Becoming the Means: Technologization for Transocialism (Why Technologize? & Ausmosis)

I. Why Technologize? & Ausmosis

II. Chlorogenesis & Xenosocialism

III. Why Transocialism?

Why Technologize?

To speak of technologization and transocialism (whatever that will mean) in the same breath is first to claim three things: that (an analysis of) one is not complete without the other, that technologization is for something, and that the political holds this authority over the technical. What I mean by this last point is not that we subordinate science to political doctrine (recalling the disasters of Lysenkoism), but rather that we apply science in a politically purposeful way. To confuse technical progress with social progress, as many have done, would confirm that technology is a hazardous concept, referencing late historian Leo Marx’s 2010 essay. In it he recounts that the meaning of technology has sharply transformed over the 20th century, from being merely ‘the study of production’ to a term “so inclusive, so various—its boundaries so vague as to defy exact representation (574).” He identifies a particular turning point in the 1847 railway speech by then U.S. Senator Daniel Webster, who unprecedentedly equated technical innovation (such as the railroad and telegraph) with the progress of society as a whole. In contrast to the early-U.S. liberal intellectuals (Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, etc.), who viewed technical progress as merely a means to sociopolitical progress:

“Senator Webster, whose most influential constituents were factory owners, merchants, and financiers, did not regard innovations in the mechanic arts as merely instrumental… He identified his interests with those of the company's directors and stockholders, and as he saw it, therefore, wealth-producing innovations like the railroad represented a socially transformative power of such immense scope and promise as to be a virtual embodiment - a perfect icon - of human progress [my emphasis]. Thus the new entrepreneurial elite for whom Webster spoke was to a large extent relieved of its tacit obligation to carry out the republican political mandate (566).”

This ‘virtual embodiment of progress,’ however, would only gain mobility by possessing the term ‘technology,’ and over time, rather than the word being exemplified by social systems of production, its meaning began to not only encompass, but be exemplified instead by objects (railways, telegraphs, cellphones). In the language he adopts from Marxist philosopher György Lukács, the hazard of technology as a concept is in its vulnerability for reification, to treat an abstract concept as if it were concrete (and to make this reification apparent, imagine a conversation where bodies were called biologies). To praise his wording, which I could not phrase better, he writes:

“Technology, as such, makes nothing happen. By now, however, the concept has been endowed with a thing-like autonomy and a seemingly magical power of historical agency. We have made it an all-purpose agent of change. As compared with other means of reaching our social goals, the technological has come to seem the most feasible, practical, and economically viable. It relieves the citizenry of onerous decision-making obligations and intensifies their gathering sense of political impotence. The popular belief in technology as a - if not the - primary force shaping the future is matched by our increasing reliance on instrumental standards of judgment, and a corresponding neglect of moral and political standards, in making judgments about the direction of society. To expose the hazards embodied in this pivotal concept is a vital responsibility of historians of technology (577).”

With our current political context of technofascist encroachment and climate disaster in mind, the task of redefining technology could not be more urgent. Therefore, we should supplant the reified perspective on technology, that it (singular) has agency and an internal logic, with the understanding that technologization is an inherently plural, open, and hegemonic contest. By hegemonic, I mean that the conflict is waged both for control over the means of production as well as the culture which frames our engagement with them. Indeed, it is because these processes are so interdependent that any strategy for lasting radical change must be conceived as a whole technopolitics. Without strong politics, we will fail to outmaneuver the same, the technocratic zombie of abundance liberalism. But without strong technics (a method for production and technologization), we will also fail to outmaneuver those who are informed and concerned about the ways that changing means of production can condition their hegemony.¹ Thus, what I hope to illustrate is that, rather than “the industrial work [being] effectively done,” we cannot even see the horizon of technologization, let alone determine if we have reached it.

To begin this discussion in earnest then, we should dissolve the confusion between the means of production and technology by reimagining its pre-20th century meaning. Whereas our concrete referents are the means of production, technology is merely the study of production.² Of course, the ‘merely’ here is being playfully modest, for the means of production are anything but of ‘mere’ consequence. The historian’s responsibility therefore runs doubly for organizers who seek to steer the process of technologization themselves, so for the sake of brevity and integrating feedback prior to any attempt at popularization, this essay is mainly for them (though I will include definitions and plain language where convenient). My purpose is more than to incite a reexamination of our technological assumptions; it is to articulate a paradigm of and for the ever-growing complexity of life, a technopolitics for autonomy: transocialism. So given this intertwined relationship, the politics of transocialism could only be revealed by its technics, to which I divide into three strategic dimensions (or axes): the axis of agency (to be covered in ausmosis), the axis of production (in chlorogenesis), and the axis of alterity (meaning otherness; in xenosocialism).

Ausmosis

“The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable (21).”

Contained in this passage of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) is a cancer, a fatal flaw in the very foundations of Marxism, and thus its potential to inform our praxis (our continuity of thought and action). This is not, however, a flaw in the politics of Marxism (those will come later), but rather of its technics, and we may use the starting point for the philosophy of technology as the groundwork for explaining why. Though by ‘starting point’ I really mean when the phrase ‘philosophy of technology’ was first used, with the publishing of Ernst Kapp’s Elements of a Philosophy of Technology: On the Evolutionary History of Culture (1877). Kapp’s thesis was that the activity of tool-creation (i.e. developing means of production, technics) lies at the center of the development of consciousness and culture, coining the term organ projection to describe this process. Recalling the Greek origin of the word, ὄργανον (organon: that with which one works), the term has a double meaning. Not only did he claim that the tools we create reflect the structures of our bodily organs (as an axe to an arm, a camera to an eye, the state to the nervous system), but that their creation conditions the realization of our bodily structure. In his words:

“The human being who in thinking proceeds outward from himself is the requisite condition for the human being returning to himself (7)... [Thus] self-consciousness proves to be the result of a process in which knowledge of an exterior is transformed into knowledge of an interior (22)... The tool is so fundamentally and intimately affiliated with the human being that he finds himself beholding something of his own being in the creation of his hand, his world of representation embodied in matter, a mirror- or after-image of his interior, a part of himself (24).” [...] Projecting its organs into technology, the human first learns of the operations of its own body and mind belatedly, in a dialectical process (XI).”

To oversimplify the formation, that which we make makes our self, though I will explain my caution later on why this determinist framing would be too strong. In this vein almost a century later, philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty would publish his Phenomenology of Perception (1945), augmenting Kapp’s formulation (though he made no direct reference) with the theory of body extension, that as we habituate ourselves to the use of certain means of production, they become no longer means we perceive, but our means to perceive:

“When the [walking] cane becomes a familiar instrument, the world of tactile objects expands, it no longer begins at the skin of the hand, but at the tip of the cane. One is tempted to say that the blind man constructs the cane and its various positions through the sensations produced by the pressure of the cane upon his hand, since these different positions in turn mediate an object to the second degree, namely, an external object. Perception would remain a reading of the same sensible givens, just one that is accomplished faster and faster and performed upon more and more tenuous signs. But habit does not consist in interpreting the pressure of the cane on the hand like signs of certain positions of the cane, and then these positions as signs of an external object – for the habit relieves us of this very task. The pressures on the hand and the cane are no longer given, the cane is no longer an object that the blind man would perceive, it has become an instrument with which he perceives. It is an appendage of the body, or an extension of the bodily synthesis (153-154).”

To clarify how these two theories relate to the technics of Marxism, we must first apply them to Marx’s theory of the productive forces. Capitalism, to very briefly summarize, is a system which broadly dichotomizes class (rudimentarily, a group with shared relations to the means of production), with a shrinking group of owners (capitalists or bourgeoisie) on one end who control the means of production, and a vast majority of producers (workers or proletariat) on the other who work upon those means. Of course, this is an oversimplified, mechanical way of describing class, for it only refers to economic classes rather than political classes (a distinction to be clarified later on), but for now we may focus merely on the former. To put another complex arrangement simply, Marx theorizes that a person can only make their living by possessing at least one of two productive forces: either labor-power (the capacity to produce value by working upon the means of production, conceived broadly enough to include social work, such as with a therapist and patient) or capital (the aggregation of land and machinery, money, and any other social asset besides labor-power which contributes to the accumulation of more capital). Now, whether Marx’s theories can be said to paint a complete picture of value (it does not) is entirely irrelevant here, because I aim to instead point out the technopolitical utility of distinguishing between living labor (what Marx analogizes to labor-power) and dead labor (to capital).

For brevity, we may take it as true that capital exists only in its capacity for self-expansion (money is useless if never circulated, after all), but when have we noted the self-expanding capacity of labor? After all, what is life but the capacity to (re)produce itself? By our (read socialist) emphasis on this quality being exclusive to capital, perhaps we have deemphasized the capacity of labor to expand either, namely, themselves; their bodies. It was a tragic mistake then for Engels to have claimed (in his footnote to the 1888 Manifesto of the Communist Party English version) that the producing class has no means of production of their own, because the body is our means of production. Whereas mechanical industrialization is only a means to our sustainment and satisfaction, “the body is our general means of having a world (Merleau-Ponty 147)” at all. The cancer at the founding heart of Marxism then, the most dangerous notion it has ever produced, is the conflation of the accumulation of capital with the development of the productive forces, and its subsequent prediction that this process would inevitably result in producing class victory.³ ⁴ 

Of course, this cancer is only terminal to socialist politics if we allow that conflation to stand, which is why a new distinction is in order, both to clarify the direction of socialist development as well as to establish just why that victory is not so inevitable via capitalist accumulation. In this case, the difference between embodiment and disembodiment is not enough. Most mature trees, for example, have more biomass than the average Homo sapiens, but we are not optimizing for biomass, we are optimizing for self, conscious production. In this case, our current vocabulary is lacking, so I propose we deem this process ausmosis, a portmanteau of auto- (self) and -osmos (pushing): the movement of the means of production towards consciousness. In other words, it is the process of undoing the separation between producers and the means of production (notably the exact purpose of ecosocialism as articulated in 2001 by Joel Kovel and Michael Löwy in their eponymous manifesto). We may begin illustrating this with the example of healthcare, as when a stitch is introduced to close a wound on the body. Its homonymy with osmosis thus is quite intentional: through water, we bring the means of production to life. Naturally then, the movement which expands that separation between producers and means should comprise a schismosis (schi- meaning to split), to which most mechanical industrialization and automation fall today.

The utility of these terms begins with this basic distinction as we interact with the means of production, but taken alone they remain inadequate for mapping the broader world. Schismosis, for example, is not merely an identification of process, as a literal tearing of labor-power from the producer in the creation of capital, but an identification of condition, a schismotic imbalance of the forces of production in a whole system. To help visualize this, I would adopt the Marxist base and superstructure model as a tutorial metaphor, but only to fundamentally mutate it.

Our point of departure runs along similar lines as the critique made in Marxist cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s 1977 essay “Rethinking the ‘Base-and-Superstructure’ Metaphor.” First, let us take note of his description of the model as a spatial, topographical metaphor. The common refrain we might be familiar with is that the superstructure (our conscious activities like art, culture, education, etc.) lies atop the base (the means and relations of production), like a house upon its foundation, thereby implying that consciousness is merely derivative of its economics. This could not be more misleading, as he would agree. To press upon the biological metaphor I have been building up to this point, we should rather conceive of the superstructure lying within the base instead, like a brain in its body, for if the body (where the border between subject and object is diffuse) is our general means of having a world, it would only be logical to say as well that biology mediates the relationship between base and superstructure.

To help us conceptualize this distinction (and why such schematization is even useful in the first place), rather than adopting the B/S model as given, I would adapt it to a three-sphere model of production: between a geosphere (comprising all mechanical activity), a biosphere (of biological activity), and a noosphere (of conscious activity), each lying concentrically within the previous.⁵ For those unfamiliar, I use these terms precisely because they summon an evolutionary connotation, particularly in their application to autonomy (or agency). This autonomy is in all ways critical, for it is the capacity to decide at all, let alone for any politics of self-governance. By placing the biosphere as mediating the conscious and unconscious, we bring into context that consciousness is conditioned most of all by its vessel.⁶ Thereby, it belongs to its evolutionary history, the history of autonomy that began with life. A boulder, as we know, has no autonomy in any practical sense. Sure, it exerts influence in the world, but no more than anything around it. The lichen on that boulder, however, does. Not out of nothing, of course, for it complexifies itself relative to its environment, thereby having agency within it. By extension then, as biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky would pose in coining the noosphere (see 1945), the noosphere is not derivative of the biosphere, but is rather its highest expression. When life begins to conceive the relationship between self and environment, it is to the benefit of its own autonomy. Undeniably then, conscious activity is not only a productive force, but the most important of all.

By mapping production through this topographical framework (keeping in mind it is only a map at best), we may derive a most important insight: one society as opposed to another can have a larger or smaller noosphere relative to its biosphere and geosphere. This is the decisive factor for the critique of schismosis, which we may make apparent through the law of requisite complexity.⁷ Simply stated, the law is a recognition that in order for a system to ensure stable control of another system, the controlling system must be at least as complex (capable of a greater variety of action) as the controlled system. Meaning, we can develop means of production that are useful in an absolute, theoretical sense while being detrimental in practice given their relative complexity to the people aiming to control them. Case in point, the utility of an active nuclear reactor managed by a thousand people not only disappears, but inverts in a situation where a thousand reactors are managed by one. So by orienting our technologization towards the complexification of merely mechanical means of production, we actively inhibit our ability to understand and respond effectively to the world around us (and indeed, digital overexposure and its contribution to our declining attention spans and educational outcomes is the paradigmatic example of this). Indeed, we may liken schismosis as the principle engine for what Mark Fisher identifies in his Capitalist Realism (2009) as the reflexive impotence (the inability to imagine beyond the consumerist logic) of the neoliberal era, or to rephrase this using Naomi Klein’s terminology, schismosis operationalizes shock, and by extension our unprecedentedly cannibalistic era of disaster capitalism.⁸

But the trouble runs deeper than this, for the means need not even be more complex for control to collapse, and the primary factor in this is a difference in informational entropy. To use the old, oft-criticized, but neatly simple Shannon-Weaver Model (formulated in Claude Shannon’s 1948 essay “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”), communication can be roughly broken down into four steps: encoding, transmitting, receiving, and decoding. For you to comprehend what I write, it had to be rendered as a legible essay, printed or transmitted to your device, received in your eyes as light (or your ears as spoken word), and interpreted in your mind as a technopolitical theory with its various components. Each of these processes requires at least one medium (or channel) for the message to carry through (neurons, vocal cords, screens, ears, eyes, etc), and throughout its passage from one medium to the next, the amount of information carried by the message can only decrease (becoming ‘noisier,’ as the information theorists would say). In practical terms, as we increase the degree to which information is mediated from our bodies (specifically our nervous systems), the greater decrease in control we should expect. Building another data center, then, is not merely a cost in energy (equivalent to about 1.5 million humans, if we took the world’s largest as an example, China’s Inner Mongolia Telecom), but a cost to our very ability to understand the effects of that construction.

To press this matter of data centers even further, their detriment is not merely by the entropy of information as it (de)codes back and forth from binaric language to organic language (a structural difference of far greater proportion than any two organic languages), but in how the proliferation of computers ends up reshaping our culture to operate based on their limitations. Which is to say, the projection of nervous organs into binaric language processors ends up reflecting upon society a quantified understanding of itself, the only information computers can process. Over time, we would expect education to likely give way to standardized test preparation, passions to hustles, organic networks of mentorship to audit culture, and so on. After a long while of relentless quantification, we would expect a society to forget, among other things, that a 7/10 is not a devastating critique but a measured recommendation. This quantification (and subsequent objectification of people) in mind, perhaps it seems more natural now that the emergence of neoliberalism (the dominant, market fundamentalist philosophy of the late 20th century and on) into mainstream governance coincided with the growth of electronic stock markets enabled by such computational infrastructure (NASDAQ in 1971, Pinochet in 1973).

Of course, we should be careful not to imply any strong causality, not only that the NASDAQ in particular somehow caused Pinochet’s coup in Chile, but also the notion that changes to the means of production cause a corresponding social output. Though the exact phrasing of this critique has varied (technological determinism, mechanical materialism, economism), they all comprise a longstanding discourse both internal and external to socialism, a history I could not do justice here. What I would emphasize instead is the unoriginal distinction between cause (or determination) and condition (or facilitation), using science and technology scholar Langdon Winner’s essay “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” (1980) as a reference point. Beginning from a denial of both absolute theses of technological determinism and social determinism, Winner outlines two forms in which the means of production (my substitution for technologies or artifacts) can contain political properties. The first form lies in the political intentions of the actors that develop and deploy them, to which he cites Cyrus McCormick’s implementation of pneumatic molders (requiring less skilled labor but otherwise less profitable) to undercut the ironworkers’ union, as well as Robert Moses’ planning of deliberately short bridges to exclude (predominantly black and poor) bus riders from Long Island. The second, and however controversial, more relevant here, is the notion of inherently political means of production: “that certain kinds of technology do not allow such flexibility [in political deployment], and that to choose them is to choose a particular form of political life.” He cites Friedrich Engels in particular, who in turn refers to the technical operation of cotton mills, railways, and ships at sea to argue for the necessity of political authority and subordination. Quoting Engels first in his “On Authority” (1872):

“If man, by dint of his knowledge and inventive genius, has subdued the forces of nature, the latter avenge themselves upon him by subjecting him, insofar as he employs them, to a veritable despotism independent of all social organization [elsewhere stating: “much more despotic than the small capitalists who employ workers ever have been”]… [Authority and subordination] are things which, independently of all social organisation, are imposed upon us together with the material conditions under which we produce and make products circulate.”

From this passage, Winner keenly identifies a remarkable contradiction between Marx and Engels’ views on industrialization, a prescient foreshadowing of today’s biopsy. Whereas Engels puts forth authoritarianization as coinciding with industrialization, Marx, in contrast, claims that it is rather what ‘sweeps away’ the hierarchical division of labor. It is principally this contradiction that I aim to resolve through these three axes, and though I would strongly recommend his essay for its other insights, we should return to the matter of causality. Whilst rejecting the notion that certain technologies causally require the adoption of certain political forms, Winner is unhesitant in qualifying the sheer scale of conditioning that certain means of production can affect:

“Russell W. Ayres's study of the legal ramifications of plutonium recycling concludes… “once a quantity of plutonium had been stolen, the case for literally turning the country upside down to get it back would be overwhelming.” Ayres anticipates and worries about the kinds of thinking that, I have argued, characterize inherently political technologies. It is still true that, in a world in which human beings make and maintain artificial systems, nothing is “required” in an absolute sense. Nevertheless, once a course of action is underway, once artifacts like nuclear power plants have been built and put in operation, the kinds of reasoning that justify the adaptation of social life to technical requirements pop up as spontaneously as flowers in the spring. In Ayres's words, “Once recycling begins and the risks of plutonium theft become real rather than hypothetical, the case for governmental infringement of protected rights will seem compelling.” After a certain point, those who cannot accept the hard requirements and imperatives will be dismissed as dreamers and fools (134).”

Thus, the relationship between producers and their means is perpetually dialectical, and by introducing the three-spheres as a method for mapping this relationship, we can grasp a tentative answer to what Stuart Hall (and theorists before him) poses as the problem in Marxism of rectifying the primacy of the base with the relative autonomy of the superstructure. Whereas the biosphere is distinguished from the geosphere by its self-complexification, the noosphere marks the emergence of praxis afforded by consciousness (or, to put it merely concretely, in the passage between bark and brain). Thus, it is the unique capacity of the noosphere to operationalize its self-expansion that defines its autonomy (read self-determination) within the absolute limits of matter; an autonomy we conceive as relative, not to an economy that “determines” it (thereby implying their separability), but to its discursive environment in general (see Laclau and Mouffe 1987 for what I mean by discursive). Autonomy thus is the product of exploring and reconstructing this mediation: one becomes free only insofar as they come to understand the mechanisms by which their consciousness and production are constrained. Though the brain may rely on the stomach, it is only by the brain that we may consider what has passed and plan for the future. The central locus of (class) agency therefore lies in noospheric, superstructural interventions, for intervention is only relevant in the context of an us to intend. Though none of us chose our place in the world we inherited, what we do with that inheritance is ultimately our choice, and that is the only matter of consequence.⁹ 

Indeed, I would argue that the seeds of this perspective were planted at least as far back as Hall’s description of the self-expansive role of particular superstructures (read: states), which he characterizes as instruments of rationalization (i.e., operationalization), writing:

“One way [to approach the B/S problematic] is to take the law and tendencies of ‘the self-expansion of capital’, not as specifying in detail the content and forms of the superstructures and thereby ‘determining’, but as providing the governing movements (including the contradictions and crises in that self-expansion, and the ‘solutions’ which permit capital to continue to accumulate while reproducing its antagonisms at a more advanced level of composition), dictating the tempo and rhythms of development in the other parts of the social formation: setting limits, as it were, to what can or cannot be a solution adaptable to capital's self-expanding needs, and thus as determining through the repertoire of solutions (political, social, ideological) likely to be drawn on in any particular historical moment or conjuncture (60) [my emphases].”

That self-expansivity of capital may serve a decent point for returning to the larger question: why not schismosis? By applying the theory of organ projection again, we should expect that as capital expands, so should the producers gradually come to perceive their own (labor-)power only as dependent on and directed towards the expansion of capital (thereby not their own conscious self-development). Through this and the other aforementioned problems of schismotic production (requisite complexity, information entropy, reflexive quantification, and shortly of monopolizability), we can tentatively conclude therefore that schismosis is the dominant technical movement under capitalism, and that rather than ensuring inevitable liberation, is in fact its opposite fetter. To drive the final nail into this coffin, I would quote the original pioneer of cybernetics Norbert Wiener in The Human Use of Human Beings (1950):

"Let us remember that the automatic machine, whatever we think of any feelings it may have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor (162)."

Therefore, it is extremely dangerous (especially for socialists) to take technologization for granted. Even some recent AI-related publications within and adjacent to Geese have fallen prey to the inertia of the orthodox Marxist reification of technologization, as if the open struggle for production were instead a singular teleology, that everything we develop must somehow contribute to the abolition of scarcity and coercion, that all the harms of certain means of production are merely attributable to their relationship to capitalism. As opposed to this social determinist view, we should strive for a holistic technopolitics, one which recognizes that the means of production have inherently differing politics. So to put it bluntly, our digital infrastructure has saturated far past the point where it could enable a higher stage of anything but psychosis. To pretend otherwise would be like saying that the practical gain between one and one-hundred calculators matches anywhere near the difference between zero and one, but in our case, each comes free with a poisoned river.

Given this logarithmic limitation, then, digital infrastructure could only serve a supplementary role in an ausmotic society. Neurobiology, in contrast, is both our means and ends, thereby implying a relationship of exponential self-development. Ausmosis is the technics of socialism because the process itself steers the producer to recognize that potential, their own potential. Indeed, its mechanics directly condition the overcoming of three of the four alienations (disconnections, in other words, usually accompanying discomfort or confusion) originally identified in Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (which we may also take as a proxy for addressing loneliness in general), two of which and the exception will be discussed here, with the final to be addressed in Xenosocialism. Beginning with our alienation from the products of our labor, Marx writes that:

“The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks objects. Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him (29).” 

Ausmosis directly inverts this equation. By the express purpose of the products being to unite with producers, the greater they will be themselves (though in practice individuals will likely produce mostly for others, it would be literal on the grand scale). Ausmosis addresses the alienation of the producer from other people by that same mechanism. As more and more dead labor is made obsolete or reincorporated, the boundaries which mediate our relationships with others dissolve, namely the commodity form (production for sale), though this also applies to physical boundaries as well.¹⁰ Though the organization (here literally meaning to make into bodily organs) of the means of production does not cause this outcome necessarily, bodies and organs can and have been commodified after all, slavery and organ trading is a far more difficult contradiction to maintain at scale. Thus, ausmosis conditions the democratization and non-monopolizability of the means of production.

In contrast to these alienations, it is worth emphasizing that alienation from the activity of production is not at all inherently dealt with by this reorientation towards ausmosis. Even in a world where all production is made biotechnical or social, the coercion of that labor is still very well possible. Ausmosis, then, must not be addressed as all-encompassing, but only as part of a broader technopolitical strategy. But indeed, ausmosis conditions the time and space to strategize. Elsewhere in the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty writes in his critique of Cartesian dualism:

“The wonder of language is that it makes itself be forgotten: my gaze is drawn along the lines on the paper, from the moment that I am struck by what they signify, I no longer see them. The paper, the letters on the paper, my eyes, and my body are only present as the minimum of production materials necessary for some invisible operation [my emphasis]. The expression fades away in the face of the expressed, and this is why its role as mediator can pass by unnoticed, and why [René] Descartes nowhere mentions it.”

Evidently, Engels made a similar mistake in the aforementioned footnote, but rather than taking that as a deficiency of these authors, we should take it to recognize the beauty of our bodies as means, for they are so intuitive as to nearly be invisible. Of course, this contradiction is not merely beautiful, but deeply practical, for on the other side of increasing the requisite complexity for consciousness is decreasing what is non-requisite. When functioning at baseline, the body is a means of production that the occupant can more easily understand while not as often needing to be specifically attentive to it. As opposed to the institutionalized shock inherent to schismosis, the ausmosis of autonomic (involuntary) functions frees time and space for those matters we would rather be somatic (voluntary).¹¹

It is a commonly recognized point among the left, a notable example being the 2026 program of Democratic Socialists of America, that reactionary (traditionalist and authoritarian) movements are aiming to dismantle all access to abortion and gender-affirming healthcare. This, in conjunction with the less prominent examples of vaccines (especially mRNA, which notably grant the body the capacity to manufacture particular antigens) and stem cell research, reveals their conscious or subconscious awareness that bodily autonomy fundamentally threatens their political project to assert authority over the world and our bodies. It is the revolutionary (progressive and democratic) opposition to this project that the term ‘transocialism’ aims to capture: to assert our autonomy in the world, to own and govern all of ourselves. Ausmosis is the bridge toward that future, and indeed the only consistent way of conceiving technologization at all: for the mechanism of schismosis is self-destruction, its movement could only be a pseudo-technologization. In contrast, ausmosis conditions “the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolised (23),” to reference the manifesto. All in summary, it becomes easier to imagine a world where the means of production are in the hands of producers if they are the hands themselves. The essence of ausmosis is to become the means of production.

Notes

1: Though an author and article I would otherwise highly recommend, I would categorize T.E. Moon’s “Communism is Already Here” (2026), as such an example of technical minimization.

2: Given the relevance of this topic is quite literally ubiquitous, it is helpful that this definition also bypasses the time-consuming question of where nature ends and artifacts/culture begin. As Donna Haraway would first outline in her Cyborg Manifesto (1985), the blurring of lines between the natural and artificial/cultural is technologization, making litigation over distinction increasingly irrelevant from a pragmatic standpoint.

3: This destructive logic is exemplified by the accelerationist tendency, preceded by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and, shall we say, stimulated to its schizophrenic (a term I only use to derogate his specific deployment of it) apotheosis by Nick Land. We should not ‘unleash’ the productive forces anymore than we should unleash our hands from the wheel of a car. Accelerationism, so faithful to the logic of capitalist productivism to suggest that we might as well not intervene at all, is thus one of the most extreme and perverse forms of economism. It should be no wonder then that such technological fatalism has succeeded only so well in producing an oscillation of manic hyperstimulation and suicidal hopelessness among its circles, a fitting reflection of its characteristic lack of presence in offline politics.

4: Despite my polemic phrasing, I find it quite forgivable that this distinction was never explicitly recognized. It would be difficult to overstate how utterly deprived the landscape of biological knowledge was then compared to now. Recall that Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species (1859) was only published a decade after the manifesto, and that Lysenkoism and lobotomies were all practiced in just the last century. The task never arose because the material conditions for its solution (namely the field of biotechnology in revealing the mutability of biology) were barely embryonic.

5: Some clarifications regarding my terminology should be stated, most of all to emphasize that it should not be taken too literally. The geosphere, for example, is not referring merely to the lithosphere, but rather metaphorically for matter in general. By extension then, when I say that all matter is engaged in mechanical activity, I am not implying that complex phenomena like consciousness are reducible to neurochemistry, external cause, unidirectionality, or whatever else. Rather, it is only to say that everything has a structure, some interrelation that makes it a system at all, and that certain means of production are merely mechanical. Finally, I should mention that, as opposed to Vernadsky and others, who saw the noosphere as uniquely human, we should not at all consider this the case. Noospheric activity is the product of interactions that begin even on the scale of the smallest microbes.

6: From this we may also say that affect and emotion condition our praxis far more than what we could identify (with) or consciously express.

7: Specifically originating from Ross Ashby, one of the earliest pioneers of cybernetics, who originally referred to it as the law of requisite variety. Though I would otherwise be inclined to define cybernetics for accessibility's sake, that is so intricate a matter as to deserve its own essay, which I aim to write sometime after this one.

8: Terms which they develop throughout The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007) and Capitalist Realism (2009), respectively.

9: Or to rephrase this in the Marxist vernacular: whereas the base is determinant in the first instance (there would never be an us without our star and the water on our Terra), the superstructure is determinant in the last, but this is still too rigid. Most simply, it is the difference between theoretical cause and practical cause.

10: By physical boundaries, I also mean the hyperreal (facilitating an inability to distinguish simulation and reality, coined by Jean Baudrillard) overproduction of digital content, dampening through habit our capacity to achieve the real needs they simulate. Of course, the internet allows for incredible production, but this would be far more to our benefit if ‘enshittifying’ Metaverse models of it, which rely on the constant growth of centralized data centers, were deemphasized in favor of organic home and communal computer networks.

11: Another way we might approach this is through cyberneticists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s term of ‘autopoiesis’ (first published in their 1972 Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living), meaning self-production, a system’s capacity to reproduce its own complexity (i.e. what defines the biosphere). The term has often been criticized on the grounds of implying a something-out-of-nothing relationship, leading some like Beth Dempster and Donna Haraway to propose a sympoiesis or Leonardo Lavanderos an ecopoiesis (their papers source in the biblography to be posted with Why Transocialism?). Though these terms help to emphasize that production is necessarily relational, they sidestep the practicality of distinguishing between autopoiesis and allopoiesis, to produce something other than itself (a car factory does not produce more car factories, for example). By adopting an autopoietic model of production and reducing the range of objects needing our attention, we condition a world where we can focus on our relationships with subjects, ourselves and other people.