Postcapitalist Futures_The Last Revolution_ED2_7_2_2022
As noted, we have a new section on ‘pidgin psychology’; This may not make the final cut, perhaps an appendix of outtakes. But it points to one of the reasons Marxism failed: it has no real psychology of man. Our ‘almost nutty’ take suggests it might be better to leave the issue open, a sort of ragged secular humanism even as it expresses tolerance of religious diversity. The early modern revolutionized psychology, culture and religion with an immensity of potential avenues here, yet reductionist scientism and modern psychology simply deleted almost all of it for capitalist ideology, Darwinian pseudo-science, Reformation junk religion. The modern existentialist be could eaten alive by sufi rogue occultists even as it denies the ‘existence’ of ghosts plus Kant. ‘God’ and ‘ghost’ might join our list of ‘key words’…. We would certain hope that Christian socialists might lead lead a new church into a parallel entity to our Red Fortyeight Group. But then best get ‘their’ act together
The book is now officially subject to Marxist cancel culture. But I think Marxists are as they are don’t stand a chance of leading a titmouse to socialism. They would do well to read it. This approach might itself lead to its own self-criticism, or a better version??! But I doubt you can evade this take. Good news, no funds for advertising? The book is seeping into its own leftist public.
‘Pidgin psychology’ as a common social language?
One of the puzzles of modern civilization is the lack of a realistic psychology of man. A similar charge can be laid against (the Christian) religion, even though it has features that secular humanism seems to have lost (with a newcomer in the West, the far more robust Buddhist/psychologies). In part the problem is created by reductionist science which hopes to triangulate man as a causal mechanism in the vein of physics. And this enters Marxism as a reductionist stereotype of economic man shifting between stages or epochs of production beyond any inkling of his ‘will’. This thinking has been exposed many times but persists in the impoverished state of social reference and communication. A solution, and something we need here, to be sure that we are talking about free agents creating history, is a sort of ‘common parlance’ pool of concepts in a step above slang but a step below some buttoned down (non-existent) science. Pidgin Swahili is spoken across vast areas of Africa and allows an immense Babel of speakers to communicate. Here in a quite different sense we can pool a mostly shared semi-coherent ‘higher gibberish’ to range across the legacy of homo sapiens the superstitious ape. This pidgin starts with generally shared terms, the self, the soul, the will, consciousness (and a new addition from Zen pidgin, self-consciousness, or Attention/awareness). That’s a good start and a lingo of some hundreds of terms might be added in. Or else we don’t codify but stubbornly persist in a few such terms essential to a socialist discourse, among others. We can accept the possible charge of ‘not fully knowing what we are talking about’, but we seem to be close enough to defy ruthless scientism and religious myth. We can try to refine definitions but we might fail there but fall back on our pidgin of basic hominid signals as assumed. This view ends in irony: the importance of psychology in a socialist culture
———-yesterday
Amazon seems to have put its foot down on paperback submissions with millions of spastic books now in print, and requires a fairly strict set of requirements now, all reasonable but it is pretty easy if you write the book, proof it, and adapt that to two different protocols, Kindle/paperback to goof on many of them. I may as well simply create a new edition in the process revising the whole text. A paperback is not really necessary in any case, and won’t sell next to a free online version. Kindle can archive the text which will soon be the object of attempts to destroy all copies. The powers that be will tolerate socialist free speech, but criticism of Darwinism they don’t allow, CAO (cancel at once)…..
There is a new section in Chapter 3 on ‘psychological pidgin’: a common core of concepts often filtered out of scientific (and other) discourses. The concept of ‘Will’ for example is dealt out of the deck by causal science and Marxist historicism.
A post today on this blog on a recent poll: a surprising number of people would like to up arms against the government. This would seem to be right up our alley but in fact we hold the ‘plot’ in reserve as a set of ‘preliminaries. ButI was surprised at this sea change, and The Last Revolution can be useful here.
https://redfortyeight.com/2022/07/01/a-quarter-of-americans-open-to-taking-up-arms-against-government-poll-says/
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I will leave the Kindle version in place with its images and proceed to a new edition (reversing title/subtitle with the pdfs to keep them straight (but not the book title).
The revolution meme in The Last Revolution is about ‘virtual revolution’, a tool to reflect on the steady failure of the American Republic. The US has essentially lost its Supreme Court which has become a rogue agency. Its Senate and Congress are dysfunctional.
Today, by crippling the EPA it has made a unilateral decision on climate change that will doom the US, indeed, an entire planet. That is so outrageous that American government has lost its legitimacy. You tell me what the status of revolution is?
1848+: The End(s) of History 