LBird
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It’s always a sure sign that one has hit a weak spot in a political belief, when the defenders of that belief, rather than defend that belief with argument, turn to personal attacks upon the critical questioner: that is, they attack the messenger, rather than the message.
I’ve made the mistake in the past of responding on a personal level, but even I’ve learned that it’s better to continue to focus upon the political message, rather than be side-tracked into a personalised spat, after which I’m accused of being a ‘troll’, and the party members, who originate that form of debate, are left alone by the moderators, whilst I am censured or even banned. I should make it plain, too, that I’m not just talking here about the SPGB here, but also the ICC and LibCom (all on the net), and the SWP, in real life. Because of this confirmatory history of similar political responses to critical questions about the Marx-Engels relationship (and its consequences: materialism, matter, science, and lack of democratic methods), I’m forced to conclude not only that my critical questions can’t be answered by those who prioritise Engels’ ideas, but also that this ‘personalisation’ of the debate is a necessary political response within the community who call themselves ‘Materialists’. I’m sure that anyone who knows of the history of any ‘Materialists’ who have gained power will know that this ‘personalisation’ leads to ‘confessions’ by those guilty of questioning the ‘Marx-Engels-X’ relationship (‘X’ of course, being the current unquestionable leader who has access to ‘what matter says’).
So, to continue the political debate:
Marcos wrote: “…I stay with Engles because he dedicated his whole life to the cause of the working class”
This is untrue, Marcos – Engels was fascinated with Bourgeois Science and its central concept, ‘matter’, which is why his erroneous ideas were so useful for those ‘thinkers’ determined to prevent workers’ democratic control of social production, starting with Kautsky, Plekhanov and Bernstein. None of these first-generation thinkers understood Marx, and if they had, clearly wouldn’t have touched his ideas with a barge-pole. Engels was the originator of the ‘Marxism’ which you follow, which is why when confronted with Marx’s key concepts of ‘democratic social production’ and ‘critique’ you are at a loss to make a political response.
Bijou Drains wrote: “…this whole hatred of Engles…”
There is no ‘hatred’ of Engels on the part of Marxists, BD. We just know that he and Marx wrote very different things, based upon very different ideologies, concepts and theories, and that Engels was very confused about the relationship between ‘matter’ and ‘social production’. For Marx, ‘matter’ was a social product, not something that pre-existed the human creation of it. On Engels’ part, he both agreed and disagreed with Marx, in different parts of his writings, because he had no clear understanding of Marx’s basic philosophical views, which had been fundamentally formed by his social upbringing within German Idealism. Put simply, Marx effected the unity of idealism and materialism (a task being attempted by many Idealists of Marx’s generation), whereas Engels remained in the ideological world of 18<sup>th</sup> century materialism. Of course, it was Einstein’s work in the early 20<sup>th</sup> century which confirmed Marx’s views about social production, and completely undermined the current ‘science’ of the bourgeoisie, which Engels had so unfortunately (and uncomprehendingly) espoused.
Marcos wrote: “…the whole body of ideas of Marx and Engels…”
The problem with this formulation, Marcos, is that there isn’t a ‘whole body of ideas’, which were produced by these two different thinkers.
Marx and Engels said many things which conflict with each other (and both sometimes said things which actually conflicted with what each had said earlier). There never was a ‘unity’ to their thoughts, which is a myth propagated by Leninists, to allow the political method of ‘name addition to the divinity’ to be employed: first, ‘Marx-Engels’, then ‘Marx-Engels-Lenin’, then ‘Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin’, etc. It’s simply a political method to allow the political ideas of the last-named to have a spurious legitimacy. And yes, Engels was the originator of the policy.
The 21st century proletariat has to clear up these issues, to our satisfaction. The mere repetition of the myth of a ‘whole body’ didn’t work last century, and it’s never going to work now, with an even better educated proletariat.
‘Marx-Engels’, the unified being, never existed.
Bijou Drains wrote “I find taking the piss out of them works quite well.
Ridicule the fact that they take an anti science stance whilst happily using their science based iPhones and web sites.
Call them hypocrites who denounce science but reach for the medicine cabinet as soon as they get a cough or a cold.
Ask them why they don’t trust conventional science but are happy to rely on it when they are being thrust through the air at hundreds of miles an hour in aircraft that rely on the findings of that science.
The problem with these types of fuck wits is that they cherry pick the science they disregard. They will denounce vaccination but if they get cancer or another serious health condition they are quick to return to conventional medicine.”
Whilst I don’t have any time for god-botherers, BD, I think that you’re seriously underestimating the problems in ‘science’, which allow the religious and the ignorant to build their influence amongst ‘the young and early middle-aged adults’.
FWIW, I’d prefix, what you call ‘science’, as ‘Bourgeois Science’, and point out its historical and social origins in the defeat of the revolutionaries during the English Revolution, which are also the source of its fundamental problems, the sort of problems that have been apparent in, for example, physics, maths and logic, since the end of the 19th century.
I’d contrast that ‘science’ with ‘Proletarian Science’, which has both a democratic method and entirely different ‘scientific’ aims and purposes.
I think your scorn, whilst I can understand it, will do nothing to build a viable alternative ‘science’ which would be our socio-historical method within socialism.
Whatever, it’s clear that ‘science’ (ie., Bourgeois Science) only supports and strengthens the current ruling class, and we should be trying to pose an alternative to both Bourgeois Science and ignorant pseudo-science.
alanjjohnstone wrote “A SOCIAL REVOLUTION, encompasses the whole of society and will express itself in a wide variety of ways.”
Indeed. ‘a wide variety of ways’, including ‘science’.
We’d best start preparing now, to explain why ‘science’ has to be democratised. All talk of Stephen Hawking, and his ilk, knowing ‘nature’ better than the rest of us, to the extent that we can’t vote to change ‘nature’, will have to be politically challenged.
Whilst socialists disagree with Marx’s argument that ‘nature’ is a social product, and that we can change it, we’re all hamstrung.
Only a majority can determine ‘nature-for-us’.
robbo203 wrote “Change is essentially a bottom-up process. The capitalists and their representatives have power only because we give it to them. When the writing is on the wall and their time is clearly up, there will precious little they could do about it. For the most part even they will fall in line with the will of majority, grudgingly or otherwise”
It should also be stressed that any ‘change’ from the ‘bottom-up’, if it is to lead to socialism, will have to be democratic.
Furthermore, these ‘democratic bottom-up changes’ will also involve the social production of our ‘science’, including education, academia, universities, philosophy, logic, maths, physics, nature, reality, truth, objectivity, etc.
There won’t be any ‘specialists’ who supposedly have a non-democratic ‘method’ which allows them, and them alone, to dictate to the ‘majority’ just what ‘is‘.
It’s clear to me that the reason so many self-proclaimed ‘socialists’ look to Engels’ notion of ‘Scientific Socialism’ is precisely because the bourgeois term ‘science’ implies an elite.
I’d be inclined to oppose ‘Scientific Socialism’ to ‘Democratic Socialism’, to draw out the differences in these politically-opposed conceptions of ‘socialism’, and the question of whether it requires a majority to build it, or, on the contrary, that an elite can build ‘nature’, ‘reality’, ‘truth’, etc., and so, ‘socialism’.
Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and … the alteration of men on a mass scale is, necessary, … a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.
[my bold]
It’s clear that for Marx, and thus for anyone claiming to be influenced by Marx, that the overwhelming majority of humanity is what is meant by ‘a majority’.
Any attempt by a self-constituting ‘elite’ to argue that ‘socialism’ will be brought about by a minority (which just happens to be them) is tantamount to Leninism.
To be clear, we’re talking about 80-90% of humanity here, not 3.5%, not 20-30%, not even 40-50%.
Socialism is the self-emancipation of the proletariat. Anything less will require an elite to lead it.
To specifically address the issue in terms argued by some SPGB members, the generalists will determine ‘truth’, not an elite of specialists.
Thanks for that link, alan.
The writer of the letter, H D Walters, is very confused. On the one hand, they appear to support Marx’s ‘idealism-materialism’ (ie. social productionism), but then on the other revert to a form of Engels’ 18th century ‘materialism’ (‘stuff-in-itself’, like ‘matter’ or ‘biology’).
Walters writes :
“The terms human nature and human behaviour are not interchangeable terms because they mean and connote different things.
They are not, however, mutually exclusive. The one (human nature), cannot exist without the existence of the other (the phenomenon of human behaviour) and vice versa. They are complementary.” [my bold].So far, so Marxist. We can’t talk about ‘matter’ or ‘biology’ without talking about the conscious producer of ‘it’. Humans are the social producer of anything which ‘exists-for’ them.But then Walters writes, in denial of their first statement:“May I point out what can only properly be called human nature (in contrast to human behaviour) is the sum total of the biological attributes common to all members of the human species. Far from being insignificant this unique combination of biological attributes is not only not insignificant, it is the most amazing and important biological event (apart from the emergence of organic matter itself) that has ever taken place.“.Here, they revert to ‘biological attributes’ and ‘biological event’ (and, indeed, ‘organic matter itself‘ [my bold]), which apparently are supposed to predate human social production. This is simply 18th century ‘materialism’, which Engels mistaken continued to employ, in contrast to Marx, who clearly rejected this ‘materialism’ and insisted that ‘matter’ cannot exist without the existence of humanity. For Marx ‘biology’ is a social product, which is why ‘biology’ changes as we change our forms of society, especially our forms of social production. ‘Biology’ for many other societies, now and in the past, is very different from our current ‘biology’. And of course, ‘organic matter’ is a fundamental concept of 18th century materialism, which has been superseded by later concepts such as ‘mass’ and ‘energy’ (which themselves will, have no doubt, be discarded in the future, as we humans refine our concepts, our theories and practices, about ‘ourselves’ and our ‘origins’).Marx’s views require the concept of ‘for-us’, not the pre-Kantian ‘in-itself’. There is only the changeable ‘biology-for-us’, a socio-historical product, which we produce and thus can change, rather than a ‘biology-itself’, which supposedly pre-exists our production of it, and so can’t be changed. It’s this supposed ‘biology-itself’ to which Walters is referring, and which breaks apart his earlier concept of ‘complementary existence’.I hope this clarifies the issue for you, alan.Anyone who’s a Marxist won’t be surprised by the thesis that ‘human nature’ is a social product, which changes over time, and since it is our socio-historical product, we can change it.
Only those who believe in ‘materialism’ will disagree with Marx’s ‘social productionist’ view, and will argue that ‘nature’ (of all forms, including the ‘human’) is not a social product which changes, but is ‘something out there’ which ‘bourgeois science’ ‘objectively discovers’, and so we can’t change it.
Persnickety wrote
“The problem is that there is a colossal inequality between those who have spent a lifetime in academia and those of us who weren’t even fortunate enough to go to university. Marxist theory can be very intimidating if you’re not university educated, I certainly find this. To take myself as an example, I’m not illiterate, I’m not unwilling to learn, I’m not unreceptive to Marxist ideas and I’m not unfamiliar with reading non-fiction and yet I make agonisingly slow progress with Marxist study. I would say that, if anything, I’m more amenable and intellectually curious than most of my peers and acquaintances, many of whom don’t read at all.
Without resorting to idealistic projections of a sudden intellectual renaissance or merely hand-waving the problem away what do we think about this, what do we do about this, realistically.”
I totally agree with you, Persnickety. There is a ‘colossal inequality’ between ‘Communists/Marxists’ and ‘workers’, and the cause of this lies squarely with Communists/Marxists, starting with Marx himself.
It should be the job of ‘theorists’ to explain their theories in a way understandable to the ‘interested/receptive’ worker, but this has never been done (not just done badly, but not done at all).
I have my own theory why this is so, but I’ll keep it to myself, unless you’re really interested and directly ask me, because it’ll cause no end of trouble to start discussing it here.
But… it should be said, that it takes time and effort to understand some very unusual theories, which Marx put forward, which don’t fit with the ‘common sense’ view of our world, which has been put forward by ruling classes throughout history, and so this ‘common sense’ has become a ‘ruling class idea’, and any opposition to it will appear on the surface to be ludicrous.
Thanks for the heads-up about this book, alan, and I’ve just ordered it.
I’ve already got Burkett’s Marx and Nature, Foster’s Marx’s Ecology, Smith’s Uneven Development, Castree’s Making Sense of Nature, and Grundmann’s Marxism and Ecology, so it will be interesting to see if Kohei Saito improves upon them. 🙂
Always glad to see Newcastle win, especially under Benitez!
Yeah, a new thread on Vygotsky’s Marxism would be best, when I get the text.
Meanwhile, I’m re-reading Lev Vygotsky: Revolutionary Scientist, to examine Newman and Holzman’s understanding of Marx.
Bijou, given your ‘conciliatory’ post, I’ve just ordered Vygotsky’s Mind In Society, and if you want a discussion around that work, I’m game if you are.
I’ve already read Newman and Holzman’s Lev Vygotsky: Revolutionary Scientist, which is where I got the quote in the post above from, but there is no substitute for a discussion about original work.
Bijou Drains wrote
“… I am as thick as two short Planck’s Constants”
I wouldn’t worry too much about your status, Bijou.
Planck’s Constant is a number produced by a social being, in order that another product of social beings, mathematics, could make sense of another product of social beings, physics, which was premised upon another product of social beings, philosophy, which was premised upon another product of social beings, politics.
Of course, Planck and his mathematical ideologists insist that this ‘Constant’ is a ‘Universal’, asocial, ahistorical, ‘number-in-itself’.
Yeah, right! says any Marxist, who already knows that socio-historical products ‘constantly’ CHANGE, and we humans change them, to suit our productive purposes, purposes which are always related to ‘our’ interests and needs. One society’s ‘constant’ is another society’s ‘load of bollocks’.
We just argue about who the ‘our’ is. It might turn out that your ‘objective’ status is much improved, when ‘we’ come to judge it. 🙂
Lev Vygotsky wrote:
“I don’t want to discover the nature of mind by patching together a lot of quotations. I want to find out how science has to be built, to approach the study of mind having learned the whole of Marx’s method.”
Put simply, the ‘science’ Vygotsky wished to see didn’t yet exist, and democratic discussion by workers looking to Marx would precede the ‘building’ of that ‘science’.
I think Vygotsky would have recognised Marx’s ‘revolutionary science’ as playing a crucial part in our building of ‘democratic socialism’.
alanjjohnstone, quoting Dietzgen
“the natural phenomena are by no means “things in themselves,” but objects of our sensations. Since also the particular phenomenon called subjective feeling, soul or consciousness is an object of sensation, there is no use here splitting up things into subjective and objective. The objective thing can only be perceived subjectively, and vice versa.”
Yes, this is it: ‘mind-matter’, which was Marx’s view.
Not ‘matter’ (as something which exists outside of our production of ‘it’); not ‘consciousness’ (as something which exists outside of our consciousness of ‘it’).
Subject-object (not subjective individual opinion, nor objective reality).
To split ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ requires one to argue for a non-human producer, ie. a god.
Marx was discussing the social producer, mind-matter, which produces and reproduces mind-matter. We are our own god.
