Capitalism's Fatal Flaw, and the Way Forward

Saturday, December 27, 2025

“Contradiction” is a Misleading Metaphor for Dialectical-Categorial Opposition.

“Contradiction”

is a

Misleading Metaphor

for

Dialectical-Categorial

Opposition.

Dear Reader,

The traditional use of the term “contradiction”, e.g., in the Hegelian and Marxian traditions, to describe or name, e.g., the dialectical opposition between a pair of ontological categories is often a uselessly misleading trope.

It tends to foster a confusion between formal-logical propositional contradiction/mutual formal negation, and/versus ontological, dialectical-categorial, qualitative polarity/mutual ‘supplementary opposition’, which involves ‘‘‘«aufheben» negation’’’.

Better terms for this relation of dialectical-ontological-categorial ‘supplementary opposition’ might include ‘intra-duality’, ‘self-duality’, ‘self-antithesis’, ‘internal duality’ or ‘endo-duality’, all of which still sound somewhat ‘statical’.

More exotic descriptions, some with more dynamical connotations, might include ‘intra-contra-kinesis’, ‘intra-dia-kinesis’, ‘endo-duo-kinesis’, ‘intra-contra-dynamis’, or, Marx’s, “internally self-ravaged ground”.

Of course, in certain cases, it might be useful to express the relation between two dialectical-ontological ‘contra-categories’ via a propositional contradiction, if the misleading potential of such expression can be explicitly warned-against.

Also, categorial oppositions can sometimes be well-‘‘‘translated’’’ by propositional contradictions.

Likewise, propositional contradictions can sometimes be well-‘‘‘translated’’’ by categorial oppositions, with gain of insight as to the resolution of the contradiction.

For example, the Kantian propositional antinomy of physical space, via two, mutually-negating, contradictory propositions, e.g. –

‘‘‘Space must be infinite and unbounded.’’’

versus

‘‘‘Space must be finite and bounded.’’’

– can lead, categorially, to Einstein’s, General-Relativistic solution of that antinomy, for “positively-curved” [re-contracting] and “negatively-curved” [continually-expanding] models of physical space alike, via the dialectical triad of categories –

finite & bounded space-models

~Å~

infinite & unbounded space-models

~Å~

finite & UNbounded curved-space models

– with the third category, the ‘uni-category’, of that triad representing the ‘dialectical synthesis category’ for the Kantian antinomy [propositional “ultra” contradiction] of our intuitive notions of physical space.

Conversely, for example, the ‘intra-duality’ of the industrial capital-relation as predominant social relation of social reproduction – i.e., capital as “self-expanding value” [Marx] versus capital as ‘self-contracting value’ [Seldon: due to capital’s self-driven – productive-force-growth-driven –technological obsolescence self-devaluation] can be expressed as a propositional contradiction –

The capitalist system [only] EXPANDS capital-value.

versus

The capitalist system [only] CONTRACTS capital-value.

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!

Wednesday, December 24, 2025

Engels: “The Production and Reproduction of Real Life”.

Engels:

“The Production

and

Reproduction

Real Life”.

Dear Reader,

Frederick Engels wrote the following, in a 21 September 1890 letter, from London, England, to J. Bloch, in Konigsberg, Germany:

“According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.” [Paul Blackledge, Friedrich Engels and Modern Social and Political Theory, SUNY Press, Albany, NY, 2019, p. 168, emphasis added by M.D.].

This statement not only refutes the ideology of ‘‘‘economy- determinism”’.

Whether consciously, intentionally or not, on the part of Engels at the time, this formulation also opens a door to Darwin’s work, and to its immanently-critical dialectical extension – and both Marx and Engels were critical students of Darwin’s work – to its extension to what we call the ‘Meta-Darwinian concept’ of human-social, human-species collective fitness.

This is because, once we overcome the fog of the false analogy between “artificial selection” – human agents’ domestication, via selective breeding, of the “social animals”, internalized into human ‘meta-social’ societies – and “natural selection”, as if Nature or the God behind Nature consciously picks favorites in biological evolution, it becomes plain that reproduction, and reproduction rates, are the key to fitness in biological evolution, and beyond, e.g., in human social evolution and ‘meta-evolution’ as well.

The measure of biological species fitness is the sustained rate of reproduction of their biomass. Higher sustained biomass reproduction rates indicate higher fitness.

Likewise, higher sustained rates of human ‘socio-mass’ self-reproduction indicate higher human species fitness.

But here is a key part of what puts the “Meta” in the ‘Meta-Darwinian Hypothesis’. Human social individuals are not provided, by their genome, with a fixed tool-kit – e.g., with a particular configuration of beak and/or of claw. On the contrary, the human genome provide us with open hands, that can put down one tool and pick up another, and with a capability for continual learning of new behaviors, new activities, new social praxis.

Thus, the human ‘socio-mass’ level and rate-of-expansion must take account of, not just the ‘population socio-mass’, the mass of living human bodies, but also the ‘socio-mass’ of human-Nature-made artifacts of all kinds, that humans add to Nature, and whose use can increase the total ‘socio-mass’ of the human species at an accelerating rate.

This ‘Meta-Darwinian Fitness’ of the human species, as expressed in the generally exponential growth of ‘human socio-mass’ throughout our species known history, can increase dramatically, and does increase dramatically.

This accelerating advance of this ‘human-social fitness’ is not the product of the human genome alone.

It is also the product of human culture and of human cultural evolution and revolution [‘meta-evolution’], i.e., the product of the ‘‘‘human phenome’’’ as well.

In summary, it is the product of the evolving and also ‘meta-evolving’ dialectical synthesis, which is the human phenome/human genome “complex unity”. It is not based upon, or coded-in, our chromosomes alone.

And the core of that sustained accelerating rate of ‘human socio-mass self-reproduction’ – of that ‘Meta-Darwinian Fitness’ of the human species – is what Marx called, critically appropriating/‘«aufheben»-ating’ a concept from the ideology-vitiated science of capitalist “political-economy”, “the growth of the social forces of production”; of what we rename, and reconceptualize as, ‘the human-societal self-force of expanding human-social self-reproduction’, i.e., ultimately, the ‘self-productivity of humanity’.

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!

Monday, December 22, 2025

‘Stewardship-Equity’ Cooperatives and “Cutthroat Competition”. Part 2: ‘Citizen Stewardship Equity’ series. GLOBAL STRATEGIC HYPOTHESES.

‘Stewardship-Equity’

Cooperatives

and

“Cutthroat

Competition”.

Part 2:

‘Citizen Stewardship

Equity’ series.

GLOBAL STRATEGIC HYPOTHESES.

Dear Reader,

We hypothesize that, among same-market(s) ‘Stewardship Equity’ Cooperatives there might be evoked a kind of ‘commercial athleticism’, and a “team spirit”, hopefully largely in the context of ‘“good sportsmanship”’, in their collective owners – an ‘‘‘athleticism’’’ more real, and more engaging, than today’s “opium of the people”: “spectator sports”/“professional athletics”, which involves the alienation of any real athletic participation on the part of sports enthusiasts, who are reduced to mere spectatorship, often in unhealthy forms.

Moreover, we hypothesize that Stewardship Cooperatives will be inherently, by their very nature, far less susceptible to the “imperatives” of capitalist “cutthroat competition” – which aims, deliberately, to the bankrupt competing firms/-acquire their assets and their market-shares – than are contemporary capitalist firms, in actually-competitive, non-oligopolistic markets, even if their enterprise managers and/or majority owners/founders do not share in that insatiability.

We think that enterprises with public, or even private, absentee stockholders – who constitute, in effect, an insatiable demand for enterprise expansion, and, especially for the ever-expansion of profits – tend to demand “beggar thy neighbor” strategies, based on a kind of profit motive that does not exist for worker-owned producers’ cooperatives.

The majorities of the internal owner-electorates of – the “associated producers” of – a ‘Citizens’ Stewardship Equity’ Co-op, we expect, will more likely be market-niche seekers, happy with a sustainable market-segment, although open to adaptation, e.g., to diversification, if that niche appears later to be becoming unviable.

But we see such Co-ops as being unlikely, in general, to seek the expansion of their work-time, and of their life-stress, that would be forced upon them by an agenda of “conquest”, of bankrupting their Stewardship Co-op competitors.

As well, there might likely be, in some degree, feelings of solidarity and sympathy for other such Co-ops – even for competing Co-ops.

But the Citizen Stewards of such Co-ops might not feel so charitably toward their remaining capitalist competitors, so that some regulation might be needed, not to even mention the “vice-versa” to that probable antipathy.

To ‘disincent’ capitalist enterprises from engaging in, community-damaging, “cutthroat competition”, e.g., “dumping”, against one another, as well as against Stewardship Co-ops, legislation regarding competitive practices – legal and illegal – might be the best means.

To ‘disincent’ Stewardship Cooperatives from engaging in “cutthroat competition” against remaining capitalist firms, as well as against one another, much of this regulatory need might be fulfilled by means of covenantings regarding competitive practices, by the Co-ops’ sponsoring Social Banks, making the Social-Rents-compensated provision of means of production to the Co-ops by the Social Banks contingent upon the non-practice of certain, community-damaging forms of competition.