Hi everyone, I am at work on an essay discussing working class political organization from the time of the French Revolution through today. This essay was partly inspired by Hari's recent article on the organizing work of Marx and Lenin. The purpose of the essay will be to show that the political organization the working class needs today--will emerge from work to create a common democratic platform for public information--initially for activists--and, eventually, for larger numbers of people. I hope to have something to show soon.
In the meantime--here is the appendix for the essay. All thoughtful comments are appreciated. -- Ben Seattle Appendix -- Productive forces want to be free The mathematics of conscious forces and the urge to merge -- 1 -- Copper and tin are metals, and have no special gravitational attraction to one another, beyond the normal. And, of course, they have no consciousness of their own. And yet, five thousand years ago, someone might have said that they wanted to be combined with one another--and that this desire to be combined--was irresistible. The force that fulfilled this desire of copper and tin to be combined--is a conscious force that comes from the brains of humans. Humans mined, refined and transported copper and tin across thousands of miles to combine them into durable bronze tools and weapons. The principle here is simple. Copper and tin are examples of "productive forces". Productive forces want to be free--free to combine with other productive forces--and free to create things that humans want or need. -- 2 -- There is a deeper principle at play here--a principle that does not require human consciousness--or any kind of consciousness at all. We can observe this principle in nature--where it has been driving evolution for two billion years. The most efficient way for nature to search and discover which combinations of genetic blueprints best fit a chaotic environment--is a process of random shuffling and recombination known as sexual reproduction. Our genetic cards want to be shuffled and dealt. This process drove the evolution of life for more than a billion years before the first brains evolved. And yet, with our modern minds, we can feel, directly, the transcendent power of this urge to merge. -- 3 -- Similar also, is the principle that communications systems (and social media databases) are more useful and valuable when they are connected and combined. Metcalfe's Law applies mathematics to this: a phone network of 300 people is ten times bigger than a network of 30 people--but will be a hundred times more useful--because it will enable a hundred times more connections between any two people. Ultimately, the mathematics driving combination are related to entropy, which has long fascinated the best minds in science--because entropy appears as the inescapable "shadow" of a phenomenon called self-organization--which exists everywhere in nature--and acts as if it were the life force of the universe. Self-organization, in recent years, is being called emergent complexity. Marx called it development on the basis of internal contradictions, or--in simpler terms--materialism. -- 4 -- Stewart Brand coined the slogan: "information wants to be free"--which breathes life into inanimate bits and bytes--and upsets nitpickers--who may spout off about teleological anthropomorphism and insist that information cannot "want" anything. Activists laugh at this however, because this slogan celebrates the ability of information to slip out of the control of those who attempt to own it--and to evade and route around every kind of censorship. Information wants to be free just like horny teenagers want to have sex. Blame entropy. The slogan "information wants to be free" can best be understood as an expression of the more general and universal principle that productive forces want to be free. Information "wants" to be free because humans need information to be free. Humans liberate information because information liberates humans. Humans, for example, need unrestricted and frictionless access to information about all the real news of a world rushing headfirst into civil war, fascism and genocide. Humans need this information so that they can assemble together all the parts of the puzzle--and understand the big picture--of their place in society--and what they must do to defend and advance their interests against the rule of capital and those who would burn the world. And humans will only have this ability to understand the world--when the little software robots which deliver information (called algorithms) are themselves unchained--and free to bring consciousness to the working class--and to light our way to a brilliant future. ■ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#40349): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/40349 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/117439078/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
