ALB
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dweenlander wrote:In addition I would recommend Michael Heinrich’s An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital – which focuses largely on Vol. 1 and contains some marvellous stuff on the labour theory of value.
If this is the sort of stick Heinrich's gets for challenging the falling-rate-of-profit theory of cyclical crises then it sounds as if he is worth a read:http://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/economic-crisis/the-unmaking-of-marxs-capital-heinrichs-attempt-to-eliminate-marxs-crisis-theory.htmlI think I'll start with the article of his they criticise:http://monthlyreview.org/2013/04/01/crisis-theory-the-law-of-the-tendency-of-the-profit-rate-to-fall-and-marxs-studies-in-the-1870s
I hadn't realised it till now that a large section of Trotskyist and Trotskyoid opinion supports the rebels in the Syrian Civil War (they seem to think it's a re-run of the Spanish Civil War). This requires considerable rhetorical and dialectical skill as Western imperialism supports the rebels too.Here's an extract from statement signed by various British trot groups including Workers Power and Socialist Resistance:
Quote:We believe that the people of Syria should be enabled to free themselves from the Assad dictatorship. For their struggle to be successful, they should receive all the necessary material aid, including arms and humanitarian assistance, without conditions imposed by the West.Who from, then? Trotskyist gun runners? Is a international Trotskyist brigade being formed to fight alongside the Jihadists and Western secret agents already on the ground?But the prize goes to an Australian leftwinger cxalled Michael Karadjis:
Quote:Socialists have no business demanding our imperialist governments send arms or do anything in particular, as we know their agendas; but neither should we protest if they do send some arms.But, if it would weaken the government side (as it would), why not also turn a blind eye to them bombing government installations and positions?
alanjjohnstone wrote:Our anti-war position re-Iraq would be no different if they had actually found WMDs.Good point. Our anti-war position re Syria would be no different either if the UN backed bombing Syria. I see the famous Noam Chomsky is going around saying that any bombing of Syria without UN backing would be "illegal". So that means he thinks it would be ok if the UN Security Council voted for it? Probably not, but, as a supporter of the rebels, his position on the matter is ambiguous, as this extract from an interview he gave in July shows:
Quote:Yet there’s concern that the continued failure to arm the opposition in an organized manner and within clear frameworks means the continued control of certain individuals and religious authorities in the Gulf over the provision of weapons to limited groups—the more extremist elements—within the ranks of the armed opposition. This would entail the continued marginalization of the moderate opposition fighters.Your question deals with extremely narrow tactical options. We all want to force Assad to the negotiating table and from there, to resign, but the question is how to achieve this? The first way to do this is to supply the opposition with arms. This step would most likely produce an escalation of the military conflict and open the door to further military upgrading and expansion on the part of the regime, leading to increased destruction and the regime staying in place for longer. The second approach is to go to Geneva with the cooperation of the major powers, including Russia, and force the regime to accept a truce. These are the options we have.But do you believe that you will be able to make the regime accept change through negotiations?Honestly and objectively I reckon that both options offer only a slim chance of success. But you have to make a choice. Which path will you take? Neither option is ideal, but once again, you have to think about what you have. I believe you should choose the negotiating track first, and should you fail, then moving to the second option becomes more acceptable.He didn't say who, in the event of a failure of diplomatic negotiations, would be given the contract "to supply the opposition with arms".Personally, I've always thought that Chomsky had feet of clay.
alanjjohnstone wrote:i dare say your nom de plume betrays you as some sort of Aryan racial myth-peddlar rather than a genuine student of the Beowolf legend.An Anglo-Saxon, eh? But they were immigrants in their time. Hordes of them came and pushed to the West the previously established population who spoke a language akin to Welsh. Here is what some of these think of Saxons:Where will this nonsense about sending people back from whence they came end?
Have you read Daniel Defoe's poem The True Born Englishman?http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173337That about sums it up. And that's only up to 1701 but it didn't stop then.
I notice that the war-mongers in favour of Britain bombing Syria have shifted their ground. Forgotten is all the sob stuff about "humanitarian" intervention. The justification now is the British capitalist state's "credibility". They are complaining that the No vote in Parliament means that Britain has slipped from a second-rate power to a third-rate one and are calling for a re-vote to reverse this.The Tory, Liberal and Labour politicians who are arguing this have exposed themselves as advocates of adding to the killing and destruction just to try to restore Britain's "prestige". They do have a point from a capitalist point of view as, in negotiations between states over trade and other economic matters, "might is right" and the threat of "might" and a record of it being used is taken into account. The sufferings of the people in Syria don't come into. That's just a pretext.
Mike Foster wrote:I tried looking for when Marxism 2014 is, but there was nothing on the SWP website.I wouldn't bother about not clashing with this as it is not likely to be what it used to be. Members in London who don't go to our summer school should be able to cover any residual event the SWP may organise.
Here's an article by Pannekoek in which he blames capitalist states, in pursuit of capitalist interests, for misusing the work of scientists not the scientists themselves for their work:http://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1948/revolt.htmAnd here he is setting out on the opening page of Anthropogenesis what he sees as the "scientific method":
Quote:The problem of the origin of man cannot be solved by experiment or observation. The appearance of man on earth is a fact of the past of which no report or witness could reach us. The factual data which we have at our disposal are comparisons of man of today with animals, supplemented by extremely rare, imperfect and damaged fragments of fossils of prehistoric man and remains of his stone implements. But they are silent with regard to the forces which have caused the evolution of animal to man.Where direct empirical data are lacking and indirect ones are so few, a far stronger appeal than is needed in experimental science has to be made to the mental equipment of the scientist. Whereas in the case of plenty of empirical facts that can be increased at will, no more is necessary than arranging and combining them and from them deducing new problems and making new experiments, the scarcity of such facts causes theoretical discussion to play a more important part. What matters here is the logical combination of differing data, the seeking for connexion between what lies far apart, the making of conclusions, and the careful weighing of probabilities.No hint that before Lamarck, Darwin and the others it was "true" that some supernatural being created humans by an act of will some 4000 years ago, i.e that creationism was once "true".
Meeting for you here, wiscalatus:http://antinational.org/en/why-others-stay-others
Maybe that would attract wiscalatus and he'd learn something about the "nation-state" and nationalism.
LBird wrote:Well, as long as everybody's happy that 'science' is an open book, and has no role to play in a discussion of Communism, that's that.Nobody's said that either, but it appears you need the "didactic device" of a straw man to develop your arguments.
Despite what you keep asserting, nobody here is defending "naive realism" or that what scientists do is to "discover" objective nature so we will all be able join in your discussion about the nature of "subject".By the way, a comrade has drawn attention to this passage in Pannekoek's Marxism and Darwinism (which we have reproduced as a party pamphlet):
Quote:Thus, both teachings, the teachings of Darwin and of Marx, the one in the domain of the organic world and the other upon the field of human society, raised the theory of evolution to a positive science.This doesn't surprise me since both Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius whose ideas he takes on board in Lenin As Philosopher, giving them a materialist spin, were "positivists". Neither were communists, so Pannekoek for one didn't agree with the silly position that if you're not a communist your views are irrelevant.Also, one of Dietzgen's works (with an introduction by Pannekoek) is entitled … The Positive Outcome of Philosophy !
LBird wrote:This means 'truth' can be wrong.Another counter-intuitive paradox !Here's the case for being careful about using the word "truth" put forward by AJ Ayer in his 1936 manifesto for "logical positivism" Language, Truth and Logic. Yes, I know he's a "positivist" but I think you've been unfair to them as to Feuerbach. They are not "naive realists" but their basic claim is that all knowledge derives from experience (but that's another debate). But here's what Ayer wrote about "truth":
Quote:Reverting to the analysis of truth, we find that in all sentences of the form ‘p is true’, the phrase ‘is true’ is logically superfluous. When, for example, one says that the proposition 'Queen Anne is dead' is true, all that one is saying is that Queen Anne is dead. And similarly, when one says that the proposition 'Oxford is the capital of England' is false, all that one is saying is that Oxford is not the capital of England. Thus, to say that a proposition is true is just to assert it, and to say that it is false is just to assert its contradictory. And this indicates that the terms 'true' and 'false' connote nothing, but function in the sentence simply as marks of assertion and denial. And in that case there can be no sense in asking us to analyse the concept of 'truth'.Quote:We conclude, then, that there is no problem of truth as it is ordinarily conceived. The traditional conception of truth as a 'real quality' or a 'real relation' is due, like most philosophical mistakes, to a failure to analyse sentences correcly. There are sentences, such as the two we have just analysed, in which the word 'truth' seems to stand for something real; and this leads the speculative philosopher to inquire what this 'something' is. Naturally he fails to obtain a satisfactory answer, since his question is illegitimate. For our analysis has shown that the word 'truth' does not stand for anything, in the way which such a question requires.It follows that if all theories of truth were theories about the 'real quality' or the 'real relation', which the word 'truth' is naively supposed to stand for, they would be all nonsense.In other words, "truth" can't be wrong. Only assertions or denials can be. I think in fact he is saying the same thing as you: that there is no "truth" out there to be found.He concludes:
Quote:We have now obtained the information we required in order to answer our original question, 'What is the criterion by which we test the validity of an empirical proposition?' The answer is that we test the validity of an empirical hypothesis by seeing whether it actually fulfils the function which it is designed to fulfil. And we have seen that the function of an empirical hypothesis is to enable us to anticipate experience. Accordingly, if an observation to which a given proposition is relevant conforms to our expectations, the truth of that proposition is confirmed. One cannot say that the proposition has been proved absolutely valid, because it is possible that a future observation will discredit it. But one can say that its probability is increased.and
Quote:We trust the methods of contemporary science because they have been succesful in practice. If in the future we were to adopt different methods, then beliefs which are now rational might become irrational from the standpoint of these new methods. But the fact that this is possible has no bearing on the fact that these beliefs are rational now.Isn't this what you are trying to say: that by the standards of pre-1700 rationality (what the bible said) it was rational to think that the Sun moved round the Earth, but that by today's different standards it no longer is? In other words, what changed has been the standards of rationality not the truth (or otherwise) of the proposition (empirical hypothesis) that the Sun moves round the Earth.It seems that you are a bit of a "positivist" yourself without knowing it.
Actually, there's a separate thread here in which both the points and the proposition you make are being discussed:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/events-and-announcements/left-unityorg-peoples-assembly?page=13
alien1 wrote:Words are important!Agreed that words are important. The title was not the author's but the editors chose "The Civil War in Syria" in preference to some of the other media descriptions of what is going on there such as "popular uprising", "resistance", etc which suggest that one side are the good guys (who deserve support including military intervention) whereas, as you've well pointed out, they are not.
