Editor's Note: This is the 3rd part of the series, The World Revolution advances through Hugo Chavez. - LMB
The World Revolution advances through Hugo Chavez - continuing ...
5. When is a political theory or a Historical Project revolutionary?
The revolutionary or reformist character of a theory or praxis does not depend, as is obvious, on its methods of struggle, but on its programmatic contents. Revolutionary, in this sense, is a Historical Project which seeks to substitute an existing institutionality (the status quo ) for another, qualitatively different. Given that it is easy to define the principal columns of bourgeois institutionality, it is of equal facility to determine the systemic nature (reformist) or anti-systemic nature (revolutionary) of the project of a contemporary political subject.
Bourgeois-capitalist civilization rests on four macroinstitutions: 1. a market economy organized primordially by private capital, with a varied participation by state or "public" property, under the operative principle of the optimization of the rate of profit; 2. the political superstructure of formal-representative-parliamentary democracy, which is to say, indirect and elitist; 3. the class State; and 4. the liberal-possessive subject.
Any project for the Nation, the Region or the World, which seeks to be revolutionary or which self-defines itself as such, has to have, therefore, an alternative viable proposal for each one of these four macroinstitutions. And any project which lacks any of these proposals or does not develop them must renounce the pretension of being anti-systemic or revolutionary.
6. It is necessary to demonstrate the viability of the socialism of the XXI century.
In actuality, the viability of the anti-systemic alternatives, that is, the socialism of the XXI century or of participative post-capitalist democracy, can only demonstrate itself in a scientific manner. There exists no other method of doing it. That is why the actual inflation of hermeneutic essays on the works of Marx and Engels and the interminable interpretations of "What is to be done" of Lenin, which seek the key to the qualitative transformation of the present in the works of the classics, are essentially fruitless and redundant. Redundant, because it will be difficult to find something substantially new, after the monumental work of Hal Draper.
That activity is fruitless because, in the last instance, to study and know the classic works is a necessary condition for the new World Revolution... and no more. The sufficient condition can only emerge from present science and reality. The sterility of the great majority of "Marxist" contributions to the present debate have their reason to exist here.
If the hermeneutics of the well-intentioned, and also of the ill-intentioned, will not lead the world towards anticapitalist transformation, less will the philanthropic, utopian prosystemics of the liberal intellectuals, socialdemocrats, Christian-pacifists and the NGOs, who control the debates in the Regional and World Forums. And the same holds for the sectarianism which autodefines itself as Marxist and which is no more than an abstract negation of the concrete, fossilized in the epistemology of the XIX century. For this double cognitive deficiency, to be an abstract negation and to be ignorant of current scientific epistemology, it is incapable of understanding the contradictions of contemporary reality and of utilizing them to construct the alliances and the revolutionary theory necessary to advance towards a postcapitalist civilization.
For politicians and intellectuals, it is today illegitimate to propose the substitution of the system of capital by socialism or a participative democracy, if it is not done with a base in the determination of the new anticapitalist institutionality and its forms, times and methods of transition and, above all, the demonstration of its viability , that is, its capacity to exist, function and develop itself adequately within the objective conditions of the present and their probable evolution. Because it is not ethical to make an antisystemic macroproposal, based only on the desideratum ( the desire) to help the people, in individual or collective voluntarism, dogma, or the utilitarianism of personal benefit.
To protect the majority of these positions of ingenuity, imposture and milleniumism (of right and of left), the demonstration of the feasibility of the New Historic Project is not only a practical necessity, but at the same time, an ethical imperative. Having affirmed categorically that the only available method to carry out such a demonstration is the scientific one, it remains to illustrate how a demonstration of this type would proceed.
7. How do you demonstrate the viability of the socialism of the XXI century?
Carrying out the scientific demonstration of the veracity of an empirical hypothesis means to employ "scientific protocol", that is, the sequence of five steps of theoretical-logical-empirical procedure which, essentially, constitute the scientific method. The singularity of the scientific protocol, which differentiates it from whatever other method of interpretation of reality, is based on two steps: the hypothesis, (a systematized enunciation), and its empirical contrasting.
To demonstrate the viability - that is to say, the capacity to exist, function and develop adequately under the conditions of the present and its probable future evolution- of the four institutions of postcapitalism, requires, then, the formulation of a set of hypotheses, whose veracity (or falsity) will have to be demonstrated. Formulated in a simple manner, these enunciated hypotheses will have the following form: Performing in a comparable environment, the economy of equivalence provides a greater quality of life for the majority of humanity, than the economy of the market.
The next step is the operationalization of the concepts or variables of the hypotheses employed, that is, they are assigned empiric parameters (indicators) which are measurable in a, preferably, quantitative manner. Developing the necessary models which will permit the comparison of the results of both types of economy in commensurable contexts, is the next step. The magnitudes and flows of these variables can be expressed in different scales, for example in monetary terms, values (time inputs), or volumes (energy, tons, etcetera), and be processed through adequate mathematical tools, like matrixes.
The validity of such proofs would be sufficient to comply with the ethical and the practical-political mandate to begin the struggle for the anticapitalist New Historic Project with force and conviction, always and whenever those criteria of validity for this type of hypothesis conform to the level of XXI century epistemology and not to the scientific understanding of the nineteenth. It should be pointed out, however, that there are also other methods to scientifically analyze the viability-question of current macroinstitutions versus future macroinstitutions, by way of, for example, system theory.
8. The criteria of validity
The criteria of truth of the physics of the XVIII and XIX centuries were constructed essentially on the daily and scientific experiences with the behavior of objects of certain sizes (relatively large) and velocities (relatively low), which facilitated the evolution of a deterministic epistemological focus, such as that expressed in the celebrated formulation of Laplace, that if there were a demon capable of knowing the position and velocity of every particle of the universe at a given moment and if he had the computational capacity sufficient to resolve the equations of Newton, he would be able to predict the development of everything which exists.
When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels undertoook the study of bourgeois society, they came to understand that the determinist paradigm with its rigid relations of cause and effect did not have sufficient sophistication to analyze adequately the behavior of the complex dynamic systems which we call societies, States and subjects. That was the reason which made them "take refuge" in the epistemology of the Hegelian dialectic, whose relational logic with its qualitative leaps seemed, and in fact was, much more adequate to describe and explain the evolution of society and the praxis of the social subject, which they sought to subvert so drastically.
Nevertheless, when physics began to study the behavior of material on the atomic scale, the aleatoric nature (chance) of its behavior broke the ( inevitable ) straitjacket of determinism of Newton and Laplace . New knowledge began to impinge on what could be considered the "evident experience" of each epoch and its criteria of truth. Among these the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg. which, although it was formulated on the relationship between the investigating subject and the object of investigation on the atomic scale, should serve as a guardian concept against all deviations towards a positivistic scientism.
In the same manner, the understanding that "certainty" -a state of being free from any doubts- can only be encountered in tautological systems, like mathematics and logic, while every empirical system belongs to the logic class of probabilistic systems, the same as the demonstrations of Goedel, that the systemic consistency of certain mathematic postulates is not proveable, due to the fact that every logical system of definite complexity is, by definition, incomplete, (Unvollstaendigkeitssatz) the introduction of relative truth (the dialectic of Hegel) of the concepts of space and time of Einstein; the limited interpretive capacity of all theory, revealed through their paradoxes (temporal), such as the dual character of light, in its moment, paradoxes which multiplied with quantum physics and, last but not least , the frequent incapacity of ad hoc empirical validation or instantaneity of the hypothesis, as in the case of the theorem of the form of matter known as the "Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC)", a theorem established in 1924 and verified almost 71 years later in 1995.
Spanish original first published in: www.rebelion.org. Translation from Spanish: John Manning
http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=12856
