ALB
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Yes, but we don’t claim that understanding socialism amounts to heaven under capitalism. So why claim that understanding humans’ position in relation to the universe does? It seems like an obvious fact to me, nothing to get ecstatic about.
Another question: what is the difference between “social philosophy” and “natural philosophy” ? In fact, what is this natural philosophy?
So you can achieve ‘nirvana” under capitalism simply by recognising that you are part of the universe? No wonder Buddhism is mocked.
But why do we have to have recourse to Eastern religions’ mumbo-jumbo terms when Western religion mumbo-jumbo already has a word for the same nonsense — bliss?
If anybody wishes to link a new blog on Morocco
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2022/12/moroccos-goal-in-western-sahara.html
Just got round to reading this and a bit surprised at this passage:
“Despite the Sahrawi people’s right to self-determination and their right to control their resources and international criticism foreign nations are signing trade deals with Morocco. Nations.” (my emphasis)
This can’t be right as we have always rejected the so-called “right to self-determination” as the “right” of a would-be ruling class to control the resources and rule over the people of an area.
I hope it is not too late to correct this slip.
As you are interested in Victorian atheists and agnostics, this essay refuting the possibility of immortality (and discussing memory) by SDF member Belfort Bax reproduced for his Ethics of Socialism will interest you:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/bax/1893/ethics/14-immortality.htm
Actually, Herbert Spencer was highly regarded by early Party members, not of course for his proto anarcho-capitalism but for his view that society was an organism and his theory of the origin of religion.
With reference to that (too) long quote from Hearn, one view that has been dismissed is the existence of “ether”.
I am sure Stephen Fry is well informed, maybe more so than you or me but he wouldn’t have been speaking as an expert in the field.
All I have been able to find is this blurb from a QI episode. It is not saying that the regeneration theory has been dismissed but that the “energy conservation” theory isn’t an adequate explanation.
“The most mysterious thing you do in bed is sleep, because nobody knows why we do it. People have previously thought that it was to do with energy conservation, but you don’t save that much energy by sleeping, namely 110 calories per night. In comparison, a two-fingered Kit Kat is 107 calories. One theory developed by scientists at the University of Rochester Medical Centre in New York is that our brains are cleaned while we sleep.”
That seems a bit dubious and unscientific as it seems to be suggesting some purpose to evolution. But there isn’t. It just happened as life-forms became adapted to the circumstances in which they found themselves.
It is also not clear what you mean by memory in “a biological sense”. Humans and many other life-forms are born with the ability to “memorise” their experiences but not with particular memories. Perhaps you mean what used to be called “instincts” or biologically inherited behaviour patterns. We know that this scarcely applies to humans beyond bodily functions and that human behaviour, being biologically flexible, is overwhelmingly culturally determined. In fact, much of the behaviour of many other animals has to be learnt too.
Incidentally, what are the references to the view that “the idea that it [sleep] is to regenerate energy has been dismissed”.
Thanks. That was what I thought was the case. In an earlier post you said that
karma too can be taken in the crude, popular, religious sense, or in a different sense, the sense of genetic “memory”, evolutionary “memory.”
I don’t understand the word “genetic” here unless you simply mean the cultural heritage of humanity in terms of acquired technological and other knowledge that is passed down from generation to generation. I don’t see what this has to do with karma and certainly not with genes.
As a matter of interest, do the Eastern religions that preach reincarnation say that it involves retaining memory of a previous life? I thought their assumption was that the “soul” (whatever that is) was immortal and moved from one body to another. If “souls” retained the memory of all their past lives the brain of their current life would be overwhelmed by this.
The whole doctrine is just mumbo jumbo but it did serve a social purpose for the privileged classes — by teaching the poor that they were poor because they had behaved badly in a past life and would in the next one too if they weren’t “good” in their present one. In other words, a similar social purpose as the doctrine of heaven and hell of christianity and islam. But in a sense it is worse as it also implies that the rich and powerful are this because they had been good in their previous life and so deserved to be rich and powerful. A very convenient doctrine for them.
I thought this was an interesting and useful guide to some modern radical economists. I have answered how I think we would answer the questions in red
Here are the questions:
“In his book The Long Depression Michael Roberts asks four key questions from which he derives eight possible answers about the nature of economic turmoil or even whether there is a crisis at all.
1) Is capitalism subject to economic crisis? Yes
Within the camp which says no, a second question is answered.
1b) Do periodic fluctuations need fixing?
If the answer is “yes” you are a Keynesian like Paul Krugman. If the answer is “no” you are a libertarian like Milton Friedman. For the libertarians capitalism only goes through “business cycles”.
Within the camp that says “yes”, that capitalism is subject to crisis, a second question is asked:
Is the kernel of the crisis found in production? Yes
If the answer is “no” you are an underconsumptionist like Marxists David Harvey or Rosa Luxemburg.
If the answer is “yes” about the kernel of the crisis found in production, there is another question:
2b) Are crises more than struggle over wages and profit shares? Yes
If no, you are a profit-squeeze supporter. Economics associated with this are Baron and Sweezy and Richard Wolff.
If the answer to the kernel of the crisis is found in production is “yes”, a further question should be:
3a) Are crises integral to the accumulation crisis? Yes
If the answer is “yes” you follow Marx’s argument about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This is advocated by Michael Roberts, Anwar Shaikh and Robert Brenner.
If the answer to the question is crisis integral to the accumulation process is “no” then a further question is asked.
4a) Does extra-consumption come from outside the system? No
If the answer is “yes” you are a follower of Rosa Luxemburg or David Harvey and claim that capitalism has limited resources and needs imperialism to survive.
If the answer is “no” to the question then there is second question.
4b) Does extra consumption come from state intervention? No
If the answer is “yes” you are a post Keynesian such as Steve Keen.
If the answer is “no” you are a Malthusian.”A couple of points. I don’t see why answering Yes to question 3a commits you to thinking that crises are caused by a long term tendency for the rate of profit to fall. I assume that answering No to question 4b makes you a “Malthusian” in the sense that you are saying that total consumption can only increase through an increase in population.
I am not sure that Harvey qualifies as a Marxian economist. Not only does he not stand for socialism but he comes across as a more of a leftwing Keynesian.
So far only read the introduction quoting Michael Roberts’s guide to other radical economists. I want to quote this but want to check first that the newly-introduced facility here to use red works.
It does
Maybe but they knocked out a NATO team (Portugal) so making an all non-NATO final theoretically possible. But for that they need to beat France. It looks like the main hope for delivering your karma to NATO, for engineering the exclusion of Russia and arming the Ukranian nasties, will be Argentina.
When I lived in a Belgium a law was still in force fixing a maximum price for bread. The boulangeries complied for a basic loaf but concentrated on producing and selling fancy breads at a higher price. I would think this would happen again if this was introduced in other countries. The law was only abolished in 2004.
I thought that, as a German-speaker, you might be able to contribute something useful to this thread. For instance, as which Reich the “Reichsbürger” consider they own allegiance to. Apparently not.
Anyway, now you know my birthday you can send me a card.
Can I suggest a separate thread or even section on Trolls and Trolling where we can discuss the psychology and motivation of trolls, in general as well as particular ones, without derailing the discussion on other threads.
Make of this what you will but, if true, it places the Ukraine regime in a bad light:
