LovingEmbrace
3rd August 2013, 16:45
individuality is the sense of absolute self. a determined line which is placed in between human beings, separating them from one another, preventing us from reaching the mystical-spiritual-sexual-mythical sense of belonging and kinship, and creating jealousy, resentment, dominance behaviors and class hierarchies.
the abolition of individuality can only be made by the individual. it will not mean a collective where everyone are brainwashed psyborgs. it will mean a total liberation of all human, artistic, sexual and social impulses, instantly turning the world into the Communist Paradise.
you are not you and me are no me. we are all one. we are all us. we are all I, as the universal state of being.
kiss your neighbor. burn down Babylon, and be a wild child.
Ace High
3rd August 2013, 18:14
I like this and I agree.
Fun fact though, there is much evidence to suggest that we actually ARE all connected. I used to research quantum physics, and although I never could even get close to comprehending the mathematics behind it, I found that everything actually is made up of the exact same material at a quantum level. And if you get down to the core of the quantum level, you reach consciousness itself. Interesting stuff.
nizan
4th August 2013, 02:02
The individual doesn't exist, you have everything in common with every other alienated spectator of separation. This is all which amounts to the totality of your shared continuity in existence, and it will continue to be so long as revolution is perpetually expressed in the language of image, of overdrawn critical phrases, of university dialogue. Give up on your individuality and your collectivity.
LovingEmbrace
4th August 2013, 18:44
when Communism is established, there will be a feeling of total acceptance, joy and bliss for every human being part of the Oneness in the entire universe! we will all constantly cry and laugh and shit ourselves with Joy, and no shame or guilt or loneliness will ever grip us!
that will mark the end point of individuality!
you are the cop who beat you up! he's another you! you are the girl you stalked down and raped! she's another you! you are the kitten you saved from a tree! you are Bush, Hitler, Obama, Chaplin and Jesus!
all you ever done, you've done to yourself!
Communism will liberate you! Communism will erase your sense of separation!
D-A-C
5th August 2013, 00:15
There is no such thing as alienation, in the truest sense of the word, because people are not alienated from some true sense of self.
Alienation implies that there is a form of existence that is, by default, un-alienated and this simply is not possible.
'People' and the personalities which constitute them and their actions are created by the structures of a society, even before they are born.
What it means to be a man or a woman, rich or poor, black or white straight or gay and even the meaning your name are all decided outside of the individual whilst they are still an embryo inside their mothers wombs.
This isn't to say that we are completely without choice, or we are unaccountable for our actions, rather its more a case of, 'you are free ... free to choose any colour you like ... as long as its black'.
People like Lenin for example, can come into being and embody the zeitgeist of change and can take actions which alter the course of history, but the pulses and rythms which made them take their actions existed prior to their undertaking them.
Its the same way for example that Capitalism contains within it the conditions for its own demise. This doesnt mean it is somehow inevitable and that we can sit back and wait for it to happen. Instead, it means that the 'desire' and 'possibilities' to change from capitalism are built into it because of how it structurally creates the proletariet by concentrating large numbers of workers within cities, or creates a vast system of exploitation, large gaps between rich and power, the dividing of resources etc etc. Those are structural conditions that then affect the individual.
Again, an individual doesn't choose his place in the relations of production, he doesn't ask to be rich or poor, to be the factory owner or the factory worker, but structurally those conditions have to be filled before he comes into existence.
This doesn't mean he is locked into having one world view because of his position within the relations of production, but even taking on a different point of view, say taking up the struggle against capitalism when you are rich, merely means you are taking up a pre-defined and always already there position within the relations of production.
There can never be a society in which the relations are truely open and visible, some higher, almost Nirvana like existence when the world becomes transparent before our eyes.
Mankind, will always, even under Communism, be steeped in Ideology and its effects because man has to be formed and transformed to meet the requirements of the conditions of his existence, even communist conditions of existence.
As Althusser this well in Marxism and Humanism:
There can be no question of attempting a profound definition of ideology here. It will suffice to know very schematically that an ideology is a system (with its own logic and rigour) of representations (images, myths, ideas or concepts, depending on the case) endowed with a historical existence and role within a given society. Without embarking on the problem of the relations between a science and its (ideological) past, we can say that ideology, as a system of representations, is distinguished from science in that in it the practico-social function is more important than the theoretical function (function as knowledge).
What is the nature of this social function? To understand it we must refer to the Marxist theory of history. The ‘subjects’ of history are given human societies. They present themselves as totalities whose unity is constituted by a certain specific type of complexity, which introduces instances, that, following Engels, we can, very schematically, reduce to three: the economy, politics and ideology. So in every society we can posit, in forms which are sometimes very paradoxical, the existence of an economic activity as the base, a political organization and ‘ideological’ forms (religion, ethics, philosophy, etc.). So ideology is as such an organic part of every social totality. It is as if human societies could not survive without these specific formations, these systems of representations (at various levels), their ideologies. Human societies secrete ideology as the very element and atmosphere indispensable to their historical respiration and life. Only an ideological world outlook could have imagined societies without ideology and accepted the utopian idea of a world in which ideology (not just one of its historical forms) would disappear without trace, to be replaced by science. For example, this utopia is the principle behind the idea that ethics, which is in its essence ideology, could be replaced by science or become scientific through and through; or that religion could be destroyed by science which would in some way take its place; that art could merge with knowledge or become ‘everyday life’, etc.
And I am not going to steer clear of the crucial question: historical materialism cannot conceive that even a communist society could ever do without ideology, be it ethics, art or ‘world outlook’. Obviously it is possible to foresee important modifications in its ideological forms and their relations and even the disappearance of certain existing forms or a shift of their functions to neighbouring forms; it is also possible (on the premise of already acquired experience) to foresee the development of new ideological forms (e.g. the ideologies of ‘the scientific world outlook’ and ‘communist humanism’) but in the present state of Marxist theory strictly conceived, it is not conceivable that communism, a new mode of production implying determinate forces of production and relations of production, could do without a social organization of production, and corresponding ideological forms.
So ideology is not an aberration or a contingent excrescence of History: it is a structure essential to the historical life of societies. Further, only the existence and the recognition of its necessity enable us to act on ideology and transform ideology into an instrument of deliberate action on history.
It is customary to suggest that ideology belongs to the region of ‘consciousness’. We must not be misled by this appellation which is still contaminated by the idealist problematic that preceded Marx. In truth, ideology has very little to do with ‘consciousness’, even supposing this term to have an unambiguous meaning. It is profoundly unconscious, even when it presents itself in a reflected form (as in pre-Marxist ‘philosophy’). Ideology is indeed a system of representations, but in the majority of cases these representations have nothing to do with ‘consciousness’: they are usually images and occasionally concepts, but it is above all as structures that they impose on the vast majority of men, not via their ‘consciousness’. They are perceived-accepted-suffered cultural objects and they act functionally on men via a process that escapes them. Men ‘live’ their ideologies as the Cartesian ‘saw’ or did not see – if he was not looking at it – the moon two hundred paces away: not at all as a form of consciousness, but as an object of their ‘world’ – as their ‘world’ itself. But what do we mean, then, when we say that ideology is a matter of men’s ‘consciousness’? First, that ideology is distinct from other social instances, but also that men live their actions, usually referred to freedom and ‘consciousness’ by the classical tradition, in ideology, by and through ideology; in short, that the ‘lived’ relation between men and the world, including History (in political action or inaction), passes through ideology, or better, is ideology itself. This is the sense in which Marx said that it is in ideology (as the locus of political struggle) that men become conscious of their place in the world and in history, it is within this ideological unconsciousness that men succeed in altering the ‘lived’ relation between them and the world and acquiring that new form of specific unconsciousness called ‘consciousness’.
So ideology is a matter of the lived relation between men and their world. This relation, that only appears as ‘conscious’ on condition that it is unconscious, in the same way only seems to be simple on condition that it is complex, that it is not a simple relation but a relation between relations, a second degree relation. In ideology men do indeed express, not the relation between them their conditions of existence, but the way they live the relation between them and their conditions of existence: this presupposes both a real relation and an ‘imaginary’, ‘lived’ relation. Ideology, then, is the expression of the relation between men and their ‘world’, that is, the (overdetermined) unity of the real relation and the imaginary relation between them and their real conditions of existence. In ideology the real relation is inevitably invested in the imaginary relation, a relation that expresses a will (conservative, conformist, reformist or revolutionary), a hope or a nostalgia, rather than describing a reality.
It is in this overdetermination of the real by the imaginary and of the imaginary by the real that ideology is active in principle, that it reinforces or modifies the relation between men and their conditions of existence, in the imaginary relation itself. It follows that this action can never be purely instrumental; the men who would use an ideology purely as a means of action, as a tool, find that they have been caught by it, implicated by it, just when they are using it and believe themselves to be absolute masters of it.
This is perfectly clear in the case of a class society. The ruling ideology is then the ideology of the ruling class. But the ruling class does not maintain with the ruling ideology, which is its own ideology, an external and lucid relation of pure utility and cunning. When, during the eighteenth century, the ‘rising class’, the bourgeoisie, developed a humanist ideology of equality, freedom and reason, it gave its own demands the form of universality, since it hoped thereby to enroll at its side, by their education to this end, the very men it would liberate only for their exploitation. This is the Rousseauan myth of the origins of inequality: the rich holding forth to the poor in ‘the most deliberate discourse’ ever conceived, so as to persuade them to live their slavery as their freedom. In reality, the bourgeoisie has to believe in its own myth before it can convince others, and not only so as to convince others, since what it lives in its ideology is the very relation between it and its real conditions of existence which allows it simultaneously to act on itself (provide itself with a legal and ethical consciousness, and the legal and ethical conditions of economic liberalism) and on others (those it exploits and is going to exploit in the future: the ‘free labourers’) so as to take up, occupy and maintain its historical role as a ruling class. Thus, in a very exact sense, the bourgeoisie lives in the ideology of freedom the relation between it and its conditions of existence: that is, its real relation (the law of a liberal capitalist economy) but invested in an imaginary relation (all men are free, including the free labourers). Its ideology consists of this play on the word freedom, which betrays the bourgeois wish to mystify those (‘free men’!) it exploits, blackmailing them with freedom so as to keep them in harness, as much as the bourgeoisie’s need to live its own class rule as the freedom of those it is exploiting. Just as a people that exploits another cannot be free, so a class that uses an ideology is its captive too. So when we speak of the class function of an ideology it must be understood that the ruling ideology is indeed the ideology of the ruling class and that the former serves the latter not only in its rule over the exploited class, but in its own constitution of itself as the ruling class, by making it accept the lived relation between itself and the world as real and justified.
But, we must go further and ask what becomes of ideology in a society in which classes have disappeared. What we have just said allows us to answer this question. If the whole social function of ideology could be summed up cynically as a myth (such as Plato’s ‘beautiful lies’ or the techniques of modern advertising) fabricated and manipulated from the outside by the ruling class to fool those it is exploiting, then ideology would disappear with classes. But as we have seen that even in the case of a class society ideology is active on the ruling class itself and contributes to its moulding, to the modification of its attitudes to adapt it to its real conditions of existence (for example, legal freedom) – it is clear that ideology (as a system of mass representations) is indispensable in any society if men are to be formed, transformed and equipped to respond to the demands of their conditions of existence. If, as Marx said, history is a perpetual transformation of men’s conditions of existence, and if this is equally true of a socialist society, then men must be ceaselessly transformed so as to adapt them to these conditions; if this ‘adaptation’ cannot be left to spontaneity but must be constantly assumed, dominated and controlled, it is in ideology that this demand is expressed, that this distance is measured, that this contradiction is lived and that its resolution is ‘activated’. It is in ideology that the classless society lives the inadequacy/adequacy of the relation between it and the world, it is in it and by it that it transforms men’s ‘consciousness’, that is, their attitudes and behaviour so as to raise them to the level of their tasks and the conditions of their existence.
In a class society ideology is the relay whereby, and the element in which, the relation between men and their conditions of existence is settled to the profit of the ruling class. In a classless society ideology is the relay whereby, and the element in which, the relation between men and their conditions of existence is lived to the profit of all men
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