Liquid trees

It is hardly contentious that all modern science is materialist, including even psychology, that seems compelled to prove its scientific credentials by referring and reducing to neuronal processes. The social sciences, too, investigate the positive 'reality' of materially anchored, social practices and structures. But what is matter? Is it what can be perceived by the bodily senses and measured by various techniques and apparatuses to provide data for analysis? Is it what extended, physical beings are made of?

Already with the ancient Greeks, science (ἐπιστήμη _epistaemae_) focused on physical beings with size (μέγεθος _megethos_), extension (ἔκτασις _ektasis_)  and mass (ὄνκος _onkos_). Their word for matter is ὕλη (_hulae_), which in its everyday usage covers all sorts of wood: a forest of trees, timber for building, firewood fuel. For the Greeks, the paradigmatic kind of matter is tree, from which the philosophical concept of matter is abstracted, or 'pulled off'.

Modern physics and chemistry would seem to have come a long way from this primitive Greek conception of matter, but is this truly the case? Modern physics has broken down matter into sub-atomic entities including protons, neutrons, electrons, and even stranger entities such as quarks and gluons holding them together like glue, and light itself, composed of streams of massless quantum entities called photons (from Greek φῶς, _phos_ for 'light'). Light is the purest form of energy, consisting of massless photons travelling at maximum physical speed c, the speed of light, thus representing the purest form of transformation of matter into movement, as expressed in Einstein's famous equation E=m.c^2.

In the present globalized world, energy is of vital importance not just physically by powering the movement of all sorts of technological things in production processes, but prior to that, and even more so, in powering such technological things for the sake of keeping valorization of the Medium going, i.e. the endless circular movement of thingified value going through its various value-form transformations to generate surplus-value. The hidden global imperative is that thingified value endlessly augment.

Although the valorization movement of thingified value is purely formal and infinite, it also requires the physical movements of production and circulation, including the activity of human labour, for its endless augmentation. Only by virtue of valorization of the Medium being endless does it have also an endless need for physical energy to drive all the necessary physical movements, enhanced by various technologies for the sake of cost-cutting productivity increases that, in turn, enhance the generation of surplus value.

These technologies have long since liberated themselves from a reliance on matter in the Greek sense, i.e. on wood. Technological devices and buildings are no longer made merely of wood, and energy is no longer provided by burning firewood. We moderns flatter ourselves that we have long since surpassed what a Greek carpenter can do with timber or a Greek blacksmith can achieve with a hammer, anvil and a charcoal fire. We have moved on to more sophisticated fuels as energy sources such as coal, oil and natural gas. All these so-called fossil fuels, however, derive from decomposed trees extracted from the Earth's crust. Trees decompose over geological æons into solid coal, liquid oil and gaseous natural gas, and all three fossil fuels can be burnt to generate electric current that is today the preferred power source for any physical movement, especially as required by valorization of the Medium.

It is even the case that liquid trees, i.e. mineral oil, is the material employed to make myriad kinds of plastics that are ubiquitous in today's world. Without the discovery of polymers, many modern technologies would be impossible, and our lives as players in the gainful game would not be so convenient, environmental pollution by plastics be damned.

The depletion of the Earth's huge deposits of fossil fuels by digging them up or otherwise extracting them, then burning them, has led inevitably, over frighteningly few centuries, to devastation of the Earth for the sake of endless valorization. Climate change, with devastating ramifications, including geopolitically, is upon us. Political efforts are being undertaken to accomplish the momentous shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources for the sake of sustainability. But who is seriously asking: sustainability of what?

Further reading: Laws of movement & Energy.

'An Invisible Global Social Value' TT&S Vol. 5 no. 2, 2024.

Capitalocene & The global law of movement.

Sustainability? Of what?.

Three laws of movement (again).

Three laws of movement (again)

Let us take another look at three laws of movement already addressed in other posts (see links below):

i) the second Newtonian law of physical motion 

f = m.a (or force is equal to mass times acceleration),

ii) Einstein's astounding law of mass-energy equivalence 

E = m.c^2
(energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared), 

and

iii) Marx's basic formula for the valorization of thingified value as capital 

M -> C -> M+ΔM
(value-form transformation of advanced money-capital into commodities required for a production process and the further value-transformation of the product via the circulation process into money-capital returned with a surplus value).

Re i): Newton's classical second law of motion is a most elegant example of how the physical motion of a physical body, regarded as a point mass, can be encapsulated in a surprisingly simple mathematical equation. The scope of its application seemed for centuries to be unlimited, albeit that its first realm of application, in the 17th century, was that of planetary motion, which was at the focus of attention for great names such as Kepler, Galileo and Newton. Along with the law of inertia and of equal and opposite reaction between interacting physical bodies, the law was cast as applying throughout the universe in an homogeneous mathematized (real vector) space ticking uniformly with an absolute, continuous, real time variable t.

Galileo's famous dictum of 1623 in his Il Saggiatore — that the laws of nature are written in the language of mathematics — nevertheless turns the truth upside down. Rather, it is the absolute will to power over all kinds of movement that dictates, in particular, that the physical (loco)motion of (celestial) bodies be made precalculable through an appropriate kind of mathematics, namely, the infiinitesimal calculus. Mathematical precalculable predictability of movement satisfies the will to power over movement by reducing physical motion to solvable equations. 

Already a century earlier, in 1543, with his book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, Copernicus had ostensibly empirically proved that the Sun does not revolve around the Earth, but conversely the Earth around the Sun. This is nonsense, of course, because motion is relative and reciprocal: if, from A's standpoint, B revolves around it, then conversely, from B's standpoint, A revolves around B. The point of Copernicus' discovery is that the motion of the planets becomes mathematically more elegantly describable from the perspective of the Sun's reference frame as revolutions around the Sun. The complications of Ptolemaic epicycles of planets revolving around the Earth are done away with, paving the way for a more uniform, elegant Newtonian theory of gravitational motion in an homogeneous space.

Re ii): Einstein's mind-boggling equation E = m.c^2 pronounces the equivalence of mass and energy as a postulate of special relativity theory. It was derived not by considering the equivalent of Newton's second law, but by considering and postulating the equivalent of the classical principle of conservation of momentum. Whereas in Newtonian mechanics, a) (counted clock-) time is taken to be uniform throughout the universe and b) the mass of a physical body is taken to be a non-transformable constant in physical interactions, in Einsteinian special relativity, a) (counted clock-) time is relative to the observer's inertial frame of reference and b) mass depends on the body's speed in a given reference frame. The momentum of a physical particle no longer depends solely on its velocity, but also upon its relativistically variable mass. This circumstance links mass with physical movement and thus with kinetic energy. Time itself becomes the one-dimensional path of light, that is linked to the three spatial dimensions via the Lorentz transformation. Henceforth, physical events are conceived as happening in the universe at space-time co-ordinates (x,y,z.ct) in an observer's frame of reference. (The observer here may be simply an apparatus set up somewhere to gather physical data.)

As a body (particle) approaches the speed of light in a given inertial reference frame, its mass tends toward infinity, at least according to the equation expressing the relativistic mass in terms of a particle's rest mass. In other words, the greater the momentum and kinetic energy of a particle, the greater its mass and, in the limit, the threatened, physically impossible infinitude of mass is averted by the conversion of all the mass into the motion of pure light composed of a stream of massless, quantized photons. Matter dissolves into (divine?) light. Einstein's equation expresses nothing other than this possibility of the transformation of matter into pure, energetic movement (including the thermal energy of atoms and molecules in motion) — the physical law for developing nuclear energy and atomic bombs. Anything physical moving at the speed of light cannot have any mass, which is the case for electromagnetic radiation. Note that, whereas the absolute speed limit for anything physical is equal to c, this speed limit does not apply to the movement of the mind, which is non-spatial and hence both nowhere and everywhere.

Note also that, whereas Newtonian gravitational force only acts upon physical bodies with mass, in general relativity theory massless light is subject to gravitational force by dint of its being equivalent to the curvature of space-time itself. The straight path of light in special relativity becomes its curved path in general relativity.

Re iii): Marx's formula for the valorization movement of (the Medium of) thingified value has hitherto not been called a law of movement. Unlike Newton's and Einstein's laws, it is non-predicative but instead enunciates an inexorable principle that the transformational circuiting of advanced capital through its value-forms must fulfil if the circuit is to be sustainable. If a circuit of valorization does not generate a surplus, but instead a loss diminishing the originally advanced money-capital, this endangers the movement altogether, because eventually the capital will consume itself and end up as nothing. 

The law of movement usually associated with Marx's Das Kapital read in the orthodox way is the so-called labour theory of value that Marx adopted in a modified form from Adam Smith. But this 'law of labour-value' is untenable; equal amounts of embodied "socially necessary labour-time" do not change hands in the exchange of commodity goods and services (nor even a regulated modification of such labour-time quantities as investigated in the so-called 'transformation problem'). Rather, quite the opposite: it is the exchange itself in the Medium of thingified value that determines the magnitude of a commodity's value. The commodity's embodied labour is thus evaluated on the market itself.

The deeper insight offered by Marx's main work is that a capitalist economy, and especially a global capitalist economy, must satisfy the principle of valorization if it is to remain viable. This is the law that rules the global economy. Hence economic growth must be unlimited, the finiteness of the Earth and all that lives on it be damned. This law of movement remains invisible and unknown to the modern science of economics because this social science is lacking its foundational concepts. They can only be uncovered by thinking socio-ontologically. The Medium of thingified value, namely, is an ontological form (εἶδος or 'look') of sociated labour that remains invisible to empiricist thinking.

The valorization of thingified value is plainly not a physical movement as such, but a principle governing the sociation in a capitalist economy. It does require, however, also kinds of physical movement associated with the production and circulation processes. Commodity goods and services have to be produced by many different kinds of labour employing many different kinds of physical means of production. Similarly, such produced commodity goods and services have to be actually sold to realize sales revenues for the capitalist enterprise, and this requires labour, including that of transportation and marketing, again employing the appropriate physical means. This entails in particular that the productivity of a production process can be measured via appropriate physical quantities such as hourly physical output which, in turn, can be converted into a measure of labour productivity if wage-costs are known. Each unit output then costs x cents in labour costs, but what the product can be sold for on the market is a brute fact that may have little connection with the labour costs.

As I said, the movement of valorization cannot be seen as such without the appropriate socio-ontological concepts. What capitalism is essentially, i.e. its ontological whatness, remains today an unposed and unanswered question. The social science of economics therefore cannot come to grips with the truth of this kind of sociating movement and instead fudges the questions, engaging wilfully in obfuscation. In remaining blind to the truth, economic movements are then (merely) explained by empirically based theoretical models. Economists look at empirical regularities and patterns from the past and try to extrapolate them more or less successfully. They tend to use sentences starting with 'History tells us that ...'. There is no unified economic theory at all, but only various bits and pieces of theoretical explanation for various scenarios based on unending empirical research. Empiricist modern social science does not even notice the deficit.

Further reading: Newton mathematizes Aristotelean ontology.

Laws of movement & Energy.

'An Invisible Global Social Value' TT&S Vol. 5 no. 2, 2024.

Capitalocene & The global law of movement.

Sustainability? Of what?. 

Appendix: 'A demathematizing phenomenological interpretation of quantum-mechanical indeterminacy' in Movement and Time in the Cyberworld De Gruyter, Berlin 2019.

Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking Core Phenomena of Political Philosophy De Gruyter, Berlin 2018.

On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.