twc
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wrote:You can suspect me, that I am capitalist agent send here to misguide you from your views. This is actually true, apart from the fact that I am capitalist agent.
Thank you for your honesty—not the capitalist agent bit, which you meant as a joke, but your honest aim to misguide the Party from its views. Many people invade this site on a similar mission, but are less open about it.You have laid out your political case and political program absolutely clearly, even though English is not your first language. There are no grounds for misunderstanding.Unfortunately, your political purpose and political program are totally incompatible with the Party’s established purpose [its Object] and the Party’s established political program [its Declaration of Principles], and so has no place at all in a Party based on ours. You will find ours here http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/our-object-and-declaration-principlesStudy them, and you will understand that, if the Party were to accept your political purpose and adopt your political program instead of its own political purpose and political program, it would destroy itself. Then you really would have achieved your aim of misguiding the Party, but misguiding it into oblivion.It is therefore totally impossible for the Party to take on board your own political purpose and political program, and so no meaningful political conversation with you can proceed on their basis.I suggest that you look further into our website, and read the Socialist Standard and SPGB pamphlets. If, after that, you still cannot bring yourself to agree with us, then you have a moral duty to oppose us, and seek to create or join a political organization that is more amenable to adopting your political purpose and political program of action. The Party simply can’t.As far as I am concerned, we have met an impenetrable brick wall, and that is the end of the matter.
By the way, I understand completely what you are saying. No sentient human couldn’t. And most of what you say about human values every sentient human being holds. It is therefore trivial stuff because nobody denies it.What infuriates you is that you can’t understand why I can’t go along with the rest of your stuff. I must be abnormal, because everybody else holds these views.The reason I don’t go along with you is that I see what you are doing politically. You wouldn’t get so upset if it wasn’t politically motivated. You want value judgment to imply political voluntarism.I detect you marshalling value-judgement grounds for the political voluntarism, which you valiantly defended against my former attack upon it.If so, you naturally don’t like me impeding your political progress by pointing out that socialist science essentially opposes political voluntarism.Socialist science sees value-judgement voluntarism as an abrogation of inconvenient socialist science itself, which is why you claim that the science itself is deficient. Of course it is, if you want to bypass it! Scientific socialism is extremely deficient for political voluntarists.That should make my position crystal clear. There should be no mistaking what I am saying.If you are not laying the groundwork for political voluntarism, then we are arguing at cross purpose. So here is my challenge for you to clear up the matter once and for all.Are you relying on value judgement — [for you exploitation is at bottom value judgement] — to launch a case for political voluntarism? Please answer that.
What Happens When Science Abolishes Exploitation (Continued)Here’s my reformulation of your problem in its most general form so that it includes the neo-ricardians as well as the neo-classicals [your marginalists]. How else, than by non-scientific indignant [moral] value judgment, can a scientific socialist possibly counter scientific theories of zero or indeterminate exploitation, which are entirely impervious to attack by socialist science itself?
robbo203 wrote:Back in the late 19th century when the marginalist revolution in economics got underway, one effect of this was to radically reconceptualise the whole question of distribution in a capitalist society.¹Within the general framework of marginalist theory, capital and labour were deemed—subjectively, of course—to get back exactly what they put in—no more and no less.The theoretical possibility of exploitation was thus precluded by an ex cathedra type statement which rationalised massive inequalities of outcome as something that is wholly explicable—and justifiable—in terms of the commensurate contributions to production made by capitalists and workers respectively.Ironically, while the Marxian labour value theory was severely criticised on grounds that it did not adequately deal with the problem of the heterogeneity of labour inputs and how to assign different labour time values to different skills,² no such scruples were raised with regard to the distribution of income between labour and capital.³Michael Perelman quotes the once prominent American economist—John Bates Clark—on the matter, that “the distribution of income [is] controlled by a natural law, and…this law, if it worked without friction, would give to every agent of production the amount of wealth which that agent creates. … Free competition tends to give labor what labor creates, to capitalists what capital creates, and to entrepreneurs what the coordinating function creates.” (Michael Perelman, The Perverse Economy: The Impact of Markets on People and the Environment, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003 p. 152).Fair enough, that’s their theory of rewards. Robbo’s Problem
robbo203 wrote:Now I put it to you, twc—how would you counter Clark’s point? If the capitalist countered your objection that he is exploiting his workers by pointing out that, in fact, the value of his contribution to the production of wealth is at least equal to that all of his workers combined, how would you respond? Robbo’s Dire WarningYou can recite the labour theory of value all you like but you cannot get round the [marginalist] fact that different labour contributions impart different values to the end product.The capitalist has only to assert that 10 minutes of his time in a flying visit to his factory office to sign a cheque is equal in value to a full day’s work by one of his workers to counter the charge that he is “exploiting his workers”.The point that I am getting at is that this is, at bottom, a value judgement, not simply a cold mathematical calculation that workers are exploited in terms of socially necessary labour time. If you deny that [i.e. that it is at bottom a value judgement] you cede ground to the bourgeois economists and you will find yourself engaging in a debate that will inevitably be rigged in their favour.Beware and be very aware of the perils of insisting that the case for socialism is one essentially based on objective scientific rationalism.How I Would and Wouldn’t ReplyI would first point out to you, that you are a hopeless spokesman for the capitalist before you even try to become a spokesman for the socialist.Your industrial capitalist must cover his production costs, and it is totally absurd for him to pay himself a huge wage for turning up and then have to pass that huge cost on to the customer. That’s how insane your imbecile scenario is.Suppose instead you intended him to say it’s OK so long as he turns up from time to time. But this is just as nonsensical. Why should the industrial capitalist bother to turn up at all when he pays a manager to do that for him?Suppose instead you intended him to speak like a sane man and simply say he owns the stock and that is sufficient justification for his special reward. Now that makes sense, and puts him on par with his competitor financial capitalists [rentier, stockholder, banker, landlords] who never turn up at all.But your whole scenario is so inept, and so clearly imaginary, that no self-respecting capitalist would ever stoop so low. But an idealist socialist might in his sterile ramblings. I’d back the capitalist any day.For my part, having stopped your 10-minute capitalist at his original game, by calling his bluff, I’d launch into scientific socialism.For your part. Apparently you’d be actively fueling his well-deserved contempt by your, apparently only possible philosophical response “well, it’s actually a matter of value judgement, and I happen to hold different ethical values from you”. For his part, the sane capitalist is far from impressed by your philosophical performance, and so you are now forced to resort to your ultimate weapon, your infallible display of non-scientific-socialist indignation. That should do the trick!I’ve never confronted anything so ludicrous in my life! Footnotes¹ From Marx’s point of view, there was no radical re-conceptualization, because there is no conceptualization at all involved in taking phenomena at face value which, in Marx’s sense, is a fetish—mistaking appearance for reality. It was a retreat from the conceptualization of Smith and Ricardo. What was radical was the marginalists’ mathematization of the characteristic appearance of capitalist distribution—see Marx’s “Theories of Surplus Value”. ↩ [Back]² Labour heterogeneity is settled entirely in human practice through the going wage rate for an occupation, and I’m afraid human practice there resolves ambiguity beyond further theoretical argument.Here misplaced ethics leads into ethical reduction beyond human practice, or misplaced “physicalism” leads into what Sraffa called “reduction to dated labour” and proved was theoretically infeasible. Andrew Kliman shows reduction of any kind is irrelevant, as the going wage rate is the irreducible socially established fact. ↩ [Back]³ A few “socialist” scruples were raised; even our wayward predecessor Hyndman, the year after Engels died, scrupled against it in his “The Final Futility of Final Utility", etc. ↩ [Back]
DJP: Darren, it’s even nicer to put the right face to the right name. Greetings.Sorry I had only glimpsed the first 30 seconds of the video when I responded above, and mistook who was who. I will watch it in full. It must have been hard for you to fill in at the last moment.
Vin Maratty wrote:Obviously there are strong opinions on the subject and I am keen to see them elucidated. Then we would all know where we we stand on this subject.Yes, excellent.
CredoFollowing alanjjohnstone’s request.We have a ready-made scientific theory. I outline its form by abstracting from its content.The social process appears to us to be contingent and incomprehensible.Marx developed a scientific framework for comprehending the contingent social process.That framework is scientific because it is testable.Its foundation principles are the materialist conception of history as described in the Preface to “A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy”.These scientific principles are pure mental constructs that Marx abstracted from the contingencies of our social process.The principles are intentionally vulnerable.They intentionally do not represent the contingent social process or its subprocesses.They consequentially become powerful weapons against their own framework when they are misused to represent the contingent social process or its subprocesses.The scientific theory raised upon this foundation represents the contingent social process and its subprocesses, to within varying degrees of fidelity.Upon the above foundation Marx developed a theory of the current phase of the social process, the capitalist mode of production.
Yes, Stuart it was addressed to you, but Alan wants us all to respond.It’s good to get responses from you, Vin, and DJP (by the way, is that DJP as moderator in the video on economics. If so, we met briefly at head office in 2012. Good to put a friendly face to a name.)Alan now needs a few more contributions…
I request others to write their own scientific or philosophical credo, showing what is important to them, in whatever format, and in as much space as they need.Let’s see what we hold.
Philosophical IllusionRobbo, your anti-Marxian authorities all harbour the identical illusion.Every criticism of the materialist conception of history and every criticism of base–superstructure determinism, without fail, is a personal variation on a common theme, born of the identical illusion.That common theme is: Marx’s scientific principles [the MCH and BSD] are refuted by what we see around us.The shared illusion is that this is somehow significant.Scientists understand precisely why scientific principles, being abstractions from “what we see around us”, can never correspond to “what we see around us”.Philosophers demonstrate, time and time again, that they are incapable of understanding why. Instead they imagine that they have detected an obvious flaw in the scientific principles.In other words, the philosopher hasn’t a clue what’s going on. Reinterpreting the WorldConsequently, an anti-Marx philosopher feels compelled to demonstrate his flash of brilliance by “correcting” Marx’s obviously faulty scientific principles so that they do “interpret the world” precisely as the philosopher sees it to be.And so, every philosophical criticism of the MCH&BSD turns into the analogue of Lenin’s view on objects as “faithful” representations, except that the philosophers outdo him in their even-more-stupid view that scientific principles must be “faithful” representations of our world.Yet what can a “faithful” view of our world be but the view we all hold of it.Consequently, everything Pannekoek said against Lenin’s views on “faithful” objects also holds with identical force against every one of the anti-Marx philosophers’ views on “faithful” scientific principles.Take a good hard look at all the philosophical criticisms of, or all the philosophical corrections to, the MCH&BSD, and you’ll see a direct parallel with Lenin’s true and “faithful” reflections of reality. They are therefore kin to Lenin’s mechanical materialism, even while they profess to be refuting it.As I said, the most embarrassing gaffe is to be so close yet to be so far away.Every “faithful” improver or critic of the MCH&BSD is a mechanical materialist in the simple sense that he condemns Marx’s principles for not being a “faithful” representation of perceived material reality.They are exactly parallel to Lenin, because a scientist treats his abstract principles as if they were a priori. The philosopher complains that they should be both a priori and “faithful".What an intellectually dismal state of affairs! CallengeShow me a single critic of Marx’s scientific principles who doesn’t criticize them because they don’t correspond “faithfully” to the world they intend to explain.Show me a single sympathizer of Marx’s scientific principles who doesn’t feel compelled to “interpret them in his own way”.
Materialism or StructuralismSo now you are back-tracking on Levi-Strauss also.You didn’t say outright that Levi-Strauss originated the thought. But since you knew Engels did originate the thought, we can only assume the reason you attributed it to Levi-Strauss instead of to Engels was because he [of the raw and cooked] must surpass him [of the origin of the family] in your estimation of each’s relevance to primitive kinship relations. Fair enough, your call.Well, Levi-Strauss certainly surpasses Engels by retreating backwards into philosophical dualism—your territory—in its trendy 1970s form, structuralism. For Levi-Strauss, primitive kinship structures objectify deep structures within our brain. We are to some extent trapped, as with dualist Kant, by the structural constitution of our brain. I naturally assumed you, as confirmed dualist, would lap up stuff of this ilk. But you’ve lost your appetite.Instead you back-track once more, protesting innocence that butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth “it was only food for thought”! Only, but like Castoriadis — trash Marx only “to show up twc”, so that’s OK. Dismiss Engels, but only as “food for thought, so that’s OK.What sort of thought could it be food for? Levi-Straussian dualist structuralism instead of Engelsian materialism.
Robbo, you want to move on from Castoriadis to cover your deception. Not so fast!In response to my exposé of his nonsense, you were forced to change tack and say that you happen to agree that Castoriadis is merely trashing me—which is a minor matter, about which I have no concern whatsoever.But the truth is that Castoriadis is, and always was, directly trashing Marx—which is a major matter—and you happen to agree with Castoriadis against Marx. [The consequence that Castoriadis’s direct trashing of Marx is an indirect trashing of me is merely incidental.]So I’m quite prepared to linger over Castoriadis’s direct trashing of Marx until we settle the matter. It is far too important an issue to let slip on disingenuous spurious grounds that you introduced him only to trash me, when it was quite evident that Karl Marx could only be collateral damage in such an unbelievably stupid exercise. So I am led to repeat, this riposte of yours is totally unbelievable Jesuitical casuistry.You know as well as I do that we’ve got all the time in the world in which to examine your other charges against Marx later on. They are not going to go away.So stop and confront your deception over Marx. It’s your agreement with Castoriadis trashing Marx that cries out for defence. Would you have me do otherwise than defend him, or go along with the treacherous ride?Even if you prefer to move on and cover your tracks, I’m simply not going to let you. The issue is central to socialism, and what we all supposedly stand for. Trashing MarxI remind you that Castoriadis directly trashes Marx by falling back upon the world as contingent and messy, while Marxian science is abstractly pure and rational.Ultimately this is a variant on the perennial theme that appearance is irrational. Everybody knows that, but it has always been the spur to science.It was Hegel who proclaimed “that which is actual is rational, and that which is rational is actual".That is the war cry of all science, including Marx’s scientific socialism.That’s precisely why, for Marx, science is the critique of appearance — the rational critique of the irrational.That is why, for Marxian critics, all their critiques urged against him rely on the bleeding obvious, the patent irrationality of the phenomena [appearance] that doesn’t agree with Marx’s pure rational theoretical principles. It was never meant to.Accepting the irrationality of phenomena without question is what Marx called fetishism, the falling for appearance, and the worst fetish of all fetishes is that which comes in the insidious guise of the rational, as in money, capital, etc.To get beyond fetishism is precisely why Marx’s science must be the critique of appearance, whether in its messy irrational guise or in its insidious rational guise. FetishismBut if, with Castoriadis, we can’t mount a rational critique of the irrational phenomena, socialists have little choice but to take the irrational phenomena at face value — to fetishize appearance.Politically, this leaves us falling back upon the bleeding obvious solution of voluntarism, what Marx called Banquism, or what we today would call Leninism or Leftism.It is precisely to counter such dangerous political irrationalism that, as I pointed out, Marx gave his life to remove socialism’s dependence upon emotion or, worse still, upon morality. And I stand by that statement.Standing by it has absolutely nothing to do with your imaginary claims that I thereby discount morality or emotion. That is merely your acting out the disgusting analogue of the religious person who says if you don’t rely on god, you can’t be moral. Both are nonsense and based on insularity of “thought” otherwise known as bigotry. Bigotry sits well with irrationalism, which can avoid responsibility.It is invariably those who parade morality who least honour it, partly because they consider themselves sole custodians of it. Hence your three or four summoning cries to quickly move on from Castoriadis. Do you imagine that you can run away so quickly without bearing any responsibility for trashing Marx? Just a Little on Making the Irrational RationalScience is always rational and pure, but must pollute itself in the process of dealing with contingency.In the paradigm case of Newton’s Principia we find him setting out three highly pure “laws of motion” that had been abstracted by generations of precursors — the famous giants on whose shoulders he stood.First Newton applies his pure principles—imposes them as the ignorant Castoriadis complains—upon the purity of the heavens, the solar system, from which he abstracted them. What absurdity for Castoriadis to suggest he should never do this. But what else can one expect from an impractical carping philosopher.Newton then brings his pure principles down to our impure Earth, where motion is impeded by friction, and the tides bulge out of the pure sphere, etc. He succeeds beyond all expectation here, because he has created a pure abstract rationality in order to describe, comprehend and show us how to “control” the impure concrete irrational world, of which Earth is a prime messy “irrational” example.Show me one philosopher who can rank with this achievement. Perhaps in modern times only Hegel can, since all the rest since him stand on his shoulders, and find that he anticipated them long before they were born.What Newton did in the Principia is precisely what Marx saw Hegel doing in the Logic. Moving from abstract non-determination [pure Being] to more concrete determination [Determinate Being, etc.], and ultimately tripping himself up by imagining that pure abstraction must finally by concatenation of determination upon determination, make itself so “abstractly determinate”, or concrete, so that the Reason of [behind] the world has no choice but to give birth to the concrete world of Nature, i.e. ultimately concretize itself.Now this conclusion of Hegel’s strikes us, as it did Marx, as nonsense. But Hegel’s methodology of seeing the subject as process, as self-evolving out of itself by itself, is the crucial insight into comprehending all phenomena as autonomous but dependent. It is Hegel’s organicism.Marx takes society as his subject, and treats it as evolving autonomously out of itself by itself but obviously dependent on the world it finds itself inhabiting.Consequently Marx sees consciousness as society’s consciousness, and he wants to comprehend how that consciousness comes into being, and what determines it.And so he develops a rational, abstract, useful, vulnerable and testable science of it based upon the materialist conception of history.It sets off on its life journey pristine pure but, like Newton and Hegel, ultimately pollutes itself by messing with the world, as it delves deeper into the mire of concrete contingent reality, which it uses its pure rationality to explain, since humans can only comprehend the rational by thought [even though, of course, we can appropriate the irrational by emotion, etc.]But Castoriadis exemplifies stupidity in two ways.He criticizes the abstract pure foundation.He denies the possibility of rational explanation of the irrational.This is the hallmark of all critiques of Marx. They all boil down to these two criticisms. RepresentationWith Robbo and Bird, criticism of Marx takes a Kantian form, the usual genus, that we cannot really ever know the world beyond our internal representation of it. For Kant, there is our mental or nuomenal world of representation, and our concrete of phenomenal world (which we can’t ultimately know).It is because Engels met this position head on that he is scorned by those who think he is too obtuse to recognize that we are trapped inside our own virtual world. Well, Engels argues against this trap, and against those who think there’s no access to the world beyond, and they respond to him by turning up their intellectual noses at such a “philosophical” simpleton.And Engels has the great virtue of writing in the simple direct language of a scientist, he just has to be wrong for the nuomenal sophisticates.But Marx, as well as Engels (following the lead of Hegel, who showed the way forward) rejected Kantianism. For Marx human practice inhabits the phenomenal world, and human practice is ultimately social practice, and so subservient to the social process itself of which it is a part.And social practice tests our representation and changes it. But we’ll examine more carefully what Marx means by “determines” in this context in a future post on base–superstructure determinism.Just a warning to the unwary. Marx is developing an abstract foundation and is not describing contingent phenomena as they appear to us. So any criticism of his account in the Preface to the Critique that assumes he is describing irrational phenomena as they appear to us, simply misunderstands what he is trying to do as a scientist.Any fool can see that the foundation of science is “wrong”. It can never correspond to the concrete irrationality that it has been abstracted from and that it is intended to be “imposed” [to Castoriadis’s incomprehension] back upon to make rational sense of it.Having fallen for Castoriadis, it’s quite appropriate that you also fall for another post-Kantian, the anthropologist Levi-Strauss and his deep structures-of-the-brain Structuralisme, which is similar to Chomsky, Piaget, and the whole tribe of 1970s post-Kantian structuralists.But please don’t attribute your phrase about kinship as being original to Levi-Strauss. That was Engels’s discovery before Levi-Strauss was born. Engels even states it in the most accessible of all places, as footnote to the opening paragraph of the Communist Manifesto, and you have no excuse whatsoever for misattributing it to Levi-Strauss apart from personal contempt for Engels. If you want a truly wonderful account of human morality, you could do worse than read Engels’s Origin of the Family.But Engels and the founder of it all, Lewis Henry Morgan, didn’t rely on representational structures in the brain to fashion our phenomenal world, which is what Levi-Strauss needed.Finally, for now, I am reminded of Schopenhauer, Kant’s true successor, who imagined that music, as pure feeling, allowed us to escape our virtual nuomenal world and experience the actual phenomenal world.¹ Kant had ambiguously, as is the way of all dualists, left us unsure whether or not we could really know the phenomenal world.That’s why I asked you whether you believed exploitation was phenomenal or only nuomenal. You sort of squibbed the issue, just like all dualists when pressed. Footnote¹ I have a personal interest in the composer Richard Wagner, erstwhile revolutionary associate of Bakunin, who wrote music inspired by the philosopher Feuerbach, but was later introduced by Marx’s buddy the revolutionary poet, Georg Herwegh, to the post-Kantian philosopher Schopenhauer, and discovered the latter’s “theory” that pure music through feeling lets us burrow out of our inner nuomenal world into the external phenomenal world. [Wagner was also mentor to Nietzsche, who turned violently against him.]For Schopenhauer, music was the wormhole linking our two otherwise parallel universes of the nuomen and the phenomenon. If you read Lukacs [one of Lakatos’s mentors] you’ll see he made the Party the equivalent of Schopenhauer’s wormhole into the phenomenal world. Both, are of course, nonsense.We have been crippled by unaccountable philosophers for far too long. It’s time to return to Marxian science, and that is why I attack your philosophy
Pannekoek was an Avowed Materialist in Marx’s SenseSorry to disappoint you but Pannekoek agreed entirely with Marx’s scientific method of “descent from the concrete to the abstract in order to ascend from the abstract to the concrete”—as Marx called it—just as I presented it here, and just as Castoriadis didn’t have a clue about what Marx was doing, and ignorantly attacked what he failed to comprehend.Lenin was never in the hunt, and his book on Empiriocriticism is pure drivel.
You can bloody well wait.Do you really imagine that someone can just wade through Castoriadis’s crap in five minutes, and provide a coherent critique of it. Since no-one else on the planet has bothered to dissect him, mostly because his fellows are all philosophers of sorts and probably agree with him, why should it only take five minutes.Like all science it takes work. Not like philosophy which can waffle on without constraint.Well, you fell for Castoriadis hook, line and sinker, or you wouldn’t have given him such prominence. Now you back-track from him. Your integrity has immediately sunk in my estimation. You wouldn’t have proferred his critique of Marx if you thought it wasn’t devastating. Now you lack the guts to stick to your guns, yet won’t admit as much, but instead make the feeble excuse that “Castoriadis was not central to my argument”. What unbelievable Jesuitical casuistry.Well, some of Castoriadis was obviously central to your argument, and so tell me which bits were, and then prove that you were right and that Castoriadis has demolished Marx’s materialist conception of history, and Marx’s Capital, which is its working out for capitalism. Has he or hasn’t he demolished Marx, or are you going to back-track even further once you contemplate the implications of your stupidity in trusting an avowed anti-Marxist non-scientific demolition of Marx, the practical vulnerable scientist.Furthermore, please show me that Marx simply imposed a confident 19th century globalism upon the nature of the capitalist process of production and distribution, and that it is 19th century reductionist positivism. Prove it, just don’t just say it! That was your great clincher. Castoriadis’s masterstroke! Are you running away from that too? How central or peripheral was that cheap jibe?And, if you think I got Castoriadis wrong, don’t just say so like an impractical and unhelpful philosopher, but show me where I got him wrong like a practical and helpful scientist. In other words, you be prepared to make yourself useful and vulnerable.As to not answering the rest of your points. You can wait. If I promise to get to your points, I’ll get to them.Now, you answer my last point about your ambivalent relationship to the DOP and Obj, which were essentially formulated by Marx [ask ALB if you want assurance on this score] as consequences of and in accordance with what for you is reductionist 19th century positivism. How do you square that with your socialist position? One of them’s got to give.
Castoriadis. “Marxism does not therefore transcend
the philosophy of history. It is merely another philosophy of
history.”Answer. Castoriadis is not a scientist. His critique
is that of the non-scientist perplexed by the methods of science.Science, unlike philosophy, is intended to be useful, to be practical, and so it
must be testable.Philosophy, on the other hand, is under no obligation to be useful, practical or
testable.Castoriadis makes the mistake of criticizing science by criticizing its
foundation — in Marx’s case, criticising the materialist conception
of history as if it were the science itself.He disagrees with Marx’s abstract foundation. Now, if he were a
practical scientist, he would simply go away and abstract his own better foundation
from the phenomena of history, and create his own abstract foundation upon which to
raise his own alternative science of history. That would be the scientific
end of the story.But Castoriadis mistakenly thinks he’s got to criticize the foundation
abstraction because it looks plain wrongheaded to him.But practical science cannot work by criticizing the foundation. It can
only work by building the science from the foundation up, and then criticizing the
science. You’ve got to give a science time and scope to prove its
worth.Consequently, once a scientific base has been chosen, scientists have no choice
but to treat it as sacrosanct and build the science upon it. It is the
scientific structure raised upon this abstract foundation that is scientifically
vulnerable and testable and open to attack.Finally, contrary to Castoriadis, the materialist conception of history
does therefore transcend a “philosophy of history” in the simple sense
that it is a science, a vulnerable working tool, that can be tested.Castoriadis. “The rationality it seems to extract
from the facts is a rationality which it actually imposes upon them.”Answer. Well, of course it does. This is the
non-scientist perplexed by the only way science can proceed, except that he
imagines that it’s wrong to do so.Abstraction from phenomena in order to apply back —“impose” in
Castoriadis’s language — is entirely deliberate and entirely
sensible.(twc.2)Why else would you bother to make abstraction in the first place?
There is only one reason for abstracting from concrete phenomena, and that is to
be able to recognize and comprehend other concrete instances of the same class of
phenomena we haven’t yet come across. We don’t keep that
secret. We apply it back upon similar phenomena to comprehend them.For example, we abstract from tigers something like “big ferocious cat
with stripes”. That’s our abstraction from concrete
phenomena. Once we have assimilated the abstraction, however good or
imperfect it may be, we apply it back on new concrete instances that we’ve
never encountered before, and hopefully we can now recognize other tigers whenever
we encounter them, and take appropriate action.There’s nothing mysterious about the abstraction process. What we
take away we apply. Or we take in order to put back. We do this all
the time.The only difference is that scientists do it consciously and systematically.
Thus Castoriadis, the non scientist, is simply describing the really simple way
all theoretical science works, because it’s the only way science can
work.Of course, Castoriadis thinks that we abstract “facts” as he
miscalls them. That is wrong. We simply do not abstract
“facts”. Facts are our descriptions of phenomena and inhabit a
different conceptual realm from our abstractions.Abstractions cannot be facts, because they are abstracted from numerous
“facts” in order to explain each of those numerous facts and other
instances of them.Castoriadis. “The ‘historical necessity’ of which it
speaks (in the usual sense of this expression, namely that of a concatenation of
facts leading history towards progress) in no way differs, philosophically
speaking, from hegelian Reason.”Answer. The same criticism can be made of Darwinism. All
explanation rests upon abstract necessity, or determinism. Necessity is the
other abstraction science makes from processes (twc.3).That’s simply the way science abstracts necessity from phenomena.
Newton did, Darwin did, etc. Popper used the same argument against Darwin.It’s because abstract determinism, or necessity, is dynamic that we
can’t test the abstract foundation without seeing how it develops
dynamically.Castoriadis. “In both cases one is dealing with a
truly theological type of human alienation. A communist Providence, which
would so have pre-ordained history as to produce our freedom, is nevertheless a
Providence.”Answer. Then, for Castoriadis, all deterministic science is
Providence.Castoriadis. “In both cases one eliminates the
central concern of any reflexion: the rationality of the (natural or
historical) world, by providing oneself in advance with a rationally constructed
world.”Answer. Correct, one constructs in advance a rationally
constructed world. So do all practical working scientists, like Euclid, Newton,
Darwin and the quantum mechanicists, etc.Castoriadis’s implication is that they should have constructed an
irrational world. This is the same drivel as Sorel.All science provides in advance a rationally constructed world.
Castoriadis had only to ask himself if anyone attempts to comprehend the world,
practically, how impractical would it be to pre-construct an irrational world, and
then test it rationality.Science is not a philosophical toy, but a practical human enterprise.
It’s hard enough as it is, without starting out making it irrational.In short, Castoriadis does not comprehend Marx’s scientific motivation as
the critique of appearance.Sure, Castoriadis, the world of appearance is chaotic and contingent.
That’s precisely why we construct a science to comprehend it practically, and
why we shun a philosophy that does not aim for practical utility.All abstraction is pure and totally rational, and that is the inescapable price
we must pay. It is the application, the working out, of the science that has
the unenviable task of deriving and explaining the contingent.Castoriadis. “A history that would be rational from
beginning to end – and through and through – would be more massively
incomprehensible than the history we know. Its whole rationality would be
founded on a total irrationality, for it would be in the nature of pure fact, and
of fact so brutal, solid and all-embracing that we should suffocate under
it””Answer. That is the nature of all science. Take
Newton. His three laws are perfect, and yet his first doesn’t apply to
anything concrete at all. The very same critique could be offered against
Darwin, etc.Castoriadis. “This was the science that the founders
of “scientific socialism” had sucked into their bones; the science of elegant
universalism, of cosmological laws to which there were no exceptions, of systems
that would encompass the whole of reality in their net. — no
exceptions!”Answer. What rubbish. This can be said of any
science.Castoriadis mistakenly assumes that necessary pure abstraction must be messy and
contingent. Please explain how any practical science could operate if its
foundational abstractions weren’t pure. They are, after all,
abstractions.Castoriadis. “The very structure of this kind of
thinking reflected the confident ambitions of a capitalism in full development. In
the air was the promise that life itself would soon be amenable to the same
mathematical manipulations that had successfully predicted the motions of the
stars, the combinations of the atoms and the propagation of light” (C.
Castoriadis, Introduction to History as Creation , Solidarity Pamphlet, London
1978. p.4)Answer. Utter philosophical infantilism.
Marx wrote:Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry.
The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different
forms of development, to trace out their inner connexion. Only after this work is
done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done
successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a
mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori
construction.Conclusions
I challenge you point blank to show clearly that anything Castoriadis says is not
misguided.I consider your bourgeois anti-Marxist to be a scientific ignoramus.
I am appalled. What is truly disturbing is how you fell for such a stupid
person against the intelligent Marx!And how, oh how, can you seriously square any of this abject philosophical
misunderstanding of science and of Marx with the SPGB DOP and
Obj?
