Tag: Hegel

 Recasting obsolete Marxism in one paragraph…

Note the way we have shown that it is possible to recast the obsolete and corrupted Marxist legacy on the spot with very simple means, almost in one page. It needs more work, but the point is clear. The Marxist cadre has made the whole subject impossibly difficult, requiring domination by a new elite, and error-prone. Further, we must suspect the whole Marxist field is infiltrated by covert agencies and hidden Stalinists and has been neutralized.

Update: Note that we can construct an ecological socialism/communism without marxism, without dialectic or dialectical materialism, without Marxist historicism, without Hegel/Marx and the oppressive jargon of German philosophy, The system is not a pretense of science, but a constructive recipe open to anyone at the level of basic literacy and recognizable as a socialist variant of democracy. We don’t need Darwinism which can be simplified to an empirical history of life, and not a theory, as yet. This system doesn’t indulge a battle between idealism and materialism, who cares, and follows the trend of religion from the Reformation to the rise of secular humanism: the system would probably need to incorporate the still developing history of religion in modern times. The system might stand beyond theism and atheism and still give a boost to secular humanism. The trend of modernity is beyond the ancient monotheism, but this need be no intolerant divide, another who cares in our system

Source: Democratic market neo-communism as ecological socialism: beyond theory madness to a recipe for a new system describable in one paragraph – 1848+: The End(s) of History

From rubbish 1.0 to rubbish 2.0…rescuing socialism from Marx idiots//In Defense of Slavoj Žižek

Source: In Defense of Slavoj Žižek
Update: We have a short booklet on all this: Samkya_ancient_modern2ax(1) which outlines the histories of the predecessors of the elusive and invariably botched attempts at ‘dialectic’.
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Dialectical materialism, before or after Zizek, is useless rubbish for the left now. Wake up. Hegel’s view of history is compelling but doesn’t work, and Marx’s rewrite via economics is very bad science, as was obvious already at the end of the nineteenth century. The canon coasted on its momentum into the era of the Second International until the reality of Stalinism sank in and the whole mystique was shattered. The dialectic has never found a decent defining standard, and doesn’t work as a dynamic in history, although ‘dialectical’ oppositions do appear, obviously. The dynamic of world history is almost impossible to decipher and one can only recommend at the eonic effect, not as a theory, but a periodization to see the mysterious evolutionary fragment that is clearly behind the ‘evolution’ of civilizations.
That attempt by Marx to create a system of economic epochs is so amateurish it is almost embarrassing. And Marx was hardly yet aware of the immense archaeology revolution underway: the world of Sumer, early Egypt, the Neolithic, the Descent of Man, the mysterious ‘Axial age’, the time was not ripe for a foundation of worlld history.
Economics does not drive the evolution of civilization. Historical materialism completely eliminates values, ideal aspects, free will, etc, etc…It is a grotesque and archaic period piece of early scientism when thinkers thought the example of Newton could be applied to all subjects. The results always failed because the higher levels of knowledge don’t fit into the classic canon.
Marxists are hopelessly stuck in this obsolete mess and will never in their current form manage a revolutionary transition.
Those who value the socialist/communist ideal would like to see the subject liberated from Marx fetishism and its cult of personality, bad science and botched predictions.
Zizek is a complete bullshitter peddling a mess of Marx/Hegel pottage that is extravagant and useless. It is impossible to read the cascade of gibberish he peddles as leftist commentary.

The eonic model can help here to abandon the illusions of historical theory, deal in concrete periodizations, and their empirical moments, and to construct socialism as a democracy reinvented in a Commons, etc…

That is, start with the Neolithic, then the first era of higher civilization, then proximate antiquity, and then the rise of the modern era. That’s it. That is all you need. There is no theory to explain this sequence or any proof is a dynamic epochs, but it does look like one. If not we can use it anyway to map civilization which encompasses an immense set of categories, social politics, cultural empiricism, values and religion, philosophy and its history, yogas and their legacy, the enigma of Archaic Greece and ancient Israel, etc, etc…The modern era is a universe in itself and is not defined by capitalism, which is process and not a stage of history. The whole Marxist analysis amputates almost every relevant category in the name of reductionist materialism, now out of date.

Dialectical materialism is a strange echo of ancient subjects rendered into an inaccurate and perilous version of the ‘dialectic’ or triad. Those are interesting subjects but they have been misconstrued to do what they can’t do. Explaining history as the action of triads is a great idea that always failed. There are in any case far better attempts to resolve the dialectic than either Hegel or Marx.
The left is out of time for this useless philosophical toy/luxury: simple logic is enough to construct the foundation of socialism. The idea of recipe, a procedure to do things, is needed to construct socialism. Not the ambitious idiocies of Marx and Hegel.

Source: In Defense of Slavoj Žižek

Marx and Hegel: design arguments

We should note that Barzun critiqued Marx along with Darwin (and also Wagner) and even for a socialist his arguments are interesting. In fact, we have suggested a post marxist interpretation for the left that can absorb criticisms of Marx’s theories. We are in the process of doing that ourselves. Marx ironically once critiqued comes into his own more effectively without his Grand Theory.
But the debate between Hegelians and Marx/marxists is classic and is an obvious earlier version of the design argument current. This was before Darwin but the ‘dialectic’ resembles the recent one because they both enter the terrain carefully marked out by Kant as: Achtung: minefields ahead.

Let us note that Hegel is a renegade from Kant, a scandal in itself, and proceeds to sense design in world history abstracted to a ‘concept’ of ‘Geist’, and this is countered by Marx’s attempt to promote the up and coming scientific reductionist scientism that cannot allow design arguments. Ironically Marx’s theory ends up with a materialist design argument in the posit of epochs of history leading inexorably to communism. Hegel’s ‘spirit’ is a handy mystical tidbit indeed, and consider the eonic effect and its model: some intangible something that straddles a planet and explains everything including the emergence of freedom. Result? a generation of post-Hegelians throwing rotten tomatoes at the Hegelian temple. The critique of Hegel is well taken but the attempted opposite of historical materialism is equally flawed.
In fact, the argument is intractable and for good Kantian reasons sets off multiple alarm bells is those who evidently will never learn, poor post-Kantians all.

Source: The ID Deception and the ‘atheist’ advantage in design arguments//Decoding World History and the correct approach to design in history – 1848+: The End(s) of History

In Defense of Materialism—Alan Woods | Socialist Revolution

How did the marxist left contract into ‘materialism’? The answer is clear from the work of Marx and the question rather provokes historical re-examination of the issue. It may be true that academic philosophy trends to the reactionary, but was the solution ‘materialism’ (which is what, in the age of quantum field theory)? It is true that a dark side to Hegel is indeed, if not reactionary, then a hard-to-fathom ambivalence trending to the right as Hegel aged into the Prussian centerfold. But the blame was cast onto idealism which seemed discredited, but only in the generation of Hegel. Idealism cast out into philosophical exile is a confusion of isms. In fact the rise of modernity shows in Kant a breakthrough of sorts in the discovery of a new form of idealism, his transcendental idealism. We cannot in the name of the left send this thesis into exile and in fact ‘transcendental idealism’ which is neither transcendental nor a Hegelian style idealism, is a major advance in philosophy, assuming that Plato had no discovered it first, Plato another sort of reactionary, in the end.
But Kant was the source of new school of socialism, in the late nineteenth century, and Eisner the martyr of the German revolution as such a follower.
The challenge Kant’s brilliant thinking is not a political issue. And the sad reality is that the coarse materialism of the era of Marx has diminished the marxist left and made it the antagonist to a balanced set of viewpoint essential for a sane socialist society. To pit materialism against idealism is monumental constriction of thought and we can see the terrible result in the institutional idiocy of Bolshevism (which had other flaws, no doubt). Praxis would to better to remain neutral to such a useless debate. Note that the physics of materialism must use theory structures that are idealist abstractions and a mystery in themselves.
Is the quantum field of a subatomic particle an idealist political deviation?
The issue of Hegel then is not sufficient grounds for a determination of the materialism/idealism debate that Marx suffered through with a one-sided outcome that was obsessively connected to the birth of positivism in its earliest and stunted form. Marxist succeeded with this strain of bad philosophy to make half the public heretics in the marxist religion, a band move destined to a soon arriving checkmate from the real enemies of the left.

Alan Woods provides an overview of Lenin’s arguments, and mounts a defense of materialism against the obscurantist, postmodernist nonsense on university campuses today.

Source: In Defense of Materialism—Alan Woods | Socialist Revolution

consider the materialism of…new age/archaic yoga….//Marx, Hegel, and the Critique of Religion: A Response

Update: We should be wary of critiquing Marx here on this point. The social condition of religion are clearly relevant and Marx was determined to analyze this in his own way.

Update: Having mentioned the eonic effect I should point out that the triangle of Kant, Hegel, Marx (in some ways Schopenhauer makes Kant clearer) is a spectacular moment in the eonic sequence itself at its modern divide (consult the eonic model) and that also explains why such a moment is repeatedly recalled and analyzed like an echo of that strange moment or generation. But it is only a brief moment in a large situation. Marx and Hegel are just at the limits of the eonic transition of modernity. Same for Kant who is well inside.

The so-called new atheism treats beliefs in isolation from their social conditions and does not link the persistence of religion to our alienated forms of life under capitalism.

Surely this is the wrong analysis. By restricting study to social context the gesture of reductionism fails. Religion is not an alienated form of life under capitalism. Bullshit. It might assume that demeanor in context. But religion emerges millennia prior to capitalism. Further, the rational critique of superstitions while entirely appropriate in one way misses the points that a spiritual domain is not a superstition. The problem is the destructive duality of western thought here. So it is not that spirituality is a superstition against materialism, but that both are a unity in a larger context, possibly of the universal materialism of ancient Samkhya revived in the new age movement by figures like Bennett (and his sources). The spiritual then, as an aspect of a larger material nature is real but subject to the Kantian limitations of metaphysics. It is real but can it be knowable? The materialist left was outplayed by a rightist clever piece to try and speak in materialist language: the figure Gurdjieff, that dark occultist, revived some bit of sufi interpretation of the classical India Samkhya with its materialism, atheism, and triadic dialectic. It was a clever piece taken up by Bennett. The point here is that while materialism is a good foundation but its western form is crippled by a false duality. Can anyone recall that the yoga now so popular in the new age wasteland was and is a materialist conception based on that very Samkhya? The great yogas of India were at one point materialist.
Anyway, the reduction of religious beliefs to material conditions just doesn’t work. It does not follow that we should not critique the drift into the superstition of much of this legacy.
The left should be wary of their own perspective. The strange and eerie triad of Kant, Hegel, and Marx is prone to dangerous confusions and sounds elegant in academic jargon in excelsis but is a lost thought in the actual reality invoked by ‘marxism’, which is the dangerous cadre ‘religion’ of Stalinist executioners.

Anyway the endless dialectic of Hegel and Marx is a lost cause now. If all this confusion could take five minutes to review Kant the useless and almost endless parade of marxist finery in those who are addressed by this left, might settle back into sanity. Marx and Hegel both are oblivious to Kant’s critique of metaphysics and both are extravagant metaphysicians of idealism, and materialism both.

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This is all very interesting but the study of religion in the context of Marx, what to say of Hegel, is out of date now, despite its continuing interest as one aspect.
But the issue of religion is more than that of monotheism or the issue of ‘god’. It encompasses via the New Age movement, the hidden aspects of Christianity, the case of Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, the history of Hinduism, the Zoroastrian component and much else.

A study of the eonic effect can help to free the discussion from the idiotic straightjacket of ‘historical materialism’ which is entirely brain dead on all aspects of religion. The idea that socialist revolutionaries pegged Marxist are going to rewrite world culture via Marx’s confused theories and of historical materialism will cause an immense jackknife of the left against itself and turn the public to rightist fanaticism. But Marxists won’t listen. Their own ideology has all the characteristics of religion, and religion at its worst. Don’t go that route. The world has one last chance at socialism and Marxists will be there to spoil it.
The secular trend in world history is validated here but at the same time the secular humanist has been reduced to a sort of atheist worshipping at the altar of Newton and reductionist scientism. The secularist fails to understand his own historical position.
I have often recommend the model of the eonic effect as a better foundation : it approaches theory but then stands back and sees that historical theories and theories of religion are not so easy to come by and that basic outlines are enough: there we find a simple periodization of history and evolution and a context of empirical mapping instead of the now visibly amateurish nonsense of Marx and his epochs of production. The economic angle simply won’t work on the history of world culture and its regions.
Threatened with extinction by secular reductionists the immensely elusive world of esoteric Buddhism declared war on secular modernity and generated a fascist response while remaining hidden from view.
The left cannot go about these issues in the now archaic fashion of the era of the Marx/Hegel collision.
I recommend a close study of the ‘eonic effect’ as a warning against doing stupid things after the fashion of a now long gone left…

Source: Marx, Hegel, and the Critique of Religion: A Response

 The leftist time-warp of the early 19th century

The left is caught in a time warp of early nineteenth-century intellectual culture when the battle of science, secularism, and philosophy were in the early innings of a battle that was crucial to modernity but is a bit old-fashioned now. The battle between Hegelian idealism and reductionist materialism was artificial and resulted in the pointless antagonism to idealism in the name of Hegelian extravagance. The far more intelligible brand of Kant was lost in the contraction of thinking that operated on a set of cliches and classic incidents.
The end result has been a left crippled on the questions of philosophy, science, and culture and a worldview that almost noone can accept anymore, making the rejection of socialist thinking a certainty. There is no battle of good and evil between materialism and idealism, and no need for any track toward postcapitalism to even have to bother with such a question.

The eonic model beyond materialism/idealism May 12th, 2018 We keep repeating our critique of marxist theory, suggesting a different approach, e.g. cf. WHEE: One of the reasons to suggest the macro …

Source: The eonic model beyond materialism/idealism – Darwiniana

 The strange way Marx crippled leftist thinking…

Leftists unfamiliar with the history of nineteenth century thought often take historical materialism at face value, and the history of Marx’s thinking here is complicated. But that intellectual milieu was immensely complicated and very diverse. Yet in the end the marxists took up the most narrow, reductionist form of scientism and castigated all else as class ideology. The early modern from the Reformation to the Enlightenment virtually disappered into the canon of mentally challenged marxist cultists. Continue reading ” The strange way Marx crippled leftist thinking…” →