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dex_sda posted:This analysis is mostly sound, but you are neglecting stack overflow and other forms of information sharing that are decidedly less rooted in capital, and more in direct collaboration with others. This is not to say capital dislikes stack overflow, but in general those kinds of platforms thrive thanks to aid users extend towards one another. It is also the thing that most IT people interact with most regularly. I think a better way to think about these kinds of platforms and casual teaching/advice interactions is to recognize how much capitalism requires uncompensated labor performed out of passion to function. Imagine how much surplus value would be lost if parents had to be paid to raise the generation of workers, or teachers had to be fairly compensated for the essential work they do. Even among all jobs, among the most mercenary of workers, I think there's a desire to do well at things that comes out even when not compensated (and has to be deliberately suppressed if you want to do something like a work-to-rule or slowdown). I think a better explanation for the politics of first world tech workers is that they tend to be detached from the normal institutions of cultural consent manufacturing, so they end up with more unorthodox politics based on where they socialize online instead of the standard US liberal-conservative and liberal-progressive.
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Nov 27, 2020 20:00
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Disnesquick posted:It seems to be a rule that empires collapse into decay pretty soon after reaching a state of dominance. It should be pointed out that this is complete bunk, and only gets trotted out to justify a "good times make soft men" fascist narrative. Take Rome as an example: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/30/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-ii-water-spilled-on-the-sand/ quote:Pop history has a nasty tendency to compress all of that into one idea of ‘Rome,’ which rises once and falls once, as opposed to the reality of a Rome which rose, fell into civil war, then rose some more, then had a crisis, then stabilized, then fragmented, then fell in some places while remaining stable in others. And so, for example, Sallust’s complaints about Roman decadence – which date to the first century B.C. nearly five centuries before its ‘fall‘ – are often quoted as somehow explaining Rome’s eventual demise, but Rome wasn’t even done expanding at that point. This isn’t the place to get into a complete periodization of the Roman state, but we’ll break it down into four broad periods based on Rome’s military expansion, and then address each one in turn: And this kind of behavior, where the power of an empire fluctuates in response to material events and not some abstract "I'm decadent now, time to collapse" is the rule, not the exception.
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Dec 1, 2020 06:44
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So the hypothesis discussed is whether there is a "rule that empires collapse into decay pretty soon after reaching a state of dominance." Meaning, in other words, that "reaching a state of dominance" generally causes an empire to "collapse" "pretty soon". The specific examples seem to be taken directly from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires. This introduces a number of issues which will be discussed below, such as many of these empires being very large on paper but not very dominant, and four of the five examples coming from a specific 200 year time period, but I can discuss these specific cases. Disnesquick posted:So, let's look at the top five largest empires on this planet of ours: The only one that I think does sort of fit Disnesquick's "brief flame" narrative is the Mongol Empire, which was the shortest on this list, lasting only 150-ish years. It aged and died like a human because it was for the most part tied to the life of a single human (in this case Kublai Khan). While Genghis carried out a number of reforms to make Mongol society more capable of managing an empire, he critically didn't get rid of partible inheritance, meaning most of the time when a leader died the empire descended into civil war. (Note that this is an extreme oversimplification, and and there's not a 1-1 "leader is dead time for a civil war", but that unclear methods of power transfer made incredibly frequent, especially for such a short-lived entity. Being the center of a black plague outbreak also doesn't help.) The point is that while this is the closest to the "brief flame" narrative (ignoring that many of the successor states like the Yuan Dynasty make up 50 years or so of that 150 year estimate), the collapse wasn't caused by "reaching a state of dominance" but by flaws in power transfer that they had been dealing with since Genghis' death (and the resulting civil war) in 1227. The interesting thing about the other four cases is that they were colonial powers operating in an age of colonial expansion, and the reason three of the four stopped expanding is getting wrecked by another colonial power. The Qing Empire didn't decline because they got bored, they were repeatedly defeated and colonized by various powers (note: mostly Britain). Similarly, at the time you're saying the Spanish Empire is supposedly at their greatest dominance, French troops are in Spain itself. (Note: the Spanish Empire as a colonial enterprise had a number of flaws like allowing productive and administrative forces to be built up in the colonies and extracted wealth de-industrializing rather than building up the core that the later British and French colonial empires would go out of their way to not repeat). Similarly, while the Russian Empire was gaining territory from the conquest of Central Asia up into the 1890s, it had been established in the Crimean War of 1853 that it was incredibly weak compared to modern European powers like Britain and France. The German Empire would strike the final blow, before itself dying to the British Empire, which in 1920 basically ends up being the last man standing of these colonial powers (although battered by WWI). And as in the above cases it doesn't end (to the extent that we can say that it has "ended") from too much winning but from a devastating war with a peer state and being absorbed into the new dominant empire of the United States. So even looking at these very specific and atypical (from a historical perspective) examples, we can see that "reaching a state of dominance" doesn't cause empires to collapse. In fact, the most common cause of collapse seems to be being insufficiently powerful. Disnesquick posted:So firstly, as pointed out I'm exactly not justifying that fascist narrative so that directly contradicts your first statement. However, I can see that the subtlety in distinction is getting lost so let me try and explain further. My observation here is that these mighty forces seem able to coalesce, for a short time, and create a unity of purpose, which is extremely powerful: All the normal internal conflict of class struggle is turned outward. Given an overwhelming advantage in power and technology, and the material ability to produce better technology and power, it should be the case that a super-power rapidly consolidates its eternal dominion over everything but this is never the case. This is not down to a weakness of spirit or some fascist narrative like that, but usually down to internal conflict, in the form of corruption, class struggle, power plays etc. taking precedence again. The larger the empire, the greater the scope is for fractures. You seem to be getting at the idea of asabiyyah, which was a social theory by the 14th century scholar Ibn Khaldun. At the time, it was pretty remarkable, as he was one of the first historians to propose a theory like it and it does do a good job of describing weakly consolidated empires built by nomadic peoples (i.e. the ones Ibn Khaldun would have been most familiar with, like the Rashidun Caliphate, the Umayyads, and the Abbasids). The issue, as discussed above and in the previous post on Rome is that it's poorly suited to discussing the fortunes of empires (ancient or modern) with developed, centralized state institutions. Disnesquick posted:The question that begs is "How to maintain a cooperative society forever?". Let's assume that humanity has achieved communism across the planet. At that point, what now? Do we stay on the planet and just enjoy a static life until the sun bloats? Would the ennui of knowing that no improvement is possible destroy the society from inside? After a million years of peace, could an individual rediscover violence, take over a group and restart history? Could we engineer our progeny to be better suited to that life of stasis? I don't think you've laid the groundwork to propose that individuals living stable lives causes societal collapse. Not only do I find the idea that people would feel more boredom pursuing self-actualization than slaving for 12 hours a day over a sewing machine ridiculous, the thought experiment also doesn't seem to match real-world data on how conflict affects happiness. And the idea of "restarting history" is ridiculous. The abolition of class doesn't cause history to end, it just means that the most powerful tools we've used to analyze the history of all hitherto existing society (which is the history of class struggles) will no longer be useful for predicting future events.
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Dec 2, 2020 06:36
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Disnesquick posted:This is absolutely not an argument I've made though. In fact, one of the points of my argument is exactly that such a society needs to find ways to provide that self-actualization. However, part of that self-actualization is to be able to effect change on society itself. If society is a static structure that only allows individual pursuit within those confines then it can't grow and can only decay. As discussed previously, the idea that a society "not growing" is equivalent to "decay" is a decidedly modern one that doesn't reflect the majority of our historical knowledge. My fundamental disagreement is that you seem to have materialism backwards, i.e. viewing radical structural change as an intrinsic human need instead of something that's almost always the result of external pressures or internal contradictions. Disnesquick posted:I genuinely don't think we can, or even really want to, abolish the former. If we do ever get beyond the confines of the solar system and settle the galaxy then we will be in an antagonistic relationship with that vast, hostile environment, and that's something to be embraced, in my opinion. The obsession with space colonization seems to have come from internalizing modern frontier narratives, i.e. that society depends on there always being a new rugged frontier to conquer. Except once again this didn't come from some transcendental human need but from the peculiar material basis of colonial empires. A post-capitalist society would likely be interested in space and might want to go there, but this wouldn't be because a "vast, hostile environment" is something every person or society needs.
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Dec 2, 2020 20:45
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Disnesquick posted:No. This view is not rooted in materialism at all. As is probably pretty obvious from my previous posts, I am a biologist. That has a great deal of influence on how I see the world. Biological systems exist in two states: Growth and decay and a human society is a biological system. As I've now made exceptionally clear several times now, that growth doesn't have to be physical growth but can be cultural or artistic growth. To seek actual stasis, however, is to seek death. I think I see the problem here, that you're taking a simple (but not entirely inaccurate) model of biological processes and applying it across all fields of study, regardless of whether the factors that make this model accurate for biological processes make it accurate for other fields. We can't use models of biological organisms to analyze human society for the same reason that we can't use class struggle to understand biological organisms. A general would make a terrible rocket scientist and a rocket scientist would make a terrible general, because the models we've found to be useful for engineering rockets are very different to the models we've found to be useful for conducting warfare. Disnesquick posted:No. It comes from my love of living things and a desire to see endless varieties of life explode across the vast dome of heaven. Quite the opposite. I don't think that a post-capitalist society would be unchanging (although the reasons it would change would be completely different) and I think goals would be more likely to be pursued as a community instead of as atomized individuals. The difference between now and then for a space program is that the sacrifices would have to be contributed without coercion instead of Elon Musk and his first-world bazingas fueling their vanity projects through the immiseration of a vast number of apartheid slave miners.
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Dec 3, 2020 00:28
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Disnesquick posted:On the first paragraph I think this is just a fundamental disagreement. I think we can and should use biological models to understand human systems. I posted a link to Paul Feyerabend earlier and I think it does a good job in justifying why disciplinary orthodoxy is harmful. There is no doubt in my mind that the emergent properties of the interactions between human organisms that we call human society constitute a biological system. I'd also point out that no biological model is "simple". Yes, I think this is the fundamental disagreement. Interdisciplinary research means understanding multiple fields in order to understand complex topics, not taking a single model and applying it everywhere without regard for if the mechanisms of action apply or if it matches historical data. Doing that is how we end up with animal magnetism, Lysenkoism, Jordan Petersen lobsterboys, all manner of quantum mysticism, and your "brief flame" model of human societies. And I specifically said that your biological models are simple, i.e. you can't say something like quote:To seek actual stasis, however, is to seek death. Disnesquick posted:Edit: I'd add to this also that the idea of a human system somehow escaping the realm of systems biology seems fairly opposed to the entire idea of materialism. I'm not arguing that humans don't perform more anabolis than catabolis, or that they don't maintain homeostasis, or that gravity doesn't apply to them. I am saying that someone armed only with the most fundamental first principles will have extreme difficulty dealing with complex systems, and the task will be outright impossible if they try to use those first principles to analyze the emergent properties without considering those emergent properties as products of the complex system.
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Dec 3, 2020 05:28
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Disnesquick posted:Nobody even mentioned "taking a single model and applying it everywhere". This is an absurdly extreme framing of the argument, to the level of missing the point by a mile. Trying to bring Lysenkoism into this is just completely insane, to be honest. You specifically said: quote:Biological systems exist in two states: Growth and decay and a human society is a biological system. And I don't think bringing in other deadly pseudoscientific claims is insane, although if we're specifically talking about biology applied to human society then eugenetics and scientific racism would be more appropriate examples. The belief that human society needs "external struggles" to cohere is bad sociology that has killed people in the past. Disnesquick posted:As for your final paragraph: You've just described what systems biology is. It is a discipline that is exactly meant to tackle those emergent properties with both the bottom-up approach and a top-down approach. You talk about "my biological model" but you have basically no concept of what that model is because I've never actually described a model in this context just the conclusions that one can come to from a deep understanding of biology e.g. How evolutionary dynamics emerge from systems that express inheritance, variation and selection. Whatever your full model is, I'm judging it by the predictive power it's demonstrated, i.e. your "brief flame" historical narrative, which ended up being completely wrong. I think systems biology is very good at modeling tissues, organs, and organisms (and can even model some aspects of human society, if we apply it carefully and check it against historical evidence instead of making sweeping generalizations), but unless mechanisms of action and historical evidence is demonstrated, I don't think we can say that biology implies human society necessarily needs "external struggles" to survive. Whilst an organism could exist that could be happy with stasis, I don't think that's us. It seems to be a rule that empires collapse into decay pretty soon after reaching a state of dominance. If we ever did achieve communism then I think we'd need to find external struggles to prevent that. Disnesquick posted:As one example, you mention homeostasis, which doesn't actually exist in the specific sense implied by the word. There isn't any true "stasis" in that, whilst an organism seems to be in a steady state over micro-time, when viewed over a longer period it is either growing from a neonate to maturity or slowly winding down. Homeostasis is something that only actually manifests, within the material, in the abstract, even if it is defined with specificity as an ideal. It's a useful concept to roughly encapsulate a great deal of biological mechanisms but the reality is not nearly as simple as the word, or the definition, implies. No living thing 'seeks' stasis but rather maintains a constant struggle against entropy, which it will inevitably lose (preferably after reproducing). Seeking stasis is death because you're at the mercy of that entropic force: Every time degradation is imposed by the external environment, you are now maintaining the "new stasis". That is a dynamic which can only exist in a stage of decay. To achieve even a brief approximation of a steady state requires seeking growth. That's precisely my point? That the general definition of "stasis" is so broad that it allows you to take an incredibly specific definition like "Every time degradation is imposed by the external environment, you are now maintaining the "new stasis"." and then by slight of hand apply it to any human society that lacks "external struggles". A society using the specific "new stasis" definition is too ridiculous to contemplate, as no one would eat because each new amount of hunger is the new stasis. At other times, you are clearly not using this specific definition of stasis, when you say things like "Whilst an organism could exist that could be happy with stasis, I don't think that's us" and "Could we engineer our progeny to be better suited to that life of stasis?" What we can see is that a lack of "external struggles" tends to be a very good predictor of long-term social stability. That's not to say that internal contradictions can't be papered over through external struggles, it just doesn't tend to work out in the long term, e.g. the Second French Empire lasting less than 18 years. Disnesquick posted:And I think this is the kind of thing where your misunderstanding of the materialist argument of human interactions being fundamentally rooted in biology comes from. Talking about "first principles" is the kind of obsessive reductionism that falls flat fast where biology is concerned. As some of the deeper evolutionary conversations ITT that touched on e.g. epistasis, sexual selection and artificial selection should demonstrate, even basic evolutionary theory, which if anything could be considered "first principles" of biology would be, is a thorny mess of interactions from which we can pick out, perhaps, a few broad conclusions but struggle to do so on the smaller scale. Systems biology is both absolutely fascinating and utterly frustrating for that reason. To be fair, I don't know the model you were using so I can't say why it produced such incorrect results when applied to historical human societies. Obsessive reductionism was just my best guess.
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Dec 3, 2020 08:48
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Disnesquick posted:Whether or not something has killed people doesn't make it bad science. The attempt to frame science in terms of morality is erroneous. Your failed attempt to shoehorn Lysenkoism in is probably a good example of your fundmental mistake here: Lysenkoism didn't fail because it was bad science, it failed because it wasn't science at all. It was a political need to discredit "liberal" ideas that was dressed up as science that just happened to grab this one weird guy and could equally well have used someone else. That attempt to define scientific inquiry from a foundation of morality/politics/religion etc. is completely at odds with materialism. Nuclear Weapons having killed people no more discredits the framework of nuclear physics than someone falling to their death discredits gravitation. This attempt to force theory to confirm your starting assumptions is also at odds with dialectics, which seeks a synthesis of conflicting ideas, rather than the imposition of some moral foundation onto the result. I didn't criticize your "brief flame" narrative of human societies on the moral grounds. I criticized it on the ground that even in the five specific examples you chose it contradicted the observed data. The fact that the belief that human society needs "external struggles" to cohere has killed people in the past is irrelevant to the critique, and was simply brought up to demonstrate that it's not "insane" to compare it to other pseudoscientific claims. However, you are correct that comparing your "brief flame" narrative to adopted deadly forms of pseudoscience is out-of-context as I doubt our discussion of what society could look like in 10,000 years will have any influence on what society looks like in 10,000 years. Disnesquick posted:"biological systems exist in two states: Growth and decay" is not a model, so much as an observation. If you can demonstrate a material example of such a system that is not either growing or decaying then I'm all ears but I've never encountered one. Disnesquick posted:This is precisely the point: Once you start going down that route of stasis, the contradictions of such a system immediately become apparent. The only conceivable way you could approach this is by having some external "standard" which the system is forced to converge towards but that simply removes the problem to a larger system, which tends to lead to the "turtles all the way down" line of thinking. I'm not sure what your point is about a "specific" definition of stasis. I'm not using your idea of a specific definition of homeostasis because I strongly disagree with it, from the perspective of a materialist approach to biology. Disnesquick posted:Seeking stasis is death because you're at the mercy of that entropic force: Every time degradation is imposed by the external environment, you are now maintaining the "new stasis". Disnesquick posted:You misunderstand me: I was referring to your own obsession with reductionism and general attempts to fit everything into this inflexible framework you've established for yourself. As an example: The invention that the only motive plausible for physical exploration must be a component of a colonialist mindset. Disnesquick posted:It seems fairly unsurprising therefore, that this kind of rigid thought you insist on would lead to the conclusion that a static system is the only plausible end-state for ordering human society. Although from what has been said it seems that we're mostly in agreement and are arguing with strawman versions of each other. You're calling me "inflexible" and "reductionist" because I'm criticizing the grand narrative "It seems to be a rule that empires collapse into decay pretty soon after reaching a state of dominance" not for violating some other grand narrative but for being unsupported by historical evidence.
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Dec 3, 2020 23:14
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Looking back, I did assume the worst and jump down your throat over a minor point, so it was only fair for you to do the same to me in response. I'm sorry and I hope I didn't ruin a thread that was generating good discussion.
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Dec 4, 2020 06:35
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One of the points touched on in the video is that there's not really a need to enforce the non transferability of labor vouchers. If someone makes a coat that's priced at 10 hours of socially necessary labor, there would be no reason to sell it at 9 when they could sell it at 10, and no reason to buy it for 11 when it could be bought for 10. And selling it for 10 isn't a problem. Markets could even provide a way to price unique goods or transactions that don't fit neatly into a Taylorized system. But even if transfer was entirely free, it still wouldn't be possible to bring back finance or wage labor. There would be no one to enforce a loan, and claiming to have bought a factory would probably elicit a more condescending reaction than claiming to have bought the Brooklyn Bridge. I think the issue here, and with the punishment discussion, is hashing out technical solutions that are either not universal or are already solved. Our current system has experts who are extremely skilled at determining how much socially necessary labor goes into a product, or is consumed by four children, and the problem with the current system isn't the accuracy of these estimates but that it steals the socially necessary labor and frequently doesn't feed the four children. Similarly, there's plenty of thought on restorative justice (e.g. what consequences work best to maximize rehabilitation and community health), but none of that will ever be implemented under liberalism, where thieves and mass-murderers retire to billion-dollar fortunes while the captive populations are subjected to (or threatened with) death and slavery. The consequences for a transgression in a society will depend on the conditions in that society and who in that society decides what goals to pursue. At the same time, I don't think "technology will solve it" is the best answer to these questions of practical implementation. A socialist society might implement a cybernetic system like Project Cybersyn or OGAS (or the kind of internal tracking systems used by any modern multinational corporation) if they have the technology to do so in order to save labor time and better optimize preferences, but socialist societies have existed without the technology to do those kinds of projects. It'd be better to note that every modern problem has multiple solutions that a socialist society could pursue, and which one they would choose depends on the material conditions at the time.
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Jan 22, 2021 04:46
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While I think FALC is useful for reclaiming science fiction and ideals of the far future from liberal just-worldism and reactionary despair, I don't think it's useful for foreseeing the foreseeable future. Consider the labor that went into making common goods like shirts, shoes, and tomatoes and it's not that different from the labor that went into them 50 or even 100 years ago. The only difference is that the sweatshops moved from New York to the global south and that the migrant labor comes from there instead of Oklahoma. Much of what we attribute to "automation" is these kinds of accounting tricks; checkouts and kiosks don't automate the job of a cashier but push it from a salaried employee onto the customer. If we look at tasks that have been automated over the past few decades, it's jobs that used to be considered bastions of the first world labor aristocracy that had decent pay and high standardization/centralization. It's incredibly difficult (and incredibly unprofitable) to make a machine that replaces a migrant farmworker but only moderately difficult (and usually profitable) to make a machine that replaces an automotive welder and incredibly easy and incredibly profitable to make a machine that replaces the clerk who calculates payroll. (That also isn't to say that there aren't some domestic fields that have undergone massive increases in labor productivity, like the effects of advances in agricultural science on the labor required for grain and livestock production) On top of that, over the next few decades advanced production chains are going to have to deal with the effects of climate change, topsoil depletion, increasing costs of fossil fuel extraction, and the decline of the US empire
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Jan 23, 2021 03:38
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