Tag: Kant on history

R48G: progress toward a perfect civil constitution…

R48G: progress toward a perfect civil constitution…

March  21st, 2017 ·

The issue of Kant and history… From our developing blogbook…

the basic intent is to simplify the confusion created by marxism and ju mpstart a new and practical

approach using elements of the marxist legacy taken in reserve.

Marxist historical theory doesn’t work and has been critiqued many times. It is a non -teleological crypto-teleological theory about a set of entities far too comple x for such a simplified analysis. The danger is that while waiting for the next stage after capitalism we will remain passive until the capitalist era exhausts its potential: the latter will never happen. We will burn out the planet before we exhaust all the useless combinations of capitalism.

We are betrayed by theory here in the puzzle of Marx’s complex deliberations and overly complex analysis. And that includes the confusions over the labor theory of value, and the latter makes much better sense if you stop trying to produce a theory. Much of Marx’s analysis remains of great interest, viz. analyses of class struggle but overall it belongs to the era of positivism (still quite current) and its ‘scientism’. We need to pay our dues to the era of Feuerbach  in which Marx and Engels worked and adopt a secular perspective but there are many ways to do that and we need to consider the limits of the materialism of the period which gestated socialist thought. Marx’s attempt to create a science confused the issue and the result was never really a science. We see the second international proceed down the garden path of a ‘science’ that should have been something less ambitious and focused on the practical.

Instead of attempts to rationalize ‘stages of production’ th eory in the fashion of Marx we could do better by considering a classic essay on history written by Kant: there is the issue of teleology is taken explicitly, but the core of the piece is to ask a question about history and refer the question to the future. The analysis of the eonic effect attempts to point to the probable solution to Kant’s question which also asks for a demonstration of the passage to a perfect civil constitution.

There is a key to a new praxis: can we detect the solution to the riddle o f civil ‘evolution’? Indeed we can and the eonic effect (in earlier versions with its ‘discrete freedom sequence’) shows just this. So, instead of a succession of systems in deterministic directionality we have the prospect of moving toward replacing capitalist democracy with renewed progress toward a perfect civil constitution.

The current madness is hardly perfection! This is the task of free agents nor mechanical  systems or economic structures.

Kant and the origin of the ‘end of history’ meme

https://redfortyeight.com/?s=end+of+history

After all the confusion over the term ‘end of history’ it is interesting that Fukuyama has in fact altered his view. The term is too confused for use at this point but at least we should note that the idea of democracy is a better candidate for the usage and that in the context of a challenge to its flaws in practice: Marx was insightful on this and rightly analyzed the way ‘democracy’ was hijacked by capitalism. Obvious stuff, so why is everyone confused?

The idea of the ‘end of history’ works very well if we see it in terms of a oscillating correction along the lines of a socialist blend with democracy. Obvious stuff, so why is everyone confused. The whole idea has  been scrambled by the legacy of bolshevism and the capitalist cooptation of the idea. The insights of Marx produced revulsion with liberalism, and finally democracy, in Lenin et al. and the whole fiasco began

Instead of the term we might consider a convergence that can reconcile democracy and communism in a conclusion to the social evolution of civil society: that was incidentally clearly stated by Kant…who fortunately never used the term that has induced fumble in so many….