exotic philosophical language like ‘multi-cellular type of structure’ is really only articulating an already simple and well understood feature of government; that of seperate bodies that cooperate (and keep each other in check) to make the governing process as democratic as it can be. contrarily, any government that yields absolute executive power from a ‘single cellular structure’ - to use the language of james - is a fascist government. probably the fact that you imagine socialism as being unable to be ‘multi-cellular’ is because the historical examples of any attempts at a socialism never made it past the initial stage of its revolution… and therefore had to mainstain a stringent ‘proletarian dictatorship’ comprised of a single party. this is why its commonplace to equate communism with totalitarianism, something marx nor lenin never permanently advocated. the purpose of the temporary central party dictatorship was to concentrate control and work out the difficult organizational processes involved in stabalizing the newly revolutionized society. but instead of moving past this stage, the communist countries turned into state-capitalist models. this is largely due to the fact that there was immense economic competition with other capitalist economies… so they had to be able to compete. that, and its a natural historical trend for those in power to find ways to keep their power. but this is all 20th century stuff, and the world is now more than ever ripe for a sucessful, global revolution something along the lines of what trotsky envisioned so long ago. shame that the banner of socialism is being carried by the clowns on the left today. they’re all entirely too moderate in my opinion.
there is nothing socialists oppose about the idea of a constitution per se. moreover, if you think of a socialism in terms of a governed and government split rather than a government of the governed, you’d naturally think in such dichotomous terms as ‘the government not wanting to lose its power to the governed’. but if the governed are the government, there is no opposing body to lose power to.
and the american constitution is being attacked because of how silly some of that shit is. just read a tweet of some redneck placating to trump over the right to bear arms. dude actually thinks there is a ‘god’ that has granted him a natural right to have a gun. i mean c’mon, man. seriously?
uh-oh. my toasted asiago bagel with cream-cheese has just arrived, and i should therefore like to conclude this post with great haste.
In the long run I kind of take an adverse position.Aristocracy had a stranglehold of many centuries of absolute control, the new money aristocracy knows they have to make it this time or they will be broken in an age of progressive short changing.
So it will rather be an internal spiritual virtual revolution with a spiritual head of reason triumphally coming back and willingly sacrificing itself, if , and only of, the new world order stumbles badly.
It will be the Roman Imperium redux, by structural necessity.
Even the eagerness by which a drastic power grab acceleration tries to obligate what is left of representing any form of checks and balances.
Its inconceivable for it to retain a will to powerful another socialist revolt. People will be satiated by perfumed narcotic overfed materialism to be able to sort things out.
The new left’s spectacular failure is proof enough, that was a prime example of a missed universal opportu ity.
That is not the multi-cellular aspect that I was referring to.
The way I understand it is that every SAM group is a separate cell-like or family like entity consisting of from 4 to 50 people. Each has its own constitution with unique amendments. Those constitutions act like a DNA molecule would in a human cell. The whole body of society would then have millions of those cells, each with a slightly different constitutional amendment set.
That is what I meant by “multi-cellular”.
I thought to be a fascist government required the forced oppressing or silencing of policy opposition. James’ CRH requires open, free, and constant debate concerning all laws. He even stated that laws must prove that they are accomplishing their aim else they are automatically removed.
It seems to me that a fascist government just does whatever it wants without allowing opposing views (exactly what the US Left is currently doing - a fascist socialist coup d’état). James’ CRH is the opposite, actually requiring regular debate against already standing laws as well as any new laws. The two seem completely incompatible. His CRH preempts and defuses any attempt toward fascism.
Weren’t Marx and Lenin all about historical natural outcomes of societies? If even with extra help, society ends up in a different place than they predicted, they were simply wrong.
Just from my own standpoint Marxist communism is just a fantasy. Didn’t Marx propose an eventual state of communal and peaceful anarchy, having no rulers? He imagined a day when there would be no competition against the status quo and thus everyone would simply be happy going along with the flow. That is a utopic fairy tale.
The communist party in China became dictatorial and capitalistic because natural human drives required it to happen. There was, and is, resistance from both outside and inside the communist state. And there always will be. That alone requires a military control over the population. And a military control requires an economic control which in turn requires wealth and capitalistic pursuits.
Even if they conquer the world, which they certain strive to do, they will not “beat their swords into plow shares”. That story was about as realistic as the Democrats paying off all student loans and providing universal healthcare for all the world. It was socialist carrot-on-a-stick propaganda since day one.
That sounds like double talk. The governed cannot also be the governor. That would constitute certain death. A government populous participation scheme can and does work, but there must always be something outside, uncontrolled, dictating limits. There must always be a restraining or confining element. And there must also always be incentive.
There is always division between an upper and a lower authority. And there must always be. That is why socialism always has a class distinction. It is a simple minded way to maintain a governed vs governor distinction.
In trying to avoid the potential wordsmith games involved in classifying government types, the issue is really only a matter of who has authority over your life. James was saying that the highest authority should be a combination of your own neighbors rather than someone far removed from your situation in life and probably someone you will never meet - an extreme democracy that even the Greeks would envy. He expressed the concern that a distant, unrelated person would not be able to truly assess your situation and thus not be able to properly guide or govern your life. How much does Pelosi or Trump know about your real situation?
He used the analogy of the entire world being nothing but small businesses. I didn’t see anything implying an overseeing hierarchy of authority controlling those businesses. Instead, the idea seems to be a practical answer to the concern, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” without the irresponsible welfare state debacle.
How can you have a socialist State if there is no State? He seemed to be proposing a form of constitutional anarchy - a constitutional substructure with no proposed hierarchical superstructure - no national ownership of production or financing.
It does seem that he allowed for a hierarchy to be formed by the choices of the independent groups or cells. He mentioned somewhere that a natural hierarchy would gradually evolve through time and experience from his CRH. In that vein he described the entire society to be like a human body where the brain and mind form without the conscious designs of the cells (the groups). The human body is certainly not a socialist structure. The human mind does not dictate the means by which the liver or kidneys do their job. It comes much closer to a constitutional republic of constitutionally formed cells (DNA being the cell’s constitution or James’ CRH).
sounds like a PAZ, and the first problem with these that comes to my mind is this; how do groups not bound by the same constitution interact with each other without coming into conflict over what is interpreted as legal/illegal behavior, or what is characterized as a ‘right’?
well i mean nobody can predict what will become of a society, really. aside from flirting a bit with hegel’s dialectical materialism idea that society evolves and develops according to some internal rationale/logic (which he later dismissed as too philosophical and idealistic), marx’s predictions weren’t so outlandish and really a matter of commons sense. at some point the working class will become conscious of its situation and want to radically change it. all marx did was critically analyze the relationship between workers and the owners of the means of production, and presuppose and impending conflict because of those circumstances. but phrasing such as ‘historical natural outcomes of societies’ are too ambiguous to really represent marx’s thinking. that’s something hegel would say, but probably not marx. there can be no unnatural outcome of a society, can there? i mean what’s an ‘unnatural outcome’?
that ‘utopian society’ stuff was made up by the right to caricature marx’s ideas and discredit them as fantastical nonsense. if marx ever used the term ‘utopian’ to describe this theoretical society, what he meant was a society in which drastic improvements were made to the quality of life for its citizens… not that we would all sit around the camp fire holding hands.
i don’t know if natural human drives ‘require’ anything, but i do know that there are any number of ways a political system can go under the various influences of the particular environment they are in. what happened to china is more like a contingency than a necessity. that china became what it did doesn’t mean it ‘had’ to become what it did, though.
to address all your other questions i’d rather just try and explain how eloquently simple the basic premise of socialism is. the single most important objective here is to put complete control of the means of production into the hands of the workers, and abolish private corporations. this seemingly minor detail would force a radical restructuring of the entire government and therefore affect every aspect of life directly. as a result a true democracy would take shape around it because the working class would become the managing class, hence the governing class. that’s the basic gist of it.
I didn’t see how the CRH would usurp authority from any existing Western government other than perhaps granting free speech. The Asians might not like it.
I suspect that you’re missing the point of the groups. No matter what the surrounding circumstance, it helps to have allies or friends. The SAM constitution seems to merely provide for allies regardless of life’s concurrent challenges. It really wouldn’t matter what kind of government you were under unless they expressly forbid SAM type groups. The SAM Corp (or later called “Coop”) is merely a structured agreement between friends to provide for mutual support. There doesn’t seem to be anything sinister, nefarious, or rebellious about it. It seems to be, and as he stated, merely like a small business agreement that pertains to more than merely making money. And I’n sure that making money isn’t forbidden either.
In this case, “natural outcome” doesn’t imply the existence of an unnatural. It merely emphasizes that things happen for understandable and expected reasons, like the “natural consequence” of a rock rolling down a hill or perhaps a parachute not opening in time.
So you don’t believe in determinism - everything is a consequence of what came before it?
At this point I think you have answered why you thought that James was proposing a socialist and fascist government. He was proposing the exact opposite, but I can now see why you thought otherwise.
We aren’t really talking about James anymore, but socialism. Do you have a preferred thread where we can discuss your ideas concerning the proposed benefits of socialism?
Nah I don’t hunker down and get involved in serious debates/discussions anymore. I learned years ago what a waste of effort this is. I’m only here because I’m a forum addict.
James was here for a long time discussing stuff with me. He once said I was the main reason he was here. When we had a falling out he began slowly withdrawing. He developed much of his ideas on cooperation in the period we were trying to get something on the rails. But meanwhile he was calling my friends snakes who would betray me. He was right about one or two by the way.
Its true many people aren’t here to take but to give. Everyone learns from each other though, except perhaps you, but thats not our problem.
Not to mention, will to power is what got them there in the first place. Usually, if not always, the party-leader types were, and I am from the heart of European Communism so I really have known them, the machiavellian and person-glorification types. Underneath them they have a layer of sycophants and actual hard loyalists, and these control what gets access to the leader.
How is anything more promising for socialism now? Where do you see any openings?
James completely opposed socialism because he opposes anything besides the Constitution of the US, which he intended to amend with this laborious procedure of perfectly justified adaptation to new circumstances which is partly outlined above. He didn’t intend to begin from scratch.
Either he was slipping here or was misunderstood; In physics, the “negative” should be entropy and “positive” anentropy, “self-harmony”.
Quite clearly, whereas in the lower categories, the “negative” and “positive” are value-judgments based on the standard of power, whereas “positive” or “negative” referring to electric charge isn’t a value judgment. An electrons state isn’t less desirable than a protons’.
Disagree?
Search James for Anentropy and self-harmony.
Wouldn’t that distinction be the “philosophy” category rather than physics?
It seems to me that he used the general idea of objectively constructive or gainful as the “positive”. I guess there are times when that could be merely a value judgement.
In his The Communal Particle thread, he states:
That would match with the entropy and anti-entropy. The anentropy (he explains as being the stable state) would perhaps refer to the neutral? Neither gaining or losing, but still being the most valued state in many regards.
James had pointed out long ago that life is actually not a pursuit of growth, gaining, and spreading as has been promoted for a long time, but rather life is actually interested in maintaining. The effort to expand (anti-entropy) stems from the higher concern to merely ensure maintenance (anentropy). Sex is instilled as a means to surround and protect a body with compatible defense.
He explains that the WtP thing is actually just the anti-entropy beginning stage of seeking anentropy. And that thought complies with Marx, Lenin, Hegel, and most political theorists who I know anything about.
even in this maintaining there is active force, and that we call one kind ‘defensive’ and another ‘offensive’ is really beside the point. so preservation and maintenance are just another instance of dominating, only here we call it reactive rather than active. but to be clear it’s not entirely sensible to talk (simpliciter) of intentions to grow and expand and preserve when referring to nature, because these characteristics are only attributed to language using people for describing various behaviors. of course you could say ‘this system is pursuing stability’, but it wouldn’t mean the same thing as saying ‘joe is pursuing some stability in his life.’ only a being capable of knowing and planning and anticipating can be said to ‘pursue’… while, say, a plant might be observed to be in a stable, balanced state, but this isn’t because the plant pursued these things. but james isn’t the only one guilty of this gross pathetic fallacy. here’s another guy who did the same thing…
now all this does apply to human beings and how they can understand the fundamental dynamic underlying their pursuits… but it cannot apply to things that do not consciously and intentionally pursue anything. to do so would be metaphorical and not literal language.
the grey area is… how complex does a life form have to be in order to be accurately described in such a way. are we taking monomeric molecules, polymeric molecules, prokaryotes, eukaryotes, what? at what point does it make sense to talk of an organism as actively engaging in behavior that can be defined as ‘pursuit’? i’ll tell ya. when that organism shares a public language with other language users. if a mawfucka don’t speak your language, it makes no sense to try and understand his behavior as such.
in that sense i can’t conceive of a will to power pervading through all that exists, much less that these things might have a ‘will’.
philosophers luuuuv to do this, man. and really it’s something they can’t help. they bring to life the entire universe with these metaphors and absentmindedly think of it in this distorted, anthropomorphic way. bergson does this. holy shit does he do this, man. schopenhauer as much as nietzsche, too.
Around 2014 and onward.
I started elaborately talking to him in I believe 2010.
I was just pissed off, this site has been unfathomably rich in constructive dialogue. (Ive been here since 2006)
No, because James explained atoms and even protons, neutrons and electrons in terms of anentropy and self-harmony.
Exactly. There is nothing less objectively constructive and gainful about an electron than about a proton.
Well, given the laws of thermodynamics, maintaining stability is a positive thing, requiring concerted effort.
Thats kind of the mystery that makes western philosophy superior to eastern types - the acknowledgement that neutrality and balance is an active thing, not a passive property of the universe.
What he doesn’t deny is that gaining power is required to maintain anentropy. Thus that therefore anentropy is “about” gaining power just as gaining power serves anentropy.
No one said anything about becoming manic.
It is rather that the word “power” makes people afraid, whereas it is a very morally-neutral term in physics. (Im coming from a physics background) Power doesn’t mean “crushing others”, it mostly means things like having a heartbeat. (As you know heartbeat is electrically powered so to want to keep ones heart beating is will to power.)
I personally do not believe there is any specific goal to existence. Will to power is simply a phenomenon that one can observe in all behaviours. So is anentropy a state that is observable in all stable particles and beings. My intellectual humility prevents me from prescribing a universal goal to the whole of existence. I just observe that all goals are values, thus that all goal-orientedness is valuing and that all activity which has as its orientation the maintenance of the self (indirectly, through appropriating the values proper to survival) is self-valuing.
I do not agree with James that nature has any concerns. His teleology for nature goes too far for me.
I only see tendencies which survive (due to logically clarified reasons indicated above) and tendencies which don’t.
“Will to power” is a tendency which survives because it supports itself. I call that “self-valuing”.
That makes it a profoundly fundamental thing though, doesn’t it?
Haha - don’t let James hear this. He absolutely loathed Marx.
But again will to power isn’t a political concept but one of physics and ontology, which explicates into more complex and particular fields such as human behaviour. Just like RM:AO and Value Ontology and any serious philosophical model.
I am not finding any discussion between you and him. Were you using a different name then?
I thought he explained everything in terms of affectance and anentropy was merely the stable state of gaining and losing affectance (subtle influences) at the same rate. Anything stable would be “anentropic” including those particles. Or am I missing something (I am jumping around a lot)?
He defined one as being of more affectance than what is around it and the other as being of less. Guess which was which. Both were called “anentropic” particles.
Maintaining merely means that something is enduring through time. Whether that is positive or negative is a value judgement. If you like whatever it is, its maintenance is positive. If you dislike it, it’s negative that it persists.
Apparently James agreed with that, although he has some Taoist references in there. The Taoists were anything but passive.
But he called it “anentropic” only when it is gaining no more than it is losing, like a stable economy.
That one makes me think that James would definitely be a Trumpian.
And also:
Where did James say anything about existence having a goal? I’m not finding anything.
I don’t see any disagreement with that.
“No concerns”? You believe that people and animals just live and die in blissful harmony, void of concerns?
You might want to inform the Buddhists. They seem to be wasting a lot of time teaching that trick.
Yes but you seem to be attributing concern and casting teleology now. A will is a desire. At what point does the physical mechanism become the willful incentive?
He certainty had a serious distaste for socialism.
I’m not so sure that is true. The will to power mantra has been used throughout a great deal of revolutionary politics.
I never knew how much trouble people were going through to do all of the quoting. It’s kind of a pain in the butt.
Are you referring to his proposal to make US laws obligated to their statutory goals? I’ not finding anything else concerning James being a fanatic about the USC.
He really prophetically hit the mark on that one. They aren’t hiding it any more. Trump bumped their timeline.
And his SAM Coop is completely separate from the USC. He was understandably a bit fanatical about that constitution concept.
Lol I spent years discussing it with him in dozens of threads. If thats all unsearchable, forget it, its pointless.
He wasn’t prophetic, he was just not sedated. Neither am or was I ever sedated, I feel anyone could have seen this coming.
Trump made sure its not going to happen under your radar. In their insane response to Trumps election the totalitarians have revealed themselves to you and to about a billion other reasonably sentient humans.
Could be it was mostly in PMs actually, but definitely not just.
There be some in the beforethelight.forumotion links.
In short his view was that the Consitutions only flaw is that it doesn’t have a proper process for accepting and rejecting amendments. His whole deal here with me and mine at first was to try and create a hermetically rational consensus-building protocol, which he wanted to see realized somehow into a legislature of the future.
Power is “the ability or capacity to do something or act in a particular way”.
That’s Google.
One can think of Superman who has numerous super powers such as “the ability to fly” or Heracles who was able to hold the world on his shoulders.
WTP, short for Will to Power, is the idea that everything we do we do in order to attain as much power as possible.
This means that we’d rather live a life that is short but powerful rather than a life that is long but powerless.
This is different from what JSS thinks to be the case. Using Nietzsche’s naming convention, you can say that his position is WTMIJOT (short for Will to Maximum Integral Joy Over Time.)
JSS would rather live a life that is short and powerless but high in IJOT than a life that is long and powerful but low in IJOT.
