[LBird]

robbo203 wrote:

All this nonsense about socialism having nothing to do with morality and scientific socialism being some kind of "value free" construct is just so much old fashioned 19th century mechanistic-cum-postivisitic thinking and despite Marx's supposed repudiation of morality his writings are literally suffused with a moral condemnation of capitalism. How can you possibly condemn exploitation and seek to end it without this implying a moral perspective? ….Class morality!. Now thats what we need.

I'm with robbo on this one.Which also implies 'class science', of course!

[LBird]

robbo, since we both agree that ‘individualism’ is entirely historical, I think we can leave that concept alone.But, when we come to your ‘individuality’ as ‘transhistorical’, even you concede that it isn’t.

robbo203 wrote:

Individuality is something different. It has to do with the inner life of the person, the sense of self hood. This is something that is both historical and trans-historical.

So, even ‘individuality’ is ‘both historical and trans-historical’, not just simply ‘transhistorical’. But then you go further:

robbo203 wrote:

That is why I contend that this aspect of individuality is trans historical. It is a necessary built-in aspect of infant development in all human societies. Of course the content of our inner lives is also historically contingent and subject to social influence.

[my bold]So, the apparent essence of ‘individuality’ is ‘inner life’ and ‘self hood’, which is the bit which is ‘transhistorical’. But… even this you concede is ‘historically contingent and subject to social influence’.It seems to me that your thesis depends upon identifying just what the ‘necessary built-in aspect of infant development in all human societies’ consists of. You identify this as ‘individuality’, but I’m not so sure. It seems to me to be perfectly possible to identify this ‘necessary aspect’ with purely biological functions: that is, the infant ‘in all human societies’ must be taught to feed and water itself, keep itself warm, etc. This is a long way from any notions of ‘individuality’ in any modern sense; after all, most animals go through this process of ‘necessary self development’, which enables them to exist biologically as a species. That is, without an initial stage of close support from (usually) the mother, the ‘infant’ (child/pup/kitten/etc.) would die.The philosophical background to my doubt about your thesis is Marxism. This is an essentially historical ideology, which stresses modes of production and the emergence of ideologies that ‘fit’ with specific ‘real’ circumstances of life. Further, Marx stresses the changes in ideologies over time.So, any theories of ‘individuality’ which focus on the unbroken line between, say, the Ancient Greeks or Christianity, are suspect from the start, from this perspective. I’m sure you’re aware that bourgeois thinkers constantly stress the link between the past and now, in an academic attempt to legitimise what exists ‘now’ by emphasising how little has changed from ‘then’. Ideologically, bourgeois thinkers are compelled to stress the stability and similarity of the ‘transhistorical’, as opposed to the instability and difference of the ‘historical’.I’m not accusing you of ‘bourgeois deviationism’, but merely trying to give some philosophical justification for my doubts!Further, I regard Freud as a quintessential bourgeois ideologist, so I’m very wary of anyone using his ideas to bolster other theses. ALB has mentioned this wariness, too.To finish, given the evidence I’ve provided from Anderson and Callinicos, about societies where humans are regarded as ‘tools’ and as ‘multiplicities’ which extend beyond their own skins, I’m still not convinced about the value for Communists to use a theory of ‘transhistorical individuality’. I think both our ideological basis (theoretical assumptions) and the historical and anthropological evidence from societies other than capitalist society, argue against your stance, comrade.To summarise, ‘individuality’ is a close ideological cousin of ‘individualism’, in my opinion. At best, it is only a biological concept, rather than a social one which is of use for understanding human society and its history.

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

You might like this LBird:http://philosophynow.org/issues/97/How_Old_is_the_Self

This is a link to the actual article:http://fsrcoin.com/Jaynes.htm

[LBird]

robbo203 wrote:

But I wasn't talking about "!individualism"! I agree – individualism is a relatively recent ideological phenomenon and, as I pointed out earlier, closely associated with the rise of capitalism. Individuality, on the other hand, means something quite different to individualism and I attempted to explain the difference in an earlier post I maintain that individuality is part historical and part trans-historical in the sense that it is an inevitable outcome of a socialisation process which happens in every society.

robbo, I’m not sure about your distinction between ‘individualism’ and ‘individuality’. Could you give me a brief summary of what you consider the essential differences to be? I’d be inclined to think that you are drawing a distinction between ‘ideology’ and ‘biology’, but at the moment this is just a guess. I don’t think that this distinction can be maintained, but if that’s not the point you are making, then ignore me on that point!Meanwhile, I’m providing some quotes, to give you some idea of where I’m coming from, with my questioning of your ‘transhistorical’ use of ‘individuality’.

Callinicos, Making History, p. 17, wrote:

However, cultures seem to have existed where conceiving ‘each one of us’ as ‘many’ was deeply embedded in everyday discourse. A. W. H. Adkins argues that Homeric Greece was one such culture:

Adkins wrote:

The Homeric psuché has no specific mental or emotional functions in life: it is simply that whose presence ensures that the individual is alive. To observe the mental and emotional activity of Homeric man, we must turn to…other words…whose conventional renderings, all of which are somewhat misleading, are thumos, ‘spirit’; kradie, etor, ker, ‘heart’; phrenes, ‘mind’ or (physiologically) ‘diaphragm’, or ‘lungs’; nõos, ‘mind’. The manner in which these words are used, if we take it seriously, reveals a psychological landscape quite different from our own. We are accustomed to emphasize the ‘I’ which ‘takes decisions’, and ideas such as ‘will’ or ‘intention’. In Homer, there is much less emphasis on the ‘I’ or decisions: the Greek words just mentioned take the foreground, and enjoy a remarkable amount of democratic freedom. Men frequently ‘act as their kradie and thumos bids them’…

Callinicos, Making History, pp. 18-9, wrote:

Habermas’s account of mythical thought was drawn from the work of anthropologists. But rarely has what he had in mind been better described than by Carlo Levi in his portrait of the peasants of the remote Lucanian village to which he was exiled under Mussolini in the 1930s:

Levi wrote:

They are literally pagani, ‘pagans’, or countrymen, as distinguished from city-dwellers. The deities of the state and the city can find no worshippers here on the land, where the wolf and the ancient black boar reign supreme, where there is no wall between the world of men and the world of animals and spirits, between the leaves of the trees above and the roots below. They cannot have even an awareness of themselves as individuals, here where all things are held together by acting upon one another, and each one is a power unto itself, working imperceptibly, where there is no barrier that cannot be broken down by magic. They live submerged in a world that rolls on independent of their will, where man is in no way separate from his sun, his beast, his malaria, where there can be neither happiness, as literary devotees of the land conceive it, nor hope, because these two are adjuncts of personality and here there is only the grim passivity of a sorrowful Nature…. To the peasants everything has a double meaning…. People, trees, animals, even objects and words have a double life. Only reason, religion, and history have clear-cut meanings…. And in the peasants’ world there is no room for reason, religion, and history. There is no room for religion, because to them everything participates in divinity, everything is actually, not merely symbolically, divine: Christ and the goat; the heavens above, and the beasts of the field below; everything is bound up in natural magic. Even the ceremonies of the church become pagan rites, celebrating the existence of inanimate things, which the peasants endow with a soul, and the innumerable earthy divinities of the village.

[my bold]The distance between such ways of thinking and the ‘orthodox conception of agents’ is evident.

I hope this helps to outline to you my difficulties, robbo

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

LBird wrote:

Would you like to give the rest of us the benefit of your 'training', DJP, and explain how either 'individualism' or 'the concept of an individual' are 'transhistorical', as robbo203 suggests?

My expert training tells me to tell you to re-read post 48. 

Wow! And that's what 'philosophy training' gives one, eh? Boy, I'm impressed.Anyone else care to discuss robbo203's suggestion about 'transhistorical individualism', and my counter-suggestion about 'historically specific individualism'?

[LBird]

DJP wrote:

LOL You're not getting the wrong end of the stick again are you!? …. I should know I am a trained philosopher after all.Also the concept of an individual and 'individualism' is not the same thing….

Would you like to give the rest of us the benefit of your 'training', DJP, and explain how either 'individualism' or 'the concept of an individual' are 'transhistorical', as robbo203 suggests?

[LBird]

robbo203 wrote:

Perhaps I didnt make myself clear enough. What I was trying to say was that individuality has both a historical and a transhistorical aspect. Even the agricultural slave in Ancient Rome which you refer to has some sense of himself or herself as a distinct individual never mind what his or her master may think. My point being that individuation is inevitably part of a socialisation process that happens in every society and in that sense is transhistorical. Human societies are not bee colonies. Individuality does not need to be stressed in that sense; it is an emergent property of socialisation. Where it is stressed then perhaps we are talking about the historical aspect of individuality…You might want to argue that individuality is always historical in that it is always stressed – more in some societies and less in others – but that is not the same as saying individuality is entirely historical

No, I think you're making yourself clear, robbo. I just think that I disagree.I see 'individualism' as a product of a particular society, and not as any sort of 'transhistorical' factor in humans.Societies in the past didn't have the concept of 'individual' in the sense we have. Your view about agricultural slaves, it seems to me, is just transposing the way we think now onto the past.Ruling classes always try to 'eternalise' their rule, and present their ideas as 'natural'. I think that this is what happens when people view the past through the lens of our 'ruling ideas' from the present. I regard 'individualism' as historically specific. That's why Descartes' claim of 'I doubt, therefore I think; I think, therefore I am' was so revolutionary. It represented a way of thinking that was entirely new. Before that 'individuals' didn't 'think'; it was left to their 'betters' (like the pope and lords) to do that!This is why I think Anderson's words are so revealing: some humans were 'tools', to the Roman ruling class. When people are treated in a certain way, they act in that way. That is what 'socialisation' is all about.I'm reminded of ruling class ideas when I see episodes of the 60s cartoon, The Flintstones. Many people really think that in the stone age people lived just like in 60s America. Husband going to work, wife at home, couple of kids, family pet, own nuclear family home/cave, neighbours, boss at work, holidays, vacations, etc., etc.No, in the past, people thought differently, and understood themselves and their societies in very different ways to ours.That's one of the reasons that I'm a Communist: I think 'things change', and that includes ideologies.PS. I should quickly say, robbo, that I'm not accusing you of seeing The Flintstones like that! For illustrative purposes only, comrades!

[LBird]

robbo203 wrote:

The point Im trying to make is that individuality is to an extent is transhistorical in the sense that it is the outcome of an inevitable process of socialisation that occurs in all societies.

[my bold]Isn't this a contradictory statement?If a society doesn't stress 'individuality' in its socialisation processes, why should notions of 'individuality' emerge?No, I think 'individuality' is entirely historical.

Perry Anderson, Passages, pp. 24-5 wrote:

…in Roman theory, the agricultural slave was designated an instrumentum vocale, the speaking tool, one grade away from the livestock that constituted an instrumentum semi-vocale, and two from the implement which was an instrumentum mutum.

Talk about ‘calling a spade, a spade’!Spade, sheep, slave, citizen. No ‘individuality’ there. A gradation which places some humans as tools.I think you underestimate the particularity of ‘individuality’, robbo. It’s entirely an ideological and historical construct, not some biological and transhistorical truth.

[LBird]

PCES wrote:

Also, you have a point about induction. Obviously just observing statistics and not talking about where they come from or what they 'mean' is fruitless, and probably somewhat conservative. However, what we mean is that the facts should be taught…

But… the claim that 'facts should be taught' is induction.Do the 'facts' present themselves to the PCES, completely unbidden? The problem here is that 'facts' are selected for presentation by humans employing a theory, the parameters of which determine what counts as a 'fact'.

PCES wrote:

Right now a particular theory is drummed into students…

Yes, the correct method is to 'drum several theories into students'! Since theory is inescapable, students must be exposed to as many conflicting theories as possible, the better both to identify their own (which they are probably unware of, and often deny having) which they presently employ, and to allow them to explore others and thus have a choice which one they intend to employ to select 'the facts'. This builds critical faculties, both of themselves and others.

PCES wrote:

The result is that the student thinks first in terms of theory and then in terms of the real world when it should surely be the other way around.

Doh!No, everybody (not just students) thinks first in terms of theory. Those who deny this are merely ignorant of their theory. Society teaches us 'theory' by socialisation, and to leave it unexamined is a methodological error.The theory will determine what counts as 'the real world'; the other way round is our old friend 'induction'.

PCES wrote:

But obviously all of this requries a grounding in ethics, philosophy and so forth. In fact, we believe economcis should start with the study of value.

Well, I'm sure all of us here would agree… but then we're open Communists!Unless the PCES is open about its political aims (in an ideological, philosophical, methodological sense, not 'policy'), then I fear that you will go astray. Pretence is not a good starting point. There is no 'objective' position in the universe, so we must expose our stance, our relationship to our focus of study.The biggest pretence in 'economics' (sic) is that it is an 'objective' science. This notion has been dead in physics since Einstein, and the sooner the lesson spreads to the various 'social sciences', the better.Perhaps you should adjust PCES to mean 'Pre-Communist Economics Society'.We all know that won't happen because the bourgeois myth of 'objective enquiry' in academia must be maintained. It's a lie, it's always been a lie, and whilst it continues, we are prolonging the lie.The professors won't be happy unless you adhere to their stance. You'll be castigated as 'biased' and, god forbid, 'political'!Embrace the truth, and expose their ideological biases, too. Good luck!

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

but as you say:

Quote:

To start, it bears repeating that as a society we do not have political aims. We are not lobbying to get rid of central banks, overthrow capitalism, save the planet or what have you. We are not merely pushing to have “Marx and Keynes”, or any other thinker in economics, taught simply because we happen to like them.

Fair enough.

Oh no, not the eternal myth of the unbiased observer!Theory (and ideology) determine 'what we observe'. There is no privileged position in either the universe or society, for physics or economics.All university societies 'have political aims'. To deny this is already a political position. A conservative one.Not 'fair enough', ALB!

[LBird]

A Response… wrote:

What we are instead looking for is to establish a reality based (inductively taught), pluralistic economics, particularly at undergraduate level. We want economists to acknowledge where there are competing theories which explain certain phenomena, and to draw attention to the pros and cons of the relevant theories. This is critical pluralism, not an “anything goes” smorgasbord of dead economists.

[my bold]http://www.post-crasheconomics.com/a-response-to-commentary-on-the-post-crash-economics-society/You're on seriously bad philosophical and methodological ground here, PCES.'Induction' pretends to be based upon 'reality', without questioning how it accesses 'reality'. As a result, it takes 'reality' to be what 'common sense' tells us it is, and so is an essentially conservative method. It starts from 'what exists', rather than critically examining where 'reality' come from, and who constructed our understanding of it. A historical method is opposed to an inductive method.I recommend that you begin your 'critical pluralism' with a discussion about philosophy and method, and ensure that any teacher/researcher/student exposes their ideology before you start to examine 'reality'.Anyone who says they don't have an 'ideology' is either lying or ignorant. In my experience with academics, it's the latter.

PCES wrote:

– We agree economics isn't a separate field and one of the key things we want is context (political, historical, ethical). Having said that, sometimes you have to compromise and go for the catchiest name.

Does 'catchy' mean what 'exists', what is 'common sense', what is the 'reality' of it now, what 'everybody understands'? IMO, if you continue to use 'economics' in your name, you're already on the slippery ideological slope back to whence you came! Beware!Have fun!

[LBird]

robbo203 wrote:

So here's the point Im trying to make: could it be that Marx's preoccupatiuon with the abolition of the division of labour was based on a tacit acceptance of the argument that the division of labour necessitated the existence of a market to mediate between otherwise disconnected and dissimilar individuals…

I don't think the the D of L 'necessitates a market' robbo. All sorts of societies have had a D of L but no market to mediate between 'individuals'.I think 'individualism' is an ideology, not biology.Once all workers, when asked 'Are you an individual?', reply 'No, I'm a worker', then we'll know that we're getting somewhere.The real relations of the market and its ideological excuse both need to be criticised and smashed.We can have a voluntary D of L and still meet the aims of Communism, the building of a society of 'social individuals'. The development of any individual is dependent upon the development of all.

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

It looks as if Engels wasn't the only one to talk of material conditions imposing themselves "after the manner of an overpowering natural law" on society !

No, you're quite right about Marx also having a 'positivistic' tendency, and I've made this point before on other threads. But this isn't the place to resurrect that debate.

ALB wrote:

In the end, of course, it doesn't really matter what Marx or Engels wrote or thought as socialism/communism does not depend on that. They were just a couple of 19th century socialists whose views on what socialism/communism would or should be like are no more authoritative than those of any other socialist.

I couldn't agree more. The sooner Marx is subjected to the same level criticism that Engels has been, the better for us all. Marx and Engels are 'suggestive' rather than 'prescriptive', and we must learn to select what we now consider correct after 130 years of further critical thought, and reject the 19th century guff that both of them accepted to different degrees (although, IMO, Engels was far more culpable in this).Workers must have the final say, not Marx, Engels, Lenin, Pannekoek, or any other supposed 'scriptural authority'.

[LBird]

pgb wrote:

In your previous posts you saw Mandela as "a paid up member of a black bourgeoisie" and a "class warrior" – for the rich. I found it difficult to avoid the impression from this that, for you, Mandela was a bit of a con-man, a bit of a fake, because although he presented himself as a liberator, and a "man of the people", etc, he was in fact acting in the interests of their oppressors – white capitalists and black capitalists (in waiting). Do you still hold that view?

Never mind just 'me', don't all Communists hold this view?

mcolome1 wrote:

It looks like you do support the individualistic conception of history.

I share mcolome1's opinion of your ideology, and I agree with their ideology, as expressed in that post. We're Communists, employing class analysis, you're a Liberal, employing the 'Great Man Theory of History'.Fine by me, if you think that your method is more useful for building an understanding of South African socio-economics.

[LBird]

robbo203 wrote:

Hi LBird No, Im certainly not using Engelsian philosophical categories of "material" and "objective". I did glance though the mega debates on this forum on dialectics , science and whatnot and found it all fascinating stuff – if perhaps a bit too much to keep up with. As a matter of fact, by and large I found myself very much in agreement with the position you yourself expressed throughout.

I could cry with joy at finding a sympathetic ear, and not having to go through all that science shit again, so soon!

robbo203 wrote:

But the point I wanted to convey from my reading of Marx in the passage I quoted is that he seemed to have envisaged the development of the polytechnic worker (as an ideal type) as being a precondtion for establishing communism and by polytechnic he meant someone who was multi-skilled and all rounded in a quite literal sense – that is someone who is able to quite lierally undertake a great variety of different task. This is what I was getting at.

Yes, I think you're right about what Marx meant, and I think that I agree with him. On the whole, I think that the 'preconditions of communism' will have to be largely built by workers within the womb of capitalism. The more time that workers have now, after their job, will have to be spent developing themselves in all ways: education, skills, hobbies, the 'polytechnic worker', rather than choosing the many meaningless 'diversions' that capitalism provides for us.If workers, by and large, can't start to reject the 'delights' of capitalism, and in their place start to develop themselves, then I think we'll never see Communism. These, of course, would have to be done outside the boundaries of bourgeois control. I'm thinking, initially, of the emergence of workers' study groups, to replace the crap being taught in the universities, for example.The rest of your post, about the D of L, I think I've already posted in agreement about. A voluntary D of L, rather than a compulsory one.The general tenor of my posts is based upon workers' conscious self-development; I don't believe that 'material forces' will compel anyone down a particular path. 'Consciousness' is as 'real' as a brick, and I think that we Communists need to find a way to propagandise and help to stimulate other workers. Workers themselves must want Communism, and must begin to think and act in ways which lay the 'preconditions for establishing communism'.I think that this stress on self-activity is closer to Marx's ideas, than is Engels' 'material forces' which in some way compel workers to communism. Put simply, more workers need to think critically and ask questions. We can't make them do this, and technology certainly won't.

[Author]

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