bts (02/27/83)
I spent several hours last weekend looking through some
of the more obscure science journals in our (UNC-Chapel
Hill) main library's periodicals. In a corner of the
stacks, I found a whole shelf of what seemed to be magazines
on Marxist physical science. In case you've never seen such
things, they were full of articles on how Marxism helps to
explain physics or chemistry or other sciences. (My first
impression was Creationism without the King James Version.)
I was a little nervous about standing there looking at
such things, but I did notice that there was no mention of
computer science. I know it's debatable whether or not we
are a science (or ought to be or even could be), and I know
that very few programmers were around during Marx's life-
time. Still, I was a little surprised to be left out.
Does anyone out there in net-land know if there is such
a thing as "Marxist Computer Science"? If there is, what's
it all about? If not, why is that? Everyone wants to get
into computers, surely Marxists are no exception. Can it be
that computer scientists are too logical for Marxism, or too
greedy? If Marxist computer science does exist, should the
non-Marxists among us worry? I'd be interested in seeing
facts, opinions or flames-- pretty much in that order.
Bruce Smith, UNC-CH
duke!unc!btsturner (03/01/83)
#R:unc:-471900:ucbesvax:7100007:000:2225
ucbesvax!turner Feb 28 21:59:00 1983
I don't know about \Marxist/ C.S., per se -- although Marx and more
particularly Engels wrote quite a bit about the Natural Sciences, and
the dialectic of science. Marx got quite interested in mathematics in
his later years, apparently teaching himself calculus in his fifties.
(This, in itself, is a pretty fair indication to me that he was, at
LEAST, very intelligent, if not the genius that some claim.) How this
all applies to the "Sciences of the Artificial", as Herbert Simon called
them, is not clear. The Russian penchant is still more for analog
control systems, and cybernetics generally. While this might reflect
a different (more mathematical?) culture, it has more to do, I think,
with their underdevelopment in digital electronics and memory technology.
This technological lag has, as it turns out, some IDEOLOGICAL (if
not strictly Marxist) roots. This is pretty obvious from the history
of computing, where we can see that Eastern Bloc countries (Poland, in
particular) were at most a couple of years behind the west in their
development of electronic computers (ca. 1949).
What followed has yet to go down in history with the Lysenko debacle,
but it certainly should: the Party line on computers was that they were
likely to engender an elite technical class, which would (of course!)
imagine itself to be better than the "proletariat", AND have more material
control over the workings of society and the economy than the party
cadres and bureacrats. An untenable situation, clearly (from the point
of view of cadres and bureaucrats, anyway.) This view held throughout the
50's. (And, of course, they held up a number of achievements to support
their view of the dispensability of computers: the H-bomb, Sputnik, manned
space-flight. Great proletarian technological feats.)
Now, of course, they are playing catch-up; and Scharansky, among
many others, is good evidence for their original thesis. So they lose
on both counts, being both wrong AND right. *sigh*...such is
dialectical materialism, fellow apparatchiks. Pass the vodka.
Catch Ya Later, Fellow Elitists,
Michael Turner