Author: Christopher

entry 16

Here I develop and explicate both my critique of marxist Dialectic Materialism and aspects of my own philosophy through interpreting & commenting on a passage by David Harvey, a respected contemporary author on the left.

”Marx […] insists that only by transforming the world can we transform ourselves; that it is impossible to understand the world without simultaneously changing it as well as ourselves.” (David Harvey: Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (1996), p.56)
 
 

Now, I agree prima-facie with the passage and find it basically fine, at least on a technical/extensional level.* But I’m going to contrast two possible interpretations of the passage that have significantly different implications – my view of the dialectic of transforming our world [from capitalism to something better], and a second interpretation that is partly different and that may reflect marxist thinking.**

I see a process consisting, basically, of complementary and synchronized halves:

Half (h1) is the stepwise building of a post-capitalist world – in our individual and collective minds and in society and economy*** – with each step requiring that both a) the previous step is in place as a basis to build on, and b) material and ideological space for the new step to be built into is free.

Half (h2) is the process that makes space available in the current world for (h1), i.e. to grow and build a post-capitalist world into: It is a commensurate stepwise/layerwise process of capitalist reality receding, synchronized with availability of a next step of (h1) to replace the part of capitalism that is removed.

The marxist version is identical except for the process half (h2) not being required to be gradual and commensurate – it may be an abrupt, violent process [and is seen as such as the default].

So, why these two variations and how do they relate to the quoted passage? This may become clearer as I elaborate the side of each half**** that concerns understanding or ideology, i.e. the mental side:

regarding (h1):  Each step of this positive transformation consists of material and ideological changes that reciprocally cause and require each other, much as described in entry 11. The ideological side of this includes building an understanding of how a post-capitalist world works and of ourselves as minds/subjects within post-capitalist society – with this gradually forming an ideology that is both institutionalized in society and manifested in post-capitalist economy[ ,replacing the institutions of capitalist realism and economy]. And of course each ideological step of change requires the material and ideological changes of the previous step to be in place, i.e. it requires the previous step of transformation of the world.

regarding (h2): The process of capitalism shrinking and diminishing materially and ideologically has to be stepwise – or layerwise – and commensurate with the organic growth of post-capitalism because: Capitalist reality is an ideological and material reality structure of the same quality and requiring the same approach as any other: Its foundations/principles produce and re-produce capitalist reality, blocking alternative manifestations, as long as that institutionalized ideological structure is in place. And it remains in place – in individual and collective institutions/structures of culture and tradition – until it is made conscious, understood and can then be negated with precision – and one must build an understanding[/consciousness] of [unconscious] capitalist ideology just like building any other theory or understanding of some complex process/structure that one does not understand. This gradual building of a complete understanding of capitalist reality is a gradual disruption and erosion of capitalist ideology and reality, and it is the only way to truly free up space for an alternative reality to grow.

now to re-simplify and contrast the two interpretations and two versions of the transformation process:

Marxist version: We gradually/dialectically democratize/positively transform the world and our individual and collective minds, made possible by a non-gradual and non-dialectic, material-revolutionary disruption of material capitalist relations.

My version: two complementary and synchronized processes: We gradually/dialectically de-capitalize material and ideological systems/processes, including our own minds – whilst gradually/dialectically democratizing/socializing/positively transforming the world and our individual and collective minds.

which brings me to the core of my thesis regarding sustainable and positive global transformation:

The synchronized change of these two halves produces a moving central nexus in which the two halves reciprocally facilitate and cause each other – an active core in which we are switching capitalist relations to social relations and making visible the next layer of the remaining capitalist reality and working out what to replace it with. Any change is at the same time progress in our understanding of ourselves as parts of capitalist reality. The battleground is our own mind: change must at the same time be a change in our understanding of ourselves as parts of capitalist reality: We are all capitalists – even workers and marxists – until we have uncovered the roots of our own unconscious ideology.

Positive global transformation and revolution can only happen through our minds self-transforming, not through re-setting or inversion of power relations!

Or, more generally: To be able to deliberately change something, one must see it.

 

*If one analyses the passage in terms of standard extensional logic, then the passage is very simple and obviously easily compatible with a fairly standard and modest philosophy/worldview.¹ However, this may be an example for the limitations of analysis of extensional logical form, as the important questions only really appear when one departs from the question of material truth conditions and instead considers candidate concept structures or processes as models that may be co-extensional but that differ in very significant ways in their implications in the actual context of capitalism, ideology, and the project of material or ideological change. 

** I do this firstly for contextual reasons – the context here being the thinking in and near marxist tradition in general, especially Dialectic Materialism, and criticism of capitalism, and of course the idea of revolution involving use of material power to abruptly dislodge or invert the power relations of capitalism – and secondly because it’s important to explore such critical interpretations and find out whether they do indeed match the [intended] meaning [within a tradition], precautionarily playing the devil’s advocate. You can of course judge for yourself whether my interpretation fits – on the one hand how it fits the passage and on the other how it fits marxism – and indeed it may turn out that my interpretations are just ideas loosely inspired by the passage and are, in a way, extreme misinterpretations.

*** ‘economy’ here in the broadest sense, i.e. not implying specific types of economy such as economies that feature money or commodities

****As you may notice, this whole thing seems to be taking the form of a self-similar structure of nested pairs.

¹ for example, the passage’s logical form may be taken as this pair of simple propositional logic phrases:

p → q ; r → (p ˄ q)

with p, q, and r being statements as follows:

p: (we transform ourselves/are transformed – we change)    q: (we transform the world/the world is transformed/the world changes)    r: (we understand the world in a new/better way – we reach a next step of understanding of the world)

entry 15

This entry and the next address the same question in different ways, the first written around 7 weeks ago, the second written a few days ago. This first one was posing difficulties to me on re-reading it and trying to understand it, though in this transcription I’m happier with it again. The second note addresses the same topic in a different way and together they may make more sense.

[human] History is the process consisting of the reciprocal duality of material changes & ideological changes: material conditions and [largely] unconscious ideological conditions change and cause/precipitate eachother and so constitute the dialectic process that is history. 

It is philosophy’s task to understand this dialectic, which means to make the unconscious ideology conscious & visible so that it can be seen and consciously processed and reacted to by society/humanity. Hegelians, e.g. Zizek, seem to understand this – however, Marxists, following Marx’ Dialectic Materialism*, actually don’t:

Marxists [at least ostensibly] want to move on to the post-capitalist phase of history, which would be the dialectic synthesis of capitalism and capitalism’s antithesis: The synthesis would be a new whole that fully produces and holds/includes the antithesis to capitalism. The antithesis is the dialectic negation of capitalism – which would negate exactly every component of capitalist ideology. To negate all components of the ideology, one requires exactly all components of the ideology – identifying the underlying generative process/concepts of capitalist ideology, aka finding the thesis of capitalism.

Now, only such an antithesis would be the true, exact negation of capitalism – and a less thorough negation is not dialectic*, it’s just a contradicting thesis. And such an antithesis or full negation would require capitalist [unconscious] ideology to be understood completely, i.e. made conscious at its deepest/root levels.

However, Marx’ approach is to go straight to changing the material conditions (marxist revolution, workers seizing power over production) in the blind hope that material change will end capitalist ideology or at least provide a way out of it, i.e. hoping that, in the changed material conditions, current/existing ideology won’t inevitably re-produce the same dialectic and the same problems and that there aren’t deeper material or ideological conditions/processes/concepts – i.e. a deeper dialectic – that also re-produce capitalism. And marxist denial of the necessity of fully working through this excavation of ideology makes it impossible to complete the step of the historical dialectic and reach the next higher level of the dialectic totality. And what Marxist endeavor instead leads to is a different, very speculative, question.

So one thing I’m proposing – which I think corresponds to Hegelian
thought – is that changing the material conditions in order to escape a certain material-ideological reality is ineffective without understanding the [logical] relations between existing ideology and proposed altered material conditions, and without ascertaining that the proposed material conditions aren’t just one of many possible manifestations of an underlying ideology and that the proposed material change really is a way out of the dialectic in question.

 
 

*Marxists do of course excavate, explore, analyse and critique capitalist ideology, to varying depths/degrees. But it seems to me that their aim in this isn’t to reach full understanding, but instead to reach sufficient understanding to be able to see and explicate enough problems of capitalism to motivate material change…

 

entry 14

I’ve recently been considering my criteria for selecting which notes I transcribe from my notebook to here:

Should I practice more restrictive selection leading to a low post frequency and high average quality or should I practice less restrictive selection, posting many notes that are more random, speculative, imperfect and that I am less certain about and are subject to probable revision? This question has been particularly current as I have been thinking a lot about politics, an area that a) I have spent relatively little time studying, especially and b) arguably contains especially complex questions.

In the last few days I’ve decided to practice looser selection, here are a few reasons:

1) Simply producing more has certain brute-force practical advantages regardless of content or quality.

2) In transcribing notes that are less clear/perfect, I am re-ordering and tidying them up in a way that makes them easier to work with later.

3) If I post many of the notes that are more unfinished, temporary and speculative, this can produce a visible record of my meandering philosophical journey, which could be interesting. In particular, maybe a Hegelian *Bewegung der Begriffe* will become observable in the way that – as I have sometimes noticed – after gradually thinking through a topic and reaching a feeling of understanding and conclusions, I tend to then later go back and explore a direction that opposes those conclusions – i.e. I continue to move conceptually instead of accepting reached understandings/conclusions as given, in the faith that if my originally perceived understanding was indeed an understanding, that then I will eventually return to it anyway, finding and seeing it again.

4) It should help me to avoid counter-productive levels of inhibition/self-doubt/self-censorship – I don’t want to consider each post so carefully that doubt is multiplied counter-productively. Plus I anyway only write things in my notebook if I feel the thing is important enough to need to be written down – I’m a lazy person – and ultimately I trust my own judgement in this regard and shouldn’t be second-guessing judgement of potential readers.

entry 13

für die [phil.] Praxis eine Festhaltung/Wiederholung eines mir schon bekannten, einfachen Problemschemas/Phänomens bzw. einer Unterscheidung:

[induktive] Verwechslung von Zusammenfassung mit Erklärung:

Naturgesetzte bzw. Prinzipien – die ja in [wissenschaftstheoretischen Schemen von] wissenschaftlichen Erklärungen den erklärenden Gehalt liefern sollten – sind* eigentlich gar nicht erklärend, sondern nur verallgemeinernd/zusammenfassend.

Der eigentliche Sinn einer Erklärung – bevor man versucht ‘Erklärung’ zu definieren, etwa im Rahmen der Wissenschaftstheorie – ist ja, dass sie eine befriedigende Antwort auf eine ‘Wieso?’ Frage darstellt, d.h. dass sie einem zu neuem Verstehen verhilft. Und das wird nicht unbedingt erfüllt durch eine gewöhnliche wissenschaftliche Erklärung anhand eines Allgemeinen Prinzips – auch wenn die [wissenschaftsth.] Kriterien einer wissenschaftlichen Erklärung erfüllt werden und das zu erklärende tatsächlich eine logische Instanz des herangezogenen Gesetzes ist. Denn das Gesetz ist oft eigentlich nur eine [durch logische Induktion/Statistik] von gesammelten Einzelfällen/Daten zustandekommende allgemeine/zusammenfassende Beschreibung der Welt – was vielleicht praktische Anwendungen hat aber das eigentliche Wieso nur innerhalb der selben Ebene verschiebt statt mit einer zweiten Ebene zu verbinden – d.h. statt das Verständnis der Sache zu vertiefen durch Verbindung mir einer zweiten Sache die prima facie nicht logisch/statistisch verwandt/ähnlich ist, sondern erst gemeinsam ein neugesehenes, qualitativ komplexeres Ganzes bildet bzw sichtbar macht…

*Ja – ein quasi-genereller Satz der etwaige pedantische Leser irritieren könnte. Aber man kann sich selber fragen, auf welche empirische Gesetze/Methoden bzw in welchen Kontexten meine Analyse zutrifft und auf welche nicht…

entry 12

Many prominent & vocal leftists condemn successful capitalists as greedy, and this moral accusation of greed plays a major role in leftist polemic. Billionaires and bosses are called ‘greedy’, and so-called corporate greed is criticized.

However, it is not greed – at least not in any relevant or non-trivial way – that drives capitalists and corporations to do what they do. Moral defects or character defects aren’t really the cause of capitalists’ problematic behaviour patterns.

The true cause is the reality within which they live and within which they actually try to do the best they can. What I mean by that is: like most normal people they are believers, in part consciously and in part unconsciously, in mainstream reality and its principles – principles that produce a specific, fixed structure of culture and morality within which they try to behave and do well, and especially try to behave rationally. If their reality is flawed at a deep level and thus behaving according to its culture ultimately must produce problematic results, then this is not due to them, but rather due to history.

And indeed the notion that greed is the problem – that the problem is that each bad actor has this problematic personality trait – is itself individualist thinking as opposed to collectivist/structural thinking, i.e. it is anti-leftist and both reinforces individualism and provides a very easy way for the criticised to counter the polemic with individual justification that is provided by standard rationalist ethics.

So the left should focus on the structural critique – criticizing the ideology that produces the capitalist reality that capitalists are unwitting and dogmatic agents of.

 

And if one insists on making an individualist criticism of capitalists, greed wouldn’t even be the most fitting criticism: It would be that capitalists lack the awareness and courage to notice that their reality and ideology are fundamentally flawed. But, again, that would be a flawed criticism, as it consists of stating facts that are easily explained by the structural factors: Capitalists are normal people who, like other normal people, grow up in and are formed by capitalist realist social structures – a culture that is so dominant and all-pervasive that it would simply require statistically infrequent levels of rebelliousness or alternativeness for a random mind to thoroughly resist, traits which of course tend to result in marginalization.

entry 11

de-mystifying the term ‘unconscious ideology‘ – a term that may sound esoteric or meaningless or unscientific etc. – what it means and how it occurs:

Some material change occurs, and that change means that different strategies/behaviour patterns are now viable [to different degrees].

In these new circumstances, those agents have an advantage whose dispositions (which are unconscious structures of the mind) are better compatible with the new set of more viable behaviours.

And those agents who possess advantageous unconscious traits rise in success/power relative to others, and thereby those unconscious traits spread through [higher levels of] hierarchies of success/power/respect etc. .

And this proliferation constitutes an emergence of common/shared [similar] unconscious traits [- and a shift in the makeup of unconscious traits within certain social/hierarchical groups/levels].

And those shared unconscious dispositional traits at the same time are a shared causal foundation/base for common sets of rationalizations – in other words, now that minds with certain shared intuitive/unconscious aspects/traits have grouped together, this leads to certain [new] sets of rationalizations finding group appeal & acceptance and becoming prominent and standard.

This kind of complex of such sets of group rationalizations with a shared unconscious causal basis that comes about through material change interacting with unconscious mental traits is what I mean by ‘unconscious ideology’.

And of course such sets of rationalizations can build/produce more complex structures of rationalizations over time, thus more obviously becoming ideologies or systems/structures of common thinking.

entry 10

individualism & rationalism* as social & theoretical-philosophical anti-structuralism** respectively

individualism:

Individual freedom is seen as freedom from social structures… & freedom to use money to do whatever one wishes – and this monetary liberalism at the same time erodes, disintegrates, dissolves and liquefies social structures.

rationalism/rational tradition:

on the linguistic level: Under rational methodology, ones tries to reduce statements to such that can be defined and used independently of any [theoretical] context that might be too broad to be tangible, definable & explicable, and to such statements that consist of components whose meanings/functions are independent of any intangible, unconscious, impractically complex contexts. Put more simply, words and statements are isolated out of the complex structures they are/were parts of.

on the level of object/reference domain: When considering an object or a question, one can often find that this object is actually embedded in a more complex structure that is beyond practical rational analysis, and that the object’s properties and identity are dependent on a larger structure. The rational method tries, when tenable, to put aside such more complex structure in order to isolate and focus on an object that is a tangible, bounded, comprehensible piece of the universe. And rational objects of analysis thus tend to be physical and of theoretical dimension (- i.e. of [minimum] number of relata of the object’s predicate -) low enough to be reducible or definable using the available/accessible [mainstream] theories & theory levels.

on the level of belief/truth: At the same time rational theorizing tries to be free from dogma and bias by trying to be free from ideology, i.e. ideological idea structures. And this manifests in tending to minimize the positive content of theory structure, being opposed to theory structures that contain positive beliefs/determinations/propositions, instead aiming to build a purely technical/mathematical structure of neutral sets of possible choices. And this keeps the theory structure from growing in minds***, and thus minimizes the dimension and complexity of the theory structure, i.e. minimizes the extent of structure.

—

Now, the idea of freedom from social structures is of course false – a naive rationalist denial of unnoticed, unconscious structures that humans are embedded in – structures of class, hierarchies, traditions, genders, etc. And this situation of naive ignorance of causally active social structures is open for exploitation by reactionary paternalism.

And analogously, the assumptions underlying rational methodology are also naive and exploitable.

*I’m not yet sure whether to say ‘rationality’ or ‘rationalism’ or something else here – and this isn’t simply a matter of looking up which term is the one closer to what I mean, it’s a matter of a longer process that involves exploring the logical and historical relationships between these terms and contemporary ideologies/traditions and developing a terminology that can most effectively be used to let a reader see the connections and distinctions I am trying to make or explicate. Suffice to say here that I mean ‘rationalism’ in a very broad, undefined, exploratory, speculative sense and not exactly in the sense of any particular existing historical definition of ‘rationalism’. Some other of many terminological candidates for what I’m thinking of are ‘rational tradition’ and ‘rational methodology’ and ‘rational-analytical methodology’.

**I use ‘structuralism’ here in a broader sense than the common usage of the term, especially than the sociological usage: By ‘structuralism’ I roughly mean: a meta-theory/philosophy that says that structures and relations actually exist and need to be taken into account for correct analysis of any single part of the world.

***I expect to write much more on this in other notes concerning the connection between rational-analytical method and nihilism.

entry 9

Minds that try to be rational nevertheless have some feelings/intuitive thoughts that lack a rational foundation/reason/justification. But under rationalism, it is not ok to have a purely emotionally or intuitively grounded conviction – to state a thought as true with no rational explanation/argument for it – with nothing to make it rational.

One of the natural and common reactions a mind that is trying to be rational has in this situation is to come up with* a rational reason which can replace the intuition – aka a rationalization. This lets the mind hold the originally emotionally/intuitively grounded thought/conviction [or a satisfyingly compatible one] in a rationally acceptable/permissible way.

Now, the original sub/un-conscious structures of mind – the ones that produced the feeling/intuition – are still there, and in fact become hardened and perpetuated [over time] by the presence of static rationalization that is fixed over them.

now to the main point of this note:

A potential problem arises for the mind here: If the current rationalization is rescinded/removed**, then rationalism dictates the mind negate/remove the conviction, which is a painful assault on that subconscious part of the mind that still supports the conviction.

And so, somewhat ironically, the mind trying to avoid this problem develops emotional attachment to rationalizations***, which then leads to fear, entrenchment and defensiveness…

And in my experience philosophical training implicitly shows that rationalization in this very broad sense is folly and that calmness & trust & patience & openness are more effective: one observes, in repetition ad nauseam, that even the seemingly strongest, most convincing arguments and rationalizations eventually turn out to be flawed.

And it is actually ok to have a purely emotional-intuitive [theoretical/philosophical] conviction as long as one sees and says it as such instead of rationalizing it… This is especially obvious when one considers that no conviction has a completely rational reason/justification/rationalization – if one logically follows reasons ever deeper to and into the foundations, one will always find something non-rational or a dogma…

This is part of an anti-rationalist or non-rationalist philosophy.

*which, by the way, is usually a completely intuitive/non-rational/unconscious process, and always has at least some unconscious components or base even if the [conscious] mind doesn’t notice this (the mechanism relies on the mind not noticing this, and the mind usually doesn’t.).

**and not in that moment replaced by a different rationalization with the same conclusion… hopefully I will write more related to such smooth rational transitions in later posts.

***to be clear: I use ‘rationalization’ here in a very broad and more value-neutral than usual sense, including rational theories in general – scientific theories that meet the standards of rationalist methodologies.

entry 8

Surplus [of production] isn’t bad per se. The question is what the surplus is used for/transformed into:

Is it transformed into

a) more energy, light, consciousness

or into

b) more power? – with power here meaning power over others & the environment, & appearing in the form of money in its most general sense: money as credit that ideology-society-state make to function as power-over by guaranteeing the holder of the credit a freedom [& practical ability] to do something that is in logical conflict with another agent’s freedoms (Deutsch: Befugnis)

– maybe relevant to marxist theory

entry 7

some highly theoretical and somewhat vague speculation - dialectic cosmology and ontology brought together with general cosmology:

The law of entropy is only a special case of a [more general] law of sustainability – the law that unsustainable structures will dissipate/disappear/disintegrate: Entropy is the law of sustainability applied to a certain level [or set of levels] of the cosmos…

And in this context, the essence of nature* is the [process of] production of sustainable** structures at ever-higher levels [of the cosmos].

*nature here seen as an non-boundaried part – or better aspect – of the cosmos & of the cosmological process. I.e. I’m not using a conception of nature that implies a boundary between the natural and unnatural.

**’sustainable’ here roughly meaning that a process re-produces or repeats itself without depleting its conditions of/for existence