Behaviorism is indispensable for building socialism

Bolivarian revolution needs behavioral science to succeed:
an open letter to the members of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV)
by Alexei Brykowski in Berlin, Germany

All social revolutions are aimed at a radical transformation of society in the direction of social justice, political liberty and solidarity. These lofty aims got a lapidary and precise formulation of "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite" by the Great French Revolution already in 1789. Nevertheless these precious goals were never really attained; the way was either blocked by the violent resistance of old elites or perverted by new "revolutionary" elites.

People with idealist and religious set of mind are inclined to see this process as the predestined victory of Evil over Virtue in our sinful world. Yet revolutionaries should brush away this superstition. They should face the reality without preconceived notions and illusions in order to see the genuine causes of these recurrent defeats, so as to be successful in their next revolutionary struggle. And they should also remember the words of one of the forerunners of behaviorism, Niccolo Machiavelli:
"There is nothing more difficult and dangerous, or more doubtful of success, than an attempt to introduce a new order of things in any state" ("The Prince", Chapter VI).

Discussing this theme inevitably means coming to grips with a certain doctrine which claims to be the scientific blueprint for putting the ideals of socialism and communism into practice and self-righteously denounces all alternative social revolutionary ideologies as "utopian illusions". This one-and-half century old doctrine still retains the monopoly of socialist theory and is called marxism. And there is - especially in Germany - a scandalous unwritten law that in order not to be denounced as an enemy of socialism one should not criticize anything labeled as "marxist". This franchise trick upholds the monopoly of marxism: as long as you call yourself a "marxist", you can sell anything you like under the trade-name of "marxism". And being a "marxist", you are free to purge "marxism" of anything that is obviously shameful or nonsensical, or momentarily out of fashion, or annoying and attacking you personally, by branding it either as "bourgeois ideology" or "stalinism". By ignoring this franchise I lost almost two years in futile attempts to publish the contents of this letter as an article in German "leftist" media and to start an open discussion. The only answer I got was hostile silence.

A curious and well-concealed fact is that not only Friedrich Engels, but also Karl Marx himself was a member of a very rich Jewish family. He was the favorite nephew of rich banker Lion Philips, who i.a. was the originator of "Philips" multinational corporation. Marx obtained an exquisite university education and openly hated and despised those whom he called "petty bourgeois ignorants". Alvin W. Gouldner gives an account (in his posthumously published work "Against fragmentation. The Origins of Marxism and the Sociology of Intellectuals" (Oxford University Press, 1985) of how Marx as the General Secretary of the "1st International" devoted all his energy to intimidating and denouncing the majority of its members who were artisans and "petty bourgeois". For this purpose he used his really excellent education, especially the Hegelian dialectical philosophy which he "materialized" by proclaiming it as the "materialist scientific methodology of socialism". Marx used this trick to tow "consciousness" alias the "soul" of idealist philosophy into supposedly materialist socialist ideology in order to vindicate his claim as an intellectual to be the "carrier of the revolutionary consciousness" with the "mission to enlighten the consciousless working masses" and thus to be their leader.

Accordingly, the central dogma of marxism is the assertion that the "hegemon" (supreme force) of social revolution is nothing else but the product of the development of capitalism called "proletariat" or industrial working class. Or in a nutshell: "Without highly developed capitalism - no strong proletariat, and therefore - no social revolution". This fallacious dogma resulted from Marx's misinterpretation of anticapitalist forces in England of the 1st half of the 19th century. As convincingly shown by English historian Edward P. Thompson in his monograph "The Making of the English Working Class" (London, 1964) these were the anticapitalist struggles of the same social groups which were victorious in the French Revolution of 1789, i.e. artisans, petty bourgeois and peasants. The defeat of the Napoleonic armies in 1812 resulted in the whole brunt of reactionary elites' vengeance being directed against these social groups. The antirevolutionary policies were especially cruel and successful in England. The British government's policies of subsidies for big property owners and capitalists in combination with legal and economic sanctions against petty producers resulted in the elimination of the latter as an independent political and economical force, hurling them into misery and turning them into American immigrants, Australian convicts or, at home, into dependent wage-earners, proletarians. The dogma of "proletarian revolution" was repeatedly defeated by facts after Marx: not a single revolution of the 20th century was "proletarian": in Russia, Mexico, Spain, China, Cuba etc. For details see "Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century" by Eric R. Wolf.

In practical terms, marxist ranting against "petty bourgeoisie" has the fatal consequence of splitting the forces of the victims and enemies of capitalism. It is of big help for all sorts of imperialist demagogues - nationalists, racists, "law-and-order" conservatives and christian "social" fundamentalists in recruiting their followers. Their prey is the multitude of those who have a slightly higher status than proletariat and enjoy being called "middle class": artisans, farmers, bus owners, petty shopkeepers, army officers, students and bureaucrats. This "middle class" formed the mass support of Franco, Mussolini and Hitler, was also organized and trained by USA agents for terrorism, sabotage and protests against socialist governments, be it 30 years ago in Chile, 10 years ago in Yugoslavia or now in Venezuela - and later always discovered with dismay that it was fighting on the wrong side.

Still worse, the fiction of "revolutionary proletariat" served as the justification of recurrent purges and internecine fractionary struggles in the socialist and communist movement, which always had and still has not "proletarians" but "petty bourgeoisie" as the majority of their leaders, members and supporters. This "Catch-22" (J. Heller) situation in Soviet Union led to political instability and Stalin dictatorship, but was resolved under Brezhnev who consolidated the power of "nomenklatura" - a mafia-like ruling upper class slightly camouflaged with ideological bullshit as "the dictatorship of proletariat". This new elite naturally abused its dictatorial power for the abolition of socialism - as predicted by G.Orwell in "Animal Farm" (London, 1945), warned against by Michael Voslensky in "Nomenklatura" (Vienna, 1980) and finally implemented by marxist Soviet elite under Gorbachev, Yeltsin & Co in 1989. Now - when it is far too late - other marxists call them "traitors"...

Next let's have a look at marxist economics. It is a clone of traditional, purely capitalist political economics as preached by D.Ricardo and A.Smith with their adoration of the fictitious "invisible hand of the market". The marxist version has the peculiarity of insisting that this "invisible hand" leads mankind not into the capitalist consumer paradise, but into the crisis followed by social revolution. Here we see the same hatred of petty bourgeoisie and adoration of big "the bigger - the better" capitalist enterprises teeming with "proletarians". Marx castigated the "anarchy of capitalist production" but strangely enough didn't mention the main culprits who actually create crisis bubbles - banks. He ignored the fact that banks by manifold leveraging of credits create huge fictitious capital through the recycling of interest-bearing principal and thus are the main (often the only) cause of the so-called "overproduction crises".

Bankers make crises deliberately (the "naivety" of Greenspan & his gang is utterly false!) and then press governments into coverup activities - government borrowing, deficit spending and inflationary money printing. The last resort in this coverup of financial mess is war. All this is possible thanks to fiat (paper) money which is primarily the manipulatory instrument enabling the banks to endlessly expand credit via which they drink the living blood of the economy. Victims of some recent national currency collapse will tell you that paper "money" has no value, it is no money, it is a con trick. It was the common sense and bitter experience which made traditional cultures to outlaw usury (money lending). Even in Europe usury was punished with death - before the age of absolute monarchies with its incessant wars and extravagant court spending made banking a respectable business. For more on this subject see "Super Imperialism" by Michael Hudson.

Nevertheless, Marx asserted that banks are merely oiling the operations of the "invisible hand" with credit, accumulating the capital and therefore - via "the bigger the better" - bringing the day of social revolution nearer. I can only guess that this idyllic picture of banks is due to very warm personal relations between Marx and his aforementioned super rich uncle Lion Philips, who up to his death generously supported Marx with money and had a keen interest in Marx's life-long economics studies which were later published as the famous "Das Kapital".

Furthermore, Marx envisioned socialism as the society of wage earners. He was so completely immersed into the capitalist logic of money circulation that he could not imagine it to be absolutely incompatible with liberty, human dignity and social justice. Money as a generalized positive reinforcer is perilous for socialism. Being the instrument of bureaucratic taxation makes it antidemocratic, and being the instrument of usury (capitalist credit) makes is antisocial. Socialism should be based on completely different, non-pecuniary economic principles. This was clearly seen by many prominent social revolutionaries, for example by Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin in his popular book "The Conquest of Bread" - "La Conquete du Pain" (Paris, 1892). Nevertheless the Soviet system embraced money economics - to its own peril. Yet the heroic Latinoamerican revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara was very reluctant to accept the Soviet model of socialist economics. For example, in his famous article "Socialism and man in Cuba" ("Marcha", Montevideo 1965) he wrote:
"The pipe dream that socialism can be achieved with the help of the dull instruments left to us by capitalism (the commodity as the economic cell, profitability, individual material interest as a lever, etc.) can lead into a blind alley. When you wind up there after having traveled a long distance with many crossroads, it is hard to figure out just where you took the wrong turn. Meanwhile, the economic foundation that has been laid has done its work of undermining the development of consciousness. To build communism it is necessary, simultaneous with the new material foundations, to build the new man and woman."

Unfortunately, Che gave no clear answer on how to build this new man and woman - neither in this article, nor in any other speech or publication. No wonder! It is extremely difficult even for a very talented man to imagine vividly the process which he never saw as everyday routine, both functioning and malfunctioning. Che was fully aware of this crucial problem of social revolution, but unfortunately did not solve it. Therefore he had to resort to abstract mentalist/cognitivist terms like: "new consciousness", "moral incentives", "conscious process of self-education", "development of social consciousness" etc. when asked for explanations. And it is really sad that even now, fourty years later, the Venezuelan finance minister Ali Rodriguez used (in his TV-interview of June 22nd, 2008) similar mentalist phrases: "cultural shift to a socialist new ethic","change the mentality of the Venezuelan from a profit-driven culture to a productive culture. This implies generating a new ethic"...

Well, people who attempt to build a "new man" generally have two approaches. The first one is imagining the ideal personality of this "new man" and then trying to make common people to change their ways accordingly. This was the approach proposed by St. Augustine in his "Confessions" and followed by innumerable preachers of high morality, both religious and secular. They rejected the habitual way of life and prescribed norms, commandments, rules, laws etc. as instruments of the "rebirth" of "corrupted mankind". In reality it is nothing but vicious manipulation and patronizing of followers who are pressed into pathetic self-destructive behavior. Experience shows that all such projects collapsed under the burden of hypocrisy, intrigues and quarrels. I would compare this to an intellectually fascinating way to build a house starting with roof tiling. Yet its only results are broken tiles - or human lives - which "refuse" to stay suspended in thin air.

The other approach was developed by those who tried to understand how and why people behave as they do in their everyday lives. The first of them were writers of Renaissance and Enlightenment: N. Machiavelli, E. de la Boetie, M. de Montaigne, F.-M.A. Voltaire, F. de la Rochefoucault, J. de la Bruyere, L. de Clapiers de Vauvenargues, N.-S. de Chamfort, Ph.S. Chesterfield, who tried to discover the hidden levers which control human behavior. I would compare it to the common-sense way of building houses - from foundation upwards. One remarkable - and very witty - writer who followed this approach from the very first years of Soviet Era was Michael Zoshchenko. He was a keen observer of the behavior of common people thrown into the vortex of revolutionary transformation of Russia and became the most popular Soviet satirist. I would warmly recommend his books, and particularly "The Sky-Blue Book" (Leningrad, 1934) as an amusing and useful reading to all Venezuelans who actively take part in Bolivarian revolution. Zoshchenko, although a popular writer, was not superficial. He had a remarkable competence in behavioral science and was a regular participant of round-table meetings organized by Nobel Prize winner Prof. Ivan Pavlov in his Leningrad laboratory.

And here we are at last on the doorstep of behaviorism (or behavioral science). The following introduction into it is necessarily very short. Please see the list of recommended literature for further reading at the end. Although all titles are in English, I am certain that several important books on behaviorism are also available in Spanish.

Behavioral science is quite different from the bogus "science" of psychology (in Greek: "Science of the Soul") including Gestalt, Freudism, Frommism, Jungism and all other cognitivist/mentalist doctrines. It has no place for the fantoms called "soul", "mentality", "consciousness", "internal personality", "cognitive structures of the nervous system" etc. It is based only on experimental data and therefore has no common ground with aforementioned speculative and introspective doctrines. Whereas cognitivism ends up in pathetic post-modernist muddle, behaviorism gives a uniquely reliable practical approach to solving both social and individual problems (which are actually the same).

Behavioral science studies two reactions of organisms: reflex (discovered and characterized by Pavlov, Sherrington and Watson) and operant (discovered and characterized by Burrhus F. Skinner). Reflex and operant are fundamentally different phenomena: reflexes are simply reactions of organisms on external stimulae, for example tears caused by the irritation of eyes by cold wind or dust particles. Operants, on the other hand, are more complicated reactions, in which external stimulae are triggering apparently purposeful actions (performances) of an organism which were previously "learned" because were immediately followed by some positive event called reinforcer (reward). This "learned" chain of stimulus, action and reinforcer is called operant and is the central concept of behaviorism. Actually operants are what mentalist/cognitivist psychologists wrongly call purposeful or intentional behavior and explain as the result of wishes, experiences, thinking and/or memorizing.

As soon as an organism "learns" an operant, it responds to the stimulus with the performance, no matter whether the reinforcer follows or not. The organism "anticipates" the reinforcer and faithfully responds to the stimulus with the "learned" performance many times in vain before "giving up". This withholding of reinforcement is called extinction and is instrumental for the purposes of modifying and manipulating behavior. The circumstances under which performances are (or aren't) followed by the reinforcer are called contingencies of reinforcement. When stimulus is presented recurrently and reinforcer is given intermittently in some orderly pattern, the contingencies of reinforcement form a schedule of reinforcement which is the main device of obtaining reliable experimental data.

Both most obvious and striking demonstration of the extent to which operant behavior can be manipulated is provided by the art of animal training for circus performance. Bears riding bicycles, rabbits drumming distinct tunes, dogs performing with their trainer dramatic scenes and demonstrating "intelligence" in their acting - all of them display the results of operant chaining - the possibility to alter operants by consecutive insertion of new performances between the stimulus and the established performance. This process is the basis - and should serve as a sobering reminder of the limitations and capriciousness - of human ingenuity, knowledge and intellectual activities like logical thinking.

The folly of cognitivism alias mentalism lies in ignoring the fact that our perceptions, intentions and "ideas" are products of operant conditioning. Our thinking and speaking is the peculiarity of man as a social animal, and is the result of our communication via verbal operants with other humans. Being the product of communication (both interpersonal and mass media), our "thoughts" about the world are sets of operant signals and not its mirror image - "reflection". Or, "a world map is not the world", as the founder of general semantics Alfred Korzybski warned us. Language and thought, intellect and self-consciousness are evolutionary behavioral instruments of social co-operation and mutual manipulation of individuals which serve the survival of human group or society as a whole, and are not "personal achievements" of individuals, as preached by cognitivist psychology. Cognitivism paints a flattering image of an individual as a thinker contemplating the world as if it were a chessboard in front of him. Behaviorism reminds the individual that he is simply a figure on the chessboard where the rules of game and moves are determined by operant conditioning. The choice between these two views is simply the choice between flattery and truth. Cognitivism incites people to egomania and competition, whereas behaviorist socialism induces people to accept others as equals, not as passive objects.

According to cognitivists/mentalists, the intellect or consciousness should warn an individual against any behavior which is self-destructive: say, induce to study the theory of probability as a remedy against gambling habit. Yet the world is full of cute dealers who end up totally broke; or those who fritter away their life and money on following fashions; or those who screw up their lives with alcohol or heroin; or those - and they are the majority - who squander their lives being at bosses' beck and call.

Even the individual's own thoughts and ideas - let alone friendly advice or prohibition by others - are powerless against his habits, fears and/or expectations of pleasure and success (reinforcement) formed by the manipulated hectic of everyday life. The so-called "natural", habitual and impulsive behavior is especially easy to manipulate, and inevitably our civilized social life consists mainly in the deliberate one-way manipulation of the people by the parasitic elite of rich and powerful - the so-called "jet-set".

Is not it amazing that intellect, highly praised by cognitivists, doesn't protects individuals even against the simplest sucker-traps of capitalist society? The capitalist way of life strips every man and woman of their dignity and honour, putting them for sale, attaching price tags indicating how much each of them is "worth" for capitalist masters. Wage slavery is not only exploiting, but also dishonouring the people. But capitalists present dependent employment as a sort of boon and honour for the people. "Learn to sell yourself!" is what kids are taught at school. And people willingly accept this outrageous humiliation of making them objects of slave trade as approbation and benefaction!

The global dictatorship of the super rich under the thin veneer of "democratic" demagogy is normally accepted by the people without protest only because it is masked by very efficient manipulative mechanisms. Social manipulation is now much more sophisticated than at the beginnings of mass-society described in 1895 by Gustave Le Bon in "Psychologie des Foules" - "The Psychology of Crowds", which was the favourite reading of a certain Adolf Hitler. Manipulation is efficient only when it works not as a sledge-hammer but as a skeleton key opening the hearts of its victims, i.e. when it is based on precise estimates of its effects on the targets. Such estimates are provided by opinion polls, surveys and other methods of data gathering and compilation, further processed by data mining and knowledge discovery. The resultant so-called predictive models can be directly used for designing manipulative operants covering whole social groups. For more on these technologies see Oscar H. Gandy, (2002) Data Mining and Surveillance in the post 9/11 environment, Presentation at IAMCR, Barcelona, at http://www.asc.upenn.edu/usr/ogandy/IAMCRdatamining.pdf

Capitalism is attractive solely because it saturates life with gambling which incessantly teases them with offers of winning and success: the "American Dream". It takes experience and age to get annoyed by this sucker-punching, therefore capitalism promotes the cult of youth. Wide acceptance of this illusory offer was brilliantly explained by B.F. Skinner in his experiments on rats and pigeons under the conditions of overstimulation and withholding of reinforcement, which brought them to total exhaustion in futile efforts to "earn" reinforcement. In the "rat race" of capitalist society we see the same haunting omnipresence of stimulae (advertizing and brain-washing by mass media) combined with extremely thinned-out reinforcement, with the resultant performance - as designed by the manipulators - being obsessive exactly because of almost complete absence of reinforcement.

Capitalists actually do not need to give reinforcement to their victims. It is enough to show a man repeatedly how others win and enjoy success (reinforcement) to lure him into the trap. The main function of mass-media is to shamelessly exploit this copy-cat behavior in the interests of advertizers. They show the people how media stars - "winners" - ostentatiously enjoy consuming this or that junk - and secure massive sales of this junk. Sometimes manipulation has unforeseen results. For example, a substantial number of children jumped holding open umbrellas out of their windows to death after they watched a stupid fairy-tale film about Mary Poppins floating in the air under her umbrella. It is quite obvious that this mechanism of exploitation and subjugation was not known to Marx and other 19th-century socialists. Yet I wonder why the present-day "leftist" ideologues are absolutely unaware of it.

It is appropriate here to note that the strongest positive reinforcer for any animal or human being is controlling its/his environment. In social life it means controlling and manipulating other people. This reinforcer is the basis of social life; and manipulation, violence, money, religion, laws, science etc. are its mere contingencies - no matter whether efficient or illusory or even counter-productive and self-destructive. So-called weak-willed people even resort to self-destructive behavior (suicide, masochism, blind obedience to the boss etc.) to gain this reinforcer in their own pathetic way. A failurer habitually teases others as their potential victim, and being victimized proves to him that he does control and manipulate the others. For more on that see "Games People Play" by Eric Berne. On the other hand, some dependent people (mainly children) are caught by simultaneous mutually contradicting operant signals (e.g. tutor's fake kindness combined with concealed threat) in a behavioral deadlock, which pushes them into psychosis. This phenomenon was called "double bind" by psychiatrists who discovered it (Ronald D. Laing and Gregory Bateson). Thus not only social evils, but also apparently "mental" personal problems could as well be eliminated simply by applying the basic knowledge of behavioral science. Yet the power of jet-set based on people's ignorance precludes it.

The urge to master the social environment is the basis of all intellectual pursuits. To master it means first and foremost to come to terms with its manipulation by others. This is what cognitivists/mentalists call "new consciousness" attained through "creativity" - or, according to behaviorism, a new more efficient operant chain replacing old operants which brought far too little reinforcement. In retrospect I discovered this process to shape my "fate" all life long.

I was born in Moscow and was exposed to indoctrination with marxist ideology from childhood on. I must confess that it simply did not work. Russians were under a constant rain of empty slogans, and as you couldn't evade it, you got used not to notice it. The apathy, alcoholism and mockery about the marxist ideology were on the increase since mid-1960ies, after Nikita Khrushchov and his reforms were discarded by the ruling communist party elite. The following years were marked by increased reliance of the Soviet system on money which the bosses believed to be the only stimulus which makes people to work hard - with the resultant growth of black marketeering, nepotism and corruption. The hypocrisy of marxist ideologists was so nauseating that it created "dissidents" - the people who openly rejected the indoctrination and embraced the deceptive ideology of "democracy" and "free market" peddled by Western propaganda radio stations - BBC, Voice of America, Radio Liberty/Free Europe etc. Yet for me - and the majority of my generation (the "baby-boomers" born in 1950ies and 1960ies) in Soviet Union and Eastern Europe - the open conflict with the government was too tough, therefore we all led the double life of ostentatious obedience and concealed rejection. This way of life permeated the whole society from bottom to top. The official marxist ideology was paid lip service and in practice hollowed-out and rejected even by its own priests, therefore the crushing of marxist power system under Gorbachev and Yeltsin met no resistance. Their "democratization" and "liberalization" dictated by Western tutors was in practice nothing but legalizing and clearing the way for already existing corrupt and criminal patterns of social relations which now dominate all over the ex-East Bloc with the exception of Belarus.

I migrated to East Germany 1983 to enjoy its higher standard of living working free-lance as technical translator. Here I witnessed 1988/89 how East German marxists lost control over the people and the country. It is amazing that allegedly socialist East Germany was peacefully conquered in 1989 by capitalist West Germany not with bombs, tanks and rockets, but with handouts of 1 Kg (ca. 2 pounds) of bananas and 20 DM (ca. 10 US dollars) per person plus the promise to convert all East-Mark savings of East Germans into West-DM (Deutsche Mark). West German Chancellor Kohl promised East Germans: "Nobody will be worse off and many will be far better off" - and it was enough for the overwhelming majority of them to give him their vote. This is how positive reinforcement beats all ideologies (including the capitalist one which is strictly opposed to "Nanny State").

So, I encountered capitalism in 1989 when East Germany was annexed by West Germany. This was not the process of "reunification" which implies that the result is some mixture of both components, but a ruthless and total destruction of the Soviet-style "socialist" social norms and unconditional wholesale acceptance of the capitalist way of life by the conquered, not only in East Germany, but by everyone everywhere in the former Soviet Block. It established the dictatorship of super-rich oligarchy and promoted greed as the sole imperative of interpersonal relations under the cover of propaganda empty talk about "liberty, democracy and the freedom of choice". The magic weapon of capitalist conquerors was debt creation which gave the people all eagerly desired positive reinforcers using the nasty operant trick of "enjoy now, pay later", resulting in debt slavery as the source of power of capitalists over individuals via personal credit and over society as a whole via government debt. And again, the explanation of how and why the bait of consumerism and extravagant government spending works to enslave individuals and whole societies without resistance is given by behaviorism but not by traditional sociologists - Comte, Spencer, Weber, Marx, Durkheim, Pareto and their modern epigones.

I must admit that at first I was mind-boggled: although marxist ideology prepared me "theoretically" to what should be expected from capitalist rule, all my "habits" or the framework of operant conditioning acquired under Soviet system was incompatible with the transformed reality, and it took me several years to acquire new patterns of behavior adapted to it. Naturally, I got really interested in communism only after tasting capitalism. I joined the PDS (the predecessor of "Die Linke"-"The Left" party) 1995 after naturalization in Germany. I left this party 1997 after realizing that it and other so-called "established" - parliamentary - leftist parties are doing much more harm than good both to the people and to the cause of socialism, so as the words of the Bible (St. Matthew, 23, 27): "Ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead bones, and of all uncleanness", apply fully to them. They do all they can to prevent the emergence of living rivals - truly socialist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist popular movements. Their "political struggle" is nothing but shade boxing - just radical enough to get the votes of those who are fed up with the sickening corruption of all openly pro-capitalist parties. Yet as soon as a leftist party wins seats in parliament, it becomes a reliable actor in this political puppet theatre of the capitalist system and eagerly participates together with all other parties in corruption, privileges and power abuse - which are the reinforcement politicians receive from the super rich masters of capitalist "democracy".

I also saw a very strange and sad picture when I visited Cuba in 1999: a Soviet-style society frozen for years on the brink of collapse. The political system directed by the will of Fidel Castro survived and keeps under control a society totally devoid of any traces of living communism which Che Guevara dreamed of, a society which - despite the fact that all who wished have already left Cuba for the USA -follows typically capitalist patterns of behavior: passive obedience to the bosses, individualism, craving for money (US dollars), consumerism (in dreams), prostitution and quiet desperation.

These and similar experiences convinced me that the everyday behavior of people goes on unaffected by ideologies and indoctrination attempts. Be it marxism or liberalism - in both cases "ideas altering consciousness" is the only trick the pony knows, and this trick never works in real life. In the meantime the dominant ideologies of the "left" (marxism) and of the "right" (liberalism) were replaced by post-modernist verbiage and, correspondingly, by silly imperialist globalization tales of Fukuyama's "End of History" and Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations". The only result of these changes was that the abyss between everyday life and the hollowness of ideologies became far too obvious, even ostentatious. It challenged me to try to penetrate the smokescreen of new metaphysics peddled by fashionable mass-media-advertized ideologues, which they renamed into "metanarrative". I devoted my leisure time to studying social sciences, but it was only three years ago that I dug out the solution - behaviorism - from this enormous heap of trash.

Yes, behaviorism provides a lucid explanation of the mechanisms of manipulative control of mass society and is obviously routinely misused to manipulate the people in the interests of the capitalist and bureaucratic elite. But how it could happen that behaviorism sank into oblivion? Neither the advocates of mass manipulation such as Edward L. Bernays in "The Engineering of Consent" nor adversaries as Edward S. Herman in "Manufacturing of Consent" mention behaviorism, and if some authors like Naomi Klein do mention it - in "The Shock Doctrine", chapter 1: "The Torture Lab" - then they show a caricature of it: a psycho sadist on CIA service who happened to call himself behaviorist.

My guess is that after the jet-set realized behaviorism to be a very potent instrument of social engineering, it did all it could to hide behaviorism from the general public: first, to conceal both the vicious madness of capitalism and the manipulation which keeps it running and, second, to prevent the development of viable socialist alternatives. Probably the cover-up was prompted by the fact that the utopian novel "Walden Two" by B.F. Skinner, published in 1945 and remained unsold for 20 years, suddenly cropped up as a favorite reading of the rebellious youth of 1968. Behavioral science received huge government support in the USA from 1940, but after 1970 it was denounced as a "simplistic and dehumanizing materialism" and was crowded out from the universities by "cognitive psychology". Programmed learning and learning machines, developed and successfully introduced into schools and universities by B.F. Skinner, were abandoned and condemned as "incompatible with the creativity and spirituality of teaching". This innovation survived only in interactive computer games which lavishly use the Skinnerian principles of reinforcement to keep players on the hook.

On the other hand, it was an unfortunate coincidence that some prominent intellectuals who enjoy authority over the "leftists" happened to be pure cognitivists/mentalists and rejected behaviorism without any slightest attempt to understand it. This is the case of Noam Chomsky, who is well-known as a critic of imperialism, mass manipulation which he calls "thought control", and post-modernist bullshit. But Chomsky also made his name in linguistics with the obscure doctrine of "generative or transformational grammar", which with its postulate of transcendental, supposedly inborn "deep structures" is more akin to freudism and cabbalistic mysticism than to science. No wonder that Chomsky's attacks on Skinner's "Verbal Behavior" made behavioral science a non-kosher taboo for western leftists.

The official Soviet opinion of behaviorism was also mainly negative. When a schoolboy in Moscow I enjoyed several encounters with Soviet clones of Skinner's learning machines, which were later abandoned as soon as they were out of fashion in the West. Although Skinnerian behavioral science is actually a further development of the research on reflexes made by Russian Noble Prize winner Prof. Ivan Pavlov which was declared to be one of the pillars of purely marxist science, the contradictions between behaviorism and the official ideology of marxism which was granted in the Soviet Union a status similar to that of the Bible during Reformation, were far too obvious. Just imagine the embarrassment of a marxist ideologist when he faces, for example, the straightforward behaviorist explanation of the sad fact that the "proletarians" are not revolutionary simply because they regularly obtain their wages from the capitalists, which, according to behavioral science, means receiving positive reinforcement of their subservient and docile attitude towards their "employer". No wonder that behaviorism was denounced as a "bourgeois ideology" and prohibited.

I think it would be appropriate now to point out that behaviorism is not an ideology. First of all, an ideology (as marxists say: "Weltanschauung") is always based on a distinct system of values.

Second, ideology is a metaphysical substitute and secular extension of religion. It is a system of beliefs in a set of principles which seemingly enables the believer to "understand" the world and to act in it by following simple rules (verbal operants). Ideology relieves the believer of the necessity to confront and analyze all complicated and messy details of reality (contingencies of reinforcement), which, as happy hegelians and marxists imagine, are "aufgehoben" (canceled) by ideology. As church school hammered religion into the heads of 19th century people, public schooling hammers the taste for and acceptance of ideology into the heads of the members of modern mass society. Ideology is the false shallow bottom of consumerist "reality": a child playing computer games needs to know only the "inputs and outputs", i.e. what happens after he bangs this or that key on the keyboard. He "learns" or, correctly, undergoes the corresponding operant conditioning without understanding how computer really works. The same is true of a wealthy car owner: he can drive his car, but can't repair nor build it. Here we see the crucial difference between ideology and science: the former can't help you to build or to repair the world when the things go wrong. By following an ideology, you don't solve problems, you only make the mess bigger. A modern example of murderous racist ideology is zionism.

Third, it is the view of reality that makes behaviorism the opposite of ideology and philosophy. Ideologues and social philosophers regard it as "the objective reality" - either as the "reality of the ideas" by idealists or as the "reality of the matter" by materialists, on the basis of which both groups made century-long futile attempts to build their ivory towers of "the objective truth". But in fact the distinction between reality and illusion or "false consciousness" (which became the favorite scapegoat of marxists after they realized on the sly that their doctrine is impotent) is entirely imaginary. Behaviorism established that individuals do not impartially "reflect" the reality but selectively perceive, recognize in it operant stimulae, they read it as operant messages prompting their responses. The reality of both humans and animals is built of operant stimulae (signals) which trigger their seemingly purposeful actions. The social environment of a human individual evaluates his actions, placing them somewhere between "common sense" and "mad nonsense", and positively reinforces or punishes him not because they are sound-minded or illusory, but according to their socialization, i.e. the conformity with the system of conventional obligatory operants which is culturally peculiar to the society he belongs to. Thus, according to behaviorism, the only reality we perceive (not the esoteric cognitivist / mentalist fiction of "objective reality") is purely social both in its origin and function.

And finally, if we recollect the two approaches to "building a new man" discussed earlier, we see that ideology is the first of them, dealing with ideas - the esoteric cognitivist stuff which in practice tend to be empty talk, wishful thinking and shameless swindle. Behaviorism, on the contrary, is the second approach which studies how and why humans really act, and how to manipulate their behavior.

This juxtaposition demonstrates that behaviorism is a science and, in practical application, the technology of social engineering, and as such can be used as an instrument by any ideology, to proliferate (or to eradicate) patterns of social behavior, be they competitive or co-operative; pro-capitalist or pro-communist, elitist or egalitarian. It can be either antisocially misused by the jet-set or applied socially for the benefit of the people. It is absolutely irrelevant that Skinner was a conservative supporter of capitalist system. For example, he proposed the US government to replace collection of taxes with state-owned gambling parlors and lotteries. This smart trick shows that Skinner didn't give a damn for social justice; but why shouldn't we do our best to apply the behavioral technology developed by him, yet with the opposite aim of social-revolutionary, egalitarian transformation of society?

Now let's see how this can be done in the "natural" way, i.e. how to match harmoniously the inherent properties of operant behavior discovered by Skinner with socialist ideas and ideals as they always were and still are: nebulous and vague. It would be a job similar to making an Ordnance map of the Shangri-La of our dreams. That's why the socialist goal-setting ideology should be designed very cautiously. Social revolution should neither "demand the impossible" from the people nor promise to give them the proverbial "pie in the sky".

Behaviorism established that operant (supposedly "intentional", "rational", "deliberate") behavior of humans and animals is determined by reinforcement. It is the universal mechanism (there are no alternatives to it) which selects actions which can maximize pleasure (positive reinforcement) or minimize suffering (negative reinforcement). This natural selection approach to behavior is analogous to the famous natural selection approach of Charles Darvin's evolutionary theory. Behaviorism and darvinism deal with the behavioral and, respectively, evolutionary mechanisms of species survival, whereas all:
- "Ideas" and "Imperatives" of Hegel and Kant,
- "Will" of voluntarist philosophers (Schopenhauer and Nietzsche),
- "Values" and "Consciousness" of marxists,
- "Id" and "The Subconscious" of psychoanalysts (Freud, Fromm, Jung & Co),
- "Instinct" of K. Lorenz, N. Tinbergen and sociobiologists, etc.,
smuggled into sociology and anthropology are nothing but the equivalents of creationism and lamarckism in biology.

It is extremely unfortunate that the theory of social revolution is still monopolized by hegelian-marxist idealist tradition. The reality of social relations was increasingly obscured by the "Dialectics" of Hegel, "False consciousness", "Alienation" and "Basis & superstructure" of Marx, then by "Cultural hegemony" of Gramsci, "Class consciousness" of Lukacs, "Overdetermination" and "La structure a dominante" of Althusser, and finally totally obstructed recently by the gobbledygook of "leftist" post-modernist intellectual clowns who got a well-deserved bashing in Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont.

Ideological abstractions sound very attractively - yet unfortunately you cannot apply them in the practice of social engineering. To do the job of Bolivarian revolution, we have to deal not with abstractions, but with measurable and reproducible parameters of operant behavior, we should study contingencies of reinforcement and design most efficient schemes of reinforcement. Therefore neither marxist "Weltanschauung" nor post-modernist pearl-games of "micro-politics" on the top of ivory tower, but some very different, down-to-earth and truly humane ideology would accord well with behavioral science in doing the job of social cultural revolution.

Yet if we abandon marxism, should we blindly embrace some alternative "universal socialist ideology" and prescribe it to all ethnic and historical entities? Certainly not. It must always first be adapted to habits, traditions and culture of every specific country and only after we shape it to be attractive enough for the overwhelming majority of the people to make them willing to abandon for it the ideology and myths of consumerism which are dominant all around the world, that we can use this alternative ideology as a general framework for building up socialist society with the methods of behaviorist social engineering.

There is one ideology - humane, egalitarian, materialist and atheist - which is interesting enough to be considered here in some detail as the raw material for the goal-setting ideology mentioned above. Like behaviorism, it deals with maximizing pleasure and minimizing suffering in everyday life. It does not demand - in contrast to marxism - personal sacrifice and obedience from its followers. Maybe that's why this ideology had plenty of followers and was enduring enough to flourish and serve mankind seven centuries long, the last two of them - under vicious persecution and defamation by the hordes of obscurantists, hypocrites and man-haters called "christians". It is the noble teaching of the Greek philosopher Epicurus and his followers, among them Roman authors Lucretius and Horace.

Here are some quotations from Epicurus' writings:
1) "Tetrapharmacos - The four-part cure":
"Don't fear god,Don't worry about death;What is good is easy to get, andWhat is terrible is easy to endure.
2) From "Vatican Sayings":
8. The wealth required by nature is limited and is easy to procure; but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity.
11. Most men are insensible when they rest, and mad when they act.
14. We have been born once and cannot be born a second time; for all eternity we shall no longer exist. But you, although you are not in control of tomorrow, are postponing your happiness. Life is wasted by delaying, and each one of us dies without enjoying leisure.
21. We must not force Nature but persuade her. We shall persuade her if we satisfy the necessary desires and also those bodily desires that do not harm us while sternly rejecting those that are harmful.
34. We do not so much need the assistance of our friends as we do the confidence of their assistance in need.
46. Let us completely rid ourselves of our bad habits as if they were evil men who have done us long and grievous harm.
52. Friendship dances around the world bidding us all to awaken to the recognition of happiness.
53. We must envy no one; for the good do not deserve envy and as for the bad, the more they prosper, the more they ruin it for themselves.
70. Do nothing in your life that will cause you to fear if it is discovered by your neighbor.
78. The noble man is chiefly concerned with wisdom and friendship; of these, the former is a mortal good, the latter an immortal one.
3) From "Kyriai Doxai - Principal Doctrines":
2) Death is nothing to us, because a body that has been dispersed into elements experiences no sensations, and the absence of sensation is nothing to us.
5) It is impossible to live pleasantly without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly. Whenever any one of these is lacking (when, for instance, one is not able to live wisely, though he lives honorably and justly) it is impossible for him to live a pleasant life.
8) No pleasure is a bad thing in itself, but some pleasures are only obtainable at the cost of excessive troubles.
28) The same conviction which inspires confidence that nothing terrible lasts forever, or even for long, also enables us to see that in the midst of life's limited evils, nothing enhances our security so much as friendship.
37) Among actions legally recognized as just, that which is confirmed by experience as mutually beneficial has the virtue of justice, whether it is the same for all peoples or not. But if a law is made which results in no such advantage, then it no longer carries the hallmark of justice. And if something that used to be mutually beneficial changes, though for some time it conformed to our concept of justice, it is still true that it really was just during that time – at least for those who do not fret about technicalities and instead prefer to examine and judge each case for themselves.
39) He who desires to live in tranquility with nothing to fear from other men ought to make friends. Those of whom he cannot make friends, he should at least avoid rendering enemies; and if that is not in his power, he should, as much as possible, avoid all dealings with them, and keep them aloof, insofar as it is in his interest to do so."

Unfortunately, even a good ideology has no direct influence on everyday life. Ideas cannot change your behavior, even if you repeat them formulated as easy-to-memorize sayings day and night (as, e.g., prescribed by autogenic training and its superstitious offspring called meditation). Yet there is - besides social engineering - another efficient device to translate ideas into contagious patterns of behavior, which was already known in the Antiquity: the theatre. And I am afraid that Bolivarian revolution risks to fail if leaves mass entertainment in Venezuela as it is - in the hands of capitalist media and dominated by Hollywood crap. To win the battle for the hearts of the people, Bolivarian revolutionaries should create their own, socialist theatre and cinema as the booster of cultural revolution. As widely quoted words of Vladimir Lenin go: "Of all arts the most important for us is the art of cinema." But why is it?

The answer lies in the most famous phrases written by Guy Debord, the founder of the Situationist International, in his "Society of the Spectacle":
"5. The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation among people mediated by images." (I would add to "mediated": "and implanted" - A. Brykowski)
"6. The spectacle cannot be understood as the abuse of a world of vision, as the product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images. It is, rather, a Weltanschauung which has become actual, materially translated. It is a vision of the world which has become objectified."

This overwhelming influence of entertainment is due first, to the imitative nature of social adaptation (so-called copy-cat behavior) which was described already by G. Le Bon as the target of mass manipulation, and second, to the extreme plasticity of social behavior, which - as discovered and explained by behaviorism - is caused by the structure of operants. Operants are the instruments of flexible adaptation of organisms' behavior to the environment and therefore allow arbitrary combinations of any external stimulus (signal) with any performance (action) of the organism, glued together with a reinforcer. As already mentioned, the most striking demonstration of this phenomenon is given by animals trained to perform in circus. All animals smoothly acting together in a circus show have "no idea" of the designs of their trainer which make the audience to applaud. Their "acting together" is nothing but an appearance which is sustained by stimulae and reinforcers given by the trainer to each of them at appropriate moments - things which the audience normally doesn't perceive.

This enormous, actually limitless plasticity of operant behavior which makes it the favorite target of advertizers, demagogues and other social manipulators can be turned against the manipulators, by - as Debord called it - "the Construction of Situations". I would interprete his words as constructing new reality by engineering new operants and chains of operants which direct social behavior of the people towards the socialist ideals of equality, solidarity and humanism.

This is also - in my opinion - what meant the prominent Soviet film maker Sergei Eisenstein (the author of the world-famous film "Battleship Potemkin") when he spoke of "the Montage of Attractions". In his quest of means to attain spontaneous emotional involvement of film audience, to maximize its undivided attention to the film, its excitement and suspence, he actually came to montage, or assembling films as conditioning sequences of (as behaviorists would call it) socially innovative and culturally significant operants. This was his - unknowingly behaviorist - way to impart "naturally" the ideological message to the audience.

Elites protect the vulnerable spots of their power by making them taboos. The Victorian England was a superpower thanks to government manipulation of economics and population explosion. It hid them behind the dead mask of "free market" and "christian chastity". Modern capitalist mass society is totally dependent in its functioning on manipulation, both social and economic, and hides it behind the dead mask of "democracy" and "free market". No wonder that "manipulation" is a dirty word!

Yet manipulation is not inherently evil, it is the essence of social life. "Battleship Potemkin" is an example of beneficial, socially responsible manipulation - it wins the spectators' sympathy for the cause of social revolution, it incites them to revolutionary patterns of behavior. That is why this film was banned and censored in the West. And, accordingly, Russia under the dictatorships of Gorbachev & Yeltsin was flooded with Hollywood crap which served to infect the people with the corresponding decadent patterns of behavior: violence, corruption, imbecilic pornographic sex, mind-bogle of esoteric "phantasy", psychotic nightmares of autistic asociality and sugary fairy tales of capitalist "success".

Media manipulation grew out from the recognition of the fact that it is dramatic experiences, not dull ideologies or intimidation, that control people most efficiently. The imperialists know pretty well that it isn't by compelling or convincing, but by seducing with what Debord called spectacle that people willingly become antisocial and dishonored consumerists, psychotic individualists, racists etc. Those who still have knee-jerk objections against using manipulation for building socialist society, should understand that the people of capitalist mass society are totally controlled by the artificial world of spectacle created by mass-media manipulation. Big city dwellers are robot-like, they are zombies having not a single desire which was not perverted by capitalist manipulation. The people of mass society have no more individuality, dignity and liberty than tinned sardines. Therefore it is purely humane to open their eyes on manipulation and learn them how operants work.

Capitalists nevertheless can't do without bureaucratic government as the instrument for suppressing the people in emergency situations. Yet capitalists prefer it to be corrupt and incompetent rather than strong and efficient, because a weak and despicable bureaucracy is quite easy to manipulate. They have a wide choice of efficient pecuniary operants to do it. Capitalists - as was correctly noted by Gramsci - are even afraid of strong bureaucracy which can easily outgrow its capitalist masters and become a menace for them, as was in the case of Italian and German fascist dictatorships.

Yet the fact that capitalists dislike strong government doesn't imply that bureaucratic dictatorship is an acceptable instrument for building socialism. The experience of the failure of Soviet system shows clearly that bureaucrats have their own interests and in the long run inevitably betray the cause of socialism.We can defeat capitalism not by forcing but by inciting people to be socialists. And to do it, we need not the reinforcers which nourish the insane illusion of being a super-man, such as the power of a bureaucrat to issue orders or the power of the rich to corrupt and bribe fellow people, but solidary and dignifying non-pecuniary positive reinforcers, such as mutual assistance, honour, the safety of community life and the pride of fruitful and creative participation in it. And it would be a suicidal stupidity for socialists to reject manipulation or to ignore the fact that it is omnipresent. Already some basic knowledge of behaviorism gives an individual the insight that his genuine liberty, honour, security and free will are totally dependent on the goodwill of the people around him, or, in other words, his self-reliance and esteem as a member of society are the outcome of mutually manipulative operant relations of interdependence, equality and solidarity.

The only economic enterprises which can function in accordance with these principles are the co-operatives. The co-ops provide maybe the only practicable vehicle of transforming economy from capitalist, money-based into a non-pecuniary, socialist one. This topic is too important to be treated here superficially; an excellent (and probably still the best) reading on the co-operative economics is "Социальные основы кооперации" (Socialnye osnowy kooperacii - The social foundations of co-operative economics) by Michael Tugan-Baranowski (Petrograd 1915, new printing Moscow 1989)

It is obvious for a behaviorist that money and socialism are incompatible, simply because selling and buying quite naturally train people to be speculators and misers. Therefore basic items of everyday consumption should be distributed bypassing the market, in exchange for ration stamps. This solution also eliminates black marketeering which is an inevitable plague of subsidized shops. As long as such alternative distribution system works satisfactorily, the devaluation of national currency is irrelevant for social policies. Inflation can even have socially beneficient impact by undermining the power of money as universal positive reinforcer. It gives a beating to bank accounts and speculatory schemes of the rich, and makes ridiculous the dreams of common people to become wealthy. Socialism should give people the opportunity to stop wasting their lives as greedy traders and voluntarily turn to useful and directly reinforcing (satisfying) occupations. And finally it is worth noting that the Soviet Union was socially stable only in those times when it had a properly functioning ration stamps system.

The value of money is artificially sustained only because it is the instrument of legalized robbery of the people: first, through taxation by the bureacracy, and, second, through usury by creditors. Fiat money by definition has no inherent value, therefore "fighting against inflation" inevitably means heavier taxation and/or higher interest rates - the two pillars of antisocial economic policy. Fighting inflation can even be self-destructive for Venezuela in case the imperialists flood it with counterfeit bills in order to ruin its economy and to finance the counter-revolutionaries.

I would like to repeat again the sad but irrefutable truth that people behave not in accordance with reason, but as dictated by the contingencies of reinforcement. Society is shaped not by ideology but by the framework of dominant verbal operants. Verbal operants are usually called "ideas", but whether some idea "works" or not is due not to something generally inherent to this idea, but to peculiar contingencies of reinforcement of the specific verbal operant this "idea" refers to. The old Russian saying that "The truth is born in disputes" is plainly wrong. Disputes end with the victory of one of competing verbal operants, or "paradigms" as Thomas Kuhn called them, cancelling the influence of all other alternatives. Therefore traditional sociology and economics which totally ignore the reality of operant manipulation which shapes and sustains social order, are of no help for building socialist society with its peculiar social relations, i.e. its dominant operants.

Capitalist "order" is perpetrated by capitalists discouraging people to be economically self-reliant and co-operative, and by politicians and bureaucrats stripping people of political self-determination. Social revolution has to discontinue this "natural order of things" and therefore needs skillful (i.e. based on behavioral science) politics of bestowing people with a framework of operants reinforcing both self-reliance and the interpersonal relations of mutual help and solidarity. Political and economical self-dependency should be massively encouraged, i.e. positively reinforced, because without it people, although charmed by revolutionary slogans and manifestations, can't acquire new socialist patterns of behavior and their everyday life remains dominated by subservience to the bosses and swinish "dog-eat-dog" interpersonal relations.

The Soviet system was doomed because first, it relied on money economics and, second, it rebuilt the pre-revolutionary inefficient and corrupt tzarist bureacratic machine which was smashed by the revolution of 1917, and hid it behind the dead mask of marxism. Soviet marxist rulers were not innovative, they were just narrow-mindedly dashing in desperation between the two instruments of power inherited from their royal and capitalist predecessors: the power of bureaucracy and the power of money. After the dictatorial "military communism" introduced in 1918 by Trotsky failed, 1922 they rushed to purely capitalist "new economic policy" of Lenin, then in 1930 jerked back to the bureacratic violence of Stalin's "collectivization" and "industrialization" with its enormous cost of human lives.

Then in 1941 Soviet Union was assaulted by Nazi Germany. Very soon it was clear for every Russian that the precondition of his survival as an individual in this war against the German fascist gang of mass-murderers was the survival of the country. Therefore the operants of mutual help and solidarity started working without, maybe even despite the marxist indoctrination machinery. As a youngster I heard from many elderly people that they felt living in a truly socialist way only amongst the horrors and deprivation of the war of 1941-1945 which was quite correctly called the Great Patriotic War. Yet the victory in this war was followed by another wave of Stalin's repressions against his own people, which ended only after his death in 1953. After the short interlude of Nikita Khrushchov's rule - who attempted to put fresh blood of innovation into the veins of Soviet system - was aborted in 1963, all following Soviet rulers relied more and more heavily on both bureaucracy and money, in obvious oblivion of the ultimate object of building socialist society. And when the mask of official marxist ideology was dropped in 1989, the bureaucracy - led by marxist party bosses Gorbachev & Yeltsin - rushed into the orgy of high treason and criminal corruption, making a replay of the disgusting farce of Rasputin court intrigues and corruption under Nicholas II.

Let me also remind you that the crucial role in the destruction of the Soviet Block was played by Poland. From the very beginning of their rule in 1945, Polish marxists were light-minded in their choice of reinforcers which they applied to control the people. The situation was aggravated when Edward Gierek came to power in 1970. Ten years of his rule were an orgy of squandering huge sums borrowed from Western banks. Gierek also unscrupulously flirted with anticommunist prejudices sown by imperialist propaganda and Roman catholic church. This craving for cheap popularity turned Polish marxists into two-faced demagogues who made no effort to play the trumps of socialism to win the people by countering the operant teasers employed by anti-communists: consumerism, conservative nationalism, religious obscurantism, the idealization of pre-socialist past, "money first" shopkeeper mentality and the viciously anti-communist political and intellectual clownery of the so-called "dissidents". As Polish marxists temporarily bought the consent of the people with imported consumer goods, they rewarded themselves for this questionable "success" with increased corruption, nepotism and privileges. The Polish people took for granted both the social welfare and the foolish government foreign debt spending on consumer goods, and got the wrong idea that they had been cheated by marxist government before Gierek, and that they only have to liberate themselves from socialism to live happily in the capitalist paradise. As the result, the economic productivity plunged and the rejection of the "horrible" socialist way of life became commonplace. The Polish youth had only one dream: to obtain education and then emigrate to Western Europe or USA. The last 20 years of its existence Soviet Union heavily subsidized Poland and repeatedly paid the debts of Polish government to Western banks. Yet this appeasement backfired: it only reinforced the defiance. The more Soviet Union paid - the more it was hated and despised in Poland as "the oppressor".

These stories prove that the only way to design an efficient policy is to shape it as a finely tuned, fool-proof scheme of reinforcement which produces the voluntary co-operative effort of the people. And to do it properly, without mistakes which can turn out to be fatal, Bolivarian revolutionaries should gain basic knowledge of behavioral science and then routinely subject their policies to the test of the applied technology of behavioral analysis.

The worst mistake a revolution can make is not to be radical enough. And here I am compelled to insert a rather long quotation because it is hardly possible to make this point more brilliantly than it was done by Errico Malatesta in his "Anarchy" (London, 1891):
"Man, like all living beings, adapts and accustoms himself to the conditions under which he lives, and passes on acquired habits. Thus, having being born and bred in bondage, when the descendants of a long line of slaves started to think, they believed that slavery was an essential condition of life, and freedom seemed impossible to them. Similarly, workers who for centuries were obliged, and therefore accustomed, to depend for work, that is bread, on the goodwill of the master, and to see their lives always at the mercy of the owners of the land and capital, ended by believing that it is the master who feeds them, and ingeniously ask one how would it be possible to live if there were no masters.
In the same way, someone whose legs had been bound from birth but had managed nevertheless to walk as best he could, might attribute his ability to move to those very bonds which in fact serve only to weaken and paralyse the muscular energy of his legs.
If to the normal effects of habit is then added the kind of education offered by the master, the priest, the teacher, etc., who have a vested interest in preaching that the masters and the government are necessary; if one were to add the judge and the policeman who are at pains to reduce to silence those who might think differently and be tempted to propagate their ideas, then it will not be difficult to understand how the prejudiced view of the usefulness of, and the necessity for, the master and the government took root in the unsophisticated minds of labouring masses.
Just imagine if the doctor were to expound to our fictional man with the bound legs a theory, cleverly illustrated with a thousand invented cases to prove that if his legs were freed he would be unable to walk and would not live, then that man would ferociously defend his bonds and consider as his enemy anyone who tried to remove them."

I am fully aware that Bolivarian revolutionaries wish to build a so-called "democratic socialism". Obviously, the present reality of government in Venezuela is messy and can be described by the words of the Bible (St. Matthew, 6, 24): "No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other". But I hope that Bolivarian revolution will soon be able to spare the power of bureaucracy and corruption-prone federalism and parliamentarism. Bolivarian revolution created new organs of people's power - consejos comunales, which in my opinion are the analog of Soviets in Russia, which have been the organization of grass-roots initiatives as political force before they were subdued by marxists - Lenin and Trotsky - in the bloody suppression of Kronstadt uprising in March 1921. Afterwards Russia was ruled by a marxist copy of old tzarist bureacracy with powerless Soviets functioning as a mere pretence of "socialist democracy". Socialism is incompatible with the bureaucratic institutions of capitalist "democracy" which were honed and finely tuned by many generations of elite, making them the most efficient weapons of one-way manipulation and oppression of the people.

Therefore consejos comunales should be empowered to monitor all activities of the inherently corrupt and anti-revolutionary "democratic" traditional power of bureaucrats and elected officials - governors, mayors, police officers, judges - and be in the position to organize efficient campaigns to veto their decisions, to fire or, respectively, impeach them and to replace them with the nominees approved by consejos comunales. The consejos should give the people the sovereign democratic power to manipulate and - in prospect - to abolish the despicable gangs of "democratic" officialdom.

My concluding statement is utterly clear: be it the creation of emotionally powerful dramatic pieces - films and plays, or be it the revolutionary creation of a new social reality, a new socialist culture and a new socialist man - all these are jobs which require skillful application of behavioral science. Therefore the people of Venezuela, to be successful in their revolutionary mission, should get to know it, first by popularized presentation of the principles of behaviorism in mass-media and, secondly, through education and the availability of behaviorist literature - see the following list.

1. Charles B. Ferster & Stuart A. Culbertson: "Behavior Principles" (excellent textbook)
2. James G. Holland & B.F. Skinner: "The Analysis of Behavior" (programmed learning material)
3. B.F. Skinner: "About Behaviorism" (introduction to behaviorism and an excellent polemics against the mentalistic psychology)
4. B.F. Skinner: "Science and Human Behavior" (behaviorist view of sociology)
5. B.F. Skinner: "The Technology of Teaching" (behaviorist revolution in education)
6. B.F. Skinner: "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" (polemics against the idealist hypocrisy in social sciences and everyday life)
7. B.F. Skinner: "Walden Two" (behaviorist utopian novel)
8. B.F. Skinner: "Reflections on Behaviorism and Society" (essays)
9. B.F. Skinner: "Upon Further Reflection" (essays)
10. B.F. Skinner: "Recent Issues in the Analysis of Behavior" (essays)
11. B.F. Skinner: "Notebooks" (posthumous compilation from)
12. B.F. Skinner: "Verbal Behavior" (in-depth treatise of )
13. B.F. Skinner: "Contingencies of Reinforcement" (in-depth treatise of)
14. B.F. Skinner & Charles B. Ferster: "Schedules of Reinforcement" (in-depth treatise of)
15. B.F. Skinner: "Cumulative Record" (collection of the most important journal publications)
16. Michael Zoshchenko: "The Sky-Blue Book"(entertaining analysis of human behavior)
17. Peter Kropotkin: "The Conquest of Bread" (popular ABC of social justice)
* * *