Crow posted:
Here: http://www.williambowles.info/sa/FanfareforEffectiveFreedom.pdf
A second key idea was that by using the viability criterion all alone - for the reasons I gave earlier, one might succeed in identifying regions of policy in the total organisational space that represent homeostatically stable points for long term survival. I am pointing now to a possibility that it is open to mankind at last to compute a set of organisational structures that would suit the needs of actual men-as being at once themselves independent viable system with a right of individual choice, and also members of a coherent society which in turn has a right of collective choice. Now one of the main issues identified was the issue of autonomy, or participation (these are catchwords), or perhaps I mean just liberty for whatever element within whatever viable system. Then this means that there ought to be a computable function setting the degree of centralisation consistent with effectiveness and with freedom at every level of recursion. This I now believe. It is a bold claim. Let me try to give it verisimilitude.
it goes on. frankly the entire pdf file is relevant here
thanks corw!!!
DRUXXX posted:
man, not having been involved with academia for the past here has really gotten me to be hypersensitive to the bullshit ass way people write stuff when they're trying to sound like they're some sort of postmodern genius. 'Let me try to give it verisimilitude,' really?
'Let me theoretically push points of praxis, introducing and minimizing variability'
babyfinland posted:
crow doesnt this bring bordiga to mind for u
yea! Looks like the ol kook had notions of freedom on his main brain after all
The network of Soviets undoubtedly has a dual nature: political and revolutionary on the one hand; economic and constructive on the other. The first aspect is dominant in the early stages, but as the expropriation of the bourgeoisie proceeds, it gradually cedes in importance to the second. Necessity will gradually refine the bodies which are technically competent to fulfil this second function: forms of representation of trade categories and production units will emerge and connect with one another, especially as regards technique and work discipline. But the fundamental political role of the network of workers' councils is based on the historical concept of dictatorship: proletarian interests must be allowed free play in so far as they concern the whole class over and above sectional interests, and the whole of the historical development of the movement for its emancipation. The conditions needed to accomplish all these are basically: 1. the exclusion of the bourgeois from any participation in political activity; 2. the convenient distribution of electors into local constituencies which send delegates to the Congress of Soviets. This body then appoints the Central Executive Committee, and has the task of promulgating the decisions regarding the gradual socialization of the various sectors of the economy.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1919/representation.htm
Dr. Ure gives us two definitions of the factory. On the one hand he describes it as:
“‘combined co-operation of many orders of work people, adult and young, in tending with assiduous skill a system of productive machines continuously impelled by a central power’ (prime mover)”
and on the other hand as:
“‘a vast automaton composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs, acting in uninterrupted concert for the production of a common object, all of them being subordinate to a self-regulated moving force’.”
Marx shows that:
“the second is characteristic of its use by capital and therefore of the modern factory system.”
The first could, however, correspond to our programme: “the combined collective worker, or the social labour body, appears as the dominant subject, and the mechanical automaton as the object.”
But today instead
“the automaton itself is the subject, and the workers are merely conscious organs, co-ordinated with the unconscious organs of the automaton”
Have you heard, you liberal liberators of bodies, spirits and consciences, who accuse us of automatising life!?
“Ure therefore prefers to present the central machine from which the motion comes as not only an automaton but an autocrat. ‘In these spacious halls the benignant power of steam summons around him his myriads of willing menials’.”
Doesn't the centrality of the concept show for the hundredth time that it is not a question of describing capitalism, as even Stalin pretends, but of discovering the social characteristics that the revolution will have to do away with? Here are other passages.
“In handicrafts and manufacture, the worker makes use of a tool; in the factory the machine makes use of him. ... In manufacture the workers are parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism which is independent of the workers, who are incorporated into it as its living appendages.”
A further comparison of Fourier’s of the factory with a mitigated gaol, which the chapter closes with, recalls that in the galley, the rowers were incorporated into the ship, chained for life to their benches: they had to row or sink with it.
“Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour-process, but also a process of creating surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the worker that employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the worker . But it is only in the factory system that this inversion for the first time acquires technical and palpable reality. By means of its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labour confronts the labourer, during the labour-process, in the shape of capital, of dead labour, that dominates, and pumps dry, living labour-power.”
A cold description, is it not, you band of vulgar falsifiers?
The physical person of the individual master is thus not required, and bit by bit he disappears into the pores of share capital, of management boards, of state-run boards, of the political state, which has become (since a long time ago) entrepreneur and manufacturer, and into the very latest vile form of the state which pretends to be “the workers themselves” and thus is able to tie them to the feet of the sinister steel automatons.
Factory despotism: only the communist revolution will tear it up by the roots when there is no longer intoxicating involvement in “struggles for political freedom” and similar popular mirages, denounced in bourgeois industrialism from its very beginning, accompanied by real class revolutions, but made up with stinking democratic rouge. Not a syllable is to be touched of the sentence that we have had ready formulated for ninety years, and which unfortunately is still not ready to be carried out.
“... unaccompanied by either that division of responsibility otherwise so much approved of by the bourgeoisie, or the still more approved representative system. This code is merely the capitalist caricature of the social regulation of the labour process which becomes necessary in co-operation on a large scale and in the employment in common of instruments of labour, and especially of machinery. The overseer’s book of penalties replaces the slave-driver’s lash.”
The latest liberal phantasms; autocracy and dictatorship, “in life” and not in the pallid legal lie, did not begin again with Mussolini, Hitler, Franco... not even with Stalin and his proconsuls, not even with Truman, Eisenhower and the stupid slaves of United Europe: they are a technical fact linked to the beat of huge central generators turning on the banks of the Hudson, Thames, Moscow and the Pearl River.
Giacchino Murat’s regime was extremely liberal. Imagine a modern regime as liberal as this that says: anyone is free to install electrical machinery and to plug it into the first electrical cable that comes to hand!
In all periods, then, public authority has had to regulate and co-ordinate productive activities and energy sources, all the more so when their dependence on a single network, on the same material flow of energy provision, became technically inevitable; and there is a full parallel between the flow from a certain head of water and that of electrons from a conductor at a given voltage.
.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1953/horsepower.htm
Edited by babyfinland ()
https://www.facebook.com/pages/MARKS-ENGELS-LENIN-BORDIGA/180413935344328
babyfinland posted:
haha i searched bordiga on facebook and the group is turkish
https://www.facebook.com/pages/MARKS-ENGELS-LENIN-BORDIGA/180413935344328
but what was practically instituted before the coup was much more straightforward data-harvesting than the intended hyper-recursive structure afaik although both were implemented simultaneously as a necessary consequence of socialist politics
Beer thought that a coup was coming and that if he set up enough of the nervous system soon enough we would see an digital version of what happened in venezuela in 2002.
By raising the level of both political and cybernetic consciousness, I consider that a dictator’s ability to abuse the system can be readily sabotaged. Maybe even the dictator himself can be undermined; because ‘information constitutes control’ – and if the people understand that they may defeat even the dictator’s guns.
that didn't happen, but it was less "too much centralization" and more "too much not giving people fucking guns"
Edited by Francisco_Danconia ()
The internet has become contested terrain, a new form of class struggle,engaging national liberation and pro-democracy movements. The major movements and leaders from the armed fighters in the mountains of Afghanistan to the pro-democracy activists in Egypt, to the student movements in Chile and including the poor peoples’ housing movement in Turkey, rely on the internet to inform the world of their struggles, programs, state repression and popular victories. The internet links peoples’ struggles across national boundaries – it is a key weapon in creating a new internationalism to counter capitalist globalization and imperial wars.
To paraphrase Lenin, we could argue that 21st century socialism can be summed up by the equation: “soviets plus internet = participatory socialism”.
The internet has played a vital role in publicizing and mobilizing “spontaneous protests” like the ‘indignados’ (the indignant protestors) mostly unaffiliated unemployed youth in Spain and the protestors involved in the US “Occupy Wall Street”. In other instances, for example, the mass general strikes in Italy, Portugal, Greece and elsewhere the organized trade union confederations played a central role and the internet had a secondary impact.
In highly repressive countries like Egypt, Tunisia and China, the internet played a major role in publicizing public action and organizing mass protests. However, the internet has not led to any successful revolutions – it can inform, provide a forum for debate, and mobilize, but it cannot provide leadership and organization to sustain political action let alone a strategy for taking state power. The illusion that some internet gurus foster, that ‘computerized’ action replaces the need for a disciplined, political party, has been demonstrated to be false: the internet can facilitate movement but only an organized social opposition can provide the tactical and strategic direction which can sustain the movement against state repression and toward successful struggles.
In other words, the internet is not an “end in itself” – the self-congratulatory posture of internet ideologues in heralding a new “revolutionary” information age overlooks the fact that the NATO powers, Israel and their allies and clients now use the internet to plant viruses to disrupt economies, sabotage defense programs and promote ethno-religious uprisings. Israel sent damaging viruses to hinder Iran’s peaceful nuclear program; the US, France and Turkey incited client social opposition in Libya and Syria. In a word, the internet has become the new terrain of class and anti-imperialist struggle. The internet is a means not an end in itself. The internet is part of a public sphere whose purpose and results are determined by the larger class structure in which it is embedded.
Francisco_Danconia posted:
the idea of "centralization" is as illusory as the idea of "totalitarianism" probably
in what respect? centralised planning and management century was completely reified, for example, for russian peasants who had their highly decentralised agricultural systems totally altered by central planners in the soviet govt. it's also a useful descriptor for network topology, central place theory, etc
Francisco_Danconia posted:
but what was practically instituted before the coup was much more straightforward data-harvesting than the intended hyper-recursive structure afaik although both were implemented simultaneously as a necessary consequence of socialist politics
i looked at the article crow linked but i didnt get a sense of how cybersyn was supposed to look to workers on the ground. were ordinary people intended to be integrated into the system beyond measurements of productivity, material availability etc in workplaces?
animedad posted:
that op is like really intimidating. can u plz insert yourself and add some stuff about you doing ketamine and going to a party w/ boriqua hipsters. tia
I think its very good! Very clear and well written IMHO. Not that I agree with what you're sayin, Miss March... gonna reply tomorrow after the train ride tho, haha.
animedad posted:
you doing ketamine and going to a party w/ boriqua hipsters. tia
i call racism. what is 'boriqua hipsters'
Wassily Leontief was born on Aug 5 1905 in Munich. His parents were a professor of economics from a dynasty of old-believer merchants living in St Petersburg since 1741, and the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family from Odessa. He earned his first degree at the University of Leningrad in 1924. In 1925, Leontief was allowed to leave the USSR. He continued his studies at the University of Berlin and in 1928 earned a Ph D degree in economics under the direction of Werner Sombart, writing his dissertation on Circular Flows in Economics. From 1927 to 1930, he worked at the Institute for the World Economy of the University of Kiel. There he researched the derivation of statistical demand and supply curves. In 1929, he traveled to China to assist its ministry of railroads as an advisor. In 1931, he went to the US and was employed by the National Bureau of Economic Research. During WW2, Leontief served as consultant to the Office of Strategic Services. Leontief joined Harvard University’s department of economics in 1932 and in 1946 became professor of economics there. Around 1949, Leontief used the primitive computer systems available at the time at Harvard to model data provided by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics to divide the US economy into 500 sectors. Leontief modeled each sector with a linear equation based on the data and used the computer, the Harvard Mark II, to solve the system, one of the first significant uses of computers for mathematical modeling. Leontief set up the Harvard Economic Research Project in 1948 and remained its director until 1973. Starting in 1965, he chaired the Harvard Society of Fellows. In 1975, Leontief joined New York University and founded and directed the Institute for Economic Analysis.
Leontief earned the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on input-output tables. Input-output tables analyze the process by which inputs from one industry produce outputs for consumption or for inputs for another industry. With the input-output table, one can estimate the change in demand for inputs resulting from a change in production of the final good. The analysis assumes that input proportions are fixed; thus the use of input-output analysis is limited to rough approximations rather than prediction. Input-output was novel and inspired large-scale empirical work; in 2010 its iterative method was recognized as an early intellectual precursor to Google's PageRank.
"Inherited will... the destiny of the ages and the dreams of the people... These are the things that cannot be stopped. As long as people continue to persue the meaning of freedom, these things will never cease to be!" - Communist Revolutionary Leader Monkey D. Dragon
Ok, here we go. First of all, sorry for the late response, it took me quite a few train rides to finish this. Turns out that all I really feel like doing when I come home from work is playing video games and drinking whiskey, haha. But this was a lot to think about! I found myself agreeing with you on many points, but of course, in the end, a contrarian like me, being both a technologist and a luddite, can't help but disagree vehemently with you every conclusion haha... you got me feelin' like I'm in the role of the reactionary here!
Cybersyn is a tricky subject for me. You know, there's two considerations here. The first is Cybersyn as it actually existed, in which, given the level of technology available at the time and the short span of its life, it couldn't have been more than a toy, still not yet beyond the shadow of the Cybersyn that shined in Stafford Beer's mind's eye. To me, however, what's really interesting here is the Cybersyn truly stands in dialectical juxtoposition is not totalitarian dictation. What is most interesting about Cybersyn, to me at least, is as a a method of socioeconomic organization, while totalitarianism I think is more of a mode. There are many types of totalitarianism, from under the pressing thumb of a tyrant to being channeled through mass movements. We instead should look towards Laissez's Faire - the free market economy. Now here is a proper antithesis! And indeed, after Pinochet had his goonsquad dismantle Allende and Beer's budding Marxist monument, he invited his own extrapatriate contractors, the Ambiguously Free Duo, milton Freedman and Freederich hayak, to remold Chile's economy in the shape of this vicious ideology. It was a transaction beneficial for both parties: Pinochet was able to keep control for far too many years, and in return, the AFD were able to use their "Chilean Miracle" as a propaganda tool in new battlegrounds far away.
That Cybersyn and the capital-F Free market have modes in common is apparent when you examine how they operate. Each represents a super-structural system for regulating and directing the social order by controlling the magnitude of the inputs to various nodes (representing aspects of the economy) in order to control their outputs, which then of course become the inputs to other nodes, etc. The difference is how they go about doing that: a top-down system like Cybersyn tries to regulate the *value* of goods by mediating their magnitude in order to let the system solve for the equilibrium flow, while the market tries to regulates the *flow* of goods by mediating risk (i.e. potential changes in value, its derivative) in order to the system find the equilibrium value. In neither case do they purport to directly assume responsibility for the social order.
In this way, one could see great potential in Cybersyn, at least on the surface, in that the aim of regulating value is essentially an exercise of trying to bias the system, i.e. society, towards some goal by the system controller, and that could theoretically be done by a true democratic vote. We could have our cake and eat it too... In contrast, the market is an autonomous entity, a beast prone to roam wild until it is attacked and consumed by some other beast, more vicious and powerful. (or perhaps even by a capitalist bishokuya, like Lloyed Blankstein or Jamie Dimonm, just for the hell of it. Itadakimasu!) However, it is also precisely because of that potential for control that Cybersyn suffers a fatal flaw: it will never be able to maintain itself in balance while maintaining an accurate representation of the underlying economy it seeks to model. Not at least without consuming an infinite amount of energy. Even if we were able to freeze time, and spend our whole lives investigating the most appropriate coefficients for every filter and feedback loop to the millionth decimal point, the second we let the economy run again, the system would slowly start to unravel. As time rolls on, so too does the smoldered desires and dreams of men begin to inflame again.
Now, luckily, (or unluckily, depending on how you look at it), there is a way to mitigate this inevitable phase-decay: by increasing the complexity of the system. A filter could be replaced by a homeostatic loop, for instance, regulated by some other; furthermore, the filters and amplifiers inside that loop can like be likewise replaced, etc, increasing system robustness and accuracy with every revision. However, taken ad absurdum, like the ambitious cartographers of Borges' On The Exactitude of Science, if you increase complexity enough you will eventually converge on very system you sought to model! We need not take it that far to see other problems, of course. As the system increases in complexity, so too does our inability to understand and control it, and so too does it take ever increasing energy to operate. The fear of living at the mercy of entrenched technocrats is not an unfounded one... living life under the thumb of some aspergite that cares more for maintaining system balance then they ever could about the people that it contains. (Hahaha, sounds just like this very forum, am I right guys? Eh Eh? Eh???) "Change this coefficient to this!", the politicans may tell them. Well sure... as long as you don't mind my multiplying by the reciprocal down the line... Am I sounding a lil paranoid? I'm not so sure...
In any case, an economy dominated by an autonomous market isn't any better, if not much worse. For in whose hands could I feel more uncomfortable than a bureaucrat’s, then a greedy business magnate's, who would crush and squeeze the lifeblood from my body simply to lotion the delicate skin of his palms? But... I wonder what Stafford Beer would think of the works written by our so called "Masters of the Universe", whose millions upon millions of lines of code regulate the American economy? Virtual speculators trade billions of stocks, bonds, and commodities per second, indirectly setting the prices of every good in the economy to near-instantaneous equilibrium value. And it works pretty well, too - why, it has to! Given that the minor, minor, minor fractions of percent-error that are in effect extracted from every transaction is Real Money, (Yeah, just like in Office Space, haha yeah I saw that movie too. Ok.), that accumulates in the pockets of bankers and brokers - thieves both, the system would fail in an instant if its functioning was not near-perfect.
So where the cybernetic system fails due to a fLaw of managed complexity, the market fails due to a fLaw of Perfect Information. And in fact, these are the same thing, as they both represent the impossibility of the information entropy in the system reaching towards the infinite, and thus there lies the implication that the error between this ideal and the actual reality will feed-back negatively in order to mitigate the overall entropy. And indeed, would any of us question that they, the maintenance men of the market, have power today that dominates our country's political will for their own purposes? Cybersyn and Wall St. are actually two sides of the same coin, you see. Well, I see it that way at least. Cybersyn for the proletariat, Wall St for the bourgeoisie.
This is not to say that humans should never organize, burn it all, anarchy forever, Kurt Cobain still lives man, in our hearts man, you know it, etc. The answer is probably, haha, somewhere in the middle, or, more likely, somewhere outside this spectrum entirely. One interesting development are the changes happening in the Cuban model under Los Brothas Castro, who have, its recently been reported, begun loosening the grip of the command economy in order to allow some sectors of the economy to become autonomous. The few reports in the Western Media I've seen about this of course proclaim "AHHHHHhh ITS THE END OF COMMUNIST CUBA LET THE FREEDONG MARKET RING!!!", but we can see better that the objective here is to alleviate the unnecessary overhead while still maintaining its overarching democratic essense.
But, subtleties of economic organization are not really what this thread, nor this dialectic, is about. I have also come to the same conclusion, from a different point of vantage, that the dialectical synthesis here is this:
With cybernetics we seek to lift the problems of organisational structure out of the ruck of prejudice-by studying them scientifically. People wonder whether to centralise or to decentralise the economy - they are answered by dogmas. People ask whether planning is inimical to freedom - they are answered with doctrines. People demand an end to bureaucracy and muddle---they are answered with a so-called expertise which from its record has no effect. If dogma, doctrine and expertise fail to give effective answers, then what criterion of effectiveness shall cybernetics use? My answer to this question is: the criterion of viability. Whatever makes a system survival-worthy is necessary to it.
The criterion of viability is a critical one, I think, but it also brings to mind another, its counterpart, and just as critical: to what extent do the means justify the ends? Or do the means become the ends? Thus Stafford Beer continues:
Dear Chicho,
As I read your last pages, I had a vision of you lining up a row of molecules and saying: “Look, chaps, don’t polymerize. There’s no future in it. You’ll find that you’re part of some damn organism, and your individuality will be subordinated to the total need. You might want to be a bit of an eye, but some totalitarian bastard ‘principle’ is going to send you off to the thyroid gland. Stand up for yourselves”. But it turns out to be in the nature of certain molecules to polymerize.
For Beer, Cybersyn was just the beginning. His dream was a millenarian dream, a teleological argument that the purpose of economic organization is the furtherment and fermentation of economic organization itself - that we move humans as beings away from our humanity and towards something beyond human, something that better embodies a more-prefect order. And that the essential limiting counterbalance to that goal is freedom - freedom as movement against order, not "freedom" in the narrow bourgeoisie sense. This is as true for Cybersyn as it is for the Free Market. A sentiment that humanity can no longer take care of itself, if it ever could, but perhaps our works - our capital - which we see as more pure, as… better than ourselves, maybe that could do it better. A materialist’s fetish,and the dominance of future generations by our dead labour. In a way, it is a dream that we, ourselves, can become works too, little molecules, distilling our souls down to the purified essence of what makes us useful to some greater purpose and power. This sentiment is one I am very familiar with; being something of a professional cyberneticist myself, I work with many others who feel this way, although they would never outright say it.
But I say that it is a fatal mistake to think of people this way! A fatal trap, although I understand the logic behind these thoughts very well. It goes like this: using the axiom of choice, if we take an individual (or group of individuals) that are a subset of a larger set of individuals, then it is tempting to say that, given that any action by the subset does not affect the composition of the set, then, therefore, the potentiality for the freedom of action for the subset on the set (that is to say, the interactions between the smaller group and the larger group) is thus subsumed in the total freedom of action for the larger group. (meaning that all potential actions are closed in a loop) This leads to the claim that, therefore, freedom is not an autonomous complex intrinsic to the individual/smaller-group, but movement within an all-encompassing homostatic loop in which we all take part. That he who does not feel me is not real to me, therefore he doesn't exist, so *POOF* - vamoose you son of a bitch. (H to the izz-o, M to the okay how about the rest of y'all carry out this chant awhile) And this conception of freedom as rights and liberties/privledges is congruent to that. For every positive freedom, is there not a negative complement that is but a half-circle around the loop? That someone's privledge to kill is inverse to everybody else's right not to die? What else could freedom be beyond that?
Returning to Beer:
What about the dialectic problem of unity and differentiation in society that disappears in the bland slab of margarine you are calling 'Freedom’? You evince no cybernetic consciousness. What about the structures of recursion and autonomy that are in fact the guarantee of liberty within each homeostatic loop? You evince no insight into the Chilean experience. What about millions of people struggling against their past oppression?
In what sense can a people struggle, or in fact be oppressed to begin with, if their freedom is guaranteed within the loop of their own survival? Would not the free-est way to live then be to close ones eyes, hum a quiet lullaby under ones breath, and do exactly as one is told without a further thought to the matter? My friend Moolali used to say that to me, whenever he stressed about arrange marriage that his parents forced him into. To him too, it was all a question of viability in the struggle for survival. If he fought, with all his might, against the marriage, he would not have won, and the rest of his life would have suffered for it. Or so he said. And so he closed his eyes, hummed a little lullaby, and said he was better for it. But is that really freedom? Is that really viable?
Mohandas Gandhi is one that so often get a bad rap around here; the argument goes something like, that in the turmoil of the first half of the 20th century, the British had but little choice to relinquish control of India. All Gandhi had accomplished, for all his hootin' and hollerin' (or rather than opposite of that actually haha - "bougie activism" is how I remember it being called the last time this came up) was to delay the inevitable. To me, an argument like this is ridiculous. Had Gandhi not attacked the Bourgeoisie exactly where it hurt them the most, would India have truly achieved the level of independence it now has, for better or worse? And I don't mean on the British side - think how common it is to hear upper-caste Indian expatriates - doctors, lawyers engineers, and scientists - defend, with absolutely no-irony, for the British exploiting and massacring their people for hundreds of years. "Oh, but it was good that the British conquered our country! They gave us technology, and civilization, and showed us the proper way to do business, haha!" What would be the nature of the autonomy of the people of the sub-continent today if the cozy relationship between these powerful sympathizers and the British Crown stood fast? I do not think that Zizek is not mistaken when he sez that Gandhi, on the ideological level, was more violent than Hitler - for he understood that the critical battle for freedom, for his people's case, required a rupture on the level of class, not nationalism.
It is a mistake to look at a method of economic organization, see it as a form of "collective," and dub it Communism, just as it is a mistake to see "collective" as the same as Communism. Were the Fascists of Italy or the Nazis of Germany.... Communists? Is a colony of ants, or a hive of bees? A big oozing mug of LCL? There is a big difference between a collective and a community - a big difference between a lynch mob and a worker's council. The form is not what matters here, but the structures of power between the participants. If, on the mass level, we have true Democracy, or at least as something as close as reality allows - then we can call that Communism. If we need to redefine the word "freedom" for it to exist at all, then we have something else entirely.
Thus, *my* understanding is that the nature of power and its structures is critical to understanding the question of freedom. [zizekvoice] Conception of freedom as liberties and rights ignores the most important aspect of freedom at all - the freedom to change what freedom means. This, I claim. [/zizkevoice] This "meta-freedom" is movement orthogonal to the homeostatic circuits in which rights and liberties flow, stretching and skewing their form. For what else than that is the dream of Communism, then the dream of the ultimate realization of this kind of human freedom? And why else could this dream have survived through the centuries, to be inherited by us today, but because it is a dream inherent to humanity itself? Were we to crush it in the clutches of Cybersyn, how then could we call this Communism?
Edited by germanjoey ()
honey bee: socialest bug
When a honey bee stings a large mammal, its stinger dislodges and the individual bee dies. This is well-known. It is also well-known that a honey bee colony can be seen as an organism, the individual bees serving as self-enclosed mobile limbs, sensors, combatants, and sexual organs; the honey bee is an individual which has not been individuated. This is close to the ideal for a human society, only this as yet is not well-known. For humans, community and not collective is the ideal: a community is an interdependent group of actualized individuals; a collective is a mass of limbs. Communism follows.
Impper posted:
hey joey i wrote a simple little paragraph in my book that was inspired by your community/collective idea. i really love that distinction you make - it's so useful especially when you're having theoretical discussions about, for example, communism and fascism's "united front" against liberal individualist modes of organization, at which point people begin to ask what the difference is then between communism and fascism. anyway here it is. it feels insufficient and unexplored now, but it was a fast-moving part of the book.
honey bee: socialest bug
When a honey bee stings a large mammal, its stinger dislodges and the individual bee dies. This is well-known. It is also well-known that a honey bee colony can be seen as an organism, the individual bees serving as self-enclosed mobile limbs, sensors, combatants, and sexual organs; the honey bee is an individual which has not been individuated. This is close to the ideal for a human society, only this as yet is not well-known. For humans, community and not collective is the ideal: a community is an interdependent group of actualized individuals; a collective is a mass of limbs. Communism follows.
lol kewl
Impper posted:hey joey i wrote a simple little paragraph in my book that was inspired by your community/collective idea. i really love that distinction you make - it's so useful especially when you're having theoretical discussions about, for example, communism and fascism's "united front" against liberal individualist modes of organization, at which point people begin to ask what the difference is then between communism and fascism. anyway here it is. it feels insufficient and unexplored now, but it was a fast-moving part of the book.
honey bee: socialest bug
When a honey bee stings a large mammal, its stinger dislodges and the individual bee dies. This is well-known. It is also well-known that a honey bee colony can be seen as an organism, the individual bees serving as self-enclosed mobile limbs, sensors, combatants, and sexual organs; the honey bee is an individual which has not been individuated. This is close to the ideal for a human society, only this as yet is not well-known. For humans, community and not collective is the ideal: a community is an interdependent group of actualized individuals; a collective is a mass of limbs. Communism follows.
rip Honey Bee Allende and honey bee impper.
If dogma, doctrine and expertise fail to give effective answers, then what criterion of effectiveness shall cybernetics use? My answer to this question is: the criterion of viability. Whatever makes a system survival-worthy is necessary to it.
One of the major themes of this essay has been summarized by Beer in the last sentence in this paragraph: that viability is the great determiner of each political project; in fact, there is no other measure.
and here is why socialism is no longer popular, because people see actually existing socialism's defeat as proof of it's lack of viability, which is perfectly reasonable tbh.
there's cool stuff about how societies/economic systems outcompete each other that I have to read, but the example from the ecological economics textbook i have is cool: if there are two neighboring societies, one very skilled at everything and very conservationist, the other brutally exploitative of the environment, the exploiters always win due to sheer population growth, even wildly successful warriors who are ecologically-minded can't defeat 1.5-2x as many ppl.
the capitalist world-ecology will ultimately die out, but whether by man or the forces of nature it is too early to tell (probably some ecosystem assistance is required).
and new, viable projects must be started, etc. perhaps inspired by, but transcending socialism.
daddyholes posted:sounds like we have a great liberal discussion starting here, comrades
In studying a problem, we must shun subjectivity, one-sidedness and superficiality. To be subjective means not to look at problems objectively, that is, not to use the materialist viewpoint in looking at problems. I have discussed this in my essay "On Practice". To be one-sided means not to look at problems all-sidedly, for example, to understand only China but not Japan, only the Communist Party but not the Kuomintang, only the proletariat but not the bourgeoisie, only the peasants but not the landlords, only the favourable conditions but not the difficult ones, only the past but not the future, only individual parts but not the whole, only the defects but not the achievements, only the plaintiff's case but not the defendant's, only underground revolutionary work but not open revolutionary work, and so on.
TheIneff posted:Where exactly is he being incoherent? The Big Project of 20th century socialism was crushed and the starting point of the non viability perspective is totally rooted in this.
It's an exceptionally western centric pov being argued, both 1.) ahistorical 2.) parochial (in that the analysis resides within the experiences of detached, 20-something, ennui raver academics, as if their opinions on communism have ever meant shit)
So when I say incoherent I mean it in the aforementioned manner, though, probably poor word choice. The meaning is understood it's just not reflective of anything material or substantiative, reads like: "My study group believes Stalin sucks! And liberalism is Good aS Shit. SOcialism IS OVER!". I just don't have the energy or will power, atm, to want to argue that same and tired tripe, tbh
I guess my suggestion to NFW would be to go and tell this worldview to the millions of people around the world currently resisting capitalism and striving towards worker ownership of the means of production; that they should realize socialism is bad now, because Stalin did a 9/11 on the brand and prole determinalism should "transcend socialism" or whatever the fuck in case Vice readers catch a glimpse of a hammer and sickle flag and begin pearl clutching.