Shay

Eben

Lizzie

I share Lizzie's concerns, and add that I remain unconvinced by Eben's answer to my question today in class. As much as I agree that "increasing the quantity of human knowledge" is important for increasing class consciousness, I nonetheless feel that this revolutionary prescription departs from Marxist canon, the persuasiveness of which relies on its intimate marriage with the really existing material forces that govern human existence.

So I think you're being at once too functionalist and too idealistic, Shay. We have the productive capacity to feed everyone in the world (a gift, shall we say, of the industrial revolution, though it is a more recent capacity) and yet we fail to do that. We also now have the infrastructure in place to allow people to read and learn and think in a way that simply wasn't possible fifty years ago. And yet people can't read and write. These problems are as much a function of politics as technology. The the current capacity of technology is limited by politics. How do we transform that into a society that has food, clothing, shelter but also knowledge? Wresting control of technology from the current power brokers is a necessary step. It's not just a matter of the revolution reaching people. That sounds nice but I think you've simplified it in your own mind.* How does that work? Where would it start? Would it not look like taking control of technology? Would it not look like more time to learn, less working, more health care, less profiteering from pharma? etc etc

Eben - I apologize if the below is unclear, but its intention is to demonstrate that one of the most important implications of "the idea we call 'Marx'" is that the ultimate constraint on human freedom is the struggle for subsistence. Your response demonstrates exactly what I take issue with. How can you on the one hand invoke Marx's name and on the other argue that reducing human illiteracy is more socially productive than investing directly in expanding access to food, water, or (as I hope to do) energy? The children of the world are not exploited because they use the incorrect software. They are exploited because they do not possess sufficient resources to survive. The anxiousness and fear resulting from that insufficiency convinces them to engage in a system of production that is fundamentally exploitative and directs their labor time to frivolous endeavors.

The United States is one of the most literate nations in the world, and how do American prodigies use that literacy? By building Facebook, iPhones, and Tinder - precisely the sort of innovations you condemn. The most talented, successful and well-educated should be spending their time solving the problem of subsistence. As I see it, the Revolution should begin there - not by hoping that others will do it for us. .

So I think you're being at once too functionalist and too idealistic, Shay. We have the productive capacity to feed everyone in the world (a gift, shall we say, of the industrial revolution, though it is a more recent capacity) and yet we fail to do that. We also now have the infrastructure in place to allow people to read and learn and think in a way that simply wasn't possible fifty years ago. And yet people can't read and write. These problems are as much a function of politics as technology. The the current capacity of technology is limited by politics. How do we transform that into a society that has food, clothing, shleter but also knowledge? Wresting control of technology from the current power brokers is a necessary step. It's not just a matter of the revolution reaching people. That sounds nice but I think you've simplified it in your own mind. How does that work? Where would it start? Would it not look like taking control of technology? Would it not look like more time to learn, less working, more health care, less profiteering from pharma? etc etc

For what it is worth - and in the interests of intellectual honesty - I do identify as a Marxist. Not dogmatically; perhaps a little instinctively, in that I can't find anyone with a more convincing set of analytical tools for understanding the world, even if we can argue endlessly about their application. So if that just makes me a thinker and a politician so be it. What I would say is that Marxist thinking, in my view, certainly is not simply concerned with materialism. It's about bread and roses.

[If anyone has a better method for formatting this, please be my guest.]

You did hear me point out that I'm not in fact a Marxist, right? I don't depart from the canon, I make off with it. In fact, I'm not a Marxist any more than Marx was. I am also a historically-oriented social theorist, with a set of concerns that take their root in political economy and technology. I'm no philosopher, as my co-author was no computer programmer at all. Neither of us follows one another's doctrine, of which there isn't any. We are thinkers and politicians who are part of the long struggle for freedom of thought. I think the idea we call "Marx" along with the idea we call "Darwin" and the idea we call "Freud" are the greatest intellectual achievements of the period from the French Revolution to the First World War that we call the Nineteenth Century. Comprehending the implications of those ideas is what it means to have attained intellectual culture in our time, from my point of view: being "against" one of them makes no more sense than being "against" Isaac Newton or Pablo Picasso. But I'm not a Newtonist or a Picassist, either.

I didn't say increasing the quantity of intelligence was important for increasing class consciousness: I said it was important for solving the myriad hard problems that collectively constitute the problem of subsistence. I said that from my point of view there is no point of investment of social force where one can achieve as many advances as one can here. I was then and I am speaking of advances on the problem of subsistence: how, as I said, to make a human population as large as the carrying capacity of the planet itself live without poverty and deprivation. I think, as I said, that the point of attending to the brains growing within the network is that the brains thereby liberated think about the problems of survival and welfare of the people around them. By multiplying the quantity of human intelligence we multiply the intelligence devoted to human survival and welfare, which does not scale by quality, but by quantity. These are the things I said, and which I think. Perhaps you think something else, and that would be the place for us to resume the conversation. The rest of this schematic below doesn't seem to be responsive to what I said at all, wherever it comes from.