Bijou Drains
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So if everything that is social produced must be subject to democracy, presumably, this would also include music, art, literature,etc. as all are socially produced.
Bijou Drains wrote: “…you state that the only way to reconcile ideal and matter is in conscious human activity.”
No, BD, Marx stated this. I just happen to agree with Marx.
Again you make assertions that are incorrect. Where did Marx actually state the exact following words “the only way to reconcile ideal and matter is in conscious human activity”,
If you are unable to produce the exact quote, I can only assume you haven’t got it.
Marx, Pannekoek, Gorter, etc. argued that we need to account for both ideal and material. They are both part of humanity.
Agreed
The only way to reconcile ideal and matter is in conscious human activity. Or, social production.
You have made an assertion without any supporting evidence, you state that the only way to reconcile ideal and matter is in conscious human activity. Human activity is not the only form of animal consciousness, animals as diverse as octupuses and ravens have used tools to consciously change their environment.
Thus, social production is regarded as the creator of material and ideal. And if we create both, we can change both, which was Marx’s whole point.
Again an assertion with no underpinning evidence. Marx, Pannekoek, Gorter state “we need to account for both ideal and material” accounting for both the material and the ideal does not elevate social production to the status of the creator of material and ideal, therefore your conclusion that “if we create both we can change both” is invalid and illogical. Furthermore even if it were true it does not follow that just because you create something it is possible that you can change it. As a species we create an awful lot of carbon dioxide through breathing, that doesn’t mean we can change the way we breathe
“Yellow is found between green and orange on the spectrum of visible light. It is the color the human eye sees when it looks at light with a dominant wavelength between 570 and 590 nanometers.”
I propose that this scienists’ definition be put to a world referendum. Is there a seconder?
ALB, you are displaying your elitist tendencies! You naughty materialist. Surely before we can define yellow we need to define colour, wavelengths, spectrum, nanometers and perhaps more importantly the concept of number. Unless we democratically decide the socially produced concept of number, we are guilty of Leninist-Englesian distortion of Marx!!!! and anyway, who said you could use letters to signify speech without having a vote on it.
“power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony……….. You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you……………. I mean, if I went ’round saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!”
“Whenever I ask ‘Who determines truth within socialism’, you don’t answer that it will be brought “by the thinking, conscious, proletariat”.”
That’s because we recognise there is no such thing as the truth, all truth is subjective.
There are issues with the internet, no one can doubt that , but I don’t see dumbing down as one of them. It might not be that the classics of literature are read in the way that they once were, but most of the culture of previous generations that has been preserved in literature is the literature of the ruling class.
Not many of you will have heard of Jack Common (his brow was apparently the model used for the bust of Marx in Highgate Cemetary and George Orwell described him as the writer he always wished he was) but I was put on to reading him by my mother, who read him when first published. I went in to Newcastle City Library in the early 80’s and no record of his work was any where to be seen (Newcastle, my home town, was his place of birth and the subject of his work). With the marvel of the internet his work is saved and available. A quote from one of many websites now deveoted to him goes as follows:
“To say that the work of Jack Common has been ignored and forgotten by both the literary establishment and the city he once described has become routine within the few esoteric corners of academia and journalism which have brought attention to the man and his work over the last few years.
While his name may grace the wall of Byker Metro station and designate a collection of papers at Newcastle University, he nevertheless occupies an obscure role in the history of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Geordie culture, one subordinate to the likes of Richard Grainger, John Dobson and Lord Armstrong who through the display of pervasive architectural grandeur remind us day by day of their existence. Without the surface magnificence of Grey Street or Central Station, Common’s works, ranging from the essays found in The Adelphi and The Freedom of the Streets to his two autobiographical novels Kiddar’s Luck (1951) and The Ampersand (1954), not only explore the banality, exuberance and joy of industrial Newcastle in the early 20th century, but delve into the politics of working class culture, the love-hate relationship the ambitious Geordie has with his roots and the difficulty of obtaining class mobility, themes greatly relevant in our age of consumption, individualism and aspiration.
While many Geordies upon reading Common will ask why his name has remained a mystery until that moment of enlightenment – and of course why he has not been introduced in the curricula of English literature classes around Tyneside – his interest in both the local and universal should engage those outside the region, and as Keith Armstrong has argued rescue the man ‘from being a mere footnote in Orwell studies’. In his Preface to Seven Shifts, a book which assembles a group of seven working lads to ‘describe their jobs, their conditions, and some of the their reactions to the life they lead’, Common aptly illustrates his relationship to companion and rival George Orwell and the literary establishment: ‘My friends include members of the literary bourgeoisie and lads from the unprinted proletariat. Both parties talk well, and you’d probably enjoy a crack with them as much as I do. But here’s the pity. The bourgeois ones get published right and left – especially left; the others are mute as far as print goes, though exceedingly vocal in public-houses’. As the voice of the silent and oppressed majority, Common’s non-fiction and autobiographic works are of great value and worthy of much study and investigation”
Thanks to the internet some of OUR culture is being preserved looked at, accessed, considered and evaluated. Without IT much of this would be lost and working class experience would continue to be a footnote in history.
For instance without the internet the true story of the second world war would remain untold!!
‘Who determines truth within socialism’,
Why would “truth” need to be defined within Socialism, there would be situatons where knowing what the majority opinion is, would be important, but not “truth”
“Matthew, you seem to have a handle on things.
I presume, since you argue that ‘workers are scientists’, then you’d agree that ‘workers’ should determine ‘science’?”If you are going to ask me that question, you first have to define what you mean by science, as the notion that science is some part of human existance divorced from the rest of that existence is, at least for me, problematical.
