Capitalism's Fatal Flaw, and the Way Forward: Marxian Dialectics: New Dialogue, Exchange #1.

Dear Reader,

The transcript of "Exchange #1" in a new, 'multi-exchange' dialogue on extended Marxian Dialectics, has recently been posted to the www.dialectics.info website, as a new entry within Aoristos's Blog.

I have also posted this transcript here, below, for your convenience.

Regards,

Miguel Detonacciones,
Member, F.E.D.,
Officer, F.E.D. Office of Public Liaison

Exchange #1: Dialogue on F.E.D. Dialectics. 21MAY2015.

I1: Please tell me: Who or what is the Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica? What is the nature of your work, and what do you hope to accomplish by it?

I2: Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica is an organization for the conduct of ‘‘‘universal labor’’’, as defined by Karl Marx [Capital, volume III, Chapter V, Economy Through Inventions, NW [NY: 1967], p. 104].

Marx named, by his term “universal labor”, the conduct of the kind of human labor that, as distinguished from, but also as interconnected with, “cooperative labor”, and with ‘‘‘particular labor’’’, discovers new universal principles, principles that, potentially, advance the productivity of cooperative labor, and enhance potentially all ‘‘‘particular labors’’’. It thus includes, in particular, the labors of scientists and inventors.

The easiest way to define Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica is to say that it is the organization for the development, the eventual publication, and, thereafter, for the continued updating of Encyclopedia Dialectica.

But this is also the least revealing definition.

A more revealing way to define the Foundation is to address the resonance that we intended in naming it so -- the resonance, and the analogy, between the fictional world of Isaac Asimov’s ‘Foundation Heptalogy’, and the real world of contemporary global terran humanity.

Asimov described a fictional world in which a galactic scale human civilization was declining, whose culture in general, and whose science and whose ethical values, in particular, were in a nose dive, headed for a dark age, for 30,000 years of barbarism.

Asimov’s fictional Foundation, even using its new scientifico-mathematical tool called “psychohistory”, had only just enough resources, given the already advanced state of decay of that civilization, to deploy seeds of a new civilization -- enough to reduce that dark age interregnum of agony to a single millennium. The compilation and publication of that fictional Foundation’s “Encyclopedia Galactica” was a key element in the accelerated catalysis of the rise of that new galactic civilization, preserving the long accumulation of human culture, of art, of science, and of invention -- of human knowledge -- that would otherwise be lost in the descent into that dark age.

The intensions of our actual Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica are analogous to those of Asimov’s fictional “Foundation Encyclopedia Galactica” [for a galactic scale civilization], but at the planetary scale of planet Earth. Our contemporary global civilization writhes in a complex contention of tendencies that portend a first global renaissance, and tendencies that portend a new, likely final dark age.

It is our intension, in concert with like-minded others, to do all that we can to avert the actualization of those tendencies in the form of a new dark age here on Earth, and to catalyze their actualization, instead, in the form of global renaissance, or, if it is too late to avert a new dark age actualization, to act to help minimize both the severity and the duration of that dark age -- to avert its finality.

Our real Foundation is equipped with the newly-discovered tools of the dialectical arithmetics, and of their algebras, and with the principles of a successor field to classical science, which we too call “psychohistory”, or, more specifically, ‘psychohistorical dialectic’ -- a ‘meta-science’ which aims always to take into account, not just the cognitive content of the theories that we humans create, but also the «mentalité», the culture, the ideology [in Marx’s sense], in short, the ‘‘‘phenome’’’ of the theorizers, in the evaluation of old theories, and in the formation of new -- including through dialectical-scientific explanation of said «mentalités» themselves, as part of the ‘[meta-]evolution’ of the ‘‘‘human phenome’’’ as a whole.

We hold that we can achieve these aims, in part, through a revival, and through a ‘‘‘[trans-]modernization’’’, including through a ‘mathematicization’ [in a manner which also ‘co-transforms’ mathematics], and through an empirical ‘scientification’, of the dialectical tradition -- in the Occident, the tradition from Heraclitus to Zeno to Socrates to Plato to Aristotle to Hegel to Marx and Engels [to name only its principal developers] -- which, until the post-1900, descendance phase of capitalist civilization set-in, was the widely-acknowledged leading tradition of philosophy, of philosophical systematics, of philosophical logic, and of social science [at least].

Our goal, in short, is, via this revival of the dialectical tradition, to catalyze an accelerated advance in ‘‘‘universal labor’’’, including in the sciences of ‘‘‘human Nature’’’ and of ‘‘‘extra-human Nature’’’ alike.

This ‘re-advance’ starts with logic, and with mathematics.

For, as we have come to see, the primary barrier to further human scientifico-engineering advance -- to ‘re-advance’ in the conscious, democratic social engineering of new human-social “relations of production” [Marx], and in the infrastructural engineering of the new “forces of production” requisite to those new social relations, and to global, human-social renaissance -- is “The Nonlinearity Barrier”.

That Barrier is a deeply conceptual, philosophical, and affective barrier, not a simply “technical” Barrier.

Indeed, we have found it to be none other than ‘The Dialectics Barrier’, in its mathematical disguise.

Seen another way, our work is that of the immanent critique of the prevailing, crippling ideologies, in Marx’s sense, that can be foreseen, by ‘psychohistorical dialectics’, to afflict the ‘‘‘human phenome’’’ in the advanced-descendance phase of its global capitalist social formation, the predictable final phase of humanity’s “pre-history” [Marx], whether that “prehistory” ends in the globally liberating life of ‘political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY’, or in “the mutual ruin of the contending classes” [Marx and Engels].

This means to resume the work -- of the immanent critique of contemporary ideologies, and of the dissemination of the positive fruitions of those immanent, determinate, dialectical negations -- that Marx and Engels began, but left far from finished as of the times of their deaths.

The scope of this resumption includes -- and without the slightest concessions to the fraudulent claimants to Marx’s and Engels’s legacy; to the psychohistorically predictable, dictatorially corrupted, totalitarian ideologies of Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc., etc., ad nauseam -- the clarification of Marx’s ‘psychohistorical materialism’, of his dialectics, of the “dialectics of Nature” paradigm, opened especially by Engels, of the “law of motion of modern [i.e., of capitalist] society”, and of the lawful self-induced demise of that global capitalist/world-market system [including the clarification of the ‘the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall’, and of the ‘intra-duality’ of capital, as ‘self-expanding value’, versus as ‘self-contracting value’], the ‘psychohistorical materialist’ explanation of ‘The Modern Ideology’ in its entirety, i.e., of the pervasive «mentalité» of capitalist humanity -- its benefits, it pathology, and its remedy -- and the extention of Marx’s immanent critique of the capitalist-ideology-vitiated social science of “economics” [of capitalist “political economy”, “classical” and “neo-classical” alike], to an immanent critique of all fields of modern science, theoretical and applied/engineering alike -- of modern science in its totality, including, and, indeed, starting with, the immanent critique of mathematics and of mathematical logic, via the immanent critique of ‘infinitistic’ set theory, a critique whose positive fruition takes the form of a ‘mathematics of nonlinearity’, i.e., of a ‘mathematics of dialectics’, in ways which enable new fundamental advances in the human-social forces of expanding human-societal self-re-production, and, last, but far from least, the detailed dialectical derivation of the essential features of the higher successor system to the present, capitalist, system, for the organization of human-social reproduction, which we call ‘Political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY’, ‘‘‘Generalized Equity’’’, or ‘‘‘Equitism’’’.

Encyclopedia Dialectica, and the other publications and communications of Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica, are intended to serve as catalysts, and as seeds, toward all of the developments detailed above, seeds of a new, human-species-wide, ‘‘‘human phenome’’’, fit for the task of transcending human prehistory, with the human species in tact.