Democratic Workers Party? Whatever happened to Marlene Dixon? (Contemporary
Marxism was an ok journal, "Our Socialism" not, think they tried to takeover
west coast office of NACLA once) Three ex-members
wrote a summing up in Socialist Review around 1985. Knew one of the authors
when I was active in the Jesse Jackson campaign in '88. Without him the
computers and mailing labels would have been a nightmare. Janja Lalich,
another former member, and now a "cult expert" has written on her experience
in the DWP too. (And with caution see the website of cult deprogrammer, Rick
Ross, he has some stuff there too. (Yes, Lou, I remember the Cockburn stuff
on Ross) Another member I knew later through reproductive rights/clinic
defense work, had a full set of the collected works of Kim Il Sung gathering
dust.
Michael Pugliese
----- Original Message -----
From: "Louis Proyect" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, April 09, 2001 5:33 PM
Subject: [PEN-L:10054] Reflections of a Marxist computer programmer
> Ellen Ullman, "Close to the Machine", (City Lights Books, 1997):
>
> Twenty years before my meeting with the vice president, I was a communist.
> I joined an underground party. (I quit the party after one year-I was
> expelled when I tried to leave. I then reviewed what I knew about computer
> programming and got my first job in the industry. My employer was amazed
at
> my ability to work hundred-hour weeks without complaint, and I was
promoted
> rapidly. He did not know that my endurance came from my year in the party.
> Being a cadre in an underground political party, as it turned out, was
> excellent training for the life of a computer programmer.)
>
> I took a nom de guerre. If I had been clever enough to write a bug fatal
to
> world banking, I would have been promoted to party leadership, hailed as a
> heroine of the revolution. Nothing would have pleased me more than
slipping
> in a well-placed bit of mislogic and-crash!-down comes Transnational
> Capitalism one Christmas Eve.
>
> Now the thought terrifies me. The wave of nausea I felt in the vice
> president's office, the real fear of being responsible for her system,
> followed me around for days. And still, try as I might, I can't envision a
> world where all the credit cards stop working. The life of normal people
> -buying groceries, paying bills -would unravel into confusion overnight.
> What has happened to me, and what has happened to the world? My old
leftist
> beliefs now seem as anomalous and faintly ridiculous as a masked
> Subcommandante Marcos, Zapatista rebel, son of a furniture- store owner,
> emerging from the Mexican jungles to post his demands on the Internet.
>
> We are all hooked on the global network now, I tell myself, hooked to it
> and hooked on it. The new drug: the instant, the now, the worldwide. A
line
> from an old Rolling Stones' song and an ad for an on-line newspaper keep
> running through my head:
>
> War, children,
> it's just a shot away, it's just a shot away.
> ("Gimme Shelter," by the Rolling Stones.)
>
> The entire world
> is just a click away.
> (Advertisement for "The Gate," an online service of the San Francisco
> Chronicle and Examiner.)
>
> The global network is only the newest form of revolution, I think. Maybe
> it's only revolution we're addicted to. Maybe the form never
> matters-socialism, rock and roll, drugs, market capitalism, electronic
> commerce- who cares, as long as it's the edgy thing that's happening in
> ones own time. Maybe every generation produces a certain number of people
> who want change - change in its most drastic form. And socialism, with its
> quaint decades of guerrilla war, its old-fashioned virtues of
> steadfastness, its generation-long construction of a "new man"-is all too
> hopelessly pokey for us now Everything goes faster these days. Electronic
> product cycles are six months long; commerce thinks in quarters. Is
> patience still a virtue? Why wait? Why not make ten million in five years
> at a software company, then create your own personal, private world on a
> hill atop Seattle? Then everything you want, the entire world, will be
just
> a click away.
>
> And maybe, when I think of it, it's not such a great distance from
> communist cadre to software engineer. I may have joined the party to
> further social justice, but a deeper attraction could have been to a
> process, a system, a program. I'm inclined to think I always believed in
> the machine. For what was Marx's "dialectic" of history in all its
> inevitability but a mechanism surely rolling toward the future? What were
> his "stages" of capitalism but the algorithm of a program that no one
could
> ever quite get to run?
>
> And who was Karl Marx but the original technophile? Wasn't he the great
> materialist- the man who believed that our thoughts are determined by our
> machinery? Work in a factory on machines that divide the work into pieces,
> and-voilà!-you are ready to see the social nature of labor, ready to be
> converted from wage slave to proletarian soldier. Consciousness is
> superstructure, we leftists used to say, and the machinery of economic
life
> is the "base." The machines decide where we are in history, and what we
can
> be.
>
> During my days in the party, we used to say that Marxism-Leninism was a
> "science." And the party was its "machine." And when the world did not
> conform to our ideas of it-when we had to face the chaotic forces that
made
> people believe something or want something or do something-we behaved just
> like programmers. We moved closer to the machine. Confronting the
messiness
> of human life, we tried to simplify it. Encountering the dark corners of
> the mind, where all sorts of things lived in a jumble, we tightened the
> rules, controlled our behavior, watched what we said. We were supposed to
> want to be "cogs in a wheel." (Today's techno-libertarians have a similar
> idea about the mechanistic basis of human existence, but for very
different
> reasons. They see human thought and consciousness merely as the result of
> many small, local processes in the body and brain, rather than as evidence
> of some observing self. While we communists wanted to make good fighting
> machines of ourselves ostensibly to further social equality,
> techno-libertarians prefer to see human life as a collection of small,
> local mechanisms because such mechanisms "prove" that controlling
> superstructures, like governments, are not necessary.)
>
> When the Soviet Union began to crumble, and the newspapers wrote about the
> men who controlled the empire, I couldn't help noticing how many of them
> had been trained as engineers. Our country is ruled by lawyers, I thought,
> theirs by engineers. Engineers. Of course. If socialism must be
> "constructed" (as we said in the party), if history is a force as
> irrefutable as gravity, if a new man" must be built over generations, if
> the machine of state must be smashed and replaced with a better one, who
> better to do the job than an engineer?
>
> "I'm a software engineer," I reassured myself when I met the vice
> president, "an engineer"
>
> A week after seeing the vice president, I had lunch with the old friend
who
> had recruited me into the party. We were talking about grown-up
> things-houses, relationships-when suddenly I couldn't stand it anymore. I
> reached across the table and asked her, "Did we ever really believe in the
> dictatorship of the proletariat?"
>
> She looked at me like I was crazy.
>
> I drove home through a tunnel and over a bridge, thinking about San
> Francisco earthquakes. I went home and thought about the gas line in the
> old Victorian flat where I used to live. We can't live without cash
> machines the way we can't live without natural gas, I thought. There is no
> way back. This is the fragility of what passes for regular life in the
> electronic era. We may surround that gas line with fancy moldings, all
> decorated with curlicues, yet it remains what it is: a slim pipe full of
> explosives.
>
> What worried me, though, was that the failure of the global electronic
> system will not need anything so dramatic as an earthquake, as diabolical
> as a revolutionary. In fact, the failure will be built into the system in
> the normal course of things. A bug. Every system has a bug. The more
> complex the system, the more bugs. Transactions circling the earth,
passing
> through the computer systems of tens or hundreds of corporate entities,
> thousands of network switches, millions of lines of code, trillions of
> integrated- circuit logic gates. Somewhere there is a fault. Sometime the
> fault will be activated. Now or next year, sooner or later, by design, by
> hack, or by onslaught of complexity. It doesn't matter. One day someone
> will install ten new lines of assembler code, and it will all come down.
>
>
> Louis Proyect
> Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
>
