Tag: dialectic materialism

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.