Tag: capitalism

69

summer 22, reading the Dawn of Everything, re. p. 159 on sacred & private property:

maybe history has in fact not whitnessed a de-sacralization, but instead a total sacralization:

[transitioning over millenia] from the sacred being limited to special rituals     to the abstract god’s sanctity: omnipresent locally and temporally, extending down to every man & thing through the sacred rational structure/institution called law –

thus replacing the functional, informal {property/safety/freedom}-{ensuring/producing} relationship of inter-personal trust with the alienating/particularizing individual connection to [quasi/de-facto ]monotheistically centralized law … culminating historically in the abstract sacral legal structure of money

– of course, single entities can no longer be sacred per se, but instead only relative to their connection to the one god – i.e. through their ‘value’… 

(…and historically this relation spreads automatically, through commerce and rational governance, to everything and anything that exists in [mainstream culture’s consensus ]reality… and once it becomes global and total, it is no longer noticeable that our reality has this sacral, magical property.

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 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 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.