Eternal Social War: A Theory of Social Forces

A unity-collectivity in Proudhon's social science can be represented as a mesh network of highly interconnected connected, mutually interacting nodes, where each of those nodes does not have to interact with every other node in the network, but generally connects to as many other nodes as possible, and where the connections are multiplied so that generally speaking if you take a path from one node to another, there is always a route back to the first node that does not use the same set of nodes in between, so that the interactions on the mesh network can go in a loop instead of just back and forth. Furthermore, the connections between these nodes will generally be tight and high-bandwidth, meaning that they can foster a lot of communication and mutual resource and information sharing, as well as containing some fluidity by which different actions can be taken with respect to each other depending on the situation, since a highly formalized and rigid connection between two nodes is more distant.

The borders between unity-collectivities, both nested ones and peer-related ones, are often fuzzy, because there can be relations between nodes in two different unity-collectivities, or the same individuals can be part of multiple ones, creating an overlap of connections. Nevertheless, the separateness of these collectivities can and this is clearly the case, "don't think, just look" through the understanding that even the same person can operate in different social capacities, and the fact that connections themselves can be understood to be different in character, with different degrees of closeness in the coupling, and furthermore, the presence or absence of other paths, as I described earlier, can significantly change the character of a connection.

A collectivity, in this sense, can be anything from a friend group, to a or even the entire global society! Every unity-collectivity you look at is both technically just a section of a larger one, and technically the composition of smaller ones.

In the foregoing analysis, I am using the word 'node' as a simle way to refer to any type of social entity, any being or organization of beings capable of action and interaction in the social world. This includes both individuals and smaller, more tightly interconnected collectivities, which can exist nested within larger ones.

Now, what gives these collectivities their unity? What makes a collectivity a social entity? It is the alignment of the individual in a single direction, according to a single logic. Thus multiple smaller unities become a larger unity, and the collectivity becomes a social entity in its own right, apart from just the social entities which compose it.

A unity-collectivity becomes more than just that which composes it for two reasons. First, because this unity of the application of forces which compose it gives it much greater force than any of those individual powers alone, which is called collective force. Second, because such unity-collectivities often act seemingly with a mind of their own, displaying emergent behavior as a sort of social superorganism, as a result of the intense feedback between the intra-network interplay of reasoning and decisions, and because such organizations tend to be established for certain purposes, and have their own commonly understood methods for making decisions, their own internal logic, not to mention the fact that the undeniable brute fact of the existence of the unity-collectivity can create self-referential interests in its members, such as the interest to keep the collectivity alive and operating and growing for its own sake, which exist apart from the members' prior interests and the prior purpose for the creation of that collectivity, and which give it freer play to operate by its own internal logic because those interests ensure that it has at least some constitutive entities which will serve it instead of subjecting it to their own other interests. You can see examples of this kind of emergent behavior especially with corporate bureaucracies.

I think it might be a good idea to expand on the idea of collective force a little, because it's important to Neo-Proudhonian theory and it will make what I'm saying about a unity-collectivity being more than the sum of its parts clearer. Quoting now from Proudhon:

Collective force is thus something other than the sum of the individual forces of which it is made up: I add that in the application it is, by virtue of its unity, greater than that sum.

A man, whose muscular strength, in all parts of his body, is equal to six times that of an individual of average vigor, would not only render as much effective labor as six men, but in a struggle he would lay them low. The reason is that, being able to deploy on each side a superior power, or to oppose a superior resistance, he crushes his divided adversaries in a mass.

This is the image of the group: its strength or force, numerically equal to that of its components, is more than equal in its unity to all together specifically. The military men know it well, their whole science consists, through progressions of attacks and retreats combined, in breaking up the enemy mass so that they can oppose everywhere a greater force to lesser forces.

A warship with 100 cannons will chase off 500 fishing boats; a steamer with a force of 100 horsepower, giving the same service as a crew of 100 horses, will be much superior to them with regard to general costs and risks; a large agricultural operation will give, for the same amount of land cultivated, finer and more abundant products, and at lower cost, than would a dozen little farms. The mechanical arts abound with facts of this nature: the Creusot steam hammer, which represents in weight two or three hundred times the big hammer of a blacksmith, produces more effect in a single fall than two hundred blows struck by a worker; the work of a mechanical saw offers more precisions that if it is used by a half-dozen arms; the sound created by one hundred singers in unison is Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, “Principles of the Philosophy of Progress

Essentially, collective force is an emergent property of collective a much than any one person working alone could hope to achieve no matter how long they tried, and so far more than any number of people working completely alone could achieve. Consider an example from What is Property? where Proudhon mentions that a thousand workers working together for twenty days can achieve what would be completely impossible for a single worker why is this?

Well, as one example, working with the help of others, you can take advantage of greater knowledge than any one person can possess, and that knowledge can add together in such a way that it actually multiplies the usefulness of other knowledge: two pieces of information, apart, may not be very useful, and so the sum of their separated use might not be very large, but when actually communicated to each other and assembled together, they might mean a lot, and contribute something much greater.

For another example, when working with others, you can apply everyone's strength all at once, and in the same organized direction, and make a big push, whereas, if each were to apply themselves individually to the same task, they would be applying each of their strengths individually and not make much of a dent at all, so that overall the sum of their individual accomplishments would add up to much less than the combination. Imagine here attempting to lift a heavy statue upright, or something to that effect.

There is also the emergent properties of the division of labor and specialization, and the ability to do things simultaneously that would otherwise have to be done sequentially, which makes certain operations possible that would not have been physically possible at all if they had to be done sequentially, and even more emergent properties besides. If you look into any manufacturing process, or spend any time working in a group, you'll come across an endless variety of examples of this. For a small example I'm sure everyone has experienced, sometimes, when I know this because of my experience building it is actually impossible to do it without two or more people, because you need someone to hold a piece in place or move something, while you are focused on doing something else.

The principle behind this, that of a combination being more effective than an individual through the application of the whole power of the combination to an individually lesser task, where, when separated, the constituents of the combination wouldn't be equal to the tasks, is demonstrated in reverse by the division of labor: instead of combining force to conquer a greater task, a task is split up into easier ones so that a lesser force can deal with them. This is, again, something Proudhon talks about in great depth:

Thus, in the division of labor as in the collective force, the principle is the same: it is to always attack a lesser task with a greater force. While, in one case, the laborers, individually too weak, form into groups, in the other they break, as it were, the bundle of their operations, in order to take them up again, with more advantage, in detail. What the group, with its immense power, is in comparison to a mass inaccessible to the individual, that one becomes vis-à-vis some

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, “The Principles of the Philosophy of Progress

Every individual and unity-collectivity in society, at whatever scale you wish to consider the collectivity of "society," every social entity, on the social entities around it, on the world, and on itself, in an exercise of self-determination but also the elaboration and expression of the self in the world at large. This is Nietzsche's will to power as it exists in the social world. Of all the vast panoply of expressions of will and

the complex interplay of sometimes-aligned, sometimes-opposed interests, the push and pull, give and take, aid and war, of social reality.

And what exertions of power involve the social world? Any desire that we, or any other social entity, may have about the material world around us, or relations and arrangements between us and others, which takes place in society, concerns other social entities, as they will be effected. Every social entity has a different set of desires, different things to exert their power for and different ways to use it, different degrees of it, according to their capacity and willingness, but let me show you how this applies to the everyday life of the individual:

• We might exert this power to protect the necessities of life and protect ourselves from harm, against those who might wish to hurt us or prevent this.
• We might exert our power to protect a space for ourselves in the world and this, again, requires repelling the interests and powers of those who might want our home for themselves.
• We might exert our power to create other spheres within which we can freely move and express ourselves and make our fingerprint on the world felt (all the same thing, merely expressed in degrees).
• We might exert this power to protect the people and causes and things we care about.

But this brings about conflict, because the full extent of the desires of all cannot all be satisfied.

The "direction" of any individual or unity-collectivity, that is, what it ends up doing and the states it ends up in, is determined by the press of its power against the powers of others, just like the direction of any object in Newtonian physics (if we pretend that the internal force of a social entity is yet another force acting upon it, just emanating from it) is determined by the sum of all the vector forces that act on it in various different directions. Every entity in society is constantly seeking to push any other entity you could look at in the directions they please, exerting their power to further their interests, and this either overpowers, balances, or is overpowered itself by the power of that social entity and all the other ones aiding it. It's like a constant gravitational physics simulation.

The force that a unity-collectivity exerts on itself is not, however, necessarily just the sum of the forces that act within it. When, as I discussed in Democracy Won't Save You, people begin to serve and preserve an association with others for its own sake, to elevate the idea of the association above the actual purpose it serves them or others, as a sort of ghostly presiding figure that hangs over everything, to create an ideology around it, or their interests become bound up not in what the association can do for them, but in the perhaps because of the power and prestige that they gain as a side effect of being part of that or as the iron laws of bureaucracy begin to take hold if the association has become too obsessed with rules, procedures, proper channels, and methods, and lost sight of the actual goal those things were created to try to achieve, you can end up in a situation where the collective force of the unity-collectivity gains its own sort of emergent unique will. It becomes a social super-organism of its own, which can be in contradiction to literally all of the overall interests of its constituent members and yet still perpetuate itself thanks to collective action problems, prisoner's dilemmas, and other micro-scale incentive and game theoretic problems which keep people acting to preserve systems that hurt them. This is why things like systemic racism can exist, and why it is very important to be careful not to let associations become polity-forms or organizations and take on a life of their own.

Thus society is an eternal struggle, and the key is to always maintain find allies, arrange associations, and create mutually because if you drop your guard for even one moment, that will be taken advantage of. To give up that responsibility is to cease using your power for yourself, and to lend it to another, who will use it against you. Thus Novatore says,

But you, oh rabble, may not yet know how to adapt yourself to the idea of eternal war, you who have cradled yourself like a poor baby in the sweet dreams of eternal peace… And to think that even the blind would have to notice by now that anyone who isn't able to accept eternal war Renzo Novatore, Cry of Rebellion

Society is war. It is also peace, love, and reciprocity. But because of the nature of social existence, it is always also the product of mutually opposing forces, testing each other and pushing against each other. But this war does not have to be open, bloody war, with winners and losers: it can also be balance, the meeting of forces, equilibrium. But to maintain equilibrium, both forces must always push.

To summarize, then, I have drawn a picture of society where the direction of everything in it, and of the thing as a whole, is determined by the complex interplay, the push and pull, of all sorts of forces generated by an endless array of various social entities, which themselves can be analyzed in the same terms, as microcosms of the same composition and subject to the same kinds of rules about forces. This is, in practice, an immensely complex beast to draw out, but I think applying this sort of analysis to real world political problems is often fruitful: asking questions like “"where does this ideology/organization/group's power come from?", or "how is their power directed, through what channels?" or "is it really controlling its power, or lending it to something else?" or "what interests actually directly effect this outcome, and which are just given lip service to?" can often lead to really enlightening answers.

For instance, voting: do people really exercise their power over the government? If you actually look at it, the answer has to be no, because they do not set their power up in opposition to the government. They let the government direct them, and so let it direct their power. They don't actually threaten the government with anything real should it not do what they want. No matter what laws are made, for the most part, people will generally obey them, and maintain the state's legitimacy. They won't actively resist or overthrow the state, force it to do what they want. So the “"power" that people exercise over the government is really just the government's promise, kept out of precarious good will and the adherence to ideology on the part of government officials, and one that can't even be enforced. Suddenly, the reason why the government rarely actually does what people want, makes a lot of sense!

The next question is: where does this general social theory lead us?