One thing I learned from the witty patron of PoMoCon, the late Peter Lawler, is that there’s a strange Communist-Libertarian convergence in modern thought & in America especially. Peter used to make fun of the name communism, since what Marx holds out as desirable is a world where people have nothing in common, do nothing together, because they don’t need each other & their freedom means no one can make claims on anyone else. The communist ideal is a world where it is not necessary for man & woman to come together to make a baby. Surely, that’s the libertarian ideal!
It’s hard to think about Marx in America for three obvious reasons. To begin with, the Soviet Union was the Cold War enemy, perhaps China is an enemy now, & they declare for Marx. Next, ordinary Americans are confused by the liberal elites who have embraced what is humorously called “cultural Marxism,” i.e. Nietzschean analysis of power in Marxist egalitarian drag. Finally, what people know of Marxism as an economic doctrine is discredited. So Marx cannot have any place in America. Now, however, let me offer you one of the basic propositions of Marx: The agent of the revolution is the machine. I.e., technology, not ideology is what counts in the historical transformations that have led to capitalism & the perfection of capitalism in communism. Accordingly, Marx had no use for Russia or China as vehicles for the revolution—they were ahistorical or at any rate backward—but expected England or Germany, the most advanced industrial economies of the world in the late 19th c., to move on to communism. So Marx’s thought is unsurprisingly very close to the American mind, which is spellbound by technology as revolutionary!
All this came to mind the other day reading the Andreessen Horowitz Techno-optimist manifesto, a remarkable document intended, I think, to inspire aspiring techno-lords to free themselves from the increasingly despotic regulatory regime in America, from the hatred liberal elites have of tech, & perhaps from their own easygoing assumptions about future involving technological innovations. The manifesto is indeed optimist in the strict sense, it holds out universal salvation through the power of the human mind focused on modern science. Here’s the central section of the 15 sections of the manifesto, on abundance, describing exactly Marx’s dream of a classless society:
We believe we should place intelligence & energy in a positive feedback loop, & drive them both to infinity.
We believe we should use the feedback loop of intelligence & energy to make everything we want & need abundant.
We believe the measure of abundance is falling prices. Every time a price falls, the universe of people who buy it gets a raise in buying power, which is the same as a raise in income. If a lot of goods & services drop in price, the result is an upward explosion of buying power, real income, & quality of life.
We believe that if we make both intelligence & energy “too cheap to meter”, the ultimate result will be that all physical goods become as cheap as pencils.
We believe we should push to drop prices across the economy through the application of technology until as many prices are effectively zero as possible, driving income levels & quality of life into the stratosphere.
We believe that technology ultimately drives the world to what Buckminster Fuller called “ephemeralization” – what economists call “dematerialization”. Fuller: “Technology lets you do more and more with less & less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.”
We believe technological progress therefore leads to material abundance for everyone.
We believe the ultimate payoff from technological abundance can be a massive expansion in what Julian Simon called “the ultimate resource” – people.
We believe, as Simon did, that people are the ultimate resource – with more people come more creativity, more new ideas, & more technological progress.
We believe material abundance therefore ultimately means more people – a lot more people – which in turn leads to more abundance.
We believe our planet is dramatically underpopulated, compared to the population we could have with abundant intelligence, energy, & material goods.
We believe the global population can quite easily expand to 50 billion people or more, & then far beyond that as we ultimately settle other planets.
We believe that out of all of these people will come scientists, technologists, artists, & visionaries beyond our wildest dreams.
We believe the ultimate mission of technology is to advance life both on Earth & in the stars.
Now, I can find a few things with which to disagree here. For example, if you ask me, the world we live in already has “intelligence too cheap to meter” & only lacks for cheap energy, & there may be a connection between the two facts. Or, on the theoretical side, the claim that technological progress means advancing toward God—making everything out of nothing; if that’s not a reduction to absurdity, I don’t know what is… But whereas others might feel it’s an exorbitant ambition to go around populating the planets orbiting other stars, I would say that’s the only serious part of this doctrine of abundance—the hardship of populating the universe would be the only thing left for men to do, the only necessity against which to strive, whereas people in luxury can hardly be bothered to face the pain of living & the difficulty of thinking.
But read the whole thing—it has a rousing conclusion quoting Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the anti-Marx. The manifesto seeks to appeal to the love of the superman & seems to understand that Nietzsche was modernist, fully committed to science. But it rehearses, without giving it a thought, the Nietzschean problem of the superman: If this is a future for mankind, for the planetary culture, then everyone might end up being superman. It’s not clear what would prevent it. & if that’s so, then it’s obvious that there can be no such thing as a superman, since there is no overcoming possible where there is no hierarchy. Indeed, the manifesto would seem to be an attempt to effect an unnatural marriage, all the inequality of Nietzsche & all the equality of Marx going together in a techno-dominated correlative of cultural Marxism. Maybe one can call it private inequality, public equality, but I don’t see how that can work as an education of aspiring Silicon Valley young men.
I wrote about Andreessen’s vision of the human future & the history that builds up to it this summer, I recommend the essay below:
Also, this one:
Thanks for the report, and love the Lawlerian set-up--the Lawler essays to get on this topic are in Stuck with Virtue.
It's easy to forget but at the end of the day Marx and all Hegelians are still in the Kantian, German idealist school; as such their highest end is a kind of "freedom"- even at the expense of everything else that matters (be it religion, metaphysics, morality, truth). And so they agree at a fundamental level about ethics with the libertarians who disagree with them about size of government; they are all autonomy freaks.
If y'all haven't read it before, I highly recommend old Tom West on this topic too (who gets much of what he says about this from our even older teacher, Leo Paul De Alvarez)
https://www.hillsdale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/1987-Marx_and_Lenin.pdf