The beginning of the atomic age
Does existential risk have a political meaning?
‘“Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” What does “regression into barbarism” mean to our lofty European civilisation? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means.’ — Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet, with the quote from the Erfurt Programme by Kautsky, misattributed to Engels
‘No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. It ends in the total menace which organised mankind poses to organised men, in the epitome of discontinuity. It is the horror that verifies Hegel and stands him on his head. If he transfigured the totality of historic suffering into the positivity of the self-realising absolute, the One and All that keeps rolling on to this day—with occasional breathing spells—would teleologically be the absolute of suffering.’ — Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, tr. E. B. Ashton
Rosa Luxemburg was talking about the world war. As anyone who attended a certain reading group will tell you, barbarism meant the degeneration of capitalism via imperialism. Imperialism referred to the period of capitalism after the 1848 revolutions where the great powers oversaw the second industrial revolution, the rise of the modern State (with its armies and police forces and economic management), of monopolies and of large trade unions, the Marxist Second International of socialist workers’ parties and the division of the world between cartels, trusts, financiers and colonial empires. Imperialism meant the highest, but decaying phase of capitalism, in which it fully developed the force that will destroy it (the organised proletariat itself.) Imperialism meant the eve of world revolution. The barbarism of the world war, and the betrayal of the socialist movement by German Social Democracy (SPD) indeed signified a harrowing moment—but one full of possibility.
The reason I’m raising this now is because ‘socialism or barbarism’ at some point in the meantime took the form ‘socialism or extinction.’ This raises the question again: what does barbarism mean ‘for our lofty civilisation?’ For Luxemburg, barbarism was a step to pass through into socialism—it now reads as the foreclosure of the possibility of humanity, let alone socialism.
If barbarism now means extinction, perhaps the transition happened in the 1950s where humanity literally became capable of destroying itself with nuclear weapons. Today we fear destruction from climate catastrophe, engineered pandemics and artificial intelligence. Marxism saw technology as clarifying the need for socialism. As the automatisation of production became increasingly comprehensive, the distribution of commodities according to claims of individual labour would seem increasingly contradictory, fueling the movement of deskilled labourers’ demands for ‘democracy’ and ‘socialism.’ The process was ugly but revealed the way in which humanity was destined for redemption. Technology created barbarism, but barbarism was but a stepping stone to socialism.
Adorno never contemplated extinction. In the section of Negative Dialectics from which the memorable quote comes on the slingshot and the hydrogen bomb, he identifies the world-spirit of Hegel with “a permanent catastrophe.” Marx stood Hegel on his head by reading his dialectic of Spirit as a moment in humanity’s engagement with Nature in production. Adorno does so by suggesting that instead of ‘a plan for a better world,’ the content of history is actually a series of moments of antagonism and suffering (barbarism?) whose positive unity can only be posited philosophically.
‘Society stays alive, not despite its antagonism, but by means of it; the profit interest and thus the class relationship make up the objective motor of the production process which the life of all men hangs by, and the primacy of which has its vanishing point in the death of all. This also implies the reconciling side of the irreconcilable; since nothing else permits men to live, not even a changed life would be possible without it.’
The basis of changed life is through the wreckage of history—Adorno was a Marxist after all, and he is merely recapitulating Luxemburg here. But all this is silent on the possibility of complete destruction. Does it really have no meaning to politics, or philosophical history, that we are now dealing with this possibility?
Perhaps the change of meaning of barbarism came not with the atom bomb, but a little earlier, with Stalinism. Stalinism destroyed the party as the instrument of knowing and remembering history, and consciously working through the development of capitalism and the real movement to transcend it. Instead, it embraced the State, and its ugliest form at that. Barbarism spread across the Earth, but it was no longer pregnant with the possibility of socialism. By the time the atom bomb arrived, politics had already been over. On this reading, the Promethean moment had no further political meaning. Imperialist capitalism had already bound the world into a totality that set the task of world revolution. And world revolution had already failed.
Needless to say, if the road to socialism must lead through the barbarism of the present, it is essential that this barbarism does not result in the death of everyone. Either we must trust some feature of capitalism to ultimately be able to contain existential risk, or a reconstituted socialist movement will work under a time pressure. Those on the Left who desire ‘socialism or extinction’ are unclear on what this call for socialism means without an existing workers’ movement. They also underestimate the difficulty of extinction. As Adorno noted, capitalism survives through discontinuity, through suffering—but it survives nevertheless. As Stalinism liquidated the party into the State, and rushed to acquire a hydrogen bomb, it also ushered in a world where competing and antagonistic States are forced to manage existential technologies together. Capitalism tends towards barbarism but not towards extinction—in fact, increasingly barbarous acts might be necessary to fend off the dangers of extinction. It is society in crisis, not society gone suicidal.
In 1955, Hungarian mathematician and member of the Manhattan Project John von Neumann penned the essay Can We Survive Technology? For Neumann, the world entered a special phase of civilisational history when humanity’s powers to shape the world have truly become global. Previously, any destruction was automatically contained by geography—there was no bomb large enough, no political force far-reaching enough, no environmental effect dislocated enough—to present a legible danger to the survival of the species. In the second half of the 20th century, this changed. Previously, there was a “safety mechanism” of externalities being absorbed through geographic expansion:
‘Now this safety mechanism is being sharply inhibited; literally and figuratively, we are running out of room. At long last, we begin to feel the effects of the finite, actual size of the earth in a critical way. Thus the crisis does not arise from accidental events or human errors. It is inherent in technology's relation to geography on the one hand and to political organization on the other. The crisis was developing visibly in the 1940s, and some phases can be traced back to 1914. In the years between now and 1980 the crisis will probably develop far beyond all earlier patterns. When or how it will end—or to what state of affairs it will yield —nobody can say.’
He focuses in large part on nuclear weapons and nuclear energy as enabling access to unlimited destruction and energy, respectively. But he also tackles the topic of changing climate and automation.
‘Let us now consider a thoroughly “abnormal” industry and its potentialities—that is, an industry as yet without a place in any list of major activities: the control of weather or, to use a more ambitious but justified term, climate …
‘The carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by industry's burning of coal and oil—more than half of it during the last generation—may have changed the atmosphere's composition sufficiently to account for a general warming of the world by about one degree Fahrenheit. The volcano Krakatao erupted in 1883 and released an amount of energy by no means exorbitant. Had the dust of the eruption stayed in the stratosphere for fifteen years, reflecting sunlight away from the earth, it might have sufficed to lower the world's temperature by six degrees.’
He anticipates the difficulties of controlled interventions in the climate, but seems quite optimistic that it would not be too difficult to eventually figure it out.
‘The main difficulty lies in predicting in detail the effects of any such drastic intervention. But our knowledge of the dynamics and the controlling processes in the atmosphere is rapidly approaching a level that would permit such prediction. Probably intervention in atmospheric and climatic matters will come in a few decades, and will unfold on a scale difficult to imagine at present.’
He was right in intervention unfolding ‘on a scale difficult to imagine’—but strangely he did not expect continuing (and uncoordinated) carbon emissions to be the culprit. Neumann also notes the exponential potentials of computers, which were in their infancy at the time.
‘In our century, … small electric amplifying and switching devices put automation on an entirely new footing. This development began with the electromechanical (telephone) relay, continued and unfolded with the vacuum tube, and appears to accelerate with various solid-state devices (semi-conductor crystals … ). The last decade or two has also witnessed an increasing ability to control and “discipline” large numbers of such devices within one machine.’
Having discussed some of the ‘disruptive’ technologies emerging in the following period, Neumann then turns to the question of how we can regulate them. He notes two properties of the emerging technologies: that they are both intrinsically useful and also lend themselves to destruction; and that they tend towards the global, towards dismantling geographic barriers.
How do we control the destructiveness of such technologies? Neumann argues that banning them is not an option. The first reason is that they are difficult to delineate, and they are also intertwined, which means that writing effective legislation to ban them would be near impossible. The second argument is that to ban them, we would need a special political formation, one of such power, that the entire question would become trivial:
‘the banning of particular technologies would have to be enforced on a worldwide basis. But the only authority that could do this effectively would have to be of such scope and perfection as to signal the resolution of international problems rather than the discovery of a means to resolve them.’
Indeed—I argued before that this would be the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat!’
There is a third argument against pursuing a ban:
‘Finally and, I believe, most importantly, prohibition of technology (invention and development, which are hardly separable from underlying scientific inquiry), is contrary to the whole ethos of the industrial age. It is irreconcilable with a major mode of intellectuality as our age understands it. It is hard to imagine such a restraint successfully imposed in our civilization. [My emphasis.]’
The ban would be the end of bourgeois society—the ban would constitute a form of barbarism itself. It would go against bourgeois right, it would mean micro-level control of everyday life and an expanding surveillance apparatus instituted by the State, as well as worldwide coordination between multiple (competing?) states. This feeds into a rather bleak conclusion from Neumann:
‘What safeguard remains? Apparently only day-to-day — or perhaps year-to-year — opportunistic measures, a long sequence of small, correct decisions. And this is not surprising. After all, the crisis is due to the rapidity of progress, to the probable further acceleration thereof, and to the reaching of certain critical relationships. [My emphasis.]’
Makes sense from a member of the Atomic Energy Commission! So that is it—technocracy to keep destruction in bay, small, day-to-day correct decisions!—or: the destruction of the ‘ethos of the industrial age’ and ‘a major mode of intellectuality’—personal liberty. If it is the former, and if there is a certain chance at every point that a decision goes wrong, (and they have to be discretionary, not rules-based decisions, by nature of the matter), then we can expect a certain ‘background rate’ of human extinction: every day carrying a minuscule chance that something goes wrong and the world blows up, or gets turned into grey goo, or is eaten up by some engineered pathogen.
Are we in a moment like Neumann’s? We can see a return of the 1950s in some ways. Chief of them is the new role of the state in the post-neoliberal world, the ‘soft-fascist mission economy’ (SFME) as the form of capitalist politics. A central objective of the SFME is going to be the control of existential technologies, and the ways in which automatisation in particular is going to proletarianise white collar work. This threatens with the destruction of the way of life of a large portion of today’s middle-classes. Aside from extinction, the two aspects of capitalist politics (poised against each other in tension) will be making ‘small, correct decisions’ in regulating technology, respecting ‘bourgeois right,’ civil liberties, on the one hand; and to go ‘contrary to the ethos of the industrial age’ and ‘intellectuality as our age understands it’—against bourgeois society, towards barbarism on the other hand. Political parties will try to appease the middle classes with some cocktail of personal rights and safety, while rushing to stabilise capital accummulation.
What about socialist politics? In Neumann’s time, the international socialist movement had been liquidated into Stalinism, an embrace of nationalism, the State and of counterrevolution. In our time, there is not even Stalinism, just a haunting memory of the Left rallying around this or that conglomerate of capitalist politics. If only it were socialism or extinction! That is an easy choice. But we currently have no socialist option—sinistra est mortua. In some ways, it is more difficult to face up to the possibility that capitalism can manage climate change, can manage artificial intelligence and demographic collapse and nuclear arms races. Watch and be amazed how, through catastrophe, mass murder, ecological degradation and plagues the world-state of capitalism reassembles and survives. Not in the perpetual peace of commercial society, but in the wreckage of war and chaos—or that which amounts to the same, the threat thereof. Until there is socialism, the choice is ‘barbarism or extinction’—and until there is socialism, ‘we’ don’t get to choose anyway.
Hát ez elég durva lett.