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

"Whenever Theory and Practice are separated, they fall into a distorted one-sidedness. Theory and Practice can only fully develop in connection with one another. Human activity is always purposeful, but in the earliest stages of development of society, before the development of the division of labour, there was no separation between theory and practice. With the development of the division of labour, the theoretical side of the development of human activity separated out from teh practical aspect of that activity, with supervision of labour becoming a distinct activity in itself. The distinction between th eobject of practiec, which is changed, and the means of practice, which is used up, is important in making sense of practice. It should also be noted that one has practiec, in general, and practices - each of which is directed toward specific ends and using specific means. Practice is the criterian of truth."

Marx also said that truth was practice.