I have been going through bouts of depression lately - and the reason is partially the unsettling political ambiance around me. Since "around me" sounds rather ambiguous, I'll go ahead and specify it. India is making it to the international headlines everyday given its fascist governance and the consistent crackdowns on the capital city, in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, West Bengal and basically just everywhere. The last time I had passed through a similar phase was in 2014, during the 51 day war in Gaza. That was a fairly terrible case of psychosis. I could hear drone sounds in my nightmares, and I have carried traces of the horror I felt inside me ever since. Back then, Modi had just been elected and most of my countrymen were oozing with the kind of glee that the Germans perhaps did when they had elected Hitler. Slowly, the situation got worse. The economy is on the verge of recession, women would perhaps be burnt on the pyre on accusations of witchcraft any other day...the students, the Dalits, the farmers, the Muslims are all in grave danger. And even the apparently ignorant upper middle class is in for some serious trouble this time.
Journalists, freethinkers, intellectuals have been attacked, murdered, arrested all over the country. Muslim women are leading non-violent struggles in Shaheen Bagh and Park Circus and people have been slaughtered by the Hindu fundamentalists right in front of the camera! You don't need to be a scholar right now to know what is in store and why is it in store and what is coming next. Almost every sane person I manage to have a conversation with is convinced that today's India is Nazi Germany recreated. The semblance hurts. It really does. And if the rising death tolls, attacks on the universities and the unidentified bodies found in the gutters do not nauseate you, do not make you question everything - basically everything, I do not know what else would.
Interestingly, the university classes are still going on as per the schedule and slowly, very slowly, the ambiance is changing within the campus, too. People who profess the ideas of Marx seldom practice them, people who think are practising the Marxist approach have barely had the time or consciousness required to comprehend him, people who think there is nothing else that can be done call him an idiot. What's more, activist Varvara Rao was questioned upon being arrested why he reads works of Mao or Marx!
Every single seminar/conference I have attended in the last two-three years have had scholars compelled to choose the method of obscurantism to state the fact that we practically do not have a functioning democracy anymore. And, even if we did, we are not sure how it has helped to sort out the basic, fundamental problems of poverty, malnutrition, hunger, immense wage gap that has been widening infinitely over the past seven decades and the direct confrontation of ecological balance with the gruesome extent of unsustainable that modern day capitalism is. There is no question of a human face in capitalism anymore (maybe there never was any, to begin with) , there could be a human facade somewhere but that is what it is. So, we have, by now, after having lived through the twentieth century totalitarianism, the living hell that the United States is at the moment and the post-neoliberal third world. If all of them point to one specific, very certain truth about capitalism and trickle down economy, it is that it doesn't work. And no pseudo-science, no sarcasm, no anecdotes would change the fact that it very well doesn't. Take a close look at the whole world and the far-right rulers of all of the major developed and developing economies at this point. Which element would you point out that is pointing towards a governance that is not regimented, hypermasculine, sexist, racist, homophobic, and dehumanising?
While academia at its very best does provide you a space to internalise conflict within you, a completely implicit periphery of internalised conflict could give rise to precisely nothing. This might sound a little exaggerated but without understanding the socio-cultural, economic, technical, immediate and magnanimous impact of technology and virtuality on the ideas of space and perception, it is impossible to comprehend the spaces we are creating around us - individual, cultural or political. It is true that cognitive science gives you some direction, but cognitive science as a discipline will necessarily not require you to understand society as an essentially humane discourse.
That way, no one really knows what to do with Marx, even in between and beyond the liminal spaces in academia. He wasn't exactly what you would call a sociologist, and I've never been through the work of a demarcated sociologist who understood the economist Marx and the economist who understood the sociologist in him. One could and many scholars have, categorised him as a "philosopher", which I guess is safer than the rest of the options but the point of this petty sarcasm is that the cliche that most people do not get what the bearded guy had to say is true. And it is true not because those who understand him are geniuses or he's a complex puzzle. It simply signifies that we lack resources to provide apt contextualisation. We lack the balance of information and consent required to comprehend his ideas. It would be important to note that we do not lack information, we lack the balance in the volume and extent of information that we have. We have a raging pandemic of over-information and
over-communication the world over. So much so that we do not understand what to recollect, what to analyse, what to synthesise and why to do what to do.
Living the nightmare that all of us are is not so metaphorical as it might seem. While we contextualise the nightmare, it becomes important to feasibly point out exactly what or who are leading to the culminative crises of non-existence. And in fact a number of people are contributing more than their fellow, and less powerful men. The pyramid hasn't changed its shape, the idea of the 'cashless' or the cryptocurrency isn't changing the gaps in ownership and the bigotry and nepotism clearly visible in all the neo-fascist regimes are not surreal. While Chomsky argues that capitalism does not necessarily give birth to fascism or isn't necessarily fascist, in this case, I would advocate Zizek's opinion that it does give birth to fascism as one of its outcomes. This is fairly clear by now and even if it might not coincide with fascism in its embodiment, it certainly carries the potent foetus of a feasible fascist system under the facade of something else.
There is another misconception that by capital, Marx referred to only financial capital, or ownership of physical resources. I also hear people say he "desired" a classless society, which is kind of fictional because he didn't desire it, he sort of predicted it and took the role of an obscurantist to deem the future of such a possibility as null or close to null. Marx had a somewhat faulty understanding of differentiation because he did not grasp the concept of limit in mathematics very well. However, he certainly understood the literary meaning of an utopian system and I can bet not once in his nightmares did he imagine he was Houdini. I am sure one profound reason why Marx is so highly misunderstood is because of the language that he chose as the medium to communicate his most intricate and complex ideas. There is no debate about the fact that German is not a simple language and as somebody who has only began to learn the basics, I could say it's hard to encompass the organic mind in it - I don't know in what other way to put this, but a feminine language is lucid and easier to follow. German, even as a language, is somewhat of a man. Till date, I have only been able to go through translated works in English and very few in Bengali but I aim to study his original, untranslated work in some time.
When someone quotes, "Religion is the opium of the people", they seldom mention the context in which it was said immediately after which Marx is classified as a materialist forever and ever. He did very prudently talk about the catharsis one finds when he delves into his imagination corresponding to a normative "beyond human" divinity.
What must be understood here is that he was not a messiah, or a sorcerer or a wizard. He wasn't making future predictions out of thin air and he wasn't writing a book on social humour. The one condition that has to be maintained while reading Marx is the deliberate urge to curb obscurantism, even the tidbits that modern liberal neo-Marxists hammer inside your head. We could rather read his work like any another philosopher's. It would be better if one can manage to not consider him a sorcerer and yet not fixate his work in a particular time zone and conclude that period has passed so it has got no use anymore. That is another common mistake people make and then he's either converted into meme material or considered the bearded European brother of chairman Mao.
Engels in his book 'The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State' partially based on notes by Karl Marx to Lewis H. Morgan's book 'Ancient Society' identifies the family as an entity to ensure controlled wealth distribution between kins. 'Kinship' is a rather morbid topic in context of India imbibed with the caste system but nonetheless - with Hegelian dialectics turned on its head, we can presume that the state will and almost never has had a problem with families on that note as much as they have had it with "foreign" and "inferior" communities (such as Muslims and Islamophobia, which is a whole different story in this century), which of course are constituted out of families but the state machinery is largely interested in the "macros" and bare funationalism of its constituent components and barely wants to carry surveillance and filtration on its own. Ethnic cleansing only occurs when spirituality can be morphed to look like a football match in the public eye except that in this case angry, naked mobs want to catapult their "soldiers" against one another.
Marx even identified women as a class and tried to look at 'love' beyond platonic analysis through a materialist spectacle. Now, that, to this day, has been important for every feminist who believes that modern day capitalism cannot sustain feminism and vice versa. Betty Friedan's "A problem with no name" literally runs on repeat inside your head once you begin addressing the emotional crises of a modern woman. While Judith Butler's take on emotional labour is more radical, Friedan as a Marxist feminist highlights the subtlety caught in between the gaps of what looks like nothing to the naked eye.
Marx did not "miss out" entirely on social capital and more intriguingly, Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein took this to a whole new level by incorporating modern pedagogy and the extent of linguistic acquisition that an individual is able to attain given the ambiance he is able to exercise in terms of social networking, in terms of intellectual stimulation consistently over a
period of time. Basically, capital is rooted in both space and time and the domination or apparent control that human beings have seeked over them ever since the advent of modern technology.
So if, there is a third world war, imperialism would still continue aggression to a great extent (but I highly doubt who would, in the end, lubricate the wheels of the machine) but the war in the virtual space, which has been intertwined with the 'physical' so intricately that we do not even care to notice them as individual entities anymore might just be the sole subject of the war. The pandemic of over-information is deliberate and the ones who control it push the mercenaries to manufacture consent. Since Chomsky has elaborated the concept in his book already and two decades ago, we need to start taking technology both as an immediate, machinistic, inorganic tool and perceive it as a humane-borne force/discourse/catastrophe at the same time. Data and technology have to be understood at the core - which stretches beyond statistics, beyond the mechanical discourses we are compelled to be cogs and only cogs to. Contextualising Marx today would certainly be more complex and deeper than it was half a century ago, but nonetheless is more relevant than ever.
Journalists, freethinkers, intellectuals have been attacked, murdered, arrested all over the country. Muslim women are leading non-violent struggles in Shaheen Bagh and Park Circus and people have been slaughtered by the Hindu fundamentalists right in front of the camera! You don't need to be a scholar right now to know what is in store and why is it in store and what is coming next. Almost every sane person I manage to have a conversation with is convinced that today's India is Nazi Germany recreated. The semblance hurts. It really does. And if the rising death tolls, attacks on the universities and the unidentified bodies found in the gutters do not nauseate you, do not make you question everything - basically everything, I do not know what else would.
Interestingly, the university classes are still going on as per the schedule and slowly, very slowly, the ambiance is changing within the campus, too. People who profess the ideas of Marx seldom practice them, people who think are practising the Marxist approach have barely had the time or consciousness required to comprehend him, people who think there is nothing else that can be done call him an idiot. What's more, activist Varvara Rao was questioned upon being arrested why he reads works of Mao or Marx!
Every single seminar/conference I have attended in the last two-three years have had scholars compelled to choose the method of obscurantism to state the fact that we practically do not have a functioning democracy anymore. And, even if we did, we are not sure how it has helped to sort out the basic, fundamental problems of poverty, malnutrition, hunger, immense wage gap that has been widening infinitely over the past seven decades and the direct confrontation of ecological balance with the gruesome extent of unsustainable that modern day capitalism is. There is no question of a human face in capitalism anymore (maybe there never was any, to begin with) , there could be a human facade somewhere but that is what it is. So, we have, by now, after having lived through the twentieth century totalitarianism, the living hell that the United States is at the moment and the post-neoliberal third world. If all of them point to one specific, very certain truth about capitalism and trickle down economy, it is that it doesn't work. And no pseudo-science, no sarcasm, no anecdotes would change the fact that it very well doesn't. Take a close look at the whole world and the far-right rulers of all of the major developed and developing economies at this point. Which element would you point out that is pointing towards a governance that is not regimented, hypermasculine, sexist, racist, homophobic, and dehumanising?
(Source: Twitter)
While academia at its very best does provide you a space to internalise conflict within you, a completely implicit periphery of internalised conflict could give rise to precisely nothing. This might sound a little exaggerated but without understanding the socio-cultural, economic, technical, immediate and magnanimous impact of technology and virtuality on the ideas of space and perception, it is impossible to comprehend the spaces we are creating around us - individual, cultural or political. It is true that cognitive science gives you some direction, but cognitive science as a discipline will necessarily not require you to understand society as an essentially humane discourse.
That way, no one really knows what to do with Marx, even in between and beyond the liminal spaces in academia. He wasn't exactly what you would call a sociologist, and I've never been through the work of a demarcated sociologist who understood the economist Marx and the economist who understood the sociologist in him. One could and many scholars have, categorised him as a "philosopher", which I guess is safer than the rest of the options but the point of this petty sarcasm is that the cliche that most people do not get what the bearded guy had to say is true. And it is true not because those who understand him are geniuses or he's a complex puzzle. It simply signifies that we lack resources to provide apt contextualisation. We lack the balance of information and consent required to comprehend his ideas. It would be important to note that we do not lack information, we lack the balance in the volume and extent of information that we have. We have a raging pandemic of over-information and
over-communication the world over. So much so that we do not understand what to recollect, what to analyse, what to synthesise and why to do what to do.
Living the nightmare that all of us are is not so metaphorical as it might seem. While we contextualise the nightmare, it becomes important to feasibly point out exactly what or who are leading to the culminative crises of non-existence. And in fact a number of people are contributing more than their fellow, and less powerful men. The pyramid hasn't changed its shape, the idea of the 'cashless' or the cryptocurrency isn't changing the gaps in ownership and the bigotry and nepotism clearly visible in all the neo-fascist regimes are not surreal. While Chomsky argues that capitalism does not necessarily give birth to fascism or isn't necessarily fascist, in this case, I would advocate Zizek's opinion that it does give birth to fascism as one of its outcomes. This is fairly clear by now and even if it might not coincide with fascism in its embodiment, it certainly carries the potent foetus of a feasible fascist system under the facade of something else.
There is another misconception that by capital, Marx referred to only financial capital, or ownership of physical resources. I also hear people say he "desired" a classless society, which is kind of fictional because he didn't desire it, he sort of predicted it and took the role of an obscurantist to deem the future of such a possibility as null or close to null. Marx had a somewhat faulty understanding of differentiation because he did not grasp the concept of limit in mathematics very well. However, he certainly understood the literary meaning of an utopian system and I can bet not once in his nightmares did he imagine he was Houdini. I am sure one profound reason why Marx is so highly misunderstood is because of the language that he chose as the medium to communicate his most intricate and complex ideas. There is no debate about the fact that German is not a simple language and as somebody who has only began to learn the basics, I could say it's hard to encompass the organic mind in it - I don't know in what other way to put this, but a feminine language is lucid and easier to follow. German, even as a language, is somewhat of a man. Till date, I have only been able to go through translated works in English and very few in Bengali but I aim to study his original, untranslated work in some time.
When someone quotes, "Religion is the opium of the people", they seldom mention the context in which it was said immediately after which Marx is classified as a materialist forever and ever. He did very prudently talk about the catharsis one finds when he delves into his imagination corresponding to a normative "beyond human" divinity.
What must be understood here is that he was not a messiah, or a sorcerer or a wizard. He wasn't making future predictions out of thin air and he wasn't writing a book on social humour. The one condition that has to be maintained while reading Marx is the deliberate urge to curb obscurantism, even the tidbits that modern liberal neo-Marxists hammer inside your head. We could rather read his work like any another philosopher's. It would be better if one can manage to not consider him a sorcerer and yet not fixate his work in a particular time zone and conclude that period has passed so it has got no use anymore. That is another common mistake people make and then he's either converted into meme material or considered the bearded European brother of chairman Mao.
Engels in his book 'The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State' partially based on notes by Karl Marx to Lewis H. Morgan's book 'Ancient Society' identifies the family as an entity to ensure controlled wealth distribution between kins. 'Kinship' is a rather morbid topic in context of India imbibed with the caste system but nonetheless - with Hegelian dialectics turned on its head, we can presume that the state will and almost never has had a problem with families on that note as much as they have had it with "foreign" and "inferior" communities (such as Muslims and Islamophobia, which is a whole different story in this century), which of course are constituted out of families but the state machinery is largely interested in the "macros" and bare funationalism of its constituent components and barely wants to carry surveillance and filtration on its own. Ethnic cleansing only occurs when spirituality can be morphed to look like a football match in the public eye except that in this case angry, naked mobs want to catapult their "soldiers" against one another.
Marx even identified women as a class and tried to look at 'love' beyond platonic analysis through a materialist spectacle. Now, that, to this day, has been important for every feminist who believes that modern day capitalism cannot sustain feminism and vice versa. Betty Friedan's "A problem with no name" literally runs on repeat inside your head once you begin addressing the emotional crises of a modern woman. While Judith Butler's take on emotional labour is more radical, Friedan as a Marxist feminist highlights the subtlety caught in between the gaps of what looks like nothing to the naked eye.
Marx did not "miss out" entirely on social capital and more intriguingly, Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein took this to a whole new level by incorporating modern pedagogy and the extent of linguistic acquisition that an individual is able to attain given the ambiance he is able to exercise in terms of social networking, in terms of intellectual stimulation consistently over a
period of time. Basically, capital is rooted in both space and time and the domination or apparent control that human beings have seeked over them ever since the advent of modern technology.
So if, there is a third world war, imperialism would still continue aggression to a great extent (but I highly doubt who would, in the end, lubricate the wheels of the machine) but the war in the virtual space, which has been intertwined with the 'physical' so intricately that we do not even care to notice them as individual entities anymore might just be the sole subject of the war. The pandemic of over-information is deliberate and the ones who control it push the mercenaries to manufacture consent. Since Chomsky has elaborated the concept in his book already and two decades ago, we need to start taking technology both as an immediate, machinistic, inorganic tool and perceive it as a humane-borne force/discourse/catastrophe at the same time. Data and technology have to be understood at the core - which stretches beyond statistics, beyond the mechanical discourses we are compelled to be cogs and only cogs to. Contextualising Marx today would certainly be more complex and deeper than it was half a century ago, but nonetheless is more relevant than ever.
1 Comments
I don't know if any of the socio-economical philosophers had already a look into that problem, but I think that the success of capitalism is the consequence of humans being … humans. In Christianity, there is the concept of 'seven mortal sins' and that is basically what is intrinsic to almost all humans … greed, arrogance, overindulgence to name only a few. As an INTP, you know that almost all progress is done by a small minority of the population, and while a few of them act altruistic, most of these pacemakers will only go the extra mile if there is some reward at the end. And if you lose these trailblazers, innovation will stop. In my opinion the problem is unsolved: capitalism is not for the future, but what alternative can include these human weaknesses to be able to function for the future?
ReplyDeleteWhat are your perspectives?