Really interesting stuff, I remember first noticing Marx was more of a spiritualist than an 'economist' or Scottish Moral Philosopher in late high school. It is always very strange when you question these cultural marxist types deep enough and see if they actually subscribe to Lenninsm or Maoism or any of the more radical implementations of the 'middle society' necessary to get to Marx's Utopia.
This post is a masterpiece of concise and coherent evolutionary dynamics of progressivism.
While it operates on the level of ideas, somewhat abstracting from human nature - for example, we are susceptible to all the catechisms of ideals listed because the memetic liberating utopias are built on the same emotional foundation of envy, resentment, and group cohesion that caused bands of youths to go and pillage the next village, very well exemplified by, among many other primitives, the Maoris from 200+ years ago, where the "genocide" of the next village or clan was a customary occurrence, and an evolutionarily sound zero-sum ecological balancing. So much for "noble savages." In the modern environment of plenty, the ideas have become more abstract and detached from the reality constraints of existence, but they have become so much more deranged while still being nourished by another adaptive cognitive mechanism - group cohesion around such deranged beliefs as multifaceted markers of belonging.
Thus, my paragraph above is just a small evolutionary addition, not really necessary for the completeness of Lorenzo's post, because it is covered in many of Lorenzo's other writings.
Again, this is a masterpiece. Sadly, many of the most wordy commenters here skillfully show how little they understand of what Lorenzo is conveying.
Great as always mate! And I have to admit that the Aussie spanked England in the Rugby League Ashes ( that's a proper sport for readers who don't know, like Aussie Rules!). Anyway, you are always am inspiration, a mine of interesting information, analysis and references. Pop over to my sub-stack sometimes, i think we are on a similar wavelength. And as the night draw in here in old blighty, seasons greetings to all in Oz!
> A key idea in Hermeticism is that properly-oriented humans participate with God in the process of creation, a process that the Creator requires to complete Himself. This is God-as-Becoming not God-as-Being. Take God out of the story and human action becomes the definitive process of creation.
There is a hard underlying paradox here. Basically the "why didn't God tell Moses how to build modern technology?" problem. Yes, there are various ways to answer that question, but they all have implications that conservatives won't like:
1) Because God doesn't actually exist.
The problem with this one for conservatives is obvious.
2) Because technology is a hindrance or at best irrelevant to God's plan for salvation.
This is rather close to Rousseau's view that civilization is imprisoning. At least it seems to imply that we should all become anarcho-primitivists, or at least Amish.
3) People at the time weren't ready for technology.
But we are? If not, see (2). If we are, that implies we are morally superior to the prophets and church fathers, so why should we be basing our morality on what they wrote?
4) Now we come to the Hemetic/Hegalian God-as-becoming.
There's a reason nearly everyone is a *de facto* Hegalian these days, whether they admit it or not.
As an aside, if I may, and please don't be offended, I did wonder about whether an LM was used to assist in writing (lots of - abc -), as it's a growing divisive subject (to use or not to use, etc).
As a second aside, recently I came across an interesting piece here on substack, complementary to your work, which I suspect warrants more attention. Basically the CIA funded, through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a lot of stuff in the new left of the 50s and 60s. I came across this recently and feel more needs to be written on the subject. They funded the Frankfurt school, amongst other things.
Returning to your essay, which is a tour de force, on unpacking the metaphysical history and ideas behind how we got into the present mess, one glaring deficiency is that it's divorced from the contextual history of the past and our present. What I mean by this is that while I completely agree with you that human history and complex societies are based on cooperation, capitalism (and mercantilism) are also straw paupers if we compare and contrast the theory with the practice.
My point is that communism and socialism, just as decolonialism, find fertile ground because in our imperfect reality, the dynamics of power, domination, exploitation, inequality, etc, do exist.
So while I do agree with your essay and do commend you for writing it (I learned a lot and generally really enjoy reading your work), I couldn't help but feel that this imaginary golden future gains traction because of the imperfect present and the lack of alternative ideologies offering a cogent reordering of human socioeconomic-political affairs so as to create a better tomorrow.
So in a sense, while Marx (who didn't have the benefit of the academia which came after him) is imperfect, he was onto something important: religion is ideology, profit is surplus value and it is not returned to the community and society involved in its production. Now we can support the myriad forms of entrepreneurship and producers of wealth all we like, but realistically, across all history and the present, they seek to share as little as possible and use power/networks to alienate workers from their own communities and societies, giving rise to the tensions which the left/progressive/socialist/communists then exploit.
We can hardly argue the debt binge (starting with decoupling from the gold standard in 1972) and financialization from the 80s onwards was created by the left. The whole imaginary infinite growth fallacy and the reduction to the blandness of a material reality, etc, hardly the left's fault. The collapse of Christianity because the Church abused it's position centuries ago, hardly the left's fault. These things need to be recognized or we're going to do more than just rhyme with history.
So I thought your essay was good and a must read to help illuminate and understand how we got where we are, and I don't mean to be unnecessarily critical, but while reading I felt we need to return to a humanism where we accept imperfections exist, are focused on the present and seek harmony.
Religion is much deeper than ideology (which is only a product of the Enlightenment - where ideas themselves are king). Surplus value is nonsense as Marx conceives it because he relied on the labor theory of value which while rhetorically clever is fundamentally flawed (by an infinite recursion). The Frankfurt School were realist enough to look at how Marxism was applied and conclude it didn't work. Thus they set out to reform Marxism, as Luther wanted to reform The Church.
You're right about religion being deeper than ideology, but I disagree with your characterization of Marx's theory of value being rhetorically clever but fundamentally flawed. Marx's theory of value is among the most widely misunderstood concepts, even among Marxists (in fact, it's great fun to ask Marxists/Communists/Socialists to explain it as it often reveals they haven't studied what they preach). Marx's theory of value is actually quite good at explaining the extraction of surplus value, which we commonly refer to as profit. Obviously it's contextually suited to the industrial world pre 19th century technological revolution (when it was easier to identify the big 3 of land/rent, capital and labor) and further breaks down when applied to finance/services. That said, Marx got a lot of stuff wrong and his solution (communism) is pie-in-the-sky thinking, but along with Adam Smith, he remains one of the most outstanding political economists of that time.
If you follow the links I provided you'll find the Frankfurt school was financed by proxy by the CIA. This does not mean we should dismiss it, just that we might want to consider why ideas originating there are so prominent in our thinking. The Frankfurt school, as well as early feminists and the French new left intelligentsia, were allowed to flourish through financing of their journals. Fast forward to today and we're living downstream of a big social experiment that didn't emerge organically. We grapple with DEI and LGBTQI+, but at their point of origin, their precursors were promoted as an alternative to communism to redirect social forces within Western liberal democracies to jettison their more communist ideological vision.
It might be no accident that we then had the great return of financialization in the 80s and the gradual destruction of labor unions and outsourcing of jobs, which today leads us to populism (Trump).
Part of the problem we have today is the distinct lack of alternatives to the present political system of "liberal democracy" and "capitalism". While Oz's essay focuses on the ideological evolution of ideas of the left, we must also recognize the vacuousness of the ideas on right/conservative end. Capitalism is great in theory but in practice it's just as diabolical as communism.
The problem is in the concept of surplus value itself - surplus to what? Smith postulated the LTV but couldn't resolve the problem with it - the "numeraire", i.e. the portion of the labor necessary to sustain the laborer. Neither did Marx. Without that it isn't analytical, it is purely rhetorical. Supposedly Sraffa solved it, ironically around the time that the Frankfurt School was established and Marxists were abandoning the materialist basis.
Funny how for leftists, the CIA is as all powerful as the KGB was for John Birchers and others on the right.
"Capitalism is great in theory"
But Capitalism was never theoretical in nature. Smith was describing what already had organically come into being, not postulating a theory to impose upon reality.
Lorenzo doesn't mention Bakunin, but he was the earliest critic of Marx for failing to understand the human value of cooperation. [Which Marx misses because Rousseau missed it.] If you can't grasp Marx's error in his assertion about ALL history being material conflict - then you are simply a zealot.
Surplus value is profit. That's the whole gripe of Marxism, that it's exploitative and labor misses out on the benefits of production, hence inequality, hence capitalism bad, etc etc etc.
Marx was theorizing before economics had all it's sumptuous models of today, before before, before econometrics, before computers. You don't have to be a Marxist to give him credit for being a brilliant economist of his day. Like I previously said, he didn't get everything right. If you read what he wrote about India, for instance, it's pure garbage.
The Frankfurt school. I suspect they're trotskyists at heart. Like the neocons, originally they were trotskyists. The new left created to become controlled opposition.
You know, capitalism has undergone a lot of changes since the time of Smith.
You're not grasping the problem with the LTV. Surplus value is only profit under capitalism; you would still have surplus value in any system as long as you theorize value based on labor (since labor produces more than is required to just sustain the laborer). And it really only works for commodity goods at that. If you think Marx was a brilliant economist, you are star-struck, not coldly evaluating his thinking. He was wrong about everything economically speaking (as capitalism has failed to fail as he predicted it must).
Well at the time you were either a Stalinist, or a Trotskyite - so yes, they were Trotskyites. It appears (from the link you provided earlier) that you are fond of some very unorthodox Marxists.
You're changing the goalposts again. Communism doesn't work for a number of reasons. Communitarianism is more interesting, but suffers from the complex society scaling issues. Surplus always exists, so what else is new? No one would do anything if surplus energy didn't arise. I think there are many brilliant economists, from Smith to Marx to Schumpeter to Keynes to Lenin to Friedman to Sen to ... it's a long list. Unlike you seem to be, I'm not an ideologue, I take good ideas and what works and move along, unafraid to change my mind if and when I learn something new.
What you (and most people) call capitalism is not actually capitalism. Take the USA, ever since the Fed came into being and Roosevelt later, it's hardly been a capitalist economy if authority picks winners and losers. If all the manipulations weren't clear as day, especially post 2008 GFC, I can't help you sir, try stepping outside your comfort zone and reading about the everything bubble, to name just one of the innumerable risks staring us in the face.
"Capitalism is great in theory but in practice it's just as diabolical as communism."
As evidenced by the North Korea, South Korea divide or the West Germany vs East Germany divide, or the pre-commercial China vs the existing China. If it's not perfect, it must be rejected right?
A case in point. Foucault. Foucault is fucking amazing. His analysis of power is the dogs bollocks. We can divide his early and later work, we can say that not everything he touched turned to gold, we can his sexual proclivities and be mindful of his connection to the pedo stuff. But his analysis of power is awesome and throwing out the baby with the bathwater won't do us any good.
In terms of critical theory, dei, postcolonial studies, there's certainly a lot of crap in there. It's really smelly too. But there are also basic truths about discrimination, about individuals who no matter how talented or worthy are shunted because of their backgrounds (or looks or how tall they are). These things need to be taken into consideration.
Colonialism and imperialism ravaged the places they visited. Israel today is a good case in point. To somehow elevate the past and give credence to the sometimes expressed noble civilizing intent as a free pass to the atrocities visited upon the victims, that's just as much an ideological fallacy as the avant-garde of communist revolutions promising a land of milk and honey once the revolution has killed those opposed to it.
> A case in point. Foucault. Foucault is fucking amazing. His analysis of power is the dogs bollocks. We can divide his early and later work, we can say that not everything he touched turned to gold, we can his sexual proclivities and be mindful of his connection to the pedo stuff. But his analysis of power is awesome and throwing out the baby with the bathwater won't do us any good.
No he isn't. Foucault is simply the re-emergence of Protagorian sophism after Christianity had kept it buried for nearly two millennia.
His whole shtick is basically that since anything follows from a contradiction, one can use any available paradox (usually the Munchhausen trilema) to argue for any position one wants. He's simply clever enough to make it non-obvious that this is what he's doing.
Maybe you might have missed something in the Archaeology of Knowledge and Discipline and Punish, just saying, but that's ok, as long as you can write a word salad comment without saying anything I suppose you're the thinker we've all been awaiting since I can't remember the time.
Israel is the reclamation of the land they possessed prior to the Roman diaspora - or do you dispute that history? There was certainly no Palestinian state, ever. I believe the Ottomans referred to the area as Lesser Syria. England and France created Mandatory Palestine.
Hahaha. Go look at the maps before 1917, you'll find Palestine. If you're going to play the mandate game, you're handing victory to the left's oppressor/oppressed binary.
What you're writing is akin to saying when the Etruscans show up, Italy will forfeit it's statehood, just like the native tribes could reclaim the USA. Borders change, nations and empires rise and fall. Just because Judea doesn't mean Israel. Israel today has a right to exist, as do the Palestinians. Go read Norman Finkelstein.
The colonial studies framework has its usefulness. The trick is to have ideas and not for ideas to have you.
Personally I think Israel today is best understood from an eschatological angle. Let's see if the Mashiach turns up in the next 23 months. Interesting times as the Chinese say.
I read this from him, his reaction to the Oct 7th massacre, which he erased and tried to hide (showing he has some shame):
"I, for one, will never begrudge—on the contrary, it warms every fiber of my soul—the scenes of Gaza’s smiling children as their arrogant Jewish supremacist oppressors have, finally, been humbled."
What kind of person says that a massacre "warms every fiber of my soul", regardless of politics and regardless of the fact that he's a Jew celebrating the mass murder of Jews, before the bodies were even buried? Who celebrates a massacre??
Finkelstein is a sick and twisted person whose deranged hatred makes him impossible to trust.
I'm sure you've heard the statement "the winners write the history" - you could add "and make the maps". Of course winning and losing is probably an oppressor/oppressed dynamic as well. I'd rather read Nietzsche.
Yup. And I'm sure you know nothing lasts forever. The strong get judged on how they treat the weak, so who knows what will happen if the EU and the USA stop financing Israel, maybe not even because they don't want to, but simply because they can't afford to. Nietzsche is great, making a comeback these days.
One day we may move beyond dialectical materialism into a realm for which we have no adequate word — the closest I can conjure is “political thermodynamics”.
All closed systems - whether ensembles, populations, or political models of the world, businesses, science, religions - tend toward increasing entropy unless they continuously expend energy (and dissipate waste heat) to maintain coherence.
A stable political system - one capable of homeostasis - is one that keeps its predictions about the world consistent with its sensory inputs, either by updating its internal model (through reform, lawmaking, and deliberation) or by acting upon the world (through policy, enforcement, or transformation).
Political ideology functions as a Markov blanket: a statistical boundary that separates a system’s internal model from external reality while permitting a controlled exchange of information, resources, and energy.
In a responsive democracy, election results, a free press, and open data continuously update the state’s internal model. The Markov blanket here is transparent, permeable, and adaptive - capable of learning from its environment.
The art of governance, in thermodynamic terms, is the management of this boundary’s permeability: allowing enough signal to adapt and evolve, but not so much noise that coherence dissolves into chaos.
Systems that endure the longest are those that minimize the energetic cost of maintaining this balance - they adapt efficiently, dissipating the least energy while preserving predictive alignment with reality.
In such a view, “left” and “right,” “liberal” and “conservative” become secondary distinctions. What ultimately matters is whether a political order is low-waste or high-waste: whether it conserves or squanders the energy required to remain coherent in a changing world.
There are many, daunting results of this ultimately empirical principle.
When two political systems with different informational, ideological, or energetic efficiencies come into contact, the less adaptive (higher free energy) system will tend to dissolve, fragment, or be absorbed.
A Rousseau ensemble is merely one which has a null markov blanket, and is instantly absorbed into any more ordered system it comes on contact with. A Rousseau ensemble is an anarchy, or perhaps diffused online activity. They instantly become consumed.
A Marx ensemble is a self-organizing social system that maintains coherence by metabolizing contradiction — converting internal tension (class, production, ideology) into structural change, rather than suppressing it. A Marx system fails when the dialectic becomes dogma and entropy rises until homeostasis is not possible energetically.
A theocratic ensemble is a closed, belief-stabilized political system that maintains coherence by suppressing informational entropy rather than metabolizing it.
Its stability is purchased through rigidity; its downfall is guaranteed by contact with more adaptive, energy-efficient systems.
We will soon enter the age of algorithmic or other ensembles and other strange models. We have entered some already.
One is disorder harvesting states.
Consider a system that deliberately seeks out high-entropy zones - failed states, chaotic markets, informational disorder—and extracts usable energy (data, labor, innovation) from them.
They are parasitic, but self-sustaining; thrives on global disequilibrium. The Markov boundary is expansive and porous; the boundary grows by absorbing disorder.It can be sustained until the surrounding environment becomes uniformly ordered or entirely depleted—then implosion. It is sort of the black hold of political systems, empire 2.0.
Another one is auto-catalytic computational political ensembles; ones which algorithmically redefine themselves to minimize political surprise rather than using liberal democratic inputs. Consumes informational entropy as fuel; governance is continuous “machine learning.” The constitutional layer - code defining who may edit code - defines the minors of algorithms.
It has potentially high until value drift accumulates; collapse occurs when optimization targets diverge from human thermodynamic needs (resources, meaning).
You have written comprehensively in the past on immigration.
The concept of immigration ensembles are precisely those of watching the generation of thermodynamic equilibrium in these models, via the markov blanket.
With very large immigrant inflow, if there is a large mismatch between bandwidth of the markov blanket and the information delta between two ensembles (populations) is large, entropy accumulates very rapidly and can cause dissolution of the political systems.
The US has an extremely adaptive system, The UK is quite brittle; the EU in-between. We are witnessing the accumulation of uncertainty in those systems, realtime, in response to immigration. Sweden is maximizing political uncertainty (entropy) in those ensembles, and all lead to an energetically unfeasible state soon.
Really interesting stuff, I remember first noticing Marx was more of a spiritualist than an 'economist' or Scottish Moral Philosopher in late high school. It is always very strange when you question these cultural marxist types deep enough and see if they actually subscribe to Lenninsm or Maoism or any of the more radical implementations of the 'middle society' necessary to get to Marx's Utopia.
This post is a masterpiece of concise and coherent evolutionary dynamics of progressivism.
While it operates on the level of ideas, somewhat abstracting from human nature - for example, we are susceptible to all the catechisms of ideals listed because the memetic liberating utopias are built on the same emotional foundation of envy, resentment, and group cohesion that caused bands of youths to go and pillage the next village, very well exemplified by, among many other primitives, the Maoris from 200+ years ago, where the "genocide" of the next village or clan was a customary occurrence, and an evolutionarily sound zero-sum ecological balancing. So much for "noble savages." In the modern environment of plenty, the ideas have become more abstract and detached from the reality constraints of existence, but they have become so much more deranged while still being nourished by another adaptive cognitive mechanism - group cohesion around such deranged beliefs as multifaceted markers of belonging.
Thus, my paragraph above is just a small evolutionary addition, not really necessary for the completeness of Lorenzo's post, because it is covered in many of Lorenzo's other writings.
Again, this is a masterpiece. Sadly, many of the most wordy commenters here skillfully show how little they understand of what Lorenzo is conveying.
Great as always mate! And I have to admit that the Aussie spanked England in the Rugby League Ashes ( that's a proper sport for readers who don't know, like Aussie Rules!). Anyway, you are always am inspiration, a mine of interesting information, analysis and references. Pop over to my sub-stack sometimes, i think we are on a similar wavelength. And as the night draw in here in old blighty, seasons greetings to all in Oz!
> A key idea in Hermeticism is that properly-oriented humans participate with God in the process of creation, a process that the Creator requires to complete Himself. This is God-as-Becoming not God-as-Being. Take God out of the story and human action becomes the definitive process of creation.
There is a hard underlying paradox here. Basically the "why didn't God tell Moses how to build modern technology?" problem. Yes, there are various ways to answer that question, but they all have implications that conservatives won't like:
1) Because God doesn't actually exist.
The problem with this one for conservatives is obvious.
2) Because technology is a hindrance or at best irrelevant to God's plan for salvation.
This is rather close to Rousseau's view that civilization is imprisoning. At least it seems to imply that we should all become anarcho-primitivists, or at least Amish.
3) People at the time weren't ready for technology.
But we are? If not, see (2). If we are, that implies we are morally superior to the prophets and church fathers, so why should we be basing our morality on what they wrote?
4) Now we come to the Hemetic/Hegalian God-as-becoming.
There's a reason nearly everyone is a *de facto* Hegalian these days, whether they admit it or not.
Read this essay about an hour ago:
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/can-socialists-be-happy/
Happiness or perfection? What a question.
Remember: Real astrology has never been tried!
excellent analysis
Great essay!
As an aside, if I may, and please don't be offended, I did wonder about whether an LM was used to assist in writing (lots of - abc -), as it's a growing divisive subject (to use or not to use, etc).
As a second aside, recently I came across an interesting piece here on substack, complementary to your work, which I suspect warrants more attention. Basically the CIA funded, through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a lot of stuff in the new left of the 50s and 60s. I came across this recently and feel more needs to be written on the subject. They funded the Frankfurt school, amongst other things.
https://open.substack.com/pub/rhyd/p/how-the-left-got-fucked-part-one?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=jpgb
https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/1995-2/origins-of-the-congress-of-cultural-freedom-1949-50-cultural-cold-war/
Returning to your essay, which is a tour de force, on unpacking the metaphysical history and ideas behind how we got into the present mess, one glaring deficiency is that it's divorced from the contextual history of the past and our present. What I mean by this is that while I completely agree with you that human history and complex societies are based on cooperation, capitalism (and mercantilism) are also straw paupers if we compare and contrast the theory with the practice.
My point is that communism and socialism, just as decolonialism, find fertile ground because in our imperfect reality, the dynamics of power, domination, exploitation, inequality, etc, do exist.
So while I do agree with your essay and do commend you for writing it (I learned a lot and generally really enjoy reading your work), I couldn't help but feel that this imaginary golden future gains traction because of the imperfect present and the lack of alternative ideologies offering a cogent reordering of human socioeconomic-political affairs so as to create a better tomorrow.
So in a sense, while Marx (who didn't have the benefit of the academia which came after him) is imperfect, he was onto something important: religion is ideology, profit is surplus value and it is not returned to the community and society involved in its production. Now we can support the myriad forms of entrepreneurship and producers of wealth all we like, but realistically, across all history and the present, they seek to share as little as possible and use power/networks to alienate workers from their own communities and societies, giving rise to the tensions which the left/progressive/socialist/communists then exploit.
We can hardly argue the debt binge (starting with decoupling from the gold standard in 1972) and financialization from the 80s onwards was created by the left. The whole imaginary infinite growth fallacy and the reduction to the blandness of a material reality, etc, hardly the left's fault. The collapse of Christianity because the Church abused it's position centuries ago, hardly the left's fault. These things need to be recognized or we're going to do more than just rhyme with history.
So I thought your essay was good and a must read to help illuminate and understand how we got where we are, and I don't mean to be unnecessarily critical, but while reading I felt we need to return to a humanism where we accept imperfections exist, are focused on the present and seek harmony.
Religion is much deeper than ideology (which is only a product of the Enlightenment - where ideas themselves are king). Surplus value is nonsense as Marx conceives it because he relied on the labor theory of value which while rhetorically clever is fundamentally flawed (by an infinite recursion). The Frankfurt School were realist enough to look at how Marxism was applied and conclude it didn't work. Thus they set out to reform Marxism, as Luther wanted to reform The Church.
You're right about religion being deeper than ideology, but I disagree with your characterization of Marx's theory of value being rhetorically clever but fundamentally flawed. Marx's theory of value is among the most widely misunderstood concepts, even among Marxists (in fact, it's great fun to ask Marxists/Communists/Socialists to explain it as it often reveals they haven't studied what they preach). Marx's theory of value is actually quite good at explaining the extraction of surplus value, which we commonly refer to as profit. Obviously it's contextually suited to the industrial world pre 19th century technological revolution (when it was easier to identify the big 3 of land/rent, capital and labor) and further breaks down when applied to finance/services. That said, Marx got a lot of stuff wrong and his solution (communism) is pie-in-the-sky thinking, but along with Adam Smith, he remains one of the most outstanding political economists of that time.
If you follow the links I provided you'll find the Frankfurt school was financed by proxy by the CIA. This does not mean we should dismiss it, just that we might want to consider why ideas originating there are so prominent in our thinking. The Frankfurt school, as well as early feminists and the French new left intelligentsia, were allowed to flourish through financing of their journals. Fast forward to today and we're living downstream of a big social experiment that didn't emerge organically. We grapple with DEI and LGBTQI+, but at their point of origin, their precursors were promoted as an alternative to communism to redirect social forces within Western liberal democracies to jettison their more communist ideological vision.
It might be no accident that we then had the great return of financialization in the 80s and the gradual destruction of labor unions and outsourcing of jobs, which today leads us to populism (Trump).
Part of the problem we have today is the distinct lack of alternatives to the present political system of "liberal democracy" and "capitalism". While Oz's essay focuses on the ideological evolution of ideas of the left, we must also recognize the vacuousness of the ideas on right/conservative end. Capitalism is great in theory but in practice it's just as diabolical as communism.
The problem is in the concept of surplus value itself - surplus to what? Smith postulated the LTV but couldn't resolve the problem with it - the "numeraire", i.e. the portion of the labor necessary to sustain the laborer. Neither did Marx. Without that it isn't analytical, it is purely rhetorical. Supposedly Sraffa solved it, ironically around the time that the Frankfurt School was established and Marxists were abandoning the materialist basis.
Funny how for leftists, the CIA is as all powerful as the KGB was for John Birchers and others on the right.
"Capitalism is great in theory"
But Capitalism was never theoretical in nature. Smith was describing what already had organically come into being, not postulating a theory to impose upon reality.
Lorenzo doesn't mention Bakunin, but he was the earliest critic of Marx for failing to understand the human value of cooperation. [Which Marx misses because Rousseau missed it.] If you can't grasp Marx's error in his assertion about ALL history being material conflict - then you are simply a zealot.
The ad hominem attacks are unnecessary.
Surplus value is profit. That's the whole gripe of Marxism, that it's exploitative and labor misses out on the benefits of production, hence inequality, hence capitalism bad, etc etc etc.
Marx was theorizing before economics had all it's sumptuous models of today, before before, before econometrics, before computers. You don't have to be a Marxist to give him credit for being a brilliant economist of his day. Like I previously said, he didn't get everything right. If you read what he wrote about India, for instance, it's pure garbage.
The Frankfurt school. I suspect they're trotskyists at heart. Like the neocons, originally they were trotskyists. The new left created to become controlled opposition.
You know, capitalism has undergone a lot of changes since the time of Smith.
Everyone has missed the cooperation angle.
You're not grasping the problem with the LTV. Surplus value is only profit under capitalism; you would still have surplus value in any system as long as you theorize value based on labor (since labor produces more than is required to just sustain the laborer). And it really only works for commodity goods at that. If you think Marx was a brilliant economist, you are star-struck, not coldly evaluating his thinking. He was wrong about everything economically speaking (as capitalism has failed to fail as he predicted it must).
Well at the time you were either a Stalinist, or a Trotskyite - so yes, they were Trotskyites. It appears (from the link you provided earlier) that you are fond of some very unorthodox Marxists.
You're changing the goalposts again. Communism doesn't work for a number of reasons. Communitarianism is more interesting, but suffers from the complex society scaling issues. Surplus always exists, so what else is new? No one would do anything if surplus energy didn't arise. I think there are many brilliant economists, from Smith to Marx to Schumpeter to Keynes to Lenin to Friedman to Sen to ... it's a long list. Unlike you seem to be, I'm not an ideologue, I take good ideas and what works and move along, unafraid to change my mind if and when I learn something new.
What you (and most people) call capitalism is not actually capitalism. Take the USA, ever since the Fed came into being and Roosevelt later, it's hardly been a capitalist economy if authority picks winners and losers. If all the manipulations weren't clear as day, especially post 2008 GFC, I can't help you sir, try stepping outside your comfort zone and reading about the everything bubble, to name just one of the innumerable risks staring us in the face.
"Capitalism is great in theory but in practice it's just as diabolical as communism."
As evidenced by the North Korea, South Korea divide or the West Germany vs East Germany divide, or the pre-commercial China vs the existing China. If it's not perfect, it must be rejected right?
I think you're misinterpreting what I wrote. Go back to sleep and watch American gladiators.
A case in point. Foucault. Foucault is fucking amazing. His analysis of power is the dogs bollocks. We can divide his early and later work, we can say that not everything he touched turned to gold, we can his sexual proclivities and be mindful of his connection to the pedo stuff. But his analysis of power is awesome and throwing out the baby with the bathwater won't do us any good.
In terms of critical theory, dei, postcolonial studies, there's certainly a lot of crap in there. It's really smelly too. But there are also basic truths about discrimination, about individuals who no matter how talented or worthy are shunted because of their backgrounds (or looks or how tall they are). These things need to be taken into consideration.
Colonialism and imperialism ravaged the places they visited. Israel today is a good case in point. To somehow elevate the past and give credence to the sometimes expressed noble civilizing intent as a free pass to the atrocities visited upon the victims, that's just as much an ideological fallacy as the avant-garde of communist revolutions promising a land of milk and honey once the revolution has killed those opposed to it.
Cooperation requires compromise.
> A case in point. Foucault. Foucault is fucking amazing. His analysis of power is the dogs bollocks. We can divide his early and later work, we can say that not everything he touched turned to gold, we can his sexual proclivities and be mindful of his connection to the pedo stuff. But his analysis of power is awesome and throwing out the baby with the bathwater won't do us any good.
No he isn't. Foucault is simply the re-emergence of Protagorian sophism after Christianity had kept it buried for nearly two millennia.
His whole shtick is basically that since anything follows from a contradiction, one can use any available paradox (usually the Munchhausen trilema) to argue for any position one wants. He's simply clever enough to make it non-obvious that this is what he's doing.
Maybe you might have missed something in the Archaeology of Knowledge and Discipline and Punish, just saying, but that's ok, as long as you can write a word salad comment without saying anything I suppose you're the thinker we've all been awaiting since I can't remember the time.
Speaking of word salad.
Israel is the reclamation of the land they possessed prior to the Roman diaspora - or do you dispute that history? There was certainly no Palestinian state, ever. I believe the Ottomans referred to the area as Lesser Syria. England and France created Mandatory Palestine.
Hahaha. Go look at the maps before 1917, you'll find Palestine. If you're going to play the mandate game, you're handing victory to the left's oppressor/oppressed binary.
What you're writing is akin to saying when the Etruscans show up, Italy will forfeit it's statehood, just like the native tribes could reclaim the USA. Borders change, nations and empires rise and fall. Just because Judea doesn't mean Israel. Israel today has a right to exist, as do the Palestinians. Go read Norman Finkelstein.
The colonial studies framework has its usefulness. The trick is to have ideas and not for ideas to have you.
Personally I think Israel today is best understood from an eschatological angle. Let's see if the Mashiach turns up in the next 23 months. Interesting times as the Chinese say.
Go read Norman Finkelstein.
I read this from him, his reaction to the Oct 7th massacre, which he erased and tried to hide (showing he has some shame):
"I, for one, will never begrudge—on the contrary, it warms every fiber of my soul—the scenes of Gaza’s smiling children as their arrogant Jewish supremacist oppressors have, finally, been humbled."
What kind of person says that a massacre "warms every fiber of my soul", regardless of politics and regardless of the fact that he's a Jew celebrating the mass murder of Jews, before the bodies were even buried? Who celebrates a massacre??
Finkelstein is a sick and twisted person whose deranged hatred makes him impossible to trust.
What nonsense. Go back to the recess whence thy came from.
I'm sure you've heard the statement "the winners write the history" - you could add "and make the maps". Of course winning and losing is probably an oppressor/oppressed dynamic as well. I'd rather read Nietzsche.
Yup. And I'm sure you know nothing lasts forever. The strong get judged on how they treat the weak, so who knows what will happen if the EU and the USA stop financing Israel, maybe not even because they don't want to, but simply because they can't afford to. Nietzsche is great, making a comeback these days.
Interesting.
One day we may move beyond dialectical materialism into a realm for which we have no adequate word — the closest I can conjure is “political thermodynamics”.
All closed systems - whether ensembles, populations, or political models of the world, businesses, science, religions - tend toward increasing entropy unless they continuously expend energy (and dissipate waste heat) to maintain coherence.
A stable political system - one capable of homeostasis - is one that keeps its predictions about the world consistent with its sensory inputs, either by updating its internal model (through reform, lawmaking, and deliberation) or by acting upon the world (through policy, enforcement, or transformation).
Political ideology functions as a Markov blanket: a statistical boundary that separates a system’s internal model from external reality while permitting a controlled exchange of information, resources, and energy.
In a responsive democracy, election results, a free press, and open data continuously update the state’s internal model. The Markov blanket here is transparent, permeable, and adaptive - capable of learning from its environment.
The art of governance, in thermodynamic terms, is the management of this boundary’s permeability: allowing enough signal to adapt and evolve, but not so much noise that coherence dissolves into chaos.
Systems that endure the longest are those that minimize the energetic cost of maintaining this balance - they adapt efficiently, dissipating the least energy while preserving predictive alignment with reality.
In such a view, “left” and “right,” “liberal” and “conservative” become secondary distinctions. What ultimately matters is whether a political order is low-waste or high-waste: whether it conserves or squanders the energy required to remain coherent in a changing world.
There are many, daunting results of this ultimately empirical principle.
When two political systems with different informational, ideological, or energetic efficiencies come into contact, the less adaptive (higher free energy) system will tend to dissolve, fragment, or be absorbed.
A Rousseau ensemble is merely one which has a null markov blanket, and is instantly absorbed into any more ordered system it comes on contact with. A Rousseau ensemble is an anarchy, or perhaps diffused online activity. They instantly become consumed.
A Marx ensemble is a self-organizing social system that maintains coherence by metabolizing contradiction — converting internal tension (class, production, ideology) into structural change, rather than suppressing it. A Marx system fails when the dialectic becomes dogma and entropy rises until homeostasis is not possible energetically.
A theocratic ensemble is a closed, belief-stabilized political system that maintains coherence by suppressing informational entropy rather than metabolizing it.
Its stability is purchased through rigidity; its downfall is guaranteed by contact with more adaptive, energy-efficient systems.
We will soon enter the age of algorithmic or other ensembles and other strange models. We have entered some already.
One is disorder harvesting states.
Consider a system that deliberately seeks out high-entropy zones - failed states, chaotic markets, informational disorder—and extracts usable energy (data, labor, innovation) from them.
They are parasitic, but self-sustaining; thrives on global disequilibrium. The Markov boundary is expansive and porous; the boundary grows by absorbing disorder.It can be sustained until the surrounding environment becomes uniformly ordered or entirely depleted—then implosion. It is sort of the black hold of political systems, empire 2.0.
Another one is auto-catalytic computational political ensembles; ones which algorithmically redefine themselves to minimize political surprise rather than using liberal democratic inputs. Consumes informational entropy as fuel; governance is continuous “machine learning.” The constitutional layer - code defining who may edit code - defines the minors of algorithms.
It has potentially high until value drift accumulates; collapse occurs when optimization targets diverge from human thermodynamic needs (resources, meaning).
You have written comprehensively in the past on immigration.
The concept of immigration ensembles are precisely those of watching the generation of thermodynamic equilibrium in these models, via the markov blanket.
With very large immigrant inflow, if there is a large mismatch between bandwidth of the markov blanket and the information delta between two ensembles (populations) is large, entropy accumulates very rapidly and can cause dissolution of the political systems.
The US has an extremely adaptive system, The UK is quite brittle; the EU in-between. We are witnessing the accumulation of uncertainty in those systems, realtime, in response to immigration. Sweden is maximizing political uncertainty (entropy) in those ensembles, and all lead to an energetically unfeasible state soon.