[DJP]

I think you're mistaken. Marx was clearly a goatist, that is he thought that everything is a goat. I have used the Microsoft Word autocorrect feature to correct the entire Marx and Engles collected works so now every reference to "material" and "materialism" has been changed to "goat" and "goatism" respectivly.More on goatism can be found here:https://philosophynow.org/issues/71/Everything_is_a_Goat

[DJP]

This could have been written in responce to Brand and his "spiritual" revolution:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1980s/1989/no-1020-august-1989/personal-growth-or-social-revolution

[DJP]

??? Did you even read the article?

[DJP]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

Lets be very clear…the Enclosure Acts deprived the rural workers of a livlihood and drove them to seek work in the new factory sustem in the  growing urban centres.

It's not quite that simple. Yes those things did happen but that is not till quite late on and wasn't the only process whereby the formation of capitalism took place, eclosure laws where pretty much one of the last pieces of the jigsaw. See my article here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2011/no-1284-august-2011/rise-capitalism

[DJP]

SocialistPunk wrote:

As I'm not the one claiming our class conceived the "work ethic",  it's up to YMS to present the evidence. But I'll log it in my books to read list.

FWIW no-one's obliged to spoon feed you. If you really are interested in these things you should take the time to learn about it yourself. The origins of capitalism where not some kind of clever con trick inserted by a clever elite from the outside but the result of a process of which the to-be working class did play an active role….

[DJP]

SocialistPunk wrote:

I still need proof of the "work ethic"being a concept of our class and not as my socialist education taught me, before I ditch it. If shown the error of my thinking I will amend it accordingly.

If you're feeling brave try reading EP Thompson "The Making of the English Working Class" or something like that…

[DJP]

ALB wrote:

Black Blob anarchists reject Brand here:http://blackrobinanarchy.blogspot.nl/2014/10/russell-brand-anarchist-critique-of-his.html

I think this guy got "Anarchist" and "Ninja" mixed up.

[DJP]

LBird wrote:

I think that I've done my best to show why 'materialism' can't provide a critical basis

All you've done is shown that you don't really get what "materialism" means.Perhaps this will help…

Galen Strawson – Real Materialism wrote:

Realistic materialists—realistic anybodys—must grant that experiential phenomena are real, concrete phenomena, for nothing in this life is more certain. They must therefore hold that they are physical phenomena. It may sound odd to use the word ‘concrete’ to characterize the qualitative character of experiences of colour, gusts of depression, thoughts about diophantine equations, and so on, but it isn't, because ‘concrete’ simply means ‘not abstract’. For most purposes one may take ‘concrete’ to be coextensive with ‘possessed of spatiotemporal existence’, although this will be directly question‐ begging in some contexts.  It may also sound odd to use ‘physical’ to characterize mental phenomena like experiential phenomena: many materialists talk about the mental and the physical as if they were opposed categories. But this, on their own view, is like talking about cows and animals as if they were opposed categories. For every concrete phenomenon in the universe is physical, according to materialists. So all mental phenomena, including experiential phenomena, are physical phenomena, according to materialists: just as all cows are animals. So what are materialists doing when they talk, as they so often do, as if the mental and the physical were entirely different? What they may mean to do is to distinguish, within the realm of the physical, which is the only realm there is, according to them, between the mental and the non‐mental, or between the experiential and the non‐ experiential; to distinguish, that is, between mental (or experiential) features of the physical, and non‐mental (or non‐experiential) features of the physical[…]Materialism, then, is the view that every real concrete phenomenon is physical in every respect, but a little more needs to be said, for experiential phenomena— together with the subject of experience, assuming that that is something extra—are the only real, concrete phenomena that we can know with certainty to exist, and as it stands this definition of materialism doesn't even rule out idealism—the view that mental phenomena are the only real phenomena and have no non‐mental being— from qualifying as a form of materialism! Now there is a sense in which this consequence of the definition is salutary (see e.g. §§14–15 below), but it would none the less be silly to call an idealist view ‘materialism’. Russell is right to say that ‘the truth about physical objects must be strange’, but it is reasonable to take materialism to be committed to the existence of non‐experiential being in the universe, in addition to experiential being, and I shall do so in what follows.

  

[DJP]

I wonder if LBird thinks that 'cows' and 'animals' are opposing catergories?FWIW worth this is the same mistake he is making in his understanding of "material" and "mental" (or perhaps better put as experiencial)..

[DJP]

"Externalities" are costs / benefits that are not included in the price of a good or service.It is precisily the type of information above that is not included in the pricing mechanism.Productive decisions in socialism would not be made by isolated "consumers" choosing products as the appear at the end of the production process. Everyone would both a producer and consumer and directly involved in the productive process in one way or another, remember "producers" and also "consumers".

[DJP]

Ah sorry I see the confusion. You're talking about the Yahoo group not this web forum. Unfortunately I can't help you. Try contacting the forum moderator or yahoo…

[DJP]

Just typing something into the comment box should work. Regardless of if you pastse or not. If you have the time and date of the failed posts I could look in the server log. If not we'll just have to put it down to the gremlins.

[DJP]

Don't know. Which thread have you been trying and what have you been doing?

[DJP]

amen to the above

[DJP]

ALB wrote:

By coincidence the comrade concerned just rang. He remembers the incident and says that he called Walford an 'empirical reductionist' who couldn't see beyond what existed.

Sounds like a familiar accusation 

[Author]

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