Marx vs Keefe (2024)
The following extracts below outline the stated position of Abraham Leonard Keefe on Karl Marx, Marxism, and their related concepts. Containing extracts from a variety of texts, this document can serve as a succinct introduction to where these philosophers are in agreement, and where they diverge in analysis or approach.
A broader introduction to the philosophy of Abraham Leonard Keefe can be found here: https://medium.com/theredpen-news/the-philosophy-of-abraham-leonard-keefe-2023-20741fa0a70a
Weaponising Price
Marx’s Labour Theory of Value posits that despite fluctuations in supply and demand, value in a consistent long-term sense is more correlated with the socially necessary labour time it took to make the tool. Marx doesn’t say that supply and demand don’t matter, but he does say that for gaging consistent long-term value, our best means of quantifying it is in SNLT. Not just any old labour time, that is, but the labour time that is required to create something of use. This is, of course, a compelling theory and you can definitely see where Marx and other advocates of the LTV, including Smith and Ricardo were coming from. Empirically speaking, it might appear justifiable — in a study of 42 countries from 2000–2017, Isihara and Mokre conclude that a statistical analysis of available data (theirs being one of the largest scale on the subject) shows “only small and stable deviations” between Marx’s SNLT-derived quantifications of value and average market price. There are many other studies that have attempted to do the same, such as that of Anwar Shaikh, who calculated said deviations as under 10% on average, and that differences in SNLT account for at least 93% of difference in price.
We must start by asking the question: What is value? What does it mean to value something? To Marx, it’s not that SNLT is correlated to value as reflected by price, but price correlated to value as a reflection of SNLT. In other words, value is a universal objectivity that exists prior to our subjectification of it into personal designations of value. British economist Joan Robinson points out that if value exists before we perceive it, and value is defined by SNLT, then the labour theory of value is inherently tautological and therefore impossible for it to ever be proved wrong. You cannot falsify the idea of labour as the source of value if “true value” is defined directly by how much labour was put in, and hence such a theory cannot be taken as scientific, and cannot therefore be an objective universal truth prior to subjective abstract interpretation at all. Any “true value”, clean from the distortions of human subjective perception, cannot be scientifically justified. Therefore what “value” means has no definition other than that which we create out of our own abstract thinking.
What we can therefore see is that within the context of the domineering cultural framework of the present day, labour aligns close enough with general trends as to how people designate value, but we have to avoid our impulse to overgeneralise this to something essential to the human condition or the condition of the universe. It depends entirely on the processes by which we think and rationalise, and the surroundings that condition said processes accordingly. Who knows, maybe in an alternate reality people would eagerly discard the rod, for the opportunity to do more repeated work might be valued more highly than the ability to do something else with the time. The point is, value isn’t something objective unless humans all essentialistically perceive in the exact same way as an inherent consequence of their “human nature,” a nature that simply does not exist. We know that both perception and communication cannot exist objectively as of Derrida’s work on deconstruction, and we know that essentialising a human condition is often fallacious from Foucault and his study into the archaeology of the human sciences, every context cultivating differing epistemes uniting in a differing epistemology (i.e. those processes we referred to earlier).
There’s also the case of marginal utility — your perception of something’s value is always contextual based upon how much of the thing you already have or the time in which you can get it. If value is subjectively perceived by consumers, the subjectivities of their situation will undoubtedly colour their process of valuation. To go to a very different tropical island in which life is much more difficult, water may be more valuable than food at first, but the more water you have collected the less you’ll probably value it in comparison to the food. And you’ll probably subconsciously value the last bite of your rations quite a bit more than your first.
So perhaps the general modernist attempt to try and ascribe a set objective value to things, or derive a formula to do so, may be an impossible wild goose chase, but this doesn’t mean that we should write off the more general essence of LTV and it’s premise — that labour is the essential catalytic factor in changing raw ingredients into the assembled product, and is therefore responsible whatever addition or subtraction of any subjectively determined value that results from the process of production. Even where increased value is seemingly derived from time, such as in the maturation of wine for instance, the value’s increase is dependent on the worker’s creation of a product to mature in the first place.
Therefore the expropriation of labour by the capitalist, and exploitation through not attributing that addition or subtraction unto the worker (instead, as we know, deriving profit for shareholder dividends), still stands even without the LTV’s claims of objective value. Therefore, Robinson still accepted the theory of exploitation even without the LTV, and this reconciliation of exploitation with subjective evaluation is sometimes referred to as “Pigouvian Exploitation”. Robinson, whom I agree with in this instance, refers to the concept of price discrimination and monopsony in explaining the dynamics of this Pigouvian Exploitation. Price discrimination refers to selling a thing at different prices to different demographics. Because the worker can only sell their labour to the company they work for at that one time, that company has monopsony, or, a monopoly on purchase and consumption. Therefore, as the worker has no option but to be part of the expropriation of labour, the price determined by the company for that labour can be valued low, to the capitalist expropriator’s benefit. But then, the capitalist can switch their valuation of the labour in that production process to drastically higher, when selling on the product to consumers, often utilising fetish cultivation tactics like spectacle and distance, or playing into marginal utility or supply and demand mechanics.
Hence due to the situation of the capitalist, they can play market forces to their benefit and maximise their own earnings, at the exploitative expense of either worker or consumer (depending on the approach you look at it). Had we cut out the capitalist and the expropriation of labour, and had the workers have control over the fruits of their labour (fructus), communicating with consumers themselves, they would be better off within any transactional society. In today’s society however, the capitalist can leverage their wealth, power, monopsony and social reach to accumulate without doing anything productive, anything that the workers wouldn’t be able to do in an instant themselves had they the possession of the capital, from which they are currently excluded, by the institution of property. As a consequentialist, I believe this ability to perform price discrimination, fetishisation and exploitation is something we should criticise and condemn, due to its role in exacerbating feedback loops of accumulation and stratification. This leads in turn to more inequality, and as a result increased propensity for the powerful to subjugate the powerless into their own fascistic, regimented order, and suppressing the freedom for many to engage in liberated intellectual perpetuity, to contribute to the generation and accumulation of abstract thought so central to the human experience.
The Proprietarian Clause
Marx, too, was evidently a critic of property in Proudhon’s sense, even claiming that communism (the eventual end point of historical progression), could be summed up simply as “abolition of private property”. Again, like with Proudhon, this looks initially good for the anti-proprietarian, yet there’s still a catch. Marxism has come to classify property into three main categories, and the anarchism of people like Proudhon has essentially gone along with this classification system: private, personal, and collective property.
Private property is essentially synonymous with capital — property that is owned for accumulation to make you a profit, or to justify the expropriation of labour. To Marx, it was this sort of property, such as in ownership of land or business or a factory, in which the capitalist sought a legal means of taking value produced through the labour of a worker, taking some of that for themselves as passive income, returning to the worker a wage less than the value that they added to the materials they used. This was also the type of property that Proudhon declared theft: monopolising control over an industry, and using said control to leverage workers into exploitation to satisfy their needs, was theft theft from all the rest of us — what gave that capitalist right to confiscate that control from the commons, and keep it for themselves? Private property, instead of allowing people to keep the fruits of their labour, actually justified instead those fruits being taken away by some capitalist, according to Marx and Proudhon.
Collective property, however, was Marx’s preferred solution to this dilemma. Instead of industries and other private property being owned privately, Marx proclaimed that a socialist society would have this ownership and control redistributed to the workers, in preparation for the communal property of communism: ownership by the community as a whole. Some Marxist strands of socialism saw state ownership as a way of centralising and coordinating this workers’ control, with representatives carrying out those workers’ will respectively.
Personal property is used to refer to things that an individual may own for their own usage. A house, a car, a toothbrush; Marx saw no reason to collectivise or communalise these things, and nor did the anarchists. To Marx, you should be able to still own personal property in socialism, after all, the Marxist critique of capitalism is based on workers not coming to own the full value of the labour they produced, and this was what Marx wanted to fix. While under socialism, exchange may be done ideally in terms of labour points instead of a circulating currency, Marx expected this would eventually become so well-practiced in the higher stage of socialism, or communism, that exchange of this sort could be done without the formalities. But nonetheless, this prospect is still based on ownership of personal property existing, coming from the labour one performs, and carrying an inherent set economic value.
The communalist philosophy in its modern sense actually directly posits an alternative to property: usufruct. This is not a word that was made up for ideological purposes, it’s actually an arrangement that currently exists in law, in which the person with the usufruct may perform two of the three property interests onto the object or service that the usufruct is for. To demonstrate this, we can look at these three property interests that property rights bestow, and how usufruct, as it exists with proprietarian society, differs from property.
Usufruct legally gives the subject right of usus (the right to use the object) and fructus (the right to profit off the fruits of that usage), but leaves out abusus (the right to destroy or exchange that object at their will). Now within our current society, usufruct is usually given by property owners to other people, with the user gaining right of use but not inherent ownership, which remains with the proprietor. But in communalism, without property, Bookchin envisions the concept of usufruct to become the norm instead of property, in describing the relationships between objects and people.
Both the collective property of Marx and the mutual aid of Kropotkin are criticised by Bookchin as intrinsically proprietarian, as they still trace the mandate for an individual to appropriate and use a certain thing, to an inherent proprietary nature of that object. This idea of an inherent relationship of ownership within the metaphysical capacity of an object, Murray saw no reason to sustain — it does not need to exist, and insisting on the redeemability of some property only serves pave the way for restriction of other people’s freedom to use and provide justification in itself to the notion of other forms of property. The right to forcibly infringe on the right to use (which to Bookchin was the right integral to life, property merely being one flawed way of trying to ensure it), were themselves a creation of property rights, be they private or personal.
Bookchin’s view of usufruct was posited as providing a replacement framework for the justification of the right to appropriate something. Instead of “who is the inherent owner” of an object being the focal point on the question of who can use what, such questions would become moreso about respecting the right of the current user to usufruct of all non-property; with when they finish using the thing, relinquishing any inherent right to appropriate it. In other words, property is no longer property, but its allocation to a certain person would be guaranteed conditionally based on other rights: the right to use (usufruct) itself of course, but also things like the right not to be assaulted, which would need to be broken in order to forcibly divorce a person from what they’re using — something that only property rights happen to legitimise on an irrational, undemocratic basis.
Given democratic decision by all those concerned was still very much supported by Bookchin even to justify abusus or extraordinary circumstances, the reality is that in practice, Bookchin’s communalism and communism aren’t too dissimilar — you keep rights to use what you use, and lose rights to own things you don’t use. The difference is largely philosophical, as to whether you actually own the stuff you are able to keep rights to use. But it’s an important difference to Murray Bookchin, even just in emphasising user rights as more fundamental than owner rights (the latter of which need not exist). It’s fundamental to the way we perceive not only our rights, but our relationship with the surrounding world as well.
The task for the usufructarian, in proposing an alternative to the current proprietarian consensus, is to demonstrate how usufruct can guarantee everything one relies on property for, and more. An important thing to know, in order to approach such a debate in appropriate context, would be the historical impetus for property and the conditions which proprietary arrangements were designed to best navigate. In many societies, particularly on the proto-American continent, the concept of property was not introduced as an organic response to material conditions, but through conquest by those whose societies had given rise to property.
This is, of course, important to understand — not all impressive historical civilisations were built upon modern, Western-style concepts of property. Historical development can be approached in a multitude of different ways and in different directions, reflecting the specific shared understandings, with relative codes of behaviour and morality. What we can look at is a shared foundation for all of these traditions in the form of what Marx called “primitive communism.” Make no mistake, this society was hardly a model we should seek to replicate, however understanding it can help us to demonstrate that more egalitarian and collective alternatives to proprietarian institutions are hardly incompatible with any “human nature,” (they have existed far longer than property itself) and we can evaluate from analysing this society the characteristics of society that such institutions were adopted to respond to — notably Bookchin’s concept of complementarity.
The change in conditions begetting proprietarian institutions can, in short, be identified with the recognition of a sort of “scarcity ceiling” in tandem with the territorialisation of production, in which simply moving into undepleted territory no longer became as viable. Consequently, institutions that allow personal reservation of land and resources which are now subject to a scarcity that even collective action couldn’t fundamentally overcome at the time, was adopted within Eurocentric traditions as a means of survival insurance. With this variability in resource opportunity came new power relations and grand involuntary hierarchies that ultimately would become all-consuming in their pertinence to lifestyle. Accumulation, individualist self-interest and exploitation, to maintain one’s place on this hierarchy, become self-defensive measures, and proprietarian society evolves consequently.
Our task now, be it within the context of a greater cultural movement or within political institutions, is to evaluate whether the needs for something like property that were responsible for its creation, still apply. In a world defined by overproduction, the spectre of automation, and a multitude of crises for which we need complementarity back, I would posit that property — all property — has exhausted its function to our society and now exists as a net negative. The vast majority of people in today’s society are now unequivocally more limited by reservation of things outside of one’s immediate possession, than empowered by it. Unlike when property first manifested, our capacity to use (hence to survive, to express ourselves freely, to follow our dreams free from dictation, to have choice and security and so forth) would be increased were we to make the switch from property to usufruct.
The much needed reemergence of collective interest as a priority of self-interest would only serve to expand personal responsibility, and would be the natural consequence of removing the market’s artificial incentives in favour of the natural survival impetus that has sustained our species long prior to property’s existence. As for the question of economic efficiency, the use of new technological frameworks like liquid e-democracy would allow us to expand the dynamic nature of a horizontally planned economy to a much greater reach than ever before, to be updated instantaneously with far more precise information as to the nature of demand and the supply available than any speculation-driven market or price signal could ever provide as a middle man. All of the advantages and needs we see in the institution of property, seem only to be one-upped by usufruct within a society of our current technologies.
Ultimate Convergence
In the contemporary age, many analysts — perhaps most notably Yanis Varoufakis — are starting to liken late-stage capitalism to a system which looks increasingly feudal. Exploitation is becoming increasingly multilayered, with each person being assigned and classified to a more specific role in the production process. The feedback loops that stratified society into classes continue to stratify, further classifying the population into further and further specificity. Property clothed as a capitalist meritocracy is devolving into rigidity in a similar manner to its preceding outfit of feudal meritocracy.
A Synthetic Collectivism
Marx’s thought was concerned with the conflicting interests within society than their cohesion, namely in tracing behaviour, instinct and culture to one’s material conditions. Therefore, the reality of how one interacts with the means of production, distribution and exchange, amounts to the delineation into distinct social classes of people based on the shared roles they play in society and the economy resulting in different conditions, needs and interests which often conflict. The owner’s desire to expand their profits may, for instance, conflict with the worker’s desire for better wages and conditions. To Marx, it was this conflict that drove history, with material conditions resolving in a revolutionary synthesis — in other words, the ideas that build society are determined on a reaction to objective material conditions.
It is without doubt that Marx’s materialist approach, that analysing one’s material conditions and role in society is key to understanding how a person develops into who they are, is a vitally important part of the picture if we want to investigate what makes us, and our society more largely, what it is. Yet again, if extrapolated out, Marx’s framework of dialectical materialism teleologically foretells socialism, and then communism, as an objective scientific inevitability, in a manner that simply hasn’t materialised in accordance with its prediction.
The fact that I do not, nor probably do you, fully agree with this extrapolation nonetheless does not detract from the fact that one can definitely see utility in its approach in various ways, and make use of the contextual and analytic information that it may yield. Marx’s socialism misses the craniocentric premise and cannot survive poststructuralism, so knowing what we do from previously discussed subjects, taking a modernistic approach such as this one dogmatically would not appear to align with that which we have ascertained elsewhere.
Ultimately, the fundamental difference in approach between people like Marx and Max Weber can be summarised in a crucial question: should we see ideas as creating material conditions, or material conditions as creating ideas? It’s a debate that I’ve mentioned many times before on this channel, the debate between materialism and idealism. Historically it goes back to Plato and Aristotle, but is nowadays encapsulated more so by the philosophical forums of German Idealism and British Empiricism. One of those German idealists, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, posited the dialectical model as a way of illustrating how two contradicting conceptualisations or ideas (thesis and antithesis) will eventually resolve their tension in a synthesis that shapes the material world. Meanwhile some materialists would eventually go on to develop logical positivism — that truth can only be ascertained from the scientific method.
Marx’s own theoretical framework was largely built off of inverting the model provided by Hegel, and in doing so, Marx set himself somewhat in between the hardline materialist and idealist schools of thought. He identified that conceptual framing, or the superstructure, did create a degree of subjective variation, thus cultures and ideas could condition and impact society — this was something that hardline materialists would criticise. However, he remained a materialist by ultimately positing that those ideas were ultimately derived from material conditions, and hence traced from the objective material reality of society. To Marx, the concepts and ideas could indeed shape or impact the world, but they aren’t fundamentally at the source. The world is still determined by its material conditions.
Of course, this had not only descriptive analytical implications, but also has led to a political divergence. This material determinism has led to many Marxists placing their faith in what they call scientific socialism — inevitable spontaneous revolution in the culmination of material contradictions — and is contrasted with the utopian socialism of preceding socialist thinkers, who instead design a vision for society and then convince people to implement it. That utopianism has had varying degrees of success in the past, but ultimately has never really seen implementation on the full scale of a prior-existing nation-state, and thus to Marxists appears futile and somewhat arbitrary.
As we’ve mentioned, however, in the absence of an expected spontaneous revolution in Germany, spontaneous revolution is yet to occur at the stage of capitalism Marx foretold, and so Marxist theory has been continuously revised by multiple political theorists and strategists, to justify revolution under different material conditions from those Marx identified. Most notably, Lenin expanded on the imperial dynamic to late capitalism and class struggle, and suggested the use of a vanguard party to propel Russia — a quasi-feudal economy at the time — into a workers’ state, to be steered through capitalism and socialism by a communist leadership.
Lenin’s bolshevism would create a significant tradition of leftist theory, and would in turn be revised by Stalin, Trotsky, Bordiga, Mao, Hoxha, Khrushchev, Deng and many others, each branching off in different directions. It is from bolshevism that we saw socialist experiments on the largest scale the world has yet seen. Within the leftist political camp, there is an ever-ongoing debate as to how we react to and evaluate these historical regimes which have identified with our political tradition. Lenin, Stalin and Mao tend to be the figures most talked about, and often are deemed controversial at the very least. In particular with the latter two, many will disagree as to whether the societies they presided over were actually socialist, and even more will disagree as to whether any of them actually had, by the end, any commitment to the communist endgoal of a stateless, classless, moneyless society. One of them in particular properly attempted to kickstart a transition from socialism to communism: Mao. It was also, to note, a failure. Mao’s attempts to communise soon were cut back, as the encouraged communes fell pretty promptly into a disorganised sort of cadre corruption, and so central hierarchy remained.
However, there have also been other traditions emanating from Marx that took different approaches. Some in the West, seeing no spontaneous revolution, resorted to reformist and incrementalist methods. Others, in turn, aimed to analyse why such revolution hadn’t taken place, in an effort to overcome the obstacles distorting the Marxian historical trajectory. This discourse would gradually come to revolve around a nebulous yet crucial concept: ideology.
In its colloquial sense, you would probably think of “ideology” as somewhat analogous to “political philosophy,” “belief system,” or “worldview.” This interpretation of ideology is implicitly quite idealistic and predicated on consensus theory, which posits politics as the search for a fair system for all, and can trace itself loosely back to Durkheim. Marx’s approach to ideology was more materialist, however. To Marx, ideology was the revolutionary synthesis. The different interests of different classes gave them competing agendas, and those agendas could be sorted into a proletarian ideology, a bourgeois ideology, and so forth. Ideology, deriving from material conditions, constituted the subjectivity between beliefs.
The early 20th century Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci would take Marx’s perspective on ideology and its materialist premises, but nonetheless was curious as to why the proletarians didn’t seem to be adopting their proletarian ideology, the position that their real-world experiences should obviously lead them to. His answer to this question was the theory of cultural hegemony, that the ruling class maintains its control through cultural institutions it sets up, to introduce ideological narratives. They use these, and their cultural influence over social norms and media, to falsely convince someone that their interest is the same as their own, thus dissuading and distracting anyone from overthrowing their system. Gramsci posited that the bourgeoisie test the waters to see how much they can get away with, and then use a manufactured form of uninformed consent to coerce thought away from where it would otherwise naturally go. To Gramsci, Marxian conflict theory may be the reality, but capitalists have painted the illusion of consensus theory to obscure this.
A recent example of what Gramsci was talking about can be found in Noam Chomsky’s book Manufacturing Consent, in which he outlines how the media is subtly conditioned towards the interests of capitalists and their profits, through direct ownership, a reliance on appealing to advertisers, a reliance of official state sources, lobbying and intimidation, and an appeal to Cold War era fears about communism. Another example can be found from the work of the Frankfurt School and their notion of the “Culture Industry,” in which people passively consume consumerist narratives and values fed to them through mass media and popular culture, fitting them into the capitalist tapestry. Art forms and media which may otherwise provoke thought or subvert are appropriated to sell, comfort or excite, and are turned into industries that we consume uncritically. Through convincing people of “false needs,” capitalists condition false consciousness, distracting from issues of class, so people remain alienated and disorganised.
Gramsci believed that building a counter-hegemony, through taking over those institutions one by one, is the only way to free workers from these unwittingly artificial / coerced narratives and reassert their actual material interests. To Chomsky, uncovering and revealing the truth about what the state is actually doing, through critical media literacy, could get people to wake up to the deception and start to organise against the state. To the Frankfurt School, their answer was critical theory, into the implicit messages and institutions perpetrated within what we passively consume. In other words, the first step of the Gramscian revolutionary is to spell out the lies, the illusions, the mythologies we’re being fed. Debunk and neutralise the false narratives that try to trick you, and allow the people to authentically come to their own inevitable conclusions as to what’s best for them.
Politically, we must critique and examine the narratives of property, or of the free market, until their rationale and their justifications fall apart. And then, we need to push this criticism, and an alternative vision, to the cultural foreground — this is part of why I believe so strongly in the idea of revolution by cultural movement and something like a potential craniomodernism. However, as we’re about to see, this is a piece of the puzzle. Critique of ideology has developed significantly beyond Gramsci, presenting us all kinds of complications for us to also consider.
Perhaps the most significant post-Gramscian theorist was a man named Louis Althusser, who discussed a concept that he called the Ideological State Apparatus. It’s no longer just about those in power tricking you by selling you fallacious beliefs, but about them teaching you to automatically generate those fallacious beliefs on your own. Media, education, religion, and other institutions and structures, are designed to “interpellate” us, or call upon us to position ourselves in a very specific way towards a certain concept or issue, so that our response to it will reflect the ideology of the state. Reframing your perception in a fallacious mould is something we are conditioned to internalise.
This makes our task a lot more difficult. Althusser believed, like myself, that we should try to posit a counter-hegemony and neutralise individual narratives and institutions to the best of our ability, but ultimately he believed that only revolution could overthrow and dismantle these mechanics and succeed in building a counter-hegemony, thus rebuilding more authentic ideology. We will be submerged within ideology even as we try to fight against it, and that makes the outcome of revolutionary activity a lot more unpredictable than Marx or Gramsci would have insisted.
All this might raise some eyebrows about Althusser’s position on the idealism-materialism dichotomy. Clearly, he assigns a lot of significance to framing and conceptualisation — ideas — as opposed to a clear materialist teleology. This results in Althusser taking a perspective that he terms “Aleatory Materialism,” dropping the “science” and teleology from dialectical materialism. While still believing material conditions are at the root of ideology and subjectivity, and that those things can still be boiled down to the interaction of material conditions, that interaction is more of unexpected “chance encounters” between all kinds of different unpredictable conditions. Thus leftist organisation needs to be more fluid and adaptable to unforeseen conditions and syntheses.
After Gramsci, and then Athusser, the next major theoretical addition to the critique of ideology comes from the Internet-famous philosopher Slavoj Zizek. Zizek looks not only at the narratives or the framing that ideology imposes, but also considers what ideology is imposing upon. What is it in us which is actually being conditioned? This line of thinking complicates Althusser’s revolution, as on its own, a revolution attacks the system but not the subconscious that the system has conditioned. Thus after the revolution, we risk ideology continuing to run, manifesting in new systems of domination emerging instead of ending domination. This fear is clearly justified; creating a necessary political overseer class to disestablish the economic classes and regulate or redistribute economic power (or vice versa) still presents a hierarchical social context where hierarchy would be internalised and hence perpetuated.
I side more with Zizek than Althusser on this one, but where we diverge is ultimately in how we might address that hostile subconscious. Zizek here invokes Freudo-Lacanian psychodynamic truths and complexes as a potential way to understand where and how ideology latches onto us as a psychological fetish, and thus the closest thing we get to a solution from Zizek is psychoanalysis. One issue with psychoanalysis is that it would require grounding oneself in psychodynamics as a universal truth. If one believes those psychological building blocks to instead be assembled entities varied based on their formation, all the way from an infant’s entification of life itself, it becomes almost impossible to fully critique and dismantle ideology from within itself. We cannot simply separate ideology from all our other subjective processes of perceiving and rationalising, so countering ideology thoroughly may need to start during socialisation, thus making compatibility with communism an intergenerational project.
To Control Socialisation
The historical failures of both Marxism and anarchism can be perhaps most succinctly summarised in the mention of one principal obstacle, to which neither have proven to aptly consider or respond: a hostile subconscious. This is ultimately due to the shortcomings of both in assessing and navigating the creation of the entity in human thought processes, and the subsequent internalisation of our surroundings both during socialisation and thereafter. When people say that egalitarianism or usufruct is antithetical to human nature, they’re demonstrably wrong as we’ve proven before, but they do in a roundabout way have a very important point. Clearly, in the way we learn to think and act, the conditioning of socialisation can channel these things in a very specific manner and cultivate certain instincts and subconscious premises that ultimately, as a survival strategy, align with survival in a hierarchical or proprietarian social mould. We default to the ways of survival we have tailored to our current system, because this is the lens by which our surroundings and cultures have taught us to understand existence. We might not have a definitive nature, but we definitely do have a sort of temporal nature, as a de facto objectivity.
It takes massive conscious effort to discipline and repress that which we’ve internalised subconsciously. So it’s no surprise that if our subconscious is conditioned and structured around the logic of our existence under proprietarianism and hierarchy, we’ll be fighting an uphill battle that will always be on thin ice. Be it from socialism or directly from capitalism, that last jump into a usufructarian communist structure is going to be incredibly difficult, and if that subconscious ever makes itself apparent, our work may dissipate. But remember, human will and abstract thought is not to be underestimated here. If we put our mind to something, to approaching an ideal like communism and building compatibility with it, we can absolutely change the world for the better. This begs the question, instead of the subconscious working for what we have now, leading to us most likely defaulting back into a proprietarian mould whatever our conscious aims may be, can we recalibrate that subconscious to default us back to usufruct and complementarity instead? Can we turn our greatest point of weakness into an asset?
Cranioanalysis is an understanding of how an epistemology, or way of thinking, is built — where premises for subjective choices and systems of rationality come from. If we understand every “entity” to be a fulcrum and a conflation of a process behind it, we can begin to probe deeper into the instinctual assumptions and conflations that we’ve internalised, and how these shape the way we think and act. To locate, analyse and “attack the fulcrum,” both collectively and personally, is in this sense an act of revolutionary potential, especially should such become culturally standard. It is to reclaim socialisation, to reclaim the premises which we have buried below consciousness yet ought to consider reassessing. In short, cranioanalysis is the tool for controlled socialisation, as it allows us to understand where the sources of obstacles to communism come from, and what we can do to circumnavigate them. To build communism, we need cranioanalysis to be ubiquitous — for it can tell us how and what we need to do to control socialisation in the first place, and overcome past internalisation if need be. Reclaiming conscious territory as such allows for more fluidity and creativity in finding new ways to live, that we can then go on to respectively internalise themselves. Such is true for undoing our programming to proprietarianism or grand hierarchy.
A Synthetic Collectivism
Now, the chicken or the egg question — idealism or materialism, utopian or scientific, primacy of subjectivity or of objectivity, perhaps of philosophy or the sciences to a degree — is one with a complex answer that will undoubtedly interweave both sides, and criticise the classical perspectives of each. But it’s from poststructuralist and postmodern theory that we derive a craniocentric premise — that subjectivity and abstract thought is primary to everything — and we must thus be at least definitionally more idealist and utopian than materialist and scientific. Considering the structuralist movement, which was somewhat in between modernism and postmodernism, we must critique determinist notions (such as dialectical materialism for instance) which hold to a universal truth, because different structural frameworks of different places and different cultures around the world all yield different conclusions, due to the biases of these systems, of these structures, all of which are somewhat unique from each other.
So in our sociology, in our “collectivism,” in our analysis of ideology, we must indeed synthesise Marx, Weber and Durkheim, but it must be on the premise that ultimately material phenomena must be subject to a process of interpretation stemming all the way back from the first process in epistemology-building, that cannot be reduced to a binary. Thus creativity is not something that can be charted deterministically, and a response to any material stimulus will be somewhat unpredictable. We can still ascertain a lot by looking at society through a materialist lens, but for a more nuanced and complete understanding of the collective, we must also see culture and their ideas as autonomously impacting social phenomena. This brings us to an approach like the Cultural Sociology of Jeffrey Alexander, which treats culture as a potential source of sociological phenomena instead of reducible to the conditions which created it. And then with such analysis, we can use this knowledge to further clarify and overcome obstacles to communism and usufruct.
The spectrum of the left is often upon an oddly drawn continuum. On the international stage, the centre-left could be seen as movements critical of or counterbalancing capital (think maybe Bernie Sanders), the left as one aiming to remove capitalism and replace it with socialism, the far left as one aiming to ultimately remove property and replace it with communism. Thus it would appear that to go further left is to criticise the preceding movement for its lack of thoroughness. And this, in turn, is why theorists like Amadeo Bordiga and other “left communists,” who criticised a lack of thoroughness in far-left movements’ Marxism, utopianism or anarchism, have been historically fitted with the term “ultraleft.” Recalling the craniocentric case for controlled socialisation, we also criticise those same movements in their lack of thoroughness — but unlike the ultraleft, this case leaves the far-left frameworks themselves as something to be indicted with this criticism, not just their application. And yet we are not post-leftists either, we still pursue communism and identify with a leftist tradition. Thus we are left with the term “hyperleft,” one which I think suits our predicament quite nicely.
If we’re serious about trying to create a better world, then a thorough approach that considers a synthesis of approaches to social science and the dynamics of social groups is not something we can afford to compromise on. The infamous quote, “It has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” tells us how pervasive ideology is in the present day — something Mark Fisher calls Capitalist Realism, a conclusion of the neoliberal teleology. I do believe that, while deeper and more insidious aspects of ideology may make living in a sustainable communism ourselves a difficult task, combatting the surface of ideology could restore a conscious desire to at least work towards it, and thus give us a conscious impetus to engage in cranioanalysis. We must all do our bit to expose some of the main narratives and mythologies of our current systems as much as we can, and the battle into the media will be one difficult to understate in importance. Because reclaiming that initial inkling of desire to create a better world may just be the first step on a path to finally skirting ideology, in a craniomodern cultural movement.
Of course, no disrespect is meant to Marxists or anarchists here — I happily support anarchism where it works and revolutionary socialist states where those work, for purposes of cutting off capitalist feedback loops and improving human life. So long as, when the time comes to take the step further into communism, you can give people like me a voice. You could say my view of socialism or local communes is a bit like, say, how many Marxists might view social democracy. — Abraham Leonard Keefe
