[LBird]

Vin wrote:

LBird wrote:

No, humans are the creative matter, Vin.

So matter creates. Matter is creative.

No, Vin, rocks do not create.That ideological belief, that you hold, comes from Engels. It is 'materialism', and focuses upon 'matter' (Kline mentions this attention to the noun 'matter', by 'materialists', but not by Marx, in his article – please have a read).Only human consciousness (material consciousness, ideal-material, subject-object, consciousness-being, mind-matter) produces our world, by theory and practice.If you stick with 'matter', 'materialism', Engels, you are losing half of the relationship. And, as Marx reminded us, that loss is 'the active side'.Without it, 'materialists' are forced to hide their 'active side' and pretend 'matter' itself is 'active'. Since it isn't, they have to substitute an 'active' element for humanity (ie., workers), and this 'active (non-democratic) side' is an elite (either social (in a 'conscious' party) or religious (in a god)).'Materialism' is the philosophy of an elite, and hence that of Leninists.

[LBird]

Vin wrote:

LBird wrote:

But humans are not just 'matter': they are 'consciousness',It's Engels who went looking for 'creative matter', which is just another term for a divine creator which is not humanity.

Humans are creative matter

No, humans are the creative matter, Vin.We create our object through social theory and practice. The role of social consciousness is inescapable. Ideas, in a nutshell.

[LBird]

YMS wrote:

…but her position is in fact an entirely idealist one, in as much as she separates the object from the thought.

We're getting down to the epistemological basics, here.Materialism = objectivism (it separates 'material object' from 'conscious subject');Idealism = subjectivism (it separates 'conscious subject' from 'material object');Marx's Idealism-Materialism (unites the 'conscious subject' with 'material object' through social activity ie. 'theory and practice')= subjectivism-objectivism.Engels was a Materialist, because he sought a 'matter' which was outside of consciousness. As do modern physicists, who seek to 'know objectively' the smallest particle. They separate 'being' from 'consciousness'.The simple test of whether any scientist is a bourgeois 'materialist' or a Marxist 'idealist-materialist' is to ask them 'What social consciousness (ie. ideology) do you employ in your relationship with your 'object'?An 'idealist-materialist' will be forthcoming with their subjective position: they will say, for example, 'I'm a Marxist physicist'.A 'materialist' will hide their subjective position, and pretend to be an 'objective individual' simply dealing with 'objective reality', a process that will produce 'objective knowledge' (ie. eternal Truth).

YMS wrote:

The whole point of MKarx is that as we act in the world, we change the world, but it also changes and acts upon us.  We are inextricably parts of a process.

Yes, you're spot on.Since 'we are inextricably', which "inextricably we's" social ideas do you employ during your social process to understand reality, YMS?I'm a Democratic Communist. I'm inextricably a part of a social process of understanding our physical and social world. Unity of subject and object, idealism-materialism, Marx's social theory and practice.

[LBird]

Vin wrote:

LBird wrote:

Lots of things are 'matter', Vin, just as Marx listed in the quote that I gave from Capital, earlier, but they do not do 'theory and practice', that is, idealism-materialism.

Matter does theory and practiceHumans (matter) do theory and practice

But humans are not just 'matter': they are 'consciousness', too. Rocks, which are also 'matter', do not do theory and practice.Marx got his 'active side' from the supposed 'divine conscious creativity' of the idealists, but realised that it's humans that are creative, and that they, not 'god', create their world by social production, by theory and practice.As Marx says, this 'social creativity' (which changes our world and us, and so is historical) is what separates us from the bees, or Dave's 'leafcutter ants', which merely repeat their actions.It's Engels who went looking for 'creative matter', which is just another term for a divine creator which is not humanity.Engels' materialism is of no use for workers looking for a critical and creative response to the 'what exists' of capitalism. If 'matter' determines, 'what exists' determines, capitalism determines… and never us class conscious workers.With materialism, we can't change our world, which was Marx's abiding concern.

[LBird]

Vin wrote:

LBird wrote:

Vin wrote:

LBird wrote:

 Only humans have purpose, not matter.

Humans are matter 

At least you've got half of the way towards Marx's thinking, Vin.

Just pointing out one of many of your contradictions. 

If it's a contradiction, Vin, it's Marx's contradiction, not mine.Lots of things are 'matter', Vin, just as Marx listed in the quote that I gave from Capital, earlier, but they do not do 'theory and practice', that is, idealism-materialism.

[LBird]

Vin wrote:

LBird wrote:

 Only humans have purpose, not matter.

Humans are matter 

At least you've got half of the way towards Marx's thinking, Vin.

[LBird]

Dave B wrote:

To be candid L Bird I am really not interested in your ‘bamboozling product of human knowledge’ and I am not going to buy or vote for it.And intend to exit.

Fine by me, Dave.You haven't mentioned, though, how workers can democratically control their means of production, if they don't have new and critical ideas, to change the existing 'material' world.They can only do this through theory and practice.I've given the quote from Marx in Capital, earlier on the thread. Only humans have purpose, not matter.Whilst workers follow the Engelsian myth of 'Marx's Materialism', they remain disarmed, and at the beck and call of those who do provide their own purpose, from above the workers. A Leninist purpose.

[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

A|Znd thinking is a material process of chemicals and electrons in a brain.  And, of course, since thinking occurs in language which comes from without the individual [ie. it's social], it is cultural material processes that do the thinking.  The whole world is an ongoing process and movement of which we are only part, but the world exists before we do.  Maybe cultural materialism is the term you're looking for…

[my bolds/insert]Given what you've said here, YMS, I'm not sure why 'idealism-materialism' is so repugnant to you.The only reason to retain 'materialism', and yet to reject 'idealism', is unthinking deference to Engels' mischaracterisation of Marx's views.It's a recipe for continued misunderstanding on the part of socialists, continued mystification amongst workers seeking new ideas opposed to capitalism, as to how an 'idea' is made of 'matter' (it isn't, and they won't be taken in for another century), and continued domination of workers by an elite with a supposed 'special consciousness' to which the workers cannot aspire, which prevents the democratic control of the means of production.Although, you and some other posters have made clear enough on many threads, that you will not countenance workers' democracy (in either production, knowledge, science, physics, maths…).Just what 'socialism' consists of, for you elitists, I'm not sure.

[LBird]

Dave B wrote:

So what you are saying is if you consciously plan and implement something you are not a materialist; you are an idealist-materialist. 

If we choose to put it that way, then 'yes'. If we are to combat Engels' misunderstanding of Marx, the misunderstanding of Marx that leads to Leninism, the non-Marx term 'materialist history', then we are compelled to link 'materialism' with 'idealism'.We could choose another term entirely, which doesn't employ either 'materialism' or 'idealism' (Marx suggested 'humanism' or 'naturalism'), but while the anti-democratic term 'materialism' is current, we have to correct it, for interested workers.We must insist on 'theory and practice', which is, as Kline's article suggests when discussing 'economic/material' in Marx, as much about ideas as about the physical.

Dave B wrote:

Feuerbach the first self described anti idealist and materialist wouldn’t like that much I suspect. 

But Marx wasn't a 'Feuerbachian', so that a consideration of Feuerbach's likes and dislikes needn't worry Democratic Communists.

Dave B wrote:

And thus conscious human beings (a tautology for most of us perhaps) can’t be materialists as they are mutually exclusive; unless they have no idea what they are doing or why they are doing it. 

No, they are not 'mutually exclusive': consciousness and being, subject and object, mind and matter, etc., are inescapably interlinked.This is where most physicists are still going astray. No matter what Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Bohm, etc. say when philosophising about this relationship, most day-to-day research ignores this, and continues to just 'do science'. They even ignore Godel's works, and continue to believe that 'nature' is 'mathematical', a habit they picked up from Gallileo. This is the 'common sense' belief even today about 'physics' (for 'common sense', read 'ruling class idea').The bourgeoisie removed 'consciousness' from 'being' (supposedly) in its search for 'Truth'. This is clear from the setting up of the Royal Society in London in the 1660's, and other so-called 'scientific societies' across Europe.Of course, the political effect of this 'separation of being from consciousness' was the separation of property from society, and so the end of any idea of democratic control of production, that is, Communism.We can only control our productive world (material/economic, which is ideal-material, subject-object, etc.) when we realise that we control maths and physics, because humans produce knowledge, and we acknowledge that 'truth' has a history, and different socities, having different purposes (which Marx mentions in Capital), produce socio-historical truth. Thus, we can change our ideal-material world, because we are its creator. We create our own object, for our purposes.Finally, whilst the proletariat is bamboozled by 'materialism' (or physicalism, to use a modern term), it must remain passive, because, as Marx pointed out in the 1840s, the 'active side' of idealism is required to change our world.Any belief that 'science' discovers 'True Knowledge', which, once found, is 'True Forever', an eternal, unchangeable 'Fact', leaves us in the hands of 'a special elite', who have the consciousness required, and who pretend that this consciousness is not available to the 'masses', and so denies democratic control of the means of production.That is, of course, Leninism, and has nothing to do with Marx's project about workers consciously liberating themselves.

[LBird]

northern light wrote:

LBird,regarding the pfd link you mention in #10, it will not open for my computer.

If you do a google search with the terms "Kline" and "Although Marx did not initiate" (ie. the initial phrase from the text I quoted), you should get only two hits, the Kline article, and now this thread.Hope that works for you, nl.

[LBird]

Dave B wrote:

You have lost me now L Bird; are you saying leafcutter ants are idealist materialist because “They produce their food”? 

Have you never heard of 'theory and practice', Dave?Marx's idealism-materialism requires humans to creatively change their environment. That is, they plan and implement. They consciously produce their conditions of life.How you read Marx to be saying that 'leafcutter ants' do this, is quite baffling.

Marx, Capital, Chapter 7, The Labour Process, wrote:

Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htmLeafcutter ants are not mentioned, Dave, only some other insects, which clearly do not use 'idealism-materialism', theory and practice.

[LBird]

Vin wrote:

Nothing in your last post contributes in anyway to the discussionYou have started early. All your discussions end up with you labelling an opponent (religious materialist), setting up a strawman then attacking it.You are also attacking the rest of the forum members as 'religious materialists' in order t elicite a response from themIt's pathetic 

Perhaps pathetic, Vin, but true, too.You'll notice that no-one will attempt to actually read Kline's article, to which I've given a pdf link, and discuss the meaning of Marx's use of 'material'.

[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

Yes, Marx was distinguishing against idealism, the notion that nothing exists except ideas.  He also notes, that to even have ideas, humans have to eat, first, and that their minds come with bodies attached.

Ho, hum.Religious Materialism, once more.I can but try, to encourage reading and critical thinking.For humans, they have to think first, what to eat. They produce their food, even by hunting and gathering, for the social band.The RM-ers would have us believe that the active pies thrust themselves into our passive mouths… after they've consulted with the active rocks first, of course…Marx was an Idealist-Materialist.

[LBird]

Vin wrote:

DJP wrote:

A stupid question with an even more stupid answer from LBird. What was that thing about "you can't blow up a social relationship"?

What an intellegent response. I wont bother answering that one, I will just call it 'stupid' What a dumb response.

The ironic thing is that DJP, whilst pretending to be concerned about 'social relationships', thinks that the mind is not a 'social relationship', but is inside the 'brain'!'Materialists/Physicalists', eh?I can now bet that 'irony' will go over the heads not just of workers, as ALB claims in his elitist materialist mode, but over the heads of the party members who subscribe to 'materialism'.Irony abounds, today!Who'd've thought today's axis would be Vin-LBird! Welcome, comrade, to the dark side!

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

A stupid question with an even more stupid answer from LBird. What was that thing about "you can't blow up a social relationship"?

And a 'material response' from a stupid physicalist who can't 'feel' a joke.Grow up.

[Author]

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