What is so powerful and profoundly moving about finding out and questioning your social position, is that it can show you a door to guide your way out of that cycle of pure lonesome contemplation. Is my life, and my simple need to freely choose what I ought to do predetermined by the mythical forces beyond my pure volition? Does my volition really matter when it comes to my social position under the forces that act beyond me, and determines my life for me? Once you have questioned all those little aspects, you will make everything easier for yourself and stop making everything that happens to you about you in isolation.
If you happen to find yourself in the utmost depths of despair at your abject powerlessness, where that misery you inhibit only contains yourself and no cause, I will always assure you that you don’t have to struggle alone! We don’t have some sort of predetermined duty that necessitates us treating ourselves to a sadistic form of self-isolation. Something more practical like: trying to find help from a potential friend, could be a good start—finding someone similar to you to share your pain with, can change your life more than clinging on to the cop-out of regulating your self in isolation to deal with your problems! If you can’t find anyone, I hope—through the instrument of my words can help you feel a bit more hopeful via this little essay, at least. Making someone’s day better certainly makes me happy, at least through my wholeheartedness in hoping for the betterment of everyone else living on this hellish place they called civilization. Not just that, but If I can make folks feel a bit less powerless under our conditions of thralldom, and feel like the trajectory of their lives can be changed, then I’d reckon I have achieved my entire life’s purpose.
The responsibility of what happens to our lives cannot be changed or achieved alone. This is already being established by how the so-called civic responsibility of our own actions has been assigned to us not by a mythical form of nature, but the concrete moral laws and self-regulating legislations imposed onto members of civil society by statehood. The actions we take then, and the consequent events that follow as a result, are a component of the otherness that make up our own identity, our own little particular element of selfhood. But so many folks under subordination are too afraid to admit that, because the mind and the external have been separated into a dualism, so we can only have the comfort of perverted solipsism. But when people bring up universal maxims of life such as: “take responsibility for one’s own actions,” they do not account for the reality that the responsibility taken for their own actions is now separated from them by the external forces that be. Their responsibility has been stolen and estranged from them, and is then en-forcibly used against them. (In the context of the state, this can take something akin to the carceral form, for example.) So if the state enacts cruelty towards the subject, it will diffuse that cruelty in the form of this precise ideological illusion: “taking responsibility for one’s actions.” (The state is taking that responsibility for them, not them.)
The only form of action we need to find a way out, to self-emancipate ourselves from our predetermined conditions is the de-isolation of ourselves towards the people who share our abject humiliation. It would be nice if we can all help each other in need within the struggle. If perverts aren’t allowed to ask for the state-phallus to provide for our needs beyond a formal admission of subjugation, what precisely is stopping you from asking an other pervert for the mutual struggle against that precise phallic object?
The revolution comes in many practices, and overthrowing society as a whole can really start anywhere. Once you escape out of pure contemplative spectatorship of your misery, you begin to truly feel like there is a way out of that powerlessness that isn’t founded upon pure chance. It can come from the smallest of gestures. You can start with something like.. mutual aid, or even smaller, start with practicing the smallest facets of empathy, for the other, for someone. Look at that disabled person right in the eye as you have an earnest conversation with them. Start a conversation with that homeless guy down the street, not in the position of a person with a home talking in pity—in the position as a fellow human being, with compassion. Maybe there is something mutual position we all can share with each other, as well as our particular differences. If we can embrace our differences and mutual elements, we can begin something akin to a magnificent social relationship, it’s that beautiful thing people can reasonably call “Camaraderie,” or “Friendship.” Once you’ve achieved even the smallest degree of positive change, you can further build practice from there. You can then turn that practice into something even bigger, a change that is profound in its scale, grand in its vision towards the future. An emancipation profoundly massive in its destruction of the things that be, yet that precise destruction will be in its utmost productive form that mankind has ever seen.
Our position as the “identical subject-object.” like beings allow us to change reality around us. But in a civil society that subordinates us to isolation, the last thing we want to do is to act alone.
Brief Notes On Lukács’s Self-Criticism.
So I recently read on late lukacs’s self criticism on is 1967 preface, after a period of de-stalinization in which he himself went through such practices of self-criticism, History and Class Consciousness was no exception, in which the “identical subject-object” seem to have been not just superfluous, in his account but fundamentally mistaken in the nature of marx’s theoretical base.
One as much as I do think it is important to read I do feel like there is a reconciliation to this, as objectification and alienation do play a specific relation that is identical, and it can only be in the context of capitalism. Because objectification can mean many things. If we can perform objectification in communism practically, it ought to be mediated by our own self-consciousness. But what we have now, through alienation, is a form of subordination of our consciousness through its objectification. If psychic subordination and the unconscious is real, then alienation obviously extends to more facets of reality than strictly the economic and laboring context. What Lukács isn’t reconciling with in the preface is that every phenomena is practical, conscious or unconscious. What the communist movement strives for is the former, as we ought to enact praxis consciously and move through the objectification process mediated by self-consciousness in order to achieve an organizing material force that is both radical, and organized. As that would constitute the self-consciousness of the proletariat, an opportunity for practical material change. If objectification is social, then it is alienation that obscures the social nexus through putting objectification inside a context of dualism. So i’m unsure if lukacs’s insistence in self-critique on a reinventing a dualism between the object and subject is truly practical. Both “objectification” are both forms of practice that influence the external through the subject, but one falls under the bourgeois separatism between subject and object towards a form of alienation, one is conscious and reconciles us towards the real and not self-isolating contemplation. Alienation and reification doesn’t take up the form of strictly an economic relation. The economic relations and the relations of labour force and the bourgeoisie force extends all the way out to facets of ordinary life that is dependent on the forces of capital induced alienation.
But what I think lukacs is saying in this overall self-polemic is important to go through for most readers, because his clarification on objectification is an important on hegel’s form flattening of alienation towards all forms of objectification (Or his inclination towards the pure subject). The reason to address this self-critique on the identical-subject-object in particular (and wherever you opt to see practical use of it in the realm of communism), is that the duality that Lukács is criticizing (hegel’s dual form of alienation, seemingly he fell through in thought) is usually parroted around by the more conservative, crudely scientific/orthodox marxists. So vulgar materialists under the ruse of marxism can determine what nature constitutes whilst allowing the subordination of consciousness towards psychic latency, and pure data inscribed as “objects of truth and nature.” The reification form still persists in objectification. Hegelians and 20/21st century tendencies of marxism tend to put objectification in contexts that does not exist in the exact present. Opposite forms of purity through each of their own dualism.