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Potemkin wrote:Your thinking is still constrained by the limits of bourgeois liberalism, Rugoz. You see society and the individual as simply being in opposition to each other; society constraining the free will of the individual, and the individual rebelling against those constraints. Rather, the individual requires society in order to be free, in order to be most fully himself. Society and the individual are not in opposition to each other; they are in fact a dialectical dyad - they require and complete each other. Society requires free individuals in order to be adaptable and creative, while the individual requires society in order to be materially sustained and to achieve self-actualisation and freedom as a member of a human society. Freedom is not merely freedom from, but freedom to.


Don't get paternalistic on me Potemkin, you haven't earned it.

I do not reject the existence of positive liberty. It's you who rejects negative liberty altogether, which is quite frankly absurd.
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One thing more people need to do is, when they are angry about some political scandal, imagine the parties reversed. If you want to defend Trump, try thinking about how you would react to Obama doing the same thing. If you want to defend Obama, compare him to W.

For instance, Trump is famous for doing what he tweeted about Obama against. Like executive orders, or Syria. He criticized Obama on both, then immediately turned around and did them. No one seems to have a problem with that for some reason.
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For instance, Trump is famous for doing what he tweeted about Obama against. Like executive orders, or Syria. He criticized Obama on both, then immediately turned around and did them. No one seems to have a problem with that for some reason.

Trump is a narcissist. If somebody else does something, then it's shocking and outrageous. But if he does it, then it's okay. Lol. :lol:
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EDIT: Actually stuff my thoughts, a more focus approach is probably best summarized in 'The Concept of the Ideal - Evald Ilyenkov'. Don't think it gets into the 'higher' forms of beliefs, but I think its from this background need to approach the matter to bypass a lot of other stuff.

I think going to try a go at situating the sort of process that I think is thought to happen from my narrow comprehension of Marxism to compliment the previous post's emphasis on lived reality shaping our consciousness. It's going to be messy and a lot of concepts won't be fleshed out as they're significant matters in their own right. This is a very long post that probably is no where near fleshing out the required details but I hope points more clearly in the direction of what perspective I take. It doesn't give the probabilistic accuracy of being able to predict someone's political ideology beyond the heuristic of one's class position which clearly lacks the ideological institutions/structures in society and their influence on the human subject. I just try to give an emphasis to the perspective taken contrasted to views seen as problematic/flawed and it's emphasis on human beings relation to the real world. I perhaps a bit repetitive and this is verbose and overwhelming in that these ideas aren't something that one probably reads and has some sudden flash of understanding but must stew over for some time.

I think the best starting point is to reject the dualism of
mechanical) materialism versus idealism, as well as the mind body dualism. As well as to touch on somethings that show that Marx's emphasis on praxis isn't just wisdom of not being simply passive thinker or an actor without thought but that our very sense of the world lies in our activity within the world. The emphasis on people as active is quite profound philosophically and practically.
Theses On Feuerbach
The chief defect of all hitherto-existing materialism…is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradiction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism—which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.

This does a nice summary of Marx's position in a easy to understand manner.
Spoiler: show
Marx’s rehabilitation of the sensuous
The fact that this intermediate status of qualia is rarely observed, has everything to do with the traditional opposition between idealism and materialism – precisely the opposition Marx wants to overcome in the first Thesis on Feuerbach. Because traditional materialism stresses one-sidedly the passivity of man with respect to nature, it can understand qualia only as secondary, ie as mere effects in consciousness caused by external objects. And because idealism, in contrast, stresses one-sidedly the (mental) activity of the human subject, it cannot understand qualia as coming from external objects. The result is that materialism and idealism, precisely because of their opposing positions (passivity vs. activity), come to a surprisingly unanimous opinion about the ontological status of sensory qualities: they are merely subjective and not objective. Thus the traditional contrast in philosophy between materialism and idealism has led to a systematic disregard of the true in-between status of sensory qualities. Marx was in a sense the first to rehabilitate that true status of the sensory by taking up a position between materialism and idealism. That seems to be one of the main reasons why Marx in the first Thesis on Feuerbach focuses specifically on sensation, that is, on “reality, sensuousness” which in traditional materialism “is conceived only in the form of the object or of intuition, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively”. Marx’s point is therefore not that man as part of nature is a sensuous being, rather his point is that reality as such is sensuous, i.e. praxis, the reciprocal determination of subject and object that takes place in sensation. For Marx, the sensuous is the medium (ie the middle, the “between”) in which subject and object – man and nature – meet and determine each other.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay2.htm
Spinoza found a very simple solution to it, brilliant in its simplicity for our day as well as his: the problem is insoluble only because it has been wrongly posed. There is no need to rack one’s brains over how the Lord God ‘unites’ ‘soul’ (thought) and ‘body’ in one complex, represented initially (and by definition) as different and even contrary principles allegedly existing separately from each other before the ‘act’ of this ‘uniting’ (and thus, also being able to exist after their ‘separation’; which is only another formulation of the thesis of the immortality of the soul, one of the cornerstones of Christian theology and ethics). In fact, there simply is no such situation; and therefore there is also no problem of ‘uniting’ or ‘co-ordination’.

There are not two different and originally contrary objects of investigation body and thought, but only one single object, which is the thinking body of living, real man (or other analogous being, if such exists anywhere in the Universe), only considered from two different and even opposing aspects or points of view. Living, real thinking man, the sole thinking body with which we are acquainted, does not consist of two Cartesian halves ‘thought lacking a body’ and a ‘body lacking thought’. In relation to real man both the one and the other are equally fallacious abstractions, and one cannot in the end model a real thinking man from two equally fallacious abstractions.

I think this does a good summary to how the methodological ontology of say, biology in examining biological processes simply can't speak but merely speculate to the relationship between it and the social, but unfortunate many try to explain the social on a higher ontological scale through speculated relations to biology. Which no doubt exist, but the exact relation being more complex than the linear causality employed with a mechanical materialism where humans are reduced to biological parts and processes must to the neglect of their conscious being.
When discussing biological factors, one should not reduce them to the genetic. More attention should be given to the physiological and ontogenetic aspects of development, and particularly to those that evoke a pathological effect, for it is these that modify the biology of the human being, who is also beginning to perceive even social factors in quite a different way. Dialectics does not simply put the social and the biological factors on an equal footing and attribute the human essence to the formula of biotropic-sociotropic determination favoured by some scientists. It stresses the dominant role of the social factors. Nor does dialectics accept the principles of vulgar sociologism, which ignores the significance of the biological principle in man.


So from the above, though their broader works help contextualize the sense one should make of it. But a problem but a necessary step in human thought was the individuating and breaking down of things into parts. We gained a great deal of knowledge through this, it was born out of an initial holism that didn't see many of the parts that we understand to exist today to an incredible small scale.
But the problem was that many modern thinkers were unable to see the forest for the trees, they broke things down conceptually and discretely then wondered why they could put it all back together again though they've conceived of them as separate. They seek to overcome something that they've done mentally themselves, likely because they're not sensitive to the manner in which they abstract about things.
For a good summary on the matter, Alexander Spirkin has elaborate views about the the relation of parts to the larger whole.

And to emphasize the way in which we have access to the 'external' world which we conceive ourselves as separate from due to our sense of internal self, when one rejects the essential self but adopts a process sense of self. We can develop a very persuasive sense of how one can come to 'perceive' things but not fragment the world into outer and inner exactly, but to maintain a direct causal link.
I use the summary of Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy even though it might not transcribe perfectly in that I think it contains enough similarities to Marxist outlook to be useful.
https://philosophynow.org/issues/114/The_Philosophy_of_Organism
The philosophy of organism’s solutions to these problems begin by rejecting the bifurcation of nature into mind and matter. With an acknowledged debt to the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941), Whitehead rejects such a dualism through his reformulation of perception. The underlying erroneous presupposition of anti-realism is that perception is only the representation of an object, or in general terms, of an external world. Whitehead dismisses this presupposition and replaces it with the notion that perception is part of the object or of the world. He names this reformulated notion prehension. Concisely put, such perception does not stand in relation to the world as representation-to-object, but as part-to-whole. To give a human example, the light which emanates from a star changes the eye seeing it, the optic nerve, the cortex, possibly the mouth muscles (speech); and so part of the star – its electromagnetic radiation – becomes part of me. However, as a process philosopher, Whitehead rejects the existence of solid things with fixed attributes, and asserts, as Heraclitus did in ancient Greece, that all is change, flux: a mountain is a wave, given enough time. So for Whitehead a star is only its activity, including its radiance, and its electromagnetic energy continues its activity within us – there is no absolute delineation of activity. So a part of the whole star has become part of our perception. Thus one aspect of the realist element of his philosophy is that the real object and the real subject are partially fused. We are not only made of stardust, but also of starlight. Contra solipsism, we know that we perceive reality because our perception is part of that reality and not a mere representation of it.
...
It is parsimonious in that it reduces a dualism to a monism: matter and mind are one, that is, the same thing – both terms are merely abstractions from a unified concrete reality. Or we might say, matter is mindful – emotive and creative. This position also eliminates any mysterious causal connections between mind and matter (as seen, for instance in epiphenomenalism), and it fully adopts the causal efficacy of the mind as well as of matter, since they are of the same kind. So-called mechanical causes as such, involving physical force, are but abstractions from the concrete reality that includes the associated mentality. In this respect, Whitehead is akin to Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) with his idea of Will as the inner affect of observed external forces, or Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) with his notion of the Will to Power. Wielding Occam’s Razor, in organic realism we directly perceive causality because perception is causality: it’s the flow of so-called ‘external objects’ fusing into, and thereby altering, the subject. This makes David Hume’s ‘Problem of Causality’ – that we do not perceive causality itself – false; and therefore it makes Immanuel Kant’s critical project (that is, his whole later metaphysics) based on Hume’s purported problem of causality redundant. It seems Kant woke from his dogmatic slumber into an axiomatic blunder.

A great example to illustrate this in more detail is found in Feliks Mikhailov's The Riddle of the Self, where he plays out a discussion between two hypothetical persons where, from my memory and account of it, plays out a position similar to the description above of Whitehead against some sort of idealism. A discussion in which one speaks of the candle on the table, where the idealist begins to speak of the candle existing in one's head, thus doubling the world into the candle that exists externally and the one inside one's mind that one can never find. But let's be careful here and note that our abstractions aren't the world itself, a distinction quite crucial but sorely lacking for some.
https://arigiddesignator.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/kripkes-refutation-of-identity-theory/
Kripke’s argument simply establishes that mental states are not identical to brain states. It still is possible that they be correlated, maybe even concomitant phenomena. Materialists do not like this because they want to explain the mind with only reference to physical facts. As Searle points out, “[this argument] is essentially the commonsense objection in a sophisticated guise” (39, Rediscovery). The commonsense objection is that pains and brain processes are simply two different kinds of things.


Spoiler: show
Feliks Mikhailov's piece
You see what a specific scientific form the theory of knowledge that regards the acquisition of knowledge as a passive act of contemplation acquired in physiology and neurology. Having adopted these positions, even the physiologists were compelled to assume that sensations, perceptions and representations take shape as 'secondary' images in the receptor centres of the cortex. Note that the author calls this standpoint 'the main obstacle to the correct understanding of cerebral mechanisms'. This is yet another example of how contemplation, the notion of the process of cognition that we have been calling the 'pyramid', acted as a hindrance to scientific research. But let us read on.

The “receptor theory of sensations tended to regard the first stages of this complex path as the elementary and passive physiological processes and the later stages as complex and active mental forms of activity. This theory inevitably caused ... a gap between elementary and higher forms of cognitive activity....

A different approach to many of these phenomena is taken by the reflex concept of perception, founded by I. M. Sechenov and experimentally demonstrated by I. P. Pavlov. ...

The reflex theory treats sensations and perceptions as active processes distinguished by a certain degree of selectivity and including efferent motor elements. Sechenov pointed out that every act of visual perception comprised both centripetal (afferent) and centrifugal (efferent) mechanisms. In perceiving the objects of the surrounding world the eye actively “gropes” for them and these “groping” movements along with the signals from the eye motor muscles are elements of visual perception... So the investigation of visual perception under laboratory conditions shows that it has a complex structure, similar in principle to that of tactile perception, where the groping hand identifies a succession of attributes that only gradually unite into one contemporaneous whole (A. I. Kotlyarova, 1948; B. G. Ananyev, 1959). Genetic studies (Piaget, 1935; A. V. Zaporozhets, 1960; V. P. Zinchenko, 1958, and others) showed that the development of visual perception in the child also passes through the corresponding stages, first, the overall “groping” of the object by the hand and eye and only after this, the concentrated forms of perception. If the conditions of visual perception are made more complex, the process of orientation amid the separate attributes of the perceived object, and particularly the imagining of it, again broadens out and observation becomes a long “feeling” of the object by the moving eye. [A R Luria]

“Well, there is no need for us to go any deeper into the neurophysiological and psychological subtleties of the various stages of visual perception, but I hope you have grasped the main point: in its active, seeking movements the eye 'feels' the object. Yes, our organ of vision is more like a hand than the lens of a camera. Incidentally, you wouldn't think of asking me such questions as: where is the weight or where is the firmness, warmth, shape and other attributes of an object that can be sensed by movements of the hand? Here you will say exactly what I said about visual perception: the hand senses the real shape of the object, finds it by feeling or groping. So why did you react so violently when I said that the shape of the object discovered by the eye belongs to the object itself? Yes, the eye 'feels' the object, gropes over it like a hand (not literally, of course, but I am deliberately using a well-known analogy) and in its movement reproduces the shape of the object. Where, then, is the shape, the visual image? In the head? No, obediently obeying the orders coming from the cortex, the nervous apparatus of vision detects at a distance, by means of electromagnetic, light waves the actually existing objects, glides over, scans their surface and, as it were, reproduces their shape in the course of its extremely complex movement. So the visual image is the movement of the eye over the object. It is just as much in me as outside me, and without the external object, without its real shape detected by the sense organs there can be no special 'second' object existing only in me.
...
But the brain is not wax and the organism is not a lump of matter on which the external world leaves its imprints. And not just because of the different scales of their material and structural organisation. What matters is the way in which the problem is theoretically formulated.

I think Feliks Mikhailov probably also has some thoughts into how our feeling of things is retained in memory in some way, that we can dream of things that aren't there. But it may be that one can't think of things in a way that one has not experienced things before, as one has to have engaged with the world in activity to develop a felt sense of it for it to be memorized. The blind likely have no dreams/memory of sight, just as the deaf lack the same of sound.
But I think the emphasis on sensational experience as being a very active process, something that is in constant change is pivotal. And human beings can be described
As the highest intelligent being, man is the focal point of all forms of the motion of matter.


Now that is a basic summary of the process and position somewhat, which can then be extended to more social manner. That we are in large part products of society and social relations, which isn't to presume a blank slate but to put the social as part of our nature. So for an intuitive point, a person raised outside of society and social relations with other people will likely not being 'human' in a sense, they'd be feral.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/mikhailov/works/riddle/riddle3b.htm
In man, on the other hand, we encounter a diametrically opposite mode of inheritance. Man inherits part of the “species programme” of life-activity, but the greater part (and precisely the specifically human part) is geared into the “mechanisms” of his life by his mastering the objectified means of culture in intercourse with other people. He even develops his bodily needs and abilities in the process of mastering the historical ways and means of activity and intercourse, such as the need for communication, for prepared food, for “instruments” to consume it with, for objects that provide for the human functioning of his organs, creating the conditions for normal sleep, rest, labour, and so on. And, particularly important, the infinitely diverse and infinitely developing means of realising the inherited “programmes” of life-activity are acquired only in the form of the socially significant instruments of activity and intercourse created by the labour of previous generations.

Academician N. P. Dubinin writes: “The possibilities of human cultural growth are endless. This growth is not imprinted in the genes. It is quite obvious that if the children of contemporary parents were deprived from birth of the conditions of contemporary culture, they would remain at the level of our most remote ancestors who lived tens of thousands of years ago. Whereas the children of such “primitive people” placed in the conditions of contemporary culture would rise to the heights of contemporary man.” [2]

The words we speak, the level of society we inherit from the objectified works of our human ancestors.
And whilst activity theory has come a long way, Vygotsky's work is quite a significant work in trying to tease out this relation between the social world as linked into an individual's being. He doesn't accept the duality of humans being purely biologicaly predetermined or not as human beings are both a universal nature and particular one mediated through one's reality and its relations.
Spoiler: show
vygotsky's educational theory in cultural context
the neo-vygotskian approach: general theoretical assumptions

To summarize briefly, Vygotsky’s (1978, 1986, 1997, 1998) main ideas that underlie the neo-Vygotskian approach are as follows. Human mental processes, just like human labor, are mediated by tools. But, these are special, psychological tools such as language, signs, and symbols. Humans are not born with these tools, just as they are not born with tools of labor. These tools are invented by human society, and they are acquired by children in the course of interpersonal communication with adults or more experienced peers. Having been acquired and internalized, these psychological tools begin to mediate children’s mental processes. Human mental processes mediated by tools were called by Vygotsky higher mental processes, to differentiate them from lower mental processes with which children are born, and which are specific for both young children and animals (see Kozulin, this volume, for more detailed analysis of Vygotsky’s concepts of psychological tools and mediation).

Thus, human mental processes neither are developed in the course of children’s independent activity (as constructivists would hold), nor “unfold” as a result of maturation (as nativists would hold), nor are inculcated into children by adults (as behaviorists would hold). The development of mental processes in each period of the child’s life is determined by mediation in the context of the specific to the given period relationships between children and their social environment. These relationships were called by Vygotsky (1998) “the social situation of development” (p. 198).

In turn, new mental processes “that arise toward the end of a given age lead to a reconstruction of the whole structure of the child’s consciousness and in this way change the whole system of relations to external reality and to himself ... [which] ... means that the social situation of development ... must also change” (Vygotsky, 1998, p. 199). The change of the social situation of development results in the child’s transition to the new period of development. Thus, children’s development during each age period prepares them for the transition to the next period of development.

The model of development described made it possible for Vygotsky to give an innovative interpretation of different periods in children’s development (for detailed analysis, see Mahn, this volume). However, the major shortcoming of this model was that the concept of the social situation of development, and, especially, the role of the child’s activity as a component of the social situation of development, was not sufficiently elaborated by Vygotsky. To be sure, he was far from viewing children as passive recipients of psychological tools presented by adults in the course of interpersonal communication. After all, the “assumptions about human action ... underlie the entire framework of Vygotsky’s approach” (Wertsch & Tulviste, 1992, p. 554). However, when turning his discussion to children’s development at different stages, Vygotsky often limited this discussion to the analysis of their acquisition of verbal tools in the course of interpersonal communication (see, for example, Vygotsky’s (1986) doctrine of acquisition of scientific concepts as instrumental in the development of school-age children). This analysis may lead to the position that “whatever is of major importance for the development of individual consciousness, is introduced into it through social consciousness” (Leontiev & Luria, 1968, p. 353) rather than being the result of children’s activity oriented toward the external world. Such a position would undermine the theoretical view of both Vygotsky and his Russian followers of the child as a subject rather than an object of development.

http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA/Mail/xmcamail.2010_04.dir/pdfaj3KKzidoJ.pdf
TOULMIN: Through his brief career, Vygotsky’s preoccupations centred on consciousness: more specifically, on the modes in which consciousness is “represented” – both mentally and neurologically – in the life of the individual. In his view, these problems cannot be convincingly dealt with by focusing either on our genetic inheritance and innate capacities alone or on the influence of external, environmental factors alone. Vygotsky was willing to take neither the “nativist” route preferred today by Chomsky ... nor the “external conditioning” route followed by Skinner ... Those two routes – he insisted – were not the only options available to us. Instead, he undertook a new kind of developmental attack on these problems.

In the course of a child’s upbringing, education, and social experience, the child comes to “embody” in itself certain modes of perception, thought and behaviour ... In short, it becomes both socialised and enculturated. (In Soviet jargon, the child’s “consciousness” becomes “structured” as it does on account of the “cultural-historical conditions” in which it is embedded.) What Vygotsky set out to discover was how these changes take place, and what more general processes they typically involve. Certainly, in his view, they rest neither on maturation alone nor on conditioning alone; and, furthermore, they clearly implicate both psychological and neurological processes. In psychological terms, Vygotsky’s goal was to discover how enculturation, socialisation, and the development of thought processes are shaped by the child’s inner life – especially by the use it makes of “inner speech.” In neurological terms, similarly, he wanted to find out how the social, cultural, linguistic, and intellectual skills it acquires during the formative years are supported by, and “represented in,” the cortical mechanisms of the maturing nervous system.

In coming to developmental psychology from aesthetics and literary criticism, Vygotsky was exceptionally sensitive to the varied and changing roles of language in a child’s mental life. He studied with particular care the manner in which the child makes use of, and relies on, language in making new skills its own. Typically, those skills are first mastered and exercised in social and instructional settings, among and alongside other human agents, more or less in the way of public linguistic regulation and commentary. Subsequently, they are consolidated in the course of solitary play, with the help of “talking to oneself,” and then they become part of the child’s unthinking repertory of abilities bit by bit, through being the topics first, of the child’s progressively more condensed inner speech, and finally of its silent thought.

Unfortunately I'm not familiar with Vygotsky and the influence of his work though I get the sense Andy Blunden (Summary)may have built upon the history of his work and influence in a way that I don't fully understand.
This should do well to at least make intutive that the position adopted isn't one side of a duality, though I haven't given detail to the biosocial nature of person, though Erich Fromm might help clarify this integration.

Now as correctly noted by Mikeman earlier
Which is a ridiculous thing to do IMO.

My main response to your post is that as I see it morality comes from society and as society evolves and changes so does morality. What is considered moral is also subject to dialectical materialism and no declarations of objective moral truth can actually be made.

Though we are starting to get off topic from how we form our political opinions into moral philosophy.

Morality clearly develops along with society and it's concrete changes, because what ever morality there is said to exist is derived from the real world. Though we could drill in on what objective is meant to mean and it's significance. Because I could for example speak of many things that are socially constructed, but they are very very real and have very real influence upon the lives of others despite their connotation of being less real. Money doesn't cease to have it's social function between one claims to not believe in it's legitimacy because it's a social construct, because it's function and essence is built into the fabric of society and it's relations, one can not wish it's significance away even though as an empirical entity it is not 'money' of any value.
Something incredibly true of capitalism in that it's a very abstract system.
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/abstraction-abstract-labor-and-ilyenkov/
As objectified abstract labor, value takes an independent form, money, which exists as value in the abstract. But abstract labor itself, though it is real, though it is objective, only exists through its manifestations as various concrete labors. Here the concrete becomes a subordinate to the abstract. This is because in capitalism abstract laws dominate individuals. Isolated, independent concrete labors are at the mercy of abstract social forces which dominate individuals.

And as such, whilst morality might not be objective in the sense of some universal truth that is true no matter the subject. This notion of truth and reality seems to be a sort of truth that never existed because it was poorly formulated, a truth only existent from the perspective of everywhere/God's POV.
But because human beings are intimately tied within reality, the objective world so to speak, their morality can have a very significant grounding. That many come to internalize their social world to such an extent that it is objective truth and they, to use Althusser's words, 'work by themselves'. And from Zizek's perspective, presumably because there can be a serious gap between our subjectivity and our actual behaviour (the basis for hyproisy) we can still perform the materiality of ideology even as we don't believe in it, ideology can be empty, disbelieved and still we work for it. I like to use myself as an example, for all that I think to be true or to hold significant explanatory power of the Marxist outlook, based on my behaviour alone I couldn't be significantly differentiated from any normal subject in a capitalist economy. No sign of being radical in behaviour but rather quite conventional.

But moving on from that, this is why I like to emphasize that the British Empiricists seemed to have shown a neglect and even disrespect to the active nature of people which was left to idealism to pick up. The consciousness of humans that is entirely unfathomable from the ontological perspective of examining biological processes and assuming that these process capture the entirety of the human being when one already excludes the subjectivity from one's methodology. One does not find qualia upon looking at brain scans, and the correspondence between our body and subjectivity is still poorly understood.
And as such, Marx doesn't treat abstractions in such an insignificant way, but following Hegel's lead, seems to abstract in a rather complex way where certain ideas can be said to be more concrete because they're not empty formalisms like that found with Kant. Because the essence of things is to be found in their relations, because one only plays with empty signs when one rips things from their real world context and interrelations in a continuous flux. A processing and relational ontology is important to seeing the reality's interdependence rather than considering things in a static fashion.
Spoiler: show
https://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/dd_ch05a.php
In his most explicit statement on the subject, Marx claims that his method starts from the "real concrete" (the world as it presents itself to us) and proceeds through "abstraction" (the intellectual activity of breaking this whole down into the mental units with which we think about it) to the "thought concrete" (the reconstituted and now understood whole present in the mind) (Marx, 1904, 293-94). The real concrete is simply the world in which we live, in all its complexity. The thought concrete is Marx's reconstruction of that world in the theories of what has come to be called "Marxism." The royal road to understanding is said to pass from the one to the other through the process of abstraction.

https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/abstraction-abstract-labor-and-ilyenkov/
Concrete reality is composed of many interrelations, relations which form laws of motion. The goal of theory, or science, is to understand this concrete reality in all of its interrelations. A concrete concept is one that captures the real essence of these interrelations. The goal of thinking, of theory, is concrete concepts. However we cannot immediately see all of reality and understand all of the complex interrelations all at once. We can only see a bit at a time. We point our camera to the right, then to the left, then we zoom in, then we zoom out, etc. What is this process? It is the process of abstraction. Abstraction means to leave out some detail and focus in on certain aspects at the expense of others.
The goal of this abstraction is to eventually identify the essential connections between different abstract aspects, slowly piecing the pieces together to give us a concrete picture of the whole. However this can only happen if we abstract correctly. There are two senses in with Marx talks of abstractions, a good and a bad way of abstracting. When abstraction has gone bad Marx often refers to the abstraction as ‘one-sided’. This means that the abstraction views an aspect of reality in an incomplete, one-sided way. An essential aspect of the nature of the object has been left out.
...
This shows that abstraction can be arbitrary. If we are free to select one general feature over another we can radically change the concept of capital. If we choose only the ahistorical features we can make capital seem eternal. If abstraction is just seen as the identification of general features then we have no choice but to be arbitrary in our abstractions. But if abstraction is seen differently, as identifying the essential nature of an object, as identifying the “relation within which this thing is this thing” as Ilenkov puts it, then we can be scientific about our abstractions.
When we make an abstraction we want to select that aspect of the object which identifies its essence. Since the essence of things is in their relation to other things, we want to identify the essential relations which govern the object, abstracting away other non-essential aspects.
...
A good abstraction, one that really identities the essential “relation within which the thing is the thing” is called a ‘concrete abstraction’. From the standpoint of old-logic this seems a contradiction in terms. But it makes perfect sense once we jettison the prejudice that abstract-concrete refers to thought-reality. Concrete abstractions don’t just refer to ideas. They refer to real things in the world. Every concept is abstract in the sense that it just refers to one aspect of reality. Every concept (every well-defined dialectical concept) is concrete in that it refers to the specific features that define an object in relation to the whole rather than to abstract general features. So every well-conceived dialectical concept is a concrete-abstraction.

http://69.195.124.91/~brucieba/2014/04/13/ilyenkovs-dialectic-of-the-abstract-and-the-concrete-i/
For Hegel the essence or content of objects of investigation cannot be known by examining them in isolation. The thing cannot be known in itself as its essence exists outside of itself and in relation to, or in its connectedness with, other objects or phenomena. As Ilyenkov explains:


“That is why a concept, according to Hegel, does not exist as a separate word, term, or symbol. It exists only in the process of unfolding in a proposition, in a syllogism expressing connectedness of separate definitions, and ultimately only in a system of propositions and syllogisms, only in an integral, well-developed theory. If a concept is pulled out of this connection, what remains of it is mere verbal integument, a linguistic symbol. The content of the concept, its meaning, remains outside it-in series of other definitions, for a word taken separately is only capable of designating an object, naming it, it is only capable of serving as a sign, symbol, marker, or symptom.”
...
Therefore for Marx the starting point of any thought is the concrete existence of real material phenomena irrespective of any thinking about them. However this is also a completely different idea from empiricism or positivism whereby thought is seen as pure abstraction cut off from real sensuous objective material reality. For Marx although material phenomena are primary, thought is no less concrete but is intimately connected with real material processes that are merely refracted or reflected in our minds. Thus:

“Insofar as ‘the concrete’ is opposed to ‘the abstract’ the latter is treated by Marx first and foremost objectively. For Marx, it is by no means a synonym of the ‘purely ideal’, of a product of mental activity, a synonym of the subjectively psychological phenomenon occurring in man’s brain only.”
...
“Insofar as Marx treats the epistemological aspect of the problem, he interprets the abstract as any one-sided, incomplete, lopsided reflection of the object in consciousness, as opposed to concrete knowledge which is well developed, all-round, comprehensive knowledge. It does not matter at all in what subjective psychological form this knowledge is ‘experienced’ by the subject – in sensually perceived images or in abstract verbal form.”

https://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/pilling2.htm
To examine this matter further, let us consider Kant’s position, a position which appears to be at the root of many misunderstandings about Capital. In an effort to vindicate scientific reason in the light of Hume’s rejection of causation and of knowledge of the external world, Kant argued that the mind is an instrument which, by its very construction, always apprehends isolated, individual facts in rational form. Kant realised that without categories, rational thought was impossible; but for him these categories have their basis in our thoughts, thought which is necessarily sundered from the material world. Sensation and the logical moments of knowledge do not on this view have a common basis – there is and can be no transition between the two. (Or as the Althusserian; would put it, ‘Our constructions and our arguments are in theoretical terms and they can only be evaluated in theoretical terms – in terms, that is to say, of their rigour and theoretical coherence. They cannot be refuted by any empiricist recourse to the supposed “facts” of history’ (Hindess and Hirst, 1975, p. 3).) Concepts, according to Kantianism, do not grow up and develop out of the sensed world but are already given before it, in the a priori categories of reasoning. These categories are supposed to grasp the multifarious material given in sensation, but themselves remain fixed and dead. ‘Sensation’ and ‘reason’ were counterposed to each other in thoroughly mechanical manner, with no connection between them. And the same was true of the content of knowledge and its forms. On this last point Rubin is surely absolutely correct when he states:

"One cannot forget that on the question of the relation between content and form, Marx took the standpoint of Hegel and not of Kant. Kant treated form as something external in relation to the content, and as something which adheres to the content from the outside. From the standpoint of Hegel’s philosophy, the content is not in itself something to which form adheres from the outside. Rather, through its development, the content itself gives birth to the form which is already latent in the content. Form necessarily grows from the content itself. (Rubin, 1972, p. 117)"
...
According to Hegel, concepts developed by thought ceased to be dead, a priori products of the individual mind, but forms endowed with life, the life of the movement of thought itself. This is Lenin’s point when he says, ‘ What Hegel demands is a logic the forms of which would be forms with content, inseparably connected with that content’ and Lenin notes Hegel’s attack on logic considered entirely from the subjective standpoint:

Logic is the science not of external forms of thought, but of the laws of development ‘of all material, natural and spiritual things’, i.e. of the development of the entire concrete content of the world and of its cognition i.e. the sum-total, the conclusion of the history of knowledge of the world.

In this respect there can be no doubt whatsoever that Marx adopted Hegel’s position (against Kant). In stressing the historical and objective nature of concepts, Hegel prepared the way for introducing the role of practice into human thought, even though his conception of this practice remained too narrow. Marx followed Hegel’s lead in insisting that the movement from the ‘sensed’ to the ‘logical’ was a process in which social man penetrated ever more deeply through the appearance of phenomena, deeper and deeper into their essence. It was this social practice that lies at the very heart and foundation of the development of man’s conceptual thinking. The form taken by man’s knowledge, summarised in the concepts of science, represents an index, a resume, of his education and in particular the education of his senses.

It is useful to note that the ideal for Marx relates not in the typical fashion of the empirically real and the abstract, in idealism about things existing purely in one's head.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htm
In Capital Marx defines the form of value in general as “purely ideal” not on the grounds that it exists only “in the consciousness”, only in the head of the commodity-owner, but on quite opposite grounds. The price or the money form of value, like any form of value in general, is IDEAL because it is totally distinct from the palpable, corporeal form of commodity in which it is presented, we read in the chapter on “Money”. [Capital, Vol. I, pp. 98-99.]

In other words, the form of value is IDEAL, although it exists outside human consciousness and independently of it.

This use of the term may perplex the reader who is accustomed to the terminology of popular essays on materialism and the relationship of the material to the “ideal”. The ideal that exists outside people’s heads and consciousness, as something completely objective, a reality of a special kind that is independent of their consciousness and will, invisible, impalpable and sensuously imperceptible, may seem to them something that is only “imagined”, something “suprasensuous”.


And so hopefully that situates things a bit better, and now this is where one can look to the world's objective conditions to find the relations between things, to find their essence, and see certain 'contradictions' or tensions. Because unlike the desire for equilibrium that characterizes those who think in an linear evolutionary process, equilibrium is a passing state in that because things are in flux there are tensions within things that maintain them. The perceived lack of tensions likely comes from the mechanical materialist perspective.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/positive/positii.htm
Spoiler: show
The reader has probably already managed to notice how often and persistently the magical word equilibrium is repeated in the quotations from those texts. Yes, here we are dealing not simply with a word, but a genuine symbol – a symbol of faith, a fundamental and key category of the logic of their thinking. No matter where their arguments originate, or where they lead to, they inevitably begin with equilibrium and end with equilibrium.

From their works the reader discovers that equilibrium is not simply or solely an equal balance on the scales with which everyone is familiar from personal experience, but it is something much more important and universal, something metaphysical.

It turns out that this magical concept contains within it both the secret of life and the secrets of the functioning of social organisms, and even the mysteries of all cosmic systems and events. It turns out that all these mysteries, secrets and enigmas are simple and easy. One only has to apply to them the magical 'lock pick' – and they become transparent and simple.

It turns out that the entire infinite Universe strives to achieve equilibrium. Thus the history of mankind, the history of social organisms (people, lands, states and civilisations), is directed towards and yearns for equilibrium.

Immediately, everything becomes clear: both the condition of economic and political relations and the organisational principle of the living body of the frog, and the direction of the evolution of the solar system.

It is remarkable that in not one of the works of the Machists will we find an intelligible explanation of the meaning of this word. They all prefer to explain it by means of examples. But throughout the entire system of such examples, the actual meaning of this 'empirio-symbol' clearly shines through: it is first of all a state of inviolable rest and immobility. It is the absence of any noticeable changes or deviations, the absence of motion.

Equilibrium means the absence of any state of conflict, of any contradictions whatsoever, i.e. of forces which pull in different, contradictory directions. And where is this seen? You will never see such a state, even in the shop, even in the example of the scales. Even here equilibrium is only a passing result, an ephemeral effect, which is achieved at precisely that moment because two opposing forces are directed at each end of the lever: one presses upward, and the other presses downward.

In the Russian language, equilibrium means: 'A state of immobility, of rest, in which a body is under the influence of equal and opposing forces.' But according to the logic of Machism, the presence of opposing forces exerting pressure at one point (or on one body) is already a bad state of affairs. It resembles the state which is designated in Hegelian language as contradiction, as 'a body's state of discomfort', in which two opposing forces exert pressure, either squeezing the body from two opposite sides or tearing it in half.

Such an understanding of equilibrium is therefore unacceptable for the Machists. How could it possibly be that equilibrium turns out to be only the passing and quickly disappearing result of contradiction, the result of the action of opposites applied at one point, i.e. the very state which every living organism tries to escape as soon as possible, and by no means the state which it supposedly is striving to achieve.

Here then arises the concept of equilibrium which the Machists want to counterpose to contradiction, which is the presence of two opposing forces. It is a state in which two opposing forces have ceased to exist and therefore no longer squeeze or tear apart the ideal body (or the equally ideal point of their application). The forces have ceased to exist and have disappeared, but the state which they have established at a given point still remains. Equilibrium is a state of this kind. A state characterised by the absence of any opposing forces whatsoever, be they internal or external, physical or psychic.

In this form, equilibrium is the ideal. It is the ideal model of the cosmos and the psychics, the fundamental philosophical category of Machism, and the starting point of Machist arguments about the cosmos, about history, and about thinking. The aspiration to escape once and for all from all contradictions whatsoever from whatever kind of opposing forces, is the striving for equilibrium.

In addition to all the rest, equilibrium finds under these conditions all the characteristics which ancient philosophy describes with the words 'inner goal', 'objective goal', and 'immanent goal'. According to Machist logic, equilibrium is by no means a real state, given in experience, even if in passing, but only the ideal and the goal of nature, man, and being in general.

Such an equilibrium is static, complete, disturbed by nothing, an equilibrium of rest, an equilibrium of immobility, a state of 'suspension in the cosmic void'. It is the ideal model of the Machist Bogdanovian concept of equilibrium.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/spirkin/works/dialectical-materialism/ch02-s06.html
The cause-effect connection can be conceived as a one-way, one-directional action only in the simplest and most limited cases. The idea of causality as the influence of one thing on another is applied in fields of knowledge where it is possible and necessary to ignore feedback and actually measure the quantitative effect achieved by the cause. Such a situation is mostly characteristic of mechanical causality. For example, the cause of a stone falling to the ground is mutual gravitation, which obeys the law of universal gravitation, and the actual fall of the stone to the ground results from gravitational interaction. However, since the mass of the stone is infinitely small compared with the mass of the earth, one can ignore the stone's effect on the earth. So ultimately we come to the notion of a one-way effect with only one body (the earth) operating as the active element, while the other (the stone) is passive. In most cases, however, such an approach does not work because things are not inert, but charged with internal activity. Therefore, in experiencing effect they in their turn act on their cause and the resulting action is not one-way but an interaction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_in_the_Soviet_Union#Philosophical_and_political_struggles_in_the_Soviet_Union


And these tensions are where concrete conditions give rise to conflicts and then develop a language to articulate that reality from one's position.
And as previously summarized
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/help/foucaul1.htm
Firstly, how does the subject form the object? Who is this subject? Of course, the subject cannot exist outside of individual human beings, but that means nothing - one also needs hydrocarbons, but so what? The subject which forms concepts is the social and historical practice of human beings. Concepts are social products. They are passed on to generations through social vehicles and products such as languages, media, institutions, wars and industries, etc. They are not primarily the creation of individuals, who 99% inherit concepts and work with them together with others within definite social relations, and to the extent of no more than 1% do individuals create concepts.

So when, for example, my male chauvinism confronts your feminism, it is not true that both are equally true, nor that the truth of each are incommensurable, or that the truth of each is in my life and your life, or yours is true for middle-class Western women and mine for backward males, nor surely that "truth" is meaningless, or something trivial that interests only dogmatists!? Nor that I make a better, more convincing, politically-correct defence of my position which is published in a reputable journal, or vice versa, or that I get more votes than you. But nor can I make the claim that my idea reflects what objectively exists, independently of human experience and yours not - what an absurdity! Perhaps we can say that yours is liberatory and mine repressive, and although neither is true, one is good and the other is bad, and that is all that matters? Perhaps we could settle the matter by arm-wrestling?

We must not get this question confused with the right of an individual to hold a view. This is of course a basic bourgeois right. But that is not the point; I do not thank you for allowing me the right to walk across a mine-field. I am interested in whether my idea of the best way home is objectively correct or not.

The structuralists were right when they identified the location of truth in the social practice of a culture, but limited by the conception of culture in anthropological static isolation (dynamic, static or partial "equilibrium"). The truth and error of my view and your view (continuing the metaphor from above) is a really-existing patriarchal society of which we are both a living part and which is undergoing transformation under the impact of the socialisation of women's labour and your struggle for the value of your labour. That is the source of the concepts (of "feminism", "male-chauvinism", "sexist language", etc.), that is the criterion of truth and that is what is changed by the material struggle of our ideas, that is the meaning.

The struggle is in reality, the morality or even political position is to be found in people's real world conditions.
And this is why for some there perhaps can said to be no 'objective' morality, in that morality and even our epistomology entails our subjectivity and in that subjectivity, our relation to things and thus our expeience of the world based on it is different. To live a life as a person who has to work to survive leads to a fundamentally different sense of reality than living life as an upper class person who doesn't need to work to survive.
As such, this is where Marx rejects the sense of morality or justice, at least in the liberal sense and advocates a workers morality that would in the process of changing society establish a new standard, because it would reject the old worlds standards.
http://isj.org.uk/marxism-and-ethics/
This ethics is not to be confused with abstract morality. There is no standpoint from which we might agree on the “fair distribution of the proceeds of labour”. “Does not the bourgeoisie”, he wrote, “claim that the present-day distribution is ‘just’? And given the present mode of production is it not, in fact, the only ‘just’ system of distribution?”68 To attempt to persuade the bourgeoisie of the injustices of the capitalist system would be to miss the point. What appears unjust from the perspective of workers’ struggles appears perfectly fair from the capitalist’s perspective. This is why the class struggle within bourgeois society manifests itself as a conflict of “right against right”, and that between “equal rights, force decides”.69

Importantly, Marx claims that the truth of the process of exploitation is obscured so long as it is seen from the point of view of atomised individuals, to become fully apparent only when

To be sure, the matter looks quite different if we consider capitalist production in the uninterrupted flow of its renewal, and if, in place of the individual capitalist and the individual worker, we view them in their totality, as the capitalist class and the working class confronting each other. But in so doing we should be applying standards entirely foreign to commodity production.70

This claim provides the all-important point of contact between Marx’s scientific, explanatory account of the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production and his normative critique of capitalism. As against the bourgeois separation of “is” and “ought”, these two aspects of Marx’s social theory are best understood as two sides of the same coin: the labour theory of value underpins Marxism both as a social science and as a normative critique. Moreover, this argument provides the key to understanding Marx’s condemnation of morality. He dismisses those moral attitudes which pretend to offer some mechanism through which a universal good might be promoted in a world in which social divisions undermine such a project, and he does this from the point of view of a class based morality which, he believes, is in its purpose genuinely universal in a historical sense.71

Marxism, therefore, both presupposes and reaffirms the sort of social practice—collective working class struggles—which not only reveals the facts of exploitation but also points to a potential alternative mode of production. As Terry Eagleton argues, “In the critical consciousness of any oppressed group or class, the understanding and the transforming of reality, ‘fact’ and ‘value’, are not separable processes but aspects of the same phenomenon”.72

And here, there can be no clear discrete difference between is/ought (fact/value) because those that try and present certain things as neutral objective fact often most clearly ideologues that try and universalize their views as everyones.
Perfect example is how politicans speak of we in an abstract way, when clearly the identity of being American, Australian or what ever glosses over the concrete divisions within a nation.
https://www.guernicamag.com/john_berger_7_15_11/
The word we, when printed or pronounced on screens, has become suspect, for it’s continually used by those with power in the demagogic claim that they are also speaking for those who are denied power. Let’s talk of ourselves as they.


A false neutrality, which is clearly expressed in the idea that one can entirely seperate is from ought, not that the ought is clear from what is, but that they're not discretely separated as one's view of the reality impacts what one perceives as ought.
It's the difference of opinion one sees in a protest where one sees the legitimacy of the state in crushing workers whilst others see the state as unjustly crushing workers because it entirely ignores them and doesn't represent them.
Image

This is the abstract morality that bullshits people and confuses us from seeing the world and our place within it. Because there exist clear conflicts and tensions based on the objective conditions of society. There can be no universal humanity because the conditions of society don't actualize a concrete universality between humanity, we're still effectively divided up. The essential division still being that which Marx identified, that of class. Consider this.
p. 152, Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.

They have monopolized everything that it is possible to monopolize; they have got the whole earth, the minerals in the earth and the streams that water the earth. The only reason they have not monopolized the daylight and the air is that it is not possible to do it. If it were possible to construct huge gasometers and to draw together and compress within them the whole of the atmosphere, it would have been done long ago, and we should have been compelled to work for them in order to get money to buy air to breathe.

And if that seemingly impossible thing were accomplished tomorrow, you would see thousands of people dying for want of air - or of the money to buy it - even as now thousands are dying for want of the other necessities of life. You would see people going about gasping for breath, and telling each other that the likes of them could not expect to have air to breathe unless the had the money to pay for it. Most of you here, for instance, would think and say so.

Even as you think at present that it's right for so few people to own the Earth, the Minerals and the Water, which are all just as necessary as is the air. In exactly the same spirit as you now say: "It's Their Land," "It's Their Water," "It's Their Coal," "It's Their Iron," so you would say "It's Their Air," "These are their gasometers, and what right have the likes of us to expect them to allow us to breathe for nothing?" And even while he is doing this the air monopolist will be preaching sermons on the Brotherhood of Man; he will be dispensing advice on "Christian Duty" in the Sunday magazines; he will give utterance to numerous more or less moral maxims for the guidance of the young. And meantime, all around, people will be dying for want of some of the air that he will have bottled up in his gasometers.

And when you are all dragging out a miserable existence, gasping for breath or dying for want of air, if one of your number suggests smashing a hole in the side of one of th gasometers, you will all fall upon him in the name of law and order, and after doing your best to tear him limb from limb, you'll drag him, covered with blood, in triumph to the nearest Police Station and deliver him up to "justice" in the hope of being given a few half-pounds of air for your trouble.

Can one read this and come away with the sense that they're pro-capitalist? Such notions have to be delegitimized as false. Or even better yet, they're just crazy ideologues because capital is synonymous with freedom, american, democracy, rah rah rah terms empty of content.
http://rickroderick.org/202-nietzsche-on-truth-and-lie-1991/
But in this essay Nietzsche says the following “What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms; in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which, after long use, seem firm, canonical and obligatory to a people. Truths are illusions bout which one has forgotten that that is what they are, metaphors that are worn out and have lost their sensuous power. They are like coins that have lost their pictures – faces – and which now matter only as metal, no longer as coins”.
...
There are certain things that after long use that have become obligatory for us to believe are true. I have heard, and I have heard it ad nauseam, and until ah, well, ad nauseam. Let me say it in my West Texas way; until I want to puke, I have heard it. That the United States is a democracy. Because after long use, after herd like obedience to this word, we have come to believe it. The most dangerous thing, in some ways, that threatens our democracy is the belief of the overwhelming majority of our citizens that perhaps in some sense we do have one. If we questioned deeply what a democracy is, you know, a government in which the power really does come from a people or whatever. If we question these worn out metaphors, and looked behind… in other words, try to look for their origins in power and who deploys them, it might become interesting to see that this is an illusion about which we have long since forgotten that it is one.


And so the idea of a purely objective truth that is universal isn't possible and is based on an problematic epistemological position that entirely neglects the subject, the subject which in fact imbues meaning in things beyond their mere empirical existence.
https://larvalsubjects.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/existent_s_-_hegel_s_critique_of_kant12.pdf
The point here is that the very idea of the thing-in-itself contains an internal contradiction insofar as it calls us to think a thing without determination, yet the very nature of a thing is to contain determinations. In the Phenomenology, Hegel shows that the distinction between the unknowable thing-in-itself as conceived by Kant and appearance is itself a distinction of the understanding, and therefore a product of thought.8 It is nothing but the ego’s reflection of itself into an other. That is, the thing-in-itself is identical to the ego, as a substrate divested of all concrete properties or qualities, a pure void as Hegel puts it, and therefore a phantasm of thought much like Zeuxis asking what is behind the veil.

And where does the subject develop the sense of things to which it injects? Through it's relations experienced and felt in their existence within society. You come to hold a sense of private property because there are clear forces to delineate as much. It's not objective in the sense that private property couldn't exist without the history of social development and thus organize it but as well as subjects to perceive it. But good like trying to pretend that private property though socially constructed is something that is insignificant because it's a creation of man organizing society. And to comprehend one's self within the totality of relations is to move pass the obscurity and one sidedness of abstraction many take. The sort that fools people into internalize a dominant classes morality even as it it doesn't follow it.
And so, political opinions are a complex inheritance of tools and artifacts that we've inherited, things like particular words, concepts and such which we learn through relations to others and the rules that are enforced upon us, that we feel. Much like physical forces, which is how social forces can come to feel so real and objective (in the subjectless sense). But no doubt the woman who is left without a significant means of supporting herself and child in Colonial Australia felt the wrongness of her circumstance in having a husband who spent it gambling and drinking and struggled for some means to satisfy her problem. Certainly workers feel the pressure of being severely exploitative that the moral maxims in their abstractness begin to ring hollow as no such morality exists in how they're treated. Morality is to look at reality and pick a position within it. Because if one for example, really believes that all people are ends unto themselves and worthy of a certain standard of respect on that basis, a human dignity, then the radical conclusion presents itself quite forcefully in seeing the lack of it being the case.
http://www.lacan.com/zizrobes.htm
Spoiler: show
To break the yoke of habits means: if all men are equal, than all men are to be effectively treated as equal; if blacks are also human, they should be immediately treated as such. Recall the early stages of the struggle against slavery in the US, which, even prior to the Civil War, culminated in the armed conflict between the gradualism of compassionate liberals and the unique figure of John Brown:

African Americans were caricatures of people, they were characterized as buffoons and minstrels, they were the butt-end of jokes in American society. And even the abolitionists, as antislavery as they were, the majority of them did not see African Americans as equals. The majority of them, and this was something that African Americans complained about all the time, were willing to work for the end of slavery in the South but they were not willing to work to end discrimination in the North. /.../ John Brown wasn't like that. For him, practicing egalitarianism was a first step toward ending slavery. And African Americans who came in contact with him knew this immediately. He made it very clear that he saw no difference, and he didn't make this clear by saying it, he made it clear by what he did. [11]

For this reason, John Brown is the KEY political figure in the history of US: in his fervently Christian "radical abolitionism," he came closest to introducing the Jacobin logic into the US political landscape: "John Brown considered himself a complete egalitarian. And it was very important for him to practice egalitarianism on every level. /.../ He made it very clear that he saw no difference, and he didn't make this clear by saying it, he made it clear by what he did." [12] Today even, long after slavery was abolished, Brown is the dividing figure in American collective memory; those whites who support Brown are all the more precious - among them, surprisingly, Henry David Thoreau, the great opponent of violence: against the standard dismissal of Brown as blood-thirsty, foolish and insane, Thoreau [13] painted a portrait of a peerless man whose embracement of a cause was unparalleled; he even goes as far as to liken Brown's execution (he states that he regards Brown as dead before his actual death) to Christ. Thoreau vents at the scores of those who have voiced their displeasure and scorn for John Brown: the same people can't relate to Brown because of their concrete stances and "dead" existences; they are truly not living, only a handful of men have lived.

But these tensions don't just find themselves in abstract ideals, but in the real world in which the conditions show themselves amicable to change and that other forces act as a fetter to progress and thus must be crushed to allow things to develop freely. Forces of stagnation who wish to eternalize the present as in spite of reality constantly changing.
http://isj.org.uk/marxism-and-ethics/
similar argument was developed by Gramsci. In an allusion to a phrase from Marx’s preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy he wrote that “the scientific base for a morality of historical materialism is to be looked for, in my opinion, in the affirmation that ‘society does not pose for itself tasks the conditions for whose resolution do not already exist’. Where these conditions exist ‘the solution of the tasks becomes “duty”, “will” becomes free’”.100
#14814934
For instance, Trump is famous for doing what he tweeted about Obama against. Like executive orders, or Syria. He criticized Obama on both, then immediately turned around and did them. No one seems to have a problem with that for some reason.


Trump is a narcissist. If somebody else does something, then it's shocking and outrageous. But if he does it, then it's okay. Lol. :lol:


Trump is not alone in this. Nor is it limited to narcissists. It's the nature of politics. We are brought up to be logical and consistent in our thinking and behaviour. This is often praised and rewarded in society. But in politics this doesn't always work. There will be many opportunities to criticise/address/attack an opponent's behaviour or a pressing issue. Those who try to be consistent may loose an opportunity and be overlooked or overshadowed. Those who do make use of the opportunity may be criticised in the future when they do something similar. Thus politicians are doomed, whether they do or don't do. And since in politics the act of doing things/taking position is often more favourable than not doing, they have an eternal dilemma and habit of not being consistent. :lol:
#14814943
Trump is not alone in this. Nor is it limited to narcissists. It's the nature of politics. We are brought up to be logical and consistent in our thinking and behaviour. This is often praised and rewarded in society. But in politics this doesn't always work. There will be many opportunities to criticise/address/attack an opponent's behaviour or a pressing issue. Those who try to be consistent may loose an opportunity and be overlooked or overshadowed. Those who do make use of the opportunity may be criticised in the future when they do something similar. Thus politicians are doomed, whether they do or don't do. And since in politics the act of doing things/taking position is often more favourable than not doing, they have an eternal dilemma and habit of not being consistent. :lol:

That's certainly a factor, but I think there's more to it than that. Narcissists do not hold themselves to the same standards to which they hold everybody else. In fact, in behavioural terms, this is the defining characteristic of narcissism. Nor is this merely hypocrisy - they actually do believe that they are such precious, unique little snowflakes that the normal rules of social intercourse do not apply to them. The fact that politicians tend to behave like this more often than most people is not merely due to pragmatic reasons - after all, what sort of person tends to go into politics in the first place? You can see this again and again if you read the biographies of politicians - they are almost always crashing narcissists, from a very young age. Lol.
#14814957
Politics certainly attracts narcissists. And perhaps politics induces and rewards narcissistic behaviour, thus also producing narcissists over time. Not holding yourself to the same standards of test is the particular quality that can be very useful in politics.

Certainly most politicians become more alienated/disconnected as they progress their career. And few overcome their success.
#14814998
I believe there is clearly an optimum way the planet should be organized. However, biology is essentially random chaos, and as a result the evolutionary concepts we define as pysche, ego, language, and early politics reflect the inherent chaos in the natural and indeed human condition. History is the story of the imposition of order on political anarchy (realism). Modern national and global politics is a bizarre goulash of archaic Early Modern state formation fused with Post-Modern, Huxley/Jungian self examination and internationalism.

Technology, environmental degradation, income inequality, endemic warfare, are all real threats that will transform or destroy life on this planet in the coming decades. Profit seeking egomaniacs run huge private bureaucracies in a kafkaesque nightmare alongside abject poverty, due to the massive global population increase over the last 200 years, Malthusian in nature. Although art flourishes, it is frequently corporate and soulless, utilized as advertising to pry into your life and invade your existence with relentless noise, repetitive plastic music and other manifestations of the hyper-reality spectacle life as replacement for existentialism.

In the pyramidal structure of the power hierarchies- cultural, economic, political, military- life in the affluent world is one of seemingly magical utopia, the problems are relatively few, basic and advanced needs are all met. The centralization of wealth, however, and the globalizing of the economy that facilitated this, has enabled a tiny group of plutocrats to rule the earth, ruthlessly utilizing state and private propoganda to achieve their nefarious Mammonic ends. The democratic political apparatus, although it may function fairly well at regional or municipal levels, becomes unwieldy in democracies with tens, even hundreds of millions of voters. Demagoguery and populism flourish, advanced by the animal savagery of entertainment media, transnational crime, inner-city violence. International terrorism sows fear amongst the population, and increasingly militant reactions are developed, wether truly popular or not, by agents utilizing the internet to organize.

These problems that I have described, given the conditions by which they have arisen and evolved, I believe, can never be solved by existing conditions, in which greed and corruption are too rampant. The popular psyche of the multitudes simply never overcame existential nihilism- its implications were hidden from the masses, kept distracted by Netflix and video games, the rat-race, casinos, interest spending and debt accumulation.

As Carrol Quigley observed, the best solution when existing institutions have institutionalized to the point of fossilization, new institutions must be created to take their place, either circumventing through gradual reform, or through revolution. A moral society is clearly desired, but political-religion prevents rational men from endorsing any perverse state theocracy. The erosion of the rule of law has been the result the rise of political-religion in the 21st century.

When formulating a political opinion I therefore imagine an ideal society, in a socratic if not platonic sense, moralistic and educated, but not legalistic or paternalistic. Since the concept exists only as an Arcadia/Utopia in my mind, my method for direct action take the form generally of my work, such as writing this post on politicsforum.org. As my objective in doing so, as with other things, is to in someway improve the general society, I feel it is as much as political action as voting or protesting.
#14816430
Well the core of my ideology is christianity, namely Jesus statements, like:

- Love god above all and your neighbour as thyself
- Gods will be done
- Dont do to others what others shouldnt do to you
- Dont judge others so god doesnt judge you
- Those who rule shall be servants of those they rule over
- Who lives by the sword will die from the sword
- To enter the kingdom of heaven, you have to be like little children
- Its more likely a rope fits through the eye of a needle than that a rich person goes into heaven
- Sabbat was made for man, not man made for Sabbat
- ... many more ...

In my interpretation from these core statements of the bible all modern law follows, namely human rights, democracy, and liberte/egality/fraternite.
#14816577
Being an old fart who has been around for a long time, in short, most of my political opinions are formed from personal experience and as a direct desire for them to benefit me and my immediate family.

I am not totally altruistic to be sure although I do give back to others based on my own personal beliefs and ideals. I am not one of these people who says thaty are totally altruistic and hold on to an ideology that ultimately works against my personal interests.

In short ... leave me the hell alone as much as possible, let me keep as much of the money I earned as possible, and politics (read Party Politics) will sort themselves out. Personally, I hate political parties.
#14816864
I don't have political opinions. I leave that to journalists, editors and self appointed experts. I sift through what they offer, trying to separate fact from opinion. If someone announces ideology, I know they are lying. People are people, politics is about gaining control of their tax revenue.
#14816867
mikema63 wrote:Political parties are, however, necessary in a democracy for political organization. It's sausage making of course, so it's quite off putting, but sausages must be made regardless.


Oh I agree. They are needed, but that doesn't make my dislike for them any less.

A Proctology exam is a needed thing too ... doesn't mean I have to like them. :lol:
#14819294
I dont believe political parties, as they exist right now, are very democratic.

It is very required that people in political parties can only progress if the people as a whole vote for them. That means the political party itself shouldnt have any influence at all on whos of their members are getting on the voters list. Instead the voters would directly vote from the list of candidates who would apply. Those candidates that get the most votes from the voters would succeed.

Further I would want voters to decide all really important decisions during elections instead of the parliament doing that for them. For example changes to the constitution should exclusively only be doable through elections.

Etc.

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