[LBird]

SocialistPunk wrote:

…drawn like moths to a flame when it comes to LBird…

Are you suggesting, SP, that I'm the irresistable Light of the Universe?Or just simply recording the natural behaviour that ignorant insects self-immolate?

[LBird]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

Quote:

I've taken on this task myself, and can explain 'value' is terms familiar to workers, like using 'cars', 'castles', 'watches', so that they can get a hook into Marx's value,

 Any chance you have something on it that can go online. The blog could use some simplification of Marxian theory. I'll of course credit you 

Two points, alan.1. I do not want any credit. I can't personally visit every worker on the planet, to fill in the gaps and answer questions.2. I've already tried, several times on several sites, to build something suitable for publication online, with no success whatsoever.I regard the task of 'simplification of Marxian theory' as a social task, for which no individuals should be given any credit whatsoever, because it should be the task of anonymous Socialists/Communists to provide this help for all workers.The only way to do this is to subject any offered explanations to social criticism and voting, so that the very best possible explanation is arrived at, by a democratic method.I've tried to institute this method, but have only been met with resistance. I'm still not sure why this resistance exists, but it clearly does. I was naive enough, at first, to think that lots of comrades would enthusiastically join in with this irreplacable social task, to both develop comrades now, and then other workers when the task is in suitable shape for wider comprehension. For a time, I was shocked at the continuous resistance to 'simplifying Marxian theory', but not any longer.I've drawn the conclusion that, for many, Marx-Engels's works are religious texts, and 'these workers' are outraged at a worker having the temerity to criticise, judge, translate, amend and even reject some parts, of the Holy Texts.I should make it clear that this conclusion is not aimed simply at the SPGB, because I think it is a widespread attitude amongst those who would have no part in workers controlling production using democratic methods, no matter what they appear to profess by being 'socialists'.At various times, I've suggested that workers should democratically control arms, science, maths, truth, matter, etc., but have always been met with shock and outrage at such a stupid suggestion.Of course, those who disagree with me can never say who, in their opinion, should control arms, science, maths, truth ,matter, etc. I think that they're hiding something, and that is either an elitism which later emerges in a form of Leninism, or an individualism that emerges as a form of Anarchism.So, to sum up, there has to be a collective effort by socialists to make Marx accessible to all workers, but I'm coming to the conclusion that socialists are a blockage, rather than a means.That thesis would certainly explain why, 130 years after Marx's death, most workers know nothing whatsoever about his ideas. Of course, the 'socialists' blame the workers…

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

LBird wrote:

Capital, contains the three opening chapters which are no more use to workers than the stuff from the Grundrisse.

Well these workers seem to have understood and found a use for it…https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/classstruggle/conversations/messages/6

[my bold]From January 2002, eh?Seems surprising that in over twelve years 'these workers' haven't bothered to explain it clearly to all the other workers, like me, who have constantly asked various parties face-to-face or on socialist internet sites, to explain 'value'.The problem is, 'these workers' want to explain it in Marx's terms, rather than in terms suitable for today's workers. Any explanation of 'value' must start from non-economic explanations, just as any teacher knows that one should introduce a difficult subject by explanations rooted in other subjects, with which the students are already familiar.Whenever I've asked socialists to do this, they haven't been able to. And so, I drew the conclusion, a long time ago, that they can't explain, neither to me nor any other workers.That's why I've taken on this task myself, and can explain 'value' is terms familiar to workers, like using 'cars', 'castles', 'watches', so that they can get a hook into Marx's value, prior to reading Capital.But… whenever this didactic method is itself explained, so that all socialists can employ it to make Marx's works more accessible to all workers, 'these workers' throw up their hands in exasperation, because if other workers can get up to speed in a few weeks, about which subject 'these workers' took years to achieve, then 'these workers' lose their significance as 'specialists' who 'understand the texts', which are impenetrable to the ordinary worker.It might have taken me years to do this, but I'm happy to reduce this task to months or weeks, because I put class before party. That's why I'm a democrat, because I believe that ordinary workers can understand 'value' and 'epistemology' and that it is the task of socialists to provide the means of workers' self-education.I know you don't agree with me, DJP. I can't even mention the term for this method to you on this thread now, because you take refuge in calling me a 'troll'.Good luck with 'these workers', and you can happily forget all the rest.

[LBird]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

But wasn't Grundisse simply his private notes and rough drafts, not for publication but for his own use and own aide memory and not intended to be read by others. So surely we cannot apply the same rules on clarity. He knew what he meant when he wrote it and when he includedbits of it in what he intended to be his public works, he re-wrote it re-worded it and re-phrased it to make the meaning clear. He didn't expect it to be published several decades after his death for all and sundry to study like the Hebrew scholars of the Talmud and unlike German Ideology which was meant for publication but never saw the light of day during his lfetime.

If you can point to any clearer version of what Charlie meant by 'the method of political economy', whether published in his lifetime or not, I'll be keen to read it, alan! Let's face it, his main published work, the central effort of his life, Capital, contains the three opening chapters which are no more use to workers than the stuff from the Grundrisse.Anyone who wishes to understand Marx's works for themselves (as opposed to just accepting what the 'priests' tell us), has to interpret his words, simply because they are not clear. This is nothing to do with 'private notes and rough drafts', but the context in which he was writing and who he was writing for (academics familiar with German philosophy, especially Kant and Hegel), which means that his best efforts are opaque to us.Funnily enough, the 'Hebrew Talmudic' method is the one followed most people on this site, from what I can tell. And many have admitted that they haven't actually read either Marx or Engels for themselves, but just periodically dip into the 'Talmudic' interpretations, because it is so much easier.For myself, I think the 'Marxian Critical' method is far better, but that means we have to question, rather than simply read, his works, private, rough or published.The same applies to Bhaskar, who, like Marx, stimulates one's thinking, if only to provide food for critical thought.

[LBird]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

Be interesting to know what you consider meaningless in Marx. I always thought he was very concise with his words.

Much of what Marx wrote is very verbose and unclear, so unclear as to be meaningless. It's easy to read at least two 'meanings' into his words, and often more.For example, if any comrade can sum up this passage, I'd be very obliged. I admit I can't grasp what his central thrust is.

Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 100-2, wrote:

(3) The Method of Political EconomyWhen we consider a given country politico-economically, we begin with its population, its distribution among classes, town, country, the coast, the different branches of production, export and import, annual production and consumption, commodity prices etc.It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage labour, without value, money, price etc. Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations. The former is the path historically followed by economics at the time of its origins. The economists of the seventeenth century, e.g., always begin with the living whole, with population, nation, state, several states, etc.; but they always conclude by discovering through analysis a small number of determinant, abstract, general relations such as division of labour, money, value, etc. As soon as these individual moments had been more or less firmly established and abstracted, there began the economic systems, which ascended from the simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market. The latter is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation [Anschauung] and conception. Along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second, the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought. In this way Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself, by itself, whereas the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind. But this is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being. For example, the simplest economic category, say e.g. exchange value, presupposes population, moreover a population producing in specific relations; as well as a certain kind of family, or commune, or state, etc. It can never exist other than as an abstract, one-sided relation within an already given, concrete, living whole. As a category, by contrast, exchange value leads an antediluvian existence. Therefore, to the kind of consciousness – and this is characteristic of the philosophical consciousness – for which conceptual thinking is the real human being, and for which the conceptual world as such is thus the only reality, the movement of the categories appears as the real act of production – which only, unfortunately, receives a jolt from the outside – whose product is the world; and – but this is again a tautology – this is correct in so far as the concrete totality is a totality of thoughts, concrete in thought, in fact a product of thinking and comprehending; but not in any way a product of the concept which thinks and generates itself outside or above observation and conception; a product, rather, of the working-up of observation and conception into concepts. The totality as it appears in the head, as a totality of thoughts, is a product of a thinking head, which appropriates the world in the only way it can, a way different from the artistic, religious, practical and mental appropriation of this world. The real subject retains its autonomous existence outside the head just as before; namely as long as the head’s conduct is merely speculative, merely theoretical. Hence, in the theoretical method, too, the subject, society, must always be kept in mind as the presupposition.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htmAs many critics have pointed out, Bhaskar is at least as bad, if not worse.You'd think, sometimes, that Communists don't actually want to explain the world to workers.Perhaps Pareto summed up the problem best:"Marx's words are like bats; one can see in them both birds and mice".https://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/dd_ch00_content.php

[LBird]

DJP, Vin.Why not get me banned?You're a pair of bluffers, who can't argue their case, and every time I ask either of you to explain anything you believe, to the same depth and with the same amount of detail about thinkers and their texts as I do, you both revert to crying like babies about about 'trolls'.And as to 'personal attacks', I only ever give it back to those who attack me. I'm always comradely to those who are comradely towards me. If you can't take it, don't dish it out, losers.This thread has taken the usual course. DJP talks nonsense, is called out about it, quite decently and asked to explain, and then throws his dummy out of the pram, because he can't answer my questions, in the same way that I can answer his. I admit my ideological biases. And then, who should come out from the shadows? Vin, who is the least intellectual person with whom I've ever had an intellectual argument. You really haven't got a clue, Vin. And that's saying something, given the competition on this site.Ad hominem?Yer a pair of cry-babies.Warning:  6. Do not make repeated postings of the same or similar messages to the same thread, or to multiple threads or forums (‘cross-posting’). Do not make multiple postings within a thread that could be consolidated into a single post (‘serial posting’). Do not post an excessive number of threads, posts, or private messages within a limited period of time (‘flooding’).

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

I've told you I'm a free market libertarian.But seriously can someone ban this troll now?

Fear. Pure fear.The fear of one about to be unmasked.Forget liberal ideas of freedom of critical speech, never mind socialist ones of 'funding' them!You're a bluffer, DJP.

[LBird]

SocialistPunk wrote:

Like LBird sys they are ideologically in favour of the prevailing socio economic system, as the emphasis of the "science" is that we are hard wired to behave the way we behave.

It never ceases to surprise me that there are Communists who can see through 'the market' as an entirely human created system, with a historical development and social changes, rooted in classes and exploitation, and defended to the hilt with social ideology, but just can't see that all these factors also affect all human thinking, whether about wider 'science' or narrower 'cognitive biases and beliefs'.The belief that 'biases and beliefs' are rooted in nature is an ideological belief, not some version of 'objective science'.Unless we uncover the class nature of this myth, we might as well also accept the 'market as human nature' argument, too.

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

Actually this topic is about cognitive biases and beliefs, it is not another thread about Critical Realism. If you want to discuss that again start another thread…

[my bold]Well, I was trying to get you to discuss your 'cognitive biases and beliefs' about your devotional 'physicalism', but, of course, you won't do that, so you just smear me with wanting to divert into CR.You still don't seem to understand that you need to reveal your ideology. I do, and openly declare it to be Marxism and CR, which I regard as mostly synonymous, for Communists, if not for other CRs with other politics.So, any thread about 'cognitive biases and beliefs' has to start from both my ideological beliefs (Marx and CR) and yours (… empty space, something to hide?).What have you got to hide about your 'cognitive biases and beliefs', DJP?Why won't you tell us what you believe about 'cognitive biases and beliefs'?Why pretend that you're interested in any subject, but won't discuss your beliefs about that subject, and prefer to follow the ideological lead of bourgeois thinkers, and pretend that it's down to some universal flaw in human nature, as you alleged at the start?Why start a thread, and refuse to engage, just because you don't like 'difficult' questions about your unexamined ideology?Why is it always someone else's fault, and not yours?'Cognitive biases and beliefs'? You haven't got a clue, DJP, and you're never like to have one, because you refuse to discuss.And that's your choice, not some failing passed on from human nature, or a biological failing in your genes, as your ideological mentors allege.

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

LBird wrote:

Your 'belief' in 'physicalism' might provide a good test case, then, of how and why 'beliefs' are so difficult to change, which seems to be the underlying purpose of this thread.

Possibly. Likewise your mistaken belief that Marx's method and Critical Realism are compatible.. But I think we're already doomed.

The difference is that I've continously tried to get a discussion going about Marx and CR, but first we have to identify both Marx and CR, which comrades seem reluctant to do, so we never get to make any comparison.I've given many examples of CR 'in action', and even shown how CR fits well with an explanation of Marx's concept of 'value', but I've just been met with religious devotion to 'materialism' (and Engels' version at that, not Marx's), rather than the adherents of 'materialism' giving similar examples of it 'in action', and going on to show how it explains 'value'.I've met this response on LibCom and the ICC site, too, so I'm quite prepared to think, with you, that the discussion is already doomed. It's always quotes from 'The Great Man', The Word (and that word is 'material'), rather than critical thinking. Tell me again, which of those two methods was Marx's?

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

LBird wrote:

You won't even accept that it just might be an ideological belief, and that someone might have an interest in deceiving you.

I've never said that I do not accept the possibility of being wrong…. Again I don't think anyone has.

Your 'belief' in 'physicalism' might provide a good test case, then, of how and why 'beliefs' are so difficult to change, which seems to be the underlying purpose of this thread.

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

No I'm not saying either of those things. It's only you that suggests that anyone does. Ad infinitum it would seem..

Nothing to do with your 'method' of posting uncommented links, and no critical discussion, so that we have to guess what you 'are saying'.

DJP wrote:

The questions I am thinking of are "what does it take to change a belief?" and "how do we know when we're deceiving ourselves?

On 'physicalism'?As far as I can tell, nothing works.You won't even accept that it just might be an ideological belief, and that someone might have an interest in deceiving you.The first thing to ask is 'where do my beliefs come from'?I always expose my 'sources', my ideological mentors, but you (and others on this site) always seem to think that you're just 'stating the truth'. As objective individuals, of course, dealing with the real world…

[LBird]

Bhaskar's works are as difficult to read as Marx's, which is why we need to 'translate' them into terms understandable to most workers, and to sort the wheat from the chaff.There is much that is useful in both Marx and Bhaskar, but there is also lots that is either meaningless or simply wrong.I think this work is a task for Communists, who mostly seem to make no effort to encourage and help develop workers about issues that are vital for them to understand, if workers are to democratically control social production across the planet.

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

Well there's my point proved in one post 

I must admit that I'm still missing your point, DJP.Or are you saying that academic 'psychology' can't be challenged on ideological grounds?Or that bringing 'ideology' into discussions is impermissable, because there is a 'Truth' out there, and 'ideologists' like me are just spoiling perfectly decent objective discussions between non-ideological individuals?If I were to be a bit more critical in tone, I would argue that it's your own refusal to engage in ideological debate that is preventing discussion, not some universal, natural problem with humans and their inability to discuss honestly or seek the (or 'a') truth of their society.

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

In short:We're Not Programmed to Seek "Truth," We're Programmed to "Win"Our Brains Don't Understand ProbabilityWe Think Everyone's Out to Get UsWe're Hard Wired To Have a Double StandardFacts Don't Change Our MindSo what do you think?

I think that this list is based on an ideology.

DJP wrote:

Should be give up or just carry on knowing that our brains make us deluded egotists that like to form narratives with ourselves as the hero?

The problem, DJP, is that you're following this line of thinking as if it's 'the objective, god's honest truth', rather than a non-Communist view of humans.For a start, it's a transhistorical statement, not one that locates 'us' in history and society, never mind that we live in class society, where a small minority, aided and abetted by their academic dupes, tell 'us' these things, all the time.Biological individuals who just want to 'win', isolated, paranoid, duplicitous and impervious to 'material conditions'…Who'd have an interest in 'us' all, not only believing that, but posting it on a Communist site?On a wider note, DJP, you seem to often give links to non-Communist sites and their thinking, without any apparent critical awareness that 'psychology' as a discipline is riven with ideological bias.Unless I'm missing some subtle point that you're making?

[Author]

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