New Age Marxism?

We are living at a time when we are told that there is a New Age perspective out there about everything. There is hardly anything this catchy label cannot be attached to. For instance, we have New Age therapy, New Age religion, New Age Physics and New Age everything. But the idea of a New Age Marxism never crossed my mind until I heard a recent speech of Sitaram Yechury, Marxist ideologue and Polit Bureau member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

Mr. Yechury's address at a function on the Kannur University campus on November 26, 2011 was on predicted lines as it contained run-off-the-mill ideas which essentially say that Marxists have a better understanding of how a society functions and boast of having a perfect prescription for shaping a perfect society. His speech on the higher education policies being pursued by the Government of India expectedly accused the present dispensation of implementing neo-lilberal policies that help international finance capital maximise profit by commodification of education. It is all fine as it perfectly fits into the Marxist world view of what is good and what is bad.

But I felt Mr. Yechury was on the brink of a metaphysical quest uncharacteristic of a Marxist ideologue when he sounded New Age-y as he embraced some of the concepts that would have thrilled admirers of Fritjof Kapra or Gary Zukav. He was talking about the intellectual resource that India possessed for making the country an intellectual power house. To exemplify that, he recounted his recent visit to the Silicon Vally where he found a substantial number of Indians, especially people speaking his mother tongue, Telugu, manning the frontier technologies. He was told by one senior personnel in the Apple Computer that 'i' of iPad, iPhone and iPod stands for 'infinite loop' and that it was 'very similar to your Marxist concept of negation of negation'.

The idea of infinite loop developed by Steve Jobs, one of the founders of Apple and a cult figure whom many would describe as a New Age Mahatma or the spiritual guru of technology is very similar to the Marxist dialectical principle of negation of negation! Very interesting. Let me quote Mr. Yechury:

"When we talk of negation, people misunderstand it as a circle, saying that Marx has said that history repeats in circles. No. History never repeats itself in that sense but it replicates itself at a higher level. So, it is a loop."

That reminded me of the Caltech debate on March 14, 2010 featuring Michael Shermer and Sam Harris on one side and Deepak Chopra and Jean Houston on the other side. During the interactive session, which I watched on YouTube, Caltech Professor of Theoretical Physics Leonard Mlodinow asked Deepak Chopra if he would like to have a short course in quantum mechanics so that his (Deepak's) misuse of quantum notations could be corrected. Following is the short encounter between them:

Deepak Chopra: By the way today is Einstein's birth day (3/14), so we are at a very fitting place and it just occurred to me 3.14 is the first approximation of Pi which refers to infinity. So, as long as your point of Physics explanations help me understand infinity, I would be honored.

LM: We have to keep it (inifinity) local, though, and not non-local.

DC: Do you sir, believe in the infinite?

LM: I believe that I understand some of the concepts of infinite.

DC: Ok. Do you think that your mathematics requires infinite to explain things that you explain to the people?

LM: We use the concept of infinite quite a lot.

DC: Thank you.

LM: You are welcome...(Deepak's) use of term non-local was not correct.

DC: I think consciousness is non-local.

LM: You know I have never gone across the definition of consciousness that I understood. So maybe you can teach me something.

DC: (Consciousness is) a super position of possibilities.

LM: Well (laughs), all right, I know what each of those words mean. But still I don't think I know it.

DC: I am right now talking to a conscious being...

LM: I hope so.

DC: ...even though that conscious being is pretending to be a physicist...pretending in the larger context. You are an infinite being who has taken on the identity of a physicist in space and time.

Mr. Yechury is no Deepak Chopra, a medical doctor by profession, who has 'packaged Eastern mystique in credible Western garb,' to quot Time magazine, and built a successful enterprise of wellness industry. Sam Harris describes him as "the very definition of what we mean by pseudoscience". Mr. Yechury, for his part, is presenting the idea of infinite loop as an exemplification of the Marxist dialectics of negation of negation as if that 'law of dialectics' were perfectly applicable for all time and for all things.

His attempt (in my view) to further prove the validity of Marxist dialectics in what he called the 'battle of ideas' came when he dwelt on the invention of zero by the ancient Indians. Referring to Charles Seife's book Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, Mr. Yechury said that zero was a dangerous idea in the sense that it was impossible for people to conceive of nothingness. The opposite of zero was infinite, Mr. Yechury said adding that this was unity of opposites in dialectics. Asserting that nothing worked in modern science without zero and infinite, he said:

"Your entire calculus is tending towards zero or tending towards infinite. This concept of unity of opposites - between zero and infinite - was invented by our earlier generation for this world."

Nothing wrong there as far as he was just trying to prove that the Marxist dialectics was still relevant. But what really flummoxed me was his embrace of the New Age ideas of Tao of Physics to prove it. Was he laying the foundation stone for what may be called 'New Age Marxism'? He told the audience that Tao of Physics describes Shiva's Thandav as cosmic dance of subatomic particles. Referring to the huge Nataraj statue presented by the Government of India to the CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research) underground laboratory experimenting the Large Hadron Collider, Mr. Yechury said:

"This cosmic dance of subatomic particles, that Shiva's Thandav, how do we see it always? You have Shiva in that Nataraj statue, but he is always in a circle. If the cosmic dance of subatomic particles is the infinite, the infinite is always bounded by the zero....You cannot conceive of zero without the infinite. So there is nothing called nothingness without the completeness of the infinite or the completeness without the nothingness....This is dialectics of unity of opposites in Marxist terminology."

Mr. Yechury here is further seeking to secure endorsement of the Marxist dogma of dialectics, which is just a philosophical postulate just like any other philosophical postulate. From a metaphysical perspective, seeing everything as a process of motion involving strife between opposites (thesis and anti-thesis) is just what it is: philosophical speculation. But its validity is questioned when we apply it in the field of science. What is, for example, the opposite of the scientific truth that the Earth is round? Is there a synthesis to come out of the strife between thesis (Earth is round) and its anti-thesis (Earth is flat)? Or is it all just the dance of the dialectic?

'Dance of the Dialectic', by the way, is the title of a book authored by another Marxist intellectual who tries to rescue Marxism from dogmatism. Bertell Ollman, who authored the book, is more honest. Here is what he says:

"Dialectics is not a rock-ribbed triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis that serves as an all-purpose explanation; nor does it provide a formula that enables us to prove or predict anything; nor is it the motor force of history. The dialectic, as such, explains nothing, proves nothing, predicts nothing and causes nothing to happen. Rather, dialectics is a way of thinking that brings into focus the full range of changes and interactions that occur in the world." (p. 12, Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx's Method, University of Illinois Press, 2003)