What are Ideas?
The Power of Ideas ✦
As we will see, the superior method is not to use the concrete to answer questions about the abstract, but to use the abstract to determine the concrete. The concept of an “idea” exists in consciousness already. They seem often to be flexible, and thus amorphous. They seem often to be narrow, and thus condemnable. To truly determine their nature, we need to understand how they work in relation to other material things, their abilities, and the power that they have.
The activity of communists does indeed include considerations of tone and proportion. Though this is a matter of tactics, not principle, it is a primary question, not secondary. This is because changes in consciousness are the only reason communists must continue studying current events and processes. Or rather, the role of perspectives in practice reduces to the need to understand changes in consciousness. Raising consciousness is indeed our historic task, because the goals of communism ultimately depend on it.
It is often said that the Marxists need to “educate the working class”. The education of the working class, the raising of class consciousness, does indeed depend on its most conscious elements. Yet, this innocuous premise already suggests the sectarian implication that the working class is unconscious and inert, and the victory of socialism simply depends on the loudness of the Marxist megaphones. But the working class is no “revolutionary subject” in this sense that “revolution is not possible because the working class live comfortably”. As I will explain, the consciousness of the working class is objective, responding to events only. The education of the working class depends on its most conscious elements, but not in a linear, mechanical fashion of repeated propaganda. In contradistinction, the task of the Marxists is to expand their own objective standing on the basis of their subjectivity, whilst the influence of the working class depends only on its objectivity. All this applies even in revolution, only that the path of least resistance is shorter on the basis of class independence from the bourgeoisie.
The Power of Ideas ✦
The movements of the working class as a whole can indeed only be reasonably understood as responses to experience. To understand how the working class moves, we must understand the large processes taking place in history, understanding that only the surface is an objective factor of consciousness, whilst the underlying “real movement”, as Marx says, is toward communism.
Does this mean that unorganised or non-revolutionary members of the working class are a mere homogeneous, unconscious mass? Of course not! The opposite is evidenced, first of all, in the level of immense productivity workers have in the most developed economies, but also throughout the world. They are individually engaged in all different manner of extremely complex processes, whereby they acquire fantastic powers of discrimination and conclusion, and understand more generally about the world, and often deeply in their specialisms bar the greatest of them, than the top of society did in antiquity. That is, save perhaps, I say hesitantly, for the understanding of interpersonal and spiritual pleasures that those emperors, scholars and clerics had.
Throughout the whole of society, you can see every which idea expressed in some way. Often, it finds a very confused and contradictory expression. It would seem that when an idea is ever conceivable, there will be individuals in the world committed in belief and practice to those ideas. For every event in society, the degree of capability, creativity, memory and comparison for the reasoning in all people can give birth to a hundred conflicting popular conclusions.
Thus, it is because of the richness and complexity of the inner life of the working class that its consciousness as a whole does not even seem to establish more than a single premise, or make more than a single step, in reasoning. The only thing the consciousness of the working class can do as a whole, objectively, is reject the current state of affairs. All the sharp edges of consciousness within the working class sit in contradiction, and every progressive tendency within has a counter-reaction. The resultant force is merely the minimum needed to overcome the inertia when the objective factor is rejected, via a method, which is itself an objective factor, which is the method that takes the path of least resistance. If a ruling party is rejected, the next most visible alternative is elected, and so on. Invariably, more complex but less radical ideas are tested first. The only idea which can lead to an uninterrupted success, social revolution, an open class struggle, is the most fundamental. Yet also it is the last to be tested because it is the most radical.
Think of a mass movement, heterogeneous as all mass movements are, learning from events. The false tactics are rejected one by one with each passing experience, as the direction, coordination and acceleration of the mass movement grow sharper, turning from an amorphous cloud into the shape of a wedge. With time, however, rejected states of affairs re-concretise from the contradictions of the last, often on a higher level. What truly develops the class consciousness of society, then, is the pace of events, such that these events collapse into each other, exhausting the less radical possibilities. Russia went through every kind of struggle and revolution which was possible at the time, before the October Revolution arrived.
The power of what could be, the power of ideas, then, comes first in their latent potential with regard to the objective factor. For example, the correctness of a hypothesis in calculating the arc of a projectile actualises the necessity of a mere possibility. A subjective factor informed by correct ideas can thus position itself to have far greater influence than its objective strength, though it requires patience and the seizure of opportunity. Such is the power an idea can give to a subjective factor, which is most effective when an idea is presented with such clarity and simplicity that it does not need to be thought through to be understood, but inspires thought for days, weeks or months. The power of ideas comes second, then, in the ability for the idea to develop into a possibility in mass consciousness. Of course, these two powers can only exist in conjunction, and we can draw out the process wherein an idea becomes objective with our understanding. Marx notes: “[t]he concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations.” Imagine an outlier in a series of measurements. Perhaps, a fringe, abstract theory is made with it. Over many measurements, or determinations, this theory can be made concrete and asserted as true. The difference in quality between the abstract and concrete is a difference in the quantity of determinations, and thus concretisation is merely a form of abstraction. Therein, an idea becomes objective. The name for this quality of such ideas, objective ideas, is “true”. Reality is unmediated, made of motion and matter, being the medium for interaction itself, whilst the truth can only be determined.
On the Disdain for Abstraction
The disdain for abstraction is founded on a false premise that there is an unbridgeable gulf between the abstract and the concrete, the dualism that mechanical materialism and subjective idealism necessitate, where abstractions are formulae which can only be forced onto reality, and thus are only good for matters of principle, as in the case of Lenin’s correct advocacy for what he described as “Marxist dogma”. But the application of abstractions is far broader than that, and where the empiricist argues abstractions are mere generalisations, the creation of categories, downstream from the concrete, the opposite is in fact true. As Marx says, the concrete “appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation [Anschauung] and conception.”
Marx describes economics, where the concrete is conceived of in two ways, both mental. Firstly as the starting conception, later dissolved in favour of an abstract, and second as a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought from the abstract:
Along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second, the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought. In this way Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself, by itself, whereas the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind. But this is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being.
To add the details for my purposes here, which is to combat blind empiricism rather than idealism, our rich, fleshed-out experience of the world is indeed only a man-made determination, from which we can draw out abstractions. But there is, of course, an external world, an objective reality our initial concretisation made through our senses is almost always correct about. Typically, we expect to have confidence in our senses. That being said, our sensory concretisation is not nearly a complete concretisation of reality. And so, rather than this underlying, unmediated reality being a world of forms, or things-in-themselves, it is in fact richer, more interconnected, more interdependent and more detailed than our initial concretisation shows, not less. The scientific method, on the other hand, Marx argues, begins with the abstract qualities to reach a concretisation.
Often, encountering a specific sense can “trigger” a memory. This is an initial concretisation: an experience being abstracted from, serving a necessary function within this memory, thereby causing it to be recreated. The rest of our mental faculties are influenced when we experience a memory, causing the abstraction to take effect. But the initial concretisation, too, is also a determination made by our senses, which idealists revel in the fallibility of. I must admit, however, Marx’s gloss makes something of a leap in the “initial concretisation”, which should really be regarded as itself an abstraction from individual ideas, which are themselves abstractions from our senses. Sensory information is really a puncture rippling through a working abstraction, of which the field of disturbances constitutes the content of experience. Such is the Cubist wisdom: we cannot see a full picture at once as a camera does. We do not gather experience like the Terminator, with a continuous field of view, where notable features are labelled by our abstractive faculties. Instead, we begin with the features. Most information is discarded immediately, “forgotten” as memories are, because our ability to abstract upon them has been exhausted at the point of reception, leaving only the features, the sensations, which are the building blocks for experience.
But there is also something else about consciousness: the stream of autobiographical narrative, the feeling of living, impetuous, sensation, the struggle for survival… Trotsky argues that consciousness cannot be reduced to a person’s physiology, because it could offer no benefit beyond non-conscious physiology if that were the case. I argue the most basic sensations do not reduce to the workings within a person, despite the nervous system itself has abstractive power because of its internal relations, because it is in fact more fundamentally an abstraction of a person’s relation to its environment. This is why I assert our most basic sense-perceptions as abstractions from the beginning. Consciousness as such thus emerges from our historical and social existence, as these processes and relations themselves have powers of determination, the will to persist, creativity and abstraction. Most of the content of our abstractions, such as the names of things, is in fact not ideas of our own creation. Even the consciousness of an isolated individual who was stripped from all social existence at birth must be considered as a result of a necessary historical development of all who came before them, in the previous generation in their relation of isolation from their predecessors, and stretching all the way back to the first mechanism in the line of development of their consciousness which responded to its conditions — a tropism found in a primordial soup, which would reject a certain state of things, and benefit in terms of reproduction.
Thus, I say consciousness cannot be separated from determination — knowing and will. Further, I say sensation, experience, knowing, reasoning and conclusion are all forms of “abstraction”. I reduce the creative generation of ideas and the determination of things to being forms of the same process of said abstraction.