Tuesday 17 May 2011

Make Light of Reason

Marxism is Romantic. It therefore has an ambivalent attitude towards the Enlightenment.

On the one hand, it proudly claims to be based in reason and materialism, also acknowledging that these are enlightenment values - and thus preconditions for science and technology, themselves preconditions for industrial capitalism.

On the other hand, it looks forward to a postcapitalist world, where industry serves the necessary needs of all humanity, as opposed to the unnecessary greeds of a very few.

In such a world, reason and materialism are the philosophical norm, and while advanced science and technology won't be seen as good or inevitable in their own right, they would most likely be ubiquitous. Everyone would have all the technological comforts they could want - provided the production of this technology weren't harmful to other people, or the environment.

In the marxist image of capitalism, the people are servants of reason, itself a servant of the ruling class of industrialists. In the marxist image of postcapitalism, the relation between people and reason is inverted, which raises the question of which image came first to Marx, and which was the derived inversion.

Under marxist postcapitalism - aka communism - reason is the servant of the people. This is significant because it's seen as a re-inversion - a restoration of the corrupted original order - of the role of reason in classless primitive communism. It's not an accident that the original (pre-fall, edenic) state of humanity shares a name with the projected (post-apocalypse, idyllic) final state.

Under communism, we are returned to a classless, oppressionless state - but higher than the original. Indeed, the negation of classless society by classes is negated by the industrial and social products of class society.

Given the severe problems in dialectical theory, this alone should set off alarm bells.

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