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With the addition of the remaining articles from March, May and June, the whole of the first six months of 1923 are now online.
New March ones
Anti-dotes for doped notes
The Commune of Paris, 1871
Thoughts of a scientistNew May ones
Editorial: Building workers trapped again
To a new reader
Correspondence
Who gets it?New ones for June
The consitution of the future
The “benefits” of nationalisation
The only way
You’d be surprised
Be self-reliant!
The pessimists
The working-class
Hunger!
Correspondence. Why political organisation?The articles can be accessed via this page.
There is some discussion on this here on Spopen, our forum for members of our parties in different countries.
TM, I don’t think you are yet quite ready to be accepted into the Roman Catholic Church. The so-called “angelus” is also said and sounded at 6am and 6pm. I don’t know if this is still the case:
“In Ireland, the Angelus is currently broadcast every night before the main evening news at 18:00 on the main national TV channel, RTÉ One, and on the broadcaster’s sister radio station, Radio 1, at noon and 18:00.”
The claim that Marx held that there is nothing outside of human conscious activity is groundless
The view that a tree doesn’t exist unless it is being observed has a long tradition in philosophy. It was expressed by the Irish philosopher, Bishop Berkeley, who got round the problem of this being contrary to common sense by saying that the tree existed because god was observing it, i.e the world external to an inividual existed in the mind of god. The view being groundlessly claimed as Marx’s gets round it by saying that it exists in the collective mind of humanity. The “empiriocriticism” that so enraged Lenin was also in this tradition.
There is no justification whatsoever for attributing it to Marx. Marx had once been interested (very interested) in philosopy but after 1845 left it aside to concentrate on economic and historical matters in accordance with his new “historical” materialism. He doesn’t seem to have been intererested in higher-order philosophical questions such as “ontology” (the nature of existence) or “epistemology” (the nature of knowledge), leaving Engels to deal with this when it arose.
Engels explicitly held that the external world existed independently of human perception of it. If Marx had indeed taken the “intersubjetivist” view that it only exists in the collective mind of humanity he would surely have criticised what Engels published in Anti-Dühring (1878). But he didn’t, from which I think it is fair to conclude that he accepted that the external world existed independently of the whole of humanity and its activity as well as of the individual.
So there is no justiication for attributing to Marx a theory that it doesn’t and for describing this as “Marxist” or as “Marx’s onotology”, especially not for the admittedly innovative addition to it that what the collective, intersubjective human mind decided existed should be taken by a democratic vote.
Basically, Marx didn’t have a view on the nature of existence and didn’t need to for his purposes (analysing how the capitalist economic system worked and helping workers organise for socialism). Like most people, he accepted that the external world existed without feeling the need to go into any philosophical justification for this.
I hasten to add that this means that the view I expressed cannot be called “Marxist” either since it wasn’t expressed by Marx himself. The most I would claim is that it was developed by two other revolutionay socialists, Joseph Dietzgen and Anton Pannekoek (who, as an astronomer, was a scientist himself) who noted that Marx hadn’t any particular theory of knowledge and set out to develop one that was compatble with Marx’s historical materialism.
Actually, the view that scientists are describing rather than discovering the external world is fairly mainstream. The view that the mind simply reflects the outside world is old hat these days.
But he has bombed Syria. Like he said, America is back. I wonder if he will have baseball caps made with that on it.
I finished reading that during the first lockdown, though it is more about the next historical period. It’s heavy going with all the footnotes but good stuff. And you can see how Protestantism was a first step towards secularism (though it took nearly three centuries to get there) and so historically progressive compared to Catholicism.
Just evening up a top-heavy pro-Reformation bias in this country and in the schooling we all received
I wouldn’t be so sure of that. I expect many here will have gone to a Roman Catholic school and been taught by nuns and Christian Brothers and so would not have been taught about Bloody Mary, Guy Fawkes and Mary Queen of Scots being baddies. I imagine they will have been pictured as heroes. Perhaps, anyone here who had a Catholic education imposed on them can confirm this.
Being loath to judge someone just by their name, I thought I’d check first and Duffy is indeed a Roman Catholic, a former member of the Pontifical Historical Commission no less.
Sounds like an attempt to rewrite history from the point of view of the losers. The Roman Catholic Church only defends “religious freedom” when it’s in a minority.
grandstanding, egotistical, manipulative opportunist.
A bit like Alex Salmond then who will get more people than him to vote Tory !
Maybe the Tories are right that an independent Scotland would be a corrupt banana republic?
The remaining articles, from September, October and November 1928 have now been added, meaning that the whole year 1928 is now online.
New September ones
The transition period
Socialist Definitions—A Critic corrected
The socialist searchlight
The plain case for Socialism
Answers to correspondents
A look aroundHere: https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1920s/1928/no-289-september-1928/
New October ones
Questions on Socialism
Corrupt America and Pure England
The Secret of No Wages
Rationalisation or Socialism
The plain case for Socialism
Progress in Australia
What is the State?Here: https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1920s/1928/no-290-october-1928/
New November ones
The Labour machine in Conference
Do we want a censor?
“Modernism” v Materialism
The battleground of the class struggle
Socialist definitions: a rejoinder
The economics of the I.L.P.
A talk to wives & mothersHere: https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1920s/1928/no-291-november-1928/
Doesn’t addition of the word ‘independent’ make it a distinct name?
Yes and no.
It does for everyday purposes but not for UK electoral law where the issue is what name can be put on the ballot paper.
The UK Electoral Commission is pretty strict on party names and variants of them so as to avoid confusing voters. For instance, they refused to allow the Trotskyist “Socialist Party of England and Wakes” (SPEW) to register under that name as they held that would confuse voters with us. The SPEWers are however free to use that name on their election literature but on the ballot paper they appear under their registered name of “Socialist Alternative”. Just as the new ISPGB would be free to.
On the other hand, the Commission has just given us notice that they intend to strike off one of the registered variants of our name — The World Socialist Party (UK) — on the grounds that this doesn’t identify who we are to voters. We have appealed and are awaiting their final decision.
Incidentally, there is a suggestion that this new party might be a rightwing outfit rather than yet another “socialist” party. See the discussion here.
I think it is fair to say that by “material” in his materialism Marx meant “social conditions” and that, as these are created by human activity they can be changed by human action, at this stage of human social evolution democratically into socialism.
But this “material” is not the same as “matter” as the subject of human experience. As far as I know, the only place Marx discusses this is in detail is in this chapter of The Holy Family, another of his writings of the time (1845) in which he was settling his final accounts with German philosophy. People can make of it what they will.
https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch06_3_d.htm
Whatever it is that humans experience, it is not like social conditions, i.e., a product of human activity. Humans only describe it. They focus on a part of the world of experience (abstract it) and give it a name. This applies as much to tables and chairs as it does to “matter”. But this is not same as creating (bringing into existence) what is being described. That is there independently of human descriptions of it.
On this view, what scientists are doing is not “discovering” the world “as it really is” but describing it in various ways, ways that have changed over time, especially as technological advances have enabled humans to experience the world in new and different ways.
For the record, more par for the course about the Labour Party — support for nuclear weapons. No doubt Starmer would have no qualms about pressing the button if he was convinced that vital interests of the British capitalist class were at stake. In short, a psychopath. Or maybe he’s just saying it to win votes and not expecting his bluff to be called.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-politics-56198972
The present leadership of the Labour Party and most of their MPs are a despicable bunch of career politicians more eager to get their bums on the ministerial benches than anything else. After all, that’s why most of them “entered politics”.
