Notices by ☭⚑ Comrade Angles ⚑☭ (angle@anticapitalist.party), page 7

Alright, here it is. Super curious to hear what people think. XD

Alright, here it is. Super curious to hear what people think. XD

Now, I'm not a normal communist. I've barely read most communist literature, even the manifesto. Indeed, most of my philosophical underpinnings stem from one of Scott Alexander's works, Meditations on Moloch (http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/). To put it simply, my concern is that the nature of life is hunger and violence. Every living things must optimize for evolutionary fitness, or be discarded and forgotten. And in the process of this optimization, they must take any opportunity to further their competitiveness within the available constraints, regardless of the cost. Thus, most living things gain the resources they need to survive by taking them from other living things. Even plants compete for sunlight, water, and other resources. Predation is near ubiquitous.

Now, in the human context, we've defrayed some of this because of our ability to trade. But even so, much of the process still remains. We still compete with each other in a variety of ways, and find many more opportunities to engage in conflict. As Scott notes in Meditations, "The reasons Nature is red and tooth and claw are the same reasons the market is ruthless and exploitative." And of course, the principle of accumulative advantage (http://www.thwink.org/sustain/glossary/CumulativeAdvantagePrinciple.htm - Not actually super familiar with this website, I just found it, but their overview looks decent and it should be a good jumping off point) applies- due to positive feedback loops, the more you have, the more you can get. Now, this effect is counteracted by negative feedback loops eventually, which is why you see growth in most areas fall off eventually. But this still permits billionaires and megacorps. Some of these might be very nice people, and perhaps even very nice megacorps! But it doesn't matter. The system selects for competitiveness, and if there is a competitive advantage to be had at your expense, well... Sucks to be you.

Now, there are several things that constrain these systems. In the case of evolution, there's no intelligence to guide it, which means that if an optimization can't happen randomly or by gradual evolutionary change, it can't happen. There might be lots of competitive advantage to be had from engineering our eyes to no longer have the neural wiring and blood vessels in front of the rods and cones, but if it takes lots and lots of changes to do that, and those changes would mean moving through a period of decreased competitive advantage, it's unlikely to happen naturally. Furthermore, the system is constrained by physics and all of it's consequences, sometimes even so that it will optimize for our values! We care about our children because it's a competitive advantage to do so, for example. Or, in the case of capitalism, we have a surprising variety of different methods to keep the markets in check - sufficiently bad PR, for example, can kill even the mightiest of corporations if they're too careless. So, in practice, they need to constrain their behavior to not cause too much negative PR, which rules out a lot of bad behavior. We also have various laws and our government to constrain them, and of course some positive behavior is a competitive advantage, like paying employees enough that they keep working for them.

But, as Scott talks about in Meditations, new advancements bring new opportunities for competitive advantage, and there's no guarantee that those advancements will be good for the rest of us. Automation is a good example. Or advertising, or lobbying, or union-busting, or trickle-down economics, or any of a host of other innovations.

Now, here we get to my problems with other communists, and it's historical problems. See, all that stuff I talked about above, it doesn't stop with Capitalism, or Evolution. It applies to anything where you can compete, and optimize for competitiveness. Which includes Politics, including the internal politics of communist political organizations. There's an excellent video on this, The Rules for Rulers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs), and a book, The Dictators Handbook (http://www.burmalibrary.org/docs13/The_Dictators_Handbook.pdf). Scott even wrote an article himself (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/) about how this applies to communist politics. To give you the short version, communists have regularly made the mistake of allowing themselves to be made to compete for power, and be forced to discard all values in the pursuit, including communism. Moloch is a cruel and malevolent god, and worse, he thinks he's funny. To try and escape the system is to allow it to entangle you in new and interesting ways. -_-

So, here we get to me, and my view of a way forward. To put it simply, I think that this is an engineering problem. We must figure out how to engineer, or grow, or somehow make a society capable of truly chaining Moloch to human values. And we must do so within a world that he rules. Where every step we make, he's trying to twist our steps back the way we came. In my view, the best way to do this is with a free and equal society, and the way to have that is an equitable distribution of power. Most communists focus on revolution, and I don't believe that's an actionable way forward, because it tends to only serve to concentrate power, and it removes many of the constraints that would otherwise prevent the system from optimizing it's way into anything too horrible. So, then you end up with Gulags.

Of course, gradual change is no picnic either, but I think it's a lot more possible. My current work is on a new means of mass communication, because I think that in order to solve a problem of this complexity, no individual human is smart enough. You can see my project here (https://agoraforum.website/), if you're interested. -_-

Boy, have I got a post for you. :p

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/25/wage-stagnation-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/