DJP
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“So what would a modern scientific materialist say space is?
Not matter?”Well according to that source of not always accurate information, Wikipedia; “in everyday as well as scientific usage, matter generally includes atoms and anything made up of them, and any particles (or combination of particles) that act as if they have both rest mass and volume. However it does not include massless particles such as photons, or other energy phenomena or waves such as light or heat.”
“I think that what Pannekoek was trying to say was that atoms at that point were theoretical non observal concepts inferred from observal phenomenon.”
No, he wasn’t saying that. What he was saying isn’t changed by developments in microscopes.
Following Dietzgen, he’s talking about how in order to make sense of the world and operate within it, we chop up the observable world of phenomena and abstract it into different categories and concepts in our minds. What he said about atoms could be said about anything else.
i.e You don’t “see atoms”, you perceive some phenomena and use the concept of “atom” to make sense of it.
In that quote, Pannekoek isn’t talking about the ancient atomists, but 19th-century ‘physicists’ i.e scientists using the concepts and theories of the physics of their time.
This ‘plenist’ and ‘vacuist’ distinction isn’t one that is relevant to us today. Philosophy and science have moved on.
“Whereas philosophers spoke of the essence of things, physicists spoke of matter, the lasting background behind the changing phenomena. Reality, they say, is matter; the world is the totality of matter. This matter consists of atoms, the invariable ultimate building stones of the universe, that by their various combinations impose the impression of endless change. On the model of surrounding hard objects, as an extension of the visible world of stones, grams, and dust, these still smaller particles were assumed to be the constituents of the entire world, of the fluid water as well as of the formless air. The truth of the atomic theory has stood the test of a century of experience, in an endless number of good explanations and successful predictions. Atoms of course are not observed phenomena themselves: they are inferences of our thinking. As such they share the nature of all products of our thinking their sharp limitation and distinction, their precise equality belongs to their abstract character. As abstractions they express what is general and common in the phenomena, what is necessary for predictions.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1938/lenin/ch03.htm
To link all this law stuff to another thread, Kautsky wrote extensively on this subject too – I’ve yet to read it to see how it compares to the SPGB but English translations are in this book. Unfortunately, it’s not on Marxists.org and the retail price is €153. Pirate copies can be found online on place like Library Genesis I’m told, but we shouldn’t promote that here..
“In a pamphlet entitled Socialism and Law the late Pieter Lawrence argues that the above article, which appeared in the November 2000 edition of the Socialist Standard, does not state the socialist position on law but rather an anarchist utopian position.”
I’m presuming you’re talking about this:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lawrence/2006/6socialism_law.htmBut I can’t see any reference there to what you are talking about…
Contrast that article with this one:
“[… ] a society without any enforceable norms of behaviour would amount to a kind of tyranny of the individual and, as such, would not meet the definition of a civilised society. Socially-useful rules regulating human relationships and our relationship with the broader environment will persist in socialism. Enforceable rules and regulations which prohibit certain conduct towards environmental destruction and such things as violence, rape, drunk driving, child abuse and similar will continue in a socialist society, but its purpose will be to serve the interests of society as a whole, not the capitalist class. Such rules and regulations will be conceived and administered by members of the community as part of its democratic structures and adjudicated by ordinary people, perhaps through an expansion of the jury system, or similar. They will not be punitive, but rather restorative and rehabilitative to facilitate social inclusion.”
Is the position on “law” one that is fully worked out?
“So those in control of the US state machine have decided to put a prominent leader of the opposition on trial on a political charge. This is the sort of thing that authoritarian regimes like Erdogan in Turkey and Putin in Russia do. And the left said Biden was the lesser evil.”
Is Biden in control of the judiciary?
“The young bloggers are commenting on Kautsky’s Chapter IV.”
I guess age is relative. But these young podcasters are all either professional lecturers or post-doc students. Hardly teenagers.
“It’s fascinating to hear how Kautsky’s 19th century social-democratic socialism pleasantly shocks the young commentators, and how much of it rings true in the 21st century to people, presumably schooled to see “socialism” through a Leninist lens.”
Yes it’s interesting to listen to things like this to try and get some kind of gauge of what people “out there” are thinking. Though I think the presumption of learning about Marx through Leninism is increasingly outdated. One of the presenters says an influence is Raymond Geuss, who was a lecturer at Cambridge – His lectures on Marx are actually very good, and are not derived from some kind of Marx = Lenin presumption. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfqdvDnX3lbAGzd770mJOFyRI4Khz50Uq
“So, the party position is we oppose reforms as a means to socialism, but in the meantime we kind of like them?”
Opposition to the idea that you can gradually get to socialism, or ameliorate all the problems of capitalism, through reforms.
Whether or not an individual reform is veiwed favourably, unfavourably, or with indifference, depends on what that specific reform is.
Did Kautsky envision the ‘Zukunftsstaat’ as having some kind of coercive force that stands above society in general? The only way we could answer that is to read the chapter, and then we can know if the translation of staat as ‘commonwealth’ was a liberty or not.
To bring this back to the podcast, rather than Kautsky in general, all of the commentators seemed to be sympathetic to the idea of the revolutionary use of parliament and said it is a view that isn’t expressed very often these days. But what can we conclude from that?
“He unquestionably contributed to the confusion into which the term “socialism” subsequently fell”
But there never has been a universally accepted understanding of “socialism” as a marketless, stateless society etc. Look in the Communist Manifesto. It’s not a fall, more a contestation, which is still ongoing.
It’s true there are many things that Kautsky got wrong, but that doesn’t mean that there is nothing of use in his writings. He was most certainly a strong influence on the people that set up the SPGB, and if you read the various debates he took part in over the issues of spontaneity versus organisation, councils versus parliament (his conclusion was “why not both”), or against the bolsheviks, there are certainly insightful things to learn.
