The Dynamics of the Material and Ideological Conditions in Society - Book Report/Review Example

Running head: MATERIAL CONDITIONS AND IDEOLOGY The Dynamics of the Material and Ideological Conditions in Society (Professor) (Date) I. Introduction There are two seemingly opposed and yet complementary ways to analyze society. On one hand, there are those who would like to interpret society from a purely materialist view. This is captured by Marx’s famous quote, “it is not consciousness that determines life but it is life that determines consciousness”. On the other hand, there are those who would like to interpret society from a purely idealist or ideological view. This can be encapsulated in the saying, “we think and it comes to pass, life is our looking glass”. However, we all could be just like the five blind men of Hindustan who are describing the different parts of the elephant. We will generalize the description of the whole elephant from our limited experience of the part. We will all be fools if we take only one limited perspective and consider it already to be the whole society. The thesis of this paper is that the materialist and ideological ways of interpreting society are both correct and inadequate. And in order to fill up the inadequacy, one has to take into consideration the point of view of the other side. This is the only way to see the whole. In the physical sciences, as in the social sciences, we say that the whole is not equal to the sum of its parts. Analyzing society from a purely materialist point of view, starting with economic production, exchange and distribution, is only a partial way of analyzing society. In the same vein, analyzing society only from a purely ideological, cultural, inter-subjective and phenomenological perspective is enlightening but it will be lacking in the concrete institutional manifestations in the field of economy and politics. The way to give a more complete picture of society is to analyze society from both points of view and to see the dynamics of the whole. By looking at how the materialist and ideological perspectives intersect and mutually complement each other, we can have a picture of a living and dynamic society-not comparable to the mechanism of the clock but comparable to the dynamics of a living organism. This article would first analyze society from the materialist perspective using Jeremy Rifkin’s book entitled “End of Work”. The second part will analyze society in terms of ideology using the classic work of Theodore Roszak “Where the Wasteland Ends”. After this, we would tie the two interpretations of social reality together to see how they complement. In the end we will come up with a fuller view and a larger perspective of social reality which is dynamic and continually in motion. II. The Materialist Interpretation of Jeremy Rifkin In his book, The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin elaborates on the issues confronting modern society and the contradictions that society is heading towards (Rifkin, 1995). He articulates clearly how modern capitalist competition has developed as economic production pressured by cutthroat competition directed the corporations to invent technologies for wide-scale and intensive mass production. Driven by the compulsion to growth and by the fear of bankruptcy, technological development has been the name of the game. The one who wins in the battle for creating the best technology which can produce the most commodities becomes a monopoly while the rest are reduced to poverty. Rifkin demonstrates how high technology has replaced human labour at the cost and expense of increasing poverty, joblessness, social inequality and social violence. Machines multiply human labour from a thousand times to a million times and, thus, in the end, massive layoffs are being done all over the world as human labour becomes increasingly useless. Thus, we enter into a world where machines are more expensive and important than human lives. In the endless pursuit of profit, the goal of corporations is to invent better machines who can replace the work of people; so they can decrease the costs of paying the workers while increasing productivity and, therefore, profits. Rifkin elaborates on how major revolutions in technology hastened production while increasing social inequality. Beginning from the First Industrial Revolution of the Steam Engine to the Second Industrial Revolution of internal combustion using oil up to the Third Industrial Revolution by using computers and information we can see how production has evolved from the use of simple tools to make commodities to complex machines, from machines that make machines to computer software that can operate machines. Now technological development can create machines that can think a thousand times better than the human mind. Genetic technology has already made it possible to create computerized biological beings that can literally replace actual persons. Thus, Rifkin’s title of his book is The End of Work. However, progress such as this has its dire consequences. When people lose their jobs, they would have no money with which to purchase the very goods that corporations produce. Thus, it leads to a dead end where corporate competition that spurred technological development will actually be the one that leads to global economic collapse. As the rich becomes richer and the poor becomes poorer, development and progress will begin to lose their meaning among the increasingly impoverished population. As machines begin to rule the world, people become alienated, disempowered, silenced and eventually repressed by the Ruling powers. Wide-scale and intensive mass production does not mix well with the intensification of poverty and helplessness because no one will be able to buy the commodities being produced. At the same time, mass production takes its pressure on the environment and ecological issues arise. As corporations become richer than most governments, a new social contract arise where the role of governments are downplayed giving corporations a greater hand in dictating the global economy. Welfare services are taken off the responsibility of governments. At the same time, increasing pressures and conflicts give rise to the police state. Protests from the oppressed sectors are bound for massive violations in human rights. Low intensity wars and conflicts are engineered to preserve the new social order. Rifkin also looks into the development of a different kind of intellectual workers who are the actual owners of the Information Age. There is also the increase of the service sector that is less bounded by the market economy and those people are freer to do what they think is right, just and better for the world. Our current system now wallows in hard contradictions that seem hard to resolve. Many of those who produce the food such as the farmers in Third World countries are those who are hungry. United Nations data shows that the world can feed each and every human being with 3,600 calories per day and yet many are dying of poverty. Those who produce commodities such as the workers in developing countries cannot buy commodities in the market. Those who make tall buildings live in shanties. Many of those who are educated deceive and oppress people for individual gain. The market has become the god of the corporations. III. The Ideological Interpretation of Society by Theodore Roszak In his book, Where the Wasteland Ends Theodore Roszak posits that the increasing crisis and contradictions in the economic and political structures and social institutions are giving way to a counter culture that would eventually critique and question society. This counter culture would present an alternative way of life and living (Roszak, 1973). For him the way out of the wasteland of our current society is first to develop new and novel ways of thinking. There is a need to create a new paradigm, new philosophy and create a counter culture that would eventually change the political and economic landscape of the world. His critique of society is comprehensive and wide ranging. He discusses the increasing loneliness, alienation, and egoism of dominant culture. He discusses ecological issues being one of the first and the few who supports the Gaia Theory that the Earth is alive, as propounded by James Lovelock. He provided an incisive critique of technocracy and how mechanism has ruled our culture and consciousness. He debunks the old paradigms of society of dualism, objectivating sciences, and scientific tunnel vision, among others. Roszak believes that all major people’s revolutions in history all began in the realm of culture and dreams first before making sweeping changes in the political scene. Cultural transformations are the only way where the future can be made present and where the enslaving grip of the past can be transcended. When a civilization is collapsing, cultural change is the way forward in order to escape decay, petrification, and mummification of the old society. Roszak presents to us a deep assessment of our current values, rejecting what is useless, affirming what is useful, and promoting what is relevant and needed for the New World (Roszak, 1973). IV. The Complementation of the Materialist and Ideological Interpretations of Society The views of Rifkin and Roszak are both valid and valuable and yet both are inadequate. The dynamics of society is comprised of economics, politics and culture. Here is where the hard social institutions of the economy that you can see and touch are completed by the inter-subjective institutions of culture that can be best understood through participation and membership. To simply look at the materialist perspective without looking at the ideological aspects of reality would be to say that we are no different from machines that can be conditioned by society. Then Skinner and the behavioral psychologists would be probably right that we are like animals that can be controlled and socially engineered after all. At the same time, to simply wallow in philosophy and ideology which finds no grounding in the actual conditions of society would be as futile and impotent like chasing in the wind. We are thinking human beings and our thinking is not a mere reflection of the material conditions of society. Our consciousness can also change the very society that conditioned our thinking. In fact Engels quoting Hegel said that “Necessity is blind only in so far as it is not understood” (Engels, 1939). This is a tacit acceptance by materialist philosophy itself that knowledge of the laws operating in reality increases human freedom. Young Marx says that when theory is embraced by the masses, it becomes a material force in history. This is just like saying that ideology once internalized can have the power to change the very material conditions of society. In fact, our very knowledge of the world frees us from it. John Stuart Mill studied the state and his deep understanding and knowledge of politics became the foundation for his treatise on liberty. He laid the foundations of the modern nation-state where there are limits to the powers of the state, as well as social considerations in the individual’s assertion of freedom (Mill, 1947). This is a concrete example where ideology and material conditions work hand in hand in the creation of social reality. The reason for counter culture is actually to protest the present material conditions in order to change it. In fact the true goal of philosophy is not only to interpret the world but to make the world a better place. As the material conditions of society pattern the dominant culture to be commercialized, secularized and materialistic, the very material conditions of oppression lead society to think and criticize the economic and political structures. It also leads us to debunk the premises of dominant culture. Thus, in a sense, counter culture is also a result of society and the emerging new society is also the result of the counter culture. Culture can be powerful enough to change the material conditions of society. In the end we can say that the materialist and the ideological perspectives of analyzing society are complementary and mutually interdependent. Both are needed in order to understand society better. References Engels, F. (1939). Anti-Duhring. Herr Eugen Duhring’s revolution in science. New York: International Publishers. Mill, J. (1947). On liberty. Alington Heights: Crofts Classics. Rifkin, J. (1995). The end of work. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Roszak, T. (1973). Where the wasteland ends. New York: Anchor Books. Read More