Post War Marxists
All of the
selections from Post War Marxist were taken from Marxist Internet Archive
Following World War
II many on the left began to look for the humanist and utopian roots of the
more scientific Marxist writings. In doing this topics like was is alienation, its causes and the solutions to
the pain suffered because of alienation. Not only was Marxist humanist roots
carefully examined, but also Marxism as a Cultural Ecology or naturalist
philosophy was clearly outlined. Life should be a celebration to be indulged in
and not a burdened to be endured. Anything that interferes with that
celebration is the cause of repression, exploitation and alienation and must be
opposed. These Marxist reexamined Marx’s earlier writings to look for that
humanist continuity with his later writings.
The following
selections give a brief examination of these concerns. The next few diversity
of positions gives us a selection of opinions on these topics. Not increasing
misery of the workers as many workers in the industrialized West were
represented by labor unions, which were able to negotiated contracts that did
offer the union members a living wage. But, boredom, lack creative control over
the job sight, arrested creative development and alienation remained
unchallenged.
Raya Dunayevskaya
The Theory of Alienation:
Marx’s Debt to Hegel: (1983)
The revolution is an on going process, each generation
builds upon the previous generations. As each social movement resolves it’s own
contradictions, win or lose, creates fertile ground for the birth of the next
world-shattering fermentation.
Liberation is only the
beginning of a revolution, not to take the next step is only to be forced to
repeat what has already been accomplished. The continual revolution is sweeter
than the initial victory.
The struggle against colonialism, neo-colonialism, imperialism
and capitalism are only the preconditions of revolution. The real revolution
begins with, includes and goes beyond direct democratic control of our
worksites, communities and the world; but also includes the living unity of
work, play and art in everyday life. At this time people become the authors of
their own lives and not its victims. Life becomes a ceremony to be indulged in,
not a burden to be endured. Our social lives within a
cultural and historical setting are always embedded within and growing out of
nature, a real physical and social environment that is ever changing as the
environment we live in changes. Each form of class
society evolves in a real historical setting within an eve changing
environment. As a people fight against their own limitations they define
themselves and others.
George Novack’s
Understanding History
(Pathfinder, 1972)
Alienation
Alienation is not in any
sense the fanciful idea of the revolutionary intellectuals. Socialism addresses
the real concerns of people. Not only the struggle for the secure control over
the necessities of life, they must come to terms with the basic emotional and
psychological needs for the fulfillment and meaning in life. Alienation stands
at the center of these concerns. Estrangement lingers at the focal point of
extent of the degree of anxiety. These concerns are real and painful. Growing
from the enmity that is central between the relationships of the class society
that decides upon and sets that society’s political and economic policies and
the dominated in the capitalist world.
Life is weighted down with a frustrating feeling of
powerlessness. Anxiety leads to trepidation that runs deep because ordinary
people have decisions made for them by a small global elite who control the economic
choices that remain. This elite decides matters of life and death. Freedom now
is to choose between a limited numbers of options. Freedom becomes a shallow
mockery cautiously organized by large investors, capitalists, powerful
government officials, bureaucrats, administrators, Secular Caliphs,
professional managers and licensed technical mandarins.
Care must be taken in our careful study that is required to
understand how deeply individual workers, families and communities are hurt by
reducing real people to being no more than the means to an ends defined by a
small elite. At every stage class analysis remains important to understanding
the source of alienation. Socialist humanism sates publicly we need to release
people from oppression and bondage to another’s property, to the pursuit of
profit in the servitude to ‘economic necessity’.
Seclusion, separation and alienation are the crucial lessons
in the nature of thought as a way of life. The outlines between identity as the
separation between self and other and the defining characteristics between you
and me are ultimately founded on an external material reality. Yet everything
is always changing. In this process of change everything is continually
becoming something other than what it is currently. The struggle for a
meaningful life puts the individual up against a social reality designed to
separate that same individual from the necessities needed to control ones own
fate while maintaining the illusion of real freedom. Each individual is also
separated from the social context that gives birth to the individual as a
biological social animal. Rebellion becomes problematic until the collective
individuals come to realize their private as well as their social lives is in
fact born out of a publicly orchestrated set of lies.
Through labor humans are spiritually connected to nature
from which they are an active and interactive force. Through exploitation this
consecrated connection is severed. Nature and labor become continual sources of
pain and estrangement. Property belongs to another separating the individuals
from their own living essence. Labor which is this connection with living
nature becomes alienated continually when the direct producers works, not
honestly for herself not even collectively united individuals amalgamated by
shared needs, but for the owners of property interests which stand in sharp
contrast to the needs of the direct producers. Those who work hard and
continuously to create the wealth of the few and the basic necessities of everyone
else is estranged from her own body which must be maintained as a physical
object for the use by another functioning as an element of the industrious
development of the outsider’s profit.
Nature becomes a foreign and hostile force not
the mother of her existence. Nature is no longer the natural force central
creative self-satisfaction but the source of power for the one who oppresses
and exploits her. Her creative and inspired imaginative part of her inspiration
is degraded to a mere extension of a mechanism of mind sedating drudgery.
Workers are turned against other workers in the competition for employment.
Work becomes a source of personal slavery that strengthens
the owner at the expense of the worker and her family. She forges her own
chains in order to survive. While at work she is the property of and wholly
subject to another, because of her dependence on the owner for the opportunity
to live. From this relationship the capitalist become rich and powerful and the
source his strength is the wealth he has stolen from the worker and her labor
power. Every other worker stands in potential opposition and in competition to
her to livelihood because there often are more workers than jobs available. Her
source of pain is the source of wealth and pleasure for the Capitalist. His
wealth the capitalist identity, the foundation of affluence and his happiness
can be procured only by stealing the very life force and inner self of the
worker.
The worker through labor power creates a product that is
alien to her as a hostile and foreign spirit that replaces her true creative
essence. This remote power over her is the lonely and compulsory end result of
the estrangement of drudgery of toil and labor.
The worker does not assert herself in her
employment but relinquish herself to her oppression through her wage labor. She
cannot experience genuine gratification but remains deeply discontented in her
secret heart. She cannot evolve generously in her physical and intellectual
power but work will demean her body and spoil her intellect. The worker only
feels herself to be human outside her work, and while at work she feels foreign
to herself. ‘She is at home when she is not working, and when she is working
she is not at home’.
Labor has two temperaments first called concrete labor that
which produces real commodities that have specific use values, and abstract
labor called this because it has the quality of being a summarize account of
work in general what all labor shares in common. This is the source of wealth
in capitalist society. This enables us to appreciate and give details into the
nature of commodity production as the source of value and surplus value as well
as such ambiguity of the power of money in a market economy. We must make a
differentiation between labor as a concrete tangible type of work that is
capable of creating specific types of use-values of particular items and labor
power, and the ability to work, which is the value-producing property of labor.
With the evolution of property and classes one class has
control over the access over the resources necessary in production. The
producers then become dependent upon the owners of private property for right
just to live. They must work under the condition set by the owners. The workers
lose control of the resources needed to live and the “material means of
production”, forfeiting the right to control the tools and wherewithal needed
to produce the necessities of life. Thus they surrender power over the
conditions that they live under, and any real say about the circumstances and
the conditions of their subsistence
Capitalism is only the most advanced form of class society.
For capitalism to thrive, the direct producers had had to be both divided and
estranged from any remaining access to the resources of production. Previous
social relations and non-capitalist economic systems had to be either ruined or
these economies were forcefully brought under rival control of the logic and
authority of a global capitalist economy. Wage labor now replaces custom,
social relations based upon kinship or patronage, and some measure of control
over the resources guaranteed in a traditional economy. Separated from the
materials used in production the wageworker finds her labor stolen from her by
the provisos of the labor contract called employment.
Capitalism is both a very recent and unique economic. Where
the direct producers whether artisans or peasants were forcefully separated
from access of the resources necessary for production. For capitalism can exist
only with wage labor in which the worker have nothing to sell on the open market
except their ability to work. Labor power being their only commodity means the
worker can live only if they have a job and work for someone else.
The worker sells her self piecemeal to the capitalist. The
capitalist is free to use that labor power any way he sees fit. After each turn
around of the investments in capital, the accumulated resources under
capitalist control continue to grow ever larger. The worker living from
paycheck to pay check only sees her meager savings eaten up by unforeseen events
as she becomes increasingly anemic in relation to capital. At the job site
production is separated from design with a division of labor between the
salaried professionals whose expertise give them a measure of autonomy and
control that is lacking among the line workers who are reduced an extension of
the machine. The worker is transformed into a material a secondary and
ancillary part of production. The capitalist is the living force of assets and
speculative investments. The worker is even further dehumanized.
The salaried employed professional is pitted against the
worker as an alien and hostile force all to the disadvantage of the worker.
After the day is done what the worker has created is now a show of aggression
leveled against the worker as a foreign force under the control of the
capitalist. The government that protects
the capitalist meets the worker as a force of nature beyond the control of the
worker and always a serious threat to the worker and her family. Ultimately
even the powerful capitalist and his friends in government are unable the
control market forces which ultimately lead to unforeseen consequences which in
the end creates startling end results which the capitalist and not the worker
is once again saved by direct government intervention
to rescue the free market
yet again. The war is truly all against all.
The larger capitalists devour his rivals or form a unity with a
competitor who can turn on him at any minute. The workers are many and the jobs
are few. Workers at home and abroad threaten other workers.
The poverty of the many is necessary for the wealth of the
few. Democracy is a sham, in which options are controlled by these few, and we
truly do have a choice but the alternatives are restricted in away in which the
capitalist is never seriously threatened.
This poverty is made even more absurd because money an
abstraction, determines who is rich and who is poor. Money a fantasy, which
becomes the only really real reality, also determines who lives and who dies.
To keep it altogether government enters on the side of capital to make sure
this barely actuality genuine ridiculous certainty is never doubted. The
dictatorship of money and with the support of the state over the everyday lives
of the working people is in the last analysis the destitution of the
meaningfulness of the stagnant social order.
Life under capitalism is absurd. Life is reduced to the most
uninspired and inconsequential levels. Yet rebellion, resistance and death are
constant companions. Government must be on the continual watch or freedom and
creativity will break out, bringing the whole system collapsing to its very
foundation. Government must keep the influence of commonplace citizens hemmed
in, so that the private property of the elite is never threatened.
Workers of course are alienated from their very existence on
this planet. But, the autonomy, privilege and opportunity of the professionals
come at a heavy expense. To put on the market one’s essence for the continued
exploitation of the starving, over worked and destitute browbeaten day
laborers, sweat shop slaves, undocumented domestics, underemployed and wage
workers without a future must reduce the professionals to existentialists with
the ghosts of dead philosophers as constant companions in a daily ocean of
angst. Unless they become rebels there is little hope. The cure is to overthrow
the existing economic and political institutions.
The historical summary is a theoretical criterion that has
to be linked to accessible data and the condition of progress is placed
satisfactorily under democratic control if they are to become tangible and
creative. Then at this point socialism becomes the direct opposition to the
alienation Wrought by capitalism. The on going war against the twisted market economy that meets the absurd
interests of profit based economy class antagonisms between capitalist and
worker are going to be the founding principles of socialist ethics. The
insecurity of the workers life is the result of the logic of an irrational economic
system. The socialist ethics reflects this struggle.
An economy that condemns the direct producers to a life of
grinding poverty and rewards the gambler and the criminal is the moral basis
upon which capitalism and a market economy rests. Laws are instituted to ensure
that the property of the thief and the
parasite is protected
while those who create the wealth are locked out of the fruits of her labor.
The emancipation from the alienation of labor is the dream
of all socialists. This is the final goal even if it is impossible to fully
achieve this. Direct participatory democracy is the ultimate benchmark of
success. We use this ideal to measure how far we still have to go. To live in a
truly communist world is the long-term goal. But, what this would look like is
not clear. It may be replacing exploitation by the capitalists with worker
councils, neighborhood councils, community councils federated into larger units
with democratically elected representatives on these larger councils representing
local councils. It comes with the unity of working, playing and art making
because labor at that level is lived as being the spiritual connection to
nature. It may be reducing necessary labor time worldwide to a minimum say,
five to ten hours a week depending on the season. What everyone agrees upon is
drudgery must be reduced to a bare minimum and creativity greatly expanded.
This expansion of rational imaginative judicious artistic expansion of human
energy along with the elimination of want, hunger, poverty, destitution or
deprivation is why we are revolutionaries.
Erich Fromm 1961
Marx’s Concept of Man
The ideological superstructure including the political
culture and institutional structures, the spiritual, emotional, and cultural
settings are related to social relations that are set in a specific historical
setting embedded in an environmental and technological arrangement forming a
complex interactive feed back system. Culture is the sum total of all shared
knowledge, learned behavior, patterns of attitudes and perceptions of a people.
Culture refers to socially shared and transmitted knowledge, both how the world
is and how it should be. Ideology is the openly expressed system of beliefs of
a people. This multifaceted structure in which the configuration is arranged in
a way in which people through culture is always an active and interactive part
of nature.
People are a product of their historical environment. While
this is true, it is also true people are not only the authors of their own lives,
they collectively create their historical environment. The social and the
ideological interact in such away that people truly are a product of their
social upbringing, which reflects their public background which they are born
into an exists independent of their consciousness, yet is changed by people
making conscious choices and acting on those selection of possible options. We
are acting on what is really happening and our interpretations of what is out
there. The results will either lead to unforeseen consequences or a chance of
success.
Each person has both the temperament one is born
with and the embodiment of the aggregate of features and traits that form the
individual that is generated and adapted by the historical cultural setting one
grows up in and is living in at the current time. The contradiction then
modifies itself to become an interactive feed back loop in which people often
act without all the information.
Humans interacting within their environment crate
themselves. As they try to understand their true nature they create that
nature. If their information is flawed they create demons that rise up and
dominate them and they are powerless in the face
of the monsters they
created. As products as well as producers the lives of people are the product
of an objective environment independent of their consciousness, but as a
product of conscious choice they are the subjective subjects of their own
actions. For
the individual is a social
creation. Because the existence of the public person who is the creation of a
real situation that is distinct from her awareness, yet at the same time a
result of deliberate assortment of living situations her life is the personal
focus of her
own conclusion. A
person finds her self in her relation to another person, or in relation to a
community of people. It is in a social context that we become human. In this
same context humans are an interactive part of nature. We become what we become
only in this complex of relationships. It can be a source of our greatest
fulfillment or the source of our enslavement and degradation.
The struggle for freedom is the resistance against
enslavement and for the love of existence. Life being reduced to a burden to be
endured diminishes the human character of life. Slavery enslaves both the slave
and the master. While the rich and powerful have all the best things in life
they do not have their humanity. While the slave is stripped of every ounce of
humanity they carry the key to liberation. Only when the slave is emancipated
can the master regain a lost humanity.
Through work the exploited worker is reduced either to a
minor machine part or a beast of burden. Everyday is degraded and stripped of
humanity. Labor which is the spiritual connection a person has with nature is
turned into its opposite and becomes the source of spiritual death. Labor which
connects nature, art, play and our humanity is turned into its opposite and
labor becomes a source of mind deadening drudgery.
What we believe and what is really real do not always coincide.
Our job as historical sociologists is to discover the discrepancy and to
ascertain through rigorous observation where the difference between what we believe
to be real and what is really real lie. Through our close observations and
carefully thinking about what we observe the riddle of the bond between the real
meaning and its being is realized. We can define the essence that better
reflects this reality. At this time existence and essence come closer to being
the same. Through a better understanding of the world outside our consciousness
we come to understand ourselves better. When we have improved information we can
make healthier decisions in our lives and create a world that reflects our
wishes better. With better information our actions acting upon the outside
world, in such away that the result are more closely connected to what we have
expected. Only at this point can we say we are the authors of our own fate and
not its victims. We domesticate the gods and put them in the backfield where
they will never interfere with our dreams again. On, the other hand we are
always the authors of our fate, but in such a way that unforeseen consequences
overwhelm us. Only through a deeper understanding of the world around us can we
limit these unforeseen consequences and tame the unexpected outcomes.
The truth we seek is always changing because we change it
through our actions. We then create our reality working with raw materials
drawn from a material realty independent of our consciousness and yet we change
it through our actions. Through ignorance our passions lead to actions that
only harm us. When we act with good information our act lead to results that
only increase the long-term happiness for ourselves and the community, the rest
of humanity and all living things. If we act with the correct knowledge of the
world we live in, our lives and our work are the artistic expression of the joy
we have in living. It is only through this creative interaction with the world
around us can we truly say we are human. In this more rewarding
life, we reach true
happiness without exploiting others. The true simplicity of our lives gives
riches that gold cannot buy. Through our labor we interact with others forming
links of friendship, we interact with nature defining who we are and finally
creating a deep meaning in our lives. Through this type of life we bring to our
selves and to others. Through our interaction with others we become human, through
our interaction with nature we become alive. A simple non-exploitive happiness
for ourselves, is the best
we can give to others.
Through simple hedonism we preserve the best of nature for our heirs.
People are first of all animals with basic animal needs. As
these needs are met people create a new reality they become social beings with
social needs. The next stage of evolution the social beings become a community
of artists. It is through these efforts that we find ourselves in others. It is
through these collective action that not only do we discover we are an
interactive part of nature we are nature at its best.
Through equality, compassion and true participatory
democracy each individual become truly unique and fulfilled in the interaction
with others. A community of individuals is formed in relation with other
individuals. This takes love to a new level,
not just the use of
another but in the mutual completion and satisfaction of others in their
interaction and in the full celebration of each person’s exceptional worth.
Life in a world that we can understand, in nature that we are a part of, in
humanity we share, it is only then that we become fully human.
With wealth came poverty. With private property came the
propertyless. The wealth has all the good things and life but not their
humanity. The poor have nothing but their misery. It is only through resistance
can the poor envision their humanity. Poverty
really hurts because it
kills the very fiber of life. Through rebellion that life once again can feel
the pulse of existence. The ironic outcome of private property is that it makes
us stupid. In life the bodily and intellectual wisdom have been replaced by the
straightforward isolation of all life’s meaning.
The final goal is for each individual participating in a
community of equals is to have a say in the decisions of those facts that
directly affect their lives on the jobs and in the communities. To establish a
setting in which production and design is united into a single process in which
work is the goal of on the job struggles. To make work, play and art
inseparable. To reconnect with nature in which through work a person is linked
to nature is a deeply spiritual bond. Finally work becomes neither drudgery nor
a necessity if work is not connected with being able to afford the basic
necessities of life.
The socialist struggle is a goal for liberation from
alienation as well as hunger and want. The two are co-equal and one cannot be
won without the other or we trade one form of oppression for another. When we
become separated from our creative processes
we become passive victims
of a fate controlled by the other. This other derives benefit from a flaccid
sufferer of both isolation and incongruity as we collectively create our own
fate and yet we are unaware of that fact and react to our creation as if they
were divine whims beyond our control. Thus, we trust the elites to give us
direction even as we allow these elites to exploit us. We create our own
slavery by allowing the few to control the resources necessary for our
survival, to control the access to what is needed to create our meaning and
self worth. It is the many, who create what is necessary to live through
interacting with nature. It is the many who possess the power of liberation. It
is the few who remain powerful because they control the force necessary to
manage the
resources needed to
continue to exist and we remain separated from the power we control because we
remain divided one from another and unaware of our true potential. We as slaves, create
philosophies to give us illusions of freedom as we passively submit to our
exploitation and oppression. In turn, we establish a way of thinking that will give
us fantasies of power as we submit to our passivity. We as slaves have lost
sight of our deeper meaning and creativity. We became dependent upon those who
harm us for our very survival. We became separated from our true nature as a
part of nature and a community of those who both love and respect us. We became
alienated and dehumanized. Labor should be our spiritual connection with nature
and that, which
defines our humanity. But
because of class society, specifically wage labor and capitalism labor is our
separation from nature and our separation from our own humanity. We toil to
create our own chains of bondage by the products we make for the capitalist as
rented slaves. Everything the capitalist is we are not. We are not free, rich,
or fulfilled.
Where each individual should be the personification of
humanity and humanity expresses it through each individual. In fact because of
class society, private property in the means of production each individual
becomes an atomized extension of the production process, stripped of the spirit
of human essence. The work is lost in the product, even though not a living
thing is more alive than the worker. Tool rules over living flesh all to make
the capitalist rich and the worker poor.
Because with the worker who is hired only to expand the
wealth of the one who hires her and because the product become the source of
this wealth only if it is sold on the market, the product becomes more
important than the worker who produces it. The identity of the worker is even
less important than the machines and the raw materials used up in production.
The worker can live only if employed, and will be employed only if there is a
market for the product being produced. Like the slave the worker lives only at
the mercy of the master or the capitalist. When the slave becomes free this
dysfunctional codependent relationship is broken. The worker is the enabler to
the extremely abusive capitalist. All of humanity becomes human only when the
worker or slave shatters the chains of oppression that is built upon servitude.
The worker is estranged from her own life, any peripheral part of the natural
world, her intellectual existence and her individual living. This in turn leads
to alienation in the method in which we labor, from what we produce, from the
state of affairs of our everyday lives, which is indistinguishably joined
together with alienation from oneself, from other workers in our own
communities and from the natural world. We become more and more atomized beings,
strangers in our own homes and living as an alien in a neighborhood of
foreigners. Each friend could become a threat; each family member is a
potential Judas.
The free person main object in living is to live. We live in
a community and we find ourselves in the other. Under capitalism the individual
and the other is severed. Under capitalism the other is less a real human being.
Under democratic socialism the
individual is a mutually interacting supportive other. Under capitalism the
other becomes an abstraction in which we
judge ourselves by but never fully understands. We find ourselves in things and
not people under capitalism. Money defines our worth, and power like wealth is
defined by money. Money is an idol given power by people, yet only real if we
all agree to pretend it is real. Under capitalism alienation is so common most
victims cannot even fantasize what it would be like to be free, not to be
alienated, to have meaning in our lives.
Life is an illusion of our own making keeping us in slavery.
Only in rebellion do we know our humanity. Everyday life in capitalist society,
living in a culture where the
market is anything but
peripheral, requires us in our action and our thoughts to reject the core
values upon which our nation is founded and replace them with democratic humanism.
Marshall Berman, 1963
Freedom and Fetishism
Everywhere people are in chains, yet everywhere people
cannot escape the fact we all make choices. To accept our slavery passively or
to rebel is the choice we can never escape. We live in a world of idols of our
own creation and what we believe becomes a choice we make. We give these false
deities influence that creates power over our own lives. These idols are
everywhere treated, as they were real. Everywhere we go we can never escape
this choice. We see that there is clearly something wrong in our lives. Only we
have the power to rise up against our oppression by not accepting the lies told
us in our schools, churches, the media and our government. Only we through our
rebellion can improve our lives, not just for ourselves but also of all living
things on the planet. It is our inescapable moral obligation is to resist and
not to make us co-responsible for the oppression that exists everywhere in
totalitarian capitalist world of alienation. Finally we can find a life that is
truly rich and rewarding in rebellion. Everyday life becomes a ceremony to be
indulged in and not a burden to be endured.
Free labor and a free markets creates a new kind of slavery
in which feudal ties of bondage is forever broken and replaced by slavery for
rent, in which we forge our own chains. Because workers have little choice on
what is produced and for whom, they have little influence over the work process
itself. Under capitalism employment is not an exercise in participatory
democracy. Production is for sale and not strictly for use. If the capitalists
cannot have profits then the workers are laid off. The obsession of production
is never to provide needed and desired products and services for all the people
regardless of their ability to pay, but only when the capitalist make money. In
past economies of public service was the major motivation for work. Under
capitalism the worker lives only if she finds employment. Her wages keep her
alive, it is paid to her in the money the capitalist cannot consume or reinvest
in his company. The capitalist tries to keep wages down and the worker has to
struggle for every penny. Social service or use value, needs, or the betterment
of the community remain secondary to profits, budgets, costs, or money.
Products sold on the market are seen as authentic and the people who make the
products remain hidden from view and thus profits are real, not people.
Wealth is the ultimate goal. Wealth is the source of all
power, and its own justification. Because use value, personal need, public
service or social commitments are only means to an end, profit. There is never
an upper limit to how much is enough wealth. The war of capital against labor
becomes a worldwide conquest of wealth by the capitalists. Capitalists forming
alliances with other capitalists when it suits his fancy only to knife his
brothers in the back whenever it meets his needs. With capitalism there is no
honor among thieves.
The suffering of the worker and her sisters in the factory
are no more than raw materials consumed in the production process.
Life is not life. Humans
like iron, fuels, machinery and etc. are wasted if they are not consumed for
creating profits. As long as this is the dominant way of organizing the economy
few options are allowed.
Markets, prices, profits like money are real
only as long as we believe them to be real. When enough people begin to doubt
their reality then this economic system is in trouble. As long as the workers
have faith in capitalism the most they can ask for is a little more in their
wages and maybe a little better environment to work. Alienation as a way life is preserved. When it
is realized that capitalism is a historically created economy, in which choice
made at that level of revolutionary actions of real people and direct
government intervention then capitalism too can be overthrown.
The capitalist society is a casket society. A dreamless
sleep that is unadorned. Living our lives as if we have only one and the same existence
that is forever stretched out like a level plain in all directions. There is
everywhere an impassive hopelessness of lethargy. To be free is possible only
if others around me are also free. That is it is, those who are like me, also
need to have a say on those events that affect their lives be it on the job in
the neighborhood. In a family or a community multiple points of view can come
together, each needing to be heard and each individual will have an influence
on the final decision. This stands in mark contrast to current day society.
Inventing deceptive environs by typecasting ideology into tired old jokes. This
is the crap we are sold in schools, churches, the news and popular culture. By
creating still photographs out of living emotions and giving birth to an obstinate
human outward appearances of a prefabricated role-playing, thus reducing every
child to a mundane caricature of a person, symbolizing all the pretexts and
qualities of the illusive group of a people which in turn is prepackaged to
meet artificial wants. But, this cruel illusion cannot rest because rebellion
also will spring up again and again because the enslaved are predisposed to
exercise their freedom through rebellion.
Gajo Petrović 1965
Reification
Alienation under capitalism is expressed through reification
in regards to an imaginary thing that we take as real and acting towards it as
if were in fact real. People become hidden behind our creations and forgotten.
Goods are made in factories and sold around the world, no one knows nor cares
about the individual lives of the workers who created the products that are
bought in a store. Those goods will only be produced if there is a market for
them. No one knows nor cares what may be the true needs of the producers. Nor do they really care about sweatshops or
ruined lives. We have very little information on how are products were made.
The workers live only if they have a job, and they are employed only if the
capitalist can make a profit.
Economists provide answers on price and maybe what will
sale.
Marketing departments
exist to get me to buy what I really don’t need. Objects become real because
selling can make money, another fantasy. People are only a means to making
money either as workers or customers. If I cannot afford the basics but I really
need them, this is irrelevant. If there is no market for my skills I do not
have a job. Everything comes down
to money. I work for wage and my employer hires me only if it is profitable to
do so. That is our relationship. Our shared humanity is buried and my survival
depends upon the sale of a product. I had only a small part of what sold to a
stranger. The objects I buy are made in China. The lives of the people who made
these products mean nothing to me and I do not want to know anything more than
the price I have to pay.
This economy in which the goal of labor is to
provide for the needs of others is replaced by working only for personal
gratification i.e. wages vs. profits or how to divide up the money after the
product is sold. If the product is unsold in the market I lose my job. Overproduction
happens over and over again. We can work only because of continual intervention
by government to protect capitalists from themselves. There is a blind belief
in the “free enterprise system. There is a closing off of all alternative
options and there is high risk gambling with other people’s lives. What becomes
real are prices and money. Both are fantasies we agree upon and thus it becomes
real. Economic decisions are made along the lines of costs, balanced budgets,
prices, and marketability all of which are independent of the lives shattered
by these decisions.
István Mészáros 1970
Marx’s Theory of
Alienation
As capitalism developed it
needed a new ideology to lend itself to generalized acceptance. From the early
middle ages following the crusades when usury was forbidden by the Church in
Catholic Europe, the Jew became identified with the middleman minority of
merchant, trader, banker and bureaucrat, profit in money lending and sells
became a specialized profession. However unfair and anti-Semitic the belief in
the middleman as Jews was a despised subgroup in European society in part because
of this belief. With the rise of international trade centering in Western
Europe and with the Protestant Reformation Christians, particularly Protestant
Christians became more and more in control of international markets, the slave
trade and international finance. In a word the thousand years plus attempt to
convert the Jews to Christianity failed completely and the Christian
particularly the Protestant became even more Jewish than the Jews as defined by
anti-Semitic stereotypes.
In point of fact Jews believed they were chosen by God as a
unique people with a highly extraordinary and only one of its kind relationship
with God shared by no one else on the planet. The religion of Christianity is a
religion for all of humanity. Yet in the high middle ages with the churches ban
on profits, Christianity became isolated and inaccessible to global
development. The particularity of Judaism allowed for international co-religionists
to gain a near monopoly on international trade.
In the early modern period of international trade the
Christians would need to challenge that near monopoly held by the Jew. The
conservative nature of the Catholic nations handicapped them in controlling
this international trade. Protestants with their personal and individual
relationship with God allowed them to become international merchants without
being tied to either a church hierarchy or a ridged religious community. First
the Dutch and then the British Protestants took on all the negative traits
blamed on the Jews by the anti-Semite. That is the Jew converted the Christian
and not the other way around.
It became normal to calculate everything including nature,
land, and people, wage vs. profit, in terms of market value, i.e. money.
Profitability of commodities that are determined by their prices, substitutes
for the communal comradeship of social relations between people. Understanding
is mesmerized by the self-centered necessity by duping and exploiting in order
to make a little more money. The civil religion of self-seeking remoteness
along with avarice becomes the virtues of a back-to-back society. This is a
historical and cultural state of affairs that is unique. We lie to our selves’
daily and yet convince our selves we are telling ourselves the truth about our
everyday lives.
Our beliefs being a product of our lives and defined in
terms that are understandable by the language of our culture is in part the raw
materials in which we construct the mythology about our imaginary tales about
who we are. Because much of what we call common sense remains unexamined and
while it justifies the status quo it is in fact causing us harm and we do not know
the source of our bottomless discontent and solitude.
In time of economic crisis and political
upheaval it is possible for a brief moment to see clearly the flaws and
weaknesses of the major institution of society and the way of transcending
current society into something more alluring and fulfilling for its citizens.
This is the beginning of
historical sociology, because with the study of history using a modified form
of science we expand our understanding of life, which was originally only
covered by legend, imagination and the absurd. Until historical sociology
replaces common sense, the dominant ideology was taken as universally true in
all times and places as if it could not be any other way. This dominant ideology
was accepted by the majority of the poor and was refined by the elites.
What needs to be studied is why a people would accept
established inequalities, and to determine the extent that an oppressed people
fail to understand the source of their exploitation and the existing
inequalities. The intellectuals of any society create complex explanations that
justify this inequality in away that excuse slavery or minimum wages or poor
people who work very hard and still stay poor. As long as it is just and
natural to see existing poverty and extreme wealth is seen as either gods will
or a reflection of what one truly deserves. These explanations are seen outside
of their historical context and it fails to recognize alternative explanations
that may do a better job of explaining the inequality in a historical setting.
Without studying economics using the tools of a marriage of
history, sociology and anthropology leads to conclusions that are founded upon lies
that are cynically constructed to keep the poor and oppressed in line. History
studied in the context of an ever-evolving social whole in which each part of a
society interacts with and changes every other part operating within a larger
whole. Each interaction changes the society as a whole. Then by comparing how one
society with compares other societies in similar situations, we gain a better
understanding how economics works. Any other approach to economics is
superstition.
The ancients defined the divine in accordance with their own
communities. Modern economists see as that every individual anywhere and
anytime all the way back to our earliest primate ancestors operated as
proto-capitalists. Both views are mythical and not scientific.
Each culture defines what is to be a person, and what ever separates
a person from fulfilling that ideal would be seen as alienation. Where ever
inequality is an established fact an ideology is needed to justify the
oppression and exploitation of one group by another. Ideology not only allows
the elite to feel good about themselves, but the workers who produce the wealth
and power of the elite are educated to accept their subordinate position.
It becomes acceptable not to develop fully as a human being
and freedom is redefined to include a subordinate role. This is “alienation” or
“reification”. Alienation is the condition of being out of contact with the
real material situation and cut off from the objective world, and every
stratified society explains its’ inequality in a way that makes the existence
of classes seen natural. The intellectuals in particular in all cultures, up to
now, have a line of attack that is used to justify inequality by defining
“human nature” in a way that allows the society to continue to exploit the
masses for the benefit of the minority. This establishes the passion of the
belief in the justification as well as the temperament of the real nature of
alienation.
Cultural Anthropology creates a comparative Historical
Sociology. Over time by comparing many distinct societies we gain a deeper
understanding of a single society. Otherwise without this historical grounding
any statement about human nature, or better human natures, is simply trading
one form of mystification for another. At this point we find religion and
government, along with formal economics and functional sociology define human
nature as outside of time and therefore independent of real people in their
everyday lives set in a specific and unique historical setting. If the misery
of the day labor is taken for granted than a whole system of government,
religion and social philosophy is called in to protect the establishment of
privilege, and from there we develop absolutes that protect are artificially
created truths from threat of changes brought about by those properly socialized
to accept their inferior status.
What is created in each of these cultural and historical
settings are unnatural requirements that are built upon fantasizes cravings of
artificial needs and imaginary redundant wishes. These can express themselves
in spiritual terms or in consumer-based materialism either way relations of
power and economic inequality are protected. One philosophy replaces another as
economies mature and replace previously existing economic systems. Not until we
have a Historical Anthropology that looks at the continuously evolving social location,
while looking at a historical background with a long enough view to compare to
other historical settings can we get beyond the mystification of the present.
Only at this point can it be shown that modern society evolved along with its political
philosophy justifying liberal culture and a “market i.e. capitalist economy”.
Reason replaces revelation as a source of this mystification.
The Dialectic, Humanism and
Consciousness
In
the on going struggle between bourgeoisie (capitalist class) and the
proletariat (working class) it is the worker and not the capitalist that has
the possibility of transforming bourgeois (liberal) society in the direction of
real democracy founded upon the mutual aid in a self fulfilling significance
through reciprocal service through our lives within society. Hegel offered the
way to understand the changes that modern society was going through. Yet it was
up to Marx to liberate Hegel from his theological superstition and create a
theory of liberation. By using the dialectical method, both science and a
scientific approach to historical sociology could be use to understand what in
fact exists, what are the choices currently available and what is the best way
to make the choices that will offer the best chance of achieving true
liberation given what we have to work with. By understanding what is to be a
fully conscious human being we can better understand the individual in her
specific historical setting.
Epicurus
and Modern Socialist Revolution
The goal is to live within your life and to enjoy that
life and harm no one. To be angry leads
us nowhere but pain. We should try to turn that anger into an assurance that we
are supposed to find the source of irritation and do something about it. Live
as if each day was the last and embrace each day fully. The fact that we all
will die, we should not let that honesty interfere with the living and
celebration of life. Death is not daunting for while you are alive you are not
dead. When you are dead you are no more. Once you into the natural elements
that make up our bodies we feel no sensations we worry about nothing we suffer
no grief. Experiences of sensations are for the living, without thought there
is no fear.
The goal of receiving and giving pleasure and avoiding
and giving no pain is the goal of all living things. We as people should
respect that and try not to exploit others for our own limited desires.
Ataraxia is distinguished by liberation from anxiety, apprehension or dread.
Enjoyment of life is hedonism. Hedonism that does not harm our bodies is a good
thing; hedonism that harms no one else is even better. Hedonism that can be
gained through reciprocity, generosity and compassion is what the core of socialism
is all about.
Real hedonism requires a strong sense of social justice.
With equality we live without fearing those who have less than us. Without
everyone getting their basic needs met the public realm becomes one of anger
and fear. If there were no large amounts of wealth side by side with poverty
then we would all live without exploitation and theft. Struggling just to
survive while others live in luxury because the wealthy steal what others have
worked so hard to produce.
The teachings of Epicurus are a sound foundation for
socialists thought. The wealth necessary to live a good life without exploiting
others is found in the natural world, which has environmental limitations. But it is simple to get hold of the resources
needed to live modestly but comfortably for everyone. The wealth needed to survive a market economy
bolstered by arrogant morals of corporate accumulation become more intense as
wealth grows for the few and poverty for the many extends to infinity. The
prosperity requisite in the environment is limited; if we go beyond natural
limitations we destroy our own homes.
Comfort is easy to achieve; but the avarice that is obligatory by
narcissistic gluttony of capitalism extends to eternity. Hedonism based upon
greed is not hedonism but iniquity. Intemperance centered upon avarice is not
only self-indulgence but also social injustice. Simplicity, fairness,
mutuality, directness, justice, reciprocity, kindheartedness, consideration,
understanding and appreciation of others are the sources of happiness.
Social justice is necessary for security. But justice is
fairness only if it is independent from any suggestion of antagonism or
retribution. In living the good life then, pleasure is the highest virtue if
that pleasure is not bought at the pain and suffering of others. Reciprocity is founded upon mutual bond of
having confidence in the thoughtful appreciation of others.
Life is a celebration to be indulged in and not a burden
to be endured. Any thing that interferes with that merriment called living is
injustice. Injustice anywhere it comes to our attention it must be opposed with
all the moral indignation we can muster.
This in itself becomes our celebration. If we are to stand for justice
we must confirm the worth of the victims of injustice.
Justice is the nonexistence of hate, resentment, avarice
and disrespect for others. Victory is the intelligent human condition that will
prevail over injustice by good sense and useful study of the natural world and
of other people from which we form a scientific foundation for sympathetic
understanding.
Our knowledge of the world around begins with our
sensational experiences of that world. All our sensations are basic stimulus
response and in the beginning are absent of purpose and because it is not open
to of recollection, thinking about and based on reason or philosophy we define
reality. Our experience of the external world it is not self-caused. It does not have an external cause outside of
that experience. Our experience cannot add anything without our interpretation.
The external world is given and we learn through stimulus response and by
talking to others thus an ego embedded in an ever-changing culture is formed.
Reason is born with that this complex interaction between the ego, sensations,
the external environment and communication with others.
“Epicurus, the
son of Neocles and Chaerestrata, was an Athenian from the deme of Gargettus and
the lineage of the Philaïdes. He was born 341 B.C.E. He live till 270 B.C.E.
From his garden he crated a utopian community where people could live devoted
to simple pleasures and joy in a way the exploited no one, harmed no one,
including oneself and could easily be shared with all of humanity. This is what
he taught.
The fundamental
obstacle to happiness, says Epicurus, is anxiety. No one can be happy if they
are anxious or never satisfied no matter how rich. Good health will not make
you happy if you're worried about getting sick. You will not be happy in this
life if you're worried about what happens to you after you die. People who are
fearful of worried about being punished or victimized by powerful divine
beingswill only find sorrow in life. It is very easy to be happy if you follow
the four basic truths of Epicureanism: there are no divine beings that threaten
us; there is no next life; what we actually need is easy to get; what makes us
suffer is easy to put up with. "Don't fear god, don't worry about death;
what's good is easy to get, and what's terrible is easy to endure”.
In
summery:
Epicurus
four keys to happiness:
1. Fear
no god
2. Fear
death even less
3.
Pleasure is easily attained
4. Pain
is easily endured
Epicurus
Path to Happiness
1. It is
impossible to live pleasurably without living sensibly
2.To
provide for one self with minimum effort to secure protection from harm
3. True
security cost little
4.Comfort
is easily attained and wealth is never enough
5.
Pleasure that costs little and harms no one is best
6. The
greatest pleasure is the simplest pleasure
7.
Reason makes any surprises acceptable
8.
Allowing all people the same amount of life's necessities this makes theft
unimportant
9. The
greatest obstacle to pleasure is fear
10. The
fear of the gods and of death is the source of most evil
11. We
can dispel these fears by understanding life, death, nature and the universe
12.
Pleasure is impossible until science dispels superstitions about life, death
and nature
13. True
pleasures are simple and easily attained neither wealth or eternal life adds
anything
14.
Eternity contains no more or greater pleasure than that attained in the now
15. The
gods add nothing to humans or their happiness
Source:
Epicurus
& Epicurean Philosophy
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