Notes

Review | Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State

Notable:

  • TVEs (township and village enterprises), while often nominally state-owned, were de facto private enterprises, and as such outcompeted SOEs (state-owned enterprises). Rural TVEs were often non-agricultural, typically in the industries of commerce and manufacturing, and survived in large part because of policies allowing for the resurgence of RCCs (rural credit cooperatives) as private lending institutions.
  • In 1985, RCCs accounted for 76.8 percent of all agricultural loans and 47.8 percent of all loans extended to TVEs. Post Tiananmen Square, RCCs were restricted to solely providing credit for agricultural purposes, curtailing entrepreneurship for the manifest reason that *most entrepreneurs started their business to get out of agriculture.
  • TVEs (in English) refer to xiangzhen qiye (rural and township enterprise) rather than xiangcun qiye (township and village enterprise). TVEs refer to the entire xiangzhen qiye phenomenon, which includes collective TVEs and straightforward rural private enterprises, while xiangcun qiye just refers to collective TVEs.
  • Wenzhou Province served as a pioneer and bellwether for the reformist orientation to the "private sector" broadly, and specifically with regards to informal finance. In Guizhou Province (the poorest), fully 68.9% of households had taken informal credit, and 81% of private credit loans were used for production.
  • Unlike other East Asian economies, the Chinese investment to GDP ratio increased as Chinese GDP increased, such that investment accounted for fully 50% of Chinese GDP in 2005. It can be argued that such obscene investment levels serve as a substitute for entrepreneurship, and would have been unnecessary only if China continued its pseudo-liberal policies of the 1980s.
  • In fact, such large investments in infrastructure came at the cost of investment in rural education and public health, directly leading to increased illiteracy rates and a marked decrease in improving infant mortality rates. Additionally, productivity growth stagnated.
  • Considering Shanghai an innovation hub is misleading. Zhejiang and Guangdong surpassed Shanghai in patent grants in the early 1990s, from 0.3x in the mid 1980s, due to their more entrepreneur-favoring policies. (This is especially striking when you note that Shanghai had between 3-6x more research scientists and R&D spending).
  • Urban entrepreneurs in Yunnan and Shanghai earned similar amounts, when the GDP per capita in Yunnan is one tenth that of Shanghai.
  • Personal income per capita and GDP per capita were negatively correlated in Shanghai in the 1990s.
  • India creates (where the present tense refers to ~2008) more value per laborer than China and is better at retaining wealth.

Summary of main points given by author:

- Explicitly private entrepreneurship in the non-farm sectors developed vigorously and rapidly in rural China during the 1980s. - Financial reforms, again in the rural areas, were substantial in the 1980s, and the Chinese banking system channeled a surprisingly high level of credits to the private sector in the 1980s. - Conventional property rights security was — and still is — problematic, but the security of the proprietor — the person holding the property — increased substantially at the very onset of the economic reforms. The Chinese policy makers in the early 1980s strongly, directly, and self-consciously projected policy credibility and predictability. - The political system, although absent of the normal institutional constraints associated with good governance, became directionally liberal early during the reform era.

On reforms:

- The Chinese definition of TVEs refers to their locations of establishments and registration (i.e., businesses located in the rural areas), not their ownership; Western researchers, on the other hand, have come to understand TVEs in terms of their ownership status. - The cognitive gap is huge: As early as 1985, of the 12 million businesses classified as TVEs, 10 million were completely and manifestly private. Almost every single net entrant in the TVE sector between the mid- 1980s and the mid-1990s was a private TVE; thus both the static and dynamic TVE phenomena were substantially private. - Private TVEs were most vibrant in the poorest and the most agricultural provinces of China (and this feature of private TVEs also explains the understatement of their size in the conventional reporting as well as the connections between rural private entrepreneurship and poverty alleviation). - There are reports of privatization of collective TVEs in the early 1980s and large-scale privatizations in the poor provinces. - Rural financial reforms — credit provisions to the private sector and allowing a degree of private entry into financial services — in the 1980s were endorsed by the governor of the central bank and the presidents of the major commercial banks. - Chinese reforms were heavily experimental in nature rather than relying on a blueprint approach, but the outcome of the experimentation was private ownership and financial liberalization. - By the measure of private-sector fixed-asset investments, the most liberal policy epoch, by far, was in the 1980s; in the 1990s, the policy was reversed, and many of the productive rural financial experiments were discontinued. - Rural administrative management was substantially centralized in the 1990s. - Credit constraints on rural entrepreneurship, including private TVEs, rose substantially in the 1990s. - Growth of rural household income in the 1990s was less than half of its growth in the 1980s, and the declining growth in the rural business income was especially pronounced. - The size of government — measured in terms of headcounts of officials and the value of fixed assets it controls — expanded enormously in the 1990s. - The directionally liberal political reforms of the 1980s were discontinued and reversed.

On Shanghai:

- Although they are located in the richest market in China, indigenous private-sector businesses in Shanghai are among the smallest in the country, and self-employment business income per capita is about the same in Shanghai as it is in provinces such as Yunnan, where GDP per capita is about 10 to 15 percent of that in Shanghai. (As an illustration of how unusual the above pattern is, imagine finding that self-employment business income per capita in the United States was about the same as that in Turkey.) - The political, regulatory, and financial restrictions on indigenous private entrepreneurship in Shanghai were extreme, as evidenced by the fact that the fixed asset investments by the indigenous private-sector firms peaked in 1985. - The share of labor income — inclusive of proprietor income — to GDP is very low in Shanghai. - Shanghai’s GDP increased massively relative to the national mean, but the household income level relative to the national mean experienced almost no growth. - Although wage income is high in Shanghai, asset income is among the lowest in the country. - Since 2000, the poorest segment of Shanghai’s population has lost income absolutely during a period of double-digit economic growth. Although aspiring to be a high-tech hub of China, the number of annual patent grants in Shanghai decreased substantially relative to that in the more entrepreneurial provinces, such as Zhejiang and Guangdong, in the 1990s. - Shanghai was also corrupt.

On consequences:

- Although GDP growth was rapid during both the 1980s and 1990s, household income growth was much faster in the 1980s. - The share of labor income to GDP was rising in the 1980s but declining in the 1990s. - Several studies on total factor productivity (TFP) converged on the finding that TFP growth since the late 1990s has either slowed down from the earlier period or has completely collapsed. - The majority of the much-touted poverty reduction occurred during the short 8 years of the entrepreneurial era (1980-1988) rather than during the long 13 years of the state-led era (1989-2002). - Income disparities worsened substantially in the 1990s, while they initially improved in the 1980s. - Governance problems, such as land grabs and corruption, intensified greatly in the 1990s. - The heavy taxation on the rural areas led to the withdrawal and rising costs of basic government services. - Between 2000 and 2005 the number of illiterate Chinese adults increased by 30 million, reversing decades of trend developments; this development has garnered almost no attention in the West. - The way the Chinese measure adult illiteracy implies that all of this increase was a product of the rural basic education in the 1990s, and this adverse development coincided closely in timing with the intensification of urban bias in the policy model.

misc:

  • urbanization -> centralization of power? Jane Jacobs might have something to say here?
  • much FDI just allowed for capital to be more efficiently used in China by routing through Hong Kong. See Lenovo
  • Stiglitz's perspective on TVEs was just plain wrong?

Review | Anglo-Saxon Magic

Possibly the most comprehensive extant anthology of rituals, especially Anglo-Saxon rituals. It opens with some historical notes, a discussion on the germane characteristics of magic, and applications / motivations of common ritualistic ingredients.

Storms notes that it is incoherent to consider magic as descending from animism, just as it is incoherent to consider religion as descending from animism. Given that magical practices were considered to have effects independent of the effects wrought on the world by spirits or phantoms, the two traditions obviously coexisted rather than being dependent on each other. Additionally:

Another argument against animism as the explanation of all magic is that the spirits themselves are subject to the power of magic, which would be hard to account for if they were the originators of that power. . . . A form of magic that is spread all over the world is that in which a man is killed by means of an effigy. . . . There is nothing animistic in this form of magic and it is based on the principle that like influences like, and that a thing that has once had contact with another thing remains irrevocably connected with it. Its effect is probably due to suggestion and autosuggestion.

What is magic?

In defining magic we have to bear in mind the practical side of magic, that is, the way in which it operates, and the theoretical side, that is, the notions, conceptions and beliefs that are the basis and origin of magical practices. We define magic as the art of employing a personal power that operates in such a way as cannot be perceived by physical sense and that is carred into effect by means of a traditional ritual.

The underlying idea of magic is that of power, force, or strength. Primitive man does not distinguish between ordinary, normal, natural power and extraordinary, abnormal, supernatural or preternatural, magical, spiritual, or even divine power. As Graebener says: "The Australian aborigines do not regard the natural as supernatural, but the supernatural as natural." A medicine man has not two functions but one function; he does not apply two methods but one method. Curing a patient by magic or by natural means is one and the same thing in the mind of a witch-doctor; he cures a sick man ans there is the end of it.

It follows, then, that there was no inherent difference between the rules by which normal procedures or magical procedures were meant to work. In fact, Storms claims that originally "all magical practices were simple and straightforward", and that their opacity was added later purely to enhance mystery amongst onlookers.

Anglo-Saxon magic primarily draws upon Christian and pagan influence (Icelandic, Germanic, Celtic, classical). Woden is one of the only gods frequently mentioned by name in suriving rituals, and distinguishing e.g. Germanic from classical influence is infintely harder than distinguishing Christian and pagan.

Rules for rituals would encompass an entire volume in and of themselves, but it is notable that the more pungent the ingredient the stronger its perceived effect was. From this, you get goat dung as a wound salve.

The earliest instance of an individual using a word with the function of "magic" to describe certain practices was Herodotus describing a class of Persian astronomer-priests. When you consider magic as primarily the domain of primitive peoples, it makes sense that from a civilized perspective one would want to reify it (and subsequently kill it in the process). So, the best way to study rituals is to treat them as a practice rather than the outcome of some established metaphysics.

His primary sources are the Leechbook and the Lacnunga.


Review | Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism

Concepts featured: natural tendency towards monopolization, power-law distribution of production, virtues of vertical integration, value accretion to speculators, capital oligpolies, capital export.

The basic argument:

Imperialism emerged as the development and direct continuation of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism in general. But capitalism only became capitalist imperialism at a definite and very high stage of its development, when certain of its fundamental characteristics began to change into their opposites, when the features of the epoch of transition from capitalism to a higher social and economic system had taken shape and revealed themselves in all spheres. Economically, the main thing in this process is the displacement of capitalist free competition by capitalist monopoly. Free competition is the basic feature of capitalism, and of commodity production generally; monopoly is the exact opposite of free competition, but we have seen the latter being transformed into monopoly before our eyes, creating large-scale industry and forcing out small industry, replacing large-scale by still larger-scale industry, and carrying concentration of production and capital to the point where out of it has grown and is growing monopoly: cartels, syndicates and trusts, and merging with them, the capital of a dozen or so banks, which manipulate thousands of millions. At the same time the monopolies, which have grown out of free competition, do not eliminate the latter, but exist above it and alongside it, and thereby give rise to a number of very acute, intense antagonisms, frictions and conflicts. Monopoly is the transition from capitalism to a higher system.

Lenin is surprisingly perceptive. Or, perhaps, his ideology tended to notice inconvenient truths about the "market" economies of the Gilded Age (most of which are downstream of markets having power-law distributions in outcomes) such as the centralization of not just raw material production, but commodity production and capital itself.

Repeatedly, I have seen the biggest flaw of pre-WW2 Marxist analysis to be its inability to predict or even notice the effects of technological innovation on the common man.

It goes without saying that if capitalism could develop agriculture, which today is everywhere lagging terribly behind industry, if it could raise the living standards of the masses, who in spite of the amazing technical progress are everywhere still half-starved and poverty-stricken, there could be no question of a surplus of capital. This “argument” is very often advanced by the petty-bourgeois critics of capitalism. But if capitalism did these things it would not be capitalism; for both uneven development and a semi-starvation level of existence of the masses are fundamental and inevitable conditions and constitute premises of this mode of production. As long as capitalism remains what it is, surplus capital will be utilised not for the purpose of raising the standard of living of the masses in a given country, for this would mean a decline in profits for the capitalists, but for the purpose of increasing profits by exporting capital abroad to the backward countries.

Sure, the Haber process was incubated and developed on the government's dime. But BASF then matured and implemented it, massively multiplying crop yields because there was money in it. Only capital-rich organizations can afford to invest in 0-1 jumps, and nations happen to be capital-rich organizations which work for the public benefit. Yet the exact ills of monopolies are also boons: vertical integration and large scale production allows the 1-many innovations to be implemented.

Regardless, companies will take the low-hanging fruit, and the low-hanging fruit in the early 20th century was investing in colonies. Railways, oil, coal, metals, cash crops, etc.. Marx and Engels claim that this results in the "bourgeoisification" of the British working class, as the profits from such foreign investment accrue in Britain rather than South Africa, and that British labor unions were pro-imperialist. This seems to be broadly correct.

Capital as export is a powerful force:

In 1904, Great Britain had 50 colonial banks with 2,279 branches (in 1910 there were 72 banks with 5,449 branches), France had 20 with 136 branches; Holland, 16 with 68 branches; and Germany had “only” 13 with 70 branches.68 The American capitalists, in their turn, are jealous of the English and German: “In South America,” they complained in 1915, “five German banks have forty branches and five British banks have seventy branches.... Britain and Germany have invested in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay in the last twenty-five years approximately four thousand million dollars, and as a result together enjoy 46 per cent of the total trade of these three countries.

He also makes the argument that the cause of net immigration to the colonial powers rather than net emigration from them is that such profit accruement decreases the incentives to leave:

One of the special features of imperialism connected with the facts I am describing, is the decline in emigration from imperialist countries and the increase in immigration into these countries from the more backward countries where lower wages are paid. As Hobson observes, emigration from Great Britain has been declining since 1884. In that year the number of emigrants was 242,000, while in 1900, the number was 169,000. Emigration from Germany reached the highest point between 1881 and 1890, with a total of 1,453,000 emigrants. In the course of the following two decades, it fell to 544,000 and to 341,000. On the other hand, there was an increase in the number of workers entering Germany from Austria, Italy, Russia and other countries. According to the 1907 census, there were 1,342,294 foreigners in Germany, of whom 440,800 were industrial workers and 257,329 agricultural workers. In France, the workers employed in the mining industry are, “in great part”, foreigners: Poles, Italians and Spaniards. In the United States, immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe are engaged in the most poorly paid jobs, while American workers provide the highest percentage of overseers or of the better-paid workers. Imperialism has the tendency to create privileged sections also among the workers, and to detach them from the broad masses of the proletariat.

Centering the monopoly as simultaneously alien to the free market and yet the inevitable result of a free market is particularly poignant, I feel. His other analyses are interesting from a historical perspective, but without intimate knowledge of the context they should not be wholly trusted.My translation was particularly good. Quite happy with it.


Chemical Turing Machines

Finite state automata (FSA) can be modeled with reactions of the form A+BC+D. FSAs operate over regular languages, so our job is to find some reaction which corresponds to determining whether or not a given "word" (sequence of inputs to the reaction) is a member of the language.

Generally, we will be associating languages of various grammars in the Chomsky hierarchy to certain combinations of "aliquots" added to a one-pot reaction, and in this case we want our aliquots to be potassium iodide and silver nitride. Take the language over the alphabet a,b consisting of all words with at least one a and one b. Now associate a with some part of KIO3 and b with some part of AgNO3. Then, the reaction KIO3+AgNO3AgIO3(s)+KNO3 only occurs when both of the reactants are present in solution, so the word is in the language if and only if silver iodide is present. (Or, equivalently, heat is released).

Type-2 grammars consist of languages that can be modeled with pushdown automatas, which differ from FSAs in that they have a stack that can store strings of arbitrary sizes. We call these languages "context-free languages", and the reactions which we associate to context-free languages are those with intermediaries. Again, because of automata equivalence, we can consider the simple case of the Dyck language: the collection of parentheses-strings that never contain more closed parentheses than open parentheses at any i and contain exactly equal amounts of closed and open parentheses at i=n.

We associate this with the pH reaction of sodium hydroxide and acetic acid (vinegar), with the amounts of each aliquot normalized to create identical disturbances in the pH of the solution. Note that as pH indicator aliquot is present at the beginning and end of the reaction (we associate it with the start-and-end token), the aliquot serves as the intermediary (the "stack", if you will). So, if pHmidpoint pH throughout the reaction, but is midpoint pH at the end, the reactor accepts the word. If not, it does not.

Incidentally, you can interpret this as the enthalpy yield YΔH(%) of the computation, defined as YΔH(%)=reaction heat during computationformation heat of input string×100. Dyck words maximize the enthalpy yield, whereas all other input sequences with imbalanced numbers of parentheses have lower enthalpy yields. Implication: all PDAs are doing something like "enthalpy maximization" in their computation. Couldn't find a good reference or exposition here, but something to look into.

How do we model Turing machines? You can think of a Turing machine as a "two-stack" PDA, where each stack corresponds to moving left or right on the tape. Physically, this implies that we want to model TMs with a reaction with at least two interdependent intermediaries, and we want it to be "expressive" enough to model "non-linearities". Oscillatory redox reactions are a natural choice, of which the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction is the most famous.

A typical BZ reaction involves the combination of sodium bromate and malonic acid, with the main structure as follows: 3BrO3+3CH2(COOH)2+3H+3BrCH(COOH)2+4CO2+2HCOOH+5H2O.

BZ reactions have a ton of macro-structure. Color changes as a function of the amount of oxidized catalyst, the proportions of the reactants and products fluctuate periodically, and even spatial patterns emerge from micro-heterogeneity in concentrations (e.g. reaction-diffusion waves, Pack patterns). These properties are incredibly interesting in and of themselves, but all we need for modeling TMs is that the reaction is sensitive to the addition of small amounts of aliquot.

Consider the language L3={anbncnn0}. Dueñas-Díez and Pérez-Mercader associate the letter a with sodium bromate and b with malonic acid. c must somehow be dependent on the concentrations of a and b, so we associate c with the pH of the one-pot reactor, which we can read with sodium hydroxide. An aliquot of the rubidium catalyst maps to the start-and-end token.

Oscillation frequency f is proportional to [BrO3]α×[CH2(COOH)2]β×[NaOH]γ, but it can also be modeled as a nonlinear function of the difference between the maximum redox value of the reaction and the mean redox value of a given oscillation, that is: D=Vmax+(VT+VPVT2), where VT and VP are the trough and peak potentials, respectively, and Vmax is the maximum potential. Ultimately, the final frequency of the reaction can be modeled as a quadratic in D# to high-precision (# denotes the start-and-end token, so it can be taken to be the last timestep in reaction coordinates).

What actually allows word-by-word identification though, is the sensitivity of the oscillatory patterns to the concentrations of specific intermediaries:

The various "out-of-order" signatures for words not in L3 can be explained as follows. Each symbol has an associated distinct pathway in the reaction network. Hence, if the aliquot added is for the same symbol as the previous one, the pathway is not changed but reinforced. In contrast, when the aliquot is different, the reaction is shifted from one dominant pathway to another pathway, thus reconfiguring the key intermediate concentrations and, in turn, leading to distinctive changes in the oscillatory patterns. The change from one pathway, say 1, to say pathway 2 impacts the oscillations differently than going from pathway 2 to pathway 1. This is what allows the machine to give unique distinctive behaviors for out-of-order substrings.1

Thermodynamically, characterizing word acceptance is a little bit more involved than that of PDAs or FSAs, but it can still be done. Define the area of a word as A(Word)=Vmax+τt#+30t#+τVosc(t)dt, where t# is the time in reaction coordinates where the end token is added, τ is the time interval between symbols, Vmax is the maximum redox potential, and Vosc is the measured redox potential by the Nerst equation Vosc=V0+RTnFln([Ru(bpy)33+][Ru(bpy)32+]), where Ru(bpy)33+ and Ru(bpy)32+ are the concentrations of the oxidized and reduced catalyst of the BZ reaction, respectively. Now, the Gibbs free energy can be related to the redox potential as so: ΔGosc=nFVosc, so the area of a word can be rewritten in terms of the free energy as A(Word)=1neF(ΔG×τt#+30t#+τΔGosc(t)dt). Accepted words all have some constant value of A(Word), while rejected words have a value that is dependent on the word.

L3 is a context-sensitive language, so it is only a member of the Type-1 grammar not the Type-0 grammar. However, for our purposes (realizing some practical implementation of a TM) it is roughly equivalent, as any finite TM can be realized as a two-stack PDA, and this models a two-stack PDA quite well.

1

Dueñas-Díez, M., & Pérez-Mercader, J. (2019). How Chemistry Computes: Language Recognition by Non-Biochemical Chemical Automata. From Finite Automata to Turing Machines. iScience, 19, 514-526. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2019.08.007

2

Magnasco, M. O. (1997). Chemical Kinetics is Turing Universal. Physical Review Letters, 78(6), 1190-1193. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.78.1190

3

Dueñas-Díez, M., & Pérez-Mercader, J. (2019). Native chemical automata and the thermodynamic interpretation of their experimental accept/reject responses. In The Energetics of Computing in Life and Machines, D.H. Wolpert, C. Kempes, J.A. Grochow, and P.F. Stadler, eds. (SFI Press), pp. 119–139.

4

Hjelmfelt, A., Weinberger, E. D., & Ross, J. (1991). Chemical implementation of neural networks and Turing machines. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 88(24), 10983-10987. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.88.24.10983


Review | The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

Broadly, I see three separate threads in this work: an attempt to situate second-wave feminism in a historical context, a pseudo-rehabilitation of Freudianism in service of the sexual dialectic, and an argument for the necessity of reproductive substitutes to achieve true equality.

The first of these, while interesting, is not something I have much to say about. The second primarily exists to justify the third—"exactly because Freud was correct in identifying the psychosexual underpinnings of society,1 then freedom can only be achieved by eliminating these shackles on mankind." The third germinated the cyberfeminist movement of the 1990s, which itself spawned CCRU and modern accelerationism (via Sadie Plant).

If you adopt this framing, Firestone's choice of the dialectic as a structure is in large part pragmatic, given she is trying to replicate Marx's totalizing analysis of class but as applied to sex. Adopting Freudianism is necessary to ensure that the nature of sex-oppresion subsumes that of class-oppression by establishing exploitation within a nuclear family as a more fundamental primitive than exploitation in the workplace. Race-oppresion is dealt with similarly.2

She is not kind to Western family structure. In a patriarchy, she argues, oppression of women and children are fundamentally intertwined. Both are forced to be physically dependent, sexually repressed, repressed in the family, and repressed in society. Even a mother's love is borne out of a shared helplessness. 3

She is even less kind to love. "For love, perhaps even more than child-bearing, is the pivot of women’s oppression today." Why? Because love allows male culture to parasitically feed off of the emotional strength of women. What should be a love between equals is perverted by its political context and the inevitable power dynamic between husband and wife. Regardless, men can't love. Men are incapable of loving.4

The solution? Free women from the "tyranny of reproduction" with artificial wombs and joint responsibility of the sexes for child-rearing. Give women and children political autonomy via economic independence. Completely integrate women and children into society, and give women and children sexual freedom.5

This "feminist revolution" she conceptualizes is similar in nature to the predicted uprising of the proles, but instead initialized by "cybernetic" innovation and a population explosion. "Cybernetics" (what we would today call AI and automation) would simultaneously eliminate the need for a "transient workforce" (mostly women) and the need for house-labor. The population explosion would necessitate some form of population control, which ought take the place of artificial reproduction. Ergo, the fundamentals would be in place for a feminist revolution.

I love this book. It bites bullets.6 It has novel conceptual insights. It has truth to it. Her intellectual descendants were better off for her having written this, and it gives a transcendent vision rather than an immanent one. She even gives a blueprint for her utopia.

Quotes

1

Other such examples are abundant, but I have made my point: with a feminist analysis the whole structure of Freudianism – for the first time – makes thorough sense, clarifying such important related areas as homosexuality, even the nature of the repressive incest taboo itself – two causally related subjects which have been laboured for a long time with little unanimity. We can understand them, finally, only as symptoms of the power psychology created by the family.

2

Like sexism in the individual psyche, we can fully understand racism only in terms of the power hierarchies of the family: in the Biblical sense, the races are no more than the various parents and siblings of the Family of Man; and as in the development of sexual classes, the physiological distinction of race became important culturally only due to the unequal distribution of power. Thus, racism is sexism extended.

3

The mother who wants to kill her child for what she has had to sacrifice for it (a common desire) learns to love that same child only when she understands that it is as helpless, as oppressed as she is, and by the same oppressor: then her hatred is directed outwards, and 'mother-love' is born.

4

It is dangerous to feel sorry for one's oppressor – women are especially prone to this failing – but I am tempted to do it in this case. Being unable to love is hell. This is the way it proceeds: as soon as the man feels any pressure from the other partner to commit himself, he panics. . .

5

But in our new society, humanity could finally revert to its natural polymorphous sexuality – all forms of sexuality would be allowed and indulged. The fully sexuate mind, realized in the past in only a few individuals (survivors), would become universal. Artificial cultural achievement would no longer be the only avenue to sexuate self-realization: one could now realize oneself fully, simply in the process of being and acting.

6

In this view, the later Russian reinstitution of the nuclear family system is seen as a last-ditch attempt to salvage humanist values – privacy, individualism, love, etc., by then rapidly disappearing.

But it is the reverse: the failure of the Russian Revolution to achieve the classless society is traceable to its half-hearted attempts to eliminate the family and sexual repression. This failure, in turn, was due to the limitations of a male-biased revolutionary analysis based on economic class alone, one that failed to take the family fully into account even in its function as an economic unit. By the same token, all socialist revolutions to date have been or will be failures for precisely these reasons.