> being dialectical, this circuit never stops... since the ruling
> ideas of an
> epoch are the ideas of that epoch's ruling class it more than could
> be that
> the neuroses and ideologies of that class rule as well, making for
> personal
> psychoses rooted in significant part in social contradiction...
Again, this seems to be using "dialectical" with a sense that ignores the relation of Marx's usage to Hegel's "higher dialectic of the conception". The latter has the "self-estrangement" of the individuals whose particular location in "the ensemble of the social relations" that define "capitalism" makes them the "class of the proletariat" work as a "steeling school" "giving the greatest impulse ... to the integral development of every individual producer" and thus "fitting" them for the task of human "emancipation", while the "self-estrangement" of the individuals whose particular location in that same "ensemble" makes them the "propertied class" does not.
“The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of Hegel, in its abasement the indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature and its condition of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature.
“Within this antithesis the private property-owner is therefore the conservative side, the proletarian the destructive side. From the former arises the action of preserving the antithesis, from the latter the action of annihilating it.
“Indeed private property drives itself in its economic movement towards its own dissolution, but only through a development which does not depend on it, which is unconscious and which takes place against the will of private property by the very nature of things, only inasmuch as it produces the proletariat as proletariat, poverty which is conscious of its spiritual and physical poverty, dehumanization which is conscious of its dehumanization, and therefore self- abolishing. The proletariat executes the sentence that private property pronounces on itself by producing the proletariat, just as it executes the sentence that wage-labour pronounces on itself by producing wealth for others and poverty for itself. When the proletariat is victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then the proletariat disappears as well as the opposite which determines it, private property.
“When socialist writers ascribe this world-historic role to the proletariat, it is not at all, as Critical Criticism pretends to believe, because they regard the proletarians as gods. Rather the contrary. Since in the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need -- the practical expression of necessity -- is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity, it follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate itself. But it cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own situation. Not in vain does it go through the stern but steeling school of labour. It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organization of bourgeois society today. There is no need to explain here that a large part of the English and French proletariat is already conscious of its historic task and is constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch04.htm
"Universally developed individuals, whose social relations, as their own communal [gemeinschaftlich] relations, are hence also subordinated to their own communal control, are no product of nature, but of history. The degree and the universality of the development of wealth where this individuality becomes possible supposes production on the basis of exchange values as a prior condition, whose universality produces not only the alienation of the individual from himself and from others, but also the universality and the comprehensiveness of his relations and capacities." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch03.htm
This account of the conditions that would produce the degree of "integral development" characteristic of what Marx means by the "universal individuals" able to initiate the "revolutionary practice" that would create "socialism" is badly mistaken, however, as the failure of wage labour to lead to the development Marx anticipated shows.
Among other things, it ignores the insights available from psychoanalysis into the conditions required.
At least, it ignores those available from the psychoanalysis with which I'm familiar. This must be different from the "psychoanalysis" employed by Zizek. The latter, apparently, is consistent with locating the required conditions in the worlds' slums.
Ted