ALB
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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
You are right, Alan. Treat this as an Off Topic subject where those interested can amuse themselves by playing Whack-a-mole, waiting for some absurd idea to come up and then whacking it down. Our feathered friend seems content to play the mole.
Herr Vogel
I am grateful to you for taking an interest in my work. However I am unable to accept your editing of what I wrote. If I had meant to avoid using the word “materiel” I would have done so but that would not have conveyed the meaning I intended.
I am therefore obliged to respectfully request that you refrain from altering the wording of my articles.
Yours for the Revolution
Karl Marx
Yes, Robbo, quite irrelevant. Marx was arguing there against a creationist and used the philosophical argument that if you say “man and nature” need to be created you are implying that they are “non-being” (don’t exist in their own right), adding that this means that you are too. Marx doesn’t seem to think that his opponent found this rather Hegelian argument convincing as he has him come back to say: “I do not want to posit the nothingness of nature. I ask you about its genesis.” So Marx changes tack, to argue that humans’ sense experience shows that they created themselves through labour in nature and that this shows that “man and nature” exist independently, by themselves.
All very Hegelian, too Hegelian in my view. “Human consciousness” in the sense that has been used here is a Hegelian concept. As far as I can understand Hegel (and I don’t claim to understand too much as his language is impenetrable), for him it is a manifestation of the Absolute Spirit, or God. So he was a creationist. The Young Hegelians, of which Marx was one for a while, threw out God and gave “human consciousness” the status of being the creator of the world.
If you take this position then you argue that the way to change the world is to change consciousness. Marx disagreed and broke with the Young Hegelians to argue that the way to change the world was to change the material conditions of life that gave rise to content of the consciousness.
If what human consciousness creates is by definition “true” then there can be no “false consciousness”. The trouble is that there is no uniform human consciousness (as what all humans think). Which means that there will be all sorts of “truths”. So, as twc has pointed out, if you take this road you end up in the dead-end of post-modernism.
One way to avoid this to decide by a majority vote of all humans what “the truth” is. The problem here is that those who voted against what is carried are then the carriers of a “false consciousness”. But unless you say they should be forced to accept “the truth” (I am not sure anyone has) then the vote changes nothing. So what’s the point, as you’ve asked many times, Robbo? Democratic social post-modernism is also a dead-end.
You are right, Robbo, to point out that only an individual human can have “consciousness” in the sense of being “conscious” and so that to talk of humanity having consciousness in that sense can be misleading. For instance when Eugene (not Joseph) Dietzgen writes:
“phenomena outside of us … exist independently of individual man, although they cannot exist for mankind independently of human consciousness”, what did he mean? He would indeed seem to be implying that there is such a thing as “human consciousness” apart from the consciousness of individual humans. Which, as you point out, doesn’t work either as a fact or as an analogy.There is, however, another sense of “consciousness” — as the content of what people think as, e.g., in “class consciousness” as a common view held by a group of people. But this sense won’t work either for Eugene Dietzgen as there is not a human consciousness in the sense of a view held by all humans.
Consciousness in this sense is of course a social phenomenon if only because it is expressed in language which itself is social. But what conditions what views a group of people hold? Marx’s famous answer setting out “the materialist conception” of history (and society) seems clear enough:
“The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary,their social being that determines their consciousnesses.”
Also, on Eugene Dietzgen’s apparent theory, a “false consciousness” is impossible.
Adam Buick wrote: “Included in the Kerr edition of Dietzgen’s
Philosophical Essays is an essay on Max stirner by
Eugene wherein we read that ‘whatever does not
partake of the psycho-physical nature of the
universe, cannot exist for us’ and that ‘phenomena
outside of us … exist independently of individual
man, although they cannot exist for mankind
independently of human consciousness.”That was the view and terminology (“psycho-physical nature of the universe”) expresed by Joseph Dietzgen’s son, Eugene (more here on him), and are not Dietzgen’s own words. He was making a different point. From the same article:
Mind and Matter
Dietzgen, as we saw, called himself a materialist. There are however various kinds of materialism and Dietzgen was careful to differentiate his dialectical materialism from what he called ‘one-sided,’ ‘narrow’ and ‘mechanical’ materialism. This was the view (indeed the traditional materialist view going back to the philosophers of Ancient Greece) that the world is composed of tiny particles of tangible ‘matter’ and that the mind and thinking are simply the effects of the movement of these atoms. Writes Dietzgen:
“The distinguishing mark between the mechanical materialists of the 18th century and the Social-Democratic materialists trained in German idealism consists in that that the latter have extended the former’s narrow conception of matter as consisting exclusively of the Tangible to all phenomena that occur in the world.”
Every phenomenon, everything that occurs, exists, as part of the entire world of phenomena. Since non-tangible phenomena, e.g. ideas, thoughts etc., also occur, they are just as real or, if you like, just as ‘material’ as tangible phenomena:
“In the endless Universe matter in the sense of old and antiquated materialists, that is, of tangible matter, does not possess the slightest preferential right to be more substantial, i.e. more immediate, more distinct and more certain than any other phenomena of nature.”
Dietzgen had no objection to the classification of the world of phenomena into two general categories, one consisting of tangible phenomena and called ‘matter’ and the other consisting of mental phenomena and called ‘mind.’ He had no objection either to explanations of mental phenomena in terms of tangible phenomena. What he was concerned to point out was that, in this sense, both ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ were abstractions, even if very general ones, from the real world of phenomena. The rigid distinction between ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ was a mental distinction that did not exist in the world of phenomena which, despite this mental operation, remained an undivided whole:
“The mind is a collective name for the mental phenomena, as matter is a collective name for the material phenomena, and the two together figure under the idea and name of the phenomena of Nature.
This was the basis of Dietzgen’s statement, which, as we shall see, so upset Lenin, that ‘our materialism is distinguished by its special knowledge of the common nature of mind and matter’.By this he simply meant that both mind and matter were parts of the world of observable phenomena.
Those Dietzgen called the ‘narrow’ materialists made the mistake of not thinking dialectically, that is, of not realising that the parts of the world of phenomena do not exist independently but only as interconnected parts of that world. In taking one part of the world of phenomena and making it the basis of all the other parts, they were falsely ascribing a real, independent existence to what was in fact only an abstraction:
“This materialism is so enamoured of mechanics, that it, as it were, idolizes it, does not regard it as part of the world, but as the sole substance of which the universe is made up.”
Another example of a movement for some measure of political democracy being crushed by a powerful state. Did the pro-democracy activists really think they could win against the Chinese central government if they took them head on? Who decided to make the mistake of storming and trashing the legislative assembly building and other provocations? A less confrontational approach may have been able to save something but it looks as if they have now lost everything.
Looks as if our feathered friend is ignorant in one or other sense of the term. Someone should tell him to read the section on “Mind and Matter” in this article from the Spring 1975 number of Radical Philosophy. I’m not going to.
Our feathered friend’s brief hibernation hasn’t improved his behaviour or his logic. He has the gall to accuse us of trashing Dietzgen when we were the ones that kept his conception of materialism alive (basically that both matter and mind are equally real) in face of criticism from CP hacks who kept up Lenin’s trashing of him in his book on empiriocriticism.
We not only did that but we were instrumental in introducing his ideas into academia in 1975 and so indirectly for the publication of the article he refers you to, Alan. See pages 215 to 217 of the article.
