For the most part dialectics is just a mind-numbingly boring attempt to manipulate people.
I can't imagine how awful Marxist dialectics must have been when talking with Marx, or Lenin or any of the true believer crowd.
But sometimes, as Hegel well knew, it is the quickest way to clarify an idea.
From American Affairs Journal:
REVIEW ESSAY
The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business
by Stephen R. Soukup
Encounter, 2021, 196 pagesIn 1654, Peter Stuyvesant, director general of New Amsterdam (later New York) barred Jews from entering the colony. Then all progressive hell broke loose. Under pressure from shareholders, the Dutch West India Company reversed Stuyvesant’s decision and gradually “cancelled” him.1 It was an early example of political activism in business.
Stephen R. Soukup argues in The Dictatorship of Woke Capital that the Left today has harnessed the power of business to advance its political ends. Yet “woke capitalism”—meaning capitalism that puts political goals ahead of profit, and where business forever worries about antagonizing public opinion—is nothing new. As the Stuyvesant story suggests, “woke capital” has been around for centuries. Only the ideology behind wokeness has changed.
On some level, Soukup recognizes this. He traces “socially responsible” investing as far back as John Wesley, the eighteenth-century English cleric who founded Methodism, and who told investors to steer clear of businesses that violated God’s law. Even as late as the twentieth century, some conservative investors avoided companies that made alcohol and tobacco. The difference between then and now lies in the nature of today’s wokeness—and its totality. Most major American corporations have joined with academia, elite media, and government bureaucracies to push a progressive cultural agenda.
Soukup’s book reads like an indictment, suggesting a conspiracy at work, almost forgetting that all trades have their seamy side. It brings to mind tracts written in the 1970s that accused the Rockefellers, the Trilateral Commission, and the big banks of trying to take over the world. Yet this is the wrong approach. With so many average Americans today as woke as their corporate leaders, one senses an inexorable “woke” force moving through society, carrying America’s corporate leaders along with it. In fact, that force is capitalism itself.
The Dialectics of Woke CapitalKarl Marx has much to say about capitalism, but Soukup overlooks him, tracing wokeness, instead, back to Marx’s missteps. The absence of any revolution in the West along the lines Marx had predicted led to Gramsci’s view that a cultural revolution within institutions needed to precede the economic revolution. This led to Lukács’s position that all of society must first undergo a cultural revolution, which in turn led to Marcuse’s call for a sexual revolution and, later, censorship. The result, says Soukup, is “Cultural Marxism,” which, combined with identity politics, is the ideology of today’s woke. Yet if Soukup had paid more attention to Marx, he might have found a better way to explain “woke capital”—and to fight it. In a supreme irony, those seeking to advance a center-right agenda today could benefit from reading Marx.
Marx thought dialectically. What does this mean? Take a certain social phenomenon: it develops to its utmost limits, makes use of all its potentialities, creates the highest thing it can, and stops. This is called the thesis. Then comes the antithesis, a hostile force. It also unfolds to the very end, and stops. Born out of these two hostile phenomena is a third force, the synthesis, making use of the result achieved by both, and reconciling them. And society moves forward again, always forward, toward the new.
A rough dialectical history of the United States since the end of the Civil War might be said to unfold as follows, with woke capitalism the most recent entry. In 1870, most Americans worked as independent small farmers. Most business firms were also small, with one or two employees besides the owner.2 A culture of individualism and a religious ethos that gently repressed greed complemented this economy. The country prospered, yet the economy’s small scale limited how much it could produce. This was the thesis.
Hostile forces emerged in the form of robber barons who built large corporations, sometimes through deceit and manipulation. A culture of social Darwinism that equated worldly success with spiritual superiority replaced the older, more innocent religious ethos. Many Americans found themselves subject to both the vicissitudes of the market and business chicanery, as large companies undercut their ability to make a living as independent operators. Indeed, one of the most important changes in the U.S. economy during the second half of the nineteenth century was the dramatic increase in the size of the average enterprise, along with a reduction in the number of firms in each sector.3 The new system produced more wealth than before through improved economies of scale, yet its roisterous atmosphere created uncertainty, and it soon reached its productive limits. This was the antithesis.
Corporate America and welfare-state liberalism were the synthesis. In the first half of the twentieth century, the robber barons’ large enterprises became the tamed corporations that promised stable salaried employment, while the robber baron himself morphed into the harmless corporate manager, indeed a business bureaucrat. The old religion that had gently repressed greed returned in a slightly new form called the “social ethic,” which promoted the ideal of company teamwork and repressed outward displays of ambition. Meanwhile, government added another layer of stability in the form of FDIC and Social Security and, later, in the form of welfare payments, Medicare, and Medicaid.
After the Second World War, the American economy found itself launched on a great boom, yet this synthesis soon reached its productive limits. By the 1970s, large corporations promising stability had grown less flexible and innovative. Meanwhile, government spending had increased to one-third of GDP. High tax rates sustained the expanded welfare state, yet they also discouraged investment, while government intervention to increase people’s purchasing power contributed to inflation.
A dialectical analysis explains what happened. From 1950 to 1970, welfare and entitlement programs grew from 9 percent of GDP to 15 percent4 (while military spending trended lower but ticked up during the Vietnam War). Capitalism needed a “floor” to avoid the risk posed by a demoralized and disgruntled workforce. In the form of expanded Social Security benefits, Medicare, Medicaid, federally assisted welfare programs, agricultural subsidies, and a minimum wage, government became an active force for personal income security. A stable political climate—a necessity for business investment—could not exist without this floor, yet the new government spending led to inflation, which discouraged business investment. It was a contradiction.
Inflation had already climbed to 4 percent on average during the late 1960s, and to 6 percent in the early 1970s, before the “oil shocks” in 1973.5 The origins of this inflation ran deeper: the synthesis was unraveling through contradiction. A century before, a spike in oil prices would have more likely caused a depression rather than inflation, as industries would have curtailed their operations and consumers cut back on their spending. A culture that prized “standing on one’s own two feet,” spurned handouts, and one that believed “what goes up must come down” would have discouraged any artificial increase in business or consumer purchasing power through government spending. The synthesis that prevailed during the 1970s, however, encouraged such spending. Its culture embraced entitlements and believed “What goes up today is likely to go up tomorrow,” leading to the kind of behavior that accelerated inflation and hastened the demise of the old synthesis.
Hostile forces—the antithesis—soon emerged in the form of upstart companies such as Microsoft, Sprint, and Apple, which spearheaded innovation. In the case of Microsoft, for example, IBM paid Bill Gates to develop an operating system for PCs almost as an afterthought, overlooking software’s potential, and allowed Gates to retain the intellectual property rights, which would fuel the rise of Microsoft.
One hostile force even carried the word “hostile” in its name. A new merger wave broke out in the 1980s that dwarfed all earlier periods of corporate consolidation, with the “hostile takeover,” once a rarity, increasingly the dominant form.6 The result was another contradiction of capitalism. High interest rates needed to fight inflation depressed the price of corporate shares, while the deregulation needed to boost the economy allowed corporate raiders to buy out these undervalued corporations and sell off their valuable assets. The mergers created new wealth, but also displaced millions of workers and middle managers. Those who kept their jobs often lost the economic security they had enjoyed with the traditional large companies. IRAs and 401(k)s gradually replaced the old company-based defined-benefit pension plans. When U.S. corporations threatened to move production overseas, labor’s influence weakened and private sector union membership began its long decline.
During this period, which spans the Reagan years, a new entrepreneurial culture replaced the old Social Ethic. The notion that “greed is good” justified the new economy, much as the Social Ethic had justified mid-twentieth-century corporate America and social Darwinism had justified the robber barons. Yet the entrepreneurial culture’s belief in the “primacy of economic man” ignored emerging tears in the social fabric, ranging from African Americans marooned in crime-ridden cities to families stressed by the new demand that both spouses work. In the latter case, capitalism not only encouraged women to enter the workforce, but also demanded it, and benefited from it. With businesses paying relatively less to any individual worker, both spouses now had to work to maintain the middle-class lifestyle that a single wage earner could once provide—a point that both social conservatives and economic progressives, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, would later focus on.7 These social strains, along with economic uncertainty, limited how much this economic organization could produce.
What has been called “progressive neoliberalism” emerged as the new synthesis, drawing from the two previous historical stages. It reached its high point during the Clinton administration. Capitalism’s rules continued to guide the economy in accordance with the “primacy of economic man.” Under President Clinton, for example, shareholders prospered through lower capital gains taxes and more free trade agreements. Clinton also tried to control the deficit while restricting welfare payments.
Meanwhile, in the culture, specific identity groups were targeted for support to manage tears in the social fabric. It was a variation on the old Social Ethic that had tried to help people “adjust” by attending to their feelings. Women got set-asides, while African Americans got easier access to subprime mortgages. Yet more important was the rhetorical support given to these specific groups, which didn’t hang very heavy on the corporate balance sheet. African Americans, women, Hispanics, and Native Americans gained more attention and recognition—for example, in the form of “hate crime” legislation, postage stamps bearing the face of a marginalized group’s leader, or holidays named after the same—with little financial cost. These were “cultural entitlements” rather than economic entitlements, directed toward helping people feel better about themselves independent of their material condition. George H. W. Bush’s “kinder, gentler conservatism” and George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” operated within this tradition, as these mottos supported capitalism, while also trying to compensate people psychologically—and they did, in some nebulous way.
Yet this neoliberalism soon reached its productive limits, which is where “woke capital” comes in. The neoliberal synthesis accelerated the offshoring of manufacturing, while many of the new tech companies employed fewer people than the old large companies did. Wealth increased, but was concentrated in fewer hands, while the bottom half of the population faced increasing pressures on living standards. After 2000, weaker growth brought lower interest rates, which contributed to real estate and financial bubbles.....
....MUCH MORE
See also yesterday's Schumpeter's opening words are apocalyptic: "Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can." for the thoughts of a guy who predicted this in 1942.
International Day of Direct Action Against Climate Change and the G8
....Time to brush up on the Dialectical Materialism (nobody told you this was going to be easy):
Lenin's elements of dialectics
Lenin made some brief notes outlining three "elements" of logic after reading Hegel's Science of Logic in 1914. They are:
| “ | 1)
The determination of the concept out of itself [the thing itself must
be considered in its relations and in its development]; 2) the contradictory nature of the thing itself (the other of itself), the contradictory forces and tendencies in each phenomenon; 3) the union of analysis and synthesis. Such apparently are the elements of dialectics. | ” |
| — Lenin, Summary of dialectics |
Lenin develops these in a further series of notes, and appears to argue that "the transition of quantity into quality and vice versa" is an example of the unity and opposition of opposites expressed tentatively as "not only the unity of opposites, but the transitions of every determination, quality, feature, side, property into every other [into its opposite?]."
Even Wikipedia gets a little confused as to what Lenin is saying, whereas Lenin seems to nail Hegel (which ain't always easy).
"There's battle lines bein' drawn..."
See you June 8th.
For more of our philosophical foundations see "Big Four Accountant Partners: "Does Kant’s definition or Augustine’s and Aquinas’s definition of evil as privatio boni in subjecto...".
Or Schopenauer's "Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten" (The Art Of Controversy) for tips and strategies on not just talking dialectics but WINNING at dialectics:
....Put His Thesis Into Some Odious Category
It Applies in Theory, But Not in Practice
Don't Let Him Off The Hook
Will is More Effective Than Insight
Bewilder Your opponent by Mere Bombast
A Faulty Proof Refutes His Whole Position
Become Personal, Insulting, Rude (the Ultimate Stratagem)
And that, children, is why we study philosophy.
(and watch Monty Python)
Thanks to coolhaus.de for keeping the Art of Controversy on the web.
