In the natural world, we often similar solutions evolve across many species because the solution space for challenges such as locomotion tends to be fairly small. This phenomenon, known as convergent evolution, illustrates that nature tends to converge on a small set of optimal strategies when faced with similar types of problems. One such strategy is the development of systems for coordination. The ability to act as a unified whole turns out to be a very useful adaptation for the functioning of any complex organism. Let's take a look at why that is.

To thrive, animals must coordinate the actions of countless cells, tissues, and organs. This coordination is made possible by the nervous system and the brain, which integrate sensory input, process information, and orchestrate responses. Without such systems, a complex organism would collapse into chaos. Imagine a human body where each organ acted independently: the heart pumps without regard for oxygen levels, the lungs breathe without synchronizing with the muscles, and the limbs move without direction. Such an organism would have a very short existence. Coordination proves to be essential for orchestrating complex dynamic systems.

Of course, not all large organisms require such intricate systems. Take the Armillaria ostoyae, a fungus that spans thousands of acres. This organism thrives in a relatively static environment, relying on a network of mycelium to absorb nutrients and reproduce. Its structure is homogeneous, and its ability to adapt to rapid change is limited. While it is vast, it lacks the adaptability of animals. The need for coordination arises from the demands of the environment and the complexity of the tasks at hand. In dynamic, unpredictable environments, the ability to act in coordinated fashion becomes a survival imperative.

We can extend this principle beyond individual organisms to societies, which can be thought of as metaorganisms. Just as cells and organs work together within a body, individuals within a society collaborate to achieve shared goals. Societies, like organisms, compete for resources, and their competition exerts selective pressure. Those that can effectively coordinate labor and resources are more likely to persist and thrive. In small societies, coordination can be relatively simple. A tribe might have a leader who helps organize tasks, but much of the work is distributed among autonomous individuals, each specializing in a specific role, like hunting, crafting, or farming. The structure is flat, and communication is direct.

However, as societies grow, so too does the need for more sophisticated coordination. The transformation from a small tribe to a large civilization is a shift where quantity transforms into quality. With more people comes greater specialization, and with specialization comes interdependence. A blacksmith in a small town might work independently, but in a large society, blacksmiths become part of a broader network of producers, traders, and consumers. This interdependence demands systems to manage complexity, much like a nervous system manages the complexity of a multicellular organism. A group of people specializing in a particular profession is akin to an organ within a living organism.

This pattern emerges in all types of human organizations, from companies to governments. In a small team, direct communication suffices. Each member knows their role, and decisions can be made collaboratively. But as the organization grows, the lines of communication multiply exponentially. What works for five people becomes unmanageable for fifty, and impossible for five hundred. At this point, delegation becomes necessary. Departments form, each with its own leader, and these leaders coordinate with one another. Such hierarchical structure necessarily emerges as a solution to the problem of scale. It mirrors the way an organism relies on a brain and the nervous system to manage its many parts.

The need for coordination, in turn, gives rise to the need for authority. Authority is not inherently oppressive; it is a tool for managing complexity. In a software development project, for example, dozens of individuals might work on interconnected tasks. Frontend developers rely on backend developers to provide data, while backend developers depend on database administrators to manage information. If one team member fails to deliver, the entire project can stall. To prevent such breakdowns, the team must agree on shared norms, schedules, and decision-making processes. These agreements require a team lead to take charge in order to resolve disputes, set priorities, and ensure that everyone is aligned. This authority is not arbitrary; it emerges from the practical demands of coordination.

The same principle applies to large-scale industries. Modern factories, with their complex machinery and hundreds of workers, cannot function without a clear chain of command. Independent action gives way to combined action, and combined action requires organization. Authority, in this context, is not a top-down imposition but a bottom-up necessity. It arises because of the material conditions of production dictated by the scale, complexity, and interdependence of tasks.

Critics of authority often argue for absolute autonomy, but such arguments overlook the real and tangible need for coordination. Authority and autonomy are not opposites; they exist on a spectrum, and their balance shifts with the needs of the group. In a small, simple society, autonomy might dominate. In a large, complex one, authority becomes indispensable. To reject authority outright is to ignore the lessons of both biology and history: that coordination is the foundation of complexity, and that complexity, in turn, demands systems to manage it.

Authority, far from being a mere social construct, is a natural response to the challenges of scale and complexity. It is not inherently good or evil. Rather, it is an effective tool for addressing the needs of the group and the demands of the environment.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/1517140

Lukács’s work set off a firestorm among Western left theorists seeking to accommodate themselves to the new American imperium. In 1963, George Lichtheim, a self-styled socialist operating within the general tradition of Western Marxism while virulently opposed to Soviet Marxism, wrote an article for Encounter Magazine, then covertly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in which he vehemently attacked The Destruction of Reason and other works by Lukács. Lichtheim accused Lukács of generating an “intellectual disaster” with his analysis of the historical shift from reason to unreason within European philosophy and literature, and the relation of this to the rise of fascism and the new imperialism under U.S. global hegemony.

This was not the first time, of course, that Lukács had been subjected to such strong condemnations by figures associated with Western Marxism. Theodor Adorno, one of the dominant theorists of the Frankfurt School, attacked Lukács in 1958 when the latter was still under house arrest for supporting the 1956 revolution in Hungary. Writing in Der Monat, a journal created by the occupying U.S. Army and funded by the CIA, Adorno charged Lukács with being “reductive” and “undialectical,” writing like a “Cultural Commissar,” and with being “paralysed from the outset by the consciousness of his own impotence.”

However, the 1963 attack on Lukács by Lichtheim in Encounter took on an added significance due to its absolute condemnation of Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason. In this work, Lukács had charted the relation of philosophical irrationalism—which first emerged on the European Continent, particularly in Germany, with the defeat of the 1848 revolutions, and that became a dominant force near the end of the century—to the rise of the imperialist stage of capitalism. For Lukács, irrationalism, including its ultimate coalescence with Nazism, was no fortuitous development, but rather a product of capitalism itself. Lichtheim responded by charging Lukács with having committed an “intellectual crime” in illegitimately drawing a connection between philosophical irrationalism (associated with such thinkers as Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Georges Sorel, Oswald Spengler, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt) and the rise of Adolf Hitler.

Lukács provocatively started his book by saying “the subject matter which presents itself to us is Germany’s path to Hitler in the sphere of philosophy.” But his critique was in fact much broader, seeing irrationalism as related to the imperialist stage of capitalism more generally. Hence, what most outraged Lukács’s critics in the West in the early 1960s was his suggestion that the problem of the destruction of reason had not vanished with the historic defeat of fascism, but that it was continuing to nurture reactionary tendencies, if more covertly, in the new Cold War era dominated by the U.S. imperium. “Franz Kafka’s nightmares,” Lichtheim charged, were treated by Lukács as evidence of “‘the diabolical character of the world of modern capitalism,'” now represented by the United States. Yet, Lukács’s argument in this respect was impossible to refute. Thus, he wrote, in terms still meaningful today:

In contrast to Germany, the U.S.A. had a constitution which was democratic from the start. And its ruling class managed, particularly during the imperialist era, to have the democratic forms so effectively preserved that by democratically legal means, it achieved a dictatorship of monopoly capitalism at least as firm as that which Hitler set up with tyrannic procedures. This smoothly functioning democracy, so-called, was created by the Presidential prerogative, the Supreme Court’s authority in constitutional questions, the finance monopoly over the Press, radio, etc., electioneering costs, which successfully prevented really democratic parties from springing up beside the two parties of monopoly capitalism, and lastly the use of terroristic devices (the lynching system). And this democracy could, in substance, realize everything sought by Hitler without needing to break with democracy formally. In addition, there was the incomparably broader and more solid economic basis of monopoly capitalism.

In these circumstances, irrationalism and the “piling up of cynical contempt for humanity,” Lukács insisted, was “the necessary ideological consequence of the structure and potential influence of American imperialism.” This shocking claim that there was a continuity in the relation of imperialism and irrationalism extending over the course of an entire century, from late nineteenth-century Europe, through fascism, and continuing in the new NATO imperium dominated by the United States, was strongly rejected at the time by many of those associated with the Western Marxist philosophical tradition. It was this, then, more than anything else, that led to the almost complete disavowal of Lukács’s later work (after his 1923 History and Class Consciousness) by left thinkers working in conjunction with the new post-Second World War liberalism.

Nevertheless, The Destruction of Reason was not subject to a systematic critique by those who opposed it, which would have meant confronting the crucial issues it raised. Instead, it was dismissed vituperatively out of hand by the Western left as constituting a “deliberate perversion of the truth,” a “700-page diatribe,” and a “Stalinist tract.” As one commentator has recently noted, “its reception could be summarized by a few death sentences” issued against it by leading Western Marxists.

A GLOWING ENDORSEMENT!!!

IF YOU READ THIS FAR YOU ARE OBLIGED!!!!!

Georg Lukacs - The Destruction of Reason-Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services) (2021).epub

0.9 MB https://files.catbox.moe/w2jp94.epub

Still, there was no denying the scale of the undertaking represented by The Destruction of Reason as a critique of the main traditions of Western irrationalism by the world’s then most esteemed Marxist philosopher. Rather than treating the various irrationalist systems of thought of the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries as if they had simply fallen from the sky, Lukács related them to the historical and material developments from which they emerged. Here, his argument relied ultimately on V. I. Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Irrationalism was, therefore, identified, as in Lenin, principally with historical-material conditions of the age of monopoly capitalism, the dividing up of the entire world between the great powers, and the geopolitical struggles over hegemony and spheres of influence. This was manifested in an economic-colonial rivalry between various capitalist states, coloring the entire historical context in which the new imperialist stage of capitalism emerged.

Today this fundamental material reality in many ways persists, but it has been so modified under the U.S. global imperium that a new phase of late imperialism can be said to have arisen, dating back to the end of the Second World War, merging immediately into the Cold War, and perpetuated, following a brief interregnum, in the New Cold War of today. Late imperialism in this sense corresponds chronologically with the end of the Second World War, the emergence of the nuclear age, and the beginning of the Anthropocene Epoch in geological history, which marked the advent of the planetary ecological crisis. The consolidation of global monopoly capital (more recently monopoly-finance capital), and the struggle by the United States—backed by the collective imperialism of the triad of the United States/Canada, Europe, and Japan—for global supremacy in a unipolar world all correspond to this phase of late imperialism.

For the Western left itself, the history of late imperialism has been primarily marked by the defeat of the revolts of 1968, followed by the demise of Soviet-type societies after 1989, which had as one of its primary consequences the collapse of Western social democracy. These events placed the Western left as a whole in a weakened position, ultimately defined by its general subordination to broad parameters of the imperialist project centered in the United States and its refusal to align with the anti-imperialist struggle, thus guaranteeing its revolutionary irrelevance.

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