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There seem to be a bunch of very meaningful holes in the categories in this book from the perspective of applying them into the present, at least going by your explanations (I haven't read the book). It seems obvious to me how it stems from where and when it was written, but correct me if I make inferences that just aren't true given the text as a whole. First off, the harmony expected by the believers in the bourgeois principle has never actually been real, it has always been an illusion that people have collaboratively participated in building. The break in the harmony never appears or disappears, it only moves around and seems to appear whenever it enters the walled-off section of society that writes the history that we read. Capitalism has always had the mass of the people within its limits excluded from liberal rights defined by the bourgeoisie for themselves. When capitalism was a national phenomenon, the majority of people living within the borders were not extended equal rights by any means. The seeming harmony after the 60's or so was due to the disharmony being expelled beyond the national borders after capitalism had developed into a united world system and made the turn from terror to conciliation possible with regard to highly exploited minorities. But that process didn't even go that far before being forced to turn back around as the disharmony within the oppressed nations animated them to win further rights and expel part of the disharmony. My point is that when harmony seems impossible to restore in a certain location, it's nowhere near as world-shaking as it seems to the people who have lived in the liberal bubble, for most people in the world it's just business as usual. Second, abstracting real existing society to just a bourgeoisie and a proletariat is not possible, and causes Tillich to mislocate social forces that would not have been hard to locate if he had been to open a history book before having decided on his categories. Tillich's concept of the radical bourgeoisie contains both what could be called the radical bourgeoisie (those who radically disrupt old social relations and ways of thinking wherever bourgeois ideology does not yet dominate) and the radical middle classes (those who seek social harmony on the basis of the bourgeois principle with democracy as their tool to acquire the same rights as the bourgeoisie had merely granted the propertied). He assigns to the radical bourgeoisie the honor for what they fought against to tooth and nail, for decades, everywhere, every step of the way. Democracy as we know it is undoubtably the product of an alliance between the middle classes and the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. Obama was radical bourgeois only in the sense I use, looking at his practical track record he was extremely ready to compromise on any middle class democratic values the held when it came to people outside the US-liberal bubble. Third, we have gone far along enough within capitalism that romantics don't have to look at feudal or pre-feudal structures for their primary inspiration anymore, and don't. Today, what they typically want is the golden age of imperialism back, the 50's or the 70's or so depending on their stance on women and minorities. In Europe, classical social democratic values are now the expressed values of political romantics and the proto-fascist parties in basically every country are voted by a massive amount of people who want basically what is construed as socialist in a very progressive sense in the USA right now. Romantic myths love harmony across class lines based on religion or nation or something equivalent, where everyone was seemingly content in their position in the social hierarchy. The golden age of social democracy was exactly that. The time of a bourgeois-proletarian alliance on the basis of mutual prosperity through plunder of third-world nations. People who seek that state of affairs are not progressive, they are reactionary. They used to be progressive in the bourgeois sense, letting imperialism run wild destroying traditional relations around the world, but bourgeois radicalism has moved past that stage onto the stage of global industrial supply chains that is incompatible with first-world social-democratic desires. And they were never progressive in the proletarian sense, actually advancing socialism in the world. The reason for that is that their socialism depends on excluding the majority of the workers of the world from participating in anything but the most brutal semi-tributary capitalism. It's a complete dead end development because of its economistic core, ideologically transforming the proletarian struggle into a national struggle for a more equitable share of what their bourgeoisies win in international competition. Social harmony itself is a middle-class illusion enabled by the liberal mythology and news-bubble that externalises existing disharmony into the fault of pre-capitalist practices. In established practice seeking harmonious developments mainly produces right-wing errors and revolutionary socialism has only succeeded in heightening the level of disharmony in society, since the new is forced to coexist with the old for a long, long time due to the global nature of capitalism. I agree that developed democracy requires a considerable level of social harmony, but that isn't really something that is attainable more than locally within the world system. If you make the mistake of privileging the nation as the locality that matters, as things stand, you can only find meaningful harmony and democracy in alliances of opposing classes that find greater unity in opposition to other nations. That is, either temporary defensive alliances or insatiable robbers and warmongers. Hardly in socialist countries, in which there will be intense internal struggle as long as socialism hasn't yet become a self-sustaining system where people interpret capitalist ideological influences in a socialist manner as naturally as the first staunch liberals interpreted their historical influences in a capitalist manner. And that can't become the case until the illusions of the superiority of capitalism are dispelled. Firstly, socialism has to be economically self-sustaining enough for its success to not fluctuate based on what happens in the capitalist system, and secondly, capitalist countries must not be able to produce a false image of superiority by externalising the poverty that their prosperity requires into other countries. Edit: I'll quickly clarify my basic difference of opinion about harmony where it seems like both of us are just talking about the limits of harmony under capitalism. I get the feeling that Tillich at least at the time was in the mainstream pro-imperialist camp of socialism, believing that the bourgeoisie had a civilizing mission in the world: they would bring prosperity and harmony where they went, even if getting there would take time after breaking down the traditional social relations. They'd just eventually hit a hard limit, after which socialists would have to take over. That view would be antiquated and has been shown to be the worst kind of wrong. TBH it was a mistaken and confusing exaggeration for me to say that establishing socialism within a capitalist world system decreases social harmony, it was only genuinely fought for in places where it could and did bring principally harmonious developments. The point I was reaching for was that when analysed through western middle-class values, the intent to find even greater harmony and prosperity for themselves as individuals than they currently experience, genuine socialism necessarily appears like a dead end that holds no promise. uncop fucked around with this message at 08:26 on Jan 17, 2020 |
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Jan 16, 2020 12:38
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AceOfFlames posted:Ok, so is there like a Complete Idiot's Guide To Society Under Socialism? Because I consider myself to be a smart guy and all the terms in this thread make my head spin. The thing is, you can’t really define socialism in general as a system except as something that all socialist movements, regardless of their professed goals, end up working toward. There are lots of statements of political intention, but they conflict with each other and historically have a very variable track record of what actually gets there in reality. The pure essence of socialism is to make the outcomes of society more responsive to the general human will: it’s whatever you want but limited by historical conditioning, which is initially immense. The specifics of the system that arises depends on what is found to increase the potential for human self-determination, and have to keep changing because the barriers need to be overcome one by one, each requiring new methods of overcoming. Moreover, there are local differences that create different barriers, like how for people of colonised nations there has been no way but to first overcome political dependence and then economic dependence on exploiters. In the Global North, the immediate barrier seems to me to be the rule of the bourgeois definition of economic growth over political decisionmaking. I mean how political initiatives are considered the height of irresponsibility if they don't pay for themselves in a way that doesn't hurt growth, and politicians are basically fired from executive positions if they let people do things that look like they may have hurt growth. Keynesianism has been used as sort of a happy ideological tale to claim that enacting what people want can actually more than pay for itself, but the limits of that argument lie where the ideology begins conflicting with reality. Theories of socialism are all conjencture based on studying society from some perspective or another, formed in service of the struggle to enable you to choose your job, preserving your quality of life, giving you what you need and deserve, while also getting everyone to assume such positions in society that it works as a whole and the others also have the same possibilities as you. The theoretical claims can't be interpreted as workable political promises any more than other forms of intellectual conjencture can. To begin to make political promises one needs a coherent political organization that is able to use power for coherent ends. Moreover, those promises need to be based on the situation at hand rather than the ends or ideals or most of them will inevitably be broken in the short term. uncop fucked around with this message at 09:52 on Feb 18, 2020 |
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Feb 18, 2020 09:26
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Bar Ran Dun posted:I think this right here is incredibly important. Sartre said “existentialism is a humanism “. One could steal and modify that. The content of our systems should be human and for humans. Contextual systematized humanism, socialism is a humanism. The content and beneficiary of our systems should be all of us collectively. Maybe, but I was just describing the historical actuality of socialist thought and I'm not sure if I'd agree about the shoulds. Existentialism, at least, is an individualist, anti-essentialist brand of humanism that I flat out disagree with philosophically. It requires a subjective idealist starting point to even be able to conceive people as existing prior to being determined to conform to any blueprint that is independent of their will. Philosophy rant incoming! The marxist humanist (Dunaevskaya & co.) standpoint is an okay humanism. It conceives the individual person to unavoidably be an instance of a historically determined, self-transforming species-being (human nature). For marxist humanism, reality as it stands is fundamentally not humanist, crucially because it forces people to exist in a manner that runs counter to their nature. That means one can only live a humanist life through exceptional circumstances. And it considers mainstream humanisms to be false consciousness that runs counter to their objective of actually transforming society to actually work according to humanist principles. Even marxist humanism has confusions because of its hegelian focus on the universal. It veers into marxist hegelianism where only universals represent genuine truths. When humanity in the real world doesn't appear to share in a common universality, a historical subject (the proletariat or somesuch) must be posed that represents the universal at the moment, and those who aren't part of that universal must be rendered either historically passing or altogether "nonhistorical". For a dialectic of human nature, nonhistoricity is nonhumanity. So when they confront the issue while holding onto the hegelianism, marxist humanists are forced to either deal with the implication of subhumanity or to extend their historical subject beyond any point of practical usefulness. For nonrevisionist historical materialism, the people of the world all taken together right now actually don't and can't even share a common good or, by extension, a common nature. Instead of universals, history produces local generalities that differ from and are opposed to each other in various ways. The generalities must engage in struggle where some are denied in favor of others and others engage in compromises between equals. A suitable concrete sequence of struggle and unification, struggle and unification, is the only theoretical way to approach the appearance of a genuine common good and common nature, bit by bit. I believe that we fundamentally enter antihumanist territory with the position that not all people share even the same humanity. It sounds messed up to question a common humanity and by extension common human rights and so on, but it's altogether less messed up than having to conceive some peoples as subhuman to preserve the concept of humanity in the face of real peoples who refuse to conform to that vision of it. I also find it preferable to the Sartrean individualism where the common human nature is limited to an ahistorical freedom that technically anything could have regardless of its participation in natural and historical humanity. Once we are firmly in antihumanist territory, it's not unintuitive to begin asking whether human good is enough of a goal, even if it's common human good. For humanity as mere humanity, it's only natural to exploit all aspects of non-human nature to the extent that it's sustainable for humanity itself. But humans share e.g. a common sapience with lots of species, should we not progress to develop a common good between sapient life if we had the means, even to the extent that it denies aspects of common human good? Granted, lots of humanists would answer with a conception where humanity already is sort of like the rational consciousness of nature and its genuine good could only represent the good of nature in general as well, but it's the same bullshit logic that every supremacist ideology produces. Basically, there's no utopia waiting down the road, we will never escape the feeling that things are unsettlingly flawed. Each victory will raise new and more complex issues into the spotlight, and make people who used to look great look a bit lovely after all. There's no universalist "should" that won't go embarrassingly out of date someday.
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Feb 19, 2020 17:14
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"People are reasonable and can be educated" and "people are reasonable and already know better than they let on" seem like the only way to build a democratic mass politics when you don't believe in democracy for its own sake but that the political system should serve goals that you happen to find reasonable for them. I go with the hope that the latter claim is true, that people are actually very quick to intuit their own good within a political framework and would behave differently if politics offered them more concrete options to take control over their lives rather than basically bread and circuses. That generally speaking, if people decide to elect a Donald Trump as president, or even love and support an absolute monarch, it tells more about the limitations imposed on their thinking by the system than it does about their inherent reasonability. And I should expect their reason to conflict with mine and be capable of correcting me, educating me. In fact, letting people correct me is the only way we can end up finding the same solutions reasonable together. Education from above could only overcome social contradictions if there were *universal* reason that those that are above represent and everyone else has to take as given or be unreasonable and unworthy of political participation. Universal reason is the big bourgeois take on human nature, that they have full humanity in that sense and everyone else has various levels of imperfection in their own. That's how it never seemed weird to early liberals to be living with a category of subhuman that didn't have human rights by themselves, only the right to be "raised up" by a "patron" as he saw fit.
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Feb 25, 2020 05:56
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just another posted:I don't mean to derail with pedantry but I am trying to interpret these equations in a way that doesn't break down under any scrutiny and I am failing. Universal reason is precisely the presupposition that every reasonable person tends toward similar, objectively correct conclusions, when knowledge between them is equalized through education. When it doesn't, the person for whom it doesn't is conceived as out of their mind, dominated by emotion, or the like. Even now, people who claim that democracy would work far better if citizenship demanded more education are more often than not thinking on these lines, that they hold keys to universal reason and if plebs only knew what they do, the plebs would agree with their already held notions. People who believe in universal reason always reveal that democracy for them is just a method of legitimizing technocracy, because after assuming universal reason, technocracy represents the best that can be done anyway, because those who know best just do what we would do ourselves if we only knew better. Our "democratic" societies are built based on the idea that the vote is just a validation step that punishes technocrats who would reason based on their own good rather than the common good. The claim that people are reasonable, in its soft form, means that they can be educated to believe what you do, and in its more radical form means that when they don't believe what you do, they are not being led to their conclusions by lack of knowledge or inability to reason like civilized men, but precisely knowledge that you don't have and ability to reason based on it. Socialists can continue the bourgeois tradition of believing that their ideology represents universal reason at work and that those who don't agree with it should just be followers rather than leaders, or they can conceive themselves as students of what seems to be good and empowering for people and follow empirical observation where it leads them. The former is to try to educate people to have the "correct" opinions, the latter is to to try educate people to be able to see their own good and the need to arrive at collective good clearly and take as "correct" opinion the understanding that their democratic debates and clashes produce. uncop fucked around with this message at 08:38 on Feb 25, 2020 |
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Feb 25, 2020 08:28
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The Anarchist FAQ is interesting that it it declares likely outcomes for a struggle based on that they are probably technically possible and that anarchists want to make it all happen. "We must point out here that we are discussing the social and economic structures of areas within which the inhabitants are predominately anarchists" indeed. I like anarchists from a moral perspective though. Enabling anarchists to do their thing seems like a decent yardstick for a realistically free society. Like, right to pseudo-secession into autonomous territories of whatever size that retain the responsibility to provide certain basic rights to their inhabitants, to comply with ecological regulation and similar inescapable social responsibilities, to compensate for local privileges they gain in relation to the average citizen and damages if they harm some long-term investments, and to refrain from allowing foreign states in or otherwise utilizing violent means to subvert the general system. Ironically, a right to secede and rejoin and resecede on different terms that would be used in practice would have to create a hilarious bureaucracy to deal with it all in a way that doesn't leave obvious loopholes to exploit for local privileges.
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Feb 25, 2020 13:10
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just another posted:What is the difference between educating people to have the correct opinions, and educating people to see their own good? Perhaps the Liberal and the Socialist legitimize their prescriptions with appeals to different philosophical traditions, but in either case, the claim is that there is a caste of teachers with access to a knowledge of the methods of human flourishing that, when taught, will reproduce their politics on a societal scale. In the former case, you have discovered the solution to everything a priori, in the latter you've only discovered a kind of social solution-seeking process a priori. The idea of how the process is supposed to produce and reproduce socialism is simply the hypothesis that socialism is the collective good of the people. That claim can not only be interpreted in the sense that you have discovered socialism and the people must follow you there if they understand their own good, but in the converse sense, that by understanding and being free to follow their own good, they can discover a more workable conception, not only an implementation, of socialism than you ever could have. And of course they will surprise you, and it should not be frightening or a sign of moral corruption. Socialism as a system for me is not a set of solutions to be arrived at, but a reliable process for producing solutions (there is overlap, but only the parts that are necessary for the process to start up and be defended). I only need to believe that humans are capable of coming up with what they need to flourish and productively compromising with each other to let go of myself and my own preconceptions about what exactly should be. IMO the necessary educational part is about learning to cut through ideological bullshit and rethinking the bounds of political possibility. When I said "see their own good" I didn't mean give such a thing to them, because you don't really have it in the first place, but dispel the haze that makes it hard to conceive it in the first place. Edit: I left in a bit of room for confusion that I don't have time to resolve. Basically I use the word "socialism" in two senses here: in the sense of a developed mode of production and the sense of a process to get there and beyond. You could say that there's no guarantee that the latter would ever lead to the former, but if capitalism turns out to have been something that remains while following the collective good of people or classless society otherwise is not that, then gently caress me I guess. uncop fucked around with this message at 06:12 on Feb 26, 2020 |
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Feb 26, 2020 05:49
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Bar Ran Dun posted:I’ve been thinking about this a couple days... Yeah, the parts of the old keep existing as a subdued side of the new whole. Stuff like markets and money have already shown themselves to be very resilient. But I don't consider them hard impediments to a new system in the first place, they don't in themselves necessitate economic class. They were already around in stateless pastoral and peasant societies and did not work toward creating British-style agrarian capitalism. Even the subdued existence of capital isn't threatening to the enclosing system when it faces tough limits for its expansion, i.e. people having way better options than going to work for a capitalist (or just can't due to being slaves or serfs or the like). I'd say that as long as capital isn't truly subdued, but competing for dominance as the highest determining force of the system, the attempted new system hasn't found a self-sufficient existence and so we won't be out of the woods yet. It means representatives of capital still keep rising as a political power players, like it was in the USSR and China too. And in an unfortunate way independent capital continues to be necessary, how do you exist within a capitalist world market as an exporter of something other than primary products without having competitive enough export enterprise of your own? Primary product exporting, after all, is when you tear up your nature to sell things that are steeply undervalued in relation to the labor expenditure. And the marriage of socialism and capital isn't some worker co-op at all, but more like a state-owned enterprise that gets its labor savings by the state subsidizing a low-wage workforce for it: housing, healthcare, pensions, food, education are all things that don't need to be paid in wages, and taxes can also be kept low. But that marriage also acts as a limiting force on the rest that can be, because people have to be willing to go to work there, and the capitalist world market has rules on what kind of subsidies are not fine. Small market production like worker co-ops doesn't have an expansionist and consumption-denying dynamic, more like the opposite. The consumption-denying enterprise more or less requires a class separation, where one class is in control and denies the other's aspirations while serving itself just as the others would like to serve themselves. Capital is one of those things that one can't live in separation of in the long term because it's inherently expansionist, never satisfied with anything less than exponential growth. It has to swallow you up to keep existing. Or rather, the only kind of capital you can live separated from is failing capital, commodity production and exchange whose aspirations at being capital are constantly frustrated.
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Feb 28, 2020 05:57
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Bar Ran Dun posted:I think we are on the same page. Minor point of confusion: Piketty uses the mainstream conception of capital, which means something like factors of production that aren't money or labor. When I talk about capital, I mean the process of converting money into more money, and the reason that capital grows exponentially has nothing to do with efficiency, the process simply can't exist without doing so. And its method of accelerating its growth on the level of the whole is transforming more people into its wage workers and making them work more for it. So what makes the growth bad is not just hierarchy or monopoly or the limits of nature, it's that capital must destroy all alternative ways of living that it encounters in order to live. Peoples may turn to capital for help because it produces goods more efficiently than their old ways of production, but the reason they need to do that is because foreign capital has already entered and began threatening their ways of life and they can only defend themselves by increasing their own production. I don't quite follow what you're thinking. "Capital is just replaced monarchy. Nothing new was created existing parts were rearranged." and "So where can we place reason that it will not have to have monarchy?" come from somewhere way outside my thought paradigm. What for you is the "new" that was not created? And what is the practical role of this location of reason? If I understand you at all, you're talking about how we have concentrated the basis of our decision making power into some centralized entity outside us. The literal monarch symbolically represented the will of God on Earth, and now there's an analogous abstract monarch metaphorically commanding all the people who conceive of politics as just the responsible management of the economy. And you consider the necessary "new" to be taking back the decision marking power from such centralized entities, reconnecting people with what is simply their own power. But then, you seem to imply that society is organized according to where the source of reason is thought to lie, like if people in general believe God to be the source of reason, then they must arrange society so that it follows His will. Conversely, I believe that the concept of having built society according to reason is just post-hoc bullshit. If there's a literal absolute monarch, there's basis to say that it's to a great extent being built according to their subjective reason, but the metaphorical will of capital is an emergent property autonomous from the will of any group of people. People simply must follow it because the logic of capital rewards those who obey and punishes those who rebel. It's not the source of reason, it's like some lovecraftian eldritch god and human reason simply says to seek success and avoid pain. The same human reason leads to radically different results based on the pressing demands posed by the human environment. And people will be able to produce a narrative to philosophically justify any arrangement at all that they end up in, attribute it to reason.
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Feb 28, 2020 19:20
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Bar Ran Dun posted:What if Job is a story of Becoming? I like what you're thinking, if I understand it. Let's take this religious dialectic (that I hope approximates Tillich's take closely enough to make sense) of God as the universal universal: everything real is of God, and is because it is of God. Christ is the human universal, the human aspect of the universal universal, and a symbol of a dialectical becoming of God: first, humanity became a thing that exists through God, but later on God became a new kind of human through human society. This signaled a new stage of humanity, beginning to transform all the individual people through its universality. The word of God and the word inspired by God are the mechanism through which the universal human developments are transmitted to individual people. The last part, I assume, is why we are interested in a story of becoming for the current times in the first place. The attempt to secularize the grounding of being just makes this a more general idealist dialectic, where word may exist independently of God's existence but its historical appearance nonetheless signals the progressive stages of humanity and human individuals become part of the new universal stage through assimilating the word. Perhaps universality gets questioned and is transformed into smaller generalities, if rather than word of one true God there are multiple competing lineages of word without any of them having special supernatural privileges over one another. Let's turn the dialectic on its head: instead of the structure where God/word is first, humanity becomes out of God/word and developments of human individuals follow developments of God/word, start from a naturalist evolutionary viewpoint where first nature produced a pre-humanity, then it developed language, and finally became humanity proper through the use of language. Things change a lot with that inversion, but they don't change in a critical way that would invalidate the point, that universal stories of becoming are meaningful to produce. People first engage in new forms of practice and only then produce the word to describe themselves in that practice, but the spreading of word is still the mechanism through which particular human developments transform into general human developments. Roughly speaking, progress follows the kind of word that can generalize novel and beneficial developments of real practice, reaction follows the kind of word that defends old practice against the former kind of word. Here IMO is the root of why reaction is unable to ground its narratives in reality: it's engaged in defending itself from people recognizing and applying something that is unquestionably real. But progress is still just people dealing in narratives, it doesn't follow reality directly but basically always mediated by word, i.e. also simply placing their faith in a narrative of reality. As I understand the story of Job, it's a story about dealing with uncomfortable reality as it comes at you and not pretending to be able to take things as signs of some kind of karmic judgment of the way you're living. Doing what you have fundamental reasons to believe make a good person and a good life and not taking what is immediately happening in your life as a necessary consequence of doing it and sign that you were wrong. Not a story about understanding reality, but rather acting in awareness of not really understanding it. Believing in things that are not necessarily real because of judging the proof against them to be a special case and the proof in favor of them to be overwhelming even while personally living the special case for far longer than is bearable and believable to others. I think you are right about it being a story of becoming, about representing something that is to become universal while in present reality it's still exceptional and counterintuitive. I think it's a misjudgment in the first place to think that it's enough for socialists to believe in what is real: they're even better characterized as people who believe in something that is not real. Socialists are very much in that position where it definitely does not look like they're right to most people, and at times it gets difficult to believe that themselves, because they don't actually represent the real directly but rather the dialectical opposite of present reality that is merely implied by that present reality. To be socialist without socialism is principally a matter of faith. The difference between progressive and reactionary faith is just that while reactionary faitth is dogmatic and denounces reality when it doesn't agree with the faith, progressive faith is humble enough to let reality inform it of its misunderstandings and then judge whether the misunderstanding is fundamental (requiring change of position) or of an exceptional special case (requiring perseverance). I think the term "scientific ideology" really captures the dialectic of the socialist. The contradiction between the study of reality and the faith in making what is real, unreal, and what is unreal, real, pushes the socialist forward, alternately in terms of transforming reality and transforming their own faith.
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Apr 9, 2020 13:01
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Truth and lie is probably the better pair to think of than real and unreal. Real and unreal, I’m comfortable with something that materially doesn’t exist still being real. That confuses the he’ll out of people. Present existing reality can be either truth or lie as can things that do not materially exist. But the other thing is the need to go further. The tendency is to try to resolve the pair to one or the other side. I mean that’s Heideggar’s question why is there something and not nothing. We immediately think x or y. It is more something/nothing. Another way I’ve seen it is from NGE you can(not) progress. Way back when I was first discussed Tillich with my wife (good God that was decades ago), she described his view as people being sliced up being both being/non-being simultaneously. I don't see how truth and lie actually make a pair of opposites though, without implicitly lumping untruth believed earnestly into either category. Truth and untruth are pretty analogous to real and unreal as a pair, except operating on the level of statements rather than forces. But I roughly agree that trying to resolve the pairs to one or the other is a mistaken tendency, to strictly wall being being and non-being off from one another. Forces phase out of and back into reality as they're eliminated by counter-forces that later are eliminated the same way themselves, and that phasing is a continuous rather than discrete change so there must be a conceptual "in-between" state. It has become kinda intuitive for me to think of reality in general as organized unreality, that nature is composed of what wouldn't be recognizable as anything at all without being organized in complex forms. Like, all the chemical and physical particles we discover turn out to be composed of <1% some types of subparticles and >99% nothing. But the nothing is very important, it provides the space without which the form of the actual thing would not be possible, so is it not a genuine part of the not-nothing? And then, hit that form with the sort of energy that causes it to fall apart, and most of what it was composed of returns to nothingness. Probably all that we think about complex arrangements of such forces are in some in-between state of truth and untruth because we haven't dealt with all the complexities, all the states the system can find itself in. I mean even if our statements are very close to true, the untrue side is revealed when the system it describes moves toward some unexpected state, and starts looking more true again once the system starts moving back toward an expected state. Also, no mass religion could be a mass religion without being based in truth in the sense that they understand reality in some meaningful fashion. But they disagree so at least all but one must also be simultaneously untrue. And if they stand still while the world moves, they have to become less truth-based over time. quote:But here is the problem. Something I learned in practical term about explaining complicated ideas to people is : if you come up with a securing arraignment Willie the meth head down a the warehouse has to be able to understand it. Or to reference a colleague, the expert in his subject matter regarding his book : it is written for drunks with a fifth grade education. Socialism is trying to be the class consciousness of the proletariat. But to do that it has to speak in their language and symbols Yeah, I'm painfully aware of this and it sucks how hard it's to speak in a language that speaks to the listener while also not giving an overly distorted picture of what's being described. You outright can't do it without having done the work of understanding who they are and what they do. The internet with its anonymity and detachedness is definitely not a very good environment to reach to people, when you think about it. But lol, this is making me think about the people who manage to describe anything in some Harry Potter (or other hit pop culture work) analogy. Is that where we are as a society now that no one has read the Bible but everyone has seen lots of Marvel movies?
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Apr 10, 2020 05:34
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Oh, so this book is why a very specific catholic discourse appeared recently! That type of book is necessarily going to be "yet so far", but I'm intrigued by the basic thesis about how breaking down kinship bonds has been this huge cultural turning point. Christianity, especially protestantism, really seems to have become uniquely suitable to be the superstructure of capitalism in development. And I think the classical marxist discourse on socialism has always assumed this sort of westernization or weirdification: that the path from kinship bonds to a sort of socialist universal kinship would go through a kind of cultural individualisation of the people. And acting third world communists have by and large continued the same trend of individualisation first, they've built a lot of support by catering to people who have an interest in breaking from the restrictions of local traditions and responsibilities, such as women and LGBT people. The original third-world people who took up the ideology had a pretty weird mindset and looked toward western ideas because they spoke to them in a way unlike local ones. Sampatrick posted:ah, the west, notable for not being obsessed with nationality "Nationality" is actually a very peculiar form of semi-universalist kinship. Much like mass religion, it's an imagined community that's most eagerly taken up by people who already had their concrete familial and tribal kinship bonds broken. The obsession with nation and religion specifically speaks in favor of the basic thesis IMO (remember how today's crazy religious excesses are a rather new phenomenon, as well as the modern conception of nationhood). uncop fucked around with this message at 09:33 on Sep 13, 2020 |
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Sep 13, 2020 09:29
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Sampatrick posted:I mean, the thesis that nationality is a relatively modern conception has never seemed particularly convincing to me. It's always seemed, much like the Rousseauian idea of societies moving from egalitarian hunter gatherers to authoritarian agrarian societies, to be mostly a thing people say is true but is mostly not the case based on actual evidence. I don't see why modern nationality is in any way distinct from tribal identities that existed beforehand. Maybe I just don't fully understand some essential distinctness between the two, but I've never really understood the idea. Well, real social formations are defined by their consequences, how they act in reality. I think we can kinda apply the category of "nation" back in time, but the category becomes a bit hollow and metaphorical because of how different the practical dynamics of the modern nations and past pre-nations are. Of course there are serious similarities as well, like shared language and closer interrelations than with outsiders, but the whole is quite different. For instance, modern nation monopolizes the land, it doesn't really permit other nations to exist on its territory, it tries to force them into the role of national minorities. The law is (roughly) the same for all, and gets pretty deep into how people should live their lives. It forces everyone to learn its language and customs. It frowns upon everyone on its territory who reject its cultural norms and try to preserve something totally different. I see the arrival of nation as analogous to the arrival of mass religion when society was in upheaval from domestic formations to tributary formations. Countless people were painfully ripped from their kinship ties and joined cults, causing specific cults to swell into mighty powers that could topple states. The whole purpose and social role of religion was changed, it wasn't really the same as previously existing religion even though it utilized the same spiritual tendencies people had. Ancient religions were localized and defended custom, the new religions were universalized and demanded everyone submit to religious law. A religion couldn't be used as a base of social power that could unite millions of people before that period of social upheaval, but once it could, it became the glue of the dominant societies around the Mediterranean sea. Similarly, nation couldn't unite a massive number of people before a definite historical period, but once it could, it knocked religion down from its position as the primary social glue of the dominant societies, and acquired its modern social role. That new role, those new dynamics, are the actual empirical reality that made mass religion and nation something new, while comparisons to similar historical formations must be metaphorical because the same definitive roles didn't exist at all back then. Bar Ran Dun posted:And taking this to the question of kinship. That gets broken in a similar way. Our national myth that gets broken in the same way. People get left with nothing. That’s the problem with individualisation first. Not having kinship to support them or nationality or religion is untenable because they are left alone. There is an assumption that because these myth were broken that they’ll participate in the current dominate synthesis, but it doesn’t work that way. So that’s where reaction and romanticism enters. Great point about the mythbusting that modernity did. It kinda does have to be like that though, doesn't it? Kinship is a bit of an all-or-nothing affair, it dissolves rather quickly once certain bonds get broken. Imagine a tribal leader who becomes a general bureaucrat and is pressed between their social responsibilities to be shamelessly nepotistic and to not be "corrupt" from an egalitarian perspective. It doesn't work out very well. Modern society demands that the same rules be applied to everyone, and "kin" should correspond to governmental structures (region, locality, party...). I suppose setting up society along the lines of the old kinship structures can ease the pain somewhat, but even then common law is going to trample over local customs. And historically there have been and still are lots of horrible customs that people have demanded protection from! There's a similar huge issue between many individual rights that we treat as nonnegotiable and old patriarchal rights like filial piety and so on. Lots of people have felt so oppressed by patriarchal rights that they would leave them even at the expense of being left with nothing, and put their relatives in distress. How can there be amicable reconciliation? Without reconciliation, of course reactionary sentiments are going to set in at least for those people who were left by the others. Their whole world would be upturned. I'm genuinely curious how the worst pains could be avoided without doing basically liberal centrism where justice for the oppressed is indefinitely postponed so that the rest of society can feel safe and comfortable.
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Sep 14, 2020 13:04
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 04:01 |
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Okay, that was a great answer, thanks. It doesn't sound like a silver bullet (and he doesn't present it as one), but it sounds familiar in a good way and like it should usually be the preferred aim. Reality can change radically without necessarily requiring total re-evaluation of the relevant mythology. And when the oppressive content of familiar symbols can be changed, shattering the symbols themselves is just unnecessary cruelty. It's just too easy for people who don't have deep connections to those symbols to imagine that they are simply helping the others see through illusions that constrain their lives, and that they're just backward if they don't appreciate the "help". The  analogy is a good one: sometimes it's the best option available because of social limitations, but one would prefer not to have to do it to improve their situation.I think this topic really is concretely useful for the anti-fascist struggle. I mean you can think of leftism as a collection of myths and leftists as people who participate in those left-recognized mythologies. You can see how leftism is currently associated with sort of demanding everyone to give up what they used to believe in and take a baptism to wash themselves of the sin of their previous selves. It hasn't been terribly easy to contribute to progressive struggles without being much of a leftist. On one side, there is organisation that is hard to work with, and on the other, organisation that is unprincipled and unfocused. (Note: I don't really consider spontaneous grand mass movements like the current BLM uprising "leftist" or "organisation", they just contain leftists and organising. Imagine if committed antifascists were nearly as easy to work with as such movements!)
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Sep 16, 2020 14:21
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