Fritjof Capra's Web of Life (1996),

[skitty]

As recommended by Mr Natural, I just finished Web of Life; but can't see the blueprint for society. No regrets, though, as it was a great reminder of interconnectedness. I'm still working on 'bringing forth a world' through cognition! If memory serves, after reading Hardt/Negri's Commonwealth I thought 'This is a blueprint for where we should go'. The problem is, small groups, autonomous collectives, communes, Wobs have been doing this sort of thing forever-little islands surrounded by determined opposition. Isn't the real problem lack of mass? Are you out there, Mr Natural?!

[Mr. Natural]

Skitty, I'll have to begin scanning the Literature forum now. Yes, Capra's Web of Life dramatically underscores interconnectedness, but this is an interconnectedness of what? It is the interconnectedness of self-organizing living systems. Life is a bootstrap (radical interconnectedness) of these living systems that create and compose the life process.

You posted, "Isn't real problem lack of mass?" Well, no, the initial problem at least is the organization of "mass." If organized in the pattern of life, the small groups you mentioned will develop and reproduce. Life on Earth began with one or a few self-organizing protocells, and they evolved to populate the Earth with living systems and the pattern of organization of life they established has been replicated by all living systems since.

So what is the organization of the living systems of life? Capra presents a triadic, "reductive" model for life's universal, inseparable pattern of organization in Chapter 7 of Web, and I believe "Capra's triangle" is the key to the human future. This triangle is in agreement with the Marxist materialist dialectic and serves to bring it to full-bodied, potentially popularly usable life.

Capra's triangle declares all life consists of living systems existing in dynamic interdependence (radical interconnectedness) with each other and their physical environment (bootstrap), and that these living systems (and healthy, viable human social systems) have a universal pattern of organization. They are self-organized matter network-patterned with their life activity. This "life activity" is what they do: how they dynamically interconnect with the rest of life and obtain the energy and habitat niche essential to their being.

A critically important Marxist work in this area is Bertell Ollman's Dance of the Dialectic (2003). Ollman is in his 70s and still teaches a full load at NYU, and his scholarship firmly establishes that Marx's materialist dialectic is rooted in his exposure to Hegel's philosophy of internal relations and dialectical categories. As stated earlier, I believe Capra's triangle embodies the materialist dialectic and brings it to life and potential praxis.

It is exceedingly important that Marxism, the materialist dialectic, anarchism/communism, revolutionary processes, the new sciences of organization, Capra's triangle, and life are a natural unity. They are all similarly organized. The triangle then makes it possible for humans to consciously organize their lives in this pattern.

Thanks much for the OP, Skitty. Now a final question: Doesn't life consist of living systems that are self-organized matter network-patterned with their life activity? Isn't a raven a self-organized material system that is network-patterned internally into the form that dynamically interconnects with its envirnment to make its living in the raven way? Doesn't this "economic organizational model" of life also apply to humans? Are we not life?

Marx and Engels, Anti-Duhring: "Dialectics, however, is nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society, and thought." Engels, in his plan outline for Dialectics of Nature: "Dialectics as the science of universal inter-connection."

Capra's triangle brings usable organization to the motion and development and dynamic interconnection of life.

Two other books on systems-complexity science, its center at the Santa Fe Institute, and life's underlying "rules" that I find to be immensely readable and mind-grabbing are Roger Lewin's Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos (1999) and M. Mitchell Waldrop's Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (1992).

Everything I post is aimed toward developing revolutionary processes out of capitalism into a realized anarchist/communist human future. Capra's triangle is the unprecedented, even previously unimagined mental tool that makes such social transformations possible.

Thanks again. My red-green best.

[skitty]

Thank you Mr Natural...I'm still at the point where all this makes my head spin. Miles to go...

[Mr. Natural]

Skitty, Trying to see and understand organization makes everyone's head spin. Human perception/consciousness is reductive and almost blind to organization, and humanity must learn to see and apply life's organization if we are to continue.

Once I saw Capra's triangle, I began relentlessly applying this simple test to life and society: Is the living or social system I am testing self-organized matter network-patterned with its life activity? It has always been so; Capra's triangle has always been affirmed.

I want to re-recommend Pulitzer Prize winner Roger Lewin's Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos (1999). This is written for a popular readership and is a fun read that explores those head-spinning hidden organizational relations that underly the things we see. Lewin gave me a "feel" for engaging this stuff.

Wasn't all that interconnectedness Web of Life portrayed lovely? And comforting? We aren't isolated things externally controlled by God or other external forces, but self-organizing beings who live together with each other and the many other beings in a process of dynamic interconnection. We belong: we are natural beings currently living unnaturally within the cancer of capitalism. And life belongs: it is a natural development rooted in the evolution of the deep universe.

So what's the organization of all this life we see around us? It will be human organization, too, for we must live in our human way as natural beings. The universal pattern of the organization of life and community is modeled by Capra's triangle.

My red-green best.

[skitty]

Do you see Zen in all this? Here's an unrelated book I read a while back:
ISBN-10: 0195145925...very mixed reviews and also made my brain hurt!

[Mr. Natural]

Yes, I see Zen's dynamic interconnection of being in all of this, although the practice of Zen tends to be socially passive. I am much attracted to Eastern spiritual philosophies intellectually, for they understand existence and life as dynamic, organic, systemic process, as does Capra's triangle and the Marxist materialist dialectic. There's my "red-green" and your appreciation of all the interconnection going on in Capra's Web of Life.

As for Julian Barbour's End of Time, it made my head hurt just researching it. I tend to forget the "details" of the new physics and cosmology as fast as I encounter them, but never philosophically lose the dynamically interdependent, interconnected "feel" for existence these new sciences provide.

Now that you've read Web of Life and appreciated it, my sense of where you are leads me to again recommend Roger Lewin's Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos. This is really easy, fun reading that will give you an intuitional feel for all the slippery, sloppy, unseen and unthought stuff going on under life's "things."

Here's a Zen saying for you: "If you don't get it from yourself, where will you go for it?" Yes, we are all educated by others, but it is You who engage those others and self-determine what you hear and learn. This is in agreement with all of life consisting of living systems (people are living systems) who are self-organized matter existing in dynamic interdependence with their environment. Their environment triggers reactions, but a living system determines what environmental stimuli it will react to and how it will react.

So that Zen saying converted to living systems theory might state, "If a living system doesn't self-organize, where did its self go?"

And if anarchist/communist revolutionary processes aren't rooted in the individual selves of persons coming together in new, radical formations, what has happened to the Manifesto's "association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

Thanks for the conversation. My red-green best.