> OK I am lost.
> Why are we seeing societies as organic stages in natural history? That
> sounds like fascism because then we are only one step away from talking
> like
> fascists about making our societies vital, healthy, strong, etc.
The use of organic in this sense is not a functionalist (organic) or teleological (stages) one but one where the dynamic material/agencial processes of the elements and institutions produced by and abstracted from "societies" by practical thought (ideological or otherwise) "organically" generate changes in those dynamic materials, agencies, elements and institutions. Like you, perhaps, I try to avoid the use of the term organic for fear that it'll be read/heard as functionalist or teleological.
> Why do contradictions have to be in time? Two opposite sides of a coin are
> inseparable at any one point in time. Still we have to choose one side;
> remember the coin flip in No Country for Old Men. That was of course more
> like a Western than an Eastern!
>
Two sides of a coin do not make a contradiction, they are simply different sides... there's neither any agency or immanence within them. The whole point of the coin flips in NCfOM was not that there was a contradiction between heads or tails but that the materially temporal outcome of flipping the coin combined fate and agency to produce a contingent outcome. Contradiction, in Marx, works VERY differently than this.
Bertell Ollman writes, in Dialectical Investigations, that: pp.11-12 “Dialectics restructures our thinking about reality by replacing the common sense notion of ‘thing,’ as something that *has* a history and * has* external connections with other things, with notions of ‘process,’ which *contains* its history and possible futures, and ‘relation,’ which * contains* as part of what it is its ties to other relations…. The assumption is that while the qualities we perceive with our five senses actually exist as parts of nature, the conceptual distinctions that tell us where one thing ends and the next one begins both in space and across time are social and mental constructs. and
pp.13-15 Four kinds of relations:
a) identity/difference – takes process/relation qualities as given,
b) interpenetration of opposites – assumes process/relation qualities are contextual,
c) quantity/quality – stresses process/relation boundary development and differentiation, and
d) contradiction – emphasizes incompatible trajectories or interference patterns (dialectics of enablement and constraint) of component developments, whether quantitative, qualitative or quantitative in relation to qualitative in nature. It is the interplay between these processual relations that mandates time in re: contradiction.
> What are the needs of the Spirit? I would not want them to be ruled out as
> needs of an oppressed class but there are also those needs of the body.
>
Most folks here see the species being as inseparable from the material being of humanity, which is necessarily tied to and includes the body.
> Thanks for the clarifications.
> LR
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