The four anti-pillars of Marxism

Those who don't understand history are doomed to repeat it.... And those who do are doomed to watch in horror as those who don't repeat it. 

In recent years, I've watched in horror Marxism seemingly coming back in fashion, as if we're in the 1920s. Too many people lack the practical experience, theoretical context,  or intelligence to know the lessons of the last 100 years. 

The seven pillars of wisdom in Christianity or the seven pillars of Islam are things you should build on. With Marxism, we have some seductive big ideas that you should not build on. I call them anti-pillars.  I won't explain them since many great people have before. I'll just list them as pointers.

1. Economic calculation problem and the fallacy of central planning.  

It is not just about having better computers or more data. The information in an economic system doesn't exist in one place or time, it is distributed. Furthermore, even if you had it all at once, much of it is not explicitly manifest but rather implicit preferences.

2. The labor theory of value is wrong

It is not just labor vs capital, there is also value and, more subtly there is quality.  If I spend an hour on the piano and Mozart spends an hour, it's one hour of labor. But there is a subjective difference in value. And an objective difference in price that others will pay for it. Finally, there is something that is neither objective nor subjective, beyond dialectics, namely quality.

3. The class struggle is a static one dimensional model, but human economic relationships are dynamic and multidimensional. 

This may have been subtle in the 19th century, but in the 21st century, it should completely obvious.  In fact even in the 20th century, class was often cynically replaced by ethnicity or religion by various revolutionary Marxists hungry for power.

4. A political system based on class struggle necessarily evolves into an escalating war of purity. In this process, the most ruthless sociopaths, the self-appointed revolutionary vanguard, always end up as the rulers. Which is why almost every Marxist state converges on a violent totalitarian government.

If you are ever about to be to be seduced, at least know these anti-pillars, and spend a small amount of time understanding them.

አቡጊዳ...? Completion of the abugida sequence

I've long been curious about the structure of "a-bu-gi-da".  What comes after the first four elements of the sequence? Finally today, I worked out an answer:

አቡጊዳሄዝቶየኩሊማኔስዖፐሩሢጣዬፍኆፀቹዊሓሼቅኞጀጹጲ

Since I'm just having fun, and I am lazy, I didn't do any real research. I just tried to construct it somewhat logically. But it's probably wrong. So, apologies to real scholars out there. If there's an authoritative answer, maybe one of you will see this post and tell me. As they say, the fastest way to get an expert answer to a question is to post a wrong answer on the Internet! While we wait, let me explain my construction.  

Background

Abugida is the name used for alpha-syllabaries, like the Ethiopic (aka Ge'ez) script, where each character is a syllable equivalent to a vowel + a consonant in the roman alphabet. In fact, the term comes from ge'ez. But it is now used as a general term for alpha-syllabaries including some Indic ones.  Now normally, the Ethiopic character set is organized in a matrix where the columns correspond to the vowel form and the rows to the consonant, like this:

Image courtesy of this paper

As you can see the sequence of rows (consonants) here is not a-b-g-d-.... It is h-l-h-m-s-r-... So where does a-bu-gi-da come from?  Notice it sounds a lot like: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, ... 

A Greek connection

So it is related to the Greek alphabet! 

Note that I say "related" and not "comes from", which may surprise Westerners who tend to think of ancient Greece as the origin of a lot of stuff. But Greek letters descended from the Phoenician alphabet, and Phoenician is Semitic, as is Ethiopic. So the relation may go back to an earlier node in the ancestor tree, or could be a more recent adoption. 

Another interesting connection is that Ethiopic numerals from 1 to 6:  ፩, ፪, ፫, ፬, ፭, ፮, ... look a lot like the first 6 Greek letters α, β, Γ, δ, ε, ζ, ... (lowercase except gamma being uppercase). I should note that Professor Hailu Habtu in a recent book entitled "Aksum: A glimpse into an African Civilization" (excellent book by the way) disagrees with this connection. But I digress.

The Diagonal

The a-bu-gi-da consonant order is the same as the first four letters of the Greek alphabet. But notice also the vowels correspond to the first four vowel forms of the Ethiopic alpha-syllabary. So if we imagine a different matrix, with the rows matching consonants in the Greek order, and columns matching the vowels in the Ethiopic order, then we are basically going down a diagonal. Cute!

I am fond of diagonals. Like Cantor's diagonal argument that the real numbers are not countable. A classic way to introduce the difference between countable and uncountable infinity. Everyone should learn that! And how about eigenvalue decomposition... But I digress, again.

So if we follow the diagonal, wrapping around when we run out of columns, i.e. diagonal with column index being modulo 7, we can continue the a-bu-gi-da sequence. Here's the sequence with explanations. 

አ (a) – ሀ (h), 1st vowel /ä/ (Greek: Α, alpha)

ቡ (bu) – በ (b), 2nd vowel /u/ (Greek: Β, beta)

ጊ (gi) – ገ (g), 3rd vowel /i/ (Greek: Γ, gamma)

ዳ (da) – ደ (d), 4th vowel /a/ (Greek: Δ, delta)

ሄ (he) – ሀ (h), 5th vowel /e/ (Greek: Η, eta)

ዝ (zə) – ዘ (z), 6th vowel /ə/ (Greek: Ζ, zeta)

ቶ (to) – ተ (t), 7th vowel /o/ (Greek: Θ, theta)

የ (yä) – የ (y), 1st vowel /ä/ (Greek: Ι, iota)

ኩ (ku) – ከ (k), 2nd vowel /u/ (Greek: Κ, kappa)

ሊ (li) – ለ (l), 3rd vowel /i/ (Greek: Λ, lambda)

ማ (ma) – መ (m), 4th vowel /a/ (Greek: Μ, mu)

ኔ (ne) – ነ (n), 5th vowel /e/ (Greek: Ν, nu)

ስ (sə) – ሰ (s), 6th vowel /ə/ (Greek: Ξ, xi)

ዖ (‘o) – ዐ (‘), 7th vowel /o/ (Greek: Ο, omicron)

ፐ (pä) – ፐ (p), 1st vowel /ä/ (Greek: Π, pi)

ሩ (ru) – ረ (r), 2nd vowel /u/ (Greek: Ρ, rho)

ሢ (śi) – ሠ (ś), 3rd vowel /i/ (Greek: Σ, sigma)

ጣ (ṭa) – ጠ (ṭ), 4th vowel /a/ (Greek: Τ, tau)

ዬ (ye) – የ (y), 5th vowel /e/ (Greek: Υ, upsilon)

ፍ (fə) – ፈ (f), 6th vowel /ə/ (Greek: Φ, phi)

ኆ (ḫo) – ኀ (ḫ), 7th vowel /o/ (Greek: Χ, chi)

ፀ (ṣä) – ፀ (ṣ), 1st vowel /ä/ (Greek: Ψ, psi)

ቹ (ču) – ቸ (č), 2nd vowel /u/ (Greek: Ω, omega, next Ge'ez consonant)

ዊ (wi) – ወ (w), 3rd vowel /i/ (no Greek equivalent, next Ge'ez consonant)

ሓ (ḥa) – ሐ (ḥ), 4th vowel /a/ (next Ge'ez consonant)

ሼ (še) – ሸ (š), 5th vowel /e/ (next Ge'ez consonant)

ቅ (qə) – ቀ (q), 6th vowel /ə/ (next Ge'ez consonant)

ኞ (ño) – ኘ (ñ), 7th vowel /o/ (next Ge'ez consonant)

ጀ (ǧä) – ጀ (ǧ), 1st vowel /ä/ (next Ge'ez consonant)

ጹ (ṣu) – ጸ (ṣ), 2nd vowel /u/ (next Ge'ez consonant)

ጲ (p̣i) – ጰ (p̣), 3rd vowel /i/ (next Ge'ez consonant)

To generate this I used the Grok large language model. After all, LLMs are language sequence completers, how appropriate! It took a bit of prompting to get to this. If you are interested, here's the whole conversation with Grok.

Actually this whole exercise was as much to see if an LLM could do this as it was about the subject itself.   

Oh by the way, if you want serious content on Ethiopic, check out  geez.org.