ALB
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It appears(though not sure how reliable this source is, but it was also reported in the papers yesterday) that the rebels in Syria are now just rival brands of fanatical Islamists striving to impose their brutal rule on the people of Syria, particularly on women (Saudi Arabia is financing and arming one of these gangs) and minorities:http://www.globalresearch.ca/syria-the-army-of-islam-saudi-arabias-greatest-export/5352638Talk about out of the frying pan into the fire.
Brian wrote:From my recollection LBird has many times pointed out the distinction between what was 'thought to be true' and the actual 'truth' becoming revealed through further scientific discovery and investigation.I think you've got the wrong end of the stick, Brian. This is precisely the position LBird is arguing against, as I assume he will confirm by return of post. I'm not sure I'd defend it either.
LBird wrote:So, to return to ALB’s essential question:ALB wrote:But, in turn, I put a question to you: what in your view are the criteria by which to judge whether a theory or view is "knowledge" or just fantasy or wrong/inaccurate/inadequate?Given my beliefs as a Communist and following the outlined theory of cognition of science, I’d argue that the only ‘criteria’ which can ever be acceptable for humans are those arrived at by the society that is doing the human social activity of science. The current ‘criteria’ of the bourgeoisie won’t be the future ‘criteria’ of the proletariat.
But what would you say are the current criteria by which capitalist society distinguishes between "knowledge" and fantasy or a wrong/inaccurate/inadequate theory?
LBird wrote:Do you agree that ‘knowledge’ is a separate entity to ‘object’?Yes (not sure about the word "entity", though). It can't be the same, if only because the "object", the passing world of ever-changing phenomena, is the whole universe of observable phenomena. "Knowledge" can only concern a selected part of it. But, in turn, I put a question to you: what in your view are the criteria by which to judge whether a theory or view is "knowledge" or just fantasy or wrong/inaccurate/inadequate?
LBird wrote:Do you agree that ‘knowledge’ is ‘produced’, rather than is an identical copy?Yes. Everyone does these days, don't they? I don't know if this is relevant but there's an obituary into today's Times of David Hubel, described as "Nobel prizewinning neurophysiologist who first showed how our brains translate the signals from our eyes to give us vision". It says that his and fellow researcher Torsten Wiesel's work in the 1960s and 70s
Quote:consigned to oblivion the popular notion that the brain received images from the eyes like film projected onto a screen.I'm afraid I haven't read Schaff and so am not in a position to comment on whether or not his view is the same as Pannekoek's.
LBird wrote:Well, since from my very first post I've argued that the 'object' exists outside of, and precedes, the process of cognition, your triumphal point about my 'concession' (sic) isn't very productive for a discussion of 288 posts, is it?Of course I never really thought that you were an idealist. It was just that some of your phrases such as "thinking precedes sensation" and "theory precedes practice" left this open to doubt.
LBird wrote:What's being avoided is discussion of 'the process of cognition'.Why can't you describe your process of cognition, ALB?No it's not. I thought this had been settled. Anyway, again, here it is (from Pannekoek's 1937 article on "Society and Mind in Marxian Philosophy"):
Quote:The human mind is entirely determined by the surrounding real world. We have already said that this world is not restricted to physical matter only, but comprises everything that is objectively observable. The thoughts and ideas of our fellow men, which we observe by means of their conversation or by our reading are included in this real world. Although fanciful objects of these thoughts such as angels, spirits or an Absolute Idea do not belong to it, the belief in such ideas is a real phenomenon, and may have a notable influence on historical events.The impressions of the world penetrate the human mind as a continuous stream. All our observations of the surrounding world, all experiences of our lives are continually enriching the contents of our memories and our subconscious minds.The recurrence of nearly the same situation and the same experience leads to definite habits of action; these are accompanied by definite habits of thought. The frequent repetition of the same observed sequence of phenomena is retained in the mind and produces an expectation of the sequence. The rule that these phenomena are always connected in this way is then acted upon. But this rule – sometimes elevated to a law of nature – is a mental abstraction of a multitude of analogous phenomena, in which differences are neglected, and agreement emphasized. The names by which we denote definite similar parts of the world of phenomena indicate conceptions which likewise are formed by taking their common traits, the general character of the totality of these phenomena, and abstracting them from their differences. The endless diversity, the infinite plurality of all the unimportant, accidental traits, are neglected and the important, essential characteristics are preserved. Through their origin as habits of thought these concepts become fixed, crystallized, invariable; each advance in clarity of thinking consists in more exactly defining the concepts in terms of their properties, and in more exactly formulating the rules. The world of experience, however, is continually expanding and changing; our habits are disturbed and must be modified, and new concepts substituted for old ones. Meanings, definitions, scopes of concepts all shift and vary.[My emphasis]LBird wrote:ALB wrote:Positivism is the view that the only source of ideas and knowledge is experience.I disagree with your definition of ‘positivism’, here, ALB. I think positivism goes further than ‘experience’, and claims that ‘experience’ provides ‘positive’ proof of ‘objective reality’. This claim can’t be true, because we know that science both makes mistakes and can only give a ‘partial truth’ of the ‘object’, at best.In its simplest form, it claims that the scientific method can’t be wrong. The twentieth century has put paid to that ideological claim!
As I said, I didn't want to get into argument about semantics, but I doubt that you will be able to bring forward someone calling themself a positivist who would hold the view you attribute above to positivism. To tell the truth, I don't understand what you mean by "'experience' provides 'positive' proof of 'objective reality'". If not, what does? Historically positivism arose as a criticism of the view that science discovers the world as it actually is and introduced the concept of partial, temporary truth.
LBird wrote:ALB wrote:As someone once put it if not in so many words, sensations (or, rather, the outside world that gives rise to them in humans) have to precede thinking about them.No, the ‘outside world’, or object, precedes ‘thinking’, but ‘sensations’ don’t necessarily. Have your ever ‘sensed’ Tasmania (or somewhere you haven’t been, if my example falls down by you actually having been to Tasmania!), or is just a theoretical construct in our minds, but which we can scientifically prove, if we wanted, by flying there? Theory precedes practice.
Actually, hearing and learning are "sensations" ! I think you using "sensations" to mean "facts". Anyway, you have conceded the point by saying that the outside world precedes thinking. Which makes you a materialist after all.
In the original smear article the Daily Wail hack referred to LSE professor and Labour politician Harold Laski who died in 1950, as Ralph Miliband's mentor, describing him as
Quote:a giant of Labour's Left, whom some Tories considered to be a dangerous Marxist revolutionary.Laski is now more or less forgotten, so here's an article from a back issue of the Socialist Standard on him:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1940s/1946/no-502-june-1946/professor-laski%E2%80%99s-secret
jondwhite wrote:George Osborne attacked 'Marxism' the other day.Quote:…I share none of the pessimism I saw from the Leader of the Opposition last week.For him the global free market equates to a race to the bottom with the gains being shared among a smaller and smaller group of people.That is essentially the argument Karl Marx made in Das Kapital. It is what socialists have always believedI missed that but have found it here.Here is what Marx said on free trade, not in Capital, but in a talk on the subject he gave in Brussels in 1848 to a meeting of bourgeois democrats:
Quote:What influence will the adoption of free trade have upon the condition of the working class? All the laws formulated by the political economists from Quesnay to Ricardo have been based upon the hypothesis that the trammels which still interfere with commercial freedom have disappeared. These laws are confirmed in proportion as free trade is adopted. The first of these laws is that competition reduces the price of every commodity to the minimum cost of production. Thus the minimum of wages is the natural price of labor. And what is the minimum of wages? Just so much as is required for production of the articles indispensable for the maintenance of the worker, for putting him in a position to sustain himself, however badly, and to propagate his race, however slightly.But do not imagine that the worker receives only this minimum wage, and still less that he always receives it.No, according to this law, the working class will sometimes be more fortunate. It will sometimes receive something above the minimum, but this surplus will merely make up for the deficit which it will have received below the minimum in times of industrial stagnation. That is to say that, within a given time which recurs periodically, in the cycle which industry passes through while undergoing the vicissitudes of prosperity, overproduction, stagnation and crisis, when reckoning all that the working class will have had above and below necessaries, we shall see that, in all, it will have received neither more nor less than the minimum; i.e., the working class will have maintained itself as a class after enduring any amount of misery and misfortune, and after leaving many corpses upon the industrial battlefield. But what of that? The class will still exist; nay, more, it will have increased.He concluded his talk:
Quote:But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.I don't see what this has to do with the Labour Party. Given what people can see the Labour Party is, I can't see the Tories getting away with labelling it as "Marxist". Everybody knows that's nonsense. Still it's good to see that Marx's ideas are still being discussed.
I see he again raises the question of the limitations of "consensus" decision-making:
Quote:Many found that consensus, which worked well in small groups, created paralysis in groups of several hundred or a few thousand.By co-incidence somebody gave me the other day a copy of Workers Solidarity, an anarchist publication from Ireland, for Jan/Feb last year which, perhaps inadvertently, made the same point:
Quote:The consensus process that successfully prevented groups or political parties from packing assemblies to further their own ends also caused some problems. A proposal to work with the Dublin Congress of Trade Unions (DCTU) to organise a march was blocked at a GA by a small number of people. This created a rift and some people went on to do this work on their own.The fact is that, except on procedural or non-controversial issue, consensus decision-making tends to favour "the tyranny of the minority". Better to stick to the old democratic method where the minority has its say but the majority has its way.
admice wrote:Thank you for any links or explanations.LBird wrote:If we can leave the intricacies of Bogdanov side for the moment, ALB, you’ve said something that I don’t agree with.ALB wrote:They would merely be saying that "sense-impressions" precede thinking about them (a not unreasonable position that we have been trying to convince you of).But ‘sense-impressions’ don’t precede thinking about them. Of course, the external world exists before we think about it, but science is the application of our minds (and their social theories) to the external world, through our sense-impressions. But what we consider ‘sense-impressions’ is determined by our theory. If we started from ‘sense-impressions’, we’d be overwhelmed by infinite sensation, and have to accept the ‘bucket theory of mind’. So, I think it is an entirely ‘unreasonable position’ to take! The notion of the ‘primacy’ of ‘sense-impressions’ is empiricism and inductivism. And the belief that these ‘sense-impressions’ tell us the ‘whole truth’ is positivism.
OK, let's leave Bogdanov aside. Actually, this gives me a chance to raise something I've been wanting to but have avoided till now so as not to get into an argument over semantics, i.e your view of what "positivism" is.Positivism is the view that the only source of ideas and knowledge is experience. It is a rejection of all "metaphysics", i.e. of the view that there is anything outside or beyond the world of experience. In this sense both Dietzgen and Pannekoek were "positivists". In fact, Dietzgen called one of his articles precisely "The Positive Outcome of Philosophy".But there are positivists and positivists. Bourgeois positivists (of which Betrand Russell would be an example) start from the isolated individual sitting in their study and trying to build up a picture of the external world from reflecting on their own individual experiences. Socialist positivists such as Dietzgen and Pannekoek, on the other hand, accept that the world of experience is a never-ending, ever-changing stream which the mind, again on the basis of experience, breaks down into parts (by naming them) in order to understand them.Positivism is not committed to the view that "'sense impressions' tell us the 'whole truth'", only that knowledge is constructed by the mind by organising sense impressions. I can't see how anyone (other than an idealist) can argue that sense-impressions are not primary, but that before they can be experienced the person experiencing them has to have a theory. This is not how a child acquires knowledge (nor how the pre-human mind would have evolved into the human mind). For the new-born child, the world is indeed a mass of mere sensations which it eventually learns to make some sense of by learning the names of parts of it. As someone once put it if not in so many words, sensations (or, rather, the outside world that gives rise to them in humans) have to precede thinking about them.
I'm afraid I've been unable to read Rowley's article beyond page 2 as I'm not an academic with access to this journal and am not prepared to pay to read it.We're in an odd position here. Neither of us can read Bogdanov in the original so we have to rely on others who have, but these have their own opinions in the light of which they summarise and interpret his views. For instance, in the abstract Rowley states that "naive realism" is consistent with scientific socialism, a position all of us here have rejected:
LBird wrote:David G. Rowley Studies in East European Thought, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Mar., 1996), pp. 1-19Quote:ABSTRACT. Lenin espoused a naive realism that was consistent with scientific socialism, but which did not satisfy Bogdanov.It doesn't satisfy us or Pannekoek either.I think you may be being put off by the terms "positivism" and "empiricism" being applied to Bogdanov's views because you associate them will "naive realism" and the "discovery" theory of science. But Bogdanov rejected both of these.
LBird wrote:Rowley, p.5, wrote:Bogdanov sought a form of empiricism that could provide certainty without relying upon Kantian categories. He realized the centrality of epistemology to the debate, but (in light of contemporary trends in philosophy) he declined to rely on Plekhanov's unsophisticated "reflection" theory of knowledge. Following the empiriocriticism of Ernst Mach, Bogdanov espoused a strict empiricism and denied the possibility of a priori knowledge of any sort at all.We can reject Plekhanov’s (and Lenin’s) ‘reflection theory of knowledge’ (naïve realism) without needing to fall into empiricism. Theory precedes observation.
Yes we can, but I don't think that the sort of "empiricism" espoused by Mach and Bogdanov does necessarily reject the view that "theory precedes [scientific] practice". They would merely be saying that "sense-impressions" precede thinking about them (a not unreasonable position that we have been trying to convince you of).
LBird wrote:Rowley, p.5, wrote:Bogdanov defined reality in terms of experience: The real world is identical with human perception of it. Bogdanov's universe was a monist system, but the monism was "a type of organization according to which experience is systematized." It is a monism of "knowing method." In Empiriomonism, the first major collection of his positivist writings, Bogdanov illustrated how this was possible. "The basis of 'objectivity,' must lie in the sphere of collective experience … The objective character of the physical world consists in the fact that it exists not for me individually but for everyone, and for everyone has a definite meaning, exactly, I am convinced, as it does for me." In this way the sense of a real external world, the knowledge, and the values of any particular social group are not the mere subjective whims of individuals. "Reality" is made up of the shared perceptions of the collective consciousness of a society. "The physical world is collectively organized experience."[my emphasis–ALB]Bogdanov seems to equate ‘reality’ (ie. object) with ‘knowledge’. We have already seen that this can’t be done. Object, subject and knowledge are separate cognitive categories, and ‘knowledge’ is an on-going process, not a ‘once-for-all-time’ discovery, which some authority then ‘knows’ with finality.
I think the view attributed to Bogdanov here is open to criticism, but from the opposite point of view. He seems to be operating within a two-category framework: subject and knowledge. Which makes the external world an inter-subjective one rather than an objective one. Joseph's son, Eugene, made the same mistake in that article I drew your attention to, a mistake which does lay those making it open to the charge of "idealism". Dietzgen and Pannekoek, starting from the same premises as Mach and Bogdanov (that all knowledge is derived from our sense-impressions), did not make this mistake. But whatever criticism can be made of Bogdanov I can't see how he can be accused of a accepting the discovery theory of science.Incidentally, what does the Rowley article say about Bogdanov's conception of socialism and why he regarded Bolshevik Russia as building state capitalism?
Hadn't heard of it before, but as a registered trade union the Pop-Up Union would anathema for the ICC. They would see it as an agent of the state like all other unions.http://popupunion.org/Breakaway unions and ginger groups are not new in the history of the working class or even of the SPGB. In the 1930s a Party member was prominent in setting up a breakaway busmen's union from the TGWU (now Unite), the National Passenger Workers Union and later, after the war, in setting up another breakaway union from the TGWU in the docks. Other Party members remained in the TGWU. So there were Party members in rival unions. Ken Fuller in his history of the London busworkers Radical Aristocrats writes:
Quote:In Snelling's case, his own party's anti-Communism possibly played in his decision to form the breakaway, although at a public meeting called to discuss the new union by the Socialist Party of Great Britain in July 1938 he was opposed by W. E. Waters, also of the SPGB.Fuller gives the source for this as Lewisham Borough News of 26 July 1938. I haven't seen this report but it sounds as if it might be worth tracking down.The Party decision seems to have been not to intervene, but to leave individual members, as well as individual workers, to join the union of their choice (as long as they joined a union). A reflection, I suppose, of our general position of not trying to take over workers' struggles. Though it has always been our position not to support breakaway "socialist" or "revolutionary" unions, as was once the policy of the old DeLeonist SLP and of the Communist Party at the end of the 1920s and beginning of the 1930s.Not that the Pop-Up Union seems to be setting itself up as a rival to the existing unions, more as a ginger group allowing membership of other unions, to influence them. Which is what the IWW has become as well. Since some members are in the IWW I wouldn't have thought that whether or not to join the Pop-Up Union would be up to individuals members, but I can't see the Party adopting the policy of encouraging such unions.But is the Pop-Up Union still going?
jondwhite wrote:Weren't there SPGB members who argued unions could not increase wages beyond a certain value, instead only able to stop wages from falling below a certain value?I don't know, but in the 1920s there were some members who argued that the trade-union struggle was not part of the class struggle but merely a "commodity struggle", which elicited this response in the Socialist Standard of the time:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1920s/1920/no-195-november-1920/commodity-struggle-or-class-struggleA similar position is taken up today by some "ultra-left" groups (quite a few in fact) who dismiss the wages struggles as merely variable capital trying to realise its value.
jondwhite wrote:Also if the ICC believed unions were trying to reduce their own membership, this notion seems a bit far-fetched.That was my caricature of their implacable anti-union position. They see unions as agents of the capitalist state and all permanent organisations formed by workers as unions, and they have argued that workers would be better off without them and should rely instead on ephemeral temporary strike committees.I imagine that they would interpret the graph as proof of the uselessness of unions and would find some convoluted way to attribute to the unions some responsibility for what it shows.
