Bob Myers was born in 1949 in London to a middle class mum and a working class dad who had met in a factory canteen during WW2. They were both involved in the Workers Educational Association and their house was full of books.
Bob and his elder brother both became interested in politics at school and joined the Labour Party youth movement. Then both joined the Trotskyist Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP)
After leaving school Bob first worked in a large hospital kitchen and then became a construction worker and active in the Builders Union. Later he trained as a sheet metal worker and was employed in car and aircraft factories. While he was a member of the Metal Workers union, he helped organise a UK tour by metal workers from the South African BTR Samcol strike. He became close friends with some members of the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa and he made several visits to the country both during the apartheid period and after.
As much of UK manufacturing was offshored, Bob became unemployed and, with two small children to support, he and his family left London with its high rents and moved to Manchester. He has lived in the world’s first industrial city ever since.
He then took advantage of a government scheme that paid unemployed people to return to full time education. He took a degree in Physics.
Just after graduating, he became involved in organising a solidarity convoy to take food to miners in Bosnia. Their multi- ethnic town of Tuzla was besieged by ethnic cleansers. The solidarity convoys carried on for three years till the war ended.
For the last few years of his working life, he went back to where he started and became a chef in a small restaurant.
The WRP had begun to break up in 1985 after the expulsion of its leader for sexually abusing young women members. After a ten-year communal discussion with a few WRP comrades, they drifted away from the dying remnants of the ‘party’. Since that time Bob has worked with a number of different political organisations but is not a member of any party or group.
Hard Crackers is especially pleased to being able to publish Bob’s essay on “From Anaximander to Marx” in three parts over the next couple of weeks. We hope that people will read all three parts and engage with their provocative ideas.
For an example of Bob’s previous political writings, readers might want to check out his account of his trips to South Africa.
Introduction
As a teenager in 1960’s Britain, I joined the Labour Party Young Socialists but soon got bored with the weekly meetings and disillusioned with the newly elected Labour Government of Harold Wilson, plus (let’s be honest here) there were no girls I fancied in my local Labour Party. I decamped to the youth movement of the Socialist Labour League (SLL) that later became the Workers’ Revolutionary Party (WRP). I thought I’d become a Marxist revolutionary. Over twenty years later, in 1985, the WRP fragmented into many parts when Gerry Healy, who had been the Mr. Big of the party for decades, was revealed to be a serial sexual groomer, abusing the loyalty of young women members for his own sexual and egotistical satisfaction. Some people departed with the disgraced ex-general secretary thinking his behaviour was just fine. Others wanted to carry on just as before but with the ‘bad apple’ removed. And some of us started to think about things. We soon realised that our ‘revolutionary’ party had all the internal relations and psychology of a religious sect. Now, at the age of 75, I am fairly certain that we didn’t just have the trappings of a religious group; our very method of looking at the world, our understanding of events, was made with the same approach as all religious thought. We had effectively turned Marx into a god and his writings into a bible.
If this was just a feature of the WRP, which has more or less vanished, then I wouldn’t waste my time, or yours, by writing this but I see the same method repeated in so many organisations that claim to know the road to revolution. It’s possible to try to understand this in many different ways and the route I am now taking may seem very distant from the cut and thrust of political debate over the present situation. Sometimes, however, it can be useful to take a step back and look at things in a different way. I started to think about what follows after reading several books by the wonderful Italian quantum physicist, Carlo Rovelli. This is my fusion of his passionate opposition to dogmatism and my own experiences of 60 years in the labour movement and radical circles.
Days of hope
When I joined the SLL/WRP I thought revolution was around the corner. I certainly wasn’t the only one. In March 1968, I was outside the US embassy in London when hundreds of thousands of anti-Vietnam war protestors violently clashed with police. My mate was arrested and got a month in jail. A few months later, I was in Paris just as the gendarmes were taking back control of the streets following the huge student protests which had seen the country brought to a standstill. A year later, in 1969, singer/songwriter Thunderclap Newman went to Number One in the UK music charts with his song ‘Something in the air’:
‘Hand out the arms and ammo
We’re going to blast our way through here
We’ve got to get together sooner or later
Because the revolution’s here, and you know it’s right…
We’ve got to get it together …. now’.
It wasn’t just a catchy tune. The words chimed with many young people’s desire for change in so many aspects of their lives. Of course, revolution meant different things to different people. For me it was something along the lines of the Russian Revolution. In Europe it was a time of
huge strike waves by workers and street protests by young people. School students went on strike. Teachers organised alternative curricula. Television had weekly plays like ‘The Lump’, Cathy Come Home’ and ‘The Big Flame’. Millions of people watched these radical dramas about the problems of working class people and talked about them at work the next day.
A few memories of my own from that time. In 1972 UK dockworkers were taking industrial action to try to defend their jobs which were threatened by the new use of containerisation. Five London dockworkers were imprisoned for picketing outside a storage depot which wasn’t their place of work, making their action illegal. At the time I was working as a sheet metal worker in a British Aerospace factory making the Concorde. As news of the dockers’ arrest came on the radio, the 70 shop-stewards (worker representatives of different departments) in my factory met and we decided to call a mass meeting of the 5,000 strong work force and recommend an all-out strike to demand the dockers’ release. Up and down the country similar meetings were taking place. Before we could even organise our mass meeting the government had capitulated and freed the five dockworkers. The ruling class were in disarray! A year later we occupied the aircraft factory demanding better wages. After five days the management gave in. 1977, a year before the ‘winter of discontent’, I was working at Rolls Royce Motors when we went on strike in defiance of a Labour Government’s wage freeze. After we had been on strike for two months firemen across the country went out on strike as well. Thousands of firefighters gathered outside a meeting of the Trade Union Congress (TUC). The union bigwigs, who supposedly represented all workers, were meeting to decide whether to support the firefighters or side with the government. As the union bosses inside turned against the strikers, the firemen outside made their views known by adapting the Doris Day song and chanted:
‘Que sera sera,
Whatever will be will be,
We’re fucking the TUC,
Que sera sera.’
The sound of the massed, radical voices in the narrow London street was uplifting. It wasn’t just the ruling class who were in disarray, the conservative workers’ leaders were also being challenged.
This air of militancy was not confined to Britain. Around the world the spirit of revolt was making itself felt. In the colonised countries liberation movements were throwing out the oppressors. US troops had to flee Vietnam, as the French had done years before. Saigon fell
to Ho Chi Min’s army. In apartheid South Africa, township youth were in revolt and a spontaneous general strike of black workers spread throughout Natal province. Millions of people like me thought that capitalism’s days were numbered.
And then came Margaret Thatcher and the defeat of the year-long British miners’ strike while most of Britain’s manufacturing industries were shifted to the low paid Far East. I became one of the four million unemployed.
‘The Workers United will never be defeated!
This slogan was chanted on the many mass demonstrations throughout the period I’ve been talking about as workers tried to defend their rights. And what a meaningless slogan it was. The working class had united behind the imprisoned dockers but when the miners went on strike for a year, no-one struck in solidarity despite massive sympathy. What had changed?
We were all defeated. Maybe it wouldn’t be very catchy but if only someone would chant: ‘The workers have been defeated, let’s think why?’
Today, in my seventies, I still believe another world is possible, free from the catastrophic destructiveness of capital, but this possibility seems dwarfed by impending disaster and the horrors that are already taking place– Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine. Even in the ‘wealthy’ countries most people are struggling to get through. Hanging over all of us is climate change, already impacting on many communities and threatening the very existence of humanity. Nothing
better expresses the crumbling of civilisation than President Trump’s vision of real estate opportunities on the Gaza seafront and his petroleum fixated chant of ‘Drill baby drill.’
Can we find a way out of this terrible situation? I look back at my younger naivety that thought social transformation was within reach and relatively straightforward. Our ‘Party” would lead the masses to power. Today things do not look so simple. Surely, we have to totally re-organise the way society conducts its basic activity of creating the conditions for the daily sustaining of life, both at a local and global level. We have to have different wants and aspirations. It’s true we have fantastic technical and scientific knowledge that could assist such a change but for this to be useful we need a humanity that is able to cooperate, politically and economically and use all of its rationality and knowledge to confront the crisis we face. Previous revolutionary social changes, for example from feudalism to capitalism in Britain, were carried through by a new aspiring class within an ideology that only distantly related to furthering their class interests. Cromwell sought the right of all men to talk to god, not just the King. Of course, behind this religious clash lay all the material differences between a landed, feudal aristocracy and a wannabe capitalist class but this was hidden within the religious debate of the time.
But the social transformation we need right now cannot come about without real clarity since the objective is the subordination of the productive processes to rational control by the producers themselves. So it needs this clarity of aims to permeate the mass of people. Now such clarity doesn’t arrive from a book or a lecture, important as those might be, it arrives from people’s own lived experience. Or rather, it has the potential to develop. For the moment, however, the opposite is happening.
It’s true that the whole of humanity now works almost as one to produce all the things we need to live, we are all totally interdependent, but the means of production by which we sustain life, the factories, the machines, the distribution networks are owned by private corporations whose only imperative is the recreation of more capital. And these corporations dominate governments, their armies and police forces as well as having control over media and all of this is sustained by the unchallengeable ideology of competition and profit. The vast mass of people who produce the things we need and the services we use don’t see their fellow producers around the world as their ‘co-operators’ but as their rivals. Their outlook mirrors the reality of the part of capital they work for that seeks to compete with and triumph over other parts of capital. Racism and nationalism divide, fragment, antagonise and make impossible the rational international co-operation that is essential for tackling the problems humanity faces. With dwindling resources, war and climate change, we are facing the prospect of human migration on a scale never before seen. Where is the spirit of human solidarity to deal with this? Instead, we have ‘Stop the boats’, ‘Send them back’ and ’Build the wall’. European Social Democracy rushes to echo the extreme right to woo the electorate.
Many people are looking at this crisis and trying to chart a way out. We all have ideas. But this is not what I want to write about here. I want to look at the very method, or form of thinking, that we use to try to understand the world and the society we are living in, a society that is changing very rapidly. If we simply apply old formulas and recipes, like a repeat of the Russian Revolution, to a world that is vastly different, our perspectives cannot become a road map to assist millions of people to act differently. If we try to cram today’s reality into yesterday’s analysis we will never see what is new. If we don’t really listen to what people are saying and why they are doing what they are doing how will any proposals for change make any impact on them? We need to know what is going on and why, we need to look at how we can collectively gain that understanding. The world changes each day and not according to some old formulas with which we happily comfort ourselves that we already know what’s happening.
Getting to know the universe we live in
Throughout the evolution of humankind people have sought to better understand their environment. Slowly, over millennia, knowledge was accumulated – stone working, pottery making, metal extraction and metal working. On and on. We will probably never know exactly how our hunter-gather ancestors understood the world they lived in. Their only traces – tools, cave painting, burials, etc. are not enough to know their world view. But from contact with the last remaining hunter gatherer societies, it is probable that their creation stories and understanding of their world was similar to those people who did begin to leave written historical records. Our ancestors took all natural phenomena–storms, earthquakes, seasons, floods and their own societal affairs–to be the result of supernatural forces. They lived in a world controlled by gods, spirits, dreams and ancestors. Everything was explained through the medium of superstition and folklore. But more important than the almost universal stories of giant serpents, angry deities and evil enchantresses was the way of thinking that lay behind these myths and legends. All understanding about the present was to be gained from the lore of the past. The gods had laid down the laws long ago and all that could be done was to try and understand the present in line with those laws. The priest, the oracle and the soothsayer were as essential to any king going to war as was the latest chariot design. Astronomy and astrology were the same thing.
But in the 6th century BCE a new way of thinking about the world emerged. In the Greek city state of Miletus, on what is now the Turkish coast, a man called Anaximander tried to make sense of the world and all the phenomena he saw with natural explanations rather than resorting to old myths. He concluded that rain came from the clouds which resulted from the
evaporation of water in the oceans. He wrote that all living things had originally come from a common ancestor. He argued that there could never have been a ‘first’ human being since infants are incapable of survival without parents so they must have developed from other life forms. He thought that probably all life began in water. He saw the earth as something that floats in space. This was at a time when all cultures saw the earth as a flat surface supported on the backs of giant turtles or something similar. This view was not without reason. All human experience suggested that things don’t ‘float’ unless supported – they drop. So, if the earth was not supported on anything, why doesn’t it fall? Anaximander replied that objects only fall towards bigger things and since there was no big thing nearby, then for earth there was no up or down and no reason to fall.
Anaximander tried to explain everything in terms of natural causes without reference to gods or religion. He was the first person that we have a record of that started to look at the world in this way. Others followed. In 450 BCE another Greek, Democritus, wrote some sixty books about every aspect of the universe using the same method of thought. He saw the universe as a boundless space with no above or below, filled with matter that was all composed of a basic substance that came in the form of atoms – the smallest possible particle that must be the building blocks of everything. He thought that just as the letters of the alphabet could be assembled in different combinations to form tragedies, comedies and romances so the atoms could be assembled into all the objects of the universe. Humans were just another part of this multitude. He came up with rigorous arguments to justify his conclusions. For example, he said atoms must exist since it is possible to break everything down into smaller and smaller pieces but if things could be broken down to the infinitely small then these particles would exist simply as dimensionless points in space and then however many of these dimensionless points were put together they could never form actual matter, so there had to be a smallest quantity of matter. He used the same kind of rational, naturalistic arguments to justify all his conjectures. The idea that world was round emerged at this time. Two and half thousand years before atomic theory and quantum physics, without the aid of any microscopes or any other equipment to extend the senses, the first steps were being taken to truly comprehend the nature of existence, not just the properties of a particular object but the relations between things in an endlessly changing universe.
This was a giant a leap in human understanding. We may laugh at the almost universal myth of the world being a flat disc resting on the back of giant turtles, but see how this idea fits with everyday experience. We walk on a seemingly flat surface. How could there be people ‘below’ us? They would fall off. How could the earth not be supported by something under it? In Miletus, people began to recognise that the universe was not as it first seems, that everyday experience does not necessarily give a true picture of things. It is necessary to go beyond the outward appearance of matter. To do this they had to use a radically different method of thought.
Anaximander, Democritus and others from the same period gave us a new way of looking at the world. They used observation and reason rather than seeking answers from traditional mythical, religious stories. Prior to this, earthquakes, floods, famines, etc., etc. had all been looked upon as the work of the gods. Wars between people, the collapse of civilisations, the rise and fall of military and political leaders – all of these things were determined by the gods. People sought to see into the future by reference to the stars or chickens’ entrails through which the gods revealed their plans. But now, natural explanations were sought. Unsurprisingly, when no scientific equipment was available, many of their explanations were only partially right but they laid the basis for an outlook that said it was possible to constantly correct our world view and to discover aspects of reality hidden from view, to discover the new. They decided the earth was round, it took the development of sophisticated measuring devices to find that it isn’t actually round but flattened at the poles and with bumps in other
places. Knowledge can grow and a ‘round’ earth was a pretty useful approximation at the time.
Using the same outlook, two thousand years later, Einstein made Democritus’s atomism solid and translating his ideas into mathematical formula he arrived at the actual dimensions of the atom.
The importance of time and place – the Greek City States
Now this is not to say that these Greek thinkers didn’t believe in the gods, they may have or may not, but the important point is that that they had no need to resort to religious explanations for natural phenomena. Or to put it another way they did not try to fit what they saw or what they hypothesised into existing ideology, rather they had to change their ideas to fit with the realities of the world. This was a revolution in the way people gain knowledge, a revolution in how to look at the world. Indeed, there would be nothing unusual if at the same time as making their revolutionary proposals they also still believed in some aspects of the old stories. The human brain is quite capable of rationally looking at the world in one sphere of knowledge and resorting to superstition in another. Many of the people in the 20th century who contributed to the development of quantum physics simultaneously believed in god. Indeed, we are living in a world today where so much is known about the universe by so many people and yet most of humanity still believe in ‘fairies’ of one kind or another. Look at the climate scientists who diligently, methodically research and reveal what is happening to our weather but remain completely in thrall to myths about how the society we live in actually functions. They don’t examine the claims of our political representatives with the same ideological method they interrogate the climate data. But that’s changing. The camouflage that politicians and the fossil fuel industry used in the charade of the COP talks is wearing thin.
Anaximander and those who came after him were not somehow ‘cleverer’ people than their forebears. It was not just accidental that this revolution in thought took place there, at that time. Miletus was at the centre of a trading empire. Trade meant not just the exchange of goods but also of ideas. The accumulated knowledge of other civilisations, like the Egyptians, became available to them. They borrowed the Phoenician alphabet but turned it into the first proper phonetic alphabet making it far easier for people to learn to read and write. Prior to this, literacy was confined to small, usually priestly, groups within any society. In the Greek city states, most of the free adult males were literate, speeding up the process of knowledge accumulation, discourse and debate.
Lastly was the nature of the Greek city state societies of this time. They had passed through the overthrow of monarchies followed by the overthrow of oligarchies and were now ‘democracies’. It didn’t extend to the slaves or to women but all decisions about the governing of the city were in the hands of the collective adult free males. There was no royal or priestly hierarchy defending its power, its religion or ideology. This form of governance developed the culture of debate, of decisions arrived at through discussion, argument and voting. It meant yesterday’s ‘wisdoms’ were open to criticism. Yesterday’s wise men could be wrong and people could be persuaded to change their minds through debate.
Anaximander and Democritus both studied at the feet of their teachers from whom they learnt all that could be learnt. They wrote with respect and admiration of their teachers but, vitally, they also criticised them and tried to overcome their shortcomings. The past was not something that had to be worshipped. Understood and respected, yes, but evaluated and rejected when new knowledge made the old ideas untenable. When we think of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein and so on, everyone one of these people had to assimilate all that was already known and taken as the last word and then reject it because new information could no longer be contained in the old ideological framework. Each one of them revolutionised the world view and then, in turn, had their limitations revealed. This process also reveals an important point – knowledge is evolutionary. There never is a last word on anything.
It is interesting to note that long before the Greeks began to suggest the world was round the Chinese emperors had set up an Imperial School of Astronomy. This institution existed almost without interruption for three thousand years and yet throughout that period the learned astronomers thought the world was flat. This idea was only changed when China was visited by Jesuit monks in the 16th century AD. There is surely a connection between the longevity of this misconception and the fact that Chinese society was insular and strictly hierarchical, held together by an ideology in which the past was revered as the source of all knowledge. New ideas could embellish and strengthen the ideas of the ancestors but never challenge them, or challenge the Emperor.
The method of discovery and learning that emerged in Greece flourished. There was a dramatic advance in the use of mathematics, a new language with which to understand the movement of the stars and planets. There was an ever-growing written archive of their discussions, reasoning and theories. The greatest accumulation of human knowledge was to be found in the library at Alexandria. So important was this store of knowledge to the Alexandrians that their law demanded that any book on board ships that arrived in port had to be handed over to the library so it could be copied and then handed back. Any sea captain who failed to comply with this could be executed.
In this day and age of the internet and Google search, it is easy to forget how fragile the accumulation of knowledge was in the past. Skills and ideas could simply vanish and have to be rediscovered hundreds or thousands of years later. The Greek City States in which this enormous change in outlook had occurred did not survive. The library at Alexandria was burnt and most of its unique manuscripts destroyed. Today there is no trace of the writings of Anaximander or Democritus. We only know of them via the writings of others who came later and who, for the most part, rejected their method of reasoning. The monotheistic, christianised Roman Empire could not tolerate the ideas or method of these Greek naturalists and burnt their books, killed their exponents and expunged their way of thinking from the vast empire.
In most of the world, Anaximander’s way of thinking vanished for over a thousand years. Superstition and myth once again ruled unchallenged. A few of the Greek manuscripts were preserved in parts of the Islamic world and would, centuries later, return to Western society. Of course, this does not mean that in Europe there was no development of knowledge. There was. In the same way that people going about their affairs had always uncovered new information about the world, knowledge did develop but not in ways that altered the overall world outlook, a world dominated by the ideas of Christianity and the powers of the various elites who sat themselves at the pinnacle of the Godly hierarchy. But just as the nature of the Greek City states had acted as a cradle for the ideas of Anaximander and Democritus so changes in European society created the conditions for the resurrection of the Greeks’ thinking.
An increasingly wealthy England under Henry the 8th had broken free from the power of the papal empire and its monasteries torn down. In Venice the accumulation of enormous wealth through trade gave rise to people who were prepared to challenge the existing order of things. In 1417 the work of the Roman poet Lucretius was rediscovered and in his ‘On the nature of
things’ he incorporated much of the thinking of the Greek atomists. In 1516 the Roman Church banned the writings of Lucretius and burnt anyone found reading him. But the cat was out of the bag. Changes in society that would slowly undermine Feudalism gave rise to a free thinking that readily absorbed Lucretius and through him revived the knowledge of the Greeks. His writings and the slow rediscovery of all of the wonders of the amazing writers in the Greek City states formed a key part of the Renaissance that led to the works of Galileo, Kepler and Newton. The Church’s universe with the earth at the centre collapsed and its absolute domination of ideas began to crumble. In England people like Francis Bacon were once again able to look at the world in a naturalistic way, with a mind able to enquire without having to conform to the oppressive, mind numbing ideology of Church and State.
Today we live in a world were nearly every aspect of life is dependent on the development of physics in the 20th century, above all of quantum mechanics. The ideas of Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and others have made possible the technologies of the micro-chip and computing, data processing, information storing and exchange. There is a direct line between these discoveries and the way ideas were developed by Anaximander and Democritus.
Now it may look like this potted history is about the development of science in the sense of physics, chemistry, astronomy, etc. But the word science was originally synonymous with the word knowledge. What we think of today as ‘science’ only began to gain a separate meaning a few hundred years ago with the development of the ‘scientific method’, i.e., the use of experimentation and measurement to gain a greater insight into the nature of chemical and physical matter. But if we take the Greeks’ concept of developing knowledge through observation, reason and debate, free from the need for conclusions to be within the prevailing mythologies, then the investigation of human society is no different from looking at the motion of planets or chemical reactions. The means by which an understanding can be gained will be very different. The language of maths is of no use. The ability to conduct experiments is impossible. Conclusions can never be verified in the way that Einstein’s theories could. But does this mean that the way Anaximander speculated about the origins of life or the cause of earthquakes cannot also be applied to human society? It can. Only here the tools are not maths or experimentation but the study of the history of human beings, their societies and the current unfolding of this ancient drama in which we are all active participants.