ALB
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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.
LBird wrote:What do you think, ALB? Is it a fair reflection of Bogdanov’s views, in your opinion?Not really. It's from an ICC pamphlet written by someone who was one of their members at the time and reflects their ambiguous position towards Lenin, seemingly endorsing his criticism of Bogdanov. Although Bourrinet is a socialist/communist in our sense and Kolakowski a declared anti-socialist, I think we can have more confidence in Kolakowski's summary of Bogdanov's views as he would have read Bogdanov in the original Russian while Bourrinet would probably not have done.It is true that Bogdanov wanted to incorporate some of the ideas of Mach and Avenarius into socialist theory (as did Pannekoek) but I don't think he saw this as "going beyond Marx's limitations" (any more than Pannekoek did). More like filling a gap both perceived in socialist theory by adding a theory of the nature of knowledge (epistemology) to it.Anyway, (for what it's worth) here is Kolakowski's summary of some of Bogdanov's views (he devotes 11 pages of his Main Currents of Marxism to discussing them). Referring to a book Bogdanov wrote in 1899 Kolalowski writes:
Quote:In this work he displays the relativist tendency which he regarded as a cornerstone of Marxism: all truths are historical in the sense that they express man's biological and social situation; truth is a matter of practical applicability, not objective validity.And on what Bogdanov got from Mach:
Quote:According to Bogdanov, Mach's philosophy supports Marxism inasmuch as they both treat cognitive processes as instruments of man's fight for existence and reject the possibility of ideas not derived from experience. The 'objectivity' of acts of cognition lies in the fact that they are valid for human societies and not only for the individual. This collective aspect distinguishes physical phenomena from "subjective" ones. "The objective character of the physical world consists in the fact that it exists not for me personally but for all, and has for everyone a definite meaning, the same, I believe, as it has for me" (Empiriomonism, i, 25). Nature is "collectively organised experience". Space, time, and causality are forms in which men co-ordinate their respective perceptions; but this co-ordination is not as yet complete. There are experiences, socially significant and with a social origin, which nevertheless conflict with other experiences. This is due to social antagonism and the class division, which have the effect that human beings only understand one another within certain limits, while their discordant interests inevitably produce conflicting ideologies. In an individualistic society like ours each person's experience centres on himself, whereas in primitive communist societies the "self" was merged in the community. In the society of the future it will be different again, when work is collectively organized and there is no possibility of conflict between my own self and another's.By which I take Bogdanov to mean that in socialist/communist society all humans will share a common "ideology".He does seem to have been a bit of a technological determinist but to accuse him of prefiguring "the stalinist view" is grossly unfair. After all, while he regarded the Russian Revolution as "progressive" he did not regard it as socialist and realised that what the Bolsheviks (Lenin and Trotsky as well as Stalin) were building in Russia was state capitalism not socialism.
The website comrades have just added another article to the Socialist Standard archive here which exposes Militant's confusion over another economic question: banks and credit. This article criticises a pamphlet they brought out in 1977 in which they argue that banks can create credit out of thin air:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1980s/1981/no-917-january-1981/militant-confusion-about-inflationThis might go down well today in some reformist circles but is just as much mistaken today as it was then. They are still fishing in currency crank waters as this article calling for the "banksters" to be jailed shows. It also shows that a nationalised bank is a key part of their reformist plan to relaunch the capitalist economy by a massive programme of public works:
Quote:the banking system should be nationalised under democratic popular control. Only on this basis would it be possible to get rid of the spivs and speculators that are holding working class people to ransom. A genuinely nationalised banking sector would be run for the benefit of the majority, rather than for the super-rich. Those struggling to pay their mortgage would have it converted to an affordable rent; small businesses could get cheap loans, and public works such as a massive house-building programme could be cheaply financed.alanjjohnstone wrote:The Socialist Party does not shy away from mergers with groups where there is a common identity of interests.No doubt this is true in the abstract (though it has never happened of course and it is not immediately clear what "a common identity of interests" might mean, i.e a common aim and set of principles) but a 'merger" is not what the EC;s letter proposes or has in mind. It is merely proposing a meeting to discuss the principle that in any one country there can only be one socialist party. As it concludes:
Quote:As there can be no point in two socialist parties in one country we should like to propose a meeting to discuss the principle of a single socialist party, based on sound socialist principles, as opposed to forming yet another leftwing reformist party.In other words, to draw their attention to the fact such a socialist party already exists. A meeting would also be an opportunity to discuss differences, especially their clause 8 which says that a socialist party should have a reform programme.
It's another interesting but different graph, showing this time how, since the 1960s, the share of national income of the top 10% has gone up at the same time as the percentage of workers unionised has gone down.I'm not sure, though, that we can conclude that the share of the top 10% went up because the percentage of workers in unions went down. We certainly can't argue that if union membership hadn't declined then the share of the top 10% would not have gone up. That would be to attribute to unions a power they don't have.Unions may (and do) have the power, when first set up, to increase the wages of their members (and some others) and then to more or less maintain this in the long run (pushing up wages in boom times and slowing down wage cuts in slump times), but that's as far as they can go.Not even governments can reducee income inequality. Reformist governments have tried but failed and given up. Instead, in recent decades, governments have helped capitalism's tendency to increased inequality, by reducing taxes on profits and high incomes. Government anti-union legislation, making unions less effective in their limited sphere, may have been a factor but only a minor one.Union membership will have declined in line with the decreased share of manufacturing (where they were well organised) in GDP. But even if union membership hadn't declined I think the top 10 percent's share would still have gone up.
"Middle class" here is defined as "the middle 60 percent of households" by income. So what's really been talked about is the middle 60 percent of income-receivers, most of whom will of course be members of the working class properly defined.In the olden days, the ICC would probably have said it was a conspiracy by the unions, at the behest of the capitalist state, to reduce their own membership and so effectiveness so as to allow the income of the workers concerned to fall. These days they would more probably point to this part of the news item as confirmation of their view that workers are better off without unions:
Quote:Studies have discovered that during the economic recovery, non-union workers fared considerably better than union workers in fields like manufacturing and private construction. Also, during the 1982 and 1991 recessions, states with fewer union members were found to recover more quickly than states with a strong union presence.What should we make of it? First, that the middle 60 percent of incomes is not a very meaningful group. Second, that "middle class" is not a useful description of it as class is determined not by income but relationship to the means of production. Third, that a group's declining share of total income does not necessarily mean (as the title, but not the small print, of the graph suggests) a decline in their real income.
Well, well. Everybody's heard of the revolving door between top civil servants and big business. Now it applies to the BBC economics "experts" and big business:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24288088Not surprising really when you consider that the BBC and other TV news always employ people working for City financial firms to comment on the economy. In the (now distant) past they at least tried to be seen to be neutral by interviewing academics.
By co-incidence the other person who was refused admission to the Socialist Platform meeting on 14 September was the German journalist who was the author of the article from issue 941 of the Weekly Worker JohnD gives.From what she told us in the pub where we went instead, these are an unsavoury lot. Nasty people who break up other people's meetings. She specifically singled out "Platypus" as their English-language version.Incidentally, David Rovics has a hilarious song attacking the idea of a Vanguard (often played during the lunch-hour at our Head Office). It can be heard here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSeU9q6zyT4Here's the lyrics:http://lyrics.wikia.com/David_Rovics:Vanguard
Actually, in his book The Marvelous Learning Animal Arthur Staats doesn't contest "the facts" collected by today's dominant biological determinist scientists, that the brains and brain patterns of men, women, gays, people with learning difficulties, schizophrenics, etc are different. What he is challenging is the "ideological" assumption that these differences must be genetic. He says this is just an assumption which the biological determinists have not been able to prove by showing how genes do or even could determine human social behaviour. He proposes that the differences could equally be due to the experiences (learning) of these groups being different and this having an effect on their brains.You seem to be suggesting that just because socialists favour the second possible explanation socialists should interpret "the facts" in this way. That of course would be wholly "ideological". Staats says that the view he supports needs to be backed up by a coherent theory that fits "the facts", i. e. those who take this approach must show how learning affects and changes the brain. Which is where the neuroscience and (yes) neuroscientists come in. They do indeed seem to be doing our work for us. After all, we are not qualified to do it ourselves, are we? Are you?But we are in danger of turning yet another thread into a discussion of your theory of science.
DJP wrote:Behavioral economists and psychologists are doing the hard work for us!Just reading this book The Marvelous Learning Animal by a behavioural psychologist which seems to be backing up our long-argued position on human nature:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14568718-the-marvelous-learning-animal
