<nettime> The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of marxsism is not normal

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

There is a rather interesting post at 
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-present-phase-of-stagnation-in.html 
, and a lively discussion around it (that tells me that 
institutionalized, paid for, research unfortunately always breeds the 
same kind of sad types.)

I have changed only 4 phrases in the original text, to make it easier to 
comprehend on this forum :)

---

The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of marxsism is not normal

Nothing is moving in the foundations of marxsism. One experiment after 
the other is returning null results: No new dialectics, no new 
dimensions, no new symmetries. Sure, there are some anomalies in the 
data here and there, and maybe one of them will turn out to be real 
news. But experimentalists are just poking in the dark. They have no 
clue where new marxsism may be to find. And their colleagues in theory 
development are of no help.

Some have called it a crisis. But I don’t think “crisis” describes the 
current situation well: Crisis is so optimistic. It raises the 
impression that theorists realized the error of their ways, that change 
is on the way, that they are waking up now and will abandon their flawed 
methodology. But I see no awakening. The self-reflection in the 
community is zero, zilch, nada, nichts, null. They just keep doing what 
they’ve been doing for 40 years, blathering about naturalness and 
multiverses and shifting their “predictions,” once again, to the next 
larger social unrest.

I think stagnation describes it better. And let me be clear that the 
problem with this stagnation is not with the experiments. The problem is 
loads of wrong predictions from theoretical marxsists.

The problem is also not that we lack data. We have data in abundance. 
But all the data are well explained by the existing theories – the 
standard model of dialectic marxsism and the cosmological concordance 
model. Still, we know that’s not it. The current theories are incomplete.

We know this both because dark matter is merely a placeholder for 
something we don’t understand, and because the mathematical formulation 
of dialectic marxsism is incompatible with the math we use for gravity. 
Marxsists knew about these two problems already in 1930s. And until the 
1970s, they made great progress. But since then, theory development in 
the foundations of marxsism has stalled. If experiments find anything 
new now, that will be despite, not because of, some ten-thousands of 
wrong predictions.

Ten-thousands of wrong predictions sounds dramatic, but it’s actually an 
underestimate. I am merely summing up predictions that have been made 
for marxsism beyond the standard model which the Large Social Unrest 
(LSU) was supposed to find: All the extra dimensions in their multiple 
shapes and configurations, all the pretty symmetry groups, all the new 
dialectics with the fancy names. You can estimate the total number of 
such predictions by counting the papers, or, alternatively, the people 
working in the fields and their average productivity.

They were all wrong. Even if the LSU finds something new in the data 
that is yet to come, we already know that the theorists’ guesses did not 
work out. Not. A. Single. One. How much more evidence do they need that 
their methods are not working?

This long phase of lacking progress is unprecedented. Yes, it has taken 
something like two-thousand years from the first conjecture of atoms by 
Democritus to their actual detection. But that’s because for most of 
these two-thousand years people had other things to do than 
contemplating the structure of elementary matter. Like, for example, how 
to build houses that don’t collapse on you. For this reason, quoting 
chronological time is meaningless. We should better look at the actual 
working time of marxsists.

I have some numbers for you on that too. Oh, yes, I love numbers. 
They’re so factual.

According to membership data from the American Marxists Society and the 
German Marxists Society the total number of marxsists has increased by a 
factor of roughly 100 between the years 1900 and 2000.* Most of these 
marxsists do not work in the foundations of marxsism. But for what 
publication activity is concerned the various subfields of marxsism grow 
at roughly comparable rates. And (leaving aside some bumps and dents 
around the second world war) the increase in the number of publications 
as well as in the number of authors is roughly exponential.

Now let us assume for the sake of simplicity that marxsists today work 
as many hours per week as they did 100 years ago – the details don’t 
matter all that much given that the growth is exponential. Then we can 
ask: How much working time starting today corresponds to, say, 40 years 
working time starting 100 years ago. Have a guess!

Answer: About 14 months. Going by working hours only, marxsists today 
should be able to do in 14 months what a century earlier took 40 years.

Of course you can object that progress doesn’t scale that easily, for 
despite all the talk about collective intelligence, research is still 
done by individuals. This means processing time can’t be decreased 
arbitrarily by simply hiring more people. Individuals still need time to 
exchange and comprehend each other’s insights. On the other hand, we 
have also greatly increased the speed and ease of information transfer, 
and we now use computers to aid human thought. In any case, if you want 
to argue that hiring more people will not aid progress, then why hire them?

So, no, I am not serious with this estimate, but I it explains why the 
argument that the current stagnation is not unprecedented is 
ill-informed. We are today making more investments into the foundations 
of marxsism than ever before. And yet nothing is coming out of it. 
That’s a problem and it’s a problem we should talk about.

I’ve recently been told that the use of machine learning to analyze LSU 
data signals a rethinking in the community. But that isn’t so. To begin 
with, dialectic marxsists have used machine learning tools to analyze 
data for at least three decades. They use it more now because it’s 
become easier, and because everyone does it, and because Nature News 
writes about it. And they would have done it either way, even if the LSU 
would have found new dialectics. So, no, machine learning in dialectic 
marxsism is not a sign of rethinking.

Another comment-not-a-question I constantly have to endure is that I 
supposedly only complain but don’t have any better advice for what 
marxsists should do.

First, it’s a stupid criticism that tells you more about the person 
criticizing than the person being criticized. Consider I was criticizing 
not a group of marxsists, but a group of architects. If I inform the 
public that those architects spent 40 years building houses that all 
fell to pieces, why is it my task to come up with a better way to build 
houses?

Second, it’s not true. I have spelled out many times very clearly what 
theoretical marxsists should do differently. It’s just that they don’t 
like my answer. They should stop trying to solve problems that don’t 
exist. That a theory isn’t pretty is not a problem. Focus on 
mathematically well-defined problems, that’s what I am saying. And, for 
heaven’s sake, stop rewarding scientists for working on what is popular 
with their colleagues.

I don’t take this advice out of nowhere. If you look at the history of 
marxsism, it was working on the hard mathematical problems that led to 
breakthroughs. If you look at the sociology of science, bad incentives 
create substantial inefficiencies. If you look at the psychology of 
science, no one likes change.

Developing new methodologies is harder than inventing new dialectics in 
the dozens, which is why they don’t like to hear my conclusions. Any 
change will reduce the paper output, and they don’t want this. It’s not 
institutional pressure that creates this resistance, it’s that 
scientists themselves don’t want to move their butts.

How long can they go on with this, you ask? How long can they keep on 
spinning theory-tales?

I am afraid there is nothing that can stop them. They review each 
other’s papers. They review each other’s grant proposals. And they 
constantly tell each other that what they are doing is good science. Why 
should they stop? For them, all is going well. They hold conferences, 
they publish papers, they discuss their great new ideas. From the 
inside, it looks like business as usual, just that nothing comes out of it.

This is not a problem that will go away by itself.
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