LBird
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LBird, you once staked your political credibility upon absolute democracy.
The SPGB claimed to do this, too, which is what attracted me to the SPGB initially.
But… it turned out that the SPGB are undemocratic ‘materialists’, who won’t have the proletariat determining what their ‘reality’ is.
The SPGB believes in an elite, who will determine ‘reality’, a ‘reality’ which is materially apparent to that elite, but not to the masses, who must simply passively follow those like twc, who ‘know better’.
Is twc a follower of Mao, in beliefs and method? Yes, if his posts are to be believed.
<strong class=”d4pbbc-bold”>From Yan’an to the Fifth Plenum: the CPC’s commitment to self-reform
….That should reassure the masses.
That’s the political question that I’m asking – does it ‘reassure the masses’?
@LBird,
When Richard III became king he set about decrying abuse of justice and calling for fair courts … yet before he was king, he was as capable as any feudal magnet of engaging in lawfare to hoover up manorial estates and revenues.The political question is, though, did he set up a justice system that was widely recognised as ‘fair courts’ for the majority of people regarding laws that most people would have been involved in going to court for, in defence of their own judicial interests, like theft and murder? Obviously leaving aside the issue of what the minority of great landowners also used the justice system for, ie. their own class interests.
If a ‘fair court’ system was set up, surely this was a positive progression for the majority on an earlier lawless society?
Thanks to those comrades who expressed their caring for my medical trauma!
Regarding China, its party, and its democracy, what do other posters think of this:
From Yan’an to the Fifth Plenum: the CPC’s commitment to self-reform
Is it just ruling class bluff, or does the CCP widely believe this?
Good to hear from you L Bird
Haven’t heard from you for a while, I hope life is treating you as well as it can.
Well, apart from an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest two months ago (which apparently less than 10% survive), and having my life saved by my wife’s CPR, yeah, life is treating me as well as it can!
GrandpaGB, I’d be interested to read your comments about this thread:
TomandBob wrote: “…my problem with so called ‘socialists’ is that they seem to want to temper societal aspirations…”
Socialists argue that ‘society’ should ‘temper’, through democratic means.
If you’re arguing that each ‘I’ should ‘temper’, through individual means, then we have a difference of opinion, not least about ‘aspirations’ and their origin and realisation.
Perhaps this is our point of difference: capitalist ideology stresses ‘individual’ (thus undemocratic) power, whereas socialist ideology stresses ‘social’ (thus democratic) power.TomandBob wrote: “…to share out the misery”
Why would socialists share out ‘misery’ rather than the ‘fruits of their own production’? Where does this ‘misery’ come from, is it a ‘natural’ state of humanity (as some religions would argue)?
TomandBob wrote: “[What] I want or need for a happy life may be different to you and this is where conflict may arise in a “socialist” society.”
Yes, conflicts will arise, and will be solved by discussion and voting. If you want a society where some individuals have the power to override the majority’s wishes and to damage other individuals’ wants or needs ‘for a happy life’, then you’ll disagree with socialists.
TomandBob wrote: “No. I don’t think I’ll bother. Thanks”
TomandBob, what’s the point of coming to a Socialist site, when you’ve no real interest in Socialism?
If you fundamentally believe that Capitalism is a better form of society, why ask questions which will get answers that you dislike?
Most people start to ask questions about Socialism precisely because they’ve already become disenchanted with Capitalism through their own experience, so that their ‘beliefs’ are already being undermined.
I’m no fan of twc (in fact, I consistently argue with them), but they’ve done a good job of challenging your ‘beliefs’ about Capitalism, of which you’ve made no attempt to justify.
If you’ve just come to ‘win an argument’ with Socialists, you’ll always ‘win’ it, given your pre-existing ‘beliefs’.
However, if I’m wrong, and you do have some disagreements with Capitalism, you should express them, and allow argument to develop those disagreements, and to pose some alternatives.
BTW, the materialist notion of ‘underlying’ regularities has been around since the Ancient Greeks, with their concept of ‘hupokeimenon’, which literally means ‘underlying’.
But neither any Greek nor modern ever explained how we ordinary people could access this ‘underlying’. It clearly remained a task for a ‘special minority’, like Plato.
Roberto wrote: “Your reflection raises a deep philosophical issue that has existed inside Marxist debates for more than a century: whether concepts like value, nature, and even science should be understood primarily as discoveries about an independent reality or as products of human social activity. ” [my bold]
Yeah, and the fact that Marx focussed upon ‘production’, which produces “products of human social activity”, suggests he was of the latter persuasion.
Marx’s politics and philosophy was focussed on human creative activity, and he rejected both ‘idealism’ (which focussed on ‘divine creative activity’) and ‘materialism’ (which focussed on ‘human passive experience’). Marx unified the two into ‘idealism-materialism’ (rejecting both divine creativity and human passivity). That’s why his method is ‘theory and practice’ (and not ‘practice and theory’, as some would have it).But the key here is understanding what ‘an independent reality’ actually means. I’m inclined to think that ‘materialists’ think it means ‘outside of an individual’s head/mind/brain’. But no Marxist would argue that that is untrue: obviously, ‘external’ to its producer is exactly what a product is.
But if ‘an independent reality’ means an externality that has no relationship to an active subject, how would the subject know this ‘independent reality’?
Clearly, any ‘external world’, ‘natural world’, ‘material reality’ that we humans know, is a unified product of our theory and practice, our active engagement with our own reality. That’s why WE CAN CHANGE ‘it’.
Anything ‘independent’ of humans can’t be known. So, our ‘material reality’ is our active product, and has a social and historical dimension.
Roberto wrote: “Confusing the two risks either scientism (rule by experts) or voluntarism (the belief reality bends to democratic will).”
But this is exactly what Marx predicted that ‘materialists’ would argue. If neither ‘experts’ nor ‘the social producers’ will control ‘science’, who will? It will lead back to an unelected ‘special elite’, as Marx predicted. ‘Materialists’ have a hidden distain for the majority, if the ‘materialists’ believe that most humans in a democratic socialist society would ‘vote for carpets to fly’.
Marxists don’t argue that democratic control of our science means a belief in ‘anything goes, if it’s voted for’, but that the social producers must democratically control their production of their own world, and democratically control its own experts, universities, research, funding, and methods.
The reason that this ‘deep philosophical issue’ continues to ‘exist inside Marxist debates’ is that it reveals the true nature of its competing adherents’ views about ‘democracy’, and views about the potential for a wider humanity.
‘Materialism’ requires a special elite, and that ‘the common masses’ keep their sticky little fingers off the ‘pristine bourgeois science’ of an elite who claim that they know better.
That’s why Lenin was a ‘materialist’, who didn’t understand ‘value’, which is an ‘ideal-material’ concept and power.
Roberto wrote: “When LBird writes, “Where that leaves ‘value’, I’m not sure,” the uncertainty may arise from treating value as something that must either be objectively “out there” in the world or else merely subjective opinion. But Marx’s concept of value does not fit comfortably into that dichotomy.”
Yeah, Marx is very clear in Capital that ‘value’ does not contain ‘matter’. Marx, as you say, does not use the supposed opposition of ‘material’ versus ‘ideal’, but focusses upon ‘social production’ which requires both objects and ideas, both of which are our own products. There is no ‘matter’ out there which we can’t know, and there is no ‘conscious creator’ of our natural world.
As I’ve argued before, Marx is an ‘idealist-materialist’, to use those terms, which is better expressed as a ‘social productionist’. All of his key theoretical concepts involve ‘production’, not ‘matter’: mode of production, means of production, forces of production. We are the active producing agent in our world, both natural and social.
I suspect this next is our main bone of contention.
Roberto wrote “However, the claim that “we make our own laws, whether ethical or physical” needs some qualification. We certainly make our social laws — institutions, norms, economic structures — and therefore we can change them. But physical laws are not of the same order. Gravity does not disappear because we vote against it. What we can change is how we understand and apply physical laws through science and technology.”
No, our ‘physical laws’ are just the same as our ‘social laws’: we socially produce both, historically have changed both, and in the future, in a democratic communist society, need to be able to democratically change all of our socially produced laws. Any study of ‘science’ shows that it has a history, often changes, and has always been controlled by a self-selecting elite (who serve the ruling class, whatever their own supposed individual intentions).
As often happens, opponents of Marx’s democratic social productionism revert to a ‘materialism’ that Marx opposed, and which Marx warned, in his Theses on Feuerbach, would lead to an elite in control of this ‘materialism’, as society was separated into two halves, those who have to remain passive in the face of ‘The Physical’ (the majority), and those, a small elite, who have a special consciousness which allows them to change the laws of science.
In your example, ‘gravity’ compels all – so why do we need ‘science’ to understand ‘gravity’? The vast majority would vote to agree that jumping off a ten storey building would prove to be painful for the jumper. So much for the ‘physical’, which any individual can understand.
But our problem is that ‘gravity’ (ie, the idea, the concept) is a social product, which can be changed. The explanation of why a body falls on Earth could be changed (and the history of science suggests that it probably will in the future), and the name that we give to our experience of falling could change, too. It might not always be called ‘gravity’, with the underlying explanation of ‘why’ we fall.
Roberto wrote: “Marx’s value theory, then, sits at the intersection of structure and agency. It describes a social law that we ourselves produce but which, under capitalism, operates behind our backs and beyond our conscious control. The ethical impulse arises precisely from recognizing that this “law” is neither eternal nor natural, but a historically specific way of organizing social life — one that can, in principle, be superseded.”
I’ll finish on a point of complete agreement, regarding ‘value’. But we don’t need the concept of ‘material’ to have this agreement.
LBird wrote: “Where that leaves ‘value’, I’m not sure.”
Perhaps to clarify, I think Marx’s theories, including ‘value’, have an inescapable ethical dimension.
Furthermore, I think that many of the discussions about ‘value’ are an erroneous attempt to prove the ‘objectivity’ (or, ‘material reality’) of Marx’s ‘value’.
To me, ‘value’ is a human, social, historical, changeable, product, and we can choose not to produce it, if we want to.
We make our own laws, whether ethical or physical. And we can change them.
Roberto wrote: “The debate, therefore, is not merely normative (what is more just), but categorical: is the market a neutral tool that can simply be democratized, or is it a social form that structures behavior and relations independently of who formally owns productive units?
That is where the core disagreement lies.”But if production is democratised, why would distribution remain by a market? Who argues for this, and why?
If distribution is also democratised, doesn’t that remove ‘individual choice’, which is what I suspect is behind the argument in favour of ‘market socialism’. That is, the belief that ‘individual choice’ is the highest ethical/normative/moral/political standard.
It seems to me that democracy does imply the weakening of ‘individual choice’, and I’m in favour of ‘democratic production’.
That is, ‘social choice’, not ‘individual choice’. Collective consumption, not ‘individual consumption’.
Where that leaves ‘value’, I’m not sure.
ALB wrote: “This suggests that the way to end this is for workers to have democratic control over what they produce. It provides a theoretical justification for “workers control” — but of what? Of what is produced for sale. The way out is workers’ cooperatives producing for a market not socialism.”
But couldn’t ‘democratic control over what they produce’ also imply ‘and what they consume/distribute’, and no market sale?
Or does Cohen specifically exclude ‘distribution’ from ‘democratic control’, and specifically argue for ‘market distribution’ and workers’ cooperatives?
