A Return to Kautsky and Liebknecht for the SPD?
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Alan
If you post any article about Engels, Kautsky, and Luxembourg, yo know what is going to happen, the topic is going to be re-routed to something else, We have being dealing with this trolling for many years, and it is like an endless cicle, it never end. You can present the best evidence, and the answer is going to be the same, this case is closed. You are doing a good job at SOYMB, therefore, publish similar article in your website and they are going to be more fruitful. We know what we are, we know what we are looking for, and we stay behind our party principles, so, why are we wasting our time ? Whoever wants to change something in the party, we have an application for membership in our website, it can be filled out, and then, the proper committee will take care of the rest, it is much better to argue inside than outside
LBird: “And Engels got his notions of ‘science’ from Robert Owens [sic] (a well-documented autocrat, who wanted to help workers, not be under their control), and overlaid Marx’s core ideas of ‘democracy’, ‘social production’ and ‘critique’, with an elite ‘science’ which studied eternal matter to produce a final ‘Truth’.”
I will defer consideration of LBird’s problematic claim about Robert Owen’s notions of ‘science’ and consider here only the incontrovertible evidence for where Engels got the content, rather than the notions, of his science.
Engels
Engels studied mathematical physics in many sources, including the classic 18th century “Traite de dynamique” by Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (co-publisher with Denis Diderot of the great French Encyclopédie).
However, his primary modern source for mathematical physics was the Feynman lecture course of his day, the celebrated 19th century “Treatise on Natural Philosophy” by Thomson and Tait (popularly known as “T&T”).
Engels’s primary modern source for chemistry was the celebrated “Treatise on Chemistry” by Roscoe and Schorlemmer. Readers familiar with the Marx-Engels correspondence will have met organic chemist Carl Schorlemmer as a Marx/Engels comrade-in-exile from ’48 and their trusted scientific consultant.
The two “Treatises” that Engels primarily studied happened to be the standard university textbooks from mid century right up to the First World War.
Marx
LBird assures us that Marx took no interest in the progress of natural science.
Why then did chemistry professor Carl Schorlemmer and evolutionary biologist Ray Lankester attend the private funeral gathering of nine persons to mourn the passing of an obscure economic scientist whom Engels eulogized as “the best hated and most calumniated man of his times”?
The new/forthcoming “Marx Engels Collected Works MEGA(2)” Volume 31 [not yet translated into English] lets us glimpse the extent to which Marx took an active interest in the progress of natural science.
Marx’s Chemistry Notebooks (1877-83)
Notebook 1. On the Atomic Theory
- atomistic principle as propounded by John Dalton
- related stoichiometric laws of chemical combination of elements
- determination of atomic and molecular weights of elements and compounds—J. L. Gay-Lussac; L. R. A. C. Avogadro; ‘vapour density’ and ‘molecular weight’, etc.
Notebook 2. Tabular summaries of inorganic and organic chemistry
Notebook 3. Tables of chemistry
Notebooks 4 & 5. Tables of inorganic and organic chemistry
Notebook 6. Formulae of organic chemistry
Marx’s Tabular Summaries/Tables include
Inorganic Chemistry Tables
- Non-metals and metals
- Periodic system of Lothar Meyer (independent discoverer of the Periodic Table but ceded precedence to Mendeleev)
- Quantitative valency
- Oxides, hydroxides, acids and salts, etc.
Organic Chemistry Tables
- Paraffins, carbohydrates, aromatic compounds, alkaloids, uric acid, carbonyl and sulfocarbonyl compounds, etheric and anhydride substances, ammonia and derivatives, organic acids, etc.
Studies in electromagnetism: Edouard Hospitalier
- Power sources: Voltaic piles, Galvanic batteries
- Electric current: Ohm’s law
- Physical Units: electrical current, voltage, resistance, etc.
Marx’s Notebook Sources include
- Chemistry: Lothar Mayer, Henry Roscoe, Carl Schorlemmer, Friedrich Kekule
- Modern chemistry: Marx attended August Hoffmann’s lecture course at the Royal College of Chemistry, London
- Agricultural Chemistry: Justus Liebig
- Physiological Chemistry: Wilhelm Kuhne
- Human Physiology: Ludimarr Hermann; Johannes Ranke
- Physics: Benjamin Witzschel
- Geology: Joseph Jukes
Forthcoming natural scientific materials (perhaps now published) include Marx’s notes and excerpts on Physics, History of Technology, Geology, Soil Science, History of Agricultural Plants, Agricultural Chemistry, Physiology of Plants, of Animals and of Human Beings, parts of Mathematics and on the interrelationships of the Natural Sciences and Philosophy. One day we will discover just what the mature Marx actually wrote about the latter.
Atoms
LBird assures us with his customary air of authority that (1) Engels thought only in terms of atoms while (2) Marx never thought in terms of atoms.
Re (1). In fact Engels adopted a field (non-atomic) approach to electricity (of course, the electron had yet to be discovered, but so too had quantum electrodynamic field theory).
Re (2). To deprive Marx of atomic theory is to ignore his Ph D dissertation on Epicurus. Marx famously defended Epicurus’s statistical atomic “swerve” (a Greek pre-echo of quantum indeterminism) for allowing free will to arise within a primarily deterministic atomic world.
* * *
I will return to Robert Owen on another occasion.
Marx studied mathematics in order to study economics and the economists at the beginning was not Marx, it was Engels the Economist. Engels was a very well educated man and he did not learn any scientific thoughts from Robert Owen.in his time people used to read many books in many different topics. Reading his books we can see that he had profound knowledge about Physic, chemistry, Biology, Anthropology, and Robert Owen did not have that type of knowledge. He has a personal obsession with Engels
Wow ! Can we used that in the Socialist Standard as a definitive refutation of the nonsense/slander that Marx was some sort of post-modernist?
All that is included in the new MEGA collection of 114 volumes . There are many things about Marx that we do not know, as someone wrote: It was too much work for one man Engels was not the only who cultivated natural sciences , and anthropology, Marx also did it
ALB wrote: “Wow ! Can we used that in the Socialist Standard as a definitive refutation of the nonsense/slander that Marx was some sort of post-modernist?”
I’m all for the refutation of the nonsense/slander that Marx was some sort of post-modernist!
Marx definitely wasn’t a post-modernist, he was a social productionist.
I used to regard our feathered friend as merely a distraction and nuisance but this time he’s perched too close to a slumbering lion who, upon waking, has delivered a tour de force to swat away the unhappy avian. As ever LBird will not answer the points made for the simple reason that he can’t. You’ve got to admire the depth of knowledge present in our Party. Bravo.
Yet despite Marx’s knowledge , some still pull him up on his for not knowing everything.
““Should we put a limit on what Beyoncé makes? I don’t see why,” Steyer told the Guardian by phone. “I don’t think in the United States of America, we should put a ceiling on how far people can go.” Steyer transitioned to a critique of communism and the argument that “at the heart of every great fortune is a crime”: “What Karl Marx failed to take into consideration was software – that if you are Michael Jackson or Rihanna or Beyoncé or anyone producing an idea, with software you aren’t just the best singer in your village … you have an ability to reproduce that song infinitely at very low cost around the world.” ”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/15/tom-steyer-2020-inequality-democrats
Marx, of course, is famous for never ever in his life discussing machinery, new technology and labour-saving devices . I don’t believe he ever mentioned nuclear power making electricity either. And when did he ever talk about DNA.
Some expect him to have the prophetic powers of Nostradamus rather than laying down principles which can be applied to an analysis of society which would result in valid conclusions.
Of course Marx didn’t know about software, but he did anticipate what would happen if capitalism’s tendency to increase productivity (output per worker) continued indefinitely: it would result in individual commodities having so little direct labour content as to have a price close to zero. Software achieves this in certain fields today with digitalised sounds, images and writing. Once produced, anyone with a computer or similar device can, technically, access them for free. Steyer himself recognises this technical fact when he says there is now an ability to produce a song “infinitely at very low cost”. This means that they could be made available for free, but that’s not capitalism’s way. The digitalised song is private property thanks to copyright laws. That’s why Beyoncé, Rihanna and the rest are filthy rich. They are living off artificially created rent. Without this, their incomes under capitalism would be limited to the income from live performances and the sale of the first digitalised copy of any song (or video or photo); they would only recover the cost of producing it plus the going rate of profit. Steyer himself is also a parasite even by capitalist standards. He didn’t make his money by investing in production, but merely by buying stocks and shares at one price and selling them later at a higher price.
ALB: “Can we use that in the Socialist Standard”?
Of course, with these corrections/modifications:
- Insert “Part IV” before “Volume 3”
- Replace “Lothar Mayer” by “Lothar Meyer”
- Replace the final sentence by
Postscript
I excerpted the contents of Marx’s science notebooks from a paper by MEGA scholars Somnath Ghosh and Pradip Baksi http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/26/173.html
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