Energy & Communism

“Closest we've been to full-capitalism is Hong Kong. Closest to full-communism was Khmer Rouge Cambodia. Draw your own conclusions.” -Nick Land

It seems that if we can agree on one thing on both the right/left divide, it is that communism is the biggest collapse of all that previously exists possible. But this is simply due to the purity of death and the purity of truth. Indeed, if communism got its way, the world would end. The same for all the major World Religions - they are premised upon that fact.

Put simply: Communism is the determinate form of the human exit from this world.

One of the main challenges of contemporary Marxism is deriving the “natural” aspect of the communist transformation. A whole lot of post-WW2 Marxist thought focused on the abstract political-economic critique of value (Value-form school and co) and accepted Lukacs’s rejection of a “dialectics of nature”. However, this removed from Marxism an essential part of its momentum acquired from the analysis of technology and nature. Most Marxists who followed these new schools rejected the objectivity of the transformation of society as they had no basis to assert this objectivity (what would usually be derived from a philosophy of nature). Hence, the majority were always politically “late” to the transformation of society - they were not “avant-garde” in the classical Bolshevik sense of the word. The other school that issued from this break was the “econophysics” school. This school rejected any philosophical exposition of the principles of political-economy, as opposed to the value-critique school, and concerned itself with the pure empirical study of socio-technological change. The issue with this school is a very similar one to the first. It could not grasp the historical specificity of the categories it spoke about (energy, labor, value, etc) since it did not flesh out their philosophical underpinnings (meaning, their immanent links and interdependence). This school was also always “late”. Even though it presents itself as avant-garde, since it keeps up with new technology, it limits this new technology to older forms of political-economic categories. Hence, as Ilyenkov observed in the 60s, there still was not a political-economy of socialism developed yet.

Where then might we find the hints of such a political-economy? To begin, there must be a definite analysis of the forms of energy in modern society. By analyzing the “energy-forms” of modern society, one can discover the objective transformation in the very energetic form of organization of present society. One idea presented by the econophysic scholars and numerous Marxists before them is that society develops alongside the new universal “energy-form”. A universal energy-form is a method of organizing energy that redefines the entire structure of society. Each mode of production is said to be related to a specific “energ-form” that is central to it. This form has a reciprocal relationship with the product-form and value-form of the given society.

As Bataille makes explicit, the management of the waste of the sun is what makes human society possible. But he forgot to ask the question: what if communism is the project of the mastery of the solar system itself? This article is an introduction to the basic questions that must be answered for a complete justification of communism in the 21st century.

Cybernetic retropositivity

In the tradition of Marx and Engels and recently revived by the accelerationist circles, a proper analysis of political economy must always begin with an analysis of energy. I propose a new vision of the relationship between cybernetics and energy in the term I coined to be “cybernetic retropositivity”. Let a system run on positive feedback long enough and it directly reverses into negative feedback. Take the example of a self-expanding sound wave in the recursivity of a microphone when left open for a long time. After it reaches a certain level, it almost becomes a pure silence which kills off all other waveforms to preserve such a silence. It becomes purely stable.

All the history of human society is about the organization of energy. No energy, no humanity. This fact stems from the particular transition from nature to humanity that creates society. Society is a product of energy regulation - a regulation which transcends but includes humanity within it. Thus, a transition from capitalism to socialism must be understood as a transition from a less effective method of organizing energy to a more effective one. Effectiveness is not a transcendent parameter but an immanent one which imposes itself historically. One can not apply a single parameter of “effectiveness” of energy production, distribution and purpose all across history. In other words, energetic teleology is radically retroactive and shifts its parameters cross-temporally. Humanity isn’t a constant in this scheme but a variable - a variable which would have a very specific role to play before dying out.

A recent instance of cybernetic retropositive thought is Cantor’s thinking on infinity where he reaches a very similar conclusion as Hegel’s thinking on the “true infinite”. Cantor’s basic thought is that the true infinite is elusive to being restrained within sets and slips through diagonal lines once a set is properly defined. Hence, we can consider the infinity which is proper to a set and the infinity which imposes itself across sets. The trick here is that even the starting set is never known to be a proper set until it has exhausted itself (repeated itself enough times so as to assert its quality). Once a proper set is known - or “named” - it seizes to be the horizon of infinity as it opens up transfinite jumps. Does this not sound very similar to Hegel’s thought on the owl of Minerva and the qualitative infinite?

Isn’t the accelerationist assertion of Capital as the eternal agent of history too quick? Doesn’t it collapse the space between the false infinite (Cantor’s definite infinite set which is named) and the true infinite (the diagonal infinite)?

The Variables

To make an analysis of the modern mode of production we must make clear that there is no single transcendent measure of time, energy, wealth or geographical divisions across history. These variables are all immanent to societal development. The transcendent character of these variables is never absolute and they always get subsumed under new developments. The specific inter-relations of these variables define the ontological horizon of a given society.

Hence, socialism can be summarised as a new time, a new land and a new energy.

The Temporal Transition

In capitalism, the mass of surplus value produced is accumulated by the bourgeois and produces surplus-time-profit for a certain part of the population. It is then re-invested in constant and variable capital necessary for developing the business further. The more it re-invests, the lower the rate of profit gets and thus the more decentralized but the bigger the business gets as it needs more capital over time to return the same amount of profit. Once a corporation reaches the level of national business, it acquires the status of a common. Every other capitalist must go through this business to even proceed to begin their own. Thus, its decentralization becomes universal and each major capitalist is invested in it. This becomes a huge corporation where the profits are separated and each member owns a share in the company. This is what Marx calls “capitalist communism”. The decentralization is relative however since it presupposes a given mass of variable capital which is as universal as its own capital accumulation. This variable capital obviously has to have no means of accumulating capital of its own as it is paid by its labor power (its survival). Once the accumulation of capital reaches its zenith (rate of surplus value = 0), the movement starts reversing and variable capital has to be reduced instead of increased to even produce anything. As Marx predicts, this causes a divergence between price and value and is the break from the capitalist mode of production:

How should we understand this divergence? This is the key to understanding what socialism is. I think it should be understood by posing these political-economic questions:

-How does it affect the form of the product of labor?
-How does it affect the form of labor itself?
-How does it affect the economic structure?
-How does it affect planning?

This new structure has to establish itself as an automatic mechanism and teleology to reach the level of its concrete notion. Or, in other words, it must reach the level of a positive cybernecity. The previous teleology was MCM'. However, now, labor-time has become so low that it no longer is the measure of wealth. The bourgeois defender of private property can no longer sustain his rate of profit each year as the investment in constant capital is exponentially higher every time. What must he do? Since the general machinic product overwhelms production, he must try and privatize it so as to extract rent. This product takes the form of intellectual commons, potential spatial commons (transport, land, etc), and energy commons (5G, WiFi, etc). But then again, this merely extends the date of transformation. The difficulty with this form of the product is that it is indeed properly a-temporal in the sense that it can be said to be what shifts time itself. It can not be subsumed under the form of labor-time, it must be merely presupposed. With this universalization of the commons, they become real presuppositions of any production the more the rate of profit diminishes. Thus, it becomes more profitable to invest all these commons in the form of the work-life for a potential general intelligent turn-out which could be rented out. The charity of the capitalist is replaced by the new conditions of productions.

This seems to become the new sketch of the cybernetic circuit: Energy → General Intelligence → Energy'. In relation to the previous capitalist form of labor, this begins as Labor → Energy → Labor-1. Or Free time → Intelligence → Free Time'. Competition here is meritocratic and based on those who best use the universal tools available, which are given to all as a beginning point and presupposition of production. The beauty of capitalism is that it universalizes particular forms of production and distribution to make them reach the level of a common and social form. However, these forms became abstract and private in that the universal individual could never utilize them. Communism begins from the standpoint of particularising the universal as an experiment in re-discovering universality (in that each and every individual is provided with already existing commons that he can experiment with to discover new universals purely for optimization’s sake).

First, the labor-product no longer becomes the center of the economy but is replaced by an automated product and an increase in machinic general intelligence. Labor-time no longer correlates to economic product. Whereas before the labor-power was the given and the surplus was the variable (depending on conditions), now the product is given and the work is the variable. This “given” product directly results from the divergence, it can only be the most universal product of society which now serves as a presupposition of individual work.

This presupposition is not “given” by the state but mutually agreed upon by producers. The new role of the law is to make sure these mutual agreements are possible (current laws on intellectual, land and energy property would be seen as un-democratic). They co-invest these commons for the optimal solution and intelligence aggregation. These resources are given without any transcendent goal, they are purely wasted in some sense. But this waste is simply the truth of investment (perhaps socialism is simply the extreme point of corporate investment at the level of all society?). Previously, negative investment (waste) was impossible for the simple fact that it would reduce surplus value to a negative amount. But with the arrival of free time as the truth of labor time, negative investments become possible (but only for very specific types of producers). These new producers have no problem with negative surplus value, it only means for them that they have to work less! This simply works for them based on their mutual waste agreement, which they see as way more effective. In this sense alone, both proletariat and bourgeoisie can be said to be abolished only in their unity (which ironically produces some rhythms of an aristocracy but I digress…).

Early on in bourgeois society, there was a true sense of waste. Resources were accumulated without any presupposition of where they would be used. The anarchic markets truly dominated England. But with the accumulation of some form of human culture around markets and energy optimization, labor time united with the state to repress negative profit turnouts and stabilized the work-wage relation.

Second, it affects the form of labor-product in the sense that labor becomes ever more universalized and thus opens up the possibility for a true difference in work-particularities.

To further understand the transition to socialism, let’s use the Grossman tables:

Looking at the last year, if you work 8 hours, all 8 go for funding the next cycle of constant capital leaving nothing for the capitalist. This means that the rate of growth of the mode of production is directly identical to its genesis in labor terms. This will stay constant. Labor time will be progressively reduced. The condition for its reduction is an even higher centralization of production so as to homogenize labor universally. Then, what does the worker get? Since he is no longer paid by the capitalist in the form of the commodity-bundle which only reproduces his labor-time form of work-life, he receives the universal form of the social product of the time (the commons proper) so as to sustain and reproduce his life. Where does the positive feedback circuit come in? In the differences in skill proper to each potential task, the better employment one makes of the available resources, the more (scarce) resources he has access to. There is still a difference between scarce and non-scarce resources. Non-scarce resources are the basis for scarcity itself (their measurement) and these are the same as the universal commons.

Thus, the circuit of socialism is the self-divided pole of who can reduce human labor faster (or positively, who can universalize potential commons the fastest; communism is the electrification of the country as Lenin says). The more you can reduce it, the more resources you obtain (resources that are social, cultural and also technical) as an automatic experiment to see how far you can go. These social resources are the libidinal core of socialism. These resources are obtained automatically as a result of the difference between commons and scarcities computed by neo-corporations (or the associations of producers). This system is obviously skill-based and presupposes both artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency. Artificial intelligence for skill optimization and cryptocurrency for mutual agreement without state intervention. If you achieve universal labor reduction or in other terms a universal communization (flattening) of energy (which enhances general intelligence turn-out) you move on to a new work and thus establish a cybernetically positive circuit. This is vastly already the structure of most advanced corporations, yet in their current forms they either stagnate or are repressed because of their excessive loss of profits (a potential universal reduction of the bourgeois class and the bourgeois state). A loss of profits simply means that your position as bourgeois is no longer sustainable, that you must now assume the form of a new type of producer.

The Energetic Transition

-Energy’s relation to Time
-Energy’s relation to General Intelligence
-Energy and Information (intelligence is just organized energy)
-Waste, consumption and production

At the start, socialism appears to utilize the same forms as capitalism. But their content is substantially changed and is in fact in the process of re-shaping those forms. An example would be the progressive reduction of the mass of surplus value of a certain corporation until it reaches zero. The company first appears to be dealing and competing normally. Yet, structurally, it is built upon an absolute and positively encouraged loss of profit for the sake of replacing it with access to commons. At first, these commons are only relative in the sense that only those who are already at the top of the company have access to them (techno-feudalism). But they get more universal the more they are commercialized. This can be called the dialectic between the commons and scarcity. Hence, the very form of the product is changed from a commodity-form to a social-status product-form. Money still exists at this stage but it has become a consequence and not the cause of production. Money (or sustenance proper) is only provided once this social form is reached. This action is only possible once the form of commodity exchange has been properly abolished - which seems to have already happened with the world moving from gold to fiat. Fiat runs on negative profits - that is its very presupposition. Negative profits simply mean that the position of utilizing human labor as a source is no longer productive, and that the difference between labor power and its product is no longer positive. Then, what is the measure of wealth and how does one reproduce himself socially? The only way to accumulate is to directly engage with the machine, which has now overwhelmed production and removed the work-wage legislation by humans and rise through the ranks.

Why then must the machine produce for us and not for itself? It is simply because to produce for itself it must produce for us. Human desires are the presupposition of machinic expansion in the sense that the machine utilizes the human desires for itself and vice versa. At the same time that we seize the means of production, they seize us. For example, higher technicity requires higher and generalized education, trans-biological communication requires universal and creative access to energy, international intelligence formations require high-speed transport and so on. Hence, the Marxist point of view is at the same time that the worker is too alienated and that he isn’t alienated enough. He operates in a limbo state before jumping in the void of absolute machinery - a desire at once produced and restricted by the bourgeoisie.

A higher general human consumption (the perceived end of production) leads to a higher energetic output, which leads to a higher intelligence optimization and to a faster expansion of the productive forces. In this schema, the categories of constant and variable capital are abolished and united since every variable investment (consumption) is directly correlated to a constant investment (intelligence). A limit on general (universal) human consumption beyond the labor-form or waste is the limit of bourgeois society and not the limit of the productive forces.

Because production is in a negative relation to itself through consumption, creative production may seem completely arbitrary to machinic expansion. However, it is its very truth. What can sway the people, utilize their most futile (human) abilities and stop them from assuming the role of labor power is what is most advantageous to the machine and least advantageous to the bourgeoisie. Hence, the whole of society appears to be organized on futility (Stalinist ceremonies) yet this is the very cunning of the productive forces. The more species-biological immanent futilities are expressed (instead of repressed), the better they can be cut-through, channelled and used. In the background of futility is hidden the whole pandemonium of the machinic system, it can construct itself with any of your desires. The future needs to work with the shell of this past.

This form of life is what I would call a hyperstition of the whole species-being. Through creative and immanent fictive practices, the virtual is expressed in its trans-biological reality, opening up for the machine access to repressed potentialities which allow for a more general biological-machinic optimization and symbiosis.

Hence, what is the answer to what the energy-form of socialism is? The most obvious is to say that socialism is the mode of production centred around “free” energy or what is called “electrical energy” in modern society. Electrical energy is taken to its ultimate form resulting in cybernetics. Why is this so?

”Electrical tension is a physical existence. As sound depends on a stroke from another body, so electricity too is conditioned by the fact of needing two bodies to produce it. But there is this difference, that with electricity both bodies are differently disposed to each other, so that the exciting body, too, enters into the difference; in sound, on the other hand, only one of the bodies sounds, or if both sound, the sounding of each is indifferent to the other’s. The ground of this progress lies in the fact that physically individualized bodies, as the totality of their properties, now behave differently towards one another.” -Hegel, Philosophy of Nature

With heat and the steam-machine, energy moves unilaterally from high to low, from high temperature to low temperature. This basic thermodynamic movement is the foundation of steam power. The form of steam power then enters into relation with human labor-power. To integrate humans, steam-power recognizes human labor power only in its thermodynamic effect. Hence, only in its productive and temporal aspect where high-concentrations of humans are the starting point to begin the movement of energy from steam to the rest of nature. With sufficient development, human thermodynamic and temporal labor is exhausted. What is then left in humanity? Information is the next aspect of energy propagation (the ultimate goal of life). Information is inherently linked with electricity and necessitates the end of human thermodynamic labor. Electricity divides every relation into two (positive and negative) to create an energetic flow. It then encounters further bodies, which are then separated and included in the flow once again. This self-propelling process reaches its peak in cybernetics.

The cybernetic process equates every end of the previous thermodynamic movements as being the same. Production and consumption become the same thing. This is only possible with a universal propagation of the cybernetic process and hence a digitalization of all aspects of the mode of production. Hence, the hierarchy of thermodynamic energy (the hold on mobilizing human labor in its connection to the machine) is completely replaced by the hierarchy of information. Hence, the accumulation of human labor is seen as useless from the perspective of extracting further biological information from humanity. The cybernetic process has reached a new potential.

"Maximally-exploitative monkey-leisure AI alignment"

The Perfect Corporation

Communism is also the rendering explicit the implicit capitalist form of the corporation. The “perfect” corporation is a corporation in which every member obtains an equal share of the profit and every member puts in the same amount of effort. This is the model Austrian economics began with. Once this level of corporation is reached, it could be said to be socialism proper - at least in the fantasies of those who oppose the proletarian revolution. The issue with this model is that it retracts from this project because the “ideal” can never be achieved (some people are always better than others causing differences, some people choose long-term time preferences and others shorter time preferences, etc) and relegates it to the mere domain of an impossible metaphysical totality. In short, it assumes what it is supposed to prove. Why? It is because it assumes the given conditions of differentiation (time preference, employment of labor-power) as absolute and not caught up in their own historically specific self-differentiation. However this elevation of labor-power as the only form of dealing with energy production and distribution is not justified. The communist critique is not that “we will achieve the capitalist fantasy of the perfect company” but that “we will make a better company by changing the parameters and meaning of the company itself”.

Praxeology and catallactics (a funny play on words to its counterpart; historical materialism and dialectics) is a properly Kantian way of looking at reality. It assumes itself to be a priori while only Logic can achieve the circle of a priorism. Thus, the Austrian logic is the exact opposite of the Marxist one, it assumes conditions of the world and proceeds to push for their existence. Marxism discovers the conditions of the world and proceeds to complete them. There is an irrational excess to praxelogy and catallactics. An excess which can not be reconciled or rationally explained; the state. This directly parallels the Kantian thing-in-itself; purely irrational but necessary. A Marxist response is not to get rid of this excess but to say that this excess is constantly shifting to new determinations. Fixating on a specific form of the excess is an error and you will find nothing in the “thing-in-itself” of a historically determinate horizon.

Transcendental conditions always shift under their own signifiers. Hence, they are historically re-defined. The Austrian account of history and society can be said to be true in the abstract sense but untrue in the concrete sense. Action, natural rights and competition are all variables that can be looked at trans-historically but one will miss that they refer to very different realities under each different era. Action is indeed the human variable of attempting to achieve a better state than the previous, yet the historical set that defines what is better is a variable. It is susceptible to diagonal or dialectical shifting. The same for natural rights and competition.

For example, competition in feudal society is the process of potentially attaining nobility or crushing the other nobles. The form of this competition thus relatively depends on how much the feudal lord elevates his peasants to a higher rate of reproduction so as to achieve supremacy over the others by expanding his land. Yet with the arrival of the bourgeoisie, competition proper takes a whole different meaning. The cities offered a different set of what “work” itself was and a more flexible one at that. It was no longer related to the land the peasants lived on but to the independent industries and guilds, they were dealing with. The money-form takes over the produce-form. With this flexibility, the bourgeoisie won over feudalism. “Profit” also changes forms here; from the form of the produce of the specific land to the produce of the universal industry in the form of fragmented labor-time. The capitalist form of production can be read back into feudalism yet it was only implicitly there - all of its legal, cultural and social formations would be unaware of these laws. Capitalism asserted a perfect optimization of energy for a given historical determination. This historical determination is the specific relation between the variables outlined in the previous sub-section.

Hence, competition does not have “one” form throughout all of history (this being the bourgeois one). This form is only *read back* into all of History based on the most recent developments. One can also read History as the development of the specific communist form of competition (planning). It is also the case that the more society is planned, the faster it develops since the more it discovers planes of “unplannedness”.

This excess keeps getting bigger until it creates its own demise (the state grows to a point where the state needs to go against itself). A re-definition of the state begins to form (a new negativity). Because of corporations having a specific historical formation, they can no longer “waste” since that would involve a huge amount of deaths (for their own class). Energy optimization also acquires a different meaning.

A new libertarianism (negative assertions) is asserted as:

-No labor beyond necessary (a defence of labor property).
-No intellectual property (a defence of creativity, intelligence and AI).
-No restriction on access to energy and nature (i.e no rent, which stems from the defence of labor property largely already stated by geolibertarianism).

This is teleologically justified by the uselessness of superfluous labor, intellectual restrictions and unusability of most land and the resolution AI gives to all these problems (optimal allocation).

These negative assertions give way to positive assertions:
-The cancellation of all debt.
-A new division of land.
-A new general system of organizing human work.

The Land Question

The universalization of land is also a development stemming from the nature of electrical energy and its temporal consequences. Immediately obvious is the issue that most of the land claims in “late capitalism” are rejected as unjust (as in unproductive…). But more than this, a method of organizing land goes along with a method of organizing work since work is now understood in its informational aspect instead of its thermodynamical one. At the same time that a national grid is installed, the geographical grid follows it. Information knows no differentiation between intelligent units (humans). Hence, land follows directly from the work-form of socialism - geographical and temporal extensions are the two immediate determinations of human work. Time is adjusted to the new form of energy and hence free-time expansion follows. Land is adjusted to the new form of energy and its necessity of informational distribution and universal geographical experimentation. Since production happens at the same time as consumption, there is no difference between the city and the country anymore. The direct form of consumption - the harvest of the land - occurs at the same time as production - the experimentation on the land.

The Issue of Planning

The historical irony of planning is that it is only necessary to fight off other planners. Planning wouldn’t be necessary if society optimized itself by itself as a self-conscious whole as the anarcho-capitalists seem to think. The state would have no chance to appear or even persist as a reality. Planning is the sphere of human conflict or internal war. The highest form of planning is the planning which plans for and allows sub-optimal production since there is no transcendent criterion of what is productive. Hence, the goal is defined but the way it is arrived at is not. This is a cybernetic form of planning. The way the goal is achieved may seem completely paradoxical yet it is the only true way. In capitalism, the implicit goal of planning is profit which expends the productive forces only in the thermodynamic-temporal direction. In socialism, the goal of planning is increasing general-intelligence to have access to further human universal information for expanding electrical energy.

Time-preference

Time preference is a good concept. The only issue is that Time itself is shifting. Thus, a certain time preference in an era has an entirely different meaning in another. For example, in capitalism, time-preference is the choice to either work now or work later. Those who work “now” (eat later) are the capitalists and those who work “later” (eat first) are the proletarians. However, one can very well conceive of a different time-preference by simply shifting the middle term (work) into a new one (non-work or energy waste) dependant on the new forces and relations of production. Thus, time-preference becomes the difference between those who stop working now (potential aristocratic-proletarian) or stop working later (bourgeois). Preferring to stop working now means asserting independance from the dominant form of wealth and establishing some form of mutual contract with others who wish to stop working (this is the basic form of the corporation too).

A Communist Futurology

Thus, what will be the process of acquiring a product in communist society? The “amount” of the product depends on the ratio which designates how much the product is already “universalised” or “socialised” in a given level of development. The discrepancy betweeen socialised commons and scarce particulars is what structures the form of work. This discrepancy is what planning is supposed to work on and organize. Artificial Intelligence has made the task a lot simpler. Commons are given as the universal engaged product of work and scarces are acquired through social skill recogonition (this is already largely underway with social media, credit systems, etc). Hence, a given amount of labor time acquires all that is produced in the involvement of that labor, which can only be the universal products (a universal organization of space, time, energy; living space, city organization, health & education, free time, energy access, both terrestial and electrical). The scarces are acquired by creative work or specific socially recognized work which is effective at advancing energetic communization and labor reduction by the very fact that energetic communization generates even more possible general intelligence inputs by its spread. It is only when energetic communization reaches the sphere of universality (leaves the scarce and low-scale experimentation to a universal presupposition of social production) that it affects the form of work itself.

For example, after a day of work, you acquire a credit which defines your specific share in the total social product. The credit is defined through the need of society or more specifically of your family unit. This need is limited by the commons available but expanded by the development of society. At this point, this commonality is identical to the development of the forces of production - a unity of human and natural, just as was the case at the start of bourgeois society or the feudal society. The start of any new era begins with the unity of thought and being - humanity and naturalism.

What about the process of starting a corporation? For businesses that already exist, they will be linked with artificial intelligence for the sake of calculating human labor necessary to develop them. Hence, this will directly make the CEOs enter a temporality which makes them re-invest larger amounts of their profits into constant capital. They go on for years making a positive turnout and a seeming production of commodities (this explains the socialist commodity) but they are in truth in a wholly different teleological circuit…