[twc]

Determined and Inevitable?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.]

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Hud955 wrote:

I'm unclear how you are using the word ‘determines’

In the sense of “social being determines consciousness”.In the sense of “general, abstract determinants which obtain in more or less all forms of society” [Grundrisse, Ch. 1, ‘Method of Political Economy’].In the sense of an abstraction whose concrete utility can be tested by “the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete [which is precisely] the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind” [Grundrisse, ibid].

Hud955 wrote:

the word 'determines' has a strong and a weak sense

If you choose to sterilize determinism by imagining it in a ‘weak sense’, it ceases to be deterministic. Emasculated determinism loses its procreative powers.You, like all of us, have found the received abstraction of “determinism” at loggerheads with social reality. So did Marx. But he saw no reason for a subservient abstraction to take the knife to recalcitrant reality, and castrate it, in our minds.The received mechanical abstraction of “determinism” that applies, after a fashion, to billiard balls does not hold for quantum mechanics, nor for evolution, nor for the materialist conception of history, nor for any complex system, which is what reality (including real billiard balls) happens to be.

Hud955 wrote:

the materialist conception of history has the capacity to free us in some degree from 'necessity'

First, whence your ‘necessity’ if for you there’s no such thing as social causality “(in the accurate sense), at least at any level that we can comprehend”?My case will always be [subject to someone proving convincingly that our Object and Declaration of Principles are mistaken] that it is precisely the causality that can be comprehended by the materialist conception of history that can free us from the necessity of capitalism and secure us the necessity of socialism.

Hud955 wrote:

The materialist conception of history does give us grounds for believing that it is both possible and even, perhaps, likely, because certain material forces that we can comprehend are tending in the direction of socialism. And those of us who are conscious of it can in the meantime act to further that social understanding.

How low have we sunk, after a century of global abuse against Marx, socialist theory and the materialist conception of history, to parade this abysmally “weak” claim that there may be “grounds for believing” not even in socialism! Only the eunuch’s hope that restoration of virility is “possible and even, perhaps, likely”.And why do we hold out such forlorn hope? Not out of social necessity, not out of determinism, and especially not out of causality. No, we hold out such hope simply because “certain material forces that we can comprehend [sic] are tending in the direction of socialism”. How demoralizing!

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Hud955 wrote:

Marx, in fact, very rarely speaks in the language of causation.

Nonsense.Materialists hold that man is the product of his environment. Marx holds that social being determines consciousness. If materialism isn't causal, what is its point? If Marx "very rarely speaks in the language of causation" what is his point?If you hardly ever hear "the language of causation" in Marx, it's because a fixed abstraction of "causation" — something that transcends specific actual instances of it — is effacing the varied concrete forms it takes in different contexts. [Celebrated forms of causality include those of classical physics, quantum physics, Darwinian evolution and the materialist conception of history.]Socialism must be materially caused or it remains forever unattainable. Socialism must reproduce itself causally, or it is totally unsustainable.Socialists have little choice but to "speak in the language of causation" at all times. What alternative language should we be talking in?

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Hud955 wrote:

According to the MCH, man makes his own history and is not a mechanical puppet whose strings are being pulled by some (impossible) meta-historical process.

It can equally be said that man does not make his own history — just as it can equally be said that workers don’t run capitalism. Both do what they must under compulsion.The assertion that man does not make his own history is surprisingly the essential slant of the materialist conception of history.Firstly, man does not make his own history “out of the whole cloth”. He is compelled to accept the historical fabric handed down to him by his former self, and make what he can out of it. Man’s making of his own history is thwarted by a historical fabric of his own making.This is a constraint recognized by the materialist conception of history that is imposed upon man’s making of his own history. It limits what man can do. It is the fundamental argument against voluntarism.It is also the first determinism [considered here] that acts upon man in the making of his own history — the determinism of his transmitted world.Secondly, to the extent that man doesn’t comprehend the warp and weft of his own history, man cannot be said to make it consciously at all. On the contrary, history can be said to make an unconscious tailor out of him.In an uncomprehended historical process man is quite correctly characterized as mere puppet controlled by the process of uncomprehended history, even though he is its necessary agent — even though he actively imagines that he controls history.That is a second determinism [considered here] that acts upon man in the making of his own history — the determinism of false consciousness.These are two powerful determinisms that limit man’s freedom over the making of his own history.Thus we come to perceive Marx rapidly marshaling determinisms of the materialist conception of history in a few compelling lines of his “Brumaire”.Sure, man for Marx is definitely not the same “mechanical” puppet he is for the French philosophes, whose materialist world view Marx absorbed in his teens and later discarded in favour of the materialist conception of history.Sure, the historical process for Marx is definitely not the “meta-historical” process of World Spirit it is for Hegel, whose idealist world view Marx absorbed at university and later discarded in favour of the materialist conception of history.Yet, perhaps surprisingly, Marx does come close to considering social man in pre-socialist society as akin to a conscious puppet [until now unconscious of his own historical process]. Isn’t that a reasonable characterization of the blind capitalist personas we find around us, directed by the needs of capital to the detriment of the needs of society?That mankind behaves like puppets is a critique of the conditions that call forth such behaviour — not a slur upon our species but upon our conditions.Of course, the most fundamental determinism of the materialist conception of history is that man’s social being determines his consciousness.At the very moment when man becomes conscious of the historical process — conscious that he is “determining the course of history” [as in our achievement of socialism] — his consciousness is most subservient to the determinism of his social being.He hears his social being crying out in agony to him for action to realize what it cannot because in substance it is after all man who “makes his own history”. The contradictory assertions of making and not making our own history are here most urgent, and here explained.We find that, when man is supreme determiner of history, he is its supreme puppet. He is in thrall to that most paradoxical of circumstances in which the determiner [the puppeteer social being] determines the determined [the conscious puppet man] to determine the determiner [to change the puppeteer social being].Man can never ever fully free himself from the necessity of playing puppet to the puppeteer — his social being. He can only come to understand it, and to comprehend the necessities it imposes upon him to control it.The bourgeoisie understand the need to control the social being they blindly constructed, but they must fight a parasitic process they built upon the essential social process.[As Hud955 suggests, primitives had a direct social process to control but, as I suggest, their inability to understand their social process scientifically left them prey to mythologizing it.]To return to social revolution. Even when freeing himself from one form of social subservience man necessarily enchains himself to another.That’s where social subservience to our Object “common ownership and democratic control of the substance of social reproduction” cuts in to determine our consciously-social socialist being.I assert that the essential difference between primitive and future world socialism is the historical product, among which the most important conscious acquisition is Marx’s materialist conception of history that finally permits us to understand and so control our social being.

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Buckley’s ChanceThe most explicit account of Australian Aboriginal “murder” comes from a European who lived amongst them — separated by 1000 km from the nearest European settlement in Sydney and environs — for 32 years.Convict William Buckley, aged 23 years, escaped from an exploration camp near Melbourne in 1802, and managed, despite overwhelming odds, to assimilate into the Wathaurung tribes until their dissolution following the 1835 actual settlement of Melbourne. The improbability of his survival has entered the vernacular in the phrase Buckley’s chance.The Wathaurung called Buckley “returned from the dead” because his skin was white. He explains, when describing a tree-platform death-and-cremation ceremony, “the fire cheers and warms the dead man. All things being completed, one word was uttered … The dead is gone to be made a white man”.Buckley, 6ft 7in Cheshire farmer, apprenticed builder, regimental foot-soldier, recipient of stolen goods, transported convict, escapee, hunter–gatherer, became uniquely placed anthropologist:

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I have seen a race of children grow up into women and men, and many of the old people die away, and (by my harmless and peaceable manner amongst them) I had acquired great influence in settling their disputes.

Primitive “Murder”Buckley found Aboriginal warfare to be more terrifying than his campaign with the “King’s Own” Foot in the French Revolutionary Wars.Over three decades he witnessed 50 killings. Members of his own clan were summarily killed for their imagined implication in a fatal snake bite.Warner summarizes traditional violence thus: “Special factors contributing to high Aboriginal death rates were constant raiding for women, never-ending chains of payback killings, and the belief that most deaths (except for those of infants and elders) resulted from an enemy’s sorcery and must be avenged.” [W. I. Warner, A Black Civilization: 1937]Buckley recounts:

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Numbers of murderous fights I prevented by my interference, which was received by them as being well meant; so much so, that they would often allow me to go amongst them before a battle, and take away their spears and boomerangs.

On the payback killing of one of his own adopted or biological children:

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The dead man’s family forced my poor blind boy away from me, and killed him on the spot, merely because he had happened to be in the same hut in which their sick young man had died, believing that the blind boy must have been in some way responsible for his [untimely] death.I managed to escape with his little sister, moving on, and on, until meeting up with the tribe of her future husband, to whom she had been promised in infancy. They immediately vowed vengeance, and two or three of them set out for the purpose of murder, returning in a few days with the intelligence that they had killed two of the children of their enemies.

Buckley describes a world of interminable retribution killings that determines his periodic retreat to the seclusion of his famous estuarine fishing hut where he is later joined by a “wife”. [So it seems possible to live on the fringes of hunter-gatherer society — but then Buckley was always a unique phenomenon within that society].And yet most of the time, harmony prevails. One wonders just what his imaginative Aboriginal clan, feasting on kangaroo around the campfire at night, made of his tall tales of horses and carriages on the city streets of London.Expanding FrontierEuropean settlement in 1835 focused Aboriginal retaliation against the European rape of their traditional absolutely-indispensable means of social reproduction. Necessity of a new alien mode of social reproduction supervened upon their ancestral own.  Broome [Aboriginal Australians, 1994] estimates 1000 Aboriginal and 80 European deaths in border skirmishes over the subsequent 15 years of European expansion into Victoria.“A settler taking up a new country is obliged to act towards its original occupiers in this manner [murder] or abandon it.” [settler Neil Black, Geelong, 1840].ImplicationsI see no reason to abandon the materialist conception of history in the very domain where it can most readily be tested. But that’s matter for another thread.Suffice to say here that, if we treat the materialist conception of history as only “a guiding principle”, we remain scientifically bankrupt — bereft of any definite principle on how to proceed other than by what suits us.Moreover, Marx didn’t say that the materialist conception of history was a guiding principle of his studies. He said it was the guiding principle of his studies. That tiny the, in Robert Frost’s estimation, makes “all the difference”.

[twc]

Enjoyed Brian Morris's excellent Marx as Anthropologist talk.Wonderful to hear it "like it is/was" from an erstwhile hunter–gatherer himself.[Yes, Steve. We do need a new thread, but I had not read your post when I drafted my reply off-line on the tram.]

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Myths change because they are actual processes. Change of form is a given.I was considering the persistent abstraction of actual processes:the signature “thingness” that characterizes them all,the abstract invariant that survives their actual transience.That abstraction is the consciousness born of common ownership of the means of primitive social reproduction.Many actual implementations of primitive common ownership are possible — but all appear to take the form of a modified family. Nurture is a natural focus for social coalescing and foundation for social cohesion. Hence the common ownership and control relations in the form of inter-dependent “kinship” groupings.Egalitarianism is a Capitalist StandardIt is contrary to the materialist conception of history to judge a society as socialist by how well it conforms to abstract egalitarianism. Common ownership and democratic control constitute the only scientific criterion. How else can anyone scientifically comprehend the social implications of socialism?Egalitarianism is a bourgeois “right” we all now enjoy, even though most of us abuse its great advantage to the working class — equal suffrage — by perpetuating the system that implements it.Humans are not and never will be equal as humans. [Only quantum particles are identical. Macroscopic entities, like humans, always differ. Amazingly, even tiny macroscopic objects like snowflake crystals differ. No two snowflakes are identical — physicists are confident that this is ever so, even throughout all of Earth’s history.]Anyone who desires socialism out of notions of Égalité — i.e. in order to restrict, limit, constrain, unify, destroy, cripple, curtail, outlaw human diversity — misconceives socialism in capitalist terms.Diverse socialism retorts: Vive la différence!That’s why Marx, in his critique of capitalist thought, governance, jurisprudence and ethics — everything the capitalist philosophers, politicians, jurists and ethicists hold dear — hurled at social-democrat “egalitarians” the unanswerable riposte:“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)…”“Equal right is therefore a right of inequality like every right.”I fail to be impressed by arguments against primitive socialism based on notions of inequality.Murder and the Whole CalamitySimilarly, applying bourgeois criteria to primitive murder, warfare, rape, or whatever you want, in order to claim that a society based on common ownership can’t be a socialist society, is simply not scientific.One must follow the science fearlessly where it leads, and not where you want to lead it. Science is solely there to wield.One must explain primitive behaviour in terms of primitive socialism, and not by abandoning it.It strikes me as not at all difficult to explain primitive murder, warfare and rape within primitive socialism. Primitive consciousness inhabits a mythical world alien to ours, which it is crucial to understand scientifically.Reinterpreting the Silenced PastThe unalloyed past is now lost. Reinterpretation is therefore reconstruction. I assert that the only way forward is through the materialist conception of history.

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Steve,Reference to irascible Dr Jacob Bronowski recalls his flamboyant educational skills.I haven’t watched his “personal view” Ascent of Man for years, but it’s hard to forget the Auschwitz scene nor that self-indulgent sipping of Napa Valley vintage in his Californian coastal mansion overlooking the Pacific as he pontificates upon the future of mankind.The man aggressively projected himself as thoroughly anti-Hegel and anti-Marx in the common mould of his time, partly in conformity with understandable anti-Leninist cold-war attitudes, but also encouraged by the then-dominant accretionist–falsificationist “philosophy of science” of Kantian/Schopenhauerian self-savior of social democracy: Karl Popper.I will never forget Bronowski’s contemptuous putdown of Hegel as Lear’s fool. Hegel and Marx are contemptible collateral damage to his forthright hatred of totalitarian regimes. If anyone wants to survey the background to Hegel and the planets, a brief explanation. Bode had said of a gap in a hypothetical mathematical progression of planetary orbits “can one believe that the Founder of the universe had left this space empty?” Hegel simply replied, in passing, that if instead of Bode’s progression you tried Plato’s progression from his Timaeus there is no empty gap to fill.[That Hegel’s mathematical modifications are arbitrary is entirely another matter. The student was yet to become the mature philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel.]I wonder what the Standard thought of Bronowski and his Ascent at the time?

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Hud955 wrote:

I’m not sure I agree entirely with twc — if I understand him correctly — that hunter gatherer societies act entirely unconsciously, as there appears to be quite a lot of evidence that they are very aware of the kind of social and even productive activities that can disturb the equilibrium of their groups, and they have very subtle and elaborate ways of dealing with them.

Oh yes, I’m sure you are right. The extraordinary account by escaped convict William Buckley, who lived for 33 years as an “aborigine” among the totally isolated unknown Southern aboriginal tribes before white settlement of Melbourne, contains countless instances, sprinkled with rather humorous examples of his residual European frustrations within his largely assimilated primitive “consciousness”, to the point that he is driven to hide the communal spears to prevent ritual retaliations. Oh yes.And primitive observational “science” functions, when stripped of its mysticism, as effectively [actually more effectively, because it was truly social] as our testable vulnerable base–superstructure science.“Kinship” OrganizationHowever, I was referring to the primitive social organization that universally takes the form of extended “kinship” groupings.I claim that primitive “kinship” social structures arise “unconsciously” out of common ownership of social resources. They arise because they are the appropriate way of organizing social reproduction based on common ownership of the means of primitive social reproduction.In other words, primitive sexual division of social labour, and primitive “kinship” division of resource control, constitute the adequate elaboration of social labour under common ownership of the means of primitive social reproduction.This form of social organization — unlike a future world socialism — arises “unconsciously” because no-one thought it into being. It arose spontaneously out of social necessity.People simply arranged their social affairs this way by doing. The thinking came afterwards in the form of mythology.The appropriate primitive consciousness for explaining why they did what they did [actually what nature impelled primitive society to do] is mythical rationalization.The universal constraint of social “kinship” systems upon primitive social organization admits many variations. Look at Lewis Henry Morgan’s voluminous patterns of social consanguinity — patriarchal, matriarchal, etc.My point is that people born into such necessarily-cooperative primitive societies inherit and inhabit a world animated by ancestral and animal totem spirits that sanction the social division of labour and the control of social resources. This circumscribed outlook on the social world is a given of their entire social existence. It is what makes their conscious world meaningful.This remarkable, despite its mysticism, primitive mental outlook is something that people born into our consciously crafted future world socialism will not inherit.Consciousness Came Too LateObjections may be urged against my reference to the "unconscious" nature of the consciousness necessary for establishing and maintaining the basic social relations that sustain social reproduction. As in all things human, consciousness is always crucially involved. [This topic needs a separate thread to thrash out, since it bears ever so deeply upon the materialist conception of history.]For the moment, it suffices that whatever may have been consciously elaborated in the distant past had already become socially established by the time we encounter primitive social organization in history.All historical encounters with primitive societies find any rational explanatory kernel of primitive “consciousness” irretrievably encrusted within a mystical explanatory shell — any non-mythical kernel was long since lost to an established time-immemorial myth that had become the “fact” of primitive existence.But, as the materialist conception of history points out, technological change [increasingly in the form of social contact with an advanced technological society] challenges the dominant social consciousness appropriate to primitive social organization, and ultimately undermines it — and so overthrows primitive society.There are first-hand accounts of this process of the dissolution of primitive social consciousness: e.g. the ancient playwrights, especially Aeschylus’s Oresteia; the ancient historians; the colonial chroniclers, explorers, settlers; the observant missionaries and early anthropologists…The mental conceptions [consciousness] adequate to holding primitive society together proved powerless before technological change. This simply proves that primitive consciousness was an attribute subservient to social organization, even though it appeared to function as governing that social organization.As Hegel put it, the rational kernel finally becomes evident in the demise of the system that nurtured it. Marx saw this historical phenomenon as the hallmark of an “unconscious” [primitive society] or “false conscious” [class society] social superstructure.I consider [perhaps naively] the sorts of social misdemeanours that loom large in the current discussion thread to be relatively minor in the scheme of things. Something not beyond the capabilities of a future consciously-organized world-socialist society, that actually does comprehend the nature of its social reproduction, to be able to solve “consciously” in the interests of the whole community.

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Hi Steve,You say I wield the materialist conception of history "like a club".Just as Newton wielded his laws of motion and Darwin wielded his theory of evolution, although they wielded their guiding principles more elegantly than I — more like a rapier or a scalpel.Marx used the materialist conception of history everywhere, even where it's not immediately obvious. He explicitly tells us that it was the guiding principle of all his studies, just as the other conceptions continue to be the guiding principles for Newtonians and Darwinians.Scientific theory is useless if you can't wield it. Wielding is precisely what scientific principles are for. That is their social role.We wield the materialist conception of history as much to apply it as to test it. That's because the materialist conception of history is a testable, vulnerable, deterministic science.By following a scientific principle where it leads us and not where we want to lead it is the only scientific approach. If we correctly apply it, and it fails, we deterministically weaken the materialist conception of history as a scientific principle.Somebody, some day, needs to go through Marx and make explicit just how he consistently wielded the materialist conception of history throughout his complex scientific structure.So much hot air has been wasted on challenging or re-interpreting his clearly stated materialist conception of history as a foundation by people who think they have a better foundation. Well, the challenge for such people is to develop a social science whose guiding principle isn't the materialist conception of history, and then we can take them seriously.Until then, challenges to the materialist conception of history remain so much waffle — untestable and indeterministic. On this score, challengers have cowardly eschewed determinism and avoided testability.For the moment we proudly wield [even if  like a club] the extraordinary social conviction that "social being determines consciousness"!

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Dear Steve,No, I argue from a social level  — the Marxian science of society [the materialist conception of history] — and not from a mechanical level.You seem to argue from a biological level — something like biology determines socialism — or an ideal level — something like fine ideals do.The materialist conception of history plays a comparable role for comprehending human society as, for example, Newtonian mechanics does for understanding the solar system or Darwinian evolution does for understanding biological development, etc. It is simply a testable vulnerable science. Your biologicism or idealism is more a Holy Grail [as you wildly assert the materialist conception of history to be] — a mysterious talisman that humans create in their imagination, interminably quest for on a pure simpleton's errand, and that ever fails to deliver its hoped-for miracles.Science, on the contrary, is more prosaic, and attempts to displace mystical idealism by testable determinism.Science can be demonstrated to be wrong. That is the challenge you must meet.You misunderstand the materialist conception of history if you think that it "pays no heed of conscious human beings" when you must at least know that it aims to understand that very human consciousness you take as being absolute, fundamental, self evident — something that it is not necessary to explain because it is to you, as it is to Socialist Punk, obvious.No product of consciousness is self evident. All consciousness is a social construct. Consciousness is superstructural and not basic, in terms of the materialist conception of history. [You want to make it basic.]Your vaunted ethics and morality — the more selfless they manifest themselves — are clearly non individual. Ethics and morality are attributes of society, not of individuals. Selfless behaviour only makes sense if it is in and for society and not within or for an individual.Ethics and morality are simply not individual at all. If they remain individual, they become their very opposite: selfish. More dangerous if they become internally idealized like the self-absorbed moralism of a Kierkegaard.The more that ethics and morality appear to be individual concerns rather than social concerns  — i.e. the more they appeal primarily to the individual  — the more they misrepresent the very society that calls them forth and to which the individual wants to apply them. Individualized ethics and morality unconsciously reveal how powerless they are within their social context — the more they resemble the current ineffectual social parody of individual charity donations "solving" social problems.No, socialists, like most humans, are necessarily concerned with, for and about other people. Of course, like the rest of society, we find our natural communal behaviour continually blunted by capitalism, but we manage to rise above the inhumanity of our present anti-social society, partly because we must, and sometimes we do so cheerfully enough to our own personal cost.The significant difference is that Marxian socialists have a testable vulnerable science to show us all deterministically how we can realize the ethical social needs you so strongly feel.

[twc]

My dear Socialist Punk, the situation is by no means as obvious as you think.Much of your referenced material is probably correct. But that is not the point.The materialist conception of history is concerned with consciousness that arises out of the social relations — the conditions of ownership and control — that necesarily coalesce around the substance of social reproduction. In primitive societies these social relations of ownership and control are neither scientifically comprehended nor scientifically constructed by the members of that society in the modern sense that they can be by the members of a future socialist society based on common ownership and democratic control that emerges out of the positive achievements and the destructive ruins of capitalism.Primitive consciousness is prey to the scientifically limited and so uncritical comprehension of the primitive social relations that generate it. [It is necessarily mystified.]Primitive consciousness universally conceives the structure of its own society through that universal extension of the biological family — "kinship relations" — those famous systems of social consanguinity first discovered by Lewis Henry Morgan.What Hud955 is pointing out is that The default [spontaneous] consciousness that arises from primitive common ownership of the means of social reproduction is unquestioned sharing of social consumption — what you conceive of (by comparison with our own society) as a caring society.The possibility of variations on this unquestioned sharing consciousness arises precisely because the primitive "kinship" social structures are essentially "unconscious" or "spontaneous" social constructs.The functioning of primitive "kinship structures" is prey to the limitations of the primitive consciousness they generate. From this arises what you might (by comparison with our own society) conceive of as aspects of a non-caring society.However, judgement of "caring" or "non-caring" behaviour is ridiculous if we use as standards of judgement criteria transferred directly from our 21st century capitalist society back into primitive stone-age society.There are simply no "obvious" socially universal standards of "caring" and "non-caring" behaviour because such standards arise out of and must conform to the needs of society — which, as we socialists know, society is a process.By modern bourgeois notions, primitives behaved both sensibly and stupidly, and they simiarly behaved both caringly and uncaringly.That's precisely how Europeans also appear to primitive consciousness. You only need read the excellent first-hand accounts of the First Fleeters in Sydney [e.g. Watkins Tench] to glimpse this two-way admiration and contempt of aborigines and Europeans for each other's social intelligence and stupidity, and especially for each other's social "caring" and "non-caring".[Recall, the First Fleet biographers were men of the Enlightenment who first filtered their observations of a pristine 50000-year isolated culture through Rousseau's "noble savage" conceptions.]What appears as primitive "non-caring" is, just as YMS revealed, the overriding necessity of a grand unifying social structure trumping the necessity of a mere individual in that structure. [This is exactly what happens in capitalism all of the time. The grand social necessity for capital to expand trumps the necessity for us mere individuals to live in security and to die in comfort.]In other words, the modern rock-solid case for socialism depends entirely on class, not at all on values, no matter how much we are motivated by our common sociability.Values are consequential to the case for socialism. Values are not fundamental to it. Values continually change, and the finest of them are daily trampled underfoot before our eyes.Class, however, is fundamental to the case for socialism. It is constant, and is daily reproduced ever more strongly. 

[twc]

Thank you for guiding us through our confusion.First we ignored ethics. Then we ignored values. Finally we ignored government force.We remained ignorant before our fortunate exposure to your everyday bourgeois modes of thought and practice, which somehow we managed to miss.Ideals, Ethics and Values are Ineffectual

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why do you defend the "natural" cycle (1) of social reproduction whilst attacking its corruption cycle (2) by the "capitalist class"?Clearly, it's because you value a functioning, positive, fair societyand you are convinced that a socialist system is the proper approach towards that goal.In other words, there are values that underly your socio-economic position. They lead you towards it.

Yes, I do assent to (2) and (3). But my assent is not fundamental — as you blithely assume. My assent is consequential.You assert the fundamental motiving power of deep ideals, ethics, values — the furthest a bourgeois brain can fathom.Did it ever occur to you that every human being and every social movement assents to (2)? And yet none can actuate it.Did it ever occur to you that people daily seek to fulfill (2), partly because they are impelled to by the necessity to keep cycle (2) ticking over? And yet they fail to achieve it.Did it ever occur to you that essentially all political movements towards implementing capitalism — numbering dozens even within the 20th century alone — assented to (3)? None called itself a “[pro-]capitalist” party; but instead all called themselves “social” (Mussolini) or “socialist” (Hitler), alongside the multitudinous avowedly “communist” parties. Why is this so, if they didn’t assent to (3)? Yet none of them could actuate (3).People and movements that place sublime trust in the efficacy of ideals are deterministically doomed to failure through the objective determinism of having to implement and to be subservient to cycle (2), whose overwhelming objective determinism over-rides all ideals, whether grand or tawdry.The necessity of cycle (2) turned them all — Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Castro, et tutti frutti — into their detested opposites: witting or unwitting capitalists.An objective determinism that derails the most strongly held ideals, ethics and values is some powerful determinism.But look at it the other way. Ideals, ethics and values that succumb to social necessity are feeble indeed. If they succumb to deterministic necessity they are proven to be illusory.What other proof do we need that something is illusory if it proves to be ineffectual?So, no! Contrary to your wildest dreams, I don’t assent to (4). Nor should any socialist.Liberty, Equality, FraternityThe French bourgeoisie fought their Revolution under the banner of bourgeois ideals — the rights of man. Ours is the world they implemented.Our world substitutes capitalist liberty for feudal dependence, capitalist equality for feudal hierarchy, market fraternity for feudal dominance.But the great transformative motivating ideals, ethics and values remain unrealized. They are proven to be ineffectual.Did it ever occur to you that that’s precisely why these universally grandiose ideals, ethics and values are so readily tolerated — even encouraged and embraced — by class societies. That it is precisely because they are safely unattainable that they constitute the great bulwarks, the great buttresses, of class societies. For class tyrannies, their very ineffectuality is their supreme virtue.Did it ever occur to you that precisely because the great vaunted ideals remain remotely abstract they constitute an irresistible attraction to pontificating “philosophers” who lord their critiques of apparent social stupidities by haughtily sneering at the, to them non-understandable, practical behaviour of common humanity compelled to suffer under social necessities — just as you haughtily scoff. It is ever so easy to scoff at uncomprehended deterministic behaviour.Not only are the great ideals tolerated by those who prosper precisely because they violate them, they are actively promoted as inspiring and motivational — the very things you want to guide us by. Such tainted intellectual goods can only succeed in suffusing a commonly shared aura around a class-divided world — a communal aura that sanctions the vicious actuality of class-divided societies whose very essence these ideals deterministically contravene.The origin of these semi-universal ideals must therefore be sought in the very conditions of social reproduction [for capitalism, in cycle (2)] that they must deterministically arise out of. The link is far too strong to be otherwise.These fine ideals are the exact opposite of our harsh social actuality. That they emerge as motivating social ideals implies that we need them as social actualities. Why else would they emerge?That they persist as motivating ideals implies that social reproduction [cycle (2)] systematically violates them, day in day out. They are reproduced as unattainable.That we can’t realize these ideals is the great critique of our present social actuality.It was Feuerbach who first gained an inkling into a specific instance of this general social-inversion process. He comprehended the essence of Christianity as the distillation of everything fine humanity hopes for in the actuality of mankind.It was Marx, standing on Feuerbach’s shoulders, who saw further that this ideal distillation of actuality was an unconscious critique of the society — social formation — that needed it.Marx was able to prove the great social generality that, through the necessity of cycles (1) and (2), the social relations and consciousness required to prosecute these indispensable cycles is deterministic of our ideals, ethics, values and even our government and its forces — the very things you calumniate against us as totally ignoring.Well, yes, we do ignore them — at least the ideals — as motivators with good reason. But we believe we have a fair chance of actualising them when we actualize cycle (1) — but that, along with government force, is subject enough for another post.So, in this limited sense, (2) and (3) indirectly, or consequentially, motivate us. They don’t fundamentally motivate us.We are motivated fundamentally by class consciousness — also a subject for another post.Ideals Enslave UsFor the moment I won’t pursue Marx’s scientific base–superstructure formulation of his deep insight that “social being determines consciousness”, except to point out the obvious — that it is the reverse of your bourgeois “idealistic” illusion that “consciousness determines social being”.However, I make two brief closing observations.A century of misguided attempts to bypass our Object and Declaration of Principles has demonstrated that socialism based on non-science is a miss far worse than a mile. Your universally self-evident ideals are a miss, in some ways a most insidious miss.Ideals are comforting. Ideals are reassuring. They are consoling — the more rarefied, decent and obvious they are, the more inspiring. But, as far as human activity is concerned, it is worth contemplating that whatever consoles a slave in his servitude does his master an incalculable service.Not only are ideals ineffectual, they are enslaving. They merely reveal what is wrong with our social condition.

[Author]

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