LBird
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Dodgy thinker wrote: “By “scientific” I mean a theory that identifies an empirically detectable and measurable…”
alan, it’s the definition of ‘scientific’ that you need to question.
You’ll lose any argument where a bourgeois definition of a socio-historical activity is simply accepted.
By ’empirical’, they actually mean ‘accessible to a biological individual‘ (by ‘senses’, like ‘touch’, which are not regarded as socio-historical products, as Marx argued) and by ‘measurable’ they mean ‘only quantitative and not qualitative values are acceptable‘ (whereas Marx regarded ‘value’ as ‘qualitative’).
Marx’s labour theory of value can’t survive such ‘scientific’ analyses. If we employ their definitions, we’re lost from the start.
Of course, this definition of ‘science’ is widely accepted by many…
Bijou Drains wrote: “So by that logic, if I give you a good hard kick up the arse…“.
No, you’re misunderstanding Marx’s logic, BD.
As I explained earlier, Marx’s logic revolves around an ‘active socio-historical producer’, not, as for example, Fichte, an ‘active I’, or, as for example, bourgeois science, a ‘passive I’, but a ‘social producer’.
Further, for Marx, he defines classes as ‘social producers’, so whereas it’s possible to define a ‘mode of production’ as a ‘social producer’ (which might be the case in a non-exploitative mode of production), Marx further divides exploitative modes of production into classes, exploited and exploiting.
So, your question, to make sense to Marxists, would have to begin:
“So by that logic, if the proletariat give the bourgeoisie a good hard kick up the arse…“.
I know that you don’t use Marx’s logic, though – which is ‘your’ choice, and has nothing to do with ‘ruling ideas’…
I can only presume you believe that ‘logic’ is asocial and ahistoric, and was created by a universal being, not humans.
Perhaps you and Stephen Murphy share this wonderment, at a non-human creator.
I obviously don’t.
Stephen Murphy wrote: “I know enough about quantum physics to know that the physical world is far weirder than normal ‘reality’ suggests. I know enough about the debate on consciousness to know that the majority of scientists would say that the relationship between thought and matter remains as much a mystery as ever. And I am aware of the fact that whether light is observed as wave or mass appears, oddly, to depend to some extent on the observer. Bizarre indeed! None of this, of course, proves there is an underlying non-material entity to creation any more than it disproves it. But the whole thing really is too odd to suggest, as Rear View does, that everything can be ‘adequately explained…!’ A bold and rather premature statement indeed!”
Stephen, I think that Marx gave the most relevant answer: humans produce any ‘world’ that we know.
Get rid of ‘social production’, and ‘quantum physics’, ‘the physical world’, ‘normal’, ‘reality’, ‘consciousness’, ‘scientists’, ‘thought’, ‘matter’ and ‘mystery’ all disappear.
It’s been clear since Kant that the ‘subject’ is at the very centre of all this (indeed, this was clear to some ancient Greeks, but the insight had been lost from ‘mainstream science’, ie. bourgeois science). The German Idealists that followed Kant made this ‘subject’ an ‘active’ one, and Hegel made this ‘active subject’ an ‘historical’ one. Finally, Marx made this ‘active historical subject’ a ‘socio-historical’ one (ie. not an ‘individual subject’, as for Fichte and others).
For Marx, humanity is an active, socio-historical creator of its own ‘reality’, a ‘reality-for-us’.
As you say, ‘observation’ can’t be removed from any ‘reality’. The main issue, though, is to see this ‘observer’ as a creator of what it ‘observes’, by its own activity (rather than a passive ‘observer’ of what already supposedly ‘exists’ outside of any active production by the ‘observer’).
Marx was ahead of his time, and Einstein showed that the bourgeoisie was only following in his footsteps, but is still lagging behind, even now.
ALB wrote: “Of course you could argue that Marx was wrong to have said that capitalism had to have developed before socialism became possible, but was he?”
But don’t forget, regarding the potential development of Russia in the late 1870s, Marx himself had argued precisely that – ie. that the then Russia didn’t have to have developed capitalism before socialism.
So, in your terms, Marx did ‘argue that Marx was wrong’.
Marx didn’t believe in ‘necessity’, ‘material’ or otherwise, because he was a social productionist who believed that humans could change their products.
When he came to study Russia, he seems to have realised that he’d been far too ‘deterministic’ in some of his middle-period works.
He realised (again) that ‘necessity’ and ‘determination’ prevent conscious change. By the 1870s, Marx was thinking much more like he had in the 1840s.
John Oswald wrote: “Sounds like a reiteration of the conquest of nature syndrome!”
One can only hold to this ideology, if one believes in a ‘Nature’ which is nothing to do with human production, which ‘pre-exists’ our production, which we then proceed to conquer.
It’s a standard ‘green’ ideology, John, but it’s nothing to do with Marx.
That doesn’t mean Marx was correct, of course, but it’s best to be open about one’s ideological choices.
If one holds to ‘Nature’ being ‘conquered’, one can’t hold to Capital.
But many try to do this.
alanjjohnstone wrote: “Can’t say I fully understand…“.
As I’ve said many times before, alan, Marx is a social productionist.
This is nothing at all to do with the bourgeois view of a ‘Nature’ which is ‘out there’, a ‘nature-in-itself’. Any ‘nature’ that we know, is a ‘nature-for-us’, our social product, and we can change it. If we don’t know it, Marx says it is a ‘nothing for us’.
We are our own god.
‘Matter’ isn’t, because we create ‘matter’, a ‘matter-for-us’, a product of our social activity, of our labour.
The title of this thread is ‘Is reality all in the mind?’
There are three possible answers, which correspond to the three politico-philosophical positions that I outlined earlier.
- Idealism answers ‘reality is in the divine mind‘;
- Materialism answers ‘reality is in reality-itself‘.
- Marxism answers ‘reality is a reality-for-us, a social product, which we actively produce, and so we can change it’.
The elite social producers of ‘Quantum physics’ are trying to fool us that the ‘reality’ that they produce is ‘reality-itself’. Only we can democratically determine whether ‘quantum physics’ suits the interests, aims and purposes of ‘reality-for-us’. We can change this ‘reality’, it isn’t a ‘final’ account of ‘reality-itself’, or an ‘Ultimate Truth’.
Whatever the quantum physicists write today about ‘reality’, they wrote differently in the past, and they’ll write differently in the future.
Any ‘reality’ that we know, has a history, is a social product, and changes – it is a changing, socio-historical product, a ‘reality-for-us’.
And democratic socialism would mean that we politically control its production, for our benefit. ‘Science’ must mean the creation of a better world for all, not the supposed disinterested exposing of a ‘truth-out-there’ by an unelected elite of ‘experts’.
Physics is a political issue.
John Oswald wrote: “You can all keep your stinking Marxist human supremacism! And your non-materialist idealist anti-scientific drivel!”
Yeah, this is always the materialists’ response to reasoned argument, historical knowledge and philosophical expertise in workers. The replacement of political argument with personal abuse is the standard reply, and the archetypal example of this was the materialist Lenin, in texts like his Materialism and Empiriocriticism. There is never any attempt to analyse the opponent’s argument or outline the materialist’s own, but simply a resort to name-calling. This was how Lenin responded to Bogdanov’s arguments, which were far closer to Marx’s, than Lenin’s were.
The epithet ‘Idealist!’ plays the same role as does ‘Satanist!’ in a church’s reply to atheistic criticism. And materialists wouldn’t know ‘anti-scientific drivel’, because they refuse to give an account of ‘science’ to measure ‘drivel’ against, because any socio-historical account of ‘science’ shows that it’s nothing to do with materialism, has its modern origins in the bourgeois defeat of revolutionary, democratic science, and that ‘science’ changes constantly. Only Marx’s social productionism can deal with these issues about ‘science’, and attempt an answer to the question posed in the thread title.
Physics and mathematics are social products, and change, and any democratic socialism will have to explain how these, and all academic disciplines, can be democratised, so that we, the associated producers, can control these changes. Otherwise, ‘reality’ will be in the hands of an elite.
John Oswald wrote: “Socialists who say they are materialists but believe in non-material substances, including non-material mind, free will and human divinity should petition Rome for a mass baptism and a receiving into the Church.
… Oh, wait a minute … The Catholic Church has now accepted evolution as valid science. Oh drat!”LOL!
Yeah, it’s been said before, John, that ‘Socialism’ is a form of religion, and that socialists regard Marx as a prophet!
But… there’s no substitute for discussing just who the materialists have in mind for their god – ‘Science’ or ‘Matter’.
Whichever it is, it certainly isn’t the great mass of humanity.
That’s why your ideology of materialism/physicalism/realism isn’t suited to any democratic socialism. It contains no account of ‘social production’, no account of ‘democratic control’, no account of socio-historic change… in fact, it’s supposedly ‘objective’, so it doesn’t require any of these essentially human requirements.
Oh, and when the materialists find ‘mind’ in the wet brain, be sure to tell us.
We’re going to have a long wait, because ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’ is a social product, not wet matter. But try telling the current generation of researchers…
John Oswald wrote: “I am a Marxist only in the political sense.”
Unfortunately, you’re not even that, John.
Politics is about power, and Marx argued for democratic power.
I think that quite probably you’ve either read Engels or heard Engels’ views from other materialists, and had them labelled ‘Marxism’.
Whatever your ideology is, and to me it seems to be a pretty standard bourgeois materialism/physicalism/realism, it’s nothing whatsoever to do with Marx’s social productionism, the belief that humanity socially produces its world, a ‘universe-for-us’, a ‘nature-for-us’, and that that production should be democratic.
John Oswald wrote: “So, L. Bird, if humans created nature, they created the Earth and the stars, and all other living beings. They created the dinosaurs, the wild grasses, the mountains, the sun and the moon. Anthropos, supreme deity.”
Thanks again, John, for a model ‘explanation’ of what Marx argues, from a materialist’s perspective.
All materialists separate ‘mind’ from ‘matter’, ‘consciousness’ from ‘being’, ‘humanity’ from ‘nature’ – even though they claim to be ‘monists’.
Marxists do not do this – their account always includes both.
So, for example, we don’t separate ‘dinosaurs’ from ‘knowledge of dinosaurs’, and pretend that some special ‘scientist’ has access to ‘dinosaurs’ that doesn’t involve our active participation. Any ‘dinosaur’ that we know has been create by us – that’s why we can give a socio-historical account of ‘dinosaur construction’, and, for example, see how different our view of ‘dinosaur’ differs from the Victorian view of ‘dinosaur’. There isn’t (and never will be) a ‘final’ account of ‘dinosaur-for-us’ which is ‘dinosaur-in-itself’.
But, to be clear, this is not just a ‘historical’ problem about ‘dinosaurs’. Exactly the same point applies to ‘nature’, ‘Earth’, ‘stars’, ‘beings’… and indeed ‘rocks’, ‘bricks’, ‘matter’, etc., etc.
And yes, for Marx, humanity was the ‘supreme deity’.
And he also pointed out that, since a ‘supreme deity’ is always need for organised, conscious production to take place, the materialists, having falsely claimed that they deal only with ‘dinosaurs’ or ‘rocks’ in-themselves’, will proceed to produce ‘dinosaurs’ or ‘matter’ for their own, elite, undemocratic purposes. They’ll claim ‘objectivity’, of course! But we know, this elite will play the part of the ‘supreme deity’. They’ll retain power.
This is the whole point of Marx’s view of socialism: it’s a creation of the mass of humanity, by democratic means.
Materialists, as did Lenin, dispute this, and wish to retain the power of production for an elite. They call it ‘Science’. And they won’t have democratic control of physics. Or of ‘dinosaurs-in-themselves’. 😉
John Oswald wrote: “L. Bird: Thanks for putting me in a neat little box.”
No offence meant, John. Just labelling the ‘box’, so that others can situate your ideological beliefs within the rough schema that I’ve outlined, as stage 2 materialism.
Once again, your reduction of ‘human active consciousness’ to ‘brain’ is bog-standard materialism/physicalism. If you want to believe that, and propagate that belief as suitable for building democratic socialism, it’s open to you to do so. It’s just that Marxists will disagree with your belief, and so will challenge it. That’s what political and philosophical debate is all about.
John Oswald wrote: “Do not confuse natural philosophy with social philosophy.”
Once again, this ‘splitting’ of the ‘natural’ from the ‘social’ was a act by the bourgeoisie, to ideologically separate off their ‘hard science’ from the democratic and revolutionary concerns of ‘soft humanity’. This is the ideological root of the current ‘academic’ division between ‘art/science’, ‘matter/mind’, ‘reality/ideology’, etc. On the contrary, Marx’s aim was to unify all human social production, and regard poetry and physics as part of the same human effort to produce our knowledge. We can’t separate ‘nature’ from ‘society’.
John Oswald wrote: “…as though our species’ concerns had relevance beyond us“.
It’d be nice for any materialist to outline any ‘non-relevant concerns’ which shouldn’t concern us. If any materialist knows the ‘Beyond Us’, they should tell us just how they themselves got ‘beyond us’, when it apparently isn’t open to the mass, from whom it is supposed to be ‘beyond’. Marx pointed out this elite trickery of the materialists, in his Theses on Feuerbach. It requires a ‘Knowing Elite’ who are separate from ‘Society’.
Wez wrote: “…the more we understand nature (the universe)…“.
The philosophical problem, Wez, is ‘Is ‘nature’ to be considered prior to us, or to be our product?’
For materialists, as we’ve seen from John’s contributions, regard ‘nature’ as prior to ‘humanity’. So, ‘matter’ precedes our ‘consciousness’.
Marx, however, regarded any ‘nature’ that we know as our social product, so ‘nature-for-us’ comes after us. So, ‘our production’ precedes our product, ‘matter’. And we can change it.
It’s a bog-standard ideological belief, produced by the bourgeoisie, that ‘Nature’ is sitting ‘out there’, merely waiting to be ‘Discovered’, and that that is the task of their ‘science’. It doesn’t require democratic participation, of course.
If Marx is right, any understanding of nature that we develop, will place us at the productive heart of ‘it’, and that understanding will be necessarily socio-historical, containing an account of how and why humanity’s notions of ‘Nature’ have originated and changed.
Materialism does not do this, but merely returns to idealist notions of The Absolute, in the new garb of ‘matter’, an unchanging, universal, ahistoric, asocial, ‘star stuff’.
John Oswald wrote: “Matter is not created, and mind is a property of matter. Matter has no beginning and no end. Mind, as one of the properties of matter, is subject to the same physical laws of motion, cause and effect.”
Thanks, John, for a standard restatement of stage 2 ‘Materialism’.
Those workers who are interested in building a democratic socialism (and who will already thus be aware of the need for both ‘active humanity’ and that ‘humanity’ being defined as the ‘mass’, not an ‘elite’), and wanting to know more about Marx’s stage 3 ‘social productionism’, should note that John doesn’t mention humanity, democracy nor social production (all key elements in Marx’s philosophy), but argues that our active consciousness is merely a ‘property of matter’, and ‘subject to the same physical laws’. Thus, the ‘active side’, for John, as for all stage 2 materialists, is ‘matter’.
This is, of course, all bog-standard 18th century ‘materialism’, which Marx rejected. For Marx, the creator of both ‘physical laws’ and ‘matter’ is humanity (as also Pannekoek agreed). Thus we can change ‘it’. For John, ‘matter’ plays the role of an eternal, universal, god – his quote even has religious overtones “Matter has no beginning and no end“, which equates it to The Absolute.
Marx is a ‘productionist’, not a ‘physicalist’, John.
Wez wrote “…even after the revolution we will still ponder the questions raised by this thread in terms of mind, consciousness and reality…“.
In an attempt to give a very brief outline of the development of these questions, and to give those without any great understanding of philosophy a chance to orientate themselves to the issues, I would reduce its stages to:
- consciousness creates being;
- being creates consciousness;
- consciousness creates being.
This could also be summarised as:
- mind creates matter;
- matter creates mind;
- mind creates matter.
or:
- subject creates object;
- object creates subject;
- subject creates object.
or:
- idealism;
- materialism;
- idealism-materialism.
The key difference between stages 1 and 3 is the concept of ‘consciousness/mind/subject’.
For stage 1 (idealism), the subject is believed to be ‘divine’, whereas for stage 3 (Marxism), the subject is regarded as ‘humanity’.
In stage 2 (materialism), which first placed ‘humanity’ as the subject, the subject was regarded as ‘passive’.
The key move by Marx was to take the ‘active subject’ from Idealism (ie. god), and replace the ‘passive subject’ of Materialism with the new conception of of the ‘active subject’ being humanity. Marx unified (as he wrote himself) idealism with materialism, which was a longstanding aim of German Idealism. But Marx achieved that aim.
So, we went from:
- active divine subject creating nature-for-god;
- active matter creating passive humans;
- active humanity creating nature-for-us.
Marx’s term for this ‘human creativity’ is ‘social production’. And because our world is our product, we can change it. And this change can be democratic.
I hope this very brief outline helps to orientate any workers interested in politics. If one remains at stage 2, the bourgeois stage, one remains under the control, as Marx wrote, of a minority, who claim that ‘humans are passive in the face of matter’, but then make themselves, the minority, the ‘active side’, whilst the majority has to remain passive. Lenin embraced Materialism for this very reason.
