[LBird]

Yeah, evil 'Idealism', the culprit once again.In truth, though, and to be fair to you, Vin, the arguments that you're making are the arguments of (so-called) 'Marxism'.The real revelatory statement, which is nothing to do with Marx, and many thinkers since at least the 1920s have said prevents socialism, because it claims that something other than workers' critical thinking can build socialism, is:

Vin wrote:

Material conditions should guide the working class…

No matter how often workers ask 'what determines our knowledge of what 'material conditions' are?', they can't get an answer. The 'materialists' claim that the 'material conditions' are self-explanatory, and that mere observation and experience of them by workers will suffice, but this is untrue. 'Ideas' determine 'experience' (ie. 'theory and practice'), as science has known for years since Einstein, and as Marx pointed out in Capital, prior to building, the thing to be built must exist in our ideas.How 'material conditions' guide is never explained. The proper method of Marx is to criticise the existing 'material conditions'. So, far from 'guiding', they are to be 'guided' by active, thinking, critical humans, who employ 'ideas' to shape their 'practice'.

Marx, Capital, wrote:

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.

[my bold]https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htmOn your terms, Vin, Marx was an 'Idealist'. Must be a shock to you, all this 'imagination' stuff, 'before' and 'already existing' our 'material conditions'.Good luck to being lead by the 'mud pies' and 'rocks'. Sorry, 'guided'.My apologies, I won't be joining you on that journey. 'And I'm not the only one…'

[LBird]

So much for my hoping that analogies will explain the mysteries of Marx.YMS, all I can say about your misreading of the analogy of single brick, brick-in-a-wall, wall and dog protection, is that it is consistent with the CR concepts of a component, a component in a structure, structure and emergent property.I think that it helps explain use-value, exchange-value, capitalism and value.If it doesn't for you, that's sad, but hopefully it will help some other comrades less able than you (like me) to get a handle on Marx's poorly explained theories in Capital.Whilst comrades insist that links to texts like 'Value, Price and Profit', or, god forbid, the first three chapters of Capital itself, are sufficient as explanatory aids for workers, I think that the audience for Marx's ideas will continue to shrink.As for the notion that "workers' struggle" in itself will lead to 'consciousness', I think that's not true, and I also think that the SPGB's own strategy actually undermines that belief.It pains me to realise that cult-like behaviour includes reference to texts which are not understandable by the laity. To be clear here, I'm not referring to the SPGB alone, but to what I've started to come to see 'Marxism' in a living sense as.Of course, I  simply don't regard much of today's 'Marxism' as much to do with Marx's ideas, when I've read them for myself.I'm sure that the proponents of 'Marxism' (who I regard as 'Engelsist') will disagree with me, and they're the ones in the so-called "workers' organisations", whereas I'm not any longer, so their views will be the ones taken forward as 'Marxism'.Perhaps it's time to me to face up to the truth, that I really don't have much in common with the SWP, ICC, LibCom or the SPGB, and stop pestering them.

[LBird]

Vin wrote:

LBird wrote:

And because you can't have a detailed discussion, because you don't know the academic basis of your arguments, you turn to personal abuse of me.

 

LBird wrote:

It'd probably be more cost-effective for them to give you five hundred quid every week, and send you to the pub.At least then you wouldn't actually be alienating any workers reading these threads, and ensuring that the SPGB remains marginal.

It's like having my own personal stalker.Do I fascinate you so much, Vin?

[LBird]

Vin wrote:

LBird wrote:

I'd rather be unable to grasp but trying to help, than sniggering at 'workers who don't grasp the meaning'. How hilarious.The turn this thread has taken, given the efforts I've made, is illustrative of why the SPGB has no influence amongst workers.

 I am not sniggering at any old worker but one that claims to be the only communist in the village and the only communist capable of explaing exchange value to the workers 

At least you're laughing, Vin.Makes it worthwhile the SPGB having a site just for that, eh?It'd probably be more cost-effective for them to give you five hundred quid every week, and send you to the pub.At least then you wouldn't actually be alienating any workers reading these threads, and ensuring that the SPGB remains marginal.

[LBird]

Vin wrote:

Lol. I agree. He doesn't grasp the meaning of exchange value.

And yet you apparently do 'grasp the meaning', but won't share it with workers.I'd rather be unable to grasp but trying to help, than sniggering at 'workers who don't grasp the meaning'. How hilarious.The turn this thread has taken, given the efforts I've made, is illustrative of why the SPGB has no influence amongst workers.

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

LBird wrote:

A single brick (as a unstructured component) = a use-value,A brick in a wall (as a part of a structure) = an exchange-value,Dog protection (an emergent property of a wall) = value.Or,A tin of beans for eating = a use-valueA tin of beans for sale as a commodity (the structure of capitalism) = an exchange-valueThe emergent causal power of many commodities to destroy human relationships = value.

Kind of reads like a failed answer to a "what is value, exchange value and use value" exam.I suggest you read those first three chapters again…

Yes, so-called 'experts' like you have been recommending just that, for 100 years, and no workers are listening anymore. It's a failed method.Still, as long as you can laugh at someone at least making an attempt, then that justifies your existence as a 'socialist', eh?Thanks for your help, DJP, the workers salute you.

[LBird]

YMS wrote:

I have a mild disagreement that the value isn't the relationship but is the outward sign of inward relationship, but that is not to say that saying value is a relationship is wrong, but capable of furtehr refinement.

I’m inclined to regard ‘exchange-value’ as the position in a social relationship, and ‘value’ as the emergent property, the ‘social acid’ that destroys human relationships.To use an analogy that I’ve used before,A single brick (as a unstructured component) = a use-value,A brick in a wall (as a part of a structure) = an exchange-value,Dog protection (an emergent property of a wall) = value.Or,A tin of beans for eating = a use-valueA tin of beans for sale as a commodity (the structure of capitalism) = an exchange-valueThe emergent causal power of many commodities to destroy human relationships = value.These sorts of analogies are endless, and can help get workers into the mindset of regarding the world as composed of components, which put together in certain relationships form structures, and which structures produce emergent properties.Again, components like cogs, springs, dials, hands and a case, put together properly by a watchmaker, produce a watch, which has the power to tell us the time.And structures can act as components for higher level structures, so that a wall (composed of bricks) structured properly with other walls can form a castle, which has an emergent property of military defence. And a number of castles, build in correct geographic locations, can form a chain of forts, from which political domination can emerge.I think that the ontological elements of Critical Realism (components, structures, levels and emergence) can play a didactic role in introducing workers to the complex ideas of Marx which they will find in Capital, especially use-value, exchange-value, commodity and value.It’s my belief that we need to explain these unfamiliar ideas of political economy, which are so baffling, even to many academics, and most of the time to ordinary workers, who need to have an understanding of how exploitation works, and why they must reject the market and money in their entirety (because they produce a substance which is poisonous to humans, and so 'market socialism' is clearly a non-starter), without having to discuss in fine detail every nuance of Marx’s text.

[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

It's as complex as explaining centimetres, litres, feet and stones.  The application of human labour is the only commonality for commodities.  The Robinson analogy makes things very celar, if we as a community only have a set amount of time available for work, it makes sense to measure tasks by the time taken by members of our society to achieve them. 

But you still haven't given an example of how you would explain 'value' to a worker, who doesn't understand economics.Or are you saying that, if they refuse to accept that they must use economic categories, they must be rejected?

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

LBird wrote:

Errr… by using a meaningful concept to explain the meaningless concept? Y'know, by analogy?

But if it really where meaningless they'd be nothing for the meaningful concept to refer to. Meaningless means there's no meaning in there to be had, like saying "the number 7 sleeps furiously", not that there's meaning there but that it's not understood…

On a thread entitled 'What is value?', there's no real answer to your strange concerns, DJP.Perhaps you've been influenced by something like analytical philosophy, but, as a Communist, I'm concerned with how we can explain our ideas better to workers, rather than discussing the 'meaning of meaning', or the 'meaning of the 'meaning of meaning' '.

[LBird]

YMS wrote:

But we don't ned analogies: the concept is simple, that we can only evaluate or compare like things (we can't compare apples with oranges) if we're going to exchange we need sopme sort of common feature to compare them, and the only one available is abstract labour time. That is the basis on which we make exchanges and measure the worth to the community of work done.

I'll pass that one on, YMS, next time a curious worker asks me to explain 'value'. I, too, always find the concept 'abstract labour time' is so obvious, that the mere mention of it sees 'the lights coming on', and other curious workers, overhearing that 'simple concept', throng around me for more 'obvious explanatory concepts', like 'A L T'.[uncrosses fingers]

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

In fact how can a meaningless concept be explained?

[my bold]Errr… by using a meaningful concept to explain the meaningless concept? Y'know, by analogy?Isn't this entirely normal human behaviour? The idea that we teach each other? Y'know, good old-fashioned social interaction.It's a bit worrying that fellow comrades seem to have difficulty with the idea of humans passing on information, and helping each other to develop.Hmmm…. I'm tempted to think that you, being a 'materialist', think that 'meaning' is within an object, so that the very idea of something being meaningless to one person, but meaningful to another, is anathaema.Perhaps you came out of the womb, DJP, entirely up to speed on Marx's Capital, but for most of my life this book was almost entirely meaningless. Large parts of it still are!What's more, I know that my experience of the meaninglessness of Capital is also the experience of the vast majority of workers who've tried to read it.Of course, there are always the clever shites, who join 'parties', but whenever they're asked to explain to baffled workers, they can not do so. They can mouth the platitudes (see ALB's post, which I took a quote from), but they can't explain.Apparently, these 'materialists' (let's call a spade a spade) think that 'matter' tells humans 'what it is', so 'meaning' is within the 'matter', and any worker, who continues to look baffled in the face of platitudes, is written off.So, workers, faced with the continuing refusal of 'socialists' to explain the meaning of the world, and thus still finding it meaningless, turn to those people who can explain 'meaningless concepts'. I, of course, refer to various hornswoggling liars, like the bourgeoisie and their 'invisible hand' of the market, or the religious and their 'invisible deity'.But, while comrades like you continue to be astonished at the very idea that we actually explain the meaningless to workers, then we will remain well behind the Market, Catholicism and Islam, in the list of 'ideologies to turn to for explanation' for the baffled yet  curious worker.It's the 21st century, and we're still arguing about why we should explain the world to workers. Ah well, Charlie's been dead for 131 years, and Fred for 119, and we're still not explaining our ideas.Mind you, how long did it take after the deaths of Smith, Jesus and Mohammed for their ideologies to take root?I suppose all this talk, for materialists, is just evidence of the evil 'Idealism' trying to make inroads in the SPGB?

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

…more modern [materialists] might baulk at reviving Aristotle's idea that there are hidden forces at work. But let's not digress.

The issue that we should not digress from is better explanations for workers by Communists, so that understanding of value becomes ever-more widespread amongst workers.As to 'reviving Aristotle and hidden forces', Marx was influenced by Aristotle, and Marx's famous quote about science lets us know his view on 'the hidden'.

Marx, Capital III, wrote:

But all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch48.htm

ALB wrote:

Anyone who knows anything about the SPGB will know that we have always insisted that "value" is a social relationship, i.e between people, but which expresses itself as a relationship between things (commodities).

Yes, fair enough, but it's not an explanation.Most workers who take an interest enough to ask for help in understanding (and I include myself in that category, in the past), want to know what the statement " "value" is a social relationship, i.e between people, but which expresses itself as a relationship between things (commodities) " actually means.To me, even now, it's essentially meaningless, even though I now understand what you and the SPGB are trying to get at.It's taken me a long time to wrestle with the issue of understanding it, and understanding it enough to explain it to others, in a way that they can get a handle on it, far faster than I could.To me, this explanation must take the form of analogies, using forms that any worker finds readily understandable, like cars, lego, walls, castles, acid, grace, etc. And I think that the concepts and methods that Critical Realism uses in explanations (components, structures, levels, emergence) are the best that I've found to make explanations easier to understand.And, as you well know, I regard talk of 'materialism' and Engels' 'matter' as entirely counterproductive of explanation for workers, and also as providing the philosophical basis for Leninism.I'm quite happy to accept that my particular explanations can be improved (as analogies, better ones could be found) or their ontology changed (perhaps CR's concepts could be bettered, although I don't know yet of any), but I won't be 'digressed' from the importance of the need to explain, rather than endlessly repeat 'formulae' that contain some usefulness (as you show above), but that don't explain.It's time for Communists to explain to workers what the hell we (and Marx) are on about, and help workers to come to class consciousness of their physical and social world.

[LBird]

To take the analogy of ‘value as a social acid’ a bit further, we could show how a scientific test could be done, to test for the presence of this intangible, unobservable ‘social acid’ within a society. This test is very similar to using ‘iron filings’ to show to humans the presence of an intangible, unobservable magnetic field.Since value is an ‘acid’ (a destructive agent of social relationships), we need a ‘litmus paper’, a paper test which makes apparent levels of acidity, even low levels in fluids which a human could drink without any noticeable effect. Humans can be insensitive to acid, and require a theory and practice (chemistry and litmus test) to make acid known to them.A form of a ‘litmus paper’ for this social experiment, to make known an intangible substance, could be a £50 note. To check for the presence of ‘value’, the £50 note is simply tossed onto the ground in a city square, and left alone. If ‘value’ is present in this society, the litmus paper will be eagerly picked up. If ‘value’ is not present, the litmus paper will be ignored, as if it was merely a sheet of toilet paper.Communists could film these experiments, to be shown after the revolution to children then trying to grasp how capitalist society worked, and wanting to vicariously experience the ‘causal power’ of ‘value’. Of course, to the children of a Communist society, such behaviour, of humans chasing bits of paper because of the ‘power’ that the paper can bestow on them, would seem similar to us watching a film of medieval peasants attending mass, so that they can receive ‘grace’ from god. ‘Value’ is as intangible, but as powerful and thus real, as ‘grace’.It’s my opinion that explanations like these, of ‘value’ as a ‘social acid’, which is produced by ‘social relationships’, and is as unobservable and as intangible as ‘love’, but its affects can be seen everywhere, and can be both tested for and its strength estimated, are very useful prior to reading Capital. Again, reading about a commodity that has two aspects, use-value and exchange-value, is made easier to understand if one already understands that a piece of lego (a component), when included in a model of an aeroplane (a structure), also has two aspects. On its own, it is a plastic brick; but as part of an aeroplane, it is also a ‘wing’. Its ‘wingness’ is not within itself, but emerges from its presence within a structure. If the lego brick is removed from the model aeroplane, and then included in a model tank, it then has a different aspect, that of a ‘turret’. So, a piece of lego, in addition to its ‘plasticity’ can also have either ‘turretness’ or ‘wingness’, or neither, depending upon the presence and type of structure within which it finds itself. And so it is for a tin of beans: it’s a commodity, with both use-value and exchange value, if it’s within a certain type of socio-economic structure (capitalism); but the very same tin of beans, if placed within a very different socio-economic structure (communism), would not be a commodity, and would retain its ‘use-value’ but lose its ‘exchange-value’. One of these aspects is intangible and unobservable in a tin of beans, because it emerges from the structure, and thus is a relational property.‘Value’ is a product of a relationship, not a ‘physical thing’, embodied in a commodity. ‘Value’ can be regarded as a ‘social acid’, because of the effects it has upon human relationships, and ‘value’ can be seen as just as social and historical as ‘grace’.The ‘materialists’ who seek to measure or count ‘value’ might as well measure or count ‘grace’. The ‘materialists’ who think ‘value’ is within the physical body of a commodity might as well cut open a rosary bead to reveal ‘grace’, or break open a communion wafer to display ‘the body of Christ’. Of course, beads, wafers and tins of beans are real in a physical sense, but grace, Christ and value are also real in a relational sense, and so are not material, but are social and thus ideal.Biological humans and their conscious ideas are in an essential and inescapable relationship, which requires Marx’s ‘idealism-materialism’ to understand, and this potential for understanding is harmed by Engels’ ‘materialism’, which denigrates the ‘ideal’. Marx unified parts of idealism and materialism, and rejected parts of idealism and materialism, in his Theses on Feuerbach. Marx was not a ‘materialist’, who was concerned about ‘matter’, in the sense that Engels erroneously was. The reality of this need to combine both the ‘ideal and material’ in a method of ‘theory and practice’ is apparent from the various attempts to name Marx’s ideology, which always takes the form of a double-barrelled name, like ‘the materialist conception of history’ (Engels) ‘dialectical materialism’ (Dietzgen; and later, in a different form, the Stalinists) ‘historical materialism’ (most later ‘Marxists’). Marx never separated out his method, because he was engaged in understanding ‘social production’, of both physical things and human ideas, and he recognised that ‘theory and practice’ required both ideal and material, for humans.Just like ‘value’. To understand ‘value’, workers need ‘idealism-materialism’ (or the same thing, given a different name, but which doesn’t erroneously stress either ‘materialism’ or ‘idealism’, to the exclusion of the other)

[LBird]

As I said earlier, "love is the product of a social relationship".But 'love' can't be touched, it's not a 'material thing', but a product that emerges from a loving relationship, and a product that has 'causal powers' over humans. Put simply, it can make humans do things, even though it has no material body.In a similar way, 'value is the product of an exploitative social relationship'.Value has no material body, but is emergent from a relationship, and has causal power over humans.It could be characterised as a ‘social acid’, which destroys human lives.It’s a bit like hydrogen and oxygen being combined to produce water, which has the power to drown humans. Of course, this is a ‘physical’ analogy, but as long as the general ideas are understood (combination of components into a structure that has emergent powers), then that can form the basis of an explanation. Comrades just have to understand that not everything ‘powerful’ in nature is ‘material’ (in a ‘touchable’ sense). Perhaps like magnetism or gravity: they have power, but can’t be touched.As an explanation of ‘value’, though, I think that this will be rejected by the ‘materialists’, who like their ‘things’ to be concrete.Yeah, if ‘value’ is regarded as a destructive ‘social acid’, then some understanding of it is gained.

[LBird]

The best I can say to any workers reading, is that the ideology one chooses will determine how one interprets 'value'.I'm afraid comrades will have to choose the one that they think makes most sense to themselves, on other grounds than 'economics'.At the end of the day, only a vote by workers can determine the meaning of 'value', for the workers' movement.

[Author]

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