Painting by Odilon Redon
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If time is really cyclical, in any sense (e.g. spiral), or, at the least, epochal, then perhaps the epoch of what Guenon understands by “religion” is long over. Rather than being the clarion call of return to tradition in its specific form of “religion” (Islam, in Guenon’s case), perhaps Guenon was the swan song of religion, its last great proponent. He comprehended it, both in the sense of understanding its true character, and in the sense of constituting its circumference—that is, insofar as he outlined its circumference, its limits, he was already on the threshold of something else. One could argue that these limits of religion were already understood by the “mystics” (the imprecision of this term, notwithstanding) of the past, but Guenon’s exposition does not confine itself to an assessment of religion's metaphysical structure, but also to its place in cyclical (or epochal) time, to its context within a certain temporal or historical domain. This capacity to definitively contextualize religion, in its epochal contingency, suggests that we have already reached its limit in time, that we have fully comprehended it, that the circumference of religion has already being surpassed.
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History, if anything, is more of a polygon than a circle—hence, history has turning points. If it was a “true circle”, it would be all-turning. Regardless of its total outline, it is cleat that history has an angular character. Incidentally, the simplest polygon is a triangle. The number 3 is the root of angularity, and hence a figurative key to history.
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It is amusing to hear it said, in an academic context, that such and such a scholar’s interpretation of such and such a text has been “called into question”. Interpretation always calls into question and begins by rendering something question-able. Naturally, any interpretation of such an interpretation would have precisely the same effect. It is almost redundant to say that an interpretation has been “called into question”. Every interpretation is founded on question-ability, and is itself question-able, in turn.
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In defense of dogmatism: dogmatism is a machete for hacking away the weeds of ideology. One does not have the time to address every point of view, every bourgeois ideological accretion, to address the questions of all inquirers regarding this or that idea. In order not to be caught up in the brambles of antiquated thinking, one must simply hack away, brush aside these ideas, “sweep them under the rug”. In many cases, the ones inquiring about this or that idea do not possess the requisite intellectual background to readily understand the nature of the dispute surrounding it, and therefore any attempt to catch them up will be unjustifiably laborious. It is, at the end of the day, much easier to say “no, that is bourgeois thinking” than to address every little concern in exhaustive detail, every time that it is brought up.
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A history of rationality (or “Reason”) would consist in the history of the sorts of ratios we have applied and how we have applied them. For example, the ratios of “wisdom”, that is, the capacity for a non-discursive weighing of actions and values against one another. Or, for instance, the ratios of class composition in various societies, the ratios of resource distribution, and the like. Which concepts or symbols render these factors into standardized quantities susceptible of being measured one against the other? To what extent and in what way are these concepts “framed” with the intent of biasing our weights and measures, “in advance”, in one direction or the other?
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Nostalgia generally aims ten years back, twenty years back, fifty years, maybe one hundred, but hardly more. This is why it is so sterile. If you want to aim far into the future you need to pull your bowstring far, far back into the past. This is not the same as the antiquarian who digs himself into the past as into a hole out of which he cannot be extricated. Historical continuity produces momentum. In order to do acquire momentum it should possess mass, that is, it should be a “materialist” history.
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Monumental history uses the past toward the future. There is another category of using the past, however, which does not bear a distinctive name yet, a use of the past intended to obscure the character of the present and to bolster the already-reigning order. The antiquarian historical approach treats the past as a rubbish heap that it rummages through to find various decorative baubles. This as yet unnamed approach, by comparison, rummages through the past for weapons in its struggle to foreclose the future, not to decorate the present, but to establish it as a fortress, a bulwark against the future. Monumental history not only takes the past and uses it in future-oriented action, but transforms the past itself (through re-interpretation). This future-foreclosing history, for lack of a better term, might be referred to as “Olympian history”, in reference to Zeus' preying on Prometheus' liver, the liver being a divinatory instrument for prognosticating the future.
Monumental history, therefore, is not only a past which reaches into the future, but a future that reaches into the past. Olympian history is a past that closes off the future—“The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living”.
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There is no sense in “waiting for the stars to align”. The stars are always already aligned. One just has to find out what that alignment is, and take advantage of it.
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One must break through the bounds of personal hubris to be capable of hubris on a grander scale—humility, then, is the condition of a greater hubris. This sort of humility is not an enforced humility, not humility as the suppression of an ascending tendency. On the contrary, this humility is the melting away of merely personal and interpersonal limits, the opening up to a collective hubris. One becomes humble to the same degree that one gives way to the grand hubris of the human collective.
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“God is my strength”—yes, because God is mine, because God belongs to man and not the other way around. God is the first gift of Prometheus, the heavenly fire itself, brought down to Earth.
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A work of finished art, such as a painting or a sculpture, is never really static. It provokes a dialectic within psyche, a struggle between sensation, feeling, and thought, and is ever re-transfigured before our eyes and hearts.
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Narrative is a fundamental aspect of the human psyche. Therefore, to explore the psyche through the use of narrative, as great novelists do, is a genuinely scientific instance of psychological research. The mundus imaginalis is itself explored by imaginal means, that is, by means conformable to its own nature.
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What traditionalist seem to miss when they speak of “satanic inversions” and the like, is that, per “traditional metaphysics”, our world already is precisely a mirror image (“as above, so below”; Solomon’s triangle) of the principial domain. Our world is supposed to be an inversion. Hence, during the “Golden Age”, it is Saturn, the god of strenuous labor, who rules on earth. “Traditional monarchy” is precisely a “satanic inversion”, a usurpation of heavenly prerogatives.
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One can speak of two capitalisms—capitalism as rule by capitalists, and capitalism as rule by capital. Explanations which take the former to the exclusion of the latter tend toward conspiracism, in a vulgar sense. Explanations which take the latter to the exclusion of the former tend toward impotent academicism.
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It is interesting that Plato’s scheme of types of governance is dialectical in almost a Marxist sense. The various types of polity succumb to their own internal contradictions and give way to the next stage in political “degradation”. Plato's dialectic is “traditionalist”. A movement toward a pristine, pre-Homeric ideal.
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One can distinguish between globalization, which is the process of global "preliminary transformation into capital", and planetization which is the process, already present within globalization, of planetary socialization, not only of the human world but also of "nature". “Planetization” does not conceive the world as a geostrategic map, but as a historical and natural landscape, a source of sustenance, and a soil out of which human enterprises might emerge. Planetization is the process of productive interconnection and socialization (of both ends and means) which, in the long term, is producing a unified planetary organism.
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Cybernetics can never finally and definitively usurp human society, or the natural world. This is not to say that cybernetics is not also natural, which, of course, it is, but that it is but the foam on the sea of nature. Dialectic is productive of cybernetic processes, which it continually also undermines through its qualitative historical revolutions.
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Imperialism is the financial parasite that presides over the continuing process of global socialization, which happens irrespective of imperialism.
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Can the modern individualist tendency be leveraged in a useful direction, or must it be overcome? I think, perhaps, not only can it be leveraged to our advantage, but that it must. It is too intrinsic a tendency in the character of modernity. It cannot be effaced; at least not at any price we would be willing to pay. How, then, do we leverage it? By culling all nonessential forms of individualism, all superficial individualisms, e.g. such as in fashion (everyone dressing in their own overly “unique” way). There are many such pointless individualisms. In restricting the scope of individualism, we also heighten its intensity in certain directions (e.g. the arts and sciences). That is, by making individualism more quintessentially individual, we overcome individualism in its trivial sense.
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Under the dictatorship of the proletariat, exploitation is converted into its opposite. Socialism is the preliminary transformation into society.
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There is no such thing as “the” economy. It’s somebody’s economy, and probably not yours.
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Narrativization not only helps us to discern the past (without this it would be unintelligible), but to change the present. Narrative, in other words, meets the criteria of revolutionary epistemology which Marx establishes in the Theses on Feuerbach. Socialism, therefore, must likewise tell us a story which renders the past intelligible, and acts toward the transformation of the present.
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Having a stake in the capitalist system is, itself, no guarantee of opposition to communism. Capitalism is not a static system, but one in motion and development. The system itself tends toward socialization of both its ends and its means, over the long run.
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We require not only a union of town and country, symbolized by the hammer and sickle, but a union of land and sea power. This latter union must also have its corresponding symbol—Atlas, the mountain (Atlas mountains) who ruled the seas (i.e. Atlantis), including the “seas” of outer space (Atlas carries the heavenly spheres on his shoulders).
In other words, we are interested, fundamentally, in total planetization as a grounds for extra-planetary pursuits.
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Man’s needs are social, but the sort of society one fundamentally belongs to is rather variable. In this sense, the Stoic’s “absolute standard” of bare needs is not entirely fallacious. The Stoic belongs to the cosmopolis, and the needs of its citizenry is established by different criteria than those which establish the earthly polis. The “social need” of the cosmopolitan is “bare subsistance”. The cosmopolitan is a kind of rationalist ascetic.
Similarly, the ontopolitan’s social needs are determined through the society to which they belong. In addition, one must also take into account the manner of belonging. The way in which the ontopolitan belongs to the polis of being, is not the same as the way in which the cosmopolitan belongs to the cosmos.
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Marxism both sheds light on the prevailing state of affairs and engages in revolutionary deeds, at one and the same time. The archetypal image of Marxist “revolutionary epistemology” is the hammer which strikes the anvil, at the same time producing sparks of light.
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Alienation is not only a condition passively suffered, but a power—the power of self-extension, of delegation, of severing one’s self from one’s self, etc. The setting up of a state institution over and above, and formally representative of, the public-civil sphere, in general, is an “alienation” of that sphere from itself—and, so what? This power of cleaving a thing into “ontological portions” (it finds its being represented in two partial ways) is a great power that humanity possesses, not a mere vicissitude of fate. The fundamental question is: who gets to exercise this power?
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Proletarian rule does not necessarily mean some sort of spontaneous and direct proletarian rule, as if all men could spontaneously be locked in a chain of harmony and agreement and administrate social affairs in unison. More fundamental than rule is power. An organized proletarian power base must be established. Let the state functionaries of the proletariat rule, just as the state functionaries of the bourgeoisie rule today. Here rule and administration are used synonymously, but are they really identical? I think administration is a spectral transposition of rule into the domain of logistics. This is why Marx and Engels’ idea of an “administration of things” that will succeed political rule is naive. Administration is still possessed by the specter of rule.
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Motto of Promethean socialism: “from each according to his ability, to each in excess of their need, for us according to our ambition”. “Us” referring to the collective.
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I think my vision of the reversal of polarity (i.e. proletarian dictatorship as “upside-down feudalism”, Saturn's Golden Age) is much more in line with Marx’s basic assumptions of historical development than his own vision of the classless society. The society of reversed polarity emerges out of the contradictions of the present society, in an attempt to resolve them, but possesses its own contradictions which, in time, and as it uses its newfound power to expand production and transform the nature of society, will lead to the creation of new social forms and new modes of production. The question is: what sort of society will the Saturnalian society eventually turn into? What are its tendencies?
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The temptation to reduce communism to something discursively explicable must be resisted. Communist metanoia takes precedence over communist theoretical exposition. Communism as metaphysics, in the original sense, must be apprehended through its principial and symbolic character, as well as its passively intellecting way of being-in-the-world.
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Industrial labor is inherently socialized labor, whereas agriculture is socialized under the present conditions, but not essentially socialized. If, for instance, agricultural labor were to organize their own revolution, so to speak, and take agriculture away from the owners of large scale agricultural production, what force is there that could compel these laborers to maintain agriculture on a large scale? They could just as easily divide the land among themselves and return to small scale agriculture. What do they care for the broader social requirements? Modern industry, on the other hand, is fundamentally socialized. It is not even possible for it to become small scale without ceasing to be industrial. This would be a return to artisanship, which is an entirely distinct phenomenon. The difference between artisanship and industry is in kind, not only in degree. The transition from artisanship to industry is an instance of the conversion of quantity (scale of social production) to quality (type of social and cultural organization). The impetus toward communism comes from urban and industrial labor, but moves in the direction of the socialization of the countryside as the precondition of its long term endurance and flourishing.
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The struggle against Anglo-imperialist capitalism is generally framed as a struggle against the spirit of Atlanticism, but what if Atlanticism itself must be claimed as the authentic spirit of the modernity? What if Atlanticism itself, its brazenness, its audacity, must be converted into socialism? Is Promethean socialism the conversion of Atlanticism into a form of socialism, the transfiguration of Atlanticism such that it almost ceases to resemble itself? Sea power must become our power.
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Historical materialism, I believe, constitutes its own peculiar form of intellection. To really begin to apprehend the ongoing and historical dynamics involved, the present tensions, the real existing conflicts, the structure of the geopolitical order, etc—this is truly an “enlightening”, an eye-opening experience. It hits you, once you really begin to understand it, like a revelation. You never quite see the world the same way again. It renders the world intelligible in a way that it previously was not. On this basis, alone, it is difficult to reject the thesis that historical materialism constitutes a variety of intellection. The question is just how far this intellection can be pushed in the metaphysical direction—just how far can geopolitics be pushed toward “geo-estoerism”. The world-axis, the king of the world, paradise, etc—all these are part of the make up of geo-esoterism, and such a geo-esoterism, if it is to be grounded in the real condition of the earth, in the reality of planetary industry, must take communism as its basic context.
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Communism’s revolution—that is, it’s circular motion—is a motion reaching out from the future, leaping into the past (Marxist reinterpretation of history as a development through class struggle), bringing this momentum to bear on the present, and hastening all of this back into the future. This is the revolutionary circle of communism.
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Geopolitics, as such, as a study, carries an imperialist and Atlanticist (historically, these are predominately the same) slant. It presupposes control of routes as the primary factor in politics, rather than production (whether industrial or cultural). In that respect, one could place, in opposition to it, a theory of geopoetics, taking poeisis in its broadest sense possible to also include, besides artistic production, industrial-social production. Geopoetics would look at how human productivity, its development, content, qualitative types, etc is related to geographic considerations. It is a theory of the productivity of the earth’s soil, and of man’s ability to leverage the earth toward the new productions, and, ultimately, to even transform (terraform) the earth itself.
Geopolitics is intrinsically linked with its own form of productivity, with capitalist profit-oriented productivity, with a mercantile system of trade, upon which geopolitics seeks to prey by offering a strategy of global piracy for the West, and also, to a lesser extent, to those lesser powers that seek to integrate into this system or cope with it in some fashion. Geopolitics is wedded to capitalist economics, and geopoetics (or socialist economics for the global age) is wedded to socialist politics.
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Marxism has need of a pedagogical iconography akin to that used in Orthodox Christianity. Not everyone has time to engage in deep, discursive study of Marxist theory. There must also be mytho-symbolic windows of access.
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The bourgeoisie are human beings (“biologically”) that are not human (socially), and the proletariat are inhuman instruments (historically, contingently) that are human (fundamentally; homo faber).
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The “radical” (for lack of a distinct term) is a pathological revolutionary. The revolutionary plays to win. He does not stay a revolutionary forever. The radical wants to playact the pathos of a revolutionary indefinitely. It is literally patho-logical. The pathos associated with revolutionaries becomes a “principle” (logos) to be obeyed as eternal law. Here, also, the working class becomes an object, an object in the hands of an ideo-logical subject—an abstract, structure-furnishing idea takes a real, living social class in its grasp, as the instrument with which it remakes society in its own image.
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Working class politics should never become this parochial thing where it's just about “organizing your local community”, the end. Obviously that’s important too, but we can never let the ruling classes have a monopoly on foreign policy, as if they were the only ones “qualified”.
The working class is an international class, and they must have the audacity to reach beyond their local environment, and take bold stances. Those stances will, predominantly, be anti-imperialist. Isolationism is a reactionary posture.
The mantra, common among the right wing today, “think locally, not globally” is totally wrong headed. The response is “think locally, and globally”. There is no mutual exclusion here.
If you stop thinking globally (or rather, internationally), someone else (i.e the ruling class) is till going to do it for you, and you won’t like what they have planned for you. Proactively wresting globally-scaled systematic action away from the ruling class is the only answer, not closing your eyes.
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The marketspace: the market seen from the standpoint of a zero-sum competition for social and political dominance. As distinct from the concept of the “marketplace” which views the market as the zone of “voluntary transactions between rational actors”.
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All roads lead to communism. It is the attempt (futile) at standing still which re-produces capitalism.
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The small business class love to elect people who promise to reduce their taxes, but if they reduce their taxes they also reduce their power, that is, their leverage over the state. They’re a vestigial class, and the only reason they’re kept around is in order to finance the state. If they stop paying taxes, they stop being useful, and that just ups the incentive of big capital to bulldoze them.
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The goal of socialism is to put political and economic power in the hands of the working class. What they do with that power is their affair—but then does anyone have to tell the bourgeoisie what do to with their power? Must they be schooled in the virtues of profit-seeking? No, they always and everywhere pursue their advantage without having to be inculcated into it by any dogma or bourgeois economic theory. The workers, once in power, will similarly pursue their own interest. They need only be made conscious of their class position, not inculcated with various aims and values imposed from without.
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The way to “abolish” social antagonism is not to create a classless society, in the sense of a “sublation” of class society. The way to “abolish” antagonism is for it to remain but to cease to be antagonism. That is, for antagonism to cease being a passively suffered condition and to become a conscious social instrument, an integral component of a new social form that no longer experiences such antagonism as its limit. That is, social antagonism must be made into a science. Only the working class can leverage antagonism in this way. The bourgeois class are slaves to profit, and, hence, always beholden to the antagonisms produced in the competition to exploit (i.e. the competition to cheapen the labor process). The working class, as homo faber, make use of capital and capitalists, “in the transitional period”, as the working implements with which they reconstruct their world. The antagonism between these classes is nullfied as a social limit by appropriating the bourgeois class as an instrument. It is a social limit in the present society in the sense that the bourgeois class cannot dispense with the working class. This antagonism and its reproduction must be maintained if the bourgeois class is to continue subsisting. The working class can dispense with its bourgeois instruments, and adopt other means of structuring its society. It is only a question of whether they choose to dispense with this instrument and to what degree, of whether they cease to find this instrument useful.
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Marx discovered a new mode of historical time—history as development of social production. The development of social production is, of course, the development of human society, not abstract society. The development of human society is none other than the unfolding of the possibilities of the human being. Since man’s “essence” is a creative nothing, his historical development, too, primarily consists in the development of productive power (which is a type of nothing, as a opposed to an already-produced something), and productive power, in turn, is primarily social—man is a political animal. This development of production itself happens productively, that is dialectically—dialectic is mimetic, and fundamentally something productive.
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Our main instrument, in the most generic and abstract sense, for creating something new is force. We apply force to things in order to re-make them as something else. For example, we apply force to marble in order to bring forth a sculpture. So, our main instrument for creation is force, which is something fundamentally destructive.
Value has a similar structure. When I evaluate something at a certain value, I do not just determine the magnitude of its value, but I value it in a certain way and for certain ends. This occludes (or “destroys”) the other ways that I could value it, as if I were chipping them away to reveal this thing in a particularly defined way.
The mean between the poles of value and force is socially necessary labor—force applied within an evaluated world, which in turn changes that world and affects our evaluations of it. Or, we could just say labor. Labor, as a concept, always entails valuation. It is distinct from a blind application of force, such as a madman thrashing about. Labor is oriented at certain ends, and the determination of ends entails valuation, not to mention that the production of ends (as opposed to choosing from a predetermined list) entails the creation of a world of valuation, a world in which certain valuations come to the fore.
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The tendency of capitalism to lead to socialism follows the logic of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”. In a crisis, which is something frequent for capitalism, the government can intervene, provide relief, maybe even nationalize certain key industries in order to address the crisis—if they do this, however, people will get a taste of what real organization can accomplish, and begin to desire more. This opens up the road to socialism. Damned if you do. On the other hand, the government can do nothing, more or less, and the leave the people to their own devices during the crisis—but then the people will clamor for a new way of governance, for a system that will address their needs, or even take upon themselves the task of self-organization. Damned if you don’t.
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Ethics is public, communal, and morality is private and individual. Ethics is not communal in a strictly social sense, however, but includes the immanent “communis sensus” of the individual, for example. In so far as I become a community of passions, ideas, a living worldview, I become ethical—that is, I embody an ethos.
An ethos is not normative, or rather, is not enclosed within a normative horizon, though it includes the power of issuing norms within its own horizon. The study of ethics is a study of descriptive psychology, the study of this or that ethos, of how this or that ethos is constituted, of how it can be represented in thought. Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics attempts to represent the ethos of the Greek city-state in thought. It is a descriptive account.
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What is needed, in order to combat the psychological warfare that has been instituted in order to preserve capitalism and subvert countervailing tendencies, is not a regime of psychological warfare in the “opposing direction”, but “psychological cooperation”. Psychological warfare itself is premised on a zero-sum conception of the social space, and this must be challenged by fostering cooperative forms of psychological life. Which is to say, we must develop the “class community”.
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The utopian type of “model city” is a good example of the point at which utopian and scientific socialism can intersect. The model city also belongs to scientific socialism, but in this case as an isolated experiment within the broader space of scientific socialism, not as an ideal to which we submit ourselves and all of our undertakings.
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Interesting to compare Marxist class based analysis and “class subjectivism”, on one side, and traditional metaphysics along with guna-based caste system on the other.
The guna-based analysis of the traditional metaphysics of the social order posits that people are defined by the predominance of certain qualities and elements which render them suitable for certain social roles. The main issue with this analysis is that social roles are dependent on social structure, and social structure is not fixed. Not only is it not fixed, but its manner of changing is not only always passive (though sometimes it is that also), an acquiescence to natural forces, but also active and revolutionary, changing according to the will of historically acting classes.
Guna-based analysis has a certain descriptive merit vis a vis quality, but it cannot offer, on its own, recommendations regarding social role. The metaphysics of the gunas =\= the Law of Manu, though, obviously, the connections between them are based on a more or less rigorous analogy. Nevertheless, the social structure prevailing in antiquity is no longer present, and therefore this analogy has no directly practical pertinence. If practical pertinence is to be found for the gunas as analytical tools, it must be through establishing new analogies to our present system of social organization—i.e. the factually present mode of socialized labor (not the bourgeois merely-political facade).
Additionally, one cannot adopt all of the same metaphysical presuppositions as the gunas-based system ordinarily entails. Insofar as it is embedded in the Advaita tradition, it acquires a “contemplative passivity” in its conception. A Marxist-Shaktist metaphysics would necessary entail a revolutionary reinterpretation of the gunas.