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The Camden Philosophical Society will meet on Tuesday, December 17, 3:30 – 5:30 p.m. EDT in the Picker Room of the Camden Public Library. All are welcome to participate, in-person at the Picker Room of the Camden Public Library or by Zoom. That goes for visitors, as well as year-rounders in Maine, and friends of the society wherever you may be.
If you wish to participate via Zoom, please email sarahmiller@usa.net. You will receive a Zoom invitation on the morning of the meeting. Click on the “Join Zoom Meeting” link in that invitation at the time of the event.
The Camden Philosophical Society is taking its exploration of philosophical questions related to artificial intelligence (AI) in a new direction in our next few sessions. We are asking how society’s approach to AI relates to capitalism. To start that ball rolling, we will discuss definitions of capitalism at our next regularly scheduled meeting, on Tuesday, Dec. 17. Some of the readings have been provided as holiday gifts from our own members.
Some weeks ago, we had a request from a participant for a discussion on the topic of capitalism. We begin our readings this month with a brief article written for the online outlet The Medium in 2022 by our own Sarah Miller, called “What Makes Capitalism Capitalism.”
The article can be found here: https://medium.com/@sarahmiller_22747/what-makes-capitalism-capitalism-51b99ae2d924.
Sarah asks whether capitalism is incompatible with a livable planet. If so, why? She suggests factors important to considering the question are the incessant growth that characterizes capitalism (again, why?), the work arrangements that contribute to this, and what we might identify as the engine that makes growth an imperative: competition. In so doing, she provides a framework for understanding what makes capitalism capitalism.
To flesh out our understanding we read a short chapter from Karl Marx’s Capital outlining a good part of the answer to Sarah’s question. In Chapter 4, called “The General Formula for Capital,” Marx explains how money is invested to make more money. We all know that, but how are we to understand its significance? Marx picks up a distinction from Aristotle’s Politics between the art of acquiring those things needed to maintain a household and to facilitate a good life – economics – and the practice of acquiring money to make more money. For the first form of acquisition, money is a means to facilitate the transaction; for the second, money has become the goal of the transaction. How does that work? And what is the significance of the difference for our lives? What does it mean for money to be the end goal of the transaction? Why did Aristotle think this improper? And what does it mean for value, what Marx calls the ‘dominant subject’ of the process, to become the “subjective purpose” of it? Indeed, Marx identifies value as not only a subject, but as an “automatic subject,” and a “self-moving substance.” Again, how are we to understand these characterizations?
Chapter 4 can be found here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch04.htm
Our third reading is also from Marx: An excerpt from his so-called “rough draft of Capital,” a text called the Grundrisse. The excerpt is itself an excerpt of a section popularly known as “The Fragment on Machines.” It illustrates two things we’re likely to overlook in reflecting on how things are produced: First, Marx argues that with developed capitalism, machines dominate the worker, not the reverse: if you shovel snow, the shovel carries your intention to the material you work on; if you’re on an assembly line, the machine dictates what you do. Second, Marx notices that the way our tools work is shaped by the social relations within which they evolve. Machines evolve in a way that allows them to fulfill the demands of capitalism; they develop “into a form adequate to capital.” We want to explore the implications of these points. In particular, do Marx’s conclusions hold for AI?
See Word document attached to this email for Marx fragment.
In her article Sarah recalls the quip that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Worth asking then, she suggests, whether moving beyond capitalism is even conceivable and what that might mean. In a short excerpt from the last chapter of his book, Capital as a Social Kind, Howard Engelskirchen, also of our group, addresses that question. The excerpt begins with a section called “Overview: Winning the Battle of Democracy,” and follows with an exploration of the democratic tasks that moving beyond capitalism might place on the agenda. The book had earlier explored the social relations of separation that characterize the fundamental structure of capitalism.
Now, Howard argues (in a passage that does not appear in the excerpt): “For one thing, we can start from where we are. Any action, now, anywhere, can be tested by the extent to which it furthers democratic forms that foster association rather than separation.” This includes such propositions as adding the right to work and earn a decent living to rights considered inalienable; participative worker control over production; and – continuing a theme of our recent sessions – democratizing the development of artificial intelligence: Eben Moglen, of the Software Freedom Law Center, insists on full and open access to AI; he is quoted: “Moglen’s Corollary to Faraday’s Law says, wrap the Internet around every brain on the planet, spin the planet. Software flows in the network. It is wrong to ask, “What is the incentive for people to create?” It’s an emergent property of connected human minds that they do create . . . We are a social species, and we create together; that’s our nature.”