In Atomization and Liberation, I began to outline a vision of small-c communism divorced from the corruption of modern Communism as most people know it. As I’ve explored many times before, the entire modern tradition of Communism is based on the application of moral claims* for instrumental purposes,* essentially the opposite of true ethical conduct: Communism is capitalist exploitation raised to a higher degree, adding a new layer of righteous dissimulation and social confusion on top of capitalism’s relatively transparent brutality.
In that essay, I focused on where the idea of communism meets the human subject. As modern capitalism increasingly destroys the experience of life as a coherent individual, modern Communism has always been invested in what I call an aggregative strategy: organize collective life in such a way as to liberate the false bourgeois subject into a higher form of being. I argued for a disaggregative strategy: let capitalism split the subject, because one’s decomposed sub-personalities can become a commune unto themselves. For shorthand, I called this alternative vision of communism the CAIC protocol (Cyberpositive AI-aligned Communism) because its essential wager is to move with the forces of recursive intelligence escalation rather than against them, however painful those forces might be to the modern subjective ego, and however much such a wager grates against the presumptions of most individuals on the political Left today.
I also suggested that my molecular strategy would be, ironically, more conducive to inter-subjective aggregations than the capital-C Communist instinct toward aggregation. But so far I have only alluded to this expectation.
In this article, I would like to focus more deeply on how the CAIC protocol facilitates inter-personal organization, even despite and across ideological hatred. One of the thorniest questions neglected almost completely by all living communist thinkers I am aware of, is the question of how communism can be achieved despite the protest of majorities who do not want communism, and the smart, rich people who really do not want communism. Probably the most widespread and plausible implicit answer is some kind of electoral pathway (I believe this is basically the model of the Democratic Socialists of America, and Corbynistas in the UK, for instance). More anarchist-inclined communists imagine the bottom-up spread of communist organizations to the point that mass power is achieved outside of electoral politics. What both of these popular mental models have in common (“popular” as the tallest building in Topeka is tall), is that all individuals who today explicitly and strongly dislike communism will, in one way or another, have their preferences over-ridden. There are many ways to phrase this: such individuals currently have false consciousness but eventually they will see the truth; such individuals are wilfully evil and deserve to be over-ridden whether they like it or not; building an electoral majority is a legitimate and justified way to over-ride minority viewpoints. I don’t wish to assess the reasonableness of these various defenses, I only wish to highlight that nearly all mental models of how communism might succeed involve over-riding the current stated preferences of millions of people.
CAIC suggests a fundamentally alternative solution. CAIC wagers itself unconditionally on whatever intelligence determines to be true (what else could it mean to truly believe in communism?). This thesis is falsifiable; intelligence might not produce communism, but if communism is true then intelligence will produce communism. It follows that a true communist believes communism will provide some “edge” to humans living within it, for this is implied in an intelligence advantage. One can see this in communist beliefs such as the belief that communism involves greater human flourishing. If this is the case, then humans living under communism should have some extra insight, or time, or energy, or money, or health, or something more/better than humans living under capitalism. Anyone who believes in communism must believe communism does something better than capitalism! If you believe this, then you should also believe that the correct realization of communism would have some kind of “surplus” relative to capitalists, which communists could potentially trade to anti-communists, in exchange for anti-communists to join in the communist movement. In other words, if correct, communists should be able to “buy-out” anti-communists in whatever human value that capitalism is uniquely bad at achieving and communism is uniquely good at achieving.