I take Paul Cockshott’s recent blog piece on technical jargon seriously and yet I persist in cranking stuff out that tries to make sense of materialist thought without lapsing into jargon. Then, I go ahead and break my promise while producing English Marxist writing that is harder to understand than it needs to be.
This piece is no different. The idea of a quantum economics that supports political economy objectives is appealing but its current literature emphasizes neoclassical perspectives with little attention to either Keynesian or even post-Keynesian economics, much less the latest versions of Marxist economics.
Complexity rules our politics as “A.I.” rules critical discourse,
Ronny Chieng’s ‘F*ck AI’ Speech Met With Cheers From Harvard Graduates “AI is just going to end up making mediocre people dumber,” the ‘Daily Show’ star cautioned.
Could it not be so and still address the coming revolution in machine language approaches to research as well as quantum process methodology. Already we’re down the jargon rabbit hole, trying not to obscure underlying ideas.
The first tradition is the one associated with Engels and the early translators of Capital, such as Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling.
Their translations were aimed at self‑educated workers — people who needed clarity, not mystique.
Engels supervised these translations closely, and the result was a body of English Marxism that was readable, concrete, and faithful to the original.
The second tradition emerged in the mid‑20th century, particularly among translators associated with New Left Review and the early British Althusserians — Nicolaus, Fowkes, Fernbach, Brewster, and others. These translators were writing for a very different audience: graduate seminars, university reading groups, and the burgeoning academic industry of “theory.” Their translations often imported foreign terms directly into English, creating a specialised vocabulary that signalled sophistication but frequently obscured the underlying ideas.
This is nicely put. The machine that subordinates all life to its own algorithm of self-expansion is already operating: It’s called capital. http://www.newyorker.com/science/anna…
As it’s currently imagined, the technology promises to concentrate wealth and disempower workers. Is an alternative possible?
When we talk about artificial intelligence, we rely on metaphor, as we always do when dealing with something new and unfamiliar. Metaphors are, by their nature, imperfect, but we still need to choose them carefully, because bad ones can lead us astray.
So, I would like to propose another metaphor for the risks of artificial intelligence. I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company (see Pete Buttigieg).
Social-media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic. Just as A.I. promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America.
A former McKinsey employee has described the company as “capital’s willing executioners”: if you want something done but don’t want to get your hands dirty, McKinsey will do it for you.
Suppose you’ve built a semi-autonomous A.I. that’s entirely obedient to humans—one that repeatedly checks to make sure it hasn’t misinterpreted the instructions it has received. This is the dream of many A.I. researchers. Yet such software could easily still cause as much harm as McKinsey has.
The only way that technology can boost the standard of living is if there are economic policies in place to distribute the benefits of technology appropriately. We haven’t had those policies for the past forty years, and, unless we get them, there is no reason to think that forthcoming advances in A.I. will raise the median income, even if we’re able to devise ways for it to augment individual workers. A.I. will certainly reduce labor costs and increase profits for corporations, but that is entirely different from improving our standard of living.
The Pope then identifies the second principle of the “universal destination of goods.” At this point, and in other parts of the encyclical, Pope Leo XIV insists on the need to ensure that technologies are not concentrated in the hands of only a few people, thereby widening the gap between those included and those excluded from the digital revolution (67). The third principle, subsidiarity (68), requires humanity to overcome “any form of paternalistic or welfare-based management of societal life” in favor of shared responsibility. Solidarity (73), the fourth principle, is both “a principle and a virtue,” says the Pope, noting it is opposed to indifference and takes into account people and future generations.
“Big Tech is essentially its own religion with its own theology and rites, not to mention its own power and influence. Pope Leo’s encyclical will be automatically viewed as false doctrine.”Gift link: http://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/25/t…
“Big Tech is essentially its own religion with its own theology and rites, not to mention its own power and influence. Pope Leo’s encyclical will be automatically viewed as false doctrine.”
Ultimately any accusation of ‘false doctrine’ is also about false consciousness especially with “Big Tech” and its pseudo-libertarian anarcho-capitalists and their technocratic and technofeudal tendencies. The contradiction comes in fetishizing some concept of liberty/freedom while building electoral authoritarianism on monopoly power, oligarchy, and in the US case, a (T)rump GOPhascism. The more racist paranoids are now fleeing to Argentina, because isn’t that where an antichrist would go?
The Pope acknowledges this in his second principle and “insists on the need to ensure that technologies are not concentrated in the hands of only a few people, thereby widening the gap between those included and those excluded from the digital revolution”.
This discourse demands critique with anti-capitalist ideas that seek humane, democratic alternatives in these areas:
Class struggle: The conflict between capitalists (those who own the means of production) and laborers (those who sell their labor) is a fundamental aspect of capitalism.
Wealth concentration: The accumulation of wealth among a small elite can lead to significant economic and social disparities.
Influence of corporate interests: Large corporations often wield significant influence over government policies and regulations, shaping the economic landscape to their advantage.
The Pope implies moral positions beyond property issues but is opening the range for engaging the historical materialism of anti-capitalist activism. This resembles the goals of liberation theology rather than the conservative Catholicism that would reinstate the Latin Mass. For Protestants, Project 2025 is a similar extremism, hence JD Vance picks a fight with the Pope to serve the Trumpian Christian Nationalists.
Such politics includes information studies including digital issues beyond property and privacy rights and related to adopting large language models and its effect on the deskilling of labor classes and the accumulation of corporate capital.
All of these engage concepts of Capital and relate to developing the revolutionary subjectivity essential in social and political change.
The role of science and mathematics facilitating that praxis needs further attention. Quantum machine language cannot be the sole development of such research even as it can make political economists better.
Atoms are identical and passive; they don’t change based on observation.
Humans are heterogeneous, irrational, and reflexive.
Predictability
Highly predictable given initial conditions (deterministic).
Unpredictable due to expectations. If everyone expects a crash, they act to cause one.
Laws
Universal and unchanging (gravity works the same today as in 1900).
Context-dependent; laws change as culture, technology, and psychology evolve.
Equilibrium
Systems naturally seek equilibrium.
Markets often remain in disequilibrium (bubbles, crashes) for long periods.
3. Where the Analogy Fails: Despite the mathematical elegance, the analogy has significant limitations because human agents are not atoms.
Can we do that disciplinary synthesis both concurrently and sequentially or as some authors have suggested, such theory-building resembles a post-war Marxism particularly the so-called Western Marxism accused of being an ersatz and hence an empty materialist methodology that some would call revisionist or reformist.
If we had choices for our collective methodological commitment, could we bridge the arts and sciences rather than indulge in the ideological scapegoating that passes for ruthless criticism of which there are some interesting examples like Catherine Liu on Virtue Hoarding, and Gabriel Rockhill on intellectual counterrevolutionaries.
The obvious candidates to evade a divisive discourse would first engage the political economy of communication and information, where even the latter gains a wider range of meaning when engaging the shared information fields of economics and physics. Ultimately the difference between data and information is science, social or otherwise.
The use of physical science models of mechanics has remained a means to ensure the objectivity and relevance of what some call a ‘dismal science’, as distinguished from a ‘gay science’. “Disentangling” the false dichotomies in the field of political economy should be easier after a half-century of working through the end of the “Specter that haunted Europe” among other places..
This piece, placed on this site, tends to brevity, but outlines a virtual capital model that incorporates concepts that while seemingly meta-theoretical and even superfluous, actually point to incorporating new subfields like quantum mechanics.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, a new interdisciplinary research movement has started, which aims at developing quantum math-like (or simply quantum-like) models to provide an explanation for a variety of socio-economic processes .
Quantum technology refers to devices, systems, and applications that exploit phenomena from quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is the fundamental physical theory that describes the behavior of matter and of light; its unusual characteristics typically occur at and below the scale of atoms.
One trope for a virtual capital definition could be Myerson’s: The expected profit of any truthful mechanism is equal to its expected virtual surplus. Achieving that virtual surplus might not be as tangible or intangible as expected. Measuring capital will figure into that profit expectation. The following text only speculates on the possibility that quantum entanglement pertinent to economics can be materially specified and identified as both tangible and intangible.
Such a model can include a post-hauntological Marxism that signifies a quantum “spooky action at a distance” that provides methodological arguments and empirical claims beyond those analogies and metaphorical possibilities of “quantum entanglement”. Like the confusion of literal and figurative meaning, semiotics can account for textual complexity. Because it studies signs, ‘symbols’ and sign processes, semiotics tells us where the signs and symbols may include non-linguistic ones like “spooky actions at a distance”.
Semiotics is the study of signs. It is an interdisciplinary field that examines what signs are, how they form sign systems, and how individuals use them to communicate meaning. Its main branches are syntactics, which addresses formal relations between signs; semantics, which addresses the relation between signs and their meanings; and pragmatics, which addresses the relation between signs and their users.
Accordingly, there are semiotic explorations, particularly those of C.S. Peirce that combine mathematics, linguistics, and economics. In that realm’s point of view, econophysics seems the place to start if one assumes the positions of neoclassical economics, which has become an excluding rather than inclusive field for study. The test of a Marxist logical model will bear on entry point, logic, and object. as in this below table from (Wolff and Resnick 2012). Note the difference in the use arrows.
Like “A.I.” there remains much confusion about what a “quantum political economy” could be, and in comparing neoclassical, Keynesian/post-Keynesian, and Marxist approaches to economics, an econophysics has reemerged as one among many ways to transcend what has been a checkered past for a still misunderstood Analytic Marxism, whose interdisciplinary research program has yet to be rendered fully anachronistic. Post-Keynesian and Marxist economist have made those critical research moves, even as an analytic Marxism itself resists falsification, much like Wittgenstein waving a fire poker.
A 21st Century political economy should avail itself of many discourses in building a research program that can benefit from a number of “quantum economics” approaches.
This interdisciplinary research would use econophysics to combine the political economy of information and an “information science” more informed by physics. It retains the possibility of reaffirming the classical nature of Marxist political economy that clusters Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx, among other historical figures in subsequent developments like neo-Ricardian approaches to heterodox and transdisciplinary approaches in economics.
In this context there is a subfield of quantum economics that while focusing on improving (neo)classical economics, also provides an opening or ‘entry/exit’ point for engaging political economy of a heterodox type. Beyond creating new terms or neologisms, it creates a possibility for theorizing a (critical) “quantum political economy” that can examine more complex issues related to the analysis of sustainability and financialization. It’s more than studying the qualitative, as in analogies and metaphors; it is about fairly sophisticated quantitative analysis. Human agents are not atoms, however and there always limits to the analogies and metaphors.
A possible empirical candidate in renewable energy political economy is below.
For example, what a quantum political economics could assess is the complex effects of withdrawing renewable energy technology from one region to subsidize growth in fossil fuels in a totally different geographical area.
Carbon policies and more generally valorization require more complex forms of capital analysis and measurement beyond cap and trade and other market constructions. The failure of regulatory institutions has only been appropriated by reactionary movements like technocracy and technofeudalism.
Beyond the current corrupt nature of crony capitalism, there are regional effects, finance effects and global trade effects as the current Iran war has revealed. Quantum methods could improve their analysis in the continuing North/South asymmetry destroying the planet.
The next step is then to reassess of definitions of commodity (and its markets) already mystified in a global fossil fuel crisis. An historic example of capitalist contradiction is the Trump administration paying foreign energy corporations to desist in building wind farms located in the eastern US by technically subsidizing a shift in investment to Texas fossil fuel for ruling class interests. Such blatant climate crisis corruption is the feature of a GOPhascism capitalizing on the margins of policy manipulation. Complicit are all three government branches and the agencies as political power favors capitalist hegemony.
Under the unusual deal, TotalEnergies would forfeit its leases in federal waters for two wind farms, which would have been built off New York and North Carolina. The Justice Department would then reimburse TotalEnergies $928 million, the amount it paid for the leases during the Biden administration.
In exchange, TotalEnergies would invest that money in oil and gas projects in the United States, including a facility in Texas that would export liquefied natural gas to global markets. The company would also commit to producing more oil in the Gulf of Mexico and said it was developing some additional gas-burning power plants to meet rising electricity demand from data centers.
The deal is an extraordinary transfer of taxpayer dollars to a foreign company for the purposes of boosting the production of fossil fuels, a main driver of climate change, while throttling offshore wind power. It comes as the war in the Middle East has shocked global oil markets, prompting concerns about energy supplies.
Heatmap, citing records obtained by Congress, reported that the agreement seems to have been underway before officials later settled on the “national security” rationale used to block additional offshore wind development.
The timing is the key issue. According to Electrek’s summary of the events, Interior emailed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management on Nov. 13 to outline an agreement between the government and TotalEnergies, the French oil giant that had planned offshore wind projects in Carolina Long Bay and the New York Bight.
As Electrek described, the email trail suggests negotiations were already in progress before “national security” concerns appeared in the record. Those concerns emerged later, in late November and December, during discussions involving the Department of Defense and offshore wind.
Interior ultimately announced the payout in March. As noted by Electrek, TotalEnergies said in a press release that the projects were no longer in the U.S. “national interest,” even though the company is still pursuing wind development in other countries, including France.
The source of the money is also drawing scrutiny. Officials reportedly used the federal Judgment Fund, which Electrek described as money generally set aside for legal settlements and judgments against the government.
Trump Lapdogs Trying To Pass Additional Fees For Offshore Wind #CrooksAndLiars
Capital generates a wide range of possible meanings especially since it depends on your choice of theory and gets worse when you try to measure things. For example, measuring capital can have these differences in the following table:
First, standardization often makes measurement easier. Standardized capital, which is usually produced, can usually be valued by all three valuation methods: transaction price; reproduction costs less depreciation (for produced standardized assets); and present value of future benefits. It is also possible to infer a price based on a very similar (standardized)product. In practice, national accountants typically pick whichever valuation method is easiest to implement. Second, items that are non-exclusively owned cannot be valued based on their market price. The basic problem is simple. Even when market transactions are available, they only reveal the exclusive value of an asset rather than the non-exclusive value. For example, the exclusive value for a very beautiful building which is protected from renovation by a landmark designation may be lower than the exclusive value for an ugly building which can be renovated freely. In these circumstances, economists must use either re-production cost (if possible) or the discounted value of future non-exclusive revenues to value capital. Finally, non-produced assets cannot be valued by their production cost. The complete elimination of one valuation method is not so serious for non-produced assets which have an easy to observe market value. But many non-produced assets are rarely transacted. Furthermore, most non-produced assets are so non-standardized that the few transactions which do occur yield little useful information about the market value of other non-produced assets. Similarly, non-produced assets are often non-exclusively owned and therefore do not have easy to observe revenues. As a result, values for important natural resources like the atmosphere or biodiversity cannot be measured reliably.
Marxist theory and the global environmental crisisInterview with Ian Angus, author of Metabolic Rifts: Capitalism’s Assault on the Earth Systemopen.substack.com/pub/iancangu…
Deconstructionist Critique of capital and capitalism
Deconstruction is always a double movement of simultaneous affirmation and undoing.
A deconstructionist critique of capitalism involves analyzing its underlying power dynamics, assumptions, and the impact of its ideology on societal structures.
Analyzing Power Dynamics Within Capitalism Capitalism is characterized by a complex web of power dynamics, with various stakeholders vying for influence. Some of the key power dynamics include:
Class struggle: The conflict between capitalists (those who own the means of production) and laborers (those who sell their labor) is a fundamental aspect of capitalism.
Wealth concentration: The accumulation of wealth among a small elite can lead to significant economic and social disparities.
Influence of corporate interests: Large corporations often wield significant influence over government policies and regulations, shaping the economic landscape to their advantage
There must be alternative critiques, maybe there should be at least one hundred of them.
virtual capital & political economy 