Marx: the consciousness and the social existence that determines consciousness

[Joseph Tracy]

Yes to all that. That is really the beauty of this way of looking at humanity. We may be just a little out of balance rather than fated by out of control systems. These all-the-good-stuff qualities are clearly part of evolution and are basic to most lives. To my mind the success of  Bernie’s message is a powerful sign that there is a widespread sense that our basic balance as a society needs adjusting. As a grass roots phenomena it is, you know, phenomenal. 


 


> On Feb 13, 2016,  at 1:12 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> All I am going to say until I get the book is Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, the evolution of altruism and all the good stuff too, if we are talking TOTAL EVOLUTION. Love, heroism and more and more. 
> 
> 
> 
> On Sat, Feb 13, 2016 at 1:01 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> Marx was a smart guy but the communist party has not proven too impressive in healing the excesses of capitalism. And the whole theory about the workers paradise has not worked out that good. The thing about material power and economic arrangements is that whether or not they precede an intellectual frame, they always produce benefactors who will promote and defend such a frame. That generation of a belief/intellectual system defended by the powerful is a problem with Marxism and Capitalism.
> 
>  The portion of the book I am now reading concerns the kinds of things being talked about. Interestingly, McGilChrist  proposes not only a kind of dialectic between left hemisphere ideologies/systems and right hemisphere ways of thought, but also between the material cultures that arise and either their own past or other competing cultures. It is hard in his tracking of key historical turning points to separate intellectual changes from practical material changes. Money for example favors left brain systems that equate symbols with goods but also promote a fluidity of cultural exchange. Any material culture favors and produces certain intellectual biases, but often seems to emerge out of philosophical/intellectual tendencies. ( Even the direction of signal communication systems like writing or pictograms mark changes in hemispheric bias)
> 
>  The big problem right now is the discord between measuring success in money and measuring success in terms of widespread happiness and long term planetary sustainability/health/resilience/diversity.  Our material culture has presumed that life-forms and biospheric ecosystems are simply material resource pools( and dumping grounds)  rather than proceeding out of an emergent integrated whole and elegantly balanced living wisdom shaped by millions of years of evolutionary experimentation.  This bias has led to the delivery of machine and fossil fuel based comforts at the direct expense of species diversity, the suffering of the colonized, climate stability, clean water, clean air and thriving oceanic abundance. This bias also has favored the most skillfully devised sytems of control and violence, which appear quite practical to winners, less so to losers, but have many large -scale dangers as weapons systems become more powerful and leaders become wackier.
> 
> 
> 
> > On Feb 13, 2016, at 6:29 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Why was Marx a materialist?
> >
> >
> > http://socialistworker.org/2011/10/28/why-was-marx-a-materialist
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 13, 2016 at 6:22 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into
> >> definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely
> >> relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the
> >> development of their material forces of production. The totality of
> >> these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of
> >> society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political
> >> superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social
> >> consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the
> >> general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not
> >> the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their
> >> social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain
> >> stage of development, the material productive forces of society come
> >> into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this
> >> merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property
> >> relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto.
> >> From forms of development of the productive forces these relations
> >> turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The
> >> changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the
> >> transformation of the whole immense superstructure.
> >>
> >> In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish
> >> between the material transformation of the economic conditions of
> >> production, which can be determined with the precision of natural
> >> science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic
> >> – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this
> >> conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by
> >> what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of
> >> transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this
> >> consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material
> >> life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of
> >> production and the relations of production. No social order is ever
> >> destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient
> >> have been developed, and new superior relations of production never
> >> replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence
> >> have matured within the framework of the old society.
> >>
> >> Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to
> >> solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem
> >> itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are
> >> already present or at least in the course of formation.
> >>
> >> https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list
> 
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> 

-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l