Young Master Smeet
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Yes, the sheet can only become known by a knower, so far so banal (but at least we'regetting somewhere). The thing in itself remains unknown, and we can only know the thing for us: but for a knowing relationship to occur, for here to be a relationship.I think also, the word "create" is the problem, unless you can point to Marx using the word create, we have the citation I posted from Jordan that the relationship is "production" (i.e. transformation), the knower produces the sheet-for-the knower.Lets try getting away from blank sheets, clearly that's confused you, Can we enter into a relationship with nothing?
LBird wrote:'Nature for us' is 'properties for us'.You're arguing for 'properties in themselves'.So, you are seeking to know 'nature in itself'.No, I'm arguing in properties for us, if we give things all their properties, if they do not exist without us, they do not exist, and there is just us. To be a thing for us is different from the thing in itself.Imagine a rorschach test: for me, it is a a terrifying dragon: for you, it is an accurate reading of Marx: for both of us, such a thing is terrifying. Now, for us, it brings patterns of light, we never see the blots in themselves, but we enter into a relationship. We cannot enter into a relationship with a blank sheet.
Lbird, I think you need to brush up on yoru English. What is the subject of this sentence: "unalienated humanity that's mental states accord with its lived experience"The absence of power is not about individual sovereignty (you're the one interpolating that), but of conditions in which consent and co-operation are the basic need. Power creates sovereign individuals, the absence of power is the absence of the sovereign indivuidual.DemocracySocial productionRevolution.
LBird wrote:Your argument is flawed because the 'subject' is the 'active side'.If you wish to 'know' the 'properties' of 'inorganic nature', that is, 'nature-in-itself', then you are separating subject and object.I'm not seeking to know Nature in itself, but what nature for us is.
Quote:Your claim differs from Marx's. Marx argues for the social production of 'organic nature' (or, 'nature-for-us'). You're arguing for 'nature-in-itself'.And I agree with that claim, I'm asking, if there is a relationship between subject and object: what is the relationship, if only one part has properties? Perhaps you can explain, for Marx.
*Ahem* "Emancipated labour", "Common ownership""Humans, without power": do you see power existing in socialism? "mental states accord with its lived experience" is that not another way of saying "theory and practice" oh, I think it is. I also didn't mention moon rockets, calamari nor bovril.
Lbird wrote:either the subject-object relationship has to be presentWhat is the relationship? When I enter into a relationship with a chair, I bring my mass, and the chair brings its molecular structure which is capable of holding its shape under my mass. Me sitting on it is what makes it a chair. It is not active, I give the chairiness to it. However, I cannot launch it at the moon. A relationship involves two things, if one part adds nothng to the relationship, there is no relationship. Can you at least agree with that basic premise? If not, where is it flawed?I've already described how, as I udnerstand it, the thing for us works: a coke can is absically a ball of light, it is our eyes, the way they work, our fingers, the way they feel, our muscles, the way they lift, our chemical receptors that give it smell: all those things that turn it into a cold weighty cylinder with a metallic taste.See, the thing is: if theThing in Itself is irrelevent, since we can never approach it, and so we might as well consider it doesn't exist. If the thing for us does not give any quality to the subject object relationship, then it might as well not exist, and there is no norganic nature.As for citations: I have readMarx' works, and I give quotes to back up my argument, you always refuse to.Finally, the whole point of this discussion is that I think you are misreading Marx, I think my claims agree with what he (and to a greater or lesser extent Jordan) wrote.
Emancipated labour, under conditions of common ownership allows for the realisation of unalienated humanity, one that's mental states accord with its lived experience: a practical unity of actions and control over the world and its collective social enviornment, a conscious association that knows itself to be a human community. Its thought objects would emerge from the discussion between humans, without power, thus enabling discourse to be free and unfettered, a language of a hamanity without distortions needed to keep a subject populaion in check. The free development of each would be the condition for the free development of all, and each human would be an end in themself.
Well, BBC speaking speed is 200 words a minute, which would mean reading the pamphlet aloud would take 1 hour. So, taking the nine chapters as a start, we could do it in 10 minutes within about 200 words per section, which is doable. Lets say 20 minutes, though, to go into details where necessary.
LBird wrote:I don't think that you ask genuine questions and clarifications, because it's clear that your questions often have nothing to do with what either I, Marx or Jordan write, but what you wish that we'd written.There is always the possibility, if multiple people fail to understand what you write, that the problem may be in the way that you communicate. For example, when I try to go to the text, the accepted way of resolving exegetic disputes, you simply say that people who disagree with you have a different ideology, rather than seeking to prove a hermeneutic basis for your assertions.My ideology is that of a Marxist and a humanist, I consider that human beings exist within the world, that ideas are cultural and material, that ideology is lived. Our unconscious exists in the world around us, which is structured semiotically through deferred meaning. I agreed with the Bakhtin school that signs are polyphonic and contested, meaning is historical. I agree with Serle that language is intentional and not merely algorithmic.
buggerit I'll provide my own citations:
Chucksie Bums wrote:Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being and as a living natural being he is on the one hand endowed with natural powers, vital powers – he is an active natural being. These forces exist in him as tendencies and abilities – as instincts. On the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited creature, like animals and plants. That is to say, the objects of his instincts exist outside him, as objects independent of him; yet these objects are objects that he needs – essential objects, indispensable to the manifestation and confirmation of his essential powers. To say that man is a corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective being full of natural vigour is to say that he has real, sensuous objects as the object of his being or of his life, or that he can only express his life in real, sensuous objects. To be objective, natural and sensuous, and at the same time to have object, nature and sense outside oneself, or oneself to be object, nature and sense for a third party, is one and the same thing.And
Charlie Mouse wrote:Whenever real, corporeal man, man with his feet firmly on the solid ground, man exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature, posits his real, objective essential powers as alien objects by his externalisation, it is not the act of positing which is the subject in this process: it is the subjectivity of objective essential powers, whose action, therefore, must also be something objective. An objective being acts objectively, and he would not act objectively if the objective did not reside in the very nature of his being. He only creates or posits objects, because he is posited by objects – because at bottom he is nature. In the act of positing, therefore, this objective being does not fall from his state of “pure activity” into a creating of the object; on the contrary, his objective product only confirms his objective activity, his activity as the activity of an objective, natural being.Man doesn't create the objects, he transforms nature into his objects. Quite a fundamental misreading, I think.
Lbird, I do read your comments, and when I ask for genuine questions and clarifications I'm met with accusation or obstruction. The problem is when i read what Marx wrote, and what you say he said, i see a variance. "A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being" is pretty plain for Chucky.A relationship for necesarily implies properties (we've been over this several tiems) which your view would deny, since you cannot admit without your whole argument crashign down) that inogranic nature brings anything to the party.
Lbird wrote:For Marx, 'object' is produced by (ie. comes into 'existence-for') a 'subject'.Citation needed.
Can I pitch in, if there is any party work worthy of a video/whiteboard it should be Socialism as a Practical Alternative? (I don't mean, necessarily verbatim, but as the underlying basis for something). What grabs the Zeitgeist crowd is the notion of a plan, and since we're in the business of putting the positive case for socialism, I thinkt hat is where a video is based placed. I'll see about asking my branch to put something to conference to this end, but I'll float it here too.http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/socialism-practical-alternative
Kind of relevent to this discussion:http://existentialcomics.com/comic/164I think the basic problem with Lbird's misreading of Marx is that essentially Lbird abolishes the thing for us. I'm rather reminded of an old Ropyal Insitution Christmas lecture, I think it was trying to demonstrate how smell works, using a "handedness" metaphor, imagine a wall of right hands, and some lefts hands, and some paws and some tentacles and other weirdly shaped appendages. Now, each hand/appendage, can only shake with a like and opposite hand/appendage. Although we define, through our senses and our being in the world, the thing for us, there has to be some thing there for us to grasp: and that includes abstractions and hought objects like numbers.I'd like Lbird to contemplate this:
Marx wrote:Hunger is a natural need; it therefore needs a nature outside itself, an object outside itself, in order to satisfy itself, to be stilled. Hunger is an acknowledged need of my body for an object existing outside it, indispensable to its integration and to the expression of its essential being. The sun is the object of the plant – an indispensable object to it, confirming its life – just as the plant is an object of the sun, being an expression of the life-awakening power of the sun, of the sun’s objective essential power.A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being, and plays no part in the system of nature. A being which has no object outside itself is not an objective being. A being which is not itself an object for some third being has no being for its object; i.e., it is not objectively related. Its being is not objective.It is difficult to square this notin of objects without the self, and the sun being the object of the plant, with the notion that all objects are humanly created.
