[Young Master Smeet]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/15/crime-terrorism-and-tax-evasion-why-banks-are-waging-war-on-cash?CMP=twt_guPaul mason pedicts the end of cash, as a possible emergency government response to prompt investment:

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Why would a central bank want to eliminate cash? For the same reason as you want to flatten interest rates to zero: to force people to spend or invest their money in the risky activities that revive growth, rather than hoarding it in the safest place.

Quite why people wouldn't hoard jewelery and gold is another matter.

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The advantages of a digital-only payment system to the user are clear: you can emerge from the surf in only your bathing shorts and proceed to buy beer, food, or even a small car, providing your balance is positive. The advantages to banks are also clear. Not only can all transactions be charged a fee, but bank runs are eliminated. There can be no repeat of the queues outside Northern Rock, nor of the Greek fiasco last summer, because there will be no ATMs, only a computer spreadsheet moving digital money around. The advantages to governments are also clear: all transactions can be taxed. Capital controls are implicit within the system.

[Young Master Smeet]

Oh, the hilarity, I point out the straw man fallacy, and Lbird responds with: an ad hominem (with a touch of appeal to the gallery).  No account for the production of quality within his 'ideology'  Whenever I asked Lbird to give an account of his ideas, he responded with what he supposes to be my ideas (or a version of what he supposes to be my ideas), a classic straw man fallacy.  he would usually couch that with a reference to Marx (an appeal to authority fallacy). What we are left with no account within his schema for how inorganic and organic nature relate to one another.  We know that qualite emerges within 'organic nature', but have no idea is human being/consciousness or labour possess qualities.I think it would be fair to say Lbird can't answer that point.

[Young Master Smeet]

(p.s. you've added Aunt Sally/Straw man to the list….)

[Young Master Smeet]

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for one ideology, 'qualities' are within 'inorganic nature'

For that ideology, what role does inorganic nature play in the production of those qualities?  Can you explain how these qualities are produced? 

[Young Master Smeet]

Nope, I'm afraid you still haven't explained how inorganic nature relates to human labour. 

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For my ideology (Marx's idealism-materialism), 'qualities' are produced by humans, and so are within 'organic nature'.

So qualities are produced ex-nihil?

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To me, 'qualities' are 'relations produced', between 'consciousness' and 'being'.

Do consciousness and being each have qualities?  Or are they undifferentiated?

[Young Master Smeet]

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What bit is so difficult to understand?

How something with qualities can interact with something that has no qualities.  Please explain that.

[Young Master Smeet]

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Which 'piece of logic' would that be, YMS?

That if inorganic nature has no qualities, there is no relationship, and for all intents and purposes, does not exist. Why would Marx talk about inorganic nature if the qualities of Labour alone produced organic nature?Lets take Tony:

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For Historical Materialism it is a question of the relationship of our thoughts to the phenomena which we experience as the external world.

For those who dabble in English, that sentence can only be read there being pheneomena of experience of the external world.I mean, there is a relationship between a lock and a key, between pencil and paper, but there is no relationship with a void, unless a party brings some qualities that affect, combine with or change the otehr, there is no relationship.I cheerfully accept that humans create their social world, and all things in it, including ideas (which are entirely material from beginning to end); I'm happy to accept thatour ideas come from our being in the universe, and it is our active processes of living in it that produces ideas, but we are limited in what we can do, and our ideas are limited by what we can do.

[Young Master Smeet]

Relational between what?  If there is no quality of nature, there is no relationship.

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No, I keep saying, we produce 'organic nature' from 'inorganic nature', by social theory and practice.

If there is no quality to 'inorganic nature' then there is no need for Marx and Pancake to refer to it (a simple textual matter). There is only social theory and practice producing organic nature (or society, for Cakey boy).What I want is for you to respond to this simple peice of logic.

[Young Master Smeet]

LBird wrote:

But, as we have seen with Marx and Pannekoek, 'qualities of natural phenomena' are produced by active humanity. 'Natural qualities' are relational 'qualities', not 'something out there'.

Relational between what?  If there is no quality of nature, there is no relationship.

LBird wrote:

YMS wrote:

If there is no difference or quality, then nature does not exist.

This is an ideological statement – you wish 'nature' to exist outside of active humanity, whereas Marx and Pannekoek are talking about humans producing their own 'nature'.

Ad hominem and appeal to authority. If there is no quality to nature, then there is no relationship between labour and nature, only relationships between different qualities of labour.Accordng to oyu, nature is a blank slate we can write anything on we want, is that not the case? 

[Young Master Smeet]

Sorry, you're skipping around arguments.  We were discussing whether a divine entity is needed to be assumed if there is a nature beyond human experience, and I said such an assumption is not necessary, which it isn't.We were also talking about the differentiation, or qualities of natural phenomena, which may delimit what humans can do, and the phenomena we experience.  If there is no difference or quality, then nature does not exist.  Maybe you could comment ont he logic of this, without appeal to authority?The object of historical materialism is the human activity in the world, but, as Pannekoek says so well: "spiritual phenomena, sensation, consciousness, ideas, are derived from the [experienced material world]."

[Young Master Smeet]

LBird wrote:

YMS wrote:

…mere accdient suffices…

Who or what determines what is 'accident'?

No one needs to, excepting that Ockham's razor suggests in the absence of further evidence we can assume accident/randomness.The point of historical materialism is that meaning isn't simply stored in one brain, but is emergent of a whole human process (which is active) and in which ideas of the world are inseperable from the objects of the world, they are not mere reflections but a part of the object and a part of all objects is the lived experience of them.  That does not make human culture a blank slate on which we may write what we like, much less the same for nature.

[Young Master Smeet]

Pancake wrote:

Both agree insofar as they are materialist philosophies, that is, both recognise the primacy of the experienced material world; both recognise that spiritual phenomena, sensation, consciousness, ideas, are derived from the former. They are opposite in that middle-class materialism bases itself upon natural science, whereas Historical Materialism is primarily the science of society. Bourgeois scientists observe man only as an object of nature, the highest of the animals, determined by natural Laws. For an explanation of man’s life and action, they have only general biological Laws, and in a wider sense, the laws of chemistry, physics, and mechanics. With these means little can be accomplished in the way of understanding social phenomena and ideas. Historical Materialism, on the other hand, lays bare the specific evolutionary laws of human society and shows the interconnection between ideas and society.

and

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For Historical Materialism it is a question of the relationship of our thoughts to the phenomena which we experience as the external world. Now man’s position in society is not simply that of an observing being: he is a dynamic force which reacts upon his environment and changes it.

So, for Pannekoek there are phenomena and a material world, mediated and shaped by labour and a society that produces knowledge.So,

Lbird wrote:

If humans are not the 'active side', then there must be a 'divine' force out there.

That is not valid, and doesn't follow, mere accdient suffices.As I've noted before, if the stuff of nature is not differentiated, if it is all some primal goo which we shape with labour, then it doesn't exist, and we can just scrub it out of our equations.You're also, as I noted beforemisreading Marx' theses on Feuerbach, the point is that there is no outside position on which to stand (much like Einsteins later dicovery that ther is no absolute frame of reference, kind of Marx' theory of social relativity).

[Young Master Smeet]

LBird,But as we had out before, you refused to accept that 'inorganic nature' is differentiated, and at least limits what we can do with it, and thus we have not got unbounded freedom to will some truth out of nature, we can only do with it what we can.   

[Young Master Smeet]

Thanks to ALB bringing Pannekoek into the discussion, I begint to see where the confusion has crept in.  As he notes, Lenin as Philosopher is interesting:

Pancake wrote:

For middle class materialism the problem of the meaning of knowledge is a question of the relationship of spiritual phenomena to the physico-chemical-biological phenomena of the brain matter. For Historical Materialism it is a question of the relationship of our thoughts to the phenomena which we experience as the external world. Now man’s position in society is not simply that of an observing being: he is a dynamic force which reacts upon his environment and changes it. Society is nature transformed through labour. To the scientist, nature is the objectively given reality which he observes, which acts on him through the medium of his senses. To him the external world is the active and dynamic element, whilst the mind is the receptive element. Thus it is emphasised that the mind is only a reflection, an image of the external world, as Engels expressed it when he pointed out the contradiction between the materialist and idealist philosophies. But the science of the scientist is only part of the whole of human activity, only a means to a greater end. It is the preceding, passive part of his activity which is followed by the active part; the technical elaboration, the production, the transformation of the world by man.

and

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Hence Historical Materialism looks upon the works of science, the concepts, substances, natural Laws, and forces, although formed out of the stuff of nature, primarily as the creations of the mental Labour of man. Middle-class materialism, on the other hand, from the point of view of the scientific investigator, sees all this as an element of nature itself which has been discovered and brought to light by science. Natural scientists consider the immutable substances, matter, energy, electricity, gravity, the Law of entropy, etc., as the basic elements of the world, as the reality that has to be discovered. From the viewpoint of Historical Materialism they are products which creative mental activity forms out of the substance of natural phenomena.

Herein is Lbirds apparent claims clearly and much better expressed, but note the difference, there is no denial that the external world exists or that we can just make up our science by will alone, natural science is a valid and partial form of materialism for Pancake.  There is no denial of natural phenomena in the above, but an acknowledgement that knowledge is the product of societies and ways of being in relation to that nature.Also, niote the distinction between materialisms, Pannekoek talks of 'bouregois materialism' and 'middle class materialism' (what Chuck in his Theses on Feuerbach called Old Materialism, but which we'd mostly know as mechanical materialism).

[Young Master Smeet]

LBird wrote:

I said it includes 'ideas', including physics and maths, and so 'democratic control of the means of production' means ''democratic control of physics and maths'.

Socialism means the common and democratic ownership and control of the means and instruments of producing and distributing wealth, phyasical and mental.We could unpack what democracy means: it means run by and for the whole community.  So, yes, physics and maths would be a part of common ownership, and physics and maths societies and inteest groups would be democratically organised, and their resources taken from the common stock by democratic agreement (i.e. in today's parlance, their budget).One possibility is the wikipedia model.  There knowledge is organised by the community for the community without commodity relations.

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