Young Master Smeet
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The point, for Marx, and historical materialists, is that material determination is not like clockwork, but occurs precisely because humans live in the world, in whole ways of life (to borrow from Raymond Williams). That produces culture, which also produces humans. We are not mechanical materialists but cultural materialists.
Quote:At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement.Ahem…
Quote:man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature.So, man takes nature as he finds it, changes it, in accordance with his own imagination, and is in turn changed by nature. See what happens when you highlight different bits?So, just to make clear, nature "produces" (according to Marx); action in the world changes the human being (accordinmg to Marx); these "reactions" are "material" according to Marx.Of course, Marx never says what he means. Nature here means "fish", reaction means "social productive forces", material means "Spain".
LBird,can you explain how consciousness is formed/changed and how socialist consciousness would grow?
LBird wrote:Even Engels misinterpreted Marx's notoriously opaque works, and the longer his misinterpretation is taken as 'gospel', the less influence Marx's actual meanings will have to workers.But, since you're not a Marxist, YMS, you're not as interested in this issue as some of us workers are, who are keen to create our world, create our socialism.Well, if the workers found Engels'interpretation to be useful, and they created the Marxism we know today, maybe they did so for a reason?How do we socially produce our world?
Quote:If we humans supposedly don't create our world, we can't change itThat's not true. Someone else creates my clothes, but I change themevery day (Badum-tish), more seriously, I do alter my clothes, when I need to.
Quote:'who does create our world?'Define 'create' and define 'world'. I'd say we produce our human environment, and transform the world around us, but we don't do so ex nihil.I'm sure you know this quote, on whay Marx thought of Hegel:
This Man is Always Wrong wrote:The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of “Das Kapital,” it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre Epigonoi [Epigones – Büchner, Dühring and others] who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a “dead dog.” I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.Of course, we must bear in mind that when Marx says Germany, he means Spain, after all, Marx never used words to mean what they mean.
http://www.electionexpenses.co.uk/ITN/Channel Four are going big on this and shelling out for a website. I suspect they are sure of their ground, and see this as a slow burn story. Sadly, it only becomes big after a conviction, and chances are the police of the commission will bury it before it coems to court, as any conviction will be marginal:
Quote:The elections watchdog has launched a probe into general election campaign spending by the Conservatives linked to the key South Thanet constituency following a Channel 4 News investigation.Police are waiting for the Election Commission to report before they step in and investigate. Since what the Tories seem to be doing is relying on a sort of 'primary purpose' rule, so if they 'just happen' to have a conference in the neighbourhoood, and the attendees 'happen' to go canvassing in the afternoon, then the accomodation cost won't apply…
Of note:http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Test_cubes_floating_freely_inside_LISA_Pathfinder
Quote:ESA’s LISA Pathfinder has released both of its gold–platinum cubes, and will shortly begin its demanding science mission, placing these test masses in the most precise freefall ever obtained to demonstrate technologies for observing gravitational waves from space.they've found somethign useful to do with gold, how's that for the ultimate refutation of value…
Incidentally:https://theconversation.com/lisa-pathfinder-will-pave-the-way-for-us-to-see-black-holes-for-the-first-time-51374This is a mission in space, it is humanity using the whole planet as its object, a thing that cn only help us to think globally. The project is necessarilly international:
Quote:eLISA will comprise three satellites in a triangular arrangement with arms of some millions of kilometres. Precision arm length measurements will be made between “test masses” in each spacecraft – freely-floating mirrors that reflect the measuring laser beams that will travel along the long arms.Such toys:https://www.elisascience.org/articles/new-astronomy/gravitational-wave-astronomy(take a look at some of the physics they're wanting to get out of this, impressive list of things, let's not forget how much came out of utting the Hubble telescope into space, once it started working).
YPG official statement (apparently):https://twitter.com/cahitstorm/status/700274038854262784
LBird wrote:Once again, the SPGB bottles intellectual discussion, and reverts to childishness.So predictable.How can one have rational discussion where one party can take the textual sources, say they don't say what they mean, and then re-writes them to mean what they want them to mean?
Oh, I forgot capital:
The Devil Himself wrote:My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.At Last the Truth wrote:The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling football team of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of social football at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant football team relationships, the dominant footballing relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance."There we have it, we simply need to overthrow the ruling football team. When Boro[*] top the league, the workign class will be liberated. [*]Soon to be the only North East team in the Premiership, just saying like.
Quote:socially productive forceWhat constitutes the socially productive force?Would they be
Quote:the framework of definite modes of production, which, of course, are not dependent on the will, alien [fremde] practical forces, which are independent not only of isolated individuals but even of all of them together, always come to stand above peopleNo, what Marx meant when he used the word 'Material' was 'Tuesday', so he wa only referring to things that make Tuesday happen.
Humty wrote:When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’I love this method of exegesis wherein Marx (through Engels' pen, whose handwriting that passage is in) meant something else entirely.I dunno, though, we have on the one hand the gnomic 'Theses on Feuerbach' and some comments from the manuscripts, but in a book length critique of Feuerbach, written in collaboration with otehr humans (social production) for publication, we should take teh former over the latter. See, it's hard to square your reading with the preface:
Chaz & Fred wrote:Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence. This valiant fellow was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany.(Or Lbird).
I find Marx & Engels prose to be so much clearer, but the emphasis is on the material production of ideas, and the possession of the means of mental production is the key difference. So, the class that has the time to think, the means to communicate, acess to that communication, will dominate the battle of ideas. It follows that a change in material circumstances will change the ideas.I was going to try and get us back on track by discussing this:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/pirate-website-offering-millions-of-academic-papers-for-free-refuses-to-close-despite-law-suit-a6875001.htmlThe practitioners of academe and science these days are not personally 'gentlemen of independent means' and most have nothing but a public salary, although there are contned attempts by governments to comemrcialise academia (by, say, making academics seek grants and research funding, i.e. make them behave as entrepreneur as well as thinkers) many resist, and the practice of science itself means a focus on the use value over exchange values. Science is largely performed by proletarians, by waged and salaried workers, and information is owned in common.The practices of the publishing firms to restrict access are against the values of the daily practice of the scientists, hence the ideological battle between academia and the science publishers over the means of communication.
