Matias Vernengo — Economic and technological determinism

If you are interested in Marx.

Speaking as a philosopher commenting on Marx as a philosopher more than he was an economist, I think that Matias Vernengo gets is about right. He is in agreement with John Kenneth Galbraith on it.

Marx was a materialist ontologically. He had written his doctoral dissertation on Greek materialism.  He looked forward to occupying a chair in philosophy at a university as a career. His political activism obviated this, and he was forced to go into exile to more liberal Britain. Instead of becoming a professor, he spent his days doing research and writing, supplementing the funds that Engels, his close friend and collaborator, provided for his support by working as newspaper columnist.

In addition to ontological materialism, Marx also assumed naturalism as a methodological framework, in keeping with the 19th century science that had become intellectually predominant. 19th century scientific  naturalism was essentially a deterministic framework, since quantum theory had not yet been discovered.

Both methodological naturalism and ontological materialism are essentially deterministic in that they assuming that the motion of matter is regular rather than random and there are no non-material forces operating on the material system that we called "the universe" or "cosmos." Cosmos (kosmos) means "ordered" (regular) in Greek in contrast to chaos (xaos), or lacking order.

This determinism doesn't imply that all the laws of matter (nature) are known or even can be known, but rather assumes that the universe is material and that the motion (change) of matter is neither purely random, that is, un-ordered, nor subject to supernatural influences. Nature operates in accordance with "rules" such that that regularities can be discovered.

Strict materialism holds that "mind" is an aspect of matter, e.g., an "epiphenomenon of matter." Naturalism assumes that mind is unable to directly act on matter so as to change its motion. But it is possible to be a hard of soft materialist. The question is what kind of materialist Marx was.

This question is somewhat complicated by the fact that Marx was an "economic determinist" in the sense that the mode of production establishes a framework that serves as a foundation (infrastructure) of a social and political system (superstructure), delimiting the scope and scale of the overall system by "the mode of production."However, he was not a strict determinist historically in that he acknowledged an interdependence and mutual influence of the infrastructure and superstructure of a socio-economic and political system as a society.

In his assumption of economic determinism, Marx held that particular modes of production exhibited regularities that could be discerned and expressed as "laws of motion." The fundamental law of capital motion is accumulation. He did not think the same of history, in which contingency apparently predominates, making the unfolding of events in time uncertain. History doesn't necessarily repeat, although it may rhyme, to paraphrase Mark Twain.

As a philosopher, Marx was responding chiefly to Hegel and to some degree to Kant and the philosophers between Kant and Hegel, all of which he was quite familiar with. These predecessors of Marx were all idealists to one degree or another and viewed ideas as primary influencers rather than material conditions. Marx took the opposite position, holding that material conditions were the chief influencers of history.

The debate over the role of technology as an influence takes place within this context. Marx acknowledged the importance of technology for the mode of production.

Economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions of the social relations of production. M. Proudhon, holding this upside down like a true philosopher, sees in actual relations nothing but the incarnation of the principles, of these categories, which were slumbering — so M. Proudhon the philosopher tells us — in the bosom of the "impersonal reason of humanity".

M. Proudhon the economist understands very well that men make cloth, linen, or silk materials in definite relations of production. But what he has not understood is that these definite social relations are just as much produced by men as linen, flax, etc. Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.

The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with the material productivity, produce also principles, ideas, and categories, in conformity with their social relations.

Thus the ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products. —Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Ch. 2

And what is technology if not the application of knowledge and skill to material conditions?

But how and why did technology arise and become scaled at a particular time? This post seeks to answer that. It's short, but if the subject is of interest, link are provided for those that wish to follow up.

In my view, the major influencers were not the productive technologies one ordinarily thinks of, like mechanisms and the harnessing of energy, but rather information technology. First came the invention of language, then the invention of writing, then the invention of paper that could be inexpensively scaled, then the printing press, and now digital technology that is ushering in the "information age." As result, the flow ideas have been transformative, along with the exponentially increasing stock of knowledge.

Naked Keynesianism
Economic and technological determinism
Matias Vernengo | Associate Professor of Economics, Bucknell University

Colin Drury — Mark Carney warns robots taking jobs could lead to rise of Marxism

Mass unemployment, wage stagnation and growth of communism could come from technological advances

 Karl agrees:

The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.
Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation....

Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
The Independent
Mark Carney warns robots taking jobs could lead to rise of Marxism
Colin Drury

Daniel Lazare — The Dangerous Decline of US Hegemony

The bigger picture behind Official Washington’s hysteria over Russia, Syria and North Korea is the image of a decaying but dangerous American hegemon resisting the start of new multipolar order, explains Daniel Lazare.…

Unipolarity will slink off to the sidelines while multilateralism takes center stage. Given that U.S. share of global GDP has fallen by better than 20 percent since 1989, a retreat is inevitable. America has tried to compensate by making maximum use of its military and political advantages. That would be a losing proposition even if it had the most brilliant leadership in the world. Yet it doesn’t. Instead, it has a President who is an international laughingstock, a dysfunctional Congress, and a foreign-policy establishment lost in a neocon dream world. As a consequence, retreat is turning into a disorderly rout.

This is not just official Washington but the entire Anglo-American and European power structure — "the Atlantacists" —  that has dominated the global beginning in the 16th century.  Could have another world war over it as the Atlanticists struggle to maintain position. They realize that position cannot be maintained statically but must be advanced through expansion of control. These are parlous times for humanity with the world brisling with WMD and not just nukes.

See Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History for the rise and fall of civilizations.

Also Oswald Spengler.

Spengler predicted that about the year 2000, Western civilization would enter the period of pre‑death emergency whose countering would necessitate Caesarism (extraconstitutional omnipotence of the executive branch of the central government).

This also coincides with the work of Strauss and Howe, and also Ravi Batra, under the influence of Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar.

While historical trend analysis is far from precise, it provides a framework for thinking about issues that are complex owing to reflexivity and involve emergence that necessitates adaptation.

This dynamic is a whole lot bigger than the Thyucides trap between the US and China.

Many forces are converging now — natural forces like climate change, social forces like conflict of value structures and competing ideologies, and artificial forces like technological disruption brought by the "third, fourth and fifth industrial revolutions," which also have military implications.

"The times they are a-changin'."

Consortium News
The Dangerous Decline of US Hegemony
Daniel Lazare

Tony Wikrent — The best of times. The worst of times.

These are the best of times. These are the worst of times. The times we live in give us great hope. And, the times we live in crush what little hope we have.

We have hope, because we know what to do to solve the problems that now threaten our very existence. But we lose hope, because implementing these solutions seems politically impossible. Too few people with too much money would have their financial interests hurt or even destroyed by these solutions, so the media they own obscures the solutions behind false equivalencies, and the politicians they own dismiss the solutions as "too expensive." ...

Our great hope is based on the fact that we basically need to build an entirely new world economy, to replace the old economy that is so heavily dependent on burning fossil fuels. Considering that the entire world economy produces around $71 trillion in goods and services each year (of which the U.S. economy produces around $16 trillion), that means we could easily see double digit rates of economic growth each year, for many, many years. $100 trillion over 15 years is just under $7 trillion a year. That's just a ten percent increase in world output right now! We CAN do this - we have hundreds of millions of people worldwide who would welcome the opportunity of a new, well-paying job that moreover made a significant contribution, in whatever large or small way, to building a better future for their children and grandchildren....

We already have the science, and we already have the technology. What we do not have is a society that values scientists and engineers more than Wall Street speculators and usurers. That will change as the combined triple crises of climate change, resource depletion, and economic degradation under the burdens of usury and speculation, compel us to turn to science and technology to save our very lives. This will be similar to the process described by Thomas Piketty, in which the tragedies of World Wars One and Two destroyed the stranglehold oligarchs in various countries had achieved over their nations' economies. Even now, we are developing the new ideologies that will replace neo-liberalism and conservatism, and change our culture so that doing good is no longer a losing proposition.

The level at which World War Two was actually won, was the level of science and technology, with the deployment of mass produced internal combustion engines, directed radio waves (radar and sonar), computers for code-breaking as well as effective combat fire control, and, finally, the splitting of atoms. The level at which humanity will win its struggle to survive global climate change will again be the level of science and technology, and woe betide the selfish oligarch and financier who stands in the way.

Real Economics
The best of times. The worst of times.
Tony Wikrent