Second notes toward conceptualizing the radical law of material identity

21 August 2019

First, is material the best word? Perhaps social is better, but are the two
synonymous in a radical context which aims to get at the roots, natural and
constructed, of existence in reality?

i.e. sociality in pre-human naturality was constructed by living beings who

human named once they entered the living terrain.

e.g. worker-, drone-, and a Queen bee form a society via their life-activities to
survive and contribute to the global eco-system, a process which requires the
building of a hive with space for bio-reproduction and social storage of the
products of bee-labor

While either word can work here, perhaps, the better of the two is probably
material because preceding the formation of a society by living beings,
whether human or bees, the materiality of the natural world presupposes the
formation of a society from those materials, the knowledge of knowing that
process precisely itself being part of the seemingly endless objective that’s at
the core of the radical law of material identity

The radical law of material identity contends that Aristotle’s (non-)radical law of
identity, or A = A, is so profoundly devoid of use-value, because it primarily relies on
external appearance and cannot account for the internal difference between the As
when B exists in one A but not the other, as to render it ready for the dustbin of
history

In this way, the radical law of material identity is an objective philosophical concept

As of now, it has two elements which form its core: one, normative oppression and,
two, the acquisition and construction of knowledge

Binding the two core elements together is the problem-solving process, itself
always a set of real actions, physical and verbal, never one or the other
whether separate and independent from each other, on the one hand, or one
over the other as if there is an inherent superiority to either the physical or
the verbal, on the other hand

Such is important to note as a natural dialectical relationship, not one of

competitive domination which is an invention, because physicalism and
verbalism, both as action which, in their naturalness, each requires the other,
inside and outside living bodies, for action to occur each living day

To be clear, the physical witness of say, an edge of a forest from the plain
terrain of a grassy field, becomes a verbalism as the human brain works to
 make language out of the neurological activities stimulated by the witness of
nature, which, in the making of language becomes the exercise of individual
reasoning as a practice of human construction power to identity, describe,
and explain the parts of the natural scene witnessed around one’s self, from
skin-in looking out to the world

All of this, of course, needs additional living relations, not just between
nature and self, but also self-to-self or self-to-selves and nature, in this
example, to articulate the inner material process of witness, express aloud
the word or words which materializes in the socio-neurocognitive
experience of materially producing language within nature’s structure

While the first humans probably produced sounds before the formation of
actual whole words which became how the world was first known, it is
critical that this sound-to-word production process be recognized as
occurring before the first invention of oppression because the foraging
societies which precedes permanent agricultural settlements needed
articulateable language as invisible material tools to organize hunting and
gathering activities, cooperate once food and plants are gathered, and
practice original democracy in the process of sharing in caring mutuality to
live to experience the next day

As such, the radical law of material identity assumes, as one element of its core, that
oppression is the normative experience of everyday life for about the last 10,000
years

i.e. since the construction of class and sexed domination, only some of which
became cisheteropatriarchal societies based on those male-bodied people
who, through self-selection based on who practiced activity the most,
perhaps, deemed their own bodies naturally superior to female-bodied
people and people born intersex and trans (Kendall, 2016)

Subsequent forms of oppression, like race, gender, nationalism, and sanism,

were then invented, deployed, and developed as mechanisms of social
control to meet the so-called needs of rulers who governed the surplus many
people practicing their body-power as labor-power produced

Those oppressions, without personal-social transformation into liberatory

concepts of caring self-identity, then and now, work to hinder, to some
degree, or fully negate, at worst, the pursuit of authentic self-affirmative
individual being-ness across classed lines—the –ed in class here meaning the
classification systems which formed as rulers tools of social oppression noted
above

To be sure, the concept of oppression that’s operational here is from a third

world marxist originally based in Brazil named Paulo Freire
 In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), their social theorization about
dehumanization, and their education practices in teaching critical literacy to
formally illiterate adult workers led to the formation of a scientific equation
for identifying oppression actions: “Any situation in which ‘A’ objectively
exploits ‘B’ or hinders [their] pursuit of self-affirmation as a responsible
person is one of oppression” (55).

The process of problem-solving, whether to resolve the problems which oppression

poses each living day since its inception, inevitability is bound up in a learning and
knowing process

i.e. oppression’s a terrible teacher, but it teaches nonetheless

But the problem of survival, before and after oppression’s invention, also
forces learning and knowing activities to occur

Yet the more consciously this can be practiced, especially as cooperative

problem-solving actions to overcome oppression and other obstacles to
survival to achieve the human needs of joy and love, the better knowledge
forms, from shared practice in shared activities, the better its applied and
further developed

Acquisition and construction of objective knowledge in and of the world, past and
present, including subjective experience of differently oppressed living bodies,

This includes those who socially accumulate or culturally inherit ruling class
power by experiencing the privileges of their power roles over others which,
in facilitating objective exploitation and hindering the self-affirmation of
those who are oppressed, becomes a limited oppression above rulers whose
illusory belief to be necessary as a class in the world (else society fall into
crisis or perish) negates their own need for authentic self-affirmation as
responsible persons

Because no dominating power system has a moral idea of responsibility it

can ethically act upon, a process of de-consciencing occurs where in children
and adults in ruling class groups learn amoral knowledge which says harm to
others is a natural and necessary part of governing human society

Based on Freire’s operational definition of oppression, then, this means

rulers are relatively oppressed by the irresponsible systems they operate
over and above those subjected to their authority as well as over and above
their own dehumanized selves

In acquiring and constructing knowledge true to all, this needs to include the
subjective experiences of others beyond an individual self
 When shared, subjective experiences becomes objective knowledge of
particular subjectivities in reality, the realness of which can then be made
realer-to-realest the more empirical and existential evidence (like memories
and feelings) is shared which corroborates that subjectivity as objective
experience

When that personal and social process achieves a dialectical unity, whether
in relation to parts of the past and present world, singularly and detached
from one another, as parts are correctly connected to each other (“correct”
meaning in ways that establish validity and soundness), or as a combination
thereof in the often messy realness of authentic learning and knowing
processes, that partial or fuller achievement, the more it becomes an
achievement of what’s invisible inside things-objects and bodies-subjects, the
better its relations to its outside appearances can be known and understood

This is what the radical law of material identity seeks to apprehend, not
statically, but in dynamic and complex motion with clarity

Written differently, the radical law of material identity is the process of becoming a
worker-owner, democratically inside a human body with the tools we use to
acquire, construct, and possess knowledge,

Once set in motion, a person practicing this informal, moral, and scientific
legality is a person who’s in the process of or has already achieved the
possession of more or less of the realer-to-realest knowledge possible

At one of the dialectic’s most general expressions, this is acquired and

constructed knowledge about the relations between living existence and
material reality, before oppression’s invention and after, from the Earth’s
natural base to its built societies to the entire cosmos in which Earth is
suspended, on its axis, always in rotational motion

The radical law of material identity, in its commitment to learning, knowing, and
understanding the truth—always a singularity of many truths across a finite yet
renewable spectrum of realness—is the achievement of the unity of realnesses in
the world and inside living bodies, empirically and existentially

It’s not the amaterial spiritual oneness literary scholar David Foster Wallace
refers to in their relatively popular and deeply meaningful 2005
commencement address

But it’s the personal-social oneness of knowing and understanding the

material self in material reality in its truest totality—including the
materiality of spirituality and the “phantoms” of the human brain which Marx
 argues always have a material basis whether that’s visible, immediately, or
not quite so yet

This, for me, is a terrible first expression as to what this concept is and means

Most likely, at this early stage of practical philosophical development, this

concept is an extension of Freire’s point that the shared vocation of all living
beings called human is to become fully human

i.e. liberated from the oppression of dominating power systems whose most
powerful ruling agents require social liberation from below, as well as their
own exertion of authentic effort to break free of the insaned formations
they’ve involuntary been forced into, whether that’s by ruling class
socializations that masked the cruelty of the dominating relations they
entered into or as a series of terrible initial decisions about being “the best”
for managing and owning the surplus, undemocratically, which many
produced through their shared efforts, over and above others who are read
as “incapable” or too “irrational” to equally and freely operate society in
peaceful, harmonious cooperation with each other

This means, from rulers to more oppressed people, especially those who
have internalized the cruelties of domination’s meanings of being less than
those who rule more-over them, the human need to discover the realest
knowledge possible is also, in everyday life-activities, also the process of
becoming and being the realest selves we can in personal, social, and
existential motions

This occurs, when and where it occurs, in everyday life-activities of

productive and reproductive work

The absence of rulers and managers in the former, seemingly a widespread

aspirational goal that capitalist institutions interpellate into each new
generation since its original formation began about 500 years ago or so,
sustains their dehumanized experience of disconnectedness as a
contradictorily oppressed and privileged experience of hindered-to-negated
self-affirmation, on the former hand, and as objective exploitation, on the
latter hand

In everyday life-activities, uncompensated work to recreate human bodies

and society for the next day’s incentivized work, then, the radical law of
material identity aims to achieve and sustain an individual’s self, within their
intersecting, self-defined groups and class position, so that their fuller-to-
fullest authentically affirmed self become their self-in-motion each day:
being-to-body, unified, on one hand, and being-to-body-to-materiality-as-
sociality of many cultures in an unequal world, unified, toward a fully living
equality
In Angela Davis’ words that dialectically echo Freire’s social theory’s desire
for a fully liberated world, means our relatively limited “freedom is a
constant struggle” to fully know and completely transform the world as we
expand and extend the enumerated freedoms we have already established

Those limited freedoms each has now, already uneven relative to multi-
oppressive capitalist hierarchy, inside and outside us, is what we need to
practice to get liberated from the invisible chains and the visible cages that
bond us to the dominating capitalist system

The realest knowledge of what, how, and why we’re bound in and to this
world in the cosmos in unity with all, multidimensionally, can engender the
pedagogical and revolutionary spirit necessary for overcoming oppression in
its worst forms which create premature death and sustain irresponsible
dominating power systems

Practicing the radical law of material identity, still in need of much more
work, could be one critical problem-solving tool to help us make a new
society without oppression that’s fully caring where the preconditions for
fulfilling that caringness is simply being alive in a body in the world

Doing so toward knowing and understanding how to cooperatively exist, in

full democracy without dominating hierarchy compelling what a few rulers
want, could be the objective direction the radical law of material identity
heads in, especially once we learn and know how to transformatively use it—
myself included