19 Comments

1. jay taber:

   Add Networks and Netwars by Arquilla and Ronfeldt to that list.

   http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_10/ronfeldt/

   19 June 2006, 11:54 am

2. Michael Anderson:

   The “Corporatization” of the barter system?

   20 June 2006, 1:33 pm

3. Neilcaff:

   I really like reading these Alf Hornburg posts. He’s one of the few writers in the world who makes truly constructive criticisms of Marxism, (the others being some of the feminists contibutors and writers highlighted on this blog)
   I think his emphasis on looking at energistic inputs into production and its effects on a world scale are vital for understanding environmental destruction and economics etc. Its true this side has been neglected by Marxists.
   On the other hand I’m not sure its fair to say using labour power as the basis for calculating value is a normative valuation. If I understand normative correctly it means a perscription from society that tends to homogenise behaviour. So according to Marx value should be measured in terms of labour power. “To say that land labour or energy should be the gauge of value is in itself a value judgement” Yes and no. Of course if Marx was engaged in a extended lifetime polemic against the mystification of value by using prices he was going to plump for labour power. But labour power is a real tangible thing. While factors like energy dissipation and appropiation of time and space are important I think we need to bear in mind that none of things can actually happen in the absense of human activity i.e. labour power.

   21 June 2006, 10:29 am

4. Stan:

   This is a very subtle point, as you indicate. Hornborg is struggling with the notion of unequal exchange and the challenge that presents to “labor power.”

   I doubt Hornborg is trying to abandon human work as part of this process. He is a world systems person who is seeking some empirical measure that is not as tricky as LP in accounting for unequal exchange.

   I don’t see Hornborg as Marx’s detractor at all… but as someone who is trying to find a deeper historical materialism… to continue down the path that Marx opened with the notion of fetishism.

   Thermodynamics and semiotics were not around in 1850.

   Marx’s work was essential, but Hornborg is trying — as we all must in light of the ecocide we are witnessing — to overcome the vestiges of Enlightenment dualism that remain in marxism… the separation of “Man” and nature.

   I think he also sees this approach as an end run around “the ideological and practical hegemony of exchange value.”

   Thanks for contributing on this. It’s a tricky topic.

   21 June 2006, 10:51 am

5. Neilcaff:

   Hmmm just had a brainwave about labour power, sort of making it up as I go along so bear with me.
   Its difficult to put labour power into empirical terms because we’ve traditionally looked at it in terms of wages, price and profit. Of course this isn’t the whole of the story. Maybe we would have a clearer picture if we were able to analyse the realtionship between labour power and the expropriation of time or energy dissipation etc rather than treating them as seperate analytical catagories. For example I’m convinced the high price of oil is bound up with the massive amounts of millitary man hours (gendered language, apologies) both official state and mercenary and all the costs that go with it that are needed to ensure its continuing supply.
   This is all a bit hazy. I’d promise to think a bit more on it and get back to you but since Argentina are playing Holland tonight that would be a total lie! Hope my non-football loving comrades can make something of this.

   21 June 2006, 11:54 am

6. Charles Brown:

   Thermodyanmics and culture is dealt with thoroughly by the school of anthropology developed by Leslie A. White. Another theoretical high point is Sahlins and Service’s _Evolution and Culture_ ( Sahlins has repudiated the White’s Cultural Materialism to some extent) A present day anthropologist who follows the thermodynamic paradigm is Comrade Eugene Ruyle.

   Leslie White
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   Leslie Alvin White (19 January 1900, Salida, Colorado – 31 March 1975) was an American anthropologist known for his advocacy of theories of cultural evolution, social evolutionism and especially neoevolutionism, and his role in creating the department of anthropology at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor.

   Contents [hide]
   1 Biography
   2 White’s anthropology
   3 Further reading
   4 Selected publications

   [edit]
   Biography
   He was born to a peripatetic civil engineer. White lived first in Kansas and then Louisiana. He enrolled to fight in World War I, but saw only the tail end of it, spending a year in the US Navy before matriculating at Louisiana State University in 1919.

   In 1921 he transferred to Columbia University where he studied psychology, taking a BA in 1923 and an MA in 1924. Although at the same university as Franz Boas, Leslie White missed the founding father of American anthropology altogether. However, his interests even at this stage of his career were diverse, and he took classes in several other disciplines and institutions, including philosophy at UCLA, and clinical psychiatry, before finally discovered anthropology via Alexander Goldenweiser’s courses at the New School for Social Research. In 1925 White began studies for a Ph.D. in sociology/anthropology at the University of Chicago and had the opportunity of spending a few weeks with the Menominee and Winnebago in Wisconsin. After his initial thesis proposal — a library thesis which foreshadowed his later theoretical work — he conducted fieldwork at Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico. Ph.D. in hand, White began teaching at the University at Buffalo in 1927, where he began to rethink the anti-evolutionary views that his Boasian education had instilled in him. In 1930, he moved to Ann Arbor, where he would remain for the rest of his active career.

   The three-year period at Buffalo marked a turning point in White’s biography. It was during this time that he developed a worldview — anthropological, political, and ethical — that he would hold to and actively advocate until his death. The student response to the then-controversial Boasian anti-evolutionary and anti-racist doctrines that White espoused helped him formulate his own views regarding the evolution of human social life. In 1929 he visited Soviet Union and on his return joined the Socialist Labor Party, writing articles under the pseudonym ‘John Steel’ for their newspaper.

   White came to Michigan when he was hired to replace Julian Steward who departed Ann Arbor in 1930. Although the university was home to a museum with a long history of involvement in matters anthropological, White was the only professor in the anthropology department itself. In 1932 he headed a fieldschool in the southwest which was attended by Fred Eggan and Mischa Titiev, among others.

   It was Titiev that White brought to Michigan as a second professor in 1936. As a student of White — and who knows, perhaps his status as a Russian immigrant was salient as well — Titiev suited White perfectly. However, during the Second World War, Titiev took part in the war effort by studying Japan. Perhaps this upset the socialist White — in any case by war’s end White had broken with Titiev and the two were hardly even on speaking terms. More faculty were not hired until after the war, when the two-man department was expanded. This, compounded by the foundation by Titiev of the East Asian Studies Program and the import of scholars like Richard Beardsley into the department, created a split on which most professors fell one way or another.

   As a professor in Ann Arbor White trained a generation of influential students. While authors such as Robert Carneiro, Beth Dillingham, and Gertrude Dole were to carry on White’s program in its orthodox form, other scholars such as Eric Wolf, Elman Service, and Marshall Sahlins drew on their time with White to elaborate their own forms of anthropology.

   [edit]
   White’s anthropology
   White’s views were formulated specifically against the Boasians, with whom he was institutionally and intellectually at odds. This antagonism often took on an extremely personal form: White referred to Franz Boas’s prose style as “corny” in no less a place than the American Journal of Sociology, while Robert Lowie referred to White’s work as “a farrago of immature metaphysical notions” shaped by “the obsessive power of fanaticism [which] unconsciously warps one’s vision.”

   One of the strongest deviations from Boasian orthodoxy was White’s view of the nature of anthropology and its relation to other sciences present. White understood the world to be divided into cultural, biological, and physical levels of phenomenon. Such a division is a reflection of the composition of the universe and was not a heuristic device. Thus, contrary to Alfred L. Kroeber and Kluckhohn or Edward Sapir, White saw the delineation of the object of study not as a cognitive accomplishment of the anthropologist but a recognition of the actually existing and delineated phenomena which comprise the world. The distinction between ‘natural’ and ’social’ sciences was thus not based on of method, but rather on the nature of the object of study – physicists study physical phenomena, biologists biological phenomena and culturologists (White’s term) cultural phenomena.

   While the object of study was not delineated by the researcher’s viewpoint or interest, the method by which he approached them could be. White believed that phenomena could be explored from three different points of view, the historical, the formal-functional, and the evolutionist (or formal-temporal). The historical view was essentially Boasian, dedicated to examining the particular diachronic cultural processes, “lovingly trying to penetrate into its secrets until every feature is plain and clear.” The formal-functional is essentially the synchronic approach advocated by Alfred Radcliffe-Brown and BronisÅ‚aw Malinowski, attempting to discern the formal structure of a society and the functional interrelations of its components. The evolutionist approach is, like the formal approach, generalizing. But it is also diachronic, seeing particular events as general instances of larger trends.

   While Boas claimed his science promised loving penetration, White thought that it would “emasculate” anthropology if it became the dominant position. White viewed his own approach as a synthesis of historical and functional approach because it combined the diachronic scope of one with the generalizing eye for formal interrelations provided by the other. As such it could point out “the course of cultural development in the past and its probable course in the future” a task that was anthropology’s “most valuable function.”

   As a result White frequently championed nineteenth century evolutionists in a search for intellectual predecessors unclaimed or — preferably – denounced by Boasians. This can be clearly seen in his views of evolution, which are firmly rooted in the writings of Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, and Lewis H. Morgan. While it can be argued that White’s exposition of Morgan and Spencer’s was tendentious, it can be safely said that White’s concepts of science and evolution were firmly rooted in their work. Advances in population biology and evolutionary theory passed White by and, unlike Steward, his conception of evolution and progress remained firmly rooted in the nineteenth century.

   For White, culture was a superorganic entity that was sui generis and could only be explained in terms of itself. It was composed of three levels, the technological, the social organizational, and the ideological. Each level rested on the previous one, and although they all interacted, ultimately the technological level was the determining one, what White calls “The hero of our piece” and “the leading character of our play”. The most important factor in his theory is technology: “Social systems are determined by technological systems”, wrote White in his book, echoing the earlier theory of Lewis Henry Morgan.

   White spoke of culture as a general human phenomenon, and claimed not to speak of ‘cultures’ in the plural. His theory, published in 1959 in The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome, rekindled the interest in social evolutionism and is counted prominently among the neoevolutionists. He believed that culture – meaning the sum total of all human cultural activity on the planet – was evolving. White differentiated between three components of culture: technological, sociological and ideological, and argued that it was the technological component which plays a primary role or is the primary determining factor responsible for the cultural evolution. White’s materialist approach is evident in the following quote: “man as an animal species, and consequently culture as a whole, is dependent upon the material, mechanical means of adjustment to the natural environment”[1]. This technological component can be described as material, mechanical, physical and chemical instruments, as well as the way people use these techniques. White’s argument on the importance of technology goes as follows[2]:

   Technology is an attempt to solve the problems of survival.
   This attempt ultimately means capturing enough energy and diverting it for human needs.
   Societies that capture more energy and use it more efficiently have an advantage over other societies.
   Therefore, these different societies are more advanced in an evolutionary sense.

   Composite image of the Earth at night, created by NASA and NOAA. The brightest areas of the Earth are the most urbanized, but not necessarily the most populated. Even more than 100 years after the invention of the electric light, some regions remain thinly populated and unlit.For White “the primary function of culture” and the one that determines its level of advancement is its ability to “harness and control energy”. White’s law states that the measure by which to judge the relative degree of evolvedness of culture was the amount of energy it could capture (energy consumption).

   White differentiates between five stages of human development. In first, people use energy of their own muscles. In second, they use energy of domesticated animals. In third, they use the energy of plants (so White refers to agricultural revolution here). In fourth, they learn to use the energy of natural resources: coal, oil, gas. In fifth, they harness the nuclear energy. White introduced a formula

   C= ET,
   where E is a measure of energy consumed per capita per year, T is the measure of efficiency of technical factors utilising the energy and C represents the degree of cultural development. In his own words: “the basic law of cultural evolution” was “culture evolves as the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year is increased, or as the efficiency of the instrumental means of putting the energy to work is increased”[3]. Therefore “we find that progress and development are effected by the improvement of the mechanical means with which energy is harnessed and put to work as well as by increasing the amounts of energy employed”[4]. Although White stops short of promising that technology is the panacea for all the problems that affect mankind, like technological utopians do, his theory treats the technological factor as the most important factor in the evolution of society and is similar to the later works of Gerhard Lenski, the theory of Kardashev scale of Russian astronomer, Nikolai Kardashev and to some notions of technological singularity.

   [edit]
   Further reading
   Leslie A. White: Evolution and Revolution in Anthropology by William Peace. University of Nebraska Press, 2004 (the definitive biography of White).
   Richard Beardsley. An appraisal of Leslie A. White’s scholarly influence. American Anthropologist 78:617-620, 1976.
   Jerry D. Moore. Leslie White: Evolution Emergent. Chapter 13 of Visions of Culture. Pp. 169-180. AltaMira, 1997.
   Elman Service. Leslie Alvin White, 1900-1975. American Anthropologist 78:612-617, 1976.
   The Leslie White Papers - Finding guide and information about Leslie White’s papers at the Bentley Historical library.
   [edit]
   Selected publications
   Ethnological Essays: Selected Essays of Leslie A. White. University of New Mexico Press. 1987.
   The Science of Culture: A study of man and civilization. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1949.
   The Pueblo of Santa Ana, New Mexico. American Anthropological Association Memoir 60, 1942.
   The Pueblo of Santo Domingo. American Anthropological Association Memoir 60, 1934.
   The Pueblo of San Felipe. American Anthropological Association Memoir No. 38, 1932.
   The Acoma Indians. Bureau of American Ethnology, 47th annual report, pp. 1-192. Smithsonian Institution, 1932.
   Retrieved from “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_White”
   Categories: American anthropologists | Columbia University alumni | University at Buffalo alumni | 1900 births | 1975 deaths

   21 June 2006, 4:56 pm

7. Charles Brown:

   Marx’s use of the _human_labor theory of value gives a very humanistic cast to his economics.

   21 June 2006, 4:58 pm

8. Stan:

   “Karl Marx visualized an egalitarian society based on advanced, industrial technology. The collapse of the Soviet Union ultimately reflects the failure of Marxist thought to escape the illusions of what I refer to in this book a ‘machine fetishism.’ The communist alternative has proven unviable, but it would be unwarranted to simply conclude that the mainstream economists were right, for the so-called free world may well be in line for economic collapse. The industrialized sectors have to sell in order to survive because selling is their means of drawing fresh resources from their peripheries. Because of the dissipative character of industrial production, however, this is an inherently contradictory relationship. There is constant pressure to keep prices of fuels and raw materials low, yet the periphery must have the revenue to transfer — through purchase of industrial products — enough money back to industry to grant it continued access to those resources. If industrial growth were generative of ‘productive potential’ rather than dissipative, this would not be a problem. The industrial sectors would be content with domestic markets, and the sums gained from sales would not have to exceed the sum of costs. Then, also, growth would be able to ’spill over’ into peripheral areas in the form of rising prices for natural resources and increasing amounts of ‘developmental aid.’ To believe in such a vision, however, is to disregard the Seocnd Law of Thermodynamics. As the ‘technomass’ of industrial sectors grows, so does its thermodynamic cost of maintenance, not only in terms of the amounts of fresh resources required in the center but also in terms of the inputs of resources required to extract increasingly inaccessible resources in the periphery. Faced with this predicament, industry would not have been able to survive and expand for two hundred years were in not for the curious cultural institution we know as *money*.” (AH)

   21 June 2006, 8:44 pm

9. Neilcaff:

   On the question of USSR and macine fetishisation. I’m sure Hornburg doesn’t reduce the collapse of the regime purely to technocratic illusions. I think he’s putting the cart before the horse though. Machineism and idustrialisation were relics of the early 20th century and the drive to modernise the USSR to stave off foreign intervention. I think the crucial point though is the dead hand the Soviet bureaucracy exercised on the workers state in the latter half of the century. The lack of workers democracy ment there was no self correcting mechanism to prevent the ruling clique continuing essentially the same policies of the 30’s in a changed world. Perhaps a more democratic regime would have been more sensitive to the environmental destruction that happened in the soviets and been more flexible in change rather than shattering as it did.
   Hornburgs point on growth contradicting the 2nd law of thermodynamics raises some disturbing implications for leftist and our hopes for a better world. For me as a commie the absolute minimum for a better world is guarenteed access to decent housing, healthcare and drinking water for everyone. Thats not to say I don’t dream of the destruction of racism and patriarchy I just don’t think its possible to have genuine human equality in conditions of scarcity. (I’m going to get in sooooo much trouble for saying that. Be nice comrades ) My point is can we guarentee these things for 6 billion people without a net increase in industrial production?
   Hornburg makes the point that as the industrial metropoles increase in complexity they require greater inputs of fossil fuels from the peripheries to sustain themselves to sustain themselves. To me this is an out growth of two features of capitalism, the concentration of industry, finance etc in confined geographical areas in order to maximise profits and imperial domination by the core countries. If we as revolutionaries acting in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in the south were able to break the strangle hold of capitalism and imperialism on Earth would this not mean we could negate some of the centralising tendancies of capitalism. Would not our aim in the industrialised metropoles be to de-complexify our cities by planning our econimies to more evenly spread the fruits of science and industry around our respective countries and thereby reduce the need for greater inputs of fossil fuels to sustain our existance. By the same token if imperialism can be defeated those resourses from the periphery can be more equitably distributed. I think we are seeing this in embryonic form in Latin America with the way Vezezuala swops oil for doctors with Cuba.
   What I’m driving at here is I think science and industry are essential to raise humanities living standards, while at the same time recognising its limits and destructive potential.
   (Phew, I’m begining to see the attraction of post modernism, these meta-narratives are damn tiring!)

   22 June 2006, 8:05 am

10. Stan:

    I cannot strongly enough recommend the whole book by Hornborg, “The Power of the Machine,” which addresses all these issues and more.

    One of the key reasons the Soviets lost the fight, imo, was that — while they had systems of socialist distribution, they (under pressure from encirclement from without and backwardness from within) adopted capitalist relations of production… Lenin embraced Taylorism — the USSR has no periphery to exploit… or at least a limited one compared to the Euro-Americans and Japanese.

    But the more important point is — and I think you are honest about it, comrade, because you ask instead of assert — can we provide what is necessary for (actually) 7 billion human beings without expanding industrial capacity?

    This is a temporal question, as well as a blade with two dangerously sharp edges.

    The 2nd Law is not one that gets violated. Hornborg’s point, and mine, and De’s and others’, is that there very well ARE limits to industrial growth, and we have, in too many respects, already passed them.

    Much as the fetish of the machine (believing technology is divorcable from the social relaions that produce it) and the dualism that intellectually separates us from Nature may lead us to hope we haven’t passed any tipping points, we are not separable from the biosphere. Using energy is a dissipative process, and that is a scientific certaintly. The question of how to reduce the velocity of that dissipative process and preserve the geo-biological counter-entropic architecture that concentrates new “productive” energy for the future is a very urgent one. Science is essential to figure this out, but we may have to radically re-think what we mean by industry.

    We have driven headlong into a course where these 7 billion souls are now being substantially fed with a fossil energy to food ration of 10 to 1 calories. That very form of agriculture is demonstrably NOT sustainable, and in fact is destroying the material basis of its own method. For the first tenbtative answers to this dilemma, look to Cuba, where they have dropped their dependence on industrial farminginputs by a factor of twenty and developed a Manhattan Project of soil scientists to figure out organic and sustanable agriculture.

    I’m as red as anyone on this list, unless I’ve been excommunicated for heresy, but our canon does not have the answers for this, and we have to go outside that canon. As Mark Jones once commented, ecology is the orphaned child of bourgeois (and I would add MALE) science, and revolutionaries are obliged to adopt it.

    I am with you one hundred percent that imperialism must be broken, because it is the expression of this historic dilemma. But there are two self-reproducing systems that function as substrates to imperialism, that will reproduce its worst features even in the wake of a linear “defeat” or the collapse of the current system… industrialism as we know it, and patriarchy.

    I have been insisting for some time that along with the dualism and fossil-energy industrialism we have absorbed on the left from the very system we purport to oppose, we have also osmosed their linear, Eurocentric, militarized thought patterns with regard to strategy.

    Joining with and strengthening the struggles of environmental justice advocates and women is strategic in the most essential way. The Bolivian uprising began over water. Vieques happened over environemental racism. The most salient feature of the fascism that is gestating inside the metropoles is gender.

    We really do have to begin to see the fight for the biosphere and the struggle for women’s full social emancipation not as outcomes, but as preconditons for social transformation. And we have to let go of the notion that political strategies are always attacks like chess, and begin to incorporate the idea of occupying strategic spaces (and those spaces abandoned by a degenerate system), as in the Chinese game, Go.

    22 June 2006, 9:06 am

11. Neilcaff:

    Thanks Stan I’ll try and get my hands on that book.
    Just to clarify on the path to revolution, I agree you can’t expect a social revolution without the active partication of women armed with a liberationary perspective. I just think even if we were able to establish a regime that could lay the basis for gender and racial equality if conditions of general scarcity prevailed on a world scale over an extended period there would most likely be a slide back the same old CRAP so to speak.

    22 June 2006, 12:02 pm

12. Sks:

    I take issue with anything based on the premise that:

    1) Marxism is a project, rather than a toolbox to develop projects.

    2) That the utter failure of actually existing socialism, as represented by the USSR, means that marxism is to blame.

    3) Critiques the so-called Enlightment in quite the same terms at the Enlightment critique everything.

    While it is refreshing to see Marxism critique seriously rather than dismissed, I think one must resist the temptation to accept critiques simply because they both make sense and because they are sensible and seem to meet our needs for a critique.

    And, of course, a critique that has no basis in concrete political struggle I hold suspect, bibligraphicaly since the Theses on Feurbach, but empirically because there is almost as much bullshit dilletantism in the revolutionary movement as ther eis in the reactionary camp…

    I do share with Stan and others this view:

    “Joining with and strengthening the struggles of environmental justice advocates and women is strategic in the most essential way. The Bolivian uprising began over water. Vieques happened over environemental racism. The most salient feature of the fascism that is gestating inside the metropoles is gender.

    We really do have to begin to see the fight for the biosphere and the struggle for women’s full social emancipation not as outcomes, but as preconditons for social transformation. And we have to let go of the notion that political strategies are always attacks like chess, and begin to incorporate the idea of occupying strategic spaces (and those spaces abandoned by a degenerate system), as in the Chinese game, Go.”

    But still find it insufficient. Class and national self-determination, for example, are missing. And I believe it to be an error to second class this. Ethnic/National and class oppression are not seondary, even if they have, in error, made superior to other forms of oppression an alienation.

    One of the things that I believe has greatly harmed movements of social-change, in particulary de revolutionary movements, in the choosing of a manicheist and polarizing, rathe rthan dialectical approach to the struggle. This is why while formally aligned to anti-revisionism, I uphold people like Buenaventura Durruti (an ananrchist) or Alexandra Kollontai (a radical feminist and Bolshevik).

    Brings what to me is the greatest example of this synthesis in practice today: The EZLN.

    (I won’t talk about Sub. Marcos, nor about the political reformism they advocated in the ten years after they started the armed insurrection -armed reformism, for me, is the worse kind of reformism: if you take up the gun, with all the negative sthat entails, make it really count!-.

    Both are things I have in the past subjected to heavy, “formal” critique.)

    Lets concentrate rather on three things:

    1) Their gender politics
    2) Their environmental politics
    3) Their “Other Campaign”.

    - besides being overwhelmingly women led, their elite troops being mostly women, they have invented two words in spanish: “insugentas” which is a female form of the word for insurgent, and “comandanta” the same for commander. And this was not a top down desicion, but a struggle won by the insurgentas against patriarchy: specifically it was a direct attack on Marcos’ patriarchial style when leading drills, subject of a famous letter and self-criticism by Marcos.

    Women in the EZLN have pushed against the “traditionalist” wing of the ethnic movement, who want to keep patriarchal organization intact, have pushed for direct democracy in the home, have ensured that technology be used in evironmentally-sound ways including farming etc. They have also fought for education to be de-gendered, for economic equality, for de-gendered unions etc.

    At the same time, this gender liberation is a national self-detemrination struggle, a class struggle, and an enviromental struggle!

    This something to explore…

    22 June 2006, 9:08 pm

13. Sks:

    1) Leslie A. White didn’t understand thermodynamics (as do most, if not all, social scientists who use thermodynamics and quantum physics as analogies for social analysis… ill explain myself later) and was obviously conditioned by a near cultish philosophical idealism, almost religious/mystical in nature. When I was in college before droping out I wrote a 20 page paper of thermodynamics, evolution, and White without fully grasping the debate with Boasians, with whom I accidently shared a number of critcisms of White, but who are guilty of a lot of the fuckup shit they acuse White of saying, and were indeed corny.

    But the guy at least had an imagination.

    Those days of study made me an enemy of proto-fascist orthodox ecologism, social-darwinism, evolutionary psychology, socio-biology, and of the whole range of “criticism of modernity” or postmodernism, except, cha-clim, that post-maoist called Michel Foucault, which I like to provocatively call the gramsci of the academic (as opposed to organic)intellectuals, and which is a huge influence in a lot of my theoretical background, in particular in teaching, sometimes by negative example, sometimes not sucesfully, the limits of analogy.

    2) Aw, singularity theory and fiction. Alas, something all male, all the time.

    I know, I have flirted with it, only to be put off by the likes of the InstaPundit and other ultra reactionary “libertarians” who dominate singularity politics.

    But singularity is the logical conclusion of observers of technological capitalism unwilling to come to grasp with Rosa Luxemburgs prophetic, hair rasing sentence of “Socialism or Barbarism”.

    Why? Consider that when you are faced with the reality that the end of history and the last man was all wishful thinking, you need something to grasp at, that isnt the current fucked up state of affairs.

    These singularity theorists are all to imperialist capitalism what Brezhnev was to the Soviet Union: they promise the Utopia to come if we only stay the course. No pain, no gain. You got to break eggs to make the omelette. Ya-da-yi-ya-da.

    Yet! But!

    There is an interesting notion that escapes critics of singularity, and that is an important insight into social/cultural development of humanity: how technology has shaped human society and culture, how in fact we have moved well beyound our biological limits

    Long story short, consider this:

    For at least 250,000 years (a quarter of a million years!!!) biologically human animals wandered the earth in pretty much the same state. They had rudimentary tools, probably didn’t have language, maybe had music, and went about pretty much as other apes go around.

    Make no mistake: we are talking people that if we had a time machine and brought back we would be able to teach them everything we know, we would be able to mate, etc. Exact same biological creature.
    With the exact same biological equipment, brain chemistry, neural pathways, opposing thumbs, vocal chords, etc etc etc.

    Yet these people could be compared in life expectancy, health, nutrition, cultural creation etc to the human population today with the least cultural baggage, and this contemporary population would seem ultra-technological next to them

    This brings me to:

    3) Problems of applying quantum science and physics to social science are many:

    population: human society consists of less discrete units than subatomic particles in the space occupied by a single hydrogen atom.

    timeframe: humans exist in a time scale that is finite and measured by an intrinsict biological scale, subatomic particles, in fact, all matter and energy, can neither be created nor destroyed. Humans are by definition created and destroyed, and so are human societies.

    certainty: you can observe humans without modifying they behaivior

    its too late but lets keep talking…

    23 June 2006, 12:35 am

14. Stan:

    You cannot conflate all things called feminism, then generalize from that. And womanism has a real use and meaning, different than your own.

    My mention of “singularity” was that instant before the Big Bang that everyone talks about, where the universe was (according to this notion), as TS Eliot would say,”rolled into a ball.”

    You have misread Hornborg completely… but that may be my fault for posting an excerpt from within a book-length riff.

    Thermodynamics is in operation in the material universe at all times, and therefore IS a substrate for any social system. It defines the limits, but social systems are also themselves situated in time and space, albeit dynamically.

    Hornborg is suggesting that mapping the entropic flows in the world system is one way of solidifying the debate about global capitalism, and reconciling the problems associated with the issue of “unequal exchange.” Labor is wthin that energy mapping, especially in the reproductive dimension (in the marxian sense) because dissipative processes are most acute in two essential areas… food and transportation.

    The exponential accelerant of this process that excerbates the contradiction between center and periphery (and advances the dialectic of overdevelopment-underdevelopment) is that “technomass” itself, for both accumulation and maintenance (production and reproduction) requires ever more inputs of “negentropy” (thermodynamic order) from the periphery. This has an interfused social and environmental consequence. That is why Hornborg is a rabid advocate for environmental justice activism (like Vieques, or like Warrenton NC, or like Ogonoi-land), and local-national struggles for self-determination.

    The social-ecological process not only draws “order” (resources) away from the periphery and into the center, it exports the disorder (ecologic and social, they are inseparable) back to the periphery.

    Remember that ship full of US garbage that roamed the ocan for weeks trying to find some country who would let it dump there?

    A note on observation… the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle clearly demonstrates that observation DOES change what it observes. This is not just on a quantum/particle level.

    You’ve read your Foucault… how does the Panopticon work, if not through internalization of the Panopticon gaze. (-:

    23 June 2006, 8:04 am

15. Neilcaff:

    Hi Sks
    Can you explain what singularity politics are?
    Thats a good point on applying quantum physics to social studies. I think it’s a different story when it comes to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. People on this site aren’t trying to extrapolate social behaviour from these laws they are pointing out that the forces of production as currently geared towords expansion and growth do not have a material basis for continued growth. Alot of us on the left do seem to think that a democratic workers regime could negate this while still expanding our industrial base.
    While I think a socialist society could slow down this headlong rush to gobble up resource we would still be faced with the same problems of resource exhaustion at some stage. Ok maybe we will crack cold fusion or whatever at some stage but that still wouldn’t help solve our consumption of other raw materials. At the same time though we do need to raise humanity out of its grinding poverty the majority lives in. This is the nub of the problem really. We are not going to figure it all out here at Feral scholar no matter how much late night coffea’s you guys guzzle (or in my case scive off work in the morning) but I think the dialectic we’ve got going here on this and other subjects can give us the correct theoretical grounding to hopefully answer it one day.

    23 June 2006, 8:10 am

16. Stan:

    The reality is that the grinding poverty has more than one face. There is economic poverty with food, and poverty without food. The latter can and has been mapped, by people like Mike Davis, and it has to do with the the imposition of capitalist industrial agriculture that pushed people off the land and into hellish urban slums.

    There is a direct relation between this dynamic, which is an imperialist dyanmic, poverty-without-food, ecocide, and “machine fetishism.” There is no technocratic fix.

    That is why I say that Cuba is in the vanguard right now, committing a huge effort to developing sustainable, localized agriculture, permaculture, and organic methods of food production.

    The developmental-model for poverty eradication is a dead-end, BECAUSE it is technocratic. The error of this is m ore than merely epistemological. As devotees of a materialist dialectical (complexity) understanding, we know that ideology does not exist apart from material conditions, and in fact is part of them. Only the kind of vulgar marxism that led Stalin to embrace crackpot evolutionary science, and many of our forebearers to adopt a mechanical base-superstructure schema fails to grasp that. Marx, at the end of this life, had himself grown deeply concerned about soil exhaustion and the implications of it for what we now call developmentalism. He said that the contradiction between rural and urban was a crucial issue.

    The technocratic error reside precisely in dualism.

    The Man vs chaotic Nature meme, with which we are all infected (”cracking” cold fusion, eg, and I’m not cracking on you - pun intended), not surprisingly has origins in gender (the system, not the consumer choice). Man (and they MEANT man) the conquerer… CONQUERS the chaotic (nature-bound, barbaric) colonies, CONQUERS Nature (seen as female), and CONQUERS women (who are seen as irrational, chaotic, a PART of nature to be subdued).

    (Conquest, btw, involves trophies… remember the big picture of Zarqawi’s dead face behind the CENTCOM press briefer a couple of weeks ago… a hunting trophy.)

    I wrote a long piece on energy, that talks about cold fusion and other chimera, that was vetted by a nuclear physicist (Manueal Garcia, Jr.), and he said it had only one minor error… the main points are all discouragingly valid.

    What some of us are trying to persuade the left of, BECAUSE we are OF THE LEFT, because we respect that the left is an active political force that means it when they say they want to change the world and liberate humanity from alienation (THIS was Marx’s real preoccupation), is that developmentalism is a dead-end, and that the solutions we seek must be sought out in some new arenas where others have begun to explore… the struggle against patriarchy, for conscious bioregionalism, incorporating the insights of ecology, and for a long, intentional effort to back ouselves out of the awful ecological cul-de-sac we have gotten ourselves into.

    There are new solidarities that can be formed around such a political project, new methods os struggle that can be employed, new organizational forms to be worked out… but first we have to be ruthlesly critical of our past errors, take a fearless inventory of our current situation, and then try some things that may not be in the framework of some Comintern Grand Strategy.

    23 June 2006, 10:23 am

17. Sks:

    Stan:

    I just wrote a longass reply, complete with quotes from marx and whole bunch of original, world-shaking, incredibly important stuff, and then accidently hit back button and lost it all.

    I swear it was original, world-shaking, incredibly important stuff.

    Really.

    No, really, am being humble!

    Now, it will have to wait a few days untill I get inspiration back…

    It will suffice to remind you we had a discussion a while back in a friends home about the thermodynamics. I just remembered so if you dont remember dont feel bad. I just say saw cause I am familiar with that stuff.

    And, the one I can’t just let go, but abriged: you are probably confusing HUP with observer effect. HUP is for elemental particles and certain subatomic particles. It is a mathematical equation with that specific limited scope, in spite of it being explained usually as prose.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle

    Ask your buddies, cause thats what mine are telling me!

    I hate when stuff like this happen, it was a serious reply to which I would have loved to hear reactions…

    25 June 2006, 3:09 am

18. Sks:

    Nilcaff:
    “Can you explain what singularity politics are?”

    Essentially the politcs growing out of this:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

    Mostly right-wing libertarian in the present but techno-utopic, post-capitalist in the future.

    Reactionary, IMHO.

    25 June 2006, 3:14 am

19. Yvonne Fox:

    I wonder if the Alf Hornborg who wrote this piece once lived in Cape Breton. If so, as his former grade 6 teacher and one who organized a mini reunion for he and his fellow classmates at the Port Hastings Museum & Archives in 1985, I’d appreciate hearing from him.
    Cheers,
    Mrs. Fox

    27 August 2006, 11:42 am

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