On technology and the classless society

Marx’s argument amounts to this: any project to deliver a classless society, with wealth distributed according to need, must be based on the most advanced technologies and organisational forms created by capitalism itself. It can’t be based on schemes originating in the heads of philanthropic bosses or philosophers. And you can’t return to the past.

This passage, I am told via Nick Srnicek's tumblr (by way of Mark Fisher's Twitter feed), comes from Paul Mason's book, Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions (Verso, 2012; they appear to have been pushing this book rather hard). I find the formulation helpful, because it allows me to directly address something that's been nagging at me for a while now, making me feel alienated from most currents of the Left. I have no idea what Mason actually discusses in his book on this point, but it was excerpted as if it stands alone, and it is close enough to other leftist formulations that I feel justified in taking it as it is. Anyway, whenever I read something like this, I want to shout: The classless society of the future cannot "be based on the most advanced technologies and organisational forms created by capitalism itself"!

I see this as a massive problem, yet when I do want to shout, I instead hold back, not wanting to get into an internet battle I don't often have the patience for. Feeling insufficiently read up on this or that theoretical model, or otherwise under-informed, or wary of being accused of nostalgia, of Luddism, of Romanticism, or something like that. That said, here are just a few (very) preliminary points that occur to me:

1. Too often technology is taken for granted, in the sense that advances are taken as the natural order of things. This is fitting, I suppose, in that capitalism itself is experienced as simply the way things are and must be, as the air we breathe, as natural. I don't think that's the problem here, but it's common enough, even among leftists.

2. Just in general, theoretically, it seems to me that a classless society implies a situation in which the state no longer exists, and a situation in which, by definition, class inequalities, along with massively hierarchical institutions, also no longer exist. In which case, precisely how could such a society be based on the most advanced organizational forms created by capitalism? Or, perhaps the problem is, what is meant by "advanced"? Is "advanced" a value judgment? (If so, how is that judgment made, and by whom?) Otherwise, I fail to see how the massively hierarchical corporation, or government agency, or the like, can possibly be the model for, or basis of, a classless society of the future.

3. Politically, not enough attention is paid to the circumstances through which our advanced technology is produced and maintained. Questions need to be asked concerning the source of the energy needed to develop, produce, and maintain today's advanced technology. Who does that work? Would a classless society transfer, by force, the energy needed to fuel such a process? Or, how would a classless society justify the continuation of such transfers? How would it justify the kind of labor needed to make it happen? (Is the internet possible without cheap oil?)

4. Practically speaking, it seems obvious to me that our current ecological situation all but screams out that we need to come to terms with the idea that our advanced technology will not be available forever. While we have them, we should feel no compunction about using the various advanced tools currently at our disposal, but it seems to me we should not expect those tools to always be available.

5. Notice how the question is framed (and almost always seems to be framed): either you believe the classless society should be based on the most advanced technological and organization forms created by capitalism, or you're guilty of utopian dreaming ("schemes originating in the heads of philanthropic bosses or philosophers") or of romanticizing this or that pre-capitalist past. Often it's explicitly framed like this: either you're resolutely modern, or you're a dangerous dreamer who romanticizes the past. I maintain that this binary is unhelpful. The past has a lot to teach us, and we've forgotten much.

Ok, that's enough for now; more to come.

"Little else is worth thinking about"

The cheerful posts come fast and furious. Robert Jensen's words, excerpted in the last post, reminded me of Philip Goodchild's preface to his difficult and fascinating (and as yet unfinished by me) book, Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety. He describes the book's origins:

This book emerged from the tension between four powerful insights—insights bringing problems, not solutions. The last insight to arrive was the contemporary truth of suffering: a growing awareness that current trends in globalization, trade and the spread of technology are not only leading towards a condition where the human habitat is unsustainable, but the urgency and responsibility announced by this preventable catastrophe mean that little else is worth thinking about. Prior to that, research for this present work was initiated by the realization that the encompassing framework delimiting the production of thought and values in modern life, and exerting increasing influence, was simply the impersonal and self-positing structure of money as the measure of values. As a whole, however, my work is grounded in an 'idea'—or perhaps I should say an 'experience'—of what I will call 'God'. This 'idea' was so overwhelming and so distinct from our customary ways of thinking that, while intelligible in itself, it remains incommunicable until it has called into question and reformulated all existing categories of philosophy and theology. Finally, the work of the revaluation of values which may lead to the cessation of suffering was developed in the form of the 'murder of God'—the actual work of calling into question the fundamental concepts and values of the European tradition.

Each of these insights fractured my self-consciousness, exposing an abyss beneath all my thoughts and relations to myself, to others and to the world. I became a stranger to those closest to me as well as to myself. Each issue imposed itself as a dynamic force on thought, a problem of unlimited importance that I feel barely equipped to begin to address. Moreover, these are not personal but universal and global problems, imposing the responsibility on each person to find an appropriate way of addressing them. In the case of each problem, however, there is only a minority who feel the impact of its force, and those who are concerned with two or more of these problems are much fewer. The public consensus is engaged in a vast enterprise of evasion, sheltering in a wicked and lethal complacency. Yet each of these problems calls to and awakens the others. Anyone who carefully attends to the significance of these issues—and this book is an attempt to communicate their significance—may risk having their world shattered. Thinking is nearly as dangerous as complacency.

Hysterical and apocalyptic

At New Left Project, Robert Jensen (not to be confused with Derrick) writes about the pitfalls of online activism (e.g., the tendency to think that political information = political action) and the challenges facing activism in the face of immanent ecological collapse ("The problem is not just that existing economic, social, and political systems are incapable of producing a more just and sustainable world, but that there isn’t time available for working out new ways of understanding our self, others, and the world"). Towards the end of the piece, he writes:

Though I made no claims to special predictive powers, two things seem likely to me: (1) All human activity will become dramatically more local in the coming decades, and (2) Without coordinated global action to change course, there is little hope for the survival of human society as we know it. When I offer such as assessment, I am routinely accused of being hysterical and apocalyptic. But I don’t feel caught up in an emotional frenzy, and I am not preaching a dramatic ending of the human presence on Earth. Instead, I’m taking seriously the available evidence and doing my best to make sense of that evidence to guide my political choices. I believe we all have a moral obligation to do that.

Addressing the role of online activism in all of this, he notes that "we’re used to talking about the people who don’t embrace computers as being the ones stuck in the past. After all, isn’t the internet the key to the future? Not if the future is going to be defined by less energy and less advanced technology." Localism. Sustainability. Less energy and less advanced technology. An altered sense of what constitutes the good life. When do we think seriously about it? And in any case how is my thinking seriously about it going to do the trick?

Placeholding thoughts on science and philosophy and politics, etc

A few things have been on my mind, jostling for position amidst the fog, angling for inclusion in essays. A longer post or two may come out of these, but no promises or threats.

1. I may have missed the best time to acquaint myself with the language of philosophy, but this is not altogether a bad thing. My perspective on things is different for not having already immersed myself in it. For example, in reading blogs such as Levi Bryant's Larval Subjects and Graham Harman's Object-Oriented Philosophy, I have learned that being a realist means that one holds that the world exists--objects exist--independent of man's relation to them (but not necessarily those traits that we perceive); I have further learned that this runs counter to the main currents of continental philosophy. I find this astonishing (assuming I understand things correctly). In the deleted iteration of his blog, Harman suggested that "this results from the combined fear & boredom with which most humanities types face the natural sciences". No doubt this is true. I find myself more interested, by far, in continental than in analytic philosophy, yet it would never occur to me to doubt the independent existence of external objects. (This Larval Subjects post helps clarify the realism thing for me. His casual use--not at all unique to him--of the word knowledge bothers me. Something else to return to here.)

2. Science, it follows, is very important. This sounds like a ridiculous thing to say, but I say it to make it clear that I personally value science very highly and am aware that some of my posts in recent months might give one the impression that I do not. I come out of that utilitarian, empirical, Anglo-American mode which I have elsewhere decried. Part of that is a strong devotion to science (which is not to say that I have been specifically trained in any of the natural sciences). So science is unquestionably important, but I have some political, philosophical, and ethical questions for it, some which I've always had, if largely unarticulated, some of which have come to mind more recently. In my view, science is too often seen as this pure mode of inquiry, independent of political and economic concerns, untainted by prejudice or point of view or money, unrelated, in its historical development, to other historical arcs. Of course it is not. Worse, the history of science and of technological change is seen as inexorable, inevitable, as if it were not heavily implicated in the history of capitalism (which, recall, requires continual technological and organizational change in order to maintain the rate of accumulation).

3. Allow me, then, to use this theme as an excuse to once again refer to Graham Harman and two posts he wrote (one, two) reporting on a lecture he attended in Ireland given by James Lovelock. The topic, of course, is climate change and how we're basically fucked. Harman makes the lectures and Lovelock's books sound both fascinating and frightening (there is nothing about climate change that is not finally frightening, if one pays the least attention to the science and isn't simply trying to make excuses in order to avoid massive change), but there is one thing in particular I want to highlight here. Among the points Lovelock makes, according to Harman, is this:

Guilt is unhelpful. We got to this point because we all naturally struggled to survive and flourish, farming and industrializing for this reason. Anger at energy companies is misplaced. They only produce so much carbon dioxide because we all demand energy in our own lives.

Similarly, in this article at TomDispatch, Chip Ward, while arguing correctly that perhaps we should not be trying to "recover" the economy as it was because of its inherent ecological untenability, says this:

Believing that we are unbounded by nature's limits or rules, we built an economy where faster, cheaper, bigger, and more added up to the winning hand. Then -- until the recent global meltdown at least -- we acted as if our eventual triumph over anything from resource scarcity to those melting icebergs was a foregone conclusion.

He goes on for a bit longer in this vein. Who is this "we" of whom he and Lovelock speak? We did not build the economy. While we do certainly all naturally struggle to survive and flourish, there is absolutely no reason to believe that industrialization was necessary to that struggle--meaning both that there is no reason to assume that industrialization necessarily occurs out of that struggle, nor that industrialization has aided us, for humanity as a whole, in that struggle. And in no sense can it be said that we merely "got to this point" because of decisions we made. Capitalism was imposed and resisted. Industrialization was imposed and resisted. This imposition and resistance continues.

4. This post at Voyou Désœuvré, on Andrea Dworkin and Joan of Arc and Machiavelli and constructions of masculinity, reminds me, yet again, that I've been wanting to read Dworkin and other radical feminists for some time. To my mind, the way forward must be radically feminist, which to me means that at minimum change must be woman-focused, which itself inevitably means focusing on issues surrounding pregnancy and birth and childcare and other things of immediate importance to mothers. That is, the larger conception of feminist politics should focused less on "the workplace" (the right to work being on the one hand largely redundant, since most women have no choice, and on the other hand normalizing highly dysfunctional male work values) than on childcare work and on health issues for women and children--i.e., issues affecting most women. Anyway, Voyou isn't talking about this here but ends by making use of Wendy Brown's criticisms of Catherine MacKinnon and "the doomed attempt by some feminists to achieve feminist ends solely by appealing to the very liberal legal structure they themselves recognize as irredeemably patriarchal". Good stuff.

5. More science pointers, to finish up. I have found a few more recent Larval Subjects posts about neurology utterly fascinating, full of all kinds of stuff that I know is absolutely right, but which also raise in me the germ of objection at a certain basic level. This one has me wanting to read books by neuroscientist Gerald Edelman, for example his A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination, discussed in the post. Late in the entry, LS makes this crucial observation: "philosophers all too often privilege the standpoint of the adult and the 'healthy', ignoring childhood development". And this post about the "bidirectionality of causal relations between different levels" of different kinds of systems, such as DNA and the environment, has me nodding along, yes, yes, yes, yes. A longer quote to spell more of it out (since I have not described it at all):

[Biologist Gilbert] Gottleib is pointing out the manner in which the environment (not to mention RNA, cells, networks of cells, and organs) can actualize and activate DNA in a variety of ways producing very different outcomes. Pause and consider that for a moment. Rather than an inexorable unilateral development from DNA to structure and function, we instead get bidirectional feeding forward and backward producing an aleatory outcome that can only be described as a genuine creation. Factors such as environmental temperature, light and darkness, the presence or absence of particular nutrients and chemical substances, the presence or absence of dampness, the presence of various predators, altitude, caregivers, etc., all make important differences in the final actualized individual or phenotypical outcome. But to speak of a phenotypical outcome is already to speak poorly, for ontogenesis is a lifelong process for the organism that doesn’t simply end with maturity. But in addition to all of this, all things being equal, cultural formations, social relations, social encounters, etc., as environmental factors, feed back all the way to the genetic level as well. I am not simply a product of my culture at the level of my mentality, my subjectivity, but at the level of my cells and my DNA as well. Were I born in the 18th century, my DNA and my cells would be actualized differently as a result of a variety of different environmental factors ranging from diet to how I am brought up. My phenotype, my mature organism, would not be the same.

It's nice to see the adaptationists (who, as LS notes, end up "naturalizing and essentializing human practices, social organizations, and forms of subjectivity in ways that can only be described as reactionary") taken to task, and those steeped in cultural studies and social sciences should indeed be chided for ignoring out of hand neuroscience and evolutionary biology (as they have also been chided by, for example, Marxist anthropologist Chris Knight, who in his brilliant and important book Blood Relations, recall, called the general leftwing response to modern evolutionary theory a disgrace). To my mind this is all blindingly obvious (note, also, that in my post about patterning texts I effectively make part of the same argument). Or, more charitably, it's a more detailed version of the nature and nurture argument. Anyone who has a child, or indeed as ever watched children with any attention, can see that the child both has its own personality, distinct from those of his or her parents, and is always learning, always figuring things out. Nature versus nurture has always been a false dichotomy, one that's always bothered me, since before I understood the first thing about evolution.

This post was going to be even longer and include stuff about literary and more explicitly political stuff on my mind of late--including Blanchot's communism, Heidegger, the bourgeois novel, genre--but they'll have to wait as it's time to close this one out.

Ecologically Untenable

In truth, of course, it's not quite the state of the economy that elicits my real apocalypticism. The economic crisis could in fact be a distinctly positive event, in the big picture, since a massive economic downturn seems to be the only thing capable of putting the breaks on accumulation and production. Because the real engine driving capitalism is, as Harvey puts it, "accumulation for accumulation's sake", the endless need for growth, expansion, technological change. This needs to stop. It is destructive, irrational; it's going to kill us. Derrick Jensen says we're all insane; I'm not sure he's wrong.

Is it obvious I'm talking about the environment? Widespread ecological breakdown is immanent, a breakdown which is not being taken sufficiently seriously.

On this theme, here is John Bellamy Foster, in the March 2009 issue of the Monthly Review:

In addressing capitalism as a failed system I have focused first on the deepening economic crisis. But this is not the worst of the world’s problems. The greatest peril is the growing threat of planetary ecological collapse. Here the danger is much greater than in the case of the world economy but the sense of alarm and the call for immediate and massive action is less widespread. As the Swedish Tällberg Foundation stated in its 2008 report, Grasping the Climate Crisis: A Provocation,

The world [at present] faces a breakdown of the global financial system. The consequences are staggering, with ripple effects the world over that deliver the severest blows to the poor. Fear is rising. One would have expected somewhat of the same level of anxiety with regard to the looming breakdown of major parts of the Earth system—rapid deforestation, overfishing, freshwater scarcity and the disappearing Arctic sea ice. Reports of such events and processes are abundant, but the level of concern is still conspicuously low.

The most serious ecological threat is of course global warming, which is inducing widespread, multi-faceted climate change, with disastrous implications for life on earth. But in a wider sense, the global environmental crisis involves manifold problems and cannot be reduced to global warming alone. These multiple hazards have a common source in the world economy, including: the extinction of species, loss of tropical forests (as well as forest ecosystems generally), contamination of and destruction of ocean ecology, loss of coral reefs, overfishing, disappearing supplies of fresh water resources, the despoliation of lakes and rivers, desertification, toxic wastes, pollution, acid rain, the approaching exhaustion of easily available crude oil resources, urban congestion, the detrimental effects of large dams, world hunger, overpopulation, etc. Together these threats constitute the greatest challenge to the survival of humanity since its prehistory.

The whole thing is worth reading. Meanwhile, mainstream ecomomists keep on keeping on, as if an expansion of greenhouse emissions is still acceptable, or ecologically viable. As Foster puts it:

despite the seriousness of this contradiction between the capitalist economy and the planet, establishment economists generally argue against any major attempt to avert climate change, i.e., to bailout nature.

To say nothing of the outright obtuseness of politicians and pundits. If I appear to wish for the immediate end of capitalism, even if I know we're not ready for it and know that it's unlikely in the extreme, and I do, it's because its continuation, even for the short-term, is ecologically untenable. And yet we blithely go about our business. We are insane.