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ParodyLBird and his UFO “scientific” mentor believe science operates as follows:“bourgeois” scientific practice — if experimental data clashes with theory, ditch the theory,“marxian” scientific practice — if experimental data clashes with theory, ditch the experiment.The key difference is: their science rejects theory before evidence; our science rejects evidence before theory.What Actually HappensIn practice, scientists operate in both ways (1) and (2) under different circumstances.When they are engaged in normal science, scientists employ (2) with utter conviction. The purpose of scientific theory is to guide human practice. Science, as social life generally, would be impossible if humans lacked a reliable guide to action.Since theory provides that guide, experience must be interpreted in its terms. We do this scientifically by determining mentally concrete instances of a scientific theory’s abstract principles by means of its abstract formal determinism [roughly (2)].Normally that works fine, just as our daily-life abstractions deliver us concrete guides to negotiating the world.However, when scientific abstract determinism fails us, and forces us to increasingly torture it into determining instances that match observation which no longer make much sense to us — i.e. when observational anomalies mount — a serious crisis starts eroding away at confidence within the scientific community.We sense that something deep down is wrong with our science’s structure. Its abstract principles and its abstract determinism are no longer working in harmony for us. We appear to have exhausted their scope [lifetime]. Our theory is ceasing, in as yet unknown ways, to be a reliable guide to practice. It must be overturned by practice, but how?Then begins an astonishing period of revolutionary science, in which scientists engage in (1). In such periods, consciousness consciously subverts itself. This is the stuff of conviction in the world.Collapse of Classical [Newtonian] PhysicsIn terms of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a band of physicists ceased engaging in normal science — for which they lived and died by the current theory (or loosely by the Current Paradigm) — and engaged in revolutionary science — a response to crisis which drove them to rethink the Current Paradigm from its very foundations in light of disturbing counter evidence, while simultaneously being held in check by every fibre in their intellectual bodies compelling them to salvage as much of the mightily successful past as they could.As superb example of a Hegelian negation-of-the-negation, the Modern physics that arose out of the crisis, and resolved it, contains Classical physics as its limiting cases. Conviction in the world is restored, but from a new standpoint — new abstract principles and new abstract formal determinism. New conviction.A negation-of-the-negation reassures us that we are entering a new phase of the same process.Logician of science Karl Popper (who purported to despise scientists who weren’t permanent revolutionaries without really making it clear how they should actually go about working productively in normal life in such a fundamentally destructive fashion) has been hailed by adherents as “revolutionary” relative to Kuhn, precisely because Popper — like you, LBird — knows no other science than (1).Of course, Marx, Kuhn, Gould [Punctuated Equilibrium Darwinism] all recognized that (2) was the norm, and that (1) was the dialectical exception [the nodal point of phase transition]. Just as stasis is most certainly the norm under capitalism today.ImagineIf your and your mentor’s (1) versus (2) scientific practice were a correct description of actual scientific practice…Your “bourgeois” science [physics, chemistry, mathematics, …] would stagnate theoretically into impractical quagmires [as their theories would be continually jettisoned in the face of counter evidence].Your “marxian” science would stagnate practically into abandoned theoretical swamps [as all counter evidence would be continually ignored].Is this the two-dimensional Ronald Reagan theory of their and our science you want to foist upon socialists?The whole point of Kuhn’s book was to point out how devastating a scientific revolution (1) is to the norm because, by challenging core principles and practice of (2) that formerly made the world meaningful, it shakes conviction in the scientific community’s collective enterprise.IncommensurabilityYour mentor harbours an unshakable belief that compels him to deny (1) because there’s considerable counter evidence to his unshakeable belief. So he also denies that Einstein and Planck made scientific leaps which remain theoretically incommensurable with Classical physics, while he daydreams that Modern physics can be harmoniously reconciled with Classical physics through dogged adherence to Classical physics by (2).Your similar adherence to “permanent revolution” (2) leaves you sitting quite comfortably alongside the evidence-dismissive apologists for creation [intelligent-design] science, tobacco-lobby [no-causal effect] science, global skepticism [it rained yesterday] science, theology, Leninism…If we are to engage in a discussion of a “socialist theory of science”, we need to know whether you still hold your earlier avowed position as being identical to your mentor’s UFO-defensive “theory of science”.
WarningLBird’s scientific authority is a UFO “scientist”.Scientific Theory. UFO “science” is compelled to undermine the credibility of the authoritative scientific theory it opposes and that it finds itself opposed by. Just like LBird. [So too are intelligent-design “science”, warming-skeptic “science”, alternative-medicine “science”.]Scientific Practice. UFO “science” is compelled to descend into the alarmist paranoia of whistle-blowing against what it perceives as an “authoritarian” cover-up specifically designed to keep “the rest of us” in the dark. Just like LBird.UFO “science” believes that we are monitored and manipulated by aliens conducting experiments upon us. At least LBird’s “scientific” mentor believes so. Does LBird?I have read the web “science” postings of LBird’s “scientific” mentor. The kindest I can say is that I find nothing in them of merit for socialists.CrankI challenge LBird to disown the “science” of his scientific authority.
Nature as FoundationRussell is cutting us moderns down to size. According to him, the ancients revered external nature [and its dire necessity] as the realm where scientific truth resides. Human arrogance set in with the Renaissance, and got out of hand when Fichte [philosophical code for Hegel and Marx] turned truth into a social construct.That is Russell’s bourgeois take on truth, and on the threat to it of growing irrationality. The titled Lord is proposing we all adopt social humility toward external nature as antidote.Like you, he warns against social corrosion. Like you he lacks an abstract deterministic theory of consciousness — for us, he lacks the materialist conception of history.You Read What You Want to ReadQuite funny that you blindly misread Russell as supporting your position on truth — recoiling from his ideologically toxic reference to ‘facts’ and fooled by his hysteria over impending disaster.What a devastating self-critique you unconsciously make of yourself, as exemplary educator of the educator, exposing your embarrassing 180° twist in adjudicating ideological truth as falsehood.If you easily dupe yourself to vote for Russell when every fibre in your body compels you to vote against him, heaven save socialism from impending catastrophes when it lets you loose to misdirect your personal vote on the truth of the whole of human science!Self-correctionRussell famously takes 300 pages to “prove” 1 + 1 = 2 [would you have sneered — “in what base ≥3?”] and then Frege had the indecency to locate a paradox in Russell’s set theoretic assumptions back on page one.Note, Russell’s immediate retraction exemplifies that science is, in its deterministic practice, self-correcting.But your non-deterministic tripartite model of cognition provides no practical method of self correction — something you demonstrably need. That’s precisely why you crave correction by ideology.Your tripartite schema is correct as far as it goes — philosophically speaking. But it is incomplete, scientifically speaking. And so it must remain forever ideological. Its determinism can only be decided by a battle of competing ideologies.You scornfully look down your nose from on high upon Engels’s simple description of self-correction, which is not intended to be “philosophical”, as you misjudge it to be.Waste of TimeYou seem blithely unaware that scientific revision has implications. It has ripple effects in unexpected places. Nature is connected. And our conception of it [including us, as we are part of it] changes all the time.[That has nothing to do with 19th century materialism.]The problem you aim to solve falls in the computational complexity class of NP-complete [nondeterministic polynomial time] problems. Mankind needs to spend its time in socialism in far more productive ways.How about trying deterministic base–superstructure science instead.
LBird wrote:Glad to see you’re keeping up with human thought.Really?[Gone beyond it.]Of course I recognize your Kuhnian point. It is the central plank of your Lakatosian/Kuhnian/Feyerabendian [LKF] inspiration that, because theory dictates scientific practice, science must start with theory.Anyone who reads and rereads the remarkable “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” cheers when Kuhn murders Popper on this very point.Again, I am not alarmed as you are by the fact that the social superstructure [which includes science and class ideology, proper] is a social construct.Marx’s, apparently dismissible materialist conception of history “social being determines consciousness” presented that to the world a century before LKF, who took it off him in timid emasculated form.Sure, capitalist ideology is our target.But I suggest you look at how the Marxian economists of the world absolutely and mercilessly demolished Marx on the basis of the honest, openly transparent — all assumptions exposed — mathematical tract by Piero Sraffa [1960] on the “Production of Commodities by Commodities”.[Seek out if you want to be humiliated by friendly fire, Steedman’s [1977] apparently devastating demolition “Marx after Sraffa”. And Sraffa’s intention was to trounce the marginalists and to shore up Marx, not to destroy him in the process.]You then might realize that the problems we face here and now run deeper than your simplistic fear of that 18th century materialist dogma that “ideology rules the world”.To rejoin the actual world, where fierce battles are fought, read Andrew Kliman’s [2008] amazing rescue of Marx — “Reclaiming Marx’s Capital ”. Then you may observe a striking instance of how ideology actually operates to paralyze thought and action.Theory and PracticeSure, theory decides what observation is and how to make it. Not a difficult concept to understand, since theory was abstracted from observation expressly for this purpose. But, despite this, it is equally apparent that observation just as certainly determines how to make theory.Both statements demonstrably apply at the level of immediate experience — at the level of appearance.The explanation can never be, as you surmise, one of mere interaction, or alternation. between both. Thereby hangs the miraculous metaphysical assumption that two opposing determinisms are exactly equally balanced or are somehow harmonically coupled as swings and roundabouts — extraordinary equalities or couplings worth trumpeting to the skies.The solution to such paradoxes [man makes history but history makes man; social existence determines consciousness but consciousness determines social existence; theory determines observation, but observation determines theory] lies in precisely acknowledging that both horns are equally correct at the phenomenological level.The point is that this acknowledged complementarity, being appearance, is what must be explained by reality — by science. Hegel always saw such doubles as two sides of the same coin, and therein lies the secret to building the science.But, building a science is hard work. When we come to theorize the science, we abstract from appearance, which implies we must analyze that appearance, for it is that appearance we want to explain.And what we abstract from appearance will always be experientially false, simply because our abstractions are not the same as immediate experience. [They could hardly hold for all material instances if they actually held for any one of them.]Take the sciences that LKB study. Those sciences work for us precisely because their abstractions [categories and determinisms] also don’t apply immediately to any actuality. They only apply as abstract categories mediated by abstract determinism. [Both categories and determinism are abstracted from appearance.]That makes your Kuhnian point that it’s the abstract theory which is on trial, and not any one of its determinations [or, viewed as appearance, any one observation].The trouble is that LKF work with appearances when they theorize the science of science. Marx, who understood these issues more deeply than they, consciously works with abstractions and deterministically derives appearances from them. That is also how LKF’s sciences operate. But it is not how these philosophers operate.Consequently these philosophers [at least one, Kuhn, is a giant, while Lakatos with his minor “research programs” circles like a minor planet around his Kuhnian sun, and Feyerabend is somewhere off in the Kuiper Belt] trail a legacy, taken up by non-determinists who learn their own science by cherry-picking from LKF’s philosophical science of science.The pitiable residue is little more than “IDEOLOGY RULZ”. What a sorry fate for such remarkable work.Marx explains the appearance of scientific practice by decidedly coming out against your confident clinging to appearance — as true disciple of the ideological streak in LKF.Theoretically for Marx — and theory is the only reality for us — practice precedes theory. At the level of the theory of theory: Social being determines consciousness.PostscriptSurely you recognize the formalism of deterministic science as subsuming your static tripartite model, supplying the necessary dynamics that turns your schema into a process, and the necessary determinism that turns theory, in principle, into a self-checking and self-correcting human enterprise.I have no fears of ideology under socialism [but that’s another thread].I oppose your restrictions on human thought and human endeavour. I consider them to be utter madness.
LBird wrote:And how does human 'practice' happen, without human 'theory'? Induction?Drivel. We acted before we were conscious of it. Consciousness comes after.[Social being determines consciousness. But you know no determinism,]This quote is precisely what you said ages ago — "science begins with theory", or words to that effect. And that theory is based on ideological assumption, etc.Your defense of interaction between subject and object is almost meaningless waffle. Only you could imagine that has any definite meaning.
Whence Socialist Ideology?
Marx showed that the materialist conception of history implies that socialism lacks capitalism’s need to camouflage social relations of class dominance.
When people cooperate to run society as associated producers of wealth and culture, mystification of social reality [conscious and unconscious ideology] vanishes along with the rest of the social-superstructural conditions required to reproduce the capitalist class as dominant.
[Social Reproduction].
But LBird fears the emergence of a new ruling class of scientists who own and control scientific truth and keep the rest of us in deliberately ignorant subjection under socialism.
He asserts that all truth is irredeemably ideological, and so it had better conform to society’s ideology than to the ideology of the practicing scientists who discover and formulate it. Of course, the practice of discovery and formulation is irredeemably ideological as well. Everything is an ideological social construct.
LBIrd demands that all of society decide on the truth of science, its laws and its results.
Democratic Truth
The following suggests some of the apparent absurdity of demanding that we all vote democratically to formulate ideological truth. Recall, we are not discussing scientific accountability, or scientific practice, or scientific fraud, as such, but only scientific truth.
How do we go about assessing physical truth of this kind [expressed in a mathematical creole for viewing on this web site]?
ℒ_{SM} =
kinetic energies and self-interaction of the gauge bosons
¼ W_{μν} • W^{μν}
— ¼ B_{μν} B^{μν}
— ¼ G^a_{μν} G^{μν}_a
kinetic energies and electroweak interactions of fermions
+ bar{L} γ^μ ( i ∂_μ
— ½ g τ • W_μ
— ½ g′ Y B_μ ) L
+ bar{R} γ^μ ( i ∂_μ
— ½ g τ • W_μ
— ½ g′ Y B_μ ) R
W^{±}, Z, γ and Higgs masses and couplings
+ ½ | ( i ∂_μ — ½ g τ • W_μ
— ½ g′ Y B_μ ) φ |² — V(φ)
interactions between quarks and gluons
+ g″ ( bar{q} γ^μ T_a q) G^a_μ
fermion masses and couplings to Higgs
+ ( G_1 bar{L} φ R
+ G_2 bar{L} φ_c R
+ h . c . )No Conviction without Determinism
The first lesson a scientist learns is to hold conviction in abstract determinism.
Judging deterministic truth is a measurable task, and so it is meaningful. By what criteria do we judge ideological truth?
How can we judge truth if we don’t recognize the efficacy of abstract determinism to predict the outcomes of states and actions?
If we do recognize abstract determinism, why do we need to vote on truth, rather than just test its efficacy?
If testing [experiment, observation and measurement] are irredeemably ideological, can we stop the recursive ideology-on-ideology descent other than by collective ideological fiat?
If theory is irredeemably ideological, what are our grounds for conviction? Enthusiasm?
Conviction in abstract determinism worries the philosopher, but it is the only reliable source of conviction we have.
Conviction in class consciousness is ultimately conviction in scientific determinism, or it remains ideology, as it does for LBird.
Science as Determinism
Contrary to LBird’s imaginings, mankind created science neither to seek truth nor to answer interesting questions [no matter how significant they have emerged as consequences for us] but to solve practical problems.
LBird sees science springing from theory [ideological assumptions] not from practice [need, experience, measurement]. Textbooks and subject reviews often cut to the chase and start their presentation with abstract categories and abstract determinisms — as if they sprung from nowhere — and deterministically develop these abstractions to describe actual instances of material phenomena.
But it would be truly amazing if those abstract categories and abstract determinisms could yield concrete abstractions that actually describe material phenomena if the abstractions themselves had not been originally plucked from the material phenomena they’re stuffed back into.
Marx’s Science
Marx, in Capital, who thought deeply about science as process, first analyses the material practice of commodity exchange in order to abstract from it his key conceptual category value [an imaginary category like all abstractions, that doesn’t correspond to anything material, except by deterministic derivation of concrete mental instances of it].
Marx deliberately offers us the phenomenology of discovery before presenting the logic of determination. He first builds his toolkit of abstract categories [such as surplus value] before he can actually launch the investigation.
In other words, he starts with the practice he hopes to turn his abstractions back into — the material substrate that engendered them, but this time as mentally concrete instances. That’s how all deterministic science generates conviction. The only conviction we really know, and can rely on.
And what is Marx’s abstract deterministic logic? It is the materialist conception of history. Here is the sought-for “proletarian science” of society and of the “ideology” of class society.
Postscript
Note how the formalism of base–superstructure determinism transcends LBird’s tripartite model of cognition — it alone yields truth by conviction [What’s so special about Base–Superstructure Determinism?]. That is the only truth we know.
By the way LBird, there’s little new under the sun.
Marx was quite familiar with the 18th century French materialist view that “opinion [ideology] governs the world”.
LBird wrote:The complete democratic control of the entire process of science, no ‘ifs’ or ‘buts’.Thought PoliceCensorship of human thought is LBird’s gross misunderstanding of Marx’s thesis III on Feuerbach.Materialist Feuerbach imagines he can change man by changing his conditions of existence, independently of [because he is ignorant of] the determinism inherent in existing social conditions.As Marx put it: Feuerbach, the philosopher, raises himself superior to [above or outside of] the actual process of society. Consequently he, and his philosophical plan, will be brought to earth by the actual social determinism he tries to flout. Marx’s charge against him is not elitism per se.LBird misreads thesis III through his anti-Leninist eyes, with vestiges of Leninism clouding his vision. He is alarmed by imaginary social determinisms in socialism that relate to actual social determinisms in a different social formation, capitalism.Consequently, despite himself, he raises himself superior to the actual process of socialist society, whose determinism he lacks confidence in. He doubts the efficacy of our Party Object to maintain socialism as socialism.Instead he insists the SPGB sign up to instituting the ultimately futile. He wants it to outlaw dangerous thought, to imprison thinking within socially-safe bounds.If the tortured history of science proves anything conclusively, it is that shackled scientific thought will burst its shackles. It cannot be tamed. Science is inherently subversive. “Eppur si muove”.LBird intends to slap social surveillance and re-education upon that part of the social superstructure that is science, in blithe ignorance of the social and scientific determined processes. By thwarting the social superstructure that spontaneously arises from the free untrammeled workings of the socialist social base, he and his imaginary plan will be brought to earth by those very processes.Of course LBird only wants an innocuous “lite” version of Torquemada’s Inquisition, Robespierre’s Terror, Stalin’s Purges. He forgets that those worthies started out thus innocently, inspired by noble intent. Paranoia has always fueled social control.He forgets that if science can subvert socialism, then so can his democracy be manipulated to distort science. In other words, if you can’t trust scientists, you can’t trust any of us under socialism. He comes with vestiges of Leninism that see only authoritarianism as the counterpoise to opposition. He is dangerous.Determinism and TruthMarx adopts the formal structure of deterministic science: Base → Determinism → Superstructure ≡ ObservationThe base is pure abstraction from a material ensemble.The determinism is abstract formalism from that material ensemble.The superstructure is derived by formal determination from the abstract base — it is still abstract, but it purports to be a mentally concrete instance of the abstract base.The observation is a materially concrete measurement of an instance from that material ensemble.The truth of a base–superstructure deterministic science over the domain of its material ensemble consists in its ability to derive mentally concrete instances that measure in abstraction [within bounds of contingency] the same as the materially concrete instances they purport to be.The truth of a base–superstructure system, and its instances, is the only sort of truth we know. The formal determinism of the system is the only determinism we know.Crucially, base–superstructure determinism proves [or disproves] itself because of its essential feedback between theoretical determinism and practical observation.Theory ⇄ Practice.Such truth is partial. Such determinism is partial. Such base–superstructure determinism is itself a process.The material ensemble, which is only determined for us by the science, is ultimately the thing that subverts the science [by analogy with Marx’s account of social revolution in his famous Preface to the Critique] and forces scientists to rethink the scientific base and determinism.Outsiders can easily gain the false impression from reading the famous 1960s debates on scientific revolutions that science is perpetually revolutionizing itself. But the scientific process is, as Stephen Gould [following Thomas Kuhn] described for evolution, essentially one of stasis, punctuated by revolution.If it weren’t for the stasis, daily life and formal science would be impossible. The working truths and working determinisms of daily life persist, or we could not navigate their instances in our daily lives. They hold for us. Likewise, the formalized truths and formalized determinisms of science persist, or scientific research would be meaningless.It is sheer elitist blather to smear science by sneering at its partial truths instead of celebrating its working truths — the only ones we know and can ever know — that persist for us within a conditional but comprehensible stasis. We all live through such stases. Capitalism is one such.Just as we must agree on daily conventions, so too must science agree on conventions in order that its practitioners may communicate and collaborate. That is not elitism. That is spontaneous deterministic human practice.Abstraction or AssumptionIn LBird’s opinion, the scientific base is an ideological assumption, and the scientific superstructure is an ideological consequence. Presumably, the determinism [couched in mathematics and logic] is also an ideological assumption.On the contrary, the base and determinism of modern sciences have long histories of descent from precursor abstractions that were successively teased, thrashed and filtered out of experience [observation].Take Newton’s laws of motion that are so refined they no longer correspond to measurable [observable] material. Only their deterministic concrete instances do. The student who doesn’t know their history is condemned to take them on trust, or ignorantly mistake them for mere assumptions.In actuality they are distilled residues of abstractions that predate civilization, that were crystallized out by the Greeks — in particular by the anti-religious, and so socially embarrassing, particle materialists — refined by the priestly medieval Schoolmen, and mathematized by Kepler in his three “laws of planetary motion” abstracted from Tycho’s observations of the planet Mars from a Copernican moving Earth.Newton acknowledged the abstraction spadework of his predecessors: “if I have seen further than others it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants”. He also taunted philosophers who build upon formally explicit assumptions: “I make no hypotheses”.[In reference to “bourgeois science”, it might be noted that Newton entered the House of Lords, rising to Master of the Royal Mint. Not one of his precursor giants was a class-conscious proletarian.]The abstract bases [laws] and abstract determinisms [couched in mathematics and logic] of our deterministic sciences are mankind’s supreme achievements.Abstraction and determinism are the substance of our consciousness, and the secret of the efficacy of our human practice. As such, they cannot be mere assumptions.RelativityLBird proffers his account of Einstein’s thought experiment as a perfect analogy of social ideology.A physicist would recognize that LBird is merely describing the [Galilean] relativity of classical physics, that Einstein is here expressly refuting.Thanks to James Clerk Maxwell, classical physics deterministically implies a constant velocity of light — a constancy that Einstein recognizes must violate the addition of velocities of classical relativity, and so has subversive implications for the classical measurement of space and time.Einstein is primarily interested in determinism. Classical relativity stands in its way, and so ends up as determinism’s casualty. [In a very real sense, the comparison of observations across inertial frames is very special indeed, as no such inertial frames actually exist.]But in fact, LBird’s example would not defeat most mammals that navigate the world guided by stereoscopic vision. You see, the ball will never move forward from the man, only up and down beside him. Einstein’s dog would take that into account, and snatch it.Fail to see how that proves science is based on ideological assumption.[In reference to “bourgeois science”, James Clerk Maxwell, as Elder of the Church of Scotland, as avowed opponent of Darwinian evolution, and as proponent of the impossibility of scientific sociology, seems a perfect representative of this detested type. Presumably that neatly explains the elite privileged velocity he assigned to light.]Democracy of ThoughtLBird, wants to subject scientific thought to global democratic decision making lest elite scientists take over the world of socialism. That is imaginary science fiction.LBird has proven that he has no idea of the way science works. Many of his pontifications have the false emphasis of partial truths — the things he scorns.He has demonstrated that he cannot contribute at the leading edge of a specialist science. Of course, no scientist can hope to contribute at the cutting edge of all scientific knowledge as is falsely supposed possible even as recently as the Renaissance.It’s never been possible to do so. The favorite polymath Leonardo the man, not Leonardo the myth, could not have contributed to, say, then current Ptolemaic astronomy.Science is, and probably will always remain a cooperative human enterprise conducted by specialists.Science is definitely elitist in the human sense that it takes dedication, imagination, often extraordinary ability, motivation and sheer hard work to master and conduct it. Consequently it must rely on specialist division of labour, and so implicitly on scientific trust — on scientific integrity.But we have also seen that science’s base–superstructure determinism is itself self checking.Perversion of ScienceThe issue of “bourgeois science” is a complex one. Never forget that Marx [like Hegel before him] developed a theory of human consciousness: “social being determines consciousness”.Marx has explored ideology in deeper ways than just class-perverted science [which he was really the first to expose]. For him, material things like money are ultimately ideological in extraordinarily interesting ways. But such deeper matters are for another thread.I hereby oppose LBird’s insistence that the SPGB subscribe to controlling the meaning of scientific research.
DeterminismEngels wrote this 70 years before the Russian Revolution.He condemns Bolshevik politicians [Lenin and Trotsky] before they were born to betray their working-class movement should they seize power under social conditions unripe for realizing their political program.Leaders over the ProletariatEngels was writing in the aftermath of the European Spring [1848–49]. This was a heady time of democratic upheaval against authoritarian regimes — a time just like the Arab Spring or the end of the Soviet Union.Engels continues:
Frederick Engels wrote:We have seen examples of this in recent times. We need only be reminded of the position taken in the last French provisional government by the representatives of the proletariat, though they represented only a very low level of proletarian development.Whoever can still look forward to official positions after having become familiar with the experiences of the February government … is either foolish beyond measure, or at best pays only lip service to the extreme revolutionary party.Celtic, will you, like the Bolshevik politicians, impose your consciousness upon the “unconscious” proletariat [as you call it] for its own good, just like Lenin and Trotsky?[Just like Christian missionaries; like the Taliban; like the intellectually superior everywhere — is that also just like you?]Celtic, will you, like the Bolshevik politicians, cling to anti-democratic power against the majority, even on failure to deliver your program, just like Lenin and Trotsky?[Just like England’s Charles the First; like France’s Bourbon kings; like Russia’s Tsars; like ruling classes at all times. Will you respect the people’s wishes, or will you ignore their demands because you know better than the people?]Celtic, will you, like the Bolshevik politicians, impose state terror in perfect conformity with your vanguard Party’s hierarchical power structure of authority control from above over those below?[Of course few people intend to resort to terror, like young innocent Mr Lenin and young innocent Mr Trotsky. But once an anti-democratic course is set in train, determinism sets terror in its wake. Anti-democrats have cowardly discarded the sole mechanism for bringing opposition out into the open. Instead they send it dangerously underground — hence the necessity for secret police. Anti-democrats advertise their fear. They have already proven that they are afraid. Do you intend to terrorize the opposition into safe submission until you’ve successfully educated its “unconsciousness”?]Celtic, will you, like the Bolshevik politicians, twist ignominious policy failure into glorious victory. Will you lie in the teeth of humanity that a pathetic state-controlled market-capitalist system is “communism”, just like Lenin and Trotsky?Or, Celtic, are you prepared to consider that an alternative system of society described by our Object is what Marx, Engels and the World Socialist Movement, have always considered communism, or socialism to be? The only social consciousness that liberates us all from the insidious false consciousness of capitalism is the class consciousness that comprehends the necessity of achieving our Object. That understanding has to be assimilated by each of us individually. It can’t be imposed.
Ed wrote:I agree with you, but …Et tu Brute
Ed wrote:I also find it to be a very common misconception.All the more reason to expose it!
Ed wrote:We can help teach others without resorting to petty point scoring.There was no “resorting to petty point scoring” — Socialist truth hurts.
Ed wrote:We can debate in a friendlier way.Tell that to Alex. He spat precisely targeted anti-SPGB accusations at ALB, alanjjohnstone, etc, which they took on the chin out of deference to his youthful naivety and boundless enthusiasm.A friend would tell Alex that he has much yet to learn about the dynamics of the human society he wants to save. An enemy would obfuscate at the ultimate expense of that society.
Alex Woodrow wrote:We, as human beings, are capable of producing an abundance of resources all in our local communities.Humans don’t create resources. Nature does.We, like all life forms, appropriate Nature’s resources. But our appropriation is ultimately an exchange between Nature and itself. We and our resources are ultimately Nature’s. That is an inescapable constraint Nature imposes upon all life forms.The hallmark of us humans is that we consciously appropriate Nature’s resources. We fashion them to our needs and desires. In so doing we set in train an inescapable action–reaction between technology and culture that is mediated by conscious thought.In reshaping Nature to our needs and desires, we simultaneously reshape our conscious thought, which reshapes our needs and desires, and so reshapes our relationship with Nature. In so doing we reshape ourselves.That is what we humans are. We are what we do and what we are conscious of doing. That is our dynamic.Alex, you seek to curtail this dynamic. To stop it in its tracks, Such efforts must plunge us into some form of comfortable “rural idiocy”. Stop the world, you want to get off. We oppose your agenda tooth and nail.
Alex Woodrow wrote:There are alternatives to copper you know, as we can use other materials such as aliminium wire, tinsel wire etc. So there are ways around this.The county of Cornwall suits your copper—aluminium—tinsel scenario. Let’s contemplate an imagined closed commune and its plan to wire its local Internet somewhere in Cornwall.Cornwall exhausted its copper supplies years ago. It also lacks aluminium — a metal whose energy-intensive refining amounts to congealing ore and electricity and, in any case, exceeds the production capability of a local closed commune.So imagine that our Cornish commune had the good fortune or foresight to settle upon a silver-rich locality. It collectively decides to wire its Internet with “tinsel” wire, and so starts mining silver deposits that are found in its commune-managed territory. [“Tinsel” was originally fashioned from silver shavings.]Of course, in the imaginary localist mine-is-mine and yours-is-yours world of autonomous resource-owning communes, our silver-privileged community is a fortunate commune. You see, “tinsel” isn’t an option for all Cornish communes. The unlucky mineral-poor communes must try something else, or go without their wired Internet.But Alex Woodrow assures us that every community can stand on its own two [or two hundred] feet, and so will doubtless succeed. Anyone who suggests they mightn’t succeed is ipso facto called a “capitalist”, whatever he misunderstands by that term.Alex, for someone who violently disparages Marx, it might be worth considering Marx’s epigrammatic gloss on local resources: “it is impossible to catch a fish in a pond where there aren’t any”.[Our local commune, of course, will deliberately ignore the fact broad-band is moving to optical fibre and wireless. It will stick appropriately to its locally-sourced narrow-band metal.]Before proceeding, let’s examine a geological map of Cornwall — all of Cornwall, not just the little bit of it that is owned and controlled by our isolated ownership-and-control conscious commune.Notice, if you will, how unevenly mineral resources are deposited. Notice the concentrated zones of mineralization in association with granite outcrops. These hold the tin and tungsten deposits, while copper and arsenic deposits extend beyond, and lead and zinc extend even further beyond.The global science of geology — better still, the science of global geology [geo = world, globe] — explains why local Cornish mineral veins form in this manner. But such global science possibly falls beyond the limited horizon of our local property-conscious closed-upon-the-world commune which, unlike excluded Moses, is comfortably cocooned within its self-sufficient land of milk, honey and privileged “tinsel” silver.So, our imaginary commune dwells on the granite, jealously guards its mineral private property, and is ready to mine its possessed silver for wiring its communal Google-free wholesome internet.However, while delving underground our communal miners [being good Cornishmen] discover that they must pump out the continuously in-flooding subterranean aquifer, whose course they have necessarily disturbed. Our idyllic commune now must confront the far-from-idyllic prospect of having to manage the toxic arsenides that are inexorably seeping into and souring its ground water.Does this autonomous self-sufficient local commune blithely divert its toxic effluents downstream into the alien waters of the equally autonomous and self-sufficient neighbouring commune that sips in blissful isolation of upstream contamination. Does the alien commune matter to it at all? [Alex implies that they don’t even deign to talk.]If, according to Alex, you aren’t a “capitalist” you must agree that your untouchable neighbour commune can very well stand on its own two feet! Problem solved. Your neighbours are resourceful and can solve the problems you bequeath them. Both communes faithfully remain parochial, xenophobic and imbecile to the end.[If only the ancient civilizations along the great rivers had stopped at this stage of social isolation. we’d still be living in blithe indifference towards each other and everyone else!]And so, to conclude our insight into an idealized localist world of autonomous self-sufficient harmony, our isolated communes continue to live autistically ever after, one texting over its private fairy-tinsel intranet and the other drinking from its private fairy-melted snow. Except that Nature connects them.Total Dependence With modifications, this parable holds for the entire globe. That’s precisely why we need a global solution.John Donne expressed conviction in our inter-related humanity, and against notions of human isolation, as well as anyone has.
Quote:No man is an island, Entire of itself, Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. … Because I am involved in mankind, And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.Donne captures the global position of the SPGB.The Socialist Party opposes any local section of society that seeks to control Nature’s resources in its own local sectional interests. See our Object.Nature’s resources are mankind’s alone, to be controlled democratically and held in common by the whole of society. In other words, not to be owned and used by a section or part of society [as they are now by the capitalist class].Mankind has suffered far too long because the substance of its life has been controlled by a portion [always the privileged minority] of society in the interest of that privileged portion, and so against the interest of the rest of society [always the majority].Localism selfishly seeks the right for a local section of society to control its property relations to its local resources in order to wield them in its privileged local interests. Localism is indifferent to the rest of mankind, which it excludes and forbids from its private possessions. Localism, like all privileged ownership of Nature’s resources is a position inimical to and hostile to mankind.Rights and privileges are artifices constructed by society. It is sheer effrontery to believe that one, or a group, of us can actually own a piece of Nature. If anything, Nature owns us, in that the global contains the local. Never forget we are part of Nature.Human right and privilege are always and everywhere a social power over other people exercised through things. They are necessary fictions in a class-based society — essential creations of a society which needs to justify private ownership and control of Nature’s resources. They vanish when all mankind controls Nature democratically.That’s precisely why Alex Woodrow, who accepts private property in Nature’s resources as a right and privilege of locality, can’t see a conflict between his localism and capital. There is little disparity between them. Localism is merely a fantasy form of petty capital. It is naively and unconsciously anti-social.We are all Nature. We are all different parts of it — none equal. But we can all work together, democratically holding Nature’s resources as one, united as associated humanity to help make living worthwhile for all of us within the Nature we all must manage. Only society in concerted effort can achieve and sustain this.
Alex Woodrow wrote:Anyway, if anyone here has examples of problems that may occur in a society of localism, then would it be all right if you could please say, as I really don't see any problems of localism.The problem with localism is that society is global. Localism cannot sustain itself locally. It cannot reproduce itself on its own terms.That alone is sufficient to damn it.Society condemns the local to inhabit the global — to at most function as local organ of global organism. More than that is disease of the global organism.We are in this together. Humans need each other. We are individuals because we are society.Our resources [minerals and agriculture], technology [science and engineering], culture [language and arts], and prowess [we humans ourselves] are global.They form the essential social “substance” by which society daily reproduces itself.The global character of our social “substance” is a fundamental constraint that confronts our fragmented capitalist society. Localism now opposes itself as a barrier to social progress.The localism that strives to localize our social “substance” is as anti-socialist as nationalism and racism. The proletarianism that limits its sights to local worker control of local factories is fundamentally anti-socialist.Political localism revolts at the frightful conquest of the local by the global. It reacts against what capital is impelled to do, simply because it is capital.Global capital clinically annihilates local capital. Global capital mercilessly plunders local labour. It is the nature of capital to rape our social “substance”.Seekers after the grand old days of local capital should never forget that local capital was equally avaricious on the local scale. The fault lies not in the global but in the capital.As the Communist Manifesto put it far too long ago “The workers have no country. … They have a world to win.”That world is inextricably global. To win it, we have no choice but to deal with that!
Determined and Inevitable?
Quote:Yes. In the sense that it [socialism] is determined. No. In the sense that determined processes can be derailed by other determined processes.It’s great to realize that we do agree on the underlying determinism of the materialist conception of history.
Quote:The difference that remains between us I believe, is that I conclude from this that socialism is not inevitable and you appear not to.Yes, like you, I certainly believe we have to fight for socialism. It won’t happen without us — man is the agent of his own history.But socialists can’t simply make history blindly — that’s the stuff of class society, which has scant interest in society as such.We socialists can gain mighty help from history itself — that substance inherited from the past. That substance can only be comprehended by the materialist conception of history, and we must wield it as our tool for achieving and maintaining socialism.Our Object is the greatest challenge ever hurled at the world, and it is pure scientific prediction. As such, our Object is the one great consequential conclusion [i.e. consequence of determinism] of the materialist conception of history.Our Object puts class society on notice: we understand property [ownership and control], we can defeat property’s ownership and control of mankind and its hijacking of our common human social process, and we can forever sustain that triumph over the socially destructive private ownership of our individual lives.We wield the substance of past history for our own future. That substance of history distilled into its abstract essence is the materialist conception of history.Our future is determined by our past [that’s the determinism of all autonomous processes, like the serpent shifting its past fulcrum into its future one]. If man is the product of his circumstances [determinism] we’ll change those circumstances, and so change man.We know how to make man human in concrete actuality, and no longer just in our minds — something mankind has excelled at during the tenure of class society.The materialist conception of history gives us the confidence that we can weave our future out of our past by overcoming the desperate barriers necessary for sustaining our present.For that purpose, I believe that the materialist conception of history and our Object are precisely equivalent to the necessary class consciousness.
emily_chalmers wrote:Thank you so much for your response; it will be extremely helpful. I'll let you know how it went when I'm finished. I should be working on it for around another month.On writing about socialism and determinism in another post, I recalled that I wrote about it in response to your socialist questionnaire, on the question: “Is socialism inevitable?”.I then, as now, agree that socialism is inevitable — a response which apparently strikes most people as akin to fatalism.Emily, you did offer to let us know how your research went. I trust it went successfully, and look forward to learning of its results.
Determinism or What?Of course determinism can’t explain every possible contingency. No-one ever thought it could; though you seem to think it must.You assert socialism isn’t determined. Why then are you confident that we can establish it? How then do you intend to hold it together?I consider class consciousness to be simply our recognition of the determinism inherent in the materialist conception of history. That recognition is indispensable for establishing socialism. It alone gives us confidence in our social commitment to common ownership and democratic control. If social being determines consciousness, then it alone ensures that socialism will be self-sustaining.There’s enough target material here for you to get stuck into.Determinism or ContingencyYou imply that contingency [chance] destroys determinism [causality, necessity].If so, there could never be any determinism, because the world we inhabit is thoroughly contingent. Yet that world is just as thoroughly alive with determinism, and much of what we take to be pure contingency is readily explicable deterministically.Determinism and contingency are inter-penetrating concepts. Both are abstracted from the same phenomena. Determinism is the abstract view. Contingency is the concrete view. [We usually find competing contingencies, and so competing determinisms.]Marx describes our process of concept formation as the “descent from the concrete to the abstract”. [For Hegel, our descent is a phenomenology.]Abstraction is how we apprehend the concrete in our minds. Marx describes this process as the “ascent from the abstract to the concrete”. [For Hegel, our ascent is a logic.]Science is the union of the descending and ascending arcs. [For Hegel, science is the union of phenomenology and logic, For Thomas Kuhn, it is the union of revolutionary and normal science.]In ascent, [normal] science sees abstractions implementing contingent concrete instances of their abstract selves. Abstractions tell concrete things how to behave [e.g. Newton’s laws].In descent, [revolutionary] science considers contingent concrete forms to distill into an abstraction of themselves. Concrete things tell abstractions how to behave [e.g. Newton, Darwin, Marx, Einstein].For Marx, science is the formal union of contingent concrete things dictating to abstractions that dictate to contingent concrete things. Fortunately, evolution has made us expert at recognizing abstract form in concrete contingent actuality.[Idealist Hegel discovered this formal union but, for him, abstractions and concrete things are forms of the World Spirit.]Contingency is the substance of determinism. Our abstractions, distilled from concrete contingency, constitute the base of a deterministic superstructure wherein we consciously navigate concrete contingency. That is the formal structure of our determinisms.That consciousness is how we, along with all sentient creatures that are compelled to live by their wits, manage to survive. Without being able to comprehend determinism in contingency we couldn’t make our way through the world.Darwinian DeterminismDarwinian determinism has similarities [we ignore differences here] to the determinism of the materialist conception of history. It is thoroughly studied, even debated in public, and yet no consensus seems to obtain.So, as you understand, I’m giving my own view.Karl Popper once adopted the position that determinism was absent from evolution. He declared “the theory of natural selection is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research programme” [Unended Quest 1976], a view he later repudiated.Stephen Jay Gould stressed that Darwinian determinism was re-directed by random contingency [minor as well as major ones, such as catastrophic mass extinctions]: “wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale [530 million years ago]; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay”.Perhaps so, but winding it back a mere 2.5 million years to the Taung Australopithecine boy, must increase those odds enormously. By then, evolution had solved a host of foundational problems for “anything like human intelligence”, and it now had no choice but to work with the new Australopithecine material. What plastic mental material to manipulate for issuing forth “anything like human intelligence”!The first point I make is that blind evolution, just like purblind social development, is forced to work with material “transmitted from the past”. It must remake its own circumstances out of its own former self. [That looks awfully like determinism to me.]Gould took the panda’s peculiar “thumb” as a wonderful instance of contingency co-opted by Darwinian determinism. But we have already recognized above that determinism working upon contingency of its own making is the nature of actual concrete processes.The second point I make is that both blind evolution and purblind social development solve the problems their development throws up. Species and societies both create their own worlds. They do “make themselves”.photosynthesis turned a greenhouse into a benign atmosphere [capitalism seems hell bent on reversing this archaic 2.5 billion year process],mating created diversity out of cloning,lungs and legs conquered land, and wings conquered airnurture led to training, intelligence, etc.[Marx saw society solving its problems in exactly the same fashion as evolution. Obstacles are there to be overcome. And they are overcome, in society, just as in evolution. Enough for now. To explore determinism in society is to start a new thread.]
