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That's what I once thought. There's nothing wrong with someone defending their own views. What is objectionable, and in the end intolerable, is someone distorting our view and being abusive to those who protest. If they are not going to take into account what we are really saying then the point comes when it's not worth continuing to argue with them. In my view that point was reached some time ago, but I'll give it one more go.

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Tim Kilgallon wrote:

Dear ModeratorApologies. On re-reading my post, it may come across that I was trying to be disingenuous with my comments. In retrospect, using words like: low self esteem, friendless and bellend,. could be interpreted in a different way than I intended, if this is the case, please accept my withdrawal of those terms. So just to be clear, it is not my view that L Bird is a friendless, bellend who suffers from problems associated with low self esteem. I hope that clarifies the matter,

Sorry, I apologise too just as effusively.

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Tim Kilgallon wrote:

Vin, I think that's an excellent point. Come on then L Bird, we're all waiting.

I'm not. We don't want him contaminating this thread. If we must accommodate him let's try and contain him in a thread devoted to his obession of what is knowlefge. Mind you, I suppose he has his uses as a foil and punchball.

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Since you insist, it's this (but it's a theory of science not an "ideology"):http://mailstrom.blogspot.co.uk/2007/04/joseph-dietzgen-workers-philosopher.htmlHere's an extract that's relevant to your recourse to Kant's theory of an unknowable thing-in-itself as a way of trying to avoid coming across as a classical idealist:

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Dietzgen was a thoroughgoing empiricist and materialist. For him all knowledge was derived from sense-perception and what human beings perceived had a real existence independent of their perception of it.The Nature of Human Brainwork (1869) presents an empiricist theory of knowledge derived from a rejection of Kantian dualism. Kant had claimed that Reason (=science, knowledge) could only deal with the world of experience, but the world of experience, according to him, was only a world of appearances or, to use a word derived from Greek meaning the same, a world of ‘phenomena’. Thus science could never come to understand the world as it really was, the world of what Kant called ‘things-in-themselves’ of which he supposed the world of phenomena to be but appearances. For Kant. there were two worlds: a world of phenomena, which was all the human mind could come to understand, and a world of things-in-themselves beyond human experience and understanding.For Dietzgen, to posit the existence of a second world beyond the world of experience was simply metaphysical nonsense. ‘Phenomena or appearances appear – voilà tout.’ The world of phenomena was the only world; phenomena were themselves real, the substance of the real world. Phenomena, however, says Dietzgen, do not exist as independent entities; they exist only as parts or the entire single world of phenomena. The world of reality is a single entity embracing all observable phenomena, past, present and future. Reality is thus infinite, having no beginning nor end. It is constantly changing. The universe and all things in it consist of transformations of matter, which take place simultaneously and consecutively in space and time.

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LBird wrote:

'Inorganic nature' is an unknowable 'in itself' ingredient for active human social theory and practice.

Aha, so it's back to Kantian dualism with the distinction between the phenomena we experience through the senses and an unknowable thing-in-itself behind these phenomena !From the Encyclopaedia Britannica:

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Noumenon, plural Noumena,  in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the thing-in-itself (das Ding an sich) as opposed to what Kant called the phenomenon—the thing as it appears to an observer. Though the noumenal holds the contents of the intelligible world, Kant claimed that man’s speculative reason can only know phenomena and can never penetrate to the noumenon.

And a comment from elsewhere as to where this leads (and has led many times on this forum):

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According to Kant, the problem of philosophy before him had been that objects were confused with things in themselves. That is, the tree outside my window was thought as being the tree-as-it-is-in-itself. This lead to the problem that if this is so, then what I am really seeing is the mere idea of that tree, a representation of it, and the real tree is always left unperceived. That lead to skeptical problems like Hume's, where it was accepted that we can never know whether there really is a tree out there or not, if we are stuck with only the idea in our head. Berkeley also advocated such a view so that he claimed that it makes no sense to begin with, so matter must be dropped – the real tree is also an idea.

If that's your view I agree it would be out of order to call you a "materialist" even by another name. I don't think "Marxist" would be appropriate either as it wasn't Marx view.

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Were there any local party members there to run the stall that was offered?

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Yes it was. He was an NF member at the time of that strike. What the examples of him and Hill confirm is that you don't have to be a socialist to be a militant trade unionist.

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LBird wrote:

ALB wrote:

LB is using it differently to mean some part of his "inorganic nature" that humans have already isolated in their mind and which is thus already a mental construct.

No, I am not arguing that 'inorganic nature' is 'isolated in the mind'.

ALB actually wrote:

The confusion arises over the different usages of the term phenomena. Pannekoek used it in same sense as LB's "inorganic nature", i.e the world out there, the "externality from consciousness" that provides the material out of which the human mind produces "mental constructs".  LB is using it differently to mean some part of his "inorganic nature" that humans have already isolated in their mind and which is thus already a mental construct.

I don't think you realise the huge concession you have made to "materialism" with your concept of "inorganic nature" as an "externality for consciousness" that is not "isolated in the mind". The difference between your "inorganic nature" and "matter" is only a matter of terminology. You too are separating "being" ("inorganic nature") from "consciousness".If you want to call yourself an "inorganic naturist" that's ok as long as the definitions are clear, but personally I still prefer "materialist" despite its range of meanings.

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I think that in his confused way he may be trying to say  the same as us, i.e. that there is something out there which exists independently of consciousness and that to survive in it humans, in societies, create 'mental constructs' of it which are not the same nor a mirror image of it. He calls what the human mind works on  "inorganic nature" (and imagines that Marx did, but that's another matter. but it's not what it's called that matters):

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No-one is arguing that is 'nothing out there independently of consciousness'. There is, according to Marx, 'inorganic nature', from which we actively create 'organic nature'.

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The 'something that is perhaps beyond description' is Marx's 'inorganic nature', the externality from consciousness that provides a resource for our labour, our theory and practice. Marx argues that we 'metabolise' inorganic nature into organic nature, so 'phenomena' are our creation, and our descriptions of phenomena are thus objective descriptions of our objects.

LBird wrote:

This is Marx's method of 'theory and practice', in which historically-specific social groups actively produce their social knowledge of an 'inorganic' nature: that is, they produce 'organic nature', 'nature-for-us'. Inorganic nature' is not the 'active side', and humans do not passively reflect 'inorganic nature', we create our object, our 'organic nature'. 'Gravitational waves' are a socio-historical construct, they are 'knowledge'. They now form part of current 'organic nature'.

The confusion arises over the different usages of the term phenomena. Pannekoek used it in same sense as LB's "inorganic nature", i.e the world out there, the "externality from consciousness" that provides the material out of which the human mind produces "mental constructs".  LB is using it differently to mean some part of his "inorganic nature" that humans have already isolated in their mind and which is thus already a mental construct.This different linguistic usage leads him to think that we think "mental constructs" are the real world (i. e are crass materialists) and us to think that he is saying that all that exists are mental constructs (i.e is a crass idealist). Or, in relation to theme of this thread, he thinks we think that "gravitational waves" are real rather than mental constructs out of "the world of phenomena" while we think he thinks that the part of the "world of phenomena" out of which the concept of "gravitational waves" has been constructed is itself just a mental construct.

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alanjjohnstone wrote:

But if what you say is correct it is really a charge against modern-day Saudi Arabia

That's what it was meant to be.

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alanjjohnstone wrote:

 During my time working in air traffic control decades ago,

When I used to work in Luxemburg, decades ago too, our trade union organised the staff working for Eurocontrol, the European air traffic control organisation (above a certain height). Among other things, they used to train people from outside Europe. I remember one of them telling me that the trainees they had from Saudi Arabia thought that the world was flat because that was what the koran taught. I don't fancy a plane I'm in being guided by anyobody who thinks that (but I must have flown over so-called Saudi Arabia once on my way to visit relatives in Australia) and I pity the poor sods in Syria who are going to be accidentally bombed by pilots who believe this, though come to think of it they might bomb the Saudi royal palace thinking they are bombing Damascas.

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If this report is true, that Turkey has shelled an air base recently captured from the Islamists by the Kurdish nationalists with Russian air support, this would represent a major escalation of the proxy war between Russia and Turkey:https://www.rt.com/news/332380-turkey-shells-northern-syria/Watch out for Russia's next move.

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Marx wrote:

Physically man lives only on these products of nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, etc. The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body – both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body – nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.

From the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htmTo say that "Nature is man's inorganic body" is an odd way of putting it as that would mean that what is normally regard as "organic nature" (life forms) is being classified as "inorganic". Which might explain why some people misinterpret this and have him say that  man actively creates "organic nature" from "inorganic nature". But as far as I know Marx never used the term "organic nature" or, if he did, it would have been in the sense of what Darwin studied.Once again, Pannekoek is clearer than Marx on this, if only because he was writing for publication and had the benefit of the advances in understanding since 1844. See, for instance, his Marxism and Darwinism.

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I don't think he put the word "reality" in inverted commas to emphasise it but, rather, to say that it wasn't really "reality".  Pannekoek was not arguing that there was nothing out there independently of consciousness. For him, there was and this was "the continuing, ever-changing world of phenomena" as a whole. That was all that "existed", the only reality if you like. A "phenomenon" was a part of this. What was a mental abstraction was not the phenomenon but the namings and descriptions of it by humans. This is well explained in easy-to-follow terms in that chapter 3 of his book (here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1938/lenin/ch03.htm ).So the "gravitational waves" that have now been detected rather than just predicted will be a mental construct, but not the phenomena this term and the theory behind it are attempting to describe/explain. They will long have existed as part of reality, for more than a billion years according to the estimates.

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Email letter from another member about this:

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Dear ComradesThe obituary on Jimmy Hill (February Socialist Standard) failed to mention his role as consultant and mediator of a ‘rebel tour’ to apartheid South Africa to play football in 1982. There was also omission of his  defence  of football manager Ron Atkinson’s use of the word  ‘nigger’  in an off-air  2004 television transmission  for  football .I am also very surprised that we devoted so much space to the death of David Bowie .Joel

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