The Universal Unity of Consciousness:

What I learned from Hegel

Categories of Subject and Object

1. Agency is what some would call freewill. Agency requires an acting subject that undertakes an act of will within a structure and a context. Each person acts with the information at hand with a preexisting set of circumstances. But to act, both the action and what is being acted upon must be defined.

2. This is understood as a defining entity before action can take place. This is a delineated being or person, which in turn has a real and independent existence and is the connecting tissue of many separate individuals into a single shared category. This category points out the chief qualities of the unit under consideration and identifies the essential qualities that become its meaning. This concept is a unifying set of characteristics that are placed together in the process of creating a definition.

3. In establishing each specific set of characteristics that will be used in understanding in any category of a comprehensible entity existing in the external world, we will also be describing what is excluded from that category. Setting up the defining and essential qualities of a category or entity helps establish the boundaries around the necessary and important traits. This helps clarify all that is excluded from our category; depending on the chosen significant and definitive features of specific qualities of our category, and the items we are investigating. Definitions can, at this point, be either expanded or narrowed in order to better understand more closely how this category is embedded in an externally changing material reality.

4. We create categories that are divided into species and genera of a universal that is created intellectually from the logical process of trying to understand the external world. Each defined entity stands in opposition to every other entity, because one thing is not another. Because of our familiarity with this, each species is contained within our larger understanding of the universe around us by our awareness of how this species is set apart by the boundaries that separate each species from every other species and everything else.

5. To avoid confusion it must be made clear that the differences between species are not the essential and defining characteristics for any species. Taking two closely related species, the dissimilarities are not indispensable and central to the description of any species’ uniqueness, but the dissimilarities are vital for the detailed description of the variety of characteristics of closely related species. With those differences in mind it is now possible to understand what any entity is not. Because two closely related species share many characteristics in common, it becomes important to understand what they do not share to understand the boundary between them.

6. Both the essential qualities and secondary traits give only partial information about species. Also important is knowing characteristics excluded from those that are part of the identity of the species.  Because any species exists in a larger ever-changing environment, the boundaries between one species and another is never perfectly fixed.  The specific qualities we use to describe a species change as what we need to understand changes with new information. These concepts and defining characteristics are mental reflections of an ever-changing material reality. Evolution is the only constant, not only of material reality, but also our understanding of that reality. When the fit between our categories and what they represent becomes too uneasy, there follows cognitive leap and new ways of understanding the world around us. Old worldviews are either redefined or they are abandoned to be replaced by new ones. 

These changing categories outline the boundaries between species and are also included in those traits that other species share.

Awareness, the Will and Consciousness

1. Awareness forms the envisioned liking the goal of the will to the interpretations of reality and their explanations to the existential. Of course this awareness begins at the appearances. This is the individual’s relationship to herself.  This relationship is her mirror to the imaginary other. The self only exists in a relationship to the other. Yet through imagination the self can create the other.  But, the invented other required a real other to model itself after.

2. Because self is a social construct, it requires a community of interacting individuals in order to form the self. Because the self is also a single individual then individual interpretation is also required. Isolation of each personality is a network of many mingling comradeships and kinship of communal set of connections is the on going creative masterpiece of life. Remoteness of both personality and identity is a set of connections of various kinds in which we come together as comrades in association of shared arrangements of linking ideas that is the current cultural meaning and inspires the on going work of art of our existence.

3. Life containing the determination of the phenomenology of existential subsistence is in the process of making self a work in progress. The study of subjects and objects of a person’s experiences requires the structures of consciousness as qualified from the first-person point of view that is born from the empirical experiences of a sustained way of life of being. The personality is formed in this interaction.

4. The endeavor of the meaning within consciousness is to make its emergence related by means of its genuine significance. The authentic importance is not only significant for the individual, but also at some point in communication with many individuals sharing a common identity. This helps raise conviction to the level of fact, at least if this cultural meaning is adaptive to a real environment.

5. Consciousness is formed with the interaction between the temperaments of the person with the external environment as mediated by the individual’s communication with the group she interrelates with directly. Her consciousness, her relation to the objective world is the consequence of the down to earth estimated confidence of an existential and sensual responsiveness to that world adjudicated through her intellect. The sensory consciousness belongs to the type of sensation that unites external and internal for each individual. Consciousness includes groupings integrated with the abstract personality. Thus awareness is but a summery reflection of the complex relations between an individual and what exists independent of that individual. Learning and responsiveness is always leading to a more defined limits of data while expanding what can be learned. This expanding identity of knowledge will be seen as having fundamental general characteristics in common that are found in similar but always some different instances that can be compared to it.

6. Knowledge based upon experiences is the beginning of reason. Reason is created out of the unity of the subjective reaction to the objective. Through the thought process the rational is merged with the empirical. Empiricism or systematic and detailed observation of the outside world gives the data to use in rational studies. Through reason and empiricism, the study of the world outside the mind while using a heightened consciousness is used to arrange the data to create an enriched self-awareness and awareness of the external world.

7. Self-consciousness is born from the ongoing interaction between a person’s mental reflection of the external world and the reality of that world. Through a cultural understanding, a person sorts out the meaningful from the meaningless. Being overwhelmed by sensory information, a person could not react safely to the environment. Thus, what we discard is as important as what we keep and analyze. Truth is ultimately how successful this interaction is. The self is the idea of our individual isolation while being created out of and existing in a social context. Tearing apart prior judgments that could exist creates this self-independence. These bracketed judgments are resurrected when one feels a level of certainty that these ideas are based upon reason and observation can securely be introduced into our thinking. This is learning based upon reflection. Through reflection the self can look upon the self as one would look upon any external reality. This is the origin of introspection and the substance of self-consciousness.

Hegel Science of Logic

And History of Philosophy

From the above Hegel develops a philosophy of dialectical awareness. What follows is a Humanist consciousness.

Agency, Consciousness and the Dialectic

1. The Agency of an acting subject is whose activity is set within a structured environment within a specific context. As said before, some people would also call agency free will. The agent is eternally trapped in mire without escape. The agent can never escape the fact that at every turn there are choices, this is what Sartre calls freedom. What Sartre fails to understand is that freedom is not a thing or part of the human condition. Freedom is a feeling and as a freedom it may or may not match anything real in the lives of the free.  It is choice, which is inescapable.  Choice is what Sartre calls freedom. Choices are firmly set in a historical structure that exists objectively even before we act. However limited, and limited it is, choice exists. Ideas and action are born out of choices – choices framed in a determined material world. Choices are incessantly formed and modified out of lived experiences and action is guided by philosophy. Because action founded on choices amends reality, action modifies and changes philosophy.

2. Agency operates within a social setting and is in part a result of past action taking place in an already formed but ever changing environment. Current social structures are reflections of adaptations to environments of the recent past. Cultures are themselves reflecting precedent adaptations to environments of the recent past. Because of this, cultures are presently readapting to the existing ever-changing social-cultural and natural environment.

An innovative social movement is set in motion through actions based upon categories created out of actual experiences; guiding theory based upon observable facts, that had come into view and can be recognizable before a fresh outlook could be work out. This would be the creative process of a social order already changing.

3. From the point of view of people advocating profound structural changes, this evolving way of life would assume the character of a new historical mindset. This sustains deep corporeal configuration that is becoming something different born out of the remains of the corpse of the previous world; the social activists would call this a true Renaissance. The new philosophy born in opposition to the philosophy of the dying world is an increased intellectual awareness as a guide for popular action. Seen as a concretization of the dawning of a new age with a “New Type of Humanism”.  This means that each set of ideas corresponds to a specific set of behaviors. Actions are married to consciousness that both reflect the objective world through our understanding; but also understanding through informed social activity. The material reality independent of our world of ideas is modified by our actions guided by our ideas.

4. Every set of ideas has its own set of limitations, these limitations often undermine the coherence of this set of ideas; also because people try for some measure of understandability. This set of ideas develops into different sets of thoughts. These notions soon bump into philosophical contradictions because of the inherent limitations. The resolution is a new philosophical system or such reinterpretations of old ideas such that it, in fact, is functionally a new system.

5. This interactive union between the material and social world with the ideological superstructure is the foundation of agency. Agency is founded on a subjective experience and yet the subjective always remains embedded in an objective world. In the same way, the self exists independently of awareness; only real to us in a similar manner in relation to the other. The ideas we have are but our consciousness set in a social environment. It is in the social environment that our consciousness and our personalities are formed.

6. Even though what exists is independent of awareness, this existence is only understandable and therefore real to us because of our awareness; and only through awareness do we know anything.  The tension between the subjective and the objective is the source of our knowledge and knowledge is learned in a social as well the natural environment. The knowledge of the external world that we obtain is a lot like a photograph. Depending on lighting, angle and distance the image reflects an external and objective reality founded upon the point of view of the observer. It is not necessarily that any one photograph is more real than another, but one may be more current than another. What we actually observe depends on our cultural and historical background, experience, and type of education. What we actually observe empirically will be affected by the considerations outlined above. Taken together they give us a more or less complete understanding. Depending on the position we hold in a social and historical setting, we see which options are available. Some viewpoints offer a more realistic grasp of options than others and there are more right at that time. However, by comparing concurrent theories we get a more complete understanding. Finally, depending on our interpretation of the objective, the subjective is altered. This is where communication furthers understanding and the subjective evolves with increased understanding. Because imagination is the product of the subjective and that subjective is reflected in a person’s imagination and the subjective is a reflection of the objective, the objective and the imagination interact and are related. Interpretations, which are always influenced by imagination, complete the subjective and our understanding of the objective.

7. The objective-subjective interaction is completed through interaction in a cultural and historical setting. If there is an amiable interface between the objective- subjective, it is real enough to allow people to survive; and our understanding of the external world is a fairly close fit. If there is a serious disconnect, then revolutionary changes may be required to survive. This becomes clear as the environment is always changing. Whether the there is a disconnection or the fit is close, the interaction of subjective-objective makes sense only if we define it in cultural and historical terms. 

8. This is more than simply a phenomenal reality of external determinability. The general presupposition is negated in the process as we learn through interaction with the environment and others. This how we are always learning and readapting. Through this interaction a state of being is set firmly as it is reflected in the mental processes of understanding the Objective. This continual process of establishing objectively in possessing a true being is part of our culture and ecological adaptability. Even if interpretations that are based upon delusions survive as long as they are understood in a social context and practical in an objective setting. These on going and changing interpretations will correspond close enough to the existing circumstances that they persist in meeting the material needs of the people. The strange thing is people survive even if the cultural beliefs and interpretations are irrational as long as the guiding actions are too disruptive to the needs of survival.

9. Change will happen as what we already know is reinterpreted. What was in our body of knowledge is being replaced even as we try to preserve the old ideas. We are changing these ideas. Truth being in part an interpretation can reflect reality only imperfectly. Yet specific procedures of combining systematic empirical observation with disciplined rational analysis. The promise is we can achieve an even closer approximation to external reality.

If we base our actions on what we learn from this procedure our actions will become even closer to the external environment and the results would be nearer to what we would like to achieve. Our actions become not only more successful, but we can better predict our outcomes and we can have more control over the unanticipated consequences. With increasing awareness of the Objective and Subjective becomes more under our individual and collective influence. The Subjective is always but an appearance of the Objective, with better understanding we have a better fit between the two.

10. This continuous interaction between appearance and an external reality that we can become aware of, even though is one of approximations, is clearly attainable through careful investigations. At least some guiding ideas lead to new ideas that give us more

Feuerbach, Ludwig. (1986). Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. Hackett,

The Universal

1. What appears as a defining entity, connecting many individuals into a single category is an intellectual replica of reality. This concept is a unifying set of characteristics that are placed together in the process of creating a definition. The universal is created from the logical process of trying to understand the external world. Each defined entity stands in opposition to every other entity, because it is defined as one thing and not another. Each species is self-contained in our understanding by the boundaries that separate it from everything else. But the differences between species are not the essential defining characteristics for any specific species. The dissimilarities are not indispensable and central to the descriptions of species uniqueness, but the dissimilarities are vital for detailed descriptions of the variety of closely related species. These differences are necessary for pointing out what it is not. Though two species may share many characteristics in common, what they do not share defines the boundary. (Hegel)

2. In establishing each specific characteristic, the definition also describes what it is not. What it is are the essential qualities and what it is not are together the necessary and the important traits. Depending on the chosen defining features, specific qualities change as the need for understanding changes. The most important elemental qualities of species, if they are shared in part by other species, helps create a larger genus uniting species in this broader category; while maintaining the distinct identities of more narrowly defined species. Each object once defined allows for understanding not only about the object but also how it relates to other objects that are of different species. (Hegel)

3. Similarities in data are categories created out of generalized experiences that appear to have characteristics in common. This generalization is the origin of the Universal. The first Universal is the dichotomy between Subject and Object. (Hegel)

4. Universal is an intellectual abstraction. The Universal is not a direct reflection of empirical experience. Universals are systematically worked-out tools constructed by logic using rational analysis. Categories based upon a concept of logical necessity are ideal types used to come closer to that external reality. Certainty is another ideal type that comes prior to universal categories, and reflects empirical experience. (Hegel)

5. Essence, which is defined by the observer, is based upon the experience of existence. Once this is done, essence becomes an artificial construct, needing only an element of the arbitrary.  If similarities are discovered, a generalized definition becomes an artificial construct independent of specific existence. It now becomes a part of the reality of the observer. In this way the essential also becomes real. These artificial tools and concepts become necessary for us to understand external reality. (Hegel)

6.  “I” being the first Universal can exist only in relation to the “Object”. The “Object” now becomes the second “Universal.” The “Objects” of a specific series of experiences are brought together by abstracting similarities leading to an understanding of a concept called “Itself”.  “Itself” is an “Object” experienced by the “I” as something outside of an independent of the “I”. At this point the “universal” is universalized. The observer and the observed are universalized and detached from any details of subject or object. (Hegel)

7. The self can experience the external world with meaning. Through interaction with the external world, the self proceeds to define herself through her meaningful experiences. Self-definition is not only molded by understanding the external world, but also greatly influenced by the definitions of parts of the external world. (Hegel)

8. Further experiences of the specific are understood in relation to these intellectual constructs of “Essence” and “Universal”. Specific differences are negated by the process of generalizing from similarities in forming the “Universal”.  The “Universal” is in turn negated by experiences that form around the tensions of conflicting trends, that the intellect resolves by creating a new “Universal” that stands in contrast to past experience and forms new conflicts with future experiences. The external reality also shows observable signs of tensions that resolve themselves in the beginnings of a new reality. With this frame of reference, specific characteristics are used in defining an object. Once the characteristics have been defined and isolated they become a list that is used in the future classification of categories of species. Each specific characteristic is independent of other defining characteristics. These characteristics are recombined to form new definitions of another species. (Hegel)

9. Consciousness is indispensable to perception just as awareness is fundamental to knowledge. Consciousness is molded out of the clay of perception. Self-consciousness exists in an interactive relationship with the external world. We become aware of ourselves by becoming aware of the external world. In turn, we are aware of the external world by being aware of ourselves. (Hegel)

10. With the knowledge of what is before us, we assume what we observe is real. It is also assumed that what exists is independent of the observer.  We can know what is, only if we know what is real. Reality is given.  Awareness of reality also assumes an Ego that is capable of knowing. Truth is both independent of the observer and understandable by the observer. The object being observed remains separate from the observer. Consciousness is this awareness. To be conscious is to be cognizant of Self and Other. (Hegel)

11. The Ego that observes interacts with the object. This is also true when the object is the Other. Consciousness is formed through the interaction of the Ego and the Other. To be aware is to be sensitive of the self and the Other. When the Other is also aware of this relationship, the self is defined by the interaction between the consciousnesses of self and Other. (Hegel)

12. Consciousness is defined as a relation between the known and the knower. Social consciousness is set in a social environment. Each Ego is the Other to all Egos. Every relationship in this setting has many interacting and contradictory qualities. With this complexity set in motion, there are several alternatives, each changing the direction of history depending on which alternatives are chosen. (Hegel)

13. This would mean there are regularities in nature and society that are independent of our consciousness. This reality is in motion, and this motion itself has patterned regularities that can be observed and understood with our consciousness. These material regularities are also dialectical in that they change over time. Tensions within the structure that is studied form the basis of this change. These changes add up until the structure itself is something Other than the original structure. A new entity is formed with its tensions or contradictions. At every turn, choice remains between more than one predetermined alternatives. The choices, once they are made, change future patterns in the regularities of nature and society. (Hegel)

14. Because the Ego is set in a social environment, the individual is defined not only by the choices of the individual, but also by the choices of other individuals. In this way the” I” is reflected by being separated yet united with the Other. The External though independent of the Ego, is made known through acculturation into a community by the consciousness of the Ego; formed in relation to the Others that form the reference group that is part of the Ego’s environment. (Hegel)

15. The relationship between this community of Egos and the External material reality exists before and after any Ego is alive. This larger relationship forms the Other and any Ego in turn forms a relationship with this Other.  The Ego is defined in its relationship with the Other. The interaction of all the Egos of the Community is delineated and formed by and through an increasing awareness of the External. The Object is but a particular manifestation of the External. (Hegel)

16. This awareness is the raw material of Consciousness. Consciousness is set in an ever-changing reality. Both the subjective and objective reality is changing and Consciousness is always in a process of redefining itself. Consciousness requires artificial constructs to understand the external. Continuity is a necessary but synthetic concept. What we understand is always changing. This means that what we know is always something that is other than what we first knew, thus it is always in a process of being mediated through an awareness of an external reality that is always changing. (Hegel)

17. Time itself is an intellectual tool. As such, this tool is an attempt to understand the continuing changes to this external reality. Time negates itself because of the ever-changing mid-point called Now. The Now never exists, but without this Now, the past and the future have no meaning. (Hegel)

Overly Determined

1. Etiology becomes a diachronic and synchronic interaction.  Cause and effect is both described and replaced by a model that emphasizes the interaction of several variables contributing to a single event; with nearly all the variables having some influence.  Some have greater and some have lesser influence over time. The effect is determined by multiple causes. This includes examination and study of more than one statistical variable at a time. The word multivariate is defined as: "having or involving a number of independent statistical variables." (Hegel)

2. Philosophy and activism, when taken together, explore the relationship between the actual and the possible. The actual is determined empirically and the possible can be determined only by understanding the actual. (Hegel)

3. Science, math and logic require assumptions at the beginning of the study.  Each assumption or concept is embedded in a multivariate empirical environment. As this combined distribution of interacting variables in a changing environment that is founded upon lived experience evolves, the founding suppositions also change. These assumptions may be minor premises in a more complex empirical observation; yet as the environment changes, the assumptions are expressed differently. (Hegel)

4. Necessity determines movement in nature and in society. With necessity, the determinism of events is only a matter of probabilities within a field in which accidents are not uncommon. Accidents change necessity; and with human consciousness, humans must continuously re-evaluate changing events. Evolution requires accidents and accidents are understandable as they play off and are in opposition to necessity. Because accidents go against the existential encounter with essence, new material reality is in a long-lasting corporeal conflict with necessity. (Hegel)

5. With human society, accident is related to choice. With choice there is agency. Agency changes necessity. Because determinism studies necessity, necessity reflects agency and agency is limited by necessity. (Hegel)

6. Because of the interaction between necessity and agency, hard determinism provide a model to study relative necessity.  With each choice, all other alternative choices are negated. Determinism is an animated and variable flow of events. With each alternative possibility, there would be a divergent and dissimilar history. By understanding the historical sociology of the series of events and the actual possibilities, the unforeseen consequences of history are lessened. With a scientific understanding of historical events, control over outcomes is increased. (Hegel)

7. People make daily decisions that affect their lives. In making decisions they work with materials already in existence. The society and culture that surrounds them and precedes them defines the options, possibilities and probabilities. In this setting, people’s conscious actions driven by choice have consequences. The effects of these choices create new situations for which no one really planned. Often this results in a feeling of helplessness by the people who make decisions that shape change; and also results in a world out of control. (Hegel)

8. With clear analyses, a possible meaningful review is arrived at. To abstract from one situation to another is essential and inescapable. With abstraction, risk is increased; and with generalization possibility is amplified. This is basic and crucial. With theory it becomes possible to study the outcome of options. To be one thing is not to be another, to choose one thing is not to choose another. That which is not chosen is forever excluded. To define something is not only to list its characteristics but also to understand what it is not. Characteristics change over time, requiring a rethinking and a redefinition. (Hegel)

9. Permanence is a generalization of appearances. Continuity is an intellectual tool we create to understand change. Change as a statistical concept can only conclude probabilities, not necessity. The abstraction we create to understand external reality never perfectly fits that exterior universe.  Time and space are intellectual tools that form a conflicting relationship with the material reality of which we are a part. (Hegel)

10. Essence is an abstract model created to understand what exists independent of essence. Essence creates knowledge of appearances; which, though artificial, helps us understand existence. Appearances change even as they are being understood through the use of our intellectual tools. (Hegel)

The Potential and the Negation

1. Liberty is possible by making informed decisions based upon a deep understanding of the regularities of natural processes. Subjective truths are real only when we understand objective reality. Faith in powers beyond material reality and a belief in the supernatural will lead to a private frailty. Submission to the divine begins a voyage to a diminished humanity and a restrained understanding of nature. In this, faith is a downfall of self-determination. (Hegel)

2. Action within the context of possibilities is agency.  Agency is the action of freedom. Agency is the negation of negation of necessity.  Necessity sets the limits of agency and agency changes the boundaries of necessity. Agency without knowledge of possible alternatives is imaginary romance and numinous fantasy. Awareness of potential options for making choices is embedded in authentic material reality. This pertinent wisdom is based upon the fact that material reality follows repeated patterns. Natural laws are intellectual constructs created by humans trying to understand these patterns. (Hegel)

3. All products, cultural or material, are created from natural raw materials following the ever-changing forces governed by natural laws. By understanding these natural processes, success is possible. Liberation is achievable only when a scientific and deterministic model is used. The systematic and deterministic model is successful because the particulars of an event typify natural laws that have satisfactory sources for its existence. Determinism is the understanding of natural laws and natural resources.  Only understanding these objective processes expands free will, and a self-conscious attempt to understand the world becomes more likely. (Hegel)

4. People create their own reality by creating their lives. In this way, people are but one part of nature; although they are an active part of a continually changing nature. Without a wide-ranging authoritative acknowledgment of tangible validity of data drawn from a world external to our subjective lives, that same life moves beyond the command of the authors of those lives. Unforeseen and uncontrolled consequences over power challenge the best attempts of creators of those lives. (Hegel)

5. Nature, culture, society, and individuals are always changing.  Changes require more changes.  Movement is always passing away in a process of becoming.  Nature, society and culture are shifting, flowing movements. Everything in the Universe is temporary.  These changes follow patterns we can understand through careful observation. Both Nature and human history follow patterns that are integrated in ever-larger wholes. Patterns form ever-larger arrangements of comprehensive systematic transformation. Because of culture, human understanding is set in changing myths and traditions. Cultural knowledge changes as circumstances change. (Hegel)

What logic tries to capture is an understanding of all this, yet changes require us to constantly take our investigation to new places. Everything is constantly changing -- becoming what it is not. Life is living out possibilities, good or bad; and everything is the realization of potential.  For pleasing outcomes or dreadful consequences, again and again, what is ceases to exist to become something yet in existence.

Hegel, G. W. F. The Phenomenology of the Mind

Contradiction

1. The contradiction between the subjective and the objective is erased and a new reality is formed in which the self is our interaction in the process of creating a real person. Yet the environment in which this identity was formed is always changing and a new contradiction is formed out of a new self-consciousness undermining the old and changing the current until yet another new self-consciousness is formed.

2. This agency or free will is the active part of interaction with nature, within this interaction the individual is the subject. Because this subject exercises her agency while acting within an established structure set within a specific context, this becomes the relationship between the individual and society and society and the rest of nature. This connection is interactive in both directions and this relationship is understood.

3. It is in this context that understanding is established. In this milieu the interaction between subject and object is the defining relationship between agency and determinism or determinism and chance. This contradiction is an interactive contradiction that is necessary for change and transformation is continuous.

4. All human action takes place in an environment in which choice is inescapable and choice takes place in a structure that is determined. The action following choice changes the structure, thus determinism determines choices and choices establishes the preceding events that shapes the environment.

5. This relationship is further expanded to include the connection of many interacting individuals acting within a larger whole. This social whole establishes the defining characteristics of the community, group or society. These definitions will help the investigator understand what is being studied.

6. Cultural concepts begin with a unifying set of characteristics. Historically cultural traits interact through acting individuals within a community of persons to create an ever-evolving tradition that is always in a process of defining a whole worldview for each generation within any community. Though this understanding is a sorting process, it is also an unraveling course in which the relevant is separated from the irrelevant. In this understanding, the continuing arrangement and rearrangement of particular sets of characteristics that will be used in deciding what will be included and excluded in the defining categories are decided.

Hegel, G. W. F. The Phenomenology of the Mind

Hegel, G. W. F. The Science of Logic

Hegel, G. W. F. Lectures on the Philosophy of History

Resistance is the Renaissance, Resistance is the Enlightenment

Resistance is Today

An open dialog between a Classical Marxist with various Hegelian or Neo-Marxists

            To escape the sterility of dualism is to unlock the ability to study chances of improvements while transformations are happening in the context of specific changes. If there are long term patterns of social change then rule by autocratic oligarchies through coercive organizations, built upon irrational ideologies like patriotism and ethnic exclusivity, then this in turn can be and must be challenged. The exposed illogicality in modern society is the foundation of popular democracy in the struggle against authoritarian oppressive control of information and education that creates a feeling that rational is irrational, and irrational is rational. This reification of the absurd and the emotive turns the superficial into the profound by allowing superstition to appear as science. By consenting, as the surface, to be represented as the deep and the multi-layered is neither here nor there. Once lied to, we share in the creation of our own reality. The intent to deceive is part of the daily bread of news broadcasts by mainstream media, resources of facts conveyed and instruction. The source of repression is masked. Through modern use of rules founded on judiciousness in the impersonal operation of authorized administration, ethical stupefaction results in the clear-cut management of the general public for the benefit of closely established elite. The mistake made by liberal-conservative sociologists and historians is when surface appearances appear real; fault rests in their weak historical methodology and a theory of knowledge separated from the historical and ecological setting for a culturally based body of knowledge. The universality of liberalism placed the scientist beyond history or culture. This created the illusion of an elite with a truth that also stands outside of context. This is idealist philosophy at its worst. The social scientist is always embedded in a distinctive historical setting and an explicit cultural worldview. All worldviews have limited logical conclusions.  By exposure to multicultural historical understandings even science can be expanded to embrace a variety of worldviews as part of the environment, both of what is being studied and the one doing the studies. This becomes the basis of understanding the history of how historians do history, which in turn becomes a guide not only to future studies by also a guide to the informed activists. Action in a social setting has enduring consequences. Many unplanned and unanticipated consequences that change the historical setting cannot be avoided entirely, but their effects can be in part controlled, and unintentional and unforeseen outcomes proscribed.

            Through interaction with the immediate other, the infant becomes a child and the child a youth. Stimulus response is soon mediated through interpretation learned in an ever-changing culture. This social setting requires the other for that individual to develop self-awareness. In stratified society a person with the ability to use the “labor power” of others is the master. Master is vast only in relation to a person whose survival is subject to the whim of the boss. The person in charge and the drudge know about bondage in relation to a slave-owner. The oppressed and subjugated worker define freedom in relation to overcoming the conflicting relationship between the exploited struggling to become free and the exploiter who wants to maintain the established unequal relationship.

            This makes the slave the voice of the future and the master the voice of the past. Out of this conflict a new social order is born with a new culture and a new worldview. Human nature is radically transformed to become what it is not. This something soon develops its own contradictions and history moves on. Because change is constant and because the slave is not satisfied with her lot in life, the status quo can never be anything but temporary. The world of the master is built in a past already changed, and the world of the slave manifests itself in a future not yet defined. This conflict can only be resolved when the antagonisms creating these conflicts are resolved by transcending this conflict with a new reality.

            The slave worker was devoid of fulfillment, while the master's minimum wish was satisfied without effort, without work.  It is through work that humanity becomes human. Work creates a necessity of collective production and therefore society. Work is art expressed through necessity. Work is the manifestation of freedom because it humanizes the connection with nature. When work is coerced, it binds the worker who loses the connection with humanity with the loss of freedom. The non-worker owns the fruits of labor but does not have that connection with nature.

            Such utopian dreams are a philosophical foundation of science in the service of democracy. A critical theory of science becomes necessary for this to happen. With this new critical theory there is a concern with the human subject as a person that experiences participation in conscious action, with a concept of freedom of choice after an objective knowledge of the option available. Especially when using historical sociology as a guide to the study of the history of history and historical realism. This diachronic anthropology is the groundwork of understanding human reality. People participate through conscious choices on the changes affecting their lives, even when those choices are limited by an objective reality people have little control over. This soft determinism can be modified with better knowledge of the environment. This includes the reality that social action is not a moral imperative, but an unavoidable veracity.

            Humans are separated from one another through a unnatural illusion of money in an economy based upon profit as most important; and people producing to meet the basic needs of all members of society through a human relationship between producer and consumer being a conceptual impression. Economics is a sub-branch of sociology centered on social relations; that is people cooperatively meeting their own material needs entering into relations of production and distribution. But, economics itself becomes a reification based upon analytic deduction and not empirical investigation of the social environment in which an economy is embedded.

            This marriage of Marx and Polanyi becomes a tool to fight back against the dehumanization of alienation. Because all economies are embedded in social relations and its supporting ideology, alienation is not only the result of a capitalist economy it is also the consequence of a capitalist culture.  Work, the natural and artistic connection between humans and their natural environment, becomes something hostile and an action insolent to, withstanding satisfaction of, and fighting against the worker. Humans become slaves to their own tools as machine pace and the boss controls production goals. This knowledge can lead to the unity of production and design, and the regulation of the economy to meet the basic needs of all members of society;\ or the primacy of the poor. When poverty is eliminated, we can work on replacing consumerism with a more improved understanding of life and a deeper creative meaning of our work lives.

            This is a confidently believable avocation of liberty, pertaining to the distinctive existence of a human being as a self-determining agent responsible for authentic choices, though limited. Promoting a collectivist method that spoke of a humanitarian system of social organization, based on the holding of all property in common as the realization of "authentic humanity" and "total personality" of the individual. This is the set of ethical guidelines that define humankind’s compassionate responsibilities as being involved in every aspect of the welfare of all people, especially the poor.

            Utopian dreams may seem on the surface as wish fulfillment or escapist illusions, but the beginnings of a challenge to mainstream Sociology and positivist philosophy is the foundation of a thought pattern that was part of the liberal or (bourgeois) Weltanschauung.  It had to be discarded before a real understanding of the underlying connections between long-term historical trends could be clearly recognized. The obvious inadequacy of most scientific education in grasping world issues, and its open separation of reason from history, has led radical sociologists to search for new ways of thinking; a search that led to closely examining Marxism, both classical and neo, Cultural Ecology and Cultural Materialist Anthropology, Substantivist Economics of Polanyi and Dalton, Anarchist Communism and Syndicalism, Left Existentialism, Secular Humanism, and Traditional Indigenous World Views. Each intellectual would come up with her own mix, but we are all heading in the same direction.

            In the closed and superficial mid-range theory of the liberals, things are as they appear and analysis is quite simple -- what is missed is everything.  The multiple interactions between variables over a long period of time, the overly determined and interactive changes in the environment, cultural history and consciousness; and most important, a deep appreciation and understanding of life as an artistic expression of opposition to a liberal society and through protest the creation of a deeply meaningful life of our own.  We each define for ourselves who we are. While the powers that be are greater than any of us, we can choose either to go down peacefully lending our decayed bodies to manure heaps that nourish oppression, or kick and scream and shout knowing that each revolutionary in the bright lightening of insurrection undermines the legitimacy of the autocratic oligarchy pretending to be democratic. People are not encouraged to question this legitimacy through our institutions of education. Each rebel must discover her own possibilities for self-transformation from a victim drugged on the individual self-interest of personal accumulation, personal salvation, personal satisfaction, and personal growth. The ultimate reality of capitalist liberal society is that each of us will live alone, shop online, have everything delivered, earn an income online, develop relationships online, eat alone, talk to imaginary friends and lovers, masturbate alone in the dark and never be aware that we are alone -- a brain in a bottle, locked in a dark closet.

            The tragedy in all this is that people become alienated not only from each other and their own creativity on the job, but we become enslaved by our ability to consume. The human animal as part of nature becomes sheepishly estranged from nature. Nature, like faith in the fantastic, becomes a way of viewing life with the wrong side up; and born out of a frustrated human awareness of the daily agony of the absurd and a protest against genuine suffering the wounded panther cry of the oppressed wretches of the earth in response to a callous world escape is the essence of bleak circumstances – fixation on a daydream that brings about dreariness while it anesthetizes the intellect, creating a happiness of quick diversions.

            Sports, nature, religion and popular culture are carefully orchestrated to provide the citizens with bread and circuses.  As Marx once said in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right Introduction:

This state, this society, produces religion, which is an inverted world consciousness… Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. (Marx, 1975)

            With this as a backdrop, we can now talk about resistance and liberation.  There are four concepts that need to be examined closely. All these concepts have been misused and abused. We need to clarify in order to understand. I will use these terms as most people will use them. Choice is what Sartre calls freedom. Choice is inescapable at every moment in our lives. The choice to accept our fate or fight against, even if making the choice to fight, costs us our lives. When family is threatening, the cost of resistance is too great, but we still need to accept responsibility for our choices. By choosing not to choose, we lie to ourselves. It is not that there was no choice, but the costs are too great and someone else controls the rewards. The issues lie in the quality of the choices that are outside our command. Humans as a species are always making choices as part of what defines us as a genus (Homo).

            Then there is liberty, or more correctly liberties. These are specific freedoms specifically defined and empirically observable as in freedom to do something specific.  To speak my mind, to print my opinion, to worship as many gods or goddesses as I want or no god at all are examples of liberties. They are definable and observable, and any restrictions on these liberties whether for national security or some arbitrary reason are also observable.

            Liberties are closely related to rights. Rights are defined limitations on authority. The right to speak my mind is a limitation on the authority of government to stop me. The limitation on authority is a right, speaking my mind is a liberty.

            Then there is freedom proper. Freedom is not a thing but a feeling. The most avid Nazi supporter was free to support Hitler. The Nazi was free to support state-supported hate crimes. There was not liberty to protest these murders.  There were no legally defined rights that protected the opposition to these national massacres. The state had the authority to silence dissent and the dissident had the choice to actively resist and be publicly executed or remain mute while the sadism of mass murder was carried out by the government.  The supporter of totalitarian tyranny is free.

References and Further Readings:

Cameron, Kenneth Neill (1995) Dialectical Materialism and Modern Science. New York International Publishers.

Carrillo, Santiago (1977) Eurocommunism and the State South Hampton, UK: Camelot

Dunayevskaya, Raya (1973) Philosophy And Revolution. From Hegel To Sartre And From Marx To Mao  New York: Dell

Engels, Friedrich (1955) The Conditions of the Working Class in England. New York International Publishers.

Engels, Friedrich (1965) Peasant War in Germany. New York International Publishers.

Korsch, Karl (1970) Marxism and Philosophy, New York: Monthly Review

Lenin, V.I. (1970) Materialism and Empiriocriticism. Peking: Foreign Language Press.

Lukacs, Georg (1968) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics Cambridge

Luxemburg, Rosa (1970)The Russian Revolution and Leninismm or Marxism Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press

Marcuse, Hebert (1968) Reason and Revolution Boston: Beacon

Marx, Karl (1938) Critique of the Gotha Programme: Internationa Publishers

Marx, Karl (1964) Karl Max: Early Writings Ed. T. B. Bottomore New York: McGraw Hill

Marx, Karl (1975) Karl Marx Early Writings Translated by Lucio Colletti and Gregor Benton, New York: Vintage Books

Marx, Karl (1964) The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. International

Publishers

Marx, Karl (1940) Civil War in France: The Paris Commune

 

Marx, Karl (1994) Early Political Writings Edited by Joseph O’Malley. Cambridge

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels (1970) The German Ideology. New York International Publishers

Novack, George (1971) An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism. Pathfinder Press

Trotsky, Leon (1939) The ABC of Materialist Dialectics in From A Petit-bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party Dec 15 1939

Marxist or Existentialist

To the Existentialist the individual feels alone. She lives in a society where she is cut off from nature, humanity, friends and self.  To the Marxist, this sense of being alone as a social occurrence is historically created. We are living in a transitory period when values are uprooted and confused.  Crises – political, economic, moral, social, and psychological – are normal. We each live a daily contradiction. On the one hand our lives are overly rationalized and bureaucratized in which each individual is but a replaceable part; and on the other, each life seems stripped of any rational consistency. The individual lives a life without any underlying goals and over-weighted with superficial external goals defined by the pop economy. The perpetual social crisis is internalized. Old standards are forever being delegitimized and new ones are being discredited. Increasingly, only technical and practical decisions have any meaning, and then only in specific contexts and for a specific moment. Modern philosophy has become a life centered on mental gymnastics and theoretical masturbation, divorced from the concrete reality of daily life.

Existentialism focuses on the subjective and psychological feelings of the individual and does not analyze the objective historical context that creates the emotional chaos of estrangement.  Existence is defined as the “…immediate living experience of the individual. This takes priority over essence or the rational abstract laws of objective reality.” (Poster: 9 –10)  The existentialist claims to freely choose a course and follows it with total dedication. The choice remains relative. The choosing, and not the choice is what is important. Only by choosing among the many possible and arbitrary positions, voluntarily, can one find solace in a world stripped of any final meaning. The basis of this decision for the individual is at best non-rational, but it is important to act as it were grounded in reason. Torn between conflicting truths, we can do no more than make an attempt at finding meaning. In a world pulling in several directions at once, we are able to see beyond the fetishes of our “truths”. It is possible now to see that “truth” is the subjective creation of the one who holds this truth. Our gods and wisdom are our own creation. We can see past the illusions, which mistook a profound truth as universal and failed to see how truth was constructed. This frees us to pick from competing truths, all of which appear to be valid; and to mold our life around such insights and put our freely chosen beliefs into practice.  The individual still makes sacrifices for those values considered as vital, yet she can see beyond blind faith into both the underlying intentions as well as the results of our most “sacred ” beliefs.

The pessimism of existentialism is but a starting point. In rejecting all previous philosophies, one is free to search and to construct a new philosophy on “fresh foundations”.  This is the reason for the insistence on freedom and upon personal responsibility.  For Sartre, freedom is released from all conditions. Each individual is free to become what one wishes. (Novack: 17 – 28) In order to develop this concept of freedom, Sartre draws upon the phenomenological method of Husserl. This focus on the subjective experience in which any objective condition is to be put aside or bracketed comprises Sartre’s studies of freedom. With this, Sartre claims to create a third way which is neither idealist nor materialist. In spite of the claims of Sartre, this third way in fact becomes idealism without a god.  It was also an irrational description of the human condition subjectively perceived by the individual.

With no preplan, we are forced to choose, and choice is unavoidable. With nothing to judge the worth or validity of each decision, the individual remains responsible for every success or failure. With no set criterion, each decision is possibly wrong, yet decisions are unavoidable. People are constantly escaping their moral responsibility in religion, cults, fads, drugs or suicide it is all the same. Even in these escape routes, moral cowardice cannot prevent the individual on some level from living a lie; and there is no avoidance of the constant threat of failure. What Sartre is describing is the individual in mass society. In a world of continuing revolution of the means of production, all past ideologies are torn from their moorings and cursed to remain forever outdated. Sartre thought he found a universal truth in that there is no universal truth. What Sartre in fact found was that his vision of the human condition was the condition of advanced Capitalism in which any existing worldview is always being pulled away from its material roots by the rapidly altering technical world. Both Marxism and Existentialism view theory as a tool; its reality is determined by its effectiveness in social change. However, Sartre over-romanticized the subjective and discredits the objective influence on the ego.

What Existentialism lacks is a method. If the world and society are doomed to be irrational, then rational choice can never intercede to improve the human condition. The classical Marxist would argue that such a position is the luxury of the privileged-but-alienated professional or petty bourgeoisie classes. The Existentialist counter that what the Orthodox Marxists lack is an appreciation for the subjective condition of psychological chaos. Many existentialists claim all Marxists have overly rational explanations; these revolutionaries ignored the individual who experienced a crisis of constant culture shock. The pain and poetry of alienation was replaced by explanation of economic determinism. The extreme individualism of Bourgeois society left each of us with a feeling of abandonment, which an understanding of economic roots could not ease.  Personal values became commodities sold like the latest fashions, and Marxism became but one of these competing fads. Camus claimed Marxism was yet another excuse for oppression.  History replaced God and now any crime could be excused as necessary for the benefit of generations not yet born. Camus further claimed Marxism demanded faith and sacrifice of its followers. Practically, this meant faith was not to question why the leaders got to live while the followers must die. To the atheist existentialist like Camus, Marxism was perhaps the least satisfying of world’s major religions. Marxism can offer neither eternal life, nor a chance to see the fruition of one’s sacrifices. One must give up the joys of this life for a stranger not yet born. One must kill in order to save people not yet alive. Orthodox Marxism led to a sterile faith divorced from the effectiveness of its method as a social science. Yet Marxism, not Existentialism, can offer the possibility of creating a society that allows the individual the freedom that the Existentialist revels in. Only by gaining control of the means of production can people create their own history in ways they choose. Existentialism offered no answer to the subjective feeling of abandonment or the psychological alienation claimed to be central to the human condition. This could easily be seen as negative religion based upon faith. Any revolutionary would claim the subjective meaning one gets from being a radical аre fourfold. There are real problems whose origin is endemic to the social-economic logic of a historically specific society. Through a system study of the historical and sociological roots of these problems real solutions are possible, one is ethically bound to try and the life as a revolutionary is the only meaningful life to live. What Sartre believed was that a dialogue was possible between the two leading radical philosophies of the mid twentieth century, Marxism and Existentialism.

            Hegel was the common ancestor in the evolution of both the Marxist and Existentialist traditions.  Hegel focused on the connection of the parts of the totality, an interdependency of contradictory parts. (Poster 3 –8) Alienation was the major focus of those who attempted to reconcile these two traditions. Hegel gave the word its original flavor, which was to mean estrangement.  A consciousness that projects its substance outside the subject ended in alienation. An attempt to reach this, created a myth that would only lead to despair. (Desan: 27). Feuerbach saw these visionary worlds constructed from the mind in our imaginations. Each part of the human psychology was deified and was carefully placed within the existence of a Supreme Being created by devoted worshippers.  Instead of looking at reality, one’s desires were to be fulfilled in the essence of the Being. With belief, the individual loses her strength and the personality becomes fragile and powerless. God exists at a great distance in perfect splendor of external manifestations of the cultural essence of the pious. The individual became isolated from her own essence. Attention is focused away from this world towards the illusion we create and a God that cannot exist outside the mind of the believing individuals negates any chance at self-transformation. (Desan: 27) For Marx, religion is a symptom rather than a cause of alienation. Religion is a sign of an unhealthy society. Religion divides the individual who now has only a partial commitment to this earth and an eye to the supernatural. (Desan: 30)

            In the political and ideological realms alienation is the construct of class struggle. The class, which controls the means of production, controls the political and ideological structures, which furthers its own interests. Alternative theories can become a revolutionary force. Yet philosophy by itself is nothing: In order to reach the people and transform the world, action is necessary. For Marx, Lefebvre, and Sartre “Truth is concrete.” Only through action in a historical and empirical context can truth be known according to Marx; anything else is empty speculation. (Desan: 28 – 37)

            Hegel taught that an individual becomes a “Self” by being recognized by the “Other” and in turn recognizing the “Other” in the same way. This idea was significant when applied to the relationship of Master and Slave. This part of Hegel became an important metaphor in the study of alienation for Marx and most left Existentialists. When two egos come together, one gains greater power and uses this against the other. The ego that became vanquished becomes the Slave while the victor becomes the Master. The Slave becomes a thing, a part of the material base like the products the slave makes, while the Master becomes free to live life at its fullest.  Nonetheless, the Master is only a Master if she is recognized as such by the Slave. When the Slave no longer does this, the Slave becomes the Master.

            In the Manuscripts, Marx compares the proletarian to the Slave. The proletarian remains dependent on capital for survival. The object of her labor is taken away to the profit of another. Her labor is coerced because she must sell herself in order to live.  Capitalism separates the individual from nature; she is no longer a part of nature that acts and is acted upon by nature in natural ways. Nature is an alien force to be conquered for the increasing accumulated power of the few, not the harmonious security of the community. The worker must live in fear and trembling, for other workers could always replace her in the production of commodities. Without the necessary close ties to other individuals, she is isolated from herself; for her, humanity is dependent upon the recognition of her humanity by other humans. (Desan: pp 33-37)

            This is the basis of all other forms of alienation. In producing a commodity, work creates both use value, the value an object has in satisfying a need, and exchange value, the value a product brings in the market. All commodities share the fact they are the products of labor. The labor of the worker is also a commodity bought by the capitalist. The exchange value of her labor power is called variable capital, or what the proletariat takes home in order to live. The actual worth of the worker is how much value she really produces. The difference between these two sums is the surplus value, or the profit that defines capitalism, which is observable by the continual accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of the few.  This is the Marx that Sartre, Lefebvre, and the Existential Marxists see as basic. This gives direction to their struggle. Deliverance is to be gained through reconstructing the social-economic order. This provides a social dimension and an appreciation for the external objective reality ignored by Existentialism. The isolated protest of the Nietzchean individual is both a social guidepost, or substantive dimensions and a shared ethic.

 Nietzsche claimed:

Few are made for independence – it is a privilege of the strong. And he, who attempts it, having the completest right to it but without being compelled to, thereby proves that he is probably not only strong but also daring to the point of recklessness. He ventures into a labyrinth, he multiplies by a thousand the dangers which life as such already brings with it, not the dangers which life as such already brings with it, not the smallest of which is that no one can behold how and when he goes astray, is cut off from others, and is torn to pieces limb from limb by some cave minotaur of conscience. If such a one is destroyed, it takes place so far from the understanding of men they neither feel it nor sympathize – and he can no longer go back! He can no longer go back even to the pity of men! (Nietzsche: p 42)

Using the metaphor of the Master and Slave, the proud struggle of the lonely Rebel creates a dilemma for humanism underlying existential philosophy. What if the Slave is successful? Will she become a new Master with another set of Slaves? The relationship between Master and Slave is distorted from the beginning. For liberation, the relationship between Master and Slave must be attacked at its source. Servitude destroys common shared humanity. Silence replaces dialogue, eliminating any shred of common ground. This is the injustice because it maintains a silent hostility that separates the Oppressor from the Oppressed. It destroys that part of existence by which the individual can become truly human by the mutual understanding of egos involved. The Master’s desires are not evil, for the desire to possess is but the desire to endure. It is similar to futile love, yet “no human being, even the most passionately loved and passionately loving is ever in our possession.” (Camus: 280) It is this source of oppression that separates the humanity of both, preventing genuine needs from ever being fully met. (Camus: 254 – 284)

The slave who opposes his master is not concerned…with repudiating his master as a human being. He repudiates him as a master. He denies that he has the right to deny him, a slave, on grounds of necessity. The master is discredited to the exact extent that he fails to respond to a demand which he ignores. If men cannot refer to a common value, recognized by all existing in each one, then man is incomprehensible to man. (Camus: p 23)

Rebellion is an act in the name of a subjective value taken to be universal. Though irrational as this is objectively, this remains as the first principle of the rebel. The act itself is as much a confirmation of this principle as it is a negation of the oppression. Rebellion is an act to maintain order that allows this ill-defined principle to thrive. Oppression is defined as such because it represses the full development of the individual in achieving this principle. Idealist as this maybe, it remains a non-rational emotional commitment on the part of the Rebel.  This is both the source and the end of rebellion. Once the rebel justifies her actions, she reifies a new source of oppression.

As soon as a man, through lack of character, takes refuges in doctrine, as crime reasons about itself, it multiplies like reason itself and assumes all the aspects of the syllogism. Once crime was solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trail; today, it determines the law. (Camus: p 3)

Camus, like the anarchist, sees the end and means as inseparable. Not to act is a crime; to act is also criminal if it negates either the humanity of the rebel or another individual. This leaves the rebel with an uneasy feeling that ethics are both universal and situational in the same way, at the same time. Choices are relative and arbitrary between difficult alternatives that demand our full dedication, always knowing we could be wrong.

This is what Existential thought can add to Marxist social thought: the personal. In addition, with concern for the personal, the revolution is for the now, not exclusively for a world not yet ready. Existential struggles are in the present giving meaning to the rebels in their own lives.

Insurrection is a profoundly spiritual awakening. An awakening, which fills the universe, it strikes to the innermost essence of one’s being, and it involves the whole of humanity. One sees the world anew with eyes one has never known before. When one sees something with such intensity that he loses all awareness of the self, he is then committed to life at its fullest or to die in the pits of the absurd. The radical is coming to realize the beauty and the tragedy of the human existence; and this becoming will follow her for the rest of her life.

The Master and Slave for Kojeve was Hegel’s theme no theorist could ignore. The individual at first is contemplation, a consciousness reaching for an object for confirmation. The lack is called a desire; it completes a person to recognize oneself in another. The individual needs another individual to recognize her desire.  In this life and death struggle for prestige, humanness is learned. “The Victor became the Master or autonomous consciousness and the Vanquished, the one who refused to risk himself in the struggle, became the slave or dependent consciousness.” (Poster: p. 12) The relationship shapes the consciousness of both parties. Both are crippled by this relationship. The Master is dependent on the Slave for the position of the Master to thrive. The Slave is the source of all change, for she receives no prestige as a slave and because she experiences oppression is motivated to change the relationship. It is the Slave who must learn to sublimate her desires, while directing nature and creating products that confirm one’s internal aims. The Master neither produces nor learns self-discipline in relation to nature. A free and satisfied human being is a slave who overcame slavery. (Poster: pp 14 – 17) Work allows one to gain the essence of humanness by realizing the power of thought through actions, which means that only slaves have the potential for freedom. (Poster: p 17)

Hyppolite claimed that by seeing oneself as an object one could become human. This can only happen in a community. Each individual must be fulfilled in another to be an individual. The Slave, in denying the immediacy of consciousness in relation to nature and others allows for the possibility of becoming fully human.  This position states that only in a social context is individual liberty possible. (Poster p. 24)

Merleau-Ponty states that through communication one confirms oneself and the other. This is the basis of existence. Both my view of myself and the other’s view of me are distorted; only together can I understand myself. The objective structure must be completed with the human subjective. For Goldman, Existentialism was necessary for Marxism to cut through reification of the subject in bourgeois thought. (Poster: p 48) Only when there are correct objective conditions and a subjective decision to see these conditions is action possible. Truth of history cannot be independent of our projects and freedom can only modify what history presents. For Merleau-Ponty, this history is uncertainty; any outcome is never foreseen and values are always blurred. (Poster: pp. 149 – 155)

Finally, the Existential Marxist, in addition to the need of a subjective awareness of the individual, felt constrained by the rigidity of Stalinist Orthodoxy. A need for a critical Neo-Marxism was necessary to stand poised against both advanced capitalism and bureaucratic socialist societies. Lefebvre, when he broke with the Party in 1956, led the attack of Existentialist Marxism. To him, Marx’s naturalism was founded on human relations and the struggle with nature. Work was the source of alienation, reciprocally related to all other forms of alienation. No alienation could be overcome until work had become humanized. Humanization of society means gaining control, consciously, over nature and society. (Poster: p 57) Some trends noticed by Marx were still valid: The socialization of society, concentration of wealth, and integration of the world. Yet, monopoly capitalism replaced completive; and superstructure and base lost their distinct outlines. The proletariat is becoming depoliticized. Because of automation, job security became a primary concern for labor struggles. Petty-bourgeois culture became the standard model for society with its concern for individual autonomy. Working class interest focused more on leisure and less on work. In daily life the individual was strained between the cyclical time of nature necessary for renewal and reproduction, and linear (cumulative) time, which is the basis of industrial society. New areas of radical discontent replaced the proletariat in advanced capitalism. Youth, women, dissatisfied professionals, bureaucrats and other white-collar workers added new dimensions to radical movements. These groups were not integrated into the two traditional major organized economic classes, nor were they well defined enough collectively to have significant coordinated economic or political clout. (Poster: p 245) Existentialism added to Marxism offered a theoretical tool for cutting through the subjective reification of bourgeois thought.  (Poster: p 48) Marxism was too integrated into a total conceptualization while studying the relationship between the real and the imaginary. While Marxism brought together ecology, biology, psychology and historical sociology, Existentialism now brought philosophy back into the mix. (Poster: p 218) Marx, and Hegel before him, provided a critical theory of everyday life; which requires unlimited departure from any authoritative ideology, continual critique, relativity, understanding contradictions, challenge and the struggle against reification.  Camus added a conscience to insurrection. Sartre, an understanding of the unavoidable responsibility of making choices and accepting the consequences of opposing the limits imposed upon the individual by injustice. Nietzsche, in spite of his flaws, provided a constructive theory of rebellion in a life lived as a festival to be indulged in and not a burden to be endured.

The two schools must stand opposed to each other, each supplementing the other, yet maintaining their respective autonomy. Any total synthesis would compromise the power of each as a social theory. Marxism provides the most effective tool for understanding scientifically how the individual and society interrelated. In the first instance where our minds and hearts dwell, Existentialism speaks with a voice that can cut to the core of the individual, her joys and her lonely struggle.

References:

Camus, Albert (1956) Rebel. Alfred A. Knopf, New York

Desan, Wilfrid (1966) Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre. Anchor Books, Garden City, New York

Nietzsche, Fredrich (1973) Beyond Good and Evil. Penguin Books, London

Novack, George Ed. (1966) Existentialism Versus Marxism.  Delta Books, New York

Poster, Mark (1975) Existential Marxism in Postwar France. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey.

Reason and Empathy

Marxists Meet the Humanists: What a Tryst

Reason is only part of what knowledge is all about. Knowledge is embedded in wisdom. The core of wisdom is empathy. Because humans have highly developed imaginations they can come into contact with lives of people they have never met and people can feel the experiences they never experienced. This is the origin of empathy. Knowledge is founded on reason but also transcends reason through empathy.

The intellectual quest is to understand. To understand is reflected in our ability not only to study rationally and empirically the interacting variables that determine the lives of the victims of oppression and exploitation, but to reflect through sympathetic understanding those lives as lived by real people. This places any serious study at odds with wealth, power, rank and property. Philosophy, science and art are tools to empower the powerless. Education is always subversive; if it is not, then it is not education but misinformation. Education is literacy. Through literacy the disenfranchised will become enfranchised and the dispossessed can claim what has been stolen from them. Among the children of the privileged they can walk away from the comforts of that privilege and stand with the poor and the powerless.

The morality of public life is based upon a higher ideal of not only the greater good of the community, but also the more full development of the individual. The establishment of the interpenetration of art and labor, in which the anagogical connection between humanity and nature is born, is a marriage between Marxism and Humanism. The revolutionary potential of any social movement is based upon a serious study of historical sociology of the social structure and the long-term historical trends that underlie the continually changing nature of those structures. The awareness of a commonly shared humanity and the resilient empathic association with the humble and the expelled, are as a general rule the communal distinctiveness of a reasonable deep-seated humanism. This humanist tradition set for itself the task of fighting in resistance to the opposition of the increase and spread of knowledge and the reaction against improvement of the condition of the poor as a class; leading to the premeditated mystic puzzles of avoidance of lucidity.

The intellectual must find a home with one class or another. The intellectual, to be honest, must be a rebel who claims that most human suffering is the result of decisions made by real people.  When decisions are made that hurt others, it must be asked why? Perhaps it is due to unforeseen consequences or the result of deliberate action on the part of people who know what they are doing. Depending on the circumstances, it could be one or the other or a little of both.

Four points unite classical Marxism with Secular Humanism. The first is in alliance with Naturalism. The earth is a mid-size planet in a minor solar system with only one sun. This solar system is lost toward the edge of a modest sized galaxy with billons of suns, many with solar systems. Millions of galaxies make up galaxy strings and millions of these strings make up a cluster, etc. 

Next, Philosophical Materialism teaches us that human beings are first and foremost an integral part of this earth at each and every point an interacting part of nature and a natural ecosystem. Humans are physical, social and cultural animals; and like any other species, interconnected with their environment in an active way adapting to and changing and readapting the natural world. Through labor, people connect with nature to take from nature what is needed to survive by working with other people, altering resources taken from nature into products that are used to live. In the process, people also create connections with each other, which in turn create society, culture and the personality of the individual.

Thirdly, Humanism allows us to see our commonly shared humanity. The commonality transcends history, culture or the limitations of patriotism or intellectually stifling nationalism. It is claimed Tom Paine said, “The world is my country and to do good is my religion.” Maybe Robert Ingersol misquoted it.

Finally there are the ideas of primacy of the poor, preeminence of the humble people, class struggle and “working class” resistance to exploitation.  To identify with the impoverished and the disadvantaged is to make common cause with those left out of the daylight of hope. Toilers create all wealth and those who generate this wealth live without sharing in the prosperity.  They are forced to live in a deep subterranean tunnel of despair with no way out except changing all of the economic and political relations of society.

These four points add up to a struggle against an autocratic oligarchy centered in the United States, Europe, Japan, and China and neo-colonialism and imperialism everywhere else. This means a struggle, not only for participatory democracy, but real political, economic, social, cultural, intellectual and spiritual democracy everywhere in the world. Not only do people have an innate right to good food, decent housing, appropriate clothing, free education from pre-school to PhD and high quality universal health care, but also the right to highly creative socially meaningful employment.  These basic rights are fundamental to any social progress. When they are met, artistic and humanist principles are expanded to include the full potential of the individual.

The goal of the rebel is to get hold of the genuine power that only comes with true sovereignty for the masses. This can only be done when we triumph over the profound division between those who are deprived of food, comfort and freedom and the ruling class which is not accountable to the people, but controls access to the resources necessary to live and the avenues of authority. This unequal access to the resources for the production of the needed materials of life is the most important and key blockage to the development of the means for achieving any measure of economic security for the majority of this planet and not just the few. Without all the people being guaranteed the basic necessities of life, any measure of social solidarity and human happiness is impossible. Only by empowering the powerless can poverty ever end. Poverty is necessary for wealth. The two are husband and wife of tyranny. To eliminate poverty, wealth of the few must be challenged and in the end you cannot have a minimum income without a maximum income. Because it is the poor majority of this planet who create the wealth of the few, eliminating both wealth and poverty seems just. Because all economies are and have been regulated in a democracy, it is the majority that can choose to regulate the economy for the benefit of the poor first, and everyone else next. This is possible because people create their own lives through their joint labor and recreate these lives each generation.  Humanity has created and recreated society and culture in the course of the advancement of the labor process set in a natural environment that is co-evolving along with cultures, societies and the lives of people. This small and insignificant planet is our known universe and it is the world that through natural forces created us; and in this world we make our lives and it is to the earth we all return to give nutrients to future life.

Because humans create themselves through their collective labor in a social and natural environment, human nature is a social product. Human nature is always changing in culturally and historically specific terms. Human nature is localized in time and space. Society molds people through the process of real people interacting with one another and then these same people refurbish their social relations; thus, themselves as individuals in the process. Because humans are both animals in a natural ecosystem and social artifacts, people eat, sleep, mate, think and make things of beauty for the pleasure of it. They do all this in the social setting they are born into and recreate anew with each generation. The limits of what is possible are predetermined, but those limits are in part the result of decisions made by past generations.  The decisions we make today will redefine the limits for future generations. The aggressive irrational nature of production for profit has long been exposed as a luxury for the few, that society as a whole cannot afford.

Historical studies take into account the necessity for people to provide for their basic needs in order to live. This activity is set in a specific environment that includes the interaction of cultural, social and material elements as part of an ongoing natural process. It is in this setting that real individuals live and work. People live in communities were they talk to other people. They learn from each other and the society they are born into comes ready-made with a culture, which is the sum total of all shared knowledge, learned behavior, patterns of attitudes and perceptions of a people. This culture is the raw material from which a group of individuals draw their inspiration when they interact to solve the ongoing problems in life. With new problems, and most problems are in some way one-of-a-kind before we figure out a solution, an innovative approach often becomes desirable. This is the basis of historical change.

The authors of change are individuals acting in a social setting. This is what we call agency. This agency is characterized as an act that is willfully chosen as shared human activity, and this action is communal by its very nature. Talking is a social activity. Thinking is filtered through cultural learning and therefore even thinking is a social activity.

The result of living in society is that not only we are a product of our social up bringing, but also of a group identity.  Even in protest, we are a creation of our common education. The changing history we meet beneath the profound throbbing wallop of very important inevitability has formed by excitement and pulsation of life itself is the ever present new world born from our blood and sinew of our labor pains of creation.

Source: International Socialist Review, Vol.20 No.1, Winter 1959, pp.13-16. [1] (William F. Warde was a pseudonym of George Novack.)

Source: International Socialist Review, Vol.20 No.2, Spring 1959, pp.53-59.

Source: Camus, Albert (1956) The Rebel New York: Vintage

Source: Dunayevskaya, Raya (1965) Marx’s Humanism Today New York: Doubleday

Source: Dudintsev, Vladimir Dmitrievich (1956) Not by Bread Alone Boston, Dutton

Source: Formm, Erich (1966) I. On Humanism in Socialist Humanism Garden City, New York: Anchor

Source: Marcuse, Herbert  (1960) Reason & Revolution Boston: Beakon

Source: The German Ideology  (1978) Karl Marx and Frederick Engels New York, International Publishers

Source: The Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1964) Karl Marx, New York, International Publishers

Source: Marx, Karl (2006) The First Writings of Karl Marx Ed. By Paul M. Schafer New York, IG

Source: Marx, Karl (1964) Introduction: Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in Karl Marx: Early Writings Ed. By T. B. Bottomore New York: McGraw Hill

Source: The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman, Herder and Herder, 1971; Alexandra Kollontai

Dialectical Materialism as Humanism

         The Hegelian logical system called dialectics was recast under the Marxists’ view of nature and history. The importance here is that Hegel developed his philosophical school and its corresponding logic within the German idealist tradition. Marxists modified this logical system by using the dialectical method within a larger materialist approach. Then in the beginning as Engels pointed out Dialectical Materialism was set up in opposition to German idealism and French materialism or mechanical materialism.

         All philosophical systems are set in a particular historical frame of reference and a particular cultural setting that is always changing. Philosophy reflects a set of economic, political, social and cultural interests of specific classes set in their own meaningful historical time span. Thus, opposing philosophies represent opposing interest.

         Idealism can be defined as “in the beginning was the word” or in other words in history consciousness comes first and all else follows. Materialism on the other hand was founded upon empirical and scientific investigation of an external and material reality. Marxists in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries argued that idealism was used by the wealthy and powerful elites, to pacify the victims of exploitation by focusing their attention away from the real causes of their sufferings.

         If materialism is the foundation of the scientific method, then scientists acting as scientists, whether they are religious or not, are materialists when doing science whether they admit it or not. In modern times materialism has defined much of what has become a modern way of life. There are two classes, which have made use of the materialist philosophy in modern times. Both the capitalist and the workers have benefited from materialism. Dialectical Materialism used by Marxists in socialist led unions and political parties, and positivists and neo-positivists that were used by pro-capitalist theorists like Herbert Spencer and neo-liberal economists like Friedrich Hayek and Paul Samuelson.

         Marx used the concept that there are real regularities in nature and society, which are independent of our consciousness. This reality is in motion, and this motion itself has patterned consistencies that can be observed and understood within our consciousness. This material uniformity changes over time.  For Marx, tensions within the very structure of this reality form the basis of this change; this is called dialectics. These changes accumulate until the structure itself is something other than the original organization. Finally, a new entity is formed with its own tensions or contradictions.

         Science evolved very rapidly during the 18^th, 19^th and 20th centuries. Both science and capitalism grew at the same time. Each was building on the other. Both these trends took off in Britain and Northwest Europe and spread to every coroner of the globe. Both the workers and the capitalists were a creation of capitalism. Because there was a clear relationship between capitalism and science, science took a modernist flavor. Because the capitalist found positivism to their liking and Marxists parties representing labor found dialectical materialism useful, opposing ideas on what science meant soon developed. In sociology structural-functionalism, elite theory, pluralist sociology all leant support to the status quo. Where as a Marxist historical sociology leant support in a more rigorous way Scientific Socialism giving socialists an insight into the long-term trends in the development of capitalism.

         Idealism argues that the best way to study history, change and reality is to begin with the world of ideas and through understanding conscious awareness we can gain an insight into the underlying themes of historical change. But, idealism in its original form declared frankly that not only does history reflect changes in the ideas that govern the direction and content of specific historical tendencies and equivalent transformations, they also held that the Universe itself was the creation of divine consciousness. This in turn led to what exists, exists for a reason and ours is to accept what happens in our lives is either preordained or the result of our own individual actions. Rather than challenging the existing economic order we learn to adapt and accept our fate. Idealism then openly supports the existing relations of power. Positivism for the ruling economic and political elites and faith based religions for the rest of us.

         Materialism assumes there is an external reality that is independent of our consciousness. We are born into a world that already exists and will continue to be present long after we are gone. Through careful observation and systematic studies we can gain a clearer understanding of that reality. That reality is always changing. Thus, materialist theory evolves and changes over time.

         Idealism has its roots deep within human history. Ancient tribal societies that existed long before the first traces of class society, it was the people in those communities that both feared and loved the forces of life and nature. It seemed the outcome of existence was beyond their command. Animism along with spiritual and divine forces in conjunction with magic was used for protection and celebration.

         With the establishment of class societies powerful people strove to keep superstition alive in order to keep the toiling masses passive. The gods reflected human society with their own hierarchy. The gods were ranked according to social position, reflecting the beginning of social stratification among human society. It was their power, which both the gods and human chiefs and monarchs cherished.

         Materialism of the ancient Greeks and the infancy of the early stages of their science were set in motion when certain philosophers looked to nature and not the gods or Neo-Platonism monism for answers. Science stagnated with the Romans and died with the early church of the middle ages. It was not until inherited rank of feudal society was challenged by the new commercial class who were moving into positions of power that things began to change toward open inquiry. This rising class and their intellectual supporters ask hard questions and science was reborn.

         Science looks to the external and material reality. Through careful observation and study we learn of the existing patterns of nature. Through gaining a clearer understanding of these patterns of nature we can design our strategies. These strategies are based upon real scientific principles allowing us to have more supervision over the physical outcomes of our lives. Not prayers, magic, incantations or even fatalism but scientific determinism gives us more freedom not less.

         It is not only materialism and science, but Dialectical Materialism that gives us a model designed to study the changes all around us. Dialectical Materialism helps us arrange information in away that best utilizes this logical strategy in a way that makes understandable that everything in the Universe is ultimately material and this material substance is always changing. This is the defining principle of Dialectical Materialism. The Universe, the earth, human communities, individuals are all natural and material. Everything is interacting with everything around it, evolving in a never-ending movement of transformation.

         This profound understanding begins with the observation of matter in motion and constant change. As Engels described nature is in a constant process of coming into existence, while at the same time ceasing to exist. From the decay of the old order the new order is born. This happens day after day until something new is brought forth. Insignificant and hardly noticeable quantitative changes are constantly accumulating until enough of a strain is built up and then change becomes increasingly more rapid until… In the natural environment one climax community replaces another as continents shift and weather patterns change, the sun explodes destroying the solar system creating the raw materials for a new sun and its own new solar system.

         Everything is made up of internal contradictions. This is the source of change. While the old is breaking down the new is being formed. Engels outlines this as the process beginning with the law of unity and conflict of opposites. Then there is a slow accumulation of quantitative changes appearing over time until the final breakdown.

         This is followed by rapid qualitative changes and the birth of something new. There is social revolution in society, punchuated evolution in nature, super novas, etc. The law of the negation of the negation, the formation of something new, is based upon the Hegelian “triad” of thesis-antithesis, synthesis or a new thesis.

            This gives us an improved working model in the field of Historical Sociology, as well as science as a whole. In order to accomplish the desired outcomes through our actions we must bring our ideas into conformity with laws of the actual physical and social world. Knowledge cannot be separated from practice. Theory guides our practice in a real world.  From our practical activity theories develop. Morality is tied both to our subjective needs and our objective understanding of our universe. Through this connection between the theory and practice our actions lead to more authority over our lives. In this way both the objective and subjective manifestations of our needs can be understood and dealt with. Through a deeper understanding of the universal and the specifics of our humanity and our struggles we can gain an understanding of the basic nature of our existence in its entirety, along with the internal links and the inherent arrangement of things in our environment. By way of inductive understanding and deduction we are able to formulate reasonable insights based upon our discoveries. From these insights our morality is formed and not divinely revealed.

            Physicalism, or logical positivism begins with the statement that things in the world around us can be understood through the use of science and mathematics. Religion, ethics and metaphysics are meaningless. Anything that cannot be demonstrated through observation or proven through experimentation, logical deduction is simply a matter of opinion with no real content. This fits the needs of capitalism, in which the bottom line or profit, not ethical or humanitarian concerns, becomes the center of economic plans. This frees both the scientist and the capitalist of long-term social responsibilities. Both science and economic investment become dis-embedded from the social ethics of the larger community, i.e. value free.

            Historical Materialism takes another approach. It is not value free, but unites theory and action. The research projects are grounded in the needs of real people. Historical Materialism is the sociological application of Dialectical Materialism. Because this was meant to be a guide to social action the sociologist, anthropologist, or scientist is also an activist. There are three themes that link Historical Materialism to social action. They are materialism, action and choice. Action within nature is central to movement. Free choice through action is central to liberation and sovereignty. Through our actions, conscious or subconscious, we endlessly adjust the preparations and influence we have within society and nature. Not only action, but also action within a preexisting environment is the groundwork of theory. These preexisting but changing boundaries do in fact limit the range of our free choices. Frontiers do exist and they cannot be breached. These include the physical universe, biology, ecology, social arrangements, technology, populations, organization, social design and mode of production. Any change we bring about to the above can only come about by studying them objectively and use to science to modify them.

            Theory leads to action, from action comes new theory. Moral choice, determinism and a sense of freedom form an interaction that cannot be separated. Natural history, geology and biology is coupled with human history including sociology, anthropology, psychology and all the other social sciences         

             People participate through conscious choices on the changes affecting their lives, even when those choices are limited by an objective reality that people have little control over. At every turn choice cannot be avoided, it is the alternatives that are determined ahead of time. Once a choice is made the environment is forever altered creating a new set of predetermined options in the future. This is the heart of Historical Materialism uniting theory and action. This soft determinism can be modified with better knowledge of the environment. This includes the reality that social action is not a moral imperative, but an unavoidable veracity.

            Four points unite classical Marxism with Secular Humanism. The first in alliance with Naturalism the earth is a mid-size planet in a minor solar system with only one sun. This solar system is lost towards the edges of a modest size galaxy with billions of suns many with solar systems. Millions of galaxies make up a galaxy strings and millions of these strings make up a cluster, and of course etc.

            Next Philosophical Materialism teaches us that human beings are first and foremost an integral part of this earth. At each and every point there is an interacting part of nature and a natural ecosystem. Humans are physical, social and cultural animals and like any other species interconnected with their environment in an active way adapting to and changing and readapting the natural world. Through labor people connect with nature to take from nature what is needed to survive. Then by working with other people altering resources taken from nature into products that are used to live. In the process people also create connections with each other creating society, culture and the personality of the individual.

         Humanism allows us to see our commonly shared humanity. The commonality transcends history, culture or the limitations of scriptures.

         Finally primacy of the poor, preeminence of the humble people, class struggle and “working class” resistance to exploitation.  To identify with the impoverished and the disadvantaged is to make common cause with those left out of the daylight of hope. Toilers who create all wealth in which those who generate this wealth live without sharing in the prosperity and forced to live in a in a deep subterranean tunnel of despair with no way out except changing all of the economic and political relations of society.

         All ethics are situational ethics. That means moral codes are embedded in a particular historical and cultural setting. Moral codes represent the interests of a particular class in that setting, and often are presented as a general and universal truth. In fact one class will benefit more than the existing competing classes. This is not to say all moral codes are equivalent. The larger the classes protected by the principled instructions on life the closer it comes to also protecting the humanitarian concerns of the opposing classes, as well a offering a chance for liberation to the classes suffering oppression. Thus, ethics has a historical reality. Those moral codes that protect the power of the elites tend to focus on issues shielding the existing social arrangements. While oppositional movements create a code of ethics based upon a common advantages and a mutual aid to larger groups of people. With liberal capitalism came political rights and political democracy. Socialism adds economic rights and economic democracy to this. While adding to the already existing sets of rights without eliminating them, we create a radically new society by taking humanity to places never before gone.

Thus, ethics has its own evolutionary progress.

         We are coming closer to understanding the basis of a “proletarian” ethic, the class of a wage earner’s moral guidelines.  A community of individuals, in which individuality is more fully realized through the near complete rejection of egoistic individualism, is now realized. This is a situation of mutual aid between members of the community, and a reciprocal confirmation, with an innate reflectively inspired interaction between this community and nature.

         As soon as the worker becomes alienated from work, from the product, from nature and from other people labor becomes a labor of personal sacrifice, of humiliation. Under this set of circumstances someone must suffer so someone may benefit.

         Only under the state of affairs of mutual aid flanked by citizens of the nation, abided by a common validation, with an inborn thoughtfully educated communication connecting this group of people and natural world can humanity move to a more complete morality. This does not mean that any ethical system can be achieved before the material preconditions for its insights exists in the historical and social environment.

         At each stage in our analysis of morality it will be noted, that goals are nothing to be jeered at as a basis of ethics. While end and means interact, morality does not predate the material reality that gives rise to it. There cannot be any other meaningful ethics other than situational ethics. Eternal truths and universal ethics are both dogmatic and dictatorial as well as corrupt and unprincipled.

            Marxism like all Humanism acknowledges our commonly shared humanity as the ultimate source of reason, understanding, ethics and social justice without reference to the supernatural, magic, the spirit world or other canons and fables.

         Before we can attain a more universal ethical code moving from family to clan to tribe to nation to humanity and finally to the living planet we need to attain a material reality that is based upon an increasing interdependence that we are aware of an ever larger community. If our world consciousness stops with the next mountain range we will not develop a humanist worldview. If the capitalist income is derived from the labor of others surplus value and economic equality is seen only as a Marxist emblematic fairy tales. From the view of the wageworker socialism, communism, worker councils, worker self-management, and the cooperative commonwealth federation frees the worker and the capitalist.

Sources Used and Further Readings:

Afanaslev, A. G. (1987) Dialectical Materialism International Publishers

Afanaslev, A. G. (1987) Historical Materialism International Publishers

Berman, Marshall (1963) Freedom and Fetishism

Cameron, Kenneth Neill (1995) Dialectical Materialism and Modern Science New York International Publishers

Raya Dunayevskaya, (1965)  ‘Marx’s Humanism Today’ Socialist Humanism, edited by Erich Fromm (New York: Doubleday)

Engels, Frederick (1935) Ludwig Feurbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy  International Publishers

Engels, Frederick (1975) Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State New York International Publishers

Engels, Frederick (1977) Dialectics of Nature New York International Publishers

Engels, Frederick (1978) Anti-During New York International Publishers

Feuerbach, Ludwig (1989) The Essence of Christianity  Prometheus

Godeler, Maurice (1977) Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology Cambridge University Press

Hegel, G. W. F. (1979) Phenomenology of Spirit Oxford University Press

Hegel, G. W. F. (1990) The Philosophy of History Prometheus Books

Hegel, G. W. F. (2005) Philosophy of Right Dover Publications

Lenin, V.I. (1970) Materialism and Empiriocriticism Peking, Foreign Language Press

Lukacs, Georg (1968) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics Cambridge

Luxemburg, Rosa The Accumulation of Capital Monthly Review

Marx, Karl (1964) The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 International Publishers

 

Marx, Karl (1994) Early Political Writings Edited by Joseph O’Malley Cambridge

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels (1970) The German Ideology. New York International Publishers

Mao Tse-Tung (1965)  Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung  Volume I On Contradictions Foreign Language Press

Novack, George (1971) An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism Pathfinder Press

Trotsky, Leon (1939) The ABC of Materialist Dialectics in From A Petit-bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party Dec 15 1939

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Educational Bureau (1974)The Fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist Philosophy  Moscow