robbo203
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Tim Kilgallon wrote:This is the scenario. We are living in a socialist society which works along the lines of your proposal for voting re scientific theories. In an area of the world an outbreak occurs of a particular illness at a level of deadliness previously unknown, perhaps a little like the recent Ebola outbreak. Would the development of an effective treatment for this illness be required to go through the lengthy, time consuming process of organising a worldwide vote, with all of the requisite sharing of relevant information, etc.at every stage of the process, before a treatment for this deadly disease could be given to the victims of the disease?
You wont get an answer from LBird on this question, Tim. I note that it is his clear policy to shy away from anything remotely connected with the mechanics of how a global vote on thousands of scientific theories is going to be organised. Little wonder too. He has been hoisted by his own petard and is too embarrassed to admit it
LBird wrote:How can you consciously know 'matter', ALB, without a vote being taken by your fellow social producers?How would this vote be organised among 7 billion people, LBird, What would happen to the minority within the tiny minority of people ever likely to vote, if they disagreed with the majority within this tiny minority? Would they be allowed to continue holding and propagating their minority view? Or would your Leninist thought police be on to them , rounding up all these non-conformists in dawn raids? If none of the above, please explain in plain terms to simple proles like myself what was the point of this vote being taken among the social producers . What did you hope to achieve by such a vote?
LBird wrote:. The SPGB has started to argue for 'specialists', who are not under the political control of the 'generalists'.This is Leninist politics by another name.No, LBird, the only Leninist here is you with your leninist argument for so called "democratic centralism" Not only are you a leninist but you are a dishonest leninist to boot. The suggestion that the SPGB argues for specialists not under the political control of the generalists, clearly implies that said specialists have, in some sense, the power to impose their views on others against the will of the latter. Where has this ever been suggested? Cite the evidenceThe problem really boils down to your utterly childish and idiotic argument that there can be no specialists and no specialisation in socialism/communism. You have never bothered to explain how, for example, a neurosurgeon can become a competent neurosurgeon without specialising in neurosurgery, without devoting years and years of her life to studying and honing her craft. In LBird's surreal worldview, anyone can just walk off the street in a socialist society and perform a complex brain operation becuase, according to him, every single one of us will be fully competent skilled and knowledgeable in every conceivable kind of occupation. There will be no specialists in anything because we will all specialists in everything The idea is so preposterous its hardly even worth debating, Of course any advanced modern type of society requires specialisation to some degree – do you deny this LBird and if so on what grounds? Lets hear your argument for a change. Come out in the open with it and defend your ideas instead of forever running away from this argument every time it is levelled against you. And while you are at it, please explain how a neurosurgeon, being a neurosurgeon, can have any power over others in a society in which all work is performed on a purely voluntaristic basis and where all goods and services are made avialabe on a free access basis
ALB wrote:A joker wrote:No matter what Marx says, you're not going to have workers voting about whether 'matter exists' or not, are you?robbo203 wrote:the silly idea that scientific ideas – tens of thousands of them – should be put to a democratic vote by the global population …, if your silly idea were ever to be attempted I suspect less than 0.0001 per cent of the populace would even bother to vote on whether sting theory was true or not.I agree with you, Robbo, that if the issue "Does matter (external reality) exist? Yes/No" was put to a referendum, most people would vote with their feet — in the same way that Dr Johnston did when he answered the same question by kicking a stone. And if the No side won the Brexiteers' dilemma would be nothing compared with theirs. No doubt, our joker would be there to insist that "Exiting Reality means Exiting Reality". Who could disagree with that?
Yes indeed, ALB. I mean, what LBird is saying is so ludicrous it is astonishing that he doesn’t even seem to have the faintest glimmering of this. Is he seriously proposing that some new theory concerning, say, the asexual reproduction of the Malaysian tapeworm is gonna be put to a global vote of 7 billion people??? C’mon. Let’s get real here. LBird is obsessed with the word elitism” but it got nothing to do with elitism. Its get everything to with the fact that individuals are different in multiple ways. I couldn’t care a toss about the asexual reproduction of the Malaysian tapeworm, frankly, but somebody might. Maybe there is a little community of enthusiasts scattered around the world who are deeply interested in the subject. Good on them! Maybe LBird could join their forum if they would have him. He seems to think that every individual in a future communist society is going to be 1) fully knowledgeable and 2) fully interested in every conceivable kind of scientific theory that is being churned out so perhaps he should practice what he preaches and lead by example by actively participating in the discussion of that forum with fegular feedbacks to this forum I imagine, though, that some Facebook group for Malaysian tapeworm enthusiasts is unlikely to organise a democratic vote on this startling new theory but supposing that it did, what then? Are the rival factions going to stop debating the topic just because one of them carried the day and got more votes than the others? Of course not. So what really was the point of the vote in that case? You see this is what LBird doesn’t understand. He pretends to be a “democratic communist” but he hasn’t got a clue what democracy is about or what it is for. Democracy is not about stifling the free expression of ideas, denying the right of a minority to continue expressing their ideas in the face of majority opinion. This is what is so sinister and repulsive about what LBird is saying. He is a Leninist putting forward the Leninist principle of so called democratic CENTRALISM. The whole thrust of his argument is totalitarian, not libertarian, and it is high time he should be outed on that count. In effect, since there is no possibility of his apparently ultra-democratic proposal of a global vote on all scientific theories ever being implemented what he is actually arguing for, if only by default, is for a tiny minority to decide what the rest of us should think. That is to say, once this vote has been taken – in effect, by a tiny minority, since there is no way 7 billion people are going to concern themselves with the asexual reproduction of the Malaysian tapeworm – that’s it! No further dissenting opinion will be permitted. The TRUTH has been decided once and for all. This is the fascism of a Big Brother state, frankly. It is certainly not remotely what democracy is about. Democracy is not about controlling and regulating ideas. LBird’s basic argument is that ideas are socially produced which is true enough but he fails to see that just because something is socially produced, it does not follow therefore that it must therefore be subject to democratic control. My mobile phone is socially produced. Does that mean that every aspect of it’s design and functionality must be subject to a democratic vote of the entire world population. Seriously? Until LBird begins to learn the difference between what democracy is for and what it is NOT for, we will not make much headway in this discussion. Once he has jettisoned these junk ideas he holds then, but only then, can we begin a serious discussion about what democracy will look like in a democratic communist society
LBird wrote:And robbo keeps up his elitist claim that the 'science' done by a minority outweighs the opinions of the majority of producers.Bollocks. I say nothing of the sort. Its you who upholds the silly idea that scientific ideas – tens of thousands of them – should be put to a democratic vote by the global population, not me, So the question of the views of some "outweighing" those of others would simply not arise in my case. In practice, if your silly idea were ever to be attempted I suspect less than 0.0001 per cent of the populace would even bother to vote on whether sting theory was true or not. Meaning a tiny minirity anyway And if you still haven't answered the question – what happens if the global population of 7 billion (or 0001 per cent of 7 billion) decided by a majority that string theory was wrong?. Would people who thought that String theory was correct be preventeted from propagating their ideas in your Brave New World? I think you are basically a Leninist, LBird, with a strong attachment for the Leninist principle of democratic centralism whilst pretending to be a democratic communist
Young Master Smeet wrote:I ask, would Lbird see practicing geneticists gaoled if they continued to dispute the majority vote? Or tried to contionue writing papers and doing research against the wish of the majority?Yes I wanna know LBird's answer to that too! He never did get round to explaining what was the point in 7 billion people voting on tens of thousands of scientific theories every year or indeed how this even remotely practical, Nothing wrong with organising production on a democratic basis but democratically determining the truth value of ideas is another matter entirely!
What ever happened to Barry? One of my most memorable memories of him was when he represented the SPGB in a debate in Guildford back in 1980s against an organisation called – I vaguely remember – "Peace Through Nato" or some such name. He brought along with him an antique sword which he unsheathed and held up during the course of his contribution much to the consternation of his opponent who, I swear, turned slightly pale at the sight of it. Barry's point was a simple but effective one – war was gruesome, irrespective of the technology used, and he took care to point out the runnel down which the blood would flow when the sword pierced the victim's body.Yer just don't make 'em like that anymore!
Dave B wrote:[2] emergence is becoming an increasingly important idea in theoretical physics Thus it was a central theme in this recent Institute of Physics lecture The origin of the Universe. From macrophysics to microphysics Wednesday, 11 January 2017, 18:30 – 19:30 Professor Lucio Piccirillo, University of Manchesterhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmergenceIts not just in physics that the emergence paradigm is gaining ground. In sociology a notable example of this approach to Durkheim is Keith’s Sawyers thought-provoking article “Durkheim’s Dilemma: Towards a Sociology of Emergence” https://www.unc.edu/home/rksawyer/PDFs/durkheim.pdf According to Sawyer, the emergence paradigm has become well established in a number of disciplines but has yet to really take hold in sociology (he wrote this article in 2002, mind you). One such discipline where it has made considerable inroads is the cognitive sciences. In the process, it has provoked much philosophical debate on the vexed relationship between mind and brain . Looking at this relationshop from an "emergent perspective" affords us analogous insights into the relationship between individuals and society in sociological thinking. The early post war era ushered in the “cognitive revolution" – though many of the ideas associated with this development can be traced back at least to the early 20th century when "emergentism" began to be discussed in a significant way and was often linked with the philosophical tradition of pragmatism However, this did not come to much and was soon eclipsed by the rise of the behaviourist paradigm which became absolutely dominant in the field of psychology by the mid 20th century. Behaviourism, developed and popularised by the likes of Pavlov, Watson, B F Skinner and others, more or less rejected "mentalism" with its focus on thought processes in favour of what it called a "science of behaviour", Behaviour was something that could be "objectively" observed and scientifically measured whereas mental states were, by their very nature, unobservable. Needless to say, Freudian psychodynamics relying on introspection and the recollection of childhood experiences was also repudiated for this reason. With the cognitive revolution, this whole behaviourist paradigm came under assault. That revolution was the outcome of several factors. Among these were the increasing application of interdisciplinary approaches to this whole subject and the introduction of new technologies such as sophisticated brain scanning equipment and computers. Computerisation in particular provided fertile soil in which new speculative insights into the way in which the mind might work, took root. Analogies were drawn between a computer's hardware and its software in which the brain was said to correspond to the former and the mind, the later. The development of Artificial Intelligence was predicated on the assumption that machines could simulate human intelligence and thus necessitated investigation into such mental processes as reasoning, perception and communication. Actually, it was Chomsky's celebrated critique of Skinner's book Verbal Behaviour in 1959 on the subject of language acquisition in which he propounded the view that human beings had an innate capacity for language that, in a way, sparked the cognitive revolution and marked the turning point in the fortunes of behaviorism. In the wake of that revolution a new theoretical perspective gained ground, loosely called “non-reductive physicalism”. Representing the “emergence paradigm” in this particular field, non-reductive physicalism increasingly came to be seen as a kind of intermediate position between the reductionist physicalism of “identity theory” (which regards consciousness as an essentially neurophysical process) and metaphysical dualism (which disavows any substantive connection between thought and neurophysical activity). I think the same basic kind of approach could be usefuly applied to sociology. Society depends on individuals but is not reducible to individiuals as per the mythical "contract" theory of society, propounded by Locke and other individualust thinkers, where society is essentially just the individual Writ Large. Or Mrs Thatcher's balmy claim that there is no such thing as society only individuals and their families…..
Osama Jafar wrote:am writing on the Subject Body!Osama. it might be better to start a new thread than change the title of an existing thread. It gets very confusing otherwise!
J Surman wrote:Something wrong with this page – it's not moving on from 02/01/17 although it's at the head of today's posts.Anybody else finding this?Yes and the title has changed hasnt it?
Utopia. The word itself was coined by Thomas More in 1516. Deriving from the Greek word for "no place" (which, spelt slightly differently, means "good place"), it stands for an imaginary, idealised and sought after society. It conveys also the idea of something that is essentially unachievable. To be called a "utopian" is to be dismissed as an impractical dreamer. Utopians, however, may take some comfort from the fact that history, amongst other things, has been a record of what was once thought to be unachievable, even unimaginable, being realised. As Oscar Wilde put it in The Soul of Man under Socialism, "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at. Progress is the realisation of Utopias" Utopian thought has had a long and illustrious past – from the musings of the legendary King Gilgamesh of Ancient Sumeria in 2000 BC to the hi-tech eco-friendly communes of today. What do all these different utopias have in common? According to Ian Tod and Michael Wheeler: The answer is very little in detail, except perhaps for an almost universal dislike of lawyers, and there are even exceptions to that generalisation. However, utopias are about how people should live, about human nature, and the meaning and purpose of life. And thus they deal with perennial problems: happiness, good and evil, authority, the state, religion, knowledge, work, sex, equality, liberty. Some utopias assume that people are inherently bad and that they need a state to prevent society breaking down in chaos. Others maintain that people are inherently good and it is only institutions like a state that prevent them living in peace and cooperation. Some see the solutions of social problems in the pursuit of material prosperity, whereas others see it in austerity and simplicity. Some advocate private property but by far the majority advocate some form of communism, with equal access to the bounty of nature and equal status between people (I Tod and M Wheeler Utopia, Orbis Publishing, London, 1978, p.7) It is with this last kind of utopia that, I suggest, socialists are primarily concerned with.
mcolome1 wrote:irwellian wrote:I look forward to a possible future with one or two capitalist restorationists standing on a street corner handing out copies of Capitalist Standard to the disinterested socialist masses.Capitalists under a socialist society ? It must be a miracle. Capitalists only exist on a capitalist society based on wage slavery, economical exploitation, extraction of surplus value, value of exchange, market, and private possession of the means of productions. Are we going to have those features under a socialist society ? Probably, not. If they are socialists they are not disinterested socialist either. I have heard from workers the following expression: I am a capitalist because I support capitalism, they are workers supporting capitalism, but they are not capitalists. If the slaves support their masters, Do they become slaves owners ?
Yes , I too have encountered people who say they are capitalists because they support capitalism. Its an unfortunate confusion but it has a certain logic to it. After all we socialists say we support a social system called socialism. But capitalism too is a social sysem so you can see why supporters of this system should call themselves capitalists even though "capitalist" is class category pertaining to capitalism which the great majority of us quite clearly do not fall under. Perhaps to be consistent we should call ourselves "pro-socialists" and the supporters of capitalism, "pro-capitalists". Or we could just live with this confusion and muddle our way through as is usually the case anyway
JamesH81 wrote:yes i would agree with full freedom of speech and no restrictions on non – socialist parties / organisations – to be a truly free socialist society – open debate across the whole political spectrumI would endorse the idea of full freedom of speech but what do you mean "non – socialist parties / organisations", James? I am not even sure we can usefully talk about parties even existing in a socialist society in the sense that parties exist today to aspire to take control of the state, when there is no longer a state to take control of in socialism. That is what a political party would seem to be about – an organisation intent upon capturing state power.There may of course be non socialist organisations in the sense of being organisations intent upon bringing about the restoration of capitalism. I would say they should be permitted to spout their ideas without any kind of restriction being put on them, They are not going to make much headway though. Try persuading an ex-slave that she needs the return of a slave society. But difficult, isnt it?
Bob Andrews wrote:The' World Socialist' claimed the proto-fascist D H Lawrence as a socialist. I don't think it needs reviving.Even if this were true and I have already shoen this to be completely false, how is this an argument against reviving such a journal? It strikes me that a movement called the World Socialist Movement needs a journal called the World Socialist or some such – no? In any event, my main point stands – there is a pressing need for a journal which has a more theoretical or, if you prefer, academic approach than the Socialist Standard which quite rightly focusses on more topical issues,
Bob Andrews wrote:The' World Socialist' claimed the proto-fascist D H Lawrence as a socialist. I don't think it needs reviving.Here is the article in question – judge for yourself. And you are dead wrong. The article said quite explicitly "He was not a socialist and did not profess to be one" From the Winter 1985-6 issue of the World Socialist D. H. Lawrence and the abolition of money The novelist and poet, D. H. Lawrence, who died in 1930, was born one hundred years ago, on 11 September, 1885. He was not a socialist and did not profess to be one, but there can be no doubt that he possessed some excellent ideas about what was wrong with the money-wages-profit system and what sort of society would be fitter for humans to live in. Certain rather foolish literary gentlemen and superficial Leftists have described Lawrence as a fascist. There is no evidence to support this claim, and we would argue that it is a label mainly put about by Stalinists who resented Lawrence for having been a non-conservative who was totally opposed to the state-capitalist dictatorship of the Russian Empire. In the 1930s to have taken up such a position, even if you were in favour of social transformation, meant that the so-called Communists would call you a fascist in the hope of discrediting you. In the case of D. H. Lawrence, who wrote explicitly about why he opposed fascism, the label struck and the smear has no doubt led many people to dismiss the social and political context of his poetry. To do so is to dismiss some of the most forcefully revolutionary poems ever written in English, a selection of which we publish below. They were written in 1929 and are taken from the second volume of Lawrence's selected poems published by Heinemann (the book is deceptively called Pansies, but we can assure you that it is not about flowers). Why did Lawrence take up some of the ideas expressed in these poems? Reading them, one might think that he was acquainted with the Socialist Party of Great Britain, but there is no evidence to show that he was. More likely, Lawrence picked up the socialist content of his thinking as a result of visiting the home of his girlfriend until 1912, Louise Burrows, whose father was a committed socialist who possessed the socialist writings of William Morris and spent his time talking with Lawrence about the case for socialism whenever the young writer visited his house. The connection between William Morris and D. H. Lawrence is rarely made, and shallow critics would have it that the former was a romantic revolutionary while the latter was a fascistic reactionary (both utterly mistaken observations): in fact, it will be seen from the poems published here that Lawrence too shared a passion to change the insane society of capitalism, and that, if anything, his poetry was more expressive in its simplicity. Moreover, it is known that he had read Morris' News From Nowhere, and was inspired by its depiction of a socialist society. The poems can be accessed here http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com.es/2013/12/d-h-lawrence-and-abolition-of-money.html
