[ALB]

Actually, I thought you're supposed to be high priests of Mammon.

[ALB]

DJP wrote:

I think Strawson would say that there are concrete and abstract elements to nature. We can only abstract from the concrete and can't really know that much about the nature of the concrete. Concepts belong to the experiential side of the physical are abstract not concrete. Numbers, beauty and love exist but you can't touch them so they are abstract not concrete. Though mental goings on are part of the concrete..Or have I missed the point of what you're asking?

I was just concerned that he was apparently ruling out ideas as being part of "reality" but I see he seems to be saying that thinking is a form of experiencing like hearing or touching and that experience is the only reality, so thinking is an experience of reality. But I'm still not sure where this leaves thinking about thinking.There was one passage which has some relevance to what we are discussing here:

Quote:

All materialists until the twentieth century were real materialists, where this means, crucially, that they were real realists about experience, and took experience so conceived to be wholly physical. It seems to me that present-day participants in the debate need to be more aware of this—aware that the view that experience is wholly a matter of what is going on in the brain (or body) is not new. Joseph Priestley, a strict materialist, holds in the 1770s that «the faculty of thinking is the result of a certain arrangement of the parts of  matter»; that «sensation and thought do necessarily result from the organization of the brain»; that «mind […] is not a substance distinct from the body, but the result of corporeal organization». This is also Hobbes’s view in 1641, as remarked. It’s Regius’s view in 1647, Locke’s suspicion in 1689, Toland’s view in 1704, Collins’s view in 1707–8. It’s extremely widespread in eighteenth-century France, it’s old news in the powerful nineteenth-century movement in Germany that followed German idealism and was known as German materialism.There’s no reason to doubt that Democritus and other ancient materialists and atomists held essentially the same view.

He adds a footnote to "German materialism":

Quote:

German materialism is really just a kind of straightening out of German idealism, which is itself arguably best described as a form of naturalistic realism. The present resurgence of interest in panpsychism among German-speaking analytic philosophers may help to bring this point into the light

I'm trying to remember my grammar here and the significance of the comma after "German idealism". Is he saying that German materialism is a form of his "naturalistic realism" or that "German idealism"  is?Anyway, it seems that Marx wasn't the only "German materialist" who straightened out "German idealism".

[ALB]

And I'm glad that I missed the subsequent descent into "post-modernism". Bring back ordinary language, I say.But to return to young Strawson (interesting and maybe revealing that his dad should have given him a non-christian name), I haven't listened to the whole of his talk but I thought I heard him say at one point that only the physical forms part of "concrete reality". But isn't thisbegging the question since "concrete" and "physical" mean more or less the same?

[ALB]

Here's the "sentimentalised" version sung before the queen. It's not just sentimentalised. It's fucking obscene. I wonder who the cynical bastards were who knowingly travestied the original in this way:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5gTOcoD0c0&feature=youtu.be

[ALB]

Is this Strawson connected to the "ordinary language philosopher" PF Strawson I was forced to study when I was in college years ago?. I say "forced to study" as I found so-called "ordinary language philosophy " so boring and nit-picking that I concentrated on studying classical philosophers such as Berkeley and Locke (though Hume was a bore too). Having said that, the logical positivism from which they were descended was a form of "materialism".Incidentally, the other Strawson's talk is given as a talk on "real naturalism" not "real materialism". This might make a difference as his "real naturalism" would only be one form of "materialism". I'm not sure I'd like the term "real materialism" as this would imply that all other kinds of materialism were not real or not really materialism.

[ALB]

Look likes he might want to be photographed with you, Gnome:http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/politics/sketch/article4266074.ece

[ALB]

LBird wrote:

Since ALB hasn’t yet come back with a comment on the quote above

ALB isn't at his computer all day, everyday. He sometimes goes out. But "materialist-critical socialism" is as ok by me as well as "the materialist conception of history" or even "historical materialism". I don't think they are misleading (unless you want to be misled).

LBird wrote:

Thus, we can see that whatever Marx’s ‘materialism’ was, it wasn’t simply ‘materialism’

None of us here have ever said it was, despite your accusations that we do regard Marx  (and Engels) as simple materialists (by which you presumably mean define that only the physical is "real").So this is a never-ending argument about definitions.. As I say, I'm happy to call myself, like Marx was, to  a "materialist" in some broad sense. Doen't he write somewhere of his "materialist method"? I don't think that either "productionism" or "idealism-materialism" is a better name than "historical materialism". In fact, the second is a bit of an oxymoron like "square circle", "military intelligence" or "Islamic scholar".Anyway, I think we can let Marx and Engels have the final say, with this quote from their The German Ideology:

Quote:

Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as masturbation to sexual love. [Chris Arthur, L & W edition, p. 103]

[ALB]

Can you take out the part where Jeremy Poxman (aka DAP) interviews Danny for nearly an hour and make it a separate item standing on its own? It's good.

[ALB]

Just come across this from the Introduction to Karl Marx. Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy edited by TB Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel (one of the books on our recommended reasing list):

Quote:

Marx's method has usually been called 'historical materialism'. This is misleading in so far as it attributes to Marx a philosophical intention which he did not have. He was not concerned either with the ontological problem of the relation of thought and being, or with problems of the theory of knowledge. Speculative philosophy of this kind was what Marx rejected, in order to substitute science for metaphysics in a new field of knowledge.Marx spoke of the 'materialist basis' of his method of investigation. In his postcript to the second edition of Capital, he refers the reader to the preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy for a fuller explanation of his 'materialism'. An examination of this preface, which condenses into a few propositions the theory worked out fifteen years earlier in the Brussels and Paris manuscripts, shows that the term 'material' is employed simply to designate the fundamental primary conditions of human existence. The expression used as 'material life', 'material conditions of life', 'material productive forces', 'modes of production of material life', 'material transformation of the economic conditions of production', etc.[emphasis added]

Looks like a 1 all draw then, unless Marx's preparedness to be regarded as some kind of 'materialist' is not taken into account (how could he not have been prepared to given the number of times he used the word 'material' ! )In any event, I would have thought that the word "productionist" would be open to a greater misunderstanding than "materialist". Isn't it something the Green don't like because it favours ever-increasing production even at the expense of the environment?If people don't like "historical materialism", what about "social materialism"?

[ALB]

We're both saying the same thing ! Companion party members can subscribe to Spopen but not to Spintcom. Of course no harm done in posting it here too.

[ALB]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

(Forwarded by Central branch secretary) [and then by me, ajj, since it was originally posted on Spintcom that many companion party members will not be subscribed to]

Actually no Companion party members will be subscribed to Spintcom (though like everyone else they can look at it). However, they can be and some are subscribed to Spopen at:https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/spopen/infoHaven't looked at it for ages myself but I see it's still going. 

[ALB]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

BTW, you're not really hashing over anything that Raymond Williams didn't when he discovered Marx wasn'tr a mechanical materialist.  That was back in 1950-something.

Just checked what Raymond Williams (ex-CP) wrote about "materialism" in his 1970 work Keywords:

Quote:

Marx's critique, of the materialism hitherto described, accepted the physical explanations of the origins of nature and of life but rejected the derived forms of social and moral argument, describing the whole tendency as mechanical materialism. This form of materialism had isolated objects and had neglected or ignored subjects especially human activity as subjective. Hence his distinction between a received mechanical materialism and a new historical materialism, which would include human activity as a primary force. (….) Marx's sense of interaction — men working on physical things and the ways they do this, and the relations they enter into to do it, working also on 'human nature', which they make in the process of making what they need to subsist — was generalised by Engels as DIALECTICAL (q.v. )materialism, and extended to a sense of laws, not only of historical development but of all natural or physical processes. In this formulation, which is one version of Marxism, historical materialism refers to human activity, dialectical materialoism  to universal processes. [his emphasis]

In his discussion of the word "dialectic" he says:

Quote:

Hegel's version of the dialectical process had made spirit primary and world secondary. This priority was reversed, and  dialectics was then 'the science of the general laws of motion, both of the external world and of human thought — two sets of laws which are identical in their substance but differ in their expression' (Engels, Essay on Feuerbach).  This was the 'materialist dialectic, later set out as  dialectical materialism, and applied to both history and nature (in Dialectics of Nature). (…) There has been immense controversy about the relation of dialectical materialism to the thought of Marx, who did not use the term; to its idealist predecessors; and to the natural sciences. Some Marxists prefer the more specific  historical materialism,  not wishing to extend the  dialectical description to natural processes, while others insist that the same basic laws apply to both.

So, you are right, YMS, there is nothing new under the Sun (whether or not it goes round the Earth).Ironically, perhaps, we in the SPGB have not been too keen on "dialectical materialism".

[ALB]

This article by Leo Lewis suggests that robots are not being introduced in China as fast as some have suggested as human labour is still cheaper:http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/business/columnists/chinainnumbers/article4242419.eceI imagine you can access the whole article, YMS, but even the bit everyone can see suggests what it  is going to say.

[ALB]

You never give up, do you!I'm not going to argue with you because every time anybody does you end up insulting them. But I will point out some factual errors.First, the German Ideology was written jointly by Marx and Engels. In fact the passage you quote was literally written by Engels. Chris Arthur in his edition of the work published by Lawrence & Wishart in 1970 explains:

Quote:

The extant manuscript of the first chapter "Feuerbach" consists of pages halved into two columns, the left filled with most of the text in Engels' script — he wrote more smoothly and quickly than Marx — from joint dictation. The right-hand column has many additions from both authors.

So give Engels a break!Second, Engels, in his [1859] review of Marx's A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,  uses the phrase "the materialist conception of history". He was not speaking there about a "materialist conception" of the physical world.Third, Marx had no objection to the well-known summary of his views in the Preface to that work being called "materialist".

LBird wrote:

It’s my thesis that any reference to ‘material’ or ‘materialism’ should be replaced with ‘production’ or ‘productionism’. If one has to retain ‘material’ (for ideological or historical reasons), then it should be prefixed with ‘ideal’, so that the reference should be read, not as ‘material’ or ‘materialism’, but as ‘ideal-material’ or ‘idealism-materialism’.It’s clear that when Marx uses the term ‘material’, he is referring to ‘human production’, not ‘material things’. And as ‘human production’ contains both ‘ideas’ and their practice upon the ‘material’ world, then ‘production’ means both ‘ideas’ and ‘material’, and not simply ‘material’.

The distinction you are trying to draw is (I think) between philosophical materialism (as a theory of the nature of "reality") and materialist conception of history (as a theory of history and society).There's no need to invent a new term for the latter as "historical materialism" fits the bill exactly.Having said this I think Marx will have been some kind of philosophical materialist too (how could he have been anything else?), even though he didn't write about this as much as Engels.

[ALB]

Untruncated and unsentimental lyrics here:http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/e/eric_bogle/no_mans_land_lyrics.html

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