Phenomenology of Dialectical Materialism Part One

 

We create our reality through the interpretation of objective reality. The subjective is our creation; the objective is independent of that interpretation. The closer the two come together with the more influence we have over our future.

 

We create our gods and our explanations of creation through the way we understand external grounded existence. The trick becomes realizing we are the products of our social upbringing, set in a natural world.

 

Most interpretations evolve over time changing because of faith, the crisis of faith, and loss of faith, regaining faith only to repeat the cycle over and over again never landing exactly on the same foundations. The purpose is an ongoing creation. Yet humans must adapt to a pre-existing and continuingly changing objective reality that constantly challenges our faith. We can and do change that external reality by our actions, but only by changing the physical and objective environment of the reality that is embedded in that setting, but even with faith we cannot escape objective reality.

 

Historical change places each of us on the border, between the settled lands that have already failed and the frontier that we are only beginning to see. History is this perpetual and continuing alteration. This has always been the case. But, since the Reformation, the advent of science, the industrial revolution, globalization of the colonial, post-colonial and neocolonial world, humanity have been living in a constant emergency. Now with the failure of neo-colonialism the crisis has deepened.

 

Today academic fields like historical sociology and cultural anthropology wrote extensively of the impersonal presenting the individual as an object in controlling mass society. With the collapsing of cultural traditions comes the redefining of those same traditions. With victimized groups, it is a matter of survival, and with powerful groups, it is a fear of loss of control. But, either way, the reinstitution of culture, that culture changes.  Cultural preservation is the result that history is a lie. Picking and choosing through continuous legends can be saved through a reinterpretation of the past. Through combining hermeneutics and materialist anthropology a vain but essential effort is made to understand both the loss of faith and the revival of that faith in a social identity that reestablishes a fictitious past that creates a real historical and social identity. Deliverance and preservation become conflicting attempts at national liberation and cultural preservation. Sometimes called rationalism, dogma, nationalism, patriotism, or religious fundamentalism.

With self-cannibalization of the global, integrated, liberal economy historical memory collapses.  Most historical memories are replaced by nationalism that exposes the fable of newly made-up cultural traditions. The antique stability is replaced by a cruel creed of the chauvinistic, artificial doctrine of odium and indolence. 

The economy no longer works, nation states are collapsing, human survival is openly questioned and there is little agreement on what to do next. With despair comes opportunity.

This opens the door to a science of society. Science as a method of arranging information and not a conclusion is the definition of science. The method itself is forever evolving, as conclusions themselves never really perfectly match the ever-evolving external reality. But, with rigorous application of data to systematic examination the contradiction between the realities we study and our conclusions we draw upon these studies that become increasingly less dramatic and we gain better opportunities for more control over our futures. This stands in stark contrasts to the brutal fantasies of the good old days that never were and traditions made up as we go along.  The apriori is always the result of aposterori speculation of empirical knowledge.

 

Phenomenology of Dialectical Materialism

Part Two

Subjective insight is gained from empathy, born from our ability to generate through our imagination the experiences of another.  This discrete knowledge can guide our actions to resolve the social injustice that we have discovered. These influences on our movements produce new difficulties that will demand fine-tuning as we go along.

Once we have a radicalizing experience to do nothing is not an option. We either side with the oppressed or we side with the oppressor. Impartiality is a lie. Neutrality is the cowards’ way out.

In this action learning is an ongoing process. We act upon what we have learned. Making mistakes and learning from those mistakes. With the evolving goal, we are fighting for social justice. With every goal we achieve, we set the stage for the next struggle. The conclusion is always the new introduction.

We through this cooperative struggle move from being the results and product of what happens to us, to learn to become the authors of our future through the combined effort of working with others who are in the same or similar situation. Likewise, through our mind's eye, we can gain an understanding of the oppression and the struggle of others. This is the origin of empathy and alliances of the fight for liberty, fairness, and solidarity.

This is the foundation of the anthropology of historical sociology. The goal of gathering objective data to analyze and then to discover patterns, from which to generate a set of hypotheses, and to test those hypotheses against the data collected. This becomes the guiding values of our actions. Learning from both our successes and our failures. To create a new body of knowledge that will guide our further actions.

By acting on the environment we change that environment, but the environment continues to set limits on what is possible through our actions. When we add to the above statement the sociology of the oppressor and the oppressed we establish a more complex environment. Different groups are acting upon and dependent upon this social environment. This becomes the bedrock of our fight for freedom. In the beginning the oppressors have more control over the environment, but they are dependent upon the oppressed for their power and privilege.

First, we begin when we become aware of a profound injustice in this inequality. Because not only is there the suffering that it causes, but also because the oppressor will get an undeserved reward from the suffering of the oppressed. Second, this relationship can be overcome to the benefit to the larger society.  This starts when we become aware that we can see others’ pain and then we become the “they” that is born when we see our lives given over to the cause of social justice. The third is when our personal realization cherishes itself in another’s self-consciousness and becomes an identity of equal importance to our own.

 Michael Joseph Francisconi

 

Phenomenology of Dialectical Materialism Part Three

 

Using a model that studies society using how the various parts and institutions that is both mutually supportive and how these same principles and traditions represent patterns of competing interests exist concurrently through its history. Following the examination of a single society, however defined, societies for the most part interact and compete with other societies over issues of sovereignty vs. dominance.  Which also includes the on going interaction between independent invention and diffusion. With separate encounters, development and dispersal cultural traits the definitions of society and culture are fluid. This model cannot be a static look at civilization and peoples but at every turn evolution must be a central concern of any genuine investigation.

 

With this historical approach functional analysis becomes little more than cataloging. Multiple variable interact driving this change. Each variable’s influence has differing weights of significance and importance’s that change over time. The complex of environmental, economic, technological and demographic items that may take on more than one value during extended historical tendencies but in the long run is mainly noteworthy.

 

Along these lines depending on the unit of analysis even the most basic definitions of society and culture is fluid not only reflecting the topic being studied but also the historical position of the researcher within the cultural and social setting of the researcher.

 

Patterns must be distinguished from trends. Which reflect the degree of influences on the long-term changes and how these items of effects in turn are affected by other interacting powers over time.

 

By definition historical change is both accumulative and transformative and given enough time one society replaces another society and not simply a growth of incremental variations. These causal chains are always on going creating sequences of contributing associations.  It is this process that answers how and why complete social historical breaks follow long-term patterns of minor changes.

 

Transformations then at the minutest level, are a succession of a development of occasions of alterations in customs and tendencies. But these events are developed through long term environmental alterations, followed by crisis of faith and the birth of alternative faiths and a developing ever-changing body of knowledge and relationship to the real world data.

 

 

 

 

Phenomenology of Dialectical Materialism Part Four

 

Science is a set research methods and not a unitary conclusion. Probability and not faith are its defining principles. Patterns are discovered that helps to explain history. History is nothing more or less than living individuals. People born into, growing up, old and dying in a collection of individual variously called society, community, nation or humanity.

 

Our behavior collectively or individually happens in a pre-determined setting. The potentials, the resources, the social relations and the exchange relations, know-how and creative conditions already exist. Our actions operate in an environment that is in turn modified by our movements. Existence is not decided by our awareness of life, but our perceptions by actual being within the life we live. Choices exist, and no one can escape choice, but choices are always limited by the social environment of the moment. But, once a choice is made the social environments is forever altered if only very slightly. But, also action not only moves in a desired direction, but unforeseen consequences are the direct result of our actions and our choices. The results are never predetermined, but only the resources that limit our choices are always predetermined.

 

Thus the history of each society has its own set of fixed systematic arrangements encircled within an environment and with a prearranged range of choices. It is individuals within their communities organized around dynamic social relations that are the actors that drive history forward. Humans are animals with physical needs. People come together to work deriving from their natural surroundings food, shelter, clothing and other necessities required for life. Their tools and their social organizations reflect this. Like any other species humans’ interaction with their natural environment changes that environment. Adaptation is an on going process. Because of this the natural and social environment, the current state of technology, social arrangements for production and distribution and consumption are the core of societies. This core is not the only driving force of history. But, it does have a predominant role to play among the interaction of every changing variables in the evolution of society and culture.

 

As these changes develop, societies clearly change in significant ways creating new societies out of the remains of older ones, only to be replaced as the core of society and culture changes in appreciably sufficient ways to make either the continuation or the reappearance to the existing society impossible. Once a society can produce enough of a surplus to support a non-productive elite that are in charge of the redistribution of the yield produced, by managing production and distribution, conflicting interests develop in a way that demands compulsion of the fecund multitudes to preserve the durability of society for the advantage of the leaders. Commandments replace conventions, constabularies, judges, militia ruled by the sovereign, official religion and economic and social classes expand.

The core of each society has its unique philosophy, ethics, rules, art, creed, viewpoints, mindset and ways of life. However this dominant ideology is interpreted differently by each of the competing groups within the larger society. This multifaceted and inconsistent set of social relations may appear to be stable, but strains and differences are always present. But, as problems arise relations become strained, the social environment changes and what worked before becomes increasingly unable to deal with these changes.

 

The beginning of these damaged associations develops out of discontent born from the increasing awareness of the injustice of disparity and unfairness arising from the dispersal of prosperity, poverty and reserves assisting the affluent at the detriment of the underprivileged. The poor feel they create the wealth of the rich and share none of its benefits. In this highly charged atmosphere feelings of vexation take over. The drive for dignity is reflected in this inequality. Something must change. Hardship and humiliation are the essential and enduring qualities of class society. The deterioration in acceptability follows a crisis of faith in the defining creed, belief, justification and instruction provided by the dominant class. Everything we believed up till now is called into question. New beliefs are born out of this struggle and they replace the older established certainties. The slogans embodying the actual world-shattering philosophy produced from studying the drawbacks of what we have been taught becomes our new language. This ideology spreads to more and more groups who feel oppressed. This becomes a feed back loop. The understanding of the social situation becomes the guide for our actions. This strategy once in place is always modified to meet new needs as they come up. This in turn will meet organized opposition of the privileged groups trying to stay in power. Thus we adapt our tactics to take advantage of the weakness and mistakes of the rulers. Hopefully learning from our own frailty and errors and turn them to our own benefit.

 

 

 

Phenomenology of Dialectical Materialism Part Five

 

Beginning with the concept of information of evolution, construction, and performance of human society will lead to the epistemology of sociology, ontology of cultural anthropology and the narration of history with its description of origins with the study of human societies and cultures and their development including being concerned with the way cultures has developed and evolved through time.

 

Born from is debate founded data and careful research. Comprehensive matching competitions of the incomplete harmony of rival points of view that will be replacing through differing influences is the linking to the reasonable dialog of thoughts and substances undeniably with the pretense settling arguments. This debate learns from opposing points of view in strengthening ones own argument.

 

But, behind this dialogue of competing interpretations of reality lies a material reality that predates these opposing understandings of facts. We as living human beings react to our social, psychological and physical experiences of this external reality. This shapes and defines our personal explanations of this existence from which we respond through our behavior on this actuality altering this reality. Because other people also react in analogous respects based on wholly dissimilar understanding, conflict arises having a direct impact on the larger environment.

 

As individuals living in a larger environment, we can only interact through our conscious awareness of the environments. But, only through our interpretations of these experiences does anything make sense. This creates a problem because of the given historical, cultural, and individual eccentricities of these may interpretations vary wildly, even of the same existential experiences. As long as the misfit between knowledge and environment is not too extreme survival is possible.

 

But, the external world itself has a reality independent of our interpretations of it. The contradiction between the external world and our awareness of it, is founded upon discrepancies that create a whole set of difficulties that must be dealt with. Changing our awareness of the existential reality, the external environment, and finally ourselves brought about by our actions.

 

In spite of this relations in which the awareness of the world give rise to an interpretation of our sensual experiences of that world guiding our actions within that environment and altering that environment. There remain elements of that environment independent of any consciousness. This dynamic is historical and on going. The closer our conscious interpretation of that external is the more closely our goals will be met limiting unforeseen consequences.

Innate formulae clarify development as an imaginable manifestation of the core in the indicating the existence of a presence of authenticity. This is defined as what makes something what it is. We define the interaction of its parts, its boundaries, and its relation to ever-larger wholes in our attempt to understand the world in which we are apart. Our explanation of physical certainty in the concluding scrutiny is defined by material reality. Sometimes the fit is sloppy and the world does not make any sense. We alter our views of the world, trying to gain a measure of control over our lives. The more we understand the unanticipated results the more we can deal with unforeseen consequences. Evolution and revolution are the same; the timing that separates them is our way of trying to understand change.

 

In reason realization is communicating openly with sympathetic understanding. We know what we know, in spite of our cultural interpretations, because we our living animals interacting with nature. Survival or death, subsistence or extinction relates on how closely our interpretations of the environment match that environment. Because of our interactions changes that environment. Readjustments between interpretations and reality are never ending. Sometimes minor evolution and sometimes major revolution.

 

Thought is the constructive outcome of individual awareness. Set in a “something” observed has been sensed before as an influence involving the substances of the earth. By examining varieties of groups with deriving meaning from standard appearances an explanation will develop of the truth as we see it set in a social and historical setting. When wisdom is not considered as objective and missing historical viewpoints, while going beyond personal action, but more exactly as real manners of existing insightful communal habit, then we have joined the area of social essence. This social essence is in fact social existence a commonly shared reality.

 

The energetic ethical domain is the understanding of certainty in a specfic historical, cultural ansd social setting. This will the foundation of conscience or doing what is right within the view point of the individual. Either conferming or challenging established norms.

 

This culturally defined reality is the substance, which appears as the ultimate foundation of being, knowledge, reality and values. But this truth is falling apart before it even gets started. This leads to ever-new realities.

 

 

 

 

Phenomenology of Dialectical Materialism Part Six

 

Tradition looks upon the alternative ideology just beginning to define its vision for and the new boundaries, now called progressives as follows. Suspected of incomprehensible self-satisfied familiarity based upon dishonestly maintaining obscure information empowering the renovation of the human living energy as snobbish. Thus in suggesting that apocalyptic rumors may tolerate moral blame for a make-believe catastrophe.

 

Tradition is the driving force of community health and stability. But, tradition already being set is out of sync with an ever-changing reality. Post or neo is a very poor way of describing this. All sides are working from traditions of their own while making changes as necessary to save what they can. Inquiries into the historical philosophies of human nature, while challenging typical ideas of both human partiality and objective representation while struggling to move beyond ancient impressions of human nature lock into tribalism of the past.

Conflict defines our contemporary social life. This has always been the case. But, today i.e. the last 250 years it is more extreme. It always seems we are entering a new and even more dangerous breaking point.

 

With careful and visible boundaries or shape the coming into being of the humility leads to studying through experience via the agreement of speculation and performance.  Being and coming into being is always both the same and opposed to each other, as this dynamic is the definition of existing.

The individual creator is created through what is created. In defending our viewpoint in the face of opposition we cannot help but to redefine parts of are arguments. In spite of this there will always remain an external reality that is independent of our awareness of the reality. Our consciousness reflects that reality but that reality remains outside our consciousness. But, that external material and social realty is constantly being modified by our behavior individually and collectively. This contradiction is the motor of evolutionary history.

 

Phenomenology of Dialectical materialism Part Seven

 

The ever-changing narrative of the history of history

 

Secular hermeneutics teaches us that all meaning in the, historicity of thinking is context-dependent and therefore unstable. Actions of today help define the issues of yesterday. Clarification of the idiosyncratic and tangible potentials of the creation of lived action is what incorporates the design we call our lives.  Interpretation of the subjective and objective qualities of the story is what carries the narrative.

 

Meaning is chosen, while acting in life. Acting is a manifestation of being. The act of rebelling is taking responsibility for creating one self. Bohemian in opposition to Revolutionary may be a typical example. In the 20^th century the same individual often held the two opposing lifestyles. In America intellectuals drawn to the cause of revolution was often less disciplined than their colleges in Russia, Europe of the third world. This was the dilemma of the left intellectual in America, who struggled as an individual to resolve that contradiction finding meaning in the collective group effort.

 

The bohemian is the isolated individual, who was choosing to live free in an un-free society.  Who was living in the moment? The revolutionary is part of a group, who was fighting to eliminate all forms of oppression.  The creating a future society was the goal of the revolutionary.  The bohemian openly challenges the unquestioned core values of the dominant culture as the source of subjugation and limits place upon individual liberty. The bohemian is the individual who places individual liberty above that of the community. Only a community that offers the greatest potential for individual development is worthy of preservation. The revolutionary states an injury to one is an injury to all. If anyone is not free no one is free. The revolutionary minimum goals are to extend fortifications of well being, egalitarian human rights, democratic decision making, equity and justice for everyone. The medium program is the public control and ownership of industry, means of production and social services. Worker collective, consumer cooperatives and community council’s replace is all forms of economic enterprise and government the final goal of the revolutionary. The bohemian is live and let live by harming no one else while choosing to live free.

 

In resolving this contradiction, many radical intellectuals modeled themselves after revolutionaries in other countries. The revolutionary professional intellectual I must be willing to commit cultural suicide as a class so I can be reborn as a revolutionary worker. Then and only then can they fully identify with the most sincere and reflective goals of the revolutionary working class? As a revolutionary socialist intellectual should be able to accomplish complete identity with the class I claim speak for. The job as the revolutionary scholar is to use their position of privilege to carry out serious and objective studies to discover the issues and to use that insight to give a voice to those whose voice will never be herd by those in power. “For ourselves we ask for nothing for the workers we Demand Everything.”

 

Find sounding words but when does the struggle become the problem. In the Soviet Union Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin was dishonest, violent and a true believer. He was willing to betray his comrades for the greater good. He put party above self-interest and saw that as a higher morality.  For an atheist History and the Dialectic became an infallible living god. History could not make a mistake, thus he died not challenging what a greater evil, the party he help found.  On the other many radical intellectuals in the United have no connection with any real social group other than their small debating and quoting collectives. Academic isolation often comes from the job itself. The intellectual is a product of the society one is born into including the social and natural environment. The University is set aside to meet the needs of corporate global capitalism. Technological research and training professionals and managers to administer the day-to-day needs of commercial comprehensive unrestricted organization of revenue are of course what keeps the lights on at the Academy. But, the scholar is in a good position to discover the damaged illogicality of neo-liberal decay.

 

The social relations that define the ever evolving history of human interaction has a both a practical and immediate implication, and an obscure and subsisted unexpected a supplementary, resulting result intellectual inquiry. Though the direct result of lived experiences, the post neo-liberal and neo-conservative reaction has created an increasing popularization of anti-intellectualism of carefully manufactured ignorance. Yet a new era of social movements is constantly being reborn. What was largely ignored is the fruition of maps the birth of the new constructed world-view. The logic of the struggle of those victims of poverty and the lack of education finds common ground with the radical intellectual.

 

Social movements are born out of real crisis of social, economic, cultural and environmental emergency. The class or group that is most directly impacted is of course the class of momentum and derivation. Other groups are brought into the struggle often providing management, but never providing the characterization of the root or undertaking. The labor movement was not that of a few college-educated labor organizers but rank and file. Civil Rights movement was the African American communities and not just a small group of University trained ministers. At such point of juncture the contradiction between the intellectual and whom the intellectual identifies with becomes a closer match. The intellectual does not operated in isolation as a mental activity, but is a part of a real considerable ecologist process of the historical nature.

 

Post and neo are more apparent than real. Movements evolve in a real environment of change in both a materialist and dialectical way. There is an objective world that we act and react upon and change is that relationship. Thus, that relationship can never be static. The rebirth of nihilism is the expression the suffocation of neo-liberalism with its justification called neo-conservatism. These movements are neither new (neo) or nihilist but negativistic narcissism that allows the comfortable to enjoy their comfort without a need to defend their position of privilege.

 

Scholarly colonialism of completed contemporary trivial merchant cerebral aerobics frees the intellectual from any moral responsibilities. This moves criticism to safe margins of parlor games. Yet the corpse of revolutionary Marxism refuses to stay buried. New struggles require careful studies of a real grounding of the source of our current problems. Not all classes, groups and regions suffer the same, and a dialectal study is required of the competing interests to see how solutions manifest themselves.

 

Cultural consciousness that is a emergence of feeling is always grounded in social relations that in turn are grounded in a material environment. Collective social change is undermined by isolated individualism by design. Ethnic studies potentially revolutionary, Marxist sociology and anti-colonial cultural anthropology was accepted as a safe understanding to replace its revolutionary narrative. The University as the center of rebellion spilling over onto the streets and into the factories taken up by the working class is now defined as overly romantic. Now we can take advantage of this puerile storyline to give birth to real revolution.

 

 

 

Phenomenology of Dialectical Materialism Part Eight

Awareness of being and temperament

 

 

 

Consciousness cannot but be related to the external at every moment of life.  Consciousness of existence is the definition on of essence.  This is the interaction between the individual and the external world. There is and external environment.  This exterior atmosphere is experience by stimulus response modified by explanation. This understanding is altered by and embedded in social education.  This interpretation of reality is the establishment of a cultural life defined within a changing social and historical setting. For the individual this means an emotional response a real social and natural environment.

 

Yielding precondition in which human performance and activities are merely decided by underlying occurrences. These actions are only limited by real choices that are presented in the external physical and social environment. There are elements of human free will. Which does exist when outlined as the ability to act corresponding to one's awareness of those same choices which is formed by environmental influences including but not limited to genetics, culture, knowledge and background.

 

Choice is unavoidable in a determined existence. What is chosen negates something to avoided. What is chosen support something to be attained. With each choice we choose not to be something, while choosing to be become something else. Choice changes what will be determined in the future. This includes unforeseen consequences driving us to react to problems our choices have pushed upon us.

 

What we react to is our interpretation of the events before us. The closer our interpretation reflects the objective external reality the more likely we will be successful. Not all data is equal. In this relationship the universal is temporary. Reality is an illusion defined by the interaction between objective environmental realities, our lived experience or stimulus response, our collective understanding and the actions we take.

 

These in part define the self. The self-interacting with other selves redefines the self. This is an on going process for all individuals. This on going interaction is the history of culture. Culture is a set of social interactions within a set of social relations. This is society, which is unstable with anon going struggle for stability.  This contradiction both creates our reality and leaves vulnerable to even ore unforeseen consequences. Culture is the sum total of all shared knowledge, learned behavior, patterns of attitudes and perceptions of a people. 

 

 

 

Terms needed at this time

1. Culture refers to socially shared and transmitted knowledge, both how the world is and how it should be. 
2. Ideology is the openly expressed system of beliefs of a people.
3.  A common relation to the economic foundation to society characterizes class; this is the means of production and the socially organized patterns of distribution and consumption.  Class is a relation between groups of people, the place these groups occupy in the social division of labor with patterns of control over access to the means of production, and the appropriation of social surplus.  Class is also characterized by a cultural and social life.  Thus, members share a common life-style, educational background, kinship, consumption patterns, and common mythology, ideology and values.  “Class is defined as relations of production.  Relations of production are relationships of economic power or property.  Social relations with the same relations to production, property, and economic power are in the same class.  Class is the most important explanatory category in social science.  Class structures virtually all aspects of society, social conflict, and historical development.  Class positions permeate not only economic life, but also consciousness, culture, politics, and such ultimate things as life expectancy, sexual realizations, marriage, religion, and the very possibilities of happiness and mental health.”  Al Szymanski
4. Ethnic groups are separate groups or nations that both claim a separate identity form the dominant group and as a group form a separate nation within the larger nation with a separate relationship to the over all economy.  With in each ethnic group or sub-nation is its own class stratification with each class having its own separate relationship to the over all larger economy.  The end result is there are more differences of competing interests within each ethnic group than between them. 

 

The above terms are made to assist us to understand not only the issues, but also the possibilities before us.  When used in conjunction with the research method of dialectical and historical materialism we have a tool to aid in gaining a richer understanding of the discipline called history. The added bonus is we can also help map out our actions to gain great control of the choices available. 

 

Once action is taken, the results become part of the environment. This means the choices we make are very important. Thus, we need a clear idea, or as clear as possible, what are the desired outcomes and are the resources obtainable for the possibility of success. Then we need a vision of future actions for progressive social movements. Not all choices are the same. Some are wide-ranging and others limited. This opens up questions like which class or ethnic groups benefit and what is the nature of the opposition and who are the leaders of the opposition.