ALB
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Sorry Robbo, but it looks as if you are going to have to spell out again for our feathered friend that, even though an individual outside of society couldn’t be said to have a mind, as only individuals have brains only individuals (not human society) are capable of having minds.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can’t conceive of a what “a social mind”, as distinct from individual minds with ideas derived from society, would be.
Is our feathered friend saying that all living humans together constitute a biological organism with a brain and an ability to think and act as one? And that it is this entity that has created, sustains and can change reality as the external world experienced by individual humans?
The argument is not over whether or not the contents of the human mind is a product of society but over how the mind interprets the information conveyed to it by the senses and the brain.
“Social Nature of Mind
German idealist philosophy made ideas the driving forces of history. Marx and Engels did not deny that the real men who made history were conscious beings who had ideas about what they were doing; their point was that these ideas did not come from nowhere and were not arbitrary. Ideas, they said, arose from material social conditions so that men’s ideas reflect their material conditions of life, their activity in society. Consciousness in the abstract did not exist: “Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life process” and “life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life”.
The theory advanced here is not a theory of the physiology of perception and thinking (which Marx and Engels knew they were not qualified to formulate) so that talk of ideas “reflecting” social processes must not be misunderstood as a theory that the brain is a kind of camera photographing the world. It is a theory of the social origin of ideas. Though Marx and Engels did go further than saying merely that the particular ideas men held at any particular time depended on the particular society they were living in.
They also argued that “consciousness” (in the sense of the ability to think abstractly, to consider and plan future behaviour, to be aware of your own existence as a separate organism) as an empirical phenomenon was a social product:
“Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity of intercourse with other men . . . Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all” (p.51).
Language is obviously a social product, the outcome of men living together in societies and communicating with each other for co-operative activity. Language is not the only method of communication, but it is a highly-developed and specialized one and one which alone makes abstract thought possible. Language can be defined as an organized system of meaningful symbols (words) standing for abstractions and mental constructs from the ever-changing world of reality. Other animals can only react to their immediately-sensed environment; they cannot abstract parts of it so as to consider, delay or plan their response. The only animal that can do this is man and it is through language that they do it (of course this presupposes also a development of the brain and nervous system that makes language and abstract thought possible). Since abstract thought — “consciousness” in the sense used here by Marx and Engels — is impossible without language, since in fact language and abstract thought are two aspects of the same thing, and since language is a social product, it follows that thinking, consciousness, mind are also social products.
Once again this view is surprisingly modern, anticipating by over half a century its systematic elaboration by George Herbert Mead in his lectures at the University of Chicago (published in 1934, after his death, under the title Mind, Self and Society). It is a refutation not only of idealist theories which see mind as some mysterious intangible substance human beings are endowed with at or before birth, but also of crude materialist theories which seek to reduce thought to a purely biological, physical or chemical phenomenon. Thought of course does involve brain activity but there is more to it than that. Marx’s theory of mind was materialist in that it explained “mind” in terms of material social conditions rather than in terms of some mysterious physical substance called “matter”.
Human beings are born with brains, but not minds. Men only acquire minds in and through society, the content of their minds reflecting their social life and experience. A man outside society, could he exist, would have a brain, but no mind. Which is why physical theories of the mind are inadequate.”
From the Socialist Standard, September 1973
There’s an interesting recent addition to the archives section here: a review from 1942 of a book on “The Myth of the Mind” by Frank Kenyon in the Thinkers Library.
Here are some extracts:
“his criticisms are equally pertinent to the philosophical word-spinners who seek to dazzle the eyes of the simple with their sophistries, the people who “prove” that the material world which surrounds and includes us possesses no reality that is independent of our sense-perceptions, and is but the eternal form of a supreme mental activity—absolute mind.
”Mr. Kenyon remarks, “The belief in the mind as an entity, is due to that principle which has drawn philosophy into such disrepute: the principle of generalising phenomena into an abstract term, and then treating the abstraction as a metaphysical entity governing the phenomena it was intended to describe.”
It is also a reminder that there are changes in the brain when someone is thinking consciously compared to when they are not. But of course what is thought is not determined by the brain any more than what is digested is determined by the stomach.
He’s an arrogant piece of guano, isn’t he, Matt?
He’s walled up so much in his
philosophical ivory tour that he is unable to distinguish between something “objective” like a zebra and something that only exists in the imagination like a unicorn as both are (in his view) creations of the human mind.In practice, when he comes down to earth, he will distinguish between the two even if he doesn’t use the word “objective” to distinguish the zebra from the unicorn. Otherwise the men in white coats would be coming to take him away.
The whole of April 1942 is now on line here.
Including this article by Hardy:
Post war trade. Another scheme to save capitalism.
Also this article by Hardy and one another February 1942:
I don’t think that will alienate people unless they try to stop us using banks or cash machines.
It won’t get anywhere anyway. They will just create financial difficulties for themselves but no doubt that will make them feel virtuous.
How about this passage (scroll down to section 5)from The German Ideology (very insightful for being written in 1845), sometimes freely translated as:
A development of the productive forces is the absolutely necessary practical premise [of socialism], because without it want is generalised, and with want the struggle for necessities begins again, and that means that all the old crap must revive.”.
Also note what Marx and Engels say what would happen if a “local” communism were to be established:
“Without this, (1) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism.”
There is also their practical stance after 1850 favouring conditions for the further development of the productive forces and the working class under capitalism; which indicates that they held that the material conditions for the immediate establishment of socialism were not yet ripe.
Of course whether conditions were ripe for the establishment of socialism in the mid-19th century is now only of academic interest as, in the meantime, the degree of development of the forces of production has reached the level where, with socialism, they can provide plenty for all. So now Socialists, anarchists and any others can all agree that socialism could be established immediately and that’s what we should be working towards.
Just re-read the whole of that letter and his opinion is quite reasonable even if he does use the term “socialist government” which we don’t like (and he does as the word he uses in German is Regierung).
I like this formulation:
No equation can be solved unless the elements of its solution are involved in its terms.
It applies to all attempts to establish socialism when the forces of production are not developed enough to provide a comfortable life for all (they are now, so this is about why socialism couldn’t have been established before capitalism) or when a majority doesn’t yet want it (which unfortunately is still the case at the moment).
Robbo, now he is saying that we don’t think that “men make history” but that tools and machines do !
That would make us as nutty as him with his view that the Earth was once flat but that “human consciousness” later made it spherical and could make it flat again if a majority voted for this. Even Richard Dawkins’s “ignorant lunatic” wasn’t that looney.
That programme claims that
La Commune de Paris was a revolutionary Socialist government that controlled Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871.
That wasn’t Marx’s description. In a letter he wrote ten years later to the Dutch socialist (later anarchist) Domela Nieuwenhuis he said that the Paris Commune
was merely the rising of a town under exceptional conditions, the majority of the Commune was in no sense socialist, nor could it be.
That didn’t mean that he regarded it as worthless. On the contrary, he regarded it as a working class uprising that established an ultra-democratic regime which showed that the working class were quite as capable as the bourgeois class of administering society.
Our Party took the same view and right up until the mid-twenties used to hold a Paris Commune commemoration meeting every 18 March.
It also had important implications for socialist theory and showed that by “dictatorship of the proletariat” Marx did not mean, as Lenin did, the literal dictatorship of a party (claiming to) represent the proletariat, but the democratic rule of the working class.
More from Pannekok:
“The methods of production have continuously changed with the progress of time. Whence came these changes? The manner of labor and the productive relationship depend upon the tools with which people work, upon the development of technique and upon the means of production in general. Because in the Middle Ages people worked with crude tools, while now they work with gigantic machinery, we had at that time small trade and feudalism, while now we have capitalism; it is also for this reason that at that time the feudal nobility and the small bourgeoisie were the most important classes, while now it is the bourgeoisie and the proletarians which are the classes.
It is the development of tools, of these technical aids which men direct, which is the main cause, the propelling force of all social development. It is self-understood that the people are ever trying to improve these tools so that their labor be easier and more productive, and the practice they acquire in using these tools, leads their thoughts upon further improvements. Owing to this development, a slow or quick progress of technique takes place, which at the same time changes the social forms of labor. This leads to new class relations, new social institutions and new classes. At the same time social, i. e., political struggles arise. Those classes predominating under the old process of production try to preserve artificially their institutions, while the rising classes try to promote the new process of production; and by waging the class struggles against the ruling class and by conquering them they pave the way for the further unhindered development of technique.
Thus the Marxian theory disclosed the propelling force and the mechanism of social development. In doing this it has proved that history is not something irregular, and that the various social systems are not the result of chance or haphazard events, but that there is a regular development in a definite direction. In doing this it was also proved that social development does not cease with our system, because technique continually develops.”
Just seen the list of candidates nominated for the Lambeth & Southwark costituency for the Greater London Assembly elections on 6 May and they are back to standing against the Labour Party — as TUSC. Not surprising, I suppose, now that Labour has reverted to type, but illustrative of Trotskyists opportunism. I imagine, in fact, that they would have welcomed the defenestration of Corbyn and Labour going back to what it was as this means they should be able to pick up a few recruits. It will be inteesting to see if they do manage to attract a number of disillusioned Labour voters. T
