Anglo Box

The Anglo-Box refers to the mental cage inhabited by westerners who refuse to acknowledge the social, cultural, and psychological depth that underlies objects of sense.^[1] At root, the problem is a lack of dialectical thinking and an overemphasis on Formalism.

This formalistic way of thinking arises from the same alienation of man from his living being that is realized concretely in the division of labor. In his preface to The German Ideology, Marx writes about this alienation as a kind of totem that precipitates commodity fetishism: "[Men] have arranged their relationships according to their ideas, of normal man, etc. The phantoms of their brains have gotten out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed before their creation ... Let us revolt against the rule of thoughts."^[2] To put it simply, this formalism in thought is directly a product of the reification of the social antagonism and thus incompatible with proletarian class consciousness, which does not recognize the a priori status of fixed, metaphysical Ideas but instead recognizes these Ideas as a reflection of the living being particular to peoples and civilizations. Contrary to the Anglo-Box, which recognizes the precedence and Absolute nature of the formal structure of the cogito, Marxism-Leninism realizes that "neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, [but] are only manifestations of actual life."^[3]

In debates, inhabitants of the box definition-monger. They attempt to set up an air-tight, universal, and eternal definition, unaware that language is metonymic and does not refer to some transcendental form, and their endeavor is as meaningless as it is fruitless. Debaters like Vaush abuse this by forcing their opponents to formulate a definition which must then hold true in every case. For instance, Vaush asks, "how is China Communist? describe to me what communism is and then tell me how China is that." Infrared responds:

Do you see the way Vaush processes information and reasons? He first sets up an essence, and then superimposes that upon the reality. He doesn't derive his essence from the investigation of reality itself. You wanna see the differing perspectives of materialist and idealist view of language? Here it is: Vaush thinks you create prescriptive definitions that you then hold reality to the criterion of, rather than definitions deriving from and being created by things in reality itself. You see the difference?^[4]

External links[edit | edit source]

↑ https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Anglo-Box
↑ https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_The_German_Ideology.pdf. Cf. what Marx says about capital, from around the same time: "The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being." https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/needs.htm. In both cases, man's alienation is expressed in the investment of his mental or physical labors in an external form, a kind of golem, which he is responsible for but which takes on a life of its own and exerts an independent existence vis-a-vis its own producers. In both cases, this external form--capital and thought--is treated as a priori to its own real conditions of existence, which lay beyond the domain of any transcendental form. The word for this true a priori is, in the conception of dialectical materialism, the material.
↑ Full quote: "The philosophers would only have to dissolve their language into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, to recognize it as the distorted language of the actual world, and to realize that neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life." https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_The_German_Ideology.pdf
↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vm7HfxKZ-Eg

[1] ttps://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Anglo-Box

[2] ttps://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_The_German_Ideology.pdf. Cf. what Marx says about capital, from around the same time: "The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being." https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/needs.htm. In both cases, man's alienation is expressed in the investment of his mental or physical labors in an external form, a kind of golem, which he is responsible for but which takes on a life of its own and exerts an independent existence vis-a-vis its own producers. In both cases, this external form--capital and thought--is treated as a priori to its own real conditions of existence, which lay beyond the domain of any transcendental form. The word for this true a priori is, in the conception of dialectical materialism, the material.

[3] Full quote: "The philosophers would only have to dissolve their language into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, to recognize it as the distorted language of the actual world, and to realize that neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life." https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_The_German_Ideology.pdf

[4] ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vm7HfxKZ-Eg

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