[LBird]

robbo, you're neither a Socialist/Communist, nor a democrat, nor a Marxist, so why don't you just ignore my posts?You're never going to agree with someone who has a social, historical, class-based, critical-of-bourgeois-ideology-and-science, approach to these political questions.If you dislike my views of workers' democracy as the basis of social production, why not just ignore them, and let the thread die a natural death?You're an individualist, elitist and a liberal, so we don't have any ideological basis for discussion, never mind agreement.Does anyone else have any comments to make, about Marx's views, or about how the democratically-organised proletariat should approach these issues?

[LBird]

Mason refers to the 'Fragment on machines' from the Grundrisse, pp. 690-712Here is an extract:

Marx, Grundrisse, p. 706, wrote:

Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it.

[my bold]https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.htm#p704Here we have it all: Marx's 'idealism-materialism', social knowledge and 'things' produced by humans, by 'theory and practice', in which human purpose and will determine the production (not passive reception of 'nature', as bourgeois science alleges) of 'organic nature', 'under the control of the general intellect' (which, if it doen't mean "democratic control of the production of 'truth' ", doesn't mean anything at all).

[LBird]

Perhaps a history of ‘materialism’ within science will help to explain its emergence, successes and demise.‘Materialism’ (the belief that ideas can be reduced to ‘matter’, and so that ethics plays no part in the production of knowledge) emerged with the establishment of the bourgeoisie as an important productive force in society.This can be dated to the mid-17th century, with the creation of institutions of bourgeois ‘scientific research’ across Europe. Some of these were:Accademia del Cimento, Florence, 1657Royal Society, London, 1662Academie des Sciences, Paris, 1666The key ‘change of concept’ that underwrote these creations was the alteration of the very meaning of ‘science’ itself. Prior to the bourgeois colonisation, science had meant, since ancient times, the building of the good life for all of humanity. This was called by the ancient Greeks eudaimonia. So, the purpose of science was making the world a better place for everybody. As part of this, thinkers just prior to the bourgeoisification of science, like Francis Bacon and Comenius, stressed: (a) the need for education to be available to all, not just to those able to pay; (b) for education to be conducted in vernacular language, not Latin which most people did not understand; and (c) the social and ethical content of human knowledge, rather than a disembodied, non-political understanding of nature.As an example of the new rejection of third belief, that is, the new bourgeois view that ‘politics should be kept out of physics’ we have Robert Hooke’s draft for the Royal Society, which makes this change very clear:

Hooke, quoted in Mendelsohn, p. 18, wrote:

This society will not own any hypothesis, system, or doctrine… (not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar, Rhetorick, or Logick).

This new view of ‘science’ dealt a death blow to the science that regarded knowledge as a human product, inevitably entangled in ethics and politics, and ensured that concepts like the ‘good’ life for the many, and the ‘betterment’ of all, fell from consideration by the new ‘practical men’ of bourgeois science. Clearly, since ‘good’ and ‘better’ are entirely ethical concepts, and thus amenable to social discussion and voting, the bourgeoisie made the democratic control of science an impossibility by the new nature of ‘science’. The myth that science produces ‘objective knowledge’.In a nutshell, the bourgeoisie wanted a science that dealt with ‘things’, hard items, a world reduced to individual components, which could be identified for profit. ‘Matter’ played the same role in science as did the commodity in political economy. Both were outside of ethics or relationships: the atomisation of the material mirrored the atomisation of production (and the atomisation of society itself). From this ideological perspective, neither a rock nor a commodity was ‘political’: they were both amendable to individual understanding (the weighing of a rock in one’s hand under one’s own eyes, as an estimation of ‘what it is’, is matched by the psychological theory of ‘value’, in which the ‘value’ of a commodity is estimated by the individual buyer). Relationships between rocks and the society that tries to understand them, or between commodities and the society that produces them, are ignored.This ‘bourgeois science’ had its greatest successes during the 19th century, with the method of positivism, and Engels was so impressed by the technical advances made by ‘positivist science’, that he either forgot or never understood Marx’s ‘idealism-materialism’, which by its very nature places ideas and matter on the same footing, and thus can allow humans to control their social knowledge, a knowledge that is inherently ethical.With the 20th century, after the deaths of both Marx and Engels, the development of physics started to undermine the ideological basis of physics. We are still living with the discussion of what ‘relativity’ meant, in both narrowly scientific, and wider philosophical, terms. But one thing is clear for workers: Einstein’s theories provided scientific support for Marx’s epistemological views, and completely undermined the positivist science which is the basis of Engels’ views.If one is an Engelsian ‘materialist’, and thinks that our understanding of ‘matter’ is outside of consciousness (that scientific knowledge is ‘True’ eternally, and is not social and changes  over time), and which is fundamentally based upon the bourgeois ideological belief that the purpose of science is to produce ‘objective knowledge’ (ie. physics outside of politics), then one will disagree with Marxian ‘idealism-materialism’, which looks back to pre-bourgeois science and the production of ‘The Good Life’ as the purpose of science.Science is political, the production of knowledge is ideological, and the purpose of science is a human choice, not a self-defined, self-evident practice just ‘done’ by physicists.Religious Materialism denies that science and knowledge have ethical content, a content which can, and must, be voted upon. Truth can be elected, and thus the good life for humans can be established, by active humans employing social theory and practice. That theory and practice must be available to all, so that it must be conducted by everybody, educated to a suitable standard, in a language which all understand, for the purposes of eudaimonia.We must reject the bourgeois science of the priest-physicists, conducted in Latin-maths, with the mythical aim of knowing ‘matter’ outside of social consciousness. We must democratise science, which includes determining what science actually is, how it is conducted, and how we ‘know’ ‘truth’.Further reading: Mendelsohn, Weingart and Whitley (eds.) (1977) The Social Production of Scientific Knowledge Reidelhttp://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/2184192[edit]just another link to a copy of the paperback for just under £16http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/9027707766?SubscriptionId=AKIAIWBZRQIIPF7IKQPA&tag=bookbutleruk-21&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=12734&creativeASIN=9027707766&condition=used

[LBird]

A whole post on the development of the ideology of 'science', and its role in class understanding, and a recommendation for further reading, and you two blather on, as usual, about nothing in particular.I don't know why I bother.

[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

Quote:

You play with your 'logic' and 'words',

Logic you are unable to refute.  To retiterate, if the only way to know the validity of a ruth claim is to vote on it, how can we know the result of the vote?

Is that 'bourgeois logic' or 'True Logic, as given to us by God himself'?Back to the playpen, YMS.

[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

Lbird, have done.  So, bourgeois science throew off the shackles of feudal superstition, and cleared the way for us to understand the world clearly, and it is the job of socialism to put that understanding to use.  Cheers, glad to know I was right all along.

[my bold]At least you now openly admit your reverence for the bourgeoisie and their supposed 'clearing' of the way for us workers (although, as usual, you don't mention classes).So, nothing left to be done, eh?So much for your passive message to workers – but some of us think that the bourgeoisie mystified the way for us to misunderstand the world as opaquely as possible.Take 'political economy' for example – who was that guy who wrote a critique?But that's not your method, is it, YMS? For you, 'the way is clear!'Do as you've been told, YMS, and keep listening to teacher, and don't ask daft questions, like those naughty socialists.

[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

Quote:

Truth can be elected, and thus the good life for humans can be established, by active humans employing social theory and practice.

This is demonstrably untrue.A) A truth claim can only be verified by a vote. The polity votes on the truth claim.C) The result of the vote is itself a truth claim.D) The result of the vote can only be discovered by a further vote.

That's why you're not a Democratic Communist, YMS.Your method cannot provide a 'truth' for the producers.At a guess, you seem to be some sort of post-modernist, focussing on language, rather than the politics of production in a class society.I don't know why you and robbo don't form a new party, dedicated to 'elite-experts not knowing truth'.I can't see its political appeal, to workers in struggle, trying to defeat the bourgeoisie by democratic methods of production, of factories, goods, services and knowledge.But, the 'truth' is, isn't it YMS, is that neither you nor robbo have this concern as a focus of your discussion?You play with your 'logic' and 'words', and robbo can stay on his knees to Hawking, and the workers who wish to understand Democratic Communism, to help them change the world in which they live (both mental and physical), can continue to explore issues of great concern to them.Have a nice day.

[LBird]

Read my last post, YMS.

[LBird]

I'm not allowed to answer you yet again, robbo, on pain of yet another ban.Please stop asking me the same questions (founded upon your wish to deny workers' democracy), all the while continuing to ignore the same answers.This thread is about your Religious Materialism, and I wish to adher to that topic.If you wish to pursue your topic, please read the answers that I've given before, time and time again, on other threads.

[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

Quote:

Here we see how consistent naturalism or humanism is distinct from both idealism and materialism, and constitutes at the same time the unifying truth of both.

Shirley, you should be calling the theory naturalism, or humanism, since those are the terms Chucky expressly uses in the above. In the same text, Chaz also praises Feurbach for :

Quote:

The establishment of true materialism and of real science, by making the social relationship of “man to man” the basic principle of the theory

so instead of idealism-materialism, maybe we should use Marx' own word: true materialism?

So, it's not 'materialism', then?

[LBird]

Vin wrote:

LBird wrote:

Anyway, we seem to be there now!

What happened. You call it ideal-materialism, I call it materialism. You have already admitted that much. Your only bone of contention is that you wish to change the name. So move on.

We can't 'move on', Vin, because all the socialists who think that they're 'materialists' are talking shite, and workers won't fall for it any more. We're discussing this 132 years after Marx's death, and we have less influence in the working class than ever.You naively think that it's just a 'word', but it represents so much more, and until you confront the nonsense of 'materialism' you'll remain in the bourgeois world.What's worse for me, is that I think that you, personally, are a sincere socialist, and I can't understand why you won't listen to other workers, like me, who've sussed the Leninist philosophy.FFS, I've been in the SWP, almost everybody I know has been in one Trot sect or another, and they've all left. Why is the SPGB following a philosophy (Engels' "materialism") that leaves us workers disarmed?

[LBird]

How come the Religious Materialists get to repeatedly post the same old crap, whilst avoiding responding to Marx's words, and so I have to keep responding to their nonsense, and none of them get a warning?Are you an RM-er, mod?

[LBird]

robbo203 wrote:

You do talk a load of tosh at times LBird, as well completely evading my central point…

And talking to you is like trying to reason with a particularly dense boss, robbo.The 'central point' of a thread about so-called 'materialism' is that Marx wasn't a 'materialist', but an 'idealist-materialist', not your individualist incomprehension about workers' power, collective action, and democracy.And, by god, my 'cheap and empty smears about "elite experts" '… you won't have a bad word said about the bosses' ideologists, will you, robbo?Stop tugging your forelock, loser.It's a shame that the thread has taken the usual turn, where the so-called 'materialists', when confronted with texts written by Marx, always resort to personal abuse, about my 'idiotic, kneejerk'… errr…. evidence.And when I return to insults in kind, the dickheads come out of the sun in squadrons, complaining about my behaviour.I can feel yet another ban coming on… to keep the site safe from critical thought, and safe for the Religious Materialists, like robbo, who won't have workers' democracy in truth production.

[LBird]

As long as you're happy with Marx's 'conception' being called, as it should be according to quotes from Marx already given, 'the idealist-materialist conception of history', I'm happy, too.If you're not, and you want to retain Engels' erroneous formulation of 'the materialist conception of history', you'll have to explain to those workers that you're trying to explain socialism to, how ideas/consciousness/thinking/theory etc. is 'matter'.I'm with Marx, who unified the truth of both.

Marx, EPM, CW3, p. 336 wrote:

Here we see how consistent naturalism or humanism is distinct from both idealism and materialism, and constitutes at the same time the unifying truth of both.

[my bold]https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/hegel.htmProduction requires a social 'theory and practice', which develops historically.If we're to explain Marx's theories to other workers, we have to use terms which make sense.'Materialism' does not, and is also incorrect, according to Marx.Perhaps the real problem, robbo, is that you don't want to explain to workers, and you're quite happy with your own 'individual understanding'. That thesis would certainly fit with your refusal to democratise truth production, and your wish to retain 'elite expert' control in science. You could then pose as the 'elite expert' in philosophy and history, and prevent workers from controlling the production of history writing, too.In fact, this sequence is precisely what happens with the Leninist philosophy, of elite 'special consciousness' being embodied in a cadre party, who will 'lead' the dumb workers to socialism. No workers' democracy there, and none with you, either.

[LBird]

Vin wrote:

LBird wrote:

Vin wrote:

LBird wrote:

If one thinks 'material conditions' means human 'ideas and practice' determining, we have no problems.

 

If what I'm saying has clicked, Vin, I'm very happy! 

It is difficult to take you serious, Lbird. I was pointing out that 'ideas' are material conditions 2 years ago and you now finally agree.  Which made me think the penny had finally dropped. Look back. On every thread I have pointed this out to you. I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are not being dihonest and put it down to confusion and a memory laps.  

It's difficult to take serious your refusal to call Marx's views 'idealist-materialist', Vin.Why you accept the centrality of 'ideas', but call it 'materialism', is a two-year mystery, which I still haven't solved.It's not my 'dishonesty or memory lapses', Vin, but your refusal to use the English language in way that workers can understand."Marx was an 'idealist-materialist' " is so much more comprehensible than 'materialism'.Anyway, we seem to be there now!

[Author]

Posts