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EqualityEquality and democracy are not absolute Kantian categorical imperatives.  They are not inalienable human rights of man.  They are not ideals that transcend scrutiny by human rational thought.For Marx, imposing human social equality is actually imposing human social inequality:

Marx, in the Gotha Program (1875), wrote:

One man is superior to another physically, or mentally…This equal right [of equal pay for equal work] is an unequal right for unequal labor [but] it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right.Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only…To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.”

There could be nothing clearer.Marx resolves the issue by “from each according to ability to each according to needs”.  We all need each other, and complement each other.DemocracyDemocracy only makes rational sense if participants have a common interest in, and a clear knowledge of, what’s at stake.  Democracy is there, for us, solely to resolve common interest and common knowledge but different considered viewpoints.In a society based upon the capitalist mode of production, common social interest is hijacked by private stake in capital expansion, the true subject, object and goal of the capitalist mode of production.  Common social interest is swamped by warring venal sectional interests.In a society based upon common ownership and democratic control of the material conditions of life, everyone in the community participates equally in social decision making, bringing to the democratic table differently considered viewpoints, abilities and needs.  Common social interest is not swamped by private, or anti-social, interest in capital expansion but remains practical social interest, even if communally divisive.  That’s what democracy is for.The precondition for rational democracy under socialism is consequently a common knowledge of the running of society by each member of the whole community.Specialist knowledge, particularly that at the inconclusive forefront of science, is something that even specialists must take conditionally on trust.  It simply does not meet the preconditions for democratic decision making by the whole community, and rarely even by the specialist community, and would be held suspect if its truth were always decided by so unscientific a procedure.Instead, actual consensus at the forefront of science arrives in surprisingly novel ways, that finally turn out, just as surprisingly, to be totally appropriate to the issue at hand, being integral to the long-sought solution, and not a precondition of it.  Consensus may then strike with the suddenness of a gestalt switch, overturning everything held communally dear, that finally makes sense of the hitherto inexplicable, and instantly renders the exercise of democratic decision making pointless and incorrect.Society is thus compelled to take much specialist thought on trust, though conditionally so, just like the specialists do themselves.  That is the reality of research, and social decision making must therefore democratically decide how it must approach inconclusive scientific issues, but it should in no way imagine that society can solve such inconclusive issues conclusively by democracy.The question remains on the table:When you and your voluntaristic big-C Communism impose control over specialist thought, in the name of your categorical-imperative big-D Democracy, while the concrete needs of social practice demand that complex scientific thought cannot be circumscribed by democratic social ignorance, and the scientists rebel against your Kantian edict, will you be able to sustain your control without giving up your rights-of-man big-D Democracy over everything that threatens big-C Communism, no matter whether democracy is an appropriate mechanism or not, because it conforms to an incontrovertible big-C Categorical Imperative?Will you be forced by material circumstance to resort to a reign of terror to continue to impose your absolute decision making stranglehold upon mankind?

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Big-C CommunismYou say you advocate democratic control of scientific thought because you are a big-C Communist while I, thankfully, am not.As a big-C Communist, you want society to determine the truth content of science because a big-C Communist can never be quite sure what anti-social thoughts scientists might concoct if left to beaver away on their own without proper supervisory micro-management by big-C Communist society.Amazingly, you have naively expressed unbounded delusional confidence that grateful scientists will embrace you with open arms, for proposing global interference in their individual productive lives, by shoving big-C Communist society’s snooping snout between their suspect selves and the world they study.Now, we can all readily imagine gigantic world-wide collaborative research projects being organized and conducted productively over the web.  That may very well be the future of much theoretical research.Scientific research necessarily involves collaboration, but it crucially relies on division of labour, upon divide and conquer, not merely to investigate and comprehend all of nature, which is a humanly impossible feat, but just to investigate and comprehend in depth a mere part of nature.Research, simply because it investigates the as-yet-unknown, is difficult to conduct and often frustratingly fruitless for sustained periods.  It necessarily requires dedication, self discipline, controlled imagination, clarity of thought, and stamina for damned hard work, and sometimes this requisite combination lies uncomfortably beyond the frail capacities, drive, inclination or personal interest of any given human being.Each of us is made of different stuff.  We all possess different skills, inclinations and interests, and thankfully each’s different capability helps complement each other’s.  We are not equal in specific abilities, thankfully, and socialism is not going to make us so.  That’s precisely why Marx adopted the old Saint Simonian catch cry “from each according to ability to each according to needs”.But big-C Communism seeks to make us different folks conform.  It wants to homogenize our scientific thinking, even the essentially vague musings or playful ideas of exploratory scientists.  Why so thorough?  Why total surveillance?The big-C reason for controlling scientific thought is to tame it, to emasculate it, to ensure that it is never subversive of big-C society.  For idealists, thought is the ideal “substance” of material being and, consequently, thought brings with it the ever-present fear that it is the harbinger of action, and so potentially the harbinger of reaction.LBird may object to being called an idealist thinker, but there is no serious doubting that his readings of the young Marx have thoroughly steered, and parked, himself into this actual position, even if he prefers to masquerade as an overt syncretist, the easiest thought position to hide idealism under, because it is no commitment at all.  Syncretism, as supposedly genuine thought about the relation of being-and-thought, is actually empty of any serious thought content [Hegel].Interestingly, the even younger Marx, in his university dissertation, passed the most terrifyingly withering judgement upon syncretism I’ve ever read, hurled against that juristic master of it, Cicero.  Even juvenile Marx was never a syncretist, whatever LBird may conclude to the contrary from Marx’s later juvenilia of the 1840s, by which time he was a committed materialist.To repeat, no-one can possibly doubt, from LBird’s contributions here, that his overt arguments are proudly idealist and, concomitantly, unflinchingly anti-materialist.Of course, LBird syncretistically bandies around the regulation materialist phrases so as to pacify the mob, and thereby establish credentials of some sort that satisfies his self esteem, but he actually repudiates materialist thought as being beneath his very own elitist contempt, as suitable only for those ignorant pedants, the hidebound Engelsians, who are responsible for ruining everything.  Oh Dühring, meet your adequate avenger.Have I misrepresented you?Your ExplanationLBird’s explanation is as follows.  Big-C Communists abhor any form of elite thought because big-C is necessarily idealist, and thought necessarily precipitates action, and so elite social thought necessarily precipitates elite social action.  Consequently, big-C must control elite social thought in order to pre-empt control of society by elite thinkers.What drivel for a society in which the material means of production are commonly owned and democratically controlled.  If society based upon common ownership and democratic control can’t generate social cooperation as a rational mode of human behaviour then nothing else can, and socialism can never succeed because you cannot enforce human cooperation against its will, except by compulsion.Cooperation must be the rational outcome of necessary social practice [just as now anti-cooperation is the rational outcome of necessary social practice].To return to big-C.  It fears control of society by which elite?  By elite scientists, of course.  Possibly the world-weary seers fictionalized benignly by Jules Verne, or more likely those impossibly malign megalomaniacs of the pulp Ian Fleming variety.  These pulp megalomaniacs are the feared alter egos of big-C Communists.Have I misrepresented you?Paranoia of VoluntarismBeing a proud syncretist, you are necessarily a defiant political voluntarist.Voluntarism and idealism [especially when veiled beneath overt syncretism] are perfect bedfellows.  Voluntaristic thought is the adequate expression of idealism in politics.  And syncretic rationalization is the perfect soporific to lead blind voluntaristic followers into political romanticism.Big-C Communism is to be born out of political voluntarism, thought which is ipso facto able to inspire and precipitate action which can transcend the determinism of the being it seeks to change.  Heroic political voluntarism inevitably taints big-C forever, and holds it in thrall to continuing thoughts of heroic counter-political voluntarism.Consequently, your big-C has no choice but treat specialist thought it doesn’t comprehend with suspicion, as potentially conspiratorial, exactly as occurred to Robespierre, Lenin, etc.  Non-conformity becomes the indicator of conspiracy, and so breeds suppression of thought.Big-C claims to be different.  It implements social control of thought for our own good, and for the noblest of reasons — to keep big-C society in tact.  But so did all the others.  Do you, like them, envisage a police force and military-style surveillance to enforce it?  Or do you envisage milder, more considerate, big-C vigilante mobs of thought police?And if division-of-labour, or elite, thought is socially destabilizing, what about equally, division-of-labour, or elite, philosophical thought, which includes morality and religion, and the latter necessarily encompasses atheism?  Will big-C society determine how we all should think about them?What about aesthetics?  Will big-C society feel equally threatened by provocative art, literature, music, theatre?.  Will big-C society homogenize elite art and make it safe for big-C society?We are not talking about general discussion.  We are talking about your general control, or reign of terror, the historical type indicator of paranoia attendant upon any voluntaristic social revolution.In your case, this reign of terror takes on an especially pathological form, when hatched and provisioned in the fertile mind of a covert idealist before the revolution.You proclaim revolutionary voluntarism as the “progressive” side of voluntarism but, once achieved, big-C must fear voluntarism’s “regressive” side, for voluntarism is dual-edged thought.  If we can create big-C society voluntaristically, we can equally uncreate it, voluntaristically, through reaction, subversion, or just simply by moving beyond it.Your democratic remedy — the only one available to voluntaristic idealism — is consequently democratic control of thought itself, the very substance of voluntaristic idealism.  The intellectual core of our being.Sure, as democratic, the social act of policing scientific thought might seem remarkably benign, and so totally unobjectionable, but it is human thought, after all, that we are dealing with here.Scientific thought is the most subversive thing we humans possess.  And it is determined by social practice.  Thought that does not accord with necessary social practice will be necessarily weeded out in the necessary process of social practice.  Socially shackled thought, bred by social practice, will always break its bonds.  Such thought is ultimately uncontrollable.Thankfully the history of mankind confirms this.  Human thought is the social indicator of the human practice that engenders it.  If human practice is forced to shackle thought, then human practice must already be socially shackled.  Such shackling of society may accord with big-C practice, but it is not socialist practice.In championing human thought, you are forced to shackle it.  That is the Achilles heel of your idealist voluntarism.

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The real question is:  Will you be forced, by the inexorable materialism of social being, to oppose your purely idealistic adherence to democracy, in order to sustain big-C, once you institute your global thought control regime? The question is not academic, but one that all reigns of terror must ineluctably confront, not in the safe abstract world of social thought, but in the dangerous concrete world of social practice, where we must prove ourselves, and what we really believe:Can you afford to remain democratic?

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My dear boy, can’t you see that plate tectonics explodes everything we ever thought fixed for all time about the Earth, its continents and oceans.  There is nothing fixed for all time about the geological science that discovered this historical geological process.  There is nothing fixed for all time about the dynamic historical process of plate tectonics itself, but it's hard to imagine us going back to fixed continents just because we suddenly, on a whim, refuse to read the rocks.I fail to see how anyone could miss the fact that our ancient lithosphere has been recycled almost beyond recognition.  If that’s not history, of the rise and fall kind, what on Earth is!Did you ever imagine, in your wildest dreams, that our oceans had a lifetime of about 200 years, that the Pacific is old [and hence wide] and its sea floor is subducting under the Pacific rim continents, and hence the ring of fire.  The Atlantic is young, and there’s no subduction zone, and no ring of fire.  This unfixed for all time conception was forced upon us against our wills and, presumably, against our better judgement at the time. It's written in the rocks.Geology is essentially reading the rocks, but reading them dynamically.  Why do you insist that this science is static, and fixed for all time by its practicioners?  You calumniate them.For you, our comprehension of the Earth's dynamics are far from dynamic and so, for you, they cease to be subversively amazing. Yet this unfixed for all time history is also, for you, just as likely to be the perverse construction of an elite cabal, in their own superior interest [whatever that could mean in this testable context], and should instead have been decided on, democratically, [in total denial of rational social division of labour] by every human being on Earth.Why do you insist on democratic voting on scientific theory, on all things scientific — as you once said, on every last aspect of every scientist's work and thought? You must do so because of the non-deterministic idealist bent to your "philosophy", which consequently forces you to rely on determination of all truth by thought alone, as you fail to comprehend that abstraction reveals external determinism, which is largely independent of humans, or it could never work for us.By the way, your Bashkar agrees that “experimental activity gives us access to structures that exist independent of us.” That is one of the two cornerstones of his Realist Throry.  And he is correct in this.But this implies that such independent-of-human structures are really that — independent of us.  Well, of course, we misinterpret them willfully or in ignorance.  But mostly they resist mere human whim, opinion, etc. to an extraordinary extent. If they didn't, there's no way scientists could agree, and that most subversive of activities, science, could never proceed.If there were no objectivity, independent of us humans, in science, we could never convince non-socialists of socialism through scientific argument.Marx's science gives us access to social structures that, although we individually function in their construction, in a social sense exist and develop independent of us. If Marx's science is mere ideology for you, then socialism remains entirely voluntaristic — entirely devoid of any determinism, entirely up to brow beating your opponent into submission.

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Great ScottRobert Falcon Scott hauled a 16 kg load of fossil plants on his fatal Polar expedition, realizing that plants found in Antarctica had to be of scientific importance.  They were intended for an English paleobiologist who couldn’t accompany the expedition because of her sex.  She was Marie Stopes.Glossopteris indica was a tall leafy fruit-bearing conifer that lived 300 million years ago, long before the dinosaurs.  It was known to have flourished on the Indian subcontinent (hence the species name indica), but here it was once flourishing 13,000 km away, separated by ocean, in frozen Antarctica.Scott had stumbled on the indicator fossil for the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana.  If you find this fossil, you know that you are standing on ancient Gondwanan rocks.  This species flourished throughout Australia, Africa and South America, as well as throughout India and Antarctica, but it flourished nowhere else in the world, not even in Asia just across the Himalayas.What are Scott’s Antarctic rocks telling us about India, Asia and the high Himalayas, about stable Australia and volcanic Indonesia, about the mutability of continents?  Just what is this long-extinct Gondwanan tree saying?I raise these questions in the context of a determined anti-materialist barrage insisting, with a finality intended to resist any possible overturning, that rocks patently don’t speak.  That rocks don’t tell us anything.  That rocks don’t ask questions.  That it is only we, idealistically, who ask the questions, and never the rocks, materialistically.Mute but MutableSure, a rock is mute, as non-committal as any other specific concrete phenomenon.  That’s Hegel’s point:  being is precisely nothing for our thought processes.  Empiricism, as long as it clings to the concrete [to mere being] consigns itself to remaining conceptually contentless.But geological thought is a process that abstracts, from the concrete, the concepts it reflects back upon the concrete to comprehend it.  Of course geology considers rocks concretely as immediately concrete objects, but it also comprehends them abstractly as contingent abstract instances of pure abstract deterministic processes.In so doing, geological abstraction discloses the enormity of time [just as astronomical thought discloses the enormity of space].  The rocks reveal the history of our planet.After all, it was the geologists, who scorned the physicists’ thermal-cooling age for the solar system as hundreds of times shallower than the deep time evident from paleontological processes.  Only when the physicists discovered that rocks were radioactive could they begin to measure and so comprehend the Earth’s extraordinary age, and so understand why, though the Earth has cooled as expected, its interior is still kept hot by radioactive decay.For those who consider scientific irreducibility to be an absolute barrier to comprehension of processes at different levels of organisation, the tale told by the Earth’s rocks discounts the bogus claim that [detested bourgeois] scientists don’t see the world as history, or that [detested bourgeois] scientists always think reductively.Geophysicists can think quite adequately, reductively or irreductively, as appropriate to the occasion, thank you very much.  It’s a pity some proclaimed “socialists”, presumably [admirable proletarian] scientists, can’t think so clearly as appropriate to the occasion.Zircons are ForeverZircon crystals, from the Jack Hills range of Western Australia, are four billion years older than Glossopteris.  Radioactive geochronometry and atomic microscopy [atom-probe tomography] confirm one of them is 4·4 billion years old.The Earth was then only 150 million years old, and its surface must have cooled to allow zirconium silicate to crystallize out as zircon crystal, in apparent association with water, in our earliest prototype continental lands, or more likely, in our earliest sea floors.  They have endured eons of subsequent heating, cooling, weathering, crushing and twisting, and still survive, while the less enduring continental rock they formed in has long since been recycled.And now rocks from those earliest continental lands have been found in Canada [as gneiss that is just a little younger than the Australian zircons].  If you stand on these rocks, you are standing on our earliest continental crust [lithosphere].Perhaps the process of plate tectonics was already underway — the 200-million year cyclic mechanism that would eventually create a future Gondwana, and then pull it apart, rifting a future India from a future Antarctica, to smash it into a future Asia, and deform the resulting collision zone into a future Himalayan range.  And scientists don’t think historically?  And rocks don’t tell us anything?Rocks Tell the Story of Life.I would love to recount the story of life on Earth, which includes us as a tiny coda, that is told by the rocks.  But this is already too long.  Perhaps that’s for another time.

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Excellent, robbo.

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Nagel: “What it’s Like to Think Like a Bat”One should not indulge the philosophers by acknowledging any merit to their problems; it only encourages them.  Nevertheless, I’ve nibbled the bait because the problem relates to socialism.As far as self consciousness is concerned, Hegel has written as much as can be said about it from an idealist point of view, and an idealist point of view might seem an appropriate starting point for comprehending the consciousness of another species.  However, Nagel, by bringing biology into the problem, expands it into the realm of Darwin and the evolutionary biology of our sensory and conceptual apparatus.DarwinBiologically, Nagel’s question looks similar to our recent discussion of how to “conceive the quantum world”, except that Nagel considers cross-species consciousness instead of cross-worlds conceptualization with the same consciousness.Nagel’s problem may therefore be amenable to considerations along lines suggested by Karl Marx.  But first, to Charles Darwin.Darwin, returned from his voyage on the Beagle, confided what he then considered socially-explosive thoughts on the biological evolution of consciousness to locked private notebooks “read monkeys for preexistence [Plato’s pre-existing ideas]”.  “O, you materialist!”.  Twenty years later, Darwin completely overturned our conception of biological inheritance.MarxMarx, on reading the Origin of Species, wrote:

Marx: Capital, Vol 1, Ch. 15 (1867) wrote:

“Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature’s technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life …“Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them.

Marx then immediately re-summarizes his materialism:  “the only materialistic, and therefore the only scientific” method, is to develop consciousness, deterministically, from “the actual relations of life”.[If only historians had adopted Marx’s precept.  But the early adopters, like Kautsky and Plekhanov, have been so anathematized by vicious Leninist attack, that the whole Marxian materialist enterprise now seems irredeemably tainted by Lenin’s touch, just like socialism itself!]Marx would doubtless scorn Nagel’s bat problem as an artificial proof of what Hegel’s Encyclopedia amply demonstrates — that we conceive phenomena to have behaviours appropriate to the level of their existence;  that the deterministic development of each conceptual science depends on the piece of the universe it investigates, and that each piece’s behaviour is not immediately reducible to behaviours appropriate to other pieces at other levels of existence, but may nevertheless be generated out of them.Marx and Hegel, despite fighting tooth and nail for conceiving the world at appropriate conceptual levels, also agreed on “mediated reduction of the immediately irreducible” at an over-arching level — like Hegel’s self-generating Idea or Marx’s more modest materialist conception of history which generatively “implements” different social formations, each with its own “irreducible” behaviours.It is therefore possible, even if not currently achievable, to “reduce conceptually irreducible” consciousness to some over-arching conceptual schema that may encompass Nagel’s bat.  We could never sustain our ever-changing society, one of our own remaking, without the already conceptually mediated within our consciousness, upon closure, instantly becoming the new conceptually immediate for our consciousness, and relegating the immediately appropriate for the mighty past, upon such closure, to the mediated dustbin of expired concepts.This subversive over-arching process is no more than Hegel’s generative conceptual method, the irresistible drive our evolutionary heritage for abstracting from immediate experience the necessary mediated concepts we reflect back upon immediate experience to survive it.Insofar as animals, including bats, actually think, their actual thoughts are presumably compelled, as Marx says of ours, to comprehend their actual mode of production for sustaining life.  That’s what evolution created their actual thinking for, just as it did ours.Their actual thinking, as perceived by observers of dogs and cats, is never immediate experience but is always abstractly mediated experience.  Actual thinking, unlike instinct, is always a mediated response to experience, and that experience, being primarily experience of necessary production, like ours, has scope for contact with ours.Bats too, if they “think”, must mediate their experience “conceptually” to avoid falling down holes and bumping into closed doors, most of the time.  Despite divergent evolutionary pathways, our conceptual apparatus evolved to handle much in common with theirs, just as has our sensory apparatus — our eyes, touch, smell, hearing — despite the fact that they echo-locate while we bump into closed doors in the dark.So a bat, if it could ever gather its thoughts together as we can, would “talk” [in indecipherable bat speak] about its immediate “social being”, about feeding, breeding, rearing, socializing and foraging, as immediately appropriate.  More complexly social, a lion (in ignorance of Wittgenstein) might at least be more complexly articulate than a bat, and our common production needs may be the Rosetta Stone for deciphering its roar.[As Xenophanes mockingly observed about 500 BCE “if horses or lions had hands and could draw, then horses would draw their gods like horses, and each would shape bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own”.]As to animal self consciousness, in the sense of consciousness of self, thinking behaviour (as distinct from instinctive behaviour) must quickly learn to distinguish self from other in order to survive — which tail not to bite and which to bite [self and other], which child to feed, etc. the whole world of ethology.In other words, self consciousness is a pre-condition for thinking behaviour itself, and only becomes a “philosophical problem” when thinking people have removed, in thought alone, their own self-consciousness from self consciousness’s own necessary survival roots.

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My definition:  Voluntarism.  [politics] A movement toward socialism that operates in ignorance of, in defiance of, or in denial of any conception of social necessity, or social determinism.It includes all our opponents, but excludes the Socialist Party through its Declaration of Principles.You bring in the Left.  It is precisely the Left that advocates socialism through voluntaristic reform of capitalism or through voluntaristic non-class conscious militancy.Can you name any voluntarist group of the Left, e.g. Labour, Communists, Occupy, etc. whose socialist wings have not been fatally clipped by the social necessity, or social determinism, they ignored, defied or denied?Can you name one instance where Left voluntaristic hostility was not tamed, like a cowed horse, into servicing the once hostile needs of capital, and thereby far more dangerously proving to immediate consciousness the invincibility of master capital?Taming consciousness is precisely what the social superstructure is for in capitalist society.  The superstructure is the consciousness of the capitalist class, and that consciousness has one sentient role — to ensure capitalist society expands value, or capital behaves as capital.  Any opposition, like blustering voluntarism, is just another irritant among the many this sentient partner has to deal with as expeditiously as it must to ensure it doesn’t impede the functioning of capital.In this actual context, to seriously interpose “free will” between social determinism and human action is a sick joke, and you really know it to be vile, despite the academicism of your freak philosophical mates.Serious humans navigate life in knowledge of and subservience to natural necessity, or determinism.  They avoid falling down holes or bumping into closed doors, most of the time.  They still believe they are free to fall down holes and bump into closed doors, but they also recognize the consequences attendant upon flouting such natural necessity, or determinism, and decide not to fall down holes or bump into closed doors instead.Marx is saying no more about political action than serious people say about everyday life, in which people are cognizant of the ground rules.  So must the Socialist Party be.

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Thanks.Carolyn Merchant, in your quote, describes a concrete social phenomenon.  If proffered as its own ineffable meaning, it is open to any interpretation you please, which possibly suits her purpose.Peter Stillman, in your quote, advances the brave politics of committed voluntarism through the insipid philosophy of non-committal syncretism.  No actual scientist abandons causality so quickly.  No actual human thinks that determinism really implies no free will.  No actual socialist ever thought other than Marx “puts human consciousness into an intimate relation with other aspects of human life.” — which is about as mind-numbingly vapid a conclusion for an article on Marx as syncretism can muster.  It is “a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing”.Your own “there is no such thing as social being without consciousness”, though equally vapid, has the virtue of bordering on its own disproof.

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Crass Misreading

robbo203 wrote:

the idea that material conditions (or, if you like, the “base” in the base/superstructure model of society) “produce” or give rise to, ideas … derives from a crass misreading of the statement that it is “not consciousness that determines social being but social being that determines consciousness”.

Marx was quite familiar with your preferred non-crass reading, but you delude yourself if you think Marx could ever subscribe to it.  His materialism forbids explanation by pure immediate experience, and commits him to explanation that is mediated by abstraction from experience.Now, it is highly significant that Marx declares “social being determines consciousness” in a scientific manifesto [Contribution, 1859] in which he writes with the clarity of a manifesto.Only a moron or fraudster blunts the point of a manifesto.  Obfuscation soon enough follows as the work of affronted lackeys, who tone things down to the level of their own “non-crass” syncretism.To me Marx is clearly repudiating the abstract commonsense claims of both idealism and syncretism, and is certainly not endorsing them as you assert, presumably to favour your non-crass reading.Marx’s materialistic attack on claims for untrammelled thought effectively scuttles your own “creative” voluntarism, or utopianism, as it was then called, and this is the main reason you find his materialist message to be crass, and the main impetus for obfuscating its crystal clarity.Post #119In post #119, I retraced a suggested path of Marx’s abstract materialist development of consciousness out of social being.  The rest of Capital is the working out of this development in concrete detail.Explaining this development materialistically was claimed here to be absolutely impossible.Well, I hope that, by shining a spotlight on the unfamiliar nature [as judged by some posts] of Marx’s own materialism, I’ve helped to clarify what Marx was getting at when he said his conception of history was materialist and, equally importantly, just what Marx was not getting at.Concrete Phenomena are Not Scientific PrinciplesI am sufficiently crass a determinist to believe that a scientist means exactly what he says he means when he consciously formulates an abstract scientific principle that states:            A determines B .I am sufficiently crass a determinist to believe that the scientist intends to use his abstract scientific principle to explain the puzzling contingent concrete phenomena that it was abstracted from:            A and B appear to interact reciprocally .I am sufficiently crass a determinist to believe — contrary to syncretists — that a contingent phenomenal observation is not an abstract scientific principle.  For example, the contingent phenomenal statement:            A and B merely interactis a restatement of concrete content in the same form as a scientific principle, but it still remains contingent and concrete in content, and so void of any abstract scientific content, and is definitely not an abstract scientific principle, even if it looks like one to the syncretist.Thus I am led to the inexorable conclusion that you are simply confusing the thought-realm of deterministic scientific abstraction with the phenomenal-realm of concrete contingent experience.  Consequently, for you:            crass ≡ scientificThis issue of materialism v. syncretism is too fundamental to drop here.I fully intend to hound robbo203 for his non-crass response to my #119.

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So what do you imagine the nature-imposed necessity, that compels all life forms to daily reproduce themselves, compels society as a whole to practice and think about, if it is not its own ever-recurring social process?If not, show me how society can free itself from that determinism, characterized by Marx as acting with the inexorability of a law of nature.If you accept that society is incapable of freeing itself from having to implement its own renewal, what do you imagine social practice is compelled to implement if not the social renewal process itself, as ever-recurring social practice?If not, show me how social practice is perfectly free of the determinism to implement the social practice of social renewal, and so is in-deterministically free to block the social renewal process just as it pleases.If you accept that social practice is compelled to implement the social renewal process, how do you imagine social relations are compelled to form themselves if not in order to actuate the social practice that must implement the social renewal process?If not, show me how social relations are perfectly free of the determinism to form themselves in order to actuate the social practice that implements the social renewal process, and so are in-deterministically free to form themselves in order to block the actuation of the social practice that implements the social renewal process, just as they please.If you accept that social relations are compelled to actuate social practice in implementing the social renewal process, how do you imagine social thought is compelled to think, if not to think the thought of social relations that must form in order to actuate the social practice that implements the social renewal process?If not, show me how social thought is perfectly free of the determinism to think the thought of social relations that form themselves for actuating the social practice that implements the social renewal process, and so are in-deterministically free to undermine the thought of social relations that form themselves for actuating the social practice that implements the social renewal process, just as it pleases.Note that I have been discussing social, not individual, consciousness.  The latter is beyond the immediate scope of abstract Marxian thought, and the present discussion, because it is far too concrete, and requires many tortuous determinations of Marxian science to comprehend that myopic thing.  But, of course, critics cannot see things scientifically like Marx.Social thought, social relations and social practice may be autonomous but they are highly dependent on the society they serve.  Social thought, social relations and social practice may violate their social conditions of existence for differing amounts of time — so much for the syncretic belief in the “inseparability of thinking and being” — but ultimately they must be brought back to earth by the society they function in and whose reproduction they function for.Social thought, social relations and social practice may delude themselves that they are free of compulsion.  Such voluntarism is the illusion of social freedom in, and from, society.  [The Communists and the Labour Party are exemplars of voluntarism being brought down to earth ultimately, by determinism, against their wills but rather reforming their wills, to serve necessary social needs.]The vaunted freedoms of social thought, social relations and social practice can never be long-term freedoms from such compulsion — they may, however, be semi-permanent freedoms for a portion, or class, in a fractured or socially-riven class society.So far I have only considered the determinisms that permeate each and every society, whether socialist or class based.  These determinisms are tame by comparison with the insidious determinisms that are compelled to reproduce class society as class society.I now turn to the consideration of society, no longer as a unified whole, but as a congeries of classes based on ownership and control of the process of social renewal.  In particular, let’s examine capitalist social reproduction.In haste, and breaking midstream because at a different time zone, I will return tomorrow to consider the far more potent determinisms that are absolutely essential for reproducing class-based societies.

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LBird wrote:

So, ‘idealism-materialism’, with no ‘primacy’, just necessary interaction.  Or, as you say, ‘the inseparability of ideas and material conditions’.

‘The inseparability of ideas and material conditions’ is deeper than you assume.It may surprise you to learn that the inseparability of thinking-and-being is common consensus among warring idealists and materialists, who nevertheless disagree over whether thinking or being determines the conjunction.Posters, who took comfort from the mere statement of this inseparability condition, were simply deriving circular confirmation of their own take on its meaning, by reading into a common agreement their own take on its meaning.  Oh dear, how easily people can be duped by political ranters proffering a cryptic phrase everyone agrees on, but each interprets differently.You see, “inseparability” is a state of fixity that remains void of content until it is explained by a dynamic theory of its “separable” components [Marx].  You can’t prove anything by the mere invocation of inseparability, but you can sure read anything you want into it.The embarrassing upshot is that those “hidebound” thinkers — the idealists and the materialists — annoyingly never made such a stupid mistake.  They always distinguished themselves from syncretic thinkers by the seriousness with which they take this conjunction of thinking-and-being as one of the serious problems facing mankind, and they seek a commensurately serious answer — not frivolous inseparability.By contrast, it is syncretic contentment in the ineffability of the mere statement of a conjunction of thought and being, that is truly hidebound “thinking”.How stupid!  The ancient Greeks invented philosophy when they recognized the inseparability of thinking-and-being as a problem that must be solved formally.  As always, the Greeks were pre-empted by the agrarian Fertile Crescent, particularly its informal “carpe diem” literature, and probably by others further back in prehistory.  But, contrary to commonsense, not one thinker in that line of thinkers so much as dreamed that inseparability could ever be its own ineffable solution, but each always saw it, quite clearly, as precisely its own outstanding problem.The grand illusion that inseparability is the clinching proof of hermaphroditic idealism-materialism is such a stunning discovery, that we at last appreciate how Marx choked over the stunning discoveries of Proudhon, or Engels over those of Dühring.What a choke!

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Marx and Engels — MaterialistsEngelsEngels explains their common agreed-upon understanding of the term materialism.

Engels: Ludwig Feuerbach, Part. 2 (1888) wrote:

The great basic question of all philosophy … is that concerning the relation of thinking and being….The answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two great camps.  Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature … [e.g., Hegel] … comprised the camp of idealism.  The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.These two expressions, idealism and materialism, originally signify nothing else but this; and here too they are not used in any other sense.

MarxMarx’s materialist conception of history is materialist in this original sense of “nothing else but” the primacy of being over thinking.

Marx: A Contribution, Preface (1859) wrote:

“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production.  The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of consciousness.  The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.  It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

One of Marx’s clearest expressions of his avowed materialism, in the original sense of “signifying nothing other” than the primacy of being to thinking, is.

Marx: Capital, Vol 1, Ch. 15 (1859) wrote:

“Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature’s technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life …“Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them.  Every history of religion, even, that fails to take account of this material basis, is uncritical.  It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly core of the misty creations of religion, than, conversely, it is, to develop from the actual relations of life the corresponding celestialised forms of those relations.  The latter method is the only materialistic, and therefore the only scientific one.”

Materialists in the Original SenseI am not claiming that Marx’s materialism is identical in content — only in stance — to old-time materialism.My limited aim, for the moment, is to establish that the mature Marx of Capital explicitly adopted the materialist stance, and explicitly repudiated the idealist stance.  In other words he remained a materialist despite — and in full unswerving cognizance of — his devastating Hegel-inspired critique of “all hitherto existing materialism”.Marx [and Engels] operated in life-long opposition to Hegel’s idealist conception of history.  As materialists they always opposed the primacy of ideas over social being throughout their entire intellectual and practical lives.The Socialist Party likewise takes its stance on the same side of the divide as Marx and Engels, and so lines up on the opposite flank to holders of all varieties of idealist conceptions of social being.The case for world socialism is materialist, and our Declaration of Principles and our eagerly-sought Object make sense only from a standpoint that is materialist in the “original significance” of the expression [as described generically above by Engels, built upon the foundation described specifically above by Marx].With them, we hurl against the capitalist world their materialist science — “social being determines consciousness”.

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You misrepresent me, and world socialists. All world socialists repudiate Lenin and communism.Your erstwhile communist comrades obsequiously worshipped at Lenin's feet, and you have only partly extricated yourself from his long shadow, still fighting for our benefit the battles you had to fight to gain your  freedom from Leninism/communism's pernicious anti-socialist influence, but ignorantly assuming that world socialism, that historically long preceded Russian communism, ever partook of that noxious elitist position, but always and at all times opposed that position, right from the start in 1904.To repeat — the SPGB and world socialism never ever embraced Leninism/communism at all.  Period.The SPGB and world socialists always opposed Leninism and communism, and were violently, often maliciously, opposed by it.  The devious Leninists [communists] were such an easy theoretical target because their political stance shifted and turned at the behest of fund-controlling and policy-formulating mother Russia, in the interest of the thugs in charge of dictating mother Russia.But in many instances they proved a dangerous physical target, because their leaders were fed by ambition and money, as Marx put it "the most violent, mean, malignant passions of the human breast".That's my take on your smart-alec response.You apparently know little about the disgusting scramble of the first-generation of erstwhile western communist leaders, seeking political power, willing to ride roughshod on the backs of western workers in the process, eager to share in the coffers and reap the plaudits, before reaping the disgrace, of their soviet overlords.I despise them all, in the historical scheme of things.  I despise their anti-socialist descendants, who won't free themselves from the long enduring clutches of their soviet heritage, and still hold society back by having hijacked socialism in their disgusting name.These people may apparently remain your comrades, but they can never ever be mine.To me, communists are enemies of socialism. We are hostile to them. See SPGB clause 7.Don't you ever try this pernicious ploy again!You, your tactics, and your arrogance betray the lingering hallmarks of your Leninist/communist heritage — something that I detected and noted precisely on our first encounter with you.  You came to set the Party straight.  You knew best.By your mark, I knew you then and I know you now. Now, answer my reciprocating peremptory demand without prevarication.

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LBird, so you are the one who is losing patience!  I've tolerated without a murmur your garallous attacks on Marx, Engels, the materialist conception of history, the Socialist Party position, and science through post after post after post in thread after thread after thread.Finally, you peremptorily demanded of me, for undisclosed personal reasons, that I forthwith disclose my own personal position on quantum interpretation — as if that mattered in the scheme of things — something I had studiously avoided doing because I'm simply not competent to judge it at the appropriate level of discourse.Neverheless to placate your arrogant demand of me, I obliged you, partly in order to assuage what could only be conceived as your petulance.And then you rewarded my reply with the opportunity to mount an attack on my abandoning of determinism, or some such accusation.  Your avowed two-way conversation descended into a predetermined dog fight.So I responded by firing a preemptive shot across your piratical bows before you hijacked the thread along your familiar, familiar, familiar lines, for which you display endless patience.Please tell me how have I misrepresented your well-documented [and long-remembered] position, that you've iterated, reiterated and re-reiterated over post after post after post?Now you, LBird, must respond in turn to my peremptory demand:Show me where I misrepresent your position.

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