Gnostic Marxist
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robbo, if anyone’s ‘living in a complete dreamworld’, it’s those who believe science is powerless.
It’s been obvious since the 19th century that science is powerful, and the 20th century has demonstrated many times the destructiveness of that power upon humanity.
And since you’ve returned, as I always predict materialist will, to insults rather than reasoned discussion, I’ll now return to ignoring your naive questions.
Dream on.
lBird — like the absolute moron he is — seriously asks “Who determines ‘Respect’, and how is it determined, according to you, twc?”
And thus we are commanded to vote upon …
- who determines the meaning of Respect, with a capital ‘R’, and
- who determines who gets Respect, with a capital ‘R’, and by implication,
- who doesn’t get any.
What a miserably cramped mind! What a husk of a human being! What a soulless world he looks forward to!
lBird, we know you want to force Truth, with a capital ‘T’, upon us, but for your own helpless benefit, chew on this …
Respect is involuntary. It is earned. It cannot be forced.
Respect flowers in normal human beings, much as the young Marx said of love, …
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“If you love without evoking love in return—that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then your love is impotent — a misfortune.
- Our presentmisfortune is lBird’s presence.
- lBird’s misfortune is to lose every last skerrick of our Respect, with or without a capital ‘R’.
Still opposed to workers’ democracy, twc?
Still wondering why workers aren’t beating a path to your door?
Why not just be honest with us?
Or do you really believe that you’re following Marx and attempting to build democratic socialism?
But without the ‘democratic’ bit, eh? Sounds like Lenin – another materialist.
LBird, have you the satisfaction of convincing anybody on this forum?
You joined the forum almost 8 years ago and regardless of whether you are right or wrong in your views, all that time you have been banging your head against a brick-wall.
Isn’t it time you gave us all up as a lost cause and moved on, at least to another topic that isn’t viewed through what could be labeled your idiosyncratic perspective.
So we are an undemocratic party of Engelsite-Leninist elitists, lacking any understanding of the depths of Marx’s position. Well, so be it, then. That may well explain our inability to connect with our fellow-workers, although i very much doubt it is the reason.
I was always tolerant of your presence but now i believe you have over-stayed your welcome here and are diverting members from concentrating and contributing to other debates and discussions with the promise of more constructive conclusions.
ta-ta, bye-bye
robbo, if anyone’s ‘living in a complete dreamworld’, it’s those who believe science is powerless.
Once again more distortion from our feathered friend.
I was NOT talking about science but about the presumed power that you imagine a scientific elite would exercise over the general population in the absence of your crackpot idea of the general population voting for tens of thousands of scientific theories
Typically , you produce not the slightest argument in support of your claim that a so called scientific elite would be able to exercise power over the population in a society based on common ownership of the means of production where goods and services are free and labour is perfomed on a purely voluntary basis. In these circumstances there is no leverage in which anyone, let alone a so called scientific elite, could use to exercise power over anyone else and I defy anyone to show otherwise. The state through which such power could be exercised would have disappeared.
As usual, LBird, your incoherent and sloppy sociologising is proving to be your undoing. And you still havent answered my question – HOW do you propose to go about organising a democratic vote on not just one scientific theory amongst 8 billion people but tens of thousands of them!!!!
HOW, LBird? HOW HOW HOW???????
And since you’ve returned, as I always predict materialist will, to insults rather than reasoned discussion, I’ll now return to ignoring your naive questions.
This is rich coming from our feathered friend who has done nothing except insult the SPGB, dismissing it as Leninist-Engelsist, elitist, undemocratic etc etc blah blah blah and then has gone out of his way to completely avoid reasoned discussion by completely ignoring all questions such as HOW he proposes to organise a vote by the global population on tens of scientific theories
Today our border collie met a tiger snake on the track, and instantly leapt over it without skipping a beat.
Then ensued a Mexican standoff: human on one side, dog on the other, and snake in the middle.
Bonnie had done for the snake what Hume did for Kant — she had roused it from its slumber.
The tense situation…
All three of us warily eyed the other, attentive to the slightest breakaway movement. Suddenly Bonnie, taking the initiative, sprang over the snake to my side, giving the semi-torpid reptile scant opportunity to strike. On a warmer day it might have been curtains for Bonnie.
After securing her, I approached the snake, iPhone camera in hand, to photograph it. What a superb reptile it is. The camera’s colour science doesn’t do justice to the tiger snake’s yellow underbelly and olive stripes.
On our return I reflected about how little time I would have had to get her to expert medical aid, while blaming myself all the while for stupidly risking her life late in a season when snakes were still likely to be active.
Never, for a moment, did I doubt the objectivity of the Mexican standoff. (I think I also speak for the animals, within the constraints of their consciousnesses.). Its outcome depended critically upon my respecting the external world as being reliably objective. To have dismissed the external world’s phenomenal objectivity as myth — as lBird recommends — would have been academic folly!
Now I have never [yet] been bitten by a snake, but I know what it’s like to be bitten by a venomous spider. In that instance the spider wasn’t a lethal funnel-web — a creature whose amazing fangs exceed a tiger snake’s!
Yet, such are the evolutionary quirks of animal toxins that our cat was immune to funnel-web bites. It regularly killed them and brought them to adorn our doormat! Through another evolutionary quirk of animal toxins, unlike the bandicoot family that lived in our backyard, our Puss was not immune to the bush ticks that periodically paralysed him.
If, as lBird insists, we created the natural world in a sense unmediated by a knowable external world, the question remains — how and why did we manage to ‘create’ such a wondrously complex natural world that compels us to take its objectivity seriously or else, in circumstances such as these, die in the denial?
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alanjjohnstone wrote: “LBird, have you the satisfaction of convincing anybody on this forum?
You joined the forum almost 8 years ago and regardless of whether you are right or wrong in your views, all that time you have been banging your head against a brick-wall.
Isn’t it time you gave us all up as a lost cause and moved on…”
I think that you are right, alan. I had hoped that the deadweight of ‘materialism’ could be lifted from an allegedly democratic party of socialists, given some reasonable debate over a reasonable period of time. Unfortunately, ‘materialism’ has turned out to be a more powerful religion than I could have supposed. To me, materialism makes sense in the Leninist parties, which is why they adhere to it, and it can’t be changed. But, for ‘democrats’, materialism prevents democratic practice, and leaves it in the hands of an elite, as Marx said it would. So, I had hope… but it is ‘a brick wall’.
alanjjohnstone wrote: “So we are an undemocratic party of Engelsite-Leninist elitists, lacking any understanding of the depths of Marx’s position. Well, so be it, then. That may well explain our inability to connect with our fellow-workers, although i very much doubt it is the reason.”
Yes, youse are, and youse do, and it does. I’ve no doubt whatsoever. Not one SPGB member or sympathiser has defended democratic social production. Some pretend to defend it, but always backtrack, and move to something they wish to defend more dearly: ‘material’. As I’ve said, if the mythical ‘Scientific Socialism’ is pressured, they always defend the ‘Science’ not the ‘Socialism’.
alanjjohnstone wrote: “I was always tolerant of your presence but now i believe you have over-stayed your welcome here and are diverting members from concentrating and contributing to other debates and discussions with the promise of more constructive conclusions.
ta-ta, bye-bye”
Yeah, diverting them from debates, discussions and conclusions which have nothing to do with Marx, democracy, social production, revolution, or workers.
Well, I haven’t wasted my developmental time, because in pursuit of clarifying Marx’s ideas, I’ve read and understood a great deal, about science, philosophy and history. I had hoped that others, like you, would join in this development, to help build a democratic workers’ movement, but it’s clear now that none of youse have that aim in mind, never mind putting it into practice.
So, as you say, it’s time to go our separate ways.
Your organisation to its death, and me on my journey to find those who want democratic socialism.
See yer, mate!
Risking the chance he might, Socialist Standard Past and Present came up with this 1922 issue quote of Dietzgen
“We may leave certain objects of scientific research to professionals, but general thought is public matter which every one should be required to attend himself.”
– Joseph Dietzgenhttp://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2021/03/some-dietzgen-quotes-1922.html
Much more useful:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249960065_Joseph_Dietzgen_and_the_History_of_Marxism
Read it, alan, and you’ll re-think your ‘materialism’. Dietzgen had no time for the ‘old materialism’, which is the ideology that you currently espouse.
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