LBird
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An older book about Lunacharsky:
The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organisation of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky Sheila Fitzpatrick. Cambs. UP (2002; first 1970)
Some more recent books by/about Bogdanov:
The Philosophy of Living Experience: Popular Outlines Alexander Bogdanov (ed. D. G. Rowley). Brill (2016)
Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene McKenzie Wark. Verso (2016)
Red Hamlet: The Life and Ideas of Alexander Bogdanov James D. White. Brill (2018)
The Bolshevik thinker who came closest to Marx’s ideas was Bogdanov, both politically and philosophically.
Most of the rest were much the same as Lenin, including Stalin, Trotsky and Bukharin. Perhaps Lunacharsky was similar to Bogdanov.
marcos wrote: “L Bird, you are always beating around the bushes”
Well, I thought I treated your post with respect, giving answers to all your points, including admitting that I didn’t have a clue about your earlier question.
Unfortunately, it always seems that materialists, like you, are unable to discuss civilly, or actually answer any questions about Marx, social production, or democracy.
These issues, since they don’t involve ‘matter’, are regarded as ‘beating around the bushes’.
To focus on the subject under discussion, Kautsky was an undemocratic, uneducated, elitist, like many who flocked to ‘Marxism’ in the late 19th/early 20th centuries.
What attracted them was Engels’ talk of ‘Science’ – not Marx’s democratic communism, or his philosophy of ‘social productionism’, within which humanity produces its own universe.
I’ve put this issue in a nutshell for ‘materialists’ to ponder, and hopefully answer: “Would you rather see ‘socialised science’ or ‘scientific socialism’?”.
The former is Marx’s political view – a revolutionised, democratic social activity which changes in history. The latter is Engels’ (and Kautsky’s) – a bourgeois, elitist, apolitical, ahistorical, asocial ‘method’, that allows an elite to tell the rest of us ‘what reality is’, without our active participation.
Neither Engels nor Kautsky understood this. Nor Plekhanov or Lenin. And, apparently, neither you nor the wider SPGB.
Hmmm… I think that I’ll keep ‘beating the bushes’, so that all workers can flush out the ‘materialists’ and their undemocratic ideology.
marcos wrote: “L Bird, you have not answered my question on item #194693.”
Only because I don’t know anything about any issue regarding Engels, Marx, and his The Civil War in France.
marcos wrote: “I have known for a long time that dialectic of nature is not correct, it is only possible in the realm of the mind.”
It’s better to say that any ‘dialectic in nature’ must feature an account of social production, which necessarily involves a practice directed by an active human consciousness.
marcos wrote: “Have we created the unity of Marx-Engels?”
Well, all ‘materialists’ have, because the only way that their ideology can stand up is by: 1) quotes from Engels (there is nothing in Marx, who was critical of ‘materialism’); and 2) linking Engels to Marx, as a unified being, so that Marx’s authority can be invoked. So, as for Lenin, we have ‘Marx-Engels’.
marcos wrote: “We have raised critique to both and also Marx contradicts himself on different occasion too.”
Yes, both must be criticised, and Marx requires a critical update for the 21st century, by workers who begin from ‘Democratic Social Production’. We have to correct, clarify and update Marx’s works.
marcos wrote: “Without Engels volume 2 and 3 of capital would not have been able to be published…”
It’s quite possible to argue that it’s a pity that Engels did publish Marx’s unfinished texts, which completely ignored the work Marx had done after 1867 and his first volume, on Russia and its development and potential future. Marx supported the Narodniks, not the supposed ‘Marxists’, in their political debates of the 1870s and 80s, and seemed to think it was at least theoretically possible for Russia to skip ‘capitalism’ and proceed straight to ‘socialism’. If Marx had been able to publish his own later work, it’s very probable that it would have looked nothing like Capital 2 and 3, as we have them today.
marcos wrote: “…and without Engels financial support Marx would not have been to able to finish all his works”
No, you’re right, Fred was a sound, life-long mate of Charlie. And supporter of his kids, too.
But decency doesn’t necessarily mean he had a clue about Marx’s philosophy of ‘social productionism’ and its democratic imperative. In fact, it’s soon obvious to anyone who reads Engels works, from his 1859 review of Marx, that they were talking about different things.
Unfortunately, it’s Engels’ version of ‘Marx’ that most people are taught. We have to change that, marcos.
marcos, Engels not only contradicted Marx, but also contradicted himself, within the same letter.
Plus, Engels wrote that ‘matter’ was a social product, but also wrote the ‘Dialectics of Nature‘, where ‘nature’ supposedly pre-exists its human creators.
Without Marx, no-one now would’ve heard of Engels, who would’ve been a long-forgotten, obscure, minor, 19th century worshipper of pre-Einstein ‘science’, with little to say to us, today.
But… for those who create the unity ‘Marx-Engels’… they live in Lenin’s world… ‘physical’ and ‘material’ world, of course.
And Kautsky lived in that world, too.
marcos wrote: “Pretty soon L Bird will show up saying that Karl Kautsky was a follower of Frederich Engels like the members of the SPGB.”
An accurate forecast for an accurate statement, marcos! 😛
ALB wrote: “As Mattick was saying:
“an embarrassing, scatterbrained hodge-podge of philosophical, economic and political ideas that defy description and serious criticism.” “.
Materialism? Indeed!
That incapacity to respond to ‘philosophical, economic and political ideas’ presented by Marxist critics of ‘materialism’, seems to be the source of Lenin’s diatribe in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.
Even in the links that I gave above to the Red/Green debate, it’s clear that the supporters of ‘materialism’ soon turn to personal abuse, rather than give clearly thought out, rational responses to the democratic supporters of Marx.
‘Matter’ doesn’t recognise ‘votes’. No ‘Materialist’ is able to reconcile this problem within their ideology. Thus, the usual retort that ‘idealists’ are attempting to destroy ‘science’ and modern civilisation, and put us all back into the clutches of witches.
But ‘fear’ cannot overcome workers’ consciousness of their democratic production of their world, and their determination to politically control their own production.
As Marx argued, socialism is the self-emancipation of the proletariat. ‘Materialism’ is dying out.
ALB wrote: “This passage from Paul Mattick’s review of one of her books would seem to have some application here too:
”And although Dunayevskaya’s interpretation of Marxian doctrine is occasionally true and eloquent, the book as a whole is an embarrassing, scatterbrained hodge-podge of philosophical, economic and political ideas that defy description and serious criticism.””
I too would criticise many of these thinkers, like Dunayevskaya and Pannekoek, nevertheless I criticise them from a perspective of Marx’s method of ‘theory and practice’, and the need for democratic production.
It’s important to remember that every critic has an ideological perspective, and Mattick’s is clearly that of ‘materialism’. For example, in the article he writes:
“As practice leads to theory…“.
This is a standard ideological formulation of ‘materialism’.
For Marx, of course, the opposite was true – for him, ‘theory leads to practice‘. So, Mattick too has a dog in this race – there are no ‘objective’ commentators.
So, my advice: read all the texts, but be sure to identify both one’s own and the author’s ideological assumptions.
marcos wrote: “A new version of Marxism-humanism. Raya Dunayeskaya wrote: Karl Marx is one of the most idealist materialist philosopher and one of the most materialist idealist philosopher.”
Yeah, marcos, there’s always been a strand of Marxist thought that opposes Lenin’s anti-democratic ‘materialism’ – the earliest reference I can find is Labriola in 1896, but it carried on through Brzozowski, Bogdanov, Korsch, Gramsci, Panneneok, etc. It seems to be prominent in Italian and Polish philosophy.
The one thing that I have difficulty explaining, is why (given a democratic alternative which one would suppose would better fit Marx’s political views), the anti-democratic philosophy of Kautsky, Plekhanov and Lenin should continue to predominate. To me, it’s clear that the SPGB formed in 1903 was already locked into this proto-Leninist materialism. It was ‘in the air’ in the late 19th century, and both Lenin and the SPGB seems to have been affected by the ideology. This is the ideology of which Marx said, “I’m not a Marxist“.
As you say, it appears that Jason Moore’s views are ‘a new version’ of a long tradition of democratic ideology.
I know which side I take in the political and philosophical debate – it’s that of the democrats.
I’ve just come across a debate which mirrors the debate that we’ve been having here, between ‘a mind-independent reality’ (materialism) and ‘reality-for-us’ (Marx’s social productionism, or ‘idealism-materialism’).
It’s in the context of a ‘Green/Red’ debate.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2016/06/23/two-views-on-marxist-ecology-and-jason-w-moore/
Jason Moore (and Fred Murphy, perhaps?) seem to share the ‘constructivist’ ideology of Marx, whereas John Bellamy Foster and Ian Angus seem to share the ‘materialist’ ideology, which is common on this site.
I’m pleased to have found this debate which reflects ours, because I think it is central for the future of both ‘Marx’ and democratic socialism.
Very interesting article in today’s Grauniad, regarding brain, consciousness and ‘reality’.
“By viewing the brain as a computer that passively responds to inputs and processes data, we forget that it is an active organ, part of a body that is intervening in the world, and which has an evolutionary past that has shaped its structure and function. This view of the brain has been outlined by the Hungarian neuroscientist György Buzsáki in his recent book The Brain from Inside Out. According to Buzsáki, the brain is not simply passively absorbing stimuli and representing them through a neural code, but rather is actively searching through alternative possibilities to test various options. His conclusion – following scientists going back to the 19th century – is that the brain does not represent information: it constructs it.” [my bold]
Of course, the main ‘scientist’ from ‘the 19th century’ who has influenced this philosophical approach is Marx.
As Marx argued, our world is socially produced (constructed) by our production (intervention), and we can change (alternative possibilities) it.
We are the ‘active side’; we are not the passive tool of matter (responding to inputs).
I’m sure that we’ll realise eventually that Marx was correct about ‘modes of production’, and that different modes produce different ‘consciousness’. This would help explain why contemporary survivors from pre-capitalist social production, like native Americans, Eskimos and native Australians, turn to drink when confronted with a ‘reality’ not of their making, which is beyond their social comprehension, and is ‘madness’, not ‘reality-in-itself’.
18th century Materialism is nearly dead. Hopefully, humanity and Marx’s ideas will survive.
The only way to capture the ideological difference between the ‘materialist’ and Marx, is to question the thread title.
For a ‘materialist’, there is ‘Reality’.
For Marx, there is ‘Reality-For’.
For the ‘materialist’, there is no need to specify a producer of that ‘Reality’.
For Marx, there is a need to specify a producer of that ‘Reality-For’.
Thus, Marx’s fundamental concept of ‘Production’, which permeates all of his works, and is made apparent by his conceptual terms ‘mode of production’, ‘forces of production’, ‘means of production’, ‘social production’, ‘social producer’, etc.
And because ‘production’ changes, it has a history.
This is all a long way from ‘Reality’ (the concept is actually ‘Reality-In-Itself’, but who needs consciously created concepts when one has ‘Reality’ to inform one).
alanjjohnstone wrote: “But to stick to the point…we don’t have socialism because people don’t want it because they are imbued with the capitalist ideology, ruling class ideas prevailing …and so far the contradictions created by the capitalist system which TWC expects to break down this hegemony of ideas are not sufficiently experienced or expressed enough. So do we wait?”
No ‘contradictions’ will ‘create’ anything, because, for Marx, humanity was the ‘creator’.
‘Waiting for contradictions’ will lead to, as it always has, ‘waiting’.
We’ll continue to ‘wait’, until we become ‘the active side’. And that won’t happen, whilst the ‘waiters’ are told to ‘wait’ for ‘contradictions’ (or its synonym ‘material conditions’), without which, it is argued, being ‘active’ is simply a waste of time.
alanjjohnstone wrote: “Yes, and Dietzgen and Pannekoek suggested much the same that ideas are as part of the material world as physical matter. Or am i mistaken?“.
No, you’re not mistaken, you’re correct. Dietzgen and Pannekoek were simply following Marx, who himself said that he’d unified ‘idealism’ and ‘materialism’. That’s why it’s incomplete, to one-sidedly say “ideas are as part of the material world as physical matter” – it’s just as accurate to say “physical matter is as part of the ideal world as ideas“.
It’s probably best to say ‘ideas and physical matter are as part of the ideal-material world‘. Marx was interested in social production (‘idealism-materialism’), which requires conscious human action to change its objective world.
There is no subject without object, and no object without subject. If you want to term this ‘unity’ as ‘material’ alone, you’re likely to forget the other aspect, which is why I always suggest, if the term ‘material’ is insisted upon, that the term ‘ideal’ is also insisted upon.
It makes more sense to call this ‘social productionism’, but if ‘material’ must be a part of the phrase, then ‘idealism-materialism’ fits the bill better than ‘materialism’ alone.
We socially produce the ‘physical-for-us’ and the ‘idea-for us’. As Marx said, any part of a supposed ‘nature’ which is not for us, is a nothing for us.
