Home Societal / Political Alienation A PALLID HOPELESSNESS: REFLECTIONS ON ALIENATION

A PALLID HOPELESSNESS: REFLECTIONS ON ALIENATION

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This passage introduces Marxist ontology very well. The continuation of the same passage (Kovel, 1978) begins to point up Marxism’s overlap with the psychoanalytic aim of historical inquiry:

The record of man’s self-transformation is history. Thus, before anything else, Marxism is the historical vision as such…. The historical dimension of Marxism is the successor, within the terms-of scientific discourse, to the vividness of the animistic world-view. The bourgeois revolution deadened the world and froze it into an ahistorical world of Kantian “thing-in-itself” and a knowing subject transcendentally removed from materiality. It took Marx to restore a sense of motion to the things of the world–a trajectory given by concrete human activity, or praxis. Despite a certain psychological indifference and short-sightedness … Marx leaves no doubt that our psyche, along with everything else human, is to be regarded as a historical product.’ (pp. 110-111)

Perhaps surprisingly to many mainstream Americans, they are likely to concur with Marxist ontology.

Extenuation and Distortion

A notion termed extenuation suggests a willful or tacit perceptual distortion of the actualities of human circumstances, thought, and meanings; such distortion is undertaken with the aim of sustaining a psychosocial status quo. This sense of extenuation may be adumbrated here so better to apprehend typical American understanding of Marxism: It has been presented to everyday people, and to mainline social thinkers as well, essentially as a prescriptive theory of state socialism. What is attenuated by such an apprehension is Marxism’s central guiding thrust which is a descriptive critique of existing capitalist societies.

I would agree with Marxism’s critics that it has been remanded to “the ash-heap” (or “the dung-heap”)7 of history. This does, though, not mean the supersession or the “death” of Marxism, though it seems to have run a terminal course as a developmental theory of state socialism for cultures without a capitalist precursor.

Rather, the “ash-heap/dung-heap” metaphor is taken here more dialectically than is (consciously) intended by anti-Marxists: Both ashes and dung symbolize that which is classed as undesirable, to be gotten rid of. To pro-capitalists, Marxism’s critique–to the extent that it is unsettlingly-accurate–surely is highly undesirable. The hope of the pro-capitalist is that the thrown-away detritus, literal and conceptual, of their society is gone for good. But, as in the act of (psychoanalytic) repression, the repressed necessarily returns to subtly make itself known as an influential, if consciously unrecognized, determinant of individual and social life and lives. What is repressed is not merely the theoretical-rhetoric of Marxism but the full realities of the ongoing humanly harmful practices of capitalism. These are what Marxist critique illuminates.’

A key influence of Marxism herein, then, is its critique spirit and radical digging for meanings that typically are obscured in discourse about American life. Of comparably primary influence is its dialectic methodology: Its probing for radical meaning in the interrelationships of societal elements, which also typifies psychoanalytic methodology at its explanatory best. Somewhat less primary herein, for methodological and content considerations to be taken up later, is close obeisance to many of Marxism’s specific theoretical tenets.

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