when we look around, what do we see?
you might ask, what am I looking for?
and therein lies the answer… what exactly are you looking for…
if you are looking for the meaning of life or are you looking for god
or are you looking for nature or are you looking for human values like
anger or love or hope or charity? you have to get specific on what exactly
you are looking for to actually find it…
I am looking at human society… and what I see is 5 different
components…you have the economic, the political, the social
and the philosophical and the historical… now you could have broken that up into
about a 100 ways and still not enough ways to touch the possibilities
that exist in human society…
we have the political…you see that every day with a policeman
or when you IQ45 lie about how government actually works…
you have the economic… money and the institutions
like corporations that deal with money…
you have the social… and by that we mean, how do people interact
and what songs are on the radio and what movies we watch
and what is hot… mostly our social interactions…
and this historical means how our institutions and ism’s and religions
flow from past to present and then into the future…
and we have the philosophical…these are the ones who create
theories and try to understand the underlying principles
that we have and we live by… even if we don’t see them…
do these categories exist in isolation from each other?
no, of course not… they bleed into each other all the time…
the political and the social and the economic and the historical flow into and out
of each other all the time…as does the philosophic…
now, lets us think about someone like Marx… in which category
does he belong? well, if you think about it, he belongs in a couple
of different categories, the social, the historical, the political,
the philosophical, the economic and that is the beauty of Marx…
we tend to see each category as an isolated aspect, separated from each other
when in reality they ebb and flow into each other all the time…
Marx saw this and tried to account for each category in his theory…
remember he was making a response to what he saw in
the society around him…and his response had a historical context
and a political context and social context and a economic context
and a philosophical context…
but he still broke out the categories… believing that the economic
category was the basic underlying theory of humans movement through
time…it was the substructure of human society… that is his words, not mine…
I believed he laid to much emphasis on the economic but given his historical
times, it was to be expected…
but we must rightly understand the historical, the political,
the social, the economic and the philosophical…
but we must start with remembering our prior examples
of how we see good and evil being two separate and distinct
categories and if we look at good and evil long enough, we
begin to see that they are two sides of the same coin
and if we look even longer we will see that good and evil
are the same thing… depending on where you stand when
looking at good and evil… the viewpoint decides if something
is good or evil or both or neither…if I stand on a religious
viewpoint, then say Christianity, then what is good and evil becomes
clear… if I stand from an atheist standpoint, it becomes hard
to decide what is good or what is evil… if I stand in the
political standpoint, evil becomes what damages
the society and good is what improves the society…
so our understanding of good and evil lies upon what
viewpoint we take when looking at good and evil…
and we see that even what seems like two distinct and separate
idea’s become one…
and we now understand how we must approach our artificial
categories… for our understanding of the political and the economic
and the social and the historical and the philosophical begins
with our starting point… or our viewpoint…
once we begin to understand that the political and the economic
and the historical and the social and the philosophical are all artificial
categories and in reality, they can’t be separated into nice, neat,
categories… instead of 5 categories, we really have just one
category… the human being…and once we realize that even
the human being cannot be a single category, but is part of a larger
category we refer to as life… we can reduce everything into
one category… just like good and evil become one category…
and that is the goal… to understand not the bits and pieces of
human existence, but to understand human existence as a complete
whole… to call the human being not as a category like the political
or the historical, but to call the categories as being part of the human
existence… not separate categories, but one category… the human existence…
and the political and the historical and the social and the economic
and the philosophical as part of the human existence, not as separate
categories… but as one category…thus Marx exists for us as
a creator of a model of human society… and we can become creators
of another model of human society or another or another…
human society is not fixed but evolves and changes and adapts…
and our theories of humans must evolve and change and adapt
and in having fixed, set theories of humans, we cannot then
evolve or change or adapt… our theories of who we are must
change and adapt to the ongoing aspects of human existence which
we have falsely broken out as parts of human existence we call
the political and the social and the economic and the historical
and the philosophical…they are all part of the human experience
and they can be turned into one category of knowledge…
the knowledge of who we are and what is possible for us…
there is only one real, true category and that is life…
and any attempt by us to create isolated and separate
categories of life fails to properly understand
what is really happening…we, life and us…
are the same…and every theory we have is just
isolating and separating out smaller parts of life…
there is but one category and that is called life…
Kropotkin