Tag Archives: evolutionairy systems theory

Critique on Jonas Ceika’s “Nietzsche and Marx”

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Because I know a lot about Marx and little about Nietzsche, I read How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the 21st-Century Left by Jonas Ceika

I have tried to read Nietzsche but texts that are sketchy even after reading them multiple times, resembling poetry, don’t qualify as serious work, so I gave up. I picked up some Nietzsche, reading The Man Without Qualities and When Nietzsche Wept, but that didn’t alter my opinion. Reading Ceika’s book brought to light some interesting points, but on the whole, I keep to Marx (and Gramsci, Althusser, …) Continue reading →

Materialism

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Materialism isn’t the statement that the world consists of matter, ‘substance’. This includes energies, the movement of and ‘within’  matter. This is obvious.

Materialism is the philosophical statement that any statement – including this one –, thought, language, conscience, consciousness, moral value, subject or personality is material. It is  not a thing in itself, but has to get the necessary attribute of meaning (sense). It has to exist in a material process over time in some substrate that can connect it with other statements. Before the development of AI, the only substrate that could develop and use statements was the human brain. All these statements, these ‘mental constructs’ are virtual. They only exist for a longer (memory) or shorter (reading, speaking, writing, thinking) time in the brain.

When a brain stops functioning, that particular statement or thought ceases to exist. Any statement, even 1+1=2, loses its meaning when there is no brain left that knows its meaning: when all the brains  that hold an adequate consciousness have stopped existing. Simply said: all humans who can make additions have died. It is possible that at some point in time, a new form of consciousness can come into existence that discovers addition, and maybe this consciousness will discover that in ancient times there was a civilization that could make additions.

The most important feature of thoughts, better called memes, is that they can and need to be transferred from brain to brain. This  is the social process called communication. When an individual brain dies or gets out of order, memes continue to multiply in other brains. This way a cluster of human beïngs form a living social being: a culture or civilization. The individual members die, but the civilization lives on, although it also can die. Note that this cultural being is not humanity as a whole. Humanity is made up of different (sub)cultures.

Modern materialism was first described by Spinoza.

 

Sense and nonsense about Marx and communism

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Denouncing Marx as a revolutionary hothead and idiot has reached storm level. While the violent overthrow of slavery in the Civil War and fights for freedom against the powers that be in general are mostly praised, the fight for proper treatment of workers is denounced. In present days especially by those who want to fight the powers that be for… the middleclass working or jobless people, formerly known as the proletariat: the “populists”. Continue reading →

Piketty is obsessed by inequality

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In “Capital and Ideology” (2020), Piketty continues to see inequality as the evil to be fought. While sometimes it’s about extreme or increasing inequality, what degree of inequality is acceptable isn’t clear. The picture emerges that the only acceptable world for Piketty is an equal world, in which everyone participates and lives roughly in the same material circumstances. Continue reading →

Criticizing present-day Marxism

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For me, present-day Marxism is exemplified by the most eminent Michael Roberts as a Marxist economist and by the no less eminent Peter Thomas for the philosophical and ideological side of Marxism. To a large extent I can value their contributions to the Marxist analysis, though I have some pressing unanswered questions regarding economics.

Now, analysis is only one side of Marxism and both observe that it’s necessary “to change the world”. And while they update the analysis, this can’t be said for the political, strategic ideas, which still uncritically rests on notions like proletariat, class struggle, revolution and abolishment of the capitalist relation of production. Thus paying no or little attention to the failure of these strategies in the past 150 years and the fundamentally changed  composition and position of the working class(es), which makes such strategies even more unlikely to be successful. This, though Thomas’ excellent book on Gramsci points to many issues in these strategies. Continue reading →

Yann Boutang: a pseudo Marxist jester

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karl marx bday“Cognitive Capitalism” is an avalanche of words leading to murky marshes of not understanding.

In “Cognitive Capitalism” Yann Boutang tries to show he is a good Marxist fellow, knowing what valorization, surplus value and exploitation means. To understand “cognitive capitalism” he introduces “living labor” that “continues to exist”:

The solution is to split living labor into two, and to assume that — alongside living labor as an expenditure of energy that will be partially consumed and crystallized into new machinery in the following cycle — there is a living labor that continues to exist as a means of production throughout the cycle. In other words, this living labor is not destroyed as an intermediate consumption. It is consumed as bodily energy, certainly, but it also develops as a means of production of living as living labor. It builds itself as a skill, as a know-how resistant to its reduction to pure human capital that can be objectified.

How very strange. I understood that next to labor that went into machines (“dead labor” represented by fixed capital) there always was living labor consumed in the manufacture of goods or services for the consumer, represented by variable capital. So Boutang really proposes a third category: living labor that is not “destroyed” (=consumed) in the goods or services but which continues to be there as a kind of perpetuum mobile “a know-how resistant to its reduction to pure human capital that can be objectified” How very nice! A workforce with built-in resistance! Continue reading →

Capital should be in solid hands

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It doesn’t matter if capital is concentrated in a few hands, as long as these are the right hands. solide handen

This is my answer to the outcry of Mr Piketty in his monumental study about the growing inequality in the possession of capital. As others have signaled Pikettys’ study misses the central idea of Marx: that capital is a social relation. As long as the character of this relation is not altered, the redistribution of capital over more people or even acquisition of it by the state will not help us one bit. If possible at all.

This fundamental relation is, as is well known, the exploitation of labor to extract profit, and using this profit for accumulating capital. Hence growth and concentration are inevitable in this system. Continue reading →