i decided to just get right to the second part of the robot series. the third part was written 25 years later, and i'll approach it separately, with a fourth part. i'll no doubt split the foundation series in two as well, despite my previous comments.

unfortunately, i can't write out a detailed analysis of this text, because it doesn't justify one (edit: or, at least, i didn't initially think that it justified one. i have since expanded this review to further discuss it's treatment of marx' theory of alienation, which appears to be the point of the text). we are once again thrust into a sherlock holmes mystery, with baley playing the role of sherlock and daneel playing the role of watson (and you'll have to ask somebody else to explore the judaic significance of a story with characters that have the names of elijah, daniel and jezebel - i'm not interested), but there is no underlying allegory. it's really just plot.

that said, it happens to be that the setting is coincidentally worth discussing a little bit strictly because it mirrors the social relations we find ourselves in during the covid pandemic. on the planet of solaria, which is where baley and daneel are sent to solve a crime in this episode, people live as isolated individuals in mansions dotted across the surface by hundreds or thousands of miles, with upwards of 50 robots designed to serve each individual in specific manners, in a perfect division of labour. if asimov is toying with the leftist critique of the division of labour yet again, or drawing comparisons to slave to slave owner ratios in early 19th century america, he doesn't run with it (there is what seems like a forced reference to the helots in sparta, that i suspect may have been forced as a distraction, given that the references to american slavery are heavy-handed and longstanding), nor does he play with the idea of alienation, as presented by marx, which is a theory that i'm critical of, in too deep a manner - even if it's arguably the actual purpose of the text, something that i've decided to discuss in further detail, in this space. asimov again seems to come down somewhere in the middle of this debate over the importance of physical human contact in the maintenance of normal human mental health, both exploring the positive aspects of a society rooted strictly in contact via virtual reality, and in which physical touching and sex are frowned upon as primitive and sort of disgusting behaviours, and noting some of the potential drawbacks in terms of quality of life and in terms of blowback in the form of antisocial behaviour. i suppose it's an objective exploration of the idea, in that sense. but, as mentioned, this is really strictly of interest because it's contemporary - it makes you wonder what the next pandemic might be like, 100 years from now.

why am i critical of marx' views on alienation? i should acknowledge that this is a subtle thing, but it comes down to a rejection of the marxist/hegelian concept of how humans define ourselves, in terms of purpose and self-worth. basically, i don't think we define our worth in terms of our labour, and i think that only a slave could ever argue that we do, or that we ought to. i'd argue that the alienation of the worker from their labour (and ultimately from society) is desirable, and that this is actually why we want communism - that placing labour in the hands of automation, or otherwise separating it from individual humans through a process of socializing it, is the best way to reclaim our humanity and purpose, as emancipated individuals that define ourselves in terms other than our labour-purpose. an emancipated, free person ought to define their purpose in terms of their artistic expression, or in terms of their leisure time, and not in terms of their labour, as defined as some kind of collectivist contribution to society; in many cases, a free person might choose to spend their time doing something that we might currently describe as labour, but they would do it as a form of recreation, and not in order to justify their self-worth. but, this is why i'm an anarchist and you're not - i reject the producerism, i reject the romanticization of labour and instead assert that labour is a necessary evil, something we have to do whether we like it or not, and something we should all thoroughly despise as unbefitting of a free human being. the value of robots - of automation, of mechanization - is supposed to be that it frees us of the necessity to perform this unwanted evil of labour. to an anarcho-communist, separating the worker from their labour is the whole point - it's not a process of being alienated from anything, but a process of being emancipated from the slavery of market relations.

let's get back to the text. if the purpose of the text is to explore "alienation" via this mechanism of a planet where people only interact via virtual reality, however weakly it is actually developed, then what is asimov really getting at with this? is it a marxist critique of capitalist social relations? am i as opposed to what asimov thought as i am to what marx thought? see, that all seems a little off, given that (1) solaria is a broadly communist society, where there is no longer any conflict over control of the means of production and competition does not exist and (2) what asimov seems to be criticizing, the separation of the human from their "tribe" (by which he means society), is not really what "alienation" means in a marxist framework (it refers to a worker being alienated from the product of it's labour, not individuals being alienated from society, or technology acting as a force of alienation, although the latter has been frequently applied as a tool in a discourse on marxist alienation). the actual reality is that what asimov is getting at is sort of blurry and not particularly well formed, but nonetheless is some kind of vague critique of the idea of a society where individuals have no connection to each other and is probably influenced by marx' writing on alienation, perhaps via a secondary source. he's not the first person to apply the idea of marxist alienation in a blurry or non-specific manner and he probably won't be the last, but it makes a review like this difficult. do i analyze what marx actually said about alienation, or do i analyze asimov's confused or naive take on it? or do i just point out that asimov is talking about "alienation" without really talking about "marxist alienation" and kind of leave it at that?

asimov actually seems to point to some upsides of the social relations he's describing (and, in the end, the main character decides he has to leave the earth because he can no longer live in the new york city kibbutz because it's stifling his individuality), but each of his characters seem to be introduced to develop specific reasons why such a social relation isn't particularly desirable. this is why it seems to be the point of the text: what we have is a detective arriving on this strange world and being sequentially introduced to different characters that all demonstrate a different reason why the defining social relation on the planet is not a good one (and i'll leave the formal essay to whatever high school student gets here first). the character of leebig, who commits suicide on the threat of human contact, even seems to be a parody of the archetypal introverted science nerd, taken to the extreme. that said, while asimov may be fairly clear in his critique of the alienation defining the social relations in the society he's describing, even if it's not a strictly marxist critique, and even if the society isn't very capitalist, he isn't always convincing in his critique, and i find that a lot of his intended arguments against what he seems to be deciding is "alienation" are actually fairly compelling arguments in favour of the value of escaping from the deadening aspects of a collectivist society that dulls the abilities of individual expression. while i do not think it's intentional on asimov's behalf, i actually frequently find myself relating more to the solarians than i do to baley.

so, there isn't a clear allegory in the text, and the application of marx' theory of alienation isn't always well informed, but it is nonetheless clear that asimov was trying to write a novel that critiques the idea of alienation, and was influenced by marx in what he was doing. maybe i'm missing the point - maybe there's some irony in what he's doing, in twisting the situation around, and introducing alienation into an advanced techno-communist dystopia. maybe he's redefining the concept of alienation as it may exist in an actual dystopian future, and maybe he's even suggesting that alienation (as he's defining it) is actually an inescapable consequence of marx' theories, meaning maybe he's more on my side than i think. but, i think the balance of evidence is that he's working with an idea that's come to him second hand, or that he didn't fully understand, and that, as a result, it's hard to sort it out all these years later.

one may note that the character of gloria (who exists to show a specific perceived downside of the end of physical human social contact) is exactly the sort of character that asimov was frequently criticized for not writing into his novels. it's just more evidence that his feminist admirers are more grounded in reality than his feminist detractors.

there is also a weak tie-in to the previous text's plot about utopian socialist medievalists, in that asimov does explicitly present solaria as an exaggeration of the wastefulness of contemporary earth. so, that's the ironic plot twist - the earthling of the future experiencing self-realization at seeing his own history in the mirror. but, this is really only done in passing and comes off as comical more than it does as profound. there are also further explorations of the culture of the outer worlds - the vanguard - which are further explorations of the kibbutz theme, also drawing heavily from plato. there are further references to malthus and a further exploration of the potential positive uses of eugenics. so, asimov does explore the basic premise of the first novel a little bit more, but he doesn't really expand upon anything substantive, by doing so. the text ends with asimov revisiting the ending of the first volume, in deciding that humans must return to colonizing space to prevent the earth from surpassing it's carrying capacity.

this somewhat difficult sidestepping of the discussion of marxist alienation aside, the text is really otherwise fairly unexciting, unless you're actually into the whodunnit thing, in which case it should be noted that it's one of asimov's longer texts in that style, for better or worse.

i had to nap this afternoon, but i want to get through the last short stories collection (the bicentennial man) this weekend as well, and then get to the actual journal entries (five and counting...) over the next week. remember: i'm over two years behind on this. i really need to pick it up, and if the broken computer gives me an excuse for a few weeks, so be it.

i have to stop to eat.

but, this second text has little of much interest in it [it's just another sherlock holmes story, all plot. like, the guy's even got a pipe. it's sort of shameless.], and i don't expect much of a write up.

so, as i was offline for a bit, i decided to get the first asimov reading done. i had to take a few naps through it, but it only really took a few hours - which is less time than these short story collections. so, it should actually pick up, i think. two per week/minimum until i catch up...i could potentially do 3-4 of these in a 24 hour period if i'm alert and awake enough. so, i could do the entire foundation series in a weekend. and, that was what i intended to do with this, right? i could even still do the naked sun this weekend.

what do i think of the caves of steel?

on the surface, this is yet another sherlock holmes style detective story merely set in a universe with robots, and that features a robot in the role of our dear watson. i sleuthed that out with little effort; it was elementary. clearly. no shit; really. but, this isn't of a lot of interest to me, or to history. it's really the background universe that's of some interest, and the ideas he's setting off against each other in the whodunnit, rather than the whodunnit it, itself. i'm consequently not going to concern myself much with plot. so, what is this really about?

as asimov has passed into the realm of classics departments (something i've pointed out before), his texts have picked up a lot of religious hubris, a lot of it in an apparent misreading of his work that is intended to interpret him through the filter of his much less talented and very shady contemporary, l. ron hubbard. somehow, the openly atheist asimov has become recast as a secret religionist, or even a sympathizer of radical islam. as i am going to be reclaiming asimov for the atheist left as i do this, let's get the point clear, before we start - this is a direct quote from asimov, from 1982, when he was acting president of the american humanist society:

I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.

 

that's pretty unambiguous, i'd say.

now, that doesn't mean that asimov won't explore religious ideas, usually in an attempt to discredit them, and he clearly does very frequently do so. asimov was very much in the now lost tradition of intellectual liberalism (stemming from the likes of mill) that argued that it is better to expose one's opponents than ignore them. so, just because asimov talks about religion, or gives religion a voice in his texts, doesn't mean he's secretly aligned with it, given that all evidence suggests the opposite, and in a fairly aggressive way. it would seem odd that the classics departments seem so eager to misunderstand him, apparently on purpose. 

so, there are some religious references here, but the book is not about religion, and none of the organizations are really intended to represent any sort of religious body, nor does asimov really defend or attack religion in any substantive manner. the religious references are mild cultural throwaways with little real depth or meaning at all.

so, if the text is not about religion, what is it about? the answer is that the text is about communism. i told you from the start that i was going to implement a marxist reading of asimov, which i think is the most accurate one in terms of his intent. so, here we go...

let's just get the setting down, first. 

so, we're many eons into the future, and the earth is being recolonized by humans that had previously colonized places outside of the solar system, many centuries after the earth had abandoned further colonizing outer space. as the humans that left the earth did not have anarchy in reproduction, they are physically and mentally more robust and have far more advanced developments in technology (including far more advanced robots); however, they have also lost the vigour created by the randomness of natural selection, and are more prone to disease. for that reason, the earth is walled off from the colony by a force field and contact between the native humans and the returning colonists is strictly minimal. on the earth, humans have mostly retreated indoors (into caves of steel) by moving into giant hive-like cities that have no contact with natural phenomena like wind, rain or sun. the people in these cities live in a techno-communist dystopia with strong orwellian undertones, and this may be one of the earliest actual articulations of such a thing. a secret society of "medievalists" opposes this, is concerned about the job-killing effects of mechanization and wants to go "back to the soil". through the course of the text, it is explained that the colonists have returned to earth to convince the earth to return to active colonization, as it is perceived that overpopulation on the earth may lead to it becoming a threat to other planets. the story ends with the colonists deciding on a plan to co-opt the medievalist movement, and convert it into a pro-colonization movement, from the inside.

this was published in 1953, which was just after 1984 (a clear influence on the youngish asimov) and in the scariest parts of the cold war, coming out of world war two.

i think it's easy enough to naively misinterpret this as being about conservative religious groups fighting against technology, but it's less clear to me how anybody could think asimov was taking the side of the conservative, primitivist medievalists, if for no other reason than that the story is clearly written from the opposing perspective. you shouldn't need to know anything about asimov to realize it's a critique of primitvism, rather than an articulation of support for it. but, even that reading is, i think, missing the real point - what asimov is really setting up here is not a conflict between pro and anti technological forces, but rather a conflict between the unorganized utopian socialism of actual workers and the vanguard force of what marx called "scientific" socialism, in the bureaucracy of government. and, if we are to adopt the sherlock holmes approach in addressing this, the clues are pretty heavy-handed. no shit. really...

asimov tends to correct marx, a little, on the topic. marx is insistent that workers will take control of the means of production, and place robots under their command; asimov, with the hindsight of the luddite movement, and the general development of the democratic party (including the "progressive" movement) in the post-reconstruction years, seems to realize that the fourierism of utopian socialism is a better reflection of worker psychology. the most recent manifestation of this is the reaction to globalization, where remnants of the left found themselves in a struggle against workers, to try to prevent them from retreating inwards, but this fundamental mistake by marx is empirically demonstrable so long as we've had any sort of machines. we don't tend to want to take control of the machines, as we should; we want to destroy them, instead. asimov's insight into human behaviour is pretty valuable, here - whether it's innate or taught, we're a pretty conservative species, socially, and we tend to collapse into the most reactionary tendencies with little prodding. asimov clearly doesn't enjoy this, but he realizes the truth of it. so, asimov doesn't imagine that the future is run by a corrupt worker's committee that went fascist at the first hint of power, so much as he imagines that the workers of the distant future are still the same old utopian socialists from the 1840s, or the 1930s, and a communist vanguard has developed out of capital to run society, instead.

remember: the idea of capitalism competing with socialism is a bourgeois strawman that is incoherent in a marxist framework, as socialism arises from capitalism in an evolutionary process, and does not abolish it in a competitive process. to a marxist, capital ought to be on the side of socialism. but, the anti-technology conservatism of primitivism and ludditism is a serious, reactionary force to be reckoned with. so, the real opponents of communism become the proletariat, itself - unless they can be co-opted to realize their irrational and reactionary tendencies. 

so, his vision of new york (one of the caves of steel) is a techno-communist dystopia that seems to essentially be a parody of the kibbutz system, but it's entirely top down, and retains all kinds of remnants of hierarchy, with irony, but not dripping with it. asimov subtlety critiques this, but he seems to feel it's inevitable, and doesn't really get excited about it. the kinds of restrictions on every day life that might be viciously criticized by the anarchist orwell or by a more liberal critique of socialism are written of passively, and even approvingly, by asimov; to asimov, it is merely efficiency at work, and there's little use in irrationally resisting it. and, to some extent, he's right, even if we don't know the real limits of production on this planet, as of yet.

there are indeed discussions of malthus that seem to underlie the vision that i'll leave out of this analysis. that is ultimately what he's getting at: overpopulation. while we keep putting this off, we're in the midst of an energy crisis that we've been dealing with since the 70s (and asimov very astutely talks about running out of uranium in a distant nuclear-powered future, after we've run out of coal, which is why it's not an answer to the problems we have today) and a lot of the problems he's talking about are actually startlingly current. i've recently started eating nutritional yeast as a meat replacement (albeit mostly for health reasons), and i've written repeatedly about the need to move to hydroponics, as the soil rapidly depletes in value.

so, does that mean i'm on the side of the vanguard and opposed to the medievalists? while asimov clearly comes down on the side of embracing robots via his character of baley, which is not surprising, he doesn't clearly take a side, here. but, let's recall what he's placing in opposition to one another: this is a conflict between "utopian" and "scientific" socialism, and really about infighting on the left. it's really not any sort of broad ideological discourse that requires taking a firm position on. in the end, he presents a dialectic to resolve the conflict, by constructing an algorithm to let the vanguard work through the utopian movements via co-option. and, if it was that easy, right?

but, my answer is not really. asimov was a liberal (i keep saying that.) of the old-timey variety, which meant he was a communist in slow motion, or a communist in theory but with reservations in practice. his brand of liberalism wanted communism in the end, but didn't see a way to get there. so, he's really writing about tactics, via a narrative about robots.

i'm an anarchist, and i'm coming down on this in a very different way - while i share marx' critique of fourierism, which would have been very similar to his never written critique of progressivism, i am exceedingly distrustful of vanguards. so, i'd have to argue that his technocracy, as dystopian as it is, really isn't all that realistic; if you allow for a dictatorship of resources, you're going to end up with decadence and corruption of the worst sort, you're not going to get this ordered meritocracy that he's projecting. further, i thoroughly reject marx' strawmen arguments against proudhon and bakunin, as utopians; i think it's marx that harboured the stronger sympathies for religion, and even because he understood it as a tool of oppression, and that it is marx that comes off as more utopian. so, i'm going to fall somewhere in between here, and i'm going to suggest that asimov's dialectical solution is more than a little naive, even as i point out that it might also be trite - it might be somewhat of a sarcastic joke. there has to be a better way to place the technology into common ownership that allows for distributive justice and real democracy, which is what the left should be and is supposed to be about.

but, that's what this is - it's an allegory of the conflict between utopian and scientific socialism, and one that leaves an anarchist a little on the sidelines.

i actually kind of want to do the second part of this right away, so i'm going to just get to it and could potentially be done by mid-afternoon.