> Doesn't this presuppose that we know rational self-consciousness is? Is
> arationality or
> irrationality in social life eliminable and how could we know and wouldn't
> that be a prediction
> either way the answer was arrived at?
It's an "internal relations" view of the development of rational self-consciousness.
It assumes, as I said before, that though capitalist relations are ultimately inconsistent with the full development of rational self-consciousness by anyone (so you can't without self-contradiction assume that the minds that can see how to change it in a progressive way are fully rational), they are consistent the development of a sufficient degree of it to be able to see that, say, contemptuousness is a way of dismissing reasonable ideas because they threaten, say, the "fragmentation" - e.g. "the world is made up of an immense number of bits, and ..., so far as logic can show, each bit would be exactly as it is even if other bits did not exist" - a person is unconsciously using to defend against persecutory anxiety.
A sign of this would be that they would misidentify the following ontological claims as sublating the idea of "internal relations" when in fact they directly contradict it, and would substitute contempt for argument when confronted by ideas that threatened this defence.
> "1]The world can be resolved into digital bits, with each bit made of
> smaller bits.
>
> "2]These bits form a fractal pattern in fact-space.
>
> "3]The pattern behaves like a cellular automaton.
>
> "4]The pattern is inconceivably large in size and dimensions.
>
> "5]Although the world started very simply, its computation is
> irreducibly complex."
>
> From the mathematician Rudy Rucker's 'Mind Tools', Hegel's great,
> great, great grandson.
> Aufgehoben indeed!"
it also assumes that our self-consciousness can become sufficiently rational to allow us to become aware that we are necessarily in some ways currently unknown to us unreasonable so that we must be constantly self-critical and open to the possibility that we're mistaken. This has the advantage that it at least opens us to what others say - to read and listen to them with "good will" - and allows us to change our minds if what they say shows that our beliefs are in some way mistaken.
Ted