ALB
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Report on the meeting by those who drew up the "Socialist Platform" here:http://www.independentsocialistnetwork.org/?p=2470What unscrupulous political operators the so-called "CPGB" are. True Leninists !
Ok, forget "peak oil" or agree to disagree on it and move on to global warming. I agree with you that this is happening, so how do you think that problem could be solved or at least mitigated?I must confess that I am beginning to think that your refusal to commit yourself on solutions is disguising the fact that you don't think there is one and think we are all doomed and thst the best an individual can do is to stock up on food and a gun and take to the hills to await the impending collapse of capitalism and/or civilisation.
Isn't Praxis simply the German word for practice? So Marx would simply have meant what we mean by practice. Giving it some other meaning seems to go back to Gramsci, the leader of the Italian Communist Party in the 1920s and 30s, or at least to those who have interpreted him. In a footnote to an article he wrote on Gramsci in 2007 Chris Harman (SWP) pointed out:
Quote:In this and other passages Gramsci used the Italian word ‘prassi’, which is translated in English‑Italian dictionaries as ‘practice’. Some people translate it as ‘praxis’, believing that gives it some deeper, almost mystical meaning. In fact, in Germany every medical doctor has a ‘praxis’.ralfy wrote:What you are asking for is beyond the scope of this thread given the thread title. Put simply, the question, "Whatever happened to 'peak oil'?" implies that there is no problem concerning peak oil, and since there is no problem, then there is no need to seek a solution. This makes your request illogical, unless you are now acknowledging that the question is irrelevant and that peak oil should be taken seriously. If so, then I suggest that you create a new thread where you mention that peak oil is a major issue and ask for solutions.This seems a bit pedantic. I would have thought that it made sense to discuss all aspects of "peak oil" on one thread.
ralfy wrote:I also do not understand why you argue, "even assuming you are right," as this makes me feel that I am wasting my time, i.e., having to give a solution to a problem that you argue does not exist.This is not just a dialogue between you and me. I may have started this thread but there are others on this forum who probably won't take the same position as me (in fact I was assuming some won't) and will be interested in hearing your solution to the problem you and they perceive.
ralfy wrote:Finally, I never believed that "the present world capitalist system" will solve the problem of peak oil. If any, I explained that the same system will fall apart because of such a problem.Well, at least that confirms that you are not a lobbyist for some rival source of energy to drive capitalist industry, e.g nuclearpower but it still leaves open the question of how you propose to deal with the problem. Are we to just sit around and wait for the capitalist system to fall apart? Or should we take to the hills, as the doomsters advise?
Just read the account in today's Times about the incident in Russia, where an argument about the 18th century German philosopher Kant ended in a shooting, which DJP has already drawn our attention to. It says that Kant
Quote:revolutionised Western philosophy by examining how the mind constructs our knowledge of the natural world and probing the limits of our empirical understanding of that world (…) Kant explains how reason makes experience possible by imposing structure on the data that our senses provide [emphasis added]So this discussion does have some relevance to contemporary events after all.
alanjjohnstone wrote:The real project would be to do an abridged version, Dietzgen For DummiesThis was already done by Fred Casey in his book Thinking that came out in 1922 and was used as a textbook by the National Council of Labour Colleges and so had a fairly wide circulation in radical working-class circles in the 1920s and 1930s.There are (of course) several copies in the Party library. It can also be read online, here:http://archive.org/stream/thinkingintroduc00case#page/n5/mode/2up
We once held the Summer School at Ruskin College, in Headington on the outskirts of Oxford. Don't know if they still do this or how much it would cost.
Still on the question of whether or not it makes sense to say that it was "true" until 1700 that the Sun moved round the Earth, I had assumed that this was the generally held view until then, but when discussing it with other members (yes, we're discussing this offline too, and if in Russia they can discuss Kant at a hotdog stall we can discuss helio- and geocentric models of the solar system in a pub) one member said that the view that the Earth went round the Sun had been defended in Greek times by a women philosopher called Hypatia. There seems to be uncertainty about this, but it was certainly proposed as long ago as three centuries before our era by another Greek philospher Aristarchos of Samos and also later by other Greek philosophers and by some Indian astronomers. See here.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeliocentrismThe question that now arises is: were Aristarchos, Seleucus, Hypatia, Aryabhata and others wrong or telling untruths when they argued, in their time, before 1700, that the Earth moved round the Sun? (Actually, I think DJP raised this point earlier in the discussion about, when there are two competing theories, how do you decide which is correct.)
twc wrote:Not according to Schaff p. 47, it was Raymond Aron.Curioser and curioser. Another positivist, but where does Einstein come into this, if at all?
No need for a pamphlet or at least to write a new one. It's all here in Pannekoek's 1937 article on "Society and Mind in Marxian Philosophy":http://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/society-mind/index.htmAnyway, pamphlets are not needed so much these days when we've got the internet. So we could just provide a link somewhere to Pannekoek's article.
LBird wrote:How can a 'selection' be made from a infinite stream of potential sense-impressions, originating from the object, without a 'theory'?I was not challenging the statement that "theory [generally] precedes observation", i.e. that the observer has to have some idea what they are looking for. What I was challenging was the insertion of the word "always" in place of "generally".As to the what the participants here agree and disagree on. As far as I can see, we agree on what science is doing (whether it recognises it or not) — describing a part of the "infinite stream of potential sense-impressions" rather than discovering the world as it really is. We disagree over whether or not this theory implies that it was once "true" that the Sun moved round the Earth.
jondwhite wrote:To be a stickler, and just to point out generally – 'socialist platform' is only a part of 'left unity' party. It includes at least two other platforms, the 'left party' platform and the 'class struggle' platform.The "Left Unity platform" is a vague, wishy-washy openly reformist and opportunist statement. It's the one that will be adopted when the new party is founded on 30 November. The so-called "Class struggle platform" is just the transitional programme of the Fifth International and will be laughed out of court. Mind you, this could be the fate of the "Socialist Platform" too, judging by the general comments on the Left Unity website. Most contributors are only interested in what reforms the new party should campaign for.
LBird wrote:theory' must precede 'practice', otherwise how do we account for the moment of 'selection'?Don't ask me, ask Pannekoek. He said it when discussing the origin (as opposed to the practice and methods) of science.The same must have applied at the origin of abstract thought and speech: what you call "sense impressions" would have had to have been felt before they could be named, i.e. selected.In other words, the concrete preceded the abstract. As Pannekoek put it in Anthropogenesis:
Quote:Human speech differs from animal sounds in that it consists of words. Words are names for things, actions or properties. Words are sound-symbols, sounds serving as a symbol for something else, and signifying something else. Language is an organised system of conventional sounds, serving as symbols for realities.and
Quote:Ideas and perceptions have only a shadowy, intangible and spiritual existence. The real world consists of concrete things, which are the phenomena themselves; the abstract conception is merely the expression of what a group of phenomena has in common, and therefore is outside this world of phenomena, with no separate reality. The word, the name, gives it that separate reality, as a physical existence, (although this is only transient) and changes it into a something, which can be described, and with which one can work. The word gives substance to a conception; and only through the word the vague feeling is turned into a precise thought. This is also true for the physical things of the world themselves. The thing also is an abstraction, a summary of all the separate images and impressions of sight, feeling etc., which have been acquired from different angles at different times. The identity which the word, the name, ensures to these changing phenomenal forms makes them a figure in space, a permanent and constantly recognisable object, of which the different perspective aspects can be derived and can be known in advance.Good stuff. Re-read it.Incidentally, in this work Pannekoek quotes favourably from John Dewey who you've dismissed as worthless because he wasn't a socialist/communist.
Pannekoek was of course a native Dutch-speaker writing in English so might not always have expressed himself clearly (for instance, he often writes "spiritual" from the Dutch and German word whereas we would say "intellectual). But I don't think this is the case here. He is saying that science arose from social practice and is humans' reflecting on it. So, in the beginning was the practice.All human behaviour (except a kneejerk reaction) is preceded by thought. Obviously before humans in Ancient Babylonia observed the sky they must have thought about doing it. But that's a pretty trite basis on which to conclude that "theory always precedes observation".I think it is pretty clear that Pannekoek thought that science arose from, and was preceded by, observation (he's talking about the origin of science not its current methods and practices). In his history of astronomy he went on to say:
Quote:The origin of scientific astronomy is in predicting theory, in the observing of regularities for purposes of prediction. Chaldean astronomy regarded the sky as a two-dimensional vault. Thus they had a formal mathematical representation of phenomena.He contrasted the situation there with that in Egypt of the same period where no science of astromy developed because, he says, all that was required was the observation of one star, Sirius, for purposes of chronology and agriculture, commenting:
Quote:Egypt can show us how little a science of the stars is fostered by an even brilliant sky unless that science finds a practical basis in human life and activity.(p. 85)In other words, practice gives rise to theory.By the way, does anybody know whether it was Einstein or Popper who coined the saying "theory always precedes observation".
