Rethinking the Marxist Conception of Revolution by Chris Wright
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All people are involved in participatory democracy within socialism – and they will decide the means, the methods, the procedures and the processes in how it will be exercised. I have made myself even clearer now. I am sure future society will engage in trials and experiments and involve themselves trying out various models of administration to discover what is best suited for the task in hand. Problems will be dealt with as they arise without binding a future generation to pre-ordained "solutions". Democracy i do not believe will be fixed but in flux, at least, in the early decades of socialist society until as Marx said we have got rid of all the shit left-over from capitalism. People may well chose to recuse themselves from certain aspects of democratic practice. Participation will not be compulsory. They might decide to delegate. They might have elections for certain aspects of running society. They might as i suggested, simply have people draw long and short straws. But power over oversight will ultimately still reside with the people, specifically, those impacted by directly or indirectly administrative decision-making. People in England will not impose their authority upon who should be a member of a panchayat in India. Likewise, a civil engineer will not govern the selection of an aeronautical engineer. People will reserve their democratic powers for their actual involvement and the relevance to their lives, as well as areas of expertise. You may have missed this passing post.
Quote:He even deals with your debate with LBird. He says that he is not interested in car mechanics so in a RBE he would have noting to do with it. He would participate and vote on issues of importance to him.https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/money-free-party#comment-40707 They also may well impose restrictions and parameters to participation, geographic, for instance, or professional, possibly. But that decision is a matter of society deploying either a long leash or short, the length of which is judged by all people as reasonable and accepted by them.
You're still avoiding my political question, alan.Who controls the social production of truth?One thing that I have learned in my decades of discussing politics with so-called 'Marxists', 'Communists' and 'Socialists' is to get to the nub of the issue, which is 'what actually are you proposing that workers will control?'All the flannel to avoid answering this political question (like the red herring 'there won't be workers in socialism') is simply that: flannelling of workers now. Even when I change the historically-specific term for 'social producers' within capitalism ('workers'), to the more general 'social producers' who will still exist within socialism (as they have within every human society), the flannellers still avoid this question.Who are the social producers who will democratically control the social production of truth within socialism?The Leninist/Trotskyist parties can't say the 'social producers', because they don't in their practice have a theory of democracy where all workers in their party have the same vote, but, like the SPGB apparently, have 'Specialists' to determine truth for workers.Who controls the social production of truth?
We haven't advanced far in this debate, have we, after what now has been years of exchanges and screeds of words.Fake news has recently been the headlines…and they have set up all manner of media controls to separate fake news from real news…and we as socialists know that itself is fake. The media is not a neutral medium and it can deceive by the very simple means of omission ie deciding what is the news to be told and not to be told.We can now say in todays world, it is no longer the government that controls truth but internet and search providers such as Google.When some theory is promoted, is the internet vote of traffic figures legitimise claims made and the truth of them?JFK was killed in a conspiracy so say 81% of Americans say so.They have determined the "truth" based upon what information they are in possession of, though? What are the accuracy of their information?Truth is for me too abstract a word. I read a book on the Congo pygmies, because they lived in forests the range of their sight was always limited. When the author took one to another region, the pygmy had no sense of perspective, his mind couldn't comprehend that a buffalo in the distance was the same buffalo up close. History of art showed that the truth of the painter changed with the centuries…from Egyptian style to Renaissance developments in three dimension techniques. Truth in how we represented what we saw changed.I think i mentioned that quantum physics is all gobbly-gook to me because their truth does not correspond to my own reality. I recuse myself from such conversations. You ask who controls truth…i do as an individual. I choose what i consider true. My neighbour possesses his personal world-view of his reality. That is our battlefield in politics. Challenging the common-sense truth of our fellow-workers in what they believe to be the truth…human nature means greed and aggression etc. When we all begin to share an understanding of social relationships and how our ideas arise from those and a consensus begins coalesce we can say we have a grasp on truth. No idea who will control what is seen as truth in a socialist society, or how it would be done. There are limits to my imagination and how people will change and how they will think once freed from capitalism and its conditioning is beyond my ken. I can't even have a good guess.
alanjjohnstone wrote:We haven't advanced far in this debate, have we, after what now has been years of exchanges and screeds of words….I think i mentioned that quantum physics is all gobbly-gook to me because their truth does not correspond to my own reality. I recuse myself from such conversations. You ask who controls truth…i do as an individual. I choose what i consider true. My neighbour possesses his personal world-view of his reality. That is our battlefield in politics.[my bold]The reason that we haven't advanced far, alan, is that you don't realise that 'knowledge production' is part of the class war. You subscribe to the bourgeois ideology that 'knowledge' is an 'individual' product (or, at best, a product of 'elite individuals').That is, you're ignorant of the politics of the social production of knowledge, and that ignorance is reinforced by the social ideology that you've had given to you ('ruling class ideas'), one that stresses 'individuals' in both the production of commodities and of social ideas.So, if what I'm claiming is true, then I'd expect your version of 'knowledge production' to be 'individualist', rather than 'social'.And when we examine your ideological statement, above, we find only reference to 'I', 'me', 'my own', 'personal' and 'as an individual'. It's clear that if you were referring to economics, you'd clearly be a bourgeois ideologist, arguing for 'individual' judgement of 'value' in the marketplace.
ajj wrote:Challenging the common-sense truth of our fellow-workers in what they believe to be the truth…. When we all begin to share an understanding of social relationships and how our ideas arise from those and a consensus begins coalesce we can say we have a grasp on truth.That's precisely what I'm doing on this site, alan. I'm 'challenging' your 'common-sense truth', and trying to build a 'consensus' about the need to challenge 'individualism' in science. All science is social, and has power, and must be socially controlled – which within the workers' movement building for socialism, must mean 'democratic control'.
ajj wrote:No idea who will control what is seen as truth in a socialist society, or how it would be done. There are limits to my imagination and how people will change and how they will think once freed from capitalism and its conditioning is beyond my ken. I can't even have a good guess.[my bold]That's an abdication of political responsibility, alan, which is to argue that only the social producers will control truth production in a socialist society. It's not even much of 'a good guess', to say so. For socialists who are democrats, it should be "stating the bleedin' obvious".
L Birdyou state that in a Socialist Society all members of society would be allowed to control the "social production of truth" but the reality is that you demonstrably do not believe this.
The limits to my imagination was stretched to proposing that social controls of a future society will be worked out at the time by the people dependent upon the outcome and i have no intention of pre-empting them by pre-determined models of administration of society or by defining the parameters of the authority of the many diverse and varied expressions of democratic control which will spring up, beyond some general broad-brush strokes.You say that approach is an abdication of responsibility. i suggest your premature approach is an abrogation of responsibility.I ask you, who is the democrat?
LBird wrote:Who controls the social production of truth?*sigh* everyone, and therefore no-one. The same answer as to who owns the means of production.
LBird wrote:This is precisely what Vin, robbo, and the rest of the Religious Materialists do. They claim to be dealing with something independent of society ('nature', 'matter', 'Truth', 'externality', 'reality', etc. etc.), which can't be voted upon, but then claim that they themselves, as an elite, outside of the democratic control of the social producers, can determine this 'something'.Absolute Bollocks. Another StrawmanLBird believes that truth will be decided by the collective and there will be no deviation allowed from this 'truth' Resistance is futile. No individuals making decision that concern only their community. Truth for them will be imposed upon them. brrrrrrrrrrrr1984
LBird wrote:alanjjohnstone wrote:We haven't advanced far in this debate, have we, after what now has been years of exchanges and screeds of words….I think i mentioned that quantum physics is all gobbly-gook to me because their truth does not correspond to my own reality. I recuse myself from such conversations. You ask who controls truth…i do as an individual. I choose what i consider true. My neighbour possesses his personal world-view of his reality. That is our battlefield in politics.[my bold]The reason that we haven't advanced far, alan, is that you don't realise that 'knowledge production' is part of the class war. You subscribe to the bourgeois ideology that 'knowledge' is an 'individual' product (or, at best, a product of 'elite individuals').That is, you're ignorant of the politics of the social production of knowledge, and that ignorance is reinforced by the social ideology that you've had given to you ('ruling class ideas'), one that stresses 'individuals' in both the production of commodities and of social ideas..
[/quote]Perhaps :LBird can explain what happens after 7 billion people have cast their votes on the pressing matter of whether quarks consist of 3 or 5 preons – there are apparently rival theories in this subject area which are hotly contested among physicists?If the proponents of the 3 preon theory of quarks fail to convince the majority of the soundness of their theory who vote in favour of the 5 preon theory, does that mean the former will no longer be permiited to advance their theory? If not, what was the point of the vote exactly? Please explain See, we can all agree that "knowledge is social" which is a fairly bland and uncontroversial statement to make but just becuase something is a social product does not automatically mean it needs be voted upon, does it? LBird's toothbrush is a social product. Is he seriously telling us that he will insist on voting on the of production technique employed at every stage in the production of toothbrushes? There are literally billions upon billions of things around us that are "socially produced", How does LBird propose that all 7 billion people have a say in the prduction of each of these billions upon billions of things? Over to you LBird
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