From Hegel to dialectical materialism and ideology - what is the future of capitalism?

 

I: INTRODUCTION TO HEGEL’S DIALECTIC AND SUBLATION

 

            There is no way in which we can answer the questions of socialism or Marxism (how do we define them, are they good or bad, etc.) without understanding the philosophy upon which they were built upon: Hegel’s speculative idealism. German idealist philosopher Hegel developed his philosophy upon two primary (related) concepts: the dialectic and sublation. These are the two most important concepts in his philosophy, and it is from this that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels developed their philosophy of “dialectical materialism”.

            Hegelian dialectics argue that the tension between two opposites gives rise to new useful material. One way in which you can view the idea of the dialectic is like the idea of tension in physics: an object is dragged in two opposite directions by two forces until it “breaks” or “snaps”. Imagine an elastic cord that I drag with both of my hands in two opposite directions: it will keep stretching and stretching until one moment in which it will snap, and from a circular elastic cord it will transform into a simple line. This is why Hegel was skeptical of the “reductio ad absurdum” principle in logic and mathematics, that if we have arrived at a contradiction or a paradox, then it means that our premise was flawed and/or there was a flaw in our reasoning. Hegel speculated that contradictions may very well be a good thing because nature and the universe itself are composed of contradictions – and our job is to take these contradictions “to the limit”.

            What I call this “snapping” of the tension inside a dialectic is what Hegel called aufhebung in German, which is usually translated as sublation. It is a paradoxical word that means both “to preserve” and “to cancel”. For example, the concept of “tree” sublates the concept of “sapling”. A tree both contradicts or “cancels” the idea of sapling and preserves it at the same time. On one hand, it contradicts it because an object cannot be both a sapling and a tree at the same time. On the other hand, it preserves it, because all trees started out as saplings. To “sublate” something means to progress or further develop it along its natural course. Hegel thought that his was the correct way to view philosophy – that each new development in philosophy is a sublation of the previous philosopher(s) that we are building upon: if Hegel contradicted or “disagreed with” Kant’s philosophy, that doesn’t mean that what Kant did was useless, since Hegel built upon his project, so Hegel both canceled and preserved Kant’s philosophy at the same time.

            One easy-to-understand example of the sublation of a dialectic is the movement from teenager to young adult. Other than the biological growth of a person, or the legal transition that is fixed at 18 years old in most countries, there is also a moment in the life of each person, nowadays usually somewhere between the ages of 16 and 30, where psychologically or “symbolically” they mature into an adult and are no longer a teenager. Hence, the idea of “adult” is the sublation of the idea of “teenager” – it both cancels it and preserves it, it is the natural development of one into another. Sublation is the “snap” or “pop” of the inner tension inside the contradiction of the dialectic. The dialectic of teenage-hood is the tension between having the responsibilities or expectations of an adult while having the freedom or power of a child. The more a person progresses in the state of a teenager, the more this tension gets bigger and bigger: the expectations of acting like an adult get stronger and larger without the power and freedom also getting bigger, and hence, the difference between the two largens. At a certain point in life, this difference will get so large that it will “snap in two”, just like an elastic cord dragged in two opposite directions – and that will be the moment of the sublation, of a metaphorical “revolution” in the life of the person, so to speak, when they will engage in some radical act of independence (ex: moving out of their parents’ house and going to college in another city).

            The moment of the sublation or “revolution” does not necessarily need to be violent, but it is always a tension. It could take the form of an argument or fight, or it could be peaceful. Take, for instance, the idea that a person thrown into water will learn how to swim. There is a dialectic at play there: the desire to stay alive and keep at the surface is in tension with the force that is dragging you down into the water, threatening your life. When this tension gets big enough – a third element is produced: the ability to swim. But one can also view it in a more peaceful manner: the idea of a male orgasm is the sublation of the dialectic between the upstrokes and the downstrokes of the penis – this is not “violent” per se, but it is a tension that is released after its sublation.

 

II: THE RETROACTIVE ILLUSION OF USELESSNESS

 

            One feature of the dialectic is that, after its sublation, it retroactively seems useless. This is most evident in Zizek’s “paradox of seduction” – that a seduction is successful when the seduced person later says “You had me at first glance, you didn’t need to go through all that to win me over!”.

            The stages of development inside a relationship follow the same idea of dialectic and sublation – each stage is the natural development of the next stage. You cannot skip the steps, you must go through each step in order to get to the next one, and yet whenever you get to the next one, it retroactively feels like only if you knew some sort of detail from the very beginning, you wouldn’t have needed to go through the previous one (which is not true). The paradox of seduction is that, after its sublation, the two partners feel like “Only if we knew from the very beginning that we were compatible, we wouldn’t need to go through all of that bullshit!”, when in reality their personalities and way-of-being were changed and shaped by the very process of seduction itself, since our persona changes depending on the context in which we are in. 

            A good example is this: I had a former classmate of mine that first wanted to study medicine after high school. She studied for the admission exam, failed, stayed one year at home and studied for one more year, failed again and then realized that it was actually never a good idea to study medicine in the first place, and that she actually wants to pursue psychology. After she got admitted into the psychology degree, all the effort in studying medicine seemed retroactively useless: “Only if I had known from the very beginning that psychology is right for me, I wouldn’t have wasted two years studying all this biology and chemistry that I will never use in my life!”. There is a catch here: if she hadn’t studied for her medicine admission exams, she would have never realized that she wants to pursue psychology in the first place. Hence, the sublation of each dialectic is a “necessary failure”, a self-defeating process that has a limited amount of “energy” that is consumed until it “runs out” and gives rise to the next process.

            The idea is this: each stage in the development of a process has a certain amount of “energy” or “fuel” until it “expires”, so to speak. The idea is to consume it all until its inevitable failure – at that point, we will out of necessity jump to the next stage in the process, through the very failure of the current one. However, the journey is more important than the destination in the way that the necessary failure acquires us the tools or skills to deal with the next stage in the process. In this way, my colleague needed to study medicine not in order to become a medic, but in order to acquire the skills and tools in life in order to realize that she needed to study psychology. The stage of seduction in a relationship prepares you for a relationship, the stage of a relationship prepares you for marriage. In each stage of a romantic relationship, the previous stages seem retroactively useless, but they are there to be “consumed” until they “run out” and will inevitably lead to the next stage after their inevitable failure. Each stage “works” until it doesn’t – and when it stops working, we move onto the next thing. But it is only possible to move onto the next thing if we have the tools, skills and knowledge acquired by the inevitable failure of the previous thing. In this way, each stage of the romantic relationship is designed to fail: the seduction is there not for you to stay in it forever, but to prepare you for the next stage, the early relationship is there not for you to stay in it forever, but to prepare you for the stage in which you start living together in the same house (regardless of whether you get legally married or not). Each stage is designed to fail, to “run out”, to “expire” after a certain period, and to use all that pent up energy that you “consumed” from the stage into the next stage of the process.

            It’s in this same way that we need to view the progression of society from one economic system to another. Feudalism had certain contradictions that got larger and larger until they “exploded” or “snapped” in the French revolution of 1789 – that was the sublation of feudalism into capitalism. After the French revolution, humanity immediately saw that capitalism was better in every way compared to feudalism, and we were given the retroactive illusion that feudalism was useless: “Only if we knew five centuries before that this form of organizing our society is so much better than what we were doing at the time, we wouldn’t have needed to go through all of that crap and wasted so many centuries in an inferior system!”. The problem is that without going through feudalism:

1.     We wouldn’t have the necessary skills, tools, knowledge and resources to run capitalism

2.     We wouldn’t even know what capitalism is

It’s in this same way that we need to view the progression from capitalism into the next system (which you could call “socialism”, I guess). After capitalism runs its course, we will end up in a better way of organizing our society. At that point, capitalism will retroactively seem useless “Only if we had known how to do this in the 19^th century, we wouldn’t waste so much time in capitalism, which is inferior in every way!”. The problem is that without going through all the stages of capitalism, we wouldn’t have the necessary skills, tools and resources to run socialism in the first place. This is why you cannot “skip” any steps: in the stages of a relationship, in the stages of development of a person (ex: child -> adult), or in the stages of development of an economic system.

To have a socialist planned economy requires us to solve the socialist calculation problem. Capitalism is currently run by many contradictions, and almost everyone (other than the hardcore libertarians and minarchists) agrees that the state’s intervention is necessary to correct what most economists call “market failures” – even the right-wingers. Extremely few people today advocate for a completely unregulated market, the only exception being the Austrian school of economics led by Mises. Hence, there is the need for the intervention of the state in correcting these market failures: the possibility of the development of cartels, the network effect, the development of monopolies and oligopolies, products and services with very low elasticity of demand, and other factors that lead to a large gap between the profit and the opportunity cost. The only school of economics that states that the profit of a company is equal to the cost of opportunity is Mises’ libertarian school.

Socialism is the theoretical possibility of having some sort of mechanism that automatically plans out each detail of the economy, distributing resources accordingly, without the need of the “invisible hand” of the market. Such a calculation would correct for market failures. However, we cannot have socialism without a developed-enough technology. If we will ever have socialism, it will be run by artificial intelligence. An advanced enough AI algorithm will plan out our economy. But, it is impossible to develop such an AI in the first place if we do not first go through all the stages of capitalism, in order.

One of the best things about capitalism is unlimited and accelerated economic growth, which leads to quick and efficient technological advancement and research innovations. One of the worst things about capitalism is also unlimited and accelerated economic growth, which leads to working-place fatigue and the destruction of the planet and the quick consumption of our planet’s limited resources. Capitalism is the best system for quick research and innovation, and thus, the only system that can lead us to the discovery and development of such an advanced system of artificial intelligence and automation of most jobs. Hence, the only way to have the necessary toolkit to run socialism is to first go through capitalism – capitalism’s job is to prepare us for socialism and then inevitably fail, just like feudalism’s job was to prepare us for capitalism and then inevitably fail.

The main crisis that will lead us to the socialist revolution will be the climate crisis. We will consume the resources of our planet so much until the unregulated “free” market model of competition will become unsustainable. We will gradually need to apply more and more regulations on businesses and individuals on the market until the market will become so constrained and regulated that it wouldn’t make sense to call it capitalism anymore. However, the only way to run the economy at that point will be with the technology, knowledge, robots, computers and AI algorithms that were developed in the previous stage, with the consumption of our planet’s limited resources. Hence, the inherent paradox in the dialectic of capitalism is that we must first destroy our planet in order to learn how to live our lives efficiently without destroying the planet. This gives us the retroactive illusion of uselessness, that we will only find out how to live our lives with both advanced technology and some stable climate-regulations only when it will seem “too late”.

Marx was a genius for his time, but he did not get the details right. This makes sense since what Marx was trying to do was a prognosis, and the further into the future you try to predict something, the more your accuracy decreases. Just like my prognosis for the weather tomorrow will be better than my prognosis for the weather in one week, Marx got the general schema of dialectical materialism right, as well as the idea that it will be technological progress that will help us run socialism. However, when Marx wrote his theory, the phone was just getting invented. Marx did not know what a computer is, what a mobile phone is, what the internet is, and most especially, what artificial intelligence is. He could not have known that artificial intelligence will be the tool that will slowly automate most of our jobs (and in the future, politicians as well, according to my prediction) because that didn’t exist in his time. Still, for a prediction ~150 years into the future, his accuracy was incredible regardless.

 

III: AND WHAT IF YOU SKIP STEPS?

 

Popular wisdom, regardless of how stupid it may be at times, teaches us that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. However, I argue, that everything is a constant process of breaking, of becoming broken. The phone I use right now is not broken, I can still use it, so there is nothing to fix. But at one point in the future, it will break. Until then, it’s in a constant process of breaking or decaying.

The next stage in the development of a process is the result of the breaking or decaying of the previous one. Everything works until it stops working, and after it stops working, we will move onto the “next, better thing” out of necessity. Until we move onto the next thing, we need to “consume” or “use” the current thing until it breaks. The dialectic inside my mobile phone is a literal tension inside its tiny components and circuits. Once the tension gets big enough, those components will break and my phone will stop working. There is no reason for me to buy a new phone yet, but I will be forced to buy a new one when my current one will break.

In other words, each stage in the development has a limited lifetime. You can only move to the next stage until you have “finished” or “consumed” the entirety of the current stage. The process of moving from one stage to another in the dialectic is the point of sublation, as previously explained.

A relationship must go through various stages, and the number of stages, their description and the details vary with each relationship. The most common version (in capitalism) is unregulated polygamy (“casual dating”) -> informally regulated monogamy (“committed relationship”) -> legally regulated monogamy (“marriage”). The couple moves from “no contract” to “informal contract” to “formal, legal contract”. However, they can only move from one stage to the next when they have “consumed” the limited lifetime of the current stage. The couple decides to define the terms and conditions of their relationship (first, informally, without the intervention of the state or the church) when there is a certain tension or “problem” that arrives in the first stage. If the jealousy gets big enough, they may decide to become monogamous for example, and “close” their relationship. However, one can only progress to this second stage once the first stage somehow “breaks” or “stops working”. If it’s not broken, you cannot fix it, and hence you must “consume it" to its inevitable failure - you "close" or "define" your relationship whenever the model of an undefined/open relationship stops working. The progress from “boyfriend/girlfriend” to “spouse” is the same – once the former stage “stops working”, the couple will need to inevitably get married out of necessity, because the tension in the contradictions in the former stage got big enough until it “broke” or “snapped”. For example, the couple moves together in the same house, and now they need legal protections from the state, and other contracts. The informal contract stops being viable and out of necessity they will get legally married. If the couple is religious, then a similar religious/spiritual tension or contradiction may arise and they will get married in the church as well. Of course, this is a general simplified schema of the most commonly-found progression, but each relationship is different and may have different obstacles and resolutions to those obstacles.

To skip the stages in a relationship means to solve a problem that hasn’t been encountered yet. It is unadvised – to get married after you have known each other for 3 months usually means to rush through things. Such a “skip” leads to what in psychoanalysis we call a repression of the dialectic in the previous stage. A couple is married only “in theory”, but in practice it is not a properly married couple and still acts like a young couple, but because they are “technically” married, the “young” nature of their relationship gets repressed, “swept under the rug” as we say in common language. This repression leads to a return of the repressed, some sort of symptom that causes discomfort. For instance, after getting married too early, they are forced to act like a mature couple while they are still a young couple, and the return of the repressed (the psychoanalytic symptom) is a series of conflicts, misunderstandings, etc.

The stages of life are the same. You cannot send a 14-year-old teenager in another city to college and to live on their own. This will lead to a repression of their status as teenager and a return of the repressed. They will “force themselves” to act like a young adult while still not officially being one. A symptom, the return of the repressed will appear: mental illness, failed classes, bad grades, etc.

From this perspective, we can better understand what Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks tried to do a century ago, for example. They skipped the steps. They tried to implement socialism earlier than it was even possible to do so. Their regime was only socialist “in theory”, because in practice, capitalism (private propriety, the free market, etc.) was not abolished but banned. Hence it was “repressed” onto the black market. And hence, the “socialist” regime of the USSR was just as much a capitalist regime where the capitalist, unregulated black market ran most oft he economy, and the planned economy was only a veil, a mask, to hide the fact that there was no true socialism in the first place. Socialism is the abolishment of private propriety, so to call the USSR socialism is like calling America a “drug-free” because they made drugs illegal, it does not make sense. You can call it a “repressed capitalism”, and from a certain perspective, it was even more capitalist and right-wing that today’s “mixed economies” because their black market was way crazier and more unregulated than our current market. Sure, most of our mixed economies today also have a black market, but way smaller – the USSR had a black market for everything, because privately selling anything was illegal: t-shirts, CDs, chewing gum, etc. There is no black market for chewing gum in Sweden, and hence, the entire market of chewing gum is partially regulated by the state (through taxation, etc.). The USSR’s market for chewing gum was more “right-wing” or “libertarian” because it had little to no state intervention, even if it was illegal. Just as much as the USSR was a communist dystopia, it was at the same time an anarcho-capitalist dystopia. To answer the question “what was the economy of the Soviet Union?” does not make sense since it is a stupid question in the first place, a better question would be a question about the economies of the Soviet Union, two economies that were in a constant dialectical tension of opposites.

The result of trying to skip the steps of capitalism by Lenin and his boys was disastrous: a failed economy and a totalitarian regime that was arguably even more murderous than Hitler’s Nazi regime. The mistake is to assume that socialism is flawed by its nature just because it always failed. What Lenin did was equivalent to sending a 14-year-old to college, or to marrying someone after knowing them for a few months: this does not make going to college or marriage inherently “bad” in any way. Socialism is not flawed in theory and it is only flawed in practice in our current time period. Similarly enough, if I were to be teleported into the 14^th century, I would acknowledge, in my mind, capitalism as a theoretically superior system to feudalism while also knowing that it would be impossible to implement at that time, and that any attempt at implementing to it would lead to a disaster even bigger than early feudalism.

 

IV: DETERMINISM AND THE ILLUSION OF FREE WILL UNDER CAPITALISM

 

Marx’s theory of dialectical materialism that I am using here is inherently deterministic, as you can see. It implies a limited amount of freedom in deciding the way we run our country and our economy. We still do have some freedom, just like a teenager has a limited freedom in deciding how much they mature for their age, but they are also limited by the constrains of biology (their brain and body are not fully developed yet) and by the constrains of their limited life-experience. Humanity has limited freedom in deciding the way it organizes itself just like the individual human has limited freedom in deciding the way it organizes their own life, limited by the constrains of their unconscious.

Determinism is inherently anti-ideological and ideology is precisely a symptom of capitalism, as Slavoj Zizek most commonly argues. It is the illusion of free will, the idea, for instance, that humans can just democratically decide to implement any policy and any economical system they want if there is enough support. Hence, both right-wingers and most self-proclaimed “socialists” are under the spell of ideology by their very definition of what it means to “support” an economic system. Under the ideology of capitalism, to support socialism means to support the idea that socialism is not only good in theory, but that you will take immediate action into implementing it if you were to be in office. Capitalism wants you to act on your desires, not to repress them (see: Byun-Chul Han’s book “The Burnout Society”). We do not live in a culture of repressing desires but in a culture of a compulsion to enjoy – the individual now is forced to “be themselves” to “do more of what makes them happy”. The system of oppression inside capitalism is a subtle one of indirect manipulation and seduction – you are allowed to do whatever you want while the system psychologically manipulates you into wanting certain things. Intention is part of ideology, and hence the idea of “supporting” capitalism or “supporting” socialism is distorted by ideology in order to imply that you are also intending to take immediate action into implementing such a system. Hence, if you tell a person that you support socialism, they will assume that if you were in office, you will take steps in the next 4-years into transitioning into a planned economy, as Lenin or Mao tried to do, for example. Hence, the self-proclaimed socialists, from the Stalin and Mao apologists to the “anarcho-communist” teenagers on Reddit are all followers of ideology by virtue of the fact that they believe that it is even possible to implement their systems in the first place.

Intentionality is a symptom of ideology, as intention, as most philosophers argue, is a desire with a plan of action. Hence, all intentions imply desires but not all desires imply intentions. If you intend to become president, it means you want (desire) to become president, but not the other way around - if I want to become president, it doesn't mean that I intend to become one, as long as I don't have a plan of action. Capitalism's ideology incentivizes us to turn desires into intentions since the system wants us to act on our desires ("do more of what makes you happy", "become who you want to be", "follow your dreams", etc.). The proper response, as Zizek notes, is "I would prefer not to". In the context where what I desire to obtain or to become is influenced by capital that runs targeted advertisement campaigns, what if I simply refuse to do what I want?

Acknowledging your lack of power and freedom is the first step in combatting ideology. I am reminded here of Zizek’s quote in “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema” where he comments the Matrix movie (paraphrasing): “The red pill wakes you up from the simulation, the blue pill makes you continue living in the simulation, forgetting everything that you learned about it. I want a third pill, I want to continue living in the simulation while knowing that it is a simulation.”. It is the same way that we need to treat ideology and capitalism, to not unnecessarily accelerate to the next economic system, but to find ways to survive inside capitalism, while also knowing that most of our problems are caused by it. The stance is to take a paradoxical stance where we are both for and against capitalism at the same time: against capitalism because in the future there will be a better way to organize our economy and because capitalism is the filter through which we view all of our problems, arguably even causing most of them (mental health, dating & relationships, sexuality & consent, even the idea of “illness” is a capitalist construct as the line between healthy and ill is determined by whether you are capable of working or not). For capitalism, because to intentionally cause its end causes more problems that it solves (as we see from the numerous failed attempts at implementing socialism), and because it is a superior system to all the previous ones (feudalism, slave economy, bronze economy, neolithic economy and hunter-gatherer economy). Each system has a “limited lifetime”, not in chronological time necessarily (years and months) but in logical time (the “steps” you have to go through), and so does capitalism have a limited “battery”, and we must continue living in capitalism until its battery runs to 0% and the necessity of socialism will accumulate to 100%.

On one hand, right-wingers are right when they say that implementing socialism will cause more problems that it will solve and that socialism is an utopian ideal that does not work in practice, and that there is no better alternative to capitalism right now. On the other hand, right-wingers are wrong to assume that this is related to something inherent in capitalism or in socialism as such, abstracted away from the dimension of time. In fact, these statements of right-wingers are only true in the temporal context of our current society, but they are wrong to assume that it was always like that and that it will always be like that.

On one hand, socialists are right when they say that socialism is a better system of organizing our society and our economy than capitalism. On the other hand, socialists are wrong when they imply that it is even possible to do such a thing at the moment.

On one hand, “centre-left” social democrats are right when they say that capitalism must not be abolished right now, but reformed through a strong welfare state. On the other hand, the reasons for why they want to do that are not correct: they are wrong in assuming that this is because a “mixed economy” is the best method of organizing our society in general. A mixed economy is the only way of organizing our society right now.

On one hand, “democratic socialists” are right when they say that democracy is the best system of political decisions to progress towards socialism. On the other hand, democratic socialists are wrong that the transition towards socialism will necessarily be a gradual shift that will be decided by a peaceful set of democratic elections. It may be peaceful or it may be a violent revolution, or a mix of both, who knows.

Anarchists are not right about anything. The sole purpose of their existence is to have someone to make fun of. Anarcho-communism and anarcho-capitalism do not make sense as the existence of both capitalism and socialism rely on the state. The state was invented with the invention of writing in the third economic system: the bronze economy. There were only two forms of "anarchism" in history: the hunter-gatherer economy and the neolithic economy. These two stateless or "anarchist" form of social-organization comprised around 90% of human history.