"The self", society, and "species-being"

I am going to attempt to give my explanation for why right-wing nationalist ideas exist, how they are comparable to left-wing socialist ideas, and how through this comparison we can see that left-wingers are actually operating on a "higher" level of consciousness than the right-wing.

I am going to start with some seemingly irrelevant (but actually, I think, very interesting) brief information about the history of the development of Marxist thought.

Before he ever cracked into economics, Marx was a philosopher, and a student of Hegel. Many theorists have argued that between the 1840s and the early 1860s, Marx goes through a complete break or change in his thinking, during the time that he began to study economics. There is no doubt that his writings change a lot during this period; he goes from abstract philosophical discussion of (important and interesting) concepts like historical materialism, alienation, the state of man under capital, etc. to a more concrete economic analysis of the capitalist system.

Before the 1860s, Marx mentions to concept of "species-being" several times, and explains that humans are species-beings. A species-being, Marx says, is a species that recognizes itself as an instance of its species, capable of the same thoughts, feelings, and actions as any other member of its species (with some obvious exceptions e.g. some disabled people) and acts accordingly. He goes on to say that this species-being-ness is not always realized in humans; that is, we do not always act in accordance with the fact that we are species-beings: because-and-therefore (dialectics in action) we are not aware of ourselves as being species-beings.

So - how does this tie in to my argument?

The right-wing nationalist cares about people just as much as the left-wing socialist. In fact, what they want (usually unconsciously, except for the NazBols) is a society in which those people that they care about are provided for, healthy and happy, with the scope to realise their ambitions and to preserve that positive experience of life for future generations.

There is nothing un-caring about the views of the right-wing nationalist; when it comes to those people that they view as worthy of caring about - and this is where the concept of "the self" arrives, intimately connected to Marx's concept of species-being.

Now, Marx's concept of species-being can be dismissed as ideological nonsense, of course. But it reflects something quite true; we have a conception of "the self" that goes beyond just "my self". It extends to our children, our bloodline. For most people, it extends to their family, their nieces and nephews, and even beyond that.

I am using the term "the self" here to describe that circle of people deemed worthy of that care. For the nationalist, it is the people of his nation, or at least those that he deems worthy. For the plain old white supremacist, it is all white people (again, at least those that are deemed worthy). For the Islamic fundamentalist, it is all devout Muslims. For the international socialist, it is all humans of the world - the international working class.

The right-wing and the left-wing both operate these circles of care, these wider or narrower concepts of "the self". They both have a sense of "species-being", although only the left has the true species -being. The right settles for "nation-being", or "my-arbitrary-decision-of-where-the-race-barrier-falls-being". So humans are all species-beings, in terms of cognitive operation, really - just with smaller or larger concepts of "self". Only the left-wing is truly realizing their nature as species-beings - the right-wing has not developed their concept of "self" enough yet.

Thoughts? Criticism appreciated, I think this is probably quite wanky and garbled.

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_human_nature
marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1965/marx-humanism.htm
unityandstruggle.org/2014/07/30/communism-is-the-ascension-of-humanity-as-the-subject-of-history-a-critique-of-althusser-and-the-affirmation-of-marx/
socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/5334/2235#.WZ3BEZOGPEY
cominsitu.wordpress.com/2014/05/10/the-universality-of-marx/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

I don't think I can agree that they care about "people." They care about themselves, and some other people just happen to benefit from that.

I have been thinking though about species-being and alienation. Even if they are just philosophical abstractions, I think they might be describing actual phenomena.

For the average person, as far back in history as you want to go, life is short and hard. Stone tools are effective, but flimsy. Survival then depends greatly on constant physical labor. Endless days of hard work aren't really an inviting prospect. I think it's hard to believe that thinking people would tolerate it, if that's all that there was to look forward to.

I don't have anything to back this up but speculation, but in short I think humans evolved to enjoy their work, because if they didn't they'd become miserable and die or kill themselves. However, we can see that people don't enjoy work for work's own sake (generally speaking). On some level then, there must be operating some perception which makes self-directed work more palatable than work forced onto an individual.

I fancy too that escapism evolved alongside this. There is no way of avoiding unpleasant labor, but for example, day dreaming during a boring meeting, is an effective way to deal with this temporary state of alienation from self-direction/self-labor. I think this is in part a reason for humans developing things like amusement, singing it storytelling for example. It's a sorry of spiritual balm for the realities of forced, unpleasant labor.

Again, this isn't really based on anything, just thoughts I've had about it.

It was really only Althusser.

What a load of horsecrap. This has absolutely nothing to do with the concept of species-being, which originated in Feuerbach btw. Read Marx. Hell, even just read this fucking wikipedia article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_human_nature

Happy to give you quotes and citations:

The concept describes a human essence, not necessarily always realized, which consists in “consciousness” and in “treating the species as its own essential being or itself as a species-being”; that the species-being is “universal and therefore free” and that “production is his active species-life” (EPM, p.327-329).

He explains species-being as necessarily realized only in its “empirical life”, and only when “individual man resumes the abstract citizen into himself and as an individual man has become a species-being” (OJQ, p.234).

Marx confirms the nature of species-being as "universal" in other writings from this period: “species-being confirms itself in species-consciousness and exists for itself in its universality… Man, however much he may therefore be a particular individual… is just as much the totality” (EPM, p.350-353).


EPM = Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, written 1844, in Karl Marx, Early Writings, Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1992

OJQ = Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, written 1843, in Karl Marx, Early Writings, Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1992

Also,

Many commentators (Soviet, Italian) of Marx noticed the same thing.

You are right to point out that the species-being is a Feuerbachian concept.

modern cybernetic society tries to prevent you from constituting yourself into a subject every step of the way. No wonder why the technocrats love the death of the human subject so much. You are no longer a subject, but an object to be constructed.

Althusser's muh epistemological break is bad scholarship. It doesn't even have a clear chronological basis, even in Marx' late worksthere are 'humanist' aspects that Althusser dismissed as insuficiently orthodox.
marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1965/marx-humanism.htm

the narrative of the evil human subject vanquished for good by brave philosophers from the ecole normale superieure, is way too simple. couldn't it be that something was also lost along the way? Bourgeois society has given way to cybernetic society. It's our task to escape from cybernetic control, in a completely demeaned barren world, an archeology of the recent past is revolutionary.

"In my first essays, I suggested that after the "epistemological break" of 1845
(after the discovery by which Marx founded the science of history) the
philosophical categories of alienation and the negation of the negation (among
others) disappear. John Lewis replies that this is not true. And he is right. You
certainly do find these concepts (directly or indirectly) in the German Ideology, in
the Grundrisse (two texts which Marx never published) and also, though more
rarely (alienation) or much more rarely (negation of the negation: only one
explicit appearance) in Capital.
On the other hand John Lewis would have a hard job finding these concepts in
the Communist Manifesto, in the Poverty of Philosophy, in Wage Labour and
Capital, in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in the Critique
of the Gotha Programme or in the Notes on Wagner's Textbook. And this is to cite
only some of Marx's texts. As far as the political texts are concerned – and this of
course is equally true of the texts of Lenin, [26] Gramsci or Mao – well, he can
always try!
[…] If you look at the whole of Marx's work, there is no doubt that there does exist
a "break" of some kind in 1845. Marx says so himself. But of course no one
should be believed simply on his word, not even Marx. You have to judge on the
evidence.
In 1845 Marx began to lay down the
foundations of a science which did not exist before he came along: the science of
history. And in order to do that he set out a number of new concepts which cannot
be found anywhere in his humanist works of youth: mode of production,
productive forces, relations of production, infrastructure-superstructure,
ideologies, etc. No one can deny that. […] If John Lewis still doubts the reality of this "break", or rather – since the
"break" is only the effect – of this irruption of a new science in a still
"ideological" or pre-scientific universe, he should compare two judgements made
by Marx on Feuerbach and Proudhon.
Feuerbach is described in the 1844 Manuscripts as a philosopher who has made
extraordinary discoveries, who has discovered both the basis and the principle of
the critique of political economy! But a year later, in the Theses on Feuerbach,
and in the German Ideology, he is object of an all-out attack. After that he simply
disappears.
Proudhon is described in the Holy Family (end of 1844) as someone who "does
not simply write in the interest of the proletariat, but is himself a proletarian, a
worker. His work is a scientific manifesto of the French proletariat." [27] But in
1847, in the Poverty of Philosophy, he gets a hiding from which he will never
recover. After that he simply disappears.
If, as John Lewis says, nothing really happened in 1845, and if everything that I
have said about the "epistemological break" is "a complete myth", then I'll be
hung for it.

[…] We can also say: look at Marx's texts, look at the birth and development of his
scientific concepts, and – since John Lewis insists on talking about them – you
will at the same time see the gradual disappearance of these two philosophical
categories inherited from the past and still subsisting as remnants, known as
alienation and the negation of the negation. Now in fact, the more we advance in
time, the more these categories disappear. Capital speaks only once of the
negation of the negation in explicit terms. It is true that Marx several times uses
the term "alienation". But all that disappears in Marx's later texts and in Lenin.
Completely.
[…] The young Marx, born of a good
bourgeois family in the Rhineland, entered public life as editor of a liberal
newspaper of the same land. That was in 1841. A young and brilliant intellectual,
he was, within three or four years, to undergo an astonishing evolution in politics.
He was to pass from radical bourgeois liberalism (1841-42) to petty-bourgeois
communism (1843-44), then to proletarian communism (1844-45). These are
incontestable facts. But parallel to this political evolution you can observe an
evolution in philosophy. In philosophy, over the same period, the young Marx
was to pass from a position of subjective neo-Hegelianism (of a Kant-Fichte type)
to theoretical humanism (Feuerbach), before rejecting this to pass over to a
philosophy which would no longer merely "interpret" the world: a completely
new, materialist-revolutionary philosophy.
[M]arx had "settled
accounts" with his previous philosophical consciousness (1845), because he had
finally abandoned his bourgeois liberal and petty-bourgeois revolutionary
positions to adopt (even if only in principle, at a moment when he was letting go
the ropes) new revolutionary-proletarian class positions in theory, it was because
of all this that he was able to lay down the foundations of the scientific theory of history as
history of the class struggle. In principle : because the process of recognizing and
occupying these new positions in theory needed time. Time, in a ceaseless
struggle to contain the pressure of bourgeois philosophy.
On the basis of these points it should be possible to account for the intermittent
survival of categories like those of alienation and of the negation of the negation.
Note that I talk about intermittent survival. For alongside their tendency to
disappear in Marx's work, considered as a whole, there is a strange phenomenon
which must be accounted for: their total disappearance in certain works, then their
subsequent reappearance. For example, the two categories in question are absent
from the Communist Manifesto as well as from the Poverty of Philosophy
(published by Marx in 1847). They seem to be hidden in his Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy (which he published in 1859). But there are many
references to alienation in the Grundrisse (preparatory notes made by Marx in the
years 1857-58, and which he did not publish ). We know, because of a letter sent
to Engels, that Marx had "by chance" re-read Hegel's Logic in 1858 and had been
fascinated by it. In Capital (1867) alienation comes up again, but much more
rarely, and the negation of the negation appears just once. And so on. [32]

[32] One must be careful with philosophical categories taken one by one : for it is less their name
than their function in the theoretical apparatus in which they operate that decides their "nature". Is
a particular category idealist or materialist? In many cases we have to reply with Marx's answer:
"That depends". But there are limit-cases. For example, I do not really see that one can expect
anything positive from the category of the negation of the negation, which contains within it an
irreparable idealist charge. On the other hand it seems to me that the category of alienation can
render provisional services, given a double and absolute condition: (1) that it be "cut" from every
philosophy of "reification" (or of fetishism, or of self-objectivization) which is only an
anthropological variant of idealism; and (2) that alienation is understood as secondary to the
concept of exploitation. On this double condition, the category of alienation can, in the first
instance (since it disappears in the final result) help to avoid a purely economic, that is, economist
conception of surplus-value : it can help to introduce the idea that, in exploitation, surplus-value is
inseparable from the concrete and material forms in which it is extorted. [ cont. onto p. 71. – DJR ] A
number of texts from the Grundrisse and from Capital go, in my opinion, in this sense. But I know
that others go in a different and much more ambiguous sense."

I think u are definitively on something. Actually you are writing about universalism (against particularism of idpol), so it will be good if you search about marxist authors who expand on this.

You shouldn't ask for Holla Forums's opinions on right-wing nationalist ideas. You will just get more strawmans like .

Your first mistake is confusing all right-wing nationalist ideas as "racist". Fascism specifically, as it advocates malleability to different peoples with different needs, wants, and values.

Secondly, what makes a united human populace any "more advanced" of an idea than a group of allied nationalistic states?

Also "the international working class" does not include "all humans of the world".

Disdainful sage for a pitiful brainlet.

You can't really separate Althusser's ideas from his political and professional project, that is, to preserve 'philosophy' and the professional philosopher. If anything, he's closer to the official philosophers of the second and third internationals, commitment to the party and all. I've noticed 'antihumanists' are prone to the cult of personality of the celebrity philosopher, ie. Althusser, Foucault, Butler, while le evil nazi humanists like leftcoms tend more towards semi-anonymity and dialectics.


unityandstruggle.org/2014/07/30/communism-is-the-ascension-of-humanity-as-the-subject-of-history-a-critique-of-althusser-and-the-affirmation-of-marx/

socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/5334/2235#.WZ3BEZOGPEY

u wot

Whatever keeps you away from reading, boy.

>>>Holla Forums

Read kaczynski. People are actually miserable if they can't work and will attempt to seek it out if they don't have it (see aristocracy and hunting). But it has to be a specific kind of work which you can actually see the results of and a bunch of other features. Modern society's work supplies us with creature comforts and easier work but doesn't give us the unalienates worm we really need. This is why people flock to sports, hobbies, Vidya, etc.

This is why nationalism is the only demi viable utopian circle jerk

Providing all the basics as well as huge extra benefits (health, education) for the whole world is just not plausible as people DO NOT GET ALONG.

For a nation, maybe it can be done with sufficient religious devotion to the nation.

:>)

fact: you have to strangle at least one woman in order to attain to the highest degree of the althusser kult.

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I just find the fact he strangled his wife amusing for some reason

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I never knew about this. Man, French academia is a hell of a drug

I'm not convinced right wing nationalists "care" about people in the same way socialists do. Right wing nationalism is often associated with fascism, and in the cases where it isn't it is something akin to a nationalism that holds the idea of the nation-state itself up as a kind of ultimate value for its citizens. I think this phrasing is a little sloppy, but you might understand what I mean. For instance, there is an American nationalism in what has been the republican base for some decades that involves a near unconditional support of the interests of the American state, though not necessarily its citizens. This is not to say they always agree with the government about what is best for the state.

For this kind of self-proclaimed nationalist, though more often "patriot", the idea of the nation state is embodied almost religiously in the holy text of the constitution, and their preferred interpretation of it. The constitution is America, and the government is just the imperfect manifestation of the constitution. Furthermore, we can see they don't particularly care about the people of America in their preferred politics, which usually involves a suspicion of any attempt by the government to intervene in private affairs. It is more the government's role, for them, to enforce property rights, deter crime, and defend the mainland against foreign enemies. The citizens themselves are left to rise or fall based on their own merits, and in a sense what they are capable of offering society on the market.

More traditional forms of right wing nationalism have generally taken this form of fealty to the ideal of the nation-state, wherever that is embodied. But even in the modern fascist type, a fascist like Oswald Mosley declared loyalty to the queen as one of the essential elements of the English nation for him. Mussolini declared the state the embodiment of the nation, which was a fluid concept of the people. But, he also said that the state was essentially the telos of the nation. For him, the citizens of the state, or the nation, were only a part of the nation insofar as they served the interests of the state, which were taken to be the full embodiment of their own. So the people were secondary to the state, and any intersection of interests was only contingent on whether or not the state's interests happened to coincide with the people's (which, for Mussolini, meant balancing the interests of the capitalist class and the working class such that the work class wouldn't revolt).

Point being I don't think you can compare socialists to right wing nationalists, as I have seen them and their ideology to exist, in a meaningful way. Their set of primary values is not "the people of the nation", but the "nation" or the "state", neither of which actually always correspond to "the people of the nation". I would say socialists are not even always caring of people either. A Marxist may claim to only care about the scientific fact that capitalism is going to collapse, and so will be replaced. What it is replaced with better benefit them, and as it is likely the Marxist is a part of the working class, he'd most likely benefit from socialism. So the Marxist doesn't have to be a humanist or care about people, only care about the fact he lives in an economic system that simultaneously restricts his freedom, and is unstable.

check out Loren Goldner's stuff
cominsitu.wordpress.com/2014/05/10/the-universality-of-marx/

OP here, this is actually a really good reposte to my argument.

I would think, though, that most people begin their political beliefs with an emotional basis - some thought like "It's not fair that…" or "wouldn't it be better if…" But yes, you're right, it is possible to have a conception of "self" that it as small as strictly the lone individual, and be either left or right wing (although I would bet money on such a person, 9 times out of 10, leaning to the right).

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bump