Understanding Historical Development: Rationality, Society, and Technology
The Rationality of Historical Development
Everything that exists is rational; it has had or has a useful role, facilitating development.
Rationality and Surviving Native Elements
Rationality is inherent in each stage of historical development. The adjustment of the superstructure to the structure is sufficient reason to consider a social lifestyle. Surviving native elements, important to this development, can become barriers to higher forms of social life.
Rationality as a Historical Concept
A rational social being possesses original rationality and untapped potential. Irrational reality has an ideological or survival-based rationale.
The Irrationality of Socialist Dictatorship
Rationality introduced through socialist dictatorship, inherent in historical underdevelopment, faces doubtful hegemonic operation unless it quickly exhausts capitalist power structures.
The Irrationality of Post-Industrial Bourgeois Societies
Post-industrial bourgeois societies become irrational due to reactionary ideology. This ideology aligns a company not through poverty or police coercion, but through seduction, manipulation, and integration.
Theological Interpretations of History are Idealistic
Judeo-Christian hegemony conceives historical development as a rational process to reach predetermined goals. This teleological view becomes an ethical problem when system operation and alignment are prioritized.
Deviations in Idealistic Philosophy of Praxis
The philosophy of praxis errs when leaders or groups are solely blamed for crises in building socialism. Marxist philosophy shows that people don’t make history solely to follow a pre-outlined path but to fulfill their needs.
Needs and Interests
The process of human liberation is determined by social needs that drive behavior and creativity. Interest arises from need, guiding the fulfillment of specific needs.
Critique of Scientism
Scientism, even when addressing national problems and promoting applied science, can be exploited within capitalist systems. Nationalism and the prestige of science often benefit the bourgeoisie.
Science as a Political Enterprise
Science is a system of knowledge about nature, society, and thought, expressed through categories, concepts, laws, and theories. Its function is to expand our understanding of natural and social contours.
The Technical and Economic Structure
Technique, a product of human activity, applies natural laws to satisfy social needs.
Use Value and Exchange Value of Technology
Technology has use value for specific purposes. Its exchange value generates market power and monopoly rents for owners.
Technology and Political Practice
Managing the value of technology requires economic policies affecting foreign investment, patent law, trademarks, and technology import controls.
Packaged Technology
Packaged technology is organized knowledge from various sources, used for project implementation.
Industrial Production Technology
Technology, often produced in laboratories or factories, becomes a commodity to satisfy economic demand.
Scientific and Technological Self-Determination
Self-determination requires actions in technology transfer, regulation of transnational corporations, and international cooperation for appropriate and indigenous technology development.
Legal Awareness
Legal awareness is a set of feelings, moods, guidance, habits, thoughts, and ideals, expressed in values and standards, achieved through focused and consistent legal ideology.
Topical Political Practice Material
Political practice is a dialectical movement within an external topical frame. It is understandable as topical material (ontological) and projected through a formal topical (methodological) framework.
Law as the Synthesis of Political Autonomy
Law represents the rationality of the historical bloc, the synthesis of political autonomy. Continued action through law is not exempt.
Praxis as a Sense Code
All practice is a code of meaning, analyzable by unit rules. This concept should be projected onto a model or language capable of understanding the establishment of hegemony (rationality of historical development).
Socialist Dictatorship and Democratic Centralism
Socialist dictatorship, as understood by Lenin, is a form of democratic centralism combining planned management with broad democracy and local initiative.
The Socialist Community
The hegemonic vocation of the proletariat dictatorship points to a self-managed, supportive, and creative civil society with universal axiological growth. The socialist international community correlates with an ethically and aesthetically enriched personality, representing the concrete possibility of objectifying human existence.