Leftist theory is a midwit wall of text built around a remarkably simple story. Here’s the fairy tale. Once upon a time, humanity existed in an immediate but unconscious social wholeness (e.g. primitive communism). Then comes rupture, appearing in successive theories as division of labor, private property, class society,... enclosure, capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, whiteness, and other forms of domination. Humanity’s own creative powers become alienated, objectified, and reified. Our creations harden into commodities, institutions, identities, and hierarchies that confront us as an independent order and masquerade as reality itself. Ideology conceals the human and historical origins of this fallen order, making contingent relations appear natural and necessary. Human possibility remains trapped inside reified forms as alienated powers awaiting recognition, liberation, and reappropriation. Now enter the awakened subject: revolutionary class, critical intellectual, activist cadre, or vanguard. They see through appearances, discover the hidden structure, identify the human potential imprisoned within it, and awaken everyone else through critique and consciousness raising. Here the Hegelian machinery gets redirected toward conscious historical action. In Hegel, history has a rational telos. Geist passes through contradiction, alienation, and Aufhebung toward fuller self-consciousness and freedom. Aufhebung, or sublation, is the mechanism. A form is negated, preserved, and carried forward into a higher unity. Its partial form is overcome while its truth survives within the fuller whole. Historical actors pursue their own purposes, but the larger movement exceeds their intentions. History becomes intelligible as Spirit progressively realizing itself through them. Hess keeps the teleology but changes the operator. Historically conscious human beings must now help bring the reconciliation about. Consciousness precedes Tat, deed. The earlier unity returns through conscious action, no longer as primitive and unreflective unity but as conscious and active unity. Awakened agents recognize the telos of history and participate in realizing it. The turn has an almost theurgic quality: the conscious subject grasps the direction implicit in history and acts to bring its reconciliation into actuality. Spinozist monism helps make this possible. Hess’s rupture occurs within one immanent reality, not between a fallen world and a true world beyond it. Division can therefore become conscious and be repaired from within. Hess reads Spinoza in precisely this practical direction, as a passage from speculative philosophy toward activity and praxis. Marx materializes this practical turn through labor, class, property, and production. Revolutionary consciousness joins a class that embodies the social contradiction, and praxis becomes the means through which alienated social relations are consciously transformed. Then comes praxis. Critique becomes action. The awakened subject exposes ideology, organizes the excluded, raises consciousness, and attacks the institutions reproducing alienation. Existing structures are negated and transformed. Reified relations are stripped of their appearance of necessity. Human powers alienated into markets, property, institutions, and hierarchies are reclaimed and reorganized under conscious social control. Lukács later makes the consciousness side especially explicit. Reification makes human social relations appear as an autonomous “second nature.” Grasping the totality reveals those apparently natural forms as historically produced human relations, and therefore as things that can be transformed through praxis. In many later critical traditions, the consciousness-bearing standpoint increasingly migrates toward marginalized subjects. The excluded standpoint becomes the position from which the supposedly false universal is exposed and the social whole reconstructed. This is sublation made practical. The alienated form is negated, the human power embodied within it is recovered, and that power is carried forward into a supposedly higher social form. Praxis also transforms the people performing it. Through struggle, the revolutionary subject becomes conscious of powers and possibilities previously concealed by the alienated order. Society is remade, and the subject is remade with it. Finally comes reconciliation. Humanity passes through rupture, alienation, consciousness, negation, and praxis, then gathers its scattered powers into a new totality. The old forms are overcome, their emancipatory human content is reappropriated, and social life is consciously reorganized. The beginning is immediate, unconscious wholeness. The endpoint is mediated, self-conscious wholeness. Humanity supposedly recognizes the social world as its own creation and consciously authors what once confronted it as an alien power. So the recurring story is: Primitive wholeness → rupture/alienation → reification and ideological concealment → consciousness of the totality → praxis [negate/sublate the alien form, reclaim alienated human powers, recenter the marginalized] → higher conscious wholeness Hegel supplies the dialectical architecture. Hess makes reconciliation a task of conscious historical collective deed/action. Marx routes that deed through material class praxis. Later critical traditions change the rupture, the consciousness-bearing subject, and the object of repair, but the underlying narrative machinery remains.show more

Yuri Bezmenov's Ghost

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