[ALB]

Obviously I was using the word "materialism" in a very general sense to mean nothing more, in the end, than "non-religious" and "non-theistic", not in any particular narrow, technical philosophical sense. Obviously too, Marx (and Engels) were materialists in this sense.

[ALB]

LBird wrote:

'Marx was wrong' about a unified scientific method, and then I can go away, and do something better with my time.I agree with Marx. If the SPGB doesn't, say so, and I'll bid you all a comradely 'goodbye'.

As you can see from this thread (and all the many other threads on the subject), the SPGB doesn't have a Party position on the nature of science, and does not see the need to, but members hold a variety of materialistic positions. All we are committed to is a general materialist and non-religious position. As one such position yours would not be a bar to membership. So you could argue your point of view from within just as much as from outside the party.

[ALB]

You could be right. Now you mention it, a comrade from a Jewish background did once tell me that when the end came all Jews would be resurrected and live in paradise irrespective of what sort of lives they had led. Clearly, such a doctrine would not be an effective way of controlling people's behaviour. Hence the need for the sanction that, if you didn't follow the religion's precepts, your descendants would suffer till the 3rd or 4th generations.My view was based on what the Bible New Testament and the Koran say some Jews held. The Sadducees, mentioned in the New Testament, didn't belief in resuurection or life after death, at least not according to this:

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The Sadducees thought of themselves as "conservatives," as the Old Believers. This is because they accepted only the written Law of Moses as authoritative and rejected subsequent revelation. As a result, the Sadducees denied many of the doctrines held by the Pharisees and by Jesus, including the resurrection of the dead, the existence of angels and spirits, and the meting out of rewards and punishment after death. These beliefs were thought by the Sadducees to be Zoroastrian corruptions of the authentic faith of Israel.

The article does go on to explain that the Sadducees died out after the fall of Jerusalem in 70AD and that modern Judaism is descended from the Pharisees (who did believe all this nonsense).Mohammed also believed this nonsense about the resurrection of the dead but, according to the Koran, this was not well received by some:

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[6:29] They say (subconsciously), "We live only this life; we will not be resurrected."[23:37] "We only live this life – we live and die – and we will never be resurrected."[44:34] The present generations say,[44:35] "We only die the first death; we will never be resurrected!"

These sceptics are believed to have been Jews (rather than Greek philosophers or socialist materialists). Needless to say, Mohammed said they would rot in hell:

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[13:5] If you ever wonder, the real wonder is their saying: "After we turn into dust, do we get recreated anew?" These are the ones who have disbelieved in their Lord. These are the ones who have incurred shackles around their necks. These are the ones who have incurred Hell, wherein they abide forever.[17:97] Whomever God guides is the truly guided one. And whomever He sends astray, you will never find for them any lords and masters beside Him. We will summon them on the Day of Resurrection forcibly; blind, dumb, and deaf. Their destination is Hell; whenever it cools down, we will increase their fire.[17:98] Such is their just retribution, since they rejected our revelations. They said, "After we turn into bones and fragments, do we get resurrected into a new creation?"

Presumably that's our fate too, even after being beheaded.

[ALB]

I wasn't trying to categorise you as a "Machist". Just pointing out that in the passage quoted in the book he seemed to be saying something similar to what you are. Pannekoek had a much higher regard for Mach than Lenin did and can even be said to have been influenced by him. I wouldn't have thought he would have denied it.Incidentally, DJP, an "instrumentalist" or "phenomenalist" is not committed to the view that there is not a "real" world out there, only to denying that there exists something "more reral" beyond the observable world. So LBird needn't necesarily be holding two positions that contradict each other. His problem, as far as I can see, is that he regards any interpretation of the observable world as entirely subjective, hence opening the door to "extreme relativism". As Mach put in that quote given in the book:

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in the investigation of nature, we have to deal only with knowledge of the connexion of apperarances with one another. What we represent to ourselves behind the appearances exists only in our understanding, and has for us only the value of a  memoria technica or formula, whose form, because it is artbitrary and irrelevant, varies very easily with the standpoint of our culture.

I think I'm right, aren't I, LBird, that you want  to argue which is the best subjective interpretation from a working class or communist point of view? Most of us here can see that this might make sense with regard to history, society, economics but not to the so-called natural sciences, e.g. there is no "proletarian" or "communist" or "bourgeois" or "capitalist" astronomy or chemistry, just astronomy or chemistry.

[ALB]

I know this will risk kicking things off again but as a second-hand bookshop near me was closing down and selling its stock off at half-price i bought for £1.50 a copy of a book entitled A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science to see if it would throw any light on where LBird is coming from. It's not a very interesting book (too technical) but there were some parts that were. As far as I can see, the person who comes nearest to LBird's position is the physicist Ernst Mach (who is attacked by Lenin in his notorious Materialism and Empirio-Criticism) when he wrote:

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in the investigation of nature, we have to deal only with knowledge of the connexion of apperarances with one another. What we represent to ourselves behind the appearances exists only in our understanding, and has for us only the value of a  memoria technica or formula, whose form, because it is artbitrary and irrelevant, varies very easily with the standpoint of our culture.

Apparently, throughout history, there have been two main schools of thought: the "realists, who according to the book's author John Losee, argue that:

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scientists ought to seek to formulate true theories that depict the nature of the universe.

and the "instrumentalists" whose position is that

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scientific theories are calculating devices that facilitate the organization and prediction of statements about observations. It is statements about observations that are true or false. Theories are merely "useful" or "not useful".

My sympathises in this debate would lie with the "instrumentalists" but I wouldn't argue that this is the "communist" position and that "realists" cannot be socialists/communists. After all, we get enough stick for ruling out people with religious views and don't need to also rule out fellow materialists who take a different view of what "science" is trying to do.By the way, the book says that Galileo was a "realist" and Pope Urban VIII an "instrumentalist". I hadn't realised before but it seems that the Church would have been prepared to accept Galileo's argumentation if only he had offered it as one alternative theory to explain why the Sun appeared to go round the Earth rather than as being "true".

[ALB]

baloch wrote:

Religion is also a tool for oppressor. No it is not a hope for a hopeless world neither the heart of a heartless world, it could be if there was merely One religion.

I don't see why there needs to be a single religion to describe it as the heart of a heartless world. Different religions offer consolation in different ways. And also different ways of frightening people into obeying their precepts. Christianity and Islam teach that you'll rot in hell forever if you don't obey. Hinduism and Buddhism tell you that you'll come back as a worm. Judaism, which doesn't believe in an afterlife, teaches that your descendants will suffer for 3 or 4 generations. All ways of getting people to submit to social arrangements which, I agree, benefit an exploting, ruling class (not necessarily or even normally a priesthood). Islam actually means "submission". Full marks for honesty (but nothing else) !

[ALB]

I should have said that it wasn't anti-Islamist enough. With their religious cleansing in Iraq they are just as bad as Israel if not worse.

[ALB]

I think the argument that religion is a racket set up by priests for their own economic benefit is simplistic. Certainly some priests do well out of it (the cardinals and bishops of the Roman Catholic Church and the bishops of the Anglican church for instance and many priesthoods in the past) but I don't think we can say that this is what religion is all about. I think Marx got it right in his early atheistic writings that religion is also the cry of the opressed, the heart of a heartless world (or is it the hope of a hopeless world?), the opium of the people and that, therefore, the criticism of religion should lead on to the criticism of the social and economic conditions that give rise to the need for religion, i.e the heartless, hopeless world where the oppressed need it as a drug to cope with their misery and oppression.

[ALB]

Not one of his good articles. Too pro-islamist.

[ALB]

Oddly perhaps, one of the clearest modern explanations of why a tax on wages ends up as a tax on profits was set out in a discussion document on a proposed tax policy for UKIP that used to be on their site. It was written by Godfrey Bloom, described as a "financial economist". At the time he was one of their MEPs. Later he was booted out of UKIP for making a politically incorrect remark about women and his proposal taken down. But we kept a copy.Here's the relevant extracts from his document:

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1. 2 The earnings of employed people are not a legitimate target for taxationIncome tax (and NI) extracted from wages through the PAYE system is, by its nature, severely counter-productive.Like VAT there is a general failure to distinguish the mechanics of the tax’s calculation from its incidence (who actually bears it). Tax under PAYE is calculated by reference to a purely notional figure called "gross pay", which no employed person in history has ever seen, let alone touched or spent. The employee's real income is of course the net pay; and that amount of tax which has been "deducted" is always the employer's liability, to be remitted by the employer to HMRC in full, every month. As with VAT, the employers are the de facto tax-collectors. In this case they are also the tax-payers!

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1.  3.     Every attempt to tax wages sets in motion a "shifting" process whereby the tax finishes up as a corporate impost anywayThis phenomenon was clearly set out 220 years ago in Adam Smith’s illustration of an employee earning £100. If the state imposes a tax of 20% his pay must rise by 25% in order to re-instate the employee's former purchasing power (£100). He must now be paid £125 so that the 20% tax leaves him with disposable earnings of £100. In practice there may be a time-lag over which purchasing power (or the basic standard of living) is restored, but national statistics always show a ratio between real (net) pay and GDP that tends toward a constant. The effect is always inflationary as the costs, no matter how notional, feature in the revised price structure.1   4.     You cannot "tax" the earnings of those who are paid out of taxesThe application of the entire PAYE rigmarole to employees in the public sector is a nonsensical charade whereby tax on the imaginary figure of "gross" pay of public sector employees is "taken" by HMRC and given straight back to HMRC in its capacity as collector.We know from the above arguments that taxing people's wages finishes up in effect as a corporate tax when the ramifications are laid bare, but the notion of applying this process to the earnings of those who are paid out of taxes lends it a still more farcical twist.  It enters into price structures throughout the community and thereby fuels inflation and distorts all public sector costings.

Bloom's beef was that PAYE taxes fall disproportionately on smaller businesses, a section of the capitalist class that UKIP seeks to represent (and does represent to a certain extent). But he still made a valid point that had been made by David Ricardo and by Marx as well as by Adam Smith. 

[ALB]

That's the ideal of bourgeois justice even if it's more honoured in the breach than in the observance. But it doesn't say anything about the content of the laws, i.e that today they are mainly concerned with protecting private property especially that of those who have lots of it. So do we socialists want those laws to be fairly enforced?

[ALB]

Actually I think it's the other way round. Rather than people lining up to benefit from "Piketty's reform" (which is not going to happen anyway as he himself admits) it is long-time reformists lining up to use Piketty's analysis to back up their already-launched reform campaign. A bit like how in the 1930s and 40s long-time reformists used Keynes's ideas on government intervention to back up their call for this.It's not even as if these people's particular reform is desirable anyway. It's not about redistributing wealth and income from the rich, whether men or women or black, blue or white, to the non-rich, whether men, women or whatever, but about redistributing wealth and income from all "white" men, including workers, to all women and "people of colour", including capitalists.

[ALB]

beler1 wrote:

Vladimir Putin's recent speech about the heroes of WW1 is also worth reading, if only for the telling sentence:'But this victory [i.e. of Russia in WW1] was stolen from our country. It was stolen by those who called for the defeat of their homeland and army, who sowed division inside Russia and sought only power for themselves, betraying the national interests.'

I see he really did say that ! In fact the whole of his speech is really terrible. You wouldn't think he was talking about the Tsarist regime. Another extract:

Quote:

The Russian army’s great values and the heroic experience of the generation who fought in World War I played a big part in our people’s spiritual and moral upsurge at that moment. This was a generation that was fated to go through not just the difficult trials of the first global world war, but also the revolutionary upheaval and fratricidal civil war that split our country and changed its destiny.But their feats and their sacrifices in Russia’s name were forgotten for long years. World War I itself, which the rest of the world calls the Great War, was erased from our country’s history and was labelled simply ‘imperialist’. Today, we are restoring the historical truth about World War I and are discovering countless examples of personal courage and military skill, and the true patriotism of Russia’s soldiers and officers and the whole of Russian society. We are discovering the role Russia played in that difficult and epoch-changing time for the world, especially in the pre-war years. And what we see reflects very clearly the defining features of our country and our people.Russia over many centuries supported strong and trusting relations between countries. This was the case on the eve of World War I too, when Russia did everything it could to convince Europe to find a peaceful and bloodless solution to the conflict between Serbia and Austro-Hungary. But Russia’s calls went unheeded and our country had no choice but to rise to the challenge, defend a brotherly Slavic people and protect our own country and people from the foreign threat.    Russia stayed true to its duties as an ally. The Russian offensives in Prussia and Galicia upset the adversary’s plans and made it possible for our allies to hold the front and defend Paris. The enemy was forced to turn its attention and direct a large part of its forces east where Russian regiments put up the fiercest possible struggle. Russia withstood the attack and was then able to launch an offensive. The Brusilov offensive became famous throughout the whole world.But this victory was stolen from our country. It was stolen by those who called for the defeat of their homeland and army, who sowed division inside Russia and sought only power for themselves, betraying the national interests.

Up until 1990 people in Russia were taught that WW1 was an "imperialist" war (as it was). Now it is in the interest of the current ruling class there to "revise" this and present this war as a heroic, nation(alist) episode. We hold no brief for the Bolsheviks (quite the opposite) but they were right on this point (as were the Menshevik Internationalists too).

[ALB]

If the writer had based their article on the editorial in this month's Standard they would have seen that the position the Economist of the time took up is referred to

Quote:

Rather surprising is the position of another pro-ruling class historian, Niall Ferguson, who argues that Britain should have stayed out and let the Continental Powers fight it out amongst themselves. This was in fact the position taken up by some members of the Liberal government  at the time.

Four members of the Liberal government actually resigned over the issue:http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/firstworldwar/document_packs/p_diplomaticsituation.htmWe have always recognised that the capitalist class is not a monolithic bloc but that different sections have different interests, as in this case.John Burns, incidentally, a former member of the SDF, was the first "working man" to become a cabinet minister. At least on this issue he was right if for the wrong reason.

[ALB]

ALB wrote:

UK GDP has indeed reached its pre-2008 level but, as has been pointed out, GDP per head of population is not expected to reach its pre-crisis level for another three years (because of course the population has increased since then).

Confirmation of this in an article in the Independent a couple of days ago:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/britain-facing-lost-decade-of-economic-growth-9647817.html

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