chapotraphouse

What would happen if capital succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries, the working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost.

Yeah, I know there's been a lot written on the USSR opening the floodgates for Capital, but I think it's time to abstract that out to "anti-enshittification anchors" that capital need to have to function, but that it is inherently hostile to and will seek to kill or co opt by any means necessary.

I don't mean like regulatory capture, I mean bodies that actively threaten capital's existence and by doing so force the concessions that ironically keep capitalism ticking over.

There's a clear argument to be made that the end of USSR really let capital off the leash so to speak. So if you imagine the theft of surplus value being a spectrum, after the USSR was no longer a counterweight

I think collapse of the USSR was a symptom and not a cause

Average heights in the west started falling from 1970 onwards. Not just the US but all of europe too, so it had nothing to do with immigration

US wages have also been stagnant since 1973. IDK what the wage timeline is for europe

There's also less incentive to do process improvements when there's cheap labor available. So the current arc of "development" is casting more and more people into greater and greater poverty.

Without the ballast of a proletarian state that prevents or fights capitalist expansion into new labor markets, the capitalist solution is to create death, destruction, and poverty to force people's surplus value out of them.

it's us pressing more and more often against the boundary of what research can be incentivized by the profit motive

yea i think you nailed what i was reaching for much more succinctly here

Out of curiosity how old are you roughly

I'm asking because you have good sentence structure

It really seams like it's just a neat trick to make the sums easier.

Part of what's weird about fundamental physics is that it is, in a sense, all just tricks to make the math easier. When you get below the level of non-relativistic QM (and even, arguably, at that level), the distinction between the mathematics of the theory and the theory itself starts to collapse. Some of this is probably just due to the fact that events and patterns at that scale are just so unfamiliar to us and our everyday experience: we can make intuitive sense of things like forces, acceleration, mass, and other stuff that's in the ontology of classical mechanics because we live in that world. Fields, Lie groups, fiber bundles, and other essential bits of the formalism at the QFT level are much harder for us to understand, because they can only roughly be mapped onto things that are familiar from our lived experience. This is part of why things like QFT, QED, and other candidate "fundamental" theories just seem like bags of mathematical tricks: in a very literal sense, those theories are telling us that the world just is a set of formal relationships and interdependent patterns. When you ask something like "well what is the theory really telling us, beyond the math?" for classical mechanics, I can give you a story--a narrative--about the world that maps the mathematics onto familiar concepts. When you ask the same question about QFT, there's no easily accessible metaphor or story: it's structure all the way down. Statements like "light sometimes behaves like a particle" means nothing more or less than "it's useful to think of light as being quantized in some contexts, because the mathematics seems to work that way."

I'm also an outsider and I find it helpful to see things in a similar way.

Everything can be divided up in different ways: relations of production, forces of production, social relations, means of production, mental conceptions, etc, etc. Science/technology is another one. They're all interconnected. Each one can develop even if the others stagnate. But there's a limit to how much anything can develop on its own. They either all develop or you reach a wall.

The hard sciences are near the wall. There's room for a little bit of development but nothing can flourish. Google '[discipline/science] funding' and have a look at what's required to secure research funding (or don't—it won't be fun lol). There is zero percent chance that any funder will knowingly pay a research team to conclude, 'capitalism must end'. There are research questions you're just not allowed to ask.

Not to mention that scientists are hemmed in on all sides by IP. Good luck advancing knowledge if you're not allowed to start at the most advanced point because some imperialist items the IP and keeps it locked away because reasons.

Researchers of all kinds know the system is terrible but without organisation none of them can do anything about it. And they're mostly labour aristocrats if they work in western research institutions, which means they are unwilling to even accept what the problem is beyond the surface detail of restrictive gatekeeping.

There's only so much even the best scientist can achieve in this system.

I feel like unless we figure out an extremely clever trick, we need just gigantic particle accelerators or quantum computers orders of magnitude better than we can currently conceive of to make substantial steps forward in physics anymore. Like, we're not even talking "Well, the USSR/China could do it because they weren't/aren't as beholden to the profit motive", we're talking particle accelerators the size of fucking countries, and helium liquid cooling on large scales to maintain quantum coherence unless we figure out more room-temperature shit.

String theory is a neat idea and I do genuinely find it interesting and have read books on it, but at the end of the day it's just a giant "so what" to me. Not "what's the point of making physics advancements" obviously, but "what's the point of creating these massive, complicated theories if we need a particle accelerator the size of the solar system to prove them right or wrong".