Relevant link; Midwestern Marx
I've hit 80 essays already! I had planned to stop at 80. Maybe I'll actually do as I planned for once! I would like to earnestly thank everyone for reading and subscribing. I hope I haven't caused others as many migraines as I have done myself! I would also like to finish with a link to a great online educational institute and YT channel which I've been following these past few years.
When I see great younger people building good things, I often have to restrain a vexatious impulse to question what they’re doing. It’s a troubling hangover from my own past experiences where I felt I had to be constantly on my guard, to be constantly (mentally!) armed for conflict, and where I was in a state of constant and profound anxiety of threats real and imagined. Sometimes the impulse seems to be a purely defensive, or competitive reaction. At other times, it is probably both the above, but also mixed with genuine inquisitiveness and desire to understand. I’ve been following these past few years a truly excellent YT/ online educational institute called Midwestern Marx (in a curious irony, both my Zen teacher and my political philosophy teachers are from the US midwest!). It is both a teaching and theoretical development collective, and is head and shoulders above most of the other such channels I’ve encountered.
Philosophically, of course, it is rooted in the worldview of Marx and those in that tradition. As far as political economy goes, I find myself pretty much convinced of the validity of the Marxist worldview, with the important caveat that my disposition to most if not all matters is pragmatic. If these philosophies are useful in the endeavour to secure a happy and fulfilled life for humans, then they are valid to that extent.
This may appear as very philistinical or even anti-intellectual veering on positivism, but it’s not where I would see it coming from. It’s not like I would dismiss all the richness of thought in the traditions of systems such as Marxism, only that I’ve come through many experiences of believing in such systems totally only to then realise their limitations and potential weaknesses. When this happens, I’m left (and I think many will have experienced this similarly) with a sense of disillusionment.
These experiences and suspicions might be considered evidence of a kind of dilettantism were it not that I fundamentally recognise the need for these intellectual structures in the quest to provide for – as I say – the security and happiness of human life on Earth, as far as it is possible. Whatever grand theoretical systems may be erected, they are – for me – only as good as they do provide for people’s happiness, or at least protection and common welfare.
My own maxim in this regard is that we should
‘draw the outlines by arranging the material conditions for people’s fulfilment, and let the people colour themselves in’ .
Colour themselves in is with reference to such metaphysical aspects as culture, identity, etc. Nature precedes and permeates human beings, and what is immanent in human beings with regards to dispositions, desires, abilities and creativity is provided by Nature (or the Divine, or God or Spirit if one is speaking theistically).
Whatever principles known, unknown, or unknowable are manifest in and as nature-and-humanity, they are always actual and active. What we might abstract from them, such as our senses of identity- collective, historical, national, individual, etc are by necessity limited and derivative and always superseded by the actual, concrete universal reality.
My maxim here with regards to such concepts as identity, tradition, national character etc is that
“the identity that is named, is not the true or constant identity”,
In other words, these notions are always abstract and to a very great degree, arbitrary. Moreover, nature-and-humanity are in a process of constant change, so that any definite designations of characteristics are always out of date as soon as they are made. Pragmatically, states and national borders are of course useful, if not unavoidably expedient. But people themselves and nature itself proceed according to their own inherent principles, and cannot be definitely fixed as if by static abstract and essential distinctions.
Systems are built by first abstracting/imposing distinctions from and on reality and then arranging the distinctions relationally for whatever the purpose or interests may be. If Marxism and it’s theoretical developments are for the purpose of enfranchising and liberating human beings from unnecessary hardship, injustice, privation, precarious circumstance, domination and exploitation then the distinct characteristics extracted from, analysed, arranged and then imposed as a system on concrete reality – such as class distinctions, property relations, national and historical forms- are valid in so far as they are fit for purpose in achieving these ends.
Apart from that, Marxism no more or no less than liberalism, libertarianism, conservatism etc is so many words and discursive thoughts– interesting , fascinating but still words and thoughts in the constant and wordless dynamism of reality.
Food for thought
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gustav-landauer-anarchism-socialism