EffortPostMcGee [any]
Anecdotally people really hate the system were in but I think that the lack of theoretical development on the “left” as it’s broadly constituted makes it very weak against a capitalism that knows all the Marxist theory, not because they’ve read it, but because they’ve adapted their system to be resilient to it. So long as we have many people on the left (from radlibs to self-avowed Marxist-Leninists) that refuse to engage in theory, we won’t have a left which is capable of adapting to the situations that we find ourselves in today.
To make my point more succinct: ask anyone in leadership at a local DSA or any other group to explain what Dialectical Materialism is, and, from my experience, it results in an answer that is at best a non-intelligible version of some youtuber or podcaster’s explanation. Is it necessary to have every leadership position filled with pure academics? No, but the theory itself is not too difficult to explain, given that someone is actually trying to understand it, and given that Marxists (or Anarchists) have already done the hard work to try to write down this stuff in some fashion. So there really should be no excuse for people to be leading organizations with such a shabby theoretical basis to direct their actions. Not to mention, it’s incredibly difficult to come up with the correct ideas without a very firm understanding of the fundamentals.
Another thing is I think getting frustrated at this is really just pointless. We don’t have the conditions for revolution and they won’t come any time soon and it never will occur unless we stop acting this way. The real error that I see on “the left” is one that really doesn’t seem to understand fully the difference between the conditions of change and the contradictions which drive those changes towards development.
“Changes in society are due chiefly to the development of the internal contradictions in society, that is, the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, the contradiction between classes and the contradiction between the old and the new; it is the development of these contradictions that pushes society forward and gives the impetus for the supersession of the old society by the new. Does materialist dialectics exclude external causes? Not at all. It holds that external causes are the condition of change and internal causes are the basis of change, and that external causes become operative through internal causes. In a suitable temperature an egg changes into a chicken, but no temperature can change a stone into a chicken, because each has a different basis.” (Mao, On Contradiction)
We can see the conditions are “heating up” (literally and figuratively) but, we’re not eggs so, what I’m trying to point out is that our internal contradictions are not developed sufficiently such that there exists a basis for the conditions of change to manifest into real change. Will this happen spontaneously? Who knows. But if we want to do anything about it, it is then our project to correctly identify where best we can develop those contradictions and that requires a great deal of theoretical understanding as well as unity of action. In my own anecdotal evidence in middle America leftists here have been more preoccupied with spending their time homesteading and thinking of ways to escape the masses, instead of doing any of this necessary work.
I just want to add that this is simply a thesis I’ve been thinking on, and I’m happy to hear criticisms because I know I’m not the “one true socialism knower”, and of course the United States is so large that what is occurring in my area of the woods is almost certainly not going to resemble yours, but this is just my estimation of it all. And of course, Death to America.
I really wouldn’t be so sure that Climate Change is just going to fix all the issues here. First of all, there’s nothing about climate that is going to make the contradictions of social production develop further, and to think so is fundamentally misunderstanding what historical materialism/dialectical materialism is. Not to mention how privileged of a take it is to sit around and advocate for doing nothing, while, since you’re replying in a post nominally about America, being the least affected by the affects hitherto and in the future from climate change. Literally this exact thing could be said at any point in time ever, and it’s idealist precisely because it neglects the entire philosophical understanding of the process of development that changes the relations of social production.
30 million comrades died defending the world from fascism. They don’t know it, but their sacrifice made it possible for many of the people who we interact with on the left to be alive today. If they hadn’t done it, how many of us would be here? Use that exact reasoning to then see that we owe it to the future humanity to actually do something, and start now, so that instead of 5 billion people dying from climate change devastating the planet, we can limit that number to as little as possible and then the children of the world can look back and be thankful that we weren’t cowards that kicked the can down the road just like our shit scum elders did.
Putin better have learned from Stalin’s mistake and not stop at Berlin.
So then would it be possible to attempt some kind of reverse engineering of this methodology to do this exact same thing but without the weird crypto angle? I feel like it should be possible, and that would be probably very desirable, but I’m not really familiar with this exact type of technology, since I’m just a lowly modeller.
Just a light counterpoint: Many different systems of production have been developed in nominally similar climates and geographies. You’re definitely not wrong that there will be damage to the system that will require reorganizing but I think the error here is assuming that will just automatically develop the masses towards some kind of revolutionary action, when the bourgeoisie can just adapt to the new economic realities and re-sublimate it under the existing relations of production. For an example, one can easily imagine the capitalist saying " We must advance vertical growing technology to make up for the damaged ecosystems!" as a band-aid slapped over it all to resolve the contradiction between classes in a world with an increasingly damaged environment, if we assume that the proletariat do not wake up to this before hand. I may be misunderstanding something but,
They [metaphysicians] ascribe the causes of social development to factors external to society, such as geography and climate. They search in an over-simplified way outside a thing for the causes of its development, and they deny the theory of materialist dialectics which holds that development arises from the contradictions inside a thing. Consequently they can explain neither the qualitative diversity of things, nor the phenomenon of one quality changing into another. (Mao, On Contradiction)
this reads to me that the fundamental thing to understand is that if the internal contradictions are not sufficiently developed, then no external factors are going to bring about change in society. I write “metaphysicians” here as clarification of who Mao is discussing because the paragraph begins with “Metaphysiciains” but I didn’t want to quote the whole thing. It’s my understanding that the material conditions do indeed dictate our economic reality, but perhaps it’s better to say it frames it and doesn’t act as a sole determinant, which I believe is the error many make because this doesn’t look at the contradictions within the thing as well. I could point out a couple other things, like how climate activists are not adhering to a program of political change and thus have yet not been effective but I think the response is getting rather bloated.
Happy to hear your thoughts on this comrade! :Care-Comrade:
I think the post is pretty good at criticizing EA’s and how incomprehensible their worldview is. However I do think you could strengthen this up quite a bit.
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I believe that you need to flesh out the parts where you try to tie in materialism or provide some definition for materialism so that we can understand what you mean better. I don’t want to outright say “I don’t think you know what materialism is” but I found this part where you say, “In short, any truly materialistic morality must be centered around the selfishness of humanity” to be very confusing. This appears to be making the idealist error precisely because the concept of “selfishness” is not material, it is a concept. It’s idealist. And yet we must center “a materialist morality” around it? We “as materialists” place matter first and thought second, that being, if conditions were such that mankind need not be selfish, then mankind would not be selfish. And indeed we see humans act in unselfish ways all the time, especially in moments of extreme duress. Hence “morality” (if that exists at all) emerges out of our material conditions and the relations of production. From the quoted section, to me, without understanding what you mean, I’m left confused about how you defined materialism or if this is even a discussion of materialism at all. Especially when “materialistic morality” is juxtaposed in the previous paragraph by “material reality”. I legitimately cannot tell if you mean “materialistic” in the hedonistic sense, or if you mean materialistic in the “coming out of material conditions” sense. And again, if it’s the latter then I think there is the aforementioned idealist error.
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“But, how do we estimate which world is better from a mathematical perspective?.. But I would imagine a comparison of the worlds A and B would be best done with a comparison of medians.” I don’t know that a mathematical perspective should even really be discussed. I get that it eventually ties into this “vulgar materialism” that EA’s have but I’ll just say that there is not a mathematical way to do this right now because our mathematical system is currently still unable to rectify the fatal blow Gödel gave to it. Philosophers of Mathematics still have no real consensus about where mathematical knowledge fits into a grand epistemological schema and “Mathematical Truth” is regarded as it’s own platonic ideal. In fact there is a whole Stanford philosophy encyclopedia entry for it under: “Mathematical Platonism”. Somehow 80 years have gone by and it seems like not a single person fully understands the hollowed out foundation that modern mathematics, and by extension modern computing, sits atop. I think that calling out the platonic notion of “Mathematical Truth” in this fashion is a better critique than trying to entertain some notion of what it may look like for “mathematically better world”.
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I really don’t know where the angle for AI comes into this at the end. I agree with you that EA’s succumb to AI-fetishization, but it seems to appear randomly out of nowhere and worst of all at the end, so I have no idea if it’s meant to have a greater point or if it’s just a bit of rhetorical theatre. I found it to be a funny dig to silicone valley bazinga brains for sure, but it didn’t feel like a proper conclusion because I was left saying to myself “Huh? What does AI have to do with this? Why did it get brought up so randomly at the end? How does this tie into the greater thesis?”. Ultimately it wouldn’t be a problem, except that it gets brought up in an insidious manner to state that “they created AI”, which isn’t really true. Hard working teams of researchers, engineers and technicians develop AI. EA’s “created AI” in the sense that they created the idealized conception of AI that everyone talks about but which doesn’t really exist (but for some reason has monopolar hegemony on every discussion surrounding AI). It really makes sense when you consider that they’re likely not the ones working on it to develop it. Indeed there is the same basic materialist analysis hidden here that would be a far better angle to attack at and would offer more explanatory power when making the connection between EA’s and AI.
Sorry for the length of my reply but I hope the criticism comes off as constructive because ultimately I think these people are a problem too so I’m glad you posted this so we could discuss it. :meow-hug:
We need more education and we need to be more flexible to consider political projects that aren’t just unions because we are likely missing something considering that our present failures indicate that our ideas need to be developed further to discover the “right” ones.
If it really just comes down to “waiting until the proletariat come around to socialism more” as it seems like they are doing, then one of the most important roles we can play is in education: education about theory, and education about organizing.
In either case, education is vital. There are plenty of agitprop outlets out there and lots of organizations. Certainly we can have more, and why would I want to limit that anyways, but in my experience the lack of education in the US is massively hindering.
Lenin also warned against this tendency. He correctly highlighted that while the workers most definitely WILL spontaneously struggle with the bourgeoisie for economic gains, this spontaneity will never magically create hordes of dedicated, ideologically sound Marxists.
Full agreement, I was juxtaposing the two positions of “attempting to build a political movement” with “waiting until the contradictions are heightened enough” to basically point out that “in either instance education will be key” because when we have many leftists not able to correctly identify the fundamentals of Marxism, it will not spell good for a hypothetical political movement nor transforming agitated proles into ideologically sound Marxists.
That being said I would just share this particularly bloomer quote that Mao has in “Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?” that,
In social struggle, the forces representing the advanced class sometimes suffer defeat not because their ideas are incorrect ! but because, in the balance of forces engaged in struggle, they are not as powerful for the time being as the forces of reaction; they are therefore temporarily defeated, but they are bound to triumph sooner or later.
here being that: suppose our ideas for revolution may in fact already be correct. We should not sit on our laurels about it then. We must educate the proletariat on these ideas so that they will be enabled to use this to continue to adapt to a changing situation. Perhaps along the way we find out our ideas need modification and so we make the modification at that time. I don’t believe this is in contradiction with Lenin’s warning.