L.B. Neill
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It is an interesting final remark upon my stance- one which seems to find no rest.
But “educate oneself about history, society, science, politics, philosophy…” seems to sit well with me. What a similarity we can share. But I put it in the affirmative: and not bad for a thoughtless rock am I! Don’ answer that!
We can leave it there, and thankyou, I appreciate your views and your debate… I am still on a learning curve, and hope it continues.
LB
Oh LBird,
Both the mental and the material matter. The terms ‘matter’ (what counts for something) and ‘matter’ (a tangible substance, even if we can’t see it) are linguistic units. If we keep collapsing their significance- and reducing them into even small, less able to sign parts- the debate will find no closure, and all becomes a relativism “saying A is as good as B is as good as .C”
We are all in it together, working it out, and making it count for something.
Material and mental need each other. If I think then my neurons fire: a mental material process. I am able to dance because I am physical, and I dance as a dancer. I am a poor dancer- I dance like Mr Bean, poorly.
We are not passive elements- or why seek to educate that we can consciously change the mode of production? The base was created, and yes, the base can be changed.
I hope my part in this debate was helpful- you know, as ALB may have clarified:
“In section 3 of Volume I of Capital, Marx says that a commodity has two forms: “a physical or natural form, and a value form” and goes on:
”The value of commodities is the very opposite of the coarse materiality of their substance, not an atom of matter enters into its composition. Turn and examine a single commodity, by itself, as we will, yet in so far as it remains an object of value, it seems impossible to grasp it. If, however, we bear in mind that the value of commodities has a purely social reality and that they acquire this reality only in so far as they are expressions or embodiments of one identical social substance, viz., human labour, it follows as a matter of course, that value can only manifest itself in the social relation of commodity to commodity”
So. Marx does indeed say that value has a “purely social reality” in that it is an expression of a non-physical social relation. But this not mean that its magnitude is purely arbitrary and can be changed by a vote or some other act of collective will. It depends, as he says, on the amount of socially necessary labour that has been embodied in it.
Marxian economics certainly does not hold that the value of a commodity depends on what people collectively decide it is (though there is a school of capitalist economic theory that does hold that view).
And it certainly does mean that the other form of a commodity — its “physical or natural form” — also has a “purely social reality” and so even less that the “matter” (Marx’s term) which forms its substance can be decided or changed by a vote.”
I think he puts it well- or puts it in a way that is helpful to me.
Metaphors are funny things- and encourage memory and thought- and yet might differ depending on who uses them and with what intention.
I think along the way the argument dived into so much, and with so little room… but I am glad to have debated with you , and the others. We learn from it.
Be well
LB,
Just wanted to say to all,
Thanks for the challenge- I discovered so much and about how I am tracking and developing in Socialist thought. Even when the challenge gets near on personal- it is ideas being wrestled- and so much pops up!
I am about to embark on reading Capital with a more astute reading posture … I will post if I run in to any complexes…
🙂 thanks
LB- no need to use the Neill- sounds formal.
LBird,
Yes it certainly provided for debate- it is important to any healthy democratic society.
When I discuss social science and its usefulness- it is to communicate how important it can be to a healthy social formation (people and persons).
Norman Fairclouth is a useful example of how Marxism and social science open up the field of discourse in helping professions. He founded a particular methods, Critical Discourse, that are significantly utilised in social work, counselling and social research. You can trace the development of his ideas back to to some of Foucault, and yet further back (using the bibliography or references in each test), and at many points arrive to Marx, leading to the development of CDA (Critical Discourse Analysis). You see, traces of Marx find their way into helping profession journals often- if he is not referenced directly, then indirectly through more recent critiques.
Disciplines do form specialised ways of working, and borrow from each other too.
Mental and the material is like saying: how do we tell the dancer from the dance. Matter will exist even if we fail to even see it- but when we do see it and cognise it, we develop schemas, thoughts and representations about it. Yes we socially construct democracy, and we are socially informed by it through our community. It is a sociopolitical activity- it is socially mediated by a community- otherwise we would not be able to think in its terms.
And that is the best I can do early in the morning on the other side of the globe- less my brain quits its job and leaves me stranded.
Stay safe,
Thanks ALB
Foucault can be difficult- some ideas useful: some not!
It has a series of methods or use that can shed light on researching meaning making practices in a culturally sensitive way and how this is lived out in practice- useful for assessing social problems/solutions.
But may not be useful in astrophysics- best left to the hard sciences and the astrophysicists and astronomers- I do not think democracy can decide on the physical forces of an event horizon: but physicists can formulate their discoveries (postulations) for us to consider.
🙂
Thanks LBird,
“What are your criteria for picking up any ‘tool’, as opposed to any other ‘tool’?”
I can give you one example of using structural and poststructural ideas- for fear of turning this into an autobiography.
Theory and practice are ‘tools’ to be put to use. When I say I use these as a skill- it is in the field of counselling. using Social constructive/construction knowledge and practice (Third wave CBT, Discourse theory, anti-oppressive Practice [social sector centred] and Narrative Theory). You might say I use integrative tools too encompassing Jung, and Lacan… so very broad and can’t be summerised in a post. It would be better for me to say using the best practice intervention that is evidenced based and has efficacy that has been proven (modern and postmodern)
I use these ‘tools’ as it fits with my identity as a helper, alleviating cognitive and emotional distress.
One example should suffice. Marx has informed so much thinking in social research and practice- and it is what draws me here, that we can consciously change the mode of production and socialism would reduce many forms of suffering in today’s jurisdictions…
It is an example you ask for. And hope my tired attempts help (it has been a long year).
Stay safe
LB
ALB
“That’s interesting (and reassuring — at least you’ve got your feet in the ground !). So some actually do see “matter” as a human creation. Do you know which one of them came up with the idea that the Sun moved round the Earth when that was the common view?”
If I had read that as a fundamental requirement to read postmodernism- I would have smiled and ran back to modernism.
I think, I read post structural thought mostly in the field of social science- and challenging ‘taken for granted ideas’: this is the way things are- and accept it. It is always good to challenge oppressive practices- and work anti-oppressively.
The are always divisions in any ‘movement’- and poststructuralism is a field that seems in a flux. Matter matters. What we do with it structures our thinking about it.
My feet are firmly on the ground, ALB!
There are some quirky ideas in any mode of thought- and there are some that would think we created existence out of our own thinking- but I think they have fell into their own thoughts without consulting any external reference and pass pataphysics off as science… Its fine, they just need to openly declare it- would hate to stub my toe on something that I was told was ethereal!
Oh, must have missed that book on poststructural thought- the Earth doth Stand Still- and the Sun Moves ‘Round it!
LB 🙂
LBird,
I appreciate your debate, and your challenges.
I said I use post modern theory- I did not say I am form my World View by it- they are just tools.
Any construction or science needs many informative disciplines- a scientist, a teacher, a mechanic, et al… can read Marx but they are also informed by many influences.
Yes it is good to expose pre-existing assumptions. Marxist ideas also compliment so many other methods, and helped shape them…
Be well,
LB
LBird,
You mention democracy- and yet a loop- you dismiss twc as being late to the discussion.
I use post structural ideas- but yet matter must sign. It is known through observation that the Earth goes around the Sun- and all our thinking will not change that.
In the past I had been accused of deconstructing an event, and just leaving it there. But I know deconstruction is a tool that then leads to reconstructing something (rather than nothing- like a manifesto that has no purpose). Not all post moderns see matter as immaterial- as I said, I can stub my toe on it: and it hurts.
Best to occupy subject positions that make room to all the narratives, and then decide.
LBird you will know, though it is an assumption to knowledge, that there are many meaning making practices out there (read some Geertz); and even poststructuralists are cautious about making matter into a relativism- Derrida concluded that society needs a quasi- transcendental signifier. Matter is bound to a signifier we produce (less it goes undifferentiated- but it is still there), and we can use whatever term- but it is still material and subject to a scientific narrative, and its field of discourse…
twc raised interesting points- and not late at all- and I notice you use signifiers to label him according to your choosing. Why not ask him and explore it!
Be kind when you debate, stay safe..
Before, during and after the Tudor era- the use of power has continuities, and traces: a genealogy of its own parentage- and it sires the ownership and accumulation of wealth, legitimizing its own authority. Call it feudalist, call it the Rule of the Rump, call it the early modern state.
The ethical differentiation of Western social formations into ‘greater’ and ‘lesser’ beings has been around a long time, and the modern period was contingent on those traces and powerful apex elites (be it royal or oligarch, or capital) having to ‘let in some, and not let in the many to its structural and institutional power.
I have always observed in social, economic and political power the same concentration of power into a ruling few.
The current use of ‘unities of discourse’ between the liberal and the conservative owes its traces back to the ‘letting in some’ to its power club. They are troublesome siblings who quarrel over their possessions- and unite if their shoeless little cousins (bonded and enslaved) even dare call on the scientific change that lay ahead- ending the traces of this division of greater: lessor beings and the hoarding of ‘things’.
I know I have deviated from a historiography on the Tudor: but that genealogy of possession and power in the few- and the unity of discourse in its modern formation is a continuity (but with newer agents or political actors)- it has a threshold and it has a point of rupture. It seems a Tudor Revolution just means more of the same- but more centralised.
Sorry for being a little vague,
LB
“Put simply ‘one’ only ‘knows matter’, because ‘one’ has been taught to ‘know matter’.”
And that is the same statement I had made supporting an idea.
I must have a ‘logical loop’ in my argument- to make a statement and then counter it.
“We can change this teaching, and introduce theories and concepts suitable for the building of a democratic socialist society, where humanity as a whole determines its own ‘reality’.”
And we can change it. We can engage in a rhetor and never find any closure-
But here is one take:
We are social beings. We socially construct our mental/material world. We put that construct into practice. Call it social constructivism/ social constructionism.
You see, the thing is, I am not materialist (dividing the world into ethical divisions of reality)- what you see is reality. Or worse: what you see is my reality, and no other may exist.
There are some articles by Geertz on the fact the working class can construct variations of reality- and independent of the ruling elite. See Ideology, an old text- but still full of promise.
So it is matter for me- as I have a collective who concurs. But now and then I might disagree. And go against it- but it is not anti-matter!
The best matter unites us. The worst divides us.
You see LBird, I agree with you- we are taught to know matter- I could go all social science from here- but will temper it.
My earlier claims are out of context in your last comment. Logical loops aside.
“The key political question is: ‘who (or what) has the power to determine ‘matter’?‘”
And this is the pivotal point LBird. Those who are in control often determine it.
Look, I know matter is matter. The thing is, the material matter of our world is so subject to change, and change according to our current understanding. And I share the idea it is socio-historical, and therefore in a flux- but an observed flux, and a flux that can be managed.
The subject is not an ‘active individual’ in and of itself. The idea I can feel pain while stubbing my toe on matter is an act of biology- but my response to it is a social construct.
A rock does not tell me it is a rock- my socially informed construct tells me it is a rock.
When I am oppressed- I know it- not that the wage slave job tells me so- but I consciously cognise it as so.
It might sound odd, or how I explain is odd, but I am agreeing with you, and yet I know there is so much data waiting to come to light around this matter.
ALB- I smiled at your Sun around the Earth- Not a Copernicus revolution after all…
Stay safe
LB
Sorry ALB, I am a bit of a post modern- so it makes me premodern and modern.
I think debate can be limited and confined by the current time- but- if we dare debate outside of it so much more is possible.
I am a paradox ALB: of faith, of postmodern, of science… of socialism.
Never ask a post modern that… way too fragmented, and way too sure.
The best answer I can give is the simplest- I share your concerns, I am but a small voice, but I will say that little voice is for socialism- no matter the ‘modern’ prefix or suffix.
We need to keep the dialogue open.
LB
Thought I would post this vid. There has been so much the mind and body can handle in 2020. Yes it is silly. But I had the first smile in a long while- I had to attend zoom meetings today with a grin because of this vid111 And try to keep a serious demeanor.
LBird and ALB,
If the forum failed to debate a broad range of ideas- we are in trouble!
The modernist thinkers had been accused of engaging in mimetic echoes- nodding approvals to one another as if a mirror confined their own image or that camera obscura took real photos!
I would prefer a parrot, looking at me square on, challenged my statement- or else it all becomes… immaterial!
Matter has no voice until our thinking gives it so… and yet… it still hurts when you stub your toe on it.
Keep the debate active!!!
LB
