Bertrand Russell
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ALB wrote: “‘and so is of more practical use.’”
To who?
Who is the active subject, for whom this ‘human construct’ of ‘science’ is ‘of more practical use’?
Materialism, as Marx said, regards the ‘active subject’ as an elite, and so cannot allow democratic methods to be employed. Hence, the materialist SPGB’s rule of science by ‘Specialists’. Hence, as Marx said, society divided into two, ‘specialists’ and ‘generalists’, with the ‘specialists’ in political control of social production.
Hello they L Bird, glad to see you’re alive and kicking.
You say
” as Marx said, society divided into two, ‘specialists’ and ‘generalists’, with the ‘specialists’ in political control of social production.”
Simple question, where did he say that?
Hiya, Bijou Drains, thanks again for your kind sentiment.
Here’s Marx, on the elitist socio-political consequences of ‘materialism’ – it ignores ‘change’ (and prefers ‘prediction’, as ALB pointed out, earlier), denies ‘change’ is socially produced by humanity (after all, ‘matter’ is an unchanging stuff, outside of our brains, which simply sits there, awaiting ‘discovery’ by the superior sort in society), and has no time for the practice of revolutionary democracy.
Marx, in his Theses on Feuerbach, III, wrote:
“The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.
The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm
It seems clear to me, that Marx was a democrat and a communist, who believed that it was possible for humanity to revolutionise its own universe. After all, any ‘universe’, that we know and can know, is our creation.
After all, if we didn’t create it, how can we change it?
Of course, the minority ruling class wish to deny this ‘creative role’ to humanity, and so their ‘science’ simply argues that they are simply discovering ‘reality’, a ‘reality’ that pre-exists its maker. This is a ruling class idea – and a successful, continuing, and seemingly all-powerful one. Even the breakdown of that ideology in the late 19th century didn’t break its hold on ‘common sense’, and school teaching of children.
Marx, of course, prefigured that breakdown by 70 years, and paved the way for Einstein’s revolutionary science – the effects of which we are still assimilating. Well, revolutionaries are – those wanting an elite to retain political control of physics, maths, logic, etc., simply deny ‘revolutionary practice’ (active conscious change) and try to bolster existing reality.
But try to tell the ‘materialists’ that they espouse a conservative ideology and method, suited to the division of ‘society into two parts’, as Marx pointed out, and they not only won’t believe you, or even read Marx, or think critically about their beliefs and where they came from, but simply close their minds.
Lenin, Trotsky, Plekhanov, Kautsky, Stalin… all ‘materialists’. An ideology which divides society into two, as befits the interests and purposes of a ruling class.
They won’t have democracy in science. Without democratic science, society is divided into two.
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