Consciousness barriers. On accelerating the cultivation of true comrades-in-arms
No. 1/77.I.2023
It is interesting to observe the depth of the abyss that lies between people from the same community - "the community of language, territory, economic life and mental make-up, manifested in the community of culture." It manifests itself especially vividly when Marxist agitators communicate with ordinary people, with representatives, as they say, of the popular masses. “This is a catastrophe of the thought process, an intellectual disease,” the agitator turns to emotions, receiving in response to a detailed disclosure of the essence of capitalist relations something like “our president will deal with the situation, and you are rocking the boat.” The opposite is also true: in the phrase “the production of the means of life is primary in relation to all other phenomena and processes in society,” the representative of the masses hears only a set of alien sounds and proceeds to insults.
Something similar could be observed in a conversation between an astronaut explaining the principles of rocket operation and a representative of an ancient civilization who considers the sun to be a kind of lantern on a thunderer's hat.
In the meantime, the conversation is not going on with the ancestor: you and your contemporary are looking at the same phenomenon and sometimes understand diametrically opposite things about it. Because one of you has a clear glass between your eyes and the phenomenon, and the other has a wall with an illusion painted on it. In other words, the gulf between you lies between different levels of scientific knowledge: from complete ignorance on one side to a holistic Marxist worldview on the other. The task of overcoming it cannot be solved by one conversation, even the most measured one.
It would not be superfluous to repeat for the hundredth and thousandth time that the main nerve of today's problems is concentrated in the fact that, according to the apt expression of A. Redin,
“The dominance of the bourgeoisie rests not on violence in the literal sense of the word, that the armed bourgeoisie is capable of suppressing the proletariat, but on the ignorance of the proletariat, since only subjective delusions allow the gigantic material force of the majority of society to exclude itself from the objective process of the class struggle.”
How is it going now?
A favorable situation for communists has arisen in the world, when the invisible leg of the market is giving ever more sensitive kicks to the petty-bourgeois proletariat in its mass, which is pushing more and more people out of ever less comfortable holes to begin to take an interest in the structure of the world around them. The painstaking work of Marxist agitators in such conditions leads to the fact that more and more ordinary people turn to Marxism. It is regrettable that a significant part of them are weeded out over time: either they are eliminated from the Marxist movement, or they settle in opportunist swamps. "Lantern from the Thunderer's hat" turns out to be more familiar and attractive.
The rest comprehend Marxism in its entirety through conscientious self-education ([ 1 ])([ 2 ]) and, upon reaching the required level of competence, may in the future join the vanguard of the working class. Unfortunately, not everyone will cope with the task, and some will drop out again and follow their “flashlight” to nowhere.
Of course, the editors of Proryv and the future party of Scientific Centralism do not aspire to mass character in itself, because the point is not at all in quantity, but in the fact that we need personnel with the highest degree of competence and conscientiousness; cadres capable of leading tens of thousands tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow millions. In the end, how will this very mass character help if "the reason for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR was the incompetence of the members of the CPSU, especially in its leadership, in matters of practical construction of communism ."
However, if the mere increase in the number of cadres of the vanguard of the working class cannot be the necessary aim of the party of the working class or the press organ, then the qualitative quantity, that is, the quantity of competent cadres, plays an enormous, if not decisive, role in the victory of the revolution. As well as the speed with which such frames appear. Therefore, it is necessary to combat the above attrition through the development of new approaches to learning. Such a task, like any other task, lends itself to planning and implementation.
As V. Podguzov writes ,
“The most complex and so far the least developed, least detailed issue of Marxist theory is the question of bringing individual and social thinking, i.e. thinking of the entire population of the globe, to the scientific and theoretical level, when only that which serves the cause of building communism on the planet is recognized as moral. Therefore, the most difficult task in the chain of tasks facing the communists is the task of theoretical modeling and practical implementation of the CULTURAL REVOLUTION, which is by no means equal to the ability to read, count and write, and certainly not identical to universal satiety and the ability to dress in fashion.
What needs to be done in order to increase the speed of forging competent personnel? First of all, for this it is necessary to increase the number of such candidates who, being pushed out of their holes by social circumstances and the efforts of Marxist agitators and becoming interested in Marxism, could go so far as to engage in full-fledged conscientious self-education.
To do this, in turn, you need to understand the essence of those barriers in the mind that make the average person return to their "flashlights" and look for ways to overcome them.
Part I. Barriers
Our potential staff is all of humanity. At the same time, as one agitator who actively communicates with the population says, “no roasted rooster will force an idiot to use his brain.”
Let's think: why is that?
To answer, first of all, it is necessary to understand which aspects of the individual's consciousness need to be paid attention to. We already know that a Marxist sets the laws of social progress as the criterion of conscience, which in turn requires a certain quality of worldview acquired through diligent self-education, and social practice that follows these laws. Consequently, two essential characteristics are subject to consideration: the ability to reflect objective reality without distortion and the ability to direct one's thoughts and actions not only at oneself. In other words, the level of conscientiousness in theory, that is, the quality of the worldview, and the level of conscientiousness in practice.
The very essence of the answer lies in how these characteristics are affected by the capitalist formation with its absolute economic law - the desire for maximum profit.
1) The worldview of a modern person in quality can vary from drowned in ignorance, opportunism and illusions of a deeply petty-bourgeois consciousness to a high-quality holistic Marxist system of views. Under capitalism, the whole system of personality formation is aimed at rooting idiocy in all social science issues.
It is known, for example, that in most bourgeois countries the profession of a school teacher is literally trampled into the mud: lined with bureaucracy, poorly paid, limited in its educational function, which means that the task of forming a high-quality system of views is deliberately profaned. Leaving school, a person falls into the tenacious clutches of the market media, which generate information and propaganda chaos 24/7. Political propaganda in a class society is aimed at hiding the essence of social relations, replacing them with national-religious-democratic haze. It's hard to put it better:
“We see distorted facts, not knowing the context, background and perspectives, we get mostly interpretations, the so-called analytics, which simply terrorize thinking. Shrinking from the onslaught of nonsense, eclecticism, superficial nonsense, the mind is attached to fragmentation, forcibly pushed into emotional priorities over rational ones. The brain learns to think in a gag, not bothering to work out the details, sides, developments, not even bothering with a banal fact check. The brain comes to binary, simple black-and-white and intensely emotional schemes that envelop any information. Such a mind easily accepts any duck that has even a modicum of plausibility, even if the whole situation is surreal and absurd.
Both specialists in idealism of a religious persuasion, who are trying to “dress up in a scientific toga”, and representatives of bourgeois science , whose picture of the world is not much different from the biblical scriptures with creation from nothing, miracles, dark matter and the transformation of motion into matter , are involved in the cause of fooling the masses .
This means that the first barrier in consciousness is the barrier of a poor-quality worldview, the barrier of illusions.
Despite this, progress in terms of increasing the number of educated people is still observed, because capitalism, due to the development of the means of production, can no longer completely get rid of professions related to mental labor. However, this progress is relative, because this growth is significantly limited, and the intellectual workers themselves, as a rule, develop one-sidedly, growing into professionals in one business. At the same time, for the masses of people who graduated from school with grief in half, the limit of mental stress is watching an educational Internet video and studying history using the example of a Hollywood movie. What kind of self-education can we talk about here if the habit of intellectual work is not instilled from childhood?!
This means that the second barrier in consciousness is the barrier of complexity, the difficulty of independent reading and assimilation.
2) The level of conscientiousness in activities varies from philistinism, cherishing animal atavisms of the bearer, to extremely impartial and self-critical Marxist social practice, carried out in accordance with the laws of social development.
The first thing to note is the path of becoming a person, the path passing through an intense struggle.
This struggle of contradictions is well understood , the struggle between the social principle of man and his animal atavisms:
“Man, indeed, is doomed to resist them with almost the same force that it took tens of millions of years of natural selection, when the ability to will was formed, acting as a bridge between reason and social life. Any renewed need of the body is non-progressive. Including sleep or nutrition, including everything that comes from mental desires of the “I want” level, which can be considered grassroots, due to the hormonal, nervous system. When such needs become decisive, they become clearly reactionary, since they take on a role that is opposed to higher forms of human motivation.
There is a wide range of characters that overcome the animal principle to varying degrees: this is a man-stomach (he is also a classic tradesman), a family man, a guardian of a group (classmates, friends, an interest group, an artel, a volunteer group), a public person ( “I will equip my native city”), a man-lover of the motherland (“I will give my life for the motherland”), an ascetic and, finally, a communist.
The second thing to note is spontaneous selflessness.
In those who have gone further in development than the human stomach, it is important to see the existence of spontaneous, that is, unscientific, inclinations of conscientiousness, and what else! For example, in our time one can observe the activities of a significant number of religious ascetics and nationally oriented volunteers who are ready to give and are giving their lives in the rear and on the front of the war against imperialism. Of course, the illusions in their heads significantly limit their ability to achieve real victory, and on the side of the imperialist enemy there are many selfless people who sincerely believe that their actions contribute to the establishment of peace.
The third thing to note is the biological mechanism that is affected by capitalist society.
One way or another, the human brain, when interacting with the surrounding reality, receives some feedback, reinforcement, informing it about the success of the action performed. How does the human stomach work? And he simply enjoys his petty-bourgeois swarming: first, education and culture fill his head with capitalist consciousness, and then he realizes it through competition with his neighbors: he goes over the heads, perhaps becomes an entrepreneur, steals and, along the way, in every possible way delights the flesh. Knowing no other reinforcement and having years of successful animal reinforcement, such a person has no idea that life can go on in any other way. You can blame him for not spontaneously becoming different, but you can equally blame the circumstances themselves. Meanwhile, reinforcements are stronger the more it comes from social and the more from necessary and conscious activity. But the blind man does not understand the reasoning about red and white.
This means that the third barrier in consciousness is the barrier of animal atavism.
Part II: Exposition. Potential personnel
From the point of view of these three barriers - illusions, complexity and animal atavisms - let's look at the conditional "map of potential personnel".
The detailed statement of the problem considered in this article follows from the above illustration. If the goal of Breakthrough is to ensure that potential candidates (category 8) through years of conscientious self-education become worthy members of the vanguard of the working class, then the purpose of this article is to start a conversation about how to effectively move the remaining seven to category 8 and how to help them overcome three the aforementioned barriers.
For clarity, consider a few characters from the illustrated categories.
Category 8: a ready candidate who develops his competence.
Category 3: the most classic tradesman - in the head a picture from the media, relies on everyday "reason", or the so-called. “the ability to think” , adapts to the prevailing environmental conditions, that is, socially mimics . When getting rid of a number of capitalist illusions, it is easily reforged into a conscious pest from category 1.
Category 4: for example, a priest, a small businessman or a representative of a national social movement, completely sincerely and selflessly giving all of himself to some good cause, the same war against imperialism.
Category 6: There are two examples here. Here is the notorious I. Strelkov. Yes, Kornilov's laurels haunt him somewhere; yes, beyond the external (albeit true) assessment of phenomena in form, he can in no way penetrate into their essence. But who can say that such a person is not capable of education, and who can doubt that today he is ready to lay down his life for his ideals, albeit distorted, but undoubtedly directed not at himself, but at the whole of Russian society in his understanding. ? Or V. Grubnik, who went through the anti-Maidan Odessa underground, betrayed by the authorities of the Russian Federation; endured years in the SBU-Gestapo; returned after the exchange to the ranks as the organizer and main engine of the humanitarian volunteer movement from the beginning of the NWO; perfectly understanding the helplessness of the current ruling regime; offering as a global solution ... self-organization of conscious Russian people in the style of the people's militia during the Time of Troubles. It can be said that the more highly intelligent a person is, the more difficult it is to overcome the barrier of his illusions. But exactly "such guys need to reveal the class content of the state, showing that on the one hand a handful of "effective" privatizers who plundered the USSR, and on the other, the working masses, brought by the market to a state of steady extinction .
Category 5: a kind of Professor Preobrazhensky, but let's remove the extra grotesqueness to penetrate the essence. Such a person can have a high level of intelligence, can work hard all his life, not be a hedonist, be able to manage teams, be able to sincerely care for a whole group of people (from family and friends to a group of, for example, volunteer interests) and have decent results in practical activities. (scientific, entrepreneurial, professional, etc.).
Observing the surrounding inequality, it naturally adapts to this risk through the constant accumulation of a “financial cushion”. Firstly, it gives the illusion of control, the illusion that the impending catastrophe can be avoided, secondly, it still provokes consumerism, and thirdly, it encourages cooperation with the oligarchy of the most obscene spill for the sake of one’s own well-being.
He considers the prospect where society develops according to plan an idealistic utopia, since such a device requires abandoning all his previous experience (the barrier of animal atavism does not allow thinking in categories of necessity on a universal scale!), First of all, from a financial pillow, than to put yourself at risk. Proceeding from this, our "professor" declares the current course of things "natural", and all crises - insignificant in the historical perspective, as humanity continues to grow in spite of them. The quantitative factor here determines his thinking, and the quality of life of these millions is insignificant.
The deaths of millions in wars and the threat to the family personally because of the wars that flare up nearby are perceived with fatalism as a natural injustice within the framework of the general historical process. Fatalism suppresses the ability to fight. He declares the revolutionaries to be fanatics, especially since their asceticism conflicts with the personal habit of redistributing part of the public goods in their favor.
To summarize the worldview of our "professor" can be this: "I work productively and diligently. I get a well-deserved reward, and to give it up for the sake of perhaps understandable, but, in my opinion, untested communist ideas - let the passionaries do this; and if the war still comes and affects us, then this is the fate of such, on the scale of humanity, judging by its quantitative growth, this will not affect.
It is easy to imagine the reaction of representatives of different categories to how the market economy with its growing crisis disturbs their peace.
Firstly, “ to the extent of the politicization of the consciousness of the majority of citizens, the growth of their social, incl. and rally activity, the preconditions for the next major social changes are being formed. Those. there is a gradual, spontaneous convergence of the content of the fundamental theory of social development and mass consciousness .
Secondly, the work of Marxist agitators pushes people to the very initial, superficial understanding that their worldview is somehow flawed and this needs to be corrected. In this sense, propaganda work is a huge step towards getting people from any category to start moving towards Marxism.
However, this is not enough, because only candidates from category 8 are able to respond correctly and educate themselves. The rest will do it differently. Representatives of category 1 will begin to defend the usual philistine world order and will not overcome the barrier of animal atavisms. Category 2s will not break the difficulty barrier and will quit reading shortly after starting. Representatives of categories 3 and even 5 will start reading and also quit, but already because of the barrier of illusion. For example, they will hold on to a religious picture of the world or to anti-Soviet myths hammered in from childhood, and even the war going around will not be able to drown out the “horrors” of the late Soviet era, like queues for toilet paper. And despite the intelligence, many representatives of category 6 also cannot resist changing the usual illusory world order.
Can we just forget these people and drop the conversation with them? Can not! But we need an increase in the backbone of the cadre, that is, a significant number of people involved in self-education - mass category 8. To create and multiply such a soil - this is how the author sees one of the current tasks of the avant-garde.
You will have to work with different categories in different ways: representatives of categories 1 and 3 will be forced to train and introduce them to practice, but in the future; with representatives of category 7 - fight, and with representatives of the remaining categories 2, 4, 5, 6 - help overcome barriers and bring their condition to category 8.
Part III: Breaking Barriers
The struggle for minds takes place in theoretical and practical planes.
On the theoretical plane, it is necessary to continue the line of self-education, avoiding simplification for the sake of simplification. At the same time, the author proposes to set an additional task to create a self-study program built on the principle from simple to complex.
Within the framework of the self-study program, the fight against the barrier of illusions should be carried out according to the principle of the widest possible blow to the unscientific picture of the world, while not sliding into depth on individual aspects. It is extremely necessary to convey a broad, holistic picture of the world, indicating the failures of the most widespread illusions.
Why is that? The wrong picture of the world is replete with logical inconsistencies, and the task is not, for example, to tire the intelligent person from category 6 with deep arguments about the correct use of Marxist categories, but to give him the opportunity to plunge as quickly as possible into a coherent and consistent picture of Marxism. This requires materials written in easy language, covering issues of methodology, philosophy, the connection between the general and the particular, economics, history in a diamatic key, etc. The author made an attempt to create such material, but the desired lightness due to lack of experience has not yet been reached. Seeing the logical failures of his worldview, our potential comrade-in-arms will be able to make a further choice: either come to full-fledged self-education, or continue to live in his illusions. There should be several materials: from the lightest to the most detailed, but each of them should contain the maximum range of issues raised by Marxism.
Within the framework of the self-study program, the fight against the barrier of complexity should be carried out through the creation of a self-education school. It is known that, in themselves, simplified materials on the exposition of Marxism are harmful; however, they become a force if they are built into a coherent, multi-level structured system in which the big picture deepens with each new stage of training. So for years the school leads a person from the elementary concept of the oral calculation of prime numbers to the highest mathematics of the most serious level through a phased immersion in complexity. At the same time, such a training system lends itself to temporary planning.
Why is that? The spectrum of knowledge is too wide to master in Marxism, and there are too few people who are accustomed to the discipline of self-education and are able to systematically cover such a spectrum. Here, at least every day, talk about conscientiousness: a person will either not physically pull out without a phased introduction to the course of the matter, or he will drown in any particulars without knowing the whole teaching.
Let's take the "Science of Logic" (hereinafter - NL). Those who have studied it will confirm that the difficulty barrier is high here. There is no doubt that in the end you will have to study it from cover to cover, but you can also help in this matter with the method proposed above. What narrative elements can be seen in NL? The transition from category to category is carried out through reasoning, built according to a certain methodology. In the process of reasoning, axioms are sometimes introduced (as, for example, about the leading role of infinity); also sometimes there may be excessive reasoning and even idealistic errors (as, for example, the derivation of objectivity from subjectivity in the study of the concept). Some categories in their sublated form fall into diamatics and become diamatic categories. It is easy to imagine a system of phased learning:
* Level 1. Broad coverage of diamatic teaching. We can cite as an example the guide material from A. Redin and an essay on NL in relation to diamatics and the need to develop a correct system for reflecting the world around us from the author.
* Level 2. Basic axioms and methods of reasoning of the NL.
* Level 3. Acquaintance with the categories and axioms of the NL, a slightly more detailed consideration of the principles of reasoning of the NL.
* Level 4. A full study of the principles of reasoning of the NL, as well as consideration of the errors of the NL.
* Level 5. The use of NL in the works of the classics (for example, in "Capital"): diamatic categories, Hegelian categories, principles of reasoning, as well as consideration of the limitations of formal logic.
* Level 6. Free swimming, that is, independent reading of NL with the use of auxiliary materials.
And, finally, within the framework of the self-study program, the struggle against the barrier of animal atavisms cannot be conducted otherwise than through controlled involvement in broad social practice so that a person in a team of like-minded people receives real “social reinforcement”.
Why is that? The spectrum of activities is too wide, and therefore it is too easy to start doing the wrong thing, especially when Marxism has not yet been mastered. One could spend a million hours digging into the untimely aspect of a theory; one can write an infinite number of articles, even formally correct from a Marxist point of view, about politics, but at the same time act purely within the framework of the capitalist “agenda”. In other words, the newcomer has plenty of opportunities to act extremely inefficiently both for himself and for the entire communist movement. At the same time, a party activist can develop a series of tasks that will consistently, from simple to complex, enable potential cadres to join the cause of communism. Such tasks can be both in the field of agitation and propaganda, for example, criticism of certain capitalist or leftist publications,a list of problems in the construction of communism that require immediate scientific and theoretical study, and make them a number of less general, simpler and more detailed subtasks.
Ya. Dubov
18/01/2023
https://prorivists.org/77_prorivists/
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