hegelian immanent critique is a very complex philosophical system, but the sparknotes are: the real critique of a social system lies inside of it. hegelian dialectics are characterised by this: negation of systems from within.
this is pretty self-evident to us meat-people. yeah, man, i guess critiques of society aren’t just slammed down by god, but emerge from living in that society. gold star for you, hegel, for telling us the spade is a spade.
what you’ve got to remember though is that hegel was an Idealist so all his very real intelligence was spent on brute-forcing something that actually made fucking sense through idealist logic. he had to Textwall so incomprehensibly to achieve this that even now people concoct wild conspiracy theories that he was just Shitposting the entire time and hegel studies are pointless.
you see, hegel still thinks the spade has a soul, so he’s got to describe how the spade being a spade matters to the spade’s soul. this Nonsense is why the phenomenology of spirit is basically impossible to read unless you go through some massive fucking hegel crash course to understand what the fuck he’s talking about.
but he succeeds. and finally, in this high-stakes negotiation with the spade’s soul, god relented, and let hegel admit, at long last, that a spade is a spade.
as a result, there’s a lot of Bullshit in hegel, as with all idealists. but immanent critique is real, and it’s marx who took this and made it grounded.
marx goes, right, way back when, societies could be destroyed by forces without. national histories were for ages based on their own internal systems of production, and this meant, you know, some guys could fucking rampage from somewhere else and change history by just popping in.
so you know, rome has its own thing going on then some blokes on horses smell Weakness and they go and Fuck It All Up. of course, they then find themselves living alongside all this Roman Shit, and they go, huh, this is neat, and they become Barbarian Kings and they do this whole “feudal” thing there. “feudalism” isn’t really a coherent thing, though, because it’s a bunch of different things in different places. even in europe: an anglo-saxon earldorman is not a french duke is not a scottish chief. likewise, an anglo-saxon man-of-oath is not a french serf is not a scottish clansman, you know. marx doesn’t actually get this nuance properly (and outside of europe you actually have to Use Your Head to describe pre-capitalist relations rather than defaulting to some dead german’s Textwall), but he’s got the right idea about it.
basically, to understand how these things are all different, you have to understand the things what came before. you have to understand them in relation to each other. you have to know why the blokes got on the horses, and why they were driven to rome, and what life on the horses was generally like.
so you know, marx says, all these ‘historians’ are talking about the wars and the conquests and the princes, and all their Blazing Souls and Great Ideas, they’re forgetting how all these people fucking got there. because they are still Idealists and they don’t think the plebs matter. to marx, the plebs matter, because you know, they compose most of human existence and are the foundation on which the princes wage their wars. observing this really basic fact was so offensive to the germans that they fucking raided his apartment and exiled him.
anyway.
basically, these things are all interacting with each other, and you’ve got to understand them on their own terms, as interweaving forces. and you’ve got to understand ideas as something propped up on this rather than its prime conditioner.
there was this thing in feudalism, though. the town. the town, where manufacture could happen — where people could take extracted materials and turn them into new things. they relied on the countryside for subsistence, but they did not give anything back to the countryside unless it was an innovation that could extract more from the countryside.
if you live in the countryside, this probably feels like a raw deal, because it is. you’re fucking breaking your back in the field and now not only is your lord taking a shitton of it, but you’re also feeding these idiots in the town. you feed these fucking people and they think they’re better than you because they have Walls and Government. but you can’t just fucking Kill Them, because they have Walls, and even more importantly, if you raised an army to kill them, the nobility would kill you with their much bigger, better equipped army. all because you fucking feed these people in the first place. what a bind. you ultimately conclude: these people can fucking eat shit.
earlier the work of repressing you would be done with other peasants or a household guard of sorts, but later feudalism had professional armies that would fucking evaporate you if you even tried. and these standing armies would also centralise the nobility into a matter of who had the standing army, and the king’s “divine right” became a real thing for once. the result was Absolutism, which was basically the idea of “the king does whatever he wants”. the Thinkers ascribed to this a great philosophical awakening and higher order of consciousness, rather than the king’s big professional army killing people who disagreed with him.
and when the townsfolk went into the countryside, say as traders, they found a bunch of dirt-soaked peasants with idiosyncratic superstitions who were immediately suspicious of you and don’t even know how to make a fucking Mosaic. and you kind of conclude these people are idiot bumpkins who don’t know anything, and they can fucking eat shit.
this, marx succinctly describes, is “the antagonism between town and country”. this war still wages today, when european farmers will roll their tractors into national capitals and tragically the professional army no longer fucks them up for this.
anyway, there’s also another contradiction in the towns! the people who manufacture are now selling the Things They Make. this is commerce, and it happens within the town but more and more between towns. some places, the romans built Roads for this, and that makes it easier.
bartering is Dogshit for this so we have this thing, Money, and together we pretend it reflects the value it says it does on the coin. and because we pretend it does, and it’s convenient for everyone to accept it, it really does reflect the value it says it does on the coin. so value is socially created, but that doesn’t make value fake. people are fucking Killing Each Other over this shit, and they’re not dying for air. it’s just, that value, if it’s real, is an abstraction of a real relationship between people, not some essential property from without. that’s what’s important. money didn’t come about because God decreed it, the guildsmen just wanted to be paid in shit they could universally exchange for other shit, they weren’t happy with grain like those stinking peasants in the countryside would be.
but now you’ve got people, traders, and the whole reason they exist is commerce. they buy shit, move it elsewhere, and sell it.
now it’s the manufacturers’ turn to go, hold on a fucking second. what do you mean there are these people, they’re buying the shit we make, then they’re selling it on, and then they buy the shit other people make, and selling that on, and now we’ve got to compete with these people. fucking ridiculous. that’s not fair.
so they go up to the lord and they go “Boss, there are these rootless degenerates running around selling shit like crazy and we’re making less mone- i mean, they’re undermining our Noble tradition of Ethical Work. can you do something about them?”
the lord goes, “yes, but i tax these people, and they are making me a Lot of Money.”
the manufacturers go, “yeah, but we make all your shit with our guild. so you know, your hands are kinda tied.”
the lord goes “ah shit fair enough you know what i’ll issue some Protections for you to prevent all this Competition.”
so now the trader’s getting hit with tariffs and duties and taxes and is making less money and the trader goes “dude, what the fuck?” because they’ve been schlepping all to take these goods from place to place and that’s a pretty big fucking service and all they got is punishment for it. they then realise it’s because the manufacturers have fucked them over, and they decide the manufacturers can go and eat shit.
they then make their own Guilds, with blackjack and hookers, to defend their interests, and now all the lords have to deal with these fucking people all bandying about for privileges.
this, marx succinctly describes, is “the antagonism between industry and commerce”. this war still wages today, when economies financialise through neoliberalism, and provoke backlash from the local workers who are now being undercut.
if you’re a dirt-munching peasant this is all greek to you, until suddenly something comes along and forces you to leave: a plague, a war, a famine, maybe it’s those blokes on horses again, i don’t know. and you might wind up in the town. and you know, you’re now surrounded by all of these big and Noble Craftsmen what with their Proper Work ethic, and their Beef with the traders.
but you’re a dirt-munching peasant. the manufacturers have their Guilds that have codified, patriarchal hierarchies, but there’s none of that for a lot of these people, because commerce has now let a new type of guy get his foot in the door, who just hires people for wages in that thing, money. and that’s often the only shit you can get. and there’s no patriarchal Do As Master says here, you are some horrible fucking mercenary and you get money and nothing else. and that’s your entire world: money.
in the world of guilds and traders, you are fucking miserable and can’t really do shit. but now there is this entire economy of rootless money-seekers, running around for Money and only Money, worker, employer, all. all these people are basically seen as Cthulhu by the guilds and the traders alike.
but things are changing. there is now trade between nations, maritime innovations have rounded the cape, discovered the americas, there’s a big old system of trade going everywhere. and now you’ve got big traders, and they’re bringing insane amounts of wealth to their countries.
if you’re one of the guild traders, you’re getting crowded out by these guys and free competition is kind of fucking ruinous for you.
so they go up to the lord and they go “Boss, there are these rootless degenerates running around selling shit like crazy and we’re making less mone- i mean, they’re undermining our Noble tradition of Ethical Trading. can you do something about them?”
the lord goes, “yes, but i tax these people, and they are making me a Lot of Money.”
the manufacturers go, “yeah, but we sell all your shit with our guild. so you know, your hands are kinda tied.”
the lord goes “ah shit fair enough you know what i’ll issue some Protections for you to prevent all this Competition.”
so now the big capital traders are getting hit with all this mercantile protectionism, tariffs, duties, taxes etc. and they’re like what the fuck, dude? because they’re schlepping across entire fucking oceans and bringing veritable mountains of wealth back home, and they’re getting punished for this big old service of theirs.
but the cat’s out of the bag, because money still talks at the end of the day. you’ve still got people going around, trading shit, and, in fact, some lords realise if they make good conditions for the global traders, they’ll start doing more trade, and thus produce more money, and that’s really good.
but they’ve still got to deal with the traders’ guilds. portugal’s conquered the indian fucking ocean and they’ve still got to deal with these idiots. and everywhere the traders’ guilds are full of the most annoying fucking people ever.
you know, you can get these people, and they could be hiring entire merchant fleets to dominate global trade on your behalf. but there’s some fucking dipshit who is trying to convince you that actually it’s much more Soulful when some pokey fucking guild does it, and that you’re killing that precious Soul by being more efficient. and it’s all because they just want to keep their trading privileges.
if only there was a big old thing you could use to fucking kill these people.
so you build that professional army we were talking about earlier and you permit a bit of free competition and the trade guilds come and they go “what the fuck dude.”
and you go, “sorry chaps, i’m getting really wealthy off this.”
the trade guilds go, “we’re going to fuck you up.”
you go, “actually, no, see these chaps with guns? this giant regimented body of professional soldiers what i trained on modern military theory? they are very much allowed to shoot you.”
and the trade guilds crash out because they’re Fucked. wars were fought over this shit.
anyway, you do get a bit cautious about this growing big commercial interest, though, because they’re getting a bit big for their britches. all very good while they’re bringing in wealth, but you don’t want the tail to wag the dog here. so you’re still restricting their interests, and those lesser nobles you cajoled into line, they’re actually quite important now.
the stage is set: it’s you against this new middle class. in french, you call the middle class the bourgeoisie.
the middle class are now a part of society, though. this surplus means they’re now lawyers and teachers and importantly, Thinkers. you get these Thinkers, and they begin to produce their own History of Ideas. they look at the world and they say, “i should have more money”. philosophy demands logic, though, so they add: “the world would be a better place if i had more money.”
this is described as “the enlightenment” in the History of Ideas–and enlightenment thinkers were very convinced it reflected yet another development of human consciousness.
you realise the king is kind of the thing stopping you from making more money.
so you get these Thinkers and they go around and it’s very fashionable for a monarch at this point to have a pet Enlightened Thinker, like frederick the great with voltaire. and you know, the monarch will use the big old professional army to do a bit of Making The Bourgeoisie More Money, but not nearly enough.
this is described as “enlightened absolutism” in the History of Ideas–and enlightenment thinkers were very convinced it reflected yet another development of human consciousness.
anyway though, these monarchs do suck at doing the Enlightenment and they aren’t listening to all of your well-thought-out critiques, just the ones they like. but you want the whole package, and there’s this pernicious fucking prick who you can’t trust to Get With The Programme.
and in france, it’s fucking ridiculous. you’ve got a bunch of inbreds and they’re fucking everything up and throwing big parties and not even pretending to care about what the bourgeoisie thinks. so you get all these middle class people and they go to a tennis court and they say “we are not going to leave this tennis court until you limit the monarch’s power!”
the king’s like “oh okay.” and then ignores them because they’re just a bunch of idiots in a tennis court. these guys go “fuck fuck fuck” and they decide to whip up a mob to go and attack the bastille, this big old prison what holds like half a dozen people.
the king goes, hmh, now that’s a problem. hey, professional army, guys, what’s up. can you fucking Evaporate these people.
the professional army he’s talking to is the french guard, the elites of the elites. the thing is, though, he’s not actually talking to the professional army. he’s talking to the army commanders, who do not actually run the army at this point and the soldiers are actually being led by their middle class non-commissioned officers, not the aristocratic officer corps.
shockingly, these people then join the people storming the bastille.
the bourgeoisie is thus catapulted into power and proceeds to kill a Shitton of aristocrats and anyone who really gets in the way of killing these aristocrats. suddenly, all the silly shit that hampered commerce is gone, and soon there’s a uniform legal code and a constitution and God Is Fake or something. eventually the bourbons are returned to power courtesy of the british (who already did this shit with cromwell and as such already have free competition and have lots of money to throw at dipshit europeans whenever the french get uppity) but the cat’s out of the bag.
there’s this big old movement for Constitutions, for Law, and all that shit, all across europe, and eventually most of europe has some sort of free competition as a result because the aristocrats steadily decided they would rather not be killed en masse again.
this, in the history of ideas, is called “Democracy”. and we all agree, it reflected a higher order of human consciousness.
this thing, capitalist production, also meant the people working for the capitalists were now all not guild people but in fact the descendants of those dirt-munching peasants who moved to the towns. and indeed now more and more dirt-munching peasants are moving to the town. and they are working. working, for a wage.
these people are kind of just living by the wage and so they naturally lack most of the pretensions the guild idiots had. they don’t really care they just want more Money. in this, they have something in common with the bourgeoisie. and in their life, they only get forward by getting more money.
and these people are morally repugnant. the bourgeoisie looks at them and they see these people who sleep with prostitutes while also being married, who steal and lie to their faces about it. some of them don’t even go to church! and they go, wow, these people can eat shit.
these people, the proles, they look back and they see a bunch of rich fuckers telling them to spend their lives on a fucking production line. they also sleep with prostitutes while also being married, they steal and lie to our faces about it. and they want us to go to church! and they go, wow, these people can eat shit.
the point is that capital created the proletariat, but capital is just yet again a social relation governing some laws of value. capital isn’t god, either. and the proletariat, marx says, need to get this, and will get this, because otherwise they are eating shit forever.
the proletariat have nothing to propose. where the bourgeoisie could propose law, civilisation, constitutions, all to make more money–the proletariat’s interest is to destroy law, civilisation, constitutions, and live for themselves, produce freely, under communism.
why am i telling you all this?
this is the materialist dialectical framework, which is in and of itself built on immanent critique.
in the middle ages, the entire social order of a given place can be upended by the blokes on horses. national history is still national history. this also means, like, if there’s a peasant revolt in germany, the chinese don’t fucking care.
what capital did is it created world-history, and brings this interconnectedness wherever it expands. the only way it can be destroyed, now, is through its own function–the blokes on horses are no longer on horses. they are working in a factory, and they want to destroy all this shit.
so when there’s a worker revolt in germany, the chinese now have to care. because capital’s knocking at their door too–and it has Workers to make of chinese people. it often does so through gunboats, on behalf of a sovereign state. and we understand this as imperialism.
but this world-history is all interconnected. capital is negated by the proletariat, then the proletariat negates itself–the negation of the negation.
this is where immanent critique is useful. the self-negating negation is negating a positive order what itself had to negate the previous positive order. where hegel had to have a conversation with the soul of a spade to realise even a kernel of this, marx finished the part he couldn’t by refusing to pretend the spade had a soul to begin with.
to see how dialectical conflicts are resolved, we first look within social systems. and indeed, the negation is a product of the conditions of the positivity, but only inasmuch as the negation is immanent to this positivity. it does not exist outside of that positivity without producing a positivity of its own; where it cannot do this, it negates itself. and that is the dialectical summary of literally everything i’ve fucking told you.
but a lot of self-proclaimed ‘dialectical materialists’ will use an alternative framework: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
this is the dialectics of johann gottlieb fichte, an idealist philosopher who had his own dialectical method.
this dialectical process involves raising something, a thesis, and it then comes into conflict, an antithesis. the antithesis, to overcome the thesis, adopts parts of the thesis, too. it becomes a synthesis. and this new status quo meets an antithesis.
this is clearly fucking inferior to immanent critique because it doesn’t actually ask where the antithesis fucking comes from, or its relationship to the thesis other than contradiction. so for fichte, you get this moronic bullshit where everything has to be the blokes on horses, and what put the blokes on the horses only matters inasmuch as it relates to the thesis.
so for fichte, the blokes on horses what ransacked rome cannot have got on their horses for any reason of their own, but instead the hand of God reached out from rome to put them on their horses, and then steer them toward rome.
but not only can this method connect unrelated things! it can disconnect related things!
for fichte, the manufacturers, who we know were based in towns as a centralisation of early industry, did not produce the means by which commerce existed, and they did not then enable and constrain it on those premises. no, the traders were some lurking potential, sprung out from the Font of History to challenge them, placed by God to punish the guilds in a twist of irony!
yes, the big traders, the logical conclusion of commerce, the bourgeoisie, arose simply to challenge the guilds and the nobility! the proletariat, likewise! they proceed from air, like twisting pixies in the night!
it’s almost impressive. you can apply this dialectical method to literally any real, existing thing, and it tells you fucking nothing about it.
now of course, this isn’t actually what fichte believed, because fichte’s dialectical method wasn’t for materialists, it was to deal with those precious Ideas he and his fellows bounced around in and between their Skulls. thesis-antithesis-synthesis was undoubtedly very useful in this philosophical noosphere, but one does wonder what the fuck i’m meant to get out of it.
there is this guy, and he is trying to figure out what a spade is, so he’s talking to the spade’s soul, and he’s so fucking enraptured he’s now trying desperately to fuck it. i want nothing to do with this pervert.
compare this to hegel, who treated the spade’s soul as a gentleman should, who didn’t impose himself, paid the bill, and expected nothing in return–this was who she graciously revealed the truth of “a spade is a spade” to.
when marx was selecting a Method for the materialist conception of history, he started with the Method of the guy who, even if it involved having imaginary friends, managed to consider a spade a spade. and then, with this mighty intellectual arsenal, he looked at more spades and each and every one he simply called a spade.
but we see self-proclaimed “dialectical materialists” using thesis/antithesis/synthesis and some of them even have the fucking gall to invoke it as a hegelian influence. they then go around tossing thesis/antithesis/synthesis around as if it’s some form of Truth.
look, these systems, they aren’t essential Truths. the whole point of marx is he absolves us of having to plug ourselves into the imaginary ley line the idealists have been gaslighting us with since they learned to think. we can take their Ideas and use them if they’re useful to us.
immanent critique is a mundane property of social existence.
thesis/antithesis/synthesis is erotic german fanfiction for gardening tools.
it’s up to you as to which one you want to do Materialism with.
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