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Marx on “materialistic-critical socialism” and its materialist basis.
Another extract from Starmer’s speech:
“For too long Labour has failed to realise that the only way to deliver social justice and equality is through a strong partnership with business. Under my leadership that mindset will change.”
Actually, this has always been Labour’s mindset when in office. It means allowing business to make profits and maintaining conditions favourable for profit-making. Since profits arise from the surplus value workers create it means accepting worker exploitation and, if need be, opposing strikes for higher wages. In the end it means abandoning promised reforms aimed at promoting “social justice and equality” if they conflict with profit-making.
We have seen it so many times before. What is slightly new, I suppose, is that this time Starmer is “getting Labour’s betrayal in in advance”, not that it really is a betrayal since Labour has only ever been anti-capitalist in words. When in office it has been obliged to maintain “a strong partnership” with profit-seeking private business since capitalism runs on profits.
Far from working with capitalists within capitalism being the only way to improve things for workers history, in the form of the record of all previous Labour governments, has shown the opposite to be the case — that capitalism cannot be made to work in the interests of the majority; as a profit-making system it can only work in the interests of the profit-takers.
Anybody without an axe to grind or an obsession to pursue can see that, when Marx wrote “The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality,” he is referring to the “abstract and ideological views” expressed when they spoke on other subjects than their particular field of science, as when they expressed a view on political or economic matters, and not to their theory of “matter” (whatever criticisms he may also have had about that).
What Marx wrote in German would have been better translated as “abstract natural-science materialism” rather than “abstract materialism of natural science” since this latter could suggest he was criticising the whole of “natural science” as physics, chemistry and biology were then called.
Naturwissenschaftliche Materialismus was a position propagated under this name by a number of German “natural scientists”, mainly in the field of physiology and anatomy, from the 1850s, whose most prominent propagandists were Ludwig Büchner and Carl Vogt. They were keen to refute the religious view that the mind was something special created by god rather than a natural product and function, and endorsed the view that “the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile”. Ths might have scored a point, in fact did, against the religious view of mind (accepted by most other “natural scientists” of the time and who didn’t claim to be materialists; far from it) but was clearly inadequate as it offered no explanation of the content of thoughts or how these arose. Hence Marx’s description of it as “abstract”, for ignoring “history and its process.” It wasn’t a criticism of natural science as such. In fact this was a subject Marx took a particular interest in and followed closely.
Marx’s criticism of the views they expresed outside their specialist field was probably directed against Vogt, who was a critic of “communism” from a bourgeois-liberal standpoint and against whom Marx had published a searing polemic in 1860.
Good headline and good quotes but, then, why does the author, a Trotskyist, support campaigns to try to reform capitalism?
The fabrication that Marx was not a materialist has been repeated here endlessly. So here, Wez, is the killer quote you can use to try to put a end to this. It’s from footnote 4 of section 1 of chapter 15 of Volume I of Capital, Marx’s major published work:
“Every history of religion, even, that fails to take account of this material basis, is uncritical. It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly core of the misty creations of religion, than, conversely, it is, to develop from the actual relations of life the corresponding celestialised forms of those relations. The latter method is the only materialistic, and therefore the only scientific one. The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality.”
Even in the unpublished notes of 1845 that Engels published after Marx’s death as the “Theses on Feuerbach” Marx called himself a materialist (Thesis 10).
Of course there are materialists and materialists and Marx distinguished his materialism from those of the 18th materialists (as in his early writings), from the “contemplative materialism” of Feuerbach, and from the 19th century “abstract mterialism of natural science”.
With his serial lying on this point and unfounded accusation that we are materialists in one of the senses that Marx criticised, our feathered friend has long since become a pain in the arse.
That’s one of the explanations offered for the drop in cases in India and talk even of “herd immunity” having been achieved there through millions of young people getting immunity through having had the disease without knowing or with only mild symptoms.
Of course, it is only talk at the moment but it raises the question of whether or not the English government’s policy of aiming to vaccinate every adult is strictly necessary — if, for the vast majority of the under 60s, you don’t have any symptoms or it’s the same as a bout of mild flu, might you not just need to vaccinate the over 60s (and younger vulnerable groups ), as some lockdown-sceptics have been claiming from the start)?
Still, better to be safe than sorry and, if the capitalist state is prepared to put up the money, no point in looking a gift horse in the mouth.
A new book on Marx’s materialism has just been published. Sounds interesting. Ridiculous price.
The irrationalists have just won a surprising victory in the Netherland. The courts there have ordered the government to lift the nighttime curfew.
“Even the group that brought the case to court, Virus Truth, seemed surprised by its success. I recently interviewed its Covid-sceptic founder, Willem Engel, in his Rotterdam dance studio. He and his followers are adamant governments around the world are using efforts to control the spread of Covid-19 as a guise to gain control of citizens.”
The proof of the pudding will be in the eating. We will see what the uptake is in younger (than 70) age groups. I was worried about side effects but that didn’t stop me having the jab in the end. I am sure that will be the case with others. What’s the next group? The 60 to 69s and then the 50 to 59s. If the vaccination programme goes to plan we should know by April whether the anti-vaxxers are being ignored.
I don’t think Marx is saying that the labour theory of value cannot explain why capitals of equal value tend to make the same rate of profit even if their ratio of constant to variable capital is different.
This passage appears in the introductory chapter of a section headed “Conversion of profit into average profit”. All Marx is saying here is that,on the face of it, the LTV cannot explain why capitals of the same value tend to make the same rate of profit, before going in to explain in the following chapters how it can in fact explain this.
A different translation of the passage in the Penguin edition of volume 3 makes this clearer:
“The theory of value thus appears incompatible with the actual movement, incompatible with the actual phenomena of production, and it might seem that we must abandon all hope of understanding these phenomena.” (page 252).
Incidentally, we take a Marxist not an anarchist view of society and certainly not that of Proudhon and Tucker who envisaged maintaining the system of production for the market (which we along with Marx, and indeed Kropotkin, envisage coming to an end).
I know that the anti-vaxxer militants are either nutty or nasty or both but is their misinformation having any effect? The case for allowing them to express their views is that they can be refuted and people judge for themselves. Hence no need to ban or censor them.
It seems that they are having little or no effect. This from a couple of days ago:
“Uptake has surpassed expectations, officials said. Infectious-disease analysts anticipated 75 percent participation, said Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England. But uptake among those 70 and older has been almost 90 percent, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said Monday. Among people ages 75 to 79, he told the BBC, “over 97 percent have taken up the offer.”
The anti-vaxxers are not being listened to. They are not influencing people. Of course it could be that people aged 75 to 79 are particularly perspicacious compared with younger age groups. We’ll see.
Wez, I didn’t think my hostility to Feyerabend could be based just on your description of his view, so I checked with my collection of Skeptical Inquirers and found that in 1997 I would have read and absorbed the criticism of him in an article in the March/April issue entitled “The End of Science?“, by Theodore schick Jr in which he wrote:
“There is a view abroad in the land that science is more of an ideology than a methodology, and thus that it cannot legitimately claim to have a corner on reality. No one expresses this view more pugnaciously than the late philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend (…) In Feyerabend’s view, science is a religion, for it rests on certain dogmas that cannot be rationally justified. Thus, accepting it requires a leap of faith. But just as government has no business teaching religion in the public schools, it has no business teaching science either. In a truly democratic society, people would be as free to choose their epistemology as their political party. (…) Scientists are a philosophically naive lot. But this naiveté does not come without a price. Because most scientists can’t justify their methodology, Feyerabend’s claims have gone largely unanswered. As a result, Feyerabend’s position has become prominent in both academia and the public at large. This has arguably led not only to the rise of pseudoscience and religious fundamentalism, but also to a shrinking pool of scientific jobs and research funds.”
Obviously we can have nothing to do with a view which provides an intellectual justification for pseudoscience by putting it on a par with science. However, during the next lockdown, I might add him to my reading list alongside Piers Corbyn and David Icke.
I don’t think common sense is about holding ideas. It’s about practice, what you do or don’t do to deal with some situation, based on past practical experience. It could almost be said to the opposite of ideology and book-learning.
Socialism can be described as common sense as it’s the obvious practical solution to the problem of how to ensure that everybody’s material needs are met. The resources are there, the knowledge is there, and the people to apply it are there, so why not bring them all together with the people applying their knowledge to use the resources to produce directly to meet their needs?
There is no way, by contrast, that capitalism can be said to be common sense. Who would have thought up a system under which resources are privately owned and most people’s needs only met indirectly via money obtained from working for those who own the resources? It works after a fashion but can hardly be called common sense.
I am not saying we shouldn’t be sceptical of all claims before making up our minds on the basis of the evidence. But you expressed sympathy for a notorious critic of science and its methods. Maybe he didn’t mean it and was only publicity seeking as a controversialist. I don’t know.
Actually, anthropology in particular has come up with evidence that strongly confirms the socialist case. So have various sociological studies and neurological ones (rather than psychological which I agree is a field for all sorts of non-evidence based beliefs).
But, to return to the subject of the thread, what is the evidence that current medical practice is not appropriate to deal with the pandemic? It’s not the bogey of “capitalist medicine” which once got a mention here before being slapped down, is it?
If some speculative philosopher says that science is an ideology on a par with voodoo and religion with its own rituals and establishment then they are lending credibility to the views expressed by the presidents of Tanzania and Madagascar, the Chief Justice of South African and the Sri Lankan minister of health that there are other ways of dealing effectively with the current covid-19 pandemic than relying on the proved theories and practices of modern medicine.
Someone here expressed sympathy for this sophism and had to be called out.
