What drives human history? In broad strokes, we can see a general trend. Firstly, productive forces tend to increase as time goes on. They increase at differing rates in both complexity and scope, and they seem to, for the most part, increasingly shape societies towards accommodating their growth. Secondly, societies trend towards an increasing ability for self propagation. A society from 300 years ago would not be able to hold its own against even the relatively underdeveloped societies of the modern day. These two tendencies are tied together. The more accommodating to the growth of productive forces your society is, The more technology you are likely to develop, the better your society can self propagate. Of course, technology is not the only metric to determine self propagation capacity. Better equipped forces do not always win, especially when fighting against a more decentralized, scattershot force. The Romans were looted by Barbarians, the Americans lost to the Vietnamese, etc. Better technology does not guarantee a win, but better technology always increases your chances of a win. It is one of a few factors that increase the ability to self propogate, and it is the one we'll be focusing on for this post.
So, because of this, we can see technological progress as more or less inevitable. A good example would be the invention of agriculture. There are many studies that show that hunter gatherer societies were likely a lot more happy and maybe even better fed than agricultural societies. Agriculture probably had higher rates of disease and was much more oppressive to your average prehistoric human. So why did anyone adopt this system? Why did nearly everyone adopt it? The answer is fairly simple. One tribe adopts agriculture out of necessity. It might become the only way to survive in a very poor climate. Once one tribe has agriculture, the fact that humans like it a lot less than their current way of doing things doesn't matter. Because agriculture is a better, fitter system of self propagation than a hunter gatherer society. It is more coordinated and simply better at war and expansion. You become stuck in an evolutionary trap. Nobody really needs to want productive forces to grow. They seem to possess an automatic will of their own. Once the genie is out of the bottle and a new type of organization more accommodating to technological growth and self propagation is unleashed upon the world, everybody must adopt it or die out. What humans want has nothing to do with it. It's simply how the process works.
Markets work in a similar way. Innovation in the realm of business is more or less irreversible. If three companies are competing to make Candy and one invents a new, much faster method of making Candy that involves dumping sludge in the river, this puts all the other Candy manufacturers in a bind. They have two choices. They can adopt the innovation, whatever their moral concerns with it, or they can drop out of competition and end up beaten by a company with a method that is simply more fit and better evolved for the purpose of profit generation at all costs. Its a trap, where everyone can be made to do something they don't want to do without any real coercion. Productive forces must grow. Competition necessitates that you become more fit and ruthless or you die. This applies to societies, markets, animals, etc.
Productive forces, in this way, seem to have a mind of their own. In the same way that value that begets more value (Capital) seems to have its own will and whims, always trending towards expansion despite the best efforts of labor organizers or central planners, productive forces seem to have a desire to grow and grow, and they are willing to kill to achieve this desire. Nobody has to want them to grow, and many people probably wish they could stop the process. Genetic engineering is a good example. Currently the whole world essentially agrees that genetic engineering of humans would be a bad idea. It would throw liberalism into crisis and possibly usher in some sort of dystopian future, the specifics of which vary depending on who you ask. And yet many countries, China specifically, are working towards genetic engineering anyway, and we can be almost sure that once they get it right, every other nation in the world will be forced to follow their lead. Does China want genetically engineered humans to exist in an abstract sense? I don't think so. Probably no more than the men running the manhattan project wanted the atomic bomb to exist in an abstract sense. Some force outside of humanity wanted it to exist though.
Technology can be best viewed as artificial life. It is at least as alive and intelligent as a clump of cells floating around in a pool of primordial goo. Productive forces have a 'desire' to grow just as much as cellular life. Obviously, technology doesn't 'want' anything, but neither do cells. This doesn't change the structural tendencies of them both. Both productive forces and life have a tendency to grow and self propagate and will increase their own ability to achieve this growth over time. The cells will evolve into organisms better at self propagation, new organizations of cells that can fit new niches and expand into new environments. Technology will evolve too, from mode of production to mode of production, trending towards increasing its own rate of growth and its ability to expand into new areas of the globe. Technology and life have very similar tendencies. Both have a primary goal of self propagation, and from this goal stems the two other tendencies, growth in systematic intelligence and growth in its own positive freedom. There are the emergent tendencies ('desires') of all forms of life. Technology, as a positive feedback loop that wants to grow, shares this. History is the story of this technology organism achieving its goals, growing in size, complexity, intelligence and positive freedom. We need a name for this organism. Lets call it Metatron.
Humanity and Metatron have so far, made a kind of deal. Not a voluntary one on the humanities part mind you, but a mutually beneficial agreement has been reached to an extent. Since we are both living organisms, we can say that the goal for both of us is basically positive freedom, expansion and systematic intelligence. So for the both of us, this has been increasing constantly throughout human history, and even more so since the 14th century. At no time in history have there been more humans on the planet, nor have we ever had more positive freedom as a species, or accumulated so much knowledge. Metatron gets its end of the deal too. Never before have productive forces grown so high, measured in value or abstract scientific advancement. Never before has the system of technology been so complex or intelligent. Metatron grows, and we grow with it, racing to see who can accommodate it best and get the next best thing.
We can chart the evolution of Metatron as it reorganized societies to accommodate its growth in the same way that Marx charted history. The evolutionary progress passes through phases, each new phase beginning with a new technology that requires society to change to accommodate its growth. The clearest example is in the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism. Industry, a radically new form of technology, was invented and could not be fully realized within the system of Feudalism. With Metatron metaphorically offering up a massive increase in self propagation ability to the first society that could get its business together and restructure to allow industry to be fully realized, European Feudalism was overthrown and Capitalism was ushered in. With the new system so much better at self propagating than all systems past, it was the same situation as the first tribe that invented agriculture. Capitalism was a lot more horrible than simple handicraft work or peasantry and the peasants violently resisted the growth of productive forces, but once one nation had managed to get their industrial society running, every other society had copy the European methods (like Japan and maybe China) or be crushed and colonized (like the rest of the world).
It is important to note that the "game" of who can adopt a new mode of production the first and thus end up running the world is not exactly a fair one. For one thing, Europe had a natural advantage in its geography, both in regards to natural resources like coal and in having a straight shot to the New World which they could imperialize with little trouble. But Metatron does not really care about setting up a fair game. It just wants to grow and will take root in the environment best suited for it, which happened to be Europe. Not at all because Europe was superior to all others, but more because the conditions were correct for Metatrons growth. Another thing acting as distortion to the fairness of the game would be the cycle of empires.
The cycle of empires is roughly equivalent to Spengler's cyclical history of civilizations with a few major differences. Before the 1400s, the cycle only ever took place on one continent or some smaller area and was thus less competitive and less grand than its current state. Its best to think of it, again, like the dynamics of a market. Back to the example with the Candy makers. Let's say that one Candy making company invents some amazing new innovation. With this new innovation, they can dominate the market by producing at or under the SNTL and still make a profit. Their dominance goes on, until, eventually, the other Candy companies manage to reverse engineer the new innovation, or steal it, or develop some sort of analogous innovation of their own. All the firms lower their prices to match the price of the first company, and competition is restored back to normal. The same happens with great (great at self propagation, no moral judgement made) civilizations. A new innovation, in structure or technology is made, and a civilization can dominate. They overpower the competition and expand to have hegemony over an entire region. Then, despite the great nation's best efforts, the other, lesser nations, manage to copy the new innovation in self propagation and the luster of the great empire is lost. Equilibrium is restored, more or less. In a market, the business that made the super profits in the last cycle will have more to invest in R&D and is more likely to develop the new technology in this cycle. This is why empires can last so long. With one good head start (the nuclear bomb, the horse and carriage, the industrial system of manufacture) you can string together a lot of wins, and always be the first to develop the groundbreaking innovation. But you can’t get lucky forever, and eventually, some lesser nation will seize the chance and destroy your eternal empire.
Increasing fitness in the evolutionary game of societies primarily through technological growth is the only real meaning of progress. The orders most conducive to progress are selected for and the orders that do not allow progress to unleash itself are trashed by the ones that do. Metatron drags human society along with it, encouraging humans to allow it even more freedom to grow faster and faster, growing better and more intelligent at its purpose of growth as it grows, a positive feedback loop that drags the world into its gravitational pull.
This raises a few questions. If Metatron has always been productive forces that grow for their own sake rather than the fulfillment of human needs, then why has Capitalism been so radically different from all previous modes of production? How does the growth of productive forces relate to self propagation regarding the question of complexity and hierarchy? Is authoritarian control or a decentralized market better at self propagation and at producing historical progress? However, this piece has gone on long enough. I will leave these questions for the next few parts, and for now, end off this blog post with a quick appraisal on how the Metatronic process applies to radical politics aiming for liberation from hierarchies and such.
Essentially, we must find a way of structuring a free society that is progressive in the Metatronic sense. If we want freedom, we have to figure out a way to make a society with freedom better at self propagation than a society without it. If we want to end Capitalism, we have to figure out a system that can self propagate better than Capitalism. If we want to fight racism, we have to make a case that racism makes a society less fit in the evolutionary game, less adept at self propagation. There is a right side of history, or rather a winning side of history. Structural reforms and changes that increase society's ability to self propagate are on the side of optimization, progress and are on the winning side of history. Structural reforms and changes that decrease society's ability to self propagate are on the side of decline, regression and the losing side of history. A powerful society that is ahead of the others by a long shot may have the slack to regress and become less efficient in one aspect if it is still miles ahead in another, but as competition increases, the cycle of empires grinds towards an equilibrium state again, options other than total optimization become increasingly impossible. I am still mulling over whether it is completely useless to fight for a cause that is on the losing side of history, but here is what I would advise : The system is too complicated to know exactly if a given reform or change will increase self propagation or decrease it, and if you are unsure as to whether history is on your side or not, then it seems worth a shot to me at least.