Marxism is Not Woke
Clearing Marxism's name
Proving beyond possible doubt that James Lindsay and other rightists are fundamentally wrong about Marxism, and that Marxist theory in the West is meaningless without the aid of Dugin and Heidegger’s thinking.
§1
Marxism has no reality at all in the West. Nearly all self-proclaimed Marxists are frauds who haven’t even read Marx, let alone understand him. They use the label Marxism, despite knowing nothing about it, as a pseudo-intellectual obfuscation for their liberal ideology.
§2
To begin, what is Marxism?
Marxism is not a theory of equality. It is not a diagnosis of injustice, nor is it a specific prescription of how to remedy society’s ills.
Marxism is a method for acquiring knowledge about the laws governing the historical development of societies.
§3
Marxism thus regards itself as a type of science. Most people think of science as something purely descriptive.
But the reason Marx’s contemporaries called him Prometheus is because he bequeathed a science that did not just describe reality, but participated in its development.
§4
This makes Marxism totally contrary to modern science.
Modern science places knowledge above its object. To know, means to strip something naked to consciousness and turn it into a utility for the knowing subject. He who knows an object, can control, master, and alter an object.
§5
But the ‘object’ known by Marxism is none other than human society itself.
And the paradox lies in the obvious fact that society is not just an object, but also a subject.
Marxists (subjects) are themselves part of the very object they make knowable.
§6
To complicate matters further, Marx does not claim knowledge of society alone can transform society.
Instead, he proves that society is already coming to know and transform itself materially in the form of the then growing proletarian class.
§7
Most people think Marx is ‘Promethean’ because he wanted his ideas popularized. But the REAL reason was because he had the courage of declaring the return of knowledge back to being itself, and human beings in particular.
He created a science that ceased to be above its object.
§8
For Marx, the knowledge of historical laws arrived at by consciousness, was being reflected in history itself.
Knowledge of humanity does not dominate humanity, but reveals that it was there, and part of it all along.
“Communism is the riddle of history solved.”
§9
Why the need for class consciousness?
This is where people misunderstand Leninism as an attempt to turn politics and state power into a tool for realizing some goal of the mind.
In reality, the role of Marxists lies in spreading the ‘good news’ to the despairing proletariat.
§10
Class consciousness, the so-called ‘vanguard party,’ and the Communist state is the realization of the proletariat’s faith in itself.
Communism is not realized ‘automatically’ without the participation of a Communist party because society is not just an object.
§11
Neither just a subject either. Communist parties do not create new societies, only guide the existing development of society.
This guidance is necessary because politics, Communist or otherwise is itself part of material reality.
§12
Without the guidance of proletarian consciousness, the movement propelling society still continues.
But it leads to an economic, political, spiritual, moral and overall social crisis. Society eats away at itself as it cannot make sense of the contradictions driving it.
§13
The crisis of Western Marxism lies in its inability to overcome the subject/object distinction when it comes to society.
How can society both be a real (material) object, while also given the quality of subjective responsibility? Two responses emerge:
§14
The first cope of Western Marxism is a type of fatalism, which Lenin calls economism.
According to this view, politics is not involved in the revolutionary transformation of society at all, which happens only because of economics, or a spontaneous uprising of the proletariat.
§15
The second (more relevant) is the opposite extreme.
In this view, society must act as a pure subject in the form of institutions (party or otherwise), exterminating every trace of its pre-conscious, and objective material being, recreating all society from scratch.
§16
But both two sides of Western Marxism are incompatible with Marx’s Promethean gesture of suspending knowledge back to being.
In the first, being is upheld entirely independent of knowledge.
In the second, knowledge is asserted over and at the expense of being.
§17
If society will become communist independently of the engaged subjective partisanship of communists, then all you have is the conceit of some subject-in-the-know passively watching their object fulfill the expectations of subjective knowledge.
§18
If communism is just some enlightened consciousness, then what you have are psychotic subjects devoid of any trust that their knowledge is actually based in (non-conscious) reality itself, denouncing the latter as ‘reactionary.’
Knowledge only as ‘subjective self-consciousness.’
§19
The ‘praxis’ uniting thought and practice then is only in the fractal movement of subjective self-consciousness - voluntary ‘action’ becomes the ‘object’ of the subject, who then acts on its basis: ‘object’ takes on the processual quality of yet-to-be fulfilled subjectivity.
§20
This is exactly why @conceptualjames places Marxism in the Gnostic tradition: This Western interpretation of Marxism is founded upon a metaphysical distrust for reality.
Because of that distrust, good, virtue, etc. lies only in knowledge as pure subjective self-consciousness.
§21
This Western Marxism has its origins in the neo-Kantian György Lukács, whose seminal work “History and Class Consciousness” was written to resolve the problem the subject/object distinction posed for the Marxist concept of society, class & history.
§22
In order to begin, Lukács engaged in an egregious form of revisionism; blaming for Marxism’s commitment to natural realism Fredrich Engels and his "dialectics of nature."23
To Lukács, when Marx referred to objective material reality, he was merely opposing society as a supra-individual horizon of meaning to individual subjectivity. It did not include objective natural reality, which Lukács brackets as irrelevant to Marxism.
§24
Society was ‘objective,’ and consciousness was ‘subjective.’ Their dialectical interaction, for Lukács, was the basis of history itself.
But the material reality outside of social mediation (nature) was irrelevant to, and outside this dialectic, outside history.
§25
The reason I mention Lukács is because Western Marxism was founded on the false view that he resolved the problem of ‘subject/object’ distinction for Marxism.
But he did nothing of that sort, he just changed the definition of objectivity to exclude objective reality itself.
§26
Here, objectivity is just the reified totality of social relations, denied of active subjective responsibility.
This obviously contradicts Marx’s materialism, for which objectivity does include nature, not just society as some purely transcendental horizon.
§27
Without including nature in the definition of material reality, then class-consciousness consists in dissolving all society, in all its objectivity, into a pure subjective self-consciousness. For Lukács, the proletarian class is the first ‘subject-object’ which does exactly this.
§28
This is a gross perversion of Marxism, and it is easy to see the lineage of the Lukácsian view in the Frankfurt School, the New Left, ‘postmodern academia,’ gender studies in Wokeism as a whole.
But is Lukácsian Western Marxism really to blame?
§29
In fact, when Lukács decided to reject Engels, he was just compromising with institutional modern realism.
Engels ‘dialectics of nature’ was too ‘metaphysical’ because it saw something ‘human’ in reality. In other words, the opposite of a metaphysical distrust in reality!
§30
In other words, James Lindsay is a fucking moron when he blames wokeism’s metaphysical distrust in reality on Marxism.
In actual fact, the distrust in reality is the very basis of bourgeois modernity.
It can be thought as the entire premise of the Age of Enlightenment itself!
§31
In the realm of science: Metaphysical distrust in reality takes the form of distrust in our conventions, intuitions, religious beliefs, and sensibilities about the nature of reality.
Reality is a pure OUTSIDE only accessed by cold, indifferent, impersonal inquiry.
§32
In the realm of politics: Metaphysical distrust in reality takes the form of distrust in traditional sovereign authority, regarding it as unjust, arbitrary, and tyrannical.
Sovereigns must be legitimated by some explicitly abstract constitutional or democratic procedure.
§33
Wokeness is just the applying it to the realm of culture, where the unwritten norms of civilization secretly disguise relationships of injustice, oppression, and marginalization - by virtue of not being premised by expressly consensual, rational, etc. consciousness.
§34
In bourgeois modernity, only what is in the sphere of explicit responsibility of conscious subjects can be ‘trusted.’
Any recognition of humanity in reality itself is no different than a superstition: Reality is arbitrary, meaningless, and malign. Only institutions are Good.
§35
The madness of bourgeois capitalism, which alienates mankind from its material being, is the true culprit behind the Woke phenomena, NOT Marxism.
All Lukács did was make Marxism compatible with bourgeois institutions. The original problem is the bourgeoisie itself.
§36
The Gnostic, occultist, and alchemical origins of the bourgeois enlightenment are abundantly clear. Lindsay accuses of Marxism, what is in fact THE FOUNDATION OF LIBERALISM!
Marxism is the exact OPPOSITE of this bourgeois conceit of knowledge (gnosis), formalism, and wokeness.
§37
In Marxism, the highest aim of knowledge is to give way to reality. This entails a great trust in material being - anything of importance arrived at by knowledge, is already reconciled within material reality itself.
But the paradox is that this ‘giving way’ is a necessary act.
§38
Lukács’ response to this paradox revised Marxism itself. But even if Lukács were to be rejected, the problem remains.
Furthermore, what is really the problem with Lukács’s revision, anyway? Exploring that reveals the way to a better solution.
§39
As we have shown, the idea of communism as a pure subjective self-consciousness, is based on the notion that objectivity is just reified social relations. This naturally begs the question of what the content of these social relations consists in, as so far they are only pure form
§40
Marxism is historical materialism, and Communism is just the practical application of historical materialism, via the class-conscious (historical-materialism conscious) proletariat, to society itself. But what does that say about the nature of society in the first place?
§41
It means society is an indescribable ‘totality’ of individual mental states, opinions, and beliefs, - the objectivity of social relationships, is merely a result of the subjective mind ‘reifying’ segments of the totality and treating them as external realities in themselves.
§42
Thus here, society has no real determinate content - it is a pure ‘Kantian Thing-in-Itself,’ a mere totality of individual relations that only asserts its existence negatively, via the reification (‘objectivization’) of its constituent parts.
§43
This means that material relations of production are rooted in reified mental states, not material reality. Consciousness of them (plus action) would dissolve them.
Material society is then defined by ‘that which subjective consciousness has not yet assumed responsibility for!’
§44
Having rejected any specific form of being as *necessarily* material, including nature, it is only upon failing to render the Totality fully transparent that consciousness may renunciate its aspiration to dissolve everything in itself.
Totality is the Lukácsian sublime.
§45
The Totality of individual relations in the form of History, or Society, constitutes a type of absolute objectivity which is not merely a reification - but the free, continuous and holistic content of every possible experience, mental state, and subjectivity.
§46
A totality cannot assume self-consciousness, since it cannot be confined to any one self. So that is simply the end of Scientific Socialism: The only thing that can really be known about society, is that nothing at all can be known. This is no more knowledge than Kant’s Thing.
§47
Subject-Object distinction reemerges, only now between a subjective self-consciousness (in the form of Party, institutions, etc) rendering transparent and assuming responsibility for all determinations of society and the Totality of relations as the supremely impenetrable object.
§48
So we are back to square one, and none wiser in answering:
To what extent is society (including all relations of production) itself objective?
To what extent is Communism merely a subjective consciousness?
These are the most fundamental questions of Western Marxism.
§49
I place special emphasis on Western Marxism, since these questions are obvious within the framework of the experience of Marxism-Leninism. There, the question of the objectivity of society, and Communism, were answered practically: In the Soviet Avant-Garde and in the GPCR.
§50
Both of these events ran upon the objective limits of their underlying aspirations, and the wisdom of Marxism-Leninism - whether in Socialism in One Country or in Deng Xiaopings Reform and Opening Up - defined itself in relation to that experience.
§51
Moreover, Marxism-Leninism is defined within the context of countries where the question of society and the individual is resolved in the concrete bonds of civilization, bonds which were never questioned even at the height of revolutionary experimentation.
§52
In the comparatively atomized West, it is not at all clear to people to what extent society is objective, or to what extent ideas are subjective, even outside Marxist theory. Modern Western thinking doubts absolutely everything about society, even the definition of gender.
§53
The very distinction between subject and object itself is not at all clear in Western society, which is extremely sensitive to algorithmically-driven shifts in culture. Even scientific consensus is (rightfully) called into question, while expert opinion disguises itself as fact.
§54
In contrast to Lukács notion of reification, the real problem with the subject-object distinction cannot but appear to be rooted in the notion of objective Being implied by it, as totally purified of human quality. Despite that in reality, all objects appear somehow tainted by it
§55
When the thinking consciousness is entirely divided from reality, as pure spirit, soul, mind, or cogito - what remains of reality is completely meaningless, and devoid of any moral, historical, spiritual, or human significance.
How could that square with Marx’s view bellow?
§56
Marxists as early as Plekhanov have also opted for regressing into Spinozism as a means to resolve the problem, where subject and object collapse into the supreme Substance. In this way thinking consciousness is the mere attribute of Substance: the most fundamental form of Being.
§57
Soviet Philosopher Ilyenkov, goes so far as to draw out speculative cosmological implications of this view, according to which thought arises as a necessary attribute of matter to prevent the heat death of the universe, by initiating a conscious cosmic catastrophe to reset it.
§58
The problem with Spinozism is not the view that mind and matter (‘subject and object’) share reality, but in the notion of reality as ‘Substance:’ a metaphysical view of the object already united with its subjective determinations. Substance thus has no stake in its attributes.
§59
This is just one of the ways of ‘resolving’ the problem by denying it all together: Substance is mere objectivity given Form by the mind. Substance is treated as supreme, antecedent, and given, but it is the repository of a dogmatic subjective determination, not true objectivity.
§60
The Marxist-Spinozist view cannot ground the origins of proletarian consciousness, Marxism, and the Communist party in reality - it represses its own origins, and pretends these arise in perfect continuity with the self-same Substance, effectively gaslighting itself.
§61
This view does not arise from any necessary procedure of thought, experience, or relation to the world. It is a metaphysical view that does not pay for itself in any way - it is an insight that cannot itself be reproduced materially, a pure dogmatism of the mind.
§62
There never comes the decisive gesture of Marx of renouncing knowledge to suspend it back into Being - Substance is the conceit of a knowledge that already inheres in Being, perfectly continuous with the intellect which at no point runs upon the limit of its pretentions.
§63
In practice, it becomes a type of ideological hubris, asserting the unreality and meaninglessness of every actually substantive bond of civilization, in favor of a supreme ‘Substance’ that has neither any skin of its own in the game, nor any reality outside a calcified intellect.
§64
More importantly, it renders Scientific Socialism into a metaphysical dogma, incapable of deriving concrete knowledge of concrete social reality. No specificity of societal objectivity is possible - everything is just ‘capitalism’ permeating the whole of its ‘attributes.’
§65
It is obvious that if ‘everything’ is objective, then nothing in particular is, including society itself. The extent of society’s objectivity is the extent it is continuous with a dogma of the mind. It is no wonder Spinoza is the favorite thinker of pseudo-Marxist academia!
§66
Spinozism is categorically incompatible with Marxism for no other reason than that its foundations make impossible insight into laws governing historical development, and the particular qualitative character of societies. It could not possibly constitute any class-consciousness.
§67
Specifically, it cannot afford any recognition of the objectivity of contradictions (such as the class struggle). In the stead of the objectivity of class struggle lies a pure subjectivist ‘will to immanence,’ a notion of communism as antisocial as Lukácsian “self-consciousness.”
§68
The scholastic concept Substance does not resolve the object-subject distinction (the principal theoretical problem of Western Marxism), but only conceals it. For the 100+ years Western Marxism has confused it with Marx’s materialism, Marxism was condemned metaphysical languish.
§69
It suffices only to recall Marx’s own apt view of Spinoza: A metaphysically disguised objectivity which excludes the objectivity of man, and therefore the socius relevant for Marx’s own materialism.
§70
Marxism succeeded in overcoming metaphysics, but only within a limited scope of practice. That is namely in the investigations of Marx in Capital, the writings of Fredrich Engels and the concrete historical experience of Marxism-Leninism.
§71
Marx and Engels failed to fully transmit their theoretical genius. Lenin alone inherited it, and gave it practical reality. The genius of Marxism survived as the genius of world-historical statesmen and civilizations, but its original spark of consciousness was lost.
§72
Marxism-Leninism emerged as a type of phronesis, whose advanced outlook was established by the context of the concrete historical experience of Communism. Not strictly a matter of theoretical intellect, but also a type of advanced sensibility based on practical reality.
§73
Marx’s Promethean gesture acquired objective reality and history exclusively outside the West, where objectivity of society was not metaphysical question, but a given reality. And the problem of metaphysics permeated the whole of Western thinking, not just Western Marxism.
§74
For Marxism to be meaningful in the West, it cannot ignore this problem, for when it does, it always remains trapped within it anyway, inevitably regressing materialist objectivity from practical Scientific Socialism into the scholastic Kantian or Spinozist frame.
§75
In the case of Kantianism (as in Lukács), proletarian objectivity dissolves in the subjectivism of social-dem institutions. In Spinozism, it becomes an intellectual conceit devoid of skin in the game. Revisionism, opportunism, and defeatism are the certain conclusion of both.
§76
The object in the form of ‘capitalism’ - whether as Thing or Substance - becomes so overwhelming and insurmountable, that the comparative weakness of Marxist subjectivity takes in. The paranoiac spectre of ‘fascism’ reflects a consciousness always in retreat before its object.
§77
And hardly anything could affirm that paranoia more than the fact that the thinker who finally initiated the revolution that would emancipate the Western mind from bourgeois metaphysics once and for all, is nearly equally infamous for their affiliation to German Nazism.
§78
Originally a student of Husserl and the phenomenological school, Martin Heidegger inadvertently lays the foundation for a complete rediscovery of Marx, emancipating Western thought from its metaphysical shackles and opening the way for a truly consistent materialist outlook.
§79
Heidegger elects to orient thought to an origin more fundamental than can be contained within the frame of the reductionist ‘res cogitans/'extensa’ or ‘subject/object’ distinction, and that is toward Being as such. This is the beginning of what is popularly called ontology.
§80
For Heidegger, Being as such pre-exists the classification, categorization, utilization, etc. of particular beings by thought. It is the ‘Being of beings’ - the more fundamental ground by which particular beings are given to us - whether in experience, contemplation, or practice.
§81
He calls the difference between Being & beings the Ontological Difference. Every relation to beings, is based on a fundamental horizon of Being as such. When a specific horizon acquires historical dominance, it is metaphysical - imposing upon Being a specific relation by thought.
§82
The view of the thinking being is set on a foundation far less metaphysically loaded than the Cartesian Subject: as Dasein, a being for which there is a question or openness of Being. Dasein embodies the very discontinuity of Being that justifies the Ontological Difference.
§83
The problem with the subject-object distinction is that it can only regard beings as objects for a given subject. This makes for a notion of objectivity that is a priori idealist. The notion of Subject also implies a specific view of objects as mere utilities for its realization.
§84
Subject, moreover, defined as res cogita, is thought itself taken as its own real object. This implies an alienation of thought from reality, foreclosing its scandalous incipience in Being. This notion is the final conclusion of idealism; for Heidegger metaphysics as such.
§85
Marx already accomplished the rejection of the culmination of idealist philosophy, especially in his early writings. But the incipient materialist language he made use of (man, class, mode of production, etc.), later fell victim to inevitably metaphysical conceptualizations.
§86
Some of these Concepts were involved in the first breakdown of European Marxism itself. The changing nature of capitalist production & role of the proletariat ceased to neatly conform to their Concept, and this was used by Social Democracy to justify its revisionism.
§87
Western Marxism, with its conceptualist orthodoxy, became infiltrated by metaphysics, so it is natural that only a Western thinker entirely outside Marxism - and even entirely opposed to it politically - could initiate the emancipation of Western thought from metaphysics.
§88
Heidegger may have been beset by various idealistic and politically objectionable peculiarities, but these do not define his primary historical significance. His primary significance lies in setting all thought on a basis which asserts its posteriority in the face of Being.
§89
The concept of Dasein helps resolve the fundamental problem of Marxist theory: The Subject/Object paradox and its methodological individualism. For the first time, society, classes, and civilizations can be acknowledged as real in a manner consistent with the materialist view.
§90
Dasein does not necessarily afford contemplation exclusive significance in its overall issue of Being, so it is not just another concept of the subject: Not simply cognition, but practically being-in-the-world, facing the constitutive disjuncture with Being in its very Being.
§91
This overall phenomenological orientation permits thought to acknowledge reality without preemptively attempting to assume the consequences or implications it has for the thinking being. Whatever consequences or implications there may be, they begin with being, not thought.
§92
It is undoubtedly possible that Dasein can be conceived exclusively as an individual, but unlike the concept of the Subject, it is not necessarily so. Being as such is a common well-spring that cuts across individuated ‘subjects,’ and is the staging ground of any shared reality.
§93
Moreover, without acknowledging the incipience of thought from more fundamental Being, Marxist materialism becomes an absurdity: Materiality becomes identical to the thought of materiality (like Substance), and thus an idea! In this way, materialism easily becomes idealism.
§94
Dasein is constitutively a being already thrown in a world, a world not only not of its choosing, but whose givenness, in the form of beings, cannot be pre-emptively defined by thoughts, ideas or concepts. It rather rests upon a relation to Being as such, which can only be uncovered.
§95
The real individual is thus set against a background within which their very individuated identity is subordinated to a more fundamental horizon of Being. Dasein, in its incipience, knows no distinction between individuals, or itself and others. It is not even a collective.
§96
Typically, Marxists try to resolve antinomy of sociality (either the sum-total of individual subjects or a collective subject individuals are part of) by just grotesquely defining it as a ‘complex’ of relationships between individuals, too numerous to ground in anything definite.
§97
The concept of Dasein, properly speaking, does not necessarily even imply individuated identity, let alone a grouping of individuals - but a more fundamental and antecedent background from which individuals acquire distinction, place and identity within a world.
§98
The simultaneous quality of being open to Being, while also itself Being, implies Dasein as an incipience of thought that goes from the question of a subject faced with its object, to a quality of the ‘object’ itself, as originally discontinuous with regard to itself.
§99
A Dasein is already immersed within a world, and is a grounded existence while simultaneously corresponding to an openness of Being at issue with, or at least discontinuous with that existence. Yet said Being is nothing more than the very Being of Dasein itself.
§100
This ontological difference (between a world of beings and Being as such) is not antagonistic, since Being merely discloses itself, implying not that it is at odds with the world, only given privileged significance in the way it reveals itself to Dasein, in contrast to beings.
§101
Particular beings acquire definition in their use, or general significance, but their real meaning is always metonymic, always referring to something more fundamental than themselves: Being as such is thus also the ultimate horizon of meaningfulness to which beings are referred.
§102
The definition of a Dasein itself, lies at the point in which it faces the threshold beyond which it cannot cross, simultaneously defining the whole of what it is. Typically understood as a person’s death, but more importantly that within which Dasein may recognize its finitude.
§103
That is necessarily beyond any particular being; even individual ego. Being as such grounds the finitude of Dasein, and meaningfulness arises not simply in the physical death of a person, but in Being itself, so far as it sets upon the limits of its disclosure to a given Dasein.
§104
Heidegger’s shortcoming lies in the ambiguity of Dasein. While Dasein is thrown into a given community, as an established horizon of being, it acquires an authentic relationship to Being only through the exercise of individual will, where it comes to acknowledge its finitude.
§105
Yet at the same time, the community is the very ground of Dasein, since ones relation toward others constitutes a given conventionally established horizon of being. What remains ambiguous is the antisocial status of the Being which discloses itself to Dasein.
§106
Experiencing finitude is necessarily individual, yet the status of the finitude of Being itself is not clear. This is heightened by the fact that for Heidegger, every determinacy of Being is metaphysical, closing the Ontological difference by reducing Being to a particular being.
§107
Though, Heidegger does not make clear how it is community acquires singularity of being, he grounds phenomenological Being the site of its conceivability, freeing it from the methodological individualism of intersubjectivity: and that is his principal achievement for Marxism.
§108
As shown, without the aid of Heidegger, Marxism inevitably regresses into metaphysics. But paradoxically, Heidegger’s understanding of metaphysics is the very chief defect of his outlook, not only condemning it to stagnation on his part, but placing it at risk of idealism.
§109
Heidegger makes no distinction, in his understanding of metaphysics, between Being in the specificity of its determination, and Being in the specificity of its understanding within the history of philosophy. He extends the label ‘metaphysics’ beyond the realm of thought.
§110
For him, metaphysics is an actuality. Thus, industrial capitalist modernity is itself the result of metaphysics and it is implied: a consequence of the history of philosophy. Obviously from an elementary Marxist, or even commonsense perspective, he gets the whole thing backwards.
§111
To understand how Being itself acquires a specific determination, it suffices to return to the ontological difference between Being and particular beings. Heidegger situates this difference at the core of Dasein’s existential turmoil, for which Being is always at issue.
§112
This quandary, while not identical, at least parallels that of Kant, for whom the transcendental subject is likewise situated between the antinomies. So it suffices to ‘in parallel’ look to Hegel for the solution, and transpose the difference as a difference of Being itself.
§113
That is to say, the ontological difference should change the operative notion of Being in the first place, from its one-sided conception mired in the stillness of thought, to an understanding of Being as itself contradiction, difference, etc. in sum, a dialectical union of contraries.
§114
Thus Being as such acquires determinacy as an absolute ontological union of opposites, transposing the difference at the core of Dasein to a feature of Being itself. That there exists Dasein in the first place should change something about our understanding of Being itself.
§115
Yet in contrast to Hegel, it is not necessary to draw the conclusion that thought comprises the essential element in the contradiction at the heart of Being - The misstep of phenomenological Hegelians from Kojeve to Žižek, who regressed from Heidegger’s original achievement.
§116
The important conclusion is that ontology - taken not as a philosophical contemplation, but the real threshold by which mankind relates to Being as such - is itself actively suspended and itself reproduced within material reality, as the formative ground of all thought.
§117
This threshold lies not in the limits of philosophy, but in the limits of man’s existence itself, itself suspended in temporal history. Such a limit lies not in the threshold of man’s mastery over nature, but the limit by which man lives, relates to others and to things.
§118
Such a limit is not preempted by any philosophy, idea, or consciousness, but the genuine limit of man’s existence in relation to the whole of Being, conditioned not necessarily by physical limitation, but by the limit of the absolute contradiction which forms meaning itself.
§119
This can be understood as the contradiction between the givenness of being and Being as such, or between the determinate norms of civilization and their unity in a state authority, a specific frame of past and future, particular and universal, many and one, etc.
§120
Heidegger (at least in his early years) could not see that Dasein is not just a being for whom there is a question of Being - but also a being for whom that question is already resolved in a specific way. Heidegger assumed that resolution was necessarily metaphysical.
§121
While true for the history of philosophy, it is not true for living and real mankind, for whom the contradiction between the determinacy of Being and an appreciation for the ontological, is the very content of the latter. It is what gives Being itself meaning!
§122
The absolute contradiction is a contradiction of incipience, between determination and origins. The contingency of Dasein is not simply a matter of choice, as Heidegger thought, but in a determination whose ‘reason’ is only clear retroactively, like a wavefunction collapse.
§123
A civilization is the way it is, not because it is physically impossible for it to be any other way, but precisely because it is physically possible. Only by assuming one determination against a background of many, can a higher reason participate in the development of a people.
§124
Western Marxism, before it engages in ‘historical materialist’ analysis, projects a vulgar metaphysical view (rejected by Marx & Engels) of humanity, according to which mankind dwells at the precipice of physical extinction. Thus, everything about society is reduced to survival.
§124.1
Hence, class struggle ultimately reduces to the Rational Choice Individual, and one group merely finds itself disadvantaged with regard to others, on account of being unable to fulfill the desires, or restricting the choices of individuals. What is problematic about this is clear
§124.2
It clearly contrasts with the Marxist view of class struggle, which situates class antagonism within a single division of labor, as a contradiction at the core of being itself - giving it ontological significance, rather than a result of clashing individuals.
§125
Understanding any given civilization, is simply a matter of understanding the mode of production. The problem is they never bother to ask exactly what is being produced in the first place. They begin and end with the individual, effectively arriving at no real knowledge at all.
§126
The problem of course is that the individual is situated within a more fundamental horizon by which they relate to others, to things, etc. This jibber-jabber is well-known to ‘Marxists,’ but precisely what is meant by it, at the objective material level they never make clear.
§127
A mode of production is the mode by which something is reproduced; that something can’t just be the individual. For a mode of production to be general, it must itself have a general object, otherwise the entire concept becomes completely useless.
§128
To begin, this object - which is really the specific Being of Dasein - must be a specific logic of reproduction. You could call it a unit of civilization, or a division of labor. Marxoids have devoted an eternity of soliloquies to Capital as a logic of reproduction.
§129
Capital, whose logic is standardization, abstraction, and utilitarianism is not a specific logic, but an empty universalism, which concludes with modern American ‘civilisation,’ and now a mere extension of Church of Cartesian metaphysics (govt, financial institutions etc).
§130
M-C-M’ is merely the form of reproduction of the modern European polity; the abstraction of the commodity form corresponding to the abstraction of the state. Capital is not an autonomous process, but a civilizational quandary. A deeper object has precedence over it.
§131
In a sense, Heidegger is right that ontology here possesses primacy. Before there was capitalism, there was a more fundamental way European civilization came to relate to Being as a whole. That is not to say the latter is arbitrary - on the contrary, it is world-historical.
§132
The point is that in contrast to the vulgar materialist view, all of mankind’s ‘metaphysical,’ spiritual, cultural, scientific, etc. questions, aspirations, fears and dreams were bound up with the development of capitalism, reflecting their highest relation to Being as such.
§133
To know a logic of reproduction, is to know what is most sacred, fundamental, and ontological for a given people. No abstract, mechanical geometrical, or arithmetic conception of physical production suffices to produce knowledge of any given mode of production.
§134
It is clear that Heidegger, though providing the foundation for a Marxism freed from metaphysics, hardly allows us to go this far with the concept of Dasein. But at the very least, with the help of Hegel, it is possible to grasp ontological difference as a feature of Being itself
§135
That is the second most important step to arriving at a true conception of the objectivity of society, after Heidegger’s phenomenological turn itself. That is because it establishes Being as a specific contradiction, thus having some kind of finitude beyond individual death.
§136
This does not yet tell us anything particular about any specific Dasein. For that to be possible, it is necessary to take a fundamental step beyond Heidegger and beyond the West itself. Heidegger gave us an escape from metaphysics - but not a perspective already outside of it.
§137
It was Aleksandr Dugin who accomplished the particularization of Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, thus allowing for it to be put to work in productive, even practical ways. And he does this by returning to the beginning of metaphysics according to Heidegger - in Logos.
§138
Logos is the first forgetting of Being, in the form of Being as the identity of difference. Whereas Heidegger identifies Being with Time, Heraclitus identified Being as change and constant flux, and thus an identity of difference itself. The beginning of Western philosophy.
§139
Dugin, rather than languish in the melodrama of the long forgetting of Being, employs Logos as a productive concept: As the logic of a given civilization’s existence, defining its particular Dasein, or ontology. This analysis is only superficially idealist, but not necessarily.
§140
Dugin claims to reject materialism as a whole. Yet only his language is metaphysical: what he describes is nothing other than the metaphysically-concealed communal being which is the premise of any application of Scientific Socialism. The kernel of his thinking is materialist.
§141
Logos is the revealed form of Dasein, cleansing Heidegger of any traces of potential subjectivism and, in a properly Hegelian manner, transposing the ontological difference itself into a determinate object. Active geopolitical analysis can then replace impotent contemplation.
§142
Dugin offers Space as a proper counterpart to Heideggerean Time, because he does not mind being ‘metaphysical,’ in the sense of grounding Being in specificity. But from a materialist perspective, going from the general to the particular is the opposite of metaphysical.
§143
Dugin is necessary for Marxism, because without specifying the communal being which is the premise of Scientific Socialism, it not only regresses into metaphysics (and cannot draw any particular insights), it becomes a cheap extension of American unipolar liberalism.
§144
Dugin may give expression to this social being in an overtly metaphysical way, but that is just halloween dressing. The important thing is that he delimits it as the very ground of thought itself, fulfilling the logic of Marxist-Leninist dialectics, beginning from the particular.
§145
Socialism in One Country reflected the precise logic that universal Communism can only be built up within a determinate communal being, not a vain pretension to the entire world, but a concrete, grounded relationship between a specific party and a specific country.
§146
Dugin’s geopolitical orientation allows for an understanding of the objectivity of civilizations beyond the formalism of statehood - states only exist to the extent that they can reflect the underlying logos of a civilization, reflected in its geography.
§146.1
For Dugin, the logos acquires particularity (beyond the mere identity of difference) where it establishes a particular logic relating one to many, identity and difference, being and becoming, stasis and flux, universal and particular, central authority and local community, etc
§146.2
Logos is stamped by a particular logic of how it relates to its own incipience, how it excludes nothingness, how a people relate to their own constitutive origins, by what means they relate to a universality, what specific limit defines their existence.
§147
The logos of civilization easily translates in Marxist terms into a specific logic of communal reproduction, which itself would mean nothing without acknowledging the primacy of ‘ontology’ - at least taken to mean the way in which mankind reproduces the conditions of Form.
§148
With Dugin, knowledge can only be derived from the ground-up: every metaphysical, noetic, even psychological assumption is suspended and imperiled phenomenally - not a single conceit of the mind can be idle in the investigation of civilizations and geopolitics.
§149
What accounts for a great deal of Dugin’s mysticism is the phenomenalization of the active intellect, which must cross beyond itself and into its real material premises, where only a language of the sublime can suffice to give expression to its objective limitations.
§150
Importantly, these limitations are put to work for Dugin - the limits of metaphysics are immanent limits of logos itself, thus enabling a positive a positive analysis and investigation of different civilizations, rather than just understanding them in terms of their differences.
§151
This brings us to what is by far the most important contribution of Dugin, and which permits him to be characterized as a true metaphysical materialist, going beyond even Heidegger - and that is in Dugin’s concept of Chaos, the true the phenomenal form of material being.
§152
Whereas Heidegger understands in Heraclitus the beginning of Being’s oblivion, Dugin identifies at the precise incipience of Logos a dark counterpart to it - that is chaos. Chaos is not randomness, nor meaninglessness. It is really the antecedent density of material being.
§153
In contrast to the exclusive principle of Logos, based on differentiation, identity - which defines itself in contrast to the void of nothingness - chaos is an inclusive principle. It is a dark shadow of logos, corresponding to Being that it has forgotten, but which follows it.
§154
Whereas Chaos is ‘Nothing’ to the Logos (or the intellect), it is in reality something. What is this if not a precise materialist view, which asserts the primacy and antecedence of a reality which cannot ever be reduced to any product of the mind?
§155
As an inclusive principle, Logos is included within Chaos, as one of its possibilities. This reflects the history of the ‘Asiatic’ Empires, which never seem to annihilate any aspect of their being (including the conquered), but only include, and aggregate in a higher form.
§156
Chaos is a type of index of Dasein’s development, which cannot be conditioned by the forms of Being it gives rise to. It is the inert density, and eternity of material being faced by the intellect, which extends infinitely into the past, assailing its development into one Whole.
§157
This bears an obvious similarity to Solovyov’s Sophiology, which identifies the feminine divine wisdom as a fourth hypostasis of the trinity. Sophia is the Whole body of universal humanity - the infinite past of infinite divine wisdom of the accumulated history of all mankind.
§158
It is in this way that Dugin renders any Heideggerean accusation of metaphysics superfluous - for Being as such is always remembered in the positive concept of Chaos, which always subsumes Logos - a kind of parallel to the Russian relationship to European modernity.
§159
Chaos affirms that every Logos, every revealed form of Dasein or communal being, is haunted by a more fundamental material ground of existence, which has given rise to it as one of its many possibilities. This tension between Logos and Chaos is the real absolute contradiction.
§160
Translated in materialist terms, civilizations acquire objectivity not because of some static metaphysical quality (like genes), but because their determination reflects an active dialectic at the heart of material being itself. Objectivity is that which realizes a contradiction.
§161
The dialectic in question concerns the incipience of what Ilyenkov called the ‘thinking consciousness’ - which is really more like Dasein - from its opposite in material being. This contradiction is itself real (and the only real thing), and not just an illusion of our finitude.
§162
For Dugin, the concept of Chaos is reflects the inert reality of that contradiction, accumulated in all its forms, unaltered but inclusive of all possibilities. This makes for a materialism surprisingly similar to the Spinozist kind, rendering Logos a kind of attribute of Chaos…
§163
The proper counterpart of the concept of Chaos is the Lacanian ‘non-all.’ Because it precedes differentiation itself, it is ‘all,’ only, not ‘all’ as the sum-total of beings. It is ‘everything,’ but reflects the incompleteness of ‘everything’ by not to be any one form of it.
§164
The problem of the concept of Chaos and by extension Dugin’s notion of Logos is that it is still too metaphysical. It is one-sided materialism, where chaos is never truly, absolutely, and fully, imperiled in its determinations. This gives rise to a type of ‘pluralism’ in Dugin.
§165
The pluralism of different Dasein, and different Logos, is Dugin’s greatest achievement, but also his greatest weakness: Because it is undercut by an unconditionally singular concept of Chaos, which is the condition of this pluralism. Somewhat similar to Spinoza’s Substance.
§166
Dugin escapes too easily the fact of a world-historical and global ‘ontological division of labor’ by humanity. It is hardly conceivable to understand Russian logos, without also including its relation and response to the European kind. The common fate of humanity is inescapable.
§167
While Dugin is right to reject globalism, with its imposition of one ontic vision of humanity, without a shared humanity, the internal reality and development of different civilizations lose their own ground of meaning. Certainty of ones fate is certain impossibility.
§168
By this it is meant that, while a given civilization can certainly come to appreciate and acknowledge its ‘logos,’ it cannot confuse this as the final horizon of Being itself - at minimum, it must rather regard any new disclosure of Being as capable of including it.
§169
Because of this, a civilization cannot recognize its own humanity without recognizing the humanity of others - since, at the level of incipient Dasein - ones own particular Being is actively suspended in the future oriented phenomenal disclosure, known only retroactively.
§170
While Dasein can be particularized, its constitutive lack of certain knowledge about what will enter its own phenomenal horizon is universal, and the same good faith a Dasein must constitutively afford for itself that it is human, it must afford for other civilizations.
§171
This is all that humanism in Marxism amounts to: not a specific ontic view of the human elevated above reality, but a recognition of the human as that to which every knowledge returns: Only the return of an outlook, thought, etc. to its real premises, reconciles it as a being.
§172
Within Marxism-Leninism (and originally consistent with Marx), lies a sophianic view of knowledge, which is neither scholastic nor based in technological domination. Persons like Stalin and Mao had the sage-like quality of knowledge in the form of wisdom.
§173
This type of knowledge does not elevate itself above its object, but is like the Hegelian absolute knowledge, corresponding to it absolutely. In this view, knowledge of civilization does not give rise to the occasion of ‘changing’ it by premising it on the basis of consciousness.
§174
To know a thing does not always mean to possess mastery of it - to know a thing also corresponds to insight into the limit by which that thing is a necessary and rational existence. This is true for nature in the era of ecology, but it is even more true for civilizations.
§175
Communist consciousness does NOT entail the voluntary transformation of society. It entails knowledge in the form of wisdom, of the laws guiding the development of society, and this consciousness intervenes in reality only at the site of the latter’s objective contradictions.
§176
The organic development of communal being, and society, is not premised by voluntary consciousness - but by the generational wisdom that allows people to make sense of their place in the world, and their relations toward others. No ‘conscious’ conceit could possibly replace that.
§177
Societies and civilizations change - but they do not change according to the whims of consciousness. They change according to what organically makes sense to people, in ways that are compatible with their living being, and their specific logic of reproduction.
§178
The application of ‘human rights’ to the sphere of culture, is the highpoint of madness of bourgeois civilization, which is beginning to consume its own human premises. No interiority of grounded life, with its own internal logical and rational development is any longer possible.
§179
Wokeness has nothing to do with the Marxist outlook. You can BULLSHIT all you want by referencing academic bullshit. In China, there is no wokeness. In the Soviet Union, there was no wokeness. Their cultural reforms they did have had NOTHING in common with it.
§180
A logic of reproduction develops on its own terms, and only in ways that are compatible with the reproduction of units of civilization itself. Hierarchy of respect, family life, and culture all reflect objective wisdoms about what human life is, passed through generations.
§181
They are wisdoms because of what they encompass in scale: You can make up your own retarded LGBT identity from scratch. But it is not tested before the wealth of possibilities, outcomes, and experiences of a human life compatible with a civilization shared by others.
§182
The significance of Communism intervenes not in the need to create a new community, but on the contrary, to give expression to the precise indeterminateness and contradictions propelling the development of a given community. That is why it doesn’t refer to anything specific.
§183
Nothing is more anti-communist than Communism itself. Impotent intellectual wimps like James Lindsay and other rightist idiots cannot even dream of coming close: Communism alone emancipates humanity from its objective ‘communist oppression.’
§184
Bourgeois modernity itself, and even Capital can be thought of as a ‘forms’ of communism, giving limitation to objective communal beings in a specific, universal, indiscriminate ‘form,’ the common reality of abstract, formalist, universal modernity.
§184.1
At stake in the consciousness of class struggle, is the sublation of this formal modernity, giving recognition to a contradiction at the heart of it. Communist universalism, unites the future-oriented universalism of modernity with the Sofianic infinite past.
§184.2
Class struggle, given proper ontological recognition, reflects the subsumption of modernist universalism (for Heidegger, Cartesian metaphysics) to a particular grounding of being, a particular traditional civilization and concrete development.
§184.3
Thus Communism does not try to escape modernity or the Cartesian subject, but fully go through it: giving it proper ontological status as an immanent contradiction, in sum, a dialectical object. The ‘value-form’ is finally given recognition, as torn from within.
§184.4
The value-form is immersed within the context of a definite logic of reproduction, which in fact gives it concrete particularity, and whose existence is the beginning of a type of production based on use - in other words, the so-called early stage of socialism.
§185
Communism is the inescapable reality of mankind - but only Communism as such, which “disdains to conceal its aims” objectively frees humanity from a given form of communal being, insofar as it contradicts the real content of communal being.
§186
Dasein is nothing other than Communism itself. Communism is the true horizon within which the objective communal being of a given people reveals itself, in a manner that is consistent with their world and society. Communism is the real movement of change.
§187
Communists do not need to ‘abolish’ anything whatsoever - insofar as anything deserves to be abolish, it has already abolished itself in reality: Only in Communism, are the contradictions, changes, and aspirations of a people suspended into a single phenomenal horizon.
§188
Communism only gives expression to the ‘real communism’ already inherent in a given civilization or people, it simply NAMES this. Communism just names the excess of development, indeterminacy, and contradiction possessed by every civilization.
§189
Communism always ‘falls into place,’ in a manner that reconciles, sublates, and is compatible with existing civilizations. Communism simply names the openness of destiny itself, which in the last instance can only be known by God - but definitely not by any man.
§190
In Communism, the whole of civilization, culture, and society, is ‘lifted up’ and imperiled in the struggle of the proletariat. Only retroactively can it be known what survives past the threshold of its inevitable victory. The whole history of mankind is imperiled in it.
§191
Communism definitely is the risk that everything meaningful and human will be dissolved. Everything is ‘suspended’ into the future, which is ultimately undecidable. Faith in faith in God, faith in the people - is faith that things will fall back into place in a way that is human.
§192
The whole of the people, the whole of the country, and the whole of history is imperiled in the fight for the future. Everything is bounded up there. Everything is actively suspended in something which will not be decided without struggle. Absolutely everything is at stake.
§193
Why it is called ‘Communism’ and not something more specific, is precisely because its specificity, while an inevitability, is never fully formed. That is on account of the historical development of mankind as a continual process.
§194
The era of the rediscovery of Marxism in the West, and America in particular, is upon us. America as the culmination of bourgeois modernity, now faces the certain prospect of civil war. And the self-consuming madness of capitalist modernity imperils all humanity.
§195
A new Event, a new era of the disclosure of Being is upon us - a new threshold by which mankind relates to Being, and thus, an era of Communist revival. 400 years of Cartesian metaphysics now comes to close, and we are thrown into an era of definite uncertainty.
§196
Marxism as a whole must be rediscovered, and emancipated from its social-democratic metaphysical decay, in a manner consistent with the ongoing experience of Marxism-Leninism. The common destiny of mankind depends on it.
§197
One may try to object to an interpretation of Marxism that draws from Heidegger and Dugin. But there is no other way to make sense of the wisdoms of Marxism-Leninism, at least from the Western perspective. And not just in terms of theory, but also in terms of practice.
§198
Real existing Communist states regarded (and continue to regard) society and civilization as objective realities, while also recognizing the role of the Communist party as the guiding light of society’s development. Development does not eliminate the laws of history.
§198.1
They did not regard Communist consciousness as some supreme reality which liquidates and replaces all the wisdoms of mankind with some empty abstraction. Communist consciousness was precisely the sage-like insight, appreciation and respect for that wisdom.
§198.2
Communism does not replace society. It only gives expression to that development which within society is truly and concretely general, truly universal, truly in common. That is the ontological supremacy represented by the proletariat: the true common destiny of mankind.
§198.3
The universalism of the proletariat takes for granted the universalism of abstract modernity (from which Communism has its origins). Yet it avoids the self-consuming madness of globalism, by giving concrete reconciliation of this abstraction in being itself.
§199
Communist development does not eliminate the laws of civilization, the mores, sensibilities and culture of a people. At best, it may reveal changes that were already latent within them, according to the tasks of a new era.
§200
The only real measure of progress, is what takes root organically, and in a manner consistent, or at least compatible with the whole of a people, civilization and history. Various individual-subjectivist trends and ‘experiments’ have nothing to do with Communism.
§201
Communist progress is measured in terms of renunciation and resignation, where a revolution finally reaches its limit. This limit alone defines it as progressive, lasting, objective, and part of the immortal history of mankind - for it defines the finitude of civilization itself.
§202
Upon realizing the limits of Hegelian absolute knowledge, Marx came upon the proletariat as the solution, the reconciliation, and the wisdom grounding the lofty heights attained by the mind.
§203
Upon realizing the limits of European social democracy, Lenin came upon the Bolshevik party, and the strategy of the joint dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.
§204
Upon realizing the limits of the geographic spread of revolution, Stalin came upon the theory of Socialism in One Country, and for the first time, Communism acquired a concrete, positive mode of development, and civilization, practically aware of its ground in being.
§205
Upon realizing the limits of the cultural revolution, Deng Xiaoping initiated the reform and opening up, and Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, which has given Communism an unprecedented vitality, dynamism, and flexibility in the guidance of economic development.
§206
It is now time to finally realize the limit of modernity itself, and American modernity in particular. This requires a comprehensive reexamination of the significance of Communism and its relationship to traditional civilizations within the West.
§207
But most importantly, it requires the unconditional assumption of responsibility, by American Communists, before the unforeseen challenges facing the American people.
Communism now entails the responsibility of mankind before its common destiny.
§208
Only out of this, may a people regain meaning after the catastrophe that is to come.