Praxis and Politics - Individual and Collective.

At long last comes another post. The lack of posts on here has been due to visitors from abroad. While this will not be a very long post, there are a few issues that are in need of being repeated - ad nauseum if necessary.

I have previously written about the self and politics, about the major breakthrough that feminism brought - the revelation of the personal as political. While some might condemn it as "identity politics", and while certainly it can veer off into that, it is a necessary tool to break through burgeoise ideology.

In the latest issue of New Left Review Malcolm Bull has written "Vectors of the Biopolitical". While this is no time to write a full post about it, he touches upon some important things. Above all the importance of Aristotle - especially for socialists and feminists.

Aristotle is one of the most important philosophers and one that Marxists should pay more attention to. Reading the Nicomachean Ethics, for example, gives you the basic value theory of Marx - without the necessary component of where value comes from, how it is produced. Marx, in his typical fashion, goes on at some length about the genius of Aristotle, but also that he lacked the ability to truly grasp the labour theory of value due to his position in society and the underdeveloped nature of production in the antique world.

Also, Aristotle's old claim that man is a political animal is an ancestor of the fact that the personal is political. The philosopher was of course one of the ideologues of patriarchy, as well as having quite a few racist notions. However, we can use quite a few of the insights that he had and that he was unable to explore and understand.

Man as a political animal and virtue as it connects to the human community which in itself is part of the polis, engaged in a structure that must be - cannot be anything but - political is essential to an understanding of morality and humanity. That also that the family unit and the private sphere is subject to power relations, ideology and politics is the key to create equality and the destruction of gender roles.

The fact of the matter is that all humans are political animals and that they are all engaged in politics daily, throughout their waking hours. The realization that there exists structures of power and ideology and the consciousness that is awoken about what happens at work or at home is the smashing of reification. Of course, this is not an easy process, but it is a revolutionary one. And indeed, life as it is is painful, filled with unknown problems and alienation. Only through collective action that awakes political consciousness can women be emancipated and a revolutionary movement awoken. Politics is what happens in your backyard, in your bedroom and what you do at school. Organizing and awaking the consciousness is what we try to do in the Left - or what we should do.

Reification and existentialism.

George Lukács writes in his premier work History and Class Consciousness about reification; about what it does to the working class and the burgeoise. What it turns people into. Though Lukács has been assaulted by two as different figures as Louis Althusser and Jean-Paul Sartre for his humanism contra his Stalinism (the 'denounced' Lukács against the 'official' Lukács) I believe that there is much to take to heart in the manner of which he presents his philosophy.

Humanism might be a product of burgeoise thinking, and certainly something that will serve to dampen the revolutionary spirit in practice, if not in theory (consider the person who idolizes the 'Revolution' but shyes away from revolutionary praxis). However, I do not believe that what I am going to focus on here is actually humanism itself, but rather an existential-proletarian situation, to speak in Sartrean terms.

To restate in less pompous, and less burgeoise terms: the situation that every labourer faces.

Lukács then, in his writings on class consciousness and the individual worker focuses on reification. That is to say, the ideological process in which categories are 'frozen' in our minds and in the manner on which we view the world. This ranges from gender categories, to the manner in which society is formed economically (one-way neoliberal politics is an example) and further. The misunderstanding of the world as given, once and for all. Since reality, especially not social reality, is like this we find ideological crisis and problems. Marx writes that famous phrase about how all that is solid vanishes into the air in capitalism. And he is right. This is no contradiction, it is simply a dialectal struggle between the categories in which we try to interpret the world (or rather: the categories imposed on us by the upper classes production of ideology, which in itself is reificated, produced from the lofty peaks of society on which they see themselves as 'free').

So, what, then, does any of this have to do with individuals and existentialism? Simply this: liberty and free development is given from the class struggle, from the ideological and political struggles of the organized working classes. If someone does desire "life, liberty and happiness" then it is simply impossible for capitalism to truly provide that for any greater number of time, simply because the ideological system as a whole reaches periodical crisis of faith: questions that have no answers, situations which inspire dread and developments that seem to come from nowhere. To truly find any safety in all this, and any meaning, practical-critical activity is a necessity. Both to gain the sense of community and mutual dependance and interaction that humans so desperately need, but also to be able to grasp the world intellectually. That can never be provided by the burgeoise; their own intellectual traditions collapsing in postmodern confusion (read: alienation) and neoliberal perversions.