The Dialectic Ends and Begins Now
I just realized why the words of Logo (along with Hudson, Veblen, Hegel, etc.) resonate so deeply with me: In some form, they posit that history and political economy move dialectically, and I live by the principle that the self (psychological, emotional, energetic) moves dialectically; as a projection of the external, and with the external as a projection of the internal, growth is a process of continual, infinite sublation into higher order contradictions and tensions. This is the core dialectic of existence and of the transmutation and destruction of matter—the dialectic of cosmological metabolism. And, at the highest level, this is always true regardless of whether someone is conscious of it or not.
For quite some time now I’ve been acutely aware that both political parties of the United States function to serve the whole, despite their more superficial antagonisms. My first attempt at articulating this can be read here. And in reading Hudson, I’ve begun to better understand the way in which countries and “competing” social, political, and economic systems will tend to subsume their counterparts and develop, in a mirror-like fashion, the very qualities of each other (such as the U.S. becoming a “better” version of the Soviet Union in its effort to destroy it during the Cold War).
The idea is that tension between systems is highly productive and functional. Each side generates the conditions needed by the other side, inherits crises from each other, legitimize the other’s existence by “cleaning up” the other side’s excesses or “failures”, thereby temporarily re-stabilizing the system as a whole, which establishes the next order contradiction. This is the core dialectic at the level of the state— a cyclical process whereby contradictions reproduce the system through alternation.
Such a process doesn’t need to be intentional to exist. In fact, it doesn’t even need to be conscious to exist (though the conscious vs unconscious form of this is where I apply most of my criticism).
The evidence is endless.
The Republican party will often deregulate, expand speculative capital, and hollow institutions which legitimizes the Democrats swooping in to restore, and manage, often bureaucratizing the very discontent produced by the opposing party. This in turn creates a bureaucratic-managerial expansion, which produces stagnation, anti-elite backlash, and populist anger, only to be capitalized on by the proceeding Republican party that inherits this tension, and mobilizes it into further action. Without Republican excess, there is no liberal restoration narrative, and without liberal managerialism, there would be no right-wing populism. Each side must continually produce the conditions that allow the other to thrive.
The most enlightening (or disturbing) reality of this dialectic is that it demonstrates why both parties are structurally incapable of solving the root issues they both claim to wish to solve. This is why it’s moronic to believe either side will advance the deeper, structural change they may espouse. Arguing endlessly over immigration, taxes, abortion and guns is the moment-to-moment establishment of coherence! It takes a leap in consciousness to see the “good” in both sides, but it takes another leap to understand the degree to which each side necessitates the other.
To “solve” their core issues would be to resolve the contradiction, and this is impossible (within the current structure of the state, and within the conditions set by the consciousness producing it) because the state would cease to become politically and economically generative. Meaning, neither side can be truly “revolutionary”, as this would collapse the means for all, and the system would be forced to restart—which no one actually wants right now because despite rising gas prices, you can still Doordash, goon to porn, and gamble all night long.
In this model, polarities do not serve to resolve one another, but rather to absorb, redirect, and compartmentalize tensions, and thus serve the continual coherence of the state as a whole.
For example, one might posit that 1960s radicalism was anti-war, anti-corporation, anti-bureaucratic, anti-managerial—yet all of this was merely metabolized into university bureaucracy, NGO liberalism, corporate diversity structures, media aesthetics, and professional-managerial identity politics.
The Democratic party absorbed the anti-capitalist sentiment, redirecting progressive energy into managerial liberalism, turning all opposition into professionalized bureaucracy whereby all anti-establishment sentiment became institutional identity-politics.
This in turn instigated the rise of a right-wing populism that evolved into media monetization, influencer branding, campaign infrastructure, donor ecosystems, and further think-tank bureaucracy.
Why do politicians swap sides? Why do they run against a policy in one context and vote for it in another? Trump 2.0 ran a largely anti-war campaign, and yet found himself in the perfect position to go to war with Iran. The hippies of the 60s became the expansion of the national security state!
Clearly, this has absolutely nothing to do with principles—it has everything to do with absorbing, managing, and re-directing tensions within the state which allows the state to progress unabated.
We see this at a higher level too in the case of liberalism itself becoming the end-state of absorbed socialism, whereby revolutionary socialist movements across Europe were transformed into NATO liberalism, technocratic governance, professional managerial ideology, and imperial administration.
Where labor radicalism became the welfare-state bureaucracy.
Where anti-war politics became humanitarian interventionism.
Where socialism became HR administration.
And where revolution itself became NGO management.
The cycle repeats.
And as can clearly be seen within the United States architecture, both sides of the dialectic continue to preserve the expansion of finance capital, the administrative state, oligarchic accumulation, the international funding of our balance of payments deficit through treasury securities, and ultimately, American (Western) hegemony.
The dialectic is not moving towards resolution. It is moving toward system continuation and increased “coherence” (despite the fact that these contradictions will inevitably cause the system to collapse, because they will become too great to uphold) through perpetual managed tension.
Of course, I posit that actual productive growth can only be possible through the conscious sublation (exfoliation) of each layer of contradiction. In other words, growth occurs when the identification with either pole collapses (you must first realize you are identified), and becomes metabolized into a higher order polarity (the next contradiction). Without such integration, the lower order contradiction remains unconscious, and the pattern must repeat.
This is the unification of all fields. Where the dialectical movement of empires, political, economic, and monetary systems, philosophy, physics, and the evolution of the self collapse into one dialectical movement—the recursive process of being becoming itself.
What becomes of “progress” then for the state?
As history shows, there is no way for a state to manage its accumulating unconscious contradictions forever. The state will either become subsumed by their superior (and perhaps “superior” in this case simply means: better at managing their own internal contradictions) and/or they will collapse from their position of dominance within the hierarchy.
It would seem that this is inevitable not due to lack of human ingenuity, but because of the inherent constraints of the nature of the system that was built by an immature consciousness.
What would it look like if we recognized the game we were playing with ourselves?
How would this shape the formation of new institutions and incentive structures?
Would anything change?
This would require that the process of sublation becomes conscious, at least for some majority of people, and this is not something that I believe is actually possible at the scale required for systemic change, precisely because such a movement en masse would contradict the broadest conditions of human experience—and this is where I get totally metaphysical with it all…