blog 2

There are four terms I have to define before taking up the topics of historical materialism and primal accumulation. If I make the meaning of these terms clear to you, everything else will follow much more easily.  The terms are subject, object, natural necessity, and historical necessity:

Subject

This is both a psychological and a philosophical term. If you can imagine yourself writing this and trying to figure out how best to define this term, you are the “subject”  of this activity. Unlike in rhetoric, where what one is writing about or interested in is the “subject,” “subject” in psychological and philosophical discourse is simply a thinking mind. This is simple enough, but at this point we are not talking yet about a human subject, about human consciousness. The conscious mind of the human subject is the product of the potential ability of human beings (which I’ll call mind in itself) to create language, which is the medium through which the subject/mind does its thinking and through which human animals become conscious beings. The mind in-itself is unknowable. When we use language to think about what it is, we merely create an “object” to think about: the mind-in-itself. However, when we feel alive (without thinking that it is we who are alive) we have glimmerings of this deep being in-itself: the ground of our natural ability to create and understand language. 

Descartes proclaimed:  I think, therefore I am.  Marx reversed this to “I am, therefore I think”. This notion that being (as potentially thinking human matter) precedes thinking itself  is the foundation of dialectical materialism, the dialectical counterposing of the dynamic unity of mind and matter to explain the conscious activity of human beings in sustaining and reproducing our lives.

Objects

The thinking subject produces ideas. All ideas are objects: notions in mind of the subject: notions about anything that can be thought--about the subject’s thinking mind, notions about the mind-in-itself, our body, our “soul”, about morality. Even our illusions and fantasies are objects created by the subject. Things become complex now. The objects we create are not things in themselves, but language’s symbolic representations of our experiences, past and present. One’s own ego--consciousness of ourselves as separate beings--is merely a complex of representations in our minds of our experience of living as a being separate among other beings. Since objects are not things in themselves, but mental representations of them, it is clear that the human subject, in creating objects in order to think, creates a kind of gap between the material world and ourselves (as objectified in the mind). This gap represents our freedom to act, to question even our own instinctual responses to things. This notion and its social ramifications are explored in Satre’s Being and Nothingness. 

Object producing consciousness in the thinking subject,however, is double-edged. it is positive in the sense that it allows us to look at nature (including other humans) as  objects existing “outside” ourselves. This frees us to act in non-instinctual, consciously purposeful ways that tend to expand the boundaries of our animal nature and shape our environment to satisfy our needs according to circumstances as they change.  Animals evolve or become extinct. Human animals create history. 

The negative aspect of human consciousness concerns its relationship with the real, substantial world outside our (objectifying) mind and independent of it. Subjectively motivated physical activity upon an objectified but real world can never be certain in its performance or its outcome. Unintended negative consequences (both physical and social ones) have been inevitable, from our primitive beginnings as barely conscious, social animals to the present. In this dialectic, between mind and matter, practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice corrects unintended consequences resulting from the physical limitations of the material world relative to human knowledge of those limits. The physical world (including other human beings) isn’t just the object of the subject. It exists outside of us, and determines what we can and cannot do (or should not do).  Subjectivity relative to the Other--other people as objects whose own subjectivity has to be taken into account, sometimes positively (trust) and sometimes negatively (exploitatively) is the basis of social evolution, but also reforms, wars, and revolutions. 

Marx extrapolated the subject/object relationship within individuals to larger social ones. For example, in the relation between the master and the slave, it is important for the master to dominate, not only the body, but the mind of the slave in order to make the slave more willing to obey. The master is the “subject” (the dominating will) in this relationship, and tries to implant his own values within the conscious mind of the slave, that is to make the slave the “object” of the master in the slave’s own mind and view his own degradation as good. If the slave accepts his condition and does not struggle against it, he becomes his slave-owner’s caricature of himself. The same sort psychological/ideological domination or “colonization” of the minds of “subjected” (objectified) groups of people occur under patriarchy (where women are forced to accept the male’s view of what women should be in a given patriarchal society), and under capitalism, where workers are the object of the owners of the means of production--and not only during working hours. Many moslem women willingly wear burkas and many western women willingly put on heels and power suits and grow “balls” to get ahead in the “peace” and wars of Western patriarchal imperialism. Hegemonic capitalist consumer culture has succeeded in emasculating working people by subverting their class consciousness with imperial racism and the notion that if one has a job one is “middle class” and a member of the ownership society. I’ll return to the notion of the domination of the minds of individuals within subjected populations by dominant groups and classes--Antonio Gramci’s the notion of “hegemony.” 

Well, I’ve worked hard to be clear and not get ahead of myself. The next posting will take up the epistemological tool of marxism, historical materialism, which will include a definition of two important ideas: natural necessity and historical necessity. Then I can lucubrate more freely, knowing that my virtual reader knows what I really mean. Then he or she can inform me.