Date: July 28, 2017Author: Paul Cockshott In my last post I repeated Marx’s phrase the the hand mill gave you the feudal lord the steam mill the industrial capitalist. One reader objected that this overstated the role of technology and that steam power was already known to the Romans. I concede that Marx over simplified. […]
Why no Roman industrial revolution? Read More »
Date: September 1, 2016Author: Paul Cockshott Were fossil fuels necessary? Did capitalism itself generate its own technical advances? Why was energy so vital to the development of capitalism? Fundamentally it is because by substituting inanimate energy for human muscle, the amount of human time and effort required to make things was reduced. A powered machine
Energy, Science and Capitalism Read More »
Date: April 18, 2017Author: Paul Cockshott n the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of
Fossil fuel and the ebbing of globalisation Read More »
Date: July 25, 2018Author: Paul Cockshott I have been producing a series of videos explaining materialism. Most of these have been accepted without controversy, but predictably enough, the last one, which was on quantum phenomena and materialism raised a number of critical comments. The gist of my argument had been that the dominant Copenhagen interpretation
Materialism and delayed choice quantum eraser experiments Read More »
Date: July 24, 2017 Author: Paul Cockshott I shall be elaborating on the following theses: The inability of 20th century socialism to progress to communism led to the crisis of the USSR. Communism requires a definite stage of development of technology. This stage was only reached at the very end of the 20th century. But this problem
Big Data and Super-Computers: foundations of Cyber Communism Read More »