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From the New Speakers Handbook on this site here:

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7. What is value?A social relationship between people which expresses itself as a material relationship between things. The value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary abstract labour time needed for its production and reproduction. Price is the monetary expression of value.8. What is exchange value? A relative magnitude which expresses the relationship between two commodities. The proportion in which commodities tend to exchange with each other depends upon the amount of socially necessary labour-time spent in producing them. Commodities actually sell at market prices that rise and fall according to market conditions around a point regulated by their value.13. Will value exist under socialism? No. Value exists only under certain social conditions and relationships, where things (including human labour power) take the form of commodities to be bought and sold on the market. In a socialist society there will be common ownership, and so no commodities, just freely given and taken services and. products. So exchange value will not exist, the law of value will not hold – leaving only use value. All production will be for use, or for the satisfaction of human need.58. Did feudal peasants produce surplus value? No. They performed surplus labour upon the fields of the lord or rendered to him a portion of their own produce and these were both unpaid labour. But the products of this surplus labour did not uniformly come onto a market; they were for consumption in the manor or for exchange in the village mostly. Surplus value is a peculiarity of the wage relationship and generalised commodity production under capitalism.

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I agree, Vin. I don't see why he thinks this sort of criticism is relevant to us. We have never said that "value" is a thing. Others have, but not us. See this criticism (the first item) of the old De Leonist SLP by someone expressing a view similar to ours:https://bataillesocialiste.wordpress.com/english-pages/1969-02-why-we-have-resigned-from-the-socialist-labour-party-of-great-britain/He should direct his criticism at Maoists and others who do think that value is a thing and one that will survive into socialism. Our maybe he can form a united front with us against them on this issue.

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LBird wrote:

Comrades just have to understand that not everything ‘powerful’ in nature is ‘material’ (in a ‘touchable’ sense). Perhaps like magnetism or gravity: they have power, but can’t be touched.As an explanation of ‘value’, though, I think that this will be rejected by the ‘materialists’, who like their ‘things’ to be concrete.

Anyone who knows anything about the SPGB will know that we have always insisted that "value" is a social relationship, i.e between people, but which expresses itself as a relationship between things (commodities). The same for "capital" which is a sum of values. And in fact for "money". We don't want to simply abolish the thing of money but the social relationships that give rise to it.Members have been hauled over the coals for describing "value" as a relation between things. There was a famous incident in the 1970s when an article in the Socialist Standard which said this had to be repudiated. And woe betide any speaker who talked about the "ownership" of capital.  Because of course if "value" and "capital" were things it could be argued, as by certain advocates of state capitalism masquerading as socialists, that they could survive into socialism. In fact this is "marxist-leninist" orthodoxy.I don't think even 18th crude materialists would have any problem accounting for gravity and magnetism, though more modern ones might baulk at reviving Aristotle's idea that there are hidden forces at work. But let's not digress.

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Seen at a railway station in an outer London suburb. And no doubt elsewhere in the country?

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LBird wrote:

YMS wrote:

In a way the value is the thing in itself…

[my bold]Yeah, that's what the materialists say.

I thought LBird knew his history of philosophy. The "thing in itself" is not a "materialist" concept, but an idealist one thought up by Kant to explain what lay behind the world of experience. It has more in common with "Critical Realism's" mysterious "non-physical causal powers". Dietzgen's materialism was based on denying that there was such a thing as a "things in itself" ("noumena") "and that all that existed were "phenomena" that could be experienced; there was nothing behind them that caused them to appear.But of course LBird is right. "Value", for Marx, is not a thing. It's a social relationship. Under petty-commodity production (which never existed, but is just a theoretical model) the relationship between independent commodity producers. Under capitalism (which does exist) it's an expression of the relationship between the capitalist class and the working class. Which is why, of course, it won't exist in socialism since there'll no longer be production for sale (production of commodities) and no longer that relationship.There's a definition of "value" in the Marxian sense in the education document section of this site here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/z-marxism/vSee also the definition of exchange value (stop off to see Engels on the way down if you want):http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/z-marxism/e

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That's a bit sad. So we're never going to know what is the difference between "materialism" and "realism".  Nor what  "ontological monovalence" ("the primordial failing of western philosophy") is. Ah well, but I guess it doesn't matter.

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I didn't realise he was so touchy.

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Fair enough. I see you are a critical Critical Realist (and why you want to distance yourself from the guru himself) but what is the difference (for you) between a "realist" and a "materialist"?

LBird wrote:

For a materialist, everything must be at base 'material'.

For a realist, must everything be at base "real"?

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LBird wrote:

Your ideological beliefs have nothing to do with Communism and democracy.The focus on 'matter' is a conservative philosophy.What's more, you can't define 'matter'.The concept is a 19th century concept.I've even told you where you get these ridiculous ideas from: Engels, in Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of classical German Philosophy.

I agree with you, Vin, I don't know why we bother to continue discussing with him. Probably because he's a socialist even if he's all over the place with philosophy and because we believe it's possible to convince people by rational argument.Actually, I doubt if he's actually read Engels's book. So, here's a few extracts.Here's where Engels explains what he means by "materialism":

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Thus the question of the relation of thinking to being, the relation of the spirit to nature — the paramount question of the whole of philosophy  (….)The answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature and, therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation in some form or other — and among the philosophers, Hegel, for example, this creation often becomes still more intricate and impossible than in Christianity — comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.These two expressions, idealism and materialism, originally signify nothing else but this; and here too they are not used in any other sense. What confusion arises when some other meaning is put to them will be seen below.

And here's him describing "the material, sensuously perceptible world to which we ourselves belong" as "the only reality" (will that do as a definition of "matter"?):

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With irresistible force, Feuerbach is finally driven to the realization that  (…) the material, sensuously perceptible world to which we ourselves belong is the only reality; and that our consciousness and thinking, however supra-sensuous they may seem, are the product of a material, bodily organ, the brain. Matter is not a product of mind, but mind itself is merely the highest product of matter. This is, of course, pure materialism.

But, like our friend, Feuerbach was unable to go the whole way because of the kind of materialism espoused by some physical scientists:

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But, having got so far, Feuerbach stops short. He cannot overcome the customary philosophical prejudice, prejudice not against the thing but against the name materialism. He says:“To me materialism is the foundation of the edifice of human essence and knowledge; but to me it is not what it is to the physiologist, to the natural scientists in the narrower sense, for example, to Moleschott, and necessarily is from their standpoint and profession, namely, the edifice itself. Backwards I fully agree with the materialists; but not forwards.”Here, Feuerbach lumps together the materialism that is a general world outlook resting upon a definite conception of the relation between matter and mind, and the special form in which this world outlook was expressed at a definite historical stage — namely, in the 18th century. More than that, he lumps it with the shallow, vulgarized form in which the materialism of the 18th century continues to exist today in the heads of naturalists and physicians, the form which was preached on their tours in the fifties by Buchner, Vogt, and Moleschott.

The extract I like is this where he deals with the argument, also advanced here, that we're all idealists:

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we simply cannot get away from the fact that everything that sets men acting must find its way through their brains — even eating and drinking, which begins as a consequence of the sensation of hunger or thirst transmitted through the brain, and ends as a result of the sensation of satisfaction likewise transmitted through the brain. The influences of the external world upon man express themselves in his brain, are reflected therein as feelings, impulses, volitions — in short, as “ideal tendencies”, and in this form become “ideal powers”. If, then, a man is to be deemed an idealist because he follows “ideal tendencies” and admits that “ideal powers” have an influence over him, then every person who is at all normally developed is a born idealist and how, in that case, can there still be any materialists?

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You are playing Humpty Dumpty again and making words mean what you say they mean. The trite observation that people are influenced to act by ideas is not what Bhaskar and his philosophy mean by "non-physical causal powers" and, as a "critical realist" yourself, you must know it.  No doubt too, you must take up some position in this debate about amongst your fellow "critical realists" about the nature of these mysterious "causal powers":

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A third issue is the ontological status of powers. Harré and Madden – and, following them, Nancy Cartwright – argued that it is things that exist, not free-floating powers. Harré and Madden used the term ‘powerful particular’. Cartwright, in turn, refers to ‘capacities’ rather than to powers or dispositions because, she says, it is harder to forget that capacities are always the capacities of something. Bhaskar, by contrast, advanced the view in RTS that the most basic things may not be things at all, but just powers tout court.

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LBird wrote:

The key problem is not simply that a return to political economy which does not downplay the importance of the social and historical factors would solve the issue, but that the 'physical sciences' (including physics) can't be simply based upon 'mathematical models', either.

This might be the time and place for you to explain Bhaskar's concept of "non-physical causal powers" that you avoided before which I had assumed perhaps wrongly (it's difficult to fathom what he's on about) implied a model of reality that was akin to mathematical ones, i.e some sort of non-physical structure.

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As you say, another nutter. and like all racists (or is it racialists?) he gets his facts wrong. Japan does have migrants from other countries, especially Korea. But I suppose he could come back and say that the old Apartheid regime in South Africa used to classify Japanese as "Whites".

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The Labour Party has gone all workerist over this. Yesterday's Sun quotes two of them.Here's John Mann, MP for Bassetlaw:

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White vans, England flags, are Labour values.

I don't suppose that'll help Labour's campaign to regain support in Scotland or go downwell in Wales.And here's Simon Danczuk, MP for Rochdale:

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Hard-working White Van Man represent the backbone of this country.

The Sun also published the political views of the owner of the house in the photo:

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DJP wrote:

Yes. You should always park your van front facing outwards.

You mean that is what the "middle class" do? Seriously, it is a stereotype of how the media and, apparently now, the politicians (after all, one of them was forced to resign over it) depict "the working class". It doesn't conform of course to our conception of the working class as anyone obliged by economic necessity to work for wage or a salary, irrespective of what job they do or how they spend their leisure time or adorn the place where they live or what sort of vehicle they drive.This is what we mean when we use the term, but are we sure it is what most of those who read or hear us understand us to mean?

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I think he'd rather see the dungeons.

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