ALB
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I think I heard right but the media mentioned “Reclaim the Streets” as behind the court action to overturn the ban on that vigil on Clapham Common (incidentally an unwise move as the law, like it or not, is clear, and I was always told “if you don’t like the answer, don’t ask the question).
Is this the same group as was active in the 1990s in various attempts to stop motorways and by-passes being built (all of which failed)? We even debated with them.
Have they recycled themselves as a feminist group or has someone revived their name?
That’s a good point BD. There are “limits” to socialism as common ownership too. Socialism is the common ownership of the means of producing wealth and not of people’s personnel possessions. When we held outdoor meetings as we used to, we had to repeatedly re-assurance our hecklers that socialism would not mean the common ownership of their tooth brush.
Actually, “common ownership” and “democratic control” are two ways of saying the same thing, from different angles — as if everybody didn’t have an equal opportunity to have a say in deciding how something was used then it wouldn’t be “common” ownership by them (but only by those who did).
So democratic control in socialism does not extend to the what might be called people’s “personnel possessions” (though things which they personally used might be a better term).
In the mid-19th century utopian communist Etienne Cabet’s novel Icaria people were required to wear the same sort of clothes so as to ensure equality. What people chose to wear would be no subject to a vote in socialism anymore than what they chose to eat or what music they chose to listen to, etc — or what to think.
In any event, democracy is not just “the majority having its way and the minority having its say”. It’s more than that. It’s a way of life and a culture which means that there are certain things that should not be decided by a majority decision. Not just what people should eat or wear but much more than that.
A majority might well decide to discriminate against a minority group, but that would infringe the spirit of democracy. In fact, even under the “bourgeois” democracy we know today what a majority can decide is limited by a so-called “bill of rights”. I can’t see the equivalent of that not existing in socialism. Otherwise critics of socialism who criticised it as being “totalitarian democracy” would have a point.
I don’t like the Beatles either but at least they (or a couple of them) composed their own music and lyrics. How many of the others on your list did?
Let’s vote on it then.
I am more into philosophy than psychology and physiology but that makes sense. Since humans are a species of social animals whose individuals are utterly dependent on abstract thinking with symbols to survive, you would expect there would be a some sort of biological propensity for this and that scientific research would confirm this.
By “abstract” I meant thinking about something in the absence of an immediate physical stimulus from it; being able to delay a reaction to an outside stimulus and “think” about what any reaction could or should be. Which I don’t think Pavlov’s dogs were able to do.
In any event, what other animal species can do that resembles what humans do is only very rudimentary in comparison. A highly developed capacity for abstract thinking is one of the defining characteristics of the human species.
Does this apply to some animals as well or just to infant humans? I am suspicious of Freud who seems more of a speculative philopher than anything else.
Depends what you mean by “thinking”. I meant abstract thinking as thinking with symbols ( (words created by humans in society to designate observed parts of external reality), ie about something that is not immediately present to the senses.
Yes, he is mixing up to the two senses of “social production”. As (a) the production of goods and services (which will obviously be subject to democratic control in one way or another) and (b) ideas as arising out of humans as social animals; in fact the mind (as opposed to the brain) is a social product if only because no one can think without language and language is a obviously one. But making what people should think the subject of social control, even if by majority vote, is not only not practical but if it was would be totalitarian, as Robbo has pointed out.
Freedom of thought is also as essential a part of democratic practice as voting (and which we apply to him here even though he is a thundering bore and a lying bastard).
Our feathered friend is all over the place philosophically and politically and only worth arguing with (if at all) to hone our arguments to face critics whose ideas need to be taken more seriously.
Robbo, his absurd conclusion about humanity having to vote for everything follows from his basic mistaken assumption that the external world only exists in and through human consciousness, a classic idealist position.
In fact, from a philosophical point of view he is all over the place.
For instance:
“But if, as you say, ‘ideas are equal’… surely the ‘physical’ can no more be the basis of ‘ideas’, than ‘ideas’ can be the basis of the ‘physical’?”
Here’s Pannekoek’s answer (from the same earlier post):
“Wherein then, do middle-class materialism and Historical Materialism stand opposed to one another? Both agree insofar as they are materialist philosophies, that is, both recognise the primacy of the experienced material world; both recognise that spiritual phenomena, sensation, consciousness, ideas, are derived from the former.
In other words, stuff existed before ideas. But that doesn’t make ideas any less real, ie a part of the stream of phenomena that humans and, as has been pointed out, other animals experience. They just became part of the stream later.
Here is a recording of a Party talk on Dietzgen from 1982:
What happens is that you and other workers baffled by ‘material’ assume it means ‘can be touched’, that it’s ‘stuff’ (as opposed to ‘ideas’).
Did you notice the sleight of hand here, Alan?
He defines “material” as stuff (which is actually the German word for “matter”) and then accuses us of holding that we think this is the ultimate reality. But just a few posts earlier there is this quote from Pannekoek which clearly states that ideas are an equal part of the “real world” :
“The human mind is entirely determined by the surrounding real world. We have already said that this world is not restricted to physical matter only, but comprises everything that is objectively observable. The thoughts and ideas of our fellow men, which we observe by means of their conversation or by our reading are included in this real world.”
This is what I learned from the Party and from the books by Dietzgen and even Fred Casey that the Party used to recommend. That we are matter-ists is just not true. There is even a quote from the early Marx about ideas becoming a material force when they grip the masses.
It also explains Engels’s remark that matter (Stoffe) is an abstraction, ie a part of the real world of a stream of phenomena that has been isolated and given a name.
Anyway, You must be a bit of a masochist to put up with his abuse!
”It sounds to me that Engels is saying that every major event is independent of any idea that is in anyone’s head.”
No, I don’t think that is what Engels meant. He is not saying that past revolutions are independent of the ideas of those who carried out and supported them. He is saying that you shouldn’t judge them by what the participants say or think they are doing but by what they actually do. Their ideas, however, won’t be completed arbitrary but arise from and can be related to the material circumstances that have made a revolutionary change necessary.
As Marx put it in his summary of the materialist conception of history in his Preface in 1859 to his A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy:
“The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.
In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.”Of course, as Robbo has pointed out, Engels expected those who established socialism would be fully aware of what they were doing. Engels is talking about past “major events”.
Now you know, Alan, that being Mr Nice makes no difference. Our feathered friend will still shit all over you and denounce us as “general philosophical materialists” of the kind that Gorter criticised – and that Marx, Engels, Dietzgen and Pannekoek did and as we have always done ourselves. Who does he think kept alive the views of Dietzgen (which both Gorter and Pannekoek adopted) in the first half of the last century in face of criticism of the Leninists of the “Communist Party”?
The trouble for him is that Marx, Engels, Dietzgen, etc still regarded themselves as materialists and all of them accepted the reality of the world outside of human consciousness.
In 1937 Pannekoek wrote an article for the journal Science and Society entitled “Society and Mind in Marxian Philosophy” in which he set out his view of materialism simply and clearly.
“Marx’s theory of social development is known as the ‘materialistic conception of history’ or ‘historical materialism.’ Before Marx the word ‘materialism’ had long been used in opposition to idealism, for whereas idealistic philosophical systems assumed some spiritual principle, some “Absolute Idea” as the primary basis of the world, the materialistic philosophies proceeded from the real material world. In the middle of the nineteenth century, another kind of materialism was current which considered physical matter as the primary basis from which all spiritual and mental phenomena must be derived. Most of the objections that have been raised against Marxism are due to the fact that it has not been sufficiently distinguished from this mechanical materialism.”
“Marxism is not concerned with the antithesis matter-mind; it deals with the real world and the ideas derived therefrom. This real world comprises everything observable — that is, all that by observation may be declared an objective fact. The wage-relations between workman and employer, the constitution of the United States, the science of mathematics, although not consisting of physical matter, are quite as real and objective as the factory machine, the Capitol or the Ohio River. Even ideas themselves in their turn act as real, observable facts. Mechanical materialism assumes that our thoughts are determined by the motions of atoms in the cells of our brains. Marxism considers our thoughts to be determined by our social experience observed through the senses or felt as direct bodily needs.”
“The human mind is entirely determined by the surrounding real world. We have already said that this world is not restricted to physical matter only, but comprises everything that is objectively observable. The thoughts and ideas of our fellow men, which we observe by means of their conversation or by our reading are included in this real world. Although fanciful objects of these thoughts such as angels, spirits or an Absolute Idea do not belong to it, the belief in such ideas is a real phenomenon, and may have a notable influence on historical events.
The impressions of the world penetrate the human mind as a continuous stream. All our observations of the surrounding world, all experiences of our lives are continually enriching the contents of our memories and our subconscious minds.”At the same time he had been writing his criticism of Lenin’s version of materialism “Lenin As Philosopher”. In a chapter on “Middle Class Materialism” he wrote:
“Wherein then, do middle-class materialism and Historical Materialism stand opposed to one another? Both agree insofar as they are materialist philosophies, that is, both recognise the primacy of the experienced material world; both recognise that spiritual phenomena, sensation, consciousness, ideas, are derived from the former. They are opposite in that middle-class materialism bases itself upon natural science, whereas Historical Materialism is primarily the science of society. (…) For middle class materialism the problem of the meaning of knowledge is a question of the relationship of spiritual phenomena to the physico-chemical-biological phenomena of the brain matter. For Historical Materialism it is a question of the relationship of our thoughts to the phenomena which we experience as the external world.”
This is materialism we have embraced and propagated. See or instance here and here.
In arguing that the external world of a continuous stream of observable phenomena is entirely the creation of human consciousness, oxymoronic “Marxism-Birdism” (“Marx and I”) is not really a form of materialism, as our guano-producing friend himself tacitly acknowledges by using “materialism” as a term of abuse.
He is entitled to express his eccentric views but there is no justification for him attributing them to Marx and even less for his non-stop lying as to the kind of materialism we embrace.
