“The labour of the private individual manifests itself as an element of the total labour of society only through the relations which the act of exchange establishes between the products, and, through their mediation, between the producers. To the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private labours appear as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material relations between persons and social relations between things.”
Capital, p.165
“Appear as what they are”, thus this constitutes a society that grounds relations upon pure appearance, which this abject element of a civil society based upon Capital has been thoroughly explained by Guy Debord in his
Perversion
Elements of Perversion in The Family
What the State constitutes and its immanently Perverse Elements
We must address that the perverse conception by the state is different than the perverse elements of the subject, of the object, and their tension in relation to experience, vis a vis a unified relation of difference and contradiction.
Perversion resides in our position as being non-identical beings. But the true perversion lies in the State, which unequivocally rejects non-identity. Per its own virtues, non-identity has a duty to be separated from man, making alienation a form of ideal virtue in the pursuit of pure hegemony. The realized conception of pure hegemony will thus conceive of what constitutes the Ideal Being, which will serve as The State’s purest form of symbolic divinity. If non-identity is thus found in a subject, that particular subject will find itself in the position of absolute perversion, independent of their own volition. As per the State’s virtues, the failure for the individual to achieve complete self-alienation constitutes a complete failure of the individual’s predetermined duty, which determines wherever The State shall bestow upon the individual a categorical purpose/utility to function in a civil society or not.
The regulative principles that makes up the state thus does not seek to find the concrete and total solution to perversion, nor the immanent nature of perversion. It merely finds the means to organize perversion in a position in which its divine volition find to be the most rational, vis a vis its own rigid system of judgements. Thus, Perversion contains no mediating elements from human to human, from subject to object, as it has been put into the position of an isolated, divine icon by The State. And this precise divinity is thus assigned to the encompassing subjects to subjugate themselves to, in the form of a pure categorization, where the non-identical finds itself in either a qualifying or a disqualifying position, a position that is subject to a universal form of sadism, the truest form of perversion.
Thus the state gives the non-identical two solutions to the dilemma it has subject them to “freely” decide for themselves, either it must self-flagellate and lower itself into a complete subordination of The Sadist (the State) qua being the position of The Masochist (the Alienated Subject) in this civil, and structural sadomasochist play (of which serves as the appearance of reciprocal relationship, but in fact only gives birth to a form of perverse homogeneity), or reject it in exchange for their position as a non-identical, thus putting them in the social position of The Pervert.
These are all particular elements of what constitutes the scripture of Perversion given forth by the State.
Resentful elements of subordination and domination
The Way out of Civic Subjugation
“The institutionalization of the social division of labor in the form of class divisions had given rise to an earlier, religious form of contemplation: the mythical order with which every power has always camouflaged itself. Religion justified the cosmic and ontological order that corresponded to the interests of the masters, expounding and embellishing everything their societies could not deliver. ”
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
“…in all metaphysics the object remains untouched and unaltered so that thought remains contemplative and fails to become practical; while for the dialectical method the central problem is to change reality.”
— György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness
Kant’s transcendental reason, and the pure practical reason that stems out of it, were founded upon an alienating presupposition, where subject and object have been subordinated to a form of dualism, which is transcendental. Thus he couldn’t conceive of a practice of reason beyond a “tranquil” spectatorship.
Pure practical reason presupposes a dualism between reason and its sensuous constituent, thus Kant has inadvertently constructed a pure system that has rinsed its sensual impurities. Pure practical reason constitutes a system of regulative principles, drawn exclusively from an isolated volition, independent from sensuous experience, and independent from the subject’s non-identical element. In Kant’s profound attempts at separating reason from scripture, he inadvertently reconstructs a systematic will, that forcibly separates all subjects away from their non-identity, under the ruse of free will—pushing them towards the pretense of the summum bonum. But the illusion of reconciliation only pertains to one of the many elements of contemplative bourgeois thought, in which man is doomed to subordinate reality to a mythological realm of what constitutes practical good. When action merely draws upon pure volition, a change of what is external and sensuous would be deemed impossible. Thus thought has been rendered exclusively contemplative, and sensuous desires have been separated from the subject as per the postulate of a divine being. This precise irony of Kant’s reconciliation between this dualism unfortunately only reconciles his moral doctrines with the precise theology that he so rigorously critiqued.
What constitutes Moral Action by the State becomes one that is passive, one where the subject is subordinated into contemplative spectatorship, under the ruse of its free individual will of the abstract moral agent, whilst the structural cogs of reality continues its incessant motion of ripping the subject away from its nature.
The only practical means the Moral Agent retains, exists as a codified set of universal law, which retains its function as an active instrument of separation, of the individual from their sensuous desires, of the proletariat from the self-consciousness of their social position. Therefore, it shall not matter what external conditions may have conceived you of your social position, as the State has given you a precise ideological instrument to avoid questioning that abject position. It does not concern you to acknowledge your position of thralldom, because it a civic duty assigned to you by the higher forces of administration as an instrument of reason to cop-yourself out in pursuit of the Ideal being, wherever it comes in the form of the Highest Good—where desire has been subordinated to pure reason, in the position of a Divine Being, or comes in the form of an ideal atom of utility which constitutes the upholding of the State.