Quote from: RE on Apr 15, 2024, 04:13 AM

Quote from: jupiviv on Apr 15, 2024, 02:31 AMWe appear to be having ourselves an online debate even if I didn't ask for one.

Here on the Diner you don't have to ask for a debate in order for one to pop into existence out of the infinite pool of ideas out in the ether waiting to be explored by curious sentient life forms, in this case homo saps.  It's the distinguishing feature of Diner participation.  So are disagreements on core beliefs and periodic napalm contests where members involved in a particularly heated disagreement devolve into ad hom argument and language usage generally not considered acceptable in a court of law or formal debate according to Robert's Rules.  :)  I try to maintain order when things get out of hand.  So far, you guys are doing fine, just a reminder to stay cool.

RE

I get it but was caught off guard by this particular disagreement, which is mea culpa for reading the title as being critical of Malm & co in the same way I tend to be.

Quote from: RE on Apr 15, 2024, 04:55 AM

Quote from: jupiviv on Apr 15, 2024, 03:18 AMTo answer your question, democratic management is necessarily rational.

I haven't found that to be true, since a democracy is composed of people and people aren't always rational.  In fact, as often as not they are irrational, governed by emotions and seduced by their appetites.  They are easily habituated and addiction prone.  The are not created equal in many respects, from physical attributes like size and strength to a range of intelligence that goes from dumb as rocks to theoretical physicists and social, religious and mystical philosophers.  They have hormonal differences that make some incredibly aggressive and others ridiculously passive.  Half carry & birth new ones, the other half doesn't. Some are followers who if you don't tell the to tie their shoes they will trip every day, others are leaders who won't do anything anybody else tells them to do.  etc, etc, etc.

Democracy tends to fail because of all of these inequalities, and you can't legislate them out of existence.  The larger and more complex the society becomes, the greater becomes the problems inherent in all these differences.  Our genetic evolution and reproductive strategy is closest to Bonobos, and anthropologically speaking, the best we ever did on a social level was as small groups of Hunter-Gatherers.  With the advent of agriculture and large civilizations, a whole slew of moral imperatives, rules and social structures have evolved to keep these unwieldy size groupings of people organized, and all of them are flawed.  The Nation State was bad enough, Globalism has made it totally unsustainable.  Most of the problems we have as a society actually predate industrialization and Marx, they go back to the dawn of civilization in prehistoric times.

Far as my claims for what human nature is, it is to live as Bonobos do.  But ya can't do that with 8 Billion people infesting every square inch of habitable land.  If were going to have a society of Homo Saps that accurately reflects human nature, we'll need a serious reduction in population.

RE

Human nature is what human society makes of it, hence not really human nature. The alternative view, yours, is to bring in a third factor which in the post 19th century world tends to be some combination of 1> genes 2> culture and ideology, ie culture/ideology sublimated out of social determinations (at least the direct material/economic kind). I disagree, but without erring in the opposite direction. Those things can and do affect what people become, but I'm unaware of any compelling evidence or theory indicating they override or at any rate function independently of socio-economic constraints and incentives.

Most of the bio/gene stuff was soundly debunked in the 70s and 80s by people like Stephen Jay Gould. The debates today are derivatives of derivatives of the original. We know that genes are not blueprints, that individual genes have diverse expressions across the whole phenotype, and also that Mendelian inheritance patterns only work as they should in theory for artificially regulated and purified lineages.

All of this is uninteresting to me because reality itself as I see it flatly contradicts it, especially through the lens of Marxism + resource-constraint-based analysis that I subscribe to. It is blatantly clear that the standard of what human nature entails is overwhelmingly determined by the given social structure. For example, the slave-based ancient societies thought slaves were naturally inferior to slave-owners, or the members of a powerful genos/clan/tribe superior to weaker ones. Nowadays no one thinks like that, not only because it's considered immoral but also because it doesn't fit in with how this society works. Even human traffickers are just trying to make a buck, same as everyone.

You're expressing the logic of decadent bourgeois liberalism when you postulate an impartial biological lottery, combined with a substratum of flawed human nature being the downfall of civilizations throughout history. If you'd lived in the middle ages, these ideas would have been incoherent (e.g the idea of 'history' as we use it simply did not exist back then). To sum up, your opinion on innate human nature is itself a product of socially determined human nature. Funny ain't it? :)

I find much more interesting your statement that most of the problems of society predate capitalism/industry. This I absolutely agree with. Capitalism is just the latest, greatest manifestation of the rule of alienated wealth over society. Capital is the transhistorical contradiction and capitalism (wage-based profit accumulation), feudalism, slavery etc are the historically progressive stages or forms. Marx himself acknowledged and wrote about this. His magnum opus is after all Capital, not Capitalism.

Anyway, so regardless of the changing structure, the social metabolism has always been rooted in the contradictory metabolism between mankind and nature. To be human is to be conscious of pain, death and scarcity. But that means the contradiction existed ever since humans attained consciousness and was always going to progress towards larger more complex forms of organization capable of manipulating nature in the service of human needs.

This is where the collapse angle is useful. Maybe things just didn't line up the right way for it to reach the stage of (real) democracy. After all capitalism did not develop equally all over the world. It developed in Europe/N America who were insatiable parasites on the global south, which developed only later on and within the severe constraints imposed by the effects of said parasitism. The ability of imperialist countries to stabilise their domestic class antagonisms, combined with discovery of cheaper-than-free oil in the colonial and settler-colonial regions has prolonged capitalism far beyond its historically tenable limits. Marx and Engels predicted socialism--->communism within 50 years, which didn't happen despite the USSR. Even Lenin thought W Europe would be socialist by 1925. Nothing worked out like it should have, and there's no certainty it will this time around.

Hunting-gathering could well be the future... although the level of destruction it would take to get there is likely to cause extinction, not to mention lingering effects of industrial civ like pollution bio-diversity loss and radiation with no means to ameliorate let alone erase them. But even if it happens, it cannot be the solution cus if it was we wouldn't have come to this point to begin with. And it still wouldn't be caused by 'human nature'.