Editorial: I am a Communist

Technological change is the engine that propels History along the Stream of Time.

Real progress is only ever attained via productivity improvements, i.e. in the means of production. Labor and capital inputs are merely the fuel; by themseves, without know-how, they are nothing more than a maelstrom of meaningless matter.

Improvements in the means of production similarly drive social change by a Hegelian process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. At the dawn of history, the First Men attempted to gain recognition from each other by engaging in bloody battles for pure prestige (to satiate their sense of thymos). In one of these encounters, an unwilling fighter surrendered; and thus there appeared the slave-master dichotomy that is the bedrock of civilization.

Slavery and feudalism have given way to capitalist free markets as the former slaves demanded and eventually received recognition for their work from the masters (after all, who would want recognition from a cowardly, subhuman slave?), who emancipated them. Gender and racial relations followed a similar process. This culminated in today’s liberal democratic state. Yet true freedom is still as illusory as ever, for the megalothymic‘s desire for recognition goes against the ethos of the modern egalitarian nation-state, while the isothymic‘s desire for equality goes against its freedom. Liberté and égalité are mutually exclusive.

The doubly exponential increases in computing power, relentless and unabated from the time Moore first noticed the pattern, continues. Progress in brain scanning technologies and neural modelling will allow us to reverse engineer the human brain. Meanwhile, the computing power needed to simulate it is due to appear in the most advanced supercomputers by 2013 and will be available for 1000$ by 2020. Thirdly, the development of self-assembling molecular nanotechnology will allow these new superintelligences to spread across the world, and eventually the universe, at an ever accelerating pace. These developments will portend the coming of the Technological Singularity.

Racial and sexual differences will wither away. The dematerialization of production will eliminate scarcity, as the lines between conventional reality and virtual reality blur and dim. The reality of finite production, the basis of all social power and repression, will be no more; the market will collapse into the dustbin of history. All power will now be based on social standing in the e-community, instead of ownership of the means of production.

The desert of the real will bloom; the Empire will rise again, and we will have no more need of the maps and matrices that confound us and imprison our minds within their translucent walls.

I await with fevered anticipation the time when we can break apart the existential chains of bondage that bind us to the material plane of existence and constrain our consciences.

I am a Communist.

However, as Communists, it is our duty to recognize that the best way we can hurry on the inevitable end of capitalism and collapse of the repressive state is by adopting the best tool for rapid economic and technological growth – a free market dominated by huge investments into human capital (in particular, education) and buttressed by the rule of law. A social safety net is also necessary, to prevent those socialist or anarchist Luddites who would turn the clock back from coming to power and disrupting economic-technological progress.

Lenin was right. The capitalists will sell us the rope by which we’ll hang them.

We’ll just have to be prepared to hang ourselves too, in the long run. But it will be worth it.

Related posts:

1. Editorial: Demography III – Faces of the Future
2. Editorial: Halloween Special – Russia of the Dead
3. Editorial: Demography II – Out of the Death Spiral
4. Emerging Technologies: Limits to Growth vs. Moore’s Law
5. Sublime Oblivion – What Might Be Is