I am trying to get a sense of how my grandparents got swept up in the social flurry (contagion?) around Marxism & those sorts of new ideas that must have been popular & enticing to youth in the late 19th century in Eastern Europe (specifically, Poland and also Russia.) My grandparents renounced old ideas such as religion and fully embraced these new ideas, bringing them here as young people & believing in these new ideas for the remainder of their lives. None of this was discussed in my family--I was raised Marxist by people who were raised Marxist, but it was all a foregone conclusion & never discussed. I'm trying to put it all in context. I see how Marxism continues to appeal to naive idealists who aren't being taught the evidence of history (I was not taught it at UC Berkeley, I received an ahistorical Marxist education.) It isn't until recently that I became aware of how I was raised in a low-control cult. Understanding how this captured generations of youth may help us to stop that ongoing capture.
What I try to point out in this piece is that Marxism as exists today (and existed for your grandparents) is only a vessel for the ongoing revolutionary spirit. Other ideologies like liberalism, fascism, nationalism, etc., serve the same purpose. I don't see Marxism as the cause for this demand for constant change, but I do see how Marxism can be used to fulfill those demands by producing ever-shifting utopian goalposts. But even this was something Marx himself lambasted in the Manifesto.
It was popular in Europe at the time as a solution for the contemporary existential crises various states were facing; it provided causal mechanisms for those crises and a means for resolving them, just as Nazism did, just as fascism did, and just as liberalism did. It provided a vision for a stable world order and a mission for its acolytes. But today instead of acting as a means of fulfilling a wholly new world order, it acts as a means of continuously pushing the existing liberal world order into the future.
I agree with you that the Marxist political projects that have been attempted have ultimately and inevitably failed and that the historical materialism Marx espoused has not and likely will not take place, but I also don't think that tracing its origins and explaining them will dissuade anyone from gravitating toward it. Even if all existing Marxist strains were to be destroyed, that would not prevent radical liberals from creating new ways to liquidate and reformulate our present order into the future. Many of the existing Marxist strains openly contradict the Marxist tradition, or are bankrolled by so-called enemies of the proletariat. Our society's inherent need to liquidate and reformulate wouldn't stop in the case of Marxist branding failing to capture the disaffected intellectual's imagination.
Marx was not alone in his thinking. All of the 19th century thinkers saw this directionality to life, this myth of progress. They were confident that just as the sun rose in the east and set in the west, that civilization began in the East and was moving westward. It's even more visible in Darwin than in Marx. They are so confident that Change = Progress that they never feel a need to search for a mechanism or a cause. The Age of Revolution left them with a world that always moved Left and they believed that that was good.
They just never seemed to realise that correlation was not causation and that repeating the same form(even a form of change) without the same spirit, the same intangibles, would never produce the same results. It's like the difference between food from land that is rich from natural farming and food from soil that is dead from decades of industrial farming. It checks all of the same boxes but something intangible is different. Our whole civilization is chasing metrics and has forgotten that the metrics are merely proxies for something else, and none of them are good proxies anymore.
I disagree, I think the entirety of the 19th century philosophers were desperately searching for a causal mechanism (Darwin in biology, phrenologists in race, liberals and nationalists in national sovereignty, Marx in class) and an ultimate resolution. None of them embraced change for the sake of change, they embraced change for the sake of their hardline goals and they believed once those goals were achieved, a new stable order based around their founding principles would emerge. What caught them unawares (with the possible exception of Marx and Engels who later softened and saw that the bourgeois revolution would likely develop itself for centuries before transforming into something else) was that their principles would also be liquidated in the modern world by the very conditions that propelled them to victory in the first place.
I don't see how they could have predicted that the productive forces of the era would never consolidate into the kind of stable order that existed before their time. Nothing like it had ever happened before, their predictions were still premised in past events. What Marx observed correctly (which others at the time did not) was that even this new ruling class would never create a stable aristocratic system but would itself be constantly liquidated and reconsolidated according to the capital they held. This was unlike the aristocratic system wherein the monarch was ultimately in control of his kingdom, it's a reversal of authority; the bourgeois capitalist acts in service to capital.
Our present society chases metrics because that's what keeps society stable even as it constantly hollows itself out just to fill itself again. An economy premised on more basic survival needs like food surpluses demands a much more stable structure, but today agriculture is a very small fraction of what fuels the global economy. Obviously if our food production is halved, the global economy would shrink by much more than half, but manufacturing and services form the backbone of the present-day economy, and those sectors demand a constant addition of value beyond basic replenishment even if we don't have an actual survival need for trinkets like smartphone chargers. But the economy's survival depends on the production of those complex machines, which in turn means they are now a survival need for everyone.
But I agree with the second paragraph, the intangible is different and it's missing; there's a constant spiritual void that is filled only momentarily before being sloughed off. The only resolution to that is a more stable order but that would inevitably lead to a marked decline in quality of life, a contraction in the market revolution which returns us to more basic survival. And unfortunately all the revolutionary principles of 19th and 20th century leaders that demanded a stable structure would lead to such a contraction. Francoist Spain faced the same economic and political fate as the Soviet Union, albeit on a smaller scale. Humans have a need economic power, political freedom, and spiritual fulfillment, but at present we can only pick two.
I'm not sure about that. They sought, you might say, an immediate or efficient cause. I.E. biological change leads to progress. But they missed out on finding, or I think even looking for, a teleological cause. 'Why does change have this directionality? Why are later forms preferable to earlier forms?' In biology, we might ask 'Why should the most fit survive at enhanced rates?' Behind it we find nothing but a tautology, 'most fit' is simply taken to mean those that survive at increased rates and perhaps this is where we find the heart of 19th century materialist thought. Mere survival, or mere improvement of economic conditions or whatever it was that the phrenologists sought, I can't pretend to know, were made the yardstick of humanity. 'The purpose of my existence is to have a good career so that I can contribute to society' where contribute to society is understood to mean improve the economic conditions of society.
But men are not economic creatures, not really. Economy is in your formulation 1/3 of the needs of men which is generous but not out of the ballpark. They ought to have predicted that the order they produced would be unstable because they began by making the target move. They began with the Hegelian idea of moving truth.(I believe that it mostly entered European consciousness through Hegel however these particular individuals obtained it.) If thesis is always combining with antithesis to make some new thesis then it is unavoidable that the entire foundation is false and thus unstable.
I brought up chasing metrics since that is what I see so much in corporate lalaland. I'll give you an example of what I mean. My team at work uses a work order system and whenever a work order is created you make an estimate of how much time the job will take. Well, we have a metric for 'hours of backlog' which is simply outstanding time. So, we are instructed not to put an actual measure of how long we think a job will take but simply to put in a very small estimate as this keeps the 'hours of backlog' metric in target. So, if I expect to spend 8 hours doing a job I estimate that it will take 15 minutes. So whatever we hoped to gain by measuring hours of backlog has been destroyed by making 'hours of backlog' a success metric. It's been hollowed out as you say. And this is the truth of all of our 'noble self-correcting' enterprises. It used to be the accusation of the traditionalists that the modern world made progress by moving the goalposts but it would be more accurate to say that we simply change the yardage calculation. We haven't moved the ball but we have called the 50 yard line the 30 yard line and feel much closer to our goals. This obviously results in most of our efforts and energy being misdirected. We are engaged in the useful economic activity of making widgets to go in the landfill or moving money from column a to column b. And it is becoming increasingly clear that the patrimony on which our society was built has been mostly squandered and soon there will be nothing left to sustain our stupidity.
I very much like the way you clarified re: the teleology of the thing, but I do take issue with the "ought," since I don't believe in historical "oughts." There are plenty of things which, in hindsight, it seems people should ought to have done to prevent a certain outcome, but from their standpoint it may not have been possible to see that ought. There are obvious mistakes, of course, but when talking about plotting a course for the overall direction of humanity I don't see how anyone at any point in time can do so to the degree of clarity we're now discussing in their future.
I likewise appreciate your clarification on metrics and how we tend to fudge how to measure the metric rather than actually change the actual rate of productivity/quality/quantity/etc. to hit the benchmark because our measuring tools have become more important than what we're supposed to be measuring. On this, I agree, there is a massive abstraction that is creating a "new man" of a kind who is more concerned with hitting benchmarks which don't actually exist rather than producing anything of substance. However, I think the squandering you're describing is happening on a grand historical scale, meaning that humanity will eventually face the consequences of the hollowing out of society, but I don't believe we will see the worst of it just yet. Even if a new world war were to emerge between nuclear powers, I'm fairly confident that that will continue in the aftermath, depending on the severity. All in all though, I appreciate your comments, they're very insightful.
I think that the 'ought' is implied in the very form of the thing. Moving truth as a foundation leads inescapably to instability. Instability is not an unintended consequence but the very nature of the thing. Change and Stability are mutually exclusive. And their was certainly plenty of backlash and resistance on exactly these grounds, from 'the Right' in general and by numerous European thinkers. All of this was stated quite explicitly such as by Kierkegaard in the 1820's and '30s. We do not see what we have a vested interest in not seeing. That is the explanation that I am left with.
The squandering is happening on the largest terrestrial scale imaginable on so many fronts. Our soil and water are dying due to overuse and simply being propped up with fertilizers or additives. Teaching is no longer about men and women making boys and girls into men and women but we simply 'teach to a test'. We strip mine Africa in the name of sustainability and make graveyards of electric cars all over Asia. GDP and Wall Street are up but we are a nation of renters in debt up to our eyeballs.(and most 1st world nations are the same I think) Look at how the professions have been hollowed out. 50 years ago an engineer was an upper middle class guy who after a few years was usually in business for himself and could reasonably expect to retire on intellectual property if he had any talent and worked hard. Now we are wage slaves. Our doctors are in debt for medical school until they are 45 and slaves to corporate hospitals or clinics until they retire. Only Finance and Entertainment industries offer a path to independence. Anyone who can't or won't take that path quite reasonably puts all of their hope in hitting the Lotto, staying stoned, or just goons all day to pr0n. I don't know when the worst consequences will get here, but it's getting pretty bad by my analysis.
Excellent as always, strigoi. Thank you for always writing so incisively.
I am trying to get a sense of how my grandparents got swept up in the social flurry (contagion?) around Marxism & those sorts of new ideas that must have been popular & enticing to youth in the late 19th century in Eastern Europe (specifically, Poland and also Russia.) My grandparents renounced old ideas such as religion and fully embraced these new ideas, bringing them here as young people & believing in these new ideas for the remainder of their lives. None of this was discussed in my family--I was raised Marxist by people who were raised Marxist, but it was all a foregone conclusion & never discussed. I'm trying to put it all in context. I see how Marxism continues to appeal to naive idealists who aren't being taught the evidence of history (I was not taught it at UC Berkeley, I received an ahistorical Marxist education.) It isn't until recently that I became aware of how I was raised in a low-control cult. Understanding how this captured generations of youth may help us to stop that ongoing capture.
What I try to point out in this piece is that Marxism as exists today (and existed for your grandparents) is only a vessel for the ongoing revolutionary spirit. Other ideologies like liberalism, fascism, nationalism, etc., serve the same purpose. I don't see Marxism as the cause for this demand for constant change, but I do see how Marxism can be used to fulfill those demands by producing ever-shifting utopian goalposts. But even this was something Marx himself lambasted in the Manifesto.
It was popular in Europe at the time as a solution for the contemporary existential crises various states were facing; it provided causal mechanisms for those crises and a means for resolving them, just as Nazism did, just as fascism did, and just as liberalism did. It provided a vision for a stable world order and a mission for its acolytes. But today instead of acting as a means of fulfilling a wholly new world order, it acts as a means of continuously pushing the existing liberal world order into the future.
I agree with you that the Marxist political projects that have been attempted have ultimately and inevitably failed and that the historical materialism Marx espoused has not and likely will not take place, but I also don't think that tracing its origins and explaining them will dissuade anyone from gravitating toward it. Even if all existing Marxist strains were to be destroyed, that would not prevent radical liberals from creating new ways to liquidate and reformulate our present order into the future. Many of the existing Marxist strains openly contradict the Marxist tradition, or are bankrolled by so-called enemies of the proletariat. Our society's inherent need to liquidate and reformulate wouldn't stop in the case of Marxist branding failing to capture the disaffected intellectual's imagination.
Marx was not alone in his thinking. All of the 19th century thinkers saw this directionality to life, this myth of progress. They were confident that just as the sun rose in the east and set in the west, that civilization began in the East and was moving westward. It's even more visible in Darwin than in Marx. They are so confident that Change = Progress that they never feel a need to search for a mechanism or a cause. The Age of Revolution left them with a world that always moved Left and they believed that that was good.
They just never seemed to realise that correlation was not causation and that repeating the same form(even a form of change) without the same spirit, the same intangibles, would never produce the same results. It's like the difference between food from land that is rich from natural farming and food from soil that is dead from decades of industrial farming. It checks all of the same boxes but something intangible is different. Our whole civilization is chasing metrics and has forgotten that the metrics are merely proxies for something else, and none of them are good proxies anymore.
I disagree, I think the entirety of the 19th century philosophers were desperately searching for a causal mechanism (Darwin in biology, phrenologists in race, liberals and nationalists in national sovereignty, Marx in class) and an ultimate resolution. None of them embraced change for the sake of change, they embraced change for the sake of their hardline goals and they believed once those goals were achieved, a new stable order based around their founding principles would emerge. What caught them unawares (with the possible exception of Marx and Engels who later softened and saw that the bourgeois revolution would likely develop itself for centuries before transforming into something else) was that their principles would also be liquidated in the modern world by the very conditions that propelled them to victory in the first place.
I don't see how they could have predicted that the productive forces of the era would never consolidate into the kind of stable order that existed before their time. Nothing like it had ever happened before, their predictions were still premised in past events. What Marx observed correctly (which others at the time did not) was that even this new ruling class would never create a stable aristocratic system but would itself be constantly liquidated and reconsolidated according to the capital they held. This was unlike the aristocratic system wherein the monarch was ultimately in control of his kingdom, it's a reversal of authority; the bourgeois capitalist acts in service to capital.
Our present society chases metrics because that's what keeps society stable even as it constantly hollows itself out just to fill itself again. An economy premised on more basic survival needs like food surpluses demands a much more stable structure, but today agriculture is a very small fraction of what fuels the global economy. Obviously if our food production is halved, the global economy would shrink by much more than half, but manufacturing and services form the backbone of the present-day economy, and those sectors demand a constant addition of value beyond basic replenishment even if we don't have an actual survival need for trinkets like smartphone chargers. But the economy's survival depends on the production of those complex machines, which in turn means they are now a survival need for everyone.
But I agree with the second paragraph, the intangible is different and it's missing; there's a constant spiritual void that is filled only momentarily before being sloughed off. The only resolution to that is a more stable order but that would inevitably lead to a marked decline in quality of life, a contraction in the market revolution which returns us to more basic survival. And unfortunately all the revolutionary principles of 19th and 20th century leaders that demanded a stable structure would lead to such a contraction. Francoist Spain faced the same economic and political fate as the Soviet Union, albeit on a smaller scale. Humans have a need economic power, political freedom, and spiritual fulfillment, but at present we can only pick two.
I'm not sure about that. They sought, you might say, an immediate or efficient cause. I.E. biological change leads to progress. But they missed out on finding, or I think even looking for, a teleological cause. 'Why does change have this directionality? Why are later forms preferable to earlier forms?' In biology, we might ask 'Why should the most fit survive at enhanced rates?' Behind it we find nothing but a tautology, 'most fit' is simply taken to mean those that survive at increased rates and perhaps this is where we find the heart of 19th century materialist thought. Mere survival, or mere improvement of economic conditions or whatever it was that the phrenologists sought, I can't pretend to know, were made the yardstick of humanity. 'The purpose of my existence is to have a good career so that I can contribute to society' where contribute to society is understood to mean improve the economic conditions of society.
But men are not economic creatures, not really. Economy is in your formulation 1/3 of the needs of men which is generous but not out of the ballpark. They ought to have predicted that the order they produced would be unstable because they began by making the target move. They began with the Hegelian idea of moving truth.(I believe that it mostly entered European consciousness through Hegel however these particular individuals obtained it.) If thesis is always combining with antithesis to make some new thesis then it is unavoidable that the entire foundation is false and thus unstable.
I brought up chasing metrics since that is what I see so much in corporate lalaland. I'll give you an example of what I mean. My team at work uses a work order system and whenever a work order is created you make an estimate of how much time the job will take. Well, we have a metric for 'hours of backlog' which is simply outstanding time. So, we are instructed not to put an actual measure of how long we think a job will take but simply to put in a very small estimate as this keeps the 'hours of backlog' metric in target. So, if I expect to spend 8 hours doing a job I estimate that it will take 15 minutes. So whatever we hoped to gain by measuring hours of backlog has been destroyed by making 'hours of backlog' a success metric. It's been hollowed out as you say. And this is the truth of all of our 'noble self-correcting' enterprises. It used to be the accusation of the traditionalists that the modern world made progress by moving the goalposts but it would be more accurate to say that we simply change the yardage calculation. We haven't moved the ball but we have called the 50 yard line the 30 yard line and feel much closer to our goals. This obviously results in most of our efforts and energy being misdirected. We are engaged in the useful economic activity of making widgets to go in the landfill or moving money from column a to column b. And it is becoming increasingly clear that the patrimony on which our society was built has been mostly squandered and soon there will be nothing left to sustain our stupidity.
I very much like the way you clarified re: the teleology of the thing, but I do take issue with the "ought," since I don't believe in historical "oughts." There are plenty of things which, in hindsight, it seems people should ought to have done to prevent a certain outcome, but from their standpoint it may not have been possible to see that ought. There are obvious mistakes, of course, but when talking about plotting a course for the overall direction of humanity I don't see how anyone at any point in time can do so to the degree of clarity we're now discussing in their future.
I likewise appreciate your clarification on metrics and how we tend to fudge how to measure the metric rather than actually change the actual rate of productivity/quality/quantity/etc. to hit the benchmark because our measuring tools have become more important than what we're supposed to be measuring. On this, I agree, there is a massive abstraction that is creating a "new man" of a kind who is more concerned with hitting benchmarks which don't actually exist rather than producing anything of substance. However, I think the squandering you're describing is happening on a grand historical scale, meaning that humanity will eventually face the consequences of the hollowing out of society, but I don't believe we will see the worst of it just yet. Even if a new world war were to emerge between nuclear powers, I'm fairly confident that that will continue in the aftermath, depending on the severity. All in all though, I appreciate your comments, they're very insightful.
I think that the 'ought' is implied in the very form of the thing. Moving truth as a foundation leads inescapably to instability. Instability is not an unintended consequence but the very nature of the thing. Change and Stability are mutually exclusive. And their was certainly plenty of backlash and resistance on exactly these grounds, from 'the Right' in general and by numerous European thinkers. All of this was stated quite explicitly such as by Kierkegaard in the 1820's and '30s. We do not see what we have a vested interest in not seeing. That is the explanation that I am left with.
The squandering is happening on the largest terrestrial scale imaginable on so many fronts. Our soil and water are dying due to overuse and simply being propped up with fertilizers or additives. Teaching is no longer about men and women making boys and girls into men and women but we simply 'teach to a test'. We strip mine Africa in the name of sustainability and make graveyards of electric cars all over Asia. GDP and Wall Street are up but we are a nation of renters in debt up to our eyeballs.(and most 1st world nations are the same I think) Look at how the professions have been hollowed out. 50 years ago an engineer was an upper middle class guy who after a few years was usually in business for himself and could reasonably expect to retire on intellectual property if he had any talent and worked hard. Now we are wage slaves. Our doctors are in debt for medical school until they are 45 and slaves to corporate hospitals or clinics until they retire. Only Finance and Entertainment industries offer a path to independence. Anyone who can't or won't take that path quite reasonably puts all of their hope in hitting the Lotto, staying stoned, or just goons all day to pr0n. I don't know when the worst consequences will get here, but it's getting pretty bad by my analysis.