Thanks much for your response, Victor. You provide much to think about and
research. I would like to return to the relation of hierarchy theory to
CHAT again. Keith Sawyer has written several articles on emergence theory
and socio-cultural theory, and Jay Lemke has also done some really
interesting writing linking ideas from complexity science to CHAT to
semiotics. Your thoughts and insights add new dimensions to all this,
thank you.
The question of the genesis of the terms "law of uneven development", "law
of combined development", and the "law of uneven and combined development"
has caught my interest. Below, Trotsky drops some interesting suggestions
in the longish quote I copied from marxists.org. It looks like the study
by Solnetz on the law of uneven development in Marx might answer some of my
questions. Is this or a similar study available anywhere?
Below is a quote from Novack, and then a quote from Trotsky, both providing
some insights into the development of this theory and terminology.
- Steve
George Novack in Understanding History (1972) in the chapter Uneven and
Combined Development in World History states:
"Marx and Engels derived the essence of this law [of uneven and combined
development] from the dialectical philosophy of Hegel. Hegel utilized the
law in his works on universal history and the history of philosophy
without, however, giving it any special name or explicit recognition.
Novack continues: "Many dialectically minded thinkers before and since
Hegel have likewise used this law in their studies and applied it more or
less consciously to the solution of complex historical, social and
political problems. All the outstanding theoreticians of Marxism, from
Kautsky and Luxembourg to Plekhanov and Lenin, grasped its importance,
observed its operations and consequences, and used it for the solution of
problems that baffled other schools of thought."
From Leon Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed (1937), Appendix "Socialism in One
Country":
"In justifying his break with the Marxist tradition of internationalism,
Stalin was incautious enough to remark that Marx and Engels were not
unacquainted with the law of uneven development of capitalism supposedly
discovered by Lenin. In a catalogue of intellectual curiosities, that
remark ought really to occupy a foremost place. Unevenness of development
permeates the whole history of mankind, and especially the history of
capitalism. A young Russian historian and economist, Solntez, a man of
exceptional gifts and moral qualities tortured to death in the prisons of
the Soviet bureaucracy for membership in the Left Opposition, offered in
1926 a superlative theoretical study of the law of uneven development in
Marx. It could not, of course, be printed in the Soviet Union. Also under
the ban, although for reasons of an opposite nature, is the work of the
long dead and forgotten German Social-Democrat, Vollmar, who as early as
1878 developed the perspective of an "isolated socialist state”not for
Russia, but for Germany containing references to this "law" of uneven
development which is supposed to have been unknown until Lenin.
“Socialism unconditionally assumes economically developed relations," wrote
Georg Vollmar, "and if the question were limited to them alone, socialism
ought to be strongest where the economic development is highest. But the
thing does not stand that way at all. England is undoubtedly the most
developed country economically, yet we see that socialism plays there a
very secondary role, while in economically less developed Germany socialism
has already such power that the entire old society no longer feels stable."
Referring to the multitude of historic factors which determine the course
of events, Vollmar continued:
“It is clear that with an interrelation of such innumerable forces the
development of any general human movement could not, and can not, be
identical in the matter of time and form even in two countries, to say
nothing of all.... Socialism obeys the same law.... The assumption of a
simultaneous victory of socialism in all cultured countries is absolutely
ruled out, as is also, and for the same reasons, the assumption that all
the rest of the civilized states will immediately and inevitably imitate
the example of a socialistically organized state...."
ThusVollmar concludes“we arrive at the isolated socialist state,
concerning which I trust I have proven that it is, although not the only
possibility, nevertheless the greatest possibility."
In this work, written when Lenin was eight years old, the law of uneven
development receives a far more correct interpretation that that to be
found among the Soviet epigones, beginning with the autumn of 1924. We must
remark, incidentally, that in this part of his investigation Vollmar, a
very second-rate theoretician, is only paraphrasing the thoughts of Engels
to whom, we are told, the law of unevenness of capitalist development
remained "unknown.”
"The isolated socialist state" has long ceased to be a hypothesis, and
became a factin Russia to be sure, not in Germany. But this very fact of
isolation is also a precise expression of the relative strength of world
capitalism, the relative weakness of socialism. From an isolated
"socialist" state to a socialist society once for all done with the state
remains a long historic road, and this road exactly coincides with the road
of international revolution."
<end>
At 10:55 PM 10/19/03 +0200, you wrote:
Firstly, Thanks for the Hofkirchner material.
Second,
"I am interested in your insights on how Salthe's hierarchy theory could be
related to cultural historical activity theory, as well as to dialectical
materialism."
CHAT is generally, and in my view, correctly, described by its explicators
as a system, i.e. a scaled hierarchy of structure and operations comprised
of systems incorporating subsystems. The CHAT model seems to me to be a
collectivity of systems and subsystems linked by mediators that are
analogous to if not identical to Salthe's interpolators. Check out
Engstrom's graphic representation of CHAT as a complex of interlocked
triangles where the basal vertices of each triangle represent respectively
a system and a subsystem and the mediator is represented at the apical
vertice, e.g. [subject [instument(the mediator or interpolation)
object]](taken from Guohua, Bai and Lars Ake-Lindberg 1998 "Dialectical
Approach to Systems Development" Systems Research vol. 15 pp.
47-54). Salthe's description of scaled/extensional hierarchies is based
on cybersystems (after all he and Joclyn were at one time co-workers) hence
his insistence on the trupletted formation of minimal extensional
hierarchies. It shouldn't be too hard to reformulate CHAT as a
cybersystem, e.g. [subject[instrument object[division of labor community]]]
where the italicized terms represent the interpolations that mediate
between system and subsystem. This, by the way, provides a definitive
description of mediation as a "...cohesion of entities out of lower level
units guided by higher level boundary conditions" (Salthe, S. 2001"Summary
of the Principles of Hierarchy Theory" URL:
<http://www.nbi.dk/>http://www.nbi.dk/
~natphil/salthe/Hierarchy_th.html ). CHAT systems are no more dialectical
than was Marx's description of "the capitalist mode of production," but ,
like the latter, they are a complex synchronic organization of a
multiplicity of dialectical relations - read intensional hierarchies - that
serve to impart both a temporal locality and purpose to the synchronic
analysis.
also see parallels in these theories with his work on the sociological or
historical materialist theory Novack refers to as the law of uneven and
combined development (the original formulation is Trotsky's), and Novack's
way of describing historical processes in terms of qualitatively higher and
complex levels, a way of thinking he attributes to Marx and Engels.
I have to give here both a no and a yes.
Trotsky's formulation of the "Law of uneven and combined development" was
specifically tailored to work out a strategy of revolution in an
underdeveloped country with a weak and bourgeoisie and
proletariat. Marx believed that a socialist revolution in Russia was only
possible given a successful proletarian revolution in Europe. With the
decline of the revolutionary impetus in the 1870s, Marx believed that the
Russian peasant commune was doomed and would eventually be destroyed by
capitalism. In the 1870s Marx drew the conclusion that development of
bourgeois rights, a capitalist economy and modern working class was the
only way forward for Russia (paraphrased from the entry, Law of uneven and
combined development, in the MIA Encyclopedia of Marxism
<http://www.>http://www.marxists.org.uk/glossary/frame.htm). Recent
history seems to me to bear out Marx's position - compare for example, the
history and results of the Russian and Chinese revolutions. The dialectics
of the evolution of modes of production regard the negation of prior modes
of production as incorporating those forms rather than simply bypassing or
annihilating them. Also, the relationship between the capitalist
metropolis and its hinterlands is seamless, and should not be understood as
respecting national or even cultural boundaries. Hence the
"underdevelopment" of the capitalist hinterland is as much a part of a
single unified network as is the relationships obtaining between financial
and industrial sectors of capitalist economies. Michael Barrat Brown
(1974) The Economics of Imperialism Peguin Books provides a succinct
analysis of how capitalism produces underdevelopment rather than simply
exploits it.
On the other hand, the relation between scales and rates of activity
provide much more satisfying explanations of the relations between elements
of a materialist analysis of social relations than the ready formulas of
orthodox Marxist theory. It also raises interesting questions regarding
the relations between information (speech, icons and so on) and larger
scaled negentropies of harnessed energy and imposition of material order.
Enough for now.
Victor
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