The magic trick of a true society is for its components to rank and privilege each other. So a fluid mechanism exists whereby the biggest concentrations of A are marked by people who value A and benefit of it, and a close scrutiny is applied constantly to the quality of what is produced. Perfection: Control is bottom up, executive consequence is top down. But herein is not enclosed the whole of the formula – as, contrary to Marx dialectic as seen from the position of an abstract proletarian, it includes also that which is in the minds eye of the executive director.
Marx never came to the luminious ideas of attribution general value to the process of production. He thence never even considered the angle of justification, and spontaneous will to sacrifice – the glory of the worker for the greater good — which is all the USSR ultimately came to stand for. A virtue so high and out of touch with the ideology’s roots that it had become invisible, and in its highest visible virtues the USSR aspired to meet the invisible.
And so a new, far greater and more untouchable Above was created. It was thus that the Marxist ideal lead to the ultimate subjection of the human to the idea of the Greater Body of Man - something evidently no single human can have any conception of - and of which it is thus rather questionable, if it holds ay merits to the individual at all.
Instead, Marxism - and a child is screaming very loudly low, down below me on the beach - had led to the impulse at least toward the singularization of Capital. Marx’ very exhorting the principle of Capital as something to overcome has made capital infinitely stronger than it could have done by the mere devices of Capitalism. It has allowed the Industries to totally subject all forms of government.
Original Capitalist, minimal governments can not be bought, as they are already well invested in themselves. Socialist governments can only be bought. They can do little else than to cater to interests here and there by the ones who make themselves most available. They are bought out of good will - they basically think that all (clever) Lobbyists are Auschwitz victims.
Given that the Socialist will has prevailed, and that its means for destabilization by revolution have proven to be inexhaustible it is clever for us to introduce something else than a revolution over it; as we must be utilitarian in our causes, and ideological only in terms of our tastes; we can afford this luxury because we can afford none else. We are aristocrats by necessity; history has forced this on us.
Ironically it was only through the looming danger of the USSR bringing about the Interior Revolution in European capitalist nations that the workers demands were granted and the welfare state was created. In the brief time that this lasted, all economic rigors were slackened to bring about an enormous growth of prosperity based on the everlasting productive nature of the satisfied and secure man.
Socialism is an asymptotic climb to utopia. It approaches the satisfaction of the common man closer and closer, but at ever greater cost per increase. In the meantime everything else falls away, and ultimately satisfaction has become synonymous with banality. Intellectual satisfaction is increasingly scorned, as, when the curve progresses its stretching and flattening, some truths are becoming dangerously obvious.
Foresight itself becomes anti-systemic. All intelligence is employed to progressively stupefy the workings of the human society, turning it craftily into a kind of goo. From within this goo all exceptions bubble forth like bubbles of promise and happiness, but nothing sticks. The rock star is forever tragic, the amusing antithesis to the socialist promise.
Within any socialist society, the idolatry of successful men is tenfold; these men are interpreted not as successful individuals (all individuals are in Communist principle equally successful) as agents of necessity itself. - exempt from commonality, as even communism ultimately realizes by trial and error that power is not coherently maintained by the masses. Power mustn’t really exist, but it must still be operated.
So we get the Stalin and the Mao, the men who can do endless harm without being seen as harmful. They are perceived as too great to be said to simply ‘exist’.
The strange beauty, and only beautiful to high spirited philosophers and grand style artists and politicians (who may very live humble lives among ordinary men) is that the states that were defined by their founders as Socialist, became either pillars of monolithic power or poverty stricken backlands. The former in cases of nations and peoples that have a sense for the great, i.e. the tragic (Russia, China, also France, Iran, Israel), and the latter in cases of mere politicking. The endurance required to suffer the machinery of Communist History is not given to all peoples. Socialism has been most of all a psychological reform of Christianity – exposing new layers in the psyche to the principles of self-sacrifice for the greater good, and relinquishing power from the hands of humans even more fundamentally. Not without Socialism, could the society of man have been transformed into machine. Not without the fundamentally incomprehensible writings of Marx as a leading standard could power have gotten so utterly lost to the land of the sane.
The mark of sanity is a belief in what has has in this time been branded as ‘magic’. It is the very essence of human goodness – the versatility and readiness of good, the endless opportunities it creates or itself between agreeing humans. Communism was the greatest plague on human goodness and the natural ways of the world, ‘magic’. But magic is immortal, and unlike God or State, it is indifferent to indignities. Magic is only paralleled by light in light-ness. Death is only one of its games. Magic is self-valuing interaction. If it must abandon the Earth, then it is only because Earth has ceased to exist. It will outlive man, all of his Gods, the very Earth and even the Sun and its mothers, and its masters, and the entire universe. Principle is lord and magic is queen. As soon as three self-valuings exists, their world has become inscrutable to causal logic.
Looking at nation building and business creation, will see that all base power always involuntarily employs all magic at its disposal, and whenever it is under threat it will see to create new magic. Only the overfull magician knows to operate within his magical entity – all others are slave, in all their power, to the magic combusts and explodes this power.
It is due to a love for many communists of whom I have seen and continue to see the mighty trials of conscience, that I can see a bit into the emotional nature of Marxism, which is its engine - it works on steam, steady pressure. European Communists were of exceptionally good make in World War II. Communist Moscow inspired a feeling of both hope and fear - it was always evident that power is terrible, with the Russians - they did not attempt to make this ever go away. But they could afford it, with the land masses where no control could ever be absolute, they could live and endure the most terrible repressing machines. This is not a Russian virtue, but it is not itself a vice either - the tolerance for suffering is perhaps neither vice nor virtue - it is a capacity that can turn out either way, Self-valuing is the collapse into positivity of this capacity - disintegration, death the absence of such collapse. The USSR was a radical positive, more radical than any historically, empirically constructed nation can have been, as all are rooted in the past of which myth tells great distress and ambiguity about man and his promise. The Soviet Union proclaimed that this suffering was all over now. A couple of people who stood in the way had to be removed (another Russian virtue is understatement. Overstatement, as well) but in the end it had all led to the unthinkable; under de modest name of Yuri Gagarin, man made the symbolic step into a scientific paradigm. And science would come to establish the Utopia. That is an often understated core tenet of the Ideology; the scientific inevitability of the goodness of man. Has a nobler folly ever been enforced on a people? But how fatal, this notion, that science should of its own devices lead to a good world for a human being. And how perfectly fitting that the ideal form of humanity is recognized in the term ‘worker’. Are we done yet? No, we would have been if this were the Marxist forum - ; analysis only brings closer the possibility of action. Action is by thought, equally as analysis - do not take me for a fire-stick handling puppet, I am bound to the reality of fate which is a mind, decided by the many minds of men, all set on different particulars but within a universe of common core values, all categorically one mind, whereas only circumstantially - actually - an identity. Identity is wholly contingent, but it is always necessary. Where contingencies become of a bureaucratic rather than a blood sweat and tears kind of dynamic, the identity becomes, patient, distracted, disowned and entitled where it had been more simply a greater or lesser degree of happiness in a more ‘brutal’ (visible) world. But alas, men everywhere had become too dissatisfied as a whole with the whole, and Marx was ultimately only an agent, a continental catalyst for something that had been manifesting in England for quite a while. Marxism is thus in a sense the continental translation of modernity; Marxism is intimately intertwined with consumer capitalism. The producer has become the consumer; the terms have been reversed.
Produce per ‘capacity,’ consume per ‘requirement’. The strongest virtue of this phrase is surely its flexibility, the absolute lack of actual criteria it sets, other than that one needs to keep a worker alive, and that one is justified to pummel him into slavery to the utmost of his capacity to suffer. Someone has really thought very hard about this and figured out a way to milk this phrase for all its worth. He hammered out a framing protocol for human desire in order to obscure to the worker the fact that he is a worker. Nothing has changed - if anything conditions are becoming worse than ever - only the notion that the worker now has of himself; he is not a worker but a consumer. He is essentially fulfilling his desires, and only working as contingency to that infallible reality. This is the aim of consumer capitalism, not making money. Money is made from arms, drugs, land, metals, resources - no one makes business anymore, everyone works in a chain, and these chains do not need to make profits, they need to make life attractive enough for the worker to never question the choices of his free will. A couple of steps ahead, that is always all it takes. That and the will to do it. Right now a hundred feet below me three Che Guevara flags are tearing in the wind - all the flags here are ragged, beautiful! - a powerful fashion image, a suitable worker-costume. Capital is simply much more intelligent than any single man. It commands, during hundreds of generations, families to resist and repress, to contain and to obtain more for security. In the meantime, the power-differences that this creates cause a vast dynamic of ascension and fall, and a culture of aspiring made-men, but with an ever receding horizon of power; the age of technology has consumed power and binds wealth to science. Therefore science is controlled to not mean anything else than it has meant for thousands of years, despite mathematical paradigm shifts, the logic of power need to remain consistent with the conditions that sustain the present order. As Capital evolves so do the class-structures - it is long ago that there were simply owners of the means of production; now the means of production has become the entity it was destined by Marx definition of the world in its terms to become and it wholly owns mankind. It controls all of mans current policies, meaning his habits, which can be said to mean his character. We residing in the deep of this belly may speak and analyze but this changes nothing, until we arrive at a decision to apply what we have developed. And he who has no ears here is deaf, or tone-deaf at least; in the presently unfolding world-episode, a thought of true power is a principle of economy.
Stalin and Mao were were no simple selfish tyrants. I think of them as the inevitable consequences of the hiatus in Marx thought. They represent to me the vacuum of self-valuing in Marx materialism. Hence, " they could not be said to simply ‘exist’ " (so as to be culpable) .
Precisely like we do not take ourselves culpable, but neither science, of what we through science produce; both Stalin and Mao were ‘scientific rulers’. This might be better understood in concert with my latest post in the philosophy forum thread ‘Excerpts’ - posts written at the outset of the perspective that became VO.
Both men were driven, as are all beings, to advance their own interests, but governmental Communism especially provides this completely unconditional seat of power, connected to the eternal truths of science, a true Sun-God. Whether or not Marx intended this with his logic is no longer the point; we are well beyond the reach of the minds of Marx and other thinkers of that century; the world has grown far more intelligent and powerful an terrible than what could be described in the terms available then. Nietzsche had first to be understood in order to have a picture of political and economical realities. The difference between man and collective had to be made clear. The logic of men is always greater in size but lower in standard than the logos of one man. That is why VO can not command a logos. It can simply guide the existing logics and ground them. It works for a fascist equally as it works for an anarchist, an aristocrat and a democrat. But Marx explicitly left out the notion of self-valuing and interpreted man only in terms of his function - that is to say, in terms of a greater whole – to which he attributed a self-less but active will. This is the precise antithesis of what is even possible at all.
Hence, all this psychedelic consequence, the reaching into the cosmos, the truthful yearning for substance, having it abandoned it on the good Earth, finding it in the pure practice of science. The humanity of the Soviet Union is in the majestically innocent hope, that through cruelty and oppression, the spirit of man shall be delivered in its scientific will. It is very strange how this should have happened - if not as an intoxication, a boyish infatuation with science as his own superpower. Much of human greatness stems from profound belief in untruths; the truth is never quite as intoxicating as the lie of power - and all marketable drugs are lies-of-power, and all human aspiration is grounded in the brains capacity for lying-to-power. But no one ever did it quite as majestically as the Soviets; no culture showed at once the perennial greatness and the abysmal earthly failure of the fancy of the cosmic child. I will go as far as I can here without losing myself; having all this here I can clearly see that indeed it was the spirit of the times; the Revolution took place amidst one of the most mystically prolific periods in the history of Europe; the birth of mystery schools in England, the birth of State-Communism in Russia and then of Nazism in Germany; all this can be seen well against the Theosophical doctrine of the Hierarchy, which is the most impressive of all the schools erupted into power at that juncture. It was the time when the mind of man took a dramatic turn inward. Relativity is the great overarching thought - the new “Aeon” had taken hold and everything was possible - any idea could at that point be brought to reality, and driven to its ultimate consequence.
It too a while for all these consequences to become visible. In the end capitalism usurped all of the beautiful doctrines, as the only mechanism that is honestly dedicated to value, and self-valuing. Capital, the amassing of value. A living human body is immense capital. The greatest philosophical deed to ever have been done is the collective accepting idea that man, by definition, owns his own body. This further proves that man is capable of understanding value ontology, and that thus n artifices, catalysts and path-ways have to be devised for man to lead him to truth. Jesus and Marx can go home, and none of their brothers need return; man will ultimately prove to be capable of figuring it all out by himself, case by case by case, until all of their ancestors silliness is forgotten, - and a very new horror scenario sets in, that is mentioned briefly by Nietzsche; “consciousness ultimately as a glitch - a temporary side effect to functionality will-enforcement” – the battle of the self-nature “Lord 1” against the world-nature, “Lord 2” - the derived Lord. I try to avoid the terms god and satan. Man against the machine - but this is not a physical battle, as we by now very well know. The machine is systemic to most minds of the children of a generation; it is in the behavior, the value patterns of humans. In their case, consciousness is a glitch - and so perceived and judged.
Have you seen this terrible reality? Have you been explicitly asked by friends or what passed for them to ‘be a bit less conscious’? I have, frequently; consciousness was seen as an assault, something Martian, an intrusion on the stability of the hive mind. It is possible that consciousness as we know it will be rooted out. It is possible that man will continue more as plant than as mind. If so there is also another species being formed, of excessive mind, the caste of controllers; this is true entropy; the separation of substances, the dying of the dynamic. Our human philosophical self-valuing can only exist as pure difference, as the impossibility of peace except the heart before the vastness of nature, which includes war. Struggle and force, and the enjoyment of force and the enjoyment of being subjected, by something perceived as reflecting, bestowing abundantly ones own self-value. This is part of self-valuing, it is the consequence of man as a being within a society where he is always outranked in many fields that he can perceive the value of. It is not part of Marx; he demanded the dictatorship of the subject; but arg - of the direct opposite of the subject, of the ‘goo of subjects’ .
Marx unleashed lower class pride an led it to settle as bourgeoise submission.
Dialectic of thymos and eros
If we consider the situation of the northern European proletariat during the 19th century, we do not need a Marx, or any intellectual teacher, to understand the basic drive that got workers to uphold Marxism; the will to work less and earn more. The will to not be slaves. Marx gave them only one thing; hope. He gave them the ‘under this sign you will conquer’; - the term ‘proletarian’ was to mean ‘victorious’, through the doctrine of historical necessity. But all technical explanations as to why and how which people would come to rise, were perfectly unnecessary. Just page-fulling, ultimately; it had to loo impressive to believe it. Not that this was Marx motivation or his only intellectual merit; he is sure to have gotten somethings right - but certainly not that the workers would come to lead!! No matter the layers of dialectic and transfiguration of capital, and no matter the iron will behind it, that contradiction can not be made real. A worker works. A leader leads. They need not be different per se, but they are different terms, much like guilt and shame, and right and might; it is possible to bring them together under certain circumstances, but that does not mean that they are the same.
The welfare state and the New Deal - all had ultimately to do with the realization that people are capital, and that they need to be kept fit, which means willing. What Marxism realized is that people were to be treated as people. Marx gave the people who were workers the ‘divine right’, the claim to necessity, i.e. the courage , to fight and to organize, and this led for vastly improved conditions for the lower classes. It created out of this class a consumer class, and then outsourced all working class work to Taiwan and nations like that. Worker conditions are now worse than they were in Europe, but they are not in Europe - that is what Marxism accomplished for Europeans. We became too expensive to exploit physically, as ‘working machines’. We now needed to be exploited as ‘buying machines’. To this end we have to do largely pointless work, entertain each other; the economy of western Europe is very largely built around the creation of hi quality confusion and distraction, the art of advertising as our cultural craft and pride. The Germans, French and Italians continue to produce physical objects of use-value, but the main economy is ‘information’ which truly means distraction. Academia are , have been since the 1970’s, included in this.
The trick is that the term ‘worker’ does not really point to the real nature of the subject to the rule. The only relevant thing about a subject to a greater power is that he remains subject, and does not make claims to the throne. To this end, it was best to turn him from producer (who has pride and will) to consumer, who is only perpetually yes/no satisfied. Satisfaction was, to the worker and the aristocrat, a matter of nature - it was not a philosophy. It was more important by what one would be satisfied; there was such a thing as honor, the recognition of value, of ethics. Satisfaction as a result of the good. Now, satisfaction became the good itself; it thus became abstract, and got to be out-of-reach. It was no longer simple nature but the end of the rainbow. It was not works natural reward but the essence of life, to attain which one thus stated to look for more satisfactory means. In this process the will to power was lost and the will to the feeling of power was adopted. Thereby the difference between rule and subjects became absolute. The Workers Rights ultimately served to satisfy man with something far less than his natural part, which is the Lions part; by forfeiting the individual will to the world-will, for the collective right to a little bit of self-determination, the working class sacrificed all aristocracy, which serves as a joyfully self-disciplining medium between people and rule, and the rule was secured in its seat and freed of its responsibility. Thus was the world set on the path to waste.
The history of Marxism acutely resembles the progression of a psychosis. It starts with absolute liberation, a sense of having conquered the world by merely being. Then a period of wavering states - exaltation and exultation now and severe depression later. Then, in the transitions and dreams, hallucinations kick in and all is lost - unless a magician is known or the character is of severe self-discipline, bred in intellectual rigor, a priest - that is at the very least what one has to become, to survive a psychosis. A priest int he sense of shaman, teacher of naked truths, protophilosopher, ‘adept’. But this is not made clear by our society. I have seen countless of the most honest minds fall, and they were all first liberated, then liberators, then lost themselves in unfathomable ways, and left a wasteland. It’s too easy. Ideologies are far more psychedelic than drugs, more ‘out there’, less earthly. The Marxist progression was one of first gaining an absolute momentum, and then when the bordering phase had been reached, by no resistance but the sheer absurdity of the proposal, the effort was existentially aborted, and absorbed in ‘existentialism’ - a state of sedated hallucination under tight control of physical movement by an anonymous “Real”.
Marx theory of value holds that the value of a product is defined by the hours of work the producer puts into it. Use-value, a concept he embraces, is transferred from the object itself and its possible uses and the demands for those uses, to the effort of the laborer.
This shift has no logical ground except that it serves to redefine the laborer as the commodity. It is evident that this is in the first instance a empowering situation to the laborer, and also that it causes the collapse of industry wherever the worker is so empowered. The result is the introduction of industries that can handle low quality personnel at bottom price - all work that involves skill and very many dense hours - all valuable work - is outsourced to countries without a Marxist law-giving. So indeed, Marxism only works if the larger part of the worlds population is under Marxist law. Even then though nothing in the hierarchy has changed - workers work and owners own, but very little of worth is produced. Thus there is a tightening of the markets, less capital to distributed and owners will hoard more.
The difference between Germany and France - in rural Germany, every town is involved in an industry of parts for a greater whole. Specialisms are passes from generation to generation in the village communities. These specialisms form links in the chains of production for the different machine and automobile giants that have their bases in particular cities. America used to be this way as well, before it squandered its industrial edge to the more disciplined and secretive Japan. I attribute all this leniency to the spirit of equality and fair chances of which Marxism is a catalyst, but which fits in the larger pattern of societal aging. Suddenly the individual is justified over his work; this ha[pens when the work has become unworthy of an individual. When craft is lost. Marxism is the answer to the degradation of the work-principle. Work was no longer its own justification; work was no longer an engine and blood and heart of culture. Interestingly this is exactly what did not happen in Germany. Socialism did in the end tae hold there, but without compromising Capital. It has to do with the nature of German proletariat, which is the most naturally humble of Europe. Humble not out of ability of spirit but out of a simplicity of tastes. German tastes are satisfied by simple explicitness of quality. If something is clearly a good object in its class, the German is infinitely satisfied. He can go on for hours on the quality of the material around a wheel in a tape recorder, where it was produced, who produced it and how he battled with his neighbor over the dominant design, and he will even admit to the quality of the neighbors design and look pensively and be silent for a while. He then looks at his own little wheel and is deeply satisfied with the richness of existence and his prominent place in it. This is how these cars are built, every part wants to be better than the next. Also, I find that much if not most of all crucial work of discipline and innovation is done outside of paid hours; to be voluntarily occupied is already a proof of the worth of ones work.
Marx was a reflection of the degradation of work. I remember now one image that brings chills down my spine; during the time in Austria we once visited a castle with a treasury of ornamental objects made by medieval technicians, locksmiths, artisans, alchemists. Moderners have no idea what humans were capable of once. It was completely insane, the perfection of machines had long been attained by humans hands before the machines were created… but that only makes sense. The infinitely subtle fingers of man to satisfy his banal tastes - this is the story of Germany and it needs its clients to give meaning to its craft. It is far more impressive to see an oil sheik driving a Mercedes than it is to see a German drive one. Somehow the German looks boorish, arrogant and ugly while the Arab looks majestic and infinitely wealthy. A German in a vehicle - the best case is a family vehicle, a Volkswagen indeed. Germany serves; it now rules because no one knows how to serve anymore, so there is nothing to rule except panic. I have always hated to concept of service but I am learning to appreciate it during ours of hammering and chiseling away at the keys. I don’t need pay for the work I deem worthy - Capital is only in stratosphere of its excess justly curbed by Marxist limits. At its core, it is simply human generosity, reacted upon by human parasitism. These two are the true dialectic forces at work.
The following is an OP on ILP where the thread naturally turned into a travesty. Sourcelink (clicking not recommended)
Marx’ economical phenomenology implied “Man can not be trusted with power” but Marx the ideologue stated “we require that all men trust each other with power”.
Desire for wealth and power is human nature. So is desire to share and be fruitful. If you want to take the second and kill the first, you will represent the first and kill the second.
Economy can not be based on anything other than individuals.
Individuals do not exist in Marx’ universe. He thinks they do but he describes completely different entities. He did not understand the most basic thing about humanity and he didn’t think through the requirements of industry, among which is voluntary cooperation based on personal trust, something which was clearly demonstrated by his own production process under the auspices of Engels.
The plan that Marx set out for history needs to be seen in terms of the direct situation in which he found himself. Europe was already on the verge of revolution. Marx, through his adoption of the bizarre Hegel, gave the revolutionary impulse a psychedelic edge. And in this it was justified; only a raging madness of a billion men was able to produce the industrial pride that set the track of workmanship straight and brought all workers under control of a new scale economy; the Soviet Union invented space travel, it place man above Earth and thus conceived - and ultimately necessitated - Globalism. America is wholly reactionary in this respect; her strength lies in the homeland,which it has spent on behalf of Soviet type aspirations. (It’s not a coincidence that Marx and LSD found a happy wedding in the sixties and seventies.)