But Marx may well be right for the wrong reasons : not economic, but cultural and psychological forces redefine society strictly in terms of economic organization, with the ascendancy of the bourgeois. Granted that the unique nature of this historical emergence of a predominantly commercial culture rests on the unique basis of modern industrialism; in every instance of its appearance, the bourgeois worldview is determined and tailored by cash and credit transactions. Economics constitute the lifeblood of bourgeois society, and hence of bourgeois culture. What changes is not so much modern industrial technology as the psychology – and hence the philosophy – behind the technology.

         The only legitimately ‘scientific materialism’ is, in essence, economics itself.
         Science, of course, begins in a peculiar psychological state : a moment of experience which convinces ‘the observer’ that it is not a moment of experience, but an ‘objective value’. The one absolute of philosophy – namely, solipsism – necessarily contradicts this; that is, unless we can somehow turn solipsism itself inside out. Obviously, the experience of ‘objectivity’ is thus this double validation, proving simultaneously the objectivity of the given fact and both a fact and process of validity in the ‘self’.

         For the bourgeois, of course, the ‘self’ that is thus validated is the world process of cash and credit.

         We can defy the bourgeois culture, if we choose; something we tried in the late sixties. But the occlusion is inevitable. Therefore, the question is whether there is an alternative.

          Our brief outline of scientific experience should give us the answer.

         If we have said that the first consequence of the scientific moment is an ‘objective value’, the assumption of course is that the ‘value’ is the ‘fact’, the validation of whatever was under consideration. But the actuality of the validation is the validation itself. Value itself is proven to be ‘objective’ by this moment of experience.

         As a consequence, however, the assumption of the absolute validity of ‘factuality’ – as against the subjective conditions of the experience – is the first heresy of science as philosophy, or scientism. This heresy tallies wonderfully with the bourgeois view, if one simply inserts ‘credit process’ into the place of ‘fact’.

         But if we look at the scientific moment as thus described, we see three perspectives on value, a double process of validation that clearly, first of all, depends on a doubling at the self.

         This is what the German Idealists saw when they looked into the experience of science as the psychological mirror experience for the formation of idea. Idea begins in a prior validity, a validity, that is, prior to self and object, prior to the reflective separation in awareness. This is the point touched by scientific validity.

         Kant attached himself to the point of validity, but assumed that the process was closed; that since, logically, witnessing the witness is absurd, we can only trace out the emergent sameness of reflective awareness and reason necessarily implicit in self-awareness as revealed by ‘the fact’of objectivity. But his disciples, within the essentially monistic limitations of a persistent rationalism, nevertheless plunged into the empirical arrays that constitute the conditioning structures of our self-awareness.

         Monistic rationalism or analytical philosophy gives a narrow but specific set of views, based precisely in numbers, but, being rationalistic, refuses to proceed beyond the binary. Cause is monistic(the essence of monistic rationalism), and the One stands at both ends of the universe. What is prior to One is the point. Single cause always decays. Therefore, the finality of One is entropy or total dispersion, in spite of Einstein’s equations embedding the mutually dependent nature of space and mass. So a legitimate scientific philosophy limits itself to the act of science.

         But, from their perspective, the Idealists could only see this act through their monism. It becomes a process – the thesis, antithesis,synthesis description – pre-Hegelian, which Hegel probably intentionally ignored, precisely because it is linear rather than holistic. Hegel espoused Plotinus, whose threefold description constitutes a natural simultaneity of three causes. But Hegelianism is a synthetic process of history embraced in the One.

         The scientific moment suggests this : the self is a double ground ‘bridged’ by the experience of science itself, a principle not inherently indigenous in ‘either side’ of the ‘doubled self’. To ascribe it to the ‘object’ is natural. The experience itself ‘proves’ the ‘objectivity’ of the object. But this validity does not ‘stand’ in the object, but in the correspondence of three principles as causes : whatever divides the self and whatever comes to rest in the object, as radical principles or ‘causes’ in themselves.

         Something in the ‘object’ lends itself to this. Objects become objects because they are values first of all. At the same time, while this implies that a psychological monism has been assigned to the object which is not necessarily inherent in the object, the fact that the value is also the ‘actuality’ of ‘the object’ suggests that, while the apparent separation may be psychological, it is also not inappropriate to the ‘objective’ nature of the object.

         In other words, the value, as an ‘objective’ value is also apparently doubled, and dependent, in this situation, on the singular nature of awareness as a reflective principle.

         In other words, this is one grounding basis of dialectic. It determines the ‘metaphysics’ of dialectic, since the process of two triplets begins to break up both monism and dualism, at least when applied to empirical situations. But a careful inspection of the thesis, antithesis, synthesis description shows that it simply reverses prior causality, replacing it with finality. As a consequence, of course, the synthesis ‘gathers’ the prior two as its core moment, thus suggesting the actual moment of dialectic; but, from this perspective, the dialectic is more accurately depicted by the doubled triads.

         It is ‘metaphysic’ because it presupposes the existence and context of the empirical.

         The answer to the bourgeois ascendancy, then, is this expanding understanding of dialectic. Since dialectic is the subtending moment of self-awareness, the basis of all our present perception and ideation, it frames itself to each vocation, to each individual.

         Vocational practice leads to mastery. But vocation, being a dialectic of dialectical experience, necessarily removes one from the literally mindless devotion of the bourgeois cult. Not only can one not ride two horses simultaneously, the horse master is not an elephant trainer. How we train ourselves becomes who we are.

         Power is not dialectic, although power flows like dialectic. Credit is not dialectic, although credit flows like dialectic. Perhaps credit and power will eventually begin to flow toward masters in fields other than war and credit commerce, but the present ascendancy of the bourgeois entails a residual persecution of the living dialectic consonant and correlated with the residual imperialism on which this industrial commercialism has arisen.

         Marx was facing the wrong way. The ‘classless society’ emerges when the decaying bourgeois turn toward the new masters who have visibly mastered dialectic within the frame of their vocation and field.