logicp_writings/collectivist_theology/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 prohibit 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 today are enured to such scruples. We have seen too many improbable and incredible things 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 is such a profound influence on the way that Man lives his life thus using the exact thesis that Marx makes about the 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 should be 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, but 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.

Religious Work

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 Religious 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 reciprocation, 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 productive 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.

Publication History

*This isn't the first time that Marx brought up the bees and animals. The economic and philosophic manuscripts from 1844 is where that comes up. These manuscripts did not inform Marxism until later -> not published until 1932-33. At this point, we were deaing with the rise of the Frankfurt School and the Neo-Marxists reckoning with the failure of Marxism. Neo-Marxists look at these publications and begin to think that something went wrong in that he was more Hegelian in his earlier years as compared to

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts

Species

These give an idea of just how religious these found Here's a chapter about the man becoming estranted from his labour through its being co-opted by the capitalists creating forced labour which alienates and estranges man from the product of his labour, while estranging man from man -> conflict theory between bourgoisie and the capitalists during a time where man keeps living. Estragement from his essential nature as a human.

"Man is a species being. Not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species as well as those of other things as his object".

He's working on himself to make mankind higher level.

"He adopts the species as his object (another way of expressing it). Also, because he treats himself as the living species - a Universal and therefore Free being. The life of the species in both man and animals, consists physically in the fact that man, like the animal, lives on inorganic nature, and the more Universal man is, the more Universal is the sphere of ignoranic nature on which he lives."

Inorganic is Spiritual

"Just as plants, animals, air, light, etc, constitute theoretically a part of human consciousness (partly his objects of natural science, partly his objects of art), his spiritual, inorganic nature, spiritual nourishment, which he must first prepare to make palatable and digestible, so also in the realm of practice, they constitute a part of human life and human activity. Physically, man lives only on these products of nature. Whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, the dwelling, etc. The Universality of man appears in practice precisely in the Universality which makes all nature his inorganic body. Both in as much as nature is 1. his direct means of life and 2. the material, the object and the instrument of his life activity.".

Nature is man's inorganic body. Nature, that is, a spiritual body. Nature is the thing that the idea creates for Hegel. It is man's spiritual body, according to Marx.

"Nature is man's inorganic body. Nature, that is, insofar that it is not itself a human body. Man lives on nature, means that nature is in his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchanges if he is not to die. 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."

Tricky, because "for man is a part of nature" is not the entire point - nature is man's spiritual body. So, nature is that which exists in man's consciousness in perfected form and spiritual form.

If you don't understand that he's coming from this subjectivist position where the world is being created from inside your head, it's very difficult to know what he's talking about. This is a theological view making ontological claims.

"In estranging from man one nature into himself, his own active functions, his life activity, estranged labour, estranges the species from man. It changes from him the life of the species into the means of individual life. Likewise, in its abstract and estranged form, for labour, life activity, productive life itself, appears to man in the first place merely as a means of satisfying a need. The need to maintain physical existence. Yet, productive life IS the life of the species. It is life engendering life. The whole character of a species, its species character, is contained in the character of its life activity, and freee conscious activity is man's species character. Life itself appears only as a means to life."

With the fact of divided labour, man is estranged from the product of his work. The work is not creating what he's envisioning in his mind anymore, it's for somebody else's bidding in exchange for money that he uses to purchase the things that he neds to live, like food. It changes, for him, the life of the species into the means of individual life (individual is not social man). Individual man has been estranged from the collective, the social, the commune. The goal of the commune/communist ideal is make man back into Social Man that's no longer Individual Man performing individual labour for his individual needs. It changes, for him, the "Life of the species into a means of individual life".

Life of the species is WORK. It makes individual life the purpose of the life of the species.

Consciousness and Estrangement

"The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity.

Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will, and of his consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity. It is just because of this that he is a species being (human/higher nature - aware of itself as a species), or it is because he is a species being that he is a conscious being (his own life is an object for him). Only because of that is his activity free activity. Estranged labour reverses this relationship so it is just because a man is a conscious being that he makes his life activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence."

When you work for somebody else you're no longer out creating the world according to your consciousness, which would otherwise be performing sacred work which creates the world and humanizes it, and thus making you and humanizing you. You are now doing somebody else's work for them, so they are not even engaging in productive work to have this spiritual transformation through the sacrament of work. Meanwhile, you're not performing your authentically free conscious activity necessary to realize the authentic expression of humanity's species character. You have reduced it to a mere activity of obtaining what you need to live through the artificial construct of money that's being exchanged for your work, which has become estranged labour. In other words, estranged meaning the same kind of estrangement as when God kicked us out of the garden. On the commune everybody's working in the garden and none of the labourers are estranged because they're just doing what you would most naturally do in the garden, but when the tyrant kicks you out and enforces the division of labour, now you're doing somebody else's work: neither of you are advancing in your sacred work. You are only tilling the soil, doing backbreaking labour and, eventually, dying.

"In creating a world of objects by his practical activity in his work upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species being, that is, as a being taht treats the species as its own essential being, or that treats itself as a species being (as a self conscious being). Admittedly, animals also produce. They build themselves nests - dwellings - like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces Universally. It producers only under the dominion of immediate physical need whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal's product belongs immediately to its physical body whilst man freely confronts his product. AN animal forms objects only in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man, therefore, also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty. It is just in his work upon teh objective word, therefore, that man really proves himself to be a species being (conscious being - the pinnacle of life - the creator). This production is his active species life. Through this production, nature appears as his work and his reality."

You picture the word, you work to make it, and it appears nature - your inorganic/spiritual body - as your work and reality.

"The object of labour is, therefore, the objectification of man's species life, for he duplicates himself not only as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively in reality. And, therefore, he sees himself in a world that he has created, and tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his species life and his real objective as a member of the species and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body is taken away from him. Similarly, in degrading spontaneous free activity to a means, estranged labour makes man's species life a means to his physical existence. The consciousness which man has of his species is, thus, transformed by estrangement in such a way that species life becomes, for him, a means."

That's not mere philosophy, this is deep ontological claims about the nature of man, the nature of being as man, what separates from man from beast, and what the effect of this fall of man through the division of labour where we're no longer Social Man, anymore, although in estranged little social pods called tribes and communes - we're now individual man who has to work for himself and that is able to be exploited by selling his individual labour to s/omeone else. Neither is doing their spiritual work, creating nature (and by creating nature and society and therefore creating himself). And, so, the ejection from the garden for Marxist Theology is the act of dividing labour. This creates, though, another dialectical spiral that we can see, which is that Man does Work, and authentic work creates freedom and liberation, but freedom and liberation is what makes man Man instead of Beast, which allows him to do work and create more labour and liberation".

You have a telelogical process in the relationship between man, work and freedom, and at the end when this dialectic synthesizes the whole thing, you have truly free men whose work is all just the projecion of their sacred labour and will to work. So, man creates himself into a truly free man in this way and the name of that truly free man is Social Man because Social Man is a man that realizes he lives in a Society, and he is therefore not exploiting any other man and stealing from him his fundamental nature or estranging him from one another and the product of his species labour. The man bootstraps himself to total freedom, just like he bootstraps himself as a species being in the Marxist theology. The end of this rainbow is Communism - when we get to complete Social Man who has achieved the goal of creating the complete independence of Man.

Being and Existence

Here Marx talks about Being/Existence/Creation when he says:

"A being only considers himself independent when he stands on his own feet and he only stands on his own feet when he owes his existence to himself".

We can't be subject to God or children of God because we don't stand on our own two feet - we would owe our existence to our creator - so we must owe our existence to ourselves as men

This whole idea that God the creator would see this in a gnostic way that it is a lie. In fact, as we saw from the Critique of Hegel that he would see religion as being a construction of Man and thus God as being a construction of Man. Man created a construction of God as an ideology to justify why he is doing what he does and why he is not standing as Man himself and in himself.

"A man who lives by the grace of another regards himself as a dependent being. But I live completely by the grace of another if I owe him not only the maintenance of my life, but if he has moreover created my life - if he is the source of my life. When it is not of my own creation, my life has necessarily a source of this kind outside of it - the Creation is therefore an idea very difficult to dislodge from popular consciousness. The fact that nature and man exist on their own account incomprehensible to it, because it contradicts everything tangible in practical life. The creation of the Earth has received a mighty blow from Geognosci - that is from the science which presents the formation of the earth, the development of the earth as a process - as as self-generation. Generatio Equivica is the only practical refutation of the theory of Creation.

Now it is easy to say, to the single individual, what Aristotle has already said. You have been begotten by your father and your mother, therefore, in you, the mating of two human beings, a species act of human beings, has produced the human being. You see, therefore, that even physically, man owes his existence to man. Therefore, you must not only keep sight of the one aspect - the infinite progression which leads you to further enquire "Who begot my father, who his grandfather, etc" - you just also hold onto the circular movement, sensually perceptible in that progress by which man repeats himself in procreation. Man, thus, always remaining the subject.

You will reply, however, I grant you this circular movement, now grant me the progress which drives me ever-further until I ask who begot the first man in nature as a whole, and I can only answer you: your question is itself a product of abstraction - ask yourself how you arrived at that question - ask yourself whether your question is not posed from a standpoint to which I cannot reply, because it is wrongly put. Ask yourself whether that progress, as such, exists for a reasonable mind. When you ask yourself about the creation of nature and man, you are abstracting in so doing from man and nature. You postulate them as non-existent and, yet, you want me to prove them to you as existing. Now I say to you: give up your abstraction and you will also give up your question. Or, if you want to hold onto your abstraction, then be consistent, and if you think of Man and Nature as non-existent, then think of yourself as non-existent, for, you too, are surely Nature and Man. Don't think - don't ask me - for as soon as you think and ask your abstraction from the exsitence of Nature and Man has no meaning. Or are you such an egotist that you conceive Everything is Nothing and yet want yourself to exist?"

This is where Voegelin accuses him of being an intellectual swindler - sidestepping the fundamental question of ontology, and creating Man as a brute-fact of the world that has then bootstrapped itself into the state that it's in now. You can see the Marxian flavours of advising to not ask questions, etc. Voegelin takes him for heavy task for that, but then does the typical Marxian thing - "or are you such an egotist..."

Cut this out, or there's something wrong with you. Intellectual swindler is the term, again, that is used for this.

"You can reply "I do not want to postulate the nothingness of nature", etc. Just as I asked the anatomist about the formation of bones, and so on. But since, for the Socialist Man, the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of Man through human labour, nothing but the emergence of nature for man so he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through himself of his Genesis. Since the real existence of man and nature has become evident in practice through the sense experience, because man has thus become evident for Man as the being of nature, and nature for man as the being of Man. The question about an alien being, about being above nature and man, a question which implies the admission of the unreality of nature and of man has become impossible in practice. Atheism, as the denial of this unreality, has no longer any meaning for Atheism is a negation of God and postulates the existence of man through this negation, but

Socialism as Socialism no longer stands in any need of such immediation. It proceeds from the theoretically and practically sensuous consciousness of man and nature as the essence.

Socialism is man's positive self-consciousness, no longer mediated through the abolition of religion, just as real-life is man's positive reality no longer mediated throught he abolition of private property through Communism. Communism is the position as the negation of the negation and, hence, is the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and rehabilitation. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but Communism, as such, is not the goal of human development, the form of human society."

This is Marx talking about the origin of humanity and he says that "For the Socialist" we just see that Man is Man and Nature is Nature, and we are, in practice, the entire history of the world is nothing but the creation of Man through human labour. For Marx, man is creating man through the process of history, and man is creating himself by realiziing that he is a man in this process. For Man to realize that he is man in himself, which is along the path to becoming Socialist Msn, he first has to realize his potential for full independence and, eventually, to be man in himself, he has to realize his full independence, independence from God, independence from his parentage. Man as creator placed in place of Deity - that's what's going on in the Marxian Theology - each Man has to become his own creator. Theory and practice in place of religion, or as a religion, is what's going on. Socialist Theory explaining what's happening and practice until those two fuse.

Praxis

"Practice and Theory" From Marxists.org "Practice means activity with a means and an end. These words, practice, action, activity, praxis, labour, behaviour - are used with different meanings by different writers at different times in different languages."

• I'm going to separate that:*
• Work is the sacred thing that Marxists do, and it's not perfectly consistent with Marx's use.
• Labour is what happens when it is appropriated by bosses, capitalists and the division of labour.

• Activity is what you do when it doesn't have a conscious direction in mind (what animals do)

• The crucial point is that, for Marxists, praxis is inclusive of its mental, theoretical or ideological aspects*:

• mental: the vision in your mind

• theoretical: conforms to theory

• ideology: born of ideology

Ideology for Marx

Badly understood, but insightful to watch Charles Mills "From Class to Race" - explains how he went from being classical Marxist to Critical Race Theorist:

• every Marxist in existence is wrong about what Marx meant by "ideology"

Ideology, for Marx, is the set of justifications that people give for doing work that's not productive. In particular, for making other people work for them.

• Priests create "God" as an ideology and religion. They aren't productive, but as priests they know they will be fed. In the ideology of Religion is a set of justifications given for why a Priest needs to be doing as he does, instead of doing real productive labour.
• Lawyer isn't doing anything practical - not real work - he just hustles paper and arguments and wields an ideology about the law and how it exists so that he can understand it and mediate it for those who haven't the same capacity. His ideology about the law justifies his existence as a lawyer.
• Ideology is whatever idea justifies super-structural work and is continuous with the superstructure itself.

"What we have here is that for Marxists, practice is inclusive of its mental, theoretical or ideological aspects. These ideological or mental aspects can be abstracted from practice only relatively. The contrast between theory and practice is always only a conditional and relative one. Practice is active, rather than being a passive observation, and is directed at changing something. Practice differs from activity, in general, because practice is inseparable from Theory, which gives its means and end."

The only real work is Socialist Work - because practice has to be performed while having the idea in one's head. The worker has a vision of what he is creating in mind. It already exists in his consciousness and he is bringing it about as creator into the world, and he will understand himself better as creator and more human as a result. The subjective is brought into the objective world and the subject understands itself better as a result. That's activity. Practice goes beyond that.

Practice is also inseparable from Theory which means that the only kind of work that counts as practice is work that's in coordination with Theory - Marxian Theory - which gives its means and end. While activity or behaviour usually includs unthinking reflexes.

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

Theory inspires practice, practice requires reflection, which is going to reform theory and give rise to a new iteration. This is the wheel of becoming until Theory and Practice fuse, once again. When the practical idea and the theoretical idea fuse into the absolute idea, for Hegel, you have the Escaton. For Marx, you take this away from Idealism (Theoretical and Practical => Absolute), but will now be Theory and Practice becoming Unified into something Unified - perfectly theoretically informed activity with a means and an end that are informed by Theory and which is, therefore, Socialist. When practice and theory become the same thing, theory-practice, they are no longer divided whatsoever - and that's the thing that Social Man does in Socialist Society, which both also become fused as well.

"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 the practical aspect of that activity, with supervision of labour becoming a distinct activity in itself. The distinction between the object of practice, 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 practice, in general, and practices, each of which is directed toward specific ends and using specific means. Practice is the criterion of truth."

Marx also said that truth was practice.

"In this sense, practice must be understood in its broadest sense - inclusive of the many kind of mental and material activity which contribute to changing knowledge in the world."

The Problem

Problem with this subjectivist view is that there are other people.

You have a subjective view of the world and you are bringing that world into creation through your life processes, and thus making yourself into a species being. And so do I. And maybe we don't have the same picture in our head - the same subjective consciousness.

Other people, all people, might have different subjective consciousnesses and the Geist of Society can only unify them so much.

The problem of subjectivism and the idea that you are creating the world that exists in your head, which might be the only world that exists at all, is that there are other people.

If we both go outside and look at a tree, I can point to the tree and you'll see that same tree, but neither of us had to condition the other one's subjective experience - we didn't have to manifest the tree such that the other person would manifest the exact same thing, therefore something is being left out from the subjectivist position. We could talk about various features of the tree, and we'll both be able to see them.

The subjectivist will say "you have to point it out just right before I see it". But that's not true: we could look at something each independently in private and compare our written observations and find remarkable accordance - "Correspondence Theory of Truth" - what is true corresponds to what we see and experience in reality/bring in through our senses and instruments that extend our senses (Marxists refer to it as "Instrumental Reason", at times).

The subjectivist philosophy has this huge problem with the idea that an authentic worker is creatin the world and himself and creating man as a species by creating history and by creating himself as a species being by creating that which he is not estranged from. What is this huge problem? There are other people with other views.

In fact, there are other subjects who might decide they want to exploit others. I decide to hire you to do a particular task - I want to bring a vision into the world, but I don't really want to do it. I offer you food and money to come over and do the work. I might reduce your work/practice to labour because, now, you are doing activity in accordance with me vision - my theory.

The only way you can resolve this is everybody has the same theory. Otherwise, you have exploitation and the creation of labour from work - creates estrangement and alienation and, in the process of creating that, whoever is the one that's estranging and alienating is going to create an ideology to justify what they're doing and, consequently, whoever is doing the work is going to be brainwashed with the ideology to explain why they should have to suffer having their work estranged from themselves.

This requires Communism as a religious object in the sense that everybody has to adopt the same view - everybody has to have the same consciousness so that they are all doing the same work - the same social consciousness so that thir work is towards the same ends and using similar means.

The problem of the faith of Marxism, because it is ultimately subjectivist, is that there are other people who might not think the same way, or might see a different approach. They are the problem - they break the religion. And history has taught us this lesson. So "Communism" has to become the escatological end which provides the impetus for Socialist Man to do his work in creating the Socialist Society in which everyone who lives in such a society will have the same subjective vision of the world based on the same theory.

As they work in such an environment, they generate the same vision in unity with one another. No ideology has to be generated, as there is no necessity for anyone to rationalize their exploitation of another. The vision in your head that you're trying to produce through your Socialist work has to be Communism as the escaton. According to Marxism, this is not the end goal, but the next "big stage" of human History. This is the Utopia where everybody is free from all exploitation, and it can only come about when all subjects are holding it as the Theory which informs the practice - the authentic work which only takes place in a stateless and classless society.

The point of an Ideology is to hold up a class that is either managerial/priestly/etc in order to divide labour. As a result, Communism becomes the Religious Object that Socialist Man is holding in his mind and trying to create in the world through the process of Socialist Work that he can reflect into himself in order to see the world more in terms of that Socialism. That's the Theology of Marxism. That's the Religion of Communism. Why?

German Ideology

"Only at this stage does self-activity coincide with material life, which corresponds to the development of individuals into complete individuals and the casting-off of all natural limitations.

The transformation of labour into self-activity corresponds to the transformation of the earlier limited intercourse to the intercourse of individuals as such."

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 - man in favour of a Social existence, 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 - 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).

For work to be authentic, it must be Theory-informed Socialist Work, done by Socialist Man who has the process of bootstrapping himself into Communism as his chief objective. If everybody isn't doing it, then it doesn't work because there's a need to dominate one or over the other - hence why Real Communism hasn't been tried.

The people who create the division of labour (the Fall) are ultimately subjects who are exerting their subjectivity over the subjectivity of others. This objectifies them, estranges them from their labour, alienates them from themselves and each other (and the fruit of their work) and, thus, enslaving them. They do this by turning their Free Work into Labour, and that transformation of Labour for someone else's vision creates estrangement and alienation - the unforgivable sin.

What this means is that Marxism isn't just Collectivist, but intrinsically Totalitarian.

Marxism believes that Ideology is eliminated by raising consciousness about what it believes Ideology to be - justification for division of labour and domination - so that you can create the master-slave dialectic and, in turn, a revolutionary potential:

"Violence is the midwife of revolution."

A violent revolution overthrows society and turns the wheel of the Marxist dialectic another revolution (pun).

Any systematic justification for domination, hierarchy, division of labour etc. The priest creates religion so he can tell people he needs to be fed in order to continuing ministering for people. The lawyer creates and manipulates the law so he can do no-productive work to manage legal affairs. The society creates a whole ideology claiming the need for priests, religion, lawyers, politicians and more in a state with an ideology asserting that these strata are necessary. Each stratum has to justify their own participation in the hierarchy, rather than being equalized to the level of production.

"This holding of ideology is not possible for Socialist Man because Socialist Man understands the difference between work and labour, and is conscious of the fact that work is activity informed by Theory, and has an understanding of historical conditions which made History and Man as the object of history as time has gone on. He also understands the difference between Work and Labour (where one person dominates another by exerting their subjectivity over the place of others.)".

Socialist man can't possibly be an ideologist because there's no need for an ideology when there's no division of labour, and when all work is theory put into practice. Especially, if it's highly evolved theory. If Socialist Man is fully-committed to being a Social Man that lives in a Social Society that's the product of Socialism (the non/anti-ideology) and understanding his role as a Social Animal, then he can't possibly be an ideologist - he rejects ideology. Marxism is not an ideology, because Social Man lacks any ideology - understanding no justification for any domination whatsoever.

Important to consider how meaningful this is. Marxism is assuming that the entire concept of dominating and manipulating others is completely contingent on division of labour, and that so long as everyone has the same belief about working in connection with one's subjectivity, in a pure form, that history progresses to a place where no one would ever have to manipulate one another again. This creates the perfect world, where every human being can do exactly the things that are most meaningful and important to them, and that this creates a Utopia where no malevolence, subversion, treachery or betrayal takes place.

Every failed Communist experiment can be said to have not tried real Communism because it turns out that the people who seized power reproduced domination because they weren't truly Social Man. They weren't Man who had absolute equitarian liberation as their vision, where everything is perfectly equal and everybody is as equals.

In the Marxian Theology, man becomes Social Man by doing "The Work" - Material socialist work? Organizing and having revolutions? Or Cultural Socialist Work, which is whatever the hell Critical Race Theorists are obsessed with - grievance-mongering - inflamming the contradictions across the stratifications in society and blaming everything you don't like on an ideology (White Supremacy - the root cause of everything in CRT - being the dominant ideology which produces a superstructure called Whiteness. White Supremacy is the ideology of the suprestructure of Whiteness).

Man becomes Social Man and sets everyone free by doing the Social Work and creating more Social Men. Social Man is the target of the unfolding of history - man is the creator of history by his very activity, his life activity when it is Work, in place of Estranged Labour or regular Activity - this is because Man is necessarily Social. Social Man is a conscious man and is man who is aware of the Marxian Theology - putting Theory into Practice and then, where necessary, Dialectically reflecting on that to enhance the Theory and put it back into practice - these are those who are on the right side of history. Social Man is man made to live in society - the free society of Communism in which there is no Ideology. That is the Marxian promise.

Rousseau's Savage

Rousseau had an idea misunderstanding what Colonizers and Priests were writing and sending to France RE their observations from Islands. He was a sentimentalist and a romantic who looked at Western Society as not being Instinctual and that this lead to man suffering in society that was in downfall. The savage, however, in these colonized areas, was truly free but too instinctual, so he couldn't progress beyond a primitive form of life. He saw a need for a dialectical transformation to take place.

He based everything on Aufheben where you take a concept, keep it in portion, abolish it in portion, and meanwhile lift it up to a higher level of understanding. Rousseau wanted to figure out a way to bring down the over-rationality of Civilized European society (which had problems that he pinned on civilization and reason itsel), and wante to elevate the nobility of the savage by dialectically fusing those two things into something which he called "Savages Made to live in Cities". This was the concept that inspired Hegel, leading to all the wokeness today.

Now we have the same idea, re-invented in Marxism where the worker becomes the Free Worker who is very much like an animal, except that he is conscious, and theoretically conscious if he's proper Social Man. He is a man that's no longer interested in domination - truly made to live in society. A perfect Society in the Marxist view would be a society with no domination - a true society of people who see each other as equals. Social Man is man made to live in society - by implication, individual man (or "normal people"), are not made to live in society - they don't have the noble aspect of the pure worker who has the vision in his mind that he is creating and bringing into the world and, thus, making his subjectivity object so that he might then dialectically inform his subjectivity to a high level while understanding that this must be reflected on other people - other people have to be working in concert with one another. The consciousness has to be in agreement so that nobody is dominating. It has to be full conscious awareness that we are living in a society and that the true nature of a social society is one in which domination is unthinkable. Man is Dialectically made to live in society, and this generates a free society because it's a society where there can be no exploitation, no alienation (from products of one's labour), no estrangement between people or for man from himself, at different ontological levels

Contradictions

For Marxist Theology, man is actually only free if all men are doing this, in which case all men are enslaved by the need to do it. That's the contradiction that sends millions to their death, because it cannot be resolved.

You are not free if you have to have the proper social consciousness and everyone else has to have the same consciousness in a perfect borg-like hive mind. Every man has to become Social Man, in order for it to work. This is the contradiction which justifies killing those who cannot be educated.

Gulags are not prisons - it's a place where you are sent to be re-educated into Socialist ideology. If you cannot be re-educated, you must be liquidated.

If the project can't work, we never have a true society with true freedom and everybody is enslaved by the fact of the existence of domination in the world. This is a terrible, ridiculous theology which proclaims that man is only free unless all men are like him. Every man becomes enslaved to the need to be Social Man.

Marxists Archive: contradictions baked into the Dialectic

Hegel believed that everything contained contradiction and that this produced motion. "Since contradictions are a natural part of the real world, Marxists understand that planned contradictions in theory is a strength, while most philosophers see contradictions as the breaking of the system".

This is the religious commandment of Marxism. Hold mutually contradicting ideas in your mind simultaneously and hold them there without seeing a problem until they spontaneously synthesize. It's even worse than a contradiction.

Communism is the State of Affairs in which all the men who are still alive have the consciousness. Communism, when it's properly tried, is when all the remaining humans are awakened to this consciousness and therefore holds this consciousness voluntarily. They are free not to hold the consciousness except that they wouldn't, because it's how they understand the world - it's the interjected morality which has helped them to understanding/need the full expession of a Socialist Society. Communism is not particularly good knowing how to get to that point where eveyrbody (who is still alive) has this consciousness voluntarily. Mao said: "Power comes at the barrel of a gun." People had to be re-educated and liquidated.

Soviet statistic said 1/4 of males were in Gulag being reducated. If you couldn't be re-educated, you were labelled unable and though some managed to flee, many were tortured and killed. A defective person who can't have consciousness of reality awakened in them - not better than a beast - you can't pssibly understand theory and put it into practice.

Marxists Reject the Contradiction

Marxists don't see this as a contradiction. When you raise consciousness, which is the evangelistic Commandment to follow, then everybody will espouse the view voluntarily. Doesn't technically enslave people since it's assumed they'll be doing this faithfully and organically. They also wouldn't say that a contradictions leads to deaths, but that it's a failure to put it into practice properly. It's the failure, and not a contradiction, which is a murderous hiccough.

Imagine having a rationale to enslave anyone under the assumptions that doing so will lead to an outcome where everyone is doing the correct thing without anyone ever having to be enslaved.

Marxian theory wouldn't consider the fact of people failing to do things spontaneously for a prolonged period of time sufficient to incur millions of deaths as a contradiction for another reason, and that reason is the Dialectical Relationship between Man -> Reality -> State:

Man in himself (holy independent of creator and even parents). Dialectically, man produces a society. The society produces a state. The state is then responsible, through Gulag, to produce the man.

Man is only truly a social man when he is also in Socialist society. Socialist Man have the right idea, but he can't truly express it with his being because he still has to live in a world of exploitation and domination. He has to have, at the very least, a Socialist state that's trying to push forward into that direction, or he has to live in Communism where that direction has yet been realized. Communism, the next stage in human history, is where Man and Society have to be Dialectically Synthesized so that they are co-continuous. Man made to live in Society, thus both have to be made co-continuous, requiring Totalitarian Collectivism.

Up until that point, the work of Social Man is to do Socialist Work to make more Social Men. All it is is consciousness-raising. As has been said many times, the whole point of Critical Race Theory is to make Critical Race Theorists. They are the race-version of Social Man (Racial Consciousness). When everyone has Social-Man consciousness, everybody has the same consciousness and is therefore projecting the same image of the world out into the world and doing "The Work" to create that world simultaneously, with nobody dominating or exploiting anybody else. They just have to raise consciousness (they don't have to teach you math or reading) because this leads to everyone doing Theory-informed Practice (Praxist)

Return to Garden

i.e. The Work. When the Social World is created, it is reflected back into Man which increasingly creates Justice - a perfected world that is the re-creation of the garden of eden, where the division of labour, cultural labour etc has not yet come into the world. The Ideologists have not yet given any justification, etc. The work is to get back into the Garden.

Everybody has to be on the same page because everybody has to have the same means and ends in mind. When everyone has this, and is doing the same practice to create the Utopia, we see ourselves in the garden and become the denizens/citizens of the Garden. Then, because it's the Garden, we no longer need a state, and thus the Stateless/Classless Society is achieved.

The Work of Social Man is until the moment of the Escaton. This is when Social Man finally, truly exists. Perfect Social Man in the Perfect Society, built out of the jungle of social relations, power dynamics and nature itself. The Humanized World is where Man Lives and Humanizes himself. That's what Praxis is - a Religious project.

The solution to the Dialectical riddle of Social Man made to live in Social Society: The Marxian Theology is a project of spiritual renewal and transformation through The Work, where The Work being Practice. Putting the tenets of the Theology into practice in the world, to where Theory and Practice become fused, which occurs when the division of labour is completely obliterated. The goal is to recreate and reenter the Garden of Eden where all the Tribes of the world are not estranged from one each other, but are already Communist. All of Man's needs are taken care of by the nature of the garden. He doesn't have to create a false idea of a God as the warden of the Garden will imaginarily throw him out for his own Sin, but that sin turns out to be the Division of Labour.

So Social Man in the Socialist Society can only truly exist when they exist in tandem and Socialist Society, and thus Socialist Man, only truly exists when everyone is Socialist Man who does the work for Socialist Society, in order to build and maintain it. That's the nature of the Marxian Rainbow Fever Dream.

Going Deeper

Their relationship to the idea of Truth is another indication that this is a religion.

Marxists.org Truth (Epistemology - Gnosciology)

"Truth is usually taken to mean correspondence of an idea to the world outside thought. However, following Hegel, Marxists take truth to be something that may be said of a Social formation or of Social practice itself. The truth of a Social Practice is always relative since, as Goethe said, "All that exists deserves to perish. Sooner or later, everything turns out to be false". Some philosophical currents believe that teh truth of an idea can be established through logical deduction from clear ideas. In general, each current has its characteristic criterion of truth. For rationalism, it is reason. For empiricism, it is observation and an experiment. Pragmatism makes practice the criterion of truth (does it work), but, like empiricism, Pragmatism knows only immediate individual action and misses the cultural and historical content of social practice."

*Marxists epistemology is, in fact, the putting into practice of Marxist Theory. When it works, it's true, and when it doesn't work it is not true. Truth is The Work that produces progress through history. Like pragmatism, in the view of whatever works must be true, where work now means Socialist Work - the advancing of Marxist Socialist faith. Just as Hegel saw his own philosophy as a system of science - vernunft - the higher level understanding of science. This is no mistake, and it has Hegelian roots as well. True in Marxian faith is that which advances Marxism.

So when they say your reality and my reality and all these people's truths - what they're actually talking about is that something is truth if it advances Marxism. This is why Kelly Oliver wrote in 1989 that we no longer have to have true theories or false theories, or be concerned about them, but can, instead, have strategic theories. That which achieves the Marxist political aims, as we've heard, that is the work. Marxian Gnosciology/Epistemology.

Epistemology to add to the other pieces. Recap:

• Ontology
• System of Values
• Axiology
• Theory of society and how it operates
• Escatology
• Theodyssey

Why is there evil int eh world? BEcause of the division of labour (being kicked out of the garden)

Wrap-Up

Within Marxism we start with the idea that man is incomplete but COMPLETABLE.

HE can be completed by realizing first that he can become free by becoming Social Man who adopts Social Theor ynad puts it into practice. Social Man, by putting it into practice, after a revolution, will get to live in a society created by Social Man -> Socialist Society. And, eventually, Socialist Society and Social Man will become co-continuous (in other words spontaneous) and will thus transform into Communism.

The question becomes: Why don't we have that?

Lack of Consciousness.

Why don't we have the class Consciousness? It's because historical conditions limit the range of one's consciousness. Sometimes we hear "False consciousness is conditioned by the heteronomous interests" from Marcuse. Historical conditions range the limit of one's consciousness - this is the heart of the ideas we've been examining in Material and Structural Determinism. There's no need to get into what Structure at the moment, but it's the Dialectical Synthesis of the collision between the infrastructure and the superstructure which creates the tenuous fibres of how structure actually works. The structure of a racist society, the racial infrastructure (POC), Racial superstructure (Whiteness) which collide with one another, creating a structure of society which conditions how society actually works

Structural Determinism: the structure actually conditions people to be able to lack consciousness. In Critical Race Theory you are structurally determined to believe in the White Supremacy ideology and, therefore, have White Privilege and be blind to the realities of racial oppression, whereas if you are a racial minority, you are being brainwashed to accept your servitude. Within Marxism, if you are in the bourgeoisie, you have all these ideologies that tell you why it's natural for you to be on top in society and why it's right for you to exploit other people's labour, or how the worker deserves to be exploited because he hasn't gone to school or hasn't worked as hard as you, and thus doesn't have the "merit" that you have.

The conditions, the historical conditions of the society that's existing at the time which is along a dialectical process, but not complete, those limit, through Structural Determinism, what it is you're able to be conscious of. The Marxist sees himself as, basically, a step or two ahead in history in bringing everyone forward by raising consciousness.

This is why they think: A. They are a step or two ahead of people B. Superior to everyone else C. Justified in excluding people from society and even killing people because they aren't coming along and are hindering the progress of history.

In a metaphysical sense, the historical conditions don't just have material and structural determinism, but they create the limits of subjectivity.

The Limits of Subjectivity

Marxism is a subject-centered view. It centers consciousness as the descriptor of the world which causes the practitioner to have the false belief that the limits of subjectivity are actually arbitrary.

We live in a subjective world where anything is possible. Marx had said that we are going to transcend all boundaries: "We will get past all natural limitations". For the subjectivist view, it exists entirely in your head. The limits of your subjectivity, which rae the conditioned respone of the historical conditions you live under, are all that you have preventing you from living in the perfect world. They are your own mental block created by the conditions outside of you.

Marxists, therefore, invert the world and believe that the subjective creates the objective and, thus, in doing that, humanizes it and makes it good through the Work, but because they believe that the limits of subjectivity are arbitrary, they also believe, as an extension of that belief, that the limits of objectivity are also arbitrary. The limits of the objective world don't really exist, which is why they think they can transcend nature, do away with human nature, have transhumanist projects to remake man into something like New Man, New Soviet Man, Socialist Man. They will always try to build this in order to transcend the boundaries of reality itself. Liberation means the liberation from reality - the limitations in the objective world, outside, are actually the products of the limitations of the subjective world inside, which has been limited by the historical conditions limiting your subjectivity. We could live in, basically, unbeliveably perfect metaverses if only we would deny the limits that the historical conditions have placed upon us. We would bring about whatever is in our subjective world in actuality, in the objective world, by us doing The Work.

Their enemy is Ideology (not theirs, of course, which doesn't exist). Objectivity itself is an ideology - a justification for why we are limiting our subjective range. Why can't we fly? We have an ideology which says it's physically not possible, and the scientists and positivists are exploiting in order to limit our subjectivity so that we cannot transcend our own reality - the ideology of objectivity is part of how we do this. This leads to some of the most narcissistic frames of mind, which they think to be the absence of ideology.

Prometheus

This also brings in a lot of Promethean thought. Marx was obsessed with Prometheus, which you also see in Marcuse later as well. They see themselves as Prometheus, bringing the light/fire of the Gods to human beings to set them free. For the MArxist theology, freeing oneself of subjective limitations expands the real of possibilities. Foucault was also all about this - expanding the potentialities of being by expanding your subjectivity. Getting rid of the Metanarratives (ideologies). Expand the possibility in terms of subjectivity and through the Work, which expands the objectivity.

The Work (the successful transformation of the world) teaches this lesson to people and lets them believe themselves as creator. And not just any people can be creator - it has to be everybody on the same page all the time. Social Man working for Social Harmony in the Socialist Utopia. Praxis is what is said what achieves this by taking the theory, putting it into action, taking that theory-informed practice and then seeing what's happening in the world and reflecting upon it. The objective is realized when it is, int he end, synthesized with the subjective (which is what Hegel said would be the creation of the absolute) and for Marx that's what happens when Social Man is able to produce Socialist Society. When there is no genuine object out there to dominate any longer.

This is the religion of being able to turn yourself into creator and you are only an authentic creator who is not a dominating demon creating the division of labour when everyone is working together in the Socialist mindset. Marx holds that man, and his species, are his object. The thing for which he does the Work, out of his Theory-informed subjective understanding, to transform is himself and his species.

Man and his species are his own object - we must keep saying that to get it to sink in. The Work (productive work that goes beyond meeting basic animal needs), that's informed by Theory, is done upon the object. The Work is therefore to humanize the world and man, the object is an illusion of the subject, who realizes this in the final synthesis, when the object, man himself and the entire species, has been successfully transformed into Social Man and Socialist Society by doing the Work (Praxis and creating more Social Man - brainwashing people and getting them to adopt this theology). In keeping with Hegel, Subject and Object lose their distinction, become the Absolute, and because there is neither Subject nor Object after the Escaton, there is no domination and we are now in the Communism scenario where everybody is equal and doing The Work in the name of the society. Perfect Collectivism. Everybody and everything is subject and object at the same time (Subject-Object). The Work and what the work is being done on become co-continuous in the end, just as Social Man becomes Co-Continuous with Socialist Society.

Subject Object would therefore be Subjects who realize they are their own Objects and Objects of their own subjectivity. It makes sense when you understanding what they are talking about. It's not possible, but you can understand what they're talking about. This all comes back to the Species Being - the human nature of the will to create, to mould, to shape and to produce through The Work, plus the meeting of your various needs (hunger, thirst, shelter, sex, comfort, etc). In other words, the sacred work of the Marxian Theology is to do The Work which arises from the Will to Create which, in the long run, allows man to see himself as independent and creator/co-creator (Social Man is sort of a Hive Mind because it's comprised of individuals who all have the same subjecive understanding or consciousness).

Shaping the Object

The moulding and shaping process for Marx is not just about making things or making the world around you, but it's a process of spiritual renewal - making yourself and actualizing yourself as a creator. But the actual creator isn't Man as in you/me/a man/a woman. It is, in fact, all men and all women as Social Man (Mankind actualized as the creator of history). Mankind itself is the creator of history. Every individual person is a various facet made in the image of the Socialist God. The transformation of inorganic nature into a humanized world is man's life-activity by which he makes himself in the species objects of his creative powers. Marx places The Work in the place where Hegel had put speculative thought, which is what's supposed to completely redo the world, and Marx quite rightly criticized Hegel for getting that wrong: "Thinking never does anything in the world, but Work Does". Hegel had actually remarked that "Work is what actually creates value", and Marx gives him credit for having observed that.

This isn't far from the Hegelian Theology, even though Marx claims that it's a total inversion:

• Hegel: "The last great synthetic step is the sublation of subject and object into the unified whole of the absolute." The absolute is the primordial subject, it gave birth to the object in the form of the world so that it would have an absolute, abject other against which to compare itself and to understand itself, and when it realizes finally in the end, when the subject realizes that the object it created is just an extension of itself (its inorganic/spiritual body), that's when the absolute/deity actualizes in the realization that there is no difference between its position as subject and the object that is the result of its own creative capacity.
• Marx: Marx does away with the absolute and replaces it with man and himself, so the Deity gets replaced with man. So Man becomes the creator of Man (both as subject and as his own object - at the level including of species - all of mankind is the object of man and his subjective will.), just as we read in the economic and philosophical manuscripts where he dodges the question. Social man has to be transformed, and the entire species has to be transformed into Socialist Man. Doing the work transforms you, but it also transformers others, leading to the entire species becoming Socialist Man. He transforms the world and himself through this life activity until Socialist Man lives in Socialist Society. Through this process, in the Marxian Theology, man realizes that he, in his own nature, is both author and object, creator who creates the world and then himself, thus he is wholly independent.

This is like building the garden out of the world - humanizing the jungle of the world, where the world is ultimately going to be society in the end (the whole world humanized. Nature humanized. Various conditions up until that point in history are just part of that process. Anything that happens in the unfolding of that process, such as contradictions in conflict with one another, are all ultimately the result of the division of labour, which came about because of the belief in a difference between God and Man. God is a tyrant/gnostic.

This image of the Garden is very intentional because the Marx's socialism idea is to build on earth and thus reclaim the Garden of Eden. In part through denouncing God and his condemnation in The Fall as false evil and tyrannical. This is gnosticism - Marx is a speculative gnostic. Man's removal from the garden, because Man created God in the first place, is a self-imposed act based on the idea of creating God to justify the domination following from the division of labour. Man fell from the state of being Social Man to that of being Historical Man/Individual Man who sees other men as his objects. His objective is, through the process of History in the Marxian Theology, is to apply Marxian theology so that every man becomes Social Man and the garden can be reclaimed. Now, not in its primevil state, where the various groups were estranged from one another, but rather where there is absolutely no separation from one to another and it is a global garden.

In the Garden of Eden, and in any Garden, the Garden is turning the world into something that provides for all your needs. In the Garden of Eden, all of man's needs are provided for him. You are careful, you fear no predators, you have all the food you need to eat, except eating from the Tree of Knowledge is forbidden. In the Garden all work is volitional, liberated, and free and it is the expression of their true nature as species being; their work is all productive work and it is authentic work bringing meaning to him and transforming him into an even better person - actualizing him. Under the division of labour, Nature can no longer supply people's needs because Property Rights/Capital have come into the world as an idea. (belief in Property Rights/Capital are ideological)

So Marx's idea of the division of labour as original sin is that it alienates man from one another (and nature can no longer provide), in addition to all this other alienation which alienates him from his species being. Since the productive labourer is having work taken from him. His work becomes a torment. Someone else must be benefitting and taking pleasure in his exploitation, and the person who's actually enjoying this torment of making other people work for his own subjective view (not a reflection of That's the conflict part of the Consciousness that Marx want.

Ideal

In that state man is no longer in the estranged state - kicked out of the garden. Not for spiritual renewal through their work. They're working just to be able to maintain means to meet their needs that were their birthright in the first place. They are estranged from themselves by labour and estranged from one another by labour. In other words, the turning of Work into an act of Domination. So Marx's idea of labour as original sin is that it alienates man from one another in addition to all this other alienation which alienates him from his species being, as we've talked about. So, since the productive labour is having hsi work taken from him through this domination and alienates him from it, his work necessarily becomes a torment - which is the toil that you read in Genesis III.

Someone else must be benefitting and taking pleasure from his exploitation, and this person who is enjoying the torment of making other people work for his own limited subjective view, that's not a reflection of the actualized end of history where everyone is Socialized and in Social society. What you have, then, is that the bourgeois capitalist is a demon who has taken off a part for himself and is no longer reflecting the potential for God. He is, in fact, creating a simulacrum of the creative force to exploit and enslave other men by extracting their surplus value at the cost of their alienation. That's why the Bourgeois, capitalist, straight, white, etc are hated by these Marxian theories. They've taken their own subjective image of what Socialist man could be and created it for their own benefit, separate from the whole.

This is true evil in the Marxist religion - employing other people, having division of labour, having positions like Priests and Lawyers - because that extraction of surplus value through the division of labour is the extraction of man's capacity to apply his productive effort in the process of societal and self-renewal and transformation. You can't spiritually advance if somebody else has caught you. If you work for somebody else, you are enthralled to a Demon. This alienation of one from another can only be overcome, according to Marxian thought, by raising consciousness that man is in fact a Social Being (a Socialist being) and that, as a Social Being (on the lower level - the product of Social relations that he himself creates and has created throughout history and that these conditions have become perfectly equitable) he will become Just. He will no longer be dividing labour and become a capital-less Social man with a completely different consciousness. By having the right Socialist mindset, Man can be made to see himself as part of the great societal project - Communism. By doing that, man becomes able to overcome his alienation from other men and, thus, free himself from the domination which exists intrinsically as a result of any division of labour.

Conclusion

We have seen the makings of a Theology here. Not only is there an account for Man and his Origins (albeit, a bad one), there is also an account of man's Telos (purpose), an ontology and an axiology.

Origins

Man makes himself through the process of history. What man actually is, that separates man from animal, is that man is able to bring the conscious products of his effort into the world, subject first, creating object, by which he understands and elevates subject and becomes increasingly human in an increasingly humanized world.

Telos

He has a purpose to take this to its complete logical extension and to humanize the entire world and totally himself. To create the Utopia - the Socialist/Communist Utopia.

Ontology

This theology comments on the state and meaning of his existence

We have an understanding of what it means it means to be a man. A man is somebody who has the capacity to do volitional work and by doing so change the world in accordance with his subjectivity, including a subjectivity acting on other people to change them into Socialist men as well. He is able to change the world in a way that reflects back into himself and allows him to understand himself and actualize himself as he engages in spiritual renewal so that the entirety of his inorganic body, nature, becomes the object of his subjectivity.

Theodyssey

We have an explanation of the tragedies, both current and historical, of existence. Why is there evil in the world? We have a theory of evil, within Marxism - because the division of labour exists and creates domination, and the domination creates material and structural conditions which, in turn, condition the people, leading them to be in conflict with one another. History uses people to move along the dialectic as this conflict plays out, and discard them.

The tragedies of existence are the result of domination, so what we must do is end domination by any means.

Domination and the progress of history are the explanation for evil. History, as it will be at its end, after achieving the Socialist Utopia, will allow for all violence and tragedy to be understood as having been necessary to resolve the contradictions in whatever moment of history so that it could have been made to move forward. Evil in the world is either the stupid capitalists who are evil in and of themselves, or it's the result of the limitations of consciousness imposed by the material conditions and social conditions of the time, limiting people's ability to understand themselves as social subjects.

All of the terrible violence and acts of history are just part of the process of moving history along until the end where we can see who was on the right side of it.

Soteriology

We have a theory of Salvation. Theory, which is dialectical praxis, from the conditions of history, is how man frees himself from this estranged and alienated state. By putting Theory in Practice - that dialectical Praxis, is the Soteriology. We are going to save all of mankind by making all of mankind Social Man living in Social Society.

It has a vision for the potential conclusion of the current state of existence and transition into one that is fundamentally different and better, which is an escatology. A theory for the end of the world. The end of history arrives when history no longer has to be made, because we have achieved Social Man in Social Society.

Axiology

It has a resulting axiological values program which is that "You have to do the work". You have to participate in this - you have to be on the right side of history. And that axiological values program gives rise to duties of conscience for every believer. Social Man has to make more Social Men and act in accordance with Theory and Practice in all things. This leads to rampant evangelism of the Socialist Faith because more people have to be programmed with the Social Theology so that they understand it and can become Social Men themselves and work toward this heaven on Earth which doesn't require a God - the rebuilding of the Garden.

Epistemology/Gnosciology

Connects them all. Truth is that which moves along the Marxist program, that which extends from Theory. Theory is not just the criterion of truth but its substance.

The Gnosciology of Maxism is predicated on the belief that that which advances Marxism is true and all else is false. The Axiology turns out to be the same - that which advances Marxism is good and all else is evil.

Marxism is a full-blown Theology. Who is the God of Marxist Theology? Man perfected. He doesn't know that he is that yet - his subjectivity is limited by the historical conditions taht he's contrained by, but man in himself, totally independent from any other thing, the man at the end of history that is fully synthesized and Social and is to be every man. He only truly exists in that perfected, Socialist society - Communism - which only comes into existence at the end of history, when man Perfects Himself as Social Man who is continuous with Social Society. When all the men perfect themselves to become the perfect expression in practice of Marxist theory, the God of Marxism is then the projection of man into Socialist Man who only exists in the Utopian future that Marxism upholds as a necessary historical possibility.

How is any of that supposed to make sense? From Marx's discussion of his origins:

"Don't think. Don't ask me. Now, I say to you, give up your abstraction and you will also give up your question".

Marxism is a Theology.