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"The bourgeois ... is free not because he is conscious of his causality, but because he is ignorant of the social causes that determine his being."
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Christopher CaudwellThe bourgeois ... necessarily regards all behaviour that bursts ‘spont — Christopher Caudwell
"The bourgeois ... necessarily regards all behaviour that bursts ‘spontaneously’ forth from the individual ignorant of its causality, as above all free. Therefore the instincts are conceived as freely striving for unconscious goals, and psychology becomes the adventures of the free instincts in their struggles against the restraints of the environment (in Freud, of society) which impede and cripple their freedom. Out of this struggle cognitive and emotional consciousness is born.Now the only objection to this bourgeois psychology is that it inverts the picture. The instincts are not free springs of connation towards a goal. They are, so far as they can be abstractly separated, unconscious necessities, as Kant realised. They are unfree."
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Christopher Caudwell
Christopher Caudwell
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Christopher St John Sprigg, best known by his pseudonym Christopher Caudwell, was an English Marxist writer, literary critic, intellectual and activist.
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"The bourgeois ... conception of freedom really arose as a special case of a group of illusions about domination which has been associated with all forms of society based on dominating classes. This group of illusions has for a common factor the belief that domination secures self-determination."
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Christopher CaudwellQuote
"All relations are determining. ... As soon as we realise there is a determining relation, and become conscious of its nature and how it grips us, we are that much freer."
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Christopher CaudwellQuote
"Slave-owning culture ... gives rise to the teleological explanation of the Universe, which reaches its subtlest form in Plato’s or Aristotle’s philosophies, in which all phenomena are determined by Ideas or Forms. These correspond to the plans formed in the mind of the slave-owner which his slave passively fulfils."
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Christopher CaudwellQuote
"The domination inherent in the slave-owning system is not repressed, as with the bourgeois, but is conscious, and the illusion consists, not in supposing that no domination exists, but that society is in fact really determined solely by the will of the master, and does not in turn determine his will."
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Christopher CaudwellQuote
"I mean by pacifism, not the love of peace as a good to be secured by a definite form of action, but the belief that any form of social constraint of others or any violent action is in itself wrong, and that violence such as war must be passively resisted because to use violence to end violence would be logically self-contradictory. I oppose pacifism in this sense to the Communist belief that the only way to secure peace is by a revolutionary change in the social system, and that ruling classes resist revolution violently and must therefore be overthrown by force."
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Christopher Caudwell