Capitalism's Fatal Flaw, and the Way Forward

Saturday, June 06, 2026

THE HISTORICAL DIALECTIC of the Wage-Labor and/versus the Capital Categories.

THE

HISTORICAL

DIALECTIC

the

Wage-Labor

and/versus

the Capital

Categories.

Dear Reader,

In ancient times, in ancient civilizations, long before the “capital” social relation of social reproduction and the “wage-labor” social relation of social reproduction coalesce into the predominant social relation of societal self-re-production of modernity, of industrial capitalism, there was a prehistory of the capital social relation – there existed socially-marginal, socially-subordinate, “antediluvian forms” [Marx] of capital – e.g., merchant’s capital and usurers’ capital.

Just so, also in ancient times, in ancient civilizations, there existed a pre-history of ‘protoic’, socially-marginal, ‘‘‘antediluvian’’’ forms of wage-labor, that were, initially, unhinged from those “antediluvian” capital-forms and their monetary-profits-creation.

The relative sub-species categories of this ‘protoic’ wage-labor relative-species category include:

1. Ancient Soldiers’ Wages. The Roman military state, from circa 406 BCE, paid a retainer, called, in Latin, a «salarium» or «stipendium», to its citizen-soldiers – typically land-owning farmers – to meet their livelihood expenses while they were away from their farms, providing military services to the Roman state, which funded these salaries, not from money-capital, but from plundered tribute and taxes. These salaries were subsistence revenues for the soldiers, and did not produce surplus-value for the Roman state to re-invest. The Roman state merely consumed the labor-services of their soldiers, made possible by paying such salaries to their soldiers. As land-owning farmers, these citizen-soldiers were not completely severed from means of production ownership-access, hence escaped the “modern proletarian” condition of the propertyless wage-laborer, incorporated into capital via the wage as sole legally-sanctioned means of worker-survival. The “return on investment” r[e]aped by the Roman state via this «praxis» was not a mass of grown or crafted commodities, saleable, on markets, for a profit, but plundered goods, captives of war convertible to slaves-as-commodities for the Roman, slave-labor-based economy, and incremental land-ownership for the Roman state.

2. Wages Paid to Slave Overseers. In the ancient Roman agricultural estates [«latifundia»], an overseer of slaves, called, in Latin, a «villicus», himself often a – highly-trusted, by the estate’s owner(s) – slave or former slave [“freedman”], was paid a wage called a «peculium»: a sum of money, and/or of property, managed by that «villicus», but still legally owned by the “slave-master” owner(s) of that «latifundium». This wage served as part of a slave-labor economy’s psychological incentives management strategy. The overseer, if still a slave, might save these wages to eventually buy freedom, motivating such an overseer to a draconian extraction of labor from the “overseen” field slaves, “lower” in the plantation hierarchy. These «latifundia» were themselves ‘protoic pre-vestiges’ of later, industrial-capitalist “productive capital” [Marx], producing, e.g., massive quantities of grain agricultural commodities, mainly for Mediterranean markets, and selling those commodities, on those markets, typically at a profit.

3. Wages Paid to Ancient Day Laborers. In ancient Athens, there existed free citizens, called «thetes», who owned no land or other means of livelihood – e.g., who were unable to farm for their livelihoods – and worked in return for a wage, paid to them daily. Within the psychohistorically-inevitable «mentalité» born of the human-social conditions of those times, and of the ‘human phenome’ that those conditions reproduced, these «thetes» were looked down upon, by “landed” commoner citizens and “nobility” alike, with extreme derogation and disdain, as ‘almost slaves’, or ‘near slaves’. This was because they were dependent upon others for their daily livelihoods – a condition akin to “temporary slavery”.

However, modern, full-form, Industrial-capitalist “wage-labor” required a long historical process which completely severed the “wage worker” from ownership-access to any means of production – agricultural, craft, industrial, etc. – so that the wage-worker became abjectly livelihood-dependent upon wage-employment by individual capitals.

For more information regarding these Seldonian insights, and to read and/or download, free of charge, PDFs and/or JPGs of Foundation books, other texts, and images, please see:

www.dialectics.info

and

https://independent.academia.edu/KarlSeldon

For partially pictographical, ‘poster-ized’ visualizations of many of these Seldonian insights -- specimens of ‘dialectical art’ – as well as dialectically-illustrated books published by the F.E.D. Press, see –

https://www.etsy.com/shop/DialecticsMATH

¡ENJOY!

Regards,

Miguel Detonacciones,

Voting Member, Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica [F.E.D.];

Elected Member, F.E.D. General Council;

Participant, F.E.D. Special Council for Public Liaison;

Officer, F.E.D. Office of Public Liaison.

YOU are invited to post your comments on this blog-entry below!

Saturday, May 30, 2026

The Key Place of Religious Freedom in an Equitist Society.

The Key

Place

Religious

Freedom

in an

Equitist

Society.

Dear Reader,

It is crucial that ‘‘‘Religious Freedom’’’ – in the full ‘intra-duality’ of its meaning – be «aufheben»-conserved in a successful self-«aufheben»-transition from capitalist society into Equitist-socialist society.

An Equitist government – i.e., a ‘political-economic-democratic’ – government, to be such, must collectively and officially take an agnostic position regarding all theisms and atheisms.

Thereby, it can sustain the human right of religious liberty from, e.g., the U.S. Constitution, and from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, etc.

In this way, an Equitist government can maintain its neutrality relative to all mutually-disputatious religions that may persist among its polity, and also maintain its neutrality vis-à-vis disputes among its religious versus its non-religious Citizens.

The meaning of such ‘‘‘Religious Freedom’’’ must encompass the duality of “Freedom of Religion” and “Freedom from Religion”.

That is, Citizens must be free, without state interference, to choose which religion they will adhere to, or even to form a new religion, and those who choose no religion must be free from state imposition upon them of any governmentally “established”, “official” religion; from any “state church”.

The state must also protect non-religious Citizens from coercive impositions upon them by unofficial, non-state-established religions, and must also protect religious Citizens from coercive impositions upon them by non-religious Citizens and civil society institutions.

Religious beliefs, though varying at least as widely as spoken natural languages vary, are, like spoken languages a universal phenomenon among Homo sapiens sapiens humans, albeit not an all-humans-inclusive phenomenon.

Religion is not “withering away”, and is not likely to do so, even in a society that has overcome the universal self-alienation – the mandatory “self-selling”, or “universal prostitution” [Marx] – of the wage-labor/capital social relation of production. We expect that it will not disappear so long as human beings are mortal, all facing the anxiety of the inescapable prospect and foreknowledge of certain death.

Given this universality of human religious propensities, to suppress all religion would require a police state. Likewise, for the state to impose a single state religion upon all Citizens would also require a police state.

Many religionists refuse to associate with – or try to coercively proselytize – non-religious Citizens. Many non-religious Citizens shun religious Citizens. Many religionists shun other Citizens who have adopted other religions.

The best course of action, we hold, is to collaborate together – non-religious Citizens, Citizens upholding any given religion, and Citizens upholding other religions – in projects of mutual concurrence, and to engage in dialogues about their respective views when there is ‘inter-mutual’ consent to do so.

As we see it, those who assert their absolute certainty of the non-existence of a Universal Deity are lying, or are self-deluded. Likewise, those who assert their absolute certainty that their version of such a Deity exists, must be lying, apart from an experience of personal revelation of that Deity, which may also be self-delusory.

As long as no one can produce absolute proof that no such Deity exists, or absolute proof that such a Deity does exist, we hold that the rational position is the dialectical synthesis of the Theist and A-Theist positions: Agnosticism.

If there is a Universal God, then She/He/It must be one Who hides from all collective, public, objective existential verifiability, thereby forcing agnosticism upon rational humanity as the rational alternative, since Deific existence can, so far, neither be proven true nor proven false.

The proposition that “God Exists.”, and the proposition that “God does not exist.”, constitute two contradictory, undecidable propositions, but are not undecidable quite for the usual Gödelian reasons.

www.dialectics.info

and

https://independent.academia.edu/KarlSeldon

https://www.etsy.com/shop/DialecticsMATH

¡ENJOY!

Regards,

Miguel Detonacciones,

Voting Member, Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica [F.E.D.];

Elected Member, F.E.D. General Council;

Participant, F.E.D. Special Council for Public Liaison;

Officer, F.E.D. Office of Public Liaison.

YOU are invited to post your comments on this blog-entry below!

Friday, May 29, 2026

Marx’s “Single Science”: ‘Dialectical Science’ and Universal Science. Part 10.: Karl Seldon on Karl Marx Series.

Marx’s “Single Science”:

‘Dialectical Science’

and

Universal Science.

Part 10.:

Karl Seldon on Karl Marx Series.

GLOBAL STRATEGIC HYPOTHESES.

Dear Reader,

It is my pleasure, and my honor, as an elected member of the Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica [F.E.D.] General Council, and as a voting member of F.E.D., to share, with you, from time to time, as they are approved for public release by the F.E.D. General Council, Karl Seldon’s commentaries on the world-historic breakthrough work of Karl Marx – work not to be confused with the world-historic catastrophe of Leninism’s bait-and-switch fraud: state-capitalist, police-state hell hole dictatorships.

This 10th text in this by now long-running series is posted herewith, together with supporting text-images and diagrams [Some E.D. standard edits have been applied, in the version presented below, by the editors of the F.E.D. Special Council for the Encyclopedia, to the direct transcript of our co-founder’s discourse].

Seldon –

“In The German Ideology, written jointly, by Marx and Engels, during 1845 and 1846, with Europe on the verge of the 1848, continent-wide anti-monarchist revolutions, on its second page, the start of its section entitled “1. Ideology in General, German Ideology in Particular”, reads as follows –

“We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of [K.S.: ‘exo-human’ ]nature and the history of humanity[, K.S.: I.e., of human Nature]. The two sides are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the history of humanity are dependent on each other so long as humans exist. The history of [K.S.: ‘exo-human’ ]nature, so-called natural science, does not concern us here; but we will have to examine the history of humanity, since almost the whole of ideology amounts either to a distorted interpretation of this history, or to a complete abstraction from it. Ideology is itself only one of the [K.S.: ‘‘‘psychohistorical’’’] aspects of this history.”*

– but is not the first invocation of “the single science” in the Marxian legacy.”

“In Marx’s writings of 1844, the year before he started working with Engels on The German Ideology, in the private texts later, by others, titled “The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts”, Marx had already stated the following –

“[K.S.: human ]History itself is a real part of natural history, of the development of [K.S.: pre-human ]nature into humanity. Natural science will one day incorporate the science of human Nature, just as the science of human Nature will one day incorporate natural science [K.S.: I.e., the science of ‘exo-human Nature’]; there will be a single science.”**

– although further elaboration of this astounding insight into a future “single science” had to await later years in the development of Marxian Theory, including via Engels’ attempts, in the unfinished manuscripts posthumously published under the title “Dialectics of Nature” – to extend that theory to encompass exo-human Nature, albeit formulated at a time before natural science had penetrated exo-human Nature deeply enough to discern the universal, «aufheben» architectonic of our cosmos.”

“Moden science does not notice – at least not officially – does not cognize, and does not leverage, theoretically, or mathematically, the Grand Universal Pattern and Unity of Cosmological Nature, a Pattern and a Unity which its own, protracted observations have, gradually and implicitly, disclosed.”

“And the Dialectical Science, implicit in Marxian Theory, is also, and thereby – by virtue of its very ‘dialecticality’ – a Unified and Universal Science.”

“It breaks with the tacit and ‘Kantianoid’ expectation, detected in some topoi of the contemporary “scientific community”, of a virtual antinomy between “natural science” and “social science”.”

“This is scene in the, oft-detected, assumptions that “social science” will need a radically distinct and separate mathematics, to adequately model human-social “processes and phenomena”, from the mathematics that is adequate for “natural science” – adequate to model the “processes and phenomena” addressed by the “physical”, “hard” sciences.”

“The mathematics of dialectical categorial progressions, that F.E.D. has developed, applies equally to modeling the earlier, pre-human-social realities and history of universal Nature as known to us today, and to modeling the later, human-social realities and history of the human portion of Nature, as known to us today.”

“Of course, that mathematics, of explicit dialectical categorial progressions, in its first ‘ideo-formation’ – its first axioms-systems ‘ideo-ontological’ category – is “purely”-qualitative, “purely” ontological-categorial, via a “purely”-qualitative axiomatic system of “non-standard” arithmetic/-‘contra-Boolean’ algebra.”

“We have yet to publish proofs that the later, ‘qualo-quant-itative’ axioms-systems of arithmetic/algebra in that first system’s own further dialectical categorial progression, are scientifically effective at modeling both pre-human-social and human-social reaches of universal nature.

“Thus, the Foundation’s work is only just getting started.”

*[Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1968, p. 28. K.S.: To update this text to the contemporary context, in which a wider partial liberation of women – in a cause which Marx championed, from his “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” of 1844, onward – has impacted prevailing language, we have changed occurrences of the word “men” to the word “humans”, or to the word “humanity”.].

**[Karl Marx, Early Writings, McGraw-Hill, NY, USA, 1964, p. 164. K.S.: as in the immediately-previous citation, and for the same reasons, we have changed occurrences of the word “man” to the word “humanity”, or to the phrase “human Nature”.].