logicp_writings/collectivist_theology/Marxism Theology Notes.md

Introduction

Any attempt to understand the quasi-religious language of Paulo Freire (The Politics of Education) should compel one to understand the logical structure being invoked. This goes back further than Marx, but it is Marx where the logic is specifically applied to the creation of Man. Paulo Freire's vision for education is to apply tools of the Dialectic, Gnosticism, Hermeticism in the context of a Liberation Theology. This theological framework juxtaposes itself against Christianity ("Be in this world and be of this world").

To get a good grasp on these concepts, it's important to go back to Marx himself, who formalized this vision.

• Communism as socioeconomic theory, but Marxism as Theology
• Extends out of the Rousseau sentimentalist/subjectivist view
• Modernist religion

Voeglin

Marx as Speculative Gnostic

• Speculative process of reflecting on the world vis-a-vis the realm of ideals
• Man is an aspect of nature with capacity to be changed/created by man
• Purpose of speculation is to shut off being from transcendent being; being IS becoming
• Marx insists that the true analysis of man is that of socialist man, and not individual man; only socialist man would have speculative insight

Marx

A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

• Criticism of religion is prerequisite to all criticism
• Church was Hegemon throughout Europe: tear down religion and open to door to criticize anything else

Religion

• Religion is self-consciousness/esteem of man not won through to himself
• Seek superman instead of reality; religion becomes the self-consciousness/self-esteem of man
• Man should be the world of man, state, society (man-centered)

Gnosticism

• State/society produce an inverted consciousness (religion)
• Reality of man is world of man
• Struggle against religion is struggle against world with religion (sight of oppressed creator)
• Oppressed have real oppression but fantastic rationale, keeping them sedate and preventing resolution

Illusory

• The illusory happiness of the people
• Giving up religion causes people to wake up about their real conditions
• Man should regain his senses and move around himself as his own true son (in place of religion moving around man)

Remake the World

• Task of history to establish the Truth of this world
• Task of philosophy to unmask self-estrangement (division of labour)
• Human estranged themselves and created God as tyrant
• Criticism of Heaven turns into Criticism of Earth
• Criticizing religion yields the following progression:
  • Religion -> law -> Theology -> Politics

Modern Marxist Perspective

• Marxist study of history to identify the conditions and agents of struggle

  Hegelian View

• Triad of focus: individual voices, masses trapped in circumstance and the ideas

• Subjects of history: self-conscious masses whose inherited ideas take new form through leaders

• Idea -> state -> society -> idea revolution (repeat)

Marxian View

• History is all of man's struggles in light of conditions
• Self-conscious masses have ideas and aims inherited from past (understand history -> teleological insight into where it is going)
• No part of Triad can be active without the others:
  • Mass without organization and consciousness cannot make history, nor can leader who does not voice the aspirations of the masses
• Organization built around oppression (Oppression) and demands with a leader who reflects them
• Subjects are not forces of production or laws, but people under material/spiritual conditions who seek to change them

Subjects of History

• Religious tribe (accepting the historical conditions and trajectory)
• Cause history to create new Man

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 who is aware of structural forces, the nature of thos eforces, adn the need to make a change, inspiring them to become activists to cause that change.

Change agent, applied to you rchild at school, is actually one of Marx's subjects of history - updated with new terminology.

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History, for Marxism, as the object of its theology, is therefore the trajectory of change, asc reated by the work of so-called "conscious" people

• History is made and progresses, with man as creator (of conditions, the world and himself within that society)

Comparison to Christian Trinity

• Father/Son/Holy-spirit
• Co-eternal and continuous with one another
• Inversion of Hegelian Dialectical Theology: Idealism is nonsense
• "The Idea" or "Absolute" is Man understanding existing world in human terms to create himself

Sacred Work

• Authentic Work
• Humanizing the world - in which he sees himself
• Creates history, sees himself as creator of history
• Work which divides labour is mere activity/animalistic/not fulfilling sacred duty
• Evolution of work guided by Social Relations, which are what provide context of history

Human Nature

• No human nature except base animal nature/sensuous nature
• Humanizing the world humanizes himself, thus no human nature
• Behaviour cultivated through social interactions/labour, which reflect off underlying animal nature (hunger/thirst/etc)
• Ontology of human nature is contingent on social relations in corresponding epoch of History
• Man free of animal nature when he is fully conscious (Social Man in Social Society) and free of ideology (no domination)

German Ideology

• Human expression is determination of what and how something is produced given particular material conditions

The Grundrisse der Kritik

"Not only do the objective conditions change in the act of production, fo rexample - the village becomes a town, the wilderness a cleared field - 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."

"But the objective conditions change in the act of production" causing man to change

• City man isn't actually different from country boy - they adapt easily
• Production and outputs are a sacred object producer by sacred work, creating a new kind of man which can be perfected

The Creator

• Man is incomplete and completable
• Due to high intellect, he knows he is incomplete
• Project of history is the project of Man completing man
• Conscious subjects of history know they are making history by using Dialectical Materialism to transform man:
  1. Man Creating Society
  2. Society Creating State
  3. State Creating New Man
• Fundamental unit of society:
  • Conservative: family
  • Leftist: institution
• Create history and complete man (Social Man co-continuous with Socialist society)
• Work brings own vision into the world.
• See yourself in vision and reflect on the world as one's abject other to refine Theory being put into practice in one's work
• Humanize the World to Humanize the man.
• Man, seeing himself in his creation, and seeing that his creation is good, realizes that he is good

Good

"The idea of the Good is when the subject tries to mould the world in the image of itself"

• To do good is to transform the Object into the Subject

Subject/Object Split

• Kant proposed that we perceive objective world from our trapped perspective with a subjective consciousness, making the world only an interpretation
• Subjectivist view sees one's consciousness as creating objective world because both still need to be reckoned with

World as Abject Other

• Hegel: World is Abject Other to Absolute
• Dialectical Process for Subject to realize Object is, in fact, completely continuous with itself
• Marxism: Man instead of Absolute, Himself/His Species/Nature as his Object are things which are not separate from one another
• Reflected Praxis changes idea of yourself so you can change the world iteratively
• Man looks back at creation of history with image of Utopia (no domination/estrangement) as standard
• Process of Dialectical Materialism wherein work identifies contradictions/material & social conditions and puts these things in in conflict with one another to advance Master-Slave dialectic

Religious Work

• Doing Work changes Material Conditions which change Social Conditions and Oneself
• Hammer and Sickle - Religious symbol of productive work's capacity to remake world in image of oneself
• Work creating conditions where man's needs are met
• Work is only Work when man does work out of his freedom and for his freedom to make his freedom
• Productive Work is unexploited Socialist Work

Freire (Politics of Education)

• Action is work because of the consciousness the subject has of his own effort
• Work must produce significant products that are the object of reflection
• Transform world by work and it conditions your consciousness through inversion of Praxis
• The quality of work can be assessed in relation to the process of conscientization

The Bees

(Chapter 7 of Das Kapital)

• Labour (work) a process in which both man and nature participate - He changes the external world and his own nature
• At the end ... result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer

Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts

Species

• "Man is a species being... adopts the species .. as his object ... adopts the species as his object"
• All nature is man's spiritual, inorganic body:
  • "That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature"
  • Nature is man's object as man and his species are his object
  • In man's consciousness, nature exists in perfected form
• Division of labour estranges man from himself, nature and the species because the "life of the species" is changed "into a means of individual life"
• Life of species is supposed to be the Sacred Work, which cannot be done if individual labour is performed for individual needs

Consciousness and Estrangement

• Animals are one with life activity, but man must mitigate his will.
• Conscious life activity makes him a species being (and vice versa)
• Estranged labour reverses free activity and transforms it into mere means to existence
• Neither you nor your employer are doing work productive to authentic free conscious activity which realizes the species character.
• Wasted existence as enslavement
• Man produces universally by practical activity upon inorgainc nature and treats the species as essential and himself as a species being.
• Man produces freely even when free of physical need to produce
• Man reproduces the whole of nature
• Man produces in accordance with every species
• Man forms objects in accordance with beauty
• His work upon the objective proves himself to be a conscious being
• The object of labour is the objectification of man's species life, duplicating himself in consciousness and actively in reality, seeing himself in the world he created
• His own advantage over animals is used to disadvantage him by removing his inorganic body (no longer free)
• Consciousness of his species views it as a means, causing estrangement These are deep ontological claims about the nature of man, being, separation of man from beast, and the effect of division of labour Teleological process in the relationship of man, work and freedom

Being and Existence

• Man not free/independent unless he owes existence to himself (the actual creator)
• Even physically, man creates man
• Wrong to ask of first man, as it is wrong to abstract man from nature (man is nature)
• By sidestepping fundamental ontology, Marx bootstraps man into role of Creator
• Man is the being of Nature; Nature is the being of Man
• Impractical to theorize about alien "God" being above nature and man
• Socialism doesn't need Atheism's negation of God
• Socialism is Man's "positive-consciousness": the natural form of consciousness for emancipated man, not contingent on abolition of religion
• Communism occurs at the onset of "positive-reality": natural form of life for emancipated man, not contingent on abolition of private property
• Communism is when we negate the need to negate: the final negation
• Praxis of theory and practice which become iteratively more proximate until they converge/fuse

Praxis

"Practice means activity with a means and an end"

• Cyclical reflection of theory put into practice
• Put theory into practice, reflect on it, update, repeat
• Praxis includes 3 aspects:
  • Mental - the vision in your mind
  • Theoretical - conforming to theory
  • Ideology - born of ideology

Praxis 2: Ideology for Marx

"Practice is only enacted through theory, and theory is formulated based on practice"

• Ideology is "justification for unproductive work", particularly "work done for you"
• Priests create "God" ideology so they can be fed
• Lawyers create "law" ideology to justify their manipulation of system through law as a means to live
• Ideology is continuous with super-structure and used to justify work
• Real work is in accordance with vision in one's mind; create for objective world, causing subject to better understand themselves as they and the world are further humanized
• Practice inseparable from theory with intention towards the end

Keep Them Coupled

• Separating theory/practice causes one-sidedness because they must develop together
• Theory bound to practice at beginning of history; division of labour caused decoupling
• Practice is the Criterion of Truth

The Problem

• Desire to unify over subjective consciousness
• 2 subjects look at one tree and make different observations
• Disparate conceptions of what work is authentic and how to create the world/species/Man
• If you make a mistake, it must be due to ideology
• Communism must become the religious object around which all are aligned
• Subjective Faith - all must be reflecting it
• We only know we're practicing correctly when all hold the same theory and there is no exploitation occurring

German Ideology

The work cannot be estranged from Man, nor can it estrange man from himself, or others, or his species being, or what it means to be a man. The only work that is The Work must be Socialist Work - work that is designed to make Man in his own image - man meant to live in society (man recognizes himself as Social Man - a man in favour of a Social existence, and as the product of his species being), but man is doing this to obtain freedom. Man does this to retain his independence as man in himself - a man that's created himself, while he lives in and makes a society.

Otherwise, we have a problem - man would objectify other men, and this process would cause them to leave their sense as subjects, thus reducing them to mere animals being dominated in a system of labour. Even believing that labour can be divided causes this (the original sin)

• Man's work must be transformational self-activity
• Man must be in favour of a Social Existence to be truly human
  • Otherwise Man does not exist as Subject and is reduced to mere animal
  • Belief in division of labour causes this
• If work cannot yet be spontaneously authentic, it must be Theory-informed with the chief objective of Communism
• Communism cannot be tried until the optimal state is achieved

Division of Labour

• The fall of man
• The source of oppression, domination and estrangement
• Man as subject takes another man and his labour as his object
• Prevents free work, and causes estrangement

Estrangement

• From your labour
• From yourself
• From each other

Ideology

• Any justification for division of labour
• Eliminate through consciousness-raising
• Master-Slave dialectic yields revolutionary potential
• Every field of work is tainted with division of labour, and produces ideological justification for the oppressive hierarchy

Not Ideology

• To be free of ideology, you must put theory into practice for purpose of eliminating division of labour, or;
• You must be Socialist Man living in Socialist Society
• Absence of justification for domination is absence of ideology
• Without ideology, no one justifies division of labour, and thus all work in connection with one's pure subjectivity
• With no division of labour, no malevolance, subversion, treachery or betrayal take place

Do The Work

• Regardless of the subset of Marxism, you must do the work
• Create more of your collective (CRTheorists, Social Men, Queer folk)
• Consciousness raising: not simple allegiance, must embody their class consciousness
• Perform Praxis:
  • Theory into practice
  • Dialectically reflect to enhance theory
  • Repeat

Rousseau's Savage

• Sentimentalist/Romantic who misunderstood reports from colonies
• The savage is free and instinctual
• Man in society, being overly rational and lacking instinct, suffers
• Dialectical transformation:
  • Savage maintains the nobility of his free, instinctual nature but;
  • Is raised up from inability to progress beyond primitive life
  • Savages Made to Live in Cities

Marxian Lense

• Free Worker would as an animal, except he is conscious
• If conscious of theiry, understands he is Social
• Social Man analogous to Noble Savage made to live in Cities
• Individual Man is not conscious of the fact that making his subjectivity object is the path to reaching a higher level nor the fact that this must be reflected in others doing the same
• Consciousness in agreement so nobody is dominating; awareness that true nature lies in Social Society
• Free Society with no alienation from products of one's labour; no estrangement between people or from oneself

Contradictions

• Man is only free if all men are doing working to produce pure Social Society, thus;
• All men are enslaved to the need to be Social Man, lest no one is free
• Justification to eliminate all who cannot be educated to believe this
• Gulags are intended as an attempt to re-educate

Contradictions baked into the Dialectic

• Hegel believed everything contains contradictions and this produces motion
• Marxist commandment: hold contradicting ideas in mind without seeing a problem, until they synthesize
• Communism occurs when all living men voluntarily hold the same consciousness
• Communism not good at doing this on its own, but Mao: "Power comes at the barrel of a gun"
• Soviet Stats: 25% of males in gulags for re-education
  • Those who cannot be re-educated go to the harshest camps or are killed

Marxists Reject Contradiction

• Expecting everyone to raise consciousness and espouse the same view is not considered problematic or conducive to enslavement, because it is assumed that everyone will espouse the same view once they achieve Critical Consciousness
• Deaths are simply a failure to effectively put theory into practice
• Failure over prolonged time = millions of deaths
  • These deaths are not contradictory - they are part of the triad working out
• Creation: Man -> Society -> State -> Man
  • Repeat until Man, State and Society are uniform and co-continuous
  • Totalitarian Collectivism (until double-negation)
• Social Man with the right idea, but before realization of Social Society, must "do the work" -> Social Work making Social Men (raise consciousness): Class, Racial, Gender, Queer, Intersectional If everyone is doing theory-informed practice (Praxis) they'll be projecting the same image of the world and thus that is what the world will have become.

Return to Garden

• The world with no division of labour
• We are thrown from/prevented from enjoying the Garden of Eden:
  • Ostensibly because we sinned, but actually;
  • Division of labour is the true sin
• Doing the work is leading us back/recreating the Garden: -