[Young Master Smeet]

LBird wrote:

You clearly claim to know that something is not 'in itself', so you must know 'in itself' to say that something is not 'it'.

Not at all, sometime all I can know of one thing is that it is not another thing. Whatwe do know, is that there is a difference, not necessarily what the difference is.

[Young Master Smeet]

LBird wrote:

Young Master Smeet wrote:

… not yellow in itself.

How do you know 'yellow', in itself, YMS?You must have a method that allows you, alone, to 'know' stuff 'in itself'.Your claim is nothing to do with Marx's method, of social theory and practice.

Nope, don't need to have such a method, perfectly legit to say we cannot know the thing in itself.  Yellow is just a proxy for truth here, if we cannot manufacture yellow we cannot manufacture truth.

[Young Master Smeet]

LBird wrote:

But how do you 'know' what 'they are'?

It doesn't matter what they are, for our purposes here, only that they are.  It may well be that we can only ever know what they are not.

LBird wrote:

Also, because you won't have the rest of us employing the same method, and then voting on its results of 'what they are', your method must be an elite one, that the rest of us can't employ.

That doesn't follow, I am suggesting that we all can have direct access to nature/reality, rather than the elitism of your majority only access.

LBird wrote:

Marx, on the contrary, argues that we 'know qualities' because we act upon inorganic nature, and produce our 'knowledge of qualities'.So, 'qualities' are a social product of a relationship between an active subject and inorganic nature, which produces their 'object'.

I don't disagree, but the object we create is the knowledge object, the truth claim.

LBird wrote:

'Yellow' is a social product. I've said all this before, but like all 'materialists', you refuse to read what I write, and simply insert your own ideological terms (like 'matter'), and proceed to insist that you, individually, 'know qualities'.

But the social product is a thought, a sign, a signifier, not yellow in itself.

[Young Master Smeet]

LBird wrote:

What are these 'qualities', YMS?

It doesn't matter what they are, all that matters is that they are.  If, as Marx says, Nature is the source of use-values, then Inorganic nature brings qualitative substances to the table, and brings properties and differences to the relationship when admixed with human labour. That is the issue.The truth that is out there thus becomes human knowledge (or, rather, truth claims about the world).  As in the old saw, I have a working scale model of the universe, unfortunately the scale is 1:1, any truth claim is going to be partial, scaled and contain degrees of truth, and any claims come from being in and of nature.The question about Humpty was a serious one, words often seem to mean what you want them to mean.And I'll note that you declined to answer the question, can we produce yellow?

[Young Master Smeet]

Lbird, could we produce yellow?Are you Humpty Dumpty in disguise?  Are you humpty in disguise?

[Young Master Smeet]

Marx in Gotha programme wrote:

Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power

Nature is a source of use value, that implies to me that inorganic nature has qualities which restrict what we can do with it.

[Young Master Smeet]

LBird wrote:

I've said it, time and again, Marx and LBird agree on 'inorganic nature': this is the 'ingredient into' social labour.

Marx wrote:

The religious world is but the reflex of the real world..The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature.The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.

For Marx there is a real world,and the goal of man is to confront Nature.  Man could not confront, or have relations with Nature is it goes not posses qualities with which to relate.  Also note Charlie's phrase 'material conditions', tough one, eh?

Lbird wrote:

And you'll continue to passively contemplate 'Truth', eh, YMS?And hail your eternal god 'Matter'.And you'll continue to place your trust in the 'elite' who 'know' your God. Or, so they say.Whatever reason could they have for denying, like you, the workers a vote on 'matter'?

Can we produce Yellow?  I never said that an elite can know the truth, I said statements can approach or contain the truth, no one statement will ever be the truth: the truth is the truth, just as yellow is yellow and not yellow socks.  There will be continuing debate, or dialectic if you like.

[Young Master Smeet]

So, unlike Marx Lbird does not believe in an external Nature, and that we are part of Nature, not that Nature is part of us.I'll return to a question Lbird posed some time again (my time is short today), "who determines the truth?" I beleive was how it was phrased.  I believe this is a flawed question.  The truth just is (or, rather, per Fox Mulder, the truth is out there).  No-one determines the truth.  Just as we cannot, and I would be interested to hear if Lbird accepts this, produce Yellow.  We can produce yellow substances.  We can even create yellow light beams, but we cannot make Yellow.In thuswise, we cannot 'make truth'.  We can produce statements, that may convey truth, or contain truth, but we cannot command truth, it just is.So, to return to the question of scientific production: those working in scientific endevours will produce statements, containing truth, and those statements will be subject to open discussing and debate that may generater new statements.The free associations of scientific practitioners will be organised democratically, and they will democratically decide what is an isn't valid methodology for their fields and associations, subject to being democratically acocuntable to the whole of society (which will in turn allocate resources for the continuation of their endevours, and to dissemination of the outputs of those endevours, their statements and propositions).So, groups of workers will act: if we want to put a satelite into orbit, we will have to apply special relativity in order to communicate with it (I think it's special, may be general) and to maintain geocentricity.  We will vote to decide to have such satelites (though I doubt we'd have a vote of the whole of humanity over the issue, the worldwide communications bodies could be mandated to do that sort of thing).  Resolutions to action will implicitly include scientific understanding, in order to make them possible.  We'd accept the climate science on anthropogenic global warming (sadly we can't just vote the carbon away).So, no-one determines the truth.  The truth just is.

[Young Master Smeet]

 In post #328

LBird wrote:

Marx, Capital Vol. 1, p. 169, wrote:

…categories…are forms of thought which are socially valid, and therefore objective, for…this…mode of social production.

'Objectivity' is determined by its 'social validity'.

I think Lbird is quoting the Penguin edition here, in the online (older) translation it's:

Chaz wrote:

The categories of bourgeois economy consist of such like forms. They are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production, viz., the production of commodities. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4The point is, Marx is talking about commodity fetishism, and the commodity fetishistic society.  So, Lbird quote is not saying that in all societies and everywhere social categories give rise to objective reality, but that in commodity society, social categories take the form of the objects of society.Indeed, in the preceeeding paragraph, Marx makes this interesting point:

Charlie wrote:

Man’s reflections on the forms of social life, and consequently, also, his scientific analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of their actual historical development. He begins, post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him. The characters that stamp products as commodities, and whose establishment is a necessary preliminary to the circulation of commodities, have already acquired the stability of natural, self-understood forms of social life, before man seeks to decipher, not their historical character, for in his eyes they are immutable, but their meaning.

Compare also with Hegel's dictum that the owl of Minerva spreads her wings with the dying of the light. Further, from, the same section:

Quote:

 The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature. The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.

Now, Marx frequently refers to Nature, which is a synonym of reality/external world/physical objects.  Nature can only really mean 'that which happens without the interventiopn of Man'.So, thanks to Lbird for point out a section of Marx which utterly disproves what he has been saying here for so long.

[Young Master Smeet]

Worker 2 is compelled under threat of poverty to work for a capitalist, and the capital;ist then uses the worker (or, more accuraqtely, uses the worker's ability to work, their alienated labour power).  At the very minimum, worker 2 cannot use their labour power for themself.

[Young Master Smeet]

If you assume you make an ASS of U & ME.  *Badum tish*Crap corporate joke.  Point being assumptions don't help in a court case, if it gets that far.  Generally we'd have to surrender at the first take down notice.

[Young Master Smeet]

LBird wrote:

Sometimes I wonder if you lot deliberately put the most obscure spin on everything I write.

No spin, you keep making arguments by assertion which don't logically follow.  Thatcherism is only relevent in a commodity context, and hunter gatehrers illustrated a non-commodity society of individual freedom.

LBird wrote:

So, do we have 7 billion individuals each as individuals defining what their own personal 'individual freedom' consists of, or we going to democratically determine what 'individual freedom' consists of?

I'd see it more as we agree the stage on which individuals are left free to act, and in which their self interest is in helping otehrs to be free.  Noting that hunter gatherers had such a system does not imply that I want to return to hunter gatehrer society.

[Young Master Smeet]

LBird wrote:

To argue that 'Freedom and individual development' is not task for  'social theory and practice', under the democratic control of all, is to argue for Thatcherism.

That doesn't follow.   As, I believe has ben argued here by others, hunter gatherers are highly individualistic, but they are hardly Thatcherite in their primitive communist societies.

[Young Master Smeet]

LBird wrote:

[I'm not sure what point you two think that you're making, other than, according to you, democracy is pointless and voting is a process without an end product.

Its a legitimate reducio ad absurdum of your claim that only a vote can determine he truth: if that is so, we can't know anything since we cannot know the result of the vote without voting on it.  Voting is a means to an end, an enhancement of communication and co-ordination between concrete social indviiduals, it's not an end in itself.In the course of living, we will have to vote and make democratic decisions on our self-activity, which will implicitly have to accept scientific premises as part of our action: even a decision to install computers means we have to accept the work of Faraday, f only up to a point.Society will be run democratically, but to the end of freedom and individual development.

[Young Master Smeet]

Sympo wrote:

Wait. what? The value produced by worker 1 will be less than the value produced by worker 1?

No, the value paid to worker 1 will be less than the value they add to the product (food).

Sympo wrote:

"Worker two, does not add value: but without worker two, the restaurateur cannot get any payment unless the food reaches the tables.  Worker two is paid the value of average socially necessary labour time that goes into creating and reproducing his ability to work."Is worker 2 not creating any value?

From the point of view of the capitalist, worker 2 doesn't create anything, doesn't produce anything.  Without worker 2 the goods cannot come to market, but the only operation 2 does is move a plate load of value from one place to another.

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