4,130 words.
“Too much of heaven / Can bring you underground / Heaven (Yeeeeeah) / Can always turn around” – Eiffel 65, Too Much of Heaven
I cannot sanction science-fiction writers proclaiming their genuine predictions for the future, especially if it is concerning public policy suggestions. I have encountered serious men explain at length how unimaginable moonshots can be unleashed if we simply begin mining asteroids by hurling them back to Earth and catching them. We can achieve lightspeed travel, we are told, by developing technologies the complexity of which would approach that which would grant lightspeed travel.
One imagines they view the world like a real-time-strategy game, with a resource counter floating somewhere high above beside which is our collective Level. If we can simply max out diamonds and gold, then we can unlock all tech trees at once.
If you get a console command you can get infinity copper, and then you can just do the Dyson Sphere path right off the rip.
Pessimistic and Optimistic Accelerationists alike believe the technological singularity is inevitable, and it is only a matter of time before we will subsume ourselves into the exponential developmental momentum to become blissfully inhuman. Technology will solve all problems caused by technology, markets will vanish, classes will evaporate, and scarcity will be a distant memory.
Have we always had a utopia-shaped hole in our clutches? It’s not obvious that pre-Christian cultures – European Paganism or Eastern Mysticism – had much interest in creating a perfect world on Earth, and despite possessing varying conceptualizations of the end of the world they did not seem particularly obsessed with any sort of divine apocalyptic reckoning. It seems that our attempts to perfect the world have multiplied within modernity, cutting across all ideologies and monotheistic faiths.
Michael Löwy calls our attention to one illustrative example of the sociopolitical implications of this thinking with the account of Jewish intellectuals in Germany from the middle of the nineteenth century up to 1933.
During this era, the culture of the Central European Jewish community blossomed into a Golden Age comparable to that of the Judeo-Arab community in twelfth-century Spain. A golden age which gave the world Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Ernst Bloch, and Walter Benjamin. They were towering examples of a larger generation of intellectuals whose writings were drawing from German (romantic) and Jewish (messianic) sources.
The central argument is that very special kind of dialectical relationship developed between two disparate cultural configurations; a mutual attraction that went as far as a fusion. Connective tissue is sketched between Jewish messianism and an ascendant Socialist wonderland free of ancient hierarchies. While many of the figures are legendary in the halls of Marxism, this intermingling is purported to have birthed what we know as Libertarianism.
Löwy builds a case for what he terms “elective affinity,” where worldviews that are discordant yet alike enough to exist in geographic proximity select each other for allegiance. Is it true that there is something in the DNA of cultures that makes them more likely for collaboration over others? This author is inclined to believe that synthesis can be forced and that one of the perils of ethnogenesis is that it is reactive to those groups which find themselves in close relation. Ethnogenesis is reactive rather than prescriptive.
If you put enough Sub-Saharan Africans into Norway, it may take only one generation for those wildly disparate peoples to form a trauma bond.
“For the Jewish intellectual who belonged to the ‘romantic generation’ of the 1880s, who sometimes attended the informal German circles at which romantic anticapitalist culture was being developed – such as the Max Weber Circle in Heidelberg, frequented by Lukács and Bloch – one problem arose immediately. A return to the past, which was at the heart of the romantic orientation, drew upon German ancestry, medieval aristocracy or Protestant or Catholic Christianity – that is to say, upon national, social or cultural references from which he, as a Jew, was completely excluded. As for the others, the majority of Jewish intellectuals of German cultural background, only two solutions were possible within the framework of neo-romanticism: either a return to their own historical roots, to their own culture, nationality or ancestral religion; or adherence to a universal romantic-revolutionary Utopia.” – Michael Lowry, Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe
The logic follows that this is how Jewish theology became interwoven with German Romanticism, thereby graduating to a universalist politic that would nonetheless benefit the ethnic identity of its proponents. Socialist utopia is not so different from Libertarian utopia, seeking above all to replace the state apparatus with a society of individuals moving as a rational self-aggregating collective. In either example, what state permitted to exist serves the material needs of the population.
To be Anti-Authoritarian and Traditionalist presents obvious obstacles, unless a propositional history is isolated. Then Heaven only exists as a schema for sweeping social policy. The solution to tradition is the politicization of everything, and there’s only anarchy in the afterlife. The end of days shepherded by political revolution, at which time we will surrender to the authority of divine will.
The promise of utopia is a grand leveling; total immaterialization. Each mode of thinking presents obstacles that prohibit inevitable progress to this Millenarian immersion. To the Communists it was those who seek to hold ownership over the means of production. To anarchists, it is all who seek power as such. To liberals, it is the world of tradition. Libertarians, the state itself. And so on. Each ideology redistributing the human biomass into a homogenous collective has an archetype, the apex individual these human units are modeled after. All historical time collapses towards this ideal.
I am not enthused by yearnings of immersion into total fluidity of being. From tribal immersion into the paranormal to the adoration of self-replicating 4-D nanotech singularity, all utopias are goo.
Where once we believed we could strip away consumerism like a scab upon our essence, each successful political system is currently searching for the most effective way to supercharge it. Naturally, it didn’t used to be this way; there was a time where awareness of capitalism invited hostility and endorsement rather than bitter acceptance.
Let’s begin with the Soviet Union’s economy. Your saintly patience is recognized and appreciated.
The entire Soviet leadership expected that world capitalism would enter a period of heightened class struggle, which would bring opportunities for Communist expansion. As Lenin explained in a May 1918 address, “If war is waged by the proletariat after it has conquered the bourgeoisie in its own country, and is waged with the object of strengthening and extending socialism, such a war is legitimate and ‘holy.’” This is to say, contrary to the prevailing mythology circulating in Communist circles, the Soviet Union was primed for ongoing aggression on the global stage.
In the formidable accounting provided by Sean McMeekin, a dangerous virus was injected into the international system, with political parties in every significant country in the world devoted to routinely sabotaging their own governments while in the paid service of a foreign power. This was evident most vividly in the United States, although there was similar agitation throughout Europe.
“In the years after Roosevelt recognized the USSR, dozens of Soviet agents and CPUSA members infiltrated the US government, helped along by the vigorous (and almost entirely un-vetted) bureaucratic expansion of FDR’s New Deal. Key targets for infiltration included the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), where a Communist cell run by Harold Ware provided entrée for notorious Soviet agents such as Whittaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley, and Nathan Silvermaster.[..] Communists also infiltrated the Works Progress Administration, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Justice Department. The State Department, meanwhile, was honeycombed with Soviet agents such as Laurence Duggan (code name Frank), Michael Straight (NIGEL), and Alger Hiss.” – Sean McMeekin, Stalin’s War
After World War 2, by measures of territory conquered and influence gained, Stalin was the undeniable victor in both Europe and Asia. Britain was bankrupt and moribund. The United States emerged in a strong position, inheriting the infrastructure of the British Empire by financial default but moving onward with exterior infiltrations emboldened.
Lenin himself was convinced that the cataclysmic demands of their movement would eventually make enemies of the whole world, so the USSR strategized itself in a very advantageous military position. The Communist economic experiment was on solid footing during this time, and its tendrils extended far to subvert ideological opposition both politically and culturally.
This was the advantageous status quo leading into the Cold War where the lofty goals of a classless revolution would be tested.
Starting in the mid-1950s, Soviet elites began to reimagine the confrontation between socialism and capitalism from the successful “military-industrial” approach to what became explicitly labeled a “socioeconomic competition” extending throughout the the latter half of the 20th century. According to the work of Yakov Feygin, a dynamic story of economic reform in the post-Stalin USSR is told through the emergence of a new kind of policy entrepreneur, men who based their authority and decision-making power on oftentimes heterodox economic expertise.
The Soviet Union was able to expand as many of their counterparts did; rapid industrialization and the transformation of a peasant class into a specialized worker class. This ended up placing demands upon the system that it could not fulfill as it was locked in statis by the middle-income trap.
Stalin’s particular reading of Marxist theory meant that building socialism in one country would take acutely coercive approaches to setting up the institutions necessary to force household savings. Like all industrializing economies seeking to form capital very quickly, the USSR repressed the consumption of its population to increase the rate of capital investment. The problem with such a model is that it has diminishing returns.
“Before economists could think about transforming the Soviet system to meet the challenge of the new Cold War, they would need to think about ways to reform the Soviet growth model without crossing ideological third rails and to find the chance to make themselves relevant. Thus, to become reformers, these economists needed to create agendas for redefining value within the state-run economy and successfully turn those agendas into programs for economic reform with concrete policy prescriptions.” – Yakov Feygin, Building a Ruin
As households found more and more cash in their hands, they had three options for what to do with it. First, they could spend it on goods. But since the supply of consumer goods did not respond to increases in consumer demand or kept low through centralized planning, this was not an option. Second, they could deposit the savings at the state bank or invest them in state bonds, thereby allowing some of the excess cash to reenter the budget. However, exceedingly low real interest rates, distrust of authorities, and the fact that the appearance of goods on markets necessitated immediate access to physical cash made comrades hesitant to surrender their funds. The most common course of action was hoarding cash.
This is the middle-income trap, which freezes the movement of money. The economy of the future was stalled in the one place it could not exert total control.
Khrushchev attempted to remedy this by boosting investment, although my most accounts it worsened the imbalances endemic to the chosen growth model. Despite slow-moving internal reform across successive leaders up to Gorbachev, and the emergence of an clandestine entrepreneur elite within the state apparatus, inability to address the movement of money was the primary driver of the economic strife. They could not solve the problem with increased production.
The theory detailing this crisis was novel at the time, one of its leading proponents being Marxist academic by the name of Michał Kalecki.
Outside the academic journals that dominated monetary economics during the early 20th century, two schools of thought emerged each claiming to secure a firmer grasp of monetary circulation. One of them sought to focus money and credit around a principle of stock-flow consistency. Its limitation for the analysis of monetary circulation is that the whole economy becomes too complex to be entirely predictable as soon as one tries to break down the ‘transactions’ of the private sector down into the transactions of individual households vs. firms/organizations. The other school of thought has sought to reconcile the monetary theories of Marx with Keynes by examining ‘circuits of money’.
Kalecki’s central thesis, which still directs towards a fantasy of full employment for every citizen, was that the economy was not a spreadsheet of rational transactions guided by an invisible hand that would inevitably sort through its own irregularities. Rather, everything was driven by the accumulation and centralization of capital, and such centralization could dictate the terms of the entire transactional ecosystem.
In short, only capital owners can bequeath capital and choose how it moves, and it is the movement of such capital that defines the success of an economy. Removal of these capital distribution centers lead to stagnation, and this was the system slowly ricocheting between ideological rails and gaining form by degrees in the winter of the USSR.
“There are certain fundamental principles that run through the fragments on money and monetary circulation in Kalecki’s work. The first and most important of these principles is his assertion that capitalist money is the money of capitalists. This money is thrown into circulation when capitalists undertake production and investment. […] This assertion is perhaps most obvious in Kalecki’s famous definition of a capitalist: ‘Many economists assume, at least in their abstract theories, a state of business democracy where anybody endowed with entrepreneurial ability can obtain capital for starting a business venture. This picture of the activities of the ‘pure‘ entrepreneur is, to put it mildly, unrealistic. The most important prerequisite for becoming an entrepreneur is the ownership of capital.”- Jan Toporowski, Interest and Capital: The Monetary Economics of Michał Kalecki
The way many people still understand the relationship of credit is: you as an individual ask for a loan from the bank, which holds everybody’s savings. Your repayment of the loan with interest repays the loan and society gets richer.
According to Kalecki and his contemporaries, interest has little impact on investment. The system of creditism is a series of spigots opening and closing over institutions, with the central bank releasing seemingly endless credit over banks which can disperse it as they see fit, orchestrating economic activity in a more decentralized way. Interest rates and taxes control consumer spending, rather than raising funds or extracting profit. A Marxist like Kalecki, once grasping the realities of the Money Space, was forced to pursue communist aims through these intractable rules.
A polished pane of idealism spiderwebbed by the mallet of the markets.
Marxists continue to think they are in a war of productive forces, and it is the highest producing country that wins. Their inability to enter into an American Hegemonic international trade system, they believe even now, was the main reason the Soviet system failed. This is another way of saying that without Capitalists to buy their goods to support them, they could never dream of survival. Many authors have attempted to predict how this same model could once again achieve dominance and crush the American empire, one such author being Fadi Lama.
In Lama’s framework foretelling the imminent collapse of Western hegemony, political elites reflect the interests and agenda of the economic elite known as FIRE sector (Finance / Insurance / Real Estate.) The interests of these political elites present throughout the developing world are coherent with the Western financial construct. While this inclines the political elites in the Global South to serve Western interests, the stage is set for a tectonic shift towards regional sovereignty.
The central players to this move are Brazil, Russia, Iran, China, and South Africa, known collectively as BRICS. They constitute the coordinated pushback against the monetary system thus far described, and a return to the economics of production, wealth redistribution to the lower stratas of society, and classless peace.
“The current global geopolitical clash is in essence a struggle between the colonial powers wishing to preserve the Bretton Woods system that facilitates siphoning the wealth of nations and sovereign nations striving for independence and an end to a millennium of their oppression. During WWII, at peak colonial power, the Bretton Woods conference established the financial and monetary architecture for the post-World War II era, a framework which has controlled the global economy for eight decades and proved more effective than colonial armies in extracting wealth from Global South nations.” – Fadi Lama, Why The West Can’t Win
Multipolarists believe that the decentralized FIRE money powers may have recently given up on global hegemony after a millennium of expansionism, and the stage is now set for new manufacturing forces to assert control. They blame the materialism, neoliberal policies, and war as the main contributors to America’s decline, ignoring that most of these variously apply to China, Russia, and Iran.
The promise is reminiscent of all those that came before: if the oppressive constructs are removed by force, then the age of peaceful exchange can begin. Reason can reign supreme. The Default of Heaven can wash the world unimpeded. Technology will solve all problems caused by technology, markets will vanish, classes will evaporate, and scarcity will be a distant memory.
This process is, of course, inevitable, with revolution only utilized to speed up the process.
This defensive position is justified in light of the many proclamations of Western geostrategists, notably Zbigniew Brzezinski whose book “The Grand Chessboard” loudly telegraphs the disruptive power of the American sphere of influence. He states that China’s opposition to America has more to do with its hegemony status rather than what it represents ideologically. This is as opposed to Russia who has a historic and existential war with the West in general, and a long history of imperialist efforts. The union of Anti-American nations is much more precarious than its agents assume. America’s admitted goal is to expand the European Union as a springboard to the rest of Eurasia. From there the mission is to take soft control of Eurasia by promoting national pluralism with America as the leader while distancing itself from the appearances of a conniving superpower.
This manifests military in the form of NATO, and without such a charge NATO has no reason to exist. The Multipolarity advocates are correct that Western forces are attempting to disrupt the region for the purposes of control, thereby maintaining the status quo. The animating belief is that he who controls East Europe controls the heartland, who controls the heartland controls the world island, who controls the world island controls the world.
Even if you do not believe this to be true, it has guided the decisions of statesmen for generations and we must reckon with these realities where the rubber meets the road.
Despite the salience of their paranoia, the overarching assertion is that the Sovereign World – the regional powers outside the American sphere of influence – will imminently generate a variety of development models, reflecting the civilizational diversity of the world. This harkens back to the generative ecosystem of free transactions and assuming a comparable consumer market can replace the current system of international trade.
For them there is no qualitative aspect of labour; Chinese workers are equal to Russian workers which are equal to African workers, and the one with the most human capital has an edge.
Conversely, the West has moved on entirely from the debate over labour power and is even now seeking a way to the other side of materialist consumerism. Dreams of anarchy bind the tapestry of all our disparate secular nirvanas. It is ideological millenarianism acting like a political Roko’s Basilisk demanding we be on the right side of historical nature. A preposterous and ahistorical notion, and yet the same oceanic idealism pollutes the foresight in the West as well.
To wicked capitalists like Keynes, technological development ought to lead to the fulfillment of all of our basic needs, triggering a post-economic age wherein each of us would be required to only work a maximum of 15 hour per week, and allowing for the remaining time to be used as we please (presumably to improve society.) Of course, this era never came to fruition. Instead of proposing limits to technology advancements in order to halt the replacement of labour by mechanized automation, Jack Buffington proposes that we develop a new economic model that will complement the benefits of accelerating technology to transform markets into a frictionless supply chain model.
A new form of Economic Accelerationism with acute focus on the consumer circuit of money, this hypothesis attempts to move beyond mass manufacturing entirely, supercharging the circuits of consumption while dismantling the traditional centers of production. This is one example of Western innovation attempting to exit the 20th century notion of labour as such, buttressed by artificial intelligence and nanotechnology.
“I am advocating a virtually infinite computational model of design that is a no design approach, like exists in nature through emergence that will only be possible when supercomputers are able to do so. As such, the long tedious process of the Edisonian approach will be replaced, and nor shall we expect to follow a glacially slow process that exists in nature of natural selection, self-organizing emergence. Through this sheer computational power will be the no design paradigm of our products in a twenty-first century frictionless market.” – Jack Buffington, Frictionless Markets: The 21st Century Supply Chain
In this model there is no longer a design process, creative production, or conceivably even engineers. No longer is a market analyzed by entrepreneurs, a solution to a problem devised, a design laboriously drawn up, and a product mass produced to service this market. Everything becomes automated, from fabrication to distribution, even the analysis of desires.
In the early stages of this possible future, a product designer will have an idea for the modification of an existing product, or a wholly new product or material altogether, and go to the an artificial intelligence driven Material Genome System with simple data. One can easily imagine readily-available public data being parsed by this same system, deploying predicted products to regionally-located prefabrication facilities then sorted for robotic delivery.
The technological singularity proposed by Kurtzweil will have been achieved, especially if our standards can be coerced lower. Technology will solve all problems caused by technology, markets will vanish, classes will evaporate, and scarcity will be a distant memory.
The circuit theory of money and the spigot theory of decentralized credit – both primary drivers of the non-oppressive victory over Marxist economics – proved a nation must allow the market to define itself through emergent centers of elite control while providing money new horizons to travel towards. However, the extreme of this is a fluidic nanobot-driven hypematerialism acting as a conveyor belt to a post-scarcity utopia. An anarchic grey goo with 4k God Rays blasting from it.
These Edens Within Reach all bear a striking resemblance: a land of plenty, where people live in peace and labour is no longer coercive. It is taken for granted that the forces guiding us towards patriarchal dominance, feudal lordship, or corporate amalgamation will not emerge again. It is assumed that the aberrations and exceptional individuals will not separate themselves from the rest under their own directive, resulting in yet another interior to the exterior.
All the AI powered mutually assured destruction systems, workers tribunals, eugenics, and appeals to ancient constitutions cannot exempt us from the reality that complex systems are engines for the production of exceptional glitches. Regardless of how attuned our vast networks or institutions are to our perceived goals, heaven will recede further from our grasp. The aberrations persist. Black swans glide across the pond. As the oft repeated quote by GK Chesterton goes: “I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity.”
I do not believe we can achieve a post-scarcity world for the flattened collective; it is much more likely that peaks will climb and valleys will crater while the fog that hovers between these extremes gestate unpredictable specters of mammoth size, perceived only by the furthest reaches of either end. Some will say that the quest itself for the end of materialism by way of hypermaterialism is the impossible goal that conjures cascades of wonders even in its failure, even if we fall short. It’s not the destination, it’s the journey, or so they say.
I submit that the most advanced societies are already exiting this paradigm and are seeking alternatives to the infinity diamonds cheat code.
We don’t need to approach the light, hypnotized as we are to dive into its core. We need only to catch the light with the understanding that if it deigned appropriate we would already be bathed in its entirety.