ALEGATO POR UNA NUEVA MISION BOLIVARIANA “WALDEN TRES”

ALEGATO POR UNA NUEVA MISION BOLIVARIANA “WALDEN TRES”

Summary in Spanish:

Nací en 1956 en Moscú y por eso era testigo de la impotencia de la ideología marxista y de la derrota de la sociedad socialista en la URSS y desde 1983, cuando emigré a Berlín, también en la RDA. Desde 1990, cuando el capitalismo se restauró en Europa Oriental bajo el júbilo general, dedicaba mi tiempo libre por completo al autoestudio de las ciencias sociales. Mi consecuencia es ya que sólo el Behaviorismo puede crear una imagen adecuado científico de la vida y la actitud social y puede desmistificar las técnicas sociales de manipulación. Con su apoyo, la Revolución Bolivariana puede evitar el destino triste de otras Revoluciones – la mexicana, rusa, china y otras – con la cultivación de las costumbres y tradiciones solidarias con técnicas behavioristas. En otras palabras, una Revolución Cultural permanente a base de la ciencia de la conducta.

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Born in 1956 in Moscow, Soviet Union, I collected enough experience in history and politics to note that popular antiimperialist movements inevitably crystallise around a charismatic leader - Lenin, Mao, Peron, Ho Chi-Minh, Castro, Gaddafi, Ortega, Chavez - and this rigid identification of the movement with its leader endangers these movements in the following ways:

-- First, the movement tends to acquire weaknesses of the leader and even to be proud of them. Criticism of these weaknesses is regarded as blasphemous or counterrevolutionary, and the movement adopts these weaknesses without discussion;

-- Second, the death or electoral defeat of the leader is very dangerous for the integrity and strength of the movement. The successor is always definitely inferior to the founding leader and can even lack not only genuine charisma, but an elementary human decency as well (as was the case of Lenin’s successor Stalin).

In my humble opinion the remedy of these problems should include:

-- developing instruments to open the politics of the movement (i.e. PSUV) to all positive criticisms and suggestions of improvement, with all critique and suggestions being discussed widely as alternatives and having decisive influence on the official decision-making; and

-- encouraging political activity of ALL the members of the movement. The mass of movement members and sympathisers should in perspective become competent enough to act as a „collective leader“.

Although these problems were given no satisfactory remedy by any preceding social mass movement, I am confident that the Bolivarian Revolution and PSUV can and should do it - with the help of behavioral science. The task is to make the Bolivarian Revolution both self-sustainable and irreversible even in the absence of its leader - i.e. President Chavez or his legitimate successor.

Therefore I plea for a new Bolivarian mission: „Walden Three“, this name indicating the essence of this mission as a country-scale application of the principles and methods of social engineering discovered and developed by the father of radical behaviorism, Prof. B.F. Skinner. Prof Skinner popularised these methods in his novel „Walden Two“.

Since 1990 I devoted practically all my leisure time to studying how society works - in an attempt to understand why Soviet system failed so miserably and what we ought to do to make the dream of socialism reality. I read a lot, joined the German PDS (now „Die Linke“) party for a couple of years, and later joined the anarchist group FAU, also for a couple of years. I also visited Cuba in the year 2000 - only to discover there the „imperfections“ similar to those which resulted in the downfall of the Soviet Union.

And at last in 2006 I became aware that mainstream sociology, cognitivist psychology and marxist philosophy cannot help me. Therefore I concentrated my studies on behavior and social behavior in particular. Very soon I rediscovered Prof. Pavlov and a bit later - Prof. Skinner, the father of radical behaviorism. In fact, I have already „studied“ their works: many years ago as a university student in Moscow, but did not really understand and accept the behaviorist approach to society. Now, it turned out to be a very fruitful approach - which is now unfortunately widely abused by imperialists for their ends (in mass media manipulation, advertising, management, military and particularly as the notoriously cruel personality-breaking CIA interrogation techniques)... Whereas socialists and communists are hopelessly hypnotised by the phony „science“ of marxism and are utterly ignorant of behaviorism.

Well, discovering advantages of the behaviorist approach to socialism is one thing; the other, far more difficult task is to convince others in these advantages. Unfortunately the proposition of behaviorist (i.e. operant) social engineering as the scientific basis of socialist politics is considered by far too many well-meaning socialists and communists as anti-marxist and therefore totally unacceptable. People plainly refuse to consider any alternative to marxism, this 150 years old neohegelian idealist doctrine which monopolised socialist thinking. It is obvious that there can be no progress in socialist theory without a fundamental „paradigm change“ away from marxism.

From the behaviorist point of view all unresolved problems of Soviet, Chinese, Cuban etc. socialism are due exactly to uncritical acceptance of the idealistic rationalist (Hegelian) naive belief of marxists - that indoctrination can directly influence and change social relations (as Marxists say, via „class conscience“ overcoming „false conscience“). But the experience of Soviets clearly demonstrates that this does not happen. „Proletarians“ were NOT „awakened to the socialist way of life“, neither by marxist ideology nor by Mao’s „cultural revolution“.

Another marxist belief - that economics is „the essence“ of social life - played a nasty trick on the Soviets. Their preoccupation with economics and neglection of all other aspects of social life proved to be fatal: The habits of competitive individualism (struggle for power, privileges and money) survived concealed under the thin veneer of marxist phraseology. The mode of life in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba etc. remained basically non-socialist, power- and money-oriented. Although all economic activity was nationalised, government legislation and administrative coercion failed to create genuinely socialist community life based on solidarity.

The party power apparatus which Lenin hoped to use as the instrument of socialist transformation, was used by Stalin to subdue the people to the tyranny of the new elite - „Nomenklatura“, as it was called by Michael Voslensky. Nomenklatura had its own class interests, that’s why workers, peasants and the rest of the people were not trained in new communitarian habits and socialist way of life. Instead, the government and „communist“ party were busily coercing the people into the way of life of meek conformists and wage earners. All so-called „socialist“ property was considered by the people as the government property managed by party bosses. That is why after the Soviet system had been run many decades as state capitalism, it was easily privatised in 1990 by the elite - the „communist“ party nomenclatura under Gorbachev and later Yeltsin - without any popular resistance.

The same problem faces now the Bolivarian Revolution. What is now being proclaimed in Venezuela as the „social property“ (propiedad social, dominio publico) should become more than a legal title. Legal and administrative procedures, although neccessary, are not sufficient to create new social REALITY. The people need new habits, new values, new attitudes to this property and to each other. In other words, social property must not remain an empty legal form, but should be filled with living social relations, with those new habits and patterns of behavior which can be created only by purposefully cultivating them with the help of behaviorist techniques of social engineering based on operant conditioning.

As I see him, President Chavez is an extremely kind, generous man, wishing to eradicate misery and suffering by giving presents to the people, and especially to those who need it most: the poor. But I think that building socialism can be done not by giving presents, but only by training people (with the technique of positive operant reinforcement) to give presents to each other, i.e. by creating the culture based on the desire to share, and not on the typically capitalist desires of bosses to dominate and to exploit and those of the people - to grab and to consume.

Why? Because the desires to grab and to consume are actually the result of insecurity, helplessness and alienation which are both the product and the precondition of typically capitalist exploitation and oppression. And giving out dole, although alleviating misery, does not cure these social ills, this antisocial degradation of the poor. On the other hand, socialist culture should be based on the habits of mutual trust and mutual encouragement of self-help and self-confidence of every member of the community, inducing everyone to sincere generosity, habitual desire to give, to share with the others - the way it is (not always, but often enough) still practised among family members, especially in traditional societies.

And as the experience of Soviet Union, Cuba etc. clearly demonstrates, these habits can be reintroduced in the society as a whole not by indoctrination, but only by social engineering based on the behaviorist techniques of operant conditioning. Indoctrination is an idealist, religious attempt to „save“ man. Experience shows that indoctrination and coercion generate only hypocrisy.

On the other hand, the behaviorist approach is to create a CONTROLLED social environment where the contingencies of reinforcement are designed and managed so that the socially desired behavior of individuals is positively reinforced and thus FELT by them as spontaneous and directed by their „free will“. Such an environment should be free from all fundamental social institutions of capitalism, first and foremost the tyranny of money, this extremely powerful positive reinforcer which alienates individuals, i.e. dissolves the relations of mutual interdependence between them.

After reading this, you may exclaim: “Controlled environment! How cruel! You want to rob the people of their liberty! etc.” But I must remind you that modern capitalist society ALREADY IS a totally controlled environment. Read Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle” and you recognise that the capitalist society he described 40 years ago was already a social environment totally controlled by the “Spectacle”, i.e. by images created by advertising and mass media which dictated the everyday lifestyle and social behavior of the people. The “choice” it offered was manipulated by advertising and propaganda and was therefore fake, illusory. Needless to say that nowadays the manipulation and control of people in capitalist society has got much more efficient, fine-tuned and omnipresent.

There are two things which now, in the present situation of reactionary „globalist“ restoration of capitalism, became obvious:

-- First, it was NOT the socialism of Robert Owen who gave the absolute priority to practical creation and management of socialist communes ISOLATED from the hostile capitalist environment that was “utopian”! Really utopian was the Hegelian “theoretical” bullshit verbiage of Marx, Engels, Trotzki etc. about the “historical necessity” of a “generalised world-wide crisis of capitalism” which “should automatically result” in the victory of “world-wide proletarian revolution”. I would like to tell those who still preach marxist “inevitable victory of proletarian revolution” in USA, Germany etc.: “Good luck to you, morons!”

Socialist revolution can win and build socialist society ONLY a) in isolation from the hostile manipulative environment of the globalised power of capitalists and imperialists, and b) in possession of essential resources and military power needed for unhindered and protected economic development INDEPENDENTLY from the capitalist world. Read Owen’s “A New View of Society” and you will agree with his denunciation of “corrupting influence”. As I recollect, “The Iron Curtain” IN ITSELF was a far cry from the horrible thing depicted by Western propaganda.

-- Second, the socialist alternative way of life with its behavior patterns, habits and institutions, being the antipode of the capitalist way of life, even in an isolated country DOES NOT emerge spontaneously, by grass-roots activism and imaginary „self-organisation of masses“, as idealist cognitivist marxist philosophers would like us to believe. Creating socialist interpersonal relations and thus the whole framework of social relations, habits and norms based on solidarity, mutual trust and mutual help should be the most important direction of active revolutionary change, it should be systematically promoted, cultivated and encouraged by the revolutionary Bolivarian government.

This government policy should have its aim on creating the new socialist society as a controlled social environment with a complete network of functionally interacting, mutually well-attuned social relations. This policy needs the scientific basis and technological apparatus of behaviorist social engineering with its instruments of operant manipulation of behavior to be fool-proof, efficient and successful. This policy thus needs a numerous well-trained and dedicated staff who REALLY know the mechanisms of behavior and social engineering, to implement it. Therefore Bolivarian revolutionaries must at least know what behaviorism really is and how it works.

As an additional reading I recommend (with certain reservations) Chapter 14 of „Walden Two“ by Prof. B.F. Skinner.