What is what is. It is what it is for a reason. But what is always holds within itself the seed of its own overcoming. The appearance of eternity, of a permanent natural order, of givenness, is just that — an appearance.
It is often remarked that the method of dialectical analysis is obscure and practically irrelevant. Yet dialectical critique is the means by which we can penetrate through these appearances and discover the basis for transformation from within the given order. Revolution means lifting the veil and practically exposing the untruth of reified, naturalized appearances. A placid body of water reflects what is above it, creating an illusion of stability. To splash the water is to reveal what lays within, and to participate in the creation of the water’s movement.
The acknowledgment in dialectical critique of the total mediation of our experience of life further offers a tool to smash naturalized orders.¹ By mediated, I mean mediated by concepts, language, and the social-historical baggage of one’s milieu. One always thinks and expresses oneself by medium of concepts, which have their own history in social activity. Our ways of thinking are in line with ways of life, down to our very grammatical expressions and the etymological origins of the words we use in everyday life. Karl Marx succinctly identified an example of this in the German language in a March 25, 1868 letter to Friedrich Engels:
“But what would old Hegel say in the next world if he heard that the general [Allgemeine] in German and Norse means nothing but the common land [Gemeinland], and the particular, Sundre, Besondere, nothing but the separate property divided off from the common land? Here are the logical categories coming damn well out of “our intercourse” after all.”²
While a theory of knowledge based on an assumption of immediate access to knowledge of reality seems to be more populist than one based on mediated knowledge, it can rather be more conservative. The notion that our experience of the world is a mirror image of reality in itself implies a certain naturalization of the world order as it is. It fails to account for the power of ideology except as mere delusion. Yet ideology can itself seem rational according to appearances, as in the case of commodity fetishism.
What appears ready at hand is never totally immanent or immediate, there is always mediation in every experience. The appearance of pure immediacy obscures the social and historical specificity of all experiences. It mystifies the fact that all experience is the experience of a living, breathing, thinking subject, one who is a social-historical subject. A human subject thinks in linguistic concepts, concepts which hold histories behind them beyond the pure experience of the individual subject themselves. In the words of Theodor W. Adorno:
“Reified thought is the copy of the reified world. By trusting in primordial experiences, it lapses into delusion. There are no primordial experiences”³
Everything in human experience is mediated.
However, we must also distinguish a specifically revolutionary theory of mediated experience from a more conservative one. In the latter notion of mediated knowledge, we can only think within the limits of what is given. Mediating thought is taken as relatively unchanging and as basically a cap on our ability to think about and practically transform the world.
Another, more characteristic of Marx, identifies this mediation in the history of social practice itself, of the history of human activity, and thus accounts for the ability of human activity to shape its own destiny with the material it has inherited. Further, it recognizes the basis for the overcoming of what has been and what is within itself, as it identifies the basis of conceptual contradictions in real world social-historical contradictions. Thus, this offers a liberatory mode of analysis.
In our world, the relevance of human social activity seems nonexistent. We all feel powerless in the face of a leviathan which careens into the abyss, dragging all of us with it. The beast lashes us with the barbed wire chains of transnational markets, with disease, with ecological collapse. It devours the earth in its maw. In appearance, it is inhumanity embodied. We constantly feel overcome by powers far beyond our control and which bind us, helplessly, to them. We become caught up in engineered networks which affect our fundamental ways of thinking and living, whether these are online networks or market networks. It seems that no one is driving, and there is nothing we can do. Why bother with anything?
Yet this appearance is not separated from our social activity, but emanates from it. Alienation is alienation on the basis of the way our social relations are arranged. Our world has run beyond anyone’s control because our societies are arranged on the basis of private interests and the maximization of profit. This is not a natural order of human existence as such, but is specific to a society based on generalized production of commodities, or production for the market. This doesn’t mean the nonhuman aspect of all of this is irrelevant or only a veil. Rather, the way we view it as a power unto itself is the veil to tear off.
We are not dominated by “technology.” We are dominated by technology which has been designed and coordinated in a particular way in accordance with a particular social system. This social system objectifies itself into our infrastructure and the objects which shape our everyday lives, yes. But the fundamental potential for human agency in transformation remains, because the terrors of this way of life are themselves based in the way our human activity is organized. Under capitalism, the parts are rationalized, such as through maximization of efficiency, while the whole is irrational. This contradiction, and the dependence of all on all in the midst of a system of production based on feeding the beast of capital, warrants the need to fight for a rational whole. This rational whole would be socialism.
Any proposition contains in its very premises the seeds of its own opposing response. Dialectical critique shatters any appearance of simple, tranquil unity in logic. Yet, as mentioned, conceptual thinking is itself the congealing of histories of human activity into forms of logic. Marx, being a materialist, singled out revolutionary action as itself a practical critique which breaks apart the appearance of an eternal, natural unity in the social order. Revolution bursts forth from elements within society itself, revealing its internal contradictions and the seeds of its own overcoming and transcendence by a new social order.
For contemporary capitalist society, this is the revolts of the working classes against an alienated system committed to valorization instead of human needs. These working classes are capitalistically produced, and feed capital through their labor, yet also represent the potential for a new cooperative mode of life. To revolt against the existing order is to challenge the idea that it is a law of nature, and to mark a psychological break from its claim to fundamental legitimacy. This was well recognized by Frantz Fanon.⁴
Of course, a total psychological shift can only come with a transformation of our way of life itself, which is the process of revolution. The process of coming to consciousness is identical with the process of revolutionizing society. Revolt alone is not enough, it is only a first step clearing the debris of decaying civilization. It is up to revolution to constructively and practically theorize a new way of life.
Today, the situation seems hopeless. It seems the inhumanity and death-worship of capitalism is insurmountable, and that the world is too far beyond our control to concern ourselves with it. In the consumerist West in particular, where we are hooked into engineered networks of the culture industry, it is easy to desire nothing more than to drop out and immerse oneself in nihilism.
The potential for transcendence has not gone out, however. Our world is still based in social relations, and thus human agency still lies as a potential weapon through which we might smash reified appearances and open up a vision of a new, possible world. We must reconstitute relations of communality and reassert life against death, concrete flesh against the abstraction of valorization, and joy against extraction.
Capital cannot fully abolish the social or the communal, it must feed its spell by their fuel. Potentials for communality and intersubjectivity are immanent in everyday life, whether in the creation of concentrated communities or by the networks of labor. Our task is to realize their self-consciousness against the atomizing force of bourgeois society and irrational reason.
Revolution is immanent in our apocalyptic conditions themselves. This is not to say the situation is not dire, but that as long as the potential to reignite human communal action exists within the existing premises, a practical critique is possible. Where practical critique is possible, so is practical transcendence. A tranquil unity is always merely an appearance. All unities can be broken open by critique.
“The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the root is man himself.”⁵
— Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
