/empirical marxism/

why not?

Read Cockshott lad

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Well for one thing, it wont appeal to people who already have it in their heads that socialism is totalitarianism - so its appeal is already extremely limited. It also excludes anarchists who don't want a central planning apparatus. It seems like we spend so much time assuring people that socialism is not just central planning and then Cockshott's idea for a "new socialism" is basically central planning w/ computers.

this is good, anarchists have bad theory and they should feel bad

This shit looks schizophrenic as fuck. Not that I don't like it. It's great when people come up with idiosyncratic new scientific systems. I'd like to see more of that. But Cockshott is demanding something very different. We need something more accessible, a new Marxist canon to stand against Austrian School nonsense. Taking in all the new advances in science.

I'm personally thinking we ought to watch what's going on in systems-theory. Marxism is the systems ideology, and systems are all the rage right now. All other ideologies seem to have a very poor grasp on how great networks are what determine economic outcomes. It's never about the clever innovations of some dumb enterprise. Amazon is big because it resides a network of sellers and buyers, not because it provides a good service. Everyone intuitively understands this, yet there's no political narrative that makes it explicit. Marxism can be that political narrative, we just need to stress new aspects.

Right-libertarianism claims to be individualist, but all it does is push individuals in their own private little boxes. All it does is punish the individual. Marxism, on the other hand, rightly conceives of the individual as the center of a system encompassing our entire society. Capitalism has brought this system about through globalization. Our material existence and cultural sense of self is now dependent on a single world-economy. Now humans are all discrete, highly individual manifestations of a single overlapping substrate. Socialism, then, is the moment when the individual identifies himself as fundamentally social, and subordinates the social whole to itself. This, ironically, can only happen collectively, making it the ultimate act of collective individualism.

I'm rambling, however. It's important though that we build a new body of economic theory and political talking points. Austrian School bullshit and right-libertarianism in general are the incarnation of capitalist ideology that we need to critique. That's what will lead us to this theory.

As I understand it the point is mainly to illustrate that cybernetic planning is a real possibility. I'm not entirely content with Cockshotts approach either. We need to work on it.

I've been thinking about an anarchist counterpart to Cockshottism. Cybernetic syndicalism I'd call it. (Cybersyndicalism for short.) It works as follows:
1. We start by constructing a realtime systems-based overview of our entire economy.
2. We build an algorithm to identify all moments that we wish to abolish.
3. We automatically connect with all other individuals who share these goals, forming an organic collective.
4. We collectively adapt our consumption and production behavior in accordance with our goal.
Alongside this we maximize our economic impact through the introduction of worker and consumer cooperatives. Eventually the strategy will necessarily lead into something functionally equal to a planned economy.

There is an Anarchist critique of Cockshott around called "Against Cybernetic Stalinism" I don't have it and I can't find it though.
It was pretty funny

BASEDMAN COCKSHOTT

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You cant shot the cockshott

that was an ancap though

Do you have it? I've been wantiong to read it again for ages

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this isn't even different from what cockshott wants, in fact in towards a new socialism all industry is run by syndicates, and there is no concrete planning board, labour assignments in the different sectors of production are done by popular vote, and all task neccesary to complete this are done by different soviets composed of people who know what the fuck they are doing

i think it was this one
mises.org/library/review-oftowards-new-socialism-w-paul-cockshott-and-allin-f-cottrell

Thanks, but no it was not this one, and now that I've remebered more, I'm quite sure it was made by Ancoms not Ancaps

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i can remember it actually, was the one speaking something about that if cybernetics were implemented, then you would have to simplify everything in life, and he used the example that in cyber stalinism people couldn't have two jobs, and have to cam to sustain their children

That's retarded. How does someone even arrive at such an idiotic conclusion?

It was quite funny, I really want someone to have it , but it seems difficult

What we need is indeed some way of communicating the essence of the systems of knowledge which we're trying to spread. Of course, we need to talk about self-causation and self-reflection. What we are dealing with is actually, in a sense, pre-Kantian (yes, I'm borrowing some of what I say straight from Rafiq). We need sciences which involve ourselves as struggling and self-causing rational subjects alongside our own praxis and history, and nowhere is this more important than in economics which is, again, precisely related to how we organise the world and practicality itself (it is crucial to note that I am not speaking in a utilitarian sense). FED (suspect name, I know!) attempts to provide some new axioms and systems using new kinds of algebra with different contexts (generic; synchronic/current; diachronic/historically-cumulative), meta-numbers (I still have no idea as to what these are!) and 'quanto-qualitative' algebra. They even claim that they have found a way to make division of real numbers by zero meaningful. A lot of this involves notions of how these things are related to our praxis and how thought itself is historical rather than fixed in its meaning and practicality as we are led to believe.

Right-libertarianism is indeed trash. I believe that some have compared it to conceiving of individuals as gaseous atoms (I am not sure if the comparison of free market capitalism to an ideal gas in a container seen in Laws of Chaos is quite in the same spirit and for the same purpose). Individuals are presumed to act 'naturally' and 'rationally' in a certain way and this is assumed to have some sort of meaning which is not based on praxis itself but on ahistorical laws to which humans are bound to in conducting their praxis (this is their application of praxaeology). This ignores the social and intersubjective nature of reason; in the case of the theorists themselves, they did not have these concepts in their minds when they were born. No genes and no movements of atoms whose limitations we know quite well from the current empirical sciences can code for the innumerable thoughts which we can come up with, and this is only cemented by what I discuss in the next paragraph just below this one. There is no evidence that we are caused by anything to think these thoughts, hence practically the fact that we do anything at all leads to the conclusion that we cause ourselves and we set the terms of what's practical or not. This is where Marxism's importance is at its greatest, not at the level of empirical data itself but HOW WE RELATE TO IT. Marxism need not introduce any new empirical claims and test for them (hence even with countervailing tendencies, it still holds despite becoming unfalsifiable and unverifiable for the present empirical sciences; Marxism becomes meaningless as an explanation for our present empiricists).

The mathematical systems which the right-libertarians use are assumed to be fixed, when it is actually that we created these mathematical systems in the first place and there's no reason as to why we cannot create more (linking this again: adventures-in-dialectics.org/Adventures-In-Dialectics/DiaRith/Intro/Dialectical-Ideography_An-Introductory-Letter.htm#The_Immanence). What's more, practically-speaking we are not subject to 'objective' and ahistorical laws regarding our behaviour because we cannot predict something that we are a part of - even by predicting this and reinterpreting it, we critique ourselves and our thoughts. We are subject to more dynamic forces than 'social' animals whose ultimate aim is to reproduce their species. We are obliged to qualify whether that is practical and we understand self-overcoming and the transience of these laws with regards to our praxis. FED speculates about meta-humans and whatnot on top of all of this.

I do remember the whole deal about communist egoism. Only communism leads to the greatest fulfilment of individual aims and also of the continued (re-)organisation of the world for the sake of struggling to (re-)organise it. Everything else is narrow and ultimately collapses into the politics of identity in the broadest sense - if not that which is based on characteristics which are deemed as being essential and inherent to us humans with variations across in-groups, then that which is based on humans being subject to some sort of eternal law and this being an essential part of the identity of humans. (Stirner shows this very well! One can even say that he performs an abstraction of the presently-inapproximable rational part of humans away from all sense data and physical forms; this is what it means to be unique.)

Cybernetic planning must be able to work with the terms which we use for the new mathematical systems. For the time being, it will require our input since we haven't yet built self-causing computers. This will take some time.

paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2017/08/28/reply-to-brewster/
Also pic related.

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You seem to be quite gaseous yourself here. I believe the comparison of individuals with atoms in a gas stems from from the correspondence between a macro pattern in the economy (wealth distribution) and the distribution of energy in a gas. The point is exactly that the atoms don't act with any foresight whatsoever, and making an analogy between that and individual wealth in the economy is as far away as one can be from meritocratic wealth explanations that are popular with the right.
Is planet Saturn not subject to objective laws if the planet is unaware of its own movement? It doesn't follow.
Don't post in a thread named empirical marxism, post in a thread named abracadabra divide by zero bixnood.

I'm very suspicious of your doctrine of self-causation, exactly because it seems to fit in so well with right-libertarian ethics. In my opinion, the very opposite must be presumed true, and is actually indispensable for a full conception of human freedom. The fact of the matter is that humans are caused by external forces. We very clearly adopt ideas and mannerisms from the people around us. We learn to work the machines that are available. We eat and drink what we are served. We relate to others according to the economic mode we find ourselves in. Without this nothing much of Marxism remains, and you end up exactly with the vacuous mess of right-libertarianism.

The reason I say that this fact is indispensable to human freedom is a simple dialectical trick. If humans are truly free, they must be free to identify themselves as caused by something else. Otherwise you're putting an external limit on their self-determination. In material terms, I mean that humans must be able to acknowledge structural causes of their own behavior and correct them. This can be done in any possible way, from making small cybernetic adjustments to the movement of a pencil, to cleaning up your room with the aim to clear up your mind, to collectively building a revolution in order to change the behavior of your entire social system. All this is part of the same kind of self-determination, in which you acknowledge yourself to be externally determined and then claim responsibility for it.

Now, empiricism comes in handy exactly in describing the workings of this social system and prescribing the ways in which it ought to be reformed. This is why we need a new body of Marxist theory. Cockshott is exactly who we need for this.

I'm also not sure about fully rejecting the libertarian mathematics – i.e. their work on praxeology – on the basis of the action axiom (which I think is what you're trying to do), saying that the mathematical systems that follow are forever tainted by it. Right-libertarianism relies on a wrongful interpretation of the axiom that "humans act." (A deliberately obfuscated description they like to use.) This does not mean that the structural significance of the axiom is useless. We just need to end the assumption that humans act, and turn it into a proposal that humans act. There is this latent assumption in neoclassical economics that their models, because they apparently describe eternal givens about human rational interests, they must also describe human interests under capitalism. This is the point at which we have to reject them, not when they try to make an analysis of how rational human interests work socially. It's their assumption that capitalism is rational that needs to go, not the idea that humans can act rationally. Humans can and should live in a rational social system, but this system isn't capitalism, it's socialism. And praxeology may be a method to discover how socialism may work. Whereas right-libertarians make the ridiculous claim that human behavior under capitalism is a perfect expression of their rational desires, we will take the position that it isn't, and that for people to take responsibility for their actions would mean to overthrow the entire social system.

I hope that makes sense. This is the first time I've written these thoughts down.

In response, I should clarify that we as individuals are using intersubjective reason and this is the basis of the self-causation; while individual subjects themselves are not free, reason is irreducible to physical things. (I know, I said that rational subjects are self-causing, I have to excuse myself there.) I can only posit that I am unique using intersubjective reason. We only identify ourselves in relation to the collective, of course. I agree with you when you say that we are confronted with real choices which are intersubjectively-known and mediated accordingly. We are only able to differentiate between ourselves and others through and using the social field, for example.

If a person was alone and they had read every single book over and over again: in a sense, history would be developing at the pace of their thoughts alone and their own self-reflection. But nothing would necessarily be controversial. One would act in reaction to the world around them and that's it. No friction between any two subjects because a second subject would not exist. There would be no irreducible social totality, only a being who would be able to be modelled as an individual animal of some sort. This lone individual would be uniform, too.

We are not free in terms of the choices that we can make but we are able to devise axioms and we are not reducible to our biologies. Of course we have to service them, but there exists a dynamic which cannot be approximated within the field of biology or any physical science - or, for that matter, ANY FORMAL FRAMEWORK WHATSOEVER. We go beyond such frameworks; we know this because thought is historical.

Of course we can describe the workings of our social system, but how was this possible without understanding what the data means? Empirical data does not care about how we divide and taxonomise it; it is simply a matter of us practically-relating to the data.

I must also remark that praxaeology was a left-wing school of thought. Of course, humans act, but HOW and in relation to WHAT? We do not exist in vacuo.

My response is incomplete but I am tackling these points in some big promised wall - though you're better off just reading Rafiq's work: archive.is/NyK8q

Saturn does not cause itself to move. It is caused by OTHER THINGS to move. You've served up a straw man.

Not relevant to the point made. Lack of awareness of a pattern doesn't imply its non-existence.

This amounts to a misunderstanding of the definitions used - namely, a confusion between 'actually-existing' and 'ahistorical'.

What you say there is correct; it's a point that Marx also makes IIRC, and it is relevant to our criticisms of the simple empiricism which was used by the classical economists (and for that matter assertions that 'capitalism is natural and transhistorical'). However, I am talking about what separates us from what is known to the present natural sciences, hence your point remains a straw man. Saturn, of course, need not be aware of its own movements for it to move, but it does not move itself. It doesn't know anything! All that Saturn does can be explained using the laws of physics. Meanwhile, though many people are not aware of capitalism and the Marxian analysis of capitalism, it is knowable to them. We are not reducible to current physical laws because there are no correlates between things which are scientifically-known to our present empirical sciences and thought itself. We are dealing with unquantifiable 'numbers' of thought. Thoughts exhibit qualitative differences to the 'empirical world'. What's more, thought changes through incrementations which are not continuous in a quantitative sense. These incrementations are discontinuous jumps. We maintain our monist and dialectical materialism because thought is not an abstract floaty-floaty thing in a different world but rather what we apply to the world itself. It is only through material things and the dynamics of these things that the order of reason is meaningful and can be accessed. Besides that, there is no reason to say that it exists. It is in THIS SENSE ALONE that we are not subject to 'objective' and ahistorical laws, and I mean 'objective' in the sense that I believe Anglo-empiricists use the term.

The confused one here seems to be you, confusing objective, but historically contingent with non-objective.
Evolutionary speaking, action comes before thinking. In the beginning was the deed. Are you aware of everything you do, for instance every breath you take while asleep?

>The confused one here seems to be you, confusing objective, but historically contingent with non-objective.
At this point the matter is one of semantic quibbling. I've explained the senses in which I mean things such as 'objective' when I use the term. Did I not also use the term 'ahistorical' (without quotation marks, too!) to illustrate what I meant in that sense? But regardless, I agree that historical contingency does not mean non-actuality. If I were to argue otherwise, I would have to join Maggie Thatcher and scream that 'society doesn't exist'.
No, but I can understand the abstract functions at hand. I can make these things knowable to me. I am able to grasp the matters at hand. This is what Saturn finds no need of doing: understanding and reasoning. Does Saturn speak about what it imagines it's doing when we're not looking? Of course not. But we do this. That's the point that I'm trying to get at.

I'm a Historyfag at Oxbridge. How do I get into this stuff even though I'm a total bao bao at STEM?

just read it's not that hard, tans only has like one single system of equations, and one easy explanation of system controllers work, the rest of the book is just shitting on the ussr and how to fix it