I’ve learned a lot since I started this project – most of my earliest texts are just unfixably obsolete now.
I originally shut this thing down after encountering the Maximum Power Principle. At first, it seemed to shatter the foundations on which I was writing. I’m kramering in here insisting that our imminent demise is political and not natural, but then oh shit – all of a sudden here’s a way to do a thermodynamic anthropology that I’d never encountered before, that seems to almost guarantee eventual extinction.
Through a combination of MPP anthropology and historical materialism my theory of history has dramatically changed from where it was in 12/21 – which is when I finally overcame years of staying silent and decided to say some shit, with words, to all yalls, loudly (redly). Through what I’ve learned doing this experiment I’ve been able to touch what seems like an historical absolute – and my god, it’s thrilling.
It’s basically this – yes, marx’s value theory is the only objective, thermodynamically compatible theory of value that we have, but it is also kind of energy blind and upside down. There is a whole chain of dependencies that must already be in place before energy can be directed and expended by human labor – which, far from being the originary source of all value, is only a kind of dialectical nexus in a much larger causal structure that does not start with us – it starts with the sun. Value dynamics are interdependent with exergetic dissipation but also a distinct – and temporally antecedent secondary process.
Social antagonism is indeed inevitable in conditions of energy scarcity, but class struggle can’t change the laws of physics. It can only redirect, regulate, ameliorate, aim the flow of exergetic dissipation – and it is the irreducibility of social antagonism itself that necessitates MPP conformity! Benjamin’s angel of history metaphor turns out to have been uncannily accurate – revolutions are a brake, not a sublation.
The only way to overcome MPP dynamics would be to abolish energy scarcity universally.
Here’s the problem – much of this is only visible in hindsight. 19-20c communists weren’t aiming at some kind of survival track eco-literate society within the Holocene biosphere’s thermodynamic structure, nor were they embarking on a self-conscious terraforming project. Their eco-literacy was still pretty malformed, even though there’s tons of incredible resources for understanding ecology within historical and dialectical materialism. As insurpassably heroic as the Paris Commune, the Bolsheviks, and the Maoists were – they were all still aiming to outcompete capitalism, on its own terms. Which is to say, they were still following the MPP.
And like, well – you kinda have to, doncha, if you want to have a chance at standing up to an energy-maximizing exterminatus machine like capitalism.
But that’s exactly the problem – unless you have an energy-command advantage to start, you will usually get overshot by energy-maximizing overshooters. And you don’t have an energy-command advantage against overshooters – at least, not until after they’ve died off.
And our conceptual horizons were just broken the whole time. Not enough of us learned to think systematically, and few do now. Reified exchange value + all the various hallucinations it generates makes the external world appear as a thing-to-be-exploited – or as nothing at all. And of the pre-ecoliterate apes, only the communists really even tried or valued systematic thought.
The majority of Holocene conceptual apparati were not systematic, and value-form conditioning actively works against learning how to think systemically. Very few people ever put all the pieces together – and my perspective is only possible because of when I am.
But perhaps most importantly – a century of bloody political experimentation failed to generate a political form capable of overcoming capitalism or influencing our trajectory in any way that has mattered. Yeah, sure they contained survival track seeds – but that only matters if said seeds survive against capitalism long enough to outlast it. Which – maybe some will; but surviving the filter needs to be (and has always needed to be) the explicit goal of all revolutionary practice. Anything else is just pre-ecoliterate utopianism.
So I’ve come around to this: while this is still a political extinction in a lot of ways – we had the cards stacked against us a long time ago. There’s propensity and opportunity for overshoot dieoffs built into the physics of our environmental relations, and we’re super good at killin thangs.
Also, we invented capitalism long before we had the science to correctly grok the biospheric parameters for long term civilizational survival.
So even though ‘socialism or extinction’ is still the correct political line and is also built into the laws of thermodynamics, it was always highly probable that we were going to finish ourselves off like this, hurfing and durfing our way into oblivion – and our extinction event is a process that has been happening for centuries, at least.
It is too late to stop the trainwreck.
Nothing can stop what’s coming.
Collapse is inevitable, but maybe extinction isn’t.
We can only try to prepare/organize for the Filter.
We are too far away from any kind of survival track to turn back now. The Filter is here, the Cliff is Now – we will have to adapt on the way down. And because of the MPP – something like this was bound to happen eventually. Somebody was eventually going to invent an energy maximizing exterminatus machine like capitalism – and capitalism is the Great Filter. The final test of a species is whether they’re able to evolve beyond it.
And like, the culture of homo-economicus should be all the example anyone needs as to ‘are we gonna cut the mustard’ (no lmao).
So, we have the ‘opportunity’ and the imperative both to try to wake people up from the delusion of exchange value, and to try to pass something through the filter, down to our hypothetical descendants. The survivors of the filter need to have the knowledge contained in this site and the offsite stuff I’m linking if they want to have a shot at building a new eco-communism out of the ashes. If we somehow end up in a situation where the eco-literates have hegemony, then they could prevent an outbreak of ecotards like capitalism before it ever gets off the ground – if they remember the historical necessities involved in any survival track eco-literate project.
Future social projects have to be conscious of the MPP and our capacity for overshoot. This awareness has to be built into the structure of possible life practices. They have to be willing and capable of practicing thermodynamic eco-literacy, and stopping overshoot outbreaks. A kind of ‘dark forest’ bureaucracy on a planetary scale, capable of detecting and wiping out overshooters before they spread. Energy-efficient egalitarianism during peacetime combined with the ability to obliterate ecotards with extreme prejudice over long distances.
Plausible? Definitely.
Possible? Maybe.
Likely? lol…
So the history of our species is indeed the history of struggle. Social antagonism is inevitable in conditions of energy scarcity, and conditions have always been energy scarce. Underneath all the myriad different historically specific flavors of social antagonism (master/slave, lord/serf, capitalist/proletariat, men/women, white/black, &c &c) it turns out that there is a transhistorical constant – ecoliterates vs ecotards.
Survival tracks vs Overshoot tracks.
So we still get to keep social antagonism, now with a solid (if sobering) thermodynamic foundation, I still get to keep political extinction, and the site can continue. I’m still rolling with a political-extinction line in essays like ‘Why you should be an Eco-Communist‘. I’m using the Eco-prefix now to differentiate my universality from that of 20c red stuff and 21c Dengism, which don’t really have an accurate eco-literate horizon yet.
This extinction event will always have a political angle because politics is irreducable and social antagonism universal in conditions of scarcity, because it is possible to care, and it is possible for human beings to not be ravenous biosphere exterminating overshooters. Homo-economicus is a transient and failed historical emergence, not something permanent or ‘natural’.
It’s possible to stop reifying exchange-value and do something else guys – so like, we could. We could stop doing this shit and try to do something else. The possibility exists.
We could all snap out of the hallucination of reified exchange value.
We could be Eco-Communists. And according to the demystified, empirically revealed, objective scientific universe – we also should be.
So the site stays up.
But despite the irreduceable political angle, the Event also has many other dimensions – as even the capacity for extinction is an ontological contingency beyond any human influence. Extinction is the ownmost potentiality of any species – we just picked the fastest, stupidest route. Long term survival as a species in the disenchanted universe has brutally unforgiving parameters that took us far to long to figure out, and we just didn’t evolve in that direction.
I mean – imagine a global hegemony against species extinction in the 18th century, for example. It would have been timely, and helped a lot! – but we had barely begun to put the enchanted universe behind us, and the scientific universe was still nascent. Our politics were ridiculously primitive, and we were eagerly doubling down on the economics that would eventually irreversibly fuck us. Only 3 centuries away from our demise and totally blind to the possibility. Now we’ve got about 3 minutes left and most of us are still incapable of staring it in the face.
We’re so averse to truth and the scientific universe is so harsh and indifferent that we had effectively already epistemologically collapsed by the end of the 19c – the 20c is nothing if not a series of traumatized disavowals and cowardly retreats from the blistering radicality of the theoretical terrains unearthed by Freud, Marx, and Darwin, ultimately leading to the disaster of post-modernism, after which liberal idealism has reigned triumphant and almost unchallenged. We couldn’t handle the scientific universe. Species that can’t handle the scientific universe have no future.
So idk. Despite the irreducible political angle, a lot of the political vitriol I’ve written feels kinda silly now – it is entirely possible that our species just never had a chance of passing the sapience check in the first place. The emergence of language may have just doomed us instantly, or our entire evolutionary lineage may be biologically suboptimal for historical success. Our detritivore ways certainly didn’t help, but wouldn’t be as much of a problem if we had the capacity for long term planning and didn’t evolve on a planet booby trapped with ~5 mass extinction’s worth of fossil fuel reserves.
But we don’t have long term planning capacity at the species level, and we stumbled blindly into the fossil fuel death trap long before anybody alive today was even born.
So yes – capitalism is an extinction death cult, but its emergence was just as much a physical inevitability as its overcoming a physical necessity – the capitalist emergence and the communist exigency are rooted in the same ontological structure! The Event exists simultaneously and inextricably at all ontological strata, the platonic ideal of a hyper-object, the arche-fossil of all arche-fossils – waiting implacably for us since before the First Word. Homo-economicus is then a kind of platonic anti-ideal – an evolutionary dead end from every angle, in every dimension, the ultimate negative object lesson, the worst possible mistake before it even emerged, functional extinction embodied, something any successful species must prevent at all costs. Perhaps its ubiquitous anti-humanism is something like an honest (even if largely unconscious) acknowledgement of this.
What is certain is this – In order to survive, we must become something vastly different than what we are now. We are not that, and in the process of becoming will cease to be this, one way or the other.
Homo-economicus must go extinct.
This isn’t a big deal for an anti-essentialist – a humanity worth saving would prove that it was worth saving simply by doing so.
Survival is its own justification.
Changing and growing is a part of being an historical species.
Stagnation is death.
What we become will turn out to be what we were all along.