Young Master Smeet
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LBird,Having already provided quick descriptions of materialism, idealism and marxism I also provided a definition of epistemology. I'll also note I pointed out that your blank page description of idealism was just plain wrong, so of no use to workers whatever.SP,
Quote:For most would be socialists, it takes active investigation that can include asking questions and debating (it's what this forum is for).Quite, and most workers don't even feel the need to begin that level of examination. If the workers wanted socialist ideas, they'd be beating a path to our door. Or, as I'm sure you did, they'd be putting across socialist ideas themselves. As it stands, for them the sun is green, and their daily experience concurrs with this.
AFAICS I've answered it. Maybe you're asking the wrong question? Anyway, of course, the point is that the line isn't static, it's being drawn (or maybe it's carved out like canals with water flowing through it); or better still, the line is an animation, and changes subtley each time its drawn.
LBird,erm. I'm sorry, I'm lost now. I explained:Idealism: [object] is in your mind.Materialism: [object] is outside your mind.Historical Materialism: [Object] is your mind.How's about that? Like a line drawn first into the shape of, say, a man, and then a house, and then a cat. One continuous line. It's the same line manifesting as several different things.
Yes, capitalist and workers consciousnesses are of the same substance, and part of the same reality, which is transformed into various different elements by the operation of history and through its interaction with itself. We are all parts of one system.
SP, well, ask yourself, if the establishment kept swearing blind that the sun was green and sunlight harmful, would you believe them? or, would you find that your lived experience, and your need to go out into the sunlight would contradict them? I'm suggesting that indoctrination and ideological maipulation wouldn't work if working class people didn't find that reality as explained to them (and how they identify themselves) worked. As EP Thompson noted in the making of the English Working Class, the working class is not the passive object of the capitalists. Durham Miners fought hard to create the wages system and a free market in labour, for example.
Lbird, no, I'm the meatbot. But, lets try.Idealism: the page can only exist inside your mind.Materialism: the page exists outside your mind.Historical Materialism: the page and your mind are the same thing.
Lbird wrote:To the idealist, there is no limit to their creative originality in their drawing of a picture of knowledge. They can draw freehand on a blank canvas, and any individual artist can freely improvise, with no external framework to impose a pre-existing structure upon their individual musings and scribbles.That's not idealism. Many idealists, such as Hegel would suggest that the pad is numbered as well, except that the dots are ideas. A dualist would say there are two pads that somehow match each other, and a materialist says the dots exist outside the human mind.
SP,Sorry, I was ansswering:
Quote:I was hoping you would be able to provide some possible analysis to the reasons why milions of workers have conciously chosen to reject the socialist case?and in a hurry, but I think my answer is plain enough.
I remember in March 1998 the Guardian ran a leader suggesting William Morris would have approved of Lord Chancellor Derry Irvine's luxurious rennovation of his official apartments.
Guardian Nonsense wrote:FOR THE baying members of the hunt, the pursuit of Lord Irvine over the cost of re-decorating his state apartments has been rollicking good fun. The no -expense-spared refurbishment has given the impression that his Lordship rivals Marie Antoinette in terms of political sensitivity. He would certainly struggle to win any awards for PR. But is that such a bad thing? Those pillorying the Lord Chancellor tend also to be those shedding crocodile tears for the dumbing down of politics. One of the main criticisms of Westminster is that it is awash with on-message automatons and short on characters. Well, the Lord Chancellor is certainly a character….In fact, Lord Irvine is merely following a noble tradition that dates back more than a century to Labour's roots in William Morris's Arts and Crafts movement. Morris saw socialism as the contrast between beauty and ugliness, and between the worker as artisan craftsman and the worker as slave to the machine. In an era of mass output, it is good the Government is helping high-quality small firms to thrive.For anyone who has read Morris' journalism, i doubt very much he would have had anything but baying venom for Lord Irvine.
SP,Imagine if the broadcast media, all the university experts and a substantial number of people kept on insisting that the sun was green, and that it was impossible to see in the daylight.Therein lies my answer.
LBird wrote:Furthermore, even the Leninists at least pretend that, after the revolution, they'll be able to develop workers to understand epistemology, that workers have abilities denied to them by the present society. Even Stalin brought the Russian workers and peasants on educationally, ensuring most had access to the means of developing themselves…And that was Leninism's greatest sin, the belief that you could have the revolution before the working class were intellectually capable of understanding and wanting socialism and could then 'raise their culture'. The point is that teh workers today have the capacity to run their own lives, and run capitalism from top to bottom, in the interests of the capitalist class. As Charlie said in these infamous theses, philosophers have interpreted the world, the point is to change it. A working capacity to change the world is what is required.
AFAICS, and I'll end it here, is you want to call materialism idealism-materialism while referring to the same thing everyone else does when they call it materialism. I couldn't care less what the name is. The upshot is that ideas are subject to necessity, and are part of the unfurling of a singular universe without dualism.If the workers try and maintain that Unca' Charlie was some sort of dualist, they're wrong (whetehr or not they vote on it).
My philosophy is trombonism. The world is made of trombones, and the only stuff in the world is trombones. We are trombonebots. There is no intereaction between trombones and catfish, there are only trombones, and thus no priority. Catfishism-trombonism is absurd.
