant" agenda in a way which we haven't seen
since the murder of Zapata or the crisis of narodnischestvo earlier in this century.
The petty bourgeoisie, as always, is a contradictory force. On the one hand, the massive
expansion of the rentier elites have lead to an unprecedented expansion of small enterprises
catering to luxury consumption interests. And the expanding sections of the bourgeoisie --
financial and technical-- are, as always, surrounded by concentric rings of petty bourgeois
wannabes and hangers on: consultants, providers of support services, etc. These groups are
almost uniform in their support for neoliberalism, and indeed often produce its most consistent
ideologues. On the other hand, the traditional petty bourgeoisie of artisans and shopkeepers
serving the working classes are under increasing pressure from capital and have thus moved into
the conservative resistance. This is especially true as the center and center left parties which
these groups formerly supported have themselves embraced neoliberalism. Thus Italian
shopkeepers who once voted for the Christian Democrats or the Republicans (a party of the
radical democratic left) now support the neofascist Allianza Nazionale (Abse 1996). The
traditional petty bourgeoisie provides one of the principal reservoirs of support for religious
conservatism --in part not doubt because of dietary laws and other religious practices which
create specialized niche markets in which small shops can survive and even prosper.
At its upper reaches the petty bourgeoisie shades over into what might be called the
entrepreneurial bourgeoisie. What is remarkable in the present period is the gradual
marginalization of this stratum from the ruling classes, and indeed a tendency for the stratum to
dissolve altogether, so that its condition is not really different from that of the petty bourgeoisie
from which it emerges. This does not mean that there are not new businesses being established,
many of which in fact become capitalist enterprises exploiting a large workforce. But under
conditions of a unified global market in capital, such enterprises, in order to grow, must be
wholly subordinate to the dynamics of the financial markets. It is no longer simply a question
of the firm's product or service selling, and of the enterprise turning a profit. Rather each new
allocation of capital must match the highest rate of return available in any sector of the economy
anywhere on the planet. The entrepreneur is thus transformed from an innovator and an
organizer of people and technology into a financial manager and agent of the capital markets. An
entrepreneur who is unwilling or unable to adapt to this new reality will fail, or at best be
consigned to the ranks of the struggling petty bourgeoisie. Like the working classes, therefore,
the petty bourgeoisie is increasingly divided into a prosperous, promarket stratum which buys
neoliberalism and is undergoing rapid rentierization, and a conservative, declining stratum which
sees progress of any kind as a threat to its very existence.
The result is that very few people at any level within the system see themselves as agents of
social progress held back by the market system --and that there is, currently, no mass
constituency which is spontaneously receptive to synergism. Clearly this presents us with a very
difficult strategic situation.
Before we move on to strategic considerations, however, we need to analyze briefly the
current political conjuncture, and the way in which the underlying social dynamics we have
analyzed are expressed in the activities of various socioreligious movements and political-
theological tendencies. The long conjuncture between 1978 (the date of the silent coup against
Carter and the Trilateralists, the rise of Thatcherism in England and Reaganism in the U.S.) and
1989-1991 (the final collapse of the Soviet bloc) was characterized by a sharp bourgeois offensive
against the working classes and the national liberation movements. Beginning in 1988, but very
definitively by 1992, there was a shift towards the consolidation of the new global neoliberal
regime, marked on the one hand by the transformation of the United Nations --long a strategic
reserve for the national liberation movements-- into a mechanism of international political-
diplomatic and especially political-military control for global capital, and on the other hand by
the finalization of a series of international trade agreements designed to institutionalize global
"free" trade --NAFTA, GATT, etc.
Broadly speaking, the dominant dynamic is still one of consolidation of the new global order.
But within this context a number of struggles are being played out which have considerable
tactical, and in some cases strategic, significance for the progressive forces. First, debates have
emerged within the bourgeoisie over the purity of the market regime to be instituted and
precisely where and how it should be modified. Rising segments of high technology capital,
concentrated especially in the information sector and in the civilian, as opposed to military side
of industry, began to press for increased investment in infrastructure, education, research, and
development. These "moderate neoliberals" allied themselves with moderate social
conservatives (the so-called "communitarians") distressed by the disintegration of the social fabric
under the impact of both market and bureaucratic structures. It is these elements which brought
Bill Clinton to power in the U.S. and which have kept the European and Japanese center left
alive as the older social liberal alliance disintegrates.
It rapidly became apparent, however, that the political-economic conditions for actually
carrying out the moderate neoliberal-communitarian program do not exist. The heavy debt burden
of even the advanced industrial countries, result of years of social liberalism, made it effectively
impossible to finance the required "investments" through yet higher deficits. Broad based anti-
tax sentiment, meanwhile, made tax-driven financing all but impossible. This was especially true
given the combined reticence and inability of the moderate neoliberals to mobilize broad based
working class support. On the one hand, neoliberal entrepreneurs and technocratic intellectuals
had no desire to reawaken the workers movement, with which they had little or nothing in
common. Workers, on the other hand, were not about to mount a costly struggle just to get
slightly better retraining programs --especially with the likes of Robert Reich (who passes for
Clinton's "left" wing) telling them to expect their wages to erode towards Third World levels
anyway unless they transformed themselves into "symbolic analysts" capable of earning
monopoly rents on innovation. As a result, the workers deserted the Democrats and other center
and center left parties, and began flocking to social conservatives who spoke to at least part of
their misery. The result was the defeat of the Democratic party in the 1994 election and a
growing crisis of credibility for Social Christian and Social Democratic parties in Europe as they
increasingly towed the neoliberal line.
But as the events of 1994-1996 make clear, there has been no broad based shift to the
neoliberal right. The radicalism of the Contract on America has proven itself even more
unpopular than the arcane policy proposals advanced by the Clinton government. Gingrich and
company have not delivered much more to their allies in the defense/aerospace industry and the
social conservative movement than Clinton did for the computer industry and his
"communitarian" friends. The only real "policy" at present is that of the global market.
Workers' parties, generally speaking, have taken one of two principal stands with respect to
the current crisis. Most but not all social democrats and "reformed" communists (such as the
Italian Partito Democratica della Sinistra or the Polish Democratic Left-- have largely accepted
the premises of neoliberalism, and simply argue for a slower and less draconian reduction in the
social wage and higher levels of "investment" in infrastructure, education, research and
development. In this regard it is not at all surprising to hear the deputy leader of the Italian PDS
arguing for the creation of something like the Democratic Party of the United States. This kind
of strategy has produced favorable electoral results only where the party in question still has a
strong organizational apparatus with ties to the industrial working class (as in Italy) or where
there is no real alterative (as in Poland). When such parties have come to power, only to
implement "soft" versions of the neoliberal program, they have found --not surprisingly-- that
when they return to the polls the working classes reject them.
Other parties --Workers' Russia for example-- have taken up what might be called a
"conservative economist" position, defending nationalized industry, state bureaucracies, pensions,
wages, social security, etc. against the neoliberal offensive, without really advancing a credible
vision for the future. A few --the Russian Communist Party, the Partido Revolucionario
Democratico in Mexico try to have it both ways.
In the meantime, large sections of the working class and the petty bourgeoisie are being
attracted by semifascist and neofascist movements, from the Buchanan wing of the Republican
Party in the United States to the nationalist and anti-European right in Western Europe, to the
"Liberal Democrats" of Vladimir Zhironovsky. In Asia and Africa a similar niche is filled by
Islamic and Hindu fundamentalism. Small numbers of marginalized intellectuals support
"ecologist" parties or "left" formations imbued with the impotent and pessimistic spirit of
postmodernism.
The current conjuncture is thus best described as one in which neoliberal hegemony is largely
uncontested, the strictly subaltern status of productive capital --high tech or low tech, military
or civilian-- to finance capital having been firmly established --though there does, to be sure,
seem to be a continuing struggle between two broad factions within capital regarding the extent
to which a regime of perfect competition should be established and the precise ways in which this
regime should be modified. The working classes and the petty bourgeoisie, meanwhile, oscillate
between more or less passive resignation to the neoliberal regime and conservative resistance.
The progressive forces are not even on the map.
III. Strategy and Tactics
A. Strategy
Where do we go from here? The task is daunting. While our analysis is little more than a
rough sketch, it should be apparent that no mobilization of the existing opposition can mount a
credible challenge to the market system. We must rebuild, almost from scratch, a movement
which has met with global defeat on an unprecedented scale --and that under the worst
imaginable conditions. It is necessary to reorganize the working classes (intelligentsia, proletariat,
peasantry) around a new, progressive vision (synergism).
This makes the task of developing a comprehensive strategy extraordinarily difficult. At this
point it is possible only to identify a few broad strategic principles. First, it is important to keep
in mind that fundamental civilizational transitions have occurred not only through reform and
revolution --the historic models of the socialist movements-- but also, as Samir Amin first drew
to our attention in 1980 (Amin 1980), through decadence and renewal. Clearly this was the case
with the transition from the enormously unproductive slave-based petty commodity social
formations of the Mediterranean Basin to the highly innovative system of European feudalism.
The decay and disintegration of late bronze age tributary empires also seems to have been a
major factor in allowing the emergence of neocommunitarian societies based on specialized
agriculture (grain, oil, wine) and iron technology in the period around 1200-700 B.C.E. Clearly
it is impossible to say at this point that the coming transition will be by decadence and renewal
rather than reform or revolution, but given the depth of the crisis and the weakness of the
progressive forces, we clearly need to prepare for this possibility. This means organizing to
conserve the heritage of human civilization through a period of profound social disintegration as
well as developing a vision for a new, postmarket social order.
Second, the ambiguity of the present situation means that we must maintain a proper balance
between the task of building an organization which can serve as a vehicle for synergism, and
working with the existing opposition to try to avert a wholesale civilizational collapse, and if this
proves impossible, to help conserve what we can of the achievements of civilization as we
prepare for a long period of darkness. On the one hand, existing ideologies and organizations are
clearly inadequate to the tasks facing human civilization, and the task of developing a new vision
and a new strategy remains paramount. On the other hand, neither our own organization, nor
any other devoted to retheorizing the next steps in the human civilizational project, and to
building a new leadership core, is likely to enjoy mass support in the short or medium run, for
the reasons we have outlined above. The range of existing opposition forces, however, is in fact
quite broad, and properly mobilized it might be able to avert the worst sort of disaster. This
means looking carefully at the distinctive potential contributions of each element within the
progressive bloc. Debates of the kind which shaped the local revolutionary struggles of the
twentieth century, between advocates of a peasant-based prolonged popular war, an urban
proletarian insurrection, a popular front, or "cultural hegemony" exercised by revolutionary
intellectuals, or between advocates of armed struggle and electoral politics will have no place in
the coming period. The fact is that all of these diverse forms of struggle have and will continue
to play an important role. Peasant wars are unlikely in New Jersey, but events in rapidly
industrializing and urbanizing Mexico have shown they are unlikely to disappear entirely from
the global scene. At the same time, however impotent and reformist electoral struggle may
appear to peasants organizing under an authoritarian regime in a still largely agrarian country,
it can be neglected only with great peril --something which the Communist Party of the
Philippines learned to its chagrin. Revolutionary strategy in the next century will increasingly
become centered on the task of organizing and orchestrating all of these diverse social forces,
drawing out their latent potential, challenging them to grow and develop and become something
more than they are --while still respecting their autonomy and their rootedness in and constraint
by distinct local conditions.
Similarly the old struggle between reformist gradualism and revolutionary rupture needs to
be seen in a new and very different light. As human civilization develops it must be continually
reorganized in order to unleash new potential which cannot be accommodated by old structures.
Transcending the market system will not change this. From this point of view the difference
between serious structural reform and revolutionary transformation does not seem so great --
certainly not so great as the difference between a progressive, reformist/revolutionary transition
and a transition through decadence and renewal. This is important because many of the rising
forces on the left are broad parties which are very far from proposing social revolution --the
PRD in Mexico, the Workers Party in Brazil, etc. This does not meant that they cannot and will
not make an important contribution to breaking the current impasse. At the same time, we must
be clear that many so-called parties of the left have abandoned the working classes altogether,
and become parties of the hegemonized technical intelligentsia. This is certainly true in Europe
where even the PDS is talking about cutting corporate taxes and loosening labor markets. In
assessing whether or not a particular organization constitutes part of the core constituency for
synergism, is a strategic or tactical reserve, or perhaps even part of the enemy, we must use a
variety of different criteria. On the one hand, we must look at its base. Is it an organization
of the working classes --i.e. of one of the sectors of society which lives from productive labor,
manual or intellectual? Is it an organization of the petty bourgeoisie or of the petty rentier strata
--classes which engage in productive labor but live from the profits of enterprise, or from interest
and dividends? Or is it an organization of the unproductive bourgeoisie which adds nothing to
the organization of the universe? Organizations of the working classes constitute our core
constituency, those of the petty bourgeoisie and petty rentiers are strategic reserves, and those
of the bourgeoisie adversaries or at best tactical allies. Second, however, we must ask how the
base is organized. Is the organization in question an instrument of neoliberal hegemony, which
uses fine language about "investment" in human development to lure workers and intellectuals
into its fold? Or is it an organization which, even if only implicitly and incompletely, rejects
the hegemonic neoliberal regime?
Furthermore, as we relate to these diverse sectors, we face a dual task. On the one hand, in
the short and medium run, we need to find ways to draw them together into a broad alliance to
conserve the integrity of the ecosystem, the social fabric, and the historic achievements of
human civilization --and to catalyze renewed progress in the development of human social
capacities. These tasks can be carried by a number of different social forms, from revitalized
and protected peasant communities, through autonomous foundations operating within the context
of civil society, to renewed state regulation and rationalized reallocation of resources.
What would otherwise be the difficult question of just which of these tasks to emphasize is
largely settled for us by the diverse character of the sectors in question. Indigenous and peasant
communities, organized in groups like the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberaci¢n Nacional (EZLN),
as well as working class and petty bourgeois groups living in communities with strong social
fabric will be more focused on the conservative tasks of our period; skilled workers and
intellectuals on the progressive tasks. Both are important and their relative weight is determined
by the relative strength of the social forces which carry them, which in turn reflect the overall
level of development of human society.
Second, we need to find ways to draw each of these sectors into the struggle to build a new,
postmarket social order. Once again there are diverse forms of transition open to us,
corresponding to the rich diversity of forces which make up the potential opposition to
capitalism.
The transition to a postmarket economy involves two main tasks. First, we need to break the
nexus between work and wages. We can do this by gradually increasing the social wage in the
form of free health care, education, public transportation, and subsidies for housing, food,
clothing, and other necessities, while at the same time establishing quasi-mandatory education
and work programs, with exemptions for parents caring full time for children (an activity which
would be credited as full time skilled labor). The aim should be to provide people with as much
training as they can benefit from, and to gradually get to the point where we guarantee everyone
employment in their chosen field, at the highest level at which they can perform. This will
remove the disintegrating pressure of the marketplace on families and communities, by permitting
people to opt to care for their children rather than selling their labor power, while creating a
powerful upward pressure on wages which will in turn create an incentive for automating those
jobs which essentially no one wants to perform. Necessary but routine labor which cannot be
automated can be performed through mandatory service programs. Most important, these reforms
will begin to awaken the dormant creativity and initiative of the working class, and create a basis
in experience for understanding that work is our highest vocation --that we consume in order to
work, to add something to the universe, and not the other way around.
Clearly the most straightforward way to carry out these changes is through the state apparatus.
But if the balance of social forces compels us to weather a transition through decadence and
renewal, then one of our main tasks will be to build up collectives or communities in the space
opened up by the disintegration of the market order which uphold the principle of a strict
separation between work and wages or subsistence needs.
Second, we need to find ways to centralize resources for human development --not only for
the increased social wage proposed above, but also for infrastructure, education, research, and
development. In this regard it must be said that bureaucratic centralization through taxation, or
through revenue generated by state enterprises, has not yet expended its progressive potential.
On the contrary, this is the only way we know to carry out very large projects: building high
speed rail, astronautics, etc., and it may be the only way to finance projects which generate little
or no direct revenue: health care or education in poor communities. This is essentially the
historic socialist option.
There are, however, other ways to insure that the social surplus product is used in a way
which promotes the development of human social capacities. One of the simplest is already in
use: the corporate charter. We currently require that nonprofit corporations use their resources
in a way which serves the "exempt" purpose of the organization. There is no reason why for-
profit charters cannot (under the pressure of the victorious working classes) gradually be
rewritten to contain similar requirements. This means, of course, understanding that the mission
of a corporation is to produce some useful good or service, not to make profits for stockholders.
The result would be a gradually phasing out of dividend payments, reduction of executive
salaries, etc., and ultimately the end of the financial markets and the market in capital generally.
Banks would be transformed into something more like private foundations. This does not mean,
however, that the corporations would fall under state control. Rather, they would be governed
as nonprofit corporations are currently governed, with significant leeway as to the way in which
they allocate their resources, as well as the right to form strategic alliances, etc. While private
stockholding would essentially disappear, "shares" might be allocated to hospitals, school systems
and universities, research institutes, etc. to support work which does not itself generate revenue.
We call this the "social charter" system.
In some regions and some sectors of the economy still less centralized options exist.
Neocommunitarian and neo-monastic forms (with or without fully communal living) may be
attractive options under certain conditions: a highly productive, intensive agrarian, handicrafts
(including "custom high technology crafts"), and/or service economy (e.g. a residential school)
coupled with an intact village or intentional community. The aim here is not complete autarchy.
The community provides goods or services to the larger economy, and its charter forbids luxury
consumption. It may even pay a tax in cash or kind. And in order to be development, the
community would undoubtedly need goods and services from the outside. But because it
approaches self-sufficiency, it retains an even greater autonomy in decisions about resource
allocation than state or corporate systems, albeit on a much smaller scale.
What we need to keep in mind is that while all three of these structural options centralize and
allocate resources for human development, they will lead to very different patterns of
development. Consider the question of energy sources. Full development of safe fusion energy
is likely only under a system with significant state centralization of resources for research and
development. Neocommunitarian or neomonastic systems, on the other hand, are likely to favor
development of solar energy, because of the greater independence it affords. Social charter
systems, or the social charter sector in a larger system, while freed from the market pressures
which favor continued use of fossil or fissionable fuels, might tend to be a bit more
opportunistic, each organization favoring whatever energy source helped it carry out its own
mission. State-centralizing systems make space exploration possible; at least with current
technologies village communities do not --but they do conserve social fabric and provide a rich
context for certain forms of artistic, scientific, and religious development. On the other hand
there is little reason why either the state or small communities ought to, or would want to, be
involved in making heavy machine tools. Clearly we need some combination of all three systems,
and different regions will likely opt for somewhat different combinations.
The choice between these different options depends in large part on forces over which we will
have at best very limited control: the relative weight of the various social classes within the
progressive bloc, and the conditions under which we are organizing the transition. A
revolutionary or reformist transition clearly favors the historic socialist option, though there is
no reason why it cannot conserve significant social space for the social charter and
neocommunitarian options. A transition through decadence and renewal clearly favors the social
charter and neocommunitarian options --the latter more strongly the deeper and more rapid the
disintegration. Even so, any form of organization will require the existence of some institution
which exercises at least minimal state functions: the administration of justice and the defence of
the realm. Those of us in the Americas, and in parts of Asia and Africa, who have spent our
lives fighting the imperialist state may soon find ourselves in the position of the monastics of the
early feudal period, mourning the complete disintegration of state authority. For our comrades
in Europe or the former Soviet bloc, where the state has played a more progressive role, the shift
in orientation will seem less ironic.
This brings us to the specific role of the Foundation in this larger global grand strategy, and
to our own tasks in the present period. While our influence has certainly grown over the past
five years we are still very far from being able to influence events on a global scale, nor do we
have the resources necessary to act effectively on all of the many different fronts which we have
identified as strategically significant. We need, rather, to concentrate our efforts in those areas
which are especially timely, and in which we enjoy an overwhelming comparative advantage,
while building strategic relationships with institutions which can help us both to become more
effective in our areas of strength and to expand into new areas so that we can eventually act at
a global grand-strategic level. The direction suggested by our analysis both of the larger global
situation and of our own strategic assets is very clear. The principal task of the progressive
forces in the present period is to develop a new, synergistic vision and strategy, and a new
leadership which can help to develop and implement that vision and strategy. Indeed, apart from
profound ideological changes and enormous organizational development, the mobilization of the
progressive forces outlined above will be effectively impossible. And it is in precisely these areas
that we enjoy the greatest strengths.
Let us look at each of these tasks in greater detail. We have already shown that the crisis of
socialism (and thus the weakness of the existing opposition) derives from the internal
contradictions of dialectical materialism, and specifically from the contradiction between a vision
of social and even cosmic progress on the one hand and atheism on the other. Our first and most
important task thus remains the work of regrounding our knowledge of first principles, and thus
of the transcendental principles of value, in a scientific understanding of the organization of the
universe, and then elaborating the ethics and strategy which flows out of those principles. From
this standpoint and this standpoint alone will we be able to effectively combat the hegemony of
neoliberalism, fundamentalism, and postmodernism.
One area in particular stands out as especially important. We need to vigorously combat the
mystified understanding of progress promoted by neoliberalism and its information theoretical
philosophy, and work to clarify the character of authentic social progress and human excellence.
This is vitally important if we are to rebuild within the working class a belief that social progress
is possible, that it is a good thing, and that it is something which involves and benefits --in fact
depends on-- its labor and their creativity. This is especially important as we attempt to transform
the conservative resistance of the middle and lower strata of the working classes and the
peasantry --be it religious, social democratic, or communist-- into an authentic force for social
progress.
But the foregoing analysis suggests a certain change in emphasis. When we first undertook
the task of regrounding transcendental principles of value we opted for a broadly defined natural
law or "cosmic law" approach, partly because this approach seemed logically most coherent, and
partly because it seemed amply supported by recent scientific developments in anthropic
cosmology, complex systems theory, postdarwinian evolutionary biology, dialectical sociology--
which were gradually constructing a vision of the universe as a relational, self-organizing, and
teleological system. As our research has progressed, the picture has grown more complex.
Much of the "new science" turns out to be very "old" and even backwards and reactionary in
character. This is especially true of much theoretical physics and of the tendency in complex
systems theory and evolutionary biology which is dominated by information theory. Other
tendencies in complex systems theory on the other hand have begun to yield results more
promising from a philosophical standpoint than we dared hope for five years ago, laying the
groundwork for a philosophical cosmology and an archelogy which truly revitalizes and
synthesizes the dialectical and Catholic traditions. As our system takes shape, our theoretical
work, while continuing to ground itself in scientific research --in an active effort to learn from
the cosmos through systematic observation-- will need to emphasize far more the critical,
regulatory role of archelogy vis-a-vis the special sciences, pointing out errors and internal
contradictions.
Our analysis also has very definite implications for our leadership development work. Our
analysis of the contradictory patterns of human development within the working class suggests
that we cannot rely on recruiting leaders from the intelligentsia and skilled working class, since
it is precisely these sectors which are most privileged, and most hegemonized by postmodern and
neoliberal ideology. On the contrary, we need to create a new intelligentsia drawn from the
middle and lower ranks of the working class and the peasantry --an intelligentsia which is trained
to systematically study the universe as a whole, to abstract first principles --transcendental
principles of value-- to draw out the ethical implications of the principles, and to build and
exercise the power necessary to realize them. Such an intelligentsia must be global in character,
integrating universalizing interest in the cosmohistorical evolutionary process and the human
civilizational project as a whole, with a rootedness in the diverse traditions which are the
particular forms of that project. It must have strong relationships with the traditional
intelligentsias --managerial, technical, humanistic, clerical, etc., with working class
organizations, and with the peasant communities. And it must lead in the moral as well as the
intellectual virtues. It must be driven to add something to the cosmos rather than to consume,
steeled for battle but never given to revenge or wanton violence, constantly willing the highest
Good, and all particular goods in proportion to their value. We have already described the
character of this leadership in our article "In These Dark Times ..." as a revival of the ancient
revolutionary disciplines of the prophet, the priest, and the political leader.
B. Tactics
What do these broad strategic directions mean in terms of concrete initiatives? Both the
relative success of our various initiatives thus far, and the tasks presented by the current
situation, suggest that research needs to remain the Foundation's main priority. It is only on the
basis of a compelling vision and strategy for the next steps in the human civilizational project that
we will be able to attract the kind of people we need to our leadership core and position
ourselves as a strategic center in the emerging resistance. While this does not mean abandoning
entirely educational programs directed at a broader audience or the development of consulting
relationships with parishes and community organizations, it does suggest that these activities are
at best auxiliary: means of recruiting potential members and of building financial and institutional
support. The main task of the Foundation in the present period is research and, as it begins to
attract leaders to its core, training, positioning, and mentoring them, and it is on its achievements
in these arenas that its work must be evaluated.
1. Research
Our research priorities remain essentially the same: developing and grounding a vision and
a strategy adequate for the next steps in the human civilizational project. In particular, we need
to rebuild the consensus for social progress and convince people that the market is an obstacle
to the full development of human social capacities. But this, in turn, presupposes some criterion
by which we can determine what is progressive and what is not. Thus the importance of
regrounding ethics in a credible doctrine of first principles --one which transcends the historic
atheism of dialectical materialism. This in turn means demonstrating that the universe is in fact
a self-organizing system which evolves infinitely towards ever higher degrees of organization,
and thus "terminates" in a qualitatively infinite form, i.e. God. This argument involves three
broad stages:
* development of a synoptic view of the results of the physical, biological, and social
sciences, in order to construct a philosophical cosmology demonstrating that the universe
is an infinite, organized and structured system,
* development of an archelogy, or doctrine of first principles, which flows out of this
cosmology and which analyzes the nature of being, essence, and the transcendentals,
showing that there is in fact a necessary being (organization itself) which grounds
judgements of value, and
* development of an ethics, including doctrines of right, virtue, and social justice, together
with a general treatment of questions of strategy and tactics.
This project, Organization, Teleology, and Value, which we expect to result in a book of the
same name, will constitute my single most important responsibility for the foreseeable future.
The second basic research project, tentatively entitled The Nature and Conditions for the
Development of Human Excellence, involves first of all analyzing the nature of human
excellence. This involves the development, on the basis of the best social scientific research, of
what has traditionally been called a philosophical or theological anthropology, and of an ethics.
Second, it involves systematic investigation of the conditions for the development of human
excellence. This second dimension of the project offers significant opportunities for empirical
research. We are particularly interested in exploring the impact of various social structural
locations (village community, market, socialism) on the development of intellectual, moral, and
theological virtue --a continuation of Luria's pathfinding research earlier in this century. While
this second project is, in a certain sense, contained theoretically in the first, it has its own unique
dynamism, driven as it is by more immediate practical concerns regarding the conditions for
development of a leadership core which can lead the next steps in the human civilizational
project. We do not currently have the resources to undertake much more than preliminary
planning for this effort, but we expect that as it unfolds Maggie will provide the key leadership.
These core basic research projects will unfold in the context of an ongoing dialogue with
representatives of diverse philosophical trends, many of whom participate in our research
networks and write for Dialectic, Cosmos, and Society. Of particular importance in this regard
are people working on the philosophical implications of recent developments in the physical,
biological, and social sciences, and people exploring the contemporary significance of a variety
of philosophical traditions, including Scholasticism, idealist and materialist dialectics, Russian
religious idealism, process philosophy, etc. We plan to place more emphasis on systematic,
critical assessments of trends which in some way contribute to or challenge our developing
synergistic system.
Our basic research will continue to be supplemented by research regarding questions of
political-theological strategy. Here we enjoy some unique comparative advantages which, as in
the case of our basic research program, coincide with areas of critical strategic importance. The
most important of these comparative advantages is in the area of religion and politics. In
particular, we have unusually strong capacities in analyzing the political valence of Catholicism,
at both the institutional and popular levels, though there is almost no socioreligious tradition on
the planet in which we do not have some expertise. Given the role of religious institutions in
conserving nonmarket principles of value and thus in legitimating resistance to the market order,
this is an arena of extraordinary importance. Among our highest priorities in this area is the
ongoing analysis of the Catholic Church as a global political-theological actor, but we are also
pursuing an initiative in Mexico in conjunction with the Universidad Autonoma de Ciudad Juarez
regarding Church-State relations which pose themselves in a particularly interesting way in
Mexico, with the Church arguing that statutes which contradict natural law need not be obeyed,
and the state, recognizing a threat both to its own authority and to the new market driven
economic strategy it is promoting, rejecting the right of the Church to even teach such doctrines,
much less promote actual resistance. The institutional confrontation seems to confirm core
aspects of our basic thesis regarding the progressive, antimarket political valence of Catholicism.
But matters are complicated by the fact that the Mexican hierarchy leans towards the right, and
the Catholic Partido Acci¢n Nacional is even more strongly pro-market than the government.
Our second comparative advantage is in the analysis of the organized left and of developments
in the former Soviet bloc and the remaining socialist countries. This is an area we continue to
monitor closely while we look for opportunities to conduct more focused research.
Finally, the broad analysis we have developed of the current crisis argues for the importance
of an independent prophetic-philosophical office and suggests that social progress has been
compromised by the subordination of these functions even to such progressive institutions as the
Church and the Party. But what happens when the intelligentsia enters the service of such
fundamentally reactionary institutions as the capitalist corporation or the bourgeois state? Living
and working in places like Washington, D.C. and Los Alamos, New Mexico has brought us into
contact with several of the main institutions of the U.S. military and intelligence research
apparatus, and suggested the importance of an in-depth analysis of the nature of these institutions.
Are the underlying contradictions between the vocation of an intellectual as a knower and
organizer of the universe and of human society and the institution of the marketplace sufficient
to make subversion of these institutions possible? Or is the strength of the hegemonic neoliberal
ideology --and the rentierization which is its social basis-- too great?
As we carry out these research initiatives, we need to continue to expand, and to strengthen
collaboration within, our research network. Specifically, we want to foster increased discussion
and debate among people working in different fields and from different perspectives, and
eventually convene a conference or series of conferences at which the members of our network
can engage in some face to face discussion regarding the future of human civilization. We also
need to improve the circulation of our own journal, Dialectic, Cosmos, and Society, arrange for
electronic publication, indexing, etc., and continue to increase dissemination of our work through
established academic and public affairs journals.
2. Other Initiatives
While research remains our principal task, we need to continue to lay the groundwork for the
development of a real leadership core which can help to develop and implement our vision and
our strategy and to build financial and institutional support for the Foundation. For the moment
most of our leadership development activities will continue to focus on leaders already
sufficiently advanced be to attracted to our vision and strategy and to be interested in further
training and mentoring. Given the dispersed nature of our network, much of this work will be
one on one, though we have identified opportunities for regular study groups in a few areas. In
the longer run, however, we hope to build strategic relationships which will allow us to
undertake larger scale initiatives which can help us build a new intelligentsia out of the ranks of
the working classes. Specifically, we are studying the feasibility of a two-year, community
based, liberal arts program which would help students from working class communities make
the transition from high school to first rate liberal arts colleges, and an advanced leadership
development program, for experienced adults interested in exploring fundamental philosophical
and theological questions while developing their leadership skills. The first program would
require a partnership with a major organization or a consortium of organizations (probably
universities and/or Catholic dioceses) which could provide financial and institutional support. The
second program would certainly benefit from accreditation to grant degrees. We regard both of
these initiatives as important, but medium to long term --something we hope to develop over the
next five to ten years at the earliest.
As we noted above, the principal mission of the Foundation makes it very difficult for it to
function simultaneously as a consulting business. What makes us distinct and excellent also
makes us appear a bit odd or even suspicious to organizations looking for contract research,
leadership development, or strategic planning services. Because of this, while we do not intend
to withdraw entirely from this arena, we no longer regard it as an effective or principal method
of building financial and institutional support in the present period. This makes all the more
central the task of building up other mechanisms of support. First, we need to increase and
regularize our subscription/dues base, which is our only real guarantee of autonomy and
continued survival. Our principal asset in doing this is the uniqueness of the product we offer.
Only in Dialectic, Cosmos, and Society can readers find an authentic effort to develop a vision
and a strategy for the next steps in the human civilizational project; only in Dialectic, Cosmos,
and Society can they find scholars from such diverse disciplines writing from such a wide range
of perspectives. In short, we have created a unique and fine publication --now we need to
market it more effectively.
Second, we need to identify strategic partners who can both provide us with in kind support
and help us leverage foundation grants, etc. The most straightforward alternative in this regard
is a major university. An affiliation between the Foundation and a university would help to
position the institution in question as a center for thought about the next steps in the human
civilizational project. Such an affiliation might also provide a context for the development of our
liberal arts program. We are also assessing the feasibility of applying for accreditation as a
nongovernmental organization affiliated with the United Nations. Both our research and our
leadership development initiatives fall within current program priorities for such United Nations
System organizations as the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, the
United Nations Institute for Training and Research, and the United Nations University.
***
We have come a long way, but we also have a long way to go. Building an organization
designed to chart the next steps in the human civilization is a difficult task --far more difficult
than building a corporation or a trade union, a political party, a church, or a university-- for it
involves understanding and being able to reorganize all of these different kinds of institutions on
the basis of a vision which is at once clearly fixed on promoting the development of complex
organization, but also always fluid and developing. It is the work of a lifetime --a lifetime of
struggle, but also of incomparable joy in knowing that we participate, at a level few others have,
in the self-organizing activity of the cosmos, in which we all live and move and have our being.
We urge you to join us in this effort, to add your strength to ours, as we make straight
humanity's pathway into the future.
References
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Personnel
Officers
President/Treasurer: Anthony Mansueto
Executive Vice President/Secretary: Maggie Mansueto
Assistant Secretary: Robert Anderson
Council
Samir Amin, Director, Forum Tiers Monde, Dakar, Senegal
Ernesto Cardenal, Director, Casa de Tres Mundos, Managua,
Nicaragua; formerly Minister of Culture, Republic of Nicaragua
Boris Gubman, Chair, Department of the History and Theory of
Culture, Tver State University, and Tver Regional Director, Russian
Academy of the Social Sciences, Tver, Russian Federation
Pavel Gurevich, Laboratory Director, Institute of Philosophy, Russian
Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russian Federation
Errol Harris, Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy,
Northwestern University, U.S.A.
Francois Houtart, Director, Centre Tricontinental, Louvain-la-Neuve,
Belgium
Tony Hinajosa, Mayor, Cockrell Hill, Texas, U.S.A.
Richard Olenick, Chair, Department of Physics, University of
Dallas, Irving, Texas, U.S.A.
Dejan Pavlov, General Director, Institute for Strategic Studies and
Development, University "Braca Karic," Belgrade, Yugoslavia
Rudolfo Rincones, Profesor/Investigador, Unidad de Estudios
Regionales, Universidad Autonoma de Ciudad Juarez, Ciudad Juarez,
Mexico and Director of Research and Evaluation, El Paso Independent
School District, El Paso, Texas, U.S.A.
Mieczyslaw Spzorer, United States Library of Congress, Washington,
D.C., U.S.A.
Introduction
In this issue we continue our analysis of the philosophical implications of recent
developments in the sciences. Our lead article, by Irina Dobronravova of the
University of Kiev, draws on the categories of the Hegelian dialectic in order to
understand the significance of the new theory of self-organization advanced by Nobel-
prize winning chemist Ilya Prigogine and his collaborators. Prigogine's work is
fundamental for the larger project of synergism. He argues that far from being in a
perpetual state of entropic disintegration, there is a fundamental tendency in matter
towards self-organization --towards the development of ever higher degrees of
differentiation and integration. This insight is fundamental to any effort to reground a
doctrine of cosmohistorical progress --indeed any effort to understand the universe as
ultimately meaningful. Professor Dobronravova's article focuses on the implications
of this insight for our understanding of the conditions for the stability of emerging
organization. This then leads her to identify various distinct levels of organizational
integrity, or totality, a question which ultimately involves the status of the universe as
a unified system.
This issue also includes "Cuestiones Cu nticas," a new poem by Ernesto Cardenal,
which broaches related issues regarding the ultimate meaning and destiny of life and
intelligence in the universe.
Finally, this issue marks over five years of work by the Foundation for Social
Progress. We thus include a major report assessing our achievements, analyzing the
current situation, and outlining our strategy for the future. Cuestiones Cu nticas
Ernesto Cardenal
"Despu‚s de Einstein se demostr¢
que se envejece m s despacio
mientras se avanza m s rapido."
¨Y una velocidad infinita
no es un tiempo sin vejez?
Para Einstein el espacio es real
y el tiempo imaginario, o viceversa.
¨Y si hay un espacio-tiempo espiritual
escondido en las part¡culas elementales
y que la ciencia no puede detectar?
¨Y si la resurrecci¢n de los cuerpos
ser de esas part¡culas elementales
que estuvieron tambi‚n en otros cuerpos,
part¡culas elementales tras de las cuales
ya no hay nada m s, sino s¢lo Dios?
Todas las c‚lulas de nuestro cuerpo
tienen los mismos cromosomas, sean
del ojo, del coraz¢n, del h¡gado
¨y si las part¡culas de los cromosomas
son la misma part¡cula toditas,
todo el cosmos como un solo cromosoma?
As¡ entendemos mejor, aunque vagamente, Carmen,
el dulce dogma de la resurrecci¢n de tu carne.
El vos dentro de vos,
tu m s profundo t£,
consciente de su conciencia,
reflejo de espejo en espejo
(o sea infinitos espejos)
es lo que no muere. Pero no quiero
un vivir despu‚s de la muerte
s¢lo como pura informaci¢n.
¨El alma s¢lo informaci¢n?
Como Bohm sostiene
(y no s¢lo Bohm)
todo es uno solo aunque lo vemos por partes.
Pero las separaciones sentidas como v lidas
Un trapecio en mi infancia meci‚ndose
en un kiosco en casa de me t¡a Antonina,
muy borrados ahora trapecio y jard¡n ...
Todo est conectado con todo,
aun part¡culas sub-at¢micas
separadas por billiones de a¤os.
Desde los quasares a un candelita de cumplea¤os.
Lo que Bohm ha llamado "no localizaci¢n."
Nada est en ninguna parte.
A nivel sub-at¢mico todo junto en todas partes.
La primera dial‚ctica fue el Big Bang,
compresi¢n/expansi¢n.
Cielo y tierra estaban separados desde Arist¢teles
y por eso la luna no se ca¡a.
Hasta que Newton descubri¢ que ‚ramos lo mismo
el cielo y la tierra, y por eso la luna no ca¡a.
La implicaci¢n universal de la ca¡da de la manzana.
Si la manzana no cae es porque todo cae sobre todo.
Y arriba y abajo es s¢lo en el planeta.
A escala del universo no hay diferencia
si decimos un a¤o o mil a¤os. Y un jard¡n ya lejano.
The red shift.
El espacio se expande, no las galaxias. Pero
¨en qu‚ se expande el espacio? ¨en otro espacio?
La estrella que colapsa sobre s¡ misma
por su densidad y desaparece
¨para d¢nde va?
Oh Bohm, que sea cierta tu teor¡a.
El misterio que llevamos dentro o mente.
¨Es la manzana roja la misma para ti que para m¡?
La misma fue para Ad n que para Eva
aunque eran distintas sus neuronas
(y las de Newton).
Las manzanas se pudren y las neuronas
pero algo que no muere sale como una mariposa
de la complejidad del cerebro y la simplicidad de la mente,
de este universo de 3 libras de peso.
Quantum Questions
Ernesto Cardenal
"After Einstein it was proven that one ages more slowly, while one advances more
rapidly."
And an infinite velocity --isn't that a time without old age?
For Einstein, space is real and time imaginary, or vice versa.
And if there is a spiritual space-time hidden in the elementary particles, which science
cannot detect?
And if the resurrection of the body will be of those elementary particles
which were also in other bodies,
elementary particles besides which there is nothing else, but only God?
All the cells of our body
have the same chromosomes, be they
eye cells, or heart cells or liver cells.
And if the particles of the chromosomes are the same particle,
the whole cosmos like one single chromosome?
Thus we can understand better, even if only vaguely, Carmen,
the sweet dogma of the resurrection of your flesh.
The you within you
the you more profoundly you
conscious of your consciousness
mirror image in mirror image
(or perhaps there are infinite mirrors)
is that which does not die. But I don't want
a life after death
only as pure information.
The soul only information?
As Bohm holds
(and not only Bohm)
Everything is one even though we see it by parts.
But the separations are felt so strongly.
A swing from my childhood, slowly rocking
in a pavilion at the house of my Aunt Antonina,
very fuzzy now, the swing and the garden ...
Everything is connected with everything else,
even subatomic particles separated by billions of years.
From the quasars to a birthday candle.
What Bohm called "nonlocality."
Nothing is anywhere in particular.
At the subatomic level everything is linked together everywhere.
The first dialectic was the Big Bang,
compression/expansion.
Heaven and earth were separated since Aristotle
and because of this the moon doesn't fall down.
Until Newton discovered that we are the same
the heaven and the earth, and that that is why the moon doesn't fall.
The universal implication of the fall of the apple.
If the apple doesn't fall its because everything is falling on everything else.
And up and down makes sense only on the planet.
On the scale of the universe it makes no difference
if we say one year or a thousand. And a garden already so distant.
The red shift.
Space expands, not the galaxies. But
in what is space expanding? in another space?
The star which collapses on itself
because of its density and disappears
where does it go?
Oh Bohm, that your theory might be certain!
The mystery which we carry within, or mind.
Is the red apple the same for you and for me?
It was the same for Adam as for Eve
even though their neurons were distinct
(and those of Newton).
Apples rot and also neurons
but something which doesn't die goes out like a butterfly
from the complexity of the brain and the simplicity of the mind,
from this universe of three pounds weight.
Dialectic as a Means for Understanding
Nonlinear Science
Irina Dobronravova
Why study theories of the self-organization of complex systems? There is a tendency to
represent nonlinear science as primarily a science of chaos. But while the results of nonlinear
theories of chaos are very impressive, they do not exhaust the results of this promising area of
scientific investigation. Furthermore, from the standpoint of an effort to establish a new unity
among the natural sciences on the foundations of nonlinearity, theories of self-organization are
far more important. I have in mind here the possibility of understanding the relative stability of
dissipative structures as a dynamic stability, as the self-reproduction of self-organized systems.
This allows us to see stability from an evolutionary point of view. And it is precisely the
problem of stability which is the main problem in the unification of modern science, integrating
"the physics of being" and "the physics of becoming," to use Prigogine's expression, by
retheorizing the content of both classical and non-classical physics from a nonlinear point of
view.
The contemporary revolution in the natural sciences is associated with the creation and
development of two new scientific programs, which both involve the study of nonlinear processes
of self-organization in complex systems: the research program of unitary gauge theories and the
research program of synergetics. These two research programs have resulted in a new style of
scientific thinking, which we call "nonlinear (Dobronravova 1990)," oriented towards the
analysis of whole systems in the process of becoming. Among the defining characteristics of
this new style of thought, we identify:
a) a focus on the investigation of the conditions of an unstable state initial system (the
principle of spontaneous symmetry breaking), and
b) the analysis of alternative possibilities for the emergence of new stable formations (the
principle of coherence presupposing a correlated behavior of initial medium elements that
compose the parts of a new whole, which can be shown mathematically by the
emergence of new symmetries).
This new style of thinking is associated with formation of a new world picture, where the world
is presented as a self-organizing entity, both when taken as a whole and on many levels of
organization. It might seem at first sight that only unitary gauge theories bear on the existence
of the world as a whole, because they help ground modern cosmological models. And it is true
that most synergetic theories concern mainly macroscopic objects. I hope to show, however, that
only the new synergetic understanding of the integrity of self-organized systems makes it possible
to say something about the world as a whole. This is because synergetics --the theory of
self-organization-- has made variable existence in its becoming and transiency the subject of
investigation, while nonclassical physics (of which unitary gauge theories form a part), like
classical physics before it, is directed towards the search for the essence, and the universality of
the laws of it discovers is interpreted as a manifestation of invariability of the essence sought for.
Such a static theory cannot comprehend the universe as a self-organizing, and thus evolutionary
totality. Synergetics makes this possible.
The extension of the object of mathematical natural science from conservative to dissipative
systems, from linear to nonlinear dynamics, from equilibrium to strongly nonequilibrium
situations, from stability regarded as invariability to dynamic stability, has, to be sure, changed
our understanding of reality and universality and their relation to natural laws. In so far as they
focus on universal, invariant laws, classical and nonclassical physics --the physics of being-- both
treat reality as substance. Self-organization is not, however, a fully regular process. The
"choice" by a system of one path of development over another at bifurcation points is not
determined by law. This makes the destiny of a self-organized system irreversible. Thus,
natural science acquires the features of historical science. Its object is no longer nature "as the
being of things, so far it is determined by general law" (Kant in Prolegomena, paragraph
14 ), but also the becoming these things as well as the formation of the general laws which
govern that process of becoming. These means that the stable existence of a system will have
a different ground than those envisioned by the physics of being, a ground which cannot be
reduced to the continuous action of linear laws which are invariant with respect to the direction
time. From the very beginning the description of self-organized systems has aimed at the search
for the conditions of their stability. Moreover, the discovery of several types of stable solutions
for nonlinear equations means that the historic commitment to generalization, which has always
characterized scientific method, can be retained. For all the unpredictability which characterizes
the development of self-organizing systems, as they opt for various alternative paths of
development, synergetics has discovered that mathematical modeling is possible and that we can
arrive at some general theoretical principles. Even if these principles are interpreted rather
modestly as just a set of typical ways to realize self-organization, their discovery shows that the
specific features of a natural science oriented to the cognition of the general have been retained.
The ability of science to retain its main features, even when its objects and methods are
changed, is rooted in the development of fundamentally new styles of thinking and the
development of new categories of thought. These new categories play a vital heuristic role at
certain stages of scientific development. Thus to comprehend the situation of bifurcation with its
break in the functioning of laws, when a system is transiting from one relatively stable state to
another in which it will obey new laws, the limited categorical forms effective for the physics
of being are inadequate. Paired categories of necessity and randomness, possibility and actuality,
cause and effect within the conception of probable causality enable us at best to comprehend
randomness as a manifestation of necessity, retaining the prearrangement of the necessity which
initially limits the realm of the possible. Within the framework of these categories one cannot
pose a question of the emergence of new a necessity governed by new laws, of the role of
randomness in this becoming, or of the grounds for the emergence of the possibility of such a
becoming and of conditions of preservation of what has become.
Fortunately, the philosophical tradition does have resources which can help us solve this
problem. Among the most important of these is the Hegelian dialectic, with its analysis of the
process of form building. Categorical analysis of theoretical descriptions of self-organized
systems has already demonstrated the usefulness of the dialectic in the understanding of
self-organization (Dobronravova 1990: 98-116). Here I would like to make particular use of
categories derived from Hegel's Science of Logic. While the first definitions of becoming are
given in the "theory of being," it is the "theory of the essence," which forms the middle part of
the work which I find most useful. This is because the categories of being and becoming
describe systems in their immediacy, whereas the quality is self-organization is something which
comes to the fore only after analysis --i.e. only after theoretical mediation. Such phenomena as
laser performance or a heart beating do not reveal their similarity as self-organizing processes
to the naked eye as it were, but do so only through the lens of scientific theory. Besides, the
relations of necessity, which are interesting for us, are described by Hegel in his theory of the
essence.
Before proceeding, I would like to explain the way in which I use philosophical categories
to interpret scientific results. I treat the philosophical heritage not as a historian of philosophy,
investigating the grounds of the appearance of one or the other philosophical idea, but rather
as a philosopher of science, trying to find in the history of philosophy the means to understand
the current situation in science. I doing this, I draw freely on M. Mamardashwily's notion of
philosophical inventions --ideas which, once developed, may be freely used by others as the basis
for the development still other ideas (Mamardashwily, 1990, 94-95). I thus use one such
philosophic invention, Hegel's dialectic, to help us understand recent developments in nonlinear
science. More precisely, I will use certain parts of Hegel's "Science of Logic" as an
instrument for theorizing the concept of "self-organization." Given the powerful prejudice against
Hegel among philosophers of science, I need to stress that I am not embracing Hegel's larger
idealism or his attitude towards nature, but simply using some of his ideas, which he elaborated
specifically as logical means for understanding becoming and the evolution of new totalities.
The advantage of his approach is that it permits us regard a whole from the inside and thus to
comprehend it in the process of its own becoming and self-reproduction. I would also like to
stress here that my use of Hegel does not entail a critique of or a departure from scientific
rationality. The basic character of scientific rationality has remained unchanged: the same
reasoning and discursiveness, no special logics. That is, the phenomenon of becoming which is
comprehended in the Hegelian dialectic is mathematically described by nonlinear dynamics and
bifurcation theory, supplemented, where necessary, by probability descriptions.
***
The new whole which emerges as a result of self-organization may be generally described as
a coherent structure. The problem just how a new structure emerges may be properly formulated
as a problem of finding the ground of the becoming in the conditions of its realization, rather
than the problem of a result obtained due to a certain cause. Categorical analysis of theories of
self-organization has demonstrated (Dobronravova 1990: 98-116) that medium nonlinearity should
be regarded as the ground for the emergence of new coherent structures New wholes form due
to the transition to ordered motion of medium elements whose motion prior to this transition was
chaotic and noncorrelated. Until the problem can be described in linear equations (e.g. chemical
kinetics equations), fluctuations (deviations from the average values which provide a solution for
linear equation) may be neglected, because they are extinguished by the chaotic motion of the
medium elements. However, at the critical control parameter value near the non-equilibrium
phase transition, when medium nonlinearity becomes crucial, solutions to the nonlinear equations
describing the system generally have two (or more) values. This phenomenon is called
bifurcation. Here fluctuation is no longer a deviation from the average (which does not exist).
Rather, the system makes a random choice between two equally probable solutions. It is the
fluctuation, which "selects" one of two solutions of equations possible at a certain critical
parameter value (condition), that can be understood as the cause, whose action is the formation
of a coherent structure, i.e. the choice by the system of a certain evolutionary pathway. Hence
the situation, where the choice may be both possible and random, is prior to the formation of the
cause.
The application of Hegel's doctrines to bifurcation analysis thus allows us to understand that
with the nonlinearity of medium as the ground, as the control parameter approaches its critical
value, a system confronts objectively different isomeric and equally probable possibilities. The
"choice" of a particular path of development is determined by fluctuation, and is thus a random
choice. But any chosen solution appears to be necessary: it is determined by a real state of the
system prior to phase transition. Thus, the randomness is an addition to the necessity. All
possible paths of development have their own grounds and their own conditions of realization,
and besides, the fluctuation value and the very situation of choice have objective grounds. As
Hegel put it, "real necessity contains chance (Hegel 1974: 180)." This characteristic gives a
profound description of the situation of self-organization, where the system is subjected to
macroscopic laws between the bifurcations. In the vicinity of a bifurcation, a random choice
returns the system to the way of necessity.
It is necessary to emphasize that fluctuation as a cause of order is far from being a "small
cause of big effects". In a phase transition fluctuations are not small: they have not only a large
amplitude, but also a long range (Prigogine 1985: 150). "There is no content in the action other
than in the cause" (Hegel 1975: 146). A new coherent structure represents a large-scale
fluctuation which shows the behavior of an integral macroscopic whole despite the short-range
nature of the interaction between the medium elements, which cannot be compared in scale with
the fully developed fluctuation. In some cases we are dealing with one fluctuation which,
developing faster than the others, according to the "slaving" principle (G.Haken) "captures" the
whole system, giving coherence to the action of its elements. In other cases many fluctuations
appear simultaneously, and among these fluctuations a coherence is established which is
supported by external conditions.
As it was mentioned above, among the conditions of self-organization a special place is
occupied by the conditions which provide for the stability of newly formed coherent structures -
-i.e. for new wholes. The physics of being concerned itself with age-old systems the stability of
which was grounded in laws which function uninterruptedly. But if the subject of natural science
is to involve the formation of systems along with the laws which regulates their existence, then
we need to understand the conditions under which these systems become stable in the first place.
In discussing the determination of form-building in the light of Hegel's dialectic, we
considered the form building of the whole. This is important from a methodological standpoint,
since the interrelation between the whole and the parts in the investigation of the becoming of
the whole is opposite to the reductionistic principle, which regards the parts as something
separate from the system and their inter-relationships as eternally stable. Indeed, from a
dialectical viewpoint, a whole forms its constituents in the process of becoming. This categorical
attitude enables us to adequately comprehend the action of the "slaving principle" - one of the
fundamental principles of synergetics. This principle illustrates the situation within a process of
self-organization wherein the most rapidly developing fluctuation "captures" the entire space of
the initial medium, forming its constituents from the medium elements. Slower processes have
no time to develop. Thus, at autowave formation synchronizing effects are observed: medium
elements perform the oscillations with a frequency imposed by the most rapid source (i.e. in
cardiac contractions rhythm is established). The same submission principle acts during the
formation of thermal structures in plasma, of turbulences in the flow of liquid, of periodical
vibrations in chemical reactions and so on. In all such cases, though the interactions between the
medium elements are of a short range nature, instability may lead to the emergence of a
long-range order due to which the system functions as a whole.
If, however, self-organization is understood as the becoming of a new whole, the problem of
the stability of this new whole is replaced by the problem of its possible self- reproduction.
Self-organization can lead to the formation of wholes with different degrees of stability. Thus,
coherent structures with limited stability, which are opened into the future stream of becoming
(e.g. thermal structures in plasma), are formed by a certain arrangement of the elements of the
medium. Here a permanent exchange with the medium takes place and, in the long run, the
properties of the nonlinear medium appear to be crucial (determination by the ground, the system
"forgets" the initial conditions of its formation). However, the stability of such systems is
limited, since there is no way in which this new whole can reproduce itself within the medium.
Such a possibility is realized by stationary coherent structures in open systems - i.e.
dissipative structures. For them too the form is determined first of all by the ground of their
existence - that is, the properties of the nonlinear medium. But external conditions also enter into
the determination of their form: the dimension and the geometrical form of the initial system.
As for the possibility that other external factors may affect the process of self-organization,
it should be taken into account that even a weak effect upon the nonlinear system in the vicinity
of bifurcation may determine its destiny, while much stronger effects out of the vicinity of
bifurcation cannot disturb the stability of the dissipative structure. To the conditions of this
stability I. Prigogine assigns the remoteness from equilibrium and the openness of the system
which provides for a local decrease in entropy connected with dissipative structure formation and
maintenance of this state related to a higher level of organization. The flux of energy and matter
passing through the system provides for the export of excess entropy to the medium. Apart from
this, the dimension of the system is important because "the stabilization of dissipative structures
requires a great number of degrees of freedom" (Prigogine 1985: 156- 157), though in the
vicinity of bifurcation the law of large numbers is violated. The connection between the internal
and external for dissipative structures as well as for open nonstationary integrities remains very
close, and the boundary between them is conditional. All the elements of the medium in this area
become "internal" for dissipative structure performing certain functions within its constituents.
The elements however are not secured with these constituents. They can perform different
functions moving from one constituent to another (e.g. ascending and descending convection
fluxes which form the walls of Benard cells and their central part). Besides, under external
parameter changes (temperature, system dimensions, etc. ) the same elements form different
structures.
An entirely different degree of segregation between the internal and the external is found in
systems whose degree of stability is such that we can understand them only by reference to the
category of totality. Hegel defines totality in this way: "a separate circle as a totality in itself
breaks through its elements' limit and grounds a wider sphere..." (Hegel 1974: 48). By totalities
I mean those self-organized systems which have such a level of self-reproducing stability that
they may serve as elements for the systems with higher levels of self-organization. They are the
structural units of the matter: nuclei, atoms, molecules, and living organisms(1).
The categorical differentiation of integrity, whole, and totality helps us avoid the confusion
of different types of self-organized systems. It also helps us to comprehend that the degree of
integrity of living organisms, though they do form dissipative structure hierarchies, is much
higher than in usually investigated dissipative structures including those which perform certain
functions in the organism as a whole. The stable integrity of living organisms is comparable only
with the quantum integrity of the structural units of matter.(1)
Analyzing the stability of nucleus, atom, and molecule as a dynamic stability --i.e. a constant
reproducibility of form-- allows these traditional subjects of the physics of being to be regarded
from the inside, as totalities in the Hegelian sense (Hegel 1974: 48). From the point of view of
physics this means taking into consideration the openness of these systems with respect to the
physical vacuum of those fields whose quanta are the system's elements. This openness is
associated with a constant virtual energy exchange with the vacuum which is manifested in
experimentally observed effects such as Lamb's shift. Such exchange cannot be identified as a
dissipation in a literal sense (electrons lose no energy), but metaphorically it is possible to refer
to "virtual dissipation". The study of nuclei, atoms, and molecules as dynamically stable
self-organized structures, virtually opened with respect to physical vacuum, makes it possible to
situate the content of the nonclassical physics of being in the context of the evolutionary ideas
of the nonlinear worldview.
During the becoming of a totality a transition from the internal into the external and back
occurred, i.e. self-organization took place. However, these processes could occur only under
conditions different from the conditions of stability of the objects under study: at different
energies, at different stages of development. Here the self-reproduction of the whole also takes
place, but it is determined, as if by law, by the stable object structure which has become a form.
The stability of the totality itself, its ability to survive in the course of evolution, showed the
conformity of the form to the inner content of stable objects as well as to the conditions of their
formation.
Having undergone a "natural selection", the totality demonstrated the necessity of its own
existence, i.e. its reality. Thus, we recognize the "absolute anxiety of becoming" (Hegel), which
is a necessary initial point of development, though it is only one of the points. We also
recognize the irreversibility of development which, with the account of dialectics of randomness
and necessity in the process of becoming, assumes the stable reality of the object which became
a dynamically stable entity and may serve as an elemental ground for further complexity. If I.
Prigogine is proceeding from "being to becoming," making a notable step from being to
understanding its genetic grounds, we should not forget about the way from becoming to being,
about the importance of the theoretical reproduction of evolutionary irreversibility and about the
understanding of the grounds for the origin and existence of dynamically stable objects as
necessary stages on this path.
***
Application of the category of totality to the most stable self-organized systems suggests the
need to consider one more aspect of this category of Hegel's dialectics. The totality of a separate
circle, which "breaks through the limit of its elements and grounds the wider sphere" (Hegel
1974: 48) is more than the property of a given circle. The totality of every circle is possible as
a moment of the whole. Not in vain the category of totality was used by Hegel in
phenomenological description to characterize the world of phenomena. (Hegel 1974: 135).
Indeed, the integrity of nuclei, atoms, molecules, and living organisms cannot be described as
a totality without bearing in mind that they fit into the totality of the world, since the common
destiny of its development determined both their elemental composition and the kind of
interaction which takes place within them, as well as the permanent connection with the physical
vacuum which gave rise to these elements. The category of totality thus necessarily raises the
question of the universe.
But what if, as some trends in modern cosmology suggest, the "universe" which we perceive
is just one of many "swelling universes" (Linde 1984) that emerge as fluctuations of the primary
vacuum which is natural under the conditions of primordial chaos. How would this affect our
thinking about totalities?
From the point of view of unitary gauge theories the formation of a set of elementary particles
and their interactions are treated as a result of spontaneous initial symmetry breaking under phase
transitions carried out within the period of decreasing temperature in the expanding space of the
universe. (Weinberg S.: 1981). Synergetics allows us to understand the emergence of the
universe as a process of self-organization (Prigogine and Nicolis 1990: 317-326). This leaves
open the possibility of other random choices under symmetry breaking and of the existence of
the other worlds, respectively.
The problem of the plurality of the worlds is not new in the history of philosophy, but the
questions put forward in modern cosmology (How does the matter emerge from nothing? What
was prior to the beginning of time?, etc.) with their paradoxical form touch the limits of
comprehension of specific scientific statements. Since the limits of meaning in human thought
are given by its categorical structure, the correct formulation and solution of such limit problems
of knowledge requires that we clearly identify the content of both scientific and philosophical
categories and that we specify just how they relate to each other. In this case we are dealing with
the category of "matter" in its relation with the category of the "world" and the cosmological
notion of the observed universe. Clarification of the relationship between these ideas should give
us the philosophical foundations we need for the construction of a scientific picture of the world
on the basis of new cosmological theories.
One attempt to comprehend the content of these categories has been made by Ukrainian
philosophers S.B. Krymsky and V.I. Kuznetsov (Krymsky and Kuznetsov 1984). They suggest
that complete realization of the potential latent in matter should be identified not with the
"world," but with the Universum. The notion "world" which is related to the cosmological
universe observed is just peculiar state of the matter with hindered peculiarities.
Defining the content of the notion of the "world", the authors of the above paper identify a
number of characteristics associated with this notion in the philosophic tradition. Among these
they include the integrity of the world as unity in diversity, and monadicity of the world whose
borderline of peculiarity goes through every object which is the bearer of this specific form of
material existence determined by the system of laws that function within this world order. All
these and the other attributive characteristics of the category of the "world" are appropriately
specified in the modern physical picture of the world. Thus, the harmony of the world order is
realized via the principles of symmetry which determine the possible types of laws of physics.
The type of local symmetry breaking determines the meaning of physical constants and the
peculiar elementary composition of all the objects in the given world, etc.
This approach to understanding the basis for the existence of the various elementary particles
changes the status of the laws which determine the origin of these particles by associating them
with the specific destiny of the specific world, making them no longer universal but rather
specific to a particular world. The problem of universality however remains unsolved. The
description of our world as one of many possible variants in a complex evolutionary process
makes it possible to discuss other variants. There may be an anti-world e.g., where quarks
cannot be transformed into leptons, and antibarions would prevail over barions, unlike in our
world, where at the moment of the initial symmetry breaking between the strong and electroweak
interactions the number of particles exceeded the number of antiparticles.
This is the way to solve the problem of the existence of anti-worlds with respect to modern
physical picture of the world. This problem was posed within the framework of the quantum-field
theories ideas of an earlier worldview: the particles could be born in vacuum only in combination
with their antiparticles, so the existence of an anti-world was presumed to be parallel to the
existence of our world. The concept of the world as a self-organized whole interprets the origin
of the world rather than anti-world as a random irreversible choice in the process of world
formation and explains the absence of a real anti-world parallel to the world while retaining the
idea of the possibility of its existence in the Universum.
Thus, a state of matter different from the one characteristic of our world can become the
subject of a physical theory, irrespective of whether matter actually exists in such a state in the
actually existing world. The mode of its existence presupposes a relative stability as well as the
possibility to grow more complex up to the level of life and intellect, or else the physical
constants related to the other possible symmetries and their breaking will make the existence of
this form of matter unstable and its constitution into a world impossible.
It would appear most reasonable to refer the universality of laws to their realization in the
Universum. It should be emphasized however, that only our world is actually existent for us, and
the other worlds are only theoretically possible (Krymsky and Kuznetsov 1984: 95-96). The
metaphor "island universes" used by cosmologists unintentionally provokes the image of a certain
enveloping space, which is fundamentally wrong, because space-time exists as the space-time of
a given world only from the moment at which the gravitational interaction became separated from
the other fundamental forces (supergravitation theory) (Freedman and New Van Hejsen 1979).
Matter, therefore, can be understood properly only in the context of a particular world, defined
by a particular pattern of symmetry breaking.
Within the framework of the nonlinear worldview, the problem of the universality of the most
general physical principles can be formulated only with reference to the whole complex of
possible worlds. We bear in mind the assumption that fundamentally different possibilities for
the origin of worlds whose mode of existence might be based on symmetry principles other than
those which dominate our own world can be offered at the expense of chaotic virtual oscillations
of initial vacuum in cosmological scenario of "swelling universes". True vacuum, as a lower
energy state of certain types of fields, carries with it definite symmetry principles, the value of
physical constants, and possible variants in their breaking at world formation. Here the range of
possibilities is already determined, and while a particular world is yet unchosen, we deal with
the special instead of the general.
Now it is evident that in the modern scientific worldview, the problem of the world's being
cannot but be regarded as the problem of its becoming and transiency. Retention of this being
for a certain period of its transient existence can be understood heuristically proceeding from the
experience of nonlinear natural science only as a dynamic stability determined by the coherence
of it constituents.
REFERENCES
Dobronravova I.S. (1990) "Synergetics: Becoming of Nonlinear Thinking". Kiev: Lybid Press.
(in Russian)
Freedman D., New Van Hejsen P. (1979) "Supergravitation and Unification of Physical Laws",
UFN, vol. 128: 22-34.
Haken G. (1980) "Synergetics ", Russian translation - Moskow: Mir.
Hegel G.W.F. (1975) "EnzykolpÄdie der Philosophischen Wissenschaften", vol. 1. Berlin:
Academie-Verlag.
Hegel G.W.F. (1975) "Phenomenologie des Geistes". Berlin: Academie-Verlag.
Hegel G.W.F. (1974) "Wissenschaft der Logik". Berlin: Academie-Verlag.
Krymsky S.B., Kuznetsov V.I. (1984) "Weltanschanung Categories in Modern Natural
Sciences". Kiev: Naukova Dumka. (in Russian)
Linde A.A. (1984) "The Swelling Universe", UFN, 144: 177-214. (in Russian)
Mamardashwily M. (1990) "The Idea of Succession and Philosophical Tradition", in
Mamardashwily M. "How I Understand Philosophy". Moscow: Progress Press. (in Russian)
Prigogine I. (1985) "From Being to Becoming". Russian translation - Moscow:Nauka Press.
Sit'ko S.P., Andreev E.A., Dobronravova I.S. (1988) "The Whole as a Result of
Self-Organization", Journal of Biological Physics, 16: 71.
Veinberg S. (1981) "The First Three Minutes", Russian translation - Moscow: Atomizdat.
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1. One of the reasons for creation of the quantum physics of the living was the discovery of
characteristic eigen-frequencies in the mm-range electromagnetic radiation and the interpretation
of this event as a correlation of living systems with the criterion of the stable integrity of
quantum systems, i.e. the living was regarded as the next step following the molecular step on
the quantum ladder. The existence of the alive as a dissipative structure hierarchy is considered
to be a condition of such integrity. (Sit'ko S.P., Andreev E.A., Dobronravova I.S. 1988: 71).
Organizing for Synergism
Five Years of the Foundation for Social Progress
Anthony Mansueto
I. History and Achievements
A. Context
This year marks the completion of five years of work on the part of the Foundation for Social
Progress, and it is a useful time to take stock of our work, to assess the current situation, and
to map out the next steps in our project. The Foundation was established in 1991 in response to
a deepening crisis of the human civilizational project. On the one hand, the long crisis of the
market system continued. Markets have no access to information regarding the impact of various
activities on the integrity of the ecosystem and the social fabric or on the development of human
social capacities. The penetration of market forces into every sphere of social life transforms all
activity into just a means of advancing individual consumer interests. The result was ecological
crisis and social disintegration and stagnation as ever more resources were allocated to luxury
consumption, and less and less to infrastructure, education, research, and development. The
socialist system, on the other hand, was in collapse around the planet, partly, perhaps, because
it was unable to manage the implementation of the new information processing and
communications technologies which came on line in the 1980s, but mostly because it was unable
to contain the growing consumerist pressure generated by residual market structures. Clearly it
was necessary to fundamentally rethink the next steps in the human civilizational project.
But it was precisely this task which both the hegemonic neoliberal trend and what remained
of the socialist movements seemed unable to carry out. Neoliberalism, of course, felt itself
triumphant, its claims for the superiority of the market system vindicated by the collapse of the
Soviet bloc, and saw no impasse whatsoever. The entire socialist spectrum, on the other hand,
had largely lost touch with the fundamental aim which had driven it during its phase of
expansion: the full development of human social capacities, and ultimately the expansion of
complex organization throughout the universe. Social democrats, for the most part, yielded to
the new neoliberal orthodoxy, as did the right wing of Leninism --the perestroika group in the
Soviet Union and the Deng Xiao-ping group in China. The Leninist left, meanwhile, remained
fixated on centralized state planning structures which had certainly demonstrated their
appropriateness to the tasks of industrialization, but which hardly represented the "solution to the
riddle of history." What was left of the "new left" descended into postmodern nihilism and
despair. Indeed, it often seemed as if it was only the social conservatives who were addressing
the social crisis at all --and they only by attempting to hold together by means of repression what
the market was rapidly tearing asunder.
B. Our Starting Point
Our aim was to create a center for research, education, and organizing dedicated to
developing and implementing a vision and strategy adequate to the next steps in the human
civilizational project. We approached this task from a very definite point of departure, both in
terms of our general perspective, and in terms of the strategic assets which we had at our
disposal. As a result of several years of research and organizing experience, I had become
convinced that the crisis of socialism derived from a contradiction at the heart of dialectical
materialism. On the one hand, dialectical materialism proclaimed that matter is self-organizing
and develops towards ever higher levels of organization, gradually giving birth to intelligence,
civilization, and ultimately communism. This drive towards higher degrees of organization in
turn defines a kind of moral imperative. The problem with the market system is that it holds
back the progress of human civilization, and thus of the universe.
The dialectical materialist doctrine is, however, incomplete. Dialectical materialists were
always somewhat ambivalent about the ultimate destiny of life and intelligence --especially after
von Helmholtz proclaimed the impending heat death of the universe. This meant, among other
things, that Marx and Engels ended up opting for atheism. This is because the claim that the
universe develops necessarily towards ever higher degrees of organization, ultimately giving birth
to a qualitative infinity of different forms, is convertible with the claim that the universe is divine
--i.e. infinite and necessary. A universe in which the process of development is cut short,
however, and which ends in entropic death or in a kind of eternal cycle of birth and decay is a
universe without a God. In such a universe the drive towards higher levels of organization is
just one tendency among many, and not ultimately the dominant one. This hardly provides an
adequate ground for a moral imperative to promote progress.
Different trends within dialectical materialism responded differently to this contradiction.
Soviet philosophy, following Engels, attempted to remedy this problem, criticizing the errors of
bourgeois scientists in a number of fields, from cosmology through biology to political economy.
But the underlying error couldn't be corrected without approaching the question of God. In the
end the Soviet party substituted itself for the missing ontological ground, laying the groundwork
for dangerous authoritarian tendencies. Most European Marxism, on the other hand, only made
the problem worse by rejecting the "dialectics of nature" in favor of the pessimistic bourgeois
cosmology, so that human history became just an island of meaning in a universe otherwise given
over to chaos and contingency. This had the effect of leaving the whole drive towards social
progress ungrounded even in nature, and of reducing socialism to an aspiration of certain specific
social groups. This in turn opened the way for postmodernism, which asked the obvious question:
Why should the proletarian drive towards progress through productivity be paramount? Why
labor? Why not race? or signification? or sex? or sadomasochism? The implications of the line
of reasoning are now apparent. There is no stable vantage point from which to criticize the
market order or sanction a nonmarket allocation of resources.
If we were to address this crisis we needed to recover and reground a vision of the universe
as a unified, structured system developing necessarily towards infinitely high levels of
organization, in which human civilization plays a critical role as a center for the development
of dynamic organized complexity. Such a vision would necessarily involve an affirmation of the
reality of God.
There had, to be sure, been some tentative moves in this direction during the postwar period -
-most notably in the dialogue and collaboration between the Catholic Church and other religious
institutions and the International Communist Movement. But this process was never really
consummated, either intellectually or politically, in large part because the institutional interests
of both partners were threatened by a real synthesis. The Party, heir to the old imperial
mandate, had grown accustomed to its status as the "highest level of organization of humanity,"
and thus of the universe, and did not want its leading role in the human civilizational project
subject to prophetic criticism from the standpoint of a philosophical doctrine which might find
the socialist state wanting, even if it was also judged superior to the market system. The
Church, for its part, claimed the prophetic as well as the priestly office for itself, and could not
tolerate criticism of its exercise of the latter fully legitimate function from a standpoint outside
the celibate male clerical corporation. Clearly, if we were to move beyond the eclectic religious
socialist amalgams of the 1970s and 1980s and work an authentic synthesis we needed to create
a new kind of institution, neither Church nor Party, but intimately related to both, which could
serve as the bearer of the prophetic-philosophical office.
Each of the founders of our institute brought an essential ingredient to this synthesis, as well
as somewhat different ties to both of the institutions involved in the old Catholic-Communist
dialogue. I had been raised in the tradition of Sicilian anticlerical and socialist Catholicism, more
devoted to the Virgin Mother than to Jesus. I was steeped in the dialectical tradition --Hegel,
Marx, Gramsci, Lukacs, and Althusser. I knew the strengths of this tradition and was deeply
aware of the fact that it was in crisis. While I rejected atheistic materialism almost from the very
beginning, and had strong roots in the rapprochement between the Catholic and the communist
movements which dates back to Gramsci and Sturzo, I approached the question more from the
Communist than from the Catholic side. My formal study of religious traditions, certainly, had
been from the standpoint of a strategic interest: understanding the role which popular religion
in particular appeared to be playing in the global resistance to the market system. My wife and
cofounder, Maggie Mansueto, on the other hand, brought to our work a solid foundation in
scholastic, and especially Thomistic philosophy and theology, though her perspective was
enriched by the influence of a diversity of thinkers, including Eckhart, Fuller, Fromm, Miller,
and Daly. And institutionally, she approached our collaboration from the standpoint of the
mission of the Church. This inner core was surrounded by collaborators reflecting a wide range
of different perspectives, ranging from a traditional dialectical materialism through liberation
theology and Spiritual Zionism to Russian religious idealism.
We began our work under very difficult strategic conditions. We brought, to be sure,
unusually strong assets in theory, leadership development, organizing, and political-theological
operations. More specifically, we enjoyed an extraordinary comparative advantage in the areas
of social analysis, philosophical and theological reflection, and strategic analysis. We were both
excellent teachers and during my time serving as Director of the Justice and Peace Commission
for the Catholic Diocese of Dallas, I had developed a unique approach to leadership development
which integrated training in social analysis, social ethics, organizing, and political strategy with
careful positioning, mentoring, and reflection on practice. I had also built a large institutionally
based political organization in alliance with the Industrial Areas Foundation and had developed
a mass base and local leadership core in the Dallas metropolitan area, as well as strong
relationships to progressive Catholic organizations nationwide.
But the Foundation was established the year the Soviet Union collapsed --a time of global
defeat for the progressive forces. We had also suffered marked setbacks during our last year in
Dallas --a necessary but costly break in our alliance with the Industrial Areas Foundation, and
an equally costly struggle with the right-wing organization Opus Dei. The leadership core we had
built there was all but destroyed, and our relationship with base organizations undermined. The
few who remained were, furthermore, demoralized by both our local setbacks and the global
political situation. Nationally I was regarded with a mixture of respect and suspicion. Both my
plans for the Foundation and my critique of the IAF evoked interest and even admiration, but
little in the way of concrete financial or institutional support.
This complex cluster of considerations determined the way in which we defined both the full
portfolio of activities in which we wanted to be engaged, the way we positioned ourselves vis-a-
vis potential constituencies, allies, and adversaries, and the way in which we defined our
principal tasks. Our reading of the current situation placed a high degree of priority on the tasks
of developing a new vision and strategy adequate to the next steps in the human civilizational
project, but also called for building an organization which could implement that strategy and for
action directed at reorganizing institutions in the light of our vision. The way in which we
understood our comparative advantage and the way in which we defined our mission and tasks,
however, meant that our potential constituency was very narrow. We needed people who either
already possessed or who had the capacity and drive to develop, the very highest order
intellectual (political and theoretical), moral and spiritual capacities, willing to make a high order
commitment to difficult work --initially at least, and perhaps permanently, without compensation.
We hoped to build on our experience in Dallas, rebuilding and consolidating our core there and
replicating the experience on a national and eventually international scale. This meant a
significant secondary focus on relationship building and on advanced leadership training. Finally,
while the loss and or collapse of our base organizations ruled out direct political action, we
wanted to retain some active engagement at the institutional level, more as a way of building
relationships and recruiting than for the direct political impact which we expected. Since we
brought skills rather than numbers to the table, we decided to focus on the development of
consulting relationships with local congregations and community organizations, providing
leadership training and strategic planning services, in the hope of recruiting advanced leaders,
and perhaps gradually building our own network. We also hoped that these consulting
relationships, together with dues from a growing membership base, would generate sufficient
revenue to enable us to support a small staff.
C. Achievements
1. Research
Our achievements have been most dramatic in the theoretical field. I have completed one
book, Towards Synergism: The Cosmic Significance of the Human Civilizational Project
(University Press of America, 1995), which attempts to chart a vision and a strategy adequate
to the next steps in the human civilizational project. I have begun work on a second book which
will ground that vision and set it in the context of a philosophical system which revitalizes and
synthesizes the Catholic and dialectical traditions in the light of developments in the physical,
biological, and social sciences. I have also conducted research on strategic questions, both
domestic and international. During 1993-1994 I conducted a study of congregation based
organizing in the Chicago metropolitan area and have published articles on both this question and
on developments in the former Soviet bloc. While I have done most of the actual writing on these
projects, Maggie's training in theology and human development, as well as her capacity to
generate insight after insight in nearly every field we approach, has made her an absolutely
essential collaborator.
Maggie has continued her study of Catholic theology, while drawing increasingly on social-
psychological and comparative historical studies of human development. Her aim is to develop
a new theological anthropology and a doctrine of virtue: an account of what it means to be an
excellent human being, and of how one gets there, with a particular emphasis on the broader
social conditions of human excellence.
The result of this theoretical work has been the elaboration of what we call "synergism,"
which we believe is a new and compelling vision of humanity's place in the universe, and a
powerful new strategy for the next steps in the human civilizational project. We see the universe
as a unified, structured totality which develops towards ever higher levels of organization. This
process of evolution is logically necessary, and takes place through concrete material interactions,
but is ultimately grounded in and driven by the incredible beauty, truth, goodness, and unity of
God, in which the universe participates to the extent of its development. Human civilization plays
a critical role in this process as a center for the creation of dynamic, organized, complexity.
Social progress requires the centralization and allocation of resources for human development.
The best way to do this depends on the level of development of human social capacities. New
technologies make old ways of organizing obsolete. But the market system, which has no access
to information regarding the impact of various activities on the integrity of ecosystem or the
development of human social capacities, and which transforms all activity into just a means of
advancing individual consumption interests, has demonstrated that it is always and everywhere
an obstacle to development. The progress which has taken place under the market system is due
almost entirely to nonmarket forces: either direct centralization of resources for development by
nonprofit institutions or by the state, or by the private sector acting under sheltered conditions -
-tariff protection, regulation, government contracts, etc. The crisis of socialism was partly a
result of an inability to accommodate new technologies, but primarily a result of a failure to
actually transcend market relations --and thus the consumerism generated by the market system.
Humanity needs to discover a new way of centralizing and allocating resources, which is more
flexible and less centralizing than the old Soviet system, but which also definitively breaks with
the market system.
As we have developed our vision, we have found a small but growing number of collaborators
--including a number of well respected scientists, scholars, and literary figures, the most senior
of whom constitute the Foundation's Council, or Board of Directors. Some of these people have
come from our historic core constituency on the Catholic left: Rev. Francois Houtart, Director
of the Centre Tricontinental at the Universite Catholique de Louvain, and the poet Ernesto
Cardenal, former Minister of Culture for the Republic of Nicaragua. Others, like Bulgarian
philosopher Dejan Pavlov Kreculj, come from the orthodox dialectical materialist tradition. But
we have also attracted a number of people from the former Soviet bloc, from Africa, and from
Latin America who are trying to come to terms with the simultaneous crises of socialism and of
the market system: Pavel Gurevich, a Laboratory Director at the Institute of Philosophy of the
Russian Academy of Sciences, Boris Gubman, Tver Regional Director of the Russian Academy
of Social Sciences, the economist Samir Amin, and others. My own efforts to reground the
dialectical tradition in recent developments in the physical, biological, and social sciences has
drawn attention and support from people working in these sciences: physicists Rich Olenick, Eric
Lerner and David Brin (also a science fiction writer), biologists Curt Naser and Irina
Dobronravova, etc., as well as philosophers interested in these questions: Errol Harris and
Helena Knyazeva among others. In short, we are gradually putting together an authentically
global research network, which includes people working in different disciplines and from
different theoretical perspectives.
We have also enjoyed increasing success in publishing and disseminating our work. Our
emerging vision goes very much against the tide. We are neither neoliberals nor postmodernists,
and this has made publishing difficult. Our own journal, Dialectic, Cosmos, and Society, while
its circulation remains very small, is beginning to have some visible impact, especially in the
former Soviet bloc. And we have begun to break into such established academic journals as
Filosofskie nauki, the Journal of Religion, Social Compass, and Studies in Soviet and East
European Thought.
2. Building a Leadership Core
The Foundation for Social Progress has developed a unique approach to leadership
development which integrates training in methods of social analysis, reflection on mission which
is at once philosophically informed and grounded in the religious and cultural traditions of the
community with which we are working, and rigorous training in building and exercising power.
We understand power in a relational sense, as the ability to develop and realize human potential.
We train our leaders to analyze and tap into the capacities, interests, and relationships of
individuals and organizations, building strong public relationships, and to think strategically about
developing and deploying their most important asset: human creativity.
Leaders who have participated in Foundation programs currently serve or have served in such
capacities as Mayor of a small city, Vice-President for Recruitment and Training of a major
corporation, Director of Research and Evaluation for a major public school district, Budget
Director for a county mental health agency, and Founder and Executive Director of a nonprofit
center for displaced steel workers.
The scope and depth of our leadership development activities has, however, been severely
restricted. We have had difficulty interesting contacts in an ongoing relationship with the
Foundation, consolidating relationships with the people we train, and integrating them into the
work of the Foundation. There are a number of reasons for this. First of all, our potential
constituency appears to be even more narrow than we initially realized. Neoliberal and
postmodern ideology maintains a real hold even on those who question it. We find that many
people are attracted to our vision, but stop short of really embracing it. Many, even among the
intelligentsia, lack the philosophical training necessary to understand fully what we are doing.
And the marketplace really does make the universe appear to be just a system of only externally
related atoms ...
Appetitive as well as intellectual factors, must, however, be taken into consideration. The
most important of these is probably the demoralization which resulted from the collapse of the
Soviet bloc in 1989. Whatever people may have thought of the Soviet Union, it did serve to
demonstrate that alternatives to capitalism do exist, and it provided a valuable strategic reserve
for the progressive forces. In the wake of the crisis of 1989, relatively few people wanted to
invest time and energy in training to lead a fundamental reorganization of human society. And
without hope, temperance, fortitude, and justice become far more difficult. People fear --and
not without reason-- that their consumption interests, their friendships, their careers, and possibly
even their lives will be threatened if they collaborate too closely with us. Maggie, after all, has
been living under a death threat from Opus Dei since 1991.
Strategically, we may have underestimated the need of having a well developed vision and
strategy, accessible through both our own and other publications, in order to attract intellectual
leaders. In this regard, at least, our position has improved significantly. We may also have
concentrated too much on recruiting intellectuals, rather than on developing a new intelligentsia
out of the proletariat. Intellectuals, as we will argue below, are far more susceptible to
ideological hegemonization by the market than members of the other working classes. Tactically,
we have been inhibited by the dispersed character of our networks. The only way to cultivate
temperance, fortitude, justice, and hope is by building a community in which people can be
challenged to develop morally as well as intellectually, and this is very difficult to do with a
loose global network. Even in the "information age" all real politics is local.
These are all issues which we need to address in the coming period.
3. Reorganizing Institutions
The Foundation helps the organizations it works with to analyze both their own resources --
especially their human resources-- and the social context in which their are operating. We put
a special emphasis on helping organizations to reflect on their mission in a way which focuses
attention on their specific contributions to humanity's larger vocation, and on helping
organizations to develop effective ways to organize, develop, and deploy their resources.
While this kind of institutional organizing work plays a central role in our understanding of
the transition to a postmarket system, and thus in our global strategic vision, it has played only
a supporting role in our work over the past five years, as a means of recruiting leaders, and
building financial and political support.
We have employed two main tactics in this organizing work. On the one hand, we have
attempted to position ourselves and others in our network within institutions in a way which
permits us to exercise significant influence over their development. At the same time, we have
attempted to negotiate contractual consulting relationships between the Foundation and various
institutions.
Both tactics have met with serious obstacles. This is due primarily to the strength of the
hegemonic neoliberal ideology in the political-economic arena, to the influence of postmodernism
in the academy, and to the continued rightward drift in the Catholic church, all of which have
combined to create a decidedly inhospitable atmosphere for our work. This has made it extremely
difficult to position ourselves within strategic institutions, difficult to motivate those in our
networks who are well positioned to use their power to affect the institutions within which they
work, and difficult to secure consulting contracts.
Our strongest institutional ties continue to be with the Catholic Church --especially Catholic
parishes, which we have helped come to terms with interethnic and intrastaff contradictions as
well as with the aftermath of clergy sexual abuse --all problems which reflect ongoing tensions
in the larger institution. We have also helped parishes think about longer range questions of
pastoral strategy and leadership development. I have developed a strong relationship with the
University of St. Mary of the Lake in the Archdiocese of Chicago, where I taught Philosophy
in the Autumn of 1995, and we have good relationships with clergy and lay leaders in Chicago,
Dallas, and the El Paso/Juarez/Las Cruces border region. Several members of our network
continue to serve as active leaders in the Catholic Church. I continue to have relationships with
Catholic social action directors around the country, as well as with key members of the USCC
social justice staff. What we have not yet been able to do is to transform this network of
relationships into real support for the Foundation or real impact on the institution.
Our second area of concentration has been within the academy. Here we have run up sharply
against ideological barriers which are, in fact, much higher than in the Catholic Church. The
hegemony of neoliberalism and postmodernism has kept us out of most secular institutions --and
out of increasingly secular Catholic institutions as well. Even where explicit ideological tensions
have not been an issue, the highly specialized character of most academic research has been.
Academic freedom, at least in the United States, has been bought at the price of staying away
from fundamental questions --and thus at the price of forsaking the historic vocation of
philosophy. We know of individuals holding tenure-track appointments at major universities who
are open supporters of terrorist organizations; they are tolerated so long as they restrict their
research to modest scholarly articles and books which analyze the work of others. Any claim
to say something really original about the nature of the universe or humanity's vocation therein,
however, is branded "intellectual arrogance," and condemns one to exclusion. This trend is no
doubt global, but it is far less advanced outside the United States, which is why our work has
met with a better reception there.
We have negotiated a small number of research and/or consulting contracts with universities
and research institutes including the University of Illinois at Chicago/Office of Social Science
Research (UIC/OSSR), Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the Steel Industry Heritage Foundation.
We conducted a study of congregation based organizing in Chicago as part of the Religion in
Urban America Project for UIC/OSSR and revised the Religious Studies bibliographies for the
new online version of Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Steel Industry Heritage Foundation
contracted with Bob Anderson, a member of our network with many years experience organizing
in the Southwestern Pennsylvania Steel industry, to conduct an in-depth interview study of
worker resistance during the steel crisis of the 1980s.
During 1992-1993 we made some effort to connect with the academy, and especially the
scientific research community at a rather different level --the question of financial support for
basic research and the development new civilian technologies. We found that the vast majority
of scientists are disconnected from the larger political struggles which are shaping the global
research agenda, and that the science managers who are engaged in these questions seem
committed to an alliance with either the military industrial complex or with civilian industry.
On one occasion we were explicitly barred from contacting scientists at the Very Large Array
in New Mexico, and most of the contacts we made at Los Alamos and (to a lesser extent) Sandia
National Laboratories were either apolitical or leaned sharply to the right. Interestingly enough,
this was as true of people involved in basic research or in developing civilian technologies,
including solar energy, as it was of those involved in areas related to weapons research. The
solar energy community in particular seems to have an extraordinary confidence that the market
will make solar systems profitable. We continue, however, to believe that this whole sector is
important and hope that relationships we have developed on the basis of our basic research will
help provide us with insights regarding the best way to organize scientists.
We have continued to maintain relationships in the political arena, both at the base level and
with other leadership organizations. Our historic relationship with the community organization
movement has suffered from the growing hegemony of the organizing institutes, especially the
Industrial Areas Foundation and Gamaliel, and by the decline of independent community
organizations as the networks associated with the institutes have expanded. The IAF and Gamaliel
have established an effective monopoly on congregation based organizing and we expect them
to maintain this monopoly for some time. Our attempts to demonstrate that these networks are
actually deeply at odds with their predominantly Catholic base ideologically have met with little
success, probably due to the larger Augustinian drift of contemporary Catholic theology, which
makes this contradiction all but invisible. While we are aware of considerable dissatisfaction with
the actual achievements of these organizations among their constituencies, this seems to make
little difference to the Catholic ordinaries who support them. Clearly there is room to enter into
competition with the IAF, but we do not currently have the right relationships or the necessary
resources for such an undertaking.
Our relationships with the organized left have suffered from the crisis of the left on a global
scale. We have collaborative relationships with leaders in the Balkans working to revitalize the
tradition of multinational political unity which characterized the region before the crisis of
socialism, with leaders of Renovaci¢n Sandinista in Nicaragua, and with leaders throughout the
Americas, Europe, and the former Soviet bloc working to come to terms with the crisis of
socialism and chart the next steps for their movement.
II. The Current Situation
As we develop our plans for the coming period, it is necessary to take stock of the current
situation. As we have argued in previous documents, it is possible to understand the current
situation only in the context of a global analysis of the unfolding of the human civilizational
project.
Human civilization plays a critical leading role in the larger cosmohistorical evolutionary
process, as a center for the creation of dynamic, organized complexity. Civilization progresses
because we humans develop new ways of organizing and reorganizing physical, biological, and
social matter, and thus new ways of creating higher forms of organization. This organizing
activity in turn requires some structure for centralizing and allocating resources. In order for
civilization to progress, it is important that these structures be adequate to the level of
development of human organizing capacities. Village communities are not adequate to the task
of building complex irrigation networks, temple-observatories, etc. and new structures, such as
the state are thus required. Failure to develop new structures adequate to emerging forms of
organization can lead to stagnation.
The more important obstacle to progress, however, derives from structures which permit
exploiting classes to emerge and siphon off surplus for use in warfare and luxury consumption.
Two such structures have emerged on this planet. Beginning around 3000 B.C.E. communities
occupying unfavorable ecological niches, but with access to bronze weapons technology
discovered that they could develop more rapidly by conquering and exploiting other communities
than by investing in new technologies. The result was the warlord state, which dominated most
regions of the planet between 3000 B.C.E and roughly 1500 C.E. This development was
accompanied by the displacement of the archaic matriarchy with a patriarchal regime. Later,
around 700 B.C.E., the development of specialized agriculture in the Mediterranean Basin and
other areas led to the emergence of large scale trade and eventually --over a long period, and
with many reversals (indeed, the process is only now nearing completion), the formation of a
global market, first in consumer goods, then in labor, and finally in capital. The emergence of
markets was, once again, a result of the fact that certain individuals or communities found they
could develop more rapidly through trade rather than through productive labor.
Both of these structures held back the development of human social capacities --the first by
letting warlord elites siphon surplus through rents and forced labor to support warfare and luxury
consumption, the second because markets have no access to information regarding the impact of
activities on the development of human social capacities, and thus lead to an irrational allocation
of resources.
In order to resist these structures social movements emerged: salvation religions, which sought
to restore humanity to harmony with the divine order, and later, as markets undermined
humanity's faith that there even is a divine order, philosophical movements which attempted
to reground our knowledge of the Beautiful, the True, the Good, and the One, and to lay the
groundwork for the construction of a society which serves these values. Not surprisingly, these
movements were themselves subject to deformation by the social structures in which they
emerged, but nonetheless made very significant contributions to social progress. Socialism must
be understood in the context of this larger history, as a stage in the development of the
philosophical tradition which, under the alienating impact of market structures, lost sight of the
first principle, and thus produced a vision and a strategy which were ultimately inadequate to the
tasks of the period.
We now stand at a crucial juncture. The capitalist system has been in a general crisis --in the
sense of constituting an effective brake on social progress-- for some time. While it is clearly
difficult to quantify and thus to measure social progress, a number of indicators converge to
suggest two critical junctures. Two of these indicators are technological --rate of growth in
energy production per billion human lives and fundamental technological innovations-- and the
third scientific --underlying breakthroughs in basic science (physical, biological, or social). The
underlying stagnation seems to date from the late 19th or early in the 20th century, but there
seems to have been a brief resurgence in the rate of social progress in the middle of the 20th
century, and then a crash after about 1970. This, in any case, is the pattern we find when we
analyze the rate of growth in energy production. Measured in terms of major technological
innovations the results are still more startling. After the invention of the airplane in the 1900s
we get no major technological innovations except for the television (1920s) until the 1940s and
1950s, which bring the transistor, the computer, radar, nuclear energy, the laser, and rocket
technology which makes possible space exploration and a satellite network. Much of the so-
called new technology which drives the "information society" is really just an application of these
older basic advances. In reality it amounts to little more than a collection of neat gadgets --new
consumer items which do very little to actually increase human creativity. Those technologies
which do save labor, such as the use of information processing technologies for factory and
office automation, are being implemented in a way which marginalizes large numbers of
workers, driving down wages and increasing relative exploitation, leading to the further
expansion of the rentier elites, and not in a way which frees up time and talent for more creative
work.
Behind this technological stagnation lies a stagnation in the sciences. We are, in a very real
sense, still living off the scientific capital of relativity and quantum mechanics, which gave us
nuclear fission energy and microelectronics --and even, to a very large extent, off advances in
electromagnetism and thermodynamics which were made in the nineteenth century, which provide
the underlying technology behind most of the electrical appliances which we still use, and behind
such wasteful devices as the internal combustion, jet, and rocket engines. Much of the new
science is in fact speculation which exploits, but does not resolve, contractions within and
between relativity and quantum mechanics, or between these disciplines and new experimental
and observational evidence.
Why the depth of the current stagnation? It is interesting to note that the onset of the crisis
coincides with the intensification of the underlying contradictions of capitalism identified by Marx
--declining rates of profit in high technology sectors, and a tendency towards underconsumption
as capital compensates by redeploying to low wage, low technology activities. The resurgence
around the middle of the century coincides with a reassertion of nonmarket, mostly state-
centralizing structures: socialism in the Soviet Union, social democracy and social liberalism
in Europe and North America, and, for that matter, fascism. And the crash after 1970? It was
after 1970 that the contradictions of social liberalism and social democracy began to become
apparent --rising debt burdens and the use of taxation increasingly to pay interest to rentier elites
rather than to finance new development. And it was after 1970 that the limitations of the Soviet
model of development became apparent --an inability to accommodate information technologies,
and an inability to contain growing consumerist pressure generated by residual market relations.
This global stagnation set in motion a broad movement to restrict and even transcend the
market system. The student movements of the 1960s and 1970s were first and foremost
movements of resistance to the proletarianization of the intelligentsia and to the restriction of
creative activity this implied. This same period witnessed an upsurge in strike activity and a
number of electoral advances for the European left. But most notable in this period was the
intensification of political pressure from the periphery of the system, mostly from national
liberation movements with a strong peasant base and a socialist or communist leadership. These
movements drew support both from the Soviet Union, which was becoming increasingly aware
of the internal contradictions of its own model of development and of the need to seize the
geopolitical initiative before it was too late, and from the Catholic Church which increasingly
saw its future among the workers and peasants of Latin America rather than in the increasingly
secularized and consumerist countries of Europe and North America.
Capital met this challenge with a complex and subtle strategy. The student revolts were put
down with a combination of increased market pressure and consumerist hegemonization. This
is the significance of the transformation of the "yippie" into the "yuppie." The final and
definitive formation of a unified global market undermined the political weight of organized labor
and undercut the political initiatives of the European left. An emerging neoliberal-conservative
alliance exploited mass discontent with high rates of taxation to mount an assault on the welfare
state, while the national liberation movements were defeated partly on the battlefield and partly
through financial pressure on progressive regimes already in power.
The socialist countries, meanwhile, proved unwilling and/or unable to respond to this
challenge. The Chinese had already opted out of the global struggle for socialism in favor of
an alliance with the U.S. against Soviet "social imperialism." And the Soviet leadership
apparently felt that direct confrontation with the U.S. was too dangerous --especially after 1980,
with the trigger happy Reagan regime in power. The election of John Paul II as Supreme Pontiff
set in motion a sharp turn to the right on the part of the Catholic Church, which meant an end
of Catholic support for liberation movements in the Third World and the beginning of an active
effort to de-stabilize the socialist regimes of Eastern Europe --most notably in Poland.
By 1986, the Soviet leadership, under growing pressure from its own citizens to expand
production of consumer goods, and thus to reduce military spending, began a systematic retreat -
-a retreat which opened the door for the events of 1989-1991. By 1 January 1992, the
international workers movement had been effectively defeated, and capital was free to make the
world in its own image.
What kind of world is capital trying to create? We need only look at the organic ideology of
the hegemonic sectors of finance capital --what I call information theoretical neoliberalism. In
its pure/complete form this ideology regards the universe as a whole as an information processing
system. Matter is the "hardware" component of the system, the laws of nature the "software."
Drawing on the information theory developed by Shannon and Weaver (1949), theorists such as
Frank Tipler argue that the organization of a system is its negative entropy, or the quantity of
information encoded within it. "Life" is simply information encoded in such a way that it is
conserved by natural selection. A system is intelligent if it meets the "Turing test," i.e. if a
human operator interrogating it cannot distinguish its responses from those of a human being
(Turing 1950).
This broad ideological framework has given rise to a very specific vision of humanity's future
--a system which might best be called infokatallaxis. By infokatallaxis we mean a system in
which capital has become instantly mobile and is instantly reallocated to the most profitable
activities. This is a kind of pure finance capitalism in which entrepreneurs, managers, and
workers are all fully subordinated to investors, who in turn behave in perfectly market-rational
fashion. In such a system, innovations are excludable only to the extent that they have not yet
been reverse engineered, and monopoly rents on skill --indeed any differentiation between
products-- thus vanishes in a time which converges on zero. This is the kind of hypercapitalist
utopia promoted explicitly by people like Frank Tipler and implicitly by the entire neoliberal
right. Tipler himself has gone further, proposing to re-engineer the entire universe using self-
reproducing automata, in order to create a kind of cosmic supercomputer (Omega) which will
experience infinite subjective time and process an infinite quantity of (all logically possible)
information --and in the process, incidently, resurrect the dead in the form of computer
emulations (Tipler 1994).
Infokatallaxis is a world without a state. Indeed, it is a world in which politics itself has
disappeared in favor of the nonpolitical allocation of resources and activities determined by the
market. And this is, in fact, the trend at present. As the working classes are forced to sell more
and more of their labor power, less and less is left over to invest in building and maintaining the
structures of community life. Working class organizations of every kind begin to disintegrate,
even as capital benefits from tight labor markets. Fewer and fewer workers learn to build and
exercise power, and the prospect of organizing against capital becomes ever more difficult, as
there are fewer and fewer existing networks and emerging leaders to work with.
The decay of political organization does not, however, affect only the working classes. On
the contrary, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the market undermines political
organization in general --even the political organization of the bourgeoisie. This is apparent on
a number of fronts. First and foremost, as the global market becomes increasingly integrated
and capital increasingly mobile, state structures become less and less effective instruments of
policy. If the state acts in a way which conflicts with the interests of one or another firm, then
that firm can easily relocate to a more favorable venue. Second, there has been an increasingly
obvious --indeed and increasingly eerie-- tendency for political leaders representing capital to
self-destruct in scandals which are either substantively trivial or which reflect very poor political
judgement. Many of those who have not been implicated in scandals have chosen to retire. One
is tempted to look for an explanation in intra-capitalist contradictions, but the fact is that the
pattern of destruction is broad based and affects political leaders associated with a wide range
of different interests. It may be that the stress and strain of high level office in a market society
is too much for many to bear, or that it is simply becoming increasingly apparent that the real
power no longer lies with the Senate but with Wall Street. But it is also quite possible that capital
is anxious to constrain the emergence of any leadership whatsoever, even leadership which
clearly supports the neoliberal program. After all, political leaders by definition respond to
nonmarket forces, and thus represent a constraint on markets even when they offer political
support to the market system.
Infokatallaxis, finally, is a social system in which meaning and value have disappeared.
Knowledge gives way to information, which in turn is simply pattern with out referent and
without end. If the entire universe is simply an information processing system, then the "value"
of an idea derives not from its ability to encode the underlying structure of the system, but rather
to increase its overall information content. Things are real to the extent that they are thought --
and they are thought to the extent that people want to think them. Everything, in the end, is
reduced to consumer preference.
A few words are in order here regarding the ideologies which present themselves as
alternatives to neoliberalism: religious fundamentalism on the right, and postmodernism on the
left. Both of these trends are, in fact, mechanisms of bourgeois hegemony. Religious
fundamentalism has an authentic popular base. It articulates the rage of the dispossessed at the
disintegration of the social fabric, but it attempts to restore the frayed social fabric by imposing
order "from the outside," or more precisely "from above." In so doing it implicitly confesses
faith in the principal tenet of the neoliberal creed: that matter has no organization of its own,
except what emerges from random variation and natural selection. That religious
fundamentalists, unlike neoliberals, regard this "spontaneous order" as radically inadequate
matters little. What is important is to keep people from realizing the organization latent in
matter ...
Postmodernism plays a similar role on the left. The ethics of diff‚rance has a real base
among peoples who feel their culture being undermined by the hegemony of the market system.
But postmodernism defends difference by denying the whole in the context of which difference
has meaning, purpose, and value. Indeed, as we have seen, though it emerges from a very
different intellectual tradition --Francophile rather than Anglo-Saxon, linguistic rather than
mathematical-- postmodernism in fact reproduces most of the principal theses of information-
theoretical neoliberalism. It simply radicalizes them and draws out their logical implications,
demonstrating that infokatallaxis is just one more new "grand narrative," no better grounded than
its predecessors.
The fact is that "infokatallaxis" is impossible, at least for human beings. First of all, so long
as production actually involves the reorganization of physical, biological, and social matter, the
instantaneous reallocation of capital is impossible. This is, of course, why finance capital aspires
to the creation of a pure information economy, and attempts to retheorize all activities, from
growing corn to making steel to cooking food as forms of information processing. One would
in fact have to be at Tipler's Omega point in order to construct anything like a pure
infokatallaxis. But even so, special relativity places definite limits on the speed with which even
electronic information can be transmitted. Nothing can move faster than the speed of light. So
it appears that even at Omega perfect markets are impossible. One is tempted to call
infokatallaxis an angelic capitalism --but then angels, already being perfectly what they are,
don't consume.
But let us assume for a moment that such a system could be constructed. What would it be
like? Far from being progressive, as Tipler and his allies contend, infokatallaxis, to the extent
that it tends towards perfect equilibrium, in fact tends towards entropic death, for the reasons we
have identified above. When all capital has finally been allocated in an optimum fashion and the
instantaneous exchange of all information has eliminated the possibility of monopoly rents on
innovation, there will be no further reason to reallocate capital, and thus no investment in new
research and development, and no further progress (Martens 1995). Our neoliberal visionaries
in fact aspire to nothing more nor less than eternal death.
When a society's vision of its own future becomes focused on paths which are physically
impossible, and which, were they possible, would lead necessarily to the end of all interesting
organization in the universe, then the structures which have organized the development of that
society are clearly spent. Progress requires a break with those structures, and the creation of
something radically new. In our case this means a break with the market system.
The struggle against the market system has historically been the struggle of the working
classes. In order to complete our strategic analysis we must, therefore, analyze the situation of
the working classes, their current situation and level of organization, spontaneous activity, etc.
Here we are immediately confronted with a profound contradiction. In one sense, the most
advanced sector of the working class is simply the most skilled sector of that class: the
intelligentsia, and skilled workers especially in high technology fields, etc. One would expect
that this stratum would thus also be the most progressive, because its development is most
markedly held back by the social stagnation engendered by the market system. But this is not
the case. Intellectuals generally, and the technical intelligentsia in particular, seem to have been
effectively hegemonized by neoliberalism and postmodernism, and to have largely adapted
themselves to the neoliberal regime. There are a number of reasons for this. First, the market
system itself determines what kinds of skills are cultivated, and what kinds are not. The result
has been a massive development of technical skills and of those theoretical skills which support
technical development --especially formal abstraction-- and a neglect or even an erosion of
political skills and of the highest order theoretical skill --i.e. the capacity to comprehend the
transcendental principles of value. And the market system tends, if anything, to undermine the
cardinal moral virtues of temperance, courage, and justice. These tendencies are not,
furthermore, confined to the technical intelligentsia; on the contrary, they increasingly extend
both to the managerial and humanistic intelligentsias, which are increasingly under the hegemony
of neoliberal and postmodern ideas which reject out of hand the existence of transcendental
principles of value. As a result, the most skilled strata of the working classes are also those most
likely to accept market driven criteria, which tend to undermine any drive to imagine a new and
more interesting future. Indeed, people who attempt to grasp the transcendental principles of
value, and develop a vision and strategy grounded in those principles, tend to be weeded out of
the academy and find their promotion, and often their further intellectual development, blocked
by the ideological agents of the market system. Those who do continue to think about social
progress are often drawn to the alienated hypermarket visions of thinkers like Frank Tipler, while
those who do master the disciplines necessary to reason about transcendental principles of value
find themselves drawn towards socially conservative institutional settings, and to the extent that
they resist the market they do so on conservative rather than progressive grounds.
This tendency is exacerbated by the rapid polarization of the intelligentsia into proletarianized
and rentier strata. On the one hand, successful members of the technical and managerial
intelligentsia find themselves drawing large salaries with significant benefits packages, which they
are often able to transform into comfortable stock portfolios which permit them to retire early
as "consultants" or (if they are really successful) as New Age "seekers." Tenured faculty at
major universities, similarly, often live off of endowment income. Both of these fractions of the
intelligentsia, freed as they are from market pressures, often produce ideas which do not
specifically serve, and may even contest the market, but only from a consumer standpoint. Their
resistance to the market is a "lifestyle choice" made possible by effective freedom from market
pressures. The lower strata of the intelligentsia, on the other hand, including many who have
developed capacities which allow them to see at least partly beyond market criteria, find
themselves economically marginalized and forced to sell their labor power under conditions
which make it very difficult for them to exercise their vocation as organizers and directors of the
working class --e.g. as university lecturers with outrageously high teaching loads and almost no
security, high school teachers, minor bureaucrats, etc.
Among the middle and lower strata of the working classes the hegemony of neoliberalism and
postmodernism is much weaker, but so too is the commitment to the idea of progress. Here
residual village community structures --parishes and other religious institutions, urban
neighborhoods, etc.-- help to conserve the capacity to grasp organization and thus value, but the
economic marginalization engendered by the "information society" and the emergence of a
unified global market make progress seem like something which always and only leaves them
behind. Some struggle to keep up by seeking higher education, others accept their situation as
evidence of their own inferior ability, and still others are drawn to the conservative resistance.
The situation in the peasant communities is not fundamentally different. Peasant movements
have always focused on resisting the incursion of market relations and on restoring the land rights
of the village communities. This is an objectively progressive stance because of the profoundly
progressive potential of village community structures, but peasant movements generally
understand themselves as conservative. It is only the integration of peasant movements into the
global movement towards socialism in the period between 1894 and 1989 which led to the
dissemination of explicitly progressivist ideologies among the peasantry, and with the crisis of
socialism, we have seen a growing tendency for these ideologies to give way to various forms
of populism and ind¡genismo. Of particular interest in this regard are the new movements in
Mexico, which seem to be advancing a "purely peasant" agenda in a way which we haven't seen
since the murder of Zapata or the crisis of narodnischestvo earlier in this century.
The petty bourgeoisie, as always, is a contradictory force. On the one hand, the massive
expansion of the rentier elites have lead to an unprecedented expansion of small enterprises
catering to luxury consumption interests. And the expanding sections of the bourgeoisie --
financial and technical-- are, as always, surrounded by concentric rings of petty bourgeois
wannabes and hangers on: consultants, providers of support services, etc. These groups are
almost uniform in their support for neoliberalism, and indeed often produce its most consistent
ideologues. On the other hand, the traditional petty bourgeoisie of artisans and shopkeepers
serving the working classes are under increasing pressure from capital and have thus moved into
the conservative resistance. This is especially true as the center and center left parties which
these groups formerly supported have themselves embraced neoliberalism. Thus Italian
shopkeepers who once voted for the Christian Democrats or the Republicans (a party of the
radical democratic left) now support the neofascist Allianza Nazionale (Abse 1996). The
traditional petty bourgeoisie provides one of the principal reservoirs of support for religious
conservatism --in part not doubt because of dietary laws and other religious practices which
create specialized niche markets in which small shops can survive and even prosper.
At its upper reaches the petty bourgeoisie shades over into what might be called the
entrepreneurial bourgeoisie. What is remarkable in the present period is the gradual
marginalization of this stratum from the ruling classes, and indeed a tendency for the stratum to
dissolve altogether, so that its condition is not really different from that of the petty bourgeoisie
from which it emerges. This does not mean that there are not new businesses being established,
many of which in fact become capitalist enterprises exploiting a large workforce. But under
conditions of a unified global market in capital, such enterprises, in order to grow, must be
wholly subordinate to the dynamics of the financial markets. It is no longer simply a question
of the firm's product or service selling, and of the enterprise turning a profit. Rather each new
allocation of capital must match the highest rate of return available in any sector of the economy
anywhere on the planet. The entrepreneur is thus transformed from an innovator and an
organizer of people and technology into a financial manager and agent of the capital markets. An
entrepreneur who is unwilling or unable to adapt to this new reality will fail, or at best be
consigned to the ranks of the struggling petty bourgeoisie. Like the working classes, therefore,
the petty bourgeoisie is increasingly divided into a prosperous, promarket stratum which buys
neoliberalism and is undergoing rapid rentierization, and a conservative, declining stratum which
sees progress of any kind as a threat to its very existence.
The result is that very few people at any level within the system see themselves as agents of
social progress held back by the market system --and that there is, currently, no mass
constituency which is spontaneously receptive to synergism. Clearly this presents us with a very
difficult strategic situation.
Before we move on to strategic considerations, however, we need to analyze briefly the
current political conjuncture, and the way in which the underlying social dynamics we have
analyzed are expressed in the activities of various socioreligious movements and political-
theological tendencies. The long conjuncture between 1978 (the date of the silent coup against
Carter and the Trilateralists, the rise of Thatcherism in England and Reaganism in the U.S.) and
1989-1991 (the final collapse of the Soviet bloc) was characterized by a sharp bourgeois offensive
against the working classes and the national liberation movements. Beginning in 1988, but very
definitively by 1992, there was a shift towards the consolidation of the new global neoliberal
regime, marked on the one hand by the transformation of the United Nations --long a strategic
reserve for the national liberation movements-- into a mechanism of international political-
diplomatic and especially political-military control for global capital, and on the other hand by
the finalization of a series of international trade agreements designed to institutionalize global
"free" trade --NAFTA, GATT, etc.
Broadly speaking, the dominant dynamic is still one of consolidation of the new global order.
But within this context a number of struggles are being played out which have considerable
tactical, and in some cases strategic, significance for the progressive forces. First, debates have
emerged within the bourgeoisie over the purity of the market regime to be instituted and
precisely where and how it should be modified. Rising segments of high technology capital,
concentrated especially in the information sector and in the civilian, as opposed to military side
of industry, began to press for increased investment in infrastructure, education, research, and
development. These "moderate neoliberals" allied themselves with moderate social
conservatives (the so-called "communitarians") distressed by the disintegration of the social fabric
under the impact of both market and bureaucratic structures. It is these elements which brought
Bill Clinton to power in the U.S. and which have kept the European and Japanese center left
alive as the older social liberal alliance disintegrates.
It rapidly became apparent, however, that the political-economic conditions for actually
carrying out the moderate neoliberal-communitarian program do not exist. The heavy debt burden
of even the advanced industrial countries, result of years of social liberalism, made it effectively
impossible to finance the required "investments" through yet higher deficits. Broad based anti-
tax sentiment, meanwhile, made tax-driven financing all but impossible. This was especially true
given the combined reticence and inability of the moderate neoliberals to mobilize broad based
working class support. On the one hand, neoliberal entrepreneurs and technocratic intellectuals
had no desire to reawaken the workers movement, with which they had little or nothing in
common. Workers, on the other hand, were not about to mount a costly struggle just to get
slightly better retraining programs --especially with the likes of Robert Reich (who passes for
Clinton's "left" wing) telling them to expect their wages to erode towards Third World levels
anyway unless they transformed themselves into "symbolic analysts" capable of earning
monopoly rents on innovation. As a result, the workers deserted the Democrats and other center
and center left parties, and began flocking to social conservatives who spoke to at least part of
their misery. The result was the defeat of the Democratic party in the 1994 election and a
growing crisis of credibility for Social Christian and Social Democratic parties in Europe as they
increasingly towed the neoliberal line.
But as the events of 1994-1996 make clear, there has been no broad based shift to the
neoliberal right. The radicalism of the Contract on America has proven itself even more
unpopular than the arcane policy proposals advanced by the Clinton government. Gingrich and
company have not delivered much more to their allies in the defense/aerospace industry and the
social conservative movement than Clinton did for the computer industry and his
"communitarian" friends. The only real "policy" at present is that of the global market.
Workers' parties, generally speaking, have taken one of two principal stands with respect to
the current crisis. Most but not all social democrats and "reformed" communists (such as the
Italian Partito Democratica della Sinistra or the Polish Democratic Left-- have largely accepted
the premises of neoliberalism, and simply argue for a slower and less draconian reduction in the
social wage and higher levels of "investment" in infrastructure, education, research and
development. In this regard it is not at all surprising to hear the deputy leader of the Italian PDS
arguing for the creation of something like the Democratic Party of the United States. This kind
of strategy has produced favorable electoral results only where the party in question still has a
strong organizational apparatus with ties to the industrial working class (as in Italy) or where
there is no real alterative (as in Poland). When such parties have come to power, only to
implement "soft" versions of the neoliberal program, they have found --not surprisingly-- that
when they return to the polls the working classes reject them.
Other parties --Workers' Russia for example-- have taken up what might be called a
"conservative economist" position, defending nationalized industry, state bureaucracies, pensions,
wages, social security, etc. against the neoliberal offensive, without really advancing a credible
vision for the future. A few --the Russian Communist Party, the Partido Revolucionario
Democratico in Mexico try to have it both ways.
In the meantime, large sections of the working class and the petty bourgeoisie are being
attracted by semifascist and neofascist movements, from the Buchanan wing of the Republican
Party in the United States to the nationalist and anti-European right in Western Europe, to the
"Liberal Democrats" of Vladimir Zhironovsky. In Asia and Africa a similar niche is filled by
Islamic and Hindu fundamentalism. Small numbers of marginalized intellectuals support
"ecologist" parties or "left" formations imbued with the impotent and pessimistic spirit of
postmodernism.
The current conjuncture is thus best described as one in which neoliberal hegemony is largely
uncontested, the strictly subaltern status of productive capital --high tech or low tech, military
or civilian-- to finance capital having been firmly established --though there does, to be sure,
seem to be a continuing struggle between two broad factions within capital regarding the extent
to which a regime of perfect competition should be established and the precise ways in which this
regime should be modified. The working classes and the petty bourgeoisie, meanwhile, oscillate
between more or less passive resignation to the neoliberal regime and conservative resistance.
The progressive forces are not even on the map.
III. Strategy and Tactics
A. Strategy
Where do we go from here? The task is daunting. While our analysis is little more than a
rough sketch, it should be apparent that no mobilization of the existing opposition can mount a
credible challenge to the market system. We must rebuild, almost from scratch, a movement
which has met with global defeat on an unprecedented scale --and that under the worst
imaginable conditions. It is necessary to reorganize the working classes (intelligentsia, proletariat,
peasantry) around a new, progressive vision (synergism).
This makes the task of developing a comprehensive strategy extraordinarily difficult. At this
point it is possible only to identify a few broad strategic principles. First, it is important to keep
in mind that fundamental civilizational transitions have occurred not only through reform and
revolution --the historic models of the socialist movements-- but also, as Samir Amin first drew
to our attention in 1980 (Amin 1980), through decadence and renewal. Clearly this was the case
with the transition from the enormously unproductive slave-based petty commodity social
formations of the Mediterranean Basin to the highly innovative system of European feudalism.
The decay and disintegration of late bronze age tributary empires also seems to have been a
major factor in allowing the emergence of neocommunitarian societies based on specialized
agriculture (grain, oil, wine) and iron technology in the period around 1200-700 B.C.E. Clearly
it is impossible to say at this point that the coming transition will be by decadence and renewal
rather than reform or revolution, but given the depth of the crisis and the weakness of the
progressive forces, we clearly need to prepare for this possibility. This means organizing to
conserve the heritage of human civilization through a period of profound social disintegration as
well as developing a vision for a new, postmarket social order.
Second, the ambiguity of the present situation means that we must maintain a proper balance
between the task of building an organization which can serve as a vehicle for synergism, and
working with the existing opposition to try to avert a wholesale civilizational collapse, and if this
proves impossible, to help conserve what we can of the achievements of civilization as we
prepare for a long period of darkness. On the one hand, existing ideologies and organizations are
clearly inadequate to the tasks facing human civilization, and the task of developing a new vision
and a new strategy remains paramount. On the other hand, neither our own organization, nor
any other devoted to retheorizing the next steps in the human civilizational project, and to
building a new leadership core, is likely to enjoy mass support in the short or medium run, for
the reasons we have outlined above. The range of existing opposition forces, however, is in fact
quite broad, and properly mobilized it might be able to avert the worst sort of disaster. This
means looking carefully at the distinctive potential contributions of each element within the
progressive bloc. Debates of the kind which shaped the local revolutionary struggles of the
twentieth century, between advocates of a peasant-based prolonged popular war, an urban
proletarian insurrection, a popular front, or "cultural hegemony" exercised by revolutionary
intellectuals, or between advocates of armed struggle and electoral politics will have no place in
the coming period. The fact is that all of these diverse forms of struggle have and will continue
to play an important role. Peasant wars are unlikely in New Jersey, but events in rapidly
industrializing and urbanizing Mexico have shown they are unlikely to disappear entirely from
the global scene. At the same time, however impotent and reformist electoral struggle may
appear to peasants organizing under an authoritarian regime in a still largely agrarian country,
it can be neglected only with great peril --something which the Communist Party of the
Philippines learned to its chagrin. Revolutionary strategy in the next century will increasingly
become centered on the task of organizing and orchestrating all of these diverse social forces,
drawing out their latent potential, challenging them to grow and develop and become something
more than they are --while still respecting their autonomy and their rootedness in and constraint
by distinct local conditions.
Similarly the old struggle between reformist gradualism and revolutionary rupture needs to
be seen in a new and very different light. As human civilization develops it must be continually
reorganized in order to unleash new potential which cannot be accommodated by old structures.
Transcending the market system will not change this. From this point of view the difference
between serious structural reform and revolutionary transformation does not seem so great --
certainly not so great as the difference between a progressive, reformist/revolutionary transition
and a transition through decadence and renewal. This is important because many of the rising
forces on the left are broad parties which are very far from proposing social revolution --the
PRD in Mexico, the Workers Party in Brazil, etc. This does not meant that they cannot and will
not make an important contribution to breaking the current impasse. At the same time, we must
be clear that many so-called parties of the left have abandoned the working classes altogether,
and become parties of the hegemonized technical intelligentsia. This is certainly true in Europe
where even the PDS is talking about cutting corporate taxes and loosening labor markets. In
assessing whether or not a particular organization constitutes part of the core constituency for
synergism, is a strategic or tactical reserve, or perhaps even part of the enemy, we must use a
variety of different criteria. On the one hand, we must look at its base. Is it an organization
of the working classes --i.e. of one of the sectors of society which lives from productive labor,
manual or intellectual? Is it an organization of the petty bourgeoisie or of the petty rentier strata
--classes which engage in productive labor but live from the profits of enterprise, or from interest
and dividends? Or is it an organization of the unproductive bourgeoisie which adds nothing to
the organization of the universe? Organizations of the working classes constitute our core
constituency, those of the petty bourgeoisie and petty rentiers are strategic reserves, and those
of the bourgeoisie adversaries or at best tactical allies. Second, however, we must ask how the
base is organized. Is the organization in question an instrument of neoliberal hegemony, which
uses fine language about "investment" in human development to lure workers and intellectuals
into its fold? Or is it an organization which, even if only implicitly and incompletely, rejects
the hegemonic neoliberal regime?
Furthermore, as we relate to these diverse sectors, we face a dual task. On the one hand, in
the short and medium run, we need to find ways to draw them together into a broad alliance to
conserve the integrity of the ecosystem, the social fabric, and the historic achievements of
human civilization --and to catalyze renewed progress in the development of human social
capacities. These tasks can be carried by a number of different social forms, from revitalized
and protected peasant communities, through autonomous foundations operating within the context
of civil society, to renewed state regulation and rationalized reallocation of resources.
What would otherwise be the difficult question of just which of these tasks to emphasize is
largely settled for us by the diverse character of the sectors in question. Indigenous and peasant
communities, organized in groups like the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberaci¢n Nacional (EZLN),
as well as working class and petty bourgeois groups living in communities with strong social
fabric will be more focused on the conservative tasks of our period; skilled workers and
intellectuals on the progressive tasks. Both are important and their relative weight is determined
by the relative strength of the social forces which carry them, which in turn reflect the overall
level of development of human society.
Second, we need to find ways to draw each of these sectors into the struggle to build a new,
postmarket social order. Once again there are diverse forms of transition open to us,
corresponding to the rich diversity of forces which make up the potential opposition to
capitalism.
The transition to a postmarket economy involves two main tasks. First, we need to break the
nexus between work and wages. We can do this by gradually increasing the social wage in the
form of free health care, education, public transportation, and subsidies for housing, food,
clothing, and other necessities, while at the same time establishing quasi-mandatory education
and work programs, with exemptions for parents caring full time for children (an activity which
would be credited as full time skilled labor). The aim should be to provide people with as much
training as they can benefit from, and to gradually get to the point where we guarantee everyone
employment in their chosen field, at the highest level at which they can perform. This will
remove the disintegrating pressure of the marketplace on families and communities, by permitting
people to opt to care for their children rather than selling their labor power, while creating a
powerful upward pressure on wages which will in turn create an incentive for automating those
jobs which essentially no one wants to perform. Necessary but routine labor which cannot be
automated can be performed through mandatory service programs. Most important, these reforms
will begin to awaken the dormant creativity and initiative of the working class, and create a basis
in experience for understanding that work is our highest vocation --that we consume in order to
work, to add something to the universe, and not the other way around.
Clearly the most straightforward way to carry out these changes is through the state apparatus.
But if the balance of social forces compels us to weather a transition through decadence and
renewal, then one of our main tasks will be to build up collectives or communities in the space
opened up by the disintegration of the market order which uphold the principle of a strict
separation between work and wages or subsistence needs.
Second, we need to find ways to centralize resources for human development --not only for
the increased social wage proposed above, but also for infrastructure, education, research, and
development. In this regard it must be said that bureaucratic centralization through taxation, or
through revenue generated by state enterprises, has not yet expended its progressive potential.
On the contrary, this is the only way we know to carry out very large projects: building high
speed rail, astronautics, etc., and it may be the only way to finance projects which generate little
or no direct revenue: health care or education in poor communities. This is essentially the
historic socialist option.
There are, however, other ways to insure that the social surplus product is used in a way
which promotes the development of human social capacities. One of the simplest is already in
use: the corporate charter. We currently require that nonprofit corporations use their resources
in a way which serves the "exempt" purpose of the organization. There is no reason why for-
profit charters cannot (under the pressure of the victorious working classes) gradually be
rewritten to contain similar requirements. This means, of course, understanding that the mission
of a corporation is to produce some useful good or service, not to make profits for stockholders.
The result would be a gradually phasing out of dividend payments, reduction of executive
salaries, etc., and ultimately the end of the financial markets and the market in capital generally.
Banks would be transformed into something more like private foundations. This does not mean,
however, that the corporations would fall under state control. Rather, they would be governed
as nonprofit corporations are currently governed, with significant leeway as to the way in which
they allocate their resources, as well as the right to form strategic alliances, etc. While private
stockholding would essentially disappear, "shares" might be allocated to hospitals, school systems
and universities, research institutes, etc. to support work which does not itself generate revenue.
We call this the "social charter" system.
In some regions and some sectors of the economy still less centralized options exist.
Neocommunitarian and neo-monastic forms (with or without fully communal living) may be
attractive options under certain conditions: a highly productive, intensive agrarian, handicrafts
(including "custom high technology crafts"), and/or service economy (e.g. a residential school)
coupled with an intact village or intentional community. The aim here is not complete autarchy.
The community provides goods or services to the larger economy, and its charter forbids luxury
consumption. It may even pay a tax in cash or kind. And in order to be development, the
community would undoubtedly need goods and services from the outside. But because it
approaches self-sufficiency, it retains an even greater autonomy in decisions about resource
allocation than state or corporate systems, albeit on a much smaller scale.
What we need to keep in mind is that while all three of these structural options centralize and
allocate resources for human development, they will lead to very different patterns of
development. Consider the question of energy sources. Full development of safe fusion energy
is likely only under a system with significant state centralization of resources for research and
development. Neocommunitarian or neomonastic systems, on the other hand, are likely to favor
development of solar energy, because of the greater independence it affords. Social charter
systems, or the social charter sector in a larger system, while freed from the market pressures
which favor continued use of fossil or fissionable fuels, might tend to be a bit more
opportunistic, each organization favoring whatever energy source helped it carry out its own
mission. State-centralizing systems make space exploration possible; at least with current
technologies village communities do not --but they do conserve social fabric and provide a rich
context for certain forms of artistic, scientific, and religious development. On the other hand
there is little reason why either the state or small communities ought to, or would want to, be
involved in making heavy machine tools. Clearly we need some combination of all three systems,
and different regions will likely opt for somewhat different combinations.
The choice between these different options depends in large part on forces over which we will
have at best very limited control: the relative weight of the various social classes within the
progressive bloc, and the conditions under which we are organizing the transition. A
revolutionary or reformist transition clearly favors the historic socialist option, though there is
no reason why it cannot conserve significant social space for the social charter and
neocommunitarian options. A transition through decadence and renewal clearly favors the social
charter and neocommunitarian options --the latter more strongly the deeper and more rapid the
disintegration. Even so, any form of organization will require the existence of some institution
which exercises at least minimal state functions: the administration of justice and the defence of
the realm. Those of us in the Americas, and in parts of Asia and Africa, who have spent our
lives fighting the imperialist state may soon find ourselves in the position of the monastics of the
early feudal period, mourning the complete disintegration of state authority. For our comrades
in Europe or the former Soviet bloc, where the state has played a more progressive role, the shift
in orientation will seem less ironic.
This brings us to the specific role of the Foundation in this larger global grand strategy, and
to our own tasks in the present period. While our influence has certainly grown over the past
five years we are still very far from being able to influence events on a global scale, nor do we
have the resources necessary to act effectively on all of the many different fronts which we have
identified as strategically significant. We need, rather, to concentrate our efforts in those areas
which are especially timely, and in which we enjoy an overwhelming comparative advantage,
while building strategic relationships with institutions which can help us both to become more
effective in our areas of strength and to expand into new areas so that we can eventually act at
a global grand-strategic level. The direction suggested by our analysis both of the larger global
situation and of our own strategic assets is very clear. The principal task of the progressive
forces in the present period is to develop a new, synergistic vision and strategy, and a new
leadership which can help to develop and implement that vision and strategy. Indeed, apart from
profound ideological changes and enormous organizational development, the mobilization of the
progressive forces outlined above will be effectively impossible. And it is in precisely these areas
that we enjoy the greatest strengths.
Let us look at each of these tasks in greater detail. We have already shown that the crisis of
socialism (and thus the weakness of the existing opposition) derives from the internal
contradictions of dialectical materialism, and specifically from the contradiction between a vision
of social and even cosmic progress on the one hand and atheism on the other. Our first and most
important task thus remains the work of regrounding our knowledge of first principles, and thus
of the transcendental principles of value, in a scientific understanding of the organization of the
universe, and then elaborating the ethics and strategy which flows out of those principles. From
this standpoint and this standpoint alone will we be able to effectively combat the hegemony of
neoliberalism, fundamentalism, and postmodernism.
One area in particular stands out as especially important. We need to vigorously combat the
mystified understanding of progress promoted by neoliberalism and its information theoretical
philosophy, and work to clarify the character of authentic social progress and human excellence.
This is vitally important if we are to rebuild within the working class a belief that social progress
is possible, that it is a good thing, and that it is something which involves and benefits --in fact
depends on-- its labor and their creativity. This is especially important as we attempt to transform
the conservative resistance of the middle and lower strata of the working classes and the
peasantry --be it religious, social democratic, or communist-- into an authentic force for social
progress.
But the foregoing analysis suggests a certain change in emphasis. When we first undertook
the task of regrounding transcendental principles of value we opted for a broadly defined natural
law or "cosmic law" approach, partly because this approach seemed logically most coherent, and
partly because it seemed amply supported by recent scientific developments in anthropic
cosmology, complex systems theory, postdarwinian evolutionary biology, dialectical sociology--
which were gradually constructing a vision of the universe as a relational, self-organizing, and
teleological system. As our research has progressed, the picture has grown more complex.
Much of the "new science" turns out to be very "old" and even backwards and reactionary in
character. This is especially true of much theoretical physics and of the tendency in complex
systems theory and evolutionary biology which is dominated by information theory. Other
tendencies in complex systems theory on the other hand have begun to yield results more
promising from a philosophical standpoint than we dared hope for five years ago, laying the
groundwork for a philosophical cosmology and an archelogy which truly revitalizes and
synthesizes the dialectical and Catholic traditions. As our system takes shape, our theoretical
work, while continuing to ground itself in scientific research --in an active effort to learn from
the cosmos through systematic observation-- will need to emphasize far more the critical,
regulatory role of archelogy vis-a-vis the special sciences, pointing out errors and internal
contradictions.
Our analysis also has very definite implications for our leadership development work. Our
analysis of the contradictory patterns of human development within the working class suggests
that we cannot rely on recruiting leaders from the intelligentsia and skilled working class, since
it is precisely these sectors which are most privileged, and most hegemonized by postmodern and
neoliberal ideology. On the contrary, we need to create a new intelligentsia drawn from the
middle and lower ranks of the working class and the peasantry --an intelligentsia which is trained
to systematically study the universe as a whole, to abstract first principles --transcendental
principles of value-- to draw out the ethical implications of the principles, and to build and
exercise the power necessary to realize them. Such an intelligentsia must be global in character,
integrating universalizing interest in the cosmohistorical evolutionary process and the human
civilizational project as a whole, with a rootedness in the diverse traditions which are the
particular forms of that project. It must have strong relationships with the traditional
intelligentsias --managerial, technical, humanistic, clerical, etc., with working class
organizations, and with the peasant communities. And it must lead in the moral as well as the
intellectual virtues. It must be driven to add something to the cosmos rather than to consume,
steeled for battle but never given to revenge or wanton violence, constantly willing the highest
Good, and all particular goods in proportion to their value. We have already described the
character of this leadership in our article "In These Dark Times ..." as a revival of the ancient
revolutionary disciplines of the prophet, the priest, and the political leader.
B. Tactics
What do these broad strategic directions mean in terms of concrete initiatives? Both the
relative success of our various initiatives thus far, and the tasks presented by the current
situation, suggest that research needs to remain the Foundation's main priority. It is only on the
basis of a compelling vision and strategy for the next steps in the human civilizational project that
we will be able to attract the kind of people we need to our leadership core and position
ourselves as a strategic center in the emerging resistance. While this does not mean abandoning
entirely educational programs directed at a broader audience or the development of consulting
relationships with parishes and community organizations, it does suggest that these activities are
at best auxiliary: means of recruiting potential members and of building financial and institutional
support. The main task of the Foundation in the present period is research and, as it begins to
attract leaders to its core, training, positioning, and mentoring them, and it is on its achievements
in these arenas that its work must be evaluated.
1. Research
Our research priorities remain essentially the same: developing and grounding a vision and
a strategy adequate for the next steps in the human civilizational project. In particular, we need
to rebuild the consensus for social progress and convince people that the market is an obstacle
to the full development of human social capacities. But this, in turn, presupposes some criterion
by which we can determine what is progressive and what is not. Thus the importance of
regrounding ethics in a credible doctrine of first principles --one which transcends the historic
atheism of dialectical materialism. This in turn means demonstrating that the universe is in fact
a self-organizing system which evolves infinitely towards ever higher degrees of organization,
and thus "terminates" in a qualitatively infinite form, i.e. God. This argument involves three
broad stages:
* development of a synoptic view of the results of the physical, biological, and social
sciences, in order to construct a philosophical cosmology demonstrating that the universe
is an infinite, organized and structured system,
* development of an archelogy, or doctrine of first principles, which flows out of this
cosmology and which analyzes the nature of being, essence, and the transcendentals,
showing that there is in fact a necessary being (organization itself) which grounds
judgements of value, and
* development of an ethics, including doctrines of right, virtue, and social justice, together
with a general treatment of questions of strategy and tactics.
This project, Organization, Teleology, and Value, which we expect to result in a book of the
same name, will constitute my single most important responsibility for the foreseeable future.
The second basic research project, tentatively entitled The Nature and Conditions for the
Development of Human Excellence, involves first of all analyzing the nature of human
excellence. This involves the development, on the basis of the best social scientific research, of
what has traditionally been called a philosophical or theological anthropology, and of an ethics.
Second, it involves systematic investigation of the conditions for the development of human
excellence. This second dimension of the project offers significant opportunities for empirical
research. We are particularly interested in exploring the impact of various social structural
locations (village community, market, socialism) on the development of intellectual, moral, and
theological virtue --a continuation of Luria's pathfinding research earlier in this century. While
this second project is, in a certain sense, contained theoretically in the first, it has its own unique
dynamism, driven as it is by more immediate practical concerns regarding the conditions for
development of a leadership core which can lead the next steps in the human civilizational
project. We do not currently have the resources to undertake much more than preliminary
planning for this effort, but we expect that as it unfolds Maggie will provide the key leadership.
These core basic research projects will unfold in the context of an ongoing dialogue with
representatives of diverse philosophical trends, many of whom participate in our research
networks and write for Dialectic, Cosmos, and Society. Of particular importance in this regard
are people working on the philosophical implications of recent developments in the physical,
biological, and social sciences, and people exploring the contemporary significance of a variety
of philosophical traditions, including Scholasticism, idealist and materialist dialectics, Russian
religious idealism, process philosophy, etc. We plan to place more emphasis on systematic,
critical assessments of trends which in some way contribute to or challenge our developing
synergistic system.
Our basic research will continue to be supplemented by research regarding questions of
political-theological strategy. Here we enjoy some unique comparative advantages which, as in
the case of our basic research program, coincide with areas of critical strategic importance. The
most important of these comparative advantages is in the area of religion and politics. In
particular, we have unusually strong capacities in analyzing the political valence of Catholicism,
at both the institutional and popular levels, though there is almost no socioreligious tradition on
the planet in which we do not have some expertise. Given the role of religious institutions in
conserving nonmarket principles of value and thus in legitimating resistance to the market order,
this is an arena of extraordinary importance. Among our highest priorities in this area is the
ongoing analysis of the Catholic Church as a global political-theological actor, but we are also
pursuing an initiative in Mexico in conjunction with the Universidad Autonoma de Ciudad Juarez
regarding Church-State relations which pose themselves in a particularly interesting way in
Mexico, with the Church arguing that statutes which contradict natural law need not be obeyed,
and the state, recognizing a threat both to its own authority and to the new market driven
economic strategy it is promoting, rejecting the right of the Church to even teach such doctrines,
much less promote actual resistance. The institutional confrontation seems to confirm core
aspects of our basic thesis regarding the progressive, antimarket political valence of Catholicism.
But matters are complicated by the fact that the Mexican hierarchy leans towards the right, and
the Catholic Partido Acci¢n Nacional is even more strongly pro-market than the government.
Our second comparative advantage is in the analysis of the organized left and of developments
in the former Soviet bloc and the remaining socialist countries. This is an area we continue to
monitor closely while we look for opportunities to conduct more focused research.
Finally, the broad analysis we have developed of the current crisis argues for the importance
of an independent prophetic-philosophical office and suggests that social progress has been
compromised by the subordination of these functions even to such progressive institutions as the
Church and the Party. But what happens when the intelligentsia enters the service of such
fundamentally reactionary institutions as the capitalist corporation or the bourgeois state? Living
and working in places like Washington, D.C. and Los Alamos, New Mexico has brought us into
contact with several of the main institutions of the U.S. military and intelligence research
apparatus, and suggested the importance of an in-depth analysis of the nature of these institutions.
Are the underlying contradictions between the vocation of an intellectual as a knower and
organizer of the universe and of human society and the institution of the marketplace sufficient
to make subversion of these institutions possible? Or is the strength of the hegemonic neoliberal
ideology --and the rentierization which is its social basis-- too great?
As we carry out these research initiatives, we need to continue to expand, and to strengthen
collaboration within, our research network. Specifically, we want to foster increased discussion
and debate among people working in different fields and from different perspectives, and
eventually convene a conference or series of conferences at which the members of our network
can engage in some face to face discussion regarding the future of human civilization. We also
need to improve the circulation of our own journal, Dialectic, Cosmos, and Society, arrange for
electronic publication, indexing, etc., and continue to increase dissemination of our work through
established academic and public affairs journals.
2. Other Initiatives
While research remains our principal task, we need to continue to lay the groundwork for the
development of a real leadership core which can help to develop and implement our vision and
our strategy and to build financial and institutional support for the Foundation. For the moment
most of our leadership development activities will continue to focus on leaders already
sufficiently advanced be to attracted to our vision and strategy and to be interested in further
training and mentoring. Given the dispersed nature of our network, much of this work will be
one on one, though we have identified opportunities for regular study groups in a few areas. In
the longer run, however, we hope to build strategic relationships which will allow us to
undertake larger scale initiatives which can help us build a new intelligentsia out of the ranks of
the working classes. Specifically, we are studying the feasibility of a two-year, community
based, liberal arts program which would help students from working class communities make
the transition from high school to first rate liberal arts colleges, and an advanced leadership
development program, for experienced adults interested in exploring fundamental philosophical
and theological questions while developing their leadership skills. The first program would
require a partnership with a major organization or a consortium of organizations (probably
universities and/or Catholic dioceses) which could provide financial and institutional support. The
second program would certainly benefit from accreditation to grant degrees. We regard both of
these initiatives as important, but medium to long term --something we hope to develop over the
next five to ten years at the earliest.
As we noted above, the principal mission of the Foundation makes it very difficult for it to
function simultaneously as a consulting business. What makes us distinct and excellent also
makes us appear a bit odd or even suspicious to organizations looking for contract research,
leadership development, or strategic planning services. Because of this, while we do not intend
to withdraw entirely from this arena, we no longer regard it as an effective or principal method
of building financial and institutional support in the present period. This makes all the more
central the task of building up other mechanisms of support. First, we need to increase and
regularize our subscription/dues base, which is our only real guarantee of autonomy and
continued survival. Our principal asset in doing this is the uniqueness of the product we offer.
Only in Dialectic, Cosmos, and Society can readers find an authentic effort to develop a vision
and a strategy for the next steps in the human civilizational project; only in Dialectic, Cosmos,
and Society can they find scholars from such diverse disciplines writing from such a wide range
of perspectives. In short, we have created a unique and fine publication --now we need to
market it more effectively.
Second, we need to identify strategic partners who can both provide us with in kind support
and help us leverage foundation grants, etc. The most straightforward alternative in this regard
is a major university. An affiliation between the Foundation and a university would help to
position the institution in question as a center for thought about the next steps in the human
civilizational project. Such an affiliation might also provide a context for the development of our
liberal arts program. We are also assessing the feasibility of applying for accreditation as a
nongovernmental organization affiliated with the United Nations. Both our research and our
leadership development initiatives fall within current program priorities for such United Nations
System organizations as the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, the
United Nations Institute for Training and Research, and the United Nations University.
***
We have come a long way, but we also have a long way to go. Building an organization
designed to chart the next steps in the human civilization is a difficult task --far more difficult
than building a corporation or a trade union, a political party, a church, or a university-- for it
involves understanding and being able to reorganize all of these different kinds of institutions on
the basis of a vision which is at once clearly fixed on promoting the development of complex
organization, but also always fluid and developing. It is the work of a lifetime --a lifetime of
struggle, but also of incomparable joy in knowing that we participate, at a level few others have,
in the self-organizing activity of the cosmos, in which we all live and move and have our being.
We urge you to join us in this effort, to add your strength to ours, as we make straight
humanity's pathway into the future.
References
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Personnel
Officers
President/Treasurer: Anthony Mansueto
Executive Vice President/Secretary: Maggie Mansueto
Assistant Secretary: Robert Anderson
Council
Samir Amin, Director, Forum Tiers Monde, Dakar, Senegal
Ernesto Cardenal, Director, Casa de Tres Mundos, Managua,
Nicaragua; formerly Minister of Culture, Republic of Nicaragua
Boris Gubman, Chair, Department of the History and Theory of
Culture, Tver State University, and Tver Regional Director, Russian
Academy of the Social Sciences, Tver, Russian Federation
Pavel Gurevich, Laboratory Director, Institute of Philosophy, Russian
Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russian Federation
Errol Harris, Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy,
Northwestern University, U.S.A.
Francois Houtart, Director, Centre Tricontinental, Louvain-la-Neuve,
Belgium
Tony Hinajosa, Mayor, Cockrell Hill, Texas, U.S.A.
Richard Olenick, Chair, Department of Physics, University of
Dallas, Irving, Texas, U.S.A.
Dejan Pavlov, General Director, Institute for Strategic Studies and
Development, University "Braca Karic," Belgrade, Yugoslavia
Rudolfo Rincones, Profesor/Investigador, Unidad de Estudios
Regionales, Universidad Autonoma de Ciudad Juarez, Ciudad Juarez,
Mexico and Director of Research and Evaluation, El Paso Independent
School District, El Paso, Texas, U.S.A.
Mieczyslaw Spzorer, United States Library of Congress, Washington,
D.C., U.S.A.