Crass Misreadingrobbo203
Crass Misreading
Marx was quite familiar with your preferred non-crass reading, but you delude yourself if you think Marx could ever subscribe to it. His materialism forbids explanation by pure immediate experience, and commits him to explanation that is mediated by abstraction from experience.Now, it is highly significant that Marx declares “social being determines consciousness” in a scientific manifesto [Contribution, 1859] in which he writes with the clarity of a manifesto.Only a moron or fraudster blunts the point of a manifesto. Obfuscation soon enough follows as the work of affronted lackeys, who tone things down to the level of their own “non-crass” syncretism.To me Marx is clearly repudiating the abstract commonsense claims of both idealism and syncretism, and is certainly not endorsing them as you assert, presumably to favour your non-crass reading.Marx’s materialistic attack on claims for untrammelled thought effectively scuttles your own “creative” voluntarism, or utopianism, as it was then called, and this is the main reason you find his materialist message to be crass, and the main impetus for obfuscating its crystal clarity.Post #119In post #119, I retraced a suggested path of Marx’s abstract materialist development of consciousness out of social being. The rest of Capital is the working out of this development in concrete detail.Explaining this development materialistically was claimed here to be absolutely impossible.Well, I hope that, by shining a spotlight on the unfamiliar nature [as judged by some posts] of Marx’s own materialism, I’ve helped to clarify what Marx was getting at when he said his conception of history was materialist and, equally importantly, just what Marx was not getting at.Concrete Phenomena are Not Scientific PrinciplesI am sufficiently crass a determinist to believe that a scientist means exactly what he says he means when he consciously formulates an abstract scientific principle that states: A determines B .I am sufficiently crass a determinist to believe that the scientist intends to use his abstract scientific principle to explain the puzzling contingent concrete phenomena that it was abstracted from: A and B appear to interact reciprocally .I am sufficiently crass a determinist to believe — contrary to syncretists — that a contingent phenomenal observation is not an abstract scientific principle. For example, the contingent phenomenal statement: A and B merely interactis a restatement of concrete content in the same form as a scientific principle, but it still remains contingent and concrete in content, and so void of any abstract scientific content, and is definitely not an abstract scientific principle, even if it looks like one to the syncretist.Thus I am led to the inexorable conclusion that you are simply confusing the thought-realm of deterministic scientific abstraction with the phenomenal-realm of concrete contingent experience. Consequently, for you: crass ≡ scientificThis issue of materialism v. syncretism is too fundamental to drop here.I fully intend to hound robbo203 for his non-crass response to my #119.