LBird
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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.
alanjjohnstone wrote
“…Dieztgen and Pannekoek consider ideas as material…my reading that ideas are part of the material…”
For Marx, ‘material’ meant ‘human’ (as opposed to ‘ideal’ meaning ‘divine’), so what Marx was simply arguing was ‘ideals are social’, and not the product of a ‘god’.
‘Ideas’, just like ‘widgets’, are social products of humanity. The are no ‘widgets-in-themselves’ which produce ‘ideas’, merely by humans pretending that the ‘widgets’ already exist, and that us being ‘practical’ with these ‘widgets’ will produce ‘ideas’ (that is, that the ‘widgets’ are the active producers of our ‘ideas’, and we are passively imbibing, as ‘ideas’, the ‘truth’ of these ‘widgets’). This latter view is simply ‘widgets’ are ‘god’.
alanjjohnstone wrote
“…we are waiting for that consciousness to arise…”
What are you waiting for? For the ‘widgets’ to produce that consciousness?
alanjjohnstone wrote
“Our conviction in workers’ democracy extends to the autonomy of our class to work out the solutions for themselves and take the appropriate actions independently of any intellectual elite.”
But this is not robbo’s (or any materialist’s) argument. They argue that ‘material conditions’ (and by ‘material’, they mean something outside of ‘consciousness’) will ‘mature’, and then ‘consciousness’ will follow, hence their ‘waiting for consciousness to arise’.
Any democracy, autonomy, ‘for themselves’, actions independent, require discussion about and creation of those ‘solutions’, ie. ‘theory and practice’, by workers themselves.
Having come up with successful theory and practice (ie. a world socialist revolution installing socialism), why would the democratic producers then hand that power over to any elite (scientific, technical, intellectual, philosophical), which as you argue, a power that they will have already taken control of, ‘independently of any intellectual elite‘?
Surely, the role of the SPGB, like any worker communists (as Marx argued) is to help their fellow workers to self-develop as a class? Surely, telling interested workers that ‘material’ or a ‘technical elite’ will be the final beneficiary of the efforts and risks taken by the workers themselves, is likely to be unconvincing and ultimately unsuccessful?
If we thinking humans create the ‘material conditions’, we can change them.
If the ‘material conditions’ create thinking humans, we can’t change them.
That was Marx’s great criticism of passive, 18th century materialism. Who is the ‘creator’ – god or humanity? Engels didn’t understand that ‘matter’ was just another name for ‘god’.
