[ALB]

I see what you mean. For a moment I thought you were talking about the Unitarian christians (the last step before atheism) but couldn't understand that they had suddenly gone crazy.It seems as if Left Unity is trying to live up to Cameron's description of UKIP as "fruitcakes and loonies" .More on this here:http://shirazsocialist.wordpress.com/2014/11/12/beyond-belief-left-unity-to-debate-pro-isis-motion/But then the SWP too was always soft on Islamism. I can remember when IS meant the "International Socialism" Group from which the SWP emerged. Perhaps the fact that now "IS" means "Islamic State" is poetic justice or something.

[ALB]

SocialistPunk wrote:

such a huge flaw in the plan.

That's where you are wrong, on other threads as well. Socialism is not some "plan" that the Socialist Party is going to implement. I know we are often accused of that, but that's utopian system-building. Socialism is a system of society that the working class is going to establish by prosecuting the class struggle to a victorious conclusion. We today don't have to have the answers to everything. We haven't got them and it would be stupid and arrogant of us to think we could have. All we can say with certainty is that the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources would provide a framework within which all the problems humanity faces can be dealt with, certainly a better framework than the present one of minority ownership and control. The rest can only be speculation, interesting and instructive perhaps but not a "plan". Having said that, when the socialist movement is much larger and nearer to winning then, yes, I'm sure, groups of workers will be drawing up plans on what to do when capitalism is ended, but we are nowhere there yet.

[ALB]

DJP wrote:

ALB wrote:

Is he saying that German materialism is a form of his "naturalistic realism" or that "German idealism" is?

Can't quite work it out either but after watching the questions and answers in that video (the last 15 minutes) wouldn't be suprised if he is talking about Idealism..

If that's the case it's not clear what he's trying to get at here. Even less when he entitles a talk or article:

Quote:

"Realistic monism: why physicalism entails panpsychism"

Sounds a bit like our friend here who says that "idealism" and "materialism" can we combined. But there are two levels involved here.1. What is knowledge (epistemology)?2.  The contents of knowledge (theories about the world)?Re 1. Dietzgen and Pannekoek argue that knowledge is a description of the ever-changing passing world of phenomena. I agree with Bottomore and Rubel here that the theory of knowledge (epistemology) was not something Marx took an interest in. Even less in ontology, the theory of the nature of reality, which for Dietzgen and Pannekoek  was the whole universe (everything as a whole). I'm not sure that Engels was interested in this sort of thing either. They were more interested in explaining what happened in history and in changing society. The both of them probably just assumed that what the scientists of their day were doing (and Marx was as interested in this as Engels) was "discovering" or "uncovering" the physical world "as it really was". I could be wrong. It doesn't matter all that much anyway.Re 2. is about the status (valid, useful, etc) of desciptions of parts of the world of phenomena (parts of reality).  This is where idealism, materialism, etc come in. They are rival descriptions of parts of reality. Personally I've long been convinced that materialism is the best/most useful description in terms of describing what happened and predicting what will happen (if something else happens), e.g. that the physical world existed before life, that a brain can't function in the absence of living physical body, that there is no afterlife,that  no supernatural being intervened or intervenes in the evolution either of the physical world or of life or of history or of present-day society.  I'm sure both Marx and Engels would have been materialists in this sense. After all, it was atheism (the criticism of religion) that led them to socialism (the criticism of the existing material conditions of life).I don't know why Stawson wants to give some credibilty to "panpsychism"(that mind is part of everything). which strikes me not only as a useless theory but as mumbo-jumbo. Or was he being ironic or provocative?

[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".

[Author]

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