logicp_writings/new/Marxism_Theology.md

Introduction

James explains why he stopped focusing on Paulo Freire for a while in order to dive back into Marxism and understand the mechanisms by which Freire appears as a religious figure in Wokeism, particularly to Henri Giroux, who was his evangelist and the man responsible for having made "The Politics of Education" become so well-cited in Pedagogical disciplines

I've been doing a series about Critical Pedagogy Theory and if you're following along which is kind of diffuse sprinkled in with other podcast episodes, you'll know that I've gone backwards in time and I'm deep within Paulo Freire who is recognized pretty widely as the grandfather or Intellectual Godfather of Critical Pedagogy (the father being Henry Giroux) and Freire is most famous for the Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Freirean thought is the theological bedrock upon which Critical Education Theory has been built, and it must be understood as such. As I read through his book, what I keep running into is this overwhelming view of how religious Freire's writing is. It has provided the basis for the Woke theology.

Marxism is best understood as a theology, not as a social theory or an economic theory. Communism could be understood as a socioeconomic theory, but Marxism is a very specific approach to Socialism or Communism or both, and I am quite convinced it is a theological development - scientific nosticism. It's a nostic religious movement, and that observation is not original to me.

Eric Vogeland is probably the most prominent name in the list of people who have identified it as such.

What has gone on is that the pre-modern era where religious magisteria was coming to a close or had come to a close by the 1840s when Marx was taking up this philosophical writing. The modern era was blooming - the scientific post-enlightenment reason, empiricism and pragmatism, and then Marxism comes in as another which is based on Hegelian Dialectical faith and Russeau sentimentalist/subjectivist view, and when you combine that with gnosticism you have a profoundly subjectivist religion where the subject becomes the center of religious view and, in fact, becomes the creator of the external world. Without understanding this and how Marx organized his thought in this kind of weird man-centered, modernist-style new religion is to not understand Marxism at all.

We're now in a post-modern era which actually derives off of both Rousseau and Marx again to a new era of thinking that's rooted in images and power and narratives and discourse being the dominant strain. Marxism has to be understood as a modernist religion whereas something like Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam or Buddhism are pre-modern religions.

Voegelin

Marxism is actually a rather terrible but modern religion and it has a theology at its heart, and that's what I want to uncover, because I don't think you can understand Freire until you understand this about Marx and Marxism. I'm going to read from Marx, in particular from his Economic and Philosophic manuscripts of 1844, which are also known as the 1844 Manuscripts or the Paris Manuscripts. Das Kapital was 1967 or 8, to give you a picture of the dates where everything was going on. He's about 24-25-26 years old when he was writing these ideas from E&P, but before I do that I'm going to straight into Eric Voegelin, but the trick here is that by invoking Voegelin, I've lost a lot of left-inclined people because one of their mottos is "Voegelin not even once" because Voegelin characterizes Marx very poorly and connects him both to Gnosticism and Hegelian speculation, but I'm actually going to start there.

"Marx is a speculative gnostic..."

Reading what I have said I'm going to read from, the Economic and Philosophic manuscripts - according to Voegelin, that particular set of manuscripts is where he realized that Marx was a gnostic, and that unlocked being able to understand Marx and Hegel.

Speculative doesn't just mean speculation, although it sort of does, but it's a more technical term referring to a speculum, which is a Latin word for "Mirror". The idea was, for Hegel (and relevant for Marx), is that figuring out how the world works is a speculative process: you see things happening in the world, and then you sit in reflective contemplation and you imagine seeing them reflected in the perfect realm of ideals. (A lot of Platonism or the Plato's philosophy with the realm of ideals coming in with how Hegel was thinking). Basically, this idea of reflection is key to understanding how this theology works.

Before I go any further, when we say that Marxism is a theology, it's not meant to bring about a discussion about comparisons to Christianity, but it's very easy to talk about Christianity as a theology, but we aren't trying to do a point-by-point comparison, because a Theology is a comprehensive study of the divine or the nature of God, and it's very easy to do that with Christianity, but with Marx not only does he not put God into his story, he rejects God quite specifically. He is angry about God - he wants to not only end religion, the opium of the masses, but also he wants to recharacterize God into a completely different way - it's more of a promethean rebellion against God. This isn't about finding the inversion of Christianity, but the harder part is to understand that for Marx, rather than a Theology being the study of God, it's actually the study of Man. This only makes sense when you understand this subjective perspective, which is derived from Rousseau/romanticism, and also when you understand that Man as creator is replacing God as creator.

When you see it in that regard with the creative capacity being essentially infinite/absolute, man takes on the characteristics of God - of course, when you start to invoke characters like Prometheus, or Satan, from mythology, those themes come up. You get a flavour for what kind of Theology Marx has, depending on which way you want to frame it. Marx was big on Prometheus, and Voegelin covers that as well.

"Marx is a speculative gnostic. He construes the order of being as a process of nature complete in itself. Nature is in a state of becoming, and in the course of its development has brought forth man. Man is directly a being of nature. Now, in the development of nature, a special role has developed upon man. That being, which is itself nature, also stands over, against nature and assists it in its development by human labour, which in its highest form is technology and industry based on the natural sciences. Nature, as it develops in human history, as it develops through industry, is true anthropological nature. In the process of creating nature, however, man at the same time also creates himself to the fullness of his being. Therefore, all of so-called World History is nothing but the production of Man by human labour".

This is key to understanding Marx's philosophy and that it is in fact a theology, but instead of a God-centered science, it is a Man-centered science with Man taking the role of creator. When you understand how Man becomes the creator in Marxism, you understand how it becomes a theology. Nothing but the production of man by labour. Labour or work holds a very sacred place in the Marxist theology. It produces all of history and, in the process, produces man. This is almost a commandment anda duty of conscience.

"The purpose of this speculation is to shut off the process of being from transcendent being, and have man create himself. This is accomplished by playing with equivocations in which nature is now all-inclusive being, now nature as opposed to Man, and now the nature of Man in the sense of ascentia. This equivocal word-play reaches its climax in a sentence that can be easily over-looked. A being which does not have a being outside of itself, is not a natural being. It does not participate in the being of nature".

Back to Voegelin: "In connection with this speculation, Marx himself now brings up the question of what objection the particular individual would probably have to the idea of the spontaneous generation of nature and man. "The being itself, of nature and of man, is inconceivable to him because it contradicts the tangible aspects, all the tangible aspects, of practical life". The individual man will, going back to generation to generation in search of his origin raise the question of the creation of the first man. He will introduce the argument of infinite regress, which in Ionian philosophy led to the problem of the origin, to such questions prompted by the tangible experience that man does not exist of himself, Marx chooses to reply that they are "a product of abstraction". "When you inquire about the creation of nature and man, you abstract from nature and man." Nature and man are real only as Marx construes them in his speculation (Hegelian - the nature of speculative philosophy). Should his question oppose the possibility of their non-existence and Marx could not prove that they exist. In reality, his construct would collapse with this question, and how does Marx get out of his predicament? He instructs the questionner: "Give up your abstraction and you will give up your question along with it"."

That sounds like Aufheben to me!

"If the questionner were consistent", says Marx, he would have to think of himself as not existing, even while in the very act of questionning he is. Thus: "Do not think, do not question me". "Individual man", however, is not obliged to be taken in by Marx's syllogism and think of himself as not existing because he is aware of the fact that he does not exist of himself. Indeed, Marx concedes this very point, without choosing to go into it, instead he breaks off the debate by declaring that for Socialist Man, for the man who has accepted Marx's construct of the process of being in history, such a question becomes a practical impossibility. The questions of the individual man are cut off by the ukase of the speculator who will not permit his construct to be disturbed. When "Socialist Man" speaks, man has to be silent".

Socialist man is a gnostic - he has special insight into the world and how it works. Marx is a speculative gnostic.

"And now, for the Marxian suppression of questions, it represents, as we shall see, a very complicated psychological phenomenon, and we must isolate each of its components in turn. First, the most tangible:

• Here is a thinker who knows that his construct will collapse as soon as the basic philosophical question is asked. Does this knowledge induce him to abandon his untenable construct? Not in the least, it merely induces him to prohit such questions. But, his prohibition now induces us to ask: was Marx an intellectual swindler? Such a question will perhaps give rise to objections. Can one seriously entertain the idea that the life work of a thinker of considerable rank is based on an intellectual swindle? Could it have attracted a mass-following and become a political world power if it rested on a swindle? But we we today are enured to such scruples. We have seen too many improbable and incredible hings that were nonetheless real. Therefore we hesitate neither to ask the question that the evidence presses upon us, nor to answer. Yes, Marx was an intellectual swindler. This is certainly not the last word on Marx. We have already referred to the compexity of the psychological phenomenon behind the passages quoted, but it must unrelentingly be the first word if we do not want to obstruct our understanding of the prohibition of questions"

Voegelin talking about Marx, particularly his work from 1844 which preceded the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. The first word, if we talk Voegelin at his word, that we have to say about Marx is that he was an intellectual swindler - he was fudging it and he knew he was fudging it. Voegelin has quite the intense takedown of Marx following that - he was cheating people intellectually and he knew he was doing it, so he said "Don't question me". But he says that this is the first word, and I think that understanding Marx as a theologian and not a philosopher is the later word we're going to have to get into.

We are going to examine the first page of the Introduction to Marx's "A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right".

Marx's Introduction

"For Germany the criticism of religion has been essentially completed, and the criticism of religion is the prerequisite for all criticism." Breakdown:

• The criticism has been completed: was it actually complete? The enlightenment/rationalist criticism of religion had been made, yes, and so he is seeing this new scientific era which leaves the superstitions of the past behind.
• The prerequisite of all: Because the Church was the absolute hegemon (pre-modern hegemon) throughout Europe and Germany. By tearing down at religion, you open the door to be able to tear down at anything carrying the power of hegemony (was it was later named). The criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticisms - it can only flourish if you don't have religion stamping it out.

"The profane existence of error is compromised as soon as its heavenly speech for the altars and hearths has been refuted".

• Heavenly speech refuted

"Man, who has found only the reflection of himself in the fantastic reality of heaven where he sought a superman (God) will no longer feel disposed to find the mere appearance of himself, the non-man (Unmunsch), where he seeks and must seek his true reality. The foundation of irreligious criticism is Man Makes Religion, Religion does not Make Man. (New Atheists pushed this very hard. We don't want to stain too heavily the name of Christiopher Hitchens, but he made this point all the time - paraphrasing Marx - Perhaps due to being a Trotskyite. Complicated view analogous to one of Marx's claims (that religion is wholly Man-made)).

Why is this complicated? Religion si such a profound influence on the way that Man lives his life thus using the exact thesis that Marx makes about hte progress of history - religion is actually making man, instead of man making religion. If Marx was consistent in his views he would have seen that religion was actually making man (making man Religious) and that might actually evaluate as a good thing (or not necessarily a bad thing)."

"Religion is indeed the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who is either not won through to himself, or has already lost himself again".

Marx is creating a man-centered theology. What is religion, for Marx? It's what you do in order to have self consciousness, self-awareness, self-esteem, when you haven't realized that man is sufficient in and of himself, or where you had that but fell off the wagon and lost yourself again. You subsume yourself to a deity which is a creation or construct of your imagination, and in this way, religion is the self consciousness or self awareness of a man who has not won through to himself or has lost himself again.

"But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world; man is the world of man - state, society."

Enter Gnosticism

So state and society become crucial concepts to know what man is and state and society are the world of man. Man is the world of man, as Marxism claims. So what I've said about religion and put it in state and society, and that's what is making man. Man is the world of man.

Enter gnosticism (God is not real God, he is a false god and a tyrant created by man to enslave himself. The tyrant enslaves man and the true gnostic knowledge reveals that God is a tyrannical construct and you can have true knowledge of that which precedes God outside of that.)

"The state and society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point de honheur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, it is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality."

The true reality of man is in the world of man, right? So man in himself is the true reality of man, for Marx. It is a man-centered religion.

"The struggle against religion, therefore, is indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

When you suffer with religion, you've created a fantasy - God, religion, purpose connected to your faith, that suffering has meaning, etc. You have real suffering but you're protesting against experiencing that real suffering. Religion is a thing you do when you're oppressed but don't want to do anything about your oppression. You want to rationalize your oppression and create an ideology which explains why its just and reasonable that you are oppressed, rather than taking the steps to overcome it. It keeps you calm and sedate, even though you're in conditions that shoul dbe painful and intolerable.

Illusory Nature of Religion

"The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real hapiness."

Religion lets you pretend you are happy and that you have a good life, but it's fake and an illusion. To abolish that illusion is the demand a better life for real -> lead to real happiness.

"To call upon them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition which requires illusions"

If we get rid of religion, people will realize that they're oppressed and they're going to say 'let's solve our problems'.

"The criticism of religion is, therefore, an embryo. The criticism of that veil of tears of which religion is the halo"

Roll back to the beginning where he says "The criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism". Because you get rid of people's theodyssy - their justification for evil. You get rid of their false hope that if they pray or are sufficiently pius that God will deliver them. You get rid of that and put the mantle on people by telling them to unopress themselves. You can only engage in this criticism after you get rid of religion, because religion is the thing that's working as an opiate which prevents people from feeling the weight of horror and oppression.

"Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain, not in order that man should condinue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, btu so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man so that he will think, act and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses so that he will move around himself as his own true son. Religion is only the illusory son which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself."

Understand that the Marxist theology is Marx setting up man in himself as creator and deity. To throw off God and say "no it's not you, God, but it is ME who is at the center of the Universe. It is me who is the creator, not you, and, in fact, I as a man created you and I know that I created you and could create otherwise, including the kingdom you promised us or the garden you expelled us from with the secret knowledge that I have. The secret knowledge Marx offers is "science". Hegelian view of science which is broader than the science we see being practiced by the scientific method. It's more akin to the science that we are dealing with in the world, today.

Remake the World

"The criticism of religion disillusions man so that he will think act and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses so that he will move around himself as his own true son. Religion is only the illusory son which revolves around man so long as he does not revolve around himself. It is therefore the task of history, once the other world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy which is in the service of history to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked."

That's what the religion of Marxism does. Humans have estranged themselves, and then created God as a tyrant which threw them out of the garden (act of estrangement), which was a fiction. The theology holds and the goal of the religion is to unmask the self-estrangement once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked.

"Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of earth"

Criticizing religion allows us to engage in critique that will remake the world. The criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.

Marx's contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right Written in February of 1844 and that gives us a basis for talking about Marx in a fairly theological way.

What is the task of history? In this sense, History becomes something which is capitalized (Hegel and Marx were both historicists, though Marx perhaps more strictly so). History is the sum total of all the interactions and phenomena of human activity as it unfolds and, in the process, it changes man from one epoch to the next. Everything that man has done as a society, past present, and eventually the future.

Modern Marxist Perspective

Reading from Marxists.org "The Marxist study of history seeks both to elucidate the conditions and, first and foremost, the material conditions under which historical struggles are fought, and then to identify the agents who make history."

What are the conditions that led to the struggles that people were in, and then who/why/how were they involved in those struggles? For Marxists, the agents/subjects of history are not focused only on the prominent individuals whose voices speak the aims and consciousness of the masses, nor on masses of people trapped on circumstances, nor on the ideas which animate people, but specific unities of all three. The subjects of history are self-conscious masses of people whose ideas and aims are inherited from the past, and given new form in the voices of individual spokespersons and leaders.

A very Hegelian thing - with Hegel the idea inspires the state, the state creates society, and the society realizes its contradictions and overthrows the old ideas to create new ones in a revolution of ideas which then creates a new state and society, recurringly as we move forward through history. That's th ebecoming nature of the Hegelian Dialectic as it bears upon the ontology of man (what it means to be human and how humans come to be).

Marx takes this to a new level by saying History is all the struggles man has had in light of his conditions and the people involved in the struggle are the subjects of history and the only ones who count rae the self-conscious masses of people whose ideas and aims are inherited from the past (they understand history as Marx would present it, and what it means teleologically IE where it's going) and given new forms in the voices of individual spokespersons and leaders (men of action). Men put into action for a new epoch of history. These subjects of history are actually:

• A. men of action/prominent individuals who speak the aims and consciousness of the masses;
• B. masses of people trapped by their circumstances;
• C. the ideas that animate them

That's who the subjects of history are - the self conscious messes - the people who think this way about history (The way that Marx wants people to think about history, in terms of the unfolding trail of sets of circumstances and epochs of time as they go from one state to another -> primitive communism where tribes have economies -> into the future into socialism and Communism, if the subjects of history were able to gain enough power to affect those ideas, which he thought was inevitable).

"No one of these 3 aspects of a historical subject can be active without the others: a mass of people without organization, and without a consciousness of its own demands cannot make history, and nor can leader who does not voice the aspirations of the masses".

You have to have an organization built around the ideas of what's wrong (their own oppression), and what demands need to be made of history, but then also need to organized around a leader - a leader who reflects the voice and aspirations of that mass of people.

"The subjects of history are not the forces of production, nor the laws of history. People make history, always acting under certain material and spiritual conditions. It is these conditions and how people sought to change them which give meaning to the stories that are told in history."

Subjects of history is then the designation of a religious tribe. Just like accepting Christ makes someone a Christian, accepting this understanding of history and unfolding of material conditions according to a trajectory of this history with man as the creator of history to cause history to create man in an unfolding, dialectical process, you become a subject of history, or Social Man. This is the designation of a religious tribe. The object of which they are conscious is history itself. History becomes the object of the Marxian Theology, which studies how Men make history unfold so that history creates man reciprocally (they call it the Inversion of Praxis).

Recap

The subjects of history are the people who are aware of their conditions, how those conditions arose, why they are oppressive and how these changes can be changed towards liberation.

A modern term for subjects of history is Change Agent - someone aware of the structural forces of society, the nature of those forces, and the need to make a change, inspiring them to become activists to cause that change.

Change agent, applied to your child at school, is actually one of Marx's subjects of history, updated i the terminology.

History, for Marxism, as the object of its theology, is therefore the trajectory of change, as created by the work of so-called "conscious" people. Religion based off of man Creating Man through the activity Man which creates History. The conditions of any given time create the man of that time, and the conditions are intolerable and need to be found intolerable by conscious man. And the conscious men awaken to the intolerability and contradictions of their situation and create a revolution.

History is made and progresses. The Marxian theology. Man as creator (not only the conditions of society, but of the world itself and of himself within that society/world. Man is the world of man, which is the state and society - statement from 1844 Critique).

Comparison: Christian Trinity

Christian trinity heavily informed Hegel who heavily informed Marx.

Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Tri-partheid features of God. Co-eternal and continuous with one another. All 3 are / is / unchanging before time, outside of time, across time. Yahweh - I am the alpha and the omega. God Is within the Christian. Father-Son-Holy spirit as the trinity within that "is". God is not in the process of becoming - a Heremetic Idea - an Alchemical idea.

Christianity is not a dialectical faith. It is not in the process of becoming.

Hegel, being an alchemist/hermeticist, brings into a different idea. And he says: "in the place of the father, you have the absolute or the absolute idea, and that gives rise to nature and the world as its abject other against which it comes to know itself, and the manifstation of the absolute idea at its stage of understanding itself in the world is the state"

"The state is the divine idea as it exists on earth."

The state creates a circumstance that people live in, which gives rise to a spirit or geist, or a general culture of that. What happens is that culture realizes that the idea that the whole thing is based on and thus that the state is implementing is not perfect, because Hegel was a speculative idealist. The idea leads everything. The idea gives rise to the state, the state gives rise to the culture/geist/spirit of the people, and eventually the contradictions contained within the imperfect idea - the incompleted idea where the absolute and the world itself do not recognize themselves as being one and the same - leads to a revolution and the idea. The idea actually awakens, a little bit. It's not just that it just changes - it awakens a little further, and then this process repeats.

The absolute is updated - it becomes more self-conscious - this self-consciousness gives rise to an improved state, a new society arises out of that, and eventually there is another dialectic revolution. And, so, we have a dialectical trinity of Father/Son/Holy Spirit with the absolute idea taking the place of the father, the state taking the place of the son, and then the spirit of the culture being a holy spirit which is a reflection of that idea channeling through it. This is not a static "I am, Co-Eternal" theology. This is a dialectical theology that is based on the idea of becoming. The absolute becomes more self-aware, more completely aware by the process of this unfolding.

This ties into another big philosophical dialectic that Hegel was very interested in which is that the dialectical opposite/opposite in general of BEING is NOTHING. This is an ontological question. Being is at the base, and its opposite is nothing -> but how can you have being and nothing in opposition to one another?

• That which is must have become from that which was not, in some way or another Therefore, the process of becoming what something is from what it wasn't previously (making a table from wood. The table becomes as a result of that process -> and it included productive work.). Hegel recognized productive work as the seat of all value - the creation of all value.

This is a God that becomes, and for Hegel, at the end/the escatology of Hegelian Dialectical Faith, is that at the end the absolute idea finally realizes that it is perfectly continuous with the natural world - the world is actually not an other. It is, in fact, perfectly continuous with it and the idea awakens as the absolute. The theoretical idea and the practical idea unite. The subjective and the objective idea unite into the absolute idea. Wholly complete. Neither theoretical nor practical, but simultaneously both. Neither subjective nor objective, but simultaneously both.

The perfected idea - this revolutionary becoming dialectical process - finally comes to a halt at the moment of the escaton, which is imminetized this way, when the absolute realizes itself because the absolute idea realizes that it is Deity, and therefore perfect. As the absolute idea, its last reckoning that it has to have is to understand itself as perfect, which gives rise to the perfect state, which gives rise to the perfect society, and thus the revolutionary nature of this becoming process grinds to a halt.

That's the Hegelian Dialectical theology that Marx took and inverted, as he said. He said that Hegel had this upside down, because he said that Idealism is nonsense. He said that if you look out into the world, what we think is the idea is actually human beings looking at the world that already exists and, in fact, understanding them in Human Terms. He put into place of the absolute - you can think of it like a triangle, right, the absolute in the place of the father up above giving rise to the state and then the state produces a new man, and you have the revolutionary becoming dialectical process again, but now, in place of a Deity in the form of an absolute ideal for Hegel, you have Man Creating Himself, and the trajectory of this process, which is a dialectical-theological process, the trajectory of this process of man creating himself by creating society and a state and then creating himself - slowly realizing his own perfected capacity as man in himself but man living in society, dialectically-fused, and thus no longer needing a state to encode society and enforce it upon man in the next iteration - the trajectory of this dialectical process is what Marx refers to as "History".

So, man creates History and by creating History so creates himself. That is the central theological claim of the Theology or the Religion of Marxism. Unfortunately, our supreme court missed the opportunity several times in the 20th century to name Marxism as a religion, because they didn't understand this. They don't want to be named a religion because then the first amendment would preclude them from being able to occupy positions in the state which, in their religion, they must because the state is in the position of the son.

By creating history in this theology, which is what man does, man is creating himself. This is a bootstrapping theology. For Marx, mankind has bootstrapped itself into the status of creator and man, which is above the animals (no angels or gods), he becomes the pinnacle of creation by becoming a creator.

How is this done? Through the Scared Aspect of Work. Authentic Work. The kind of productive work, like creating a table out of raw materials like wood. Felling the tree, shaping the wood, hammering and nailing/gluing it together - whatever is involved in creating the table. Creating something productively through his work, man is creating the world which is humanized and in the humanized world he sees himself.

THe way that man creates history and comes to see himself as the creator of history and thus what makes man rather than beast, which is the pinnacle of creation, is done through Man's Authentic Work (not labour - which is coopted by someone who is making you do it). Marxism, as a Theology, makes authentic work sacred, and the division of labour becomes fundamentally evil, and mere activity (satisfying your basic needs), is animalistic in base.

You can see how this works. The division of labour - someone becoming a boss or organizing a company - is the fall of man. Is what kicked us out of the primitive gardens in primitive communisms which existed in all the different tribes was that there there was no division of labour; they had primitive Communism, even though they were estranged from one another, those were individual different gardens and the goal - the end of history - stage 6 for Marxist stages of history (Communism) is when we return to a global garden, where everyone is in the same garden, and there is no division of labour.

So, for Marx, being a Materialist - looking at things that were coming out of Darwin, having a mentor of Feurbach - he was a product of this evolution, which was barely understood in 1844 when he was writing this, but this evolution was guided all along by the necessity of Social Relations. Social Relations are what determine what History looks like in this Marxist religion - thus, who are the producers, and who are the managers who are exploiting the producers in this division of labour.

Furthermore, for Marx, there is no human nature inside man except our base animal nature, or sensuous nature as he would have it, and what man has made himself into by making the world for himself - humanizing the world, and thus humanizing himself. There is no human nature except what man has made for himself through his social interactions which are the key way to understand this, and how those social interactions, and the product of his labour, reflect off of his underlying animal nature (satisfing hunger, thirst, other needs).

The fundamental ontological question of what it means to be human is based in the idea that human nature is wholly contingent upon the nature of the social relations in each period or epoch of history, and this is something which is unfolding through a dialectical process where men are making history and thus making themselves and new aspects of human nature which are reflections of those social relations at each period.

So, history is the history of Social Relations, as created by man, and it is the history, in this sense, which makes man as a "becoming" entity with the goal that he will eventually become Social Man who is fully conscious no longer believes in the division of labour, has abolished all ideology and fantasy, and is now living as a truly free and independent being.

The German Ideology (Marx)

"As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production. Both with what they produce, and how they produce. The nature of the individual depends on the material conditions determining their production."

Grundrisse (Marx)

"Not only do the objective conditions change in the act of production, for example - the village becomes a town, the wilderness a cleared field, etc - but the producers change too, in that they bring out new qualities in themselves, develop themselves in production, transform themselves, develop new powers and ideas, new modes of intercourse, new needs and new language."

Using the example he gives, the village becomes a town, the town becomes a small city, the city becomes a metropolis, and you can see that life in the city is very different. City slickers aren't the same as Country boys in some sense, and this is what he is looking at in that regard. But he says:

"But the objective conditions change in the act of production, but this causes man to change."

The city man is actually fundamentally different than the country boy, but it turns out that that's not actually true. They say you can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy, but you actually can. You can take a country person and they get accustomed to city life and they live according to what's going on in the city. You can take a city person and you can stick them in the country and eventually they become accustomed to country life, or whatever.

So, he sees what's happening is that the production itself and the outputs of the production, as a sacred object, produced by sacred work, are actually creating a different a new kind of man that, at the end of history, can be perfected into these perfect social entities.

Man the Creator

The view within the Marxian ontology of man is that man is incomplete and, in fact, completable. And because he is man and, therefore, of high intellect, he knows he is incomplete. The project of History is the project of Man making man - completing man - and the conscious men, who are the subjects of history, are the people who are aware of the fact that they are making history - they are changing conditions and thus changing man toward becoming Social Man at the pinnacle - which is Man in himself perfected by the dialectical materialist process:

1. Man creating society
2. Society creating the state
3. State creating a new man (institutions giving birth to who people are).

This is why where your typical conservative would see that the family is the fundamental unit of society, your typical leftist, especially a Marxian leftist, would see the intitution as the fundamental unit of society and the institution creates the man. This is why they call the family an institution, for example.

The way that man creates History and thus completes man, which is Social Man (the Communist, in the finalized Communist society where man and society are co-continuous), is through work. Work is not activity, like a beast, like animals hunting/walking/eating/digging up roots. Work is something different, and it's not labour (for someone else's profit). Work is what brings a man's own vision into the world. He then sees himself in that vision (Subjectivist Religion) while spiritually elevating himself through the Act of 1. Work itself and 2. Humanizing the world around him which is his abject other that he's comparing himself against.

If we Humanize the World we Humanize the Man. The goal is to build the garden. Marx talks all the time about the need to Humanize the World/Man/Society/Everything, but the fundamental view of this work-oriented society/theology is "I as Man created that, I am creative, I am the Creator".

Man in himself looks upon his creation and sees that it is good. He sees himself in his creation and sees that he is good.

Good

Marxist.org Encyclopaedia Acording to Hegel's logic: "The idea of the Good is when the subject tries to mould the world in the image of itself"

Intellectuals don't understand that they are reckoning with Marxism on their own terms, which are the enlightement terms or the pre-modern religious terms, where there is a world outside about which we are receiving information through our senses. We are, therefore, reacting to an objective world that exists outside of ourselves.

In a Subjectivist view, this is not how it works. This is a romantic idea following from Rousseau, William Blake, etc.

Tangent:

Subject/Object split

A deep philosophical consideration is:

• The world exists out there
• We perceive it and have subjective consciousness of what we perceive
• We are trapped in our subjective consciousness, which is an interpretation of the world as it is outside

But, the fully subjective view does not take that position. You cannot the subjective view from an objectivist perspective, you lose what is going on and what is being said. To the subjectivist, the world is not actually out there, but your subjective consciousness which is creating the world. If you look at a lamp, the lamp is not there because you can't philosophically know if it exists or does not. Are you a brain in a vat? Is this a simulation? That lamp isn't really there, it's just being experienced. The objective and subjective need to be reckoned with.

The Good (continued)

The Good is when the Subject tries to mould the world in the image of itself. You're trying to merge what might be out there with what's in your head.

"The subject moulding the world in the image of itself"

When you are trying to mould the world in the image of itself.

World as Abject Other

Hegel insisted that the world is the abject other of the Deity (hermeticism). The Deity is the absolute, the Ideal, and the world has been produced by the Ideal as an abject other. The Subject comes first, and the Object follows -> Subjectivist in its orientation - and the goal of the Dialectical Process for Hegel is for Subject to realize that the Object is part of itself and completely continuous with itself.

This is the same goal as Marxism, but now it's not the Deity in the form of the absolute idea (perfected God-level idea of how the World actually is) - the subject is now man in himself. So the world out there is being created by man, in himself, and the world is in his abject other. By doing work upon the world, man realizes that he is the position of creator that shapes the world and thus, through the idea of praxis (reflecting on what your work has achieved), you then change the idea of yourself so you can change the world and reflect again to continue changing yourself.

The dialectic of praxis is that you have theory which gives rise to action which gives rise to reflection which leads to an adaptation of theory in an endless spiral.

For Hegel, the world is the abject other of the deity (the absolute), but the absolute doesn't recognize itself. It created the world as an image of itself so it could know itself through the dialectical process in full dialectical synthesis which is said to occur at the fusion of the theoretical and the practical, which was retooled by Marx through work.

The Marxian view is that man in himself is imagining looking back on the creation of history with the image of Utopia as the standard and is seeing that it is Good and will therefore create the vision of Utopia for the world by doing work. The image of the actual world is a Communist Utopia which already exists, except that we have become estranged from it through labour. What he's doing, by doing work, which is unfolding the dialectical materialist wheel is that he's trying to create Utopia by making history as he goes - that's what's good. He does that by doing work, which is conscious activity with a perfected end in mind.

The process, again, is Dialectical Materialism where the work is identifying the contradictions, material conditions and social conditions that man finds himself in, putting these things up against one another in continuous conflict (Oppressor vs Oppressed) until Synthesis is achieved using the Master-Slave Dialectic -> the oppressed have the view of the oppressor AND what it's like to be oppressed, thus they have a second-view/second-consciousness that moves the Dialectic and it is achieved through cyclical revolution in the making of history.

Work, The Work (do the work) is the Sacred Charge of the Marxist. The Work is Socialist Work which is to Humanize the world until the world is perfectly Humanized creating only Social Man that lives in Socialist society. Socialist/Spiritually/Laborious productive process which changes the world Materially and thus by changing the material conditions of the world he changes the social relations that define the Material Conditions of the world, hence changing himself.

The Hammer and Sickle are a Relgious Symbol of productive work in its capacity to remake the world into the image of itself - the Communist Utopia - the tended Garden through the Gnostic Vision of realizing that God is the jailer and then remaking man into a perfected state. So, in Marxism, you must Do The Work. Work Makes Free. Work Creates Freedom. Labour and activity don't create freedom, only work does that by creating the conditions under which man is no longer dependent because his needs are being met through work and the conditions through which he is able to use his work to create spiritual improvement through reflection that leads him to realize, eventually, that he's free because all domination and ideology are dispelled/critiqued into the ground (Praxis). In reciprocration, Work is only Work when man is actually free and doing work out of his freedom and for his freedom in order to make his freedom.

Socialist work is the only real work, and producive work is Socialist work when it is not being exploited by the capitalist who takes off the surplus value and transformed work not into a process of making freedom, but rather transmogrified into an exploitative process which is the producer of alienation and estrangement. This is why they hate the capitalists in the crazy Material Religion of Marxism.

Freire (Politics of Education)

James' triggering section - Paragraph describing the difference between work and activity. "There is a further fundamental distinction between man's relationships with the world and the animals' contacts with it. Only men work. A horse, for example, lacks what is proper to man, what Marx refers to in his example of the bees. "At the end ofevery labour process we get a result that already existed in the imagination of teh labourer at its commencement". Action without this dimension is not work. In the fields as well as in the circus the apparent work of horses reflects the work of men. Action is not work because of the greater or lesser physical effort expended in it by the acting organism, but because of the consciousness the subject has of his own effort.

This possibilty of programming action, of creating tools and using them to mediate between himself and the object of his action - to having purposes of anticipating results - still more, for action to be work it MUST result in significant products which, while distinct from the active agent at the same time, condition him and become the object of his reflection. As men act upon the world, effectively transforming it by their work, their consciousness is, in turn, historically and culturally conditioned through the inversion of praxis. According to the quality of this conditioning, men's consciousness attains various levels in the context of cultural historical reality.

We propose to analyze these levels of consciousness as a further step towards understanding the process of conscientization (becoming conscious)."

One of the things Freire brought which made him such a huge religious figure in the Woke Religion is that he understood Marx much better than most Marxists up until his time.

The Bees

Chapter 7 of Das Kapital - 1867 "Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and nature participate, and in which man, of his own accord, starts, regulates and controls the material reactions between himself and nature. He opposses himself to nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, heads and hands, and the natural forces of his body in order to appropriate nature's productions and adapt it to his own wants.

By thus acting upon the external wrold and changing it he changes in turn his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and empowers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not, now, dealing with this primitive and instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal, an immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things things in which a man brings his labour power to market for sale as a commodity from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We presuppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human".

Nature's productions are in a form adapted to his own wants, he appropriates nature's forms to his own wants by acting on the external world and changing it, he in exchange changes his own nature. He's making himself by making the world. The key rthing is that he had the image in his head - that subjectivism - making the world in his head which is his own image because it's conditioned by the inversion of praxis - the material relations that he is involved - this is a circular religion

"A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in his constructions of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from teh best of the bees is this: the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour process we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement".

*This line is so important. Within the theology of Marxism what makes work authentic and real is that you have, as a potential worker, a vision of what you want th world to look like inside you - you are the creator. Your subjective consciousness - you already see the product of your labour in your mind's eye, and then you go and make it. If you want to cook food, you aren't just slopping around in the kitchen. You have a vision of what the cakae will look like after its baked and you methodically and an in an organized fashion put together the cake and produce the cake according to what the imgae in your mind already is. You as creator have created the imgae from your mind and thus you learn that you have the creative capacity - and are like God - you can create the world, but we dispense with those fantasies in Marxism, so you actually are God. You are man in himself. And so that is a very key idea - what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of the bees is that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality, and at the end of every labour process we get a result that already existed (ontological claim) in the imagination of the labourer.*

"He not only affects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realizes a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi into which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act - besides the exertion, the bodily organs, the process demands that during the whole operation the workman's will be steadily on consonance with his purpose (close attention). The less attracted by the nature of the work and the mode in which it is carried out and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention his forced to be".

That's the origin of work and the bees. Man is resolving the dialectic of man, and thus bootstrapping himself into the position of creator within the Marxian Theology. Who is the God of Marxism? Man. But not any man - Social Man - man that realizes that he's man that's supposed to live in a society.