ALB
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Why not? I know the anarchist Proudhon objected to filling in forms as he regarded them as hindering petty free enterprise. I don’t know about Bakunin — he liked burning public records. But Marx loved them, citing the censuses of 1841, 1851 and 1861 in Das Kapital.
I don’t suppose there’d be questions on “religion” or “race” (just what was your main language perhaps). As to sex, gender or whatever, this could be useful for the sort of reason Trevor Phillips mentioned.
Incidentally, have you found out if Marx and Engels were registered voters in England? We know Engels voted but did Marx?
The UK government is carrying out a census on 21 March. According to Trevor Phillips writing in today’s Times of London:
“A noisy campaign to persuade the ONS [Office for National Statistics] to abandon the compulsory question on sex almost succeeded, despite the blindingly obvious need to know the likely numbers of people stricken by ovarian or prostate cancer”
adding
“Contrary to the claims of trans-fantasists it really is not possible to suffer from both these conditions.”
(I think that means that he’s going to be no-platformed from giving talks to university students.)
I suppose they could satisfy these people by including another question similar to the one on “race” which, unscientifically, offers over 18 choices plus a write-in box (which we socialists have a policy of filling in “member of the human race”). Or they could go as far as Russia and China which offer a choice of 192 and 56 as these state’s respectively do for “ethnic” (in reality cultural) groups.
Perhaps the whole issue could be settled by not asking a question about which sex or gender you are but simply which type of cancer could you get — ovarian or prostate. That should separate the sheep from the goats.
“Yellow is found between green and orange on the spectrum of visible light. It is the color the human eye sees when it looks at light with a dominant wavelength between 570 and 590 nanometers.”
I propose that this scienists’ definition be put to a world referendum. Is there a seconder?
That what I thought you said and meant, Robbo, not this distortion attribued to you which I read at first as a direct quote from you:
“the specialists themselves should control the social theory and practice of the specialists, not society as a whole democratically“.
Another fabrication from our feathered friend.
And of course the crackpot thinks people should also vote on the meaning of everyday things like “yellow” and “table” not just of “matter” and “energy”. What a nutter.
Don’t worry, ex-comrade, every time “gender politics” raises its ugly here it gets a bollocking (so to speak) as it currently is from comrade Jordan.
The article on Jack Common was written by Brian Rubin(and was signed BR in the print version). He is no longer on the books but, as far as I know, is still a socialist somewhere in the wilds of Surrey (he was a member of the old Guildford branch). Maybe Robbo will know more about him.
This is becoming embarrassing. I don’t think you are old enough to qualify as a grumpy old man. But (or should that be “however”?) you might get a letter in the Daily Telegraph as Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.
I think thou art being a bit snobbish (or is that knobbish?) I expect you also insist on saying whom and my husband and I. Insistence on ultra-correct spelling and grammar is a mark of the insecure petty bourgeois.
If you understood dialectics, comrade, you would understand that everything changes, including language.
I say u for you in texts. Don’t you? I see there’s a comrade on another thread here who uses cuz for because and he’s written one of our pamphlets. It’s just that there’s different spelling for that medium. Nothing to do with not bring edicated.
He’s at it again. Suggesting that Marx was a critic of materialism despite being confronted with the evidence that he described himself as one. It looks as if things are pointing towards option (b).
When someone who has known us for over five years repeatedly accuses us of arguing that socialism will not have to be brought “by the thinking, conscious, proletariat”, there are only three possible explanations. They are either
(a) a troll
(b) a lying bastard
(c) a fruit cakeTake your pick.
BD, I think your interpretation of the passages from Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 is correct. In the passage he is arguing against that view God created humans and the rest of nature, not for the view that humans created nature. His argument was that humans created themselves by their labour in the rest of nature, which showed that both they and the rest of nature didn’t require something outside of them — “an alien being above nature and man” — to have come into existence.
In a preceding passage in the same section Marx had written “Generatio aequivoca is the only practical refutation of the theory of creation”, a term which means self-generation or spontaneous generation. Marx was applying this concept to the creation of humans and the rest of nature. This was a philosophical rather than an empirical refutation of creationism. It was not until some fifteen years later, in 1859, that Darwin provided the evidence of how one species spontaneously developed out of another, though even he didn’t know precisely how.
In 1844 Marx was still largely a Feuerbachian materialist but by 1845 had come to see its inadequancies, as he and Engels wrote in 1845 in The German Ideology:
“Of course, in all this the priority of external nature remains unassailed, and all this has no application to the original men produced by generatio aequivoca [spontaneous generation]; but this differentiation has meaning only insofar as man is considered to be distinct from nature. For that matter, nature, the nature that preceded human history, is not by any means the nature in which Feuerbach lives, it is nature which today no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral-islands of recent origin) and which, therefore, does not exist for Feuerbach.”
Nor for someone else, it seems.
