(N.B. As we only publish a relevant
selection of the
correspondence, some remarks refer to letters
not
published here. However, their absence
does not
influence the flow of scientific and philosophic
argumentation.)
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 1997 / From: khalid.ali@utoronto.ca /To: John Tennyson Lee Franz <lee@faces.ula.ve> /
Subject: Re: Wild West and Ronald Reagan
Thanks for your two lectures, they were both brain-wrecking to some extent, particularly the last one. The inverse and reverse relation of truth is now an already accepted norm in today's language in particular by politicians, bureaucrats and business leaders. It is an ideology, almost a dogma and a mantra in the varied repertoire of what is known in public relations as damage control, especially in turbulent times when the sighs of frustrations of workers are evident.
It is also about politics and power, but it is mainly a concerted and barefaced conscious attempt to deceive, and at the same time to demonstrate, that they, the ruling class, care for you and me.
Budget cut-backs, restructuring, re-engineering, restraint, downgrading are some of the familiar terms used to justify what the ruling class promotes as "tough medicine" to their 'recalcitrant' cohorts, the 'masses'. For them:
WE all have to taste this "tough medicine" if WE want Our future to be secure- especially if WE want OUR children and grandchildren to benefit from the 'emerging global economy.'
Resultant expectations by the mind deceivers: Be calm, don't protest!
THEY are doing everything to "help" the future generation: If THEY do not cut down on spending and restructure the economy, "Canada will fall in its competitiveness in relation to other countries and WE will ALL be doomed."
This is a typical message spurted out like a mantra everyday by almost every Tom, Dick and Harry, including the politicians and the CEO's. Big Brother is indeed always alert and knows how to let his "accomplices" identify themselves with his efforts to design the present and next road map of global exploitation.
The second aspect of your lecture (Ronald Reagan Syndrome) is, yes indeed, complex and mind-wrecking. I cannot, in all honesty, pretend that I understood everything - I did not. I understand that you cannot explain everything and maybe you already think I know or follow everything. This is understandable. You explained that Praxis is a conscious theoretical action (understood), it is also a combination of both the affirmation and negation; and it is negatively oriented, primarily because it does not affirm the sort of action that I perceive as the "sudden consciousness" of individuals, who have had enough and begin to question their environment (Socialists, "Marxists") which led them into demonstrations and protests...! Here you argue, that this action has nothing to do with Praxis, but is rather practice.
Elaborate further here for me: Why is this not Praxis?
The question of Theory is very controversial in the North
American vocabulary. You caution not to confuse it with ideology.
In my mind, after six years in North American Universities, I always
equate the term with some sinister ideology. At the same time you proclaim
the need to rescue its "contents, its thought existence." I guess this
is practical scientific correlation that has been already proven over and
over. Am I on the right track, here?
Finally, you explain that it has nothing to do with Praxis. Okay, therefore, according to today's conventional understanding of the terms "Theory" and "Praxis", we would be talking about "idea" and "practice". Now from here my "coco" explodes, and so I will continue with the next aspect of what you explained later.
Love and Good Night
Khalid
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 1997 20:49:22 -0400
From: khalid.ali@utoronto.ca
X-Sender: khalid.ali@log3
To: John Tennyson Lee Franz <lee@faces.ula.ve>
Subject: Re: Sand & Typhoons
Your two mini-lectures are a marvel to read. They provided yet another excellent opportunity to seriously analyse one's relation to the outside world and to wake up, be alert, be attentive and to defend what you think is correct. For this reason one cannot over emphasize the importance of knowledge. Knowledge is obviously a reflection of reality that originates from a conscious and scientific mind through practice and experiments. (And this is why I am fortunate to have you to tinker around with, since you test your hypothesis before you even begin to speak or write.)
Knowledge, to my mind, also is a practice (not sure if I am using the word correctly) in that it not only has a purpose, but it severely impacts man's vision of reality. That reality is the essence to reflect, to question and to put to task the object ( e.g., ideology) and to turn it upside down; in other words to strip it from its natural state and to penetrate its inner secrets and purposes, including its goals and what it purports to represent, in order to bring to light its real essence, content and impact on one's mind. It's not my intention to get into a debate on importance of knowledge, but, after reading a number of your lectures, I think I can come to this (I hope a not too bad) conclusion. Later, I will comment in detail some of the points which you have raised.
I like your comments on the 'pitfalls of generalizations' -
you are
right, the question of identity is also so important; thanks for
raising it. It is significant for me too, not only Nandi, especially being
a minority and living in Canada. This, I would like to seriously discuss
with you in the future. Unfortunately, time is up for me and my brains
are exploding. I spent all day reading a number of technology and business
magazines. The information is just overwhelming - I will discuss it with
you in N.Y.
Goodnight!
Love and pleasant dreams, until tomorrow!
Khalid
KHALID & FRANZ (Continuation)
Sunday, 26.10.97
HUMAN BEING XV
(Labour)
My dearest Khalid,
Still the same problem with the gods; we cannot log-on to our domain server, Zeus. Hence, I have to wait until mercy arrives, and then I will send off this lecture. We are fine, surely, you are still happy and "gay". Taking into account the invaluable information which you had given me in your last letters, with reference to the "wonderful human beings" and the "wonderful world" in which we live, I will now continue our "Human Being" lectures.
Let me commence with some general remarks and observations. If it is true that the average "human being", during a lifetime, is only using a fraction of his brain, i.e., only about 5% of its capacity, then we must ask: What happened to the other 95%? Is it already destroyed by "mental rust" or ideology, indoctrination and manipulation? Or has it never ever been "activated", or will it never ever be functioning? How many giga-bytes of capacity are still left in the individual brains? Is it only this miserable 5% that differentiates us from the "beasts"? Is the human mind already so destroyed that its other capacities cannot be sparked off anymore? How many abilities and capabilities has "mankind" lost over the last 100 000 years of perverted "Labour"?
Furthermore, can we rely on this 5% knowledge about "reality"? Can we deduce "absolute" and "scientific" truths with this limited beta-version of a brain? From bad to worse, even this 5% brain is programmed with ideology, beliefs and ignorance, of course, excluding the simple "facts" that are generally known in the Patria. We will give you below some excellent religious examples.
The "Holy Bible", the "Gospel Truth" !
All Christians swear on their Bible, and the very Bible, in its last chapter, in the Revelations or Apocalypsis, swears hell-fire to any Christian who alters anything about the "gospel truth" which it contains. And yet, very few Christians know, that the Bible is censured or that it is incomplete, or that there are things in it which have nothing to do with beliefs or revelations.
For example, the official Catholic Bible does not contain the Apocrypha,
which appears as appendix to the King James Version of the Old Testament;
in other words, few Christians, with their 5% beliefs, know anything about
the books of Judith, Tobit, Bel & The Dragon,
or Susanna & The Maccabees.
What Are The Gospels? Who Wrote Them?
They do not even know anything about the Lost Books of the Bible, written after the death of the "historical" Jesus, by such authors like Nicodemus, Peter or Marcion. For example, these books show more about the life of Jesus as a child, and of Mary before Christ's birth. Even more dramatic is the question: Who wrote the New Testament? Few Christians know, that the gospels are in reality only mythologies created by different religious communities for various self-purposes, and that they are only very distantly related to the actual Jesus, who might have lived, or who probably has never lived at all. As far as the Intellect, thinking and memory are concerned, we do not even utilize 5% of this 5%.
A Creative Functioning Mind
A functioning brain can ease and breeze effortless through a lecture or a speech without notes; it can remember at any time what we wrote or said where, or who said what when and where. It can remember a slew of phone numbers which we had used in the past decade at a moment's notice. We could memorize anything which we ever sensed almost instantly, we can read comprehensively, relate hundreds of processes, eliminate absentmindedness, develop our creative imagination, even tap sources already present in our mind, provided that we are not drowned by spirits, wine spirits, ideology and religion. Now, just check how many "human beings" are capable of the above things, even possible in the Patria itself. And now use a creative imagination in an emancipatory environment to estimate, what an emancipated historian could think with its, his or her brain.
We think these examples show how limited even the "average" 5% brain capacity is, not only in the field of scientific and philosophical knowledge, but even more so in the domain of religious confusion. But enough of all this now, let us get along with much more pleasant thoughts.
Labour: The Root of All Evil
In the last lecture, we tried to introduce the "labour" concept. We have to differentiate that, which we understand by labour, from that, what generally in the Patria is meant by this word. Of course, in everyday life, this term means a hell of a lot. We give you a sample:
work, toil, bodily work, pains, duties, a task requiring hard work, effort towards the satisfaction of needs, workers collectively, supply of workers, services of workers, bodily workers, Labour Party, its cause, principles or interest, the outcome of toil, trouble taken, exertion of influence, the pangs and efforts of childbirth, heavy pitching, heavily rolling of a ship, to be oppressed, to take pains, to strain, to over-elaborate, compulsory work in prison, work undertaken with hope, to take pains to convince, to produce, forces of work, source of surplus value, etc.
Well, this is enough; now you know exactly what labour is in the Patria. Nowhere above, Labour is defined as an intrapatriarchal relation, as the perverse relation between exploited Nature and dominated Society, as the "Human Being" itself in macrocosmos, as the process of Alienation itself. The nearest to which the above "definitions" came, was to indicate labour as "pain", and as "pain" by human birth, when the human baby was cut off from Mother Nature, due to labour pain; labour is really a pain in the ... .
Towards Intellectual Labour ...
Nonetheless, let us review what we had determined as the mental degree of Intellect. If you remember, the Intellect has to do with affirmation, negation, affirmation and negation; with simple negation, and with double negation, but not with surpassing, not with superation, not with the domain of Reason.
Intellect: The DNS of Cosmic Action
The Intellect (Einai-In-Itself) concerns action and thinking, but, in contradistinction to Reason, it does not occupy itself with itself, i.e., it does not think about thinking itself. As far as History is concerned, the Intellect, on its specific degree, occupies itself with the non-relations between Nature and Society. However, for the time being, History itself "is" the mension towards which Reason (Einai-For-Itself) transcends, hence we will only treat the intellectual intensive-extensive contradiction, Nature and Society, and not its extensive-intensive aspects, which pertain to Reason.
Labour & Marxism
In the Patria, which is composed of maltreated Nature and deformed Society, the relation between the two, as accepted by Marxists, is defined as Labour; as Division of Labour. This simply means that Labour, Work, the exploitation and domination of Nature, was split into physical (cosmic) and spiritual (ontic) labour, which causes alienation, i.e., Labour as such is alienated Labour. All Patrians, including the Marxists, have no problem with Labour exploiting or dominating Nature; in fact, they claim that exactly this is the very essence of Labour, is the very essence of life, of the human being. The action of Nature, via Labour, has always been placed unilaterally in the service of Society, to the detriment of Nature itself; this is why we currently have ecological or ecosuicidal problems.
PRIMITIVE POLITICS: DOMINATING MOTHER EARTH, NATURE
As we stated before, for Marxists, the problem is not that Man exploits Nature, but that Man exploits Man; and, according to him, this is not normal, is not acceptable. In this sense, the "History" of the Patria is simply the process of Production, the process of Labour.
For the species Man, according to his very own formal logics, in order to survive, to live in peace and harmony, he must dominate his mortal enemy, Nature, he must produce without threats. Man was thrown out of Paradise, and he was cursed to toil on Earth by the sweat of his brow; this means that Nature was the curse cast upon him; only through labour, he has the hope to survive. Hence, even in the Bible this antagonistic, aggressive, "negative" attitude towards Nature is reflected. "Negative Attitudes" are fundamental in the Labour Process, in Global Production !
The Darwinian "Chosen Few"
Of course, the Division of Labour and the Exploitation of Nature, which are synonymous, had made many a chosen people rich. Also the division of labour led to the exploitation and domination of Man himself; the few rich, the intellectual labourers, began to subdue the many manual workers; thus exploitation and domination entered Society: eventually, social classes, class struggle, accumulation of capital, pauperization of the major part of Man, of Society, came into existence, and the conflicts, frictions and absurdities began to threaten the very essence of the Patria itself. Later, we will deal with the elitist "chosen few", with the modern "philosopher-kings", created during the "Age of Reason", the rational labourers of the "Kingdom of God", of the "Fatherland". Also, in this case, as understood by us, Historic, Emancipatory Reason appears as a perverted downgraded version, as another non-relation in the Patria.
Draculian Exploitation and Draconian Domination: The Essence of Croesusian Wealth !
Exploitation became double and like a worm was eating up the very marrow of the Patria. Democracy and Socialism are supposed to heal this cancer, to return Man to his superior status, to his harmonious, peaceful and Draculian exploitation and domination of Nature, to the status quo ante rem. This all explains why the destiny of any human being born is to labour; in "primitive", slave and feudal "societies" the above is still evident; in present bourgeois industrial "society", the secret of the whole Patria is veiled, but, even so, essentially labour is directed towards the exploitation of Nature; in its advanced form, as Draconian political and military domination, it threatens the very existence of Society itself, but, it produces "Croesusian" Wealth for the elitist "Chosen Few"!
Money is not the real root of All Evil; in fact, the "Evil" itself is Labour .
We Beg To Differ ....
For us, History does not have Labour as its existential relation; it is the Patria, which is alienated History, which is the very process of Alienation, of Labour, which has an alienated intensive "non-relation" or "contradiction". For this very reason, we cannot be emancipated within the limits of the Patria, not intensively within the framework of Labour and Capital, but intensive-extensively in History itself.
Also it is not a case of inventing History. History had preceded the Patria, exists alongside of it, and will surpass it. Before European "History", millions of years before, History had existed already, and it will still exist, in spatial-temporal terms, long after the stardust has forgotten that such a thing ever existed in the Cosmos a n d Einai AND Nothing.
It is necessary to introduce Labour, from there we will treat Property.
This is enough for today; sleep well, and increment the 5% of thinking
capacity!
Love,
Franz.