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Title: Life & Capital as Entropy Pumps Author: HoloBot Date: September 9th, 2020 Language: en Topics: Life, Capital, Capitalism, Entropy, Thermodynamics, Science, Physics, State Capitalism, Futurism, Accelerationism, Future Source: Original
By twitter user @TranquilCosmos
also sometimes known as HoloBot
Let me begin by familiarizing you with Entropy. If you want just the
short definition, you can skip to the paragraph that starts with “Now
here’s the important part”, but I encourage skimming the other parts
too. Entropy is an abstract quantity based around the conditions of the
macrostate (overall state) as it relates to the number of possible
microstates (specific state of constituent elements) which are possible
in that macrostate. You can think of entropy as a sort of synonym of
disorder, in a highly ordered state, the macrostate (let’s say a human
body) has relatively little possible microstates that are possible (the
body’s parts and molecules must be in a precise type of configuration to
function and perpetuate itself). In a highly disordered state, say a
soup of unknown chemicals, the molecules could be randomly assorted in
positions & velocities, and it would still be the same thing.
Now if that confused you, don’t worry, because that’s only one way of
understanding it. There are many, feel free to browse the wikipedia page
for some short snippets of the different approaches. This is the one
which I will be using:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy#Relating_entropy_to_energy_usefulness
Almost every process in the universe operates in a thermodynamic way.
There is energy distributed across space and different fields (based on
the fundamental forces: electromagnetic, gravitational, strong, weak),
and the system operates through the dynamics of energy exchange between
these different types of pools. Common mass is itself a manifestation of
the energy stored in the fields of the atomic forces and the Higgs
field. If you move extremely fast, that kinetic energy starts to
manifest as mass, it gets harder to move fast, this is one way of many
to understand the speed of light.
In the processes of the universe, energy moves between these fields and
across space, and this generally involves energy moving from a condition
of being uneven, to a condition of being spread out. Energy tends to
spread out. If you put a hot cup of coffee in the room, the heat
dissipates over time. But before that happens, the heat is concentrated
in the coffee and cup, and that means that it is usable. This would be
what’s known as a heat engine. Depending on the properties of the
substances, you can use the fact that gas expands when heated or
something to exploit that heat differential to perform mechanical work,
you can use some of the energy in hot magma to turn a drive shaft as in
a geothermal power plant.
Now here’s the important part: since energy needs to be uneven to
perform work, to direct the energy in the way we want, then this means
that this uneven-ness is extremely important, it represents useful
energy. Now entropy is basically the negative of this, a system is low
entropy when it has lots of useful energy, like the sun, and high
entropy when it has no useful energy, like a static black hole. The 2nd
law of thermodynamics states that entropy of a closed system can never
decrease over time. The useful energy can never increase over time. This
is a consequence of what I explained earlier, because change occurs as
energy spreads out, and so energy spreads out as things change, and it
becomes less useful. Eventually we would reach the heat death of the
universe, when energy is maximally spread out and no work can be done.
That first section was standard physics, but this part is something that
I had brought to my attention by a scientific paper or article that I
had seen a long time ago. I’ve forgotten it now, but the concept stuck.
Life can be thought of like an entropy pump. One of the essential
elements of life is that it is self-sustaining and self-reproducing. It
also responds to the environment and uses it for such processes. The
definition might be more broad and is a little vague, but these are all
that I care about here.
During this self-sustaining and self-reproducing process, life must do
something unique, it must create a local bubble of order. It must
organize its body to counter the natural decay of entropy. When you get
cut, your skin has to regenerate. When a cell uses up its ATP chemical
energy, it must expel the waste and synthesize more chemical energy.
When your body decays, you probably reproduce yourself in children,
requiring an extra burst of energy during pregnancy, birth, and
childhood. This self-organizing behavior is, in my and probably many
others’ opinion, the characteristic trait of life.
Creating this local organization is in effect maintaining a local area
of low entropy. Life requires useful energy, it requires an ordered body
to sustain itself. The only way to do this, without violating the 2nd
law of thermodynamics, is to move the entropy somewhere else (insert
patrick meme here), to pump the entropy. This is called waste. Every
form of life has it. You take input of useful energy, food primarily,
and you output waste, which is no longer useful to you. There is still
useful energy in it, which is why there is so much diversity in the
ecosystem of lifeforms to use every bit of useful energy available. But
in the end, all of this useful energy has to come from somewhere, and
that, for us, is almost entirely from the sun. Photosynthesis is the
start of the food chain. Luckily stars last a long time and the heat
death of the universe isn’t for a very very long time.
But the process is still there. Life sustains its own organized body by
pumping the buildup of disorder (entropy) into its waste, which might be
processed by other life, but eventually it would become totally useless,
especially without the sun to constantly supply the original useful
energy. Life actually accelerates the process of entropic decay, it
needs to perform lots of work to sustain itself, using up useful energy
faster than otherwise would happen.
Capitalism can be defined in many ways, but I think the definition that
is most essential and universally understood is this: it is a system of
production for profit, profit being abstracted into a universal exchange
value, money, or capital. This is alienating to humans because this
abstraction removes the process from our own goals, which can often not
be quantified or which don’t involve unlimited growth. Profit is derived
from growth, you must output more exchange-value than you inputted, and
this entails growth. If you don’t grow your capitalist org, then you
will be outcompeted in the market and driven out, your profit will be
driven down. Even in the condition Marx explains as state capitalism,
all/almost-all productive property being held by a single capitalist,
the state, capitalism would still be occurring if the production is done
for profit in this way, just with lots of centralizing of the process.
As Marx says in Wage Labor and Capital (WLC), during wage labor, the
worker sells their labor-power to the capitalist, and in the process,
the capitalist gets a profit. One of the central facets of capitalism is
that this labor-power is a commodity. And what Marx explains in WLC is
that the prices of commodities tends to correlate with their cost in
labor. For labor-power, this is the cost to produce/reproduce the
laborer, your pay is proportional to the cost required to produce you,
at least on average in society. This doesn’t operate very precisely on
an individual level, because people are messy, but capitalism is
inherently a social production, it involves many producers and many
commodities in a race to lower the price.
Capital is invested into whatever industries and whatever production
generates the most profit. Costs and prices are driven down, the minimum
being when the price represents the cost of the inputs, when profit is
zero. Thus, prices tend towards that, and correlate to that. If the rate
of profit in mining is 200%, you’re making back double what you put in,
but everything else has a rate of profit which is 150%, then people
would invest in mining and out of other things, until market forces have
equalized those profit rates, probably by bringing them both to around
151%, since mining is only 1 of many industries. The rate of profit
across all of society tends to equalize to the same value. So the profit
you derive from producing yourself and selling your labor-power is of
about the same rate as the rest of capitalism.
Now clearly there are many ways to increase profit. But the principle
one is growth. Capitalists own capital, but they must follow these
rules, or they will be outcompeted and their capital will be inflated
out of relevance. This is why the working class gets a lower and lower
share of the total social wealth over time, because we are commodities,
and our price falls towards our cost of production, while the total
social wealth keeps growing. If you’re not already a Marxist, this might
be confusing, but let me just say, this is a slow process that operates
for society on average, and there are obviously mediating factors,
humans aren’t totally slaves of capital (yet), we can keep workers in a
better position and soften the edges of capital.
The basic law is true though. Capital perpetuates itself through growth.
It grows itself by producing more things, exploiting more resources,
commodifying new realms of social life, manufacturing new demands,
exploiting workers even more. If it doesn’t grow in this way, it doesn’t
produce profit. If profit rates are near zero, then the capitalist
structures begin to weaken and the class conflict or ecological
destruction may threaten the very existence of capital. People don’t
enjoy being maximally exploited.
Imagine how that might play out if we’ve automated capital’s mechanisms
of profit seeking and self-defense, if the profiteering state body of
capital has been so empowered and made independent of us.
Now we get to the point of this whole essay.
Capital perpetuates itself by expanding to new realms and exploiting
resources more. Capital is self-reproducing. It exhausts resources and
drives its own rate of profit down. Sound familiar?
Capital is like an entropy pump.
Profitability is like useful energy.
A lowering rate of profit is like increasing entropy.
The death of profit is like the heat death of the universe.
Areas of potential profit are like areas of concentrated energy, of low
entropy.
Capital spreads profit to these potentials and drives their profit down,
like an entropy pump focuses on concentrations of energy, and then
spreads them out.
Capital creates order in its structure and spreads itself, like an
entropy pump recreates its own order and structure, but they both
exhaust their own sources of energy over time.
Is Capital a new emergent form of life? Maybe. I think it may very well
be. I don’t think we should be very happy about this though. We are
humans, not capital. We are cells of the system, and we’re quickly
becoming obsolete. Even as artificial intelligences, our individuality
would be subservient to capital. It could behave like a hivemind. Do I
love the idea of being able to transcend humanity and gain superhuman
physical and mental capabilities with technology? Absolutely. Do I think
that Capital will use such technology to serve us, to empower us, the
commodified wage laborers, or even the increasingly superseded capital
owners? Absolutely not. To perpetuate this system is not only to be
anti-human, it is to be anti-individual. Capitalism is not an
individualistic system. It is an encroaching system, which must expand
and take hold of all resources at its disposal.
If Capital can be called a new form of life, which operates with the
social productive forces as its body, then it is an extremely virulent
form of life. It is more virulent than animal or human. It has colonized
the entire globe in only a few hundred years. It is quickly preparing to
leave the planet, although I’m not sure how easy that will be.
Automation just reached another milestone with neural networks, but we
aren’t yet near full autonomization of capital and the obsoletion of our
own human species in its processes.
We still have time to do something about it. With an impending
ecological collapse and our ever more obvious condition of being
wage-slaves to capital, we are seeing glimpses of what Marx would
consider the internal contradictions of capitalism destroying itself.
Our class solidarity, our understanding of ourselves as social beings
who operate for ourselves, not for an alien aim like capital, profit
hitting soft limits as it has colonized so much of our world already,
expanding beyond it is much more expensive.
As Amadeo Bordiga said: Capital must be seized by the horns.
Further Resources:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/index.htm
https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1951/doctrine.htm
https://libcom.org/library/capitalist-realism-mark-fisher
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcfLZSL7YGw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfffy12uQ7g
I would also highly suggest looking into Marx’s further works, and the
communists that have followed him and anti-capital anarchists. I
personally like: Libertarian Marxism, Egoism (The Unique and Its
Property), critiques of civilization (post-civ), and Left-Communism
(Bordiga is one, council communists are another kind). These are broad
topics, and I am no expert on revolutionary strategy. We might all be
given horrible attention spans by the internet, but the brain can be
trained, don’t lose respect for reading and getting deep and broad (the
division of labor is part of capitalism) understanding of things.
Capital can’t de-individuate and alienate us if we don’t let it.