What thermodynamics teaches us about free will
You don't have to be a determinist to recognize profound systematic limits to our political agency.
Marxists, historically, have often argued that human behavior is governed by deterministic laws of cause and effect rather than by free will. This was particularly the case in the early twentieth century, as I wrote a while back; but today one can make an even stronger case for this, particularly as our study of the human brain has found essentially mechanical explanations for an ever-growing range of behavior.
Still, most people continue to believe in some form of free will. And superficially, it seems like this could pose a challenge for Marxists: much of our critique of capitalism insists that even if we hypothetically have the freedom to address certain problems, we won’t. Why should workers who feel they are underpaid seize the means of production or demand a state-enforced minimum wage when they could just all agree to bargain for better pay in the market? If we think that corporate media is propaganda, why not just refuse to watch it until it decides to change course?
There are a lot of ways to answer these kinds of questions, but here I’d like to make an argument that contemporary activists are loathe to make: even if we have free will, that doesn’t mean that we can leverage it to create large scale systematic change.
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Quick high-school physics refresher: the second law of thermodynamics tells us that our universe is gradually moving from a state of relative order towards states of increasing disorder. At the largest scale this is evident in the expansion of the universe itself, but you can also see this at much smaller scales. Knock over a vase and it doesn’t shatter into the shape of an even more complex vase; it breaks into a million shards of ceramic flying in every direction.
Though most people have at least a passing familiarity with the second law of thermodynamics, ask any high school physics teacher and they’ll tell you that a lot of folks misunderstand it in the exact same way. Since we call it a natural law, people often take for granted that it is a law in the same way that gravity and electromagnetism are laws. Just like gravity is a kind of force that acts on matter and forces it to behave in a certain way, we imagine that thermodynamics does this too: instead of saying “move towards other particles based on their distance and mass,” it tells particles to behave more chaotically and disorderly with time.
But that isn’t actually what’s going on! When we talk about the second law we are actually just talking about a tendency that emerges among systems of particles by default, even when no forces are acting on them at all. Imagine if you pumped a cloud of smoke into a room and then counted up all of the ways that it could possibly dissipate. You would certainly find a lot of orderly ways it could arrange itself — into a tight sphere, for example, or in the shape of an elephant; but you would count many, many more ways that it could dissipate with no order at all. All the second law of thermodynamics tells us that since there are always many more disorderly states than orderly states a universe can move into, it is always more likely to move into one of the former than the latter.
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To put it more abstractly, the second law of thermodynamics demonstrates something that systems theory calls emergence — predictable behavior that one cannot infer simply from looking at the behavior of its constituent parts. Emergence is a feature that we find in all kinds of complex systems that appear in the natural world. Some cases of emergence even seem, superficially, to defy the second law; think of how the complex and orderly geometric patterns of a snowflake emerge from the way that ice crystals form. It does not seem useful or sensible to suggest that its individual water molecules were following some rule that said “assemble into this shape”; that’s what happened, but not because it was determined to happen in that sense.
Emergence is not just a feature we find in the inanimate behavior of physical systems. From its inception, systems theory has long been interested in how these insights can help us understand human behavior and human systems — and in particular, the economy. In his Waldrop’s 1993 book Complexity: The Emerging Science Between Order and Chaos, the author describes how systems theory trailblazer Brian Arthur began by asking simple questions about economics:
Why had high-tech companies scrambled to locate in the Silicon Valley area around Stanford instead of in Ann Arbor or Berkeley? Because a lot of older high-tech companies were already there. Them that has gets. Why did the VHS video system run away with the market, even though Beta was technically a little bit better? Because a few more people happened to buy VHS systems early on, which led to more VHS movies in the video stores, which led to still more people buying VHS players, and so on. Them that has gets.
What do both of these questions have in common? Both are investigating how humans, presumably acting with free will, nevertheless ended up acting in completely predictable ways as if they were compelled to follow very simple rules. Arthur’s explanation for this was to argue for a kind of emergent behavior called “increasing returns” that inevitably appears in free market economies. It is a kind of snowball effect that one finds all over the place in capitalism.
Capitalist economists were not amused:
Outside of this immediate circle at Stanford, most economists thought his ideas were — strange… In seminars, a good fraction of the audience reacted with outrage: how dare he suggest that the economy was not in equillibrium!
Back in the eighties, even moreso than today, capitalist apologetics were still leaning heavily on neoclassical ideas about a market that stayed in equilibrium. That’s what made the ascendence of VHS so puzzling: in a market where consumers were free to purchase any video system that they liked, it made no sense that they would rally around the one that was technologically inferior. In that light it’s not hard to understand why the concept of “increasing returns” was so threatening to capitalists.
But I think there was some subtext at work here that Waldrop misses: Brian Arthur was not the first economist to notice the problem increasing returns could create for free markets. That honor goes to Karl Marx:
The laws of this centralization of capitals, or of the attraction of capital by capital, cannot be developed here. A brief hint at a few facts must suffice. The battle of competition is fought by cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities depends, ceteris paribus, on the productiveness of labour, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore, the larger capitals beat the smaller.
This is a classic example of emergent behavior. In a free market, consumers are not forced in any kind of legal sense to patronize any particular business; so if one grows too large for the public’s liking, it seems like they could in principle take their money elsewhere. In practice, however, this is not what happens — because in practice, economies of scale give large businesses an insurmountable advantage in pricing.
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One can find so many parallels between systems theory and Marxist theory that I suspect this explains, at least in part, why capitalist economists find them both so threatening: one reminds them of the other. There is also, however, an implication here that I think contemporary socialists often resist as well.
Consider again the problem of monopoly and economies of scale. If I explain to a libertarian that his ideas about responsive market equillibrium are a farce, socialists will applaud. But if I then say the same thing to a socialist calling for a boycott of Exxon Mobil — that this is unlikely to have much of an effect since capitalist markets are not actually responsive to consumers — the reaction is likely to be very different. If I make the general point that major corporations and decentralized cartels control are drowning out independent voices and with their enormous platforms, even liberals are likely to agree. But moments later, you will then see communist activists calling on their comrades to tweet out their opposition to Western imperialism — and condemn the failure to do so as an abdication of personal responsibility.
An extraordinary amount of modern activism, even on the radical left, proceeds as if there are no real limits to our political power. And given the popularity of rhetoric about “agency” and our habit of “holding accountable” individual people for large-scale sociopolitical trends, it’s hard to miss the implicit reasoning. The assumption is not just that we all have freedom to do the right and optimal thing; it is that if we do this, our choices will naturally aggregate into massive political consequences. Did the left’s boycott of Exxon fail? Yep — so we need to find out who kept buying gas from them, or who was supposed to recruit more people but chose not to do so.
If you want to understand popular politics under capitalism, imagine a giant machine designed to neutralize individual agency with collective action problems. This even happens at the level of language! You can criticize capitalism, and you can even develop your own special terms and concepts to do so; and ordinarily, liberalism will just sit back and let it happen. But if your criticism starts mobilizing and organizing too many workers, you can be sure that the right will start to co-opt it and use it to break your movement apart. This won’t happen because the right is necessarily following some rule that they should do so; they will just naturally gravitate towards popular language and try to wield it to their own advantage.
Ultimately this means that even though liberalism frees us to say whatever we want, socialists will always face a serious limits to our ability to persuade people to our cause. Usually these limits will be completely invisible simply because we have not become enough of a threat for the systematic co-option to begin; and when the limits are invisible, we’ll be tempted to believe they don’t exist. Six or seven years ago American socialists were wildly optimistic about their ability to build a mass workers movement using media, advocacy organizations, and interpersonal persuasion. It was precisely then that right-wing dark money, working through the usual network of think tanks and media influencers, aggressively promoted a neopopulist rhetoric that gestured towards class struggle but redirected it towards “woke capitalism”, “PMCs”, “the establishment,” and so on. Today all that socialist optimism has largely dissipated, and one can easily see that we were always going to face this kind of reaction, and that we were never going to be able to do much about it.
Capitalism has internal mechanisms for dealing with boycotts of Exxon. Capitalism has internal mechanism for dealing with activist public persuasion campaigns. Capitalism has all kinds of ways to disrupt collective action, and it can often do it without placing limits on individual action. In this way, capitalism is a lot like blowing a puff of smoke into a box and hoping it will condense into the shape of a castle. There is nothing that prevents individual particles of smoke from doing this, and yet we can be almost certain — just understanding how they behave collectively — that it isn’t going to happen.