Skip to main content

Human Consciousness

The following, from a piece entitled Canadian Persepectives 2009: The Failure of Capitalism and the Need for a Socialist Alternative written by the Canadian section of the IMT, is a wonderful description of the dialectal nature of human consciousness. Understanding this is key to understanding how societies change, and this excerpt is some of the best writing on the subject I've ever read. (Click here to read the whole piece.)

The most revolutionary observation about human consciousness is that it is inherently conservative. People do not expect or welcome change. The empirical philosophy of "what you see is what you get" is how most people live their lives. For most of their lives, this philosophy is a close enough approximation of reality that it does not cause people too much distress. However, during times of great change and crisis such as the period we are currently passing through, the philosophy of empiricism is woefully inadequate. Capitalism has failed, and yet the psychology of the mass of the population is more reflective of the past than the present. If psychology faithfully kept track with objective reality, we would have been living in a socialist society for at least 100 years.

The relationship between reality and psychology, the objective and the subjective, is not linear. However, there is obviously still a relationship. This relationship is contradictory and dialectical - in other words, after doing everything possible to resist change (taking on increased overtime, a 2nd or 3rd job, sacrificing health and family, etc.) a limit is reached where there are no more "individual" solutions. It is impossible to determine exactly when this limit will be reached; people are willing to endure more in some periods than others. But eventually, people start looking for collective, systemic explanations and solutions to the change going on around them. They reject the old justifications (and those who peddled them) and look for ideas that explain reality. Consciousness does not catch up to reality in a gradual, linear, reformist manner; it catches up in a convulsive, sudden, and revolutionary way. A conservative consciousness leads to revolutionary conclusions - dialectical philosophy calls this phenomenon the unity and inter-penetration of opposites.

The "old" discredited idea of socialism is coming back with a vengeance. Newsweek magazine even declared, "We Are All Socialists Now." Those who extolled the virtue of small government and free markets are now spending billions of dollars of taxpayers' money to intervene in the economy. They are even nationalizing banks. The captains of industry, the best and the brightest with their multi-million dollar bonuses, have driven the largest banks, corporations, and the entire economy into the ground. In this environment the ideas of genuine socialism can again get the ear of the masses. When every other "solution" has failed, when the so-called experts have failed, and when workers are faced with the prospect of unemployment and homelessness, the idea of occupying your factory to save your job no longer seems so outlandish. People ask themselves, "Why should the bosses receive billions while there is no money to help workers facing foreclosure and bankruptcy? Why couldn't we use that money to nationalize industry to save jobs? What purpose do these bosses play anyway?" Marxists have long explained that it is not revolutionaries that cause revolutions. It is capitalism that creates the conditions that lead workers to revolutionary conclusions.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I’m somewhat familiar with the story, but haven’t seen the tv series “the plot against America.” Is it any good? I’ll admit I have doubts that will be difficult to overcome. My guess is it’s a well stylized but historically simplified attempt to frame international liberalism, particularly the US dominated post war order, as something deeper than what it has become- a value championed almost exclusively by the cosmopolitan elite and global corporations. I also predict that the entire post WW1 context (three months involvement and almost 120,000 Americans dead, split evenly between fighting and the flu pandemic) is lost to Lindbergh and his anti-Semitism. Is this accurate? “The man in the high castle,” another alternative history book made into a tv series that I actually did watch, missed an opportunity to dig into American militarism by not really explaining why so many high level American military members joined the Nazis. (We were supposed to believe it’s just because the Germans wo
4 comments
Read more
  I voted for Joe Biden and hope he wins. I’m also alarmed at the increasingly transparent alliance between the Democratic Party and influential sectors of corporate America, namely media conglomerates and the technology industry. (Their relationship reminds me of the Republican Party and the energy industry.) It’s true there are conservative media outlets that are not friendly to Democrats, but it’s far less certain how objective the “paper of record” and other “serious” media would be to a post-Trump and post-COVID Biden administration that is politically and ascetically their peer. (I would say we are at a point of competing Pravdas, but that would be a slander against the Soviet newspaper’s pre-Stalinist period when it was a battleground of ideas.) Perhaps even more damning is the Democratic Party’s relationship to the technology industry, particularly when companies like Twitter and Facebook have shown they are prepared to unilaterally decide what’s true and what’s false. Not many
2 comments
Read more
State power (that is the ability of the state to use brute force) has increased beyond any somewhat comparable moment in history, yet the state’s ability to everyday govern has decreased to historically poor levels. People (across the political spectrum) typically make sense of this through various conspiracy theories, some more attached to reality than others. (Many are nakedly conspiratorial, others have elements of structural analyses, usually done by trained post-structuralists of course.) America is ground zero, but this is not exclusively an American phenomenon. (China is a possible counter-example, though their competence is both exaggerated and relies heavily on the brute force part of the state.)  This creates a stalemate of sorts. The state lacks legitimacy, but also can’t be replaced. You can add Ross Douthat’s Laschian critique of societal “decadence” (drift may be a better word) to this context. His analysis is largely correct in my view and he’s also right that it’s relat
Post a Comment
Read more