Thomas_More
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They’ve been Maoist tyrants all along.
I think Mao gave North Korea to Kim Il-sung as a region where he could play a Little Maolet, as there was no job for him available in China.“While like you, I’d prefer a clean break from Capitalism there just isn’t enough support to make that happen.”
And people saying just that ensures there never will be.
” many on the left who are Socialists and supported the historical Labour party via Social Democracy/Democratic Socialism have been let down.”
They should look us up.
“Thought was discovered not to be passive as the materialists had claimed, but active. ‘It is the whole man who thinks,” says Marx. Thought is a function of living, it comes into existence by doing something, it manifests itself in action. The existence of social institutions generates certain human needs, the effort aroused to satisfy these needs produces an altered form of consciousness; there is a conflict between the mind of man, expressed in action, and the opposed conditions. Out of the contest ensue changed conditions and a different consciousness expressing itself in further action.” (WS July-August 1951).”
I agree with that 100%.
““Marx refused to divide social experience into two mutually exclusive compartments and classify one, the external world, “cause,” and the other, consciousness, “effect.” On the contrary he showed that social change resulted from the interactions of nature, society and human intelligence. That the conventionally accepted “effect,” consciousness, was itself as much a cause as the laws of nature and society, and that vice versa, the assigned causes were in turn effects.” (WS March-April 1950).”
I go along with that too. Human will (consciousness) is both an effect and a following cause. Thoughts and feelings are both results, but also doers and causers. This is what I mean by chain of causation, not only the factors external to us.
I have never denied Will itself. If my language is archaic, it is because I am versed in it, from the writings of the Encyclopedistes. So we have been at cross purposes.
The Labour Party, from its formation in 1906, did socialism a serious disservice, by seducing the workers away from it. We already existed, from 1904, for real socialism, but Labour was formed to compromise with the capitalists and begin an endlessly futile path of reforms.
There was a documentary some weeks ago about the Labour Party’s machinations against Corbyn. This happens inside undemocratic leadership parties like Labour.
Covvie99, you have probably realised that when a thread “turns” a page, one’s message is lost. When this happens, I press the back arrow and copy and paste to reuse, remembering to add a few words, so that a “duplicate message” alert doesn’t block it.
The woman whose video I posted here is unknown to me. I was just scrolling through Youtube videos for arguments against free will and picked it. She is not my mentor.
The word is necessarian, btw.
I have stated my position and I do not consider myself a fatalist. Why would I have joined the party if I were? Also, why would a fatalist bother to argue, about anything?
I don’t see Marx as having exploded pre-marxian materialism. I see him as having built upon it.
The issue is number 3, 1972, and the article is there introduced as a classic.
(Continued)
But a man has self-consciousness. We are aware [inside ourselves] of endless debates, resolutions and inhibitions, a constant stream of endless processes. We get a subjective view of the whole process, and because we consciously decide a certain way it seems that we voluntarily choose that way.
But when another person looks at you he sees you objectively. He knows that your conceit of free will won’t hold water, for he can try a few experiments and be sure of his results.
If he starts early enough, he can make you a Catholic or a Buddhist, a Nazi or a Communist.[Paragraph on theology follows]
But there is something more, of greater importance to workingmen.
The chains that bind the modern wage slave to the wheel of capital are not iron, but of more subtle stuff. They take hold upon the mind. The dominance of the few rests on the potency of deceptions, and not the least of these is the myth of “freedom.” The very breath of capitalism is freedom. Freedom to buy and sell wage labour. Freedom to contract. Freedom to pillage and destroy, and to exploit the weak. [The worker] is free to do all sorts of wonderful things – in theory. And in this catalog of catchphrases, half truths and lies, the mystery of free will is no less potent than the rest.
But the most vital argument that the socialist advances against free will is that its acceptance precludes the possibility of a science of sociology. The socialist expounds the principle of laws acting behind social causation. If man is a creature of caprice, if he thinks and acts independently of his heredity and social milieu, then the search for laws supposed to govern human history, economics and social relations is forever doomed to futility. The acceptance of free will is a flat denial of social science. Bourgeois sociology, hampered as it is in scope and application, is sterilized by its attempt to combine popular myth with scientific method.
The Marxist alone is free to uncover social laws and explain class relations without pandering to power and privilege. He is the advance agent of the future. He alone has an incentive to uproot the old decrepit illusions that block the path to mental and economic liberation. Not the least obstructive of these is the fallacy of free will, a theological conception devoid of scientific merit, destined at last to the museum of philosophic curiosities.
