Competition among Intellectuals
Competition among Intellectuals
The thoughts, ideas, and insights of a person, regardless of the social and economic system they are subject to, are products of their environment. What they think, how they think, and how they perceive and recognize things – knowledge about a matter exists in the context of the influences that affect that knowledge. The person does not exist in a vacuum, where a correct insight could simply be accepted. In capitalism, the individual experiences alienation from knowledge itself, partly because the process of gaining knowledge is hindered by the deafness of leisure time, which contradicts its capitalist nature. By this, I mean that knowledge of what is right itself stands in complete opposition to what a person in capitalism has to do; namely, increase surplus value and profit. What is inherent in the capitalist individual is deafness, which is characterized by the nature of wage labor and the compulsion to it. The alienation from the product of labor, which manifests in the product itself, the alienation from fellow humans, and the reduction of oneself to a commodity, lead to a leisure time that is solely dedicated to pleasure, consumption, entertainment, and inertia – and this is, of course, not the fault of the worker. With the digitization of the world and completely new consumption opportunities through social networks, the cultural industry has found entirely new ways to profit from this alienation. It reproduces bourgeois consciousness, primarily through the absence of productive thinking. The cultural industry actively opposes knowledge, mainly because it is difficult to convey in 10-second videos. Frustration still exists; symptoms of capitalist contradictions are clearly recognizable to everyone, such as the often-propagated age poverty, the wars in Ukraine and Palestine, the increase in migration – but the cause remains unrecognized. And this is precisely because addressing symptoms, e.g., “the fight against migration,” is much easier to communicate than explaining the root causes. Of course, because there is nothing to it; the rise of nationalism and fascist tendencies is a response to the easily marketable symptom-focused policies of bourgeois and fascist forces. (More on the rise of the far right here.) A Bild newspaper sells much better than a Junge Welt, but that says nothing about the content – only how easy it is to digest and sell. From this realization, namely that the person in capitalism is alienated and does not act in a vacuum, the most important lesson for every Marxist: Agitation emerges. 95% of people in Germany are employed in wage labor, with only a few percent of petty bourgeois entrepreneurs and a handful who finance most of their wealth through living labor and the resulting surplus value theft. Most of the wage workers in this country are aware of this; wealth inequality is no secret. Unconsciously, the reasons and consequences of this, based on the law of profit maximization—war, fascism, crisis—are understood. Only a small part of these 95% are academics or those who could afford to study Marxism with its complex analyses. I am not selling “the people” as dumb with this thesis, I just recognize that capitalist life, due to alienation and inertia, makes studying complex theories more difficult. Someone who spends 8 hours a day stocking shelves at Edeka will not accept, no matter how valid the argument, if the first two lines are so complicated that they do not want to read further. Instead, they read Springer and Spiegel, because their arguments are content-free but at least understandable. “In the organization’s paper production, we mainly recognize their practice only as the competition among intellectuals, who compete in front of an imaginary jury, which cannot be the working class because its language already excludes their participation, for the rank of better Marx reception. They are more embarrassed to be caught with a false Marx quote than with a lie, when their practice is at stake.” When Marxists, at the current level of social consciousness, write only in a way that other Marxists can understand them, one must ask: What are you fighting for? The goal cannot be socialism, because it cannot be built by a handful of intellectuals. They fight for themselves, solely to elevate their extensive theories, which they reproduce for their ideological comrades, onto a pedestal – even against other Marxists. These people dissect every argument down to individual terms, without a goal – or with a goal that cannot be the agitation of 95%. The level of awareness here in the country is not at a point where one could afford to make Marxism appear more incomprehensible. No one you can reach will be reached with a language they do not understand. No one you can reach will be reached with a language they do not understand. Point; Agitate! (The article “Focusing on Appeals” deals with a similar topic, read here.)