twc
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robbo203 wrote:That different levels of reality require different orders or explanation to make any sense at all seems to be a very strong reason for repudiating reductionism or at least what Dennett calls greedy reductionism. Indeed, would subscribing to such a form of reductionism even be compatible with socialist thinking? I don’t think so.
Before jumping to such rash conclusions that our “levels of reality” are absolutely autonomous, and not partly relative to the necessary human practice of “divide and conquer”, and contrary assertion is absolutely incompatible with socialist thinking, you might first acknowledge that “levels of reality” are abstractions from experience.Abstractions from experience can only be turned into absolute barriers, if the world is actually disjointed like our theoretical apprehension of it. If you are here staking a claim that the world is actually isolated into conceptual pockets of parallel universes, then you find yourself totally incompatible with a foundation socialist thinker, who called such “thought” that fetishizes necessary human practice as mechanical materialism.It is impossible to put two electrons in the same quantum state, but it is possible to put two photons in the same state. But no-one today could claim with equal confidence that it is not possible to reduce chemistry to physics, because every chemist knows his science stands entirely upon the physics of atoms.I would urge caution. Yours is the sort of silly conclusion one is driven to by bourgeois discussion of consciousness [which is of minor concern to socialists], while socialists are concerned with the content of that consciousness, which we agree can be understood materialistically.Your problem is that of the autonomy of things/processes.Our concept of autonomy arises out of ordered experience. Like all concepts, it is neither wholly static [persistent] nor wholly dynamic [change] but is instead their conceptual union within an abstract theory. Even the apparently trivial autonomy of experiencing the unity of a cuckoo call, is mediated by abstract theory.Contrary to your assertion, there is no abstract reason why our theoretical autonomies, such as explanatory levels, are not subservient to the overall autonomy of the world, and so are relative, and can become suitable candidates themselves for theoretical treatment. [Engels gets roundly condemned for criticizing those who fetishize theoretical levels as absolute barriers, but he is correct.]In modern terms, we can readily conceive irreducibility-of-level as merely an apprehension of Thomas Kuhn’s incommensurability, which he devised for incompatibilities within theoretical paradigms. Here it reveals itself across, or between, disparate systems of paradigms.Kuhn [unlike his contemporary, the baboon Feyerabend] never thought incommensurability was absolutely unbridgeable. We made the chasm, and we can work out how to cross it. If you don’t accept that, you really are a naive closet determinist, no different from your hated economic determinist.All of Marx’s Capital and especially his Theories of Surplus Value consists in bridging the divide between disparate “incommensurable” paradigms.For Marx, experience is ordered autonomously because the world is so ordered. The theoretical autonomies we grasp are our idealizations of the concrete autonomies of the world. We treat them as theoretically absolute, even though we know they are really relative.When we apply them back upon the world, the impure contingent world is not kind enough to let them act out their autonomy in pure isolation, free from contaminating interference. In this practice of application, when we reconnect pure abstraction with its impure source, we are made forcibly aware that our theoretical sciences are themselves contingent.Thus, in practice, we are forced to compare the abstract deterministic content of theoretical abstract categories of thought against the measured experienced phenomenal concrete, and prove that our theory describes actuality. [Engels’s “proof of the pudding”.] Without transgressing from theory to practice, we remain trapped forever within the abstract.In other words, your assertion is not proved by our necessary mode of explanation. It can only be proved in practice, and we already know that Marx was able to bridge the greatest chasm of them all by reducing human consciousness to our hungry belly and our compulsion to labour.I urge you not to jump to rash conclusions about refutation of socialism based on the contemplation of consciousness as such, and not from the only thing we can trust, the comprehension of its content.
[Just for your benefit, since you clearly approach my stuff from the prejudiced viewpoint that it corresponds to an economic determinist caricature, just drop that imbecility and try to understand what I am saying without misconstruing it from a predetermined prejudiced position.]You might find the following worth persevering with.Steedman proved that value and exploitation could be (1) negative and were (2) redundant, because everything could be expressed in terms of price.And nobody was able to disprove him. Nobody.Steedman’s neo-ricardian science had thereby demolished Marx, marxian science, and the socialist case. Marx was wrong to have dismissed Ricardo, etc.How would you have defended Marx when marxian value and exploitation had been proven beyond obvious doubt that they could be negative and did not influence price and profit at all. Our key concepts were meaningless.I automatically assumed you were aware of this.Indignation and your “value judgement” were all that remained to rely on. Exactly your scenario.As a consequence, of conditions most favourable to your case, you’d expect socialism, freed of encumbering science, to thrive. For marxian science was dead, and swept aside. Value judgement had the field to itself. I’m unsure whether you are a product of these value-judgement circumstances, but in any case your trump card of “at bottom” value judgment had no competition throughout three and a half decades. It held a monopoly.Yet, in circumstances most favourable to your case, socialism waned while triumphant Sraffian science [look up Okishio] thrived in its stead. And Sraffian science proved that Marx was way off the mark, up the creek. Who in his right mind could now defend Marx?Socialists might keep on reciting Volume 1, but as far as anyone knew they were spouting nonsense.The simplest approach these days for you to get to comprehend the demolition of Marx that took place is to read the chapter on Marx in Keen’s popular book “Debunking Economics”. It describes the anti-value/anti-exploitation view that dominated in the aftermath of the demolition, and is still Keen’s view today.Keen defends the Marx of Vols 2 and 3 only insofar as they abstract from marxian value and exploitation, but he scorns marxian value and exploitation as meaningless concepts. How would you go about rebutting him?You can rant and rave over exploitation and value as much as you like, but if they can both be negative and redundant, and so economically incoherent, and thus not explanatory, then you are ranting and raving in defence of nonsense.Ask someone independent of me, if you want to know what happened from the 1970s to the 2000s, if you don’t trust my account. Ask the author of the Standard article on Kliman’s book, if you want confirmation of what I am saying, if you don’t trust me.It all started, robbo, after Sraffa embroiled Samuelson, and bested him, but then forced labour theory of value historian Meek [look at the Preface to his second edition of his “Labour Theory of Value” book] to renounce the labour theory of value!That was devastating enough. It soon became apparent that the implications of Sraffa’s remarkable book “The Production of Commodities by Commodities" were that Marxian economics was irrelevant because value didn’t influence price. Sraffa’s implications were soon recognized to hold for the Monthly Review school of Sweezy, etc. They were all pervasive.Marxian theory was in terminal crisis. The rest of the marxian economists quickly succumbed, falling like a house of cards, until it became embarrassing to hold to marxian value and exploitation. The few professional marxian economists who held out, like Anwar Shaik [whose non-“solution” dear old David Harvey fondly believes in] reproduced Sraffa in veiled or what’s called iterative form.Make no mistake about it, Sraffa inadvertently killed Marx, and marxian value along with marxian exploitation. The SPGB simply ignored the problem and went on teaching Vol 1 just as Marx wrote it, and was absolutely correct in doing so, but it too was powerless to mount a case against the Sraffians who had proven that Capital Vol 1 was nonsense. The fact remained that when Capital was expressed in input–output form in linear algebra, value and exploitation vanished, and indignation and “moral value judgement” were the sole remaining residue, which is a real-life instance of your fairy-tale scenario.Lots of people ranted and raved then, and solved absolutely nothing. Marxian value and exploitation remained resolutely incoherent concepts that ranting and raving could not save from obscurityYou rant and rave against me now, but it similarly doesn’t kill scientific socialism, although for you it “gives the wrong impression”.It’s you, apparently having slept through it all, who are insular, and— unlike you and your war dance—I am not grandstanding. I am describing actual history. The indignation arises naturally out of that. There’s no need to grandstand.The SPGB would be a standing joke in persisting with Marxian economics based on marxian value and exploitation if it wasn’t for Andrew Kliman.¹Forget about your perceived problems with the MCH [by the way, I’m exploding Stillman in my next post] it was the generally agreed core of marxian economics—value and exploitation—that were proved to be irredeemably problematic.In such circumstances, the SPGB would be clinging onto concepts that had been convincingly proven by linear algebra to be meaningless.So don’t knock Kliman. You owe the coherence of any argument you mount to his reclamation of Marx.You, standing on ignorance, have the cheek to grandstand that marxian materialism, as I express and defend it, is outdated. Grow up, and at minimum try to understand what I’m about to say in my next post. I want a reasoned response, not a rant and rave.Just try for once to comprehend the real-world implications of the death of Marxian science during the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, that many still hold in the 2010s.Don’t you dare pull that miserable stunt again of assuming that I don’t recognize the moral dimensions of socialism.Dear Socialist Punk, who is going through difficult times, and is the founder of the original thread, knows my personal views. But I don’t parade them. Footnote¹ Kliman’s book “Reclaiming Marx’s Capital” is descriptive, interpretative [hermeneutics], and mathematical, which makes it inaccessible to some [its mathematics are typeset most ghastly].It is available, for example, from http://www.amazon.co.uk/Reclaiming-Marxs-Capital-Inconsistency-Dunayevskaya-ebook/dp/B00EORHR5Q/ref=la_B001JSALNS_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1399169860&sr=1-2General information can be found from the Wikipedia articles on Andrew Kliman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Kliman, and the TSSI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_Single_System_Interpretation ↩ [Back]
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.
