Hannah Arendt believes that political thought should exercise itself 'with the modern break in tradition and with the concept of history with which the modern age hoped to replace the concepts of traditional metaphysics'. She forgot that Western political thought had its traditional foundation in the Church and a certain event in Jerusalem, not Athens. The West emerged from its Dark Ages with sacred monarchies, not republics and it was many centuries before Renaissance scholarship and humanist knights or councillors of State played any political role. As for 'traditional metaphysics', it had been subsumed by scholastic theology from which the West broke free with empiricism and the rise of scientific methodology.
Political thought is concerned with the distribution of power and the formulation of public policy. Its exercise determines the fate of peoples and of nations. Metaphysics is merely an inconsequential type of pedantry.
Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle.
Nonsense! It had its beginning in tribal institutions and feudal conquests but was subsequently modified by the interessement of clerics and, at a later point, lawyers and bureaucrats. The Bible mattered. Plato and Aristotle first reappear in theology. Mercantile republics- like Venice- might wax and wane for economic or geopolitical reasons, but this was not undergirded by Greek political philosophy. One may say that from about the middle of the seventeenth century, the authority of Aristotle was pressed into service by political polemicists but, previously, Aristotle had been claimed by Alchemists and Astrologers. There was no causal link between such claims and the texts themselves.
Arendt emigrated to America. Why did she do? It was wealthy and powerful? What made it so? Capitalism. The profit motive. True, when the Puritans first arrived, their heads were filled with Millenarian ideas and radical political ideas attributed to Plato and Aristotle. Thus, initially, land was held in common and corn was grown 'by each according to her capacity' and distributed to 'each according to her needs'. The result was everybody went hungry. Famine threatened. The Governor, William Bradford wrote of this experiment in collectivism that it might ' well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato's and other ancients applauded by some of later times; that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God. For this community (so far as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For the young men, that were most able and fit for labour and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense. The strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labours and victuals, clothes, etc., with the meaner and younger sort, thought it some indignity and disrespect unto them. And for men's wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it. Upon the point all being to have alike, and all to do alike, they thought themselves in the like condition, and one as good as another; and so, if it did not cut off those relations that God hath set amongst men, yet it did at least much diminish and take off the mutual respects that should be preserved amongst them. And would have been worse if they had been men of another condition. Let none object this is men's corruption, and nothing to the course itself. I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in them, God in His wisdom saw another course fitter for them.'
To be fair, Marx himself would tell the German Social Democrats that the rule must be, 'to each according to his contribution' till scarcity comes to an end.
I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx.
Arnedt hadn't heard of Lenin who completely changed the subsequent trajectory of Marxist thought. The Soviets spent a lot of time measuring the contribution of each worker. The Stakhanovite was well rewarded. Sadly, agricultural land was collectivized. The result was famine on a massive scale.
The beginning was made when, in The Republic's allegory of the cave, Plato described the sphere of human affairs all that belongs to the living together of men in a common world in terms of darkness, confusion, and deception which those aspiring to true being must turn away from and. abandon if they want to discover the clear sky of eternal ideas.
That nonsense ended soon enough. Aristotle's pupil was Alexander who became a God and sought to establish a universal empire based on 'homonoia' rather than priestcraft. Divine Caesars pushed forward this program before Rome fell to barbarians only to recover its synoecist role as the seat of the earthly Vicar or Viceroy of a Man-God Pantocrator crucified in Jerusalem.
The end came with Marx's declaration that philosophy and its truth are located not outside the affairs of men and their common world but precisely in them, and can be "realized" only in the sphere of living together, which he called "society," through the emergence of "socialized men" (vergesellschaftete Menscheri).
Such creatures had appeared tens of thousands of years previously. Moreover, philosophy was already known to have no 'truths'. It was a fucking waste of time. Marx understood that America was ahead, not behind, Europe (indeed, the Civil War was the first modern war) and since there were no American philosophers- but there were American submarines- it followed that Philosophy was kaputt. Smart Germans were emigrating to America as fast as they could which is why German-Americans are the largest claimed ancestry group in America with 50 million members. Arendt, it must be said, was as fond as others of her ilk of the almighty Dollar.
Political philosophy necessarily implies the attitude of the philosopher toward politics;
Nope. If you are teaching that shite, you don't have to bother with politics. The main thing is not to masturbate while giving lectures.
its tradition began with the philosopher's turning away from politics and then returning in order to impose his standards on human affairs.
No philosopher imposed shit.
The end came when a philosopher turned away from philosophy so as to "realize" it in politics.
Marx and Engels were failed politicians. That is why they lived in England.
This was Marx's attempt, expressed first in his decision (in itself philosophical) to abjure philosophy, and second in his intention to "change the world" and thereby the philosophizing minds, the "consciousness" of men.
He failed. Lenin succeeded. But this had to do with Trotsky being better at killing people than the Tzar's generals. Still, it was Stalin's superior command of the Siberian Gulag which made Marxist-Leninism into a compelling ideology for the stupider and poorer parts of the world.
The beginning and the end of the tradition have this in common:
they were stupid and didn't matter in the slightest. Killing people or incarcerating them in Gulags can matter- if the place you rule is populated by stupid and poor people. Philosophy can certainly play a role in making them stupider and poorer yet.
that the elementary problems of politics never come as clearly to light in their immediate and simple urgency as when they are first formulated and when they receive their final challenge. The beginning, in Jacob Burckhardt's words, is like a "fundamental chord" which sounds in its endless modulations through the whole history of Western thought.
That chord is the notion that God is the King of Kings or Dictator of Dictators and thus a Stalin or a Hitler or a Mao or Saddam is like a good shepherd who keeps slaughtering us for meat and wool and leather because...urm... Dictators like living large for in their House there are many Mansions, not to mention Dungeons, and places to rape little girls.
Only beginning and end are, so to speak, pure or unmodulated; and the fundamental chord therefore never strikes its listeners more forcefully and more beautifully than when it first sends its harmonizing sound into the world and never more irritatingly and jarringly than when it still continues to be heard in a world whose sounds and thought it can no longer bring into harmony.
Very true. Te Deums don't sound so great if you are being stretched on the Inquisitor's rack or consigned to the flames of the auto da fe.
A random remark which Plato made in his last work: "The beginning is like a god which as long as it dwells among men saves all things" IS true of OUR tradition; as long as its beginning was alive, it could save all things and bring them into harmony.
In other words, 'the beginning' does not exist just like some supposed gods who dwelt among men and spent their time saving cats from dogs or credulous investors from fraudsters or con-men.
By the same token, it became destructive as it came to its end to say nothing of the aftermath of confusion and helplessness which came after the tradition ended and in which we live today.
Arendt lived in America which kept up a tradition of party politic already apparent in late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century England. It concerned itself with solving collective action problems of a socioeconomic or geopolitical type This had nothing to do with gods turning up and living with folk. It had to do with an expansion of the franchise and increased power, based on its ability to raise taxes, for the elected chamber of parliament. In America, there was 'dual sovereignty' and a costly war was fought to determine if there was a right of secession. This was a debate conducted between men of property well versed in the Common Law- not Roman Law, nor Greek philosophy.
In Marx's philosophy,
Philosophy was recognized to be shit. Marx was seeking to become an economist of the English, empirical, type. He failed but, from the British point of view, just as Ricardo was associated with opposition to the Corn Law, extension of the franchise, and a shift in power from the landed aristocracy to the industrial bourgeoisie. Marx was seen as taking the next step and championing the proletariat, universal franchise and so on. True, Marx's own work was stupid and useless but Henry George had come up with an argument for heavier taxes on the 'unearned increment' accruing to land owners while the Marginal Revolution provided the intellectual ammunition to target sources of market failure- monopolies/cartels, externalities, under-provision of public goods etc. etc. Arendt, studying utter shit in Germany, was blissfully unaware of these developments. Still, she had the sense to emigrate to Capitalist America, not some Marxist Leninist shithole.
In Marx's philosophy, which did not so much turn Hegel upside down as
vainly hope the Prussian King would take the German Crown from the Frankfurt Diet in which case Engels would have been an important politician and Marx might have been appointed a Professor in Berlin. Instead both had to fuck off to England. Still, Bismarck did ally with Lasalle against the Catholics. Later the Catholic Centres decided to support Hitler against both the Social Democrats and the Communists who considered the latter to be 'Social Fascists'. Their reward was to get East Germany for themselves for a sufficient number of decades to prove beyond doubt that Communism sucks ass big time.
invert the traditional hierarchy of thought and action,
That 'traditional hierarchy' was that only the thoughts of those whose acts were consequential mattered.
of contemplation and labor,
if you have money go for the former. If not, you are shit out of luck.
and of philosophy and politics,
stupidity and greed
the beginning made by Plato and Aristotle proves its vitality
stupidity
by leading Marx into flagrantly contradictory statements, mostly in that part of his teachings usually called Utopian. The most important are his prediction that under conditions of a "socialized humanity" the "state will wither away," and that the productivity of labor will become so great that labor somehow will abolish itself, thus guaranteeing an almost unlimited amount of leisure time to each member of the society.
Unless the Commies win, in which case there will be Gulags for everybody.
These statements, in addition to being predictions, contain of course Marx's ideal of the best form of society. As such they are not Utopian, but rather reproduce the political and social conditions of the same Athenian city-state which was the model of experience for Plato and Aristotle, and therefore the foundation on which our tradition rests.
No. Marx knew that Athens relied on slaves and colonies.
The Athenian polis functioned without a division between rulers and ruled,
Nonsense! There was a marked division between the rich- who undertook liturgical duties and who stood to profit most from colonial expeditions- and the poorer sort of infantry soldier citizen. As the expense of liturgical duties increased and the reward from conquest decreased, Athens became unviable.
and thus was not a state if we use this term, as Marx did, in accordance with the traditional definitions of forms of government, that is, one-man rule or monarchy, rule by the few or oligarchy, and rule by the majority or democracy.
Athens was sovereign and ruled by the Ekklesia. It was a state and, at certain points, had an Empire of its own.
Athenian citizens, moreover, were citizens only insofar as they possessed leisure time, had that freedom from labor which Marx predicts for the future.
No. They were citizens even if they never turned up at the Ekklesia. Some had leisure. Most didn't. The complaint was that it would only be the elderly who'd attend the Ekklesia- that too to get paid two or three obols.
Not only in Athens but throughout antiquity and up to the modern age, those who labored were not citizens
Slaves toiling in the mines were not citizens. Farmers, artisans, merchants, sea captains etc. were citizens. Simon the shoemaker was one such.
and those who were citizens were first of all those who did not labor or who possessed more than their labor power.
No. Those who were citizens were first of all those whose parents had been citizens regardless of their occupation or income.
This similarity becomes even more striking when we look into the actual content of Marx's ideal society. Leisure time is seen to exist under the condition of statelessness, or under conditions where, in Lenin's famous phrase which renders Marx's thought very precisely, the administration of society has become so simplified that every cook is qualified to take over its machinery.
A butcher would have been better able to run the vast Gulag that was the USSR.
Obviously, under such circumstances the whole business of politics, Engels' simplified "administration of things," could be of interest only to a cook, or at best to those "mediocre minds" whom Nietzsche thought best qualified for taking care of public affairs.
His own mind turned to shit and he became catatonic. Still, there's a pattern to this. Arendt and her ilk found it profitable to run away from countries run by barroom brawlers- like Nazi Germany- or bank robbers- like Stalin's Russia, to places run by lawyers and patricians who had undergone a 'cursus honorum'.
This, to be sure, is very different from actual conditions in antiquity, where, on the contrary, political duties were considered so difficult and time consuming that those engaged in them could not be permitted to undertake any tiring activity. (Thus, for instance, the shepherd could qualify for citizenship but the peasant could not; the painter, but not the sculptor, was still recognized as something more than a 'Banausos',βάναυσος- a pejorative word for menial labour. However, unlike Aristocratic rank which in medieval France could be withdrawn from those too poor to live save by the sweat of their brow, Athenian citizenship was not withdrawn from those who had to dig ditches to earn their bread.
the distinction being drawn in either case simply applying the criterion of effort and fatigue.)
Not really. There is a wide difference between a guy digging ditches on his own land so as to make it more productive and a hired hand who may have migrated from a place poorer yet.
It is against the time consuming political life of an average full-fledged citizen of the Greek polis that the philosophers, especially Aristotle, established their ideal of skholē (σχολή) of leisure time,
it is the origin of the word 'school'. What Arendt doesn't understand is that there is a 'principle of comparative advantage' at work here. We only go to school- thus forfeiting play-time or time spent earning money- if the reward from doing so is greater yet. Similarly, it is worthwhile for a Society to have some people sitting in Parliament if they can learn to coordinate with each other so as to better solve collective action problems. By foolishly thinking that only sweated labour creates value, Arendt is seizing hold of the wrong end of the stick.
which in antiquity never meant freedom from ordinary labor, a matter of course anyhow, but time free from political activity and the business of the state.
There can be a school for budding politicians. Sophists provided this service. I suppose one could say that rhetorical declamations enhanced the aesthetic aspect of 'political activity' and thus made it a more attractive way of spending ones leisure. Similarly, Professors might give entertaining lectures attended by Society Women.
The problem here is that if you don't use your leisure in a manner which improves your life chances, you may fall behind or become subjugated those raised in sterner circumstances. Condorcet had described a Utopia. Malthus's rejoinder was that if it really was so nice, migrants- perhaps invaders- would enter. There would be a Malthusian 'tragedy of the commons'. The Soviets, while pretending they had achieved the worker's paradise, were actually stricter than the Americans in keeping out immigrants though, to be fair, their more urgent task was to keep their own people from fleeing.
Marx's own attitude to the tradition of political thought was one of conscious rebellion.
No. He emigrated to places with a longer tradition of revolutionary thought- viz. Paris and then London which had 'Levellers' and other such 'philosophical radicals' in the mid Seventeenth century. However, Marx was aware that British 'Chartism' might not be revolutionary. The upper working class, which might become Imperialist and anti-Irish, might ally with the bourgeoisie and leave the lower working class in the lurch. Indeed, universal suffrage only came to the UK after the Great War. It was only then that Labour began to displace the Liberal party.
In a challenging and paradoxical mood he therefore framed certain key statements which, containing his political philosophy, underlie and transcend the strictly scientific part of his work (and as such curiously remained the same throughout his life, from the early writings to the last volume of Das Kapital).
Had the Frankfurt Diet of 1848 persuaded the Prussian King to take the German Throne, Engels might have been more important than Lasalle while Marx would have been a Professor in Berlin acclaimed as the Hegel of the new Reich.
Crucial among them are the following: "Labor created man" (in a formulation by Engels,
Evolution created all life. Man evolved in competition with other species on an uncertain fitness landscape. As Heraclitus said, War is the father of all things.
who, contrary to an opinion current among some Marx scholars, usually rendered Marx's thought adequately and succinctly)
thus exposing its absurdity.
"Violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one,"
Not in England. There was no violence at the time of the Great Reform Bill or the further expansion of the franchise in 1867. There was some violence in the 1880s, but it didn't greatly matter.
hence: violence is the midwife of history (which occurs in both the writings of Marx and of Engels in many variations) .
So, War, not Labour, is the father of all things. The Marxist Utopia would have lots of guns but no butter.
Finally, there is the famous last thesis on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; the point is, however, to change it,"
for the worse
which, in the light of Marx's thought, one could render more adequately as: The philosophers have interpreted the world long enough;
Anglo-America had taken an empirical turn since the time of Roger Bacon. 'Natural Philosophy'- i.e. Physics, Chemistry etc. were okay. Metaphysics was shit. Sadly, the Germans were too stupid to absorb the sound Common Sense of the Scottish enlightenment. It was inevitable that the illiberal worship of enlightened despots which constituted beamtenliberalismus would be succeeded by something stupider and more abject yet.
the time has come to change it. For this last statement is in fact only a variation of another, occurring in an early manuscript: "You cannot aufheben [i.e., elevate, conserve, and abolish in the Hegelian sense] philosophy without realizing it."
You can't achieve shit by sublating shit.
In the later work the same attitude to philosophy appears in the prediction that the working class will be the only legitimate heir of classical philosophy.
Being the heir of classical philosophy means queuing up for a rotten turnip while the nomenklatura live large and buy nice things in the dollar shop.
"Labor created man" means first that labor and not God created man;
No. The least marked meaning is that some creatures- elves or dwarves of whatever- worked hard creating human beings. Alternatively, some men enslaved other men- this is the Hegelian 'Master Slave dialectic'- and the slaves became more human because...urm... working hard is ennobling or some such shite.
Anyway, it was Darwin, not some fucking psilosopher, who kicked God in the goolies.
second, it means that man, insofar as he is human, creates himself, that his humanity is the result of his own activity;
only in the sense that a tree, insofar as it is a tree, or a rock, insofar as it is a rock, is so only a result of its own activity. Sadly, the law takes a different view. The fact that I'm bone idle doesn't mean you can treat me as a rock. I still have fundamental human rights.
it means, third, that what distinguishes man from animal, his differentia specified, is not reason, but labor,
It is neither. A drooling imbecile incapable of labour is still a human being- not an animal.
that he is not an animal rationale, but an animal laborans;
like donkeys. Marx was a donkey but not a useful one.
it means, fourth, that it is not reason, until then the highest attribute of man, but labor, the traditionally most despised human activity, which contains the humanity of man.
Why stop there? Why not say it is fisting yourself vigorously while kicking your baby to death? Traditionally, that was an activity even more despised than digging ditches. Had Arendt understood this, she could have become a third wave Feminist.
Thus Marx challenges the traditional God, the traditional estimate of labor, and the traditional glorification of reason.
Marx failed. God is still around. Menial labour is not well remunerated. Scientific reason is glorified.
That violence is the midwife of history
only if it leads to technological development or a rise in productivity as a result of demographic replacement or enslavement or the operation of commercial imperatives.
means that the hidden forces of development of human productivity, insofar as they depend upon free and conscious human action, come to light only through the violence of wars and revolutions.
Nonsense! War may catalyse innovation but only if the potential for it existed. Otherwise, it can plunge societies back into the Dark Ages.
Only in those violent periods does history show its true face and dispel the fog of mere ideological, hypocritical talk.
Fuck off! Once the superpowers had H-bombs, History had to show a very different face- one where proxy wars were confined to poor, backward, parts of the world- because otherwise there would be a nuclear winter.
Again the challenge to tradition is clear. Violence is traditionally the ultima ratio in relationships between nations and the most disgraceful of domestic actions, being always considered the outstanding characteristic of tyranny.
What tyranny was involved in America's Civil War- still its costliest military episode?
(The few attempts to save violence from disgrace, chiefly by Machiavelli and Hobbes, are of great relevance for the problem of power and quite illuminative of the early confusion of power with violence, but they exerted remarkably little influence on the tradition of political thought prior to our own time.)
They are wholly irrelevant for America- which is where Arendt had the sense to settle.
To Marx, on the contrary, violence or rather the possession of the means of violence is the constituent element of all forms of government;
because the fucker was German.
the state is the instrument of the ruling class by means of which it oppresses and exploits, and the whole sphere of political action is characterized by the use of violence.
Marx was constantly being beaten and sodomized by the Duke of Westminster. Queen Victoria was not amused.
The Marxian identification of action with violence implies another fundamental challenge to tradition which may be more difficult to perceive, but of which Marx, who knew Aristotle very well, must have been aware. The twofold Aristotelian definition of man as a a being attaining his highest possibility in the faculty of speech
dumb peeps may be much smarter than chatterboxes. Aristotle had shit for brains.
and the life in a polis,
Genghis Khan didn't live in a fucking polis. He ended up ruling half the known world. Seriously, city life isn't that great. The best life is that of a pirate.
was designed to distinguish the Greek from the barbarian
Alexander had a better idea. Once the Jews took up Greek- Second Maccabees is written in Koine- Christendom was all set to come into being. Jerusalem had annexed Athens and Alexander's homonoia was freed from ethnos to acquire universal prescriptivity. But Christ won no wars.
and the free man from the slave.
Christendom would come to find the distinction odious.
The distinction was that Greeks, living together in a polis, conducted their affairs by means of speech, through persuasion, and not by means of violence, through mute coercion
Unless that is what they decided to do. There was plenty of internecine conflict in the Greek polis which, in any case, turned out to be inferior to that of Rome.
. Hence, when free men obeyed their government, or the laws of the polis, their obedience was called Πειθαρχία ,
Peitharkhia- Obedience, which is the wife of Salvation and the mother of Success. In other words, obedience or compliance was a matter of pious duty- i.e. eusebia which is the Greek word for 'dharma' or piety.
a word which indicates clearly that obedience was obtained by persuasion and not by force.
It might arise from hope for Salvation- i.e. faith in God. It did not depend on persuasion. The word also means discipline or regimentation and arises from fear of God or Authority. Arendt is giving us a cod etymology. The fact is no Athenian wife- however highborn- was a citizen. She was obedient as a matter of course, not as the subject of persuasion. Peitharkia was an obedient wife.
Barbarians were ruled by violence and slaves forced to labor,
Athens ruled Greek colonies with violence and held Greek slaves who were forced to labour. How fucking stupid and ignorant was Arendt?
and since violent action and toil are alike in that they do not need speech to be effective, barbarians and slaves... did not live with each other primarily by means of speech.
Yes they did. Greeks knew it though, no doubt, they might pretend otherwise from time to time.
Labor was to the Greeks essentially a nonpolitical, private affair,
Nonsense! Under exigent circumstances, there was corvee labour though Solon's seisachtheia reforms had suppressed its more obnoxious aspects in the Sixth Century.
but violence was related to and established a contact, albeit negative, with other men.
So did trade and diplomacy and bumming each other.
Marx's glorification of violence therefore contains the more specific denial of speech, the diametrically opposite and traditionally most human form of intercourse.
He was a Jewish lawyer not a fucking Junker.
Marx's theory of ideological superstructures ultimately rests on
an economic substructure defined by the means and mode of production. Arendt was too stupid to understand this.
this anti-traditional hostility to speech and the concomitant glorification of violence.
Fuck off! You don't need to talk or fight when you buy or sell stuff. Economics is not about beating or blabbering.
For traditional philosophy it would have been a contradiction in terms to "realize philosophy" or to change the world in accordance with philosophy
No it wouldn't. Traditional philosophy was about suggesting that everybody should do some traditionally philosophic type of stupid shit- e.g. holding goods in common and taking babies from their Mummies so as to bring them up in Public Creches.
and Marx's statement implies that change is preceded by interpretation, so that the philosophers' interpretation of the world has indicated how it should be changed.
Coz if you interpret the world as being fucking marvellous, you won't want to change it.
Philosophy might have prescribed certain rules of action, though no great philosopher ever took this to be his most important concern.
Aristotle had a particularly stupid theory of economics which the Epicureans laughed heartily at.
Essentially, philosophy from Plato to Hegel was "not of this world,"
Hegel praised the Prussian State which was very much of his world. Indeed, it paid his salary.
whether it was Plato describing the philosopher as the man whose body only inhabits the city of his fellow men, or Hegel admitting that, from the point of view of common sense, philosophy is a world stood on its head, a verkehrte Welt.
Natural philosophy- maybe. Did you know the Sun doesn't go around the Earth which isn't really flat. Sadly, the shite Kant & Hegel did was to justify the views of the common herd by means of arcane metaphysical nonsense.
The challenge to tradition, this time not merely implied but directly expressed in Marx's statement, lies in the prediction that the world of common human affairs,
which is run by engineers and O.R mavens and Super Computers and Actuarial Scientists and FinTech rocket scientists
where we orient ourselves and think in common-sense terms, will one day become identical with the realm of ideas where the philosopher moves, or that philosophy, which has always been only "for the few," will one day be the common-sense reality for everybody.
Not the 'few' who were teaching worthless shite. They were welcome to remain stupid and ignorant. However, even a guy running the local Subway franchise would need to know how to use the Company's Management Information System for purposes of Payroll, Inventory Management, etc.
These three statements are framed in traditional terms which they, however, explode; they are formulated as paradoxes and meant to shock us.
What is shocking is the stupidity of these useless pedants.
They are in fact even more paradoxical and led Marx into greater perplexities than he himself had anticipated.
He shat the bed because he hadn't kept up with the econ which, sadly, had turned mathematical from the time of Gossen etc.
Each contains one fundamental contradiction which remained insoluble in his own terms. If labor is the most human and most productive of man's activities, what will happen when, after the revolution, "labor is abolished" in "the realm of freedom," when man has succeeded in emancipating himself from it?
Kantorovich had an answer. Shadow prices would be used to allocate resources. This isn't really a head scratcher. If people know a thing is in short-supply- e.g. not enough biryani is being cooked though Eid is round the corner- they set their Robo-Chef on the appropriate setting and add basmati rice and chicken or whatever.
What productive and what essentially human activity will be left? If violence is the midwife of history and violent action therefore the most dignified of all forms of human action, what will happen when, after the conclusion of class struggle and the disappearance of the state, no violence will even be possible?
Marx really wasn't a blood thirsty Hun. He just thought that if the Duke of Westminster stopped beating and buggering him, then he'd have the chance to go fishing in the morning while whiling away the evening hours performing brain surgery on those who felt their brains looked too Jewy.
How will men be able to act at all in a meaningful, authentic way?
Under Socialism, man will authentically be able to suck himself off. Nothing could be more meaningful.
Finally, when philosophy has been both realized and abolished in the future society, what kind of thought will be left?
The thought that sucking yourself off isn't really the summum bonum. It would be nice if you had big boobies you could fondle while fellating yourself.
Marx's inconsistencies are well known and noted by almost all Marx scholars. They usually are summarized as discrepancies "between the scientific point of view of the historian and the moral point of view of the prophet" (Edmund Wilson),
Marx wasn't a historian and didn't have a scientific point of view. His moral point of view was that the Duke of Westminster should stop beating and buggering him so incessantly.
between the historian seeing in the accumulation of capital "a material means for the increase of productive forces" (Marx)
The accumulation of capital does nothing by itself. It is when factors of production are combined that 'productive forces' increase.
and the moralist who denounced those who performed "the historical task" (Marx) as exploiters and dehumanizers of man.
Because Marx thought that the fact that the Duke of Westminster was so much richer than him must have led the latter to, in some occult manner, beat and bugger him incessantly.
This and similar inconsistencies are minor when compared with the fundamental contradiction between the glorification of labor and action (as against contemplation and thought) and of a stateless, that is, actionless and (almost) laborless society.
It is the same contradiction between having to live a miserable life on Earth doing stupid shit so that some shitty God can grant you an eternity of sycophancy in the most boring of Heavens. T
For this can be neither blamed on the natural difference between a revolutionary young Marx and the more scientific insights of the older historian and economist,
older not wiser.
nor resolved through the assumption of a dialectical movement which needs the negative or evil to produce the positive or the good.
e.g Marx being buggered incessantly by the invisible cock of the Duke of Westminster. This evil was productive of the great good of the Gulag.
Anglo-America has its own traditions and system of Common Law and notion of 'limited monarchy'. No doubt, from time to time, the thing may have been given a Latin or Greek gloss. But that Thing, or Folkmoot, was ancestral to Parliament. Arendt, being a stupid German immigrant, didn't get this.
The strength of this tradition, its hold on Western man's thought, has never depended on his consciousness of it.
If the tradition in question is 'political philosophy', the reverse is the case. The thing was highly self-conscious.
Indeed, only twice in our history
the history of imbecility
do we encounter periods in which men are conscious and over-conscious of the fact of tradition, identifying age as such with authority.
No. Most of the time, authority is traditional in nature. There are moments when political constitutions change but even then some tradition may be appealed to. Thus when Vietnam or Cambodia turned Communist, they soon equipped themselves with Politburos and Five Year Plans.
This happened, first, when the Romans adopted classical Greek thought and culture
some did. But it would be truer to say that Rome went in the direction of Egypt with a Divine Emperor. But, by then the Jews, too, were Hellenized and it was this Hellenized Judaism which prevailed. Athens became a backwater and though Byzantium revived the power of the Greek logothete, it proved unable to withstand the Turk.
as their own spiritual tradition and thereby decided historically that tradition was to have a permanent formative influence on European civilization.
Every race and region had its own traditions. The Etruscans had theirs and some of those traditions were incorporated into those of Imperial Rome, but it was Jewish traditions which placed the bigger stamp upon Europe. Sadly, this wasn't always good news for actual Jews.
Before the Romans such a thing as tradition was unknown;
Coz Egypt had no traditions- right? How come, Herodotus says the opposite?
with them it became and after them it remained the guiding thread through the past and the chain to which each new generation knowingly or unknowingly was bound in its understanding of the world and its own experience.
What prevailed against the Dark Ages was not Rome or Athens but Jerusalem as represented by the traditions of the Church. That's why a new epoch for Christendom opens with the Crusades.
Not until the Romantic period do we again encounter an exalted consciousness and glorification of tradition.
Fuck off! The Romantic period wasn't about tradition. It was abut fantasies regarding traditions. The architectural fashion for the Gothic found favour with Merchant Bankers not marauding freebooters.
(The discovery of antiquity in the Renaissance was a
product of the flight of Greek scholars from an embattled Byzantium. But the thing was driven by rising mercantile wealth.
first attempt to break the fetters of tradition,
every fetter of tradition had already been broken. Even the Brits had stopped painting themselves blue with woad.
and by going to the sources themselves to establish a past over which tradition would have no hold.)
Because it was imaginary. You can't inherit an imaginary estate. Tradition means 'what is handed down'.
Today tradition is sometimes considered an essentially romantic concept,
Nope. The US Senate observes various traditions. They are as boring as fuck. There is nothing romantic, or even erotic, about them.
but Romanticism did no more than place the discussion of tradition on the agenda of the nineteenth century;
Romanticism was a fad. There was a fashion for Gothic architecture and Pre-Raphelite redheads who looked like they might need an enema.
its glorification of the past
an imaginary past
only served to mark the moment when the modern age was about to change our world and general circumstances to such an extent that a matter-of-course reliance on tradition was no longer possible.
No. All that had already happened pretty much everywhere because oceanic commerce took off by the end of the fifteenth century.
The end of a tradition does not necessarily mean that traditional concepts have lost their power over the minds of men.
Yes it does. Otherwise the tradition hasn't ended.
On the contrary, it sometimes seems that this power of well-worn notions and categories becomes more tyrannical as the tradition loses its living force
because it hasn't lost its living force you stupid cretin!
and as the memory of its beginning recedes;
Nobody remembers how traditions got started or, if they do, they keep quiet about it.
it may even reveal its full coercive force only after its end has come and men no longer even rebel against it.
Just as the cat only reveals itself to be a cat long after it turned into a dog and everyone kept requesting it to say 'woof woof' rather than 'miaow'
This at least seems to be the lesson of the twentieth-century aftermath of formalistic and compulsory thinking, which came after Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche
stupid shitheads. Darwin mattered as did the non-Euclidean math of Gauss and Lobachevsky culminating in Einstein's magnificent General Theory.
had challenged the basic assumptions of traditional religion,
God didn't make man in his image. On the other hand, maybe his fart was the Big Bang.
traditional political thought,
politicians have political thoughts. Stupid pedants don't.
and traditional metaphysics
there is nothing 'beyond' physics save shite stupid pedants prose on about.
by consciously inverting the traditional hierarchy of concepts.
Fuck would stupid pedants know about the hierarchy of concepts?
However, neither the twentieth-century aftermath nor the nineteenth-century rebellion against tradition actually caused the break in our history.
Running the fuck away from Europe caused a break in Arendt's history. Sadly, she could not break with the stupid shite she had imbibed there.
This sprang from a chaos of mass-perplexities on the political scene and of mass-opinions in the spiritual sphere which the totalitarian movements, through terror and ideology, crystallized into a new form of government and domination.
From which smart peeps ran the fuck away.
Totalitarian domination as an established fact, which in its un~ precedentedness cannot be comprehended through the usual categories of political thought,
Fuck off! It could be so easily comprehended that almost everybody wanted to run the fuck away from such places.
and whose "crimes" cannot be judged by traditional moral standards or punished within the legal framework of our civilization,
Nonsense! The Allies had no difficulty executing war criminals. Sadly, you have to win a war to do so.
has broken the continuity of Occidental history.
Very true. That's why Bavaria is now part of Bangladesh.
The break in our tradition is now an accomplished fact.
Arendt was no longer in Europe. That was true enough. But plenty of Germans had been heading to America for centuries.
It is neither the result of anyone's deliberate choice nor subject to further decision.
Emigration tends to be a deliberate choice.
The attempts of great thinkers after Hegel to break away from patterns of thought which had ruled the West for more than two thousand years
there was no such attempt. Hegel was a bit mystical- like Meister Eckhart- but was a sound enough Christian, albeit of a stupid Teutonic type.
may have foreshadowed this event and certainly can help to illuminate it, but they did not cause it.
Hegel was a useless pedant. He caused nothing but confusion.
The event itself marks the division between the modern age rising with the natural sciences in the seventeenth century,
based on the natural sciences of the sixteenth century which were based on the natural sciences of the fourteenth century etc.
reaching its political climax in the revolutions of the eighteenth,
England had two revolution in the Seventeenth century. The second was more or less bloodless.
and unfolding its general implications after the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth
it began in the eighteenth century
and the world of the twentieth century, which came into existence through the chain of catastrophes touched off by the First World War.
They were inevitable. Arguably, if the War had been brief, there would have been more rapid, more robust, reform.
To hold the thinkers of the modern age, especially the nineteenth-century rebels against tradition,
they were in the tradition of the eighteenth century Enlightenment which was in the tradition of an earlier 'Humanistic' Reformation.
responsible for the structure and conditions of the twentieth century is even more dangerous than it is unjust.
It is foolish but not dangerous.
The implications apparent in the actual event of totalitarian domination go far beyond the most radical or most adventurous ideas of any of these thinkers.
Nope. Totalitarian domination wasn't particularly important. The British War economy, by about 1917, already displayed many of the features Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany would struggle to implement. However, even in the Second World War, the Brits were better at mobilizing resources for total war. The plain fact is, economists who worked for the American or British government during the Nineteen Forties, knew that Democracies could do Planning better than the semi-Asiatic Soviets. The trouble was that even with the best bureaucrats and the most honest businessmen, the thing was bound to be allocatively inefficient for a Hayekian reason.
Their greatness lay in the fact that they perceived their world as one invaded by new problems and perplexities which our tradition of thought was unable to cope with.
This simply wasn't the case. There was no 'greatness' here. There was only shittiness. I recall, when ISIS was rising, there were one or two nutters who claimed that its victory was inevitable because its DNA was optimized for going viral or some such pseudo-scientific shite. But ISIS wasn't something new. It was something old which was bound to fail once fracking fucked up its finances.
In this sense their own departure from tradition, no matter how emphatically they proclaimed it (like children whistling louder and louder because they are lost in the dark),
Fuck whistling. I'd be screaming loudly for my Mummy.
was no deliberate act of their own choosing either.
True. They were probably getting paid a little money to talk or write stupid shite.
What frightened them about the dark was its silence,
Fuck that. What would frighten me, in the dark, would be growling or snarling noises.
not the break in tradition.
Traditionally, night was full of light.
This break, when it actually occurred, dispelled the darkness, so that we can hardly listen any longer to the overloud, "pathetic" style of their writing.
More particularly, if there's Peyton Place on TV.
But the thunder of the eventual explosion has also drowned the preceding ominous silence that still answers us whenever we dare to ask, not "What are we fighting against" but "What are we fighting for?"
We are fighting for ourselves. We are fighting against guys who want to kill us. If such is not the case, we aren't really fighting at all. Maybe we are running away to America. Maybe we are writing bollocks to earn a couple of dollars. But, why bother. Watch Peyton Place. Have a fucking beer. Let Communism collapse by itself.
Why was Arendt such a fucking imbecile? My theory is that, having been born in Konigsberg, she had a sort of neo-Kantian belief that there must be something 'extrinsic' to 'orientability'. But, if so, there must also be some sliver Archimedian point for the theory of value. But 'externalist' value theories are a one way ticket to babbling imbecility.
Consider the following-
Nietzsche's devaluation of values,
transvaluation
like Marx's labor theory of value,
which arose out of Smith & Ricardo's notion of a labour numeraire in general equilibrium.
arises from the incompatibility between the traditional "ideas," which, as transcendent units, had been used to recognize and measure human thoughts and actions,
there were never any such things. What Arendt means is 'My Professor said some smart Greek dude, whose books are studied at Uni, said non-Greeks can't talk to each other. This must be true, coz I wrote it down in my notebook. This is a 'transcendental unit'. The fact that Niggers can talk must mean some terrible break with tradition occurred probably because of the Industrial Revolution or the Bolshevik Revolution or some such shite. Also, there was a time when doing labour was frowned on. Then Marx said it was okay to dig a ditch. Marx was a very nice man. I want to marry him when I grow up though I'll make do with fucking Heidegger till I graduate.'
and modern society, which had dissolved all such standards into relationships between its members, establishing them as functional "values."
Previously, if you wanted a ditch dug you humiliated and abused a bloke till he broke down and admitted he was no better than a fucking labourer and thus would have to dig your ditch for you. It wasn't the case that people paid muscular dudes to dig ditches or build walls or manufacture stuff.
Values are social commodities
Nope. That's why I can't sell you my values or my morals or my virtues or my cuteness or my cuddliness.
that have no significance of their own but, like other commodities, exist only in the ever-changing relativity of social linkages and commerce.
My values are such that I think eating food is nicer than eating shit. Apparently, I can sell this value of mine. Goody! I've got lots of other such values. I'll soon be rich!
Through this relativization both the things which man produces for his use
e.g. a chicken you roast for your dinner
and the standards according to which he lives
e.g. eating nice food instead of dog turds
undergo a decisive change:
You can sell your roast chicken. You can't sell your values or 'standards'.
they become entities of exchange, and the bearer of their "value" is society and not man,
Arendt bore her 'values' away from European Society so as to become a member of American Society.
who produces and uses and judges. The "good" loses its character as an idea, the standard by which the good and the bad can be measured and recognized; it has become a value
a value is an idea. So is being useless and wholly without value.
which can be exchanged with other values, such as those of expediency or of power.
Nonsense! You can have all of them at the same time. They are 'non-rival'.
The holder of values can refuse this exchange
there is no exchange
and become an "idealist," who prices the value of "good" higher than the value of expediency;
There is no 'price' on either. Moreover even a beggar can have as much of both as he wants.
but this does not make the "value" of good any less relative.
Nope. A value can be absolute or have reference to it.
The term "value" owes its origin to
discussions of the 'just price' and whether price controls by the magistrates should be implemented in times of dearth.
the sociological trend which even before Marx was quite manifest in the relatively new science of classical economy.
There was an empirical 'Political Arithmetic'. There was no 'science' of economics classical or mercantilist or otherwise.
Marx was still aware of the fact, which the social sciences have since forgotten, that nobody "seen in his isolation produces values,"
Nonsense! Everybody produces value when they wipe their own bum.
but that products "become values only in their social relationship."
Nope. I like having a clean bum and thus wipe my ass even if I have no fucking relationships to speak of.
His distinction between "use value" and" exchange value" reflects the distinction between things as men use and produce them and their value in society, and his insistence on the greater authenticity of use values, his frequent description of the rise of exchange value as a kind of original sin at the beginning of
the giving of gifts or bartering necessities
market production reflect his own helpless and, as it were, blind recognition of the inevitability of an impending "devaluation of all values."
Also how come we have to fuck somebody of the opposite sex to have a baby? Why can't we just fuck ourselves? I feel so devalued knowing I can't get my hand preggers.
The birth of the social sciences can be located at the moment when
sufficient statistical evidence became available for the estimation of elasticities or other coefficients in equations.
all things, "ideas" as well as material objects, were equated with values,
This has never happened. Prices are established by 'market makers' who announce they will buy or sell at a given 'spread'. But most things don't have markets. Different people are welcome to ascribe different values to them. But they can do the same to imaginary or incompossible things.
so that everything derived its existence from and was related to society, the bonum and malum no less than tangible objects.
Society is little concerned with most transactions which, in any case occur over narrow networks.
In the dispute as to whether capital or labor is the source of values,
both sides are stupid. Without physical capital, labour would have low productivity. The reverse is also true. One should emphasize the intelligence and ability of the manager or entrepreneur combining the factors of production. But it is the arbitrageur- the market-maker- who permits something approaching allocative and dynamic efficiency.
it is generally overlooked that at no time prior to the incipient Industrial Revolution
or after it
was it held that values, and not things, are the result of man's productive capacity, or was everything that exists related to society and not to man" seen in his isolation."
Nobody- apart from one or two nutters with PhDs in useless shite- like Karl Marx- ever thought it worthwhile to say 'guys who produce stuff are also guys who live in a Society of some sort'.
The notion of "socialized men,"
as opposed to dudes who are floating around by themselves in outer space
whose emergence Marx projected into the future classless society, is in fact the underlying assumption of classical as well as Marxian economy.
Also they assumed that people live on the Earth and aren't floating around the Milky Way.
It is therefore only natural that the perplexing question which has plagued all later "value-philosophies,"
externalist theories of value
where to find the one supreme value
utility or ophelimity
by which to measure all others, should first appear in the economic sciences which, in Marx's words, try to "square the circle to find a commodity of unchanging value which would serve as a constant standard for others."
i.e. a numeraire. This is a technical matter for econometricians. Sadly there is no 'canonical' or non-arbitrary answer at least till 'the end of mathematical time'.
Marx believed he had found this standard in labor-time, and insisted that use values "which can be acquired without labor have no exchange value"
He hadn't noticed that you can buy and sell a forest or even a mountain. Scarcity is all that is required for exchange value to exist.
(though they retain their "natural usefulness"), so that the earth itself is of "no value";
And yet Princes wage wars to gain control of portions of it.
it does not represent "objectified labor."
Nothing does. My blog isn't 'objectified labour'. It is merely a hobby. True, if everybody suddenly became very fucking stupid, they might, subjectively, think I was a freakin' genius and suddenly my books would be selling for big bucks on Ebay.
With this conclusion we come to the threshold of a radical nihilism,
not as radical as that of the Buddha
to that denial of everything given of which the nineteenth-century rebellions against tradition as yet knew little and which arises only in twentieth-century society.
Nonsense! There is nothing new under the Sun.
Nietzsche seems to have been unaware of the origin as well as of the modernity of the term "value" when he accepted it as a key notion in his assault on tradition.
He was merely saying that things previously thought good- e.g. being meek and obedient- were bad. What mattered was evolving into something higher than man.
But when he began to devaluate the current values of society, the implications of the whole enterprise quickly became manifest Ideas in the sense of absolute units had become identified with social values to such an extent that they simply ceased to exist once their value-character, their social status, was challenged.
Nonsense! It was easy enough to say 'don't give money to the poor. Let them starve. That way the quality of the race will improve.' The Eugenicists- some of whom were real smart, e.g. Karl Pearson- were way ahead of nutty Nietzsche and his silly Superman.
Nobody knew his way better than Nietzsche through the meandering paths of the modern spiritual labyrinth,
No. He was ignorant. His philology was for shit.
where recollections and ideas of the past are hoarded up as though they had always been values which society depreciated whenever it needed better and newer commodities. Also, he was well aware of the profound nonsense of the new "value-free" science
Nonsense! The fucker didn't know his Mach from a hole in the ground.
which was soon to degenerate into scientism and general scientific superstition
them crazy scientists claim that men can fly through the air in 'aeroplanes'! Some even say man can walk on the Moon! How fucked is that?
and which never, despite all protests to the contrary, had anything in common with the Roman historians' attitude of sine ira et studio.
Very true. Einstein used to get very angry with Newton's equations of motion. He accused them off being Lesbian and having fisted Queen Victoria. Newton's equations cried and cried. Minkowski tried to remonstrate with Einstein to no avail. Finally, Sir Arthur Eddington got the fellow to calm down and stop saying mean things about the Queen Emperor.
Arendt studied stupid shit at Uni. Grete Hermann did not. Thus Grete could contribute to Mathematical Physics, Neo-Kantian philosophy, and, after the war, the political program of the German Social Democratic party. Arendt did manage to earn a bit of money in America but it was Ayn Rand who pulled down the big bucks and who had a political impact. Why? Reading or fucking Heidegger doesn't make you a special girl. It makes you stupider than nature intended.
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