[Young Master Smeet]

lbird wrote:

So, if a democratic vote is not 'binding' (in some sense), what's the point of it?

Exactly!

Lbird wrote:

There is still only 'one part' in society: the producers.But, clearly, any democratic vote produces two 'parts': the thing voted for, and the thing voted against. This is nothing to do with Marx's point in his Theses on Feuerbach, about an elite which 'outranks' the producers, in the decision-making process.

The same could be said of a Leninist vanguard.  In fact, the ame could be said of genius materialists who know the truth no-one else knows, as long as they are still producers.A vote also produces the people who voted for, and the people who voted against.  The winners and the losers, one part of society will have access to reality, another part will be denied it.And I'll re-phrase that 'meaningless' bit.The majority, in your theory, is still an elite.  That is not wordplay, that the facts.  There is nothing in the definition of elite that requires it to be a minority.And, as we've discussed before: how can we know the result of a vote if the only way to find out the truth is to have a vote?  We'd have to vote on the result of the vote.

[Young Master Smeet]

Bourgeois science works by rstricting access to the fruits of collective endevour: education, training, resources to practice science and time.  When there are no more classes, and the intellectual fruits of society are available to freely access by all, and the working day is reduced to the bare minimum, members of society will be able to practice a different sort of science.  The basis of that society will be that the free development of each will be the condition for the free development of all, so there will be access to heterodx views, and active steops taken to ensure that minorities interests and opinions are supported so that they can test and promote their ideas through equal access to the means of communication.  Where large projects are required, society will democratically decide whether it is worthwile to build ITER, or CERN like facilities, and we will co-ordinate worldwide to ensure that we can all benefit from them.Science would be a part of daily life, with the practical possibilities of being able to feed it into our communities and workplaces providing a fucs, so knowledge will be produced out of our daily existence.  Where "the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations."  What we won't have is a "doctrine [which] must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society." by having binding votes on whateveryone thinks.Indeed, it will be a society in which 'everyone' can access [evidence], and then have to decide what it means to them… "Finally:

Quote:

Because I'm a Democratic Communist, and think that humans actively produce their knowledge of what 'evidence' says, and I argue that socialism cannot be in the power of an elite…

As I have demonstrated, the basic definition of an eleite would include a majority, so your theory is elitist and does include an elite.  I'm afraid that isn't wordplay, it is the logical outcome of your own theories.  Not to mention that you have never adressed the probblem of how we can know the result of a vote without voting on the result of the result of the result…

[Young Master Smeet]

LBird wrote:

YMS, post #272 wrote:

But collective production does not mean voting…

YMS, post #275 wrote:

Materialism does not necessitate an elite with special access to reality…

[my bolds]I'll have to leave it to others to determine the meaning of what you're writing, because I can't make sense of your contradictory posts.

Those statements are not contradictory.  In what world are they contradictory, they are talking about two different subjects.

LBird wrote:

YMS wrote:

So they refuse to use the evidence of the minority, or to allow the minority to collect evidence?

Yes, the 'evidence' produced by the minority is put to the vote.If the majority accept that the 'evidence' produced by the minority suits the purposes and interests of the majority better than the earlier 'evidence' which had won a vote, then the new 'evidence' becomes the current 'truth'.

But you have previously said the minority has no access to reality?

LBird wrote:

YMS wrote:

And doesn't the evidence dictate the coclusion?

No, 'evidence' doesn't 'dictate' – the democratic producers 'dictate', by a vote.

So if despite overwhelming evidence produced by a minority a thing is so, the majority can make it not so? 

LBird wrote:

Workers in the 21st century are no longer going to fall for the claim by 19th century 'materialists' that the 'materialists' have a special access to 'evidence',  which allows the 'materialists' alone to determine 'what the evidence says'. That's the direction 'materialism' takes us: to an 'elite' with a 'special consciousness', who alone, without a vote by workers, determine what 'evidence' says. It's the philosophical basis of Leninism.

But materialists don't claim they have special access to evidence, they claim that there is evidence, and everyone can have access to it.  What I can say about your theory is that: "This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society."  Your majority is superior to society.  "But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations."So, lets put it in a nutshell.  You have failed to back up your claim that material necessitates claims to 'special access to reality', and further, let us recall, you have no way of establishing the truth, since as we've noted we cannot decide what the result of the vote was until we decide the result by a vote on the result of the vote. Your theory does turn society into two parts, with one superior to the rest, and that is the elite majority, self selected. 

[Young Master Smeet]

LBird wrote:

That's one ideological point of view, YMS, but I don't happen to share it, because I'm a Democratic Communist, who looks to Marx, and his ideas about social production, workers' power, and democratic production.

And for marx Communism was about 'conscious association'.  It was also a society based on the 'free development of each'.

LBird wrote:

If you wish to argue that "collective production does not mean voting", you'll have to specify what this 'collectivity' consists of (it can't be 'the proletariat', for example), and how it decides what to produce, and how it determines 'true knowledge', and why it does things in this way.

It means conscious association, individuals acting together in a way that acknowledges their desire for continued comity, wherein the actions of everyone contribute to the wellbeing of everyone.  Voting is a necessary but not sufficient part of this: voting is a form of negotiation on a wide scale.

LBird wrote:

Yes, but the reason I accept this, is the the majority produce their 'evidence'.

So they refuse to use the evidence of the minority, or to allow the minority to collect evidence?  And doesn't the evidence dictate the coclusion?  

LBird wrote:

YMS wrote:

So, the majority can be the elitie.

If you're reduced to playing with words, YMS, it only weakens your already flimsy, ahistoric, asocial, non-Marxist, anti-voting, case.

I'm reduced to showing you the truth of your own major premise, which does not hold. Materialism does not necessitate an elite with special access to reality, your view, that the minority are denied access to reality is elitist.  So, not just false, but dangerous.

[Young Master Smeet]

LBird wrote:

I can't even 'write something etc.' to persuade our fellow socialists, who supposedly look to Marx and workers' democracy, but won't apply those ideas to 'science'.I don't think my writing a blog attacking the SPGB for its inability to produce thinkers who can cope with ideas about science, epistemology, physics, maths, social production, etc., would be productive in the wider class. The idea that the membership would 'endorse' my views is currently laughable, because Religious Materialism is their ideology, but not mine.I look to Marx, social theory and practice, workers' democracy, the collective production of truth, class origins of bourgeois science, etc., etc., etc…

But collective production does not mean voting, it means knowledge arises out of human agency, and that means out of the whole proceses of production of knowledge, not by legislative fiat.  Last I checked, Lbird has accepted that the majority would act on evidence, and investigation of the world, but would his majoritarian elite be able to act against evidence?  Could they make the sun turn green merely by fiat?  I think not.  Their knowledge and capacities emerge from their being in the workld, and being part of nature: and that world includes working with the ideas they inherit from history.BTW, a quick appeal to authority:

OED wrote:

Elite, n. 1. The choice part or flower (of society, or of any body or class of persons).

So, the majority can be the elitie.  Lbird continues to peddle his elitist views, and refuses to respond to evidence.  SP members have rpeatedly said that science, and the whole of society woiuld be under the self active control of all it's members, and our collective agency would produce for all our needs, and we'd all have access to the fruits of that society, including incorrect and heterodox ideas.

[Young Master Smeet]

Looks like it's bunkum: I can't see why using a public block chain would necessarily circumvent banks or put frational lending out of business, they could still register your loan/savings on an account, and only issue such block-chain coins as they can get their hands on.  I can write an IOU on the back of a fag packet, they creates circulating money (as long as people are willing to accept the fag packet).  Doesn't matter about block chains or paper money…

[Young Master Smeet]

And, of course, Marx-Engels wrote:

Quote:

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htmAs a Post-Hebredian Exophagist, I endorse this view.

[Young Master Smeet]

Quote:

Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives. Because it is a process of thought he derives both its form and its content from pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors. He works with mere thought material which he accepts without examination as the product of thought, he does not investigate further for a more remote process independent of thought; indeed its origin seems obvious to him, because as all action is produced through the medium of thought it also appears to him to be ultimately based upon thought. The ideologist who deals with history (history is here simply meant to comprise all the spheres – political, juridical, philosophical, theological – belonging to society and not only to nature), the ideologist dealing with history then, possesses in every sphere of science material which has formed itself independently out of the thought of previous generations and has gone through an independent series of developments in the brains of these successive generations. True, external facts belonging to its own or other spheres may have exercised a co-determining influence on this development, but the tacit pre-supposition is that these facts themselves are also only the fruits of a process of thought, and so we still remain within that realm of pure thought which has successfully digested the hardest facts.

So that is Engels:https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1893/letters/93_07_14.htmObviously, as an Anarcho-Monarchist I cannot endorse this view.

[Young Master Smeet]

As for Marx:

Quote:

Hence, when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it.  Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language. The recent scientific discovery, that the products of labour, so far as they are values, are but material expressions of the human labour spent in their production, marks, indeed, an epoch in the history of the development of the human race, but, by no means, dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves. The fact, that in the particular form of production with which we are dealing, viz., the production of commodities, the specific social character of private labour carried on independently, consists in the equality of every kind of that labour, by virtue of its being human labour, which character, therefore, assumes in the product the form of value – this fact appears to the producers, notwithstanding the discovery above referred to, to be just as real and final, as the fact, that, after the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered.

The original German of the bolded part is "Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun" which has in the hands of some writers become the Marxian dictum of ideology.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4

[Young Master Smeet]

SocialistPunk wrote:

It's a fair enough assumption to make.

Fraid not, not unless the work you're taking it from has an attribution and a licence statement (as we have at the end of the staandard).  We all know what happens when you assume…

[Young Master Smeet]

That is the courts would be unwilling (probably) to uphold my copyright (and arguably, as I was an agent of the party there, it's also arguable the copyright belongs to the party), but unarguably the footage belongs to the BBC and that culd be enforceable.  If in any doubt, ask permission, that's a lot safer.

[Young Master Smeet]

No, my electrons, the ones I'm wasting dealing with you. Lets return, though, to your major premise.  If an external reality exists then only a minority can determine what is true.This is demonstrably false: if you show ten people a circle and ask them what shape it is, all ten will say circle.  The circle exists outside each of them, and each has access to the circle.  The real risk, and difference is that where a minority can seize control of any instruments and resources (per my example above, only a minority had eyes) then they can dictate what is known about the world, the point is to open up access to those resources to common ownership, so that each may freely avail themselves of the evidence.

[Young Master Smeet]

LBird wrote:

Bingo! I knew that your poor grasp of Marx would fail you, Young Master Stalin!The 'materialists' always resort to abuse, because their ideology is an outdated 19th century one, which has nothing to say to 21st century workers, who wish to unite, just like Marx, our scientific method, so that physics and maths are just like history and sociology.'Materialism' is elitist, and denies, just as you have, democratic production and workers' power over their own products, including scientific knowledge and 'truth'.

At the end of a long and detailed rebuttal (and one which didn't rest on Charlie).  You've in fact resorted to ad hominem type, when driven off your central premise that that materialism is essentially elist.  You can't hold your position: you're the one who wants to restrict science and reality to a majoritarian elite, whereas the truth is that everyone is involved in producing knowledge, even the minority, and even the wrong.You call me all the names under the sun, and when I refuse to rise to your bait, you walk off in a huff.  You have no argument: yuo are an empty bucket, you bring nothing to the debate but the weakest and fablest arguments by assertion.  You, sir, are a waste of electrons.

[Young Master Smeet]

LBird wrote:

Of course, minorities can disagree, and attempt to persuade the majority (just like the SPGB study guide suggests), but at any given point 'right' is the product of the majority. If the minority remain a minority, their views are 'untrue' and 'wrong', from the point of view of political power. No minority can claim to hold 'right' or 'truth', against the decision of the majority.

But that minority have always been right, as the new majority say so, and the old majority were wrong. 

LBird wrote:

Yes, and you are wrong, because within Communism, only a majority have access to reality.

In which case the minority have no opportunity to become amajority, and there is no mechanism for a majority to form itself, since until it has a majority is has no access to reality. What, though, is special about the majority?  I'll one up you: only  unanimity can create reality.  Ha! Watch your mere majority squirm before the might of unanimity.

LBird wrote:

There is no 'minority' who have this special access. 'Reality' is a social product, and only the majority can build it.

Since reality is maleable, and has no properties of its own, must it be singular?  Can we not gerrymander majorities to be local: in England the moon in Green, in Botswana, it's blue?  Or does the greater population of England prevail (and then, are we talking majorities, or pluraliies, can't the biggest minority decide an issue?).

LBird wrote:

You can't get away from the elitist premise of your 'materialism'.

I can: watch me.  Everyone can have access to reality, unlike the elitism of your case that denies minorities access.

LBird wrote:

This ideology of science you espouse is one basis of Leninism, and has nothing to do with Marx's ideas about 'social production'.

I have exposed my ideology, an an anarcho monarchist (with traces of having passed through Hebridean exophagism).  This does have nothing to do with Marxism.  Now, run along, and take your snarks with you.

[Young Master Smeet]

Is the clip featuring me still there?  That's copyright the BBC (or their production company).

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