Young Master Smeet
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LBird wrote:When Marx and Engels mention ‘material’, they are talking about different things: Marx is talking about humans producing their environment, whereas Engels is talking about ‘matter’, outside of human consciousness.
Which, as a critical realist you also hold to, that's what realism means, that thre is matter outside of human consciousness. Marx did talk of Materialism, not least in the Holy Family, and the critique is not negative, since he expressely notes that materialism leads to communism. he also co-wrote the German Ideology, which has plenty to say on materialism.So, lets recap here: no-one has argued against democracy in society, democratic organisation of scientific institutions and organisations, the only question has been one of deciding the status of scientfiic fact (I mean, we can democraticaly decide the names of planets, the units of measure, we could re-organise the periodic table to our hearts content; but as previously stated, we cannot vote for the tides to turn, and it that you have to address, as a philosophic principle).
To which I reply, for the umnpteenth time, power is less relevant than interest: power is an anarchist concern. In the world today we make our own minds up (when we choose to do so) based on the evidence and learning before us. Political power favours the capitalist class because the working class actively suports capitalism, and sees it as being in their best interests. They have their say in that through the ballot box, and through the involvement of the workers in organised political parties like the Tory party.There is an ongoing discoursive struggle for meaning and control of the descriptions of that system, and certain words: welfare, immigration, terrorism, are loaded with contested meanings and inferences, and the ongoing discoursive battle to decide what is real (which is, if you've been paying attention, royal, the royalty that settles disputes in the end).Many workers in science struggle through their trade unions to control those work places, and to protect the freedom to direct their own research areas.If you're asking philsoophical qwuestions, I can only say you seem to be formulating them very badly, the equivilent of 'Life, the universe and everything?' (the answer is 42, btw). I'd say if pushed that in general a certain "materialism" is now the predominate theory, even the Tories no longer maintain that problems are down to individual wickedness or original sin, even if they do not consciousless espouse materialism (and indeed would be deeply against it), that said, most Tories these days are liberals in disguise anyway.Anyway, the point is that you notions of democracy seem limited, and don't account for the quality as well as the quantity of opinion (and I don't mean quality as in expertise, but strnength of feeling: a vote on fixing Wiunterval dinner does not elicit thje same responses as, say, votes on abortion).
Maybe there is some miscommunication going on here. You say that people will be stopped from practising science, which AFAICS is an impossibility, science is thinking and discussion, it can't be stopped. People living in the real world will decide, just as they do now, because socialism will have to be built out of the practice of the world as it is now to make it into the world that will become. Each will decide for themself in social conditions not of their choosing.
Society will stop them reading books? Reading journal articles? Take out their eyes? Confiscate their pen and paper? Really? Will science databases be restricted? Datasets? Really?As for Mengele, what an absurd absurdum. There is no valid conmparison between experimenting on humans and sticking thermometers in waterfalls.
Won't be allowed to do science? Who will stop them? And how? What blithering nonsense.As it stands, popularising science is a particular sxjkill, distinct from the practice of science, some people are competant at this, and otehrs aren't. If a scientist can use the technical language of precision to talk to scientists who can explain it, that's fine, shirley?
If I claimed to be a free individual now, that would indeed be bourgeois ideology, the point is to become one: I am nothing, I must become everything. And I must develop fully and roundly, "to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic." That means building a social relationship in which I won't want or need to go against the findings of a democratic vote (or, more pertinently, in which democracy is the means to liberate individuals, not constrain them).Marx, when asked, did not state his goal to be the delineation of structures, but the emancipation labour.
As a free individual there are things that your comrades will not democratically ask you to do, the condition of developing and promoting freedom sets the limits of the free association. Yopu wll not be democratically asked to go down a salt mine. You won't be given a job you detest (you'll only be asked to do work that is necssary or enjoyable). That is, my comrades would treat me as an end in itself, not a means to an end.. thus, we reconcile the individual with the community, so that the collection of individuals does nto appear as an alien force to each member of it. As a social individual I won't have to be consciously compelled, but will be socialised for co-opration and inmbued with socialist consciousness: recognising that my interests are those of the community, and that my road to development lie through and with my fellows.
Erm, no, according to YMS Socialism will entail a fuller, rounder development of the individual than is allowed by the crushing division of labour in capitalism, as socialism will be a society in which the free development of each will be the condition for the free development of all, in which the commonality of interests means that the means of production and the networks of production cease to appear an alien uncontrolled force, but one aligned with our expressions of individuality and subjectivity; and where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch she wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
LBird wrote:Neither you nor YMS are Democratic Communists/Socialists or Marxist 'idealist-materialists', who emphasise human social activity, creativity and criticism (in short, 'ideas', the 'ideal', Marx's 'active side'), and the provisional nature of 'knowledge' and 'truth'.The provisional nature of knowledge is part of standard science, so hardly a world shattering claim. I've emphasised the material nature of ideas, and how they must be taken into account as part of a rounded aesthetic materialism (as opposed to seen as passive reflections as they would be under mechanical materialism). I've also discussed socialism and science and the role of bold hypotheses. I'd suggest that you repeatedly demonstrate the failures of your scientific method by assuming in advance what you think people are propounding and then reading their words in the light of those assumptions, instead of what they actually say.Anyway, back to socialism and science. Just another wee point on interest. Socialism would necessarilly mean that scientists would have no interest in their science apart from that of the general community: they would not have intellectual property, patents nor even salaries (they would have dreams, prestige and, yes "budgets" in terms of having their projects approved, but that would depend, as now, on pleasing the approvers). The coincidence of interests means that, unlike anarchists, we have no need to fear the "power" of expertise. Indeed, I'd suggest collectively we'd want to develop as diverse sets of expertise as possible to avoid the ecological failure as demonstrated by present day automated trading software, which in all behaving the same means that problems are systemwide, rather than to specific instances.Oh, and if you mean by the 1930's the publishing of the Philosophical notebooks, you may notice I have read them, and post 1950's marxist culture criticism, such as Raymond Williams, hence my instance on the materiality of ideas.
But how do you know you're not happy with that conclusion? Isn't your unhappiness and ideological disrtotion of the turth that you really are happy with that result?#FunWithSkepticism
But how do you know that the distortion you've identified isn't actually a distortion of the truth: that we can know? If every claim about the world is a distotrion then so is the claim that there is a distortion, so claims could be true, except if they were true then that claim would be false, so it wouldn't be a distortion so it would be true. All Yorkshiremen are liars.
*sigh* Interpretation is one thing, but such things as whether Marx did or didn't make a statement is something we can debate without distortion. (By the way, how do you know that there is distortion? I don't think you can know that).By the way, I've forgotten, might you be the same Lbird who is a communist?I'm confident that we have a framework of investigation that allows us to be confident in the information about the world we are capable of producing.
Of course, we don't treat the words of Marx as holy write, if we get dragged into these 'what did they really say' arguments, it's to rebut distortion. We're more interested in the ideas than the man. For example, this morning I've been tracking down this disgusting article by Marx on the Russian Loan it's utterly indefensible, and we wouldn't want to defend it. Marx held many abhorent views with which we fundamentally disagree: it's the ideas we propound.
No, I've shown that I have a position, and opinions, not that i know. I'm interested to see what you're on about. That's what debate is for, to have my positions challenged and tested. Yes, frankly I am suspicious of the whole 'It's all Engels' fault' thing, because it exonerates Marx, and I think they hang together or not at all. They wrote the Holy Family together, and the German Ideology together. yes, we can read the differences between Principles of Communism and the Manifesto to see that Marx seemed to be more theory orientated and what he brought to the relationship, but overall, as can be seen from some letters, I think it's more that their general output got caught up in the intellectual atmosphere of the time (as their own theories would suggest).
