[FORUM] "The permanent revolution"

[rfmcdonald]

Charlie Stross' latest blog post makes perfect sense to me. And to you?

For most of the duration of the human species, change has not been an overriding influence on our lives. In fact, it's only since roughly 1800 that you couldn't live your entire life using only knowledge and practices known to your mother and father. We are undeniably living through the era of the Great Acceleration; but it's probably[*] a sigmoid curve, and we may already be past the steepest part of it.

An interesting point is that this ideology works very well as a match for the political ideology of revolutionary republicanism which emerged in the 18th 17th century, and which pretty much everyone reading this blog[**] is in complete agreement with — the ideology that replaced the Divine Right of Kings and the Great Chain of Being as an organisational paradigm with "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite" (or, in bastardized form, Freedom, Equality of Opportunity [to make money], and Patriotism).

The doctrine of continual change through technology is not value-neutral; it feeds into the continual disruption that enables the permanent revolution of the anti-monarchists to roll forward, and prevents the oligarchs who sit astride the juggernaut from becoming too comfortable. It is in principle possible to suppress change; the problem is that suppression is a sub-optimal strategy in a polycentric world with competing interests. But once the capital imbalances that are driving development in the developing world and immiseration of the proletariat in the post-democratic first world subside, stasis will become an increasingly attractive policy to the oligarchs. (When the Great Acceleration stops, my guess is that the oligarchy will ossify into a nobility, and eventually a monarchical-system-in-all-but-name, within a century at most. And there are already worrying signs that this is happening.)

Please don't deny that you are a believer in this revolutionary ideology — and it is revolutionary; so much so that Republican Democracy, Fascism, and Communism are just minor doctrinal disputes within it. It's okay to admit it here; I'm a supporter of this ideology, too. None of us are supporters of feudal monarchism; we're all the inheritors of the early Jacobins. Which makes us revolutionaries.