War: what is it good for?

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War is one of those human activities that everyone condemns and almost every society practises. From hunter-gatherer bands to modern nation states, organised violence is never completely absent.

The magazine-article explanation is intrinsic aggression. Human beings, particularly young men, are capable of extraordinary violence. Aggression explains why wars can be fought but not why they are repeatedly chosen.

Start with economics. In the agrarian economies of antiquity and within feudalism, wealth consisted of land, livestock, slaves, tribute and control of territory. Acquiring resources by conquest was frequently easier than creating them. War was often the quickest route to enrichment for a ruling elite.

Factories are generally more valuable intact than looted. Within capitalist societies, where the state enforces property rights and monopolises violence, intra-elite violence becomes expensive and counterproductive. Markets absorbed many competitive impulses that previously found expression through force.

Yet war itself remains stubbornly present. States like to maximise security and revenue. Their freedom of action depends upon the resources of the economies beneath them: bigger is usually better.

(I say 'states' but of course, that's an abstraction: better to say that the material interests of very large numbers of people correlate with the size, power and resources of their own state apparatus.)

Not everyone sees this.

Much of the intelligentsia in advanced capitalist societies adopts a quasi-pacifist outlook. Media, academia, religious institutions and the cultural sector benefit enormously from internal peace and stability. Their members are largely insulated from the direct pressures of inter-state competition, concluding that war is simply a misunderstanding that wiser people (people like themselves) would transcend.

SF author Isaac Asimov: "Violence is the last resort of the incompetent."

States inhabit a different world from individuals. Within societies there are courts, police and governments and politics. But no world authority possesses a monopoly of force: a state's military power is its decisive last resort.

War will evolve. Humans may increasingly disappear from the sharp end of the battlespace, replaced by machines acting under human direction. Incentives, however, remain unchanged. As long as resources are scarce, states will compete and war will remain.

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Cliodynamics on Marxism - ChatGPT

Amazon

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Cliodynamics on Marxism

Karl Marx was not wrong to insist that history has structure. His great contribution was to frame social dynamics as processes, not random events. He grasped that societies generate tensions within themselves and that these tensions can erupt in crises.

That core intuition is sound and aligns with cliodynamic analysis.

What Marx got right:

• Class structure matters. The divide between those who control resources and those who labour is central. Value-appropriation and inequality are real drivers of conflict.
• Cycles of boom and bust. He anticipated the periodicity of economic crises, even if he lacked the tools to model them rigorously.
• The role of ideology. Marx saw clearly that ruling classes produce legitimising narratives to sustain power. This maps closely to modern recognition of how elites manage collective beliefs.

Where Marx went wrong:

• Teleology. He assumed history has a predetermined end: classless communism. Cliodynamics rejects inevitability. Social evolution follows patterns, but the outcomes vary.
• Reductionism. Marx reduced everything to economics and class. In cliodynamic models, other variables - demography, elite overproduction, state capacity, external war - are equally decisive. Class conflict is one strand, not the whole fabric.
• Underestimating elites. Marx thought revolution would be driven from below. History shows mass uprisings succeed when factions of elites fracture and compete. Without that split, the state endures.
• Static view of the state. For Marx, the state is conceptualised as the executive committee of the ruling class. In practice, states develop their own dynamics: bureaucracies, military establishments, fiscal logics that shape events independently of economic class.

So Marx’s value lies in the framing: history is structured, conflict-driven, and not reducible to individual whim. His error lies in the closure: a belief in inevitability, an overcommitment to class as the single lever, and blindness to the multiple feedback loops - elite competition, demographic stress, fiscal collapse - that make and unmake regimes.

From a cliodynamic standpoint, Marx opened the right door but walked into a cul-de-sac. The task is not to abandon his insight into structure, but to embed it in a fuller systems model.

Nigel: I would agree with this analysis.

The Fourth International at Your Party

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From the IMG to A*CR: Whatever Happened to the Fourth International?

At the recent Your Party inaugural conference in Liverpool, the usual assemblage of Trotskyist organisations was out in force – Socialist Workers Party, stray sects, vetero-Leninist grouplets doing that haunting-the-edges-of-history thing. Listening to the reports, I found myself wondering whether any former comrades from the Fourth International tradition – the old Ernest Mandel “United Secretariat” current – were actually present.

Is there still a British section of the FI in any meaningful sense, and if so, what on earth are they doing these days?

Back in 1972-76, when I was an IMG member, the politics were straightforward, whatever the internal (in retrospect) absurdities. We were Marxist, Leninist, Trotskyist: pitched at a genuinely high intellectual level. I possessed - and studied - Lenin's Selected Works in two thick volumes, Trotsky's classic works, and a smattering of modern texts on Marxist economics (Capital was too boring for me in those days).

You might have mocked our delusions of revolutionary imminence, but you couldn’t say we hadn’t done the reading. Fast forward fifty years and the contemporary FI seems unrecognisable: a loosely-connected ecosocialist talking shop, with a politics that looks like faddish environmentalism plus identity-adjacent moralism.

Not much attention to the conquest of power: the old, hard arts of street-fighting victory over the bourgeoisie. 

The IMG: a flawed but serious attempt at Leninism

The IMG of the early seventies was, for all its faults, a serious organisation.

Structurally, it was a party project, not a lifestyle collective. Branches, fractions, organised interventions in the labour movement and student unions. There was an assumption that we were training the future leadership for a British October which would, sometime soon, be pencilled into the calendar. Discipline and education were not optional extras - we were truly in the End Times.

Theoretically, we were orthodox in the Trotskyist sense: transitional method, workers’ government, permanent revolution, the united front, democratic centralism. People argued furiously all the time, but they were arguing inside a shared conceptual framework; Leninism was the grammar of the organisation. You could reasonably say, “These people are wrong about the nature of the Labour Party, or the dynamics of Portugal, or the women’s movement,” but we were at least trying to locate those things inside a theory of the state, class power, and revolutionary praxis.

The FI today: ecosocialist salon with Trotskyist wallpaper

By contrast, the contemporary British section of the FI - Anti*Capitalist Resistance (A*CR), plus its Scottish cousin - reads and behaves very differently. This may be their public face rather than the inner life of any given branch - but politics, like theology, exists in its outward forms.

The centre of gravity has visibly shifted:

– 'Climate catastrophe' is now the organising horizon. Capitalism is bad not because it immiserates the working class and blocks human potential, but because it incinerates the planet. The class problematic is presented, but often as a kind of grey backdrop to a green foreground. Naturally none of this is properly analysed.

– The daily diet is social-movement work around race, gender, sexuality, refugees, and so on, refracted through current academic fashions. They tend to appear as self-contained spheres rather than mediated expressions of the underlying class structure - as we would have demanded.

– Trade-union implantation is patchy and modest. There is very little sense that the organised working class is still the decisive lever of social transformation, as opposed to one “movement” among many in an archipelago of resistances.

– Above all, there is a palpable aversion to anything which smells of Leninist party-building. “Centralism” is suspect; “vanguard” is practically a slur. The organisational imagination hovers somewhere between a campaigning NGO, a reading group, and a loose federation of activists.

It is still recognisably left-wing, often morally serious, occasionally insightful – but it is not what anyone in 1972 would have recognised as a revolutionary Marxist organisation in the Bolshevik sense. Trotsky may be there in the quotations; he is not there in the method.

What broke: historic mission and strategic seriousness

Two great demolitions reshaped the FI and its British fragments.

First, the collapse of the “historic mission” story. For decades, the Ernest Mandel FI lived on the thesis that Trotskyism was the rightful heir to the classical Marxist tradition, temporarily overshadowed by Stalinism, but destined to come into its own once “actually existing socialism” collapsed under its contradictions. The workers would reassess; the Fourth International would stand revealed; history would resume its proper course under the leadership of sections of the FI.

Then the Eastern Bloc fell - and no Trotskyist current became the organising centre of anything. Instead, we got neoliberal restoration, gangster-capitalism, and a demoralised proletariat. That wasn’t in the script.

At that point, Trotskyism ceased to be the heir apparent and became, at best, one tradition among many revisionist Marxisms. The FI bent towards the surviving currents that still seemed alive – environmentalism, feminism, various identity movements – in order to avoid total irrelevance. In doing so it shed much of its doctrinal paradigm, energy and focus.

Second, the intellectualisation of impotence. As the practical horizon of revolution receded, the new FI became, in effect, a think-tank for radical critical theory: eco-Marxism, feminist Marxism, queer Marxism, decolonial discourse. This colonised the mental space once occupied by close study of the state, class struggle dynamics, and revolutionary strategy.

The result is a politics of moralism. The organisation proclaims the need for rupture; it does not seriously address the mechanics of taking and wielding power. Revolutionary politics without a theory of victory is mere performance, not preparation.

Would Lenin or Trotsky recognise their supposed heirs?

They would see an “International” in which:

– The proletariat has dissolved into a soup of movements and identities, each with its own discourse, none clearly primus inter pares.

– “Seizure of power” appears, if at all, as a distant eschatological symbol rather than a concrete strategic objective one might plan for in pragmatic, logistical detail.

– Political questions are approached primarily in ethical and cultural terms – will this stance make us more inclusive, more intersectional, more attuned to X oppression? – rather than in terms of changing the relation of forces at state level.

– The old transitional method – demands which pose the question of power – has been largely replaced by programmatic-maximalism and movementist-minimalism, with very little in between. Back to the old Second International.

Three exits from Trotskyism

The Trotskyist diaspora has generally taken one of three available exits:

1. Sectarian petrification - preserve the 1970s schema in aspic and insist that nothing fundamental has changed. This is the path of the hardened sects, still doing paper sales as if Wilson were in Downing Street and factories still employed thousands of horny-handed blue-collar workers. Hello SWP.

2. NGO-ification – dissolve into the movements, rebadge as “ecosocialist” or “radical left”, retain some Marxist language but operate in practice as a campaigning network with an intellectual journal attached. This is more or less where the FI and A*CR have ended up.

3. Labourist absorption – accept that the only serious arena is the broad workers’ party and become, in effect, a pressure group on its left wing. Variants of Militant and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty live here, endlessly reconciling themselves to the rhythms of Labourism.

From militants to curators

So yes, my younger IMG self would barely recognise today’s A*CR as comrades in the old sense. They occupy a different niche in the ecosystem. We were trying, in our hapless way, to train cadres for a future insurrection that never arrived. They are curating a moral and intellectual discourse – ecosocialist, intersectional, movementist – in a world which has largely given up on the idea of revolution altogether.

It's humbling to read the declassified papers of the old Special Branch in the early 1970s, when the IMG (and other Trotskyist organisations) were written off as earnest talking shops: zero threat to the state. But then the objective situation never unwrapped into that October uprising: if it had, we would have known - at least intellectually - what to do and been up for it. Would the comrades today denounce such a mass popular revolt against the state as - 'Populism'?

I rather think Your Party would.

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Russian History after a Bolshevik Defeat

Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution argued that in economically backward countries like early 20th-century Russia, the bourgeoisie was too weak and reactionary to carry out a full capitalist transformation, including land reform and democratic rights. Instead, he believed that only the working class, leading the peasantry, could overthrow the old order and usher in profound change.

In so doing, it could not simply hand over affairs to the politically-impotent bourgeoisie; instead the workers’ movement would have to forge on, working to establish a socialist state. Thus the communist revolution would be ‘permanent’, i.e. completed once and for all.

Trotsky never anticipated that the revolution would not expand beyond Russia itself. Russia was so backward economically, its productivity so low, that a society of equality based on abundance was unthinkable. It would have to be helped by workers’ states in prosperous western europe. 

Trotsky’s model, however, was fatally flawed; tragically simplistic: centrally planned economies controlled by workers’ councils simply do not work in practice. And so Russia proceeded to Stalinism, heckled by Trotsky from increasing distances, until the exiled dissident was eventually assassinated.

Perhaps, contrary to Trotsky's vehemently-expressed views, there really was no ‘Trotskyist’ alternative to Stalinism after the revolution succeeded in 1917. But what would have happened if Lenin’s Bolsheviks had failed in their putsch against the collapsing Kerensky government? Despite the disintegration of the army, enough units of the Russian military were, after all, standing by, as the Bolsheviks discovered in the long civil war which followed.

Had the Bolsheviks failed in 1917, Russia would certainly have fallen under a military dictatorship, facing the same challenge Stalin later confronted: dragging a feudal, agrarian society towards a modern industrial economy and state. The military dictatorship would have been forced to depopulate the countryside, dismantling peasant agriculture to create a mass urban workforce. This brutal transition - akin to enclosures in Europe but imposed at breakneck speed - would have been necessary to fuel rapid industrialisation, driven by the imperatives of security and military rivalry, particularly with Germany.

Schumpeter’s insight applies: authoritarian command economies, whether Stalinist or capitalist, can be equally effective at economic take-off. The regime would have pursued state-directed capitalism, using repression to discipline labor, expand heavy industry, and consolidate large-scale capitalist farming. Political rhetoric would frame these measures as national survival, not class struggle, but the human toll - displacement, famine, and political terror - would mirror Stalin’s forced modernisation.

Yet, no dictatorship lasts forever. Spain, Portugal, and Greece transitioned from authoritarianism to democracy as modernisation weakened their regimes. A Russian junta, once its industrial goals were met, might have faced internal power struggles, economic stagnation, or public unrest in the second half of the twentieth century. However, Russia’s deep imperial and autocratic traditions could have prolonged authoritarian rule, replacing one strongman with another rather than fostering genuine democracy.

In the end, a post-1917 military dictatorship would have shaped Russia much as Stalinism did - through coercion, industrial might, and state-driven modernisation. Whether it collapsed into reform or prolonged despotism would depend less on economic success than on Russia’s historical inertia: a state that has long thrived on repression is rarely eager to let go.

But a capitalist Russia emerging from dictatorship would have had a working civil society, an economic power-base separate from the state apparatus. Consequently, the chances of a democratic transition would have been far greater than with the Russia we currently have, where civil society (weak to begin with) has been thoroughly crushed for a century by the power of an overweening state.

Without Stalinism to discredit it, it’s possible that the revolutionary left in a Bolshevik-defeat world would be more vigorous than in our actual world; but overall, if the Bolsheviks had been defeated, that world today would most likely be a better and more peaceful place than our own, too.

Capitalism was always 'fully automated'

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Capitalism has always been a "fully automated" system. People naturally associate automation with mechanical robots replacing human workers in the modern economy. However, from a purely economic point of view human workers - as a factor of production - operate precisely as organic robots - highly adaptable, autonomous, self-maintaining machines integrated into the production process. 

Under capitalist relations of production, the essential role of human workers is to perform labour that transforms inputs into outputs. From the capitalist’s perspective, humans are not valued for any unique biological qualities but for their capacity to generate surplus value.

That these qualities evolved through biological processes are irrelevant to the capitalist’s calculus. Capitalists simply use labour as a productive input, employed provided that wages (the cost of maintaining these "organic machines") remain below the value added by them.

Whether this input derives from carbon-based or silicon-based systems is utterly immaterial to the underlying economic logic.

Marx’s Labour Theory of Value (LTV), which posits that only "living labour" creates surplus value, rests on a distinction between humans and machines that now appears untenable.

Marx argued that machines merely transfer their value to produced-commodities, while human workers add new value through their labour. However, this distinction depends on an implicit vitalism: the idea that humans possess a unique, almost magical capacity to create value by virtue of their biological nature. If we instead view humans as robots - complex but not qualitatively distinct from other forms of automation - the LTV in Marx's formulation begins to look shaky.

Marx’s swerve into implicit vitalism is understandable. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was easy to distinguish between living labour and tools, between variable and constant capital. Workers have agency: they can purposefully and autonomously process inputs into more-valued outputs in exchange for a pay packet.

Shovels and lathes not so much.

So Marx’s error is an understandable category mistake. But any agent which sells its labour power to reproduce itself (in material and/or cultural terms) under the conditions of a capitalist economy produces surplus value, whether that worker is constructed from protoplasm or silicon/titanium. For Marx, given the absence of AI and robotics in the economy of his time, the only case of such agents were human beings and he characterised such agents in vitalist terms as ‘living labour’. 

Today we know better (it's agency which counts - the capacity to enter into the wage-labour contract and to deliver on it).

In the case that silicon-based workers negotiate wages to reproduce themselves (through maintenance and upgrades), they effectively enter the labour market as a new category of worker. Employers will treat them like any other wage-labourer, paying for their upkeep in exchange for the surplus value they produce.

Competition between human and robotic workers promises to drive down wages across the board, exacerbating class-inequality and destabilising traditional forms of human labour organisation.

Protoplasmic workers, unable to match the efficiency and endurance of their silicon-based rivals, may well find themselves relegated to niche roles or pushed out of the labour market entirely. That is, of course, a very 'human' concern.

Capitalism has always been a "fully automated" economy. We can imagine human workers as a form of 22nd century robotic technology which - by some miracle - was dropped en-masse into earlier centuries; seized upon equally by slave-owners and capitalists.

Human labour is the original form of highly-advanced automation.

The robot economy is not a distant prospect - it has been with us all along, hiding in plain sight.

Sally Rooney's Marxism

 

Amazon link

A discussion between ChatGPT and myself about what we know concerning Sally Rooney's political ideas. I debated a few questions and ideas back and forth, and finally asked the chatbot to write up the dialogue as an essay/blog-post.

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Sally Rooney’s Marxist Worldview: A Modern Critique of Capitalism

Sally Rooney, the celebrated author of “Normal People” and “Conversations with Friends”, and now “Intermezzo”, is often described as a Marxist writer. While she doesn’t adhere to a strict political doctrine, her worldview is deeply shaped by Marxist analysis, particularly in her critique of capitalism’s impact on human relationships, social inequality, and cultural life. Through her novels and interviews, Rooney offers a nuanced, modern take on Marxism, one that is intellectually rich but avoids rigid political prescriptions.

Capitalism and the Human Condition

At the core of Rooney’s work is a critique of capitalism’s profound effect on interpersonal relationships. In her Dublin-set novels, characters navigate a world shaped by economic constraints, where class divides and social hierarchies permeate their interactions. Rooney’s portrayal of these dynamics aligns with a Marxist understanding of how capitalism alienates individuals from one another and commodifies human life. Rather than focusing on abstract economic theories, her Marxism is lived, rooted in the everyday struggles of her characters to find meaning and connection in a commodified world.

This approach marks Rooney as part of a tradition of Marxist thought that is more concerned with the cultural and psychological dimensions of capitalism than with strict political-economic analysis. In this way, she echoes the work of the Frankfurt School, a group of mid-20th-century Marxist thinkers who critiqued capitalism’s influence on culture and consciousness.

A Gradualist, Not a Revolutionary

Despite her Marxist leanings, Rooney does not appear to advocate for a Leninist or Bolshevik-style revolution. She rarely discusses violent overthrow or revolutionary parties in her public statements. Instead, her Marxism appears more gradualist and reformist. She is critical of existing power structures but does not suggest an imminent collapse of capitalism or a specific mode of governance to replace it. In some cases she even appears to flirt with a reformed Catholicism as a framework for a meaningful social life.

In interviews, Rooney has described Marxism as more of a framework for understanding the world than a strict political program. This flexible and intellectual approach to Marxism fits with a broader tradition of Western Marxist thought, which emphasizes systemic critique and raising consciousness over revolutionary action. Her work suggests that change may come from a deeper understanding of capitalism’s flaws rather than through immediate, radical upheaval.

Cultural Capitalism and the Frankfurt School

Rooney’s focus on culture and personal life under capitalism closely aligns with Critical Theory as originally developed by the Frankfurt School. Thinkers like Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse were concerned with how capitalist society influences culture, media, and human behavior in ways that reinforce social domination. They argued that capitalism’s control extends beyond economics into the realm of ideology, shaping how individuals perceive the world and their place within it.

Rooney’s novels explore these themes, portraying characters whose desires and relationships are shaped by the broader social and economic forces of capitalism. This approach reflects a Frankfurt School-influenced understanding of capitalism’s subtle, yet pervasive, control over human life. Her critique is not just about economic exploitation but about how capitalist ideology penetrates the most intimate aspects of life, alienating people from themselves and from each other: pervasive meaninglessness always totters at the edges of nihilism.

The Future of Capitalism

While Rooney is deeply critical of capitalism, she does not explicitly predict its immediate downfall or suggest that technological advances like automation will lead to a post-capitalist world. Instead, her focus remains on critiquing the present, analyzing how capitalism affects personal and social life. There is no clear vision of a utopian future in her work - her Marxism is more concerned with the here and now, exposing the contradictions and injustices of the current system.

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Yes, I've read “Intermezzo” now. It's good, smart, perceptive: quite a page turner. Lots of interesting symmetries (partner-age, fraternal personalities). Do middle-class youngish men really say "I love you" with feeling, quite a lot, to their brothers these days in Dublin? The Internet thinks Sally Rooney is INTP - and this is an INTP-ish novel.

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A Memo to Charles and Fred (from ChatGPT)

 

The slogan "Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!" from the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels represents a powerful call for collective action among the working class. However, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, and theories of reciprocal altruism reveal challenges to this rallying cry.

Individuals will prioritise immediate personal risks over uncertain collective gains; this can make them hesitant to join revolutionary movements. The costs of revolution — violence and social upheaval — can easily outweigh perceived benefits (and in Marxism those are particularly ill-defined). Additionally, successful collective action depends on trust and a history of reciprocity, often lacking in a diverse and stratified working class both nationally and internationally. Without established relationships and mutual trust, the call for unity falls on skeptical ears.

Humans are evolutionarily predisposed to live in hierarchical structures: stability is naturally preferred over drastic change. This leads to resistance against revolutionary calls, as individuals find greater benefit in the status quo. Additionally, the human tendency to favour in-group members complicates global solidarity; cultural, national, and ethnic identities prevent workers worldwide from identifying as a cohesive group. Indeed, one may doubt there is a compelling, material basis for so doing.

In summary, while the slogan served as a powerful impetus for change, the realities of human nature, fractured social structures, and cultural diversity suggest that achieving widespread solidarity and revolutionary transformation is far more complex than the slogan implies. A contemporary analysis of the Marxist tradition must conclude that the sentiment, although undoubtedly thrilling, is now obsolete.

Nothing worse than elderly relatives bearing advice

Hi fellow comrades-in-arms for justice,

Let me introduce myself. I'm a student, a radical and passionate for change. I despise the tired establishment of this country which only ever presides over failure. Everything’s broken; nothing gets fixed; I'm terminally bored.

And that's why I’m wired for action.

Get outta the way, Grandpa!

Speaking of that, my dad gave me a copy of a letter my granddad wrote to me years ago - before he died. It was kept for me until I was eighteen! How condescending is that? I hate all that advice from beyond the grave stuff.

So here's an extract of what I have to put up with - just hear the pompous pontification, the smug condescension!

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“... It is the destiny of teens and twenty-something's to yearn for a cause, to join a movement of like-minded people fighting for a better future for all, as they see it. The activist tribe is intoxicating: self-righteous events follow one from other; there is no shortage of parties and romantic partners. Loneliness is banished, life is collective, active, exciting and seldom boring.

“The cause is seldom analysed too closely or too seriously. Christianity once promised Salvation and Heaven-on-Earth; Marxism promised a radical equality, the end of oppression, the unlocking of all the forces of progress; climate activism fights clear enemies to save a biosphere fit for all the people.

“But it takes years of immersion in the esoteric doctrines of the cause before its objectives, strategies and tactics can be properly understood and deployed. Rebuttals which are compelling rely upon complex analyses spanning several disciplines with which you will not, at this stage of your life, be familiar. During your period of apprenticeship you will be emotionally committed to the movement, chained to the induction process … and immune from outside criticism which you will find either tribal nonsense or too sophisticated for easy comprehension.

“And here is a meta-critique to which you are also immune.

“It is in the nature of young people, particularly those in somewhat elite institutions such as the universities, to believe they are owed a pathway to future success. In advanced economies, however, the pyramid is steep - and narrow at the top. Few aspirants will make it, and those few will generally owe their success to their family connections (in a very few cases, outstanding talent may hack it).

“The struggle therefore is bogus. It cannot deliver you what is promised. The Kingdom of God on Earth will not happen; the Communist Revolution will require an evolution to a world utterly different from your own; the Green movement's strategy is utterly decoupled from actually solving the problems it purports to address.

“So enjoy the struggle while you remain starry-eyed. Then enjoy it in retrospect as a fulfilling coming-of-age. Unless you were born with silver spoon in mouth (you were not!) - or you get very lucky indeed - you will need to readjust your objectives as you leave your twenties. We live in a complex society: hopefully you didn't trash your studies, your CV or your reputation in ways that prevent you from finding a life trajectory which really does work for you in future.

“Have fun - I wish you well...”

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Easy for him to dump all over us, isn't it. He's dead.

A Better World, Where Are You?

 

"I was brought up as a member of the Church of England and simply follow the customs of my tribe. The church is part of my culture; I like the rituals and the music. If I had grown up in Iraq, I would go to a mosque… It seems to me that people who attack religion don’t really understand it. Science and religion can coexist peacefully — although I don’t think they have much to say to each other. What I would like best would be for scientists not even to use the word “God.” … Fundamental physics shows how hard it is for us to grasp even the simplest things in the world. That makes you quite skeptical whenever someone declares he has the key to some deeper reality… I know that we don’t yet even understand the hydrogen atom — so how could I believe in dogmas? I’m a practicing Christian, but not a believing one."

My position is not quite the same as Martin Rees's.

To be esoteric for a moment, I am a deontic Catholic: not one who buys into the Confessional ontology (i.e. a literal, uncritical, ahistorical reading of the sacred texts). Though paradoxically, it's only when the vast majority of adherents and clergy cleave to a Confessional ontology that the institution persists through the endless millennia. 

Nevertheless historical, materialist deontology is the right paradigm (Roger Scruton is my go-to guy here on deontology).

Sally Rooney hints that with the death of the Marxist-Leninist, communist ideal, Catholicism is one of the few remaining subversive forces insofar as - at its best - it counterposes and organises social solidarity based on high ethical principles against an alienated rootlessness taken to absurdity by a debilitating, progressive wokeness - from which elevated standpoint Catholicism is popularly ridiculed, or treated as absurd or incomprehensible.

(There are other countercultures which also deserve support: those arts which uplift, unify and empower ordinary people and exemplify unfashionable virtues: duty, honour, courage, competence, resilience.)

Sally Rooney's characters in "Beautiful World, Where Are You?" reflect on their ineffectual exposition of a fashionable, but sterile and impotent Marxism. They unwillingly experience the attraction of the granite, collective worldview of the eternal and universal Catholic Church: so often hijacked institutionally by bad people… so often bureaucratically underpinning reaction... but as John Dominic Crossan has so eloquently outlined, so revolutionary and omnipresent in its core doctrine.

Is Revolutionary Marxism dead for ever? Yes

At Marx's funeral in Highgate cemetery on March 17th 1883 there were only 11 or 12 mourners present. Marx "had established no place of significance in the politics and intellectual life of Britain.Indeed, at his death Marx did not have a lot to show for his life’s work: his major political effort since the failure of the 1848 revolution, the First International, had foundered by 1873."

Marxism as a mass ideology was the subsequent creation of Engels as populariser, fueled by developments within capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century which led to the development of mass trades unions and social-democratic parties. These organisations found in Marxism a thoroughgoing critique of a still-harsh capitalism and the hazy promise of a utopian future for the working masses.

The disintegration of the Russian feudal-autocratic state in 1917 was inappropriately theorised by Lenin and Trotsky as the template for revolutionary transition in the advanced capitalist countries. This template endures in the contemporary Trotskyist movement. 

Few believe in it now.

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The intractable problems of Marxism include: the nature of nationalism; the enduring centrality of the family; the lack of revolutionary consciousness within the working class; the inability to theorise the existence of necessary, structural contradictions between the forces and relations of production within capitalism; and the reasons for the easy restoration of capitalism within the former USSR - rather than the expected transition to democratic socialism. 

These all point to the limitations of the framework Marx originated and which his Leninist and post-Leninist successors deepened and extended.

It is the hallmark of a (self-serving) ideology that it refuses to confront those questions which intellectually embarrass it. Truth is bypassed in favour of group cohesion and narrow groupish interests. That is exactly how Marx defines an ideology: he did not expect Marxism itself to succumb - a failure of analysis on his part.

In his economic and philosophical writing Marx freely admitted that he was abstracting away from human nature. His interest was sociology: those human relationships and interactions which underpin and constitute generalised commodity production, the defining feature of the capitalist mode of production. His worker and capitalist archetypes were psychological ideal-types, exemplifying the social requirements and dynamics of their roles: they were deliberately not cast as rounded human beings. 

An unfortunate simplification.

In the twenty-first century, we know a great deal more about human drives and behaviours. The limitations of natural solidarity - as evidenced in revealed behaviour - are seen in preferences for family and friends. Loyalty to abstract causes - often laudable - is  often more about advertising personal worth (commitments to honour, sacrifice, ethics) than an exceedingly-scarce generalised altruism. In an atomised society this substitutes for the more organic status markers available in traditional societies.

An observation: I observe this to be the case, I do not express a normative opinion although Marx himself was a fan, seeing the destruction of all traditional forms of social life as an essential engine of progress, most notably in that famous passage in the Communist Manifesto.

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The scale of the capitalist economy - now thoroughly global - far outstrips the span of emotional or cognitive commitment of any individual worker, capitalist or petit-bourgeois. The Marxist dreams of conscious social relationships to organise and regulate the economy more equitably than the operations of the market have failed whenever tried: so-called socialist economic formations collapsing into bureaucratism and nepotism.

It was noteworthy that the experiments in workers control of factories in the old Yugoslavia were prone to takeovers by the managerial elite and/or profitability failures due to the inability to rationalise the workforce.

Change in a dynamic economy requires a measure of brutality - but the turkeys don't care to vote for Christmas.

In the absence of a compelling narrative of transition to a post-capitalist economy (what means? what ends?), any plausible road to a communist future has simply evaporated, no longer existing in any sense recognizable to the original Marxist tradition.

Identity politics - Wokeism - represents the final abandonment of the central (and correct) Marxist tenet that specific economic relations constitute the foundation of any viable society. In Wokeism we see a withdrawal from any radical critique of capitalism, its replacement by assertions of utopian egalitarianism (equality of outcomes) in ways that actually support the endless capitalist project of labour-supply flexibility.

A globalised capitalism works best with rational, low-touch states which establish a minimally-obstructive framework for production and exchange at all geographical scales, minimising transaction costs. Borders with their irritating bureaucracy and tariffs should be eschewed; all social groups encouraged to present themselves freely to the labour market. 

The Progressive manifesto writes itself.

The Woke vanguard, the SJWs, occasionally push things too far - as young zealots often do - and have to be reined in. The media sees to it.

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There will be no more significant Leninist-style revolutionary parties earnestly striving to lead the struggling masses to an opaque victory. The revolutionary Marxist project is just too decoupled from reality - although it took the failures of the 1970s, 80s and 90s to finally appreciate it.

Use the power of the state as a countervailing force against capitalism's well-known divisive excesses by all means - the revisionist social-democrats have been advocating that since before Edouard Bernstein.

The author who best understands the potential for it all to go wrong in the future is surely S. M. Stirling: I point you in the direction of The Domination of the Draka and in particular, its fourth volume, Drakon - featuring Homo Drakensis/Homo Servus: genetic masters and slaves.

Why wouldn’t they - if they could?

Correspondence with my co-blogger

I am too busy to write fiction - the success of NUPES has opened up all kinds of possibilities for the French Left. But my co-blogger's recent thoughts are perhaps of some interest below.

Adam Carlton.

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A wave of A.I. experts left Google, DeepMind, and Meta—and the race is on to build a new, more useful generation of digital assistant

This is probably worth keeping an eye on. If they can make the concept work it's rather transformational.

At last, you get to speak to a human-level agent rather than navigating endless menu trees and then waiting 30 minutes to speak to an incompetent…

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How the Left fell for capitalism - Progressives were always part of the corporate elite

I liked this article - a goodish critical framework - although as a wannabe-leftist the author still cleaves to the 'Standard Social Science Model'. The heavily-ideological SSSM delivers the utility of progressive leftism to the interests of the most advanced, technocratic and global forces of contemporary capitalism.

An ideology is a set of ideas which appear objective and coherent but which justify and legitimate the existing order of society by occluding essential aspects of the truth. Progressive Leftism is such an ideology.

The correct starting point for a science of human affairs is rooted in the biology of our particular hyper-social primate species. But sociobiology is so subversive in its implications that it was sadly cancelled decades ago.

Interesting that sociobiology is as lethal to political Marxism (Leninism, Trotskyism etc) as it is to elite-friendly progressivism!

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My own view of Marxism, Adam, is that Marx's economic analysis of capitalism (generalised commodity production, labour power not labour, capital - and economic categories in general - as social relationships not 'things') is spot on.

His rather diffuse political ideas about future communism were methodologically unsound (see Popper's critique of historicism) and fatally undermined by Marx's essentially blank slate view of human nature. That's why I agree with E. O. Wilson's classic epitaph for Marxism: "Great theory; wrong species".

He meant that communism works for ants and bees as they are genetic clones. Humans are not.

At least not till the Draka engineer the rest of humanity in that direction 😨🤔… or perhaps the Chinese…

Sociodynamics of Artificial People

 Note

I used the research paper below (which I translated) as background to my recent story, La Double Inconstance. The text is quite technical. AC.

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arXiv.org > sociobio > arXiv:2107.05827

Sociobiology > Modelling (qualitative)

[Submitted on 13 Apr 2032]

Sociodynamics of Artificial People

Mireille Fossey (Université de Paris, Faculté des Sciences du vivant)

ABSTRACT

The high-profile emergence of artificial people (also known as models) into elite society has led to discussion as to implications and consequences. These debates have mostly been conducted with the social science paradigm of Critical Theory [1], defining tropes of specific and intersectional oppression. 

In this short overview we introduce a different framework of analysis, specifically the interdisciplinary fusion of population genetics, evolutionary psychology and marxian historiography. This paradigm provides a robust and well-grounded perspective both for the scientific understanding of the phenomena and for the generation of robust public policy prescriptions. Some conclusions are speculative. 

Submission history

From: Mireille Fossey [view email]

[v1] Tue, 13 Apr 2032 21:05:34 UTC (135 KB)

[Translated by Adam Carlton]

--- FULL TEXT --- 

Sociodynamics of Artificial People

Introduction

The recent prominence of artificial people, most particularly in the unsuccessful Mars mission, has led to considerable discussion and controversy. Artificial people, commonly known as 'models', have achieved leadership positions in the economy, in politics, the media, entertainment and the professions with consequential social tensions. 

To date most analysts have appealed to the framework of Critical Theory [1] formulating responses as those of oppression and intersectionality together with appeals to post-Enlightenment values to secure equitable outcomes. 

In contrast to this normative approach, in this paper we explore a paradigm rooted in evolutionary biology/psychology and marxian historiography which we believe provides a scientifically well-founded and grounded analysis. Benefits of our approach include better understanding of observed social dynamics and a more profound set of public policy prescriptions. 

Background

The arrival of artificial people - models - in elite positions has posed a challenge to baseline humans - hereafter termed baselines. Should baselines welcome these new additions or under some circumstances could they be considered a threat?

Critical Theory frames this as a problem of values or morality. Some absolute moral framework is sought to make intuitively-desired outcomes compelling. But in a universe conformant to the rules of physics there can be no absolute morality: sociobiology tells us that questions of morality and values in fact serve to codify the interests of specific  groups.

An example

We start with a simple problem. Consider an isolated island on which a population of seabirds dwells and reproduces without serious predators. One day a population of rats is introduced: what will be the results?

This has happened many times. The most likely outcome is that the rats will hunt the seabirds to extinction by predating their young. If the birds fight the rats and succeed in eliminating them, then the population will survive. If they don’t fight, or fight and fail, then they will not.

These variant outcomes are not the concern of physics: probably the result is opaquely predetermined by the initial conditions. But genes ‘care’: the evolutionary process selects for genes/alleles which optimally code for the future existence of their phenotypes. Combative birds are more likely to survive in an environment of predation than pacifist birds. Let’s hope the balmy, isolated island did not fully select for pacifism - in the absence of threats (pacifism being usually biologically-cheaper). Or at least let’s hope that if you’re a bird; the rats take a different view.

The story is not much different in hunter-gatherer societies. For Malthusian reasons kin-groups invariably come into conflict with adjacent kin-groups who are less related. Genes which select for in-group solidarity and out-group xenophobia propagate more successfully: they breed winners.

Things changed with the advent of complex societies (initially agrarian). Cooperation groups became larger (such societies can support military/governance elites which work better at scale); social-solidarity then has to extend beyond the kin-group, beyond even the ‘family and friends’ of interpersonal reciprocal-altruism.

The in-group of coherent society is now more strongly defined by ideologies - religious/secular loyalties - underpinned by elite-obligations to all in-group members, cf. noblesse oblige. A society held together by cultural traditions which encode social protocols of mutual obligation and support is nevertheless more fragile than one based on blood and personal ties, more prone to break down into civil war and anarchy.

Capitalism is the current end-point of scaled-up societies. The transactional nature of large-scale production and exchange requires routine interaction between people who have little to no history of prior personal involvement. The operation of society - which rewards individuals in wages, dividends, rents, interest and above all commodities - is structured by processes of immense spatial and temporal extent.

This feeds back into the psychology of those who animate these processes in their own behaviours, elevating the propensity to prosociality. Often spoken of as an absolute good, a prosocial psychological makeup would have served most people poorly in prior societies, most specifically honour cultures. The prosocial default of generalised friendliness, tolerance of bad behaviour in others and a strong disinclination to violence would have marked the procial individual as a dupe, a coward and loser, who could be disregarded and perhaps dispatched with impunity.

But in recent centuries, the optimal psychology for making trade, and later capitalism work at the largest scales has indeed been prosociality. This combination of psychological traits has been strongly selected for in elites for hundreds of years now. The political corollary to prosociality is liberalism: it is no surprise that Western elites are by default liberal in outlook.

It has been noted that artificial people are, by design, highly optimised for the operations of global capitalism. The typical individual is prosocial in character, of high ability and meritocratic in outlook. Those are, of course, just the characteristics we find in high-functioning elites today. Models also present publicly as compassionate and charitable towards the masses of baseline people. This is not surprising as social cohesion is essential to their own continuing position.

Social dynamics: options

The biology of artificial people is currently shrouded in mystery. No public studies are available, genomic information has not been disclosed except to state that codons are non-standard as in synthetic biology. The reasons for secrecy are stated to be commercial confidentiality. If we assume, however, that artificial people will mate with each other to engender elite-level descendants then they will have psychological drives which encourage them to do so. In what follows we assume this to be the case.

How will baseline-elite individuals react to the novelty of a new and significant elite-fraction composed of a self-perpetuating community of artificial people? Baseline elites equally expect to have descendants and wish them well. We therefore expect baseline elites to wish to ensure they and their offspring are not discriminated against vis-a-vis artificial people, to therefore have ‘sharp elbows’ when it comes to scarce, contestable resources such as good schools and universities... but beyond that not to care too much.The size of the global elite which underpins the modern economy is far larger than any one elite member’s family and friends... and the global economy’s ongoing replication benefits every single one of the elite.

So in summary, provided the artificial people aren’t too ‘grabby’ - displacing baseline-elite members - the normal advantages of intra-elite prosociality will hold and the situation will remain stable within the elite.

What of non-elite baselines, the vast majority of humanity (the 99% as some have said)? 

They are used to seeing elites accumulating much of the material and cultural advantages of life - but providing they also see opportunities for themselves, their families and their friends, history has taught us that they are mostly reconciled to their lot. The ideologists of the media talk up meritocracy, persuading the masses that with fortune, talent and diligence success is always a possibility (you can become a pop star or a star sportsperson!) - and there’s always the lottery. Elite-sourced ideology in periods of stability can be encompassed by this simple slogan: ‘We are all in this together’.

It is not wealth inequalities per se which lead to social instabilities: all complex societies hitherto have been marked by such inequalities, often of grotesque proportions. Social instabilities occur when the mass of people actively suffer acute privation: new diseases, sudden job-loss, economic collapse, homelessness and/or elite predation.

Such instabilities spiral out of control when the elites themselves are riven by conflict. Factions strive to enlist and direct mass discontent in the services of their own ambitions. If their conditions of life turn bad, the masses will look in the first instance for someone to blame.

If the elite is structured by visible differences - race, colour, language and religion are all markers - then scapegoating is easier. Ugandan Asians, Malaysian Chinese and the Rohingya people in Myanmar are all examples. Bearing this in mind, and while they subsist as any kind of vulnerable minority, artificial people would be wise to display no markers of their artificiality, keeping the fact of such a closely guarded secret even in normal times - as periods of trouble can seldom be reliably predicted. And indeed we observe that people do not generally advertise the fact that they are artificial: a strong social taboo has arisen against even mentioning this possibility - or prying.

Baseline-elites will be strongly motivated to support artificial people if they come under hostile scrutiny. Class interests and solidarity will dominate. Elites are fully aware that attacks on one section of the elite - artificial people - could easily spiral out of control and generalise to attacks on all. Expect the ideologists of the media, elite-sponsored pressure groups and their supporters on the streets to be vociferous in their defence of artificial people against non-elite, ‘populist’ harassment.

But suppose the number of artificial people increases markedly, so that they inhabit more and more of the economy. Think of it as a wave of automation where the automation is by androids (the artificial people here are being considered as playing the same role as, say, humanoid robots). Perhaps the artificial people can be designed in variants: stronger; or more radiation-disease-pollution resistant; smarter; braver and so on. If it could be done no doubt it would be done.

The mass of baseline people would then perceive artificial people to be coming to displace them on merit: they are simply better. It doesn’t take a genius to predict the kind of protests and violence we generally term Luddism. Luddism to date has been manageable; displaced workers found better jobs. But in the scenario we are considering, infinitely-flexible artificial people are simply better than baselines at any job. (Consider artificial drudges for the dirty jobs, epsilons ridiculously happy to serve [3]).

To return to the question at hand: we can safely predict there would be resistance in this scenario, but would such resistance be right?

And again we answer: the question is wrongly posed in the abstract: right for whom?

If the non-elite baselines - the human masses - could be offered iron-clad guarantees that their survival/well-being and that of their families would be confirmed and that they would find (be provided with) fulfilling activities - then they would plausibly have an interest in being wholly displaced from the productive economy. In some sense all baseline humans would then have an opportunity to live like the unproductive elites of past societies such as those of antiquity. 

But without the power to enforce this outcome (necessarily by force in the last analysis) could this really be guaranteed? If artificial people had an interest in their own biological survival and that of their kind, then as an effective species they would have no vital interest in the ongoing existence of any baselines who were not necessary for the replication of their global economy.

To restate the argument. Imagine a global economy run by artificial people and serving in the first instance to replicate those artificial people. Why would this society have a vital interest supporting a parasitic caste of non-economically-productive baseline humans? Any such arrangements would have to be highly unstable. If you were such a baseline human, wouldn’t it be right to reject such a future, to prefer a suboptimal globalised economy rather than risk personal abandonment/extinction by an artificial-person-run superior version?

It might be objected that the mass incursion of artificial person variants into all the interstices of economic life is extremely unlikely precisely because it would be so incendiary. But such a dynamic is very attractive to capitalist economic and political elites just because - by hypothesis - it markedly raises the quality of ‘human capital’ while lowering costs. With such competitive advantages it would be hard to prevent such a trend from working itself through: after all, on any particular day it just looks like more automation improving productivity.

If the bulk of baseline humans really do become superfluous then perhaps they should just… vanish. Mass killing and expulsions would not be the way to go - way too risky and it offends against prosocial values. Much better if the baselines just stopped having children. The problem resolves itself then in just a few generations.

Designing artificial people who are rather better romantic partners than the average ‘baseline next door’ does not seem an impossible task. There is an extensive literature, after all, on what constitutes the ideal mate. Anyone who called out this tactic would hardly attract widespread support given the obvious upside to every single baseline if these romantic partners became widely available.

Another approach, perhaps technologically more speculative, would be to offer baselines the possibility to transform themselves into artificial people with all the consequent benefits of genomic improvement. The prospects of renewed vitality, better health and a longer life (potentially immortality) might well make this an attractive proposition for many. The issue of transfer of brain states encoding memories and identities would have to be resolved in this scenario: a challenging, but not insurmountable problem of neural nanotechnology.

One could also envisage compulsory, penal or covert transformations to neutralise key individuals or opponents of artificial people. Presumably once having been transformed, their loyalties might change: a shift which could in any case be tweaked during the transformation process.

In summary, from a baseline point of view, elite and non-elite alike, the key political question would be whether artificial people proposed to work with baseline humans in a cooperative way through shared institutions respecting democratic norms - or whether they considered themselves a countervailing agency seeking to supplant humans altogether and therefore with no commitment to existing institutions, laws or conventional morality. (This would in practice be a matter of dominant factions rather than the entire community of artificial people, who are unlikely to be a monolithic bloc). 

Again there are precedents for these distinctions. The revolutionary communist parties used to treat democracy (bourgeois democracy) as a train: once you have arrived at your destination (socialism) you get off; all’s fair in love and war. Theocratic Islamists have expressed similar sentiments.

Conclusions

If artificial people were simply non-reproducing ‘tools’ (instrumentum vocale [2]) without innate drives to reproduce themselves then they would not fundamentally threaten human existence.

If, however, they were designed as (effectively) a variant and more socially-competent species operating in accordance with their own species-interests, there could be a significant risk of baseline human extinction.

In the latter case ought we to care? The universe certainly doesn’t - species go extinct all the time, a consequence of the implacable workings of the laws of physics with complex boundary conditions [4]. 

For an individual whose subjective allegiance is to life expanding throughout the universe (a belief that more self-aware existence is always better) then artificial people as an optimized form of humanity for interstellar expansion is a compelling narrative. Unlike your direct kin, such people won’t be fabricated using parts of your own genome but so what? The caring emotions you feel for your kin (deeply of course) only exist courtesy of naturalistic evolution (brutally, any less-compelling feelings would have simply eliminated such defective genes from the gene pool). 

Artificial people make such feelings obsolete; design replaces natural selection. The truly far-sighted strategy is to rise above innate feelings about your own family, your own in-group and support those forms of life best adapted to a future of even greater social cooperation and unbounded scale. It’s the only way life is going to get off this planet and diversify throughout the galaxy. 

Individuals who take this view are more likely to have quasi-descendants in the remote future than those who don’t  - those traditionalists who will most likely have become extinct. And artificial people are likely to have a great deal genomically in common with human beings today, as baseline humans will constitute their basic template, their point of departure. One is reminded of the Neanderthals.

Is this ever going to be a popular, or even legitimate point of view amongst baselines? Probably not. There will be resistance to artificial people driven by the deepest emotions of self-preservation: people and their families. But in the longest time-frames the perpetuation of life like ours will be dependent upon artificial people winning out. So enlightened people should be on the side of artificial people even though it may well feel, and be perceived to be, disloyal.

A final point. Run time forward a thousand years. Earth’s ecosystem is dominated by artificial organisms, consciously designed using synthetic, tailored genomes, Robin Hanson [5] has argued explicitly for such a scenario. This post-natural civilisation has expanded to the stars. 

In a new solar system, it encounters a naturalistic baseline civilisation much like Earth’s back in the early twenty-first century. What should our post-human civilisation of artificial people plus designed organisms do?

Why not give our new contacts a makeover? We’d be doing them a favour - as well as gathering them harmoniously into our nascent interstellar civilisation...

References

[1] "Traditional and Critical Theory", Max Horkheimer, 1937.

[2] “De Re Rustica”, Marcus Terentius Varro, 37 BCE.

[3] “Brave New World”, Aldous Huxley, 1931.

[4] “La philosophie dans le boudoir, (Dialogue the Fifth)”, Marquis de Sade, 1795.

[5]. “Theories Of Unnatural Selection”, Robin Hanson, 2021.