Kant's romantic idealism or Marx's scholarly materialism?
Marx's materialism definitely,if not the ultimate triumph of the industrial proletariat over the possessing classes. No-one in their right mind would pay any heed to nonsense such as Romantic or Late Romantic literature as exemplified in Kant's works e.g. Kant's Kritik der Reine Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason). Cant or Klatter D'atsch is the constant repetition of a few simple phrases, gossiping. That representation is also known as platonic idealism (or narcissism). Romantic idealism is associated with escapism in modern life. It often becomes a journey into the vagaries of entertainment and street-crawling as an active diversion from reality.
No one should take Kant seriously when social problems such as those presented by war and famine and the lack of civility and social altruism as we see everywhere and at all stages in history are under discussion.
Noone, it appears,apart from a wordy buffoon (Dean,Dozent) at Heidelberg University or a daft, Indian rote-learner from Tubingen University. The academic world is full of these ready-rub psychophants and fools.
Intelligent Westerners do not want to read penny prose emanating from backwoods German ideologues or have it retold by other ideologues no more than they want to listen to broadcasts about business ethics, private philanthropy and literary balderdash coming from London, Berlin, Paris and New York in the 1990's.
Why economic obsolescence of the European Marxist dictatorships, the political revisionism and what is the link to financial asset-stripping in the East, 1990-2005?
Greed or capitalism and the world economy. The neo-liberal craze ended in industrial collapse and social decay in the East and medical insults, police mischief and rough and unmannerly treatment of the poor and the unemployed in the West.
Materialism
Marx's philosophical analysis shows that conditions greatly influence collective consciousness. That is a fact of modern life and something every person in possession of their full mental faculties knows. We do not count the average Dreamer from America or the Indian sub-continent in the group of enlightened souls, nor do we take seriously the well-heeled charlatan. Nor,do we count anyone who smokes imported Cuban cigars or someone who engages in pedantic right-wing nonsense about social utility as tuned-in.
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What is the enduring message of the law of the immanent self- expansion of capital that has swept away much of European industry since the English Reaction?
This ever-present phenomenon and the resulting political changes have had the effect of huge wealth transfers to an underdeveloped country,China and to that vanquished country,Russia in lock-step.
New times?
My observation is that we should allow those two architects of capitalist change and perennial economic chaos,Britain and America sort out their own problems and have as little as possible to do with their elusive dreams of constant chaos and perpetual motion.
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3.7.2023
Old cant...
Many of the educated people who have been in contact with CIA agents of influence reckon after Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,"Everything turns into its opposite".
That is the basic philosophical tenet of both Marxism and Anarchist Communism. It represents the triumph of chaos as in Die Wende.
History leads China watchers to the 1852 proposition of Marx, "History always repeats itself,first as tragedy,then as farce,". While it is taken as a literary flourish it is often a true precept in revolutionary history, given that is little prospect of a turnaround in that country.
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Marx in Soho
Marx was hemmed in by agents of the Prussian Embassy in 1852 while he lived in Dean Street. His views were conditioned by the street mobilisations of waifs,loose women and pious old spinsters. In hard-to-come-by writings,Marx in 1848-1852 referred to mannafestations in the vicinity of Dean Street, Soho as a street assemblage of "promoters" (The Communist Trial, ed., Rodney Livingstone, 1969, Lawrence and Wishart,London).
Police manifestations and "dissembling" are practiced in modern societies by those who the Emperor of France assembled into the paramilitary Mobile Guard.
This function is carried on in Northern Ireland by the Neighborhood Watch.
Previously,the activity was carried on by the British Army's part-time soldiery;in the 1990's in the South,by the FCA . More recently in the South the street crawlers,private security firms are paid by the Department of Defence and private employers.
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Specifics. One of Marx's aphorisms
Corroboration for one of Marx's throwaway propositions comes from an unlikely source. Marx wrote,"De te fabula narrator!" (or "This is an allegory you are hearing from a fair-weather acquaintance you are meeting and it concerns you,not the person it is apparently directed at!")
It is to be found in that biblical wisdom and it runs,"The blows destined for us fell on him [or Our Lord]".
The Latin form of the Mass prescribes,""Mio peccato,!"("I acknowledge my sins!") as a corrective rite.
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17.7.2023
Marx and his insights
His advocacy of national unity in Germany and national liberation movements in Ireland,Italy, Hungary and Poland,the latter a country facing East and West colours much of his early writing.
Probably it was a presentiment of things to come.
In terms of a sideways-look at the issue let us bear in mind German brutality and Polish people's gentle and sensitive nature,much like Old Germany and our own under the tutelage of priests in the 1960's.
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Other themes of Marx
Difference and attraction
Attraction, repulsion
Race,consanguinity
Two propositions,therefore.
Firstly,like attracts like and opposites repel one another. That proposal comes from kinetics,particle physics.
Then,we all move in sealed worlds, the 'nuclear' option.
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These themes of attraction and repulsion in the current perilous European situation,what to make of them?
Unity in Diversity is one option.
Or,paying close attention to the decisions of that great organ of peace set up to defeat the ends of warmongers in 1945,the United Nations .
Or,if you prefer,China must condemn Russian ethnocentrism and aggression and Putin's bloodymindedness in Ukraine.
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Other philosophical propositions of Marx and his legacy?
Some of Marx's propositions come with a vaguely sentimental tinge. His press articles on Westminster by-elections in the 1850's inspire political meddlers to opposition.
In his prose,he positted Russian absolutism as the cause of the defeat of Napoleon's 'liberty with stability'. He opposed what he called the Holy Alliance of Austria-Hungary, Prussia,England and Russia.
His other beliefs,now dated?
He was an anti-Semite and Jew-baiter and a German nationalist (see The German Ideology,Lawrence and Wishart,1968, London).
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Engels,Marx's colleague in revolutionary prose
Engels rejected the proposals of free healthcare and free education and free legal aid as state provisions for the poor (See his Remarks on the Erfurt Programme from 1891,Marx and Engels,Selected Works in Three Volumes, Lawrence and Wishart London,1968).
It took the Trades Union Congress in 1882 to discredit Continental socialism (Introduction to the Communist Manifesto,1848,1882).
Exit Marx,stage left. Seventy years later,enter the Welfare State, stage right!
Marx's socialism
Marx and Engels are found sadly wanting of basic humanity and respect for the poor and beaten down. Read their remarks in the Communist Manifesto on the 'lumpen proletariat' for a literary "starter for ten" (Der Spielplan, July-August 1988, Rathmines, Dublin,Ireland).
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27.8.2023
Kant revived. The Judeo-Christian tradition
The basic proposition of Hebraic philosophy is that no man can serve two masters. It reads,"He will love one and hate the other or,hate one and love the other".
It is notable that many Western governments serve two masters. Duality is the basic phenomenon of the times.
Note one dualism,the cults of humanism and Freudianism.
We say to both of the orchestrators of this modern schizoaffective idealisation,the BBC and 'head' doctors,"You're trying to ride two horses,God and Mammon. You're hallucinating. A rich old Judy like you or your Asian and African friends and other guests of the nation never give a penny to any charity. You're only a hypocrite who doesn't understand or accept the basis of public medicine. There's a stink of you. Do you not even believe in washing, you dirty old tramp."
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4.9.2023
Comparisons and the origins of concepts. Some insights into the concept of capitalism
It is sometimes assumed that the 'head' of a team of horses on a carriage was the real point of departure for Capital as a lead economic concept. Marx's written epithet "Accumulate,accumulate,accumulate. That is Moses and the prophets!" is a nineteenth century analogy of a horse accelerating quickly when hitched to a carriage and whipped.
A modern philistine,a political meetings man called the literary conclusion of his imperialist rampage "A Journey". I refer to Tony Blair.
A literary coincidence perhaps. In his capital horse setting off on a journey at the head of a team of horses, Marx's allusion to capitalism rests.
A lead horse and,to introduce the Hebraic tradition,a horse is viewed in Isaiah as a fearless creature which rushes blindly forward.
To turn the analogy around we refer to Greek wisdom to discern the fate of the modern lead horse,the working class. The European workhorse in Aesop's fables can be construed as the donkey whose diet was steadily reduced to a blade of grass a day by its merciless exploiter.
Both of these allusions when construed with the etymology of Capital derive from a contemporary and a pre-Marxist mode of thinking.
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Later we learn of two propositions of Russian Narodnik (populist) "revolutionary spontaneity" and "excitative terror" from Lenin in his early years of socialist activity from 1896-1903.
The contemporary relevance
Those may well be two propositions the immature Tony Blair read of in his early years as a Member of Parliament and served him as a guide to understanding our Irish Narodniks. In 1983,he,for his part, certainly believed in what followed,that which the socialist successors to Narodism practiced, state control of society,Terror and publicly owned industry.
But to deal with the legacy of his latter-day social idealism in power,we count Tony Blair as amongst those "hole-and-corner reformers, charity mongers and anti-vivisectionists" who Marx railed against in his first popular literary work (The Communist Manifesto, 1847-8).
Blair and his successors had recourse to the Jews in the end to keep his paranoidal plans alive. He made of Britain a deindustrialised wasteland and idle society. Today,there are far too many in Britain today without a meaningful occupation or real job because of his schizoaffective Christian Socialism (Fabian Society,1995).
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12.10.2024
Setting out Russian Marxism's pitch to the intelligentsia in 1913,Lenin wrote Monism or a characterisation of the empirio-scientific method.
In this method of reasoning,there is much merit because it is rooted in Russian and Greek orthodoxy.
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Beware however of solely following one analytical method,students. Lenin's methodology,the method of historical materialism-dialectics is more a philosophy of social and political progress-because there are many others all worthy of practice.
Therefore,we say with certainty that Marx's observations have withstood exhaustive criticism and that nowadays we find in many of Marx's critiques a guide to a world which has adopted the industrial movement. The world is as Marx described it would be.
We find very little of relevance in Kant's Romantic idealism other than escapism,narcissism and a culture of death, euthanasia, contraception, divorce and abortion.
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6.11.2024
The division in modern social sciences lies between endogenous (or ideological) reasoning and socialism whether the socialism in question be critical or materialistic.
In our political environment,this spaltum or schism takes the form of conservative against labour and the left or ideology against reason.
Ideology of the extreme leftwing tendency ignores all restrictions and legal restraints on political authority. Marxist ideology sets aside law and the basic tenets of a civilised society.
Romantic idealism is in the ascendant in a world without materialist state models. The Chinese and the mixed economies of the East are too weak to oppose fascist revanchism and the currents of war emanating from Europe and the Americas.
From within or from without,which is it to be?
Neither to the exclusion of the other,I think. More desirable is the preservation of political norms and legal rules.
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The conundrum of the Philosopher's Stone,"Is it round or is it flat?" is a puzzler for the female mind,female searchers after truth and for the philosopher.
Women often as they are possessed of horse sense,fail at every attempt to gain a rational understanding of any problem of ideology apart from sentimental reasoning and quickly lose their way when confronted by a simple puzzle. Note Keegan and Butler-Sloss and countless other legal and media chicks. Stick to children's crossword puzzles and simple arithmetic,ladies,and don't get involved in any nonsense about strutting your stuff in public or trying to put the chicken back into the egg.
