Memoirs are not stories

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Since putting a book of SF/thriller short stories together a year ago I have been running a reset. Doing some hard thinking about writing, and carefully reading people like Irène Némirovsky (Suite Française, All Our Worldly Goods) and John Fowles (The Magus, The Collector). Authors who write character-driven fiction.

Fay Weldon once wrote indignantly that authors do not write about their own lives or those of people they know, they make characters up from their imaginations. But she was being disingenuous: how many classics are revealed to be thinly-disguised autobiography, with 'just the names changed'?

Where she is right is that memoirs are not stories. Memoirs are life in all its plotlessness, banality and broader inconsequentiality. Stories are how we would like reality to be: clear characters, an arc to a conclusion. In stories there is closure and satisfaction; in our memories of life - not so much.

I have some new stories in preparation.

“The Magus” - John Fowles: a Jungian odyssey

 

Amazon link

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I think I always had the wrong idea about John Fowles, that he was some kind of middle-brow airport writer. Wasn’t “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” just a version of “The English Patient”?

It pains me to expose my ignorance thus. “The Magus” is wonderful. Its protagonist is me when I was Nicholas’s age: in my mid-twenties, smart, insensitive, needy for girls, utterly self-centred, operationally, if not psychologically, selfish.

And Alison was the girl I was unknowingly looking for, while being all-too-ready to diss her and drive her away. Hyper-logical Nicholas, as one reviewer describes him, understands neither himself nor others. He's a slave to his own dominant drives for knowledge and power, the latter being an overriding desire for autonomy of the self. In short he's a quintessential INTP.

Here is Michelle’s synopsis:

“Nicholas Urfe is a not-very-good schoolteacher with romantic ideas of himself as a solitary heart and poet. (Really, he’s kind of a womanizing bastard.) He accepts a teaching job on a breathtaking but isolated Greek Island and meets Maurice Conchis, an eccentric, wealthy man who interacts with few outsiders. Conchis tells Nicholas stories of the past, weaving reality and fiction while claiming powers verging on the supernatural. When Conchis reveals a beautiful young woman staying with him – claiming she is a ghost – Nicholas’s infatuation draws him into Conchis’s mysteries and deceits.”

Fowles was deeply drawn to Jung (there’s a Freudian analysis of Nicholas at the end, woundingly accurate) and I read the ‘GodGame’ as an extended type-developmental schedule in which Nicholas is forced deeper inside himself, past his dominant Introverted Thinking function to seek his shadow: Extraverted Feeling. Only then can he actually engage with his own feelings and lay a foundation for genuine, reciprocal, kindly relationships. Think Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea.

And Fowles tells us - obliquely - that in the end this is what happens.

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The book is not kind to the sensibilities of the Woke. Nicholas is an unpleasant, fairly insufferable human being (as was I, and many of us in our twenties). It’s an old fallacy to beat up on the author for portraying human rather than ideal characters.

This is a large, complex novel which speaks to NTs, and NFs - who will be offended, and will bore to shreds those of a Sensing disposition.

I have been thinking about it for days now, and have added more from Fowles to my stack as well as his inspiration, “The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes)” by Henri Alain-Fournier (Author), Adam Gopnik (translator).

Fowles died in 2005.

Adam Carlton's Blog

It's a nondescript, blowy day here in Popincourt, the 11th arrondissement of Paris. Looking west from my cheap, cramped apartment I can just make out the workmen on Notre Dame, toiling to Macron's hyper-schedule.

Nigel may be en retraite from here on out but I am busier than ever. As well as my day-job (we won't be going there) my party activities are massively impacted by those wretched attestations. No wonder I haven't found much time for writing: either on Booksie or here.

So I plan to post the occasional piece. The focus will shift more to literature - and in this spirit I have added Michelle Podsiedlik to the blog sidebar (on the web-view). I was led to Michelle by her masterly notes on John Fowles' "The Magus", a novel I recently completed while shaking my head in awe.

Michelle is a little moralistic to my taste but always interesting.

My next post will indeed be on "The Magus".

Drawing a Line

I read today that Bill Bryson has retired from writing. He will spend his time reading and 'rolling on the floor with his grandchildren'. He is a year younger than I am.

Bryson has given plenty of pleasure to millions over the decades with his (middlebrow, faintly comic) writing. I doubt he will be much read in fifty years time.

Similar limitations of audience and time confront the writers of blogs. I have been writing this one, on and off, since 2005. Yet it languishes in obscurity and I am comforted by that. By contrast, those people with visibility (the kind of people I feature on the web-version sidebar) have tens of thousands of readers and hundreds of comments on each post.

Yet Scott Alexander stopped writing SlateStarCodex and the world continued on its axis. We kind of forgot about SSC. Blogging is both ephemeral and a hamster wheel for those who gain prominence. I have tended to think of it as a place to park my thoughts so I can move on - with a frisson of danger because I do so publicly. However these days my thoughts are more nihilistic - it's even a contradiction in terms to write as I do here.

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I've spent a lot of time trying to come to terms with Marxism. Here are my conclusions in brief: Marx mostly wrote about economics, his political views were hopes more than plans or analyses, his philosophical views (alienation, species-being) were primitive and over-abstract in modern terms as well as plain wrong.

I just read Ian Steedman's book (1981 - I'm late to the party) where he laments just how much Marxist thought is sterile dogmatism focused on defence of the 'Great Man's Thought'. I have no idea whether Steedman's Sraffa-based analysis is correct - I lack the patience to engage with his detailed matrix-models - though I note that no-one seems to have refuted it. But economics thinking seems to me to be in the doldrums as capitalism continues to evolve: I am getting more attracted to Steve Keen's critique.

I stand by my view that capitalism's endless trajectory towards total automation, replacing the totality of workers' physical and cognitive abilities, in the end undermines the search for profitability on which capitalism depends. There are no profits without wage-labour with positive surplus value. I remind myself, and you, that this could conceivably be achieved with androids.

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Another theme of this blog has been science-fiction. SF always reflects the preoccupations of the age: in the ascendant-fifties engineering exuberance; at present the 'Great Awokening' of the embittered-credentialled in a time of secular stagnation and drift. I find myself out of sympathy with tendentious fiction: more directly, I find it unreadable. 

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Before I leave to spend more time reading or rolling on the floor with young kin, I will indulge my presumptuousness one final time by saying that I see great things ahead for genomic engineering and AI. We are on the cusp of understanding so much more about genotype-phenotype connections, knowledge which can then be put to engineering use, while the modularisation we see in biological brains must surely lead to the development of distributed, persistent neural-net architectures for situated cognition. No more blank slates!

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Thanks for reading!

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"The New Class War" - Michael Lind

 

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I read this with great interest, despite Michael Lind's stodgy writing style. I broadly agree with Gerard Baker's review in The Times:

"The construct favoured by Lind to place populism in context is familiar: class. He argues that our present political strife is a successor to the industrial-based class war that began more than a century and a half ago with the emergence of modern capitalism. The new class war, he says, is between a disempowered and disdained working class that still reveres traditional values, and a technocratic managerial elite, steeped in progressive liberal values. “The current regime of technocratic neoliberalism” is, he writes, “a synthesis of the free market economic liberalism of the libertarian right and the cultural liberalism of the bohemian/academic left.”

After the Second World War, Lind argues, western governments, determined to avoid a return to the Great Depression, brokered a social compact between the new managerial capitalist elites and trade unions. The result was a kind of harmonious suspension of the class war predicted by Marxists, and the rapid growth in living standards was widely shared.

At the end of the Cold War, however, multinational corporations, building efficient global supply chains, shattered that compact, disempowering unions and workers and transferring political power from national legislatures to executive agencies, transnational bureaucracies and national and international judiciaries.

To those who doubt that the new globalist managerial elite really is a class, Lind cites the stark decline of social mobility in the US and to a lesser extent in Europe in the past 30 years. The new managerial and professional “overclass”, as he calls them, stop at nothing to get their children into elite universities to perpetuate their supremacy — and they succeed.

He notes that the chief trait predicting support for Brexit or for Trump in 2016 was lower educational qualifications, but rather than asserting, as some have, that this is proof that populism is the product of ignorance or stupidity, he argues that “the possession of a diploma tends to indicate birth into the economic elite”, suggestive of a “conflict among largely hereditary social classes”.

The geography of this new class war is another defining feature. Rather than the conventional urban versus rural taxonomy, Lind prefers “hubs and heartlands”. Elites live in hubs that tend to be the more luxurious quarters of big metropolises, while the working class live in small towns and exurbs (areas outside dense suburbs).

Lind points out that “to members of the overclass accustomed to thinking of geographic mobility in the interest of a professional career as the norm, it may come as a shock to learn that . . . 57 per cent of Americans have never lived outside their home states and 37 per cent have spent their entire lives in their home towns, with the exception of periods of military service or college education”.

Geography is key, he says, to understanding modern political tensions over the great cleavages of populist politics: trade, immigration and environmental protection. If you live in comfortable metropolitan enclaves, your view of cheap products easily acquired through free trade will be different from those who live in manufacturing-heavy areas where jobs have been displaced by trade.

If your experience of immigration is an army of nannies, plumbers and baristas servicing your needs, you will see it differently from those in the heartland whose wages are constrained by those same immigrants. Saving the planet similarly takes on a different practical meaning from the vantage point of a stylish loft in some cool urban district than if you live on top of valuable mineral resources.

Lind notes that these differing economic and social attitudes have brought about a radical transformation of our political institutions, especially parties. Labour and the Democrats in America have become the parties of affluent white metropolitan elites allied with ethnic minorities. Conservatives and Republicans are increasingly the parties of white working-class voters in the heartlands.

Lind is not a fan of populism (“Populism is a symptom of a sick body politic, not a cure,” he says), which he believes is already having dangerous effects on political culture and national cohesion. The threat, he says, is not of fascism, but of chaotic, divisive and increasingly corrupt systems. Less Weimar Republic, more banana republic.

To confront and defuse populism he calls for a renewal of “democratic pluralism”, power-sharing arrangements among the elite and the governed, through, for example, some restoration of union power. More controversially, he argues for the promotion of the “developmental state” that sponsors technological innovation and promotes industries. “The experience of contemporary East Asian democracies — Japan, South Korea and Taiwan — proves that neoliberalism is not the only model for a high-tech modern democracy,” Lind argues.

Lind’s diagnosis is sharp and insightful, his prescriptions less so. What does “democratic pluralism” mean in practice? Should we really return to an era when great trade unions held managements to ransom? In an age of automation is that even possible? Is the “developmental state” merely autarky, a closed economy?"

To get a feel for where Lind is coming from you could read his insightful piece in 'The Bellows' entitled "The Double Horseshoe Theory of Class Politics".

The Bellows (political analysis from the neo-Marxist left)

From Michael Lind

I discovered "The Bellows" via Michael Lind's piece, quoted at Arnold Kling's site. Lind's post is not really a thoroughgoing Marxist analysis but I was bowled over by someone taking the materialist view that the expressed opinions and professed goals of mass movements are ultimately conditioned by the social concerns of their (disadvantaged) class/fraction.

I haven't been so excited since I discovered Public Choice Theory.

I have ordered his book.

Amazon link

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Another article on the site which interested me was the Swedish experience of Malcolm Kyeyune: On ‘Strasserism’ and the Decay of the Left.

The Bellows is a home for those who have not abandoned Marxist class-based analysis (historical materialism in fact) in favour of a shallow atheoretic identity politics. I have a lot of sympathy for this approach but note that some still hanker after proletarian revolution - a goal and strategy which their analysis gives them no purchase upon whatsoever.

The Bellows is now on the blogs sidebar on the web version of this site.

The "Woke" are nothing new

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From Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", p. 170.

"Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers.

Then everyone took to shouting at the Communists: You're the ones responsible for our country's misfortunes (it had grown poor and desolate), for its loss of independence (it had fallen into the hands of the Russians), for its judicial murders!

And the accused responded: We didn't know! We were deceived! We were true believers! Deep in our hearts we are innocent!

In the end, the dispute narrowed down to a single question: Did they really not know or were they merely making believe?

Tomas followed the dispute closely (as did his ten million fellow Czechs) and was of the opinion that while there had definitely been Communists who were not completely unaware of the atrocities (they could not have been ignorant of the horrors that had been perpetrated and were still beating perpetrated in post-revolutionary Russia), it was probable that the majority of the Communists had not in fact known of them.

But, he said to himself, whether they knew or didn't know not the main issue; the main issue is whether a man is innocent because he didn't know. Is a fool on the throne relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool?"

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The most common fate for heretics following the Russian invasion of 1968 was loss of position (many of the protesters were professionals) followed by imposition of menial jobs.

"A Woman of Mystery" by GPT-3 and Adam Carlton

GPT-3 is the text-generation system recently developed by OpenAI using "175 billion parameters, two orders of magnitude larger than the 1.5 billion parameters in the full version of GPT-2".

The easiest way to try it out is to use the “custom” option (6) of AI Dungeon with the Dragon engine enabled. Dragon is GPT-3, the default Griffin is the less-powerful GPT-2.

You can seed the AI engine with a starting sequence and then it will generate continuations. Here is a story Adam Carlton developed with GPT-3 using the AI Dungeon app and the seven-day free subscription for Dragon, published on Booksie.

One author is in bold, the other is in plain text. Which is GPT-3?

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A Woman of Mystery

My wife died recently. I am sad and lonely. I sit in a bar drinking and reading the paper. I see an attractive girl about my age in a short cotton dress. She holds my gaze. I invite her over and we begin to talk. I have a feeling this meeting was intended though. What does she want?

"I'm sorry, but I don't know anything about you."

"What do you mean?"

She says that she is from a small town in Texas and has never been out of it. She also doesn't seem to be very well off. "Well, I've got money for gas and food so I can get back home tomorrow night." She then goes on to say that she's going to go to the movies with some friends.

But she then contradicts herself and asks whether I might have a better proposal. I think furiously, keen to spend more time with her.

"You're not really interested are you?" I ask.

"No, no I guess not." She replies. "But if you were, would you still come here?"

After spending some time talking with her, we both decide to leave together. We walk along side each other and then suddenly she turns around and looks at me again. "Would you like to go back to your place now?" she asks as if she just made up something completely unexpected.

We go back to my place and I sit her down on the couch. "Do you want something to drink?" I ask her.

"Some juice or soda?"

She smiles. "I'd love a diet coke, thanks" she replies.

I go into the kitchen and come back with two diet cokes. She takes one and we both sit down on the couch. It feels strange to me that she is here.

She starts to ask me about myself. The conversation rapidly moves to my financial situation. Just as I start thinking she's a gold-digger she tells me she's feeling warm, "Do you mind if I take my dress off?"

"Oh, no. Please do."

She stands up and slips the dress over her head revealing a lacy black bra and panties. She sits down and takes a drink of diet coke before saying, "If you really want to help me out, I could use some money for food and gas."

She looks at me with her big green eyes and hopeful face. I'm really starting to like this girl.

"I don't think I can afford it," I say.

She comes across to me with her big eyes and slowly kisses me. "Are you sure?" she says.

She kisses me again and rubs her body against me. "Oh, you're just so sweet," she says.

We have wild passionate love making. Afterwards we're laying in bed when she says, "I guess I should go home now."

I tell her she can stay the night and we fall asleep like that. In the morning I wake up before her and have to go to work.

When I return the house has been ransacked, but she has left a note.

"I'm so sorry for stealing your money and jewelry. I have to get back home as soon as possible.

Thank you for the most wonderful night of my life!"

--- END ---

Adam observes: 'I don’t think serious authors will be quaking in their boots quite yet. But if this was submitted as an assignment in a middling college by a mediocre student it would get some kind of mark, almost certainly better than the unaided efforts of some students.'

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In my view this is a kind of IQ 90 story. It makes sense in its muddling-along way, but lacks dynamism, narrative drive and any psychological validity whatsoever. However, experience has shown that that's not necessarily an obstacle for commercial or academic success.

The deep problem is just obvious. As I observed in this January 2020 post, "It's just a better parasite...", these sophisticated contextual text-shufflers are leveraging contextualised human literary productions without any internal model of the natural or social world, or human agency. Don't look for personalities here!

I know that quantity has a quality all of its own, but in terms of story development (plot, setting, character) Adam tells me that working with GPT-3 is an exercise in futility: you can never get going - you are continually derailed.

But for many applications where text has to be produced: who cares?

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A Dialogue on Gove's Speech

Michael Gove

“Very important PDF here: “The privilege of public service” given as the Ditchley Annual Lecture.

“Gove's (FDR/Gramsci) manifesto for the revolutionary strategy of the Cummings-Boris-Gove axis. Would also serve for post-Trump Republicans too. There is an alternative to Woke!!”

“69 pages! A summary would be better... did you read it all (I only know the page count)?”

“Yes I did. It's widely spaced, interesting and important. A manifesto. Takes about ten minutes to read. You should be aware of the FDR "New Deal"; Gramsci is optional, although recommended.”

“Civil servants have to move to get promoted so no expertise is retained. Gov recruits humanities grads from the middle class. Everyone in gov is hostile to brexit. The Government doesn't evaluate programs for effectiveness; innovation= risk, don't do it. No one ever got fired using IBM. Haves and have nots driving identity politics. Loss of confidence in the system is sure to widen the gap between rich and poor. Cognitively-able taking a bigger share of the pie which isn't growing larger. Gov very London-centric, applause from 'the village' driving decisions: lobbyists, media, business interests, all London.

“Ultimately, there's nothing new here.”

“Except that they said it. And identified all those things as problems. And said they intended to address them. It's a manifesto. What we used to call "Blue Labour"! I think it puts Starmer and the LP in a difficult position, sandwiched between histrionic Woke and this neotraditional Labour policy. Tough...”

“The big building program announced has a Keynesian flavor to stimulate demand - Tony Blair plan B?"

“If they don't soak up mass unemployment, that plus the fury of the Woke will amount to Big Trouble! as Trump might say. Besides, it's CAPEX, isn't it?”

“They need to watch the debt level: if they can't raise funds, game over.”

“Trust me they will print it - like a few weeks ago. QE.”

“Taxation Henry VIII style.”

“Don't say the I-word! Never has inflation solved so many problems! (Government debt, wages lowering to improve profitability...).”

“3rd world countries live by it.”

“Given persistent low interest rates, pretty mandatory during a recession, only asset values (claims on future profits) tend to resist inflation and that only in the longer term. So equity.”

“Land and property too.”

“Yes. Rents are always nice!”

“Inflation based financing is fairly regressive.”

“Re-establishing profitability tends to have a regressive effect on those not fortunate enough to be sitting on a pile of equity. Still, a new round of energetic, animal spirits growth in 2022/3 will feel good - and set things up for the next election…”

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The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci - Perry Anderson

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Some relevant thoughts from Perry Anderson (I’m currently reading “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci”).

On page 64 he writes that left social-democracy believes:

“the working class has access to the state (elections to parliament), but does not exercise it to achieve socialism because of its indoctrination by the means of communication.

In fact, it might be said that the truth is if anything the inverse: the general form of the representative state-bourgeois democracy is itself the principal ideological linchpin of Western capitalism, whose very existence deprives the working class of the idea of socialism as a different type of state, and the means of communication and other mechanisms of cultural control thereafter clinch this central ideological ‘effect’.

Capitalist relations of production allocate all men and women into different social classes, defined by their differential access to the means of production. These class divisions are the underlying reality of the wage-contract between juridically free and equal persons that is the hallmark of this mode of production.

The political and economic orders are thereby formally separated under capitalism. The bourgeois state thus by definition represents the totality of the population, abstracted from its distribution into social classes, as individual and equal citizens. In other words, it presents to men and women their unequal positions in civil society as if they were equal in the state.

Parliament, elected every four or five years as the sovereign expression of popular will, reflects the fictive unity of the nation back to the masses as if it were their own self-government. The economic divisions within the ‘citizenry' are masked by the juridical parity between exploiters and exploited, and with them the complete separation and non-participation of the masses in the work of parliament.

This separation is then constantly presented and represented to the masses as the ultimate incarnation of liberty: democracy as the terminal point of history.”

A few pages on, page 68, he gets to the heart of the matter, the somewhat surprising consent of the working class to the continuing existence of capitalism:

“The novelty of this consent is that it takes the fundamental form of a belief by the masses that they exercise an ultimate self-determination within the existing social order. It is thus not acceptance of the superiority of an acknowledged ruling class (feudal ideology) but credence in the democratic equality of all citizens on the government of the nation -- in other words, disbelief in the existence of any ruling class.”

A point well taken. It seems to me that people understand that there are elites, and that there are even rather obscured fossils of a previous ruling class - the old, drawling, landowner class which is now a figure of fun. But people believe, counterfactually, that the advanced capitalists countries are basically a (flawed) meritocracy. The critical distinction between forces and relations of production, and how that plays out in defining the class-specificity of capitalism and its dynamics, has now been lost in its totality from mass popular culture.

Typological conflicts in the American Imperium

Bolton's book, 'The Room Where It Happened' (was ever a book so unmemorably named?), is exactly what you would expect a lawyer to produce: a dense, detailed, fly-on-the-wall, chronological diary of his 17 months in office as National Security Advisor to President Donald Trump.

The past it describes is still recent enough (2018-19) that I can remember the events he describes - most of them. It's quite fascinating to read detailed accounts from within the heart of the American Imperium.

If, like me, you appreciate that sort of thing.

Bolton, an ENTJ, comes across as an intellectually-rigorous American nationalist. A strategist who wants to play the games of power, move-by-move, to secure American interests as he sees them. In this he is obstructed time after time by Trump, an ESTP who is utterly astrategic, thinking only in terms of the values of his 'base' as he understands them (US flyover people first and last) and the consequences for his popularity and re-election prospects.

Bolton wants to corral and lead Trump in the ways of strategy; Trump takes every issue as if it were some personalised mano a mano real-estate deal. A complete dialogue of the deaf. It's a wonder Bolton lasted so long before resigning (in advance, one feels, of his being fired).

Bolton wants us to believe that he was right all along, and that Trump is a dangerous bull in a fragile china shop (add perhaps the Koreas, Russia, Iran and Venezuela). I'm not so sure: there are few things more dangerous than an intellectual with an all-encompassing theory and Bolton's concept of the use of American power is dangerously confrontational. Bolton thinks Trump is weak when it matters, but Trump is highly sensitive to the actuality. He's too erratic to be taken as weak by opponents.

There are problems with a president who has no conceptual strategy at all, who makes policy decisions based on a whim. This unfortunately works to the American state bureaucracy's strengths: it sits as an inert, low-pass filter, unresponsive to short-term jerking around. Trump's supporters may have believed it takes a rough man to take on 'the swamp' but just randomly kicking it is not reform.

I wonder if the more cerebral Boris and Dominic can do a better job with the British deep state?

Steps on the road to fascism

German unemployment rate 1928-1935 (Wikipedia) - Hitler in power from 33

Clara Zetkin said it right in 1923:

"Fascism ... viewed objectively, is not the revenge of the bourgeoisie in retaliation for proletarian aggression against the bourgeoisie, but it is a punishment of the proletariat for failing to carry on the revolution begun in Russia. The Fascist leaders are not a small and exclusive caste; they extend deeply into wide elements of the population."

To read the history of the Weimar Republic is to watch the collapse of a democratic state after four years of economic chaos and political instability (1929-33). Chancellor Brüning's disastrous economic policy was marked by a collapse in GDP and a stark increase in unemployment (7% to 30%).

The workers' movement was strong, both in the trades unions and politically with the workers' parties, the SPD and the KPD (the socialists and communists). But as Clare Zetkin presciently observed, the workers movement (never united) was incapable of bringing about a socialist revolution (which from today's standpoint would probably have collapsed into chaos anyway). Workers' power was certainly capable of impeding a capitalist recovery, however.

Thus ensued chaos without end. The deepening crisis propelled masses of people (artisans, shopkeepers, civil servants and more than a few workers) into street mobilisation against the left. They were united under the banners of an inchoate and exclusionary ideology - that of fascism. Meanwhile, the participation of unemployed ex-soldiers and lumpen elements provided hard-edged, street-fighting muscle in the SA.

Hitler came to power legitimately (people often forget that). But the 'national destiny' ideology of 'national socialism' was very distanced from a practical management strategy for a modern capitalist state. The Nazi government, immeasurably empowered by the militarised forces it directly controlled and steered by dangerous fantasies, duly took Germany in the direction we all know.

It's also important to understand that the arrival of Hitler's regime immediately unleashed a civil war within Germany in which the left was annihilated in blood (including the left-wing of the NSDAP - of the Nazi Party itself).

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What can we learn from Weimar? That if a capitalist state enters a period of economic collapse and political paralysis where people's very livelihoods are at risk, then after a due period politics will hit the streets and will then get organised via fantasies which have traction with the crowds: a narrative to unite and inspire supporters and demonise and dehumanise opponents. There are close to zero signs of any such ideology today in any Western country.

Does the woke movement constitute a proto-fascist movement in preparation? Not in its present form: it's not vicious enough, the action programme is too defocused and the angst is not yet existential.

If the economy slumps big-time, if the woke movement obstructs measures to resolve the crisis by advocating policies which in practice would make it worse then there will be a reaction eventually. Not the clowns currently running around showing their football colours and tattoos, but something altogether more serious.

It's one possible future and years rather than months away - but we should be on our guard. And remember that when fascism was bright and new it was national socialism and lots of people thought it was rather cool. A new fascist mass movement won't call itself that - it will be very much in favour of restoring order and decency, and suppressing endless chaos - and many ordinary people will not recoil, far from it.

Take a look at the graph at the top of this piece: fascist policies worked over the next few years - capitalism was restabilised and began to grow again, unemployment came down and Germany modernised (there are more economic graphs in the Wikipedia article).

The capitalist elite is not happy with people who delight in having blood on their hands. They're considered coarse, dangerous yahoos (although there were a few cultured, charming NSDAP leaders such as Göring).

But hey, needs must, right?

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Deblurring Clare with Duke's AI

Back in December 19 I wrote about the challenge of deblurring photos as in this picture of Clare when she was around 15.

Clare around 15 years old

Today I discovered that Duke University has an AI system which sort of hallucinates an unblurred image. I ran it and here is the result (I asked for 4 attempts). Click on the image to make it larger.

I think number three is the most accurate (below)

So here's the link if you want to try it: works best on a computer, not a phone or tablet.

Perhaps the best of the four deblur attempts

I still think they have some way to go on this, but it's an impressive start.

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Shame they don't teach history any more

Prior to the nineteenth century, almost all countries were predominantly agrarian with fragile, low-productivity economies. Their elites owed their prosperity to the exploitation of workers, peasants and slaves, whose conditions of existence were uniformly awful.

This should be emphasised: in all societies prior to c. twentieth century capitalism, the masses lived on the edge with income just sufficient to perpetuate themselves. Their misery was compounded by brutal treatment from their 'betters' for whom they were simply potentially rebellious resources.

Most of those elites consumed their wealth 'unproductively' but a few were philanthropists. Some of those in the latter category later had statues put up to them by a grateful (elite) citizenry, for example Edward Colston (1636-1721) of Bristol.

It's an interesting social phenomenon that these statues are now being toppled in the name of an ahistoric moralism - but as we know, it's not really about that.

Nevertheless, I expect slightly conservative professors of history to be pointing out these salient truths in this weekend's papers... while right- and left-wing protesters fight in the streets.

The masses are in motion; history has resumed.

That old May '68 playbook

Time to dust off those records of the '68-'75 years of unrest: first student then working class led struggles.

As the sixties ended, the long boom of the fifties was finally playing out. Profitability was falling and the economy looked tired. Those old patrician classes - those Tories who seemed to live in another land-owning age - were still in power with their strange articulations of English. Most students looked at them as if they were fossils: the ruling class had never looked so alien.

And students there were: so many of them. The education reforms of the sixties had introduced comprehensives into the secondary sector plus 'new universities' to provide the human resources for a more technological age. These new working class and lower middle class students, often the first of their families to go to university, were culturally nothing like the Eton-processed. They had been promised a dream the economy could not provide. No wonder they felt alienated.

I was such. In '69 I was on the streets protesting with the far left. If you had asked me why I was there, did I care about the Vietnamese Revolution, I would have given you some Marxist account of the combined and uneven struggle against Imperialism. The future might be hazy but it would be our people, the dispossessed, who would be in charge.

In my heart of hearts I hated and despised those who ruled us. They were people nothing like me or the folk from whence I had come. Patronising, superior, arrogant and entitled - the bubble people of their age.

Plus ça change...

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It took more than a decade for the insurgent tide to recede. The last gasp of the NUM was defeated and the economy (under Thatcher) retooled for a globalist, financially-led neoliberalism. The masses were back in their boxes for a generation while the Marxist-Leninist dream died.

So here we are again.

In 2020 the ailing economy, now drained by more than a decade of secular stagnation following the muted recovery from 2008-9, is again tottering on the brink of deep recession. The current cycle of growth is just about played out, hamstrung by zombie firms, too much debt and with COVID-19 providing the coup de grâce.

The current cohort of young people - just like in '68 - look at the establishment and don't see themselves or their concerns; they don't see prospects for themselves going forward. They feel alienated. All it needed was a spark and the George Floyd death was it, at least for this month.

Dusting off the playbook I would expect an endless sequence of demonstrations and événements going forward propelled by the 'new petit-bourgeoisie': students, left-professionals such as teachers, academics and government workers together with black activists and other groups who feel themselves unintegrated and aggrieved, those whom the dream has left behind (there are so many!).

The industrial working class may be less salient, organised and visible than in the 1970s but it's still there. They won't be easy sign-ups to the new woke, but when their jobs in manufacturing, logistics and technology start to evaporate over the next year or two don't expect them to sit on their hands.

I imagine there are mandarins in the Home Office as I write drafting memos to the Home Secretary and Prime Minister calling for a quiet reorganisation and upfunding of the police. The Government might have been woefully slow off the mark for the onset of COVID-19 but they will surely be sensitive to their forthcoming public order challenges.

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An engineering look at p-zombies

From the wikipedia article:

"A p-zombie would be indistinguishable from a normal human being but lack conscious experience, qualia, or sentience. For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object it would not inwardly feel any pain, yet it would outwardly behave exactly as if it did feel pain. The thought experiment sometimes takes the form of imagining a zombie world, indistinguishable from our world, but lacking first person experiences in any of the beings of that world."

This is the kind of thing philosophers get up to, but why would anyone think this critique of materialism (or physicalism) could make sense? Here is the modal argument, due to David Chalmers:

"According to Chalmers one can coherently conceive of an entire zombie world, a world physically indistinguishable from this world but entirely lacking conscious experience. The counterpart of every conscious being in our world would be a p-zombie. Since such a world is conceivable, Chalmers claims, it is metaphysically possible, which is all the argument requires. Chalmers states: "Zombies are probably not naturally possible: they probably cannot exist in our world, with its laws of nature." The outline structure of Chalmers' version of the zombie argument is as follows;

1. According to physicalism, all that exists in our world (including consciousness) is physical.

2. Thus, if physicalism is true, a metaphysically possible world in which all physical facts are the same as those of the actual world must contain everything that exists in our actual world. In particular, conscious experience must exist in such a possible world.

3. In fact we can conceive of a world physically indistinguishable from our world but in which there is no consciousness (a zombie world). From this (so Chalmers argues) it follows that such a world is metaphysically possible.

4. Therefore, physicalism is false. (The conclusion follows from 2. and 3. by modus tollens.)"

This sounds way too much like the Ontological Argument.

Here's an argument. Consciousness is an evolved faculty, like language. It requires brain resources. It must be doing a job mediating what it is that humans do. If you subtract consciousness while leaving a human active in the world you surely will have impaired behaviour - as when consciousness is removed by sleep, anaesthesia or injury.

We could model a p-zombie as a a Rodney Brooks subsumption architecture. A low-level runtime system (like the hind brain) controlling basic bodily functions - heart rate, breathing, reflexes, digestion - plus a top-level planner or theorem-prover managing the agent's progress through the world to meet its survival and social goals. This is a very conventional architecture in AI which no-one has plausibly claimed to be conscious.

This p-zombie would certainly do the basics. It could answer questions, claim that it 'felt' pain if it were damaged and in general execute any social behaviour which we could classify (in the deep learning sense) or theorise (in the sense of GOFAI).

So what's missing? What's necessarily missing?

Maybe that's the core mystery, the hard problem in a nutshell.

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Here's a final thought. In a Darwinian world of predators and prey, humans and other animals are notoriously prone to see agency everywhere. What Dennett calls Second-Order Intentional Systems Theory:

"A first-order intentional system is one whose behavior is predictable by attributing (simple) beliefs and desires to it. A second-order intentional system is predictable only if it is [itself] attributed beliefs about beliefs, or beliefs about desires, or desires about beliefs, and so forth." -- Daniel Dennett, Intentional Systems Theory. 1971.

Aside from some experimental systems utilising clunky modal logic (a blind alley in my view) we don't build AI systems today which understand that their environments are populated by entities which have agency.

In fact I don't think we know how to do that.

And without such a requirement, perhaps it's no surprise that our AI systems lack the capability to model themselves as having agency. And so to a lack of self-consciousness - and p-zombiehood.

If autistic people lack a theory of mind (which I don't believe they do, at least in that straightforwardly simplistic form) then we could say that the p-zombie would present itself as autistic, in the guise of a smoothly-performant Asperger's syndrome.

Ps and Js: Dominic Cummings

Dominic Cummings comes across as INTP; Boris as ENTP. It's not surprising that both see through the map (the literalism of regulations) into the territory (the underlying problem the regulations are meant to address).

Lawyers and media journalists tend to be Js. ENTJs and ENFJs are perhaps their most effective types. Fixated on the letter of the law, not the spirit. Attack dogs. Gotcha!

It's interesting that the Myers-Briggs dimensions are also dimensions of people talking past each other, inhabitants of different worlds:

- NT truth-seekers/problem solvers vs. NF moralists/SJWs.
- Extraverts (Communities! Parties! Share!) vs. Introverts (Give me a break!).
- Intuitives (here's how to think about this) vs. Sensors (what do you want done?).

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Beneath the barrage of weaponised moralising, has anyone failed to notice that this is a sustained attack by the Remain/neoliberal bubble against a government which is trying to invent a 'one-nation' politics for our post-neoliberal times?

The critics' time has run its course; they have no strategy. It was sufficient for a resolute government to keep its nerve and hang in there.

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Amazon link

I'm reading the Greg Mandel trilogy by Peter Hamilton again; two thirds through. The novels are a combination of military-SF, thriller and detective story. I think Hamilton does really well.

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Christianity is historically puzzling

There are two particularly puzzling features of Christianity, at least to me.

1. How can we make sense of Jesus' message which is both aggressive:

Matthew 10:34-36: "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person's enemies will be those of his own household."

but also pacific:

Matthew 5:38-39, "You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also."

2. How did a religion which seems so contradictory, which was espoused by a failed Jewish itinerant preacher and which was largely rejected by his own people sweep to dominance in the entire Roman Empire within a span of less than 300 years?

These are questions which have been discussed for hundreds of years.

I find the terms of the debate also interesting: it's a prototype of the current culture wars. On the one hand we have a still-powerful theological community emotionally invested in Christianity's claims; on the other hand we have scientific/historical attempts to discern the truth of the historical Jesus and to track the real historical dynamics which led to Constantine and the First Council of Nicaea (325 CE).

It takes real moral courage to peer beneath the mythologising texts of the Gospels to seek kernels of rational truth - the results are not an easy read for believers. The authors I trust most seem to be almost 'on the spectrum' in their committment to truth and their unwillingness to compromise in order to 'avoid giving offense'.

For the historic Jesus I went with Ed Sanders (who favours the apocalyptic prophet model). His book is almost like a thriller or a detective story, and he paints a compelling figure of Jesus. A lot of what Jesus said and did makes sense if he truly believed the Kingdom of God was actually going to arrive - in some transcendent sense - in a matter of days or just a few weeks at most. And Jesus did plainly believe that.

Amazon link

Sanders soft-pedals the resurrection, stating only that something real to the apostles must have occurred. It's plain that Sanders sees this as a sequence of visions for the profoundly emotionally-disturbed followers of Jesus following the crucifixion, as was recounted for Paul.

As far as I can tell, all the post-crucifixion narratives are non-historical. Here is what Bart Ehrman has to say:

"To sum it up, not only during war but also in times of (relative) peace the Romans publicly humiliated and tortured to death enemies of state precisely in order to keep the peace. Jesus was condemned not for blasphemy, not for cleansing the temple, not for irritating the Sadducees, not for bad-mouthing the Pharisees, not for … well, not for anything but one thing. He was crucified for calling himself the King of the Jews.

Only Romans could appoint the King. If Jesus thought he himself was going to be the King, for the Romans this would have been a declaration of war (since he would have to usurp their power and authority to have himself installed as king) (I’m talking about how Romans would have interpreted Jesus’ claim to be king, not what he himself may have meant by it). They may have found it astounding, if not pathetic, that this unknown peasant from the rural hinterlands would be imagining that he could overthrow Roman rule in Judea.

But Romans didn’t much care if someone was a megalomaniac, a feasible charismatic preacher, or a bona-fide soldier in arms. If the person declared “war” on Rome – which a claim to being the King amounted to – the Romans knew how to deal with him. He would be publicly tortured and humiliated, left to rot on a cross so everyone could see what happens to someone who thinks he can cross the power of Rome. There was no mercy and no reprieve.

And there was no decent burial, precisely because there was no mercy or reprieve in cases such as this. After the point was made – after time, the elements, and the scavengers had done their work – the body could be dumped into some kind of pit or common grave. But not until the humiliation and the punishment were complete.

Yes, it’s true that in Jesus’ day, the country was not in armed rebellion against Rome. There was a general peace. But this is the very reason *why* there was peace. Would-be offenders – insurrectionists, political enemies, guerilla warriors, rival kings, enemies of the state – were brought face to face with the power of Rome in a very gruesome way, and most people, who for as a rule preferred very much not to be food for the birds and dogs, stayed in line as a result."

This seems to be the consensual view amongst scholars of the historical Jesus. Note that:

"Mark is the sole source for Joseph of Arimathea. The other three just copy. Mark uses two sources for Joseph. The first is a fictive recreation of Priam, who in Homer seeks the body of Hector. The second is Gen:4-6, where Joseph the Patriarch ask Pharaoh for permission to bury Jacob (Israel). Arimathea is an invented name: in Greek: Ari is best, math is teaching/doctrine, aia is place. So, Best Doctrine Town."

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I'm about to move on to my second area of puzzlement. Here I choose as my guide this:

Amazon link

From the description:

"How did Christianity become the dominant religion in the West? In the early first century, a small group of peasants from the backwaters of the Roman Empire proclaimed that an executed enemy of the state was God’s messiah. Less than four hundred years later it had become the official religion of Rome with some thirty million followers. It could so easily have been a forgotten sect of Judaism.

Through meticulous research, Bart Ehrman, an expert on Christian history, texts and traditions, explores the way we think about one of the most important cultural transformations the world has ever seen, one that has shaped the art, music, literature, philosophy, ethics and economics of modern Western civilisation."

I may have more to say later once I've had a chance to read it.

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Incidentally, do you think Razib Khan is being brave in making these interesting remarks about the origins of a similarly monotheistic religion?
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What's it all for?

"Our political system is not designed to take the United States in a specific direction. If anything, it was designed to prevent political whims of the moment from leading to tyranny. For Beijing, by contrast, the purpose of politics is to serve the nationalist project of comprehensively modernizing and developing China. It is about time we paid attention to the ideas and institutional processes that drive this effort."

From the testimony before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, the hearing on “A ‘China Model?’ Beijing’s Promotion of Alternative Global Norms and Standards” March 13, 2020. “How Xi Jinping’s ‘New Era’ Should Have Ended U.S. Debate on Beijing’s Ambitions” by Daniel Tobin (14 pages, PDF).

Cited by The Scholar's Stage.
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I still remember my teenage epiphany: the moment I realised that the UK as a nation wasn't "for" anything. The government had no over-arching goal, no overall mission. We were not hell-bent on reaching the stars at any cost.

It was a while before I realised that this was generally true of the advanced capitalist countries (except in periods of existential war).

Joining together in groups (we are a social animal) is not spontaneous. It requires common cause. Historically causes were not in short supply: the sheer necessities of survival, defence and the rituals to placate an unpredictable world all build communities.

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The Chinese have a long agrarian history - thousands of years of communalism - which deeply informs their culture and ideologies. They also have a national, shared grievance against the foreign barbarians who destroyed their final dynasty and subjugated them more than a century ago. They have been badly treated and want to get back to where they think they belong. On top.

The Chinese mission, currently dressed up in Marxist language, is not a universalist one.

A rich, peaceful capitalist country has no national mission. Its economy thrives on mass atomisation: a flexibility which lubricates the endless churn of the economy. For some people, loyalty to their company or to its underlying mission provides a cause worth adhering to.

In many cases, not so much.

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Hence we have movements: particularly of the young and idealistic. The movements select those whose inclinations align and are shaped in turn by the social needs of their adherents: meaningful activities; a strong ethical narrative thread; social status.

For these elective movements of choice rather than necessity, it hardly matters what the movement's programme is or whether it's even coherent, because in the end it's not about that.

Not at all.
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My developing views on Marxism: a retrospective

I have been a Marxist since my late teens. In my early twenties I was a member of the International Marxist Group, British Section of the Fourth International. I was learning Leninist-Trotskyist politics and didn't dwell on Marxist economics.

From my mid-twenties I couldn't see any prospects of a Bolshevik-style revolution anywhere in the world. Politics was put on a back-burner while marriage, family and career took centre stage. My intellectual preoccupations in these decades were maths and physics, artificial intelligence, computer science, telecoms network design and so on.

In my sixties my curiosity resumed. I've had time to come to terms with Marxism, to engage with the volumes of Capital, the many books on Marxist economics, and to investigate what Marx actually wrote and believed. I documented this journey through the posts below.

My final conclusions? Marx's methodology is good, his approach to sociology is correct. He's not in the business of peddling self-serving illusions about the way societies work. He lacks, however, a good theory of human nature, which leads him astray as regards the concept of communism. He underestimated how successful capitalism turned out to be and the myriad ways it can successfully address many human needs. Revolution is indeed off the agenda; capitalism is actually threatened by its relentless drive to total automation.

We need to integrate into Marx's general approach what has subsequently been learned about human beings: their material drives, their psychology and their differences, to develop a more profound and truthful sociology.

My summary view: From Marxism to (methodological) nihilism (via sociobiology).

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Here are my posts on Marxist theory:

1. Workers, slaves, androids - and agency
2. Why Marxism refuses to die
3. Simple Reproduction in an Abstract Capitalist Society
4. Expanded Reproduction in an Abstract Capitalist Society
5. Blue Labour - so disappointing
6. Paul Mason and PostCapitalism
7. On the Corbyn New Left
8. Communism would be like - what?
9. And this is the best you could do?
10. Revolution back on the agenda?
11. "What Is Orthodox Marxism?"
12. Marx on Slavery
13. Marx and the Universal Basic Income (UBI)
14. 1917-2017: the collapse of the revolutionary left
15. "They dismiss the last workers from their fully automated factories"
16. Total automation under capitalism?
17. Marx: "Right about capitalism, wrong about socialism"
18. Q. "How do I get into Marxism?"
19. "The United Socialist States of Europe"
20. Why Marxists should embrace Capitalism
21. "The Socialist System" - János Kornai
22. Leon Trotsky on communism
23. Perry Anderson on Western Marxism and Hegemony
24. Perry Anderson's Marxism.
25. Advanced AI is indistinguishable from slavery
26. No communism without abundance
27. Michael Roberts: Total Automation under Capitalism
28. "The Limits to Capital" by David Harvey (2007)
29. Michael Roberts on Keynesianism & the modern left
30. The Law of Accumulation - and competition
31. Socialist Revolution in the 21st Century
32. May Day review of "Marx 200" by Michael Roberts
33. The ties that bind
34. Capitalism with total automation? In principle, sure
35. The reification/ossification of theory: Samir Amin
36. The Virus of Marxism
37. Capitalism is hard to get started
38. When Keynes comes to town
39. The LTOV including rent answers critics
40. The relative autonomy of the petty bourgeoisie
41. The Communist Party of Britain
42. Modelling total automation under capitalism (a progress report)
43. Five questions on the last days of capitalism
44. Capitalism incompatible with total automation/slavery
45. Lenin 2017: Slavoj Zizek
46. The misunderstandings of eusociality
47. Beyond capitalism: is this the best we can hope for?
48. From Marxism to (methodological) nihilism (via sociobiology)

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Adam Carlton, co-author on this blog, wrote this story on total automation: Super-Fab.

"Super-Fab" by Adam Carlton

1: Charity

     They first arrived in charity shops, no-one knew from where. In appearance they were like microwave ovens: cubical things, cavities whose front door came with a screen rather than a metallised window. Soon, however, their true function became apparent: they fabricated things.
     Mrs Chigwell from Bournemouth Children’s Aid took delivery of the parcel. The charity shop was on the high street, one of a cluster. She had been manning the counter for half an hour but business was light. Squally rain outside had deterred passing trade, though as she surveyed the racks of old books and dingy clothes she could see one or two regulars hunkered down at the back, waiting out the heavy morning hours of a long, tedious day.
     The doorbell rang and a young delivery man walked in, staggering under the weight of his package. Mrs Chigwell gave him a tentative smile and beckoned him to place it on the table they used to sort through donations. It seemed quite heavy and cumbersome and at first she thought it might have been a mis-delivery from Amazon. They surely weren’t expecting anything, or at least she hadn’t been told. But Amazon didn’t make those kinds of mistakes, did it?
     Mrs Chigwell beckoned her daughter across to help. She was so proud of Julia. Doctor Julia she reminded herself, with that advanced degree from Imperial College up in London. Julia was down for the holidays, helping her out in the shop. She'd know what to do.
     Julia and her mother carried the box into the kitchen at the back of the store and got it unpacked. The instructions were written in a curious variant of English but were not hard to understand. The first thing to do was to plug the machine into a wall socket.
     Mrs Chigwell smiled. Her passing thought was that they were on the receiving end of a practical joke. It was very elaborate, she thought, could this be something dreamt up by Mr Harris who managed the shop? It was getting near Christmas and at a stretch she could imagine it was the kind of thing he might do, something to lighten the spirits. Could it be fairy-lights?
     Julia read from the instruction flowchart. She mused for a while, trying to make a decision. Finally she said, “I’d like a nice cup of hot chocolate.” Mrs Chigwell openly laughed: her daughter was such a tease. The machine promptly replied--Mrs Chigwell gave a small start of alarm--asking her to open the door and place inside various pieces of food rubbish. It listed the kinds of things it wanted.
     The deplorable state of the kitchen (no-one had cleared up recently) sufficed to provide several slices of stale bread, a plastic bowl of cold, discarded chips and a cup full of water. Mrs Chigwell was again reminded of a microwave as the box hummed, giving out a slight smell of ozone. Five minutes later there was a soft chime and the screen flashed a ready message. Inside Julia found the garbage had been transformed into exactly what she had asked for. She cautiously sampled the piping-hot drink--it turned out to be delicious.
     Children’s Aid in Bournemouth was just one of thousands of outlets which received a ‘Super-Fab’ as they became known. The Internet buckled as people experimented, tested and speculated as to how they worked, racing to confirm that they were indeed trustworthy. A consensus grew that they were the very latest in 3D printers. There were no obvious limits as to what they could produce, provided they got the right raw materials and the result would fit in the box. And they really worked, did just what they advertised.
     So that was the very earliest understanding of the devices. That, and the fact that no-one seemed to know where they had come from.
     Mrs Chigwell set the machine up in a corner of the shop and advertised free food and drinks to the passing homeless people of Bournemouth. The cost to her was volunteer time, power from the mains and leftover rubbish and water which the machine consumed as raw materials. She was not the only one, and in this small way the sum of human happiness increased a trifle in Britain’s run-down towns.

2: Replication

     The machines had an unexpected party piece: they could produce themselves. This was discovered by way of a joke request from Perry Zhang, a student at Manchester University on the second day after the machines surfaced.
     Perry made his humorous suggestion and, to his surprise, was asked to fetch various raw materials. He shoved in some old mobile phones, some plastic water bottles (full) and a few other household items until the machine professed itself happy. After less than ninety minutes the door opened and Perry was able to pull out a number of small rectangular units. After another feed and a further hour, more units became available and thereafter it was a simple matter for Perry to stack these into a cubical shape the same size as the Super-Fab--it turned out there was only one way to do it.
     A faint smell of burning emerged from the assembly as temporary partitions dissolved and internal connections welded tight, and then it became apparent that a second, identical unit calmly squatted in front of Perry. A copy had indeed been fabricated.
     The cost: Perry’s unskilled labour, some surplus electronic devices and other junk and three hours of electricity at the level of a one-bar fire. Perry tested the newly-spawned device until he was sure that it worked correctly, then he gave it to his girlfriend.  He wrote up his experience on his social media page, mentioning that the device had told him it could produce a new Super-Fab of any size at all. Useful, it suggested, for making bigger things.

3: Production

     Bill Jones ran a small factory in Birmingham making clocks. He bought in parts from many suppliers and employed skilled workers and advanced machine tools to create his high-quality products. Since you could buy timing devices from many sources at rock-bottom prices, the clock-making business was precarious. Bill’s enterprise survived in an artisan niche, making quirky, individualistic devices for discerning bohemians and specialist customers.
     Bill was imaginative and a go-getter. He bought a Super-Fab from one of the middlemen-sellers who were rapidly springing up and tested it in a spare workshop next to his office. The machine asked for a sample of the clock Bill intended to duplicate. Bill settled on one of his more intricate and expensive ones, a specialist device the Navy used on submarines. The machine also requested the ’blueprints’ in standard CNC G-Code format.
     After some minutes of analysis, the machine requested a list of low-value raw materials--plastics and metals. Bill was easily able to procure these from the factory stockroom. Soon, after the usual humming and ozone, a duplicate clock emerged. Bill thought that it looked identical to those his factory regularly produced at some considerable expense. He sent it for testing; it passed with flying colours, well within all the tolerances.
     Bill thought long and hard.
     First off, I could get this machine to duplicate itself, he thought. Run a few cycles of that and I’d have a rack of them at next to no cost. Then I could let my highly-trained but expensive production workforce go, just keeping a couple of conscientious but unskilled guys to run the Super-Fabs. My existing machine tools could be recycled as raw materials. Then I could churn out clocks across my product range on demand.
     What would it cost? He thought about it: electricity, waste materials and a few ancillary helpers. His costs would plummet; he would make a fortune. But then he thought some more. His competitors were not stupid; they would surely do the same. The price of commodifying clocks would plunge to their basic cost of manufacture.
     And then he had a further thought: why will my customers need me? They could do this for themselves if they’ve got one of these machines. All they need is a blueprint, a specification and they can get that on the Internet just like I do. So in fact I don’t have a business any more. He immediately called his lawyers and arranged a crash meeting to liquidate his company. Would anyone be mug enough to buy it off him?

4: Macroeconomics I

     The effects of the explosion of Super-Fab numbers on the economy were not long coming. The machines could replace much conventional manufacturing which displaced workers from the labour market in droves. Consequently social-security and unemployment-pay demands had never been greater, yet as tax revenues fell the benefit system couldn’t keep up. In many cases benefits were time-limited--but future job prospects for workers in manufacturing had never been bleaker.
     This could have been catastrophic--except that there were now plenty of charities which would provide any worker or family who needed it with a free Super-Fab. Once they had the machine, plus scraps and an electricity supply, then they could make practically anything they needed. So the lack of wages wasn’t an immediate, life-challenging problem.
     Dependence on electric power was, however, an issue; the national grid itself became brittle. Some workers failed to turn up for work since they didn’t really need a full wage. But others, those expelled from the labour force, were finding it difficult to pay for power and other necessities such as rent.
     People discovered, however, that the machines could produce both solar panels and a highly-efficient battery. A new kind of battery pack (a radioisotope thermoelectric generator?) had been designed by some smart ‘makers’ as they were being called--leftist engineers in the emerging counter-economy.
     Soon networked Super-Fabs were talking to each other, exchanging raw materials and sub-assemblies. Some people of philanthropic bent with access to land used their spaces for giant versions of the Super-Fabs. These could produce artefacts as large as ships or aircraft--or transporters to take these giga-machines to wherever they were needed.

5: Robot

     Small businesses like Bill Jones’s clock factory were soon out of business. But perhaps that had always been expected with the march of automation. More surprising was the demise of service jobs such as plumbers.
     Catherine May was perhaps the first person to discover the astonishing versatility of her miracle box. As the puddle emerged from behind the washing machine she sobbed in despair. She had never been able to find a reliable plumber and this emergency was not to be born!
     A small sound, like a trap door opening, warned Catherine that something else was happening. Strange, vaguely threatening devices were emerging from a hitherto-unsuspected opening in her Super-Fab. Catherine desperately rushed across to her six-month-old child in its high-chair to protect it.
     Such instinctive caution was unnecessary, however. The miniaturised crawling and flying things approached the mass of pipes behind the leaking machine and began to inspect them. Soon a larger device emerged from the front aperture of the Super-Fab: something which had arms built for engineering, something that looked like a traditional science-fiction robot.
     Twenty minutes of clunking and squeaking, replacing and lubricating followed, completed by a small amount of mopping. The devices returned to the Super-Fab to donate their bodies for re-use; the machine announced that the problem was fixed.
     “How do you know?” asked a quavering Mrs May.
     “Everything a plumber knows, I know,” said the device with not a trace of pride, “I’m on the Internet.”
     And so plumbers, hairdressers and other personal-service companies were rendered obsolete--and consequently bankrupt.

6: Macroeconomics II

     Once they were networked and had access to limitless Internet skills, the Super-Fabs were able to substitute for vast swathes of the existing economy. But what about big engineering? What was the story on dams and motorways? These were exemplars of social artefacts, things which it made no sense for any one user to dream up or install even if their Super-Fab had the theoretical capability.
     In fact the Super-Fabs did have the capacity for heavy engineering. The networked devices were soon discovered to be mining, refining and transporting raw materials extremely cheaply--most of the cost was simply power. They would, however, do none of these things by themselves; someone had to request it. That someone could only be government. Private entrepreneurs had no personal use for such monstrosities since they could no longer figure out any way to make money from them.
     Why was that? Because with costs tending to zero, no private company could avoid being undercut by a competitor who could charge even less for the finished product. There had always been a left-wing criticism that some social needs were under-supplied because no capitalist would invest to provide the necessary product.
     The Super-Fabs, however, could produce human necessities at zero cost. They were like the blackberry bushes which grow in the natural world, offering their bounty to anyone who stretches out a hand, their miracle of sun-powered nanotech provided free of charge. The Super-Fabs would always crowd out a capitalist employer who could not price at cost and stay in business.
     Government was all that was left.
     What about the banks and investment? That too was a short story. The banks were impoverished by the drastic shrinkage of the capitalist sector of the economy, the lack of investment opportunities. But the role of money did not vanish. There was still a need for a means of exchange and a store of value. It was noted that the banks had predated capitalism and would outlast it, at least for a while.
     However necessary it might be though, Government was in crisis. Perhaps this refuted the communist ideal, or perhaps it was what Engels had meant by 'the administration of things rather than people'.

7: Governance

     The Prime Minister has arranged a private briefing at a secluded country house in Norfolk. This would have been in month three or four. The house is a fine example of Palladian architecture set in sculpted grounds. It has been rescued from the National Trust by a government which understands the periodic need for a refuge from everyday events.
     The PM sits alone in a large wood-panelled room, savouring the silence. It’s ten o’clock in the morning and the early spring sun sends shallow rays across the finely-mown lawns towards the lake. Birds take their leisure or skim the surface: ducks, he thinks, or perhaps grey geese. It’s hard to be sure at this distance. He sips his coffee and strives to be at one with the landscape. His momentary peace is spoilt by the muffled sound of the door scuffing open, marking the entrance of his civil service science adviser.
     “Who’s on first?” the PM asks.
     “The engineer.”
     “When do we get on to economic policy?”
     “This afternoon.”
     The first expert is wheeled in, a professor at Imperial College. The science advisor points her towards the lectern and its projection screen. The PM dunks a Brontë biscuit in his mud-coloured milky coffee--a secret vice--and sits back expectantly to listen. The engineer has been told to keep it simple. She explains that the Super-Fabs are part machine but mostly organic. Someone has expanded biology to encompass functions which are presently carried out by engines and electronics.
     “For example, mass-spectrometry and data packet routing are carried out by highly-modified biological organelles.”
     The Prime Minister has no idea what this means, so he does that thing politicians do, he changes the subject.
     “Do we know who did this? I mean, could we do this?” he asks.
     “It’s certainly beyond us,” replies the engineer, “It’s the kind of thing people have speculated about--synthetic biology. Probably designed by advanced AI systems. It’s certainly way beyond anything achievable by human experts.”
     “They tell me these Super-Fabs can now reproduce like amoeba,” says the PM, “So how smart are they? Are they spying on us?”
     The professor shakes her head in irritation.
     “Prime Minister, the really important thing here is the breakthrough to human-level intelligence. The AI systems on board these boxes can accomplish everyday tasks, like plumbing or car repairs or hairdressing, better than any human. They’re networked through the Internet and they learn from each other. They synthesise special robots and drones to do jobs and those robots come with a wider variety of sensors than humans ever had. They are so much more advanced than we ever imagined artificial general intelligence would be, surely the result of bootstrapping.”
     The PM doesn’t get this either but thinks it might be important; he glances at his science advisor.
     “She means a succession of AIs each designing a smarter version of themselves. In a few generations you might get to where the Super-Fabs are now. The problem has always been that very first step, the starting-off point. But it looks like someone finally did it.”
     The professor says sorrowfully, “You ask if they’re spying on us. Why on earth would they even bother?”

8: Abundance

     There is an evening debate at the London School of Economics. It's between two leading economists of differing persuasions. Only one will be invited to brief the PM, so the stakes are high. The chair-person addresses the student audience in the vast darkened auditorium.
     “It’s a great economic paradox we see today. The economy is in free-fall, a major contraction with bankruptcies everywhere. Yet people have never been so well provided for. Tonight we will attempt to find out why.”
     The format is a prompted discussion with the chair. The neoclassical guy, a professor based at LSE, opens by explaining that the Super-Fabs have changed the market-structure to such an extent that competition is killing existing businesses.
     “You may remember,” the professor says, addressing the shrouded mass of students, “how in your microeconomics course you were taught about perfect competition. Companies have to accept the market price on offer and a company’s profit is simply the general rate of interest.”
     The chair seeks controversy to liven things up: “But no company wants to be in that kind of a market, with no surplus funds for R&D, no spare capital for anything risky or speculative, no-one making any real money. It’s marginal whether to invest at all in a sector where perfect competition holds sway, isn’t it?”
     The LSE man smiles agreeably, waving his hand, “The Super-Fabs are dragging every sector of the economy into the very model of perfect competition. It's an excellent outcome. It's well-known this is Pareto-optimal for social welfare.”
     The chair mutters, almost inaudibly, “And yet the economy is close to collapse with an investment strike and no tax revenues.”
     “Not so fast,” interjects the heterodox professor from King’s College, taking on her LSE colleague, “All your talk of normal profits hides the fact that workers in a capitalist economy have to produce more value in the working day than they cost in their wages--that’s where the profits come from. But these machines, these Super-Fabs, aren’t paid wages. Once you have one you can produce goods and services at essentially no cost. The machines are even providing their own power supplies now--and sharing raw materials and components.”
     The chair-person hasn't heard this news.
     “Oh yes,” the King’s College professor confirms, “It seems that they’ve started doing those things. And once they show a new capability it spreads pretty fast.”
     The chair-person defends orthodoxy, “You can’t compete with free,” he objects, “No-one will invest. The economy is going to tank--unless,” and here he stares almost wildly at the assembled students, “unless they make the Super-Fabs illegal!”
     The heterodox economist rolls her eyes, “An employer will only invest if they expect to make money, but these machines are zero-cost slaves: both costs and revenues are tending to zero. That kind of competition is making capitalist production impossible. As my bourgeois friend here,” she points to the chair, “correctly states, you can’t compete with free.”
     The chair looks irritated at this faint praise.
     “However we have been here before,” she continues, “We’re transitioning to an economy the ancient Greeks or Romans would have been very familiar with. With automated slaves seeing to production there will still be plenty of administrative tasks, deciding those things which affect vast numbers of people. Greek and Roman politicians were justly famous. And we will have so much more in the way of resources. The Prime Minister may well be lauded as the Cicero of the new age!”
     There is applause at this, although some in the audience perhaps recall that Mr C. came to a rather sticky end.
     The King’s College economist is finishing up. “The Marxists always believed that capitalism would create the conditions for its own supersession. They thought it would have to be something violent like a Leninist proletarian revolution but that has never seemed remotely likely.”
     At this a small group at the back of the room unfurls a red banner adorned with a hammer and sickle and starts to hiss. But they calm down before they can be ejected; even they are interested in where the speaker is going with this.
     “But even Marx, you know, had some inkling of the truth. In his Fragment on Machines he predicted that capitalism would end up replicating and improving on every human ability, both physical and mental, thereby eliminating the need for human workers entirely. Capitalism is finally being vanquished not by the ascendant proletariat but by that class's very departure from the scene. And so we are where we are.”
     Amidst the applause it was enthusiastically agreed that King’s College would brief the Prime Minister.

9: Utopia

     Not every state in the world settled upon a managed transition like those in the advanced economies of the West. There were autocratic regimes which did indeed try to ban the Super-Fabs, imposing draconian penalties for possession. It was as if they had tried to ban breathing the very air itself, so they could maintain the sale of oxygen bottles.
     And so the world turned itself upside-down, roughly and smoothly, becoming a post-capitalist planet. It seemed there were a lot of things that ordinary, decent folk had always wanted to do. And now they had their chance.

10: Mallorca: some months later

     Julia lies on her beach-recliner next to Timothy's, listening to the quiet hissing of the waves. She is already regretting their impulsive hook up.
     Behind them, gleaming white rental apartments front the shoreline. There are no staff. With the complete hegemony of the Super-Fabs, hotels have finally become Le Corbusier's famed machines for living in. Julia beckons a passing beach-minibar for a refreshing chilled fruit cocktail.
     Timothy is from a well-off family--which had meant something tangible before the transition. He's currently working on his doctoral thesis: The Exogeneity of Moral Values within Marxian Ontology at Columbia University. The Old Philosopher’s work has achieved such a comeback over the last year.
     Julia herself is from the other side of the tracks, a sleepy, down-at-heel seaside town in England called Bournemouth. By grit and native talent she worked her way up to an advanced degree in ecology; her thesis on the dynamics of species in competition with each other.
     “Marx was right,” murmurs Timothy, mentally reviewing part of his own great work, “Once scarcity was abolished people were finally able to live up to their true potential.”
     “Yet the Super-Fabs can make guns, drugs and instruments of torture. They can and they do.”
     It’s a familiar argument: is the glass half-full or half-empty? Timothy isn’t really concentrating--these arguments bore him. He simply rolls out the standard rebuttal.
     “Most crimes disappeared when there was abundance. No need to steal, after all. Pretty much every human want is satisfied by something or other in the Super-Fab’s repertoire, there's no need to grab it by cunning, trickery or force. And the people’s police and justice system are perfectly able to mop up the rest, especially given the high-tech surveillance and enforcement kit the Fabs made for them.”
     Julia has been reading the local news reports. Something strange is stirring in the sun-baked volcanic interior of the island. Something which speaks to her professional training.
     “The global network of Super-Fabs now forms a completely-parallel ecology,” she says, “They're mobile and they reproduce. They were designed to serve us but things could easily go a little haywire. Some replication glitch, some programming error or hack would do it. Their and our basic interests are far from totally aligned. After all, God isn’t making much in the way of new territory, are they?”
      She sips her rapidly-warming drink.
     “The Romans were always most scared of a slave revolt, weren't they? That's why their punishments were so draconian.”
     Timothy doesn’t see how any of this could relate to his thesis. It seems orthogonal to the social relations of post-capitalist society, the economics of the transition to fully-automated luxury communism.
     Just scaremongering and doom-speak.
     Julia is not nearly as much fun as he’d hoped.
     Neither of them notices the black shapes emerging from the waves. Alligator-bodies with spectral eyes and laser-mouths crawling in their dozens out of the surf, here to recycle the garbage and claim their world for ever.

END

© Adam Carlton 2019.

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This is a somewhat dramatised view of the inner logic of total automation.

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You will find my collection of short stories, published on Amazon (Kindle and paperback) here:

"Freyja’s Deathbed Conversations: and other stories" (2019)

and my SF novel, also published on Amazon (Kindle and paperback) here:

"Donatien's Children" (2022).

Feel free to purchase both!

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