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A Matter of Perception[Relocated by request of moderator1]

LBird wrote:

a ‘fossil’ won’t exist for the Neolithic hunter employing a rock as flint to light a fireOf course, though, the fossil ‘exist’, [but it] can [only] be observed by the ‘educated’ observer.  In our case as proletarians, [to be able to observe value] means being educated in class consciousness and Communism.if a human directs their attention to one level (e.g. a rock), they are by choice not directing their attention to other levels (eg. fossils).

 Flint with FossilUniversity of Cambridge, Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, Id #1916.82/Record 2. Paleolithic handaxe—100,000 to 10,000 BCE. [West Tofts, Norfolk, England]——————————————————Fossils fascinated some of our ancestors.This handaxe is fashioned symmetrically around a Cretaceous marine fossil [the mollusc Spondylus spinosus] that appears intended to attract visual attention. The artefact was written up scientifically almost 40 years ago by Kenneth Oakley, who had previously exposed the infamous big-brained ‘missing link’ Piltdown Man—a scientific hoax sustained for half-a-century by idealist preconceptions of cranial complexity precipitating our move from ape into humanity.A century earlier, Engels surmised, on the basis of the materialist conception of history, that it was descent from the forest to the savannah, that unleashed the niche pressure for selecting upright stance and bipedal locomotion.  Anatomical adaptation to life on the open plains had the collateral effect of liberating the hands to fashion tools.By changing its means of production, a species is forced to adjust its social practice of operating them, and so change its mode of production based upon those changed means.  Its social existence becomes historical.  Under such evolutionary pressure, a species can survive only if its brain can adequately comprehend and adequately communicate its changing social practice, or else vanish from the face of the Earth.Social practice that changes itself seems to have driven hominid brain complexity.

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[Relocated to ‘Science for Communists’ thread by request of operator1.]

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At the risk of thrashing-to-death a minor issue…I stumbled by chance upon Eduard Bernstein’s article, of 30 July 1898“What Drove Eleanor Marx to Suicide”It is available athttp://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bernstein/works/1898/07/death-eleanor.htmThis article was written while Bernstein was thinking out his “revisionist” letter to the German Social Democratic Party, which he presented two months later, and subsequently published as “Evolutionary Socialism.

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Having written so confidently about Freddy’s parentage, and dismissing Terrell Carver’s account (from my memory of it, which I too hastily dismissed at the time, having read it with my mind already made up by Kapp, and others) because the opposing view had just been reinforced by a lightening read of Rachel Holmes’s new book, which also follows most recent Marx biographers in imputing the siring of Freddy to Marx,  I thought I should revisit Carver’s account at http://marxmyths.org/terrell-carver/article.htmI have just re-read it, unblinkered by the new established tradition, and am no longer quite so certain.  Carver has done an excellent job in laying out the opposing case.  I recommend Carver’s account as a “corrective” for anyone interested in the case of Freddy.

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Thanks, Peter.  I wasn’t aware that Lewis Feuer re-discovered Freddy’s story.The Social Democrats, Bernstein, and Kautsky, whose not necessarily reliable or unbiased ex-wife is the [gleeful] prime source of the story, were all too painfully aware of it, and of its potential political damage, and in the political and social climate of the times, naturally preferred to let sleeping dogs lie.But Marx’s fleeting liaison with Jenny’s life-long personal domestic-companion since adolescence, and governess of the means of production of the Marx household, and then of Engels’s household—all this in the days before modern domestic appliances—is totally understandable in the close cramped conditions of the Soho flat, and Jenny’s absence, and Marx, with his self-acknowledged Pater familias [i.e. sexual] needs.That the domestic fracas was patched over between Marx, Jenny and Lenchen, speaks volumes about their dependent circumstance and their deep relationships—of course, Carver sees it as speaking against Marx’s fling. That all three had poor “wronged” Freddy as constant reminder, only adds to the poignancy of the situation for all four of them.And Eleanor always assumed that Engels was Freddy’s dad.  Yet he was remote in Manchester, and the last person in the world to invade Marx’s household sexual province, and with almost nil opportunity to do so, and whose household Helene moved into after Marx’s death, presumably without bringing their supposed joint offspring back into his rightful domestic fold.As always, Engels it seems took on “reponsibility”, and reluctantly “agreed” to carry the intra-Marx-family can over the matter.  Eleanor had naturally been previously cold towards Engels over his presumed paternity yet embarrasingly overt indifference towards his supposed son Freddy, something Engels demonstrably never showed towards Marx’s legitimate offspring.Freddy’s case was simply fraught with too much Marxian pain. Today’s indiscretions are stored out there on the cloud, in Facebook, tweets and emails.  The 19th century hoped to consign its indiscretions to the lounge-room fireplace.The proof of Marx’s paternity of Freddy remains circumstantial.  And the naming of the boy “Freddy”, unmistakably after Engels, raises all sorts of doubtful and dubious questions, especially if as the evidence points that he was Marx’s son.  The issue may never be “solved” to everyone’s satisfaction.Yep, Engels truly was most expert in the world to write authoritatively on “The Origin of the Family”, though silent until the end on Marx’s own.It’s a pity that Freddy never joined the SPGB.  I often wonder if Eleanor might have, had she lived another 20 years to her dad’s age.I consider that to be a distinct possibility, which indeed would have been the sort of unbeatable endorsement of the SPGB that the folks seeking outside-of-the-party endorsers can never hope to obtain.Eleanor’s death is a truly great tragedy.  Had she lived on, she might have sunk into irretrievable personal and political depression.  On the other hand…Her story is certainly is an interesting case study of one side of the difficulty of promulgating Marxian socialism.

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It’s a good read.There’s little new to add since Yvonne Kapp’s ground-breaking mammoth two-volume bestseller of the 1970s, but the tale is well told.Eleanor’s tale is the story of one born into the generation after, forever in the shadow of the generation before, but striving to find its own way.Dad prolonged her adolescent infatuation-cum-engagement to Communard Lissagaray, almost two decades older than his precious daughter, but a god in her estimation because a literary Communard. Of course, dad assiduously helped Eleanor translate Lissagaray’s History of the Paris Commune of 1871, the start of a long line of her excellent literary-first translations that include many Ibsen plays and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.On dad’s death she moved in with still-married Edward Aveling, in a free liaison in which each blossomed as intellectual partner in the early socialist movement, under Engels’s guidance and supported unstintingly by Engels’s money—he’d do anything for Marx’s kids, which their lay-about husbands willingly sponged on.As Engels lay dying, speechless through throat cancer, Eleanor extracted from his faltering handwriting on a slate, the shocking fact that dear “cousin” Freddy Demuth, the out-of-wedlock son of the family’s life-long maid, Helene Demuth, was not as Eleanor believed Engels’s illegitimate son, but Marx’s. Poor innocent “wronged” Freddy became her close suffering companion.[Terrell Carver, in Marx myths, disputes Marx’s paternity, but the evidence for it seems overwhelming to me. In any case, apart from Hal Draper’s myth, all the myths on the Marx myths website are bunkum.]Following Engels’s death, key members of her own generation now felt at liberty to question the validity of her father’s works, and her very close companion Eduard Bernstein openly broached revisionism—bringing Marx up to date and user-friendly—using not dissimilar persuasion to what is being offered today on this site.Meanwhile her husband was gravely ill, but had secretly married and moved in with a young stage actress, dropping in on Eleanor whenever he needed her boundless love and understanding, as well as a top-up from Engels’s financial legacy to Eleanor, which he eventually snaffled and then, on his own demise, became the property of the actress who had already ignominiously displaced the trusting Eleanor, of his free socialist liaison, in legal marriage.For socialists unfamiliar with the Marx household and with daughter Eleanor, this is a fascinating read.

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I suggest your football team needs far more soul searching than the party.

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Oh Alan, as a materialist, I could never hold that the peasants were inherently stupid, but that their stupidity was a product of their restricted social existence, which Engels rightly despised. I made that obvious from the start.  We don’t need a Monthly Review moron like John Bellamy Foster to make such heavy weather of what materialism, as an explanation of human behaviour, has always been about.I thought we all comprehended such basics in our blood. If such things as normal materialism don’t go without saying, the problem with the membership is not one of terminology at all.And frankly, I am certain, from the context, that Engels is overlaying contempt for dumb peasant life because he’s already contemptuous of dumb Proudhon and his own sentimental ideas about the persistence of the rural peasantry, etc. [The Housing Question]. Both the “theorist” and his beloved peasantry are contemptible.You baulk at accepting Engels’s contempt for the peasantry because, in today’s gentrified world, ethnic contempt seems infra dig. Engels held no such false bourgeois scruples.Good night.

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Sorry, I did have a duty to read, and ponder, your concerns. I now feel your anxiety.Rest assured, I have considered thoughts, but first to my economics article, which may (or may not) help to explain my thoughts.  Couldn’t get on with the article today.  So tomorrow.But now, pepys, pepys, …

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To alanjjohnstone,Yes, we all know what happened to the Australian party.It was precisely the movers and shakers, moving and shaking away from “socialism”, who moved and shook the party, and moved and shook themselves out of the party. That’s my warning to you. You’ve got the story the wrong way round.  More anon.Unfortunately, I’m afraid I must now invoke Sam Pepys’s immortal line — And so to bed.  It’s getting late here.

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To YMS,Just so.  But that doesn’t prevent Engels—the materialist—from engaging in wordplay that overlays biting contempt atop the Greek, to convey disquiet over the thousand-year imposition of stupidity by the feudal system upon its lord, court and, particularly, its serf and peasants. The Elizabethan poet Spencer captures this “brutish rural imbecility” well in his magnificent Faerie Queene. Book II. Canto XII. [A title, by the way, that has none of its modern connotation.]Said Guyon; See the Mind of beastly Man, That hath so soon forgot the Excellence Of his Creation, when he Life began, That now he chuseth, with vile difference, To be a Beast, and lack Intelligence. To whom the Palmer thus: The Dunghil Kind Delights in Filth and foul Incontinence: Let Grill be Grill, and have his hoggish Mind. But let us hence depart, whilst Weather serves, and Wind.

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Thought I should check the translation against the original.

Engels, in original German, wrote:

… aus der Isolierung und Verdummung herauszureißen, in der sie seit Jahr-tausenden fast unverändert vegetiert.

Engels, in English translation, wrote:

… to save the rural population from the isolation and stupor in which it has vegetated almost unchanged for thousands of years.

Engels says Verdummung ≡ dumming.So, Dummkopf, three strikes and out.For the third time,  Engels refutes Draper!

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Why didn’t you answer my question: “By what evidence do you assert that The socialist movement has felt obliged to abandon the use of an important word because it had become too corrupt”?Now to your question:

alanjjohnstone wrote:

“I will ask you to refer me to an article in the Socialist Standard that uses the phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ as an aspiration of the Socialist Party.”

Of course I can’t.  But that proves nothing, since your Socialist Standard test backfires.I will ask you to refer me to an article in the Socialist Standard that doesn’t use the term “socialism” as an aspiration of the Socialist Party.I will ask you to refer me to an article in the Socialist Standard that doesn’t refer to the party as the S[ocialist]PGB, or the “Socialist Party”, etc.Socialist Standard usage reveals pride, rather than shame, in the term “socialism”.  We therefore should keep it.Now to the minor matter of the ‘idiocy of rural life’.I have never considered Marx and Engels to be insulting over the materialist consequences of social conditions.  Their materialist point is clear enough, and Draper explains it, after a fashion.  But, Draper misses something vital.Engels wrote the Manifesto (with Marx), and he reproduced the phrase as “idiocy of rural life” [sic] in his 1888 English translation (with Sam Moore).Engels was an expert linguist, superbly adept in German and English.  He knew precisely what he was translating from and precisely what he was translating to.Engels was one of the greatest editors the world has seen, and has never been successfully convicted of failing to reproduce Marx with the utmost fidelity.If Engels gave the English Manifesto his imprimatur, that’s good enough imprimatur for me.For the first time,  Engels refutes Draper!You insist, on the contrary, that Engels refutes rural idiocy when he says

Engels wrote:

the abolition of the town–country antithesis “will be able to deliver [rescue] the rural population from the isolation and stupor in which it has vegetated almost unchanged for thousands of years” (Housing Question) [http://www.socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2013/02/idiots.html

It’s my turn to ask you to explainthe hair-splitting difference between rural idiocy and rural stupor,the non-idiocy of vegetating almost unchanged for thousands of years,why your non-idiotic non-stupid rural population needs to be rescued at all.For the second time,  Engels refutes Draper!Finally, to your harmonious solipsist farewell canto “You can sing your own song your own way.”Let me remind you that Marx, Engels, Morris, Fitzgerald, Baritz, Gilmac, Hardy, our forefathers, … sang that “socialist” song in unison.On the other hand, you seem to have no song-in-itself and a bedraggled untrained croaking chorus.

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Hal Draper wrote a magnificent study—the definitive study—of the term Dictatorship of the Proletariat, as Volume 3 of “Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution”. [All four of Draper’s volumes are excellent, often ground-breaking, studies, despite the man’s communist intellectual lineage.]Draper retraces the history and usage of the term “dictatorship” from ancient times, and he discusses in extremely close detail every one of Marx’s half-dozen usages.Draper also published a shortened version of the work that discusses Lenin’s [ab]usage as well. These are excellent studies by one of the greatest 20th century writers on Marx.  Brilliant stuff.Now to your aversion.“Dictatorship of the Proletariat” is a perfectly legitimate phrase to describe the crucial act of the working class confiscating capitalist-class ownership and control of the means of life.  The bourgeoisie are unlikely to confiscate ownership and control of their own free will.That grand historical act can only be the consciously thought-out democratically-condoned action of one class abolishing the foundation of all class domination.  The bourgeoisie aren’t likely to abolish the foundation of all class domination of their own free will.The social act of pulling the rug from under any future attempt at class domination has to be an act of class domination in the process of abolishing class domination.  The bourgeoisie aren’t likely to pull that rug of their own free will.It will be the act of the hitherto subservient class abolishing its erstwhile ruler’s control and ownership of the means of social life and conferring that power upon all of society.  The bourgeoisie aren’t likely to confer social power of their own free will.If that ain’t adequately termed “dictating” to—enforcing your dominance over—your erstwhile dominator, give me a better term.  But don’t waste your time in trying to find a softer, whiter, brighter, marketing term. “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” is the only adequate phrase, and it will be the adequate revolutionary phrase on everyone’s lips when it is acted out.  This is entirely independent of whether you abolish the phrase in your imagination or deprecate it by decree.We have far more serious issues ahead of us than “terrifying terminology”![Recall that it was Luxemburg who openly condemned Lenin for duplicitously abusing the then-accepted phrase “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” as a smokescreen to cover the actuality of his “Dictatorship by the Party”, i.e. dictatorship by himself. We, of course, know that Lenin was simply practicising what all prototype bourgeois leaders in the aftermath of a bourgeois revolution against feudalism are compelled to do in order to run a prototype capitalist economy, and embark on capitalism’s murky beginnings of forced primitive accumulation.  Of course, he saved face by distorting terminology.]As to today’s common usage — that’s ephemeral in the scheme of things — on the timescale of social modes of production, which is measured in centuries, and not in weeks, months or years.Modes of production survive because they solve the social problem of how to reproduce society.  That’s why they prove to be pretty damn robust things, thank god, or we’ll all be clamouring for next year’s model on the morning after the revolution.On that timescale, by the time we introduce a genuine class dictatorship that abolishes all classes, the old abused meaning of the phrase that everywhere accompanied the beginning of capitalism will hardly be a memory.On that timescale, Marx wrote (what Kuhn recapitulated a century later about serious scientific theoretical frameworks):“No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed;  and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.” [Marx: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy].Current usage is, as it always is in a class society, based entirely on mistaking the outward appearance of the mode of production for its inner workings.Current usage on matters relating to a social mode of production is ephemeral, as it changes with changing outward appearance while the inner workings remain invariantly working, unchanged, as ever.Current usage will lose its force, its zing, its pizzazz, its élan, when folks start to see through that appearance, but not before they do.Then folks will look incredulously at a party, that survives only because it eschews outward appearance for inner workings, yet has jettisoned the only invariant terminology adequate to invariant inner workings, and embraced instead yesterday’s vulgar usage.We rely entirely on technical terminology. Why should we capitulate to current unsage, and ingratiate ourselves to the mob by validating its false consciousness that adequately expresses the mere outward appearance of things, when our whole case is crucially based on exposing that outward appearance for the fleeting illusion that it is.As to “rural idiocy”, well, what can I say.  We have abundant examples of concomitant “urban idiocy” created spontaneously by a triumphant capitalism, expressed in today’s common usage that fetishizes the outward appearance of things.Large sections of our urban proletariat are as “idiotic” as the useless Roman proletariat that gave us the servile “idiocy” of christianity, and the feudal “cretins” who perpetuated it.For the sake of mankind, I am at one with Horace — Odi profanum vulgus et arceo, favete linguis, carmina non prius audita … canto — We sing our own songs in our own linguis.  Damn the “idiotic” vulgar tongue!Sorry, but I’m not capitulating to ignorance, no matter how mellifluously its oh-so-acceptable voice charms the ear with today’s common usage.

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Oh my god!  I couldn’t stomach reading it through in one go.It contains more subjunctives than a talk-back radio caller who knows exactly what “should” be done because it’s so obvious.By what evidence do you declare that “The socialist movement has felt obliged to abandon the use of an important word because it had become too corrupt.”?Meanwhile, I will be posting, probably tomorrow, at your request regarding Vin and the TSSI, a modern account of Marxian economics that refutes most of what I fear you’ve said about Marx and socialism.

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