[LBird]

YMS wrote:

I'd say if pushed that in general a certain "materialism" is now the predominate theory…

It is amongst those who know nothing of epistemology. Oh yes, and those who follow Engels, like the Leninists.

YMS wrote:

…even the Tories no longer maintain that problems are down to individual wickedness or original sin, even if they do not consciousless espouse materialism…

I could weep at your ignorance. Especially after dozens of threads and a thousand posts here, in which I've given loads of detailed explanations, you still think that the only alternative to 'materialism' is arguing for 'original sin'.We're doomed.

[LBird]

YMS wrote:

Maybe there is some miscommunication going on here.

There's no 'communication' of any sort 'going on here', never mind 'mis'.I'm asking you questions about political power, and its underlying philosophy, but you haven't got a clue about those sorts of discussions. To you, this is all about you and the world of your day-to-day life, and your personal concerns.Your inability to have a fundamental discussion at a higher level than 'you' doesn't bode well for our class. If workers who are already in a party can't do this sort of thinking, 130 years after Marx's death, and a 100 years after the events of WW1 and 1917-19, then it just demonstrates to me, the tremendous distance we have yet to go.You keep saying 'people living in the real world will decide, just as they do now', seemingly oblivious to the obvious fact that the vast majority of 'people living in the real world', now, don't have any say whatsoever about 'decisions', whether political, scientific, economic, ideological, etc.Quite frankly, your naivety is in some senses touching, but mostly just frightening. You seem to know nothing at all about 'power' and the questions we have to answer.I just wish, for once, you'd question your philosophical individualism. Believe me, your views are nothing to do with Communism/Socialism. That is an issue about power, and who wields it. If we don't introduce democratic methods from the very start, in all aspects of proletarian politics, then some minority will take command. Not 'individuals', but an organised political force, like the Leninists.This all has to be done before you can have a political discussion about science, YMS.

[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

Society will stop them reading books? Reading journal articles? Take out their eyes?  Confiscate their pen and paper?  Really?  Will science databases be restricted?  Datasets?  Really?As for Mengele, what an absurd absurdum.  There is no valid conmparison between experimenting on humans and sticking thermometers in waterfalls.

Stop being a fool, and ask yourself: 'who decides?'As far as you're concerned, you decide.That's not Communism.You can't answer a philosophical and political question, and constantly resort to stupid 'real world' questions.Just like a true conservative.Are you representative of the SPGB's level of thinking, sophistication and understanding?Mind you, at least you can hold a conversation (at the simplest school-kid level, though), unlike Vin.Anyway, time to leave you two 'thinkers' to organise the class. I feel for them.

[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

Won't be allowed to do science?  Who will stop them?  And how?  What blithering nonsense.

Society.Society will determine the parameters of science.Not your 'experts'.YMS, your understanding of science is that of Mengele.

[LBird]

Vin Maratty wrote:

LBird wrote:

Science is a social activity, and part of the training for scientists in a Communist society would be the ability to explain clearly to the workers whose interests are behind the research, and whose collective efforts make science even possible.

You really haven't a clue

Another useful comment from the expert.

[LBird]

YMS wrote:

Marx, when asked, did not state his goal to be the delineation of structures…

More's the pity.Marx was a shit writer, and most of the problems we've had since he was alive and writing (never mind after he died, and Engels mangled his obscure and often meaningless works) were caused by his inability to state anything clearly. Marx never used one word where ten would do.We have to critically examine Marx's works, and dig out the suggestive and useful, and give it some meaning that workers today can understand.IMO, a large part of the reason for the state of the Communist movement today is the sheer inaccessibility of Marx's texts. Anyone who says that they understand the first three chapters of Capital and can explain them clearly is a bloody liar. I know, because I've been asking for years for an explanation, and have never received one in plain English. I've even had dickheads telling me to read Hegel first, before even attempting Capital! If there's one writer that makes Marx's texts seem like Janet and John kids' stories, it's Hegel.It's a condemnation of Communists since the 1840s, starting with Marx himself, that no-one has sought to make far simpler and understandable the central texts for workers to come to an understanding of capitalism. Like most workers, I suspect most 'Communists' (especially Leninists) have liked to keep it that way, so that only they (and not common-or-garden workers) actually understand their world.And you're a fan of this method, too, YMS, with all your talk of the mathematical inaccessibility of science to ordinary workers, hence your hostility to democracy within science.If a scientist can't explain what they're doing to everyone else, they won't be allowed to do 'science'.Science is a social activity, and part of the training for scientists in a Communist society would be the ability to explain clearly to the workers whose interests are behind the research, and whose collective efforts make science even possible.We should be starting this now, with a 'translation' of Capital. IMO, Critical Realism has the potential to provide this clear explanation of Marx's key work, for all workers to understand.I disagree with many posters here, including alanjjohnstone (who otherwise I agree with about many issues), who are of the opinion that a mass understanding of the method and philosophy of science is not necessary to building Communism/Socialism.If workers don't have that ability (and I think Communists should be developing that class ability, through education and propaganda), then they will remain in thrall to the 'Leninist-sciento-mathematico' elitist/expert ideology that you, and others here, espouse, YMS.

[LBird]

YMS wrote:

…that my road to development lie through and with my fellows.

That implies democracy, and not 'free individual'. You keep making the above statement, but denying its political implications.What your constant reference to yourself, as the final arbiter of what you will or won't do, means is:

YMS, to be philosophically and politically consistent should have wrote:

…that my road to development lie through me.

If you claim to be a 'social individual', YMS, you have to say what your social role is: either 'worker' or 'boss' (at its simplest). These are structural roles. In CR terms, our 'individuality' is at the 'component level' and our 'worker-ness' is at the level of 'structure'. So, as an 'individual', one is like a use-value (eg., a tin of beans, a component outside of any structure), whereas as a 'worker', one is like an exchange-value (eg., a commodity, a component within a structure).If one wishes to understand the two-sidedness of bricks/walls, use-value/exchange-value, tins of beans/commodities, individuals/society, that is, relationships, one should employ Critical Realism, the modern name for the method used by Marx's 'idealism-materialism'.Claiming to be a 'free individual' is bourgeois ideology, and ignores the inescapable social context for every human that has ever lived. It ignores relationships.

[LBird]

YMS wrote:

…the free development of each will be the condition for the free development of all…

[my bold]You recognise no 'condition' upon the 'individual'.For one's development, there is the condition that all must be able to develop.'The free development of each' (in other words, we must provide the conditions for the development of each and every individual) is a condition imposed on 'all'.The 'free development of each' can't simply be the lone task for each individual, as you allege, but is a social task for all.You pay lip service to the concept of a 'social individual', and claim to be one, but won't allow any claim of the 'social' half of the couplet to intefere with your 'biological' half of you as an 'individual'.As a 'social individual', I will comply with the democratic decisions of me and my comrades.As a self-declared 'individual', you won't.But then, I'm democratic Communist.You're a bourgeois individualist who doesn't like what he sees of bourgeois society in reality (because you are not 'free' to do as you want), and so wishes to realise the myth of bourgeois individualism in a non-bourgeois society.You mouth platitudes, but have no concept whatsoever of the political implications of those views.Communist society won't be 7 billion isolated individuals doing as they like, but 7 billion social individuals working to a common purpose, the social task of developing 7 billion individuals.Communism is not solipsism.

[LBird]

Marx commenting upon YMS's 'individual' view of 'individual' production.

Marx, Introduction, wrote:

The further back we trace the course of history, the more does the individual, and accordingly also the producing individual, appear to be dependent and to belong to a larger whole. At first, the individual in a still quite natural manner is part of the family and of the tribe which evolves from the family; later he is part of a community, of one of the different forms of the community which arise from the conflict and the merging of tribes. It is not until the eighteenth century that in bourgeois society the various forms of the social texture confront the individual as merely means towards his private ends, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, namely that of the solitary individual, is precisely the epoch of the (as yet) most highly developed social (according to this standpoint, general) relations. Man is a Zoon politikon [political animal] in the most literal sense: he is not only a social animal, but an animal that can be individualised only within society. Production by a solitary individual outside society – a rare event, which might occur when a civilised person who has already absorbed the dynamic social forces is accidentally cast into the wilderness – is just as preposterous as the development of speech without individuals who live together and talk to one another. It is unnecessary to dwell upon this point further. It need not have been mentioned at all, if this inanity, which had rhyme and reason in the works of eighteenth-century writers, were not expressly introduced once more into modern political economy by Bastiat, Carey, Proudhon, etc. It is of course very pleasant for Proudhon, for instance, to be able to explain the origin of an economic relationship – whose historical evolution he does not know – in an historico-philosophical manner by means of mythology; alleging that Adam or Prometheus hit upon the ready-made idea, which was then put into practice, etc. Nothing is more tedious and dull than the fantasies of locus communis.Thus when we speak of production, we always have in mind production at a definite stage of social development, production by individuals in a society.

[my bold]https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/appx1.htm#188YMS, an 'individual' of his 'epoch', both regarding politics and science.Apparently, according to YMS, Communism will involve more of the same 'individualism'.

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

If you have a clear grasp of what it is you're trying to say this shouldn't be too difficult.

I've said this over and over, DJP.Neither you nor YMS are Democratic Communists/Socialists or Marxist 'idealist-materialists', who emphasise human social activity, creativity and criticism (in short, 'ideas', the 'ideal', Marx's 'active side'), and the provisional nature of 'knowledge' and 'truth'.You both seem to be 'individualists' and Engelsian 'materialist/physicalists', who emphasise biological sense impressions, human passivity when confronted with the 'material', and the purely physical nature of 'reality' and 'eternal Truth'.It's not too difficult to say, but apparently it's too difficult for you two to grasp.After more than 12 months of my presence here, and nearly 1000 posts on this thread alone, you two (and others) still don't seem to have the slightest clue about the problems, which have been obvious since the 1920s/30s, with 'official Marxism' (ie. Engels and 'materialism'). Talk about 'heads in the sand'.Quite frankly, DJP, its religious certainty that I'm trying to overcome.

[LBird]

Fred Engels, in a letter to Schimdt, wrote:

The materialist conception of history has a lot of them nowadays, to whom it serves as an excuse for not studying history. Just as Marx used to say, commenting on the French "Marxists" of the late [18]70s: "All I know is that I am not a Marxist."….In general, the word "materialistic" serves many of the younger writers in Germany as a mere phrase with which anything and everything is labeled without further study, that is, they stick on this label and then consider the question disposed of. But our conception of history is above all a guide to study, not a lever for construction after the manner of the Hegelian. All history must be studied afresh, the conditions of existence of the different formations of society must be examined individually before the attempt is made to deduce them from the political, civil law, aesthetic, philosophic, religious, etc., views corresponding to them. Up to now but little has been done here because only a few people have got down to it seriously. In this field we can utilize heaps of help, it is immensely big, anyone who will work seriously can achieve much and distinguish himself. But instead of this too many of the younger Germans simply make use of the phrase historical materialism (and everything can be turned into a phrase) only in order to get their own relatively scanty historical knowledge — for economic history is still as yet in its swaddling clothes! — constructed into a neat system as quickly as possible, and they then deem themselves something very tremendous.

[my bold]https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_08_05.htmWho is the contributor to this thread who is actually studying the issue of 'Science for Communists?'?It's certainly not the 'materialists'.

[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

But how do you know that the distortion you've identified isn't actually a distortion of the truth: that we can know?  If every claim about the world is a distotrion then so is the claim that there is a distortion, so claims could be true, except if they were true then that claim would be false, so it wouldn't be a distortion so it would be true.  All Yorkshiremen are liars.

If you're happy with that conclusion, I'm happy for you, too.Me, though? I'm afraid not.

[LBird]

YMS wrote:

…By the way, how do you know that there is distortion? I don't think you can know that…

Science tells us that.Human science.The science that came after the one you're wedded to.Marx's science.

[LBird]

YMS wrote:

…it's to rebut distortion.

Since everything humans approach is 'distorted' by the action of 'approachment', then we have to expose our framework of 'distortion'.I do this, but you (and the others) do not. You won't tell us your ideology.Unless, of course, one claims to have a scientific method that allows humans to approach reality (ideal and material) without distortion (as 19th century science claimed), and thus one 'doesn't have an ideology', but merely deals with 'reality'.I think that you think that you have an 'undistorting' approach, YMS, and that you merely deal with the 'real world' of your senses.For you, this 'empiricism' is tied to a view of yourself as an 'individual'.Whatever one thinks of this, it's nothing to do with Marx's views.

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

LBird wrote:

Blah, blah blah…

Karl Marx wrote:

He [Her Duhring] knows very well that my method of development is not Hegelian, since I am a materialist and Hegel is an idealist. Hegel's dialectic is the basic form of all dialectic, but only after it has been stripped of its mystical form, and it is precisely this which distinguishes my method.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1868/letters/68_03_06-abs.htm 

So there you go…

Ahhh… the religious and their texts, eh?Yes indeed, 'there we go…'.You won't have a word said against your gods, and heresy really annoys you so much, that you can't just let critical thought explore, can you, DJP? You just have to keep chipping in, every so often, having ignored all the detailed posts I've written, and the other thinkers that I've quoted, and indeed Einstein and Kepler, because you're a religious devotee.I'm very clear that I wouldn't last long in the SPGB. In fact, all the contributions by SPGB members on this thread have been intensely hostile to my critical engagement with Marx and Engels. Or, your god, 'Marx-Engels'.Not one SPGB member has displayed any doubt at all.

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