Relation
27th installment to my philosophical system.
To have a right to do or claim a thing means nothing more than to be able to do or take or use it without thereby injuring anyone else. Simplex sigillum veri (The simple is the seal of the true). This definition shows how senseless many questions are; for instance, the question whether we have the right to take our own life. As far as concerns the personal claims which others may possibly have upon us, they are subject to the condition that we are alive, and fall to the ground when we die. To demand of a man, who does not care to live any longer for himself, that he should live on as a mere machine for the advantage of others is an extravagant pretension.
Although men’s powers differ, their rights are alike. Their rights do not rest upon their powers, because Right is of a moral complexion; they rest on the fact that the same will to live shows itself in every man at the same stage of its manifestation. This, however, only applies to that original and abstract Right, which a man possesses as a man. The property, and also the honour, which a man acquires for himself by the exercise of his powers, depend on the measure and kind of power which he possesses, and so lend his Right a wider sphere of application. Here, then, equality comes to an end. The man who is better equipped, or more active, increases by adding to his gains, not his Right, but the number of the things to which it extends.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, On Human Nature, Government.
All relations have their necessary connection with life. There is no relation without life. It doesn’t even make sense to consider relation without first considering life. Relations, like causes, have their seed in the mind, and germinate to become full flowers of action and decision in the hearts of men as they are exposed to the world and made to act within it.
Relations have importance only insofar as they are considered existentially—that is, from the standpoint of a single individual; a man brought into the world who wishes to leave it a slightly better place. That is the hardest thing on Earth, for so few truly consider the grandeur of existence, and thus let slip past them the greatest of all possibilities—life. If it were truly understood, everyone would act for the betterment of all; what is missed is the idea of connectedness—that you are not sustained by yourself alone, but that everyone around you is in some way responsible for your continuation.
With the world being so vast, and few actually capable of comprehending the immensity of modernity, most live life egoistically (nothing considered except personal well-being) rather than individualistically (living for yourself but in a way that respects the individuality of others).
If life were a commentary on human action, it would point out and emphasize every folly and vanity but none of the joys and immensities. What has always been considered first in life is the self—for self-preservation has always been the major preoccupation of man, and his perspective has not changed on this yet; but this kind of mentality shows the bankruptcy which lies at the heart of modern considerations on life.
The self is glorious, yes, but it is made greater by its ability to be realized in everyone. Egoism, the common strand of life today, is to ignore the other in its essentiality—that is, to ignore the other as an individual but to continuously reap the benefit of the other without thinking of them as such, removing their selves from yourself (in that sense objectifying them) and thus treating them as mere objects rather than subjects like yourself.
The contradiction implicit within modern social dynamics is an utterly fascinating one, not in the least because it is a relatively new phenomenon. Before Rousseau, the concept of the individual—the human being as an independent, autonomous entity with consciousness, feeling, and sympathy—didn’t really exist. Everything in relation to man was either subordinated to, or primary for, some other.
In the Neoplatonic conception, man existed midway along the chain of being: situated below God (the highest), angels, and superlunary substances (stars, planets, and the cosmos itself), but above the Devil (the lowest), plants, and beasts of burden.
In this framework, it was man’s purpose to work towards God and the higher aspects of being, but to shun and stay far away from the lower aspects. You see at once: the self was always viewed in relation to something higher, and with man’s capacity to reason and attain virtue by acting in accordance with reason, it only made sense to act in the ways God commanded—which, again, could only be arrived at by reason.
Without a doubt, this is the oldest conception of man’s place in the universe, for it has its roots in Homer, specifically in the eighth book of the Iliad, where Zeus speaks of a catena aurea (golden chain) which he could lift up and bind to Olympus even if all the other gods—and even the heavens and Earth itself—were attached to the other end. I suppose you could go back further to the days when man had only a primitive form of animism to believe in, and where there was no real distinction between the self and the other—for everything was communal then—but that framework, I feel, is too foreign to modern man.
For thousands of years, and still in some form today, man lived in complete subjugation to another—always in relation to power, which manifests itself in as many ways as there are ambitions within man to act upon. There has always been an artificial hierarchy which men have followed because they believed it to be natural, and this exact thinking still persists today, but only changed in relation to the material conditions which men exist under.
For most of human history, this power was physical. It was only when civilization became a thing, and one man could no longer keep in check others through power alone (for there were too many people to effectively instill fear into by a show of strength only) that ideas took the form of power—propped up, of course, by the priestly class and educated elite, who existed solely for subordination to the leader. Men internalized their lowly position as a necessity within the world, and endured it on the basis of that false idea.
Their own subjugation was sold to them as a necessity for the sake of the leader, and nothing could change them otherwise from their place. In some civilizations, this subjugation was seen as a divine command: as in Islam—which literally means submission, to God of course—and in India with the caste system. Ideas today have replaced force, for force is not really required when measures are taken by the state, or the ruling class, to deliberately ensnare the masses with diversions, financial pressures, and debilitating austerity—all of which contributes to and culminates in a rather tepid, monotonous, uninteresting, and uneventful life.
Nothing is harder for modern man than to live a life of dignity when most of it is spent for the sake of keeping himself alive, working in a spiritless, complex, and fantastically tragic occupation. It is no wonder, then, why Kafka has become like a prophet, for he saw the beginning of the end for man—the organization and commodification of the masses was already nearing perfection in his time, and it has only been further perfected in our own.
Man today is without guidance, tossed into a world where all the social conditions are decayed and without support. In former times, as already explained, there were sturdy foundations on which to walk culturally; there were norms and traditions which worked and continued to work long afterwards; there were ready-made narratives to buy into which actually gave toil and misery meaning. Where is any of this for the modern man?
Modern man’s toil and misery is, I’m sorry to say, not much different from his Paleolithic ancestors: we forage and gather and work to keep ourselves alive, but never with God or higher ideals on the mind—it is an animal’s life, a brute existence; only now we move to and fro with cars, in and out of well-ventilated rooms, boxed in by four walls at all times, lit only by fluorescent lights.
Old traditions for today are just talk; nay, it is worse—it is talk for talk’s sake. Words fill the air, and our minds are filled with ideas as a result, but nothing is permanent or lasting; very few actually care about consistency within their principles, and thus relations hold no sway. Relations only maintain themselves in understanding that each experience builds towards some collective goal by which to approach with action.
No amount of consistency will change the world if only a single person does it. There must be solidarity between relations, and responsibility must uphold its end of the bargain by maintaining consistency. It is easy to complain but hard to build relations that do not crumble under the weight of conditions which cause complaint in the first place. The world is made but not structured for individuality, and such is why egoism reigns supreme across the entire world.
The first modern man, I would suspect, was born sometime in the late 1700s, maybe after the French Revolution, for that was really the first time the ideas of Rousseau were understood intuitively by the populace—and thus modernity was born. There is within all modern states an underlying sense of relation and cooperation—a general will—which predominates every social organization. Relations encompass every facet of life. Indeed, without them, you could not compel a man to work merely for his own subsistence if social mobility, or freedom, were not offered him in return. These are the modern liberal ideas which enslave men today—the modern religions: occupations, labor power, wages, bills, utilities, rents, mortgages, commerce, calculation, accounting, law, equality, equal opportunity, freedom—nothing but the will of man made rational.
It has recently been announced (I refer here to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos), for the first time in modern history mind you, that the modern “rules-based order”—the rational enslavement of the mind—has always been a lie, an untruth, a “… rupture in the world order; the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality.” It is something which has more or less been admitted by the radicals (communist and utopian socialist) since the failed revolutions of 1848—that great bellowing of consciousness across the world which the proletariat were solely responsible for—but is something which those within the upper crust of society (the bourgeoisie) are really grappling with and admitting now for the first time.
The modernity which man has lived under since Napoleon… is dead. What follows from this point is nothing but a new evolution in the consciousness of mankind—the working class, the intellectuals on the side of the working class, and those within the current power structure who must necessarily concede to the working class, must all be cocked and ready for the slightest hesitation within the powermongers—that hesitation which indicates true, revolutionary change, for the normal tactics will no longer work. It is a force which is inevitable at this point.
I know how common it is for us revolutionaries to take any failings in the power structure as the end of that structure’s status and reign of domination, but I really don’t think it is a bluff this time; I really feel the world domination of capitalism is in a death spiral so severe that it can never recover, even with progressive policies adopted. All progressive policies that perpetuate capitalism are doomed to fail precisely because capitalism is a system built off of exploitation and cycles of collapse; we see it all around us and don’t need to be told how true that is.
Affordability is the populace’s rallying cry at present, but it is also a call back to a form of organization that is no longer possible anymore, for there is no connection between economic development and consumption—the so-called real economy. Nearly every nation in Europe is enslaved to capital, and for that reason is necessarily subjugated to America; there is no modernity without America, and that is why the fate of this great nation hangs by a thread that is ripping apart in real time. It is the end of an era, and with that must come a new mode of conceptualizing what the role of government, order, and the economy is—otherwise, our collapse is all but certain, and the future of our economic prosperity is but a dream… without doubt, things will get worse in fact; and, in my view, to pray for a better tomorrow is about as useful as consulting the stars to predict the future if it is not to incorporate the majority who uphold and determine that very future.
Modern life really is built upon relations which we do not see or hear, and is for that reason, I suspect, why Dostoevsky put in the mouth of Father Zosima (in The Brothers Karamazov) the famous line, “Every one of us is responsible for everyone and everything, and I more than all the others.” The world upholds us, and our decisions determine whether the world will continue to uphold us, or whether we shall all become bones by our own hands.
From a philosophical perspective, relations have usually been considered from the standpoint of causality. The actualizable ensembles of life all collapse into one at the end of every action, and thus, what is is ultimately what has been. Relation, insofar as it has any meaning at all, must conform to the lived realities, the “facts” if you will, of the real world. Many men love to idealize life because they fear the actual ground which they walk upon, for they know it is really in constant flux beneath them.
Reality is too much for modern man to bear because he must simultaneously live for himself and for others; and that complexity confuses him, and so he retreats into what is simple rather than what is difficult, and takes wholesale that which is not his own out of a very stupid pragmatism.
Pragmatism can only be pragmatic if it is done in and for yourself in relation to your current circumstances. Anything which makes you live against your own best interest is folly, and it is for that reason why modernity must be abolished; for modernity is against itself, and is right now engaged in the most ridiculous dialectic in history: the solutions are obvious (a world organized around prosperity rather than competition), but those with the power think otherwise because competition, and by extension austerity (economic leverage), is the only form of real power they have now; since the narrative is dead, and they can no longer make economic hardship a personal, moral failing (the oft-quoted “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” no longer holds) they have to make financial hardship and job insecurity a reality in order to maintain stability and order on a global scale—order here referring to the current modality of modernity, the structure which structures lived reality—things such as trade agreements, infrastructure projects, the prevention of war, food abundance, preventing ecological disasters (climate change primarily), and job creation.
It is a contradiction so powerful, no amount of dialectical substitution—that is, modifying the primary thesis (capitalism) with a contradiction (either Democratic socialism or communism) that doesn’t actually go against the thesis, thereby making it a false antithesis—can ever bring about actual progress.
Hegel’s dialectic, which Engels rightly codified into three fundamental rules—the main one being the third: negation of the negation—has a teleology of “infinite progress,” but that “progress” is all too contingent on material conditions which Hegel, being a true idealist at the end of the day, didn’t account for, or rather, didn’t think mattered.
There are two main downsides to Hegel’s idealist dialectic: the first is that progress is not always progress; in the course of history there have been periods in which there is a kind of anti-progress—the Dark Ages for example—in which man returns to a former state of consciousness from which he may never come out; it must also never be forgotten that progress is only possible insofar as human consciousness exists—once the human race is snuffed out, and the last light of consciousness is returned to darkness, there will be no more progress to speak of in the human sense, only the fate of the Earth dialectically playing out without us, and what a fear this causes, for man is vain enough to make himself the center of the world.
The second downside is that progress is dependent on man’s prior material conditions which, if they are not fortunately copious, will make it very difficult to progress out of; just look how short civilization is as an experiment, no more than 5,000 years, compared to the hundreds of thousands of years that came before in which man lived as nothing more than a glorified beast, hunting and gathering and bonding in small tribes, worrying every second, never at ease in anything, always uncertain—doesn’t that existence resemble the current lived experience for most people, only this time on an industrial, urbanized scale, where instead of nature limiting us, it is bureaucracy which limits and controls us?
Where there is no hope of advancement, due to a lack in the means by which to bring it about, there can be no hope for progress in the world—and no amount of citing Hegel’s List der Vernunft (the cunning of reason) will get around that lived reality, that is unless action is the primary mode by which consciousness advances, rather than some fanciful conception which occurs in abstraction only in the mind of intelligent men who can actually conceive of it as such.
Progress is not always progress, and progress is dependent on the prior material conditions which men exist in in order to bring that progress about in the first place. Just like how the working class, and class struggle more generally, didn’t exist prior to wage labor, so too man’s current conception of the good life didn’t exist until it was revealed to him in the abhorrent accumulation of capital by those who control the means of production, and more generally those who supply labor to the working class—the first capitalists.
Our modern relations, which shape how we understand and internalize ourselves in the real world, are solely focused on relating man to his subjugator for the sake of progress at all cost, even if the cost is at the expense of those who make progress possible. It is shocking to me just how confused we moderns are about our real power, and it’s so shameful to see so much misery and mental anguish on behalf of ideas which we don’t fully comprehend but which we adopt uncritically nonetheless.
If only our power was really understood: we would change the whole world in a second merely by rejecting all the falsities that came before, and usher in a new epoch of human history that proclaimed the true liberation of all from worry and hardship, merely by reorganizing our collective struggle for survival away from the nonsense of corporatization—which literally subjects to the market and the whims of asset managers the necessities to life—to a harmony of shared interest and mutual cooperation based upon the material conditions of nations.
The only reason capitalism survives at all at this point in history is that it is intertwined with the concepts of liberalism and freedom, but what part of labor exploitation—that is, the extraction of surplus value from surplus labor in order to increase the value of the commodity made for greater profit on behalf of the owner of the means of production: in short, the valorization process—is liberating? Better yet, what good are wages if the amounts provided are constantly outpaced by inflation? The common retort from economic liberals (bourgeois economists to use Marxian language) is either to save more (“live below your means,” that well-trodden platitude which means very little in this context) or get a job with better pay—ignoring the obvious impossibility of that for most people.
Let’s assume they have a point: QUID TUM? What then? What is to follow from these very liberal, very independent, very “strong,” awe-inspiring really, apologetics for misery? Nothing more than slavish adherence to the status quo, to keep things the same, to, in fact, spread the misery around in order to further entrench the notion that nothing is possible and capitalism is here to reign until the end times. They would argue for freedom in the market, no regulations, and total capitulation to laissez-faire economics (“let the market do its thing”) in the same way anti-abolitionists in America argued for the necessity of slavery in order to keep the southern economy going.
The arguments at once lose all objectivity: they are no longer tied to material reality, or what the evidence actually reveals, but are couched in moral terms; all arguments for capitalism at this day and age are moral ones, not economic ones—they’re arguments made on behalf of capital, not against it, and so they are essentially arguments against the workers who make capital possible; and to think, we argue for injustice everyday we go to work for the sake of our survival—man today is really no different from the Thracians or Scythians whom the Athenians were bold enough to call barbaroi (barbarians—those who did not speak Greek); you see, even then workers/slaves were dehumanized by labeling them as an other rather than as a fellow human being, an individual with feelings and goals just like the freeman.
And so I return finally to that original point about Rousseau: modern man is different from man of the past because his subjectivity is internalized in himself: he recognizes himself as a free man with capacity and talent which must be exercised in the world; man’s conception of himself is no longer beholden to some higher authority or placed beyond him as a result of cultural tradition. Today, nothing is sacred but the individuality of man, and no life can be fully actualized until man is freed from the necessity of wage labor to survive; and if that means that the freedom of the capitalist to make profits is to be enslaved to the well-being of his workers (by taking away his means of production) then so much the worse for the capitalist; for what the capitalist was offering up prior to his ownership being placed in the hands of his laborers was base servility on pain of death from starvation. Who could ever forget what Shakespeare puts in the mouth of Shylock:
Nay, take my life and all. Pardon not that.
You take my house when you do take the prop
That doth sustain my house; you take my life
When you do take the means whereby I live.
— The Merchant of Venice - Act 4, scene 1.
How could anyone hope to live off the fat of the Earth if the butcher (the greedy capitalist) is the one who cuts the cattle (the constant capital derived from the already existing material) and supplies himself with the majority of the meat (the profits that should really be repaid in the form of higher wages to his workers)? We have to get beyond morals, and treat the material conditions of the world realistically and dialectically if the majority is finally to live a life of dignity and meaning. It is very easy to give up or to resign yourself from the world in the face of capitalism, but capitalism, like every economic system that preceded it, will come to a glorious end—the only question is how long must men wait for that greatest of liberations?
Every subjugation has its master and slave. In the times of the Old Stone Age (the Paleolithic) man’s master was his mother—nature; in the times between Sumer and the antebellum South it was man enslaving man (Jews enslaved to Egyptians, Turks enslaved to Greeks, Africans enslaved to Romans, Pagans enslaved to Christians, Muslims enslaved to Christians and Christians enslaved to Muslims, whole continents enslaved by the Mongols, etc., etc., etc.); and all this lunacy eventually culminated in imperialism—the highest transfiguration of debauchery—when Western civilization (primarily) thought it ought to enslave the entire world, plundering wherever resources could be found (mainly taken out of Africa) and justified it under various moral, legal, religious, and philosophical frameworks, which were really sophistical sleights of hand, to debilitate and utterly demoralize and dehumanize vast swaths of the globe, whole peoples immiserated for the sake of someone’s ambition—if all that was done for the sake of profit, or national defense, or nationalism, then I want nothing to do with that kind of liberation or freedom; all this to say nothing of the modern enslavement people are under today: wage slavery, that is, subsistence which is increasingly precarious due to the decreasing purchasing power of the money we receive from our jobs—I ask again, what kind of freedom is it if real GDP doesn’t increase proportionately with nominal GDP (GDP not adjusted for inflation). If we are to argue on moral grounds alone, which is really all the capitalist can do, let the countless miseries played out on behalf of capital serve as a thorough refutation to this backwards, barbaric, idiotic, childish, insipid, sardanapalian, venomous, vampiric, exploitative system.
Our relations must be made strong by a firm commitment to ourselves and those around us. Until this is realized, relations may as well be considered no different from rules, norms, customs, or the international order itself—useful fictions that could be overturned by the will of a single avaricious individual, who would destroy the freedom of others in order to exercise his own. That is what the single individual lives in today, that is the world which he inhabits, one of cutthroat competition for the sake of empowering those who are already powerful and weakening those (the working class) who actually uphold their power to begin with. All relations rest on power, and I think it’s time the majority finally exercise it for the sake of liberating themselves from this most damnable of deprivations.