04.18.09
1848
Some readers have wondered what the blog category ‘1848′ stands for. You can get that from here:
7.1 1848: End of Eonic Sequence?
(The plus in 1848+ means the period sequence after that date)
The previous post is, I think, answered by this approach to the question of capitalism/socialism.
What does socialism mean? That’s the problem it doesn’t mean anything. Nor does Marx deserve to have walked away with the term, one that had a whole spectrum of adherents in the 1840’s, people lost to history now.
We can admire Marx, study him, but we should remember that he quite deliberately, and with an odd will to power, seized the socialist idea from everyone else, and made it his. If the result had been a success, that would be one thing. But given the twenty century history we have to wonder if the original diversity as it arose in the generation before 1848 wasn’t a bit more wholesome. Maybe many of these socialists were the ‘idiots’ Marx and Engels thought they were, but then again the point is that ’socialism’ as we know it is now an artificially marxianized idea. We should be at least aware of this fact, and then, giving Marx his due, reconstruct the whole possibility, if there is one, free of the subtle scheme of domination created by Marx, and still visible in the ragtag remnants of his followers.
The passage cited from World History And The Eonic Effect contains the basic framework required to think through the inundations of propaganda, from the left and right, and especially the arch-clever distractions of Fukuyama. The question of the ‘end of history’ never gets anywhere, because it is a phantom that snowballed from nothing in Hegel to a lot in Fukuyama, when the only meaning it could have is the detection of the teleological aspect of history and democracy. Fukuyama garbled the theme, but the question remains: is socialism going to negate liberalism, to produce greater freedom?
The point is that in an age of science discussing teleology was Verboten. So, since the discussion was about teleology, it had to be finessed so cleverly that people could actually walk away thinking that this was non-teleological science.
And the question of capitalism is not analyzed properly by Marx, although he produced a set of fragment insights that are crucial to understand.
The point isn’t complicated: the status of capitalism is problematical. Can it continue forever?
Probably it can, until the environment collapses. But the point lost in the hysteria of the left is that, as the essay puts it, econostream != eonic sequence.
As far as the past is concerned, we cannot say that economic laws drove the development of man, as historical materialists have put it, instead the reverse is the case: something higher than that drove development. So, therefore, we must not let economic dynamics become the driving force of the future. Note that in critiquing Marx we end up restating his idea in a new and less dogmatic form.
So the point is merely that we must find freedom in the transcendence of economic dynamics.
Let’s remember that that is vague, for better or for worse, and we at least know it is vague.
To refer to a word ’socialism’ pretends to take away that vagueness, and that becomes its own contradiction.
Socialism as a term despite all Marx’s ministrations remained so vague that people forgot it meant ‘democracy’! Not the democracy of capitalists, but, well, democracy. The vagueness of the term, well, consider Lenin in 1917, or 1919.
Whatever the case, the date 1848 in the eonic model is just a convenient marker, and idea to peg a tale: the ‘end of history’ discussion recast in a less propagandistic form. In the eonic model, this becomes not the ‘end of history’ but its beginning as the last part of the eonic sequence completes (as far as we know).
It is then up to us. But we seem powerless even as we are empowered. So the idea of ‘revolution’, another black hole term, is really a question, how do we produce real change?