God's water

From time to time we will post things here that are not so serious, like the travelogue that follows.

I really have no idea why the place is called “Agua de Dios”- ‘Water of God’, but it conjures up in my mind a picture of Zeus or Thor standing up in the clouds and peeing.

Whatever the reason for the name, we just spent a long weekend at a “finca” near Agua de Dios. The area is about 100 KM due west of Bogotá, which means two hours driving time when there isn’t much traffic, and three or four or five hours driving time on three day weekends when there is a lot of traffic.

There are two ways to go: the highway to Melgar, and then on to Giradot, or the highway through La Mesa. Both have been privatized under the patronage regime of Colombia’s beloved President Alvaro Uribe. Not completely privatized, but leased out. The results have been a large infusion of private investment into state infrastructure, in return for which motorists have to stop fairly frequently to pay high tolls to the lucky beneficiaries of Uribe’s largesse. It’s a mixed blessing for travelers, because the state of the roads in Colombia was terrible, and now is better.

And things are a lot better now than when the roads were first leased out. At first the private contractors invested money in toll booths, and nothing else! This did not sit well with the rest of Colombia’s capitalists who believe in privatization only up to the point where it benefits them, and they need good roads. It also didn’t sit too well with the country’s military strategists, who also want good roads, since this is one the principal means of drying up the seas in which the guerrilla used to swim.

In any case, we chose the road through La Mesa, since it is rumored to be faster and less crowded than the other, more traditional route.

We made a mistake, though right at the beginning. Instead of heading out Calle 80, we chose to go west on Calle 13. Calle 80 leads to the highway toward Medellin, but to get to the highway to La Mesa you have to turn off onto a toll road that has been rebuilt in a way that has caused me to get lost twice. So we took Calle 13, despite misgivings about driving through the industrial heart of Bogotá.

Like I said, this was a mistake. The country’s 150,000 independent truck owners had just ended a week long strike. The strike had been called over high fuel prices, and over unfair competition from the big trucking companies. I am still not sure what the deal was that ended the strike, but nevertheless, it ended Saturday afternoon just as we were leaving town.

This resulted in a miles long traffic jam of big rigs waiting to pass through the weigh station on Calle 13 at the outskirts of Bogotá. And that resulted in an hour or so delay while we tried to squiggle through the endless array, and disarray, of trucks.

Once we got out of Bogotá it was pretty clear sailing. We drove as fast as traffic would allow while we climbed up the slope of the Andes past “Mondoñedo”, one of the city’s two major garbage dumps. Then the air, and the traffic, thinned out, and we were able to travel the speed limit down through the pretty countryside of the western side of that range of mountains. We hit another traffic jam in La Mesa, and then sped on to the town of Tocaima.

Tocaima marks the foothills of the Andes as they run along the valley of the Rio Magdalena. Here a road heads south, reaching the river at Giradot. Along the way it follows the foothills and passes through Agua de Dios. The road has recently been rebuilt, and there are no tolls! Smooth sailing!

If you have ever driven highway 49 through the Sierra foothills in California, you have some idea of what the countryside is like. The country side is dry, but not desert. The mesas here are sharper than those in California, instead of flat table tops, the tables are all keeling over to one side as if the tectonic upthrust of the Andes was being guided by some drunken sailor. The sedimentary layers of shale and sandstone near the mesa tops are clearly outlined beneath the dry brown grass. Down below, along the creeks, everything is a lot greener than in the California foothills.

Dry is relative, because even though this countryside is nowhere near as humid as the nearby river valley, and much much less humid than the interior tropical plains, this is still a lot wetter than the California foothills could ever imagine.

Like the California foothill country, a lot of this area is cattle country, but here you mostly see Brahman cattle with their big hump backs.

Driving south from Tocaima the country gets a little greener around Agua de Dios. The town itself is prettier than most small towns. A friend has developed a rule which makes sense, the older the town or neighborhood here, the prettier it is, the newer the town or neighborhood here, the uglier it is. After giving the rule a little thought, I concluded that there are three underlying reasons which make it true: stucco, paint, and trees.

Most buildings in small towns are do-it-yourself brick buildings, with tradition rather than architects and engineers providing the design. Often part of the first floor is built, and then the next part, and then the next. When the lot is built over, the second story is started, and sometimes a third or even a fourth. Once construction is finished, something that often takes years or decades, decoration begins. The stucco goes on, and then the paint. And, if there are any empty patches of earth, maybe a tree or two gets planted.

Agua de Dios’s buildings are mostly stuccoed over and painted in pastels and whites, and there are lots of trees.

Agua de Dios, besides being prettier than most towns, stands out as the location of three leprosy hospitals: two for men, and one for women. Why they are segregated by sex beats me, and I will not repeat the awful jokes I heard explaining possible reasons.

The place where we stayed is a few miles south of the town. Although the word finca more or less means farm, this place is not a farm, it is a vacation house built just to rent to families and large groups for weekend trips. At the front there are lots of large trees shading a little parking area. Next to the parking area there is a covered open air recreation area with a billiard table, a ping pong table, “Rana” (frog), and some sofas and chairs to lounge around in. Next to the roofed area there is a tejo court and a mini-tejo court.

Rana is the Colombian answer to darts. You play it while drinking beer, only there aren’t any sharp pointy things. Instead you throw weighted metal tokens into frogs’ mouths. Tejo is a more explosive drinking game, sort of the Colombian answer to horseshoes, only you don’t throw horseshoes you throw metal weights. And you they don’t hit a little pole and make the shoe clang and spin around. The object is to hit throw the weights and hit a little square filled with black powder and make it blow up.

Connected to the rec room area is a little house with two bedrooms, one for the guests and the other for the owner’s girlfriend and her son. Nearby there is another little house for the couple who take care of the place.

Up the hill there is a lawn and a swimming pool, and then the main house. The house is nothing special. In fact it is sort of utilitarian. Four big bedrooms with loads of bunk beds. Two bathrooms, a kitchen, and a very wide central hallway/living room connected the rest. Behind the house is a sort of poorly maintained soccer field. At the back of the soccer field there is a barbed wire fence which someone thoughtfully decided to install a door in. The door even has a window. And a lock.

For a group of 10 or more it costs less than $10.00/day/person.

We ate, slept, swam, played, read, relaxed, got sunburned, and got bitten by bitey bugs.

A few words about the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees.

I don’t really know the names of all the local flora and fauna, but the flora includes a lot more flowers than you would find in a similar place in California. And the fauna includes a lot more kinds of birds and insects than in a similar place in California.

Tropical places have lots of ants, and several different kinds in one place. At this finca there were big ants, little ants, and flying termites. Also wasps, some other things that looked sort of like wasps, lots of little bitey gnats, and butterflies: yellow butterflies, black butterflies, and blue butterflies.

The little bitey gnats were worse than mosquitoes. You didn’t really ever notice they were biting you until after the fact. After the first night I had dozens of little welts on my legs, and so did everyone else. Luckily I didn’t have much reaction to them, and they just faded away. Unfortunately other people had major reactions to them with little bites growing into big angry looking itchy red hives.

It’s hard to say how many kinds of birds there were at Finca Lareno, but there were a least a dozen different kinds. Besides the turtleback doves which seem to be everywhere in Colombia, and besides the big black vultures gliding high up in the air currents over the foothills, there were lots of other birds.

There were little yellow and red colored birds that looked like wild finches or parakeets. There were several different colored humming birds: at least red yellow and green. There was a larger bird with a brown body and red wings. There were some medium sized black birds with long tails and an odd manner of flying. It looked sort of like the breast stroke. There were some gray and white birds. One bird, maybe the gray and white ones or the black ones made a really weird oommmuuup kind of sound. There were white egrets that like the swampy areas down farther near the river. And there were hawks.

Driving back was like driving there, only in reverse order. Smooth sailing at or near the speed limit until we got close to the top of the last ridge before “Mondoñedo”, then heavy traffic all the way into the city.

Now here we are, back in Bogotá.

By way of an introduction

Part 1: Scientific Socialism and Social Science

By Anthony Boynton

If you are not very familiar with Marxism, this little essay might help you discover Marxism. If you are familiar with Marxism, this essay will tell you where we are coming from. In either case it is an introduction to Marx Redux.

We hope to contribute to the revival of Marxist theory with this blog, a revival that is now beginning on a world scale. Mat and I differ on many details, but have broad agreement on key points. Both of us think that it is possible to understand the world, and that understanding – “theory” – is the best guide for action.

The action we have in mind is socialist revolution.

Marx, or maybe Engels, coined the term “scientific socialism” to describe their version of socialism and to differentiate it from other varieties they deemed to be unscientific.

What I think they meant by this idea is that human society is just as much a part of the material universe as are chemical compounds, planetary motion, and cellular biology. Consequently human society is evolving along with the rest of the material universe, in ways that can be understood, and if understood anticipated.

Moreover, since human society is the aspect of the material universe most directly influenced and shaped by human actions, understanding and anticipation of the direction of change could, under the right circumstances, allow human society to shape its own destiny.

They were amazingly far-sighted. Ahead of their times in every sense.

Marx and Engels discerned that the evolutionary logic of 19th century capitalism pointed in the direction of change toward socialism and communism, but that direction was barred by the self-interest of the ruling classes of the time.

The evolutionary logic of human society could only move in its natural direction through class conflict, and social revolution. Marx, or maybe Engels, said class conflict was the motor force of history.

This, in brief, is what I understand as the notion of scientific socialism.

Marx and Engel’s revolutionary conclusions were based partly on their personal experience in 19th century European social and political struggles, and partly on their study of history, especially modern European history. Important instances for them were the Peasant Wars in Germany, the French Revolution, the Revolutions of 1848, the American Civil War, and the Paris Commune.

And of course the way in which they approached their experience and the history they studied was framed by their Hegelian formation.

The Hegelian undercurrent in the thought of Marx and Engels is very important, because it explains how they were able to grasp the role of social conflicts, especially class conflicts, in bringing about the transformations of social structure which have been the key turning points in human history.

Here is what Engel’s says about Hegel’s system in Chapter One of Anti-Duhring

“This new German philosophy culminated in the Hegelian system. In this system — and herein is its great merit — for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process, i.e., as in constant motion, change transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development. From this point of view the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally condemnable at the judgment-seat of mature philosophic reason and which are best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as the process of evolution of man himself. It was now the task of the intellect to follow the gradual march of this process through all its devious ways, and to trace out the inner law running through all its apparently accidental phenomena.”

By way of an introduction

Part 2: Academic and bourgeois social science

By Anthony Boynton

Interesting is the fact that in the physical sciences things have in some ways caught up with Marx and Engels. In the above quoted text, Engels wrote, “...for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process, i.e., as in constant motion, change transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development.”

But this idea was not well accepted in the 19th century. Darwin’s ideas were controversial, and in fact are hated to this day by the extreme right who are still vainly mounting their cretinist – I mean creationist - counterattack.

The notion of constant motion was okay, as long as things basically stayed the same. The earth revolved around the sun – forever and period. Gravity was a constant, unchanging, reassuring force. The notion of constant transformation and development - for the most part, except for the work of Darwin - had not yet entered the picture.

But now that has all changed: starting with the Big Bang, and on through super novas, black holes, planetary evolution, pangia, tectonic plates, and the transformation of organic molecules into cellular life the physical sciences have embraced the idea of constant transformation and development.

The physical sciences have discovered that everything is connected in one big whole, and that it and all of its parts are constantly undergoing change, transformation and development. Amazingly enough, many of the thousands of small discoveries that went to make up this new system of scientific thought were achieved by people unaware of Engel’s, or even Hegel’s, thoughts on the subject.

Hooray! 21st century physical sciences have advanced to the level of 19th century Marxism.

The only field where the notion of constant transformation is not yet accepted as the most basic fact is social science! The notion that the current economic, social and political structure of the world will last forever, maybe with a little fine tuning here and there, is the basic assumption of most academic social science.

Since the current world order is very, very new, and came into existence through two centuries of war and revolution – more or less from the Seven Years War to the end of the Cold War – the notion of a static social order should seem strange even at first sight.

True, academic social science does recognize tumultuous transformations in human society, as long as they happened a long time ago. The watershed between paleolithic society and neolithic society now known as the agricultural revolution is an example. But as academic social science approaches the present it starts doing its best to erase any sharp dividing lines in the evolution of human society.

Despite the fact that human society is changing at a far faster pace today than ever before in its history, absurd dreams like those of Francis Fukayama are right in the main stream of academic thinking. Continuity, not change, is the watch word in all social science.

The most important reason is simple self-interest. No academic wants to lose his or her chair, or chance at one. Those who discover that the current social order is likely to become a relic of history in the not too distant future are less likely to be promoted, and so are less likely to publish their startling discoveries.

Those who advocate change are courting dismissal and persecution.

This is burned into memory by the millions of victims in and around academia - primarily in the social sciences - of the anti-communist witchhunts in the USA which transpired over nearly two decades from the late 1940’s to the early 1960’s, and which never really stopped.

Ward Churchill is one recent example.

Academic conservatism in the social sciences is encouraged or enforced to one degree of another in every part of the world, although Western Europe and Latin America have much stronger traditions of university autonomy than do the United States, China and Russia.

One reason is simply that the ruling classes of the world do not like to think about how temporary their positions are. Probably more important to them is the fact that radical academics have historically formed a key part of the leadership of every important mass movement for social change in recent history.

Probably the most important reason is that the ruling classes understand the importance of social consciousness in guiding political actions and struggles.

The powerful pressure of ruling class self-interest shapes academic social science, but so far it has not killed it. Academic social science investigates areas which are safe to investigate, or which are popular to investigate according to ruling class fashion. Since ruling class fashion shifts in ways that reflect changes in real social relations, academic social science continuously uncovers uncomfortable truths about capitalist social reality.

Consequently, and unintentionally, it is a treasure trove of information and data, if not always of analysis. And, sometimes, it produces analyses which reach half-way to the truth before they are reigned in by the processes of censorship and self censorship described above.

By way of an introduction

Part 3: Engels and Marx’s method

By Anthony Boynton

Marx and Engels own efforts almost always developed in the form of a critique of petty bourgeois or bourgeois social science and philosophy. They began with a critique of Hegel and the Young Hegelians, continued this critique in their battle with Bakunin, turned their critique increasingly on 19th century political economy and expanded their critique to other utopian socialists.

When Marx and Engels criticized the work of other thinkers their method was not simply to make debating points, although they were good at this. Their aim was to examine the contradictions within the hypotheses and conclusions of others, and to draw logical conclusions not yet reached by the author being studied, and – even if the views they were polemnicizing against had little merit of their own – to use their polemic to develop their own independent analysis.

Marx and Engels tried to identify the truths which these other authors might have uncovered, while refuting any mistaken or false analyses surrounding those truths. Having done this, they attempted to analyze again the material they had subjected to criticism, and arrive at a truer analysis of their own.

Capital is the best and most complete example of this method of work.

Marx and Engels did not engage in collecting and measuring observations, instead they relied on the work of bourgeois social science to supply them with the raw material for their own analyses. Given that they had next to no resources, while bourgeois social science had relatively vast resources with which to gather and analyze data, their method was absolutely correct.

(And, unlike virtually all academic social science, Marx and Engels engaged in as much “experimental social science” as possible: they actively participated in the revolutionary movements of their time and place.)

The critical method of Marx and Engels, necessitated by a lack of resources to do the original research needed to measure and analyze changes inhuman society, was adapted by later Marxists, including most famously by Lenin.

His little pamphlet on imperialism is a good example. (Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline)

Given the fact that Mat and I have absolutely zero resources to launch any independent collection of data on social relations and dynamics of 21st century society, we are going to rely heavily on the method of critique in this blog.

Next: The Defeat of 20th Century Marxism: Social Democracy, Stalinism, and Trotskyism