This isn’t a fiction story, these are some disorganized musings I’ve been having both lately as well as very very long ago.
Karl Marx is one of society’s bugbears. It’s funny when you think about it, few people probably really understand the true thrust of what he was driving at in his works, and yet we remember him. Hold him up as some particular thing, an object that reminds us of where we’re going. Or where we aren’t.
My own understanding of Marx comes mostly through what others have told me about him. Both in written as well as verbal form. I think my favorite written critiques of Marx are Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class and Arendt’s The Human Condition.
As for conversations, there will always be the half understood debate I mistakenly entered into with a Brazilian professor of economics that one time over a decade ago at USP.
It’s fun to see people only through the eyes of others, to suss them out via the traces of them that others sketch.
I’ve never read Karl Marx, but I know enough to know that through him run the difficult-to-best sketches of the Hegelian dialectic. I think it was Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, who talks about how ironclad Marx’s ability to wield the Synthesis, to imbue the trajectory of man with a finality, an inevitability.
How do you argue with the ironclad, an unbending arc of history that bends towards an ultimate transformation? I don’t think that you do. This is at least, the ultimate Struggle, as I understand it, with upending Marx, killing the bugbear once and for all: overcoming his correctness at the turning of the world. He was immovably accurate about how the world moves itself forward.
(Notably, Pirsig resolves the feedback loop of the human self by stopping the flow altogether, by pivoting straight from staring at the unending arc of time and human movement, myopia, forced myopia, until the world at last stands still. This is zen, this is the momentary. This is the highest experience of the unalienated self.)
It’s funny, when you really think about it, how “Thesis, Anti-thesis, Synthesis” is really the primitive construction of what today we know intimately as the feedback loop. It’s the very same feedback loop that Hofstadter took to the self and termed a “strange” one. (I Am A Strange Loop, he says.)
If we look through the lens of the self as strange loop, and turn that lens back onto the question Marx poses of alienation, what do we see?
I don’t really know what Marx said about alienation. I think it has something to do with labor and value and extraction. Like, if you work and someone else profits from your labor, that alienates you from the meaning of what you’re doing. I think in programming we call this “abstraction”.
I learned these things, I think, through a half-understood conversation with an economics professor at USP, at a class that I visited with my roommate at the time, who was studying Econ there in 2011. How attached is the labor to the self? (Veblen cheekily retorts: how attached is the leisure to the labor?)
If the self is a feedback loop and the labor is not attached to the product, then Marx surely must be saying that the feedback of production is detached, one layer removed from the maker. Which is correct, no? The master of the tools, of the space, of the capital detaches for themself some indeterminate portion of the feedback, the income, of the labor, of the output.
Is the work a full product of the labor or is the participation of the initiator via the set and setting and process an integral part of the final coming into existence of the object?
(It’s funny, you can see a bit of Heidegger in that last phrase, if you squint.)
I think we’ve hit upon something pretty clutch here about the definition of alienation — that alienation is the dampening of a signal, the reduction of feedback. We can comfortably re-term economic alienation as the result of a siphoning off of money (economic feedback) by the capitalists.
Where does that leave self-alienation though? If “alienation” is a reduction or dampening of feedback, what is the phenomena of outpacing or failing to successfully ‘loop the self’?
Looping Pirsig’s definition of Zen is interesting here as well; if we can define zen as the slowing of the bend of time to the momentary, does that also freeze or pause the speed of the loop of the self? Slowing the loop seems like the anti-thesis of alienation, the dampening of the loop.
In one you step out of the self-loop and fail to respond to what it’s telling you; in the other you slow the loop to a crawl. The slowing of the self-loop is the powershift of meditation, where the locus of control finally moves outside the processing-of-the-self into pure Being.