I once subscribed to the thought. But now when I think about it, I could hear Joey Ayala singing “ang lahat ng bagay ay magkaugnay/magkaugnay ang lahat” with his “lumad” voice. The thought that “everything is connected” brought comfort to my younger self who was trying to get involved with politics.
But to acknowledge Marxism is of course, to acknowledge contradictions, to acknowledge the law of dialectics. Why do things conflict and contradict? Simply put, things, objects, people, formations, everything in the real world, even reality itself, have their own property which can be considered as autonomous. The further development of the focus of physical sciences, from its departure from Newtonian inertia to relativity to quantum physics bring about the validity of everything’s relative autonomy.
The real “theory of everything” resides in this internal property of everything to move by themselves, according to their own set of rules, whether set by its material properties and formations or by its own sentience, in the case of us human beings.
Things, then, can be connected, only through conflict. Not inherently, like the propaganda of the Joey Ayala song.
It is painful to hear how what counts as “critical thinking” in wokeness is the ability to make rhetorical connections to everything. This is where the logic of liberal intersectionality fail. These “connections” are essentially another form of conspiracy theory.
It is in this theory of connectivity that we can find one of the sources of liberal cynicism and petit-bourgeois nihilism. This is the reversal of the understanding of politics as power relations. This theory of connectivity assumes the classic capitalist phantom of the “invisible hand” but this time, this hand “controls” either your mind, your fate. They pass these off as “sad realities.” See for example, contemporary thrillers which features naive persons with high sense of justice as its protagonists always end up “exposing” a grand conspiracy which in the end gets out of their control. Like Star Cinema’s On The Job. Conspiracy theories like these often undermines agency of all forms, and mostly exposes a supposed “dead end” which works for the benefit of those who they think they are trying to expose. Since it undermines agency, it denies dialectics.
Dialectical materialism always assumes agency. Which is why the elementary conflict in human history according to Marx is, still, class conflict, or the class struggle. Struggles assume agency. Marx’ theory of value ensures the agency of the oppressed: the working class are the only ones who produces value, and therefore, has agency. And this agency, along with their self-consciousness of their own conditions, highlights class struggle. The only connection that there is between the working class and the ruling class is their relationship with the means of production which determines the current mode of production.
Seen in the light of dialectical materialism, vague, fatalistic and linear connections disappear, and we are presented with paths which can be taken on different ways. And these paths determine the politics of class struggle.
It is in the same sense that we can say that not everything is political, unlike the common phrase that we could hear from younger woke folks. This might be the same case of misunderstanding, as it was in the personal is political. From what I see, this came from a misreading of Michel Foucault’s concept that power is everywhere. But what did Foucault actually mean by it?
A bit of syntactic play, everything is not inherently political, but there can be politics in everything (or as Dauber-Mankowsky noted, everything can be politicized), provided that these “things” that we are looking at are modes of “relationship.” As understood in contemporary critical theory, what we mean by “politics” is, as I mentioned earlier, power relations. The operative term is “power.”
But what is power? Traditional conception of power has something to do with an “agency” to propose a kind of domination. Foucault challenged this notion of power as “diffused” and has given a kind of inter-change with knowledge. His notion of “power/knowledge” signifies that power has something to do with a capacity to express, and is expressed through accepted forms of “knowledge”, “scientific understanding” and “truth.” To assume the dialectical relative autonomy, is to assume also that power, and not politics, is inherent to everything.
Let’s think of class struggle. Class struggle is, of course, as a signifier, and as an operative concept, itself political. It points out a relationship and not a thing: that is, a relationship within a mode of production. Value, whether use- or exchange-, comes in through modes of valorization after being produced by the working class, which in itself a form of knowledge. Class struggle comes as political, on the conflict on who between the workers or the ruling class should determine value and take credit for it. Both conflicting classes, have their own properties, and move in accordance with these properties — their relationship with the means of production — and therefore perform their end of the negotiation.
What moves the individual power into political is its negotiation with another individual. Communities, tribes, and other group-formation of humans are established through these negotiations. These formations are modes of relationship, which are necessarily established through negotiations in power. Developments, of course, in relationships, especially in relationships within modes of production, do not come smoothly. Marx noted that commodities stand in for our social relationships, most especially, with money as its crystalized form — as the universal commodity. The more that the workers produce, of course, the more that power takes on different forms, since commodities that the workers produce also produces differences in the way social relationships take form.
Of course, looking at it in a general sense, under capitalism, we only have one form of relationship, and that is consumer relationship, a relationship between and as commodities. Contemporary political realities diffuse these relationships more. Neoliberal modes of work force a worker to forget any form of negotiation and contract to make one believe that what he’s doing is his own, as commodities these modes of work shift from analog to digital. It is harder now to think of a kind of disconnect among things and commodity-relationships, but, we need to always remember this simple fact: that politics only happened through these relationships. That what made our every move — or even non-motions — political, especially under bureaucrat capitalism, is because our daily conflict with capital, which involves not just our labor, but the labor of multiple working classes — lives among us through the commodities we produce but never really take enjoyment from.
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