Kritik
In general, when considering the suffocating disortions of patriarchy, racism and capitalism, it is difficult not to feel as if we are falling underneath a great, heavy weight. When you consider the mass of your unconscious actions - turned into mere reflexes, never considered twice until now - you notice patterns of power, recognition, status, etc. Man as he is, is mutilated by the processes of socialisation that we grow up in.
I think it is difficult to fully realize how deeply these problems go, but even in the most "enlightened" company it is always there. Sometimes as a shamed silence, sometimes in outright statements of sexism or a reificated consciousness. The way in which our habits are formed are structured around the economical system that we live in. Time becomes money, the time of the day that is the most full of toil becomes estranged to the labourer and all his relations are defined from this, hard base.
Generations upon generations have lived like this, with moments of furious rebellion that lights up the blackness of capitalism. Like a fog that always surrounds us we face the image in the mirror. Our relations to friends, family, lovers, people we will never see again, must always be measured against time-space, occupied for the most part by the iron law of Capital. We have to sell ourselves, or spend our time in social functions that either replenish ourselves (with the knowledge that it is but temporary) or prepare us. A few oasis exist, but these are few and far between - as the minimal budget of the student can attest to. Each of these oasis are absolutely the creation of the class struggle.
As if this is not enough, there are the walls that we raise unconsciously as we stigmatise certain groups. A reflexive sort of action appears where women, immigrants and so on take on and internalize the role they have been given by the dominant power of society. This, of course, entrenches the existing patterns of interaction and gives off a sense that we are part of a god-given schema which is harder to break than the actual bars of iron in a prison.
Is everything night, then? Is everything we do, in a most postmodern sense, doomed? Are we all captured by this wish to dominate, structured around contingent facts and strewn with prejudice? No, not really. There is Kritik, as the old Germans meant it. Kritik in the sense that we take on the world, break it down, analyse it. This existential marxism is an individual one in the sense that "...man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind."
The sheer, moral outrage of so many activists: from animal rights to feminists, from the muslim protestors in the Middle East to the contempt against politicians of so many Americans is something of a movement, a Kritik, in this sense. Of course, it is not always very developed. Kritik is a part of class consciousness, but it is not class consciousness. It is the movement of the independent mind - as independent as a mind can become - and at best finds aufhebung as it joins with class consciousness to enrich both.
Nietzsche once said wise words about merciless criticism: Marx said even wiser ones. It is necessary to be a critic, and to be ruthless as well. If we really do believe in marxism, then there is nothing to fear. In the end, our premises and conclusions hold. For young communists, it is certainly an important skill, an important weapon to devastate all of our old prejudices, our venerable trains of thought with the Kritik handed down to us from Kant.
I think it is difficult to fully realize how deeply these problems go, but even in the most "enlightened" company it is always there. Sometimes as a shamed silence, sometimes in outright statements of sexism or a reificated consciousness. The way in which our habits are formed are structured around the economical system that we live in. Time becomes money, the time of the day that is the most full of toil becomes estranged to the labourer and all his relations are defined from this, hard base.
Generations upon generations have lived like this, with moments of furious rebellion that lights up the blackness of capitalism. Like a fog that always surrounds us we face the image in the mirror. Our relations to friends, family, lovers, people we will never see again, must always be measured against time-space, occupied for the most part by the iron law of Capital. We have to sell ourselves, or spend our time in social functions that either replenish ourselves (with the knowledge that it is but temporary) or prepare us. A few oasis exist, but these are few and far between - as the minimal budget of the student can attest to. Each of these oasis are absolutely the creation of the class struggle.
As if this is not enough, there are the walls that we raise unconsciously as we stigmatise certain groups. A reflexive sort of action appears where women, immigrants and so on take on and internalize the role they have been given by the dominant power of society. This, of course, entrenches the existing patterns of interaction and gives off a sense that we are part of a god-given schema which is harder to break than the actual bars of iron in a prison.
Is everything night, then? Is everything we do, in a most postmodern sense, doomed? Are we all captured by this wish to dominate, structured around contingent facts and strewn with prejudice? No, not really. There is Kritik, as the old Germans meant it. Kritik in the sense that we take on the world, break it down, analyse it. This existential marxism is an individual one in the sense that "...man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind."
The sheer, moral outrage of so many activists: from animal rights to feminists, from the muslim protestors in the Middle East to the contempt against politicians of so many Americans is something of a movement, a Kritik, in this sense. Of course, it is not always very developed. Kritik is a part of class consciousness, but it is not class consciousness. It is the movement of the independent mind - as independent as a mind can become - and at best finds aufhebung as it joins with class consciousness to enrich both.
Nietzsche once said wise words about merciless criticism: Marx said even wiser ones. It is necessary to be a critic, and to be ruthless as well. If we really do believe in marxism, then there is nothing to fear. In the end, our premises and conclusions hold. For young communists, it is certainly an important skill, an important weapon to devastate all of our old prejudices, our venerable trains of thought with the Kritik handed down to us from Kant.
posted by Björn at 9:14 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home